Eron stood back. He hadn’t known how afraid he was of the Admiral until now. He hadn’t dared show him his little psychohistorical model of Rith’s past for fear it was all a
fantastic misapplication of the Founder’s tools. It wasn’t, and the confirmation of that in this most ancient of places gave him a surge of confidence. He had something with which he could argue down any of Konn’s objections. He was beginning to like history because it gave him such insight into the future.
37
DEATH HAS MANY DISGUISES, 14,810 GE
Beware if you try to stay neutral in a dispute when both sides need you as an ally—for you can be sure that two nets have been cast out and two stake pits dug to ensure your cooperation.
—Emperor Ojaisun-the-Adroit, 3231-3245 GE
When the Personal Capsule began to erase itself, Rigone the Scav activated his own office disintegrator with a code-gesture; its petals opened, and to make doubly sure there would be no trace of communication he dumped the smoldering ashes into the opal turbulence. Spacedamn! His past was catching up with him. He glanced at his den of quantronic tools. Emergency! He stuffed surgical clothing in his bag. After passing through his forcecurtain, he reset the curtain to block a running man, then opened the vault door. Its teeth were still closing behind him with a hiss while he bounded down the stairs into the Bistro.
"I'll be back," he said to his bartender.
The tables of the Teaser’s Bistro were half full. These students were too young to have known Eron Osa, but they had been talking about his execution—the execution of the fam Rigone had meddled with. Space help me if that item ever enters police files! Perhaps it already had. He cursed the hour he met Hahukum Konn. He cursed the hunch that had guided him to the Helmar Rift. I was forced to do it! Not really. From the Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift he had brought back equipment he knew he could not have resisted. Because of it he had been at the top of his quasi-legal racket for twenty years, rich even. Where on Splendid Wisdom was his competition? But such dark possessions encouraged a man into borderline operations that give him a police record. Would even Second Rank Konn be able to protect him now? The man from the Thousand Suns had come back to haunt him.
Down the entrance stairs he raced, almost sliding down the carved snakes, up the alley to the Olibanum’s Deep Shaft. And then he stopped. He had to take a pod; at that distance there was no other way. But he had never been sure that the police didn’t keep a record of every pod journey. It wasn’t likely, but he decided to use a false identity anyway. Petty crime didn’t matter beside treason against these Emperors in Pscholars’ Clothing.
The pod took him to a mixed neighborhood of clerks and retirees, with a significant population of transients. He hesitated outside the robohotel. By the bells of every holy place in the Galaxy, why wasn’t he turning this man over to the police? Informers did well. The answer was simple; to cover up one’s minor crimes one committed major crimes! He had modified Osa’s fam and didn’t want the police to know! Why wasn’t he just ignoring the whole matter? The police wouldn’t, that’s why! He was scared. Inside the hotel the robostaff ignored him just as Murek Kapor had promised, if Murek was that shadow man’s real name. This was a prepared safe house, so he claimed, and knowing the tech of the Thousand Suns, Rigone had no doubt of the truth of those words. As ordered, he put on his surgical gloves and mask.
The door didn’t open—wasn’t expecting him. No obvious comm. The robowalls were there to do that, and they had been programmed not to see him. He knocked. No answer. Frustrated, he tried the door. It opened, unlocked. Inside there was a corpse on the bed on top of the covers. He looked into the dead eyes. But the chest still breathed. There was blood in the hair. “You all right?” Silly question.
The corpse’s lips moved. “Rigone? Can’t see. Can hear. The body... coma... you’re talking to a fam...hard to control body... brought it here unconscious... take fam... get out.”
“That will kill you. Your fam is all that’s keeping you alive!”
“Body already brain-dead... checked.”
“What happened?”
The corpse was almost angry at the delay. “Didn’t predict this... take fam... get out!” The body shuddered, a gasp in its breathing. “... accident... running from police.. .jumped out of pod...police at other end...only chance...got whacked... bad mistake... take fam...Eron will come... you liked him...hurry...body on last legs...take fam... destroy body... hurry...”
The room came equipped with a Personal Capsule terminal. How had a man in a coma managed to use it? Zenoli training? There was no easy way to destroy the body. He wasn’t going to do that. That was too much like a murder rap. And taking the fam was too much like stealing evidence from the scene of a crime, but he did it, turning Murek slightly off his shoulders. He didn’t have the heart to kill the body nor the means to dispose of it. He left it breathing, comatose.
When he arrived back at the Teaser’s, his bag and mask and gloves had already been disintegrated at a convenient dispozoria, and he was his usual jovial self on the outside, but he retreated to his upstairs apartment, barricading himself. He was glad to be living alone, between women with nothing to explain. Women were always too curious. Then he spent time cleaning the blood off the fam, so thoroughly that even a police scan would find nothing. He had half of a man’s soul for his shelf, a poor ghoul trapped in a place without sight or sound or smell, nor voice, nor arms, nor legs. He set it behind his virgin fams and various fam parts.
The worst wasn’t over. A mindless Eron Osa was going to turn up to claim the ghoul. Maybe. And how would it be of any use to him? No man could use another man’s fam—each uncrackably coded by its own unique experience with life.
You don’t put on a fam—you grow up with it. Might as well try to read the memories out of a man’s wetware. Kapor was dead. He wondered what had been in the boy’s fam that had made it so dangerous to others as well as himself. What was in the modification he had installed in that aseptic room on Neuhadra? He would never know.
He smiled. Rector Hanis, out of rage or fear, had destroyed the evidence. Thank Space for the small cushions provided by a major disaster.
The Scav had regrets. He had liked the boy, liked his drive. When he had goaded Hahukum Konn into taking on the boy as an apprentice—feeling good that he had influence with a Second Rank—he hadn’t been doing the kid’s career a favor. He remembered the mature Eron. After putting down roots at the Lyceum and finding his way around, Eron had been a lively fixture at the Teaser’s. Hadn’t seen much of him since the boy had gone to work for Hanis, hadn’t thought of him. Now fear was doing funny things to his head. Rigone thought about selling the Bistro and retiring— if he lived that long. What in the name of Splendid Wisdom was going on?
38
DINNER WITH HAHUKUM KONN, 14,798 GE
Classical Logic, the consistent kind, has a fatal flaw. No matter how you arrange the consistency of your axioms, you come up with a logic that is only a subset of the class of all logical systems. Yetthe very act of embracing consistency has sealed off the gateways to any of those larger systems; you have trapped yourself inside a walled fortress with no exit. There are always, always fascinating truths that lie outside those walls. A consistent logician makes a good bureaucrat but a terrible explorer. Heretical inconsistency is the only way through the walls. But being inconsistent contracts you to a devil for a guide. He may lead you to exterior treasures, but it is more probable that he will lead you to falsehood, madness, and death. That is life. From inside a Fortress of Consistency you must seek a way out. But once outside a Fortress of Consistency you must seek your way back in.
—Second Rank Psychohistorian Hahukum Konn after drinking wine
On his return through the Pyramid’s maze, Eron’s interest in ancient measuring instruments inspired him to dally at a shop which carried primitive artifacts in its come-on display. There was the usual landfill bric-a-brac: ceramic insulators, fishbowl castles, handled cup
s, even a manual ceramic dispozoria—but what caught Eron’s attention were the calculators. The rotund salesman was magnanimously happy to see him, to the point of bowing his head lower than he had to, the tassels in his braids flapping expectantly. He had all kinds of strange numeric devices piled in dusty corners: brass dials in mahogany for multiplying; pocket (nonworking) supercomputers in hardened silicon; a replica of an automatic weaving device; miniature Babbage engines which, according to their engraved inscriptions, had once been given out as souvenirs at the ten thousandth anniversary of the invention of computing; a rack of abaci; an encrusted (fake) cash register, all at atrocious prices.
Eron was tempted by the Greek diagrammismos, an early base-2 device that helped simian man divide and multiply by 2, 4, 8,16, 32, et cetera, an important calculation in a fledgling merchant culture that cannot easily do roots. He played with a Mesopotamian abacus that could convert between decimal and hexadecimal computation, but what Eron came away with was a slide rule and its template because Rossum’s #26 had meticulously placed the construction date of their fossil aerobattleship as prior in time to even the crudest kind of electronic calculation. That slide rule was going to be useful.
During the day Eron was always working with Konn’s engineers. Their task was full of puzzles. They had been able to construct a virtual model of the Fortress that would fly in a virtual universe—but only if they equipped it with devices not yet known in the mechanical crankshaft age. Konn had made Eron’s job clear—authenticity or be nailed to a religious icon upside down. But whenever Eron goaded the engineers to test a model that was programmed only with technology known to be known to the ancients, it always crashed into its virtual landscape of checkered farmland with red bams and windmills and quaint villages or into the virtual skyscrapers. One of Konn’s engineers had a wry theory that advanced beings from outer space had been aiding Washington State in its war with Goering. Sapiens were too primitive to...
Back at the hangar, Eron put the slide rule into good slipping condition and used his nanocalib to check the markings. It was a precision instrument. It would give at least three-decimal-place accuracy to a careful hand. He spent the evening using it to do physics problems, then made up a six-tyne of them at the office manufacturum and gave them out to the incredulous engineers in the morning. He was the junior member of the team but a Faraway education in physics still carried clout, and when he insisted they they redo all of their calculations on the slide rule they argued politely rather than dismissing him.
As their final ploy, the three senior engineers returned to their mnemonifier to bring out a set of critical specs that couldn’t be computed on a slide rule. Eron just smiled. “Ah, that must be your problem.” He suggested that the Seattle City-State authorities couldn't have designed their war machines around specs that required more accuracy than a slide rule provided. “They didn’t have a technically sophisticated society. Their soldiers did have powered wheels and a few other useful inventions but, aside from a handful of elite aerial phaetons and some coal-stoked treaded vehicles for support, had to fight on the ground bare-chested without even a computerized bayonet. They didn’t have any computers. They had Look-Up Tables.”
“War was impossible before computers! Rithians were pastoral animals!”
“Gardak, you’re an engineer, not a historian. The original infantrymen didn’t even have wheels when they conducted war—coal stoked or otherwise. War predates the chariot. They walked. Their swords weren’t powered!”
“You must be wrong. During the Goering War the Amerindians used the Fortress to deliver atomic explosives. They had a computer at their atomic labs. The Feynman Scriptos as much as says so.”
Eron smiled. “I looked into that Old Englic is not a well-understood language. They wrote prolifically but on media that wasn’t rated to last. The passages you are referring to just might be construed to suggest a crude computer—but was more probably a network of slaved women tied to mechanical gear multipliers passing notes to each other at the orders of a supervising paternalist manning the rostrum and an assistant who chanted out timing signals. It is well known that the Americs were slave owners. We even have a picture of one of their master-priests in a kind of visor cap. Blast weapons are very low tech.”
“It is just not possible for them to have built that Fortress without a computer functioning error-free to at least ten places!”
“You think so? Gardak, that’s true only if your intention is to re-create that fossil aerocar in an improved version.”
“I’m a professional. I improve every immature idea.” “That’s an approach,” Eron agreed. “I’ve seen your airflow design for the wing surface to minimize drag. Clever little powered grooves. You’ve embedded more computational oomph in one wing panel than their Eytortionists used to collect taxes to support the war. You’re aiming for a replica that flies by itself while the crew drinks tea. You’re trying to make the skin immune to the impact of inertial weaponry. You’re trying to build in the ability to fight from a distance, out of danger, and—just in case the automatic pilot can’t stay out of danger—you’ve added target-seeking spitters.” He scowled. “They used hand-operated manual spitters.” “But Konn won’t authorize sentient beam weapons! And you can’t hand-man a spitter that’s tossing lead into a thirty-five meters per jiff wind at a moving target!”
Eron shrugged. “And how about that little unobtrusive package of just-in-case atomics?”
“It’s just there for an emergency or when Konn gets tired of pussying along and wants to go supersonic. He doesn’t have to use it.”
“He doesn’t want it!”
“But that lumbering battlewagon runs on hydrocarbons. The engines could die. It’s heavy. It would drop like a stone.” “So? The original ones crashed! They were blown out of the sky. The Seattlites lost hundreds of heroes every time they sent those contraptions of aluminum and rivets out on a bombing mission!”
“But it’s not a hero who is going to fly it. That idiot Konn is going to be flying it. It has to be safe,” whimpered the engineer.
Another of the more sanguine engineers piped up to counter the wail of his colleague. “That old windbag Hahukum is expendable. Forget him. It is you and I who have to test fly the damn thing before the Admiral gets in it.” Eron wouldn’t relent. The slide rule was in. That was an order. In protest the engineers sent a delegation to Konn.
Presently Hahukum Konn came back out of his giant mushroom with the delegation following meekly. He wore a dress uniform of blue and braid and the Latin symbols USAAF, which meant something like SPQR, which Eron recognized from reading Virgil. Then Konn mounted an impromptu podium—a mobile staired runabout used in the hangar—silently making sure that all of his engineers and workmen were watching before he spoke in tones that the Emperor of the Galaxy might have used.
He ordered them to carry out Physicist Eron Osa’s instructions to the letter. He might even have been grinning.
And then he relaxed, inspected progress on the fuselage in the distant manner of an Admiral in control, and finally cornered Eron privately. “You’ve been here a long time and we haven’t had our discussion yet. Come over for supper tonight.” An abstract look came over his face as he consulted his fam, then he smiled again and mentioned the time. “When you come, do not ignore my dog. He’s my inspector-general and will not let you in until you have passed security. Make sure that you have washed all enemy smells off your hands.” Eron was alert and neatly dressed and washed at suppertime. Rhaver was asleep on the entrance step but jerked up his nose. “SupperGuestOnTime,” he announced, slowly getting to his feet. Dutifully he sniffed Eron, his crotch as well as his hands, and then reached up with entwining fingers and opened the door. “SlipMeBone. GetChance. MasterSome-timesNotAttentive.”
The table was already set with elaborate Rithian linen mats, a wine jug of cut glass, and long candles. The abundant utensil types were of lucent ceramic. Konn was already seated, did not rise, but expected Eron to se
at himself.
“HeTookBath,” commented Rhaver, curling up at a strategic place underneath the table.
“Wine?” offered Konn. Then he turned his head and spoke to no one. “Magda, he’s here.”
Magda immediately arrived from the kitchen with soup and rolls. She was a very pretty girl with a sapiens hauteur. “You’re in for a treat,” said Konn. “Her particular Rithian eccentricity is her refusal to use a cuisinator
“You don’t always get your meals on time, though,” said the girl.
“Only Rhaver minds.”
“UsedToIt. NoSoupCourseForRhaver,” came from underneath the table.
“Magda, meet my finest student. At least that’s what he promised me in his overflowery self-praising resume. Eron Osa, I think the name is, if I’m remembering correctly.”
She curtsied, which seemed to be a Rithian custom— when politeness was intended. ‘Taste the soup! Is it good? I do sex very well, too, if you indulge. Moderate prices. Rithians have had time to perfect the sexual arts.” She brushed his hair back. “You don’t want to get hair in your soup,” she proclaimed.
"TellHerSoupIsGood. Uncouth Visitor." Rhaver was watching his guest’s manners.
Magda directed her attention under the table. “Enough out of you, or you don’t get your bone!”
At the magic dog-word, Konn perked up. “No bone for Rhaver. He’s too fat.”
Rhaver whimpered.
“The soup is very good,” exclaimed Eron. “I’ve never tasted the like.”
“It’s leek,” she said, and disappeared back into her kitchen.
Konn watched her with sad eyes. “Poor girl,” he said, “I found her sleeping in the street. She couldn’t pay her insurance premiums and her family kicked her out. She has some grave genetic disorders, nothing drugs can’t handle now, but
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