"Is this why you came to me?" I asked her once. "Because you knew that through me you could do more good for your cause than you could otherwise?"
"Yes." She made no attempt to avoid the issue. She was not the type.
"And my wife sent you for the same reason?" I always meant Megan when I referred to my wife, though I had been married several times.
"Yes."
"May I never disappoint either of you."
"You have not so far."
"But you expect me to in the future?"
"When you die."
Oh. And of course my end was approaching, for the exhaustion of my access sites for dialysis was accelerating as I had increasing trouble with clotting. We had moved from my legs to my arms, no longer needing to conceal the scars. I was at this point sixty-eight years old, and considering it realistically I judged that two more years was all I could expect of mobile, functional existence. Thereafter I would be bedridden, and deprived of the various pleasures of independent existence, sex among them.
I think it was at that point that I decided to die in my own fashion, not waiting for the inevitable degradation to have its way with me. I did not fear death; I feared a helpless, meaningless life.
"What unfinished business do I have?" I asked her.
She ticked items off on her fingers. "Completion of the Triton Project. Incorporation of the Middle Kingdom. Designation of a successor to the Tyrancy."
"And only a year to do it," I muttered.
"Pardon?"
"Let's get on it." But of course she had heard me the first time.
We took the tube to Triton. By this time there were many projection tubes, serving all the planets, and the self-receiving projection units were coming off the Jupiter lines. These actually amounted to the preset conversion of light beams in photon computers, the beams calibrated so accurately that the mergence of the key beams did not occur until the set distance had been traveled. The farther the distance, the more precise the settings had to be. We had used a very crude version to travel from Mercury to Jupiter; the difference between a span of a light-hour or so and that of a thousand light-years or so is manifest. But with the perfection of that technology, we were ready to send colony ships virtually any distance into the galaxy. It was time to officially inaugurate that program, and Forta was right: it had to be done by the Tyrant, the unifying figure for this effort. If I didn't see it started in my lifetime, it might very well dissolve thereafter into factional fragmentation, and the chance to do it peacefully would be lost.
For though the Triton Project represented the gateway to man's future, a channel for man's aggressive energies in lieu of internecine warfare, it also represented danger. In the wrong hands, that technology could be turned to the projection of bombs, and against these there was no reasonable prospect for defense. Mankind had to colonize—or risk destruction. Once the colony ships reached their locations, there would be no incentive for war. The challenges of the local systems would be enough to absorb the full attentions of the expeditions, and what point would there be in projecting a bomb to another system, that would not arrive for many years or decades even at light velocity? In fact, since the colonists would be traveling to widely differing regions of space, one colony would be setting up at a nearby system while others were still on their way, perhaps not materializing for another twenty years. Though transit would seem instant for those aboard each ship, it was not. Never again would man be cramped within a single system, able to attack his neighbors within a span of hours. As I saw it, interplanetary warfare would be over—and that was the Dream. Chairman Khukov had conceived it, and not lived to see its completion, but I was seeing it through.
That reminded me of Lieutenant Commander Repro, the officer of the Jupiter Navy who had conceived the dream of the perfect unit, and had implemented it through me. He had died when it seemed that unit was finished, but it had survived, and with its assistance I had become the Tyrant. Now I was doing the same for Khukov's Dream. Khukov himself had been a tough, unscrupulous man, who had used his talent, which was similar to mine, to win his way to his planet's highest office and position of power, but his Dream had been a great one. Perhaps there is good in the most evil of men, and while Khukov had not been truly evil, his Dream was truly good. Forta was right: I had to see it through while I lived. The fate of my species might well depend on it.
Of course I was nominally in charge of the Triton Project. But once I got it organized, I had hardly been there. So this was an inspection trip. Spirit joined us for it; she was more conversant with the details.
As our ship approached Triton I was amazed. The project had started as a single dome on the planet. Now it was a monstrous complex spreading from crater to crater. Projection tubes orbited it, not one or two, but hundreds. As we drew near, I discovered the size of them: each greater in diameter than any ship I had known in the Navy. What monstrous vessels were they designed to accommodate?
Then, in closer orbit, we spied those vessels: colony ships of a scale hardly imagined before. Even after allowing for necessary supplies for a decade or so, including construction equipment for planetary sites, each ship looked big enough to handle tens of thousands of colonists. Yet these, I knew, were not the major vessels; the big ones were bubbles, to be projected entire, with up to a million residents each. Those were being outfitted in the atmosphere of Neptune. No wonder this project was expensive!
It had been happening all along, and I knew that Spirit had been running it and Forta had been receiving bulletins on progress throughout; I simply had not been paying attention. I plead age and illness; I had been more interested in dialysis and distaff anatomy than in the business of the Solar System. Though my physical powers were waning, my interest in performance had not; consequently my romantic life had taken more attention, not less. Perhaps this would not have been the case, had Forta been less versatile. She had provided me, in her fashion, with every type of woman from Helen of Troy to the barely nubile. She had given me another affair with my teenage lover Amber, who in real life was now in her late twenties. But I really should have kept up on what was happening around Triton!
I had already decided to complete my business in life expeditiously, but this was a forceful reminder. The project I was nominally running had outstripped my awareness while I dallied; I was allowing age to narrow my compass, and I regretted it. Yet I also felt pride, for, however circuitously, I had wrought this thing. I had only to see the first great colony ship projected, and then I would know that even if I died that instant, mankind was on its way to the stars at the velocity of light, and my work in life was done.
Spirit squeezed my scarred arm, signaling her understanding. Her life, too, was merged in this project. She had done the actual organizational work to make it come to pass. It was really hers more than mine.
I glanced at her. She had been apart from me much of the time in recent years, traveling to Jupiter and the inner planets, handling the myriad executive details of the organization of man's effort of colonization. She was sixty-five now, and looked it. She had not bothered with the treatments and cosmetics that retarded the semblance of aging, and the faint pattern of scars on her face had become more pronounced. The scars of the burns received when she handled a drive-rocket with her bare hands, saving our lives. She had been twelve then. Now her face changed, in my view, and I saw again that sweet, tough child who had supported me so well. From that time until this, Spirit had been my true strength.
I found myself kissing her. I had not known I was going to do it, or that I was doing it; it was as if my consciousness formed in the middle. She was kissing back. Then I drew away, and looked away, and she neither moved nor spoke. On the one side I wondered why a man should feel apologetic for kissing his sister; on the other, I knew why. But this could not be spoken.
Forta was gazing ahead, looking at Triton and the massive complex of the project on its surface. "You left your kidneys here," she murmured.
And there
was another thing to ponder. The beginning of the ending of my life had been here, too, as well as the beginning of the completion of it. Coincidence or design of fate—which was the more accurate description? I wasn't sure I cared to know.
We landed and were ushered into the complex. The personnel were ready to answer any questions and had enormous stores of ready data, but I was tired already, and very soon Forta put me to bed and held my hand while I drifted like a disabled ship into the orbit of slumber.
I dreamed of flying, only I was not the flier, I was being carried, borne by a great fantasy creature, an ifrit. He brought me to a castle, and into a high tower of that castle, and laid me on a bed beside a truly lovely young woman. She was garbed in the robe of a princess, and a circlet of precious stones bound down her flowing hair. Then the ifrit changed into a bedbug and bit me on the rear, and I woke, startled, for the first time becoming aware of the damsel. In my dream this made sense, as it would not have in life; I had more than one level of awareness.
I gazed upon the damsel, and lo, she was the fairest creature I had ever seen, the image of my first love Helse, and I said to myself "Oh, if this be the princess my father wishes me to marry, I have been a fool to resist his wish!" Then I put my hand on the girl's shoulder and tried to awaken her, but she slumbered on soundly. I stroked her body, moved to desire by the perfect rondure of her breast and the firmness of her thigh, but she would not wake and I would not rape her. So I lay back down beside, resolved to tell my father in the morning that I agreed after all to marry the one he had selected.
When I slept, the ifrit spoke to the ifritah, the female of his species. "Now do you wake your charge, and we shall see how she reacts to him." And she became another bedbug and bit the princess on her plush behind, and she woke, slapping at the place, then spied me sleeping beside her. "Oh, what a charming prince!" she murmured, and it was true; I was as young and attractive for a male as she was for a female, and set onto my head was a thin crown of gold, and my robe too was encrusted with gems. But I remained asleep.
She put her hand on me, and shook me by the shoulder, as I had with her. "Oh, wake, Prince!" she whispered, but I did not.
"If this be the man my father wishes to betroth me to, surely I have been willful to deny him!" she exclaimed. Then she stroked my handsome face, and when I still did not wake, my arms and chest. She opened my robe and ran her hands down inside, and caressed my belly and my thighs and my member, but I slept on. She lay across me and kissed me, and finally returned to sleep, embracing me.
Then I woke—but the princess was gone, and I was myself again, old and frail and unhandsome. Ever has it been thus, in reality! I pondered the dream, and recognized it: It was from the depths of my childhood memory, a tale of sorcery, in which ifrits had had a beauty contest, each believing that the person he or she had discovered was the most beautiful in all the world. So they had brought the two together, and awakened them by turns, letting the young folk judge by their reactions which of them was the most attractive. The ifrit favoring the man had because the woman reacted more to the man than the man had to the woman. Then the ifrits had returned the two human folk, sleeping, to their own residences and thought no more of the matter, leaving each longing with futility for the unknown other. A good, and frustrating, story.
Why had I remembered it now? Why had I dreamed it, as if I were a figure in it? I did not know.
"Forta," I said.
She was there immediately. "Yes, Hope?"
And what did I want of her? That she be young and beautiful, like a princess, and I like a prince? Ludicrous! She would do it, I knew, if I asked her—but why should I put her to this trouble, just because of a foolish dream?
"Tell me, Hope," she said.
So I told her. She nodded. "Be right back."
But by the time she returned, I had fallen asleep again, and her emulation was wasted. Well, perhaps not entirely, for in the morning I found her sleeping beside me, garbed as a princess and resembling Helse. I kissed her on the mask, appreciating her effort; she tried so hard to please me, and I hardly felt worthy of it.
In the day we talked with the officials of the project, and ascertained that they could ship the first colony vessel at any time; it was not necessary to have facilities for the entire System before starting, as the complete process would take years or decades. The logistics of handling five billion living human beings guaranteed that.
But almost a third of the living people of the System were not yet committed to the project. That was because South Saturn—the Middle Kingdom—had not joined. I had invited that huge nation to participate, but a mistake I had made before haunted me. I had allowed my old enemy Tocsin to be exiled there, and, true to his nature, he had poisoned the people against my works. Short of conquest, which would have been ruinously expensive and risky, there had been no way to obtain their commitment, so I had let it go. Now I realized that I had to do something; we could not leave the Middle Kingdom behind. Those many hundreds of millions of people would overrun the remainder of the System unless they had their own quadrant of the galaxy to colonize.
So it was we traveled next to South Saturn. We were treated cordially there; it seemed that the officers had been watching the development of the Triton Project, and had increasingly desired to participate in the conquest of the galaxy, because the need of their nation was greater than that of any other except populous Earth. But it was difficult for them to reverse themselves; there was a matter of face.
Of course they did not state this directly; I read it in their reactions as they spoke, while Forta translated their words for me. They were ready to cast off the malign influence of Tocsin, who it seemed was wearing out his welcome, but they needed a suitable pretext to do so. Well, I was a statesman, which is a polite term for an executive who is out of power; surely I could devise such a pretext. "How goes it with the rings?" I inquired. There was a scowl. "The rings are rightly part of Saturn," the Premier said. "But we lack the navy to do what should be done."
"The rings are a far better place from which to launch colony ships than the surface of Saturn itself," I reminded him. "If it were possible for you to join forces with Wan—" For that was the name of the Nation of the Rings. The former government of the Middle Kingdom had retreated to the rings when defeated on the planetary surface, and only the presence of the Jupiter Navy had prevented further action there.
"We should be glad to join forces—by reuniting that territory with the planet, as is fitting," he said grimly.
"Yet you hardly need the rings, other than as a station for departure," I pointed out. "What use will they be to Saturn—after Saturn has colonized a major segment of the galaxy?"
He nodded. "You are clever, Tyrant," he said via the translation. "We might settle for conquest in name only, provided there is no public denial, and the shipping facilities of the rings were made available to us."
"Let me talk to Wan," I said.
We traveled to the rings. I speak as though this happened in hours; actually I have greatly abridged these proceedings in this narrative. They took months, because we had to talk also with the several major provinces of the Middle Kingdom, a time-consuming process. But this was the essence.
I had never before been actually in the rings of Saturn, because they were proprietary territory; our ships had gone around them, and I had admired them in passing. Now that changed. For the first time I saw them at truly close range.
From a distance, as we know, the rings are beautiful, a gigantic halo around Saturn, perhaps the most dramatic sight in our System. Up close, it fuzzes somewhat, because it is composed of small separate stones or balls of ice, and they are not artistic individually. We nudged inside, seeking the capital-bubble of Pei, and now the fragments seemed to float all about us. It was like being in a magnified fog, with each droplet of water expanded. It reminded me of a vision I had had, decades before, when I had been with Roulette, using poles to push away floating rocks so our ship could get throug
h. That had been a dream; this was real. Why does so much of my present experience remind me of my past?
We pushed on, moving slowly through the pebbles and rocks and scattered boulders of the ring, noting how the system was not rigid, but liquid on the larger scale, the inner fragments orbiting faster than the outer ones. Perhaps this was not directly visible, but in my fancy it was; I saw the channeled soup of it, this living substance of the ring. I remembered also the time I had emptied the refuse containers of our little space bubble, as we drifted toward Jupiter; the stuff had gone into orbit, and surely remains there now. These rings of Saturn—could they be the refuse of some ancient alien spaceship, whose creatures needed to unload before departing for home? How ironic, that such beauty should come from such an origin! True, scientists had long since sampled and analyzed the substance of the rings, and pronounced it natural—but who can say what alien refuse might resemble?
Thus my experience in passing through the rings was not the average, but it was worthwhile for me. Now I felt I understood the rings. Perhaps this would help me negotiate with the authorities of Wan.
The Generalissimo of Wan was courteous but firm: his nation would join forces with the Middle Kingdom only by conquering it, as it was his firm intention to do. Of course it has been his intention for thirty years, and his chances of success, should the Jupiter Navy even allow him to try, were practically nonexistent, but that was his attitude. It was a matter of face.