Prime Minister Hegaton

Prime Minister Hegaton, elected to the job by the people mostly because no-one had been willing to stand for it, strode into the Eidolon’s throne room with confidence.  Despite his age he had now been Prime Minister for nearly thirteen years.  The next election was due this year, in about four months time, and he was worrying constantly if he should step down, having reached a Fibonacci number of years in power, or if he should stand again and pray he could get another eight out to reach the next Fibonacci number.  Assuming, that was, that the Eidolon didn’t kill him in the meantime – or worse.

“Your Majesty,” he said, stopping half-way across the stone-flagged floor of the throne room and kneeling.  He knew that the Eidolon had been aware of him by various senses, several non-human, since he entered the room, but she was affecting certain odd traits from reading about medieval history, and announcing his presence in a suitably respectful manner was one of them, as was walking backwards when leaving her presence so that she was never out of his sight.  She turned her head – another affectation, as her head consisted of two rings of eyes, eight in the upper ring and seven in the lower – and pretended to have only just noticed him.

“Hegaton,” she clicked.  Her mouth was embedded in her long, graceful neck, and was hard to see unless you were looking directly at it.  When she spoke though, a dark red split opened up and stringy things, glistening wetly, moved inside there.  She had difficulty with most human languages as her voice seemed designed to make clicks, whistles and susurrations, but over the decades she had learned how to overlay susurrations as harmonies and punctuate them with clicks that humans could understand as words in their own languages.  Hegaton had made some progress in the other direction, constructing a small aural dictionary of Eidolonic sounds and what they meant, but it was a very secret project as he was sure the Eidolon would not be pleased.  “Report.”

“Your Majesty,” he said, adding the throat-click at the end that the Eidolon insisted on.  “Current trade projections suggest that there may be an issue between us and France.”  He spoke for nearly half-an-hour, running through the most pressing matters of governance.  He brought to her everything that he could reasonably expect input for, and a couple of things he knew she’d be disinterested in so that she could believe she’d heard everything.  He continually found it ridiculous that she would believe that a daily half-hour report could possibly keep her current on everything, but it allowed him more freedom to run the country on human terms.

“France’s Eidolon is dying,” clicked the Eidolon, her voice like the sighing of the wind in the trees.  “There are reasons for its erratic behaviour at this time.”

Hegaton looked at her, thinking hard.  That this Eidolon might die was always topmost in his thoughts, but he’d not actually considered what might happen if the Eidolon of another country died.  “What would that entail?” he asked.

“A period of transition,” said the Eidolon.  “And then a new Eidolon.”  She said something else, clicking and whistling in her own tongue, but didn’t translate it.  Hegaton pretended he’d not heard it.  “However,” she said abruptly.  “There is another option it would seem.”

Hegaton, who had been considering applying trade sanctions and other options open to governments bickering amongst themselves, widened his eyes slightly, wondering what she meant.

“What is that, please, Your Majesty?” he asked.

“We invade France while their Eidolon is weak, and conquer,” said the Eidolon.  “This is normally what you would do, isn’t it?”

The history books, thought Hegaton miserably.  She’s still reading the damn history books.  How can we fight a war now when we’ve no idea what weapons to use?  If our weapons were any good against the Eidolon you’d not be in power now!

“Historically, that is something we’ve done,” said Hegaton, hoping his diplomatic words might buy him some time.  “We haven’t had a war in decades though, in fact, I’m not at all sure we still have anything we could call a standing army.”

There was no army.  It had never been rebuilt after the Eidolon invasion, and the remnants of it had been all too glad to slip away back home and find other things to do.

“Then we will conscript!” The Eidolon’s voice seemed to almost hiss the words at him.  “Go away and ready us for war.  The Eidolon of France will be dead in a month, and we must be ready in half that time.”

Hegaton started backing away, his pace slow and measured, his feet shuffling to avoid hitting anything he couldn’t see and falling over.  Two weeks to raise an army was ridiculously short, and then there were the logistics of equipping it, shipping it overseas, and the still insoluable problem of what weapons to use against an insectile overlord that had shrugged off all their previous technologies.

“Hurry!” hissed the Eidolon.

Jasreen and Hegaton

The Eidolon had insectile eyes.  There were fifteen of them, arrayed around her head in two circles, one just below the other.  Some poets had described them as being like a double-tiara, a crowning vision when the doggerel was seriously upon them; other poets had been more sensible and run away screaming.  Some of them had even got away too.  The others had been eaten, for the Eidolon had learned to hunger.
Scientists were more curious.  There were, they opined, entirely the wrong number of eyes.  There should be thirteen or twenty-one, a Fibonacci number.  And two rows of eight and seven were wrong as well, it should be eight and five or eight and thirteen.  The Eidolon declined to comment.
If you ignored her eyes, which it was hard to do, the Eidolon was attractive.  She had a firm, nubile body, and her hips swayed very gently as she walked.  Her hands were golden brown and long-fingered, delicate like a pianist's.  Her feet were petite, and her legs were long enough for an old-fashioned noir-mystery writer to bite through his pencil in electrified frustration.  But, and it was a significant but, her head was mostly eyes.

*

Jasreen bowed his head and walked backwards.  The Eidolon had lately been reading about medieval courts and had decided that the notion that her subjects should always have her in their sight when they were in her presence appealed to her.  Jasreen could see why, as anyone in her presence was always in her sight.  He'd done some very subtle and not entirely conclusive experiments that made him think that she had no blind spots at all; the cumulative vision overlapped enough that no matter where anything was she could always see it.  With, he noted, the obvious exception of things directly above her head.

He reached the door without incident and then stumbled over the threshhold, which was a treacherous centimetre or two higher than the floors on either side.  He put his hands out to steady himself, catching the doorframe and struggling to override the instinct to look away from the Eidolon and see what he was doing.  He felt his neck begin to turn, but he managed to hold it in check, and backed further through the room until he could sidestep and be out of her sight.

"She grows more human every day," said a voice next to him, and now for a moment he couldn't bring himself to turn his head to see who was talking.  How had medieval courtiers managed this insanity?  Then he freed himself of the mental block and looked to his left.

The antechamber was wooden-panelled and furnished with ornate metal chairs that the Instars made.  The Eidolon had kept the Instars hidden for decades before they were discovered, and exactly what they did and how they made the furniture – or what they made the furniture for – was still unknown.  Most of the people in the antechamber were standing, close to the walls and away from the furniture.  The speaker though, was sat on one of the chairs, looking slightly uncomfortable with one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, but he was smiling beneath a brown, bushy beard.

"How do you mean?" Jasreen recognised the speaker as the Eidolon's Prime Minister, Hegaton Yearnchap.

"She immerses herself in our culture and tries it out, repeatedly.  She never really grasps why we did these things, or what they were intended to achieve, but she tries anyway, and slowly, she becomes human.  It's ridiculous to make you walk backwards like a medieval courtier, because she's far too well protected to be at risk of attack from you, and she doesn't care enough about you to be insulted if you're not awed by her presence.  She makes you walk backwards because it humiliates you and establishes a pecking order that she wants to keep in place.  She's becoming human."

"Is that a good thing?" Jasreen sounded cautious, unsure if these words he was listening to counted as sedition or not.

"No.  She's not human, and she doesn't have human perceptions or powers.  When she acts like she's human, she puts us all at risk."

"Risk from what?"

Hegaton smiled through his beard again and stood up.  Jasreen's eyes were automatically drawn to little pinpricks of blood on Hegaton's suit and neck, the dark red seeming to pulse rhythmically.  He knew that almost no-one else would have spotted any of them, and he tried to push down the sudden hunger that he felt.

"Risk from the Instars," said Hegaton.  "The Eidolon is a known quantity, but her offspring are not.  Why should we risk having her replaced, with something crueler?  Or just more disinterested?"

"The Instars can hardly be found," said Jasreen.  His voice sounded distant in his own ears, and there was an iron taste in his mouth.  His fingers flexed, on both hands, straightening and contracting back into claws.

"That's not true," said Hegaton.  "It's just not common knowledge where they can be found, because they are a danger in their own right.  By the way, I know what you are, you don't have to fight down your urges so firmly."

Jasreen managed a half-smile, but it felt as stiff as a grimace.

"But still," said Hegaton.  "I must go and present myself to her, and see what her regality wants next.  This will be fun, don't you think?"  He walked through the antechamber door into the Eidolon's throne-room, and Jasreen sat down on the floor with a thump, his legs suddenly unwilling to support him.  He saw, and listened.