The Sundering

by Walter Jon Williams

  Chen stared at the Lord Senior in profound shock. “My lord?” he said.

  “The chain of wormhole relay stations between Zanshaa and Magaria has never been cut,” Saïd said. “We can speak to each other if we need to. They have demanded our surrender, and we have refused…officially.”

  Something in Saïd’s tone sent a cold waft of suspicion through Chen’s thoughts. “And unofficially?”

  “Since the failure at Magaria the Naxids have been contacted by what claims to be a dissident organization within our government. They claim a base of support both within the Convocation and the Fleet. They have been pleading for time while they organize an overthrow of my,” Saïd smiled, “inflexible government. And our false traitors are also using the conduit to feed them false information—for instance that the Fourth Fleet is in a much better state than it actually is, and will be here from Harzapid at any time.”

  “And the Naxids believe this?”

  The Lord Senior gave a subtle shrug. “They show every sign of belief. We hope to delay long enough to bring reinforcements to Zanshaa.”

  “This game is very dangerous, my lord,” Chen said. “You can never be certain who is deceiving who. And they may decide to force the issue by coming anyway.”

  Saïd gave a thoughtful nod. “True, lord convocate,” he said. “But what choice do we have?”

  Chen left the Lord Senior’s office with his mind on a thoughtful, rolling boil. He was a Peer of the highest caste, and until the previous day he had felt himself ready to meet a Peer’s fate, dying for the Praxis beneath the fire of Naxid antimatter bombs, or with a pistol to his head as Naxid gendarmes broke down the door of the Chen Palace.

  If he had thought the situation completely without hope, he would have shot his wife and daughter first, and he would have expected them to show the same indifference to fate as he hoped to display himself.

  But that determination had ended the previous afternoon, in the quiet garden amid the scent of lu-doi blossoms, when Martinez had spoken to him, and Chen had seen new possibilities open before him like a flower.

  Now, Lord Chen realized, it was possible that his wife and daughter would survive, and that very possibly he would live as well. And in order for this to happen, he would have to convince enough members of his own caste of the virtues of a plan developed by their social inferior.

  Mere days ago, he would have laughed at this idea. But that was before he had spoken to Martinez.

  He already had a mental list of people to talk to, people both in Saïd’s administration and without it.

  He stepped into his own office and told his secretary to contact the first person on the list.

  A singer stepped onto the stage. She was dressed in the traditional flounced skirts of the derivoo, her hair was drawn severely into a forward-tilting pile atop her head, and her face was whitened, with a perfect circle of red on each cheek.

  The audience fell into an expectant silence. Accompanied only by three musicians, the derivoo began to sing. It was a song of love and longing, and despite her antique appearance the singer’s voice was a wonder, caressing each syllable with the silky care of a languid lover. The singer’s hands, whitened like her face, fluttered in the air like doves, illustrating the words as she sang. At times the singer paused, letting the suspense mount, and Sula found herself holding her breath until the singer released the tension with her voice.

  At the end, the applause was ecstatic. Sula had seen derivoo before, but only on video: she hadn’t realized how powerful a live performance could be.

  “She’s a wonder, isn’t she?” Martinez said.

  “Yes,” Sula agreed. His hand slipped across the table and took hers. His hand was large and warm and not over-moist. On the whole, Sula decided, a good hand.

  The singer began again. It was a song about death, a mother pleading with the unknowable for the return of her child. The voice that had formerly caressed now took on a desperate, raw tone of perfect emotional desperation that cut like a razor. By the end of the performance, the singer’s whitened face was furrowed by the track of a single tear.

  Sula retrieved her hand to applaud. Listening to the singer was like having her nerves scorched with acid, but for some reason it felt good. The songs of mourning and love drew aside the curtains from a charged, elemental fact of the universe, something true and primal and grand. These, the songs said, were death and longing, the unchangeable facts of existence. This, the songs said, was what it meant to be human.

  Derivoo was almost wholly a human art. Though one of Terra’s great contributions to imperial civilization was tempered tuning, few of the great composers or performers to make use of this discovery were human. Because the faces of the Daimong were expressionless, their chiming voices communicated all emotion, nuance, and context; they were born into what was essentially a musical environment, and lived in it all their lives. They were capable of enormous brilliance and subtlety in musical interpretation, though their performances were best appreciated in recording: the scent of rotting flesh tended to limit the appeal of concert appearances, and the best place to appreciate one of the magnificent massed Daimong choirs was from far upwind.

  Whereas it was generally agreed that the Cree were music. Their primitive eye-spots were balanced by the sensitive hearing of their broad ears and the sound-ranging capabilities of their melodious voices. Their personalities tended toward the effervescent side of the spectrum, and the music they created was ideal for expressing joy and delight. The most popular performers and composers tended to be Cree, and even if a song were written or popularized by a member of some other species, it was usually a Cree who recorded the version the worlds thought definitive.

  When the musical expression of magnificence, joy, splendor, and dance became a province of other species, the Terrans had been left with tragedy, with the music of loss and sadness. Other species found something fascinating in the Terrans’ straightforward utterance of despair, in standing to face the truths that were unendurable. Even the Shaa approved. They found the idea of tragedy ennobling, and perfectly in tune with their own stern ethic, their own belief that all but their own ideas were transient and mortal…and if people like Lear and Oedipus came to grief, it was only because of an insufficient understanding of the Praxis.

  Derivoo was simple—one singer, a few accompanists, and absolute purity of tragic expression. It had none of the Daimongs’ grandeur, or the burbling joy of the Cree. What derivoo possessed was the confrontation of one soul with darkness, a soul resolute in the knowledge that darkness will triumph but willing nevertheless to shout the fact of its existence into the face of the howling cosmic wind.

  Sula listened enthralled. The singer’s presence was magnificent, and the musicians knew how to accent her effects without spoiling her simplicity. The urgency of her voice and the purity of her emotion closed on Sula’s heart like a fist. She seemed to hear the words pulsing through a veil of blood. Death, to Sula, was not a stranger.

  She had helped to carry Delhi’s dead from the scorched control room, crew curled into charred husks that weighed no more than a child, that left a dust of charcoal mortality on her hands.

  She had killed two thousand or more Naxids at Magaria.

  When she was young she had killed a grown man, had him thrown into a river.

  She had once killed an unhappy, confused young girl.

  Mortality wove a web through the air around her, warranting that her spark, too, was brief, that she, too, was dust on the hands of fate.

  Assured of this, she felt a smile draw itself onto her lips. She knew where she was.

  Sula was home.

  There was a brilliance in Sula’s face that evening, a rising of color in the cheeks and an unearthly glow in the green eyes. The derivoo had transformed her. Martinez watched in fascination as the singer’s spirit entered Sula, and he was so overcome by the ivory and roses of Sula’s complexion glowing in the soft light of the club that the only reason he failed to fl
ing himself on her and feast with his lips on that perfect countenance was that he was afraid he’d spoil it, that her beautiful trance would be broken….

  He didn’t dare kiss her until after they’d left the club, until he felt her shiver in the chill of the night air and he could wrap her in the warmth of his arms and press her lips with his own.

  “That was wonderful,” she said after a moment. He felt a brief disappointment that she spoke of the derivoo and not his kiss.

  “She’s one of the best,” Martinez said. He took her arm and walked with her down the street in the general direction of the funicular. The door of a bar opened and cast a warm glow on the pavement. Music thumped out from clubs.

  “You’re cold. Would you like to stop in one of these places and take the chill off?”

  “I’m not cold. I’m all right.” She forced a smile. “I don’t want to hear any other music tonight. It wouldn’t measure up.”

  She turned to him, the color still high in her face. Her smile was brilliant. Martinez maneuvered her into the recessed doorway of a shop and took her in his arms and kissed her. For a moment he enjoyed the warmth of her breath on his cheek, the softness of her lips, the taste of a citrus-flavored soft drink on her mischievous tongue, and then he drew back. Sandama Twilight whirled in his senses. His heart was beating thickly, to a strange lurching rhythm, and his mind seemed to be lurching as well, incongruous thoughts and impressions flashing from its dim recesses. He forced it into the channel he wanted.

  “You know,” he said, “I wasn’t joking when I said I wanted to join your family.”

  Her smile was bemused. “I suppose I could arrange to adopt you. Though I hadn’t planned on being a mother quite so young.”

  “There’s an easier way I could join,” Martinez said. “We could get married.”

  Sula stared at him, pupils wide in her green eyes, and then an expression of suspicion crossed her face. “You’re not joking, are you, captain?”

  “N-No.” Martinez fought the stammer that seemed to have suddenly possessed his tongue. “Absolutely not.”

  Sula’s face was dazzling in its sudden brilliant splendor. Further words seemed suddenly unnecessary. His lips took their answer from hers.

  A moment later, mind whirling, he was walking with her down the street, aware of the idiot’s grin on his face and the bloom of happiness in his chest.

  “Your family really thinks this is all right?” Sula asked. Earlier in the evening he’d told her what had happened to Sempronia, banished for loving a man of insufficient rank.

  “They’ll have plans for you,” Martinez said. “They’ll want to load you with a few million zeniths and buy you a showcase palace in the High City and a country estate where we can entertain.” He grinned. “And if you don’t want any of that, you’ll have to be very firm with them.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “And in return for this, I’ll have to do what exactly?”

  “Pry open some doors in the High City that are otherwise closed to provincials.”

  She gave a bemused shrug. “I’m much more a blunt instrument than I am a pry bar,” she said. “I could get the doors open, maybe, but I wouldn’t answer for what the folk on the other side might think about it.”

  “Best let Roland work that out on his own.”

  Sula gave a sudden bright laugh and swung herself like a child on the end of his arm, shoes skipping on the pavement. “So what happens next?”

  “We could make the announcement tomorrow afternoon at the reception after Vipsania’s wedding.” He grinned at her. “That’ll serve her right for diverting the guests’ attention at my party.” He swung her laughing on the end of his arm. “And before that, in the morning, we could pay our visit to the Peers’ Gene Bank and get the paperwork out of the way.”

  She gave him a startled, half-believing look and dropped his hand. “The what?”

  “Don’t worry. They just take a drop of blood.”

  “The what bank?” Her voice turned insistent.

  “The Peers’ Gene Bank,” Martinez said. “Just to get all the bloodlines on record.”

  She turned down the street, and he fell into step with her. He saw her face reflected in window glass, a wavy dark-eyed ghost. Skepticism invaded her face. “Is this strictly necessary?” she asked. “I never heard of this place.”

  “I don’t suppose the Gene Bank advertises,” Martinez shrugged. “But then they don’t have to. It’s the law, at least here on Zanshaa, if you’re a Peer and want to marry. We have a gene bank on Laredo, too, though it’s not just for Peers.”

  “There wasn’t anything like that on Spannan.” The planet, Martinez knew, where she’d been fostered after the execution of her parents.

  “Some Peers care more about their bloodlines than others, I suppose,” Martinez said. “It’s a stupid old institution, but what can you do?”

  They came to one of the Lower Town’s canals and turned left to the bridge they could see in the distance. The scent of the canal filled the air, iodine and decay.

  Sula’s face hardened. “So what happens to the drop of blood once they draw it?”

  “Nothing. It just goes into the record.”

  “And who consults the record?”

  A canal barge chugged by, its running lights shimmering on the dark water. The greasy wake slopped against the stone quay. Martinez raised his voice against the sound. “No one consults it, I imagine. Not unless there’s some question about the parentage of the children.” He slipped up behind her as they walked and wrapped her in his arms. He nuzzled close to Sula’s ear and said, “You’re not planning on having children by anyone but me, are you?”

  He could feel surprising tension in her shoulders, and then the deliberate attempt at relaxation. “No one but you,” she said abstractly. She slowed her walk, then turned to him and gave him a quick kiss. “This is so sudden,” she said. “A few minutes ago I was just a woman with a medal and no job, and now—”

  “Now you’re my partner for life,” he said, and was unable to restrain his grin.

  She looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read. “You’re not getting carried away in some kind of stampede, are you? How many marriages are going on in your family, anyway?”

  “You and I will make three. Or four, but I’m not sure Sempronia rightly counts, and I don’t know if she’s actually getting married or just threatening to.”

  Her arms tautened around him like wire, and she pressed her cheek hard to his chest. Sandama Twilight floated through the air. “Three marriages at once,” she said. “Isn’t that unlucky?”

  “It sounds lucky to me,” Martinez said.

  “I can hear your heart beating,” Sula murmured irrelevantly. He stroked her pale gold hair. A cold gust chilled him. Water slopped against the quay.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  There was a moment’s silence, and Martinez felt a wariness touch his nerves. She loosened her arms and looked up at him.

  “Look,” she said. “This is all very sudden. I’m not used to the idea yet.”

  He looked at her with the dizzying sensation that he had just stepped onto the edge of an abyss, and that a single misstep would send him spinning into the void.

  “What,” he said carefully, “are you trying to tell me?”

  She gave him a gentle kiss and offered a tentative smile. “Can’t we just go on as we are for a while?”

  He looked at her. “We don’t have a lot of time. I want this to happen before…”

  A door opened ahead of them, and music boomed out. Torminel in the brown uniforms of the civil service spilled into the doorway, then stood there calling to one another while the music shouted out around them, stringed instruments shrieking in a minor key. Sula bent her head, put her hands over her ears as discordant cymbals crashed.

  “I need to think,” she insisted over the noise.

  Sudden anger drew a hot slash across Martinez’s chest. He found himself raising his voice over the
blaring music.

  “I’ll spare you the trouble,” he said. “A moment’s thought would tell you that this is your best chance for security and the restoration of your family name, not to mention your difficulty in finding a patron in the service. So my own brief analysis would seem to indicate that your problem isn’t the money or the palace or the place in the country, your problem lies with me….”

  Sula’s eyes lifted to his, wide and sea-green and cold. “Spare the commentary,” she said in a voice hard as diamond. “You don’t know anything about my problems.”

  Martinez felt his spine stiffen under Sula’s gaze. His mind raced, a dark turmoil illuminated by jagged flashes of anger. “I beg to differ, my lady,” he said. “Your problem is that you lost your money and your position and all the people that you loved. And now you’re afraid to let anyone love you, because—”

  “I won’t hear this!” Sula’s voice cut like a lash. Her hands were still flat over her ears. The gold light that poured from the open door glowed in her eyes like angry fire. “I don’t need this pompous idiocy now! You don’t know anything!”

  The Torminel were staring at them now with their huge nocturnal eyes. Cymbals, tuned to strange minor keys, crashed again and again in Martinez’s ears.

  “I—”

  “It’s not about you!” Sula shouted. “Will you please get it into your head that it’s not about you!”

  Then she spun on her heel and marched away, pale legs flashing beneath the hem of her black dress as she shouldered her way through the Torminel. Martinez stood on the pavement and watched her, a wild disbelief throbbing through his veins.

  It was happening again.

  Once before he had watched Sula walk away through the night, her heels emphatic on the surface of the street while the lights of the Lower Town gilded her hair. Once before he had stood stupidly and watched while she walked out of his life, while a cold morning wind blustered along the canal and his heart filled with a mixture of bewilderment and anger and knife-edge anguish.