In the aftermath of the delegates’ favorable outcome to the military crisis, the word “constitution” first began to be thrown around. A few of the delegates would have been familiar with it; estimates of the pre-revolution Empire place the number of planets with constitutions at around 10%. The idea of a written document affirming the fundamental laws under which a polity would be governed was not totally foreign to those delegates that hailed from that small number of planets or from the few who had knowledge of the broader world. Still though, this was probably only around 200 delegates at most. And even those delegates that did come from constitutionally governed planets were often unfamiliar with the precise functioning of that constitution. Over the millenia, the actual documents had become more artifacts than law codes. More often than not, the planets they claimed to govern were run more by informal practices developed over the generations than the specific text handed down from the founders.
It is lost to history who first brought up the idea of an Imperial Constitution. Most likely it was a delegate from one of the above-mentioned constitutionally governed planets, but if this was the case we have no record of who specifically. The word rapidly spread throughout the entire camp of delegates. Ælfthryth Karunanidhi, delegate from Liore who would turn out to be quite conservative, would say of the time that “A great spirit had overtaken us. On this one issue the minds of a thousand individuals were fused into one: we must have a constitution. Justice itself would not permit us otherwise.” One of the very few critics of this new mood was, unsurprisingly, Vestin Vestowski, who had a rather lower opinion of his fellow delegates. “They got so piss drunk on justice that they all poisoned themselves.”
It was also unclear how many of the delegates actually had a clear idea of what they wanted or what a constitution meant. The idea had taken them all by storm in much the same way that a commitment to “justice” had, with few of the delegates really understanding what they had all agreed to. This would have significant repercussions in the future, as what precisely justice or a constitution was would be decided on whichever faction or individual held the most power at that specific moment.
There were at least two people who were beginning to Dream though. The “Dreams” of the revolution, famous and infamous in equal turn, are some of the most contentious elements in revolutionary history, but I will attempt to propose a way to understand them that I find most helpful here. To simplify dramatically, a Dream is a vision for the future. It is the vision for a future configuration of society, one that is often dramatically different from the one in current existence. The opening statement of a Dream is usually a short portrait of the society being worked toward, one in which the listener can feel the power of the Dream exhilerate them. More than just a vision though, it is the commitment to act toward it. Dreams require action and movement. Idle belief and commitment mean nothing, those Dreams wither away and die.
Q Loakh often goes down as having the “First Dream.” While the actual chronology is confused and the claim to having the inaugural Dream is most likely more proof to Q’s effective propaganda apparatus than histrocial fact, it was undeniably the first Dream to gain a significant amount of adherents – both within and without the Vaird. Considering Q’s unsavory reputation, especially among the early historians of the revolution, there has been considerable text written over the question of whether or not Q truly believed their Dream or it was merely a vessel for personal advancement. This book officially being a biography of Ghale Thusif (albeit one that ventures far from its subject at times), we do not have to trouble ourselves with every detail of this academic debate. Most likely, the recent historians are the most accurate. To quote Uulit the Transcriber, author of one of the best biographies of Q in the past 50 years, “Within their [Q’s] heart, what was good for them was good for the galaxy. Their Dream was self-serving, because when they were doing well, so was humanity.”
Part of what made it so contagious was that Q’s Dream was simple. The Dream was of a more just society within the Empire. Of basic protections enshrined in an Imperial constitution that bound every member of the Empire, from the lowest servant to the Emperor themself. That justice would be honored across its breadth and everyone would be treated with dignity. The picture painted was of a court, where in some far flung province an employee was able to sue their employer and receive a fair trial. That this far flung province was unspecified was entirely the point, it must be able to be anywhere. That every planet was essentially under a different government had to change.
This was an extremely attractive vision, partially because a wide range of society could sign on to it, even many of the elites. While they might be weakened by losing special privileges placing them above the law, so would the Emperor and bureaucrats who they had long chafed under. Not all of them would sign on board and initially at least they would form the most significant opposition to the Dream, but enough of them would that Q could claim to have kept their promise to never favor any one faction against another.
One of the most important factors of this Dream however, and the part that has found the most critics both at the time and since, is how vague it was. It was all very nice to imagine a society in which everyone was treated with a degree of equality to ensure justice, but what does that actually mean? The most clear element was equality before the law, but it could very easily be interpreted as meaning the elimination of class, religious, or ancestral based rights altogether. In an Empire where the vast majority of planets had some form of formal or informal caste system. The exact cause of divisions between castes and the restrictions they enforced were different across different planets, but they were almost always there. And while Q may or may not have intended them to, the people who were at the bottom of society were the ones most likely to read those elements into it. For their own purposes, when the word of Dreams began to seep out of the Vaird and pick up a popular following, Q would regularly speak out of both sides of their mouth, affirming that they only meant equality in a courtroom to one audience and that they really did believe in abolishing ancestral rights in another. That was for the future though. For the moment, their Dream spread like a wildfire through the delegates. Nearly every player in the revolution would start off identifying as a Legalist, the name eventually applied to followers of Q’s Dream. Vanishingly few would remain as one forever.
The second Dream that was formed at this time was by the former Pteni metalworker, Sara Heartsbane. Until this point, Heartsbane had been totally uninvolved with Symposium politics, but according to her own testimony, hearing Leaf Rivers’ speech had awoken something in her. She was fired with a passion for justice and the new constitutional mood had sparked a Dream inside her. In Heartsbane’s Dream, every planet would be under the same constitution, guaranteeing the same rights for Imperial citizens across the entire Empire. The differences from Q’s Dream are obvious; she was proposing the total overthrow of the government of every single planet in the Empire to reorganize them on identical lines. The patchwork of laws that governed the Imperium would be shattered, replaced by rational governance.
In hindsight, it is obvious such a rigid Dream was never going to catch on in the way many others did. The planets, and the people on those planets, valued their relative independence. They did not want to be rationalized, they wanted to be themselves. And the Dream itself was incredibly vague, more so even than Q’s one. There was no guarantee of legal equality, either in the courtroom or otherwise. This might occur, but that would entirely depend on what the authors of the constitution decided. Without that guarantee, the Dupe Dream, pejoratively named for the fact that it was to make every planet a duplicate of every other, had no chance of gaining mass support. Nor did it appeal to the elites, for whom it seemed no safe bet that the Dream would attack Imperial rights in the way that Q’s Dream would. The only ones who would subscribe to it were those who had some intellectual justification for it. And while nearly every revolutionary would first believe Q’s Dream, there was one who would be a Dupe before all else.
Ghale Thusif’s interactions with Sara Heartsbane started around the same time that she began forming her Dream. Some contemporaries allege a sexual relationship between the two, but there are conflicting reports and it is at least possible that their friendship remained platonic. There is an undeniable undercut between his attraction to the Dupes and his later beliefs however, so any claim that his affiliation with them was purely for sexual reasons by unsympathetic sources is entirely unfair. What appealed to Thusif was the very thing that made so many others hate the Dream: the consistency. Throughout all of his actions over the course of the revolution, Thusif prioritzed the consistency and stability of the Empire above any other principle. Already at this early hour, he judged that the best way to both rationalize and keep the Empire stable was to ensure that the same laws ruled throughout. The mess of bureaucracy had been a lulling factor, allowing an explanation for why laws were applied differently across the galaxy. If Q’s Dream was to come into fruition however, it would necessitate a rationalization of bureaucracy. Citizens would begin to look at their neighbors, both on their own planet and on nearby ones, and ask why they were being treated differently when they had all supported a constitution that gave them all legal equality. In Thusif’s mind, Q’s Dream would only lay bare the unequal system of laws the Empire ran on by making it blatantly obvious that different planets got different privileges, not just different classes within a single planet. That was why they could never support Q, and the instability that did eventually come is what Thusif would spend the last years of his life fighting against.
The Emperor called the Symposium together again one week after backing down from the crisis. As with so many of the Emperor’s actions, this decision to wait has puzzled historians ever since. The increasing radicalism and political engagement of the delegates was something even an outside observer would be able to see and allowing time to pass only made that issue worse. The most effective way to tramp down on it would have been to call the Symposium immediately and overload the delegates with work, making them too busy to radicalize themselves. Just sitting around in the Crystal Palace with the Symposium barely having started, the delegates had nothing else to do but sit around and talk politics with each other. That this, and several other apparent missteps, is such a seemingly obvious miscalculation is the thrust of the argument by a sizeable minority of historians who subscribe to the thesis that the Emperor’s desire for the revolution was much greater than is typically thought. What the Emperor would actually do once the Symposium met is one of the biggest arguments in favor of their theory.
The first official meeting of the Symposium was held in the Garnet Vault. At the bottom of the Crystal Palace, the Vault was the longest and widest room in the entire structure. Gemstones studded the ceiling and walls. Most importantly for the purposes of the Symposium however, there were around one hundred crystalline tables placed across its floor. Every delegate was assigned a seat at a table with nine other delegates. “Advisors” would be allowed to stand behind their delegate, but were not provided chairs of their own, presumably as a sign of the Emperor’s displeasure at their presence (there are several recorded instances of advisors manually bringing chairs into the Vault).
Upon finding their seats, the Emperor began to speak: “Welcome delegates, to the first meeting of the Symposium. Unfortunately, it will also be the last. Effective immediately, the Symposium has been dissolved.” A murmuring spread across the room, but before it could turn into anything the Emperor continued, “All of the delegates formerly elected to the Symposium have been immediately assigned as delegates to the newly formed Constitutional Chamber. Congratulations on your elections.”
This announcement was greeted by the delegates with cheers. The radical ideas that had been percolating through the delegates were given an outlet. The Emperor soon clarified that while they would have final veto power over the acceptance of the constitution the delegates would construct, but they would be lenient and give the delegates wide latitude in the construction of the document. With this, the Emperor successfully resecured the support of the delegates. The rift that had formed between the most radical elements of the Symposium and the Emperor was mended, for now.
That the delegates should greet the Emperor’s decision with such rapturous applause was a sign that they were no longer the same body as when they had first left. The expression of glee at being granted explicit political power was not something most of them had been prepared to do or to even think they deserved to do. For the vast majority of delegates, they arrived hoping to advise. But the experience of the fight over delegate acceptance and the Command Crisis and the new vocabulary of justice and constitutions had changed them. None of the delegates were the same people as they were when they had arrived. Human striving and imagination of a different future that had been slowly declining and suppressed for thousands of years was awakened. It did not yet know its limits.
The next stage of the revolution is one of the most difficult to tell, because a lot happens, it is often simultaneous and does not become important until events outside the Vaird catch up with the delegates. The construction of the Imperial Constitution was a complicated process. I will handle it topically, taking special interest in areas Thusif was personally involved in. Firstly, there was one issue pressing to the delegates above all else: the makeup and powers of the Imperial bureaucracy.