The Thousand Emperors

‘Because then you might have to explain to them why the hell the Coalition Ambassador just paid you a visit.’

Maxwell gazed at him with an expression of utter stupefaction.

Luc waited, his hands clammy, all too aware of the gentle hum of the mechants on either side of him. His stomach growled audibly in the otherwise still silence of the library, and he realized it had been a good long while since he’d had anything to eat.

‘May I say, this is turning out to be quite the novel day,’ said Maxwell suddenly, as if coming unfrozen. ‘You’re hungry?’

‘Yeah, very,’ Luc admitted.

‘My dining room is on the lowest level of the library,’ Maxwell told him, gesturing towards the mechants. ‘I’ll see you there in a minute or two.’

Maxwell’s data-ghost vanished, and Luc followed one of the mechants to an elevator platform that carried him swiftly downwards. He gazed along the length of the library in the moment before it disappeared out of sight, and wondered what it must be like to live in such a place, buried inside a mountain with no eyes to the outside world beyond the lenses of mechants.

The platform came to a halt, and he followed the mechant down a long gallery to another room lined with yet more books. A third mechant was busy placing serving dishes and bowls on a table, at one end of which sat the flesh-and-blood Javier Maxwell.

‘Don’t look so nervous,’ said Maxwell, indicating an empty seat across the table from him. ‘Take a seat. Please. It’s nice to have the opportunity to eat with someone who isn’t also my gaoler, even if he is intent on blackmailing me.’

Luc remained standing. The mechant that had guided him here floated up to hover in one corner of the ceiling. ‘You still haven’t told me why Ambassador Sachs was here. Or has he not departed yet?’

‘No, the Ambassador is gone. He left just before one of my mechants found you. You know, I was just about to eat when you woke, and I don’t know about you, but I hate long conversations on an empty stomach.’

‘I need to get in touch with Zelia—’

His stomach rumbled again.

‘Dear God,’ said Maxwell, picking up a fork and stabbing it towards the empty chair. ‘Sit down and eat first. Then we talk.’

Maxwell lifted the lid from a serving dish and the sweet, aromatic scent of grilled fish rose up. Luc sat and watched as Maxwell, pointedly ignoring him, focused all his attention on filling his plate.

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.’