Cardenia looked up, confused, as she was being stripped down. “I just saw you in the audience.”
“That’s because I was just in the audience.”
“How did you get here so quickly?”
“Because it’s my job,” Naffa said, and magically a clipboard appeared. “How are you doing?”
“Tell me I never have to do this again.”
“It’s exceedingly rare for an emperox to have two coronation ceremonies, so, yes. You will never have to do this again.”
“Now tell me I can go home.”
“As the emperox owns Xi’an itself, technically speaking you are home.”
“There’s a terrifying thought.”
“In more prosaic fashion, however, you may not go home yet. In the next ten minutes, you must change into the formal uniform Dochae here is now showing you—” Naffa nodded toward the assistant, who indeed had a very formal uniform at the ready. “—and then you must go to the presentation balcony to wave to the tens of thousands of people who are currently ruining the lawn of the cathedral in the hope of seeing you. You’ll be up there for five minutes and then we go back to the palace where you will have an hour’s worth of five-minute audiences with a minute between them, and another hour of ten-minute audiences with two minutes between them. Then you are to arrive at your coronation celebration, at which point you will give a short address—”
Cardenia groaned.
“—which I have already prepared for you and which no one will listen to anyway because it is not of consequence, and then for the rest of your celebration you’ll spend three hours in a receiving line, shaking hands and having pictures and video taken with everyone, which I suspect is exactly the hell you imagine it will be. Then and only then will you be able to relax and eat something, so I suggest that while Dochae here helps you into that new uniform, that you also eat the protein bars she has for you. And maybe drink some water.”
“Do I get to relieve myself?”
“There’s a lavatory here. Door to your left. Before you ask, it’s stocked with everything you need at the moment.”
“Thank you. I’m glad someone remembers I am still actually a human.”
“Of course. Take your time as long as your time is under a minute.”
Cardenia groaned again and headed toward the lavatory.
Seven minutes later Cardenia’s coronation outfit was packed, her post-coronation outfit was on and surprisingly comfortable, and her phalanx of bodyguards was surrounding her in the elevator taking her up to the cathedral’s observatory deck, where her presentation balcony awaited. Cardenia looked around her and realized that outside of the palace itself, she was likely never to be alone in an elevator ever again.
The elevator door opened and there was Naffa again, standing in front of the alcove that was the presentation balcony.
“You have to stop doing that,” Cardenia said. “It’s creepy.”
“Relax. I took up the elevator on the other side. It has its own set of bodyguards.”
“Welcome to my world.”
“I’ve been in it a while. I hope you noticed.”
Cardenia laughed, stepped to exit the elevator, and then was knocked back into the elevator as the presentation balcony exploded. She was unconscious before her body slammed into the elevator’s back wall.
*
“There’s a very real possibility that the Flow streams that connect the Interdependency will collapse during your reign,” Attavio VI, Cardenia’s father, or rather the computer projection of him, said to Cardenia in her dream.
Cardenia was aware she was dreaming; Cardenia was also aware that the dream was, for the moment at least, replaying her first conversation in the Memory Room. She was not aware of how or when it was that she fell asleep, and the part of her brain that was lucid enough to register that she was in a dream was strongly shying away from thinking about it that much. Go with this conversation. It’s safe, that part of her brain seemed to be saying, so Cardenia did, saying her part of the conversation again as if reading off a script.
“How will that happen?” Cardenia asked.
“I’m not a scientist,” Attavio VI said. “But the Count of Claremont is. He’s been collecting data for three decades now. He sends me updates from time to time. The data he’s collected suggests that the stability of the Flow is an illusion and that over a long enough timescale everything shifts, and that we’re about to enter a period of shifts. He says it’s already been happening slowly, and it’s about to start happening very quickly indeed. It’s happened before.”
“To Dalasysla. When the first Grayland was emperox.”
Attavio VI nodded. “Yes. She was given information, just like I have been given information—information you’ll now have access to.”
“She had information, but why didn’t she act on it? If she knew they were about to lose the stream to Dalasysla, why didn’t she do something about it?”
“I could tell you, but you can ask her yourself.”
Cardenia blinked at this. “She’s in here?”
“Of course.”
“She was lost in the Flow. I didn’t think she existed.”
“She updated before her final trip. Everything but those last few days is in here.”
This took Cardenia aback. On one hand it made sense. On another, the idea of a person being … incomplete was odd. “Jiyi, show me Emperox Grayland I.”
A shimmer and a tall, wide woman appeared and walked toward Cardenia.
“You’re Emperox Grayland I,” Cardenia asked.
“Yes,” the woman said.
“You … know what happened to you? How you died?”
“I’m aware of the information, yes.”
“How do you feel about it?” This was all an aside, but Cardenia had to know.
“I don’t feel anything about it. I’m a computer simulation of a person. That said, given what I know about it, I imagine the actual Emperox Grayland I was exceptionally pissed about it.”
This made Cardenia smile. Then she got back on track. “You knew the Flow stream for Dalasysla was collapsing.”
“I was given models by scientists that suggested that the stream was in danger of collapsing, yes. Given the data and my understanding of it, I thought it was possible, and likely.”
“But you didn’t evacuate the Dalasysla system.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Politics,” Grayland said. “Evacuating the twenty million people who lived in the Dalasysla system would have required immense planning and capital on the part of the Interdependency. There was no will for it.”
“The parliament didn’t want to save the lives of twenty million people?”
“They didn’t see it as a matter of saving those lives. They considered it a matter of someone they saw as a weak emperox trying to manufacture a crisis, as a way of shifting the balance of power away from the parliament. They also saw it as a threat to trade and the economy, since a large number of ships would need to be committed to an evacuation, at a huge cost.”
“What about the data showing the possibility of a collapse?”
“They held a commission which featured other Flow physicists poking holes in the findings, introducing enough doubt to undermine any political drive to do anything. Even the representatives from Dalasysla voted down my recommendation to begin an evacuation. What eventually passed was a recommendation for further study. But money wasn’t appropriated in the imperial budget for that further study, so nothing came of it.”
“So—” So you did nothing, Cardenia was going to say, but then stopped because it would be rude and would make Grayland almost instantly defensive. Then she remembered she was talking to a computer who didn’t have feelings. “So you did nothing.”
“I sent the local duchess an advisory, and told the military and local imperial bureaucrats to assist, on an expedited basis, any Dalasyslans who wanted to leave.”
“And did they?”
“We don’t know. The Flow stream collapsed almost immediately after I sent the advisory.”