Trantor Falls

“They crush it.” Sarns passed a weary hand across his forehead. “I know that as well as you, Maryan. But if he has courage, we can’t handle him as we would have before. “

“There is that,” she admitted. “Quiet, now—he’s almost here. “

Gilmer, Sarns thought, looked more like a barbarian chief than Emperor, even if a purple cape billowed behind him as he advanced. Beneath it he wore the coverall blotched in shades of green and brown that his soldiers used. Sarns supposed it was a camouflage suit, but in Trantor’s gleaming corridors it had more often exposed than protected the troopers. The nondescript gray of Sarns’s own coat and trousers was harder to spot here.

The usurper’s boots beat out a metallic tattoo. “Majesty,” Sarns said, knowing he should speak first and also knowing that, since Gilmer had seized Trantor, the title was true de facto if not de jure. Sarns did not approve of dealing in untruths.

“You’re Dean Sarns, eh?” Gilmer’s granite rumble should have come out of that hard, bearded countenance. The Emperor of the Galaxy scratched his nose, went on. “You’ve got some tough fighters behind you, Sarns. I tell you right now, I wouldn’t mind taking the lot of them into my fleet. “

“You are welcome to put out a call, sire, but I doubt you’d find many volunteers,” Sarns answered. “These young men and women are not soldiers by trade, but rather students. They—and I—care more for abstract knowledge than for the best deployment of a blast-rifle company. “

Gilmer nodded. “I’d heard that said. I found it hard to believe. Truth to tell, Sarns, I still do. You spend your whole lives chasing this—what did you call it?—abstract knowledge?”

“We do,” Sarns said proudly. “This is the University, after all, the distillation of all the wisdom that has accumulated over the millennia of Imperial history. We codify it, systematize it, and, where we can, add to it. “

“It seems a milk-livered way to spend one’s time,” Gilmer remarked, careless of Sarns’s feelings or—more likely—reckoning the Dean would agree with him when he pointed out an obvious truth. “What good is knowledge that you can’t eat, drink, sleep with, or shoot at your enemies?”

He is a barbarian, Sarns thought, even if he’s lived all his life inside what still calls itself, with less and less reason, the Galactic Empire. Fortunately Sarns, like any administrator worth his desk, had practice not showing what he felt. He said, ‘“Well, let me give you an example, sire: how did you and your victorious army come to Trantor?”

“By starship, of course.” Gilmer stared. “How else, man? Did you expect us to walk?” He laughed at his own wit.

Sarns smiled a polite smile. “Of course not. But what happens if one of your busbars shorts out or a hydrochron needs repair?”

‘“We fix ‘em, as best we can. Seems like nobody in the whole blasted Galaxy understands a hyperatomic motor any more,” Gilmer said, scowling. Then he stopped dead. “That’s knowledge too, isn’t it? By the space fiend, Sarns, are you telling me you’ve got a university full of technicians who really know what they’re doing? If you do, I’ll impress ‘em into the fleet and make you—and them—so rich they won’t ever miss their book-films, I promise you that.”

“We do have some people—not many, I fear—studying such things. As I said before, you are welcome to speak with them. Some may even choose to accompany you, for the challenge of working on real equipment.” Sarns paused a moment in thought. “We also have skilled doctors, computer specialists, and students of many other disciplines of value to the Empire.”

He watched Gilmer nibble the bait. “And they’d do these same kinds of things for me?” the usurper asked.

“Some might,” Sarns said. “Others—probably more—would be willing to instruct your technicians and personnel here. Of course,” he added smoothly, “they would be less enthusiastic if you shot your way in. You would also likely waste a good many of them that way.”

“Hrmmp,” Gilmer said. After a moment, he went on. “But any ships with their techs, their medics, their computer people gone—they’d be no more use to us than if they rusted away.“

“Not immediately, perhaps, but later they would be of even greater value to you than they could ever be with the inadequately trained crews I gather they have now.”

Gilmer lowered his voice. “Sarns, I can’t afford to think about later. I’d bet a million credits against a burnt-out blaster cartridge that there’s at least three fleets moving on me the same way I moved on Dagobert. Now that Trantor’s fallen, all the dogs of space will want to pick her bones—and mine.”

Privately, Sarns thought the usurper was right about that. It would only be what Gilmer deserved, too. But the dean-turned-general felt sadness wash over him all the same. No time to bother to learn anything new, no time to think about anything but the moment—that had been the disease of the Galactic Empire for far too long. Gilmer had a worse case of it than the emperors before him, but the root sickness was the same.