The Thousand Emperors (31 page)

Despite himself, and the terrible urgency that continued to dominate his every thought and action, Luc ate.

The food and wine helped chase some of his nerves away. He had the sense the meal was as much a delaying tactic for Maxwell as anything else, an opportunity for the imprisoned Councillor to try
and work out what Luc’s presence here meant. The mechants worked efficiently at clearing empty dishes away and replacing them with new ones.

He tried again to engage Maxwell in conversation, but the old man’s only response was to tap the edge of a dish with a fork and shake his head.

When he was finished, Maxwell took a last sip of wine, regarding Luc from across the table. ‘One of my mechants was observing you,’ he said, ‘when you woke up. I watched you
picking through the books in that room I left you in.’

Luc hesitated, then carefully put down his knife and fork. ‘What about it?’

Maxwell pushed his chair back and stood, then crossed over to a nearby shelf, trailing his fingers along a line of volumes before selecting one in particular and pulling it out.

‘Perhaps you’d indulge me in a little experiment,’ he said, bringing the book around the table and placing it next to Luc.

Luc cleared his throat nervously. ‘What kind of experiment?’

Maxwell flipped the book open, then slid it closer to Luc’s right hand. ‘I want you to place your hand flat on these pages.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘Then my mechants will find a way to
make
you, Mr Gabion.’

‘What is the book, exactly?’

‘An account of the fall of Earth, by a man named Saul Dumont. Ever heard of him?’

Saul Dumont.
‘Of course I have. He was the last man on Earth.’

‘The last man to
escape
Earth, would be a more precise way of putting it.’

Luc shook his head. ‘There’s no such book. If there was, I’d have heard of it – we’d
all
have.’

Maxwell regarded him with an expression of tolerant pity. ‘The book is called
Final Days
. He wrote it during his decades on Novaya Zvezda, back when it was still called Galileo.
It’s an eye-opener, let me tell you – it most certainly does
not
correlate with the sanctioned histories of the Tian Di, and is all the more fascinating because of that.
Now,’ Maxwell continued, ‘do as I say: press your hand and fingers flat and firmly on the pages.’

Luc hesitated, and one of the mechants drifted towards him, weapons slithering from out of its belly.

‘Just a minute,’ said Luc, sweating now. ‘How could this book possibly exist—’

‘Unless it had been deliberately redacted on the orders of Cheng and his faithful Eighty-Five?’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘I could say much the same for many of the books I keep here.
If this prison had a name, Mr Gabion, it would be called the Library of the Damned.’

Luc reached out hesitantly, his hand hovering over the pages. Maxwell made an impatient sound and pushed Luc’s hand flat against the smooth, metallic paper.

He stood at the entrance to a room as small and undecorated as a monk’s cell, the scent of ocean water mixed with the stink of rotting seaweed.

He stepped inside and past a heavy iron door to see a man seated by a desk, its surface bright with icons floating above it. Words formed in the air as the man murmured quietly to himself.
The desk was an antique, manufactured on Earth prior to the Abandonment.

The man – Saul Dumont – had dark chocolate skin and close-cropped hair, and wore a heavy coat over a zipped-up jerkin to keep out the cold. He had undergone his second
instantiation within the last several years, and so looked young despite being well into his second century.

Dumont glanced over his shoulder at him, favouring him with a weary smile.

‘What took you so long, Javier?’ he asked.

Javier glanced to the side as a woman in late middle-age entered the room beside him. She was similar enough in appearance to Dumont that one might easily assume them to be mother and
son.

‘Dad?’ Her voice quavered slightly as she spoke to Dumont. ‘We need to get going. Johnson’s got the boat ready. We need to evacuate.
Now
.’

Dumont gripped the edge of the desk with one hand, then pushed so that his chair slid back from it.

‘There’s still time,’ said Dumont, addressing his daughter. ‘We can still negotiate with Hsiu-Chuan—’

‘Cheng,’ she replied. ‘Please remember, Dad.’

Dumont waved a hand in irritation. ‘Whatever the hell he calls himself these days, Hsiu-Chuan’s no fool. He must know we’d blow the rigs before we’d let the Tian Di
Hui install their puppet government here. We
—
’

‘Warships set out from Ocean Harbour more than a day ago. Please,’ she said, stepping closer to him. ‘We know how hard you fought for autonomy. We all do, but you have to
accept that the fight is over.’

‘No, it’s not.’ Dumont’s voice rose, and he slammed a fist against the desk, making the icons ripple. ‘Ettrick and Litewski still have some say on
Franklin,’ he continued, a plaintive edge creeping into his voice. ‘We can run our own damn affairs.’

‘Ettrick and Litewski have already agreed to the transfer of power,’ his daughter replied. ‘They didn’t have any choice. They’ve already arrived back through the
transfer gate.’

Dumont stared back at her in horror.

‘She’s right,’ said Javier. ‘We need to retreat and regroup.’

‘For God’s sake, Javier,’ said Dumont, ‘I know Hsiu-Chuan – he’s a monster. Whatever he’s got in mind for us, he can’t
possibly
—
’

Luc gasped as his fingers slipped from the page. Maxwell stared down at him, tight-lipped.

‘Impossible,’ Maxwell muttered under his breath.

‘How does it work?’ Luc managed to croak. ‘It’s like I was actually there, out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Saul Dumont was there—’ He stared at
Maxwell in shock. ‘
You
were there. I was seeing everything through
your
eyes.’

‘The memories are encrypted,’ said Maxwell, shaking his head. ‘How could you possibly access them without an encryption key? In fact, how could you even have a
lattice
?
No one outside of the Council or Sandoz has one, except . . .’

He stopped abruptly, his mouth trembling slightly.

Luc nodded at the shelves around them. ‘Can all of these books do the same?’

Maxwell shrugged, looking defeated. ‘A few, but not all.’

‘And what I saw and heard . . . That was all real?’

Maxwell nodded. ‘Quite real. You just experienced my own memories, from about a century after the Abandonment.’

‘You were on Novaya Zvezda, with Dumont?’

Maxwell sighed as he sat back down. ‘I grew up there, long ago enough that I can remember when the first transfer gate was destroyed, years before the Abandonment even took place. I
remember the clamour when Dumont was first brought down from orbit.’

‘What happened to Dumont? Didn’t he disappear?’

‘No, he simply decided he preferred life in the Coalition to the rule of the Council, some time before the Schism. If he’s still alive, he’s to be found there now.’

Luc recalled his history. Before escaping on board a starship carrying a new transfer gate to Galileo, Dumont had shut down the entire wormhole network to ensure the survival of the colonies. By
the time the ship arrived at Galileo, the Earth had been sterilized by some unknown, alien force.

‘Dumont said something about Cheng – that it wasn’t always his name.’

Maxwell nodded. ‘His name back in those days was Shih Hsiu-Chuan.’

‘So why the change of identity?’

‘Because he’s a man with many secrets,’ Maxwell muttered, taking his seat at the table once more and pouring himself a new glass of wine. ‘Assuming a new identity makes
it easier to ensure that those secrets stay secret; he picked Cheng because it’s a common name, as is Joe.’ He made a circle with one hand. ‘A man of the people, you see. Father
Cheng, because a father always takes care of his children.’

‘But . . . why would Cheng allow you to keep those memories stored here, in this prison? Surely they’d be dangerous to him, if they were found out?’

Maxwell didn’t reply, and Luc glanced at the book where it still lay on the floor, its pages half-folded.

He came to a realization. ‘Cheng doesn’t know these recordings exist, does he? Does anyone else know about them?’

Maxwell regarded him balefully. ‘You know, I could still order these mechants to kill you. It might save me a lot of unnecessary bother.’

Luc glanced towards the mechants and saw that they had still not retracted their weapons. ‘You could,’ he replied slowly, ‘but I think if you were going to, you already would
have.’

‘Please don’t make the mistake of making too many assumptions about me,’ Maxwell snapped. ‘For all Zelia knows, you’re lying dead out there in the snow. She might
never know you were here.’

‘Then why the hell did you even bother to rescue me at all?’

‘I looked you up while the mechant was escorting you here,’ Maxwell replied. ‘You’re the one who killed Winchell Antonov, my former colleague and, dare I say it,
brother-in-arms.’

‘So it’s revenge you want?’

Maxwell laughed. ‘I have no intention of harming you, Mr Gabion. Revenge is for the young, and killing you wouldn’t bring Winchell back. If I’m guilty of anything, it’s
simple curiosity.’

‘You said that apart from me, no one outside of the Council or Sandoz has a lattice,’ said Luc, ‘but then you said
except
. Except who?’

Maxwell didn’t answer.

‘You were going to say Ambassador Sachs, weren’t you?’ Luc hazarded. ‘He’s the only other one outside of either of them with an instantiation lattice.’

Maxwell sighed and took another sip of wine. ‘Nobody should be able to access those memories without my permission,’ he agreed. ‘Not you, not Sachs, not anyone without the
appropriate encryption key. And yet the Ambassador’s lattice somehow unlocked the memories automatically, and without effort – as did yours.’

‘Who else has a copy of that key?’

‘Only me,’ Maxwell replied.

Luc glanced around the ranks of books surrounding them, thinking about all those people, Cheng and the members of the Eighty-Five, coming here and browsing their pages, entirely unaware of the
sophisticated circuitry contained within them. Surely they must handle these books all the time . . .

‘You’ve been stealing their memories,’ Luc guessed, regarding Maxwell with new eyes. ‘Every time one of the Eighty-Five picks up one of your books, it sieves information
out of their lattices without them ever knowing. Am I right?’

Maxwell’s expression became strangely sad. ‘The circuitry in the books is meant to push extra embedded information the other way – from the pages to the reader’s lattice.
It took me a while, but I worked out how to reverse the flow of data and keep it hidden.’

‘Why do it?’

‘Because one day, the people of the Tian Di will need to know the truth about their leaders, and they’ll find all the evidence they need right here in this library. Tell me, just how
much contact have you had with the members of the Temur Council, apart from Zelia?’

‘More than enough, for this lifetime.’

‘Dreadful people, aren’t they?’ Maxwell said dryly. ‘If I had the means, I would destroy the Council, and Vanaheim along with them.’

Luc stared at him. ‘Why?’

Maxwell put his glass back down, and Luc tried not to flinch when one of the mechants drifted forward to refill it. ‘Because they’re a travesty of what they once were, long sunk into
the introspection of old age, and dark perversions you would scarcely believe.’

‘What kind of perversions?’

Maxwell looked at him in disbelief. ‘You’re Zelia’s puppet. Surely you’ve encountered the “experiments” I’ve been hearing so much about? Or has she
grown bored with that now?’

Luc shifted uncomfortably, again seeing a hunched figure immolating itself in his mind’s eye.

‘So you
have
seen them,’ said Maxwell with an expression of dour amusement. ‘It’s a shame you killed Winchell. He was one of the few men left from the old days
still worth a damn.’

‘Even knowing of all the atrocities he was responsible for? The assault on Benares, the Battle of Sunderland—’

‘You’ve been taken in by Cheng’s propaganda. I’m well acquainted with the details of the Benarean assault: Cheng came here on several occasions prior to that campaign, so
he could describe to me his plan to discredit Black Lotus. He lied to you. All of them did.’

‘Bullshit.’

Maxwell smiled enigmatically. ‘You’ve already worked out, haven’t you, that Vasili paid me a visit not long before his death?’

Luc stiffened. ‘Why would you assume that?’

‘Why else would you have been so afraid of that book you leafed through downstairs, unless you’d encountered a memory-enabled book before? And I can tell you for a fact that Vasili
was the only person in possession of a book taken from here. Now tell me,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘That book I gave to him – do you have it with you?’

Luc licked his lips. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t.’

Maxwell sat back, looking deflated. ‘Then tell me what you learned from it.’

‘That he knew someone was coming to kill him,’ Luc replied. ‘He muttered something about how he’d been wrong, and Antonov had been right. But about what, I don’t
know.’

‘It’s such a shame you don’t still have that book,’ said Maxwell. ‘It contained some very valuable information indeed.’

‘What information?’

‘The answer to that question,’ Maxwell replied, ‘lies in part inside
another
book, in another section of the library.’ He pushed his chair back and stood.
‘I’ll take you there now.’

‘Why not just tell me?’

‘Encoded memories, Mr Gabion, offer more fundamental and easily assimilated truths than speech, which is so very vulnerable to interpretation in a way that direct experience is not. To
experience the memories of a man is to know certain unassailable truths about him.’