Mer was staring at him in astonished uncertainty. “A Second Rank Pscholar who wants a math fix! Now I’ve heard everything! Aren’t you afraid we’ll tell?”
“The advantage of being the Crazy Admiral,” said Konn, “is that my colleagues both believe everything they hear about me and believe nothing. Of course, I’ll skin you alive for coat leather if I catch you telling—and close down the Teaser’s if I catch Rigone saying more than he should.”
“I haven’t promised anything. You’re an old man. That makes meddling dangerous.”
“I’m middle age,” corrected Konn.
“Why don’t you just sit down and learn the stuff? It’s safer. Get a sabbatical. A kid’s brain is still flexible and can handle a wild fam kicking it around. Yours is locked up, less shockproof. At worst you could sustain brain damage. The fix might not even take. No guarantee that you’d be able to call up the new functions.”
The Admiral grinned. “I’m farsighted. It’s what makes me a good psychohistorian. I laid in the mental hooks I’d need sixty years ago—when I was a student.”
“After sixty years of nonuse your wetware hooks will have atrophied.”
“No. I used motor-memory. For instance, I danced the haesila just downtime with a girl younger than Mer. How long has it been since I even thought about the haesila? Motor-memory doesn’t forget. You’re stalling. This isn’t the delicate stuff. You won’t be trying to connect me to a new fam personality—just some algorithms.”
With a long face, Mer disappeared around the comer into Rigone’s study. Rigone just sat there, thinking. “All right. I can do a crib sheet. I haven’t got the latest tech but—”
“Get it. You’ll make more on this one than off a year’s clutch of students.”
Rigone took in a painful breath, but Konn could see the reluctant agreement—and the cunning. If someone was going to subsidize a tech upgrade for him, that would become a remunerative part of his normal business. “I have just the crib sheet for you. Put out by a very enterprising student I know. Give me a decawatch or so to slouch a copy. The up-to-date tech will take longer.” He muttered to himself unhappily. “I hope that’s all you need—but is there anything else?”
Hahukum sipped his Armazin. “No.” But, of course, if a man felt he wasn’t giving all that he might the proper thing to do was to ask him for more. “Let’s just say that if ever you happen upon a clever student who is willing to do a little kidnapping on the side—and who doesn’t believe everything he’s told—send him to me. You can make that a long-term standing order. I’m only looking for the very best.”
“You deal with students watch after watch. More than I do. I’m always looking. Send me a risk-taker who always lands on his feet and there’s a commission in it for you. A big commission.”
“The Lyceum has the best talent screening apparatus in the Galaxy...”
“No it doesn’t. Take my word for it.”
Did he really need a crib sheet just so it would be easier to stay abreast of theoreticians, train more data sifters, and brief more troubleshooters? Was keeping up with hot-waxed kids the best he could do? He already had more analysis capability than he knew what to do with—and what had that given him but strange perturbations in the evolving historical fabric which had led him into his suspicions and his selfdoubts and his tenuous conspiracy theories? Damn, and damn! What he really needed was to muster a posse to go out there to kidnap one of those live flesh-and-blood rogue psychohistorians who didn’t exist! Only then would he know he was right. But he was too old.
Mer came back with one of Rigone’s ivroid modules in her hand and a smug verve. “I have something for you.” If Konn knew his Scavs, it was probably an original and not a template’s reproduction. Scavengers had appeared as a class only after the Sack, and they had a weird collector tradition—it wasn’t enough that an antique be old, it must not be a copy! “It’s our bribe.” She set it on the Admiral’s lap without consulting Rigone.
And Rigone’s hand had raised itself halfway in a gesture to take the module back before restraining itself in midair, his mind’s rationality being slighdy stronger than its possessiveness.
A contrite Mer was delighted by her find. “I’m sure you don’t have it. It’s a hundred million words of eyewitness memoirs of the Marche campaigns collected by the Berogi brothers. Navy war stuff. Ships. The long-drawn-out Wars Across the Marche.” She was more than a little bit frightened by the possible consequences of her earlier outburst. She knew their guest was a naval buff and that such an offering might placate him.
“It won’t be of much use to you,” Rigone suggested with a lame hope. “The reader was never standard, and it went out of production.”
“Do you have a reader?”
Rigone dutifully showed him the compact apparatus in its discreet alcove. Konn slipped the book in place and, with quick finger-code, waved over its eye a random request. The machine chose for him an item.
Hahukum was plunged, via eyefeed, into the ruthless interrogation of some poor Helmarian captive whose mind was being pillaged by psychic probe. The described technique seemed crude beyond belief but its vivid recounting was not what caught Konn’s attention... he was astonished by the diabolical trap that had been used to capture the spy. It was something to add to his file on the trapping and interrogation of enemy agents.
Rigone hovered beside Konn, almost as if he were ready to snatch the module from the slot and restore it to its shelf, but the Admiral was a collector, too, and had no intention of yielding such a welcome gift. He leaned on his hand so that his arm was a bar that guarded the ivroid box. “Our library of templates for old reading machines is very good. I’ll have a reader built by tomorrow. My heartfelt thanks for the gift.” He smiled at Mer and ignored his unhappy host.
All he really needed was a copy of the module. It would take him no more than a few watches to get such a copy made and to generate a compact index of its contents for storage in his fam—but, if he let Rigone grieve for a few endless jiffs before he returned the treasure, then that young man’s gratitude would be enormously greater than if he told him now that he intended only a borrowing.
Konn was intrigued as he stood reading. Here was an appetizer to tease a curiosity which lately had been dwelling on the nature of protracted wars. Even as he scanned through the descriptions of the Marche Campaigns that had spanned many lifetimes, he was prompted to think of the present. Was the Second Empire really involved in a war that had so far been conducted for centuries without the Fellowship’s knowledge? The equations for extended conflict were quite different than those of shorter, more decisive clashes.
Perhaps there lay the trouble. Such prolonged perspectives lacked color, the emotional rush of emergency—they weren’t gut-real—and that led to lazy thinking. Hadn’t Konn himself spent too much time as a child wrapped up in the quick slashing dramas that were designed to fit inside a youth’s attention span? Certainly he had started his career as a man who wanted instant results; his patience was an acquired trait. We think about what assaults our senses and in that way do not notice the glacier overrunning our position. Only the old men remember where the ice used to be.
The book would have other uses. Since the Admiral’s mind was on the necessity of capturing prisoners for purposes of interrogation, it might do to spend time researching how such covert operations had been conducted in the Empire’s barbarian past. Kidnapping was probably an art that could be perfected—the two centuries of the Wars Across the Marche had not been a pleasant time—but perfection starts with what has already been achieved. Konn liked perfection. It was the duty of a modem psychohistorian to make war so pleasant that die parties in conflict hardly noticed it was happening.
11
THE WAY STATION AT RAGMUK, LATE 14,790 GE
The Wars Across the Marche have not gone in our favor. After two centuries of ferocity our defense has collapsed. We lament our defeat. With sorrow we concede that the Thousand Suns Beyond the Helma
r Rift have been conquered. Helmarian signatures have been forced upon the Treaty of Sanahadra, giving up all Helmarian rights in exchange for sworn fealty to emperors whose hubris first rules the Galaxy and then claims a universe.
But we, the soldiers of the shrouded bases, are unanimous in our desire to continue the struggle for independence. We cannot violate the terms of Sanahadra without dooming our people (those who have been spared) and so duty demands that we honor the treaty no matter what our feelings. Yet we are the soldiers who were not at Sanahadra to surrender. We have not signed the treaty and we will not sign the treaty. Though it takes us countless millennia, we shall be the Auditor General of the Peace. We are the Overseer. We reavow the promise made by our forebears to defend the Helmarian virtues forever against whatever fate an emperor shall impose upon us. We weep tears of fire that will, from the humiliation of Sanahadra, forge a new choice of weaponry. Peace can be as sharp as any sword. Peace shall be our new definition of war.
—From The Hidden Document of Reaffirmation, 7981 GE
This was the third leg of their journey. Already Hiranimus Scogil (alias Murek Kapor) and his student Eron Osa had spent fifty-four watches aboard the cramped cargo ship. Now they had docked for change of crew and exchange of cargo at a cometary station some 570 microleagues from the star Ragmuk of the Thousand Suns, which was only a member of the Thousand Suns by ancient Imperial Decree, lying, as it did, on the wrong side of the Helmar Rift. Still to come were four more stops and thirty-six more watches of jumping along the Main Arm just to get as far as Sewinna. Then they were going to have to debark and shop for a transfer to the Periphery. Hiranimus was already feeling the need for money sticks he didn’t have.
Their hyperfreighter’s nature was to spurt and then linger, taking on passengers only as a sideline. The Skipper’s frugal choice of supply station at the interplanetary rim of the Ragmuk System was designed in the interest of energy conservation—the station was moving almost at rest relative to the velocity of their starting jump, and it was high in its star’s gravity well, a piece of citified home built into a tundra of ice and sludge.
Ragmuk had been settled these seven millennia past, not by Helmarians but by Imperial troops of the Stars&Ship laying out a forward base at the beginning of the Wars Across the Marche. Previous to the wars it had been a slumbering Military Resupply Outpost, lacking government colonial subsidies and too poor to support any kind of thriving colony on its own. But it was high ground to the Imperial General Staff: it looked outward over a roil of new stars across the Helmar Rift toward the original Thousand Suns. This was the observation point from which suddenly attentive warrior-emperors had measured the panoramic threat of the Helmarian people. To a true Helmarian the constellation which included Ragmuk was called the Dangling Blade.
Hiranimus Scogil was Helmarian, a peculiar loyalty.
He hit the oval door of the cabin with a shoulder, intending to unjam its stuck hydraulic hinges—not even the basic luxury of a robodoor here. He poked his head inside, ducking the pipes, looking for his charge. Their cabin was “shelf space” on one of the catwalks that circled the motors. It was about arm-wide and held only two skinny bunks, one on top of the other. “Wake up, Eron. The Skipper has granted us a watch worth of leave with the callous admonition that if we aren’t reboarded in time, the ship will depart without us— taking our baggage with it.”
“I can pack,” said Eron sleepily. “Nothing I can’t carry on my back.”
“No, we leave our stuff here. Just stay close to ship’s dock and watch the time. I’ll be leaving you alone for a stint. Business.”
He had schemes on his mind that needed attention, and he felt that the boy was old enough to wander alone. Nevertheless, when the youth was loose in the terminal, Hiranimus didn’t go about his affairs right away but kept the boy under a watchful, if distant, eye. He relaxed. Eron seemed to be fine, a spirited sightseer with his nose plastered to a viewport, drinking in the line of berthed hyperships tethered to the great pier that rose pallidly against its astral background. Ragmuk itself was no brighter than a minor star.
Scogil refocused on his own concerns and went looking for an ultrawave terminal. On a station whose whole rationale was interstellar traffic, sending a message to the Oversee would be as easy as praying. But a reply? Directives to lower agents like Scogil came down from mobile relay ships staffed by a priesthood of aides who weren’t in direct communication with the Oversee themselves. The Fortresses, wherever they were, had maintained such strict ultrawave silence for sixty-eight centuries that they had simply vanished Into Helmarian mythology.
One could report to the Overseer in elaborate code, one could warn them of an emergency—but the communication was all one way. The Overseers accepted Personal Capsules but never sent one out. Two-way handshaking was taboo. It was a conversation with a God who often left you to answer your own questions, who answered obliquely if he answered at all, and then only at a time when he felt it auspicious, all transcribed into the runes of some cabalistic ritual that you might or might not be able to decipher. If you wanted a twoway conversation you talked to a lower priest. Cumbersome but safe. In wartime such a convoluted procedure, if maintained, would prove dangerously slow.
Back on Agander or Mowist, where prolonged transmissions might have attracted attention, Scogil had not dared pursue matters to the point of clarification. He was used to having the authority of the final judgment himself, the doubt of the lonely decision, the act based on incomplete analysis. It left questions; he was anxious to address incomplete concerns. It was much safer to do that out here where a high level of dispatches was normal. But he really didn’t expect to get answers until he was recalled to a Fortress himself. What he needed now was an immediate bundle of cash sticks.
Hiranimus found an ultrawave utility three floors above the main deck of the station inside the office of a small freight brokerage. They warned him about local hyperspace storms kicking up a ruckus but plugged his cash stick into the connector anyway. Being out in nowhere’s boondocks seemed to have its disadvantages.
Behind a privacy barrier he made his interstellar connection—but the handshaking went out of time/phase. Ultrawave always went on the kibosh when the handshake tried to acknowledge the message before it was sent. A storm. It was a nuisance. The more the autocorrect tried to mitigate the storm by probabilizing a region of space, the more the message fluttered in time, and vice versa. He waited and tried again. During the second attempt the timing stayed on but locked onto the noise—even a clutch of error-correction algorithms he had stored in his fam could make no sense of the garbled reply.
Then—when he did get through—it was because a second agent far above the storm had taken the call and was rerouting... That roboclerk took the Galaxy’s own languorous time about tracking down his (new) boss. The ultrawave charges were gulping his limited funds. Scogil’s mood turned rancid. His contact, after being reached, was also in bad humor having been interrupted from some vital activity he did not want to discuss. Because of the transmission difficulties the conversation proceeded at a high-redundancy, low-information rate full of frustrating pauses. Ultrawave, because of its probabilistic “speed” of transmission, could deliver packets to Personal Capsules far better than it could modulate a handshaking conversation. That he needed handshaking meant that he had to go through a very low-level contact.
He came out of the ultrawave communication booth in a chastised and angry mood. How could he have created such a mess? It seemed that his contacts had misunderstood almost everything he had sent them from Agander and Mowist. Or else they had forwarded his requests to the Oversee, and, in its own good time, for its own inscrutable reasons, the top Smythosians had made other plans for him. The Ragmuk System was a ridiculously inconvenient place from which to change one’s whole itinerary.
Secure ultrawave channels did not seem to be a good medium for subtle verbal argumentation. The logic was lost when passed through secondaries to shadow men whose
priority was hiding. The devious scheme hastily plotted on Agander had unraveled spectacularly. So much for assumptions made during a high state of enthusiasm! They didn’t trust a man as young as he. Chary dunderheads! No wonder they’d had to pull out of the Ulmat. Or, he thought, maybe the right man hadn’t yet received his proposal. If ever. He had to laugh because he had already used the credit he wasn’t going to get.
In any event, the Oversee would not approve his plans in time, and, at least on the lower levels, his shadowy bosses were disputing even his right to make plans. Scogil noted sourly his reassignment to Coron’s Wisp where his youthful enthusiasm for the cause could be kept under restraint, and under budget. Nothing he had suggested had been accepted. No response; just orders. That’s what the ultrawave exchange had been about. Duty. Return for instructions and retraining. They would arrange a blind pickup.
He still had no idea where in the Galaxy his old school was located. He had once been sure that the Fortresses were around here somewhere, perhaps in the Rift, perhaps in the darker recesses between the Thousand Suns. After all, they were Helmarian—but maybe the rumor was true that they weren’t located anywhere in Helmarian space. Maybe the forge of his Smythosian soul was thousands of leagues off the galactic plane. It might be hidden on some lost planet tossed into the darkness a billion years ago by eccentric binary parents. He’d never seen its sky. For all he knew, it might be smack in the middle of some provincial capital.
At least, face-to-face, his old mentors would have to listen to his objections about this new assignment of theirs. Face-to-face they’d have to talk back—if you could call a virtual confrontation with an immortal mask, worn by a carousel of mortal men, a face-to-face anything. If they wanted to bind him, they’d have to be convincing. He’d have to see the math. Or... he’d have to be eloquent enough to sway them.
Where in Space was Coron’s Wisp? His orders only mentioned a five-star pentad system with one habitable planet around each star. Twenty-seven Wisps were mentioned in his fam’s huge database—but no Coron’s Wisp. It must be a very minor place. Was it just another Ulmat to be abandoned tomorrow? For all their calls for more operatives to work at the heart of the Empire, they didn’t seem anxious to send a seasoned man anywhere near Splendid Wisdom, nor had anyone been willing to support his clever plot to place Eron Osa as an unknowing mole inside the Pscholar’s Fellowship. Too dangerous a plan for cautious cowards?
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