The Last Emperox

by John Scalzi

  “Because?”

  Marce jabbed back at the blue lines. “Because these mean we’re dead,” he said. “There’s not enough time if these are all we have. We could commit every Flow-capable spacecraft that exists right now just to getting people to End, and that would still only get a few million people there. Out of billions of people. Everyone else gets what happened at Dalasýsla.”

  Chenevert sobered at the name Dalasýsla. It was an Interdependency system whose Flow stream had collapsed eight hundred years before, stranding it and dooming the inhabitants there to a painful whittling of resources that went slow, and then terrifyingly fast, killing millions. “And yet there were some Dalasýslans who survived,” he said.

  “A few hundred,” Marce said. “And they weren’t doing all that well, if you recall.”

  “I do.”

  “There’s no time here,” Marce said, tilting his head toward the blue lines. “If we want to save more than a few, we have to look here.” He glanced toward the red. “We have to find more time. I have to find it.” He looked over to Chenevert again. “And I feel like I’m missing it. Whatever it is.”

  “Maybe it’s just not there,” Chenevert said, gently.

  “Maybe,” Marce said. “But I wouldn’t be a very good scientist if I just stopped looking now.”

  “Do you have the time for that? On top of everything else you’re meant to do.”

  “I’m the imperial timekeeper,” Marce said. “I have to try to save everyone. I guess I’ll make the time.”

  Chapter 6

  The imperial palace compound of Xi’an was immense—so large that it was said that an emperox could visit one room of it a day for their entire reign and still not have visited every single room. Whether or not this was an exaggeration was entirely dependent on the reign of any particular emperox, of course; absolutely true in the case of the Emperox Victoz I, who was emperox for thirteen days and died of anaphylactic shock due to mushroom powder being inadvertently present in the wildly allergic emperox’s mashed potatoes, possibly not true for Emperox Sizanne, who ascended to the throne at seventeen, lived to be one hundred and two, and was succeeded by her great-grandson.

  What was true was that no emperox had visited every single room in the imperial compound for the near millennium that it had existed on Xi’an, itself a habitat built expressly to be the home for the emperox and their court. The palace compound held not only the private apartments of the emperoxs and their families, but also the residences of various ministers and staff in apartments ranging from lavish to what were essentially bunkhouses.

  The imperial palace compound was also a place of work, festooned with offices, conference rooms, auditoriums and shops and cafeterias, not to mention storehouses, lavatories, gyms, janitorial closets and electrical rooms. There was a jail and a hotel (not close by each other), several post offices for mail both interoffice and interplanetary, a fabrication room, and an entire wing of secure offices and interview rooms where either you needed very high clearance or to have done something genuinely awful, or both, to see the inside of.

  Grayland II had not done anything awful, but she was the emperox, and therefore had sufficiently high clearance to be inside the secure wing of the compound. In point of fact she had not been into the secure wing before; her own apartments and offices had their own secure rooms that not only rivaled but exceeded the security of this particular wing, and in any event, anyone who worked in the secure wing would come to her. For today’s briefing, however, her security people asked for it to be on their home turf, for logistical and technical reasons.

  Thus it was that Grayland II found herself walking through the offices of her imperial security forces, heading for a secure conference room at the back. Grayland came unaccompanied by staff and with only a bare minimum of her own personal bodyguards, who were hired and vetted by the security team housed in this wing of the palace.

  No one stared as Grayland, in the dark and unflashy attire she wore when she wasn’t being paraded around in public, walked through the corridor to the conference room. If you hadn’t have known she was the emperox, from the response to her presence you would think she was a middle-level bureaucrat at best. This was fine by Grayland, who continued to find the aura of the emperox one of the most exhausting things about the job.

  Grayland walked the corridor and into the conference room, where three people awaited her. She nodded to her bodyguards, who closed the door to the conference room and stationed themselves on the other side of it. As the door closed there were almost silent hissing and clicking sounds as the door sealed to the outside world. Until the door opened from the inside, it would take something close to a nuclear device to get into the room.

  “Your Majesty,” Hibert Limbar, chief of the Imperial Guard said, bowing. He motioned to the other two people in the room. “This is Koet Gamel, who runs the analytics section of Imperial Security. And this is Dontelu Sebrogan, who did the research and simulations you asked for. Both are of course cleared at the highest levels of security.”

  Gamel and Sebrogan bowed to Grayland, who nodded back. “You are why we were asked to come here,” she said. Normally when meeting with Limbar, Grayland felt comfortable using the informal address for herself, but in the presence of new people, and people for whom meeting the emperox would likely be a once-in-a-lifetime event, she switched to the royal “we.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Gamel said. “Everyone here is secure and vetted. And while we have no reason to believe your personal staff is not also secure and vetted, people will talk, even quite innocently. Someone who knows what I and Dontelu do might be able to surmise why we were visiting you and giving you a presentation.”

  “Our visiting here at all will be enough of a topic of conversation,” Grayland said to Limbar.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Limbar said. “But given the range of, uhh, challenges the Interdependency is facing at the moment, there will be no clear consensus as to which of them has been the occasion of your unexpected visit.”

  Grayland smiled ruefully at this. “Indeed.” She motioned for the others to sit, and then sat herself. Limbar, Gamel and Sebrogan waited until she was seated to take their own seats. “Then let us proceed with the occasion of my visit.”

  Limbar nodded to Gamel, who nodded back and then turned his attention to Grayland. “A few weeks ago, and in the aftermath of the coup attempt against you, my section was asked—I presume at the direction of Your Majesty—to offer a threat assessment for the Interdependency, in light of the imminent collapse of the Flow and other factors.”

  “We have of course been modeling threat assessments since evidence of the Flow collapse came to light,” Limbar said.

  “Yes, of course,” Gamel agreed. “However, these new assessments factored in the fallout from both the coup attempt and Your Majesty’s response to it.”

  “You mean our throwing a couple hundred of the highest-ranking and most connected members of parliament, royalty and clergy into jail on account of their treason,” Grayland said.

  “Just so,” Gamel said, and coughed. He motioned to Sebrogan. “Dontelu is, bar none, the best analyst in my section, and her remit in the last year specifically has been modeling out the consequences of the Flow collapse. She is going to take the lead on this briefing, if that’s acceptable to Your Majesty.”

  “Yes, of course.” Grayland turned her attention to Sebrogan. “You may proceed.”

  Sebrogan looked at her superiors uncertainly, and then back at Grayland. “Your Majesty,” she said. “Before I begin, I need to ask you a question.”

  “You may.”

  “How blunt may I be in presenting my assessment?”

  Grayland smiled at this. “You mean, will we be offended by strong language and possible negative outcomes?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “One of our foremost advisors can’t go a sentence without using the word ‘fuck,’ and just spent half of the last executive committee meeting trying to co
nvince us that the economic underpinnings of the Interdependency were under direct and immediate threat. We think you should be fine.”

  “In that case, Your Majesty, we’re all kind of screwed.”

  Grayland laughed out loud. “Now, tell us why,” she said, when she was done laughing.

  “Some of this you already know,” Sebrogan said. “The collapse of the Flow has begun and is taking out centuries-old streams that serve as the arteries for commerce in the Interdependency. When they’re gone the individual systems of the Interdependency will be isolated from each other. Inasmuch as the structure of the Interdependency is predicated on all the systems being reliant on each other, this means that within a few decades the human habitats in those systems will begin breaking down.”

  “The Dalasýsla Effect.”

  Sebrogan nodded. “You have given parliament a few months to devise a plan to mitigate this, but our analysis suggests that parliament will not devise a workable plan in that time.”

  Grayland nodded at this.

  “Also, our analysis suggests that you have already factored this indecision into your planning,” Sebrogan said.

  Grayland looked over to Limbar, who shrugged. “You said you wanted a thorough analysis, ma’am,” he said.

  “What does your analysis suggest I will do after that?” Grayland said, turning her attention back to Sebrogan.

  “The most probable course of action is that you attempt to commandeer some or all of the Interdependency’s fleet of starships, to transport as many people as possible to End, which is the only planet in the Interdependency capable of supporting human life on its own.”

  “And how well does this work?”

  “It doesn’t,” Sebrogan said. “First, it’s deeply unlikely an attempt at nationalization on the necessary scale would succeed. Guild houses would balk and rebel and you would likely be deposed, probably within a few months. Second, even if the first scenario didn’t happen, there aren’t enough ships to transport every subject of the Interdependency to End, either all at once—”

  Grayland raised her hand.

  “—or in a scenario where the systems most vulnerable to collapse were evacuated first to other, less-threatened systems.”

  Grayland put her hand back down, frowning.

  “And third, the total population of the Interdependency is at least twenty billion people. End has less than one hundred million people. Its infrastructure can’t handle two hundred times its current population, or even a fraction of that number. For that matter the ecosystem of the planet itself would likely collapse with the sudden—by both human and ecological timescales—introduction of even a few billion humans. In trying to save humanity, you would quickly kill the one place it would be able to survive.”

  “That is, even if they could make it to End to begin with,” Gamel said. “We have to assume that Ghreni Nohamapetan and the Prophecies of Rachela have control of the Flow shoals coming into the End system. They can destroy any ship entering their space before the ships could even hail them.”

  “We’re working on that,” Grayland said.

  “Even if you are, Your Majesty, that won’t solve the other problems,” Sebrogan said. “Those are pretty well baked in.”

  “So no matter what, billions will die.”

  “If your plan is to move them to End by ship, yes. But, ma’am, it’s not likely you’ll be able to get that far.”

  Grayland frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Remember that you gave me permission to be blunt,” Sebrogan said.

  “Yes, yes.” Grayland waved her hand, annoyed.

  Sebrogan looked at her bosses again before looking back over to Grayland. “I estimate that there will be another significant coup or assassination attempt against you within the next three months,” she said. “And that attempt is very likely to succeed.”

  * * *

  “It’s no great feat, predicting a coup or assassination attempt against you, considering your track record since you became emperox,” Attavio VI said to his daughter.

  “Thanks, Dad,” Grayland said back to him. She paced the confines of the Memory Room. Attavio VI’s gaze followed her as she went.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said.

  “You didn’t.” Grayland stopped and reconsidered. “No, actually, you did offend me. But you’re not wrong.” She started pacing again.

  “And yet you seem surprised.”

  “I thought this sort of thing was behind me, at least for a little while.”

  “Because you put in jail everyone who was plotting against you.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not how that works.”

  “That’s not what you told me before,” Grayland protested. “When I came in here and told you how I had everyone arrested, you told me I’d won.”

  “You did win.”

  Grayland gestured annoyance. “And yet here we are, Dad.”

  “You won a round, Daughter,” Attavio VI said. “You’re still in the fight.”

  “I could abdicate,” Grayland mused.

  “You wouldn’t be the first.”

  “It wouldn’t solve the actual problem, though.”

  “It would solve the problem of a coup,” Attavio VI pointed out. “If you’re not emperox, you can’t be overthrown.”

  “That’s not the actual problem. The actual problem is billions of people dying no matter what I do.”

  “That’s not your fault.”

  “It’s not anyone’s fault.” Grayland stopped, again. “Wait. That’s not actually true. Jiyi.”

  The humanoid figure appeared. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Show me Rachela I. By herself, please.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” There was a shimmer, and both Jiyi and Attavio VI disappeared, replaced by the image of Rachela I, the first prophet-emperox of the Interdependency.

  As always, Grayland was still a little awed by the fact that she could summon Rachela, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, at all. If Grayland gave it any thought, she would have to admit that being able to talk to any of her predecessors, here in the Memory Room, was an amazing feat in itself. But all the other emperoxs, not excluding her father, were … just people. Massively important people, in their time, clearly. But still people. Grayland, who had the same job as they did, felt no need to think of them as fundamentally better or worse than she was.

  Rachela, on the other hand, had founded the Interdependency, as well as the church that the Interdependency gave its name to. She’d had help—the entire Wu family, both as ambitious and duplicitous then as it was now, had worked hard to get her into her various roles—but at the end of things, Rachela was the one who had made it all work.

  That Grayland’s conversations with Rachela revealed her to be no more or less human than any other emperox, immensely cynical and not in the least bit holy, did not lessen her predecessor in Grayland’s eyes. If anything, it raised her up. Rachela had nerve, which was not a thing every emperox who followed her could claim.

  Grayland’s respect for Rachela, however, didn’t mean she couldn’t be annoyed with her.

  “Why didn’t you build the Interdependency to survive Flow collapses?” Grayland asked Rachela.

  “It didn’t occur to us at the time,” Rachela said.

  “How could it not occur to you?”

  “We were busy with other things.”

  “But you knew Flow streams could collapse,” Grayland said. “Humans come from Earth. There’s no Flow stream to Earth anymore. You knew it had collapsed.”

  “That was a naturally occurring collapse, as far as we knew.”

  “It wasn’t,” Grayland reminded her. “It was intentionally caused by the Interdependency’s predecessors.”

  “True, but we had forgotten that when I was alive.”

  “And even if it were naturally occurring, how does that even matter? You had evidence that Flow streams could and did collapse, for whatever reason, and you didn’
t factor that into the development of the Interdependency.”

  “It had only happened once.”

  Grayland gaped at Rachela. “Seriously?”

  “Moreover, by the time we were forming the Interdependency, the prevailing scientific theory of Flow streams was that they were stable and would remain so for centuries and more likely millennia. That wasn’t wrong.”

  “It wasn’t wrong, until it was.”

  “Yes,” Rachela agreed. “But it was wrong a thousand years into the future from when I and the rest of the Wus created the Interdependency.”

  “You’re suggesting that you’re not responsible for thinking through the consequences of your actions.”

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” Rachela said. “I will note that humans are not great at thinking over the long term, and we were no exception to that. Neither are you, for that matter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were just complaining to Attavio VI how you thought coup attempts were behind you. But you hadn’t thought out the longer-term implications of throwing hundreds of people in jail for treason. Now you’re having to deal with the shame and anger of their families, their houses and their organizations.”

  “How—” Grayland stopped herself from finishing that sentence. Of course Rachela knew what Grayland had said to Attavio VI. Effectively she was Attavio VI, and he Rachela, because they were both Jiyi, wearing the skins of the now-dead emperoxs. Grayland made a note to stop falling for the pathetic fallacy at every turn.

  And anyway, as much as it galled Grayland to admit it, Rachela had a point. When she herself couldn’t truly register the implications of her actions a few weeks into the future, she wasn’t sure how much she could blame Rachela and the rest of the Wus of her time for not gaming out where the Interdependency would be a thousand years on.

  “I wish you had thought about the long term,” Grayland said to Rachela. “It would make my life easier now.”

  “No it wouldn’t,” Rachela said. “You might have avoided this particular problem, yes. But you would have had other problems. You don’t know if they would be better problems, or worse.”