Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  The circular screen dominating the bridge was as expansive as a vanity mirror in an expensive brothel. Adding to the impression, the encircling baroque bronze frame sported leafy vines that modestly clothed voluptuously shy tree sprites. The control toggles were nymphs and undines and maenads and sylphs, sensual to the touch. A companion celestial roboconsultant sat beside it in the disguise of an open-mouthed sibyl with four breasts. Above the telescope were pinned two good-luck charms—one an icon of Emperor Kambal-the-First and the other, in full regalia, a tiny replica of Emperor Harkon-the-Traveler.

  After start-up the telescope’s immense milky surface dissolved into life. Eron fiddled with its contrast and resolution and magnification like an eager four-year-old. What was fun was to toggle through some of the frequency filters. He had the whole electromagnetic spectrum at his command, picking a broad band from radio to gamma to see everything, or a narrow band of ultraviolet from 150 to 250 nanometers to see only suicidally hot stars, or he could filter out all the stars that didn’t have a specific set of, say, fraunhofer carbon lines. They were alone now, but he had been told that if he time-space linked up with the telescopes of other ships he could even see planets up to fifty leagues away. Wow! He imagined himself as a Stars&Ship general, with a thousand starship telescopes hooked together planning an attack on a remote solar system.

  And he could aim the telescope wherever he wanted without asking the boss-witch to move the ship! Where to look? He happily famfed into the instrument a few choice coordinates from a stellar catalog he had once memorized on a winter’s evening while scanning Agander’s heaven with his binoculars. Wonderful! Even useless knowledge stuffed into his extra brain could come in handy at unexpected moments!

  First he picked up Agander’s star and stared at it for a full inamin before he swung the image...

  ... to bring in the swirl of Andromeda. Was there another edacious empire across the vastness of intergalactic space eating up planetary systems? He imagined, in pastel color, intelligent lizards with eyes in their nose who wore coats of tanned mammal skin and kept their many-jeweled timepieces in pockets tooled of soft female breast leather, each closed by a brass ring in its nipple.

  Grinning, he jumped his instrument to a local nebula called the Great Demiurge with its skein of exploding filaments, a solar system blasted, its history undecipherable, its records rendered into plasma... then bounced his aim in the direction of Splendid Wisdom’s Imperialis but could see nothing in the dazzle of the central confabulation of stellar voices.

  There was a presence behind him. “Not that way! Are you looking for Splendid Wisdom?” It was the two-breasted mammalian Chairman of the Bridge, who maintained a live infrared link to monitor her cub’s use of her telescope, holding herself in free-fall behind him. When he got things wrong the old witch turned up and mussed his hair and corrected his hand—so that with only a few false starts...

  This time she showed him how to simulate the main stars between here and Imperialis and to flick-toggle back and forth between sim and real in feedback overlay mode. He was able to see where Imperialis would be if only the dazzle didn’t get in the way. Dreamily he remembered the first millennium of emperors from his book—greedy as they were, in the first thousand years of their nascent human empire they had been able to conquer only a small fraction of the vastness included in this single telescopic view.

  He wanted to know everything. Why hadn’t his tutor told him everything? His eyes strayed from the telescope. What was tutor Murek hiding? Why had they suddenly changed plans at Ragmuk? Was the money stick empty? Why had their credit dried up? A cautious distrust of farmen was preventing him from asking. But he intended to find out with a spider’s patience. All he had to do was feign innocence and wait for hints to flit too closely to his web. High on Eron’s priority list was an upgrade to more memory and a faster mind.

  But that could wait at least until the maternal Chairman had pried him away from her telescope!

  He didn’t have all the pieces yet. Was Murek Kapor this farman’s real name? Hints... slips... indicated otherwise— but he didn’t yet know why his tutor had changed names or what identity it masked. Was he running from the law? The masks out here in the empire were everywhere! If only he could see far enough, he could see the roofscape of trees that masked the Lyceum on Splendid Wisdom!

  Never enough time for everything! The old witch brought out the watch cycle’s duty roster and gave him his next assignment. He sighed. No more telescope. He didn’t even plea. He knew this she-witch by now. She patted his bum with a firmness that gently propelled him off in the direction of his work.

  Scrubbing gave him lots of time for further brooding. He had already deduced that his tutor’s promise of a scholarship was worthless. What could be more revealing than their accommodations for Neuhadra? His mentor and Rigone had a small double-bunked cabin, horrible enough—but he was relegated to sharing with a crewman. He dreamed of a morning sun pouring in over leafy vases of plants. Had he actually been gauche enough to grumble at his mother while she held onto his ears as he sullenly watered them? How had he failed to notice the glory of his luxurious room back in the highlands of Agander’s Great Island? Scraping centuries of neglected dirt from the encrusted walls of a dim ship’s corridor gave him a sudden respect for a mother’s taste in design and furniture and her insistence on their regular maintenance.

  He was allowed to sleep only when his bunkmate was on duty-watch. It seemed to be a part of the contract Murek had negotiated that for Eron pay his way by cleaning and performing tasks too menial for a robocrab. Various parts of the ship were undergoing repair. When he dared complain, that scruffy matron, the witch, only smiled and found more work for him to do on that theory that a busy boy was a happy boy. She could afford theories like that! She wasn’t mean but he sometimes shocked her and she responded with an expression that implied You aren't by any chance under the delusion that you are, by some divine right, a passenger? Other than assigning him yucky work, the Chairman of the Bridge noticed him only when she had some ship’s arcana to teach. Like telescopes. Once she slipped him a cookie from the secret store she kept in her bra. It tasted better than the gruel in the mess.

  Centijiffs added up to inamins, a hundred inamins by the gulp to hours. Watches passed. A hundred watches added up to a month. He was coming to a boil. Working with his hands, sleep, scrub, sleep, paint, sleep, hustle and defer! There was a limit to such indignity! He was the son of a Gandarian High Adjudicator!

  But before Eron broke out in open revolt, Murek hastily restrained him with a curt “Do what you’re told. This is nothing. Where we’re going they have child labor contracts that make the Chairman of the Bridge look like your sainted mother.” And then his eyes twinkled but Eron wasn’t sure he was joking. “I can sell you for pocket credit when we get into port. Plans don’t always work out the way they are supposed to, and you, you little pest, ask too many questions. Yes, to answer you, I don't know exactly what I’m doing; but aren’t we still jumping by the grace of my wit? So keep your mouth full of potatoes and shut up with the whining.”

  That didn’t exactly sound like master Murek Kapor knew what he was doing, wits or witless. Eron decided to postpone his revolt. They still had endless watches ahead of them to jump from one murky hell of a barren outpost to the next. That gave Eron time to plot—in his dreams—jail-breaks from dark interstellar worldlets. Would Murek really sell him into slavery? Wasn’t slavery illegal everywhere? Wasn’t this the Second Empire! The Founder help him if he had fallen back in time to the Glory Centuries of the Evil Empire!

  After roundabout hyperspatial spelunking far from any sun, the tedium broken only by the trading stopovers at minor interworlds of the stellarways, the Chairman made the announcement that they had reached Neuhadra. At last! Eron was reassembling pipes that he had painfully polished inside and out. No more of such drudgery! But he wasn’t reassured. After all, this was the Planet-with-the-Child-Labor-Laws.

  Eron kn
ew his guardian had been reduced to pauper-hood—but by how much? He knew that a certain young boy was the only salable commodity that his tutor possessed— but would Murek really... ? Of course it was only logical to anticipate the worst. And then again, maybe not. It was true that he trusted Murek. Maybe he’d go along with him. Nevertheless he had contingency plans to take off on his own as soon as they hit dirt. Yes. Like a rocket on antiprotons!

  But life never makes sense just at the moment when you think you have all the angles covered. The Chairman of the Bridge slipped him a last cookie from her bra. The roboskiff delivered the three of them, Murek and Rigone and Eron, to the high customs station where they were met by a golden yacht with huge decorative fins and two solicitous crewmen who bypassed them around customs procedures and brought them down to planet inside a wood-burnished cabin whose robocook served them champagne and soft-boiled eggs. With fresh egg in his mouth, Eron goggled out at the awesome twilight landscape below—which was rapidly expanding into a private spaceport between mountain peaks. It seemed to serve a single castle. Was this castle-on-a-lake the planet’s largest slave owner?

  It was night and cold when they debarked. A fresh frost was on the ground, on the buildings, on the fields, on the trees, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, only stars. They were given electrical coats and Eron marveled that when he breathed, fog came out of his mouth. It was thin air. Their furry hats were oxygen concentrators that hid an optional face mask. Some kind of hardy bird was chirping an evening sleep call.

  And wonder of wonder, stars were falling everywhere from the sky. He tugged at the brocaded sleeve of his tutor’s guest-coat.

  It was Rigone who responded. “Looks like we arrived in time for a real shower.”

  “Does this all the time, not every hour, but most months,” volunteered their uniformed escort, guiding them to a waiting aerocar.

  “See those bright stars up there?” As they walked through the cold, Eron’s strange farman was being a teacher again, pointing toward two brilliant lights halfway up the sky and to a smaller blaze above the mountains where the Galactic Swirl powdered the horizon. The beacons looked like artificial searchlights but they didn’t move. They were stars! “Neuhadra is in a seven-system; we can’t see the other four from here. Our companions are far enough away so that Neuhadra is in a stable orbit even if it isn’t as circular as the climatologists might like—but our companions make it hard for the debris out there to settle down. That makes for good comet watching and brilliant shooting-star displays. I don’t think anyone on Neuhadra doesn’t keep an eye out for errant debris.”

  “Have you been here before?” asked Eron.

  “Nope, but my friend Mendor used to squawk about the sky falling when we were in school. All the time.”

  “Is he a mathematician, too?”

  “And a very good one. Also rich ” Murek stooped to whisper a final word in Eron’s ear. Eron couldn’t see the grin, but he could hear it. “I got us here just in time! How about that? Are you as hungry as I am?”

  Their heated aerocar pressurized itself for the short hop to the gabled roof of a family mansion big enough to hold a hundred rooms. From the rooftop landing pad it looked even bigger. Chimneys! Eight of them. Did they have the same function as the huge chimneys on Splendid Wisdom that controlled the weather? “No,” said Rigone. His guess was that they were part of the air conditioning.

  Eron tried to compose himself without saying much while he sat through a raucous late dinner with the Glatim clan. There were more servants than people! And the servants all had robots to attend them who morphed out of the walls on command. The bustle went on and on. Neuhadra had a long day and an equally long night, punctured by several twilights. For the whole of the dinner from roast fox to lady fingers in marmalade cream sauce, Murek was immersed in his reunion with his old friend, Mendor, getting behind in his eating—and then holding his palm up and out to stop the conversation while he caught up on the food with a quick fork and rapid munching.

  Eron eventually mustered up enough courage to nudge his friend and ask quietly in his ear, “Is this where I’m to be sold?”

  His tutor only grinned happily. He returned the nudge, slightly off target. “You’ll just have to put up with my sense of humor. Remember how I pulled your leg about the Horezkor?” he teased. His voice was slurred. “Maybe I just might buy a present for you. Have you ever owned an underage slave?”

  It was all an astonishing transition from poverty to wealth. It hadn’t been more than two watches ago that Eron was breaking his back scrubbing down a wretched little starship that could have been the Alcazar’s lost dungeon of his childhood imagination. From that to a gravity that made his legs leap, to a table laden with too much food, in a room that was far too big and full of light-headed people, all overdressed, all strangers. It was outrageous that Murek forbade him to wear a holstered kick among so many unknown farmen! His mind was boggled at all the conflicting cues; by the time the clock boomed Neuhadra’s midnight hour he was woggy enough to welcome any kind of bed, even a starship’s closet. His sense of time was out of whack—they didn’t live by watches here, and their day wasn’t properly decimalized!

  He hadn’t realized until trying to stand that he’d also been drinking too much of the sweet wine. Maybe it was the thin air. A young maid, probably his own age, supported him to his rooms with an amused forbearance, picking up his luggage on the way, not that there was much of it. She hefted his book as if she’d never seen one before. He didn’t feel comfortable with such a wisp of a child doing a man’s work, yet she became amused and uncooperative when he tried, out of Ganderian politeness, to unburden her.

  “You’re drunk, sir,” she remonstrated with a smile. “Another stagger out of you and I’ll throw you over my shoulder.”

  So he just complied. Murek had warned him about strange customs—and, after all, she was a farman. He was too tired to think more about it. With the maid’s gentle help—she was strong—he managed the stairs after only a single lapse of dignity. Their journey along a planked second-floor hallway (enormously wider than the ship’s corridors he’d been resurfacing) led them to the portal of a bedroom he couldn’t believe. But he had no zest left to explore; he went straight to the bed, big enough for a man four times his size, and in less than a jiff he was asleep. Facedown on the nearest pillow.

  When Eron woke the next morning it was to the golden-red light of a dawn pouring over him. He’d had enough sleep; Neuhadra was a lazy planet with a long day, 37 percent greater than the galactic standard of three watches, but the slight girl, who should have been gone, was still in attendance. She must have undressed him for he was naked. She was in bed with him, and naked, too, still asleep, her warmth under the comforter close and erotic. That was all very un-Gandarian and unexpected. He was so shocked that he turned his head away, toward the oval window that was as big as the room—and saw the full magnitude of a humon-gous lake that was so huge one didn’t notice, at first, that it was a crater-lake.

  A planet-buster on one side and a barely adolescent girl on the other. Very scary. He was between a rock and a soft place! He’d have to review his fam’s summary of an evening his organics hardly remembered through his hangover. Maybe, Space forbid, more had happened between him and the girl than he recalled.

  “You’re awake,” she said, and because his head was turned away toward the window and he was absolutely immobile, she added, “I know you’re awake.” She touched his shoulders cautiously and Eron was appalled when his penis responded. She gently shook him, thought better of it, and paused for a breath. “Don’t you turn around and try something before we talk,” she admonished. “All you farmen are alike. I don’t trust you. My mother told me never, never to trust a farman when she signed my contract.”

  “What a crater!” said Eron evasively, staring through the oval window at the only thing big enough to distract him. He was on his side and that didn’t give him the best view but he didn’t dare sit up. “It looks
like a mountain range!” The Glatim Mansion was perched on the raised rim, situated to stare down into the impact basin and across. The spaceport must be behind them. Eron’s educated fam absorbed details of erosion and weathering and concluded that the cataclysm couldn’t have happened more than a million years ago, probably half that. He was impressed, but what he was feeling was the soft hand on his naked shoulder.

  “It’s the biggest one on the planet but it’s just a dumb old crater,” she said. “We have lots of craters.” She began to try to shift him around toward her, his back to the bed, gently but with a peasant’s strength. “You aren’t paying attention, sir. You have to listen and seal our parley with your eyes.” She took his hair in a firm grip and twisted his head to face hers. “I told you not to try anything. You have to swear with your eyes not to try something.”

  He found himself being forced to stare into an intent set of eyes, their blue speckled with slim dashes of henna, but his kept wandering. “What happened when it hit?” Eron was calculating energy of impact and extrapolating to the size of the asteroid that had made it. “Space! What did that thing do to Neuhadra?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaking his head slightly, not sure that she had his attention. “I wasn’t bom then.”

  He had dreamed often of his father’s mistress undressing him. Dreamed. Sweet Melinesa. She was at least a respectable forty; having a naive girl this age in bed with him was ridiculous. Boys like him were supposed to be educated by experienced married women! After being forced to face her, Eron couldn’t resist checking to see if she was actually wearing her fam—she was; a delicate Crafter design gracefully snuggled under her full hairdo. She sure wasn’t using it to advantage! There she was—all that brainpower concentrated to resist attack by a farman who was, at present, as frozen as a scared rabbit. It was a shock to find that he was now one of the intriguing-terrible farmen. He couldn’t help but try out one of Murek’s you-don’t-know-why-I’m-smiling smiles.