“Yes, Mercurio,” the men said in near-unison.
In the nearest pond one of the fish—I recognised it as one of the Asagi Koi, with the blue-toned scales laid out in a pine-cone pattern—opened and closed its mouth as if trying to tell me something vital. I turned from the scene and made my way back into the Great House. By the time I reached the emperor’s reception chamber the building was buzzing with rumours of the assassination attempt. Despite my best efforts, the news would be out of the Nexus within the hour, hopscotching from world to world, system to system, spreading into the galaxy like an unstoppable fire.
The emperor’s new body rose from his throne as the doors finished opening. He was dressed in a yellow silk gown identical to the one worn by the corpse. Aside from the absence of injuries, the body was similarly indistinguishable, appearing to be that of a white-haired man of considerable age, yet still retaining a youthful vigour. His habitual expression normally suggested playfulness, compassion and the kind of deep wisdom that can only come from a very long and scholarly life. Now his face was an expressionless mask. That, and a certain stiffness in his movements, betrayed the fact that this was a new body, being worn for the first time. It would take several hours for the implant to make the fine sensorimotor adjustments that gave the emperor true fluidity of movement, and allowed him to feel as if he was fully inhabiting the puppet organism.
“I’m sorry,” I said, before the emperor had a chance to speak. “I take full responsibility for this incident.”
He waved aside my apology. “Whatever this is about, Mercurio, I doubt very much that you could have done anything to prevent it.” His voice was thick-tongued, like a drunkard with a bad hangover. “We both know how thorough you’ve been; all the angles you’ve covered. No one could have asked for better security than you’ve given me, all these years. I’m still alive, aren’t I?”
“Nonetheless, there was clearly a flaw in my arrangements.”
“Perhaps,” he allowed. “But the fact is, whoever did this only reached the body, not me. It’s unfortunate, but in the scheme of things little worse than an act of vandalism against imperial property.”
“Did you feel anything?”
“A sharp blow; a few moments of confusion; not much else. If that’s what being assassinated feels like, then it isn’t much to fear, truth be told. Perhaps I’ve been wrong to keep looking over my shoulder, all this time.”
“Whoever did this, they must have known it wouldn’t achieve anything.”
“I’ve wondered about that myself.” He stroked the fine white banner of his beard, as if acquainting himself with it for the first time. “I almost hate to ask—but the koi?”
“I’ve got my men searching the ponds, looking for bullet fragments. But as far as I can see the fish didn’t come to any harm.”
“Let’s hope so. The effort I’ve put into those fish—I’d be heartbroken if anything happened to them. I’ll want to see for myself, of course.”
“Not until we’ve secured the Great House and found our man,” I said, speaking as only the emperor’s personal security expert would have dared. “Until the risk of another attempt is eliminated, I can’t have you leaving this building.”
“I have an inexhaustible supply of bodies, Mercurio.”
“That’s not the point. Whoever did this…” But I trailed off, my thoughts still disorganized. “Please, sir, just respect my wishes in this matter.”
“Of course, Mercurio. Now as ever. But I trust you won’t keep me from my fish for the rest of eternity?”
“I sincerely hope not, sir.”
I left the emperor, returning to my offices to coordinate the hunt for the assassin and the search for whatever evidence he might have left behind. Within a few hours the body had been subjected to an exhaustive forensic analysis, resulting in the extraction of bullet shards from the path of the wound. In the same timeframe my men recovered other fragments from the vicinity of the corpse; enough to allow us to reassemble the bullet.
An hour later, against all my expectations, we had the assassin himself. They found him with his weapon, waiting to be apprehended. He hadn’t even tried to leave the grounds of the Great House.
That was when I began to suspect that this wasn’t any act of mindless desecration, but something much more sinister.
“Tell me what you found,” the emperor said, when I returned to the reception chamber. In the intervening time his control over the new body had improved markedly. His movements were fluid and he had regained his usual repertoire of facial expressions.
“We’ve found the assassin, sir, as you’ll doubtless have heard.”
“I hadn’t, but please continue.”
“And the weapon. The bullet itself was a goal-seeking autonomous missile, a very sophisticated device. It had the means to generate stealthing fields to confuse our anti-intrusion systems, so once it was loose in the grounds of the Great House it could move without detection. But it still needed a launching device, a kind of gun. We found that as well.”
The emperor narrowed his eyes. “I would have thought it was hard enough to get a gun into the Nexus, let alone the Great House.”
“That’s where it gets a little disturbing, sir. The gun could only have been smuggled into the grounds in tiny pieces—small enough that they could be disguised by field generators, or hidden inside legitimate tools and equipment allowed the palace staff. That’s how it happened, in fact. The man we found the gun on was an uplift named Vratsa, one of the keepers in charge of the ponds.”
“I know Vratsa,” the emperor said softly. “He’s been on the staff for years. Never the brightest of souls…but diligent, gentle, and beyond any question a hard worker. I always liked him—we’d talk about the fish, sometimes. He was tremendously fond of them. Are you honestly telling me he had something to do with this?”
“He’s not even denying it, sir.”
“I’m astonished. Vratsa of all people. Primate stock, isn’t he?”
“Gorilla, I think.”
“He actually planned this?”
“I’m not sure ‘planned’ is exactly the word I’d use. The thing is, it’s starting to look as if Vratsa was a mole.”
“But he’s on the staff for—how long, exactly?”
There’d been no need for me to review the files—the information was at my immediate disposal, flashing into my mind instantly. “Thirty-five years, sir. In my estimation, that’s about as long as it would have taken to smuggle in and assemble the pieces of the weapon.”
“Could a simple uplift have done this?”
“Not without help, sir. You’ve always been very kind to them, employing them in positions of responsibility where others would rather treat them as subhuman slaves. But the fact remains that uplifts don’t generally exhibit a high degree of forward planning and resourcefulness. This took both, sir. I’m inclined to the view that Vratsa was just as much a puppet as that body you’re wearing.”
“Why the bullet, though? As I said, Vratsa and I have spoken on many occasions. He could have hurt me easily enough then, just with his bare hands.”
“I don’t know, sir. There is something else, though.” I looked around the walls of the room, with its panelled friezes depicting an ancient, weatherworn landscape—some nameless, double-mooned planet half way across the galaxy. “It’s delicate, sir—or at least it might be delicate. I think we need to talk about it face to face.”
“This room is already one of the most secure places in the entire Radiant Commonwealth,” he reminded me.
“Nonetheless.”
“Very well, Mercurio.” The old man sighed gently. “But you know how uncomfortable I find these encounters.”
“I assure you I’ll be as brief as possible.”
Above me the ceiling separated into four equal sections. The sections slid back into the walls, a cross-shaped gap opening between them to reveal an enormous overhead space—a brightly lit enclosure as large as any in the Great House. Floa
ting in the space, pinned into place by gravity neutralisers, was a trembling sphere of oxygenated water, more than a hundred meters across. I began to ascend, pushed upwards on a section of flooring immediately beneath me, a square tile that became a rising pillar. Immune to vertigo—and incapable of suffering lasting damage even if I’d fallen to the floor—I remained calm, save for the thousand questions circling in my mind.
At one hundred and thirty meters, my head pushed through the surface tension of the sphere. A man would have started drowning, but immersion in water posed no difficulties for me. In fact, there were very few environments in the galaxy that I couldn’t tolerate, at least temporarily.
My lenses adjusted to the differing optical properties of the medium, until I seemed to be looking through something only slightly less sharp than clear air. The emperor was floating, as weightless as the water surrounding him. He looked something like a whale, except that he had no flippers or flukes.
I remembered—dimly, for it had been a long time ago—when he was still more or less humanoid. That was in the early days of the Radiant Commonwealth, when it only encompassed a few hundred systems. He had grown with it, swelling as each new territory—be it a planet, system or entire glittering stare cluster—was swallowed into his realm. It wasn’t enough for him to have an abstract understanding of the true extent of his power. He needed to feel it on a purely sensory level, as a flood of inputs reaching directly into his brain. Countless modifications later, his mind was now the size of a small house. The mazelike folds of that dome bulged against drum-tight skin, as if about to rip through thin canvas. Veins and arteries the size of plumbing ducts wrapped the cerebellum. It was a long time since that brain had been protected by a cage of bone.
The emperor was monstrous, but he wasn’t a monster—not now. There might once have been a time when his expansionist ambitions were driven by something close to lust, but that was tens of thousands of years ago. Now that he controlled almost the entire colonised galaxy, he sought only to become the figurehead of a benevolent, just government. The emperor was famed for his clemency and forgiveness. He himself had pushed for the extension of democratic principles into many of the empire’s more backward prefectures.
He was a good and just man, and I was happy to serve him.
“So tell me, Mercurio, whatever it is that is too secret even for one of my puppets.”
The rising pillar had positioned me next to one of his dark eyes. They were like currants jammed into doughy flesh.
“It’s the bullet, sir.”
“What about it?”
I held the reconstructed item up for inspection, confident now that we were outside the reach of listening devices. It was a metal cylinder with a transparent cone at the front.
“There are, or were, markings on the bullet casing. They’re in one of the older trading languages of the Luquan Emergence. The inscription, in so far as it can be translated into Prime, reads as follows: Am I my brother’s keeper?”
He reflected on this for a moment. “It’s not ringing any bells.”
“I’d be surprised if it did, sir. The inscription appears to be a quote from an ancient religious text. As to its greater significance, I can’t say.”
“The Luquans haven’t traditionally been a problem. We give them a certain amount of autonomy; they pay their taxes and agree to our trifling requests that they instigate democratic rule and cut down on the number of executions. They may not like that, but there are a dozen other special administrative volumes that we treat in exactly the same fashion. Why would the Emergence take against me now?”
“It doesn’t end there, sir. The bullet had a hollow cavity at the front, inside the glass cone. There was enough space in there for the insertion of any number of harmful agents, up to and including an antimatter device that could easily have destroyed all or part of the Great House. Whoever made this, whoever programmed it to reach this far, could easily have gone the extra step necessary to have you killed, not just your puppet.”
The ancient dark eye regarded me. Though it hardly moved in the socket, I still had the sense of penetrating focus and attention.
“You think someone was trying to tell me something? That they can murder me, but chose not to?”
“I don’t know. Certainly, the provisions I’ve now put in place would prevent anyone making a second attempt in this manner. But they’d have known that as well. So why go to all this trouble?” I paused before continuing. “There is something else, I’m afraid.”
“Go ahead.”
“Although the bullet was hollow, it wasn’t totally empty. There was something inside the glass part—a few specks of reddish sand or dust. The surgeons extracted most of it from the puppet, and they’ve promised me that the few remaining traces that entered the koi ponds won’t cause any ill effects. I’ve had the dust analysed and it’s absolutely harmless. Iron oxide, silicon and sulphur, for the most part. Frankly, I don’t know what to make of it. It resembles something you’d find on the surface of an arid terrestrial planet, something with a thin atmosphere and not much weather or biology. The problem is there are ten million worlds that fit that description.”
“And within the Emergence?”
“Fewer, but still far too many to speak of.” I withdrew the replica bullet from his examination. “Nonetheless, these are our only clues. With your permission, I’d like to leave the Capital Nexus to pursue the matter further.”
He ruminated on this for a few seconds. “You propose a mission to the Emergence?”
“I really don’t see any alternative. There’s only so much I can do from my office. It’s better if I go walkabout.” The phrase, which had popped unbidden into my mind, caused me disquiet. Where had it come from? “What I mean, sir, is that I can be much more effective in person.”
“I appreciate that. But I also appreciate that you’re incredibly valuable to me—not just as a friend, but as my closest and most trusted advisor. I’ve become very used to knowing you’re close at hand, in the walls of the Great House. It’s one of the things that helps me sleep at night, knowing you’re not far away.”
“I’ll only ever be a few skipspace transits from home, sir.”
“You have my agreement, of course—as if I was ever going to say no. But do look after yourself, Mercurio. I’d hate to think how I’d manage without you.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.” I paused. “There is one other thing I need to ask you, sir. The uplift, Vratsa?”
“What about him?”
“We subjected him to mild interrogation. He gave us nothing, but I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t point out that we could employ other methods, just to be certain he isn’t keeping anything from us.”
“What’s your honest judgement?”
“I think he’s completely innocent, sir—he was just following a script someone programmed into him thirty-five or more years ago. He no more knows why he did this—and who’s behind it—than the bullet did. But if you feel something might be gained…”
“Have him tortured, on the very slight chance he might tell us something?” It was clear from his tone of voice what he felt about that.
“I didn’t think you’d approve, sir. As far as I’m concerned, it would achieve about as much as smacking a puppy for something it did the day before yesterday.”
“I’ve spent much of the last thousand years trying to enforce humanitarian principles on the more barbarous corners of my own empire. The very least I can do is live up to my own high moral standards, wouldn’t you say?” It was a rhetorical question, since he allowed me no time to answer. “Take Vratsa and remove him from the Great House—he’s a continuing security risk, even if he doesn’t know why he did what he did. But I don’t want him locked away or punished. Find some work for him in the outlying gardens. Give him some fish to look after. And if anyone harms a hair on his head…”
“They won’t, sir. Not while I’m in charge.”
“That’s very good, Mercur
io. I’m glad we see things similarly.”
I LEFT THE Great House a day later, once I was satisfied that I had put in place all necessary measures for the emperor’s continued security in my absence. From the moon-girdled heart of the Capital Nexus, through skipspace via the Coronal Polities to the fuzzy perimeter of the Luquan Emergence—sixty thousand light years in only a handful of days. As I changed from ship to ship, I attracted an unavoidable degree of attention. Since I would require Great House authority to make my investigations in the Emergence, there was no possibility of moving incognito. I travelled in full imperial regalia, and made sure the seriousness of my mission was understood.
How much more attention would I have merited, if they had realised what I really was?
I looked like a man, but in fact I was a robot. My meat exterior was only a few centimetres thick. Beneath that living shell lay the hard armour of a sentient machine.
The emperor knew—of course—and so did a handful of his closest officials. But to most casual observers, and even people who had spent much time in the Great House, I was just another human security expert, albeit one with an uncommonly close relationship with the emperor. The fact that I had been in his service for tens of thousands of years was one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Radiant Commonwealth.
I was rare. Robots were commonplace, but I was something more than that. I was a true thinking machine. There were reckoned to be less than a million of us in existence—not many, considering the billion worlds of the Radiant Commonwealth, and all the teeming souls on those planets and moons.
There were two schools of thought concerning our origin. In the thirty-two thousand years of its existence, the empire had been through a number of historical convulsions. One school—the alchemicals—had it that the means to manufacture us—some critical expertise in cybernetics and programming—had been discovered and then lost at an earlier time. All remaining sentient machines therefore dated from this period.
Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds Page 27