"I hear the sounds of a gold rush," the Emperor muttered. "And I'm starting to feel like John Sutter."
"Pardon, sir?"
"Never mind. More of the history you refuse to learn."
"Yessir. You want the capper?"
"Go ahead. By the way... did you bring a bottle?"
Mahoney nodded glumly. He fished a bottle of what the Emperor had synthesized and dubbed scotch from the pack and set it on the boulder between them.
"Too good," the Emperor said. "We'll start on mine."
He walked to his tent and came back with a glassine jar full of a mildly brownish liquid. Mahoney looked at it suspiciously. One of the problems of being the Emperor's head of Secret Intelligence—Mercury Corps—and his confidant/aide/assassin was being subjected to the Imperial tastes for the primitive. Remembering a concoction called "chili," he shuddered.
"They called this 'shine," the Emperor explained. "Triple-distilled, which was easy. Run through the radiator of something those hillpeople called a fifty-three Chevy, which I never bothered finding out about. Then aged in a carbonized barrel for at least a day or so. Try it. It's an experience."
Mahoney lifted the jar. He figured the less the taste, the better off he'd be, and poured a straight gurgle down his throat.
He realized he'd never noticed that the river was a nova and that he seemed to be standing in the middle of the fireplace. But somehow he didn't drop the jar. Eyes watering, seeing double, he still managed to pass it to the Emperor.
"I see you're wearing a gun," the Emperor said sympathetically "Would you mind holding it on me while I have a drink?" Mahoney was still gasping as the Emperor chugged a moderate portion.
"Continue, Colonel, with your report. You are planning to stay for dinner, aren't you?"
Mahoney nodded. The Emperor smiled—he did hate to eat alone, and his Gurkha bodyguards preferred their far simpler diet of rice, dhal, and soyasteak.
"I ran a computer project, sir," he went on. "We can supress the existence of this X-mineral for perhaps two, possibly three E-years maximum. And at that time every footloose wanderer and entrepreneur in the Galaxy will start for the Eryx Region to make his fortune."
"As I said, a gold rush," the Emperor murmured. He was busy dressing the fish. He'd picked a handful of berries from a bush on the outskirts of the clearing and a small clump of leaves from each of two bushes nearby.
"Juniper berries—they grow wild here; two local spices, basil and thyme, that I planted twenty years ago," he explained. He rubbed berry juices on both sides of the split salmon, then crushed the leaves and did the same.
Mahoney continued with his report. "Per your orders, sir, I instructed my Mantis team to take the most direct way back from the Eryx regions toward Prime World."
"Of course—that'll be the route all my eager miners'll follow if word gets out."
"The plot led through the Lupus Cluster," Mahoney said.
"What the hell is that?"
"A few hundred suns, planets... mostly inhabited... back of beyond."
"Inhabited by whom, might I ask?" the Emperor said.
"My team's ship got jumped by one of your majesty's ex-cruisers. The Turnmaa."
"Are they all right?" the Emperor asked tersely. All pretense of casualness was gone.
"They're fine. The cruiser starting shooting, my team put down on some primitive world. The Turnmaa came after them. So they took the ship. Two hundred dead black-uniformed crewmen later, they came home in the Turnmaa."
"Hostile group of boys and girls you breed over there in Mantis," the Emperor said, relaxing. "Any idea why these baddies jumped my ship? It was supposed to look like a tramp miner, wasn't it?"
"They started out by screaming In the Name of Talamein," Mahoney said, as usual preferring the indirect explanation.
The Emperor slumped down on the log. "The Talamein! I thought I put a stake through their heart ten generations ago!"
No psychohistorian has ever been able to explain why, throughout human history, waves of false messiahs come and go. Never one at a time. Witness, for example, the dozens of saviors, from 20 B.C. until A.D. 60, who gave the Romans a rough road to go.
A similar wave had swept the Galaxy some four hundred years previously. Since the Emperor knew that a culture must be allowed religious freedom, he could do little until a particular messiah would decide he was the Entity's final fruition and declare a jihad. Until then, all the Emperor could do was try to keep the peace and endure.
There was much to endure.
Such as the Messiah of Endymion VI, who decided that all women on the planet were his sole property and all the men were unnecessary. The first item of interest is that the entire male population, believers all plus or minus a few quickly sworded atheists, suicided. Even more interesting is that the Messiah was impotent.
There was an entire solar system that believed, like the early Christian Manichees, that all matter, including themselves, was evil and to be destroyed. The Emperor never learned how they managed to blackmarket a planetbuster nor how they managed to launch it into their sun, producing both a solar flare and a sudden end to the movement.
A dozen or so messiahs preached genocide against their immediate neighbors, but were easily handled by the Guard once they off-planeted.
The messiah of one movement took a fairly conventional monotheism system, added engineering jargon, and converted several planetary systems. The Emperor had worried about that one a bit—until the messiah absconded to one of the Imperial play-worlds with the movement's treasury.
One messiah decided Nirvana was a long ways off, so his world purchased several of the old monster liners, linked them together, and headed for Nirvana. Since their plot showed Nirvana to be somewhere around the edge of the universe, the Emperor quit worrying about them, too.
And then there was the faith of Talamein. Founded in reaction to a theology in decay, a young warrior named Talamein preached purity, dedication of life to the Entity's purpose, and putting to the sword anyone who chose not to believe as he did.
The old religion and the new were at gunspoint when the Emperor stepped in. He offered the Talameins and their Prophet enough transport to find themselves a system of their own. Overjoyed, the warrior faith had accepted, boarded ships, and disappeared from mortal man's consciousness.
The Emperor was fairly proud of his "humanitarian" decision. He had interceded not because he particularly cared who would win the civil war but because he knew that (a) the old, worn-out theocracy would be destroyed, (b) the people of Talamein would have themselves close to a full cluster as a power-base, and (c) that faith would inevitably explode out into the Galaxy.
The last thing the Eternal Emperor needed, he knew, was a young, virile religion that would ultimately find the Emperor and his mercantile Empire unnecessary. The result would be intragalactic war and the inevitable destruction of both sides.
Not only did the Emperor defuse the situation, but he also guaranteed that if the faith of Talamein survived, he would always be thought of as Being on Their Side.
All this the Emperor remembered. But, being a polite man, he listened to Mahoney's historical briefing.
"More fish. Colonel?"
Mahoney burn-cured a slight case of the hiccups with a shot from their second jar then shook his head.
After the birchwood fire'd burned down to coals, the Emperor had put the salmon on the sapling grill. He'd left it for a few minutes, then quickly splashed corn liquor on the skin-side and skillfully flipped the slabs of fish over. The fire flared and charred the skin, and then the Emperor had extracted the fish. Mahoney couldn't remember when he'd eaten anything better.