In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  Holmgard poured essence into their cups. The purple liquid glowed faintly as it made a graceful low-gravity arc, with motes moving within it. Stars shone many and very bright through the dome above, making the mild springlike temperature—tropical warmth to Martians—seem like the small bubble of life it was, in a universe coldly inimical. The gasbags of floatlights shone as well, a light cooler than electrics and tinged with red, circling the building as they sculled themselves along with feathered limbs. Things rustled and clicked in the dense groves and gardens that separated the mansions and palaces of Zar-tu-Kan’s inner zone.

  “And on that cheerful note . . .”

  Teyud za-Zhalt finished her last inspection of the Intrepid Traveler as the sun rose eastward behind the highlands. The air was slightly cool, just enough to leave a rime of frost on exposed stone, and the din and clatter of the port sounded sharp through it.

  The landship was a sixty-footer with a central hold and two internal decks fore and aft; a hundred fifty tons burden, which made her medium sized. Old but sound, with a single hundred-foot mast and an auxiliary engine that could supply enough hydraulic pressure to the rear axle motors to move the craft at better than walking pace in a pinch. The layout was standard for a vessel of her size, with one fixed axle at the rear, another amidships, and a longer pivoting one forward. Axles, mast, and spars were single-crystal growths; unfortunately there was no way of telling how old they were—the slight yellowish tinge to the clear flexible material meant only that they weren’t new.

  They could be a hundred years from the plantations and good for another thousand, or a thousand and likely to go to dust at any moment. Bearings, cables, and sails all looked reliable, and there was a good ring-mounted darter on the quarterdeck.

  The crew . . .

  She grimaced very slightly at the score of them: a collection of scar-faced toughs, tokmar addicts with a faint quiver to their hands, and obvious lowbreeds. One was nearly noseless, with nasal slits that closed and opened nervously, and he had a russet brown hue to his skin—some sort of hybrid from the deep deserts. They stood waiting, a few working on their personal gear or playing atanj, while De’ming trotted from the stone wharf across the boarding rams to stow bundles of dried meat and asu-fruit, ceramic casks of pickled eggs, ammunition and gun-food, spare cable, and stores of a dozen kinds, down to glow-rods and blood-builders. Half a dozen of the little subsapient laborers went and squatted on the foredeck when the loading was finished; she’d bought those for the usual tasks. Ordinary workers attached a hose to fill the tanks; this district had a water tower and pressure in the mains.

  Several of the crew came more erect as they felt her gaze. She knew that a yellow-eyed stare was disconcerting. Old legends spoke of it. Others remained dully indifferent, and one kept chewing on a kevaut on a stick he’d bought from a vendor with a portable grill, spitting out bits of carapace as he sucked out the last shreds of flesh.

  “What do you think of the engine?” she said to the hireling who had an engineer’s hairdo.

  “Middle-aged, and the temperature is just a little higher than I’d like, so I would advise not straining it,” the hatchet-faced woman said. She was short, a full foot shorter than Teyud’s seven-two. Shaking her head, she went on, “But it’s of a good local budding strain, it doesn’t cough or have the runs, the tentacles are well-bonded to the sleeves of the cranks, and it’s been adequately fed and the sludge-tanks are full. As long as we eat and our bowels function, it won’t starve. I’d rather replace the drive-train gearing and put new bearing-races on all axles before starting a long trip, but all should function for the next few months.”

  Exactly my own analysis. Jelzhau didn’t try to cheat us. Extraordinary. Even more extraordinary, this Baid tu-Or seems to know her work. I wonder why she wants to get out of Zar-tu-Kan badly enough to sign with us. At least she will probably play an acceptable game; I have yet to meet one of the vaz-Terranan worth setting up the board for.

  A little reassured, she checked that all six of the addicts had sufficient tokmar to last out the trip; of all the fates available, being trapped in the wilds with a tokmar sniffer deprived of his or her daily dose was one of the least attractive.

  One of them didn’t have enough, and asked for an advance to buy; she simply let her hand fall to the hilt of her dart pistol and looked at him until he shuffled off. That one didn’t have much longer to live. The tremor was turning into jerks, and the mental effects of his habit had obviously gotten beyond the point of mere recklessness—nobody but the reckless would have signed up for this cruise—to outright loss of survival instinct.

  “Now listen to me, you fodder for the recycling vats,” she said, pitching her voice to carry and using the Imperative-Condescentative tense. “I have no interest in how you feel about the vaz-Terranan, as long as you fear me as you do personal extinction. Do you?”

  “We fear you exceedingly, even to the relaxation of sphincters!” they chorused, in the convictive-metaphorical tense; and spoke honestly, she thought, except possibly for the hybrid with the nostril slits and the long bow over his shoulder. “You are pain and death in sapient form!”

  “Good. Maintain an attitude of terrified submission and harmony will be sustained. Suddri, Xax, Taldus, crew the darter. The rest of you, on board and to your stations, make ready to depart. Show speed!”

  She turned to survey the docks as the De’ming finished their load and trooped back toward the warehouses under the touch of the supervisor’s rod. The Traveler was at the last of the docks that still saw regular use; beyond to the south was a tumble of wharfs half buried in drifted soil with a sparse cover of atmosphere plant, and a wilderness of broken-roofed buildings eroded to snags by wind and abraiding sand. The tops of actual trees showed there—the ruins would concentrate stray moisture.

  Northward, every second slip was occupied, and a big three-master was in the graving dock, with the planking off its hull and artificers crawling about within. A crane extended a tentacle as she watched, hoisting some massive fabrication out of the structure and onto a repair platform.

  She kept an ear cocked backward; the sounds indicated the scratch crew had some idea of what they were doing. Her eyes narrowed to focus on two craft that had stayed at anchor out on the plain. They were long and low, a bit bigger than the Traveler, and lay quietly with furled sails. The hulls had few openings and no walkways or balconies, and all the hatches were closed.

  Not local, by the lines, she thought, then shrugged. Trade from all around the planet found its way here.

  The vaz-Terranan arrived, with their surprisingly scanty baggage.

  This voyage will be both profitable and an interlude of respite from boredom, she told herself. The life of an exile is irritatingly lacking in long-term goals.

  She had dreams enough: what she would do if she sat on the Ruby Throne, for example. That was about as likely as a trip to the Wet World. Though with her broader experience of how the Real World fared . . .

  The taller Terran smiled. His face was rough, as if hewn from rock by a not very skilled sculptor who used a percussive method, but oddly engaging, even intriguing in its open mobility.

  Teyud allowed her lips to turn up very slightly.

  Mars, City of Dvor Il-Adazar (Olympus Mons)

  Ministry of Hydraulic Management

  February 1, 2000 AD

  High Minister Chinta sa-Rokis sighed in exasperation.

  “No,” she said. “I do not consider the reactivation of that reservoir by the Supremacy’s Terran tembst a positive development.”

  She waited patiently while her three carefully selected listeners blinked at the blunt contradiction of the Tollamune will.

  The listeners were all members of the High Council. They sat in recliners around a black jade table, their postures of informal communication, as one did with social equals. If you looked very closely, you realized that the seemingly solid block of the tabletop had been carved until it was as insubstantial as lace in
a pattern of repeating fractals that could hypnotize the unwary. The essence in the globes each held was of an antique pungency and swam with a living culture that guaranteed vividly entertaining—or terrifying—dreams to the user. The floor was a slab of living honey-colored wood whose rippling grain responded to body warmth by exuding a pleasant scent. Rugs crawled to envelop the feet of the four officials, warming and gently caressing.

  By contrast, the heroic murals on seven of the eight walls were boringly antique, depicting the semilegendary construction of the Grand Canal in the early years of the Dynasty. Their very age guaranteed that the Minster must endure them, however, and since they celebrated a notable Imperial accomplishment, modification might be taken as a gesture of disrespect. Nobody else was present, except for a brace of her personal De’ming, and they were of a special subspecies with no sense of hearing. The glassine eighth wall looked over nothing but empty courts until the farmlands at the city’s foot, and her personal Coercives manned the towers between.

  The silence stretched. All of the other High Councilors she had invited for private consultation were, in Chinta’s opinion, nitwits, though not in any technical sense. Their minds had rotted from disuse. One was obsessed with collating an encyclopedia of the poetry of the Terminal Lilly Period; another spent nearly every waking hour on the records of atanj tournaments although she was no more than a mediocre player herself; the third provided an essential source of valuata for the city’s more expert commercial specialists in parareproductive entertainment.

  I despise them all, she thought. Ironic, that this makes them the most suitable to my purposes. I may take consolation that I also further Prince Heltaw’s purposes . . . at least to a certain degree . . . and he is a man to respect. And hence to fear.

  The three High Ministers’ accumulated resources and the influence of their Lineages, however, were far from contemptible. And besides that, they all shared genetic linkages with her, common among the bloodlines of the upper bureaucracy. Competitive examination for office had been the rule since earliest Imperial times, but you could breed for success in that capacity no less than for any other. If you did so and hoarded your genome strictly, you could expect a practical monopoly.

  “It seems to be of long-term benefit that our water resources be increased,” one said cautiously, sipping at his essence. “Water is life.”

  “ ‘Benefit’ is a relational term, not an absolute,” Chinta said, wincing slightly at the ancient cliché about the fluid. “The question is, how do we benefit—or the reverse.”

  “How do you benefit, or the reverse,” another pointed out, which, if obvious, was at least not sententious.

  “We will all suffer losses,” Chinta said forcefully. “A ten percent addition to the flow will profoundly disrupt the productive patterns of this area—patterns from which we derive our incomes. True, there will be benefits, but the benefits will accrue to individuals either not yet born or to those presented with new opportunities. The costs will be immediate and to established interests, which is to say, to us and our client lineages. First and foremost, the value of the water allocations to our properties will be depressed at once as prices decline.”

  “While painful, a decline of ten percent—”

  It is a crime against your lineage and what remains to us of Sh’u Maz that you have been allowed to reproduce, Chinta thought.

  Aloud, she said, “Since the water will be available now, and the added plantations, manufacturing facilities, biomass, and population will take some time to appear, the fall in prices will be extreme. Perhaps as much as a third; at least one quarter within ten years of this date. Because we are not likely to command all the eventual increase in production—it will accrue to the Ruby Throne’s chosen clients, of course—the ripple effects will be similar even when the price of allocations stabilizes with higher net use. Overall equilibrium will not be reestablished for generations and when it is, we and our offspring will be at a relatively lower position in the economic hierarchy.”

  Their faces fell as she presented the figures and graphs. Chinta went on, “And you all heard the Tollamune’s will: We must begin a program to copy the tembst of the Wet Worlders.”

  She pointed at a chart. “Which means increased activity for the Ministry of Savantiere,”—her finger moved—“the Ministry of Tembst Refinement,”—and a third move—“and the Ministry of Mineral Supervision.”

  All three Councilors adopted postures of concern, the response as involuntary as willed; she had just pointed out that they would have to finance and oversee the very changes that would threaten their steady incomes and relative status.

  “Surely you are not proposing a Dynastic Intervention?” one said, a slight quaver in his voice.

  Chinta spread her arms out to either side with fingers spread, and widened her gaze for a moment as she stared upward: horrified negation.

  “No. It is the tragedy of our age that there is no heir to the King Beneath the Mountain . . .”

  Which meant, without any offense that could call for an Apology or the services of the Expediter, The Emperor will die soon and then all options are open.

  “. . . save Genomic Prince Heltaw . . .”

  Who was known to be notably conservative, apart from the matter of his relative status.

  “. . . and only in this age of declension would one who shares so slightly in the Tollamune Genome be considered at all. Even if he were to use one of the stored ova.”

  They all nodded. Considering Heltaw’s own age—which promised a reign of at least a century, given the probable maximum life span of the current Emperor—and then the likely disposition of an heir socialized under that very conservative Genomic Prince’s supervision . . . and there was doubt about the viability of the stored ova. Subtle sabotage had been one of the weapons in the last Dynastic Intervention, and they had been in storage for more than two hundred years of the Real World in any case. Entropy could not be defeated forever. The sperm were viable, yes: the more complex ova, very probably not.

  This made Heltaw’s gender a factor, unless he was prepared to merely keep the Ruby Throne warm for his siblings’ potential grandchildren.

  Chinta was pleased to see the calculation behind the three pairs of eyes that met hers. She relaxed into an informal Communicative posture. At least they had that much survival instinct left intact.

  “But why have you called us for this consultation, if all we need do to avoid the unpleasant alternatives you have sketched is to exercise patience?”

  And drag our feet in implementing inconvenient decrees, went unspoken. The bureaucracies they headed had a great deal of practice at that.

  “Because the current Tollamune may not be as bereft of offspring as we have assumed,” she said grimly. “And sustained pressure from the Ruby Throne by a young, energetic, and potentially very long-lived Emperor is”—metaphorical mode—“another kettle of to’a altogether.”

  That brought them all sitting erect, hands flashing to press palms to either side of their faces: aghast concentration.

  When Chinta had finished, she stroked her symbiant. It raised its head and whistled; the ears of the intercom system opened their tympani. “Let the Professional Practitioner of Coercive Violence Faran sa-Yaji enter,” she said.

  The door dilated. The other three High Ministers bristled a little when the mercenary adopted an insolently undeferential posture, each hand clasping the opposite elbow and golden eyes level. That he was obviously of pure or nearly pure Thoughtful Grace strain made the hostility stronger, not less; the rivalry between them and the Imperial Administrator lineages was as ancient as the Mountain.

  Chinta ignored it. “We have a contract for you,” she said.

  The Thoughtful Grace raised one eyebrow. “One attractive relative to that offered by Genomic Prince Heltaw, Superiors?” he said smoothly.

  Chinta restrained herself from grinding her teeth. She had hoped that the news hadn’t spread that far. Still . . .

 
“One comparable, and easier of accomplishment,” she said. “You have contacts in Zar-tu-Kan?”

  “Disreputable ones,” Faran said whimsically.

  “Excellent. One does not engage a savant of Sh’u Maz for illegal lethality. Then—”

  Mars, Approaching The Deep Beyond

  Southeast of Zar-tu-Kan

  May 2, 2000 AD

  “Ahoy, matey! Avast the cross-forgainsails and clew up the lower buttock shrouds!” Jeremy said, holding on to a line of the standing rigging with a foot on the leeward rail.

  “Oh, stop being cheerful!” Sally snarled, still looking slightly green.

  The Traveler was heading out into what the Martians called the Deep Beyond now, spanking along at nearly twenty miles an hour before a following breeze, with each low rise in the undulating plain making the hull heel and then roll back slowly against the suspension system’s muscles. The result wasn’t much like a watercraft’s motion, but it could produce the equivalent of carsickness. The Martians had watched in horrified fascination as Sally gave back breakfast to the ground cover; they didn’t throw up unless they’d swallowed poison or were very ill indeed.

  “You’re the one who’s traveled all over on these things,” Jeremy pointed out.

  “Retching most of the time,” she answered grimly. “There, I think the pill’s finally working, thank the Buddha.”

  The Traveler had passed the end of the active part of the canal last evening. The mountains that marked the edge of the old continental shelf had gradually fallen out of sight to the left as they headed northeast. Gritty reddish soil showed through the thinning mat of atmosphere plant, individual specimens growing too far apart for their leaves to overlap, and the air had a haze of fine, dark pink dust. It smelled intensely dry, with less of the sharp medicinal scent of the crushed leaf. Sand of the same reddish color had piled up against the abandoned wall of the canal in a series of long drifts on the western side, sending tendrils out across the glassine of the covering and burying it in places.