And then, little by little, Kyes began to believe that he was being used. After that, he began noticing that his firm was becoming more and more dependent on the Emperor's contracts. He had enjoyed enormous expansion in the past few years, but he was beginning to realize just how delicate the expansion was. A frown from the emperor would mean starting all over again. Except that with only five years left, to start again would be impossible.
Kyes became obsessed with newly realized vulnerability. He could see no way of stopping it. It seemed as inevitable as the winding down of his biological clock. Then he began thinking about the Emperor. The Eternal Emperor. And he realized there was nothing empty about either word in the title.
Kyes met envy face-to-face. And it was just about then that Tanz Sullamora began whispering in his ear.
After Durer, the whispering was replaced by louder and louder mutterings of discontent. At first, Sullamora just complained about how the Emperor's busy schedule prevented him from consulting his privy council for their thoughts on how to deal with the depression that was sure to follow after the war. The others not only agreed but became encouraged to complain that the few times they had been consulted, their advice had been ignored.
"Take me, for instance," Volmer had said. "The last time I spoke with the Emperor I strongly suggested that we had to start planning for the future right now. A good propaganda campaign isn't created overnight.
"We've got to come up with our message. Target our audience. Tailor the message for the various target groups. And then deliver it in a carefully orchestrated way."
The message, as Volmer saw it, was: "Hope through sacrifice. Each of us is going to be called upon to sacrifice for the good of the Empire. And of our children. And our children's children."
"I like it," Lovett had said, immediately thinking about some ideas he had concerning interest rates pegged to inflation, with a high floor to take care of any unexpected deflation. "What did he say?"
Volmer frowned. "He asked me what I was planning to sacrifice. He said for a message like that to work, people would want to see their leaders do a little suffering... Suffering, what a negative word! Sacrifice is much easier to sell... Anyway, I told him flat out that was an insane idea. Why, if people see us hurting"—he waved, including his colleagues in—"what would they have to hope for? Destroys the whole concept."
He found no disagreement in that.
Each of the other members had similar horror stories. Malperin wanted wage controls but no ceiling on prices. The Kraas wanted "more enlightened" pollution and safety laws.
Sullamora wanted a one-sided tariff arrangement to shield his merchant empire. And as for Kyes, well, Kyes did not say anything for some time. The others wondered at that for a while, disturbed that the Grb'chev was not reaching in for his share of the pie. What they did not know was that Kyes, with one huge exception, already had all that he wanted. And he figured that if he ever thought of anything else, he was quite capable of getting it on his own, without the benefit of Imperial intervention. Still, there was the exception...
Several meetings went by before he moved his first pawn. He opened on the king's bishop side. And when he spoke, everyone was respectfully silent, waiting for him to finally declare himself. They were not disappointed.
"Perhaps we are doing our Emperor a disservice," he said slowly, as if he were thinking out loud. Every member of the council knew better. "From his point of view, perhaps we are firing ideas at him from all directions. He has so much on his mind now. How can he pick here and there when he can see no whole?"
His colleagues nodded wisely, merely to mark time until Kyes got the rest of it out.
"Let's make things simpler for him," Kyes said. "We need to speak as one. To present a coherent view. And then have the authority to enact the needed reforms. With the Emperor's concurrence, of course," he added quickly.
"Emperor's concurrence... of course," everyone muttered.
What Kyes proposed was deceptively simple. The privy council would call upon the Parliament and then the Emperor to create a quasi-public agency—consisting of members of the sitting council, to start with—that could act independently of the whims and fads and pressure of any special-interest group.
Said agency would take the long view of the economy, carefully managing the AM2 pump to control the strength of the Imperial credit, keep a close eye on vital industrial and agricultural supplies, make sure that the government always spoke with one voice, and serve as a much needed check and balance between the competing views of business and the public good.
There was no disagreement. Sullamora, the man with the most direct clout with Parliament, would take point. The first step would be approached cautiously. The skeleton of the proposed agency would be buried in a "sense of Parliament" resolution which, once enacted, would be difficult for the Emperor to shoot down without causing a very loud fuss. The trick was to keep anyone—especially the Emperor's back-bench toadies—from even guessing that something was up. The privy council decided to praise Caesar rather than to damn him. The praise took the form of a lengthy document profusely congratulating the Emperor for his victory over the Tahn at Durer and calling for Empirewide support of the Emperor to carry the victory forward to a final surrender and then beyond. Even on the surface, it was not an empty document. It was worded in such a way to make even the fence sitters who had been the bane of the emperor for some time to back his act. If approved, and Sullamora's people went out and twisted every arm and tentacle available to assure its passage, the resolution would break the back of the neutrals.
Sullamora knew that would ensure the Emperor's support. He also had his experts put together a swampland section that committed Parliament to "render every assistance" to the Emperor in his "brave and lonely struggle." The independent agency was the gator hiding in the swamp.
Sullamora's analysts pored over the document and finally agreed that there was no way anyone could ever spot the gator amid obfuscations no one would bother to read. As one patriarch of the Parliament once put it, "If everyone knew what they're voting on, we'd never get out of here." When the big moment came, Sullamora personally planned to present the resolution in a speech punched up to the nth degree by a team provided by Volmer. It was pure-dee guaranteed to be welcomed with thunderous applause.
Sullamora paced back and forth in the small anteroom, waiting to be called to the speaker's rostrum. As he paced, he rehearsed the speech in his head, punching out at the air with his right hand to mark the rhythms. A door hissed open behind him, and Sullamora turned, mildly surprised. The call was five minutes early. But instead of seeing the huge jolly figure of the Parliament's sergeant at arms, he found himself gaping down at a small, dark man with a large curved knife hanging from his uniform belt. It was a Gurkha, one of the Emperor's personal bodyguards. The Gurkha gave him a small, barely polite bow and handed him a message. It was a summons. The Eternal Emperor had spotted the gator.
The Emperor was a study in casualness, feet propped up on his antique desk, a drink before him, another in front of Tanz Sullamora, and a bottle between them. He even picked up his drink frequently as he talked, seeming to take a sip and then replace the glass on the desk. Sullamora noted that the level never went down.