“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.”
“So twenty million people died because of politics and bureaucracy.”
“Yes. Not immediately, of course. But the intentional nature of the Interdependency is that each system is reliant on the others for essentials. Remove one system, and its ruling house and monopoly, and the dozens of other systems will survive. But that one system will not. Over time it will begin to fail. The habitats in space and outposts on otherwise uninhabitable planets and moons will fall into disrepair and over time will become harder to fix. Farms and food production factories will also start to fail. Social networks will break down predictably, commensurate to failures of the physical plant and the realization that ultimately nothing can save the people in the cut-off system. Between the physical and social failures that will follow the collapse of the Flow stream, system-wide death is inevitable.”
“How long did it take?”
“When the Dalasysla collapse happened, I ordered radio observatories in the Kaipara system to train in on Dalasysla. Kaipara was the closest system by physical distance, seventeen light-years away. I was dead before they heard anything.”
“But they heard something.”
“Briefly. Most in-system communication in my era was through focused streams of data, so it would have been difficult to eavesdrop randomly. When I ordered the radio telescopes to listen I hoped someone at Dalasysla would have the presence of mind to point a wide-spectrum transmitter at Kaipara. And as I understand it, someone did, for about a month, two years after the collapse.”
“What did it say?”
“Basically: civil war, murder, violence, sabotage of life-support systems and food production, the rise of cults of personality. There’s a classified report that was prepared by my son and successor, Bruno III.”
“Classified?” Cardenia turned to Attavio VI. “Is it still classified?”
“I didn’t unclassify it, no,” Attavio said.
“Why not? Especially if you believe the Flow is in danger of collapsing?”
“Because the problems that existed in Grayland’s era exist in ours, or mine, I should say. The parliament would still see raising the concern as a political move to marginalize them. No one wants to disrupt trade or the privileges of the guild houses. And in this case it won’t be just one system, like Dalasysla. It will be all of them. There won’t be anywhere to run. What happened at Dalasysla will happen everywhere. Unless I was absolutely sure, I wasn’t going to open that particular box of trouble.”
And here is where Cardenia, in her dream, departed from her script. “This is all stupid,” she said, to Attavio VI and Grayland I. “We’re doomed only if we keep doing what we’re doing. If we know a collapse is coming, we have to reform the Interdependency. End the house monopolies. Help every system prepare for the collapse.”
“It won’t happen,” Attavio VI said.
“You don’t know that.”
“Of course I know that. I’m the emperox. Or was.”
Cardenia turned to Grayland I. “You saw a collapse happen. In your time, they must have responded.”
“I was assassinated,” Grayland I said. “And after a brief vogue for entertainment about the lost system of Dalasysla, everyone decided to forget about it. The other Flow streams looked stable, and thinking about Dalasysla was inconvenient.”
“No one wants the Interdependency to end. Including the House of Wu. There’s too much money and power at stake,” Attavio VI said.
“And the survival of humanity doesn’t matter?” Cardenia asked, incredulously.
“Not if it means the end of the Interdependency.”