by John Scalzi
“And you want me to accept your control of the House of Nohamapetan as just business too.”
“It is just business. And right now there’s no one else to run it. You’re on the run, your mother is in jail, one brother is dead and the other brother is on End, so he might as well be dead. You’ll be happy to know your family business is running along perfectly well at the moment. And when everything is said and done and all accounts are settled, you can have it back.”
“Just like that.”
“Pretty much. Don’t get me wrong, Nadashe. The House of Nohamapetan is paying me handsomely for my stewardship. I’m not running your businesses out of the goodness of my fucking heart. I’ll get mine. But you’ll get yours too, and I’m good enough at running yours that you won’t even miss mine.”
“Getting mine includes those accounts of mine you’ve frozen. The ones you haven’t already turned in.”
“Yes.”
“You have to know that sort of transfer is going to ring bells. Explain to me how you’re going to get it to me without implicating me or yourself.”
Kiva talked at length about how she was going to do that, walking along with Wolfe in an erratic pattern. They crossed the length of the boulevard incessantly, moving from tree to tree, avoiding open spots in the canopy, and occasionally nearly colliding with bicyclists and pedestrians. If Wolfe figured out what Kiva was doing, he gave no sign of it, preferring instead to offer exasperated grunts as Kiva maneuvered him around. Kiva gave not one shit about his aggravation. He was body armor to her at the moment.
Eventually Nadashe seemed satisfied that Kiva could do what she set out to do. “So we’re agreed,” Nadashe said. “Short term, you get those still-hidden funds to me. Long term, my family takes back control of the House of Nohamapetan.”
“Yes to the funds,” Kiva said. “The long-term thing is entirely dependent on whether you can pull off your plans.”
“Let me worry about that.”
“I will,” Kiva assured her. “But part of my deal is being in the inner circle for this. You let me in, and in return I can tell you, literally up until the last week, the state of thinking from inside the imperial palace. And I can help you keep this whole thing silent much better than you’ve managed so far.”
“Yes,” Nadashe said. “I was rather annoyed with Drusin when I found out his moment of gloating led you directly to us. It was unfortunate.”
“Next time remind your co-conspirators to keep their fucking mouths shut.”
“That’s a very good idea, Kiva, thank you. I will.”
“Now what?” Kiva asked.
“Now you’ve passed the audition,” Nadashe said. “Further instructions are coming for both you and Drusin Wolfe. You’ll know them when you see them.”
“That’s vague.”
“You won’t miss them, I promise. Goodbye, Kiva. I’m looking forward to getting mine, and to you getting yours.” The earpiece went dead.
What an asshole, Kiva said to herself. She pulled the earpiece out of her ear canal.
By and large that “meeting” had gone as well as Kiva had expected it would. She didn’t expect Nadashe to welcome her with open arms; that wasn’t the point. The point at the moment was to build détente, and to start gathering information, the better to shove the right sticks into the right gears at the right time. Grayland didn’t want her to destroy this coup; she wanted Kiva to grind it to a halt and look helpful as she did it.
I can do that, Kiva thought. Senia was right: When it came to blowing up other people’s plans, Kiva was the best, and was getting better as she went along. And this little adventure was right in line with Kiva’s decision, made not long after her first tussle with the House of Wolfe, to force change on others for the betterment of all, whether they wanted it or not. This coup attempt was going to fucking fail, and it would be because of Kiva, and when it was done maybe the Interdependency, or at least its people, would be that much closer to being saved.
And I’ll have punted the fucking Nohamapetans into the sun, Kiva thought. And, well. That would be a bonus.
“What did she say?” Drusin Wolfe asked.
“You want a transcript of the whole fucking conversation?” Kiva asked. She looked down to slip the earpiece into her coat pocket.
“Just what we’re supposed to do next.”
“She said further instructions are coming.”
“I wonder what that means.”
“You tell me, you’re the original co-conspirator,” Kiva said, looking up just in time to see a hole sprout out of Drusin Wolfe’s nose, above his left nostril. Drusin blinked once, looked at Kiva and then fell backward.
Kiva heard a clatter and turned to see a handgun settling onto the boulevard, people beginning to scream and run, and a person of indeterminate personal attributes lifting a weapon up to her face. Before everything went black Kiva had time for a final thought:
Well, fuck. She really did curse me.
Chapter 13
“Okay, this gets complicated,” Marce said. He fumbled with his tablet to call up his latest presentation.
Cardenia kept herself from giggling at the warning. “I know that,” she said. “Remember what we’re doing. Your job is to make what you’re about to say comprehensible to people who aren’t Flow physicists. Politicians. Journalists. Normal humans. Me.”
“You’re not normal,” Marce pointed out.
“No,” Cardenia allowed. “But once upon a time I almost was. I’m definitely not a Flow physicist, however. For the purposes of this presentation, I’ll do.”
The two of them were in the small media theater attached to Cardenia’s personal apartments. It could seat about twenty-five and was where the emperox, when she felt like letting her hair down, could invite friends to watch the latest entertainments on a large screen with genuinely amazing sound.
That was the theory, at least. In reality, by the time Cardenia was done with her daily tasks as emperox, the last thing she wanted to do was to have a couple dozen people whooping and yelling at something bright and noisy. She mostly just crawled into bed with Marce, and if the two of them watched anything, it would be on one of their tablets, propped up by one of their knees. Marce had once observed the irony of the most powerful person in the known universe consuming media like a starving college student; Cardenia had replied by hauling him out of bed and making him watch their show in the theater. They ended up watching five minutes of the show and then did something else entirely, which did not involve watching what was up on the screen.
Cardenia smiled at the memory. What they were doing in the theater now was not what they had done then.
“Okay,” Marce said, and then activated his slideshow on the theater’s very large screen. The first slide’s title was “What Is the Flow?” Marce frowned. “You, uh, already know this part,” he said to Cardenia.
“Yes I do,” she agreed. “Why don’t you skip ahead to the new, complicated part.”
Marce flipped forward through several additional slides covering the very very basics of Flow physics and the astrography of the Flow and the Interdependency; Cardenia made a note to have one of her people ask one of the visual artists in the Imperial Information Office to help Marce pretty it up for general consumption. Marce might be a genius in many respects, but visual design wasn’t his forte.
“Right,” he said, finally, and stopped at a slide that featured a visual representation of a Flow shoal. “This is a Flow shoal as we typically know it. It’s where ships enter or exit the Flow, and it’s static, relative to the most massive object in its system, usually its star. Indeed, in a way you could say the Flow shoal is anchored by gravity—it’s why we find shoals in star systems but almost never outside them.”
Marce tapped his tablet and then another representation of a Flow shoal appeared, this one moving and shrinking, on a loop. “But then about two years ago”—Marce glanced up at Cardenia—“literally just before I got on a ship to come to Hub, in fact—”
Cardenia smiled at this.
“—a fiver that had unexpectedly been dropped out of a decaying Flow stream discovered this: an evanescent Flow shoal that, unlike the Flow shoals we typically see, both moved independently and shrank. In fact, given how small the time frame was in which it existed, it’s fair to say that it evaporated.”
Another slide, filled with equations Cardenia could not hope to follow. “How did this happen? I hypothesize that the decay of the Flow stream precipitated the existence of several localized evanescent streams that connected temporarily to the main stream—like fibers spinning out of an unraveling rope. There’s no gravitational source for them to anchor to, so they don’t last. We’ve never seen this before because usually when a ship unexpectedly falls out of a Flow stream, it’s stranded in deep space and is never heard from again. There’s no data.”
Tap, new slide. “But now that we have that data, and now that, thanks to Hatide Roynold, we understand the concept of and some of the physics behind evanescent streams, I think I have some potentially extraordinary possibilities to consider, with respect to how these evanescent streams will appear in local space.”
Marce stopped. “How is it so far? You following?”
Cardenia held her finger and thumb close together. “About this close to not following.”
Marce nodded and moved to another slide. “Then I’ll make this simple. I think when an evanescent Flow stream appears, its shoal does what our nearly doomed fiver saw the disappearing shoal do—but in reverse. It appears, tiny at first, and then moves and grows until it becomes anchored.”
A pause. “Actually I think all the Flow streams do this when they emerge into normal timespace, but the regular Flow streams have been so stable—well, until recently—that there’s just never been a chance to see it there.”
“Maybe leave that part out when you talk to other people,” Cardenia suggested.
“Got it.” Marce returned to his slides, and advanced another one, with more equations on it. “So, why does this matter at all? Because if the Flow shoals on emerging evanescent streams grow and move, then there may be a way to manipulate and even control that growth and movement—to position the Flow shoals closer to human habitats, and make them large enough to allow major structures to pass through.”
“So, more ships,” Cardenia said.
“No,” Marce said. Another slide appeared, showing a full-sized human habitat, one that could contain hundreds of thousands of people in it. “I’m thinking actual places.”
It took Cardenia a second before it hit her. “You want to put entire human habitats into the Flow?”
“‘Want to’ isn’t the phrase I would use,” Marce said. “But it might be possible. And if it’s possible, then suddenly things get interesting.”
“Interesting?!?” Cardenia exclaimed. Because now she got it. If you could stuff actual entire habitats into the Flow, then the biggest bottleneck issue humanity had—actually moving millions of people out of systems when starships could transport only a fraction of that number—became much less of a problem. You wouldn’t need ships anymore. You could just move people where they lived.
And you could save almost everybody.
“Let’s do this,” Cardenia said.
Marce held up his hands. “Hold on,” he said. “It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
“Because—well, I don’t have a slide for that, actually.”
“Forget the fucking slides,” Cardenia said, irritably. “Just tell me.”
“Wow,” Marce said.
Cardenia held up a hand. “Sorry. That came out a lot nastier than it should have.” She pointed up at the screen. “But this. It could be it. The answer.”
Marce smiled. “Maybe,” he agreed. “But there’s a lot that has to come before that.”
“Like what?”
“Well, first of all, I have to actually find out if this is correct.” Marce waved up at the screen. “This is just a hypothesis. It’s a guess, based on data. And not even a lot of data, since it’s based substantially on a single event. I’d be a bad scientist if I didn’t tell you that this is more than a little bit shaky.”
“Fine,” Cardenia said. “So how do you find out?”
“I’d need to observe the shoal of an evanescent Flow pop into existence.”
“Okay, so do that.”
“And ideally more than one.”
“How many more?”
Marce wiggled his hands indeterminately. “Like, dozens? For starters?”
“How much time would that take?”
“If it was just me, more time than we have. With others, maybe a year.”
“By that time, systems will start being cut off.”
“Yes,” Marce agreed. Cardenia frowned at this. “But even once we gather the data, all we have is the data. We’ll know if the hypothesis is sound enough to become a theory. But then we have certain practical issues to consider.”
“Like how to make one of these shoals large enough,” Cardenia said.
“That’s right. And not only that.” Marce pointed to the image of the habitat. “Habitats aren’t ships. They’re parked in orbits or at Lagrange points. They don’t go anywhere, relatively speaking. And they don’t have any way to go anywhere. At best they have engines that counteract drift, to keep them in their orbital lane. But those aren’t going to move the habitats any appreciable distance. We can’t get them to a Flow shoal. The Flow shoal would have to come to them.”
“And how do we do that?”
Marce shrugged apologetically. “Well, see. That’s the complicated part.”
“So you don’t know,” Cardenia said, and as she said it she realized that it came out almost accusingly. She hoped Marce wouldn’t pick up on that.
He did, of course. “Sorry?”
Cardenia counted to five before continuing. “No, don’t be sorry. I’m just … well.”
“I know,” Marce said. “I’m right there with you. Trust me on that. But I can’t work on trying to direct a Flow shoal to a certain point without knowing that they move at all. This is the ‘one step at a time’ kind of science, I’m sorry to say.”
“I hate that there are no shortcuts,” Cardenia said.
“There aren’t,” Marce said. “I mean, unless you can find the data from whoever it is that created the Rupture.”
“What?”
“The Rupture. You know, the thing where the people who were in the Interdependency systems before the Interdependency decided to cut themselves off from Earth and everyone else.”
“I know what it is,” Cardenia said.
“Okay, so, whatever it is that they did, they had to understand the physics of the Flow extraordinarily well to do it. They actually triggered the collapse of a Flow stream.” Marce grimaced here. “And in doing so set up the repercussions that we’re dealing with now. To do all that, they’d have to know what they were doing better than we know what we’re doing. Better than I do, anyway.”
“So if you had their work, you could bypass all the stuff you were talking about.”
“I don’t know,” Marce admitted. “I think we need to confirm the moving shoals no matter what. All the rest of it…” He shrugged. “It depends. But we’d be better off than we are now. But it doesn’t exist. You told me Jiyi didn’t find it.”
“Yes,” Cardenia said. “Right. But … what if Jiyi did find it?”
“You mean, if Jiyi had all the data we were just talking about.”
“Yes.”
“Then I’d be really pissed,” Marce said, after a moment. “Because that would mean that you knew that data existed, and that you didn’t give it to me. Which means I’ve been burning out my brain trying to save billions of people from dying with the mental equivalent of my hands tied behind my back.”
“Oh,” Cardenia said.
“So? Does Jiyi have the data from the Rupture?”
“Well,” Cardenia said. “Um.”
>
* * *
“Apparently I am history’s worst monster,” Cardenia said to her father.
“Statistically speaking this seems unlikely,” Attavio VI said.
“Don’t be so sure,” Cardenia said. “I’m currently on track to fail to save literally billions from a slow death as the universe collapses around them. I’m not sure anyone else compares, statistically speaking.”
“The universe collapsing around them is not something you can control,” Attavio VI said. “Failing to save them is not the same as killing them.”
“Yes, well, there’s some debate about that at the moment.” Cardenia recalled the ending conversation of Marce’s presentation run-through, which had, much to Cardenia’s dismay, devolved into the couple’s first true and actual fight. When it was over Marce excused himself, ostensibly to continue work on his presentation, but in fact to not have to talk to Cardenia anymore. He had gone to his own quarters in the imperial palace, which were basically a dorm-style room for junior imperial bureaucrats.
“This is where I’m meant to inquire about the event that precipitated your visit, is it not?” Attavio VI asked.
Cardenia narrowed her eyes at her father. “It is, but you’re not supposed to say it.”
“I will remember for next time.”
“Never mind,” Cardenia said. “I don’t think you’re the person I want to talk to anyway.” She dismissed Attavio VI and called on Jiyi to bring forth Rachela I, the first emperox of the Interdependency. As Attavio winked out of existence, Cardenia had the almost plaintive realization that she had dismissed the simulation of her father with the same sort of casualness as she would dismiss any other of the apparitions she encountered here in the Memory Room. In some very real way, some connection with her father—her actual father—had been lost in the act.
Cardenia would have thought on it more, but Rachela I was in front of her, waiting.