Impersonations

by Walter Jon Williams

  Lady Amelia guided the conversation away from the subject of cultists. Sula waited another two courses before bringing up a different martyr.

  “I had the honor of commanding your cousin, Pierre, in the war,” she said to Lord Moncrieff. “I imagine he was your cousin, yes?”

  “Something like that,” said the lord governor. “PJ—” He turned to the others and added an aside. “We called him PJ. He was an ornament to the family.”

  Sula smiled privately. Ornament was apt, for the amiable young man whose primary function in life had been decorative.

  Lord Moncrieff turned to Sula. “We were a bit surprised, really, to hear he’d become such a hero.”

  “I used him to gather intelligence. He was so well connected that he could find out anything going on in the High City. But what he really wanted to do was fight, and so on the day we stormed the acropolis, he took up arms and got killed.” She remembered the delightful, ridiculous PJ, and the joy that blazed from his face as she finally gave him permission to take part in military action.

  She also remembered him dead, his hands still clenched on the rifle that hadn’t fired a single shot, and an expression on his face of wistful surprise.

  “He was very brave,” Sula said. “I liked him.”

  “I’m sure he was fortunate to have you as a friend,” Lord Moncrieff said.

  Lady Amelia turned her sharp nose toward her husband. “He’d just been married to that Martinez woman, wasn’t he?” she said. “After the first one ran off?”

  PJ had loved his first Martinez fiancée, Sempronia, apparently unaware that the arrangement had been an alliance of convenience between the Martinez family and his own and that no feelings of affection were expected or necessary. When she’d run off with a secret lover, he’d not only suffered a broken heart but had been packed into a hasty marriage with Sempronia’s older sister.

  “Yes,” Sula said. “That’s what happened.”

  Loving a Martinez, as Sula knew to her cost, was a hazardous business.

  “I imagine PJ didn’t have much to live for after that,” Lady Amelia said.

  Nor did I, Sula thought. She had done her best to get herself killed, and failed, and instead ended up ruling a planet.

  And though what Lady Amelia said was perfectly true, Sula felt she ought to correct the record. She preferred not to leave PJ Ngeni in such a hopeless light.

  “He was brave,” she insisted. “He stayed behind to fight. Almost all the important Peers fled and took their treasures with them, but he was willing to stand up against the invaders. With no training at all, unlike so many of those who just ran away.”

  Lady Amelia seemed not to appreciate the disparagement of her class.

  “Peers fought,” she said. “Many were killed.”

  “In the Fleet, yes,” Sula said. “Peers make up most of the officers, and of course they were stationed on warships and couldn’t run away. But Zanshaa? None of the first rank died there. By the end, I was the only Peer in the army.”

  “Wasn’t there another Peer?” asked Koridun. She dabbed blood from her chin with a napkin. “Someone who was appointed governor?”

  Sula felt her lips pucker at the sour memory. “Trani Creel was never in the army. She spent the war hiding in the country, then emerged after the fighting was over. She outranked me”—Sula shrugged—“so Fleet Commander Tork saw fit to appoint her governor.” She turned to Lord Moncrieff. “She complained about the poor quality of her rations during the war. I complained about the shortage of bullets to fire at the enemy.”

  Lord Moncrieff smiled appreciatively. Lady Amelia gave Sula a quizzical look, and Sula could almost see her keen social antennae delicately probing the atmosphere. “I do not know any Lady Trani Creel,” she said. “Not a prominent family, surely. Are you sure she was really governor of Zanshaa?”

  “For only a few days,” Sula said.

  “She was murdered, was she not?” asked Koridun. She’d lost control of her diction, and the words lisped through her fangs.

  Sula gave her subordinate an annoyed look. “She was killed in a riot,” Sula said. “Lady Trani made the mistake of threatening a unit of the army, and . . .” She shrugged again. “They were all armed and, by then, used to killing.”

  In fact, Trani Creel had been killed at Sula’s suggestion, by people she could trust to do the job. She’d had no intention of letting her work be undone by a fatuous, cowardly incompetent who would probably have only got herself killed sooner or later anyway.

  “There was an investigation that identified the killers,” Sula said.

  “Were they ever caught?” lisped Koridun.

  Sula turned to her. She supposed these were reasonable questions for a security officer to ask, but Koridun’s persistence was irksome.

  “I don’t know,” she lied. “I left Zanshaa to join the Fleet.”

  In fact, she’d invented the accused killers, forging both the documents that proved their existence and the evidence against them. They hadn’t been caught for the simple reason that they were pure fiction.

  Though that wasn’t the sort of thing one could say at a dinner party.

  Dho-ta seemed to perceive the awkwardness of the topic, and he lifted one of his thu-thu pastilles and regarded it critically while he changed the subject. “Lady Sula,” he said, “as you’re so interested in antiquities, I would like to offer you a guide for your stay here. My assistant, Mr. Ratnasari, can call for you tomorrow. What time would be convenient?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be any trouble.”

  Dho-ta popped the pastille in his mouth. “You honor us with your interest in our work. It will be my pleasure to offer you any guidance you need.”

  Your pleasure, Sula thought, but Ratnasari’s labor. But she was delighted by the offer, and smiled.

  “Tenth hour, if that’s all right.”

  “Certainly.”

  Sula settled into her chair with a growing satisfaction. Perhaps there was a point to these dinner parties after all.

  * * *

  Aziq Ratnasari was a native Terran, from the state of Pahang in Southeast Asia, and shorter than Sula, with even, sepia-colored skin. Cheerfully he took Sula to see the mosaics under the Palace of the Governor. They were a mixture of natural and mythological subjects—griffins, animals, a Green Man, children rolling hoops, hunters pursuing game, a man feeding a donkey—and even the mythological subjects were shown in ordinary, everyday poses, as if they were nothing to get excited about.

  Sula was excited. She’d never seen anything like it. If the mosaics had any instructive or ideological purpose, it was completely obscure. They seemed intended simply to delight.

  The mosaics were set in the floor of what had once been a sizeable room in the palace, but no one knew who had commissioned the floor or what the room had been used for. It was as if one of the caesars had just sent a message of joy into the future.

  Ratnasari answered Sula’s questions about Byzantium and its monuments as well as he could. When she asked if any of the hippodrome racetrack were visible, Ratnasari said not, but that you could get to that level of the city through some tunnels at the back end of the racecourse.

  “A bit damp, though,” he said. “You’ll need waders.”

  “Where can we find waders?” Sula asked.

  Ratnasari had the waders brought from his office along with flashlights, then led her to the Sphendone, the bulwark supporting the south end of the hippodrome, an enormous brickwork mountain of tortured irregular arches and the remains of other structures that had once adhered to the wall. The Sphendone seemed to be holding up all Sultanahmet, including the Palace of the Governor, and appeared to have undergone some kind of horrific geological process. There were arches that faced in different directions, stairs that led nowhere in particular, bricks that had been fused together by gravity and the ages, their courses tipped at alarming angles. All the arches had long ago been bricked up, and those bricks had been subjected to the same to
rtuous tectonic history as the rest.

  “These arches were once identical,” he said. “But a few thousand years of earthquakes and patching and reconstruction made each one unique.” Waders squeaked as he led Sula up a narrow metal stair and through a battered steel door that opened to his thumbprint. Air wafting through the door smelled of time and cool water. He groped to his left, found an old-fashioned switch; Sula heard a clack and saw lights go on.

  “Come in,” said Ratsanari. Sula followed him into the chamber and stood on a metal bar grating poised above a long, curving, flooded corridor. Overhead wire strung floodlights together, and in the glare, the passages were filled either with brilliant light or deepest shadow.

  Below the platform, still water formed a perfect mirror of the arches overhead, making the corridor seem far taller than it was.

  Brick and more brick, damp and mossy, oozing nitre, courses as tempest-tossed as the ocean. In the silence Sula could hear the throb of her own heart.

  “I’ll go first,” Ratnasari said. “I’m shorter, and if I fall in a pit and my waders fill, I know how to escape.”

  “Very good.” Sula already loved the place but preferred it not be her tomb.

  “This was used as a mosque once, then converted to a cistern.” He waved his arms apologetically. “It’s proved difficult to drain.”

  Sula turned on her light and followed Ratnasari down into the clear water. It came up past her knees, and waves spread from her legs to lap against the ancient bulwark. Her skin prickled with cold. Fish darted in and out of her flashlight beam.

  The ancient walls were spangled by dancing light reflecting off the water. Sula followed Ratnasari down the long curve that formed the end of the racecourse. Apparently, chariots needed a lot of room to turn. Ratnasari spoke cheerfully about the history of the hippodrome, built originally by Septimius Severus, enlarged and improved by Justinian, and subsequently sacked by rioters, Crusaders, Mamelukes, and neglect. “Justinian also suppressed the Nika riots,” he said. “You’ve heard about them?”

  “Yes, of course.” Justinian was the sort of Terran ruler of whom the Shaa conquerors could approve. Slaughtering thirty thousand dissidents with primitive weapons was an act which the Shaa could only admire, and the deed was celebrated in the approved Earth histories.

  “Not bad, considering the limitations of the technology,” Sula judged. She considered the antimatter missiles that had fallen on Petrograd, Cape Town, Mumbai, Shanghai, Los Angeles, New York, and so many of Earth’s other great cities.

  “Though of course,” she added, “the Great Masters put Justinian to shame.”

  “The Shaa were perfection itself when it came to upholding the strictures of the Praxis,” said Ratnasari. Sula gave him a sharp look, both at the possibility of irony and the fact that the words sounded familiar.

  “From the eulogy given the last Shaa,” Ratnasari said helpfully.

  “I missed the funeral,” Sula said. “I was on duty.” Guarding the terminal of a space elevator, in case the passing of the Great Masters led to despair, anarchy, and violence.

  Which, against the odds, it had not. At least, not then.

  Another hour was spent splashing around in the corridor, and then they hauled themselves out of the chilly water and returned to the warmth and life of the city.

  “Where next?” Sula asked.

  “Well.” Ratnasari offered a brilliant smile. “We already have the waders.”

  “Then we’d better wade.”

  A Byzantine cistern had recently been discovered in Edirnekapı, millennia old and forgotten for most of those thousands of years. The place had never been open to the public, hadn’t been fully explored, and there were no lights but what Sula and Ratnasari brought with them. The place was magical, and Sula wandered through cool water thigh-deep while the light of her flash gilded the drops of water that rained from the ceiling. The pillars that supported the distant brick arches were all different, some of elaborately patterned marble, and were a contrast to the utilitarian brickwork of the ceiling vaults.

  Next was the Cistern of a Thousand and One Columns, which didn’t require waders because it was dry and filled with small shops. Ratnasari suggested tea and snacks. They sat in a cafe, Sula looked at the porcelain and found it undistinguished, and they discussed Earth history for a long, civilized hour. She was surprised at how many gaps existed in her education.

  “It’s not surprising,” Ratnasari said. “The Shaa conquered an empire, and so they favored the bits of Terran history that mirrored their own experience. So, if we’re taught anything about Earth history at all, it’s usually about the Egyptians, Chinese, Persians, Romans, and so forth, right up to the Russian and British empires. Other histories were neglected or sometimes suppressed.”

  “Such as?”

  “The history of religion is pretty well kept out of the standard texts. You need special permission to study the ancient cults—though of course, if you have the right academic qualifications, permission isn’t that hard to get.”

  “You have such permission?”

  “No, that’s not my field.” He offered a shy smile. “I’m more of a specialist in government—it’s surprising how many forms of government the old Terrans came up with.”

  “Such as?”

  “Corporatocracy, where a country is directly ruled by a profit-seeking corporation.”

  “Making a profit seems a narrow basis for government.”

  “At one point, the British East India Company ruled all of India, and the Dutch East India Company ruled the Indonesian archipelago. They issued their own coin, had their own armies, and possessed the right to declare war. They went on for centuries.”

  Sula thought she spotted the flaw in this arrangement. “What was the responsibility of the corporation to the population they governed?”

  “None. Only to the stockholders.” Ratnasari smiled. “The India companies imposed their rule on the population by treaty or conquest—of course, the conquered people were far away from the stockholders, oceans away in a period when it took a long time to cross an ocean.”

  “So, all the stockholders knew of the companies’ actions was when the dividends arrived.”

  “Or didn’t arrive. The India Companies’ rule was based on monopoly, and once that monopoly was compromised, they failed, and the parent governments had to step in and rule directly.”

  Sula sampled an eggplant dish. “In what other imaginative ways were our ancestors governed?”

  Ratnasari mentioned diarchies, triarchies, and tetrarchies, which Sula thought useful insofar as the rulers could check each other, and timocracies, where honor was the primary virtue, and the rulers tended to come from the military.

  “A recipe for catastrophe,” Sula said. “In my experience, most high-ranking military can’t even command their own units, let alone a state.”

  Laughter might have been dangerous, and Ratnasari controlled his, but there was still a glimmer of amusement in his eyes. “I defer to your superior experience, my lady.” He waved a hand. “If the commanders can’t run things, you could try demarchy, in which officials are chosen randomly from a list of eligible citizens. Most posts in ancient Athens were filled that way. It’s a preventative against corruption.”

  Sula couldn’t see the point. “Why would random people be less prone to corruption than anyone else?” she asked.

  “Fewer long-standing relationships with corrupting influences, I suppose.”

  “Corrupting influences have a way of finding their way to those with power. Besides, I thought the old Athenians had mob rule.”

  Ratnasari considered this, then spoke carefully. “That is the classic accusation against democracy, that a mob would vote unwisely or rule through violence. You would know better than I if the same accusations might be made against our Convocation.”

  Sula sipped her tea and contemplated the possibility that she might be talking with a subversive. On the basis of that last sentence alone, she co
uld probably have Ratnasari arrested and killed.

  Not that Ratnasari wasn’t right. The Convocation’s decisions in the late war had been disastrous and veered between reckless delusion and utter cowardice.

  Plus, of course, they ruled through violence, as any well-bred mob might do.

  “In fact,” Ratnasari added, “most violent mobs were historically in service to those in power.”

  Sula was surprised. “Why would someone in power need a mob?”

  “To enforce their rule through terror and violence. Police are supposed to have scruples and obey the law, but mobs don’t have to—and they provide a degree of deniability to those whose interests they serve.” Ratnasari poured strong black tea for the both of them. “The exception is during periods of actual revolution, when the authority of government is absent or compromised, as in the Nika riots we just mentioned. Then you find mobs acting against the established order. But under normal conditions, governments can suppress citizens who challenge them—if they couldn’t do something as simple as that, they could scarcely survive as governments. So, any group of citizens who appear out of control and cause chaos are most likely working for the authorities, whether they know it or not.”

  Sula considered this as she poured honey into her tea. What Ratnasari said was reflected in her own career—she had led her own army in support of a government that she distrusted and disliked.

  Of course, it was easier to support the legitimate government when it was the rebels who were trying to kill her.

  And she had also employed a mob of sorts against Trani Creel, the governor whose assassination she had arranged. Which might have been an attack on the established order, except that the results were in favor of a previous order she had established herself.

  This was growing confusing. Sula decided that it was futile to try to fit her actions into anyone’s categories but her own.

  Sula sipped her tea and said nothing. Ratnasari filled the silence. “If these anachronistic political arrangements interest you, you might be interested in Democracy Club.”