by John Scalzi
Proster pointed to the tablet with the trigger. “What’s the point of showing me this?”
“You said you were expecting something louder. I wanted to make the point to you that I could have been much louder, if I thought it suited my needs.” She took the tablet, closed the application, and handed the tablet to Proster. “Here. A souvenir. A little reminder that I didn’t have to just get rid of Deran. I could have taken out all the important Wu cousins and thrown the entire house into chaos. I had that option. I didn’t take it.”
Proster took the tablet. “I don’t know why not. I would have, in your situation.”
“Well. Perhaps if you weren’t in the room, Proster, I might have.”
Proster was momentarily startled. “Me?”
“You said it yourself. You’re the most senior Wu at this point. I don’t think you have plans to let anyone else have the general directorship after all this nonsense, do you?”
“It’s tradition for whoever holds the directorship of security not to run for the general directorship.”
Nadashe snorted, which then caused her to cough, ruining the moment. “Come on, Proster,” she said, nevertheless. “Things are a little past that now.”
“Nadash—Karen. Just because I thought Deran was a grasping fool who had no business running the House of Wu doesn’t mean I want that job for myself.”
“Who else is there?” Nadashe said. “You know your cousins. Do any of them fit the bill? Especially now, when there’s nothing to look forward to but crisis after crisis?”
Proster was silent at this, as Nadashe knew he would be. Proster might have been willing to let Nadashe poison Deran—and Nadashe was delighted to do so, as the two of them had a history that she felt obliged to revenge—but at the end of the day he was for the House of Wu through and through. He had been a power behind the throne long enough to know there was no one else among the Wus who merited that throne right now. Nadashe enjoyed watching Proster semi-grudgingly admit that to himself and picture himself—finally, irrefutably—running the most powerful house in the Interdependency.
Or, at least, the most powerful house for now.
“Come to your point,” Proster said, finally.
“My point is that right now, we can’t afford chaos.” Nadashe pointed to the tablet now in Proster’s possession. “Blowing up the directors would have caused chaos, but poisoning Deran potentially restores order. Restores the directors to their rightful position running the House of Wu. Offers you, who understands the need for order more than any of the other directors, a way to return things to how they’re supposed to be.”
Proster smirked at this. “I’m not buying the idea that you did this out of the goodness of your heart.”
“Of course I didn’t,” Nadashe agreed. “I had my own scores to settle. But I settled them—and only them. Doing anything else would have been ruinous. We’re at the end of days, Proster. What we do now determines whether we—whether any of us—survive what’s coming.”
“And how do I fit into this?”
Nadashe nodded again toward the tablet. “I’ve earned a little credit with you?”
“A little.”
“It’s fair to say your dear cousin the emperox is not the most popular person among the noble houses and the parliament at the moment.”
“Since she put a sizable percentage of both into prison recently on the count of treason, that’s fair to say,” Proster agreed.
“And you would agree that doing so has contributed to chaos at the worst possible time, for everyone.”
Proster regarded Nadashe. “If you say so.”
“Then what I’d like from you, Proster Wu, is to organize a little get-together for me. To talk to those whom our emperox has discomfited.”
“You understand how difficult that’s going to be,” Proster said, after a moment of goggling in disbelief. “The emperox already has all their houses under investigation. Your house has been disenfranchised. You”—he motioned around the mess—“aren’t exactly in good odor, or have the means to do much about that.”
“And again I say, if you really believed that, Proster, you wouldn’t be here now.”
Proster held up the tablet. “If you had been smart, you wouldn’t have given me this.”
“If you were smart, Proster, you would have realized by now that I wouldn’t have given you that if I didn’t have other ways of getting what I want from you.”
“Well, that sounds like a threat.”
“I’d rather call it insurance,” Nadashe said. “Which I won’t have to use anyway, since you and I want the same thing.”
“Which is?”
“Order. And survival. On our terms. Not your cousin’s.”
Proster thought about this for a minute. “You must truly hate Grayland,” he said.
“I don’t hate her,” Nadashe lied. “I think she’s in over her head. The problem is, when she drowns, she’s going to take all of us with her. You. Me. All the houses. And the Interdependency. I’d rather not drown.”
Proster stood. “I’m going to have to think about this.”
Nadashe stayed sitting. “Of course you are. When you’re done, you know where I am.” Proster nodded and headed out. “But, Proster.”
Proster paused by the door. “Yes?”
“Remember we don’t have much time.”
Proster grunted and left.
Nadashe sat alone in the mess, hating, and planning, and wondering, not entirely idly, how much time all of them actually had left.
Chapter 5
Not that long after it became clear that what they had together wasn’t just an awkward fling, and in fact Cardenia Wu-Patrick actually had the same mix of feelings for Marce Claremont that he had for her, and in more or less the same proportions, Marce’s new girlfriend, who also happened to be Emperox Grayland II of the Interdependency, gave him the first gift she would ever give him: a pocket watch.
“I didn’t get you anything,” he said to her when she gave it to him, in bed. She had, after a session of languorous sex that Marce strongly felt could have been described as actual lovemaking, reached over to a nightstand that was probably five hundred years old and worth more than Marce would make in his life, and pulled out the pocket watch, and told him that it was for him.
“Of course you didn’t give me anything,” Cardenia said. “What could you give me that I don’t already have? I mean that literally,” she said, after catching his look of feigned hurt. “You know I have actual warehouses full of things people give me, that I never see.” She held up the pocket watch. “In fact, that’s where this came from.”
“Your first gift to me is a regift?” Marce said in mock horror.
Cardenia smacked him, very lightly, on a shoulder. “Stop that. Anyway, it’s even worse than that. This wasn’t even given to me. My warehouse manager tells me it was given to Hui Yin III, which would make it about two hundred years old.”
“How did you find it?”
“I didn’t. I told someone I wanted a pocket watch, and they pulled a couple dozen out of storage for me to look at.”
“This story is getting more horrifyingly impersonal as you go along.”
“Yeah, I know,” Cardenia said, and raised up the pocket watch slightly. “But, when I saw this one, I immediately thought of you. So that makes it personal again.” She handed it over to Marce.
Marce took it and considered it, turning it over in his hand as he did so. The pocket watch was small but heavy for its size, which suggested to Marce that its workings were mechanical. It was a hunter-style pocket watch, with a finish that reminded Marce of pewter, although he suspected, as this had been a gift to an emperox, that the metal was something more dear than that. The engravings on both sides of the outer case were arcs of flowering vines, the centermost of which on the front was clearly a Fibonacci spiral, terminating in a stylized flower with a dozen petals. Marce opened the case to look at the watch face, which was simple and elegant. The watch
chain glimmered with tiny emeralds that were set in every few links.
“This is genuinely the nicest gift I’ve ever been given,” Marce said.
Cardenia beamed at this. “I’m glad.”
“I usually get stuffed animals or fruit.”
“I’ll remember that for next time.”
Marce felt the weight of the small object in his hand. “I’m terrified I’ll drop it or lose it or scratch it or something.”
“That would displease your emperox,” Cardenia said, in a comically low tone.
“It would displease me,” Marce replied.
Cardenia pointed at the inside of the case. “I had it engraved.”
Marce looked over, shocked. “You engraved it? To me?”
“Well, yes. Since I was giving it to you as a gift and all.”
“But you said it was a couple hundred years old. It probably belongs in an actual museum.”
Cardenia smiled and kissed Marce. “And if it were from a museum, I could still have it engraved, and then it would become even more historically valuable. Because I am emperox. Which is ridiculous, but true.” She tapped the pocket watch in Marce’s hand. “Hundreds of years from now, maybe it will be in a museum, and people in the future will wonder what the inscription means.”
“What did you have inscribed?”
“Read it.”
Marce moved his hand slightly to angle the inside watch cover to where he could read the inscription. The inscription design matched that of the rest of the watch; if he hadn’t known otherwise, Marce would have thought that it had always been there as part of the watch’s original design. To Marce Claremont, imperial timekeeper, it read, followed by symbols he did not recognize.
“That’s Chinese,” Cardenia said. “That’s where on Earth the Wu family was originally from.”
“What does it say?”
“It says ‘This is our time.’” Cardenia made a face. “Probably. It was a machine translation. Sorry.”
“So now I’m imperial timekeeper?”
“It’s not an official title. But you’re the one who told me what was happening with the Flow. You’re the one who knows better than anyone else how much time we have before it collapses entirely. You know how much time we have left.”
“That’s … not entirely cheerful,” Marce said.
“Well, that’s the public explanation.” Cardenia stretched and then snuggled into Marce. “Also, you’re keeping time with the emperox. You’re the imperial timekeeper.”
Marce carefully set the pocket watch onto the small table on his side of the bed. “That’s a terrible pun.”
“Yes it is,” Cardenia agreed. “But as long as you get to keep time with me, do you care?”
Marce did not.
But Marce did think of his new, officially unofficial title in the days and weeks that followed. He thought about it as he took the data that he, his father, and the late Hatide Roynold had gathered about the collapse of the Flow in the Interdependency, and added to it both all the current and historical Interdependency Flow travel data that the emperox had ordered be handed over to him and the immense amount of Flow data from outside the Interdependency that he had been provided by Tomas Chenevert, the (former, and late) King of Ponthieu.
The new data had given him a set a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the one he had before. This allowed him to better estimate when the long-stable set of Flow streams that defined the Interdependency would collapse, and when and where a new, far less stable set of Flow streams—the Evanescence, as he and Hatide had called it—would appear, and how long those streams would last before they, too, collapsed into nothingness.
The more Marce worked the data, the more he realized that Cardenia, his emperox and lover, was correct. By this time nearly every Flow physicist in the Hub system was working with his data set, and most of them in the other systems had at least started in on it. But none of them, save for his father and Hatide, had worked with it as long—and his father had had no new data for more than a year, and Hatide was dead.
Which meant that no one else alive could see the data like him, synthesize it like he could, grasp it holistically as he was able to, and manipulate the data as well, to provide the emperox and her advisors with the best and most accurate predictions.
Marce did not flatter himself into thinking this advantage was a result of his own native ability. There were dozens if not hundreds of Flow physicists more naturally talented than he was, starting with his own father, who had been the first among them to see the Flow collapse staring out at him from the earliest data. Marce’s advantage had come simply from time spent seeing and working the problem. He imagined he would be superseded soon enough.
Until that time, however, he was, in fact, the imperial timekeeper, the one person who knew, best of all, how much time the Interdependency had left.
And yet.
The more Marce looked at the data, the more he thought he should be something more.
“Look here,” Marce said to Tomas Chenevert, and pointed. The two of them were on Chenevert’s ship, the Auvergne, Marce because he had come to value the friendship with Chenevert that had been formed in duress, and Chenevert because in a sense he was the Auvergne, and it was the place he could best apparate and exist.
Marce was directing Chenevert’s attention to a simulation of the Flow streams of the Interdependency over the next several years. It was highly accelerated; in it, the formerly stable Flow streams glowed in blue and disappeared suddenly and permanently, while the evanescent streams flickered in and out in red. As the simulation continued, the predictive confidence of the simulation decreased, represented by the blue streams wobbling as they entered their estimated collapse window, and the red streaks fading to white the less confident the simulation was. The simulation was streaked with flickering reds, fading whites and wobbly blues.
“What am I supposed to be looking at aside from a seizure hazard?” Chenevert asked.
Marce stopped the simulation, ran it back, and started it again. “Watch the evanescent Flow streams,” he said.
Chenevert watched the simulation again, paying special attention to the red streaks, and later, the white ones. “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” he said.
“Look again.” Marce reached to run back the simulation.
Chenevert held up a hand. “I could watch a thousand times more and still not see whatever it is that you want me to see, Marce.”
Marce frowned. “I thought you of all people—”
“Me, of all people?” Chenevert smiled. “Does this have something to do with the fact that I’m no longer human, and exist through the good graces of this ship’s computer?”
“Well, yes,” Marce said.
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“But you run this whole ship. Mostly subconsciously. You kind of are this ship. A Flow space–capable ship.”
“Could you run this ship, Marce?”
“What? No.”
“But it’s a Flow space–capable ship, and you know all about Flow space.”
“Yes, but that’s entirely—oh, okay, I get where you’re going.”
“I thought you might, you’re smart.”
“Still, I would think having access to the processing of this ship would make understanding Flow physics easier,” Marce said.
“It might, but I’d still have to take the time to learn it and incorporate it.” Chenevert tapped his virtual head. “The model of me that exists in this ship is still mostly human. It can run the ship without thinking much about it in the same way that you can breathe without mostly thinking about it. But if you want me to learn Flow physics, you’ll have to give me time.”
“How much time?” Marce asked.
“Probably less than you would have to give someone else. But still more time than you would think.” Chenevert motioned to the simulation. “So in the interim, perhaps you should just tell me what I’m supposed to be seeing, rather than expecti
ng me to see it.”
“That’s just it,” Marce said, and started the simulation again. “There’s something about how the evanescent streams are appearing that’s bugging me, and I needed someone else to look at it to see if they see it. Because whatever it is, I can’t quite grasp it. It’s there, I can feel it, but…” Marce shrugged. “Feel doesn’t cut it.”
“There are other Flow physicists,” Chenevert noted.
Marce shook their head. “They’re all still catching up.”
“As opposed to me?”
“Well, I overestimated you.” Marce paused and then looked over to Chenevert. “Sorry. That came out wrong.”
Chenevert laughed at this. “It came out fine. I understand you.”
“If Hatide were still alive, she could see it, maybe,” Marce said. “This is mostly based on her data.”
Chenevert watched the simulation. “The evanescent streams look like they’re appearing randomly to me,” he said.
“As far as I can tell, they are,” Marce said. “And their duration time is random too. Some last for an hour. Some last for almost a year.”
“No pattern or rhythm to it.”
“Not that I can see and not that shows up in the data.”
“What do you feel about this?” Chenevert asked. “You said you feel something about it.”
“What I feel is that there is a pattern,” Marce said. “Not a pattern, exactly. But something not random about it, either.” He threw up his hands. “I don’t have words for it.”
“Because it’s math,” Chenevert suggested.
“Yes, but I don’t know that I have the math for it, either. But—” Marce shrugged again. “I don’t know. I feel like if I could figure it out then I could buy everyone more time.”
“That you could stop the collapse of the Flow streams.”
Marce shook his head. “No, not that.” He motioned to the blue lines, some wobbly, some not, all eventually disappearing. “The collapse of these Flow streams is a near certainty. All we can do about those is try to predict them accurately so people can prepare. These, I get.” He motioned to the red and white streams. “These I don’t. They’re the ones I’m interested in now.”
