DAMON ARGYRIS HAD NOT exaggerated. The Lothrian First Ballet was sublime. I have little understanding of dance, perhaps less of music. But beauty is, and even the poorest poet among men knows it by its signs. A line of women in pale leotards moved like crystal clockwork upon a stage of glass, their ghostly reflections chasing them as they danced to music sweet and clear.

The music swelled, filling the auditorium with the opening strains of Ademar Giallo’s Earth Afire.

I counted the dancers.

There were fifty-two.

Watching them dance and spread across the star-strewn glass, I wondered if Ademar knew the significance of his figure, or else if the association between the Mericanii and the number fifty-two was lost even in his remote day. But I knew it. The answer was one of many things we’d learned in the Archives Emperor Gabriel II had left beneath the Great Library on Colchis. There had been fifty-two daughters of Julian Felsenburgh’s revolution, fifty-two distinct artificial intelligences bred by his chief creation, the Columbia system that had ruled Old Earth as the sun set on her Golden Age. In allegory they danced before us, each daughter played by a Lothrian girl so like the next they might be clones of one another: lithe, high-breasted, black hair pulled up.

We could not see the audience beneath our box, and sat in whispering quiet—Valka and I—alongside Lord Argyris and certain of the consular staff. Our hosts sat about us, politely attentive. The Ninth Chair had not spoken all evening, leaving the duties of host to the gallant Seventeenth Chair, who leaned in to inquire, “Is the delegate pleased?”

I was unclear on what subtle change in Lothrian protocol allowed the man the right to speak more freely, or if it were only that for him the rules were more flexible. A more cavalier attitude toward the niceties from the Seventeenth Chair might explain the stony silence on the part of the Ninth, whose dedication toward Lothrian’s brand of progress he guarded with an almost religious zeal.

Valka answered for me. “They’re marvelous!”

“They are impressive,” I said, watching as the fifty-two daughters of silicon each in their own circle of light seduced male counterparts in red leotards with gold circlets about their foreheads. They were, I knew, the great kings of men who ruled the offworld colonies before their fall. “They must train all their lives.”

“May all who excel in one avenue of life offer that excellence to the People,” the Seventeenth Chair agreed, shifting back to the stilted language of formal Lothrian, perhaps responding to the silent pressure of the Ninth Chair not five seats away. “May each bend that excellence to the service of the People. May each offer a life entire.”

Yes, I translated to myself.

The white-clad girl in center stage danced about one of the men, but he rebuffed her while all about the others fell. Nodding at him, I said, “That’s our God Emperor.” The first Sollan Emperor had—when he was but a petty king in exile on Avalon—rebuffed the advances of the Mericanii. They had wanted his world. On the other colonies they sublimated or built—as on Earth herself—mankind had been seduced by his own creation, and from that incestuous union had sprung all the horrors of machine rule: the great pyramids that rose above the cities of Earth and her colonies. The dream worlds into which the machines led mankind and trapped them. The cancers whose ceaseless growth kept those men alive so the machines might crouch spider-like in their unused brains. The homunculi grown to replace the few who died and to swell the ranks of captive man, to replace him, and to serve the machines he’d made to serve himself.

I doubted that Ademar had known any of it when he’d composed his ballet. What had been history had turned to legend over the long millennia, and legend to fable and scripture. Few were the men who knew the names of Felsenburgh and Columbia, and fewer still those who knew the horrors they had wrought. And of those who knew the God Emperor of old had received his visions and his authority from the Quiet, the same alien thing whose unseen hand guided me, the same being who had redeemed me from the dead, two were seated in that box.

“I’ve never seen such precision,” Valka admired.

I leaned toward her and whispered, “Because they kill the ones who fail.” By then, we were certain that neither Chair understood Valka’s native Panthai, and I thought I’d spoken soft enough not to catch the ear of any of their retinue.

Valka scratched me gently with long fingernails. She spoke Galstani to forestall reply and so end the conversation there. “And your lot don’t?” Even an exile and a fugitive from her clan, she was Tavrosi to her bones. I felt certain that some great lord of the Imperium had killed performers before, but I felt equally certain that the Chantry had punished many lords for such excesses.

“Of course we don’t!” I said, never one to back down from her challenge. “And what do you mean, my lot?”

“I don’t see much difference,” Valka said.

“They don’t even have names, Valka!” I hissed, squinting at her in the dark of the box.

She waved this aside. “As you like, but I . . .” She broke off suddenly, her machine eyes unfocusing.

“Are you all right?” I feared she was having another episode, another flashback caused by Urbaine’s worm. Her hand tightened on my arm, and she shook her head as discreetly as was possible.

“ ’Tis nothing,” she said. When I did not back down she glared at me more intently. “ ’Tis nothing.”

Wholly unaware of Valka’s distress, Lord Damon Argyris exclaimed, “Did I not tell you they know their art here in the Commonwealth?” He leaned around Valka to look at me, missed Valka’s nails like claws digging into my gloved left arm. “You should have seen the display they put on for the Durantine Doxe. The holography alone shames anything in the Eternal City!”

“You have been too long apart from the Empire, my lord consul,” I said, eyes still watching Valka. Whatever had bothered her, it had not been nothing. “You are too quick to discount the achievement of your countrymen.”

The Seventeenth Chair, overhearing this, cut in, “Is the performance not to the delegate’s liking?”

I realized I’d not answered the question myself when he’d first asked, and turned from contemplation of the stage to regard the man who seemed so lordly and imperial in that place which professed hatred for lords and empires. “Oh, the delegate is quite impressed,” I said in Lothrian, sparing a glance at Ninth Chair, who sat stone-faced to the far side of his associate. Before speaking, I drank from the nearly flavorless spirit our hosts had poured for me. Not knowing how to express myself with the limitations of Lothrian, I switched back to Imperial Standard. “I only mean it is an Imperial ballet you perform for us, however impressive the performance. My friend the consul forgets this.”

Beneath his bushy mustachios, Damon Argyris frowned. “Fair point, Lord Marlowe, but mine stands. These Lothrians are capable of quite the performance.”

“I should have liked to see the show you put on for the Doxe,” I said to the Seventeenth Chair. Privately, I was surprised the ruler of that most serene republic had come to a place like the Commonwealth. On the stage below, the dancers had traded white for red, and the women writhed in artful tumbles across the floor before the advance of the men—now in white with the dancer playing the God Emperor at the center. I had never seen a performance of Ademar’s rendition of the Burning of Earth before, but I did not think the composer intended the way each male dancer—dressed in Imperial white, I realized—stood above the female dancers like conquerors in a captured harem. I smiled at the implied insult, at the Lothrian ability to say so much without words. “I’m sure it was quite a show.”

In time the curtains fell, and in the space where an applause ought to have been there was only the awkward clamor of our hands. The Lothrian audience below did not clap or give any sign. Uncomfortable—having stood to clap as was the Imperial custom—I bowed and thanked our hosts.

“Here is a People without masters,” the Ninth Chair intoned, staring up at me with flinty eyes, “without gods, a People whose every action glorifies itself.”

I looked down at the little man in his gray robes, his eyes as gray beneath his cap of oiled black hair. Studying him, I was struck again at just how similar these Lothrians were to one another.

The Ninth Chair kept watching me, and when I did not respond, he continued, quoting, “Let there be hard labor for the strong. Let there be deep learning for the wise. Let there be great trials for the just. Let the skill of each be turned in service to the good of all.”

“Your dancers served well,” I said. Not asking, I wondered what service a man with no name might offer, not knowing himself or what he was worth.

“Let each be loyal to the Conclave,” the Ninth Chair replied. “Let then the Conclave be loyal to the Book. This is order and justice.”

I bowed again. “I know something of loyalty and of service myself.”