The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  “You want to watch your step. One thing to work for them—we all have to do that—but loving them?—Oh, no, child, that will not be tolerated. Do you understand me? Will not be tolerated.”

  Nothing could convince her of my innocence.

  When I saw Haunt later that day, I could not bear to tell him what she had said. It was too bizarre, too shameful. I looked at him—the squat little Ansaar officer with the scaly skin and the long dangling arms, the short neck and the protruding jaws, the prickly spines of his crest marching across the top of his head, and I thought, No, no, we could never be lovers. But he is decent and kindly, and I feel no hatred for him.

  Was I a traitor, though?

  Yes. Yes, I was. I saw that now. In my naïveté I had betrayed my people, and they hated me for it. And my life was in jeopardy. If I went on working against my own kind, I would pay for it.

  Two days later, I was attacked again in the street.

  I never saw my attacker. Someone darted out of the shadows, struck me hard in the face, disappeared. Again my lip was cut. It was as though a white-hot blade had been drawn across it.

  “Tell me who it was,” Haunt demanded.

  I could tell him nothing. He put me under the protection of security robots. Wherever I went I had a robot at my side. I was pointed at, hissed at, jeered at. The robot intercepted things that were thrown at me, but it could not intercept their hatred.

  I thought of asking Haunt to release me from my annexation and return me to my village. But I liked working for him. I enjoyed helping him learn Earth’s history of Earth. And also I felt I was serving the cause of Earth by working with the Ansaar. I was studying them while they were studying us, learning not only their language but their nature. That might be useful someday.

  Three indecisive days passed. Then a tall white-haired man halted me outside Haunt’s headquarters and said, “Do you recognize me, Laylah?”

  I stared at him. “No.”

  “Dain Italu is my name. I knew your father in medical school.” He lowered his voice. “Do you know about the Partisans, Laylah?”

  “The Partisans?”

  Quietly he said, “We work for Earth’s freedom. I’m told that you work willingly with the Ansaar, Laylah, and that you even—” He paused. “Well, there are other charges. They proposed a sentence of death. I spoke out for you. I said no daughter of Tomas Walis could be guilty of such things. I hope I’m right, Laylah.”

  My face turned red and hot. “I’m not sleeping with an Ansaar, if that’s what you were trying to say, Dr. Italu. But I am working with one, yes.” And I told him that I felt what I was learning about the Ansaar could be valuable to Earth’s cause.

  “Perhaps. But I warn you, Laylah: get yourself free from this Ansaar of yours. Have nothing further to do with him. Otherwise—when the trouble starts—”

  His voice had become ragged and uncertain. And it struck me that he was telling me something I probably should not be hearing, out of friendship that had once existed between him and my father.

  He left me standing there, confused, deeply troubled.

  I went up to Haunt’s office. Ancient documents were spread out before him, texts going back to the era of warring nations.

  “Look at these, Laylah. They’re fascinating—absolutely fascinating. But there are some things here I don’t quite understand. Perhaps you can—”

  I have things to tell you, I thought. There’s going to be a rebellion. You’re at risk, Haunt, and so am I.

  But all morning we looked at documents and I said nothing. And that night, when the uprising began—

  Ah, Lordship, but morning has come again, I think! And so there is no more time for me to tell my tale!

  The Emperor said, “How sly, Laylah! You lead me along and lead me along, and just as I’m caught up in your story, eager to know what happens next, you tell me morning has come again!”

  “But morning has come again, Sire. And the executioner is waiting.”

  “Let him wait!” cried the Emperor. “Who rules this Empire, the Emperor or the executioner? There’s much that I need to hear. Partisans plotting rebellion—an insurrection against Ansaar rule—why am I learning of these things for the first time? Go on with it. That night, when the uprising began—”

  “I have talked all night, Sire. There is so much more to tell; but not now, not now!” Laylah yawned delicately. “I beg your indulgence, for I must sleep now, Excellency. And you—the responsibilities of the throne await you. Tonight, when I resume—”

  He smiled wryly. “Tonight! Tonight! And so you buy yourself another day of life!”

  “Ah, my lord, so I do. But life as a prisoner. What kind of life is that? I’d gladly tell you all in the next hour, and go at last to the fate reserved for me. But I am so tired now, Majesty.”

  “I will see you at sundown,” said the Emperor Ryah VII, and she could not tell whether his tone conveyed annoyance or amusement, or perhaps some of each. “Rest now, Laylah. And prepare to bring your story to its conclusion this evening.” And he was gone.

  9

  You have ordered me, O Master of the Galaxy and Lord of All, to be concise. And so I will be; for I am a mere barbarian slave and you are the Pillar of the Empire. I will tell you quickly of what happened on that terrible and violent evening in New Haraar.

  Ansaar blood was shed that night. Know, O Highest, that Earth has but one moon, large and brilliant. It goes through its phases every twenty-eight days; and so a time comes once a month when the night sky is dark but for the cool sparkle of the stars. On such a night of no moon the Partisans struck their first blow.

  You must remember, Excellency, we were once a violent race who with great difficulty had learned the way of peace; but now the buried violence in our souls had come roaring back into us with the vehemence of a beast that had been chained too long.

  Two billion of us and only a handful of Ansaar: the Partisans reasoned that if they could pick a few Ansaar off, five here and ten there, the flame of resistance would catch and blaze high, and then the Imperial government might decide we were too fierce, too savage, to take into the Empire.

  For weeks the Partisans had gathered weapons—not Ansaar weapons, beyond our poor maula skills to understand, but the crude weapons of Earth itself, knives and clubs and such. And they struck in the same instant in a dozen parts of New Haraar. With their knives, their clubs, their simple barbaric weapons.

  Jjai Haunt was among those Ansaar who fell in that first onslaught. If I had not left work early that night, I might well have died beside him. He was alone. They came out of the darkness and struck him again and again; and though he fought back bravely—I know he did—there were too many. They struck him down with their knives and their clubs, their simple barbaric weapons; and so they slew an Ansaar who had seen service on twenty worlds of the Empire.

  Twelve other Ansaar died in twelve different regions of New Haraar. The moonless night was lit by the red blaze of fifty fires.

  Dain Italu came to me. “Get your things together, fast. The Partisans will be here tonight to kill you.”

  He grabbed a traveling case of mine and threw some things into it; and I collected a few things more—clothing, books, pictures of my mother and father. A floater waited in the street.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked.

  “To Sinon Kreish’s castle,” said Italu.

  Sinon Kreish, Majesty, is dead now; but he was the wealthiest man on Earth, of a grandeur that only an Emperor can understand. To me he was legendary.

  “Have all the Ansaar been killed?” I asked.

  “Only a few, Laylah. The ones who were marked for death.”

  “And I was marked for death too, then?”

  “By one faction, yes. Others argued for saving you. You’ve been closer to the Ansaar than almost any of us, and you know them in a way that we’ll need later on.”

  We were far from New Ansaar by now. I thought of Jjai Haunt lying dead in the street, and I wa
nted to cry; but no tears would come. I was too sick at heart, too bewildered.

  Pale morning brightness entered the sky. A great black mountain loomed before us.

  “Mount Vorn,” said Dain Italu. “The estate of Sinon Kreish.”

  The floater landed on the black, craggy summit. And I knew I had come to a place of wonders and miracles.

  Golden sunlight ran in rivers across the iron-blue sky. Sweet morning air rushed into my lungs like fine mellow wine. Ancient sorceries penetrated my soul.

  A woman of Sinon Kreish’s staff moved toward us with wonderful grace, as though drifting weightless through the strange thin air.

  “I am Kaivilda,” she said. “Welcome, Laylah Walis.”

  And I entered the dwelling of Sinon Kreish.

  Kreish himself, O Master of All, was complex and sophisticated, wealthy and powerful and shrewd; a personage of splendor and significance. An hour with him, Sire, might have caused you to revise your notions of the barbaric qualities of the maulas of Earth.

  I wandered through his castle in an ecstasy of amazement. The Keep was a vast, gleaming onyx serpent, looping and leaping along the knifeblade-sharp ridge that is Mount Vorn’s highest peak. Its topmost level, a quartz bubble, held Sinon Kreish’s bedchamber, with his conjuratorium just alongside. Below—a horn of pure shining platinum boldly cantilevered out over the valley—was his trophy room; and just beside that, a blatant green eye of curving emerald, was the jutting hemisphere of his harmonic retreat.

  A white-vaulted passageway led to the apartments of Sinon Kreish’s family. A row of razor-keen blades that would rise from the carnelian floor of the passageway at any provocation guarded these.

  A second passage opened into a pleasure gallery supported by pillars of golden marble. Here the castle’s inhabitants swam in a tank lined with garnet slabs, or drifted in a column of warm air, or made contact with the rhythms and pulses of the cosmos. Here, also, Sinon Kreish maintained patterned rugs for focused meditation, banks of motile light organisms for autohypnosis, and other things whose purposes I did not know.

  From there the structure made a swaybacked curve and sent two wings back up the mountain. One contained Sinon Kreish’s collection of zoological marvels, the other his botanical garden. Between them were two levels of libraries and chambers for the housing of antiquities and objets d’art, and the castle’s dining hall, a single octagonal block of agate thrusting out into the abyss. Below that was the room of social encounter, a cavernous hall where Sinon Kreish entertained guests. A landing stage for visitors’ vehicles protruded from the mountain alongside. Behind it, hewn deep into the face of the mountain, were kitchens, waste-removal facilities, power-generation chambers, servants’ quarters, and such.

  In this miraculous house I spent the next six months, cherished like a member of Sinon Kreish’s own family. As for Sinon Kreish himself I saw only an occasional glimpse of a striking, formidable figure moving through the gleaming halls, at least in the beginning. But his kinfolk treated me warmly. It was a time of pure enjoyment—a dream-life, Sire, a time out of time for me. Gradually I began to recover from the shocks and surprises of the time of the Annexation.

  They are all dead now, O Lord of All, those sons and daughters of Sinon Kreish, and the castle itself was long ago reduced to rubble by the vengeful armies of the Ansaar. But my stay in that place remains as bright as ever in my memory.

  There was no sense there of the Ansaar presence on Earth. The entire Annexation might never have taken place at all.

  In time I learned that the New Haraar uprising had failed. Before dawn of that first night Ansaar forces had arrested nearly all the conspirators. Most were dead now. There had been terrible reprisals everywhere. Some of Earth’s greatest monuments were leveled; several of our most productive agricultural zones were systematically ruined. Word went forth that any further attacks against the Ansaar would be met even more stringently. So it was clear that the benevolence of the Ansaar regime was no more than a veneer, that we were in fact slaves, that if we were unruly we would be punished like beasts.

  In Sinon Kreish’s castle the weeks went by, each much like another. My life was strangely static, leading nowhere, containing no meaning. But then there was a great deal of meaning, indeed.

  I was taken to Sinon Kreish’s private retreat, the emerald-walled globe at the summit of the entire structure. Sinon Kreish stood rigid and upright as a tree. It was the first time I had ever been alone with him, and I was frightened.

  “I will tell you a great secret, girl, that would be worth my life if ever it reached the ears of the Ansaar. I am the leader of the resistance movement here on Earth.”

  I looked at him in amazement. “The Partisans?”

  “In a way. Their goal and mine were the same, to win back our planet’s freedom; and so I gave them a certain amount of aid. But the Partisans had no sense, no discretion. They could think only of murder and destruction. What could that gain? We murder ten Ansaar and they kill ten thousand of us. We burn five of their buildings and they destroy five of our provinces.” He smiled, the fiercest, most icy smile I had ever seen. “The Partisans were wrong, and paid with their lives. The Empire is stronger and wiser than we are; and it has dealt with rebels before. How many annexed worlds, do you think, have ever won their freedom from the Ansaar?”

  I had no idea; and so I said nothing.

  Sinon Kreish nodded. “Correct. None. Not one, in the ninety thousand years of the Empire. Revolts, yes. Wars of independence, even. But not a single planet has ever escaped the Ansaar grasp.”

  “Then we will be Ansaar slaves forever?” I asked.

  “Perhaps. We can never force the Ansaar to set us free. But maybe someday we can have our freedom as a gift, do you see? Not by resisting, girl, but by freely and willingly cooperating.”

  I was baffled. Why would the Empire ever relinquish its control over a meek and cooperative world? That was just the sort of world it would want to keep. And how did one resist by cooperating?

  He said, as though I had spoken aloud, “I deal with the Ansaar as I would with anyone with whom I am linked by common purpose. The Ansaar don’t want to destroy us. They want us to be docile, manageable members of the Empire. I too want to avert Earth’s destruction. So we have a common purpose, the Ansaar and I. Therefore I deal with them, do you see? I launch no insurrections. I countenance no assassinations, no arson.”

  He peered down at me from his great height. “Let’s get down to particulars, child. Dain Italu says you speak fluent Ansaar and that you’ve made a study of their ways and customs.”

  I nodded. “But I still have a great deal to learn.”

  “And we want to give you the opportunity to learn it. The more you know about the Ansaar, the more useful you are.”

  Useful? To whom? I wondered. And how?

  Sinon Kreish went on, “I have spoken lately with my friend Antimon Felsert, who is, you know, High Procurator for Earth.”

  His friend? The word took my breath away.

  “The High Procurator,” he said, “will let a few young people from Earth enter the Empire to study Imperial ways. I’ve shown him that mankind needs proper knowledge of the society it’s joining if it is to be integrated into the Empire.” He smiled. “We have been so isolated, so remote from the main currents of galactic life. But if some of our brightest can go forth to travel and study, they’ll ultimately serve to explain the ways of the Ansaar to the people of Earth, and to help the Ansaar learn something of our ways as well.”

  I was thunderstruck. This was all so sudden. I searched desperately for words. “Well—yes—I think—that is—”

  “There’d be no possibility of setting foot on the core worlds of the Empire, the ones inhabited by the Ansaar themselves. Entry to Imperial Space is forbidden to maulas. You know what that word means, do you?”

  Reddening, I said, “Yes. Barbarian.”

  “Actually it means simply ‘those who are not fully civilized.’ But yes, ‘
barbarian’ is basically correct. So you could never enter Imperial Space, but that still leaves the vast region of Territorial Space, where non-Ansaar races that are beyond maula status but nevertheless not yet entitled to full Imperial citizenship dwell. You’ll have plenty to study there.”

  It was agreed; and I left the castle of Sinon Kreish and traveled back to New Haraar. Where I soon found myself being ushered into the presence of Antimon Felsert, the High Procurator for Earth.

  —But I think that morning has come again, Sire. My time is at an end, and I must cease telling my tale.

  “This Felsert,” said the Emperor. “The name seems familiar.”

  “It is morning, Sire!”

  “Yes, yes, I know. Felsert, Felsert—”

  “He was assassinated by terrorists in the last year of your father’s reign. Sinon Kreish was charged with the crime and he and his entire family were put to death.”

  “Yes,” the Emperor said, half to himself. “I remember now. The first High Procurator killed by natives in something like four thousand years. There were worldwide reprisals, weren’t there?”

  “Severe ones, Sire. I was on one of the Bessiral worlds at the time, but I know my world suffered for his death. I was shocked by the assassination, myself, Majesty. It seemed pointless to me.”

  “Indeed.” The Emperor seemed oddly unwilling to leave.

  Laylah said again, “Is it not morning, Sire?”

  He swung around and glared at her. “It is morning, yes!”

  “And the executioner—”

  “The executioner, the executioner, the executioner! Vipraint the executioner! Why are you in such a hurry to die?”

  “I’m in no hurry at all, Majesty. But the law requires—”

  “Do you presume to teach me the law?”

  “A thousand pardons, Sire. I was only reminding you—”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  “But if in your great mercy, All-Powerful, you choose to let this poor maula remain alive another day, I would offer thanks to the gods of all the worlds.”