“Peace and freedom—don’t you see? Poland’s had the stablest government in the world for over three hundred years now. Why should we want to jeopardize that by antagonizing your country, or the Russians?”
“It’s wrong to slave under a dictator!” she sputtered. “Monarchies are outmoded, archaic, despotic forms of government. No other major power has a king or queen.”
“And no other major power is quite as major as the republic, for that very reason. What’s wrong with ‘slaving’ under the highest standard of living in the world? So we have a true king, with absolute power. He serves only for five years. And then we elect a new king, or queen, from the nobles and princes. It works. That’s the only rationale I can give you.”
“It’ll collapse any day now,” she insisted, “and then maybe you’ll get a real democracy.”
“Good God, no! Anything but that, Dana. A ‘real democracy,’ like yours? Where the legislature is paralyzed, the executive corrupt, the courts logjammed? We’ve become what we have precisely because we’ve avoided all that.
“Just as an example, to change the republic’s television networks to 3-D hologram, the king signed a proclamation. You’re still arguing over who gets what rights, years later. And we’ve not called on the final check—the Society of Assassins—for 230 years.”
She didn’t understand. They never would, he thought sadly. An elected monarchy was impossible
171
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE . ..
and therefore could not exist. This did not trouble the Poles.
“Look, don’t ruin this launching, Dana. I don’t blame you for misinterpreting the data you found. You don’t really know what all that information means, do you?”