In the Hall of the Martian King (25 page)

“We do,” Dujuv said, “so you don’t have to speak of it unless you want to.”

“He wasn’t really the same after he lost Seubla, and then after he lost Xabo they said he was just drifting through the motions.”
Brimiyan’s eyes were filling with tears and he was wiping them furiously from his eyes with his sleeve. “But just the same,
after Xabo was killed and Vifu took over, Kawib and Vifu still took care of us and made sure we were adjusting and kept our
spirits up and they were always there to help—”

Jak had a sick feeling, realizing that there was about a fifty percent chance that he had shot Vifu, whom he knew. But then
Sib and Kawib were dead too … it was all too much. He put an arm around Brimiyan, and the man—released now to be a miserable
boy—clutched Jak and sobbed.

Jak looked at Dujuv, making a slight
what can I do?
face at his toktru tove, but Dujuv was not looking at him; the panth was staring at Kawib’s head. Jak followed his friend’s
gaze.

Kawib had apparently popped his head out just after firing his grenade in Sib’s direction, and Sib in turn had caught him
with the classic most-effective laser shot, across the face through the eyes, leaving Kawib with a black carbon mask with
two deep black holes in it, and a strange swelling in the head where his brain had exploded into steam.

“Nakasen’s balls,” Dujuv muttered to Jak. “Oh, Nakasen’s bleeding balls. Just like Seubla.”

Seubla had been Kawib’s only demmy, ever. He had loved her deeply, and the two had been devoted, but because their bloodlines
were a threat to the Karrinynya, Princess Shyf had kept them in a frustrating together-and-apart relationship, with Kawib
in the RPG and Seubla a lady in waiting, always seeing each other but never able to be alone or to court each other. Though
Shyf had liked Seubla and trusted her as a friend (as much as any princess could do any such thing), eventually Seubla’s ancestry,
tracing back to more than one possible pretender to the Karrinynya throne, had led Shyf to decide to end the problem forever.
Jak and Dujuv had been there at the party when Seubla had been assassinated; Dujuv had killed the assassin with his bare hands,
scant seconds too late.

Seubla too had died with a laser cut across the eyes—the way Hive Intel taught you to make it. The professional way, whether
“assisting a friendly monarch” or “preserving the consistency of the Wager.”

Nakasen had taught nothing of the afterlife, holding that it was unknowable and irrelevant to right action in the present
besides. But seven hundred years had not yet eradicated the idea from human consciousness; “Wherever he is, I hope he’s with
her,” Jak murmured, and Dujuv whispered back, “Toktru, old tove.”

Shadow arrived then, and knelt beside the body. He drew his family dagger from the short leather skirt that the Rubahy wore
into battle; it was used for just three purposes. The first as a last-ditch weapon—Rubahy honor required it was always to
be the last one drawn, and to draw it in a fight effectively made a binding vow to kill or die; hence their expression about
“fighting till daggers are drawn.” The second was in order to kill an oath-sworn enemy, to administer the coup de grace to
an enemy of great prestige and power whose killing would win honor for the whole family.

And the third purpose was this one: Shadow on the Frost knelt, raised the knife in both hands above his face, and brought
it down to form a gash on his left shoulder, where the mourning scars for friends were traditionally administered. Blue-green
blood flowed out and stained the white feathers; Shadow leaned forward and let a little drip onto Kawib’s lip, where it lay
like a sapphire on a ruby in the now-bright early morning sunlight.

He stood and said, “Dujuv, my oath-friend, you and I together are strong enough to move the bodies. Perhaps we should get
them together, and then consider calling for help? We are not within the limits of Freehold but I think they would come out
as a compassionate mission.”

Dujuv nodded. “It seems like—”

“Attention parties from Greenworld and the Hive.”
The voice was loud, and it came through all their purses at once, as an override.
“You are ordered not to fight and not to move from your present location. We will be arriving in less than one minute. Be
careful to avoid all weapons discharges as our automated systems will home on the source and fire.”

“Send a reply,” Jak told his purse.

“Can’t identify the source.”

“Then broadcast, general hailing. And copy to all our team.”

“Ready.”

“Complying. All Hive forces, lock down.”

Brimiyan lifted his purse to his face, and gave the same order to the Greenworld forces. Both sides were in the open, scattered,
hopelessly intermingled with an enemy, and already stood down; whoever the new players in the game might be, they were the
ones who had the drop.

“It’s Paxhaven,” Gweshira said, coming up beside Jak, her face still drenched, looking down at the ground and clearly keeping
her voice level and even only by considerable force of will. “They’re finally here.”

“Finally?” Jak asked. “Should we have been expecting them?” As far as he knew, Paxhaven was usually inconsiderable, a quaint
little island on the other side of the pole, a few thousand kilometers away.

“Oh, yes,” she said, nodding, and then her breath caught. “So stupid,” she added. “I almost said, ‘Sib will be so disappointed
…’ ”

T
he Paxhaven forces arrived: four big statisaucers, donut-shaped aircraft lifted by counterrotating, electrostatically driven
central rotors. They were silent, graceful, and elegant, but did not move quickly; Jak would eventually realize that this
nicely summarized why Paxhavians preferred them.

At the time he was mostly awed by the silence of the approach and the swift grace of the descent. The troops that emerged
did not act like peacekeepers or like commandos, but walked out of the ship as if walking was the only thing on their minds.
Jak wasn’t sure whether they were in uniform or just dressed alike; they wore what everyone in Paxhaven wore, something that
looked rather like an ancient-style martial arts gi, with press-fastenings to close the lapels and soft, brightly colored
undershirts beneath the uwagi. There were no badges of rank visible but clearly some were giving, and some were following,
orders.

The woman in the center of the group said a few things in a pleasant, conversational tone, the people around her turned and
said things to the people around them, and they all walked off in several directions, to perform their various duties. It
all seemed very civilized and very calm.

She approached Jak and said, “Jak Jinnaka, my name is Petol Porizeux. I am here from Paxhaven because we know that your two
forces were fighting over the lifelog of Paj Nakasen. We hold mandates from the League of Polities that we could reasonably
construe to mean that we have title to that object. Unlike anyone who has touched it so far, we intend to submit a case to
the League of Polities and to abide by their decision. I should add that we also are well aware that the only other polity
that might sustain a claim on the lifelog is yours, the Hive. Will you allow us to take possession of the lifelog?”

“With all my heart,” Jak said. “You can’t imagine how sick of the stupid thing I am.”

She smiled slightly. “Given that Nakasen’s lifelog is the most sacred relic now existing in the human part of the solar system—and
the quite likely source of a great era of religious revelation that may run for centuries hence—and that you are referring
to it as ‘the stupid thing,’ I believe I
have
imagined how sick of it you must be. I am sorry it has been such a burden. No doubt when you picked it up, your reasons seemed
good, and now they seem very foolish.”

Jak’s eyes stung with tears; Petol Porizeux took a step toward him, put a hand gently on his shoulder, and looked into his
eyes. He felt curiously calm, as if all the evil and tragedy of the last few hours were temporarily lifted off him. She said,
so softly that probably only Jak heard, “We all carry such burdens; be grateful you have set one down.”

“How did you know my name?” Jak asked.

“It was in our files, along with many identifiers for you,” she said. “You have been of great interest to us, because of your
uncle. We had just been contemplating what invitations to issue to him, and to Gweshira, when this tragedy struck. If you
will let us, we can give him a loving and respectful burial. We think he might have liked to come back to Paxhaven.”

On the Hive, bodies were powdered into fine dust and then dropped into the central black hole, warming and nourishing the
whole space colony; for reasons he could feel but not name, Jak knew Sib would have preferred Petol’s offer.

“Then we are decided,” she said. “We will take you and your party, the Greenworld RPGs, and the lifelog back to Paxhaven with
us, and sort out everything there.” Again she leaned in to whisper something to him, as if they were members of the same zybot
or shared a family history. “You’ll see. This is the best thing.” Then she took a step back from him, and without raising
her voice, gave orders that were obeyed instantly by everyone. Only Clarbo, very briefly, tried to raise some objection, and
at her glance, he fell silent and got into the statisaucer where he was supposed to go.

With four corpses in the holds, and thirteen passengers in the visitor seats, the statisaucers rose from the face of Mars,
as silently as they had arrived, high into the bright morning sky. Jak glanced down for the last time at the black scorch
between the rocks that marked the place of Uncle Sib’s death, and began to cry, harder and harder, holding on to Dujuv’s hand
as if it were a life preserver. Below them, it was a beautiful, clear early summer day in the northern desert, broken by with
the occasional brilliant blue river and lake surrounded rich green blotches of foliage, heat shimmering off the flat rocky
places and the sun sometimes glancing at them from the little circular Bombardment-crater lakes, like a pupil recurring in
a thousand eyes.

It was the first time Jak had flown in an aircraft in Mars, and he remembered how Uncle Sib had always wanted him to be aware
of the scenery (and he never really had) wherever he went, and even as he wept, he tried to wipe his face so that he could
see and remember. After a while, he fell into exhausted, often-waking sleep.

When Jak awoke, Gweshira was sitting next to him. “We need to talk a little, Jak. You’re going to learn things here—things
that Sib and I weren’t sure you’d ever need to know, things that maybe we’d have been better off if you’d never had to learn
them, but you’re going to learn them now and I suppose it would be better to have you prepared. Paxhaven is where Sibroillo
studied to become the fighter and agent that he was, and it’s where Circle Four had much of its leadership for a while. Sibroillo
and I both studied there, though I arrived about a decade after he left. And it’s also where Bex Riveroma had his training.”

Jak felt, as he always did, a cold surge in his liver at the mention of his mortal enemy.

“Paxhaven,” she went on, “though it isn’t mentioned much, because they like to keep this quiet, is the home of many important
social innovations. It’s not an accident that many zybots have been headquartered there or had a presence there, even though
it’s a little place with barely two million people scattered around the islands in the ring. And among their social innovations,
they were the mother school of all the Disciplines training—it was to Paxhaven that all the great martial arts masters fled
at the end of the Old Empire, and it was at Paxhaven that Paj Nakasen converted the Great Mother Dojo, en masse, to the Wager,
and the Disciplines came out of the integration of the ancient arts with the Wager. Paxhaven was also where Maniples was first
played … and many other things. So for the warrior-to-be, it was—and for that matter it is—
the
place to go to train.

“Sibroillo, you see, had very mixed feelings about how he himself had turned out … and he felt that for every more-or-less
decent individual such as himself, the place had bred a dozen Bex Riveromas. True, the program under which they trained had
been redone … but you were his last living blood kin, and he felt that the Jinnaka line would have a better chance at the
fine destiny he thought it deserved, with you growing up as you did, fostered by him, than in the narrow, rigid world that
would have been school at Paxhaven. I suppose someday, when you know Paxhaven well and you know the world well, you might
form an opinion about how right, or not, his decision was.”

“So that’s where he became enemies with Bex Riveroma. He must have been about my age at the time—” Jak said.

“About your age when he was at Paxhaven, yes. While they were there, the two of them were mostly friends, and for a long time
very close friends. By the time they left they were fierce rivals. Enmity didn’t come for a while after that, but it came.
Now that Sibroillo is dead, you’ll be free to learn something of your family and your origins, and you will find that that’s
a pattern with Jinnaka men; intense friendship and intense enmity and nothing between.”

They sat quietly for a while, before Jak said, “And was Sib happy while he was at Paxhaven?”

“I can’t say for sure—I didn’t meet him till we were both past fifty—but he always said that the years at Paxhaven were the
happiest in his life, and to judge by the way his eyes would light up when he talked of it, I think that was true.”

Jak stared out the window at the sun-washed blue-green sea below, and said, “Well, then, if Sib liked it there, it will be
a good place for him to have his funeral.” He sighed and added, “He and Kawib had sat and talked at dinner, not two days before.
And now they’ve killed each other, in a quarrel over something that I don’t think either of them gave a fart in a windstorm
about. I don’t know which one I feel sorrier for, Aunt Gweshira.”