Sewinna that dated back to pre-interregnum times when it had been a military barracks for officers of the Empire. Why had his life taken him there?
Once, when his archival search led him into the rebuilding of Splendid Wisdom after the Sack, he was mentally flipped into what seemed to be his initiation as a Rank Seven Psychohistorian...
... under an enormous transept that rose five stories above the heads of his fellow robed acolytes. A wash of unnatural awe, overwhelming immensity. Upreaching arms of stone and fiber and metal, delicate hues of light, ethereal sounds that healed the spirit. Had such a drama happened? Was this “memory” real or a mere collage built out of his humiliating trial? Had he ever entered the Ranks?
None of these reveries sated him. They were too vague. Only when his search brought him near his fugitive goal did he feel ecstasy. The thrill came erratically, then was lost in illusive evasion. Sometimes he came close. Once when he was searching through a listing of Handler Theorems, he hallucinated upon the face of Hanis. Hanis of the Trial! He recognized Hanis, both furious and sarcastic, taking the lapse of his student Eron Osa as a personal affront, chastising his young protege for even thinking about publishing without first having his methodology reviewed by his superiors.
Eron’s organic brain flashed with insight! Psychohistorians did not publish. Then he was a psychohistorian! Slyly he even knew why psychohistorians did not publish. It had come to him as an odd footnote in his recent dream, an aside by the voracious farman ghost. The Fellowship was a secret society. If all men could predict history, then history became unpredictable and the Fellowship of Pscholars would lose its power to predict and control. To publish the methods of historical prediction was the ultimate sin. That felt exactly right—the ultimate sin. A man could lose his fam for committing such a sin!
He slept again, then woke up early to an ancient rhythm— though who knew in Splendid Wisdom what was day and what was night?—eager to pursue his spectral haunts. Perhaps he was making progress? For more than a watch of this session, the Archives taunted him with impalpable apparitions and with vivid events, perhaps from his life—few of them relevant. He was groping but he felt that he would be able to recognize “it” when he found “it” and so he continued to troll patiently. As if he had anything else to do. And on this watch, just as he was fatigued, just as the clock turned over and reminded him that this was his watch for sleep, still eager but at the same time almost ready to doze off, a sudden “hit” stirred a deep emotional dazzle.
He sat up with such alertness that his aerochair bobbed in the air.
He repeated the archived item.
Again the triggering image flowed in front of him in hologram—a gestalt of red symbols and multicolored action against a multigraph of a stable, self-perpetuating decision state. At first he was puzzled. Then he became cognizant of an unfamiliar mainstream mathematics that leaned heavily upon a notation commonly used by physical scientists. The math wasn’t easy to understand without his fam—but: He recognized it as a rudimentary account of stasis. He knew that the psychohistorians did it better because he had once known more about stasis than any man alive. This wasn’t what he was after, but it was a near miss that had triggered his mind.
Ah so!
The concomitant emotional rush came with a clear patter of babble as his organic mind intoned in a ponderous voice: “Early Disturbed Event Location by Forced Arekean Canonical Pre-posturing: An Analysis in Three Parts.” He grinned uncontrollably. That, whatever in Space it meant, would be his, Eron Osa’s, dissertation!
He pondered this miracle of precipitate memory, astonished. Wetware minds worked by peculiar magic! Where had such a revelation come from? He wasn’t sure what the babble was about, except that it had to do with... psychohistorical stasis brought on by... what? He didn’t know. All he knew was that this monograph was the object of his search and that he had to have a copy. It was going to be a “no” to sleep!
But being a vagued-out moron was utter frustration when you had memories of being a genius.
He paused before making a formal request for the monograph over the network. Were his actions being monitored? Doubtful. The Pscholars did not monitor people; they monitored trends. People acting alone had infinitesimal power. De-fammed criminals were a threat to no one.
Half a watch and a growling stomach later, he suspected with a growing certainty and a terrible disappointment that his monograph had vanished from the Archives of the whole Imperialis star system. For a wrenching moment he wondered if he had ever written such a document Yet he remained gut certain that he had! Was his certainty only an illusion brought on by the loss of his fam? Perhaps he had never gone past the intention to write.
Yet he could guess the real truth. His work had been erased. All copies were gone. Thoroughly gone; even his unique fam, with its ability to re-create the research, had been destroyed.
Now what?
Eron switched off the insubstantial console with a gesture of his finger and left his chair bobbing in midair. He paced about the strange apartment, too cramped for his aristo taste, wondering where he really was in relation to the rest of Splendid Wisdom. Where were his friends? Could that ancient psychohistorian who had sat on the very panel that had condemned him be a friend? He had only dared explore his immediate neighborhood. All else was a terrifying maze. Everything in the apartment folded into the wall, everything was white, not a trace of luxury or space. The dispozoria was leaking urine. This wasn’t home! He buried his head in his arms.
Ping! The tiny, gleaming sphere of a Personal Capsule appeared in the functional wall niche, unnoticed.
Of course this wasn't his apartment; he was no longer an acolyte of the Psychohistorian Fellowship; he was alone, disowned, friendless, possessions confiscated, tossed into the lower warrens of Splendid Wisdom where he was condemned to think with treacherously slow neurons! It was infuriating ... and for a moment he had a rush of uncontrolled rage that stunned him into an unbalanced mental fall because it was not resisted by the restraining calmness of fam input. He had shoved emotionally against a removed wall... flinging himself into emptiness.
The rage turned to instant consuming fear—without his fam he was a very asymmetrical animal. His zenoli training was useless, his brain-fam centering lost. He could no longer trust his own responses. This was worse than he had anticipated when he had been whole and accepting of the dangers inherent in his rash deeds. Being an asymmetrical animal didn't fit with his plans! Plans! Again his mind lurched out of control with a flash of joy at the thought of his brilliant agenda.
But, when he tried to remember the nature of such an agenda, he found only vacuum. He glanced about him in desperation. That was when he saw the Personal Capsule. It stopped him, reminding him of danger. He grumbled bitterly to himself—My orders from the police. Yet his eyes disclaimed such a conclusion; the omnipotent police, backed up by the certainties of psychology, had no need for supersecurity. A Personal Capsule? Here? How was he to read it without fam input?
Curiously he picked the small sphere from its niche. It opened in his hand and would not have opened for any other of the trillion inhabitants of Splendid Wisdom. There was no famfeed attachment A tiny screen scrolled its message with a flashing warning that whatever scrolled off the top was unrecoverable. It read:
See Master Rigone at the Teaser's Bistro, Calimone Sector, AQ-87345, Level 78. (The Corridor of Olibanum.) I’ve already told Rigone what you'll need. I’ve got myself in a
real fix and don’t know how much more I can help. Your benefactor.
Inessential words began to fade, leaving only a list of critical information. By then the screen and sphere were well on their way to dust.
Eron Osa didn’t even have to memorize the message. Rigone sounded like the name of a friend, or was it just a ghost figment of his dreams? From somewhere he knew of the Teaser’s Bistro—a tolerated black market came to mind, a dive where young Fellowship rakes hung out to drink and rollick and have ille
gal attachments added to their fams. He couldn’t recall ever having been in such a student den, but, for all he knew, he might have spent most of his idle time in just such a place.
22
SEDUCED BY HISTORY, 14,791 GE
On the death of that emperor [Caesar-of-August], his testament was publicly read to the senate. He bequeathed, as a valuable legacy to his successors, the advice of confining the empire within those limits, which Nature seemed to have placed as its permanent bulwarks and boundaries; on the west the Atlantic ocean; the Rhine and Danube on the north; the Euphrates on the east; and toward the south, the sandy deserts of Arabia and Africa.
Happily... the moderate system he recommended... was adopted by the fears and vices of his immediate successors. Engaged in the pursuit of pleasure, or in the exercise of tyranny, the first Caesars seldom showed themselves to the armies, or to the provinces; nor were they disposed to suffer, that those triumphs which their indolence neglected should be usurped by the conduct and valor of their lieutenants. The military fame of a subject was considered as an insolent invasion of the Imperial prerogative; and it became the duty, as well as interest, of every Roman general, to guard the frontier entrusted to his care, without aspiring to conquests which might have proved no less fatal to himself than to the vanquished barbarians.... Germanicus, Suetonius Paulinus, and Agricola, were checked and recalled in the course of their victories. Corbulo was put to death.
—Edward Gibbon in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volumes I-V, original editions (English)
1776-1788 AD, translation by Colmuni of Archaist Press 75,398 AD
Nothing had come of his fam upgrade and that had chastened Eron, giving him much to mull over on the trip out from Neuhadra. The first leg of their journey would take them to ancient Sewinna, one of the first worlds colonized in this arm of space. He kept to himself on the ship, suddenly conscious that soon he would no longer be under anyone’s tutorship. He practiced making decisions on his own—while he still had the indomitable Murek to run to. The fam mattered less and less; it was as if he had stopped grasping at flotsam to keep him afloat in the ocean and was now determined to learn how to swim. He kept away from Nemia, except to quiz her about her strange Egg which so fascinated him that he couldn’t keep his hands off it. He was resenting his tutor less and less.
He found himself ignoring the stars, indifferent to the shipboard telescope which had so recently fascinated him. One peek at a star and you’ve seen them all! Glatim’s odd group of roustabout sailors and meteoroid specialists teased him too much—once during a jump-stop they sent him after a left-handed nanowrench when he was trying to be helpful; so much for trying to be friends with motherless piss drinkers! And their snarks! The next time they set him up for laying traps to catch cable-eating shipsnarks he was going to put salt in their sugar!
He began to seclude himself at a spare console (found while looking for the left-handed nanowrench). It was scrunched up in a split-level storage closet off the library’s memory racks. Even in that confined lair, with only a screen connection to the library, ignoring the stars wasn’t easy. Ship’s memory was overstocked with the minutiae of millions of solar systems, almost as if the ship were a police catalog of all the rocks in the universe ever booked as troublemakers. Special attention was given to gargantuan planets that gathered gangs of whatever rabble passed by, scattering them helter-skelter.
Still, it was possible to skip over all the celestial mechanics because the archives had also accumulated huge gobs of history about the regions of space they were passing through. History just seemed to come along with the bookish weight of solar system mechanics like a laundrator accumulating lint—mapping expeditions, the details of political crises caused by astronomical events, the fracas around the Epsilon Oramaist nova, the weird jungles on the moon of an almost star-size planet, endless background detail. Sometimes the interesting lint was just a story that one of Glatim’s men had downloaded into the ship’s archive years ago for personal reasons and no one had bothered to erase.
Because their first destination was Sewinna, he did a search on the Sewinnese Archipelago to see what he could find. The most interesting item he turned up was a fictional account of the Sewinnese revolt. That was early Interregnum stuff when an especially greedy viceroy had done the unthinkable and broken his domain off from the First Empire.
The story, composed only years after the now-buried historical event it described, was told from the viewpoint of a young soldier of noble blood still committed to the old values—and as blind as the author to the grand significance of the unfolding events. Eron found the tale fascinating because it wasn’t a story built upon modem tropes and psy-chohistorical hindsight. Everything about it was strange, even the interwoven music was strange—blood-dancing stuff, primitively regal—yet accompanied by words so naive that Eron couldn’t believe he was hearing diem. He famfed the whole novel out of the library so that he could mull it over during “bunk-watch” and use his fam’s imaginator to blank out the underside of the upper bunk with the exotic images of battles and conflicts suggested by the adventure. He especially liked the lurid sex and the passionate men who were unafraid to use their blasters!
Viceroy Wisard (a historical figure) had ambitions on the throne. The author (probably correctly) supposed that Wisard took the newly crowned Boy Emperor to be too weak to reply to separatist audacity so far from the Center. Hadn’t the minor Precinct of Nacreome already been lost a century earlier to his great-uncle? A spineless dynasty. The Galactic Empire obviously needed new Imperial blood of a more ruthless kind. Wisard’s kind. Driving the Sewinnese into the hardship of war preparations, Wisard provoked only a revolt of his own people. (In the story the revolt is led by the fictional hero who rallies the Sewinnese to rejoin the Empire by carrying out their honorable duty, the obvious preference of the author.)
Meanwhile (as the hero drives Wisard and the remnants of his personal guard off planet) the Boy Emperor is marshaling his answer to insurrection through the Imperial Navy’s most pitiless Admiral. His armada arrives with soldiers intent upon loot and a leader intent upon seizing the viceroyalty himself. (These were dramatic scenes of struggle on a large stage capable of a graphic elaboration much more interesting than a view of the bunk above!)
The naive counter-revolution, though pro-Empire, was viciously suppressed, its goals not being in the self-interest of an Admiral who, like his vain predecessor, had unnatural ambitions. Again the Sewinnese populace suffered horribly. (The hero fights a valiant retrenchment in the thick of this setback and, finally, at the height of the bloodshed, bungles his desperate attempt to assassinate the new viceroy. The hero’s honor, honed by failure, demands revenge, if not upon the Admiral, at least upon the youthful tyrant who sent forth this bloody fleet of retribution. In a breathless climactic action sequence the avenger smuggles himself into Splendid Wisdom, there to succeed in assassinating the Boy Emperor. The author’s final tragic scene, pure fictional melodrama, sets both hero-assassin and dying Boy Emperor in an embrace where they tearfully confess their sins to each other before the Imperial Guards belatedly reduce the hero to cinders.)
Eron was lured into the role of director, his fam on overdrive creating sets, costumes, special minor characters, fantastically immense Imperial machinery, and even changing some of the clunky dialog, especially the words to the music. That was a sleepless night! He missed breakfast with his sailor-tormentors.
In the next few watches, as Eron delved into other sources to research the real-life Boy Emperor Tien-the-Young, 12,216-12,222 GE, he found that all of the information about Tien’s real assassin had been lost in the violent Sack of Splendid Wisdom 116 years later. The historical record did mention that his agent, the Admiral who so cruelly punished the Sewinnese people for Wisard’s sins, died at the hands of the only surviving son of a family he had imprisoned and tortured.
The story intrigued Eron’s budding curiosity about history because it had been written only a centur
y before the Sack and the author, though clearly troubled by the politics of his time, was among the vast majority of that age who could not conceive of an Empire at the end of its tether— troubles came and went but the Empire was forever—which was amazing because the whole novel was about the rot that would destroy the Empire within the century! The Founder had already told the Galaxy what would be happening and was himself centuries dead—but the Imperial Court and humanity just weren’t listening! Even authors who wrote about the find decay—who lived it!—couldn’t see the extent of the coming disaster!
He began to wonder if there wasn’t something as preposterously obvious about his own age standing so hugely in front of his face that he couldn’t see it. Was the real world invisible to the dulled perceptions of a boy trained to view the Galaxy from the cliched axioms of a Ganderian? Was he living in a renaissance? Or was he standing at the top of a landslide that was set to sweep them down into a Vortex of Death? Was he looking out over a plateau of stability that would last a million years? Or was there a snark out there, hidden even from psychohistorians become complacent? He didn’t know. He felt blind. He felt ignorant. He felt, above all, curious.
When the hypership reached Sewinna and popped into orbit while Glatim’s men rounded up supplies needed at Tre-fia, Eron ran away. It was just another revolt to establish his independence, another notch in his history of rebellion— though this time it was driven by his passionate need to wander through the stones stronghold from which the whole
Sewinnese Archipelago had once been ruled. The story’s intrigues began inside that redoubt; the author had actually been one of the irregulars who had attacked it, and Eron had to touch the ancient stones with his own feet and the pillars with his own hands. It was a real place. (How would it compare with his vividly imagined version?) He fully intended to be back at the ship in the nick of time, the thrill of his own revolt being tempered by a growing common sense. But let his pompous tutor sweat a little.
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