To the cautious men of the Oversee—who were backing this scouting patrol—the whole expedition seemed ill-advised. Wary Oversee agents, preceding Scogil to Splendid Wisdom, had formed—even joined—cells in the Hyperlord’s organization in an attempt to penetrate it and test its weaknesses. They were already well entrenched, performing their assigned duties, but so far had learned nothing other than that this weird organization of discontent was being run professionally.
While Scogil thought his sober thoughts, Kikaju’s nubile playmate had been foraging in hidden spaces. In triumph she brought out her loot, one of Jama’s wigs, on her upraised arm, its fine hair black and youthful with a red ribboned pigtail. The brat’s other arm swooped mischievously to snatch up a second wig, the white one on his head. Revealed to all was a pate of crew-cut stubble which clashed with his dandy lace accoutrements. “You look terrible in white,” she teased. Onto his head she dropped his black wig, slightly askew. “If you’re going to be my escort to the dithyramb you need a wilder, more youthful look!”
“I never promised you anything of the kind! I promised I’d escort you to something reasonably sedate like that affair to be put on by my passacaglia friends, which is also scheduled for the eighth watch.”
“You promised!” She turned and eyed Scogil while she asked Jama (out of the side of her mouth), “Does your friend dance? Bring him along! Maybe if two of you old men spelled each other at the dithyramb both of you would survive my attentions?”
Kikaju coughed. “I doubt he could manage anything more elaborate than a chaconne. He’s from the provinces.”
“He’s from Space?” Her voice noticeably brightened and she took a new interest in Scogil.
“He’s married and just had his first child to whom he is anxious to return.”
The budding nymph straightened the black wig and kissed Kikaju on his rouged cheek. “Since when did anyone being married ever bother your appetites!”
“It should bother yours!”
“Oh, now really! Is that because you are unmarried and vociferously available to teach young virgins?” she teased. “Well, I’m not going to grow up to be a prude like my mother and stick to stuffy old bachelors. I like married men. I’ve been a woman for a whole year and have been preparing myself by learning every aspect of the trade ever since I was six. I think it is truly old-fashioned to atomize men just because they stray a little when they are off on a very long trip.” Henceforth she ignored the handsome Hiranimus without forgetting him. Adroitly she kept out of the reach of Kikaju’s grope, except when she deliberately let him fondle her.
Scogil watched the exchange, aghast. On such lecherous men an uprising depended! This barely mature child should be slapping his face and stalking off in indignation—but she loved him. It seemed that everyone loved Hyperlord Kikaju Jama. Impossible! But there it was.
The Hyperlord took time out to examine his new look in his magic mirror which gave him a full wraparound view of himself at a sedately slow pace. He didn’t even have to pirouette. He did have to adjust his wig. Then he excused himself for a moment, ostensibly to check out the protocol for distribution of the Eggs, but Scogil suspected that was a ruse to cover his selection of a perfume.
Fortunately, at this stage of the Oversee’s risky game, events had not yet reached a critical divide. The Hyperlord could fail them and it would be a setback—but it wouldn’t be lethal. The present shipment of astrological aids was harmless—nothing was contained in them that would inspire more than contempt in an industrious psychohistorian who was foolish enough to master their arcane workings. This batch of Eggs merely did astrology in ever more complicated layers through to a (fifth) “Prophet” level, which, though detailed enough to serve as a foundation for a galactic social model, by itself generated only convoluted astrological gibberish. It did not even contain the suspiciously advanced mathematics of the Monk level. A blaster without charge...
Scogil’s fully tested implementation of the (sixth) “Monk” level, to say nothing of the advanced seventh level, was long past due. It would come—hopefully by the time that user organizations, here and elsewhere, had matured enough to be able to profit from the procedures of such a seventh level in which the full methods of psychohistorical prediction had been embedded.
When the Hyperlord returned to the room he was magnificently composed; one might imagine him to be a Hyperlord of old, commanding billions while servant-lords carried out his orders with swift efficiency. In synchronous sympathy, the eyes of Kikaju’s dolls turned to stare at Scogil, and the Hyperlord’s eyelight turned to illuminate the outworlder. “Everything seems to be in order.” His tone said that it was not “I am pleased with our progress”—but a Hyperlord’s frown erased his pleasure—“except for one item. You did promise me that I would have access to the Martyr’s Cache. You chide me for my lack of patience, and I do appreciate what you have sent me already—but it is not enough. You are behind schedule.”
Scogil was annoyed to find that he actually felt like a servant in need of groveling to get back into the good graces of his master. Did Splendid Wisdom do this to everyone? “It is not easy to decipher the Founder’s lifework and to put it in communicable form,” Scogil countered lamely. That was only half of the problem. Bringing consistency and order to the system of fake mathematics behind which the Oversee would be hiding when they moved into the open was turning out to be every bit as hard as the real mathematics! Jama wasn’t yet soldier enough to uphold such an unfinished shield in battle. And maybe never would be. Strategy demanded that Scogil admit no such thing.
“You are stalling.” Kikaju was adamant.
“Should we be discussing... ?” Scogil gestured pointedly at the girl whose back was to them while her fingers, now bored, traced the pattern of an antique comer shelf.
“She is the daughter of my security chief,” said the Hyperlord icily. “She is better trained than you are. I believe in teaching her everything.” Meaning that Scogil was an out-world barbarian unable to appreciate either the niceties of convoluted security or the joys of kinky sex with minors.
Scogil gave up. He had no choice but to work with the Hyperlord, but more and more he felt the resolve to strengthen all parallel organizations, especially those well distanced from this stellar cauldron which served its Pscholar priests as the Command Center of Civilization—and harbored such men as Kikaju! Splendid Wisdom was an ideal place from which to attack the hegemony of the Pscholars, their heart, their soul, but it was not the only battlefield where a victory would lead to the final triumph. There was much more to the Project than the mere redesign of the Egg as an infective vector.
He sighed. He was years behind schedule and his current galactic gallivanting was a forced attempt to catch up, to nourish, by personal attention, the multiple loci that prudence had seeded. One strong locus was vulnerable to massive retaliation. Many weak loci were more robust. But such gallivanting was leading to an extension of delays already intolerable. Nothing was as advanced as it should be.
He chose retreat. “I shall do my best to accommodate you.” While he bowed he was thinking Damn muddled fool thinks he can tell the difference between mathematics and astrology! Contritely he promised to meet tomorrow with the Hyperlord’s best mathematicians. Best diddlers? The mathematicians of Splendid Wisdom (outside of psychohistory) were an underfed lot! He could at least sketch out for these diddlers how the specialized astrological math yet to be embedded in the Monk level was being deliberately designed for use as objects in a for-real seventh-level prognosticator. Gladly he backed into the apartment’s small levitator.
Up in the corridor his original optimism was gone. He had been feeling the pressure and the lack of sleep for months. He had even persuaded Nemia to give his fam a few boosts. That had helped—but not much. The reluctance of the Oversee to commit vastly more of their Fortress resources to the Project was as great as ever. Resources or no, a whole network of users had to be in place and fine-tuned at a pace he was not goin
g to be able to keep. The growth in things to do seemed out of control. True, with each iteration he had further optimized the probabilities of success on a galactic scale—but the dice which actually made the calls had yet to be rolled.
The good came with the bad. He did seem to have a commitment from a reluctant Oversee because he was getting superb support from them if not nearly enough of it—coordinating this covert trip to Splendid Wisdom being an example. That was a pleasant surprise. At least he hoped it was support. Maybe the Oversee’s normal caution had been overbalanced by the riches he was slowly feeding them from his application of the methods of the Martyr’s Cache. After millennia of hiding, the leaders of the Oversee were smelling blood.
He had become a slave to his own perfectionism.
Finally—he emerged out into the Concourse of the Balas-ante, thinking he was free, at least until tomorrow, but he had been tailed silently and she sneaked up behind him, only letting him know she was there by taking his hand. It was the hand of a coquettish lover which prompted him to look, to his shock, down into wide sensual eyes. He was alarmed, supposing that she was about to proposition him—a dithyramb or something worse—but no; she was just going his way and wanted company. She asked about his baby.
“Her name is Petunia. She was about as long as my foot when I left her back on Timdo. I hope she’s not two feet long and on her own feet before I get home.”
“I hope for her sake that you had your gengineers delete the genes for your nose!”
He grinned. “Nothing as drastic as that! I’m a fundamentalist conservative when it comes to the creative science of tinkering with evolution. We just did some minor diddling with her neurotransmitters to allow her to link to a new high-performance fam when she is three.” That had only meant giving her five untried genes, each tested in sim by the Oversee, each meeting galactic standard specs so that as an adult she would be able to mate with any galactic standard hominid. There was no hurry. It was going to take thousands of years to optimize the human-fam interface.
“Have you run her horoscope?”
“Would I learn anything?”
“You’re the expert!”
“That’s why I didn't chart her horoscope.”
“How are you going to get psychohistory out of astrology, that’s what I want to know!”
It made him uneasy that this child knew so much, but after all that was the point of the game, sharing knowledge. “It isn’t easy,” he evaded.
“That’s why my mother rolls her eyes all the time. She thinks you’re all crazy. But how will you do it?”
“It’s a trick. It’s my way of getting lazy people to do math. First an apprentice astrologer (Aspirant level) has to draw lines and make curves and measure distances and do some baby geometry if he doesn’t want his clients to suspect him of fraud. Then he has to go out and measure things in the sky and translate those marking on his instruments into numbers. He has to sort things into different houses and relate them. Maybe even use his fam!” They stopped. It was the junction of corridors where they had to make a decision: to walk or to take a pod, perhaps to part. “I’ll take you home,” he offered gallantly.
She frowned. He waited, not knowing where she lived. “We walk!” she announced firmly. “That will give you time enough for a longer explanation. Continue.”
“By then,” Scogil continued, “our naive apprentice astrologer has put in too much effort to abandon his quest but realizes that his underused brain is pretty exhausted by his warm-up and he still hasn’t got the machinery to make a prediction. All he has learned is some uselessly abstract math. Time to retreat for a breather—some tea and a quick refresher course in mumbo-jumbo to cover for his ignorance.” “You’re a cynic!” she marveled. “My mother was right!”
“Splendid Wisdom brings out the cynic in me, I’m afraid. It doesn’t show on Timdo. But don’t think I don’t believe in what I’m doing. I’ve already laid my trap. At this point my apprentice astrologer has clients. And king-client is impatiently eyeing his head. If said astrologer values all that is above his eyebrows, he has to start flying by the flapping of his ears and get on with telling the king what the king wants to hear. That’s the hard part—pretending to knowledge one doesn’t have. That doesn’t satisfy the better Aspirants—they hurry on to the next level; they already know they have much more to learn. The dilettantes inevitable stop at first level, content with the mumbo-jumbo—and that’s all right. They’ll be there, en masse, for the psychohistorians to see and dismiss.”
“I’m Mentor level,” Otaria announced proudly.
“Really? So you’ve noticed how the Egg tempts the more ambitious to go on?”
“No such thing! I go on because my mother thinks it’s crazy.”
“She’s right. It is certainly a lot crazier now than when there were only twelve signs in the zodiac.”
“Twelve! A retarded monkey can count to twelve!”
“That figures; the early astrologers were retarded Rithians. When the Greeks set up the rules for astrology they were so clueless about astronomy that several thousand years later when the precession of Rith’s equinoxes had moved everybody’s sign into the next zodiac, not a single astrologer even noticed. By preinterstellar times they were plotting their horoscopes on birthdays that were months out of whack. The poor enthusiast who ran his life as an intellectual Aquarian was really an impulsive Capricomian. Youth is simple! Now there are billions of zodiac signs that have to be mastered!”
“I haven’t learned how to count that high yet.”
“But you have learned category theory.”
“Of course.”
“You see? I’ve arranged that while an astrologer is moving from Aspirant to Mentor, he has to learn his category theory to make sense out of it. He has to find relationships between the things in the multitudinous houses and the lines and the numbers. And it all changes with time! And though, as a Mentor with a Mentor’s training, you are better at bluffing than you were as an Aspirant, you still don’t command the machinery to make a prediction!”
“I noticed. Very frustrating.”
“You see? Luminant level beckons. More hordes give up and stay at the second level. You look bright enough to persevere. How is your category theory?”
“Still shaky.”
“The Egg doesn’t tell you that, in learning categories, you are mastering a tool that has critical uses at the seventh level when combined with..
“Should I give up?” The wonders of the Balisante were trying to distract them from their conversation.
“Of course not! The billion signs of the zodiac don’t matter a damn, but the category theory does. Imagine yourself in the same shoes as a little kid who wants to write a novel. The little kid is sprawled on the floor, sweating blood over the first three sentences, getting them just right and even fitting them onto the edge of the page.”
“I did that!” exclaimed Otaria. “It was a novel about the world at the bottom of the creaky stairs hidden at the back of the closet behind mom’s unused clothes.”
“Did you finish it?”
“No. I was too scared.”
“Of course not. By the third sentence the brain of our young novelist is wozzled, so he starts to scribble. He scribbles a nice neat imitation of script for page after page, getting happier all the time as his output accelerates. When he’s finished he proudly presents the five pages to his mama. ‘Mama, look! I wrote a novel!’ His mama, who wants to believe in his ability, can’t resist his smile and his sheer confidence. ‘Wonderful!’ she says, and puts his novel into her inlaid Osarian treasure chest. If that’s as far as it goes, fine, but if mama is serious and wants to transmogrify her child from a scribbling kid into a real novelist, she has a lot of guidance work ahead of her. You asked how I was going to squeeze a psychohistorian out of an astrologer. Well, that’s my answer. Whoever wants to transmogrify an astrologer into a psychohistorian must know how to set up astrology as a series of more and more difficult levels
of math with greater and greater prestige attached to the levels-not-yet-mastered as well as arranging a comfortable living as a charlatan for those who don’t make it.”
“Stay away from my mama—she’d kill you for your sins of hypocrisy and deceit!”
“Yes, I’ve seen her collection of ears. Very sobering! But is it really a sin to offer a little candy to a child in exchange for some racy reading lessons describing the exploits of the old emperors—while sneaking in a little orbital geometry?”
“Do you have to know history to become a psychohistorian?”
“Naw,” said Scogil. “Maybe a little.” They were passing a sensorium whose fluid come-on ad was touting adventures in a history that had never been.
“I study history. I’ve heard that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”
“You’re too young to know how ancient that aphorism is. If it’s true, we’re doomed. There’s too much history to know”
Otaria withdrew her hand from Scogil’s indignantly. “I can’t believe I heard you say that!” She stopped, hands on hips, staring him down, daring him to escape her wrathful enfilade, but there was no retreating except to step back into the hologram.
He glanced uneasily over his shoulder, deciding to make a stand rather than escape into a mythical past of no substance. “Suppose I was designing a sensorium,” he pleaded to the slowly advancing Valkyrie. “Would I have to own the plans of every sensorium ever built? No. I’d need to know a little materials science, some physics, and own a set of power tools. Actors don’t build theaters. Historians don’t make history.”
She took his hand again, forgivingly. “But don’t you like history just a little bit? I love it. It’s so full of adventure. Men saving the Galaxy and things like that.”
“Sometimes I indulge in history to drown my sorrows— but only when I’m crazy and despairing for humanity.”
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