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remain above the waist.
    The cheating death—the one which brought no enlightenment nor power, only nothingness—would come. After sixteen hundred years Absolute (although only five hundred subjective, such were her travels) she would finally be extinct, the Reason for Empire gone.
    And it was the case that the Empress, despite her arctic absence of desires in any other normal sense, very much did not want that to happen. She had said otherwise to her brother on recent occasions, but now she knew those words to be untrue.
    "The room is now under imperial surveillance, m'Lady," a voice said to the Child Empress.
    "Soon, then." The Empress mouthed the words.
    The commando cocked her head. The Rix creature always reacted to the Empress's whispers, no matter how carefully she subvocalized. She seemed to be listening, as if hoping to hear the Empress's invisible conversant. Or perhaps she was merely puzzled, wondering at her prisoner's one-sided conversation, the Empress's absolute stillness. Possibly the soldier thought her captive mad.
    But the confidant was undetectable, short of very sophisticated and mortally invasive surgery. It was woven through the Empress's nervous system and that of her Lazarus symbiant like threads braided into hair. It was indistinguishable from its host, constructed of dendrites that even bore the royal DNA. The Empress's immune system not only accepted the confidant, but protected the device from its own illnesses without complaint, although from a strictly mechanical point of view, the device was a parasite, using its host's energy without performing any biological function. But the device was no freeloader; it too had a reason to live.
    "How is the Other?" the Empress asked her confidant.
    "All is well, m'Lady."
    The Empress nodded almost imperceptibly, though her eyes remained focused on the Rix guard. The Other had been well for almost five hundred subjective years, but it was good in this strange, almost trying moment to make sure.

    Of course, every tribe of scattered humanity had developed some form of near immortality, at least among the wealthy. Members of the Rix Cult preferred the slow alchemical transmutation of Upgrade, the gradual shift from biology to machine as their mortal coil unwound. The Fahstuns used myriad biological therapies—telomere weaving, organ transplant, meditation, nano-reinforcement of the immune and lymphatic systems—in a long twilight struggle against cancers and boredom. The Tungai mummified themselves with a host of data; they were frantic diarists, superb iconoplasts who left personality models, high-resolution scans, and hourly recordings of themselves in the hope that one day someone would awake them from death, somehow.
    But only the Risen Empire had made death itself the key to eternal life. In the Empire, death had become the route to enlightenment, a passage to a higher state. The legends of the old religions served the Emperor well, justifying the one great flaw of his Lazaru symbiant: it could not bond with a living host. So the wealthy and elevated of the Empire spent their natural two centuries or so alive, then moved across the line.
    The Emperor had been the first to pass the threshold, taking the supreme gamble to test his creation, offering his own life in what was now called the Holy Suicide. He performed his final experiment on himself rather than on his dying little sister, whom he was seeking to cure of a childhood wasting sickness. Anastasia was the Reason. That gesture, and sole control of the symbiant—the power to sell or bestow elevation upon his family's servants—were at the root of Empire.
    The Child Empress sighed. It had worked so well for so long.

    "The rescue attempt grows nearer, m'Lady," the voice said.
    The Empress did not bother to respond. Her dead eyes were locked with her Rix captor's. Yes, she thought, the woman was starting to pale a bit. The other hostages were so active, sobbing and fidgeting. But she was as still