Ah, thought Nemia. This was just the kind of “special” problem she’d been trained to exploit. Two hundred sixty-two thousand unused hooks! Perhaps unusable hooks, perhaps not. An interesting challenge.
“Beucalin has been instructed to decline Scogil’s unseemly request—but out of friendship for Mendor Glatim will find a surrogate to do the work on the sly. And”—he chuckled—“out of sight of the Oversee.” Nemia’s grandfather liked his little jokes on the young people of the world who thought that they and their fams were too smart to be outsmarted. “The surrogate will be you. It might even be possible to bring you in without involving Beucalin. You have the perfect motive. Love and Sex over Duty and Honor.”
“Watch it, old man,” she said aloud, “or I’ll have your mummy cremated!”
The voice of the dead man ignored her. “Scogil’s ideas for the modification are far too crude and detectable.” His voice had broken and there was a pause before he spoke again. “Oeyy! The pain gets to me sometimes. I’ll be back.”
Her heart jumped. But she didn’t have time to anguish; the splice in the recording, to her, was immediate and when he returned, he was calmer, more relaxed. It was his own voice, not a smoother simulation. “This has to be one of your special jobs, little girl. The Lion will give you the details. You won’t do the fam surgery yourself—that is, you will not directly hack Scogil’s youngster. Have I lost you? All the work on him must be executed by the butcher from Splendid Wisdom whom Scogil has so conveniently brought with him. If the project fails and the Pscholars lay on a trace, we want it to point at the butcher. It will all be his doing. Your hand has to be invisible.” The pain was back in Grandfa’s voice. Then, suddenly, he skipped whatever else he wanted to say in order to blurt out what was really important. “Hey, big girl, there’s plenty of water on Neuhadra for showers. You won’t have to be sneaky.” And he was gone.
“Grandfa!”
And even this last little bit of him was crumbling into powder.
Too many shocks at once! Death. The threat of marriage. A wrenchingly new off-Fortress destiny. She whacked her head and headed for the bed. She thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep, but the thought wasn’t finished before she was sound asleep in her clothes with shoes still on her feet. Dreams resolved her grief. Dreams plotted a hilariously amazing off-Fortress adventure. When the hour for her prime-watch chimed, she rose with a light heart, said her thirty-two theorems in prayer position, and had breakfast. To a Smythosian acolyte, duty was the foundation of every good life. She chose to sing in the morning network-choir; then—to work.
She organized those duties of Grandfa that he had bequeathed to her, rebuilding key nodes in her fam to prioritize her new obligations, famfeeding the files that Grandfa’s will had tagged for her, and actually sorting his few physical possessions.
He had kept Grandma’s love letters. She was killed tragically under circumstances unclear to Nemia; Grandfa never liked to talk about it. The letters were on real homemade paper that Grandma had whomped up in her manufacturum, written with a naive ink that was already fading.
The biggest box was Grandfa’s template collection of antiques. He was forever rearranging his apartment, destroying this antique so that he would have room for some striking masterpiece he had just remanufactured. Nothing ever matched. Nothing was ever conveniently arranged. She had memories as a little child of negotiating her way between— what she had never dared say aloud—his junk. No object in Grandfa’s whole collection had an esthetic relationship to any other object, but all had historical import. History was everything to the old man. He liked to stumble over it while he wandered about, his mind’s eye lost in contemplative visions of some past or future era.
Then there was his precious collection of Coron’s Eggs, eight of them, nine if you counted the one he had given her that sat prominently on its wooden stand in her atrium, none of them a first edition, all too complicated to be stored on a template. He had first become interested in the Eggs when the Oversee had assigned him as a young man to work on the outré6 mathematics of the Coron’s Wisp project.
He had been inspired to a mad belief that a “first-edition” Egg would lead to the lost Martyr’s Cache. Second-edition and later Eggs hadn’t met their promise. Grandfa had been undeterred and still had quantronic agents touring the Galaxy looking for a “first-edition” copy, Eggs by now probably all victims of entropy or, if extant, buried in the rubble of some Interregnum war. His search agents had become, by the machinery of Grandfa’s will, her servants. Nemia had heard a zillion ‘lost treasure” stories and put little stock in this one. Men had been wandering around the Galaxy for seventy-four millennia littering space with their mysteries. The Protocols of Eta Cuminga. The Lost Mine of the Mi-radeas. She sighed. Why did Grandfa think she was going to pick up on all of his obsessions? She’d have to cancel those agents, but that was not easy from the Fortress. For that she’d have to wait until she reached Neuhadra.
Extraordinarily proud of his collection, he’d kept every Egg in good repair and often used one of them to cozen or dazzle people at his parties. He had been, in her mind, the Galaxy’s fastest-talking astrologer. His favorite trick was to take some young Smythosian, fresh from his heretical seminary studies of forbidden psychohistory, full of a mathematical belief in the unreadability of personal destiny, and con him into an Egg reading. The room would go dark, the stellar panorama would unfold, and, with Grandfa’s simple chitchat, prompted by increasingly complex star-charts, his mark’s past would be revealed in a way that led surreptitiously into his personal future. Everyone would smile at the sagacity of the reading—and its superficiality—until the morrow, when it would all start to come true. Grandfa had tried to teach her the tricks and deceptions of fortune-telling, but she had never quite mastered the art at his level of dissimulation.
Her prime-watch coincided with the eleventh watch. Nemia spent the time at the Lion’s den being instructed in the nuances of her assignment. Grandfa had been thorough on his deathbed. It became obvious that the whole idea of Scogil’s introduction into the Coron’s Wisp venture was based upon a very chancy gamble. When she complained that the probability of success was small, the Lion reminded her archly that the Oversee had its eye on many antelope in the herd. It did not matter if they were pursuing a hundred independent events, each with a mere one percent probability of materializing, because then there was a sixty-three percent probability that at least one of those events would come to pass.
The Smythosians liked to work with low-probability events because those were the kind that the Pscholars had the most trouble tracking. More specifically, the modeling of high-probability events was beyond the Oversee’s computational resources. They didn’t have the Pscholars’ twenty-seven centuries of psychohistorical practice behind them nor the full resources of the Second Empire.
And the work she would be doing to modify the fam of Scogil’s protege? That was a another low-probability gamble. They were giving him an ace he could play or not play as circumstance demanded. She was not to implement the kind of modifications that Scogil had asked for; her modifications were to be to the Oversee’s specifications.
That angered Nemia. “I can’t just modify a fam to order! It doesn’t work that way! I’ll be hacking under enormous constraints. I won’t even know what the constraints are until I do tests!”
“He’s only twelve years old,” reminded the Lion.
“Twelve is an adult!” she snapped. “His fam has jelled”
“If you fail, it is of small consequence. Scogil will just have to play our game without that particular ace.”
She cooled down. They went on to discuss the professional minutiae of event-fulcrums and how this particular event-fulcrum related to some of the finer points of fam design. The Lion jumped from general psychohistorical principles to the finicky details of how quantum-state design parameters, in this kind of case, could alter the predictive equations. He often went beyond her competence, then caught hi
mself, to turn back to the specific items relevant to her mission. She had the impression that she wasn’t dealing with one person even though the Lion’s persona was seamless; his knowledge base was too broad. The Lion, she suspected, was an artificial coordinator-mind for a very heavy-duty committee.
She was in up to her eyeballs. Nemia took off the next cycle for partying with her friends in the gardens of the Presidio.
Within a ten-watch she was deep aboard a jumprunner, commanded by one of the mysterious men with the tide of Starmaster, any view of the interstellar sky forbidden to her. She spent the time with her mnemonifier doing homework, planning. Half of her mind was working seriously; the other half was churning out an escape path from the marriage trap set up by her relentless Grandfa. Marrying one of her teenage crushes in Service to the Greater Good! Ridiculous! Even if he did have nice ears.
They had even supplied her with material on Coron’s Wisp, material deliberately withheld from Scogil so that it would be she who briefed him on key aspects of his next assignment. That twist, she thought ironically, hadn’t been necessary. That was just another item in Grandfa’s ploy to marry her to Scogil!
Scogil! She was filled with outrage again and was half tempted to use one of the Eggs to plot an astrological chart of her own future. But with an iron will she shrugged off this temptation toward the irrational. To be afflicted by superstitious impulse was the price one paid for being condemned to the use of cheap wetware that had mindlessly evolved in an ancient ocean! Anon they would learn how to scoop out the wetware and replace it with quantronics that weren’t limited by robotic laws laid in by the environmental demands on fish.
But—back to the real problem she had been given, upgrading the fam of Scogil’s protoge. Her main task was to construct a single-purpose module—one that enhanced the kid’s mathematical intuition. Almost routine. That he was still a child young enough to make use of such flexible structures would greatly simplify her work—a fam modification to be utilized by an adult brain necessitated a very different (and difficult) design philosophy more akin to building an expert computer program activated by primitive organic triggers. Still, it wouldn’t be easy.
Her secondary task, not usually feasible with Faraway designs, was to implement an undetectable persona shift that would prime the boy to traitorous behavior at key trigger points in his life. Because of Faraway’s notorious “safe-walls” design philosophy, she was here allowed to operate under an “if possible” clause. But given the electronic failings of this particular uncertified design, she thought she might be able to... The unused hooks that had stymied a whole team of Faraway engineers weren’t the big challenge, though they opened up unexpected avenues of attack. Hel-marian Crafters routinely fabricated quantum-state devices that were only theoretical dreams to other engineers; the Neuhadran foundries were adequate to build whatever weave she needed. Linking into die hooks was a piece of fancy footwork she could do—but bypassing the walls...
The starship cabin wasn’t large enough for her and her mnemonifier. She tried working with her heels on top of her “mnemy,” and then with her toes peeking around, and then with the damn machine strapped to the ceiling—but nothing was comfortable. Thank Space for zero-g! No adequate solution presented itself until she implemented a scheme to worm their stellar coordinates out of the Second Watchman. She didn’t succeed, alas, because he didn’t know—the ship’s officers used unshared partial-keys to navigate—but she did find out that his cabin was larger than hers.
Immediately she conned the Second Watchman into exchanging cabins, a deal she paid for by looking at the holos of his family and teasing stories out of his mouth that he’d always wanted to tell but lacked an audience. She also stroked the stubble on his head and ran her finger down the ridge of his nose. But, sadly, in the endgame her brilliant strategy failed. The finale saw her stowing her mnemonifier out in die corridor while the Second Watchman stayed in his cabin and held her in his arms. He whispered poetry into her ears in between nibbling at them. She kept thinking about her bulky mnemonifier.
I'm not very good at predicting, she told herself ruefully. A Second Watchman didn’t fit very well into any psychohistorical equation she knew... now, if she’d had to deal with ten thousand men like him, all at the same time, it would have been a snap!
Thus Nemia had to postpone her work on the persona modification until she arrived at Neuhadra. Beucalin briefed her in his office while her attention was fixated on the landscape beyond the Institute’s lofty windows—there were green fields and endless stretches of forest that had taken over the hills as far as eye could see into the morning mists. Nearby she could see shellback hickory and mountain oak and hardy tramontanes from Zeta Tigones. And wind that blew clouds across the sky! She hadn’t been here since she was a small child. More than once she asked Beucalin to repeat himself.
“You’ll have plenty to do before tackling Scogil. Wait until you hear from me before you try to contact him,” he was saying. “I’ll have to soften up Scogil with bad news about how I can’t help him. Let him stew for a gaggle of watches before you serendipitously arrive as his savior. Play innocent. A couple of hints, maybe. Don’t offer him anything. Let him pry out of you—very slowly—what you can do for his scheme.”
While she waited she again took up her ideas for Eron Osa’s persona-change package—the still-unsolved side of her assignment. She couldn’t fix the final parameters. She’d have to meet this child first. She always worked with traits that were already there—otherwise it was hopeless—tweaking this, damping that, exaggerating, redirecting. It took a lot of observation. And all changes had to be compatible with the hardware and wetware constraints. For now all she had to work with were the known hardware weaknesses.
No two fam’s architectures were exactly the same. Faraway designs, for instance, emphasized security. Cloun-the-Stubbom had conquered a good bite of the Galaxy with a Crafter-devised mentality-altering machine based upon the very same tuned probe that, in its modem incarnation, transduced information between fam and wetware. Cloun’s weapon of conquest had been devastating. The survivors had been impressed. Since then a great deal of thought had gone
into protecting personality integrity. The first Faraway fams had been nothing more than devices that detected and countered tuned probe attacks and concentrated on monitoring the emotional feedback loops—neural and chemical— among cortex, hypothalamus, locus ceruleus, pituitary, amygdala, etc.
The original Faraway designs had had their limitations. If the fam was removed, by guile or force or neglect, the organic brain again became defenseless against alteration; the absent fam could then be replaced, but the personality changes induced in its absence would remain. Modem designs, like the one that this Eron Osa child wore, kept a stack of persona parameters that it tagged when it detected decoupling and, upon recoupling, set about reversing any changes made during the separation. Faraway, whose hegemony had been the chief victim of Cloun-the-Stubbom, soon became, and remained, particularly good at implementing defensive protocols in fam design—the famous “safe-walls.”
The problem-solving aids, the data stores, the search engines, die graphics engines, the monitoring agents, and sophisticated internal regulation of emotion all came later—but in Faraway designs these “features” remained subservient to the goal of security. Under certain circumstances, that in itself was a weakness. When Beucalin called and gave her the all-clear that Scogil had been set up, she had already postulated more than sixtyne ways to attack Eron Osa’s brain, all with a high probability of success. First, of course, she had to test-drive his fam before she could finalize the surgery. That fam, having been a child’s constant companion for almost a decade now, was already well outside of its original specs.
15
ARRANGED MARRIAGE, 14,791 GE
Don't expect your parents to do everything, but let them go about doing what they do well.
—Ancient Helmarian saying
It was important that Sco
gil be led to believe that he had picked her for his team and never to find out that she had been assigned to him as a watchdog. Only Grandfa really trusted him. She certainly didn’t!
Her spies had been following him for several watches before she was able to pick the opportunity to accidentally-on-purpose run into him. He had flown into the city from the Glatim estate, moving around at a frantic pace, his agenda impossible to predict. Then—thank Chemistry for hunger—he finally decided to eat at a quiet but well-attended rooftop garden. The moment she knew, she was on her way. En route, her spies narrowcasted a floor plan with a red circle denoting his table.
She entered the rooftop through the pop-up levitator. Carefully she did not look in his direction, not caring whether he noticed her or not. Through the soaring glass windows and the dangling vegetation she had a magnificent view of the pressurized buildings of a city crafted for a tenuous atmosphere. She pretended to be selecting a quiet spot to eat.
Then she picked the moment. Looked. She simulated uncertain surprise and walked over to his table, standing at a civil distance. His meal had already been served. He was intently shoveling sauteed fish into his mouth. It looked like tank-grown blue trout. He hadn’t seen her.
“Don’t I know you?” she interrupted him.
He looked up from his fish, not recognizing her.
She waited. Still he evinced only blankness. She was going to have to prompt him. “You look like a Hiranimus I once knew. Hmmm? Not quite. You seem more handsome and even worldly!”
“Nemia of l’Amontag!” He grinned. “I didn’t recognize you...” He paused.
“... out of the shower,” she finished for him. “Wasn’t youth wonderful!”
“Well, now! This is a small Galaxy. What are you doing here”
“This is my planet! What are you doing here!”
“Visiting Mendor.”
“I haven’t seen him since school. You liked him, didn’t you? You two always seemed to be together.”
Psychohistorical Crisis Page 22