She knew that anything short of swift denial was treasonous, but she couldn't bring herself to lie.
"I don't know, sir." She half-closed her eyes, her face tense as if awaiting a blow from an angry parent's hand.
But Captain Zai said, "I don't either, Hobbes. I don't either." He turned away again, and they went up to the bridge.
Senator
The garden had changed.
Arciform sand dunes still dominated the walk to its center, but the scorpions had been replaced with desert flowers. The many fountains still played their tricks of orientation, lovely gravity wells bending the water through playfully twisted paths, but the liquid was now phosphorescent, the drops sparkling like the last glimmers from a firework display. The sinuous and threatening vines Nara Oxham remembered lining the walk had been done away with. Ranks of tulips framed the spiraling path now. Purple and black, their petals were variegated with red lines caused--she remembered--by a virus.
They were quite beautiful, though.
Senator Oxham wondered if these changes to the Emperor's garden were part of some weekly redecoration, or if the lighthearted touches were a response to war, a curative for the sovereign's cares. The short journey through the garden certainly seemed less threatening now.
Oxham shook her head, realizing that her own assurance had nothing to do with the flowers or sparkling waters. She was simply no longer intimidated by the Imperial mystique.
The dead man waited for her at the center.
"Counselor," he greeted her.
"Good day, Sire."
"Please be seated, Senator Oxham."
Oxham sat in the floating chair. It seemed to remember her, adapting to her shape more quickly than it had the first time she'd come to the Diamond Palace.
It was strange to meet the sovereign again outside the presence of the War Council. The precisely balanced tensions of that group had become so familiar, their range of emotional reactions so predictable. Oxham felt a sense of dislocation. Perhaps that was why the Emperor had reconfigured his garden, to put her subtly ill at ease.
A cat leaped into her lap, startling her. The creature was the color of gray ash, with an apricot-colored mask and white paws. Oxham ran her hand along its back, feeling with quiet distaste the ridges of the symbiant.
"Does it have a name, Sire?" she asked.
"Alexander."
"He seeks new worlds to conquer, then."
The Emperor smiled wanly. "Perhaps." She could see the emotions in the dead man clearly. Anxiety, tempered with the confidence of a well-laid plan. Oxham had set her apathy bracelet perilously low, but here, shut off from the raging city, her sensitivity was bright. She remembered Roger Niles's warnings, and determined that she would make no mistakes today.
"To what do I owe this honor, Your Majesty?"
The sovereign reached under his chair. He produced a small human skull, turned so that its eye sockets stared at her.
Oxham stiffened slightly, and the little beast on her lap betrayed her reaction with wide-eyed annoyance at the motion.
"Forgive me, Senator," the sovereign apologized.
"I am your servant, Majesty." Oxham stealthily jabbed the cat with a fingernail, but it simply purred.
She regarded the skull. At first, it seemed to be that of a child, but the cheekbones jutted ahead of the brow, and the teeth were arrayed in an uncorrected, pretechnology jumble. Along with the sloping forehead, these characteristics suggested the diminutive skull of an ancient hominid adult.
"Another history lesson, Sire?"
"An illustrative example, Senator." He rotated the skull in his hand, tipped it to face him as if he were going to play Hamlet. Now its top was to Oxham, and she saw the holes.
There were four of them in a rectangle, each a few centimeters across, the two closer to the front much larger. Old cracks emanated from the holes. Only a sealant of gleaming transparent plastic kept the skull from crumbling in the Emperor's hand.
Nara swallowed. This example might be a grim one.
"Some ancient form of execution, Sire?"
He shook his head. Another cat appeared from among the tulips and wound between the legs of her chair, then disappeared.
"Just an old story, for those who can read it."
"I'm afraid I cannot, Liege."
"This creature, one of our honored ancestors, lived on the African continent of Earth Prime." "In Egypt?"
"Farther south," he corrected. "Before there were nations. At the edge of humanity's existence, when tools were first emerging."
Oxham nodded. This skull was old indeed. What a long, strange journey it had taken, to wind up here in this dead man's hand.
"They lived in darkness, without language or fire. No agriculture, of course. Her people had no rudiments of civilization. They had no writing or spoken language."
"What did they eat, Sire?"
"Wild plants, from the ground. Distasteful."
"I've eaten wild plants, Sire."
"Vasthold has a primeval charm."
"It did when I left it."
The sovereign turned the skull to face her. "She and her people lived in lava funnel caves, massive and deep, extensive enough to support their own food web. Our ancestors had a stable and protected niche. We would be there still if they hadn't been driven outward into the sun."
Oxham's eyes narrowed as she looked at the holes again.
"The teeth of a predator, Your Majesty?"
"Dinofelis. Extinct long before the diaspora."
The senator took a deep breath, realizing that the Emperor had returned to his favorite theme.
"I take it, Sire, that this animal is one of the great cats?" Until a few years ago, Oxham had always assumed the creatures legendary, created by the Apparatus at an Imperial whim. But the Imperial Zoo here on Home held a small, inbred family of lions that were generally believed to be natural. Awful beasts from a childhood nightmare, four times the size of any predator on "primeval" Vasthold.
The Emperor nodded happily. "A creature more than two meters long, when humans stood under a meter and a half. It possessed so-called false-saber teeth. Knives in its mouth."
The Emperor of the Eighty Worlds made a claw of four fingers with his right hand, and plunged them into the holes. Oxham removed her hand from the purring creature on her lap.
"The great cats lived deeper in the caves than our ancestors, in the absolute darkness beyond the humans' twilight domain."