The results were not encouraging. Most people thought that the flight of the Convocation, and the departure of the Fleet, marked the end of the war. They didn’t find the prospect of domination by the Naxids particularly threatening. In any case they were willing to give the Naxids the benefit of the doubt. “You think they could be worse than the Shaa, beauteous lady?” as One-Step remarked.
“There are a lot more Naxids than there ever were Shaa,” Sula answered him. “Billions. They’re going to get all the top jobs—and the best middle jobs, too.”
One-Step shrugged. “You got to have a job for any of that to matter, lovely one.”
As the summer wore on the most popular song was “Season of Hope,” by the Cree performer Polee Ponyabi, a song about giving up one’s cares and anxieties and returning to a simple life of love and joy. Sula heard the soulful but catchy melody from windows, from vehicles, from clubs. The inhabitants of Zanshaa seemed willing to follow Ponyabi’s advice: the restaurants and clubs were jammed, lines waited outside theaters for tickets, and the war seemed very far away.
Thus it was that when the enemy came, they seemed to come from the depths of some half-remembered dream. While taking a siesta on a hot afternoon, the windows open to bring a drift of sultry air over her skin, Sula felt the atmosphere throb with the deep basso rumble of the tocsin, the automatic horns that were normally blown only in case of flood or extreme weather. Sula jumped from her bed and told the video wall to turn itself on.
A grave announcer informed the population that news had flashed along the chain of wormhole relay stations, and it was now known that the Naxid fleet was coming. It would be another day before they arrived in the Zanshaa system, and the public was urged to remain calm. All clubs and theaters were ordered closed until further notice, and all other businesses were ordered closed after noon on the following day.
Just enough time for some fine scenes of panic in the food stores, Sula thought, and so it proved. The local Covered Market was open well into the night, and closed only because every item had been sold.
Her own supplies had already been laid by. Thoughtfully she stroked the finish of a bookcase that Macnamara had made for her, then touched the trigger that opened the secret compartment and revealed the butt of a pistol. She drew the pistol out and felt its firm solidity in her hand.
No, not a dream.The Season of Hope was about to come to an end.
A short while later she found herself in the communal apartment, where Spence already waited as the video wall repeated the same news over and over. Macnamara drifted in shortly thereafter. It was as if they all wanted each other’s comfort as the world turned to night.
The next afternoon they moved onto the roof, which had an unobstructed view of the Zanshaa ring. Sula kept her hand comm on, tuned to a news channel. There were a few people there already, sitting in chairs with drinks in their hands, and the numbers grew as the day waned until it seemed the entire population of the city had become refugees, taking shelter on the roofs from an advancing flood. Sula saw even the building’s Daimong janitor on the roof, pale-skinned and sinister among the drifting tide of Terrans.
The tocsin moaned out again in the late afternoon as the Naxid fleet flashed into the system, drowning out Sula’s hand comm and the words of Governor Pahn-ko, who broadcast an assurance to the invaders that neither the ring nor the planet of Zanshaa would offer resistance.
The same was not promised of the horde of decoy missiles that still orbited the system, and as night cloaked the city Sula could see bright flashes amid the early stars that marked the decoys’ annihilation. The scent of hashish drifted from one roof to the next. The crowds criedaah andooh as if they were watching a fireworks display. With intoxication and night and the crowds, the roofs began to take on a kind of party atmosphere. A few young people began dancing to music.
It was then that Governor Pahn-ko came onto Sula’s comm, and hers was one of many voices that call for silence.
“Naxid missiles have been fired in the Zanshaa system,” the governor reported. He was an elderly Lai-own, his head nearly bald over his orange eyes, his muzzle bright with implant replacement teeth. He wore the deep red uniform of a convocate, with the ribbon of his office across his keel-like breastbone.
“We have reason to fear for the Zanshaa ring,” Pahn-ko said. “I ask all citizens to remain calm in the event that the ring is attacked. In the event that the ring is in danger of destruction, I have ordered engineers to demolish it in such a way as to prevent any danger to the inhabitants of the planet.”
“Brilliant,” Sula breathed into the sudden fearful silence of the stricken crowd. Without actually saying so, the lord governor had implied that if the ring were to be destroyed, it would be the Naxids who were at fault.
“I thank you for your loyalty in the past,” Pahn-ko went on, “and I have every trust that you will remain loyal in the future. Remember that the Convocation will return, and any who cooperate with the criminal Naxid government will be brought to account.”
And how many believethat ? Sula wondered.
About twenty minutes later the tocsin sounded for the third time, and the Zanshaa ring was destroyed, mourned by the groaning horns seemed to rumble from deep in the protesting bones of the earth. Bright flashes illuminated the night along the great arc of the ring; strobe-light painted the upturned faces of the population with silver. Sula heard a scream, and sobs, and she watched in fascination as the last-ditch plans of the old, long-dead engineers came to fruition, and the broken remnants of the ring began slowly to separate.
She had not actually believed they would destroy the ring, not until she saw it happen.
The upper ring must have been braked and locked down, because its remains didn’t separate and fly away. What happened instead was that the ring fragments rose in slow, stately silence into the night, so slowly that the fragments’ separation wasn’t apparent for some time. The fragments wouldn’t leave Zanshaa altogether, Sula knew, they didn’t have nearly enough energy; but they would rise to a higher orbit, dragging their cables behind them. Much of the fragments’ mass, eventually, could be scavenged in the event the ring was rebuilt.
The tocsin fell silent, and the crowd watched, sickened and suddenly sober, as the great symbol of Zanshaa’s prosperity and dominion floated from their reach.
When the Zanshaa ring had been built, the human race had been divided into primitive nation-states whose populations were happily engaged in bashing each other over the head with lengths of iron. Now that great monument of civilization and peace was no more.
Zanshaa was on its own.
Lights began to go out over the city. Much of the planet’s electricity was generated from matter-antimatter reactions on the ring and sent to Zanshaa on the cables, or beamed by microwave to great rectenna fields in deserted corners of the world. Sula, as an employee for the Logistics Consolidation Executive, had arranged for large quantities of antimatter to be taken to the surface for power generation, but no more antimatter was coming, perhaps for years, and electricity rationing was an inevitability.
People began to drift away in the pale glow of the few remaining emergency lights. Sula remained, gazing upward, catching out of the corners of her eyes the bright flashes as more decoys were destroyed.
And then the deep awe she felt in her soul began to be replaced by swelling satisfaction.
Her plan.They had carried outher plan.
What can the Naxids be thinking now? she wondered.
FOURTEEN
The day after the ring was destroyed Sula took theJu-yao pot out of storage and carried it to her little apartment. She placed it on the bookshelf in the alcove by the window, where the northern light could illuminate the fine crackle of the glaze with fine threads of silver.
This place was her home, she thought, the first she’d ever had. The apartment in the High City didn’t count: she’d acquired that place not for herself, but for Martinez. This little room, in contrast, was all her own.
She sat crosslegged on her mattress and gazed at the pot, the little ancient survivor brought to live in this incongruous, raucous neighborhood. Cooking smells floated through the window from the stalls outside, mixing with the scent of paint and varnish.
The scent of home.Home. The small, fresh-scented room she shared with the old pot, the venerable survivor of fallen dynasties.
She hoped that was an omen.
“Oh, I forgot. You don’t drink. Four-nine-one, shall I have Ellroy make you some tea?”
“No thanks, Blanche,” Sula said. “I’m perfectly all right.”
