"No," I said, with a fierce shake of my head. "That's completely inconceivable. What do you think this is, the Middle Ages?"
"I think this is the year 3159 A.D., Yakoub, and there is an Empire of many hundreds of worlds at stake, and nothing essential has changed in the human soul since the time of Rome and Byzantium. Periandros won't sit idly by and see Sunteil have the throne, nor will Naria step aside gracefully for Periandros, nor-"
"There won't be any more wars, Julien. Humanity has changed. Going to the stars is what did it."
"You think?"
"War is an outmoded notion," I told him grandly. "Like the appendix, like the little toe. Another five hundred years and nobody's going to be born with an appendix any more, and good riddance to it. A thousand years beyond that and there'll be no more little toes either. And war is already gone. You know that as well as I do. It's an obsolete concept in this age of galactic empire." I was getting heated up by my own rhetoric. That's always a danger sign. But I went steaming right on. "There hasn't been a real war since-since I don't know when. Hundreds of years. A thousand, maybe. Not since Earth went down the drain and all its petty little garbage went with it." I was wondrously worked up now. "Wars are unthinkable in today's galactic society! Not just unthinkable but logistically impossible!"
"Don't be so sure of that."
"Why are you such a pessimist, Julien?"
"Only a realist, mon ami." There was a sudden wintry bleakness in his eyes that I could hardly bear to see. He had given much thought to all this. Not that I hadn't; but I had been away from it for five years. Had I let myself get too far out of touch with reality? No. No. No. He said, "I think the idea of war might be all too easy to revive. Perhaps some entirely new kind of war, a war between stars, but bloody and horrible all the same."
Yes? No. This is all nonsense, I thought. I laughed in his face. Poor gloomy Julien, lost in these morbid apocalyptic fantasies. Scared shitless by phantoms. War? Between stars? If wine did this to him, maybe he ought to stick to water. He was starting to annoy me now.
"Come off it," I told him. "I'm too old to be frightened by this sort of stuff. "
"Then I envy you. For I myself am greatly frightened." "Of what?" I shouted.
He kept calm. Calm as death. "It is too great a vacuum, this absence of a clear line of succession. A vacuum can engender disruptive forces, my friend, and the greater the vacuum the greater the disruptions."
I couldn't argue with that. It was verging across the line from politics into physics. I never argue with physics.
"They'll work it out," I said, more quietly and without much confidence. I think I was beginning to experience a slow confidence leak. "An agreement among themselves. A rational division of authority. Maybe even a partition of the Empire, who knows? Would that be such a bad idea?"
"There is not one vacuum but two," he went on, as if I had not spoken at all. "For what also is absent is the King of the Rom." "Don't start with me again on that, Julicn."
"Just tell me this, Yakoub: putting aside the question of your resuming authority again, what if you were to return to the Imperium and request a meeting with the emperor-he'll see you, whether you're king or not-and make the nature of the crisis clear to him?"
Now I saw his real game. I didn't like it.
I said, "And advocate the naming of the Lord Periandros, perhaps, as his successor?"
Julien reddened. "Do you think I am so clumsy as to ask that of you?"
"You do favor Periandros, don't you?"
"I favor stability. I am close to Periandros. But I would rather see Sunteil wear the crown, or Naria, than have the Imperium shattered by civil war. What matters is that there be some succession. You might be able to bring that about. No one else would dare to speak of such things with the emperor."
"I've abdicated, Julien."
"The system is out of balance with you gone."
"Polarca said the same thing in virtually as many words. Polarca's ghost. Let it be out of balance, then. A rat's ass for the balance of the system, Julien."
"Yakoub-" "A rat's ass!"
"The possibility of war-"
I waved my hands around impatiently as though his words were farts and I was trying to clear the air.
"If you would only consider, Yakoub, the risk of allowing such instability to-"
Again I cut him off "No," I said. "Enough of this." And then I said, "What did you say this thing we were eating is called, Julien?" With a sigh he answered, "Cassoulet, mon ami."
"And how is it made?"
You can always distract a Frenchman by asking him for a recipe. "It is the garlic sausage, and the breast of lamb, and the filet of pork, to which one adds the white beans, and-"
"It's superb," I said. "Absolutely superb. I must have some more."
NIGHT CAME WE SAT QUIETLY OLD FRIENDS HAVE THE privilege of being silent with one another. Sleet beat furiously against my window for a time. Then the storm moved on and the sky began to clear. Stars cut their way through the thinning storm-clouds, sparkling with fierce intensity against that deep backdrop of blackness that is seen only on a world where no one dwells.
I sat quietly, yes. Feeling the fullness of my belly, feeling also a certain pressure on my shoulders that I knew was the weight of all the universe moving above me. That immense inconceivable clockwork mechanism, the billion billion soundless stars gliding on their tracks in the heavens, whipping their billion billion billion worlds along as they turned on the unknown axis that was at the center of it all somewhere. Everything interwoven, everything connected by invisible rods and struts that we imagine we understand.
And then I thought of our own little corner of it all, that speck, our few hundreds of worlds within our one galaxy-the galaxy that seems so vast when we are out traveling in it, but which is only one small stitch in the whole colossal tapestry. The worlds of men, of Gaje, of Rom. Kingdom and Empire. All our intricate struggles and maneuverings: they were so tiny against that great sky. Tiny, yes, but not trivial, for what was the universe, after all, except one atom and another and another and another, each one as important as any other in the structure of the whole thing? No, not trivial. Nothing is trivial. Subtract one atom from the universe and all is lost.
So they would need a new emperor soon, in this little corner of the universe that is everything to us? Well, I knew what that situation was like. I was around when the Fourteenth Emperor was dying and I am even old enough to remember the last days of the Thirteenth. To be close to a dying emperor has its perils, as it is perilous to be close to a star about to burn out. The star has been blazing away for nine billion years and now its course is just about run: in a little while the wild dance of the hot little nuclei will be stilled forever and there will be only a sphere of cold blackness where there had been ferocious light. Then it happens and in that moment of the birth of void a great whistling inrush of air comes bellowing in from every corner of the cosmos at once. You can get swept willy-nilly to the ends of the universe if you happen to be in the way when that wind goes rushing by.
(Of course I know that there's no air in the space between the stars. Don't be a literal-minded fool. Just try to understand the sense of what I'm telling you.)
The Fifteenth was dying and mighty tornados would spawn in his wake. And afterward, when the roaring had stopped and a deathly stillness was setting in, they would have to anoint someone as the Sixteenth and give the universe into his hand. Sunteil, Periandros, Naria, those were the choices. The three lords of the Imperium. Well, no surprises there. I knew them all. I had seen them come up and I had watched them move themselves into position. Year after year of subtle jostling and maneuvering until power came within reach; and just one more maneuver left to go. And everybody's nerves cranked to the breaking point until the outcome was settled.