The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(81)

But she had to know. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Chenevert, né King Tomas XII of Ponthieu, or his information. He had no particular reason to lie to her or to Marce. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and what Chenevert was claiming was the most extraordinary thing that Cardenia had ever heard. It had to be substantiated.

And, well, how to do that? The Imperial Library at Hubfall had the single largest library in the Interdependency, with five hundred million volumes of work in print and electronic form dating back to the Racheline days. The Imperial Library at Xi’an—technically Cardenia’s personal library as emperox, although open to visitors and researchers—had twenty million volumes, with a specific emphasis on the lives and administrations of the emperoxs. Trying to comb through even the smaller of these two, even in the significantly smaller numbers of the appropriate area of study, would take more time than Cardenia had, and would probably require more time than the Interdependency had before everything collapsed. And then there were the literally billions of other books and documents and theses around the Interdependency.

Never hide, just overwhelm, Cardenia thought. She thought about who it would be that would try to find the histories that had been hidden. And then she had another thought.

Well, I am in the Memory Room.

“Jiyi,” Cardenia said, calling forth the Memory Room’s default avatar, a creature without apparent age or gender. Jiyi appeared and stood before Cardenia, waiting.

“This room stores the memories and thoughts of all of the previous emperoxs,” Cardenia said.

“That’s correct,” said Jiyi.

“What else does it store?”

“It would help if you were more specific.”

“What do you have on the Rupture?”

“Are you asking about the notable third-century musical group, the motion picture from 877, or the pre-Interdependency historical event in which the Free Systems severed their connection with Earth and the Assembly?” Jiyi asked.

*

“So it’s true,” Marce said to Cardenia, that night, in bed.

“Not just true, but hidden,” Cardenia said. “Jiyi said that within fifty years of the Rupture it was the agreed-upon policy to refer to it as a natural event rather than instigated by the Free Systems. No one wanted to own it.”

“Because it was a terrible use of technology?”

“Because the Free Systems almost starved. They were as economically dependent on the other systems in the Assembly and Earth’s confederation as we all are with each other. Jiyi says numerous people pointed this out at the time, but the political will was to turn their backs on the other two unions. After they all got done congratulating each other, there were food and resource riots. Hundreds of thousands died and the Free Systems started raiding each other before everything got all straightened out.”

“They saw the folly of their ways.”

“No, the old guard died off and then the next generation decided never to speak of it again. And it worked, mostly.”

“Then how did Jiyi find it?”

“You’re not going to like the answer,” Cardenia said.

“I mean, I just found out today that Jiyi exists and lives in a secret room where you have conversations with ancestors who have been dead for hundreds of years, so I don’t know that anything you tell me will unsettle me more than that.”

“Jiyi goes through people’s stuff.”

“Okay, you’re right, I don’t like that,” Marce said. “How does that even work?”

“Jiyi is a thousand years old and has a mission to remember things. In that time it’s found its way to have its agents access every network across the Interdependency and find all the nooks and crannies where people store or access information. But not all information. The information that people actively try to hide. It sends its little programs out, and they find it and bring it back to Jiyi. Who then sits on it. Forever.”

“Why secret information?”

“Because non-secret information is already accessible. Jiyi’s programming doesn’t see the need to retrieve that. It only takes the information that’s hidden. Rachela programmed it that way. Or had it programmed that way, since I don’t think she was a programmer. I asked her about it today. She said, ‘When things are hidden, there are always people who will object.’ I guess she was the first.”

“Why didn’t she just tell you that Jiyi had been doing that for a thousand years?”

“Because she’s not a person. She’s a program and she only answers what you ask her. I didn’t ask her if Jiyi had the information.”

“That sounds evasive to me.”

“It sounds that way to me too.”

“So Jiyi knows everything.”

“No, Jiyi knows everything hidden. If it’s not hidden, Jiyi doesn’t record it because Jiyi doesn’t need to. It can just access that information like you or I do. But if it’s hidden it can disappear. And Jiyi doesn’t want that. It doesn’t mean Jiyi instantly knows everything that’s hidden. It’s not magic. It’s here and its agents are everywhere and it takes them time to come back. But Jiyi is patient like nothing else in the universe is patient. Sooner or later it finds everything it sets out to find. It may take decades or longer. But it finds it.”