The scar was the legacy of a bad car accident on the interstate near Albany; she had almost lost her arm. Neela by her own admission drove “like a maharani.” It was up to other road users to keep out of her imperious, supra-legal way. In areas where she and her car became known—Blefuscu, or the environs of her smart New England college motorists, when they saw Neela Mahendra coming, would often abandon their vehicles and run. After a series of small dings and near misses, she experienced the very unfunny Big One. Her survival was a miracle (and a close thing); the preservation of her heartbreaking beauty was an even greater astonishment. “I’ll take the scar,” she said. “I’m lucky to have it. And it’s a reminder of something I shouldn’t forget.”

In New York, fortunately, it was unnecessary for her to drive. Her regal attitude “my mother always told me I was a queen, and I believed her”—meant she preferred to be driven anyway, although she was also a terrible backseat driver, full of yelps and gasps. Her rapid success in television production enabled her to afford a car service, whose drivers quickly grew used to her frequent cries of fear. She had no sense of direction, either, and so-remarkably for a New Yorker—never knew where anything was. Her favorite stores, her preferred restaurants and nightclubs, the location of the recording studios and cutting rooms she regularly used: they could have been anywhere. “Where the car stops is where they are,” she told Solanka over the fourth cocktail, all wide-eyed innocence. “It’s amazing. They’re always right there. Right outside the door.”

Pleasure is the sweetest drug. Neela Mahendra leaned into him in their black leather booth and said, “I’m having so much fun. I never realized how easy it would be around you, you looked like such a stuffed shirt at Jack’s place, watching that stupid game.” Her head tilted toward his shoulder. Her hair was down now, and from where he was sitting it veiled much of her face. She let the back of her right hand move slowly against the back of his left hand. “Sometimes, when I drink too much, she comes out to play, the other one, and then there’s nothing I can do. She takes charge and that’s that.” Solanka was lost. She took his hand in hers and kissed the fingertips, sealing their unspoken compact. “You have scars, too,” she said, “but you never talk about them. I tell you all my secrets and you don’t say one single word. I think, why does this man never talk about his child? Yes, of course Jack told me, you think I didn’t ask? Asmaan, Eleanor, that much I know. If I had a little boy, I’d talk about him all the time. You apparently don’t even carry his photograph. I think, this man left his wife of many years, the mother of his son, and even his friend doesn’t know why. I think, he looks like a good man, a kind man, not a brute, so there must be a good reason, maybe if I open up to him he’ll tell me, but, baba, you just keep mum. And then I think, here is this Indian man, Indian from India, not Indo-Lilly like me, a son of the mother country, but apparently that also is a forbidden topic. Born in Bombay, but on the place of his birth he is silent. What are his family circumstances? Brothers, sisters? Parents dead or alive? Nobody knows. Does he ever go back to visit? Seems like not. No interest. Why? The answer must be: more scars. Malik, I think you’ve been in more accidents than me, and maybe you were even more badly hurt somewhere along the line. But if you don’t talk, what can I do? I have nothing to say to you. I can only say, here I am, and if human beings can’t save you then nothing can. That’s all I’m saying. Talk, don’t talk, it’s up to you. I’m having a good time and anyway now the other one is here, so shut up, I don’t know why men always have to talk so much when it’s obvious that words are not the thing required. Not required right now at all.”

12

Akasz Kronos, the great, cynical cyberneticist of the Rijk, created the Puppet Kings in response to the terminal crisis of the Rijk civilization, but on account of the flaw in his character that made him unable to consider the general good, he used them to guarantee nobody’s survival or fortune but his own. In those days the polar ice-caps of Galileo—I, the Rijk’s home planet, were in the last stages of melting (a large stretch of open sea had been sighted at the North Pole) and no matter how high the dikes were built, the moment was not far off when the glory of the Rijk, that highest of cultures set in the lowest of lands. which was just then enjoying the richest and most prolonged golden age in its history, would be washed away.

The Rijk fell into decline. Their artists put down their brushes for good, for how could art—which relied like good wine, on the judgment of posterity—be created once posterity had been canceled? Science failed the challenge as well. The Galileo solar system lay in a “dark quadrant near the rim of our own galaxy, a mysterious area in which few other suns burned, and in spite of their high level of technological achievement, the Rijk had never succeeded in locating an alternative home planet. A cross-section of Rijk society was dispatched, cryogenically frozen, in the Max H, a computer-controlled spacecraft programmed to wake its precious cargo if a suitable planet came within range of its sensors. When this spacecraft malfunctioned and exploded a few thousand miles into space, people lost heart. In that most open, broad-minded, and reasonable of societies there now arose a number of fire-and-brimstone preachers, who blamed the coming catastrophe on the godlessness of Rijk culture. Many citizens fell under the spell of these new, narrow men. Meanwhile the sea continued to rise. When a dike sprang a leak, the water pushed through with such violence that whole counties were sometimes flooded before repairs were complete. The economy collapsed. Lawlessness increased. People stayed home and waited for the end.

The sole surviving portrait of Akasz Kronos shows a man with a full head of long silver hair framing a soft, round. surprisingly boyish face dominated by a wine-dark Cupid’s bow of a mouth. He wears a floor-length gray tunic. with gold embroidery at the cuffs and neckline, over a frilled white high-collared shirt: the very picture of the dignified genius. But the eyes are mad. As we peer into the darkness around him, we make out fine white filaments floating from his fingertips. Only after much study do we notice the small bronze-colored figure of a puppet man at the bottom left of the picture, and even then it takes a while before we realize that the puppet has broken free of the puppeteer’s control. The homunculus turns its back on its maker and sets off to forge its own destiny, while Kronos, the abandoned creator, takes leave not only of his creation but of his senses, too.

Professor Kronos was not only a great scientist but an entrepreneur of Machiavellian daring and skill. As the Rijk lands drowned, he quietly moved his center of operations to the two small mountain-islands that formed the primitive but independent nation of Baburia, at the Galilean antipodes. Here he negotiated and signed an advantageous treaty with the local ruler, the Moyol. The Baburians would retain ownership of their territory, but Kronos would be granted long leases over the high mountain pastures, for which he agreed to pay what seemed to the Mogol a very high rent indeed: an annual pair of wooden shoes for every Baburian man. woman, and child. In addition. Kronos undertook to guarantee the defense of Baburia against the assault that must certainly come as the Rijk’s lands sank below the rising waves. For this he was accorded the title of National savior and granted droit de seigneur over all the islands’ new brides. Having come to terms. Kronos proceeded with the creation of the masterpieces that would prove his undoing, the so-called Monstrous Dynasty of Puppet Caesars, also known as Professor Kronos’s No-Strings Puppet Kings.