She couldn't take it all in; she started, got half-way through, lost it again, started more slowly, then read it in full a second time.
By the end of it, Gadfium was staring at the piece of paper; she could feel her eyes bulging from her face and sense the tension in the surrounding skin. Her head still felt as though it was spinning. She gulped, looked at the smiling, shining face of Clispeir.
There was a knock at the cabin door. 'Ma'am?' Rasfline asked, voice muffled.
Gadfium cleared her throat. 'I'm alive, Rasfline,' she called, her voice shaking. 'Just let me rest. Ten minutes.'
'Very well, ma'am.' She could hear his hesitation.
'Yes, Rasfline?'
'We should not stay much longer, Chief Scientist… and also, there is an urgent message from the Sortileger's office. He would like to see you.'
'Inform him I'll be on my way in ten minutes.'
'Ma'am.'
They waited a few moments, then Clispeir seized the other woman's shoulders, glancing at the paper Gadfium held. 'I know some of it seems like nonsense, but isn't it just the most exciting thing?'
Gadfium nodded. She put one shaking hand to her brow and patted Clispeir's shoulder with the other hand. 'Yes, and very dangerous,' she said.
'You really think so?' Clispeir said.
'Of course! If Security hear about this, we're all lost.'
'You don't think if you could somehow get this to the King he'd, well, have a change of heart? I mean: realise that the best thing was for us all to work tog — ?'
'No!' Gadfium said, appalled. She shook the other woman's shoulders. 'Clispeir! The message itself mentions the King and his pals seem to have some secret agenda; if we tell them we know they'll just silence us!'
'Of course, of course,' Clispeir said, smiling nervously. 'You're right.'
'Yes,' Gadfium said, 'I am.' She took a deep breath. 'Now, we have ten minutes — may I keep this?' She held up the sheet of paper.
'Certainly! You'll have to make your own copies for the others.'
'That's all right. Now, as I was saying; we have ten minutes to decide what to do.'
3
The Palace was situated in the Great Hall's central lantern, a tall octagonal construction protruding from the centre of the steeply pitched roof which in a humanly scaled version of Serehfa would have been open and hollow and have helped light the Hall's interior below.
The Palace filled a hundred tall storeys within the lantern and projected downwards into the Great Hall for another ten levels; those lower floors were mostly devoted to the Security services and their equipment. Lush gardens and broad terraces graced its outer walls, and within it were housed its own great halls, ballrooms and ceremonial spaces. Its summit was capped by further walled gardens and a small airfield.
His Majesty King Adijine VI sat in the great solar, at one end of a mighty table too long to be used for purely vocal discussion without amplification. He listened to the chief ambassadorial emissary for the Engineers of the Chapel as he forcefully outlined some subsidiary position on possible technological cooperation should the hoped-for peace be forthcoming. The emissary's voice boomed out across the hall. Possibly, thought the King, the emissary would not have required amplification.
The chief ambassadorial emissary was a fully sentient human-chimeric; a man in the guise of an animal — in this case ursus maritimus, a polar bear. Such creatures were generally frowned upon; animals were seen as the final resting place — or at any rate one of the last resting places — for the crypt-corroded souls of the long dead, but the clan Engineers had a tradition of such beasts. It had been something of an aggressive statement for the Chapel usurpers to make, appointing such a being as their main representative at the talks. Adijine didn't care.
He was finding the chief ambassadorial emissary's tirade tiring; certainly in the course of providing the bear's body with vocal equipment capable of reproducing human speech the Chapel scientists had created a powerful and profoundly bassy instrument, but one could grow weary of it all the same, and the man within the beast ought to leave the sort of detail he was now dealing in to his retinue. However, as well as liking the sound of his own voice, the chief ambassadorial emissary seemed unable to delegate effectively, and Adijine had rather lost interest in the substance of what was now being discussed.
He switched away.
Like the other Privileged, the King had no implants, save for those which would be used only once, to record and transmit his personality when he died. Unlike most of them he had access to technologies that allowed him the benefits of implants without the drawbacks, giving him unrestrained one-way access to all those with implants and — in the right circumstances — even those without them. It did mean he had to wear the crown to make it all work, but he had a choice of several attractive models of crown, all of which were tastefully designed and sat lightly on one's head.
In theory the regal paradigm best expressed the reality of modern power — better than a commercial, civil or military archetype for example — and certainly it seemed that people were happy enough with a kind of benignly dictatorial meritocracy which at any given moment looked somewhat like a real monarchy — with primogeniture and fully hereditary status — but wasn't.
Actually he suspected few people these days really believed that in the past kings and queens had been chosen by the accident of birth (and this when it really had been an accident and even their crude attempts at improving their bloodstock tended to result in in-breeding rather than regal thoroughbreds). Equally, though, the sheer grandiosity of the stage that Serehfa itself presented might be seen to demand an imperial repertoire.
The King entered the minds of the men behind the walls.
Twenty troops of his bodyguard were concealed behind the paper partitions lining the room. He scanned each quickly — on principle, really, they were thoroughly programmed — and then focused on their commander. He was watching the scene in the hall on a visor monitor. Adijine followed the man's slow sweep of the view and listened to quiet system chatter coming over his audio implants. Head-ups flickered on and off as the guard commander's gaze fell on individuals in the room.
His gaze settled on the King for a second, and Adijine had the always rather strange experience of looking at himself through another's eyes. He looked fine; handsome, tall, regal, impressively robed, the light crown sitting straight on his curly black locks, and by his expression paying due but not deferential attention to what the polar-bear emissary was saying.
Adijine admired himself for a while longer. He had been bred to be King; not in the ancients' crude hit-or-miss interpretation of the words but in the literal sense that the crypt had designed him; given him the aspect, bearing and character of a natural ruler before he'd even been born, selecting his physical and mental attributes from a variety of sources to make him handsome, attractive, charming, gracious and wise, balancing wit against gravitas, human understanding against moral scrupulousness and a love of the finer things in life against an urge towards simplicity. He inspired loyalty, was difficult to hate, brought out the best in men and women and had great but not total power which he had the sense and modesty to use sparingly but authoritatively. Not for the first time, Adijine thought what a damn fine figure of a man he was.