Konn shut down his apparatus. “Come on, let’s go. We’re on a tight schedule this watch.”
“Eron was usually obsessively cautious,” mused Nejirt.
“I know. He always had his own ideas, but he always took my advice. I’m probably the best trouble sniffer that psychohistory has ever produced, but in the last analysis what am I doing? We live in peaceful times. I’m fretting over molehills that might, just might, turn into volcanoes if left untended for a few centuries. You know what a mole is, don’t you? I think they are extinct. It was a little animal that dug tunnels underground and piled up dirt outside in little tiny mounds. If you didn’t go after the buggers with a club, the mound gradually turned into a hill, and if you were lazy the hill turned into a mountain range. That all happened before our Founder. I think the mole was a Rithian animal. A mammal. Psychohistory is now so advanced that crises are handled hundreds of years before they happen.”
“I’ll remember that story the next time you send me out after a molehill in places like the Coron Pentad. Molehills grow into mountains. I complain too much. So, you humored Eron?”
“What else could I do? As tactfully as I could, I pointed out all the errors in his math so that he could think things over and work them out. I remember the errors he was making in his excitement, exactly, but I’ll be a monkey if I remember his line of reasoning. Psychohistories were springing up like poison mushrooms all over the Galaxy, wild stuff. He never mentioned it again. And he kept doing good work. And then, boff, he went to work for the project of our glorious Rector.”
“You grieved,” said Nejirt.
“Yeah. He was a son to me.”
“So you think he delivered the same thesis to Hanis?”
“I can’t suppose anything else. It must have been very convincing—that’s what worries me—because Hanis went berserk and Hanis usually just runs over people with his charm, ignoring all unpleasantness. I think Eron published as his last defiant resort.”
“Hahukum, be honest with me. You mentioned to Bama your nightmare that our corpse might be a psychohistorian. Was that based on your half memories of Eron’s wild conjecture?”
“Of course. I’m a professional paranoid. Nobody else wants the job.”
“Then he was probably just an astrologer.”
“Probably.”
‘Thank Space! For an inamin, there, you almost had me paranoid.”
“Wait until you meet my other psychohistorian.” “Another!”
“A local I have under detention. Cingal Svene.”
“I know him. He’s a nut case. He pretends to be a mathist, but he’s more a numerologist. For the last twenty years he has come out with a new pseudorandom number sequence that he claims can be used to generate the primes.”
The Admiral laughed. “That was last year. This year he’s a psychohistorian.”
“They are springing up like poison mushrooms, are they?” “How do you think you’ll look in a scraggly beard and comfortable brimmed cap with food stains—and, perhaps, protruding false ears?”
“Is that the new psychohistorian’s uniform?”
“We’ll have your fam programmed with a new voice and a new gait by next watch. You’re my best field agent. You’ll be taking over Cingal Svene’s life. At least you won’t have to fake the psychohistorian gig.”
“Can’t I just go to work for Hanis?”
They had emerged onto the fourth floor of the balcony that spiraled along the inner walls of the oval-domed central keep of the West Wing of the Lyceum. Eight stories tall, it served as the display-well for a galactic simulacrum that was, at the moment, running a trade-route optimization, lightning flashes passing between stars as new combinations were tested. Konn gripped the parapet in the straight-armed pose of a man who owns all that he beholds.
“Just some thoughts I want to share while we’re here.” His gaze wavered as he asked permission of some unseen source. Then he squeezed at a palm-size console that he had magically retrieved from his coveralls. The optimization program continued but was no longer displayed while Konn took over the simulacrum with his own files. “This is as the Empire stood a century ago. The pale yellow and the gold cover all areas where the probability of deviation from prediction was greater than five percent, the gold indicating sites of strategic dynamism where failure of our predictions would have consequences meeting the Founder’s criteria of direness. My predecessors, of course, sent rectifying teams into the gold regions. Now watch as I overlay the blue.” All of the blue appeared inside the gold. Corrective measures had either not worked or been counterproductive.
“I’ve seen your molehills before,” said Nejirt with amusement.
“Certainly, but right now let’s look at them from a new viewpoint. The blues cover the current battle theaters of intractable uncertainty.”
‘That you see and nobody else sees,” amended Nejirt.
“Because statistics tries harder for me. She loves me.”
Nejirt Kambu made a quick visual estimate that the blue covered perhaps one percent of the Second Empire, a realm more imposing in this huge model than it was from the dwarfed viewport of a spaceship. Konn had never defined what he meant by such an alarming phrase as “battle theater,” but he was a man infamous for using alarming phrases. Coron’s Wisp was well within one of the designated regions.
“As a student I took such anomalies as my research project. For my thesis in psychohistory I was going to prove the conventional wisdom, that any deviation which did not respond to remediation was a random effect not driven by intelligence.” He grumbled. “But I kept coming across correlations with intelligent opposition, not big ones, mind you, but big enough to pique my interest.”
Nejirt knew the story. As a young man Hahukum had assumed that his research would be welcome and, later, that his ability to contain the blue zones would be appreciated. But his research was not welcomed and the Admiral was still considered to be a wild man who had reached high rank only because he was an unscrupulously fast and wily politician.
Men like Hanis continued to deny the existence of blue zones, attributing Konn’s success to the absence of a problem in the first place—just as a skeptical Nejirt had, himself, done in his youth. Briefly Kambu’s memory flashed on a neat little bot of his early childhood which scurried around cleaning up after the messes children made. Why bother to put things back into toy boxes? why deign to pick up crayons after drawing a picture? The world around him cleaned up by itself. But there was this annoying little bot that was always messing with Nejirt’s things—so he broke it. Perhaps therein lay his loyalty to Konn; his mother had had a draconian sense of discipline, refusing to replace the bot even under the duress of Nejirt’s most capillary-popping temper tantrums.
“So do you see the differences?” asked an enraptured Konn.
“It looks like the same old Galaxy I saw last time I was here. There are thirty-seven blue topozone crossovers driven by locally independent factors. Shall I recite the factors?” Nejirt was teasing Konn.
“Why independent?”
“Because you told me so—in detail.”
“But they could all be connected by one giant conspiracy. How could I have missed it? That’s what I’m seeing that’s different.”
Nejirt was grinning at this new paranoid twist. “An appealing idea.”
“Think about it. When you were in the Ulmat mopping up, putting things to their final right, Eron Osa was there. When the forces of evil vanished, Eron went with them— and reappeared on Faraway. For training. He has an exotic limited-edition Faraway fam designed for fancy upgrade. The source of that fam conveniently no longer exists. His fam acquires, or had built-in, a transponder connected to the eyes of the user, and Space knows what else. Probing finds no signs of surgery. After training the way is paved for him to be sent to Splendid Wisdom, to the very heart of psychohistorical power where he can spy on me, the victor of the Battle of the Ulmat. We catch a falsely identified man from Coron’s Wisp activ
ating Eron’s transponder... Of all my hot spots, Coron’s Wisp has risen to be the most active. A Faraway plot? Something even more sinister? How many other connections are there between all the blue zones?”
Nejirt let his boss lose himself among the possible permutations of intrigue within this vast galactic simulacrum that rose before them for eight stories. He counted to five. “Admiral, Rector Hanis is sneaking up behind you with a knife.” That broke Konn’s concentration. “Ah, yes. Politics before pleasure.” He muttered again to some unseen source and the blue zones faded. Tiny lightning flashes reappeared. “Off to the dungeon. Follow me.”
“Dungeon!”
“Of course. Every castle has a dungeon with a skeleton reaching through the bars for a bowl of water just out of reach. In this case, it is one of my offices hastily converted for the comfort of Cingal Svene. By the way, don’t shave for the next watch or so. My associates tell me that our beardgrowing nanosalve works best with a good stubble as substrate. You’ll have to tell Wendi you are off on a trip again. You’ll be operating out of Svene’s old apartment.”
“And when someone checks my retinal pattern?”
“As of the current watch the real Cingal Svene would be living a nightmare if he tried to prove he was Cingal Svene. When you were with Bama I had his identifiers globally replaced by yours.”
“Is that legal?”
“If you stretch the emergency power laws. But I didn’t go through channels.”
“I could get into trouble. Impersonation is illegal.”
“You are already in trouble. Hanis has you on his exile list—or worse. You may want to keep your Svene identity indefinitely.”
“Let’s start from the beginning.”
They had arrived at the little briefing room not far from the dungeon. One of Bama’s lieutenants instructed Nejirt in the communication protocols used by Svene’s revolutionary cell. Ordinarily these protocols would be useless to the police because they required a fail-safe identifier; if Svene was captured and forced to communicate, he would just leave out that identifier and thus clue in his correspondent to break off contact. But Svene was not only a very sloppy mathist, he was a sloppy housekeeper and had left the fail-safe identifier in a convenient place for reference, behind a book,
“We’ve already gone through a few cycles of communication,” said the lieutenant. “No suspicion on the other end. They just wanted a few simple psychohistorical predictions, which were easy enough for us to supply. They praised his progress and signed off.” The lieutenant took him through Svene’s routine, where he shopped, where he ate. He ate mostly at automats but had a few favorite spots where it was the job of the waitress to sit down and chat with her male clients. The lieutenant was thorough, supplying pictures of the waitresses and a profile of their interests.
“I don’t look like Svene.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said the lieutenant. “They’ll notice your beard and your puffy ears. The accent will be right, and so will the funny way you pick up a cup. Best of all, your credit stick will go through without a hassle with a slightly better than usual tip. Half a month of watches like that, and the real Svene could walk in and they’ll think he was the fake.”
Konn cut in. “The org we’re penetrating doesn’t know who he is because he wanted it that way and because they wanted it that way. Makes it harder on us police.”
Nejirt took Konn aside for a quiet chat “What has this sting got to do with Hanis? I know you very well. You don’t give a jellybean for helpless little conspiracies of malcontents. You go for things like a vast tidal wave of taxpayer rage, or the meme of defiance that has penetrated a whole society and is passed down from generation to generation. Guys like Cingal Svene you’ve ignored all your life.”
Konn grinned. “This is internal politics, not defense of the Empire. Recall that Hanis has called off his truce. Right now he’s maneuvering out of sight to get the whole lot of us excised out of psychohistory. He could exile us—he has enough people in his thrall to do that—but would he dare scatter the seeds of a thousand disgruntled psychohistorians all over the Galaxy? I doubt it. I think he has something more extreme in mind.”
“He wouldn’t dare.”
“Let me think about that. I’m the professional paranoid. Right now you are just a bearded, big-eared malcontent who tried three times to pass the Lyceum entrance exams and failed and after all these years still harbors a grudge against all things psychohistorical.”
“I’ve got to know the game plan.”
“Okay. Here’s what Hanis doesn’t yet know. He doesn’t know my agents intercepted a Personal Capsule for Eron when he was under house arrest. He doesn’t know we tracked down the source of that Capsule and chased him a merry chase that ended in both disaster for him and for us. When we raided our corpse’s apartment we picked up a few very good leads. It is only a matter of time before Hanis clues into all this, so we have to act fast without my usual subtlety and patience. The main item led us to a man out of the past who calls himself Hyperlord Kikaju Jama. He’s an antique dealer who has been selling Eggs brought in from Coron’s Wisp. He is not a big player because we know our corpse brought in huge numbers of Eggs, only a few of them going through Jama. So far, not a trace of the other Eggs. We should wait. But it is Hanis’ schedule, so we have no option but to sting this Hyperlord before we have the full picture. Not easy. I’m amazed at the professional level of his security—which is another sign that this is not just a simple commercial venture.”
“It could be just a fad,” mused Nejirt. ‘The Egg is a very impressive gadget. It is too fine-textured to be duplicated in a manufacturum so whoever knows how to distribute it could make a fortune. They’d want to keep their distribution network a secret.”
“And put a transponder right in the middle of the Lyceum?” “All right. My role?”
“Arresting only this Jama wouldn’t create a ripple. It has got to be a big sting. Then I can turn around and tell the Ranks that Eron was warning Rector Hanis of a major conspiracy and that Hanis immediately suppressed all of the evidence right down to the contents of Eron’s fam. He can’t produce evidence to contradict me, because he had all the evidence destroyed.”
“Suppose he kept a private record?”
Konn grinned. “Does it matter? I know the nature of Eron’s warning because he warned me. I will have no trouble showing that this Hyperlord is part of a dangerous galactic conspiracy whether it is true or not.”
“That’s not good psychohistory.”
“But this isn’t psychohistory. It’s politics.”
The lieutenant wanted their attention. “Beg pardon, but the honorable Kambu should spend a few hours with our subject if he is to fine-tune his imitation.”
Cingal Svene was alternately afraid, defiant, angry, propitiative, whining, and sometimes everything a cornered hero should be. Konn left his claws sheathed, even when Cingal made blatantly erroneous mathematical statements; his was a buttery friendliness that was not the kind of friendship he would have offered a friend. Nejirt decided he might as well like this guy if he was going to have to be him, scraggly beard and all. He took on a sorry-about-the-inconvenience demeanor, “let me fluff your pillow.” Cingal eventually broke down into hysterical crying, which turned into defiance as he brushed away the tears, and finally into a cheerful slyness. Konn had kept the man’s Egg in his hand, prominently displayed, so that the conversation would keep revolving around it.
“Shall I tell you gentlemen thieves your fortune?”
“By all means,” said Konn, handing over the astrological tool.
Nejirt was bored. He had seen this nonsense before. The light dimmed. Even the comers of the room disappeared as the stars came out. Cingal was good, much better than Ni-jert’s clumsy effort with Bama. He also knew all the little tidbits that astrologers throw out to make their clients believe that they have a secret mainline into the client’s psyche. He made veiled references to Zeta Anorka, the home system of Nejirt, and
the constellations of Zeta Anorka actually appeared with the planets in the sky exactly as they had been on the day of Nejirt’s birth. That was creepy. He wove into his story the three failed love affairs that had tormented Nejirt before he met Wendi. That was unnerving. But true to the astrological craft, he used the changing sky above to puff up their egos, finding all the fine secret features of their personalities that made them uniquely outstanding citizens of the Galaxy. Both Nejirt and Konn knew that it was all conjured flattery but were smiling at their astrologer’s sagacity just the same.
And then Cingal peered at them above his beard with a little boy’s sly and innocent eyes. “And would you like to know your final doom? Only the courageous need proceed.”
“Of course,” said the Admiral. Nejirt, more reluctant, said nothing but nodded.
The stars flew by. They dived into a spectacular nebula and lost themselves within its tendrils. The nebula hazed over and faded to the darkness of an interstellar dust cloud. “Your future universe approaches,” their seer intoned. Nothing happened. It became so dark that faces were invisible. And then, slowly, majestically the Founder’s red equations began to scroll across the sky, page after page after page, rolling endlessly in mute silence...
46
SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS, 14,806 GE
When I look back to the time, already 20 years ago, when the concept and magnitude of the physical quantum of action began, for the first time, to unfold from the mass of experimental facts, and again, to the long and ever tortuous path which led, finally, to its disclosure, the whole development seems to provide a fresh illustration of the long-since proved saying of Goethe’s that man errs as long as he strives. And the whole strenuous intellectual work of an industrious research worker would appear, after all, to be in vain and hopeless, if he were not occasionally through some striking facts to find that he had, at the end of all his crisscross journeys, at last accomplished at least one step which was conclusively nearer the truth.
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