The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency #1)(49)

Cardenia looked over to the door to the Memory Room, sat there for a couple of minutes thinking. Then got up and let herself into it.

Jiyi appeared the moment she entered. “Hello, Emperox Grayland II. How are you?”

“I am alone,” Cardenia said, and immediately hated the adolescent drama of the statement, but it was true, and there it was.

“You are always alone in the Memory Room,” Jiyi said. “And in another sense, you are never alone in it.”

“Did you think that up yourself?”

“I do not think,” Jiyi said. “It was programmed into me years ago.”

“Why?”

“Because eventually every emperox tells me they are alone.”

“Every emperox?”

“Yes.”

“That … weirdly makes me feel better.”

“That is a frequent reaction.”

“The Prophet is in here, yes? Rachela I.”

“Yes.”

“I would like to speak to her, please.”

Jiyi nodded and shimmered out, replaced by a woman. She was small and in this image nondescriptively middle-aged, which was different from the usual depictions of the Prophet, which showed her young and with flowing hair and striking cheekbones. The image did not look anything like this.

It also did not look anything like Naffa. Cardenia felt a momentary spasm of disappointment about this, then inwardly chastised herself for it. There was no reason she should have expected the Prophet to be Naffa outside of her dream.

“You are Rachela I,” Cardenia asked the image.

“I am.”

“The founder of the Interdependency, and the Interdependent Church.”

“Basically.”

“Basically?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, in both cases. But we decided that having me be the founder of both would serve the mythology the best, so that’s what we said.”

“Were you an actual prophet?”

“Yes.”

“So you knew the things you were saying about the Interdependency and the principles of interdependency would come true.”

“No, of course not.”

“But you just said you were a prophet.”

“Anyone can be a prophet. You just have to say that what you’re talking about is a reflection of God. Or of the gods. Or of some divine spirit. However you want to put it. Whether those things come true isn’t one way or another about it.”

“But what you said did come true. You preached for interdependency and it happened.”

“Yes, it was good for me that it turned out that way.”

“So you didn’t know they would.”

“I already told you that I didn’t. But we certainly worked hard to make them happen, and to give it the appearance of inevitability. And of course the whole mystical angle helped too.”

Cardenia furrowed her brow. “You’re a founder of a church.”

“Yes.”

“But listening to you, you don’t seem to be particularly religious.”

“Not really, no.”

“Or to believe in God. Or gods.”

“I really don’t. And when we designed the church, we intentionally made the divine aspect of it as ambiguous as possible. People don’t mind having the mystical aspect of a church being poorly defined as long as you make the rules of the church clear. We did that. We modeled a bit off of Confucianism, which strictly speaking wasn’t a religion, and added bits we thought would be useful from other religions.”

“So you don’t believe in your own church!”

“Of course I do,” Rachela said. “We created a set of moral precepts to bind the various human systems together. We did it because we thought it was desirable and to some extent necessary. Since I believe in those precepts, I believe in the mission of the church. At least, the mission of the church when we founded it. Human institutions tend to drift from their creators’ intent over time. Another reason to have clear rules.”

“But the divine element is fake.”

“We decided that it was no more fake than the divine aspect of any other religion. As far as the evidence goes, in any event.”

Cardenia felt a little light-headed. It was one thing to believe the predominant church of the Interdependency was bunk, which was a thing Cardenia had believed for as long as she could remember thinking about it. It was inconvenient when, strictly speaking, you were now head of that church, but she could at least keep that to herself. It was another thing to have the founder of the church, or at least the core of memories that comprised her, confirm it was bunk.

“Naffa was right,” Cardenia said. “The Interdependency is a scam.”

“I don’t know who Naffa is,” Rachela I said.

“She was a friend of mine,” Cardenia said. “I had a dream where she appeared to me, as you, telling me the Interdependency was a scam.”

“If I were telling this story, I would have said that I had had a mystical vision of the Prophet,” Rachela I said.

“It was just a dream.”

“In our line of business there is no such thing. Emperoxs never just dream. They have visions. That’s what we do. Or what we were supposed to do, when I became the first emperox.”