The Empress

by S. J. Kincaid

  “Hybridized? What—I don’t—” Tyrus said.

  The Interdict pointed to his temple. “They started off installing computers in their brains to make themselves smarter. Then more. Bionic eyes, limbs, tiny machines to supplement their immune system. They embraced the artificial. And I don’t mean they did so the way we would use a med bot, or a beauty bot. They did the equivalent of implanting a beauty bot under their skin, a med bot in place of an arm. They removed the natural and inserted the unnatural. Tell me, if you replace one neuron—a single cell in your brain—with a mechanized duplicate, are you still you?”

  Tyrus didn’t answer.

  I spoke instead: “Obviously, you are.”

  “Ah, then if you replace five?” said the Interdict. “Ten? A hundred? A thousand? One million? If you take every bit of your brain and you duplicate it electronically, and replace yourself with that duplicate . . . Tell me, at what point are you no longer you? At what point are you something else entirely?”

  Neither Tyrus nor I spoke. There was no answer to such a question.

  The Interdict spread his palms. “And there you have the reason we are out here, and Humanity Prime—as you might call them—remains on Earth. They became something that was no longer human. Our ancestors were but twenty thousand people in the beginning, and they chose to be done with those unnatural improvements. They ventured out here and devoted themselves to returning to their natural state. Now, without those machine minds, some things certainly became more difficult. Technology such as this”—he gestured about us—“is virtually impossible to duplicate or figure out with a standard human mind. You need the machine men to create such things.”

  Tyrus gaped at him a moment. Then, soberly, “You are saying that we didn’t make any of this.”

  “It was all crafted before departing Earth, or by the first generation to settle here. They were cleverly built. You are looking at ancient machines that have repaired and sustained each other for thousands of years. The first generation knew their descendants wouldn’t have their same intellectual capabilities. There are limits to human intelligence in a natural state.”

  A dimness came over Tyrus’s face. He seemed to look inward, and I knew what had just occurred to him. So much of what he’d planned for the future when it came to repairing malignant space and restoring the sciences depended on the assumption we could learn once again what our ancestors knew.

  The Interdict had just suggested otherwise.

  “Our ancestors knew they were giving up those staggering minds,” said Orthanion, “and they did it willingly—to save their souls. That is why we must honor the legacy of those twenty thousand founding mothers and fathers and act as they would have wished. The Empire’s body is in your hands, but its soul is in mine. Today, I will protect it. In twenty years, if you return and have the same request, I will abide by it. Now go and catch your gravital window. This is a short one.”

  Tyrus was speechless. This wasn’t one of the responses we’d prepared for.

  But the Interdict was walking away, and I didn’t know what to do. I just knew this couldn’t stand, it couldn’t. . . .

  So I slammed the flat of my fist over the back of the Interdict’s head, knocking him unconscious before he could leave us.

  “Nemesis!” exclaimed Tyrus as the Interdict collapsed.

  “What?” I said. “He wasn’t cooperating. Think of it: he’s been living here in this beautiful place removed from everything for so long. Let’s take him onboard the Hera and make him see the state of the galaxy.”

  Tyrus opened and closed his mouth several times. I’d already knocked the man out; it was too late to take that back.

  “Maybe we are not machine men,” Tyrus said, speaking almost to himself, “but we can try. He won’t stop us from trying to recover what we’ve lost.” He darted a glance out the window, and a wicked gleam came into his eyes. “We’ll take him on the Hera, but . . . but I’ve a different destination in mind. One that will speak to our Most Ascendant One in a way he’ll never forget.”

  Then he strode over and drew me into a hard, reckless kiss. We grinned savagely at each other, and possibility electrified me.

  Then we kidnapped the holiest man in the Empire together.

  18

  WHATEVER ELSE the Interdict was, he served as an excellent distraction and human shield for our trip back through the Sacred City to the Hera. Indeed, the vicars, and the armed vicars who served as Inquisitors, didn’t truly know what to do with us, or to us, as we carried him away.

  We shut our ears to the cries of grave sin, and threats of excommunication, and we shuffled the limp, old—very, very old—man onto our ship. Then we tore away from the towing cables and launched into space.

  Tyrus flipped on a med bot, then paced back and forth briskly next to the unconscious Interdict. His heartbeat was so frantic, I could see it in his neck. “This is the most insane thing I’ve ever done.”

  He’d played the madman for half his life, so that was saying a lot.

  “If it doesn’t work,” I said evenly, “then we follow my plan. Turn around and take him sightseeing.”

  Tyrus jerked his head in a nod.

  Then . . .

  A moan.

  The med bot was rousing him.

  I hastened to Tyrus’s side so we could present a united front in this mad tactic. When Orthanion sat up, he froze at the sight of us.

  “Most Ascendant One,” Tyrus said coolly. “Welcome to outer space.”

  The Interdict launched to his feet, took in his surroundings, and sputtered with disbelief. “What in the . . . Are you . . . are you utterly mad?” he demanded.

  Tyrus gave a crooked smile. “I’ve been called that once or twice.”

  “You are kidnapping me? This won’t get you what you want! This is a crime against the Living Cosmos! Every Helionic in the galaxy will turn upon you for this!”

  “Not with you right in reach of us,” I said coldly.

  “And they won’t have a chance,” Tyrus affirmed. Under pressure, he showed only a cool, unshakable demeanor, as though we were passing a pleasant interlude, not committing a terrible crime. “We are not kidnapping you with the intention of continuing our lives as they are. You seem to think I am mercurial and young, that something will change if I am accorded another twenty years. Well, I won’t wait that long. If Nemesis and I cannot be together as people, then . . . Then we are going to seek oblivion together. Along with you.”

  The Interdict paled. “What are you doing?”

  “My cousin is doomed. I am the last Domitrian. And you—you may be the last Interdict. We disappear together.” Tyrus shrugged. “Or whatever you call it. What does happen to people thrown into a black hole?”

  All color disappeared from Orthanion’s face. He whirled about and dashed faster than I would have thought he could move. He reached the window and saw the curvature of unfathomable black we were aimed at.

  Tyrus and I exchanged a tense look behind his back. Our hope was to terrify him into giving me personhood, and therefore his tacit consent to Tyrus holding his scepter. We would record it, and then leave here—and broadcast it to the galaxy. My personhood would obliterate the grounds for the vicars to object to Tyrus holding the scepter. By the time a vicar came out of the Sacred City with the Interdict’s decree in hand saying he’d been coerced, well, a vicar could be intercepted easily enough. We would keep the truth a secret until the scepter was Tyrus’s to command, and then the truth would not matter.

  Nothing terrified a Helionic more than the ultimate death.

  Flying into a black hole.

  Orthanion’s strangled gasp gratified me, as did the raw terror on his face when he said to us, “Turn us around. You have to turn us around.”

  “Not going to happen,” Tyrus said, unmoved. He had to notice, as I had, the way the jostling of the Hera grew increasingly violent all about us. We knew there was a point of no return, a point where even light could not escape.

&nb
sp; We hoped to terrify the Interdict into submission long before that point.

  “I have to admit, I’m rather curious about what will happen when we reach it,” Tyrus said to me conversationally.

  “It will be so interesting,” I agreed.

  “FOOLS!” shouted the Interdict, rushing over to us. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  “I know exactly what I’m doing!” roared Tyrus. “I am not waiting twenty years! It is a short time to you, but the rest of us do not live five centuries!”

  “You think . . . you think I am so old?” sputtered Orthanion, looking between us with disbelief. “I am but ninety-one.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “There’s a statue of you, of your exact likeness, and it bears your name. It is half an eon old. We have both seen it at the Chrysanthemum.”

  “Yes,” he snapped out, “I posed for it. Five hundred years ago—for you. For me, it was mere decades ago.”

  I looked at Tyrus, trying to see if this made sense to him. He was looking at me, doing the same thing.

  Orthanion surged toward the window looking onto the ominous curve of black and activated the magnifiers, amplifying the view again and again and again. “Look. Just look here. Do you see it? Do you see anything there?”

  “No,” I said sharply, for I had excellent eyesight.

  “That is lucky,” rasped the Interdict, “for if we get closer and closer to that black hole, you will see something: the tomb of the Emperor Amon von Domitrian.”

  Tyrus made an incredulous, sputtering sound.

  “That’s not even possible,” I cried. “He was excommunicated centuries ago.”

  “Yes. For you, centuries have passed.” The Interdict trained his gaze on Tyrus’s face. “For Amon, close as he is to that singularity? He’s passed mere minutes. A thousand years from now, if an onlooker glimpses Amon falling into the black hole, Amon will have passed another second. Time is not constant. Do you understand? Gravity bends time. The closer we get to the black hole, the slower we creep through existence!”

  I saw Tyrus go deathly pale as it all fell into place for him, just as it was forming coherence for me. The ageless vicars, the ancient Interdict, the sheer remove of the Sacred City from the rest of us. . . .

  They literally existed in a slower time frame.

  And we were in it now, too.

  “Oh stars no,” Tyrus breathed. He leaped over to the navigation panel. The Hera gave a ferocious jolt as it turned about, but I couldn’t make sense of it.

  “He’s making this up,” I said uncertainly to Tyrus. “Time is time. It doesn’t . . . It can’t just change. It makes no sense.”

  The Interdict stared at me.

  “Are you just making it up?” Tyrus said to the Interdict hopefully. “Be honest. I will take us back either way, I swear—”

  “I am not inventing the theory of relativity!” the Interdict roared. “I am not Albert Einstein. Are you telling me that you, Tyrus—the Emperor—do not know the basic laws of physics?”

  “How would I know them?” cried Tyrus. “You made such things blasphemy. Where would I learn of this?”

  “My reforms weren’t meant for the likes of you! And they weren’t aimed at destroying all understanding of basic sciences! I meant only to eliminate those destructive technologies that . . .” The Interdict fell deathly silent, his face blanching.

  He didn’t realize this. The thought crept over me. He never intended us to become so ignorant.

  Strange.

  It had been infuriating to think the Interdict had meant to change the galaxy, meant to render everyone so ignorant.

  But to realize he’d been as shortsighted and blundering as the rest of us . . .

  That was vastly more frightening.

  19

  GRAVITY ALTERED TIME. It was something I had not known, and Tyrus had not known. Now we did. At a painful cost.

  On the Chrysanthemum, in standard space, there was a regular flow of time everyone else in the Empire was living. The Sacred City, near the black hole, shifted constantly between slower and much slower time differentials. Sometimes a day outside was a month within. Sometimes a year.

  And in aiming directly for the black hole, we’d merely traversed into slower and slower time. The Interdict himself could not tell us how long we’d been gone, not without the database at the Sacred City, which could calculate this down to a millisecond. The knowledge left Tyrus standing stock-still in the middle of the command nexus, just staring at space, his face ashen.

  The Interdict was the only one of us with the presence of mind to act: he settled by one of the Hera’s computers and began typing in search terms in the database. I glimpsed a few of them: entropy, causality, diffraction, negative refraction. He must not have found them, for he started jabbing in the words faster and faster, the pinch of aggravation on his face mounting.

  Then, with a great expulsion of breath, he shoved away from the console, looking as sick as Tyrus did.

  “This cannot stand.” He caught me staring and said, “Tell me, Nemesis, has this computer been through a catastrophic accident? Has it been wiped or . . .”

  I shook my head.

  “I wished to discover the extent of your ignorance. I began searching your computer for complex terms, and then moved to the simplest ones, hoping every time my worst fears would not be confirmed. They were. I have never been in opposition to learning. On the contrary, had I not found this calling, I would have been pleased to pass my life in a university, teaching, learning, sharing. But it was the supernova that necessitated the blasphemy decree. I aimed it at those who couldn’t be trusted with our technology. It was a pretense to disarm those who didn’t understand the implications of their actions. Not everyone should have the power we’d gained through science.”

  Tyrus dragged his gaze over to his. “You just decided others weren’t responsible enough to hold technology? I suppose the Grandiloquy were?”

  “It wasn’t only my opinion, Tyrus. Our ancestors didn’t leave Earth of their own volition,” said Orthanion. “Humanity Prime forced them to go. They believed natural human beings were too destructive to handle the technological progress the species had made with mechanized brains. They gave our ancestors—the twenty thousand of faith—a choice: if they became fully organic, they had to give up all advanced technology and live on a nature preserve. The alternative was to return to an organic state, keep that technology, but go very far away from Earth.”

  “Far away?” Tyrus said.

  “Here. To this region. Somewhere we would inflict harm upon none but ourselves. So here we are, in this fragile corridor of habitable space, surrounded by natural barriers of radiation and gravity and cosmic rays. We spread out as humans do and occupied all of the territory in reach, and then half an eon ago, we did just what was predicted of us. Some of us mere organic human beings ignited an artificial supernova and wiped out half the Empire.”

  “That was intentional?” I breathed. “Why would anyone do that?”

  The Interdict shrugged. “We are all descended from zealots. Faith can inspire greatness, but it can be used to justify breathtaking cruelties.”

  I couldn’t understand that. Someone had done that on purpose.

  “That’s when your ancestor Tarantis von Domitrian and I realized there’d been some wisdom to Humanity Prime’s warnings,” Orthanion said. “So much knowledge had been lost after the supernova, so we ensured it remained lost—by instituting the decree forbidding the sciences. Machines were concentrated among those responsible enough to use them wisely.”

  He looked between us, and for the first time, his perfect, calm arrogance had wavered, his eyes those of a fallible man who’d lived too long, who’d made a most dreadful mistake.

  “It was meant only to walk back progress a few steps. To prevent such destructive devices from ever being wielded again. I would not have suggested it without having studied history and made myself an authority in human affairs. I never anticipated the
basic laws of physics disappearing from public knowledge—eluding even an Emperor.”

  “Perhaps,” Tyrus said with a bite in his voice, “you should get out more.”

  “I have most certainly been too complacent, counting on my vicars to keep me apprised when they arrive so infrequently. . . . This is the Living Cosmos rebuking me for my arrogance.”

  I stared at him, for there was a staggering egotism in his assumption that everything was aimed at teaching a lesson to him.

  “I believed I saw our divine Cosmos’s aims so clearly, and yet now I must think of it anew. I must think of an Emperor—a Domitrian Emperor—falling in such obsessive, unwavering love with a creature that he would seek me out. . . . For of course it would be me, I am the only one who can imbue her with personhood. . . .”

  He was almost mumbling to himself now, trying to puzzle out why this was all about him.

  A strange urge to smack him came over me. I balled up my fists to restrain it, and when I looked at Tyrus, his shoulders were sagging. He seemed in a state of stunned shock.

  “I see now the will of our Living Cosmos,” said the Interdict, straightening up. “The Emperor fell in love with one only I could gift with personhood, all so you could come to me, so you would show me the error of my ways. . . . Yes. Yes, it is all so clear.”

  Tyrus looked at him wearily. He was clearly still thinking of the time lost, of the time we were still losing.

  “Miracles hide within tragedies,” the Interdict said. “And the path we must take has opened itself before me as vividly as a sunrise. My young Emperor, you must undertake the most difficult of missions on behalf of your Living Cosmos.”

  Yes, the urge to hit him truly made my palm tingle. Tyrus couldn’t muster any expression of eagerness for him.

  “You will be the Domitrian who restores the study of scientific learning,” announced the Interdict.