Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

  The Colonel was staring incredulously, wonderingly, bemusedly.

  Lanista went on, “Your friends from Gavial can go home, but you stay here. You live out the rest of your days on Hermano. You can have a villa just like mine, twenty kilometers down the coast. The perfect retirement home, eh? Hermano’s not the worst place in the universe to live. You’ll have the servants you need. The finest food and wine. And an absolute guarantee that the Imperium will never bother you again. If you don’t feel like retiring, you can have a post in the government here, a very high post, in fact. You and I could share the top place. I’d gladly make room for you. Who could know better than I do what a shrewd old bird you are? You’d be a vital asset for us, and we’d reward you accordingly.—What do you say, Colonel? Think it over. It’s the best offer you’ll ever get, I promise you that.”

  It was easiest to interpret what Lanista had said as a grotesque joke, but when the Colonel tried to shrug it away Lanista repeated it, more earnestly even than before. He realized that the man was serious. But, as though aware now that this conversation had gone on too long, Lanista suggested that the Colonel return to his own lodgings and rest for a time. They could talk again of these matters later. Until then he was always free to resume the identity of Petrus Haym of the Gavialese trade mission, and to go back to his four companions and continue to hatch out whatever schemes they liked involving commerce between Gavial and the Free Republic of Hermano.

  He was unable to sleep for much of that night. So many revelations, so many possibilities. He hadn’t been prepared for that much. None of the usual adjustments would work; but toward dawn sleep came, though only for a little while, and then he awoke suddenly, drenched in sweat, with sunlight pouring through his windows. Lanista’s words still resounded in his mind. The Imperium has twisted your life out of shape, Lanista had said. Was that so? He remembered his grandfather saying, hundreds of years ago—thousands, it felt like—The Imperium is the enemy, boy. It strangles us. It is the chain around our throats. The boy who would become the Colonel had never understood what he meant by that, and when he came to adulthood he followed his father, who had said always that the Imperium was civilization’s one bulwark against chaos, into the Service.

  Well, perhaps his father had been right, and his grandfather as well. He had strapped on the armor of the Service of the Imperium and he had gone forth to do battle in its name, and done his duty unquestioningly throughout a long life, a very long life. And perhaps he had done enough, and it was time to let that armor drop away from him now. What had Lan-ista said of the Imperium? The universal foe, the great force for galactic stagnation. An angry man. Angry words. But there was some truth to them. His grandfather had said almost the same thing. An absentee government, enforcing conformity on an entire galaxy—

  On that strange morning the Colonel felt something within him breaking up that had been frozen in place for a long time.

  “What do you say?” Lanista asked, when the Colonel had returned to the small office with the desk and the chairs. “Will you stay here with us?”

  “I have a home that I love on Galgala. I’ve lived there ever since my retirement.”

  “And will they let you live in peace, when you get back there to Galgala?”

  “Who?”

  “The people who sent you to find me and crush me,” Lanista said. “The ones who came to you and said, Go to a place called Hermano, Colonel. Put aside your retirement and do one more job for us. They told you that a man you hate was making problems for them here and that you were the best one to deal with him, am I not right? And so you went, thinking you could help the good old Imperium out yet again and also come to grips with a little private business of your own. And they can send you out again, wherever else they feel like sending you, whenever they think you’re the best one to deal with whatever needs dealing with.”

  “No,” the Colonel said. “I’m an old man. I can’t do anything more for them, and they won’t ask. After all, I’ve failed them here. I was supposed to destroy this rebellion, and that won’t happen now.”

  “Won’t it?”

  “You know that it won’t,” the Colonel said. He wondered whether he had ever intended to take any sort of action against the Hermano rebels. It was clear to him now that he had come here only for the sake of seeing Lanista once again and hearing his explanation of what had happened on Shannakha. Well, now he had heard it, and had managed to persuade himself that what Lanista had done on Shannakha had been merely to commit an error of judgment, which anyone can do, rather than to have sought to contrive the death of his senior officer for the sake of convering up his own terrible blunder. And now there was that strange sensation he was beginning to feel, that something that had been frozen for fifty years, or maybe for two hundred, was breaking up within him. He said, “Proclaim your damned independence, if you like. Cut yourselves off from the Imperium. It makes no difference to me. They should have sent someone else to do this job.”

  “Yes. They should have.—Will you stay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’re no longer of the Imperium and neither are you.”

  Lanista spoke once again of the villa by the sea, the servants, the wines, the place beside him in the high administration of the independent world of Hermano. The Colonel was barely listening. It would be easy enough to go home, he was thinking. Lanista wouldn’t interfere with that. Hop, hop, hop, and Galgala again. His lovely house beside that golden river. His collection of memorabilia. The souvenirs of a life spent in the service of the Imperium, which is a chain about our throats. Home, yes, home to Galgala, to live alone within the security of the Imperium. The Imperium is the enemy of chaos, but chaos is the force that drives evolutionary growth.

  “This is all real, what you’re offering me?” he asked. “The villa, the servants, the government post?”

  “All real, yes. Whatever you want.”

  “What about Magda Cermak and the other three?”

  “What do you want done with them?”

  “Send them home. Tell them that the talks are broken off and they have to go back to Gavial.”

  “Yes. I will.”

  “And what will you do about the doorways?”

  “I’ll seal them,” Lanista said. “We don’t need to be part of the Imperium. There was a time, you know, when Earth was the only world in the galaxy, when there was no Imperium at all, no Velde doorways either, and somehow Earth managed to get along for a few billion years without needing anything more than itself in the universe. We can do that too. The doorways will be sealed and the Imperium will forget all about Hermano.”

  “And all about me, too?” the Colonel asked.

  “And all about you, yes.”

  The Colonel laughed. Then he walked to the window and saw that night had fallen, the radiant, fiery night of the Core, with a million million stars blazing in every direction he looked. The doorways would be sealed, but the galaxy still would be out there, filling the sky, and whenever he needed to see its multitude of stars he needed only to look upward. That seemed sufficient. He had traveled far and wide and the time was at hand, was more than at hand, for him to bring an end to his journeying. Well, so be it. So be it. No one would ever come looking for him here. No one would look for him anywhere; or, if looking, would never find him. At the Service’s behest he had returned to the stars one last time; and now, at no one’s behest but his own, he had at last lost himself among them forever.

  USA Today-bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch has won or been nominated for every major award in science fiction. She also writes acclaimed mystery, romance, nonfiction, and anything else that strikes her fancy. Her latest novel, The Falls, appeared in autumn of 2016. Her latest editing project, Women of Futures Past, shows how women have always influenced science fiction. “The Impossibles” takes place in her Retrieval Artist series, in which she has published fifteen novels so far.

  For more on her work, go to her website, kristinekathr
ynrusch.com

  THE IMPOSSIBLES

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Alarm, six a.m. Earth time—the whole damn starbase ran on Earth time. Barely a moment to rub the sleep from her eyes, roll out of her bed, and bang her knees against the wall, just like she had every morning since she graduated from law school. Not quite the top of her class. Okay, twenty-fifth. Not the middle either, not last. Near the top, close to the top. Not in the top ten or even the top twenty—not in the area where she could’ve gotten recruited by some firm, somewhere.

  Didn’t matter that she went to Alliance Law, best school in the Earth Alliance, harder to get into than any school on the Moon or on Earth, harder than Harvard or Oxford or Armstrong Legal Academy. Only two hundred students qualified for Alliance Law every year, and only one hundred graduated three years later.

  Those statistics meant nothing. All that mattered, apparently, was the top twenty. And Kerrie had been just five spots away from a guaranteed recruitment.

  That was what she thought about every morning when her knees smacked into that wall. Then she would debate with herself: Was it the ninety on her second-year contracts exam? Or the essay she had to redo five times for her Earth Alliance Agreements class? Or the party she went to that last week first year that caused her to get up late for her Torts final, making Old Man Scott dock her two points for tardiness?

  Or had she failed some indefinable thing—not volunteering for Fair Housing duty or failing to participate in Moot Court every single semester?

  She didn’t know—and she cared. She had had such high expectations for herself, and she hadn’t achieved them.

  Her family was happy—she was a lawyer in the prestigious Multicultural Tribunal system. But it wasn’t as glamorous as all that. It wasn’t glamorous at all—not that people outside the base, this single base dedicated almost entirely to InterSpecies Court for the First District, knew about the ugliness of the place. She had been shocked when she arrived nearly two years ago.

  All newly minted lawyers arriving here for the first time were shocked. And all of them wondered what exactly led them here. Something they had done? Or something they hadn’t?

  It wasn’t just the student loans. It couldn’t just be the loans, with their lovely little check-off option: Loan will be paid in full if student volunteers for public service internship post-graduation.

  Everyone checked that box, and the law firms that recruited, they paid off the loan so the student didn’t have to.

  Only she didn’t get recruited. No one told her that only twenty students from every class get recruited when she applied to Alliance Law. They implied—as they handed her the damn loan forms—that all students of Alliance Law got recruited.

  And she supposed that was probably true if looked at in a purely legalistic sense.

  She would most likely be recruited when her stint was up, two months from now. After two years here, she had more experience in InterSpecies Law than half the professors who taught the courses at law schools all over the sector.

  Horrible, awful experience, but experience nonetheless.

  She rubbed her knee as she grabbed the outfit she chose for today— black skirt, black suit jacket, black blouse. No need to stand out, no need to dress well. She was as interchangeable as the shuttles constantly moving between here and Helena base.

  She downloaded the morning’s files through her links as she grabbed coffee from the tiny communal kitchen. The base provided almost everything: food, housing, clothing, if necessary. Food and caffeine were the most important because otherwise (the base had learned) too many of the baby lawyers passed out in court. They were so busy they forgot to eat, something else Kerrie didn’t believe until she got here.

  Too much work, not enough time to eat, let alone think. She thought law school was bad. Law school—the best law school in the Earth Alliance—was a cakewalk compared to Earth Alliance InterSpecies Court for the First District. The Court also known as The Impossibles.

  Here everything was impossible from the caseload to the odds of winning. No one won, not really. The reality of the system was uglier than anyone ever imagined.

  From the counter, she took a banana, which was a little longer and a little more orange than she liked. Fifteen thousand varieties of bananas alone were grown in the base’s hydroponic gardens. The gardens stretched all along one tier of the base, providing fresh fruits and vegetables for the residents and the guests, if they could afford it. Guests who couldn’t afford fresh got the same indefinable food served to the prisoners—all of whom were on their way somewhere else, all of whom were scared, confused, and, in their minds, completely innocent.

  As she hurried out the door, she nearly rammed into one of the night court lawyers coming in (What was his name? Sam? She couldn’t remember and she should have, since they shared a lease). He grunted at her, so exhausted he could hardly move, and she nodded back, a little refreshed after a real night’s sleep.

  Refreshed but preoccupied. As she scurried to the elevator, she sorted the twenty-five cases she had to deal with today into four categories— morning, afternoon, evening, and Please-God-Never. The Please-God-Nevers she hoped to pass up the food chain to the lifers who knew how the system worked. The lifers, who had arrived as loan lawyers like she did, and stayed because they claimed they liked it here. The lifers, who look five times older than they were, and who—somehow—still had just a whisper of idealism in their voices.

  The idealism left her Day Three, when she had to send a toddler to the Wygnin for a crime his father committed six months before the kid was born. She couldn’t stop it. Hell, she didn’t even have time to review the file. She just had to plead and take the best deal—and in Earth Alliance InterSpecies Court there was no best deal, only a less egregious one.

  The elevator took her to the main hallway for Courthouse Number One, which housed most of the InterSpecies courtrooms. There was no court “house,” of course—that was just a linguistic formality from Earth. There were a lot of linguistic formalities because this place had no buildings, just floors and sections; more floors and sections than she thought possible. Floors and sections and rings—how could she forget rings? Especially when she might have to go to the jail ring later in the day, although she hoped not.

  The only thing she’d scored on since she arrived here was the apartment. Hers was close to work. Some of her colleagues rode on the tram from the outer rings of the starbase, losing two hours of sleep per day because they didn’t dare doze for fear of missing their stop.

  She didn’t go down the main hallway. Instead, she took a short half flight of stairs because it was easier than waiting for another elevator. The half flight took her to the public defenders office, which had been her home away from home since she got out of law school.

  After twenty-two months of actual survival—of not saying fuck it and letting Daddy or a rich cousin pay off her loan, of not prostituting herself, or telling the loan agency to stick it and take it out of her pay for the rest of her life—she actually rated a desk in the defenders office. Granted, it was in the back of the bullpen and barely as wide as the chair she got with it, but it was still a desk. Some days she saw it as a medal of honor.

  Today she saw it as one stop too many in a day already overcrowded with too many stops.

  She tossed the banana peel in the recycler near the door, a bit surprised she’d managed to eat at all. She had no memory of consuming that banana—and she should have. She didn’t like the long orange variety; she thought they were too bitter and citrusy to be real bananas.

  Apparently she was so hungry she didn’t even notice, and besides, she was still shuffling case files in her head—trying to find the best order, one that sent her from courtroom to courtroom in a logical fashion and gave her the most possible time with clients.

  She’d learned through hard experience that nothing mattered more than the schedule. Not reading the file, not figuring out which judge she faced. Finding time to meet the client
, who often had a wish or an idea or a scintilla of information that might get the sentence reduced or lightened or—in a perfect universe—tossed out, although that had never happened to her or one of her clients or even to a client of anyone she had worked with.

  She had heard rumors, of course. Gayle Giolotti had saved the lives of three kids on a technicality, and Sheri Hampstead actually got an acquittal by proving that the government bringing the case (Wygnin? Disty? Kerrie couldn’t remember) didn’t have the proper DNA identification of the accused.

  She’d always planned to check on those rumors, but of course she didn’t have time, and now her stint was nearly up, and once she left this godforsaken place, she would have no reason to look, no reason to check, no reason to think about it ever again.

  A steaming mug of coffee sat on her desk along with a pair of shoes she thought she’d lost. Her boss, Maise Blum, rested one hip on the desk’s corner, as if she planned to be there all day.

  Maise was tall and thin. Forty, maybe fifty, maybe sixty, she was one of the lifers, and it showed in the frown lines etched alongside her mouth. Her long black hair, which she wore up, had a sprinkling of silver, but Kerrie couldn’t tell if that was vanity, an attempt at gravitas, or an actual hereditary detail.

  “Got a case for you,” Maise said.

  “Sorry,” Kerrie said. “I’m here to check in and then I’m off to Judge Weiss’s court to begin today’s sprint.”

  “One case in exchange for ten of yours. I don’t even care if it’s ten of the toughies.”

  That caught Kerrie’s attention. In her first month, she would have agreed without looking up. In her first year, she would have agreed without questions.