The Last Emperox

by John Scalzi

  Another group, which might charitably be called entrepreneurs—or less charitably, grifters—saw in the end of the world a business opportunity, and began to target the particularly fearful, anxious and inconsolable. That went as it usually does.

  A rather smaller group of people looked at the Flow streams that were still open, saw how long it would be before it would be impossible to catch a ship to End from where they were, and started making plans to catch those ships at or near the last possible instant, saving up all the while. This crafty bit of foresight was undercut by the fact these people generally did not, in fact, make their reservations (paid in full) the second they thought of it. It meant that when they did get around to it, they would discover that every passenger berth had been reserved years in advance, and at exorbitant rates. After all, these days, when a ship went to End, it stayed at End, forever. These people had already missed their chance to escape, and they didn’t even know it. They likely couldn’t have afforded it anyway.

  At the local and system levels, governments and their related organizations, populated from the non-noble classes, were beginning to form committees and study groups on the impact of the impending Flow collapse, and what those would mean to their habitats and cities. Of considerable and particular concern was what would happen to the commodities for which a nonlocal noble house held the monopoly.

  To give one less-critical example, take citrus fruits, whose monopoly was held by the House of Lagos. In every system, local franchisees grew and sold the fruits, taking their cut of the profits and sending the rest back to Lagos’s coffers. In the event that a franchisee decided not to send along a cut, or was just so bad at their job that they never made a profit, all the Lagos fruit stock was genetically encoded to stop producing after a certain number of generations—the number of generations predetermined before the stock was delivered.

  If the franchisee doesn’t pay up, their stock becomes useless. Seeds the fruit produce are sterile; grafting or cloning won’t work. If you think you’re going to just easily reverse engineer the stock, well, you can try, and good luck. Just remember that the House of Lagos has been genetically designing and tweaking its stock for literally centuries, with a specific eye on maintaining its monopoly. Reengineering so much as a lemon from scratch would likely take decades.

  Now multiply that problem against everything humans eat, anywhere, including the staples.

  That’s the problem.

  It was less of a problem when the goal was to tie all known human systems into a web of mutual reliance, ostensibly to lessen the threat of interstellar war and trade conflict but mostly so that a small number of mercantile families could rent-seek from the rest of humanity in perpetuity. But now that all those systems were about to be on their own, possibly forever, it became a very large, very looming issue.

  Local and system governments had begun to make overtures to the representatives of the mercantile houses about these monopolies. The general response from the houses was Oh, we’re looking at this, but we have years to work on this problem, so let’s not do anything foolish.

  Which is to say, the monopolists stalled, to their own benefit. The local and system governments, not wanting to start panics before they had to, said nothing outside their own committees and organizations.

  But again, it’s not like the common people didn’t know.

  Some of them, the more ambitious ones, if you’d like to call them that, had already started working the futures markets, placing down markers for the cost of lemons, and wheat, and beef, and every other commodity under the various suns. Others, equally ambitious, figured that the monopolies of the noble families would be broken, and shorted these commodities.

  Some of these people would become immensely rich, to the extent that money would continue to mean anything in the end times, while others would likely find their way to a convenient airlock to end their own self-inflicted suffering. They differed in their opinion as to which would be which. Capitalism was like that.

  Most others who were thinking ahead at all simply planned to stockpile certain foods. How much? A month, six months, a year, depending on available space and personal pessimism. Most of those thinking about stockpiling still had in their brains the idea that the crisis was likely to be a temporary one, and that somewhere along the way someone would figure out how to keep billions from starving to death in the habitats that would increasingly fall to entropy. To think otherwise would raise the question of why bother to stockpile at all.

  * * *

  Of course, if one wanted to genuinely understand what the over-under line for “we’re all genuinely and truly fucked” was, one ought not look at what the lower classes of the Interdependency were doing, but rather, what their banks were doing. And what the banks were doing, as quietly as possible and without raising too much of a fuss about it, was restructuring their financial services and vehicles to maximize short-term profits and minimize long-term financial risk and exposure.

  Which on one hand was entirely prudent, from a fiscal and fiduciary point of view. The Interdependency was about to enter a new and entirely unexpected period of change. Banks are inherently conservative entities—it’s right there in their name—and so it made good sense to bulk up against uncertainty.

  On the other hand, it meant that the money had cast its vote on the future, and the vote was to short it.

  (Then there was the matter of the banks beginning to transfer assets to End. Which they also did not make a fuss about—there was no reason to, since End was covered by the same financial laws and strictures as the rest of the Interdependency and “money” was such an abstruse concept anyway, does it really matter where you say these assets “are”—but which was also a vote in itself.)

  Most of this bank activity, as intended, went under the radar of the average person. The average person might have appreciated the slightly higher interest rates on their saving accounts (intended to keep them from withdrawing their funds in the short term), and those with long-term loan notes with banks might have been tempted to take up the offer to refinance to a shorter-term loan, with certain fees waived and interest rates competitive to the longer-term loans.

  Otherwise, it was business as usual. It did the banks no good to create a panic. They wanted to be sure that when the panic inevitably hit, the majority of their assets would be as far away as possible. The people and their governments would have more immediate things to worry about than the banks returning a fraction of people’s accounts, if that, when all the shit finally came crashing down.

  * * *

  But what of the Parliament of the Interdependency, the august body that Emperox Grayland II had given six months to offer up a plan to deal with the collapse of the Flow? What was going down in the house of the people’s representatives?

  It would be unfair to suggest, as Nadashe Nohamapetan and Grayland’s analysts had both done, that parliament was merely frittering away on the problem until such time as Grayland took it from them and then it would be her problem to solve, not theirs. Parliament had in fact assembled its best ministers and advisors together to ascertain the scope of the issue and to make suggestions for the parliament at large to act on. The problem for parliament’s Extraordinary Committee on the Flow Crisis (as it called itself) was that it had come to the same conclusion as everyone else looking at the problem: The vast majority of the people who live in the Interdependency were impressively screwed, and there was no easy or comfortable course of action in front of them.

  The question then became, What percentage was there in the parliament being the bearer of that sort of bad news?

  It was not merely an academic question. A not-trivial number of parliamentarians had thrown themselves in with the recent coup attempt against the emperox, which had gone poorly for them and everyone else involved. As a result, the reputation and popularity of the parliament was at its lowest point in decades and in perhaps more than a century.

  This was saying something, as parliamen
t was almost never popular, and was almost always used as a convenient target of ire for local and system governments and their representatives, who were closer to their voting populations and who were always looking for someone else to blame for local problems. These local and system governments and representatives, not to mention the noble houses and mercantile guilds, would be delighted to have the Interdependency parliament be the focus of their constituents’ and stakeholders’ anger.

  It wouldn’t be so bad for the emperox, either. The young emperox had become a favorite of her subjects for having survived two assassination attempts and a coup, and for claiming the religious mantle of the emperox in a way that none of her predecessors had since the days of Rachela I, the founder of the Interdependency. Any further denigration of the parliament worked to her advantage.

  That being the case, the Extraordinary Committee, with no plan that didn’t end in the slow death of billions, and no easy way to sell that outcome, was coming to the conclusion that its best course of action was to delay, take the relatively small hit for indecision, and let the emperox take the rather larger hit for being the bearer of the impressively bad news. Grayland had popularity to burn; let her burn all of it.

  In the meantime, the members of the Extraordinary Committee would book the rides to End that their constituents assumed would be available to them a few years into the future.

  * * *

  Oh, yes, End.

  The one exception to the doom that awaits every other system of the Interdependency. The one system with a planet where humans could walk upon its surface without a suit of one sort or another, where the land would welcome them instead of turn them into desiccated husks, where the sun would warm their unprotected faces instead of blasting them with unmediated radiation, scrambling DNA. The one place where humanity could still survive.

  Well, except for the fact that the people of End were aware what was coming for them: a sudden and overwhelming wave of refugees from the rest of the Interdependency whose sheer numbers would outstrip the planet’s ability to absorb them. The question was not whether they would come. They were coming. They were already on their way. The question was how many—whether it would be millions, which would strain the planet, or billions, which would destroy it.

  And, hey, there was that whole civil war thing going on, which made it difficult for anyone to prepare.

  It did, however, make it easier for some to do other things. The civil war was largely focused on the major cities and some strategic transport hubs and routes. In outlying provinces, enterprising farmers were claiming lands they didn’t technically own and preparing them for crops and ranching. This was every bit of the ecological nightmare that one might expect, but inasmuch as the (acting) Duke of End was busy not having his head delivered to Vrenna Claremont, no one was stopping them, and anyway the farmers and ranchers rationalized it by noting that they were planning and raising the few native crops and animals that could be eaten by humans—which is to say, the only foodstuffs that had not been genetically engineered to sustain a monopoly.

  These farmers and ranchers weren’t wrong about that, which did not actually mitigate either the land grab or the pall of the sky as thousands of square kilometers were burned away from End’s ecosystems in exchange for acreage that would not come close to feeding and sustaining the millions to billions who would be on their way.

  Which was pointed out to some of these ambitious farmers and ranchers. Who said, basically, Sure, but it’ll be years yet. Someone will figure this out. And when they do, I’ll be rich.

  And thus it was in the Interdependency in the early-but-not-all-that-early-anymore days of the Flow collapse. Everyone knew what was coming. Some even prepared and planned. But at the end of it, everyone assumed that something or someone would come along to save the civilization that they lived in and could not conceive of actually disappearing. Something or someone would come along to save them. They would be saved, along with everyone else.

  It was a nice thought.

  It wasn’t true.

  At the very least, not yet.

  Chapter 9

  “Give me a second,” Cardenia said to Marce. The two of them were in the emperox’s personal office, where, Marce suddenly remembered, the two of them had first met, not all that long ago. In the now, they were alone, briefly, in the short interregnum between Cardenia’s assistants leaving the office and them returning with the emperox’s next appointment in tow.

  Marce nodded. “Getting into character?”

  “It’s not a character, it’s me,” Cardenia said. “And yes. Now hush.”

  Marce grinned at this and watched as Cardenia closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and did her transformation into Emperox Grayland II. To the outside eye, the transformation wasn’t much—a straightening of the spine and a certain set of the face—but by this time Marce had seen it enough that he understood that most of the transformation was interior, the change of perspective from “personal me” to “imperial we.”

  When Marce had first gotten to know the emperox—which is to say, in the period of time where they had become friends but had not yet become lovers—he thought the transformation a little bit amusing. Now he realized how much it was actually necessary, not just for Cardenia to define for herself the difference between her personal self and her public role, but for everyone else she ever dealt with. It was easy for people to dismiss Cardenia Wu-Patrick, the young woman accidentally thrown into a position that she had neither wanted nor been groomed for. It was much harder to dismiss Emperox Grayland II.

  Well, harder now, Marce amended. It took a while, and the arrest for treason of roughly a third of the Interdependency’s ruling class. But Grayland had gotten there. Marce smiled to himself at this. He was pretty proud of his girlfriend.

  Grayland noticed the smile. “What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you later, Your Majesty,” Marce said. When Cardenia was in Grayland mode, he made sure to treat her with the same level of courtesy as anyone else in her court. Maybe other imperial boyfriends in history used their position to be casual and louche, but that wasn’t Marce. He wasn’t sure he could be louche if he tried.

  Grayland nodded and motioned toward the door. “These two will not be enthusiastic about what we are going to ask of them,” she said. Marce knew the “we” here referred not to the two of them, but to Grayland alone; Marce was support staff.

  “You’re asking a lot of them,” he said.

  “Yes, well,” Grayland said, and shifted her gaze to where her new guests would soon be entering. “We’ll be asking a lot of everyone. They will be no different.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Marce said. Grayland glanced over briefly at him, a small and private smile on her lips. Marce knew that she liked it when he went all formal.

  A door opened, and Admiral Gini Hurnen and General Luc Bren were brought in. Hurnen ran the Imperial Navy. Bren ran the Imperial Marines. Normally the two were attended by flocks of staff and body people. For this meeting, it was just the two of them. After introductions and pleasantries, Grayland’s staff also disappeared, leaving only the military heads, the emperox, and Marce.

  Marce watched as Hurnen and Bren glanced briefly his way and equally as quickly turned their attention back to the emperox. He had been introduced as Lord Marce Claremont, and his role as the emperox’s science advisor on matters regarding the Flow was well known. It was also well known, if not generally publicly acknowledged, that he was the emperox’s “friend,” with all the various social complications, positive and negative, that came with that particular position.

  This did not trouble Marce especially—he got it—but it meant he was having a moment of quiet amusement watching these two immensely powerful people trying to figure out why he was present at this meeting. The three of them were three of the most powerful humans in the known universe. His presence at the meeting was either an emperox’s affectation, or something else entirely. Marce enjoyed watching Hurnen and Bren trying to f
igure out which it was.

  They’ll find out soon enough, Marce thought.

  And as it happened, they found out almost immediately.

  “We need to send an armada to End,” Grayland said to her military chiefs. “Sooner rather than later.”

  Hurnen and Bren shifted uncomfortably in their seats and looked at each other before Admiral Hurnen cleared her throat. “There is a problem with that, Your Majesty,” she said.

  “You are going to tell us that the Prophecies of Rachela will destroy any ship that emerges out of the Flow at End,” Grayland prompted.

  “Yes,” Hurnen agreed. “And not just the Rachela. After the coup attempt against you, navy commanders who were complicit fled to End with their ships and crews. There are now thirteen additional ships of various sizes and capabilities on their way to End, all presumably loyal to the Nohamapetan family.”

  “More than enough to monitor and defend every existing incoming Flow shoal, Your Majesty,” said Bren.

  “And we could not overpower them by numbers or arms?” Grayland asked.

  “It would be difficult,” Hurnen said.

  “That is what we are told when someone wants to say ‘no’ to us but feels they cannot.”

  “Yes,” Hurnen said. “But this time I actually mean it.”

  “Then define ‘difficult.’”

  “Ships, mines, shoal defenses. All deployed against anything that arrives within seconds. Civilian ships will be destroyed almost instantly. Our ships will survive initial contact, but if the rebel ship commanders are smart—and they are, we trained them—they will take our ships apart in short order.”