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“And you think this adds up to a plot against the Throne?”

“A plot to seize the Throne, Your Majesty.”

“Oh, come, Prince Ganzay! You’re talking like Dorflay!”

“Hear me out, Your Majesty. His Imperial Highness is fourteen years old; it will be eleven years before he will be legally able to assume the powers of emperor. In the dreadful event of your immediate death, it would mean a regency for that long. Of course, your Ministers and Counselors would be the ones to name the Regent, but I know how they would vote with Security Guard bayonets at their throats. And regency might not be the limit of Prince Travann’s ambitions.”

“In your own words, quite plausible, Prince Ganzay. It rests, however, on a very questionable foundation. The assumption that Prince Travann is stupid enough to want the Throne.”

He had to terminate the conversation himself and blank the screen. Viktor Ganzay was still staring at him in shocked incredulity when his image vanished. Viktor Ganzay could not imagine anybody not wanting the Throne, not even the man who had to sit on it.

* * * * *

He sat, for a while, looking at the darkened screen, a little worried. Viktor Ganzay had a much better intelligence service than he had believed. He wondered how much Ganzay had found out that he hadn’t mentioned. Then he went back to the reports. He had gotten down to the Ministry of Fine Arts when the communications screen began calling attention to itself again.

When he flipped the switch, a woman smiled out of it at him. Her blond hair was rumpled, and she wore a dressing gown; her smile brightened as his face appeared in her screen.

“Hi!” she greeted him.

“Hi, yourself. You just get up?”

She raised a hand to cover a yawn. “I’ll bet you’ve been up reigning for hours. Were Rod and Snooks in to see you yet?”

He nodded. “They just left. Rod’s going on a picnic with Olva in the mountains.” How long had it been since he and Marris had been on a picnic–a real picnic, with less than fifty guards and as many courtiers along? “Do you have much reigning to do, this afternoon?”

She grimaced. “Flower Festivals. I have to make personal tri-di appearances, live, with messages for the loving subjects. Three minutes on, and a two-minute break between. I have forty for this afternoon.”

“Ugh! Well, have a good time, sweetheart. All I have is lunch with the Bench, and then this Plenary Session.” He told her about Ganzay’s fear of outright controversy.

“Oh, fun! Maybe somebody’ll pull somebody’s whiskers, or something. I’m in on that, too.”

The call-indicator in front of him began glowing with the code-symbol of the Minister of Security.

“We can always hope, can’t we? Well, Yorn Travann’s trying to get me, now.”

“Don’t keep him waiting. Maybe I can see you before the Session.” She made a kissing motion with her lips at him, and blanked the screen.

He flipped the switch again, and Prince Travann was on the screen. The Security Minister didn’t waste time being sorry to bother him.

“Your Majesty, a report’s just come in that there’s a serious riot at the University; between five and ten thousand students are attacking the Administration Center, lobbing stench bombs into it, and threatening to hang Chancellor Khane. They have already overwhelmed and disarmed the campus police, and I’ve sent two companies of the Gendarme riot brigade, under an officer I can trust to handle things firmly but intelligently. We don’t want any indiscriminate stunning or tear-gassing or shooting; all sorts of people can have sons and daughters mixed up in a student riot.”

“Yes. I seem to recall student riots in which the sons of his late Highness Prince Travann and his late Majesty Rodrik XXI were involved.” He deliberated the point for a moment, and added: “This scarcely sounds like a frat-fight or a panty-raid, though. What seems to have triggered it?”