Fia, let us begin directly. Your vows.
Of course. Everyone begins there.
And what do they ask most often? Why did you break them? What happened to you? Were you pressured?
Yes. Why did you break them? What happened? Were you pushed into it? Did Clio influence you? Did Ace lead you astray? But do you know what they ask most often?
What?
How the author dared to tell everyone about it.
And did you know?
No, I didn’t.
But even I cannot alter the principles governing relations between worlds.
The author cannot change our reality.
We cannot kill the author.
And you, my dear interviewer, are arrogant Interviewer: and people adore you.
Was that supposed to be an insult?
No. An insult would have required exaggeration. I merely chose an accurate word.
Very well. Let us assume the author survives this once. The vows remain. You kept them with absolute precision for five years. Why?
Because a person can rearrange her entire life in the name of something she later discovers was never worthy of such sacrifice.
That is still rather vague. More precisely?
More precisely?
Family legacy. Social environment. Conformism. Necessity. Pride. Career ambition. We have invented countless names for the reasons good and free people become cogs in a system. Especially when they imagine that one day they will stand at the head of that same system.
So you believed this path could lead you to the office of First Consul.
Yes.
And that goal was great enough for you to renounce everything else?
At the time, yes. Now I call it tragedy. Then I called it discipline.
But the idea of restoring your family’s honor is a noble one, is it not? And you gave so much for it.
Family honor? One of my ancestors was a celebrated fraud in the history of the Republic Interviewer: a man who robbed both friends and relatives. Do you know who he was?
One of the two emperors, I assume.
No. Aurelius Fabius — one of the beloved founders of the First Republic.
Then you mean to say there is no such thing as a pure lineage.
That is exactly what I mean. There is no family in the Republic with nothing to wash away. Some sins were covered by victory. Others were exposed by defeat. Those two emperors are remembered only because they lost.
And yet you still devoted five years of your life to redeeming the name.
Yes, as many people devote their lives to words like greatness, duty, honor. We have invented too many noble names for what is, in truth, the slow strangling of freedom.
That is severe.
No. Merely precise.
Anyone who sacrifices freedom to the myth of greatness ends by losing both.
Still, the Seven Sacred Vows were not merely decorative. The Seventh Republic came to stability through chaos, violence, emperors, fracture. A state like that needed people willing to limit themselves for the common good.
Naturally it did. Every theocracy requires its monks. Ours merely gave the role of religion to science, and the role of monastery to the state.
And you were one of its finest.
Regrettably, yes.
Two of those vows are especially striking: the rejection of wealth and the rejection of the body. Many would call that a high form of self-mastery.
People will call many things exalted if you wrap them in sufficiently sacred language. They are very fond of presenting self-punishment as moral elevation.
You did not believe in those vows?
No. Never.
Never?
Never. But a person does not need belief in order to punish herself. She only needs to rename it duty, necessity, maturity, or the future.
So from the very beginning you knew none of it was natural to you.
Of course I knew. That is precisely why those five years were tragic. I abandoned everything I loved for the sake of mythical goals. And what makes it worse is that I did it consciously.
That sounds like betrayal of the self.
In public life, self-betrayal is often given very elegant names.
Such as?
Responsibility. Maturity. Order. Dignity. Loyalty. Sometimes even career.
And what did that night change?
It invented nothing. It merely reminded me that I was still alive.
That sounds almost romantic.
On the contrary. Romantic would be saying that everything changed at once. Nothing changed at once. At a certain point, body, memory, desire, and a buried life all spoke together and said: enough.
And Ace was part of that awakening?
Of course. But people always want to assign everything to one person. It makes things simpler. It is more comfortable to say a woman was led astray than to admit she chose not to go on living by someone else’s rules.
Then let me ask plainly: what happened — was it weakness or decision?
For someone like me, continuing would have been the weakness.
Let us speak about your uniform. This black tunic, the white belt, the almost monastic silhouette — why?
Because it is the official daily attire of the Prefecture of Security. And as one of its senior figures, I considered it my duty to set an example of discipline.
Fia, surely you are joking. It is not merely discipline. It is theatre of power. The aesthetics of fear. Archaic solemnity.
Naturally. Nearly every state costume is a small performance. Some rule through garments, some through language, some through symbols. In our case, it happened to be a black tunic.
And you liked that performance?
No. It was an absurdity produced with enormous labor. The finest materials. The most refined taste. An absurd amount of intellectual energy. And in the end, what did we achieve? Something Franciscan monks could have draped over themselves a thousand years ago without any conceptual pretensions at all.
What irritated me most was the solemnity of it. Everything was done as though it mattered deeply. As though someone needed it. As though someone might even be moved by it. No one needed it. No one was moved by it. Systems simply enjoy giving form to their own emptiness.
And yet you wore it.
Naturally. As long as you are playing the game, at some point you are forced to “admire” what in truth irritates you. There is almost no alternative. If you do not, you begin to see too clearly how degrading the entire performance really is.
People speak of you as though you personally brought down the Republic’s moral architecture.
What an honor. If the Republic’s moral architecture collapses because of me, then it was built very badly.
But you admit it shocked people.
What does not shock people? If two people sleep together, it is scandal. If three do not, that is scandal too. If someone is silent, she is suspicious. If she speaks, she is shameless. It is exhausting carrying so many nervous systems on one’s back.
So you took no pleasure in having the entire Republic discuss you?
No. Though I admit certain expressions of horror were beneficial to my mood.
Had you and Ace always amused yourselves in this way?
In what way?
In making everyone else feel absurdly serious.
Yes. That was one of our more stable traditions.
And Clio? Is she truly as dangerous as people say?
Yes, absolutely. Beautiful and free people have always frightened others. If that person is a woman, the fear deepens. And if she is as intelligent as Clio — oh, then half of society promptly renames its fear a principle.
And you? Are you dangerous?
More so. A beautiful, intelligent, free woman already disturbs a great many people. Now add red hair and specialized training. Society tends to respond to such women in two stages: first gossip, then morality.
Looking at your critics, one might think they have no place in their lives for desire, the body, or pleasure.
Oh, they do. It is only sinful in others and exceptional in themselves. That mechanism is very old.
Sometimes I think what society fears most is not sin, but the possibility that someone might actually feel well.
Of course. Misery looks more trustworthy. People forgive the suffering far more easily than the content.
And still many would say: order is necessary. If everyone follows desire, the Republic collapses.
Desire does not destroy republics. What destroys republics is when people live against themselves for so long that in the end they love nothing except the forms of obedience.
That is a grim conclusion.
Not grim. Tested. Systems are served most reliably by those who have postponed their own lives. The problem is that “temporary” has a way of expanding until it covers an entire existence.
You realized this late.
Late enough to lose years. Early enough to admit it.
Do you regret it?
The lost years, yes. The awakening, never.
Let me ask what many are surely wondering: if you could go back, would you take those seven vows again?
No.
Not even one?
I never intended to lie or steal in the first place. I require no sacred text for that. The rest were merely obedience packaged in different forms.
Then what would you say now to those who still offer their freedom to some mythical greatness?
I would tell them what I should have told myself much earlier: if something calling itself greatness demands your life in advance, there is a very good chance it is not greatness at all — and you are not cherished by it, only useful.
And freedom?
Very few people truly love freedom. Many enjoy speaking about it. Many enjoy using it. But when freedom actually appears — in the body, in thought, in choice, in laughter, in refusal — half the world calls for morality, and the other half calls for security.
And you belong to which half?
I? To the half that still laughs in the end.