“Up there is all the power one could want,” he told her, for perhaps the nine-thousandth time. She didn’t mind; she was just like him. “A giant computer is the entire southern half of that little world,” he continued. “It’s a small-scale Well of Souls, able to transform physical and temporal reality on a scale that might be planetwide. See that sparkle, about halfway down? That’s the edge of the big dish, locked on the Well of Souls at the equator, frozen in place. But if freed, it would be able to transform a world as large as this one. Think of it! A world! With the people designed to your pattern, the land and resources laid out to your specifications, and everything absolutely loyal to you—you who can be made immortal. And that computer can accomplish it all merely by adjusting reality in such a way that nobody would even know anything had been done. Everyone would just accept it!”

She nodded sympathetically. “But you know there is nothing on the Well World that could build an engine with sufficient thrust to reach New Pompeii,” she pointed out. “You and I both saw the engines tumble and explode in that glacial valley in Gedemondas.”

He nodded absently. “Fourteen thousand already dead from the Alliance that warred to get that fragmented ship, perhaps another forty thousand dead in the war itself—and the same number from the opposition alliance that the Yaxa and Ben Yulin headed.”

He talked as if he were sincerely pained by the waste and futility the war represented, but she knew it was the compulsive politician in him that made it sound so. He couldn’t care less about the dead and crippled, only that the war had been for nothing and had cost Makiem its friendship with its allies and neighbors, who took a dimmer view.