Chapter Seven: The Emperor's Speech
What a man builds in a lifetime, the world will stand upon for centuries. Speak carefully. Build well.
He spoke to the world on the first day of the new year.
The speech was given in the capital — the great square before the imperial palace, which could hold fifty thousand people and did, and the words were carried by relay to every city and province, repeated by speakers in every major square of every major settlement in the world, translated into dozens of languages, printed and distributed to the academies and the markets and the village halls.
He stood on the steps of the palace and looked out at the crowd — at the sea of faces, every shade and kind that the world contained, people who had come from distances that would have been impossible to cross a generation ago before the roads — and he felt something that was not quite any single emotion but a combination of many, moving through him like weather.
He spoke without ceremony, because he had never had patience for ceremony.
"When I was a child, I wanted to conquer heaven and earth. So I learned everything I could. I mastered nine proficiencies and built the Nine Academies for those nine fields, which my people now call the Nine Heavens. I learned not to be merely a king of soldiers, but a servant of the deep future."
He paused.
"I have conquered the earth. Every land under the sun is now one land. Every people under the sky is now one people — not the same, not without their own traditions and languages and ways of living, but connected. Part of something. Answerable to each other and to the shared future we are building together."
The crowd was very quiet. Fifty thousand people, almost silent.
"The academies that I built, that we built together — I have added to their subjects. I have added every field that my scholars tell me is on the frontier of what we know: the study of mathematics in its deepest forms, the study of the materials that the world is made of, the study of the forces that move through the earth and air and water and sky. I have built academies in every major city and opened them to every commoner, because I believe — because I know — that the minds we need to answer the questions we cannot yet answer are already born. They are in the fields and workshops and fishing boats of this world. We have only to give them what they need to think."
He stopped.
He looked up.
Above the square the sky was very clear, and it was night, and the stars were out.
"I conquer the earth. I gave you the earth. Now go further. Now I ask my children — every one of you who belongs to this world, which is every one of you — I ask you to conquer the heavens. Not in my lifetime. Perhaps not in your lifetime. But in the lifetime of what we are building together, which is longer than any of us and does not end."
He paused one more time.
"The crown prince is now emperor. He is wise and he is good and he will serve you well. I have prepared him as well as I could and I trust him as I trust all of you, which is to say: completely, and with full awareness of the cost of that trust, and with the intention of holding it."
He turned to his son, who stood at the top of the steps.
He took the crown from his own head. He held it for a moment, feeling its weight.
He placed it on his son's.
The square erupted.
The sound rolled out across the city and did not stop for a long time.
Aurelion stood still in it, eyes lifted, looking at the stars.
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