In the Hall of the Martian King (19 page)

He stood still in the bright Phobos-light, his silhouette like a scraggly feathered monument to an extraordinarily ugly philosopher.

“What is it?” Dujuv asked, after a long pause.

“Should we not proceed at once to resteal the lifelog? It would wipe out every blot on all our honor, accomplish the mission’s
main objective, incidentally prevent a positive outcome for Clarbo Waynong—”

“There’s a lot to like about the idea,” Jak admitted.

Sibroillo said, “And since we have to keep our purses silent, we can always claim we could get no orders and just misjudged
what their priorities were. Shadow, you are utterly right. Shame on me for not having thought of it myself. It’s quite possible
that nobody even knows we’ve escaped yet. There will never be another chance as good as this one—it’s almost as good as the
one we threw away earlier tonight.”

“Precisely,” Shadow said. “Surprise. Probably our last chance for it. A great human thinker once said that the first punch
is worth fifteen kilos. An unexpected kick in the head from behind is beyond price.”

Dujuv clapped his hands together softly, and clicked his tongue with approval. “Toktru masen! How soon can we hit them? And
do we know where they’re keeping the lifelog?”

“On the Princess’s yacht,” Gweshira said.

“How do you know that?” Jak asked.

His uncle’s demmy shrugged. “Where would
she
most prefer it to be? And did you see the way the King and the Prince were looking at her? Allow another hour for her to
work on them, since, and where does the Nakasen lifelog
have
to be?”

Jak winced as he nodded. It made painful sense. “The landing field is an hour’s walk, going around Magnificiti. None of us
dares use a purse or our credit. Is there any way to steal transportation or spoof a taxi?”

No one had any ideas, so they started walking. Phobos, which circles Mars faster than the planet rotates, hurtled across the
sky above them, waning as it went. It was halfway down toward the east, and they were most of the way to the landing field,
when Sibroillo drifted back to walk beside Jak. For a while he said nothing, just walking beside his nephew as if they were
out for a companionable stroll together. It made Jak think how constantly he had been with Sib when he was younger, and how
much of what he thought was things his uncle had told him. It felt strange to be on his own, an adult, in command, and yet
have the gaunt, goateed old man striding along beside him, as vigorous as ever and yet as if returned from a time trip to
the ancient world.

Finally Sib spoke. “I imagine you are wondering how I feel about following the sword, when the sword follows an idiot.”

“Well, toktru, you silly old gwont. Especially when the purpose seems to be for the sword to help the idiot take power, and
to preserve the fool from the consequences of his folly.”

Their boots crunched on the crusty, broken soil, and Sib was quiet. “Sometimes the right action is to show deference to a
fool.”

“Um, sir,” Dujuv said, “I’ve learned a lot from you over the years, and I have a lot of respect for things you say, um …”

“Well, Dujuv,” he said, his voice soft, a little raspy with his two hundred years, but calm and confident as if it were his
voice that called the dark hills in the distance into being. After a few steps, he began again. “Well, then, let me try to
explain it. I know that it seems as if the world would be a much more reasonable place if we didn’t have to look after the
arbitrary privileges of well-born fools. I felt that way myself for, oh, I don’t know, about a week. When I was about twenty.
But look at every time human beings have tried being ‘reasonable’—the periods when people were trying to be equal and make
sure everyone got taken care of.

“There were some whole centuries like that in Late Medieval times. And the result was invariable—malaise, ennui, art that
petered out into experiments in meaninglessness, religion that demanded nothing of people but vague good intentions, wages
so high that anyone could get into the best places, wars that dragged on forever, politics like one vast rug market, and a
population so demoralized that you couldn’t get it to
do
much of anything
about
much of anything. One disaster after another as the human soul rotted away.

“I know your hobby is reading ancient languages. Look up ‘leisure class,’ ‘welfare state,’ or ‘consumer society.’ You can
see what the absence of real leadership does to people.”

“Well, I notice what the absence of Waynong’s leadership is doing to us,” Jak ventured.

Sib laughed. “All right. Very fair, very fair.” He chuckled again. “Very nearly the perfect retort. Yet you know as well as
I do that if—as you suggested to your superiors, Jak—we had just sent Dujuv (with perhaps Xlini Copermisr) to acquire the
lifelog, it would all be done by now, there would be no noise of any kind about it, and in consequence there would be no glory,
no achievement, nothing to say other than ‘that’s taken care of.’ The biggest religious event of the last few hundred years,
marked by a procedure as ordinary as checking a thumbprint for a visa.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Dujuv asked.

“Shouldn’t history arrive with a little more … fanfare?”

“I’d like it to arrive gently,” Dujuv said.

“No glory, no struggle, no challenge? Everything run smoothly and neatly by nice gray people in simple gray buildings? You’d
really prefer that to all the color and glory of life?”

Shadow on the Frost coughed; he had been walking beside Jak for some time, listening intently, his silhouette in Phobos’s
light rather like a basketball player wearing a bunny suit. “We Rubahy would say that one of the best things in life is going
on a stupid, wrongheaded, needless mission, especially one plagued with bad leadership and worse luck. To succeed in the circumstances—oh,
now,
that
is honor. Futility and having nothing at stake means you don’t have recourse to the sort of courage that derives from the
trivial circumstance that things are deeply important or that a lot is depending on you. One of our Rubahy arms masters taught:
‘Anyone can be brave, standing and dying for the honor of his kin-groups and the reputation of his affinity-groups; a hero
will risk his life to defend a single feather on a disliked stranger.’ ”

“Beautiful,” Sib said.

“Toktru insane,” Dujuv said.

They trudged on over the Martian desert in silence, toward the landing field.

“I am having some thoughts about this operation,” Shadow said. “Let’s do it right this time. That will be the last thing they
are expecting of us.”

Everyone laughed, and after a moment the Rubahy began to make a noise like bubbles rising in a metal bucket. “It is good to
be with friends who appreciate a joke. But this was what I believe your species calls a truth spoken in jest. We really should
try to do this well. What I had in mind was a real, genuine, big diversion, followed by grabbing the lifelog and running like
bunnies.”

Sib grunted. “Elementary—which is why it will be so embarrassing if we don’t get it right.”

Jak said, “All right, so … what’s the simplest thing we can do? Send most of the party somewhere to make a lot of noise and
cause a lot of excitement, while a couple of us go in and grab.”

“Me and Shadow for going in and grabbing,” Dujuv said. “Strength, speed, and skill, you know. And if it’s in the Princess’s
yacht, it will be in her safe, in her bedroom. That means it’s right where they’re best prepared to defend it. So you need
a
big
diversion that will pull off the whole launch crew.”

“How big?” Pikia asked.

“Big as possible,” Dujuv said. “The kind of thing that would make someone not notice a brass band in gorilla suits and tutus.
Why? Do you have an idea?”

“Well, in the first place, isn’t that the Princess’s yacht sitting in that launch cradle? And you can just bet she has some
good reason to have it all fueled up and ready to go, masen? Which means if she takes it into her mind to just take that lifelog
and run—”

“That has to be their main worry,” Jak said. “I think I see where you’re going. So figure Shyf and Witerio don’t trust each
other at all; the ship’s on the cradle, so it could take off any instant, but on the other hand Witerio could probably wreck
it, fairly harmlessly, just by having the cradle drop suddenly—and then his troops would be more than enough to take the lifelog
back. So both sides are sitting there watching each other, fingers on the buttons, all set to hit or run or both. Anything
could start right now.”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Pikia said. “Have you ever seen a double-sided snipe hunt?… you tell one group that snipe are
attracted by whistling and you can hear them coming when they thump the ground; you tell the other group that they are attracted
by thumping the ground, and they whistle as they approach. Then you just put the two groups near each other.” She shrugged,
a lopsided-looking gesture because of what had happened to her hair. “So by analogy …”

T
hey were behind the ridgeline of an anchored dune that looked down on Red Amber Magenta Green’s landing field, across the
landing linducer and toward the cradles. Their purses were on again, but under strict orders to stay silent, both acoustically
and electronically, so that each purse functioned solely as a notepad and a watch.

Phobos was now well down the sky toward the east, waning as it approached the sun that would rise in just under two hours.
Pikia’s plan, as modified by Shadow, Sib, and Gweshira, would take just about an hour to execute, leaving them an hour of
darkness to help their escape. With luck, it would be just enough.

Always assuming that we are trying to steal the lifelog from the right place,
Jak added to himself.
But no question, Cyx had that look about him, and Shyf looked like she’d set the hook pretty firmly. And if there’s anyplace
she’d want it, it would be on her personal launch.

Three hundred meters to the southeast, the local Pertrans service crossed the landing track, passing through an underpass.
To the left of the underpass was the quai where they had come in and where Shyf had arrived. Beyond the quai, the landing
track bent around to become an ordinary heavy-duty linducer track, curving around to deliver spacecraft, suborbs, and aircraft
to the hangar, the marshaling loop, and the cradles.

Directly behind the quai, the main hangar rose 350 meters above the field, and stretched almost a half kilometer long. It
hid most of the field from them; they were relying on everyone’s memory, afraid to call in satellite pictures or to look up
maps, lest their purses’ transmissions give them away. Studded with warning lights and lighted windows, the top of the tower,
eight hundred meters above the desert below, reached far above the hangar. The hangar itself was dark and quiet, all its big
doors closed.

Aside from the control tower and the hangar, two other features were visible. Just to the right of the control tower, looking
much shorter because it was only about half as high and because it was much farther away, the monitor tower— the spaceport’s
central firefighting facility—stood like a castle turret from some medieval adventure viv, the kind of place you expected
to see standing off an assault by armored knights in Helicopters. Under 15X magnification, the monitors themselves—the giant
waterguns on the rooftop—were clearly visible.

The last feature was their goal. Cradles One and Three must be in down position, for they were not visible over the hangar
or the ridgelines, but just to the right of the hangar, peeking over the ridge, was the raised tip of Cradle Two, in the up
position. And since the next commercial flight out of the spaceport was more than a day away, the logical guess was that the
reason Cradle Two was up was because it contained the Princess’s yacht; as Gweshira had pointed out, Shyf could not trust
her new ally any more than Witerio could trust her, so undoubtedly she had insisted on being poised and fueled for takeoff,
he had insisted that the cradle be down and the tanks empty, and the bluest eyes had won.

A launch cradle was not an absolute necessity, but when one was available it could save as much as a third of the onboard
fuel for takeoffs from a planetary surface. Physically, the cradle was a broad trough, rounded at one end and open on the
other, about two hundred meters long by sixty wide and sixty deep, with linducer track running down its center and all the
way up the curving back. When the cradle was tilted to vertical, a ship moving on linducers could climb into the back of the
cradle; lowering the cradle to horizontal made it easy to bring the ship forward for maintenance and outfitting. To be ready
for launch, the cradle was again tipped up and rotated to point into the correct trajectory; at the moment of launch, a surge
through the linducers would hurl the ship forward and out the open end, taking the place of a booster stage.

Cradle Two was motionless and pointed upward at about a sixty-degree angle, turned slightly away from them—the position for
a fast launch into equatorial orbit, exactly what would be needed for a quick getaway and rendezvous with
Rufus Karrinynya.

It was impossible to see through the hangar, but “If I remember right,” Jak said, “the fuel tanks are on the far side of the
cradles, from where we’re sitting.”

“That’s what I remember too,” Dujuv said. “If not, I guess we’ll have to make something up. My team is the only one that will
be affected if they’re on this side of the cradles.”

“Anyone else remember anything about the lay of the land?” Jak asked. Xlini Copermisr shrugged slightly. “Usually
Splendor One
, which is a really ancient warshuttle (four hundred years if it’s a day) and also happens to be the entire Spatial of Red
Amber Magenta Green, is on the marshaling loop for Cradle One. Sometimes it’s on the main marshaling loop, but since that’s
where they’ve got
John Carter
bottled up, I don’t imagine they’re doing that right now.”