Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  The world changed. He could still question his surroundings but what he sensed no longer echoed with answers.

  He was listening to music... suddenly void of culture or history or his stem musicology lessons... leaving him only...to hear...the bells, the gentle booms of the tym-panella, the acrobatics of the electrovibs. Who was the composer? He no longer knew. He looked to her question-ingly. Almost he panicked; he had also forgotten her name, too, and he wasn't sure why he was here. But certainly she must be the most beautiful woman he had ever seen with flaxblue eyes set in ebony. She had said the monkey would remember. He remembered that. He was swinging toward her through the aeneous green of sun-drenched trees with a gibbering joy. He had no intention of exchanging names. Something wasn’t controlling his chemistry as it should be. Lust. Where was his mind when he needed it? Was he all senses? It was raining emotions and the juices coursing through his body were at flood level.

  She sat down on the bed beside him and he felt the sheets and the warmth of her thighs. She handed him one of the goblets and took one herself. They had transmogrified into marvelous miniature universes shaded in erbium glazes. The scripted designs were runes coding the wisdom of ages—but he no longer had a mind capable of decoding anything. He was raw animal sapiens from Rith. She dipped a finger into her goblet and offered it to his tongue. It tasted as might elixir from the lost cellar of an ancient emperor. Monkey see; monkey do. He dipped his finger into his goblet and offered it in sacrifice to her tongue. He was an apprentice far-man. So many galactic rituals he didn’t know.

  They drank, elbows entwined, looking into each other’s eyes. It was like being her. What would really holding her be like? A frantic minority voice was urging him to get his fam back now. But all the action his toes desired was to reach up and wrap themselves around her. Every movement attracted him. She ran the palm of her hand against the wall behind her, drawing his attention to her face as if it were a portrait against that delicate aquarelle background. Then she reached over and ran her palm down his back. She kissed him where his fam had been. Nobody had ever kissed him there, not even his mother.

  He wasn’t a monkey. He was paralyzed by his obsessive need to remember her name. Somehow a name would give him permission to embrace her. All he could think of was “Melinesa,” and he knew that wasn’t right. He needed to touch her so he invented a name, ‘Azalea,” and whispered it into her ear as he awkwardly took her down onto the bed. What kind of flower was an Azalea? It didn’t matter. He liked the name. He liked whispering into her ear.

  “My sweet baby boy,” she whispered back into his ear. She wasn’t, he realized, as original a thinker as he was.

  “Azalea,” he whispered tenderly, marveling at his intelligence, pleased that he still had it. She held his hips, not letting him make a mistake.

  One hundred million years of famless evolution did the rest. He felt very normal for a hairless monkey who had taken to walking around on the forest floor. She giggled. He wasn’t sure that was normal. They hugged each other and grinned. That was good. Then he went to sleep with his nameless mate in his arms, struggling in his dreams to find the language of poetry that he had lost. It was an ancient dream of a garden of Eden, flowered, scented, textured, full of sensory delights, the tree of knowledge still forbidden.

  He woke as the sunlight crossed his face. A lazy hand touched nothing, reached out and still touched nothing. He was alone! His eyes shot open. He sat up, one single thought on his mind; he was a mental cripple. Where was his fam? Find it! But his mind wasn’t answering with a strategy, just with a will. He ran from room to room like a headless chicken.

  She wasn’t in the dispozoria. She wasn’t in the dressing room. Nor the study. He wheeled downstairs and found her in the underground workroom where she had shown him her diagnostic equipment. She was dressed—clinical clothes—and wearing her fam. She was at her console, and—horror of horrors—she was examining his fam, peering over some instrument, intent at her work. It was clipped to a board, the screens of multiple instruments reading excitedly.

  “All is well,” she said without looking up. “I think I’m done.”

  He resisted the impulse to run to her and snatch it away. She had his whole precious life in her hands. “I’m starting to miss myself,” he said, half in panic, frozen where he had first spotted his fam. Was she going to grab it and run, teasing, making him chase her all over the grounds to get it back? Or worse?

  She turned and smiled, gently extricating his extra brain from her apparatus. “You are thinking that I would hurt you, sweet young boy. Never. At least not beyond skinning your knees. Come here. You’ll find that reintegration is as much of an experience as doing without.” She held up his fam for him. With awesome relief he let her reattach the transducers.

  “Nemia.” That was her name. Of course. He knew that all along. It had been on the tip of his tongue. A flurry of other answers came as he did a wild, random, wide-ranging systems check. All there, it seemed. Undamaged. What had

  she been doing? “Did you fix something? Am I more intelligent now?”

  “I doubt it. Perhaps you’ve become wiser. I was only being curious. It’s my trade. It’s an unusual design.”

  “It’s a stupid Faraway design. I’m condemned to be stupid ” complained Eron. “I want add-ons.”

  Nemia became stem. “Never overreach. Your fam has above-average capacities. It is not state of the art, but it’s good. There is an old saying you should take to heart, ‘It’s not how versatile your fam is, it’s what you do with it.’” “That’s just a fancy way of telling me to get used to being stupid. You’re telling me that I’ll make a good monkey.” “You’re a genius for a monkey.” She laughed. “When you’re grown up, you’ll be a gorilla. Let’s get breakfast. I’ve been working hard all night and I’m famished.”

  “You tricked me,” he said sullenly, refusing to move.

  “Sex energizes women and puts overanxious boys to sleep,” she teased.

  “You don’t love me. You just wanted my fam.”

  “Eron my darling, you are a most lovable boy. How could I help but love you? Our mutual friend has told me that you have mathematical ambitions. He says you’re good. I hate to see people overreach themselves. I was just checking to see that your fam can actually take you where you want to go. I must say, you’re carrying around a very good mathematical machine, whatever you think. Make sure you use it. Waste is a terrible thing.”

  “Can my fam be upgraded?” he asked resolutely.

  “Yes,” she said sadly.

  18

  PARTNERS IN CRIME, 14,791 GE

  You can’t cross a galaxy merely by standing and staring at the sky and wishing upon a star. Flap your wings, and if that fails, try something else. I did and here I am an interesting distance from home

  —Epitaph on a tombstone found on Iral IV

  The corridor lights along the eastern window-wall of the Glatim mansion were dimming as the dawn glory peeked above the lake’s surface. Hiranimus Scogil was up early and pacing. He glanced out the tall windows for the hundredth time at the ruffled blue water, golden streaked by the primary sun, his eyes fam-set to high magnification, searching for the wake of Eron’s runabout—not that he expected Eron home so soon from his escapade. Nemia had given Scogil a surprise call last evening telling him to stay away as she had arranged a critical rendezvous with her young admirer, an unlikely story; it would be Eron who had arranged the rendezvous. The little brat took after his homy father in more ways than one!

  Scogil wouldn’t even be able to tease Eron about it—the boy remained wrapped in a Ganderian ethic which allowed one to banter humorously about one’s legal mate at any level of sexual detail but deemed it taboo to nudge, gossip, ask, or comment about any extramarital liaison. Cross-generational affairs, permitted in the interest of a proper “erotic education” for the young, nevertheless dwelled in a strictly invisible domain. Agander was a very strange place.

  He had to grin at
the whole situation. Nemia was such an unscrupulous woman! He might have been shocked at the way she had been flirting with Eron—except that it served his purposes. She made a good partner in crime. He was half tempted to thwart his family’s matrimonial plans for him, whatever diabolical form they were taking, with a preemptive marriage to this high-energy vortex... but stealing her from her fianc£ would mean he’d have to deal with Ne-mia’s family as enemies, and her family was a very powerful one indeed; to annoy them was to live under a sword of retribution, perhaps a worse fate than annoying his own extended family, which was suicide. Life offered up sobering alternatives.

  Damn that boy! He should be sneaking back into his room by now. Scogil was dying of curiosity to find out from Ne-mia if Eron’s fam was modifiable in any interesting way. Rigone couldn’t wait much longer, and the Oversee would have Scogil’s hide if he didn’t soon turn up for his assignment in Coron’s Wisp. He looked out again but saw nothing on the lake, only the morning glint of a ferry descending from space.

  When Glatim’s gruff Assessor sauntered by and invited him for breakfast, he took the invitation. He was hungry. In the empty dining hall, the smells of frying yamums and jam and cinnamon beckoned them both back into the kitchen to the cozy staff table where the cook and his helper, together, concocted a sumptuous meal faster than any cuisinator— good food and small talk with the servants always took one’s mind off serious concerns. Mendor himself joined them before they had finished their second helpings, popping an extra chair out of the floor to face Hiranimus. As usual, he brought up business before he joined the banter.

  “You and the boy are looking for a ride to Faraway, right?” Faraway was at least twenty thousand leagues from Neuhadra by pythagorean line, more like thirty thousand leagues along any usable trade route, a greater distance than Scogil could afford.

  “You have a berth?”

  “It fell into my lap; it seems destiny has been looking at you favorably for the last ten million years, working up to your salvation.” Mendor’s humor tended to be deadpan.

  “I’ve been patient,” said Scogil, although, at the moment, he was anything but.

  “A contract from Trefia came in last evening—Trefia is a sparse planetary system only four hundred and eleven leagues from Faraway, dynamically very stable and un-chaotic”—Mendor began to chuckle—“with a political elite so clueless about meteoroid impacts that they’ve been trying to contact the Omneity of Planetary Safety to ask about their problem.” The Omneity of Planetary Safety— long ago vanished into the early Interregnum—had once been a powerful department of the First Empire’s bureaucracy. “Some schoolboy had to refer them to ms.” Everyone joined the laughter, even the cook. Mendor went on to explain that Trefia hadn’t been impacted seriously for the last two hundred million years and so evidently wasn’t geared up to deal with such a problem. Their Assembly was in a panic.

  “Poor jokers haven’t even had their astronomers on a small-body watch and were only warned by a curious star-ship captain. The villain is an interstellar rogue, a biggy on a bull’s-eye orbit. Probably ejected by some coalescing planetary system billions of years ago. Not an emergency, but it will be a lot cheaper to take care of now than a few years down the orbit. I’ll be sending off an expedition as soon as I can organize one. That might be faster than you can pack your sack. Can’t go myself. The crew will have to stop at Sewinna for supplies and then on to Faraway for some of the more specialized machinery—our meteoroid seems to be just a huge pile of rubble cemented together by a prayer and a little ice, so the extra machinery is to be sure we don’t turn it into buckshot when we do the deflection. The ride will be free for you and Eron, if you want it, compliments of the Trefians who are too scared shitless right now to balk at a few extra expenses like passage for a second-rate mathematician and his apprentice. We have you on the payroll as an orbital mechanic.”

  He waited a moment while he assessed how well his friend was taking his needling, then smiled. “I’ve asked for a little under-the-table bribe to be paid directly as a charitable grant to Asinia Pedagogic’s scholarship fund for needy mathematics students—with invisible strings attached to the Osa boy in such a way that no one there will question his qualifications too seriously. How’s that? It’ll take some worries off your shoulder.”

  “I was just about ready to hit you for a contribution to Eron’s maintenance fund.”

  “Who, me? That’s why I struck first. The Glatims didn’t get rich by giving charity to twelve-year-old paupers. We got rich by being stingy. Speaking of stingy, you’ll be on your own getting back.” That didn’t really sound right to him even if it did fit his cherished family image; Hiranimus was one of his oldest friends. He slapped the table. “Maybe I can charge the poor Trefians your return fare, too, though it’s not liable to be on one of my ships. We don’t make regular runs out that way.” Business done, Mendor turned to food. “What do you recommend: the hen’s eggs or the fish eggs au gratin? Maybe I’m just in the mood for cinnamon toast.”

  Scogil scurried up and off to bring back a plate of the marvelous fish-egg recipe, plus the cinnamon toast—whereupon he rattled off an aside to the Assessor, who had been left out of the conversation, loudly enough for Mendor to hear. “Mendor has just paid off the debt he owes me for saving his life innumerable times while he was a wayward youth.” He spoke happily, all the while factoring in the extra time pressure of an early departure.

  “Hey, always willing to help out a friend when he’s out of line.”

  “Mendor! I’m never out of line. I’m just off the road picking up herbs to liven up our standard evening chow.”

  “Don’t try to swab out my ears, you worthless nitwit. You’re always out of line. Why do you think they sent you to

  Agander? It was the only secure, out-of-the-way prison they could find.”

  “I escaped. Shut up and eat your fish eggs!”

  “Say, where’s the kid? He’s usually an early riser with a big appetite, out spying as soon as the sun is up.”

  “He’s off doing research for me,” said Scogil glumly. Indeed, Eron wasn’t back until late morning. Scogil watched him, from a distance, silently bring in his runabout, then keep to the shadows while he snuck back inside the mansion. A wait was appropriate. Give the brat time enough to pretend he’d been sleeping. He waited impatiently. He paced. He thought about Nemia. Had she, maybe, taken a shower with the impudent brat? He rapped heavily on Eron’s door, ignoring the delicate chimes, reminding himself to pretend that nothing had happened.

  “Time for your math lesson!” he shouted through the suite’s portal. Eron answered, all innocently willing to please. That was good. Scogil, almost forgetting to mock up his mild Murek persona, gave Eron the workout of his life, oral exam, prompting, prodding, challenging, tripping, patiently repeating what Eron did not understand, diagramming around misunderstandings, then demanding that Eron reproduce exactly what had been implied. Eron gave him no lip. That was a wonderful change. The brat worked harder to please than Scogil had ever seen him work. Scogil never let up. He took Eron past suppertime, right up to first sunset. Refusing to break, the boy used fam stimulation to push body and brain well past die exhaustion point. He’d sleep well. No dallying tonight!

  Hiranimus stood, relenting. “I have good news. We have passage to Faraway. And about your recent work—it was good; I’m more and more sure you’ll pass the entrance exams for Asinia Pedagogic. You handle pressure well. You have the talent. I’m proud of you.”

  Eron looked up, almost pathetically relieved. Scogil left him without another word. It was a long walk across this overlarge guest room, and he barely escaped without a damaging smirk, self-approving that he had not broken down and teased the boy about Nemia. I can still be a good Gan-darian, he thought, re-relegating the Murek persona to his mental closet. Then his pace quickened, and without even a thought about changing clothes he headed out to see Nemia, his pace quickening as he approached the car pool. He chose the swifte
st aerocar, the streaker which he wasn’t supposed to use except in an emergency.

  From above, he followed the lakeshore by the dimness of the false twilight, beating out Neuhadra’s secondary sun before it dropped below the horizon, arriving in front of Ne-mia’s cottage after a direct-line gentle glide. The place seemed abandoned That panicked him. After trotting up to it, he tested the airlock. Unattended. Even the robobulbs were inactive. He entered, sealing the first door behind him, restively waiting the few moments it took the vestibule to match house pressure, then went inside, not knowing what to expect.

  “An unguarded entrance!” he boomed to the high ceiling. “Your mother will catch you! You’ll be married before we can finish our business!”

  “Grrmfle,” came a sleepy voice from the upper balcony bedroom.

  He sighed. She’s just being careless again. Nemia didn’t even open her eyes when he sat down on the bed. He gently shook her shoulders. “How did my young muscled stud measure up?”

  She turned her face up at him. “Where in the Galaxy did you unearth that little emperor?” Her eyes were still closed, and that allowed him to admire the beauty of her face with unabashed enthusiasm without having to hide his feelings.

  “You’re looking top-of-the-mountain”—he smiled—“if somewhat worn out. I think you liked him.”

  She made a face, still with her eyes closed. “It was tough keeping up with him but I got him out of his fam. Now let me sleep some more.” She rolled over, away from Hiran-imus. “I’ve been up all night. He just left.”

  “It’s been longer than that. You’ve slept more than you think. It’s already night again and even Sinari is about to set. I met Eron at prenoon after he sneaked back. He was kind of woozy, like one is after a long night, but a secret grin suffused his demeanor so I assume something pleasant happened. He was even deferential toward me, which is highly unusual.”