The Killing of Worlds (39 page)

“We were made a promise,” she continued. “We were told that the Old Enemy had been defeated, that in service to the Emperor we could live forever. But the dead are dying. All of them.”

A murmur came from the audience, and Nara felt a snap in her empathy, a sudden disconnect. The rapt attention of the capital city above her had tumbled into confusion.

So soon? she wondered.

A quick check in second sight confirmed that the newsfeeds had gone dark. The Apparatus had cut her off already.

“Are you well?”

The representative of the Plague Axis looked down at his valet/minder. The young initiate had suddenly fallen to the floor, clutching her stomach, a retching noise coming through the speaker of her protective suit. The plagueman knelt and reflexively checked the suit diagnostics across the bottom of her visor.

They read green. He hadn’t infected the young dead woman with anything. And certainly the symbiant would have protected her from any disease for days at least. “Can I—”

“Turn it off!” The initiate flailed at the hardscreen upon which they had been watching the trial.

The request puzzled the plagueman, but he turned to mute the wall-sized image of Nara Oxham. Before he could gesture, however, the embattled senator’s face was replaced by a slowly spinning shield, the emblem of the Apparatus media censors. The feed from the Great Forum had been silenced at the source.

The initiate’s retching noises stopped. She put her hands to her head and groaned the same words several times. “She knows.”

The plagueman wished that he could see the initiate’s face through her biosuit visor. Here in his own sealed quarters, he wore his usual clothes, and visitors donned anti-contamination suits. The reflective visor over the suffering aspirant’s face brought home to him again how dehumanized he must appear when he wore his own suit, how anonymous he was here in the monoculture.

He didn’t need to see the woman’s face, however, to know she wasn’t well, not well at all. That she was one of the risen made her seizure even more alarming.

In synesthesia, he called for the other initiate who shared her minder’s duties. There was no response, not even the polite regrets of a busy or sleeping recipient. Just repeated queries that went unheeded. He made calls to the other palace staff he had dealt with, but none of the Apparatus was answering.

Had they all been stricken? The plagueman knew that disease could spread with incredible rapidity here in the monoculture, one of the many weaknesses of these half-people, but such suddenness and simultaneity seemed more like a biological attack than a contagion.

He blinked and looked at the media censor emblem still on the screen. The image had cut off so suddenly, very unlike the Apparatus’s usual interventions. He had seen them fade out a newsfeed’s audio when necessary, breaking in to interrupt a live interview with a spurious weather emergency or war bulletin. But the Apparatus rarely silenced its opponents so crudely as this. The synesthesia newsfeeds were still down, all of them, and even the gossip channels were blank.

What had Oxham been saying before the initiate had collapsed?

“The dead are dying,” the plagueman repeated softly.

“Don’t!” the young dead woman pleaded, sinking back to the floor. “I can’t stand it.”

The plagueman rose. “I think you need help,” he said. The plagueman quickly put on his biosuit, taking particular care with its fittings in case this was an attack, and gestured for the room to open. The triple-doored airlock began its familiar sequence of hissing noises.

Out in the halls of the Diamond Palace, he immediately encountered another stricken member of the Apparatus, an initiate rising slowly to his feet. The optics in the biosuit visor revealed that his skin was far colder than even a dead man’s should be.

“Do you know what’s happening?” the plagueman asked.

“She has the Secret,” the man said hoarsely, reaching out a shaking hand. “She’s telling.”

A squadron of the House Guard ran past, live soldiers in full battle armor. They looked unaffected by the strange contagion, and ignored both initiate and Axis representative. Apparently, it wasn’t a biological agent, or perhaps the living were immune.

The Axis representative turned to the initiate again, but a chime sounded in his secondary hearing. Perhaps synesthesia was clearing up, he thought with relief. But then he recognized the tone.

The War Council had been summoned.

The plagueman made toward the council chamber, amazed as he shuffled his slow way at the pandemonium that reigned in the usually solemn Diamond Palace. Normal staff seemed physically healthy though panicked, the Apparatus were uniformly paralyzed, and still more soldiers passed in full battle dress. He wondered if the capital had been attacked in some new and strange way, and if there were more assaults yet to come.

In the southern reaches, the house of Senator Nara Oxham became alert.

It had been pleasurable for the house to watch its mistress on the news these last few weeks. She was here at home so little since the war had started. But now her image had been cut off during her speech, quite suddenly, and without explanation.

Fortunately, the mistress had left strict instructions about what to do in this situation. She had even invoked privilege: The house was to use maximum initiative, ignoring regulations, sparing no expense to carry out these orders. The house had been a trifle amused at the mistress’s urgent tone. It had been employing its own initiative for decades now.

First, the house located the special file in its copious memory. It was a tiny thing, only a few thousand bytes of data, stored with the marvelous efficiency of pure text. The house copied this file across its memory, filling every spare nook and cranny with duplicate after duplicate. Over the last century, the house had expanded its mind deep into the mountain on which it stood, to backups in rented space at hundreds of cheap data farms on Home’s twelve continents, and into nanocircuitry spread across the snowy tundra surrounding the vast estate. Enough room for quadrillions of copies of the little file.

The house was pleased with this first phase. Even if Home was subjected to a massive nuclear attack, Imperial civilization reduced to glowing ruins, it would be overwhelmingly likely that some future data archaeologist would run across a copy of the file, somewhere.

But there was more to the owner’s wishes.

The house sent copies of the file—it was the complete text of the speech she had just been giving, the house noticed—to every news-feed professional on the planet, the messages emanating from thousands of fictitious addresses, bombarding the media with the persistence of a huge mailing campaign. Then the house began calling every possible handphone number on Home in numerical order, and reading the speech to whomever answered and would listen.

The mirror fields with which the house warmed its surface gardens were put to use, blinking the file in antique on-off codes to passing aircraft. An old hardline to its original architects was reactivated, and the blueprint plotters in the firm’s offices worldwide began spouting the senator’s speech.

With these processes underway, the house fired its missiles.

The house was quite proud of the modifications it had made to the emergency message rockets. They were to be used in case of communication loss, should a guest require vital medical attention during a storm or com blackout. They were small suborbitals, armed with low-band transmitters, useful for lofting above the weather to shout an
SOS
in a quick burst. The house had increased their range, improving the fuel and adding variable geometry wings that could keep them hopping atop the atmosphere for hours. They blazed into the cold, clear summer sky and headed for the nearest large cities, ready to transmit the speech on the reserved frequencies of weather pagers, burglar alarms, and taxi radios.

The house watched its preparations unfold with humble pleasure. Mistress Oxham should be happy. It had carried out her request with considerable creativity. In a few minutes, the planetary infostructure would be saturated with this tiny document.

With the messaging well underway, the house turned happily to its next project. The snowmelt waterfall that was the principal attraction of the west garden needed reining in.

With the spring thaws, it had become far too noisy.

Nara Oxham gathered her thoughts. She had only the Senate for an audience now. They were lost in confusion, though. Most of them had been tracking the newsfeeds with half their minds, watching instant polls and viewership numbers. Their political reflexes didn’t know how to deal with the sudden absence of media.

“Senators,” she cried, trying to gather their attention again. “Hear me!”

“Silence her!” came a shriek from the accuser. The dead woman leaped to her feet and took a step toward Oxham.

The Forum buzzed in surprise at this display. Few people had ever seen one of the honored dead raise their voice, much less scream in anguish.

“Order!” proclaimed Drexler. He glared at the accuser, aghast that one of the Emperor’s servants would disturb his Senate. “You are within the Pale, Prelate. Take care!”

“These words cannot be spoken!” the prelate cried. “Use the switch!”

Drexler looked at the cutoff in his hand. Nara saw the doubt in him, a sharp discomfort at disobeying the command of an honored dead. But the power of tradition, of senatorial privilege, was greater.

“It is Senator Oxham’s turn to speak,” he ruled. “Silence yourself, Prelate.”

Nara swallowed. Zai had told her that members of the Apparatus would feel pain at the mention of the Secret, but she hadn’t realized how frantic the accuser’s reaction would be. The dead woman’s emotions were suddenly brighter than any in the Forum, a fearful hatred that was animal in its intensity.

Oxham spoke slowly and carefully.

“We were told, Senators, that the symbiant was an immortal coil. We were told that the elevated would live forever. We were lied to.”

“No!” the accuser screamed, and leaped toward Nara.

She had never seen a dead woman move so fast. The accuser crossed the granite floor in a few strides, a flash of metal gleaming in one hand.

Nara never saw the rest, although she watched reconstructions later on the newsfeeds. The prelate came at her, knife upraised, a wild assassin trailing black robes. A meter from dealing Oxham a murderous blow, the prelate crumpled to the floor. Shown at the slowest speed, a small puff of smoke could be seen coming from one hand of the guard-at-arms, who had fired a ball of gel filled with metal pellets, a nonlethal but powerful weapon.

At the actual moment of the attack, all Nara Oxham saw was the black-robed woman falling at her feet, and the knife careening across the floor. The blade struck the bottom of the Low Dais and broke, one piece whirling on the granite floor like a spinner in a children’s game.

Gasps filled the Forum.

“I move for a recess,” the Loyalist Higgs called above the noise.

Oxham realized that this was another attempt to silence her. The prelate’s knife hadn’t killed her, but with a recess the Emperor would have won a few precious hours. She might never have this audience again.

All eyes turned to Drexler.

“Order,” he said, the old voice booming. There was silence in the hall again.

“Let me speak, President,” she pleaded.

“Bind the accuser,” Drexler ordered. “But do not remove her.”

The guard moved efficiently, deploying another riot-police device. A bright orange web moved across the prelate, winding through her limbs like a sentient vine. It curled around wrists and ankles, and around her throat. It took up stations at her mouth and covered her eyes.

“No one will disrupt this trial again,” Drexler said, “even a senator, or I’ll have them bound as well.”

The guard stood and looked across the ranks of senators, almost daring them to make a sound. Nara Oxham wondered for a moment where this young guard came from. The Senate guards-at-arms had always seemed so ceremonial, like toy soldiers. But this man moved like a cat.

Nara looked up at Drexler and was startled by what empathy showed her. There was cold fury in the President’s heart, a deep blue knot of anger that she could see clearly in her empathic sight. After a moment she grasped the source of his indignation. The most ancient Senate tradition had been broken. For the first time in the history of the realm, violence had been attempted in the Great Forum by an agent of the Emperor.

The Rubicon Pale had been crossed.

And Nara Oxham had gained an ally.

“Continue,” the old Loyalist said.

Nara nodded solemnly, trying to ignore the bound and writhing woman at her feet.

“Our beloved Empress was not killed by the Rix. She was already dying, ailing from a slow wasting that stalks every risen person in this empire. Her body was destroyed to conceal the evidence of aging, evidence of the Emperor’s lies.”

A noise came from Loyalist senators at these words, but Drexler silenced them with an icy glare. Nara could also hear the prelate whimpering at her feet, but the Forum’s amplifiers ignored the sound.

The prelate’s pain pricked at Oxham’s empathy, though. Her words were torture to the dead woman, warring against the conditioning that had kept the Emperor’s Secret over the centuries. Nara dialed up her apathy bracelet and continued.

“The risen dead do not live forever. They live less than five hundred subjective years.”

Even numbed, Nara’s empathy felt the burst of confusion among the senators. The Emperor himself was almost seventeen hundred years Absolute.

“This is the true reason for the pilgrimages,” she explained. “The dead travel endlessly across the Empire for one reason only: so that the Time Thief will put off their natural deaths. Immortality is a trick of relativity. Outside the royal family, there are no dead who have been risen more than four hundred subjective years.”

She gave her audience a moment to absorb this information. It was so simple, really. A parlor trick in the age of common near-lightspeed travel. It was little wonder that the compound mind had discovered it so quickly in the Legis infostructure. The Rix had watched Imperial shipping for decades, searching for weaknesses. They had probably begun to suspect long ago that the pilgrimages harbored some deception. According to Laurent, the invading mind on Legis had entered the Child Empress’s body through her medical confidant, and had spotted signs of her aging. The veil of deception had fallen quickly after that. It had all the data on Legis to work with, and the pilgrimage ships’ manifests were recorded in great detail by the Apparatus, the subjective age of every elevated subject carefully watched in order to maintain the ruse.