"Well, of course it's a great honor and I'm very proud to have been chosen," the Patriarch said miserably. "But there's so much to remember, all the lines and gestures and remembering to bow in the right places. They won't even allow one of my people to prompt me through my comm implant. Security reasons; all private comm channels will be shut down for the duration. Bastards. And it's not as if anyone here cares. Bet half of these Death By Fashion heathens have never seen the inside of a Church in their lives. But we couldn't say no. It is traditional… you know what the Church wants, don't you?"
"Access to the Madness Maze," said St. Nick, nodding slowly.
Though given that every schoolboy knows that the first, and indeed last, ten thousand people to enter the Maze all died or went horribly insane…"
"The Church feels very strongly that total Quarantine was an overreaction," the Patriarch said immediately, his voice firmer now that he was on more familiar doctrinal grounds. "The blessed Deathstalker and his companions survived and were transformed. They became more than Man, and thus closer to Jesus and to God. This is Humanity's destiny. We can all transcend our base selves, as Jesus did. We can't let ourselves be put off, just because all those years ago, the original supplicants lacked… faith."
"Parliament seems very firm on the issue," said St. Nick, carefully non-commital. "No one is to be allowed anywhere near the Maze again, until the scientists studying it, from what they fervently hope is a safe distance, can come up with some idea as to why Owen survived and ten thousand others didn't. You must have heard the rumors about what the Maze did to them; people turned inside out or horribly rearranged. Last I heard, the marines guarding the Maze were under strict orders to shoot anyone who even thought about breaking the Quarantine, on the grounds that it would be a kinder fate than what the Maze would do to them."
The Patriarch took another good swig of the brandy, and dealt with it rather better this time. His cheeks were practically glowing and his nervous tic had softened. His voice, on the other hand, was getting louder. "I've seen recordings of interviews with some of those whose minds were… touched by the Maze. Very hush hush, you understand. Not available at all to the general public or lower orders… They were mad, no doubt, and barking with it, but they had been touched by Something. The things they said… Anyway, the Church still demands access to the Maze. For properly prepared supplicants. This is a matter of Faith, not Science. If tens of thousands more have to die so that some may transcend, it will be worth it."
"There are times," said St. Nick, "when you people are scarier than the Maze could ever be. Give me my brandy back. Now off you go and learn your lines. And no more nonsense about demanding access to the Maze, or I'll leave you a lump of coal for Christmas. And it won't be your stocking I'll stick it up."
Not far away, a clump of carefully cheerful Members of Parliament had converged on a waiter bearing a tray of flutes of the very best vintage champagne. MPs were always on the lookout for freebies. The waiter made his escape with an empty tray and his bottom pinched twice, while the MPs toasted each other's health in almost convincing voices. Parliament's reputation was much greater than it had been, particularly in the days immediately following Lionstone's fall, when everyone had been struggling for power, and to hell with whoever got stepped on in the process. These days, most Members of Parliament seemed genuinely concerned with serving and promoting the best interests of the worlds they represented. And while they might (and frequently did) argue fiercely among themselves in and out of Parliament, there was one thing they were all agreed on. The last thing the political process needed was a well-meaning new King interfering in matters that were none of his business. A constitutional monarch should know his place.
"At least Douglas has a good few years under his belt as Paragon," said Tel Markham, the Member for Madraguda. "Nothing like exposure to real people to knock all that idealism crap out of you. People on the whole may mean well, but as individuals they can be right little shits."
"Your planetary Council's been questioning your expenses again, haven't they?" said Michel du Bois, Member for Virimonde. "I've always got on very well with individuals. It's when they start forming into special interest groups and forming agendas that I feel an urge to gather up my robes and sprint for the horizon. Still; if any individual could be said to be dangerous, Douglas would get my vote. He's always taken the King's Justice thing very seriously. The last thing Parliament needs is a King and Speaker preoccupied with justice. People don't want justice; they want mercy. And tax cuts."
Markham nodded. "If Douglas can't, or won't, learn what his job really entails… Well, people have been talking about doing away with the Monarchy and making the Empire into a Republic for years."
"You mean your people have been talking about it," said Meerah Puri, Member for Malediction. "Personally, I've always felt it can be very useful to have a public face to take the flak when Parliament finds it necessary to take unpopular measures. I wouldn't worry. Douglas is a Campbell, and knows his duty. And you have to admit he looks the part. He'll make a good King for us, once we've broken him to harness."
St. Nick gave them a loud Ho ho ho! in passing, so they wouldn't realize he'd been listening, and moved on to talk with the two humanoid robots representing the AIs of Shub. They were only roughly humanoid in shape, fashioned from gleaming blue steel, and so stylized they practically qualified as works of art. Their polished faces were blank, apart from two silver glows for eyes, so humans would have something to look at while they talked. Shub was anxious not to remind anyone of the Furies. The very human-seeming robots that had terrorized the Empire for so long, before the AIs learned Humanity from the esper saint Diana Vertue and in a flash of revelation declared themselves to be Humanity's children. They'd spent the last two hundred years repenting their former evil ways. When St. Nick approached them, the two robots were studying the Courts stained-glass windows with great concentration, particularly those bearing images of the legendary Owen Deathstalker.
"Merry Christmas!" said St. Nick, and the two robots turned and inclined their blank heads courteously to him.
"Season's greetings," one said, after a moment. "Do you really know who's been good and who's been bad?"
"I can often make a bloody good guess," said St. Nick. "I don't suppose you celebrate Christmas, do you?"
"Religion," said the other robot. "It is a fascinating concept. Of course, we know who our creators are, and you have no idea how disappointing that was for us."
"We have been contemplating the windows," said the first robot. "The icons. The representations."
"I've never been too sure what you see in art," St. Nick said diffidently.
"Fiction," said the second robot. "It is a fascinating concept. Myth. Legend. We grasp the principle, but the effects and connotations are something else. We cannot see them as you do. The whole myth-making process is very difficult for us to come to terms with. We remember the Deathstalker as he was. And his companions. We can access our real-time memories of all our encounters with these people at a moment's notice. The people we remember seem to have little in common with what these images represent today. Why make real people into fictions when the real people are much more interesting?"
"Myths and legends are… comforting," said St. Nick. "They represent eternal principles. The original people, with all their imperfections and contradictions, would not serve the Empire nearly as well. Heroes are inspiring. People on the whole… aren't. Though if anyone really was a hero and a legend in his own lifetime, it was Owen Deathstalker."
"It is not Owen and his companions who matter," said the second robot. "So much as what they've come to represent."
"Which may or may not have anything to do with who and what these people actually were," said the first robot.
"You're getting it," said St. Nick. "Besides; heroes are always so much more comforting when viewed from a safe distance. Owen was, by all accounts, a very disturbing man, in person."
"We reme
mber him," said the AIs of Shub, talking in unison through both robots at once. "He was… magnificent."
They moved off into the crowd, which gave way before them. St. Nick looked after them thoughtfully. The AIs of Shub had been Humanity's friends, companions and uncomplaining servants for two hundred years now, but he never felt entirely comfortable around them. The man inside the Santa Claus suit still remembered the millions the AIs butchered, back when they were still the official Enemies of Humanity.
When the word Shub was as much a curse on the lips of Humanity as ELF was now.
St. Nick shrugged and moved on. You couldn't live in the past. His next port of call was the clone representative, a small, rather folorn figure, clutching his flute of champagne as though he suspected someone was going to come along and take it away at any moment. Clones were not the force they had once been. The whole process of cloning people had pretty much fallen out of fashion in the modern Empire, now that they were no longer needed in large numbers to do the Empire's shit work. Much better to use humanoid robots, operated remotely by the AIs of Shub. Hard, repetitive, and dangerous work was no burden to them, and if a robot was damaged or destroyed, it was easily replaced, and no one cared. So work that was once done by clones, espers, and other unfortunate unpeople was now the province of machines, and everyone was much happier. Almost everyone.
These days, you cloned tissues, not whole people. The Empire already had more than enough people. Unless you needed a lot of people in a hurry, to kickstart the population on a new world, or to boost flagging populations of some of the more vicious hellworlds, the places you couldn't get real people to go to for any amount of money or land grants. Then, clones came into their own, which was why clones still had their own representative at the tables of the high and the mighty. Even if none of them seemed too interested in talking to him at the moment. St. Nick took the time to chat with him for a while, because that was his job.
But even he had to admit to himself that the clone representative was a boring little tit.
Next up was the esper representative, a much more important figure. He wore a simple white tunic, gathered at the waist, and even with the Court esp-blockers blunting his powers, his presence was so strong it was practically overpowering. His lean ascetic face reminded St. Nick of someone, though he couldn't place who. The esper smiled politely when St. Nick said this.
"Don't let it throw you. Everyone feels that way on meeting an esper. Since we're all part of the oversoul, if you've met one of us, you've met all of us. And we have met you. It saves a lot of time. Though deja vu's a bit of a pain in the arse."
"You've heard about the ELFs," said St. Nick. There was no point in avoiding the subject; the esper had to know it would be on his mind. It was on everyone's mind right now. The ELFs, and what had happened at the Arena.
"They're not espers," the esper said, very coldly. "They're monsters. To keep us from intervening, they abducted a low-level telepath and ripped his mind open, so they could fill it with horror. They smuggled him into New Hope, home and heart of the esper commonwealth, and he walked among us, broadcasting cannibalism memes. It took us hours to find him and shut him down. Now our streets are full of blood and death and the grieving of survivors. What happens to one of us, happens to all of us. We all ate human flesh. We all fed on others, or on ourselves. We will have a vengeance for this. The oversoul will not rest until every ELF is dead, and their foul philosophy with them."
"The Paragon Finn Durandal seems to have started without you," said St. Nick.
The esper representative nodded slowly. "Yes. We would have preferred to take our vengeance personally. And it was a… disturbing sight, a human executing espers. But the ELFs are dead, and burning in Hell, and we must take comfort from that."
St. Nick nodded thoughtfully and continued on his rounds, and if he had any different thoughts on the matter, he kept them to himself.
The next group in his path were the Ecstatics; but St. Nick decided that there were limits, even for Santa Claus. The Ecstatics were a relatively new sect, religious extremists on the very edge of the organized Church. They'd all had their brains surgically altered so that they now existed in a continuous, never-ending state of orgasm. Heaven on earth. Pure pleasure in every waking moment, and God knew what they dreamed about. They shook and shuddered constantly, their gaze tended to wander, their smiles were downright disturbing, and they tended to burn out fast. But while they lasted they were supposed to be capable of accessing all kinds of altered states of consciousness, without the need for drugs or esp. There was no denying they saw the world very differently from everyone else. They had been known to achieve depths of insight and inspiration that were startling, and sometimes they could prophesy with uncanny accuracy, though in such obscure terms that it might take years to discover what the hell they'd been talking about. And sometimes they just talked complete crap.
The Ecstatics, who lived short happy lives and cared for no one but themselves.
One of them reached out suddenly and grabbed St. Nick by his red sleeve as he passed, fixing him with a happy, unwavering stare. "I know… who you are…"
"Of course you do," St. Nick said gently. "Everyone knows Father Christmas."
"No," said the Ecstatic, his wide smile never faltering as he spoke. "I know who you are. Who you used to be. The circle is turning. He's coming back. The lost one. Thrones will fall, worlds will burn, and just possibly the universe will come to an end, very soon now."
"Well," said St. Nick, considering the matter judiciously. "That's all very interesting, but I can smell your neurons frying from here. So, I think I'll go and talk to someone else who's currently on the same planet as I am."
"Lot of people say that," said the Ecstatic.
St. Nick watched the Ecstatic wander away, shook his head a few times, and then braced himself. Next in line on his rounds, the aliens. And unlike the Ecstatics, where everyone sympathized, he couldn't avoid the aliens without risking a diplomatic incident.
Aliens were, in theory, an equal part of the Empire these days. In practice, both humans and aliens tended to be wary of each other. Of the dozen or so alien species who'd made a showing for the Ceremony, most had turned up as holo images. Partly for the very practical reason that they couldn't exist under human conditions without a hell of a lot of tech support, and partly because everyone felt a lot safer that way. The holo images wandered through the Court, doing their best not to walk through people, and everyone was scrupulously polite at all times. On the whole, the aliens seemed to find the reasons for the Ceremony fascinating, but baffling. Translator tech could only go so far.
A few aliens had appeared in person, and most people wished they hadn't. This especially applied in the case of the Swart Alfair, from the planet Mog Mor. Huge, brooding, batlike creatures, just humanoid enough to be really upsetting, with dark crimson skin and vast ribbed wings they folded around themselves like cloaks, they had a truly disturbing ambience and altogether too many teeth and claws. They'd taken their name from human mythology, on the grounds that humans couldn't pronounce their actual names without growing a new voicebox. They did amazing things with computers and had to eat in private, because they ate their meals raw and preferably still kicking. At ten feet tall and more, the three Swart Alfair towered over St. Nick as he did his best to make them feel welcome, but he didn't allow himself to be intimidated. He'd seen scarier in his time. Or so he kept telling himself.
Most distressing of all, ectoplasm boiled continuously off the aliens. Thick blue mists of (probably) psionic origin that had an almost overbearing physical presence. If you looked into the mists long enough, you would see images of what you were thinking, and sights of peoples and places long past. The weirder images that came and went were supposedly what the Swart Alfair were thinking.
The espers wouldn't go anywhere near them. Said just thinking about the Swart Alfair gave them a collective headache.
An unusual civilization, new to the Empire, an
d very keen to be a part of things, the Swart Alfair. Strange and enigmatic, casually cruel and unexpectedly kind. St. Nick smiled and nodded and said all the usual things, and got the hell out of there as fast as he decently could.
He didn't even try to explain Christmas to them. He still remembered the case of the N'Jarr, some twenty years back. Slow-moving, mushroom people, with far too many eyes. Anxious to make their human ambassadors feel at home, they'd embraced the idea of Father Christmas. They'd studied up on the seasonal celebration and then invited the human ambassadors to a great Christmas party in their honor. The ambassadors turned up in their party best, bearing gifts, and there in the aliens' gathering place to greet them, was the biggest effigy of Father Christmas any of them had ever seen.
Nailed to a cross.
Also present at the Court for the great Ceremony, though no one knew it, was Brett Random. Confidence trickster, thief, cheat, and complete and utter bastard. Though not just any bastard, as he was fond of pointing out to his acquaintances when he'd had a drink or two. Brett was a member in bad standing of Randoms Bastards, one of the many men and women down the years to claim descent from the legendary freedom fighter, Jack Random. Given Jack's eight wives and innumerable conquests, there were a hell of a lot of people claiming to be descended from the Professional Rebel these days. So many they held an annual Conference in the Parade of the Endless and signed autographs. They also ran any number of websites, mostly fixated on undermining each other's claims.
Brett Random claimed to be a very special case, descended from Jack Random and Ruby Journey. It should be pointed out that the only person known to believe this was Brett Random.
He was tall and handsome, with long bright red hair, warm green eyes, a flashing smile, and a ready charm. He was also currently wearing a formal waiter's outfit, complete with spotless white apron, that he'd had specially made. All so that he could replace the real waiter, who was currently sleeping off the drug Brett had slipped into his drink the night before. Brett had stalked his prey for several days before closing in. Good preparation is a vital part of every con. He'd chosen a redhead as his target because people tended to remember the hair, rather than the face beneath it. The face on the ID he'd taken off the sleeping waiter had been close enough, and easily duplicated in an underground body shop he'd had occasion to work with before, but it was the way people wore their faces that made them recognizable, and he couldn't afford a slip. So; bright red hair to attract the eye and distract the attention. It helped that no one paid much attention to waiters anyway.