In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (5 page)

Then the factor went on in his own tongue: “You have met the highly bred Professional Practitioner of Coercive Violence, Teyud za-Zhalt.”

And “highly bred” means exactly the same thing as describing highly bred about a racehorse, and it’s a compliment in this language. The title Professional Practitioner of Coercive Violence covers cops, soldiers and bandits
.

Minds with a profound understanding of linguistics had been at work shaping Martian for a very long time.

All that in a hand gesture and three words, one of them a proper name. It’s a bitch to learn, but I love this language! It’s so . . . smooth
.

The woman inclined her head slightly and laid her ears back, a gesture of respect to an employer or patron from someone equal in eugenic rank, which was a courteous assumption. Her breed had been lords once.

“My blades are ready, my guns are fully fed and loaded, other necessary equipment and personnel have been procured, and I command the directional template for our journey of exploration, employer,” Teyud said to Sally, adding the last in Deferential Mode.

Her voice was beautifully modulated, a little deeper than the normal Martian soprano; if a bronze bell had been precisely machined by
computer-directed lasers, it would sound like that. And her accent was noticeably different from that of the spice merchant.

Perhaps her diction is a bit . . . crisper? And there’s something about the way she handles sibilants, too. Wait a minute—it’s like the way the pillar-with-teeth spoke . . . archaic, maybe? A dialect from some out of the way place that hasn’t changed much? I’ve got to get to know her well enough to ask questions!

Then she turned to him. “Identity? Skill? Status?”

“Jeremy Wainman,” he said. “Scholar, of variation in custom through time; a partner to Sally, of lesser seniority.”

She moved her lips slowly, then surprised him by pronouncing his name nearly as he had.

“Jeremy Wainman, my subsidiary employer, I profess amiable greetings. May randomness produce positive outcomes for you in this period of endeavor, and malice be absent.”

Mars, City of Dvor Il-Adazar (Olympus Mons)
Ringing Depths Reservoir Control
January 1, 2000 AD

“What do you see?” Sajir sa-Tomond said to the Terran named Franziskus Binkis. “What amuses you?”

He had held the shrunken dominions of the Ruby Throne for two hundred Martian years; in Terran terms, he had been born in the year Elizabeth the First was crowned at Westminster. Those centuries of experience and the Crimson Dynasty’s inheritance gave him composure with Binkis, despite the extremely odd way the
vas-Terranan
and his companion had arrived here in the depths of the City That Is A Mountain.

On balance, I am content that I did not kill him when I found him in the Shrine
.

Binkis chuckled again. The pumps throbbed in the icy dimness of the great cavern; it had begun as a volcanic bubble, and been shaped to other purposes very long ago. The sound of Binkis’s amusement was lost among the harsh raw power of the sound, and there was a disturbing flicker to his lightly colored eyes. He was six feet tall and lanky for his breed, which made him a little shorter than average and
squat to Martian eyes. The Emperor was a foot taller, and mantis-gaunt by comparison.

“Incongruity,” Franziskus said. “I appreciate the incongruities.”

His hand moved slightly to indicate the brute angularity of the Earth-made reactor amid the flowing organic machinery that Martians built—or more usually,
grew
.

“And yet,” the Terran—

Who is no longer entirely a Terran, or even entirely a man
, Sajir sa-Tomond reminded himself.
He has been touched by the things of the Most Ancient, and carried across space and time by them
.

—went on, “I also see in my mind devices that are not machines at all but
relations
, contiguities of time and space as complex as the dance of neurons in a brain and as abstract as a mathematical theorem. Both these technologies are as crude as a wooden spear hardened in a campfire by comparison.”

Sajir heard the clearing of a throat behind him. He turned; it was one of the EastBloc diplomats, throughout Lin Yu-Pei.

He had arrived in conventional wise; by what the
vas-Terranan
called a nuclear rocket to orbit around Mars, and then by lander dropping on a tail of fire to the field at the Mountain’s foot, where Sajir sa-Tomond had allowed the Eastbloc base to be erected. The diplomat was as diminutive as a
De’ming
and interestingly different from Binkis in physical type, but Sajir had found him clever enough despite first appearances.

Though now he is modified. His mind now edits reality and does not perceive Binkis at all
.

And there were the guards in their insectile black armor, drifting like ghosts as they moved to keep the Tollamune, Sajir sa-Tomond the Two Hundredth and Twenty-Fifth, from any risk.

A little farther back, a knot of officials stood with their hands in their sleeves of robes gorgeous in red and purple, precious metals and jewels like banked embers, but cunningly patched and repaired, great-eyed faces blank beneath round caps worked in filigree. The golden traceries of their headgear were rotten and blackened with age, the emblems of vanished provinces, of services that had once spanned the planet. The air of the great, arched chamber was cold and faintly damp—sopping, to the Martians.

Sajir sa-Tomond adopted a posture of permission, turning the palms of his hands forward and then back, and the functionaries glided forward, moving in the formal pacing that made their robes seem to slide across the pavement without a hint that legs and feet moved them rather than wheels.

Lin Yu-Pei was sweating; probably because of the incongruity between what his eyes were seeing and what the script implanted within his brain would let him perceive. But then, Terrans sweated so readily . . .

And the elderly of the Real World let their minds lose focus. Attention to the present, Sajir sa-Tomond!

Even with the Tollamune genes and the finest anti-agathics he was
old
, slimness turned gaunt, raven hair gone white, hawk face deeply seamed with a mesh of wrinkles that moved and interlaced like cracks in spring ice among the northern seas. The bleak golden eyes were hooded and pouched but keen.

“Yes, the water of the Great Lower Reservoir once more flows to the distribution chambers,” he said. “This is a highly desirable occurrence both in contemplation and accomplishment.
Sh’u Maz!
Let harmony be sustained!”

The room echoed with the response to his command:
“Sh’u Maz!”

The ritual was comforting. Sajir sa-Tomond used it to calm himself as he considered:

My reaction to Binkis is odd. Any of my people who addressed me so would be infected immediately with larvae of the most malignant breed. Yet I do not even resent the fact that I may not order it in his case. There is . . . something else present, with this one. In the legends of the most ancient beginnings . . . and yes, he arrived here in a
most
extraordinary manner. A fortunate randomness. Through him I may hope to recover the Ancient
tembst.
And even if I do not, his advice has enabled me to reverse the intent of the Eastbloc Terrans that I be their puppet
.

At his nod, High Minister Chinta sa-Rokis moved in a smooth arc and touched a finger cased in metal fretwork to a spot on one of the great crystal pipes that ran from floor to ceiling like pillars, a spot where a flow-gauge circled the clear tube. Her cap proclaimed her Supervisor of Planetary Water Control; in ancient days, that had been a post second only to the Commander of the Sword of the Dynasty in the planet’s government.

Currently, it meant managing the municipal works and the stretch of canals immediately adjacent to the Mountain. Unlike most of the High Council, she still had
some
actual function.

“
Three hundred
ska
-flow per second
,” the monitor said, in a dialect of Demotic so ancient it was almost the High Tongue; it had been a
long
time since this reservoir was active.

“
Purity is within acceptable limits for all standard use. Flow has been steady for one hour, seven minutes, twenty-two seconds at the
—”

The words stopped and a brief pure tone rang out.

“A remarkable display of power,” Sajir said. “To raise fluid from such depths.”

Chinta sa-Rokis hissed slightly; or that might have been the long slender black-furred symbiant coiled around neck and shoulder, whose lips whispered next to her ear. Then the bureaucrat spoke, while the creature stared at the Emperor with what might have been curiosity . . . or a predator judging distance.

“Yet how long will this”—she made a mangled attempt at pronouncing
pebble-bed reactor
—“continue to function? A mere five or six decades without more fuel than that store which our
allies
of the Wet World have supplied; and the machinery itself is not self-reproducing or self-repairing, as our accustomed
tembst
is. As the one tasked with maintaining the long-term supplies of water, I must”—deferential mode—“caution of the disruption which will arise among those dependent on the additional flow when it ceases in so brief a time.”

“We have the water
now
,” Sajir said. “Water to bring life and wealth, to pay Professional Coercives, to overcome irksome limitations.”

“Even so, Supremacy”—extreme deferential mode, with emphasis on nonironic intent—“problems of management present themselves.”

“Death presents one with few managerial dilemmas, yet it is generally believed to be less desirable than the wearisome complications of continued existence,” Sajir remarked dryly.

“I will implement the Tollamune will,” Chinta said, adopting a pose of submissive obedience.

“This is generally considered a corollary of high office beneath the Tollamune Emperors,” Sajir said, his tone even more pawky.
“And we shall, of course, put a program in motion to duplicate the
reactor
and its fuel.”

Chinta sa-Rokis blinked in astonishment. Nor was she the only one. Sajir saw some of the others casting dumfounded glances at each other, and sighed inwardly. The idea might well never have occurred to
him
if Binkis had not suggested it, along with making the delivery of the reactor and spare fuel pellets a condition of Eastbloc access to Dvor Il-Adazar’s anti-agathics and antivirals.

Aloud, he continued, “The
vaz-Terranan
have only
had
this tembst a matter of fifty or sixty of their years, which are half the length of the Real World’s. Prior to a similar number of
our
years, they were unaware of even the basic principles upon which this device functions. Surely we, with the principles in our minds, can expect our savants to duplicate the accomplishments of the Wet World?”

And surely Chinta will not publicly denigrate our capabilities
, he thought with satisfaction.
In fact, I am not entirely confident. Our savants have merely recirculated known data for a very long time
.

The High Minister was capable, once prodded into action, but no more inclined to act on her own than a sessile-stage canal shrimp was to swim. Usually this was convenient; he could simply set her in motion in a chosen direction and then turn his attention elsewhere while she ran on rails like a cargo cart in a mine. When innovation was required, on the other hand . . .

And I myself am most unlikely to survive such a period at this point in my probable life span. Odd, to foresee personal extinction from natural causes in so brief a time as a few decades. I must learn to hurry, as if I were once again heedless with youth. This is an inconvenience. So many problems resolve themselves spontaneously with a mere twenty or thirty years of patience. On the other hand, I must keep in mind that death from another’s volition is possible at any point on one’s personal world-line
.

“Such is the Tollamune will!” he stated in the imperative-condescentive tense.

There was only one possible public response to
that
. The officials lifted fingertips to their temples, bowed their heads, and chanted in chorus:

“
King Beneath the Mountain! Crimson King, holding and swaying the Real World!
”

They would draw the small sharp knives in their sleeves and slit their throats in ritual Apology if he commanded. But just as the portion of the Real World he in fact commanded was much smaller than theory suggested, so would they still conspire and intrigue with every breath they drew to bend
his
will to
theirs
. The more so as he aged toward the ultimate limits and had no immediate heir. That, too, was a situation without precedent, but not one they seemed to find difficult to factor into their calculations.

No heir save for
her.
And some of them realize with horror that if my plans succeed, they will have functional duties once more. A balance is required
.

He was tempted to give the order for a mass apology in any case, but their probable successors would be no more reliable, and far more energetic and hungry. Best to keep these for the present. Their underlings had had many years of waiting, which would keep the ministers looking both upward and downward. Younger replacements would be positioned securely enough with their subordinates to look only toward
him
.

The most advantageous circumstance of being at the summit is the added velocity of the downward kick; next, the fact that there is nobody above one to do the same
.

“I am glad that Your Supremacy is pleased with our fraternal aid,” Lin Yu-Pei said, eyes flickering as he struggled to follow the conversation in Court Demotic.

He was rather obviously translating too literally from his native speech; he had been ambassador for only a few years. The attrition rate from incompatible proteins made the implantation risky with
vaz-Terranan
. The courtiers tensed very slightly, adopting postures of disassociation, implying that they were not present. The guards reacted in a more unambiguous fashion, touching weapons.