Conventions of War def-3

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Itlooks old enough.”

  “It wants cleaning.” Jukes gave a thoughtful pause. “You’ve got a good eye, my lord. Captain Fletcher bought the painting some years ago, but decided he didn’t like it because it didn’t seem one thing or another, and he put it in storage.” His mouth gave a little twitch of disapproval. “I don’t know why he took it to war with him. It’s not as if the painting could be replaced if we got blown up. Maybe he wanted it with him since it was so valuable, I don’t know.”

  “Valuable?” Martinez asked. “How valuable?”

  “I think he paid something like eighty thousand for it.”

  Martinez whistled.

  “You could probably buy it, my lord, from the captain’s estate.”

  “Not at those prices, I can’t.”

  Jukes shrugged. “It would depend on whether you could get a license for cult art anyway.”

  Martinez was startled. “Cult art.That’s cult art?”

  “The Holy Family with a Cat,by Rembrandt. You wouldn’t know it was cultish except for the title.”

  Martinez considered the painting through his haze of surprise. The cult art he remembered from his visits to the Museums of Superstition, and the other pieces he’d seen on Fletcher’s cabin walls, made its subjects look elevated, or grand or noble or at the very least uncannily serene, but the plain-faced mother, the cat, and the child in red pajamas merely looked comfortably middle-class.

  “The cat isn’t normally seen with the Holy Family?”

  A smile twitched at Jukes’s lips. “No. Not the cat.”

  “Or the frame? The red curtain?”

  “That’s the contribution of the artist.”

  “The red pajamas?”

  Jukes laughed. “No, that’s just to echo the red of the curtain.”

  “Could the title be in error?”

  Jukes shook his head. “Unlikely, my lord, though possible.”

  “So what makes it cult art?”

  “The Holy Family is a fairly common subject, though usually the Virgin’s in a blue robe, and the child is usually naked, and there are usually attendants, with some of them, ah…” He reached for a word. “…floating. This particular treatment is unconventional, but then there were no hard and fast rules for this sort of thing. Narayanguru, for example, is usually portrayed on an ayaca tree, I suppose because the green and red blossoms are so attractive, but Captain Fletcher’s Narayanguru is mounted on a real tree, and it’s a vel-trip, not an ayaca.”

  A very faint chord echoed in Martinez’s mind. He sat up, lifting his head.

  “…and Da Vinci, of course, in hisVirgin of the Rocks, did a-”

  Martinez raised a hand to cut off Jukes’s distracting voice. Jukes fell silent, staring at him.

  “An ayaca tree,” Martinez murmured. Jukes wisely did not answer.

  Martinez thought furiously, trying to reach into his own head. Mention of the ayaca tree had set off a train of associations, then conclusions, but in an instant, without him having to think through a single step. He now had to consciously and carefully work backward from his conclusions through the long process to make certain that it all held together, and to find out where it had started.

  Without speaking, he rose from his desk and walked to his safe. He opened a tunic button and drew out his captain’s key on its elastic, inserted the key into his safe and pressed the combination. Seals popped as the door swung open, and Martinez caught a whiff of stale air. He took out the clear plastic box in which Dr. Xi had placed Fletcher’s jewelry, opened it and separated the signet ring and the silver mesh ring from the gold pendant on its chain. Holding the chain up to the light, he saw the tree-shaped pendant dangling, emeralds and rubies glittering against the gold.

  “An ayaca tree like this?” he asked.

  Jukes squinted as he looked at the dangling pendant. “Yes,” he said, “that’s typical.”

  “Would you say that this pendant is particularly rare or unusually beautiful or stands out in any way?”

  Jukes blinked at him, then frowned. “It’s very well made and moderately expensive, but there’s nothing extraordinary about it.”

  Martinez flipped the pendant into his hand and returned to his desk. “Comm,” he said, “page Lieutenant Prasad.”

  A shadow fell across his door, and he looked up to see Marsden, the ship’s secretary, with his datapad.

  “My lord, if you’re busy-”

  “No. Come in.”

  “Lord Captain.” Chandra’s face appeared in the depths of Martinez’s desk. “You paged me?”

  “I have a question,” Martinez said. “Did Captain Fletcher wear a pendant in the shape of a tree?”

  Chandra was taken aback. “He did, yes.”

  “Did he wear it all the time?”

  Her look grew more curious. “Yes, so far as I know he did, though he took it off when he, ah, went to bed.”

  Martinez raised his fist into view of the pickups on the desk and let the pendant fall from his grasp so it dangled on the end of its chain. “This is the pendant?”

  Chandra squinted, and her face distorted in the camera pickups as she stared into her sleeve display. “Looks like it, my lord.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. End transmission.”

  Chandra’s startled face faded from the display. Martinez looked at the pendant for a long moment as excitement hummed in his nerves, and then became aware of the silence in his office, of Jukes and Marsden staring at him.

  “Have a seat for a moment,” he said. “This may take a while.”

  He was still reaching deep into his own head.

  He called up a security manual onto his desk display, one intended for the Constabulary and Investigative Service. Included was a description of cults and the methods of recognizing them. He read:

  Narayanism,a cult based on the teachings of Narayanguru (Balambhoatdada Seth), condemned for a belief in a higher plane and for the founder’s alleged performance of miracles. Narayanguru’s teachings show a kinship to those of the Terran philosopher Schopenhauer, themselves condemned for nihilism. Though cult tradition maintains that Narayanguru was hanged on an ayaca tree, historical records show that he was tortured and executed by more conventional methods in the Year of the Praxis 5581, on Terra. Because of this false tradition, cultists sometimes recognize one another by carrying flowering branches of the ayaca on certain days, planting ayacas about the home, or by using the ayaca blossom on jewelry, pottery, etc. There are also the usual variety of hand and other signals.

  Narayanism is not a militant cult and its adherents are not believed to pose an active threat to the Peace of the Praxis, except insofar as they promote false beliefs. The cult has recently been reported on Terra, Preowin, and Sandama, where entire clans sometimes participate secretly in cult activity.

  Martinez gazed up at Jukes and held out the pendant dangling from his fist. “Why would Captain Fletcher wear this pendant?” he asked. “It’s not a particularly rare or precious form of art, is it?”

  Jukes looked blank. “No, my lord.”

  “Suppose he was actually a believer,” Martinez said. “Suppose he was a genuine Narayanist.”

  A look of pure horror crossed Marsden’s face. Martinez looked at him in surprise. Marsden took a few moments to find words, and when he spoke, his voice trembled with what Martinez supposed was fury.

  “Captain Fletcher, a cultist?” Marsden said. “Do you realize what you’re saying? A member both of the Gombergs and the Fletchers? A Peer of the highest possible pedigree, with noble ancestors stretching back thousands of years-”

  Martinez was taken aback by this rant, but was in no mood for a pompous lecture on genealogy. “Marsden,” he said, cutting him off, “do you know where the personal possessions of Thuc and Kosinic have been stored?”

  Marsden’s larynx moved in his throat as he visibly swallowed his indignation. “Yes, my lord,” he said.

  “Kindly bring them.”

  Marsden rose,
put the datapad on his seat, and braced. “At once, Lord Captain.”

  The secretary marched away, his legs stiff with anger. Jukes looked after him in surprise.

  “An odd man,” he said. “I had no idea he was such a snob.” He turned to Martinez and raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think Captain Fletcher was a cultist?”

  Martinez looked at the pendant that still dangled from his hand. “I don’t know why else he’d wear this.”

  “Maybe it was a gift from someone he cared for.”

  “Acultist he cared for,” Martinez muttered.

  He leaned back in his chair and followed his chain of reasoning again, piece by piece. No part of it was implausible by itself, he decided, and therefore his ideas were better than any other theory that had come his way.

  Much of it had to do with the way the Praxis viewed cults, and the way servants of the Praxis had interpreted their duty.

  The Shaa had believed in many things, but they did not believe in the numinous. Any cult that promoted a belief in the supernatural was, by definition, a violation of the Praxis and illegal. When the Shaa conquered Terra, they had found the place swarming with cults, and acted over time to suppress them, gradually over many generations. Meeting houses of the faithful had been torn down, turned to secular use, or converted to museums. Believers were dismissed from government and teaching posts. Cult literature was confiscated and its reproduction forbidden. Cult organizations were disbanded, any professional clergy dismissed, and schools of instruction shut down.

  Any believer determined on martyrdom was given ample opportunity to exercise his choice.

  Cults had never vanished, of course. The Shaa, who were not without their own shrewd intelligence, might not have expected they would. But by forbidding the spread of doctrine, professional clergy and houses of worship, and the reproduction of literature and cult objects, they had turned what had been by all accounts a thriving business into a strictly amateur affair. If there were meetings, they were small and took place in private homes. If there were clergy, they had no opportunity for specialized study, and had to hold regular jobs. If there was literature, it was copied clandestinely and passed from hand to hand, and errors crept in and many texts were incomplete.

  Believers were usually not harassed as long as they did not practice in public or proselytize, and in time they learned discretion. Though belief was not destroyed, its force was reduced and cults became indistinguishable from superstition-a set of arcane and irrational practices designed to achieve the intervention of who knew what against the inflexible workings of an unknowable fate.

  There were certainly cults scattered through the empire, but most of them existed very quietly and often in fairly remote corners of the Shaa dominion. Cult members tended to marry within one another’s families and avoid public service. Occasionally a governor or a local official would try to earn a name for himself by rooting them out, executing some and forcing others to renounce their beliefs, but for the most part they were left alone.

  There was no point in persecution. Over the centuries, the supernatural had simply ceased to be a threat to the empire.

  Marsden returned within a few moments, carrying a pair of gray plastic boxes. “I assumed you wanted possessions other than clothing, my lord,” he said. “If you want to examine the clothing as well, may I requisition a hand truck?”

  That would be for Kosinic’s trunks containing the amazing number of uniforms required of an officer, plus his personal vac suit. Thuc would have had fewer uniforms, and used a vac suit from the ship’s stores.

  “The pockets would have been emptied, and so on?” Martinez asked.

  “Yes, Lord Captain. Pockets are gone through, and other places where small items might be found, and anything discovered put in these boxes.”

  “I won’t need the clothing then. Put the boxes on my desk.”

  Martinez opened Kosinic’s box first. He found a ring from the Nelson Academy, from which Martinez had graduated before Kosinic arrived, and a handsome presentation stylus-brushed aluminum inlaid with unakite and jasper, and engraved “To Lieutenant Javier Kosinic, from his proud father.” There was a shaving kit, a modestly priced cologne, and a nearly empty bottle of antibiotic spray that a doctor had probably given him for his wounds. Martinez found some fine paper, brushes, and watercolor paints, and looked at several finished watercolors, most of them planet-bound landscapes of rivers and trees, but including one recognizable impression of Fulvia Kazakov sitting at a table in the wardroom. To Martinez’s unpracticed eye, none of the watercolors seemed particularly expert.

  In a small pocketbook he found a series of foils, neatly labeled, that held music and other entertainments, and at the bottom of the box, a small pocket-sized datapad, which Martinez turned on. It asked for a password, but he wasn’t able to provide one. He slotted his captain’s key into it, but the datapad was a private one, not Fleet issue, and wouldn’t recognize his authority. Martinez turned it off and returned it to the box.

  The few belongings-the cologne and the academy ring and the inexpert watercolors-seemed to add up to an inadequate description of a life. Whatever had most mattered to Kosinic, Martinez thought, probably wasn’t here: his passions remained locked in his brain, and had died with him. He looked again at the stylus, sent by the father who might not yet know that his son had been killed, and closed the box on Kosinic’s life.

  He turned to the box labeled THUC, H.C., MASTER ENGINEER (DECEASED), and found what he was looking for right on top.

  A small enameled pendant in the form of a tree with green and red blossoms, hanging from a chain of bright metal links.

  “Ithink there was a group of Narayanists onIllustrious, ” Martinez explained to Michi Chen. “I think Captain Fletcher was one of them. He wore a Narayanist symbol around his neck, and he had a huge statue of Narayanguru in his sleeping cabin. I think he adopted the pose of a collector of cult art so he could collect Narayanist artifacts legally, and he covered his activities by collecting artifacts from other cults as well.”

  “If you insist on that theory,” Michi said, “you’re going to have trouble with the Gombergs and Fletchers, maybe even a suit in civil court.”

  “Not if I’m right, I won’t,” Martinez said. “If there are Narayanists in either of those families, we won’t hear a word from them.”

  Michi nodded silently. “Go on,” she said.

  He had asked Michi into his office on a confidential matter, and she was surprised on her arrival to find Marsden and Jukes present. Martinez called Perry to bring out coffee and snacks, and ordered Marsden to record the meeting and take notes.

  “I think there were, perhaps still are, a number of Narayanists aboard,” Martinez said. “Captain Fletcher protected them. Somehow, Kosinic found out about at least some of this, though possibly he didn’t know the captain was a part of the arrangement. As Kosinic’s knowledge was now a menace to the cultists, one of them-Thuc-killed him.”

  Michi nodded. “Very well,” she said.

  “It was a masterfully done murder, and we would never have found out about it if Captain Fletcher wasn’t killed the same way and made us suspicious.”

  Perry and Alikhan arrived with coffee and little triangular pastries, and Martinez fell silent while everyone was served. He took an appreciative taste of the coffee and felt heat flush at once to the surface of his skin. He could feel his theories boiling in his skull, and he wanted to let them escape; he was so impatient that it took an effort for him to compliment Perry on the coffee. Finally, the two left the room and he was able to continue.

  “We know that Thuc was a Narayanist because he too wore a Narayanist medallion. I think that once Kosinic was killed, Captain Fletcher began to realize that he was in a bad spot. All it would take would be a little indiscretion on the part of a petty officer, and he would be implicated in the death of a fellow officer-and not justany officer, but a member of the squadron commander’s staff.

  “He couldn’t ind
ict Thuc, because any public proceedings would expose his own membership in the cult. So he used his officers’ privilege and executed Thuc during the course of an inspection.”

  Martinez gave a little shrug. “Everything from this point is completely speculative,” he said. “I think Captain Fletcher was intent on eliminating every member of the cult in order to protect himself, but I can’t be certain that he wasn’t just after Thuc. In any case, one or more other cult membersassumed that Fletcher was going after them, and they acted to kill him first.”

  Michi absorbed this quietly. “Do you have any idea who those other cult members might be?”

  Martinez shook his head. “No, my lady. The only people I’m inclined to exempt from suspicion are Weaponer Gulik and the crew of Missile Battery Three. Fletcher inspected them on the day of his death and didn’t execute any of them.”

  “That still leaves something like three hundred people.”

  “Though I would start with those among the crew who are from Sandama, like the lord captain, or who are Fletcher’s clients. Dr. Xi, for example.”

  “Xi?” Michi was startled. “But he’s been helpful.”

  “He helpfully explained away his own fingerprints that were found in Captain Fletcher’s office.”

  “But he was the one who proved that Captain Fletcher was murdered in the first place. If he’d been part of the conspiracy, he would have kept silent.”

  Martinez opened his mouth, then closed it.Dr. An-ku I’m not, he thought. “Well,” he said, “let’snot start with Dr. Xi then.”

  She held his eyes for a moment, then her shoulders slumped as she seemed to deflate. “We’re no better off than we were. You’ve got an interesting theory, but even if it’s true, it doesn’t help us.”

  Martinez took the two pendants, Fletcher’s and Thuc’s, in one large hand and held them dangling over his desk. “We searched the ship once, but we didn’t know what we were looking for. Now we do. Now we’re looking for these. We look in lockers and we look around necks.”