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used it for this passage for his son to the cousins at Illuria. Officially, to the Station, the boy was going to learn Astral Navigation, a speciality of the college on Illuria Station, just as Amritsar Station had a reputation for micro-circuitry.
    His father gummed angrily as he attempted to lever his teeth apart with a knife. Damn the League. On Kambar Station the bio-research crowd had achieved some truly brilliant results with cloned tooth-buds… But Kambar was something like a hundred and ninety League-ordained jumps away, even if its star was visible from here, and wasn’t actually far as the Stardogs could have flown. Unfortunately, you could ship microcircuits but not tooth-buds.
    Hal Biacasta knew he’d shot himself in the foot with this outburst. The boy was a little young to go, and perhaps he wasn’t ideally suited for Nav. His results were good enough, in fact, they were exceptional. Not for the first time Hal wondered if the boy hadn’t damn well finagled the comp-testing system. Juan’s heart didn’t seem to be in Nav., but at that age a boy’s heart was seldom in anything but getting into a girl’s pants, as he remembered it. Juan didn’t appear to be any better at that than he’d been. Well, it had seemed a good idea to get the boy away for a bit, to give his son, as well as himself and Betty a bit of breathing space. That was the problem in a nutshell. The stations were really too small. But there was certainly no Imperial money for expansion, and no stationer ever volunteered to go down to the uncivilized worlds below. No stationer would ever want to.
    He was wrong. His son, for example, thought of those rough, brawling worlds in pretty vid-image colored terms. But Juan was not studying the vid-images of the parks on old Earth now. Instead he was staring at the Denaari-barge model, an idea beginning in his rebellious head. Presently he got up and took the model down, and studied it more carefully. It was a perfect scale replica.

CHAPTER 3
THE GOTHA EMPIRE

“ The Empire is like a cancer. Should it stop growing, it will die. Peace and stability are the ultimate enemies of imperialism. ”
From the collected sayings of Saint Sugahata the reviled.
    The People’s Empire of Gotha stretched across light-years. The mind-maps of the great Stardogs had taken men to 432 planets. The Empire held sway over all of them, even if only tenuously on a few like Arunachal. And of course many of the Denaari worlds had been virtually uninhabitable… But even so, the new Emperor, Turabi II, ruled absolute over 300 billion people.
    Such power is beyond human understanding. Let us turn instead to a weeping girl who had hidden herself deep in the shrubbery of the vast enclosed imperial gardens of Phillipia, the seat of the Empire. She was nineteen. She had survived just about as many assassination attempts as she had years. This, the last one, an hour and a half ago, had cost her the life of her mother-figure as well as her father and step-mother.
    She couldn’t have cared less about her father and step-mother, even if their death had put that horrible little toad, her sixteen year old step-brother Turabi, on the Diamond Throne. The Princess Royal wept instead, bitterly, inconsolably for her peasant-born ex-nurserymaid, who had mothered her, raised her, and finally shielded her beloved charge with her own body. Flecks of Lea’s blood stained her dress. The Princess knew that they were still out there, looking for her. Right now, she almost didn’t care if they found her.
    Princess Shari buried her face in the fur of a small dog of dubious parentage. The dog, with canine understanding, allowed this, despite the fact that he was a Dog-of-Immense-Dignity, who believed that cuddling should only be permitted at times and places of its own choosing. The dog growled abruptly. The delicate pale green curtain of hanging Sambar-lilies parted.
    Shari looked up. For a moment she thought it was her brother’s crony, Selim