Cardenia felt almost ashamed at how exhilarated she felt after her meeting with Marce Claremont.
Ashamed because, after all, the discussion, as brief as it was, confirmed what her father had worried about, a worry she had inherited: that the human species was threatened with extinction, not in an abstract way or over a long period of time, but in a concrete fashion in the span of less than a decade. In less than ten years every human system would be isolated, alone and forced to survive solely on what resources existed in-system, and with what craft existed to exploit those resources. Habitats could theoretically last decades or even centuries before they failed, but there was the human element as well. Humans didn’t react well to the knowledge they were cut off and doomed to slow death by habitat failure. Cardenia recalled what they knew of the fall of Dalasysla. The humans malfunctioned long before their habitat did.
Feeling exhilarated about a confirmation of that fate for four dozen human systems and billions of individual humans was nothing to be proud about.
But Cardenia couldn’t help it. She was exhilarated not because she was a fatalist or a misanthrope, happy that humanity was finally getting its comeuppance. She was exhilarated because finally the hazy nebulous shape of her reign, one whose meager main accomplishment was keeping parliament and the guilds from stomping on the unsuspecting planet of End with an influx of military boots, had suddenly snapped into focus. Cardenia now knew three things:
One, she would be the very last emperox of the Interdependency.
Two, the whole of her reign would be about saving as many human lives as possible, by any and every means possible.
Three, that meant the end of the lie of the Interdependency.
Which is what it was, and what Cardenia had learned that day she summoned Rachela I in the Memory Room and made her explain it all: how the vast majorities of the star systems accessible by the Flow were not easily habitable by humans but how they proceeded anyway, undeterred. How these independent systems began to trade and become dependent on each other for resources. How a group of merchants, spearheaded by Banyamun Wu, realized true power rested not in trade but in controlling access to the Flow, and set themselves up in the Hub system as armed toll collectors.
How they camouflaged and sold their resource grab under a manufactured religious ethos of “Interdependency,” with Banyamun’s daughter Rachela as the nominative figurehead of the new church and nascent empire. How the Wus and their allies paid off those who might oppose them with titles of nobility and commerce monopolies, creating the “house and guild” economic system that ensured a permanent caste system and actively discouraged the sort of economic diversification within each system that might now better position humanity to survive its imminent isolation.
How, in short, the Interdependency codified and manipulated humanity’s actual need for intersystem trade and cooperation, for the benefit of just a few at the very top. Starting with the Wu family. Her family.
Cardenia had been shocked at the simple, unapologetic bloodymindedness with which Rachela I had recounted the Interdependency scheme. Until she remembered that the Rachela I of the Memory Room was a computer simulation without an ego. This version of Rachela I had no need to flatter herself or rationalize the actions she, her father, and the early Wu family and allies had taken. The computer simulation was unashamed.
At that moment it had occurred to Cardenia that every emperox after Rachela had had the same moment she was then having, the one where they had entered the Memory Room to converse with their ancestors about the nature of the Interdependency, only to be told flatly that the founding story every Interdependent citizen had been told and taught was a lie. Cardenia imagined that nearly every one of them had had to suspect—her own dream about Naffa telling her it was a scam was a manifestation of her subconscious, not an actual ghostly visitation, after all—but it’s one thing to suspect it, and another thing to be told it, by the simulated but verifiable representation of your ancestor.
Because she was curious, Cardenia had Jiyi call up emperoxs at random to learn what they thought when they discovered—or had confirmed for them—that the Interdependency was founded primarily to benefit the Wu family and their allies. She had wanted to know how it affected their own reigns. Some had been surprised by their ancestors’ duplicity and used it as a spur to make the lives of the average Interdependent citizen better. Some had been delighted by their ancestors’ naked power grab and had gone about making sure that it stayed secured for further generations of the Wu family. Two were so appalled that they resigned, one self-exiling to End to become a farmer, and the other collapsing into nihilism, devoting himself to a life of “drinking and fucking,” as his simulation put it.
But most emperoxs essentially shrugged and got on with the business of running the Interdependency. How it was created and who benefited from it was academic to the fact that it did exist and needed running, and that there was nothing anyone could do that would change that, not even an emperox. Emperoxs of the Interdependency were not meant to be radicals, in any political direction; ones that were found themselves discreetly removed and replaced by more tractable children or (if necessary) cousins.
Certainly Cardenia had spent the first nine months of her reign being confronted with the immense inertia of the office of the emperox, and how tradition and obligation had hemmed her in. Was she not, right now, traveling by shuttle to tour a spaceship she didn’t care about, at the request of a politically connected family she disliked, with a man everyone but her wanted her to marry? Was this not, in itself, a metaphor of her entire life at the moment?
Now, however. The end of the Interdependency was not only inevitable as a matter of physics, but desirable as a matter of species survival. The monopolies would have to go as each system gathered resources and prepared for their isolation. The guild and nobility structures would have to fall, as impediments to the continuation of humanity. The lie of the Interdependency—that it was necessary and desirable—was coming to an end, and Cardenia, who had never wanted to be emperox at all, would be the one to end it. Would have to be the one to end it.
She was almost giddy about that fact.