The Thousand Emperors (41 page)
‘They have already been warned,’ the Ambassador replied, ‘since you just told them.’
Luc frowned. ‘We’re being listened to? Right now?’
‘Every word you say is being transmitted via a secure link running through the Hall of Gates back to Temur, and then through the Darwin–Temur gate. We wish to know, for what purpose
would Cheng want to acquire such an artefact?’
Luc imagined shadowy figures listening in to their conversation from untold light-years away. ‘My understanding is that Cheng is going to use the artefact to wipe out Benares, then blame
the whole catastrophe on Black Lotus.’
‘
Destroy
one of the Tian Di’s own worlds?’ The Ambassador shook his head. ‘What could he possibly gain from that?’
‘He intends to use it as a pretext for staying in power indefinitely. He’ll also claim that the Coalition supplied the weapon to Black Lotus. Ambassador, you
must
take
immediate action.’
‘While we agree that your intent is genuine, it may already be too late for the particular solution you seek.’
Luc shook his head, confused. ‘Too late? How?’
‘There are still certain details that you are not aware of. As you already know, I visited Maxwell with regard to preventing a war between our civilizations. I am sorry to tell you that
war has already begun.’
Luc struggled to formulate a coherent answer. ‘It has?’
‘And has been under way, for some hours – not that this will be evident for some time yet.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘As you are now clearly aware, Tian Di exploration teams did indeed discover another gate leading into the Founder Network, following which Cheng authorized his own, secret assessment of
any artefacts that might be found there, despite his stated reasons for bringing about the Schism.
‘However,’ the Ambassador continued, ‘as our ancestors once discovered for themselves, the Founder Network is an
enormously
dangerous place. The human race was lucky to
avoid total extinction following the Abandonment, and so when we became aware that Tian Di expeditions had entered the Network, we were concerned not only for their safety, but that of our entire
species, whether here or in the Coalition.’
‘So how exactly did you know Cheng had entered the Network?’
The Ambassador studied his gloved hands. ‘The point about a network is that it is interconnected. Given that, it was inevitable we would eventually become aware of Cheng’s presence
within it. But what they were doing was placing us all in terrible danger.’
‘What kind of danger?’
At that point, the assault on the
Sequoia
grew more vicious. Luc heard a loud crash from the far side of the arboretum, and within moments a ferocious gale began to tear at the trees and
bushes around them, filling the air with a terrible, deafening howl.
Luc grabbed at the branches of the surrounding trees as the sudden expulsion of air dragged him backwards along the path. He yelled, then threw his hands over his face as a mechant came hurtling
towards him. It gripped him in its manipulators, and fought to make headway against the outrushing air.
A moment later Luc felt his ears pop, and the arboretum grew eerily quiet. The air had already been sucked out of the dome. He felt like he was drowning, and caught sight of the Ambassador held
in the grip of a second mechant. Perhaps the Sandoz had decided it wasn’t necessary to take them alive after all.
The two mechants hurtled back through the passageway by which Luc had entered the arboretum. The heavy doors that had isolated the dome from the rest of the station had already swung half-open
again by the time they passed between them.
Luc struggled to stay conscious. The mechants carrying both him and the Ambassador took a sharp turn sideways into another tunnel, and through another pressure-field.
For the second time that day, Luc gasped and floundered like a fish as the mechant released him. He collapsed onto hard steel decking, coughing and gasping as his lungs again found purchase in
breathable air.
‘We need to get off this station,’ Luc gasped, seeing the Ambassador climbing to his feet a few paces away, his robe now rumpled and stained. ‘You must have
some
way off
of here, right?’
‘We have a flier,’ the Ambassador agreed, ‘but it only has room for one. You may use it if you wish.’
Luc gaped at him. ‘But . . . what about you? Why would you give a damn about saving
my
life?’
‘You think I’m sacrificing myself, but you’ll soon understand that that’s far from being the case. Besides, we have come to the conclusion that you may have it within
your means to bring current events to a more peaceful conclusion than they might otherwise. If we may?’
The Ambassador peeled off a glove, revealing an entirely ordinary-looking hand, with long and tapering fingers, and carefully trimmed nails.
He stepped towards Luc, reaching out to him with his ungloved hand. Luc jerked back in alarm.
‘What the hell are you trying to do?’
‘A touch is all it takes, Mr Gabion,’ said the Ambassador. ‘You offered a trade. Let us then fulfil our side of the bargain. This way, you’ll see and understand
everything in an instant.’
Luc felt his eyes widen. ‘Like Javier Maxwell’s books. Is that the kind of thing you mean?’
‘Encoding memories into all manner of physical substrates is an art in itself,’ the Ambassador replied, briefly drawing his hand back and showing his palm to Luc. ‘There are
almost no limits to the possible substrates that can be used, since the information is stored on the deep quantum level. It is possible, in the Coalition, to ingest or even drink memories and data
– even to breathe them in. Living flesh, allied with a lattice of the type Antonov gifted you with, can become a conduit for sensory data of all kinds.’
Irrational fear gripped Luc. ‘The last time I was here,’ he said tightly, ‘I mentioned that Antonov told me in what I thought was a dream that you could prevent a calamity, and
save both our lives.’
Something rocked the station around them. ‘Perhaps it’s safest to keep moving for the moment,’ said the Ambassador. ‘We can reach the flier in just a few more
minutes.’
They passed into another part of the station, walking quickly through what appeared to be a series of laboratories linked one to another by a common passageway. Luc observed a number of sealed
compartments with glass walls, within which lay samples of mosses and lichens.
‘I have another question for you,’ Luc called after the Ambassador as he strode ahead. ‘The lattice in my head. Did Antonov get it from you?’
The Ambassador turned to regard him as they came to a door at the end of the passageway. ‘He did, yes, but I had no part in what Antonov did to you. You must understand that.’
Ambassador Sachs next led him through a dusty reception area filled with mouldering couches. Sachs moved through the zero-gee environment with a fluid grace like he’d been born to it
– and then Luc remembered that he had.
Luc also remembered the anger written across Antonov’s face, reflected in the Ambassador’s mirrored mask. ‘He wasn’t very happy with you, for some reason. I saw part of
one of his memories. He was arguing with you, clearly extremely upset. Why?’
‘He believed we in the Coalition had dangerously underestimated Father Cheng’s determination to remain in power at all costs. Given what you’ve told us since your arrival here,
it appears we entirely misjudged the situation. Once it became evident Cheng had no intention of bringing his explorations of the Founder Network to a halt, we began conducting private negotiations
with both Javier Maxwell and Winchell Antonov. In return for Antonov’s help, and as a gesture of goodwill, we supplied him with certain technologies he might need if either he or Maxwell were
to have any chance at deposing Cheng.’
‘Such as my lattice?’
‘Such as your lattice, yes.’
Despite everything he’d learned, a part of Luc was scandalized. ‘All this time, and the Coalition really has been working against the Tian Di?’
‘No, Mr Gabion, against Father Cheng and the Eighty-Five, specifically, and out of a desperation to avoid the war Cheng has forced us to initiate. If Cheng should remain in power and
continue his exploration of the Founder Network, he risks driving the human race into extinction.’
‘You keep telling me that, but you haven’t explained what you mean.’
‘We offered to show you, but you refused.’
‘Tell me first.’
‘The Network is vast, Mr Gabion, a billion open doors scattered all across space and time and leading who knows where. Some of Cheng’s reconnaissance teams encountered something
quite terrifying during one of their forays into it.’
‘What?’
‘Intelligent life,’ Sachs replied, and turned back to the door.
Sachs cycled the mechants through the airlock first, the door sealing behind them. The docking bay where his flier waited had, he explained, suffered a breach during the
initial stages of the assault. The mechants would venture ahead in order to seal the breach, following which he and Luc would be able to continue on their way.
‘As vast as the Founder Network is,’ the Ambassador explained as they waited, ‘it’s difficult to imagine a universe in which such a thing did
not
exist, given what
we know of the mutability of space and time. It seems to be a historical inevitability that any race advanced enough to discover the means to generate worm-holes would then use them as a fast way
to access their nearest star systems. And, over time, these scattered networks inevitably fused together, becoming what we call the Founder Network.’
‘And that’s who the Sandoz encountered?’ asked Luc, unable to keep a note of awe out of his voice. ‘The Founders?’
‘Remember there is no evidence of there ever being any one race of Founders,’ the Ambassador cautioned. ‘The name is merely a collective term for an unknown number of
intelligent species who independently created their own wormhole networks, but ultimately used them to access the networks of other species, over vast epochs of time. As you know, the Coalition
have continued to explore the Network, despite the Schism, but always with the greatest caution imaginable. By our standards, Cheng’s expeditionary forces have been behaving in a manner
almost suicidally reckless.’
‘For all your caution,’ Luc growled, ‘you still didn’t prevent someone travelling to one of your worlds to steal something that could be used to murder
billions.’
‘Which is extremely unfortunate, if it does prove to be the case,’ the Ambassador agreed, ‘and it reveals a serious lapse on our part. But to get back to the point, Mr Gabion,
Cheng’s Sandoz teams were not the first to encounter alien life. We first made contact with the very same alien species a few decades after the Schism. At first, our discovery was a cause of
celebration: first contact with another species, via the Network. But our joy didn’t last for long. If the creatures we encountered ever had a name for themselves, we never learned it, but it
wasn’t long before we started calling them the Inimicals. Communication with them proved difficult from the start, indeed more or less impossible. There are many ways to build some kind of
common language – by building mathematical and physical constants, for instance. At first we thought we might succeed in learning to communicate with them, and they with us; but every time we
tried to advance beyond those initial building blocks towards anything remotely abstract, we ran into trouble.’
‘You mean you couldn’t understand them?’
The Ambassador shook his head. ‘Or they, us. They showed us images of one of their worlds, dotted with what we at first took to be cities, but then later proved to be graveyards, or
perhaps some mixture of both. Every time we thought we had a grasp on how their minds worked or what they were trying to say to us, we’d find ourselves having to throw away all our carefully
constructed strategies as new data came in.’ He shrugged. ‘Then things turned nasty.’
‘In what way?’
‘You must understand the extraordinary lengths we had gone to, from the very beginning, to prevent the Inimicals from uncovering the route back to our own time and space until we could be
certain we would be safe. At the time we first encountered them, the Inimicals had already colonized an entire hub of the Network – thousands upon thousands of transfer gates placed in close
orbit around a black hole with the mass of a million stars, located at the heart of a dying galaxy. We never knew just what triggered the hostilities – whether we somehow brought it on
ourselves, or if they’d intended to attack us all along – but those of us who survived the attack in our physical forms managed to retreat and warn the rest. We destroyed transfer gates
behind us as we went, hoping to block off their pursuit and prevent them from finding their way back to our own worlds, but had only limited success. The Inimicals had already spent millennia
inside the Network, and knew routes through it we hardly knew existed. Our exploratory teams came under attack several more times over the next few decades, as the Inimicals attempted to find some
way around our hastily erected defences. In response, we initiated research programmes that constructed weapons from certain artefacts we had recovered throughout the post-Abandonment period. Using
these, we managed to halt the Inimicals’ progress – but only at a dreadful cost.’
The Ambassador came to a halt as something thudded and clanged on the far side of the airlock door.
‘And that’s what the Sandoz encountered inside the Network? The Inimicals?’
‘Several Sandoz Clans engaged in routine explorations of the deep future via the Network disappeared without trace. We know with great certainty that the Inimicals were responsible. Should
they manage to trace the route of Cheng’s expeditions back to the Thorne system, we will all have a great deal more to worry about than just the destruction of Benares – such as the
survival of our species.’
‘But you must have told Cheng all this!’
‘Oh, we have, Mr Gabion,’ the Ambassador replied, a trace of wistfulness in his voice. ‘Despite the abundance of evidence, he and his advisors have consistently ignored all of
our warnings.’
