Ruiz passed a shaky hand over his face and glanced at the Gench. It had seated itself on its stool again, and its eyespots flickered over the far side of its head, only occasionally sliding into brief view. “Well enough,” Ruiz had answered.
Ruiz now set the brandy aside and rose to his feet. The walls of the lounge were a soft cool white, as were the furnishings. The only spot of bright color glowed from a niche set into the far wall. Ruiz went toward the niche, stopped before it. Each day, the Vigia placed in the lounge niche a different thing of beauty from Ruiz’s large collection; this day it was a spirit mask from Line, its humanoid features carved from a single blue moonstone, then inlaid with swirling bands of red jelly opal.
The boat chose at random, but somehow these choices had come to have superstitious meaning for Ruiz, as though the selection were an omen. He looked down at the mask and shuddered. The moonstone mask had come to him through stupidity and misplaced trust, a souvenir of betrayal. He kept it not only for its beauty, but also to remind him of the dangers of trust.
In the course of his bloody years on that harsh world, Ruiz had fallen in love, been delivered to his enemies by his beloved, and finally learned the cynicism that now served him for a conscience.
He found himself wishing that he could withdraw from the Pharaoh contract, but at the thought, the mission-imperative stirred in his mind, pushing the wish away. He could almost feel the death net in the depths of his mind, deep-rooted, a hair-trigger cancer, waiting to kill him. “Too late,” he said to the moonstone mask. It seemed to look back at him, laughing, its empty eyeholes full of formless certainty.
He turned away, no longer capable of relaxation.
“Time to go,” he said to the Vigia.
An hour later, Dilvermoon was a fading silver glimmer in the rear screens, and Ruiz began to study. During the three-week passage to Pharaoh, Ruiz Aw took the datasoak every eight hours, filling his memory with Pharaoh — language, customs, religion, the million details he would need to slide unnoticed through that world. In recovery he slept a great deal, but when he was awake he occupied himself by studying the charts of Pharaoh’s one habitable plateau, rising high above the boiling desert that covered the remainder of Pharaoh’s surface. In the center of the plateau, long ago, the spore ship had landed its cargo of embryos, a monumental misjudgment, with so many sweet fertile worlds to choose from. But the colony had taken hold and now flourished, within peculiar constraints.
The charts glowed in the holotank, clean lines in primary colors, but Ruiz saw the images of the datasoak, superimposed on the charts. The sterile clay of the arid plateau, streaked with a million dead shades of brown and black. The scattered oases, green-purple, each centered in its lacy spread of catchment basins and collection canals, like monstrously complex spider webs.
In the murky steams below the plateau, monstrous creatures lived. Occasionally one would climb up and ravage the countryside until it expired from the rarefied atmosphere and relative cold. Eventually the Pharaohans had incorporated these monsters into their religion, as demons — and built a wall around the edge of their world to keep them out.
The Pharaohans had slowly and painfully solved the problem of the infrequent rains and limited their population growth by a ruthless program of priestly culling. Gradually their lives had grown sedentary and secure enough to permit a flowering of craft. The Pharaohans excelled at the lapidary arts, made marvelous glasses, and porcelain of great vigor and dignity. Some of these were valuable enough to warrant export. From the venom of indigenous reptiles, the Pharaohans distilled potent hallucinogens, which were in limited demand on the pangalac market — appealing to wealthy consumers who enjoyed the cachet of primitive experiences.
Their technology typified the odd mixture to be found on long-owned Hardworlds — those planets on which humanity had only an uncertain grasp on existence. Their metallurgy was relatively sophisticated. They built steam cars of good quality, but their periodic attempts to build railroads were always thwarted by League agents, to prevent them from establishing a basis for wide-scale industrial development.
But as on all worlds, the most valuable trade on Pharaoh was in people. The conjurors of Pharaoh brought enormous prices on the pangalac worlds. These performers had created a high art with their outrageous sleights — their great plays were passionate theater enhanced by feats of illusion. Legerdemain was the factor that knit together all aspects of Pharaohan life.
Conjuring constituted the only practical means of movement upward through the rigid caste system. A famous conjuror, who for some reason was not harvested by the League, had an excellent chance of ennoblement. And were he to be harvested, his fellow Pharaohans would celebrate his disappearance as a transfiguration and envy him his new status as a demigod in the Land of Reward. The Art League encouraged the development of the art in other ways. Exceptional performances were rewarded by rainstorms — produced by invisible League technology, but ostensibly the accolade of the gods. Those nomarchies rich in conjurors were therefore rich in all things.
At one point Ruiz watched a flatscreen promotional production, distributed by the Art League to potential buyers of Pharaohan conjurors.
The opening shot displayed the League’s logo, a stylized androgynous human silhouette in red on a black ground, wearing silver chains made up of linked five-pointed stars. The League anthem swelled up, a stirring orchestration featuring a large chorus.
“Welcome, Citizens,” said an assured voice, riding over the music. “This presentation is brought to you by the Art League, an autonomous nonaligned corporation, chartered on Dilvermoon and licensed on all pangalac worlds. The Art League — the foremost supplier of sapient merchandise in the galaxy for over three thousand standard years. The Art League — the foremost practitioner of the greatest art, the art of shaping sapience into usefulness.” The anthem crescendoed and concluded on a dramatic ringing note.
The logo faded, to be replaced by a shot of Pharaoh, hanging in space. The point of view zoomed in, dropped violently toward Pharaoh’s surface. “This is Pharaoh,” said the voice. “One of the League’s most interesting and unusual client worlds. Today we take you to witness one of the great religious plays called Expiations.”
Ruiz advanced the recording past the local color segment, until he reached the beginning of the performance. He listened as the voice explained that the plays served both religious and judicial purposes, in that the gods were entertained and criminals were executed in the course of the entertainment. In the major performances, the criminal was called a phoenix and was encouraged to participate willingly in the play by the hope that a sufficiently magnificent performance would lead to a resurrection after the play’s conclusion — a hope encouraged by the League’s technicians, who sometimes resuscitated and released the victim.
He advanced it again. The screen showed an Expiation in progress, the conjurors acting out their parts with the extravagant, larger-than-life gestures characteristic of precinematic theater. They performed with a hot-eyed intensity that Ruiz found disturbing, and he moved the recording forward again, stopping it at a point where the point of view had moved within the stage, revealing the activities of those who labored in the sweaty darkness, managing the apparatus that made the illusions possible. Here was a different sort of intensity — but still painful to watch, Ruiz thought. None of these folk understood that they strove only to make themselves and their fellow Pharaohans attractive to the League’s customers. The Pharaohans had forgotten their pangalac origins, except for a few vague and discredited legends concerning people from the stars. For all they knew, the universe ended at the edge of their plateau, with only the demons below and the gods above to fear.