Glory Road

Chapter 17

We were in a large octagonal room, with lavishly beautiful silvery walls.

"—and my grandmother," Rufo finished.

"Not ‘Empress,' " Star protested. "That's a silly word for it."

"Near enough."

"And as for the other, that's my misfortune, not my fault." Star jumped to her feet, no longer looking tired, and put one arm around my waist as I got up, while she held the Egg of the Phoenix with the other. "Oh, darling I'm so happy! We made it! Welcome home, my Hero!"

"Where?" I was sluggy—too many time zones, too many ideas, too fast.

"Home. My home. Your home now—if you'll have it. Our home."

"Uh, I see...my Empress." She stomped her foot. "Don't call me that!"

"The proper form of address," said Rufo, "is ‘Your Wisdom.' Isn't it, Your Wisdom?"

"Oh, Rufo, shut up. Go fetch clothes for us."

He shook his head. "War's over and I just got paid off. Fetch ‘em yourself. Granny."

"Rufo, you're impossible."

"Sore at me, Granny?"

"I will be if you don't stop calling me ‘Granny.' " Suddenly she handed the Egg to me, put her arms around Rufo and kissed him. "No, Granny's not sore at you," she said softly. "You always were a naughty child and I'll never quite forget the time you put oysters in my bed. But I guess you came by it honestly—from your grandmother." She kissed him again and mussed his fringe of white hair. "Granny loves you. Granny always will. Next to Oscar, I think you are about perfect—aside from being an unbearable, untruthful, spoiled, disobedient, disrespectful brat."

"That's better," he said. "Come to think of it, I feel the same way about you. What do you want to wear?"

"Mmm...get out a lot of things. It's been so long since I had a decent wardrobe." She turned back to me. "What would you like to wear, my Hero?"

"I don't know. I don't know anything. Whatever you think is appropriate—Your Wisdom."

"Oh, darling, please don't call me that. Not ever." She seemed suddenly about to cry.

"All right. What shall I call you?"

"Star is the name you gave me. If you must call me something else, you could call me your ‘princess.' I'm not a princess—and I'm not an ‘empress' either; that's a poor translation. But I like being ‘your princess'—the way you say it. Or it can be ‘lively wench' or any of lots of things you've been calling me." She looked up at me very soberly. "Just like before. Forever."

"I'll try...my princess."

"My Hero."

"But there seems to be a lot I don't know."

She shifted from English to Nevian. "Milord husband, I wished to tell all. I sighed to tell you. And milord will be told everything. But I held mortal fear that milord, if told too soon, would refuse to come with me. Not to the Black Tower, but to here. Our home."

"Perhaps you chanced wisely," I answered in the same language. "But I am here, milady wife—my princess. So tell me. I wish it."

She shifted back to English. "I'll talk, I'll talk. But it will take time. Darling, will you hold your horses just a bit longer? Having been patient with me—so very patient, my love! -- for so long?"

"Okay," I agreed. "I'll string along. But, look, I don't know the streets in this neighborhood, I'll need some hints. Remember the mistake I made with old Jocko just from not knowing local customs."

"Yes, dear, I will. But don't worry, customs are simple here. Primitive societies are always more complex than civilized ones—and this one isn't primitive." Rufo dumped then a great heap of clothing at her feet. She turned away, a hand still on my arm, put a finger to her mouth with a very intent, almost worried look. "Now let me see. What shall I wear?"

"Complex" is a relative matter; I'll sketch only the outlines.

Center is the capital planet of the Twenty Universes. But Star was not "Empress" and it is not an empire.

I'll go on calling her "Star" as hundreds of names were hers and I'll call it an "empire" because no other word is close, and I'll refer to "emperors" and "empresses"—and to the Empress, my wife.

Nobody knows how many universes there are. Theory places no limit: any and all possibilities in unlimited number of combinations of "natural" laws, each sheaf appropriate to its own universe. But this is just theory and Occam's Razor is much too dull. All that is known in Twenty Universes is that twenty have been discovered, that each has its own laws, and that most of them have planets, or sometimes "places," where human beings live. I won't try to say what lives elsewhere.

The Twenty Universes include many real empires. Our Galaxy in our universe has its stellar empires—yet so huge is our Galaxy that our human race may never meet another, save through the Gates that link the universes. Some planets have no known Gates. Earth has many and that is its single importance; otherwise it rates as a backward slum.

Seven thousand years ago a notion was born for coping with political problems too big to handle. It was modest at first: How could a planet be run without ruining it? This planet's people included expert cyberneticists but otherwise were hardly farther along than we are; they were still burning the barn to get the rats and catching their thumbs in machinery. These experimenters picked an outstanding ruler and tried to help him.

Nobody knew why this bloke was so successful but he was and that was enough; they weren't hipped on theory. They gave him cybernetic help, taping for him all crises in their history, all known details, what was done, and the outcomes of each, all organized so that he could consult it almost as you consult your memory.

It worked. In time he was supervising the whole planet—Center it was, with another name then. He didn't rule it, he just untangled hard cases.

They taped also everything this first "Emperor" did, good and bad, for guidance of his successor.

The Egg of the Phoenix is a cybernetic record of the experiences of two hundred and three "emperors" and "empresses," most of whom "ruled" all the known universes. Like a foldbox, it is bigger inside than out. In use, it is more the size of the Great Pyramid.

Phoenix legends abound throughout the Universes: the creature that dies but is immortal, rising ever young from its own ashes. The Egg is such a wonder, for it is far more than a taped library now; it is a print, right down to their unique personalities, of all experience of all that line from His Wisdom IX through Her Wisdom CCIV, Mrs. Oscar Gordon.

The office is not hereditary. Star's ancestors include His Wisdom I and most of the other wisdoms—but millions of others have as much "royal" blood. Her grandson Rufo was not picked although he shares all her ancestors. Or perhaps he turned it down. I never asked, it would have reminded him of a time one of his uncles did something obscene and improbable. Nor is it a question one asks.

Once tapped, a candidate's education includes everything from how to cook tripe to highest mathematics—including all forms of personal combat for it was realized millennia ago that, no matter how well he was guarded, the victim would wear better if he himself could fight like an angry buzz saw. I stumbled on this through asking my beloved an awkward question.

I was still trying to get used to the fact that I had married, a grandmother, whose grandson looked older than I did and was even older than he looked. The people of Center live longer than we do anyway and both Star and Rufo had received "Long-Life" treatment. This takes getting used to. I asked Star, "How long do you ‘wisdoms' live?"

"Not too long," she answered almost harshly. "Usually we are assassinated."

(My big mouth -- )

A candidate's training includes travel in many worlds—not all planets-places inhabited by human beings; nobody lives that long. But many. After a candidate completes all this and if selected as heir, postgraduate work begins: the Egg itself. The heir has imprinted in him (her) the memories, the very personalities, of past emperors. He (She) becomes an integration of them. Star-Plus. A supernova. Her Wisdom.

The living personality is dominant but all that mob is there, too. Without using the Egg, Star could recall experiences that happened to people dead many centuries. With the Egg—herself hooked into the cybernet—she had seven thousand years of sharp, just-yesterday memories.

Star admitted to me that she had hesitated ten years before accepting the nomination. She hadn't wanted to be all those people; she had wanted to go on being herself, living as she pleased. But the methods used to pick candidates (I don't know them, they are lodged in the Egg) seem almost infallible; only three have ever refused.

When Star became Empress she had barely started the second half of her training, having had imprinted in her only seven of her predecessors. Imprinting does not take long but the victim needs recovery time between prints—for she gets every damned thing that ever happened to him, bad and good: the time he was cruel to a pet as a child and his recalled shame of it in his mature years, the loss of his virginity, the unbearably tragic time that he goofed a really serious one—all of it.

"I must experience their mistakes," Star told me. "Mistakes are the only certain way to learn."

So the whole weary structure is based on subjecting one person to all the miserable errors of seven thousand years.

Mercifully the Egg doesn't have to be used often. Most of the time Star could be herself, no more bothered by imprinted memories than you are over that nasty remark in second grade. Most problems Star could solve shooting from the hip—no recourse to the Black Room and a full hookup.

For the one thing that stood out as this empirical way of running an empire grew up was that the answer to most problems was: Don't do anything.

Always King Log, never King Stork—"Live and let live." "Let well enough alone." "Time is the best physician." "Let sleeping dogs lie." "Leave them alone and they'll come home, wagging their tails behind them."

Even positive edicts of the Imperium were usually negative in form: Thou Shalt Not Blow Up Thy Neighbors' Planet. (Blow your own if you wish.) Hands off the guardians of the Gates. Don't demand justice, you too will be judged.

Above all, don't put serious problems to a popular vote. Oh, there is no rule against local democracy, just in imperial matters. Old Rufo—excuse me; Doctor Rufo, a most distinguished comparative culturologist (with a low taste for slumming) -- Rufo told me that every human race tries every political form and that democracy is used in. many primitive societies...but he didn't know of any civilized planet using it, as Vox Populi, Vox Dei translates as: "My God! How did we get in this mess!"

But Rufo claimed to enjoy democracy—any time he felt depressed he sampled Washington, and the antics of the French Parliament were second only to the antics of French women.

I asked him how advanced societies ran things.

His brow wrinkled. "Mostly they don't."

That described the Empress of Twenty Universes: Mostly she didn't.

But sometimes she did. She might say: "This mess will clear up if you will take that troublemaker there—What's your name? You with the goatee—out and shoot him. Do it now." (I was present. They did it now. He was head of the delegation which had brought the problem to her—some fuss between intergalactic trading empires in the VIIth Universe—and his chief deputy pinned his arms and his own delegates dragged him outside and killed him. Star went on drinking coffee. It's better coffee than we get back home and I was so upset that I poured myself a cup.)

An Emperor has no power. Yet, if Star decided that a certain planet should be removed, people would get busy and there would be a nova in that sky. Star has never done this but it has been done in the past. Not often—His Wisdom will search his soul (and the Egg) a long time before decreeing anything so final even when his hypertrophied horse sense tells him that there is no other solution.

The Emperor is sole source of Imperial law, sole judge, sole executive—and does very little and has no way to enforce his rulings. What he or she does have is enormous prestige from a system that has worked for seven millennia. This non-system holds together by having no togetherness, no uniformity, never seeking perfection, no Utopias—just answers good enough to get by, with lots of looseness and room for many ways and attitudes.

Local affairs are local. Infanticide? -- they're your babies, your planet. PTAs, movie censorship, disaster relief—the Empire is ponderously unhelpful.

The Crisis of the Egg started long before I was born. His Wisdom CCIII was assassinated and the Egg stolen at the same time. Some baddies wanted power—and the Egg, by its unique resources, has latent in it key to such power as Genghis Khan never dreamed.

Why should anybody want power? I can't understand it. But some do, and they did.

So Star came to office hall-trained, faced by the greatest crisis the Empire had ever suffered, and cut off from her storehouse of Wisdom.

But not helpless. Imprinted in her was the experience of seven hypersensible men and she had all the cyber-computer system save that unique part known as the Egg. First she had to find out what had been done with the Egg. It wasn't safe to mount an attack on the planet of the baddies; it might destroy the Egg.

Available were ways to make a man talk if one didn't mind using him up. Star didn't mind. I don't mean anything so crude as rack and tongs. This was more like peeling an onion, and they peeled several.

Karth-Hokesh is so deadly that it was named for the only explorers to visit it and come back alive. (We were in a "garden subdivision," the rest is much worse.) The baddies made no attempt to stay there; they just cached the Egg and set guards and booby traps around it and on the routes to it.

I asked Rufo, "What use was the Egg there?"

"None," he agreed. "But they soon learned that it was no use anywhere—without Her. They needed either its staff of cyberneticists...or they needed Her Wisdom. They couldn't open the Egg. She is the only one who can do that unassisted. So they baited a trap for Her. Capture Her Wisdom, or kill Her—capture by preference, kill Her if need be and then try for key people here at Center. But they didn't dare risk the second while She was alive."

Star started a search to determine the best chance of recovering the Egg. Invade Karth-Hokesh? The machines said, "Hell, no!" I would say no, too. How do you mount an invasion into a place where a man not only can't eat or drink anything local but can't breathe the air more than a few hours? When a massive assault will destroy what you are after? When your beachheads are two limited Gates?

The computers kept coming up with a silly answer, no matter how the question was framed.

Me.

A "Hero," that is—a man with a strong back, a weak mind, and a high regard for his own skin. Plus other traits. A raid by a thus-and-so man, if aided by Star herself, might succeed. Rufo was added by a hunch Star had (hunches of Their Wisdoms being equal to strokes of genius) and the machines confirmed this. "I was drafted," said Rufo. "So I refused. But I never have had any sense where She is concerned, damn it; She spoiled me when I was a kid."

There followed years of search for the specified man. (Me, again—I'll never know why.) Meanwhile brave men were feeling out the situation and, eventually, mapping the Tower. Star herself reconnoitered, and got acquainted in Nevia, too.

(Is Nevia part of the "Empire?" It is and it isn't. Nevia's planet has the only Gates to Karth-Hokesh other than one from the planet of the baddies; that is its importance to the Empire—and the Empire isn't important to Nevia at all.)

This "Hero" was most likely to be found on a barbaric planet such as Earth. Star checked, and turned down, endless candidates winnowed from many rough peoples before her nose told her that I might do.

I asked Rufo what chance the machines gave us.

"What makes you say that?" he demanded.

"Well, I know a little of cybernetics."

"You think you do. Still—There was a prediction. Thirteen percent success, seventeen percent no game—and seventy percent death for us all."

I whistled. "You should whistle!" he said indignantly. "You didn't know any more than a cavalry horse knows. You had nothing to be scared of."

"I was scared."

"You didn't have time to be. It was planned so. Our one chance lay in reckless speed and utter surprise. But I knew. Son, when you told us to wait, there in the Tower, and disappeared and didn't come back, why, I was so scared I caught up on my regretting."

Once set up, the raid happened as I told it. Or pretty much so, although I may have seen what my mind could accept rather than exactly what happened. I mean "magic." How many times have savages concluded "magic" when a "civilized" man came along with something the savage couldn't understand? How often is some tag, such as "television," accepted by cultural savages (who nevertheless twist dials) when "magic" would be the honest word?

Still, Star never insisted on that word. She accepted it when I insisted on it.

But I would be disappointed if everything I saw turned out to be something Western Electric will build once Bell Labs works the bugs out. There ought to be some magic, somewhere, just for flavor.

Oh, yes, putting me to sleep for the first transition was to keep from scaring a savage silly. Nor did the "black biers" cross over—that was posthypnotic suggestion, by an expert: my wife.

Did I say what happened to the baddies? Nothing. Their Gates were destroyed; they are isolated until they develop star travel. Good enough, by the sloppy standards of the Empire. Their Wisdoms never carry grudges.