He stood on the deck and let his gaze range afar—a tall man, thickly muscular, with wide, craggy features, heavy blond brows over sapphire-blue eyes, thinning sandy hair. The face was tanned and deeply lined; its left cheek bore the seam of a battle scar which he had never troubled to have removed and which had become a virtual trademark. What he saw was a vast sweep of land and sky. Close by, the land had been terraformed, planted in grass, roses, hollyhocks, Buddha’s cup, livewell, oaks, maples, braidwoods, and more, the gardens of an empire brought together around human houses. Beyond was primeval Daedalus, trees and brush, leaves a somber, gleaming green, never a flower. Those were not birds that passed above, though their wings shone in the evening light as the wings of eagles would have. The sun, sinking west, had begun to lose its disc shape. Haze dimmed and reddened it enough for vision to perceive that, because the rays came through ever more air as it dropped below what should have been the horizon. Golden clouds floated above.
Olaf Magnusson did not really see this, unless with a half-aware fraction of his mind. Nor was he rapt in the contemplation of the All that his Neosufic religion enjoined. He had striven to be, but his thoughts kept drifting elsewhere, until at last he accepted their object as the aspect of the Divine which was set before him tonight.
Strength. Strength unafraid, unhesitant, serving a will which was neither cruel nor kind but which cleanly trod the road to its destiny … He could not hold the vision before him for very long at a time. It was too superb for mankind. Into his awareness there kept jabbing mere facts, practicalities, things he must do, questions of how to do them—yes, crusades have logistic requirements too—
A footfall, a breath reached his hearing. He swung about, his big frame as sure-footed as a fencer’s or a mountaineer’s, both of which he was. His wife had come out. She halted, a meter away. “What’s this?” he demanded. “Emergency?”
“No.” He could barely hear her voice through the cold, whittering breeze, as soft as it was. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have interrupted .you, except that it’s getting late and the children are hungry. I wondered if you would be having dinner with us.”
His basso rasped. “For something like that, you break in on my devotions?”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. Yet she did not cringe, she stood before him in her own pride. And her sadness. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t. But since you are going away for a long while at best, and God knows if you will ever come back—”
“What gives you that idea?”
Vida Lonwe-Magnusson smiled a bit. “You’d never have married an idiot, Olaf, no matter how much money she brought with her. Allow that I’ve gotten to know you over the years, in part, and I follow the news closely, and have studied history. What date have you set for the troops to spontaneously proclaim you Emperor? Tomorrow?”
Surprised despite himself, he gave her a long look. Unflinchingly, the brown eyes in the black face returned it. The slender body in the simple gown stood straight. They were excellent stock on Nyanza, their ancestors as ruthlessly selected by a hostile nature as his had been, although the oceanic planet had prospered afterward more than cold and heavy Kraken ever could. Among his thoughts when he was courting her had been that a crossbreeding should produce remarkable offspring. Warmth touched him from within. “I wanted to spare you anxiety, Vida. Maybe what I actually did was cause you needlessly much. I never doubted your loyalty. But the fewer who knew, the better the odds. Premature disclosure would have been disastrous, as you can surely understand. Now everything is ready.” “And you are really going through with it?”
“You will be Empress, dear, Empress of the stars we never see on Daedalus.”
She sighed. “I’d rather have you … No, self-pity is the most despicable of all emotions. Let me only ask you, Olaf, here at the last moment, why you are doing this.”
“To save the Empire.”