In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  Possibly fatal, in fact, and they had already had annoying crew losses; more would depress morale. This was similar to an atanj game, where you had to reach the Victory Conditions without driving your pieces to defection . . . but then, it was known as the Game of Life. They would have to make do with the cheaper, less capable commercial systems.

  When the landship was well within, the crew trotted back out, carrying a heavy cable over their shoulders. Baid tu-Or oversaw its anchoring to a thick stub of solid wall across the abandoned boulevard, and its covering with sand. With that in place they could use the engine-driven winch to pull the ship out into the street in a matter of moments.

  That done, Teyud personally supervised those assigned to mask the tracks of the Traveler’s wheels, easy enough with sand as fine and friable as that of the Deep Beyond. It would be impossible to conceal that the landship had headed into the ruined city, but they could mask which streets and turns it had taken.

  I do not believe those two ships abandoned the chase. Not unless they destroyed each other over the prospect of seizing our possessions, and randomness seldom falls out so conveniently.

  Jeremy came up to her, still sweating from the effort he’d put into helping, even though the temperature was mild—quite close to the freezing point of water. He sank down on a piece of wall, and she squatted on her haunches; that put their heads near enough on a level for easy conversation.

  Her nostrils twitched. His scent was strong, yes, but also oddly mild in a musky sort of way—less salty than that of a Real Worlder. He swigged thirstily from a vessel, and offered it to her. She accepted and sipped politely though the water was bland, of low mineral content as Terrans preferred. But water was, after all, water; to despise it was to despise life, and that was to welcome death. When she returned the flask, she looked at his face and blinked; they had seldom approached this closely.

  “Permission for contact?” she said.

  Granted, he replied with a side-flick of his gaze; execution of the gesture was flawless, save for the twitch that his small immobile ears could not perform.

  Teyud reached out and touched the side of his cheek briefly; there was a bristly sensation, not quite like anything she’d felt before. Not exactly unpleasant, but . . . strange.

  “Fascinating,” she said. “I had heard that this was so, but never observed it. There is hair growing on your face. Hair of easily perceptible size, nearly equivalent to your scalp.”

  He nodded. “It’s common to Terrans.” He gave a wry grimace that she couldn’t quite place. “And similar hair grows on other parts of our bodies, as well.”

  “Fascinating,” she repeated for emphasis.

  And slightly grotesque, she thought: Her own people had only the finest down anywhere but the head. Grotesque but interesting. So is his manner of speech. His Demotic is fluent, but this English influences his usage, as the High Tongue does mine.

  She went on, “But why has it not been noticeable before on you or Sally Yamashita?” She peered more closely. “The individual hairs are of considerable diameter but they were not nearly so apparent yesterday.”

  Amusement glinted in his eyes. “Facial hair is limited largely to males. We use . . . males in my culture often use . . . a blade or depilatory cream to remove facial hair; otherwise it would grow nearly as long as that on our heads. I didn’t have time to depilate this morning.”

  “Is the hair for insulation?” she asked. “There seems to be too little for that purpose, and it is said that . . . Earth . . . is on average considerably warmer than the Real World. Or is it some sort of secondary sexual characteristic, like a nokor male’s ruff?”

  She used “Earth” instead of “the Wet World,” which could also be translated as “the Big Muddy Bog” or “the Swamp-Planet.” Terrans seemed very sensitive to slights.

  “Ah . . . we’re not sure. It’s called a beard.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Your people are so intriguingly . . . rough-hewn.”

  He laughed at that. “Our favored hypothesis is that your ancestors employed tembst to suit yourselves to this environment . . . or to make yourselves more aesthetically pleasing according to the canons then prevalent. To us you look neotenous and . . . very refined.”

  Teyud nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I have heard your theory that we are descended from . . . Earth . . . life. Certainly your world seems, by all reports, to be more suited to life in general. And there have always been puzzling inconsistencies in the records of presapient life here on the Real World.”

  He shook his head and threw up his hands in an unfamiliar gesture; she judged it to be one of exasperation.

  “That is what educated Martians usually say.”

  She frowned. “It is the reasonable response.”

  “But you don’t seem very concerned by it.”

  “Why should we be? Origins one hundred million years ago—two hundred million of your years—do not affect our lives today directly, after all. For each sapient, as the proverb runs, its own existence spans the life of the universe.”

  He laughed aloud. “Now, on Earth it caused . . . is still causing no end of trouble!”

  Killing trouble, sometimes, he didn’t add aloud.

  She cocked her ears forward. “Intriguing. Well, to judge from the Terrans I have encountered, scholarship seems very important to you. It is surprising that with your brief history, you have theorized on the origins of life so deeply.”

  “Fossils . . . mineralized remains . . . are much more common on Earth, and there’s a very complete sequence. I suppose that’s why our theory of evolution appeared so early and why everyone—nearly everyone—has accepted it.”

  “Ah,” she said thoughtfully. “Although of course you have no evidence that your planet also was not seeded with life rather than developing it.”

  “Well, we do have fossil records that go back long before life was present on either Mars or Venus,” he said. “And both planets were definitely altered to be habitable and seeded with Earth life. A hundred million of your years ago.”

  She nodded, emphatically to imitate the Terran version of the gesture.

  “Yes, but that says nothing of how life originally arrived on your Earth. It merely demonstrates that it was not at an advanced level when introduced.”

  She concentrated, calling up lectures from her clandestine tutors; those had included information from Terra, as well as geology and Imperial tembst-lore and investigations of non-directed-development . . . what Terrans called “evolution.”

  “Your savants say that Earth had a thick reducing atmosphere at an early period? Then very primitive forms could have been dropped there at a remote time, multiplied explosively, and then evolved into the present species. Including those later introduced to the Real World.”

  He started to speak, stopped, and gave her an odd look. “That is . . . I don’t think I could refute it.”

  “The hypothesis is inherently nonfalsifiable, unless one had access to artifacts or records from the aliens of your hypothesis,” she said. “Still, an interesting thought-construct.”

  She reached out again and touched the beard, then pushed gently sideways. There was an immense solidity to the feel, more so than even a Thoughtful Grace, a feeling of huge strength. It contrasted so oddly with his scholar’s enthusiasm for details—

  A shout interrupted her train of thought.

  The ruins of the airship loomed above Jeremy as they followed the messenger, fading into the hazy air at the extremities.

  It takes a lot of getting used to, how tall things can be here, he thought. Looking back, Earth seems . . . squished down somehow.

  When they clambered up a dune and slid down inside, it was a little like being in the decaying carcass of a whale millennia dead. The wind had risen, flicking red dust everywhere that even smelled dry, and though it felt as soft as talc when you rubbed your fingers lightly together, it was actually like an industrial abrasive under pressure. That made it maddening if it got
in your underwear and worse beneath an eyelid. He was beginning to appreciate why Martians kept their faces covered, and to envy them that nicating membrane, and the natural oils in their skins that slowed chapping and cracking, and a whole bunch of other things.

  “The control cabin must have been plated in flame-retardant armor,” Jeremy said as they climbed down a drift half disassembled by shovel work.

  Teyud nodded beside him. The hard and supernally strong stringers of the hull couldn’t burn. They had melted and slumped in grayish dribbles and pools against the black of the cabin armor as the blazing hydrogen overcame the fireproofing anticatalyst and blazed like a blast furnace; there had been better than twelve million square feet of it, after all. The lines of the cabin were still clean and sharp, though they had the smooth curved edges of most Martian artifacts, where right angles were rare. The control cabin was about twenty-five feet by fifteen, judging from the section that had been cleared. In the middle of the roof was a two-foot circle marked by a thin white line.

  Jeremy shaped a soundless whistle as a thought struck him. The structure of the airship had not only survived that fire, it had lain here since before men built the Great Pyramid.

  Objectively he knew that these compounds simply didn’t oxidize or decay—they made glassine look about as lasting as potato peelings by contrast—but it still made his archaeologist’s reflexes boggle. When you considered what most digs on Earth looked like after a few centuries . . .

  Of course, Earth wears harder on things, he thought. Hotter, and it’s heat that drives weather; more gravity, more water, more oxygen. And this was under sand for almost all that time.

  “The cabin was armored and the stringers and ribs are of reinforced dimensions,” Teyud said. “This was an Imperial warcraft; I would postulate that it is . . . was . . . of the Rampant Intimidator class. The tembst of making that armor has been lost, except perhaps in Dvor Il-Adazar . . . a place of which I know little.”

  Her voice always had more modulation than that of most Martians, who commonly had a rather flat, low-affect tone. He thought he might be hearing something a little strained in that last phrase.

  The sky had vanished in a pink haze since the morning, swallowing the tops of the towers, and everyone had his or her headdresses on; the two Terrans wore goggles, and the Martians’ nicating membranes flicked constantly back and forth sideways across their eyes, getting the grit out. The six De’ming who’d done the actual digging squatted and leaned on their shovels with their backs to the main force of the wind, one of them nibbling on a cake of asu-flour, the others swaying and humming in some sort of collective passing-the-time ritual that might be religious or social or their equivalent of flatlining.

  Baid tu-Or slid down beside the two Terrans and the Thoughtful Grace, to stand atop the long black rectangle where it emerged from the sand. A trickle of the pinkish stuff ran around her feet as she did; digging it was only a little more permanent than shoveling water. In a day it would be ten feet deep here again, unless they did a lot more work.

  “The chitin along the seams is still smoothly fused,” she said. “Even after so long. This is impressive work. Still, let us begin around this circular line, which I think is probably a hatchway.”

  She had a tank on her back, and a long hose and nozzle connected to it in her hands. Everyone scrambled back a little on the loose, shifting sands as she sprayed a thin clear liquid. The cutter enzyme and its carrier had a sharp smell, something like winter-green and mint; the jet settled on the area around the inner edge of the hatchway and immediately began to form a thin ring of bubbling white foam. When that turned green and began emitting tendrils of vapor even more livid, everyone scrambled back more than a little, a few coughing at the acid-chemical-and-decay reek, and one of the crew motioned the De’ming to retreat as well. They didn’t have much sense of self-preservation about anything but the most obvious threats.

  They waited; most of the Martians with their slightly disturbing patience, Teyud with the relaxed alertness of a tiger in the brush beside a water hole, and the two Terrans with tense eagerness.

  Jeremy looked aside at Yamashita. I wonder why she’s quite that eager, he thought. I know why I am. If there’s really untouched material from the Imperial period in there, my name’s made and I’ll have a lifetime’s work ahead of me. But she’s a biotech specialist, not an archaeologist, and anything biological in there is going to be very tough jerky, if that. Or maybe she knows more about that ancient stuff than she was telling . . .

  The hatchway sagged, and then dropped in. Teyud drew a narrow rod from her harness and tapped it sharply against a buckle. There was a click as barriers broke and the internal ingredients mingled, and then the rod began to glow with a bright bluish light. She dropped it in through the hatchway and fell prone beside the hole, peering through with her pistol in her hand.

  “No immediate danger,” she said. “But the glow-rod has developed a yellow tinge; we should wait for breathable air to penetrate.” Then she turned to Baid to-Or. “Secure the ground against inward collapse, and erect an air-scoop to ventilate this. We may need to cover it and then dig again, if the storm is as bad as probability and evidence indicate.”

  The engineer nodded and turned to the crew. “You two, frames and sailcloth for wind-screens, in a wedge pointing so. You, get the De’ming working on shoveling the crest lines along there—”her finger traveled three-quarters of a circle around them—“down on the exterior side. And the crew will shovel as well, in relays by watches. Six De’ming are not enough to move the necessary cubic footage without imposing undue wear.”

  There was a rising grumble from the standard-Martian crewfolk present; Baid tu-Or glanced at Teyud and she twitched an ear in Sally Yamashita’s direction. The Eurasian woman nodded.

  “Double payment for the duration of such work,” Teyud added . . . but she put it in the Imperative-Condescentative tense, which conveyed a blunt threat.

  The grumbling died down and the Martians scattered to their tasks. Teyud swung through the hole and down an accommodation-way ladder. The two Terrans followed suit; the twelve-foot drop to the floor was nothing, but it was dim within and they didn’t know what the surface below would be like. While they climbed down, the Martian picked up her glow-rod and peeled a cap off one end, using the sticky surface underneath to attach it to the roof; when you were as tall as she, and long-limbed, that was easy enough. The minicam whirred as Jeremy scanned the interior methodically. It was reassuring to look through its sights and see the interior slightly grainy, more like a training video.

  The decking turned out to be some substance that looked like dark reddish brown linoleum but felt like concrete beneath their boots, giving excellent footing despite the thin scatter of dust that had drained in when the hatchway failed. The control chamber was like a box with the floor smaller than the ceiling, connected by inward-sloping walls. By the light of the glow-rod they could just see that there were portholes in the walls, shut with circles made of the same black armor. A horseshoe of control positions stood around the forward end of the chamber, with chairs fixed to the floor and with the infinity-symbol of Sh’u Maz over the central station.

  Each control position had instruments before it, though most of them were simply holes in the curved panels before them. They would have been mostly organic . . .

  And nothing organic could survive this long, not even in a hermetically sealed chamber, he thought. Nothing that could rot or rust.

  The battle armor the crew had been wearing had endured, a matte black, chitinous stuff much like the fabric of the control cabin itself, though the weird-looking helmets had slumped forward as the spines disintegrated over the eons. The suits were eerily elongated, made for slender forms easily matching Teyud’s seven-foot-plus.

  One set was crimson, not black. Teyud started at the sight of it, visibly surprised for a moment.

  “That is Imperial armor!” she said. “Only a member of the Tollamune line could wear
it!”

  The breastplate bore a device like two spirals interlinked, crimson on black, and encircled by an ancient ideographic glyph that seemed to be inscribed in sinuous strokes of flame.

  It was the sigil of the Tollamune emperors of Dvor Il-Adazar, the Kings Beneath the Mountain.

  The glyphs were a script used only to write the High Tongue, the ancient court language of the Crimson Dynasty and the distant ancestor of modern Demotic. Jeremy’s lips moved as he silently translated it to himself, reading the elements one by one:

  Knowledge-completeness-returning-recurrence-rebirth.

  “A Designated Successor’s badge,” Teyud said, shaken.

  Jeremy mentally translated what the Martian had said: The Crown Prince’s regalia . . . or the Crown Princess, same thing with Martians. Oooooh, something important did happen here.

  The black breastplates bore the same symbol, but enclosed in a white circle; it was the livery badge, worn only by the Ruby Throne’s closest servitors. Teyud made a slow complex gesture with her pistol and holstered it.

  “These were of the Thoughtful Grace,” she said, in that bronze-bell voice. “They died at their posts, attempting with complete commitment to accomplish their assigned mission. Since dissolution is ultimately inescapable, there are far worse manners in which to complete the track of one’s world-line.”

  She placed two more glow-rods on the roof, which gave a good reading-level light. That made the long-lost compartment a bit more strange, not less. He was uneasily conscious of the odd smell, a neutrality with only the faintest memory of must, and the way he had to breathe deeply to get enough air, and of how the distant hooting of the wind was muffled by the thick chitin armor and the sand piled against the walls. It had been a long, quiet wait.

  And Teyud is the only Martian in here. The others are avoiding the place. That could be lack of curiosity . . . or something else. A superstition? Rare, then. Martians generally don’t have ’em.