The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) (78 page)

He watched their descent through the bubble, which was, alas, sealed over once they hit the atmosphere. But he had seen the great porcelain skin that covered fully half of the planet’s surface: The fabled city of the emperor, as large as the great Earth continent of Eurasia. Bored and curious, he set his modeller on his knees and asked it for information on the Imperial city. It knew little enough: Theoretically the civilization of the Chapalii had risen out of the murk of Chapal and eventually learned how to sail the interstellar seas. They had, it was supposed, made a kind of shrine out of the holy ground of their birth, and their home planet had become their emperor’s residence, his palace and his parks, that he alone controlled access to.

The transport set down so gently that Anatoly did not know they had landed until the stewards came to fetch him. He allowed them to carry his saddlebags and saddle because he guessed that they might think less of him for trying to spare them that burden, even if he wanted it for himself. But he refused to let any of them touch his saber, and he tucked the demimodeller into the pouch on his belt, sparing it from prying hands and words.

The ship stood on a riverbank, landing feet splayed out on the sandy bank. A delicate skiff bobbed on the waters, tied up to a pier constructed of spears of ashen wood so slight that he could not believe they could hold his weight. But he knew better than to hesitate. A transparent tube extruded from the ship, leading down the ramp and out to the skiff, where it bubbled out in the stern, a safe, malleable chamber molded to the shape of the boat. He walked out onto the pier, and a steward in silver livery helped him to a seat on the skiff, in the stern. Belatedly, he recalled that silver livery was the mark of the emperor. He kept his expression impassive as the transport’s stewards swung his saddle and saddlebags onto the boat and the tube pinched closed around him, sealing him into an oval bubble. Another silver-clad Chapalii poled them away from the pier and they were off, caught at once in a swift current, pulled downstream.

On the horizon he saw towers, and beyond them, the pale glow of the city, bright even against the bright light of the Chapaliian sun. He reached out and touched the skin of the mobile chamber. It gave beneath his touch, cool, not sticky, molding around his fingers as he pushed outward, stretching with his thrust and shrinking back in as he withdrew his hand. It felt as innocuous as skin and as strong as silk, as tough as boiled leather.

He sat in silence for a long while. No one steered the skiff, which plunged along, barely rocking in the waters, down a deep channel. The boat seemed poured out of one mold of a translucent pink material shot through with a substrate pattern of hexagrams and five-pointed stars, light shifting through them as the vessel skimmed over the ever-changing waters. Finally, because neither of the two stewards attending him spoke, he did.

“How soon will I reach the emperor?”

Both stewards stood and bowed, a remarkable feat of balance on the moving skiff. “Most honorable and most high, this vessel approaches the Yaochalii’s seat of honor. To the unmoving throne at the center of the universe you are being conveyed.”

“You are the Yaochalii’s attendants?”

The steward on the right flushed a deep red, which meant, Anatoly recalled, that he was pleased or flattered. “I am Cha Kato-ra, Chamberlain of Swift-Current Boats, and this is my cousin, Cha Tona-ra, Chamberlain of the Linked Circles of Breath. We are only attendants to the great park at whose center lies the lake of mirrors where sits the unmoving throne. You honor us by your notice, most high.”

Cha Tona bowed in his turn. “Most honorable and most high, it is the craftsmen of my house who have been granted the privilege of crafting this—” The slightest hesitation. Cha Tona flushed blue up the line of his jaw, and then recovered himself. “—this
membrane
, whose substance will allow you to enter the presence of the emperor.”

Anatoly laid a palm flat against the bubble. A sudden, uncomfortable tingling invaded his hand, as if the skin of the bubble was trying to sink into
his
skin. He jerked his hand back, startled. “Please explain this process to me,” he said, wondering if the bubble somehow protected the emperor from him, like a shield covering potential enemies.

“Your anatomical construction does not allow you, most honorable Yao-en, to breathe the air on our planet. This membrane permeates your molecular structure and creates a barrier which then synthesizes from those elements you draw in the proper intake of oxygen and outflow of carbon dioxide and waste products which suffice daiga in their primitive breathing mechanisms.”

“If I do not accept this, ah, membrane?”

Mortified, both lords—for in fact they were by grant of title lords and not stewards—flushed violet. “Most munificent and generous Yao-en, without this
kukiwa
you cannot appear before the emperor.”

“Did the Tai-en Charles Soerensen accept one of these membranes?”

The question produced silence. Cha Tona placed one pale hand carefully on the side of the skiff, as if he was communicating with it. Off to the right, a massive mountain of obsidian breached the ivory shell to the city, its jet bulk wreathed with carnelian and jade towers, as slender as wands.

“Yao-en.” Cha Tona crossed both hands on his chest and inclined his body in a one-quarter bow. “The Tai-en Charles Soerensen did not appear before the emperor.”

“Yes, he did.”

“I beg a thousand pardons for disputing your words, most honorable, most exalted. The Emperor appeared before the Tai-en Charles Soerensen in the Hall of Dukes, as is the Yaochalii’s custom, but it is not his exalted flesh which appears there, but only his form.”

Anatoly digested this news in silence as they skimmed onward. Waves spilled once over the prow as they took a sharp dip through a flurry of rapids, and were then sucked away through the boat to vanish, leaving not one drop of water behind. Charles Soerensen thought he had seen the emperor, and he had, in a way, but only an image of him, like a nesh image, Anatoly supposed. But not even Charles Soerensen had met the emperor
in the flesh
, as the actors always liked to say.

“I accept the membrane,” said Anatoly.

No sooner had the words left his mouth than the bubble shrank around him, shrank until it hugged him and shrank further, dissolving through his clothes until he felt it like fire along his skin and stretching in through his lips and nostrils and ears and eyes to invade his whole body.

At that instant he realized he had fallen into a trap. He took in a breath, to lunge, to draw his saber and at least take them with him, but he could not breathe nor could he move, as if the dissolution of the membrane into his skin had paralyzed him. Why had he trusted them so blithely? Why had he believed that the name of Sakhalin would protect him wherever he went? What an arrogant, stupid fool.

He sagged forward, caught himself with his hands on his knees, and pushed up to sit, panting. Water flashed under the light of twin suns; he hadn’t noticed the other one before. The bubble had shadowed it. One of the suns was a great, glaring thing, angry and red; the other was small, hot, and bright, with the blue trembling of flame inside it. He sat in the open air, the breeze on his face and the bitter tang of alien water on his lips, spray from the river. The two lords sat in pale splendor, each with his hands in his lap, fingers folded together in complicated patterns that reminded Anatoly all at once of the complicated braid in Rachelle’s hair, made beautiful because of its suggestion of layers and sweep.

And he knew that he was the first human ever to sit and breathe unaided—except not unaided—in the air of Chapal, with the great palace defining the horizon on his right and an endless park of pink and white flowers to his left.

The river dipped, sinking beneath them, only it wasn’t sinking, it was rolling on along the level ground. The skiff was sinking on an impossible strip of water that seemed to be tunneling into the river itself, as if they were contained in another, invisible bubble. The river rose around them on all sides and they raced into it, underneath it, swallowed in a darkness that roared with the tumult of waters. He felt that slight touch, like the delicate brush of a hand, that usually signaled the passage into a window.

Farther back along the tunnel, receding endlessly into the distance, stands Genji, observing him still.

The blackness sluiced away like water pouring off a duck’s back and they came out of the tunnel into an eerie grotto. Anatoly pinched himself to see if he was awake. They could not have gone through a window, not
on
a planet. He was obviously hallucinating. Perhaps it was an aftereffect of his intermingling with the membrane. Only an idiot would think that such a procedure could occur without strange side effects coming after it.

The grotto lightened. They passed out under a glowing arch strung with glittering orreries onto a sunlit lake strewn with petals of gold. The light was blinding, like a thousand mirrors turned to reflect the suns.

Anatoly shaded his eyes, which helped enough that he soon discerned that the lake was vast and probably square. The shoreline rode like a thin boundary of white on the still expanse of shimmering gold. In the center rose an island, and toward this island the skiff flew, skimming over the surface of the lake without touching the surface of the water or the curling leaves of the golden petals.
It’s this lake
, he thought, craning around to look behind himself,
that Naroshi’s garden was set out to imitate.

The island rose, and rose, as they neared, a shore of gleaming white pebbles bounded by an ebony wall. Enclosed by the wall stood a marble ziggurat, squares piled upon squares, receding toward a distant peak, the even line of the ascending ziggurat severed by a wide staircase as bright as diamond. The skiff slowed and coasted to a halt where a staircase that seemed to be carved out of a single piece of ivory marched into the water, receding into the depths until, farther out, its descent was shaded by petals. Anatoly wondered, wildly and at random, if there was a second ziggurat mirroring the first, thrusting down deep into the earth.

Two Chapalii in silver livery came down the steps. Lord Kato and Lord Tona stood at once and bowed to them, but the two new lords bowed in their turn to Anatoly, by which he deduced they must be dukes in the service of the emperor. To his surprise, they took his saddlebags and saddle, and when he jumped out of the skiff and began to climb the stairs, they flanked him, one on each side, bearing his worldly goods on their shoulders.

It was a long climb.

Anatoly paced himself, taking it slowly and allowing himself a pause every one hundred steps to take in the changing view. But the higher he went the more winded he got, so he mostly got the impression of a vast blinding lake surrounded by a luminous gray mist, like fog creeping in. Yet even as high as he climbed, knowing that each successive platform was smaller, when he reached the top he halted on the edge of a broad square field. Glancing back, he saw the dukes standing about one hundred steps down, waiting. Below them, a wispy strip of cloud draped the ziggurat. He did not remember climbing through it.

“Come forward,” said a voice in Chapalii. Unlike all other Chapalii voices, except perhaps that of Genji, it hinted at emotion, curiosity, perhaps, or something unfathomable, inhuman.

Obediently, he walked forward. This field, perhaps one hundred meters square, was as black as the void of space except for the glowing lines that crossed back and forth in a giant grid. It reminded him of a huge khot board. In the center sat a slab of jet-black stone, like an outgrowth of vacuum, only it was not a standing stone but a throne. He kept to one of the glowing lines, feeling superstitious, and as he walked he passed near a three-dimensional model of a hydrogen atom, hovering about a meter above an intersection of lines. It shimmered as he passed, spitting sparks at him. He walked on, turned a right angle, and a second, and came to a halt.

It took him a long moment to find his voice.

“Yaochalii,” he said at last in his mangled accent, but he knew enough formal Chapalii, he hoped, to get by. He bowed, slightly, inclining his body at the waist just enough to show that he respected the person who sat on the throne but not that he considered himself in any meaningful way lower than him. Lifting his head, he stared.

The emperor was old. Unlike Genji, whose skin had a pearlescent hue, the emperor’s skin seemed so pale, so thin, that Anatoly almost thought he could read the shape and flow of his internal organs as through a fine parchment gleaming with the faint oils of a scribe’s fingers. Elaborate carvings decorated the throne, towers and orreries and molecular structures entwined by an endless looping, spiraling vine. Carved out of the ebony substance of the throne itself, they stood in relief as distinctly as if they been painted white in contrast. The air around them was as still as glass: If it moved at all, he could not perceive it.

“Welcome to the game of princes,” said the emperor, and extended a hand, closed in a fist. “Here is your token. Take it, and you have entered the game.”

Anatoly had learned many things from his grandmother. One was never to move in haste. “What is the object of the game?”

“To take the throne.”

“Who are the other players?”

“Is it not called, the game of princes?”

“What are the rules?”

The emperor seemed amused. “That is the disadvantage of entering the game late. The first rule is that each player must learn the rules.”

“What happens to you, Yaochalii, when the throne is taken?”

Now the emperor chuckled, not a human chuckle, but a rolling swell of amusement. “I am nothing. I cannot be taken. But the princes bide their time and maneuver for position, and when it is proper the Yaochalii passes through and a new Yaochalii takes his place.”

“Ah. Then with what resources do I play?”

The emperor lifted his other hand. It was so pale that Anatoly thought that he glimpsed, for an instant, a shifting line of carvings through it as it carved an arc in the air, rising to touch the emperor’s own mouth, fingertips brushing across his nostril slits.