10
THE DIPLOMATIC compound was secure. Pasus could not strike down Tyrus while he was here, nor vice versa. The building itself defused all projectile weapons within its walls.
The negotiation chamber had no surveillance; it was shielded from any electronic eavesdropping equipment. I’d even ventured just outside the room to press my ear to the door, hoping my superhuman hearing would make out some words.
The walls, alas, were soundproof.
So I was left in an agony of suspense, waiting for Tyrus to emerge from his meeting with Pasus. My gaze darted toward every stray sound, and I could not keep still.
I was just trying to eavesdrop again when I heard something. . . . A faint thump, then a reverberating echo above me. My mind instantly sharpened. I was in the atrium outside the meeting chamber, so the sound was suspicious. I trained my gaze on the ceiling, heard it again, and I knew it: someone was in the ceiling.
I waited for the next thump—and then I jumped up and drove my fist through the ceiling. A shout, and I’d clamped my hand upon someone’s leg, my full weight hanging from it. “Who are you?” I bellowed up at its owner.
“Stop! Nemesis, it’s me!”
Neveni.
I released my grip and dropped to the floor.
Then a panel in the ceiling tilted down on a hinge, and Neveni peeked her head out, dark hair dangling down about her. “What do you want?”
“What are you doing?” My voice was quiet, deadly.
“I am going to listen to them while they decide the fate of my planet,” Neveni said, her eyes glittering. “Are you going to punch me like last time, or are you going to let me go?”
I tilted my head, considering it. “I barely punched you, Neveni. If I had truly punched you, you would have died from the head impact. I’ve also refrained from killing you a great many times when it would have been very convenient for me to do so,” I told her.
“That’s so humanitarian of you. I suppose I owe you thanks for sparing my life.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I was sarcastic, Nemesis! God. No one should thank people for not murdering them.”
I pointed upward. “You’ll take me, too?”
“If you’ll stay quiet,” she said.
I nodded.
“I have no idea how you can even get up here. I climbed up a bookshelf—”
“I don’t need help.” I leaped up and caught the edge of the vent. Then I easily hoisted myself up into the vent with her. Neveni’s eyes were wide and dark on mine as I reached down to pull the door closed behind us.
“You’re so strong,” she said.
A rush of pride, despite myself. “I know. Now lead the way.” My voice reverberated in the darkness.
A flick, and a faint light glowed between us. She had something on her wrist to illuminate the darkness. “Stay quiet.”
Then she crawled forward on her hands and knees. I was too tall to do the same, so I eased myself after her flat on my stomach, dragging myself with my elbows. Neveni mouthed something to herself as we reached a junction in the wall, then raised her wrist to illuminate her face so I’d see her finger pressed to her lips. She quietly eased up a panel of the duct between us, just a crack, to allow voices to float up to our ears.
“. . . ask a great deal of me.” Pasus sounded amused. “I may wed your cousin, but I may not have intercourse with her. I must not only accept as family the beast that killed my daughter, but I must throw my full-throated support behind the match and urge the vicars to authorize you to use the scepter. Then, this province. You want it as well.”
“Does it seem a great deal to ask, Senator? I am giving you my consent to wed the heir to the throne. Your child will rule this galaxy. I could have demanded more. Randevald made any wedding to him conditional on paying down the Domitrian debts—”
“Yes, and so he remained unwed. His Forenight disasters did not help, either.”
“I don’t set such an onerous condition. With my cousin, she cannot consent in her state of mind. You wish to father an heir with her DNA? Use an incubator. And Nemesis is a given. You knew that coming into this.”
“How decisively you make your will known! Such a contrast to a year ago, when you were speaking to walls and raving about being a deity.”
“I was keeping myself alive a year ago, Senator. As for your support, your weight behind the vicars . . . That is the reason I’ve even considered this union.”
“Truly? And here I believed it was my bypassing you and petitioning the Senate that forced your hand.”
Pasus had a point there, and I hated knowing that. . . . But Tyrus’s voice evinced no sign of defeat: “Believe that if you wish, Senator. Whatever you may perceive of my current position, I can make life immensely difficult for you. The marriage will not happen unless I allow it, and I can swear that to you right now.” There was quiet vehemence in Tyrus’s voice.
That, too, was the truth. A private satisfaction rippled through me. The Vigilant’s Bane meant Pasus would never have Devineé without our consent.
Maybe Pasus sensed Tyrus’s certainty, because he forged on. “And you demand Lumina.”
“This province is beset with malignant space. Soon it will be worthless as a trading outpost. I cannot be seen to accept the disrespect of being accorded nothing, so I ask for this piece of your depreciating property. It’s a symbolic gesture.”
Neveni drew a sharp, angry breath, and I just pinned her with my eyes. He is playing indifferent, I thought to her, willing her to understand. It wasn’t his true regard for Lumina.
“Lumina will not be lost anytime soon,” Pasus said. “You overstate the threat.”
“I am compelled to remind you that mere months ago,” Tyrus said, “this planet would have violently freed itself of your dominion if I hadn’t intervened.”
“But you did intervene. You did so most effectively. Curiously effectively.” An odd note in Pasus’s voice, “And then—then they aided you at the coronation.” A sharp, indrawn breath—and then laughter. “Ah. I comprehend you. You cut a deal. Didn’t you?”
“I did not,” Tyrus said, and it was a weak rejoinder. He hadn’t expected Pasus to figure that out.
“You made a deal and now you mean to fulfill your end of it. My. That rather elevates Lumina’s worth in this situation, does it not?”
Neveni’s hands balled into fists, and she was glaring down toward the sound of their voices like she wished to rip the vent apart and crush Pasus’s skull.
Tyrus gave it a moment’s thought. Then, “I will offer you Gorgon’s Arm for Lumina.”
A murmur from Pasus that must have escaped without his intending it. Gorgon’s Arm was a most valuable mineral outpost.
But his voice grew sly: “What was the deal? Actually, no, let me guess. There is only one thing the Luminars ask for. Independence. You promised them liberty, didn’t you? Oh, don’t deny it, I know this planet; it crawls with partisans and delusions of self-sufficiency. Of course you made that deal! Oh, dear young Tyrus . . .”
“We are not on such informal terms, Senator,” Tyrus reminded him coldly.
“Very well—Your Supreme Reverence. Think ahead to the dangerous precedent you’d be setting by freeing this planet. Liberate one, and all the other Excess get dangerous ideas. More will want to leave the Empire. The ones of value who support the ones without will rip away first, and soon you are presiding over a worthless six-star system with no inherent worth of its own.”
I looked up at Neveni’s hard face. Yes, the Luminars knew that.
“You’re seeing this from the wrong angle, Senator,” Tyrus said, his voice softening, growing persuasive. “There is another solution entirely to such a situation: we ensure living conditions are such that these Excess wish to remain in a voluntary union! Surely that is preferable to an Empire bound by force.”
A long silence. Then, “You are very young and idealistic.”
“I strive for more. I wish to improve life for us all. Shouldn’t everyone wish for that?”
“Look about us, Your Supremacy. This capital city alone has more people than the entirety of the Grandiloquy. There are four billion people on this planet. Four billion! If a fraction of those minds are inclined toward study, and a fraction still of those understand what they are looking at that, it’s still a staggering degree of intellect all bent toward one purpose: making use of the blasphemies you so blithely handed over to them today.”
“Technology schematics are not necessarily blasphemies. I’ve been studying the Interdict’s original proclamation at length, and there is a very good case to be argued that we’re interpreting his words too literally. If the Luminars have such intellectual might at their command, shouldn’t we be relieved to have those minds working to solve the issue of malignant space?”
“I did hear your Convocation speech on that, and the . . . the new era you spoke of. Scientific pursuits. Hmm. Your blasphemies are on your soul alone, so I will not play vicar with you.”
“Much appreciated,” said Tyrus darkly.
“Instead I will speak to you as a Senator to my Emperor: this Empire is maintained by a very precarious balance between the Grandiloquy who rule, and the Excess who are ruled by us. We have a vast array of destructive technologies, yet these devices are in the hands of our small number of people—and that is why the rulers and ruled live in accord. Today you give the Excess databases, and I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume they are harmless things. That is all well and good, but tomorrow? Tomorrow they will want weapons. Starships. And if you do not provide them, they will build upon the knowledge you have given them and develop weapons themselves. Then they will use them. On us.”
“Which brings me right back to living conditions! Senator, they will develop those weapons because that’s what human beings do when they see so much in the hands of others, and they feel they are being robbed of it. We live in a universe with literally infinite frontiers. There is no reason for anyone in this Empire to know scarcity. Remove the reason for them to turn those weapons on us, and it will not happen.”
Pasus laughed. An inappropriate bout of true laughter that made me wish to drop down into the chamber and punch him. But he said, almost jeeringly, “And here I was marveling at your cleverness, yet now I am reminded that I am dealing with a mere child. They will turn those weapons upon us because they hate us, and they always have. Their descendants will hate our descendants, as their ancestors hated our ancestors, because even if we sink so far below them that we are being crushed by their feet, they will remember how we were once superior. What you propose, Tyrus, will lead to our sort, we Grandiloquy—and bastard of an Excess you may be, but Grandiloquy you are—being crushed by them. All in the name of tackling an existential threat that is only ‘existential’ to planet dwellers who cannot fly around it.”
Strange, how Pasus gave no thought to those planet dwellers. He had no pity for those who, as Tyrus had described to me, would be trapped under a sky watching their doom grow and grow.
“There is no reasoning with you on this,” Tyrus said, his tone odd. “Our views will never come to accord.”
“Ah, do not be so quick to jump to conclusions. Perhaps a break is in order. Tyrus, I must admit, I’m impressed with you. Not just these . . . dreams and ideals you somehow held in your heart in secret, but how effectively you blinded all our eyes to you. Had fate taken a different turn, your children with my Elantra might have conquered this universe.”
“For whatever it’s worth,” Tyrus said softly, “I am sorry for your loss.”
“From the man who wed her murderer,” Pasus returned, “it is not worth much, but I thank you anyway.”