Wendi growled and shook him by his ears. “Why don’t you ever tell me the truth!”
“Because you wouldn’t believe a word of it!” He laughed and made love to his wife without telling her the rest of the story. What could a psychohistorian tell anyone about the truth? What was he even allowed to say?
That old paranoiac Konn had sent Nejirt to the star systems of Coron’s Wisp to study a political perturbation—not a dangerous one, a small one, but large enough to have been picked up by the Admiral’s sieve. Within the confines of the Wisp’s five stellar systems, confidence in the galactic leadership had taken a sudden ten percent drop. On site, nothing appeared to be amiss—no economic depression, no corruption crisis, no inability of the Council to meet its goals. Nothing seemed to be driving the perturbation. After months of puzzled study, Nejirt had only been able to make a correlation with a mild epidemic of astrology. Temporal coincidence is not evidence of either cause or effect, but...
He could sleep on it yet another night. He patted his wife and turned out the crystals. He did not sleep.
Coron’s Wisp had not been the best locale from which to tackle galactic history—and a terrible locale from which to study such an esoteric subject as astrological infection patterns from pre-imperial times to the present. He had been unable to turn up any easily identifiable source of contamination. No media imports. No latent memes—though the planet’s entire sixteen-thousand-year history was spiced with references to the astrology of the first settlers, it was all innocently devoid of political context...
... barring only one much-reproduced manuscript from a monastery’s sealed library, the surviving copy on thin foils of archaic Early First Empire cellomet. Even Nejirt would not have bothered to translate (by machine) these Chinese brushings had they not contained an illustration of a vase just like the ones his wife had picked up at that Chinese souvenir factory outlet inside the Great Pyramid. But instead of a potter’s manual he had uncovered a series of algorithms for making political decisions based on the positions of the heavenly bodies in Old Rith’s ancient sky. More astrology!
It was fodder for the hordes of cults who believed in the lost wisdom of the predawn wizards but so much hokum to Nejirt Kambu the psychohistorian. He had needed another such dead-end find like a draft of hemlock. The algorithms used by the Chinese astrologers were many orders of magnitude less complicated than those used on Timdo—and, though no better in their ability to make predictions, Nejirt had to admit that the court astrologers of China had subtler ways of generating ambiguous flattery than did the dour star-watching farmers of Timdo’s mountain ranges.
For a moment Nejirt had to remind himself that he was lying on pillows beside a slumbering wife at the star-studded center of galactic sanity. Then traveler’s fatigue took him...
... to be cast in a dream of ancient prespace times when Rith was a lush paradise not yet conscious of its destiny as a desert inferno. He was a traveling temponaut from the Tien Chuen disguised in greasy woven yak wool begging a Chinese court astrologer to tell his fortune. He had gold to offer. It wasn’t enough. He ripped the seams of his shirt and brought out more Tien Chuen gold collected on their wanderings through the sky. The silk-robed astrologer grinned malevolently. It was enough. Since the astrologer’s head would not be riding on the blade of the message, he agreed to tell the truth without sleight-of-hand.
In the dead of night, atop the tower of the astrologer, Nejirt pointed out the star of his birth, a hidden nothing among the blur of the Sing Ki. “Ah,” said the astrologer, and a gong sounded and a giant bronze instrument began to move against the heavens across the horizon-shadows of a walled imperial city. Ominously the bronze shaft creaked to a halt in the direction of Tseih She, which the astrologer obligingly translated for his visitor from the stars as the Piled-Up Corpses. “That is your star.” It was nothing special, a white star, faintly blue, blazingly bright, an eclipsing variable about one hundred leagues from Rith.
“But what does it meanV his dream-self asked with the exasperation of a man who is desperate for certainty.
“It means that you are living in the time of the slayer and the slain, that the battle takes place across the stars and that the fates of empires are at stake.”
“But am I the slayer or the slain?”
“Ah,” said the malevolent astrologer, bowing under the Chinese stars, not as politely as before, “for more gold...”
Nejirt remembered the dream quite clearly because that was the exact moment that his fam gently woke him to an emergency request. He opened his eyes to the darkly tinkling crystals and took the call.
“Cal Bama. Imperialis Police.” There was no image but his fam had already verified the identification. The voice continued, “I've been informed that I have waked you from sleep after a long voyage. My apologies, sir. Our data tells us that you’ve just come in from a scout of Coron’s Wisp.” “That’s correct.”
“Your report has not yet been filed and I need an opinion. We’ve got a fast breaker here and time is of the essence.” “Ask away.”
“We’ve got a body.”
“A body?”
“A dead body. Twenty-seven watches dead. Illegally registered. We would have called you in earlier but you weren’t home. The body carried contradictory identification, deliberate deception, so we’re poking in the dark, but a lucky break on the name Scogil tells us that this man is from Coron’s Wisp.”
“That brings the odds of finding out who he is down to one in ten billion,” said Nejirt sarcastically.
“We think the case is more important than that, sir. It was your boss, Second Rank Konn, who put us onto you. He said you’d be interested.”
“All right. What else do you know about your corpse?” “Very little.”
“Have you been able to do a salvage on his fam?”
“Yeah, we would have. But his fam is missing.”
“So what have you got? He was murdered? Accident?” “No, we killed him trying to take him alive. Miscalculated his interest in survival.”
“Why were you tracking him?”
“It’s a long story, sir. It doesn’t make sense. We don’t know why we were chasing him. It’s because he is an astrologer or an—”
“And you think he’s from Coron’s Wisp?”
“We do.”
“I’ll be right there. I just hope you gentle souls aren’t stationed at my antipodes.”
They and the body were near the Lyceum from which Ne-jirt Kambu had been forged as a psychohistorian. He could never get away from that place and its hordes of students. Damn. That would mean a long hypersonic flight... at least hours of hassle; his fam was already making the arrangements. He rolled over to look at his sleeping wife. Should he wake her now—or leave a message with her fam? Before he decided, he let himself stare at the way her profile lay, eyes closed, face content because he was home.
40
AN ANCIENT FORTRESS IN THE DESERTS OF RITH, 14,798 GE
Tiring of a roost of fractious and immoral gods, certain ancient philosophers began their general reform by creating, instead, a single moralistic God in the image of a human teenager who knows everything, both seeing the whole of the future and remembering the whole of the past Inquiring heretics went further. Yet nascent science, even while rejecting the anthropomorphism of the new God with His forever youthful body and superphysical powers, clung to His abstract mind and called it the conservation of information. In the first groping millennia of the development of their atomic theory, the precocious Greek avant-garde believed that the superpositions of the quantum waves persisted forever, spreading through the dimensions in ever-complicating ripples of alternate worlds. Democritus and his student Schrodinger had abandoned the idea of infinitely divisible matter but were unwilling to go the whole way and abandon the notion of infinitely divisible space.
Grainy space, of course, can't store the infinite amount of information that a teenage God’s mind demands. Superposed quantum waves erode a
nd break and chafe against the pebbles of the media that carries them. Bit by bit, as the structure of the future becomes more and more certain, the structure of the past fades away, bit by bit. Today we are left with a more mature and slightly stooped God who is myopic when He views a future not yet created and who has already forgotten His childhood except for a little fuzzy background radiation left over from the really Big Events. As psychohistorians your profession will be to look at the future and the past—but stay humble. You’ll never be able to do better than the Myopic God with Alzheimer’s.
—From the Founder's speech to the first graduating class in psychohistory
Living by Rith’s odd days and nights and an impossible 86,400 seconds per day instead of galactically, Eron Osa was losing track of time but he knew there were roughly seventy watches per moon, and the golden desert moon had gone through all of its phases while he took the bloat out of his metric program, even starting another model to see if he could predict the broad outline of Rith’s early economic development. He spent his suppers with Konn, talking shop and sometimes quoting Latin poetry to Magda who, in her turn, taught him how to sing Somolian poetry. Before they ate Konn often indulged in a bizarre custom: he read—rather than recited—brief passages from a well-worn little book of the Founder’s Maxims. He expected a silent pause after the reading, a time for thinking.
True to Konn’s prediction, Nejirt sometimes hovered around looking for an opportunity to deliver his “Konn lecture,” but, forewarned, Eron managed to weasel out of it one way or another, often by jumping into a truck out to the local windy cliff to fly model gliders with engineers who had stumbled over their roots.
The fuselage of the Flying Fortress, often modified, was now taking its definitive shape. The engineers had rediscovered passive stability, much to their amazement. They had so many active control tools at their disposal that it was a moot point to them whether a boat had its center of gravity above or below the waterline or whether an unpowered building would buckle or whether an aerocar was passively spin-proofed.
When the basic weight balancing and dimensions of the Flying Fortress emerged from the fossil and they learned that the damn thing—minus all quantronics—would still fly even after the pilot had gone to sleep (or been killed), they began to be impressed by the raw skill of the ancient engineers, forgetting that such skill had been acquired by killing off test pilots, which was how they got the fourth decimal place that their slide rules wouldn’t give them. The final look of the plane, though basically determined by the laws of fluid dynamics, still eluded them. A “lost-wax” fossil in a mold of coral 744 centuries in the making leaves some forgotten details to the imagination.
Which was how Nejirt got his opportunity to comer Eron for a prolonged lecture. He caught him on the catwalk. “If you haven’t got anything to do, come with me tomorrow. Our tireless historian has found some pictures for us.”
“Of our Venteen Fortress? Show me.”
“Not so fast. #26 only came up with a verbal reference to the pictures, which are allegedly contained in a reference book that no longer exists.”
‘That’s no help.”
“But the pictures were taken from a mural which probably still does exist. It was above the flooding of the Great Meltdown, and the site was built to last on a geologically stable foundation.”
“Where? Let’s go!”
Nejirt only laughed. “The reference neglects to say.”
“But there are maps of Rith—millions of maps!”
“True. We can find the Mausoleum of Jim Morrison on any number of maps, but where would we find the Mausoleum of Aristotle? We have more references to old maps that no longer exist than we have maps.” When Eron slumped, Nejirt only laughed again. “We’ll find it Trust me, I was trained as a field agent and I’m very good. We know the general location—to within about ten thousand square kloms.” Eron made a doubtful face. “Besides,” Nejirt added, “the locals will know. They always know, even if the knowledge is buried in a mythology that no one understands anymore. We’ll have to go in by foot.”
Wendi insisted on coming along. She bought herself survival clothes and very expensive sole-powered hiking boots. Since they were going out among the wild sapiens, she also bought a long-nosed blaster claiming to be an expert shot. Her weapons experience, Eron discovered by gentle probing, was as a thirteen- and fourteen-year-old fighting in the
Red Army of a popular maze on Splendid Wisdom where teenagers sneaked around and zapped each other for pleasure after school,
Nejirt was more practical. He was a true psychohistorian who saw no need for weapons where wit would suffice. Most important to him was a utility backpack that manufactured basic food, clothing, and shelter out of available organic matter, basic stone tools out of rock, and simple quantronic devices for trading out of rock and a frugal supply of essential rare elements.
Eron did not share Wendi’s excitement or Nejirt’s cool. He would just as soon have jumped out into space in the buff as take a walk in a Rithian desert, but he couldn’t let Nejirt be the brave one. He was glad of the holster and lethal kick that his father had so recently gifted him. When no one was looking he reviewed his zenoli warrior training, tuning up his reflexes. Did everyone who worked with Konn go mad? Those damn wall murals had better be worth it!
An so, flying off into the dawn in #26’s comfortable interior, Nejirt began to brief them on procedures.
Eron felt hostile. “What do you mean, an untouched site? The cameramen were there to take pictures—when was that, a couple of millennia ago?—so how do we know it’s still there?”
“Well... not untouched. The grave robbers looted it of all its valuable radioactives less than a millennia after it was sealed. But it was built in a geological formation with the intention that it should endure forever, the only thing the Americs tried to build to last other than their quaint dispozoria. I’m not sure why it survived relatively intact for so long, considering the appetite of these maggot Rithians to sell their past. I suppose because it has a mythical aura of taboo. Superstition.”
“Probably because it’s not in a pleasant location, even for a Rithian grave robber,” kibitzed Rossum’s #26.
The journey was a long one, even at supersonic speeds. They spent most of their time in glorious cloud formations but did catch glimpses of the sea below. The seas of Rith were extensive even though they were shrinking as the ice reaccumulated at the poles. Over the Mars-like land one wondered where the water had gone. The planet was in desperate need of terraforming. Didn’t the Rithians have any ambition?
There were places of vegetation. #26 took a detour down one river to show them the spectacular waterfall over a dam that had been half eroded away and then down an awesome many-colored canyon, perhaps not as impressive as the canyons of Mars, but certainly the best such site that Rith had to offer.
Nejirt chose a small oasis near the ancient atomic testing range as their base of operations. It was scrubby green and didn’t look populated, but Nejirt assured them that it would be. He didn’t allow their aerocar to land anywhere near the oasis. “We walk in and ask questions. It’s got to be around here somewhere.” #26 wanted to stay with them, but Nejirt wouldn’t allow it.
Their landing had attracted attention. The dust was approaching them too fast for it to be men on foot.
“Camels!” Eron exclaimed, remembering the camel-lamp he had salvaged from the trash at Asinia.
“Camels went out with the second to last great mass extinction. Not much of the original Rithian flora and fauna left—maybe twenty-five percent. The big animals were really hard hit. Horses survived the sapiens predations but horses aren’t good for this kind of desert. Probably they are gawfs.”
Their curious visitors were gentle nomads—with their blond hair, slant eyes, and large mouths, obviously a sapiens subspecies. A little chatter in a language Nejirt seemed to recognize established that they were from a tribe of the local Lost Vegan cult, firm in the belief that it
was their ancestors who had colonized Rith from Vega and brought the bipedal gawf beasts with them—no use telling them that Vega was a blazing AO star without habitable planets and that the gawfs were a late addition to Rith’s fauna imported during the occupation of Rith by the Eta Cumingan Regionate long after the sapiens hominid had gone extinct everywhere in the Galaxy except on Rith. The sacred literature said otherwise.
Nejirt was right about the weapons. These were very friendly people who put them up with great hospitality in their little village. They were mostly interested in buying robophones, which were in short supply. Nejirt had no problem negotiating the hire of a guide and three beasts. Then-guide turned out to be a very genial teacher, smiling all the while he taught Nejirt and Eron and Wendi how to ride, laughing tolerantly at all mistakes, including his own. He insisted on bringing a boy with him, rotating apprenticeships being their form of education.
The semierect gawfs were easy to handle, imported sixty thousand years ago and now so thoroughly adapted to Rithian desert conditions that they would be unable to survive on their home planet. A gawf female treated its rider as a daughter to be protected and was generally indifferent to the small gawf mate whom she seduced and then digested in her pouch to fertilize and feed her grublike embryos, a large proportion of whom were male. She devoured a new mate for every litter. Gawfs were pampered by the Lost Vegans both for transportation and for the sake of the delicious male meat, which was a main part of their diet. On smooth ground Eron found that a gawf loped along on its hind legs; on rough ground it put down its long arms in an agile climbing gait. Gawfs didn’t like to follow the weathered cuts of the ancient roads, preferring to climb up to the highest vantage point to see where they were. They were far more independent minded than horses.
It was a desolate land, mainly supporting small alien creatures and Rith’s indomitable insects. There were few encounters. When they met brigands who hoped to strip them, their guide alerted all nearby clan groups by robophone, the phone then being released in flying mode to monitor the situation from the air. Nejirt cautioned Eron not to show his weapon. Both parties argued loudly in a strange language.
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