Bubastis made a small "Mrrr?" sound as Adrien walked away. Adrian took a steadying breath and approached the intercom mounted on the wall.
He pressed the button, and immediately his voice echoed through the halls:
"Everyone? I'd like to have a little toast, if you will, in the vivarium in a few minutes, to ring in what I hope will be a very good year indeed."
Outside his room, there was the distant sound of people making their way to the vivarium. Bubastis rubbed her huge head against Adrian's side as if she could sense his concern.
He sighed.
"Come on, girl," he said wearily. "We have a long night ahead of us."
***
In the vivarium, twelve or so men and women were laughing and talking animatedly. A bottle of wine waited on a small table set up near the fountain, along with enough glasses for each of them to be able to join the toast at Adrian's word.
Adrian entered, with Bubastis following behind.
He cleared his throat. The staff turned.
Adrian smiled. It was a perfect magazine-cover expression that did not quite reach his eyes, even as he spread his hands in warm, magnanimous welcome.
"My friends. Thank you for being here tonight, for this..."
He paused.
"
Momentous occasion."
There were a few polite nods and calm smiles in return.
"For seventeen years now, we have been struggling together to obtain a prize that many said was impossible. Others who suggested it were denounced as mad... and perhaps they were, for
giving up.
"But as for
us... we, my friends,
we did
not! We toiled through every possible answer, made great use of what other fruits our labors created, and tonight, the world will see its folly.
"And so, we celebrate our success."
His smile was now firmly affixed in position while he lifted his arms like a preacher.
"But really, what in life is
not worth celebrating?"
His audience gave him a small smattering of applause; he gestured for silence as the smile began to fade, or at least shift into something very different.
"What bit of suffering does not strengthen the mind and attune the senses to decrease the odds of repetition? My parents, ladies and gentlemen, let me speak of my parents-"
The little crowd was now beginning to look at one another and then back toward Adrian in alarm. Adrian was by now busying himself with beginning to pour the wine as he continued,
"The public record states that I was born the year my parents reached America, 1939. The public, as usual, is disappointingly only mostly right. I
I
was born in 1939, yes, but when we had to flee Germany after the war... well. We stayed in Europe until I was twelve, with my father dragging my mother and I from place to place while he evaded agents looking to bring him to justice for all those bodies he so willingly fed to the ovens-"
There were now distinctly uncomfortable noises coming from Adrian's audience, and they quickly dispersed the wine glasses among themselves.
"Don't look so shocked, please. Everyone has a few
skeletons in the closet. Mine happens to be my father."
He paused, almost thoughtfully.
"One might say nearly literally, as I could see by the time I was sixteen that the world would be better without him. It was quite easy, really. He was already ill from the poison my mother gave him after he ruined her face against a cinderblock wall...
"Yes, there were hardships and horrors. But my new homeland was as a paradise to me then. America, where my intellect was praised rather than suspected. America, where I could believe that the sins of the father would not extend to the son...
"My mother had also died by the time I was seventeen, and I was left with my father's blood-tainted legacy. And while my life might have been easier had I simply sworn to live better than him off of his funds ransacked from the victims of the regime he supported, I wanted to prove that I could start over from nothing. Only what I earned would support me through my travels in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, my idol.
"You can imagine, of course, the loneliness of being such an
unusual young man, with no companion but a man who had died three hundred years before the birth of Christ, but... Alexander was my
world. My friend, my mentor, my
lover... in my mind, at least. He was also my rival, a human challenge for me to try to outdo.
"You see, Alexander was an unusual young man in his own right. A commander at sixteen, king and conqueror at twenty, gathering the known world under his banner by twenty-five until he died at merely thirty-two years of age with no lasting plans in place. A foolish challenge? Perhaps. But I was sure of my goals as I voyaged through his domains. If I were to somehow encounter him across the eons of time, what could I say to him? 'I meant to, I swear!'?
"No. Never.
"It was in Egypt, however, that I found my bearings. Under the influence of hashish I experienced the vistas of time and space themselves in the desert, and I saw that Alexander had himself reached into the past for the spirit of his reign, and thus I assumed the mantle of Ramses, and stand before you as Ozymandias anew.
"But I have rarely dreamt of kingdoms and gods when there is a new future before us, greater and more dazzling than antiquity. Like Alexander and the Gordian Knot, I have looked beyond conventional solutions and tackled the problem before me with simple, lateral thinking. This is the culmination of a dream over two thousand years old, my friends."
There was a slight pause, and he added, in a softer tone,
"There is someone that I wished to share tonight's achievement with who could not join us. I drink to her."
He lifted a glass of wine and brought it nearly to his lips, then slowly lowered it again.
"I am only mortal myself, but what I have created will live on. Sacrifices have been made, as is often necessary under even the best circumstances. And once the dust has cleared, humanity will feel relieved of their struggle, of the pain and weeping they suffered through... of their insufficiency."
Adrian let the words hang in the air for a moment. He bowed his head solemnly.
"I am sorry that none of you will see it come to fruition."
With his cape sweeping behind him, Adrian turned his back on the slumped corpses of his poisoned staff.
"Come along, Bubastis."
The lynx stopped sniffing at the bodies and padded through the airlock. Adrian stepped through as well and shut it behind him, and then calmly opened the control panel mounted on the wall and tapped in a few numbers.
There was a screeching mechanical groan as the vivarium dome opened. Through the window, snow could be seen falling through the open gaps, freezing the fountains and covering his dead staff with an icy crust in seconds.
Adrian continued up the hallway and stopped.
He frowned.
He leaned cautiously around the corner to investigate the unaccustomed static coming from another corridor, then suddenly developed a pretty good idea of what it was.
A security officer had left his holster, complete with loaded gun and hissing walkie-talkie, at his post when everyone was called into the vivarium.
Adrian sighed, turned off the walkie-talkie, took a moment to try to breathe properly, and walked off to see if he had the stomach to eat anything tonight.