So Chandni became a kind of glorified servant. The palace staff and the Motorik and the security guards all called her “Lady Chandni,” but a servant was what she was. “Bring the Empress’s coat, Lady Chandni,” “Wake the Empress for her breakfast with the Stationmaster of Vagh, Lady Chandni,” “You will accompany the Empress on her pilgrimage to Mars, Lady Chandni.” The other ladies-in-waiting were all horrified by her — she had known they would be, and she thought Threnody had known it too. She didn’t know what to say to them and they didn’t know what to say to her, so they quickly reached an arrangement where she didn’t speak to them at all, and that was fine by her.
She wasn’t planning to stay long, anyway. The imperial palace was no place for a girl who’d run with zip gangs in the submarine slums on Ayaguz. She didn’t like being Threnody Noon’s little charity project. As she followed the Empress through the bewildering maze of the palace — the Jade Room, the Mirrored Ballroom, the Waterfall Room — she sized up the valuables. Pretty much everything here was valuable; even the stuff that looked like junk turned out to be priceless antiques from Old Earth. Chandni hoped that if she took a few good pieces with her when she left, Threnody might be too kind or too embarrassed to send Railforce after her.
But somehow she kept on finding reasons to stay. The food was good, and free, and she told herself she needed fattening up before she hit the streets again. She had a room of her own that was about the size of the house she had grown up in, the one she’d wound up burning. The room was next to Kala Tanaka’s suite, on the floor below the Empress’s quarters. All the things in it were bigger or better or just nicer than anything Chandni had been around before. Even the light looked expensive, filtering through the decorative screen that walled her bed space off from the living area. The bed was circular and as soft as cartoon clouds. She sprawled out in it and slept on her back, snoring. She could have spent all day in that bed, but Kala Tanaka made sure she was always up early and ready to go and do whatever stupid duties needed doing.
Every time Kala Tanaka woke her up, or ordered her around, Chandni told herself that this was it, she wasn’t a slave, she was going to load up with some portable wealth and slip out of a back entrance that very night. But somehow when Kala came banging on her door the next morning before first sunrise, there she still was. Well, it would be a shame to skip town before the K-bahn Timetable Authority’s banquet; she had never been to an actual banquet before. And if she was staying till then, it would be a shame not to go along for the ride when Threnody made her pilgrimage to Mars…
Mars was a pointless kind of desert-y planet way off down at the end of the Hydrogen Line, but it had been the first station on the Network, where the Guardians had opened the very first K-gate. So for some reason each new Empress or Emperor had to go there, and be photographed looking thoughtful while they peered through the pressure-dome at Earth itself, which you could see sometimes if there wasn’t a sandstorm raging. Other things you could see from the pressure dome included the remains of some of the spaceships that human beings had ridden in to Mars so they could board the first trains and go through the Mars gate to explore and settle all the other worlds. Threnody stood on the viewing platform and pointed out the sand-covered hulk of the Varanasi, the ship on which the ancestors of the Noons had made the crossing. It gave Chandni a strange feeling, kind of shivery, like she used to get in history lessons when she was little, thinking about how far human beings had come. And there wasn’t a sandstorm blowing, and there was Old Earth, hanging in the Martian sky like a tiny blue star. Chandni thought it would be nice to go there, but there wasn’t time — for some reason the Guardians had never opened a K-gate on Earth itself, and it took months and months to get there by spaceship. The Empress needed to be back on Grand Central in time for her summer party.
*
It was on the way back from Mars that Chandni had her first chance to talk to Threnody since that day in the chess garden. Actually, that wasn’t quite true: on most days since then Threnody had said, “How are you settling in, Chandni?” or “Are you happy, Chandni?” but this was the first time that Chandni had felt she wanted a real answer.
They were riding on the new Noon train. Everybody said it didn’t compare to the old Noon train, but it still seemed pretty fancy to Chandni: sixty carriages, pulled by an enormous old loco called the Crystal Horizon. Threnody’s quarters were in the middle of the train: a carriage for her clothes, and two for herself and her staff, with war drones buzzing along outside the windows and then nipping quickly into hangars in the carriage roofs whenever the train approached a K-gate, since nothing could go through a K-gate unless it was on a train. One night Chandni was trying to sleep, and finding it difficult because the train kept passing across worlds where it was daytime, so she went from her cabin downstairs into the lounge part of the car and found that Threnody was having the same problem. The Empress of the Network, with her halo of little drones, was standing at a window with a glass of hot chocolate in her hand and a little chocolate moustache where she’d been drinking it.
“So what do you think of this life, Chandni Hansa?” she asked.
Chandni, who had been about to make an excuse and go back to her cabin, stayed where she was and shrugged. She wanted to say something about the way she’d felt when she stood on Mars and looked up at Old Earth, but she couldn’t find the right sort of words. “It’s like living in an ad,” she said at last.
Threnody laughed. “You’re right! It is! We are living in an ad. My whole life is just a great, big-budget advertisement, designed to show the people of the Network that everything is under control and all’s well with the worlds. And we’re just actresses, playing our parts.”
Chandni frowned. “But you’re the Empress…”
Threnody laughed some more. “Have you not noticed Lyssa Delius?”
“The tall black lady with the tall white hair? The Rail Marshal?” Chandni had noticed the Rail Marshal all right. And she had only been in the Empress’s service for a few days before the Rail Marshal had noticed her. Chandni had heard her ask Kala Tanaka who the new girl was. Kala Tanaka, who had just magicked Chandni through all the palace employee security checks and had her tracker bracelet removed, had trotted out her friend-of-the-family-charity-job story, but Chandni could tell the Rail Marshal didn’t buy it. She had narrowed her wise old eyes and said, “I trust you know what you’re doing, Kala…”
“She’s the real ruler of the rails,” said Threnody. “I’m just her puppet. That’s why she chose me. I’m young and I don’t know how things work and I don’t have any ideas of my own. I’m just a Noon doll she can prop up on the Flatcar Throne while she tries to get the senate to pass new laws in my name. If I tried to argue she’d probably do with me whatever she did with my sister Priya, and no one knows what’s become of Priya. Lyssa Delius comes from some horrible industrial world; she grew up poor, and she wants laws that will help other poor people. Banning Motorik labor, and raising wages, and stuff like that. But you can imagine how that goes down with my family and all the other corporate families. They say I’m bringing in dangerous laws and risking instability because I’m young and foolish. But it’s not my fault! I’m just her puppet!”
Chandni thought she liked the sound of Lyssa Delius and her laws. She wondered if it would be worth asking her to bring in another, so that people couldn’t be frozen for years at a time and end up skipping across the surface of the decades like a skimmed stone. But all she said was, “It’s the Guardians who really run things, isn’t it? Even I know that.”
Threnody peered into her hot chocolate as if there might be answers there. “The Guardians haven’t said anything about what Lyssa Delius is up to. They stay in the Datasea and don’t share their thoughts with anyone. If they approve, they ought to say so, so everyone would know.”
“If they don’t approve, they could burn you and Lyssa Delius up with a lightning bolt or something,” said Chandni. She’d never really given a lot of thought to those all-wise AIs who were supposed to watch and guide everybody. It was pretty obvious they didn’t care about her, so why should she care about them? Still, she had a vague idea that if they didn’t like you they would say it with lightning bolts.
“I met a Guardian once,” said Threnody. “It was an interface of Anais Six. On Sundarban. The night Zen Starling and his Moto girl escaped. The night Lyssa Delius woke me up to tell me I was going to be Empress. That was the last time I saw Kobi.”
Chandni sat down, sensing that this was going to be a long talk. Her father used to get in this mood at the end, although he’d done it on rice wine, not hot chocolate. The train passed through a K-gate and ran out across a plain of what looked like ice beneath two red suns that appeared to be eating each other. Chandni and Threnody, experienced rail travelers, barely bothered glancing at the view.
Chandni said, “Who’s Kobi?”
“He and I were supposed to get married, before I was Empress,” said Threnody. “It was just a business marriage, meant to link the Noons to a Sundarban spacer clan, the Chen-Tulsis. Kobi was an oaf. Well, he used to be an oaf… but just at the end he was quite brave. You know how, when things get bad, you see people as they really are? And Kobi was all right, really. I think he truly cared about me. But once I was Empress it was all off. The Empress can’t go marrying into some little family nobody’s ever heard of. I’ll have to marry an Albayek or a Ngyuen or somebody…”
Chandni sat there in the glow of the dying suns and watched tears run down the face of the Empress of the Galaxy, and thought what a strange turn of events this was for a popsicle girl.
“I wasn’t in love with him or anything,” said Threnody. “I don’t know why I’m crying. I haven’t thought about him much, until tonight. I’m just tired. Kobi Chen-Tulsi! I’m lucky to be rid of him, really. I wonder what he’s doing now?”