Hiranimus Scogil retreated from the high porch into the draped residency. Nemia was asleep and he was careful not to disturb her. He could not sleep himself. His mind was agitated with the temptation to revise the Smythosian plan for Coron’s Wisp. Would he dare? The stakes were terrifying. The odds were bad. He itched to meddle but wasn’t yet sure of his vision or of his authority—the memory of his failures at the Fortress could still shake his confidence. He had been brought in by the Oversee to nurture the plan, not warp it to new purpose. Nemia would oppose any recklessness. The seed growing here at Coron’s Wisp was her Grandfa’s major bit of psychohistorical engineering. To succeed he would have to convince his wife that Grandfa hadn’t seen far enough. A daunting task. Convince her he must; she had the hardware design skills he lacked. He thrilled at the idea of being forward bite-man for the Oversee.
But other voices were advising him differently. Forget such insanity! Where was his Murek Kapor persona now that he needed it! Just relax and lead a normal life! This frantic susurrus of caution filled his mind with continuously iterating equations—checking, checking, looking for the lethal flaw that he had probably overlooked. Bravado wasn’t enough. He had to concede that. If a complete review confirmed that old l’Amontag’s plan was best, then he would have to be content to be a servant and see it through.
Yet there was all this new stuff from the Martyr’s Cache daring him.
The strategy for Coron’s Wisp had been in place now for generations, predating even Grandfa, who had not been its originator, merely its master tactician. It had its own inertia—plans are that way—and Scogil was only the latest rider still exploring the itinerary. His recent research showed him that all had been unfolding flawlessly. His replay of the mathematics had uncovered no error in the reasoning. It was Grandfa 1’Amontag’s masterwork to have mixed into the basic strategy these inward-looking monks whom he had transformed from fatalists into advocates of a transcendental journey for all of mankind. He had picked and chosen between their contradictions, until he had a philosophy that fit the parameters of his equations. He had taken the rough-cut jewel of the original Oversee strategy and worked it into an elegant set of equations that any second-rate psychohistorian could follow.
Why hadn’t the Pscholars noticed? Having been part of an adventure that had been detected, Scogil was paying very special attention to this aspect. He saw no flaws in the camouflage that this sprouting revolution needed. His admiration for Nemia’s grandfather was growing.
As a youthful wanderer, Grandfa had stumbled upon the perfect disguise. It was built into the Pscholar’s gestalt that a doctrine like astrology was so divorced from truth, so unable to predict anything, that it could never compete on a living stage with a force as powerful as psychohistorical vision. The Pscholars had no place for astrology in their galactic model for the same reason that a physicist’s equations ignored the feeble pull of a distant star on one man’s life.
The lion’s leavings are the hyena’s feast. Whatever the Pscholars ignored, the Smythosians chewed on mathematically for some usable morsel, perhaps a bone with which to club the lion, perhaps a carelessly discarded match and a stand of dead wood.
Old l’Amontag had been gifted with a cunning superbly adapted to the kind of social engineering at which the Smythosians excelled in their niche—harvesting the picayune and harmless discards of the Second Empire. Astrology might have remained a decaying copse in a sunless galactic wilderness had the Pscholars themselves not provided 1’ Amontag with the perfect tinder.
Tell a man that he is not good enough to determine his own destiny, tell him skillfully enough that the mathematics of the future is not for him, keep him ignorant and, well... perhaps he will believe you, even accept a hood and a leading hand, become dependent upon your paternalism, but... don’t be surprised if, under the hood, his ignorant soul begins to listen to a traitor whispering astrology’s seductive message:
What if the stars do control the future? What if charts that elucidate the relationships between stars and man are within the ability of a common citizen to master? What if the mathematics of the future is far simpler than the power elite claim it to be in their own self-interest?
What happens when astrology’s sages promise that a man can do even better than psychohistory’s reading of society, that he can read from the stars his own personal destiny? And what happens when his neighbors confirm the rumors with apocryphal tales of the miraculous insights pouring from heaven into their now-enlightened minds? How tempting it might be to throw off the leash and the hood and die paternalism! His ignorance will have neither the words nor the insight to caution him down a more rational path.
It looked good, l’Amontag’s scheme. Timdo was set to proselytize the Galaxy and cause an enormous brouhaha for the Fellowship. If the buildup wasn’t noticed over the next few years, an aggressive new strain of astrology would leap through the stars like wildfire through a lion’s dry savanna. The Pscholars wouldn’t have the reaction time to stop it. That seemed certain to Scogil—the equations confirmed it, no matter what perturbations were introduced. Wildfire.
But...then what? The weakness of the piecemeal Smythosian methods was their short range—the accumulation of too many half-known exterior interventions. In this case the outcome became unacceptably unpredictable beyond a century. Nemia’s grandfather had been guessing— guessing was the right word—that an astrological flash fire would so upset the elite status of the Pscholars that a new equilibrium would be reached.
Scogil was less sure now that events would happen that way. He had been playing with instruments from the Martyr’s Cache that 1’Amontag had never seen—incredible tools which continued to surprise and amaze him. Flash fires can bum out. New grass can grow on the blackened hills and all is as it was. He had nothing solid enough to confide to Ne-mia—half-worked-out omens, not proofs. Still awkward in his use of the new tools, whole chapters remained gibberish to him, but some of the understandable methods gave results so powerful that he couldn’t resist employing them again and again in place of tried-and-true Smythosian standbys, each time learning a new twist or trick. The Founder had been an absolute genius at long-term projections. His isostatic sniffers, alone, cut through mountains of routine computing when one was trying to track stable social forces through time—imagine, a three-line test for local Tulbadian stability! Scogil was still reeling!
So far he hadn’t got beyond a fast scouting expedition into the unknown—but his quicky long-term look at the Wisp’s influence on the Galaxy beyond this century was disturbing.
He lay on the bed, wide awake.
He wasn’t even sure if his setup of the problem was mathematically sound. That was bad. Too many parameters had to be adjusted to take into account human nature as augmented by the fam—not part of the Founder’s equation set. The Martyrs had only begun to wrestle with the problem. They had, after all, lived through the time of Cloun-the-Stubbom in an age when the full impact of the fam was inconceivable! Nevertheless a clear warning was emerging; the Pscholars were essentially right about cults like astrology and would be able to contain even a virulent outbreak without having to adjust their own social status. A blind slave freed of his leash was still blind and could be driven into a ditch by a skillful herdsman. Astrology didn’t have a chance if it couldn’t actually predict the future—it could go from a phenomenal gnashing-slashing giant in league-spanning boots to a pile of fossil bones within a century!
Such a whiff of spectacular failure was enough to make wild risks much more appealing. Scogil had been toying with the germ of a very dangerous idea, putting it away, glancing at it sideways, forgetting it for watches at a time— laughing at the preposterous—but now his mind seemed to be fleshing it out without prodding. His fam was totally involved. It looked so much like one of those classic psy-chohistorical leverage points which the Founder talked about so often. A lever to lift the Galaxy, a lever sitting there, waiting to be grabbed. It frightened Hiranimus. This was how C
loun-the-Stubbom must have felt. The scheme was too audacious, too fraught with risk, and yet the broad outline was jelling just the same. What if... yes... what if the Tamontag plan could be augmented by yet another underlay of conspiracy? Too complicated? Of course it was too complicated! Forget it!
There were already six grades which a Timdo astrologer might achieve. They had been carefully designed by Ne-mia’s grandfather out of the natural material he found among the traditions of Timdo’s monks, even the rankings. He had been responsible for the last upgrade of the Egg, a major one, superficially the same as the model that had first appeared during the Interregnum, but covertly reengineered to support the needs of an expanding organization.
As always, those who achieved Aspirant, the first level, were allowed to own an Egg. There had never been barriers of scholarship or sex or age or profession. This minimum level contained all the skills necessary to proselytize astrology. It was the seed level and its responsibilities and duties had been polished to perfection centuries before the Oversee had ever heard of Coron’s Wisp.
From Aspirant it was a natural progression to Mentor. A Mentor had to be working with at least three Aspirants and was himself working with a Luminant. Here Grandfa had built in his first modifications so subtly that even the highest-level monks had not noticed. The changes went on upward through the levels of Luminant, Master, Prophet, and Monk.
The Egg was an intricate instrument, and for a rise in rank one now had to learn a whole level of additional skills. It was the Egg which held the levels together and simultaneously separated them. Each level required that the votary teach, be taught, and make readings for money or pleasure. The money worked its way up to the monks who oversaw the building of the Eggs, new monasteries, and public works not adequately supported by public taxes. Grandfa l’Amon-tag had been careful to craft in the money factor by further weakening the old ascetic traditions already fatally compromised by langsyne dealings with Faraway’s traders. Traditions fade away slowly, and Timdo’s monks still frowned on ostentation but no longer on the luxuries that a monk could actually enjoy. Power was the danger. Money was the growth hormone.
These six grades of knowledge were a recent rationalization of an ancient hierarchy, but the new structure was working marvelously well and the Timdo Monasteries were a hundred times richer than they had been a mere half century ago. Still, it was time for the Egg to be modernized. There had been no new edition for twenty years. The specific upgrade that the monks wanted were unique fingering commands specific to each of the six grades, plus special teaching prompts to go with them, all to make divisions clearer and proselytization easier—and expansion painless. Other than that, the Egg’s star-catalog needed updating, and the monks hoped that recent advances in astrological computing might be included. They liked to think of themselves as mathematicians. In a Galaxy ruled by mathematicians, lesser men used math as a body lotion to give themselves the right smell.
Scogil was already thinking well beyond the dreaming monks. He saw the feasibility of adding some famlike cognitive abilities. His favorite fantasy was a Coron’s Egg carrying a hidden seventh level, an undocumented upgrade path from monk as competent parlor-mathematician to monk as psychohistorian. He kept sketching out possible quantum architectures. There wasn’t any reason they couldn’t do it. Ne-mia was one of the Galaxy’s finest quantum-state designers, and he had with him a copy of the Martyr’s Cache.
What a way to get himself into trouble! The Timdo monks would have a fit and fire him on the spot. Scientize their holy spiritual prowess? Horrors! Nemia would have a fit if he suggested such a radical change to the direction of her grandfather’s masterpiece. And those mysterious conservatives who ran the Oversee, those cowards who had pulled out of the Ulmat, would implode! What to do? He didn’t even trust himself! He was starting to think like a seriously deranged megalomaniac. While half of him was scheming to conquer the Galaxy with a basket of smart Eggs, the other half was desperately trying to carry him off bodily to be locked up behind bars.
He turned on his side and found himself smiling at Nemia’s serene profile, lit through the stone window by Succubus and old King Nechepso. Then he set his fam to manually force his sleep. Even megalomaniacs need sleep. Tomorrow his wife had scheduled some sightseeing for a change of pace that promised to be welcome. Timdo was a pleasant planet to look at. Those crazy monks talked about the harmony of the spheres, whatever that meant, yet it probably meant something, for harmony with nature was the dominant theme of their architectonics. Nothing was exactly the same style, but where did one architect leave off and a new one begin? where did structure become landscape? Nothing was built without drawing up the proper astrological charts. Impacting the stars negatively was some sort of mortal sin. He went to sleep dreaming about Eggs that meshed astrology and psychohistory into a harmonious flow of quantum states—and woke up tired, like two enemy soldiers rising at dawn on a battlefield to continue a war neither wanted but couldn’t stop.
“Hey, it’s your watch,” he said, gently shaking her. She continued to sleep, as usual, while he made warm drinks and peeled a bowlful of weird Timdo fruits whose sweet hearts hid inside skins from hell. He sat on the bed and fed her. “Your monk-chauffeur is due already,” he chided. “In fact, he’s already late.”
Nagging got him nowhere. He waited for her on the high porch while she dressed. That always took time, wherever she was. Here it was worse. She was intent on going native and doing it with the right casual wraparound. It was no use—going native, that is—nor was it any use telling her that. As a couple they were too tall. Their skin was the wrong color, not bronze enough, and especially wrong were the bones of their eyebrows and nose. Acquiring the Timdo accent was going to be hopeless, even with fam-aids. The language was standard but of an unusual dialect that contained hundreds of emotional nuances that neither his nor Nemia’s ears had been trained to hear. They would forever be treated as exotic tourists, fair marks for a reading, or with reverence by those who recognized them as Helmarian.
Nemia’s disguise was wasted on the chauffeur—his bow was too deep, his flourish at helping her up into the tricycle too respectful. He even adjusted her seat, a gesture no monk would have bothered to make for a local, not even for his own abbot. Scogil smiled. It was going to be hard to keep a low profile on Timdo while they sported such bent noses. Sometimes the best place for a freak to hide was out in the open.
Their chauffeur and guide hadn’t minded the wait while Nemia readied herself, it was a long pedal up and around the local mountain range and valleys, but when Nemia presented her schedule of destinations he was politely indignant. He wanted to do the sacred sites. Maybe there were less hills along that route. Scogil wished only to bask in the local Weltanschauung. He was about to do a serious psychohistorical study, a complete revision of the Oversee’s plan for Coron’s Wisp—just as an exercise, mind you—and a personal touch always made the math easier. Scogil lived by sifting through lots of examples. There was no way to beat the Pscholars at their own game except by nursing those hard-to-find parameters that
were being overlooked by the huge psychohistorical model maintained on Splendid Wisdom. Nemia won the argument with their chauffeur.
The mountains of Timdo were a strange place to find swamp grass, but on the lower levels of the slopes the tiered rice paddies were everywhere, their stone sides giving the landscape a contoured map feel. Some of the tiers had been taken out of rice and given over to treed parks. Little villages went up the mountain slopes, irrigation pumping stations were graciously housed in discreet stone rotundas, bridges were arched marvels of masonry, streams carefully sculpted into pools and rapids and hanging gardens. Halfway up the hills were comfortable resting stations for the bicyclist.
So it had been for more than ten millennia. High on the slopes of distant mountains, above the tree line, were the prolific ruins of almost inaccessible Monasteries—reached only by foot—a recent afterthought of time, the earliest no more than fo
ur thousand years old, their era come and gone. The monks, who had begun to flourish only during the chaos leading up to the Interregnum, had abandoned their anchorite past during the rise of the Second Empire and now ran a thriving commercial business at a lower altitude, the indirect result of making a devil’s pact with Faraway traders who saw no profit in virtuous vows of poverty. Some of them were even motorized.
For midday snack, their sweating tricycle chauffeur suggested that his guests rest at an elegant tourist trap in a flat mountain valley beside the river, but Scogil chose instead a small fanner’s chapel that offered rice cakes and rice wine— and shade for their guide. The farmer’s wife was a licensed astrologer, the chapel showing the modest Egg&Stars logo of a Luminant over its roadside turn in. She seated them at the place of honor, notwithstanding that there were no other guests. Her chitchat was an astrologer’s subtle probing into her customer’s hearts and deepest desires.
Nemia knew the ritual from listening to her Grandfa’s tall tales. When the warm rice wine was sipped to the last drop, she closed the palms of her hands together, nodded her head, and stared at the center of the table while addressing then-hostess. ‘‘Will your precious Egg give birth to wisdom for my husband?”
The woman beamed at such uncommon suavity from far-men. She beckoned; they followed, ducking under a stone arch into a tiny domed alcove done in the dead black of space. Crawling around the base, on his multiple carved legs, was the sneering torso of Albris-the-Creator, tail in teeth. When they were seated on cushions, and their Lumi-nant had left to fetch her Egg, Hiranimus turned to Nemia, who knew all about such readings from her Grandfa. “Will she tell me what I want to hear?” he whispered.
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