as possible. A year, usually. Not unusually, two years, so bishops from End can appear if they like. But End is cut off from us now in any event.”
“And you won’t perform the coronation before then.”
“Once I announce my resignation, I can’t,” Korbijn said. “I may perform the standard rites any priest may do, and I’m sure the church will allow me to continue to be a representative on the executive committee in the interim. But all my archbishopric responsibilities will pass temporarily to Bishop Hill, who administers Parliament Cathedral.”
Proster opened his mouth.
“All archbishopric responsibilities except the coronation of the emperox, which canonically falls explicitly under the responsibilities of the archbishop of Xi’an.”
Proster closed his mouth again.
“And before you ask—or don’t ask, but think, Proster—no emperox is legitimate without a church coronation. An heir presumptive may act with certain powers prior to their formal ascendance, but those powers are largely ceremonial and limited to administration of the imperial household. That’s why we have an executive committee for the interim.”
“I see what you’re doing, you know,” Proster said.
“I should certainly hope so; I’m being obvious enough about it,” Korbijn said. “But let me tell you just in case I’m not. You will have your coronation, Proster Wu. Nadashe Nohamapetan will be emperox, and on your head be it. But that coronation must be legitimate and it must be by the rules—the rules of the church and the law of the Interdependency—or your foolish game will fall into ruin. Which means, for now, you have to play by my rules. This is my last move. I know it and you know it. But it is still my move to play, and I’m going to play it.”
Proster said nothing for a longish time. Then he nodded.
“Good,” Korbijn said. “Then my successor, whoever it is, will see you here in a month. Probably.”
Proster raised his eyebrows. “Probably?”
“The bishops usually select the next archbishop from the host assembled,” Korbijn said. “But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they’ll pick one not present. When they do, that bishop must be notified. Then they must accept. Then they must travel. That could take months.”
“It’s not likely, you say.”
“It’s not,” Korbijn agreed. “But it’s possible. You should hope they don’t pick a bishop from End.”
Chapter 21
Marce and Chenevert found the emerging evanescent Flow shoal right where it should have been, doing what Marce had hypothesized it would be doing—expanding and moving—and more than that, throwing off even more Flow shoals that whipped out and forward and then evaporated in minutes or seconds. Marce hadn’t been expecting that, and it didn’t quite fit his model, and he knew that he could spend an entire career digging into just that one aspect of the emergent evanescent Flow shoals and would never run out of things to say about it.
Marce Claremont’s life was a ridiculously full festival of data.
Enough so that it fell to Chenevert to remind him that while all the data they were gathering were glorious, they had a task and focus, and maybe they should work on that. So Marce grudgingly set aside anything that was not related to gauging the baseline resonance of the Flow medium and mapping the continuing effects of the now-ancient cavitation, to see how the remaining data related to his hypothesized values of each.
These, too, were intriguingly different—close, but different, and Marce as a scientist appreciated how even small variations meant vast changes would propagate down the line, vastly changing the predictions for the appearance and duration of evanescent Flow streams, both in the near future and in decades and even centuries to come.
It also reinforced Marce’s belief that the next step was to get more readings from emergent evanescent Flow shoals and their attendant streams. Incremental refining of hypotheses with new, pertinent data was not sexy, but it was important. It also suggested—just suggested, but even so—that there might even be a way to do the thing they wanted: to shape the Flow shoals, and move them, and even perhaps get them to swallow human habitats whole.
Which would open up a whole raft of second-order problems that Marce wasn’t sure he wanted to confront, including the question of how to shape a timespace bubble of such volume that it could include a kilometers-long habitat inside of it. But he also realized that he didn’t have to solve every problem. If he solved this problem, other people could handle the rest. And solving this problem was enough for anyone.
Marce was so wrapped up in his