The roar surged again. People rushed the stage, struggling with the soldiers and robot sentinels. Elastic quasis fields gave under the pressure, then snapped the trespassers back into the crowd. A girl screamed for Althor, extending her arms, and a youth standing on a wall was knocked off into the surging crowd. Althor stood frozen, staring at the scene. Kurj felt Althor’s dismay but didn’t motion him back. His brother looked the way ISC needed him to look, like a radiant hero come to defend the empire.
It took a long time, but the roar finally faded, ebbed, subsided, and became a murmur. In a low voice, Kurj spoke into his gauntlet. “I’m going up now.”
“We’re covering you,” Jak said.
As Kurj walked to the podium, the crowd waited in silence. He deplored public speaking, which was why he almost never did it, but today a few words were required. Hell, just giving all of Althor’s titles was a speech. Kurj preferred only one title. Imperator.
He raised his arm to Althor and spoke. As loudspeakers picked up his words, they rumbled out over the crowd. “I give you Prince Althor Izam-Na Valdoria kya Skolia, Warrior Secondary, Im’Rhon to the Rhon of the Skolias, First Heir to the Imperator, Fifth Heir to the throne of the Ruby Dynasty, once removed from the line of Pharaoh, born of the Rhon, Eighth Heir to the Web Key, Sixth Heir to the Assembly Key.” He lowered his arm. “Today I Invest Althor Valdoria as my successor. From this day on, he will be the Imperial Heir.”
And the people thundered their approval, for the hope an avenging angel offered against the unending brutality of a war that ground them down, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, until they had no defense except the symbolism they craved from the dynasty of a long vanished empire.
4
Emperor U’jjr Qox, called Ur Cox by those who found the Eubian accent difficult, was a gaunt man. Tall and lean, he maintained his health well. At sixty-six years of age, life had added few lines to his face.
Until three months ago.
Hands clasped behind his back, he stood in a bare room with glossy white walls and watched the scene played out on his wall screen: Kurj Skolia, declaring his heir. Ur Qox clenched his fist. He too had named an heir. Jaibriol II. His son. The man the Ruby Dynasty had killed.
Ur had named his son after his father, Jaibriol I. The elder Jaibriol had been pure Highton, in mind, in appearance, and in his Aristo perfection. But Ur Qox’s mother had been a slave.
You tainted my blood, Ur thought to his father’s memory. You made me less than perfect. But he understood the necessity. His father had selected his mother for her genetics. And she gave him what he required, a son who carried every mutated gene needed to make a Rhon psion. That those genes were recessive meant Ur Qox manifested none of their traits. He was neither empath nor telepath.
In secret, Qox had continued his father’s work, combining forbidden genetic research with the hunt for a slave who could provide the genes he required. And he found her. He paired Camyllia’s Rhon genes with his and she gave him a Rhon son. Jaibriol.
All those years, his hopes, his pride in his son, the great sacrifice of contaminating the Qox bloodline—it all came to nothing. Jaibriol would never follow him as emperor.
Ur tried to find consolation. Jaibriol no longer suffered having to hide his Rhon nature. Ur Qox himself had never had trouble with that game of deception. He thrived, in fact, a better Aristo than true Aristos, with their inbred bloodlines. The recessive nature of Rhon genes allowed him to reap the benefits of genetic diversity without the weakness of being an actual psion. Of course no one knew his mother had been a provider. A pleasure slave.
Providers were rare. Those chosen few, whose sweet suffering provided transcendence for their Aristo masters, had to be psions. Ninety-nine percent of the Eubian population were taskmakers, the backbone of civilization. All slaves, of course. They needed owners. Aristos took better care of their slaves than the slaves could themselves. Qox had long ago tired of the hysterical Skolian cries about the so-called sadism of Eube. In their fevered raving, Skolians neglected to mention that Eubian slaves had a higher standard of living, on average, than Skolians. Giving them freedom would only frighten and disorient them.
And of course the Ruby Dynasty objected. They themselves were providers without ownership. The ultimate slaves. They had to be controlled before they destroyed the sublime beauty of the universe the Aristos sought to create.
As they had destroyed his son.
Qox waved his hand. The wall became transparent, letting him gaze out over Upper Qoxire, the city below and beyond the palace, a lofty metropolis of spires and alabaster. Upper Qoxire graced this biosculpted planet called “Eube’s Glory,” so named for Ur’s grandfather, Eube Qox, who had founded the Eubian Concord and designated Glory as its capital world.
A scene of deceptive serenity greeted him, a sunny afternoon of clear air and clear skies. Still a young planet, Glory had a short day, only sixteen hours. She claimed fourteen moons, most of them small, but several of substantial size. Mirella hung in the east, almost full. Named for the first empress, the moon appeared huge in the sky, the size of a giant gem. Eube Qox had ordered her surface altered so it glittered like carnelian. Two tiny moons shared her orbit, one sixty degrees ahead and one sixty degrees behind, each named for a handmaiden of Ix Quellia, the ancient moon goddess of Qox’s ancestors.
Mirella caused the major portion of the huge tides that battered Glory. But she wasn’t the largest moon. That honor went to Zara, named for the wife of the second emperor, Jaibriol I, who took his sister Zara as his empress. Zara was four times farther from Glory than Mirella, yet appeared more than half Mirella’s size in the sky and raised respectable tides. Jaibriol I had sheened the moon gold. She made a gilded crescent now, high in the west.
Viquara, the third largest moon, shone half full in the east. Although she was only about forty percent the size of Mirella in the sky, Viquara was the most agile of the three empress moons, orbiting Glory faster than the planet rotated. So Viquara rose in the west and set in the east. She glittered like diamond, an effect Ur Qox’s wife had requested when he named the moon after her.
The dim crescent of Glory’s fourth largest moon hung above the far, far horizon. G4. The Unnamed Moon. The choice of what name to bestow on G4 had belonged to Qox’s heir, Jaibriol II.
Now it would forever be G4.
Behind Qox, the door opened. He knew no one could enter here without his blessing. His bodyguards stood outside and his defense systems remained in operation. Still, hearing a door open behind his back, he wondered if this, then, would be the day of his death.
Without turning he said, “So.”
“My greetings,” his wife said.
Qox turned to her. The bare room needed no adornment with the Empress Viquara present. He had chosen her for one thing and one thing alone: sexual beauty. That she also turned out to be intelligent had been an unexpected asset.
Dark lashes framed her red eyes. She had a classic face, with skin as smooth as snow-marble. Her hair shimmered, straight and black, glittering in the cold light. After twenty-six years of marriage, her shape remained perfect. How she maintained her youth he never bothered to ask, but she was even more the epitome of Highton beauty now than the day she had met him, at their wedding twenty-six years ago, when she was fourteen.
He had sterilized her using methods so discreet she never knew it happened. All she understood was that despite prewedding medical reports to the contrary, she was barren.
She urged him to allow her artificial methods to produce his heirs. He refused, of course. It violated Highton beliefs. It was done anyway, but it served him no purpose to grant her the children she craved. He left her one honorable choice, an ancient solution practiced within their, highest caste, where the need for heirs outweighed matters such as love. He offered to let her commit suicide.
She begged for clemency, wept, used the many feminine gifts nature granted her. In the end he “relented.” The price of her
life was an oath: when he found a woman to produce his heir, Viquara would acknowledge the child as her own and ask no questions. So the empress kept her title and her life, and Ur Qox had his Rhon son. As promised, his wife gave no hint the boy wasn’t hers. Ur had hidden Jaibriol until a year ago, and by then Viquara played her role with ease.
Now she murmured her husband’s name, Oojoor, making it silken, with a glottal stop after the first syllable, a sound shared by Skolian and Eubian languages alike, all derived from an ancient tongue five thousand years old. He went over and took her into his arms, brushing his lips over her hair. He had never determined if she loved him or was even capable of love. It didn’t matter. She gave him what he required, as did all people, when he required it, as he required it.
If they didn’t, he got rid of them.
Their bodyguards waited outside, four men in the stark midnight uniforms of the Razers, the secret police who served the emperor. Gunmetal collars glinted around their necks, the only outward indication the officers were slaves. Thus guarded, the emperor and empress descended to the ground level of the palace.
Black and gold diamonds tiled the floor, and columns graced the huge, airy halls. The glittering white pillars and walls were made from neither diamond nor snow-marble, but a blend of the two, created atom-by-atom by nanobots. As with all nanotech, the bots were no magic machines, simply molecules capable of one function, in this case docking certain atoms into a crystal lattice.
The group stopped at the great double doors to the Hall of Circles. One of the Razers touched his collar and the doors opened. Inside, high-backed benches ringed the circular hall, glittering white and set with red brocade cushions. Aristos dressed in glistening black clothes filled every bench, hundreds of Aristos, from all three castes: Highton Aristos, who controlled the government and military; Diamond Aristos, who attended to commerce, production, and banks; and Silicate Aristos, who produced the means of pleasure, including providers. All had ruby eyes, shimmering black hair, and perfect faces.
They looked the same.
They moved the same.
They spoke the same.
They thought the same.
They watched their emperor and empress walk up an aisle that radiated like a spoke from a dais in the center of the Hall. Ur Qox mounted the dais with Viquara at his side. Then he sat in the glittering red chair there. The Carnelian Throne.
In unison, three hundred Aristos raised their arms and clicked three hundred cymbals. One blended note rang through the Hall. It was a rare expression of grief, merited only by the highest among them. Today they mourned the Highton Heir. In silence, they swore an oath: the Ruby Dynasty would pay for the loss of Jaibriol II, Eube’s shining son.
* * *
Soz stopped by a hip-high boulder, the laser carbine slung over her shoulder. Jaibriol sat down on the boulder, holding the valise with their computers.
The sky arched overhead like a pale blue eggshell. To the east, the red dwarf sun gleamed in a molten disk of gold. Although the “red” star was actually hot enough to appear white to the human eye, Prism’s atmosphere scattered away enough of its scant blue light that it shone orange instead. To the west, the blue-white sun blazed, intense and white. Soz had named the red dwarf Red and the blue-white sun Blue, at least until Jaibriol thought of something better. Although Blue was well over three times the diameter of Red, it was far enough away that Red’s molten disk appeared more than six times as large in the sky, almost three times as big as Sol when seen from Earth.
Forest surrounded Soz and Jaibriol, except for the clear stretch of ground before them. A few meters away, a wide river swelled over fallen trees.
“This is beautiful,” Jaibriol said. “The best site so far.”
She indicated a hill across the river. “We could build a house up there.”
He nodded, absently rubbing his chest through his blue environment suit.
“Is the pollen bothering you?” Soz asked.
“Not since I took MedComp’s last concoction.” With a grin, he spoke in a nasal twang. “Not even a clogged nose.”
At the sight of his smile, Soz sighed. Her mind started imagining him without the environment suit.
He made an exasperated noise. “Saints almighty, you only think about one thing.” He put his arms around her waist and drew her between his knees. “You’ve no respect for my mental facilities, Wife.”
She smiled. “I respect all your facilities, Husband. Mental and otherwise.”
His face gentled. Then he sighed and let her go. “We should get to work.”
Soz would have rather explored his facilities, but she knew he was right. So instead, she said, “All right. You run reconnaissance while I secure the river.”
He laughed. “This isn’t a military operation.”
She grinned and gave him a salute. “Onward.”
They chose a spot by the river with a small beach enclosed by palms that chattered when their crackling fronds rubbed together. Across the river, gigantic roots buckled out of the bank. The only candidate for the tree that had been nourished by those monstrous roots was a toppled trunk rotting in the water.
Over the next hour, Jaibriol explored and Soz worked with GeoComp, analyzing the samples Jaibriol brought her. The results agreed with those from the other sites they had investigated. About half the foliage was edible, a quarter mildly poisonous, the rest lethal. The water also tested the same, drinkable if they boiled it, though MedComp predicted they would eventually develop immunities to its odd honeycomb bacteria. The soil had the dark green color they had seen elsewhere, derived from chlorophylls mixed in with the loam. She suspected it would grow good crops, if they could figure out what to plant.
Although Prism was a young world, the age of Precambrian Earth, its life-forms had a sophistication more congruent with Earth’s Paleozoic Era. It thrived with primitive flora and, to a lesser extent, with fauna. The animals were unlike anything Soz had seen before. Gold and red fliers hummed through the air, part crustacean, part reptile, and part plant, with chitinous hides that incorporated chlorophyll.
The first scan made by the Earth probe, after it found the planet, had detected what seemed to be a humanoid species. Subsequent scans revealed the “humanoids” were actually bizarre plants that could move by bending over until their crowns touched the ground, sending down roots from their crowns in the new location, then pulling out their original roots and straightening up until their old roots became their new crowns.
Standing on the beach, Soz looked across the river. The forest thinned on the other side, and a loamy green hill swelled up from the bank, peaking after a few hundred meters. If the soil was as good there as here, she and Jaibriol may have found their homestead. She nodded, then leaned down and pulled off her hiking boots.
“What are you doing?” Jaibriol asked.
She straightened up to see him a few meters down the beach. “Going wading.”
“How do you know it’s safe?”
“Calculated risk.” She motioned at the water. “We’ve found no predators or other dangers. Nothing but slugs and bugs.” The “bugs” were actually more like tiny crustacean-plants.
“‘Slugs and bugs’ can hurt,” Jaibriol said. “What if they sting you or something?”
“MedComp says they have no poison.”
“The ones we’ve checked.” He came over to her, holding the carbine at his side. “We can’t have analyzed more than a tiny portion of the species here.”
She unfastened the collar of her environment suit. “I’ve done planetary surveys for ISC. This world fits well within accepted standards.”
“That doesn’t mean nothing in the water can hurt you.”
“I’ll take the air syringe. If I get a sting or bite, it can make an antidote.”
He frowned. “How? It has no history of this world.”
“We’ve given it one.” She indicated the valise with their computers. “Even one sample tells it a lot, and we’ve given it
hundreds, more than enough to map the chemistry here. MedComp is already designing antidotes.”
Jaibriol wiped the dusting of pollen on his cheek. “MedComp is effective, I’ll grant that. But you shouldn’t take chances.”
“We have to try sooner or later. We can’t avoid risks forever.”
Softly he said, “I don’t want to have to bury you.”
She laid her palm against his cheek. “You won’t.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“One of us should stay here. Just in case.”
“I’ll go then.”
“Jaibriol, I’m trained to do this.”
He blew out a gust of air. After a moment he said, “I’ll cover you from the bank.”
She touched his hand. “That would be good.”
Soz peeled off her clothes, then strapped on her belt and hung it with the syringe, a knife, her palmtop, a life jacket folded into a palm-sized square, and a cord reinforced with nanotube fibers, making it as thin as spider silk and as strong as steel. Then she waded into the river.
Clear water swirled around her legs. She let it run through the palmtop analyzer, recording more of the rich bacteria life. Spatula leaves floated past her and rocks rolled under her feet. By the time she reached the middle of the river, the water had risen to her waist. Turning, she saw Jaibriol on the beach. She waved and he nodded to her, the carbine gripped in his hand.
Soz tipped her face up to the sky. Sunshine streamed around her, blue and gold mixed together, clear and bright. Although the human eye wasn’t sensitive enough to detect the differences in light intensity when one sun was up as compared to both, her augmented optics registered that Red put out most of its light in the infrared whereas Blue put out most of its in the visible and ultraviolet. Prism’s rich atmosphere, a thick ozone layer, and extensive oceans helped protect her fragile human inhabitants, both from Red’s rare but powerful flares, which could shine with the light of many suns, and from Blue’s UV radiation.