The Thousand Emperors

by Gary Gibson

  ‘Then you must know that your top priority is to stop whoever Cheng sent to Darwin from completing their mission, because literally billions of lives are at stake, as well as the future of the Tian Di. Is there any way you can get in touch with your people back home to warn them?’

  ‘They have already been warned,’ the Ambassador replied, ‘since you just told them.’

  Luc frowned. ‘We’re being listened to? Right now?’

  ‘Every word you say is being transmitted via a secure link running through the Hall of Gates back to Temur, and then through the Darwin–Temur gate. We wish to know, for what purpose would Cheng want to acquire such an artefact?’

  Luc imagined shadowy figures listening in to their conversation from untold light-years away. ‘My understanding is that Cheng is going to use the artefact to wipe out Benares, then blame the whole catastrophe on Black Lotus.’

  ‘Destroy one of the Tian Di’s own worlds?’ The Ambassador shook his head. ‘What could he possibly gain from that?’

  ‘He intends to use it as a pretext for staying in power indefinitely. He’ll also claim that the Coalition supplied the weapon to Black Lotus. Ambassador, you must take immediate action.’

  ‘While we agree that your intent is genuine, it may already be too late for the particular solution you seek.’

  Luc shook his head, confused. ‘Too late? How?’

  ‘There are still certain details that you are not aware of. As you already know, I visited Maxwell with regard to preventing a war between our civilizations. I am sorry to tell you that war has already begun.’

  Luc struggled to formulate a coherent answer. ‘It has?’

  ‘And has been under way, for some hours – not that this will be evident for some time yet.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘As you are now clearly aware, Tian Di exploration teams did indeed discover another gate leading into the Founder Network, following which Cheng authorized his own, secret assessment of any artefacts that might be found there, despite his stated reasons for bringing about the Schism.

  ‘However,’ the Ambassador continued, ‘as our ancestors once discovered for themselves, the Founder Network is an enormously dangerous place. The human race was lucky to avoid total extinction following the Abandonment, and so when we became aware that Tian Di expeditions had entered the Network, we were concerned not only for their safety, but that of our entire species, whether here or in the Coalition.’

  ‘So how exactly did you know Cheng had entered the Network?’

  The Ambassador studied his gloved hands. ‘The point about a network is that it is interconnected. Given that, it was inevitable we would eventually become aware of Cheng’s presence within it. But what they were doing was placing us all in terrible danger.’

  ‘What kind of danger?’

  At that point, the assault on the Sequoia grew more vicious. Luc heard a loud crash from the far side of the arboretum, and within moments a ferocious gale began to tear at the trees and bushes around them, filling the air with a terrible, deafening howl.

  the Ambassador scripted.

  Luc grabbed at the branches of the surrounding trees as the sudden expulsion of air dragged him backwards along the path. He yelled, then threw his hands over his face as a mechant came hurtling towards him. It gripped him in its manipulators, and fought to make headway against the outrushing air.

  A moment later Luc felt his ears pop, and the arboretum grew eerily quiet. The air had already been sucked out of the dome. He felt like he was drowning, and caught sight of the Ambassador held in the grip of a second mechant. Perhaps the Sandoz had decided it wasn’t necessary to take them alive after all.

  The two mechants hurtled back through the passageway by which Luc had entered the arboretum. The heavy doors that had isolated the dome from the rest of the station had already swung half-open again by the time they passed between them.

  Luc struggled to stay conscious. The mechants carrying both him and the Ambassador took a sharp turn sideways into another tunnel, and through another pressure-field.

  For the second time that day, Luc gasped and floundered like a fish as the mechant released him. He collapsed onto hard steel decking, coughing and gasping as his lungs again found purchase in breathable air.

  ‘We need to get off this station,’ Luc gasped, seeing the Ambassador climbing to his feet a few paces away, his robe now rumpled and stained. ‘You must have some way off of here, right?’

  ‘We have a flier,’ the Ambassador agreed, ‘but it only has room for one. You may use it if you wish.’

  Luc gaped at him. ‘But . . . what about you? Why would you give a damn about saving my life?’

  ‘You think I’m sacrificing myself, but you’ll soon understand that that’s far from being the case. Besides, we have come to the conclusion that you may have it within your means to bring current events to a more peaceful conclusion than they might otherwise. If we may?’

  The Ambassador peeled off a glove, revealing an entirely ordinary-looking hand, with long and tapering fingers, and carefully trimmed nails.

  He stepped towards Luc, reaching out to him with his ungloved hand. Luc jerked back in alarm.

  ‘What the hell are you trying to do?’

  ‘A touch is all it takes, Mr Gabion,’ said the Ambassador. ‘You offered a trade. Let us then fulfil our side of the bargain. This way, you’ll see and understand everything in an instant.’

  Luc felt his eyes widen. ‘Like Javier Maxwell’s books. Is that the kind of thing you mean?’

  ‘Encoding memories into all manner of physical substrates is an art in itself,’ the Ambassador replied, briefly drawing his hand back and showing his palm to Luc. ‘There are almost no limits to the possible substrates that can be used, since the information is stored on the deep quantum level. It is possible, in the Coalition, to ingest or even drink memories and data – even to breathe them in. Living flesh, allied with a lattice of the type Antonov gifted you with, can become a conduit for sensory data of all kinds.’

  Irrational fear gripped Luc. ‘The last time I was here,’ he said tightly, ‘I mentioned that Antonov told me in what I thought was a dream that you could prevent a calamity, and save both our lives.’

  Something rocked the station around them. ‘Perhaps it’s safest to keep moving for the moment,’ said the Ambassador. ‘We can reach the flier in just a few more minutes.’

  They passed into another part of the station, walking quickly through what appeared to be a series of laboratories linked one to another by a common passageway. Luc observed a number of sealed compartments with glass walls, within which lay samples of mosses and lichens.

  ‘I have another question for you,’ Luc called after the Ambassador as he strode ahead. ‘The lattice in my head. Did Antonov get it from you?’

  The Ambassador turned to regard him as they came to a door at the end of the passageway. ‘He did, yes, but I had no part in what Antonov did to you. You must understand that.’

  Ambassador Sachs next led him through a dusty reception area filled with mouldering couches. Sachs moved through the zero-gee environment with a fluid grace like he’d been born to it – and then Luc remembered that he had.

  Luc also remembered the anger written across Antonov’s face, reflected in the Ambassador’s mirrored mask. ‘He wasn’t very happy with you, for some reason. I saw part of one of his memories. He was arguing with you, clearly extremely upset. Why?’

  ‘He believed we in the Coalition had dangerously underestimated Father Cheng’s determination to remain in power at all costs. Given what you’ve told us since your arrival here, it appears we entirely misjudged the situation. Once it became evident Cheng had no intention of bringing his explorations of the Founder Network to a halt, we began conducting private negotiations with both Javier Maxwell and Winchell Antonov. In return for Antonov’s help, and as a gesture of goodwill, we supplied him with certain technologies he might need if e
ither he or Maxwell were to have any chance at deposing Cheng.’

  ‘Such as my lattice?’

  ‘Such as your lattice, yes.’

  Despite everything he’d learned, a part of Luc was scandalized. ‘All this time, and the Coalition really has been working against the Tian Di?’

  ‘No, Mr Gabion, against Father Cheng and the Eighty-Five, specifically, and out of a desperation to avoid the war Cheng has forced us to initiate. If Cheng should remain in power and continue his exploration of the Founder Network, he risks driving the human race into extinction.’

  ‘You keep telling me that, but you haven’t explained what you mean.’

  ‘We offered to show you, but you refused.’

  ‘Tell me first.’

  ‘The Network is vast, Mr Gabion, a billion open doors scattered all across space and time and leading who knows where. Some of Cheng’s reconnaissance teams encountered something quite terrifying during one of their forays into it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Intelligent life,’ Sachs replied, and turned back to the door.

  Sachs cycled the mechants through the airlock first, the door sealing behind them. The docking bay where his flier waited had, he explained, suffered a breach during the initial stages of the assault. The mechants would venture ahead in order to seal the breach, following which he and Luc would be able to continue on their way.

  ‘As vast as the Founder Network is,’ the Ambassador explained as they waited, ‘it’s difficult to imagine a universe in which such a thing did not exist, given what we know of the mutability of space and time. It seems to be a historical inevitability that any race advanced enough to discover the means to generate worm-holes would then use them as a fast way to access their nearest star systems. And, over time, these scattered networks inevitably fused together, becoming what we call the Founder Network.’

  ‘And that’s who the Sandoz encountered?’ asked Luc, unable to keep a note of awe out of his voice. ‘The Founders?’

  ‘Remember there is no evidence of there ever being any one race of Founders,’ the Ambassador cautioned. ‘The name is merely a collective term for an unknown number of intelligent species who independently created their own wormhole networks, but ultimately used them to access the networks of other species, over vast epochs of time. As you know, the Coalition have continued to explore the Network, despite the Schism, but always with the greatest caution imaginable. By our standards, Cheng’s expeditionary forces have been behaving in a manner almost suicidally reckless.’

  ‘For all your caution,’ Luc growled, ‘you still didn’t prevent someone travelling to one of your worlds to steal something that could be used to murder billions.’

  ‘Which is extremely unfortunate, if it does prove to be the case,’ the Ambassador agreed, ‘and it reveals a serious lapse on our part. But to get back to the point, Mr Gabion, Cheng’s Sandoz teams were not the first to encounter alien life. We first made contact with the very same alien species a few decades after the Schism. At first, our discovery was a cause of celebration: first contact with another species, via the Network. But our joy didn’t last for long. If the creatures we encountered ever had a name for themselves, we never learned it, but it wasn’t long before we started calling them the Inimicals. Communication with them proved difficult from the start, indeed more or less impossible. There are many ways to build some kind of common language – by building mathematical and physical constants, for instance. At first we thought we might succeed in learning to communicate with them, and they with us; but every time we tried to advance beyond those initial building blocks towards anything remotely abstract, we ran into trouble.’

  ‘You mean you couldn’t understand them?’

  The Ambassador shook his head. ‘Or they, us. They showed us images of one of their worlds, dotted with what we at first took to be cities, but then later proved to be graveyards, or perhaps some mixture of both. Every time we thought we had a grasp on how their minds worked or what they were trying to say to us, we’d find ourselves having to throw away all our carefully constructed strategies as new data came in.’ He shrugged. ‘Then things turned nasty.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘You must understand the extraordinary lengths we had gone to, from the very beginning, to prevent the Inimicals from uncovering the route back to our own time and space until we could be certain we would be safe. At the time we first encountered them, the Inimicals had already colonized an entire hub of the Network – thousands upon thousands of transfer gates placed in close orbit around a black hole with the mass of a million stars, located at the heart of a dying galaxy. We never knew just what triggered the hostilities – whether we somehow brought it on ourselves, or if they’d intended to attack us all along – but those of us who survived the attack in our physical forms managed to retreat and warn the rest. We destroyed transfer gates behind us as we went, hoping to block off their pursuit and prevent them from finding their way back to our own worlds, but had only limited success. The Inimicals had already spent millennia inside the Network, and knew routes through it we hardly knew existed. Our exploratory teams came under attack several more times over the next few decades, as the Inimicals attempted to find some way around our hastily erected defences. In response, we initiated research programmes that constructed weapons from certain artefacts we had recovered throughout the post-Abandonment period. Using these, we managed to halt the Inimicals’ progress – but only at a dreadful cost.’

  The Ambassador came to a halt as something thudded and clanged on the far side of the airlock door.

  ‘And that’s what the Sandoz encountered inside the Network? The Inimicals?’

  ‘Several Sandoz Clans engaged in routine explorations of the deep future via the Network disappeared without trace. We know with great certainty that the Inimicals were responsible. Should they manage to trace the route of Cheng’s expeditions back to the Thorne system, we will all have a great deal more to worry about than just the destruction of Benares – such as the survival of our species.’

  ‘But you must have told Cheng all this!’

  ‘Oh, we have, Mr Gabion,’ the Ambassador replied, a trace of wistfulness in his voice. ‘Despite the abundance of evidence, he and his advisors have consistently ignored all of our warnings.’

  ‘And that’s why you threatened war?’

  ‘We have no objections to the Tian Di exploring the Founder Network,’ said the Ambassador, ‘so long as it is conducted with an appreciation of the considerable dangers involved. Cheng initially agreed to halt any further explorations for the duration of our negotiations with him, but he constantly reneges or ignores every agreement we have made. We now believe he has no intention of honouring any of our demands.’

  ‘But why would he do that? Why take such a huge risk with all our lives?’

  ‘A question that has been on our minds from the beginning, Mr Gabion, but the information you have brought us may answer that question. If Tian Di agents truly have attempted to retrieve artefacts from Darwin – and there is strong circumstantial evidence to support that conjecture – it may be that Cheng has simply been stalling for time until he can acquire those artefacts. It adds fuel to our growing conviction that neither Cheng nor his closest advisors are wholly sane.’

  ‘So what will you do now?’

  ‘Since he is apparently unprepared or unwilling to deal with the threat, we will have to deal with it for him, and either seal or destroy the Thorne gate. It is likely this will provoke violent action from the Sandoz, and become a full-fledged conflict throughout the Tian Di. We are extremely well prepared, however, for the coming conflict. Now, Mr Gabion,’ he said, again reaching out with his ungloved hand. ‘Time is running short.’

  Luc hesitated for a moment, then reached out and gripped the Ambassador’s hand.

  In a moment, the Sequoia slipped away.

  He saw ships like shards of black ice tear the underlying structure of space apart, triggering the d
eath of a star in a burst of blazing energy. He realized he was witnessing a battle between evenly balanced Inimical and Coalition forces, each side equipped with weapons the nature of which neither truly comprehended.

  You see? said the Ambassador, from somewhere far away.

  He remembered that once his name had been only Luc Gabion, but now he had a billion names and faces, scattered across multiple worlds, and in the cold, dark depths between stars.

  Simultaneous with witnessing this battle, he stood in a busy street and watched figures – some more or less human in appearance, some multi-limbed and bizarrely alien – engage in what might have been a dance, or a ritual, or something else entirely, their emotions and thoughts tumbling around and through him.

  He stood on the bottom of an ocean in a body constructed of plastic and metal, leaning in close to observe tiny, finger-like polyps that populated the edges of a volcanic fissure.

  There were other eyes and other faces, some on the surfaces of worlds, and others floating above the roiling surfaces of stars, naked to the vacuum.

  He was anyone and anything he chose to be.

  It was, he thought, like being God.

  But it was too much. Luc’s senses reeled under the assault of so many crowded perspectives and tumbling, chaotic thoughts.

  Then, finally, he was all alone once more, and back in his own skull – all except for Antonov, somewhere in the depths of his thoughts, grinning toothily through a bushy black beard.

  He opened his eyes to find he had folded his body into a ball next to the now open airlock door, his skin bright with sweat. Ambassador Sachs knelt on one knee by his side.

  ‘Now do you see?’ said Sachs. ‘Some of those weapons you saw being used were first developed so that we might defend ourselves against the Inimicals. We fought battles that destroyed entire star systems, but we did what we had to do because it was a choice between survival and extinction. But when it comes to a fight between the Tian Di and the Coalition, believe us when we say it is not a war we could possibly lose. Long ago, we seeded weapons fabricants in the outer reaches of several Tian Di systems, including this one, against the possibility that a day such as this might come.’