by Robert Brown
When they had finished, he said, “This is the lovely Flora.” He took one of her hands off his shoulders and held it out to me to shake. She took my hand in her tiny one, and shook it without taking her eyes from the Emperor.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said. She said nothing, and her ice-blue eyes seemed to assess me unworthy of their gaze.
“Flora, now say hello to the Doctor. Without him, your wonderful life could never have been this luxurious,” said the Emperor, so Flora turned to him and said, “Then I thank you sincerely, Doctor.” She said this in a way that told us that she not only throughly enjoyed her life, but also throughly deserved it, and that she in no way truly credited the Doctor for her successful placement in Eden.
Then the other silhouette in the tent stood up, and with a slower, more purposeful stride walked toward the threshhold. Even before I could see her features, her pace and body language told me this was a woman, not a girl like Flora, and she was powerful and capable of great wrath.
The Emperor spoke again, “And here is my first wife, Fauna. Fauna is actually a nickname, as you will see. You know her by another name.” Out from the shadow of the tent into the bright morning sunlight stepped Lilith Tess.
Lilith was no longer a young child barely out of her teens, filled with an unquenchable desire to be noticed. This Lilith was a woman in her mid thirties. She walked with authority, and power. In her eyes was a fire I could not begin to guess the cause of. “It is good to see you again, Captain,” she said in an even tone that sounded neither sincere nor sarcastic. She glanced at the red rings the hand cuffs had left me, and said with a slightly victorious smile, “May I assume your trip was comfortable?”
“Lilith!” was all I said. I was flabbergasted. You’ll recognize the emotion; have you ever been having a really bad day, everything seeming against you, and right at the end of it when you felt your very lowest you run into your ex? That’s how I felt.
Last time I saw her, she was a young thing who had kissed me, been rejected, and ran away embarrassed. Here she was, walking to me out of her palatial porno, Empress of the world? I think I may have been bested.
Flora still had her arms around Victor’s neck, but as Lilith walked to us he pulled them gently off. He strode over to Lilith to kiss her, but she turned her head at the last second, and all he met was her cheek. She did not make eye contact with him.
“I trust you two have had an enjoyable morning?” he asked her.
“Yes, we have,” said Lilith with a touch of poison and victory in her tone, and she pulled away from him.
“I am glad!” he said undaunted, “Then let’s have our breakfast, and let’s catch up! Fauna, are you pleased to see your old friend?”
“My name is Lilith,” she said as much to herself as anyone else. “And yes, I am pleased. Captain, tell me what you’ve been up to. More fruitless heroics, no doubt?”
“Well, yeah. So it would seem,” I said.
A few yards away, servants were bringing a large table to the sand. They placed it with some care to make sure it was level, and others brought table cloths, chargers, plates of fruit, bowls pitchers and bottles of Champagne. We sat around this white painted table on white painted chairs, and the servants placed the food on our plates, except for Lilith, who placed her own. The servants kept their distance from her as she gave off an aura of wrath.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake this is too damn much!” Calgori blurted out. “There are eight-year-old children employed all their waking hours in order to live a filthy life and eat scrap, while you sit here eating fresh fruit from every continent, at a beach-side castle! People in the cities are dying, killing themselves just for a chance to escape, while you have orgies on the beach? While five year olds are stolen from their desert cribs and eaten, you play here smug and happy in your domination! You killed millions of people to get here!”
Flora stood up and shouted back, “You stupid pitiful ugly old man! Do you know who you are talking to?” Her face was red with indignation.
“Sit down, my love,” said Victor calmly, but his voice had changed from enthusiastic host to an almost terrifyingly powerful man. “I assure you, you are mistaken, Doctor.” His large strong hands were spread out on the table before him, as if his will was flowing out through them.
“I am no such thing!” said Calgori. “In your cities, walled into the filthy holes you allow them, the last of humankind rots imprisoned! If they try to escape, you hunt them down, just as you slaughtered man to near extinction over the last two hundred years!”
“HUMANKIND!? MANKIND!? You tiny minded, idiosyncratic fool! You have mastered the minuscule intricacies of clockwork and chemistry, but you cannot see anything larger then your own infectious race! I have mastered this planet. I alone have restored balance to this globe, and you say, ‘Slaughter’!? I saved the world!”
He stood now. “Oh, the vanity of your race! You would kill all other life on this planet for your own good, and call it progress! Other species die off by the billions, and trillions, to make room for your roads, suburbs, cities, airports, and shopping malls, yet you continue to breed, build and fester in war, pollution and death.
“Don’t blame me for the filth of the cities,” he went on. “That is your precious human race, and its inability stay at a balanced capacity in any given biosphere. Don’t blame me for the hard lives you give yourself. Don’t blame me for your pestilence, and misery. You brought that on yourself millennia before I started fixing this human infestation.”
“I am not the Emperor and Custodian of Mankind,” and he said this word with a disgust. “I am the caretaker of the world! All things, plants, animals, even stones and rivers and the seas have a peaceful purpose. But all these are spoiled and soiled by your precious Mankind. This world has a balancing point, and humans are incapable of sticking to it. There is a proper number of all things, and all things stay to their proper numbers until your Mankind interferes.”
He pointed to a slice of orange that had fallen into the sand when the servants had brought the food. It was now covered with ants, and the trail of ants led up to the grass. “This earth is a perfect system. It cleans itself, and takes care of itself. When fruit drops, it will be eaten by beast. What beast can’t eat will be removed by insect. What insect can’t finish will be cleaned by bacteria. Even the foulness of man will be wiped clean in a few years, if the amount of these pollutants can be controlled. Leave a house, and in a surprisingly short time, trees will consume it, vines, desert sands, or the sea will wipe it clean and leave the perfect earth again.”
There was a statue on the beach, a dark-green copper Buddha, thick with patina, brought no doubt from Cambodia for the royals amusement. The Emperor gestured to it, and his rant began to slow into a rhythmical rhyme, more like he was remembering poetry then inventing it on the spot.
“Fingers of rust gently intertwine, and lace the seams of sacrifice in beautiful decline. Catalyst of creations of all that was mankind pull our corruption toward nature, the state is predefined. All that floats upon the sea, all that hangs in the air, all that sits in dust or dirt, eventually ensnared. The gentle touch of time will take you unaware. Pulling all creations down; an elegant affair. Pleasant patina pulls apart a holy copper shrine. Like gently creeping mossy claws, scarring all divine. All the things you think you value including the gift of life, will slowly, gently fall apart, until the world is right.”
“But by your hand hundreds of millions have died!” Doctor Calgori stood up now, himself full of wrath.
“NO! Not by my hands!” Victor yelled back.
“Then by your will, by your orders!”
Now Victor looked pained. “This is not true!” he said, sounding less certain. “All creatures that die in nature die at the jaws or claws or talons of someone else. I rebalanced nature, and I did so in the most natural of ways!”
“By leading men, women and children to slaughter?” Doctor Calgori asked.
“I had no part in that. I gav
e orders to rebalance the ratio of men to beasts, and when I reemerged a few decades later they had been followed and that phase was successful and over. It may seem gruesome to you, since you chose to view things from your one small human perspective, but your kind has been herding and executing its prey for thousands of years, and in far less kind and fair ways.” His speech was growing calmer now. “Do I need to tell you about the slaughter houses, and the chicken factories? Could you possibly remain naive to what your kind had done for so long to all the other species on this planet? And how much worse it would be if you were to continue your horrific growth? I have done no more than restore a balanced population. And now I do no more than maintain that, and prevent mankind from regrowing.”
He stood quiet, thinking. Then he began again, “I do not pretend to oversee the inner workings of every city. I do not make the choices for all the small decisions made by my Admirals, and Governors, and Mayors. My mind is on the global picture. Let the little people see to their little issues.”
By the end of this he seemed to have satisfied himself. He tossed his napkin into his chair and stomped up the sand towards his castle. Flora, too, left the table in a huff, and Calgori and myself sat silently for a minute at the table with Lilith. She glared at the two as they left.
THE EMPERORS WIVES
Doctor Calgori was agitated himself, and walked silently down the beach, leaving me and Lilith alone. We’d been talking with the Emperor all day now, and the sun was beginning to set.
Finally, Lilith broke the silence. “He can be wrathful,” she said, in an almost apologetic tone, “…but he has accomplished great things at great cost, in the face of the nearly assured destruction of the world. Come, let me show you around the castle, and I will explain everything.”
We walked up the beach, and into the palace. Inside was both lavish, and ancient. It was more like a castle preserved for tourists then a lived-in home. The decor was opulent, and exotic, as if the luxuries of a hundred nations all provided their greatest treasures for this one abode. Sculptures from Greece, China, and Indonesia posed proudly in alcoves or in the center of rooms. Long leather riveted sofas from Italy sat invitingly on deep and ornate carpets from Turkey. There were many huge globes, mechanical orries, telescopes, and ornate screens of carved teak. There were chandeliers of intricate brass, inlaid with a thousand facets of colored glass.
There were cats lying on every chair, with lush colorful fur. These cats were flawlessly clean and healthy. There were also birdcages of the most amazingly ornate designs, with many floors and rooms, sculpted elaborately of dark metals. In them were a vast variety of birds, most of which I had never seen before. These cages were perfectly clean, or being cleaned as we passed them, by small, quiet, brown skinned women. The doors of these cages were always open and the birds flew in and out at will.
The cats and birds seemed an odd mix, and I did occasionally see the cats stalking the birds. Nobody did anything to stop this. Perhaps this game of survival was part of Victor’s attraction to mixing these incompatible species? Was this was a game of balance he played with himself? Where most homes might have a chess board laying about, Victor instead had a small ecosystem fighting for their lives? Entertainment at the cost of lives, not merely pets.
Yet the most distinctive things in the palace of the Emperor were the calendars. They were massive, many yards wide in thick carved frames. Each calendar spanned not a month or year, but an era, illustrated by hand, in gorgeous detail. By walking the halls of the Emperor’s palace you could easily see all the eras of humanity. Some of these calendars were old, but some of them were very newly drawn, and some had huge sections crossed out with a massive red line. Was Victor planning more changes? Planning to simply remove events from history? He must have often commissioned artists to redraw these calendars constantly – or perhaps as he changed the time line these simply changed to reflect it, drawn by artists who lived their long lives in the new time lines he created. These were the kind of thoughts that could keep you up at night.
It seemed grotesque to me to see his changes laid out so purposefully. He would simply erase political movements, governments, or peoples as he saw fit. Erasing the past to create the future he wanted repulsed me – until I realized thats exactly what we had been doing with the Ophelia. And we had been doing it with much less care and craftsmanship. We just haphazardly removed events we generally thought of as “bad”, with no thought to the consequences. Victor was “gaming” the history of the planet, reshaping all that has ever occurred, in an effort to build his perfect world. Realizing this made me feel shallow and short-sighted.
As we walked, Lilith talked with a quiet urgency. It felt like a confession, as if I was to absolve her of the story as it unfolded. “When I met him, he lived in a time where the cities had grown so large that their edges connected. It was horrible and He was young, handsome, brilliant and tortured on behalf of this planet he loves so dearly. Together we created this plan to restore balance. It was his passion, not mine, but I supported him and worked with him.”
“Wait, I’m confused,” I said. “All politics aside for a second, how did you meet him, Lilith?”
“It was long ago now, ten, twelve years I think? It’s so hard to remember accurately with all our travel,” she said, getting a far off look in her eye. “I had talked Tanner into helping me steal a part of the Chrononautilus – not the whole thing mind you, just a small part you wouldn’t miss. He said he couldn’t see the harm in me striking out on my own, and that I deserved it. I wasn’t getting the attention I deserved onboard the Ophelia. Tanner was easy to manipulate, he always has to make everyone happy! His greatest weakness is his unquenchable need to placate everyone.”
My face flashed hot and red, and I could feel my pulse in my cheeks. How many of our crew died that day because of this selfishness of Lilith’s? This might have been twelve years ago for her, so she could refer to it matter-of-factly, but this betrayal was only a few months past for me. I bit my tongue. If I lost my temper now I would never hear her story, and (setting aside any religious beliefs you might have) this is arguably the most important story ever told.
Lilith went on, “I also took your Chronofax, and I must admit that has proved far more valuable than I would have guessed at the time. When it went missing, we lost a great tool,” and then a look of worry flashed across her face.
“Anyway, Tanner helped me take the plans from Calgori’s cabinets,” she went on. “And remove the parts from your ship, all while assuring me it would do no damage. I think he was reassuring himself, mostly, as I hardly cared about your damned ship and crew. You ignored me.”
“Lilith, I had to ignore you. I couldn’t give you the kind of attention you wanted…” I said, but she went on to prevent that topic from coming up.
“I spent a year reassembling the Chrononautilus, and I made a small craft that was just big enough to take me up out of harm’s way, and into what I assumed was a brighter, richer future. My goals were small then, I just wanted back to the life I saw in your time, making music with all those people fawning over me. I wanted what you had; to be the center of attention. But when I arrived in ‘the future’ I found a world of concrete, and filth, and angry machines driven by an angry population. It was nothing like I remembered it.
“I nearly died that night, falling thousands of feet into a lake as my balloon was severed the moment I traveled. Victor found me, and pulled me from the water. He saved my life!”
She went on, “He was young, rich, beautiful, and tortured by the greed of his parents. They spent their life tearing down nature to build this ugly new world, and he was tormented with the guilt of it.
“He was in graduate school, learning all he could about the natural world; environmental science, farming, political science. He vowed to undo the destruction of his family, and was arming himself with every discipline necessary to do it. When he learned of the Chrononautilus, he immediately saw its potential. So together we laid a plan
to use it to restore the balance to the world. We planned and studied, and all the while we fell deeply in love.”
By now we had wandered most of the castle, and found ourselves again on the beach. The sky was now deep-crimson at the horizon, and purple high above, as the sun had recently set over the castle and jungle. The sand was firm under our feet where the waves had wet it.
Lilith spoke with a longing for these days of her life gone by. “Our first travel took us back to the great Depression. The land was held in famine, and disease. Victor had an education decades more advanced then this era, and he used it to fix these problems. After he did, political success was easy.”
“Complete political domination was also guaranteed, thanks to you,” Lilith added with a poisoned smile.
“Me? What the hell did I have to do with this?” I said skeptically and a little insulted. “And why would the people of the world let you do these things? Why would they let him change the laws? Why would they let him unify the nations of the world? Surely they saw how well that worked for the British Empire! And for Nazis, taking towns full of people off to be killed. Didn’t anyone remember the Holocaust? How did nobody see this coming?”
She continued with a wicked grin, “But those things never happened. Not from their perspective. With all your heroics, you were changing history, and the world was becoming dependent on you, and naive. Anytime something truly bad was going to happen, you snuffed it out. By the time Victor started his campaigns for World Emperor, there was really no historical warnings for the people of the world. Having one ruler just sounded like a convenient simplification to them,” and she laughed.
I was stunned. Mankind had no way of seeing this coming, and it was my fault.
Then Lilith continued more slowly. Something was troubling her memories. “But Victor was obsessed, and he took many more trips then I. This caused him to age three times as fast as me, since he would spend so many years away accomplishing his plans.” Her eyes were moist, now, and she went on slower, “Then one day he returned…” And she inhaled sharply. “With her!” In her eyes I saw fear. “At first it was a shock, and it felt like betrayal, but he said it was not. She was for us, not him, he said. I did not fully believe him, but I was curious, so I pretended I did.”
