Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

Frightfulperson Katana of the Calmer Sea, for all her bluster, turned out to be a good lover, efficient and affectionate. He decided that she only pretended to be fierce because of her overwhelming name. What a name to have to live with! Nevertheless he was happy not to be her husband.

  Their transfer to a second and larger vehicle for the next jag of their journey was routine except that Hyperlord Jama lost all his wigs. That gave the Frightfulperson an excuse to shave his head and dress him in the black garb and silver buttons of a jackleg. She even slapped a neural fibulator on his backbone to change his walk. No one would remember seeing a fop. Jama had disappeared.

  The third transfer, to an undistinguished short-run tramp, turned out to be a con racket in which they were gently informed that “an unfortunate mistake” had been made in their reservations and that therefore the ship was “reluctantly” forced to “drop them off’ at an “inconvenient location” unless an additional “service fee” was forthcoming to ensure their well-being. In his guise of jackleg Jama felt compelled to vent his rage. The skipper became appropriately apologetic—but remained uncooperative.

  Katana fumed in a different way. She muttered under her breath about cheating Rithian scum. Aloud she promised to pay the additional fee—and indeed it arrived within a decawatch—in the form of a naval boarding party. The carrier’s skipper, an upper-caste Rithian of galactic stock mongrelized by sapiens lineage, was indicted by the commander of the boarding party under an obscurely ancient Imperial law which had never been rescinded by the Pschol-ars. His trial lasted a mere thirty-two inamins, whereupon he was summarily executed in front of his dimwit sapiens crew, all rigidly at attention.

  Katana cheered as the execution proceeded and afterward sliced off the dead skipper’s ears as a souvenir. Teach the Rithians a lesson. It was an old Stars&Ship custom from the harsh campaigns of the First Empire, probably originating in the customs of the Frightfulpeople. Jama made a rapid reevaluation of his companion’s character.

  She wasn't joking!

  How could such bloodlust have survived into modem enlightened times? No longer playing the victimized jackleg, he was appalled in his inner soul at this wholly unexpected display of violence even though he was an admirer—an advocate—of the stimulating violence engendered by the Interregnum. How could such ferocious genes have been passed on through her family for ten millennia, undiluted? What kind of people was he now attracting to his revolution? How could this woman have such an angelic daughter who sat in his lap and teased his nose? Did Katana have an ear of her husband mounted somewhere as a souvenir of recompense for his insults? Jama was going to ask her the next time they made love. And how did one get ears past the eyes of the customs bureaucrats?

  The Frightfulperson proceeded to review the chastised crew, souvenir ears between forefinger and thumb, while with the fingers of the other hand she playfully tweaked their ears, chiding them for malicious stupidity with a politeness that mocked their previously hypocritical politeness. When she saw Jama’s pale face, she grinned. “I don’t like the Rithian sense of humor,” she said of her kidnappers. “Let them sweat!”

  “Now, is it fair to judge all Rithians by the standards of this miscreant crew?”

  Gallantly, three members of the boarding party agreed to pilot the ship to its original destination as a free naval service granted to law-abiding citizens of the Second Empire. There the jackleg and his hussy vanished. Whereupon an itinerant spaceman and meek wife appeared to take steerage passage in a transport bound for the inner planets of a dim red star, Rhani, which was a minor dependent system of the Sewinnese Archipelago.

  Finally a chartered yacht, registered at Rhani, brought businessman and secretary into Faraway orbit. The yacht, not planetworthy, docked at a space station where they transferred to a ferry. The ferry aerobraked in a graceful glide over a river’s meanderings across thousands of kilometers of reddish desert, the whole countryside devoid of bureaucratic warrens! How had Faraway ever ruled? The scenery lacked even the ruins of a bureaucracy! Then came megahectares of forest with scant signs of habitation! Only at the last mo-ment did they collide with civilization as the ferry descended in a sickening drop down to the outskirts of Faraway’s Telomere City.

  From there the mad scramble into the City through underground tunnels was a more homey adventure. It almost reminded Kikaju of the comforts of Splendid Wisdom. But that wasn’t to last. They had rented a room in the imposing Hober Hostel. For a Hyperlord used to ever-present ceilings, the nearby buildings were very tall and the drop from the hostel window sickening—and distances! From the luxury of their fortieth-floor aerie, they overlooked the Mall of Knowledge, which had been laid out by the original colonists after a sketch by the Founder himself. Kikaju hung on to the curtains for safety while he let his eyes stray down the Mall. Open-air skyscrapers offended his sense of balanced architecture.

  To the left end of that extended plaza was the Palace of the Chancellor. It was hard to believe that the Chancellor of this unimpressive university town of only twenty million had once held sway over the Galaxy. The signs of boon-docks were everywhere. Trees along the great Mall open to the air!

  To the right, far across the haze at the other end of the Mall, the fading light of Faraway’s reddish sun cast shadows on the columns of the Mausoleum of the Founder, seeming to radiate the power of that mythical figure who had continued to make pronouncements from there long after his death. Jama was startled to find that the vast scene inspired reverence in his cynical soul. The Founder’s dead hand still wound up the clockwork of the Galaxy. There was an exclamatory expression they all used when overwhelmed by sudden insight. By the eyes of the Founder! Yes, the sight impacted one’s emotions—and if indeed there were a second focal point to the Galaxy outside of Splendid Wisdom, it was here in that magnificent Mausoleum.

  While Kikaju held onto the curtains for dear life and paid his silent respects to the majesty of an ancient man, Katana had been working the room’s console to contact their guarantor. But the agreed-upon coded message was evoking no response. “Nothing,” she said.

  Jama’s heart dropped a full forty floors. Had they come all this way for nothing? Ah, but he had already made allowance for that. He was impressed by his perspicacity at having included a clause in their contract which forced a default payment in case of nonappearance. “I suppose that means they wish us to show respect by cooling our heels for a few revolutions of Faraway.” To relieve his anxiety he closed the curtains.

  “No.” She smiled. “It means they haven’t arrived yet. They cannot be Faraway citizens. So. We wait. I’ve already set up a watch-screen to catch likely off-planet visitors. We are now spiders. By a jerk in the web we’ll know who they are and when they arrive—before they contact us. An old Naval Intelligence trick. If they turn out to be police, we just vanish. How do you like our room? Two beds! We can have sex twice in one night!”

  “I’ve been more taken by the decor. Such taste!” He was admiring the rear of his head inside the gilded frame of a magic mirror. He switched to profile view and tried a cocky rising-of-the-nose. “If I denuded these magnificent walls of their ornamentation and sneaked off into the dark of space with my loot, I’d make a fortune back on Splendid Wisdom.”

  “They’re only replicas of beau mondesaid Katana disdainfully, unwilling to admit that any provincial this far out on the Rim could have expensive taste, no matter how adept they might once have been at gauche conquest.

  “You don’t have my eyes or my savvy for antiques. Of course such priceless artifacts are replicas, though you can’t have any guarantee of that without a nanometric examination—but I’d wager good betting odds that on all of Splendid Wisdom no dealer has templates for these particular delights. It’s a subtle theme the hostel has running across the walls of our rooms.” His arm swept out to include the whole hallway and adjoinments.

  “First,” he continued, “there isn’t a single item enshrined here that isn’t pre-Empire. Pre-Kambal-the-First. These ar
tifacts were old when Splendid Wisdom was just another upstart trading world battling its way out of an agricultural age on the labor of farmers playing at engineer, dwarfed by the resources of the Sotamas and the Machan Confederacy. Why—when glorious aboriginal craftsmen were working the genesis of these astonishments, your sanctimonious Frightfulpeople weren’t even a gleam in your ancestors’ eyes, they being busy scrabbling out a life as raucous comet-belt thieves.” He hooked a thumb in his sash for effect.

  “Second: Though no single item presented here for our pleasure came out of the same cultural stew or time, they all have a grand affinity. They were picked by a person of immense artistic sensibilities to embellish each other. That adds immeasurably to their value. My compliments to the Hober’s staff.” He marveled. “Look at the shade of this glaze against the texture of that tapestry in the shifting light of the auroral piece over the beds!” His roving eyes went round as they met a small painting set in its own alcove. “Look at thisl” He examined the icon carefully at short distance. “I’ve heard of these. I’ve never seen one. It predates the hypership. Gummurgy, probably. Look how it simply radiates its isolation! Imagine gazing at the sky, knowing that your ancestors had come from the stars and that the stars were still unreachable! How clever to hide such a lonely icon away in this little alcove. Why... there couldn’t have been more than two thousand settled worlds at that time—all in the Sirius Sector—linked by only the most tenuous sublight contact. Such exquisite savagery in its expression!”

  “Where’s our bank?” asked Katana.

  The Hyperlord readjusted to present time, somewhat irritably. At the spaceport he had bought and famfed a tri-vid map of Telomere City for reference. Reluctantly he re-

  opened the curtains and set the map to active from the viewpoint of their room’s coordinates, zooming the wireframe outlines, fam-imposed upon his visual cortex, to match those features he saw naturally from their high window. Once oriented, he faded the wireframe. He colored their branch of the Red Sun Bank in bright polka dots to make it easy to spot, noted its real position, then canceled his fam’s overlay. “Over there,” he said, pointing with his finger in a way that even a lightspeed-shackled barbarian of sixty-five thousand years ago would have understood.

  “Well,” said Katana, “at least the building appears to be too solid to collapse into the street in the next month or so. How these free-standing structures ever hold up so long against an atmospheric breeze has always been a mystery to me. It is counter-intuitive but I suppose we can trust Faraway engineering even if we won’t be able to sleep!”

  24

  ASINIA PEDAGOGIC, ACADEMIC YEAR 14,791 GE

  While Agander's night sky whirls

  in fright from the sounding skirl

  of battle's bite, we hurl

  our knives to death’s delight.

  Heaven sits above this plight

  Indicting space born army churls:

  Across the starlit dome of pearls,

  elder wisps excite eye’s sight,

  streaming sprites with gaseous curls,

  God’s banner of flame unfurled.

  Distant bursts of suns ignite to form whose future world?

  —From “Ode to Agander’s Night” by Emperor Arum-the-Patient, 5641-5662 GE

  Eron was shocked when they reached Faraway and he was sent planetside, alone, with only a script of introduction to his new advisor at Asinia Pedagogic, a one-night hotel reservation, a map, his kick and holster—pointedly wrapped in a copy of Faraway’s weapons laws—a suitcase and a credit stick. Vm only a Ganderian boy, he complained to himself as the ferry braked through the atmosphere, isolated in the comm-blindness of its own ionic wash. They were passing over the nightside. There was nothing to see of legendary Faraway but a few twinkling ground lights and a clear sky, sparse of stars. I should be in bed. He was missing mommy and the green hills of Agander.

  His reservation turned out to be a formerly vogue room in a Telomere City hotel with invisible roboattendants who gave advice out of walls and made beds while no one was looking, its rambling buildings tucked away behind shrubs within walking distance of Asinia but not part of the campus. Once settled in, he took off on a stroll through what had to be an ancient part of Telomere. His random walk led him to explore the covered corridors of the Pedagogic—built thousands of years ago, perhaps even by the first citizens of Faraway in their nostalgia for the confined claustrophobia of Splendid Wisdom, and now conserved by its modem citizens in nostalgia for a glorious past when Faraway had dominated a chaotic stellar realm of multimillions.

  Off the arched passageways a well-kept park meandered along a stream. Eron met students he might someday know but he didn’t speak to them. A robocrawler tended a flower bed. Each tree had a plaque commemorating which group or person had planted it. One immense tree was so old it dated back to the last centuries of the Interregnum. He climbed such a tree to get a good view of the back of the sprawling Palace from where the Chancellors had once commanded the stars. He recognized it from its famous pictures, but it wasn’t as awesome as a picture. Now the Palace was just another building among many, not even the tallest.

  When he jumped from the tree, he mentally shifted to an even older era and planet to become a space-launched Imperial trooper in a grav-chute, a revanchist attacking Sewinna. With pretend Sewinnese laid out dead all around him, he ate in a crowded bistro, content to be feared by the locals. Centuries passed. By the time he returned to his hotel, alone, he had his discharge docs from the navy and had reverted to civilian status as a mysterious farman from some distant place that no one here had ever heard of.

  The next morning he tried to register. They kept telling him he was in the wrong place. They sent him to different cubbyholes and up and down stairs. They were always polite.

  The machines were politer than the people. He began to have a horrible suspicion that he was being sent after a left-handed nanowrench while the snarks watched him from the ventilation louvers. Finally, not knowing why he felt so shy, he asked a student, a tall lanky fellow whose abstract eyes suggested that he was ignorant of all bureaucratic conspiracies.

  “Ah-ha!” said the accosted one, suddenly smiling fiendishly. “You’re new here! And confused! Follow me! This is a university. Universities haven’t changed since Homo erectus anointed the first tenured professor in the jungles of Java way back when. I’m Jaiki, known more formally as Jak the Beanstalk.”

  Eron was taken across campus into a building—whose doors didn’t open automatically—and up the stairs which spiraled off a lobby, no sign of a levitator—and down a hall to a door with a hideous facemask that looked the lanky student in the eye and said simply, “Pass, friend.” The door unlocked with a muffled click—but Jak had to open it manually.

  “Anybody home?” bellowed Jak. “I found us a new roomy! I got him before he could sign in. We’re saved!” Saved from what, Eron couldn’t guess. He and his new acquaintance had entered a friendly lounge with a girl dozing on the couch. Eron could see a kitchen through an open door. A curious student poked his head out of the kitchen and another giant stepped from an adjacent bedroom-study. They were all older than Eron. The girl opened her eyes and evaluated the boy-student before returning her attention to Jak. “How do you know he hasn’t already been assigned?” “I told you I caught him before he could register.”

  The giant explained, “The last roomy they sent us was a disaster. It took us half a year to drive him crazy enough to leave. Glad to meet you. I’m Pee-wee.”

  “What makes you think our little friend here is any better?” asked the girl pragmatically.

  Jak had an answer for everything. “I found him when he was confused. That makes him trainable.”

  “The last one was very confused and wasn*t trainable,”

  complained a voice from the kitchen. “He always left the kitchen a mess and ate food out of the noncommon stashes.” “And left crumbs in the lounge,” complained the girl. “And had terrible taste in music
,” complained Jak.

  “I still have to register?” complained Eron, woefully. “Hey, we have to get you settled in first!” Jak flung open one of the doors that connected into the lounge. “Your room. It’s clean. The four of us busted our muscles all of yesterwatch cleaning it out. Keep it that way and we will love you.”

  Eron saw a monk’s quarters, a fraction of the size of his room at home on Agander. It had a single bed, a tall armoire, and a club chair. The console looked adequate: plenty of desk space, four large screens, and an alcove for holograms—which, if connected to a decent archive, would be a good setup. The only luxury was an intricately designed rug on the floor showing a couple of centuries of wear. Where was he going to put his books? He scanned the room for an appurtenancer so he could build some shelves.

  “Looking for your roboassistants? There aren’t any.”

  “No. I was looking for a place to put my books.” “Books!” Jak stuck his head back outside the room and called to the girl still lounging on the couch. “Marrae. We’ve caught another freak. He likes books!”

  Marrae immediately jumped up to stick her head under Jak’s arm. “Where?” She smiled at Eron. “I love you already. It’s so lonely living with these jerks. Don’t panic so quick! I know where I can get you a shelf!”

  “Hey,” came a voice from the kitchen, “bring him in here. I want to show him how to keep the kitchen clean. I’m Bari, head kitchen ogre!”

  “Later! I’m registering him.” Jak was at the console pulling up files. “What’s your admission number?” “14791-1261.”

  The mike picked that up so Jak didn’t have to input it. Then Jak went into exclamation overdrive, his eyes on the display that had formed on the screen. “Eron! Why are you trying to register? You’ve already been registered for a month!” He typed rapidly. “I’m pulling a fast one and filling in your address for you—here” He perused the screen and talk-gestured a few more commands. “Wow. Fees paid for eight years, too. Special Category. Tonight you can take us out to dinner, Rich Man! I’m only joking. Rich guys are human, too.”