A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

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 weapon, and established a barrier against the reek around him.

“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—”

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. “Dismissed.”

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, though 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 insurrection, 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.”

Aycharaych. The chill struck full into Flandry. He raised his eyes to the fading stars. Sol would soon drive sight away from them, but they would remain where they were, waiting.

“I have often wondered what makes him and his kind serve Merseia,” Desai mused. “Genius can’t really be conscripted. The Chereionites surely have something to win for themselves. But what—from an alien species, an alien culture?”

“Aycharaych’s the only one of them I’ve ever actually met,” Flandry said. “I’ve sometimes thought he’s an artist.”

“An artist of espionage and sabotage, whose materials are living beings? Well, conceivably. If that’s all, he is no more to be envied than you or I.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure I can make the reason clear to you, or even very clear to myself. We have not had the good fortune to be born in an era when our society offers us something transcendental to live and die for.” Desai cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to read you a lecture.”

“No, I thank you,” Flandry said. “Your ideas are quite interesting.”