‘We must assume that although she is missing, Lady Catherine—’
‘Catherine. Her name is Catherine. She has no position and so no title.’
‘We must assume that she is not dead. But you cite rules for the death of the incumbent. Moreover, two people have to assure themselves that she is dead. As far as I am aware, no one has even sent out a search party. She is liked and respected, and if you use a technicality to supplant her it will earn you the distrust of all here. You may not care about that, but you should. It is important.
‘Secondly, my statement was correct. Until he is expelled from his family, Pamarchon is the heir. He cannot be expelled until sentence is carried out. As long as he is alive and uncaptured, then your claim is invalid. You may in due course do as Catherine herself did, and be selected by the assembly. But you cannot take it by right and any presumption on your part would be challenged.’
‘By you, I suppose?’
‘By anyone who chooses to do so. Be patient. You must present yourself for election, as can anyone else. Besides, there is no alternative now I have spoken. Remember, I outrank you. My judgement is stronger than yours.’
Gontal’s face was a picture of frustrated rage, of confusion, and of calculation. Eventually he smiled grimly. ‘Well, Scholar Henary, you do always seem to be around to make my life that bit more difficult. Let us do as you say. Let us send out search parties. Let us call an assembly. Let us do everything properly so that you are satisfied. But bear in mind, when I am Master of Willdon, as I will be, I will remember this. The assembly will be in two days’ time, as it has to be on the fifth day after the vacancy is declared. I can wait until then.’
The fifth day, Henary thought. And Catherine had been ruler of Willdon for five years.
44
When Jack More left, Oldmanter sat alone, his mind turning over the little he had learned. It was certainly most unfortunate. The loss of Angela Meerson was a great setback. He had known of her for more than half a century, and had spotted her when she was still young. He had seen the extraordinary potential there, but also noticed the lack of discipline. He had doubted then whether he could bring out the best in her, especially when her abilities had been artificially enhanced. The intervention, which he had paid for, had worked well but had made her even more ungovernable. Once he had made an approach to recruit her, but she had refused absolutely. His reputation, for once, had been a disadvantage.
Instead, she had gone from second-rate organisations to third-rate ones, always creating some dispute and walking out, on one occasion resigning before she had even arrived to take up her position. Maybe she was a genius, but most people had long since concluded that she would never deliver anything of worth, that she would be one of the might-have-beens of science.
Perhaps so; but Oldmanter, whose success rested mainly on his attention to detail, tracked her erratic progress until she ended up in Hanslip’s outfit. A poor end indeed. Hanslip was never better than mediocre. He lacked the skill, the vision, the determination ever to create anything more than a minor operation. Only his vanity was larger than average.
Yet, somehow, he had allowed Meerson to flourish. He had left her alone and slowly news of her efforts began to be picked up by Oldmanter’s vast intelligence operation. The work on energy transmission, the early experiments. The theoretical underpinnings. They never got hold of much fine detail, but gathered enough to guess that something truly interesting was taking place on the island of Mull. Then Hanslip himself had approached and explained exactly what Meerson had done. He wanted a partnership, and thought his possession of the technology would match Oldmanter’s resources.
Hardly. Oldmanter had no partners, no collaborators. Hanslip’s audacity on its own was enough to merit a sharp lesson to remind the world who was truly in charge. Hanslip would, one way or another, hand over the technology. He would take what he was given in return, and that might not be much.
Still, what the man laid out was breathtaking in its ambition. Much of science now was dedicated to squeezing out extra resources, finding marginal improvements and efficiencies. Man could not go to the stars. Several centuries of effort and human ingenuity had got nowhere. Space was just too big, and no one wanted to set off on a journey so that their great-great-grandchildren could reap the dubious reward of life on some dead lump of rock a billion miles away.
On top of that, the idiots of the early period of exploration had filled near space with so much debris that they had created a new asteroid belt, all but impossible to get through. Mankind locked itself onto its own planet through sheer untidiness. Meanwhile, nothing stopped the constant expansion of humanity. Wars slowed things down a bit every now and then. Starvation, mass executions, birth control, all had been tried and had failed. As the amount of space to live in shrank, as the earth became exhausted, so the population continued to grow; now there were more than thirty billion people crammed onto a world which only supported and fed them through the constant, never-ending efforts of the elite, who organised and controlled everything with efficiency in mind. It had to be like that, otherwise chaos and collapse would result. Often enough programmes had been advanced to eliminate the useless population; sometimes they were even put into effect. They never worked. All that happened was that discontent rose, the renegades attracted more sympathisers and civil unrest increased to the point that the rulers’ control threatened to slip.
As Hanslip explained it, Meerson had swept all of this away with a simple question — why squeeze out more from what we have? Why not just get more of everything? She opened up a vista of infinity and eternity. Billions of years and billions of universes there for the taking. Even Oldmanter, used to vast power, could not have imagined something of such grandeur. Now that she had done so, he knew that he alone could make proper use of it. He wanted it, and so he decided to take it.
Besides, so his reasoning went, what if it fell into the wrong hands? There were millions of renegades in the world, whose appetite for destruction was insatiable. He had argued long and often that they should be dealt with once and for all, but still they flourished like weeds, and few really seemed to care. They were the ones who removed themselves and criticised from the sidelines, doubting and scorning the efforts of their superiors, exploiting every disaster or failing in order to undermine the well-being of the world’s society. They were the ones behind the riots, the terrorism, the strikes, the ones who sabotaged the factories to make some self-destructive point about liberty and freedom. As if people really wanted to be free and hungry.
What if they got hold of this technology? What if they withheld access to it until their demands were met? Worse still, what if they spread their stupidity like some virus across the universes? This discovery needed to be kept in the right hands. Colonists would have to be screened for obedience. If that was done, then Oldmanter could see in his mind the immense possibilities of world after world, each with vast untapped resources, trading with each other through channels which his organisation would control and tax. Each would specialise, each would produce efficiently and in unlimited quantities. But only if they were ruled by the best, and only if the populations did as they were told. Keeping control would be hard. Security would be the hardest task of all, and would require a huge investment.
He wished to give a last, great gift to humanity. He had worked and schemed for years, decades, to maintain order, to ensure that even those who could not see or understand their best interests were nonetheless governed by them. Sometimes, in councils and meetings, he operated through persuasion. At other times, with rivals and the masses, he used more direct methods.