Foundation and Empire - Isaac Asimov [45]
Kalgan was—Kalgan. It alone of all that quadrant of the Galaxy seemed not to know that the Empire had fallen, that the Stannells no longer ruled, that greatness had departed, and peace had disappeared.
Kalgan was the luxury world. With the edifice of mankind crumbling, it maintained its integrity as a producer of pleasure, a buyer of gold and a seller of leisure.
It escaped the harsher vicissitudes of history, for what conqueror would destroy or even seriously damage a world so full of the ready cash that would buy immunity?
Yet even Kalgan had finally become the headquarters of a warlord and its softness had been tempered to the exigencies of war.
Its tamed jungles, its mildly modeled shores, and its garishly glamorous cities echoed to the march of imported mercenaries and impressed citizens. The worlds of its province had been armed and its money invested in battleships rather than bribes for the first time in its history. Its ruler proved beyond doubt that he was determined to defend what was his and eager to seize what was others’.
He was a great one of the Galaxy, a war and peace maker, a builder of Empire, an establisher of dynasty.
And an unknown with a ridiculous nickname had taken him—and his arms—and his budding Empire—and had not even fought a battle.
So Kalgan was as before, and its uniformed citizens hurried back to their older life, while the foreign professionals of war merged easily into the newer bands that descended.
Again as always, there were the elaborate luxury hunts for the cultivated animal life of the jungles that never took human life; and the speedster bird-chases in the air above, that was fatal only to the Great Birds.
In the cities, the escapers of the Galaxy could take their varieties of pleasure to suit their purse, from the ethereal sky-palaces of spectacle and fantasy that opened their doors to the masses at the jingle of half a credit, to the unmarked, unnoted haunts to which only those of great wealth were of the cognoscenti.
To the vast flood, Toran and Bayta added not even a trickle. They registered their ship in the huge common hangar on the East Peninsula, and gravitated to that compromise of the middle classes, the Inland Sea—where the pleasures were yet legal, and even respectable, and the crowds not yet beyond endurance.
Bayta wore dark glasses against the light, and a thin, white robe against the heat. Warm-tinted arms, scarcely the goldener for the sun, clasped her knees to her, and she stared with firm, abstracted gaze at the length of her husband’s outstretched body—almost shimmering in the brilliance of white sunsplendor.
“Don’t overdo it,” she had said at first, but Toran was of a dying red star. Despite three years of the Foundation, sunlight was a luxury, and for four days now his skin, treated beforehand for ray resistance, had not felt the harshness of clothing, except for the brief shorts.
Bayta huddled close to him on the sand and they spoke in whispers.
Toran’s voice was gloomy, as it drifted upwards from a relaxed face, “No, I admit we’re nowhere. But where is he? Who is he? This mad world says nothing of him. Perhaps he doesn’t exist.”
“He exists,” replied Bayta, with lips that didn’t move. “He’s clever, that’s all. And your uncle is right. He’s a man we could use—if there’s time.”
A short pause. Toran whispered, “Know what I’ve been doing, Bay? I’m just daydreaming myself into a sun-stupor. Things figure themselves out so neatly—so sweetly.” His voice nearly trailed off, then returned, “Remember the way Dr. Amann talked back at college, Bay. The Foundation can never lose, but that does not mean the rulers of the Foundation