The creatures were splayed—fifteen or twenty of them—on an invisible bed of lovely gravity. They wafted like polychrome clouds down the wide, breezy hallways of the Emperor’s inner palace, carried by the ambient movement of air. Her apathy bracelet was set to high, as always here in the crowded capital, but sufficient sensitivity remained to feel some small measure of their inhuman thoughts. They regarded her coolly as they drifted past, secure in their privilege, in their demigodhood, and in their speechless wisdom, accumulated over sixteen centuries of languor. Of course, their species had never, even in the millennia before Imperial decree had elevated them to semidivine status, doubted its innate superiority.

They were imperious consorts, these personal familiars of His Risen Majesty. They were felis domesticus immortalis.

They were, in a word, cats.

And in a few more words, cats who would never die.

Senator Nara Oxham hated cats.

She halted as the invisible bed passed, anxious not to disturb the air currents that informed its slow, dignified passage. The animals’ heads swiveled as one, alien irises fixing her with languid malevolence, and she had to steel herself to return their unblinking gaze. So much for her brave, anti-Imperial heresies. Nara Oxham’s constituency was an entire planet, but here in the Diamond Palace the mighty senator found herself intimidated by the housepets.

Her morning unease had returned the moment she had egressed across the Rubicon Pale, the protective barrier, electronic and legal, that encircled the Forum and ensured the Senate’s independence. The aircar waiting for her at the Pale’s shimmering edge had been so elegant, as delicate as a thing of paper and string. But inside the car, fragility had transformed into power: the machine’s tendrils of lovely gravity reaching out to spin the city beneath her like a juggler’s fingers turning bright pins—among building spires, over parks and gardens, through the mists of waterfalls. At first lazy and indirect, the sovereign aircar had become suddenly urgent as it headed toward the Diamond Palace, a potter’s blade incising a straight path, as if the world were clay turning on a fast wheel below. This profligate expediture of energy to take her mere kilometers—a demonstration of the Emperor’s might: awesomely expensive, exquisitely refined.

Now, a few moments inside the palace, and the housecats were flying too.

Oxham shivered, and took a deep breath after the animals disappeared down the curving hallway, trying to remember if any of them had been black. Then she cast aside superstition and strode across the hall, braving their wafting path, toward her rendezvous with the Risen Emperor.