EMPIRE: Renewal

by Richard F. Weyand

  With company gone, Diener turned to Claire.

  “Was that OK, Dear?”

  “Oh, I thought I would die, but after Gail calmed me down, I had fun. They’re all very nice people, actually. I’ll be looking forward to it now.”

  “Good. Excellent.”

  The Six Top-Level Groups

  Paul Diener was working on the six top-level groups for the new Imperial administration. Ardmore had shown Diener his technique for specifying the sort of people who used to populate those positions under the Four Good Emperors, and then running those filters against the current administrative employee records of the Empire to find similar people.

  Diener ended up with hundreds of candidates for the top six positions. So how to prioritize them?

  He had left age out of the consideration when he did the first search, so now he bracketed the ages with the typical age of the person at the time they were named to the position during the time of the Four Good Emperors. That narrowed things down considerably. The average age of the bureaucracy of the Empire had been climbing slowly for the last hundred years.

  He hated to lose the experience and judgment of those older people, though. People rising into the top six positions under the Four Good Emperors had had the benefit of coming up within the organization as it was then. The younger people now were in more minor positions, given the age of the bureaucracy as a whole.

  He decided to extend the age brackets a bit on the top end in order to get people a little higher in the organization, more like the positions those younger people had held in the past.

  When it was all said and done, he had a solid pool of candidates for each of the six upper positions.

  OK, so now what? How did he choose?

  He had lunch scheduled with Ardmore, Burke, and Drake tomorrow, Wednesday. It would become their normal mid-week lunch together. He decided to ask them what they thought.

  At lunch Wednesday in the dining room of the Imperial Residence, Diener explained the problem.

  “So I’m not sure how to proceed at this point. I’m interviewing these people for a position they know nothing about. I’ll spend all my time explaining what we’re trying to do, rather than getting any idea of what their approach might be. And hitting them with it cold, they won’t have any substantive responses anyway.”

  The others thought about that for several seconds, then Burke rapped her knuckles on the table.

  “I know. Make it a homework problem. Tell them they’re being considered for whichever position. Assign them to read Jimmy’s book. And ask them for a report – put a limit on it, like two thousand words – about what they see as the problems they would face and how they would solve them. Then, having read their reports, that’s when you interview them.”

  “I like it,” Drake said. “You probably won’t even have to interview all of them. Some people won’t get it, or will go off in the wrong direction. Some might even argue against it. But you should be able to see the people you want from that.”

  “What if they don’t read the book? They just wing it?” Diener asked.

  “Then they make your job simpler, Paul,” Burke said. “You don’t want those people.”

  Diener turned to Ardmore.

  “Jimmy?”

  “Huh? Oh, sorry. I was just thinking how I would write one of those reports. Yes, I agree with the solution. And I’ll be happy to help you consider the reports if you wish.”

  “That would be great, Jimmy. Thanks.”

  “There’s one other thing you might do, Paul.”

  “What’s that, Jonah?”

  “The word ‘group’ is sort of misleading. I was thinking about it, and it sounds like a low-level function. Maybe we should call them ‘office’ instead. You know. The Budget Office, the Consulting Office, the Projects Office. What do you think, Jimmy? Does that mess anything up?”

  “I don’t think so, Jonah. I always thought ‘group’ was the wrong name, anyway. Without the context of the past, you don’t really get the sense of it.”

  “All right,” Diener said. “Thanks, Jonah. That’s what we’ll call them then.”

  At the end of lunch, Drake had a proposal.

  “Do you want to go upstairs and see what the status of the Imperial Gardens is?”

  “Can we, Jonah?” Burke asked.

  “Sure. Now I caution you they’re still pulling everything out from before, but we can see where they’ve gotten in ten days.”

  Diener excused himself to go off and write his homework assignment. Ardmore, Burke, and Drake went up the escalator to the roof. They came out in the cupola and walked out into the gardens. The area around the cupola was fenced off for now. The rest of the roof was a war zone.

  Skid-steer bucket loaders labored away at scraping the gardens down to the epoxycrete substructure. There was a gap in the glass wall around the gardens, on the rear side of the Palace, with the mouth of a tube there. When a skid-steer got a full bucket, they trundled over to the rear side of the Palace and dumped their load into the tube, then came back to get some more.

  “Where does that tube go?” Burke asked. “It doesn’t go all the way to the ground, does it?”

  “Yes, three hundred feet or more. But it’s at an angle, so it doesn’t just fall that far. It must be a tenth of a mile long or so.”

  “Wow. This is something,” Ardmore said.

  Stefan Gretzky, the Imperial Gardener, had a table there in the fenced off area by the escalator, from which he was supervising the operation. He got up and came over to them.

  “Good afternoon, Your Majesty.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Gretzky. How are things going?”

  “Very well, Sire. Using the recording, we know where the infrastructure is. You see over there? We’ve found the pool site. The pool will have to be rebuilt, of course, but the infrastructure is still in place. All the weight-bearing members and such.”

  They looked to where he pointed. Workman were there, manually shoveling to expose the infrastructure without breaking anything or losing a skid-steer into the hole.

  “Some of the facilities were added over time, and the electrical and plumbing and such is a bit of a hodge-podge, but we’ll clean that all up before we start building back up. It’ll make the gardens easier to maintain than they were in the day.”

  Drake nodded.

  “Well, it looks like you’re doing a marvelous job, Mr. Gretzky. Carry on.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  Gretzky bowed and went back to his table.

  “That’s just amazing,” Burke said, looking out over the devastation. “They’re just going to strip it all out down to nothing and start over.”

  “Yep,” Drake said. “And Mr. Gretzky’s having the time of his life. I had to approve a bunch of things for them to even get it done in a reasonable way.”

  “Like what?” Burke asked.

  “You’ll see,” Drake said and smiled.

  Gladys King received a curious message that afternoon. She read it several times and couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

  To: Gladys King, Treasury Department

  From: Paul Diener, Co-Consul

  Subject: Assignment

  You are being considered for a position as the head of the Budget Office. This is a new high-level position reporting directly to the Emperor. This new Office will consolidate all budget operations within the Imperial government.

  To be considered for this position, you should read Dr. Ardmore’s book, ‘Power & Restraint,’ attached, then prepare a report describing how you would approach carrying out this position. Your report should not exceed three thousand words. It is to be sent directly to me, not through your current chain of supervision.

  Your report is due by the start of business Monday, twelve days from today. This assignment takes priority over all your current job functions.

  King had just turned forty-five years old. If this were really that high a position, they would be considering a more senior person. Y
es, she was competent, and a good manager, but that’s not how the pecking order of the Imperial bureaucracy worked. Competence was nice, but connections and seniority were what got you promoted.

  Then again, it said ‘reporting directly to the Emperor.’ Only the head of the Treasury department reported directly to the Emperor. He was a senior administrator – politician, really, at that level – in his mid-sixties, twenty years her senior. It also said all budget operations would be consolidated within this new Office.

  What the hell was going on?

  She opened Ardmore’s book, and did a quick search on Budget. She found a description of six top-level groups reporting directly to the Emperor, Budgets, Consulting, Investigations, Oversight, Projects, and Troubleshooting. A sentence on the page caught her eye: “Throughout the reigns of the Four Good Emperors, the heads of these groups were selected for competence, ingenuity, and independence. Bureaucrats, politicians, and in-fighters were notable in their absence from these positions.”

  Well, that would definitely be a huge change.

  King clicked back to the beginning of the book and started to read.

  All across His Majesty’s government, people who had been tapped by the Co-Consul read Ardmore’s book and wrote their responses. Since he had a time-efficient way to consider candidates, Diener had sent the report request out to the top sixteen candidates for each office.

  Reports started floating in the next week, there was a spike of reports late Friday afternoon, and the rest came in over the weekend.

  Diener called Ardmore that Monday morning.

  “Yes, Mr. Diener.”

  “Dr. Ardmore, the reports have come in. All ninety-six of them. How do you want to handle this?”

  “Ninety-six reports of three thousand words each?” Ardmore asked.

  He shrugged.

  “That’s only three hundred thousand words or so, Mr. Diener. Why don’t we both just read them all? Perhaps we do one Office at a time, so we can talk to each other when they’re fresh in our minds.”

  “All right, then. Budgets is first, I guess, in alphabetical order. Let’s start there.”

  Diener pushed the sixteen reports to Ardmore.

  “Great. We can talk when we’re both done. I’ll send you a note when I’m complete.”

  “All right. Thank you, Dr. Ardmore.”

  “Oh, and do they have timestamps on them for when they were submitted?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I’m inclined to discount any that came in late on Friday afternoon.”

  “Discount them? Why?”

  “Because that’s a person who uses the entire time allotted to do an assignment, but doesn’t work on the weekends. The sort who walks out the door at five o’clock on the dot. Someone who got theirs in early, or someone who worked on it over the weekend, is surely to be preferred.”

  “I see. Interesting.”

  “Talk to you later, Mr. Diener.”

  They talked again that afternoon.

  “Well, I have three I like,” Ardmore said. “King, Zhang, and Holcroft.”

  “I have the same three,” Diener said. “Though I placed Holcroft before Zhang.”

  “I discounted Mr. Holcroft for submitting his report at four-forty-five on Friday afternoon.”

  “Ah, yes. But we’re agreed on Ms. King?”

  “Yes, Mr. Diener. She really gets it. And she sees the problems ahead clearly and wasn’t afraid to speculate on possible solutions. I think she’s the clear choice.”

  “Very well, Dr. Ardmore. Here come the reports from the candidates for the Consulting Office.”

  “Talk to you tomorrow, Mr. Diener.”

  By the close of business Friday, Diener and Ardmore had reviewed all ninety-six reports and selected the best candidates. There were only two on which they disagreed, but when they talked about the candidates, they both ended up agreeing.

  One of those was on the Consulting Office. Ardmore stressed the relatively young age of the people who had held that office, and their outside-the-box thinking, and Diener changed his mind. The other was the Investigations Office. Diener pointed out that most of those who had held that office had had some sort of police or investigations experience at the ground level, and Ardmore changed his mind.

  But by Friday evening, they had them all.

  The subject came up at Sunday brunch after coffee had been served and the staff and Guardsmen dismissed. They were seated out on the balcony enjoying the beautiful morning.

  “So, Paul, I understand from Jimmy you have your six choices for the top-level Office positions selected.”

  “Yes, Jonah. We’re agreed on them all.”

  “I am, too, Paul. I didn’t read all the reports, but I read the six winners. I think it’s a good lot.”

  “I read them, too,” Burke said. “They look good to me.”

  “So we’re all agreed,” Diener said. “What’s next?”

  “Let me talk to them, Paul,” Drake said. “Just call them all together in one place and let me talk to them.”

  “Of course. Where?”

  “One of the small classrooms on the Imperial office floors. I think.”

  “Sounds good, Jonah.”

  “Just schedule it with Mr. Moody, Paul.”

  On Monday morning, Gladys King got a message ordering her to appear at a ten o’clock meeting on the upper floor of the Imperial offices. She wasn’t quite sure how she was supposed to do that, but when she got to the Imperial Palace, she found the buttons for Imperial office floors were now in her elevator controls.

  When she got there, an Imperial Guardsman was standing in the elevator lobby and directed her down the hallway to her left. Another Guardsman at a cross-corridor guided her left again, and then one directed her into a door on her right.

  “Have a seat anywhere, Ma’am.”

  King went in and sat. Three others were there already. It was a small classroom or lecture room sort of thing that sat twenty five in raised rows. There were four chairs in the speaker’s well, one set aside from the others.

  Two more people came in. The others were all people who she recognized from the Imperial Administration Building. She had seen them around, but didn’t know their names.

  At ten o’clock, three other people came in and sat on the three chairs that were grouped together, A young female Imperial Guard captain, a stout young fellow whose demeanor screamed academic, and a middle-aged man she recognized with a shock was the Co-Consul.

  “My name is Paul Diener,” the middle-aged man said, “and I am Co-Consul to His Majesty. The reason you are all here is you have been twice selected, once to respond to the assignment to read Dr. Ardmore’s book–“ he gestured at the academic “– and then your report was selected from those submitted.

  “I know you must all have many questions. You will learn a great deal about what is going on in the next hour. Every single bit of it has been declared classified by His Majesty himself. Nothing that goes on in this room today is to be discussed with anyone else without permission from me or from the Emperor. Does everybody understand that?”

  There were nods and ‘yes, sir’s from all six. Diener nodded.

  “Good. Now, please stand for His Majesty.”

  King shot to her feet in reflex as the ninety-year-old ruler walked into the room. The six of them in the audience, and the three others in the front of the room, all stood. The Emperor walked to the chair set aside from the others and sat down.

  “Be seated, everyone.”

  The Imperial Guard captain made a sign to the Imperial Guardsmen in the room and they all left, closing the door behind them.

  “Guard,” the captain addressed the ceiling.

  “Yes, Captain Burke,” a voice came back.

  “Suspend audio monitoring for one hour.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  A soft ‘bong’ tone sounded from the ceiling. Captain Burke looked over to the light switches by the door and noted a small flashing red
light on the panel. She nodded to the Emperor. He turned to the six members of his audience.

  “I grew up in this Palace, within these walls. I was born only fifteen years after the death of Augustus the Great, very nearly at the height of Imperial power. Yes, I say very nearly the height, because the Empire has been declining since his death. You may not see that, or believe it, but I have seen it happen, with my own eyes. I tried to stop it, but I really couldn’t see how. It seemed a long, slow decline was inevitable.

  “And then, several months ago, I read Dr. Ardmore’s remarkable book. The book you all read in the last two weeks. Finally, I could see what had happened, why it had happened, and how to fix it. I hired Dr. Ardmore as the Court Historian, to assist me in understanding how to turn around this decline. We have been working together on this project since.

  “You have seen some of the signs of that effort, I am sure. Censorship is gone with the restoration of the Law of Ilithyia II. Many other nonsense illegalities as well. We are back down to two books of the law, as it was during the Golden Age of the Empire, the reigns of the Four Good Emperors, Trajan, Trajan II, Antoninus and Augustus. The filtering of our education curricula and the perversion of our scholarship program are gone as well.

  “But these changes are only the beginning. And as I go about rebuilding the Empire back into what it was, I am enlisting recruits. Dr. Ardmore there, and Captain Burke, and Mr. Diener. Now I am drawing you six into our little cabal. For you six will be the heads of the six top-level groups in the Empire, reporting directly to the Throne. The groups that used to manage the Empire. The groups you read about in Dr. Ardmore’s book. That book lays out our goals, and illuminates our path.

  “Your current responsibilities are ended. For the near-term, you will be moved into offices on this floor, my personal office floor, so we can coordinate more closely. I am told you all already live somewhere in the Palace complex, so there is no change there. Your salaries will increase to the proper level for an Imperial director reporting directly to the Emperor. The same as the current head of Treasury or Education.