The Navigator of Rhada (9 page)

The Nyori, for uncounted centuries the most cynical and suspicious townsmen in the Empire, were in this twilight of the great star kings’ age, enjoying an unparalleled prosperity and peace. Twenty thousand planets were now subject to the House of Vyka, and their wealth poured into this greatest of the Empire’s cities.

In the reign of Torquas IX, who had died in a starship accident at the age of six, and in the reign of Torquas X, whom men referred to as the Heretic, the Empire Tower had been incorporated into the grounds of the citadel. This incredibly old structure was said to be a part of the original city of Nyor, and it now descended a full kilometer into the rubbled mound of the tel on which the modern city stood. The detritus of millennia and fully a thousand sackings had built the tel into a series of quite respectable hills, so that the capital of the Second Stellar Empire stood in many places high above the placid waters of the two rivers.

The upper levels of the Tower had been extended into stepped terraces supported by graceful flying buttresses and tapering columns; in this time the building resembled a golden honeycomb atop a massive base. The Tower’s lower levels were still used as a prison, as the entire structure had been in the time of Glamiss Magnifico and his son Torquas I. But the highest stories now served as the favorite residence for the present Galacton and his court.

It was here that General Veg Tran found his ruler and sovereign, Torquas, thirteenth of that name, Galacton, King of the Universe, Protector of the Faith, Defender of the Inner and Outer Marches, Commander of the Starfleets, Beloved of the Star, Lord of Nyor and Hereditary Warleader of Vyka--whom some men called the Poet, and others the Fool.

On that spring evening, the court was enjoying a show of changing patterns of light. Even as he strode across the polished marble of the fiftieth level of the Tower, Alain Veg Tran could hear the shouts of laughter, the drugged giggles, the steely music and shrill singing that accompanied the Galacton’s pleasures.

The light shows were usually given in the Galacton’s private chambers, where, at considerable expense, the Royal Chamberlain had constructed an immense uterine cave devoid of windows and muffled with a strident melange of changeable colored draperies. The light projectors were electric, products of the royal warlocks’ workshops, and it was claimed for them that they could project a different series of light patterns each half hour for the next three hundred years without repeating themselves.

Whether or not they did repeat themselves was, however, of very little moment to Torquas and his giggling companions, for light shows were enjoyed (by specific order of the Galacton) only when the audience was completely drugged with hemp. “It heightens the perceptions,” Torquas declared, “allowing closer communion with the oversoul.” If the King of the Universe saw it this way, there could be no argument in Nyor. Light shows and hallucinogens were
de rigueur
in the city now. Cheap versions of the Galacton’s pleasures were for sale in every tavern and public house along the Great Street.

General the Honorable Alain Veg Tran, attended by a resplendently uniformed officer of the Vegan Imperials, paused for a moment in the anteroom, listening to the sounds of revelry from the Galacton’s theater chamber.

“How long has this one lasted, Captain?” he asked the Vegan warman.

The soldier’s dark eyes were amused under the feathered circlet of his dress helmet. “Only two days, Leader.”

“Has he seen anyone from the Rim?”

“He’s done nothing but listen to that electric squealing and smoke hemp for the last forty-eight hours.” The praetorian’s lip curled slightly. “The Auroran Commissioner has been cooling his heels for a week.”

Veg Tran listened for a moment to the amplified dissonances echoing from the Galacton’s chambers. The Imperial Commissioner for Aurora was a well-intentioned but ineffectual bureaucrat. News of the attack on Aurora would reach the Galacton only through channels approved by Veg Tran--which, with a fool for a sovereign, was the only proper way.

“I’ll see him now,” Tran said.

“It’s a howling madhouse in there, Leader. You’ll need earplugs,” the soldier said.

“Inform all members of the General Staff that there is to be a meeting in my town house at the twentieth hour. No excuses will be acceptable. I want them there.”

“Sir.” The Vegan saluted and withdrew. Veg Tran walked slowly toward the sounds of nightmare revelry.

At the door, two Lyri guardsmen clashed their weapons in salute and opened the violently decorated portals.

Veg Tran stepped into a maelstrom of colored light, movement, smoke, and noise. The occupants of the vast room were all young, in their teens and twenties: the Galacton’s playmates, the general thought sardonically. It was impossible to be certain in the confusion of shifting colors and shadows, but there were certainly more than a hundred young people in the room. Some lay on the pillowed floor in drugged stupor. Others recited poems or sang songs unlistened to. Still others danced, their eyes half hooded in a euphoric daze. Every sort of costume imaginable was displayed: feathers, metallic cloths, native costumes from the far worlds, mad variations of uniforms and current styles. Many of the young people had discarded all clothing and danced or writhed in time to the dissonances as the fragments of colored light painted their skins with swiftly changing patterns.

Veg Tran picked his way through the crowd, ignoring the advances of dazed celebrants. In the center of the room, sprawled on a stepped dais, lay the Galacton. He was playing a stringed instrument, and it was his music that was being amplified to earsplitting howls and twangs by the machines built for him by the warlocks in the workshop.

All around Torquas his friends and sycophants sat, squatted, or reclined. Some, perhaps sincerely affected by the music, waved their hands and arms in flying motions. Others merely sat, mouths agape in the attitude of mindless appreciation Torquas had let be known had his approval.

The Galacton himself was dressed in a silver cape and bronze codpiece. His hair and beard were long and dressed carefully into an artificial
deshabille.
Tiny platinum bells had been woven into his locks and whiskers, and their penetrating sound could be heard punctuating each undisciplined strophe of the music he was playing.

He regarded Veg Tran for some time before recognition came into his hemp-fogged eyes. Tran suppressed a scowl of disgust and merely stood, waiting. Instead of a Vyk warrior of twenty, which was what Torquas was--he looked like some strangely desexed girl. The bells pinged and tinkled as the Galacton turned his head and raised his arms for silence. The gathered celebrants subsided into a murmuring confusion.

“General,” the Galacton said, with a white smile. “General--how good of you to join us in the worship of the galactic spirit.”

A few of the more nearly coherent young nobles muttered, “Amen,” and made the currently popular variation on the sign of the Star. It was a gesture no Navigator would have recognized, Veg Tran thought wryly. But then the Galacton’s playmates plunged into a new religion--or
religious experience
as they liked to say--each week.

“An occasion,” the Galacton said with a shrill laugh. “I shall compose a poem in the general’s honor.”

The celebrants shouted approval. The current vogue was for what Torquas called
spontaneous vapidity.
This consisted mainly of art springing unconfined from souls freed of convention by various drugs. “The art of the void,” Torquas called it. “Art created to be forgotten.”

Now he struck a painfully dissonant “accidental” chord from his electric strings and began to create.

“Warlike man lies fallow in the night of space between
The stars,
Yet love speaks to us all and we listen
To its sensual voice
After all.

Iron man with an iron heart and a head of iron
Too,
Why have you come into the womb of night to
Disturb us?”

He struck another chord to indicate that the poem was ended. An empty-faced child lying at his feet writhed and began to weep. “Oh, Leader--oh, Torquas, how beautifully you speak our thoughts!” The others took up the cry, laughing or weeping or applauding as the mood struck them. Or, thought Tran contemptuously, as they thought the mood struck Torquas.

When the clamor had died slightly, the Galacton shouted to Tran, “That was for you, General. In your honor.”

Tran inclined his head slightly and said, “I am touched, Torquas.”

“I am glad you are, General. It isn’t often a
military
man can school himself to appreciate art,” the Galacton said. “Have you come to join us then?”

Tran stepped to the dais and seated himself beside the Galacton. Torquas’s platinum bells pinged delicately as he moved to make room. Tran said, “Not this time, King.”

Torquas’s face collapsed into a pouting frown. “There’s trouble somewhere. You only come here when there’s some sort of unpleasantness. What is it now?”

“I am taking my own division and some Vyks to the Rim, King,” the Vegan said. “There
is
some trouble, I’m afraid.”

“I knew it,” the Galacton said, shoving the electric lyre from him so that it hummed and twanged on the light- swirling floor. He raised his voice angrily. “All of you. Get out. Get out now.”

The celebrants began to withdraw, those able to walk assisting those too far gone in hemp to move.

Torquas said in a complaining voice, “How can one be
free
when there is always some trouble somewhere? How can
love
prevail? Answer me that, General. Answer me that, please.” Then before Veg Tran could speak, he raised his voice to shout at the unseen light-projector operators. “Stop the lights! Stop them, I say! I don’t want the lights any more!”

The dazzling movement of colors slowed and finally halted. Torquas, his face limned in red, green, and purple, stared at Veg Tran with glistening, tear-filled eyes. Hemp made the Galacton weep easily.

“It isn’t as bad as that, Torquas,” Veg Tran murmured. “A squabble on the Rim. There is no need for you to concern yourself.”

“But you’ll be
fighting.”

This,
Tran thought,
is a direct descendant of Glamiss, who conquered Vyka and then the known galaxy.

“Who is it?” the Galacton demanded. “Who is it
this
time?”

“Gonlan and Aurora.”

“Gonlan is part of Rhada, isn’t it?”

“You know that, King.”

“Yes, of course I know that.” Torquas rubbed his bearded cheeks and set the bells to tinkling. The sound irritated Veg Tran beyond measure. “I won’t have to take this kind of idiocy much longer, thank the Star,” he told himself. He said, “A show of Imperial strength will probably stop any real trouble.” Then he added obliquely, “Unless the Order of Navigators is involved.”

Torquas was not completely stupefied. “Tran, now listen to me. I want no quarrel with the Navigators. I’ll have no trouble with the Theocracy. Why do you think the Navigators are involved?”

“It’s too long a story,” Veg Tran said curtly. “But there have been indications. Only indications--nothing certain. But it may be necessary to--ah, occupy--a sanctuary. The Navigators’ enclave on Aurora.”

Torquas’s bells rang thinly. “Is that wise, General? I mean, really is that wise?”

“The Gonlani are going to attack Aurora, King. Surely we are entitled to protect a holy enclave?”

“Well, it seems--” The Galacton’s voice trailed off as his half-drugged mind tried to come to grips with the realities of what he was hearing. But Torquas had long ago lost his grip on reality. The statecraft he had been taught as a royal child was lost in a fog of hemp smoke, pinging bells, musical noises, and nonsense poetry. “I mean it seems to me--”

“You need not concern yourself,” Veg Tran said. “It is a matter for the General Staff and me to handle. I only want your authority to release thirty Vykan regiments from the city.”

Torquas looked alarmed. “Thirty, General? Thirty regiments? That will leave only a handful of Lyri and--”

“And the Vegan Imperials here in the city. That’s right.” He let his voice turn harsh. “Do you distrust your Vegan troops?”

Torquas shook his head to a tiny clamor of bells. “Don’t be offended, General Tran. You Vegans are the most loyal troops in the Empire. I know this. You can be sure of it.”

Even Torquas recognized the falsity of this statement. Vegan soldiery had been involved in almost every attempt at a coup since the time of Mariana’s rebellion. But the worlds of the Vegan Confederacy were among the most populous and powerful in the galaxy. To belabor the truth would be to alienate five hundred million Vegans--half of them arms-carrying males.

“Well, then, sir.” Veg Tran’s manner allowed no further discussion. “It is settled then.”

Torquas looked helplessly around him at the now empty chamber, garishly illuminated with colored lights. A few years earlier he might have taken this problem to his chaplain, or to any member of the Order of Navigators. But one facet of his faddist life of late had been to boast of his alienation from the religion of his fathers. Now he was quite without friends in his own court. It was acquiesce to Veg Tran’s wishes or face the hostility of his soldiers alone. “You will be careful about the Order, General?” he said hopelessly. “At least you can promise me that?”

“Naturally,” Veg Tran said, standing up. Torquas fumbled in a golden casket for a hemp pipe. The Vegan struck a light on his own torch and held the fire until Torquas was drawing the drugged smoke into his lungs. He stood looking down and half smiling as the King of the Universe’s eyes began to film and the handsome face (so like the old images of Glamiss the Conqueror) began to relax into euphoric vapidity.

“Don’t concern yourself, Torquas,” Veg Tran said evenly, “with anything.” He strode swiftly away from his ruler through the soft and cluttered room. At the door he turned and addressed the unseen light-projector operators. “Start the lights,” he called scornfully. “The show is about to begin again.”