Danger!

Danger?

Maj Thovold pulls herself upright in her sleep cocoon. A meter-high tetrahedron of brushed metal glides noiselessly over, hovering half a meter off the floor. The autoservant, triggered by her movement, awaits her command. She waves it away.

What awakened her? Fragments of a dream still cling: giant spiders the size of her fist, hitting the ground and bursting into thousands of pinhead-sized babies--a hint of danger, a taste of anxiety--but what the cause?

For half a second she ponders calling her Ministers, Defense and Security and all the others, demanding of them the source of her anxiety. Then sense returns. They would only say that the Empress is having bad dreams again, humor her, the old gal is getting no younger. Senile hallucinations.

So what if the Empress is getting old? Her hunches have saved them all, time and again.

And yet there are bad dreams, more now than when she was younger.

Maj rolls out of the warm cocoon and pulls a light robe about her. Seeing that she is on her way to the balcony, five autoservants race ahead, an assortment of geometric shapes ready to jump at an instant in case of an assassination attempt. Once Maj used Human bodyguards--she finds the cybs much more reliable. Besides, the Empress has ways to defend herself.

The night sky is alight with stars in their thousands. To her right Maj sees the outline of the dome that covers the city Xchurch, the few lights that still twinkle under the dome. New Zealand followed standing orders in preparing for the Empress' visit; her temporary palace is well outside the city dome. Maj doesn't like being within a city. She is always claustrophobic, knowing that a barrier stands between her and the open sky of a world. Never, in all her thousands of hours in Navy starships or within the curving walls of settlements orbiting free in space, has she felt the least bit cramped. Only on a world. Only under the domes.

She takes a deep, meditative breath and stretches, feeling for a moment like the reincarnation of one of her ancient Maori ancestors, come back through time and space to this valley once again. She smiles, and turns her eyes skyward.

Look at the stars, Ancestor, she says as if the flesh of her progenitor were before her. Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Indi, Epsilon and 40 Eridani ... can you pick them out at the end of a pointing finger? They haven't moved since you sailed these trackless waters in your canoe. The centuries that separate you and I are nothing to the stars. Ah, but you have not seen the worlds of those stars, worlds that I have walked upon. Euphrates, Metikos, Flajol and Promethia--the massed cities and settlements of those planets, four billion souls owing allegiance to Terra and her Empire--and these are but the beginning.

Over twenty-five hundred inhabited worlds, Ancestor, and probably ten times as many settlements. Could I name them for you, even if I knew all their names? It would take far too long, and an Empress needs her sleep.

A sleepless night's worth of names, Maj thinks, hugging her robe about her. Hours and hours of planets all across the Galaxy, all members of the Terran Empire. And she, their Empress.

Nearly two trillion Human souls in the Galaxy: all served and protected, fed and kept happy, by the day after-day work of Mai Thovold and all her subordinates.

And not only this Galaxy alone. For our ships have reached further, and our explorers have stood on the shoals of other star-islands. You would be proud of us, my distant forbear who set out in a reed canoe to find a land you didn't know existed.

Maj squints--three corneal transplants make her eyes work, but nothing can ever make them see as they had when she was young, and she is too proud to use artificial aids--squints, and sees what she is looking for, two pale clouds of starstuff high in the heavens.

From nowhere, a shiver and a dream-memory come to her, and she stiffens. The Magellanic Clouds? Is this where the danger lies? Were those the Clouds in her dream, or just swirls in the turbulent atmosphere of almost any Terran world? And by what right does she place credence in the warning of what was, after all, only a dream?

"I am the Empress," she whispers, half to herself and half to her ancestor. '"I do as I please."

Danger.

Maj frowns. Danger means change. And change all too likely means entropy. With war conquered and most forms of Human suffering under control, entropy is the last thing she wants loosed upon the Empire--and upon Humanity, for the two are synonymous. Maj Thovold bears entropy an antagonism almost personal. For entropy is the greatest enemy of this Admiral-turned-Empress.

She holds out her wrinkled hands, lets a rueful smile cross her lips. Entropy is winning the battle. Joints creak a little, these days, and too much dampness starts up unpleasant reverberations of pain in her bones. It is long past time that she should have something done, if she doesn't want entropy to claim another victory. With a word, the best gerontologists in the Galaxy are at her service.

Why bother? she fancies her Ancestor asking. She turns back to the city and the stars.

For them, Ancestor. For two trillion people who have yet to produce one among their number who could manage this Empire half as well as I. Because if I take my peace, the next day the chiefs of half a dozen Idara will be swarming over the Palace clawing one another for my position. And not one of them is strong enough to hold it, if she did manage to reach the Throne.

The balcony railing is comfortingly solid beneath hands that quiver a bit. We had the rule of the Imperial Council, nearly two centuries of constitutional oligarchy before I came along and took over. And it took twenty years to clean up the mess made by too many cooks. You didn't see it as I did, Ancestor. Some worlds where excess food went to waste as reaction mass, and others only a kiloparsec away where people starved, children with distended bellies and empty eyes, just because they were across a boundary of Idara control. Can I let that happen again, no matter what it costs me?

She lets a sigh join the night breeze. If danger is coming, from the Magellanic Clouds or wherever else, she must be prepared to meet it. To deal with the changes it brings. I am not dead, can not accept death--and a living being must respond to change.

At least it will--she can hope--break the daily tedium of the Imperial Court, the never-ending succession of crises which surround her.

The Magellanic Clouds. Hmm....

She limps back to bed, imagining relief in the way the guardian autoservants scurry back to their cubbyholes.

There are no more dreams that night.