They were a well-matched pair physically. Gold and fire. The Prince had his father’s lean sinewy grace, golden hair and star-flecked eyes. Rihana was fiery, with the beauty and ruthlessness of a tigress in her face. Her hair was a cascade of molten copper tumbling past her shoulders, her gown a metallic glitter.
“It was a wasted trip,” Javas said to his father, with his usual sardonic smile. “Earth is… well,” he shrugged, “nothing but Earth. It hasn’t changed in the slightest.”
“Thirty wasted years,” Rihana said.
The Emperor looked past them, beyond the terrace to the lovingly landscaped forest that his engineers could never make quite the right shade of terrestrial green.
“Not entirely wasted, daughter-in-law,” he said at last. “In cryosleep, you’ve aged hardly at all…”
“We are thirty years out of date with the affairs of the Empire,” she snapped. The smoldering expression on her face made it clear that she believed her father-in-law deliberately plotted to keep her as far from the throne as possible.
“You can easily catch up,” the Emperor said, ignoring her anger. “In the meantime, you have kept your youthful appearance.”
“I shall always keep it! You are the one who denies himself rejuvenation treatments, not me.”
“And so will Javas, when he becomes Emperor.”
“Will he?” Her eyes were suddenly mocking.
“He will,” said the Emperor, with the weight of a hundred worlds behind his voice.
Rihana looked away from him. “Well, even so, I shan’t. I see no reason why I should age and wither when even the foulest shopkeeper can live for centuries.”
“Your husband will age.”
She said nothing. And as he ages, the Emperor knew, you will find younger lovers. But of course, you have already done that, haven’t you? He turned toward his son, who was still standing by the balustrade.
“Kyle Arman is dead,” Javas blurted.
For a moment, the Emperor failed to comprehend. “Dead?” he asked, his voice sounding old and weak even to himself.
Javas nodded. “In his sleep. A heart seizure.”
“But he is too young…”
“He was your age, Father.”
“And he refused rejuvenation treatments,” Rihana said, sounding positively happy. “As if he were royalty! The pretentious fool. A servant… a menial…”
“He was a friend of this House,” the Emperor said.
“He killed my brother,” said Javas.
“Your brother failed the test. He was a coward. Unfit to rule.” But Kyle passed you, the Emperor thought. You were found fit to rule… or was Kyle still ashamed of what he had done to my firstborn ?
“And you accepted his story.” For once, Javas’ bemused smile was gone. There was iron in his voice. “The word of a backwoods Earthman.”
“A pretentious fool,” Rihana gloated.
“A proud and faithful man,” the Emperor corrected. “A man who put honor and duty above personal safety or comfort.”
His eyes locked with Javas’. After a long moment in silence, the Prince shrugged and turned away.
“Regardless,” Rihana said, “we surveyed the situation on Earth, as you requested us to.”
Commanded, the Emperor thought. Not requested.
“The people there are all primitives. Hardly a city on the entire planet! It’s all trees and huge oceans.”
“I know,” he said drily, “I was born there.”
Javas said, “There are only a few millions living on Earth. They can be evacuated easily and resettled on a few of the frontier planets. After all, they are primitives.”
“Those ‘primitives’ are the baseline for our race. They are the pool of original genetic material, against which our scientists constantly measure the rest of humanity throughout the Hundred Worlds.”
Rihana said, “Well, they’re going to have to find another primitive world to live on.”
“Unless we prevent their Sun from exploding.”
Javas looked amused. “You’re not seriously considering that?”
“I am… considering it. Perhaps not very seriously.”
“It makes no difference,” Rihana said. “The plan to save the Sun—to save your precious Earth—will take hundreds of years to implement. You will be dead long before even the earliest steps can be brought to a conclusion. The next Emperor can cancel the entire plan the day he takes the throne.”
The Emperor turned his chair slightly to face his son, but Javas looked away, out toward the darkening forest.
“I know,” the Emperor whispered, more to himself than to her. “I know that full well.”
He could not sleep. The Emperor lay on the wide expanse of warmth, floating a single molecular layer above the gently soothing waters. Always before, when sleep would not come readily, a woman had solved the problem for him. But lately not even lovemaking helped.
The body grows weary but the mind refuses sleep. Is this what old age brings?
Now he lay alone, the ceiling of his tower bedroom depolarized so that he could see the blazing glory of the night sky of Corinth, capital planet of the Hundred Worlds.
Not the pale tranquil sky of Earth, with its bloated Moon smiling inanely at you, he thought. This was truly an Imperial sky, brazen with shimmering lights that glittered and sparkled like a thick sprinkling of gleaming gemstones. But they were not true stars, the Emperor knew. The inner reaches of the Procyon system were strewn with rubble, asteroids, the makings of planets that never coalesced because of the star’s massive gravity field. Debris, thought the Emperor. Still, they shine beautifully. No moon rode in the sky; none was needed. There was never true darkness on Corinth.
A few true stars shone feebly through the glittering haze. One particularly bright one: diamond-hard, brilliant. Procyon’s dwarf-star companion. A star that was halfway toward death.
That is what the Sun will look like one day, the Emperor realized. Once that companion had been a normal star, fully as large and bright as Procyon itself. When it collapsed it spewed out lethal waves of heat and radiation that scrubbed all life from the surface of Corinth. When the first explorers from Earth had found the planet, it was blackened and barren, its atmosphere just beginning to stabilize after its terrible ordeal.
That is why Corinth was made the capital of the Empire. It was useless for any other purpose. No one wanted it, so the Imperial Court was free to build on it without hindrance.
And yet Earth’s sky seemed so much friendlier. You could pick out old companions there: the two Bears, the Lion, the Twins, the Hunter, the Winged Horse.
Already I think of Earth in the past tense. Like Kyle. Like my son.
He thought of the Earth’s warming Sun. How could it turn traitor? How could it… begin to die? In his mind’s eye he hovered above the Sun, bathed in its fiery glow, watching its bubbling, seething surface. He plunged deeper into the roiling plasma, saw filaments and streamers arching a thousand Earthspans into space, heard the pulsing throb of the star’s energy, the roar of its power, blinding bright, overpowering, ceaseless merciless heat, throbbing, roaring, pounding…
He was gasping for breath and the pounding he heard was his own heartbeat throbbing in his ears. Soaked with sweat, he tried to sit up. The bed enfolded him protectively, supporting his body.