Nejirt threw her only once. Without disputing a particularly cutting barb, he brought out a black card. “May I contradict you with a simple gift?”
She took the card with a puzzled distrust.
“The encryption codes to Hanis’ personal archives.” He read the incredulity in Eron’s face. “No, the Admiral shouldn’t have those in his possession, but then”—he shrugged—“he’s been tracking Hanis for a long time.”
“You can’t be suggesting unlimited access?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I’m not privy to the Admiral’s mind. He wants you to have full recourse to the past.”
“But not the present?”
“The pace of present events would distract you.”
As a result Eron-Hiranimus spent hours rooting about with Otaria in Hanis’ old study. The deposed Rector’s files consisted mainly of annotated pointers to the restricted library of the Pscholars. He was an organizer more than an original thinker. Otaria loved this kind of wallow with the relish of a gossip and a historian who has lucked into a musty store of documents unseen by man for ages. Eron, on the other hand, took the opportunity to roam over the full range of the official future history. As a Seventh Rank student he had worked with only a tiny part of it of which he remembered little. Scogil had a special interest in the plans Hanis had made for certain regions of the Galaxy, his mind almost automatically working up counter-predictions to futures he found disagreeable, some aspects of which he shared with Eron. A program whose inevitable result would be the hybridizing of Helmarian culture with it neighbors brought out the most indignation.
The renaissance Jars had intended to impose upon the Empire was awesome in its scope. Eron was reminded of a book he had once seen, a collection of sketches of architectural marvels which had never been built. He felt a stab of sympathy for the old codger—how else could a man of such lofty dreams have reacted to Eron’s dissertation outlining in the clearest mathematical terms why his life’s work was doomed?
With trepidation Eron decided to attempt activation of his own personal student files. In all likelihood they were wiped. They had once resided as a symbiotic subroutine of the Great Galactic Model. Though he had never been of high enough rank himself to revise that vast model, a student was allowed to test modifications from within a walled domain. He couldn’t remember his entrance code, but it seemed that foresight had inserted it as a riddle in the index of his dissertation based on the poetry of Emperor Arum-the-Patient.
Otaria peered over his shoulder. Instead of receiving a notification of erasure, his call triggered a secondary startling security check: “Authority level uncertain. Additional information requested. What city was bombed on the 53rd watch of Parsley, 14,798?”
Konn must have blocked erasure at the time of Eron’s trial! What a strange man!
His befuddled organic brain was going to have to find an answer to that question. Scogil might contain libraries but not that bit of information. Was it “B”? What began with “B”? Recklessly he input the name “Bremen” and—miraculously—opened up access to the currently defined state function of the galactic civilization. He tested. His own tools were still intact. That took a big strain off his brain; he knew he could use his old tools, but he didn’t know if he had enough left of his mind, even with Scogil’s assistance, to recreate them. Immediately he began to demonstrate to his ghoul why the Oversee would fail to achieve their goals. They, too, were using classical mathematics to predict their way through a peculiar psychohistorical crisis for which the mathematics of the Founder did not apply.
He got the same reaction from Scogil as he had first from Konn and then from Hanis. He shrugged; every century had its cardinals.
Eron calculated that it was just about time for the Admiral to make his grand entrance. Keeping the people who were important to him waiting and sweating a little was his style. He wanted to make sure that Eron Osa knew that Konn had power and that Konn chose to exercise his power via a very different mode than had First Rank Jars Hanis. There was to be no relentless bullying, no ultimatum, no conflagration of fams, no draconian solutions. That was the method by which the Admiral got his way.
When the curmudgeon finally came to dinner (on schedule), he appeared in the uniform of Ultimate Sam’s Amazing Air Fangs: gold-braided knee-length bluecoat with the tricorn headpiece of a thirteen-star general. He held under his arm a box of Eron’s favorite biscuits from the commissary near the Lyceum study carrels—as well as a heavy briefcase, which meant a long work session after the wine. It was so like Konn to remember the little details which were much more powerful than logic. Eron smiled and sneaked open the biscuits. Vanilla bunny rabbits with cherry eyes. But he still felt merciless. It was all a serious military campaign to this crusty old Admiral. Konn wasn’t going to enjoy defeat. But he had never, to Eron’s knowledge, burned anybody at the stake for disagreeing with orthodox reasoning.
“Good that you found time to see us, sir.”
“That has to wait! First my bladder urges me to see the facilities. Pissing with Hanis has always been an extraordinary affair.” When the Admiral returned from the dispozoria he picked up the conversation with Eron. “You’ve made an astonishing recovery for a young man shot down in flames without a parachute. For the sake of the rest of us, I was hoping you’d remain in a semicoma for a few more years.” Magda emerged from the dining room. “No fights! It will collapse my souffle.”
“How can I not fight? In dire emergencies, that’s what cunning Admirals do.” He turned to Eron. “Can that thing in your head hear me?”
“He’s still sorting out the babble.”
“Good. Then I can insult him, and you can diplomatically soften my remarks since you’ve been acting more like an ambassador for the heathen enemy than as my humble prisoner of war,” admonished Konn.
“I am an ambassador.” The crazy Admiral always tickled the sass in Eron. “I’ve come here to the Prime Residence of
Splendid Wisdom to accept the surrender of the Second Empire.” Scogil would blanch at that, if he still had a body. It was the kind of cheek that had caused Eron to be thrown out of all of Agander’s best schools, forcing his father to hire a tutor—and, finally, to be defammed and thrown out of Splendid Wisdom’s Lyceum in disgrace.
A startled Konn blinked for a moment before recovering. “Surrender, is it? Unfortunately I’ve not brought my sword.” He grinned and grumbled. “I believe there will be another hundred years of hard war before we get to the point of a surrender. Youth equals impatience.” By war Eron knew he meant psychohistorical corrective action. Though Konn built intricate scale models of the immense First Empire dreadnoughts of the old Grand Fleet, to win battles he never ordered into combat even the lightest of the Second Empire’s hypercruisers. He wielded more power than any First Empire admiral could have hoped to amass. And now, as Rector, he also commanded all of Hanis’ legions.
“You’re planning a hundred years of war?” In Rithian history the Hundred Year War was the name for that awful period of seesaw conflict where every death or assassination of a nobleman gave rise to a claim on his land by various distant relatives who had at their disposal an army willing to travel and loot. Female generals were burned at the stake when captured. “You’ll lose that way,” said Eron. “Sometimes it is better to begin polite talks a century before a major defeat. But you have to be able to see that far.”
Konn appraised Eron’s face. “You’re serious. You would actually negotiate with renegade psychohistorians! You know the equations! There has to be a central predictor. All else is chaos. Civilization will collapse.”
“Only when your strategy is governed by inferior mathematics,” rejoined Eron.
“Ha! Irresponsible youth! Arrogant! Driving without an autopilot! Sniffing the vacuum because papa said it was dangerous!” The Admiral reached into his briefcase and pulled out a heavy volume, printed on cellomet with a utility cover that was an active index, which he th
en slammed on the table. “I suppose you mean this! Your dissertation! Copies of it are appearing everywhere, not so erasable as virtual copies in the archives. I’ve scanned it. Studied it even. Slick math. You’ve cleaned up your sleight-of-hand since I last saw your act until you now look like a genuine magician, but it is still fraudulent deception! You pull an endless handkerchief out of your nose claiming you have a solution to all of mankind’s problems.” He turned to Otaria in her floating re-cliner. “You’ve thrown in with a mind-crippled madman!” He turned back to Eron. “I’ll have you on the rack till you’re a skinny giant! I’ll squeeze what I want out of that homunculus on your back!” He sat down and ate a bunny biscuit. “Eron, my son, be serious. You know that fighting a hundred years down the line—and winning—is something we do all the time.”
“Against a hidden enemy who ripostes with his own psy-chohistorical ploys?” countered Eron.
“That’s why we have to interrogate this Scogil of yours. He’s the first enemy psychohistorian we’ve ever captured. You promised to cooperate.” His voice became quietly ominous. “Have you changed your mind?”
“No. What better way to interrogate him than to play a psychohistorical war game? Your confrères have long been the Galaxy’s special experts on deviations from the Fellowship’s planned future history. A modem Inquisition. Osa-Scogil hereby challenges you and your whole staff to a hundred year war game. You can’t win, sir.” Scogil was vigorously protesting this speech at his highest rate of word composition.
The Admiral brought his tricorn to his lap out of respect for the future dead. “I do believe Hanis did succeed in taking away your mind.”
“Scogil thinks so, too, but he’s stuck with me. And I’m stuck with you. Recall that I was valiantly attempting to avoid you when apprehended. You accept my challenge then? What you get out of it is to see Scogil in action.”
“And you think you and your homunculus and your paramour are a match for my whole staff?” Konn had weakened His voice and his expression said that he was willing to accept the challenge. But he was incredulous. “/ couldn’t get along with a staff of three.”
“Great. So you intend to play fair? Assign me thirty of your best Lyceum students and I’ll train them up in my methods. If I’m remembering correctly, I’m sure you can find thirty students willing to take a crack at the Admiral!”
Konn was beginning to be intrigued by Eron’s boldness. “Your criteria of victory?”
“The immutable laws of psychohistory.” Eron dead-panned the cliche.
“You young scupper rat! I’ve been applying the laws of psychohistory successfully since before you were bom!”
“No,” said Eron, enjoying himself. “You’ve been using blasters and neutron grenades against bows and arrows, exotic math against the ignorant masses. Your army doesn’t have to know much strategy. Remember, your army is the one which executes the fam of any man who is willing to sell blasters to the warriors with the bows and arrows. Now I have to take off a few inamins to consult with Hiranimus. You’ll excuse me.” He left the room muttering and gesturing wildly to himself.
Otaria shifted herself to Eron’s seat. “He’s an unusual man.”
Konn grumbled. “He was always like that, even when he was sane. Totally impossible. Best copilot I ever had, but impossible. I thought a new fam might rattle his bones a bit. He actually talks to the ghoul of this Scogil?”
“To me it looks like he’s talking to himself. It’s a ponderous chat they share.”
“Do you think what remains of Scogil can actually play at psychohistory? Is this proposal of Osa for real?”
Otaria looked at her long hands wistfully. “Eron thinks highly of the abilities of Scogil’s ghoul, more so than the ghoul does of himself. I don’t know. The ghost seems to be missing much of Scogil’s judgment and fire—I knew him before he was killed—but I don’t talk to him directly. Have you ever met an engineer turned salesman of a technical product line? Do you really think you’ve caught a major psychohistorian? Scogil was a salesman! That’s what he did best. He knew more about my organization, the one you raided, than I did myself—because he was selling to it. You think you got us all.” There was malice in her voice. “I even thought, for a while, that you did have us all!” She smiled and said no more, and Konn knew he would get no more short of torture.
“Sorry about the accident with Hyperlord Jama.”
“Your clumsy people seem to be accident prone. He was crazy as a coot—but there were times when I loved him. He would have been furious about the blood on his lace—which you may not be able to wash away so easily.”
Konn brought out a jade ovoid as a gesture of reconciliation. “He would have wanted you to have this.” He handed the Egg to Otaria. “We’ve seized forty of them already.”
Otaria fumbled with the ovoid. Stars burst forth that melted into charts, the sky of Imperialis.
“How do you do that?”
“You still can’t play it? Would you like your fortune read?” Glibly she made up his fortune on the spot. “Compromise with your enemies before stubbornness brings you disaster. That’s your reading for the present position of the stars.”
Konn leaned over, fascinated. “I’ve seen Nejirt do something similar. But it was what Cingal Svene did with it that chilled my old bones.”
She ignored him. “I recently asked Hiranimus, through Eron, why he hid behind astrology. He said it was a simple way of giving people permission to hope that they can control their lives. You Pscholars have destroyed our willingness to predict and to choose which of our predicted futures we want to live. We have become fatalists. You choose for us!”
“We run good government. Our methodology doesn’t speak to individuals,” he admonished.
“If either of those statements were true,” she flared, “I wouldn’t be here in your comfortable prison and you wouldn’t be the illegitimate Rector of the Galaxy!”
“And when the astrology doesn’t work?”
“What’s then to stop a failed astrologer from moving on to psychohistory? You? With your secret hoard of knowledge in your guarded Lyceum archives?”
Magda called them to dinner. She was always a calming influence. Osa-Scogil arrived at the table in a good mood, seeming to have settled his internal dissension. There were no further discussions of politics or psychohistory. Magda’s rule.
Later, over sips of Armazin in the study suite, the Admiral confided in Eron the real reason for his visit. “Hanis goes on trial on the 38th watch of Salt. That’s a bit early, too soon to get all of the evidence together properly, a bit of a kangaroo court, but the hard-core Hanis faction is beginning to react and reorganize, and I can’t afford that. Press the attack while the enemy is in disarray. From the view up here at the top I can see that I have nowhere to go but down, fast. I must dispose of Hanis quickly. I need you as my prime witness.” “Oh?”
The Admiral thumped Eron’s dissertation. “The charge is treason. As good as any other trumped-up charge. He has been willfully—and for personal gain—suppressing from his colleagues all knowledge of a coming psychohistorical crisis. That’s as deadly a sin as we can scrape up from the bottom of the bin. You are to testify that you warned him.” “I think he panicked,” said Eron.
To that the Admiral replied with spoofing humor. “You take pride in yourself as an alarming scarecrow, do you, straw brains and all?” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. No one will believe he panicked. Hanis is seen to be a charming man with a calculated purpose behind his every action. All you have to do is testify that when you warned him of crisis, his response was to erase the messenger. We have the proof.” He thumped the thesis again. “And Hyperlord Jama’s group is in irons. We’ve had to manufacture evidence that Hanis knew about them. Since I’m making the rules, I don’t have to be fair. And we have this.” He produced another Coron’s Egg from his bluecoat. “Every juror will be taken to a secret room to see the Founder’s equations scrolling across the heavens. That will make
them shit in their pants, like I did in mine. Then we tell them that a million such Eggs have already been scattered to Star’s End. After which they can complete their evacuation by pissing in their pants, like I did in mine. What do you say? I’m calculating here. I suspect that you don’t harbor any love for Hanis but—more than that—you want an audience for your thesis. I’ll give you a roomful of audience. I want to nail Hanis in the upside-down position, Roman style. An old grudge. You pass me the nails. Is it a deal?”
“You’ll back me up? You’ll say there’s a real crisis?”
“Of course.”
“So you’ve finally come to believe what I’ve written?” This time the Admiral banged on the dissertation angrily. “That? Are you asking me to sign my name to the bottom of that rubbish paper of yours? It is utter nonsense. I told you that years ago. But if it helps me to cut Hanis’ throat, I’ll swear the situation is ten times worse than you say it is and with candles on top—while my fingers are crossed.”
“You want me to lie to a court of law?” Eron’s sense of moral outrage was growing.
“No, no. You won’t be lying. You believe every word you’ve written. I want your sincerity to shine through in the courtroom. I want tears in their eyes when they hear your story. I’ll be the one who is lying to save my skin.”
“What will you do with Hanis if he is convicted?”
“Boil him in oil. But I think you’ve earned first priority on that. What would you do with him?”
“He has interesting dreams. I remember being caught up in his dreams. He won’t give them up easily.”
“Tell that to your fam.” The Admiral touched his own; had Hanis’ methods scared him to act?
Eron had a suggestion. “Ship him off to a distant cluster he has picked out as one of his renaissance foci. He could teach the laymen there psychohistory and if they liked his dream they’d then have the power to make it real without asking permission of Splendid Wisdom—and Hanis could die happy.”
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