"His gaze went to the stars in the viewscreen. Without amplification, few that he could see lay in the more or less 200-light-year radius of that rough and blurry-edged spheroid named the Terran Empire. Those were giants, visible by virtue of shining across distances we can traverse, under hyperdrive, but will never truly comprehend; and they filled the merest, tiniest fragment of the galaxy, far out in a spiral arm where their numbers were beginning to thin toward cosmic hollowness. Yet this insignificant Imperial bit of space held an estimated four million suns. Maybe half of those had ben visited at least once. About a hundred thousand worlds of theirs might be considered to belong to the Empire, though for most the connection was ghostly tenuous.... It was too much. There were too many environments, races, cultures, lives, messages. No mind, no government could know the whole, let alone cope.
"Nevertheless, that sprawl of planets, peoples, provinces, and protectorates must somehow cope, or see the Long Night fall. Barbarians, who had gotten spaceships and nuclear weapons too early in their history, prowled the borders; the civilized Roidhunate of Merseia probed, withdrew a little - seldom the whole way - waited, probed again.... Rigel caught Flandry's eye, a beacon amidst the great enemy's dominions. The Taurian Sector lay in that direction, fronting the Wilderness beyond which lay the Merseians."
-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 339-606 AT I, p. 348.
"Too big, this handful of stars we suppose we know..."
-op. cit., p. 349.
Familiar Themes
The size and shape of the Terran Empire.
The edge of a spiral arm.
The tenuousness of the Empire.
Impossibility of interstellar government.
Staving off the Long Night.
Barbarians with spaceships and nuclear weapons.
The long term goal of the Roidhunate.
Imperial Sectors.
The Wilderness between Empire and Roidhunate.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Ummm, the radius of the Terran Empire was 400, not 200 light years.
Interstellar gov't might ultimately be an impossibility, but that did not stop human beings from trying, and even some what succeeding for centuries.
The long term goal of the Roidhunate was to destroy the Empire and conquer the galaxy, governed by Merseian ruled autonomous regions.
Flattering, how you linked to my "Sector Governors in the Terran Empire" note!
Sean
Sean,
The diameter was 400.
Paul.
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