The crowd in the throne room formed two columns, their hands outstretched before them, turned upward: a path of palms, from the doors to the high gray throne.

Baru walked between them, in her porcelain half-mask, a simple waistcoat and black trousers, with her gloves buckled at her wrists and Aminata’s boarding saber at her hip.

Oh, Wydd, what a thrill she felt. What a hateful thrill.

At the end of the path of hands the Emperor awaited her upon Its Throne.

Of course It couldn’t be the Emperor, who sat in the People’s Palace in Falcrest between sluiceways of glass eyeballs and ice water. Of course the marble seat in this throne room wasn’t the Throne. The Emperor here would be a lobotomite, his will pithed and destroyed with a steel pick.

They had prepared him in the full Imperial Regalia. A white smiling mask of enameled steel. A white silk raiment which bloomed out from beneath the mask and ran out taut and angular like a tent until it met the marble of the throne, where it gathered into braids, the braids woven thick and sure as ship’s rigging into steel eyebolts. Beneath the silk rig the man’s form could not be seen or selected as human. He was continuous with the weft of the Throne. Behind him the braids of silk spidered out through bolt and pulley to run away into secret corridors behind the wall. Arteries of secrets, pumping out into the world.

The gull squawked angrily. No sound otherwise, except the small decisions of Baru’s footfalls.

“STOP,” the assembled technocrats boomed, the Emperor’s voice invested in them.

Baru stopped.

“TELL ME YOUR NAME.”

“Baru Cormorant,” Baru said.

“BY WHAT MERIT DO YOU CLAIM MY ATTENTION?”

“I claim the polestar mark,” Baru said, and she opened her folio where her exams and assignments had been recorded, showing it to the Emperor and to the room: here is my worth. “I claim the Emperor’s authority. By my works I make my claim.”

“APPROACH ME.”

She climbed the short steps.

The great silk bindings of the Throne creaked and shifted: the Emperor’s left hand was drawn away, revealing a maple case. “MASK YOURSELF,” the chorus commanded, and inside that maple case Baru found a face of glazed blue-white ceramic, exquisitely blank. Around the right eye blazed the eight-pointed polestar mark, rendered in silver. The sign of overriding Imperial authority.

The mask was sleek to the touch, sensuously unyielding. Baru wondered how thrilling it would be to smash the perfect thing. Behind the right eye the interior swarmed with codes.

It fit her, of course, like a second face.

“TELL US YOUR NAME,” sang the servants of the Throne.

Baru turned to the little crowd. The whole pyramid of her life, turned upside down, with its vast base cornered by her distant ancestors, balancing on a tiny point: her, here, now.