Statesman by Piers Anthony Read Free Book Online Page B

superior personnel are only part of the total picture. I would weed out the unfit, and the fit would be organized and trained to run the program.
    There was also the matter of prices and taxes. Prices had been kept artificially low, for the benefit of the consumers but that had made it uneconomical for those independent farmers who remained. Taxes on these were high, helping to complete the disincentive. I had made a forceful case to Ivan, and to Khukov, and gained their reluctant acquiescence: a freer market, without artificial pricing, and nominal rather than punitive taxation. We wanted to make it pay to farm.
    We expected to take a loss the first season, as the reorganization was accomplished. We hoped to regain the prior level of production the next season, completing the year on an even keel. Here there were two seasons in a year. We can get three at Jupiter, and more in the inner planets, but Saturn is so much farther out than Jupiter that the light from the sun is only about one quarter as intense, or something like a hundredth the intensity of the light at Earth's distance; I misremember the exact figure. This means that the light-focusing lenses have to be relatively enormous, and even so the season is shorter. Saturn, in just about every significant respect, is a more formidable planet to live with than is Jupiter. Perhaps that is just as well, for it helps prevent its regressive political system from dominating humanity.
    But we were surprised. We were not imposing masked free enterprise on a population that rejected it; rather, we were restoring it to a population that had always desired it. The peasants were eager for greater self-determination and for the rewards of their own efforts, and once they understood that my changes were serious, and that the dread secret police had been instructed to ferret out the remnants of the restrictive order and not to bother the enterprising peasants, they got into it with a will. There must have been an appalling level of cheating at all levels, because the first season showed a fifteen percent improvement in the harvest, and the second season jumped another thirty-five percent, with every sign of further improvements to come. We did indeed double the harvest in two years—a feat I really hadn't expected to accomplish. Our real objective, remember, had been to eliminate the nomenklatura; the harvest had been mostly the pretext. Perhaps I should have been less cynical about my own words; the citizens of Kraine evidently took them seriously, and made that aspect of the Dream come true. Kraine was never my homeland, but in retrospect I feel as though it could have been, and I would not mind retiring there.
    Dear Daddy,
    You have some nerve, asking Megan for a woman! I mean, of course you always have women, everybody knows that, but you don't have to rub Mother's nose in it, do you? Oh, well, you are what you are, and this is just to let you know she's doing it. I told her she should send you a wench from the Navy Tail, someone with about thirty years' experience and warts on her bottom, but she just smiled and said she thought she could do better than that. I thought you had a sexy Saturnine secretary, anyway; don't tell me you don't know what to do with her!
    Oh, well, I suppose I'm just out of sorts because Megan stepped down, and the special elections are done, and now we have a representative democracy again and it's so darned dull. Not like all that activity in Saturn! You fired all the bosses in Kraine? It's a wonder you didn't get assassinated on the spot! Oh, that's not funny, I shouldn't joke about it. But do try to stay out of trouble, Daddy; I'd hate it if anything should happen to you, even if you can't keep your hands off all those women.
    Robertico sends his love. He says he wants to grow up to be just like you. That shows all the sense he has!

Bio of a Space Tyrant 5 - Statesman
    Chapter 5 — SMILO
    But we did not remain in Kraine. Once we had set the reforms in