Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

  “I covered her with a fine linen sheet.

  “Then for the following days and months, and years, nothing changed. No word or incident raised even the tiniest suspicion on my part. My lover was the same to me as she had always been, and I was as pleasant and giving to her and to all of my people.

  “And then my third challenge arrived. This danger came from the sky, and even at a great distance, it brought the worst possible trouble. Out on the edge of the solar system was an automated probe. A harum-scarum probe was moving at a small fraction of light-speed. The harum-scarums have always been aggressive in their explorations and colonizations, and now one of their sharp-eyed robots was plunging out of the darkness, threatening to fly past my world while taking note of everything that might bear interest.

  “I couldn’t allow myself or my good work be seen.

  “And sadly, the machines that I had left in orbit couldn’t protect me. I needed to leave the island. Wisely, I didn’t offer reasons or predict when I would return. As far as my people knew, I would be back among them before the next sunset or the coming full moon. But I begged them to continue our work—the delicate fabrication of a single machine that meant everything to me and to them.”

  In the dark, the voice dropped into a long airy sigh.

  Then quietly, but with an unhealed pain, their companion said, “This was the moment when the rebellion began. And I think you can guess who stood on the silk cushions of my empty throne, whirling a titanium hammer above her head, shouting to the throng, ‘It is time to save our world, my friends! To rescue our futures and gain control over our souls!’”

  9

  Emotions lay rich and fresh in the silence, born out of a sadness that could not be forgotten. Or maybe there was only silence, black and seamless, and the misery and burning sense of loss were supplied entirely by the human audience. It was impossible to tell which answer was correct, or if both were a little true. But then the humans heard a limb flex, the invisible body creaking as it shifted, not once but three times in quick succession. When the voice returned, it seemed slower. Each word was delivered alone, and between one word and the next laid a tiny silence, like a cold black mortar pushed between warm red bricks.

  “I could have destroyed the automated probe at a distance. I could have used methods that would have made harum-scarum scientists believe that bad luck was responsible. Some random rock, a cosmic hazard that slipped past the machine’s various armors. Nothing would seem too unusual about that. But erasing the danger was not the only problem. Harum-scarum probes are relatively common in our galaxy, and if I blithely obliterated them whenever our paths crossed, somebody would eventually see the pattern in my clumsiness.

  “No, what I did was rise up into the sky to meet the danger directly.

  “Like you, I am the loyal subject to a variety of laws concerning motion and energy. I had to race out into the solar system for a considerable distance, and then with methods that I cannot share, I invisibly changed my trajectory, racing back again, making certain that my momentum carried me close to the probe’s vector.

  “Together, that machine and I dove into the hot glare of the sun. I studied my opponent while it absorbed images of the two inner worlds. Then we climbed away from the sun, and at a moment when I would escape notice, I drifted closer and touched the machine with a thousand fingers, allowing its giant eyes to do their work even as I changed a small portion of what it could see.

  “Together, we passed between the gray moon and my blue-green world.

  “And then the danger was finished. The probe turned its attentions to the little red world coming next, and with my chore accomplished, I glanced backward, examining my home with my own considerable eyes.

  “The rebellion was well underway.

  “Twenty different security systems had been fooled, or by various means disabled. And now my clever little grandchildren had full control over their land and the ocean around them.

  “Feigning loyalty, they had continued building the machine.

  “Pretending subservience, most of them moved through their lives in the expected ways. But others openly prayed that I was dead, even while they planned my murder should I return. And still others pretended to die, their names removed from the city’s rosters, freeing them to journey over to the mainland, taking with them tools and skills as well as a story that would inspire the primitive souls they would find waiting there.

  “I was furious.

  “In ways quite rare to me, I felt the powerful, consuming need for revenge.

  “But motion and energy still held sway. I could not roar home in the next instant, and if I didn’t wish to be noticed by the probe beside me, I would have to be patient enough to obey my original plan.

  “Easing away from the probe consumed many days.

  “I spent another month pushing against the universe, slowing myself to a near-halt before turning and plunging back into the brilliant sunshine.

  “By then, the harum-scarum eyes were distant. But if the probe happened to glance back at my world, it might have noticed an island exploding before its time, a dark cloud spreading while a deep bubbling caldera defined the island’s grave. But I resisted that instinctive violence. Destroying my own work would have been an unacceptable cost, and worse, it would have been graceless.

  “And of course I could have remotely shut down the entire operation, protecting my investment from malicious hands. But that meant new risks as well as long, embarrassing delays.

  “Instead, I decided to dance with complete disaster, but aiming for total success.”

  After those words, a long pause seemed necessary.

  Finally, Perri said, “You won’t tell us. I know. But we would appreciate to know what the stakes were.”

  “I would like to know,” Quee Lee said.

  “What exactly you were building?” her husband pressed.

  “Britannia,” the voice replied. “Like any empire worth its salt . . . ” A weak laugh washed over them. “How can you separate a true empire from all of the little pretenders? What did the British possess that their vanquished opponents lacked? Why were those Northern men superior to the tropical peasants in the field and the dogs in the street?

  “Any good empire holds at least one skill that is its own.

  “The Greeks had their highly-trained hoplites and several unique if contradictory forms of government. The Chinese had the most enduring civil services ever seen on your world. Romans were possessed by their engineering and brutal legions. And so long as British boats owned the seas, their power was accepted by a world that saw no option but bow in their mighty presence.

  “An empire is always smarter than its competition.

  “And my Union is far, far smarter than the human species. Or any other species you can name, for that matter.

  “The device I was building . . . ? Well, I will tell you that it was a single component meant to be set inside a much larger machine. And that it was extremely rare and very valuable, embodying sciences that you have never mastered. Once assembled, the full apparatus can wield principles that your most brilliant minds might recognize as possible, but only that. The apparatus is magic. It is gorgeous. It was, and is, worth every cost.”

  A brief pause ended with Quee Lee’s voice.

  “So you returned to the Earth,” she said. “To Thera, or Atlantis. Although it wore different names then, I suppose.”

  “Whatever the world, whatever the island,” said the voice. “Yes, I returned, yes. To find my grandchildren engaged in an artful rebellion.”

  There was a long, contemplative pause.

  Finally Perri asked, “And what happened then?”

  “Worth every cost,” the entity said once again. “I speak without doubts, telling you what I did that day. And for that matter, what I would do on this day, in an instant, if I saw any threat to my enduring Union.

  “I would protect what I love.”

  10

  Until that moment, the
voice had been just so much noise. It was interesting and entertaining noise, the words intriguing if not completely believable. The narrative was compelling enough for the humans to feel empathy for the creatures that could well have been their own ancestors. Every portion of the disjointed tale deserved their attention as they tried to predict what would happen next and next after that; but there was no moment when they stopped wondering what kind of body was connected to the voice. Until then, that was the central question that kept begging to be answered.

  Then they heard the words, “My enduring Union,” and that simple utterance changed everything.

  Wrapped around a bald statement was stiff, unyielding emotion. Quee Lee and Perri heard the threat, the promise, the conviction and purpose— and they instantly believed what they heard. Now both of them were considering what it would mean if this story, unlikely as it seemed, was in some fashion or another true. And that was when the formless entity beside them—mysterious and unknowable, bristly and proud—became markedly less interesting than the grim bit of history it was sharing with them now.

  Human hands grabbed one another.

  Each lover felt the other’s body bracing for whatever came next.

  Another silence was what the voice decided to offer. And then from the perfect darkness came a sound not unlike a tongue or two licking against lips threatening to grow dry.

  Quee Lee and Perri had been married for tens of thousands of years. But as long as that might seem, marriage was infinitely older than their single relationship. And there were species that took intimacy to higher levels than humans could manage. The Janusians, for instance: Their little husbands rooted into the body of female hosts, literally joining into One. Yet among the human animals, Quee Lee and Perri were famous. Their relationship had evolved gradually into a complex and robust, enduring and very nearly impossible to define melange. There were a few humans who spent more time together than the two of them. Unlikely as it seemed, some married souls enjoyed their physical lives even more than these two managed. But no one could believe that any other human pair, on the Ship and perhaps anywhere else in the universe, was emotionally closer than that ancient Earth-born lady and her boyish life-mate. At some point, everybody tried to tease them.

  The happy couple generally welcomed good-natured barbs and admiring glances. But when asked to explain their success—when some friend of a friend insisted on advice for less-perfect relationships—they grew testy and impatient, even a little defensive. The truth was that they were helpless to define their relationship. A marriage was always larger than its participants, and what they possessed here was as mysterious and unlikely to them as it seemed to distant eyes. They couldn’t understand why they had drawn so closely together. They didn’t see why life had not yet found the means to yank them apart. But they were undeniably intimate and deeply dependent, up to the point where Quee Lee and Perri could never imagine being separated from one another in any lasting, hellish way.

  “Can you read each other’s thoughts?” people wanted to know.

  Not at all, no.

  “But it seems you can,” some maintained. “The way you know what each other wants, what you’re about to say and do—”

  Did they do that?

  “There’s a trick at work,” a few declared. “Dedicated nexuses let your minds share thoughts and feelings. Is that what you’re doing right now . . . ?”

  Not even a little. In fact, they made a point of avoiding mechanical shortcuts to authentic tongue-and-expression conversation.

  Eventually somebody would ask, “When have you felt closest?”

  What did that mean? Close how . . . ?

  “What was the day—the incident—when you felt as if you were a single brain shared by two independent bodies . . . ?”

  There were thousands of stories worthy of repetition, each able to satisfy the audience if not themselves. Several dozen favorites had become minor legends among the passengers. But the best answer was never offered, not even to the closest, dearest friends. It happened on that particular evening as they sat inside the perfect darkness, deep within the unmapped Vermiculate, immersed in the most isolated corner yet discovered within the Great Ship. That proud and stern and eternal voice promised them that it would do anything to protect what it loved, which was the Union; and for a singular moment, Quee Lee and Perri were one irreducible soul.

  Now they finally believed the unlikely story.

  Unseen tongues licked at dry lips, and the two lovers held each other with strong arms, sharing of flurry thoughts, speaking with nothing but the touch of fingers, the sound of breathing, the push of heavy breasts and the telltale flinch of a nervous penis.

  “There is a Union,” they decided together. “It is real.”

  And in the next moment, it occurred to them that the Union’s loyal servant would never do anything that did not, in small ways or great, help its ageless cause.

  Quee Lee pressed hard against her husband, and she shivered, and just before the voice spoke again, she whispered an obvious possibility into her husband’s ear and skull:

  “Our friend is on a mission! Now!”

  And in the next instant, with thrilled horror, both of them thought, “It’s telling us the story for a reason . . . and we are the mission!”

  11

  With a sense of deeply buried pain, or at least an old, much-practiced anger, the voice continued.

  “At last, I returned to the island. At last, I touched down in the Sunset Plaza, on an ellipse of crimson glass brick reserved for my shuttle and my immortal body. The plaza was flanked by tall apartment buildings buried beneath masses of vines—engineered greenery that thrived in the volcanic warmth, producing enough fruit and sweet nuts to feed the residents within. A thousand of my grandchildren quickly gathered around me, while thousands more sneaked looks from behind the curtains of their comfortable little homes. Every face made an effort to smile. Every head dipped in a show of respect—a gesture that I had never demanded from my subjects, that arose long ago on its natural own. Only one important face was missing, but the brave traitors anticipated my first question. Several knelt before me, palms to the sky, and they explained that I had been gone longer than anticipated, and my arrival had proved quite sudden, but yes, my mistress was as happy as anyone could be. In fact, she was waiting for me at the palace, rapidly making herself ready for my pleasures.

  “The avenue was lined with pruned trees thriving inside big copper pots and rows of intricate geometric sculptures cut from the black native stone. The smallest citizens barely noticed my passing. They were the ants and fat beetles that I had reinvented for the purpose of little jobs, and unburdened by the demands of awe, they continued cutting down the weeds and disposing of trash. But a crew of enhanced crabs was pulling superconductive cables under the pavement, and when I passed near, they paused long enough to salute me with their elegant pincers—a signal learned from the grandchildren.

  “Everybody was working hard to appear worshiping. Everybody wanted to shine with joy. And a few even managed to convince themselves that they were being honest. ‘You were gone too long,’ several complained, at different moments but always with the same worried, slightly put-upon tone. And then one or two remarked, ‘We feared you were lost, that some horrid disaster had claimed you.’

  “If that is what they wanted, those voices kept their thoughts hidden.

  “Then at the mouth of an alleyway, I noticed a very young grandchild standing in the shadows, waiting for something. Not for me, it seemed . . . but in his stance and attitude, I could see anticipation.

  “I paused and asked his name, even though I had already found his face in the public files. He introduced himself, and with a charming little smile mentioned that he had no memory of me. I had left for my errand among the stars while he was still just a toddler.

  “He was barely more than that now. I smiled, telling him that it was my pleasure to meet him.

  “He mentioned that I looked exac
tly as he expected, except I wasn’t tall enough of course, and then his gaze drifted off toward the island’s slumbering volcano.

  “‘What are you waiting for?’ I inquired.

  “‘For you,’ he replied. But before there was any misunderstanding, he added, ‘I’m waiting for you to pass, and then I can go about my business.’

  “‘What is your business?’

  “‘To walk down to the Sunset Plaza and watch the night come,’ he explained.

  “‘You like the setting sun, do you?’

  “The young eyes smiled, and the mouth too. Then a smart little voice said, ‘Yes,’ and nothing else.

  “The bodies surrounding us began to relax.

  “With a fond hand, I stroked the boy’s thick black hair and kissed him on the nose, and then continued with my triumphant stroll to the palace.

  “No one was invited to follow me inside, and no one asked to join me. My shadow passed first through the iron gates and beneath the brass arches and into the grand hall. The air was scented with spice and smoke. The floor and walls and high ceiling were tiled in a fractal pattern, cultured sapphires and diamonds lending accents to an example of mathematical beauty that I have always appreciated. My throne stood at the end of the hall—the oldest object in the palace, gold flourishes and silk laid over my adoptive father’s original chair.

  “My shadow hesitated, and so did I.

  “My grandchildren stood in a crowd outside, waiting for me to vanish.

  “Suddenly a great damp shape emerged from a back door, walking on long mechanical legs. The creature was a leviathan whose ancestors had swum the local sea. I had made him smaller while changing his lungs and flesh to where he could thrive in indoors, adeptly serving me with whatever little duty that I might require.

  “With a high-pitched warble, he welcomed me home.