He squared his shoulders. “Martin wanted to be President. That was something everyone knew. And now he’s running things back home. Dad was getting ready to call elections, and since then . . . well, Martin says he may regularize things when the emergency’s over. Want to bet that’s going to be about the Fourth of Never?”

There were some nods at that, but it wasn’t all that important to these men. They were all Changelings. They could read and write, his father had been insistent on keeping the schools going even in the terrible early years, but the old world wasn’t really real to them. Few of them had the visceral commitment to the old ways his father had had; he didn’t himself, though he was closer to it. They’d grown up in a benevolent despotism, thinking of General Thurston as the one who’d saved their families’ lives, the stern wise father figure who brought order out of chaos and let every man reap what he sowed. And not least, the one who’d put down the pretensions of budding land-rich would-be patricians.

Not that Dad wanted to be a despot. But at first it was just a struggle for survival and doing what he had to do day by day, and then he thought he could put enough of the country back together first so he could have real elections that would give him legitimacy as something more than a local warlord, and it turned out to be a lot tougher proposition than he thought. By the time he admitted that, a lot of water had gone under the bridge; Dad was stubborn as a granite butte. Martin could probably have won real elections if he’d been old enough to be a candidate under the old system, but he didn’t want that anyway. He wanted to be Emperor or something like it, and hand it down to his son. And that was before he started getting involved with the CUT.

“OK, Martin’s behind this alliance with the Church Universal and Triumphant. Does anyone here like the idea of that? Those people have slaves, and they don’t even bother calling them Registered and assigned Refugees like Pendleton . . . which Martin also allied us with. Dad declared war on the CUT when they trashed New Deseret and he fought his last battle against them at Wendell. Fought them and beat them, I was there. Now they’re supposed to be allies working for national reunification alongside the United States. Does anyone here really believe that? Is there one single man here who’ll get up and say it with a straight face?”

This time the silence was deeper.

Fred went on: “Dad broke up some of the big ranches so guys like you could have their own farms after the Change.”

A youngish ranker spoke: “Seems like the Mackenzies did that too.”