"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.)