The Novels of the Jaran (149 page)

“A whole other strata?” Maggie asked. “I don’t know. All I got were the dates of the Mushai’s rise and fall. The rest—” She shrugged.

David leaned on his elbows on the counter and stared into the tiny image of the palace. The image shifted and rotated, highlighting first this cluster of slender pagodalike towers, then that tiered garden, then that ten-kilometer-long concourse of seamless diamond roadway. “But they keep referring to the women who build the towers. And the Tai-en Naroshi offered his
sister
to design and oversee a mausoleum for Tess.”

“Artists and craftsmen,” said Jo suddenly. “There is a difference.”

They all contemplated the difference for long minutes of silence while Rajiv’s fingers brushed the keys of his hemi-slate and he muttered under his breath in a singsong voice.

Charles tapped his ear suddenly. “Incoming from Cara,” he said. “Who has a—?”

David drew his slate out of its loop on his belt, unfolded it, and set it on the floor. He stepped back. “Receive,” he said into the air.

Cara’s face materialized above the slate. Her image looked gritty and flat after the Chapalii display. “Charles,” she said. She smiled. He smiled back. “You’re well?”

“I’m well,” he acknowledged.

“Any news?”

He lifted both hands. “Much news. You’ll hear about it when I get there.”

“Ah. I’ll look forward to it. Bakhtiian is sending his niece back to escort you. She’s leaving tomorrow.”

“As are we. We’ll look for her on our way.”

“Goddess,” muttered Maggie, “how are we supposed to meet without any tracking equipment, over such a distance?”

“We’ll have to trust that they know their way around,” said David softly. “Anyway, I’ve been teaching her to make decent maps.”

Maggie snorted, but said nothing more.

“I’ll pay no mind to the peanut gallery,” said Cara’s image, but she looked amused. “Have you ordered my shipment?”

“Yes. Suzanne requisitioned it. Delivery downside is being arranged. I still think that given the potential for serious complications, Tess must at least return to Jeds for the remainder of her pregnancy.”

“Charles, leaving aside questions of transport at this late date, I remind you that to remove her forcibly at this point would probably alienate her from you completely. You must trust to my judgment. With the additional equipment, with the antigen solution, and with the studies I’ve done on Bakhtiian’s chemistry and blood, I feel certain of a positive outcome even with complications.”

David knew well what Cara’s promises were worth. She had never been a person to offer what she could not deliver.

Charles frowned. “Perhaps if the experience is difficult and painful, then she won’t be so sanguine about remaining in these conditions.”

“Charles!” David was appalled.

Cara snorted. “I can’t imagine why you keep underestimating her stubbornness, Charles, since she inherited it from the same two people you did.”

“You don’t understand, Cara. Maggie’s overturned the boulder and we’ve found a whole new ecology lurking underneath. I need Tess.”

“You’re talking in riddles, my love. I’ll wait for the report. Have you gotten that fix on Hyacinth yet? Is it possible he’s still alive?”

“Yes, in fact, Rajiv has the fix. It’s moving steadily, if slowly, northeast. They’ll make the plains soon.”

A silence. “Well,” said Cara at last, her expression a mask of relief, “bless the Goddess for that, at least. May I tell the actors?”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“You’re rather close with information sometimes.”

“Only when it’s vital. I’ll do my best to swing our route south so that we can pick him up. Anything else?”

“Tess is fine. We’re heading west tomorrow toward the royal city of Karkand. If we have to besiege it, then doubtless that’s where you’ll find us when you get here in—what—I don’t know how fast you can travel.”

“Not as fast as the messengers, but I’ll encourage our escorts to push the pace. Out, here, then.”

“Out, here.” The image flickered and dissipated.

“I wonder why Bakhtiian decided to send his niece back?” asked David.

“She’s married now,” said Maggie. “And her husband is with us. That sounds like a reason. Doubtless he trusts her in a way he doesn’t necessarily trust a captain not of his own family. You’re a valuable hostage, Charles. Too valuable to lose.”

“Am I a hostage?” Charles looked amused.

“Don’t you think so? A hostage to force Tess’s cooperation.”

Charles quirked a smile at her and paced back to stand next to Rajiv. “I rather thought it was the other way around. That Tess was a hostage for
my
cooperation.”

“Are we really going to pick up the actor?” asked David.

“If we can.”

They all fell silent, waiting for Rajiv to finish.

“Wow!” exclaimed Rajiv suddenly, Rajiv, who was not wont to indulge in vulgar or antiquated expressions of astonishment. “According to this, he flourished for five hundred years. Do you suppose they live that long?”

“How should we know?” asked Jo. “We don’t know a damned thing about their physiology. They are clearly built for efficiency, though, or perhaps have engineered themselves to be so. Cara’s studies of the Rhuian population indicate that the humans transported here were engineered as well, to make them disease resistant and to adapt them to the planet. So why shouldn’t they live that long?”

“It might explain,” said Charles slowly, “why their social structure is so static. Longevity might encourage stability, or even stagnation.”

“Like the old folk stories of elves and the fairy kingdom?” asked Maggie. “Isn’t that the analogy Cara used? Their world is static because it can’t change.”

“Yes,” said David, breaking in, “but we don’t know if five hundred years is a short life span or a long one, then, even if it’s true. What if it refers to the amount of time the Mushai dukedom flourished? Not the individual?”

“No,” said Rajiv. “I’m certain it’s the individual. The famous.
Our
rebel Mushai. Hold on.” He mumbled under his breath, talking to himself as he manipulated a three-dimensional matrix that floated above the surface of his slate.

David stared at the Imperial palace and wondered what it had really looked like in the Tai-en Mushai’s time. Or had it looked the same? Was the empire so old and so unchanging? They did not know. And indeed, why should they, humanity, minor subjects of powerful alien masters, be granted access to such information?

Rajiv sighed. “All right. As far as I can calculate, the transportations from Earth to Rhui of human populations took place over a two hundred year period approximately fourteen thousand four hundred years ago. I’ve got three calendrical dates. Chapalii
yaotiwaganishi-chichanpa-oten-li.
Before League Concordance 14,185 to approximately 13,985. Let me see, or, archaeologically speaking, you could use the old Common Era dates of approximately 12,135 B.C.E. to 11,935 B.C.E. I’ll get exact figures in a moment.”

“It jibes with Jo’s dating.” Charles nodded. “Remarkable, and that’s from a Chapalii source.”

“If she was telling the truth,” said Maggie.

“If.” Charles walked over to stand next to David, examining the glories of the imperial palace. “But I have no evidence to suggest that she is lying. Rajiv. Bring up the tables again. Everything.”

Rajiv had ordered the sequence in some wildly confusing web, with spheres and cubes and flat tables displaying scrolling data bases. David found the spray of color and shifting symbols nauseating.

“Rajiv, what is your analysis of the material contained here?” asked Charles, seemingly unaffected by this dynamic.

Rajiv considered before he answered the question, because he preferred accuracy to speed. “The easiest analogy would be to imagine we had contained here all economic, political, transportation, and commercial schedules and statistics and timetables and—well, you get the idea—for all the planets contained within the League. Except it’s far more complex than that, and not only because it contains this vast amount of information on the inner workings and structure of the Chapalii Empire. Timetables, calendrical dates within the year although not of the years themselves, economic indices, shipping charts and cargo information, freight schedules, census of house affiliations and house wealth, an atlas of all inhabited and uninhabited regions with reference to population, movement, available resources and potential resource exploitation—” He paused only to take in a breath.

“Complete and extensive.”

“Encyclopedic and precise. Cross-referenced. Triple cross-referenced. Their referencing system is nothing like ours. It’s neither linear nor hyper, but both, and something else as well. But extremely efficient.”

“Of course. What do the Chapalii prize above everything else? Efficiency. Peace. Those two things. So, what if we put a spoke into the smooth turning of their wheel? What if we disrupt their efficiency? What if we disturb their peace? As the Tai-en Mushai did, fourteen thousand years ago.”

“I record his death as 10,382 B.C.E,” said Rajiv.

David felt a shudder of misgiving—no, more a premonition, a feeling that they stood on the edge of a momentous step, that once the word was spoken, once that first step was taken, once the reckless hand turned over the first card, that there was no going back. That their road would be chosen, for good or for ill. To the death, or to freedom.

“Sabotage,” said Charles. “It’s an old Earth strategy. Constant, unending, unexpected, disruptive. A campaign of sabotage.”

“You mean terrorism,” said David.

“No, I think that’s a later accretion to the term. But use terrorism if you want to. These timetables, these charts, these merchant houses—have they changed significantly since the Mushai’s time? Do we have reason to think the Empire is static enough, the Chapalii so addicted to stability, that they might still be—” Charles paused and abruptly grinned. “Still good?”

David and Maggie and Jo all laughed. “Does the eight twenty-nine still leave Rigel for Betelgeuse?” said Maggie.

“That could take years to research,” objected Rajiv. “We don’t know enough about the Empire. But certainly many of the structural systems could have remained parallel, even pertinent to our situation now.”

“We have years. We have eternity, if our heirs keep the torch burning. But I’m convinced of it. I’m convinced that this is why the Mushai accumulated this knowledge here. I’m convinced that this is how he broke the empire that he lived in. There is proof here that the borders of the Chapalii Empire were once larger than they are now. Rhui is proof. Before they absorbed the League, before they absorbed human space, Rhui and this system were not part of the Empire just as human space was not part of the Empire. But the Mushai’s movements prove that they were once part of the Empire, long ago. How could they lose track of them? Of what they once had?”

“What if they had no history?” asked Maggie. “Or no access to historical records, at least. Or—I don’t know. Given this lead to go on, and time to work, Tess could probably make some sense of it.”

Charles bore that fixed expression on his face that meant he was absorbed in the genesis of a new idea. David was not even sure that he had heard Maggie. “For the sake of argument, let’s say that those who administered did so as if every day was the present day. So they lost track, somehow. If we fix in our minds that they don’t operate like we operate, that they don’t think like we think, then it’s possible. If all is in the present, and they are otherwise stable, why shouldn’t the information in these banks be reliable? Why shouldn’t we be able to use it in the same way he did?”

“You want to bring down the Empire?”

“I want to free humanity. I sincerely doubt we have a chance against them, main force against main force. But if we’re persistent enough gadflies, perhaps they’ll consider us too much trouble and let us go.”

“Or crush us entire.”

“There’s always that chance. Every risk we take in life risks, as one of its consequences, oblivion. But the hand of the Yaochalii is gentle. I’ve never seen the least sign that they’re as ruthless in war as, say, Bakhtiian is.”

“Well,” said David, encouraged by Charles responding to Maggie’s comments, “and we’ve certainly seen more of the Chapalii in war than any other humans have. I don’t know.”

Charles shook his head impatiently. “We don’t need to know, yet. We’ve got a lot of work to do, just to see if it’s even feasible. We’ll have to use the Keinaba house to spread out a gathering net. We’ll need to apprentice more humans into that house, to give them wider access to Chapalii space. And to get the Chapalii used to humans running around Chapalii space. We’ll need excuses for humans to travel extensively. Merchants. I doubt if they’ll let linguists and xenospecialists move so freely—”

Maggie laughed. “Repertory companies.”

“What!” David rolled his eyes, but he could not help but laugh with her. “Can’t you just see Anahita playing Mata Hari?”

A light sparked in Charles’s eyes. “Yes! Repertory companies. Musicians. Artists and craftsmen. They can gather information and have a perfectly legitimate excuse to be wandering around the Chapalii Empire.”

“But, Charles,” said Rajiv in his usual cautious manner, “all of this would have to proceed in utter secrecy. Where can we possibly find a secure base of operations?”

“Rhui,” Charles said casually, and the dizzying array of the data banks hazed and melded to become the blue globe of Rhui, dazzling against the black veil surrounding her. For a moment, David thought that Charles had simply wanted to see the planet. It was a beautiful enough sight.

“What better base than Rhui?” Charles continued. His face was quiet, but David still knew him well enough to know that Charles was concealing a perfectly violent sense of triumph. “Rhui is interdicted already. It’s off-limits to casual Chapalii observation, and any official delegations must come through me.”

“What about covert operations?” David asked. “Like the one that brought Tess here in the first place?”

Rajiv lifted a hand from his slate. “We covered that. There won’t be any more of those.”