The sun was almost down. Rays ran gold across the Antonine Seabed, making its groves and plantations a patchwork of bluish-green and shadows, burning on its canals, molten in the mists that curled off a salt marsh. Eastward, the light smote crags and cliffs where the ancient continental shelf of Ilion lifted a many-tiered, wind-worn intricacy of purple, rose, ocher, tawny, black up to a royal blue sky. The outer moon, Lavinia, was a cold small horn on top of that mass.
The wind was cold too. Its whittering blent with the soft roar of a waterfall, the clop of hoofs and creak and jingle of harness as horses wound along a steep upward trail. Those were Aenean horses, shaggy, rangy, their low-gravity gait looking less rapid than it was. Hugh McCormac rode one. His three sons by his first wife accompanied him. Ostensibly they had been hunting spider wolves, but they hadn’t found any and didn’t care. The unspoken real reason had been to fare forth together across this land that was theirs. They might not have another chance.
A vulch wheeled into view, wings across heaven. John McCormac lifted his rifle. His father glanced behind. “No, don’t,” he said. “Let it live.”
“Save death for the Terries, hey?” asked Bob. At nine years of age — 16 standard — he was a bit loud about his discovery that the universe wasn’t quite as simple as they pretended in school.
He’ll outgrow that, McCormac thought. He’s a good boy. They all are, like their sisters. How could they help being, with Ramona for mother? “I don’t hold with killing anything unnecessarily,” he said. “That isn’t what war is about.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Colin put in. He was the oldest. Since he would therefore be the next Firstman, family custom had kept him from joining the service. (Hugh McCormac had only succeeded when his elder brother was caught in a sand hell and died childless.) Perhaps his planetographic researches in the Virgilian System had not satisfied every inborn impulse. “You weren’t here, Father, when the revolution reached Nova Roma. But I saw crowds — plain, kindly citizens — hound Snelund’s political police down the streets, catch them, string them up, and beat them to death. And it felt right. It still does, when you think what they’d done earlier.”
“Snelund himself’ll be a while dyin’, if I catch him,” John said hotly.
“No!” McCormac snapped. “You’ll not sink yourself to his ways. He’ll be killed as cleanly as we kill any other mad dog. His associates will have fair trials. There are degrees of guilt.”
“If we can find the lice,” Bob said. McCormac thought of the wilderness of suns and worlds where his life had passed, and said, “Probably most will succeed in disappearing. What of it? We’ll have more urgent work than revenge.”
They rode silent for a while. The trial debouched on one of the steplike plateaus and joined a paved road to Windhome. Soil lay deep, washed down from the heights, and vegetation flourished, in contrast to a few dwarf bushes on the eroded slopes. Trava decked the ground almost as luxuriantly as it did the seabed. Mainly it was fire trava here, the serrated leaves edged with scarlet; but the sword kind bristled and the plume kind nodded. Each type was curling up for the night as temperature dropped, to form a springy heat-conserving mat. Trees grew about, not only the low iron-hard native sorts but imported oak, cedar, and rasmin. The wind carried their fragrances. Some ways to the right, smoke blew from a farmer’s stone cottage. Robotized latifundia weren’t practical on Aeneas, and McCormac was glad of that; he felt in his bones that a healthy society needed yeomen.
Colin clucked to his horse and drew alongside. His sharp young face looked unhappy. “Father—” He stopped.
“Go ahead,” McCormac invited.
“Father … do you think … do you really think we can pull it off?”
“I don’t know,” McCormac said. “We’ll try like men, that’s all.”
“But — makin’ you Emperor—”
McCormac felt anew how pitifully little chance he’d had to speak with his nearest, since his rescuers brought him home: too much to do, and each scant hour when something wasn’t clamoring for attention, the body toppled into sleep. He had actually stolen this one day.
“Please don’t imagine I want the job,” he said. “You haven’t been on Terra. I have. I don’t like it. I was never happier than when they reassigned me back where I belong.”
Imperial routine, passed over his mind. Rotate careerists through a series of regions; but in the end, whenever feasible, return them to the sectors they came from. Theory: they’ll defend their birthhomes more fiercely than some clutch of planets foreign to them. Practice: when revolt erupted, many Navy personnel, like civilians, discovered that those homes meant more to them than a Terra most of them had never seen. Problem: if I win, should I discontinue the practice, as Josip doubtless will if his admirals win?
“But why, then?” Colin asked.
“What else could I do?” McCormac replied.
“Well … freedom—”
“No. The Empire is not so far decayed that it’ll allow itself to be broken apart. And even if it were, I wouldn’t. Don’t you see, it’s the single thing that stands between civilization — our civilization — and the Long Night?
“As for armed protest, it might stimulate policy changes, but the Imperium could not pardon the ringleaders. That’d invite everybody with a grudge to start shooting, and spell the end as clearly as partition would. And besides—” McCormac’s knuckles stood white where he grasped the reins — “it wouldn’t get Kathryn back, if any hope remains of that.”
“So you aim to preserve the Empire, but take it over,” Colin said quickly. His desire to guide his father’s thoughts off his stepmother’s captivity was so obvious that McCormac’s heart writhed. “I’m with you. You know that. I honestly think you’d give it new life — the best Emperor we’ve had since Isamu the Great, maybe since Manuel I himself — and I’m layin’ not just me, but my wife and son on the board for you — but can it be done?” He waved at the sky. “The Empire’s that huge!”
As if at a signal, Virgil went down. The Aenean atmosphere held no twilight worth mentioning. Alpha and Beta Crucis blazed forth, then almost instantly thousands more and the frosty bridge of the Milky Way. The land mass on the right became utterly black, but Lavinia silvered the sea bottom under the left-hand cliffs. A tad-mouse piped into the mordant wind.
McCormac said: “The revolution has to have a leader, and I’m its choice. Let’s have no false modesty. I control the Cabinet on the principal world of this sector. I can prove by the record I’m the top Naval strategist the Empire has. My men know I’m strict about things that matter, compassionate about the rest, and always try to be fair. So do a hundred planets, human and nonhuman. It’d be no service to anyone if I claimed different.”
“But how—” Colin’s voice trailed off. Moonlight glimmered along his leather jacket and off his silver-mounted saddle.
“We’ll take control of this sector,” McCormac told him. “That’s largely a matter of defeating the Josipist forces. Once we’ve done it, every significant community in a ten-parsec radius will come over to us. Afterward … I don’t like the idea myself, but I know where and how to get barbarian allies. Not the few Darthan ships I’ve already engaged; no, really wild warriors from well outside the border. Don’t worry. I won’t let them plunder and I won’t let them settle, even if they’ll swear allegiance. They’ll be hirelings paid from tax monies.
“The whole Imperial fleet can’t ever come against us. It has too many other duties. If we work fast and hard, well be in shape to throw back whatever does attack.