Galactic Empires

by Gardner R. Dozois

Nothing.

  "You must have," Perri decided. "And my infrared corneas and nexus-links, too, I noticed."

  "All temporary measures," the stranger replied.

  "Why?"

  Silence.

  "Who are you?" Quee Lee asked. And in the same breath, she added, "What is your name?"

  Something about that innocuous question was humorous. The laughter sounded genuine, weightless, and smooth, gradually falling away into an amused silence. Then what might or might not have been a deep breath preceded the odd statement, "As a rule, I don't believe in names."

  "No?" Quee asked.

  "As a rule," the voice repeated.

  Perri asked, "What species are you?"

  "And I will warn you," the voice added. "I don't gladly embrace the concept of species either."

  The lovers sat as close as possible, speaking to each other with the pressure of their hands.

  Finally, Quee Lee took it upon herself to say, "We're human. If that matters to you, one way or another."

  Silence.

  "Do you know our species?" she asked.

  And then Perri guessed, "You're a Vapor-track. Nocturnal to the point where they can't endure even the weakest light-"

  "Yes, I know humans," the stranger responded. "And I know Vapor-tracks, too. But I am neither. And believe me, I am neither nocturnal nor diurnal. The time of day and the strength of the ambient light are of absolutely no concern to me."

  "But why are you down here?" Quee Lee asked.

  Their companion gave no response.

  "This is a very remote corner of the Ship," Perri said. "Why would any sentient organism seek out this place?"

  "Why do you?" was the response.

  "Curiosity," Perri confessed. "Is that your motivation?"

  "Not in the least." The voice was more male than female, and it sounded nearly as human as they did. But those qualities could be artifacts of any good translator. It occurred to Quee Lee that some kind of deception was at work here, and that what they heard had no bearing at all on what was beside them. "I could imagine that I am a substantial puzzle for the two of you," the voice allowed.

  The humans responded with their own silence.

  "Fair enough," their companion said. "Tell me: Where were each of you born?"

  "On the Great Ship," Perri volunteered.

  "I come from Earth," Quee Lee offered.

  "Names," the stranger responded. "I ask, and you instantly offer me names."

  "What else could we say?" asked Quee Lee.

  "Nothing. For you, there are no other polite options. But as a rule, I prefer places that don't wear names. Cubbyholes and solar systems that have remained uncataloged, indifferent to whichever label that a passerby might try to hang on its slick invisible flesh."

  Quee Lee listened to her husband's quick, interested breathing.

  After reflection, Perri guessed, "And that's why you're here, isn't it? This is one place inside the Great Ship that has gone unnoticed. Until now."

  "Perhaps that is my reason," the voice allowed.

  "Is there a better answer?" Perri asked.

  Silence.

  "You have no name?" Quee Lee pressed.

  The silence continued, and then, suddenly, an explanation was offered. "I don't wear any name worth repeating. But I do have an identity. A self. With my own history and limitations as well as a wealth of possibilities, most of which will never come to pass."

  They waited.

  The voice continued. "What I happen to be is a government official. A harmless and noble follower of rules. But when necessary, I can become a brazen, fearless warrior. Except when my best choice is to be a determined coward, in which case I can flee any threat with remarkable skill. Yet, in most circumstances, I am just an official: the loyal servant to a exceptionally fine cause."

  "Which cause?" both humans asked.

  "In service to the galactic union," the entity replied. "That is my defining role… a role that I have played successfully for the last three hundred and seven million years, by your arbitrary and self-centered count."

  Surprise and doubt ran through their bodies.

  Quee Lee took it upon herself to confess, "I'm sorry. But we don't entirely believe you."

  "You claim you were born on Earth. Is that true, my dear?"

  She hesitated.

  " 'Earth.' Your home planet carries a simple utterance. Am I right?"

  She said, "Yes."

  "I do happen to know your small world. But when I made my visit, the stars were completely unaware of that self-given name."

  "And what do you know about Earth?" Perri asked.

  "Actually, I know quite a lot," their companion promised. Then once again, it fell into a long, long silence.

  * * *

  V

  Separately, Quee Lee and Perri had come to identical conclusions: The voice was rhythmic and deep, not just easy to listen to but impossible to ignore. Every word was delivered with clarity, like the voice of a highly trained actor. But woven through that perfection were hints of breathing and little clicks of tongues or lips, and, once in a great while, a nebulous sound that would leak from the mouth or nostrils… or some other orifice hiding in the darkness. Whatever was speaking to them was slightly taller than their ears, and their best guess was that the creature was sitting on a lump of hyperfiber less than three meters from them. There was mass behind the voice. Sometimes a limb would move, or maybe the body itself. Perhaps they heard the creak of its carapace or the complaining of stiff leathery clothes, or maybe a tendril was twisting back against it-self-unless there was no sound, except what the two humans imagined they could hear out in the unfathomable blackness.

  As far as they could determine, their nameless companion was alone. There wasn't any second presence or a whisper of another voice. And it somehow had slipped into their camp, perhaps even before the lights died, and neither one of them had perceived anything out of the ordinary.

  Maybe the voice was just that.

  Sound. Or a set of elaborate sounds, contrived for effect and existing only as so much noise, produced by nothing but the unlit air or the fierce motions of individual atoms.

  Perhaps somebody was playing an elaborate joke on the two of them. Perri had many clever friends. A few of them might have worked together, going to the trouble necessary to bring him and Quee Lee into this empty hole, snatching them up in some game that would continue until the fun was exhausted and the lights returned. Quee Lee could envision just that kind of trick: One moment, a mysterious voice. And then, just as suddenly, a thousand good friends would be standing around them, congratulating the married pair on one or another minor anniversary.

  "Is this a special occasion?" Quee Lee asked herself.

  That route seemed lucrative. She smiled, and the nervousness in her body began to drain away. How many months and years of work had gone into this silly joke? But she had seen through all of the cleverness, and, for an instant, she considered a preemptive shout and laugh, perhaps even throwing out the names of the likely conspirators.

  The creature continued explaining what might or might not be real. "My preferred method of travel," it proclaimed, "is to move alone, and always by the most invisible means. This is standard behavior for officials like myself. We will finish one task in some portion of the Union, and, with that success, another task is supplied. Since news travels slowly across the galaxy, an entity like myself is granted considerable freedom of action. Few organizations are confident enough to tolerate such power in their agents."

  "What kind of tasks?" Perri asked.

  "Would you like an example?"

  "Please."

  "I am thinking now of a warehouse that I had built and stocked. A hidden warehouse in an undisclosed location. And in the very next moment, I was suddenly dispatched into my next critical mission."

  "A warehouse?" Perri asked.

  "A vast, invisible facility full of rare and valuable items. I haven't returned to that particular
location since, but it most likely remains locked and unseen today. Unused, but always at the ready. Waiting for that critical, well-imagined age when its contents help with some great effort. But that is the Union's way: We have an elaborate structure, robust and overlapping. Enduring and invincibly patient. Which is only natural, since we happen to be the oldest, most powerful political entity within this galaxy."

  "The Union?" Perri said dubiously.

  "Yes."

  "That's a name," he pointed out. "I thought you didn't approve of such things."

  "I offer it because you expect some kind of label. But like all names, 'the Union' doesn't truly fit what is real." A smug, superior tone had taken hold, but it was difficult for the audience to take offense. After all, this was just a voice in the night, and who could say what was true and what was sane?

  "Simply stated," their companion continued, "my Union is a collection of entities and beliefs, memes and advanced tools, that have been joined together in a common cause. And what you call the Milky Way happens to be our most important possession. The central state inside a vast and ancient empire."

  "No," Perri said. "No."

  Silence.

  Quee Lee felt her husband's tension. Leaning forward, she told their companion, "There are no empires."

  A long black silence held sway, and then came a sound not unlike the creak of a joint needing oil.

  "Many, many species have tried to build empires," she continued, naming a few candidates to prove her knowledge of the subject. "The galaxy's first sentient races accomplished the most, but they didn't do much. The galaxy is enormous. Its planets are too diverse and far too numerous to be ruled by any one government. And starflight has always been a slow, dangerous business. When a species rises, it can gain control of only a very limited region. When you measure the history of empires against the life stories of suns and worlds, even the most enduring rule is a temporary, very tiny business."

  Quee Lee concluded by saying, "No single authority has ever controlled any significant portion of the galaxy."

  "I applaud your generous sense of doubt," the stranger replied. "May I ask, my dear? What are you?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "By blood, I think you must be Chinese. Am I right?"

  "Mostly, yes," she admitted.

  "And the city of your birth?"

  "Hong Kong," she whispered.

  "Hong Kong, yes. A place I know of, yes. Of course you understand that your China was a great empire, and more than once. And as I recall from my long-ago studies of Earth, there was a period-a brief but not unimportant time-when the port of Hong Kong belonged to the greatest empire ever to exist on your little world. There was a minor green island sitting in a cold distant sea. It called itself Great Britain, and, with its steam-driven fleets, it somehow managed to hang its flag above a fat fraction of the world's population."

  "I know about Britain," she replied.

  "Now tell me this," their companion continued. "There lives an old rickshaw driver who plies his trade on the narrow Hong Kong streets. Does that lowly man care who happens to serve as governor of his home city? Does it matter to him if the fellow on top happens to have yellow hair, or is a Mongol born on the plains of Asia, or even a Han Chinese who is a third cousin to him?"

  "No," she admitted. "He probably didn't think much about those matters."

  "And what about the peasant farmer struggling to feed himself and his family from a patch of land downstream from Everest… the ruler of a farm that has never even once fallen under the indifferent gaze of the pale northern man who works inside a distant government building? Does that farmer concern himself with the man who signs a long list of decrees and then dies quietly of malaria? And does he care at all about the gentleman who comes to replace that dead civil servant… another northern man who bravely signs more unread decrees before he dies of cholera?"

  Quee Lee said nothing.

  "Consider the Mayan woman nursing her daughter in Belize, or the Maasai cattle herder in Kenya who happens to be the tall strong lord to his herd. Do they learn the English language? Can they even recognize their rulers' alphabet? And then there is the Aboriginal hunter sucking the precious juice out of an emu egg. Is he even aware that fleets of enormous coal-fired ships are landing and then leaving from his coast each and every day?

  "These souls are busy, embroiled in their rich and complex, if painfully brief, lives. Within the British Empire, hundreds of millions of citizens go about their daily adventures. The flavor of each existence is nearly changeless. Taxes and small blessings come from on high, but these trappings accomplish little, regardless of which power happens to be flying the flags. A peasant's story is usually the same as his forefathers' stories. And if the peasant's children survive, they will inherit that same stubborn, almost ageless narrative."

  Neither human spoke.

  "Do these little people ever think of that distant green island?"

  "I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't," Quee Lee allowed.

  "But if they did think of Britain," the stranger began.

  "What?" Perri prompted.

  "Would they love the Empire for its justice, order, and the rare peace that it brings to the human world?"

  Neither responded.

  "Of course, they do not. What you do not know, you cannot love. This is true of emperors as well as mates. So long as the peasants' lives remain small and steady, they won't be capable of hating the British.

  "Which is not to say they are unsophisticated souls. They are far from simple, in fact. But their lives are confined. By necessity, the obvious and immediate are what matter to them. And the colors and shape of today's flag could not have less meaning."

  "Suppose we agree," said Perri. "We accept your premise: For humans, empires tended to be big, distant machines."

  "As they are for most other species," was the reply.

  In the dark, Quee Lee and her husband nodded.

  "But I don't agree with that word 'big,' " the stranger continued. "I believe that even the greatest empire, at the height of its powers, remains vanishingly small. Nearly invisible, even."

  "I don't understand," confessed Quee Lee.

  "Let me remind you of this: Several million whales swam in your world's little ocean. They were great beasts possessing language and old cultures. But did even one species of cetaceans bow to the British flag? And what about the tiger eating venison on the Punjab? Did he dream of the homely human queen? And what role did the ants and beetles, termites and butterflies, play in the world? They did nothing for Britannia, I would argue… except for what they would have done anyway if left to their own marvelous devices."

  Perri tried to laugh.

  Quee Lee could think of nothing useful to say.

  "The trouble," the voice began. Then it paused, perhaps reconsidering its choice of words. "Your mistake," it continued, "is both inevitable and comforting, and it is very difficult to escape. What you assume is that the names in history are important. Because you have smart, educated minds, you have taught yourselves much about your own past. But even the most famous name is lost among the trillions of nameless souls. And every empire that you think of when the subject arises… well, that political entity, no matter how impermanent and trivial, was visible only because it wasted its limited energies making certain that its name would outlive both its accomplishments and its crimes."

  "Maybe so," Quee Lee allowed.

  "Names," the voice repeated. "The worlds you know share that unifying trait. A name brings with it a sense of purpose and a handle for its recorded history. Attached to one or a thousand words waits some center of trade, a nucleus of science, and you mistakenly believe that the most famous names mark the hubs of your great cosmopolitan galaxy."

  Perri squeezed his wife's hand, fighting the temptation to speak.

  "But the bulk of the galaxy… its asteroids and dust motes, sunless bodies and dark corners without number… those are the features that truly matter."


  "To whom?" Quee Lee asked.

  "To the ants, of course. And the lowly fish. The beetles and singing whales, and our rickshaw driver who knows the twisting streets of Hong Kong better than any Chinese emperor or British civil servant. The nameless citizens are those who matter, my dear." Their companion shifted its weight. Perhaps. Something creaked, and the voice drifted slightly to one side. "And I will confess that my empire is like all those others, if not more so. The Union that I love… that I have served selflessly for eons… is vast and ancient. But where England made maps and gave every corner its own label, my Union has wisely built itself upon places unknown."

  Husband and wife contemplated that peculiar boast.

  Then Quee Lee remembered an earlier thread. "You have visited Earth, you claimed."

  "I did once, yes."

  "Before or after your invisible warehouse?"

  "After, as it happens. Soon after."

  "You mentioned receiving a new mission then," Perri coaxed.

  "Which leads directly to an interesting story, I believe." The next sound was soft, contented. "My new orders came by a most usual route. Whispered and deeply coded. Instructions from my superiors that were designed to resemble nothing but a smeared flicker of light thrown out from a distant laser array." The words were strung together with what felt like a grin. "Alone, I left my previous post. Alone, I rode inside a tiny vehicle meant to resemble a shard of old comet, using a simple ion motor to boost my velocity to where my voyage took slightly less than forty centuries—"

  "By our arbitrary and self-centered count," Perri interjected.

  "Which is not a very long time." Those words were ordinary and matter-of-fact, yet somehow with the sound of them-in their clarity and decidedly slow pace—the voice conveyed long reaches of time and unbounded patience. "I traveled until I came to a nameless world. There was one ocean and several continents. The forests were green, the skies blue with white watery clouds. To fulfill the demands of my new mission, I selected an island not far from the world's main continent: a young volcanic island where the local inhabitants built boats driven by oars and square sails, and they put up houses of wood and stone, and they planted half-wild crops in the fertile black soil. And their moments of free time were filled with the heartfelt worship of their moon and sun-the two bodies that ruled a sky that they would never truly understand."