Glory Road (28 page)

“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 nonsystem 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 half-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.