by Ben Bova
“Father,” Javas said, “may I point out that it takes five years in realtime to reach the Earth from here? The Empire cannot be governed without an Emperor for five years.”
“Quite true, my son. You will go to Earth before me. Once there, you will become acting Emperor while I make the trip.”
Javas’ mouth dropped open. “The acting Emperor? For five years?”
“With luck,” the Emperor said, grinning slightly, “old age will catch up with me before I reach Earth, and you will be the full-fledged Emperor for the rest of your life.”
“But I don’t want . . .”
“I know, Javas. But you will be Emperor some day. It is a responsibility you cannot avoid. Five years of training will stand you in good stead.”
The Prince sat up straighter in his bed, his face serious, his eyes meeting his father’s steadily.
“And son,” the Emperor went on, “to be an Emperor—even for five years—you must be master of your own house.”
Javas nodded. “I know, Father. I understand. And I will be.”
“Good.”
Then the Prince’s impish smile flitted across his face once again. “But tell me . . . suppose, while you are in transit toward Earth, I decide to move the Imperial Capital elsewhere? What then?”
His father smiled back at him. “I believe I will just have to trust you not to do that.”
“You would trust me?” Javas asked.
“I always have.”
Javas’ smile took on a new pleasure. “Thank you, Father. I will be waiting for you on Earth’s Moon. And for the lovely Dr. Montgarde, as well.”
Borneer was still livid. “All this uprooting of everything . . . the costs . . . the manpower . . . over an unproven theory!”
“Why is the theory unproven, my friend?” the Emperor asked.
Bomeer’s mouth opened and closed like a fish’s, but no words came out.
“It is unproven,” said the Emperor, “because our scientists have never gone so far before. In fact, the sciences of the Hundred Worlds have not made much progress at all in several generations. Isn’t that true, Bomeer?”
“We . . . Sire, we have reached a natural plateau in our understanding of the physical universe. It has happened before. Our era is one of consolidation and practical application of already-acquired knowledge, not new basic breakthroughs.”
“Well, this project will force some new thinking and new breakthroughs, I warrant. Certainly we will be forced to recruit new scientists and engineers by the shipload. Perhaps that will be impetus enough to start the climb upward again, eh, Bomeer? I never did like plateaus.”
The academician lapsed into silence.
“And I see you, Fain,” the Emperor said, “trying to calculate in your head how much of your Fleet strength is going to be wasted on this old man’s dream.”
“Sire, I had no—”
The Emperor waved him into silence. “No matter. Moving the Capital won’t put much of a strain on the Fleet, will it?”
“No, Sire. But this project to save Earth . . .”
“We will have to construct new ships for that, Fain. And we will have to turn to the frontier worlds for those ships.” He glanced at Adela. “I believe that the frontier worlds will gladly join the effort to save Earth’s Sun. And their treasuries will be enriched by our purchase of thousands of new ships.”
“While the Imperial treasury is depleted.”
“It’s a rich Empire, Fain, it’s time we shared some of our wealth with the frontier worlds. A large shipbuilding program will do more to reconcile them with the Empire than anything else we can imagine.”
“Sire,” said Fain bluntly, “I still think it’s madness.”
“Yes, I know. Perhaps it is. I only hope that I live long enough to find out, one way or the other.”
“Sire,” Adela said breathlessly, “you will be reuniting all the worlds of the Empire into a closely knit human community such as we haven’t seen in centuries!”
“Perhaps. It would be pleasant to believe so. But for the moment, all I have done is to implement a decision to try to save Earth’s Sun. It may succeed; it may fail. But we are sons and daughters of planet Earth, and we will not allow our original homeworld to be destroyed without struggling to our uttermost to save it.”
He looked at their faces again. They were all waiting for him to continue. You grow pompous, old man.
“Very well. You each have several lifetimes of work to accomplish. Get busy, all of you.”
Bomeer’s and Fain’s images winked off immediately. Javas’ remained.
“Yes, my son? What is it?”
Javas’ ever-present smile was gone. He looked serious, even troubled. “Father . . . I am not going to bring Rihana with me to Earth. She wouldn’t want to come, I know—at least, not until all the comforts of the court were established there for her.”
The Emperor nodded.
“If I’m to be master of my own house,” Javas went on, “it’s time we ended this farce of a marriage.”
“Very well, son. That is your decision to make. But, for what it’s worth, I agree with you.”
“Thank you, Father.” Javas’ image disappeared. For a long moment the Emperor sat gazing thoughtfully at the wall where the holographic images had appeared.
“I believe that I will send you to Earth on Javas’ ship. I think he likes you, and it is important that the two of you get along well together.”
Adela looked almost shocked. “What do you mean by ‘get along well together’?”
The Emperor grinned at her. “That’s for the two of you to decide.”
“You’re scandalous!” she said, but she was smiling too.
He shrugged. “Call it part of the price of victory. You’ll like Javas; he’s a good man. And I doubt that he’s ever met a woman quite like you.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You’ll need Javas’ protection and support, you know. You have defeated all my closest advisors, and that means that they will become your enemies. Powerful enemies. That is also part of the price of your triumph.”
“Triumph? I don’t feel very triumphant.”
“I know,” the Emperor said. “Perhaps that’s what triumph really is: Not so much glorying in the defeat of your enemies as weariness that they couldn’t see what seemed so obvious to you.”
Abruptly, Adela moved to him and put her lips to his cheek. “Thank you, Sire.”
“Why, thank you, child.”
For a moment she stood there, holding his old hands in her tiny young ones.
Then, “I . . . have lots of work to do.”
“Of course. We will probably never see each other again. Go and do your work. Do it well.”
“I will,” she said. “And you?”
He leaned back into the bed. “I’ve finished my work. I believe that now I can go to sleep, at last.” And with a smile he closed his eyes.
FITTING SUITS
Science fiction is a marvelous vehicle for social commentary. Trouble is, most of the decision-makers in our society don’t read science fiction. We are constantly falling into predicaments and facing crises that could have been avoided if people paid attention to science-fiction stories written decades earlier.
In a sense, science fiction—at its best—serves as a kind of simulations laboratory for society. Like a scientist setting up a controlled experiment, a writer can set up a social situation, stress one particular facet of that society, and see where the extrapolation leads. The classic example of this is Cyril M. Kornbluth’s 1951 novelette “The Marching Morons.” Based on the simple notion that ignoramuses have more children than geniuses, Kornbluth’s tale chillingly foretold the global population problems that the rest of the world began to notice only a generation later.
“Fitting Suits” is a short-short story that was triggered by a news story I read: A civil servant resigned her government post because a citizen sued her personally for allegedly not perform
ing her job properly. That led me to thinking. Which led me to writing.
Always think before you write.
* * *
History, as we know, is sometimes made by the unlikeliest of persons. Take Carter C. Carter, for example. All he wanted was immortality. Instead he created paradise.
All of you are too young to remember the America of the early twenty-first century, a democracy of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers. It was impossible to sneeze in the privacy of your own home without someone suing you as a health menace. Inevitably the lawyers would also sue the home builder for failure to make the structure virus-proof. And the corporations that manufactured your air-conditioning system, wallpaper, carpeting, and facial tissues. To say nothing of the people who sold you your pet dog, cat, and/or goldfish.
It got so bad that eventually a public servant resigned her sinecure because of a lawsuit. A social worker employed by a moderate-sized midwestern city was slapped with a personal liability suit for alleged failure to do her job properly. She had advised an unemployed teenaged mother to try to find a job to support herself, since her welfare benefits were running out. Instead, the teenager went to a lawyer and sued the social worker for failure to find her more money.
Rather than face a lawsuit that would have ruined her financially, whether she lost or won, the social worker resigned her position, left the state, and took up a new career. She entered law school. The teenager lived for years off the generous verdict awarded her by a jury of equally unemployed men and women.
This was the America in which Carter C. Carter lived. We have much to thank him for.
He was, of course, totally unaware that he would change the course of history. He had no interest even in the juridical malaise of his time. All he wanted to do was to avoid dying.
Carter C. Carter had an inoperable case of cancer. “The Big C,” it was called in those days. So he turned to another “C,” cryonics, as a way to avoid permanent death. When declared clinically dead by a complaisant doctor (a close friend since childhood), Carter C. Carter had himself immersed in a canister of liquid nitrogen to await the happy day when medical science could revive him, cure him, and set him out in society once more, healthily alive.
He left his life savings, a meager $100,000 (it was worth more in those days) in a trust fund to provide for his maintenance while frozen. It would also provide a nest egg once he was awakened. He was banking heavily on compound interest.
His insurance company, however, refused to pay off on his policy, on the grounds that Carter was not finally dead. Mrs. Carter, whose sole inheritance from her husband was his $500,000 life insurance policy, promptly sued the insurance company. The insurance company’s lawyers, in turn, sued the Carter estate on the grounds that he was trying to cheat, not death, but the insurance company.
After several years of legal maneuvering the suit came to court. It was decided in favor of the insurance company. Mrs. Carter promptly sued the judge and each individual member of the jury for personal liability on the grounds that they had “willfully and deliberately denied her her legal rights.” And caused her intense pain and suffering while doing so.
The judge, near retirement age, had a vision of his pension being eaten up by legal proceedings. He quit the bench and signed a public apology to Mrs. Carter in return for her dropping the suit against him. The jurors, none of them wealthy, quickly settled out of court. The insurance company did likewise, in advance of having its entire board of directors sued.
Mrs. Carter’s lawyers, unsatisfied with their share of the loot, looked for bigger game. Fueled by Carter’s modest nest egg (Mrs. C. would not let them touch her own money), they began suing members of the National Institutes of Health and the Justice Department, on the grounds that they had failed to provide proper medical and legal grounds for judging the rights of the cryonically undead.
A new fad erupted. Suddenly taxpayers were suing local bureaucrats for personal liability over failure to fill potholes in their streets. In one state the governor and entire legislature were sued for raising taxes to cover a budget imbalance. In another, the state environmental protection agency was sued for failing to regulate the pollution emissions of diesel trucks. The Secretary of Defense was sued simultaneously for invading Mexico and for failing to conquer Mexico. Politicians everywhere were sued for not fulfilling their campaign promises.
Bureaucrats resigned or retired rather than spend the rest of their lives and fortunes in court. Politicians thought twice, thrice, and even more about promises they had no intention of keeping.
A crisis struck the civil service at local, state, and federal levels. Faced with the threat of personal liability suits over alleged failures to perform their jobs, government employees were quitting those jobs faster than they could be replaced. It did not really matter if they won or lost their suits, the time and cost of defending themselves were more than they could bear.
Several states tried to pass laws exempting civil servants from personal liability suits. Each legislator proposing or supporting such a law was sued black and blue. The idea died long before it reached the Supreme Court—which was down to five members at the time, since four justices had hastily retired.
Faced with empty desks and unfilled job openings, government departments reluctantly turned to computers to fill the roles that human bureaucrats had abandoned.
“At least they can’t sue a computer,” said one department head, wise in the ways of bureaucracies.
To everyone’s surprise, the computers worked better than the humans they replaced. Thanks to their programming, they were industrious, unfailingly polite, and blindingly fast. And much cheaper than people. They worked all hours of the night and day, even weekends. They never took coffee breaks or asked for raises. They transferred information with electrical alacrity, and eventually with the speed of light, when photonics began to replace electronics.
Computers’ programs could easily be changed to accommodate new facts, something that had been impossible with human bureaucrats.
Taxpayers liked the computers. The usual gloom and oppressive atmosphere of government offices was replaced by bright humming efficiency. Citizens could even handle most problems from their homes, with their personal computers talking to the government’s computers to settle problems swiftly and neatly.
In the meantime, with fewer and fewer liability suits to sustain them, lawyers began to sue one another in a frenzy that eventually came to be called “the time of great dying.” Within a century the last lawyer in the U.S. was replaced by a computer and sent into a richly deserved retirement in Death Valley.
By the time Carter C. Carter was finally revived from his cryonic sleep, decision-making computers had replaced humans at all levels of government except the very top posts, where policy was decided by elected officials. All permanent government “employees” had electrons and/or photons flowing through them instead of blood.
Carter, however, was dismayed to learn that his modest nest egg had long since been devoured by rapacious lawyers, and that—thanks to compound interest—he owed the estates of his erstwhile legal representatives a total of some six million dollars.
The shock stopped his heart. Since he had not had time to make out a new will, he was declared finally dead and cremated.
But his memory lives on. The happy and efficient society in which we live, unthreatened by the personal liability suits that ruined many an earlier life, is directly attributable to that unlikely hero of heroes, Carter C. Carter.
A SMALL KINDNESS
To this day, I’m not quite certain of how this story originated. I’ve been to Athens, and found it a big, noisy, dirty city fouled with terrible automobile pollution—and centered on the awe-inspiring Acropolis.
The world’s most beautiful building, the Parthenon, is truly a symbol of what is best and what is worst in us. Of its beauty, its grace, its simple grandeur I can add nothing to the paeans that have been sung by so many others. But over the mil
lennia, the dark forces of human nature have almost destroyed the Parthenon. It has been blasted by cannon fire, defaced by conquerors and tourists, and now is being eaten away by the acidic outpourings of automobile exhausts.
A pessimist would say, with justice, that this is a case where human technology is obviously working against the human spirit. An optimist would say that since we recognize the problem, we ought to take steps to solve it.
In a way, that’s what “A Small Kindness” is about—I think.
* * *
Jeremy Keating hated the rain. Athens was a dismal enough assignment, but in the windswept rainy night it was cold and black and dangerous.
Everyone pictures Athens in the sunshine, he thought. The Acropolis, the gleaming ancient temples. They don’t see the filthy modern city with its endless streams of automobiles spewing out so much pollution that the marble statues are being eaten away and the ancient monuments are in danger of crumbling.
Huddled inside his trenchcoat, Keating stood in the shadows of a deep doorway across the street from the taverna where his target was eating a relaxed and leisurely dinner—his last, if things went the way Keating planned.
He stood as far back in the doorway as he could, pressed against the cold stones of the building, both to remain unseen in the shadows and to keep the cold rain off himself. Rain or no, the automobile traffic still clogged Filellinon Boulevard, cars inching by bumper to bumper, honking their horns, squealing on the slickened paving. The worst traffic in the world, night and day. A million and a half Greeks, all in cars, all the time. They drove the way they lived—argumentatively.
The man dining across the boulevard in the warm, brightly-lit taverna was Kabete Rungawa, of the Tanzanian delegation to the World Government conference. “The Black Saint of the Third World,” he was called. The most revered man since Gandhi. Keating smiled grimly to himself. According to his acquaintances in the Vatican, a man had to be dead before he could be proclaimed a saint.