Revenge of the Damned (23 page)

In his hundred-plus years of adult-active life, Kyes believed that he had eliminated all the seven deadly sins from his system one by one. Ninety years before, he had rolled out of a prestigious institution armed with a degree in artificial intelligence, a sheaf of job offers, and a double sheaf of ideas. He ignored the job offers and struck out on his own. Twenty-five years later he was richer than any being's wildest dreams. He was also famous for the hundreds of vital patents he personally owned and the lean-mean company he had created that could identify and exploit any fad in the most faddish of fields years before his competitors. Ryes was good. And he was arrogant—as he had every right to be.

Then the big boys got together, kicked sand in his face, and took his company, wealth, and arrogance away from him. Kyes disappeared for fifteen years. But when he returned, he was a remade being. He had spent every second of every waking day studying his old foes. As he learned their weaknesses, he eliminated weaknesses of his own. He came on stage again quietly. He was still creative and inventive, but he buried his inventions in masses of partnerships and cutout companies. Just before his hundredth birthday, Kyes found himself the master of the greatest computer, robotic, and artificial intelligence conglomerate ever known. He was famous again, sought after for his views and insights. He even met the Eternal Emperor and had reason to believe that he had met him on as nearly an equal level as possible. Had not Kyes been one of the first beings the Emperor had come to for advice in his dealings with the mechanics of the Tahn conflict? And was he not one of the first appointees to the privy council?

And then, little by little, Kyes began to believe that he was being used. After that, he began noticing that his firm was becoming more and more dependent on the Emperor's contracts. He had enjoyed enormous expansion in the past few years, but he was beginning to realize just how delicate the expansion was. A frown from the emperor would mean starting all over again. Except that with only five years left, to start again would be impossible.

Kyes became obsessed with newly realized vulnerability. He could see no way of stopping it. It seemed as inevitable as the winding down of his biological clock. Then he began thinking about the Emperor. The
Eternal
Emperor. And he realized there was nothing empty about either word in the title.

Kyes met envy face-to-face. And it was just about then that Tanz Sullamora began whispering in his ear.

After Durer, the whispering was replaced by louder and louder mutterings of discontent. At first, Sullamora just complained about how the Emperor's busy schedule prevented him from consulting his privy council for their thoughts on how to deal with the depression that was sure to follow after the war. The others not only agreed but became encouraged to complain that the few times they
had
been consulted, their advice had been ignored.

"Take me, for instance," Volmer had said. "The last time I spoke with the Emperor I strongly suggested that we had to start planning for the future right now. A good propaganda campaign isn't created overnight.

"We've got to come up with our message. Target our audience. Tailor the message for the various target groups. And then deliver it in a carefully orchestrated way."

The message, as Volmer saw it, was: "Hope through sacrifice. Each of us is going to be called upon to sacrifice for the good of the Empire. And of our children. And our children's children."

"I like it," Lovett had said, immediately thinking about some ideas he had concerning interest rates pegged to inflation, with a high floor to take care of any unexpected deflation. "What did he say?"

Volmer frowned. "He asked me what
I
was planning to sacrifice. He said for a message like that to work, people would want to see their leaders do a little suffering… Suffering, what a negative word! Sacrifice is much easier to sell… Anyway, I told him flat out that was an insane idea. Why, if people see us hurting"—he waved, including his colleagues in—"what would they have to hope for? Destroys the whole concept."

He found no disagreement in that.

Each of the other members had similar horror stories. Malperin wanted wage controls but no ceiling on prices. The Kraas wanted "more enlightened" pollution and safety laws.

Sullamora wanted a one-sided tariff arrangement to shield his merchant empire. And as for Kyes, well, Kyes did not say anything for some time. The others wondered at that for a while, disturbed that the Grb'chev was not reaching in for his share of the pie. What they did not know was that Kyes, with one huge exception, already had all that he wanted. And he figured that if he ever thought of anything else, he was quite capable of getting it on his own, without the benefit of Imperial intervention. Still, there was
the
exception…

Several meetings went by before he moved his first pawn. He opened on the king's bishop side. And when he spoke, everyone was respectfully silent, waiting for him to finally declare himself. They were not disappointed.

"Perhaps we are doing our Emperor a disservice," he said slowly, as if he were thinking out loud. Every member of the council knew better. "From his point of view, perhaps we are firing ideas at him from all directions. He has
so
much on his mind now. How can he pick here and there when he can see no whole?"

His colleagues nodded wisely, merely to mark time until Kyes got the rest of it out.

"Let's make things simpler for him," Kyes said. "We need to speak as one. To present a coherent view. And then have the authority to enact the needed reforms. With the Emperor's concurrence, of course," he added quickly.

"Emperor's concurrence… of course," everyone muttered.

What Kyes proposed was deceptively simple. The privy council would call upon the Parliament and then the Emperor to create a quasi-public agency—consisting of members of the sitting council, to start with—that could act independently of the whims and fads and pressure of any special-interest group.

Said agency would take the long view of the economy, carefully managing the AM2 pump to control the strength of the Imperial credit, keep a close eye on vital industrial and agricultural supplies, make sure that the government always spoke with one voice, and serve as a much needed check and balance between the competing views of business and the public good.

There was no disagreement. Sullamora, the man with the most direct clout with Parliament, would take point. The first step would be approached cautiously. The skeleton of the proposed agency would be buried in a "sense of Parliament" resolution which, once enacted, would be difficult for the Emperor to shoot down without causing a very loud fuss. The trick was to keep anyone—especially the Emperor's back-bench toadies—from even guessing that something was up. The privy council decided to praise Caesar rather than to damn him. The praise took the form of a lengthy document profusely congratulating the Emperor for his victory over the Tahn at Durer and calling for Empirewide support of the Emperor to carry the victory forward to a final surrender and then beyond. Even on the surface, it was not an empty document. It was worded in such a way to make even the fence sitters who had been the bane of the emperor for some time to back his act. If approved, and Sullamora's people went out and twisted every arm and tentacle available to assure its passage, the resolution would break the back of the neutrals.

Sullamora knew that would ensure the Emperor's support. He also had his experts put together a swampland section that committed Parliament to "render every assistance" to the Emperor in his "brave and lonely struggle." The independent agency was the gator hiding in the swamp.

Sullamora's analysts pored over the document and finally agreed that there was no way anyone could ever spot the gator amid obfuscations no one would bother to read. As one patriarch of the Parliament once put it, "If everyone knew what they're voting on, we'd never get out of here." When the big moment came, Sullamora personally planned to present the resolution in a speech punched up to the nth degree by a team provided by Volmer. It was pure-dee guaranteed to be welcomed with thunderous applause.

Sullamora paced back and forth in the small anteroom, waiting to be called to the speaker's rostrum. As he paced, he rehearsed the speech in his head, punching out at the air with his right hand to mark the rhythms. A door hissed open behind him, and Sullamora turned, mildly surprised. The call was five minutes early. But instead of seeing the huge jolly figure of the Parliament's sergeant at arms, he found himself gaping down at a small, dark man with a large curved knife hanging from his uniform belt. It was a Gurkha, one of the Emperor's personal bodyguards. The Gurkha gave him a small, barely polite bow and handed him a message. It was a summons. The Eternal Emperor had spotted the gator.

The Emperor was a study in casualness, feet propped up on his antique desk, a drink before him, another in front of Tanz Sullamora, and a bottle between them. He even picked up his drink frequently as he talked, seeming to take a sip and then replace the glass on the desk. Sullamora noted that the level never went down.

"… I appreciate your good intentions, Tanz," the Emperor was saying. "And I plan to personally thank each member of my cabinet for going to all this thought and effort. But…"

He let the word sit there for a moment while he took another sip of his drink. From that moment on, Sullamora knew the conversation would be one he would take to his grave—or, at least, to his memoirs.

"I don't go for this independent agency concept," the Emperor finally said. He raised a polite hand as if Sullamora would protest—not that he would ever
dare
to. "I know you may think I'm being shortsighted, but these kinds of things have a way of taking on a life of their own. The fact of the matter is, I'm a one-man show. Always have been. Hope to always be. You fellows are talking about taking the long view. Well, I have to tell you, from where I sit, there is no way your view can be long enough."

He waited, encouraging comment from Sullamora.

"There was no disrespect intended," Sullamora said. "But we just can't see how one person—no matter how good—can handle everything himself. What we're offering here, sir, is a chance for you to take advantage of the experience of some of the best minds under your rule."

The Emperor pretended to think about that for a moment. Then he nodded to Sullamora.

"Okay. Let's run through this and see if maybe I'm wrong. I suppose we all agree on what we're facing once this is over. Once the Tahn agree to my terms, we turn off the war machine. And then we immediately face one holy mother of a depression. I doubt there has ever been a depression the potential size of what we're talking about.

"All your shipbuilding factories, for instance. They'll come to a halt. We've got enough ships of the line now for ten long lifetimes. The same goes for every other area of the economy. The torque will be tremendous. A whole lot of great big axles churning away, with no place to go."

"We've got ideas that specifically—"

"I've heard of them," the Emperor snapped. "And they don't wash. You want me to raise the AM2 tax from two mills to three or maybe four. But what you can't seem to get through your heads is that if you take money out of people's pockets, there's no way they can buy what little you'll be able to produce.

"It's not war that has destroyed the great empires of history. It's money, or the mishandling of same. When the soldiers' job is over, you've got this big whopping bill. And you've got interest running on that big mother of a bill. And you better not make the mistake of not paying it off. Otherwise, next time you need to fight, the money people will drag their feet and jack up the interest on what little they will lend you. Same with the little guy whose life we put on the line. If he comes home to misery, he's not gonna be too thrilled about fighting for you next time out, no matter how worthy you tell him the cause is.

"Personally, I'm thinking about pulling in my horns. Reducing the tax to peacetime levels. One mill. No more. And maybe after a while a temporary decrease to two-thirds of a mill. That way the local governments can pop on a quarter-mill tax of their own to pay back their share of what this stupid war cost."

Sullamora gasped at that idea. "At least we can increase the AM2 output," he said. "That'll bring in more taxes. Besides making it cheaper for us all to operate."

"Sure it will," the Eternal Emperor said. "It will also kick hell out of the value of the credit. People will be walking around with wheelbarrows of the stuff to buy a glass of beer."

Sullamora did not know what a wheelbarrow was, but he got the general drift. "You mentioned beer," he said. "Now, there's a way to make money nobody can object to. A tax on beer. A tax on narcotics. A tax on joy—"

"Used to be called a sin tax," the Emperor said dryly. "Another dumb idea. Between me and the Tahn, we have killed and mutilated more beings than I like to think about. What we're left with is a pretty miserable group.

"Now, the beings in this group may not agree on a lot. But if we let them, misery will be the first hammer they'll pick up. And they'll hit us with it, Tanz. I guarantee you that.

"No. This is a time to start encouraging a little
more
sin, if anything. Lots of spectacle. And as close to free as dammit."

That made no sense at all to Sullamora. The Emperor pretended not to notice and moved on.

"And speaking of keeping people happy," he said. "You realize that we're all talking about some major increases in wages, don't you? And if you want to sell anything, a major
decrease
in prices.

"In fact, since a lot of my fellow capitalists are usually pretty slow to get the drift of these kinds of things, I'm considering some pretty heavy-duty legislation on the subject."

"How—how can you possibly see that?" Sullamora sputtered out.