Well, this was more terrifying than I’d expected.
My idea, because I was stupid.
I was surrounded by hundreds of powerful cultivators. I recognized a fair number of them from Sesako’s endless battles. I was sure all of them recognized me.
I mean I hadn’t killed anyone. Not directly. But I don’t know if they knew about the difference between me and Sesako, and I suspected that none of them cared very much. They’d happily kill me to get Sesako, even if they knew it was me in control at the moment.
The entire defensive formation was formed up in an inward facing sphere around me.
There were too many of them to escape. We’d die. Very, very dead if they decided to kill me.
I mean it wouldn’t have been impossible for Sesako to pull another rabbit out of the hat if he’d been the one in control of the body — but if things went wrong, we’d die in the couple of seconds that it would take for Sesako to switch into the hot seat.
The emperor was an honorable man.
Or at least that was how he presented himself. I’d presented myself under a flag of truce, and almost certainly he’d let me fly away afterwards.
This was really, really fucking terrifying.
So many big heavy crossbows pointed at my back.
The emperor had established his huge array of firing groups in the air around the forts, and he’d been lobbing stones at us for half a day. About two thirds of the defensive energy had been burned through. We had waited as long as we could, so that more and more enchantments could be placed into the dragons.
The emperor floated up to meet us.
He looked like a movie star — tanned, tousled thick hair, a young face that was somehow also ancient and timeless, and a lopsided smile. I hadn’t been able to see his face the other time we met, except indistinctly through the visor of his armor.
The only visible flaw on his body was the twisted skin from the scar that Sesako’s father had given it. The top of it was visible over the collar of his robes.
“My darling!” He spoke gaily. “I do love visitors. Though I suppose I am the visitor. You all have an unkind way of greeting guests. This endless warring. Blood, blood, blood. Many people in my camp are quite displeased with you.”
“As they would say where I’m from, a man’s home is his castle. When one makes a mess of things when they visit, they often are not invited back.”
The emperor laughed. “My darling! You are not Sesako then, but rather the other — I suspected as much. You do not have the manner of a great warrior. But I like you, nevertheless. I like you a great deal — though you are a person of questionable expectations.”
I smiled thinly. “Your expectations are also questionable.”
“I delight in hearing tales of everything you say and do — I have so many spies you know. Especially with matters that have no obvious military importance. There are a great many people who will tell a friend who asks nicely every tale of the other who shares Sesako half the time. And then those people will tell their cousin. And then that cousin will tell the story to his friend, and thus it comes to me, in the most garbled and indirect manner — and thus, in matters of gossip, I am as well informed as any old hen. You understand thus what I mean by spies?”
“You mean to say you don’t want us to start looking for your actual spies.”
He laughed. He exuded a pure sort of confidence. “It shall make no difference, but my darling, I wish you were Sesako for a simple reason — can he hear what you say.”
“Yes.”
“I am sorry — I speak to Sesako now. I do not speak this lightly, but as an emperor who none have a right to question, and who chooses of his own volition to speak in this way: I did wrong when I killed your mother, and your sister and your brother. You must have always suspected that it was not simply a matter of ill luck that I chose the house of the one who had struck a brutal wound against me to destroy, that it was not only brutal luck through which I killed your mother and your innocent siblings. It was not. I was in great pain, and I was full of rage — I had not been hurt so since… Perhaps I had never been in such pain. And I felt the lingering touch of his blood, from all that distance, for when I was struck by the soul, I was infused with a sense of him, and of his knowledge. And filled with that pain, I chose with my final blow to strike at the house where he came from. That was a mistake. I ought not have done that. But apologies are worthless in such a matter. All that is left after the brutal and casual murder of a family is the pursuit of revenge. And I shall not permit myself to be revenged against.”
Sesako felt something.
I could not actually tell what it was, but at least it was not rage. I was glad about that, but not surprised. “Sesako hopes you die, but I convinced him that your death should not be his only goal.”
The emperor laughed.
I was again struck: He did not think there was anything for him to fear in my presence.
There wasn’t much. “But my darling, what brings you here under a signal sign of truce. Well?”
“I just wanted to ask you, what do you get out of being the emperor? What really is it that you want, underneath the obvious wants, what are the deeper wants?”
He stared at me agog — I perceived that some of the emperor’s men found that question equally absurd. Who wouldn’t want to be the emperor?
His smile crossed his face again. “Prophecy, eh. Trying to beat prophecy at its own game. I’ll tell you this. The sheer joy of ruling, of being the man who when I say act, everyone must act, is not a small part of it. No, my darling, it is good to be the king.”
“Yes, but heavy lies the head that wears the crown.”
“A poet! A poet! Such innovativeness. Philosophy, innovations in runework. And chiefly a desire to convince all of the rich of the world to be more charitable. And now poetry.”
“That was from the greatest poet in my native language. He died five hundred years ago. Wait, four hundred.”
The emperor giggled. “Which is it? Neither. You are not in your world, and I doubt very much that the time here corresponds in any clear way to that in your own world. But yes, yes. A great poet — you are a civilized man. I too on occasion quote great poets. I quote myself, my darling, often. So, you are here to convince me to abdicate, eh? Such will not happen.”
I shrugged. “I don’t expect you to. But… I want the idea to be in your mind… there are many ways for a land to be ruled. Where I was from there were no kings and emperors — we ruled ourselves.”
“You ruled yourselves?”
“Our leader was selected by a vote of all the adults, everyone whether they were a man or a woman, or wealthy or poor. All of the citizens select a new leader every four years. He served us, rather than the other way around.”
The emperor laughed. “You are from a wholly different sort of place if any leader actually saw himself as a servant.”
I laughed. “Not that different. All of our presidents thought very highly of themselves. But they also all knew that they were not the sovereign. Not the king. The president did not rule by his own right, but rather only because he could get each four years more people to say they liked him than the others who were trying to convince us to pick them — we only once had a man lead us for more than eight years.”
“Your leaders were generally not particularly popular then? My darling, that is a fascinating story. But I hardly —”
“There are great men. There are respected men. There are wealthy men. There are an infinite set of ways to be happy without being the single ruler.”
“Ah, yes.” The emperor tousled his hair with his hand again, and he grinned at me. “Trying to get me to handle the prophecy differently, eh? Since you assume it is a prophecy — everyone assumes it is a prophecy. I’ll not say that it was in fact a prophecy, but I’ll also not say that it was not. What I will say to my dear friend is this: I’ve no notion of giving up my leadership.”
“What are you truly trying to achieve? What makes you happy? I do not believe you are a man whose sole joy is in the domination of others.”
He studied me. “Come closer. Much closer. I promise not to hurt you.”
I did as he asked.
When we were close enough to him that we could touch, he reached out and placed his hands to either side of my temple. The chi around us twisted weirdly, and we were suddenly elsewhere. I knew that this place where we were was a figment of our combined imaginations.
And to my surprise Sesako stood there also, together with me in this shared dream space.
I noticed that the avatar of the emperor here did not have his scar.
Sesako snarled at him instantly, “Not enough! It is not enough! Not fucking enough. You need to suffer.”
“I’ve no intention to suffer.” The emperor pursed his lips, tapped his chin, tilted his head. He shrugged. “Nope, not any intention — really, what good would it do your dead mother if I did suffer.”
“I want you to suffer for your own sake, not hers.”
“You mean that you want me to suffer for your sake. Not for my own. Eh, and maybe you’ll succeed but I doubt it. And if you do make me suffer… eh, I’ve lived a long life. And darling mine, it has been my experience that those who achieved vengeance tend not to any great happiness afterwards. A few might, but you won’t be. You don’t have the temperament for it. Not my business! Not my business! Try, try, try all day. And I’ll try to live and enjoy my life. End.”
“Uhhhhh,” I said, rather anxious due to this scheme that clearly appealed to Sesako.
“Oh, don’t worry.” The emperor smiled. “I’ve no intention to ever kill you, no matter how hard Sesako tries to convince me that I would be safer if I did. IT could happen as an accident. I’m not stupid, and I’ll not be exploited in that way. I’ll pull no punches in a direct fight. But you are too interesting, and too valuable of a piece on the board for me to kill you just because you mean to kill me.”
“And what game are you playing?”
The emperor smiled thinly. “Several games at once! Any game worth playing is ridiculously complicated. But the chief one is a desire to avoid the death of everyone in the world.”
Sesako snorted.
“What precisely did the prophecy say?”
“Hmmmm. I wish it was only you here and that Sesako wasn’t also present. You are young, are you not? My darling, I heard it said that you were less than thirty when you died in your world. Because there was no magic to retard aging.”
“Do you mean I am not wise enough to hear the dangerous information you have to say?”
“You are wise enough. You have a philosopher’s training, an awareness of your own fallibility, and above all else, everything you say indicates that if you become convinced that you have followed the wrong path, you can change your course — you, on the other hand, my darling angry friend,” he said to Sesako, “Cannot be convinced of anything you do not wish to be convinced of.”
“You enjoy telling your nonsense to a coward who is easily blown about by the wind.” Sesako sneered.
“No, no, no. My darling, you know that he is no more a coward than you. Nor than I. Nor so easily blown about in the wind. I am more of a coward than both of you together. I have never been put to the test, but I think I would go to great extremes to avoid my own death.”
“Then why haven’t you killed Sesako?” I exclaimed.
“Since he will keep trying and trying to kill me? A very reasonable question. First, it is a matter of honor to not kill the last of his father’s children. Not after the way I took my revenge on him that first day. If I was convinced it was a matter of my death or Sesako’s I would not let that consideration of honor stop me. I would not. No, what stops me simply is this:” He turned to Sesako “Until you became a celestial, I had no reason to fear you. You never showed the slightest inclination to try a suicidal attack on me like Kisiko used in the end. And now, when you might one day grow to be my equal, or even superior…” The emperor shrugged. “Partly a matter of curiosity and honor, and partly a matter of prophecy.”
“The prophecy,” Sesako replied with a tone that was caught between a compulsive sneer and curiosity, “That you do not believe you ought to tell me.”
“I’ll certainly not speak the exact words to you. You know how they fulfill themselves. This one was more nonsense than most. But first, I’ll ask you —” He spoke now to me. “Young traveler from another world. In the place you are from, what was known of the secrets of the deep metal.”
“I do not wish to give you tools that can cause destruction if you do not have them already. If you tell me something of what you know about it, I can confirm whether it was the same in my world, but I won’t tell you anything more specific.”
“Very good. Well, once I discovered the material’s ability to produce the power that would come from the fifth dantian — yes, such a thing could exist Sesako Though it is not present in us, so we cannot try to open it. I am glad of that — I decided to use that power to run a spell to scry out the future. I assumed that the more I knew, the better the future would be.”
“Any stable self-reinforcing loop would be one that you could tolerate.”
“Precisely! — eh, but what I saw was a mix of things. A range of futures detailed and yet vague. In some I died.”
“And if the dragons live you will die?”
“In some of these futures everyone on the planet died.”
“That is impossible,” Sesako said. “You are making up nonsense, because we cannot confirm it.”
“It is possible.” I said. “There were several possible ways known to my people to kill everyone.”
The emperor smiled thinly at Sesako “I shared your shock. It ought to be impossible to kill everyone. How could universal death be achieved? There is no magic that could do so. I certainly could not have killed everyone — the dragons could not obviously. I had no notion at first when I saw this vision of a dead world — everyone dead, except the dragons flapping over the ruined destruction, I had no notion of what could have happened. In truth I still only have half an idea.”
I opened and closed my mouth several times.
“But my darling traveler. You simply say, ‘your people know how to do it’. So simple.”
“It would not be simple — but it is the chief thing to worry about. The scope of the future for humanity was vast and immense, and if everyone died, that would be much worse — at least according to many moral theories — than if merely many billions died. It would be bad because then there would be none of the humans who would be born a trillion years from now. All of those good lives would be prevented from ever happening.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
The emperor laughed. “A trillion years from now?” He then nodded, as though some hypothesis had been confirmed. “You said you would speak if my hypothesis about the deep metal is correct — is the deep metal the source of destruction that hangs over your world.”
“You are guessing.”
“Perhaps.” He shrugged.
“If you fear that metal, why did you use it to construct your island?”
“Ha! He laughed. “A worthy question. And one to which I do not have a worthy answer. Or not one that is more than half worthy. I was curious about whether I could. But the second point is actually simple: There is a nexus of destruction around the dragons. In my visions there were two possibilities — two chief possibilities of a pathway by which that destruction could be averted. In the one I somehow handed my crown to the dragons, and I no longer ruled in any way. And in the other, I triumphed over them, and destroyed them utterly.”
He smiled thinly.
I swallowed.
“Ah, darling. You see, don’t you? Naturally any man who has a taste for rule — or a taste for certainty. Either would be sufficient, would choose one of those two options rather than the other. So, I chose to kill the dragons.”
“You should have thrown everything to the ground rather than kill the Great Ones. They are better than you.” Sesako said.
“Yes, but I am not the sort of man who will submit to any man nor to any beast. Whether they are better than me is not a matter I consider. I will resist any attempt to dominate me.”
“If you dislike domination, why do you seek to dominate the whole of the world?” I asked.
He sneered. “It is a simple matter: One must rule or be ruled. There is no other option.”
“In my world it was not so. Everyone was equal — the founding charter of our nations stated that clearly: All men are created equal.”
“Created? — ah, but I do not think man was created. Man is an odd clawing thing, which raised itself above the animals through an unusual talent for magic, and the ability to speak.”
“The ability to speak is a chief part of what makes all men equal. And you do not need to say that I am then implying that those who cannot speak are not equal. Everyone, disabled or not, ought to be protected by society. Any of us could been born disabled if we had sufficiently bad luck, so —”
The emperor laughed. His friendly confidence returned. “You are an odd fellow. Odd, odd, odd. But my darling, that was not an objection which would have ever occurred to me. No, it would not have if I lived a second thousand years. Which I plan to — I take it that there were those in your world who took it upon themselves to speak for those village idiots who could not learn to speak for themselves.”
“Many of them with proper care and training can be taught to speak — some are just deaf. And —”
“Yes, yes. I am sure. And I am sure helping them is yet another one of that endless list of things which you consider as possibly being the greatest good that you can do, and you will torture yourself over the possibility that you are making a terrible mistake by not helping those who had their tongues cut out.”
“Do you do that?”
“Nature does it to the village idiots you wish to help.”
“I mostly want healers who can manage the diseases that cause significant disability. It would be best, if at all possible, to prevent such problems.”
“My darling, you are easily distracted: Sesako, what is the chief point in this conversation?”
Sesako growled at the peremptory way the emperor spoke to him.
The emperor raised his eyebrow. “Well?”
“That you are a selfish creature who would rather destroy the purest souls in the world than give up your filthy throne.”
“I can assure you that I have servants who keep the throne room pristine —think the worst of me! Please! But be interesting — Isaac, that is your name I believe?”
“It was my name.”
“Ah, you are not sure if the name still belongs to you, or if it perhaps remained with the version of you in the other world.”
“He is dead.”
“Is that certain? Unfortunate. Hmmm. But the chief point here is this: How many methods did your people discover that might destroy the world and everyone in it?”
I swallowed.
“Methods that we could already use when I died… in honesty all of the methods already developed were unlikely to kill everyone. We had three methods that could definitely kill most people on earth, one of them was —”
“Don’t tell me! Do not trust me, nor Sesako, nor Fitzuki, nor anyone with such knowledge.”
“You already have the knowledge of one such method.”
“Ah. The belief of your great councils — or at least the ones you were aware of — was that the deep metal was unlikely to kill everyone — did you know how it could poison the land?”
“We did. But perhaps there is more danger to it here. Maybe the poison lasts longer and spreads over a greater distance onto the crops than in my world.”
“Spreads over greater areas — ha!” He turned and grinned at Sesako. “And you meant to destroy it? I suspect no one would have been able to live in the great Yatamo bay for centuries.”
I felt like I’d been hit by a sledgehammer. How had I been so stupid?
“But the deep metal was not enough. Your clever, clever, clever researchers — you wanted to defeat death. You wanted to defeat limits. Everyone was a commoner, and there was a scheme that would call forth something, for the greatest good. And your idea about how to create this greatest good involved creating something that might kill everyone. It would have to be capable of enormous destruction if it would be capable of doing much good.”
“There was a great deal of work going on about how to manage each of the technological terrors that might —”
“Don’t tell me. It is enough you created them. It is enough that I know that you know of three that might kill everyone. You could accidentally describe them to me in enough detail that with a couple of decades of work, I could recreate them.” The emperor sighed. He rubbed his hand over his face.
“Forget about me,” Sesako said. His voice was different from the other times he had spoken to the emperor. It was thoughtful and quiet. “If this is your belief, why don’t you want to kill him.”
“Oh, I considered it. I even thought of violating the flag of truce. The one chance to break my word in a blatant and public manner. Since everyone trusts it — I would you know. You can trust no one if the stakes are high enough.”
“You have no character.” Sesako snapped back to the emperor. “Just a pretense of honor.”
Sesako wasn’t right.
I didn’t think that the emperor would not break his word to save his own life or maybe not even his own kingdom. If he would have… he wouldn’t have told me that he would. At least that was how it seemed to me. But I had no sense of what he truly was like as a statesman.
“So, I’ll tell you simply: I do not know. That is why I will still kill your Great Ones. In case it is not too late — but you see, if Isaac here is the poison, it has already been poured into the nervous system of the world. Everything you talk about. A world where everyone has the health, vitality and power of a celestial. A world where there is no hunger — where disease and suffering are banished forever. Where the animals we eat do not suffer, either because we have all become meatless, or because we have replaced meat with the consumption of completely mindless creatures. You talk about even helping insects — and parts of this dream resonate. Sesako, darling, are you not a little inspired?”
Sesako did not reply, but he smiled grimly.
“I am inspired even more than you are. A part of me thinks, ‘would that not be amazing, interesting — something that would give a purpose beyond simple survival and life. A thing that my empire could bring to humanity which would lead to my name being sung for all of eternity.”
“It is also worthy to be done for its own sake.”
“It is worthy. We are all connected. I am part of this great scope of history. I am from another world. You too are from another world. And we have made so many friends here. And imagine, imagine if we never had to say goodbye. Imagine if those who the poets sang, if they all could stand amongst us still, and we could praise them ourselves for their great and martial deed.”
“But,” I said, “I’d also sing the deeds of the great healers, and those who fed many. In my world, in my small community, there were those who we sang, who were great beneficiaries of mankind. Names that we chose to remember even though most of our civilization had forgotten what they owed to them. Norman Borlaug, a man who developed varieties of wheat and fertilizer that fed a billion men. Edward Jenner, who developed the first vaccine, the tool did more than anything else to stop the children from dying of disease. And Stanislav Petrov, a man whose caution perhaps prevented a war fought with deep metal — praise those of martial virtue if you must. But do not forget the more important virtues.”
The emperor nodded at my words. “Death itself. The great enemy, and even that could be beaten — you talk as though you believe it can be done. You talk as though it was merely a… a grand homework assignment for all of humanity. I have such cynicism in me that you cannot even imagine, but even my heart beats faster and leaps at this notion.”
“I do not believe you are a cynic.”
“Damn it. Damn, damn damn. My darling: Why didn’t you think before you shared this dream?”
“It is a noble dream. And it was one I believed in, and hoped for, and that inspired me — a future where everything in the universe had been turned into things useful for humans, where every star burned to provide life for us. Where we occupied every corner of the universe. And where we had everything that was permitted by physics. And in this world, there would be no death, and the only sorrow that would exist would be those sorts of sorrows that serve to make life more beautiful, more perfect, and also more fun. The real goal was to make everything fun forever. If we spread across all of the galaxies, and everywhere that can be reached by moving nearly as quickly as light itself, there could be more humans living in the future than there are grains of sand on every beach in all the world.”
“You knew. You knew that this dream could kill everyone.”
“No, I mean — age extension, and…” The idea had always been there amongst transhumanists and singularitarians that superhuman AI was the likeliest pathway to discovering hacks in the laws of physics and the nature of biology that would allow us to really win. The idea was joked about, half seriously as creating AI Jesus.
Humans weren’t smart enough to fix everything, but maybe we were smart enough to create something that was smart enough to fix everything.
Except… we might make a mistake.
And if you created something smart enough and powerful enough to stop aging, and to push to the limits of what was physically possible, it would need to be powerful enough to destroy us.
A way of describing this fear had been to imagine an industrial research accident. Industrial accidents happen all the time, after all. Some security procedure turns out to be insufficient, and some sugar dust in a factory catches a spark, and Willy Wonka’s factory blows up, taking half the city with it.
Things like this literally happen all the time. Even in the US there are several major industrial accidents each year.
Chemical explosions are generally self-contained. They can’t keep going. To kill everybody, something has to be able to sustain itself as it gets bigger.
Some of the atomic bomb scientists had feared that the first atomic test would ignite the atmosphere and trigger a self-sustaining reaction that would travel around the whole world and immolate it.
When this concern was suggested, several scientists had done the math and determined that a self-sustaining atomic process in the atmosphere wasn’t possible.
The thing is, they got their math wrong. I don’t know the details.
You can make a bad calculator that points to a correct answer — at least if it is a very general answer. But this sort of story does not make me feel safe about potentially dangerous scientific research.
In the years before I’d died, there had been huge numbers of people who persistently believed that Covid had been accidentally released by a lab trying to manipulate the virus for purposes of study.
The real question for me always was not whether it was true that this particular virus had been created in a lab and accidentally released. The problem was that it was possible. It could have happened, and that was the sort of thing that it was essential to make sure never happened — and nobody seemed to be doing anything about it.
A lab created pandemic was too destructive for us to simply wait for it to definitely happen before we banned gain of function research.
The argument for regulating AI research right now, when it still wasn’t very dangerous was even stronger. The problem though was that we really didn’t know what regulations and policies would actually do any good. There was a community of people obsessed with AI safety who ran around endlessly screaming that the sky was falling, but they failed to coordinate around pushing an actually useful response — since they all disagreed about what would be actually useful. And many of the leading voices were convinced that anything we tried was doomed anyways.
The emperor looked at Sesako. “See darling. He is starting to realize.”
“I didn’t tell anyone anything dangerous. Nothing that —”
“You told them to end aging and to make everyone a celestial. Now nobody takes this seriously as a goal. But I don’t think that is necessary. It is enough that a sense starts to spread that such things might one day happen. And you are convincing everyone that we need to work together — you said it again and again: Ideas should be shared so they can build upon each other. That is why Yatamo is able to defy my empire, without instantly crumbling. That is why they are richer than anyone else, because they have a culture of helping each other. Well, everyone wants to be able to defy me. Tell me: This is not some notion you said because it sounded good.”
“No.”
“These things that were achieved without magic in your world — discovering the secrets of deep metal, feeding a population of billions of people, defeating many diseases… I have been thinking about it ever since I met you, and more seriously since Kisiko’s funeral. What if you are the catalyst? The dragon brought you to this world. The dragon would doom mankind. How might you, with all your darling notions of goodness, this endless speechifying and discussion. What could you cause that might literally kill everyone alive? I am good at seeing patterns. And a pattern began to emerge. And now you have confirmed that I was right to fear that pattern.”
“I don’t see the pattern.” Sesako said sharply. “And I do not believe in this nonsense.”
“My darling,” the emperor grinned now. “Might you explain it to him?”
I grimaced. “The emperor’s idea is —”
“No, it is your idea, my darling.” He looked at me. “Do not try to displace — you have a tendency to displace your guilt upon others.”
“I try to take it upon myself.”
“Then say clearly what you think.”
“There are things that are unknown to cultivators. But powerful — you discovered a way to become a celestial, or at least sort of, just within the last months, while I would assume thousands of great cultivators had at least thought about how. Hinete has developed new ways to use runes. Knowledge builds upon itself.”
“Yes, and —”
“And what if one day you learn how to summon a demon, but you think it is an angel.”
Sesako nodded. “But what do you have to do with this?”
“Collaborative research enterprises. What made the world I am from enormously rich and gave us as much power as you have over the environment, despite the absence of magic, was not any particular discovery. It was that we realized that we could discover things, and as a society we began to systematically hunt for new ideas.”
“Exactly.” The emperor smiled thinly. “But if a gambler bets his fortune upon a throw of the die again and again, one day they will both turn up as sixes.”
“A philosopher in my world described it as being like taking balls out of a bucket without looking to see what color they were. All of the balls we’d grabbed so far were red, and those were beneficial, or at least not apocalyptic. But if there was a black ball that would kill us if we pulled us out, we’d eventually get to it.”
“Clever people with many metaphors.”
“What do you wish to do?” I asked the emperor. “You too have discovered dangerous things — and why do you not intend to kill me?”
“Oh, that is wholly too late. You talk a lot. Ideas cannot be killed. Emperors can’t do all that much about most things. Maybe if I ruled the entire world… but the attempt to rule the entire world would prompt every other great ruler to desperately seek ways to defeat me — and universal rulership is not enough to destroy an idea.”
“You saw pathways by which the destruction of the world could be avoided. That is why you are here.”
“Yes. And destroying the dragons would have been sufficient, at least for a long time, and further threats could have been sought and destroyed long ahead of time. If only the dragon had not pulled you here.”
“In response to your invasion.”
“No, in response to Sesako’s suicidality. As a moral matter I regret that I killed his family. But it was also, as you see, a failure of policy.” He smiled at Sesako. “Otherwise, you simply would have been another capable prodigy. A fifty percent chance of achieving the profound soul before you were a hundred fifty, but you would not have been interesting — I will not say that you ought to thank me. You ought to curse me. But you would be a very different man.”
“I would be. And I do curse you.” Sesako replied.
The emperor sighed. “I will still kill the dragons, due to the possibility that it will be enough. But later, once an appropriate span of years has passed, I wish for you to become one of my chief advisors. I might even attempt to turn my empire into something like your People ruled land.”
“What?” Both Sesako and I exclaimed in shock at the same time.
He smiled thinly. “Sesako. Darling, you may, as much as you wish, while you have control of the body scheme and strive to find a way to kill me — if you swear to do nothing that will inevitably lead to your own death in the case of failure. I’ve had no one seriously try to kill me for five hundred years. And should you succeed, I deserved it.”
“But wait, am I actually convincing you that it wouldn’t be that bad to no longer be the ruler?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I rule by right of conquest, by right of capability, and by right of just being more impressive — but I live here too. And my many children, and many grandchildren, and many great grandchildren live here as well. And whatever you may have been told, I love them. And I am an emperor, and I refuse to care nothing for the peasants on my lands, the cultivators who administer my provinces and my cities, and for the warriors who have sworn themselves to my name.”
“But why ask me to be an advisor?”
“Oh, that is simple. You understand the poison that you have released better than I do, better than Sesako could, better by far than Fitzuki, or the dragons with their inhuman incomprehensibility. Your world has not found a solution, but you know what solutions have been suggested to the problem of dangerous knowledge. I do not know if you can succeed in crafting an antidote, but such is the best notion that I have at present.”
Sesako glared at the emperor. “I will not work with you ever.”
“I know you won’t. Having two people in one body makes quite a few matters more difficult — but think about. What do you want? I imagine I can find a great deal that you would like as a prize. Think about it. Talk it over with Sesako darling. But now I have a war to finish. And try, very hard, I beg you, to not die during it. And afterwards, even if you decide to refuse my offer, I beg you to spend a month — at least thirty days by the calendar, thinking for an hour every day about anything you might know that could help the world deal with new forms of knowledge safely. Write down a codex, and then share it with me, and with anyone else who you trust to act responsibly with information that you think, upon extended reflection, should be known wider. You should at least share it with Fitzuki.”
“The only good idea I knew of was to make the government bureaucracy become much more involved in research. The idea was to make the research much slower and harder to conduct.”
“You say that like it would be bad,” The emperor raised his eyebrows, “You don’t want to slow this research, because even though you fear that it will destroy your entire world, you also desperately want to summon that angel to banish death and hunger as soon as possible. But the ritual is not a good one, unless you can prove that it will work before it is used.”
“That is why regulation would be a good idea. But we also were scared of doing something that would only slow down the more responsible groups researching the ritual. And then the summoners would be someone who got there first because they didn’t care about safety or who were focused on ignoring government regulations.”
“Ah — interesting possibility. But of course the responsible groups ought to kill and destroy anyone who dared to study the question who they did not trust. I would, and I will if I must.” The emperor shrugged. “Make that codex! In any case, off with you, my darlings. Off with you.”
We flashed instantly back into the real world.
The emperor’s guards stared at us, and I wondered what they would think if I actually took the role of the emperor’s advisor. They probably expected him to do that sort of thing.
Sesako was deeply brooding, and I did not interfere with his maundering thoughts.
It was when we reached a perch at the top of the tower fortress that he startled in my mind with a sound like a curse. I understood the question he had asked himself: How terrible will the effect upon the land be if we destroy the island as planned?
Ooops.