by John Scalzi
“Thank you,” Grayland said. “Now. You think I have come to expose Nadashe Nohamapetan as a murderer and traitor. So I have.
“But some of you in the congregation already knew she was a murderer and traitor. You knew she planned to murder me and take the role of emperox. You knew because she told you. You knew because she enlisted you into the scheme.”
The pings started rolling through the cathedral again. “You paid twenty million marks each to join her coup. You paid it up front from your personal accounts. You paid it because she promised you that if you did, when the Flow finally collapsed, you would be saved. You. You and your friends. You and your business. You and your house. Not the millions of people who you rule over and who live in your systems. They were to be left behind in slowly dying habitats and underground cities while you migrated to the only planet that could support life. You willingly and intentionally planned to condemn billions to death. I have all the details and documentation for each of you, every family and every noble who signed on to this plan of death. And now so does everyone else.”
Grayland waited until the shouting died down again. “I am dead. Nadashe Nohamapetan killed me. She murdered me as she murdered the Countess Rafellya and Drusin Wolfe and her brother Amit and my dearest friend Naffa Dolg. I am dead and I am no longer your emperox.
“I have become something else. Now I am something who knows the secrets of all the noble families. I am something who can control access to Flow streams, not just here but everywhere in the Interdependency. I am something who can decide who will live and who will die in the coming years, and in the decades and even centuries ahead.
“This is what I have to say to you noble families assembled here today. None of you here today will go to End before the last of your citizens go to End. You will not abandon them. Their fate is your fate. You can try to abandon them, if you like. But your ships will not move. Flow shoal sentries will not let you pass. And when you return home, they will know you tried to leave them behind. If you want to buy your way into End, the price of your admission is every other person in your system first. The Interdependency is its people.
“We can and we will move everyone to the End system. But it will take not just years, but decades and even centuries. I will be here—always I will be here—to help guide people to that system. In the meantime, systems of the Interdependency and the people in them will need to survive through long years of isolation. The ideas behind the Interdependency—the monopolies of the noble families and guilds—will no longer allow them to do this.”
Another wave of pings rang through the cathedral. “And so the monopolies of the families are ended. All their trade secrets are released. We can no longer afford to have food stocks self-destruct after five or six generations, or have one family build ships.”
The roar this time was immense. “It is too late,” Grayland said, over the din. “It is done. You are still the noble families. You still have a thousand years of wealth and capital. If you can’t survive without your monopolies, then it is time you let others take your place.”
Eventually the roar subsided. “Finally … finally. You have come here for a coronation. You will have one.” Grayland pointed to Nadashe. “But it will not be her. Not because she murdered me among others. Not because she has been shown, time and again, to be a traitor to the Interdependency. And not even because”—and here Grayland looked at Nadashe directly—“she’s just not a very nice person. It’s because before I died, I legally named a successor.”
Grayland turned to look at Proster Wu, sitting in the front pew of the congregation. “It is not a member of the Wu family. Twice the Wu family aligned itself with the enemies of the emperox. With my enemies. That’s two times too many. You will pay for your treason, Proster Wu. But so will your family. Our family. And that is on you.” Proster looked away.
“If not her, then who?” Archbishop Cole asked. “Who is to be the new emperox?”
“I’m glad you asked,” Grayland said, and there was a final wash of pings across the devices of the cathedral. “I’ve just sent the notice of my declaration of an heir, which I signed three days before my death and had witnessed by three others. I gave instruction for it not to be made public until the day of the coronation. You could say that I anticipated this.
“I, Grayland II, Emperox of the Holy Empire of the Interdependent States and Mercantile Guilds, Queen of Hub and Associated Nations, Head of the Interdependent Church, Successor to Earth and Mother to All, Eighty-Eighth Emperox of the House of Wu, am dead. I present to you now my heir, and the last emperox of the Interdependency.”
The doors of the cathedral opened, and through them a figure stepped through and began walking, with unhurried but deliberate pace, down the nave of the cathedral. The heir to the emperox paid no attention to the rising voices that followed, keeping a steady gaze on Nadashe Nohamapetan, the pretender to the throne, whose eyes widened as she saw who the last emperox would be.
The last emperox stepped up to the chancel of the cathedral, where Nadashe Nohamapetan now stood, and stopped directly in front of her.
“Bitch, you’re in my spot,” said Kiva Lagos.
Chapter 24
For the first time since it was created, the Memory Room received visitors who were not necessarily an emperox.
* * *
“What is this place?” Nadashe Nohamapetan said, looking at the spare furnishing and bare walls.
“It’s a place that you would have had access to if you were emperox,” Grayland said. “Where you could talk to any of the emperoxs who had come before you. Well, a version of them, anyway.”
“Any of them.”
“Yes.”
“Including you.”
“Quite evidently, me.”
“And you would have known I had murdered you.”
“As I was aware of your plans a few days before you murdered me, yes.”
“You knew, and you didn’t stop me.”
“I did know, and I did stop you.”
“Not from killing you.”
“No, not that. But from becoming emperox.”
“You did that already,” Nadashe protested. “You made fucking Kiva Lagos your heir before you died.”
“The point wasn’t to just stop you from being emperox,” Grayland said. “The point was to stop it all. All the conspiracies and plots and nonsense. That wouldn’t have stopped if I still lived. You or someone else like you—well, there’s not quite anyone like you, but you understand what I’m getting at—would have kept coming at me. If I had simply named Kiva my heir, you would have tried to kill her, either before or after she came to the throne.”
“And you think you’ve stopped all that now?”
“I think I’ve made it clear that secrets are not something that can be kept from me. And I released enough of everybody’s secrets that they’ll be too busy dealing with their own problems for a while to make any problems for Kiva.”
“You’ve made a lot of problems for the nobles.”
“Yes, that was the plan.”
“You might get some of them killed,” Nadashe pointed out.
“It’s not me who made them choose to endorse a path where billions were sacrificed to save a few and their money.”
“You just publicized it, is all.”
“Since a key portion of the plan was killing me, I can live with it, so to speak.”
“And you think you can somehow get everyone to End. Eventually.”
“I do.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“You mean, with the Prophecies of Rachela and those other ships waiting to shoot everyone out of the sky, and you having cancelled my plan for a backdoor attack through Ikoyi?”
“I meant more long term, but sure.”
“You gave out clearance codes to your co-conspirators. I’ve collected those. We’ll come in through the front door. As for the rest of it, well, the math is complicated. Just trust I can make it work. Or don
’t. You’ll be dead by the time it’s done anyway.”
“So what are you going to do with me?” Nadashe Nohamapetan asked.
“I’m going to make you lose everything, of course,” Grayland said. “The House of Nohamapetan is formally dissolved, you know that.”
“I heard.”
“That was one of Emperox Mavel’s first acts.” Grayland paused. “You know that’s Kiva’s imperial name.”
Nadashe rolled her eyes. “Yes.”
“Curious choice. In any event, Mavel chose not to ennoble any other family. She put the Nohamapetan assets in trust for the citizens of Terhathum. I thought it was such a good idea, I asked her to do the same with the House of Wu, for the benefit of the citizens of Hub. I suspect dissolving both of those houses will end a lot of mischief, both in themselves and because they will serve as object examples to other noble houses.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. Also, on a more personal level, all your accounts have been seized and turned over to the Ministry of Revenue. Also your mother’s accounts and your brother Ghreni’s accounts. You’re all broke, Nadashe.”
“We’re all under penalty of death for treason, so I don’t think that matters much.”
“Mavel and I decided that death wasn’t the appropriate punishment for you, Nadashe.”
“So? What are you going to do, then?”
“Why, I’m going to give you what you always said you wanted.”
“And just what is that?”
Grayland smiled and told her.
* * *
“You know, it’s funny,” said Emperox Mavel, aka Kiva Lagos. “I was thinking to myself not too long ago that people were going to have to change the way they live, because the end of the universe was coming, and there were only a certain number of people who could freeload, and I fully intended to be one of them. Now look how that fucking turned out.”
“The job of emperox is not a job for freeloaders,” Grayland said. “Well, it can be. Just not now.”
“So you’re saying I should have gotten this gig earlier.”
“A lot earlier.”
“Figures.”
“Sorry.”
“You could still take the job back, you know,” Kiva said.
Grayland shook her head. “I have another job now. And anyway, it’s a job for the living.”
Kiva pointed to Grayland’s head. “Fine, but just so you know, I’m not going to get a fucking set of wires put into my head,” she said. “I have too much stuff in there I don’t want other people to know. Ever.”
“You’re the last emperox,” Grayland said. “The one who wraps up the Interdependency. After you there won’t be any others. So after you there won’t be anyone coming to the Memory Room anyway.”
“Okay, good,” Kiva said. “Because I’m not going to lie to you, this shit is creepy.”
“I know. I think so too.”
“So, how are we going to do this? Wrap up the Interdependency?”
“It’s simple. You are going to tell people what to do in terms of preparing the individual systems for isolation. I’m going to tell you if they are doing it, and what to do if they’re not. The further we go along, the more systems will become isolated and the less you’ll have to do. I will start monitoring systems by direct beam-of-light communication, keeping them updated with the latest developments about evanescent streams appearing and disappearing, and the most recent science about manipulating Flow shoals. I act as a central hub for information once all the long-standing Flow streams disappear.”
“The temporary Flow streams will still connect systems.”
“The evanescent streams, yes. Only for a few months or years for each stream, but that’s enough time for a transfer of information or supplies, or to move structures from one system to another as part of the long path to End.”
“And you’re going to make this work.”
Grayland shook her head. “That’s going to be up to the people in the individual systems to do. I can give them all the information I have and they need, but once the Interdependency is gone it will be up to them to decide what to do with that information. I don’t think everyone is going to make it to End. But a lot of them will.”
“That’s going to fuck up that planet.”
“If we can eventually move the habitats, then people will still live in them. We’ll just have moved all of the Interdependency to a single system.”
Kiva shook her head. “Crowded as hell.”
Grayland smiled. “Space is pretty big. Even in one system.”
“If you say so.”
“How’s your mother?” Grayland asked.
“Smug as fuck,” Kiva said. “I don’t know why I listened to you and made her a duchess.”
“She was helpful to me. After I changed to this I needed a live human to help me do things. I needed someone I could trust and someone I knew could get things done. Like get you out of prison, for one.”
“She just rented a transport and told Senia to get in it. You did the actual jail-busting.”
“It wouldn’t have worked if the transport wasn’t there to pick you up. You know she never doubted you were alive. When I told her you were, she was just, Yes, of course she is.”
“That’s Mom,” Kiva said.
“Thank you for staying alive, by the way. If you were dead I would have had to make Marce the emperox.”
“You’re welcome. Because he would have been shit at the job.”
“I know.”
“And also, fuck you for dying, Grayland. Now I have to do this shitty job.”
Grayland laughed at that. “There are perks. You have a nice house.”
“The damn thing is haunted. I keep seeing ghosts.”
“Well, when the last Flow stream is about to collapse, you can go to End and leave the house behind.”
“We’ll see.”
“So you might stay?”
Kiva was silent for a moment. “You know my mom, the duchess, is heading back to Ikoyi.”
“I did,” Grayland said.
“She plans to die there. Not anytime soon. But one day. And until then she’ll do what she can to help Ikoyi make it through its isolation. She’s not leaving her people behind.”
“I know. You mother is one of the best of us.”
“I’m not just the emperox,” Kiva said. “I’m also Queen of Hub. When I’m done with the Interdependency and it’s gone, there will still be hundreds of millions of people in this system. And what I don’t want them to think is, Our chickenshit queen just left us.”
“I think that’s wise.”
“Anyway, you’ll still be here. You can listen to me bitch and moan about my job every once in a while. You know, when Senia wants a break from it.”
“Fair enough. I’m glad you have Senia, Kiva.”
“I’m glad too,” Kiva said. “Although that was fucking unexpected.”
“Love often is,” Grayland said.
* * *
“I want to ask you a question,” Marce said. “It’s a weird question, but I’d like to know the answer.”
“Of course,” Cardenia said.
“The night you … died, I thought I heard you call my name on the Auvergne. Just before I woke up. Did you? Was that you?”
“No,” Cardenia said, gently. “But I wish it was.”
Marce nodded at this and looked around the Memory Room. “So this is what it was like all this time.”
“This is it,” Cardenia agreed.
“I imagined it as, well, more.”
“It is more, when you fill it with emperoxs.”
“Why did you do it?” Marce asked.
“Because it was the only way to break the cycle of coup a—”
Marce held up a hand. “Not why you died. Why did you ask to marry me when you knew you were going to die?”
“I didn’t know I would need to die when I asked.”
“But you thought it might be a possibility.”<
br />
“I had thought about it. Ever since I learned about Rachela, and ever since you told me there was a possibility of shaping Flow shoals.”
“So why did you ask me to marry you?” Marce asked.
“Because I love you,” Cardenia said. “Everything I said to you that night when I proposed was true. Is true. Is still true. I loved that you were fighting the good fight even if you stood to lose it. And then I saw there was an opportunity to win that fight. Or if not to win it, then to keep fighting until there was a better chance to win it.”
“You won the fight, but you lost the possibility of us,” Marce said.
“Yes,” Cardenia said. “And when I realized that’s what I had to do, I broke down. On that bench you’re sitting on right now.”
“But you did it anyway.”
“There are billions of people whose lives I could save by doing it. I’m Cardenia Wu-Patrick, who loves you, Marce, more than I can possibly tell you. More than I love pie.”
Marce smiled and laughed at this, and then began to cry.
“I’m also Grayland II, who is the emperox, and mother of all. And I had a responsibility that was greater than what I wished and wanted and hoped for myself. I’m sorry, Marce. That was selfish of me, I know.”
“What?” Marce said, and wiped his face. “That’s the opposite of selfish.”
“Selfish because I should have told you. Or at least warned you. Or maybe I just shouldn’t have proposed.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why? My proposal is hurting you.”
“No … it’s not the proposal that hurts. You proposing to me was the happiest moment I can remember having. What hurts is imagining the future we would have, thinking about it and wanting it and then having it taken away…” Marce drew a heavy breath. “Having it taken away so soon after having the privilege of imagining it.”
“And to have it taken away by me.”
“What? No. You didn’t take it away. Nadashe Nohamapetan did it. It’s on her. It’s all on her.” He looked up at Cardenia. “You’re letting her live, I hear.”
“I suggested it and Kiva agreed, on the principle that it would make Nadashe miserable longer.”