Trantor Falls

Gilmer went down to the command post in the bowels of the Imperial Palace, the command post from which, until recently, poor stupid Dagobert VIII had battled to keep him off Trantor. Gilmer’s boots clanged most satisfactorily there. Whoever had designed the command post, in the lost days of the Galactic Empire’s greatness, had understood about commanders and boots.

The television screen in front of Vergis Fenn went blank. He swiveled his chair, nodded in surprise to see Gilmer behind him. “Sire, we have a cease-fire between our forces and those of the University,” he said. “It was easy to arrange. Our troops and theirs will both hold in place until the final armistice is arranged. “

“Good,” Gilmer said. “Well done.”

“Thank you. The leader of the University has invited you to meet him on his ground to fix the terms of the armistice. He offers hostages to ensure your safety, and says he knows what will happen to everything he’s been fighting to keep if he plays you false. Shall I call him back and tell him no anyhow?”

“‘No, I’ll go there,” Gilmer said. “‘What d’you think, I’m afraid of somebody without so much as a single starship to his name? Besides”—he smiled a greedy smile—”like as not I’ll get a look at whatever treasures they’ve been fighting so hard to hang on to. If I can’t beat ‘em out of him, I’ll tax ‘em out—that’s what being Emperor is all about. So go ahead and set up the meeting with this—what’s his name, Vergis?”

“Yokim Sarns.”

“Yokim Sarns. What do I call him when I see him? General Sarns? Admiral? Warlord?”

Fenn’s expression was faintly bemused. “The only title he claims is ‘Dean,’ sire.”

“‘Dean?” Gilmer threw back his head and laughed loud and long. “ Aye, I’ll meet with the fierce Dean Yokim Sarns, the scourge of the lecture halls. Why not? Set it up for me, Vergis. Meanwhile”—he turned away—”I’1l check how we’re doing with the rest of the planet.”

Banks of televisor screens, relaying images from all over Trantor, told him what he wanted to know. Here he saw a platoon of his troopers carrying plastic tubs full of jewels back toward their ships; there more soldiers looting a residential block; somewhere else another squad, most of the men drunk, accompanied by twice their number of Trantorian women, some scared-looking, others smiling and brassy.

Gilmer grinned. This was why he’d taken Trantor: to sack a world unsacked for fifty generations, even more than to rule it after the sack. Watching his dream unfold made that came after seem of scant importance by comparison.

Watching...His gaze went back to that third screen. All the women there would have been heart-stopping beauties on a lesser world, but they were just enlisted men’s pickings on Trantor. With so many billions of women to choose from, the ones less than spectacular were simply ignored.

Smiling in anticipation, Gilmer took the spiral slidewalk up to the Imperial bedchambers. Not even in his wildest dreams had he imagined anything like them. Thousands of years of the best ingenuity money could buy had been lavished there on nothing but pleasure.

Billye smiled too, when he came in. Her tawny hair spilled over bare shoulders. Disdaining all the elaborations the bedchamber offered, Gilmer took her in his arms and sank to the floor with her. There he soon discovered an advantage of thick carpeting he had not suspected before.

She murmured lazily and lay in his arms through the afterglow. She’d been his woman since he was just an ambitious lieutenant. He’d always thought her splendid, both to look at and to love.

He did still, he told himself. He even felt the truth of the thought. But it was not complete truth, not any more. The televisor screen had shown him that, by Trantorian standards, she was ordinary. And how in reason and justice could the Emperor of the Galaxy and Lord of All possess a consort who was merely ordinary?

He grunted, softly. “A centicredit for your thoughts,” Billye said.

“Ahh, nothing much,” he said, and squeezed her. Her voice was not perfectly sweet either, he thought.

“Here he comes.” Maryan Drabel pointed to the single figure climbing down from the aircar that had descended in the no-man’s-land between Gilmer’s lines and those held by the student-soldiers of the University.

“He’s alone,” Yokim Sarns said in faint surprise. “I told him we were willing to grant him any reasonable number of bodyguards he wanted. He has more courage than I’d thought.”

“What difference does that make, when he can’t—or won’t—control his troops?” Maryan Drabel said bitterly. “How many raped women do we have in our clinic right now?”

“Thirty-seven,” Sarns answered. “And five men.”

“And that’s just from this one tiny corner of Trantor, and only counts people who got through Gilmer’s troops and ours,” she said. “How many over the whole planet, where he has forty billion people to terrorize? How many robberies? How many fires, set just for the fun of them? How many murders, Yokim? How do they weigh in the balance against one man’s courage?”