“Howdare you presume to question my judgment?” he demanded.
Martinez felt nails bite into his palms. “Lord Commander,” he said, “I question the necessity of removing a superb leader at such a critical time—”
“Don’t you realize that I meannothing! ” Enderby cried. “Nothing!Don’t you understand that elementary fact of our service? We—all this—” He made a savage gesture toward the window with his hand, encompassing all beyond the transparency, the millions in the Lower Town, the great arc of the antimatter ring, the ships and wormhole stations beyond. “—it’s alltrash! ” His voice was an urgent whisper, as if overwhelming emotion had partially paralyzed his vocal cords. “Trash,compared to the true, the eternal, the one thing that gives our miserable lives meaning…”
Enderby raised a fist and for one horrified second Martinez feared that the Fleet Commander would strike him down.
“For the Praxis!”Enderby said. “The Praxis is all that matters—it is all that is true—all that is beautiful!” Enderby brandished his fist again. “Andthat is the knowledge for which our ancestors suffered. For which we werescourged! Millions had todie in agony before the Great Masters burned the truth of the Praxis into our minds. And if millions more—billions!—had to die to uphold the righteousness of the Praxis, it would be our duty toinflict those deaths! ”
Martinez wanted to take a step back to evade the scorching fire in the Fleet Commander’s eyes. With an effort of pure will, he kept his shoes planted on the office carpet, and tipped up his chin, exposing his throat.
He felt the commander’s spittle on his neck as Enderby raged on. “We must all die!” he said. “But the only death that gives meaning is one in service to the Praxis. Because I am who I am,at this perfect moment in time, I am privileged to havean honorable death, one that gives both myself and the Praxis meaning. Do you know how rare that is?” He gestured again out the window, at the invisible millions below. “How many ofthose will die in a meaningful way, do you suppose? Practically none!”
Fleet Commander Enderby stepped close to Martinez. “And you wish to deprive me of a meaningful death? The death proper to a Peer? Who are you to do that, Lieutenant Martinez?”
Instinct managed to find words amid the clouds of fear that shadowed Martinez’s mind. He had learned early that when he was caught out, he should always admit it and then beg forgiveness in as endearing a manner as possible. Honesty, he’d found, had its own brand of charm.
“I regret the suggestion extremely, Lord Commander,” he said. “I was thinking only of my own selfish desires.”
Enderby glared at Martinez for a few long moments, then took a step back. “Over the next few hours I shall do my best to forget your very existence, Lieutenant,” he said. “See that those letters are delivered.”
“Yes, Lord Commander.”
Martinez turned and marched for the door, ignoring the strong impulse to run.See if I ever try to save your miserable life again, he thought.
And, damn the Praxis anyway.
It was the alien Shaa, the Great Masters, who had imposed their absolutist ethic, the Praxis, on humanity after the surrender of Earth following the destruction of Delhi, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and a dozen other cities by antimatter bombs. Humanity was the second intelligent species to feel the lash of the Shaa. The first being the black-scaled, centauroid Naxids, who by the time of Earth’s surrender were sufficiently tamed to have crewed most of the Shaa ships.
No one knew where the Shaa originated, and the Shaa were not forthcoming on this or any other aspect of their history. Their capital, the city of Zanshaa on the planet of Zanshaa, was clearly not their planet of origin, and had been chosen in historical times for its convenient location amid eight wormhole gates through which the Shaa could access their dominion. The Shaa “year,” .84 Earth years, had no reference to the period of Zanshaa’s orbit about its primary, or indeed to the orbit of any other planet in their empire. Any reference to their origins had been erased from the records by the time their subject species were given access to them.
Another curiosity was the Shaa dating system, which began in the “Peace of the Praxis One,” some 437 years before their appearance in the skies above the Naxids’ home world. This suggested a time before the Praxis claimed the Shaas’ devotion, but no Shaa could be persuaded to confirm this surmise. Nor did the Shaa revere whatever Shaa—if itwas a Shaa—who first formulated the Praxis, or remember its name.
For the Shaa were adamant that every species—that thephysical universe itself —should submit to terms dictated by the Praxis. Whole categories of technology were absolutely forbidden—machine intelligence and autonomy, the translation of organic intelligence into machine or electromagnetic form, and machines constructed to manipulate matter at the molecular or atomic level. Genetic manipulation was also forbidden—the Shaa preferred the slower process of natural selection, the more unsentimental, the better.
The iron will behind these prohibitions was demonstrated again and again. Those who offended against the Praxis were punished by death, often horribly and publicly, for the Praxis itself commanded that “those who offend against the fundamental law shall receive punishment in greater proportion than their crime, so that public virtue may be maintained by this example.” Nor were the Shaa or their followers shy about using the most poisonous and destructive weapons to support their ethic. Antimatter bombs sometimes destroyed whole cities for the crimes of a few citizens, and on one occasion, when a small group of Terrans was discovered using genetic technology in hopes of breeding a plague that would kill off the Shaa, their entire planet was bombed to death, the great explosions raising vast clouds of smoke and dust that drew a curtain across the sun, condemning the survivors to lingering, freezing death in a frigid atmosphere poisoned by radiation.
Surviving Terrans, awed by the comprehensive way in which the Shaa destroyed their own subjects, felt supremely lucky that the planet involved was not Earth.
Such examples had their effect. After the lingering death of the planet Dandaphis, the prohibitions against technology embodied within the Praxis were never again subjected to such a radical challenge.
Other elements of the Praxis were devoted to social organization, with every sentient being in the empire given a place in a well-defined hierarchy, one clan ranked below the next, with the Peers over all. Those at the top were given responsibility for the well-being of those at the bottom, while the lower orders were expected to honor the Peers and the Shaa with their meek obedience.
Another clause of the Praxis forbade sentients to “curse themselves with immortality”—a curious prohibition, because the Shaa themselves were immortal. But those among the Shaa, in a rare display of the reasoning behind one of their prohibitions, freely admitted that their immortality had been a mistake, an error sufficient to drive them to eradicate by gun, flaying knife, or antimatter bomb any others who dared to seek physical immortality for themselves.
Of the Shaa themselves, the Shaa said nothing. Why these immortal beings, blessed with absolute power, began one by one to kill themselves remained a riddle. The Shaa refused to consider their own deaths a tragedy. “No being should be immortal,” was their uniform response to any questions.
Whatever the cause, the Great Masters chose to die one by one, each followed in death by dozens of loyal subordinates. And now, in the Year 12,481 of the Peace of the Praxis, only one remained.
And this last was not expected to live long.
Across the foyer of the Commandery, a map of the empire displayed the wormhole routes connecting Zanshaa to its dominions. The map bore no resemblance to the actual star systems that surrounded Zanshaa: the wormholes overleaped all nearby stars, and could in fact connect any two points in the universe. Many of the star-systems shown on the map were so remote from Zanshaa that it was not known where they stood in relation to any other part of the empire. And the wormholes spanned time as well as distance—a wormhole that leaped eight hundred light-years could also leap up to eight hundred years into the past, or alternatively into the future, or any length of time in between.
But there was no paradox when it did so. Because of the limitations imposed by the speed of light, it was impossible to get to another star quickly enough to alter its history—except by using the wormhole, in which case you found that the Shaa had been there before you.
The overwhelming fact of history was that there was no escaping the Shaa. There was no escaping the history that made Gareth Martinez a provincial lord, an object of condescension to his betters. There was no going back in time to rectify the error that had caused Fleet Commander Enderby to savage him.
There was no saving him from his mistakes, or the mistakes of civilization, or of history itself. He had to live with them all.
The heavy envelopes containing Enderby’s invitations bulked large under his left arm. Martinez transferred them to his right hand and continued his walk to the cadets’ duty room. On the way, he checked his sleeve display for any messages.
Some other time maybe.
Warrant Officer Taen’s words were printed across the chameleon-weave left sleeve of his uniform jacket. There was no audio or video, which might have given a clue as to whether Amanda Taen was angry, but from the evidence, she hadn’t shut him out altogether.
Perhaps this was one mistake from which he could recover.
Martinez triggered the silver sleeve button that acted as a camera and sent both video and audio in response. “I’m free now. Is it too late to meet? Or if it’s too late, I’ll call you tomorrow and we can reschedule.”
Flowers, he thought. If he didn’t hear from Amanda Taen soon, he would send flowers along with a written apology.
He turned off the display, and the chameleon weave of the uniform jacket returned to its normal dark green, the precise color of Zanshaa’s viridian sky. He encountered little traffic in the Commandery at this late hour as he walked to the cadets’ duty room, and the click of his heels on the marble floor echoed in the high, empty corridors. At the door, he straightened his collar with its red triangular staff tabs, stiffened his spine, and marched in.
The four duty cadets didn’t see him. As Martinez expected, they were watching sport on the room’s video walls—as he remembered from his own cadet years, watching or participating in sport was the default activity, and any cadet who failed to be obsessed by sport was marked as a “toil,” an oddball.
No toils here. The sounds of football blared from one wall, all-in wrestling from another, yacht racing from the third. The cadets lounged on a sofa they’d dragged to face the wall displaying the yacht race, and were draped across the cushions with their jackets unbuttoned and cans of beer in their hands.
There was a problem presented by cadets who had graduated from one or another of the military academies but hadn’t yet gained service experience. Jobs had to be found for them so they could gain seasoning without having the opportunity to damage themselves or others. Cadets were supposed to use the three years between their graduation and their lieutenants’ exams to gain experience and study the many technical aspects of their profession, but many preferred the more tempting curriculum of inebriation, dissipation, and gambling away their available funds. “Glits,” such people were called.
Martinez remembered his own temptations very well, and the times he’d given in to them even better. He’d managed to carry off a degree of glithood—in fact, he’d found he was good at it, and only an inner compulsion to somehow be useful prevented him from turning into a complete parasite.
The cadets in the duty room were being used as messengers until useful work could be found for them. Normally, someone needing a messenger would have called here and summoned a messenger to pick up dispatches, which could give one of these layabouts a chance to finish his drink, spruce up his uniform, and transform himself into something resembling a smart, eager officer before presenting himself to authority.
Martinez parked himself directly behind their couch without anyone noticing. Pleasurable self-righteousness filled his mind. He had tracked the slothful cadet to its lair, where it wasted and loitered and thought not of duty.
“Scuuuum!”he bellowed. Cadets were not as yet commissioned, and he didn’t have to “lord” them, even though these were almost certainly Peers.
The four cadets—one woman and three men—leaped from the couch, braced their shoulders back, and bared their throats. “My lord!”they responded.
Martinez gave them a cold look. He had just had his dignity and fortunes shredded by a superior, and he felt a very powerful, very human urge to pass the pain on to someone else. He said nothing for a few seconds, daring them to relax once they realized they were facing a mere lieutenant—and a provincial at that.
The cadets stayed braced. Rich boy Foote, with his disordered blond cowlick and a clamp on his usual supercilious expression. Chatterji, with her freckles and her red hair clubbed behind her neck. Martinez didn’t know the other two.