Chapter Eight: The Tour
A man should see, at the end, what he has made.
He left the capital in early spring with a retinue of fifty — smaller than his advisors wanted, larger than he preferred — and began moving through the world he had spent his life building.
He traveled without announcement. He preferred it this way. When he announced his coming, cities prepared — cleaned their streets, organized displays, arranged everything to present its best face. He wanted to see the ordinary face, the day-to-day reality, the thing that was actually there when no one was expecting the emperor.
What he found, mostly, was better than he had feared and not as good as he had hoped, which was the correct result for any large human enterprise. The roads were excellent. The trade was robust. The academies were full, and in the academies he found what he had hoped to find: young people studying things that he had not anticipated, combining fields in ways that his original frameworks had not foreseen, arriving at questions that pushed past the boundaries of what any single academy had been designed to teach. This was exactly right. The structure had generated something that exceeded the structure. That was the point.
The medicine had advanced significantly. The engineers in the eastern provinces had developed techniques for irrigation that were extraordinary. A group of astronomers at the Ninth Academy's southern branch had made observations about the movements of the planets that suggested the nature of the solar system was considerably more complex and interesting than anyone had previously understood.
He spent three days with those astronomers.
He asked questions the way he had always asked questions: from genuine ignorance, without pretense, with the full weight of his attention. The astronomers, who had not expected their retired emperor to sit with them for three days asking careful questions about orbital mechanics, were at first terrified and then increasingly engaged, because the questions were good questions, and his mind — still, at sixty-five, extraordinarily sharp — was clearly following what they told him and pushing it further.
On the third day he said, quietly: "You understand that what you are finding here changes what is possible."
The eldest astronomer said, carefully: "We believe so, yes."
"Good," Aurelion said. "Keep going."
He moved on.
— ✦ —
He traveled for six months.
He saw cities that had been wastelands when he was a young king and were now thriving centers of commerce and learning. He saw villages that had never had clean water before the empire's engineering corps had come through, and they now had fountains and wells and the children were, visibly, healthier. He saw a harbor city in the far west that had been built entirely within his lifetime and was already one of the great trading centers of the world, its docks busy with ships that carried goods from five thousand miles away.
He saw, once, a classroom of children in a small town in the mountains — eight and nine years old, learning mathematics — and he sat in the back of the room for an hour and watched, and when he left, the teacher came out and said, not quite believing it: "Are you —" and he said yes, and she stared at him for a moment and then said, not to be complimentary but because she meant it: "They are so clever. All of them. I cannot believe how clever they are."
"No," Aurelion said. "Children have always been that clever. We simply didn't used to give them rooms like this one."
He moved on.
He was tired, sometimes, in ways he had not expected — not physically, though the body had its complaints, but in some deeper way, some settling of the weight of all the years. He had lived a full life in the way that full is rarely meant: genuinely full, packed to the edge with consequence and effort and cost.
He did not regret any of it.
He was also, privately, ready.
— ✦ —