Jama discovered some of the colonial mine tunnels hacked into the mountainside above the camp. It looked like imported machinery had been in short supply, with the marks of homemade tools still everywhere in evidence. Inside the old drifts he stumbled upon fearful cave-ins, leading a sobered Hyperlord to a less dangerous reconnaissance outside. Yes, there were slumpings. Still outside, by the kind of careful dating that came as second nature to an antique dealer, Kikaju convinced himself that the most recent collapse was at least three thousand years old and the mine had long ago restabilized—and would remain stable barring a strong earthquake. That meant that if he was now denied access to a tunnel, it would also have been denied to a wandering martyr and could thus be ignored.
No one in Scogil’s party thought that the prisoners would have been allowed to wander so far—certainly not inside old mine diggings—but Jama had evidence that came with his galactarium—which he was not sharing—suggesting that some of those guarding the martyrs were corruptible, even unsympathetic with the sentence imposed upon their charges. They might have been lax. They might have turned a blind eye to an innocent walk in the hills. He reasoned that the guards of this remote prison would not be concerned about an overland escape, would not consider it even possible. There was no place to go and even if an equipped man did leave the compound, or fjnd a hiding place, he would die sooner rather than later. Intelligent guards would be watching spaceships.
Such speculation motivated the Hyperlord in his hopeful exploration of the mines. The worst blockages he faced were accumulations of squat and fat icicles. Eventually Jama built up enough courage to torch passages through die worst of them. His enthusiasm was tried. The farther he penetrated the mine, the more he became wary of the dangers of that kind of adventuring. His feet started a small rockslide. Only an instant freezing of his muscles kept him from stepping into a bottomless hole. And then, after convincing himself that he was being adequately cautious, his feet went out from under him and he was sliding, butt bouncing, flying down a steeply inclined shaft, careening off a rock that took a terrible gouge in the side. He landed on his back in a morass of mud that oozed below the frost line at the bottom of the slanting shaft.
Spacedamn! For a terrifying moment he was sure that he had lost his optimism!
Was his suit ripped? Were a sixtyne of bones broken? He was sure that he had stupidly been pushing his time limits and was low on oxygen. While he groped about to give himself a hand-up, his glove closed on an antique atomic slicer on the ledge he was trying to use as a grip. He slumped back into the mud and looked with amazement at the device now centered in his beam. It was a cheap hand tool—even crusted, obviously of an early Faraway design—the kind of tool that was common merchandise for Faraway’s aggressive independent traders. The sight refueled his enthusiasm. He lay in his mudbath of aches, grinning hugely. Just this tool alone would buy him a thousand wigs back on Splendid Wisdom!
After a mist shower at the base and a check of his bruises, which did not conceal any shattered bones, he had a talk with himself to fortify his courage, and, without telling even Katana where he was going, went right out again. The Hyperlord spend frustrating watches following his clue. Those nitpickers were excluding him from their dig—well, he would exclude them from his.
He found the Martyr’s Cache in an improbable place. It was not directly accessible from the surface, reachable only through a ratrun of tunnels, but did lay near the surface, was dry and in the frost zone. The tiny dungeon’s rock walls bore the unmistakable signature of an ancient Faraway atomic slicer, and inside the small cave was a box. He was too joyfully curious to report his find without first examining it, but he was also conscious of the razzing he had taken for not being careful and so he only took a small peek. He pried off the top of the box, and his beam showed him neat slices of fragile rock. Artificial. Human made. Carefully machined. Triumph!
Back at the hut, no one believed him when he boasted that he had located the Martyr’s Cache for which they had been sifting sand and finding only sand mixed with a few buttons. He let them razz him and have their laughs at his expense; the more they laughed, the higher they were being hoisted for their fall. Presently.. .he produced the slicing tool. He saw the joshing in stunned eyes suddenly arrested, the twinkle in them frozen by astonishment.
“There’s more, my disbelieving yokels!”
A clamor began with no one person having the verbal right of way. What they were all trying to say at the same time was that they desired to dress for a hike and hurry after him to claim his treasure—but the Hyperlord was not willing to give up his satisfying fame so quickly. He protested exhaustion and a need to rest his weary feet. He had them by rings in their noses. His worst detractor brought a footbath of warm water. Food appeared, the best they had in the tent. Katana broke out their last bottle of Armazin left over from the party on Faraway. He basked.
Languorously he regaled them with his story (careful not to provide a semantically useful map of the mine) while leading them through the spooky dangers of his subterranean labyrinth. He dramatized every drip, every rockfall, every black pit, every ice floe, every perilous turn and shaft, his voice in no hurry to release his captive audience. He paused frequently to pontificate, knowing that, this time, they would listen to his wisdom. Until he revealed the location of the Martyr’s Cache, no one was going to be audacious enough to interrupt him or poke at him with sarcastic asides. He missed, of course, his lordly wig and ruffled cuffs but tried to make up for that lack of impressiveness with precise diction and a selected choice of obscurely appropriate words.
In time he ran out of delays and actually had to take them to the treasure. The journey was quicker than the telling of the discovery. Reverently they carried the box back through twisting vaults, out, and down over windswept boulder and ice to the inflated command bubble. A cursory analysis showed the sarsen stone slices to be symmetrically pitted on the front and backed by a thin film of plastic. It was a cheap, soft, tough plastic commonly used to preserve food for long voyages—not particularly heat or light or oxygen resistant but, underground in permafrost conditions, bathed in Zuml’s atmosphere, it was virtually indestructible, a useful backing for something as brittle as stone. Scogil scanned several million bits of the pit sequences into his fam and broke the code almost immediately. It was meant to be broken.
“A message?” asked the Hyperlord anxiously. “They wanted to tell us something?” he queried.
“It’s mathematics,” said Scogil.
“Mathematics?”
“They were all mathematicians, remember. What else would a group of mathematicians do when isolated from all contact with civilization? They would do mathematics.” Hi-ranimus felt a pride for his profession. “We are a clever bunch. I’m not surprised that a mere gaggle of prison guards couldn’t stop them.”
“Is it psychohistory?” Jama’s voice was on its tiptoes.
“It appears to be.” The large disk of the sun had set, and the light from the inflated arch of plump cylinders above them shimmered on the stone slice Scogil was examining.
“But that’s blasphemy!” protested Jama. “They are forbidden to publish! Are they hypocrites as well as scoundrels?”
Scogil grinned. “Fanatic volunteers condemned to be erased from history without even a heroic song to tell of their going probably don’t connect publishing with the hiding of their stone scrawlings in a mine whose probable fate is to be kneaded back into the crust of Zural E by the tidal interactions of Zural. Given time to think about it, even martyrs don’t want to die without at least a marker on their graves. The marker has to be there, read or not. What is a marker but that which distinguishes oneself from all the other quadrillions?”
“Will this enable us to wrest psychohistory away from the Pscholars and apply it to our own ends?” That was Hyperlord Kikaju Jama’s fondest hope. He was remembering that one of his dreams was to finance a group of mathists who would secretly re-create the basic principles of psy
chohistory.
Scogil, who had been elated by the find, was now sobering. “Probably not. What’s on these slices was doubtless advanced mathematics for its time. Today, who knows? Psychohistory is orders of magnitude more complicated than it was. Today’s Pscholars can read social nuances beyond the wildest dreams of the Founder. They can sense a revolt or an insurrection before the leaders of that insurrection are even bom. The Founder was able to set up his colony on Faraway certain that no one would notice its strategic importance. Today such a leveraged ploy would be impossible. Early abortion is routinely applied before even an obscure threat matures.” Fleetingly Hiranimus recalled Agander. In spite of the Oversee’s deftest applied mathematics, the Pscholars had noticed the direction of the Ulmat deviation and begun countermeasures before the discontent of the Ulmat peoples could be ramped up into a useful crisis.
High above the camp their orbiting Helmarian ship warned them of an impending storm. The archaeologists could have battened down and ridden it out, but the need was no longer there. They tossed the remains of the martyrs into the landing craft for a later dignified funeral while the life’s work of the martyrs, committed to lifeless stone, was packed reverently in shockproof containers. To obscure the recent visit, obvious traces of grave robbing were erased under fresh layers of blown sand. The storm would do the rest. Then the crowded craft returned to the mother ship. The expedition jumped away from Zural to a point in interstellar space far from nearby suns, drifting. The analysis continued.
Each slice of sarsen stone was scanned and input into standard templates readable by any common household manufacturum. Scogil saw such templates as seeds which would drift across the interstellar voids in countless numbers, each seed conveniently too small to be seen by the huge galactic army of Fellowship monitors. Still, the seeds would be useless until they dropped down and took root in the kind of fertile soils that the Pscholar’s monitors were all too able to detect and sterilize.
The Starmaster’s regular crew had many expertises but none was a psychohistorian. The Hyperlord worshiped mathematics, but his mathematical sophistication was hardly more developed than the runtime routines built into his fam—public school tricks like solving partial differential equations in his head. Katana revealed her skills only as she needed them. Nemia was a master of psychoquantronics with a good smattering of psychohistorical training leavened by contact with her grandfather, who was one of the best psychohistorians that the Oversee had ever produced. But it was Scogil who had been trained from his youth as a psychohistorian, and so it fell to him to be the first to make a deep excursion into the martyr’s legacy. Others of the Oversee would follow soon enough. If he assimilated it now, he would have the jump-start.
Scogil extracted the relevant binary message from slice after slice and ran them through a decoder and then a document assembler and, hence, into his fam’s memory. The total was too meaty to be digested in one watch or a hundred. He was a python who had swallowed a very large goat. To begin, he sampled extensively, wincing at the extreme differences between Founder and Oversee notations. In the years following the Founder’s first paper his secretive followers had never published their work except in popular propaganda format. Whatever psychohistory that Scogil knew had been developed independently by the Oversee using their own symbolism and definitions. He had to construct a routine in his fam to build an efficient translator for his subconscious, then task back to his browsing.
One theorem caught his mind’s eye—he and Mendor Glatim had spent the better part of a year working through its proof, refining and polishing the machinery for their teacher, who was mining tougher psychohistorical veins. The Martyr’s proof of essentially the same theorem from the Martyr’s Cache was elegantly simple, enragingly simple once Hiranimus understood the notation—and it was a proof more than two thousand years old!
Was there anything more like that? He cut into the document at random. Up flashed a mid-interregnum description of Faraway’s economy from the Founder’s extrapolation of
ancient Faraway’s future. Scogil backtracked and was goggled at the conceptual frame which held the fine details. The Oversee had never been able to cover a whole system with such finesse. It frightened him in an exhilarating way. He was a child who knew arithmetic and had stumbled upon an advanced calculus dissertation in his attic.
Sweet irony. The boy who had been dropped from file Oversee’s elite theoretical course because he wasn’t good enough was sitting here, commanding instant access to the most dangerous text in the Galaxy outside of Fellowship control. He loved it!
26
DEALS AND OITHER INTRIGUES, 14,791 GE
Hasten slowly.
- Emperor Caesar-of-August, 61,273-61,235 BGE
After the second jump the bald Starmaster sent for Scogil. Hiranimus left a sleeping Nemia and his meditations, propelling himself through the iris of his cabin with a sigh. He monkeyed up the tube to the cramped bridge. As he arrived, the ship’s commander unstuck a bulb from under his cabinet where he kept his ample supply of refreshments. He was known to dislike multiple returns to the galley. “Have a drink. Lemonade.” His voice implied that lemonade was the ambrosia of the universe. “Do you have what you need to work? I’ll be floating here in space for maybe sixtyne to twenty watches checking that we’re not being followed.”
“Who could follow us?” Scogil glanced at the sparse drama of lonely stars, the distant Milky Way rising slowly across their false horizon as the starship turned. It was a rhetorical question. They were doing zigzags again, routine security for the Oversee even though there were probably no humans within a radius of sixtyne leagues. For all of the hundred quadrillion human beings linked by tenuous hyper-travel between the oases of the Galaxy, the expanse of the human empire was mostly empty desert.
The Starmaster rubbed his hand over his naked head. “How well do you know this Katana? I sense that she kens naval procedure more than makes me comfortable. Theirs, not ours ”
Scogil broke the seal on the lemonade bulb and let his body hang in front of the panoramic view. “She’s here to keep his Lordship out of trouble. You don’t think he needs a leash?”
“Likely. But whose leash? Maybe she has her own business. What do you make of him?”
“He needs someone at his side to keep him out of trouble. You’ll do me a favor when you see him coming my way to engage him in conversation or at least to stick out your foot and somersault him. When I’m staring off into space he thinks I’m bored and in need of company.”
“And I was thinking of palming him off on you. Just this morning he was telling me how to run my ship. What are we going to do about the Hyperlord?”
Scogil noticed the “we.” The Starmaster was a taciturn diplomat, but there was no denying his authority. He was probably here as Scogil’s boss, assigned by the Oversee. He was just too polite to say so. One would be wise to pay attention to his suggestions. Cross a boundary of unwritten command and his politeness would cease. “I’m open to your opinions.”
“The appearance is that you have made a deal with that nobleman.”
“A mutually profitable one. He’s dogged. Without him we wouldn’t have found what we were after.”
“Dogged, yes he is.”
“You disapprove of my promise to give him a copy of the Martyr’s Cache?”
“He’s a blabbermouth. Maybe it doesn’t matter. It depends upon what is etched into those documents etched in stone. You’ve had a better look than the rest of us. We’ve noticed that you’ve been turning up to dinner glazed and taciturn and then disappearing again into your thoughts. What have you found? I need to know.”
Keeping counsel with himself was no longer useful. Scogil composed his thoughts. “Everything’s there. It looks like the whole of the Founder’s Plan to navigate through the Interregnum as well as the mathematics that justifies it as seen by two score of the early Fellowship’s brightest minds. The methods he devised to monitor and tweak his vision are a fascinating exercis
e in the art and science of minimalist manipulation. Frankly, his techniques look orders of magnitude better than ours. Maybe this Cache is of more value than a burglarized copy of the Collected Works of the Founder. The martyrs were bom into a culture that already had three hundred years to digest the Founder’s message and clean it up. On Zural maybe they even had time on their hands to do a little of their own polishing. It looks that way. But I’m only beginning to get into it.”
“So there is new stuff?”
Scogil sipped for a while. The Starmaster, who was probably a high-ranking mathematician in disguise, meant “new” in the sense of something that the Oversee’s psychohistorians had failed to rediscover. “I’ve only had a chance to skim, but every place I touch down I find mathematics I’ve never seen before. I may not be the Oversee’s best psychohistorian, but I know what’s being done.”
“We’re that behind, eh?”
“No. We’re very advanced in some areas. The Founder’s work is.. .just different. I’ll tell you more within the decawatch. We’ve been trying to re-create psychohistory—because we know it can be done—but we think at the problem from the viewpoint of someone trying to grapple with an empire run by psychohistory while the Founder was looking at an empire that didn’t understand the functioning of the bureaucracy that had been created by twelve millennia of expansion. Two different problems which generate very different elans. And, it appears, a very different kind of math. I’m shocked.”
“So this is important. It’s going to give our mathematicians a celebratory meal to digest?”
“Yes. And a hangover.”
“Your deal with blabbermouth is off. My call. Too dangerous.”
The command startled Scogil, and it was a command. So the Oversee had overruled him again. Fury welled in him but he was unwilling to show his anger. “A deal is a deal,” he said calmly. “We’re a bug living in the cracks of a giant’s boot. Integrity is all we’ve got!”
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