The Crystal Empire

by L. Neil Smith

  Ayesha could keep her silence no longer.

  “They are like chickens in a coop, these poor people! Chanaa la chabhgham! Maa manna? What have they done to deserve such cruel, inhuman punishment?”

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl laughed.

  “The ‘crime’ they have committed, my dear Princess, is a lifelong one, consisting of nothing more than the inadvertent possession of a certain very peculiar excellence.”

  He turned to take in all the visitors.

  “No, foreign friends, these are not criminals, but the Dreamers, of whom We have often spoken, also at whose mention We have seen many a curious expression upon your faces.”

  He looked about him at the many rooms within sight, as if attempting to choose among them.

  “Now,” he asserted, “you shall learn more of them, perhaps, than you had wished to know.”

  XLIII: Resonance

  “My prayer, my ritual sacrifice, my living, my dying—all belongs to God, the Lord of all Being.”—The Koran, Sura VI

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl stopped, entering one of the cubicles.

  Despite themselves, Fireclaw and the others found themselves crowded about the doorway, looking in.

  The cubicle’s occupant, a young, fragile-appearing boy of perhaps fifteen, looked up at the Sun Incarnate, blinked without recognizing his ruler. The recording-scribe beside him, a girl of about the same age, had tidied his coverlet, patted his thin shoulder, then thrown herself, face downward, upon the floor.

  “We have commanded him,” explained Zhu Yuan-Coyotl in Arabic, having first spoken in one of the languages of the Han-Meshika, “to tell us what he has been dreaming of.”

  “I d-dreamt of this very place.” The boy raised an emaciated arm, answering in a weak, high-pitched voice, employing the same language he had been addressed in.

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl translated every few words.

  The boy gazed with drug-dulled eyes at the ceiling-fixtures. His body was white all over, pale as tendrils of the plantlife one finds growing beneath a rock.

  “Only the windows of each cubicle were without glass,” he added, “fashioned from thick iron bars painted a lumpy white, with reddish rust-stains leaking through. More bars blocked access to the corridors.”

  The boy sighed, licking his lips as if compelled to call up a distasteful memory.

  “Words were scratched or painted,” he continued, “upon the cubicle walls. Terrible words. Men, all dressed alike, brooded within them, consumed with a hatred many years in the making. They looked out upon other men who carried clubs.

  “I was one of those who brooded thus.”

  A tear trickled down the boy’s face.

  He stopped speaking.

  The Sun stepped closer, wiped the liquid from the pale cheek, then wiped his fingers upon the sheet.

  “Go on, child, tell Us more.”

  “Somewhere outside the cubicles a great bell sounded. The door-bars all slid aside. The men—there were hundreds of us—stepped out and stood in rows while those with clubs inspected them, poking at them with the clubs, making rude jokes. Some of their charges looked upon the others, the youngest among us, like predators, their unclean thoughts written upon their faces. Upon one occasion, I...”

  He shuddered.

  “Then the bell rang once again—much shouting by the club-carriers—we ourselves being bidden to utter and eternal silence upon pain of terrible punishment. We turned and marched along a railed walkway which clattered with our heavy footfalls. I think we were being taken somewhere to work and then to eat.”

  A sigh of envy tinged these final words.

  As if this effort at speaking against his will to remember had exhausted him, the bedridden boy let his thin, trembling hand drop to the coverlet. With a deep sigh, he closed his eyes.

  The little scribe rose from the floor without being bidden by her sovereign. Keeping her eyes averted from the Sun Incarnate, she kneaded the Dreamer’s hand.

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl spoke, not this time to the boy Dreamer, but to the girl beside the bed.

  “We suspect, child, that you grow too fond of him of whose words you are but an instrument of recordance. This is disruptive. It is not Our will that it should be so. At the next sleep-period, you will ask your supervisor for immediate reassignment.”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  The girl’s voice, not loud to begin with, and a small sob, were muffled by the coverlet she stared at.

  The Sun nodded, spread a hand to ruffle her shiny dark hair, and left the cubicle, continuing the party’s journey to yet another branching of the corridor.

  Here, he stopped.

  “It is a common enough dream here,” he told them, once well beyond being heard by the frail boy who had spoken. “A hundred thousand civilizations, it would seem, have at one time or another chosen to make a prison of this rocky islet.”

  He gave a sigh of satisfaction.

  “We Han-Meshika, at least, have made it something other than that, something proud, to be admired.”

  Sickened, Fireclaw suppressed a remark which would have been a poor substitute for what, in truth, he thought to do. They walked a few paces down the corridor, entered yet another cubicle.

  This Dreamer was a middle-aged man with exaggerated features and skin the color and texture of charcoal. His scribe, like the one in the previous roomlet, was a young Han-Meshika girl.

  “...was carrying a large leather bag through a great hall, amidst thousands of other travelers like myself, also carrying their possessions thus.”

  As he spoke, the girl took his words down in writing. Zhu Yuan-Coyotl began to translate until Ayesha informed him that the man’s words were intelligible.

  The Sun assumed a puzzled expression, glanced down at the scribe’s tablet, then nodded understanding.

  “Ah, yes, one of those rarest of outsiders who has qualified for this position. From your father’s southernmost African domains, or so it says upon the form.”

  Oblivious, the black man was still speaking.

  “Disembodied voices came out of the air, offering instruction and advice, while at a dozen glass-fronted stalls merchants hawked cheap, flashy souvenirs, clothing, colored booklets, bland food and drink costing more than it was worth.”

  He shook his head.

  “Uniformed guardsmen there were, inspecting people and the things they carried with them, bidding them pass through arches which made noises should any of the bags contain forbidden articles.”

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl folded his arms, the tolerant expression of bored amusement telling Fireclaw that he had heard tales such as this one many times before.

  “I offered passage-papers,” said the Dreamer, “to a uniformed young woman, very pretty, who smiled and led me to a great door which I then walked through. I experienced dizziness, a flash of blue light. I found myself—as I had expected to—standing before my own house, where my women and our many dear children came out to greet me as if I had been gone for a long while.”

  He stopped, as if finished speaking.

  The Sun had let his arms drop suddenly, and with them, his jaw.

  “Girl,” he ordered, suppressed excitement in his voice, “this remarkable dream, which begins in an ordinary wise—it sounds, at first, like any of a million busy travel-terminals for wheeled or winged conveyances—nevertheless bears further examination for the method of travel itself! Do you inform your supervisor. Convey to him my instruction to let me know of any progress you may make!”

  The scribe nodded, making note without speaking of the Sun Incarnate’s words upon her tablet.

  Observing the confused expressions upon the faces of his guests, Zhu Yuan-Coyotl sighed.

  “It often begins with something simple. During the reign of an illustrious ancestor of Ours, for example, one Dreamer dreamt of turning the metal base of a small glassy ‘pear,’ as she described it, into a brass-lined hole in the ceiling. When it had been seated home, it lit up with a dazzling light!”

  Fireclaw nodded. D
avid Shulieman had long since explained Han-Meshikan electric lighting to the Helvetian. It was characteristic of him that he’d already begun taking it for granted.

  “Our ancestor,” the Sun was saying, “ordered in his wisdom that the matter be pursued, through special suggestions made before the Dreamers slept, also by a thorough search for similar references in the archives already collected. It was not long before dreams of illuminated pears led to those of wall-switches—We were lucky there, one of our Dreamers was a house-carpenter in some other existence—transmission-lines, transformers, generators.”

  He clapped his hands in delight.

  Fireclaw was not displeased that the Princess had moved close beside him—some subtle scent she wore offset the murky odor of the place—as the Sun rambled on.

  “In this manner We learned to fly, the making of sophisticated weaponry, the surest means of taxation, a billion other things which, together, comprise the civilization of Han-Meshika. We are free to choose among the most efficacious of methods, making strides of a century’s progress in but a few months if We will it.”

  Still the looks about him were uncomprehending.”

  He shrugged, beginning again.

  “You have seen how this hallway splits and splits again until it has become a thousand hallways?”

  “A thousand twenty-four,” the Rabbi Shulieman offered, great weariness coloring his tone.

  “Very good,” replied the Sun. “A thousand twenty-four, then two thousand forty-eight, and so on—the same being true for some five hundred levels of this tower.”

  Ayesha opened her mouth.

  “Maadaa qulth! Five hundred—”

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl nodded.

  “Reckon it for yourself, girl. This island—the Spire standing upon it—is five hundred eighty paces long, about a third of that in width. The Spire’s height is three times the greater of those measures. In all, close to twenty-three million cubic paces, perhaps a quarter taken up by corridors and such necessities. The remainder is divided among these cubicles, three paces wide, three paces deep, three paces high. Six million Dreamers slumber here, a living sacrifice providing indispensable food for thought to their sovereign, the Sun Incarnate.”

  The earth beneath them shimmered once more, just at the edge of noticeability. Ignoring the unsettling phenomenon, the Sun Incarnate turned, slapping his hand upon the jade wall which formed the junction of two passageways.

  “They are like the splitting branches of a vast tree, are they not? An ancestor of Ours had the Spire of Dreamers constructed in this somewhat bizarre manner to teach himself a lesson. You see, the universe itself is constructed in this manner.”

  He pointed a slim finger at Fireclaw.

  “Suppose a moment that you’d ne’er left your home upon the eastern coast, great warrior. Suppose you’d ne’er traveled prairieward. You’d not be here now, would you, but in some other place, doing something else, is that not so?”

  The warrior shook his head, a grim expression upon his face.

  “Is there not enough trouble in the world, Zhu Yuan-Coyotl,” he answered in the Helvetian the Sun had employed, “to be o’erworried about might-have-beens?”

  “Upon the contrary, mighty Fireclaw, the Spire of Dreamers’s all about might-have-beens. ’Tis concerned with naught else. For in some might-be world as real to its inhabitants as ours appears to us, you did remain upon the eastern coast, to suffer or enjoy whatever consequences that decision earned you.”

  He turned to David Shulieman, looking down at the rabbi where he sat quiet and weary in the wheeled chair.

  “Likewise, scholar, in some other world you decided to become a sailor, whereas in that world, or perhaps another, your friend the Commodore, here, followed a path of religious erudition.”

  Light was dawning upon the rabbi’s pain-seamed face. He turned his head slowly, looking about the place as if for the first time.

  “I see,” the Sun exclaimed, “that you begin to understand! Those worlds exist! Our other selves exist within them! Enough worlds so that everything which can come to pass has, branching out from one another, growing in their trans-infinite number as each of us makes decisions—or perhaps with each random fall of the dice.”

  “Is this religion?”

  Fireclaw felt nothing but disgust. Six million tortured captives for the sake of a mad boy’s fantasies.

  “Or fact?” the Helvetian asked. “If so, how’d you come to know it?”

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl laughed, showing them into a third cell where an old woman was dictating.

  “I dreamt this period,” she spoke in a cheerful, grandmother’s voice, “of a blunt-nosed winged vessel stooping like a scorch-breasted bird upon the ruined surface of the moon until, unfolding wheels beneath itself, it raced upon an avenue a million paces in extent, restrained by cords across its path which brought it to a halt.”

  She leaned forward, tapped the already attentive scribe upon the shoulder.

  “People wearing glass-faced armor—I among their number—debarked, entering arch-topped dwellings, half buried in the soil, where we were greeted lovingly by kinsfolk.”

  She leaned back with a contented expression.

  “We were home.”

  The Sun Incarnate stepped outside again, addressing the Helvetian warrior.

  “There are many religions, Fireclaw, some tens of millions of which We’ve encountered through Our Dream-scribes and their supervisors. There’s but one Fact, of which the many smaller truths which comprise the universe are but minor aspects.”

  With a twinkle in his eye, he repeated the old woman’s gesture, leaning forward, tapping Fireclaw upon the chest.

  “We know this, for Our Dreamers tell Us ’tis so.”

  “As I thought,” the warrior snorted, “religion.”

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl laughed again.

  “We understand your skepticism, Fireclaw. Were We confronting this establishment, what it has to teach Us, for the first time, We hope We’d be as wary as you are. Nonetheless—”

  He folded his arms, rested his chin upon one hand.

  “Look you, recall the vases We struck upon the ground floor? Like Our ancestor, we, too, wish to teach a lesson, if only to Ourselves. We’d those jars placed there to that purpose. The outermost containers ring together when only one of them is struck because they’re identical—they resonate with one another—while the inner ones aren’t and don’t. ’Tis the principle upon which many sophisticated communications devices—”

  Ayesha, listening, had become pale.

  “Chanaa la chabhgham. What has this to do with these Dreamers whom you victimize so cruelly?”

  The Sun smiled upon her, switching back to Arabic.

  “We are, put in the bluntest of terms, parasites. What of it? It is no more than a word. A civilization peaceful, ordered, yet—a paradox—progressive. What need of individual ‘creativity’? Why tolerate the indiscipline it engenders, when you can steal its fruits from others? Yes, Our domain is advanced. But why suffer the economic or political displacements which follow in the wake of advancement, when you can control the introduction of each innovation, avoiding the eccentric prejudices of the innovators themselves?”

  Noting the expression upon her face, he went on.

  “In another world, Princess, perhaps you refused your father’s command, remaining instead in exile, perhaps upon the island Malta where your mother once lived.”

  Ayesha nodded understanding of this much, refraining to ask him how he knew of these things.

  “Very well, can we not make use of whatever similarities might be between the strong-willed Ayesha who refused her father—and the only slightly less strong-willed Ayesha who journeyed here in spite? There must be many, is it not possible, chiefmost of the mind? When one Ayesha sleeps, does not her unguarded mind perhaps resonate—as did those vases—with the other Ayesha’s equally open dreaming mind?”

  She took a step backward, away from Zhu Yuan-Coyotl.

&n
bsp; “Is it not possible,” he continued, “that, locked thus in resonance, many of the first Ayesha’s experiences are communicated to—look out, somebody, catch her!”

  Ayesha’s legs had failed her.

  She shuddered and collapsed in Fireclaw’s arms.

  XLIV: Bribery

  “Seek you help in patience and prayer, for grievous it is, save to the humble who reckon they shall meet their Lord.”—The Koran, Sura I

  “Ah, well.”

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl raised an eyebrow as Fireclaw lifted the Princess Ayesha into the safety of his arms.

  “We suppose we ought to have looked for this to happen.”

  Lips tight with a rising anger threatening, he feared, to transform itself into mindless blood-haze, Fireclaw spared a brief glance for the young man, athletic, tanned and smooth of skin, handsome of face and form—and, in the Helvetian warrior’s estimation, more marrow-evil than Oln Woeck had ever thought to be.

  “We see you disapprove of Us.”

  The Sun had not failed to observe the warning in the warrior’s eyes.

  “You think Us harsh,” he offered, with an amused twinkle in his own eyes, “o’erbearing and inhuman. You’d tell Us the measures We find recourse to are excessive.”

  Still speaking, Zhu Yuan-Coyotl turned his back to the man to face the wall. The older man couldn’t see the sly expression upon the younger’s face, nor could he have known what it meant in any case.

  Oln Woeck might have told him.

  “You’ve led a much-sheltered life, mighty Fireclaw, one most limited in its scope, learning all but naught of the universe you live in, nor of the million catastrophes an unrestrained, unguided, and uncertain humanity’s engendered—”

  The warrior let his hand creep, almost of its own volition, toward the dagger at his side. Encumbered as he was with Ayesha’s limp form, he couldn’t use Murderer. Thinking better of it—another time and place, but soon—he drew the hand back again, supporting the unconscious girl with it.

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl whirled, staring into Fireclaw’s eyes as if looking for something there. His own expression, the man noted, was an almost disappointed one.