as described by Her Glory's representative, Dworkin Barimen, styled "the Black".

The Universe—that is, the Universes in plural—are far larger and more varied than you could possibly envision. Center is the capital planet of the Twenty Universes, but Empress Star is not an empress and it is not an empire. Call her Star as hundreds of names are hers, but it is the name given to her by her husband and we'll call it an empire because no other word is close, and I'll refer to emperors and empresses—and to the Empress.

Nobody knows how many universes there are. Theory places no limit, though Doctor Skillary Hailstrandter, the Strellarius Professor of Paradoxical Anomalism at the University of Maximegalon has speculated that the ulitmate number of individual universes (with a small "u") could be as high as six raised to its sixth power, and the result in turn raised to its sixth power—1.03144x1028—10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056; any and all possibilities in an unlimited number of combinations of natural laws: each appropriate to its own universe. But this is just theory and Occam's Razor is much too dull. All that is known in the Twenty Universes is that twenty have been discovered, that each has its own laws, and that most of them have planets, or sometimes places, where humanlike beings live. I won't try to say what lives elsewhere.

The Emperor is sole source of Imperial law, sole judge, sole executive—and does very little and has no way to enforce his rulings. What he or she does have is enormous prestige from a system that has worked for seven millennia. This non-system holds together by having no togetherness, no uniformity, never seeking perfection, no Utopias—just answers good enough to get by, with lots of looseness and room for many ways and attitudes.

The Twenty Universes include many real empires. Your Galaxy in your universe has its stellar empires, and there are Gates that link the universes. Some planets have no known Gates. The anomaly in the planetoid Bridgetown is a Major Gate. About the term universe—for many centuries there was thought on Earth and other planets to be only one universe, defined as all of space and time and their contents; including planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy. With the dawn of Quantum Theory, there came into being the so-called Multiversal Theory. The multiverse is a hypothetical group of multiple universes. Together, these universes comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, information, and the physical laws and constants that describe them. The different universes within the multiverse are called "parallel universes", "other universes", "alternate universes", or "many worlds". All connected multiverses could be described as a single Multiversal Cluster—English is ill-suited for this level of description. This is what we mean when we speak of the Twenty Universes. Universe with a capital U means an individual Multiversal Cluster. Twenty such clusters have, as I mentioned earlier, been discovered to date. Each Cluster has both alternate and parallel universes with a small u. Alternate universes are defined by interbranching timelines splitting off from one another and sometimes fusing together; whereas Parallel universes, no matter how much the may resemble each other, never connect to other timelines—at least not directly. These include what your scientists call the Mirror Universe, seemingly a clone of your timeline where the abstract concepts of good and evil are swapped, such that the Federation is paralleled as the Terran Empire, et cetera. Of course, such parallel universes have their oen intertangled alternates. It can be visualised as a rope made of many cords, each of which has many threads.

Local affairs are local. Infanticide?—they're your babies, your planet. PTAs, movie censorship, disaster relief—the Empire is ponderously unhelpful. Sort of like your Prime Directive, but on steroids!