Executive (8 page)

“I warned you, Tyrant,” Coral said severely. “Now you shall pay the consequence.” She stepped into the shower.

Startled, I looked at her. She was naked and lovely. There are those who believe a woman to be beyond her prime after her twenties, but Coral had kept herself in top physical form from her martial arts, and from my vantage of fifty, the mid-thirties seemed young enough. She was of Saturn stock, with typically golden skin and Mongoloid facial features, which can be most appealing to males of any race.

Certainly I found her attractive, though, of course, I had never made any move on her. I had been loyal to Megan—while I had her. Now...

The atmosphere changed. I mean, the physical one. Warm air blasted up from the floor grille. “What?”

“A froth massage,” she explained. “The consequence.”

“Oh. I was thinking about—”

“You mentioned Asoka. I happen to have an interest in that part of the System. The roots of my culture are there.”

“But you're from Saturn!” I protested.

“And Saturn was colonized from the old Asian continent of Earth,” she said. “Six centuries ago I would have been called Chinese. But aspects of our culture were spawned in the southernmost region of that continent, called India, and so I have an interest in that, too, even though India did not go to space.”

“India—” I repeated, working on the connection. It had been a long time since I had studied ancient history! “It took over Earth!”

“My point is, Asoka was an Indian conqueror. At first he was called a tyrant, but later he became perhaps the finest of all great rulers. He is certainly a worthy model to follow.”

I would have paid more attention to her comment, but there were distractions. Not only was she nudging against me so that her marvelous body forced a masculine reaction in me, but also the warm air around us was thickening. Now the froth was manifesting, coursing upward around our bodies, tickling intimate places.

“Is your mind off business yet?” she inquired.

I laughed. “Yes. However, if one of us doesn't get out of this shower soon—”

“I have wanted to do this for a long time,” she said. She pressed her warm, slippery body against mine and drew my head down for a kiss.

The froth thickened further. It creamed up against and around our bodies, pushing, kneading, almost lifting us off our feet. I had never experienced anything quite like this before, but it was a thing worth learning about. The fact that I was next to a well-formed woman added to the effect.

“Now let me introduce you to the Tree,” Coral murmured.

“The what?”

“You Westerners tend to be unimaginative about sexual expression,” she said. “Sit there.”

“But this is the shower! There's no—”

“There is now.” And indeed there was; a seat had emerged from the wall.

I sat, and she got onto my lap, facing me, her legs spread to circle me, as the froth coursed by ever more thickly. I felt as if I were being borne up on a cloud, high in some planetary heaven, with an angel embracing me.

She lifted her body, bringing it into position, then settled firmly on me in the amorous connection. “Now,”

she said, “as you arrive, stand.”

“Stand!” I exclaimed. “But you would fall!”

“No way, Tyrant,” she breathed. Then she tightened certain internal muscles, and suddenly I felt the eruption developing. I lunged to my feet, assisted by her weight leaning back, and sure enough: she was supported and could not fall. The mass of her body pressed down most solidly, however, heightening the sensation as I pressured all that I had through that connection.

We stood there amid the moving froth, my feet planted on the floor, our two bodies branching outward at the midpoint, our heads apart. We were the Tree, without doubt! The sensation was almost painfully intense.

Then she drew her upper body into mine and reached for my lips with a frothy kiss. I felt her quiver, inside and out, and knew that she had reached her own climax.

But soon she had to put her feet down, for her support was waning. She got off me, and the froth swirled between us and cleansed us anew.

At last she turned off the froth, and we stood there, spent. “Next time, another consequence,” she said.

“When I tell you to rest, remember.”

But I strongly suspected that I would balk again the next time, requiring her to introduce me to the next consequence.

I stepped out of the shower, feeling cleansed outside and inside, and made my way to the bed, forgetting my pajamas. It didn't matter; Coral joined me in the same state.

I suppose it seems frivolous of me to make love to another woman so soon after my separation from Megan. I still loved Megan and would always love her, but the physical portion of our relationship was over. My girls were now doing what they deemed necessary to tide me through the transition, and I have no reason in retrospect to challenge their judgment. It was, as it were, all in the family.

Certainly I slept well—when Coral put me to bed.

The Saturn ship cruised on inexorably. I fidgeted, unable to concentrate properly on the details of organization. Shelia handled most of them, and I spoke directly to others only when she prompted me to.

When would that sub make contact with me?

“Sir,” Shelia said.

“Sir,” I mimicked her, teasingly, and she smiled. She was in this period my closest and most valued associate, Coral's nocturnal ministrations notwithstanding, because she was dealing with my intellectual needs in the crisis. I had hired her for merit, not body, and that merit remained solid.

“A Navy man to see you.”

“I'm not seeing any other—” I began, then broke off, looking at her.

She nodded. “ The Navy man,” she amended.

“I expected a message.”

She spoke into her unit. “The Tyrant will see him now,” she said.

“But he could be an imposter!”

“No, sir,” she said. Obviously my lower personnel had verified the man's identity.

The man entered. He wore the outfit of a mechanic, and it was dirty. He had the stripes of a corporal.

He was middle-aged. Taken aback, I stared at him.

He stepped up to me and saluted. “Commander Jenkins reporting as directed, sir.”

I returned the salute, bemused. “You seem to be out of uniform, Commander.”

“No officer leaves the ship, sir,” he said.

So he was anonymous, beyond his ship or this office. I spoke briefly with him, quickly ascertaining that he was familiar with the Navy and had known of my unit when I was there. He did seem to be legitimate.

Of course, I trusted the verdict of my lower staff; I just liked to verify things in my own fashion.

“Commander,” I said, getting down to business. "There is a Saturn cruiser on course for Ganymede. It carries contraband that must not be permitted to reach port. But because we have not been officially notified of this, we need to balk this ship off-the-record, so as to provide Saturn no pretext for protest.

Are you able to handle this?"

Now the man's nature came through clearly, as he tackled the problem. “Coordinates of target vessel, sir?”

I glanced at Spirit. She gave them.

He did a quick mental computation. “We can reach them in two days, sir. That will be a margin of two days. It would be better to let the target enter the mine field, however.”

“Mine field?”

“Perhaps your predecessor didn't advise you, sir. Ganymede is protected from intrusion by a mine field laid down fifteen years ago.”

I thought back. “When Tocsin was vice-president. Didn't the administration protest?”

“Why should it? Tocsin was in charge of the project.”

I was stunned. “You mean, we laid those mines?”

“Surreptitiously. To inhibit the Saturn connection.”

“But there has been no news of detonations!” I protested.

“Not in our press,” he agreed.

I digested this. “What of the Ganymede press?”

"Not there, either. They have preferred to scout paths through the field and to move some of the mines.

Now they do serve as a kind of protection from invasion, because only Ganymede knows the precise route through."

Spirit laughed. “So the mining backfired! It helps Gany, rather than hurting it!”

“I am not responsible for the blunders of our leaders,” Commander Jenkins said somewhat stiffly.

“But I went there as ambassador! My ship encountered no mines!”

“Not while you followed the route charted for you by Ganymede,” he agreed.

“The premier never mentioned—”

“The premier keeps his own counsel.”

So it seemed. “But if the Saturn ship uses a Gany-cleared approach—”

“Errors occur,” he said. “Sometimes individual mines drift.”

Now, at last, I caught on. “If one should drift into the entry channel—”

“An unfortunate accident,” he concluded.

“But can you move one to the right place in time? Do you know their specific channel?”

“No.”

“Then—”

“It can be very difficult to tell the difference between a mine contact and a torpedo contact.”

I nodded. “So, in that region you could take out that ship without making it obvious.” I frowned. “I wish there were some way simply to turn it back. I don't like unnecessary bloodshed.”

“Saturn cannot be cowed the way pirates can, sir. You cannot bluff it. The ship must be taken out.”

“Besides which,” Spirit added, “we cannot afford to advertise our part in this. It must seem like an accident.”

The logic was inescapable. We had to destroy that ship. Already I was being forced into exactly the kind of dirty secret dealings I had condemned in Tocsin.

But I couldn't allow Ganymede to be transformed into a true Saturn base. “Do it,” I said, feeling unclean.

Commander Jenkins saluted, turned, and departed. As he left the room his military bearing dissolved, and he slouched into unkempt mechanic status. My respect for this aspect of the Navy increased.

Now I could relax, to a degree. The problem of the Saturn ship was being handled. Perhaps Saturn would suspect what we had done, but it would not be sure and would not know why. That doubt should protect the premier, until we found some other way to “discover” the Saturn plot. In fact, debris from the ship could reveal that plot.

The rush of setting up continued. Spirit brought prospects in for me to interview; I talked with each, using my talent to read his or her basic nature, and made my judgments. My talent is not a solution to all personnel problems, because it does not tell me how much a person knows or how competent he is, only what his basic reactions are as I talk to him. Yet, if I ask probing questions or stir some emotion in him, his true reaction is clear to me, and that counts for a lot. A person who seeks to deceive me, or who has some guilty secret, rings like a false coin to my perception. I have never been betrayed by one I have analyzed in my way, even if I have taken only a few minutes.

The problems continued too. Now that the initial shock of the changeover had passed, the population was asking questions. What were the basic policies of my administration to be? Would the average man be better off than before? Would my supporters be directly rewarded? Would Hispanics be appointed to all the best jobs, at the expense of Saxons? These things were important to them. It was necessary to formulate reassuring messages, to keep the populace quiet until the actual policies were formulated and implemented. I had hardly any greater notion of what the final configuration of my administration was to be than they did.

Hopie called Thorley, explained her mission, and was astonished when he invited her to his residence for consultation. “But he's your enemy!” she exclaimed. “He condemns everything you do! Why should he help me?”

“Thorley is not my enemy,” I reminded her. “Remember how courteous he was when he accompanied us to Saturn several years ago? He is merely an honest man with a differing philosophy.”

“But he still writes the most horrible things about you! About how you have preempted the established Jupiter system of government and become the first true Tyrant we have had—”

“All true,” I said. “Thorley never lies.”

“And I'm your daughter. I'm trying to do a job you assigned me. Why should he help?”

“The complete rationale of a man as complex as Thorley can never be properly understood by others,” I said. “But I suspect that in this particular case he realizes that if he is to have any positive effect on the new order, this is the most likely avenue. If he can influence you to make truly effective reforms in education, that is worth his while.”

“But education isn't even important!”

I smiled. “Try telling him that.”

“I will!” she said defiantly, and flounced off in the manner her kind has. How I loved that child!

Within an hour she was gone, taking little Robertico with her. Spirit had arranged for a small Navy vessel to transport her to Ebor in Sunshine, where she would stay with Megan. Thorley maintained a residence in the vicinity, as he had emerged professionally from roots in that region, much as I had. Hopie would ferry across to interview him as convenient.

I made a formal public address, explaining about the departments I was in the process of setting up and reassuring everyone that I intended to be fair to all parties. “But my first priority is to balance the budget,”

I concluded. “I suspect that this will require some sacrifices, so I want to do it very carefully. Senator Stonebridge is working on that now.”

Then I turned to questions. Representatives of the leading news services were in the network, and Shelia selected individuals randomly to pose their questions.

The first one, as luck would have it, was from the Gotham Times. “Tyrant, when will the next elections be held?”

There was a murmur of humor at the manner in which he addressed me, but I knew that my preference for exactly that title would soon be accepted. His question set me back. I hadn't thought about elections, but, of course, I had abolished Congress, and I myself had taken power through no elective process.

Would I step aside in four years to allow a new president to be elected? I didn't have to. Yet elections had always been vital to our system. There would be broad and deep popular outrage if I did not commit myself to the restoration of elections.

“There will surely be elections,” I said somewhat lamely, “but I'm not sure when.”

Then they were on me, figuratively, like a pack of wolves. If I was serious about future elections, why couldn't I name the date? Was I in fact planning to remain a dictator for life? Did I think the people of Jupiter would stand for that? How could there be congressional elections if there was no Congress?

I answered as well as I could, which wasn't really adequate. I felt like a less-than-bright student before a university panel. I had to promise to try to come up with better answers, after researching the matter.

Then a respected member of the Holo Guild had his turn. “Tyrant, suppose I were to call you a gnat-brained, pigheaded, philandering son of a spic?”

Suddenly there was silence in the chamber and on the air, and probably all around Jupiter, for this was being broadcast live. I knew what he was doing: He was testing my commitment to the freedom of the press, which encompassed all the present media. Actually Spirit had arranged to plant the question without telling me; that was her little bit of teasing.

It took me only a moment to recover. I hauled my open mouth closed. “I really don't think of myself as gnat-brained,” I responded.

There was a pause as the audience assimilated the significance of that. Then the laughter began, timorously at first, swelling to heroic proportion. It was, I think, comprised mostly of relief. I had answered the true question: There would be no censorship. If the Tyrant himself could be openly insulted, without consequence, then anyone could.

In all my tenure as Tyrant I never suppressed the press. I remained true to my commitment to Thorley, made some fifteen or sixteen years before I assumed the power. In retrospect, that is one of the things I view with greatest pride. I believe Asoka would have approved.

The time proceeded in the usual manner, seeming at once phenomenally extended and laser-swift. My next sharp memory is of the handling of the Saturn ship. It cruised to within a day's range of Ganymede, slowed, and maneuvered through the mine field. Our watching instruments perceived a fleeting little nova; a ship had been blown up. But my regretful relief converted abruptly to dismay.

It was not the Saturn ship. That vessel proceeded on toward the planet, untouched.

What, then, had it been? Our survey of the debris made it all too clear: a sub had blown. Our sub.

What had happened? We consulted with our Navy man and came to a conclusion: Either the sub had encountered one of the mines, which would have been colossal bad fortune, or—

Or there was another sub. One that had lurked in ambush for ours and torpedoed it as the opportunity arose.

If there was another sub, the implications were chilling. It suggested that Saturn knew that we knew of their Gany ploy and had anticipated our reaction. That they had planned further ahead than we had guessed and secured their plot from our interference. Or that the premier had acted to lure us into the trap.

I rejected the latter notion. I knew the premier of Ganymede. He was a hard man, but he would not have done that to me. It was not honor so much as the particular brand of acquaintance we had: not precisely friendship but mutual respect.

Yet I was not sure I could accept the other hypothesis, either. Saturn could not have hidden a sub in Gany space without Ganymede's knowledge and acceptance. Had it done so, the premier would have warned me.

“She brought her own sub,” Spirit said.

That had to be it. A Saturn sub could have traveled under the cover of the Saturn ship, perhaps even attached to it. Then, as the ship approached the dangerous region of the mine field, where an ambush would be most likely if any were to occur, the sub could have been launched. It was no easier for one sub to spot another than for a normal ship to spot a sub, but the advantage lay with surprise. Our sub had been intent on the ship it was stalking; it could readily have missed the other sub. But the enemy sub had no such distraction; it was questing only for another sub, and if it nudged ahead of the Saturn ship, it could have spotted the other. Not easily—but as Commander Jenkins (rest his soul) had reminded me, Saturn was no slouch in space. In fact, Saturn was the most sub-oriented of all the planets. If anyone had the technology to spot a sub, Saturn did.

If this was the correct scenario, then Saturn did not necessarily know that we knew of its Gany plot. It was simply exercising normal caution. Or special caution, because of the importance of this particular mission. There need be no suspicion of the premier.

But our sub had been there. Why should we have been there, if not to take out the Saturn ship? That had to suggest that we did know.

Spirit sighed. “Brother, we are in trouble.”

“Double trouble,” I agreed morosely. “Not only does Saturn now know or strongly suspect that we know, it is about to dock that ship on Ganymede—the one thing we can't afford.”