erect, the height well below her own, the other differences
unreckonable. "Sir Dominic saw fit to dub me Chives," he introduced
himself. "I trust you will find his service pleasant. Indeed, I declined
the manumission he offered me, until the law about spy bracelets went
into effect on Terra. May I direct you out?"
Kossara went along through rosiness, into an aircar, on across the city
and an ocean, eventually to an ornate house on an island which Chives
called Catalina. He showed her to a suite and explained that her owner
was busy elsewhere but would presently make his wishes known. Meanwhile
these facilities were hers to use, within reason.
Kossara fell asleep imagining that Mihail was beside her.
III
---
It was official: the Emperor Hans would shortly leave Terra, put himself
at the head of an armada, and personally see to quelling the
barbarians--war lords, buccaneers, crusaders for God knew what strange
causes--who still harassed a Sector Spica left weak by the late struggle
for the Imperial succession. He threw a bon voyage party at the Coral
Palace. Captain Sir Dominic Flandry was among those invited. Under such
circumstances, one comes.
Besides, Flandry reflected, I can't help liking the old bastard. He may
not be the best imaginable thing that could happen to us, but he's
probably the best available.
The hour was well after sunset in this part of Oceania. A crescent moon
stood high to westward; metrocenter star-points glinted across its dark
side. The constellations threw light of their own onto gently rolling
waves, argent shimmer on sable. Quietness broke where surf growled white
against ramparts. There walls, domes, towers soared aloft in a
brilliance which masked off most of heaven.
When Flandry landed his car and stepped forth, no clouds of perfume (or
psychogenic vapors, as had been common in Josip's reign) drifted from
the palace to soften salt odors. Music wove among mild breezes, but
formal, stately, neither hypersubtle nor raucous. Flandry wasn't sure
whether it was composed on a colony planet--if so, doubtless
Germania--or on Terra once, to be preserved through centuries while the
mother world forgot. He did know that a decade ago, the court would have
snickered at sounds this fusty-archaic.
Few servants bowed as he passed among fellow guests, into the main
building. More guardsmen than formerly saluted. Their dress uniforms
were less ornate than of yore and they and their weapons had seen
action. The antechamber of fountains hadn't changed, and the people who
swirled between them before streaming toward the ballroom wore clothes
as gorgeous as always, a rainbow spectacle. However, fantastic collars,
capes, sleeves, cuffs, footgear were passe. Garb was continuous from
neck or midbreast to soles, and, while many men wore robes rather than
trousers, every woman was in a skirt.
A reform I approve of, he thought. I suspect most ladies agree. The
suggestive rustle of skillfully draped fabric is much more stimulating,
really, and easier to arrange, than cosmetics and diadems on otherwise
bare areas of interest. For that matter, though it does take more
effort, a seduction is better recreation than an orgy.
There our good Hans goes too far. Every bedroom in the palace locked!
Ah, well. Conceivably he wants his entourage to cultivate ingenuity.
Crown Prince Dietrich received, a plain-faced middle-aged man whose
stoutness was turning into corpulence. Though he and Flandry had worked
together now and then in the fighting, his welcome was mechanical. Poor
devil, he must say a personal hello to each of three or four hundred
arrivals important enough to rate it, with no drug except stim to help
him. Another case of austere principles overdone, Flandry thought. The
younger brother, Gerhart, was luckier tonight, already imperially drunk
at a wallside table with several cronies. However, he looked as sullen
as usual.
Flandry drifted around the circumference of the ballroom. There was
nothing fancy about the lighting, save that it was cast to leave
unobscured the stars in the vitryl dome overhead. The floor sheened with
diffracted reflections from several score couples who swung through the
decorous measures of a quicksilver. He hailed acquaintances when he
glimpsed them, but didn't stop till he had reached an indoor arbor where
champagne was available. A goblet of tickle in his hand, roses around
him, a cheerful melody, a view of pretty women in motion--life could be
worse.
It soon was. "Greetin', Sir Dominic."
Flandry turned, and bowed in dismay to the newcomer beneath the leaves.
"Aloha, your Grace."
Tetsuo Niccolini, Duke of Mars, accepted a glass from the attendant
behind the table. It was obviously not his first. "Haven't seen you for
some while," he remarked. "Missed you. You've a way o' puttin' a little
spark into a scene, dull as the court is these days." Shrewdly: "Reason
you don't come often, what?"
"Well," Flandry admitted, "his Majesty's associates do tend to be a bit
earnest and firm-jawed." He sipped. "Still, my impression is, your Grace
spends a fair amount of time here regardless."
Niccolini sighed. He had never been more than a well-meaning fop; but in
these last years, when antisenescence and biosculp could no longer hold
wrinkles, baldness, feebleness at bay, he had developed a certain wry
perspective. Unfortunately, he remained a bore.
Shadows of petals stirred across a peacock robe as he lifted his drink.
"D'you think I should go to my ancestral estates and all that rubbish,
set up my own small court along lines I like, eh? No, m'boy, not
feasible. I'd get nothin' but sycophants, who'd pluck me while they
smiled. My real friends, who put their hearts into enjoyin' life, well,
they're dead or fled or sleepin' in an oldster's bed." He paused. "
'Sides, might's well tell you, H.M. gave me t'understand--he makes
himself very clear, ha?--gave me t'understand, he'd prefer no Duke o'
Mars henceforth visit the planet 'cept for a decent minimum o' speeches
an' dedications."
Flandry nodded. That makes sense, flickered through him. The Martians
[nonhumans; colonists by treaty arrangement in the time of the
Commonwealth; glad to belong to it, but feeling betrayed when it broke
down and the Troubles came; dragooned into the Empire] are still
restless. Terra can best control them by removing the signs of Terran
control. I suspect, after poor tottery Tetty is gone, Hans will buy out
his heirs with a gimcrack title elsewhere and a lot of money and make a
Martian the next Duke--who may not even know he's a puppet.
At least, that's what I'd consider doing.
"But we're in grave danger o' seriousness," Niccolini interrupted
himself. "Where've you been? Busy at what? Come, come, somethin' amusin'
must've happened."
"Oh, just knocking around with a friend." Flandry didn't care to get
specific. One reason why he had thus far declined promotion to admiral
was
that then he'd be too conspicuous, too eagerly watched and sought
after, while he remained near the Emperor. He liked his privacy. As a
hanger-on who showed no further ambitions--and could therefore in time
be expected to lose his energetic patron's goodwill--he drew scant
attention.
"Or knockin' up a friend? Heh, heh, heh." The Duke nudged him. "I know
your sort o' friends. How was she?"
"In the first place, she was a he," Flandry said. Until he could escape,
he might as well reconcile himself to humoring a man who had discovered
the secret of perpetual adolescence. "Of course, we explored. Found a
new place on Ganymede which might interest your Grace, the Empress Wu in
Celestial City."
"No, no." Niccolini waggled his head and free hand. "Didn't y'know? I
never go anywhere near Jupiter. Never. Not since the La Reine Louise
disaster."
Flandry cast his mind back. He couldn't identify--Oh, yes. It had
happened five years ago, while he was out of the Solar System.
Undeterred by civil war, a luxury liner was approaching Callisto when
her screen field generators failed. The trapped radiation which seethes
around the giant planet, engulfing its inner moons, killed everybody
aboard; no treatment could restore a body burned by so much unfelt fire.
Nothing of the kind had happened for centuries of exploration and
colonization thereabouts. Magnetohydrodynamic shields and their backups
were supposed to be invulnerable to anything that wouldn't destroy a
vehicle or a settlement anyway. Therefore, sabotage? The passenger list
had included several powerful people. A court of inquiry had handed down
the vaguest finding of "cumulative negligence."
"My poor young nephew, that I inherited the Dukedom from, was among the
casualties," Niccolini droned on. "That roused the jolly old instinct o'
self-preservation, I can tell you. To blinkin' many hazards as is. Not
that I flatter myself I'm a political bull's-eye. Still, one never
knows, does one? So tell me 'bout this place you found. If it sounds
intriguin', I'll see 'bout gettin' a sensie."
Flandry was saved by a courier in Imperial livery who entered the arbor
and bowed. "A thousand pardons, your Grace," she said. "Sir Dominic,
there is an urgent message for you. Will you please follow me?"
"With twofold pleasure," Flandry responded, for she was young and
well-formed. He couldn't quite place her accent, though he guessed she
might be from some part of Hermes. Even when hiring humans, the
majordomos of the new Emperor's various households were under orders to
get as many non-Terrans as was politic.
Whoever the summons was from, and whether it was terrible or trivial, he
was free of the Duke before he could otherwise have disengaged. The
noble nodded a vague response to his apology and stood staring after
him, all alone.
His Imperial Majesty, High Emperor Hans Friedrich Molitor, of his
dynasty the first, Supreme Guardian of the Pax, Grand Director of the
Stellar Council, Commander-in-Chief, Final Arbiter, acknowledged supreme
on more worlds and honorary head of more organizations than any man
could remember, sat by himself in a room at the top of a tower. It was
sparsely furnished: a desk and communicator, a couch upholstered in worn
but genuine horse-hide, a few straightbacked chairs and the big
pneumatic that was his. The only personal items were a dolchzahn skin on
the floor, from Germania; two portraits of his late wife, in her youth
and her age, and one of a blond young man; a model of the corvette that
had been his first command. A turret roof, beginning at waist height,
was currently transparent, letting this eyrie overlook an illuminated
complex of roofs, steeples, gardens, pools, outer walls, attendant
rafts, and finally the night ocean.
The courier ushered Flandry through the door and vanished as it closed
behind him. He saluted and snapped to attention. "At ease," the Emperor
grunted. "Sit. Smoke if you want."
He was puffing a pipe whose foulness overcame the air 'fresher. In spite
of the blue tunic, white trousers, and gold braid with nebula and three
stars of a grand admiral, plus the pyrocrystal ring of Manuel the Great,
he was not very impressive to see. Yet meditechnics could not account
for so few traces of time. The short, stocky frame had grown a kettle
belly, bags lay beneath the small dark eyes, the hair was thin and gray
on the blocky head: nothing that could not easily be changed by the
biocosmetics he scorned to use. Nor had he ever troubled about his face,
low forehead, bushy brows, huge Roman nose, heavy jowls, gash of a mouth
between deep creases, prow of a chin.
"Thank you, your Majesty." Flandry settled his elegance opposite,
flipped out a cigarette case which was a work of art and, at need, a
"No foolish formalities," growled the rusty, accented basso. "I must
make my grand appearance, and empty chatter will rattle for hours, and
at last when I can go I'm afraid I'll be too tired for a nice new wench
who's joined the collection, no matter how much I need a little fun."
"A stim pill?" Flandry suggested.
"No. I take too many as is. The price to the body mounts, you know. And
... barely six years on the throne have I had. The first three, fighting
to stay there. I need another twenty or thirty for carpentering this
jerry-built, dry-rotted Empire into a thing that might last a few more
generations, before I can lay down my tools." Hans chuckled coarsely.
"Well, let the tool for pretty Thressa wait, recharging, till tomorrow
night. You should see her, Dominic, my friend. But not to tell anybody.
By herself she could cause a revolution."
Flandry grinned. "Yes, we humans are basically sexual beings, aren't we,
sir? If we can't screw each other physically, well do it politically."
Hans laughed aloud. He had never changed from a boy who deserted a
strait-laced colonial bourgeois home for several years of wild adventure
in space, the youth who enlisted in the Navy, the man who rose through
the ranks without connections or flexibility to ease his way.
But he had not changed either from the hero of Syrax, where the fleet he
led flung back the Merseians and forced a negotiated end to a short
undeclared war which had bidden fair to grow. Nor had he changed from
the leader who let his personnel proclaim him Emperor--himself
reluctantly, less from vainglory than a sense of workmanship, when the
legitimate order of succession had dissolved in chaos and every rival
claimant was a potential disaster.
A blunt pragmatist, uncultured and unashamed of it, shrewd rather than
intelligent, he either appalled Manuel Argos or won a grudging approval,
in whatever hypothetical hell or Valhalla the Founder dwelt. The
question was academic. His hour was now. How long that hour would be,
and what the consequences, were separate puzzles.
Mirth left. He leaned forward. The pipe smoldered between hairy hands
clenched upon his knees. "I talk too much
," he said, a curious admission
from the curtest of the Emperors. Flandry understood, though. Few
besides him were left, maybe none, with whom Hans dared talk freely.
"Let us come to business. What do you know about Dennitza?"
Inwardly taken aback, Flandry replied soft-voiced, "Not much, sir. Not
much about the whole Taurian Sector, in spite of having had the good
luck to be there when Lady Megan needed help. Why ask me?"
Hans scowled. "I suppose you do know how the Gospodar, my sector
governor, is resisting my defense reorganization. Could be a simple
difference of judgment, yes. But ... now information suggests he plans
rebellion. And that--where he is--will involve the Merseians, unless he
is already theirs."
Flandry's backbone tingled. "What are the facts, sir?"
"A wretched planet in Sector Arcturus. Diomedes, it's called. Natives
who want to break away and babble of getting Ythrian help. Human agents
among them. We would expect such humans would be from the Domain,
likeliest Avalon--not true? But our best findings say the Ythrians hold
no wish to make trouble for us. And our people discover those humans are
Dennitzan. Only one was captured alive, and they had some problems with
the hypnoprobing, but it does appear she went to Diomedes under secret
official orders."
Hans sighed. "Not till yesterday did this reach me through the damned
channels. It never would have before I left, did I not issue strictest
orders about getting a direct look at whatever might possibly point to
treason. And--Gott in Himmel, I am swamped, on top of all else! My
computer screens out lese-majeste cases and the rest of such piddle.
Nevertheless--"