Flandry nodded. "Aye, sir. You can't give any single item more than a
glance. And even if you could pay full attention, you can't send the big
clumsy Imperial machine barging into Tauria, disrupting our whole
arrangement there, on the basis of a few accusations. Especially in your
absence."
"Yes. I must go. If we don't reorder Sector Spica, the barbarians will
soon ruin it. But meanwhile Tauria may explode. You see how an uprising
in Sector Arcturus would be the right distraction for a traitor
Dennitzan before he rebels too."
"Won't Intelligence mount a larger operation?"
"Ja, Ja, Ja. Though the Corps is still in poor shape, after wars and
weedings. Also, it has much other business. And ... Dominic, just the
Corps by itself is too huge for me to know, for me to control as I
should. I need--I am not sure what I need or if it can be had."
Flandry foreknew: "You want me to take a hand, sir?"
"Yes." The wild boar eyes were sighted straight on him. "In your olden
style. A roving commission, and you report directly to me.
Plenipotentiary authority."
Flandry's pulse broke into a canter. He kept his tone level. "Quite a
solo, sir."
"Co-opt. Hire. Bribe. Threaten. Whatever you see fit."
"The odds will stay long against my finding out anything useful--at
least, anything the Corps can't, quicker and better."
"You are not good at modesty," Hans said. "Are you unwilling?"
"N-n-no, sir." Surprised, Flandry realized he spoke truth. This could
prove interesting. In fact, he knew damn well it would, for he had
already involved himself in the affair. His motivation was half
curiosity, half kindliness--he thought at the time--though probably,
down underneath, the carnivore which had been asleep in him these past
three years had roused, pricked up its ears, snuffed game scent on a
night breeze. Was that always my real desire? Not to chase down enemies
of the Empire so I could go on having fun in it, but to have fun chasing
them down?
No matter. The blood surged. "I'm happy to accept, sir, provided you
don't expect much. Uh, my authority, access to funds and secret data and
whatnot ... better be kept secret itself."
"Right." Hans knocked the dottle from his pipe, a ringing noise through
a moment's silence. "Is this why you refused admiral's rank? You knew
sneaking off someday on a mission would be easier for a mere captain."
Flandry shrugged. "If you'll tip the word to--better be none less than
Kheraskov--I'll contact him as soon as may be and made arrangements."
"Have you any idea how you will begin?" Hans asked, relaxing a trifle.
"Well, I don't know. Perhaps with that alleged Dennitzan agent. What
became of ... her, did you say?"
"How can I tell? I saw a precis of many reports, remember. What
difference, after the 'probe wrung her dry?"
"Sometimes individuals count, sir." Excitement in Flandry congealed to
grimness. I should think the fact she's a niece of the Gospodar--a fact
available in the material on her that my son could freely scan from a
data bank--would be worth mentioning to the Emperor. I should think such
a hostage would not be sold for a slave, forced into whoredom except for
the chance that I learned about her when she was offered for sale.
Better not tell Hans. He'd only be distracted from the million things
he's got to do. And anyhow ... something strange here. I prefer to keep
my mouth shut and my options open.
"Proceed as you wish," the other said. "I know you won't likely get far.
But I can trust you will run a strong race."
His glance went to the picture of the young man. His face sagged.
Flandry could well-nigh read his mind: Ach, Otto! If you had not been
killed--if I could bring you back, yes, even though I must trade for you
dull Dietrich and scheming Gerhart both--we would have an heir to trust.
The Emperor straightened in his seat. "Very well," he rapped.
The festival wore on. Toward morning, Flandry and Chunderban Desai found
themselves alone.
The officer would have left sooner, were it not for his acquired job.
Now he seemed wisest if he savored sumptuousness, admired the centuried
treasures of static and fluid art which the palace housed, drank noble
wines, nibbled on delicate foods, conversed with witty men, danced with
delicious girls, finally brought one of these to a pergola he knew
(unlocked, screened by jasmine vines) and made love. He might never get
the chance again. After she bade him a sleepy goodbye, he felt like
having a nightcap. The crowd had grown thin. He recognized Desai, fell
into talk, ended in a small garden.
Its base was cantilevered from a wall, twenty meters above a courtyard
where a fountain sprang. The waters, full of dissolved fluorescents,
shone under ultraviolet illumination in colors more deep and pure than
flame. Their tuned splashing resounded from catchbowls to make an
eldritch music. Otherwise the two men on their bench had darkness and
quiet. Flowers sweetened an air gone slightly cool. The moon was long
down; Venus and a dwindling number of stars gleamed in a sky fading from
black to purple, above an ocean coming all aglow.
"No, I am not convinced the Emperor does right to depart," Desai said.
The pudgy little old man's hair glimmered white as his tunic;
chocolate-hued face and hands were nearly invisible among shadows. He
puffed on a cigarette in a long ivory holder. "Contrariwise, the move
invites catastrophe."
"But to let the barbarians whoop around at will--" Flandry sipped his
cognac and drew on his cigar, fragrances first rich, then pungent. He'd
wanted to end on a relaxing topic. Desai, who had served the Imperium in
many executive capacities on many different planets, owned a hoard of
reminiscences which made him worth cultivating. He was on Terra for a
year, teaching at the Diplomatic Academy, before he retired to
Ramanujan, his birthworld.
The military situation--specifically, Hans' decision to go--evidently
bothered him too much for pleasantries. "Oh, yes, that entire frontier
needs restructuring," he said. "Not simple reinforcement. New
administrations, new laws, new economics: ideally, the foundations of an
entire new society among the human inhabitants. However, his Majesty
should leave that task to a competent viceroy and staff whom he grants
extraordinary powers."
"There's the problem," Flandry pointed out. "Who's both competent and
trustworthy enough, aside from those who're already up to their armpits
in alligators elsewhere?"
"If he has no better choice," Desai said, "his Majesty should let the
Spican sector be ravaged--should even let it be lost, in hopes of
regaining the territory afterward--anything, rather than absent himself
for months. What ultimate good can he accomplish yonder if meanwhile the
Imperium is taken from him? The best service he can render the Empire is
simply to keep a grip on its heart. Else the civil wars begin again."
"I fear you exaggerate," Flandry said, tho
ugh he recalled how Desai was
always inclined to understate things. And Dennitzans on Diomedes ... "We
seem to've pacified ourselves fairly well. Besides, why refer to civil
wars in the plural?"
"Have you forgotten McCormac's rebellion, Sir Dominic?"
Scarcely, seeing I was involved. Flandry winced at a memory. Lost
Kathryn, as well as the irregular nature of his actions at the time,
made him glad the details were still unpublic. "No. But that was, uh,
twenty-two years ago. And amounted to what? An admiral who revolted
against Josip's sector governor for personal reasons. True, this meant
he had to try for the crown. The Imperium could never have pardoned him.
But he was beaten, and Josip died in bed." Probably poisoned, to be
sure.
"You consider the affair an isolated incident?" Desai challenged in his
temperate fashion. "Allow me to remind you, please--I know you
know--shortly afterward I found myself the occupation commissioner of
McCormac's home globe, Aeneas, which had spearheaded the uprising. We
came within an angstrom there of getting a messianic religion that might
have burst into space and torn the Empire in half."
Flandry took a hard swallow from his snifter and a hard pull on his
cigar. Well had he studied the records of that business, after he
encountered Aycharaych who had engineered it.
"The thirteen following years--seeming peace inside the Empire, till
Josip's death--they are no large piece of history, are they?" Desai
pursued. "Especially if we bear in mind that conflicts have causes. A
war, including a civil war, is the flower on a plant whose seed went
into the ground long before ... and whose roots reach widely, and will
send up fresh growths, ... No, Sir Dominic, as a person who has read and
reflected for most of a lifetime on this subject, I tell you we are well
into our anarchic phase. The best we can do is minimize the damage, and
hold outside enemies off until we win back to a scarred kind of unity."
" 'Our' anarchic phase?" Flandry questioned.
Desai misheard his emphasis. "Or our interregnum, or whatever you wish
to call it. Oh, we may not always fight over who shall be Emperor; we
can find plenty of bones to contend about. And we may enjoy stretches of
peace and relative prosperity. I hoped Hans would provide us such a
respite."
"No, wait, you speak as if this is something we have to go through,
willy-nilly."
"Yes. For about eighty more years, I think--though of course modern
technology, nonhuman influences, the sheer scale of interstellar
dominion may affect the time-span. Basically, however, yes, a universal
state--and the Terran Empire is the universal state of Technic
civilization--only gives a respite from the wars and horrors which
multiply after the original breakdown. Its Pax is no more than a
subservience enforced at swordpoint, or today at blaster point. Its
competent people become untrustworthy from their very competence; anyone
who can make a decision may make one the Imperium does not like.
Incompetence grows with the growing suspiciousness and centralization.
Defense and civil functions alike begin to disintegrate. What can that
provoke except rebellion? So this universal state of ours has ground
along for a space of generations, from bad to worse, until now--"
"The Long Night?" Flandry shivered a bit in the gentle air.
"I think not quite yet. If we follow precedent, the Empire will rise
again ... if you can label as 'rise' the centralized divine autocracy we
have coming. To be sure, if the thought of such a government does not
cheer you, then remember that that second peace of exhaustion will not
last either. In due course will come the final collapse."
"How do you know?" Flandry demanded.
"The cycle fills the history, yes, the archeology of this whole planet
we are sitting on. Old China and older Egypt each went thrice through
the whole sorry mess. The Western civilization to which ours is
affiliated rose originally from the same kind of thing, that Roman
Empire some of our rulers have liked to hark back to for examples of
glory. Oh, we too shall have our Diocletian; but scarcely a hundred
years after his reconstruction, the barbarians were camping in Rome
itself and making emperors to their pleasure. My own ancestral
homeland--but there is no need for a catalogue of forgotten nations. For
a good dozen cases we have chronicles detailed to the point of nausea;
all in all, we can find over fifty examples just in the dust of this one
world.
"Growth, until wrong decisions bring breakdown; then ever more ferocious
wars, until the Empire brings the Pax; then the dissolution of that Pax,
its reconstitution, its disintegration forever, and a dark age until a
new society begins in the ruins. Technic civilization started on that
road when the Polesotechnic League changed from a mutual-aid
organization of free entrepreneurs to a set of cartels. Tonight we are
far along the way."
"You've discovered this yourself?" Flandry asked, not as skeptically as
he could have wished he were able to.
"Oh, no, no," Desai said. "The basic analysis was made a thousand years
ago. But it's not comfortable to live with. Prevention of breakdown, or
recovery from it, calls for more thought, courage, sacrifice than humans
have yet been capable of exercising for generation after generation.
Much easier first to twist the doctrine around, use it for
rationalization instead of rationality; then ignore it; finally suppress
it. I found it in certain archives, but you realize I am talking to you
in confidence. The Imperium would not take kindly to such a description
of itself."
"Well--" Flandry drank again. "Well, you may be right. And total
pessimism does have a certain bracing quality. If we're doomed to tread
out the measure, we can try to do so gracefully."
"There is no absolute inevitability." Desai puffed for a minute, his
cigarette end a tiny red pulsar. "I suppose, even this late in the game,
we could start afresh if we had the means--more importantly, the will.
But in actuality, the development is often aborted by foreign conquest.
An empire in the anarchic phase is especially tempting and especially
prone to suffer invaders. Osmans, Afghans, Moguls, Manchus, Spaniards,
British--they and those like them became overlords of cultures different
from their own, in that same way.
"Beyond our borders, the Merseians are the true menace. Not a barbarian
rabble merely filling a vacuum we have left by our own political
machinations--not a realistic Ythri which sees us as its natural
ally--not a pathetic Gorrazani remnant--but Merseia. We harass and
thwart the Roidhunate everywhere, because we dare not let it grow too
strong. Besides eliminating us as a hindrance to its dreams, think what
a furtherance our conquest would be!
"That's why I dread the consequences of the Emperor's departure. Staying
home, working to buttress the government and armed force, ready to stamp
fast on every attempt at insu
rrection, he might keep us united,
uninvadable, for the rest of his life. Without his presence--I don't
know."
"The Merseians would have to be prepared to take quick advantage of any
revolt," Flandry argued. "Assuming you're right about your historical
pattern, are they aware of it? How common is it?"
"True, we don't have the knowledge to say how far it may apply to
nonhumans, if at all," Desai admitted. "We should. In fact, it was
Merseia, not ourselves, that set me on this research--for the Merseians
too must have their private demons, and think what a weapon it would be
for our diplomacy to have a generalized mechanic for them as well as
us!"
"Hm?" said Flandry, surprised afresh. "Are you implying perhaps they
already are decadent? That's not what one usually hears."
"No, it isn't. But what is decadence to a nonhuman? I hope to do more
than read sutras in my retirement; I hope to apply my experience and my
studies to thought about just such problems." The old man sighed. "Of
necessity, this assumes the Empire will not fall prey to its foes before
I've made some progress. That may be an unduly optimistic assumption ...
considering what a head start they have in the Roidhunate where it comes
to understanding us."
"Are you implying they know this theory of human history which you've
been outlining to me?"
"Yes, I fear that at least a few minds among them are all too familiar
with it. For example, after considering the episode for many years, I
think that when Aycharaych tried to kindle a holy war of man against
man, starting on Aeneas, he knew precisely what he was doing."