"You're going to discuss this with Ninhursag?"

"Of course, Your Majesty. I've brought Gus' report and I'm going up to Mother after this meeting. Admiral MacMahan and I will put our heads together, and perhaps Dahak can help us pull something out of the data."

"Good luck. 'Hursag's been trying to get a handle on them for over a year now. Oh, well." Colin shook his head and rose, holding out his hand to the Lieutenant Governor once more. "In that case, I won't keep you, Mister Jefferson. Horus and I have a birthday party to attend, and two pre-adolescent hellions who'll make us both miserable if we're late."

"Of course. Please give the Empress and your children my regards."

"I will—in between the presents, cake, punch, and general hullabaloo. Good luck with your report."

"Thank you, Your Majesty." Jefferson withdrew gracefully, and Colin and Horus headed for the imperial family's side of the Palace.

Chapter Three

Colin MacIntyre tossed his jacket into a chair, and his green eyes laughed as a robot butler clucked audibly and scooped it up again. 'Tanni was as neat as the cat she so resembled, and she'd programmed the household robots to condemn his sloppiness for her when she was busy elsewhere.

He glanced into the library in passing and saw two heads of sable hair bent over a hologram. It looked like the primary converter of a gravitonic conveyor's main propulsion unit, and the twins were busily manipulating the display through their neural feeds to turn it into an exploded schematic while they argued some abstruse point.

Their father shook his head and continued on his way. It was hard to remember they were only twelve—when they were studying, anyway—but he knew that was only because he'd grown up without implant educations.

With neural interfacing, there was no inherent limit to the data any individual could be given, but raw data wasn't the same as knowledge, and that required a whole new set of educational parameters. For the first time in human history, the only thing that mattered was what the best educators had always insisted was the true goal of education: the exploration of knowledge. It was no longer necessary for students to spend endless hours acquiring data, but only a matter of making them aware of what they already "knew" and teaching them to use it—teaching them to think, really—and that was a good teacher's delight. Unfortunately, it also invalidated the traditional groundwork and performance criteria. Too many teachers were lost without the old rules—and even more of them, led by the West's unions, had waged a bitter scorched earth campaign against accepting the new. The human race in general seemed to think the Emperor possessed some sort of magic wand, and, in a way, they were right. Colin could do just about anything he decided needed doing... as long as he was prepared to use heavy enough artillery and convinced the battle was worth the cost.

It had taken him over three years to reach that conclusion where Earth's teaching establishment was concerned. For forty-three months, he'd listened to reason after reason why the changeover could not be made. Too few Earth schoolchildren had neural feeds. Too little hardware was available. Too many new concepts in too short a time would confuse children already in the system and damage them beyond repair. The list had gone on and on and on, until, finally, he'd had enough and announced the dissolution of all teachers' unions and the firing of every teacher employed by any publicly funded educational department or system anywhere on the planet.

The people he'd fired had tried to fight the decree in the courts only to discover that the Great Charter gave Colin the authority to do just what he'd done, and when they came up against the cold steel his homely, usually cheerful face normally hid so well, their grave concern for the well-being of their students had undergone a radical change. Suddenly the only thing they wanted to do was make the transition as quick and painless as possible, and if the Emperor would only let them have their jobs back, they would get down to it immediately.

They had. Still not without a certain amount of foot dragging when they thought no one was looking, but they had gotten down to it. Of course, every one of their earlier objections had had its own grain of truth, which made the introduction of an entirely new educational system difficult and often frustratingly slow, but once they accepted that Colin was serious, they'd really buckled down and pushed. And, along the way, the ones who had the makings of true teachers rather than petty bureaucrats had rediscovered the joy of teaching. The ones who didn't make that rediscovery tended to disappear from the profession in ever greater numbers, but their earlier opposition and lingering guerrilla warfare had delayed the full-scale implementation of modern education on Earth by at least ten years.

Which meant, of course, that children on Birhat had a measurable advantage over those educated on Earth. Dahak spent most of his time in Birhat orbit, and while Earth's teaching establishment grappled with Imperial education theories, Dahak had already mastered them. More, he, unlike they, had no institutional or personal objections to adopting them, and it required only a tithe of his vast capacity to institute what amounted to a planet-wide system of small-group studies. His students responded with an insatiable hunger to learn, and, to Colin's knowledge the twins had never played hooky, which was almost scary.

He walked into the study, and Jiltanith smiled at him from her desk. He took the time to kiss her properly, then flopped into his chair and sighed contentedly as it adjusted to his body's contours.

"Thou soundest well content to leave thine office behind thee, my love," Jiltanith observed, putting her own computer on hold, and he nodded.

"You oughta try it sometime," he said pointedly, and she laughed.

"Nay, my Colin. 'Twould drive me to bedlam's brink did I have naught to which to set my hands, and this—" she gestured at the hardcopy and data chips strewn over her desk "—is a study most interesting."

"Yeah?"

"Aye. Amanda hath begun to think how best we may use Tao-ling's Mark Twenty hyper gun in small unit tactics."

Colin shook his head wryly. Jiltanith didn't love combat—she knew too much of what it cost—yet there were dark and dangerous places in her soul. He suspected that no one, not even he, would ever be admitted into some of them, but a lifetime of bitter guerrilla warfare had left its mark, and, unlike him, she saw war not as a last response but as a practical option that worked. She wasn't merciless, but she was far more capable of slaughter—and less inclined to give quarter—than he. That was why he'd made her Minister of War. As Warlord, Colin was the Imperium's commander-in-chief, but it was 'Tanni who ran their growing military establishment on a day-to-day basis.

"Well, if you can tear yourself away, we're about to have visitors."

"Ah?" She cocked her head at him.

"Isis, Cohanna, and Cohanna's... project," he said less cheerfully. "I'm afraid Jefferson may be right about the logic of ordering them destroyed, but I can't say I'm looking forward to making that decision."

"Nor shouldst thou." His wife stood and walked around her desk. "Logic, as thou hast said time without number, my love, may be naught but a way to err wi' confidence."

"You got that right, babe," he sighed, snaking an arm around her as she passed. She paused to ruffle his sandy hair, then sank into her own chair. "The thing is, I think I'm trying to psych myself up to decide against them 'cause I think I ought to, and that makes me feel sort of ashamed."