“NEMESIS LIVES!”
The last time I had seen her, she had seethed with hatred for me. But I understood that it was not me whom she invoked in this final, defiant gesture, as malignant space crackled overhead and the crowd shrieked and hooted. She screamed my name to invoke the hope it conjured: the belief that change was possible.
This cause we shared was greater than the life or death of a single person. Even my life. Even Neveni’s.
Even Tyrus’s.
There was only one choice.
I crumpled up the discreet-sheet, tore the device back out of Gladdic’s grasp, and knocked open the protective dome about us. Shouts rose as I bounded forward, but I paid them no mind. I vaulted up to land on the ground beside Neveni and Anguish.
Then I aimed the device into those bright lashing clouds of malignant space and unleashed its power.
The neutralizer flared out, enveloping the bright malignancy—that token of Tyrus’s divine godhood—and crushed it into nothingness.
The ashen skies of Lumina were healed.
A thunderstruck silence fell, disturbed only by the faint buzzing of the recorders sending the live transmission across the Empire. I held still as all eyes focused on me. They recognized me despite my alterations, and my name began to travel from mouth to mouth.
“I do live,” I cried, then wheeled on Tyrus. “And you are no god.”
I blasted the neutralizer his way, missing intentionally, sending the Grandiloquy scattering. The second shot, we’d agreed, was the signal to power up the vessel buried in the soil behind us. Luminar rock scalded and melted away as the small escape craft surged out of the ground with a deafening rumble.
I seized Anguish and Neveni by their arms and dragged them to their feet, bundling them toward the waiting craft.
“This is a trick!” bellowed Tyrus. “It’s another imposter!”
His shout was lost as the craft slammed its bay doors shut behind us, and then we launched into the purple skies above.
Later, on the galactic transmissions, I watched the final seconds of the drama play out. The Divine Emperor Tyrus, flustered and suddenly reduced in his magnificence, stumbled through the remains of his thwarted execution scene, insisting, “That was an imposter, and she told a dreadful lie. I am a god. You surely see—I AM A GOD!”
And he whirled around to cast a thunderous glare at his Grandiloquy, who quickly threw themselves to the ground to grovel before him. How pathetic it looked.
For he had never seemed more lost, and bewildered, and human.
I did not know if that was entirely faked. Up until moments ago, we’d planned on moving forward together, to remaining forever side by side.
But I had to do this. I had to leave.
Inside the escape pod, matters were different.
Neveni hadn’t yet been treated by the med bot. She was choking on the blood in her lungs, yet she hurled her arms around me in wild gratitude. Anguish embraced me as well while we rattled away from the destructive chaos.
“I was never going to let you die,” I told Neveni hoarsely. “Not either of you. I had to wait for this moment. This gesture. Only the Emperor could have broadcast a message that reached the whole galaxy. I wanted so much to tell you sooner.…”
And they both were laughing wildly, delirious with liberation from death.
“We’re going to create a new era,” I vowed.
Then I plotted our course through hyperspace, to the place Tyrus and I had devised for Gladdic—that first stop in what would be many to spread the words for the ideology of a new day that would allow for no tyrants, no Emperors, no Domitrians.
“And Neveni,” I added, “what we do next, what we do from here…?”
She looked at me.
“I decide.”
They did not question it.
Instead they both grinned at me, and I could not help but smile back—because from here on, we were working together.
45
SIX MONTHS after parting ways with Tyrus, I entered the quarters I’d been sharing with Neveni and Anguish aboard the Liberty. It was the small, darting, light ship Tyrus had buried in the soil of Lumina for Gladdic’s escape.
From the foul, rubbery scent on the air, it was clear she’d failed once again at trying to duplicate the roasted snake that had been a specialty on Lumina.
“There’s something in the heater. I can’t call it food,” Neveni told me ruefully.
Anguish heroically picked up the body of the snake by his fist and chomped the head in one mouthful. Neveni gasped, hand flying to cover her mouth.
“Anguish, you have to puncture the venom pouch first! Otherwise it tastes…”
He chewed and swallowed.
“Really disgusting,” Neveni finished.
He looked at us, absolutely expressionless. He rose calmly, a mass of coiled muscle. “Excuse me.”
Then aimed right for the washroom.
A retching sound soon followed.
“You’d think he’d know better than to trust your cooking,” I murmured.
“I know.… Wait. Hey!” Neveni said with a frown.
A smile curled over my lips, but then I caught sight of the projection in the next chamber, tuned into the latest galactic transmissions.
Tyrus.
My heart twisted in my chest. The sound was muted. I stared, looking past the false features, echoes of Tarantis, for those that remained his own. The pale lashes. The steady, cool gaze.
It was a long-awaited Convocation in the Grand Sanctum. In the last months, Neveni, Anguish, and I had been moving from system to system, healing malignant space with the neutralizer I’d used on Lumina.
It was a miraculous device, one that caused an exponential chain reaction. However great the patch of malignancy, it succumbed in a matter of days or weeks to a single shot from the machine. The Excess who witnessed the process were always awestruck, and then, when they learned that the Grandiloquy had been sitting on this technology—enraged. Such people were open to the truth of Tarantis, which Neveni and I gladly shared with them.
They were open to the other words I had to say to them—the language taken from the ancient books. I’d meant them for Gladdic to use, but they fell from my lips just as easily.
Perhaps more so—for I believed in them. I believed in what we were doing.
I flatly rejected any suggestion—by any who heard me—that I should claim the throne in my own right.
“Do you imagine you were just unlucky with the Domitrians?” I’d answered more times than I could remember. “If you concentrate power in the hands of one person or one group of people, you are enabling all inheritors to wield that power too! You wish to hand me the power to choose your destinies and limit your speech because I agree with your views—but what happens if my successor does not? The answer is never to concentrate power, not into the hands of anyone—however much you trust them. You can endure hateful words spoken by your enemies, when the alternative is worse: your future enemies having the power to silence you when you speak against their injustices! Own your own lives. Take responsibility for ruling yourselves.”
Rumors of me would have been unstoppable, even had Tyrus meant to fight them rather than aid in their spread. He played it perfectly on his end. He exhibited just how keenly he could read the currents of the Empire, for he always, always took the exact wrong tack when confronted with the rumors in public transmissions.
When gently questioned by earnest, concerned citizens in need of reassurance, Tyrus met them in full imperial garb, threatening them with death and vengeance and fire for daring to doubt him. “You presume to question your God? What right do you have to ask anything of a Divine Emperor?”
When brute force was called for with rowdy, hostile crowds, Tyrus appeared to them in broadcasts, ruffled and sheepish: “Come now, this is silly. These rumors of my wife’s return are absurd. They’re silly. Take some vapors, and just let your betters concern themselves with such things.” He all but said
please.
Today Neveni tuned out the sound of Anguish retching in the washroom and pumped up the volume on the screen so we could hear what Tyrus had to say at this Convocation, a gathering in the Grand Sanctum of the Chrysanthemum for the most prominent personages of the Empire. Public figures had come in person, or as projections in holographic form, from all over the galaxy. No one wondered why he was throwing this one. Tyrus’s reputation had suffered from the debacle on Lumina, and from the rumors of my survival that could no longer be quashed.
“Let’s hear his excuses today,” Neveni muttered, because clearly she expected him to have some elaborate lie ready to rebut the rumors that Nemesis lived, and she could cure malignant space.
But that was not his plan. I knew it well.
Tyrus went through the standard greetings to the assembled Grandiloquy and Excess, and then he delved into the subject at hand: “Lies are being spread that my wife lives. That she has been healing malignant space. This is false news. Nemesis has long been dead, as well you all know, and those who claim to have seen her are lying to you. Do but watch the broadcasts from Eurydice! All the authorities in this Empire have joined me in denouncing this conspiracy theory.”
A cheer rang out from the elites gathered about him, which made Tyrus beam with satisfaction—for the more the prominent figures of this Empire doubled down on the falsehood, the worse they would look in the long run. As for the galactic media on Eurydice, they, too, were spending their credibility reinforcing Tyrus’s lies. They’d been the primary propaganda tool for the Domitrians, and with every single breath they wasted parroting words designed to please Tyrus, they eroded the public trust in them further.
I watched with satisfaction that mirrored Tyrus’s own.
“I called you together today to offer you consolation,” he said. “As it turns out, your Divine Emperor is indeed gifted with the ability to heal the malignant space in your skies, and I am prepared to do just that all across this Empire!”
At first the audience of elites rejoiced thunderously to hear it. They had to all feel mounting pressure from restive Excess in their territories, and this development would relieve it.
“So that’s what he means to do,” Neveni snarled. “He means to undercut us by healing them first.”
“Just wait,” I murmured to her unthinkingly, certain he had something else in mind. As the cheers at last faded, Tyrus gave a cruel, diamond-hard smile and slouched back in his floating throne, arms spread over the back of the seat. “Now, I ask the representatives of the Excess: How much are you willing to pay me to do it?”
Silence lapsed over the chamber.
The Domitrian Emperor just smirked from his throne, all arrogance and power and presumption, tracing his fingers over the gems of his finery.
“I’m not simply doing this for free. A Divine Emperor’s time and efforts are most valuable. I expect tribute for this gracious favor,” Tyrus said. “Perhaps you shall all band together to build me another Chrysanthemum, one orbiting a pleasure planet.…”
Neveni cast me a look of bewilderment. I just kept my eyes fixed on the screen.
“Oh, and said pleasure planet, of course,” Tyrus went on, “I wish it to be one where everyone is nude, but of course, the inhabitants must all be screened beforehand so I can ensure they are pleasing to mine eyes. I am sure many patriotic Excess will volunteer their daughters to entertain me.…”
“Is he joking?” Neveni blurted.
With an exaggerated look around him, Tyrus said, “Why no cheers? Why aren’t you hailing me? Many of your colonies have a great and destructive force bearing down on you. Tribute to your God is a small thing to ask. Now hail me.”
With those words, there was a scattering of cheers—first from the Grandiloquy and then from some among the Excess.… And I knew that whoever those Excess were, they’d instantly lost all credibility with their own people. Tyrus just smiled as though he’d been hailed as he demanded, though there was true satisfaction in his face.
Why wouldn’t there be? In a single gesture, he’d destroyed any illusion that the galaxy’s Emperor cared about the well-being of those he ruled.
“He’s completely lost his wits!” Neveni declared. She whirled around and stared at me. “Why are you so… blasé about this?”
“As you said,” I replied, “he’s lost his wits.”
* * *
It was an escalation of Tyrus’s damage to his own regime, but certainly not the last. The crippling of the Chrysanthemum’s interlinked network of mechanized bots meant a cessation of effective automated censorship—one made total after Tyrus claimed to be “displeased” with the censors he employed to replace them. He threw them all in the most notorious prison vessel in the Empire, the great oblong cityship called the Star Abyss.
As a result, censorship was ripped away overnight. No longer were there any controls filtering the galactic channels of public information, hiding inconvenient truths, banning inflammatory topics; jammers could no longer drown out voices unfriendly to the order of power.
Those first months that I traveled about with the neutralizer, speaking to the Excess on one province, then another, the first few tentative voices reared out of anonymity to make their opinions known.…
And then, when those voices were not immediately silenced, the speakers not tortured or killed, a sudden profusion of opinions began to roar into the public sphere.
The opinions had always been there, spoken by those in obscurity on the Empire’s many planets, heard only by the most trusted people in earshot—if the speaker was fortunate enough not to end up reported for forbidden, hateful speech.
But every day that passed, more and more rogue transmissions appeared on the galactic frequencies.
Now those voices were amplified, for at last, they could be projected the same way the Domitrian propagandists had been for the last five centuries. Pure and unfiltered speech grew noisier every single day that passed. Neveni kept me apprised of all the new voices gaining prominence, and I cheered to hear their words ringing from one star to another:
“Nemesis lives! She was never an imposter, and she has returned to destroy the Grandiloquy!”
“Don’t listen to the media. It’s no imposter. I saw her on my very planet, face-to-face, and she spoke of liberty and freedom—”
“The Emperor is mad.”
“The Emperor is no divine being.”
“The Domitrians are criminals!”
That last sentiment was the most heartening one to hear, for it was the most critical understanding that needed to sink in across this galaxy.
There was one thing above all that had to be eradicated, and obliterated so thoroughly it could never hope to survive: the Domitrians.
There was a notable human weakness. In hard times, one tended to erase the harsh lines of the past. One tended to see the glories of what had been rather than the promise of what was to come.
It was not enough to show the Empire the fallacies of one centralized authority.
The name “Domitrian” had to be poisoned for all time. It was more than a family; it was an idea, it was the foundation of our history. They were cheaters who’d retained an edge the other human beings willingly discarded; they’d become the shortcut to ending all wars, to vanquishing all opposition, and eventually one of them had placed himself on a pedestal at the center of this galaxy.… There could be no mythical glory remaining to them. “Domitrian” had to become a swear word on the lips of all who spoke of them.
The truth of Tarantis found fertile ground in the new swelling public mutiny. So, too, did the truth of the Sacred City and the Interdicts.
I had not released that information, but Neveni knew who had.
“The surviving Partisans,” she told me in quiet satisfaction, after we overheard a pair of vendors discussing it at a bazaar on the moon Auriga. “I told them all about it, and those who believed me tried to repeat it, but no one used to believe us.”
Matters were different
in this new era of uncensored information.
Something that once would have been dismissed as a conspiracy theory now rang true. The Interdicts were not immortal, but were kept young due to their residence in a place where gravity slowed time. The Sacred City had been destroyed.
And Fustian nan Domitrian was an imposter.
Just as that last rumor gained ground, Tyrus legitimized it on a public transmission of the Chrysanthemum’s celebration of Consecration Day.
Tyrus interrupted the publicly broadcast service in the Great Heliosphere to blurt out, “I have been troubled by something. There is a hypervelocity star passing near the Armistice Configuration that simply… moves too swiftly. Why must the star move? Why doesn’t it merely stay in its general location? It strikes me as a blasphemous act of defiance toward me. Does it not strike you that way, Most Ascendant One?”
Fustian had been in the middle of giving the blessing. Now he gawked at the Emperor, bewildered by him.
“The star just moves as it… as it moves,” he said. That was all there was to it.
Tyrus looked at him in a way that made Fustian realize the Emperor wanted agreement.
He quickly amended, “But of course, now that I think of it—our Divine Emperor is correct. There is something amiss about a star that will not settle in a general area.”
“I think we must do something about this,” Tyrus vowed.
He declared the first war of his reign: against the hypervelocity star.
At first, when the news spread, it seemed to be a joke, but Tyrus massed his forces against the star itself.
He gave rousing speeches about the ills of the hypervelocity star.
“I perceive in this star the source of all this Empire’s strife,” Tyrus declared, with the Interdict at his side to give his sacred endorsement. “I have already spoken to this star—”
“Spoken… to… it?” blurted Fustian.
“I commanded it to cease moving, and it declared that it would not. It insults me and my divine authority over the Cosmos. This star plots against my reign, and it must be dealt with.”
The Nemesis Page 31