... only thirty-four when his strike forces numbered seven billion soldiers... exploits legendary. At forty-eight, personally in command of the Thirteenth Fleet...
...a stellar tide of rebellion marred his final victories, ending only with his death by perfidious ambush at the second battle of Blackamoor Cross...more than six thousand planned invasions put on hold...
—A Short History of Our Splendid Emperors
In a weaker gravity than Agander’s, Eron Osa bounded down the stairs of the narrow street with his newly acquired Short History gripped in both hands under one arm. He had been running all morning up and down the hillwalks and over the rideways of the Ulmat Constellation’s capital metropolis, poking into stores and botanical gardens, even exploring the hallowed grounds of the Vanhosen Scholarium at a lickety-split pace that no registrar would be able to match. (Having narrowly escaped the fate of being forced to study at Vanhosen, he was in no mood to be tapped inside its halls for years by unhappy lackeys in the thrall of his father.)
He did stop once at a collegiate caf£ to memorize the faces of the students he would never mix with long enough to know—silly girls with golden finger claws and arrogant boys with funny hats. Then he ran on. He had embraced as much strangeness as he could soak up before lunchtime. Down the stairs! Leap and fly!
Tutor Kapor sat, unsweating, at the appointed table in the little caf§ in the square across from their hotel. Eron plunked his book on the tabletop. “I’m not late!” He sank down in his seat with relief.
“A book?” queried his mild tutor.
“I bought it at a used-data emporium. Chip displays, all upstaging each other! I was bogglefied! You’ll never find such stuff trawling through an archive! It was enough to transmute the brain! I was staggering around the aisles dazed when I bumped into a bookshelf on the third terrace. Books are a lot quieter. What a relief!”
“You’ve never seen a book in your life!” admonished his tutor.
“I know!” Eron exclaimed happily. “That’s why I bought one.” He added defensively, “It’s not on your money stick— it was my credit. It’s all about the lives of emperors.” He saw less than approval in the eyes of Murek so he added accusingly, “You told me to study history!”
Eron’s elder companion nudged die volume. “I’m thinking about the freight charges. You didn’t, by any lucky chance, pick up the book’s template? With a piece of junk this massive, it’s easier to manufax a new copy every time you want to read it than to lug it around with you between the stars.”
“I can’t keep it?” Eron was stricken.
Tutor Kapor spun the tome a half turn on the tabletop to read the title. A Short History of Our Splendid Emperors: Kambal-the-First to Zcuikatal-the-Pious. He hefted it to make a more scholarly assessment. “Ooof. My arm exercises for the morning,” he added dryly. He examined the title page. “It’s an old book.” He sniffed it. “Cellomet. Old for sure. If I recall right, Zankatal-the-Noose predates our Founder by about a century.” A tip of the head meant that Eron’s tutor was about to elaborate on his comment. “‘Noose’ is not his official name, of course—it’s just what Zankatal was called out here in the nether reaches of the Galaxy where he was not thought to be so pious.”
He leaned back and slapped the heavy cover. “Sure, you can keep your book, Eron—as long as you learn what every young traveler has to learn: the freight to Faraway on this book is far more than the book will ever be worth. Since those charges will be on my stick, I’m going to ask a favor of you; you’re going to have to read the damn book. And it’s an old book—there’s no famfeed; it’s all eyefeed, page by page.” He laughed. “That’ll teach you to buy books!”
“It’s not really a book!” sulked Eron. “It’s automated!” He flipped out a fold-in back-cover flatplate. “It’s got an index. Press a button and it flips open to the right pages in sequence. There aren’t any pictures on the pages, but the flatplate will give you any picture you want.” He produced the animated vizeo of some emperor who offered them a posed benediction against a Splendid palatial interior. “Hot zits!” he exclaimed while looking at the grand architecture, which dwarfed even the majestic furniture. “They lived like that?”
“Look at the words, the words,'' admonished his tutor, who couldn’t stop for a jiff being a teacher.
“You don’t know what I’ve already read,” replied the stung student. “You think it was Daigin-the-Jaw who conquered the Ulmat. You told me that. You’re wrong. It was his son, Arum, in the reign of Daigin-the-Mild, who dropped in with his fleet and cut off our balls and then went home to Splendid Wisdom and cut off the Emperor’s balls just to show the Galaxy who was boss. When I found that, that’s when I bought the book. They don’t put stuff like that in the archives on Agander! Here!” He opened the pages at the right section, just to prove that he had found out something his tutor did not know.
Emperor Daigin-the-Mild b: 5597 GE d: 5671 GE reign: 5632 GE to 5641 GE
...bom aboard the warship Santaemo to an unknown Imperial concubine during the full fury of his father’s Persean-Cara Campaign. A music scholar and dilettante, the youngest and least favored son of Daigin-the-Jaw was raised to power—only watches after his father’s suspicious death—by a war-weary court desperately ready to pursue a hasty policy of galactic reconciliation and consolidation.
... was probably unaware of the arrest and execution of six of his half brothers during the prefatory rituals before his coronation. The seventh and wiser brother, Arum, a popular commander in his father’s armada, refused to return to Splendid Wisdom for the accession, pleading urgent military duties. Two years and three assassination attempts later, Arum answered the court’s vile actions by ordering the Eighteenth Mobile Fleet out along the Persean Arm to a swift subjugation of the Ulmat Constellation. The flawlessly executed attack had no other purpose than as a warning to the bloodily pacifist court to mind its own business or suffer slit throats.
Daigin-the-Mild ruled ineffectively with repeated attempts to reconcile with Arum until his impatient brother, weary of a game that required him to pretend loyalty to a brother he despised, returned to Splendid Wisdom at the head of his fleet, there to publically castrate the Emperor and send him off to exile, the flow of Empire now safely in his own hands.
Emperor Arum-the-Patient b: 5591 GE d: 5662 GE reign: 5641 GE to 5662 GE
As Emperor... maintained a fondness for his haven in the Ulmat. He used the Ulmat Constellation as his major naval base and later established there an Orbital War Museum in honor of his father. His nostalgic poems, especially “Ode to Agander’s Night,” was very popular at court until he was poisoned by his mother...
Eron stopped reading with a wistful smile on his face, still astonished that an Emperor had noticed his home planet. “Arum must have liked Agander. To have written a poem about us...but I couldn’t find the poem. I looked! Everything should be connected to everything else, so you can find things!”