Heirs of Empire

“She—” Colin paused, then shrugged. “It stays in this office, but I guess I can tell you. You know she’s bioengineering dogs for Narhan?” His guests nodded. “Well, she’s gone a bit further than I intended. She’s been working with a couple of Tinker Bell’s litters to give them near-human intelligence.”

“What?” Horus blinked at him. “I thought you told her not to—”

“I did. Unfortunately, she told me she wanted to ‘enhance their ability to communicate with the Narhani’ and I told her to go ahead.” He grimaced. “Silly me.”

“Oh, Maker,” Horus groaned. “Why can’t she have half as much common sense as she does brainpower?”

“Because she wouldn’t be Cohanna.” Colin grinned, then sobered. “The worst of it is, the first litter’s fully adult, and she’s been educating them through their implants,” he went on more somberly. “My emotions are having a little trouble catching up with my intellect, but if she’s really given them human or near-human intelligence, the whole equation shifts. I mean, if she’s gone and turned them into people on me, it’s not like putting a starving stray to sleep. ‘Lab animals’ or not, I’m not sure I even have a legal right, much less a moral one, to have them destroyed, whatever the possible consequences.”

“Excuse me, Your Majesty,” Jefferson suggested diffidently, “but I think, perhaps, you’d better consider doing just that.” Colin raised an eyebrow, and Jefferson shrugged. “We’re having enough anti-Narhani problems without adding this to the fire. The last demonstration was pretty ugly, and it wasn’t in one of our more reactionary areas, either. It was in London.”

“London?” Colin looked sharply at Horus, instantly diverted from Cohanna’s experiment. “How bad was it?”

“Not good,” Horus admitted. “More of the ‘The Only Good Achuultani Is a Dead Achuultani’ kind of thing. There were some tussles, but they started when the marchers ran into a counter-demonstration, so they may actually have been a sign of sanity. I hope so, anyway.”

“Oh, Lord!” Colin sighed. “You know, it was an awful lot easier fighting the Achuultani. Well, simpler, anyway.”

“True. Still, I think time is on our side.” Colin made a face and Horus chuckled. “I know. I’m getting as tired of saying that as you must be of hearing it, but it’s true. And time is one thing we’ve got plenty of.”

“Maybe. But while we’re on the subject, who organized this thing?”

“We’re not entirely certain,” Jefferson replied. “Gus is looking into it, but the official organizers were a bunch called HHI—’Humans for a Human Imperium.’ On the surface, they’re a batch of professional rowdies backed up by a crop of discontented intellectuals. The ‘high-brows’ seem to be academics who resent finding everything they spent their lives learning has become outdated overnight. It would seem—” he smiled thinly “—that some of our fearless intellectual pioneers are a bit less pioneering than they thought.”

“Hard to blame them, really,” Horus pointed out. “It’s not so much that they’re rejecting the truth as that they feel betrayed. As you say, Lawrence, they spent their lives establishing themselves as intellectual leaders only to find themselves brushed aside.”

“I know.” Colin frowned down at his hands for a moment, then looked back up. “Still, that sounds like a pretty strange marriage. Professional rowdies and professors? Wonder how they made connections?”

“Stranger things have happened, Your Majesty, but Gus and I are asking the same question, and he thinks the answer is the Church of the Armageddon.”

“Oh, shit,” Colin said disgustedly.

“Inelegant, but apt,” Horus said. “In fact, that’s what bothers me most. The church started out as a simple fusion of fundamentalists who saw the Achuultani as the true villains of the Armageddon, but this is a new departure, even for them. They’ve hated the Achuultani all along, but this is a shift to open racism—if I may use the term—of a particularly ugly stripe.”

“Yeah. Anything more on their leadership, Mister Jefferson?”

“Not really, Your Majesty. They’ve never tried to hide their membership—why should they when they enjoy legal religious toleration?—but they’re such an untidy agglomeration of splinter groups the hierarchical lines are pretty vague. We’re still working on who actually calls the shots. Their spokesperson seems to be this Bishop Hilgemann, though I’m afraid I don’t agree with Gus about her real authority. I think she’s more a mouthpiece than a policy-maker, but we’re both just guessing.”

“You’re going to discuss this with Ninhursag?”

“Of course, Your Majesty. I’ve brought Gus’ report and I’m going up to Mother after this meeting. Admiral MacMahan and I will put our heads together, and perhaps Dahak can help us pull something out of the data.”

“Good luck. ’Hursag’s been trying to get a handle on them for over a year now. Oh, well.” Colin shook his head and rose, holding out his hand to the Lieutenant Governor once more. “In that case, I won’t keep you, Mister Jefferson. Horus and I have a birthday party to attend, and two pre-adolescent hellions who’ll make us both miserable if we’re late.”

“Of course. Please give the Empress and your children my regards.”

“I will—in between the presents, cake, punch, and general hullabaloo. Good luck with your report.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty.” Jefferson withdrew gracefully, and Colin and Horus headed for the imperial family’s side of the Palace.

Chapter Three

Colin MacIntyre tossed his jacket into a chair, and his green eyes laughed as a robot butler clucked audibly and scooped it up again. ’Tanni was as neat as the cat she so resembled, and she’d programmed the household robots to condemn his sloppiness for her when she was busy elsewhere.

He glanced into the library in passing and saw two heads of sable hair bent over a hologram. It looked like the primary converter of a gravitonic conveyor’s main propulsion unit, and the twins were busily manipulating the display through their neural feeds to turn it into an exploded schematic while they argued some abstruse point.

Their father shook his head and continued on his way. It was hard to remember they were only twelve— when they were studying, anyway—but he knew that was only because he’d grown up without implant educations.

With neural interfacing, there was no inherent limit to the data any individual could be given, but raw data wasn’t the same as knowledge, and that required a whole new set of educational parameters. For the first time in human history, the only thing that mattered was what the best educators had always insisted was the true goal of education: the exploration of knowledge. It was no longer necessary for students to spend endless hours acquiring data, but only a matter of making them aware of what they already “knew” and teaching them to use it—teaching them to think, really— and that was a good teacher’s delight. Unfortunately, it also invalidated the traditional groundwork and performance criteria. Too many teachers were lost without the old rules—and even more of them, led by the West’s unions, had waged a bitter scorched earth campaign against accepting the new. The human race in general seemed to think the Emperor possessed some sort of magic wand, and, in a way, they were right. Colin could do just about anything he decided needed doing … as long as he was prepared to use heavy enough artillery and convinced the battle was worth the cost.

It had taken him over three years to reach that conclusion where Earth’s teaching establishment was concerned. For forty-three months, he’d listened to reason after reason why the changeover could not be made. Too few Earth schoolchildren had neural feeds. Too little hardware was available. Too many new concepts in too short a time would confuse children already in the system and damage them beyond repair. The list had gone on and on and on, until, finally, he’d had enough and announced the dissolution of all teachers’ unions and the firing of every teacher employed by any publicly funded educational department or system anywhere on the planet.

The people he’d fired had tried to fight the decree in the courts only to discover that the Great Charter gave Colin the authority to do just what he’d done, and when they came up against the cold steel his homely, usually cheerful face normally hid so well, their grave concern for the well-being of their students had undergone a radical change. Suddenly the only thing they wanted to do was make the transition as quick and painless as possible, and if