Glory Road2006

Glory Road:
Center is the capital planet of the Twenty Universes. But Star was not "Empress" and it is not an empire. I'll go on calling her "Star" as hundreds of names were hers and I'll call it an "empire" because no other word is close, and I'll refer to "emperors" and "empresses" - and to the Empress, my wife.Nobody knows how many universes there are. Theory places no limit: any and all possibilities in unlimited number of combinations of "natural" laws, each sheaf appropriate to its own universe. But this is just theory and Occam's Razor is much too dull. All that is known in 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 human beings live. I won't try to say what lives elsewhere.The Twenty Universes include many real empires. Our Galaxy in our universe has its stellar empires - yet so huge is our Galaxy that our human race may never meet another, save through the Gates that link the universes. Some planets have no known Gates. Earth has many and that is its single importance; otherwise it rates as a backward slum.