On this last day, your soldiers march through the streets with their thorn-swords and bramble-nets to collect the philosopher-king’s former subjects for removal. In the meantime, you walk unimpeded through the mazy passages of his palace and come upon him, still sitting, still writing. You wait patiently while he finishes the page that he is working on.
“I had expected you to fight,” you say. The queen had said he would. Instead, he has done anything but.
The philosopher-king laughs softly. “I am unlike your queen in most matters,” he says, “but like her, I know the name of your gun. If I saw some escape for my people, I would have taken it. But I have read the signs in the sky, the world-tapestry’s inexorable dimming. It’s one death or another, however you figure it.”
He closes the book and holds it out to you. You eye it askance. “This is the Jewel of Mirrors,” he says. “A collection of fables. I imagine your queen will find it entertaining bedtime reading for the sleep she never indulges in. Go on, you may as well ask the obvious question.”
“If you wish,” you say. No harm in accommodating a man whose realm you have so thoroughly ruined, especially when you can sieve him dead at any moment. In the distance you hear silence baked upon silence as your soldiers staple their captives’ mouths shut. The queen despises screaming and lamentations. “Where do the fables come from?”
“The same place any riddle comes from,” the philosopher-king says. “I have spent a lifetime collecting them. Not enough of a lifetime finding answers. It appears my turn is done and your queen may have much joy of this endeavor. Call it a final gift.”
“You don’t expect to be spared,” you say, because you have to be sure.
“Of course not.”
“Why bother?” you ask. “If she appreciates the gift, it will be to lock it up in a cage of shelves, to be admired but not perused.” She has received you in her library before. Sometimes she studies the intricate spiraling designs stamped across the books’ covers, but it is rare that you catch her reading.
The philosopher-king shrugs. “Oh, I’m not concerned with her. I am, however, pleased to have this small opportunity to talk to you.”
His calm makes you wary. This entire conversation could be a trap. Still, surely he realizes that the queen has other knights, and that her soldiers will carry out their orders whether or not you’re there to supervise them? “One captive more or less will make no difference to the queen,” you say. Indeed, she made it explicit that she has no particular need for the philosopher-king’s carcass. “You cannot hope to dissuade me. I have no heart to appeal to.” One more thing the queen made certain of.
He stirs slightly at that, as if he had begun to smile. “In that you are mistaken,” he says. “I have no doubt that your queen knows the truth, even if she has misled you. A heart isn’t what you have. It’s what you do.”
Not just the palace but the capital entire is cloaked in strata of silence. The only sounds now are the words that pass between you and the doomed king. You listen for heartbeat drums and hear nothing. Even your soldiers are escorting the captives back to the Stormrose without sound.
“Take the book,” the philosopher-king says. “As a souvenir if nothing else.” And then he tells you something unexpected: “Try not to think too harshly of your queen. She is something of an expert on difficult choices.”
You accept the gift, tucking it into folds of shadow. The snakebite words pass into you; you ignore the scour of stories freeze-dried. “It’s your turn now,” you say, and raise your gun.
The queen’s people know your gun as Candor. The queen’s idea of a joke, a gift to someone who rarely has the opportunity to speak freely.
You and the queen know the gun’s true name. It is called Combustion.
As a point of fact, the gun’s incomparable lethality is only tangentially related to the vulnerabilities of paper or cloth.
The Stormrose bears you and the soldiers and the prisoners back to the queen’s starport. You are the first to disembark. The queen awaits you with her customary tiger. “What have you brought for me?” she asks. “The smoke-skeleton of a bird? A scintillant circuit? A mirror of undesired insights?”
“A book,” you say as you salute her, attempting to not express your doubts about the whole endeavor. You produce it for her inspection.
The queen laughs and returns your salute with a mocking wave. “Of course. He always did believe that everyone could be educated. It isn’t the worst fallacy I’ve ever encountered.” She takes the book from you and sets it before the tiger. The tiger bats at it experimentally. Probably just as dubious as you are.
“The disposition of the prisoners?” you ask. What was the point of ferrying them all back here, anyway? The queen has occasionally taken interest in gladiatorial amusements, but she is unlikely to be frivolous at a time like this.
“In your absence I have prepared a dungeon,” the queen says. She gestures, and you see it in the distance: an obtrusion you had mistaken for some recent fantasia of topiary. “The prisoners can reside there for the moment.”
You give the necessary orders, and the soldiers and their freight of unspeaking captives begin to march toward the dungeon. “I don’t understand what use you have for these people,” you say.
She doesn’t smile. “Book, jewel, bird, it’s immaterial,” she says. “The people were the point of this exercise in numbers.”
You should have figured it out earlier. She was never interested in refueling the lanterns through some treasure contrived of riddles, although in a land where starships coexist with chimeras, it wasn’t impossible that such a treasure would perform as specified. No: she means to use the captives as fuel.
“You have never approved of me,” the queen says dryly, “but then, I have never required your approval. It has only been enough that what I do is for the preservation of the realm; any ruler’s duty.”
“You’re going to run out of prisoners,” you say. “The supply of foreigners is finite. And after that, what then—your own people? Incompetent chefs? Birds that sing too early in the morning? Overly demanding consorts?”
“I almost wish you’d lose your temper more often,” she muses. “You’re not incapable of wit.” Her regard narrows. “But the world is dimming, and I have need of you yet.”
The world beyond has lanterns, which are called stars. Nuclei strike each other, overcome the forces that would repel them from each other, and form new nuclei. Just as shadows can be crushed together, so can particles, and in the process they dance a fury of light. Yet no star burns forever, and no universe warms its inhabitants forever, either.
This process, while it lasts, is known as fusion. A form of combustion, if you like.
You don’t like the queen, yet she has this virtue: she has always looked out for the best interests of her realm. If the rest of the world has to burn for her people’s welfare, so be it. It is this knifing purity of purpose that has kept you by her side all this time.
“A lesson for you, if you will,” the queen says. She sounds quietly exhausted, and that faint vulnerability alarms you. You do not wish to see weakness in her. It implies weakness in yourself, to the extent that you are her instrument. “There is no convenient isomorphism between the physics of the world beyond and the laws by which we live here. People are shadows, and shadows are souls. Unlike nuclei, they will burn forever: the perfect fuel. Even so, I sought to spare people—not just our people, but our enemies as well—as long as possible.
“Look up—not toward the cut-out shapes of star and crescent, but up out of the plane of the world-tapestry, up along the perpendicular. All the stars out there have burned out. Everything is cooling. We have denuded a universe of lanterns for our own survival. The only ones left to us are those we nourish ourselves.”