Emperor Daigin-the-Mild b: 5597 GE d: 5671 GE reign: 5632 GE to 5641 GE
...bom aboard the warship Santaemo to an unknown Imperial concubine during the full fury of his father’s Persean-Cara Campaign. A music scholar and dilettante, the youngest and least favored son of Daigin-the-Jaw was raised to power—only watches after his father’s suspicious death—by a war-weary court desperately ready to pursue a hasty policy of galactic reconciliation and consolidation.
... was probably unaware of the arrest and execution of six of his half brothers during the prefatory rituals before his coronation. The seventh and wiser brother, Arum, a popular commander in his father’s armada, refused to return to Splendid Wisdom for the accession, pleading urgent military duties. Two years and three assassination attempts later, Arum answered the court’s vile actions by ordering the Eighteenth Mobile Fleet out along the Persean Arm to a swift subjugation of the Ulmat Constellation. The flawlessly executed attack had no other purpose than as a warning to the bloodily pacifist court to mind its own business or suffer slit throats.
Daigin-the-Mild ruled ineffectively with repeated attempts to reconcile with Arum until his impatient brother, weary of a game that required him to pretend loyalty to a brother he despised, returned to Splendid Wisdom at the head of his fleet, there to publically castrate the Emperor and send him off to exile, the flow of Empire now safely in his own hands.
Emperor Arum-the-Patient b: 5591 GE d: 5662 GE reign: 5641 GE to 5662 GE
As Emperor... maintained a fondness for his haven in the Ulmat. He used the Ulmat Constellation as his major naval base and later established there an Orbital War Museum in honor of his father. His nostalgic poems, especially “Ode to Agander’s Night,” was very popular at court until he was poisoned by his mother...
Eron stopped reading with a wistful smile on his face, still astonished that an Emperor had noticed his home planet. “Arum must have liked Agander. To have written a poem about us...but I couldn’t find the poem. I looked! Everything should be connected to everything else, so you can find things!”
A robotray brought the two intent scholars their lunch and waited patiently for them to remove the book before it would set the table. Murek took a bite of smoked fish, imported, probably Frisan; Mowist life had never evolved as far as fish. “There are a hundred quadrillion people out there all writing their memoirs and taking cubes of their newest baby, and you expect everything to be linked with everything else, and instantaneously, all the way back to the cave paintings of Lascaux? That a student’s life should be so easy! The Galaxy is a vast place,” he said tritely.
“A biography of the Emperors ought at least to have a reference to an Emperor’s poems!”
“I’ll bet that if you let me teach you a few of the tricks of historical research, you could find that poem within a year.” “I hate it when you make curiosity sound like work! I know something easier to look for. As emperor, Arum set up a war museum out here in the Constellation somewhere. Battleships and everything. To honor his father. What happened to it? Did all that super blasting power go into orbital decay and bum up, or what?”
This was just an offhand question that Eron wanted his omnipotent tutor to answer at once, but what he got for a reply made him wish he’d kept his mouth shut. “That’s a good question to practice one’s wits on,” said Murek in the voice he used when outlining an assignment.
They had only ten watches on Mowist before they were to ship out of the Ulmat Constellation entirely, and Eron found himself trapped into long bouts of historical research about a museum that wasn’t even there anymore! He was given a whole list of things to do, not all of which made sense. Eron could understand a few stints of frantic archival searching on the hotel’s obsolete equipment, but... interviewing people he didn’t know? checking out naval hobby shops? famfeed-ing museum management consultant brochures?
But he actually did find out what had happened to the Orbital War Museum. Daigin-the-Jaw’s surplus military artifacts, after millennia of preservation, had been pirated during the Interregnum and sold off to local warlords. This he reported glumly to his tutor. The man was not sympathetic, as was his dry nature. “What did you expect? An ancient Imperial dreadnought of the Horezkor class sitting out there waiting for you to inspect it?”
“Yeah,” said Eron dreamily, “that would have been nice.” “Then why didn’t you talk to the local tourist bureau?” Eron looked up quickly. When he saw the twinkle in his mentor’s eye, he knew instantly that he had been had and rushed off to the hotel’s comm to check out all the tourist attractions. Yes, there was a Horezkor dreadnought on display, the only ship of Arum’s Museum armada that had not been sold or stolen—lacking at the time any functioning hyper-drive motors or weapons. A few hundred years ago the restored hulk had been incorporated as a part of the Greater Station, which served the Ulmat’s distant interstellar traffic.
Eron had missed it only because, from Agander, he and Kapor had hypered into Mowist’s Lesser Station, which served the local Ulmat routes. Belatedly Eron checked their outbound reservations from the Greater Station, and much to his chagrin found a full-color advertisement for the “astonishing” Horezkor tour.
He thought about the enigma of his tutor, the young far-man who was taking him, miraculously, on the adventure of his life from which he would probably never return. His father expected him to return, but once Eron had seen Agander from orbit—a blue-green wispy white ball against the spectacular clouds of space from which it had “recently” formed—he had made the conscious decision never to return. Was such a decision revokable?
He wandered back to their hotel room and found Kapor asleep, but he didn’t care. Nefarious humor didn’t deserve consideration. “Are we going to take the Horezkor tour before we board our ship?” he demanded in a loud voice. “It’s two kilometers long. It’s got everything! When it was built it had the largest hyperatomic motors in the universe! Please.”
A half-opened eye looked up at him. “Wouldn’t miss it. It’s on our itinerary.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? You rat!” Eron was angry enough now to shake his mentor fully awake—but he didn’t.
“I’m dumping you at Faraway,” said the sleepy voice from the bed. “You can’t expect me to do your research for you forever. A lot of Pscholars think their math is so powerful that they can ignore the past when they predict the future—but they lose the kind of insight that makes for the elegant use of their tools. If you want to get as far as Splendid Wisdom and make your mark there, you’ve got to know a million years of history well enough to dream through the rise and fall of any civilization before breakfast.”
“A million years! We haven’t been around that long! The Empire is still a baby!”
“You don’t think we were bom in the sublight ships of the first expansion wave, do you? Home is a cave, food consists of slugs that live under rocks, and the starry sky is a shining cave roof just out of reach. A lot between then and your own civilization. You’ll have to know it all, and I’m not going to learn it for you. I’m going back to sleep. It’s the middle of my sleep-watch! You’re on your own.” Then in the direction of the light he said, “Off!” before turning back to Eron. “Your next assignment,” he continued in the darkness, “is to find out what was in the Ulmat before mankind arrived.”
Eron reluctantly let his taskmaster sleep, but thought indignantly hurt thoughts nevertheless. He already knew the
decolonization history of the Ulmat! Nothing! All the plants in the Ulmat Constellation were young, the oldest having coalesced no more than two billion years ago. Agander was he youngest of them all. Soup! That’s what the colonists lad found. Yeach, and soup that probably didn’t even taste very good. Only Mowist had once supported multicellular life, little nondescript spiny things that had been a kind of a water pump. Rakal hadn’t even had soup—no water. Dumb-top Kapor thinks I don't know anything.
But he soon forgot the slight and was, in his imagination, marching through t
he guts of a battleship in all the full-color glory that an active fam could provide to the mind’s eye. He gave the orders on the bridge. He reviewed tier after tier of battle stations. He was the commander who had once conquered Agander!
9
TWO MEN FIND EACH OTHER, 14,790 GE
When atomic power was discovered by our feral ancestors seventy-four millennia ago, the apparatus was simple enough—but both monstrous and dangerous. The fires were blocks of carbon alternated with uranium slugs, piping, and control rods. Naturally unstable isotopes were extracted as bomb ingredients. The first crude city-destroyers were carted to their targets by twelve men in huge aluminum flying fortresses powered by air-breathing engines. There are hints in the record that a whole continent was once made radioactive by the failure of a fission power generator...At the time of the original sublight starships, when isolated stellar cultures diverged over ten millennia for lack of power to maintain communications... a slow process of evolution was perfecting a mass-to-energy technology that could deliver both a high-energy density and a vanishing gamma emission rate... ushering in the era of expansion based on Eta Cuminga’s hyperspace technology...After forty-eight millennia of inefficient double-pole hyperdrive design, the engineers of Splendid Wisdom began building the first massive Oerstan hyperdrive motors that tapped into the parallel energy of the... probably the major factor giving Splendid Wisdom’s navy an... At the other end of the scale, during the decline of Imperial... the magicians of Faraway mastered the process of local phased charge-flipping, using these hydrogen-fueled microannihilation devices to...
—From the Interregnum Exhibit at the Bureau of
Historical Sciences
Kargil Linmax was a big-boned man who hefted Kikaju
Jama’s galactarium in a six-fingered hand while he gave it a
quick eyeball scrutiny in the doorway of his spacious workshop. “Looks like a gaudy fake to me!” he roared in the general direction of the Hyperlord with a voice that might have been calling up all five-fingered hands on a warship.
Jama moved his ears back a head-width. “I know an ancestral Faraway Trader who would be miffed at your lack of faith in his judgment ,” he said in defense of his property, slightly miffed himself. “I myself watched it project stars. I can guarantee that it was once owned by a Trader. The friend who procured it for me is very reliable.”
“And it kifizzled right after you bought it? The best fakes do that. They kifizzle before you find out that they can’t really do what they are supposed to do.” He flipped his bug-eyed power-spectacles down over his nose and stared. “It doesn’t look like any Faraway design I’ve ever seen, not remotely. Pretty little tiling, though. Who knows? It’s possible that it’s authentic. By the fourth century”—he was implying Founder’s Era, not Galactic Era—“there were some very rich traders and they contracted some of the damnedest of intricate art pieces. I’ve seen stranger. The artist wouldn’t have been local to the Periphery, though. That’s not a count against it. The oddest people hypered out of nowhere down onto the shores of Faraway in that era. Let’s bounce your toy off the deck.”
At the shocked look on Kikaju’s face, Kargil’s laughter boomed. “Just an expression. At the scholarium I was trained as a nanomechanic. We learned a very gentle touch, which I’m afraid we’ve always called ‘bouncing’—in case you once again hear those dreaded words from my mouth.” “You are by profession a nanomechanic?” The Hyperlord was impressed and unconsciously took his mopcap in hand, looking for a rack upon which to hang it.
“The scholarium was eons ago; I never practiced. The navy took my contract and I spent my working life uselessly involved in the maintenance and perfection of secret naval ultrawave combat protocols. Faraway antiques are just a hobby of mine to keep me out of trouble in my old age. I’ve a nice shop, mostly naval surplus that I kidnapped from storage graveyards.”
“An impressive set of equipment,” the Hyperlord commented wryly as he stepped into the warehouse-spacious workshop. Some of the resident machines were so small that they hid themselves inside their own armored cleanboxes and could be visited only by electronic microscope. Some were mobile roboassistants of alien design and mobility. Some of the machines were enormous. “It looks like you raided a hidden First Empire cache.”
Linmax laughed. “The fill-your-eyes bulk is mostly cut-rate earthquake mountings—an exchange of mass for finesse. You noticed on your way from the station, down those cockamamie stairs, that I live inside a canyon face and am staring into the homes of my neighbors across fifty meters of natural air shaft. A hundred years ago a fault line slipped right beneath your feet. Glad I wasn’t bom then.” He grinned. “The sheared apartments were scrapped rather than rebuilt. Left a gap that makes for friendly yodeling contests. We still get our teeth rattled sporadically—nothing serious, mind you, but I take my little precautions.”
“Great stars!” exclaimed an appalled Jama, fidgeting with the velvet scales of his cap. “Why would anyone live here!”
“Cheap rent.” The big man grinned again and ran his six-fingered hand through white hair. “You don’t think the pension of a retired naval officer is enough to keep a man alive, do you?”
He had extracted the dead atomo-unit from the galactar-ium ovoid and was clamping the tiny power supply inside a cleanbox for analysis. “And what is your interest in Faraway antiques?” But before Jama could reply, Kargil Linmax grimaced. “Bad news and good news. The atomo is a Farliquar, compact shape but shoddy design. A very small outfit that was in production less than three years before it failed: 374 to 377 FE. They made exorbitant promises and couldn’t deliver. Some good stuff, but poor quality control. Screwed up on their war contracts. First Farliquar I’ve ever seen. So it’s authentic—but you won’t find a replacement.” He read more numbers off his instruments. “Looks like an intermittent failure—the worst kind.
Maybe jiggling it or banging it against your head would make it work. Except the repair might not last more than a few jiffs. Might melt your doodad. I wouldn’t bet that your piece isn’t a cheap knockoff cobbled out of war surplus and sold to a gullible Trader by some non-Faraway shyster. Where did your reliable friend find it—in some Trader’s buried discard heap?”
“Then it’s junk?” queried a stricken Hyperlord.
“Means nothing. The atomo might have been used because all the good ones were being sucked up by the war effort. But don’t get your hopes up.”
“I should tell you that it’s been in space for a couple of millennia.”
“Salvage? That could be good or bad. I’ll look for cosmic ray damage. The really bad news is that I don’t have any mating atomos in stock—and neither will anyone else. If you can spare the credit, I’ll build you some. An octad is as cheap as one. The worst that can happen is that we blow up the workshop.” He demonstrated with a wide fling of his hands. “When the zoning flunkies come after us, we’ll blame it on the fault line. Us local types have learned how to blame everything on the quakes.”
Jama had not found a place to hang his hat so he readjusted it to his head. Anxiously he watched a cheerful Kargil open up a larger cleanbox and insert the powerless jade artifact into its vicious-looking interior.
“We leave it there. I’m doing an outrageously slow analysis, but that way I get to use very soft fingers.” He made some adjustments. “We now have time on our hands. We can chat on my balcony and yodel.”
From across the shop floor, they were approached by a six-year-old girl with a breadroll stuffed with slaw and cheese, her attention on the wavering surface that brimmed atop the glass of juice she was bringing to Kargil. “Papa, you have to eat!” She turned to Jama. “And what would you like, sir?” The “sir” was added because of the elaborately important way their visitor was dressed.
“He starves, Sweet Toes,” said Kargil, already munching on his roll. “If I can turn him into a paying customer, we’ll keep him for dinner.”
She saluted crisply and ran off. The milita
ry salute so startled the Hyperlord that he just stared at her retreating figure.
“Well, after all,” explained Linmax gruffly, “I’m her commanding officer.”
“You’re her grandfather?”
“Space, no!”
Metal clanged under two pairs of feet. Jama turned and glanced back in the direction of the ruckus and saw a five-year-old boy being chased by a loudly protesting two-year-old along a second-floor gallery at the front of the workshop. A family! “My apologies.” The Hyperlord bowed as he tried diplomacy to correct his gaff. “You must be the father of these youths, of course!”
“Not likely! The father of Sweet Toes,” said Linmax sternly, “murdered her mother and then jumped to his death while trying to take with him both his daughter and the railing she was clenching for dear life. I happened to be there when she most needed kind attention—I know how to unweld fingers from metal. A home for her came as a bonus. No use burdening the social services with the shards of such a case. They are efficient but lack... well, you know what I mean.” He sighed before continuing with his story.
“One unwise decision, of course, leads to another,” he lamented. “The baby you saw chasing the boy was brought to me by a distraught neighbor—who labors under the misapprehension that I have a kind heart. I’ve been running an informal local government to handle events beyond the capacity of the bureaucracy. Baby Girl—we’ll have to give her a name—was evidently abandoned. She has no birth certificate, at least her gene class doesn’t match any of the trillion on planetary file. And she’s no immigrant because she has no nanocertification stamp in her cells to tell us that she’s been declared free of the horrors that plague our Galaxy. I checked that myself. About the boy, don’t ask.”
Psychohistorical Crisis Page 12
