The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(6)

This raised eyebrows, since no other emperox in living memory had chosen to do so. The last who had, Erint III, has done so over three hundred standard years previously, and it had been on the rather dry subject of the redrawing of ecclesiastical districting so bishoprics were better apportioned by population. Current dioceses were perfectly acceptable from a population point of view; it wouldn’t be on that.

Likewise Grayland II, while considered pleasantly ineffectual by the bishops in her role as emperox, had not to this point shown any particular affinity for the church as an entity. She had recently been preoccupied with an attempted rebellion by the Nohamapetan family and a theoretical issue regarding the stability of the Flow streams around the Interdependency, neither of which was directly related to the church, its processes or mission.

The idea that the emperox would wish to address the bishops on an ecclesiastical matter was surprising and, some would even say, perhaps cheeky. The general feeling of the bishops assembled was that they were willing to listen tolerantly to whatever musings their young emperox might have, and then go to the formal reception with her afterward, have some nibbles and a photograph with her, and then always have the event as a curious memory and conversation piece. Certainly Lenson thought this was the way it would go.

Thus was Bishop Lenson Ornill—and, to be fair, the rest of the bishops of the church—caught unawares when Grayland II, in the simple vestments of an ordinary priest rather than her cardinal finery, stood at the edge of the chancel and began by saying, “Many years ago, our ancestor and predecessor Rachela had visions. Those miraculous visions brought about our church, this church, this foundation upon which rests our entire civilization. Brothers and sisters, we have good news. We too, have had visions. Wonderful visions. Miraculous visions. Visions which speak to the mission of our church, and its role in the turbulent times of which we stand at the precipice. Rejoice, brothers and sisters. Our church is called to a new spiritual awakening, for the salvation of humanity in this world, and beyond it.”

Lenson Ornill took in Grayland II’s words, their intent and meaning, what they boded for the church as he understood it, his faith as he had developed it, and the genesis of his engagement with both, trapped in that small cabin, struggling to breathe, all those many long years ago. And then, quite without meaning to, he uttered the words to encapsulate what he was feeling about each, in this one epochal moment.

“Well, fuck,” he said.





BOOK ONE





Chapter

1

In the beginning was the lie.

The lie was that the Prophet Rachela, the founder of the Holy Empire of Interdependent States and Mercantile Guilds, had mystical visions. These visions prophesied both the creation and the necessity of that far-reaching empire of human settlements, strung out across light-years of space, connected only by the Flow, the metacosmological structure that humans compared to a river. They thought of it as a river mostly because human brains, originally designed for hauling their asses across the African savannah and not much upgraded since then, literally could not comprehend what it actually was, so, fine, “river” it was.

There was no mystical element involved in the so-called prophecies of Rachela at all. The Wu family ginned them up. The Wus, who owned and ran a consortium of businesses, some that built starships and others that hired out mercenaries, looked at the then-current political climate and decided the time was right to make a play for control of the Flow shoals, the places where humanly understandable space-time connected with the Flow and allowed spaceships to enter and exit that metaphorical river between the stars. The Wus understood well that creating tolls and monopolizing their extraction was a much more stable business model than building things, or blowing them up, depending on which of the Wus’ businesses one contracted. All they needed to do was to create a reasonable justification to make themselves the toll collectors.

In the meetings of the Wus, the prophecies were proposed, accepted, written, structured, A/B tested and honed before they were attached to Rachela Wu, a young scion of the family who was already well-known as the public charitable face of the Wu family and who also had a razor-sharp mind for marketing and publicity. The prophecies were a family project (well, the project of certain important members of the family—you wouldn’t just let anyone in on it, too many of the cousins were indiscreet and good only for drinking and being regional executives), but it was Rachela who sold them.

Sold them to whom? To the public at large, who needed to be convinced of the concept of the far-flung and disparate human settlements coming together under a single, unified governmental umbrella, incidentally to be headed by the Wus, who as it happened would collect levies on interstellar travel.

Not just Rachela, to be sure. In each star system, the Wus hired and bribed local politicians and publicly acceptable intelligentsia to promote the idea from a political and social point of view, to the sort of people who would like to imagine they needed a cogent and logical reason to toss away local sovereignty and control to a nascent political union that was already being constructed on imperial lines. But for the ones who either weren’t that intellectually vain, or simply preferred to get the idea of an interdependent union from an attractive young woman whose nonthreatening message of unity and peace just made them feel good, well, here was the newly dubbed Prophet Rachela.

(The Wus didn’t bother selling the mystical idea of the Interdependency to the other families and large corporations that they and their conglomerate moved among. For those they took another tack instead: Support the Wus’ plan for rent-seeking disguised as an altruistic exercise for nation-building and in return get a monopoly on a specific, durable good or service—in effect, trade their current businesses, with their annoyingly spikey boom-and-bust cycles, for a stable, predictable and ceaseless income stream, for all time. Plus a discount on the tolls the Wus were about to enact on Flow travel. In point of fact these weren’t discounts at all, because the Wus were planning to charge for a thing that used to be without cost to anyone. But the Wus assumed that these families and companies would be so dazzled by the offer of an unassailable monopoly that they wouldn’t kick. Which turned out to be mostly correct.)