Earthly Crown Read Online Free PDF Page B

gone to an exhibit detailing the history of Manhattan. Certainly the Chapalii era Manhattan was by far the most impressive and beautiful architecturally, seen from across the river: a mass of monuments and parks, pierced at the center by a single tower of adamantine grace and astonishing height.
    At the ducal palace of the Tai-en Naroshi Toraokii, they disembarked from the secured line into an atrium domed with tangled vines about thirty meters over their heads. Animals shrieked and called in the greenery, but they only caught glimpses of birds and long-limbed creatures rustling through the leaves. Water sheeted down in a semicircle all along the far wall; indeed, the misting waterfall was the far wall of the atrium. Charles headed out across the floor, which was a tangle of ponds, streams, parquetry decks, and marble stepping stones carved into the shape of Chapalii glyphs. Avocets and herons dotted the shorelines. A grebe swam past and dove, vanishing from their sight in one instant and popping up seconds later a meter ahead.
    David saw no passage through the huge curtain of water, but Charles walked steadily toward it, picking his way along the labyrinthine paths until the three men and the Chapalii steward came to the wall of water. Charles lifted the crystal wand. The waterfall parted.
    David gaped. It simply parted, by no agency he could see. Water still rained down over their heads, but an invisible barrier forced it to either side, allowing them access to whatever lay within. Charles led the way. The steward followed him, and David went next, letting Marco take the rearguard.
    What lay within proved to be a hall as vast as a cathedral. Their footsteps echoed as they crossed the hall’s expanse to a far door. They passed through the door into a garden lined with columns and thence into a marble-fronted basilica that transmuted, surprisingly, into an octagon, a two-storied building with a mosaic floor and somberly glowing mosaic walls portraying austere, gaunt figures. Within the greater octagon, almost floating inside it, stood an interior octagon of double arches. Within the central octagon two couches sat on the mosaic floor. On one couch, a figure reclined. It sat up, seeing their party. Charles marched them under one of the arches—banded with three colors of stone—and sat himself down on the couch opposite their host. David and Marco placed themselves behind him. The steward crossed to stand beside Tai Naroshi.
    The two dukes regarded each other in silence. Tai Naroshi looked like all other Chapalii: pale as ice with a wisp of yellow hair; tall, thin, humanlike in his symmetry, but not human at all. He wore a robe of palest orange that seemed to drape itself artistically around his form, according to his movements, by some unrelated gravitational field.
    Charles placed the wand across his knees.
    They waited.
    Then, to David’s astonishment, a mist steamed up under one of the arches and coalesced into three seated figures: Owen Zerentous, Ginny Arbha, and an interviewer. They looked so real that they could have been there in person, except that they had appeared so abruptly.
    “We ought all to remember,” Owen was saying, “that the line between barbarism and civilization is fluid. Ritual is a constant in all human society. Theater is simply a more refined, and perhaps even a more confined, elaboration of primitive ritual events. Certainly my use of the word ‘primitive’ is a subjective response based on our bias against pretechnological culture.”
    Naroshi raised one hand, and the figures froze. They then passed through a rapid succession of expression and angles, as if their conversation was accelerated. Naroshi lowered his hand, and the interview continued.
    “To find cultures that have never seen theater before,” Owen said, clearly in answer to a question. “Human cultures, that is. We haven’t seen that for centuries on Earth, or in any of the human cultures in the League, for that matter.