Кристофер Банч - Empire's End

Sten looked back at Alex.

"Do you think anybody'll grudge me the Victory ?"

"Ah dinnae think so, lad. An' thae'll be clots like Otho'll be glad't' serve. Y'll hae't' beat 'em awa' wi' a blackthorne."

"Good. Now. I'll ask you again. About staying with me."

"Ah'll hae need ae a few weeks, boss. T' intr'duce twa lassies't' m' mum. An' t' hae th' banns posted, assumin't Ah'll be able't' coerce a wee pulpitbanger. C'n Ah hae a' month?"

Sten nodded.

Alex beamed. He went to the door where Rykor waited.

"Ah, lad. It'll be braw. It'll be braw. Thae's entire galaxies thae dinnae ken aboot spotted snakes."

And he and Rykor were gone.

"You left me for last," Cind said.

"I did."

"Are you going to ask?"

"Surely. You got any conflicting plans for the next couple of centuries?"

Cind didn't answer.

She kissed him.

Then she took him by the hand… and they walked across the chamber to the door to the balcony. She opened it and they went out, into the clear, frost-chiming night.

Neither of them felt the cold.

They looked up and out, far and beyond, at the unknown stars that stretched on forever.

An Explanation, Of Sorts

The idea for Sten came to us a few years back. It was encouraged by the fact that, at the time, very few people were writing the kind of science fiction we grew up reading and appreciating—a situation that's changed for the better of late, we're delighted to observe.

But the main reason was out of general pissoff.

Science fiction, for some unknown reason, has always been overly enamored of social and political fascism, primarily because of ignorance, we suspect.

Our irk was best expressed by Damon Knight, in his classic collection of essays, In Search Of Wonder , when he was busily ripping the lips off of A.E. Van Vogt, Scientologist/confusionaire extraordinary:

"It strikes me as singular that, in van Vogt's stories, nearly all of which deal with the future, the form of government which occurs most often is the absolute monarchy; and further, that the monarchs in these stories are invariably depicted sympathetically, (one of his heroes being) a 'benevolent dictator' if you please."

"… I shall not say what I think of a man who loves monarchies… neither do I think it relevant that these stories were written and published during a time when both van Vogt's country (Canada) and ours were at war with dictatorships…"

"… The absolute monarchy was a form of government which evolved to meet feudal economic conditions everywhere, and which has died everywhere with feudalism… Modern attempts to impose a similar system on higher cultures have just been proven, very decisively, to be failures… It is no crime for van Vogt as a private citizen to wish this were not so; but ignorance, for an author, is a crime…"

Just so.

The second quote is far better known:

John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887:

"Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Equally true.

And so it was absurd for us that science fiction, in spite of its loud bannering of thinking of the future, in fact spends all too much of its substance sucking the empty husk of a false past.

Therefore… Sten .

We used all of the hard, cynical knowledge that we'd gained in fourteen years each in mainstream journalism of just how politics and raw power works.

We would create an empire, we decided, that would be big enough and old enough to contain all our bizarre notions of that great, dark, comic figure, the Human Race. We would see this empire through the eyes of an ordinary, working-class man who is overtaken by extraordinary events.

He would be just smart enough, swift enough, and—this was most important—have enough of a sense of humor to survive. And grow into a bona fide hero. Or, at least, our idea of a hero—someone with enormous clumps of clay for feet.

It would be a long story, we both agreed. It would take eight books to tell it all. One novel—in eight parts.

We guessed it would take about a million words.

Today we passed that mark.

And the story is done.