He started to seal up the envelope, then thought of something else and added a second page.
Now he sealed and addressed the letter and put it in the tray for his house agent to take to the appropriate drop. That last addition was nothing less than inspiration; all he would have to do would be to have one of the clerks deal with the paperwork to free the man, and send the family a little money, some luxury food items, and a basket of sweets for the children, and Melles would be a hero on the street. And he needn't trouble himself about petitioners plaguing him either. Now that he was officially the Emperor's Heir, the layers of bureaucracy between him and the citizen on the street were so many, so complex, and so labyrinthine that the average citizen would die of old age before he completed all of the paperwork required for an audience with him. This would only generate a little more work in the way of petitions, and there were plenty of low-level Imperial civil servants to take care of additional petitions.
Perhaps another man might have sent soldiers to arrest every member of the Movement—but another man did not have the depth of experience that Melles did. As long as he knew who belonged to these organizations, who were the real leaders and workers, and what their failings were, he was better off leaving them all in place. In times like these, insurrectionist movements were like cockroaches; squash one and a hundred more would hatch behind the wallboards. Rebels actually tended to thrive on a certain level of persecution, since persecution validated their cause in the eyes of others. In fact, many of them absolutely required feeling persecuted—and speaking loudly of it—in order to validate their own meager existence, since obviously only a Great Good would be opposed by a Great Evil. What made this even funnier, in a cripple-pitying sort of way, was that they would only proclaim their oppression to those peers least likely to disagree with them.
Melles, of course, played one facet of the same game on a much higher, more sophisticated level. People invariably polarized their views when they were given little information about a situation's complexities. If someone was not for your cause, then they must be against your cause; if not black, then white; if not day, then night. While the perennially-oppressed would use this tendency in human behavior to generate sympathy from others, Melles used it to steer public reaction. his actual plans and coups were more complex than could be briefly discussed by any layman, and he used fronts—like the labor groups and the police—to act as buffers and visible representations. He created simple concepts for laymen to absorb and react to, while giving little information about the greater, more complex goings-on. Thus, even the most clever leaders of rebel movements would be basing their actions upon incomplete information at best, low-end rumor at average, and utter fabrications at worst. Worst for them, anyway; for Melles it was simply human behavior according to schedule.
No, he would watch them, occasionally nurture them, frustrate and thwart them, and use them, but above all, he would let them have their little 'committee meetings' and make speeches and inflame one another. That kept them quiet and mostly harmless. The more they ranted about being suppressed under improving conditions, the less anyone would listen to or believe in them.
It was better to remove the occasional competent and dangerous member than to go after the entire group. If he could not manage to do so in any other way, the really dangerous ones would tragically die while defending themselves against a street thug or a house robber. Then, before the person could be martyred, various carefully- contrived 'secrets' about them would turn up during 'investigation' of the death—evidence that they were child molesters, for instance—to spoil the probable public outrage there would otherwise have been, and that distaste would carry over to be associated with any of the person's movement. It would only take ten or twenty such instances for the general citizenry to feel relieved that these troublemakers were gone.
On the whole, he enjoyed the amateur 'freedom fighters' as delightful entertainment, and if no group had sprung up, he would have had to start one just to have an organization to attract the real troublemakers. The most dangerous would be the very few individuals who realized that groups were obvious targets, and determined to undermine the authorities on their own. If he could catch someone like that, it would be by accident.
But the insurrectionist groups had their uses, not the least of which was that they gave the hotheads a place to vent their spleen. When they were making speeches, they were not setting fire to a storehouse of records, counterfeiting and giving away food chits, or breaking into a work camp and freeing prisoners.
Better a thousand fools' ineffectual speeches than a single food riot.
He moved that report from the 'pending' tray to the 'completed' tray, and turned his attention to the next in line. If conditions had not been so dire, he would have been positively gleeful; never had he possessed so much power over so many, and the sensation brought an intoxication he had not expected.
Report after report, from the heads of his specialized covert operations rings around the city, indicated that events were proceeding with as much smoothness as anyone could reasonably expect. The only things that could not be planned for were the effects of the mage-storms, and he hoped he had made enough allowance for the chaos those could cause. The precinct captains were political creatures, and although they were elected, he could replace them at his discretion. They could and would lie to save their jobs. The Imperial Commander was less likely to lie, yet still might shade the truth to conceal problems. His agents, however, were carefully picked and trained and they never reported anything but the facts, no matter how unpleasant. That was their job; he rewarded the truthful and got rid of those who were not—sometimes permanently, if they had been in a delicate or sensitive position. These reports confirmed his impression that the city was his: pacified, and lying quietly in the palm of his hand.
That was good, because he had no intention of leaving the capital, and he wanted it secured so that he could turn his attention to the Empire beyond without worrying about his personal safety and comfort. The power that
