“I would think so. I can’t imagine what the math for a planet-centric theory would have looked like.”

“It was hideously complex and convoluted. Looking at it now, it’s obviously a retrofit to uphold the superstitions of an earlier era. But something rather odd happened when the sun-centered theory, with all its elegance and clarity, was devised.”

Zai waited, his champagne forgotten in his hand.

“Almost no one believed it,” she said. “The new theory was debated for a while, gained a few supporters, but then it was suppressed and almost entirely dropped.”

Zai narrowed his eyes in disbelief. “But eventually people must have realized. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be standing here, two thousand light-years from Earth.”

Oxham shook her head. “They didn’t realize. Very few ever changed their minds. Those scientists who grew up with the old theory stuck to it overwhelmingly.”

“But then how—”

“They died, Lieutenant-Commander.”

She drank the last of her champagne. The old arguments still moved her, still made her mouth dry.

“Or rather, they did their descendants the favor of dying,” she said. “They left their children the world. And thus the new ideas—the new shape of that world—became real. But only through death.”

Zai shook his head. “But surely they would have eventually figured out—”

“If the old ones lived forever? Possessed all the wealth, controlled the military, and brooked no disagreement? We’d still be living there, stuck on that lonely fringe of Orion, thinking ourselves at the center of the universe.

“But the old ones, the ones who were wrong, died,” she finished.

The man nodded slowly.

“I’d always heard that you pinks were pro-death. But I’d thought that an exaggeration.”

“It’s no exaggeration. Death is a central evolutionary development. Death is change. Death is progress. And immortality is a civilization-killing idea.”

Zai smiled, his eyes roaming to take in the grandeur of the palace around them. “We don’t seem to be a dead civilization yet.”

“Seventeen hundred years ago, the Eighty Worlds were the most advanced technological power in this arm,” she said. “Now look at us. The Rix, the Tungai, the Fahstuns have all surpassed us.”

Zai’s eyes widened. It was a fact seldom spoken aloud, even by Secularists. But Laurent Zai, a military man, must know that it was true. Every war grew more difficult as the Risen Empire continued to be outpaced by its neighbors.

“But seventeen hundred years ago we were no empire,” he argued. “Merely a rabble of worlds, like the Rix, but far more divided. We were unstable, in competition amongst ourselves. We’re stronger now, even with our technical…disadvantages. And besides, we have the only technology truly worth having. We can beat death.”

“‘The Old Enemy,’” Oxham quoted. That was what the Political Apparatus called it. The Old Enemy whom the Risen Emperor had dared and vanquished.