The Thousand Emperors

EPILOGUE

He sat on a bench and watched an entire world die.

First, the atmosphere rippled outwards from a central point, as if an object the size of a moon had struck it. A haze spread up and out from that same central point like dark smoke, spiralling upwards with sufficient velocity to escape the gravitational tug of the planet itself.

Seen from a distance of some tens of thousands of kilometres, it made for a startlingly beautiful sight, until he remembered that hurricanes of a ferocity unseen since the planet’s formation were tearing the soil from its bedrock, and sending vast, towering tsunami sweeping across its continents, scouring it clean of any evidence that men had ever been there.

He kept watching, as the crust was stripped away from the hot molten core. By now, much of Vanaheim had been reduced to a smear of dust and gravel spread along the path of its orbit.

The laws of physics, briefly interrupted by the activation of the quantum disruptor, began reasserting themselves. He saw trillion-ton chunks of debris collide with each other, obscured by that same dense haze, still spreading out into a circle around the nearby sun.

I made this happen.

No matter how many times Luc said it to himself, he couldn’t quite take it in. Perhaps he never would.

Finally, he dismissed the recording. No matter how often he watched it, it always had the same effect, like being punched in the gut at the same time as having his head submerged in a bucket of ice-water.

He looked around the communal lounge, one wall of which displayed an entirely different view – that of a supermassive black hole orbited by blue-shifted stars, caught in slowly decaying orbits that would eventually send them spiralling to their doom. The lounge itself was vast, filled with dozens of couches and tables, all of them currently unoccupied. He was quite alone, but not, he knew, for very much longer.

He passed the time in silent contemplation, unsure of what he would say or do when his visitors finally arrived.

When he grew bored enough, he ran the recording a second time.

He stiffened on hearing a door open at the far end of the lounge, somewhere behind him. Footsteps echoed as they crossed the floor, growing closer. He felt a tightness in his chest, suddenly afraid to turn around.

‘A magnificent sight, is it not?’ asked Antonov, coming to stand by him and nodding towards the footage. ‘Zelia would have had much to say about this, I think.’

Luc looked up at him. Antonov’s lips were curled in a wistful smile, only half-visible through his bushy black beard.

Horst Sachs stood just behind and to one side of Antonov, shorn of his mirror mask, and dressed in colourful robes entirely unlike those he had worn in the course of his duties as Coalition Ambassador.

‘Zelia once told me that she wanted to journey across the galaxy,’ Luc managed to say.

‘She once told me the same thing too,’ said Antonov, nodding, regarding Luc with a merry smile. ‘And here we are, enjoying those same sights for her. A touch of irony that it should be us two dead men, rather than her.’

The lounge they occupied was not real, of course – or not real in the way Luc had understood such things by the measure of his former existence. The starship whose lounge they occupied, here so very close to the heart of the Milky Way, was in reality barely any larger than a dandelion seed. The lounge had only a virtual existence. And yet Luc’s subjective experience of the vessel was of a vast and luxurious liner, measuring perhaps fifty kilometres from bow to stern.

There were thousands of other passengers, in an astonishing variety of forms. And yet, by a simple trick of focus, Luc could make them effectively disappear from his sight, giving him the illusion of solitude. They were still there, of course – or as there as he, Antonov or indeed the lounge were – and every one of them shared the same ability. They could all, if they so chose, occupy precisely the same spot without ever being aware of one another’s presence.

Winchell Antonov looked much the same as Luc remembered him from the deep tunnels beneath Aeschere. Luc understood that this was now really a kind of affectation, since both he and Antonov were in a position to choose any form they desired. But, given their proximity to their former lives, they had each made the same, unspoken decision to maintain outward forms that closely matched those they had been born with.

Perhaps, give or take a few thousand years of subjective lifetime, they might come to see things differently. But not yet.

‘So our friends in the Coalition put you back together again,’ said Luc.

‘That, and more,’ Antonov agreed.

‘But how?’ asked Luc. ‘There was only a fragment of you inside me. Nothing more.’

‘I must apologize,’ said the Ambassador from beside Antonov. ‘That brief moment of physical contact between you and I aboard the Sequoia was all that was necessary to allow me to make a complete copy not only of your mind-state, stored within your lattice, but also of Antonov’s. Under the circumstances, there was no time to explain as much as I wanted to.’

‘You essentially tricked me by getting me to take your hand,’ said Luc. ‘Is that it?’

‘I regret the deception,’ said the Ambassador, a touch disingenuously.

‘Good old Coalition super-science, eh?’ Antonov said brightly.

‘I am sorry for being unable to meet with either of you before now,’ Sachs continued. ‘But I’ve been very busy these past few weeks, negotiating with the interim government on Temur. They’re still fighting renegade Sandoz forces refusing to accept their authority, but they expect to overcome these sooner rather than later.’

‘So are you here, or there?’ asked Luc.

‘Both,’ Sachs responded.

Luc sighed. ‘None of this has been easy for me. It’s . . .’ he waved a hand.

‘Too much to take in, so soon?’ Antonov chuckled. ‘Entirely understandable. But allow me to thank you for saving my life.’

Luc shook his head. ‘I was too busy worrying over my own to worry about yours too much.’

‘Even so, you did what had to be done.’

‘I destroyed a world,’ said Luc.

‘In order to save the rest of the human race, yes,’ agreed Sachs.

‘Cheng had endless opportunities to change things for the better,’ said Antonov. ‘And few of the Council were willing to challenge his rule. They were seduced by the same things that always seduce human beings; power, and privilege. A few amongst them will be missed, but not, I think, so many.’

‘But what about the threat of the Inimicals?’ asked Luc. ‘Nobody’s been able to tell me anything about that.’

‘I have news on that front,’ said Sachs. ‘Coalition forces have successfully wrested control of the Thorne transfer gate from the Sandoz forces guarding it. We will more than likely seal it, hopefully forever.’

‘Destroy it, you mean.’

‘Better that, Mr Gabion, than risk the alternative.’

‘You still haven’t told me how you managed to build a whole new Antonov out of just that fragment I was carrying around in my head.’

‘You are not the only one the Ambassador tricked,’ Antonov explained. ‘He did the same to me on one of our last meetings, taking the opportunity to copy my mind-state to his own lattice and then transmit it all the way to the Coalition. Then they combined my old memories with newer ones, some shared with you, following my placing a lattice inside your skull.’

‘Indeed,’ said the Ambassador. ‘Our lattice technology takes advantage of certain properties of the ultimately granular structure of reality at its most base level. Further, when combined firstly with certain properties of superluminal communications, such as the ability to maintain constant contact between two points regardless of distance, and secondly with a memory substrate that can . . .’

Luc groaned, unable to take it all in.

Antonov chuckled and clapped the Ambassador hard on the shoulder. ‘Yes, all very dry and dull. Much more fun to call Sachs a wizard, and say that he has stolen our spirits away to some magical realm. But what he is trying to describe is the means by which we are able to witness Vanaheim’s destruction.’

‘All right,’ said Luc, ‘you’ve answered pretty much everything I wanted to know, except for one thing – why did you both want to meet me here, on this ship, so very far from home?’

‘As Winchell pointed out, we do have a magnificent view of the Milky Way,’ said Sachs. ‘And besides, it feels appropriate to our purpose in bringing you here.’

‘Appropriate in what way?’

Antonov turned to the Ambassador, punching him lightly on the upper arm. ‘Go on, tell him, Horst.’

Sachs cleared his throat, regarding Antonov with a mixture of amusement and befuddlement. ‘There was, it turns out, some information of genuine value that Father Cheng recovered via the Thorne gate,’ he explained, stepping closer to Luc. ‘Here.’

Sachs opened one hand, to reveal something very like a firefly, glowing with inner radiance, nestled on his palm.

‘What is it?’

‘Please,’ said Sachs. ‘Take it.’

Luc opened his hand, and the firefly hopped from Sach’s open hand and into Luc’s.

Luc closed his fingers, the light of the firefly fading away at the same moment that a torrent of information spilled into his conscious mind. A second later he regarded his two companions with an expression of astonishment.

‘You discovered yet another race in the Milky Way?’ he gasped.

‘So it seems,’ Sachs agreed. ‘Naturally, we intend to be vastly more cautious in meeting with them than we were even throughout our initial encounters with the Inimicals. We have, however, even in the brief period since making contact, experienced a level of communication with them that has proven to be far more than merely satisfying.’

‘And that’s why you’re here?’

‘That’s why we’re here, Luc,’ said Sachs. ‘All three of us.’

‘But – another race? Are you sure that’s wise? I mean, after everything that happened with the Inimicals?’

‘We have learned from our past mistakes,’ Sachs explained, ‘and have learned much about this new species already. Enough to be convinced that they offer no possible threat to us. More than that, each has much to gain from the other.’

‘But . . . why bring me here?’

‘Our reward,’ said Antonov, ‘for services rendered.’

‘Few in history have had the opportunity to observe or indeed engage in a genuine first-contact scenario,’ added Sachs.

‘And that’s where you come in,’ said Antonov, his grin growing wide. ‘You are an information specialist, are you not?’

‘We have been given an opportunity to study this civilization’s history,’ said Sachs. ‘It’s an incredible opportunity, and one we hope to share with the citizens of the Tian Di as our two societies become more fully reintegrated. But you have to tell me first whether you want to be involved.’

Luc gazed again at the sight of the Milky Way, a wreath of stars circling a stormy void.

‘Yes,’ he said.

THE END.