by Kate Elliott
“Now, Sonia. I’m just saying that Katya is young yet and discontent…”
“Damn you,” said Sonia suddenly. It was so strange, Tess reflected, to be talking to her this way, seeing her head and torso growing up from the console as if the rest of her sat contained within. A line of static popped through the image and cleared. “I know what you’re saying. I went to Jeds when I was a girl because I was curious, because I wanted adventure, I wanted to see what lay outside the tribe. Now she wants to do the same. Let me talk to her. Tess, the others who sailed across the ocean to Erthe were told they could never come back. How can I exile my daughter like that? How can you expect me to agree to let her go, knowing I could never see her again?”
“Sonia, if what you say about Anatoly Sakhalin is true, then how can we know how much the interdiction will change? Anything could happen. There you sit talking to me across a gulf of thousands of kilometers—”
“Which reminds me,” said Sonia, the anger slipping easily from her face. “How can this image travel as fast as I can speak across a distance that would take a messenger forty days riding day and night without a break except to change horses? What is this image riding? How can it travel on the air?”
“Didn’t the ke explain that to you?”
“Well, yes, but—” She launched into such a garbled explanation of the ke’s explanation that Tess could only look toward Cara Hierakis for help. Cara shrugged.
“Sonia,” Tess broke in. “There is a tutorial encyclopedia under mathetics. Start there.”
“Is it true that Newton’s Principia has been superseded?” Sonia demanded. “I have been trying to discover how a person can travel in the heavens, but how can a ship sail on a road? How can a road hang in the air? What keeps it from falling? What is a quantum? A singularity? How can passing through a window take you to a different place?”
“Hold on, hold on.” Tess laughed.
“Furthermore,” added Sonia, “if you khaja could only devise a smaller tool than these stationary consoles, you could communicate this swiftly while you were anywhere! You wouldn’t be tied to a building. You could somehow wear them on your backs like a quiver. Think of how an army could use it. Merchants. A mother could converse with her child—”
“Sonia. Sonia! We have thought of such things. We just don’t have them on Rhui.”
“The interdiction again.”
Tess nodded.
“You are very arrogant to make these decisions for us,” said Sonia, finally, rebukingly.
“It’s true.”
“Hmm. Well. This all belongs to the jaran, now, so perhaps we will change all that.”
“What do you mean, belongs to the—? Wait a minute, Sonia. Perhaps I didn’t understand that correctly. Are you saying that Anatoly Sakhalin was made prince over all the systems governed by humans? Earth, the League, and Charles’s territory? Rhui?”
“Of course. All khaja lands now belong to the jaran.”
“Oh, my God.” Tess made a frantic signal to Cara, but Cara had heard it all before. Cara looked unimpressed. “Sonia, I will call you again. I have to…think about all this.”
“It isn’t what you expected, is it?” said Sonia astutely. “But it is what Ilya expected, after all.”
“I got the transcripts you sent. And the children—”
“As we agreed. I will bring them myself, when the weather changes and the ships sail again. Although Dr. Hierakis traveled a different way, did she not? Could we not travel in such a way, in a flying ship? I’ve never seen one. It would be faster, wouldn’t it? Is it dangerous?”
“Sonia, I will call you in two days. I have to think about this.”
Cheerful now, Sonia signed off and closed her end of the connection with practiced ease. How quickly she learned.
Tess sagged back into the chair, which gave beneath her and molded itself to the curve of her back, shifting as she shifted. “Oh, Lord, Cara, what have we gotten ourselves into? What did Charles say?”
Cara stood up and leaned onto the console, squinting at the symbols scrolling across the screen. “Tess, in a decade there’s a good chance we will face a doubling or tripling of the human lifespan. Perhaps more. How can I take this as seriously? It’s politics. Temporal power rises and falls in every generation. Empires explode into prominence and then collapse. Charles Soerensen becomes the most powerful human in Chapalii space, and then he is supplanted by someone else, who will no doubt experience his own period of fluorescence before fatigue or fashion or a reversal of fortune plunges him into eclipse. But longevity will be a sea of change for humanity. We can’t know how it will shape our view of life, how it will alter our philosophies. So let Anatoly Sakhalin have his moment in the sun. Let Charles put his intelligence to other work than playing duke.”
“But—”
“Don’t you trust Anatoly?”
“I don’t know Anatoly, not truly.”
“Don’t you trust Charles? Are you afraid he lives for ruling? For power? That this will break him? Ruin him? Corrupt him somehow by turning him into a villain out to regain all he has lost? I confess he might be a bit disappointed, but he is wise enough to let it go, to find a new—Ah. It isn’t Charles or Anatoly at all, is it?”
“Damn it. It will take me months to get through this transcript.”
“It’s Ilya. That’s it. He’s got it all. He’s finished. He’s complete. He’s won. And it leaves him nothing. What will you tell him, Tess?”
Tess shook her head, unable to talk past the lump in her throat. She palmed the console and fed all the information into the chip in her belt buckle.
“What did Sonia send you?” Cara asked.
“A complete transcript of Anatoly Sakhalin’s report on his visit to the emperor, points between, and what happened after that, including an addendum compiled by David ben Unbutu and Ilyana Arkhanov.”
“Ilyana Arkhanov? But she’s scarcely more than a child.”
“Evidently she has gotten herself apprenticed to—”
“Of course. I had heard that she had met the female. She’s broken past the veil. And? There’s something else on the screen. It’s not a transcript.”
“It’s a facsimile of the Revelation of Elia.”
“The heretical Hristain Gospel?”
“Not heretical here, remember. It’s only in the northern church that it’s heretical.”
“What do you want that for, Tess?”
“I don’t know what else, how else to tell Ilya the truth.”
Cara turned away from the flat screen and looked Tess straight in the eye. Her expression made Tess horribly uncomfortable, but she forced herself to face Cara, to hear what Cara had to say, not knowing whether she truly wanted to hear it.
“Have you asked him yet, my child, if he wants to know?”
Tess found Katya waiting outside Cara’s laboratory, practically hopping from one foot to the other in her impatience to talk to Tess.
“When will you talk to my mother?” she demanded. “I talked to a merchant down in the Exchange and he said that a ship is leaving for Erthe in ten days. I’ll just write a letter to my mother. You know that it could take a year, it could take a hundred days even if we sent it by official messenger and it got to Sarai and back without mishap.”
“And you can’t wait a hundred days?” Tess asked. Most of the corridors in the Jedan palace were not truly corridors but loggias looking out onto courtyards and gardens. So it was here; however curtailed access might be to Cara’s lab, even Cara liked to be able to step outside into the air. Tess had spent much of the afternoon in the lab, having spent the morning with Baroness Santer, the chamberlain of the palace, and a steady stream of visitors with legal questions. The sun had sunk below the rooftop, throwing the garden beyond into shade. A few streaks of snow patched the ground, in the lee of columns and striping the ground along the north loggia. But the weather was already turning. It was warmer now, at the end of the day, than it had been this morning.
&n
bsp; “No, I can’t wait! Well. I went with Ilya down to the university this morning—”
“You did! What did he want there?”
“I don’t know. He went one way and I went another. But it was interesting. I thought—well, if I had to wait, I could attend classes, couldn’t I? There were some boys playing castles in one of the sitting rooms, by a fire. I watched them for a while, but they weren’t very good. They weren’t even as good as Prince Janos.” She flushed and broke off.
“Katya. You should tell your mother why you truly don’t want to marry, if what you told me is still the truth, for you.”
“No.”
“It isn’t?”
“It is still the truth. I don’t want to marry. I don’t—” She glanced furtively up and down the colonnaded walkway, but except for two jaran guards at either end of the loggia, no one was about. No one was allowed into this quarter of the palace, except those Tess or Cara had explicitly cleared. “—care for men in that way, not truly. But I won’t tell her, Aunt Tess. She won’t understand.”
“I don’t think you ought to underestimate your mother. You certainly got your intelligence from her.”
“It isn’t that. She would try to understand, but it would hurt her. She just isn’t…it isn’t part of her world. Is it true that, in Erthe, what told you me—?”
“That not every marriage is between a man and a woman? Yes. It’s not common, but there are other ways to be granted a legal partnership.”
“Aunt Tess, you must let me go! There’s no place for me in the jaran. Maybe there will be a place for me there.”
“If there isn’t?”
“There has to be.”
Tess kissed her and left her, wondering if little Katya would brave the forbidden hall and just charge in on Cara even though she wasn’t supposed to. That would, in a way, seal her fate. She did not look back as she left the courtyard.
She looked forward.
She had to leave the palace entirely, go out into the park that lay on the landward side of the palace. The ring of guards waved her through, and she walked along a gravel path, the stones crunching in a soothing manner under her boots. She walked alone out here as twilight lowered down over the city and the palace. In its own way, in the three days since they had arrived in Jeds, this area had become even more interdicted than Cara’s laboratory. Not a soul stirred. Behind her, the line of guards was marked by an occasional torch and, here and there, a good blazing campfire.
The tent stood on a flat sward of grass, surrounded by a bower of trees and two desiccated beds of flowers. Ilya refused to sleep inside walls of stone. It had never bothered him before.
Tess halted on the edge of the sward and examined the tent. The gold banner fluttered weakly and sagged. Far away, barely audible, Tess heard the shush and sough of the waters on the rocks that buttressed the palace on its seaward front. The awning faced her, the entrance flap thrown open so that she could see into the tent. A single figure sat at the table, a lantern burning by his left hand and another hanging from the pole above. He seemed to be reading, but he was just distant enough that she could not make out the details.
The wind picked up again, a warming front that fragmented the cold haze that had hung over the city for the last three days. Branches shorn of leaves reached into the darkening sky, black lines etched into a night-blue heaven. They shivered in the wind, shuddering against each other. Like veins, they marked patterns onto the sky, pierced by the first stars.
Like a web. Tess blinked, and her implant triggered. She glanced around, once, as she always did, to make sure she was alone.
“Run Sakhalin transcript. Seek mention of transport codes delivered in tripartite sequences.” As she waited she was caught by another thought, a detail Sonia had mentioned in passing. “Open a second screen and transfer Sakhalin’s description of the emperor.” It came up simultaneously with an excruciatingly detailed documentation of transport codes, and Tess had to adjust her focus, dropping her gaze down to the ground, which provided a more uniformly dark backdrop, although the divided screen she read from provided its own transcript.
He sat in a throne. He was almost joined to it, as if part of a web, filaments linking his body to the stone that made up the throne itself.
“Cut in Sojourner transcript, also referenced to tripartite sequences.” The sudden swirl of figures fighting the ground and the gentle sway of branches made her dizzy. She put up a hand to cover the trees and the tent, so they wouldn’t distract her, and concentrated on the disembodied screen suspended in front of her.
Three sequences recorded by the relay stations as ships traveled through. One went to the public record: That was clear enough. One went to the house record, and that made sense; a ship might reserve information for its own affiliates that it would not want to transmit as public knowledge. But the third sequence, the highest level of encryption, went to an unknown destination.
She shifted her focus back to the screen detailing Sakhalin’s visit to the emperor. The emperor, who sat connected to his throne by filamentlike threads. Anatoly Sakhalin had seen this female who called herself Genji in his window visions, as if she was tracking his progress as he traveled across the empire. Ilyana Arkhanov, their under-aged spy in Genji’s Chapalii household, had seen Genji connected, also with filamentlike threads, to a chair, which could be a kind of console.
What if the emperor could travel the web? What if the emperor was tapped into the entire Empire, not like a brain, but like the switching board through which most information passed? Everywhere and nowhere. Everyone and no one. He would no longer be a true individual. Like the ke, he would be nameless, because he would be everywhere. It was like a metaphor: his body represented the Empire, just as, according to the Arkhanov transcript appended onto Sakhalin’s transcript, the net itself might be the body of the Empire.
Nets could be cut. Like Ilya’s mind, the threads severed at random intersections by the stress of his captivity.
If they could cripple the web, they could cripple the Empire. If they could cripple the Empire, they might be strong enough to simply take their freedom or at least to bargain for it while the Empire was weakened.
And Anatoly Sakhalin was now perfectly placed to set out the pieces and begin to move them. It would have taken Charles years to get the information Anatoly had so blithely included in this transcript; if Charles, the Tai-en, could even have gotten it at all. Anatoly was restricted, as far as Tess could tell, only by his willingness to throw himself into the fray and his ability to outface the Chapalii at their own game, once he had figured out how to play it. For the former, she could not guess whether he would choose to support independence or promote his own interests; as for the latter, he had already done it. It was enough to make you laugh, the sheer audacity of presenting himself as a true prince—whatever the hell that meant—to the Chapalii emperor and to expect to be honored as such. To succeed.
Could Ilya have done it? Oh, gods, was she doubting him, now? Was he less than what she had once thought he was?
She blinked off the implant and walked forward. Ilya sat with two books open and a scroll opened and pinned down by an elbow and a hand. She stopped outside the entrance flap. He did not notice her. He was talking to himself.
“ ‘And a bright light appeared out of the darkest skies, and on this light He ascended to the heavens where His Father dwelt. To mark his passing, the glance of God’s Eye scorched the dirt where His feet took wing into the heavens.’ ”
He was reading out loud from one of the books; from the Gospel of Elia, the Revelation. She watched his gaze shift from the book to the scroll. He opened the scroll a bit farther by tugging his elbow down, unrolling the parchment, and sliding the scroll to the right so that the lantern light illuminated it better. His face was aglow in the light, his hair a patch of darkness shading into the shadows that filled the rest of the chamber, surrounding him with night.
“ ‘So will the light…the lantern…the torch of God fall
to earth…” He worried at his lower lip with his teeth as he squinted at the scroll, translating it. Tess could not see what language it was written in. “Descend to earth. From the stars. From the wandering stars.” He switched his attention to the second book. “No… No… Damn it.” He leafed through the pages, searching for a reference.
“ ‘Because the fixed stars are quiescent one in respect of another, we may consider the sun, earth, and planets, as one system of bodies carried hither and thither by various motions among themselves; and the common center of gravity…will be quiescent’… This is impossible.” With his right hand still immobilizing the scroll, he drew two other books toward him and flipped them open on top of the one he had just been looking in. “The realm of the fixed stars. The realm of the wandering stars.”
Tess got a chill. He was reading astronomical texts. After a moment he shifted back to the scroll.
“The mysteries of the wandering stars are these: That they come in two types. The first are the chariots by which the angels sail upon, sail? Ride? Drive? Travel upon the roads that lead through the heavens, borne on the wings of the south wind. The second are the gates to the dwelling places of the angels. Dwelling places…palaces…no, more like a park or garden. Then why wouldn’t the fixed stars be the gardens and the wandering stars the chariots?” He was talking to himself. He pulled the topmost book toward him, one of the new books.
“ ‘In this fashion the sun and the sphere of the fixed stars remain unmoved, while the earth and the wandering stars revolve about the unmoving sun in a series of circles, each nested inside the other.’ ” He flipped pages further, losing his grip on the scroll, which rolled up against his fingers. “ ‘Suppose a man lived in the heavens and he was carried along by their motion, and looking down he saw the earth and its mountains and valleys and rivers and cities, as far above as angels, might it not appear then to him that the earth moved? Just as it appears to us that the heavens move. Unable to stand in the heavens, we can only stand on the earth and make our judgment.’ ”