Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire (42 page)

It was an age lavished with antiquities, rich with stories from Before the Flood, Before the Breakdown, Before the War, Before the Deathwinter, Before the Starfall . . . yet with this abundance of disaster-punctuated eras, and all the artifacts they'd left behind, it had grown harder, not easier, to master the art of chronology, and a superfluity of relics bred general incuriosity.

On the southern verge of the forest of Geel Dubhar a leftover road ran east and west, between one distant ruin and another. Useless! Travelers were obliged to trudge two days more, through rolling farm country, before striking the modern carriageway, which angled off toward Haust, capital of Yam.

Fat as a bumblebee, the Thraxum Motors Cherry II biplane droned to deliver Senator Ramnis across Yain's breadth to the free town of Westhaven where (the True God willing), a Zealand cog might steam him beyond reach of the false god U Gyi. Farms and old roads were mere left-horizon landmarks to the errant senator, whose zigzag course avoided areas of habitation.

Yet gods are cunning, and plan ahead. U Gyi and the senator had been allies last year, in Merica's nip-and-tuck war against INFOWEB, whose single weapon was an orbiting boomstar.

"Well then," U Gyi thought (once the victory had been sufficiently applauded), "where soars one boomstar, why not another? I will listen to the skies, those astral beeps and whistles."

The same god who loved to catalog long strings of DNA spent months deciphering the come-hither of an eight-hundred-year-old weapon. It was this beamed particle generator U Gyi now angrily invoked to smite the wicked.

The weapon smote, and reported back, but its message was a hoax. The boomstar was ludicrously underpowered, its mirrors and fatigued cells pitted into space-junk. Senator Ramnis' Model II Cherry failed to explode, much less disintegrate. Haloed by a mischief-working electrical corona, the engine merely coughed and died. The plane turned into an inept glider and began to lose altitude. Ramnis peered this way and that, swore distractedly, and waggled the craft away from Geel Dubhar's tangled treetops to find a place to land.

Before taking off, the senator had dreamed a pilot's memories to learn the art of flight, but Earth's umpteenth rennaissance was less than two decades old, and Thraxum Motors had only been in the aircraft business these last six years. There wasn't much emergency experience to draw on; just one desperate landing in the Flinthills of Ye, terminating in a forward somersault.

Now too the Cherry's wheels touched, balked, and pitched the biplane forward. It poised grandly tail-high, then crashed onto its back on the washboard surface of the ancient road.

Ramnis woke in a small, high bed, in a room given to garishly painted wooden furniture. A young girl stood gazing at him, brown of skin, stocky, and utterly bald. Ramnis groaned. "Do you speak Inglish?"

The girl fled, shouting, "Mravi, Mravi!" The one she summoned might have been her older sister: a few inches taller, fleshier, otherwise identical. "You'll have to lie still for a few days," Mravi told him. "Keep your leg elevated so the swelling can go down."

"I take it from your expression that my features lack their usual charm. Where am I? Are there telephones here? Subway connections?"

"No." The girl-woman blushed. "We are modern in Yain, but for these farms: the dominion wants us to give them up. They will not invest in us, because soon there will be food factories in all the cities."

"And you? Will you go the modern way?"

"Some of us are modern enough to wonder whether we can fix your airplane's engine and use it for our purposes. Sir, you must know that your room and care do not come free."

"If there's anything to salvage, go ahead." Ramnis spent three bedridden days in meditation, stroking his lordly moustachios. Some of his thoughts were small—how to get to Westhaven now that his plane was useless to him. Yet he wondered if U Gyi had not done him a favor by shooting him down. Perhaps he should contact Yain's dozen senators, and build a coalition against this runamok godling.

And plunge the Five Dominions into war?

In the old days wars had been productive. The war against Lord Pest liberated the ancient Library of Knowledge, full of fabulous Twentieth Century lore. After Lord Pest turned to piracy, a cabal of adventurers managed to discover INFOWEB, blackmail the gods, and use their powers to crush Pest's evil.

But surely no more unplumbed secrets remained to be discovered. Society was having more than enough trouble digesting the present feast. Any future war, fought with boomstars and food additives and turtlesong, battle armor and tinglers—such a war might bring about the utter collapse of the Five Dominions and the umpteenth downfall of civilization.

What to do? And why? Senatorial government was not so long established in Merica of the Five Dominions that anyone felt great loyalty to it, not even the senators. Ramnis called himself "senator" because "king" seemed a preposterous title for a monarch whose thousand subjects rantipoled about a crumbling arcopolis. "Senator" enhanced his dignity, as it debased the dignity of U Gyi, god of Bue Gyi and the Hills of Moon, manufacturer of U Gyi's Immortality Tonic, foremost geneticist of the known world and primate of the Redemptorist Cult.

Ramnis shook his head. It was a risk to reverse himself on the appropriations bill. He'd paid the price, but in time U Gyi would simmer down, if he wasn't pushed into a confrontation. This might be a good time to lie low and take off on a time-killing jaunt, as those with his Souldancer background were wont to do. "Where am I?" he asked, the next time young Mravi came into the room. "Tell me the local legends."

"Legends? You're ninety kloms north of Haust, in farm country. We are not a fantastical people; we raise crops and pay our taxes."

Ramnis's brown eyes twinkled. "Are there no witches? No pickaroons in the woods? No deathdog hordes? Do the wily Juju-folk never come to trade?"

Mravi shook her solemn head. "I would like to see a Juju. Is it true they have pointed tongues?"

Ramnis smiled mysteriously, and spoke again. "If you were to hike forth in search of curiosities, where would you go?"

His nurse frowned. "Our religion speaks against frivolity and indiscipline. Ah well—there's Haust, but that would interest me more than you. Or you might try walking down the road."

"To what?"

"Just a moment." Mravi departed and returned. "You can see—" she began.

"Not unless I sit up."

She helped him with his pillows and handed him the map. "It doesn't show our road going through the forest, but it did once, centuries ago, and here at what would be the terminus—three dots, signifying a ruined city. Maybe you can read the name."

"It's written too small, and the ink's faded. 'Parthansad?' "

Mravi shook her head. "That doesn't sound like our language. All this region was once part of the Empire of Dhuinunn. The ruins are—"

"—Those of an indigenous people, conquered by your Dhuini ancestors!"

"You read too many romances," Mravi retorted primly. "The dominions are overburdened with cults and factions, races and layers of history, with false gods to flavor the brew. From coast to coast the peoples of Merica are in two parts: the infatuated, who whore off to the cities after memory-dreams and roadsters, cheap factory food, and computer-spawned marvels. We are the others, who exercise caution and prudence . . ."

"Ah, but I'm a Souldancer, and it's my religion always to be infatuated. Yet cities hold no charm. With the subways tying them together, they'll soon be all alike. No, I'd be more inclined to trek westward toward this place . . ." He squinted again. " 'Purthant?' "

"On that knee?"

"If I might buy a horse . . ."

"Senator Ramnis, you were rescued and brought here, with your clothes and satchel. There was no money."

"Someone stole my poke. One of your pious farmers."

"Of course you deserve credit, the more so since I'm sure you're right about the theft, but we're a bit cut off up here, and . . ."

"I see. Well then, how long do I have to work to earn my horse?"

At first Ramnis was given light work: milking cows, shelling peas, picking plums, and hunting mushrooms. When his knee proved itself the flatpursed king was led to other labors: picking rocks, stacking hay, and splitting wood. These tasks exhausted him; he no longer tried to coax laughter from the mirthlessly sincere Mravi.

August ended. He helped harvest the wheat, and brought dried sheaves to the threshing-floor.

The ordeal was endurable, but for the visits of two grim middle-aged ladies: psaliches of the Panhe religion, who mistrusted his attitude and deemed him a bad influence. Though Yain was an advanced and scientific dominion, Panhe was the prevailing faith, and it was probably the remonstrations of these wandering busybodies that persuaded Ramnis's masters to speed him on his way a month before harvest was done.

And so, leading a swaybacked twelve-year-old mare, Senator Ramnis whistled westward, past one farm and then another, until he entered the forest. Footpaths and deer trails carried him along a slightly ditched ridge; all that remained of the thoroughfare that once connected—Perlanta? to—Onturs?

The journey took three days. The forest gave way to wind-shaken grasses, cropped now and again by herds of bison. The old road grew more obscure, then less. It crossed the modern thoroughfare to the twin cities of Shasch-Kaippa. Ramnis ignored the crossing. Continuing west, his shoulders hunched against a gentle rain, he noticed that the road was now in excellent repair. Indeed, the dominion government had put up signs: "Portland - Interpretive Center - 10 kloms."

"Portland?" The name sounded Inglish. Twice before the dominions of Merica had been dominated by Inglish-speaking peoples; Ramnis wondered whether this ruined city might not be a relic of remote antiquity indeed.

The Interpretive Center was built of stout wooden beams and planks, and surrounded by gardens on three sides. Ramnis pounded the door to no avail; then suddenly a lean gentleman arose from the shrubbery to his left, a soiled blade in his gloved hand. The senator stepped back. "Magnificent roses," he commented, always the diplomat.

"Aren't they? This place is heaven for roses, and for slugs as well. Come in. Here's our guest register . . ."

Ramnis followed the man inside and studied the room. "Is this Portlandish architecture?"

The lean man unstrung his green gardener's apron. On his head he set an official-looking skullcap with the letters "D.A.A." embroidered in a semi-circle.

"Exotic, isn't it?" he answered. "Though not much different from any other Twentieth Century city. Of course, this is a guess—the ruins, however extensive, are altogether crumbled. The ancients used materials of no real durability."

The senator frowned. "So I won't see much by wandering."

"Oh, some excavations here and there . . . Before the archeologists came you'd have never known this was once a place of note."

"Ah? The holy city of some cult? The capital of an empire?"

"More than that, and less," the gardener responded cryptically. "Would it help if I told you that Portland continued to exist for centuries following the Great Collapse?"

"No." Ramnis shook his head, and tiny drops showered off his drooping hat-brim. "Unless you allude to some unknown weapon, by which they resisted the incursions of the Dhuini—"

"Oh, they fell to our Dhuini ancestors, but I do in fact allude to an unknown weapon; sufficient to repel the Yooth of Califerni, the Albartian Canucks, the Leninish hordes— Sir, have you ever heard of the Buzz of Joy?"

"The Buzz of Joy!" Ramnis's face transformed, awe dissolved in ignorance. "Uh, I can't say I have."

His informant raised an eyebrow. "We have pamphlets. In a year or two we might even show a film. I've written to Regal Cinematics, to get a crew out to do a one-reeler on the subject, and they sound interested."

"No doubt." Ramnis hung up his garrick and hat, and plucked a brochure from the heap. "Do you get many visitors?" he asked.

"Dozens," the man responded. "You'll excuse me? My garden—"

The senator nodded, his mind already drifting into the streets of ancient Portland, where barbed-wire barricades blocked the advance of the perfidious Yooth of Califerni. Mysterious coiled antennae rose from towers to the right and left—as the Yooth charged, roaring on their mechanical steeds, power surged up the coils and the Buzz of Joy hazed the air in front of them. The Yooth reached the protected zone, guffawed with laughter, spasmed, and tumbled from their two-wheelers, their chests heaving helplessly with mirth as blood coursed from their torn limbs . . .

Such were the images suggested by the pages in Ramnis's hand, published by the Dominion of Yain, Department of Antiquities and Art—Please Refrain from Littering.

Ramnis stroked his moustachios. All he had to do was to find a pair of coiled antennae—no, not really. The antennae were the fruit of an artist's imagination. What he was looking for might as easily be an archetypal Black Box.

Ramnis moved to a second room and studied a plaster model of old Portland. Areas staked by archeologists were flagged in red. If the farmers of Yain were disciplined and methodical, how much more so were its scientists, whose digs boxed the city—without, however, yet penetrating to its heart.

The senator lacked the resources to compete with these others, whose peripheral work was clearly intended to yield barrier-relics of the Buzz of Joy. No, he was a Souldancer, and his ways were different. He would assume that the Buzz radiated like a protective dome, outward from some central height, and lo! Such heights were not hard to find. Here was one, once the acropolis of a cult of healers.

Arbitrarily, Ramnis chose that hill. He would go there, trusting in luck. Luck had made him king, and then senator; why shouldn't luck provide him with the Buzz of Joy?

On his way the senator picked up a stick and used it to hack laboring and puffing, up the slopes of the hill.

His horse balked just short of the crest, and Ramnis tethered her before clambering to the top, where he wandered among titanic trees, kicking at lichenous rocks. He returned to find that the mare had cropped all the bushes within reach, exposing a damp concrete-lined passage. Spiders had webbed the black interior, and windblown leaves had caught and decomposed, adding by increments to a humic muck that now half-blocked the adit. The stench was heavy. Perhaps a bear had recently used the place as her den, and died . . . a very fat bear.