"Imagine the temple at the center of the proto-city, Senator. In ancient Egypt, perhaps. It is a house of the gods, but also an academy. Here, the priests study the skies, learn the motions of the stars, and create mathematics. The temple is also a government building; the priests document productivity and levy taxes, inventing the recordkeeping symbols that eventually become written language, literature, software, and artificial intelligence. But at its heart, the temple had to do one thing successfully, perform one task without which it was nothing."
His eyes almost glowed now, all deathly calm erased by his passion. He reached out toward her, fingers grasping at the air in his need to be understood.
Then quite suddenly her empathy flared, and she saw his point.
"A granary," she said. "Temples were granaries, weren't they?"
He smiled, sinking back with satisfaction.
"That was the source of all their power," he said. "Their ability to create art and science, to field soldiers, to keep the population whole in times of drought and flood. The excess wealth of the agricultural revolution. But a huge pile of grain is a very tempting target."
"For rats," Oxham said.
"Armies of them, breeding unstoppably, as any parasite will when a vast supply of food presents itself. Almost a biological law, a Law of Parasites: accumulated biomass attracts vermin. The deserts of Egypt swarmed with rats, an inexorable drain on the resources of the proto-city, a dam in the rushing stream of civilization."
"But a huge population of rats is also a tempting target, sire," Oxham said. "For the right predator."
"You are a very astute woman, Senator Nara Oxham."
Realizing that she had charmed him, Oxham continued his narrative. "And thus, from out of the desert a little-known beast emerged, sire. A small, solitary hunter that had previously avoided humanity. And it took up residence in the temples, where it hunted rats with great efficiency, preserving the precious excess grain."
The Emperor nodded happily, and took up the tale. "And the priests dutifully worshiped this animal, which seemed strangely acclimated to temple life, as if its rightful place had always been among the gods."
Oxham smiled. It was a pleasant enough story. Possibly containing some truth, or perhaps a strange outgrowth of a man's guilt, who had tortured so many of the creatures to death sixteen centuries ago.
"Have you seen the statues, Senator?"
"Statues, m'lord?"
A subvocalized command trembled upon the sovereign's jaw, and the faceted sky grew dark. The air chilled, and forms appeared around them. Of course, Oxham thought, the high canopy of diamond was not only for decoration; it housed a dense lattice of synesthesia projectors. The garden was, in fact, one vast airscreen.
Senator and Emperor were in a great stone space now. A few shafts of sunlight illuminated a suspension of particulate matter: dust from the rolling hills of grain that surrounded them. In this dim ambience the statues, which were carved from some smooth, jet stone, glistened, their skins as reflective as black oil. They sat upright in housecat fashion, forepaws tucked neatly together and tails curled. Their angular faces were utterly serene, their posture informed by the geometries of some simple, primordial mathematics. They were clearly gods; early and basic totems of protection. "These were the saviors of civilization," he said. "You can see it in their eyes."
To Senator Oxham, the eyes seemed blank, featureless black orbs into which one could write one's own madness.
The Emperor raised a finger, another signal.
Some of the motes of grainy dust grew, gaining substance and structure, flickering alight now with their own fire. They began to move, swirling into a shape that was somehow familiar to Oxham. The constellation of bright flairs formed a great wheel, slowly rotating around senator and sovereign. After a moment, Oxham recognized the shape. She had seen it all her life, on airscreen displays, in jeweled pendants, and in two-dimensional representations from the senatorial flag to the Imperial coat of arms. But she had never been inside the shape before--or rather, she had always been inside it: these were the thirty-four stars of the Eighty Worlds.
"This is our new excess grain, Senator. The material wealth and population of almost fifty solar systems, the technologies to bend these resources to our will, and infinitely long lives, time enough to discover the new philosophies that will be humanity's next astronomy, mathematics, and written language. But again this bounty is threatened from without."
Nara Oxham regarded the Emperor in the darkness. Suddenly, his obsessions did not seem so harmless.
"The Rix, Your Majesty?"
"These Rix, these vermin-worshiping Rix," he hissed. "Compelled by an insane religion to infect all humanity with their compound minds. It's the Law of the Parasite again: our wealth, our vast reserves of energy and information summon forth a host of vermin from out of the desert, who seek to drain our civilization before it can reach its true promise."
Even through the dulling effects of the apathy bracelet, Oxham felt the passion in the Emperor, the waves of paranoia that wracked his powerful mind. Despite herself, she'd been caught off-guard, so circuitously had he arrived at his point.
"Sire," Oxham said carefully, wondering how far the privilege of her office would really protect her in the face of the man's mania. "I was not aware that the compound mind phenomenon was so destructive. Host worlds don't suffer materially. In fact, some report greater efficiency in communications flow, easier maintainence of water systems, smoother air traffic."
The Emperor shook his head.
"But what is lost? The random collisions of data that inform a compound mind are human culture itself. That chaos isn't some peripheral by-product, it is the essence of humanity. We can't know what evolutionary shifts will never take place if we become mere vessels for this mutant software the Rix dare to call a mind."
Oxham almost pointed out the obvious, that the Emperor was voicing the same arguments against the Rix that the Secularists made against his own immortal rule: Living gods were never beneficial for human society. But she controlled herself. Even through apathy she could taste the man's conviction, the strange fixity of his thinking, and knew it was pointless to bring this subtle point to his attention now. The Rix and their compound minds were this Emperor's personal nightmare. She took a less argumentative tack.