“Space, kid! I can’t tell you how serious this is. Okay, you be the clown; I'll be serious. I’m here to make you a promise. I don’t care what you think of your tutor. If at any time I find out that this little operation is intended to do you harm, I’m jumping out of here. If I have to go back to Splendid Wisdom empty-handed, I’ll just tell my Space-damned Admiral to stuff himself into God’s airlock and hope my friends wear black gloves for my funeral. Why? Because if I harm your mini-microbrain that has consequences for you that 1 don’t want to face.”
Eron was throwing moss at the tripartite lips of a plant that might or might not be moving from the spot where it had rested when he was last awake. The moss was taken by the breeze and rolled along the snow and caught itself in blinds and on barren twigs. Eron already knew that Rigone had too much at stake to pull out. Power felt good.
Rigone watched the boy with increasing exasperation. “If you were my son I’d take a five-stranded leather whip to your moon for eighteen lashes!”
“But I’m not your son. I’m a farman. And I have to make my own destiny.”
“Or die!”
“I don’t think so. Young men are immortal. You know that. It is just old farts like you who die.”
14
AT THE FORTRESS OF THE OVERSEE, 14,791 GE
How orderly seems the majestic procession of the planets around the Galaxy's legion of suns! Each sun has mastered a different juggling act, but the awesome cyclic symmetry is always there as if the Emperor of the Universe had once commanded the dancers at His Coronation Ball to pirouette forever in His honor.
But this order is a seasoned conjurer's illusion. Because our commercial ships avoid the roiling nurseries of the Galaxy, what audience gets to see a youthful sun at practice with his balls? Who gets to gasp when a bungling sun drops a planet while learning to juggle? It is to the major theaters we flock! From our unctuous jumpship purser we demand a ticket to some marvel and expect to be transported to a far off virtuoso artist who has had billions of years to perfect his solar showmanship. His failures are already lost to the dark thicket
Have you not noticed that the surviving balls of these experienced galactic jugglers are pimpled by collisions with lesser balls that didn't make it through the early rehearsal? Are your eyes so mesmerized by the brilliance of these jugglers that you've never noticed the droves of lonely refugees who litter interstellar space because they were flung beyond reach by some inept sun-in-training?
Nothing stays for long in an unstable orbit around a star without being eaten or ejected. Eons pass. Lo! When tardy man arrives in his finery, he finds the last, grand residue of stable orbits and marvels in attestation to the orderly mind of the Emperor of the Universe—whose hidden face is that of the Lord of Chaos!
—From the Dance of the Thousand Suns, stanza 498
For 207 years between 7774 and 7981 GE, the bloody Wars Across the Marche pitted the long-independent Thousand Suns and their allies against the encroaching Splendid Empire. During the war an elite group of Helmarian commanders built secret fallback bases on unfindable planetesimal outcasts deep in the remote darkness. The Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift eventually lost their war; the Helmarian people were decimated, forced to re-gengineer their children to the galactic hominid standard, dispersed, their thousand planets diluted with immigrants loyal to the Empire—but their war bases were never found, never suspected, never conquered. Long ago these redoubts lost the name of war base and became...
The chamber had wondrous acoustics. While her grandfather was being freeze-dried for the zero-g catacombs—his waters dripping into the flagon from the glass figurines of the ritual condenser—Nemia sang the solo canto of his requiem with a passionate devotion. Some of the words she composed out of memories as she went along, inspiring other singers to weave into the song contrapuntal poetry that complemented her emotion. During the silent interludes between cantos they sipped of his pure water. The elegy could not respectfully be ended until the last drips of condensate from his sublimation had been distributed from catch-pool to goblet to the bloodstreams of those who mourned him.
Later, alone, in private tribute, she gave the desiccated corpse a last farewell, a gentle touch of the hand not to mar his porous fragility, a wet tear, and the gift of a golden rose from the bronze rosepot of her parlor atrium. She had personally carved the lid of his sarcophagus, a pentagon of brilliantly colored petunias shaped from many woods. She closed the familiar lid, feeling a youth’s first pangs of mortality.
For a while she just wandered through the Fortress.
It was still too trying for Nemia to go back to work. She turned toward the labs along Coldfire but instead retreated east to her rooms. When she arrived she didn’t know what to do. In a somber mood, she lingered by the central rosepot in the atrium, not seeing the roses, only images of the grandfather who had adopted her to live the life of a Fortress acolyte. The room was immaculate except for wood-carving tools and chips that hadn’t yet settled in the slow gravity. From the central table she picked up and played with one of Grandfa’s Coron’s Eggs, not activating its stellar show. He was always searching for older versions, unhappy that he’d never found a first edition. Funny man. He was devoted to the past as well as the future.
From above and below, noise she had never noticed before sifted through the walls and ceiling and floor of her embedded apartment, though the doors were sealed, her communer shut down. She needed absolute silence, absolute isolation. Absently she ordered the vestibule closet to deliver an oxy-mask and headbeam and, after arguing with the stowwall to release her tool kit, took that, too. Off she went down the corridors to the nearest pullway. She didn’t bother to ask for a pullcar; she just took one, small and open, requesting the robodispatcher to route her by its most unused paths to the northern barrier. At top speed. It did not accelerate until after she was comfortably clamped.
The wind played with her hair like life played with changes. After a wild flight—zipping images of floors and ceilings and windows and shops and passageway offshoots—the pullcar reversed thrust, nudging her to a stop. Even life had its stops, where one took inventory to claim a new direction. She paused before uncoupling the body clamps—wrapped more in contemplation than in her physical restraints. For the first time in her life she had a restless need for something older than Grandfa to think about.
Nemia shoved off from the pullway with a glide that sent her down a vacant corridor to a landing near one of the border hatches. It was monitored but unguarded. The caves beyond its sealoff were not forbidden territories, just unused. She cracked the seal and muscled the barrier open. The hatch closed behind her of its own will. Thunk! Carefully she checked to make sure that the reseal had passed roboin-spection—otherwise alarms would go off and screaming fire teams would arrive within a few inamins.
And there she was, drifting through the abandoned portions of the Fortress. Silent darkness. She had only her beam to guide her. These older digs, untouched by recent concern, intrigued her the most. She came upon other seals, and other locks, even airlocks. Sometimes one of the internal pressure locks was jammed, but she had her tool kit with her and nothing much could stop a skilled hand that held both tinker-tools and instruments of brute strength. The preservation gas was helium, compliments of the atmosphere of their medium-size mother world who towed them through the sunless void, hydrogen oceans lit only by the stars.
Her beam animated shadow-beings who fled ahead of her down tunnel after tunnel and into rooms of strangely obsolete equipment... late First Empire it looked like. The Hel-marians builders were famless. Amazing what primitive brains could do! It appeared to be an enormous construction effort and yet—seven thousand years of chipping had hardly perforated a worldlet that was big enough to mask the energy output of its small colony but not big enough to field serious gravitic muscle. She did a brief calculation in her fam just to amuse herself: if the whole of this tiny rock were to be carved into catacombs, the Helmarians here would
have enough crypt space for the entire hundred quadrillion people of the Second Empire. So much for the illusion of human pretension!
She worked her way deeper and deeper into the abandoned shafts and drifts until she was peeking, mouselike, from the floor of the original command center up at all of its First Empire hardware. How had her ancestors escaped detection with energy-inefficient ultrawave generators of such monstrous size! All of the hokey accessories were perfectly preserved in the helium. Embroidered chairs. Even old strategy maps thousands of years obsolete.
She knelt beneath the main machine and said a prayer to the Old Ones, elders of a culture no empire could crush. Her prayer was the prime cry that every Helmarian knew by heart: “To die once is to live forever!” spoken with arms raised, elbows at her side, palms facing outward. And then she bowed for her beloved grandfather, wistfully recalling that it had been he who crawled with her on their polished stone floor back on Neuhadra before she’d ever learned to walk or glide or build fams. What a way with children he had! He had stolen her from her parents with his Smythosian zeal.
She stayed in that holy place all afternoon, tinkering with the failed electrical shunts until she had the old lights glowing again—so that she could play out, via fam, Hisgoold’s tragic opera against these vast machines so awesomely right for this ancient drama. Her fam created the hallucinatory singers, their voices, their movements. Hisgoold’s Family was magnificent with noble superhumanity. The chorus of the doomed Helmarian army fought its way heroically across a stage more grim and real than any she’d ever seen in live theater.
She wept at the Remonstration. Her arms cheered the Hal-lel. Her lips smiled with the Madrigal as Pani and Laura and their jokers flirted in a coy chase among the ultrawave projectors. She laughed like a child at the pyrotechnics of the Prothalamion, helplessly remembering the emotions of the naive three-year-old whom Grandfa first took to see His-goold. The Battlehymn of the Thousand Suns inspired her as it always did. The Aubade filled her with hope. She hissed when the Splendid Emperor appeared for his Triumph. And the final Lament brought her to tears as Kaggan grieved over the bodies of Pani and Laura.
Sorrow, terrible sorrow. She extinguished the lights so she could cry and cry in the blackness like she had never before bawled in her whole young life. She had to switch on the dry-blow to clear her faceplate. The evaporating wetness on her cheeks was all that her exhausted mind could feel.
When she returned home, a Personal Capsule was waiting for her in the atrium.
It tasted her fingertips while reading her retinal pattern— but instead of delivering an encrypted message to her fam, the Capsule produced a tiny black speaker that began to chat in the voice... of her grandfather. It had two simple toggles: forward/stop and retreat-one-sentence-at-a-time. The voice was, in places, fam-simulated, as if it had been too much effort for Grandfa to record with his vocal chords. The destruct was a manual toggle.
“Nemia, ah, Nemia. When death is on our mind we think only of unfinished business. So. Here I am dead and you haven’t married yet. I’ve been working on it with your mother and father.”
She laughed. He was going to leave her one last nag about that. It was a favorite subject of his that she’d never been able to terminate. She’d bawled him out quite angrily the last time he had mentioned it, hoping to shut him up forever, and henceforth had stuffed her ears at the mere mention of marriage—but he always had to have the last word. Now he was having the last word.
“I know how you feel on the subject so I haven’t kept you apprised of my actions; I’ve just been making all the arrangements behind your back. A surprise party. Now I won’t be able to finish what I’ve started so you’ll have to carry out the last details on your own. Don’t worry about the boy. I haven’t told him, either. Only his parents. They approve of you. It was to be his surprise party, too.”
“Well!” thought Nemia.
“You already know the boy. You constructed the monitor-persona we installed for his last assignment. I believe you liked him. Think back. You met him at that Reaffirmation Gala I arranged for you. The boy with the ears. I’ve never heard you rave so about a boy’s ears. I can’t, for sure, attest that you fell in love with him, but it was certainly infatuation at first sight. I always thought it was a shame that he had to leave so soon—otherwise I might have been more persistent in my meddling, which, up until his assignment, had been one of my better efforts.”
Grandfa had a hand in that adventure? She was mortified. Nemia hadn’t thought about Hiranimus Scogil for years, but she certainly remembered him. Did Grandfa know about the shower they took together? And her mash letter? She groaned with her new maturity. Poor Hiranimus had probably been relieved to be shipped out!
“He’s been haggling with the Oversee lately about an adventure he’s been trying to orchestrate. I was the only ally he had, mainly because I want to many him off to you. I like to bend psychohistorical necessity to fit my own personal needs.”
“You old goat!” But he wasn’t listening.
“The Oversee’s consensus was negative. His scheme computed out as hopelessly high risk with an extremely low probability of success. Worse, it was immoral. I had to agree. But, quite recently, these few watches before I had my attack, he turned up at Neuhadra—and there’s a new angle. I worked it up while I was dying... to keep myself busy. There’s a couple of ways to jiggle the probabilities, ways that perhaps the Founder wouldn’t have approved. It’s yours to follow up. Talk to the Lion for details. Our Scogil..
She stabbed the “stop” button. The Lion! But it was Grandfa who was the Lion! She’d figured that out years ago. Now she was confused. She stood and made herself dinner while she pondered the conundrum. The puzzle finally fell in place only after the fourth course as she whipped the chiffon pie out of the cuisinator. She mouthed the fluff, appalled at her stupidity. Of course Grandfa was the Lion—but the Lion was only a quantum-state “hat.” The Lion might... could... would be shared by many members of the Oversee, an immortal personality who took on mortal components to maintain his human perspective. Immortal wasn’t really the right word; the Lion wasn’t any older than Grandfa—that’s what had fooled her. Probably Grandfa had created the Lion. Who would she... ?
She put in a call. One never had to worry about disturbing the Lion; he had a submind that could take a thousand calls at once, none of which he handled consciously. His submind was merely a convenient executive secretary. The Lion appeared in her atrium as a fam-induced hallucination. He wasn’t the kind to bother with holographic tricks; the Lion took the direct route into the visual cortex.
“Nemia of 1’ Amontag,” he said with a graceful gesture of his paw. He’d been expecting her.
She bowed respectfully to what only she could see—a tall and not very lionlike figure. Real felines didn’t stand erect. She tried to see Grandfa 1’Amontag in him. There must be something of Grandfa there, but the Lion had always been a good disguise. “My grandfather suggested an appointment,” she said to the receptionist persona.
“About the Scogil affair. Yes.” There was a gleam in the Lion’s eye; she was sure he must know everything! Damn Grandfa’s love of storytelling to whoever would listen! Did all the Smythosians who wore the Lion’s hat know that she had showered in the nude with Hiranimus Scogil? And how could a lion look so diabolically human with his bushy orange head and black nose and carnivorous grin!
But then, how could this hallucination even exist? The four-legged lion had been the victim of one of Rith’s mass extinctions—she wasn’t sure if it had been that infamous meteor or mankind’s first massive overuse of ammonia fertilizer. The nitrous oxide of ammonia’s decomposition train was nasty stuff when it worked its way up to the upper atmosphere and started gobbling ozone. Of course, lions weren’t really extinct; gengineering had re-created them out of housecats. Grandfa’s Helmarian sense of irony. Kill me and I shall rise again. That’s what this creature of the Oversee symbolized. Who animated him now? One man? two m
en? a sixtyne?
“You have questions?” the Lion asked.
“I haven’t finished listening to his Capsule,” she confessed.
“We will meet again when you are ready. Come in person to my den at the eleventh watch, on the morrow after you have slept. Your passage to Neuhadra has already been arranged.”
The Lion vanished—but he left behind him a quick flash of Rith’s ancient predesert savanna and a whiff of sun-rotted antelope.
Nemia sat down and took up the tiny black speaker again, toggling it to the beginning of the last sentence and then to “forward.”
“Our Scogil has been doing some fast legwork,” the voice of Grandfa continued. “He thinks he has it arranged with Beucalin of Neuhadra—you’ve never met Beucalin—to train a butcher from Splendid Wisdom to modify his charge’s fam—he has a young boy in tow. Beucalin sent us a report. There are surprises in it. Tests confirm that Scogil’s charge does indeed have a remarkable talent for mathematics.
“His fam is even more unusual: an aborted Caltronic prototyped on Faraway. Not a model farmed out to a Sigel or Rosh Hanna foundry. It’s surprising that we even have the specs except that keeping the specs on rival fam designs is a Helmarian fetish. Less than seventy were made—an ambitious hi-end failure discontinued prior to production. A full century ago. His father must have picked up a remaindered unit that got misplaced on some high shelf—or was simply shunned. Ethically its Faraway engineers should have scrapped it but they were probably short of credit—and it is perfectly functional, significantly above average, though not easy to sell in its unfinished form except to a stellar bumpkin in a backeddy like Agander. Two hundred and sixty-two thousand hooks were built into it—but the designers couldn’t develop a stable overlay able to use the hooks. So they started over with a different design. Their second attempt was the famous Caltronic 4Z, now also obsolete.”
Psychohistorical Crisis Page 21
