19
GRAVITY ALTERED TIME. It was something I had not known, and Tyrus had not known. Now we did. At a painful cost.
On the Chrysanthemum, in standard space, there was a regular flow of time everyone else in the Empire was living. The Sacred City, near the black hole, shifted constantly between slower and much slower time differentials. Sometimes a day outside was a month within. Sometimes a year.
And in aiming directly for the black hole, we’d merely traversed into slower and slower time. The Interdict himself could not tell us how long we’d been gone, not without the database at the Sacred City, which could calculate this down to a millisecond. The knowledge left Tyrus standing stock-still in the middle of the command nexus, just staring at space, his face ashen.
The Interdict was the only one of us with the presence of mind to act: he settled by one of the Hera’s computers and began typing in search terms in the database. I glimpsed a few of them: entropy, causality, diffraction, negative refraction. He must not have found them, for he started jabbing in the words faster and faster, the pinch of aggravation on his face mounting.
Then, with a great expulsion of breath, he shoved away from the console, looking as sick as Tyrus did.
“This cannot stand.” He caught me staring and said, “Tell me, Nemesis, has this computer been through a catastrophic accident? Has it been wiped or . . .”
I shook my head.
“I wished to discover the extent of your ignorance. I began searching your computer for complex terms, and then moved to the simplest ones, hoping every time my worst fears would not be confirmed. They were. I have never been in opposition to learning. On the contrary, had I not found this calling, I would have been pleased to pass my life in a university, teaching, learning, sharing. But it was the supernova that necessitated the blasphemy decree. I aimed it at those who couldn’t be trusted with our technology. It was a pretense to disarm those who didn’t understand the implications of their actions. Not everyone should have the power we’d gained through science.”
Tyrus dragged his gaze over to his. “You just decided others weren’t responsible enough to hold technology? I suppose the Grandiloquy were?”
“It wasn’t only my opinion, Tyrus. Our ancestors didn’t leave Earth of their own volition,” said Orthanion. “Humanity Prime forced them to go. They believed natural human beings were too destructive to handle the technological progress the species had made with mechanized brains. They gave our ancestors—the twenty thousand of faith—a choice: if they became fully organic, they had to give up all advanced technology and live on a nature preserve. The alternative was to return to an organic state, keep that technology, but go very far away from Earth.”
“Far away?” Tyrus said.
“Here. To this region. Somewhere we would inflict harm upon none but ourselves. So here we are, in this fragile corridor of habitable space, surrounded by natural barriers of radiation and gravity and cosmic rays. We spread out as humans do and occupied all of the territory in reach, and then half an eon ago, we did just what was predicted of us. Some of us mere organic human beings ignited an artificial supernova and wiped out half the Empire.”
“That was intentional?” I breathed. “Why would anyone do that?”
The Interdict shrugged. “We are all descended from zealots. Faith can inspire greatness, but it can be used to justify breathtaking cruelties.”
I couldn’t understand that. Someone had done that on purpose.
“That’s when your ancestor Tarantis von Domitrian and I realized there’d been some wisdom to Humanity Prime’s warnings,” Orthanion said. “So much knowledge had been lost after the supernova, so we ensured it remained lost—by instituting the decree forbidding the sciences. Machines were concentrated among those responsible enough to use them wisely.”
He looked between us, and for the first time, his perfect, calm arrogance had wavered, his eyes those of a fallible man who’d lived too long, who’d made a most dreadful mistake.
“It was meant only to walk back progress a few steps. To prevent such destructive devices from ever being wielded again. I would not have suggested it without having studied history and made myself an authority in human affairs. I never anticipated the basic laws of physics disappearing from public knowledge—eluding even an Emperor.”
“Perhaps,” Tyrus said with a bite in his voice, “you should get out more.”
“I have most certainly been too complacent, counting on my vicars to keep me apprised when they arrive so infrequently. . . . This is the Living Cosmos rebuking me for my arrogance.”
I stared at him, for there was a staggering egotism in his assumption that everything was aimed at teaching a lesson to him.
“I believed I saw our divine Cosmos’s aims so clearly, and yet now I must think of it anew. I must think of an Emperor—a Domitrian Emperor—falling in such obsessive, unwavering love with a creature that he would seek me out. . . . For of course it would be me, I am the only one who can imbue her with personhood. . . .”
He was almost mumbling to himself now, trying to puzzle out why this was all about him.
A strange urge to smack him came over me. I balled up my fists to restrain it, and when I looked at Tyrus, his shoulders were sagging. He seemed in a state of stunned shock.
“I see now the will of our Living Cosmos,” said the Interdict, straightening up. “The Emperor fell in love with one only I could gift with personhood, all so you could come to me, so you would show me the error of my ways. . . . Yes. Yes, it is all so clear.”
Tyrus looked at him wearily. He was clearly still thinking of the time lost, of the time we were still losing.
“Miracles hide within tragedies,” the Interdict said. “And the path we must take has opened itself before me as vividly as a sunrise. My young Emperor, you must undertake the most difficult of missions on behalf of your Living Cosmos.”
Yes, the urge to hit him truly made my palm tingle. Tyrus couldn’t muster any expression of eagerness for him.
“You will be the Domitrian who restores the study of scientific learning,” announced the Interdict.
And Tyrus’s mouth fell open, my head reeled, for . . . for was this really happening? Now? After this?
“You want . . . restoration of the sciences. After all this time,” Tyrus said.
“I do, my child. This is your purpose. And I command you to do it. I will impart to you everything on our system, on our computers, all the knowledge lost, so it may be rediscovered with your help. Will you undertake this mission?”
Incredulous, Tyrus dropped to his knees before the Interdict, torn between hope and total bewilderment. “You are asking me to do this for you, Most Ascendant One.”
“Yes. You’ve been an agent of this Living Cosmos, and you will be one again, on this much more daunting of tasks. And you, you—the creature Nemesis. To your knees. Let me touch you.”
Baffled, I practically stumbled down to kneel at Tyrus’s side as the Interdict offered us each a hand and let us both draw them to our cheeks.
“The divine light of this Cosmos brought you to me, brought you both to me.” His eyes burned with conviction. “And now it will shine a path forward, because you ask me to grant her personhood, my young Emperor. I will not only do that, I will confer on her my holy mark of blessing. She’s been my agent as much as you have, and I don’t believe you were put in my path without design.” He drew us both to our feet. “We are all three of us agents of that which is greater than us all, and isn’t this a glorious purpose indeed?”
• • •
The ceremony was conducted right in the heliosphere of the Hera in those fleeting minutes before we reached the Sacred City.
The Interdict adjusted the reflective mirrors about him, and grumbled about having to make do with very little. Tyrus just leaned against the wall, openly and nakedly bewildered by what had come to pass, like he didn’t know whether to be demoralized or pleased. I knew just how he felt, and as I knelt before the Interdict, the wrongness swelled in me like I’d cheated somehow, and a terrible price awaited.
And then, a shift of the optics, and something happened.
Perhaps the diamonds outside, or the strike of the pulsar’s light, but when the light illuminated the heliosphere about us, an illusion of existing in a different universe entirely gripped me. The Interdict rose to his full height, aglow as his crystalline statue had been, and the import of the moment sank heavily over me, and I seemed to float back from myself, from the moment, for I wasn’t sure if it was real, and he no longer seemed to reach down to me as a mortal.
Lines of sacred chalices lit into flame, and they seared the edges of my vision while prisms slid about us with the shifting starlight, and the Interdict’s voice sounded like a stranger’s, soft and resonant. “Bow your head, Nemesis dan Impyrean.”
My heart thumped so loudly, I felt as though it resounded through the entire chamber. I closed my eyes and saw red against the bright glare, then the touch . . . Hands settling upon me, the back of my neck, my cheeks.
Images played through my mind in a great, dizzying flash. . . . The Impyrean vicar scorning me as a thing with no divine spark . . . the walls of the corrals harsh and impregnable about me . . . Sidonia’s arm stretched out as she promised me I had a divine spark . . .
And the hands were atop my head, words washing over me in and out. “. . . so matter and energy are never destroyed but merely converted as I exalt this creature before me. . . .”
Strangely, my heart began to pound and my stomach danced.
This mattered to me.
Behind my eyes, I felt like I was seeing Sidonia again, as she’d been that day, as she’d been telling me she loved me, telling me I was made of stardust as she was.
The oil seeped warm and fragrant on my hands, the Interdict himself applying it to me. Then effervescent essence over his hand, which caught aglow in a brilliant stream of light that I thought was the pulsar, and realized then . . . No, it was the quasar, the ejection of whatever brilliance departed a black hole, casting a thousand glorious colors about me.
Then his touch to my breastbone. A laser-thin slicer in his hand scorching a pattern over my heart, allowing the infusion beneath my skin of effervescent essence. The pain meant nothing in the unreality and brilliance of the moment, and his next touch slicked with healing ointment knit the skin together over the glowing mark of concentric suns. It seemed I’d crossed into some other realm, some greater reality, and Donia was there, her presence so thick on the air I felt it as though she were centimeters away, watching me.
Sidonia—my Donia—was now a part of a star, a brilliant, blazing light just as she’d always been for me, illuminating the dark corners of my soul even when I doubted whether I had one, and finally I was a part of the same light as her.
Thank you, Donia, I thought, loving her so much in that moment the emotion seemed to rip through my very soul. And I knew then that she had met her destiny, and I would join her there someday too, for I was a person.
The Interdict stepped back. I rose before him as Nemesis Impyrean, the future Empress of a galaxy. A person. And Tyrus no longer was sagging back against the wall, weary, but watched me with a radiant love on his face. For once, when I returned his smile, I knew—just knew—the same intensity of feeling lit my face, for he’d thought to ask for this.
I had just been born into the human race. At long last, I belonged.