The Best Available Man

For most of a century, the empire has been handed on by adoption. Each emperor picked the ablest man he could find, made him a son on paper, and trained him. Four times in a row it has produced a competent ruler. It is the reason the last hundred years have not looked like the hundred before them.

He now has a son of his own — the first emperor in that century to have a living one. The boy is thirteen. Everyone at court can see what he is: not stupid, but vain, easily flattered, drawn to spectacle, and not much interested in the work.

If he names the boy, the succession is uncontested and no one raises an army over it. If he passes him over for an abler man, he has told the legions that the emperor's own son can be set aside — and he has probably signed the boy's death warrant, because no new emperor lets a rival heir grow up.

He has been writing to himself for years about doing the duty rather than the comfortable thing. Now it is his son.