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12: Holy City
With the Olympus River at my left, I followed the monk who had been shadowing me. The river was a reddish, muddy body of water about 100 feet wide. It moved sluggishly past under a wealth of dense willow trees. On the opposite bank was a narrow street and beyond that the high walls of the Palace. The golden domes overwhelmed the entire scene, even the golden Temple spires, until I noticed the hulking basilica with its dark blue rooftiles among tall golden spires. On the Temple side of the river, where I walked, grassy park gave way to Temple walls. A broad street led into the Holy City. It was a busy place, and I was easily lost in the midst of thousands of robed clergy of all descriptions, plus the Swat Guards in their colorful uniforms and pikes. Dozens of beggars deformed the beautiful vista as they sat outside the gates with their hats on their leg stumps or other deformities. They received coins dropped by monks coming and going with briefcases, like divine business men—not to mention trimly elegant nuns in gray, slate-blue, and black, with box coifs and briefcases bearing the Popess' coat of arms. Everyone here seemed to be in a hurry, with a knowing and self-satisfied smile. I got the idea that all this worked very efficiently and that much of the power and money of the world found their way through these gates and those across the river. No wonder people like Balesso, who craved both power and money, saw fit to kill a Popess and...well, my next thought was, what about the King?
Entering the main square inside Holy City, I lost him, dammit. I stood in the huge square and looked through the thousands of pilgrims, monks, priests, and nuns but all I saw was a milling throng of his clones. There were monks and nuns, priests and priestesses, in brown, black, blue, gray, yellow, green, and all the shades of red from burgundy to scarlet. I soon found out that the ones in red were the hierarchy, and they appeared to be an even mix of older man and women.
I found one of many touristy souvenir stands loaded with prayer beads, prayer cards, prayer wheels, and more bric-a-brac for the pious. Seeing a little bookstand, I picked one out and ran my hand over its solar panel to activate it. The rule is that, if you turn on sound, you buy, so I ran text over its digital face. It was a book of facts about King City, and in it were chapters about the Holy City, about the Palace, and about the King and the Popess. There was a great deal to be learned, and not all of it in this sugar-coated tourist book, but I could read between the lines.
At the moment, the leader of the civil government was a king, though in times past there had been queens. At the moment, the leader of the religious government was a woman, although there had been Holy Fathers in the past. They maintained a precarious balance of powers between them, but nurtured a strong private sector, as it was known, that was the general public and which supposedly had what was called religious freedom. Coming from the so-called Free Domes, I didn't know what that meant, since in our small, tough society everyone had to pull together and if you bent the rules you went over the rail. Here, apparently, was room for a lot of finer points.
The civil ruler currently was His Majesty King Lee Upholder XIII. He had a whole string of names and was the latest in a dynasty that went back over a thousand years. Evidently there were several royal houses with differing political philosophies (and probably one as corrupt in some ways as the others, but each offering certain advantages). Together this pool of royalty owned the state. There were public elections in which all adults in the private sector could vote, so every three years either the king or queen was re-elected, or one of the other houses took its turn. The Upholders had been in the palace for twelve years and looked like shoo-ins for the next election.
I must have gaped when I read down a list of about thirty such royal houses and noticed the name Balesso among them. Apparently, here were a half dozen Venerable Houses who usually took the crown, which included the Upholders, the Steadiers, the Oldbloods, the Fineleathers, the Mariners, and the Godpodders. Then there were about ten second-tier families who occasionally got their leader elected, which included a lot of oldish money like the Greenlords, the Redweathers, the Bluebloods, the Whitetowers, and so forth—each with a color in their name. Finally there were another dozen and a half newcomers who had not yet held office, but held a lot of dukeries and other second and third string offices. These included the Balessos, the Montepythons, the Merrymen, and the like. Pondering this, I wondered if Balesso was already farther along in his game than any of the Free Domers realized. It seemed logical that, to conquer the world, you'd want to capture its two most powerful entities—the Royal state of Olympus, and the Temple state run by the Popess. This led me to the inevitable conclusion that most likely, Her Holiness Gina-Paulina Benedictina XXIV must be colluding with Balesso, who was listed here as a Duke (sort of an assistant king, I gathered).
This was all sheer guesswork, though based on months and years of pondering that suddenly flowed together like the right puzzle pieces snapping into place; and I still had to ponder how an outcast like Timony could be involved in a plot to kill the Popess.
My guess was that there was more, somehow, to the life and times of Timony and his family than I had ever guessed. Glancing through the list of royal and pretender houses again, I noticed one called Eastgarden. Oh yikes. The Eastgardens were a subclan of the Upholders currently in power.
I was about to walk to a public InfoTel and summon whatever information was available in its global relational database index, when a woman's voice beside me said: "Don't look now, but you are in danger."
I felt an electric current of surprise tingle in my entire body. The person standing next to me was a monk in a brown cowl—the very person who had shadowed me—but the voice was that of a woman. She said: "Follow me, and don't look left or right. They have you in their sights."
I waited a moment, put my own cowl up, then followed. What choice did I have? I looked around at the crowds, with the Swat Guards and other police standing among them. The woman walking ahead of me seemed tall with a muscular gait, and nobody would have guessed there wasn't a man under that cowl. She led me across the square. The entire Holy City revolved around this central square, which was large enough to have fit the Graniston 1 dome in it with room to spare. Toward the river, but this side of the wall, was a four story building labeled St. Mercury University. To the right of that, the largest building, was St. Apollo Basilica. To the right of that was a ten story skyscraper, the St. Gemini Administration Building of the Holy Faith. There were lots of smaller buildings but those were the main ones visible.
She led me through the main entrance of St. Apollo, where Swat Guards stood with crossed pike staffs and wind-blown plumes atop golden casseroles, as their pot-shaped helmets are called. They snapped to attention as we, ostensible clergy, passed through. I was surprised that nobody checked us. The inside of St. Apollo was breathtakingly large—the largest non-dome building on Mars, in fact. It was capable of holding (so a sign in the vestibule said) 10,000 people under its round concrete dome. It had a ring of pillars around the inside, and between every pair of pillars was a giant statue of some saint. Stained glass windows hung inside suspended on heavy chains, and each window told a story from scripture beginning with the Godpods and ending with the seeding of Mars and the distribution of the first two humans (Madam and Evan from Heaven). In the center was a raised podium on which I recognized the Holy Mother's throne with the legend NASA on the back. At least something looked familiar.
We exited through a small but ornate side door stuccoed yellow and painted all around with grapevines and flowers as well as bunches of purple grapes. We came out into a very dark, ancient looking cobbled street whose uneven surfaces sloped this way and that. She spoke into a tiny cube, and a black limousine cruised around the corner to pick us up. As I got in, and the car lurched away with its doors automatically closing from the momentum, I recognized the two women in the front seat. They were the two priestesses who thought I had killed their Popess.
"How have you been?" asked the redhead as she hung her arm over the seat to look at me with a big, friendly smile. Her fingernails were long and lacquered red in a manner quite unbecoming a priestess. The blonde wore a black business suit and had a black bow in the back, tying a flat, short ponytail together.
"I have been better," I said.
"So, Friar Tuck," said the redhead, "my name is Trinity, but you can call me Trini." She stuck out a pale, firm hand with red nails, and I shook it.
"Singularity," said the blonde, "but you can call me Sindi." She raised a hand with blue-lacquered nails over her shoulder, and I shook its fingers. It was the best we could do as she sped the car along the river road on the Temple side.
"Well," I said, "we've come along way from where you thought I had killed Her Holiness."
"We figured out pretty early that you had nothing to do with it," said Trini, the redhead.
"When did you pick up on me again?"
"We never let you out of our sight," said Sindi. "We had a few other suspects, and you dropped out pretty quickly. You didn't seem to be the killer type." She snickered.
"Nice work on the dufus yesterday, by the way," said Trini with a wink.
"You followed me?"
"We knew who rolled you, and we knew where he lives. It was just a matter of sending an ambulance after you roughed him up."
"Nice work, by the way," said Sindi over her shoulder as she handled the wheel. We were rolling through an industrial zone with tall cranes overlooking warehouses. "You learned fast down in the Triber lands."
"I had to."
Trini continued: "He is one of Balesso's extremely low punks. He has much bigger, smoother staff than that."
I took a greater interest and leaned forward. "So you are not on Balesso's side."
"Oh hell no," said Trini, "we are strictly Upholder. We're both third cousins of King Lee."
"Let me get this straight," I said from the back seat. "King Lee and the Popess rule up here. She rules Temple all over the planet, but here she is like his co-regent."
"Yes?" Sindi said. "You catch on fast."
"Right," I said, "so there is a power struggle going on and I got caught up on the edges of it. Within your group, the Upholder family didn’t like the Eastgardens and exiled them to the Granistons, where Timony then somehow had them fall farther out of favor."
Trini laughed gently. "Timony was next in line to the Eastgarden top chair. He was a contender for King Lee's throne if there had been a dispute within the extended Upholder tribe."
"Timony was just too strong, too radical, too...dangerous," Sindi agreed. "He had to go."
I had a picture of Sudie in my head. "Do you have any idea what happened to him, or worse yet, what happened to his sister?" I was suddenly very angry.
The two women looked at each other. "Oh-oh," Sindi said.
Trini looked sympathetic. "Farr, they are our cousins. King Lee had their father exiled to the Granistons, figuring they'd be safe there, and far away not to threaten his throne. Timony got his family in trouble all on his own, and we had no idea until long after they were sent to the Tribers. Our people actually did search for them for a while, but they hid well and our people gave up."
"That's before my time or Trini's," Sindi said, "so don't take it up with us. Please."
"I can tell you where Sudie is. I can tell you where Timony is, what's left of him."
Trini's eyes flashed. "We know where they are, and we are leaving it alone, do you hear? We understand Sudie is in a bad way, but it would kill her to leave the home she's made with Sam Gorepoint."
"I suppose Sam is another exiled cousin of yours," I said bitterly.
"Not exactly," Sindi said. "He's a disgraced priest who was given a chance to make a new life for himself, and he was sent to take care of Sudie. That's what he is doing, and they are both doing well. Our agency watches over them from a distance."
"You didn't get there in time to prevent Hang Me Now from cutting her tongue out."
They were silent for a while.
The car was moving slowly now through a sparsely populated area with large estates hidden among dense forestation—at the edges of the King City geodesic dome, for I could see huge pylons curving down and anchored to the ground with bolts the size of houses.
Trini leaned over the seat again. "Farr, in case you are wondering, we are still nuns, but we are loyal to the old Popess, not the new one. Knowing this could get you killed, but not knowing it could be even more dangerous."
Sindi nodded. "You made the decision to come here. We're glad you did, and we hope you can help our cause, but it's all on your hook. You are responsible for whatever will happen to you."
Trini said: "You have to understand that there is enough intrigue in this capital to make up for the entire rest of the world. There is intrigue among the palace families, as you have seen between the Eastgardens and the Upholder clan. There is plenty of intrigue on the Temple side, and we are part of both sets of players."
"Let me take a stab at this," I said. "On the palace side, you are Upholder loyalists, which is why you stuck it to the Eastgardens, who I am quite fond of. On the Temple side, you are with a faction that represents the late Gina-Paulina XXIII, whom I could have liked very much. Taking a further leap of imagination, I'd guess that she was killed by someone aligned with a minor family called the Balessos, who installed their woman in the Chair of NASA."
Trini gasped. "Very sharp."
Sindi said: "But we aren't surprised."
Trini said: "We know you're very sharp."
Sindi nodded as she parked the hydrocar on a gravel driveway outside a very old stone mansion with crumbling stucco walls and bird nests in the eaves. "Welcome to House Eastgarden, Your Lordship."
"What?"
"Welcome home," Trini said as she got out. She opened the door for me and stood at attention as I numbly and shakenly stepped out of the car.
"Farr," Sindi whispered under her breath, "this is going to be hard on you. We want you to know that we are at your side and will do anything we can to help."
"What are you talking about?" I said.
Trini closed the door and took me gently by the elbow. "Touching is off limits, but you need a friendly touch right now." She squeezed my arm and then let go as the double door opened. I understood the deal: they were still in their decade of denial. That's the first ten years, when a religious has to swear off sex. After that, they can live a normal life and marry, whether they stay in the life or not.
Two serving women in gray smocks stood in their doorway several steps above us. The older, sourer one said: "Yes?"
"We are bringing a visitor to Lord Eastgate Senior. He is expecting us."
"Yes, Sister," the two women said in unison.
An elderly butler in black trousers and white long-sleeved shirt appeared. He wore a subdued sleeveless silk tunic with prints of dark yellow and brown vegetation. He had a cadaverous face with heavy eyebrows, piercing dark eyes, and gray lips. "Good day, Sisters and Sir." For a moment he appeared confused, but one of the maids whispered in his ear. He brightened. "Very good. This way, Sir and Sisters."
We followed him down a long, high-ceilinged hallway. The house oozed dignity. It was much wood paneling inside, and heavy ceiling beams, and the hosue like what I'd read about lake boats. There were large paintings on every wall, and statues in every corner. It seemed a museum.
Trini and Sindi held back as I approached a large inner door. The one maid knocked, and a man's voice barked an order, and the other maid swung the door open for me to enter.
Trini whispered: "Good luck meeting your grandfather."
Sindi gave me a thumbs-up.
I entered a large library with high windows that blinded me at first with sunlight pouring in from the overhead bulbs outside. The room smelled of coffee and old paper books and new electronic books.
A familiar voice boomed harshly: "I didn't think you'd come."
I peered through my sunspots and, as my eyes adjusted to the relative gloom, I saw the Abbot standing by a table.
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