The last part of the legend was what interested Kyes the most: the prophesy that someday another Methuselah would be born, and that immortal Grb'chev would lead the species to even greater successes.
Lately Kyes wondered if he might be that chosen one.
But this was only during his most hysterical fantasizing. More likely, the extra span he had been allotted was due to nothing more than a small genetic blip. In reality at any moment he would "die."
If he was to have any future, Kyes would have to seize it himself. He would find the secret and become the new savior of his kind.
Kyes looked out the window. The car was moving through a working-class neighborhood of tall, drab tenements facing across a broad avenue. The traffic was mostly on foot. The AM2 squeeze prohibited public transport, much less the boxy little flits favored by the lower middle class. Kyes saw a long line snaking out of a soya shop. A tattered sign overhead pegged the cost at ten credits an ounce. The condition of the sign mocked even that outrageous price.
Two armored cops were guarding the entrance of the shop. Kyes saw a woman exit with a bundle under her arms. The crowd immediately began hooting at her, clawing at the package. One big cop moved tentatively forward. Kyes's car glided on before he saw what happened next.
"... been like that ever since the food riots," the driver was saying. "Course, security costs somethin' fierce, so the prices gotta go up, don't they? But you can't make folks understand that. I was tellin' my hub—"
"What food riots?" Kyes burst through.
"Dincha hear?" The driver craned her neck around, gaping in amazement that a member of the privy council was somehow not in the know.
"I was advised of disturbances," Kyes said. "But not... riots."
"Oh, disturbances,"! the driver said. "Much better'n riots. That's what they was, all right. Disturbances. Musta had twenty, thirty thousand lazy, filthy types disturbin' drakh all over the place. Cops went easy. Didn't kill more'n half a hundred or so. Course, three, four thousand was shot up some and..."
Furious, Kyes tuned out the rest. He had made his views quite plain to his fellow council members. Prime World and all the beings on it were to be handled like gossamer. As the heart of the Empire, it was the last place shortages of any kind should show up. When he had learned of the "disturbances," he had made his views even plainer. But the Kraas and the others assured him that all was well. There had been a few small glitches in the supply system, that was all. The supplies and the peace had been restored. Right! It wasn't the lies that disturbed Kyes so much—he was a master dissembler himself. It was the plain wrongheadedness of the matter.
If the privy council could not keep matters under control a few kilometers from its own front door, how could they possibly succeed in ruling a far-flung Empire? And if they failed, Kyes was doomed to something far worse than any hell they could imagine.
A second immensely irritating factor: If things were really so awful that basic foods were out of the reach of the local populace, then why were the members of the council flaunting their own wealth?
He groaned aloud when he saw, ahead of him, the spire needling up over the tall buildings of the financial district. It was the newly completed headquarters of the privy council.
"Amazin' as clot, ain't it," his driver said, mistaking the groan for a belch of admiration. "You fellas done yourself proud with that buildin'. Nothin' like it on Prime. Specially with the Emperor's old castle wrecked by bombs and all.
"I know yuz ain't seen it yet, but wait'll ya get inside. You got fountains and drakh. With real colored water. And right in the middle they put in this great clottin' tree. Called a rubiginosa, or somethin'. Probably sayin' it wrong. Big mother fig. But the kind you can't eat."
"Who's idea was it?" Kyes asked-dry, noncommittal.
"Dunno. Designer, I think. What was her name? Uh... Ztivo, or somethin' like that. But, boy did she charge an arm and two, three legs. The tree alone's gotta be fifteen, twenty meters tall. Dug it up from someplace on Earth. But they was scared it'ud shrivel up and blow away if they brought here direct, like. So they seasoned it. On three four different planets. Spent a big bundle of credits on it.
"Musta worked. It's goin' crazy in there! Picked up another two meters, I heard, in the last two-three months. Why, that clottin' tree's the pride and joy of Prime World, I tell you. Ask anybody."
As the gravcar slowed, Kyes saw a crowd of beggars push forward. A wedge of club-wielding cops beat them back. Certainly, he thought. Ask anybody. Go right ahead.
The AM2 secretary's report was a dry buzz against glass. On the table before him was a one-third-meter stack of readouts, the result of many months labor. He was reading-syllable by maddening syllable-from a prйcis not much slimmer. His name was Lagguth. But from the glares he was getting from the members of the privy council, it was likely to be changed to something far worse.
Kyes and the others had gathered eagerly around the table. This could possibly be the most important listening session of their lives. So no one objected a whit when Lagguth's aides hauled in the mass of papers. Nor did anyone raise a brow when the preamble went a full hour.
They were in the second hour-a second hour to a group of beings who habitually required their subordinates to sum up all thinking in three sentences or less. If they liked the three sentences, the subordinate could continue. If not, firing was a not indistinct possibility. After the first hour, the AM2 secretary had gone past firing.
Executions were being weighed. Kyes had several nasty varieties in mind himself.
But he had caught a different tone than the rest. There was real fear beneath all that buzz. He caught it in the nervous shufflings and newly habitual tics in Lagguth's mannerisms. Kyes stopped listening for the bottom line and started paying attention to the words. They were meaningless. Deliberate bureaucratic nonsense. That added up to stall. Kyes kept his observation to himself. Instead, he began thinking how he might use it.
The Kraas broke first.
The fat one cleared her throat, sounding like distant thunder, loomed her gross bulk forward, and thrust out a chin that was like a heavy-worlder's fist.
"Yer a right bastard, mate," she said. "Makin' me piles bleed with all this yetcheta yetch. Me sis's arse bones'r pokin' holes in the sitter. Get to it. Or get summun else in to do the gig!"
Lagguth gleaped. But, it was a puzzled sort of a gleap. He knew he was in trouble. Just what not for.
Lovett translated. "Get to the clotting point, man. What's the prog?"
Lagguth took a deep and lonely breath. Then he painted a bright smile on his face. "I'm so sorry, gentle beings," he said. "The scientist in me... tsk... tsk... How thoughtless. In the future I shall endeavor—"
The skinny Kraa growled. It was a shrill sound—and not nice. It had the definite note of a committed carnivore.
"Thirteen months," Lagguth blurted. "And that's an outside estimate."
"So, you're telling us, that although your department has had no luck in locating the AM2, you now have an estimate of when you will find it. Is that right?" Lovett was a great one for summing up the obvious.
"Yes, Sr. Lovett," Lagguth said. "There can be no mistake. Within thirteen months we shall have it." He patted the thick stack of documentation.
"That certainly sounds promising, if true," Malperin broke in. She stopped Lagguth's instinctive defense of his work with a wave of her hand. Malperin ruled an immense, cobbled-together conglomerate. She did not rule it well. But she had more than enough steel in her to keep it as long as she liked.