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Page 14.
9. Lyxa
 He stood for a moment in the great entrance hall, whose cathedral ceiling soared several stories high amid stained glass and Gothic-style fluted pillars. It was a scene borrowed from the long-ago past, a snapshot of life in a lost world, a memory of the royal past in the Vega System. The floors were covered in flagstones. Broad stone staircases rose among the pillars on all sides.
He’d been here many times in the last few years since she’d changed his life forever. If anything was different, it was that he saw servants laboring at moving furniture and large trunks and wagons of costly dinnerware far away at the ends of long corridors. Was she moving? Something was afoot. But of course, all Mercury City was in an uproar.
A herald in gold braid over white silk, wearing a black tri-cornered hat with a cockade (green-white-black) in one corner, ushered him toward her quarters on the second étage in this maze and warren of corridors, rooms, doorways, balconies, crossings, transepts, nooks, and lantern posts.
Bemused, and wonderingly as always, he ascended great, hushed spiraling stone steps. Royal servants bowed around him, insular and unobtrusive, occupied with their individual duties and finely dressed according to their rank.
The eunuch Garth, Lord High Usher of the Royal House of Vega, wordlessly swept ahead of Jared. He was much taller than Jared, elderly but robust, and carried a sort of bishop’s crook and walked with both speed and dignity. He indicated with a flick of a finger that he would lead Jared to Lyxa. As they turned corners, Jared marveled at Garth’s craggy brow, and Garth’s yellow-white fanned-out beard. What man would allow himself to be castrated in the modern world in order to be the usher in a charade of long-ago tyranny? Or was tyranny back in vogue?
There was a silence here in the palace—a muffling of all but the iron gut vibrations of ancient hallway clocks. Jared felt soggy and uncomfortable in his rumpled uniform and heavy boots. He was not of the people outside. Nor was he of this place. He did not want to be here, but Lyxa had summoned. As always, he hoped maybe this would be the day she’d set him free.
Garth swept on, monolithic, swathed in robes braided in darkening gold, with one knotty hand clutching up the cloth at his knee.
The palace was as old as the city. As old as the Olympia House, whose lowest levels had once been mine shafts, some of which ran right under and into the deep cellars of the Vegan palace.
Lyxa was crown princess of the Vegan monarchy, which had ceased to exist centuries before. She lived in the palace where once Polarian and Procyonian, and, before them, Imperial Terran administrators had lived. Her ancestors had come to Mercury City in 4901. They had been welcomed as ‘a New Order’ in that long-ago day. They had been welcomed to a city ‘where everyone ruled,’ meaning democracy. Fleeing for their lives, they had accepted a sham of becoming commoners like everyone else, while maintaining their connections and their untold zillions in wealth.
How they must have smiled (or cynically grinned) as they were welcomed to ‘a rulership greater than that which they had previously enjoyed.’ As the Hon. Lern Wilson had told the Galaxy’s delegates in the Starmeer nine hundred years ago, ‘We are a city that looks to the future.’ Such nations are meant to rule universes, he’d told the delegates. Jared had seen holos of the delegates long ago, sitting and listening with their chins in their hands. Nations looked only to their greater future, never their lesser past. This nation, Jared reflected, produced space troopers like himself, star-struck children who became the officers of the mighty fleets that spanned the Galaxy. Now where are we? he asked himself behind Garth’s rigid back. Lyxa’s people are packing to leave. That’s got to be a bad sign.
He still had some slight feelings for her. Lyxa was a sensitive, lonely young woman. Jared had fallen in love. He was drawn deeper and deeper into her world of a past she had no contact with, but she had nothing in the present, and certainly no future to grasp instead. Hers was a world he did not belong in. Perhaps, he thought, pausing with Garth before her chamber, he belonged at the beginning of what she would die with: A thousand years or more of civilization separated her from the star-struck spacer from Eye Street in Lesht. She’d been sleeping with many a man (and pretty girl) who crossed her doorstep, but he did not know this at the time.
He could forgive her many things, and almost feel sorry for her that she inhabited this shadow world of pretense in an ancient dead palace, where she medicated herself with sex and opium. She’d preempted his life at the very crowning moment as he ran above the city carrying the Olympic torch. He was celebrated (his brief moment of fame) in the media, toasted in taverns on a thousand worlds, and given a hundred great awards by important committees of men with tight little mustaches and women with stiff cleavage at ceremonies in libraries and such. Lyxa’s possession of him was just a part of all that, and he didn’t see it coming until the noose with tight and he had no escape. He was dazzled and deliriously in love with her, with her power and the whole panoply of royal pretense,
He had slept with her for a few exhilarating weeks, after which she had had him transferred to the lieutenancy of the palace guard. By then, it was becoming clear that she was moving on to other conquests. He even met one or two former lovers of hers who drank too much (on her credit, which was bottomless) and welcomed him to the losers’ club. He ran from them, refusing to be a loser like they’d become. It was his stubborn pride, his endurance, his refusal to surrender, apparently, that kept her coming back to him for more. In between lovers, she would come to him, or have him come to her, and he found himself in a strange sort of equilibrium if not equality with her, at least when they were naked in bed together. She was a beautiful young woman, and the sex was deliriously passionate and overwhelming. She knew tricks he’d never heard of, like having them suffocate each other with silken scarves so their orgasms became truly a little death and resurrection. Even all of that now tired him. He wanted to find a real woman, not a queen or a phantom, and be a man in love, a man with his sleeves rolled up, making war or tilling fields or slamming beer mugs on tavern tables with other men.
During that initial let-down and break up, he’d had left her angrily, in a big tirade (from both of them to each other). Through Academy connections, despite her will and behind her back, he’d managed, against all her machinations, to resume study for an added year at the Academy of the Universe. Then he had shipped out for a year’s maneuvers to a heady little corner of the universe where there was peace.
To accomplish this, he’d taken advantage of his reassignment under a decent officer named Jardin, the Military Policy advisor of the Mercurian delegation to the UGO. In that time, he had been skipped from the rank of rear ensign to senior staff lieutenant—ten years’ progress, never realizing she was behind it all. She did love him, in her possessive and megalomaniacal fashion—always the tyrant’s hand, with a velvet glove.
He’d enjoyed a wonderful year stationed at a rural frontier world named Lethe, where he’d finally gotten his chance to live as a normal junior line officer on some small vessel. He’d visited the planet a number of times, and fallen in love with its dark forests swept by fresh winds; its miles of green fields; its quaint towns and small cities; and of course its fresh-cheeked, beautiful young women. Before he was able to get serious with a few girls he started dating, he’d been recalled to Mercury City. He realized Lyxa controlled even that assignment. He had bitterly resigned himself to making the best of his situation while enjoying all of its perks but always looking for that moment of escape. You could run away any time, he supposed, but you lost everything and became a common vagrant with no past or future. He even considered buying a commission as a merchanter’s third mate to escape. But—he’d worked too hard to give up his accomplishments, including Academy and Victory run. There must be a way, and he’d find it. Meanwhile, he must play nice. And, as long as he played nice, she appeared to love him in some strange manner.
Garth knocked on the door with his staff. A servant opened the door to Lyxa’s fifty-room suite. Garth left silently.
Entering the main door, Jared felt her cloying, overwhelming presence as always. The air had a tinge of the finest perfumes. The walls were creamy white and gold with fine, tiny hints of lavender here, mauve there, blue iris other places. The floors were richly carpeted, and she had illusindoes (like the virtual ports on starships) showing happy green summer scenes from far places and remote times.
Lyxa came in a cloud of mink. She was tall, with long dark hair in glossy curls bouncing on her pale shoulders. Her skin was milky and pampered. It was said that the finest diamonds are genuine because they contain imperfections or inclusions. Just so, Lyxa (Li Sha, Elizabeth) had a few delightful strawberry freckles across her perfect nose, and some chocolate beauty marks in the skin of her arms and (only Jared knew) a mole by her pink opening.
She wore a long silken gown that shone, gilded, in the soft light among all this ritzy furniture. She opened her fuzzy mink wrap to reveal a slender body with small, hungry little breasts. “Lethean mink,” she said—the first thing she said, to tease him a bit mean-spiritedly, to show her power over him.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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