The Praxis Read online

  WALTER JON WILLIAMS

  DREAD EMPIRE’S

  FALL

  THE PRAXIS

  For Kathy Hedges

  And with special thanks to Geoffrey Landis for wormhole physics, to Steve Howe for information on the uses of antimatter, and to Tracy Clark for checking my math.

  Thanks is due also to Daniel Abraham, Melinda Snodgrass, Sage Walker, Terry England, Yvonne Coats, S.M. Stirling, George R.R. Martin, Sally Gwylan, Emily Mah, Trent Zelazny, John Miller, Terry Boren, and especially to Caitlin Blasdell, without whom, etc.

  All that is important is known.

  —THE PRAXIS, Preamble

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  The Shaa was the last of its kind. It lay…

  ONE

  “Of course, following the Great Master’s death, I will kill…

  TWO

  Operations Command wasn’t in the Terran wing of the Commandery,…

  THREE

  A cold weight lay on Sula’s heart. She knew what…

  FOUR

  There had been a party at the Ngeni Palace the…

  FIVE

  “He’s old. I hate him.”

  SIX

  Sula raged inwardly against her certainty that everything she said…

  SEVEN

  The catafalque of the last Great Master rolled past, moving…

  EIGHT

  The bank was built of granite, a miniature Great Refuge…

  NINE

  “My lord?” said Cadet Seisho. “I’m looking at a transmission,…

  TEN

  Martinez, with most of Corona’s crew, stood on the station…

  ELEVEN

  Sula touched her writing wand to the fourth and correct…

  TWELVE

  Captain Lord Richard Li was a witness to the moment…

  THIRTEEN

  Most of Corona’s transit to Zanshaa was rather pleasant. There…

  FOURTEEN

  Martinez stood in the well of the Convocation and let…

  FIFTEEN

  Sula fought her way out of unconsciousness with an urgent…

  SIXTEEN

  Five hours after transiting Magaria Wormhole 1, Sula’s pinnace was…

  A Note on the Calendar

  The Shaa “year” is, so far as anyone knows, an…

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  OTHER BOOKS BY WALTER JON WILLIAMS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  PROLOGUE

  The Shaa was the last of its kind. It lay on a couch in the Great Refuge, the huge domed building carved out of the great granite plateau of the High City, the massive edifice from which the Shaa had once set forth to conquer their empire, from which their councils had ruled the destiny of billions, and—now—to which they came to die.

  The Shaa was named Anticipation of Victory—it had been born in the early days of the Praxis, when the Shaa had commenced to plan conquests but had not yet begun them, and in the course of its long life, it had personally witnessed the glories and triumphs that followed. Other races had fallen, one by one, beneath the Shaa yoke, and on these the Shaa and its peers had imposed the uniformity of their rule.

  Anticipation of Victory itself had not left the Great Refuge in centuries. It was surrounded at all times by attendants and officials, members of subject races who brought reports and requests, who transmitted its orders to the farthest reaches of its dominions. Servants washed and dressed the Shaa, maintained the vast computer network to which its nerves had been connected, and brought choice foods to cater to its diminished appetite. Though it was never alone, not for an instant, nevertheless the Shaa was tormented by the bitter pangs of loneliness.

  There was no one left to understand. No one with whom to share its memories of glory.

  Memories of those early days were undiminished. The Shaa remembered with brilliant clarity the fever that burned among its peers, the urge to bend all others, to bend the universe itself, to the perfect truth of the Praxis. It remembered the splendor of the early victories, how the primitive Naxids had been turned to the service of the Shaa, how others had then fallen—the Terrans, the Torminel, the Lai-owns, and others.

  Yet with each conquest had come diminished expectation, a slight reduction of the fever that burned in the Shaa. Each race first had to be raised to the knowledge of their duty, cultivated with exquisite care like trees raised from seedlings, trees whose limbs had to be tied and twisted and shaped so they would achieve perfection and union with the Praxis. And, like trees, the servitor races had to be pruned, pruned with bullets and whips and skinning knives, with the great annihilating fire of antimatter bombs, with the slow wasting of radiation and the slower, inexorable decline of starvation. The labor had been immense, the burden enormous, and the results uncertain.

  If only the Shaa had more time! If they had only had a few more thousand years in which to cultivate their garden of perfection, Anticipation of Victory could die in the certainty that its glorious task would be fulfilled.

  But the Shaa hadn’t had the time they needed. The oldest succumbed first, their memories fading—not the old memories, which remained clear, but the newer memories which, unable to displace the old, failed to find a place in their minds.

  The Shaa became unable to remember the flourishing of their own dream. They lost not the past, but the present.

  They sought artificial aids—massive computer memories that could be linked to their own nervous systems and record their own lives in exquisite detail. But in time, accessing these memories grew wearisome and, eventually, a painful burden no longer worth the effort.

  So one by one the great constellation of the Shaa began to wink out. The Shaa did not fear to inflict death, nor did they fear death themselves. Sad in the knowledge that they had become a burden on their own dream, they chose their own deaths, and when they died, they died with ceremony.

  And now Anticipation of Victory lay on its couch, among the great machines through which it searched for his memories, and it knew that soon the time would come to lay down its responsibilities.

  It had done its best to guide the younger races along the proper paths. In its time, it had awarded both great riches and terrible punishments. It had created a system by which the Praxis could be maintained after its death and hold the empire stable.

  Its greatest hope was that after its death nothing would change.

  Nothing at all. Or ever.

  ONE

  “Of course, following the Great Master’s death, I will kill myself.”

  Lieutenant Gareth Martinez, keeping pace alongside the longer-legged Fleet Commander Enderby, felt himself stumble as he heard the words.

  “My lord?” He drove his legs through the stumble, to stride once more off Enderby’s left shoulder. Their heels rang again in unison on the shaved, glittering asteroid material that floored the Commandery.

  “I’ve volunteered,” Enderby said in his prosaic, literal tone. “My family needs a representative on the pyre, and I’m the most suitable candidate. I’m at the apex of my career, my children are well-established, and my wife has given me a divorce.” He looked at Martinez from beneath his level white brows. “My death will assure that my name, and my family’s name, will be honored forever.”

  And help everyone to forget that little financial scandal involving your wife, Martinez thought. It was a pity that Enderby’s spouse couldn’t be the family sacrifice instead of the Fleet Commander.

  A pity for Martinez in particular.

  “I’ll miss you, my lord,” he said.

  “I’ve spoken to Captain Tarafah about you,” Enderby went on. “He’s agreed to take you aboard as communications officer on the Corona.”

&nb
sp; “Thank you, my lord,” Martinez said, and tried not to let his voice reflect the dismay that echoed coldly down his bones.

  The Martinez family was among the Peers, the clans that the Great Masters—the Shaa—had placed over all creation. Though all Peers were equal in the sight of the Shaa, the Peers’ own views were less Olympian. It wasn’t enough just to be a Peer. You had to be the right kind of Peer.

  And Martinez was definitely the wrong kind. While near-omnipotent on its distant home world of Laredo, the Martinez clan were provincial nobodies to the high-caste Peers whose palaces ornamented the High City of Zanshaa. The fine gradations of rank perceived by the Peers had no status in law, but their weight was felt everywhere in Peer society. Martinez’s birth entitled him to a place in the Peers’ military academy followed by a commission, but that was all.

  In six years’ service, he had risen to lieutenant. That was as far as his father had come in a dozen years, before Marcus Martinez resigned in frustration and returned to Laredo to devote himself to making money on a grand scale.

  His son knew he needed a powerful patron who would advance him in the service hierarchy. And Gareth Martinez thought he had found that patron in Fleet Commander Enderby, who seemed impressed with his abilities and was willing to overlook his obscure home and the wretched provincial accent that, try as he might, he’d been unable to lose.

  What do you do when your senior officer announces his intention to commit suicide? Martinez wondered. Try to talk him out of it?

  “Tarafah is a good officer,” Enderby assured. “He’ll look after you.”

  Tarafah is only a lieutenant captain, Martinez thought. So even if Tarafah decided that he was the most brilliant officer he’d ever met—and the chances of that were not high—Tarafah wouldn’t be in a position to give him a promotion to the next rank. He could only recommend him to a superior, and that superior would be patron to another set of clients whose needs, Martinez knew, would rank greater than his own.

  I am hip deep in the shit, he concluded. Unless he could talk the Fleet Commander into changing his mind about annihilating himself.

  “My lord,” he began, and was interrupted as another officer, Senior Squadron Commander Elkizer, approached with his entourage. Elkizer and his staff were Naxids, members of the first species to be conquered by the Shaa, and Martinez suppressed annoyance as they scuttled across the polished floor toward Enderby. Not only did they interrupt a conversation vital to Martinez’s career, the Naxids were a species that had always made him uncomfortable.

  Perhaps it was the way they moved. They had six limbs, four legs, and another, upper pair that could be used as either arms or legs. They seemed to have only two speeds: stop, and very, very fast. When they moved, the four feet were in continual motion, scrabbling at the ground, heedless of terrain or even of success. Their feet flung their bodies forward as fast as they could, and when they wanted to go particularly fast, they lowered their centauroid bodies to the ground and used the front two limbs as well, their bodies snaking from side to side in a liquid whiplike motion that frankly gave Martinez the creeps.

  The Naxids’ bodies were covered with black, beaded scales ornamented with a shifting pattern of red. The swift-moving scarlet patterns were used for communication among them, a language which other species found difficult or impossible to decipher. In order not to hamper this communication, Naxid officers wore uniforms of chameleon weave that faithfully duplicated the patterns flashing underneath.

  On their home world, in their primitive state, the Naxids had traveled in packs led by one dominant personality—and they still did. Even without rank badges, you could tell by body language and demeanor which Naxids were dominant and which subservient. The high-ranking Naxids were impossibly arrogant, and the lower castes cringingly submissive.

  Squadron Leader Elkizer scuttled toward Fleet Commander Enderby and slammed to a halt, his upper body thrown back to bare his throat for the killing stroke.

  Kill me if you so desire, my lord: that was the service’s ideal of subordination.

  Elkizer’s entourage—Martinez wanted to use the word pack—imitated their superior. Standing at attention, they came up to Enderby’s chin, with bodies the size of a very large dog.

  “As you were, lords,” Enderby said amiably, then engaged Elkizer in a discussion about whether one of Elkizer’s cruisers would be out of dock in time for the Great Master’s death—and Enderby’s own suicide, of course. This was complicated by the fact that no one knew when the Great Master’s death would come, though everyone was reasonably certain it would be soon.

  “Leave nothing undone,” Enderby said to Martinez after the warm-blooded reptiles went on their way. “You won’t mind some extra work helping me with my preparations?”

  “Of course not, my lord.” Which meant, damn it, that his meeting with Warrant Officer Amanda Taen would have to be postponed.

  “We don’t know the day,” Enderby said, “but we must be ready when it comes.”

  Martinez felt a sodden, drizzling cloud of gloom press on his skull. “Yes, my lord,” he said.

  Enderby’s office had a soft, aromatic scent, something like vanilla. It occupied the southeast corner of the Commandery, with a curving window that made up two walls. The magnificent view included the limitless, brooding expanse of the Lower Town, and above, Zanshaa’s accelerator ring—the thin arc of brilliant sunlit silver that cut across its viridian sky and circled the entire planet.

  But Enderby had always been indifferent to the sight. His desk faced away from the huge window, toward the interior of the Commandery, and beyond it to the nearly empty Great Refuge of the Masters, where his duty lay.

  Martinez had to suppress his admiration for the view while he was with the Fleet Commander. Enderby had a knack of making himself indifferent to all but the business at hand, but Martinez was more easily distracted. He could have dreamed out the window all day.

  As the Fleet Commander’s communications officer, he supervised messages between Enderby and his extensive command, which included the dozens of ships that belonged to the Home Fleet; the installations on the ground on Zanshaa and elsewhere in the system; the paramilitary Antimatter Service, which serviced the accelerator ring; the installations, training facilities, docks, and stores on the ring itself; the elevators that ran personnel and cargo from the planet’s surface to the ring and back; communication with the Fleet Control Board, Enderby’s superiors; and handling the intricate communications net that webbed all this together.

  Despite the size and complexity of his duties, however, Martinez usually had plenty of time on his hands. The Home Fleet ran on well-worn routine, established over the thousands of years of Shaa dominion. Most of the messages reaching him dealt with matters that scarcely required Enderby’s attention: routine situation reports, information on stores and requisitions, on maintenance, and on personnel entering and graduating from the training academies. These Martinez filed without ever sending them across the Fleet Commander’s screens. Flagged for Enderby’s attention were communications from friends or clients, reports on casualties from accidents—which always resulted in a personal note of condolence from the Fleet Commander—and, more important, appeals from the sentences imposed in the event of breaches of discipline or criminal activity. Enderby always paid close attention to these cases, and sometimes sent a series of painfully blunt questions to the accusing officer, which often resulted in charges being dropped.

  Martinez felt relief whenever this happened. He had seen enough of service justice to know how rough it was, and how lazy the investigating officer could be. He knew that if he should ever be subject to the draconian penalties of the law, he’d want someone like Enderby reviewing the case.

  During his time as the Fleet Commander’s aide, nothing like a real emergency had ever occurred to disturb the orderly flow of routine. Procedures were that well-honed. But the leisurely pace of his regular work was as nothing compared to the private business on which Enderby
concentrated that day. Even though Martinez had worked with Enderby almost daily for months, he had no idea how complex the Fleet Commander’s life was.

  Enderby had a thousand details to dispose of—bequests to friends, children, relatives, dependents, and subordinates. He was colossally wealthy, a fact Martinez hadn’t quite realized. Though the Fleet Commander stayed in modest lodgings in the Commandery, he owned a palace in the High City, which he’d closed, apparently, after his divorce. This was left as a bequest to his eldest daughter, who held a high post in the Ministry of Fisheries, though suites were left to other children for their lifetimes. Other property on Zanshaa and elsewhere had to be dealt with, along with the contents of bank and stock accounts, bonds, and a bewildering array of complex financial instruments.

  Martinez sat at his desk in Enderby’s office and processed these bequests along with his normal signals traffic. Into the traffic he managed to insert a personal item, a request to Warrant Officer Taen, begging a postponement of their date.

  Enderby’s secretary, an elderly sublieutenant named Gupta, who had been with him for years, was likewise kept busy, dealing with other aspects of a long, rich, complex life now being brought to a conclusion.

  Commanders of fleet rank were allowed to recommend a certain number of promotions on retirement. But if a list existed, it did not cross Martinez’s desk, and he knew better than to ask Gupta if it had crossed his.

  But he very much wished he knew whether his name was on it.

  One personal message came to Martinez during the course of his day. Not from Warrant Officer Taen, unfortunately, but from his own sister, Vipsania. She looked at him lazily out of the desk display and tossed her dark hair with a studied gesture. “We’re having a party early next month.” Her tones were even more plummy, if possible, than when he’d last heard them. “We’d love for you to come, Gareth darling, but I imagine you’ll be too busy.”