The Empire, on the other hand, was founded for renewal rather than development. Terra's task was to restore and preserve Technic civilization, hence her citizens were often cautious, incurious, and reluctant to try anything really new. There was even a lack of initiative in adapting to conditions on other worlds (Llynathawr, Freehold). Technology, especially for military purposes, did advance but basic scientific research lagged. The arts were likewise stagnant, chiefly repeating ancient models. Terrans were now less responsive to alien influences than formerly although colonials like the Dennitzans continued cultural interactions with their resident aliens. Overall, the Empire's outlook was parochial and protective whereas the League's had been ecumenical and expansionist.
After two centuries, these negative traits had become cracks fissuring the Empire's structure. But although Terra and her most imitative subjects were crumbling, the weaknesses in the foundation did not necessarily touch alien complexes within the Empire or colonies with strong, indigenous cultures of their own. (The cleavage between urban and rural Freeholders in "Outpost of Empire" is a case in point.) Nevertheless, the sound and unsound parts of the Empire were in jeopardy together.
The once-efficient system of Emperor and executive Policy Board acting through Sector Governors and planetary Residents was breaking down under the weight of personal corruption and folly. The Imperial yoke grew heavier without any offsetting increases in benefits, making the provinces resentful. More and more often, Terra's rulers were either too short-sighted to recognize threats to the public welfare or too stingy to meet them. One contemporary civil servant said of the Empire: "'Its competent people become untrustworthy from their very competence; anyone who can make a decision may make one the Imperium does not like. Incompetence grows with the growing suspiciousness and centralization. Defense and civil functions alike begin to disintegrate. What can that provoke except rebellion?'" (A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows).
Unlike the working aristocrats on colonial worlds such as Aeneas, the Terran upper classes were largely composed of selfish parasites exploiting their position for private gain. Titles of nobility ceased to be rewards for excellence as society hardened into castes. Options dwindled for the lower classes. Slavery was revived as punishment for crime. Indifference to aliens cost opportunities for wonder and sometimes masked a casual racism. The position of women declined in practice if not in theory. Vigorous colonial women and female aliens continued the Commonwealth-era tradition of full participation in society but too many Terran women were simply menials, consorts, entertainers, or whores; (Compare the difference in feminine roles in nineteenth century frontier America and its contemporary, Second Empire France.)
Detachment, boredom, apathy, despair were the prevailing moods of the era. Terrans lost their confidence, their morale, their energy. As one observer remarked: "'We've given up seeking perfection and glory; we've learned that they're chimerical—but that knowledge is a kind of death within us,'" ("Honorable Enemies"). The world-weary sought consolation in vice or spiritual obsessions. Few even thought of resisting the Empire's inevitable fall. A nineteenth century historian's verdict on Byzantium is equally applicable to the Terran Empire: "It is a tale of what had reached its zenith, of what was past its best strength, a tale of decadence postponed with skill and energy, and yet only postponed."
Matters were far otherwise with Terra's fierce young rival, the Roidhunate of Merseia. This newer imperium would never have come into existence except for David Falkayn's intervention when Merseia was threatened by the effects of a nearby supernova ("Day of Burning"). But the League's high-handed relief tactics outraged the haughty Merseians so thoroughly, they were spurred to achieve global union. In due course, they entered space and emerged from the Time of Troubles ruling an interstellar empire composed of many peoples, including humans. However, since this was the Merseians' first turn on the wheel of galactic history, they were as energetic and ambitious as Earthmen of the early Commonwealth period had been.
Merseia's collision with Terra was another example of that old adage: "Two tough, smart races want the same real estate." Despite their green reptilian skins, Merseians were enough like humans to eat the same food and enjoy the same jokes. However, they were more ferocious than humans and could tolerate no equals whatsoever. To them, the Covenant of Alfzar they signed with Terra was no treaty of detente but an invitation to continue their struggle by covert means.
A Merseian conceived of life as a great hunt and found the meaning of his existence in the strength of the foes he overcame. The bellicose Merseians relished interspecies struggle but would not have hesitated to exterminate vanquished opponents afterwards. They were proud and severe by nature but the Roidhunate's acute xenophobia was a feature of the dominant, Eriau-speaking culture, not necessarily of their entire people. Merseian allegiance was primarily to the race, not to the Roidhunate as such. Their ultimate goal was nothing less than a Merseian-owned galaxy. Their governing Grand Council of Vachs (clan chiefs) headed by a landless, hereditary head of state (the Roidhun) had no direct aspirations to direct galactic rule but rather envisioned interlocking sets of autonomous Merseian realms. They believed their great vision justified any policy, however ruthless.
Although the warfare between Terra and Merseia resembles innumerable matches between weary old empires and brash new ones, the closest historical analogy is to the Eastern Roman Empire's duel with Sassanid Persia between the third and seventh centuries A.D. Both pairings were instances of disastrous, mutually exhausting struggles between enemies who regarded each other as their sole worthy opponent. The Eastern Empire was as preservationist, inward-turning, callous, and sophisticated as the Terran. It was perennially on the defensive against waves of enemies both civilized and barbarous. Key factors in its survival were devious intelligence agents and military officers who were hedonists in the capital but heroes in the marches. The Sassanids, on the other hand, were an aggressive, chauvinistic dynasty supremely confident of Persian cultural superiority. The intolerant state religion they ardently patronized justified their pretentions. Their obsession with hunting and their fiercely romantic masculinity were uncannily Merseian in flavor.
Terran-Merseian rivalry had smoldered for about a century when Dominic Flandry was born in the year 3000. He was the bastard son of a scholarly minor nobleman and an opera singer. Flandry had a keen mind in an agile body, a gift for languages, a ready wit, a flair for showmanship, and dazzling personal charm. He was part cynic, part idealist, self-indulgent and dedicated by turns, a refined voluptuary forever trying to explain away his good deeds. His sanguine-melancholic personality made him resilient, adventurous, and romantic to the point of sentimentality. Although descended from many racial stocks (a black ancestor appears in The People of the Wind), Flandry best fit the "Gallic" ethnic stereotype. He characterized himself as a "spoiled gentleman," explaining: "'Personally I enjoy decadence; but somebody has to hold off the Long Night for my own lifetime, and it looks as though I'm elected, (Hunters of the Sky Cave).
But Flandry's predominant fault, the one that caused the most grief for himself and others, was his total inability to understand women. He called them "the aliens among us" and no matter how passionately or how frivolously he pursued them, he never grasped their nature. The women who loved him—and there were many—suffered cruelly on his account. This is a common enough pattern for a rake who had been neglected by his mother, but in Flandry's case it had grave historical consequences.
Brilliant feats of improvisation marked Flandry's career as a Naval Intelligence officer. Of course not all his accomplishments have been chronicled, but the following were significant. (See the “Chronology of Technic Civilization” for detailed chronology.) He saved the two intelligent native races of Starkad and the Terran Navy from destruction in Ensign Flandry. But in order to achieve this, he callously exploited a courtesan's devotion and thus sowed the seed of future personal tragedy. ("Flandry knew in full what it meant to make an implement of a sentien
t being.") His first espionage venture cost him the freshness of his youth.
In A Circus of Hells, Flandry uncovered a Merseian spy network and foiled its plot to detach an entire Sector from the Empire. Through his efforts the planet Talwin became a neutral scientific base jointly operated by Merseia and Terra. Once more he reached his objective over a woman's body, this time with even less awareness of wrong-doing than in Ensign Flandry. But this outraged mistress, a poor prostitute, was psychically gifted. She cursed him never to possess the woman he loved most.
Within a few years he met and lost his great love in The Rebel Worlds. She was Kathryn McCormac, the wife of an admiral driven into revolt against the Empire by an Imperial Governor's brutal exactions. With Flandry's help she killed the Governor, thus preventing him from becoming the future evil power behind the Imperial throne. But she permitted her husband's rebellion to fail and followed him into exile rather than commit adultery with Flandry, whose disappointment became an excuse for libertine living.
Although this threat to the Empire's integrity was successfully countered, the ominous precedent of military revolt had been set. In the future it would be copied by other Navy officers hopeful of becoming "barracks emperors." Aeneas, focal point of the rebellion, was subsequently pacified and reconstructed despite Merseian attempts to reopen the wound (The Day of Their Return).
Later Flandry singlehandedly ruined the invasion plans of the barbarian Scothani and brought them under Imperial rule after seducing and manipulating their young queen ("Tiger by the Tail"). For this victory he was knighted. In "Honorable Enemies," he preserved the neutrality of Betelgeuse by deceiving Merseia's top intelligence agent, the phenomenal non-Merseian telepath Aycharaych. Simultaneously, Flandry rejected the love of a Terran noblewoman without recognizing the unselfishness of her attitudes. This episode opened years of a bitter—and bitterly regretted—vendetta between Flandry and Aycharaych. Two years later in "The Game of Glory" Flandry detected and killed a Merseian secret agent on the water world Nyanza. This time he rebuffed the attention of a beautiful woman for motives that approached chivalry.
On the steppes of Altai Flandry frustrated Merseian plans to annex that planet. This adventure ("A Message in Secret") was mercifully free from psychological torment. Then on the way home, Flandry liberated the hermit world of Unan Besar from a fiendish, biochemically based tyranny but afterwards deserted the loyal whore who had made his success possible (The Plague of Masters).
In Hunters of the Sky Cave Flandry tore apart another of Aycharaych's webs by helping expel alien invaders, the wolf-like Ardazirho, from the human colony Vixen; Once the aggressors were turned into allies, the Empire used their fleet to crush the Merseians at the Battle of Syrax. The poignance of this episode was not so much in Flandry's sentimental dalliance with a Vixenite girl but in his warmer rapport with aliens than Imperials.
The Syrax victory not only averted military peril, it made such a hero of participating Terran Admiral Hans Molitor that his troops soon proclaimed him Emperor after the reigning Josip died childless. This dynastic crisis took three years to settle. Meanwhile, Flandry gained fame by rescuing the favorite granddaughter of one elderly interim Emperor from the harem of a treacherous Duke with Imperial ambitions of his own in "The Warriors from Nowhere." Later, Flandry worked closely with Molitor during the consolidation of his reign and thus became a trusted personal advisor to him and his dynasty.
All the strands of Flandry's past knotted together in A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows. He foiled simultaneous plots to fan racial tensions and to goad the valuable planet Dennitza into rebellion against the Empire. Flandry was about to marry Kossara, a Dennitzan aristocrat who resembled his lost Kathryn, but the fruit of his youthful sins destroyed his last chance for happiness. His own son by his first mistress turned traitor, brought about his fiancée’s death, and was killed at his order afterwards. Behind all the shadows stood Flandry's old antagonist Aycharaych. Flandry discovered and destroyed Aycharaych's home world, a vacant storehouse of ancient wisdom. This revenged Kossara and cost the Merseian Intelligence Service a priceless resource.
Drained but still effective, Flandry eventually achieved a peace of exhaustion in his private life by settling down with Miriam Abrams, daughter of the officer who had originally led him into intelligence work. He and Miriam destroyed a would-be Hitler of Argolid descent on Hermes (A Stone in Heaven). Flandry ended his days as the gray eminence behind Hans Molitor's grandson.
Besides extending the lifespan of the Empire by at least a century, Flandry's deeds had important longer range consequences. The natives of Starkad, Talwin and Ramnu survived to pursue their own promising destinies. The Scothani and Ardazirho were brought into the orbit of Technic civilization and tamed somewhat. New opportunities were opened for humans on Altai and Unan Besar. Some of the McCormac rebels may have become the ancestors of the intrepid Kirkasanters in "Starfog." Vixen developed itself well enough to found a daughter colony, New Vixen, that later became a major center of civilization. Aeneas and Dennitza remained so strong they outlived the Empire and helped re-establish order in their Sectors. Most importantly, every one of the myriad lives Flandry saved was another ripple in the pool of time.
But Flandry was only manning the pump on a sinking ship. The Empire could stay afloat a while longer but it was no longer able to repair—much less rebuilditself. Destructive trends continued in Terran society despite the sacrifices of Flandry and others like him: "Too many mutually alien races; too many forces clashing in space, and so desperately few who comprehended the situation and tried their feeble best to help—naked hands battering at an avalanche as it ground down on them," ("Honorable Enemies").
Creativity never revived in the arts and sciences. Social barriers grew higher and the gaps between classes wider. Slaves increased in numbers while the conditions of their servitude worsened. Terra's fear of colonial disloyalty grew after McCormac's Revolt but her countermeasures, like forbidding Navy men to serve in their home systems, only weakened loyalty further. Colonies such as Freehold, Aeneas, and Dennitza began to plan for their post-Imperial futures. Despairing of Technic civilization, ripe for new religions and crazes, people withdrew from Terran society psychologically if not physically.
Thus it was with the Terran Empire as it had been with the Roman nearly 3,000 years before. Not enough is known about the Terran Emperor Georgios to compare him directly with the Roman Marcus Aurelius but at least he was an acceptable ruler. His son Josip, however, was every bit as degenerate as Marcus Aurelius' son Commodus and his impact on the Empire every bit as disastrous. The disorders that followed Josip's death tossed up Hans Molitor who was an exact counterpart to Septimus Severus, similarly provided with two incompetent sons, and likewise destined to die on an unruly frontier. After another round of civil wars, Flandry became the key advisor to a sound, Aurelian-like Emperor.
The Terran Empire was completing its Principate phase and beginning its Interregnum in Flandry's day. After his death, it became a Dominate, a static, repressive state with all the harshness of Diocletian's Roman Empire. All the negative tendencies of the previous era persisted unchecked. Not even a resort to divine kingship could save the Empire. The Fall, so slow, so long expected, was complete by the middle of the fourth millennium. Technic civilization was extinct. The Long Night had arrived.
Information about the Empire's Fall is inexact and largely speculative but the Byzantine-Persian historical model described earlier can usefully supplement the Roman one. It appears that Terra and Merseia wore each other out in fruitless wars of attrition, leaving each other too weak to resist other foes. Internal rebellions triggered by poverty, tyranny, and insecurity left both imperia even more vulnerable.
There may have been some new crusading movement comparable to Islam which attracted subject peoples on both sides. (Aycharaych had tried to kindle such on Aeneas and Diomedes.) Perhaps the Betelgeusans, a race noted for long range planning, had decided to end their centuries of neutrality an
d prosper at their larger neighbors' expense just as the medieval Georgians had. Possibly the fierce Gorrazani (descendants of the Gorzuni) erupted in conquest like the Turks. Or else the precedents of the Scothani and Ardazirho inspired other barbarians to harry Terra and Merseia as border savages had raided Byzantine and Persian territory. Undoubtedly, these were the kinds of factors that ruined Terra and Merseia. It is not certain if either capital world was destroyed. But shorn of her possessions, heavily populated Terra had insufficient resources left to rebuild her might. Merseia would have suffered catastrophic culture shock when her glorious dream failed.
A few incidents recorded during the Long Night show old Imperial colonies trying to retain or regain lost knowledge ("A Tragedy of Errors"). It was hunger for knowledge more than for goods that stimulated civilization's revival. Leading planets in the reconstruction period like Nuevoamerica and Kraken had never been part of the Empire. They explored far beyond its old borders ("The Night Face" and "The Sharing of Flesh"): Eventually, an entirely new approach to interstellar relations evolved. This was the Commonalty, a galactic service organization that provided quasi-governmental services without itself actually being a government ("Starfog"). Perhaps the Commonalty will avoid some of the weaknesses inherent in empires but eventually it is sure to develop special problems of its own. Meanwhile, a new and brilliant cycle of history has begun.
Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga Page 66
