Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

“Beyond words,” he said, rising to his feet and bowing very low. “Then I take it you have confirmed my identity.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “And I am more impressed with Aurigar than ever. To make whatever con he is running plausible, he has actually corrupted a very highly placed public official. I know I want into this deal now, whatever it is, but of course you’ll have to tell me what you are actually up to, and cut me in as a partner. Whatever is behind all this must be simply astonishing. I know you’ll have to confer with whoever your hidden partners are, but as soon as you can tell me what’s really going on, come right back, and we’ll see what sort of deal we can do.” Her eyes sparkled and she kissed Aurigar on both cheeks. “And Aurigar, even if your partners won’t let you tell me, don’t be a stranger anyway. You have no idea how much you impress me.”

  ·

  “Really, it’s almost to be expected,” Lord Leader Cetuso said. “All Imperials get extensive genetion. Heirs and near-heirs get even more, beginning right at the embryo stage. Even our late, mad Emperor was a polymathic genius; the madness was due to a botched assassination attempt by his mother, and some unfortunate abuse at the hands of his older brother of equally revered memory. So, naturally, Ululara, or Miriette, is beautiful, competent, cold-blooded, pragmatic, charismatic, all the things she needs to be. She was literally born to rule the galaxy. Climbing up from high-end prostitute to mistress of a hundred brothels in a few short years might have been a challenge for other people, but it was well within her capabilities.” He told the robot, “Standard setup for Aurigar.”

  “I’m not hungry, Lord Leader Sir.”

  “Have something to eat anyway. It always reduces your worrying and mellows your mood, and that helps you to be the splendid companion you usually are. And it’s your clear, calm thought I need now.”

  The robot brought the platter, and Aurigar munched, forlornly at first, but then resolutely, as if it might be taken away from him, and finally with that certain calm decision that generally preceded his best ideas. He looked up to see Cetuso smiling, and thought he detected a twinkle in one of the mirrors of his eye sockets.

  “I do hate being predictable,” Aurigar said.

  “We all do, but it’s part of what makes us useful.” Cetuso smiled at him. Aurigar felt cold fear that the Lord Leader Sir might be genuinely fond of him. “Now, if you need to eat all of that and then nap,” Cetuso said, “you have plenty of time; considering the distances and numbers involved, we probably have the better part of a marq to get the Empress onto the throne, and loyal client members of my family will make sure no one does anything rash. So rest, eat, and think of what we should do next.”

  A thought bothered Aurigar, but refused to come to the surface, so he spoke without it. “Just supposing we do find a way to persuade her that she is who she actually is, and assuming she wants the job, is there going to be a problem with any of a billion worlds or so realizing that they are being ruled from afar by—pardon the expression, but a former—”

  Cetuso laughed. “Oh, there will be a predictable number of uprisings. So long as it’s just a planet by itself, the Imperial forces will do the usual—the multiple decimation for which they are famous.”

  Aurigar shuddered. “I heard stories about that, growing up.”

  “Notice the durability of the effect. The last time your homeworld rebelled, and had to be set straight, was more than eight thousand marqs ago. There is something about the ‘ten tenths’ concept that stays in the mind.”

  Aurigar remembered a vast stone desert stretching out before him, some time before his father left, because he remembered he was holding Magrat’s collar and listening to his father explain: “It’s simple, Aurie, they ‘delete ten tenths,’ as they call it. One-tenth of all those of noble blood. One-tenth of all commoners. One-tenth of all slaves. One of the ten largest cities. Ten of the hundred largest cities. One hundred of the thousand largest cities. One-tenth of all livestock. One-tenth of all growing crops. One-tenth of all the forests. All the soil down to rock from one-tenth of the habitable surface. You see, everyone knows the formula, and everyone knows not to rebel, or not to let rebels get control of the planet. And the Emperor is always merciful; overlaps count. By slicing off the piece in front of us, he met not just the soil requirement, but half a dozen of the others as well. Nearly all the cities needed to make up the quota were located there, for example.”

  Aurigar remembered how much he had hated his father, how sad he had always felt when looking at the decimated parts of worlds from spaceship windows, and how pathetic it seemed to him that he had never once had to coerce or trick a girl into the lost princess routine; every one of them had come willingly, because it was so much better than what she had.

  He forced his attention back to the present, but couldn’t help asking, “But why does the Emperor care?”

  “Empress, as soon as we can make it clear to her that that’s what she is.”

  “I meant in general, Lord Leader Sir,” Aurigar said, skirting the edge of the great lord’s dislike for lectures not delivered by himself, “but all right, why does the Empress care if she has a planet fewer, here and there, out of a billion? She could just seal them off for a while, just a loose blockade to raise prices, and then wait for trade pressure and apathy to bring them back into line.”

  To Aurigar’s surprise, Cetuso sat back, rubbed his bare blue scalp thoughtfully, and said, “Why does anyone do anything, dear fellow? We have the technology to make every one of four quadrillion human beings as rich and comfortable as that person could reasonably consume, and to sustain that forever; between dwell, jump, and nano, there’s no reason why anyone would ever need to leave home except for fun, and no reason why there needs to be a charge on anything. So why do you suppose we have people in dreadful and dangerous jobs such as mining, ranching, and prostitution? Why don’t we just synthesize materials from lifeless planets, jump it to where the people are, grow perfect food in tanks for everyone, and indulge everyone’s sensual whims eternally in dwellspace? We could do that, you know, for everyone, and still have plenty left over for the people who wanted to travel or go camping or whatever.”

  Aurigar stared at him. “I’ve never thought of that. I just thought there were a lot of shitty jobs someone had to do. Do you have an answer?”

  “Of course, dear fellow. We aristocrats are born with all the answers, you know, it’s just a matter of getting them loaded into our heads. And the answer is: there’s only one real pleasure; everything else is just satisfactions of urges. And the one real pleasure is getting one’s way over and against resistance. The only thing human beings really enjoy is making other people do what they don’t want to. Simple as that. Why do you think there are waiters, shop clerks, and prostitutes? In this age—and for the past thirty kilomarqs at least—everything they actually do or provide could be done better and cheaper by nano or dwell, and everyone could have as much of that as they want. We need poor people, and other gender and biological and spiritual underclasses, so that there will be people who—ideally hating it, or submissively fawning over it—must do what rich people tell them, because otherwise there’s no point to being rich. That’s all. Simple, isn’t it, dear fellow—now that you’re about to be rich?”

  Ninety-four, Aurigar thought, counting the number of times Cetuso called him “dear fellow.” He wasn’t sure yet why he was counting; he had only started to count them in the last day or so, but now his mind always watched that little register, the “dear fellow” count. And why am I able to keep it so accurately? For that matter, he thought, I knew so much about Waystonn that I would never need to know, and Cetuso prefers my advice to all others, even though I’m just a tenth-rate con man and procurer. And now my father, who was barely there when I was a child, surfaces in a critical memory—

  Aurigar realized. There was no better word—it was the first and only realization of his life.

  “Well,” he said. “I know how to make this work.” He was unsurprised to
recall that Geepo owed him a large favor. “I know a man I can get, the best in the Empire in multimapping dwellfaces.”

  “Why would you know such a person and what would we want with him?”

  “Geepo is profoundly useful in salvage operations. Every so often, genetion goes wrong, or a girl decides to balk or try to escape, or for some reason her buyer simply cannot sell her physically, so we put her into dwell, and interface her into a simulation that generates decisions and behavior for some other simulation that is salable. A girl may dwell the life of a beautiful princess madly in love with a gallant knight, and behave accordingly in dwell, while dozens or hundreds of men assume the role of the traveling salesman—she experiences them as the knight, they experience her as the bored housewife. Not as good as real, but salable in the cheap markets.”

  “And this Geepo is good at dwellfaces?”

  “The very best in the human trades. The three times I’ve used him, he has been phenomenally expensive, and utterly worth it. He is difficult to work with, like every real artist, but certainly fond of money—”

  “Like every real artist. I believe I see your point.”

  Miriette beamed. “Three of you this time.” She smiled particularly at Geepo. “Do you prefer to explain the actual deal yourself, or are you one of those that always wants the lackeys to do the talking?”

  “Er, actually,” Geepo said, rubbing his upper lip in a way that made Aurigar think of rabbits, “I’m a lackey here myself.”

  “Oh,” she said, fixing him with the “you are fascinating” stare. “We’ll have to talk. Now, Aurigar, are you going to tell me what all this is about?”

  “Well,” he said, “I have convinced my principals that you could not be easily tricked into a dwelltank.”

  “From which I would never emerge?”

  “Exactly.”

  She nodded. “Then let me tell you what I guessed. Your principals, who are probably the owners of a certain very large chain of brothels based in the 11/6 arm of the galaxy—”

  “I have not named them,” Aurigar said.

  “Nor have I. At any rate, these principals of yours estimated that my managerial and business skills were considerably in excess of theirs, true?”

  “Actually they believe that left to yourself you would have a galactic monopoly within nineteen marqs.”

  “I was planning for eleven,” she said.

  “There is little doubt you know better than they,” Cetuso put in.

  “There is no doubt, Lord Leader Sir. Now, if they could get me to run their enterprise, that monopoly could be theirs, and soon. So you would have taken me to your palace in Jinkhangy, Lord Leader Sir, where all preparation would be under way for my ‘coronation.’ I would have gone into dwell for an ‘extensive briefing’ or ‘protocol training’ or whatever, and never have awakened in reality—but in dwell I would have gone through the coronation, appointed my cabinet, begun the process of ruling the galaxy. Back in reality, I would have been running all the brothels in the galaxy, through a multimapping interface.”

  “You have discerned the entire thing,” Cetuso said gravely. “I hope you are not offended. You must admit it was rather a good scheme.”

  “It was,” she admitted. “And their commitment to it is demonstrated by the sheer enormity of the bribe they must have offered you to take part. Tell me, Aurigar, how many of your other lost princesses are now ‘ruling the galaxy’ while actually doing accounts receivables for a discount clothing chain?”

  Aurigar shrugged, inwardly pleased that he had anticipated the question. “Being able to fake being a great lay is very common,” he said. “First-rate administrative talent is much rarer, and most businesses are not large or complex enough to need it. You are rather in the nature of a unique case.”

  “Of course I am; I should have realized. All right, then, let me propose an alternative. Your principals will hire me to run their entire operation for them, via dwell. For one-fifth of every day, time to be set by me, I will unhook, run my own operation, and do just as I please. My operation will not be absorbed into theirs. I expect generous compensation and a sizable piece of the overall operation. I will take a long list of precautions to make sure that I return from my first dwell, and I will be fully empowered while in dwellspace, so that I can arrange matters such that you will never dare to think of trying to hold me in dwellspace. Does that sound fair?”

  “I was carefully instructed,” Aurigar said, “not to argue about any issues regarding safeguards, or the definitions of words such as ‘generous’ or ‘sizable.’ Our principals are aware of the great need to rebuild the trust that they admittedly squandered. I think you may consider that we have a deal.”

  “Aurigar, my only remaining question is, why an honest pimp, con man, fraud, and kidnapper like yourself would get involved in something as nasty as large-scale corporate activity?”

  “The money was good.”

  “Oh, but if that’s your excuse, what will be next? Politics? Well, suit yourself, but I hate to see your talent squandered so squalidly.”

  ·

  “Can you see what she has been doing in there?” Cetuso asked, for the fifth time.

  Geepo shrugged, pulled his visor down, and spread his sensegloved fingers into the plextank before him. His fingers danced and wriggled over myriad pseudosurfaces. “Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, she has been through all the business records, penetrated all the locked files, and outcopied everything. She has also set up a remarkably complex and probably unanalyz-able system of bombs, traps, alarms, triggers, and poisons so no one can ever hold her in dwellspace against her will.”

  “Of course,” Cetuso said, “you are keeping track of those and can enable us to keep her inside—”

  “That is not what was agreed to! It would be extremely unethical. Even the beginnings of an attempt would make detection certain by a person of ordinary skill, and the princess is building the cleverest protection I’ve ever seen. We are dealing with no mean or small mind here, Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, and I should be terrified to try to step in contrary to her wishes.”

  Cetuso’s tone was dark and the silver flashes in his eye sockets were ominous. “So there is no way to control her—all we can do is try to stay on her good side?”

  Remembering that the lord was three times Geepo’s weight in super-fast, superstrong muscle—and could not be prosecuted for killing a com-moner—Geepo could barely nod.

  Cetuso sighed. “Well, Aurigar, from what you know of madams, would you want one running the galaxy?”

  “Well, yes and no, Lord Leader Sir. No, in that most of them are cruel and petty. Yes, in that they tend to be decisive, knowledgeable about human nature, and focused on the main chance.”

  “And from what I know of princesses, they have generally been pressured into some semblance of grace and largeness of spirit, but they are obsessed with improving people, prone to vacillating, and disdainful of the most practical and effective way of doing anything. Probably we are about to acquire an Empress with the personal ethics of a pimp and the broad vision of a spoiled aristocrat, about like any other political leadership of the last few kilomarqs. Hard on ordinary people I suppose, but what isn’t? And we have no reason to care about them. Time to pursue preferment, eh, dear fellow?”

  Four hundred thirty-two, and now it will turn out I already have preferment.

  “Already taken care of,” Geepo said. “I cast each of us, in the princess’s dwellspace, as particularly proficient branch managers, with dwell-space abilities mapped to our real talents on the outside. Your diplomatic ability, Lord Leader Cetuso Sir, for example, maps to a gift for motivating exotic women and attracting discerning customers—”

  “You mean I’ve been cast as a particularly classy pimp for jaded, kinky aristocrats?”

  “Exactly, Lord Leader Sir. I would say you are certain to gain a post in the Inner Cabinet. Of course, interacting with you through her interface and yours, she will think you are that pimp, but when she
communicates with you, her avatar on the screen will call you by your right name and cabinet rank. After a while, you will barely notice that anything is different.”

  “This mapping, between pimp and cabinet post—was it easy?”

  “Exceedingly so, Lord Leader Sir.”

  “I guessed as much.” The mirrors in his dark eye sockets flashed brightly a few times, and his blue face was still, except for the hint of a satisfied smile.

  Aurigar looked around from his command station. There were at least a thousand screenminders within sight, most of them directly over his head, and if it were not for the semicircle of plextanks in which he stood, each showing an aspect of the situation surrounding the six worlds remaining in rebellion, he might have been in any large orbiting office complex around any inhabited planet.

  But he was the commander of the Galactic Expeditionary Force, and he could confirm it by looking at the plextank showing six suns, all that remained of the Cleanlist Rebellion against the Empress; she had refused their surrender for the sake of example. At his touch, the plextank display rearranged to show up-close images of each system, no longer to scale, but with all six stars and seventeen inhabited worlds visible as spheres, the systems arranged in a hex around a central data console.

  It’s not even new, now, but it’s still strange, he thought, and idly plucked at the sleeve of the silly getup he had to wear in public.

  At his side, Cetuso said, “You’ve really done well for yourself, dear fellow.”

  “I suppose so, Lor—er, Cetuso.” Seventeen thousand four hundred twenty-seven.

  The blue man smiled. “Still not used to your peerage?”

  “I doubt I ever will be. To judge by the—”

  The image in the central tank vanished; Ululara, in full Imperial regalia, appeared. “Supremor Aurigar, are we ready?”

  He felt in the plextank once more, for form’s sake. “We are.”

  “Then proceed at once. We have a victory celebration to start.”

  Aurigar shrugged and spoke the order. More than a thousand screen-minders watched for errors or to countermand as thousands of robots, each prepositioned on a sizable asteroid, sprayed the surface with trillions of nanobots. In a matter of a few hundred nanomarqs, well before any remote sensor could hope to detect them, the nanobots had spread their conducting filament-nets of conductors; an instant later, an antimatter fizzle bomb popped up from the main robot and burst, feeding energy into the nanobots’ vast antennae, supplying the energy for the transformation.