The mood was ebullient. At the embarkation point there was a delay while a crowd gathered around the hereditary leader of the Bath and Garter, collecting autographs.

“Please! Please, dear ladies and gentlemen!” Farrell Cooper called out with archaic formality. “His Grace has a schedule to keep. Please! May we have some room here? You there! Mind the horses!”

Two of the large pipers arrived to help the amateur proctors push back the crowd. George Gustaf looked up after signing the book a young woman held out for him; she clutched it to her breast and gasped as he winked at her. Gustaf motioned for the pipers and proctors to let one man through the cordon.

“Hello, Mr. Smith,” he said. He shook Hamilton’s hand then turned to take another autograph book. “Come to watch another phenomenon in vivo? I must say, your articles have made a quaint little hereditary chore into a gigantic responsibility!”

Hamilton smiled back at the young man.

“Well, isn’t that what being a king is all about, Dr. Gustaf? From my own reading, I’d say it was often harder work than anything else… at least for the monarchs who tried to be good at it. Tell me something, do you ever wonder what it would have been like? I mean if…

“If the monarchies had never declined? If I was the inheritor of true power, instead of the leader of a ritual club? Well, of course I’ve thought about it, Mr. Smith. I’d have been guilty of a faulty imagination if I hadn’t!”

Gustaf finished with the last autograph seeker, waved at the crowd, then turned to look at Hamilton seriously.

“As to the reasons my ancestors had for merging their bloodlines the way they did—long after most of them had lost power—I’m as much in the dark as you are. But I can tell you something of the result.

“I’ll not deny that there is something within me that resonates with the emotions of this crowd. I’ve always had an instinct for people—and androids, for that matter. And I score at the top of the scale on all of the aptitude tests for leadership and justice-sense.”