to
generalities, and what he could remember from a presentation at the
court of Excalibur during his student days. These people had a
monarchy since before Gram had been colonized; he wasn't going to
admit that Gram's had been established since he went off-planet.
The table was small enough for everybody to hear what he was saying
and to feed questions to him. It lasted all through the meal, and
continued when they adjourned for coffee in the library.

"But what about your form of government, your social structure,
that sort of thing?" somebody, impatient with the artificialities
of the court, wanted to know.

"Well, we don't use the word government very much," he replied. "We
talk a lot about authority and sovereignty, and I'm afraid we burn
entirely too much powder over it, but government always seems to us
like sovereignty interfering in matters that don't concern it. As
long as sovereignty maintains a reasonable semblance of good public
order and makes the more serious forms of crime fairly hazardous for
the criminals, we're satisfied."

"But that's just negative. Doesn't the government do anything
positive for the people?"

He tried to explain the Sword-World feudal system to them. It was
hard, he found, to explain something you have taken for granted all
your life to somebody who is quite unfamiliar with it.

* * * * *

"But the government--the sovereignty, since you don't like the other
word--doesn't do anything for the people!" one of the professors
objected. "It leaves all the social services to the whim of the
individual lord or baron."

"And the people have no voice at all; why, that's tyranny,"
a professor Assemblyman added.

He tried to explain that the people had a very distinct and
commanding voice, and that barons and lords who wanted to stay
alive listened attentively to it. The Assemblyman changed his mind;
that wasn't tyranny, it was anarchy. And the professor was still
insistent about who performed the social services.

"If you mean schools and hospitals and keeping the city clean, the
people do that for themselves. The government, if you want to think
of it as that, just sees to it that nobody's shooting at them while
they're doing it."

"That isn't what Professor Pullwell means, Lucas. He means old-age
pensions," Prince Bentrik said. "Like this thing Zaspar Makann's
whooping for."

He'd heard about that, on the voyage from Audhumla. Every person on
Ma