Johnny Bezique becomes ruler of Loris

Johnny Bezique becomes ruler of Loris through a reversal that joins personal misconduct to strategic foresight: the Earthman who repeatedly disrupts a peaceful society is ultimately offered its leadership because its planners believe his aggression is precisely what their future requires. His acceptance converts a forecast of conflict with Earth into an intention to prepare for conquest, although the coronation and the campaign he proposes have not yet taken place.

Arrival and the Lorian Order

Bezique, a spaceship-driver for SBC Explorations, Inc., is surveying the previously uncharted fringe of the Seergon Cluster when he approaches the fifth planet and receives a message identifying it as Loris. The episode begins as a standard first-contact nightmare, but its expected danger initially seems absent. The Lorians are reasonable, accommodating, intelligent, and attractive; their society appears so peaceful that Bezique’s growing irritation is difficult even for him to explain. For nearly two weeks he behaves himself, an interval that makes his later escalation a change in conduct rather than an immediate response to hostility.

The first rupture is small by Lorian standards. Driving manually, Bezique turns left without signaling just as another car is moving past him. The vehicles narrowly avoid a collision and stop facing one another. The other driver approaches mildly, but the encounter helps expose the mismatch between the visitor and his hosts: Bezique is quick to anger in a culture accustomed to calm resolution. A counselor later recommends social-adjustment therapy and insists on it because Bezique’s aggressive moods pose a risk to other citizens. When Bezique refuses to cooperate, he strikes the counselor. The local response treats actual violence as a grave matter, and the counselor says Bezique must remain under restraint while the case is reviewed.

Flight from the Monitors

Bezique’s refusal to accept the consequences expands a personal dispute into a confrontation with Loris’s law-enforcement system. A monitor first expects him to come along voluntarily. Bezique refuses; the official leaves to obtain new orders, then returns with authority to use force if necessary. Bezique strikes him as well. Recognizing that assaulting a monitor has made his situation more serious, he decides to reach his ship and leave the planet. He can get there, but departure is impossible: about twenty workers are servicing the vessel, and its main drive has been removed for cleaning and modernization as a gift from the Lorians.

The gift, intended as a friendly gesture, instead traps Bezique on Loris. When four monitors arrive, he evades them through winding streets, loses his way, and ends up in a covered arcade. A closed door blocks his route. His demand that it open is followed by a forceful mental command; the door and other nearby doors burst open, allowing him to outrun the monitors. The incident gives him a means of escape from the immediate pursuit, but not a workable way off the planet. He is one Earthman facing an entire world, and he recognizes that flight alone cannot solve the problem.

An Improvised Claim to Authority

Bezique reaches for a strategy modeled on historical conquerors: find the ruler and threaten him until the population listens. The plan has an unexpected obstacle. Loris has no ruler. A friendly native directs him toward Veerhe, the Chief of the Office of Future Projections, whom Bezique assumes may be important enough to serve as a substitute. Before he reaches the office, a group of twenty monitors stops him. Their uncertainty suggests that arrest is an unusual task in a society of peaceful citizens, where law officers are not accustomed to confronting an aggressive fugitive.

Bezique continues toward the Planning Office and tries to pass himself off as a Lorian Planner returning from a secret aggression-training mission. He claims that his training is complete, that he has conducted tests of Loris’s psychological condition, and that he must report grave news to the Chief Planner. The monitors already know his identity, so the invented explanation does not persuade them. Nevertheless, the episode shows how he responds to Lorian institutions: rather than accept their authority, he tries to redirect it by assuming a role that their orderly procedures might recognize.

At the Office of Future Projections, ten armed monitors order him to stop. They have authority to shoot if necessary and have been instructed to ignore his explanations. Bezique says he will go through the door anyway, and walks in despite their threat. They do not shoot; he hears them arguing behind him as he proceeds through the office corridors. The encounter carries him, by stubbornness rather than lawful access, to Veerhe. There, Bezique’s attempt to impose terms meets a forecast that changes the meaning of the entire pursuit.

Veerhe’s Forecast and the Transfer of Power

Veerhe, a calm, small man with an aging pixie face, has completed a projection concerning Earth and Loris. His analysis predicts a conflict between the peoples, not because the Lorians seek preeminence, but because Earth’s inhabitants will not be content unless one side rules the other. Bezique says the conclusion is obvious to him: humans want victory more intensely than the Lorians do, who follow rules even when the stakes are high. Veerhe confirms that this is the office’s own extrapolation.

The planners have therefore chosen to act before the predicted conflict arrives. Rather than allow events to produce a prolonged struggle, they consider it reasonable to accept what they regard as inevitable and offer Bezique personal rule over Loris. Their offer is not the result of Bezique defeating the Lorians in battle or taking their institutions by force. It is an act of calculated consent: the society he has unsettled decides that a leader capable of aggression may be necessary to meet a danger it believes its own temperament leaves it poorly equipped to face.

Bezique initially doubts his suitability, but accepts. He says he likes the Lorians and intends to govern well; Veerhe replies that they will be easy to manage so long as his orders remain within their psychological capabilities. Bezique promises that life will continue much as before and says he cannot improve on the existing arrangement. His assurance sits uneasily beside the scale of the authority he has just accepted: the social order may remain familiar, but its new head is already thinking beyond Loris.

From Planetary Ruler to Prospective Conqueror

Bezique soon identifies what he regards as the consequence of his new position. If Earth and Loris are on a collision course, he believes he must conquer Earth before Earth conquers Loris. He describes the choice as a contest for a single place at the top. His justification shifts from protecting the Lorians to civilizing Earth’s people, whom he considers less advanced in how society should be organized. The ambition is presented as service to those he intends to dominate, a contradiction that exposes how readily his language of protection becomes a claim to rule.

He asks Veerhe to arrange a referendum electing him Emperor, followed by a coronation, and says that he will later review the data on the Ancient Dynasty fleet. The sequence matters: Bezique has accepted Loris’s offer, but the formal election and coronation are still prospective, as is any expedition against Earth. The forecast has not become a war; it has become a program of preparation.

The closing contrast makes the transfer of power consequential in opposite directions. For Earth, the standard nightmare is the prospect of an advanced alien civilization imposing its culture. For Loris, Bezique supplies an aggressive general, and the planet is expected to acquire mercenaries to operate its spacefleet. The Lorians’ peaceful decision gives them a possible defense, but it also places their future in the hands of the very kind of conqueror whose behavior first disrupted their society. Bezique’s elevation is thus both a protective calculation by the planners and the opening of an intended expansion beyond Loris.