The Novels of the Jaran (148 page)

“For time uncounted, years beyond years, has the Yaochalii reigned, and so will he reign, for time uncounted, years beyond years.”

It was hard for David to judge distance because of the scale and the slowly turning field of the image, but in any case, the city was huge. Of course, it wasn’t actually a city; it was the palace of the emperor, a megalopolis by human standards and yet devoted entirely to the emperor and his business. Had it once been a real city? As the Chapalii Empire had expanded out into space, had it been abandoned bit by bit, or had the emperor decreed it so and forced the evacuation? The Chapalii home world of Chapal was the emperor’s world alone now. Or at least, so the Protocol Office said. No other cities existed there, although this one was itself the size of a small continent.

“The Yaochalii holds his gentle hand over vast territories. The docks of Paladia Minor flow with ships. Merchants spin the heavens with their web of commerce. Lords preside with wisdom over their houses. Dukes administer justly. The princes are at peace. Each lord, each duke, each prince, sends a woman of his house to build a tower for the Yaochalii’s pleasure, so that the emperor may rise in the evening and see a thousand thousand lights set upon his earth to rival the thousand thousand lights that are the markers of his domain in the heavens.”

Beside him, Maggie covered her mouth with a hand and muffled a cough. Night descended on the field. The towers burned in brilliance, each one a star, reflecting the stars above. Great tiers of darkness blanketed the interstices between the blazing towers, and as the field lightened into day again, David recognized these as concourses and avenues and colonnades and gardens and labyrinths and ornamental terraces and every kind of engineering marvel, laid out in breathtaking extravagance and detail, more than he had modeled or imitated or—perhaps, just perhaps—dreamt of in his extensive studies.

“In these days comes the Tai-en Mushai to Sorrowing Tower. Thus does he choose to walk on his own feet into Reckless Tower, and so by his actions does he bring himself to Shame Tower. Thus does his name pass through the rite of extinction, and his house is obliterated forever.”

“Under which emperor did this happen?” asked Charles out of the darkness on the other side of the brightening field.

“All things happen under the eye of the Yaochalii, Tai-en,” replied Echido.

“What was the emperor’s name? Was he related to the Yaochalii-en who now graces the throne? What princely house did the emperor of that time come from?”

“I beg your pardon, Tai-en. Once a prince becomes emperor, then he becomes the Yaochalii-en. He has no other name. What he was before is lost to him. All he had before is lost to him. He brings nothing with him, nor does he leave the throne with anything but his shroud. Thus is each emperor the same, and thus is the line of the Yaochalii unbroken.”

“What about his family?” Maggie asked.

“The Yaochalii has no family. He is the Empire. All of us are his house.”

“But—what if he was married? Had children? Siblings? A favored steward?”

“All that he had before,” repeated Echido, as if it were catechism, “is lost to him.”

Marco whistled under his breath. “That’ll teach you to have ambition,” he said softly. “There’s not much advantage in it, is there, if you have to give up everything to become emperor?”

Maggie gestured with her right hand toward the glorious city shifting before them in the field, although the movement was lost to everyone but David and Marco, who sat on either side of her. “Everything but that.”

“Still,” said David, much struck by this revelation, “I’ll bet it’s a lonely life, Mags.”

“Very human of you, David, but how do you know they have the same motivations and emotions that we do?”

“Sorry. My stock in trade is anthropomorphism. What about the names for the towers? Sorrowing. Reckless.”

“It’s a translation. Who knows what they really mean in Chapalii?”

“Spoilsport. Though it would be nice to have Tess—” But he broke off.

The scene changed. The city melted away into spinning fractals which then formed themselves into the heartachingly beautiful blue and white and muddied continental brown of a carbon-oxygen-nitrogen world: Rhui, rotating in the heavens.

“Though no male may know,” continued Echido, “still, some say that it is here on this planet that the Tai-en Mushai meets his fate, dying before his years unroll into their fullness, holding to himself his secrets, and his shame, and his reckless heart.”

“So we can’t get a date?” asked Charles.

“A
date.
I beg pardon, Tai-en, but this term
date
is one whose meaning I am unfamiliar with. Perhaps you mean the sweet, oblong, edible fruit of the date palm, a tree named
phoenix dactylifera
in your scientific lexicon. It grows in tropical regions and bears clusters of
dates
as its fruit.”

“Never mind.
Ke,
perhaps you understand my question.”

The female had a peculiarly reedy voice with distinct tones whose cadences David found difficult to follow. “Tai-en, this low one does perceive the meaning you grasp for. This low one has assisted the craftsman Rajiv Caer Linn in reconstructing the data banks of the Tai-en Mushai’s network, but as you are both males, this low one can proceed no further in the particular matter you explore now.” On a whistling breath, her voice ceased. After a moment, it started up again. “If one of the females of your party wishes to discuss this particular matter with this low one, then this low one will broach with her subjects fit only for a female’s constitution.”

“What in hell is she talking about?” murmured Marco.

“Maggie?” said Charles.

“Yes.” Maggie jumped to her feet and slipped away into the darkness. A breath of air brushed by David’s face. Evidently Maggie and the ke had gone beyond the long chamber they all sat in now, back between the pillars into the white room that concealed the entrance to the control room. Above and around them hovered the field, projected out above and surrounding the two rectangular countertops that none of the humans had understood until now. They were field generators for the huge imaging three-dimensional field at which humans and Chapalii stared, watching Rhui turn and implode and reemerge as the palace of Morava, the Tai-en Mushai’s secret retreat.

As if they walked themselves, they came up the avenue bounded on the sides by precise gardens of translucent statues and flowering vines and above by four jeweled arches. The great doors glided open—David ached to know the mechanism by which their massive bulk swung so smoothly outward—to reveal the grand concourse. Along the upper half of the walls, a procession of creatures tangled with plants drew the eye along with it to the distant end. These reliefs seemed grown of some living crystal; they grew and changed as David walked down the concourse. A lion grew wings and a snake’s tail and transmuted into a gryphon. A sinuous, tentacular alien
Spai-lin
curled in on itself and became a multifaceted snail wreathed in vervain. Through grand corridors and intimate salons they passed. All was alive as it must surely have been during the Mushai’s residence. The dome lit when they entered, drowning them in the depths of a nameless sea populated with grotesque amphibious creatures. In a vast hall, a stellar map spread out along the floor in a mosaic of intricate tiling, and the map rose as light into the empty air. It was as if he walked as a god into the vast depths of space, as into an ocean as black, splintered with light and chasms of shadow, as the other had been sea-green. He strode through the spinning universe, and the music of the spheres hummed like a chorus of drowned bells in his ears.

With great relief, David came to a room where he could sit down and rest. Except, of course, he already sat cross-legged on the floor, next to Marco. Dizziness swept him as the movement and the stillness collided and merged. He let out all his breath and felt Marco slump at the same time, two sighs in concert. Glorious.

“Thank you,” said Charles. His voice shook with emotion. Charles showed emotion so rarely in his voice, these days, that each time it startled David anew, to recall that Charles still lived in there; he had simply given up most of himself in order to assume the role he had to play.

“Rather like the emperor,” said David softly.

“What?” whispered Marco.

David shook his head. The field shrank in until it encompassed only the boundaries of the innermost ring of counter. Rajiv spoke, and a bewildering array of charts and graphs and figures emerged in three dimensions and multiple blocks in the field.

“He keeps coming back to this,” said Marco in a low voice, “all these figures, timetables. I think the Mushai must have stolen the contents of every data bank in the empire and compressed them into here. Why?”

“Knowledge is power.”

“Easy answer. Why does Charles keep coming back to this?”

“Easy question. Same answer.”

“It’s time,” said Rajiv suddenly.

“End program,” said Charles. The field broke into a thousand bright pinpricks and sparkled and faded and vanished. Charles rose. Echido hurried over to stand beside him, the Keinaba house steward at his heels. A moment later, the door between the two black megaliths that led into the buffer room opened to admit Maggie and the ke.

“Hon Echido.” Charles acknowledged the Chapalii merchant with a nod of his head. “Marco Burckhardt will escort you and your party back to your ship. Tonight is the new moon. It will be necessary for you to leave the planet during this window.”

“Tai-en.” Echido bowed, hands folded at his chest. “May I be allowed to inquire about the other errand we spoke of?”

“Oh, yes. Indeed, I shall require your services in this other matter. You will retrieve the equipment Dr. Hierakis has requested and stay in touch. We will arrange a rendezvous at some point along our journey south.”

“Keinaba House would be honored, Tai-en, to transport you to these southern latitudes on our shuttle, thus sparing you the arduous physical journey.”

“I hear your offer, Hon Echido, but you know that as this planet is interdicted, by my own order, we must travel in as unobtrusive a manner as possible.”

“As you command, Tai-en. I await your word.” He bowed, precise and low. His steward bowed. The ke was not of sufficient rank to be allowed to bow to a member of the nobility, but Charles glanced her way and acknowledged her with a nod. Marco led them away to the stables, where their horses waited.

“Well?” Charles asked, turning to look at Maggie in the now quiet room.

“I think I’ve just discovered something amazing,” said Maggie. “Rajiv, can you call up that image of the Imperial palace? Not that big. Yes, that’s a manageable size.”

The field remained within the confines of the inner counter, and the five people loitering in the chamber walked forward to stand leaning at the outer counter, staring in. The sight was less overwhelming, confined in a sphere of pale blue light.

“Li an sai,”
said Maggie, the code that instructed the banks to respond to her voice commands. “Show the Imperial palace as it existed in the days of the Tai-en Mushai.” The image did not change. “Show the Imperial palace as it exists in the days of Tai-en Charles Soerensen.”

The image did not change.

“Is this a trick question?” demanded David. “Is there some time paradox here? Jo says that her dating indicates that the Mushai must have lived a good ten thousand years ago, Earth standard.”

“No time paradox.” Maggie looked smug. “There’s an essential point missing. The Chapalii always say, ‘time uncounted, years beyond years.’”

“A phrase Tess once told me applies equally to past, present, and future,” said Charles suddenly. “She said that the Chapalii live in the present. That they have no concept of past or future, in the sense that we do. No strong concept of history. The Mushai’s revolt is more of a legend than a historical event.”

“The Imperial city is the same, as it always has been,” agreed Maggie. “As it is now, so must it have always been. The same with the emperor. He’s the same emperor now as he was ten thousand years ago, even though he’s a different individual. But we thought that was the Chapalii psyche, or mind-set.”

“Based on the language study Tess did, yes.” Charles nodded.

“Did Tess ever have access to Chapalii females?”

“Not that I know of. We never see Chapalii females on Earth. Or on Odys, for that matter.”

“We never see them anywhere.”

“I thought,” said Rajiv, “that they were inferior citizens. Put in seclusion, purdah. You know. It’s one of those primitive ancient Earth customs that human culture finally outgrew. You still see it in places here on Rhui. That’s one thing I’ll grant the jaran, however barbaric they might otherwise be. There’s a kind of shared authority between the women and the men. But anyway—”

“Damn it, Mags!” David laughed out of impatience and amusement at Maggie stringing them all along. “What did the ke tell you?”

“I think it’s just the males. The Chapalii males. That live in the present. They don’t deal with the concept of history, or past, or future. Because they’re the face we see, the face we’ve always seen, of the Chapalii, we assumed it was the only one they had. The ke gave me a date for the Mushai. An imperial date. Rajiv, you’ll have to run it through the computer. I can’t calculate these things. I’m just a damned journalist. I deal in image and word, not in mathematics.” She shut her eyes, concentrated, and then reeled off a string of numbers and strange sounding words.

Rajiv pulled out his slate and began some feverish work.

“Why not do it through the field?” Charles asked.

Rajiv glanced up. “If what Maggie says is true, then perhaps this field won’t even acknowledge this kind of data. Anyway, I’d prefer to do the initial calcs on my own equipment.”

Charles began to pace, looking thoughtful. “So there might be a whole strata of Chapalii life that we’ve missed? You know, I made Tess my heir because I thought with her language skills that she would then be allowed access to all levels of their culture, and thus she could penetrate deeper than we had yet managed into an understanding of their psyche. But now I wonder if by doing so, if by making her an honorary male, as it were, I limited her instead. History!” He lapsed into silence.