The ruffians, seeming to fear the robophone’s ability to follow them, made some kind of threatening apology and left. Eron, who had shifted into the mental attitude (hilled into him by zenoli training at Asinia, was glad that he didn’t have to use his blaster. On Agander his weapon was merely ceremonial. He didn’t believe in killing helpless animals, even intelligent relatives. Even thieves. But he would have done so had the ruffians persisted.
Their guides weren’t any more direct than their willful gawfs, and a sly detour around the wrong side of a ridge brought them to join a celebratory confluence of several tribes of nomads. Job or no job, they weren’t going on until they had done their share of gossiping and singing and storytelling and trading with old friends. The tents went up for an indefinite stay and that was that. They had time on their hands.
Wendi went off with the women while the guides gambled. Two little boys excitedly tried to sell their “captive” farmen a skull. It was very old and weathered. They were determined to convince Nejirt and Eron that it wasn’t a fake. It was probably freshly robbed from some local cemetery of a more populous Rithian era and might even have been a 75,000-year-old Americ, but the studs drilled into the bone and the perfect black ceramic teeth suggested an origin a thousand years later. In any event the skull was worthless. By not limiting their population, men of that era had depreciated the value of their skulls.
At midnight all activity stopped for the homage to Vega. Vega was as bright as it had ever been in this part of the Galaxy, undaunted by all the less-splendid stars. Eron and Nejirt let the maniacal fiddling of four viotones animate them in dance with the happy girls under night’s canopy. Wendi was having the time of her life, even in her clunky boots with too much spring. There was nothing else to do.
When the celebrations wore off, days later, their guides deigned to go back to work and returned from their scouting with huge smiles. By sunset the small expedition reached the entrance to the Depository, aided by its bat smell. Swarms of bats were pouring into the darkly rosy sky for their nightly feast; winter was over and all sorts of delicious flying insects were breeding and on the move. A rough hole in the hill, hidden by an overgrowth of skorgn and sickly juniper, was the source of the bats; ancient robbers had chosen to blast into the side of the Depository near one of its still-buried original portals. The hole was kept open by guano hunters.
The hominid mammals fought a way down through their gentle flying relatives, leaving the boy behind to tend the alien mounts. They all put on masks, more to keep out the smell than for the oxygen. Though Nejirt had deliberately set the power at low intensity for the bats’ sake, the lanterns stirred up even more bats to drop from the ceiling and flutter away from the day’s roost Nejirt seemed to be enjoying himself, as if all the bats were his personal pets. Their Lost Vegan guide commented jovially on the thickness of the guano, which his people came here to collect when it was deep enough.
“You’ve just met Rith’s most successful mammal,” muttered Nejirt to his cohorts as they hurried down the tunnel into its deeper regions, which were avoided by the bats. ‘Their natural gengineering has us beat by fifty million years, and they’re so smart they’ve managed to colonize millions of planets all without having to invent a stardrive. On Zeta Anorka where I come from the insects are so bad we keep bats as house pets. We have fridged bat homes we carry around when we go camping—let them out to dehibemate and they beat any insect-zapping machine you’ll ever invent. They live a long time and you don’t have to make new ones when they wear out.”
Eron noticed that his Lost Vegan guide had no fear of radioactivity; maybe the concept wasn’t real to him. Nejirt wasn’t testing—any gamma radiation would be down by about eight orders of magnitude since the Depository was built and, as well, its treasure had been thoroughly looted at least seven hundred centuries ago, perhaps even earlier when the spent nuclear fuel, rich with rare stable isotopes, still carried high concentrations of valuable long-half-life radioactives. Nevertheless Eron felt cautious. He sampled the air and the walls with his handy pocket metricator, looking for traces of protactinium 233, tin 126, niobium 93 and 94, et cetera. He found nothing abnormal. One would need more radiation protection in space than in this emptied vault lying, as it did, beneath Rith’s atmosphere and three hundred meters of overhead rock.
They got past the guano and the scattered mummified bats. The main tunnel was immense, branching into endless side tunnels that soaked up lantern beams to show nothing, all as empty as the Queen’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. “Where did it all go!” exclaimed Eron. “There’s room for one hundred thousand tons.”
“We got here too late. Where did the pharaoh’s golden toiletries go?”
They found old fuel-cell batteries and a sack with the desiccated remains of someone’s lunch. Farther along an animal had crawled inside to die, not a Rithian vertebrate. Nejirt had been counting purposefully and now turned down an off-corridor. ‘This is what I wanted to show you.” Thirty meters along its length the tunnel had once been sealed by a bulkhead door of battleship quality. The door was gone. Beyond its threshold the walls of the gently sloping tunnel were covered with marvelous frescos in anaglyph: lots of lush vegetation, saintly men and women with halos, monsters, happy children. And a whole section devoted to soldiers and their trade. There had been lights and air conditioning but it no longer functioned.
Eron examined the murals, especially the one depicting the Flying Fortress, which was labeled in Latin with an enigmatic “SCHWEINFVRT.” It was done in ceramic glazes, certainly not hand applied for the detail had incredible resolution. Probably they’d been laid down by a hot sputtering printer, a very durable medium. “What are the pictures saying?” asked Eron.
“Nobody knows. They’re very post-Americ though they certainly had a high regard for Americ ancestors. The rest of their stuff is gone. Racks of corroded hardware, but no message. Some of the dust indicates they used paper or plastic books. There’s more.” While Wendi stayed behind to photograph the murals, Nejirt swung his beam around and took Eron up a stairway carved in the tuff. It led to an elaborate set of rooms, post-Depository, mostly stripped of everything except the dead lights and the fan machinery, intact but frozen solid. “There once was a morgue up here with five skeletons, Homo sapiens normal with a wide variance typical of the Mixed Age.” Eron wandered through hollow stone chambers with tiny doors and elaborately mosaicked floors. An occasional wall was frescoed. Power cables came through a crawling tunnel that led to a distant high-temperature generator, fission fed and still emitting low levels of radon. Most of the fuel rods were gone. Sizable air vents had been drilled up to the surface but remained blocked. “You’ll never find ruins this old anywhere else in the Galaxy.”
“What were they doing in a place like this?” Eron was incredulous.
“War refugees, probably.”
There were other sapiens-made caves. The armory was empty except for the gun racks. The guns, said Nejirt, were in the primitive weapons display at the Great Pyramid, which was where #26 had found out about this place.
That night a delicate male gawf was roasted in the ground under a campfire. After the feast Nejirt and Eron sat around the fire while Wendi and their guides slept. Nejirt made some allusions to the current politics of psychohistory.
Here it comes, thought Eron.
“I’m tempted to tell you about Konn. He doesn’t give a Spacedamn for my opinion of him, or anyone else’s, but I’d rather you kept my opinion to yourself. It’s for your information only. Use it or not. Konn is looking for a son, an heir. He’s never found one. You’re his latest wonder boy.”
“Oh.” The flames flickered and Eron fed it some more skorgn. They weren’t being bothered by insects. The bats were swooping.
“I’m one of his ex-wonderids, not the only one. We’re alumni. Want a briefing?”
“Sure.”
“First you’ll want to know why I’m still around; I could have gone off in a sulk and joined Hanis
or disappeared into the Galaxy on any assignment I wanted. I’m that good. Do you know First Rank Jars Hanis?”
“The Rector of the Lyceum?”
“Which makes him the Rector of the Galaxy. But Konn is a better mathematician. It drives me crazy. He gives me a problem. I lay out all my tools, sharpen them, whatever. I’ve built up a marvelous mathematical tool chest. I’ve got tools that weren’t invented when Konn was in school. I crank out my solution. It’s good. Konn looks at it. He scratches his head for maybe three or five or seven watches. He talks to that damn impudent dog of his. And then he comes back to me: Why didn’t I do it this way? Why didn’t I do it that way? Why did I bother with these factors? Why not match these two compensating errors against each other and throw both factors out of the calculation? And out of his hat comes my result—at twice the accuracy and a tenth the work. If you are listening, an hour with him is worth a year of courses. While you are his wonder boy you’re going to get the ride of your life. I don’t envy you. Just don’t crack up when you disappoint him. That’s what I had to tell you.”
Eron poked the fire. He didn’t know what to say. The fire gave off a thousand red sparks, like a cluster of dying stars, worn out by life. Above, the stars were white. The universe was young.
“When I heard you were from Agander, I wanted to meet you. Konn sent me on my first mission to the Ulmat. One of his crazy paranoid ideas. He’s paranoid, you know. Normal people worry about poison in their food. He worries about poison in the stars.” He paused, as if unsure he would continue. “Your father was into some pretty shady deals.”
That caught Eron’s attention. “I know. He wanted money to put me into a good Scholarium.” Eron didn’t want to talk about it. “So why was Konn interested in the Ulmat?” “Paranoia. He spots a culture like in the Ulmat Constellation that’s doing a balancing act at some cusp point. It’s got to roll off in some direction, any direction—north? south? east? west? something in between? Some little disturbance down in the noise is going to push it off that cusp. Konn’s paranoia takes over. He looks at the worst possible direction out of millions. He starts doing this mumbo-jumbo analysis of the noise pushing this way and that way. He comes to the conclusion that the noise is pushing in the wrong direction. Nobody can duplicate his results—but he knows he’s right. He knows he has to go in there and push in another, less dangerous direction. He does that. Everything comes out all right. It must have been because of his corrective action, right? That’s why Konn is Second Rank and not First. Everybody knows he’s a quasar, but no one trusts him when he’s on the subject of what he is most passionate about. Hanis tries to keep him contained.”
“Did Konn think there was any danger from the Ulmat?” “Yeah. He thought the Ulmat could lead a revolution that would tear the Galaxy apart. I did a lot of fieldwork. I tried to show him that, though it was possible, it was never going to happen—but I don’t think he ever believed me. He had a perfect excuse. He had preemptively taken counteraction and aborted the threat. You grew up on Agander. What do you think? Do Ganderians have it in them to lead a revolution against the Second Empire?”
Yes, thought Eron, feeling the blaster in its holster, but he was too much of a Ganderian to ever say so aloud.
While Eron reflected, Nejirt had a final comment. “According to my measures, your people have the will but lack seven of the critical leadership dimensions.”
“The same seven you’d find in martyrs willing to die for their cause?” Eron pulled his bite and added diplomatically, “We’re a very practical people. We’d never get involved in a revolution that wasn’t going to succeed.” And that's why we end up as galactic bureaucrats and not as underdogs fighting for right against might. A Ganderian was willing to wait forever, if that’s what it took, for the right revolution. So Konn had seen through the mask. That was a big plus for Hahukum Konn. What else had he seen?
Nejirt wandered away and scrounged another piece of now-cold gawf meat from a bowl, heating it on a stick over the coals. “Konn isn’t the only madman on the scene. Konn is paranoid. Jars Hanis is a megalomaniac, which is why I won’t work for him. He’s developing a three-millennia plan of social renovation. Very impressive. All the impressionable students are impressed. He wears the right clothes to anesthetize people’s good sense. Never have a drink with Jars Hanis or you’ll feel so good you’ll end up working for him.”
By now Eron had a dozen questions to ask, but Nejirt was ready to close shop. He crawled into his sleeping bag. “Well, we got our picture. The engineers will be delighted. I’ve called #26 and that old windbag will be here to pick us up in the morning, relieved that we’re still alive.”
The journey home was uneventful. Eron was consumed by questions, but Nejirt remained in a silent mood.
Rhaver met them. He sniffed at their trousers and then lifted the fabric with his fingers to get a better sniff of skin. “JirtNowBeBack,” he said solemnly up at Nejirt with myopic eyes. His glance at Eron was doubtful. Then he was running off, his fingers clenched into running paws. “They-Back! TheyBack!”
41
ERON OSA MEETS A FAN, 14,810 GE
12.02.13 On a planet with a trillion residents, storage space and transportation space is at a premium.
12.02.14 The only commodity that can be stored and transported cheaply is information.
12.02.15 it is easier to manufacture devices from stored information, on site, as they are needed, and to destroy them after use, than to store them away in physical bulk, waiting fora second user. Exceptions may be made in the case of (1) devices utilizing exotic materials, (2) devices requiring exotic manufacturing methods for their duplication.
12.02.16 Water, air, and sewage must be purified and reused, on site, to avoid transportation through pipes, conduits, and through the atmosphere.
12.02.17 The transportation bulk-flow of any sector design should never exceed a Hafdmakie number of 43.
Splendid Planner's Guide,
AdminLevel-NR8 Issue-GA13758 SOP-12
The now-vanished message which had appeared in his hotel’s creaky Personal Capsule dispenser was engraved on Eron Osa’s memory by repeated review. “See Master Rigone at the Teaser’s Bistro, Calimone Sector, AQ-87345, Level 78 (The Corridor of Olibanum.)..It had been signed by a mysterious “benefactor” whose identity he had been unable to guess.
In spite of his missing fam and memories, Eron remem-
bered the tattooed face of Rigone—and remembered intensely mixed feelings of awe and respect and exasperation. He could not remember if they had been friends. He knew he had spent time at Rigone’s Teaser’s Bistro and knew he had seen him many times and perhaps had known him earlier. Something about books.
For six watches, petrified to leave his hotel, Eron had been trying to find the courage to wander up the Olibanum to see Rigone—as his strange “benefactor” had suggested. Trying to contact Rigone would be irrelevant if he was first going to find himself hopelessly disoriented in the corridors of the Calimone Sector. Such fears of losing his way astonished him. Facing the unknown out there seemed akin to interstellar adventuring in the era of sublight rafting.
The fuzzy memories he had of himself told of the old Eron as a confident, arrogant young man, a mathematician, a zenoli combat adept—but confidence has its foundation in abilities, and those had been shattered. He wasn’t sure anymore that he even had the wits for such a simple task as plying the corridors of Splendid Wisdom alone. His actions kept calling upon him for lore and skills that his mind did not know were gone—until his absent fam did not respond.
Nevertheless reason suggested that even if Splendid Wisdom were an incomprehensible hive to a famless man, there should be a solution to his lack of mobility. Splendid Wisdom had existed as a labyrinth long before the fam had become a universal symbiote.
It was essential that he not remain a prisoner of his hotel. The message was acting as a goad to drive him out. But he was “hanging onto the doorjamb” for dear life!
&nbs
p; In his fury he gave himself an ultimatum. Plan! Plan even the most elementary of chores! Predict and plan! Then he laughed that his fury had induced in him the most bland of psychohistoric cliches. His cheer encouraged him out of his moping. Suppose he reviewed everything in the safety of his rooms, testing his organic brain for deficiencies? He might, that way, gain the courage to leave the hotel on an expedition. The organic brain had been evolved to think and learn, and there was no reason he couldn’t still perform such essentials. Think! he commanded himself. Once he stepped outside of his hotel into the corridors, what would he have to do that his fam had always done for him?
Eron began to flash on his famless early childhood, the only model he had for what was in store for him. Wryly he recalled the time he ran away from the family’s tourist suite when he was three. They had traveled by sea from Agander’s Great Island to the coast—he didn’t remember the name of the city because he hadn’t known it then—but he did remember his passion in wanting to see up close the fountain-waterfall at tie city’s center, marvelously rising up through a contained rapids for thirty stories and then gracefully dropping down through a series of magical shapes. Mama Os-amin, his governess, would not respond to his polite request or explain her refusal. Neither was she willing to appease his temper tantrum.
Resentful, he tricked the door lock with a candy wrapper, sneaked out, wandered down to the lower reaches of the hotel, and cunningly hopped a pod, knowing in his three-year-old mind that once having crossed the sea by boat, a person could use the landlocked pods to go anywhere on the continent. He made magisterial demands of the pod’s control console using the word “waterfall” prominently. The pod detected his youth and delivered him to the police station. He smiled. This time, as an adult, perhaps he could outwit the pods—though it was rumored that here on Splendid Wisdom the pods were the smartest in the Galaxy and intentionally surly with provincials.
Psychohistorical Crisis Page 54