“But,” said the lord of two planets, nervously, “it’s the painting called The Gladiators by the great artist Malcus Zinski, and it’s four hundred years old!”
“You bring me something so worn and ancient?” said Alexander.
“But it’s valuable,” the man said.
“Why?” demanded Alexander.
“Because it’s beautiful,” the man declared.
“So this is ‘beautiful’,” noted Alexander. “I will remember that. I will keep the painting.”
And the man’s two planets were added next day to his domain.
In an attempt to be more practical, the next overlord purred: “See, Great Alexander, I have brought you my choicest gift! In chains on the lowermost deck of my royal ship, the hundred greatest scientists of my planet, the hundred most famous artists, writers, and musicians, and the hundred most beautiful women for the pleasure of your entourage.”
At this, some who had become close servants of Alexander murmured among themselves that the overlord’s world should be spared. Alexander said, “I will learn from the scientists if they know more than I do. But the rest are not enough. My information is that you rule approximately one point five times ten to the eighth power human beings. Deliver me that number, for I can make use of them.”
And, delivery not having been made, he took those planets too, the following year.
Some fled, out from the dust-motes where mankind had settled, but others perforce remained. These Alexander had a use for, as he had promised. Their clumsy hands and bowed backs served to assemble the first generation of his armies; desert worlds rich in chrome and manganese and uranium sprouted factories like mushrooms, ice worlds were mined for heavy hydrogen, the suns themselves fed power to the machines. In orbit, steel skeletons grew to be hollow ships, and their empty bellies filled. In the wake of the refugees, the hordes of Alexander came.
In the first millennium of his existence, he overtook the would-be escapers; from the gangplank of his flagship he surveyed half-starved, half-clothed wretches rounded up to do homage to the glittering master, and uttered his first decree.
“Have I not conquered all mankind?” he demanded.
Those about him chorused fervently that it was so, for they believed it true.
“Then proclaim me Overlord of Man,” said Alexander. And was silent for a while. It so chanced that dusk was falling on this planet, and the first stars in strange constellations were sparking through the sky.
“But there is more to come,” said Alexander.
In the tenth millennium of his existence, there was no star visible from Earth which did not own the sway of Alexander, save only those which were not single stars but rather other galaxies condensed to a point of light. Alexander was informed of this, and considered the matter, and at length summoned to the palace world of Shalimar those who governed in his name on fourteen hundred planets. They were all human; there was, and would forever be, only one Alexander.
He had been given much booty, and had taken more, so that the very gravity of Shalimar was affected by the mass of it; in straight intersecting avenues across and across the face of the planet it was stacked and stored and displayed and mounted, the relics of living creatures and the accidents of nature, crystal mountains uprooted bodily and the bones of a saint’s little finger. Here, among the wealth of their master, the representatives of the subject species Man awaited the second decree.
“Have I not conquered every star visible in the sky of Earth?” Alexander demanded.
They shouted that he had, for they believed his mastery to be complete.
“Then,” said Alexander, “proclaim me King of the Stars.”
After which he was silent for a little. He had had made a cunning replica in miniature of the galactic lens, wherein a billion points of light twinkled in exact match to the star-wheel of reality.
That much remained. But his builders had worked well, and their descendants—serving him now, not their own ends—were still skilful.
“Let it go on,” said Alexander. “There is much, much more.”
In the thirty thousand three hundred and seventh year of his existence he circumnavigated the Rim of the galaxy without passing within naked-eye range of a planetary system that did not owe allegiance to his minions. Men came and went in the flash of a clock’s tick, so far as Alexander was concerned, but they were there in their scores of trillions, breeding endlessly, subservient to him, making over world after world under hundreds of thousands of suns . . . The booty of Shalimar had far outgrown any single planet, and now orbited in a huge ring of flexing steel tubes, tended by curators whose families for ten thousand years had lived and died for this sole purpose: to guard the treasure against the whim which any day might bring Alexander back to look at it.
Globular clusters like swarms of golden bees; star-wisps reaching out into the eternal nothingness between the galaxies; the circuit ended, and to Shalimar he summoned the representatives of every world where he had planted man.
They stood like a field of corn before the scythe, numbered as the sands of the seashore, totaling five hundred and eleven thousand, six hundred and sixty-one in theory but in fact fluctuating, for some died even as they stood to hear the third decree.
“Have I not girdled the wheel of stars with my armies?” said Alexander.
They shouted that this was so, for they believed his mastery unchallenged.
“Then,” Alexander told them, “proclaim me Emperor of the Zodiac.”
After that he was silent a while, for as well as the Rim bordering intergalactic space the model of the lens contained the miniature of the Hub. And there, packed close, were suns in such great number even Alexander’s mind could not contain a clear picture of the whole.
Despite which, the end was calculable, and he did not say, as he had done before, “There is much more . . .”
Inward from the Rim his forces poured: ships that outnumbered the very stars themselves, machines that
