The Thousand Emperors

by Gary Gibson

  Glancing at the other mechant, Luc saw it had done the same, its weapons swivelling until they were directed at his skull.

  ‘Now,’ said Maxwell, ‘I’ll give you, hmm . . . let’s say five seconds, to tell me why you’re here, before I order them to kill you as a purely precautionary measure. And please,’ he added, stepping slightly closer, ‘be aware that I’ve been around for long enough to be able to tell when someone is lying to me.’

  ‘I’m investigating Sevgeny Vasili’s death,’ Luc blurted, as the hum emanating from the mechants rapidly increased in pitch.

  Maxwell stared at him with narrowed eyes for a period of time that felt much longer than five seconds. Then, just as the hum was about to reach a crescendo, Maxwell raised a hand, and the hum fell away into silence.

  ‘I heard about Sevgeny,’ said Maxwell, his voice grave. ‘Joseph told me all about it on his last visit. A very unfortunate thing indeed, and something that has inspired me to greater than usual levels of paranoia. On whose authority, Mr Gabion, are you carrying out this investigation?’

  ‘I’m here on Zelia de Almeida’s authority,’ Luc admitted.

  Maxwell’s brows furrowed together, and he sighed in consternation, pulling his robe tight around his shoulders.

  ‘Zelia,’ the old man muttered half to himself, then let out a soft laugh with a shake of the head. ‘Now there’s someone I haven’t heard from in a long time. She didn’t feel like paying me a visit in person?’

  ‘She said she wasn’t allowed to come here.’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘Of course, of course. Try, if you will, to see things from my point of view; I’ve so rarely encountered anyone outside of the Eighty-Five in such a very long time that I don’t particularly care to recall just how long it’s been.’ His eyebrows, as white as the hair on his head, rose fractionally. ‘And now I find an unexpected visitor struggling to reach my library and nearly dying in the attempt. And from what scant information I’ve been able to glean regarding what transpires in the outside world, I gather Zelia herself is a potential suspect in Sevgeny’s murder. By all rights, I should inform my gaolers of your presence. I can imagine they’d take a degree of pleasure in extracting considerably more information from you than you’ve provided me with so far.’

  ‘You mean the Sandoz don’t already know I’m here?’

  ‘The Sandoz?’ Maxwell chuckled under his breath. ‘They know there’s no way I could cross a thousand miles of ice and snow on my own. What need is there to watch me closely, given that knowledge? But perhaps I should let them know about you. What do you think?’

  ‘I really don’t think you want to do that.’

  ‘Why not?’ Maxwell demanded, his voice rising, and echoing from the high walls around them.

  ‘Because then you might have to explain to them why the hell the Coalition Ambassador just paid you a visit.’

  Maxwell gazed at him with an expression of utter stupefaction.

  Luc waited, his hands clammy, all too aware of the gentle hum of the mechants on either side of him. His stomach growled audibly in the otherwise still silence of the library, and he realized it had been a good long while since he’d had anything to eat.

  ‘May I say, this is turning out to be quite the novel day,’ said Maxwell suddenly, as if coming unfrozen. ‘You’re hungry?’

  ‘Yeah, very,’ Luc admitted.

  ‘My dining room is on the lowest level of the library,’ Maxwell told him, gesturing towards the mechants. ‘I’ll see you there in a minute or two.’

  Maxwell’s data-ghost vanished, and Luc followed one of the mechants to an elevator platform that carried him swiftly downwards. He gazed along the length of the library in the moment before it disappeared out of sight, and wondered what it must be like to live in such a place, buried inside a mountain with no eyes to the outside world beyond the lenses of mechants.

  The platform came to a halt, and he followed the mechant down a long gallery to another room lined with yet more books. A third mechant was busy placing serving dishes and bowls on a table, at one end of which sat the flesh-and-blood Javier Maxwell.

  ‘Don’t look so nervous,’ said Maxwell, indicating an empty seat across the table from him. ‘Take a seat. Please. It’s nice to have the opportunity to eat with someone who isn’t also my gaoler, even if he is intent on blackmailing me.’

  Luc remained standing. The mechant that had guided him here floated up to hover in one corner of the ceiling. ‘You still haven’t told me why Ambassador Sachs was here. Or has he not departed yet?’

  ‘No, the Ambassador is gone. He left just before one of my mechants found you. You know, I was just about to eat when you woke, and I don’t know about you, but I hate long conversations on an empty stomach.’

  ‘I need to get in touch with Zelia—’

  His stomach rumbled again.

  ‘Dear God,’ said Maxwell, picking up a fork and stabbing it towards the empty chair. ‘Sit down and eat first. Then we talk.’

  Maxwell lifted the lid from a serving dish and the sweet, aromatic scent of grilled fish rose up. Luc sat and watched as Maxwell, pointedly ignoring him, focused all his attention on filling his plate.

  Despite himself, and the terrible urgency that continued to dominate his every thought and action, Luc ate.

  The food and wine helped chase some of his nerves away. He had the sense the meal was as much a delaying tactic for Maxwell as anything else, an opportunity for the imprisoned Councillor to try and work out what Luc’s presence here meant. The mechants worked efficiently at clearing empty dishes away and replacing them with new ones.

  He tried again to engage Maxwell in conversation, but the old man’s only response was to tap the edge of a dish with a fork and shake his head.

  When he was finished, Maxwell took a last sip of wine, regarding Luc from across the table. ‘One of my mechants was observing you,’ he said, ‘when you woke up. I watched you picking through the books in that room I left you in.’

  Luc hesitated, then carefully put down his knife and fork. ‘What about it?’

  Maxwell pushed his chair back and stood, then crossed over to a nearby shelf, trailing his fingers along a line of volumes before selecting one in particular and pulling it out.

  ‘Perhaps you’d indulge me in a little experiment,’ he said, bringing the book around the table and placing it next to Luc.

  Luc cleared his throat nervously. ‘What kind of experiment?’

  Maxwell flipped the book open, then slid it closer to Luc’s right hand. ‘I want you to place your hand flat on these pages.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  ‘Then my mechants will find a way to make you, Mr Gabion.’

  ‘What is the book, exactly?’

  ‘An account of the fall of Earth, by a man named Saul Dumont. Ever heard of him?’

  Saul Dumont. ‘Of course I have. He was the last man on Earth.’

  ‘The last man to escape Earth, would be a more precise way of putting it.’

  Luc shook his head. ‘There’s no such book. If there was, I’d have heard of it – we’d all have.’

  Maxwell regarded him with an expression of tolerant pity. ‘The book is called Final Days. He wrote it during his decades on Novaya Zvezda, back when it was still called Galileo. It’s an eye-opener, let me tell you – it most certainly does not correlate with the sanctioned histories of the Tian Di, and is all the more fascinating because of that. Now,’ Maxwell continued, ‘do as I say: press your hand and fingers flat and firmly on the pages.’

  Luc hesitated, and one of the mechants drifted towards him, weapons slithering from out of its belly.

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Luc, sweating now. ‘How could this book possibly exist—’

  ‘Unless it had been deliberately redacted on the orders of Cheng and his faithful Eighty-Five?’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘I could say much the same for many of the books I keep here. If this prison had a name, Mr Gabion, it would be called the Library of the Damned.’<
br />
  Luc reached out hesitantly, his hand hovering over the pages. Maxwell made an impatient sound and pushed Luc’s hand flat against the smooth, metallic paper.

  He stood at the entrance to a room as small and undecorated as a monk’s cell, the scent of ocean water mixed with the stink of rotting seaweed.

  He stepped inside and past a heavy iron door to see a man seated by a desk, its surface bright with icons floating above it. Words formed in the air as the man murmured quietly to himself. The desk was an antique, manufactured on Earth prior to the Abandonment.

  The man – Saul Dumont – had dark chocolate skin and close-cropped hair, and wore a heavy coat over a zipped-up jerkin to keep out the cold. He had undergone his second instantiation within the last several years, and so looked young despite being well into his second century.

  Dumont glanced over his shoulder at him, favouring him with a weary smile.

  ‘What took you so long, Javier?’ he asked.

  Javier glanced to the side as a woman in late middle-age entered the room beside him. She was similar enough in appearance to Dumont that one might easily assume them to be mother and son.

  ‘Dad?’ Her voice quavered slightly as she spoke to Dumont. ‘We need to get going. Johnson’s got the boat ready. We need to evacuate. Now.’

  Dumont gripped the edge of the desk with one hand, then pushed so that his chair slid back from it.

  ‘There’s still time,’ said Dumont, addressing his daughter. ‘We can still negotiate with Hsiu-Chuan—’

  ‘Cheng,’ she replied. ‘Please remember, Dad.’

  Dumont waved a hand in irritation. ‘Whatever the hell he calls himself these days, Hsiu-Chuan’s no fool. He must know we’d blow the rigs before we’d let the Tian Di Hui install their puppet government here. We—’

  ‘Warships set out from Ocean Harbour more than a day ago. Please,’ she said, stepping closer to him. ‘We know how hard you fought for autonomy. We all do, but you have to accept that the fight is over.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ Dumont’s voice rose, and he slammed a fist against the desk, making the icons ripple. ‘Ettrick and Litewski still have some say on Franklin,’ he continued, a plaintive edge creeping into his voice. ‘We can run our own damn affairs.’

  ‘Ettrick and Litewski have already agreed to the transfer of power,’ his daughter replied. ‘They didn’t have any choice. They’ve already arrived back through the transfer gate.’

  Dumont stared back at her in horror.

  ‘She’s right,’ said Javier. ‘We need to retreat and regroup.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Javier,’ said Dumont, ‘I know Hsiu-Chuan – he’s a monster. Whatever he’s got in mind for us, he can’t possibly—’

  Luc gasped as his fingers slipped from the page. Maxwell stared down at him, tight-lipped.

  ‘Impossible,’ Maxwell muttered under his breath.

  ‘How does it work?’ Luc managed to croak. ‘It’s like I was actually there, out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Saul Dumont was there—’ He stared at Maxwell in shock. ‘You were there. I was seeing everything through your eyes.’

  ‘The memories are encrypted,’ said Maxwell, shaking his head. ‘How could you possibly access them without an encryption key? In fact, how could you even have a lattice? No one outside of the Council or Sandoz has one, except . . .’

  He stopped abruptly, his mouth trembling slightly.

  Luc nodded at the shelves around them. ‘Can all of these books do the same?’

  Maxwell shrugged, looking defeated. ‘A few, but not all.’

  ‘And what I saw and heard . . . That was all real?’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘Quite real. You just experienced my own memories, from about a century after the Abandonment.’

  ‘You were on Novaya Zvezda, with Dumont?’

  Maxwell sighed as he sat back down. ‘I grew up there, long ago enough that I can remember when the first transfer gate was destroyed, years before the Abandonment even took place. I remember the clamour when Dumont was first brought down from orbit.’

  ‘What happened to Dumont? Didn’t he disappear?’

  ‘No, he simply decided he preferred life in the Coalition to the rule of the Council, some time before the Schism. If he’s still alive, he’s to be found there now.’

  Luc recalled his history. Before escaping on board a starship carrying a new transfer gate to Galileo, Dumont had shut down the entire wormhole network to ensure the survival of the colonies. By the time the ship arrived at Galileo, the Earth had been sterilized by some unknown, alien force.

  ‘Dumont said something about Cheng – that it wasn’t always his name.’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘His name back in those days was Shih Hsiu-Chuan.’

  ‘So why the change of identity?’

  ‘Because he’s a man with many secrets,’ Maxwell muttered, taking his seat at the table once more and pouring himself a new glass of wine. ‘Assuming a new identity makes it easier to ensure that those secrets stay secret; he picked Cheng because it’s a common name, as is Joe.’ He made a circle with one hand. ‘A man of the people, you see. Father Cheng, because a father always takes care of his children.’

  ‘But . . . why would Cheng allow you to keep those memories stored here, in this prison? Surely they’d be dangerous to him, if they were found out?’

  Maxwell didn’t reply, and Luc glanced at the book where it still lay on the floor, its pages half-folded.

  He came to a realization. ‘Cheng doesn’t know these recordings exist, does he? Does anyone else know about them?’

  Maxwell regarded him balefully. ‘You know, I could still order these mechants to kill you. It might save me a lot of unnecessary bother.’

  Luc glanced towards the mechants and saw that they had still not retracted their weapons. ‘You could,’ he replied slowly, ‘but I think if you were going to, you already would have.’

  ‘Please don’t make the mistake of making too many assumptions about me,’ Maxwell snapped. ‘For all Zelia knows, you’re lying dead out there in the snow. She might never know you were here.’

  ‘Then why the hell did you even bother to rescue me at all?’

  ‘I looked you up while the mechant was escorting you here,’ Maxwell replied. ‘You’re the one who killed Winchell Antonov, my former colleague and, dare I say it, brother-in-arms.’

  ‘So it’s revenge you want?’

  Maxwell laughed. ‘I have no intention of harming you, Mr Gabion. Revenge is for the young, and killing you wouldn’t bring Winchell back. If I’m guilty of anything, it’s simple curiosity.’

  ‘You said that apart from me, no one outside of the Council or Sandoz has a lattice,’ said Luc, ‘but then you said except. Except who?’

  Maxwell didn’t answer.

  ‘You were going to say Ambassador Sachs, weren’t you?’ Luc hazarded. ‘He’s the only other one outside of either of them with an instantiation lattice.’

  Maxwell sighed and took another sip of wine. ‘Nobody should be able to access those memories without my permission,’ he agreed. ‘Not you, not Sachs, not anyone without the appropriate encryption key. And yet the Ambassador’s lattice somehow unlocked the memories automatically, and without effort – as did yours.’

  ‘Who else has a copy of that key?’

  ‘Only me,’ Maxwell replied.

  Luc glanced around the ranks of books surrounding them, thinking about all those people, Cheng and the members of the Eighty-Five, coming here and browsing their pages, entirely unaware of the sophisticated circuitry contained within them. Surely they must handle these books all the time . . .

  ‘You’ve been stealing their memories,’ Luc guessed, regarding Maxwell with new eyes. ‘Every time one of the Eighty-Five picks up one of your books, it sieves information out of their lattices without them ever knowing. Am I right?’

  Maxwell’s expression became strangely sad. ‘The circuitry in the books is meant to push extra embedded information the other w
ay – from the pages to the reader’s lattice. It took me a while, but I worked out how to reverse the flow of data and keep it hidden.’

  ‘Why do it?’

  ‘Because one day, the people of the Tian Di will need to know the truth about their leaders, and they’ll find all the evidence they need right here in this library. Tell me, just how much contact have you had with the members of the Temur Council, apart from Zelia?’

  ‘More than enough, for this lifetime.’

  ‘Dreadful people, aren’t they?’ Maxwell said dryly. ‘If I had the means, I would destroy the Council, and Vanaheim along with them.’

  Luc stared at him. ‘Why?’

  Maxwell put his glass back down, and Luc tried not to flinch when one of the mechants drifted forward to refill it. ‘Because they’re a travesty of what they once were, long sunk into the introspection of old age, and dark perversions you would scarcely believe.’

  ‘What kind of perversions?’

  Maxwell looked at him in disbelief. ‘You’re Zelia’s puppet. Surely you’ve encountered the “experiments” I’ve been hearing so much about? Or has she grown bored with that now?’

  Luc shifted uncomfortably, again seeing a hunched figure immolating itself in his mind’s eye.

  ‘So you have seen them,’ said Maxwell with an expression of dour amusement. ‘It’s a shame you killed Winchell. He was one of the few men left from the old days still worth a damn.’

  ‘Even knowing of all the atrocities he was responsible for? The assault on Benares, the Battle of Sunderland—’

  ‘You’ve been taken in by Cheng’s propaganda. I’m well acquainted with the details of the Benarean assault: Cheng came here on several occasions prior to that campaign, so he could describe to me his plan to discredit Black Lotus. He lied to you. All of them did.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  Maxwell smiled enigmatically. ‘You’ve already worked out, haven’t you, that Vasili paid me a visit not long before his death?’

  Luc stiffened. ‘Why would you assume that?’

  ‘Why else would you have been so afraid of that book you leafed through downstairs, unless you’d encountered a memory-enabled book before? And I can tell you for a fact that Vasili was the only person in possession of a book taken from here. Now tell me,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘That book I gave to him – do you have it with you?’