The Excalibur Alternative

Mugabi shook his head once more and leaned back in his chair while his mind tried to sort out all he had already been told.

He supposed, realistically, that the Avalon Empire wasn't really particularly large when compared to the titanic size of the Federation. From what the Emperor and his advisers had told him, the Empire claimed only twenty-two star systems, of which only the seven "princedoms"—New Lancaster, New Yorkshire, New Wales, New Oxfordshire, Glastonbury, Avalon, and Camelot—could boast populations in excess of two billion. The Federation, on the other hand, claimed in excess of fifteen hundred stars, with an average population per star system of almost eleven billion. Given that sort of numerical superiority, Lach'heranu's fellow fleet commanders ought to find themselves with a comprehensive quantitative answer to the qualitative advantage the Empire's technology clearly gave it.

But that was assuming that the Federation had the opportunity to bring its ponderous might to bear... and overlooked the fact that over eighty percent of the Federation's population was to be found among the "protected" races.

"I'm astonished that you could have accomplished so much from such a limited begi

"We were limited only in population size," he pointed out. "In every other respect we started even with the Federation's current technology base." He shrugged again. "It was mainly a matter of improving upon the head start with which we began."

"As usual, Your Majesty," a mellow tenor voice said out of the cabin's thin air, "you understate both the scope and the severity of the challenge you faced. Not to mention the magnitude of what you accomplished."

"And also as usual, Merlin," the Emperor replied with the air of a participant in a long-standing debate, "you overstate all three of them. Not to mention the highly capable advisors I had—starting with Matilda—or the magnitude of the role you yourself played in accomplishing it."

"Which it was possible for me to play only because you were so foolish as to reject the Federation's limitations upon the creation of artificial intelligences," the voice replied, and Mugabi felt his eyebrows arch. The Emperor obviously noticed his expression, for he smiled wryly and nodded.

"Yes, Admiral," he said. "Merlin was once called `Computer' by a primitive warrior too ignorant to realize that he was talking to a mere machine."

"And one so foolish as to extend the full legal equality of organic intelligence to artificial ones," Merlin pointed out.

"No, no," the Emperor said, shaking his head. "Not foolish—cu

"Of course it was," Merlin said with a sound suspiciously like a human snort.

"Seriously, Admiral," the Emperor said, looking back and Mugabi, "Merlin has been an enormous help to us. He isn't as intuitive as humans are, but the speed and accuracy with which he can process information far exceeds anything we've managed yet, even with personal computer implants."

"I should certainly hope so," Merlin said primly, and the Emperor and his naval officers laughed out loud.

"I don't doubt that... Merlin was a great help to you, Your Majesty," Mugabi said after a moment, "but you must still have faced an all but impossible task."

"Humans seem to be better suited to `impossible tasks' than most species," the High Chancellor put in.

"Perhaps we are," the Emperor agreed, "but that didn't keep us from being neck-deep in babies for the first hundred years or so." His reminiscent smile looked out of place on his unreasonably youthful face, and Mugabi wondered how much of that sense of presence he projected had always been his and how much of that he had acquired over the last five hundred years. Mugabi had met some of the Romans whose return to Earth had formed the pretext for the Federation's "final solution," yet none of them had radiated the same blend of youthfulness and ancient wisdom and self-confidence which seemed to be so much a part of the Emperor. Of course, even though they were technically over a thousand years older than he was, they'd spent the vast majority of their enormous lifespans in phase stasis, traveling between the stars, not awake and laboring to build an empire literally from scratch. The Emperor, he reflected, was undoubtedly the "oldest" human being he had ever met—that anyone had ever met—for that matter... with the possible exception of Archbishop Timothy, he amended. Of course, after the first two or three hundred years a mere forty years one way or the other was pretty much meaningless, he supposed.

"The hardest part, though," the Emperor continued, "was finding a way to increase our population quickly enough without losing all sense of family co

He shook his head and sighed, then waved at Admiral Maynton.

"Prince John here," he told Mugabi, who cocked an eyebrow at the title which Maynton had somehow forgotten to mention came attached to him, "and his entire house are direct descendants of one of our first generation clone children. Of course, there are—what? Nineteen cadet branches of the family, John?"

"Twenty-two, actually, Uncle," Maynton replied, blue eyes twinkling, then shrugged. "But who's counting?"

"You are, you young whippersnapper," the Emperor told him with a chuckle, then turned back to Mugabi. "I decided from the outset that the law would make no distinction between cloned children and those carried to term in utero, but I wasn't really certain that our people could accept them as their own. Today, of course, that entire worry seems ridiculous, since clones and the descendants of clones outnumber `old-fashioned' offspring by literally millions to one in the Empire, but it was a real concern at the time."

"True," Archbishop Timothy put in. "On the other hand, you approached it sensibly enough to avoid the sort of problem it might have turned into, My Lord." The prelate, Mugabi had already noticed, very seldom addressed the Emperor as "Majesty," and the admiral wondered if that was a distinction limited to the Emperor's oldest and closest advisers.

"If you mean I was smart enough to let Matilda talk me into being sure that you approved the entire process in the name of Mother Church, then I suppose I did," the Emperor agreed.

"Children are children, and souls are souls," the archbishop replied serenely. "As long as the medical science is sound, and the children who are born are born whole and healthy, the miracle is the same for every child."

"And the people who raise that child are that child's parents," the Emperor agreed softly, then chuckled and glanced over his shoulder at the portrait of his Empress. "Matilda certainly made that plain enough to me at the time!" he added wryly.

"And speaking from personal experience," Captain Stanhope put in, "Ternaui make excellent parents." She smiled warmly at the High Chancellor, and Mugabi had the sudden sense of a matching smile from the immobile, saurian features of the Chancellor.

"Thank you, daughter," the Ternaui said after a moment. "Still, we must admit that raising human young is an... interesting experience. And one, we suspect, which has corrupted us rather more than our queens would ever have anticipated."

"Life is sufficient to do that on its own without blaming it on the children, old friend!" the Emperor laughed. "Not that raising them isn't an `interesting experience' for anyone... whatever their own species might be."