“This,” Marce said, and opened the folder he was carrying, which contained nine printed documents, each containing a substantial number of pages, stapled together. He began distributing the reports to the committee members.

“What is this?” Ranatunga asked.

“It’s an early draft of a scientific paper my father received several years ago, from a doctoral candidate named Hatide Roynold. She’d sent it to him because, although my father was the imperial auditor on End, he was there performing another task given to him by Emperox Attavio VI. My father was a Flow physicist, as I am, and the late emperox had him collecting data on the health of the Flow streams inside the Interdependency. Attavio VI was concerned, despite the best assurances of nearly all reputable Flow physicists, that these critical trade routes might collapse.”

“And will they?” Ranatunga asked.

“It’s happened before,” Marce said. “Most obviously we lost the Flow stream to Earth, our ancestral home, more than a millennium ago. Another stream collapse, involving the Dalasýsla system, happened a couple hundred years later. However, since then, the Flow streams have been remarkably stable, a fact which has allowed the Interdependency to thrive and prosper.”

Korbijn shook the report, which she was not bothering to flip through at the moment; others on the committee had also set them down; Nadashe Nohamapetan had put hers down to make some notation on her tablet. “Does this paper suggest the Flow streams are collapsing?”

“No,” Marce said. “The paper actually proposed that the streams are likely to undergo a radical shift, rearranging themselves over the course of a very few years. Most of the Flow streams that we have now will go away, but they’ll be replaced by emerging ones that will allow trade in the Interdependency to continue—but with End the nexus of the new Flow stream network, not Hub.”

“Is that accurate?” Korbijn asked.

“That’s what Roynold wanted to know, which is why she sent the draft to my father, who had written an earlier paper along the same lines, the findings of which he discussed with Attavio VI, with whom he shared a friendship. It was by Attavio’s request that he stopped publicly researching the topic, but the early paper was still out there. Roynold supposed that he was the only person who would take her seriously on the topic.”

“And what did he say?”

“Nothing; he was researching privately for the emperox. The only person I think he ever shared the draft with was me, because I was working with him on his research. And publicly, at least, Hatide Roynold stopped researching on this topic. Her doctorate addresses another vector of research entirely. But the imperial guards have just spoken to her overnight. It turns out that like my father, Roynold had a private patron who allowed her to continue her research on the topic of the Flow streams shifting. Nadashe Nohamapetan.”