In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (43 page)

“Binkis!” she said.

The Lithuanian, or his facsimile, looked back at her. “No,” he said. “Binkis and his conjugal partner are elsewhere. They have been of assistance, within their limitations, and will be given a more satisfactory environment. This is the most suitable interface for communication with you, and I have tapped and duplicated its data-storage and integration facilities; it should serve for this one occasion.”

“One occasion?” Teyud said sharply.

“The contamination is severe enough as it is. The primary supervisory pattern has been fully reactivated by the anomalous data. Contact with the True Source is overdue by—” a hesitation, and the bony face tilted a little, like a bird, or possibly a machine—“three thousand Martian solar periods. Six thousand of Earth’s.”

“You’re that thing that was on Venus,” Jeremy said slowly.

Teyud gestured impatiently; he’d told her that story. “No,” she said. “That was not a sentient entity, judging from the description. This apparently is.”

Errrkkk!
Jeremy thought.
I suppose she’s used to the thought of artificial entities—all her ancestors and their main squeezes are just that, after all. Seriously icky and weird, though
.

The Binkis-interface nodded. “That was a subroutine of lower
capacity. Primary storage was on Mars, with its greater geological stability.

I”—he indicated his “body”—“am located beneath the Mountain, with a heat-tap as my primary energy source.”

“Are
you
a sentient entity?” Teyud asked, curiously.

And I feel like gibbering
, Jeremy thought.
Jesus, don’t I have enough on my plate already?

“That is a matter which the semantics of this language, or the others your two species have created, are inadequate to address.”

The Binkis-interface smiled stiffly. “To simplify: I was created to oversee a program of . . . the nearest analogue is
studies
. But I was intended to be under closer supervision. Again, there are semantic difficulties and what I have said is seriously misleading. Suffice it to say I must now make a decision at the very limits of my permitted autonomy.”

There was a long pause. At last Teyud spoke: “And your decision is?”

“Given the degree of intraplanetary interaction, I will proceed to the next stage.”

“Next stage of
what
?” Jeremy blurted out.

“That was strange,” Jeremy said several hours later, in the Imperial private quarters.

“Private” was a matter of definition. He’d insisted that the
De’ming
servants usually on hand to pour drinks and fetch things be sent out; Teyud hadn’t seen the point, but hadn’t argued, either. Now she looked down at him, braced with her forearms on his chest. There
were
advantages to the lower gravity . . .

The great bed rocked slowly, hung from the ceiling by its chains; the furs and silks were pushed down to the foot, and a flask of essence stood on a pillar of crystal by the sideboard. The light was low, starlight and moonlight collected by receptors at the summit of the Tower and channeled to this chamber. Music sounded in the background, soft and languorous.

Teyud leaned down and kissed him on the nose. “Slightly strange, but I am becoming used to it,” she said. “And to think that only a few months ago, I had nothing to look forward to but ennui.”

Then she tickled him. Martians didn’t get ticklish, and she found it fascinating. Things went on from there; when they’d settled down again, he said, “No, what happened in the throne room.”

“Yes, but speculation is futile without further—”

The door sang, breaking in on the birds and silencing them. They looked at each other in surprise;
nobody
was going to interrupt what amounted to the Emperor’s wedding night without a very, very good reason. They sighed together, rolled out of the bed and threw on robes. Teyud made a step toward her weapons belt and then left it; with the Invisible Crown, it wasn’t really necessary, not here.

The door rolled open. Notaj sa-Soj stood there, his face pale beneath its natural olive. Even more surprisingly, Robert Holmegard was there, too.

“Supremacy,” the guards’ commander said. “A strange phenomenon has . . . appeared. In Tharsis.”

“That’s not the half of what’s happened off Bermuda,” the ambassador said. “And allowing for the lag in transmission time between here and Earth, at
exactly
the same moment. And on Venus, too. Your Majesty, we’d like an explanation.”

Teyud’s brow went up; she gestured, and the lights brightened. Even then, Jeremy blushed a little; the tousled state of the bed was rather obvious. The Tollamune Emperor brushed through into the presence room that lay beyond the bedchamber.

“Best you had explain first,” she said. Then she smiled. “I told my father that I was unlikely to be bored. It appears I was more correct than I anticipated.”

Mars, Dvor Il-Adazar
Moon-World, Initial Base
July 19, 2000 AD

“Well, that’s impressive,” Jeremy said.

The Tollamune Emperor simply nodded.
If this does not impress, then the mind observing it is immune to the sensation. Mine is fully engaged with sentiments of awe and wonder
.

From the airship they could see the outline of the Gate simply by the cloud that resulted instantly when denser, warmer, moister air pushed through into the thin cold atmosphere of Tharsis. That
was magnificent enough, with the setting sun turning it ruddy and gold, an arch three miles high and six across at surface level, as if a giant invisible oval had been pushed down into the ground to its midpoint. From the other, eastern side it was an impervious blankness. From the west . . . things came through. Came through from somewhere absolutely else.

“Things such as that river,” she murmured.

Though it did not fill the entire gate, it was still vast, bigger than the Grand Canal at its greatest extent and of considerably greater flow—Jeremy had compared it to the Amazon. Already at Teyud’s command thousands were at work channeling the torrent that poured through,
De’ming
and laborers and turtle-shaped earthmoving machines puffing and grunting a thousand feet below. There was a long stretch—five hundred miles—before the course of the land would take it into the Great Northern Sea. Her mind whirled at the thought of the life the superb, low-mineral water could bring to that stretch of the Deep Beyond, when properly canalized.

Though perhaps my mind is merely showing its parochial limits
, she thought, and her hand crept into Jeremy’s.

He linked his fingers with hers. “Shall we?” he said.

“At the appointed time . . . ah, yes.”

An airship came through the fogbank; it was the
Questing Dhwar
, a fast scout of the Imperial fleet.

“All . . . clear . . .” she read, as a signal lamp flickered from its bow. “No . . . new . . . hazards . . . encountered . . . fascinating . . . phenomenon . . . in . . . excessive . . . abundance . . .”

She felt bitter envy for a moment that Notaj had been first to visit, but it was illogical and politically impossible for the reigning Tollamune to take irresponsible risks. She was stretching the boundaries of the permissible by taking herself and the consort through now, weeks later.

“The savants are having a field day with the life forms coming through,” Jeremy said. He cocked an eyebrow. “Nothing dangerous so far, and much that is quite compatible. I particularly liked those fish, done in
asu
-batter.”

She took a deep breath, savoring the ozone and lubricant smells of the control gondola. And the fish
had
been delicious, even if Jeremy insisted on calling them “silent immature canids” for some reason.

“Forward,” she said.

The crew were Thoughtful Grace of the Household; despite their palpable excitement, they kept to a disciplined sequence of essential comments as the
Tollamune Rebirth
turned and headed into the stiff headwind coming out of the . . . artifact. The engines panted, but this hull and power system were derived from a warcraft designed to operate during storms, and the airspeed indicator writhed to show a ground speed of more than fifty miles an hour. Clouds closed in, and she could see veritable beads of water appearing on the windows. Teyud had seen actual rain once or twice, on the slopes of the Mountain, but it still seemed unnatural.

Then everything lurched. “Valve ballast!” Adwa sa-Soj said crisply. “Maintain neutral buoyancy!”

Sand rumbled out into the air from the keel. Not too much, for though the pull of this place was heavier than that of the Real World, the denser air also improved the efficiency of the hydrogen tanks.
Paiteng
flew well here, too.

“The air of another world,” she said softly.

Everything felt heavier; a little more than ten percent heavier, no great matter for a Thoughtful Grace, and tolerable for a standard form.

Perhaps we will use
tembst
to adjust colonists
, she thought.
Or perhaps it will not be worth the trouble
.

Below her, the river shone in the light of a sun smaller that that of the Real World and with a slightly greenish tinge to its yellow. That was not the only light in the sky; there were two moons, far larger than those she’d been born under, and also a great banded giant that covered a third of the sky, yellow and white and more . . . and this new world revolved around
it
, not the primary.

As they turned and rose, she could see the vast stretch of mud where the natural course of the river had been; from six thousand feet, it ran glistening to a sea on the edge of sight. On either side were lush forests of unfamiliar, olive green trees, some hundreds of feet tall; beyond natural levees rolled parkland, covered with a low-growing stuff whose reddish-green tint was the only homelike thing about them. Far and far in the distance was a line of dreamlike white, mountains far lower than the Mountain but large enough for year-round snows. The precise seasonal rhythms here were as yet
unknown, and they would be complex. The gas giant gave off a significant quantity of heat itself and calculations were still under way as to the precise orbits involved.

“Open to the environment,” she ordered.

The alien air rolled in as the armored glassine was cranked up; it was full of an unexpected freshness, like a garden under a dome, but wilder and sweeter and utterly free of the slight tang of dust that had been the backdrop of her life. It was as warm as equatorial high summer, and the dampness was almost uncomfortable. One would have to dress more lightly here; it would even be comfortable to go naked save for utility harness, as in a sealed environment.

“Our crops and domestic animals will probably require modification,” she said. “Of course, local material will also be useful.”

As they swung over the open ground a group of hexapodal creatures panicked at the flier’s shadow and thundered away; she blinked in surprise, her nicating membrane sliding over her eyes as she estimated their numbers.

“Greater than a million. This is an abundant biosphere,” she said. “Odd. I cannot even describe their social unit; we have not named them yet.
Owkimi
?”

That meant literally “a group of beasts characterized by six limbs.” Not particularly poetic, but accurate.

“This vista resembles some tales of the most ancient times, when the first sentients emerged to name the life they encountered for the first time. It is as if I now inhabit a literalized metaphor.”

“Yeah,
owkimi
is finicky enough for Demotic,” he said. “It all reminds me of reconstructions of the Great Plains back home. Though the buffalo didn’t have six legs and four eyes and spikes on the ends of their tails and slate gray skins with cream-colored stomachs.”

“Yes, we are definitely not dealing with an introduced flora and fauna,” she said thoughtfully. “Although the basic biochemistry suggests that there were indeed linkages, if at a more remote period. There will be surprises.”

“You say ‘surprises’ as if it that were a bad thing,” Jeremy chuckled . . . in English.

After a moment she nodded. In Demotic, a surprise
was
a bad thing unless you specified otherwise; the unexpected was usually negative and often lethal. There were advantages to knowing another
language, in the way it gave you multiple perspectives and promoted self-questioning of your world-view. Not
all
of the surprises here would be bad, not on a world that teamed with life and did not die.

And now the Real World also has alternatives
.

The savants said that it would be a very long time before pressure equalized on both sides of the gate—a planetary atmosphere was a most massive object. The effects on the Real World would be far greater than those on the new planet . . . which reminded her that they must establish a name for it.

New World?
That would be appropriate, though it posed the difficulty of an infinite-regression series: Would you name the next accessible planet Newer New World, and then Still Newer New World?

“Hear the Tollamune will!” she said. “This planet shall be known as
Vow’da!
”

A pleased murmur went through the crew, and then a brief cry of “Tollamune!”

The name played off her mother’s Thoughtful Grace title—Vowin also derived from the root for “swift”—and the literal meaning was Moon-World, which was objectively appropriate.

Three more airships were lashed down to the ground by the campsite atop the bluffs, a little way from the rows of temporary shelters and lines of tethered
rakza
and
Paiteng
and the beginnings of permanent structures as machines burrowed and ate and transformed; the skeletal form of a temporary docking tower was already rising there, made from the huge trunks of the lowland trees. A few cargoes of those had already been floated through the gate; timber merchants from Dvor Il-Adazar to Zar-tu-Kan were going into quiet frenzies at the prospective accumulation of
valuata
.