The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency) Read online

  “The what?” Marce asked.

  “The Rupture. It’s what we called the event that isolated us from Earth and its network of Flow stream systems, and from you.” He looked at Marce and Grayland, who were staring at him blankly. “Why? What do you call it?”

  “We don’t call it anything,” Marce said. “We know we lost contact with Earth about fifteen hundred years ago, but we didn’t know it had its own network of Flow streams.”

  “Or that there was another entirely separate group of systems, with its own set of Flow streams,” Grayland said.

  Chenevert looked at both of them, a dawning smile on his face. “How interesting,” he said. “You had an actual dark age. You lost everything about it. About the Rupture. And about us. And Earth and its systems, too.”

  “You knew about us?” Marce asked.

  “Of course I did,” Chenevert said. “That’s how I got into your space in the first place. Technically it’s a treaty violation that I’m here at all, but given that the option back home was being hanged, I was willing to take that chance. And I suppose if you don’t remember you had a treaty with us, and with Earth, then I shouldn’t worry about violating it.”

  “We have a treaty with you.”

  “Yes. Well, obviously not me specifically. But with the Assembly, of which my planet Ponthieu is part. Twenty systems in all. And then Earth’s empire, of another fifteen systems. Your collection of systems, what you now called the Interdependency, was the Free Systems. More systems but fewer people than either the Assembly or Earth, because most of our systems had livable planets in them and yours mostly … didn’t.”

  Marce and Grayland looked at each other again, dumbfounded.

  “You really don’t know, do you?” Chenevert said.

  “This is entirely new to me,” Grayland said. Marce nodded as well.

  “There’s irony to this, you know,” Chenevert said. “Or actually, you don’t.”

  “What’s the irony?”

  “It was the Free Systems that pushed for the treaty that broke up the systems into three partitions. And then created the Rupture when that wasn’t enough isolation for it.”

  “Created the Rupture?” Marce said. “We initiated a Flow stream collapse?”

  “You did. Or your ancestors did, anyway.”

  “That’s not physically possible.”

  “You say that, and yet it happened.”

  “Do you know how to do it?” Grayland asked Chenevert.

  “Me, definitely not. The scientists of Ponthieu and the Assembly? Not that I know of, as of three hundred years ago. It was something you had, and you didn’t share it, I suspect because you didn’t want to, you just wanted to be shut of us. And now it appears that you’ve lost the knowledge as well. I can’t say I see this as a bad thing, Lord Marce, Your Majesty.”

  “You can verify this?” Marce said. “This history you’re talking about.”

  “It’s in our history books.”

  “And you brought those?” Grayland asked.

  Chenevert smiled. “Your Majesty, when I left Ponthieu, I was leaving forever. I assure you, I have brought everything.”

  Chapter

  21

  “What do you know about the Free Systems?” Cardenia asked Rachela I, in the Memory Room.

  “They were one of the predecessors to the Interdependency,” Rachela I said. “Although by the time we were forming the Interdependency, nobody called them that.”

  “Why not?”

  “That loose alliance of systems had fallen apart centuries earlier.”

  “And why was that?”

  “For the same reason many alliances fall apart—competing interests, lack of economic enthusiasm, stupid or venal rulers, and simple neglect, or some combination of each.”

  “I’m the emperox of the Interdependency,” Cardenia said. “My mother was a historian. How do I not know about the Free Systems?”

  “You did know about them, but you weren’t aware of that particular label. Pedagogy varies over time. It’s possible that when and where you grew up, it wasn’t considered important.”

  “That sounds evasive to me,” Cardenia said.

  “I’m aware that you are addressing me with some hostility in your voice,” Rachela I said. “But I am not in any way trying to be evasive to you. Remember I have no ego to bruise and no need to justify either my actions or the actions of others. If I sound evasive to you, it’s possible you’re phrasing your questions in a way that sounds to you in your current emotional state as evasive.”

  “The problem is not you, it’s me, is what you’re saying,” Cardenia said.

  “Basically.”

  “You know, I met a computer simulation of a human today who could be evasive, if he wanted to.”

  “Okay,” Rachela I said. “I, however, cannot.”

  Cardenia took a breath and tried to center herself because, damn it, Rachela was right; she was a little hostile at the moment and it was making her ask the wrong questions. After a minute, during which time the image of Rachela I stood quietly waiting, just like a computer simulation would, she tried again.

  “Are you aware of any attempt in your time to stop teaching the time of our history in which the Free Systems existed?”

  “No. It wasn’t something that either I or my contemporaries considered.”

  “Did you ever try to censor or alter histories at all?”

  “After I became emperox, my propagandists worked to sell the story of the creation of the Interdependency that we wanted to see propagated into the future, particularly with respect, as we’ve spoken before, about the prophecies. By the time I died, our angle on it, or something very close to it, was the generally accepted view of events. Of course there were alternate versions, but those tended to be less mainstream and their authors not tenured at the best schools. Additionally, we created blasphemy laws, which we used infrequently but that had the intended effect of further entrenching the official story.”

  “But you didn’t actively work to change or alter the history of the period of time before the Interdependency.”

  “Not unless it was directly prior to the Interdependency—that is, during the period of time we were trying to create it.”

  “Have you ever heard of the Assembly?”

  “That is a very vague question. ‘The Assembly’ could be any number of things.”

  Cardenia bit the inside of her cheek to avoid snapping at Rachela I, who would not be bothered by it, which would just make Cardenia angrier.

  “Are you aware of a political entity called the Assembly, comprised of states in star systems that are not nor ever have been part of what is now the Interdependency,” she asked, very specifically.

  “No.”

  “Have you heard of the Tripartition Treaty?” Cardenia referred to the treaty by the specific name Chenevert had given her for it.

  “No.”

  “Have you ever heard of an event called the Rupture, in which the Free Systems were cut off from other human states?”

  “No.”

  “How did Earth become inaccessible to the Interdependency systems?”

  “There was a collapse of the Flow streams to and from it.”

  “How did that collapse happen?”

  “It was a natural event,” Rachela I said.

  “Are you lying to me right now?”

  “I am not intentionally lying to you. It’s possible I am telling you information you either think or know to be wrong, but if so it’s because the information of my own personal experience has been shown to be incorrect, not because I am dissembling.”

  “Did you wonder if there were other human systems out there? Besides Earth?”

  “In a casual or idle way, yes. Given what I knew about Flow streams while I was alive, it seemed possible that new ones could open up and then people from Earth would visit them. One of the most popular entertainments of my reign had that as its plot. It was called The Wizard of Oz. But it was never som
ething I gave much concern to. We were busy enough at the time.”

  Cardenia thought for a moment. “Are you the earliest person in the Memory Room? I mean, are there the memories and thoughts of anyone else in here besides emperoxs?”

  “No,” Rachela I said. “The Memory Room was specifically meant for emperoxs. The technology that operates this was banned by me for the use of anyone who is not an emperox. Not only this specific implementation of it, but any technological implementation that replicates its intent or effect.”

  “But the technology existed before you used it.”

  “Yes. It was very old technology dating back to Earth. I was looking to create a technology for this purpose, and one of the researchers checking various archives discovered it. It hadn’t been used, as far as I can tell, because the implementation cost is prohibitive for anyone who is not a state, or does not have access to the wealth of a state.”

  “How much does it cost to run this room?” Cardenia asked.

  “At this point very little, because the majority of the cost is in the past. The power and infrastructure for it are part of the carrying costs for the Xi’an habitat in general, which exists specifically for the purposes of the emperoxs. When extraordinary costs are incurred in its maintenance or upgrading, the imperial treasury simply creates the amount needed, increasing the money supply.”

  “That can’t be legal.”

  “It’s legal because I made it legal,” Rachela I said. “And in a larger sense governments print money for their own purposes. This is one of them.”

  “So there are no other examples of this technology being used, prior to this room.”

  “Not that I am aware of, no.”

  “Did it bother you that so much of our past is unknown?” Cardenia asked.

  “It’s not unknown,” Rachela said. “But it’s possible that large areas have been lost.”

  “How does that happen? We’ve been a highly technological, space-faring civilization from our beginning. It’s not like the Interdependency is like Earth, where humans had to invent fire, and wheels, and rockets.”

  “Those are all technologies,” Rachela I said. “History is not technology.”

  “You say that in the Memory Room,” Cardenia said, disbelieving.

  “The Memory Room is not memory,” Rachela said. “It is a means of preserving memory. A library is not information; it is a means of preserving information. In every case before memory or information can be stored, someone has to decide what must be stored. Someone must choose. Someone must curate.”

  “Your thoughts haven’t been curated in here,” Cardenia pointed out. “Every memory and thought and emotion you had, and that your successors had, is in here. That’s how it works.”

  “Yes,” Rachela I said. “All the memories and thoughts and emotions of only eighty-seven people to date, over the course of a thousand years, during which time countless billions have lived, each with memories and thoughts and emotions that no longer exist anywhere. They’re gone. We’re here. That’s the curation.”

  “So someone curated away an entire era of our history.”

  “It doesn’t have to have been intentional or malicious. As I mentioned before in reference to teaching, different eras have different priorities. They pick and choose and things fall to the wayside. When they fall away, whoever is next might not know how to find them to pick them up again.”

  “Or someone could have done it intentionally.”

  “Yes,” Rachela said. “Although hiding the past never works as well as simply neglecting it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When things are hidden, there will always be people who object, and who will then go out of their way to preserve and store what is being hidden, so that someone can find it later, either intentionally or by simply stumbling over it. This is why I never tried to hide alternative takes of history. It makes them more attractive to future historians when you do. I smothered them under strata of official history instead.”

  “Never hide, just overwhelm,” Cardenia joked.

  “It worked for me,” Rachela I said.

  Cardenia nodded at this and excused Rachela I, who winked out of existence. She sat there in the room, which was spare and unfurnished as always, and tried to think of where and how she might get the actual history of the time before the Interdependency. Of the time where the “Free Systems,” through their apparent stupidity and stubbornness, condemned their descendants to a terrifying free fall into chaos. Cardenia had to admit that if those people had been her immediate predecessors, she might want to bury their history too.

  But she had to know. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Chenevert, né King Tomas XII of Ponthieu, or his information. He had no particular reason to lie to her or to Marce. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and what Chenevert was claiming was the most extraordinary thing that Cardenia had ever heard. It had to be substantiated.

  And, well, how to do that? The Imperial Library at Hubfall had the single largest library in the Interdependency, with five hundred million volumes of work in print and electronic form dating back to the Racheline days. The Imperial Library at Xi’an—technically Cardenia’s personal library as emperox, although open to visitors and researchers—had twenty million volumes, with a specific emphasis on the lives and administrations of the emperoxs. Trying to comb through even the smaller of these two, even in the significantly smaller numbers of the appropriate area of study, would take more time than Cardenia had, and would probably require more time than the Interdependency had before everything collapsed. And then there were the literally billions of other books and documents and theses around the Interdependency.

  Never hide, just overwhelm, Cardenia thought. She thought about who it would be that would try to find the histories that had been hidden. And then she had another thought.

  Well, I am in the Memory Room.

  “Jiyi,” Cardenia said, calling forth the Memory Room’s default avatar, a creature without apparent age or gender. Jiyi appeared and stood before Cardenia, waiting.

  “This room stores the memories and thoughts of all of the previous emperoxs,” Cardenia said.

  “That’s correct,” said Jiyi.

  “What else does it store?”

  “It would help if you were more specific.”

  “What do you have on the Rupture?”

  “Are you asking about the notable third-century musical group, the motion picture from 877, or the pre-Interdependency historical event in which the Free Systems severed their connection with Earth and the Assembly?” Jiyi asked.

  * * *

  “So it’s true,” Marce said to Cardenia, that night, in bed.

  “Not just true, but hidden,” Cardenia said. “Jiyi said that within fifty years of the Rupture it was the agreed-upon policy to refer to it as a natural event rather than instigated by the Free Systems. No one wanted to own it.”

  “Because it was a terrible use of technology?”

  “Because the Free Systems almost starved. They were as economically dependent on the other systems in the Assembly and Earth’s confederation as we all are with each other. Jiyi says numerous people pointed this out at the time, but the political will was to turn their backs on the other two unions. After they all got done congratulating each other, there were food and resource riots. Hundreds of thousands died and the Free Systems started raiding each other before everything got all straightened out.”

  “They saw the folly of their ways.”

  “No, the old guard died off and then the next generation decided never to speak of it again. And it worked, mostly.”

  “Then how did Jiyi find it?”

  “You’re not going to like the answer,” Cardenia said.

  “I mean, I just found out today that Jiyi exists and lives in a secret room where you have conversations with ancestors who have been dead for hundreds of years, so I don’t know that anything you tell me will unsettle me more than that.�
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  “Jiyi goes through people’s stuff.”

  “Okay, you’re right, I don’t like that,” Marce said. “How does that even work?”

  “Jiyi is a thousand years old and has a mission to remember things. In that time it’s found its way to have its agents access every network across the Interdependency and find all the nooks and crannies where people store or access information. But not all information. The information that people actively try to hide. It sends its little programs out, and they find it and bring it back to Jiyi. Who then sits on it. Forever.”

  “Why secret information?”

  “Because non-secret information is already accessible. Jiyi’s programming doesn’t see the need to retrieve that. It only takes the information that’s hidden. Rachela programmed it that way. Or had it programmed that way, since I don’t think she was a programmer. I asked her about it today. She said, ‘When things are hidden, there are always people who will object.’ I guess she was the first.”

  “Why didn’t she just tell you that Jiyi had been doing that for a thousand years?”

  “Because she’s not a person. She’s a program and she only answers what you ask her. I didn’t ask her if Jiyi had the information.”

  “That sounds evasive to me.”

  “It sounds that way to me too.”

  “So Jiyi knows everything.”

  “No, Jiyi knows everything hidden. If it’s not hidden, Jiyi doesn’t record it because Jiyi doesn’t need to. It can just access that information like you or I do. But if it’s hidden it can disappear. And Jiyi doesn’t want that. It doesn’t mean Jiyi instantly knows everything that’s hidden. It’s not magic. It’s here and its agents are everywhere and it takes them time to come back. But Jiyi is patient like nothing else in the universe is patient. Sooner or later it finds everything it sets out to find. It may take decades or longer. But it finds it.”

  “I have so many questions about this,” Marce said. “None of them good.”

  “I don’t like it either,” admitted Cardenia. “And yet without it I wouldn’t know the truth about our past.”

  “That’s not entirely true. The information was out there. Jiyi found it. You could have found it, eventually.”