Nothing.
He placed the crown on the desk and leant his head back against the top of the chair, closing his eyes.
Nothing.
He got up and walked to the far end of the room, looking out through the broad windows and down into the depths of the Great Hall. Threads of smoke trailed into the air from the carpet of landscape. Airships floated against the ceiling, rolling helplessly. Then the room's lights went out and the windows polarised to black.
The King sighed into the darkness.
'Ah, Adijine, here you are,' said a half-familiar voice, immediately behind him. He froze.
They stood in a vast circular space with a floor of gleaming gold, a velvet-black ceiling and what appeared to be a single all-round window looking out onto a whitely shining surface and a purple-black sky where stars shone steadily. Above them, suspended as though on nothing, hung a massive orrery; a model of the solar system with a brilliant yellow-white ball of light in the middle and the various planets shown as glassy globes of the appropriate appearance all fixed by slender poles and shafts to thin hoops of blackly shining metal like wet jet.
Under the representation of the sun, there was a brightly lit circular construction like some half-built room. A group of perhaps two dozen people sat on couches and seats within the circle, blinking and looking up and around and at each other. Some looked surprised, some nervous and some gave the impression of trying strenuously to look neither.
The girl, Gadfium and Oncaterius walked across the glistening floor towards the group in the centre. The girl had exchanged her furs for an old-fashioned-looking boiler suit. Oncaterius looked uninjured now but his hands were bound together, as were his feet, with Resiler shackles, forcing him to adopt a shuffling gait. There was a piece of tape across his mouth. He looked quietly furious.
The girl walked into the centre of the group. Gadfium stood with Oncaterius on the circumference. She looked round the people. She recognised all of them; Adijine, the twelve Consistorians, the three most senior Army generals and the heads of the most important clans, with the exception of Aerospace but including Zabel Tuturis, head of the Engineers and leader of the Chapel rebels. They were all bound hand and foot with Resiler spancels and had their mouths taped over like Oncaterius. Also like him, none of them looked particularly pleased with their situation.
Gadfium stared at the slight figure of the young girl, who stood under the model sun, looking round the others, an expression of satisfaction on her face. If what she was seeing was a true representation of this group's current status… Gadfium thought about it, and found herself gulping.
'Thank you all for being able to attend at such short notice,' the girl said, smiling.
Brows furrowed, eyes glared, expressions darkened. Gadfium wondered what it must feel like to be the focus of such concentrated — and potentially potent — wrath. The girl seemed to be revelling in it.
She snapped her fingers. The rest of the vast circular room around them filled instantly with a mass of people, all standing looking in at the group in the centre. Gadfium inspected the nearest faces. All different; just people. They looked real enough, but frozen somehow, as though they were watching in base-level time. Perspective, or the angle of the floor, seemed to have changed; it was as if the whole huge space was now a shallow cone, giving everybody in the room, even those with their backs to the distant windows, a clear view of the group in the centre.
'We're going live to whoever wants to watch,' the girl explained to the seated group.
She clasped her hands behind her back. 'Think of me as Asura, if you like,' she announced, pacing slowly in a small circle, her gaze sweeping around each member of the group. 'Firstly, some background.
'We are here because of the Encroachment and the inappropriate response to it exhibited by those in power. The facts concerning the dust cloud and the effects it will have on Earth unless checked have been neither exaggerated nor down-played. At least one of the rumours concerning it is also true; there may indeed be a system which can deliver us all from the Encroachment. If there is, we ought to know soon. Again, if there is, access to it may be through the heights of the fast-tower, part of which this is a representation of.'
(And, in a distant province, Pieter Velteseri watched, like millions of others.
He had been gossiping with one of his sisters and dandling a grandchild when one of his nephews had walked into the conservatory complaining his implants weren't working properly and he was getting some weird live broadcast swamping everything.
Pieter had worried that it might be something to do with the attention they'd been getting from the Security people — tapped communications, interviews through the crypt and in person — all of which seemed to be linked to Asura, who'd disappeared at the airport tower before cousin Ucubulaire could find her. Pieter had crypted to see what was happening, and there she was!
He watched, fascinated.)
'There certainly is a potential escape route for a few,' the girl said, standing beneath the model of the sun and looking around the represented crowd, 'a secret passage, if you like. It is in the shape of a wormhole; a hole through the fabric of space-time. One end is contained within the Altar Massif, in the Chapel, here in Serehfa; the other end is located either in a space ship of the Diaspora or on a planet which one of the ships reached.'
She paused, glancing at Gadfium.
Gadfium was aware that her mouth was hanging open. She closed it. The seated people looked mostly bitter, resentful or angry, though one or two appeared as surprised as she felt.
'The recent dispute amongst our rulers was over control of the wormhole portal,' Asura went on. 'The Chapel commands access to the portal but cannot operate it; the Cryptographers may or may not be able to do so, depending on whether they can design and run the appropriate programs. In any event, the wormhole is physically small, and even if it is brought to an operational state in the next few months — an unlikely and optimistic time scale — it could only ever be used to save a tiny fraction of Earth's human population."
The girl looked over the heads of the seated group to the ranks of people standing behind. 'Hence the struggle for power, the war, and the secrecy. Of course, the wormhole might save many more of us — perhaps all — if we were transmitted in an uploaded form, but that solution does not appear to have appealed to our rulers, who took the decision on everybody else's behalf that it would be unacceptable.
'There is another reason for their reluctance to commit themselves to a purely non-biological form, and that involves the chaos.'
The girl paused, gazing again round the seated group before addressing the silent crowds beyond.
'What we choose to call the chaos is in fact an entire ecology of AIs; a civilisation existing within our own which is enormously more complex than ours and supports immensely greater numbers of individuals, as well as being, by the most meaningful standards of mensuration, vastly older.
'When the Diaspora occurred the humans who chose to remain on Earth also chose to renounce both space and Artificial Intelligence; in that sense, we are all Resilers, or at least the descendants of Resilers. The world data network of the time was swept almost completely free of virus; it had, of course, already exported all its AIs. Nevertheless, the corpus could not be freed entirely of non-controllable entities and the inevitable process of selection and evolution took place within the niches available within it, and so the chaos grew. Our rulers have chosen to ignore the full implications of the chaos for all these generations because its very existence fails to accord with their philosophy, their faith, if you like; that humanity is supreme, and that not only does it not need to cooperate with what it calls the chaos, but must actively oppose it.