The Thousand Emperors

by Gary Gibson

  Luc licked his lips. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t.’

  Maxwell sat back, looking deflated. ‘Then tell me what you learned from it.’

  ‘That he knew someone was coming to kill him,’ Luc replied. ‘He muttered something about how he’d been wrong, and Antonov had been right. But about what, I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s such a shame you don’t still have that book,’ said Maxwell. ‘It contained some very valuable information indeed.’

  ‘What information?’

  ‘The answer to that question,’ Maxwell replied, ‘lies in part inside another book, in another section of the library.’ He pushed his chair back and stood. ‘I’ll take you there now.’

  ‘Why not just tell me?’

  ‘Encoded memories, Mr Gabion, offer more fundamental and easily assimilated truths than speech, which is so very vulnerable to interpretation in a way that direct experience is not. To experience the memories of a man is to know certain unassailable truths about him.’

  ‘But how exactly does Ambassador Sachs tie into all this?’

  ‘The Ambassador came here on several occasions in order to privately solicit my advice regarding Reunification,’ Maxwell replied, both mechants trailing in his wake as he stepped towards the exit. ‘But before I tell you anything more,’ he said, pausing by the door, ‘I’d like to ask you something. You couldn’t have known the Ambassador was here unless you had already been watching him closely. Were you?’

  ‘We were tracking him, yes. We discovered he wasn’t where he’d claimed to be at the time of Vasili’s death.’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘So that naturally made him a suspect in Sevgeny’s murder, yes? Well, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you that he was here, with me, when Sevgeny died. In that regard, you can rule the Ambassador out.’

  Maxwell exited the room, Luc following behind, the sound of his boots echoing from the marble walls as he tried to absorb everything he had just learned.

  ‘Just how many books are there in this place?’ asked Luc, as Maxwell led him up a metal stairway in the main hall. The mechants kept pace at a discreet distance.

  ‘At least half a million, if you mean the physical volumes,’ Maxwell replied with a note of pride. ‘There are many, many times that number in data-storage. A few of the physical volumes are particularly fragile, and have to be kept separate from the rest.’

  ‘But why the hell do they let you keep them at all?’

  ‘In what’s meant to be a prison?’ Maxwell queried over his shoulder. ‘As a punishment. I have always been a firm opponent of censorship in any form, unlike dear Joe. Everything I keep here should be available to everyone, and not just those few Councillors foolish enough to think they have superior moral stamina to the common public. So even though Cheng allows me to keep these books, and read them if I choose, I can no more share their contents with anyone outside of his inner circle than I could walk out of here alive. Such things,’ he said, waving to the vast ranks and rows of books, ‘were meant for all of us, along with all the other privileges Cheng has only shared with the Temur Council.’

  They arrived at a lounge-area that felt and looked different from anywhere else Luc had seen, and he guessed they were now in Maxwell’s private quarters. He watched as the Tian Di’s second most famous renegade stepped over to a shelf and pulled out yet another book.

  ‘Tell me,’ asked Maxwell, ‘is Ambassador Sachs the one who installed your lattice?’

  ‘No. Antonov did, when he captured me on Aeschere.’

  Maxwell’s eyebrows shot up. ‘So it wasn’t voluntary?’

  Luc described the worm-like mechant Antonov had sent scurrying inside his nostril.

  ‘I had no idea such a thing was even possible,’ said Maxwell with a shake of the head. ‘But why on Earth would he have done that to you?’

  ‘To save himself,’ said Luc. ‘He’d already uploaded a partial copy of his own mind to the lattice before he inflicted it on me, and now his memories are invading my own thoughts. Zelia told me it would probably kill me unless she could find some way to stop the lattice’s growth. But now, for all I know, she’s abandoned me altogether . . .’

  He thought about how alone he was here on Vanaheim without her help, and how vulnerable, and fought back a black tide of despair.

  ‘Please, continue,’ said Maxwell, not without a hint of sympathy.

  ‘Antonov told me to seek out Ambassador Sachs and ask for his help, but when I did talk to the Ambassador, he wasn’t willing to do anything of the kind.’

  ‘Then you told Sachs you had a lattice like his?’

  ‘I didn’t need to. He somehow knew as soon as he set eyes on me.’

  ‘And your lattice already had Winchell’s personality and memories encoded into it when he placed it inside your skull?’ Maxwell nodded, half to himself. ‘A desperate gamble on Winchell’s part, certainly.’

  ‘What’s in the book that you wanted to show me?’ asked Luc, nodding at the volume still gripped in the old man’s hand.

  Maxwell glanced down at it. ‘If you’re ever going to find out who killed Vasili, you need to better understand him, and what drove him in the last days of his life. On his last visit here – the same day I gave him that other book you unfortunately neglected to bring back to me – I persuaded him to let me capture some of his more recent memories for posterity.’

  ‘Did he talk much about his suspicions over Ariadna Placet’s death?’

  ‘It would be unlike Sevgeny not to talk about it,’ said Maxwell, settling into a chair across from Luc. He turned the book this way and that in his hands. ‘Tell me, have you ever been to Thorne, where she died?’

  ‘Only briefly,’ Luc replied.

  Maxwell nodded. ‘I believe Zelia took over as Director of Policy after her death. The official verdict recorded that something went wrong with the navigational systems of Ariadna’s flier while she was travelling between biomes. Vasili was heartbroken, hardly surprising given they’d been together longer than anyone else in the Council – literally centuries. He was never the same afterwards, always trying to have the circumstances around her death rein-vestigated.’ Maxwell smiled thinly. ‘And, so I understand, making a terrible nuisance of himself in the process.’

  During that one visit to Thorne, Luc had never once stepped outside of a biome. The tiny world orbited just far out enough from its star that temperatures at the equator rarely rose above freezing. There had been some plan to seed Thorne’s wisp-thin atmosphere with CO2-generating bacteria, to create a controlled greenhouse effect that might bump the global mean temperature up in another few decades.

  ‘Did you ever suspect she had been murdered?’ asked Luc.

  ‘Look around you,’ said Maxwell. ‘There’s a thousand times more information in just the physical books here than I could assimilate in a dozen lifetimes. I hate to think how many secrets might be hidden all around us, but that I’ll never know about because I don’t know to look for them.’ He shook his head. ‘No, Mr Gabion, I had no reason to have any such suspicion – but someone else did, someone who knew that the trail of evidence leading to the proof Vasili so desperately needed started right here, in this library.’

  Winchell, Vasili had said. I was wrong, so very wrong.

  The realization hit Luc like a soft punch to the belly.

  ‘Winchell Antonov?’ asked Luc.

  ‘Indeed,’ Maxwell confirmed. ‘When Sevgeny first came to me, he told me how Winchell had approached him in secret and, despite their differences, convinced him he could find the answers he needed here. With my help, of course.’

  ‘And Vasili admitted to you that he’d been dealing with a renegade like Antonov?’

  ‘As I’m sure you can imagine, I was somewhat taken aback myself. But Sevgeny was deeply distraught when he came to me; so much so that he was willing to ignore the fact that Winchell was not only his polar opposite politically and philosophically, but also an enemy of the Council.’

  ‘And you agre
ed to help Vasili, even though he was one of the people responsible for locking you up here for all these years?’

  Maxwell regarded him wearily. ‘That doesn’t mean he wasn’t an honourable man in his way, Mr Gabion. Perhaps you don’t understand just how isolated Sevgeny had become following Ariadna’s death. He had been Cheng’s right-hand man at one time, with considerable influence on Tian Di policies, but he was a cold man, not given to emotions except when it came to Ariadna.’

  Maxwell shook his head. ‘Outside of her, there was no one in all of the Tian Di, except perhaps Cheng, he could even so much as call a friend. After her death, he demanded access to files and records that, when he was finally given permission to investigate them, proved to have vanished without explanation.’ He gave Luc a crooked smile. ‘Are you surprised to learn this only made him more paranoid? Of course, he came to believe he was the victim of a conspiracy, which led in turn to him being dismissed as a crank by his colleagues in the Eighty-Five.’

  ‘But he wasn’t a crank, was he? Or paranoid.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘His gradual isolation from the centre of power had made him . . . receptive, you might say, to influences and ideas he never would have entertained before. Even if they came from someone like Antonov.’

  ‘But how could the evidence he was looking for wind up here in this library,’ asked Luc, ‘without your knowledge?’

  ‘Over the years, it came to my attention,’ said Maxwell, ‘that certain of the Eighty-Five were using this Library’s databanks as a repository for what might be deemed highly sensitive or damaging information.’

  ‘Seems careless. Why not just destroy it altogether?’

  ‘Because knowledge is power, as they say, and such things can prove useful at a later date – perhaps as leverage, should those individuals ever find themselves suddenly out of Cheng’s favour.’ Maxwell favoured him with a thin smile. ‘An insurance policy, of sorts.’

  ‘So what did Antonov tell Vasili he could find here?’

  Maxwell stood and stepped towards Luc, handing him the book. ‘A set of communication protocols which, once I had helped Sevgeny to locate them, proved to allow access to information stored on a derelict orbital station, one of dozens in orbit around Vanaheim.’

  ‘When I met him, Ambassador Sachs had taken up residence on a station called the Sequoia,’ said Luc. ‘Was it that one?’

  Maxwell shook his head. ‘No. Vanaheim’s orbital space is littered with debris and abandoned habitats and follies. The station in question is unoccupied and, I suspect, serves as one of the Council’s many secret hiding places for its instantiation backups. When Vasili returned to visit me a few days later, having visited the station in question, he was in a dreadful state, jumping at shadows. He told me he had uncovered something monstrous – something Cheng had kept hidden from us all.’

  ‘Did he tell you what it was?’

  ‘I wanted him to,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘Whatever he’d discovered clearly terrified him, and I knew he was desperate to talk about it. But he still couldn’t quite bring himself to trust me with the information. He told me he was determined to force a general meeting of the Eighty-Five, so he could present the evidence to all of them. I told him he was being naive at best, at worst suicidal.’ He shook his head. ‘The next thing I heard, he was dead.’

  ‘And you have no idea just what it was he found?’

  ‘None.’ Maxwell nodded at the book gripped, unopened, in Luc’s hands. ‘But I did manage to persuade Sevgeny to leave behind some last few memories – in case, I said, something happened to him. Once you’ve experienced what he—’

  Maxwell paused mid-sentence, his eyes becoming fixed on some far-off point. Several seconds passed before he focused on Luc once more.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It seems there’s been a failure of some of my perimeter mechants,’ said Maxwell, looking noticeably paler. ‘I’ll have to leave you here for the moment while I go and find out what’s happened.’

  ‘Are we in danger?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Maxwell. ‘But if we are, it’s even more important you learn everything you can from that book while you have the chance.’

  Luc watched as Maxwell headed back the way they’d come, the sound of his slippered feet echoing softly. Then he opened the book on his lap, and placed his fingers against a random page.

  SIXTEEN

  As soon as Jacob had dumped the old man’s body into the well, he boarded the flier hidden by Sillars, its hatch hissing softly open. Data displays bloomed around him as he slid into the pilot’s seat, while the upper part of the hull became transparent, giving him a fine view of the forest clearing and the ruins off to one side.

  He had one more thing to do before departing. Taking a deep breath, he fetched Sillars’ pin-sized transceiver from a pocket, holding it delicately between thumb and forefinger and letting more data flow out of it and into his lattice.

  All the worry and tension he’d felt building up, ever since he’d discovered how badly his predecessors had screwed up, finally melted away. He had everything he needed to complete his mission and return to the Tian Di in triumph.

  Tipping his head back, he gazed up through the hull at the band of light and silver arcing from horizon to horizon like a bridge of light spanning the world. Then the ground began to slip away and the flier rose above the forest clearing, before accelerating towards the world-wheel like an arrow shot straight up into the air.

  The sky soon faded from a greenish-blue to black as the flier’s AG drive pushed it out of Darwin’s gravity well at a continuously accelerating rate. The curve of the horizon became increasingly pronounced until the forest merged into a coastline streaked with clouds, their shadows patterning the land below. Spindly arms that looked impossibly fragile, but each of which was in actuality some kilometres in breadth, reached up from Darwin’s equator to support the world-wheel.

  Jacob had time to review the information provided by Sillars and to make sure it matched mission expectations. Once he had recovered the Founder artefact that was his mission goal from a secure facility aboard the world-wheel, his next task would be to make his way through the recently activated Darwin–Temur gate. According to encrypted updates recently received by Sillars’ transceiver, the only people as yet allowed to pass through it were special envoys from either culture, but subtle hacks on the Temur side of the gate would cause Jacob to be identified as one such envoy making a scheduled return trip to the Tian Di. The fact that he would be departing Darwin without having ever officially arrived there was unlikely to be discovered by the Coalition authorities until it was much, much too late.

  He passed the time piecing together the modular beam-weapon Sillars had left behind for his use, fitting the last component into place and studying the resultant device with an enthusiast’s eye. Next came the wave-scramblers, grenade-like things that would – if Sillars had done his homework – induce seizures in Darwin’s global datanets, as well as disrupting communications up and down the world-wheel. He supplemented these with additional subterfuge devices and weapons from the case Kulic had been so curious about.

  Lastly he checked his suit’s integrated systems, making sure they were all fully functional. He’d already checked and rechecked those same systems many times since his arrival on Darwin, but he did it one more time anyway.

  The world-wheel grew from a thin line of silver to a mottled band of grey and white, studded with countless brightly glowing lights. The flier soon merged into the local traffic, most of it unmanned and flying within a dozen kilometres of the wheel’s inner surface as it moved from destination to destination. Jacob caught sight of zero-gee parks and urban centres embedded in the inner rim. His sense of anticipation grew, and he practised the breathing and meditation exercises he had been taught when young.

  The minutes and seconds drew out interminably until the flier finally dropped its velocity almost to zero relative to the world-wheel. He waited u
ntil the local systems had accepted Jacob’s faked authorization, then set the flier to dock automatically.

  Activating his suit’s defensive systems, he disembarked into a wide, deserted boulevard within the world-wheel’s outer shell. Sillars’ research had shown this part of the world-wheel to be deserted, and it appeared to still be so.

  Abandoned or not, Jacob knew there was no way to predict just how long it might take the local security networks to reroute themselves around the aggressive countermeasures his suit was already broadcasting. After that, he would have to think on his feet.

  As it turned out, the security networks recovered in less than a minute. Jacob had been hoping he might have rather more time than this, but his training had taught him the value of adaptability.

  Within seconds, a mechant more astonishingly complex than any he had ever encountered before, even on the killing fields of Benares, appeared from an aperture in the ceiling and came rushing towards him. He took it out with a single shot from his beam weapon, and watched it shatter into a thousand white-hot fragments.

  He walked briskly onwards, his suit informing him he was close to the physical location of a junction connecting together several local data-hubs. Pausing just long enough to break open a circuit-panel set into the wall of the boulevard and insert a wave-scrambler, he then continued along the boulevard. The scrambler rapidly integrated with the dedicated networks responsible for coordinating data traffic in this part of the world-wheel, spreading chaos.

  Jacob had taken no more than a couple of paces before the lights lining the boulevard began to flicker spasmodically, then faded altogether. Another few seconds passed before aged emergency circuits kicked in. Vermilion emergency lights embedded in the floor of the boulevard and integrated into the walls now illuminated the way, lending a claustrophobic quality to his surroundings.