In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (22 page)

Pictures showed more: street scenes in Kartahown, the Bronze Age city-state that was home to the planet’s highest civilization; plesiosaurs attacking a sailing ship on an azure sea, their long necks looping down toward the deck; a sabertooth caught in mid-leap as it pounced upon a mastodon mired in a swamp . . .

That gave him an idea for a scene; he was trying to break into the adventure-fiction market. He shook his head as his belt-com beeped and the thought vanished; when he flicked it open he saw the face and voice of his counterpart in the Martian section next door. Oddly enough, the other man was an aspiring teller of tales as well.

“Anything new, Harry?” the Aussie rasp said.

“Not a thing, John. Just walking and thinking.”

He turned back as he spoke. Then the little comm unit dropped out of his hand, shattering on the hard marble of the floor, bits of plastic and microchip scattering. A pillar of silvery light stood where the Diadem had been. And it . . . sang.

Slowly he dropped to his knees, and his rifle clattered to the stone as well. The sound echoed inside his head, and he could feel the column expand—feel it passing through his face and body, like the breath of a cool wind
inside
him. The sound rose to a piercing note and vanished.

So did the lights. He fumbled at his belt and clicked on his flashlight.
That
worked. Unfortunately what it showed was an empty case—oh, the pictures were still there, and the little display screen with the background story running on a video loop.

“Shit!”

But the
Diadem
was gone. The single most unique and valuable artifact on Earth, and it was gone. On
his
watch.

He was cursing when he noticed the perfectly cylindrical hole that had been drilled through the ceiling, the floor above, and all the way through to the roof.

“Shit!”

Venus, Gagarin Continent
Jamestown Extraterritorial Zone
May 18, 2000 AD

“Dad!
Dad!
”

Marc Vitrac looked up from his papers. For a moment he frowned, and then the desperation in his son’s voice turned the father’s expression to a questioning one. It was late afternoon, with the sun sinking in the east across the walled garden outside the French doors, and the scents of the late-blooming roses drifted in along with cut grass and warm, unbaked brick. He’d been thinking of knocking off and making some jambalaya and dirty rice.

“What is it, eh, p’tit?”

Marc Vitrac Junior was twelve, shooting up taller than his father had been at that age and still all hands and feet and gawky limbs, bowl-cut hair a tawny sun-streaked mane.

“It’s Mom.”

Young Marc was trying to control his fear. His father didn’t bother; he just dashed down the corridor to the nursery. Baby Jeanette was lying in her crib, chuckling at the mobile of dinosaurs and flying things above it, but her mother was lying on the floor beside the crib, and her eyes had rolled up until only the whites could be seen, and she shook as if with palsy.

“Calisse!” he swore as fear went through his gut like ice water, dropping to his knees beside her.

Then she sighed, blinked, and shook her head, and when she opened her eyes again, the woman he loved was there again. But the look on her face wasn’t one he was used to: It was one of raw fear.

“Teesa!” he cried, snatching her up.

The strong, slender arms went around him, tight enough to make him gasp a little. Then she drew back.

“It was the Cave Master,” she said. “But . . . Marc . . .”

“
Weh?”

“It wasn’t as it was when I wore the Diadem and talked with It. It was . . .
bigger
. And it was angry.”

Encyclopedia Britannica, 20th Edition
University of Chicago Press, 1998

MARS
:
Biology

Although Mars was sterile until terraformed by the ancients two hundred million years ago, life on the Red Planet is, in a very real sense, “older” than that on Earth. It lacks the catastrophic mass extinction that followed the Yucatan asteroid impact of 65,000,000 mya, which marks the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary on Earth. There is considerable support among paleontologists for the proposition that the asteroid was the result of ancient intervention, as neither Mars nor Venus shows an equivalent.

As a result of the uninterrupted evolutionary history, apart from a few subsequently introduced mammals, the lineages of most Martian species run back without interruption to the most successful of the late-Cretaceous introductions, birds, and the closely related birdlike therapod dinosaurs. All are warm-blooded, all exhibit cooperative care for eggs and young, and many are social. While
few are large—the largest terrestrial species is comparable to a bison in body mass—the brain-to-body ratio is, on average, comparable or superior to modern Terran mammals. This, however, may be in part due to the widespread biological engineering of the Crimson Dynasty period, which “uplifted” many species to make them more useful as domesticates. Subsequently many escaped and spread their genes.

Mars, City of Dvor Il-Adazar (Olympus Mons)
Chamber of Memory
May 19, 2000 AD

If the Thoughtful Grace on duty outside the personal chambers could have seen him now, Sajir sa-Tomond knew they would have dragged him bodily back to his bed and drugged him to keep him as quiet as the physicians wished . . . and then taken the Knife of Apology to their throats. Particularly their commander Adwa sa-Soj; she was young and zealous, sometimes beyond reason.

The thought made him smile a little as he sat back and let the tendrils grope toward the entry point on the back of his neck. Usually that contact was soothing; now he could feel the agitation that swept through the great protein machines that stored and manipulated data. He groped backward through layers of memory, the minds of predecessor after predecessor, until he reached the earliest days of the Age of Dissonance, the beginnings of the long decline.

Images flickered through his mind; the silverlike filigree of the Invisible Crown, and the experience of wearing it.

I feel intense pride in being her progenitor
, he thought.
To survive
that
without training, without assistance . . . this represents a degree of eugenic fitness unprecedented for hundreds of generations!

He had spent little time on the matter of the Crown. Even as his Lineage reckoned time, it had been lost for a very long while. But now . . .

Now I must know. Show me!

Mars, The Lost City of Rema-Dza
May 19, 2000 AD

“God, is she going to be okay?” Jeremy asked anxiously.

They’d all recovered from that weird momentary blackout, not even headaches or anything else beyond a few bumps and scrapes from falling. His watch said it had been a few seconds, though somehow it
felt
longer.

All except Teyud.
She
was still unconscious, resting on a nest of silks and furs in the antechamber. Baid knelt on her other side, applying the contents of the
Traveler
’s first-aid kit, much of it alive and wriggling. If you didn’t have a doctor on Mars, an engineer was the next best thing; they were the closest thing to vets anyway. The largest single item was a weird little creature with vestigial gripping paws and a bottle implanted in its back; it plugged into Teyud’s jugular and dripped fluids into her system. Every once in a while, you had to top up the bottle with water mixed with nutrient powder.

Jeremy found that even the squirming bait-box look of the Martian medical devices didn’t bother him now; he was simply too afraid. It wasn’t like fearing danger to himself, and to his surprise it was worse because of the added helplessness.

Does her face look better? A little less waxy? Or am I fooling myself?

Baid withdrew a worm from one of Teyud’s nostrils and looked at it. “Her temperature is rising, although still a percentile below normal. I would speculate that blood flow to the extremities returns.”

She peeled back an eyelid. “And pupil reaction is better, but only slightly; there may be neurological damage. There is little we can do but wait and apply hydration.”

“I . . .” Jeremy groped for the words in Demotic. “I anticipate improvement with intense desire for favorable outcomes.”

Baid nodded as she stowed the devices in the box and rose, dusting off the knees of her robe.

“I also entertain emotions of affectionate respect for this Thoughtful Grace,” Baid replied. “Even beyond the necessary terrified awe one feels at the display of Imperial
tembst
thought to be fictional or long-lost, and its response to her genome. Teyud za-Zhalt
has repaired my economic status beyond reasonable anticipation—I will purchase the
Traveler
myself and enjoy sufficient security of income to breed and perpetuate my lineage.”

A group of
De’ming
pulled a sled through the chamber, with a crewman following behind. They’d stash the loot in the
Traveler
’s holds. Baid looked at it with a small, satisfied nod: Imperial-era artwork and records would fetch impressive prices.

Even then Jeremy felt an impulse to wince: This was a reversion to nineteenth-century tomb robbing with a vengeance, like Belzoni rampaging through the Valley of the Kings with a pickax and flogging the results to collectors. Then Teyud moved slightly, and his attention snapped back into focus.

He held her hand in his; long fingers slightly rough with callus, cooler than it should be—cooler than the lower Martian body temperature could account for. Her eyes had a slightly sunken look, too. Jeremy wondered what he’d do if she didn’t wake up, or woke up a drooling idiot, and swallowed convulsively at the sudden bleakness of the world that the thought laid before him.

“Damn, woman, don’t you die on me now,” he murmured softly. “I was just getting to know you. Yeah, we have absolutely nothing in common. That’s the point.”

Time passed. Jeremy remained, refilling the bottle of nutrient fluid as the slow drip emptied it and doing the ongoing nursing tasks; when he had to rest, he napped curled up in silks and furs of his own. Sometimes Sally came and spelled him, long enough to let him clean himself and change his clothes.

When he was alone with Teyud, he found himself telling Teyud about his family—she’d been fascinated by it—including his two sisters, his brother the jock, his father the physicist, and how his mother had played the cello. And about his life; high school in Los Alamos, studying archaeology at the University of New Mexico; the fencing team; the weird cave he’d found on that dig in Arizona, with the rows of skeletons hanging from the ceiling and the mummified body of the little old woman and her copper pot.

At last Sally came and put a gentle hand on his shoulder; Baid tu-Or was with her.

“Jeremy, we’ve got to get back to Zar-tu-Kan,” she said. “We have to move her. The
Traveler
is ready.”

He started violently, and his murmuring broke off. He coughed, shook his head. “Yes, of course, you’re right. Let’s—”

Teyud’s hand clenched on his, powerful enough to hurt. Her eyes fluttered open and sought his.

“I heard you,” she said, her voice dry and hoarse. “I heard you in my darkness and the darkness did not consume me, though it hungered.” Then: “Water.”

He held her head up and dribbled a little between her lips. She sipped, coughed again, drank a little more.

“Strange,” she whispered, when he’d laid her head back. “This has been a very strange experience. I express astonishment, wonder, a sensation of psychological displacement.”

“Are you all right?” he asked desperately.

“I am . . . physically undamaged beyond the effects of stress,” she said, her voice a thread. “I apparently retain continuity of experience—”

I’m still me
, he translated to himself.

“—but I feel . . . extremely strange. Aspects of my . . . mind . . . have expanded. As if empty chambers were always there but are now unlocked, yet still bare and unfilled, in which I wander as a stranger to myself.”

“What
was
that thing?” he blurted.

Beside him, Sally tensed. Teyud looked at them both, and did the Martian double blink. Then her great yellow eyes looked elsewhere, as if they saw beyond the confines of the room. Her voice was stronger but pitched to a wondering softness as she answered:

“It was the Crown.”

“A crown?” Jeremy said.

“
The
Crown. The Invisible Crown of the Tollamune Emperors.
S-smau ’i Taksim
. That Which Compels. The Crown of the First Emperor, Timrud sa-Enntar.”

“But that’s a myth!” he blurted.

Sally cursed antiphonally in English and Japanese. Baid tu-Or made a choked-off sound and went down on one knee, bowing over a hand pressed to the sand until her forehead touched the ground.

Teyud smiled at Jeremy, and with that, he felt she had actually returned; it was the same ironic tilt of the lips he’d seen the first day they met.

“Not a myth, although I had strongly suspected the same, despite . . . privileged access to information concerning it. It was not a literalized metaphor after all. It is an objective truth; simply one that has been missing for a very long time.”

She touched a finger to her brow, tracing the line where the lower rim of the net of silvery metal had lain, or where what had seemed to be metal had rested.

“It has been missing since the beginning of the Age of Dissonance and the reign of Timrud sa-Rogol. The Supremacy whose identifying glyph rested in that wrecked airship.”

“Nobody ever saw it!”

“Hence the name,” Teyud pointed out. “It is visible only when removed . . . and only rarely was it removed except by the death of the bearer.”

She took his hand and touched it to her forehead; there was nothing there to feel, except smooth skin and dense, silky hair the color of bronze.

“Missing since the
beginning
of the Age of Dissonance,” Sally said.