“Not to me,” he had answered, truthfully enough.

For power had come to him; he had never sought it. And it had always been a very special, limited kind of power – advisory, not executive. He was only Special Assistant (Acting Ambassador) for Political Affairs, directly responsible to President and Council, with a staff that never exceeded ten-eleven, if one included ARISTOTLE. (His console still had direct access to Ari's memory and processing banks, and they talked to each other several times a year.) But towards the end the Council had invariably accepted his advice, and the world had given him much of the credit that should have gone to the unsung, unhonoured bureaucrats of the Peace Division.

And so it was Ambassador-at-Large Rajasinghe who got all the publicity, as he moved from one trouble-spot to another, massaging egos here, defusing crises there, and manipulating the truth with consummate skill. Never actually lying, of course; that would have been fatal. Without Ari's infallible memory, he could never have kept control of the intricate webs he was sometimes compelled to spin, that mankind might live in peace. When he had begun to enjoy the game for its own sake, it was time to quit.

That had been twenty years ago, and he had never regretted his decision. Those who predicted that boredom would succeed where the temptations of power had failed did not know their man or understand his origins. He had gone back to the fields and forests of his youth, and was living only a kilometre from the great, brooding rock that had dominated his childhood. Indeed, his villa was actually inside the wide moat that surrounded the Pleasure Gardens, and the fountains that Kalidasa's architect had designed now splashed in Johan's own courtyard, after a silence of two thousand years. The water still flowed in the original stone conduits; nothing had been changed, except that the cisterns high up on the rock were now filled by electric pumps, not relays of sweating slaves.