John’s early years in charge were turbulent, but this was due to events outside the Olympic Peninsula and gradually those too lost their violence. With peace came prosperity and a reheightening of civilization. The barons had always been fairly well educated, but men of raw action. John endowed schools, imported scholars, listened to them, and read books in what spare time he could find.
Thus he came to understand, better even than native shrewdness allowed, that the feudal period was waning. First the federal military command brought the entire USA under control, as General McDonough had done in Canada. Then Side 8
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
piece by piece it established a new civil administration, reached agreement of sorts with the Holy Western Republic and the Mexican Empire, and opened negotiations for amalgamation with its northern neighbor. Meanwhile the World Union created by the Covenant of Lima was spreading. The North American Federation joined within three years of being proclaimed, according to a promise made beforehand. This example brought in the last holdout nations, and limited government over the entire human race was a reality-for a time, at least.
At the start of these events, John decided that his call was to preserve for his people enough home rule that they could continue to live more or less according to their traditions and desires. Over the years he gave way to centralization, step by step, bargaining for every point, and did achieve his wish. In the end he was nominally a squire, holding considerable property, entitled to various honors and perquisites, but a common citizen. In practice he was among the magnates, drawing strength from the respect and affection of the entire Pacific Northwest.
Daniel was his third son, who would inherit little wealth and no rank.
This suited Daniel quite well. He enjoyed his boyhood- woods, uplands, wild rivers, the sea, horses, cars, watercraft, aircraft, firearms, friends, ceremonies of the guard, rude splendor of the manor until it became a mansion, visits to his mother’s relatives and to cities nearer by where both pleasure and culture grew steadily more complicated-but restlessness was in him, the legacy of a fighting house, and in his teens he often got into brawls, when he wasn’t carousing with low-life buddies or tumbling servant girls. Finally he enlisted in the Emergency Corps of the World Union Peace Command. That was very soon after its formation. The Union itself was still an infant that many wanted to strangle. A Corpsman hopped from place to place around the globe -later, off it as well- and most of them were full of weapons seeing brisk use. For Brodersen, here began a series of careers which eventually landed him on Demeter.
His latter-day acquaintances assumed that that youth was far behind him in space and perhaps, at fifty Earth-years of age, farther yet in time. He himself seldom thought about it. He kept too busy.
Settling his bulk into a chair, he drew forth pipe and tobacco pouch.
“Damn the torpedoes,” he rumbled. “Full speed ahead.”
The Governor General of Demeter blinked at him across her desk. “What?”
“A saying of my dad’s,” Brodersen told her. “Means you asked me to come to your office in person, because you didn’t want us gabbing about whatever `tis over the phone; and now you’re tiptoeing around the subject as if `twere a cowbarn that hadn’t been cleaned lately.” He grinned to show he meant no harm.
Actually, he suspected it, he did. “Let’s not keep me here, mixing up my figures of speech, longer’n we must. Lis expects me home for dinner, and she’s unforgiving if I cause the roast to be overdone.”
Aurelia Hancock frowned. She was a sizeable woman, rather overweight, with blunt features and short gray hair. A cigarette smoldered between yellow-stained fingers; smoking had hoarsened her voice, and rumor was that she took an uncommon lot of cancer booster shots. As usual, she wore clothes which were Earthmodish but conservative, a green tunic with a silver-trimmed open collar above bell-bottomed slacks and gilt sandals. “I was trying to be pleasant,” she said.
Brodersen’s thumb tamped the bowl of his briar. “Thanks,” he replied,
“but I’m afraid that no how can this be a nice subject.”