In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  Teyud’s relentless perfectionism with the blade and the fact that she seemed to be constructed out of monofilament cables—now, that bothered him a little. And the fact that he’d lost six for six so far.

  Be a good sport, Jeremy, he told himself. There are Neandertals on Venus but you helped get the ERA passed. This is your recreation but it’s her job. And the Thoughtful Grace were bred for it.

  “Your speed of reflex is acceptable if not outstanding and you are very strong,” Teyud said. “And you have been taught with some skill.”

  The clear glassine face mask of her practice helmet showed a slight frown of disapproval. She took up the Martian version of the en guard position, slightly more face-forward than he was used to, front knee bent sharply and free hand tucked into the small of the back.

  “But you are treating this exercise as an entertainment,” she went on. “That is not a survival trait.”

  That translated as “deplorable,” more or less. “Entertainment” could also mean “game.” Or “pseudoconflict under constrained parameters.” Atanj was a game, although it was also called the “Game of Life.”

  “The sword is for death, and nothing else,” she pointed out. “As there is no constraint in combat, so there should be as little as possible in training in preparation for it. Now.”

  He let the part of his mind that controlled his body slip into the ready state, empty of thought and ready to react out of pure reflex, eye, and nerve, balance and hand and limbs all as one. The practice sword flickered at him, a synthetic without point or edge but exactly the same weight and aerodynamically identical to the real thing. It was about a yard long, and was of enough mass that it would have weighed a bit over two pounds on Earth. No knitting-needle-like Olympic brands here. To muscles bred under three times the gravity, the weapon was still feather-light, but you had to remember that the inertia didn’t go away with the weight.

  And I’m not used to fencing with someone taller than I am, either.

  He beat her blade out of line with a simple parry and then cut at her neck from the wrist, forehand and backhand, the blade a blur of motion. Working with a Martian longsword was more like saber fencing than anything else; perhaps a combination of saber and épée styles came closest.

  She parried in prime and turned it into a circular cut, a moulinade, likewise minimally and from the wrist, then thrust with beautiful extension; when he parried in turn she came in foot and hand with hard insistence.

  The sound of the practice blades meeting was a sharp clackclack, more like hard plastic than steel. Their feet shuffled back and forth on the grit-surfaced boards of the deck; his breath showed in quick puffs in the cold air, unlike her drier, cooler exhalations.

  He kept his focus on a spot halfway between the point of her blade and her eyes, seeing everything without narrowing in on any one spot. So easy to move, when you could flick yourself back with just a flexing of the ankle; he needed the advantage to break contact and recover.

  Christ, she’s fast, he thought, as a high-line thrust came at his eyes.

  He parried in tierce, blade moving up and to the outside with the point higher than the hand, then around in a circle to control her blade, parry counter-six.

  Gotta remember that every part of the body’s valid on Mars. And she’s got damned long arms.

  The blades slid along each other in a glide, maintaining constant contact as he turned his wrist, scraping until the guards locked. He sprang in to punch at her hilt, the bully swordsman’s trick, trying to use weight and the greater strength of his grip and arm to tear the weapon out of her hand. The instructors who’d tried to turn a fencer into a real sword fighter recommended it, and it would have worked on most Martians . . .

  Her arm resisted his for a moment; they were corps-à-corps. Then he was doubled over as her knee smacked into the light cup he was wearing, backing away frantically in a crippled attempt at a passé arrier as her sword came for him again.

  He could call it off, but he didn’t; instead he let himself collapse and dove under the point, down on his left hand with his body parallel to the deck and his sword flung out, the showy Italian Passatasotto. That surprised her, and the parry was a little slow; she would have taken a nasty wound to the thigh if it had been for real . . . before she pinned him to the deck through the lungs.

  This time her smile curled up both sides of her mouth, the equivalent of a wide grin, as she tapped her blade on his back to signal the lethal hit. Martian fencing bouts didn’t stop until someone “died.”

  “Excellent!” she said. “Commendable motivation! And that was a move not in our repertoire. This time you wounded me before I killed you. Let us try again.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Encyclopedia Britannica, 20th Edition

  University of Chicago Press, 1998

  MARS: Atanj

  Atanj, or Martian chess, is like Terran chess in that it is a competitive game analogous to wargaming and strategy contests, although unlike chess, it encompasses economic and cultural weapons as well as direct confrontation; there is no Bishop, but there are Merchants, Savants, Boycotters and others. The standard mode is played from the viewpoint of the Despot, but variations involve using another piece as the principal, sometimes the Consort, more often a Savant or Merchant, or the Chief Coercive.

  It can be played by up to eight individuals at one time, though two is most common for casual entertainment, and the board is octagonal with sixty-two squares on each side. Each piece has its own set of permitted moves, which, however, may vary according to the place the piece occupies on the board. When one piece is moved onto a square occupied by another, the result depends on the relative importance of the pieces, the course of action the moving player calls, and often by the use of three tetrahedral dice.

  “Taking” pieces does not necessarily remove them from the board, as they may be turned against the original holder. In fact, perhaps the most notable feature of the Game of Life, as it is often called on Mars, is that any of a player’s pieces may “defect” to another player at any time, and that certain strategies—allowing oneself to be “boycotted,” for instance—increase the probability of defection sharply.

  Mars, The Deep Beyond

  Southeast of Zar-tu-Kan

  May 5, 2000 AD

  The topnest of the Intrepid Traveler’s mast swayed in long, looping ovals as the landship sped before a following wind. Teyud clipped her harness to a ring and raised the far-viewers to her eyes. The device was a rare and precious heirloom of Imperial tembst, one of the few inheritances she still had from her mother. It wrapped its tentacles around her face, and there was a slight sting at one temple as it tapped her blood supply, and another sensation as it plugged its bundle of filaments into her nerves, as if tendrils inside her head had been stretched out and scraped with knives, fading to blackness.

  Once in place the device supported itself, and adjusted for movement; light returned. A push of the will brought a flexing of the muscles that controlled the liquid-filled lenses, and the stretch of ancient seabed to the south sprang into focus. Her breath hissed between her teeth.

  I cannot be certain, but . . .

  “Strike sail!” she called without turning her head.

  The order was unexpected, but it was obeyed promptly; two weeks in the Beyond had knit twenty dockside loafers desperate enough to take any berth into something of a crew. Below her, the translucent surface of the big sail scrolled down onto the spinning yard with a slapslapslapslap sound, and the balloon spinnaker billowing out between mast and jib was hauled in as well.

  The landship’s motion changed at once, swaying back upright as the pressure of the wind ceased to press through the mast and against the muscles of the suspension. The mast flexed and then steadied. Momentum kept the landship going for a few moments, until it halted on the crest of a low rise.

  Teyud focused the binoculars again. Now she was sure; the tips of four masts showed over the ridge behind them for an instant, then di
sappeared as the two ships following them braked and let themselves slide backward. An estimate of the range insinuated itself into her mind, a scratchy ghost-thought from the instrument. She commanded, and the landscape turned into a mottled palimpsest of colors, in which the yellow heat plumes from the two hidden vehicles were plain.

  And . . . they are not closely spaced. Indeed, they are probably not visible from each other’s positions.

  “Yes,” she said. Then downward, “Make sail, resume course!”

  She peeled the far-viewers off her face with a series of plock sounds and normal sight returned, along with a momentary fierce itch that reached into her brain stem and then faded to a dying tingle. The instrument crawled obediently down to her wrist and then into its container on her waist belt. She unclipped from the mast, transferred to a stayline, and slid downward toward the deck. Her feet swayed out over the rail and the ground starting to move below as the landship heeled again, and then she jumped lightly free.

  “What’s the problem?” Sally Yamashita asked sharply, looking up from the screen of her curious device for recording and manipulating information.

  “We are being followed,” Teyud replied. “By two other landships. I saw the tips of their masts; they are taking pains to be unobserved. Probably they are using an orok as a scout. They may be acting in concert, or in rivalry.”

  Sally looked upward for an instant, trying to spot the flying observer. Jeremy came up, frowning. It made his face look a little contorted, like a drama-dancer’s mask for concern at a popular comic burlesque.

  I am coming to believe that their emotions are not much stronger than ours, Teyud thought. But their faces are more mobile, so that I assume that they are. This is a problem in communication and probably works in reverse as well. I must remember to exaggerate my expressions and discount theirs.

  “Why would they be following us?” he asked.

  Teyud looked at him in mild astonishment; Sally gave him something of the same stare. There were a very limited number of plausible reasons for two ships to track another well into the deserts.

  “Since they have followed us into the Deep Beyond, and endeavor to conceal their presence, voluntary exchange of valuata, a game of atanj, or parareproductive mutual pleasure are unlikely motives.”

  “What does that mean?” Sally asked, exasperated.

  “My apologies. I should not attempt humor across linguistic boundaries. Let me rephrase my remarks: They are to a high degree of probability pirates and wish to rob and kill us.”

  Teyud frowned before she went on, calculating distances and sailing time. “Though this is barren hunting ground for pirates. We are far from the usual routes for either landship trade, or fliers. Only nomads pass through this area, and they make it unsafe for routine travel.”

  “Perhaps they followed us from Zar-tu-Kan?” Jeremy said. “Not wanting the illegal deed to be observed.”

  “It is possible. I cannot be certain, but they might be the two ships I had noticed anchored some distance from the docks there. If so, why have they not caught us? The Traveler is not exceptionally swift, and we have been making frequent stops to examine artifacts. One week would be ample to be beyond the Despotate’s patrols, and prolonging the journey they must make to fence the plunder would cut into their profits.”

  “We can find out,” Sally said.

  She went below, then came up with their satellite hookup; it had a curved dish mounted on a tripod. As she snapped a headset into the open port she said, “We can get an aircraft diverted . . . one of the Despotate of Zar-tu-Kan’s through the consulate there, if not one of ours from Kennedy Base.”

  Her fingers touched the controls. Teyud watched in fascination; she found Terran technology as outré as Earthlings found the Martian variety.

  Most are not interested in Terran tembst if it is not immediately profitable. This is a failure of imagination. For a beginning, they can consistently make more of their devices whenever they please. For another, some of it has capacities we lack. They are chaotic, yet perhaps they may be the means of restoring true Sh’u Maz.

  Sally repeated the sequence, then went through it again.

  “Nothing,” she said quietly. “The pickup is fully functional as far as I can tell, but we’re being jammed.”

  Jeremy sucked in his breath. Teyud looked keenly from one Terran to the other.

  “Significance?” she said sharply, after a silence that stretched.

  “That means that other Terrans are interfering,” Jeremy explained.

  “Ah, the Eastbloc,” the Martian said.

  Now both of them stared at her. Martians who had any grasp of Earth’s internal divisions were few and far between. Most were utterly uninterested.

  “I have had some contact with them,” Teyud explained, then turned away. “It was not of an amiable nature.”

  I hope that this interference is aimed at you, my employers. Otherwise half a world was not far enough to run . . . and if I run farther, I approach the source of peril once again.

  Mars, Near The Lost City of Rema-Dza

  May 10, 2000 AD

  The dead plantations began to line the canal a day’s sail out of the lost city of Rema-Dza. Crystal stumps showed through the red sands, some still jagged where they were recently uncovered, most worn to smooth nubs. Pieces of glassine pipe showed where distribution systems had curled around the low hillsides along the contour lines to fruit trees in their individual pits. Eroded shards of wall stood out of the sand now and then, with thin scatterings of atmosphere plant on their leeward sides, protected for a while by their stabilizing effect on the moving dust. When the city itself came into sight, there was more of the green-red vegetation clustering around the bases of the towers still intact.

  The pitiful hint of life was doubly welcome as the dryness of the cool air clawed at their mouths and sinuses. Both the Terrans had special masks with water-soaked linings that they used every so often to stave off nosebleeds, and they were also using double portions of lotion on their hands and faces to minimize chapping and cracking. Even the Martians found it uncomfortable here, except for the weird one with the odd tint to his skin who didn’t seem to have a nose.

  “Why’s the growth concentrated around the towers?” Jeremy asked Sally. “Though that’s pretty sparse to call concentrated. More of a ‘very thin’ as opposed to ‘nothing’.”

  “The towers have—evidently did have even back when this place was built—systems that suck what water there is out of the air. It’s a supplement to canals and reservoirs. That would keep some life going.”

  Winds cracked the sail taut and wailed mournfully through the thin lines of the rigging; beneath that was the hiss of sand like abrasive talc, and beneath that, the deeper, irregular sounds the air made as it wove through the ruins and hooted through their twisted passages. The quiet hum of the wheels faded as they slowed and the buildings loomed larger, turning from a model in the distance to immensities like a long-lost New York.

  Teyud slid down from her perch high on the mast. Jeremy hid a slight shudder as she peeled the vision device from her face; it looked like she was being hugged at eye level by a semitransparent octopus with waxy skin and an unpleasant pinkish tinge spreading through its veins and capillaries.

  The thing scuttled into its container at her belt, filling it like a viscous fluid, then darted a tentacle back out, grabbed a handle on the underside of the lid and slapped it shut with a sharp click.

  Damned if I’ll ever like equipment that drinks your blood, he thought. Even if that does make it . . . loyal. Give me plain old electronics and optics any day.

  He was getting better at reading Martian expressions, though, or at least those of Teyud za-Zhalt. He’d spent thousands of hours looking at video, but there was a gestalt you could only pick up at first-hand.

  She’s not just a collection of traits, he told himself. I think I’m actually getting to know her a little as a human . . . that is, a sentient being.


  She was looking worried but not alarmed; evidently there was still no immediate sign of the possible pirates. Which he heartily approved of—pirates sounded much more romantic in a book about the Spanish Main than they did out here in the thoroughly modern Deep Beyond, and when Martians decided to be nasty, they could be very nasty indeed. This culture wasn’t long on empathy at the best of times; he suspected that the emphasis on genetics tended to make them indifferent to individuals. Perhaps the fact that, as far as anyone could tell, they’d never had anything resembling a religion or a belief in an afterlife had something to do with it as well.

  “There is no sign of pursuit,” she said. “The weather will probably turn bad now. Possibly very bad; seasonal wind and sandstorms are common now in this location. However, this has positive features in our situation. We will have shelter and pursuers will not.”

  The dunes that surrounded and half buried the lost city were higher than any which could stand under Earth’s gravity even in the Erg, the sand seas of the Sahara; so were the structures that towered out of them. Rema-Dza’s buildings didn’t have the candy-striped colors of Zar-tu-Kan as they jutted from the red-pink dunes. The towers still standing were reddish brown from base to tip, and they looked more like tall spindly mushrooms with buttressed bases than asparagus stalks. Some were stumps; a few had been ground open to show the honeycomb of passages and halls within but hadn’t fallen yet. Life showed there, wheeling dots that coasted between the great ruins. It wasn’t until you realized how far away they were that they stopped looking small . . .

  “Wild dhwar and paiteng,” Teyud said.

  Those were the Martian birds that held the top predator niches wolves and tigers did on Earth. Dhwar had thirty-five-foot wingspans, paiteng more like fifty or fifty-five; and their claws and beaks were of uncomfortable size. Dhwar hunted in packs or flocks and had a nasty habit of squabbling over their prey in midair, letting bits and pieces drop as they did. Paiteng had smaller groups, usually parents and subadult offspring. Around here it helped to be able to patrol a hunting territory of a couple of thousand square miles.