I'll be here until noon. If I leave earlier, I'll flashyou a signal."
* * * * *
He entered the big oval room, lighted from overhead by the greatstar-map in the ceiling, and crossed to his desk, with the viewscreensand reading screens and communications screens around it, and as he satdown, he cursed angrily, first at Harv Dorflay and then, after amoment's reflection, at himself. He was the one to blame; he'd knownDorflay's paranoid condition for years. Have to do something about it.Any psycho-medic would certify him; be no problem at all to have him putaway. But be blasted if he'd do that. That was no way to repay loyalty,even insane loyalty. Well, he'd find a way.
He lit a cigarette and leaned back, looking up at the glowing swirl ofbillions of billions of tiny lights in the ceiling. At least, there weresupposed to be billions of billions of them; he'd never counted them,and neither had any of the seventeen Rodriks and sixteen Pauls beforehim who had sat under them. His hand moved to a control button on hischair arm, and a red patch, roughly the shape of a pork chop, appearedon the western side.
That was the Empire. Every one of the thousand three hundred andsixty-five inhabited worlds, a trillion and a half intelligent beings,fourteen races--fifteen if you counted the Zarathustran Fuzzies, whowere almost able to qualify under the talk-and-build-a-fire rule. Andthat had been the Empire when Rodrik VI had seen the map completed, andwhen Paul II had built the Palace, and when Stevan IV, the grandfatherof Paul I, had proclaimed Odin the Imperial planet and Asgard thecapital city. There had been some excuse for staying inside that patchof stars then; a newly won Empire must be consolidated within before itcan safely be expanded. But that had been over eight centuries ago.
He looked at the Daily Schedule, beautifully embossed and neatly slippedunder his desk glass. Luncheon on the South Upper Terrace, with thePrime Minister and the Bench of Imperial Counselors. Yes, it was timefor that again; that happened as inevitably and regularly as HarvDorflay's murder plots. And in the afternoon, a Plenary Session, Cabinetand Counselors. Was he going to have to endure the Bench of Counselorstwice in the same day? Then the vexation was washed out of his face by aspreading grin. Bench of Counselors; that was the answer! Elevate HarvDorflay to the Bench. That was what the Bench was for, a gold-plateddustbin for the disposal of superannuated dignitaries. He'd do no harmthere, and a touch of outright lunacy might enliven and even improve theBench.
And in the evening, a banquet, and a reception and ball, in honor of HisMajesty Ranulf XIV, Planetary King of Durendal, and First Citizen ZhorzhYaggo, People's Manager-in-Chief of and for the Planetary Commonwealthof Aditya. Bargain day; two planetary chiefs of state in one bigcombination deal. He wondered what sort of prizes he had drawn thistime, and closed his eyes, trying to remember. Durendal, of course, wasone of the Sword-Worlds, settled by refugees from the losing side of theSystem States War in the time of the old Terran Federation, who hadreappeared in Galactic history a few centuries later as the SpaceVikings. They all had monarchial and rather picturesque governments;Durendal, he seemed to recall, was a sort of quasi-feudalism. AboutAditya he was less sure. Something unpleasant, he thought; the titles ofthe government and its head were suggestive.
He lit another cigarette and snapped on the reading screen to see whatthey had piled onto him this morning, and then swore when a graph chart,with jiggling red and blue and green lines, appeared. Chart day, too.Everything happens at once.
* * * * *
It was the interstellar trade situation chart from Economics. Red linefor production, green line for exports, blue for imports, sectionedvertically for the ten Viceroyalties and sub-sectioned for thePrefectures, and with the magnification and focus controls he could evenget data for individual planets. He didn't bother with that, andwondered why he bothered with the charts at all. The stuff was all atleast twenty days behind date, and not uniformly so, which accounted formuch of the jiggling. It had been transmitted from PlanetaryProconsulate to Prefecture, and from Prefecture to Viceroyalty, and fromthere to Odin, all by ship. A ship on hyperdrive could log light-yearsan hour, but radio waves still had to travel 186,000 mps. Thesupplementary chart for the past five centuries told the realstory--three perfectly level and perfectly parallel lines.
It was the same on all the other charts. Population fluctuating slightlyat the moment, completely static for the past five centuries. A slightdecrease in agriculture, matched by an increase in synthetic foodproduction. A slight population movement toward the more urban planetsand the more densely populated centers. A trend downward inemployment--nonworking population increasing by about .0001 per centannually. Not that they were building better robots; they were justbuilding them faster than they wore out. They all told the same story--astable economy, a static population, a peaceful and undisturbed Empire;eight centuries, five at least, of historyless tranquility. Well, thatwas what everybody wanted, wasn't it?
He flipped through the rest of the charts, and began getting summarizedMinistry reports. Economics had denied a request from the Mining Cartelto authorize operations on a couple of uninhabited planets; danger oflocal market gluts and overstimulation of manufacturing. Permissiongranted to Robotics Cartel to---- Request from planetary government ofDurendal for increase of cereal export quotas under consideration--theywouldn't want to turn that down while King Ranulf was here. Impulsively,he punched out a combination on the communication screen and got CountDuklass, Minister of Economics.
Count Duklass had thinning red hair and a plump, agreeable, extrovert'sface. He smiled and waited to be addressed.
"Sorry to bother Your Lordship," Paul greeted him. "What's the story onthis export quota request from Durendal? We have their king here, now.Think he's come to lobby for it?"
Count Duklass chuckled. "He's not doing anything about it, himself. Haveyou met him yet, sir?"
"Not yet. He's to be presented this evening."
"Well, when you see him--I think the masculine pronoun ispermissible--you'll see what I mean, sir. It's this Lord Koreff, theMarshal. He came here on business, and had to bring the king along, forfear somebody else would grab him while he was gone. The whole object ofDurendalian politics, as I understand, is to get possession of theperson of the king. Koreff was on my screen for half an hour; I just gotrid of him. Planet's pretty heavily agricultural, they had a couple ofvery good crop years in a row, and now they have grain running out theirears, and they want to export it and cash in."
"Well?"
"Can't let them do it, Your Majesty. They're not suffering any hardship;they're just not making as much money as they think they ought to. Ifthey start dumping their surplus into interstellar trade, they'll causeall kinds of dislocations on other agricultural planets. At least,that's what our computers all say."
And that, of course, was gospel. He nodded.
"Why don't they turn their surplus into whisky? Age it five or six yearsand it'd be on the luxury goods schedule and they could sell itanywhere."
Count Duklass' eyes widened. "I never thought of that, Your Majesty.Just a microsec; I want to make a note of that. Pass it down to somebodywho could deal with it. That's a wonderful idea, Your Majesty!"
* * * * *
He finally got the conversation to an end, and went back to the reports.Security, as usual, had a few items above the dead level of bureaucraticprocedure. The planetary king of Excalibur had been assassinated by hisbrother and two nephews, all three of whom were now fighting amongthemselves. As nobody had anything to fight with except small arms and afew light cannon, there would be no intervention. There had beenintervention on Behemoth, however, where a whole continent had tried tosecede from the planetary republic and the Imperial Navy had beenrequested to send a task force. That was all right, in both cases. Nointerference with anything that passed for a planetary government, butonly one sovereignty on any planet with nuclear weapons, and only onesupreme sovereignty in a galaxy with hyperdrive ships.
And there was
rioting on Amaterasu, because of public indignation over afraudulent election. He looked at that in incredulous delight. Why, hereon Odin there hadn't been an election in the past six centuries thathadn't been utterly fraudulent. Nobody voted except the nonworkers,whose votes were bought and sold wholesale, by gangster bosses topressure groups, and no decent person would be caught within a hundredyards of a polling place on an election day. He called the Minister ofSecurity.
Prince Travann was a man of his own age--they had been classmates at theUniversity--but he looked older. His thin face was lined, and his hairwas almost completely white. He was at his desk, with the Sun andCogwheel of the Empire on the wall behind him, but on the breast of hisblack tunic he wore the badge of his family, a silver planet with threesilver moons. Unlike Count Duklass, he
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