“Is that what you plan to be? A figurehead?”
“I plan to be the Emperor. I supplied money when you had none. I supplied the cadre when you had none. I supplied the respectability you needed to build a large organization here in Wye. I can still withdraw everything I’ve brought in.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you want to risk it? Don’t think you can treat me as you treated Kaspalov, either. If anything happens to me, Wye will become uninhabitable for you and yours, and you will find that no other sector will supply you with what you need.”
Namarti sighed. “Then you insist on having the Emperor killed.”
“I didn’t say ‘killed.’ I said brought down. The details I leave to you.” The last was accompanied by an almost dismissive wave of the hand, a flick of the wrist, as if he were already sitting on the Imperial throne.
“And then you’ll be Emperor?”
“Yes.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll be dead—and not at my hands, either. Andorin, let me teach you some of the facts of life. If Cleon is killed, then the matter of the succession comes up and, to avoid civil war, the Imperial Guard will at once kill every member of the Wyan mayoral family they can find; you, first of all. On the other hand, if only the First Minister is killed, you will be safe.”
“Why?”
“A First Minister is only a First Minister. They come and go. It is possible that Cleon himself may have grown tired of him and arranged the killing. Certainly, we would see to it that rumors of this sort are spread. The Imperial Guard would hesitate and would give us a chance to put the new government into place. Indeed, it is quite possible that they would themselves be grateful for the end of Seldon.”
“And with the new government in place, what am I to do? Keep on waiting? Forever?”
“No. Once I’m First Minister, there will be ways of dealing with Cleon. I may even be able to do something with the Imperial Guard and use them as my instruments. I will then manage to find some safe way of getting rid of Cleon, and replacing him with you.”
Andorin burst out, “Why should you?”
Namarti said, “What do you mean, why should I?”
“You have a personal grudge against Seldon. Once he is gone, why should you run the unnecessary risks at the highest level? You will make your peace with Cleon and I will have to retire to my crumbling estate and my impossible dreams. And perhaps to play it safe, you will have me killed.”
Namarti said, “No! Cleon was born to the throne. He comes from several generations of Emperors—the proud Entun dynasty. He would be very difficult to handle, a plague. You, on the other hand, would come to the throne as a member of a new dynasty, without any strong ties to tradition, for the previous Wyan Emperors were, you will admit, totally undistinguished. You will be seated on a shaky throne and will need someone to support you—me. And I will need someone who is dependent upon me and whom I can therefore handle—you. —Come, Andorin, ours is not a marriage of love, which fades in a year; it is a marriage of convenience, which can last lifelong. Let us trust each other.”
“You swear I will be Emperor.”
“What good would swearing do if you couldn’t trust my word? Let us say I would find you an extraordinarily useful Emperor, and I would want you to replace Cleon as soon as that can safely be managed. Now introduce me to your man who you think will be the perfect tool for your purposes.”
“Very well. And remember what makes him different. I have studied him. He’s a not-very-bright idealist. He will do what he’s told, unconcerned by danger, unconcerned by second thoughts. And he exudes a kind of trustworthiness so that his victim will trust him even if he has a blaster in his hand.”
“I find that impossible to believe.”
“Wait till you meet him,” said Andorin.
“What’s this about new gardeners?” said Seldon angrily. This time, he did not ask Gruber to sit down.
Gruber’s eyes blinked rapidly. He was in a panic at having been recalled so unexpectedly. “New gardeners?” he stammered.
“You said, ‘all the new gardeners.’ Those were your words. What new gardeners?”
Gruber was astonished. “Sure, if there is a new Chief Gardener, there will be new gardeners. It is the custom.”
“I have never heard of this.”
“The last time we had a change of Chief Gardeners, you were not First Minister. It is likely you were not even on Trantor.”
“But what’s it all about?”
“Well, gardeners are never discharged. Some die. Some grow too old and are pensioned off and replaced. Still, by the time a new Chief Gardener is ready for his duties, at least half the staff is aged and beyond their best years. They are all pensioned off, generously, and new gardeners are brought in.”
“For youth.”
“Partly, and partly because by that time there are usually new plans for the gardens, and it is new ideas and new schemes we must have. There are almost five hundred square kilometers in the gardens and parklands, and it usually takes some years to reorganize it, and it is myself who will have to supervise it all. Please, First Minister.” Gruber was gasping. “Surely, a clever man like your own self can find a way to change the blessed Emperor’s mind.”
Seldon paid no attention. His forehead was creased in concentration. “Where do the new gardeners come from?”
“There are examinations on all the worlds—there are always people waiting to serve as replacements. They’ll be coming in by the hundreds in a dozen batches. It will take me a year, at the least—”
“From where do they come? From where?”
“From any of a million worlds. We want a variety of horticultural knowledge. Any citizen of the Empire can qualify.”
“From Trantor, too?”
“No, not from Trantor. There is no one from Trantor in the gardens.” His voice grew contemptuous. “You can’t get a gardener out of Trantor. The parks they have here under the dome aren’t gardens. They are potted plants, and the animals are in cages. Trantorians, poor specimens that they are, know nothing about open air, free water, and the true balance of nature.”
“All right, Gruber. I will now give you a job. It will be up to you to get me the names of every new gardener scheduled to arrive over the coming weeks. Everything about them. Name. World. Identification number. Education. Experience. Everything. I want it here on my desk just as quickly as possible. I’m going to send people to help you. People with machines. What kind of a computer do you use?”
“Only a simple one for keeping track of plantings and species and things like that.”
“All right. The people I will have helping you will be able to do anything you can’t do. I can’t tell you how important this is.”
“If I should do this—”
“Gruber, this is not the time to make bargains. Fail me, and you will not be Chief Gardener. Instead, you will be discharged without a pension.”
Alone again, he barked into his communication wire. “Cancel all appointments for the rest of the afternoon.”
He then let his body flop in his chair, feeling every bit of his fifty years, and more, feeling his headache worsen. For years, for decades, security had been built about the Imperial Palace Grounds, thicker, more solid, more impenetrable, as each new layer and each new device was added.
—And every once in a while, hordes of strangers were let into the grounds. No questions asked, probably, but: Can you garden?
The stupidity involved was too colossal to grasp.
And he had barely caught it in time. Or had he? Was he, even now, too late?
Gleb Andorin gazed at Namarti through half-closed eyes. He never liked the man, but there were times when he liked him less than he usually did, and this was one of those times. Why should Andorin, a Wyan of royal birth (that’s what it amounted to, after all) have to work with this parvenu, this near-psychotic paranoid?
Andorin knew why, and he had to endure, even when Namarti was once a
gain in the process of telling the story of how he had built up the Party during a period of ten years to its present pitch of perfection. Did he tell this to everyone, over and over? Or was it just Andorin who was his chosen vessel for the receipt of it?
Namarti’s face seemed to shine with malignant glee as he said, in an odd singsong, as though it were a matter of rote, “—so year after year, I worked on those lines, even through hopelessness and uselessness, building an organization, chipping away at confidence in the government, creating and intensifying dissatisfaction. When there was the banking crisis and the week of the moratorium, I—” He paused suddenly. “I’ve told you this many times, and you’re sick of hearing it, aren’t you?”
Andorin’s lips twitched in a brief, dry smile. Namarti was not such an idiot as not to know the bore he was; he just couldn’t help it. Andorin said, “You’ve told me this many times.” He allowed the remainder of the question to hang in the air, unanswered. The answer, after all, was an obvious affirmative. There was no need to face him with it.
A slight flush crossed Namarti’s sallow face. He said, “But it could have gone on forever, the building, the chipping, without ever coming to a point, if I hadn’t had the proper tool in my hands. And without any effort on my part, the tool came to me.”
“The gods brought you Planchet,” said Andorin, neutrally.
“You’re right. There will be a group of gardeners entering the Imperial Palace Grounds soon.” He paused and seemed to savor the thought. “Men and women. Enough to serve as a mask for the handful of our operatives who will accompany them. Among them will be you—and Planchet. And what will make you and Planchet unusual is that you will be carrying blasters.”
“Surely,” said Andorin, with deliberate malice behind a polite expression, “we’ll be stopped at the gates and held for questioning. Bringing an illicit blaster onto the Palace Grounds—”
“You won’t be stopped,” said Namarti, missing the malice. “You won’t be searched. That’s been arranged. You will all be greeted as a matter of course by some Palace Official. I don’t know who would ordinarily be in charge of that task—the Third Assistant Chamberlain in Charge of Grass and Leaves, for all I know—but in this case, it will be Seldon himself. The great mathematician will hurry out to greet the new gardeners and welcome them to the Grounds.”
“You’re sure of that, I suppose.”
“Of course I am. It’s all been arranged. He will learn, at more or less the last minute, that his son is among those listed as new gardeners, and it will be impossible for him to refrain from coming out to see him. And when Seldon appears, Planchet will raise his blaster. Our people will raise the cry of ‘Treason.’ In the confusion and hurly-burly, Planchet will kill Seldon, and you will kill Planchet. You will then drop your blaster and leave. There are those who will help you leave. It’s been arranged.”
“Is it absolutely necessary to kill Planchet?”
Namarti frowned. “Why? Do you object to one killing and not to another? When Planchet recovers, do you wish him to tell the authorities all he knows about us? Besides, this is a family feud we are arranging. Don’t forget that Planchet is, in actual fact, Raych Seldon. It will look as though the two had fired simultaneously, or as though Seldon had given orders that if his son made any hostile move, he was to be shot down. We will see to it that the family angle will be given full publicity. It will be reminiscent of the bad old days of the Bloody Emperor Manowell. The people of Trantor would surely be repelled by the sheer wickedness of the deed. That, piled on top of all the inefficiencies and breakdowns they’ve been witnessing and living through, will raise the cry for a new government, and no one will be able to refuse them, least of all the Emperor. And then we’ll step in.”
Raych had no trouble seeing that he was being treated with special care. The whole group of would-be gardeners were now quartered in one of the hotels in the Imperial Sector, although not one of the prime hotels, of course.
They were an odd lot, from fifty different worlds, but Raych had little chance to speak to any of them. Andorin, without being too obvious about it, kept him apart from the others.
Raych wondered why. It depressed him. In fact, he had been feeling somewhat depressed since he had left Wye. It interfered with his thinking process and he fought it, but not with entire success.
Andorin was himself wearing rough clothes and was attempting to look like a workman. He would be playing the part of a gardener as a way of running the show—whatever the show might be.
Raych felt ashamed that he had not been able to penetrate the nature of that “show.” They had closed in on him and prevented all communication, so he hadn’t had the chance to warn his father. They might be doing this for every Trantorian who had been pushed into the group, for all he knew, just as an extreme precaution. Raych estimated that there might be a dozen Trantorians among the group, all of them Namarti’s people, of course, men and women both.
What puzzled him was that Andorin treated him with what was almost affection. He monopolized him, insisted on having all his meals with him, treated him quite differently from the way in which he treated anyone else in the group.
Could it be because they had shared Manella? Raych did not know enough about the mores of the Sector of Wye to be able to tell whether there might not be a polyandrish touch to their society. If two men shared a woman, did that make them, in a way, fraternal? Did it create a bond?
Raych had never heard of such a thing, but he knew better than to suppose he had a grasp of even a tiny fraction of the infinite subtleties of Galactic societies, even of Trantorian societies.
But now that his mind had brought him back to Manella, he dwelled on her for a while. He missed her terribly, and it occurred to him that that might be the cause of his depression, though, to tell the truth, what he was feeling now, as he was finishing lunch with Andorin, was almost despair—though he could think of no cause for it.
Manella!
She had said she wanted to visit the Imperial Sector and, presumably, she could wheedle Andorin to her liking. He was desperate enough to ask a foolish question. “Mr. Andorin, I keep wondering if maybe you brought Miss Dubanqua along with you. Here, to the Imperial Sector.”
Andorin looked utterly astonished. Then he laughed gently. “Manella? Do you see her doing any gardening? Or even pretending she could? No, no, Manella is one of those women invented for our quiet moments. She has no function at all, otherwise.” Then, “Why do you ask, Planchet?”
Raych shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s sort of dull around here. I sort of thought—” His voice trailed away.
Andorin watched him carefully. Finally, he said, “Surely, you’re not of the opinion that it matters much which woman you are involved with? I assure you it doesn’t matter to her which man she’s involved with. Once this is over, there will be other women. Plenty of them.”
“When will this be over?”
“Soon. And you’re going to be part of it in a very important way.” Andorin watched Raych narrowly.
Raych said, “How important? Aren’t I gonna be just—a gardener?” He was speaking in a hollow voice, and found himself unable to put a spark in it.
“You’ll be more than that, Planchet. You’ll be going in with a blaster.”
“With a what?”
“A blaster.”
“I never held a blaster. Not in my whole life.”
“There’s nothing to it. You lift it. You point it. You close the contact, and someone dies.”
“I can’t kill anyone.”
“I thought you were one of us; that you would do anything for the cause.”
“I didn’t mean—kill.” Raych couldn’t seem to collect his thoughts. Why must he kill? What did they really have in mind for him? And how would he be able to alert the Palace Guards before the killing would be carried out?
Andorin’s face hardened suddenly: an instant conversion from friendly interest to stern decision. He said, “You must kill.??
?
Raych gathered all his strength. “No. I ain’t gonna kill nobody. That’s final.”
Andorin said, “Planchet, you will do as you are told.”
“Not murder.”
“Even murder.”
“How you gonna make me?”
“I shall simply tell you to.”
Raych felt dizzy. What made Andorin sound so confident?
He shook his head. “No.”
Andorin said, “We’ve been feeding you, Planchet, ever since you left Wye. I made sure you ate with me. I supervised your diet. Especially the meal you just had.”
Raych felt the horror rise within him. He suddenly understood. “Desperance!”
“Exactly,” said Andorin. “You’re a sharp devil, Planchet.”
“It’s illegal.”
“Yes, of course. So’s killing.”
Raych knew about desperance. It was a chemical modification of a perfectly harmless tranquilizer. The modified form, however, did not produce tranquility, but despair. It had been outlawed because of its use in mind control, though there were persistent rumors that the Imperial Guard used it.
Andorin said, as though it were not hard to read Raych’s mind, “It’s called desperance because that’s an old word meaning ‘hopelessness.’ I think you’re feeling hopeless.”
“Never,” whispered Raych.
“Very resolute of you, but you can’t fight the chemical. And the more hopeless you feel, the more effective the drug. So, you see, I want you to be hopeless.”
“No chance.”
“Think about it, Planchet. Namarti recognized you at once, even without your mustache. He knows you are Raych Seldon. And, at my direction, you are going to kill your father.”
Raych muttered, “Not before I kill you.”
He rose from his chair. There should be no problem at all in this. Andorin might be taller, but he was slender and, clearly, no athlete. Raych would break him in two with one arm—but he swayed as he rose. He shook his head, but it wouldn’t clear.
Andorin rose, too, and backed. He drew his right hand from where it had been resting within his left sleeve. There was a weapon in it.