The Crystal Empire

by L. Neil Smith

  Water sloshed up above the level of the gunwales, crept up the transparent sides of the boat. After a moment of panic, she remembered her father mentioning Mughal ships which traveled under water. She attempted to relax.

  At length another door opened before them. The tiny vessel scooted out into the open depths amidst a flurry of rising bubbles, into the dark, murky water of the bay.

  The journey, following this alarming start, was brief and uneventful. Ayesha watched for fish, in particular the large man-eaters rumored by the Palace help to inhabit these waters, but saw nothing besides a few jelly-saucers waggling their uncertain way through the depths. She supposed the noise of the engine frightened faster animals away. Sightseeing was not much assisted by the fact that the water permitted but a few feet visibility before all became a gray-black fog about the boat. She wondered how the Sun could see to steer. A greenish light upon the console lit his face from underneath. He paid it rapt attention.

  As did Fireclaw, an ecstatic grin upon his face.

  At last they began angling upward. The waters brightened, although they grew no clearer. Daylight broke upon them as they themselves broke the surface of the bay, making straight into a little harborlet carved out of solid rock.

  Ayesha leaned back—

  —and caught her breath. Towering high above them was the tallest building she had ever seen, perched upon an island which was no more than an upthrust of barren stone. She had seen this structure from a palace window, guessing it to be half as tall, perhaps, as the Eye-of-God pyramid perched upon yet another island—not as far away as she had thought—was wide. Now she revised her estimate upward.

  With a startling rumble, the transparent boat-canopy disappeared into the gunwales.

  A blast of cold, wet wind struck Ayesha’s face.

  An attendant waiting upon the quayside assisted with pulling David Shulieman from the boat, helped to get him seated in a chair identical to the one he had left in the submarine chamber beneath the Palace of the Sun. Overhead the sky was gray and overcast. It was cold upon the naked rock, which, as if in warning, transmitted to their feet another of the silent rolling flutters—-this one much gentler than before—which they had earlier experienced.

  The breeze blew in sodden, salt-laden gusts which felt like sword-thrusts. Shivering, they hurried toward uncertain shelter at the base of the tower. All save Fireclaw and the Sun, who strolled at leisure, making swooping gestures with their hands, talking about the submarine vessel they had just abandoned with reluctance.

  The others waited for the men to catch up.

  “You may have been told”—the Sun Zhu Yuan-Coyotl glanced back at the commander of his bodyguard—“that the Eye-of-God is the heart of Our Empire. From the limited viewpoint of Our subjects, we suppose there is some truth in that.”

  He stopped before an entrance. Bronze doors half a dozen stories tall stood closed before him. The tower itself was of a featureless sandy-gray artificial stone, still showing the seams of molds into which its substance had been poured like a gigantic candle. Hexagonal in cross section, it rose uncounted man-heights into a similar-colored sky until it diminished in the distance to a point.

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl struck his fist upon a door which rang like the father of all gongs.

  A pause, then both doors began to grind aside with a soul-disturbing rumble.

  “In point of fact, however,” he went on, “this is the true heart of Our domain. Understanding it, what it represents, you will come in due course to understand Us.

  “Welcome, guests, to Our Spire of Dreamers!”

  He stepped between the bronze doors, beckoning them to follow.

  Inside, the appointments were as luxurious as the Spire’s exterior had been severe. They were in a giant entrance-hall—its ceiling seemed to vanish into darkness overhead—paneled in jade. Perhaps a hundred paces would have been necessary to cross this room from side to side. How far back it went was anybody’s guess, as most of that part was spanned—and thus concealed—by a huge, dense beaded curtain.

  Casting his feathered cloak upon the floor, as if in utter confidence someone would appear to pick it up, the Sun Incarnate strode to a low table placed across the entrance hall.

  He took up what appeared to be a long, slender drumstick.

  Standing upon the same table, with perhaps a cubit’s length between them, were four delicate-appearing vases wrought of thin uncolored glass, the outermost pair about the height of the stick in Zhu Yuan-Coyotl’s hand, the innermost of differing height, one smaller than the outer two, another much larger.

  The Sun struck a vase nearest him.

  Its ringing was not unlike that of a cut-crystal bell. He laid a palm upon its surface, yet its ringing did not cease until he had walked a few steps, placed his hand upon the furthest jar, which had begun ringing with the same tone.

  The inner pair stood silent.

  “Remember this demonstration,” the young man told Ayesha and her companions, “when you witness what this tower holds. It will save a deal of explanation.”

  He set the stick back upon the table.

  Together they walked around the table, through the clattering curtain, into the depths of the Spire of Dreamers.

  XLII: The Tree of Might-Be

  “By the sun and his morning brightness and by the moon when she follows him, and by the day when it displays him and by the night when it enshrouds him!”

  —The Koran, Sura XCI

  Beads clattered in the Sun’s wake.

  The broad curtain had concealed the semicircular foot of a titanic case of stairsteps, like the walls about them hewn from gray-green stone, twisting around, ever upward, from the ground floor of the Spire of Dreamers into heights unseen above.

  At his bidding, Ayesha followed Zhu Yuan-Coyotl through the curtain, Fireclaw holding it aside first for the Princess Ayesha, then for slow-moving Mochamet al Rotshild, pushing David’s chair. Owald in his copper kilt and blackened armor passed through it behind them.

  Ducking to avoid entangling his sword-handle, the Helvetian warrior let the beaded strands flow through his fingers. They dropped from his hand to swing clashing against each other. He strode, then, to catch up with Ayesha and the Sun.

  It was, she thought, an unlovely and unsettling place. Devoid of any decoration—if but in this alone, it was unlike any other building Ayesha had seen within the Crystal Empire—the giant stairwell which comprised the hollow central portion of the Spire was of itself unlit. Looking upward was like being a midge-fly trapped inside the chamber of a titanic rifle-barrel—the wall-hugging spiral staircase enhanced this illusion—looking upward toward the muzzle-crown.

  In the well’s center lay a low dais heaped with glowing charcoal from which the cloying smoke of incense powder issued—huge amphorae of the stuff stood open and at hand upon the floor nearby—twisting and curling toward the invisible heights.

  “Ayyah!”

  The Sun clapped his hands.

  From out of the surrounding shadows a pair of husky male attendants, arch-nosed and red-brown of complexion, materialized, unspeaking, to accompany the visitors. The threadbare robes they wore were blackened, not by any dye within the coarse-woven fabric they were fashioned of, but from years, it seemed, of wear without being washed.

  The two who wore them were far worse, their ebon waist-length hair rope-stiff, knotty and matted with some unguessable accumulation of filth, the skin about their faces and hands crusted over, crackling like the soil of some drought-afflicted land. Each brought with him his own hovering cloud of tiny insects. Larger crawling things dropped off their clothing as they passed, scurrying for the safety of the shadows. The odor of their unwashed bodies was more than Ayesha could withstand without gulping back a bitter foam—her stomach stirred, threatening worse—which rose, despite her efforts to the contrary, at the back of her throat.

  The faces of her companions told Ayesha they were suffering the same reaction.

  “Our priests—
”

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl introduced these dreadful attendants with a wave of his hand. Even he stood well back, breathing in shallow gasps in their noisome presence.

  “—will assist Us.”

  Together, they set foot upon the stairs.

  At frequent intervals, broad archways of truncated, triangular shape appeared, piercing the smooth-polished walls beside them. Entrances, it appeared to the girl, to bright-illuminated corridors radiating outward in great number from the central well, burrowing deep into the unknown outer structure of the Spire. These spilled their light in reasonable abundance into the well.

  The Saracen-Helvetian party began climbing, David’s wheeled chair paralleling the path they described, locked as it had been by the unsavory priest-attendants Zhu Yuan-Coyotl had summoned upon a clever, self-powered rail which had been mounted low at the well-end of the stairs. The mechanism made no noise as it moved the rabbi’s chair around and upward. Somehow the unwashed, insect-ridden servants had accomplished this and disappeared once more and as silently.

  Ayesha looked about her.

  Whatever insane imperial architect had conceived these stairsteps, she thought, it was certain he had not had human ease or comfort in mind. The treads were set back too far, their risers being but half the height they should have been. The going would have been easier, Ayesha reflected, had it been the other way around.

  Owald, a youth at the peak of military physical conditioning, strode along well enough, his body guardsman’s accoutrements of hardened leather and polished metal squeaking and clattering with each lifting of his muscled thighs.

  The sick and elderly Mochamet al Rotshild, upon the other hand, gasped out something between wheezes about wishing now that he had accepted the offer of his own wheeled chair.

  Fireclaw kept the pace in silence.

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl seemed cheered by the exercise.

  Before many minutes had passed, Ayesha’s own legs ached with the unnatural motions climbing the steps demanded. At the dimmer ends of the treads, away from the arches, there had been provided no protecting banister. There existed nothing more than darkened, empty space, smelling of mustiness and incense that was too sweet to abide long.

  Hanging over the abyss, David appeared pale, grim, as if resisting every passing moment the temptation to look down. Unlike the Commodore, Ayesha did not envy him the novelty of the ride.

  Thus did Zhu Yuan-Coyotl, the Sun Incarnate of the Han-Meshika, lead them, an assortment of adventurers from lands far away and perhaps now more appreciated, the Saracen Princess Ayesha, the Helvetian warrior Sedrich Fireclaw, Mochamet al Rotshild, counselor to kings and caliphs, Captain-of-the-Bodyguard Owald Sedrichsohn, David Shulieman the battle-injured Jewish scholar, past many of the radiating corridors, offering neither comment nor explanation as he did so, until, several stories up, after a climb which had been dizzying in more than one sense of the word, he at last bade them enter one of the archways.

  Some delay was occasioned when David’s wheeled chair was disconnected from the rail, without attendant help this time—he closed his eyes, swallowing, as Fireclaw and Owald swore and sweated, jiggling the contrivance over empty space—from its rail.

  When it was safe upon solid flooring, the Commodore once more took up its handles, appearing grateful for the support they offered. They then proceeded into the corridor, where they encountered an immediate branching in its course.

  “Do not fear,” the Sun answered their bemused expressions. “We have at frequent intervals wandered these passageways all Our life. We cannot therefore become lost.”

  He then lifted a weather-browned, slender hand to waist level, thereby indicating first in turn the right-hand branching, then the branching upon the left hand.

  “Nor does it matter much,” he told them, “which of the pathways We choose to explore. Each of them has its own minor peculiarities to divert Us. Yet the lesson to be learned in each is much the same. Let the Princess decide which way.”

  “Lima laa,” Ayesha answered. “As you will it.”

  She hesitated but a moment, then, remembering the habitual human tendency to turn rightward in such circumstances, strode instead into the left-branching corridor.

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl laughed.

  This branch of Ayesha’s choosing they thus followed, blinking for a while at the brighter lighting they encountered, the aged Commodore half pushing, half leaning upon David’s chair.

  Fireclaw kept his hand upon his dagger-pommel.

  As if in hostile territory, Owald took up the rear.

  Ayesha agreed with the uneasy, haunted feeling that both fighting men had, all unwitting, thus betrayed. Perhaps it was the strange surroundings. Perhaps nothing more than the subtle shimmering—something no warrior’s wariness or skill would be useful in quelling—they felt within the building, radiating upward from its roots.

  The earth was again restless.

  They had not thus proceeded twenty paces before they arrived at yet another passage branching, after that another, and another, Ayesha choosing upon each occasion, at Zhu Yuan-Coyotl’s amused bidding, which direction they should take.

  In a sense, he told them, they had no destination. They were at this moment where he wanted them to be, looking upon the sights he had wished them to behold.

  As if in illustration of this, he pointed at the walls. As Ayesha had already observed, they were not alone. Upon either side of the branching corridors they passed along, they were shown small, unembellished cubicles, hundreds of them, glass-fronted, each with its own door, in which inmates lay upon elevated pallets.

  Both genders were represented among the occupants, as well as every age, from tiny children, looking even smaller in their grown-up beds, to wizened elders. There were people here of every race.

  “These subjects,” Zhu Yuan-Coyotl explained, “are selected for this service when they come of school age and are tested for the talent it requires. They come from everywhere within Our domain, their families handsomely recompensed through a significant reduction in their tax levies. They are well taken care of, and live long, productive lives. Many of them have been here in this place far longer than you have been alive, Mochamet al Rotshild.”

  They continued walking down the branching passageways.

  David remarked aloud concerning his observation that into the bared left arm of every individual there had been inserted the end of a narrow, flexible transparent tube whose origin was a large bottle hanging upside down from a metal stand beside the pallet.

  The Sun explained that the bottles contained certain substances which aided the selectees in the performance of the service which was required of them here.

  “Chiefly,” he added, “they partake of liquid nutrients—far more efficient than maintaining kitchen services in this place—also of an expensive synthetic enzyme based upon the concentrated extracts of the hearts of the artichoke plant. We Ourselves have tried it, even to the extent of taking the drugs.”

  Ayesha swallowed, feeling herself pale at Zhu Yuan-Coyotl’s words.

  He himself chuckled, as if at the guilty memory of some minor boyhood naughtiness.

  “We are afraid We have small talent for it: one brief glimpse of a pistol made of glass.”

  Ayesha stumbled, seized Fireclaw’s great upper arm in both her small hands—then released it, feeling her breath grow short at the merest touch of him, her face begin to redden. With an embarrassed look upon his own features, the warrior cleared his throat as the party continued along the corridor.

  “All else was ordinary wish-fulfillment, small dreams of Our own everyday travails. No matter, any single subject cannot tell us much in any event. It is the aggregate which counts.”

  They peered through the panes of glass as if visiting a zoo. Other tubes, Ayesha saw, larger than the others, stretched from the middles of the sheet-draped forms down to recesses beneath the pallets. They gurgled as they worked, dark shadows upon occasion sliding through them to disappear beneat
h the pallets.

  In some alcoves, the supine inmates were being massaged by pairs of heavy-muscled attendants—not the filthy priests, but others, garbed in pale green—their limbs stretched and pounded, their skin chafed to stir the circulation.

  Ayesha guessed that there existed no need—and no excuse—for the inmates ever to leave their beds, let alone the rooms in which they were confined.

  The idea sickened her.

  Wherever the massage-teams or others performing similar services were not in attendance, some second imprisoned soul was seated in a low chair beside the pale reclining figure, writing as the inmate roused from drug-induced stupor for a while to speak. To others of the cubicles sketch-artists had been summoned—the party had collided with one such, hurrying down the hallway with his tablet and colored pencils—to draw something the inmate was describing.

  “Written accounts are taken to a central processing area,” Zhu Yuan-Coyotl told his guests, “where they are sorted, collated together, and each day summarized. Seven hundred thousand scribes—a veritable army—supervisors, clerks, scholars, historians, and archivists busy themselves with the task. We Ourselves are each day presented summaries of the summaries. Sometimes We suggest specific lines of inquiry for further pursuit. It takes up more of Our time and energy than any other of Our duties, but it is very often worth the cost.”

  In many of the cubicles, both occupants—drugged recliner and attendant scribe—dozed in subdued lighting, oblivious to visitors, servitors, casual passersby, even to the tremors rattling the fixtures.

  In one such, the “subject” sat up of a sudden, screamed, then fell back and lay silent.

  The scribe nodding his chin beside her did not stir.

  Some few of the rooms were empty, in the process of being cleaned, replastered, painted, or otherwise repaired—perhaps in response to that very rattling. In others yet the window to the corridor had been smeared over with some soapy, semi-opaque substance, as if what lay within were too terrible to behold.