The Collapsing Empire Read online

  “Yes.”

  “What happens if anyone else enters? Are there dogs? Lasers that will burn you to ash?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Can your servants go in there? Or technicians? Are you, as emperox, responsible for tidying up? Is there a small vacuum cleaner in there? Are you made to dust the place?”

  “I don’t think you’re taking this very seriously,” Cardenia said.

  “I take it seriously,” Naffa promised. “I’m just skeptical of how it’s being presented.”

  They both looked at the door.

  “Well?” Naffa said. “You might as well get it over with.”

  “Where are you going to be?”

  “I can stay here if you like and wait for you to be done.”

  Cardenia shook her head. “I don’t know how long this will take.”

  “Then I’ll be in my quarters, the ones across the palace, you know, where the palace majordomo has exiled me.”

  “We’ll get those changed.”

  “No, don’t,” Naffa said. “You need your time away from everyone, including me.” She got up. “We’re still in the same house. I’m just sixteen wings away, is all.”

  “I don’t think the palace has sixteen wings.”

  “It has twenty-four major sections to it.”

  “Well, you would know.”

  “Yes, I would,” Naffa said. “And soon so will you.” She bowed. “Good night, Your Majesty.” She left, smiling. Cardenia watched her go, and then turned her attention to the door.

  The door was ornate, like everything in the palace, and Cardenia realized that “ornate” was a design motif she was probably stuck with now; she couldn’t just burn everything down and start with clean lines and spaces, tempting as it might be. She was emperox but even they had their limits.

  The door had no knob or access panel or anything else that suggested that it could be opened. Cardenia, sheepishly, put her hand on it to feel for a secret button.

  The door slid open.

  Keyed to my fingerprints? Cardenia wondered, and then walked through. The door slid closed behind her.

  The room inside was large; as large as the bedroom in the imperial quarters, which made this single room larger than the apartments Cardenia grew up in. The room was bare, except for a single bench that jutted out from the wall to her left. Cardenia went and sat on it.

  “I’m here,” she said, to no one in particular.

  A figure of light appeared in the center of the room and walked toward her. Cardenia looked up as the figure approached; microprojectors in the ceiling were creating the image walking over to her now. Cardenia idly wondered at the physics behind it, but only for a second, because now the image was directly in front of her.

  “Emperox Grayland II,” it said, and bowed.

  “You know who I am,” Cardenia said, skipping the imperial “we.”

  “Yes,” the image said. It had no identifiable signs of gender or age. “I am Jiyi. You are in the Memory Room. Please tell me how I may assist you.”

  Cardenia knew why she was there but hesitated. “Does anyone other than the emperox come in here?”

  “No,” Jiyi said.

  “What if I invite someone?”

  “Focused light and sound waves would make it unbearable for anyone other than the reigning emperox to come through the door.”

  “Can’t I override that?”

  “No.”

  “I am the emperox.” And I am arguing with a machine, Cardenia thought but did not say.

  “The injunction was made by the Prophet,” Jiyi said, “whose order is inviolable.”

  This took Cardenia aback. “This room dates to the reign of the first emperox,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Xi’an didn’t exist then.”

  “The room was moved from Hubfall, with other elements of the palace, when Xi’an was founded. The rest of the palace was built around it.”

  The image of the space station of Xi’an being built around the imperial palace popped into Cardenia’s mind, so absurd as to be almost comical. “So you are a thousand years old,” she said, to Jiyi.

  “The information I store dates back to the founding of the Interdependency,” Jiyi said. “The physical machinery it is stored on is regularly updated, as are the functional elements of this room and the manifestation you see in front of you.”

  “I thought you said no one may enter this room but the emperox.”

  “Automated maintenance, ma’am,” Jiyi said, and Cardenia thought she heard just the slightest edge of humor in the voice. Which made her first feel a bit stupid, and then curious.

  “Are you alive, Jiyi?” she asked.

  “No,” Jiyi said. “Nothing you encounter in this room is alive, excepting you, ma’am.”

  “Of course,” Cardenia said, only a little disappointed.

  “I sense we have carried this specific conversation to an end,” Jiyi said. “May I assist you otherwise?”

  “Yes,” Cardenia said. “I would like to speak to my father.”

  Jiyi nodded and faded out. As it did so, another form coalesced, in the center of the room.

  It was Cardenia’s father, Batrin, lately Emperox Attavio VI. He appeared, looked toward his daughter, smiled, and walked over to her.

  The Memory Room was established by the Prophet-Emperox Rachela I not long after the foundation of the Interdependency, and her ascendance as its first emperox. Each emperox was fitted with a personal network of sensors running through their body that captured not only every sight seen, and every sound heard or spoken by the emperox, but every other sensation, action, emotion, thought, and desire apprehended or produced by them as well.

  Within the Memory Room were the thoughts and memories of every emperox of the Interdependency, dating back to the very first, the Prophet-Emperox Rachela I herself. If Cardenia wanted, she could ask any one of her predecessors any question, about them, about their reign, about their time. They would answer from memory, from the thoughts and recordings and the computer modeling of who they were, girded on decades of every single thing about their internal lives recorded for this very room.

  There was only one destination for this information: the Memory Room. There was only one audience for it: the current emperox.

  Cardenia subconsciously touched the back of her neck again, in the place where the network seed was implanted, to grow inside her. One day, everything I do as emperox will be in here, she thought. For my own child and their children to see. Every emperox will know who I was, better than history will.

  She looked at the apparition of her father, now directly in front of her, and shuddered.

  The apparition noticed. “Are you not happy to see me?” it asked.

  “I saw you just a few hours ago,” Cardenia said, standing up from the bench, and looking over the apparition of her father. It was perfect. Almost touchable. Cardenia did not touch it. “You were dead then.”

  “I still am,” Attavio VI said. “The consciousness that was me is gone. Everything else was stored.”

  “So you’re not conscious now?”

  “I’m not, but I can respond to you as if I were. You may ask me anything. I will tell you.”

  “What do you think of me?” Cardenia asked, blurting it out.

  “I always thought you were a nice young lady,” Attavio VI said. “Smart. Attentive to me. I don’t think you’ll make a very good emperox.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because right now the Interdependency has no need of a nice emperox. It never does, but it can tolerate one when nothing consequential is going on. This is not one of those times.”

  “I wasn’t particularly nice to the executive committee today,” Cardenia said, hearing how defensive the words sounded coming out of her mouth.

  “I’m sure that in the wake of my death, for your very first meeting with them, the executive committee made a fine show of being restrained and deferential. Also, they are seeing at
what length of chain you’re most comfortable, in order for them to get every single thing they want from you. They’ll yank on that chain presently.”

  “I’m not sure I like this entirely honest you,” Cardenia said, after a moment.

  “If you like we can adjust my conversational model to be more like I was in life.”

  “You’re telling me you lied to me in life.”

  “No more than to anyone else.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “In life I was human, with an ego, just like anyone else. I had my own desires and intentions. Here I am nothing but memory, here for the purpose of assisting you, the current emperox. I have no ego to flatter, and will flatter yours only if ordered to. I would not suggest it. It makes me less useful.”

  “Did you love me?”

  “It depends on what you mean by love.”

  “That sounds like an evasive, ego-filled answer.”

  “I was fond of you. You were also inconvenient until the moment you were needed for succession. When you became the crown princess I was relieved you didn’t hate me. You couldn’t have been blamed if you had.”

  “When you died you said you wished you had had time to love me better.”

  Attavio VI nodded. “That sounds like something I would say. I imagine I meant it in the moment.”

  “You don’t remember it.”

  “Not yet. My final moments have not yet been uploaded.”

  Cardenia dropped the subject. “I chose the imperial name of Grayland II, as you suggested.”

  “Yes. That information, at least, is in our database. And, good.”

  “I read up on her.”

  “Yes, I had planned to ask you to.”

  “You did, before you died. Why did you ask me to name myself for her?”

  “Because I hoped it would inspire you to take seriously what’s coming next, and what it would require from you,” Attavio VI said. “Do you know about the Count of Claremont, on End?”

  “I do,” Cardenia said. “An old lover of yours.”

  Attavio VI smiled. “No, not at all. A friend. A very good friend, and a scientist. One who brought me information that no one else had, and that no one else would have wanted to see. One who needed to do his work and research insulated from the stupidities of court, and government, and even of the community of scientists in the Interdependency. He’s someone who has been collecting data for more than thirty years now. He knows more about what’s coming next than anyone else. A thing you must be prepared for. A thing you are not in the least prepared for, now. And a thing I worry that you will not be strong enough to see through.”

  Cardenia stared at the apparition of Attavio VI, which stood there, a small, pleasant, distracted smile on its face.

  “Well?” Cardenia said, finally. “What is it?”

  Chapter

  4

  “Who here knows what the Interdependency is?” Marce Claremont asked, from the well of the planetarium.

  From the chairs of the planetarium, the hands of several eight-year-olds shot upward. Marce scanned the hands, looking for the one who seemed to most urgently need to answer the question. He picked a hand sitting in the second arc of chairs. “Yes? You.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” the child said. Behind the child, Marce saw one of the adult chaperones roll her eyes, get up, grab the child by the hand, and start walking him to the bathrooms. Then he picked another kid.

  “It’s the nation of systems we all live in,” said the girl.

  “That’s right,” Marce said, and pressed a button on his tablet to dim the lights and start his presentation. “It’s the nation of systems in which we live. But what does that really mean?”

  Before he could continue, the planetarium rocked slightly as what sounded like two interceptors buzzed the university science center the planetarium was part of. The children started at the noise, the chaperones trying to hush them and telling them everything would be all right.

  Marce doubted everything was actually going to be all right. The University of Opole, which housed the science center, was far from the capital and the focus of the fighting. But in the last week things had taken a decisive turn against the duke and his loyalist forces, and now even the far provinces had sprouted rebels, and the violence that came with revolution.

  He’d been surprised when this bus full of children had showed up at the science center today; he had assumed that all the schools had canceled their classes, like the university had. Then he saw the look on the faces of the adults who had brought the children. They appeared grimly determined to give the kids as commonplace an experience as they could, for as long as they could.

  Marce, who was in point of fact the only member of the non-janitorial staff to show up on this particular morning, and then only to collect some materials that were not already on the network, didn’t dare let them down. He brought them all down to the planetarium and dug into his brain to remember the standard presentation about the Interdependency that the tour docents usually gave.

  “It’s all right,” he said, to the children. “Those aircraft were just passing by. We’re just on their flight path, that’s all. The university is safe.” This was also probably not true, since the University of Opole had more than its share of rebel sympathizers, ranging from stoned students looking for a movement to join, to reflexively contrarian professors who enjoyed sticking it to the duke while still retaining tenure. Most of them, students and faculty, were probably down in a cellar at the moment. Marce, who was personally resolutely apolitical, for all the good it did him, did not blame them at all.

  Be that as it may, there was no point panicking eight-year-olds about the possibility of the university being occupied either by rebels or by the duke’s troops. Right now, Marce’s job was keeping them distracted. Today might be the last relatively normal day they’d have for a while. Might as well make the most of it.

  Marce touched his tablet again, and a star field leapt out of the projector into the empty space above the well of the planetarium, accompanied by soothing, tinkling music. The eight-year-olds, apprehensive just five seconds earlier, oohed and aahed at the sight. So did the adults.

  “What you’re seeing now are all the stars that exist in the area that holds the Interdependency,” Marce said. “From Hub to End, all of the stars we live around are here. Does anyone want to guess which one we are?”

  The children shot out their fingers, all at entirely different points of light. From his tablet, Marce tapped on one of the stars. The projected image zoomed in toward a single star and when it stopped, showed a solar system of five planets; two terrestrial, three gas giants. “This is us,” he said. “The second planet out from our sun. This is End, called that because it’s located as far away from anything else in the Interdependency as you can go.”

  Marce pulled back out into the full star field. “Now, all of these stars are in the space the Interdependency claims for its own, but not all of them have systems that humans can live in. In fact, of these more than five thousand star systems, only forty-seven of them have humans in them.” He made the star systems of the Interdependency glow more brightly, so the children could see them. The systems were not generally close to each other in space; they seemed randomly distributed, diamonds among grains of sand.

  “Why are they all so far apart?” asked one of the children, rather conveniently, for the purposes of the next part of the standard presentation.

  “Excellent question!” Marce said. “Now, you might think that all the human systems would be huddled close together so they would be easy to travel to, but all the systems are connected not in space, but by the Flow.”

  A bunch of lines arched out of the human systems, connecting them to each other system, prompting another set of appreciative coos from the children.

  “The Flow is like a super shortcut through space,” Marce said. “Normally, it would take years or even centuries for humans to get from one star system to the next.
Even the closest systems are a few light-years away from each other, and using regular drives, even that relatively short distance would take twenty or thirty years for us to cross. Even our most advanced starships, called ‘tenners,’ can’t make that trip. With the Flow, we can travel between systems in weeks or months at most. But, here’s the catch: We can only travel to the systems where the Flow is nearby.”

  He zoomed in to another system, this one with ten planets, and zoomed in further. “Does anyone know which planet this is?” There was no answer. “This is called Hub, and it’s the capital of the Interdependency. Does anyone want to guess why?”

  “Because that’s where the emperox lives?”

  “Well, yes, but the emperox lives there for a reason, and the reason is this.” Marce tapped his tablet and the planet of Hub was surrounded by what looked like a whirlpool of lines, swirling in the space above the world. “Hub is the one place in the Interdependency where all the Flow streams converge—it’s the only place you can get directly from and to nearly every system in the Interdependency. That makes it the most important planet for trade and travel. If we couldn’t travel through Hub, some systems in the Interdependency would be years away from each other. That’s why the planet is called ‘Hub.’ It’s the center of our universe, so to speak.”

  “Can’t we just make a path in the Flow between planets?” This question was from one of the adults, who apparently had gotten so sucked into the presentation that he forgot question time was for the children.

  “We’d like to but we can’t,” Marce said, answering anyway. “The Flow isn’t something that we control, and really, if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s something that we don’t understand very well. It’s like a natural feature of the universe. We can access it but we can’t really do anything with it but go where it’s going anyway. In fact, that makes for one of the really unusual features about the Interdependency.”

  Marce zoomed out, wiped the star field, and put up a grid of the forty-seven systems of the Interdependency. The systems featured stars ranging from red dwarfs to sun-like yellow stars, harboring anywhere between one and a dozen major planets. The images of the systems were not to scale and showed the planets zooming along in their orbits, some so quickly it was comical. A few of the children laughed.