In the Hall of the Martian King

by John Barnes

  “It is, old pizo. They don’t come any more serious.”

  When Copermisr arrived with her hair in a scarf and wearing something that could easily be mistaken for a medical uniform, Jak considered that she was one of the most practical and one of the least romantic of the group, and said, “All right, now I’m intrigued. What have you learned that’s so important?”

  Dujuv started to speak, then turned to Copermisr for help. She shrugged and said, “Nothing that will come as that much of a surprise to scholars of the period, except that it’s really indisputable evidence of something that we’ve all whispered to each other. There were always a number of things you didn’t publish if you were smart, things anyone could read in any library almost anywhere that nonetheless were just ignored. If you had a smart grad student get interested in it, you steered the student away. If you had somebody like, oh, let’s call him Clarbo, and you wanted to bury his career forever, you encouraged his interest in it.”

  “What is ‘it’?” Jak asked, exasperated.

  “The thing that I’m afraid to say in public, even now. The strangeness about Nakasen that was always easy enough to detect, the oddity of some of the things that went into founding the Wager. The invisible ten-ton elephant in the living room of our philosophy, or the crazy uncle rattling his chains in the attic of our religion. That which we don’t talk about even though all of us know it. ‘It.’

  “Now, there were always known to be certain touchy and iffy things about Nakasen’s record. The man lived more than two hundred years and wrote prolifically; the Principles, the Teachings, and the Suggestions weren’t even five percent of his known output, and they were far from characteristic. He wrote a few notes and letters per day for a hundred ninety years, and yet the edition of the Collected Letters most of us read in school has only about a hundred letters in it … in all that voluminous material, you see, there’s something hiding in plain sight.

  “Finding the lifelog has about tripled the amount of his writings we have … and if it were like all the other material, that would make it harder to see the problem. But Dujuv got curious about why the lifelog held so much correspondence with the Nontakers, looked into it, and found something that will go straight up everybody’s nose—a brilliant piece of work, and your tove really ought to consider life as a scholar, just as the King said, by the way, and you should be proud of him.”

  Dujuv seemed very uncomfortable and embarrassed, which, Jak knew, was the way he usually reacted to anyone’s saying anything that made him happy and proud.

  “Uh, before we discuss any further,” Jak said, “I should remind you that my purse might as well be a Hive Intel bug—”

  “That’s one reason for discussing it with you,” Dujuv said. “This is urgent. The right people have to know that this stuff is about to break on the solar system, and they need to know it earlier than when it happens. It’s a lot more than just ‘the biggest religious revelation in centuries,’ Jak. This is something … I don’t even know how to start.”

  Copermisr made an impatient little flutter of her hands. “Dujuv, doubt does you credit, but you’ve found overwhelming evidence. Jak, do you know who the Nontakers were?”

  “People who rejected the wager. A lot of them became rebels and led some of the anti-Wager organizations. The way the history books go, they’re sort of the bad guys, but not really, because usually it’s said that they just didn’t understand—”

  “Almost all the early Nontakers—the leaders, later—were close friends of Bob Patterson, later known as Paj Nakasen. They were the people who knew him best, the ones he worked with, at his old job. And what did he do for a living before founding the Wager?”

  “Um, some kind of writer?”

  “Head writer for one of the most popular comedy vid series in history. He was a funny man. He made up jokes.”

  “Yeah, they’re always pointing that out in school, how witty he was—”

  “Oh, he was witty. But what Dujuv discovered was his best joke ever.”

  The panth hunched his shoulders and said, “Most of the Nontakers were his old friends, his fellow comedy writers … and he wrote some letters to them while he was working on the Principles … explaining why the first edition was going to be published, and I quote, ‘Anonymously, as if it were by some goofy shaman wanna-be named Paj Nakasen.’ ”

  Jak had never particularly believed in the Wager, keeping quiet mostly to avoid quarrels. Yet he felt a chill run up his spine. “So it was all—what did you find?”

  “What I found basically is the ‘Just Kidding’ sign, stuck to the side of the box that your religion and philosophy, and mine, and almost everyone’s, came in. It was a joke, Jak, a joke he had to hide because it was aimed at very politically powerful people. Writing anti-aristocratic satire isn’t a healthy occupation now, and it really wasn’t healthy then when there were still people around who were witnesses, or had known the witnesses, to the Age of the Dynasties. It was still common knowledge, then, and not a quaint old business, how the first generations of aristos had come up out of organized crime—pirates, druglords, gangsters, robbers, and thugs of all kinds.

  “Well, Nakasen was a satirist. Or rather Bob Patterson was. That was what he preferred to be called, by the way, but I’m getting to that. Satirists make fun of things that other people go into rages and tears about.

  “According to his letters to his friends, Nakasen’s principles were—this is a quote—supposed to be the ‘secret rules the upper class live by,’ or ‘a guide to helping the average person be as big an asshole as the average aristo.’ He saw the way the aristos actually behaved, when you stripped away all the bowing and ceremonies that they insisted on, and being the funny heet he was, he couldn’t help mocking it. He published it anonymously because he thought people would get the joke and the tyrants and monopolists might put a price on his head.”

  “So the Principles are actually—”

  “About how to be a treacherous, murdering bastard and carve your way to the top over the bodies of your friends. Intended to make fun of that behavior. And if there’s open access to the lifelog, people will be able to see Nakasen working on that, writing notes to people who we’ve recast, in history, as his bitterest enemies, and cackling with glee whenever he takes what he thinks is a really good shot. Then they’ll get to see his dismay when the Principles become a self-help bestseller, and people start to talk about how behaving like this changes their lives.

  “That’s the saddest part, when you see the clown trapped in his own routine, trying to mitigate the damage and maybe use some of his influence for good, for the rest of his life. The Hive was a scheme to wipe out most aristocratic families, by forcing them to blend in.

  “He wanted the Hive to be a republic because, and there’s no getting around this, Paj Nakasen was a republican to the bottom of his heart. More so than our most radical republicans today. And it’s clear that the people who got the joke, the ones who laughed along with him, were dear to his heart, and that Paj Nakasen was laughing, and not even up his sleeve, at every one of the Acolytes and Teachers and all those other people they taught us to admire in school.

  “This is like an ancient Greek finding out that Socrates referred to Plato as ‘that moron’… or maybe a medieval Christian discovering a letter from Jesus that says, ‘Dear Judas, It’s so good to have a friend I can write to. Wait till I tell you the stupid thing that asshole Peter said today—’

  “And I don’t think that people nowadays are going to react one bit better than their ancestors would have. This is uproar and chaos, Jak, utter uproar and chaos, and when it gets out, the solar system will be looking at, oh, I don’t know, a century of war and rebellion. That’s why Hive Intel has to know about this.”

  Jak couldn’t breathe; the huge python, cold as ice, was squeezing him too hard. He tried but could not budge his arms; he kicked frantically about, tangling his legs in the covers. His chest was agony where the freezing cold coils squeezed his up
per arms down into his ribs, and his hands flapped uselessly, unable to touch any part of the snake. He could feel his ribs popping, and he knew that if he let himself exhale even a tiny bit, to ease the pain and pressure, that all would be toktru lost, for the snake—so cold that it burned him like a brush of liquid nitrogen—would bear down, driving the air from his lungs, so he kept his jaws clamped and endured the burning inside his chest as the air, now burning hot and devoid of oxygen, sought to force its way out of him.

  His eyes adjusted and he could see that the snake itself was made of pale blue ice; he could see its spiky spine and tiny heart, watch as thoughts like little red and black worms crawled through its frigid brain. It turned and looked at him with the most beautiful blue eyes, like Martian twilight; Shyf’s eyes … no, to Jak, those eyes were still Sesh’s …

  He wanted to scream, “What have you done with Sesh?” but Uncle Sib stood over the bed and shook his head. Jak’s uncle was alive again, his sad expression distorting as if in a wavy mirror because a loop of the ice-python had flipped across Jak’s eyes, the burned left side of his head bulging from steam and covered with crumbling black skin and hair.

  Sib shook his head again. “Sometimes, pizo, you have to do what doesn’t come natural, and sometimes you have to trust and let go. You want help, don’t you?”

  Jak tried to nod but the snake had wrapped his head down in more loops, leaving only his mouth and chin uncovered, feeling with its tail for an opening to get round his neck.

  “I imagine you do. Well, you can’t get any help from me.”

  Through the distorting clear coils, between the cage of the pale clear blue ribs and spine, Jak saw the blue eyes of the snake, with the fiery coal of the brain burning between them, closing in, and then felt its hard, smooth snout—taut elegant leather—bumping at his lips. He knew then that all the squeezing and choking was only to make him open his mouth; the ice-python intended to thrust down his throat and tear out and eat his heart.

  “Sometimes,” Sib said, casually, “you have to be willing to face the worst, head straight for the fear, go toward the pain, lean into the blade. Are all these metaphors making sense, pizo? Think about how you slip out of a hammerlock, masen? How do you do it? What are you most afraid to do right now?”

  Open my mouth, Jak thought. Dujuv is in the next room on one side of me, and Pikia is on the other side, and if I screamed for help … would the snake eat my heart before they got to me? Would they hear? I get one scream.

  He looked into the ice-python’s Shyf-blue eyes, and nearly relaxed and let it come in for his heart; but somehow behind them he could see Sib, distantly, making frantic, confusing gestures, trying to tell him not to do one thing and to do another.

  Well, might as well go out trying.

  He shouted “Help!” as his chest collapsed, then felt icy leather on his tongue and throat as the big iron-hard head hammered a passage through his lungs.

  “Jak?”

  The lights came on and Jak was rolling over to his side and vomiting, a single hard surge that seemed to empty his belly completely through his mouth, spattering across the floor. He spat frantically to clear the taste and avoid aspirating it, and then sucked in a huge, lung-filling gasp of cold pure air.

  “Weehu, old tove, did you need us here to do that on?” Dujuv’s voice was shocking in its gentleness; Jak looked up to see his friend had jumped back two meters, to the other side of the room, to get out of the way of the spew, and on the way had simply grabbed Pikia over his shoulder, like a sack of potatoes, and taken her with him. He set her down gently, apparently unaware that she was in jammies and bunny slippers.

  The world swam into focus and the last traces of sleep fled from Jak’s exhausted brain. No snake. No Sib. Another nightmare. Jak climbed out of bed, watching where he put his feet, and spoke to his purse. “Uh, can you get some cleanup in here—”

  “It’s already on its way,” the purse said. “I heard that sound and thought you would need it.” There was a thundering sound of water in the bathroom. “I’m also drawing you a tub. And mixing you up a nice warm mouthwash, and I’ll have something soothing brought in for your tummy.” Jak massaged the reward spot firmly, making sure he got several loud cheebles.

  “Well,” Pikia said, “you still seem to be alive, despite those noises you were making. I was worried. Try not to have more than ten of these a night, masen?”

  “Toktru,” Jak said.

  “Anyway, you’ve got Dujuv for company, and I’d just as soon not get home and tell Great-great-grandpa Reeb that I spent any time visiting with you in the bathtub, toktru. So I’m going back to bed, if I can find clean floor to get there on, and I’ll leave you boys to bond with each other.”

  “I’m glad you came to see if I was all right,” Jak said. “Thank you, Pikia.”

  “Any time, pizo,” she said, all her attention on stepping only on dry spots on her way back to her door.

  Dujuv stood by calmly as Jak stripped into the clothes freshener. “Need someone to talk to, or need to be alone?”

  “Need to talk to someone, toktru. Even by the standards of nightmares, that was a bad one. Thanks for coming and waking me up.”

  “Just returning the favor. You screamed like something was eating your heart.”

  “Almost.” Jak gargled and spat. He slipped into the warm water; a faint hum and whoosh told him his bathwater was being continuously scrubbed, and from out in the rest of his suite he could hear the cleaning robots getting to work.

  Jak sat up, wiping the streaming water from his face, and shook his head to get it to stop dripping from his hair. The warm clean bath felt wonderful; a moment later his stomach-settler arrived, and with it a pile of sandwiches for Dujuv, who ate, for once, as if distracted, and without the full attention he usually gave to it. After he had finished the first sandwich, he asked, “So, was it about Shyf? Or about your uncle?”

  “Both. And maybe about needing to reach out to my toves more. I’m glad you came to me.”

  “Weehu, you needed the help.” Dujuv dug into the next sandwich, masticating it to pulp in a few mighty chomps and swallowing it in one gulp. “They told you this was going to hurt, tove. And hurt a lot.”

  “Toktru.” Jak sighed. “Every time I succeed, I feel better; every time I slide back … well, I succeed more than I slide back.”

  Dujuv made a strange face around the sandwich he was in process of gobbling; he swallowed hard and took a big swig of tomato juice. “Have you thought about what we discussed a couple of days ago, Jak?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know about you, but I trust King Dexorth. He and his counselors are going to do the right thing, I think. Maybe not what the scholars and teachers back on the Hive would want, but definitely the right thing.”

  “I hope you’re right.” The panth sat on the edge of Jak’s bathroom sink with easy grace. “Never thought I’d see a problem I couldn’t solve with food. Just shows you that the world is more complicated than we know.” He took a sip of his juice. “I wish that lifelog had been destroyed before I found out what was in it. Because now I can’t not know what’s in there, and every time I think about that, the whole universe falls away from me.”

  Jak nodded. “I can tell you feel that way.”

  “And I can tell you don’t. And I have to admit, old pizo, that puzzles me more than anything else. Don’t you get it? It’s not a guide to human beings living their lives, it’s Nakasen’s satire. He was joking. And the joke turns out to be that he’s telling everyone how to behave like an aristo, what an aristo believes and does, because he thinks it’s despicable. Worse than that. Silly. Jak, if this gets loose in the human noosphere … think about it. It could trigger enough war and revolution to match any of the big convulsions before. As bad as the Age of Dynasties. As bad as the Great Upheaval. Maybe as bad, in proportion of the population and in the amount of violence and change, as the Red Millennium itself.”

  Jak nodded. “So there’s going to be plenty o
f trouble. Toktru. I get that. Didn’t we always expect that there would be a lot of trouble? Wasn’t that why we wanted the jobs we got? Uproar for the human race is adventure for us, old tove.”

  “But at what cost?”

  “I don’t think they’ll charge us anything. Very likely they’ll pay us.”

  “Jak …” Dujuv sighed. “I wish you’d burst out laughing right now and tell me you’re playing dumb. It’s weird. You’ve traveled as much as I have, but you’ve never been anywhere.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Jak, suppose human civil war breaks out. What’s that going to mean on Mercury, which is a prime piece of strategic real estate, occupied by hardworking—god, nobody works harder than they do—people who are used to getting no reward at all, when all of a sudden everyone is trying to grab their world from each other? When ten different armies land there and start to fight and six different spatials try to blockade it and a whole planet that has to import food has all its space cargo facilities bombed out?

  “Or what’s it going to mean to the merchant crewies? Nakasen’s hairy bag, old tove, with all that sail spread, you can see a sunclipper with binoculars from five AUs away, and their habitats are just thin-walled cans. And everyone will be trying to shut off trade with everyone else, and if there’s general war and civil war and revolution besides, no one is going to be respecting all the old conventions about letting neutral shipping alone. All our old trusted pizos on the Spirit of Singing Port might as well be glued to the center of a bull’s-eye the size of Jupiter.

  “Or think about the Harmless Zone. Think of every castle and palace and every delicate little opera house and every beautiful museum and statue … think of all those people just living and making life good where they are … and have you noticed that it’s a perfect place to turn into one big industrial park? Vast resources, great transport, educated population—it was an industrial belt once, and that’s what it will be again, because some damned fool is going to take the chance to take a shot at starting the Third Empire, and the Hive and the Jovian League will both be down on that—and at each other’s throats besides—