The Killing of Worlds (40 page)

The risen themselves didn’t know the real purpose of the pilgrimages. They were doled out as a reward of the afterlife, and, as in everything else, the symbiant made the risen complacent followers of tradition. In their timeless lives, the swift passage of centuries seemed natural.

“The Emperor and the Apparatus have long known the symbiant’s true lifespan. When the Apparatus and Court aren’t traveling, they use stasis, just as we members of the Senate do in order to live out our terms. But the Child Empress grew tired of the ruse. She realized that despite the Emperor’s continuing researches, the symbiant’s life would never be extended.”

Oxham let her voice dip at the mention of the lost Empress. She was giving a political speech now, riding the emotions of the Forum. Even the Loyalists were beginning to listen; the Reason had always compelled greater love than her brother.

“She had decided to let herself die, and by her death to reveal the lie on which the Empire had been built. Her body began to show signs of aging, and she required a prosthesis to maintain the appearance of health. There were decades left to her, but the Emperor had already put his agents near her on Legis. He planned to conceal her death eventually. To invent an accident or some other obliterating event when the opportunity arose. The Rix simply created that opportunity.”

She felt a sense of horror rising in the room. The Apparatus had always presented the Child Empress as the soft side of the wrathful Emperor. It was her name put to pardons and crisis relief. She was the Reason, whose illness had spurred the Emperor’s researches. The claim that she had been murdered by her own older brother appalled even the most cynical Secularists.

“Nara Oxham,” the President interrupted gently. “These are grave charges, but what do they have to do with your crime?”

She nodded respectfully, grateful that Drexler had allowed her to speak unquestioned for so long.

“To explain, I must bend the hundred-year rule, President.”

Drexler’s eyes narrowed. He placed the cutoff switch on the dais next to him and said, “Carefully, Senator.”

“Captain Laurent Zai has captured the Legis compound mind, which knew the secret,” she said. “The Emperor realized that Zai would soon learn it as well. Laurent Zai’s life was in danger. I had to warn him, a hero of the realm. That is why I broke the rule.”

“And the Emperor sought to use the rule to silence you?”

“Yes, Senator Drexler.”

The old man nodded, satisfied. She wondered what these revelations were doing to him. Drexler was long since elevated, probably only a few subjective years from death. And now his promised immortality had been revealed as a fraud, his beloved Emperor the murderer of his sister, Anastasia the Reason.

Then another empathic shock interrupted Oxham’s thoughts, a burst of emotion from the city outside the Great Forum.

“Something has happened,” she said softly.

Drexler looked up, his old fingers trembling with the slightest interface gestures.

“Our link to the rest of the capital has been cut,” he announced. “The physical hardlines below the Forum have been destroyed.”

Fearful cries came from the senators.

“Order!” Drexler commanded. “This body is still in session!”

Nara brought her second sight online. The bandwidth of the Forum’s infostructure had been degraded. The images were coming through weak wireless, as if she were on horseback trip in the deep country of Vasthold.

But the snowy newsfeed image was familiar enough. She could make out the Forum complex, a veil of smoke rising from its periphery. The low black shapes of military hovercraft surrounded the building.

“They will not cross the Pale,” Drexler said.

Godspite, Oxham thought. The army was outside. Their tradition of noninterference would be sorely tested now.

What had she started?

A rumble came through her feet. The very granite of the Great Forum was trembling.

“They will not cross the Pale,” the President repeated, quiet desperation in his ancient voice.

“The Empire faces a crisis.” The sovereign addressed the hastily assembled War Council gravely. “We are under a new and diabolical form of attack, and the War Council must deal with it without delay.”

The representative of the Plague Axis reflected silently that this was not the entire War Council. Only eight of nine were present. Three of the senators were here, still looking stunned by their swift passage from the Pale to the Diamond Palace, but Nara Oxham was not. The Senate had officially suspended Oxham from the council pending her expulsion trial, but her absence from the chamber pit had never been more noticeable.

“How have we been attacked, Majesty?” the Loyalist Senator Raz imPar Henders said.

“From the Senate floor itself,” the Emperor said.

“I must protest, sire,” the Utopian senator interjected. “The Senate is in legal session, considering a matter of great importance. The only attack on the Empire is the military’s incursion against senatorial privilege.”

“No military units have crossed the Pale, Senator,” the risen general said.

“Then why is the Great Forum surrounded?” the Expansionist demanded.

“For the protection of the Senate,” the Emperor nearly shouted.

The plagueman had never seen the sovereign so incensed. He seemed unaffected by whatever had crippled his Apparatus, though he had lost his usual boundless reserve of calm. The biosuit’s optics had always revealed the Emperor’s physiology to be more animated than an ordinary risen, but now they showed a heat in his face almost as intense as a living man’s.

“Protection?” the Expansionist sputtered. “The Senate is surrounded, its contact with the rest of the capital cut off. This is nothing but bald intimidation.”

“I assure you, Senator, no military units shall cross the Pale,” the dead general said flatly. “Not without due order by this council.”

“There’ll be civil war if they do,” Ax Milnk said. “And all of us will lose everything.”

The plagueman raised his eyebrows. That much was true. The Empire was perpetually balanced on a knife’s edge between gray and pink, the dead and the living, military and economic power. The military forces stationed on Home were as carefully equilibrated as the rest of the fragile mechanism, with units hailing from pink worlds and gray. Any military move against the Senate would be met with an equal counterforce. A disaster.

“Please, let us calm ourselves,” Henders insisted, obviously flustered at his fellow senators’ abuse of the sovereign. “Sire, what is this attack you speak of?”

The Emperor nodded, visibly working to calm himself. “Of course, we must explain. No doubt events today may have seemed precipitous. But we are sure that once you’ve heard the facts you will understand our actions.”

The pink senators and Milnk responded with stony silence.

The risen general leaned forward, gesturing to bring an image of Nara Oxham onto the central airscreen. The plagueman recognized it from her trial, clipped from the newsfeed of only an hour before.

“Counselors, during the trial of Senator Nara Oxham, we discovered that a neural virus was being transmitted from the Senate floor. The virus used the newsfeed as a carrier wave, instantly affecting a small but vulnerable portion of the capital’s populace. The virus caused nausea, seizures, paralysis. We believe that the effect would have spread to the entire population had the broadcast continued. Fortunately, the Apparatus acted quickly, shutting off the attack at its source.”

The council chamber was silent as those assembled digested the general’s words. The plagueman quietly searched the database within his biosuit. He found references to visual stimuli that could cause seizures, but only to a small percentage of human beings, most often children, and nothing that could be hidden inside a normal news-feed. This was an unprecedented weapon, if the general’s words were true.

“This sounds incredible,” the Utopian said. “Nothing but a pretext for silencing Senator Oxham.” He turned toward the plagueman and Milnk. “We heard more than you did, before we were summoned away. After the newsfeed was cut, Oxham accused the Emperor of murdering his sister. And she claims that the symbiant’s immortality is a lie.”

“Incredible stories seem to abound today,” the Emperor said.

“If Oxham is lying, then why concoct this story to cut her off?” the Expansionist senator countered.

“The palace had nothing to do with the decision,” the Emperor said. “As I said, the media monitors found themselves under attack, in great pain. They acted in self-preservation.”

“That much may be true,” the plagueman said quietly. “Oxham’s words seemed to have effected the Apparatus in particular.”

The Emperor started, then fixed the Axis representative with a glare. It was rare for the representative to speak at all, and the sovereign had counted the Axis as an ally throughout the war, especially since the vote on the Legis genocide.

“That may be,” the dead admiral said. “We don’t understand exactly how the virus works or who is susceptible. But we suspect who is behind it.”

“And that would be?” the Utopian said.

“Oxham, and perhaps some elements of the Secularist Party,” the general said.

“You have proof of this?” Ax Milnk demanded.

“Give us Oxham, and we’ll get the proof,” the Emperor said.

“This is utterly transparent,” the Utopian said flatly.

The plagueman remained silent as the argument raged, biding his time. The members of the War Council would soon lose all civility, but that hardly mattered. The details of whatever Oxham had discovered were, in their way, unimportant as well. This drama would ultimately be played out in other venues. The pressures that had been too long restrained in the Empire would shortly be released, violently and disruptively, that much was obvious. The Axis had seen this coming for a long time. It had failed in its mission to stabilize the Eighty Worlds. The Rix, with their blockade, their wars, had finally won.

But the plagueman was glad that the Emperor’s desperate gamble would allow him one last act of penance here on the council. It was clear that the sovereign would call for a vote, thinking he had five among the eight counselors in his pocket, believing that under cover of the War Council he could move against Oxham, perhaps ultimately against the Senate, and keep the whole unwieldy contraption of the Empire clanking along for a few more decades.

“I shall repay you, Nara Oxham,” the plagueman thought to himself. Not just with this vote to save her, but with all it would bring. As much chaos, progress, and the Old Enemy death as she and her party could ever want.

“God is change,” he muttered to himself.

Laurent Zai looked down upon the object.

At this point in the
Lynx
‘s slow rotation, its dark bulk was beneath his feet, barely discernible through the observation blister’s high-impact plastic. Its shape had grown ever more difficult to make out as the Legis sun receded. Now, the object was merely an absence of stars, a giant lump of coal blackening one quarter of the universe.

The
Lynx
was still studiously avoiding communication with the thing. The frigate’s mass detectors were the only sensors trained on its position; mass was the one aspect of itself the object couldn’t modulate, and thus use to signal the
Lynx
. Zai felt safer this way, cut off from the mind. One of Alexander’s secrets had already brought the Empire to the brink of civil war.

Now, the only means of contact with the mind was through the slender connection it had established with Herd. The Rixwoman spoke for it like some ancient oracle: as expressionless and miraculous as a bleeding statue, an intermediary with the deity.

But Zai knew that this prophylaxis couldn’t be maintained forever. The object was too tenacious and resourceful, too capable of unanticipated configurations. And the
Lynx
was too porous: It was fundamentally a scout ship, designed to gather information in a thousand ways. The object would get in sooner or later, would reach Zai’s crew just as it had reached Herd.

He would have to tell them. The crew knew that Zai had disarmed the politicals on board, so they would eventually have to know about the Emperor’s Secret and the coming civil war. Their native worlds would be thrown into chaos soon. Zai and his lover had lit a match that would consume millions of lives.

Laurent watched Home’s bright star rise slowly on his left, still two subjective years away, and wondered what was going on at the Forum. Nara would have made her speech a few hours ago, threatening sixteen hundred years of stability. The Apparatus’s reaction would be swift and desperate, but Nara Oxham was a Senator, and would not be easily silenced.

Laurent Zai had burned seven percent of the
Lynx
‘s entanglement reserve trying to keep track of the developments, and he knew that the Empire was already shaking. If the signs were to be believed, the Emperor had acted directly against the Senate. Zai hoped that the other messages he had sent, warnings to old colleagues and confidants within the military, would help Nara come through this unharmed. She and the Senate would certainly need allies to survive the next months. But in the long term, Zai believed, victory would be theirs.

The Apparatus would do what it could to forestall the spread of the Secret, but their efforts could only be stopgap. The data on pilgrimages were public; once examined, rumors would turn swiftly into accepted fact. And the Secret revealed would strain even the greatest loyalty. Few religions could withstand the news that heaven was, in fact, a lie. Temporary.

Zai wondered what had led the Emperor down this path. Five hundred extra years of life was hardly a trivial boon. Presumably, the sovereign had simply been mistaken at first, thinking that the symbiant was permanently stable, and a religion had been built on the concept that the Old Enemy had been beaten. When the first signs of the error had been detected, perhaps it had been too late for such a massive revision in scripture.

Well, a revision was coming now.