In the beginning was the lie.

The lie was that the Prophet Rachela, the founder of the Holy Empire of Interdependent States and Mercantile Guilds, had mystical visions. These visions prophesied both the creation and the necessity of that far-reaching empire of human settlements, strung out across light-years of space, connected only by the Flow, the metacosmological structure that humans compared to a river. They thought of it as a river mostly because human brains, originally designed for hauling their asses across the African savannah and not much upgraded since then, literally could not comprehend what it actually was, so, fine, "river" it was.

There was no mystical element involved in the so-called prophecies of Rachela at all. The Wu family ginned them up. The Wus, who owned and ran a consortium of businesses, some that built starships and others that hired out mercenaries, looked at the then-current political climate and decided the time was right to make a play for control of the Flow shoals, the places where humanly understandable space-time connected with the Flow and allowed spaceships to enter and exit that metaphorical river between the stars. The Wus understood well that creating tolls and monopolizing their extraction was a much more stable business model than building things, or blowing them up, depending on which of the Wus' businesses one contracted. All they needed to do was to create a reasonable justification to make themselves the toll collectors.

In the meetings of the Wus, the prophecies were proposed, accepted, written, structured, A/B tested and honed before they were attached to Rachela Wu, a young scion of the family who was already well-known as the public charitable face of the Wu family and who also had a razor-sharp mind for marketing and publicity. The prophecies were a family project (well, the project of certain important members of the family — you wouldn't just let anyone in on it, too many of the cousins were indiscreet and good only for drinking and being regional executives), but it was Rachela who sold them.

Sold them to whom? To the public at large, who needed to be convinced of the concept of the far-flung and disparate human settlements coming together under a single, unified governmental umbrella, incidentally to be headed by the Wus, who as it happened would collect levies on interstellar travel.

Not just Rachela, to be sure. In each star system, the Wus hired and bribed local politicians and publicly acceptable intelligentsia to promote the idea from a political and social point of view, to the sort of people who would like to imagine they needed a cogent and logical reason to toss away local sovereignty and control to a nascent political union that was already being constructed on imperial lines. But for the ones who either weren't that intellectually vain, or simply preferred to get the idea of an interdependent union from an attractive young woman whose nonthreatening message of unity and peace just made them feel good, well, here was the newly dubbed Prophet Rachela.

(The Wus didn't bother selling the mystical idea of the Interdependency to the other families and large corporations that they and their conglomerate moved among. For those they took another tack instead: Support the Wus' plan for rent-seeking disguised as an altruistic exercise for nation-building and in return get a monopoly on a specific, durable good or service — in effect, trade their current businesses, with their annoyingly spikey boom-and-bust cycles, for a stable, predictable and ceaseless income stream, for all time. Plus a discount on the tolls the Wus were about to enact on Flow travel. In point of fact these weren't discounts at all, because the Wus were planning to charge for a thing that used to be without cost to anyone. But the Wus assumed that these families and companies would be so dazzled by the offer of an unassailable monopoly that they wouldn't kick. Which turned out to be mostly correct.)

In the end it took the Wus less time than they expected to pull off their Interdependency scheme — within ten years the other families and companies were in line with their monopolies and promised noble titles, the paid-for politicians and intellectuals made their case, and the Prophet Rachela and her rapidly expanding Interdependent Church mopped up most of the rest of the public. There were holdouts and stragglers and rebellions that would go on for decades, but by and large the Wus had correctly picked their time, their moment, and their goal. And for the troublemakers, they had already decided that the planet called End, the human outpost in the newly imagined Interdependency that took the longest to get to, and to get back from, and had only a single Flow shoal in and out, would be the official dumping ground for anyone who got in their way.

Rachela, already the public and spiritual face of the Interdependency, was selected by (carefully orchestrated) acclamation as the first "emperox." This new gender-neutral title had been chosen because market testing showed that it appealed to nearly all market segments as a fresh, new, and friendly spin on "emperor."

This compact and highly elided history of the formation of the Interdependency may make it appear as if no one questioned the lie — that billions of people uncritically swallowed the fiction of Rachela's prophecies. This was not at all accurate. People did question the lie, to the same amount as they would question any bit of pop spirituality marching toward an actual religion, and became alarmed as it gained acceptance, and followers, and respectability. Nor were observers of the time blind to the machinations of the Wu family as it made its play for imperial power. It was the focus of many handwringing editorials, news shows and occasionally attempted legislative action.

What the Wu family had over them was organization, and money, and allies in the form of the other now-noble families. The formation of the Holy Empire of the Interdependent States and Mercantile Guilds was a charging musk ox, and the skeptical observers were a cloud of gnats. Neither did much damage to the other, and in the end there was an empire.

One other reason the lie worked is that once the Interdependency formed, the Prophet-Emperox Rachela declared her visions and prophecies had largely come to an end, for now. She devolved all functional power in the administration of the Interdependent Church to the archbishop of Xi'an and a committee of bishops, who knew a good deal when they saw one. They rapidly built an organization that shoved the explicitly spiritual aspect of the church to the side, to be the spice of the new religion, not its main course.

In other words, neither Rachela nor the church overplayed its spiritual hand in the critical early years of the Interdependency, when the empire was necessarily at its most fragile. Rachela's imperial successors, none of whom added the "prophet" part of the title to their address, largely followed her example, staying out of church business except for the most ceremonial parts, both to the relief, and then as the centuries passed, to the expectation, of the church itself.

The lie of Rachela's visions and prophecy was never acknowledged by the church, of course. Why should it have been? To begin, neither Rachela nor the Wu family ever explicitly said outside of family conferences that the spiritual side of the Interdependent Church was wholly...