The man in the screen gesticulated humbly. "Your blessing, sire. Mendoza of Quito reporting, Don Miguel."

"Speak, Mendoza." Miguel's tone was regally impatient. "It has not rained here for sixteen days, sire," Mendoza said anxiously. "The people are discontented. Crops are dying, and—"

"Enough." Miguel flipped a switch and a second screen came to life. "Luis, take care of this fool from Quito, and explain to him that we have no control over the weather. Then transfer all these other calls to your own line. I'll be busy for the next fifteen minutes."

The screen went blank; the flickering lights died away.

"What is that thing?" Kesley asked.

"Closed-screen television. I use it to keep in contact with my governors in the various provinces."

Miguel took a seat behind a desk; this one, like the other downstairs, heaped high with papers. He lowered his great, bearlike head between his hands and stared at Kesley for what must have been more than a minute. Finally he said, "I offered you a chance to kill me. You declined it."

"Perhaps if I got the chance again, I'd act differently," Kesley said.

"Perhaps. But the chance comes but once. I am not yet tired of life ... I think." The Duke's eyes drooped wearily. They seemed to be staring backward into yesterday—and ahead at the burden of an endless tomorrow. "Four hundred years is many years, though. Are you married, young man?"

Startled, Kesley said: "Huh—no. No, not yet."

"I have been married thirty-six—no, forty-one times. The longest was the first: twenty-six years. We were both thirty when we met. When she died, she was fifty-six; I was still thirty. I was just finding out, then."

Miguel toyed with a sparkling, many-faceted gem on his desk. "Most of the other marriages were short ones.... I couldn't bear to watch them grow old. Now I do not marry at all."

"Do you have children?" Kesley asked.

Miguel flinched as if struck. His wide lips tightened in anger; then his face softened again. "The gene is recessive," he said quietly. "And lethal in early childhood, if not immediately after birth. My dynasties have been short-lived. I have had eight children; seven lived less than a year. The eighth 

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