Once there in the valley, and seeing the fortress high on that gentle mountain slope, its awesome historicity sobered him. Lovingly rebuilt out of its ruins to serve as Sewinna’s historical library, it commanded a green landscape of forest and industrial farm. His personal revolt against his tutor began to shrink in stature as he climbed the hundred stone stairs of the grand processional way—broad enough to have allowed ten score Imperial troopers to climb abreast! He pretended to be a trooper but gave it up because his fam couldn’t virtually duplicate himself two hundred times as a line formation of goose-stepping battle-scarred soldiers marching up the stone stairs, eyes front.
Reverent footfalls took him through the portal and into the cathedral light of the haughty basilica, where his petty defiance shriveled further, finally dying of humiliation when he reached the offices of the Imperial proxy. He stood silently in awe: here had begun, in this room of polished stone, a revolt against a Stellar Empire then twelve thousand years mature, an Empire that had commanded more of the night sky than eyes could see!
The chamber of the viceroy had been refurnished to match the decor of the study it had once been, complete with antique ivroid book-modules and reader, master screens, a huge desk, throne, maps, pacing rugs. A realm of daring! A pathologically cautious Ganderian would have allowed himself only to dream the defiance of such a man—for action has its own double-edged karma, glory or tragedy at the throw of the dice. Eron saw it all and it was all tragedy... the disgraced viceroy Wisard driven into exile among the Archipelago’s minor red stars with the piratical remnant of his Imperial units, his ambition in tatters... his arrogant replacement taking measures against the people of Sewinna in salutary a sepsis, ordering, from his safe viceroy’s throne, the death of millions to teach his vain lesson—a lesson repaid, in time, with assassination, right here, as he ran abjectly to drop behind a desk he never reached.
While Eron stood frozen by his thoughts, ancient time rolled by, the tragic drama unfolding its variations on a theme. The rule of immature Tien-the-Young, murdered before his prime, gave way to the strongest Emperor seen in a century of decline. Sewinna’s next viceroy, under the auspices of this more imposing emperor, marshaled the last great fleet before the Fall, again headquartered in this very room. The viceroy, a brilliant commanding general too dangerous to leave at court, led the resurgent Empire’s successful attack against the growing might of Faraway, defeating them decisively—but his formidable Emperor’s strength, in the end, manifested itself as a “first-strike” ability to execute the more successful generals of his reign. Soldiers, battleships, fleets—all devoured by the onrushing Interregnum!
Power to the Founder! Two and a half millennia later only this stone fortress remained of that turbulent era, its ghosts and their moans of woe talking to a child of psychohistory among the shadows of a forgotten past dimly resurrected by the effete enthusiasm of scholars.
A sobered Eron Osa called in to tell the Glatim boys where he was and when he would be back, earlier than he had intended. He mentioned in passing, deadpan, that he was researching the central Sewinnese library for the latest on left-handed nanowrenches. They laughed. A relieved tutor took the comm and reminded Eron sternly that they would have to leave without him if he didn’t turn up on time. Eron promised, and even promised to call again to reconfirm his return.
He got back early, but a full watch later than he’d planned—and he did call in to confirm the delay. On his way to the spaceport a monster bookstore found him and trapped him in its history section. Two books on pre-imperial economics cost him almost all of the rest of die money he had on him, but the third, a treasure, he found thrown on a table rack with the unwanteds from an estate clearance, mostly cheap media for prefam kids.
The Decline and Fall... was printed on delicate cellomet with elaborate typography for the headings. It had a sturdy binding with an electronic back cover addendum that contained all the previous copies from which it had been translated and many of the documents that had been original sources, all in the original alphabets with correlation dictionaries. And alphabets he’d never seen before! He couldn’t tell how old the history was, but it was about really old stuff!
When his tutor saw the three new books in a sack he grumbled, but Eron offered no apology for that. He did try to apologize for running away without a word. His pseudoparent only shut him up. “We’re almost there. At Faraway you’ll be your own master. You might as well start now. Asinia Pedagogic doesn’t run its school in loco parentis; you study or you don’t—it doesn’t matter if you are twelve or fifty. You can be sure of only two things: one, they’ll deduct their due from your credit stick every semester and, two, if you aren’t certifiable due to lack of study, they won’t certify you. Run away and they won’t chase you. There is nothing to run away from anymore.” He picked out the fat book and thumbed through it like he wasn’t used to handling pages of cellomet. “Looks like you got stung on this one! Look when it was purported to have been written.” He pointed at the dates 1776-1788 AD, and laughed.
“That’s pretty early in Imperial history,” Eron said apprehensively.
“No, no. It’s a Rithian book. They never adopted Imperial Time. Being Rithians they date events from the birthday of a Rithian who, after being murdered, ascended into chaos with a bang and created the galaxies for man to inhabit. And seeing that it was good, named it heaven. Whatever con shop on Rith published your book to catch some naive tourist is claiming that it was written”—he paused—“some 743 Imperial centuries ago.” Eron’s tutor guffawed. “I doubt if any Rithian could read back then or even walk upright. To this day they still have the bewildered gait of tree-swingers who have chopped down all their trees and are looking for something to climb. Some historians think the entire body of their ancient literature is a forgery, and wasn’t created until after they mongrelized with their Eta Cumingan conquerors and figured out how to count money on their fingers.” He shook his finger at the book by Gibbon. “It damn well better be a copy—I don’t think cellomet will last that long if it’s not kept under helium.”
“Aren’t we descended from Rith?”
“So they claim—along with every other planet in the Sirius Sector.”
“You don’t think it’s true?”
His tutor shrugged. “It could be. They certainly have the simian genes and the backbone of an animal who walks on all fours to prove it. Why shouldn’t we be descended from a planetful of blowhards? A good joke, if true. It’s hard to tell because Rith produces half of the Galaxy’s con artists. Their favorite scam is to sell you an artifact that they will swear predates hyperspatial travel and, if you look especially gullible, will swear on the head of their mother that it predates space travel. They have factories producing the stuff. Some poor guy chained to a table probably wrote your charming book no more than five hundred years ago.”
“It’s real. Just read a page and you’ll see!” Eron thrust the book at his tutor and opened to a page at random.
Scogil had never downloaded Englic but he could read the first page of the introduction in the archaic but eminently standard galactic of a pedantic editor. “It must have been forged no earlier than the last couple of thousand years— sounds like a rip-off of the plot of the Interregnum. Kid, the Rithians are the Galaxy’s most adept forgers, right down to the radioactive traces... anyway... who’s going to read your book to check on them? You can’t famfeed it.” He flipped to the end. “It’s three thousand pages long!”
“I can read it in an afternoon!”
“By eye? Good luck. And in case you ever let Nemia do an astrological reading of your unpromising future, you were bom, Rith time”—he paused to do a calculation in his head, converting at the ratio of 1057 Rithian years for every galactic standard millennium—“on the second hour, third of februan, 80,362 AD. Don’t ask me under what constellation—that’s Nemia’s department.”
Eron took his book back, firmly, and started to slink away. “Not so fast, young man. I
owe you a spanking. Did you think we would have gallivanted all over Sewinna tracking you down?”
“No.”
“We would have left you stranded. Of necessity.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here,” said Eron contritely. “I did some thinking.”
“Good.”
23
THE HYPERLORD MAKES A RENDEZVOUS, 14,791 GE
In the Salki version of the Chronicles of Early Splendid Wisdom during the turbulent twilight of the Kambal Dynasty in the mid-second millennium of the Galactic Era... 1346-1378 GE... it is told that the villas surrounding the harbors of the Calmer Sea were sacred shrines of meditation, a haven within the hectic ardor of a local interstellar trading mecca, where Splendid Wisdom’s minor empire controlled 90,000 central star systems and its influence extended far beyond its borders.
By the malfeasance of late-dynasty emperors and the bribes taken by Emperor Kambal-the-Eighth, all was forfeited to the nomadic armadas of the Frightfulpeople who were then forcibly entwining themselves into the central galactic trade routes, even to the establishment of their main base of operations on the shores of the Calmer Sea of Splendid Wisdom. Disguised as a spiritual movement offering an alternative to a wealth-mad economy, they blatantly usurped Imperial prerogatives and finally named one of their own as Emperor during the Time of Two Emperors.
The ancient Kambal nobility eventually led a retaliation that cost six billion Splendid lives and an annoying million Frightful Soldiers before it was crushed by the Frightful usurper. [The casualty figures are probably exaggerations—moderation not being a feature of the Frightful-terror’s “beatification" of the Empire. The earliest secondary accounts date from three hundred years later. All surviving records contradict one another. Ed.] Frightfulperson Tanis-the-First, 1378-1495 GE, familiarly referred to as Tanis One-Eye, reigned for 117 years, dominating the indigenous population by a truly massive immigration policy and control of water. It was he who apportioned the Seas of Splendid Wisdom among his barons so that...
... after grinding miiiennia of political maneuvering, the power of the Frightfulpeopie faded. By 9892 GE, when Splendid Wisdom openly proclaimed its suzerainty over the whole of the Galaxy via the Pax Imperials, memory of the Frightful conquest, of the Frightfulpeople’s mighty draining of the oceans, etc., remained only in the minds of a loyal Imperial subclass of petty nobles. ..and... by the end of the interregnum the Frightfulpeopie had essentially disappeared from the peerage. Today...
—From the Explanatorium at the Calmer Pumping Station
Such a backtracking out-of-the-way circuitous route! Jama looked at the deceptive lines Katana had been sketching on the tabletop. How could this meandering scheme possibly get them from the center of galactic power to the legendary Telomere City of peripheral Faraway, all of 65,000 leagues distance along light’s vector? The Hyperlord was not amused.
They were awaiting their ship’s docking over a snack of pastry and hot himu tea. In an alcove of the star-station above Splendid Wisdom, Kikaju Jama’s female companion and newly assigned bodyguard set down her cup and pointed with her stylus at the ship symbols scrolling across the ribbon screen out in the corridor. “We’re on,” she said, rising and stabbing the table’s service menu for a printout of her crude diagram. “Let’s go.” She pocketed the map and erased the table’s mind.
Kargil Linmax had insisted that Jama bring her and that it be she who arranged not only the evasive details of their journey but all their subsequent contacts—her expertise being that of an ex-officer of Naval Intelligence. When Jama did not move at her command, the Frightfulperson Katana of the Calmer Sea turned to catch his eyes. She threw out a glimmer of humor. “You’re not coming? Is an old man like you afraid to bunk with a free girl like me now that our flirtation is past its public stage?”
“I was thinking of the soulful eyes of your daughter as we said good-bye.”
“And”—beamed Katana—“I’m thanking Space that, for a while, my six-year-old Otaria is going to be tens of thousands of leagues beyond your ever-lecherous clutches. I’m appalled by how much she likes you!”
He rose with offended dignity. His special attention to the delightful Otaria was no more than a recognition that recruitment to the cause did have to begin when a candidate was young. Teaching her how to count kisses was hardly lechery. After all, she was only ten years away from being sixteen! His mind refocused upon immediate concerns.
Faraway was a convenient destination for Jama in that, once there, he would be within striking distance of Zural— albeit it was somehow a suspicious destination because of that proximity. Did the seeker-after-the-galactarium already know Jama’s purpose? He/she had deposited enough money in blind escrow at Telomere City to pay for luxury accommodation to Faraway, access conditional upon the production and demonstration of the ovoid in working order; only then would the guarantor reveal him-/herself and release the fares and the fee. Such a deal, sweet as it was, left Jama feeling ill at ease—too much was unknown, too much could go wrong. But maybe the deal wasn’t that unusual; the ovoid was, after all, an artifact of the ancient Faraway renaissance and was certainly of Faraway manufacture even if it did contain components alien to the early Faraway culture. One might expect the main interest in such an exotic galactarium to come from citizens of Faraway with historical sentiments.
Risks aside, how else was he to finance this expedition?
But it did make Jama paranoid to have to meet strangers at so distant a place from his own friends and protectors. Suppose he was robbed? But the Red Sun Bank brokering the deal had once been the most powerful bank in the Galaxy and had a ridiculously conservative reputation. And the sale (less the finder’s fee for Igor Comoras) would finance his expedition to Zural. Did it even matter if he were to be robbed of his jade artifact? He had made a copy of the important astronomical data contained therein. There was, of course, the matter of the undeciphered material embedded in a deeper layer.
They were wafted weightless through their boarding tube and asked to strip naked at a medical node bulked to the end of the tube, their clothes fed through a decontami-nator while they were routed along an assembly path where nanomechanical invasions, via painless injection, exterminated whatever unwanted and invisible hitchhikers they carried. At the end of their naked trek, their clothes were restored to them. Jama was embarrassed by the holes in his hose but at least he didn’t have to shake hands with the receiving purser while in the nude. The purser alternately checked off names and pointed passengers in a helpful direction.
After ducking under the pipes in the corridor that led to their cabin, the Hyperlord regretted aloud the third-class accommodations he had bought. Their contract specified first-class fares for the bearers of the galactarium, and first-class payment was in escrow, but Jama had always tended toward thrift in things which didn’t show and Katana had insisted on the anonymity. It was probably for the better. They had no way of knowing how much a charter to off-route Zural was going to cost them—and that expense was not in the contract. He bumped his head a fourth time.
Katana shrugged off the gray bulkhead barrenness. “I’m navy. I came up from the ranks. In fact, I think you’re brave to wedge into such a tiny berth with a murderess.” She guffawed innocently and when he didn’t share her amusement, she chided him. “You must laugh at my macabre sense of humor; I require it for a long journey. Otherwise, I transmogrify into a Jon Salasbee.” That was a reference to the popular drama Knife Alive about a lower-corridor medic’s fam&wetware struggles, Jon’s fam desperately trying to pass Jon off as a sane humanitarian, bringing surcease to the unfortunate, while, all the time, Jon is terrorizing his community with a knife in the darkness during his wetware’s
slow descent into psychosis.
“My dear, laughter should be no problem for a man of my fortitude.” They turned around, careful to avoid the overhanging storage space, and hunched down on the bunk. “I promise faithfully, on pain of death, to laugh every time you tickle my
flesh with a knife.” Gossip held that she was a Jon Salasbee who had murdered her husband with a knife, perhaps slowly—though Kargil’s opinion differed.
“A man of my dreams. In such close quarters you should become hairless from your prolonged laughter before we reach Faraway,” she nudged.
This was a woman who enjoyed teasing men’s fears, thought Jama, and a woman to play along with if one could remember to flirt first and be afraid afterward. “All the better: if there is naught between you and me to cause you to itch in irritation, my sleep will be sounder!”
“I think we’ll do nicely.” She grinned. “I’ll sleep on top of you the first night and you can sleep on top of me the second. I suspect you’re safe even if you snore—it doesn’t seem that I’m going to have room enough to use my knife!”
“Do you suppose we’ll be able to move our hips?” he said, getting back to the important subject.
“We can try.”
The trip went uneventfully. They spent most of their cabin time exploring the capabilities of Jama’s jade ovoid. It projected the stars so well that it gave them the illusion of space—as long as they didn’t extend their hands into the starry blackness to feel for bulkhead or pipe. The Hyperlord was intrigued by the artifact’s obvious astrological versatility, though he didn’t have a clue how to use it to make a reading. Katana’s curiosity located the coordinates of thirteen once-secret military bases of the ancient Faraway stellarpolitical sphere and forty-nine of the false coordinates for Stars&Ship bases—cryptically annotated with their true coordinates ages ago in a Faraway military script that was obviously meant for use by someone’s naval reconnaissance teams. For what purpose? So much history had been lost! And why had their
benefactor been interested in military bases?
Psychohistorical Crisis Page 31
