after which Renyan broke open a bottle of his finest liqueur, and passed glasses around. “To Man,” he said, raising his glass, “who may not have come out of all this smelling like a rose, but who came out on top all the same.”
“Do you really think so, Mr. Renyan?” asked Agatha Moore. “Absolutely,” said Renyan expansively. “In one fell swoop we've added twenty percent to the Republic's annual income, nipped what amounted to an insurrection in the bud, satisfied if not delighted our fellow races, and secured Man's political power for the foreseeable future.” “And what do you think, Mr. Ngana?” she asked. “I think Man has had it,” he replied bluntly.
“Oh, not tomorrow, or even a century from now. I bought us quite a bit of time,” said Ngana. “But the handwriting is on the wall. We expanded too far too fast, tried to do too much too soon. In a matter of four or five hundred more years we'll have run out of stepping blocks to throw at the other races and we'll be out in the cold. I've secured us enough military might so that we'll survive. In fact, we'll do more than survive; we'll thrive and prosper. What we will not do is rule the galaxy with an iron hand. Not yet, anyway. The first chapter in Man's galactic history is coming to an end. The best we can do is consolidate what we've got and try to hang onto it for a few millennia; then we'll be ready to move forward again.”
“You sound as if we're about to enter a galactic Dark Age,” scoffed Renyan. “No,” said Ngana. “But our first Golden Age is going to get rather tarnished in the years ahead. Am I correct, Miss Moore?”
“Absolutely,” said Agatha Moore.
“Well, I'll be damned!” snapped Renyan. “You make it sound as if you sold us out!” “Not at all,” said Ngana. “I simply postponed the inevitable for as long as I could, and got us the best bargain I could manage. The problem was a fault inherent in our basic dream of Empire ... and make no mistake about it: Empire is what we were dreaming of. To control a world, you must control its economy, but for a world to have an economy it must be enlightened enough to ultimately desire fair payment for its labors. They happened to pick this point in history to demand that payment. “If it will make you feel any better, Man will continue to be the most potent and powerful single race in the galaxy. But a millennium or so from now, he will stand alone and apart from a galaxy that will be more or less united against him, or at least a galaxy with goals considerably different from his. Then Man will begin the second stage of his destiny. The first was to overcome the obstacles of Nature, and he succeeded with consummate ease. The next step will be to overcome the intelligent races of the galaxy, some of them a by-product of Nature, some bastard stepchildren of an illegitimate union between Man and Nature, for many of them would not have had their annoying drives and ambitions without our
guidance and example. I'll be surprised if Man accomplishes that step as easily as he took the first one,
but if he's to be the true master of the galaxy he'll have to do it sooner or later.” “Probably later,” said Agatha Moore.
“Don't count us out too soon,” said Ngana. “And now, if you will excuse me, I'm afraid I must return from the remote future to the problems of the here and now. The natives of Pinot VIII don't seem to give too much of a damn for the value of a credit these days, and since I'm still on salary, I imagine I'll have to look into the matter.”
And, so saying, the man who had extended the life of the Republic while simultaneously signing its death warrant scurried back to his office, thoroughly enmeshed in his newest problem. The future would have to take care of itself; as for the present, he had work to do. THIRD MILLENNIUM: DEMOCRACY
6: THE DIPLOMATS
...It soon became apparent that the Democracy had taken on the proportion of a Frankenstein monster unleashed by Man upon himself. Almost every galactic office of influence was held by nonhuman races, and Man found himself dealing from a position of weakness heretofore unknown to him. To retain what political and economic power still remained, the diplomats took on new powers and functions, becoming not merely ambassadors but actual policy makers, as in the case of... —
Eleven hundred years, reflected Hermione Chatham-Smythe, was a long time to be without glory. She looked at one of the viewing screens as her ship sped through space, and a thousand million stars blurred into one huge sparkling curtain. Some of those stars Man had lost, others he still held. But he hungered for all of them, hungered so greatly that he could almost taste them. The empty, gnawing lust was not new. Man had felt it before, had probably been born with it. And like a strong young giant, he had stalked across the galaxy, grasping at all within his reach. But in his youthful eagerness, he had grabbed more than his hand could hold, and bit by bit it began slipping away. Where once he had held twelve thousand worlds in his hand and reached for more, now he possessed a mere nine hundred, and had been seeking, for fifty generations, only to regain what had formerly been his. The worlds were valuable in and of themselves, but were even more valuable as a symbol, a testament to Man's primacy.
And Man would get them back. Even now, with his back to the wall, he dreamed not of survival, but of laying claim once again to his galactic birthright. Success wouldn't come as easily as it had in the heyday of the Republic, but it would be built more carefully this time, more solidly; it would be built to last as long as Man himself.
And Man planned to last a long, long time.
The first steps were simple: Man consolidated what holdings remained to him. Bit by bit he began
expanding again, but never did he move on to a new world or system until the last one was made secure. And always in Man's mind was the knowledge that pitted against him was an entire galaxy, a galaxy he had helped to unite in opposition to his claim upon it. It was a galaxy that, in whole or in part, still needed his trade, his science, his drive. But it was also a galaxy that was no longer playing by Man's ground rules.
Which, sighed Hermione, was where
She turned back to the viewing screen. Somewhere up ahead was her destination, the site of a very minor little war between two very minor little races. And the powers-that-be on Deluros VIII (Earth had not been abandoned, but the bureaucracy had long since outgrown it) had decided that one or both races needed a friend. At least one thing Kipchoge Ngana had predicted two millennia ago had come to pass: Although Man's military and economic power was minimal compared to that portion of the galactic races that were arrayed against him, he was still the single most powerful race around. Which meant, of course, that as long as his relations with other races were on a one-to-one basis, he was usually able to call the shots.
Just under two hours later the pilot informed her that they were entering the system that housed the Ramorians’ home planet. Hermione sent for Commodore Lucius Barnes, her young, super-efficient military adviser. “Does our basic information check out?” she asked when he arrived. “Pretty much so,” replied Barnes. “Ramor is not too different from Earth: about ten percent smaller, slightly higher oxygen content, rotates on its axis once every nineteen hours, solar year seems to be about 322 days or thereabouts. Theoretically, at least, they speak Galactic-O.” That last was a relief. No single language could be accommodated by all the varied races of the galaxy, but great strides had been made in the field of communications, foremost of which were the development of Galactic O, C, M, G, and N, the letters standing for Oxygen, Chlorine, Methane, Guttural, and Nonclassifiable. Almost ninety-five percent of the sentient races breathed either oxygen, chlorine, or methane, and one couldn't expect a crystalline methane breather to be able to produce the same explosive sounds as a carbon- based oxygen-breather, and so on. So five forms of Galactic had been developed, and most of the races were capable of speaking in at least one of the variations. There never had been, and probably never would be, a translating mechanism that would instantaneously, or even slowly, translate the sense of every native language, but every galactic traveler possessed an incredibly miniaturized T-pack which could give immediate translations of Galactic. No more than one race in five even knew of the existence of the Galactic languages, but even that percentage made the traveler's work much easier.
“Can we assess the situation yet?”
