by Tom Holt
In practical terms, it worked, up to a point. It was intended as a temporary measure only.
In the last hundred years or so, the Emperor has been encouraged to keep a low profile. Rocco VI, as already noted, made pizzas. His immediate predecessor, Wang XIV, ran a small bicycle repair workshop in the back streets of Hong Kong, right opposite the best Cantonese restaurant in the Colony. Neville III (better known to history as Neville the Magnificent) had a paper round outside Macclesfield, and did a little window-cleaning on the side, strictly cash in hand. Joseph XXXIX Ncoba carved little wooden elephants. Gupta IX moonlighted as a petrol pump attendant, and was one of the few Emperors ever to abdicate as a result of an irreconcilable conflict of interests. François XXIII spent his entire reign in a room nine feet by five, firmly convinced that he was a ratchet screwdriver. He was, everyone agrees, one of the better twentieth-century Emperors.
Rocco,Wang, Neville, Joseph, Gupta and François were the successes; the rest weren’t quite so hot. The worst was probably Wayne XI, whose five-hour reign was the second shortest in Imperial history. It wasn’t the Electors’ fault, of course; the first they knew about his disastrous latent tendencies was when he put up the Greenpeace poster in the front window of his tiny flat in downtown Brisbane.
The shortest reign on record was that of Everton I, who was deemed to have abdicated when he missed an easy chance at slip off Courtney Walsh.
The great problem facing the Electors is that only the true Emperor is going to be any good at the job; and the one and only qualification for being Emperor is being the heir apparent, by right of birth. That was why Rocco VI was originally chosen - but further enquiries revealed him to be nothing but a distant cousin of the rightful heir. It was the discovery of the true identity of Charlemagne’s closest living relative that set in train the whole sequence of events; because this time, things were going to have to be slightly different. Even temporary measures have to come to an end eventually.
It was obvious who Rocco’s successor was going to be; but this time there would have to be a little vocational training beforehand, because the next reign was going to be the crucial one . . .
And you will by now have guessed what Jane looks like - straight nose, strong jaw, the distinctive high cheek-bones familiar from a hundred Imperial portraits. And you won’t need telling that her second name, the name that appears on her passport, is Hapsburg.
‘Oh,’ said Jane. ‘Fancy that.’
The world, which had stopped, started again.
Starting implies a beginning. Maybe it’s just a cheapskate verbal trick, but we’ll repeat it to let the true significance sink in. The world started again.
Nobody noticed, of course, apart from a few market-makers in New York who suddenly realised that they’d sold everything three minutes before the most colossal upwards swing the markets have ever experienced. By the time the markets stopped rising, staggered helplessly and then quite simply ceased to exist, they’d all pinned letters of resignation to their chairs and gone off to Wisconsin to make new lives for themselves as raffia weavers, and so never knew how right they’d actually been.
Starting implies a beginning. Within ten minutes, things were already very different. The sun moved along its inevitable course. The grass grew. The rain fell. Time ticked, gravity pulled, history coagulated, the tides rose and fell, men and women tripped and blundered their way through the darkened china-shop of human existence. On the wall of Plato’s cave, nobody noticed the brand-new notice asking the last person to leave to make sure that the lights were switched off; but that was because, somehow or other, it had been there all the time.
What was different was that it was doing it all by itself. There was nobody running it. It was just . . . happening.
(‘Hey,’ said Ganger, in the back of Jane’s mind, ‘you can’t do this. Stop it at once.’
Why not? I’m the Empress, aren’t I? I can do what the hell I like.
Ganger howled, as his fingers started to lose their grip on the projecting shelf of subconscious he was desperately clinging to. ‘But it won’t work,’ he shouted. ‘There’s got to be somebody to run things, or they won’t work. They won’t run themselves, you know.’
Won’t they? We’ll soon see about that.
What Ganger meant to say was, ‘Maybe they’ll work for a while, if you give the sun and the moon and the earth and rain and wind and time and all that sort of thing some kind of semi-sentience, but who’s actually going to supervise it and fix it and put it all back on course if it starts to go wrong? Now I suppose you’ll say you will, but you’re mortal, you won’t be around for ever, and so you’ll have to train a successor, and that won’t be easy, believe you me, oh no.’ But since it’s impossible to say anything at all if you’ve suddenly just ceased to be, he only got as far as ‘Ma . . .’
What Staff, the Electors and the rest of them said is unrecorded, which is probably just as well. (It’s unlikely to have been anything nice.)
And then, with a sigh like the switching off of a hundred million computer screens, the great army of celestial officers, functionaries, administrators, schedule clerks, programmers and timeservers faded away into the air from which they had originally come; and after them their offices, their desks, their files, their hardware, their software, the memory of their existence - until all that was left was one bright, golden paperclip, spinning and sparkling in the upper air, falling or rising weightlessly into the sublime emptiness which is all that remains when Order has finally been tidied away.
And Jane thought, Right then, got that sorted, it should work fine now. I could murder a glass of orange juice.
And in her mind, something said, No, not orange juice, you’ll get indigestion, think what happened the last time you had orange juice on an empty stomach, you’ll . . . but never got any further, because a moment later it too was sucked away, to its great surprise, and Jane was left alone - definitively alone - with her thoughts.
And finally, the Empress saw everything that she had sorted out, and behold, it was no worse than she’d expected, all things considered. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.
And on the seventh day she ended the work which she had made, and she rested; or at least she tried to rest. But all the milk in the fridge had gone off because of a power cut, and none of the shops were open because it was a Sunday.
The sun rose.
Being nothing more than a dollop of burning gas, it had no way of knowing that it was bang on schedule, right on course and in exactly the right place at precisely the right time.
Because nobody was watching, the slight movement on the face of the waters as the first organism twitched into life went completely unnoticed. No reception committee, no ribbon to cut, no brass band, nothing.
Because nobody was taking notes or filing reports to the appropriate quarters, the flawlessness of the sun’s landing and the seamless interface of day and night were completely wasted.
Because it was nobody’s responsibility and nobody’s fault, the very first living cell was completely alone as it jerked open the window of its consciousness and let out the primordial scream of birth. But it screamed nevertheless. And screamed again. And waited.
There was no reply. There were sounds: the lapping of the waves, the sighing of the wind, the soft grinding of tectonic plates, the distant echoes of the scream itself wrapping themselves doglead-like around the poles and drifting back, but there was nobody to hear them except for one lonely consciousness.
It waited. It screamed again. It listened. Splash, swish, sigh, grunge, hiss. Nothing.
Now, when you’re feeling uncertain and apprehensive and you’re not a hundred per cent sure you should be here anyway, there’s nothing quite so beneficial to morale as a good old sing-song. There was a small, embarrassed cough and then a reedy, squeaky but grimly determined voice began to sing . . .
The sun has got his hat on,
Hip hip hip hip hooray . . . It was a very small voice, a s
till, small voice, an infinitesimal voice alone in an infinite sea.
The sun has got his hat on . . . it repeated firmly. Silence.
A few yards away, something stirred. The movement was so tiny that even if there had been anyone to see, they’d have missed it. But it stirred, and listened, and became alive; and sang:
The sun has got his hat on,
And he’s coming out today.
And that was that. There was no going back from here. The continents braced themselves, contorting their rocky coastlines into sheepish grins. They were going to be needed after all.
So, when the next dawn came, not one but many voices - soprano, alto, contralto, tenor, baritone, bass, flat, thin, loud and soft - many millions of voices were raised to greet it, and they sang:
Here comes the sun, little darling,
Here comes the sun,
It’s all right . . .
And the evening and the morning were the eighth day.
1 Lit: ‘Listen, snotnose, go to sleep or I feed you to the dog, kapisch?’
2 Lit: ‘Yeah. Your other brain cell burnt out or something?’
3 Lit: ‘You could do your flies up too, while you’re at it.’