The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency)

by John Scalzi

  “Tell him to send one confirming my death and the destruction of the Bransid, and then say they are going to stay behind for a month to salvage the habitats. Give a specific date they plan to leave this space.” Marce looked over to Sherrill. “If the Wus are planning to have someone blast them, they’ll reschedule to match dates.”

  “Sneaky,” Sherrill said.

  “I don’t want to be blasted to bits.” He turned back to Chenevert. “And you finally will be able to visit the Interdependency.”

  “Wait, you want to use this ship to get back to the Interdependency?” Chenevert said. “I can’t do that. I don’t have a field generator.”

  They all stared at him.

  “I’m joking,” he said. “Of course I do.”

  “We need to talk about your sense of humor,” Marce said, after he and every other human in the room recovered from their mini heart attacks. “Being semi-dead seems to have affected it.”

  “It was like this before,” Chenevert said. “How do you think I died?”

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter

  19

  Shortly before the Bransid was scheduled to return into Interdependency space, an appointment the ship and its crew would miss, two more Flow streams disappeared.

  The first was the stream from Marlowe to Kealakekua. The two systems were lightly inhabited and direct trade between them was infrequent, as their direct Flow stream took a month to traverse, while routing through Beylagan cut ten days off the journey. It was a reminder that the time in a Flow stream was not necessarily related to the distance between two systems, and also the intricacies of the Flow were something only a few people understood to any extent.

  As a consequence of this, the Flow stream between Marlowe and Kealakekua was only infrequently used for legitimate shipping and travel. It had instead become a favorite of smugglers, pirates and others who didn’t mind taking a little extra time if it meant avoiding navy interceptors and local customs enforcement. When the Flow stream disappeared, no legitimate commerce or transportation was listed as lost. The eight ships and one thousand people who were lost were all on private, unlisted or illegal transports. There was no paperwork for their itineraries, no bills of lading and no record of their comings and goings. They were, simply, gone. Their customers, clients and loved ones would never know what had become of them, because they would not necessarily have known they had taken that route at all.

  The second stream was not so obscure. It connected the systems of Guelph and Szeged, both systems considered part of the population and economic “core” of the Interdependency. Due to the nature of the Flow, the Count Claremont’s work on its collapse and the estimated schedule of Flow disruptions had yet to make it to Guelph, and the commerce and travel between the two systems was in full flower when the Flow stream collapsed, unannounced and, to the people of Guelph, unpredicted.

  The impact was immense. Tens of thousands of people disappeared, including two passenger ships, the Allure of the Stars and the Oasis of the Stars, which between them carried ten thousand souls. More than a billion marks of commerce evaporated. The journey from Guelph to Szegred, previously seven days and eight hours, would now be more than a month through alternate routes.

  The return route from Szegred to Guelph remained open, but Szegred stopped all traffic outbound for fear of a similar collapse. Guelph stopped all its commercial traffic to its three other exiting Flow shoals until an explanation could be found. The explanation would arrive from Hub more than a month and billions of marks of lost commerce later. It was a wound on the cultural soul of Guelph that would never fully heal.

  Along with the disappearance of these two Flow streams, the phenomenon of evanescence, sketched out to Grayland by Marce and Roynold, was having its effect as well, tearing open a Flow stream between Oecusse and Artibonite that lasted, unnoticed, a week before disappearing in as unheralded a fashion as it arrived. It was just as well that no enterprising ship had tried to enter its temporary shoal, as the transit time between the two systems would have been along the order of five weeks, longer than the stream itself would exist.

  A stream of even shorter duration, between End and Neunkirchen, existed for fifteen minutes; a corresponding return stream would open up seven minutes later and disappear twenty minutes afterward. Like the stream between Oecusse and Artibonite, it would go unnoticed in either system. But briefly End, traditionally the most isolated system in the Interdependency, and recently even more isolated than usual, had a back door in and out of it. That no one knew it, or could have used it, didn’t change the fact that it had been there.

  * * *

  In the Memory Room, Cardenia called up Rachela I, the first prophet-emperox, who stood before her, silent, waiting for her to ask something.

  “Did you ever have doubts?” Cardenia asked.

  “About what?” Rachela I said.

  Cardenia laughed. Because of course that was the most Rachela answer possible. Cardenia had summoned up the memory of the first emperox numerous times now, to discuss the nature of visions, and how to sell them and how to make them stick, if not to the members of the nobility, then to the masses, to whom they were pitched in the first place. In all the time Cardenia had been talking to her great-great-great-ancestress, Rachela had never once projected (figuratively and literally, as her image was projected from clever lighting in the Memory Room’s ceiling) anything other than serene confidence.

  Some of that was probably because Cardenia’s Rachela was not the real Rachela, just a bundle of memories and emotions animated by a heuristic-oriented AI that could tell you what Rachela was feeling at a particular moment in time, but couldn’t feel that emotion itself. Or any of the emotions of any of eighty-seven previous emperoxs, including her father. Cardenia was aware that technically speaking, none of these emperoxs existed and she was merely talking to Jiyi, the Memory Room’s avatar, who put on the former emperoxs like she might put on a new shirt. But when Rachela I or Attavio VI was standing in front of you, it was easy to forget you weren’t speaking to the actual person.

  But computer simulation or not, lack of actual emotion or not, it was still the case that at least some of the residue of every emperox’s personality came through in conversation. Emperoxs who had been neurotic talked and answered questions like a neurotic person. The blustery, stupid ones gave blustery and stupid answers. The creepy ones—and there were a few—were made even creepier by the lack of overt emotion.

  Rachela I’s affect wasn’t creepy, or blustery or neurotic. She was just … Rachela. Confident. A sort of confidence Grayland was getting good at pretending at, but still working on actually feeling.

  Grayland considered Rachela I’s question. “All right, did you ever have doubts about anything?”

  “Of course. Only a sociopath lacks doubt, and I wasn’t a sociopath when I was alive.”

  “Are you now?”

  “If you brought a psychiatrist in here and had them give me an evaluation, I would probably come across as a sociopath. I currently fundamentally lack empathy, although I can pretend to it. Which may be a textbook definition of sociopathy. I don’t have any doubts now, certainly.”

  “But you did when you were alive.”

  “Yes, many. Ranging from very small and trivial doubts about people, things, and incidents, to larger, existential doubts, for example, about whether we would be able to pull off founding the Interdependency.”

  “Why did you have doubts?”

  “Leaving aside any of my own personality quirks, because it made sense to have doubts. It made sense to worry that our plans were not complete and that there were contingencies we had not thought of, that I had not thought of, that would come back and affect how events would play out.”

  “And did they? Did your doubts come true?”

  “Sometimes they did.”

  “How did you deal with that?”

  “We made new plans as well as we could and put them into effect.”

  �
��You improvised.”

  “Yes. The one advantage we had, which is a thing I brought to the enterprise, was the understanding that the plan was not the goal. The goal was the goal, and we were going to get to it however we could. And if it meant changing our plans, sometimes in the middle of executing them, then we would.”

  “You sound proud of it,” Cardenia observed.

  “I was.”

  “I mean, you sound proud of it now. You, the simulation.”

  “I’m not, but Rachela was. And it makes sense to reflect that pride to you. It’s why I became emperox. I was always meant to be emperox, I should clarify—the Wu family always knew they needed a front person who could balance both the state and church roles. A useful figurehead for both. But I was more than a figurehead because I was the one reminding the others, constantly, that the plan was not the goal. We succeeded because of it.”

  “Did you doubt that your prophecies would work?”

  “Sometimes. Something we worked out between ourselves would go out in the world and fall flat, and I would have to spin it and sometimes abandon it altogether. I’ve told you before that the prophecies were aspirational, not predictive. It’s only after we worked to make them come true that they had the appearance of inevitability. And we worked very hard on that.”

  “Making prophecies, and getting them across successfully, is much harder work than what I expected,” Cardenia admitted.

  “It’s very hard work,” Rachel agreed. “I retired them as soon as it was practically possible. I know no other emperox before you bothered to have any, because it made no sense to have them. They were already emperox, so much of the hard work of establishing a rule was already done. All they had to do was maintain that rule. We set it up so that would be easy to do through the tools of the state.”

  “So you’re saying I shouldn’t have bothered with prophecies.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Because you’re not actually a human and have no interest in it outside of what I tell you.”

  “There is that. And also, your reign is unlike the reign of any of your predecessors, including mine. I worked hard to form the Interdependency, but I wasn’t the emperox then. When I became the emperox, in most ways, my crisis—the formation of the Interdependency—was over. The House of Wu had succeeded. Your crisis is the dissolution of the Interdependency. You must prepare the systems of humanity to be alone. You have the tools of the state to do it, but the tools of the state will almost certainly not be enough. So now you must use the tools of the church as well. Which is why they were there for you. I put them there for you to use. Not you specifically. But any emperox who found themselves in this position.”

  Cardenia’s eyes narrowed at this. “You anticipated the collapse of the Flow.”

  “No,” Rachela I said. “I never really understood the Flow. It always looked like a lot of math, and I had people for that. But I did anticipate that there might be a time where an emperox might need more options than just being the emperox. That they might have to take on the mantle of prophet as well. You are the second prophet-emperox.”

  Cardenia recoiled. “Oh, I don’t call myself that.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “It’s a little … arrogant. And also I don’t think it’s a title I can give myself. I think others have to use it first.”

  “From a marketing point of view I can tell you that you’re wrong. If you want people to use the title, you should start using it yourself. Or at least start seeding it out there through your propagandists.”

  “We call them the Press Ministry now.”

  “Whatever. Have them start spreading it around. It will help more than you think it will.”

  “I have doubts,” Cardenia said.

  “I did marketing. I know.”

  “No,” Cardenia said. “Not about that. I mean larger doubts. About everything.”

  “Of course you do. You’re human.”

  “I’m glad you noticed.”

  “I can tell you are hoping for some wisdom from me right now.”

  “It ruins it a little when you put it like that, just so you know.”

  “I will remember to approach it more organically the next time.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you like the wisdom anyway?”

  “Yes,” Cardenia said. “Yes I would.”

  “It’s this: Confidence isn’t about knowing you’re right. Confidence is about knowing you can make it right. You have doubts because it makes sense for you to have doubts. Just like it made sense for me to have doubts. But remember the plan is not the goal. What is your goal?”

  “To save as many lives as possible, through every means possible.”

  “Be confident in that, and everything else will follow.”

  “Thank you,” Cardenia said, after a minute. “What you said about confidence makes sense to me.”

  “You’re welcome,” Rachela I said. “I read it in a book once.”

  * * *

  Cardenia emerged from the Memory Room to find Obelees Atek waiting for her. Atek had a mildly apprehensive look on her face, in part because she was always uncomfortable coming into the emperox’s private apartments, which she felt was an invasion of personal space, and in part because she didn’t know what the Memory Room was and it disturbed her. Cardenia had explained to her that it was a relaxation chamber of sorts, which was occasionally accurate, but she didn’t think that made Atek’s apprehension any less acute.

  Cardenia smiled at her assistant, took a breath, and became Grayland II again.

  “Is my next appointment here?” Grayland asked.

  “She is, ma’am, waiting for you in your office.” Atek motioned with her hand for the emperox to lead the way.

  In her office Lady Kiva Lagos waited, leaned way back in a chair, looking up at the ceiling, kicking one foot casually as she did so. Grayland was amused by this. Most visitors were overwhelmed by the office and its centuries of priceless cruft, but Kiva gave every impression of, Yeah, you have a lot of shit in this place, so fucking what. Which Grayland could definitely sympathize with.

  Atek discreetly coughed. Grayland saw Kiva look over, see Atek giving her the get the hell up signal, and haul herself out of her chair for a bow.

  “Lady Kiva, good to see you again,” Grayland said, and excused Atek from the room. “Sit back down, please.”

  “I was staring at your ceiling, Your Majesty,” Kiva said, sitting back down. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much gold foil in one place.”

  “It’s a lot, yes.”

  “One of the perks of being emperox.”

  “I suppose it is. I honestly don’t think about it much. I rarely look up at the ceiling these days.”

  “Give it a try sometime, ma’am. It’s pretty impressive.”

  “How is your friend doing? I’m sorry, her name escapes me at the moment.”

  “Senia Fundapellonan.”

  “It’s a lot to remember.”

  “I told her the same thing when I first met her. She is doing much better, thank you, ma’am. And thank you again for sheltering her at Brighton Palace. It makes her feel a lot safer.”

  “Of course. And how are you? I know your friend was injured, but the bullet went through your window.”

  “I’ve replaced the window with something a little more bulletproof,” Kiva said. “But other than that I’m still at my place. If someone wants to come find me, they know where I am.”

  “I don’t know whether that’s brave or foolish, Lady Kiva.”

  “It’s definitely foolish, ma’am. But if someone is going to make that much of an effort, then it doesn’t matter where I sleep. So I might as well sleep at home. Besides, I have a good idea who did it. I’ve expressed my displeasure.”

  “I hear rumors that the same night your friend was shot, Countess Nohamapetan’s chief of staff was assaulted in her bed.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that, ma’am.
”

  “No, I suppose you wouldn’t.” Grayland nodded over to Kiva’s hand, which was bandaged. “What happened to your hand, Lady Kiva?”

  “This?” Kiva held up her hand. “I broke it against something stupid.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  “Absolutely, ma’am.”

  “Well, good. Keep it up.”

  “I have every intention of doing that. And on that note…” Kiva reached over, grabbed a pile of documents that were set to the side of her chair, and dropped them on the emperox’s desk. “Let’s talk about just what I’ve got on the fucking Nohamapetans.”

  Grayland raised an eyebrow at this.

  “Oh, shit, I just swore out loud, didn’t I?” Kiva said.

  Grayland laughed.

  “Sorry,” Kiva said. “I’ve been trying to be on my best behavior, Your Majesty.”

  “I’d rather you just be you, Lady Kiva.”

  “Let’s hope you don’t regret saying that, ma’am.”

  “I’m pretty sure I won’t. Especially after you show me what you have here.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, what do you plan to do with it?”

  “The information? Nothing yet.” Grayland caught Kiva’s expression. “But I promise you, Lady Kiva, none of your work here is going to be in vain. I’ll make use of it. Effectively.”

  “Then let’s get into this,” Kiva said, and pulled out the sheet. “And let’s begin with these.”

  “What are they?”

  “Nadashe Nohamapetan’s secret bank accounts. As in, the ones she never expected anyone ever to find. They are very interesting.”

  “How so?”

  “Because as of twelve hours ago, Your Majesty, someone was moving money around in them.”

  Chapter

  20

  “Are we ready for this?” Gennety Hanton asked as he looked around the bridge of the Auvergne. The ship was about exit the Flow shoal to Hub.

  If there was to be any ambush it would be the moment the ship translated into regular space-time. Ships had no momentum coming out of the Flow; the Auvergne would be sitting in space, a motionless target for any missiles, beam weapons or harsh language thrown its way. Marce’s plan to send a drone with dummy information had been followed, but whether it was successful was another story entirely. The ad hoc crew of the Auvergne was about to find out.