by John Scalzi
Obviously, she didn’t want to become less selfish. To reiterate, being fundamentally selfish had worked out great for her, and she saw no reason to change things up. To be completely honest about it, what she really wanted to do at this very moment was take Senia home and fuck her brains out, because if Kiva was going to try out this whole monogamy thing for a change, and she was, then she wanted to get full value out of it. And while, yes, Senia was likely to get some benefit out of that (and, well, had, if her testimonials were to be believed), that’s not why Kiva was doing it. She was doing it for herself. Doing things (and Senia) for herself was working out great for everyone.
Therefore, it had to be others who were going to have to make a change.
Which was going to be a challenge. It’s not like anyone else who was fundamentally selfish wanted to change what they were doing, either.
More relevantly, Kiva recognized something else: Things had reached a certain tipping point for selfish and self-interested human beings. As far as Kiva could tell, whenever selfish humans encountered a wrenching, life-altering crisis, they embarked on a journey of five distinct stages:
Denial.
Denial.
Denial.
Fucking Denial.
Oh shit everything is terrible grab what you can and run.
Bagin Heuvel’s appearance in her office, and his strategy of attack, suggested that phase five was well and truly underway.
This would make things more difficult for Kiva, as people committed to grabbing as much as they could before everything went to shit were resistant to a sudden shift to altruism.
Which was fine. Kiva liked a challenge.
The door to Kiva’s office opened and Bunton Salaanadon, her executive assistant, came through. “Lady Kiva,” he said.
“Time to head to the shuttle,” Kiva said to him.
“No,” Salaanadon said, and then held up a hand to correct himself. “Yes. But that’s not why I came in.”
“Then why did you?”
“News from the House of Wu.”
“What is it?” The emperox was a member of the House of Wu even if she didn’t involve herself in its day-to-day affairs. It was possible this had something to do with her. “Is this about the emperox?”
Salaanadon shook his head. “It’s Deran Wu.”
“Oh, that piece of shit.” Speaking of the self-interested, Deran Wu was a real piece of work on that score. “What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“Murdered.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“I … was not aware that anyone would suspect you, Lady Kiva.”
“Do we know who did it?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, does the emperox know? About any of this?”
Chapter 3
Cardenia Wu-Patrick woke up a half hour before her alarm was set because her lover, Marce, was a snorer. Normally Cardenia was able to filter it out, background white noise that the brain knew to discount and disregard. But for the last couple of days Marce had been fighting a cold, which made his snoring both louder and more random. When it woke Cardenia up, Marce sounded like he was two cavemen having a very urgent conversation with each other about discovering fire, or hunting a feral hog, or something else along that line.
Cardenia didn’t mind. She found it endearing. She and Marce were still early enough in their relationship that their faults were still endearing rather than annoying to each other; or, at least, Cardenia still found Marce’s faults endearing, and Marce was either too gallant or too circumspect to say anything about hers. Cardenia idly wondered if they would ever get to the point where faults weren’t endearing, and rather than amusedly tolerating his snoring, she would seek to smother him with a pillow. She had never been in a relationship that lasted that long. She imagined that even as she was smothering her beloved she would be delighted that they had managed to get to that point.
In the meantime, she lay there, arm draped across Marce’s chest, as the conversation between the two cavemen that he was snoring out came to a conclusion and the participants decamped, perhaps in search of a mastodon. Marce quieted down to his usual low level of snore. Cardenia lightly ran her fingers across his chest, not so lightly as to tickle him but not heavily enough to wake him, and not for the first time marveled that the two of them had gotten together. It was unlikely for several reasons. And yet, here they were.
She stayed there for a few minutes more, resting in that liminal area between dozing and full wakefulness, enjoying the warmth of Marce radiating into her. Then five minutes before she knew her alarm would wake them both, she sighed, grumbled slightly, and slid herself out of bed, careful not to wake her lover. The slippers and robe were where she had placed them the evening before; she put herself into each, and then whispered at the clock to dismiss the alarm. She needed to go to work, but there was no reason Marce couldn’t sleep in. Maybe the cavemen would come back for a further conference.
Cardenia showered, toweled, brushed her hair into submission, and then in her dressing room put on undergarments and a dressing gown. At this point, she had two options: One, walk through a door to her immediate left, behind which waited her wardrobe, hair and makeup crew, along with Nera Chernin, her morning staffer, who would go over her day’s itinerary, which would go from the instant she stepped out of makeup to some as-yet-indeterminate point roughly twelve to fifteen hours in the future, and possibly later than that.
Two, walk through another door entirely and have a conversation with those who lay beyond it. Going through this second door would not allow her to avoid dealing with Chernin and all the rest of her minions; it would just delay the inevitable by however long it was she chose to stay.
And either way, it would not change the fact that, through the mere act of stepping through a doorway, she would stop being Cardenia Wu-Patrick, and become Grayland II, Emperox of the Holy Empire of the Interdependent States and Mercantile Guilds, Queen of Hub and Associated Nations, Head of the Interdependent Church, Successor to Earth and Mother to All, Eighty-Eighth Emperox of the House of Wu.
Cardenia looked at both doors, sighed, and walked to the second one, which opened for her without prompting. Grayland II stepped through.
The room into which Grayland had entered was large, and sparse to the point of being almost featureless; only a long bench, molded straight out of the wall, offered a break in the room’s clean and almost antiseptic lines. It was, perhaps, a room not meant to be loitered in. Nevertheless, Grayland sat herself on the bench, made herself as comfortable as it allowed, and called for the room’s primary occupant.
“Jiyi,” Grayland said.
Hidden projectors flicked on, and in the middle of the room a sexless, genderless humanoid being was called into existence. It looked to Grayland, walked over to her sitting form, and nodded.
“Emperox Grayland II,” Jiyi said, as it always did. “How may I assist you?”
Grayland considered the form standing before her. This room was called the Memory Room. The thoughts and emotional states of every single previous emperox were in it—down to the very first, the Prophet-Emperox Rachela I—recorded by a neural network that each emperox, including Grayland, had embedded in their brains. Jiyi was the interface each living emperox used to access their predecessors; all one had to do was ask to see one, and Jiyi would bring them out, one at a time or together, as many as the living emperox wished to speak to.
All the previous emperoxs save one thought that had been all there was to Jiyi—an interface to other emperoxs, with some basic AI for other general information retrieval. But Grayland had recently learned that Rachela I, the first emperox, had built Jiyi with another function entirely: to seek out and find hidden information throughout the Interdependency.
In this task, Jiyi was neither fast nor efficient—some hidden information could take years or even decades to come to Jiyi’s databases—but what Jiyi lacked in speed and guile, it made up f
or in relentlessness. Sooner or later, everything hidden was revealed to Jiyi.
And now, because she knew, to Grayland as well.
“Deran Wu has been dead for twelve hours now,” Grayland said to Jiyi. “Do you know who did it yet?”
“I do not,” Jiyi said.
“Have you discovered anything that might suggest a specific culprit?”
“After his murder became public there was a surge of communications from high-ranking members of important noble and mercantile houses,” Jiyi said. “These communications were all encrypted, as is standard with nearly all their communication. It will take me some time to access them either through decryption or other means.”
“Define what ‘some time’ means here.”
“If I need to use brute force decryption, it can take decades. This is usually not necessary because there are other routes to get the information, such as accessing security cameras that show the screens with the information.”
“You read over their shoulder,” Grayland mused.
“Yes,” Jiyi said. “At the moment, none of the secure messages I’ve seen indicate certain knowledge of events, save for the communications from eyewitnesses themselves.”
“And none of them have written anything about sending final payments on a contract.”
“No.”
Grayland scrunched up her face. “Because that would make my life easier, you know, if you found all that today.”
“I understand,” Jiyi said, and Grayland wondered, not for the first time, if Jiyi really did. Jiyi was, by design, as aggressively blank as the Memory Room.
“Is there any new information that you have that I should be aware of?”
“About Deran Wu’s assassination or in a more general sense?”
“About both.”
“No other information about Deran Wu. More generally, several of the noble houses have secretly begun to transfer some of their wealth to End, and are planning to have key and critical members of each house follow.”
Grayland II nodded at this. She didn’t need a secret-sniffing millennium-old artificial intelligence to tell her that it had finally sunk into the heads of the noble families and the mercantile guilds they controlled that the Flow was actually collapsing, and that maybe they would want to preserve at least some of their wealth and send it to the one place in the Interdependency that, in theory, had the capability to survive beyond a few decades at best. She had enough legitimate security and financial reports to signal that. They would take up at least some of her day today, and she suspected progressively more of her days to come.
Worry about that later, she thought. She was in the Memory Room for the death of Deran Wu, and what the implications of that were. Jiyi, for all its usefulness, was not the person she needed to speak to about that. She needed someone who had actual lived experience dealing with the Interdependency, and the noble houses, and specifically, the House of Wu. She asked Jiyi for one person in particular.
“Dead from his tea,” said the Emperox Attavio VI, or more accurately, the exquisitely rendered simulation of him. In addition to being the former emperox, Attavio VI also happened to be Grayland’s father.
Grayland nodded, and then grimaced. “Well. We don’t know if it was Deran’s tea. The teacup itself might have been poisoned. Or there might have been components in both the tea and the cup that would become a poison when mixed together. The investigators are still looking into it.”
“But it was definitely poison,” said Attavio VI.
“Oh, yes.”
“There was no effort to disguise the poisoning, as a heart attack or a stroke, for example.”
“No.”
“There are no obvious suspects.”
“Deran’s personal assistant Witka Chinlun served him the tea and was questioned about it. They’re keeping her in custody, but as I understand it no one considers it likely that she knew about the poison. She’s apparently in shock, and is cooperating fully.”
“You feel bad for her?”
“She poisoned her boss unintentionally, Dad. That’s a lot.”
“Yes it is,” Attavio VI agreed. “You’re telling me all of this for a reason. What is it?”
“I wanted to know what you thought about it.”
“I don’t think anything about it. I don’t actually think.”
Grayland bit her cheek for a minute, holding back a thought, as it related to Attavio VI, Jiyi and all the other emperoxs. And then, remembering that the Attavio VI in front of her was indeed a simulation, she said it anyway. “I don’t think that’s true.”
“That I don’t actually think?”
“Yes. We’ve been doing this too long and I’ve had too many conversations with you where you ask questions and offer advice. You couldn’t do that if you didn’t think.”
“That’s not accurate,” Attavio VI said. “At least in the way you think about thinking. This simulation is very good at heuristic approximation. I can offer supposition informed by my life experience and based on the stored model of how I thought when I was alive.”
That’s pretty much what thinking is, Grayland said to herself, but stopped herself from voicing the thought. She was aware that once again she was getting pulled into the teleological weeds about the fact she could have a conversation with her dead father, or a facsimile thereof, and that this was not going to help her with her current set of issues.
Grayland sighed. Our civilization is collapsing and yet Deran Wu still got poisoned, she thought. If nothing else, it marked a commitment to nefariousness that Grayland could almost respect if it hadn’t also made her life more complicated.
Attavio VI, or the facsimile thereof, stood patiently while his daughter ran all of this through her head. He would stand patiently for years, if necessary. The reanimated dead were nothing if not patient.
“Let me rephrase,” Grayland said to the apparition of her father. “What would you have thought about it, when you could have thought about it?”
“Deran’s death is meant to send a message,” Attavio VI replied.
“How do you mean?”
“Your cousin was openly assassinated. Poisoned with his favorite tea. There was no attempt to hide the fact that he’d been poisoned, which would have been relatively easy to do. Whoever killed him wanted it known that he had been killed.”
“Terrorism,” Grayland suggested.
“Possibly,” Attavio VI agreed. “Or it could be something else. Has any organization claimed the death?”
“The usual groups who claim anything awful that happens,” Grayland said. “My security people say none of them had anything to do with it.”
“So, no serious claims for the assassination.”
“No.”
“Then it’s possible that it’s not terrorism,” Attavio VI said. “Or if it is, that its goal is a long-term one, not one for immediate gain.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t have enough information to go on. Who would want Deran Wu dead?”
Grayland smirked at that. “Roughly half the noble houses, a large number of military officers and ministers of parliament, and probably every single member of the former governing board of the House of Wu.”
“And you,” Attavio VI said.
“Excuse me?” Grayland blinked at this.
“If memory serves, Deran Wu was part of the conspiracy against your rule.”
Grayland smiled briefly at this comment, and at its implicit acknowledgment that a simulation of a dead man would have knowledge of an event that took place long after his passing. “He turned against the conspiracy and gave up all its members,” she said.
“As may be. You wouldn’t be the first emperox to benefit from a turncoat’s information, only to move against him later.”
“Did you?” Grayland narrowed her eyes at her father. “Assassinate anyone like that?”
“No.”
“Did you have anyone assassinated?”
“Not openly,” A
ttavio VI said.
“‘Not openly’?”
“Assassination was not a tool I preferred to use. That said, there may have been times when I wished that someone would rid me of a turbulent priest.”
“You had priests killed?” Grayland was not aware of her father having any trouble with the Church of the Interdependency, which he would have been the (nominal) head of, as she was now.
“It’s an expression,” Attavio VI said. “You can look it up. My point is that I chose not to have assassination as part of my statecraft. You might ask your grandmother her thoughts about it, however. She would be likely to give you a very different answer.”
Grayland thought of Zetian III, her paternal grandmother, and gave a little shudder. Zetian III would not be remembered well by history, what little of it remained at this point.
Attavio VI noticed the shudder. “I am understanding that you also choose not to indulge in assassination.”
“No, I don’t.”
“That’s probably wise.”
“‘Probably’?”
“Assassination is never clean and always has consequences. But you rule in turbulent times,” Attavio VI said. Grayland noticed the reappearance of the word ‘turbulent.’ “You have survived two near-successful assassinations and one near-successful coup attempt. You might not be judged too harshly if you, as emperox, decided to speed up the justice that those who conspired against you deserved.”
Grayland considered the list of people who might be on her list, if she had one. It would be enough to keep her security forces busy until the Interdependency definitively collapsed. “We have other, more pressing concerns,” she said.
“Probably wise,” Attavio VI repeated. “If it wasn’t you who decided to end your cousin’s life, then it’s best to start going down the list of the people who would, and see where that leads.” This got a nod from Grayland. “This is presuming that you have any interest in discovering who assassinated him,” Attavio VI added. “Aside from a natural pro forma investigation.”
“Of course I do.”
“I repeat: He was part of a conspiracy against you.”
