The Lotus Eaters

* * *

Wallenstein wrinkled her nose at the vile aroma arising from the helmet as she removed it from Richard's head.

She pushed it as far from her nose as she could, then carried it to a stand against one wall. There she picked up a towel which she carried back and handed to Richard.

'Actually, you didn't do badly,' she said.

He answered, while wiping his face with the towel, 'I lost my ship.'

'Everyone loses his ship,' she assured him. 'Everyone. That's not the point.'

'Then what is the point?' he asked, dropping the foul towel.

'To see who panics, who turns into a gibbering monkey, who becomes abusive. On those grounds, you did pretty well.'

'Not well enough to be worthy of actually commanding the ship.'

Again, Richard's basic decency, so rare in a natural born Class One, and humility, which was much rarer, struck her.

'You will be,' she assured him. Moreover, she was surprised to discover, she believed it was true. And that's important, not least because I'm not going to have time to hold your hand once I get back and have to deal with that idiot, Battaglia.

Chapter Thirteen

Democracy, it has been said, can only exist until the voting populace discovers it can vote itself largesse from the public coffers. Though it is less often said; it also happens that the voting populace discovers—indeed it is educated to the notion—that it has the power to radically expand the size of those coffers, seemingly the better to vote themselves largesse.

How quickly this happens depends on many factors. A relatively classless society is relatively immune, for so long as it remains relatively classless. There are several reasons for this. Large among these reasons is that, without great disparities in wealth being shoved into people's faces, they feel little envy. Less emotionally, without some apparent concentration of wealth to be tapped, people will tend to see government redistribution schemes as little more than an exercise in taking money from their pockets, peeling off a large percentage for government overhead and then returning that much reduced sum back to their own, now sadly emptier, pockets.

Never mind that even in societies with great inequalities in wealth it works much the same, as the poor use the government to take from the rich, and the rich use the fact of ownership over property, and the ability to set prices (which price setting is driven by the common tax, acting in lieu of a conspiracy), to take it right back from the poor. People tend to want to believe the illusion that this does not happen or, at least, need not, even though their own lot never improves, long-term, under such a regime. Thus they demand that the government take ever more from the rich, which causes the rich to take ever more from the poor, with only the government itself gaining any advantage whatsoever, as it takes an increasing cut of an increasing share.

This continues, at least, until the taxation gets to the point that it begins to hurt the economy. After that, government takes an increasing share of a decreasing pot.

—Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,

Historia y Filosofia Moral,

Legionary Press, Balboa,

Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468

Anno Condita 471 Presidential Palace, Old Balboa, Republic of Balboa, Terra Nova

The government which had been electorally defeated by Raul Parilla, running with the support of the Legion, the same government which had been kept alive by the Tauran Union and the Federated States, didn't control much of the country. It owned some of the police. It had most of the old city, which was but a fraction of the new, and not the largest fraction at that. It had some government buildings, the national cathedral, a museum, a few monuments, an opera house, and some very nice urban residential areas along with some wretched ones. Also it had the Presidential Palace, a sort of Venetian palazzo, complete with courtyard, and even some trixies. Wire mesh over the courtyard kept the trixies in and the antaniae out. Neither species was very happy about that.

'I want him dead! I want the ijo de puta dead!' The patriarch of the Rocaberti family fairly shrieked at his son in law, Belisario Endara-Rocaberti. Belisario had been named for the republic's greatest hero, Belisario Carrera, multi-great grandfather-in-law of Patricio Carrera. No one, least of all Belisario himself, thought he quite deserved the name. Frankly, at five feet, six and with a girth of two thirds of that, he just didn't look the part. Nor was he, as he'd have cheerfully told anyone, the stuff of which heroes were made. Sometimes women found that honesty charming. Other times, for some women, his not inconsiderable wealth and prominent family name were more attractive.

Still, he had his virtues. Realism was one of them. Young Endara-Rocaberti walked to his uncle's second floor office window and drew the curtains.

'Do you remember whose statue is out there, uncle,' he asked.

The pseudo-president scowled, his jowls trembling with rage. 'Of course I know. Your namesake. The peasant bastard.'

'Not just my namesake,' Endara-Rocaberti corrected. 'My mother and father just gave me the first name. That's not too uncommon, really. But your great enemy, your dangerous enemy, has the last name.'

'He's no blood of the original.'