“I would have thought you’d be gloating in your chambers,” Besh said.
Acron approached him quickly, drawing a short-handled blade from his tunic with resolve. He took Besh’s arm in a tight grip while thrusting the dagger in below the breastbone and driving upward. Acron’s eyes never left Besh’s face.
“I wanted to do this myself,” he hissed.
After shocked surprise, Besh’s face began to collapse, but he managed to keep his gaze focused on Acron for a moment.
“I’m not … surprised …”
Acron let him go, and Besh collapsed to the ground, drawing a last breath before lying still.
Acron turned angrily to the wide-eyed young guard.
“Get rid of him, now,” Acron said. “And say nothing, or you’ll follow his example.”
Without another word, Co-Prime Minister Acron turned on his heel and marched off to a prior engagement.
“You are here because the time for finesse is over,” Acron said. Standing with the flats of his hands on the table before him, he leveled a hard look at the four men seated around the table; three were already his own, and the fourth was needed. “Besh is gone, and I am, as of this moment, assuming the full prime minister’s mantle, with concurrent powers.”
“It was a shame about poor Besh,” Law Minister Chang said with barely suppressed glee. “My court had no choice but to find him guilty of sedition, of course.”
“He never made it to the firing squad,” Acron said, and watched Chang’s smile falter. Chang was a good bureaucrat, but, like the late Besh, was too subtle for his own good. “I dispatched him myself. Are there any objections?”
Acron was pleased at the looks on their faces; and pleased that you could have heard a pin drop in the room.
“Now that Besh is gone, our real work begins. With or without the High Leader’s help.”
This was the big step; for a moment he thought there would be no objection, but then the one question mark of the group, Cornelian’s diplomat and spy Cal-Fen, spoke up.
“Is that wise, Co-Prime—pardon me, Prime Minister? You are aware that the High Leader approved of your recent … realignment of power. The High Leader has every confidence in your abilities, and knows that the current troubles with the outer provinces will be resolved, as well as the disturbances in the cities. As the High Leader’s representative, I can assure you that relations between Earth and Mars have never been better than they are at this moment. And we see nothing but a continuance of the current special status, shall we say, of the relations of our two worlds—”
Barely taking a breath, Acron cut the man off. “Mars and Earth will continue to be friends, Ambassador Cal-Fen, as long as Mars does not meddle in Earth’s affairs. Let us call this a new era of cooperation.”
Cal-Fen gave a diplomat’s smile and prepared to launch into another flowery speech, which Acron snuffed before it could begin.
“A new era,” the prime minister said coldly, “in which Earth takes care of its own problems.”
For emphasis, Acron drew the knife he had so recently slipped between Besh’s ribs and threw it on the table, where it came to rest pointing at the Martian ambassador. Its reddened tip was like an accusing finger.
“Let me be blunt, Ambassador,” Acron said. “I am going to crush the rebellion on Earth, and, in the process, I am going to crush any Earthling with sympathetic ties to Mars. As of this moment Earth and Mars are once again two separate worlds. And you will be on a shuttle home to Mars tonight, to deliver that message personally to the High Leader.”
Ambassador Cal-Fen rose; for a moment he sought to lock stares with Acron, but when the prime minister reached over to retrieve his dagger, bringing it up under the ambassador’s chin and nicking it with the blade before sheathing it, Cal-Fen’s eyes widened and he gave up, turned on his heel, and marched out of the room.
When the door had slid closed behind him, Acron laughed, but his laughter was the only sound in the room.
“Relax, gentlemen,” Acron said, sitting down and taking a hugely deep breath. “I have no intention of breaking ties with Mars. That little charade was for Ambassador Cal-Fen’s benefit. The High Leader asked me to send him home with his tail between his legs; it seems he’s been skimming profit money from some of the Martian textile concerns here, and not sharing the proceeds. I’m afraid he has a fate similar to Besh’s waiting for him when he gets home.”
Prime Minister Acron’s florid face broke into a grin; and in a moment the other ministers, led by Chang, were guffawing at the joke.
“And now,” Acron said, “we really do have much work to do.”
And in the back of Prime Minister Acron’s iron mind was the thought, No intention of breaking ties with Mars—yet.
Chapter 6
The summons came at the oddest time: in the middle of the night.
Visid awoke, feeling a nearby presence. The room was etched in shadows; Arnie was soundly asleep on her opposite pallet, head turned outward, mouth slightly open, breathing like a child; from out in the hallway came the softly unending murmur of Lessons, the osmotic drone of hidden voices telling Venusian children, even in the midst of dreams, that they were destined to serve their home planet and destined to serve their Martian masters.
And yet–
Visid looked at the doorway; something was blocking it.
An attendant: a box on wheels, a primitive retriever model.
“You will come with me,” the attendant said. Visid rose.
“Dress,” the attendant said. “Quietly.”
Visid did as she was told.
In a few moments she was leaving the room, looking back at Arnie, still asleep. One of her friend’s hands trailed over the side of the pallet, fingertips touching the floor.
“Good-bye,” Visid whispered, and followed the attendant into the hallway and out to a waiting transport.
For the second time in a month, she had a transport to herself.
But now it was nighttime, and the stars were out. She knew the Martian names for constellations from Lessons: Great Pot, Small Pot, Hourglass. Once, there had been a lesson under the stars, on a dusty night, with an ancient telescope. None of what she had seen had been as vivid as Screen images; dust had finally covered the instrument’s lens with a thin coat, and they had gone back into the dormitory.
But the stars tonight were beautiful, and there were many more than she had imagined. As so often happened, when the dust storm ended a week ago it had drawn any moisture in the air with it; and when the winds had died, all the muck of the atmosphere had dropped to Mars’ surface in a cleansing dry rain that left the sky clean, clear and cold.
There was Earth, a tiny blue smudge, over the horizon, with its white moon a nearby dot; and higher up what must be Jupiter, huge, a gibbous lantern whose bands of color she could almost see without optical aid.
She wished she had that telescope now!
And there—
Venus.
It was unmistakable, well below Jupiter and to Earth’s right, near the horizon. It was not large, but was nevertheless softly brilliant, unmistakably a planet. Visid had read that before the terraforming of Venus had begun it had been twice as bright, due to the constant cloud cover and the planet’s nearness to the Sun. In Screen images, the old Venus had looked yellow-white; now its color was more muted, a golden red with growing patches of blue-green.
Beautiful.
Home.
Someday …
She watched for what seemed like hours, until the rusty rose of dawn began to creep over the east.
Visid’s waking dream was broken by the transport stopping before the school’s administration building; out front, barely illumined in coming morning light, was a lone, tall figure.
Oh, no.
The transport stopped; but to Visid’s surprise she was not told to depart; instead, the figure, which was that of the teacher of Culture, rail-thin and tall, stooped to step up onto the bus.
The teacher
’s eyes regarded her with a strange look; a mixture of disapproval and extreme curiosity—as if she were a bad new bug under a Biology microviewer.
“The doors in these transports are not tall enough,” he said in preamble, then added: “For some reason, you have been chosen for the project we spoke of three weeks ago.”
Visid’s heart leaped with excitement, but she kept her face stoic in reaction to the teacher’s continued scowl.
“I used my position here as chancellor—yes, child, I am more than just an instructor—to try to prevent this decision’s implementation, but to no avail.” His scowl deepened. “However, I was given assurance that if you don’t work out, you will be returned here and I may institute the brain cleaning I so forcefully insisted that you require.”
Sensing that no matter what happened in the future, she would be free of this man, Visid allowed a smile to cross swords with the chancellor’s frown.
“You may not smile for long,” the chancellor said, turning to duck under the transport’s door. In a moment, as the door slid shut, he stood in his former position, sourly watching the transport pull away as red dawn rose.
As her window passed his position, Visid said, “I will always hate you!” and was pleased to see his reaction of anger.
“That’s one bridge burned,” she said to herself; but found an odd comfort in the thought, as the transport pulled away, leaving the school and the chancellor behind as only memories, shrinking in view.
An hour later found her within the outskirts of Lowell City, as dawn turned into a workday, with the concurrent crowding of streets.
Visid had never been in traffic before. On her infrequent trips into the city, she and the other students had always been well chaperoned by attendants. The trips had been point-to-point affairs; they had traveled in darkness to a museum or off-school teaching facility, had spent the day in said facility performing specific learning tasks, and then had traveled back to their dormitory in darkness. Lowell had never been seen alive.
But today, in bright morning light, the city fairly burst with energy. Transports hemmed them in on either side; their forward progress was impeded by a long line of vehicles in front of them. The sandstone-paved streets were wide, but seemingly not wide enough; there didn’t seem to be enough room for everyone, walkers and riders.
“Attendant,” Visid queried the transport driver, “is it always this crowded?”
“Only at this time, and in the evening, when workers depart for their homes,” the robot answered. It added, “You must remember that there are nearly three times as many pedestrians in the underground walkways and transport tunnels at this moment.”
“Wow. And where do they all work?”
There was a moment a hesitation, which led Visid to believe she had asked a silly question.
“There are approximately sixteen thousand, four hundred different occupations in Lowell City, beginning with the most densely filled position, Martian defense worker, followed by Martian Marine, followed by—”
“Thank you, Attendant. That will be enough.”
“As you wish.”
“Tell me, though: when will we arrive at our destination?”
“Traffic permitting, within five minutes.”
Just then there was a break in the transport line in front of them, and their own vehicle shot ahead, making an abrupt right turn that brought it onto the straightaway bordering the Great Lawn, which led directly, blocks ahead, to the former residence of the High Prefect of Mars; its pink sandstone form was unmistakable, grand as it was, narrowing as it did to a single garret topped with a sickle within a circle of black iron, the symbol of Martian solidarity (and, lately, aggression) that scraped the pink sky.
Visid felt herself go cold inside.
“Attendant,” she asked, “where are we going?” Without turned from his driving, the attendant said, “Rear entrance, bay number four.”
“Of the residence of the High Prefect?”
“High Leader. Correct.”
“Am I to meet with the High Leader?” Visid asked; she recalled the chancellor’s last words to her: You may not smile for long.
“That I do not know.”
To their left, the empty expanse of the Great Lawn gave way abruptly to the shadowing, looming bulk of the residence; the temperature seemed to drop within the transport.
“Attendant,” Visid said, “let me out here.”
“We are not yet at our destination.”
With sudden foreboding, Visid rose from her seat as the transport began to descend an incline and pink stone walls rose up on either side of them. Unsteadily, she walked to the front of the transport, descended into the exit well, and tried to pry open the door.
The attendant turned his chromed head in her direction.
“We will be stopping soon,” he said. “Please return to your seat.”
“Let me out now!”
“That is not allowable.”
“Let me out!”
The attendant turned its attention back to driving, while its right hand let go of the transport’s drive bar and reached out to restrain Visid in a tight grasp.
“Let me go!”
“I am not allowed to harm you, but I must keep you in this position until we reach our destination.”
They were nearly in darkness as the transport continued down the incline; now dim lights showed them a docking bay area as the transport’s angle evened out.
“We are nearly there,” the attendant said.
There was a single dark opening ahead of them, labeled overhead with the number 4; a single figure stood regarding the slowing transport.
For a moment Visid’s heart skipped; the figure was tall and angularly thin, and she was struck with the flashing certainty that a cruel joke had been played on her: that the chancellor had somehow raced ahead of her to this spot, where he waited to drag her to the brain cleaning he so desperately wanted her to undergo.
“Oh, no …” Visid said.
The transport stopped and stood idling with a pleasant hum while the figure in the doorway slowly approached.
The attendant continued to hold Visid in an iron grip as the figure outside, its face still hidden in the entrance bay’s gloom, now stood before the transport’s door. Visid, trapped in the exit bay, was a mere arm’s length away from the man, who now made an impatient motion for the transport’s door to open.
The attendant activated the door, which slid open; at the same time, the attendant let Visid go.
Off balance, she fell out of the transport’s exit well, into the arms of the startled figure outside, who clumsily caught her.
Even in the gloom, she could now make out the features of the figure supporting her.
It was not the chancellor.
She gasped anyway, stifling a scream at the horrible visage she beheld: a grossly high forehead leading to a balding pate of lank, long yellow-gray hair; the skin was sallow and pale, deeply pocked about the eyes and sunken cheeks. The eyes were set in hollows and were a brackish color, the whites bleeding sickly into the irises. The mouth’s lips were missing, presenting a mouth full of bad teeth in a perpetual, rictus-like smile.
“I am,” the figure said, “Sam-Sei, the Machine Master of Mars.”
Now Visid, unable to scream, fainted instead. “And you,” the Machine Master concluded, “are here to assist me.”
Chapter 7
“Dig, damn you!”
“I am digging!”
For the thirtieth time that day, Dalin wanted to turn his shovel from the job at hand to the back of Shatz Abel’s head. The burly pirate was a madman, and everyone knew that the only way to stop a madman was by any means possible.
The flat side of a shovel, for instance.
Above the howl of wind, Dalin heard Shatz Abel’s laughter close by. He turned, and the few minuscule, unprotected portions of his face—between visor and face mask, between hood and neck—stung with the pelt of tiny, unending methane crystals. How he hate
d this snow! How he hated the fact that it sang when it fell, the crystals scraping one against the other in an unearthly high, pinging hiss. And how he hated, most of all, the fact that it wouldn’t stop!
Shatz Abel’s face, a few feet away, broke into a smile around his mouth hole. Again the pirate laughed.
“Tired, are we, Your Majesty? Perhaps a cup of tea on the veranda, overlooking the gardens? Perhaps a hot bath, drawn by your valet? Perhaps a warm kiss in a rose garden—”
“Shut your mouth!”
Shatz Abel laughed all the louder. Though by now Dalin knew that the bearded freebooter goaded him for his own good, as he had been doing for the last three years, it did not make it any easier to take.
In frustration and mostly anger, the King turned from Shatz Abel, thrust his shovel into the thickening pile of blue-white snow mounting around the storage shed, and began to dig again.
“Ha!” Shatz Abel said.
Suddenly Dalin threw down his shovel and faced the man again.
“When will it end?” he shouted, anger giving way to frustration now.
The pirate laughed. “Perhaps never! Maybe they’ll find us a hundred years from now, my liege, just as we are today! Frozen in place with our shovels—perhaps you’ll freeze solid as you stand over me, ready to strike me with your oversized spoon!”
Shatz Abel began to laugh hysterically—and now Dalin had the frightening thought that perhaps this huge man, who, even though he was boorish, vexatious, and loud, the king had come to depend on, had lost his own mind after so many years on Pluto. Nine years must be an eternity to a man such as Shatz Abel: and now, perhaps this last storm, already by the pirate’s admission exceeding in length and ferocity anything he had ever seen on the planet, had done him in. Nearly six weeks it had been storming, the wind at a constant howl, the snow falling at an incessant rate, requiring them to order their days by the storm’s clock, and each day uncover their supply shed and equipment tower lest they disappear from sight forever. Each day they ate the same food, drank the same store of tea, repeated the same conversations, and harbored the same thoughts. Each day had become like the last, which had been like the one before.
Journey - Book II of the Five Worlds Trilogy Page 4
