His Majesty King Adijine VI sat in the great solar, at one end of a mighty table too long to be used for purely vocal discussion without amplification. He listened to the chief ambassadorial emissary for the Engineers of the Chapel as he forcefully outlined some subsidiary position on possible technological cooperation should the hoped-for peace be forthcoming. The emissary’s voice boomed out across the hall. Possibly, thought the King, the emissary would not have required amplification.
The chief ambassadorial emissary was a fully sentient human-chimeric; a man in the guise of an animal – in this case ursus maritimus, a polar bear. Such creatures were generally frowned upon; animals were seen as the final resting place – or at any rate one of the last resting places – for the crypt-corroded souls of the long dead, but the clan Engineers had a tradition of such beasts. It had been something of an aggressive statement for the Chapel usurpers to make, appointing such a being as their main representative at the talks. Adijine didn’t care.
He was finding the chief ambassadorial emissary’s tirade tiring; certainly in the course of providing the bear’s body with vocal equipment capable of reproducing human speech the Chapel scientists had created a powerful and profoundly bassy instrument, but one could grow weary of it all the same, and the man within the beast ought to leave the sort of detail he was now dealing in to his retinue. However, as well as liking the sound of his own voice, the chief ambassadorial emissary seemed unable to delegate effectively, and Adijine had rather lost interest in the substance of what was now being discussed.
He switched away.
Like the other Privileged, the King had no implants, save for those which would be used only once, to record and transmit his personality when he died. Unlike most of them he had access to technologies that allowed him the benefits of implants without the drawbacks, giving him unrestrained one-way access to all those with implants and – in the right circumstances – even those without them. It did mean he had to wear the crown to make it all work, but he had a choice of several attractive models of crown, all of which were tastefully designed and sat lightly on one’s head.
In theory the regal paradigm best expressed the reality of modern power – better than a commercial, civil or military archetype for example – and certainly it seemed that people were happy enough with a kind of benignly dictatorial meritocracy which at any given moment looked somewhat like a real monarchy -with primogeniture and fully hereditary status – but wasn’t.
Actually he suspected few people these days really believed that in the past kings and queens had been chosen by the accident of birth (and this when it really had been an accident and even their crude attempts at improving their bloodstock tended to result in in-breeding rather than regal thoroughbreds). Equally, though, the sheer grandiosity of the stage that Serehfa itself presented might be seen to demand an imperial repertoire.
The King entered the minds of the men behind the walls.
Twenty troops of his bodyguard were concealed behind the paper partitions lining the room. He scanned each quickly – on principle, really, they were thoroughly programmed – and then focused on their commander. He was watching the scene in the hall on a visor monitor. Adijine followed the man’s slow sweep of the view and listened to quiet system chatter coming over his audio implants. Head-ups flickered on and off as the guard commander’s gaze fell on individuals in the room.
His gaze settled on the King for a second, and Adijine had the always rather strange experience of looking at himself through another’s eyes. He looked fine; handsome, tall, regal, impressively robed, the light crown sitting straight on his curly black locks, and by his expression paying due but not deferential attention to what the polar-bear emissary was saying.
Adijine admired himself for a while longer. He had been bred to be King; not in the ancients’ crude hit-or-miss interpretation of the words but in the literal sense that the crypt had designed him; given him the aspect, bearing and character of a natural ruler before he’d even been born, selecting his physical and mental attributes from a variety of sources to make him handsome, attractive, charming, gracious and wise, balancing wit against gravitas, human understanding against moral scrupulousness and a love of the finer things in life against an urge towards simplicity. He inspired loyalty, was difficult to hate, brought out the best in men and women and had great but not total power which he had the sense and modesty to use sparingly but authoritatively. Not for the first time, Adijine thought what a damn fine figure of a man he was.
He looked like an absolute ruler, even though he wasn’t; he shared his power with the twelve representatives of the Consistory. They were his advisers, or better, his board; he was managing director. He controlled the physical realm of the structure through the other clans, the personal loyalty he commanded from the masses, and the Security services (now including the newly formed Army), while the men and women of the Consistory spoke for the crypt itself and the elite body of Cryptographers who formed the interface between the data corpus and humanity. It was a nicely balanced arrangement, as was proven by the fact it had existed for multi-generations of monarchs. Nothing had disturbed the calm face of old Earth for millennia until that Nessian cloak of darkness had started to stain the heavens.
Adijine watched as the guard commander’s gaze curved above his King, then around him, then resumed its slow sweep.
Adijine had hoped to find the man day-dreaming, but the guard commander wasn’t thinking of anything at all; he was on automatic pilot, watching, listening, being professional. He did day-dream, very occasionally (it would have been suspicious in the extreme had he never done so) but he wasn’t at the moment. Adijine switched again.
The colonel-in-chief of the Security services was herself remoting into another mind, watching a meeting of clan Cryptography chief programmers through the mind of one who was trying to suppress thoughts of republicanism and revolution. Utterly boring. The colonel-in-chief had a robust, healthy and inventive sex-life and Adijine had spent many a happy hour with her and her partners, but everything seemed to be strictly business right now.
His private secretary was receiving details of a conversation his construct had just had with the shade of the late Count Sessine. Oh yes, thought the King; poor Count Sessine. He’d always felt a certain empathy with Sessine. The private secretary was eating lunch at the same time; anchovy salad. The King detested anchovies rather more than his private secretary adored them, and so switched again.
His seneschal was surveying the zeteticist team monitoring the Chapel usurper party for stray noetic radiations. Boring and incomprehensible.
His current favourite courtesan was remoting into the mind of a mathematician contemplating an elegant proof – the court retained many mathematicians, philosophers and aesthetes to provide this sort of vicarious epiphany – but Adijine found the third-hand experience less than absorbing.
How frustrating to attempt to pry on people only to discover they were in turn spying on others.
He checked that the ursine ambassadorial emissary was still talking (he was, and the King allowed himself a pre-emptive gloat at how the emissary was going to feel when the bomb workings in the fifth-level south-western solar came on line and he realised that this entire negotiation was just a materielly inexpensive exercise in time-wasting), then the King dipped into minds elsewhere in Serehfa; a peruker in a tower-roof terrace-town, crouched over her latest extravagant creation; a cliometrician carrelled half-asleep in a bartizan high on the east fifth level; a moirologist petitioning in the sacristy of the northern upper chapel; a funambulist reaping babilia on the pyramid spur of a shell-wall tower.
Prosaic.
He checked on his spyers, clinging to ledges and lintels, shivering on shingles and cinquefoils, hooked and netted under hoardings and machicolations or just crawling like half-frozen fleas through the gilled vertical forest of high altitude babilia while they watched the lofty, cold, snowy slopes and plains of the high castle for enemy movement, or just something interesting… Another one dead on the tenth-level northern pentice; the spyer-master Yastle insisted acclimatised men could survive at ten thousand metres, but the poor devils kept proving him wrong… A faller from the seventh level butry gable … One watching the black smoke drift inside the white, a tiny snow-scene within the cold cauldron of the Southern Volcano Room… One on the south side of the octal tower, snow-blinded and raving… Another in a mullion of the seventh-level western clerestory, holding his black, frostbitten fingers up in front of his face, crying, knowing that he would never get down now. Little wonder people thought spyers must be mad. Less dangerous to be a spy.