The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(72)
As a consequence of this, the Flow stream between Marlowe and Kealakekua was only infrequently used for legitimate shipping and travel. It had instead become a favorite of smugglers, pirates and others who didn’t mind taking a little extra time if it meant avoiding navy interceptors and local customs enforcement. When the Flow stream disappeared, no legitimate commerce or transportation was listed as lost. The eight ships and one thousand people who were lost were all on private, unlisted or illegal transports. There was no paperwork for their itineraries, no bills of lading and no record of their comings and goings. They were, simply, gone. Their customers, clients and loved ones would never know what had become of them, because they would not necessarily have known they had taken that route at all.
The second stream was not so obscure. It connected the systems of Guelph and Szeged, both systems considered part of the population and economic “core” of the Interdependency. Due to the nature of the Flow, the Count Claremont’s work on its collapse and the estimated schedule of Flow disruptions had yet to make it to Guelph, and the commerce and travel between the two systems was in full flower when the Flow stream collapsed, unannounced and, to the people of Guelph, unpredicted.
The impact was immense. Tens of thousands of people disappeared, including two passenger ships, the Allure of the Stars and the Oasis of the Stars, which between them carried ten thousand souls. More than a billion marks of commerce evaporated. The journey from Guelph to Szegred, previously seven days and eight hours, would now be more than a month through alternate routes.
The return route from Szegred to Guelph remained open, but Szegred stopped all traffic outbound for fear of a similar collapse. Guelph stopped all its commercial traffic to its three other exiting Flow shoals until an explanation could be found. The explanation would arrive from Hub more than a month and billions of marks of lost commerce later. It was a wound on the cultural soul of Guelph that would never fully heal.
Along with the disappearance of these two Flow streams, the phenomenon of evanescence, sketched out to Grayland by Marce and Roynold, was having its effect as well, tearing open a Flow stream between Oecusse and Artibonite that lasted, unnoticed, a week before disappearing in as unheralded a fash ion as it arrived. It was just as well that no enterprising ship had tried to enter its temporary shoal, as the transit time between the two systems would have been along the order of five weeks, longer than the stream itself would exist.
A stream of even shorter duration, between End and Neunkirchen, existed for fifteen minutes; a corresponding return stream would open up seven minutes later and disappear twenty minutes afterward. Like the stream between Oecusse and Artibonite, it would go unnoticed in either system. But briefly End, traditionally the most isolated system in the Interdependency, and recently even more isolated than usual, had a back door in and out of it. That no one knew it, or could have used it, didn’t change the fact that it had been there.
*
In the Memory Room, Cardenia called up Rachela I, the first prophet-emperox, who stood before her, silent, waiting for her to ask something.
“Did you ever have doubts?” Cardenia asked.
“About what?” Rachela I said.
Cardenia laughed. Because of course that was the most Rachela answer possible. Cardenia had summoned up the memory of the first emperox numerous times now, to discuss the nature of visions, and how to sell them and how to make them stick, if not to the members of the nobility, then to the masses, to whom they were pitched in the first place. In all the time Cardenia had been talking to her great-great-great-ancestress, Rachela had never once projected (figuratively and literally, as her image was projected from clever lighting in the Memory Room’s ceiling) anything other than serene confidence.
Some of that was probably because Cardenia’s Rachela was not the real Rachela, just a bundle of memories and emotions animated by a heuristic-oriented AI that could tell you what Rachela was feeling at a particular moment in time, but couldn’t feel that emotion itself. Or any of the emotions of any of eighty-seven previous emperoxs, including her father. Cardenia was aware that technically speaking, none of these emperoxs existed and she was merely talking to Jiyi, the Memory Room’s avatar, who put on the former emperoxs like she might put on a new shirt. But when Rachela I or Attavio VI was standing in front of you, it was easy to forget you weren’t speaking to the actual person.
But computer simulation or not, lack of actual emotion or not, it was still the case that at least some of the residue of every emperox’s personality came through in conversation. Emperoxs who had been neurotic talked and answered questions like a neurotic person. The blustery, stupid ones gave blustery and stupid answers. The creepy ones—and there were a few—were made even creepier by the lack of overt emotion.
Rachela I’s affect wasn’t creepy, or blustery or neurotic. She was just … Rachela. Confident. A sort of confidence Grayland was getting good at pretending at, but still working on actually feeling.
Grayland considered Rachela I’s question. “All right, did you ever have doubts about anything?”
“Of course. Only a sociopath lacks doubt, and I wasn’t a sociopath when I was alive.”
“Are you now?”
“If you brought a psychiatrist in here and had them give me an evaluation, I would probably come across as a sociopath. I currently fundamentally lack empathy, although I can pretend to it. Which may be a textbook definition of sociopathy. I don’t have any doubts now, certainly.”