In the Hall of the Martian King (29 page)

“We didn’t exactly come here for lessons oomp,” Clarbo Waynong said. Jak noted with satisfaction that Pikia had speared his
solar plexus, striking behind her with extended fingers, without looking back. Her Disciplines work was coming along marvelously.

“Then perhaps you won’t exactly learn anything, Clarbo Waynong. But that would be a sad thing, and we won’t speak of such
possibilities. Your project will be developed between you and your trainer.

“Now, let me talk to all of you, Hive and Greenworld alike. Through your party, we have recovered an object of extremely disputable
ownership. We believe our own claim to it is strong, as is that of the Hive, as is that of the Splendor of the Splendiferous
Chrysetic People. Our diplomats on the Hive and in Magnificiti, and at the League of Polities headquarters in the Aerie, will
be talking to everyone, exchanging ideas, to see if perhaps a consensus solution can be devised. Meanwhile the lifelog is
safe here with us, and should we decide to send it to the Hive, we have a party authorized to carry it, right here, on hand.
This seems very convenient for us. We shall try to make it convenient for you, by offering to do our best to make your stay
with us worthwhile. Princess, your guards and men at arms will find we can sharpen their skills, no matter how good they already
are, and we offer them this training at no cost to you or them. Now … we must find a project for each of you.”

He looked from face to face in the group and said, “Jak Jinnaka, I believe? The nephew of Sibroillo Jinnaka?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You hold your body like a man in pain, and I do not think it is your recent grief, for I can see that clearly as well, and
this is something different.”

“Yes, your—er—”

“The correct title is Your Perception. I’m afraid our protocol is not well known.”

“Yes, Your Perception.”

“Now, I think that you have been subjected to some crude and brutal form of mind control—you have several of the traces of
it about you—am I right?”

“You are right, Your Perception.” Jak’s eyes filled with tears and he didn’t know why; he wanted to throw his arms around
the King’s legs and beg for something, he didn’t know what.

Dexorth’s smile was kindly. “Well, then, that gives you a project to do here. No one stays in Paxhaven without a project,
you see, and not just any project will do. We know a great deal about treating such things, and about recovery from them …
so your project will be to be free of the crude control, and at least of its grosser damage, before you leave.”

“Er, Your Perception, I have been told it will take many months—”

“Whoever told you that lied,” the King said. Jak heard a hint of anger. “But like most lies, there was an admixture of truth
in it—in this case, that in the outside world it would take a long time. We’ll have you over it in a couple of weeks. We know
more than they do, you see.”

The King turned his attention to the others, and one by one set them to projects; Pikia to advancing quickly in the Disciplines,
Shadow on the Frost to learning the true place of Paxhaven among the human nations, Myxenna to finding a sense of peace with
her ambition and her own ruthlessness. He hesitated a moment and said, “Teacher Xlini Copermisr, and Dujuv Gonzawara … I know
you are both scholars of ancient languages, one of you professionally, one of you as a hobby. Now, since the lifelog will
be read while you are here, you are welcome to participate in the process of translation, though I think we will make sure
that someone else sees everything first, before you see it, and we may be selective in what you are allowed to see from the
lifelog. For you, Teacher Copermisr, I think this will be a suitable enough project; you seem to know your place in the world,
and to be happy with the way on which you have set your feet, and it is time for you to understand more of Nakasen, certainly.
And for you, Dujuv … you have been, I believe, harassed and humiliated all your life by the assumption that a panth is stupid?”

“I have been, Your Perception,” Dujuv said, looking at the floor, his voice barely more than a whisper.

“We have reviewed your correspondence with your friend Phrysaba Fears-the-Stars, which we took the liberty of finding in your
purse. You have the scholar’s touch, if you want to use it … so perhaps while you are here, you will let us guide and develop
that gift for you.”

“I would like that very much, Your Perception.”

“Your project will be to learn to appreciate your gift. It is relatively easy for others to know that you are bright; it seems
to be difficult for you to know. We will change you so that you cannot forget it.”

“Thank you, Your Perception.” Dujuv seemed to be choking up.

“Now, Gweshira. Your return here at this time in your life is fortunate for us all. You have a chance to look for your way,
again; we are at your disposal to help. At this sad time in your life, this may be a comfort and a source of strength to you;
it also brings, to us, the valuable perception of someone who has been out in the world recently.”

Gweshira pressed her face to the floor; the King nodded and turned to Shyf. “It must be difficult to be you, cousin.”

“I’ve always thought so,” she said, looking him boldly in the eye.

“You are witty. Would you like to contemplate the possibility of being happier?”

“You mean, would I like to be happier? Who wouldn’t?”

“I asked you if you would like to contemplate it.”

“You can’t just …” She seemed to feel the air in front of her, as if searching through a floating cloud of invisible objects.
“You can’t just make me happier?”

“Not unless you want to be, and you don’t.”

Shyf stared at him and scratched her head in a completely unprincessly way. “You’re right. I don’t. Why don’t I?”

“Perhaps you’d like to contemplate that, and find out?”

“I—yes. I think I would like that.”

“Good. A meditation master will call on you tomorrow morning.” The King looked around at the assembled visitors and said,
“Now you all have your projects. Perhaps a little history will clarify who we are and what we are, here. When Paj Nakasen
set up the Wager and began its propagation, he planned to have five pillars to sustain and uphold it. I myself do not know
what three of them were, but one was the Hive, and one was Paxhaven. The Hive was to supply force, collective spirit, and
orthodoxy; Paxhaven was to supply insight, individuality, and change. So the Hive supplies the guidebooks, the preachers,
the missionaries … we let whoever wishes, come here, and we give them a project.

“Thank you for supplying us with a reason to exist. The audience is over. It’s a nice day. Would anyone like to go outside
and play?”

The next morning a very rude middle-aged panth named Borcles tumbled Jak out of bed two hours before he had expected his alarm
to go off. The man was clearly a Disciplines master, and he combined that with panth speed and grace; Jak was helpless as
a kitten in sparring with him. After three strenuous hours, Borcles suddenly gave Jak a hard push on the chest and let him
land on his ass on the mat. “Your problem,” Borcles said, very calmly, “is that you are a worthless piece of shit, and therefore
you will never be worthy of the Princess.”

Jak came up in a tight roll, sprang forward, and went right into Borcles’s fist, nose first. His head exploded in pain. The
panth smiled broadly at him and said, “Your problem is that the only worthwhile thing you have ever done in your life is fuck
that woman, and now that she doesn’t want that, there’s no reason for you to keep existing.”

Jak swung again; his hand was hooked out of the way and the heel of Borcles’s other hand snapped against Jak’s jaw, staggering
him.

“Your problem is that you don’t know anything except that you’re hot for the Princess.”

Jak came to guard but did not strike.

“Your problem is that you don’t care about yourself or anyone else and the Princess is the only excuse you have not to die.”

“You’re right—” Jak started to say, when Borcles kicked him in the belly and knocked him flat on the mat. Jak curled in a
protective position, trying to get his feet pointed at the master, beginning to feel real fear.

“Your problem, pizo, is that you don’t know shit,” Borcles said, and walked away.

“You need to think about these experiences,” a soft, feminine voice said, beside Jak. He rolled over to see a tiny blond woman
with skin of pure white and pink eyes. “Don’t be startled,” she said. “Oh, too late, you already are. Anyway, it’s a normal
genetic variation and you will get used to it. I’m Blireana. I’m your meditation master. Get into the lotus position, get
your breathing under control, and we’ll see what we can do for you next.”

The meditation was demanding and lengthy, but Blireana seemed kind and patient enough. Then Jak was finally allowed a light
meal, followed by a nap under hypnosis (it gave him nightmares, which the doctors assured him were normal), followed by working
through the Disciplines katas, and then off to “your head doctor,” as the happy, smiling Novita, his Disciplines trainer,
explained to him.

“Uh, the doctor in charge, or the doctor for my head?” Jak asked, rubbing his face down with the warm wet towel she had handed
him.

“We’ll let you decide. He’s the heet you see next, masen?”

“Toktru masen.” Jak was tired and he knew he’d be sore the next day, but it was the kind of healthy tired and sore that promised
he’d be better eventually. “Uh, is this my daily routine?”

“Well, it will always start with Borcles, and you’re on my schedule for at least the next week.” She stretched, practicing
a couple of the moves forward-into-a-grip. “So your routine will be pretty close to this. A lot depends on how things go with
your head doctor. Right through there—”

“Are you—um, do you train a lot of people at Disciplines katas?”

“Just four a day. You’re the new one.”

“And—may I ask—do you get perfect scores all the time, the way you just did?”

“Oh, Nakasen, no, not more than eighty percent.”

“Supposedly the official record is sixty-six percent. Achieved by a heet who works through the full katas seven times a day
and does nothing else. He’s about eighty years old.”

“That would explain it. He’s overtraining. And if he keeps it up, in twenty years, he’ll be a hundred. Right through that
door—second one on the right on that third catwalk up above—Doctor Falimoraza is expecting you.”

Falimoraza was a simi—the ape genes in that breed’s ancestry were very apparent, and he looked more like an orangutan or a
gorilla than like a human, at first glance, though he could stand erect, his head had a big brain dome, he spoke better Standard
than Jak, and the clear intelligence looking out of his eyes would have been apparent to anyone. He asked Jak many questions,
drew him out gently on many sensitive subjects, took a series of neural scans and measurements, and finally downloaded a bedtime
routine into Jak’s purse. “Get to bed before twenty-one o’clock, or Borcles will be dragging you out tired and grumpy again,”
he added.

That night, Jak had bad dreams, but not impossibly bad ones, and the next day Borcles woke him, and it started again. Four
days went by and Jak mostly worked out, went to his treatments, and went to bed early. The dreams did not fade, but neither
did they become worse.

The message on his purse said, “Matter of importance to the mission,” and it was from Dujuv and Xlini Copermisr. Since they
had to meet on a particular platform at a particular farm, clearly they didn’t want the conversation overheard.

Dujuv arrived first, dressed like a Paxhavian, in gi, cloak, and high-tops, with a low hat that concealed his bald head. Jak
was about to tease him about his “disguise” when he realized that that was just what Dujuv intended, and that probably someone
who was not Dujuv’s best friend would not have recognized him. “This is serious,” Jak said.

“It is, old pizo. They don’t come any more serious.”

When Copermisr arrived with her hair in a scarf and wearing something that could easily be mistaken for a medical uniform,
Jak considered that she was one of the most practical and one of the least romantic of the group, and said, “All right, now
I’m intrigued. What have you learned that’s so important?”

Dujuv started to speak, then turned to Copermisr for help. She shrugged and said, “Nothing that will come as that much of
a surprise to scholars of the period, except that it’s really indisputable evidence of something that we’ve all whispered
to each other. There were always a number of things you didn’t publish if you were smart, things anyone could read in any
library almost anywhere that nonetheless were just ignored. If you had a smart grad student get interested in it, you steered
the student away. If you had somebody like, oh, let’s call him Clarbo, and you wanted to bury his career forever, you encouraged
his interest in it.”

“What is ‘it’?” Jak asked, exasperated.

“The thing that I’m afraid to say in public, even now. The strangeness about Nakasen that was always easy enough to detect,
the oddity of some of the things that went into founding the Wager. The invisible ten-ton elephant in the living room of our
philosophy, or the crazy uncle rattling his chains in the attic of our religion. That which we don’t talk about even though
all of us know it. ‘It.’

“Now, there were always known to be certain touchy and iffy things about Nakasen’s record. The man lived more than two hundred
years and wrote prolifically; the Principles, the Teachings, and the Suggestions weren’t even five percent of his known output,
and they were
far
from characteristic. He wrote a few notes and letters per day for a hundred ninety years, and yet the edition of the Collected
Letters most of us read in school has only about a hundred letters in it … in all that voluminous material, you see, there’s
something hiding in plain sight.

“Finding the lifelog has about tripled the amount of his writings we have … and if it were like all the other material, that
would make it harder to see the problem. But Dujuv got curious about why the lifelog held so much correspondence with the
Nontakers, looked into it, and found something that will go straight up everybody’s nose—a brilliant piece of work, and your
tove really ought to consider life as a scholar, just as the King said, by the way, and you should be proud of him.”