“Candidates are selected by examination, but the final selection is the king’s.”
“A civil service!”
“Yes, but one that is largely hereditary. The king tends to appoint the sons of the same families, generation after generation, century after century. New blood enters the civil service only when one of the families fails to produce a male heir, or the scion of the line chooses another profession—for example, the priesthood, or the army.”
“There’s a standing army, then?”
“Yes, but it’s the king’s, and only the king’s. The officers tend to come from the old families, but may be promoted from the ranks. In both civil service and army, new appointees constitute approximately twelve percent of the personnel.”
“So there’s some vertical mobility.” Magnus pursed his lips. “I gather, from the fact that the king feels it necessary to maintain an army, that his civil service’s main purpose is to assure abundant income for himself and his household.”
“No, though that purpose certainly seems to be well served.” Herkimer replaced the picture of the field with the interior of a stone palace, lush with decoration, a marble floor polished mirror-smooth, and a double file of bare-chested soldiers with spears leading to a golden throne on a high dais, on which sat a tall man wearing a robe richly ornamented with golden beadwork interspersed with gems. “The god-king charges his stewards with seeing to the welfare of his people. They gather every bit of surplus grain into royal granaries, yes—but the people are fed from those granaries, and clothed from the cotton and linen produced by the corps of king’s weavers.”
“So every facet of life is governed and everything is taken from the people, but everything is given to them, too—at least, everything they need,” Magnus mused.
“It is. In sum, only fifteen percent of the wealth goes to support the luxury of the king and his administrators.”
“Scarcely excessive,” Magnus said in exasperation. “I can hardly call that oppressive. Don’t you have anything more promising?”
“Searching,” Herkimer told him, and the card ruffle sounded again as the screen filled with dancing points of light. Magnus sat back, feeling nervous and edgy, then wondered why he should be so dismayed to find two societies that didn’t need his help.
But he didn’t have any other purpose in life—his family could take care of themselves and their home planet, Gramarye, quite nicely without him—and he had already given up on falling in love and devoting his life to a wife and children. He was only twenty-one, but had already had some bad experiences with women and romance—some very bad, and none very good. What else was a rich young man supposed to do with his time? Well, not rich, exactly—but he had a spaceship (a guilt offering from the really rich relatives) and could make as much money as he needed whenever he needed—make it literally, being a wizard. Well, not a real wizard, of course—he couldn’t work real magic—but he was tremendously gifted in telepathy, telekinesis, and other powers of extrasensory perception. Of course, he could have devoted his life to building up as great a fortune as his relatives had—but that seemed pointless, somehow, without anyone else to spend it on, and a rather unfair use of his gifts. His brief experience with SCENT, and his rebellion against it, had given him a solid feeling of satisfaction at helping an oppressed serf class who really needed liberating. He had been looking forward to that feeling of elation again—perhaps even looking forward to the strife and suffering that produced it. He wondered if, somewhere deep, he secretly believed he deserved punishing.
“This would be considerably easier,” said Herkimer, “if you would also allow me to investigate planets that currently have SCENT projects under way.”
Magnus shook his head. “Why waste time and effort when someone else is already working to free them?” Besides, he found himself unwilling to oppose his father’s organization. On the last planet, when he had seen for himself that what the SCENT agents were doing was wrong—or rather, that they were doing wrong things in order to accomplish something right it had been another matter; he had felt the need to step forward and take a stand to protect good people whom the SCENT agents were willing to abandon. But deliberately landing on a SCENT planet with the intent to upset what they were doing was another matter entirely. “No, there is no need to duplicate effort.”
“As you wish,” Herkimer said, with a tone of resignation that made Magnus long for the good old days when robots were unable to mimic emotions. “Your next possibility is the planet Petrarch.” A pastoral scene appeared on the screen, a broad and sunny plain with the walls of a medieval city rising from it. Carts rolled along the road that ran from the bottom of the frame to the city’s gates.
Magnus frowned, not seeing anyone being oppressed. “This is a retrograde colony, I assume.” Aren’t they all?
Not quite, he answered himself. A handful of Terran colonies had been so well planned, and so fortunate, that they had been able to establish industrial bases before Terra cut them off, in the great retrenchment of the Proletarian Eclectic State of Terra. Most, however, had fallen apart as soon as the support of Terran commerce and new Terran equipment was withdrawn, some even reverting to barbarism and Stone Age technology. Most, though, had regressed no further than the Middle Ages and, without electronic communications to hold together continent-wide governments, had fallen into feudalism of one sort or another. Petrarch, at least, seemed to have pulled itself together a bit.
“Petrarch orbits a G-type sun at a distance of one and one-third astronomical units,” Herkimer began, but Magnus cut in to abort the lecture before it started.
“Once again, spare me the geophysical data until we’re sure whether or not there’s any political problem worth our interference.”
“I assume you mean ‘intervention,’ ” Herkimer said primly.
Magnus had the fleeting thought that perhaps he should change the robot’s voice encoder to give it a crisp, maiden-aunt quality. “Is there reason for it?”
“Abundant reason,” Herkimer assured him. “When Terra withdrew its support, the culture virtually crashed. The infrastructure could not be maintained without electronic technology, and on every continent, the result was anarchy. People banded together in villages and fought one another for the little food and fuel that remained. As one village conquered its neighbors, warlords arose, and battled one another for sheer power.”
Magnus turned pale; he knew what that meant in terms of the sufferings of the individual, ordinary people. “But that was five hundred years ago! Certainly they have progressed past that!”
“Not on two of the five continents,” Herkimer said regretfully. “They remain carved up into a dozen or more petty kingdoms, continually warring upon one another.”
And when petty kingdoms warred, peasants did the fighting and dying—or were caught between two armies if they weren’t quick enough about running and hiding. “What of the other three?”
“There, barbarism is the order of the day. There are hunting and gathering societies, herding societies with primitive agriculture, and nomads who follow the great herds. Here and there, small kingdoms have risen ruled by despots, but there are no empires.”
“Let’s hope nobody invents them.” Fleeting visions of torture chambers, armed tax collectors, and starving peasants flitted through Magnus’s mind. “Yes, this sounds as though there might be work worth our doing. Now tell me the history.”
“Petrarch was originally colonized during the twenty-third century,” Herkimer told him as the screen filled with the towering plasticrete towers of a Terran colony. Women in full-length gowns of brocade and velvet passed before them, with men dressed in doublets and hose. Here and there, one wore a rapier, though it had a rather solid look, as though scabbard and hilt had been cast in one piece.