The Killing of Worlds (38 page)

An act of treason.

“No,” Trevim said.

“The dead are dying, Adept. Since the beginning.”

The pain screamed through her again. And worse than the physical agony was the feeling of the Other pulling away, shying from her body’s convulsions. Her heart shuddered, almost failing in her chest.

“You’re killing me, Zai.”

“Die, then,” the man said.

He went on, calmly detailing what the Rix had revealed to him.

Adept Trevim fought to control herself, to withstand the pain, to resist the pleas of the Other to return things to calm. Once, she saw her hand reach out, about to make the gestural sign that would give Zai what he wanted. But she managed to hold herself back. Then his words continued, and the wrenching punishment of the war inside her resumed.

Before her will could crumble, Trevim’s half-rebuilt heart stuttered, striking once like a hammer blow in her chest before failing, and the Other abandoned her to oblivion.

For a moment, the adept thought she’d won. Her mind began to fade. But horribly, the victory of death calmed her, and the Other returned, working its relentless miracle to begin repairs again. Trevim knew even as consciousness slipped away that she would reanimate to face these tortures again and again. The symbiant was too powerful, too indomitable and perfect, and her centuries-long conditioning was equally immovable. As she died, Trevim realized that her will, caught between these two indomitable forces, would eventually be destroyed.

Sooner or later, she would relent to Zai.

Rarely had she seen the Senate so full.

Many planets, Vasthold among them, had only a single senator in the Forum. Winner-take-all, it was called. But the majority of the Eighty Worlds sent delegations, proportional representations of their constituencies. The voting strength of each world was weighted according to its taxed economic output, and senators from planets with many representatives subdivided their world’s votes. The system had been carefully honed to achieve balance over the centuries, but it made for complex vote tabulation. It also led to a crowded Great Hall on those rare occasions when every senator was present.

They were all here now, to try Nara Oxham for treason.

The Great Forum was a huge, pyramidal hole cut into the granite foundation that underlay the capital. Plaster poured into the empty space would have cast a flat-topped pyramid with steps up its four sides. Each of the major parties claimed one of the triangular staircases, with their leadership clustered at the point down close to the center, and their rank and file arrayed across the wider rows farther up.

The President of the Senate was seated on the Low Dais, a circular riser of marble in the center of the Great Forum’s pit. Senator Oxham had seen the old man. Puram Drexler of Fatawa, seated on the ceremonial dais only once before, when he had given her the oath of office. It was strange to think that in a few days, she might be stripped of that office and condemned to death after the votes were counted aloud by the same man.

The Great Forum was lit today with a sharp, unreal light that left no shadows against the gray granite floor. That was for the newseyes, which lined the high lip of the Forum. Senator Oxham allowed herself a moment of second sight, checking the viewership. On Home, the numbers were staggering: Eighty percent of the populace was watching. Even in the antipodal cities, spread from midnight to the early morning hours, a majority were tuned in. Niles had told her that a low-grade translight feed was headed out live through the Imperial entanglement repeater network, and a high-grade recording of this trial would eventually reach every world in the Eighty. The Emperor had never turned Laurent Zai into the martyr he’d wanted, but at least now he had a villain for his war.

The Apparatus had done everything possible to inflate viewership of the Oxham trial. Evidently, they were not afraid of her words.

She would be allowed to speak in her own defense. Senate President Puram Drexler had insisted on the fullest possible interpretation of the tradition of senatorial privilege, turning back the arguments from his own party about the security of the Realm. But even privilege didn’t stand up to the hundred-year rule, so a compromise had been forged. Puram held a cut-off switch, in case Oxham mentioned the Emperor’s genocide. The shock collar around her throat reminded Nara to watch her words.

Drexler looked a bit pale, there on the Dais. The Apparatus must have briefed him about the nuclear attack the Emperor had proposed, so that Drexler would know when to censor her. Oxham was sure that he had taken deep umbrage at this breach of the Compact, but however much the Emperor’s plans had shaken him, Drexler’s politics were as gray as the stone of the Great Forum. He would silence her if she hinted at the forbidden subject. Oxham realized ruefully that the pink political parties hadn’t contested Drexler’s position in decades, considering the presidency to be nothing more than a figurehead. But now the man held her life in his hand.

Roger Niles had shaken his head when these terms had been explained in the second week of preparation for the trial.

“We’re finished,” he’d said. “If you can’t tell them about Legis, it’s pointless. Give up and beg for mercy.”

“Don’t worry, Niles,” she had answered. “I’ve got other secrets to tell.” Her counselor had raised his eyebrows at this, but she dared not say more.

The Emperor didn’t know about the latest transmission she had received from Laurent, hidden alongside a political report from one Adept Harper Trevim. A Rix prisoner had revealed what the compound mind had learned on Legis: the truth behind the hostage rescue, the symbiant, the Empire itself. The Emperor’s Secret was hers.

It didn’t matter that Nara Oxham couldn’t speak of genocide. She had a better story now. The Apparatus had locked the wrong door.

Senator Drexler opened the trial. He wrapped his withered right hand around the staff of his office, and struck its metal tip against the floor. The sound was amplified, and echoes skittered around the hard stone of the Forum.

“Order,” he said. His voice rasped like gravel.

The Great Forum became silent.

“We are here in a matter of blood. A matter of treason.”

Nara had left a newsfeed translucent in her second sight, and her own face zoomed up to fill her vision, some distant camera searching for her reaction. She had the disembodied feel of seeing herself in a synesthesia mirror. She blinked the feed away, and reminded herself to stay in the real world. Even her prepared speech was memorized; she wanted no text prompts cluttering her primary sight.

Nara needed to watch the faces of the Senate, rather than worry about how this was playing in the feeds. If she couldn’t win her fellow solons over, the impressions of the popular audience could hardly save her.

“Who is the accuser?” Drexler said.

A dead woman rose from the Loyalist benches. A prelate. The Senate had given her special permission to cross the Pale, the first representative of the Apparatus ever to do so.

“The Emperor Himself,” she said. “With me as His agent.”

“And who is the accused?”

“His Majesty’s Representative from Vasthold, Senator Nara Oxham.” The dead woman pointed as she said the words.

Nara’s felt a surge of emotion in the room, and her fingers went to her apathy bracelet automatically. But she forced her hands to her side again. She had already precisely adjusted her empathy. The capital hovered over her, a volatile presence focused on every word spoken here, but its emotions were in check. After weeks of furious calls for immediate revenge, the solemn ritual of a trial had focused the mob into a respectful audience. The people of the capital had long been trained to revere tradition.

The Senate’s guard-at-arms strode up to Senator Oxham now. The young man was the only person allowed to carry weapons in the Forum. This was another position Nara has always thought honorary, but which had become suddenly very real.

The man took her arm.

“This one?” the guard asked the prelate.

“Yes.”

The guard-at-arms released her, but stayed close, as if Nara might try to run.

“Who will speak in defense of the accused?” Drexler asked, his eyes sweeping the whole of the Senate, daring them to stand against the Emperor.

“I will speak for myself,” Nara said. Her own words seemed disembodied, a result of both amplification and the incredible situation. It was hard for Oxham to believe that was she speaking to hundreds of billions, and to history, and that her own life depended on her words.

“Then let this Honorable Senate begin to hear the accusation,” Drexler said, and sat on his chair of stone.

The dead prelate rose again, and walked to the fore of the Dais.

“President, Senators, citizens,” she began. “The Emperor has been betrayed.”

The trial had begun.

The prelate went on, as sonorous and repetitive as prayer. The ritual phrases rolled over Nara. all the words of blood oaths and bloody payment for broken promises. The war against death, and of the Emperor’s great gift of immortality, all made its suffocating way into the prelate’s narrative. Every iota of childhood conditioning was triggered, until even Senator Nara Oxham found herself appalled at what she had done. How dare she break faith with the man who had bested the Old Enemy death?

She steeled herself. Let them play all their cards now. Let them invoke every ancient superstition. The Emperor would fall all the harder when his secret was revealed.

“This woman was called to give the Emperor counsel in time of war.”

Finally, the real charges.

“And having taken an oath of secrecy,” the prelate continued, “she betrayed the Emperor’s War Council. She broke the duly invoked hundred-year rule. Nara Oxham turned traitor.”

The proof came next. The Great Forum darkened, and the airscreen above the Low Dais came alive. Puram Drexler would have had to crane his ancient neck to see, so instead he stared out at the audience like an alert teacher whose class was watching a synesthesia lesson.

The Senate listened in solemn silence, although these facts and images had been broadcast throughout the Empire for the last two weeks. In the newsfeeds, of course, each piece of evidence had been reduced by repetition to a single signifier: an image of her and Zai at the party, a few words of warning in her voice, a long shot of the palace’s east wing where the War Council met. But here in the Senate, the scale was stretched in the opposite direction. Time slowed to a crawl. Each mark the Oxham/Zai affair had left on the public record now consumed long minutes of explanation. Their first conversation was studied frame by frame like a crime caught fleetingly on a security camera; ten years of short missives were read aloud in the dead prelate’s dolorous cadence; quietly made plans were revealed with dramatic flourishes, as if their love had been a conspiracy from the start.

The last few messages between Oxham and the
Lynx
were read out, having been stripped of privilege by an overwhelming Senate vote a few days ago. Her single-word message, Don’t, was associated with Zai’s refusal of the blade of error. It was all edited in the name of security, and slanted to make her the aggressor in the relationship. Nara was glad that they weren’t going after Laurent. Over the last two weeks, the Apparatus had walked a fine line with the hero Zai. His propaganda image had been weakened, but not destroyed—he was now a once-strong Imperial warrior weakened by the influence of a scheming woman.

Thankfully, Laurent’s final message to her was absent from the evidence. Zai’s subterfuge had worked. They still didn’t know that Nara Oxham had the Emperor’s real secret in hand.

The litany went on, slipping into irrelevancies toward the end. Oxham’s antiwar bill, the one withdrawn before she’d taken a seat on the council, was revealed. Her old votes in the Senate were isolated and given new significance; the accuser even found sinister components in acts that had passed the legislature unanimously.

And this was simply the opening statement. This slow crawl was the merest outline. The Emperor’s accuser apparently planned to present an insuperable mountain of detail over the days ahead. The two hundred minutes of the accusation, half the first day of trial, seemed like years.

Finally, Nara Oxham was called to make her own opening statement.

The Senate President held up his cut-off switch and warned her before she began.

“The secrets of the Realm are sacred, Senator Oxham. Do not attempt to reveal them here in the Great Forum.”

“I won’t, President Drexler.” Of course, the old solon had only been briefed about the Emperor’s planned genocide, the issue covered by the hundred-year rule. If Laurent was right, the real secret, the one His Majesty had been willing to murder those millions to protect, was unknown to any person, living or dead, outside the conditioned drones of the Apparatus.

According to the Rix mind’s story, even the Apparatus could not to speak of that secret. It brought them pain to hear it mentioned.

She hoped that part of the tale was true.

Nara finally understood why the Empire was built on fear and bribes, on intimidation and loyalty conditioning, on the superstitious babble of some pretechnology mystery cult.

It was all because the Empire was built on a lie.

She turned to the Senate, prepared to undo it all.

For a moment Nara couldn’t speak. The weight of the Empire’s attention was too suffocating. She feared for a moment that she herself might be conditioned, bound from uttering the words by some deeply buried imperative. But she breathed deeply, lightly touched her bracelet for luck, and let the fear pass. Her anxiety was simply anticipation of how this speech would feel empathetically; she was about to take a wild and dangerous ride on the nervous animal that was the Empire.

“President, Senate, citizens,” she said. “The dead are dying.”

A small cry escaped from the prelate’s lips, but there was no other sound in the Great Forum. Drexler hadn’t cut her off, she noted with a final touch of relief. Laurent was right: Even the oldest Loyalists didn’t know.