Rudolf the Great, who’d slaughtered homosexuals en masse as pollutants that would otherwise infect the future, had now produced a homosexual among his descendants. Listen closely enough, and one could almost hear his cries of outrage from the beyond the grave.
Meanwhile, the real political power remained firmly in Eckhart’s grasp. Having risen to the rank of count, he was now a man of unrivaled influence, half-jokingly referred to as the “mooching emperor.” He made the national treasury his personal playground, where he threw around the weight of a corpulent body devoid of its virility. As he wore down his sense of responsibility and ability as a political administrator, his power sickness continued to afflict him. He tried offering his own daughter as the new empress, but she resembled her father now more than ever.
Eckhart approached the emperor in the hopes of taking his lord’s eyes off Florian, but while the emperor had always followed his counsel on other matters, he couldn’t be persuaded or coerced on this one. The moment Eckhart walked into the Rose Room, he was shot and killed by a gang under command of one Baron Risner. Risner, who’d always detested Eckhart’s tyranny, had received the emperor’s consent to execute this “disloyal retainer.” That was all well and good, but in the wake of this disturbance, the emperor left a written declaration of abdication on his throne and absconded with Florian and a handful of jewels to boot. This was exactly one year after he’d taken the throne.
Following 140 days of vacancy, the younger brother of former emperor Ottfried, Archduke Julius, picked up the abandoned crown. The senior imperial ministers, however, had their eyes on his more popular son, Franz Otto.
At the time of his coronation, Emperor Julius was already seventy-six years old yet was in extremely good health for his age. Five days after his enthronement, he’d set up a harem of twenty beautiful concubines, and a month later added twenty more.
It fell to the middle-aged crown prince, Archduke Franz Otto, to satisfy the needs of national politics while the emperor satisfied those of his still-virile flesh. Franz Otto corrected much of the corruption left over from the Eckhart era, enforced the law, and reduced taxes slightly for common citizens. The senior ministers were confident they’d made the right choice. But Julius I, whom they expected to expire sooner rather than later, held firm to the throne into his eighties, then his nineties.
In the end, by a strange twist of fate, when Emperor Julius was ninety-five, the “oldest crown prince in human history,” His Highness Archduke Franz Otto, died of illness at seventy-four. And because the archduke’s sons had all died young, his grandson Karl became “great-grand heir to the imperial throne” at twenty-four.
Karl had only a few years to wait before donning the imperial crown, although to him it seemed the emperor might live on forever. Julius had been an old man for as long as Karl could remember. He was still an old man and would continue to be for years to come. Would this “immortal bag of bones,” he mused, continue to suck the life force out of future generations, carrying on even as he continued to wither in that jewel-encrusted coffin he called a throne?
Karl wasn’t a particularly superstitious young man, but superstition had made him see the emperor through faintly colored lenses of fear and hatred. Consequently, his malice toward the old emperor was, outside of his own ambitions, at the very least cultivated in the fertilizer of self-preservation. All of this speculation and impatience led to the first parricide in the entire history of the Galactic Empire.
On April 6, year 144 of the old Imperial Calendar, a 96-year-old Julius I was having dinner with five of his concubines, whose combined age still fell short of the emperor’s single life span. After wolfing down his venison with the appetite of a teenager, he was finishing off the meal with some chilled white wine when he started gasping for air. He vomited up his meal and, moments later, died in a spasm of agony, white silk tablecloth still clutched in his hand.
The old emperor’s sudden death shocked his senior ministers, less out of suspicion than by their own relief that the old man had finally perished. In truth, his ministers, almost without exception, were bored with him. Archduke Karl presided over a grand, if emotionless, funeral. The senior ministers all expected the young new emperor to implement fresh administration after a requisite period of mourning. The people expected nothing. Lacking any political authority whatsoever, they did the best they could, living lives of hard labor and simple pleasures. But on May 1, coronation day, the public was just as amazed as the senior ministers when not Archduke Karl but former archduke Franz Otto’s second son and Karl’s cousin, Marquis Sigismund von Brauner, solemnly accepted the imperial crown.
The reasons behind the enthronement of Sigismund II were, of course, never made public. Now, more than three thousand years later, the archives at last revealed the truth behind this last-minute switch. Upon the old emperor’s sudden death, the five concubines who’d been seated at his table were forced by Archduke Karl to follow their master to the grave. Having served the old emperor as faithfully as they had, in this time of crisis they panicked, refusing to carry their duties over to the next reign. For that crime, they were sentenced to take their own lives.
The five concubines were confined to a room nestled in the rear palace, where they were forced to drink poison. Just before taking that fatal dose, one of the concubines wrote the truth in lipstick on the inside of her bracelet and had it sent to her older brother, an officer in the imperial brigade. Upon reading her message, her brother learned that Archduke Karl had coated the inside of Julius’s wineglass with a poison that, once absorbed into his stomach lining, rapidly diminished the ability of his red blood cells to absorb oxygen. His younger sister, the concubine, had been bribed by Karl into being an accomplice. The brother decided then and there to exact revenge for his sister’s death. He brought the evidence before Sigismund, second in line for the throne. Sigismund was pleasantly surprised at having just cause to oust Karl, and after shuffling things around within the palace, succeeded in forcing Karl to give up his succession to the imperial throne. He was unable to make known the fact that the emperor had been poisoned by his own great-grandson, and so he carried out his own little coup d’état behind closed doors.
After being confined to the palace, Karl was transferred to a mental institution on the outskirts of the imperial capital. There, behind thick walls, he was treated well enough to live a long life, eclipsing his great-grandfather by expiring at the age of ninety-seven. By the time of his death, the reigns of Sigismund II and Ottfried II had passed into the age of Otto Heinz I. There was no longer anyone at court who remembered the name of the old man who’d failed to take the throne more than seventy years before. Between Karl’s death in year 217 of the Imperial Calendar and the Battle of Dagon that the Free Planets Alliance took in 331, the Goldenbaum Dynasty would see eight more emperors, giving rise to their own stories across a spectrum of good and evil.
As he ran his eyes over this unofficial interim report presented to him by the Ministry of Arts and Culture, Reinhard found himself at times smiling derisively, at others pausing to go deep into thought. Though he lacked Yang Wen-li’s passion for history, those with designs on the future couldn’t get there without knowing the blueprints of the past.
Not that every indicator was to be found in what had already come to pass. Reinhard wasn’t one to follow someone else’s path.
Because now, everyone was following his.
I
IN THE LATTER HALF OF SE 799, in the first year of the New Imperial Calendar, a change that no one could have accurately predicted came to pass. The enactment of the Bharat Treaty in May of that year, in conjunction with Reinhard von Lohengramm’s coronation the following June, was supposed to have put an end to two and a half centuries of war and implemented a new universal order in its place. And while it was too optimistic to think this might go on forever, common sense dictated that the new dynasty would at the very least devote itself to the e
stablishment of a new system, that the alliance would be bereft of vengeful power, and that the next few years would be relatively peaceful ones. Even Emperor Reinhard and Yang Wen-li couldn’t escape the gravity of common sense between their own plans and the universes of which they dreamed.
In response to Commodore Ferner’s doubts, secretary of defense of the Imperial Navy Marshal von Oberstein claimed he’d done nothing more than read into these sudden developments and use them to his advantage, as anyone in his position might have done.
“It’s your choice whether you want to believe me,” von Oberstein had said.
Of special mention about the chaos that ensued in the latter half of SE 799 was that those only tangentially involved wanted to claim themselves as instigators, while those who’d been more proactive in their involvement, despite recognizing themselves as actors on an intergalactic stage, denied their roles as producers and playwrights.
Those who believed unconditionally in a higher power called it “God’s will” or “a twist of fate” and threw themselves like stones in a glass house of blind following. But cursing unbelievers like Yang Wen-li—“If my pension suddenly increased tenfold, I might believe in God, too!”—made things harder for themselves by looking for answers within the range of human reason. Whenever Yang spoke of God, Frederica unconsciously looked at her husband differently, unable to suppress a certain uneasiness over putting God in the same category as inflation. Yang’s conclusion was that everything was a coproduction between a dead playwright and living actors. But if asked who that playwright was, he would have been hard-pressed to come up with an answer. If anything, he might have said it was “an actor who believes himself to be a playwright.” In other words, Helmut Lennenkamp, the Galactic Empire’s high commissioner and senior admiral.
Although it was Reinhard who’d put Lennenkamp in that position, that didn’t mean he’d surveyed the play’s story in its entirety and decided on its cast. Lennenkamp was thirty-six, just four years Yang’s senior, but by all outward appearances he appeared no older than twenty.
Yang wasn’t the type to let on about the hardships of the battlespace and had always been indifferent to the fortitude so giddily ascribed to him by war correspondents. Admiral Steinmetz, who’d once suffered defeat because of him, took one look at Yang, who seemed nothing more than a lanky, boyish student, and muttered with disappointment.
“I lost to him?”
Then again, Steinmetz knew full well the folly of judging a book by its cover and blamed such thinking on his own part for leading to his defeat in the first place.
Lennenkamp couldn’t let go of this fixation. According to Artist-Admiral Mecklinger, Walter von Schönkopf had some choice words about Lennenkamp:
“So, he’s that much of a big shot, is he?”
Whether Lennenkamp was indeed a big shot remained to be seen.
This was how a modest, irresponsible rumor grew into a tide that changed history.
Attaching the phrase “or so I hear” to the statement “Merkatz is still alive” started it all by clouding the memories of a nervous population. Von Reuentahl and Mittermeier laughed off the very notion of Merkatz’s survival for the same reason.
As Ernest Mecklinger recorded it:
It didn’t take us long to confirm the truth of that rumor. Nevertheless, a second truth remains to be verified. Namely, who circulated that rumor in the first place, and why.
While concluding it was just one form of never-ending groupthink, the manifestation of delusional hero worship, Mecklinger was almost tempted to think that this was all meant to be. He therefore saw no reason to deny the veracity of its effect, even if the cause was born in deception:
The rumor has created the reality. Either that, or an unwitting public has interfered with the passage of time by digging its heels into a past it just can’t let go of.
Mecklinger was exercising self-restraint in putting it the way he did.
In any event, this rumor, which since June had hovered around countless lips like dark matter, crystallized into something even darker on July 16 when, in the Lesavik sector, the more than five hundred alliance ships supposedly being decommissioned and dismantled were hijacked.
The man responsible for carrying out this operation was Admiral Mascagni, who might have feigned ignorance had only the ships been seized. But the fact that four thousand of his men had vanished along with the hijackers wasn’t something he could chalk up to illusion.
During a hearing at Joint Operational Headquarters, his entire being oozed with sweat and excuses.
“In full compliance with the Bharat Treaty, we were in the middle of demolishing our relinquished warships and carriers, when suddenly, upwards of five hundred ships of unknown affiliation showed up…”
This number was, of course, an exaggeration, although there were some among his men who inflated that number to five thousand ships, and so Mascagni’s testimony was deemed relatively objective. Continuing with his “objective” testimony, Mascagni said the intruders, after making a grand entrance, had sent a seemingly credible transmission offering their assistance. With the war now over, he saw no reason to fear enemy deception, and the ships, he now saw, were undoubtedly of Alliance Armed Forces make, and so he welcomed them with full assurance that nothing would go wrong. But the moment he did welcome them aboard, the warships were taken from them at gunpoint. The working flagship—which is to say, Admiral Mascagni himself—was taken hostage, while the other ships were helpless to do anything. Moreover, this “band of thieves” announced themselves as a group of freedom fighters opposed to the imperial autocracy. They claimed a common goal and bid anyone who would join their cause to lay down their arms and follow them, upon which four thousand of Mascagni’s men, fed up with their lot, ended up doing just that.
Naturally, people were interested in who was behind all this. Several groundless theories suggested Admiral Merkatz as the culprit.
If true, then Merkatz’s disappearance following the Vermillion War had surely been orchestrated under Yang Wen-li’s baton.
Only this part of the rumor was more correct in practice than in theory. Yang saw the value in it the moment he heard it.
II
Had Yang Wen-li not anticipated the ripple effect of circulating such a dangerous rumor? Not that he could have stopped it even if he had anticipated it. Yang had never considered drawing out the Imperial Navy using Merkatz as a scapegoat, as such a strategy would have been too risky for everyone involved. That said, neither could he assume a lack of affiliation once he set Merkatz free. It was, perhaps, naive on his part to deny the potential of a single rumor. In any case, he was neither almighty nor omnipotent, and it was all he could do to follow the trail of events in the hopes of one day carving out a significant detour of his own.
As Mrs. Caselnes put it to Frederica:
“Yang is so young to have risen to such a high rank in such a short amount of time, but it’s all because of the war. Now that we’re in a time of peace, he’s got nothing to do. You’ve got to admit, Yang has never looked more content than he does now.”
Frederica agreed. Surely, Yang had never considered himself to be one of the elite, and neither did the elite consider Yang to be one of them. And yet, despite his lack of political clout and authoritarian intentions, Yang had earned his position through an uncanny aptitude in the heat of battle and the string of commendations born of that aptitude.
The elite were an exclusive group of people who shared such profound awareness of themselves as self-righteous leaders and an implacability toward distribution of privilege that, even had their door been open to him, Yang wouldn’t have cared to step through it. What would be the point of walking into a den of wolves who saw him as nothing more than a meddlesome sheep?
Yang had always been a heretic. Whether at the Officers’ Academy, in the military, or in the national pantheon of authority, he pref
erred to sit in the corner, sticking his nose in a favorite book while letting the just cause of an arrogant orthodoxy at the core of the alliance’s center of power waft in one ear and out the other. And when that aloof heretic outshone them all by his grand achievements, the orthodoxy praised him even as they cursed themselves for having to treat him so politely.
One can only imagine how much this incurred the elite’s anger and animosity. Yang was more than vaguely aware of their frustrations. He also knew how ridiculous it was to waste his consideration, and he put it out of his mind.
The orthodoxy spoke of barring Yang from their ranks more out of instinct than intellect. Although he was a military man, Yang rejected the significance of all wars, even—if not especially—those in which he’d been involved. He also denied the majesty of the nation and saw the military’s raison d’être not as protecting citizens but as protecting the special rights of the very authority figures who’d parasitized the nation. There was no way they were going to let a natural-born provocateur such as Yang Wen-li into their innermost circle. They had even tried subjecting Yang to a political thrashing in an above-the-law hearing, but in a panic had ended up having to dispatch Yang directly from the courtroom into the battlespace to fight the Imperial Navy’s massive invasion of the Iserlohn Corridor. As it turned out, the one man they detested above all was the only one who could save them.
They conferred upon him the rank of marshal, making him the youngest to bear that insignia in the history of the Alliance Armed Forces, and awarded him enough medals to weigh by the kilo. And still, that insolent heretic had the gall to give them not so much as a thank-you for all the praise they openly bestowed upon him. Anyone else in his position would have bowed his head in deference, groveled, and begged to be allowed into their ranks, but Yang crammed their hallowed medals into a wooden crate and tossed them into the basement, out of sight and out of mind. He also skipped out on important functions, preferring to go fishing instead of debating the allotment of privileges he saw to be arbitrary at best. To them, the most precious things in this world were forcing others into submission, openly appropriating taxes from the population, and creating laws that guaranteed personal profit. Yang, on the other hand, kicked aside those things as casually as he might pebbles on the side of the road. An intolerable heretic, indeed.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 6 Page 14
