In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  “—it would open. If a passive system, the sensor would open a valve to retract the locking rods. In that case, they are still in place, and cannot be moved because the pressure system is long decayed. I confess bafflement. This material is too refractory to be dissolved easily, and even a highly powered adamantium-tipped drill would require prolonged effort.”

  “Is there likely to be anything immediately behind the door?” Jeremy asked.

  He was already wincing inside; this was tomb robbing with a vengeance.

  “No,” Baid said. “Typically, there would be a section of corridor beyond the door.”

  She looked at Teyud, and the Thoughtful Grace nodded. “That was the usual pattern in the Imperial era as well.”

  “I have something that might . . . that with a reasonable degree of probability might . . . solve this problem,” Jeremy said.

  The Martians looked at him, doing that disconcerting double blink. He found it a bit less eerie after waking up for a while with an example beside him on the pillow.

  “It’s called plastique.”

  The Martians all shook their heads and then twitched their ears rapidly, despite taking his warning and covering them while keeping their mouths open. Further back, the De’ming called out in thin-voiced distress until their handler gentled them down. Dust roiled against the lights, making it nearly as dark in here as it had been when they fought the feral engines. The others had the cloth of their headdresses pressed tight against mouth and nose; Jeremy and Sally had their masks and goggles on.

  The slightly moistened air through the protective mask was a blessed benediction for Jeremy’s tortured mucus membranes. Excitement made his mouth dry anyway, the way it would get as a kid when he stayed up late on Christmas Eve, watching the candles of the Farolitos burn down in their brown paper bags on the eaves outside. Bit by bit, the dust drifted downward, more slowly than it would have on Earth, and the air cleared until it was less of a bloody mist. Teyud managed to slide in ahead of him as they went into the tunnel.

  Mindful of her duty, he thought, smiling a little before he snapped back into a hunter’s alertness.

  He was used to hunting things long dead.

  The tunnel was still and silent, with only eddies in the dust, but it still seemed to ring with the force of the explosion, as if it had shattered not only the armored door but an unthinkable weight of time.

  “Well, let’s be sure it actually shattered the door, before we wax poetic,” he muttered to himself in English.

  It had, and into six or seven pieces, at that. The bioceramics Martians used were strong up to a very high breaking point. But when they failed, they failed. The man-thick door lay in ruins like a broken dish, with the remains of the wrist-thick locking bars strewn among it like shattered sticks of candy cane.

  Teyud stopped and touched the fallen door where the symbol of the Kings Beneath the Mountain was cracked in half. Her touch had a gentleness that surprised Jeremy. To herself, she murmured, “You held your post as long as you could, sentinel, and yielded only to entropy at the last, as we all must.”

  Then to Jeremy, in the imperative tense: “Assistance.”

  That made sense; they were far and away the strongest pair in the party. Careful of their hands despite the gloves, they gripped a chunk and pitched it backward into the tunnel. The De’ming chattered softly for passage, loaded it onto their sled and dragged it away, as contented to do that as shovel sand, or to sit doing nothing. The rest followed, and then Teyud tossed a glow-stick in; the light didn’t turn yellow, so the air inside must have been exchanged by the explosion.

  She went ahead down a short stretch of corridor, then sheathed her sword and holstered her pistol. “This was the only entrance. The contents are undisturbed.”

  He thought he heard a little stress in her voice, a catch; he’d gotten better at reading it.

  Well, so I should, no? And it’s a beautiful voice.

  He shivered a little. There hadn’t been many digs like this one in his brief career, though he’d been working on them since high school.

  Well, there was that weird one in Arizona, he thought. That was . . . startling.

  He followed her even as he mused, scooping up the glow-stick and holding it up like a torch. It was faintly warm to his touch, like gripping something made of flesh.

  “Madre de Dios!” he blurted. It wasn’t often he fell back into his mother’s language without intending to, but . . .

  But this is justification in full!

  It was another circular room, about thirty feet across. The light seemed almost painfully bright because the interior was lined with some white stone, almost crystalline in its purity and polished to a high gloss but faintly laced with streaks of crimson. It sparkled, too, from the gems set in intricate patterns in the ceiling, blue and crimson, diamond white and tourmaline yellow. In the walls were a spiraling row of niches; some held to nothing but dust, or a scattering of rust-colored debris. Others held—

  An enigmatic sculpture of some hard green stone, like a face and yet abstract as a snowflake; a diamond carved in the likeness of a striking Paiteng, its beak open in a scream. A sheet of crystal marked with the constellations, but arranged across a sky quite different from the ones that looked down on Mars today, and almost as different as the stars that had shone on the coronation of the First Emperor. There was also an atanj set in black jade and platinum, carved with a whimsical realism that made him long to pick it up, and a stack of the parchmentlike material that the Vermillion Rescript had been painted on; his fingers itched at the thought of the lost knowledge that might be on it. More items, and more . . .

  And one thing that didn’t seem to fit with the others at all. It was a helmet, but an openwork one, of slim rods that might have been silver if silver could have lasted so long without collapsing into tarnish. This still shone brilliantly, and it had a red jewel over the middle of what would be the forehead if anyone wore it.

  “Uh-oh!” he muttered, taking a step backward. “That’s like the Diadem of the Eye from Venus. That’s far too much like it. Oh, Jesus. Sally was right. There is an ancient artifact here.”

  As he watched, the jewel began to glow; when he lowered the stick of illumination, the light more than made up for the loss, but its glow seemed to paint the chamber with crimson. The outline of the helm was too sharp, as if its existence cut into the world all around it, tearing slips in the fabric of things themselves. Time and space fractured along lines of weakness, like the slippage planes of a crystal breaking under stress.

  Teyud took a step forward. The jewel flared more brightly yet.

  “No!” Jeremy called. “Teyud, darling, don’t!”

  She moved like a sleepwalker, yet with all the light, powerful Thoughtful Grace precision. Then she took the helmet in her hands and raised it, lowering it over her head. The silver ran and moved, until the thing was a perfect fit, and then it seemed to blur, as if it were sinking into her flesh and bone.

  The world vanished.

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

  Hall of Received Submission

  May 18, 2000 AD

  In the Hall of Received Submissions, the two hundred twenty-fifth of the Tollamune Emperors rose screaming from the Ruby Throne, drawing free from the connection before it could obey his will. The thin, keening sound echoed from the vast hall’s ceiling as blood ran from his nose and the small lesion on his neck. Within the depths of the crystal throne, shapes moved, not with their usual slow drift but with sharp, darting distress.

  Then he collapsed backward. The Thoughtful Grace caught him before the frail bones could strike the uncushioned parts of the Throne; strong, gentle hands bore him backward. Others applied bandages of living skin that bonded with instant strength and wrapped him in a blanket that clung and hugged as it radiated warmth.

  Before the Ruby Throne, a score more took stance, their black-armored bodies blocking the view of petitioner and courtier and bureaucrat.


  “This audience is at an end!” their commander cried. “Go! Suppress speculation ungrounded in secure data! Go!”

  As she spoke, the guards were in the antechamber behind the Throne, closing the door and laying Sajir down on the couch there; it purred and began to vibrate beneath him.

  The physician in attendance withdrew a handful of colored segmented worms from his work chest, selected the ones he wanted, and applied them. One tapped into the Emperor’s jugular and began to pulse as it injected drugs. Another crept up a nostril, sipping thirstily at the blood and rippling with colored bands. A helmet of smooth glassine filled with a pink, faintly pulsing jellylike substance went over the Emperor’s head; the jelly spread, oozing into a thin, translucent film that settled over the monarch’s skull and then showed patterns coded in blue, red, and green.

  “Disorganized neural function but no stroke,” the healer said after a moment. “The Supremacy is suffering from severe shock, in synergistic interaction with longstanding general debility. The organism approaches its failure limits.”

  The guard captain came through the door in time to hear that. “Cardiac arrest?” she asked.

  “Heart function is thready and faint but regular, Superior Adwa sa-Soj, and improving. No known synthetic toxins present. Core temperature is depressed and there was a severe surge in blood pressure. I will administer stimulants and blood cultured from the Supremacy’s banked stem cells. Recovery is highly likely, but a period of rest and freedom from stress is necessary.”

  Just then, the Emperor’s eyes fluttered open. “Supremacy!” Adwa said anxiously. “Can you inform us? Is this enemy action?”

  “Water,” Sajir said.

  He remained silent as he sipped, then stared upward; the pupils of his yellow eyes were distended, and the nicating membrane flicked across them half a dozen times. Then the guard captain repeated his question.

  “What has happened, Supremacy?”

  “The foundations of existence shook,” Sajir whispered.

  Washington D.C., Earth

  Smithsonian Institute, Living Planets Exhibition

  May 18, 2000 AD

  In the Smithsonian Institute’s Venusian room the Diadem of the Eye sat in its place of honor. The USASF guard—technically he was a corporal assigned to Base Security—yawned as he walked by it with his assault rifle over his shoulder; the spotlight above kept it brightly illuminated even at night when the rest of the lights were dimmed. Invisible beams protected it, and the guard was careful not to approach too closely; the alarm system was alarming in itself, and like his own presence was part of the price the USASF had demanded for turning over the device that had baffled Earth’s best scientists for more than a decade.

  Best scientists outside the Eastbloc, he thought sardonically. Probably they’d like to give it a shot.

  Having the only authenticated artifact from the Lords of Creation had been a big boost for the United States and its allies. Not being able to tell Thing One about it hadn’t helped, though. The big-domes weren’t even sure if it was made of atoms. Nothing they could do to it affected it at all, short of strapping it to a nuclear weapon or throwing it into the Sun . . . and he’d heard that they weren’t sure that would do anything either.

  He looked through the glass of the case; there were pictures of lean, dark Marc Vitrac, the ranger from Jamestown Base, and Teesa of the Cloud Mountain People, the Venusian hottie who’d originally held the Diadem as her people’s high priestess-cum-princess. She was smiling, her snub-nosed, amber-skinned face surrounded by a long fall of sunlit blond hair against a background of huge Venusian flowers and a bee the size of his thumb. A whitewashed adobe wall was behind her, and a great, mottled, doglike creature lay at her feet and looked suspiciously at whoever was taking the picture. Its teeth were of finger-long, and bared in a warning snarl.

  Unfortunately the picture showed her in a Terran-style house-dress, not in the fur halter and g-string loincloth that were supposed to be her native costume, and she was carrying a young child—doing her Mrs. Vitrac thing, which interfered with the guard’s fantasizing a bit. Unless one fantasized about being Vitrac himself, adventurer on the High Frontier and husband of a beautiful princess he’d rescued from dinosaurs, Neandertals, Eastbloc conspirators, and the ancients themselves.

  And it was a cute kid, too. The guard grinned to himself. He had three daughters.

  “Guess that settled whether the Venusians were human or not,” he murmured to himself.

  Then he sighed. Like millions of others, he’d applied for the space program himself back in high school, and like all but a tiny percentage, he’d been turned down, despite being tall enough for Mars. All it had gotten him was a career in the USASF that was probably less interesting than his original intention to graduate from Cal Tech.

  He took a turn through the rooms, which were dim and smelled faintly of ozone, disinfectant, and floor polish, past blowguns and stone-headed spears and flint hatchets and crude hand axes, feather cloaks and bronze rapiers. The whole exhibit was devoted to the history of the exploration of Venus; one case held a seven-foot stuffed raptor portrayed in mid-leap, its sickle-clawed hind foot lashing out. Screens showed video of ceratopsians hauling logs and wagons around a building site, with humans seated on their necks and the little plastic hemispheres of the ICE machines on their foreheads showing how they were controlled by electrodes implanted in their brains.

  Pictures showed more: street scenes in Kartahown, the Bronze Age city-state that was home to the planet’s highest civilization; plesiosaurs attacking a sailing ship on an azure sea, their long necks looping down toward the deck; a sabertooth caught in mid-leap as it pounced upon a mastodon mired in a swamp . . .

  That gave him an idea for a scene; he was trying to break into the adventure-fiction market. He shook his head as his belt-com beeped and the thought vanished; when he flicked it open he saw the face and voice of his counterpart in the Martian section next door. Oddly enough, the other man was an aspiring teller of tales as well.

  “Anything new, Harry?” the Aussie rasp said.

  “Not a thing, John. Just walking and thinking.”

  He turned back as he spoke. Then the little comm unit dropped out of his hand, shattering on the hard marble of the floor, bits of plastic and microchip scattering. A pillar of silvery light stood where the Diadem had been. And it . . . sang.

  Slowly he dropped to his knees, and his rifle clattered to the stone as well. The sound echoed inside his head, and he could feel the column expand—feel it passing through his face and body, like the breath of a cool wind inside him. The sound rose to a piercing note and vanished.

  So did the lights. He fumbled at his belt and clicked on his flashlight. That worked. Unfortunately what it showed was an empty case—oh, the pictures were still there, and the little display screen with the background story running on a video loop.

  “Shit!”

  But the Diadem was gone. The single most unique and valuable artifact on Earth, and it was gone. On his watch.

  He was cursing when he noticed the perfectly cylindrical hole that had been drilled through the ceiling, the floor above, and all the way through to the roof.

  “Shit!”

  Venus, Gagarin Continent

  Jamestown Extraterritorial Zone

  May 18, 2000 AD

  “Dad! Dad!”

  Marc Vitrac looked up from his papers. For a moment he frowned, and then the desperation in his son’s voice turned the father’s expression to a questioning one. It was late afternoon, with the sun sinking in the east across the walled garden outside the French doors, and the scents of the late-blooming roses drifted in along with cut grass and warm, unbaked brick. He’d been thinking of knocking off and making some jambalaya and dirty rice.

  “What is it, eh, p’tit?”

  Marc Vitrac Junior was twelve, shooting up taller than his father had been at that age and still all hands and feet and gawky limbs, bowl-cut hair a tawny sun-streaked mane.
>
  “It’s Mom.”

  Young Marc was trying to control his fear. His father didn’t bother; he just dashed down the corridor to the nursery. Baby Jeanette was lying in her crib, chuckling at the mobile of dinosaurs and flying things above it, but her mother was lying on the floor beside the crib, and her eyes had rolled up until only the whites could be seen, and she shook as if with palsy.

  “Calisse!” he swore as fear went through his gut like ice water, dropping to his knees beside her.

  Then she sighed, blinked, and shook her head, and when she opened her eyes again, the woman he loved was there again. But the look on her face wasn’t one he was used to: It was one of raw fear.

  “Teesa!” he cried, snatching her up.

  The strong, slender arms went around him, tight enough to make him gasp a little. Then she drew back.

  “It was the Cave Master,” she said. “But . . . Marc . . .”

  “Weh?”

  “It wasn’t as it was when I wore the Diadem and talked with It. It was . . . bigger. And it was angry.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Encyclopedia Britannica, 20th Edition

  University of Chicago Press, 1998

  MARS: Biology

  Although Mars was sterile until terraformed by the ancients two hundred million years ago, life on the Red Planet is, in a very real sense, “older” than that on Earth. It lacks the catastrophic mass extinction that followed the Yucatan asteroid impact of 65,000,000 mya, which marks the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary on Earth. There is considerable support among paleontologists for the proposition that the asteroid was the result of ancient intervention, as neither Mars nor Venus shows an equivalent.

  As a result of the uninterrupted evolutionary history, apart from a few subsequently introduced mammals, the lineages of most Martian species run back without interruption to the most successful of the late-Cretaceous introductions, birds, and the closely related birdlike therapod dinosaurs. All are warm-blooded, all exhibit cooperative care for eggs and young, and many are social. While few are large—the largest terrestrial species is comparable to a bison in body mass—the brain-to-body ratio is, on average, comparable or superior to modern Terran mammals. This, however, may be in part due to the widespread biological engineering of the Crimson Dynasty period, which “uplifted” many species to make them more useful as domesticates. Subsequently many escaped and spread their genes.