“I appreciate the sentiment,” Kajri said. “And from what I’ve heard, you’ve managed to have some influence? The prisoner with the emperor’s ear.”
“I don’t know about that. I talk a lot, but I don’t know that anyone listens. Except the security detail. I assume they listen to everything.”
She chuckled, and it was a warmer, more sympathetic sound than he’d expected. “It isn’t easy, having no part of your life for just yourself. I grew up knowing that everything I said would be monitored, cataloged, filed, and judged for its potential to compromise me or my family. There’s a record in the intelligence service archives somewhere of every time I’ve had my period.”
“Because of her?” Holden said, nodding to the tomb.
“Because of her. But she gave me the tools to live through it too. She taught us to use everything shameful in our lives as a weapon to humiliate people who would diminish us. That’s the secret, you know.”
“What’s the secret?”
Kajri smiled. “The people who have power over you are weak too. They shit and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarrassed by the stupid things they did when they were young that everyone else has forgotten. And so they’re vulnerable. We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are. We can’t transcend it. So when they watch you, they hand you the power to change what they are too.”
“And she taught you that?”
“She did,” Kajri said. “But she didn’t know it.”
As if to prove the point, a guard moved across the grass toward them, keeping a respectful distance until he was sure they’d seen him and then gave them time to finish what they were saying before coming closer. Kajri turned to him, lifting her eyebrow.
“The reception is going to begin in twenty minutes, ma’am,” the guard said. “The high consul specifically hoped to meet you.”
“I wouldn’t dream of disappointing him,” she said with a smile Holden had seen before on other lips. Holden offered his arm, and Kajri took it. As they walked away, he nodded toward the tomb and the words written on it. IF LIFE TRANSCENDS DEATH, THEN I WILL SEEK FOR YOU THERE. IF NOT, THEN THERE TOO.
“It’s an interesting quote,” he said. “I feel like I should recognize it. Who wrote it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “She only told us to put it on her grave. She didn’t say where it came from.”
Everyone who was anyone had come to Laconia. That was true on several levels. Duarte’s plan to shift the center of humanity away from Sol system to the heart of his own empire had found a level of cooperation and consent that shocked Holden at first and then left him with a permanent sense of mild disappointment in humans as a species. The most prestigious scientific research institutes had all moved their headquarters to Laconia. Four different ballet companies threw off centuries of rivalry to share the same Laconian Institute of Art. Celebrities and scholars rushed to new, palatial, state-subsidized estates in the capital city. There were already movies being made there. The soft power of culture set on speed scrub, ready to flood the networks and feeds with the reassuring messages of High Consul Duarte and the permanence of Laconia.
Business came too. Duarte had banks and office campuses prebuilt and ready for tenants. The Association of Worlds wasn’t just Carrie Fisk in a shitty office on Medina Station anymore. It was a cathedral in the center of the capital city with a lobby bigger than a hangar bay and stained glass walls that seemed to rise up forever. The Transport Union’s central authority was there too, in a lesser building with fewer amenities so that it was clear physically and socially who was in favor and who was on notice. Holden watched it all from the State Building that was his home and his prison, and it left him thinking of living on an island.
Within the boundary of the city, Laconia was cleaner, newer, brighter, and more controlled than most space stations Holden had been on. Just outside it was wilderness like he’d only seen in storybooks. Ancient forests and alien ruins that would take generations to tame and explore. Holden had heard gossip and rumors about the remnant technologies brought to shambling life by the early work with the protomolecule: boring worms the size of spacecraft, doglike repair drones that made no distinction between mechanism and flesh, crystalline caves with piezoelectric effects that induced hallucinations of music and crippling vertigo. Even as the capital city became synonymous with humanity as a whole, the planet around it stayed alien. An island of the profoundly familiar in a sea of we-don’t-understand-that-yet. In a way, it was reassuring that Duarte, for all his god-emperor reach, couldn’t achieve everything in just a few decades.
In another way, it was terrifying.
The reception hall was grand, but not overblown. If Laconia had been built in Duarte’s image, there was a weird thread of personal restraint in the high consul’s soul. However grand the city was, however overwhelming his ambitions, Duarte’s palatial compound and home wasn’t gaudy or even particularly ornate. The ballroom was all clean lines and a neutral palette that reached for elegance without being too concerned with what anyone thought. Couches and chairs were placed here and there where people could rearr
ange them. Young people in military uniform served glasses of wine and spiced tea. More than power, Duarte made everything that surrounded him seem born of confidence. It was a good trick, because even after Holden saw through it, it still worked.
Holden accepted a glass of wine from a young woman and strolled through the shifting crowd. A few of the people, he recognized instantly. Carrie Fisk of the Association of Worlds, holding court at a long table, with the governors of half a dozen colonies fighting to be the first one laughing at her jokes. Thorne Chao, the face of the most popular newsfeed coming out of Bara Gaon. Emil-Michelle Li in the flowing green dress that was her trademark when she wasn’t in a movie. And for every face Holden could put a name to, there were a dozen more who looked vaguely familiar.
He moved though the thin social fog of polite smiles and nods of recognition that fell short of actual engagement. He was here because Duarte wanted him seen here, but the Venn diagram of people eager to curry favor with the high consul but also willing to risk his displeasure by cozying up to the state’s highest-profile prisoner didn’t have much overlap.
But it did have some.
“I’m not drunk enough for this.”
Transport Union President Camina Drummer leaned against a standing table, her hands wrapped around a glass. Her face looked older in person. He could see the lines around her eyes and mouth more clearly when there weren’t a camera, a screen, and several billion kilometers between them. She shifted a degree, making room for him at the table, and he accepted the invitation.
“I’m not sure what drunk enough for this looks like,” he said. “Blackout drunk? Fighting drunk? Weeping-in-the-corner drunk?”
“You don’t seem even tipsy.”
“I’m not. I’m mostly off of alcohol these days.”
“Keeping your wits about you?”
“And it bothers my stomach.”