Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  My head shook without my telling it to do so. “I can’t accept that.”

  Gibson caught the nervous tension in my face and pointed a knobby finger at my chest. “That way lies madness, Hadrian.”

  I looked up sharply. “I’m sorry?”

  “Fear is death to reason.” The words were a reflex, his mind’s automatic response to the named emotion both in himself and in others.

  I blinked, stopped my search for a stone to throw, and said, “I’m not afraid.”

  “Of joining the Chantry? Of course you are.” He looked me plain in the face, his own no different than that of a statue, the only creases there those of time, not of expression. He might have been cast from bronze. “You want to be a scholiast? Master that fear of yours or you’re no better than the rest of them.” Here he waved a hand in the vague direction of the castle as if to encompass all of lay humanity. “Imitate the action of the stone. Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it if you have to with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” I failed to recognize the quote at the time: Marcus Aurelius. Another Roman.

  Smiling, I quoted back, an aphorism from The Book of the Mind: “The frightened man eats himself.”

  Any other sort of man might have smiled, but Gibson’s mouth only quirked as he nodded his approval. “You know these things, but you haven’t learned them.” Another silence fell between us, and I turned back to watch the birds at their hunting. They were proper gulls, descended from seed stock brought to Delos with her oceans countless centuries ago. True terranic gulls, white and gray, such as plied the shores of Old Earth all the way back in Sargon’s day and beyond. “The Chantry’s not a bad option. You’d stand above the lords of the Empire. See the Empire, the Commonwealth, maybe even the Tavros Demarchy. You’d have an opportunity to put your training to good use.”

  “I was supposed to be training in diplomacy, not . . . not . . .” I couldn’t find the word.

  “Theology?”

  “Propaganda!” I sneered. “That’s all it is. They keep everyone in line with fear, Gibson, even Father. You know he said that’s why he’s sending me to them? He said he needed someone there ‘on his side.’ Like he was planning something illegal.” I ground my teeth again. “Is that all I am? A tool? Is he trying to cheat his way into a proper title?”

  As I waited for a reply, I watched the scholiast, who sat like the icon of Ever-Fleeting Time in our Chantry sanctum, wasting away, hunched over his cane. But it was the scholiast who replied, and not the man beneath. “In the technical sense, all the palatine houses have children for precisely that reason. It’s about strategy.”

  “Chess pieces.” I spat on the strand. “I don’t want to be a pawn, Gibson. I don’t want to play.” I have always hated that metaphor.

  “You have to play, Hadrian. You’ve no choice. None of us has.”

  “I’m not his.” I said the words as a snake might, glaring at my teacher, venom dripping from my tongue.

  The scholiast’s dim eyes narrowed. “I never said you were. We’re all pawns, my boy. You, me, Crispin. Even your father and the vicereine-duchess. That’s the way the universe works. But remember!” His voice cracked upward, and he jounced his cane against the weathered white stone. “No matter who tries to move you, be it your father or any man of power, you have a choice, because your soul is in your hands. Always.”

  It was strange to hear Gibson—to hear any scholiast—talk of souls. Not knowing what to say, I looked away again, back to the birds and their predation. I moved across the strand back to the stone where I had been sitting and scooped up my journal, wincing with pain as my sore fingers closed on the black leather volume. “What choice is that?” I didn’t look back at him, returned my attention to the birds and their hunt.

  Gibson didn’t answer. I knew why. Even here, away from the castle and its pricking ears and prying eyes, he could not speak treason. The instinct for obedience ran too deeply in the man. But what form of obedience? I wondered, and I wonder still. Instead he asked, “What are you looking at?”

  “The fish.”

  “You can’t see the fish.”

  “Not until the birds get them,” I answered, pointing, though I supposed the old man could not see even then. I realize now that I do not know how old dear Gibson was. His skin was like old parchment, drawn and stretched. And his eyes—do you know how old a man of high birth must be to begin to lose his vision? I have known men more than five hundred years old whose sight was sharp as flensing knives. Sometimes I think my beloved tutor was the oldest man I ever knew, discounting only myself.

  Ever the Socratic, the scholiast asked, “And what, pray tell, about the fish has your attention at a time like this?”

  In a muted voice, I breathed, “It’s fate.”

  “What?” Gibson asked, the knee-jerk query of the deafening man.

  I was glad he hadn’t heard me; I could imagine the abrading I’d have gotten for daring to reference something so tawdry and mystical as fate. I spun to face him, shrugged, and reframed my thought. “They have no say in being eaten. Pawns again. Biology is destiny.”

  Gibson cocked one bushy eyebrow as he snorted. “Must everything you say sound like it’s straight out of a Eudoran melodrama?”

  “What’s wrong with melodrama?” I brightened, relieved at the faint breath of humor.

  “Nothing, if you’re an actor.”

  “All the world’s a stage.” I spread my hands, attempted a smile, entirely certain that this, at least, was Shakespeare. Weakly I tried to laugh, but I stopped almost as quickly as I’d begun. Gibson shut his eyes for a two-count of breaths, a gesture I had learned from long experience was the man exerting his psychic faculty to suppress his own bout of laughter. The mind must be like the sand in a garden, raked clean, wrote the scholiast Imore in the third millennium. “I just feel like one of those damned fish right now.”

  The old man pressed his lips together. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “I don’t want to go to Vesperad, Gibson.”

  “Why?” Not an argument but a probing question. Damn Socrates to the Outer Dark for all of time . . .

  I opened my mouth, closed it again. Looked up at the castle. Opened it again and said, “Because . . . because it’s all a load of horseshit. The Cult of Earth, the icona. None of it’s real. The Earth’s not going to come back to us green and pure again if we repent for the sins of our ancestors.” I shook my head and spat the next words out like bile. “Bread and circuses.” I felt dirty just saying it, owning that piece of Father’s tradition. I was hard on religion as a boy where I should have been hard only on the Chantry.

  Gibson’s mouth did twitch then, forming a fractional impression of a smile. Was it triumph I saw there? Then it was gone, and he said, “You should really keep that to yourself, you know.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” I pointed up at the tenebrous mass of Devil’s Rest far above. “I didn’t tell him that! Earth and Emperor, man! Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  “I think,” Gibson replied with extraordinary care, “that you are an archon’s son and lack a commoner’s caution.”

  I barked a short laugh at that, cold and humorless. “Caution? Gods in hell, Gibson, have I not shown enough caution? I’ve tiptoed around Father and Crispin for years. And Eusebia and Severn and the other chanters. I need to do something . . .” A mad grin stole over my face then as I realized what that something was.

  “I don’t like the look of that at all.” The scholiast almost scowled at my display of emotion.

  The scheme assembled behind my eyes, thudding into place one lumbering component after another. “I’m not going.” I said the words like a prayer, small and certain and powerful. “I’m not going to Vesperad.”

  “You have to.”

  “No!” I pointed at Gibson, brandishing my journal at
him. “You said I have a choice.” I looked down at the crumpled man on the steps, a feral grin lighting my eyes. “You could draft a letter of introduction to the athenaeum primate on . . . Teukros, say.” Wearily Gibson looked up at me, a curious expression in those cloudy gray eyes, dangerously close to a coherent and lingering feeling. He pressed his lips together and stood, grunting with the effort. My proposal unanswered, momentarily forgotten, I moved forward to help him stand. Even with his back bent by untold centuries, the scholiast was taller than me, clear evidence that his was some antique bloodline old as empires. Into the reborn quietude I said, “You could, couldn’t you? For me?”

  We both knew what it was I asked. It was an act of treason, a betrayal of his lord and of centuries of service here in Meidua. Gibson had known my father all his life. Perhaps they had stood on this same strand, the scholiast advising a young and frigid Alistair on how to cope with the difficulties of ruling. Father had been barely fifty, after all, when a homunculus—a gift from one of his Mandari competitors—had killed my grandfather and thrust the title of archon upon him. Old Lord Timon had died abed, strangled by that artificial person while in the throes of lovemaking. It had taken Father the better part of a century—and the Battle of Linon—to make the lords of the Delos System forget that embarrassment. Part of me wondered if Gibson had counseled that attack, if the air had been blown from House Orin’s castle at his suggestion and the bloodline destroyed by his word.

  Voice ragged, the words broken pieces of themselves, Gibson replied, “I can.”

  I threw my arms around the man who was dearer to me than my own father, trying to suppress the warm joy in my chest. “Thank you! Thank you, Gibson.”

  Living as I did in a world of servants and masters and politics, I was a stranger to real friendships. My relationship to my parents could not at all be described as a loving one. So too my relationship with Crispin was characterized by my distaste for him. My bonds with the others of my father’s court—with Sir Felix and Sir Roban, with Tor Alma and Tor Alcuin and Eusebia the Prior and all the rest—were only the attachments of student and teacher or of master and servant. Even my nascent feelings for Kyra—though I did not know or appreciate all of what that meant—were passed through the sanitizing membrane imposed on my life by my station. Only Gibson had broken through. He was, as I have said, the closest thing to a father I ever had.

  And that damned us both.

  CHAPTER 11

  AT WHAT COST

  I THINK NOW THAT the old rascal wanted me to do it, that even during our little conversation by the strand he was pushing me, needling me so that I’d come round to my convictions on my own. I set myself quite privately to the business of escape, having only the vaguest notions of how to accomplish such a thing. I, who had never once been out-system, dreamed up ways to charter or steal starcraft and pilot them somewhere besides Lorica College on Vesperad. I entertained notions of bribing the sailors aboard whichever ship Father chartered for the voyage or of slipping away at some intermediate stop on our long cruise and lighting out for the territories. I knew it had been done, but the logistics were quite beyond my limited experience.

  As I understood it, I had two essential problems: figuring out how to get offworld and how to pay for it. Perversely, the second problem proved far easier to solve than the first. I was, after all, the son of a palatine lord, and I had access to certain avenues of wealth that the peasantry couldn’t even imagine. You will imagine, perhaps, chests of precious gems and gold diadems. While gold retains enough value for its scarcity as well as for its myriad practical functions, it is a relatively common thing, and the coined specie of the Imperium—gold hurasams, silver kaspums, and the rest—circulate primarily amongst the lowest strata of our civilization. Gemstones, which are little more than carbon in most cases, have not held value in elite circles since before the rise of the Empire. Cut diamonds, sapphires, rubies, and the rest could be had cheaply by anyone with access to an alchemist.

  Instead, the fortunes of the palatine caste are backed by the collected chemical wealth of the Imperium. Gold is one such trade-worthy material. Uranium is another, and a far worthier one, particularly because one required a license issued directly from the Imperial Office to mine it legally. Thus, whilst a single hurasam is available to anyone, the Imperial mark—nominally the standard currency of the Empire—is something available only to those whose occupations lift them from the dirt and engine grease at the base of our society.

  Marks are worth much more, one-to-one, and they are much easier to move than a shipload of gold, being only data in an account. The trick was moving them unnoticed. Father’s logothetes and the secretaries of his various ministries—to say nothing of the house treasury—had enough to keep track of as it was, but there was always the chance that one overzealous clerk might glance too closely at my allowance and the various emergency accounts banked in my name. And there was also the possibility—slim, I thought—that Father might be keeping a special watch on me.

  Three months.

  How little time that truly is, even though Delian months ran longer than standard ones, and our days were longer, too. Even for a palatine—perhaps especially for a palatine—the days pass quickly. I had to act just as quickly and turn to the one avenue of action to which I knew my lord father—for all his vaunted coldness—could never object.

  Charity.

  * * *

  “You want to what?” The Guild factionarius looked like I’d just slapped her, her deep-set, muddy eyes wide in her prematurely aging face.

  Calmly I repeated my offer from across her cluttered desk, trying not to think of Kyra and the other two guards waiting just outside the office door, as if thinking of them might draw their attention to me and what I did. “I want to make a donation to the Guild. From my personal accounts.”

  Lena Balem’s common face narrowed in suspicion. “Why?”

  Not able to meet her eyes, I looked past her to the holograph on one wall displaying a bird’s-eye view of the Redtine Valley region in three dimensions. Its mining sites were marked with the yellow glyph of radioactivity, regions shaded by their corresponding levels of risk. I’d been out that way many times before. Despite the best efforts of biologists, only the hardiest plants took root in the hill country above the river. The consensus was that some massive collision deep in the geologic past had brought to ground the region’s uranium deposits, which were then exposed again during the subtle cataclysms of our long-ago terraforming.

  At last I asked, “You’ve heard I’m leaving Delos?”

  Taken aback, the Guild factionarius leaned forward, elbows on the edge of her cheap desk. “It’s true, then? They were reporting it on daytime broadcast, but I thought . . .”

  I shook my head. “It’s true. I’m leaving aboard the Farworker on the thirty-third of Boedromion. But in light of all that’s happened in the past few weeks, I, uh . . .” Here I managed to look her in the face again, conscious that it was the opposite of what my father would have done. “I felt bad about how I left things here. I understand the Consortium was able to meet some of your needs while they were here?”

  She snorted. “One refinery crawler and a couple of drills. It’ll offset some of our losses, but we’ve still got people down those shafts with hand equipment.” Distracted, or else trying to find her focus, Lena Balem reached forward and rustled an assortment of papers on her desk. “I have to ask, Lord Marlowe. Why the sudden interest in our operations?”

  I spread my hands, all innocence. “I just want to correct a mistake I’ve made.” I waited a couple of seconds before adding, as if it were an afterthought, “And where I’m going I won’t need the money. Father’s sold me to the Chantry.” Before she could have time to think about the implications of these words, I plowed on ahead. “So I want to make a donation. One hundred and twenty thousand marks.”

  Her eyes went wide as dinner plates. “You’re serious?”
Had her jaw dropped off like that of poor Yorick’s skull and hit the desk, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Perfect—exactly the reaction I wanted from her.

  “You could outfit a dozen work crews in hazard suits with money like that, couldn’t you? New ones? Electron shielding and all?” I shook back the sleeve of my frock coat, checking the time on my terminal.

  Lena Balem reached under her desk and drew out a packet of T-free cigarettes. She paused a moment, as if asking permission, before lighting one up. When I raised no objections, she put the thing to her lips, the end glowing cherry-red as she lit it and blew smoke between us. “We could, but that still doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Which question, Factionarius?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I told you,” I said with feigned exasperation, ramping up to the truth. “I don’t want those men’s deaths on my conscience. If my father won’t pay for the equipment, I will.” I inclined my head at the desk, as if to indicate some nicety of paperwork. “Draw up a contract if you won’t take my word. You can have it in writing. In fact, I insist.” More smoke clouded the air, and I tried to clear it—coughing—with a wave of my hand. I knew the game she was playing, trying to discomfit me. I smiled, exhaled sharply. The gene-tailored tobacco wouldn’t leave deposits in the lungs, but it smelled foul. I should have told her not to light it. Maybe I was too soft.

  She rummaged around on her desk, located a file bound in false leather, and, opening it, produced a crystal tablet and rubber-tipped stylus. Her cigarette held in her yellow teeth, she said, “Here.” Silence hung on us a moment, save for the sound of ground traffic in the street beneath the Guild hall windows.