My Friend the Emperor

by William Lee Gordon

  There was hot water!

  I stood under a deluge of magnificent luxurious warm water. Once I realized that the shower handles included a temperature control I cranked it up even further. Soon my shower was full of steam and my skin was spanking red, and I was enjoying every single moment of it.

  I’ve experienced warm showers before in my life. They’d been few and far between and usually occurred during a heat wave when the sun had baked the water tanks on the top of our apartment building.

  But this wasn’t warm water; it was hot!

  I knew the energy costs to heat up water just for a shower were insane, but at the moment I really didn’t care.

  After a while I turned off the water and simply leaned forward, palms against the shower wall. The glass front of the shower and the mirror beyond were all fogged over. It was noticeably harder to breathe, the air was so thick with humidity. Eventually I opened the shower door and the stab of fresh air against my skin was like a cold bracing. I dried myself with surprisingly rubbery legs and dressed myself quickly.

  I realized I still had a massage waiting.

  ΔΔΔ

  I was a little late to our breakfast meeting. It was the first instance I could ever remember that I had totally lost track of the time.

  I found Monica and Barina in the second restaurant I checked. Once I set down Monica handed me a menu.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  Smiling, Monica said, “It’s a menu. You need to decide what you want to order.”

  I was looking at what appeared to be a hard piece of cardboard laminated with descriptions and photographs of food.

  “It’s not interactive?” I said hesitantly.

  Just then a thin man approached us. “Good morning sir, would you care to start with some coffee or orange juice?”

  I looked over at Monica without comprehension.

  After kicking me under the table she said under her breath, “Tell the man what you want to eat.”

  Once he went away I said to Barina, “A live servant? Don’t try to tell me this is normal treatment.”

  She said, “He’s not a servant, he’s a waiter. And yes, it’s very common for restaurants to have waiters and waitresses.”

  The restaurants we ate at yesterday didn’t,” I protested.

  Barina looked at me with a sad smile on her face. “Jac, those weren’t really restaurants. That was the food court. They are pretty low on the hierarchy of plush dining.

  “Look Jac, I’m not trying to tell you that everyone always stays at hotels this nice or eats at great restaurants all the time. They also don’t usually choose to use the spa every day, but I think it’s important you understand that this type of treatment is not reserved for a special class of people.”

  “Oh,” was all I heard myself saying.

  Monica picked up the conversation by asking, “What’s on the schedule today?”

  “That depends,” Barina said. “Do you have any requests or do you just want to trust me to show you the things I think you’ll find most interesting?”

  Monica looked at me and I shrugged.

  “We might as well,” I said. “What did you have in mind?”

  “I’d thought about taking you around to some of our entertainment and amusement districts but based on our conversation I think you might find it more enlightening if you could just get a feel for the way everyone lives and works. I know a lot of people and I’m sure they won’t mind if we just drop in. How does that sound?”

  Monica and I both nodded at the same time.

  ΔΔΔ

  We spent the morning and most of the afternoon visiting a factory, an office building, and the hospital.

  Everyone we met was reasonably friendly; the gruff indifference that was so common on the planets of the Empire was mostly missing.

  One of the things that stood out for me was that many of the people seemed to take pride in what they were doing. The factory workers enjoyed showing us how what they were making was an integral part of a larger construct. At the hospital the emphasis on patient care was obvious. The waiting rooms were clean and relatively uncrowded. The doctors we met seemed competent and not overly arrogant.

  The medical technology, however, was impressive.

  I don’t have any medical training but on more than one occasion I had been a patient at The Academy Hospital. Everything here was different.

  The way they took a patient’s temperature, blood pressure, or listened to their heartbeat was of a different technology than anything I’d ever seen before, even on the vids! I never saw any needles or syringes and the hospital even had a whole section devoted to wellness.

  Wellness? I thought a hospital was for sick people?

  The most informative part of the day, however, was the office building.

  At my insistence we met everyone from the building maintenance staff, to the clerks, to the IT staff, to the executive assistants, and even several of the executives themselves.

  Just to be sure, I had reiterated my questions about government ownership. No, neither the building nor the business was owned by the government. There were a group of people that had put their money together and formed a corporation; they were the owners. It was a little confusing to me because when I asked to meet them I was told that they weren’t actually here; that their job had been to fund the business and make the large strategic decisions for it. Otherwise, the day-to-day operations were run by the executives and employees.

  About midway through the tour of the building I started becoming suspicious about something. After meeting with a few more of the executives those suspicions were confirmed. Not everyone in this building earned the same amount of money!.

  This was anathema to everything I’d been taught and believed.

  It blew the whole idea of a fair and just society straight out of the water. In the back of my mind that little voice was saying, Aha! We’ve found the fatal flaw! I knew it was too good to be true.

  Chapter thirty-six

  ENSIGN JACOBY NICOLAY

  Paradigm Shift

  I must’ve been brooding because Monica finally called me out on it.

  We’d been too busy talking to everybody and seeing what there is to see to eat lunch. Barina said she had a nice dinner planned for us this evening, so we sat down together for a small snack late that afternoon.

  “Okay Jac. Spill it.”

  I was picking through some type of salad trying to figure out what some of the components were.

  “I don’t want to be rude to Barina,” I finally said.

  Barina smiled and said, “Jac, I can promise that you’re not going to offend me. We come from different cultures and different value systems. Some things that are normal to me may be offensive to you and vice versa, but it would be silly to get upset about them. I would rather understand them, wouldn’t you?”

  I wanted to tell her how wrong her society was. I wanted to stand tall with rightful indignation and expose her cruelty and pettiness and greed. How could anyone think that a society that treated people differently could possibly be fair? How could anybody think it was just?

  Deep down in my being I wanted to lash out, but Barina herself didn’t seem mean or evil and I was having trouble finding the right words.

  How can I explain the idea of fairness to someone that didn’t already get it? What was so painfully obvious to me seemed beyond the grasp of the people in this society. Even the masses of people we had observed in the shopping center had seemed basically happy. Laughter and smiles were common!

  There had to be a dark underbelly to this society. By definition, if life’s rewards were doled out unequally then someone was paying the price. Someone had to be getting by on less so others could have more. I was determined to root that out.

  “Barina I appreciate your candor, I really do. But there are more things I need to see before I can verbalize my thoughts. Will you help me?”

  Both Monica and Barina were looking at me questio
ningly but she responded, “Of course. What do you need me to do?”

  “I need to see how the other half lives,” I said. “You’ve shown us how the better part of your society lives but now I’d like to see the unfortunate. Can you introduce us to your poor? When will you show us their homes, how they live and how they work?”

  Monica had a thoughtful look on her face but Barina’s expression was much harder to read. She was smiling but it seemed a sad smile.

  “I’m going to need to change our dinner plans and make a few calls but I’m sure we can accommodate you.”

  Now it was Barina’s turn to look thoughtful.

  After a moment she said, “I’m starting to understand that you’re going to need to see it for yourself but I want you to know that what you’ve been experiencing is not the upper crust of our society. We do have people that are very wealthy but you haven’t met them yet, at least not on Gallo. The people you’ve been meeting are the largest segment of our society; they’re what we consider the middle class.”

  Monica surprised me by jumping into the conversation. “What did you mean, we haven’t met them on Gallo?”

  Barina simply smiled and changed the subject.

  ΔΔΔ

  We were riding in what she called a car.

  Of course I knew what a car was. From my experience and from seeing vid’s all my life I knew that all of the royal family and many of the fleet’s senior officers had personal transportation assigned to them. In addition, many Citizens assigned to civil service and business legions used them when posted on non-core planets.

  They were reserved for important persons because it was incredibly expensive and resource wasteful to use maglev technology for just a single vehicle. Almost everyone on all the Empire planets used public transportation exclusively.

  My estimation of Barina’s importance in her society had risen accordingly.

  That’s probably why I was now frowning. The further we got from the city center the more spread out everything seemed to be – and the more individual vehicles I started to notice.

  We finally entered what Barina called a neighborhood.

  This is more what I had wanted to see.

  “How many people live in each of those dwellings?” I asked.

  “It varies,” Barina said. Then as she realized the full meaning of my question she added, “But most of them house just a single family.”

  “Barina,” I said with some frustration. “I’d asked to see where your poor live. When will we do that?”

  “We are in one of the poorer districts,” she said. “We’ll stop soon and you can check it out for yourself.”

  True to her word we soon stopped at what appeared to be some type of store or market. I was told that this type of business was called a Convenience Store.

  We walked into the store and the first thing I noticed was that it wasn’t as clean and modern as the shopping mall. That’s not to say that it was squalid. As a matter of fact it reminded me of many of the public areas on my home planet of Lightspar.

  I had noticed a car sitting outside. The store wasn’t large and there were only a few people inside so I said aloud, “Who is using the car outside?”

  One of the men answered, “That’s mine. Why? Did you hit it?”

  “No,” I quickly said. “I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”

  I don’t think he really trusted me. I know we weren’t dressed the same as everyone else and probably didn’t sound the same either, but I wasn’t giving him any reason to be suspicious.

  “Please excuse my friend,” Barina interjected. “He’s from outworld and really is curious about the way we live. I’m ferrying them around and we stopped here hoping to have some honest conversation.”

  After a moment the man said, “Well, it doesn’t cost anything to talk. What do you want to know?”

  “Is it safe to talk here?” was the first thing I asked.

  Everyone looked confused. Finally, Barina said, “Jac, there are no monitoring devices here. Nobody is listening; everybody can speak freely.”

  Talk about strange. I hadn’t noticed any monitor globes at the shopping mall or the hotel but I had just assumed it was a rich enough area to conceal all such devices. Now they were telling me that conversations on Gallo weren’t monitored?

  “Is this a poor neighborhood?” I went ahead and blurted out.

  Barina rolled her eyes and the man frowned… And then he laughed.

  “You’re right, he’s not from around here!”

  By now a couple of other patrons of the store and the clerk were all gathered around us. I didn’t understand why but apparently my questions were quite amusing to them.

  “Yes, I guess you could say this is a poor neighborhood. We don’t really think of it that way but there are certainly higher-priced homes available.”

  “Who issued you your car?” I wanted to know.

  “Issued? You mean who manufactured it?”

  “No. Who gave it to you, and why?”

  The man looked up a Barina and said, “Does he think I stole it?”

  He turned back to me and said slowly as if speaking to a child, “I… Bought… It…”

  “You mean you own it?” I blurted out.

  “Of course I do,” he insisted. “For that matter didn’t you drive up in a car?”

  I looked over at Barina and she nodded her head, “I own my car too.”

  I was dumbfounded. There is no way my family could’ve afforded personal transportation.

  Monica was smiling and said, “Jac, it’s not that unusual. On my home world there are a number of ranchers and isolated farmers that are given permission to have transportation. They have to or they wouldn’t be able to get themselves and their goods into the cities.”

  “Who gave you permission to have a car?” I asked the man.

  Shaking his head he said, “I don’t need anyone’s permission to buy what I want. Why would I?”

  I was mulling this over as I heard Barina step in and explain to the man and his friends that Monica and I were from the Celcium Empire. She explained that where I came from the royal family owned everything and that our jobs and homes were assigned to us.

  I don’t know whether I was more surprised to learn that things didn’t work that way here or to discover that these people had never even heard of the Celcium Empire!

  Once the small crowd fully understood our situation they became very enthusiastic about correcting our misimpressions.

  It turns out that Johnny didn’t just clerk the store, he owned the store. He told us the proudest day of his life was when he had saved enough money to buy the land and building.

  “You mean you own the land, not just the business?”

  “Yep. It’s all mine and my wife’s. Someday I’ll hand it off to my kids.”

  The first man had introduced himself as Jimmy. He now made us an offer.

  “I’m getting hungry. Why don’t the three of you join my family for dinner? I don’t know what Sally has planned but if I need to I’ll throw something extra on the grill. I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

  Monica seemed agreeable and Barina nodded her head so I said, “Sure.”

  ΔΔΔ

  Jimmy and Sally’s home wasn’t new but it was spacious compared the apartment my mom and I had lived in. Their two boys even had their own rooms!

  The living area was very comfortable and was centered around what I suspected to be a holographic vid center.

  On Lightspar and most other places that I knew of, holographic technology was a joke. Almost everyone had a vid screen and the vid screens all had three-dimensional technology, but it didn’t produce a true holographic image.

  This did.

  Sally had pretended to be mad at Jimmy for inviting guests to dinner without giving her any warning, but she had been delightful to us.

  She had seen me eyeing the vid center and invited me to sit down and enjoy myself while her and Jimmy prepared dinner.


  It wasn’t just the holographic technology that surprised me. The selection of what to watch seemed almost limitless. You actually needed a menu guide to sort through it all!

  At one point I excused myself to the restroom. Once there I was very tempted to turn on the shower and test the water temperature. I didn’t know how to hide the sound of it so I settled on testing the water at the sink. Sure enough, there was hot water here too.