In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  She went on, “This would be a good nesting site and they do not need to feed locally; nor do they need liquid water. We must be cautious.”

  The buildings and broken domes that clustered around the feet of the towers were a little different too, structured as if they’d been put together from LEGO blocks and blunt wedges, staring out with more windows than the exterior of a Martian building would have these days. Even the Deep Beyond hadn’t been quite so hostile, when this place was built.

  “A very long time since it was inhabited,” Teyud said. “Since the days when it seemed Sh’u Maz would indeed endure.”

  “One of the last cities to be built in the Imperial era, but also one of the first to be abandoned,” Jeremy said cheerfully.

  He’d studied the chronicles from Earthside long enough to be sure of that, and he was feeling more than a little smug at having his—not guess, estimate . . . confirmed. There had been quite a few skeptics. Martians usually had a pretty blasé attitude toward history, as they had so much of it, and it was refreshing to have Teyud showing curiosity; most of the crew had given the place one glance and then gone back to work, except the lookouts who kept watch for anything dangerous.

  “Well, lookitthat,” Sally murmured as they coasted closer.

  The winds were backing and filling; the sail boomed and thuttered above them. Teyud made a gesture and it was brought down; at another, the engine gave a grunt and began working its cranks to turn the wheels of the stern axle. The motion of the Traveler became steadier as she swayed upright, more like the powered vehicles the Terrans were used to at home. A circular domed building at least as large as the central part of Zar-tu-Kan slid by, and half draped across the other side of it was the ruin of an airship. Teyud’s brows went up slightly, the equivalent of whistling, swearing, and slapping her knee.

  “That is very large,” she said. “And from its lines, a warcraft.”

  “Thousand feet, easy,” Sally said. “Maybe fifteen hundred. They don’t build them that large anymore.”

  The skeleton reared four hundred feet into the air, the thin flexible covering gone except for scraps. That showed the geodesic mesh of the structure below, except for large patches that had fallen in, either burned when the craft fell or simply eroded away since. If it was similar to what the Martians used now, it was made of a composite, long fibers of single-molecule chains in a resin matrix. On Earth they’d call the material synthetic, though here it was secreted by animals rather than made in a high-pressure vat.

  “To a high probability, this city was evacuated in haste,” Teyud said, looking at it. “With some fighting.”

  Jeremy nodded. “The redaction I saw was a commentary on a list of abandonments, done rather later—more than two thousand years later for the list, and another two thousand for the commentary. Two thousand of our years, one thousand of yours. The implication was that the canal was cut off upstream in some sort of disturbance—a violent agitation of resistant elements, the commentary said—and everyone had to get out fast when the water stopped flowing, and go somewhere where the resistants weren’t waiting for them.”

  “Ah,” Teyud said—that was a conversational placeholder in Demotic, rather like “well” or “so” or “um.” “You hope that the ruins were not thoroughly stripped of Imperial tembst?”

  Teyud went on, “The nomads will have been visiting for some time. Possibly beginning not long after the city fell. There were always some of them in the Beyond, if not so many or so dangerous as now. In any case, only the shells of the tembst would remain.”

  Jeremy looked at her and nodded. There were drawbacks to using organics, one of the most obvious being that they died if you didn’t feed and water them.

  “Yeah, it wouldn’t be useable, but the remains will tell us things. We’re hoping that the nomads won’t have taken everything that civilized people would, if they’d had time to strip it during a gradual decline or a planned evacuation. Of course, that was a long time ago. There might have been an expedition afterward that never got recorded. But we can hope, and even if there was, we’ll learn.”

  The desire of it overwhelmed him. To know . . .

  Teyud gave him an odd look, shrugged, and turned to the helm. Sally smiled at him.

  “Abstract curiosity isn’t something this culture encourages,” she said.

  He was getting good at interpreting her expressions, too—being cooped up with someone did that. There was a hint of something she wasn’t saying in the narrow dark eyes.

  “They must have had it once, or they’d never have developed the . . . hey, let’s call it tembst in the first place.”

  That look was there again. “The usual explanation is that modern Martian culture is decadent,” she pointed out.

  He snorted. “Yeah, but that’s insufficient even if ‘decadent’ means anything besides ‘I don’t like your sex life.’ You’re a biologist, Sally. Hasn’t it occurred to you that these people are awfully backward in things like physics to have gotten so far with the biological sciences? How did they get the equivalent of electron microscopes?”

  “They’ve got things that will do the equivalent. Those tailored enzymes they still use to splice genes, for example. And they used to have more in the Imperial era,” she said neutrally.

  “But they’re biological, too. How did they get from here to there? Their physics is pre-Einsteinian, barely Newtonian, and their mathematics are early-twentieth-century equivalents, and largely an intellectual game to them anyway. They’d never thought about atomic structures or quantum mechanics before we arrived, so how the hell did they get molecular biology? And don’t tell me they knew more once and forgot it all later. It’s a long time since the Early Imperial era, yes, and their technology literally manufactures itself, but they never lost literacy and there are some documents that old. They’ve never had better physics than they do now and they should have had something much better to develop the tembst they’ve got.”

  She hesitated. He saw it and went on, “Come clean. Does this have anything to do with my project getting approved?”

  Another hesitation, and then a shrug before she spoke. “Okay, there’s need-to-know now. We . . . the big brains back home, actually—think that there may have been an Ancient intervention here, way back when.”

  “Of course there was. Mars was a dead rock before the Lords of Creation—”

  She winced slightly at the lurid name science fiction writers had placed on the aliens who’d terraformed Mars and Venus two hundred million years ago. Half the thud-and-blunder fiction on the market today involved them.

  “—stuck their oar in.”

  “Not just the initial terraforming or the transplanting of Terran life-forms,” she said. “We know they were active on Venus fairly recently, historically speaking.”

  Jeremy nodded. Some languages on Venus were related to ones on Earth, to Proto-Indo-European specifically. That had been demonstrated back in the late ’80s. Humans had been taken from Earth and dropped there recently . . . relatively recently. Plus, there was the Diadem of the Eye . . .

  “But all we’ve got on Venus is one enigmatic artifact and a native legend about what it did before it became totally inactive,” he said. “Yes, there’s been a theory around ever since then that the Lords gave the early Martians a kick-start in biotech as part of their big experiment. But what’s changed?”

  Reluctantly, she went on, “The Eastbloc base is at Dvor Il-Adazar; that’s where the Kings Beneath the Mountain started from and it was the capital throughout the Imperial period. If any place on Mars has preserved the records of the very earliest era of the Tollamunes, it’s under Mons Olympus.”

  Jeremy’s brows went up. “You think the rulers there are telling the truth when they claim to be the lineal descendants of the Crimson Dynasty?”

  She nodded. “The Eastbloc investigators think so. What’s more, they’re worried about what’s happened to their mission. They’ve stopped obeying all their orders, and our s
ources say that it’s stranger than that, that it’s as if they don’t know that they’re not obeying all their orders.”

  “And they haven’t done anything about it?”

  “At the end of a hundred-and-eighty-day round trip, with a ship twice a year? Even laser messages take hours. And every new guy they send out starts doing the same shit. That thing on Venus, the Diadem of the Eye . . . it apparently could do things to your mind, or so Marc Vitrac always swore, and he had some evidence for it. It was working when he found it.”

  Jeremy felt his brows trying to climb up into his hairline, and his lips shaped a silent whistle.

  “The Diadem of the Eye doesn’t do anything these days but sit there and baffle analysis. They think there are functioning artifacts from two hundred million years ago at Dvor Il-Adazar?”

  She shook her head. “From thirty or forty thousand years ago, at least. Jeremy, the Diadem of the Eye was something like what the natives and Vitrac said it was. And we’ve been studying it for twelve years and we still can’t even tell definitely whether it’s made of matter or just looks like it is. But it was functional for a long time, and the Ancients showed the locals how to use it.”

  He nodded. “And the USASF—”

  “The president and the NSC and the commonwealth people and the OAS,” she amplified grimly.

  “The president and the National Security Council and our wonderful allies think that there may be Ancient artifacts here? That the Lords of Creation gave the Tollamunes . . . things . . . and showed them how to use them?”

  “Yup. And there’s as good a chance of finding that stuff here as anywhere outside Dvor Il-Adazar, and if there are Ancient artifacts they won’t be affected by the passage of time. That’s what suddenly rang bells on your research grant proposal. It crosschecked with a lot of what our historical research people said. Something happened here, back toward the end of the Imperial period, just before the era of the Civil Wars.”

  “The Dissonance, the Martians call it. There’s not much chance of finding functioning stuff,” he warned.

  Lay people keep forgetting that what archaeologists find is usually junk. Informative junk, but still junk.

  “It’s a chance we can’t take. If the Eastbloc were ever to get control of ancient technology, we’d be . . . how shall I put it delicately . . . totally ass-fucked. Those people, or whatever the hell they were, could alter planets like Play-Doh. If they weren’t gods, they were close enough for government work. I wouldn’t want our government to get that much power—and I work for them! The Eastbloc . . .”

  She shuddered, and Jeremy nodded thoughtfully. “But right now, it looks like the technology, if it’s there, has control of them.”

  “There is that.”

  He went on, “And according to my specialty, the Crimson Dynasty’s experts could do a lot of mind tricks too, even more than modern Martian drugs can—and those are scary enough. Maybe the rulers of Dvor Il-Adazar have some of that . . . tembst . . . of their own still handy, and they’ve been using it on the Eastblockers. Just what they deserve, too.”

  “Which could be nearly as bad. Remember what the Eastbloc base has on hand in the way of weapons systems.”

  “We do, too.”

  “Right, but we—and they—just use it for deterrent purposes, like the subs and silos and orbital lasers back home. Imagine Martians getting their hands on it. We don’t sell them weapons, and being careful about that was a big reason we put our base here, way out in the boonies.”

  “Then why did the Eastbloc put theirs right next to Mons Olympus?”

  “Hubris, we think. I told you back in Zar-tu-Kan we couldn’t do the beads-booze-and-blank-treaty-form thing here. Our best bet is that the Eastblockers thought they could, and now it’s biting them in the butt.”

  “That’s a pretty unpalatable pair of alternatives you’ve got there, Captain Yamashita,” Jeremy said. “Either the Eastblockers have found the powers of gods and are planning on using them—”

  “Which means we have to discover the equivalent here. This is our best bet.”

  Jeremy nodded. “Or if we’re lucky, the rulers of Dvor Il-Adazar have messed with the Eastblockers’ heads enough to take control of their weaponry.” He chuckled. “At least that wouldn’t be my responsibility, no?”

  “No, just the government’s. And they would have to try to deter whoever’s running Dvor Il-Adazar . . . or watch them nuke and burn their way back to a planetary empire, in which case they’d have a planetary government with access to our technologies, including space travel. Or to stop that, we’d have to give equivalent weapons to their enemies.”

  “That’s assuming they’d go right ahead and use what they took.”

  “Have you ever met a Martian who’d hesitate for a second?”

  “Hey, that’s a stereotype. Like the unemotional half-Martian Science Officer on the Federation Starship New Frontier . . .”

  His peace offering was ignored, even though they’d happily discussed favorite episodes over the winter at Kennedy Base. Sally went on doggedly: “Stereotypes get to be stereotypical because they’ve usually got a big kernel of truth. The only reason Martians don’t fight more wars between their city-states is that they’ve learned that it isn’t likely to produce results.”

  “That wouldn’t stop us, judging by Earth’s history.”

  “Yes, they’re more sensible than us.”

  He smiled. “Hell, they’re so sensible sometimes they decide wars by having the leaders play a game of chess instead!”

  “Atanj, not chess. And only when the force on both sides is about equal. Then the rulers or generals play with living pieces.”

  “Yeah, but the losing side actually accepts the result when they do that. And only a few die, instead of thousands. That’s strength of character!”

  “No, it’s just being cold-bloodedly smart—it’s a war game, after all, and the result probably would be the same if they actually fought the war. And the leaders accept the result because the followers are smart, too.”

  Jeremy frowned in puzzlement. “How so?”

  “They don’t have more geniuses than we do, because they don’t deviate from the mean as much, but their average IQ is about 125, which means they’ve got a hell of a lot fewer hopeless sub-one-hundred chuckleheads. If they ever get a really scientific worldview and a technology that isn’t limited to biological sources of energy—”

  “We might have some very useful friends,” Jeremy said. “There’s something to be said for Sh’u Maz, you know. It gave them peace for a long time

  Sally laughed. “Oh, you are a round-eye, aren’t you?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” he asked, baffled. “And hell, you’re half round-eye yourself.”

  “More than half, but I’m East Asian enough to know that what Sustained Harmony actually means is everyone doing what they’re told, and filling out the forms and standing in line and then doing it all over again . . . over and over and over . . . with Grandfather as official Tin God . . . which is the sort of Confucian claptrap my ancestors left Hiroshima Prefecture to get away from. And we didn’t have it as bad as the Chinese, and even the Chinese didn’t have as bad a case as the Martians.”

  Jeremy went on, “They’re smart enough not to fight much, anyway. That sort of Sustained Harmony doen’t sound so bad.”

  “No, they’re smart enough not to fight if it doesn’t look like a good idea. If they had weapons that gave an overwhelming advantage, they’d—sensibly and intelligently—use ’em. These are the people who think infecting criminals with parasitic grubs is model penology and funny as hell to watch, too, and who use the same word for ‘cop’ and ‘bandit’ and ‘soldier.’ And the same words for ‘ruler’ and ‘despot.’ And the closest you can come to saying ‘liberty’ in Demotic is ‘not subject to official sanction.’ ”

  Jeremy winced. “Well, Teyud’s a good sort; I like her. Quite a bit, in fact.”

  “Teyud’s an honest merce
nary. She stays bought. And she’s got more of a sense of humor than any other Martian I’ve met, and she’s interested in things. That doesn’t mean she’d be safe with a hundred-megawatt orbital laser or a thermonuke. Hell, we’re not safe with that stuff and Terrans average a lot higher on the milk-of-human-kindness quotient than Martians do; we just got too obsessed with space travel to kill each other off. So far. If the ancients hadn’t given us an interesting couple of planets to explore and squabble over—”

  “And the ancients themselves to worry about,” he put in.

  “—and that, odds are we’d have destroyed Earth by now.”

  Jeremy looked back toward the ruins. Suddenly his abstract love of knowledge looked as if it had unpleasantly practical applications.

  Mars, The Lost City of Rema-Dza

  May 11, 2000 AD

  Teyud watched as the winch groaned, hauling the Traveler stern-first through the gap in the great russet wall. It had taken some searching to find a suitable building with a break big enough to take the landship without being enlarged, but this was perfect; the interior was large enough that they didn’t have to dismount the mast, and the street outside was broad and aligned with the prevailing east-west winds, so they could scoot away quickly at need. The intact roof made it easy to exclude predators.

  At a guess it had been a gas storage tank; the simple building was similar to those used for that purpose even today, a square exterior with a hollow cylinder inside, topped by a movable dome, and the interior was utterly bare except for a layer of drifted sand. Probably an explosion after it was abandoned had broken a wall, one of which was usually left a little weaker than the others, to focus the effects of any such accident.

  And there was an intact thousand-foot tower nearby, one that didn’t have a dhwar rookery; that would do for a lookout. She wished for a moment that she could hand her viewer over for the scouts she planned to keep on duty up there every hour of the night and day, but it would take far too long to familiarize it with a new user of a distinct genetic pattern, and be too stressful for the recipient.