Four
The Autocrat Arrives
“Not so long ago, the Autocrat of Ceres, aside from his official position as the ruler of the minor planet Ceres, was the de facto head of state and sovereign leader of the entire Asteroid Belt, home to the smallest and most dispersed population in the Solar System. However, the Charonians killed so many people on the larger worlds, and forced so many refugees into the Belt, that the Asteroid Belt might now well have the largest aggregate population of any of the surviving geopolitical units in the Solar System.
“No one knows for sure. The Charonians left chaos in their wake, and the Belt was of course famous for being chaotic long before the Charonians awoke. Even before the Abduction, the population of the Belt was so dispersed—and cantankerous—that it was hard to get even a rough idea of how many people lived there.”
The Autocrat of Ceres prided himself on keeping an accurate and complete journal. As with all other aspects of his life, he kept his journal according to a rigid and careful schedule. Each morning as he sat at his breakfast table, he dictated to his private autoscribe, speaking in a clear, careful voice. He found that writing about the day just past allowed him to focus on the tasks for the day ahead.
“June twelfth, 2431,” he began. “Nineteen days out from Titan, the ship now almost completely decelerated. Assuming constant boost, we will arrive at Plutopoint and the Ring of Charon this afternoon. I find that I have had much time for quiet reflection on this long journey—perhaps too much. I must admit that the rather austere circumstances of my travel are in some ways a pleasure. I do not miss the company of my usual retinue, for example, and the ceremonies of state dinners can become most tiresome.
“But it has been a long journey to Pluto—or rather, to where Pluto once was. It is hard to escape one’s own thoughts in such quiet and tranquil surroundings. The crew knows I wish privacy, and grants it to me.
“I find that I am paying less and less attention to my everyday work as it is radioed in to me from Ceres. I handle it all, but not with the relentless attention demanded of me at my court. Somehow the cases recede in importance as the distance between myself and home grows greater. But it is part of the task of the Autocrat to know when to step outside the everyday. Should my people rely too much on my presence to adjudicate and execute the laws, they would fail to rely on themselves. It is part of my duty not to do my duty too well. The Autocracy is meant as a counterweight to the Belt’s anarchy—not as a replacement for it. Neither must become too strong.
“It is not that I neglect my duties, but rather that I view them in a different way. The journals and diaries of my predecessors make it clear that the tradition of the Autocrat’s Progress was established precisely to expand the Autocrat’s horizons, alter the worldview of the Autocrat, and so it is with myself.
“Every artist should, now and again, step back from the day-to-day work on this detail or that, and examine the whole canvas. There is an art to governance, of that I have no doubt. More so under the Autocracy than other forms of government, I think. I govern by what I might do, or what I do not do, as much as by direct action.
“And so I step back and think over, not Xeg Mortoi’s accusation of claim-jumping against his wife, but the circumstances of all humankind, and my place in them.
“I now understand more fully why I chose to take this trip at a time when I would be away from Ceres on the fifth terrestrial anniversary of Abduction Day. It is now time to stop mourning that catastrophe and to stop living with it as a part of the present. Now it must be accepted as part of the past. Now we must move forward, toward the future.”
Pleased with the entry, the Autocrat closed the autoscribe and stepped to his compartment’s single small porthole to look upon the unchanging stars. Plutopoint and the Ring of Charon were close now, very close, even if he could not see them from this port.
The Autocrat had a subtle and important agenda at Plutopoint. He had to prevent the Ring from coming under his control. Forces were combining to make it likely to happen, but Belt control of the Ring of Charon might well be the first step in producing far too great a concentration of power—political, technical, and economic—in the Solar System.
A Solar System dominated by Ceres would be unstable, ungovernable. Centralizing sufficient power to control the entire Solar System would require a tremendous investment in the tools of control. The Autocracy would be forced to become more powerful, too powerful, if it were to survive. It would have to deal in massive repression and control. The forces of anarchy would, quite inevitably, grow in power as well, forcing the Autocracy to respond. Terrorism, rebellion, and war could well be the final result. A classic case of the crisis of empire. No, the Autocracy—and the Autocrat—dared not become mightier than they were.
But how to force others to remain independent? How to use one’s power to prevent the absorption of further power?
A pretty question. A very pretty question indeed.
But there were hopeful signs. The Ring was in the process of becoming a more powerful place. The Autocrat needed to find some way of using the enemy’s strength against the Autocrat.
An interesting challenge.
Sondra Berghoff stood—or, more accurately, floated—at the entrance to the airlock, waiting, more than a bit nervously, for no less a personage than the Autocrat of Ceres himself. The Autocrat was a him, wasn’t it? No, wait a second. A woman. She remembered seeing a picture in a news report. No, that had been some history article, about the last Autocrat but two. Well, the office was supposed to be depersonalized, to be held by someone willing to subsume all private concerns to the needs of justice and the good of the Belt. Or something. She had never followed Asteroid Belt politics or history that carefully.
Which was too bad, as a big dose of both was just about to be dumped in her lap. The Autocrat wanted to get a look at the Ring of Charon—and at Sondra.
Sondra didn’t like that aspect of the situation, either. Five years ago she had gotten a lifetime supply of notoriety. The theft of the Earth was a defining moment in everyone’s life. Fine, so be it—but Sondra had no desire for her role in those events to be all there was to her life, the one thing that summed her up.
She remembered her long-dead Great-uncle Sanchez. He had died at an advanced age when she was a child. A century before, Sanchez had been a teenager, working odd jobs at this station and that on the Moon.
Uncle Sanchez had been one of the last ones to evacuate Farside Station, just before that mispiloted asteroid piled into it and turned lunar history upside down. But Sondra did not remember Uncle Sanchez as a witness to history, but as a boring old man who told the same stories over and over again, who spent his adult and elder years focused on the single day, the single moment of his youth, when he had happened to stumble, quite by accident, into the sweep of great events.