Earthly Crown

  She said it lightly, but Marco’s lips pressed together, and his gaze shifted from her down to the distant figure that was Charles Soerensen. Soerensen was speaking easily with several people that even from this height Diana recognized, the Director of the Royal Academy, the prime minister of the Eurasian States, a respected vid journalist, the assistant stage manager, an usher—he was a university student majoring in xenobotany—who had once made a pass at her, and one of the clerks from the box office who had brought her two children to meet The Great Man. A sudden swirl of movement in the box steadied and stilled to reveal one of the tall, thin alien Chapalii. The creature bowed to Soerensen, offering him the delicate crystal wand in which the Chapalii conveyed important messages from one noble to another.

  “I must go,” said Marco. “May I escort you down?” He offered her his elbow, and Diana placed her fingers on his sleeve. The contact overwhelmed her, and she could suddenly think of nothing to say. Walking this close to him, down the carpeted stairwell that led to the lobby, she could not imagine why he should be interested in her at all, except, of course, that she was young, pretty, and blonde. This man had explored a wild and dangerous world, alone most of the time, and he was the confidant and right hand of the most important human alive.

  “Shall I introduce you?” Marco asked suddenly, and too late Diana realized she was being steered to the box from which Charles Soerensen had watched the play.

  How could she refuse? She calmed her suddenly erratic breathing by force of habit and let him lead her there.

  A cluster of people walked toward them down the corridor. A moment later they were swept into the retinue.

  “There you are, Marco,” said Soerensen. He held the crystal wand in his left hand. It shimmered and glinted under the hall lights.

  “Charles, I’ve brought one of the actors to meet you. This is Diana Brooke-Holt, of the repertory company.”

  “Ah.” Soerensen stopped. “M. Brooke-Holt. I’m honored to meet you.” He looked ordinary enough, but his stare was intense: Diana felt as if she were being recorded, measured, and filed away against future need.

  However much she wanted to collapse into a gibbering heap, she knew how to present a collected exterior. She extended her right hand, and he shook it. “The honor is mine,” she said, careful to give the words no earth-shattering sentiment, only simple politeness.

  “You played Zabina, did you not?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She comes to a rather bloody end.”

  Diana chuckled. “Yes, she does, poor thing. But I suppose that I’ve always felt more sorry for Zenocrate.”

  He looked suddenly and acutely interested. “Why is that?”

  “Because once Tamburlaine had marked her out as his, she didn’t really have much choice but to fall in love with him, did she? Not that he coerced her as much as—” She shrugged, and was abruptly aware that both Soerensen and Marco regarded her intently, as if she were revealing some long-sought-after secret to them. She faltered, realizing that the entire retinue had stopped to listen, some with polite interest, some with no interest at all, but none with the piercing attention of the two men. With an effort, she gathered together the shredding fabric of her self-confidence and drew herself up. “A man like that would be hard to resist,” she finished, with dramatic flourish.

  “Bravo,” said Marco, sotto voce.

  Soerensen smiled. “But I particularly enjoyed your performance as Grusha in the Brecht play. I look forward to seeing what Owen and Ginny come up with for their next experiment. If you’ll excuse me.” He nodded, collected the attention of his retinue with unconscious ease, and went on his way.

  Marco lingered. “I must go,” he said again, although he made no move to follow the others.

  “I must, too,” she replied. “Really.”

  “I’ll see you on the ship, perhaps.”

  “Oh, we’ll be rehearsing the whole way out. Owen and Ginny are rather dragons about that, when they’re developing new material.”

  “Then in Jeds.”

  She smiled and finally disengaged her fingers from his elbow. “If there’s time.”

  “In Jeds? Believe me, you’ll have plenty of time in Jeds.”

  “For what? Sight-seeing, I suppose. I’m bringing a journal with me, real paper, bound, and pen and ink, to write down what I see.”

  “Pen and ink?”

  “Rhui is an interdicted world. What isn’t there already, we aren’t to bring.”

  “Golden fair, you astonish me.” He took her hand in his and bent to kiss it, his lips lingering longer on her skin than was, perhaps, warranted by the briefness of their acquaintance.

  Diana withdrew her hand from his grasp and blew him a kiss as she retreated through one of the double doors that led into the house. “‘And if thou lovest me, think no more of it.’”

  Marco laughed, delighted. “Do all actors quote?” he called after her.

  But she let the door swing and click shut behind her without answering him.

  “Di! There you are.” From the stage, Yomi called out to her. “Double time, girl. No loitering. Where’ve you been?”

  Diana walked swiftly down the aisle and up the steps onto the stage.

  “Ah hah!” said Yomi, coming to meet her. “Isn’t that Marco Burckhardt standing up there in the VIP box? Watch your step, Di. He’s a notorious womanizer, that one is. So they say. Don’t dive into water if you can’t swim.”

  “I can swim,” retorted Diana, affronted.

  “Certainly, my dear. Come on. The meeting’s ready to start. Anahita is howling about the lighting for the curtain call. And she was furious that Gwyn got called out alone. As for Hal—”

  Diana followed Yomi out stage right. She risked one final look back, to see Marco standing in the box that Soerensen and his party had inhabited. He leaned with his hands on the railing, watching her go.

  CHAPTER TWO

  UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, ANY human might have forgiven Charles Soerensen for taking a private aircar rather than using public lanes like everyone else. Any human except Charles himself. On Earth, in human space—what had once been human space—Charles never took advantage of the privileges granted him by his rank as a duke in the Chapalii Empire, as the only human elevated above subject status in the convoluted hierarchy by which the alien Chapalii governed the races and stellar systems they had absorbed into their empire. They never used the word conquered.

  “Chattel,” said David ben Unbutu to Marco Burckhardt. They took up stations on either side of Charles on the levitated train that in three hours would take them across the Atlantic Ocean from Portsmouth to North America. David braced himself for the shift as the train jolted forward. Marco, of course, seemed not to notice the transition at all. Charles was sitting down, crystal message wand laid across his knees, still talking with the prime minister of the Eurasian states. She was headed to Quito Spaceport in South America, and Charles had taken the opportunity to ask her to travel with him for part of the journey.

  “Who’s chattel?” Marco asked. “Shall we sit down?”

  “I’m too nervous to sit,” said David, although he was not surprised when Marco sat anyway, across from Charles. Four benches ran the length of the car, arranged in two pairs facing in toward each other, split by a central aisle. David stood where the inner bench gapped to allow access to the aisle. Charles and the prime minister sat with their backs to the windows, windows which, on this side of the car, showed programming, not ocean.

  “Look.” Marco pointed to one of the flat screens. “There’s that interview with Owen Zerentous again.” He took on an affected accent. “‘Ginny and I have been interested for some time in theater as the universal medium, in theater’s use of ritual and ceremony as a way to access the common essence of humanity.’ You know, I think Zerentous believes what he’s talking about.”

  “Maybe he’s even right. But you’ve never been interested in theater, Marco. Or at least, only in the ornamentati
on thereof.”

  Marco grinned. “A man can’t help looking, especially at women who are as pretty as Diana Brooke-Holt. What did you mean by chattel?”

  David glanced at the Chapalii steward standing four seats down from him, on the other side of Charles. Of course, a steward would not sit—could not—in the presence of nobility. All along the car passengers sat at their ease, watching the screens, reading from flat screens, dozing, knitting; an adolescent drew a light sculpture in the air with a pen, erased it with an exasperated wave of a hand, and began again. Human passengers. They had noted Charles’s presence. How could they fail to? They all knew who he was; they all recognized him. Many had acknowledged him, with a terse word, with a nod, to which he had replied in like measure. Now they left him his privacy, except for one very young child who wandered over and sat in a seat two down from the prime minister, small chin cupped in small hands, watching their intent conversation with a concerned expression.

  “I don’t know what I meant,” said David, “except that sometimes I think we’re just chattel to them—to the Chapalii.”

  “I don’t think they think in such economic terms. I think their hierarchy is more like a caste system than a class system, but how do we know if human theory explains it, anyway? Why are you nervous?”

  David sat down. The bench shifted beneath him, molding itself to his contours. “Why should Duke Naroshi send Charles a summons wand? What authority does Naroshi have to summon Charles? He doesn’t outrank him.”

  “As far as we know he doesn’t. Maybe the length of time you’ve been duke matters, in which case Naroshi would outrank Charles. But Naroshi is in fealty to the princely house which has nominal control of human space. Of Earth.”

  “That’s true. And it was Naroshi’s agent who was on Rhui, with Tess.”

  “David.”

  David looked around, suddenly sure that everyone was looking at him, but, of course, no one was. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “But wouldn’t that imply that Naroshi is seeking some kind of information with which to discredit Charles? Especially now that Charles has pulled off a rather major coup within the Chapalii political scene, by taking over the Keinaba merchant house?”

  “Not yet finalized, I might add.”

  “Not yet? Lady’s Tits, Marco, Charles spent long enough at the Imperial palace. Almost two standard years, he spent there. I thought it was finalized, all legal, with the emperor’s approval.”

  “The emperor approved it, but he didn’t—oh, what is that phrase? Tess translated it so neatly. ‘Seal the braid of fealty.’”

  David sighed and sagged back against the seat. “It’s all too convoluted for me. I’m just an engineer.” Marco chuckled. They had known each other for so long now, he and Marco and Charles, that they spoke as much with what they didn’t say as with what they did. David levered out an armrest, tilted his head back, and shut his eyes. The conversation between Charles and the prime minister continued across from him like a murmuring counterpoint. They were talking about Rhui.

  The whole thing was far too convoluted for David’s taste. He liked something he could get his hands on, something concrete, malleable, something that had answers that were correct based on fixed laws. Not something that was mutable. David hated politics. He’d never liked history much, either. That’s why he had gone into classical engineering—the design and construction of three-dimensional, utilitarian structures like buildings and bridges and transport facilities.

  Everything he knew about the Chapalii made him anxious. They didn’t follow the rules. Humanity had discovered spaceflight and then discovered cousin humans on neighboring worlds. Earth and their cousin humans on Ophiuchi-Sei-ah-nai had formed the League, a kind of parliament of space-faring humanity. Then, human exploration ships had run into Chapalii protocol agents, representatives of the Chapalii Empire; soon after, the emperor had simply co-opted League space as part of his dominion. But their rule was benign; some people even called it enlightened, and certainly the Chapalii did not begrudge sharing some—if not all—of their technological expertise with their subject races.

  But were humans ever content with being ruled? Not really. Charles Soerensen led a rebellion against the Empire that failed. But instead of arresting him and executing him, the Chapalii ennobled him. They made him a duke. The emperor granted him two stellar systems as his fief, one of them the newly-discovered system Delta Pavonis—discovered, that is, to possess two habitable worlds. The planet Odys was ravaged by Chapalii modernization; Rhui was interdicted by Charles’s order, an order that the emperor agreed to despite the fact that the interdiction closed off access to Rhui’s abundant natural resources. Just as it closed off access to Rhui’s native population.

  And that was the other thing that bothered David. That’s what Tess Soerensen had found out; she had discovered ancient Chapalii buildings on Rhui. The half-mythical Chapalii duke, the Tai-en Mushai, had built a palace on Rhui. He had seeded the planet with humans from Earth. It must all have happened long, long ago, millennia ago in the human span of years, or so Charles and his experts guessed, though they knew nothing for certain. Even so, how could the Chapalii have lost track of these buildings? How could they have lost track of an entire planet?

  David did not like equations that didn’t add up.

  And now Charles was going with a small party to Rhui, to find Tess and to investigate these ancient remnants of a Chapalii presence on Rhui. David supposed he was looking forward to going to visit an interdicted world where the living conditions would be, at best, primitive. At any rate, he’d be happy to see Tess again.

  The prime minister left them at Staten Island, and they transferred to a secured line in to Manhattan, which had been razed and rebuilt by the Chapalii and was now a private Chapalii enclave, barred to most humans.

  David had once gone to an exhibit detailing the history of Manhattan. Certainly the Chapalii era Manhattan was by far the most impressive and beautiful architecturally, seen from across the river: a mass of monuments and parks, pierced at the center by a single tower of adamantine grace and astonishing height.

  At the ducal palace of the Tai-en Naroshi Toraokii, they disembarked from the secured line into an atrium domed with tangled vines about thirty meters over their heads. Animals shrieked and called in the greenery, but they only caught glimpses of birds and long-limbed creatures rustling through the leaves. Water sheeted down in a semicircle all along the far wall; indeed, the misting waterfall was the far wall of the atrium. Charles headed out across the floor, which was a tangle of ponds, streams, parquetry decks, and marble stepping stones carved into the shape of Chapalii glyphs. Avocets and herons dotted the shorelines. A grebe swam past and dove, vanishing from their sight in one instant and popping up seconds later a meter ahead.

  David saw no passage through the huge curtain of water, but Charles walked steadily toward it, picking his way along the labyrinthine paths until the three men and the Chapalii steward came to the wall of water. Charles lifted the crystal wand. The waterfall parted.

  David gaped. It simply parted, by no agency he could see. Water still rained down over their heads, but an invisible barrier forced it to either side, allowing them access to whatever lay within. Charles led the way. The steward followed him, and David went next, letting Marco take the rearguard.

  What lay within proved to be a hall as vast as a cathedral. Their footsteps echoed as they crossed the hall’s expanse to a far door. They passed through the door into a garden lined with columns and thence into a marble-fronted basilica that transmuted, surprisingly, into an octagon, a two-storied building with a mosaic floor and somberly glowing mosaic walls portraying austere, gaunt figures. Within the greater octagon, almost floating inside it, stood an interior octagon of double arches. Within the central octagon two couches sat on the mosaic floor. On one couch, a figure reclined. It sat up, seeing their party. Charles marched them under one of the arches—banded with three colors of stone—and sat himself down on the couc
h opposite their host. David and Marco placed themselves behind him. The steward crossed to stand beside Tai Naroshi.

  The two dukes regarded each other in silence. Tai Naroshi looked like all other Chapalii: pale as ice with a wisp of yellow hair; tall, thin, humanlike in his symmetry, but not human at all. He wore a robe of palest orange that seemed to drape itself artistically around his form, according to his movements, by some unrelated gravitational field.

  Charles placed the wand across his knees.

  They waited.

  Then, to David’s astonishment, a mist steamed up under one of the arches and coalesced into three seated figures: Owen Zerentous, Ginny Arbha, and an interviewer. They looked so real that they could have been there in person, except that they had appeared so abruptly.

  “We ought all to remember,” Owen was saying, “that the line between barbarism and civilization is fluid. Ritual is a constant in all human society. Theater is simply a more refined, and perhaps even a more confined, elaboration of primitive ritual events. Certainly my use of the word ‘primitive’ is a subjective response based on our bias against pretechnological culture.”

  Naroshi raised one hand, and the figures froze. They then passed through a rapid succession of expression and angles, as if their conversation was accelerated. Naroshi lowered his hand, and the interview continued.

  “To find cultures that have never seen theater before,” Owen said, clearly in answer to a question. “Human cultures, that is. We haven’t seen that for centuries on Earth, or in any of the human cultures in the League, for that matter. Does theater work as a ritual for any human culture? Even one grown and bred on a planet other than our own? Are these aspects of the human condition, are the emotions that theater engenders, universal to our genetic coding? And if they are, where does the real translation take place: in the words, or in the gestures? In the letter, or in the spirit? That’s what we’re going to Rhui to find out.”