DINNER WAS SERVED AT a long, black table in the middle of an empty room. We’d ridden a lift from the levels of the People’s Palace to the marble terraces I’d spied from the streets below. The architecture of these rarefied climes was just as brutal and cyclopean, but here the blocks shone white in the starlight that fell through the veined dome above.

The floor of the dining room was of marble, too, and the walls were faced with it. No curtains hung on the horizontal slit windows, nor was there any rug to relieve the pale utility of that chamber. Its only furnishing—besides the table and its attendant chairs—was a mighty globe of the planet Padmurak in magnetic suspension slowly turning above its stand in one corner. The walls bore little decoration. No paintings or artwork relieved the dour sconces. One wall held a holograph plate disguised as a mirror. There’d been one in every room of the Chair’s apartments. I guessed they were a part of the man’s security and communications network.

The food itself was plain, but good. As Third Chair had said, there was no meat to be found in Lothrian cuisine. The meal centered instead about a stew of white beans and carrots in tomato sauce. There was bread, and roast garlic to spread on it, but no butter. No eggs. No cheese or any other byproduct of animal life. There were not even their imitations, grown in vats or synthesized.

“Are there not servants?” I asked in Lothrian, where there was no word for servant. Manyoka, I said. Helpers.

Seventeenth Chair deposited the last platter on the table. “An idle hand is ever turned against the People.” He brushed his hair back from his face as he took the seat opposite us. “Let no hand be idle. Each must serve each.” He gestured at the door through which he’d entered, indicating the direction of the kitchens, where I was certain that for all his civic piety, Seventeenth Chair had done nothing to aid the preparation of the meal.

I translated this for Valka, whose Lothrian was limited. “It all looks lovely.” She smiled at the Chair. Valka had worn her diplomatic best for the ballet, an understated black and ivory gown as much business as fashion, her red-dark hair pulled up and pinned. The nearly black lipstick she wore called attention to that smile. “You must be very proud.”

Our host returned the smile, pouring water for us each from an unassuming but well-made metal pitcher, serving me first, then Valka, then himself. “The only true pride,” he recited, “is pride in the People.” He lingered a moment, studying the spread. It struck me that without meat or fish, the meal was an oddly uncentered affair. There was no true entree, with the other dishes supporting it or otherwise accompanying it, no sense of what should be eaten first or how.

“It is a pity the Ninth Chair could not join us,” I said, noting the empty seat at Seventeenth Chair’s left hand.

Our host’s progress slowed as he contemplated his answer. “Let no hand be idle,” he said again.

Unseen beneath the table, Valka nudged me with a toe when I leaned in to whisper to her. I understood her all too well. I did not fancy the prospect of an evening spent with so limited a conversation partner. Talking to the Lothrians was like trying to roll a stone uphill, only to have it roll back again, as though I were poor, doomed Sisyphos.

Fortunately, unlike Sisyphos, I was not alone.

“Chairman,” Valka began, ladling a measure of the bean stew into her bowl, “I wonder about your language. Hadrian tells me you speak entirely by reciting quotations from your people’s codex. Can that really be so?”

I translated this from Galstani into Lothrian for our host, using sentences that were doubtless not approved by the Lothriad. The Chair still wore an earpiece, but I felt the need to editorialize.

Seventeenth Chair replied, “Only correct speech serves the will of the People.”

“Correct speech?” Valka asked. “What is correct speech?”

“That which is for the good of the People,” Seventeenth Chair replied. It was a deftly employed fragment of a sentence, used void of its original context.

Failing to translate this for Valka, I said, “The Lothrian taught in the Empire lacks this emphasis on quotation.” I had to struggle to fit my thoughts into the Lothrian pattern. It was difficult to describe how my tutor had taught me in a way that referenced neither the tutor nor myself. I was sure I sounded half a fool. I’d had little occasion to practice the guttural language since I’d left Devil’s Rest. Strange to think I spoke Cielcin better than this tongue of man.

“It is incorrect,” the Chair said. “Only the Lothriad is correct.”

“Surely that has limitations,” Valka said when I translated this for her. “Or are there correct ways to ask for the toilet?”

Seventeenth Chair only laughed.

“Or supposing you encountered something you have no words for, how could you discuss it?” Valka leaned over her plate, eager to have answers to these questions after so many weeks in the Commonwealth—and to have the opportunity to grill a pitrasnuk of the Grand Conclave at last. “Suppose you encountered a race of xenobites. What then?”

“Rugyeh,” I said, reaching her answer. To Valka, I added, “It only means the Others.” To the Lothrian, ordinary words were forced to carry the weight of a dozen others. There was so much context, so much subtext depended on for clarity of communication.

Valka toyed with her spoon. “But that doesn’t address the problem. You have no way to discuss new things if your words are written out in advance. You can’t adapt.”

Our host nodded along as I translated this, and paused to chew a mouthful of his stew. He tore a piece of bread off his portion and dunked it in his bowl. “The will of the Conclave is the will of the People. A good man is to the Conclave as a son is to a father. A father gives voice to a son.”

“How?”

“By teaching,” Seventeenth Chair replied, and again I suspected his answer was the fragment of some other sentence.

“Voice,” I said, repeating the word I’d seen used to such grave effect in the Conclave’s arena. Halas. “The Conclave writes new sentences as time goes on. And you’re the only ones permitted use of the Voice?”

“Da,” our host replied.

“And why man?” Valka asked. “A good man is to the Conclave . . . what of women?”

The Seventeenth Chair studied her a moment before replying. “There are no women,” he said, though the word he used for women, samkanka, was more precisely rendered as females. “Nor men.” This of course was untrue; the Third Chair and the Sixth were women, and several of the others besides. We had seen women by the dozen in the urban farms, and the ballerinas had been women as well. “There are no females,” Seventeenth Chair repeated, “no males. There is only the People. Only man.”

I had wondered at the Lothriad’s aggressive sexlessness. Their word for man, ovuk—which showed clear ties to the word for worker, zuk—meant only human, implying neither sex. Thus their language was half-like our own, where woman has no true companion, and the word man means man and human both. How we survive such confusion is difficult enough to fathom. How the Lothrians theirs I could not begin to comprehend.

“But your eyes know the difference, whatever your words,” I said, encouraged by Valka’s objections. “There are things stronger than our words, sir. Language cannot change reality. Only stretch it.”

“And it only stretches so far,” Valka appended, evidently as confounded by this Lothrian way of thinking as I was.

Seventeenth Chair studied the both of us over his half-eaten meal for a long moment. He lifted his water cup to his lips—there was no wine, nor any of that colorless spirit we’d been given at the theater—and drank. Not answering, he rose and plodded over to the globe of Padmurak revolving in its magnetic field. He gripped the rail that encircled the display, fiddling with his hair.

Not his hair, I realized an instant later, half-turned in my seat.

His earpiece.

Seventeenth Chair removed his auto-translator and set it—dead—on the lip about the globe. “Perhaps for now it is so, Lord Marlowe. My Lady,” he said, speaking perfect Galstani. “But in time, even this will change.”

“You speak the standard?” Valka asked, dark lips twisting into something neither smile nor frown.

“The standard!” the Chairman barked. “That too is true only for now. But we all speak your language. I was schooled in your Empire. At Teukros. So many are.”

I took this sudden change in stride. Often I had seen palatine lords disable their own security systems to speak unobserved. My own mother had done it in her Summer Palace as we planned my escape from home so long ago. I had done it myself aboard the Tamerlane time and time again, and so this revelation came as little shock. I had expected that beneath the rigid adherence to Lothrian civic scripture was an agnosticism little different than the false piety of so many Imperial lords. “So it is all an act,” I said. “The Lothriad. Your speech codes. All this talk of equity and community, and yet you are governed by different laws than your zuks.”

“As in your Empire.”

“My Empire does not pretend to be something it’s not,” I said, eager at last to have someone I could hold to account for the world I’d been witness to then for the better part of a month.

“Nor do we,” the Chairman said. “I am only a handmaid. When the Lothriad is perfected, the Conclave will no longer be necessary.”

“Perfected?” Valka echoed, glad—I think—to no longer be barred from direct conversation by her ignorance of the Lothrian tongue. She turned fully in her seat to look at the stately man in his plain gray judicial robes. “Perfected how?”

Our host’s smile did not falter, and there was a light in his black eyes such as I had seen in the vates who pray naked atop pillars in city squares and howl at the sky for Earth’s return. “The Old monsters shall be swept away: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Thoughts. But the ancients did not go far enough. They kept their language. They kept their names. These things tied them to the past. True progress—true perfection—demands more.”

“You sound like the Extrasolarians,” I said.

“The Extrasolarians have vice, not vision. They shape themselves in accordance only with the disorder of their natures. We impose our nature on nature,” the Chairman declared.

Uncomfortably half-turned in my seat, I stood. “Is hubris not vice, then? You can only push men so far . . .” With eyes for Valka, I added, “And women.”

“Old Thoughts. Old Bodies. Old Natures too will be swept away.” He shut his eyes, recited in Lothrian as though it were a mantra. “How shall Old Thoughts be expunged? By eliminating Old Desires. How shall Old Desires be expunged? By eliminating Old Natures. How shall Old Natures be expunged? By eliminating Old Bodies.”

Still Gibson’s keen disciple, I asked, “New bodies are . . . what? Neither male nor female?”

“Of course,” the Chair replied, slipping back into his native Lothrian to quote, “Where there is distinction, there is disparity. Where there is disparity, suffering. How shall suffering be overcome? By overcoming disparity. How shall disparity be overcome? By overcoming difference.”

I met him quotation for quotation, saying, “Each angel knows his place. It is in hell that all are equal.” My gloved hand went reflexively to the Red Company pentacle pinned to my lapel, my mind to the old Marlowe devil I had not worn in centuries.

“Hadrian!” Valka put a hand on my arm. “Var rawann.” Be careful.

“Why have you not done it, then? There are hermaphrodite homunculi among the Mandari. The technology exists.”

Seventeenth Chair did not answer, only narrowed those black Lothrian eyes.

“I see,” I said after a moment’s silence, believing I understood. “Your people fought back.”

A brittle smile creased the bureaucrat’s handsome face. “They are not yet ready.”

“To be replaced? No, I think not.”

Valka tightened her grip on my arm.

The Chair had called himself a handmaid, and so I imagined him, pictured him standing in a stark surgical theater to watch his children being born. A new generation to replace the old, to supplant nature. They had already removed the words for man and woman, but that was not enough. They had introduced their New Bodies, their new men, but the zuks had not accepted them. The Conclave could not replace the trillions of people in their Commonwealth, not from an assembly line. Not even the great clone manufactories of Jadd were up to that task. Had the Conclave expected its people to breed with its new men? To breed the old out of existence?

It seemed they had been disappointed. The Lothrian people had rejected the Conclave’s new men, if I understood the Chair correctly.

“We will try again,” Seventeen said into the silence.

“Old Natures die hard,” I said.

“You are Sollan,” Seventeen said. “You are a creature of the Old. It is in your nature to think this. Doubtless you were schooled by a scholiast. Scholiasts are creatures of the Old, too. They have no place in the future.”

One hand on the back of my seat, I lifted my water glass to the Chairman. “And yet you yourself were schooled in the Imperium. By scholiasts. Sweeping away the old is like knocking the foundations of a tower out from under your feet. Tradition grounds a man. Even for you Lothrians it is so.” I took a short drink. “You’ve been building your new world for thousands of years.”

The Seventeenth Chair barked a laugh. “I am but a steward. I will not live to see my paradise made real, but I will die building it.”

“I say it is the cruel law of art that all things must die, and that we ourselves must die after we have exhausted every suffering so . . .”

“. . . so that the grass, not of oblivion but of eternal life should grow,” the Chairman said, finishing the old quotation, his polished voice sliding over mine like a fencer’s blade. “Fertilized by works. I see you know your Proust.”

“I had a good teacher,” I said in answer.

“Indeed you must have done,” he said. “You understand me perfectly.”

Did I? I wasn’t sure. The whole meal I’d felt as though the Chair was trying to teach me a lesson. No, it was more than that. He was trying to impress me, to impress upon me the total superiority of Lothrian resolve, just as the ballet had been designed to convince me of the superiority of Lothrian art, as it had so evidently convinced Lord Argyris. But Argyris was a fool.

“Me . . .” I echoed the little word. It was a word no Lothrian—certainly not one of the Grand Conclave—should ever use. “Do you have a name, sir?”

“I am a steward of the Lothriad.”

“I’m serious,” I said. “Do you still have names? You must have used one when you studied in the Imperium. Shall I call you Steward?”

“Talleg,” he said. “Lorth Talleg.”

Valka cut in. “I knew you all must have names. ’Twas simply no way . . .”

Talleg’s tight smile returned, “Only those of us in the Party have proper names.” He toyed with the discarded earpiece on the table. “The zuks have none.”

“How is that possible?” I asked.

“We make it possible,” came the reply. Four words. Just four words. So little . . . to fill so many graves.

“You hypocrite!” Valka said, taking her hand from my arm. So strange for us both to be on the same side of an argument. Despite her Tavrosi collectivism, Valka’s people still valued the individual—still valued the human soul.

Lorth Talleg’s smile vanished. “Not at all. As I say, I am a handmaid of the Lothriad. A shepherd. It is my role—the Conclave’s role—to bring humanity under the Lothriad, not to live under it myself.”

“And to reduce mankind to Eloi,” I said.

“To what?” the Chairman asked.

Having established the Chairman was only a middling student of literature, I joined him by his globe. Padmurak was a sad, pale world of ice and snow and naked stone, its airless surface unrelieved by seas or lakes, gray face scarred by glacial action in the planet’s far past. It did not want for water, but what it had lay frozen in massive caps to either pole. Mountains were short and uninspiring, for the planet—while not tectonically dead—was unenergetic in the extreme. Examining the artifact, I was unsurprised to find the coastlines and lines of latitude and longitude were inlaid with platinum wire, a subtle mark of wealth. I had to remind myself that despite the apparent spartanness of the man’s apartments, here was one of the men who commanded the Commonwealth. Talleg was one of a group of thirty-four who presided over a hundred thousand settled worlds.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s an old word. From an old book.” The word old hung heavy on the air between us, twisting like a knife.

“Are you always like this?” Talleg asked, eyeing me intently.

“Oh yes,” I replied, glancing up from my study of the globe, “ask anyone who knows me.”

Talleg’s eyes must have shifted to Valka for confirmation, for her clear voice answered a moment later. “Try spending a century with him.”

Our host’s smile—vanished in his transition from Seventeenth Chair to Lorth Talleg—returned for a trifle. “You hate us, don’t you?”

“I do,” I said, sitting straight, feeling myself almost on trial. “We have slaves in the Empire, to our shame. But here all men are slaves.”

“Is that what you think of us?” the Chairman asked, leaning against the window frame. “A nation of slaves? But you forget, Lord Marlowe. I studied in your Empire. You keep whole armies in chains, imprison entire worlds. You yourself were ordered to come here. Are you then a slave?” He scoffed, a look of disgust coloring his handsome face. “Speak not to me of freedom. Freedom is like the sea.”

I froze, eyes pulled to Valka, who sat watching still half-turned round in her high-backed seat. Lorth Talleg had said he was schooled on Teukros. That could only have been at Nov Senber, the very athenaeum I had failed to reach when I fled Delos as a boy. His teachers had been scholiasts. It was a scholiast aphorism he quoted at me.

“. . . to be truly free is to be like one who is adrift on a raft in the middle of the sea. One can sail anywhere, in any direction . . .” It was Valka who had spoken, quoting Imore in the Book of the Mind.

No, I realized. Not quoting Imore.

She was quoting me—quoting my own imperfect rendition of Imore’s words as I’d recited them in that chilly dungeon beside the lake where Brethren slumbered beneath the ice and the gardens of Vorgossos.

Talleg was smiling again, nodding along with her. “But what good is that by itself?” he asked, finishing the quotation. “Freedom is no virtue, Lord Marlowe. It is an obstacle to it.” Had I not argued that same thing to Valka so long ago when I’d defended the Empire from her attacks?

I had not argued that same thing to Valka.

“So what?” I asked our host. “You have drained that ocean dry?”

“We have given the People one voice, one goal, one golden path to follow,” Talleg answered me. “And it is one where man is free. Free from poverty, free from pain. No gods, no kings, no masters.”

“Except yourself,” I said.

Talleg came off the wall, one finger pointed squarely at my chest. “I told you, I am only a handmaid. The purpose of the Conclave is to dissolve the Conclave.” This last he said in Lothrian, and I knew whence it must come. Only the Lothriad could contain so bald a contradiction.

“That day will never come,” I said, and released the globe, thus setting Padmurak to spinning once again. “Your Commonwealth is a desert, and a desert is nothing. Everything in it has turned to stone.”

“And what of your Empire?”

“The Empire is a river,” I said in answer. “It has currents and a course. And while our movement may be limited—we are always limited. By our bodies, as you correctly noted. By our minds, by nature itself. Freedom is accepting those limitations and responding to them with humility. We cannot change nature.”

“We can!” Talleg said, and his eyes were the eyes of a fanatic, bright and deadly as the eyes of his cohort, the Ninth Chair.

“Not all of it,” Valka said, voice cutting across our back-and-forth as a gunshot stuns the duelists to stillness. “Time does not run backward, Lord Talleg. Nor entropy.”

Lorth Talleg rounded on Valka. “I am no lord, lady.” The title had clearly rankled him.

She shook her head. “I am only a clanswoman of the Wisp,” she said. “Both your worlds are strange to me, but I would sooner die in Hadrian’s Empire than live in your Commonwealth.” She stood then, and came round her chair, leaning heavily on the arm. Only then did I notice the tension in that face I loved best in all the worlds, mark the dilation in the left pupil unmatched by the right. “Why did you invite us here, Chairman? Or do you insult all your guests?”

We never did get the answer to that question.

Valka collapsed in the next instant, and no answer Talleg might have given would have mattered a steel bit to me. Too late to catch her, I hurried to her side, cradled her head. “It’s all right,” I said, brushing her dark hair from her brow. Her left pupil had fully dilated, tracked independent of the right, and she’d begun sweating. “You’re all right.”

But she wasn’t.

The worm Urbaine had set loose in her mind had woken up, triggered by elevated stress perhaps, or some special feature of the conversation, or by nothing at all. She had gone so long without an episode that I had almost begun to hope they were behind her. Too well I remembered those black nights on Edda, when I had first taken Valka to seek the help of her people. The way she would bite her cheeks, her lips. The way her fingers scratched at her face, tore at her flesh until the doctors had to restrain and sedate her. Too well I remembered how that hand had reached for her throat while she ate. She hadn’t even noticed it, as if it were some other will that moved the tattooed fingers—not her own.

“What’s wrong with her?” Talleg asked, shadow falling over us.

Not answering him, I seized her left hand in mine, squeezed unfeeling fingers. On Edda, the Tavrosi had done all they could—short of destroying her mind entire—to destroy Urbaine’s virus. Their efforts had neutered the worm, dismembered it, stopped it trying to kill her. But they had failed to wholly purge the thing from her mind. What remained was only a shadow of what had been before, a chronic but fading terror that came upon her in bursts.

“What’s wrong?” Talleg asked again.

“Seizure,” I said flatly, not wanting to explain.

Talleg took a step back. “I will send for my physicians.”

Your physicians, I thought. Yours. Not a lord, indeed. But I said, “No need. She’s quite safe. But I must take her back to the embassy. I am sorry, but I must cut our conversation short.”

Valka shook as I helped her into the groundcar Argyris had sent for us, an ugly black Lothrian vehicle whose native driver did not so much as nod at us as I helped Valka inside. Sheltering her head to keep her from striking on the door frame, I bundled her into the rear compartment, noting the inch-thick alumglass of the window and the starship-grade adamant and titanium armor in the door itself.

I lingered a moment in the damp, peered up at the soft fall of mist in the streetlamps and out at the spray of the abstract fountains on the approach to the People’s Palace. Talleg’s words lingered, and the dome above pressed closer and closer still. We’d made so little progress in months of negotiating, and no wonder. The Lothrian Commonwealth was not a nation, but an experiment in human lives.

“Hadrian, get in.” Valka’s voice came from within, thin and thready.

I climbed in after her, and held her left hand as it shook. She lay her head on my shoulder, the other fist clenched in her lap. We did not speak for some time after that, permitting the driver to take us on in silence. The car was of Imperial make, red leather seats and gilt fittings. It was like a raft of home in that sea of unmixed gray. Condensation dripped like rain on the windows and ran down.

“I can’t believe this place,” Valka murmured, speaking Panthai. “I thought your Empire was bad enough.”

Matching her language, I said, “So did I, once. Really.” I could feel her skeptical eyes without having to turn back. The muscles in her arm spasmed, and she clenched them to keep them under control. “I did. But I every time I leave it, I realize I was wrong. The Extras. The Commonwealth. At least the Empire protects humanity.” I turned to study the rainy city through the windowpane, and thought, Humanity. And mankind. The Commonwealth’s ideals were as toxic to the human animal as the surgeries and augmentations the Extrasolarians enjoyed. Each people saw humanity as a problem to solve.

“What do you mean?”

I told her, and added, “The Empire isn’t a solution. It accepts the human condition, ugliness and all, and does not force its idealism onto the world.”

“Doesn’t force its idealism?” Valka repeated, nestling closer against me. Her tremors were dying down. Whatever vestigial processes the MINOS virus had left in her were running down their programming, or else were being blocked by subsystems in Valka’s neural lace. “What do you call you palatines?”

“Firstly, I thank you for the compliment,” I said smilingly. She turned her heard away with a groan. “And secondly, the High College has not made us something other than human, only stretched our humanity a little further. You heard what Talleg said. They tried to replace their whole people with homunculi, just like the Mericanii.”

Valka shuddered, though whether it was with remembrance of the images and the monographs we’d seen in Gabriel’s Archives and the revelations Horizon had made or only another of her tremors I could not say.

I peered out at the city with its stark, monolithic architecture, watched blockhouses and spiritless government buildings slide past like mountains in the early dark of Padmurak’s long night.

“This whole place is like a dream,” I said, still reflecting on Talleg’s words, “and the dream’s fading.”

“A nightmare, more like,” Valka answered, peering past me. “Like I said, it reminds me of home once you strip away . . .” She tapped her forehead with black nails, indicating the illusory world the Tavrosi painted over the utilitarian starkness of their lives. In Tavros, they lived a kind of waking dream, painted their personal artificial utopias over their colorless lives.

“Or a memory,” I said. The Commonwealth and the Demarchy were—each in their own ways—reflections of the Mericanii Empire that had ruled man’s first stars. It was their dream I saw when I looked out the window at the Great City of Vedatharad, their dream I had seen reflected in the canyon cities of Edda and in the sanitary halls of the asylum I’d rescued Valka from. I had even seen its vestiges in the state cult of the Chantry, whose Mericanii antecedents had venerated Felsenburgh as we venerate the God Emperor and who placed mankind at the center of the universe.

Ghosts of the Machine.

“I think ’tis passing,” Valka said, but did not take her head from my shoulder. So long together, we were slow to part.

“You’re all right?” I squeezed her hand, and remembered. “Are they getting more frequent? Your seizures?”

Valka paused, consulting some mental record. “No. The last was when we were on the Tamerlane, before we stopped at Gododdin.”

“Then . . .” I paused, not sure exactly what to say. “What was that in the theater?”

“What?”

“You froze up at one point. Told me it was nothing. I thought you were having another of your . . .” I trailed off, feeling I had used the word seizure enough for one conversation.

Valka opened her mouth, eyes glassy as she ran back. “Oh! I thought . . .” she shook her head, “I thought for a moment I sensed another neural lace. But it must have been another flashback.”

“Another neural lace?” I asked. “The Lothrians don’t use them, do they?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I haven’t sensed anything like since we arrived. Not even with the Conclave. I imagine if anyone here had one, one of their secretaries must.” She raised her right hand to shade her eyes. “ ’Twas nothing, Hadrian. Truly. The virus just manifests . . . fingerprints. Sometimes.” She swallowed. “ ’Tis like he’s still in my head.”

I did not not have to ask to know that he was the Extrasolarian magus, Urbaine.

“Let’s go back,” she said, and said again, “ ’Twas nothing. I’m all right. I promise.”