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Wealth, Titus knew, was a skill. It wasn't a number, or a library of sheaves, or a plush entitlement, although those certainly helped. Despite having nearly 1700 legal job titles, he spent barely a few hours a week on any of them. He'd mastered that game millennia ago. Rather, his real full-time job was "being fabulously wealthy," and it took a huge amount of time and effort. And if he was bad at his job, he wouldn't be fired. He would die.
Or worse: become poor, and then die.
Like it or not, he had his mother to thank. Before she had taken that strange and morbid turn near the end of her life, she had given him business advice, romantic advice, and even fashion pointers, but in the end they had all boiled down to one thing: how to stay very very rich for a very long time.
If he wrote a list of rules for being Entitled, it would be topped with one simple rule: hire a large number of very good lawyers, and do as they say rapidly and and without deviation. To this end, he recruited from a planet renowned for its nomadic law offices, each headed by fearsome cybernetically-enhanced partners and supported by bloodthirsty paralegals, all grim professionals who could indict a man with a serrated pike just as easily as they could disembowel him with a file folder.
Titus payed them a lot of money. Just as well, since they had yet to disappoint. He'd demanded much of them after Seraphi's death, and they had defused disaster after disaster as creditors, petty magistrates, and even his own dear, darling siblings had attempted to peck away at his money. The Money, as Seraphi had always called it. Like it was one single, solid item around which their entire world revolved.
So, after years of work and some quite literally bloody legal battles, he and his kind, irreplaceable siblings had worked out a deal. The ultimate simplicity had surprised even him.
They would, after all, drop their contests and open Seraphi's will.
It was an unpleasant compromise. Seeing his siblings in court was, to him, not much different from having them at a dinner party, but will-readings always inspired a special kind of animosity. As potential beneficiaries, the three needed to be in the room while the will was read, or forfeit their portion of the inheritance. Fortunately, his lawyer-chieftain had growled, Seraphi's own legal team had been efficient--her will was a mere fifteen million words long.
Titus knew that his mother was mocking him from beyond the grave. "You're an Abrasax," she was saying, "You have all the time in the universe." He could picture how her lip would curl with the barbed mockery.
So here he was, stuck in a small and poorly-ventilated amphitheater aboard an Orousian orbital pleasure-arcology, rented jointly between the three of them to create something approaching neutral ground. The chefs over-salted the food and every few hours he felt the sublight engines kick in to correct the decaying economy orbit, but he tolerated these hardships for the sake of The Money. So far he'd managed to ignore the actual reading of the will, relying on his legal team down in the front rows to decipher the rapid, droning notarial cant.
The boilerplate text alone took two weeks. And after that, a small stream of trinkets with no sentimental value and eye-crossingly small monetary value. It wasn't until the four millionth word that anything worthwhile came up.
He was lying on an embroidered sealskin couch, when from down in front, he heard a sudden murmuration of lawyers. The tools of their trade began a crescendo of clattering and beeping. He sat up, to see several red-bannered clerks shoot out from the throng, intent on sudden, urgent errands.
He tried unsuccessfully to decipher the executrix's arcane legal dialect, waving away the cockatoo splice who was feeding him peeled grapes. The splice had hair like nitrogen clouds and could do compound interest in her head, but this was The Money. The Money took precedence.
Another attendant saw his abrupt interest in the proceedings, and moved down to the legal pool. Words were exchanged, a diagram hastily sketched, and the battle-scarred face of the head partner turned pink as he explained. The attendant bounded back up the stairs. "She's invoked the religious law of the Abr, my lord. It puts us on another footing entirely. They're fetching the books now, but it looks like she's specifically locked in genetic primogeniture."
Titus's expression smoothed over into a small, poisonous smile. "A recurrence clause. How...quaint. Every generation is equally superstitious and malignant, don't you think?"
The attendant blinked. "I suppose so, sir."
"Summon my head actuary. Tell her we have a new risk factor." The ancient law of his ancestors, formulated in an age when everyone wanted to live forever but true immortality was always just out of reach. The priests of Abr lied to themselves, and said they could cheat death, their true essence living forever in their genetic code. Hence, the idea of recurrence. The Abrasax dynasty was built on the blood of those heretics who disagreed. Seraphi had been fascinated with the culture of those ancient mortals, but she was no true believer.
And yet, the recurrence clause was so starkly in keeping with his mother's style. Every day we eat and drink with the dead she'd said once. So she'd invoked an archaic law to prove it.
He looked to his siblings in the other corners of the room, each also surrounded by a flotilla of servants and fronted by a battalion of lawyers. Kalique's lips were pursed and she was sitting perfectly still; Balem looked absorbed in some interior hell. An iguana splice dabbed lines of sweat from his pointed face.
An immortal should spare no thought for the afterlife, Titus believed. But as he watched his brother, he saw that the gene-faith of his fathers had found one last convert.
He remembered Balem at mother's funeral, delivering a eulogy over the exquisite, oversize replica of Seraphi which lay on the bier. If the doll stood up, she would be five times her son's height, and Balem had stared into its face as he spoke. His expression had been intense but utterly unreadable. "We shall never..." he said in a dry hush, and then seemed to remember his audience, and began again more strongly, "The stars will die, the galaxies will turn to dust and silence, but my mother...we will never see her likeness in this universe again."
Titus had flushed, slightly embarrassed at his brother's emotional honesty. Still, he hoped Balem was right.