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gets in and tries to use them. This one seems to be the one we need. It won’t let Jeffros divine its purpose.”
    “And I was told he kept information about the succession separate from everything else,” the High Lady Alexandra explained.
    I slid into the red leather bench in front of the machine the General pointed at. It started up fairly readily. There was some kind of emergency battery in it. “Explain the problem,” I said as I watched the basic programming coming up on the screen. “It’s not harmed in any way. It’s just told me so.”
    “We got that far too,” the General said, with a touch of sarcasm.
    “I wouldn’t let him go beyond that,” Jeffros said. He looked strained and ill. “You’ll find it’s got magic protections.”
    I had already seen those. They did not seem very formidable. I boxed them out and typed in a command for the names and whereabouts of the Emperor’s children. Nothing. I tried ‘ HEIRS ’ for ‘ CHILDREN ’. Again nothing. Then, with memories of that mock trial last November, I typed ‘T IMOTHEO’. And got a response.
    M ALE BORN 3392 CODENAME TIMOTHEO DELETED 3412
    “ Deleted!” I said. “That’s a fine touch. What was his real name then?”
    “We don’t know,” said the General.
    Well, at least this did seem to be the machine that had the answers, I thought. “Tell me the codenames for the other children, then, and how many of them there are.”
    “Again we don’t know,” said the General. “We’re not even certain there are any.”
    “Oh, I think there were ,” said the High Lady Alexandra. “There were rumours of at least five.”
    I swivelled round on the red bench. “Look here. I got a fax two years ago, just after I took over as Magid for the Empire. It recorded the birth of a girl to… to… um… a Lesser Consort called Jaleila. That’s one at least.”
    “Wasn’t true,” said the General, and the High Lady added, “Poor Jaleila had been dead nearly fourteen years then.” The General gave me a look that was more than a touch sarcastic. “Beginning to see the extent of our problem, eh, Magid?”
    I was. My face must have been expressive. Jeffros looked up at me from stringing lengths of flex between his wands. “This Empire,” he said, “was built of planks of delusion across a real cesspit. You don’t have to tell us, Magid. The Emperor was so scared of being tossed off the planks that he did a great deal more than just hide his children.”
    “Hid them even from themselves and issued false bulletins about new births,” Dakros said. “Cut the moral stuff, Jeffros. That’s our current problem. Thanks to Lady Alexandra we’re fairly sure there are some heirs and the question is, can you find them, Magid?”
    I looked him directly in his weary face. “Do you really want to find them? Since they don’t know who they are and you don’t either, wouldn’t it be better just to start all over again with a new Emperor? You seem to have made a start yourself—”
    He had grown more outraged with every word I spoke. He interrupted me vehemently. “Great and little gods , Magid! Do you think I want to deal with this mess for the rest of my life? I want to go home to Thalangia and run my farm! But I know my duty. I’ve got to leave the Empire in order with the proper person on its throne. That’s all I’m trying to do here!”
    “All right, all right,” I said. “It needed to be asked. But let’s hope this proper person of yours has a watertight birth certificate, or a birthmark or a tattoo or something, or half the Empire is going to say he’s a fraud if we do find him. Do they?” I asked Lady Alexandra. “Get some kind of mark at birth?”
    “I’ve no idea,” she said.
    “Then I take it you’re not the proud mother of an heir yourself?” I said.
    Even in the queer, flaring light of the wands, I saw how she coloured up, and she wrung her hands in an involuntary, distraught way. Dakros made a movement as if he was