Far futures, p.20
Far Futures, page 20
Yet he could guess the real truth. His work had been erased. All copies were gone. Even his unique fam, with every ability necessary to recreate the research, had been destroyed.
Now what?
Eron switched off the ghostlike console with a gesture of his finger and left his chair bobbing in midair. He paced about the strange apartment, too cramped for his aristo taste, wondering where he was. (His suspect fam would know, but he had no desire to link into that substandard unit.) Everything folded into the wall, everything was white, not a trace of luxury or space. The disposoria was leaking urine. This wasn’t home! He buried his head in his arms.
Ping! The tiny, gleaming sphere of a Personal Capsule appeared in the alcove wall niche, unnoticed.
Damn, I’m slow! he thought. Of course this wasn’t his apartment; he was no longer an acolyte of the Psychohistorian Fellowship; he was on his own, disowned, possessions confiscated, tossed into the lower warrens of Splendid Wisdom, where he was condemned to think with treacherously slow neurons! It was infuriating . . . and for a moment he had a rush of uncontrolled rage that stunned him into an unbalanced mental fall because it was not resisted by the restraining calmness of fam input. He had shoved emotionally against a removed wall . . . flinging himself into emptiness.
The rage turned to instant consuming fear—without his fam he was a very asymmetrical animal. His zenoli training was useless; his brain-fam centering lost. He could no longer trust his own responses. This was worse than he had anticipated when he had been whole and accepting of the dangers inherent in his rash deeds. Being an asymmetrical animal didn’t fit with his plans! Plans! Again his mind lurched out of control with a flash of joy at the thought of his brilliant agenda.
But, when he tried to remember the nature of such an agenda, he found only vacuum. He glanced about him in desperation. That was when he saw the Personal Capsule. It stopped him, reminding him of danger. He grumbled bitterly to himself—My orders from the police. Yet, his eyes disclaimed such a conclusion; the omnipotent police, backed up by the certainties of psychology, had no need for super security. A Personal Capsule? Here?
Curiously he picked the small sphere from its niche. It opened in his hand and would have opened for not another of the trillion other inhabitants of Splendid Wisdom. A thin transparent tape unrolled stiffly and began to disintegrate almost immediately. It read:
“See Master Rigone at the Teaser’s Bistro, Calimone Sector, AD-87345, Level 78. (The Corridor of Olibanum.) I’ve already told Rigone what you’ll need. I’ve got myself in a real fix and don’t know how much more I can help. Your benefactor.”
By then the tape and sphere were well on their way to dust.
Eron Osa didn’t even have to memorize the message. He knew the Teaser’s Bistro—a tolerated black market. It was where young Fellowship rakes hung out to have illegal attachments added to their fams.
2
In the Salki version of the Chronicles of Early Splendid Wisdom . . . in the eighth millennium before the final maturation of the First Galactic Empire . . . it is told that the villas surrounding the harbors of the Calmer Sea were sacred shrines of meditation, girded by the hectic ardor of an interstellar trading mecca, destroyed only when the nomadic armadas of the Frightfulpeople deliberately established themselves across the central galactic trade routes and forcibly set their main base of operations on Splendid Wisdom. Revolt cost six billion Splendid lives and an annoying million Frightful Soldiers. [Probably an exaggeration—the original records were destroyed during the Frightfulterror and the earliest remaining secondary accounts date to three hundred years later. All surviving records contradict one another. Ed.]
The One-Eyed Frightfulperson, today known as Tanis the First, was displeased by the unrest. For compensation he cynically confiscated the Oceans and Seas of Splendid Wisdom and diligently began to ration water to a water-short populace so that they might behave. Tanis, a strategic genius, had noted that evaporation and circulation patterns on Splendid Wisdom were no longer providing enough rain—the weather had already been set awry by an excessive building zeal driven by hugely profitable interstellar ventures. Cities had replaced forest, desert, and prairie. The natural water table was disastrously low and the aquifers dry. Hence the Splendid crowds could be held ransom by their thirst. The Frightfulpeople built the desalination plants and the pumping stations and astutely encouraged massive immigration to Splendid Wisdom so that the dependency should become absolute.
. . . The Frightfulbaron of the Calmer Sea . . . an example of the ruthlessness with which this policy was carried out by the Frightful-people . . . commanded eighty wives, countless concubines, and sired thousands of children. It was his Frightfulgrandchildren who drove the original piles and tunnels along the shore of the Calmer Sea, reclaiming land from the sea for a building boom financed by the sale of water . . .
By the time of the Pax Imperialis . . .
—From the Explanatorium
at the Calmer Pumping Station
The light of the sun Imperialis twisted into the upper levels of the synthetic skin of the planet Splendid Wisdom through arteries of guide-pipes. Gloomy though Hyperlord Kikaju Jama’s interior residence appeared during daytime, its dim luminance was enhanced by an artificial companion light that followed the Hyperlord around, that he might be seen, and, upon demand, became a searchlight impaling the target of his gaze, that he might see.
Jama enjoyed adulation and had arranged that it be he who would shine as the most burnished object within his restricted domain. In meditation, with eyes closed, Jama was surrounded by a nimbus—all else remained spectral, dark, hidden. When his eyes were open, a sly robo-intelligence followed his glance, subtly illuminating only the stoic luxury of a deep abode, careful never to steal the spotlight from the master.
This auroral eyelight might linger on the Hyperlord’s miniature garden, fly across angular and pearly walls, touch a desk, shoot down a hall. For a moment its soft beam settled on a hand-sized jade ovoid sitting in its golden cup with legs that reached to the floor. It amused him to leave it in the open when it should be hidden. Could such astonishing computing power really be locked in a stone so small? No one would think it his most valuable recent purchase. It looked like just another bauble that could be made at whim in his manufacturum. But it couldn’t be duplicated.
He sighed. Perhaps he had wasted his money again. Peddling fabulous objects supposedly immune to replication in a manufacturum was the oldest con game in the galaxy.
When Jama chose to glance at his manufacturum, as he did now, it was never orderly, filled as it was with bits of rejuvenated artwork that he no longer desired to look at but was reluctant to feed to the recycler. About hygiene he was fastidious and so his disposoria, when illuminated, was always clean even if he had to touch it up himself between the rounds of his robo-cleaners. He was eccentric in that his small bedroom contained furniture that did not disappear, and his kitchen was laden with visible food. He liked gloom. The eyelight only brightened when, in his tiny dressing room, he selected the moment’s clothes, or his makeup, or his wig.
Since the Hyperlord was, today, anticipating no interruption of his treasonous meditations, he had dressed for comfort rather than spectacle. Suddenly . . .
A telesphere formed in the air to the left of Jama’s head with an unusual urgency, blooming from invisible to opalescent—there to warn its master. Only after formally identifying the intruder did the sphere become less urgent, speaking in the manner of a peevish butler. “Apparently uninvited, we have with us The Excellent Frightfulperson, Otaria of the Calmer Sea.”
“Let me see her.”
A fairy-sized image appeared within his guardian globe—Lord Jama’s sometime pupil and occasional erotic companion, Otaria. “She is impatient, excited,” intoned the telephone. “She is violating protocol. Advice is to be alert.”
Hyperlord Jama nodded absently to his wraithlike servant in dismissal. Acknowledged, it disappeared abruptly. The lord did not bother to activate his weapons, though he no longer held this impetuous woman in full confidence. Activating weapons automatically registered them with the police. But he was annoyed and set her entrance through the trap-tube at a slow fall.
Otaria of the Calmer Sea, indeed, he thought. How quaint the old titles sounded when one stopped a moment to think upon what must have been their original meaning. All else passes, and we, those whom history has passed by, cling to the sounds of our titles though we no longer hear them. Hyperlord itself was a title handed down by a long-ago deposed aristocracy. There were layers and layers of titles in the fabric of the Imperialis tradition, each reflecting some transient moment of power. Perhaps once there had been real ocean over that vast area of Splendid Wisdom called the Calmer Sea—perhaps in ancient days when Otaria’s unwashed ancestors had been brutal conquerors from hyperspace and Jama’s ancestors had not yet been invented.
Now every seabed of Splendid Wisdom was as dry as its moon, Aridia—enclosed, built over, sucked barren by time’s multiplying bureaucrats. Whatever currents of the Noachian oceans had once flowed within the Calmer Sea, such waters had long ago been siphoned off into the life-support piping of the planet, some of it breaking out during the Interregnum in a flood that drowned billions only to be recaptured by Dark Age engineers, hence forever to wander mournfully through a planetary maze of arterial fresh water and veined sewers, alternately becoming champagne and piss, blind to class, bathing the rich and poor alike, mixing with the blood of long-gone rebellions and the blood of commercial traffic from thirty million suns that bowed to Splendid Wisdom as the center of galactic power. One of the Frightful Otaria’s distant kith must have ordered the final taming of the Calmer Sea.
Jama was not sure when the Frightful people had themselves been pushed aside. There were too many conflicting histories. There were too many wars and too many intrigues and too many stars and too vast a span of time for one human with a single fam to comprehend. He did know that his own tide had arisen during the reign of the Som Dynasty, the first to map the campaigns of the awesome navies that led the sons and ships of Imperialis to galactic ascendancy over the peoples of thirty million stars, amalgamating myriad dominions by cunning, technical expertise, fear, diplomacy, and a legendary bureaucratic talent.
The Hyperlords had been some kind of political procurators who controlled the military men of the navy for Imperialis. In those days the Hyperlords had traveled. How they had traveled! But Jama could no more imagine the open power that they had wielded than they could have imagined the labyrinthine shadow schemings of his latter-day mind against a coterie of psychologists who ruled this Second Empire, not with protocol, but with feather-light leverings of their Little fingers on mathematically determined critical events.
He gave his ancestors only casual thought. Their distant power was too remote for him to envy. No, Hyperlord Kikaju Jama was nostalgic for a much later time in history, when complacency had taken the whole of the galactic civilization into the darkness of the (now only dimly remembered) Black Interregnum. That had been a fabulous millennium, when a galaxy dominated by Imperialis had fallen into chaos, war, collapse, massive die-offs, extinction, defeasance—and a strange kind of thrilling inventiveness.
Jama smiled. Throughout the whole kaleidoscope, covering multiple millennia of political rise and fall, some things never perished—the tides and the conceits survived, even some whose bizarre history had been lost in the entropy of the Fall. He grinned. Here was Otaria, who still proudly called herself a Frightfulperson of the Calmer Sea to honor the dregs of some barbarian past that would offend her if she was forced to live it.
The chute to his atrium shimmered, winked expansively, and Otaria dropped through, into the skyless garden of his metal grotto, stooping slightly while she did so because she wore her fam in a silly brimmed hat of feathers instead of gracefully on her shoulders. Why this silly fad to hide the damned fams? The eyelight followed his gaze and she was illuminated, a tall woman with luxurious black hair coiffured in the ringlet style, elegantly dressed.
“Well?” he asked, almost annoyed. Jama had not been expecting his old pupil and she had given him no time to prepare, even to change out of the comfortably threadbare lounging robe he had thrown on this morning. This appearance without an appointment was an outrageous invasion of privacy, but she did have the correct entry codes—he had given them to her willingly, fondly, and not very long ago. Regretting his sexual peccadilloes with a woman did not stop a misused old codger from liking her.
Otaria smiled with broad lips. “I have a man for you, a unique man.”
He did not speak. Ah, youth, he thought, an edge of irritation still in his emotions, vexed that this youngster should have caught him looking so old when a modest preannouncement would have allowed him time for wig and makeup and decent silks. He stared at her.
A man, eh? As if one man could solve my problems. By the happy expression on her face, he was probably a man “found” to solve her problems. Did young women think of nothing else? So hard to teach them the cunning discipline necessary for major subversion. And she was vain, too. By hiding her fam did she suppose that people would presume she could think without one! It was appalling the talent he was forced to work with.
But yes, he did need unique men—so she had his attention.
A conspiracy required thousands of men, competent men, incorruptible, dedicated men, moving behind screens, shielded from each other by deception and code, invisible to the masses, because they had to remain invisible to the Pscholars’ machines, which monitored all trends. Never be part of a trend. Safety lay only in being a unique individual who fitted no mathematical pattern.
Otaria was staring at him, not very respectfully, waiting for a reply.
Could the noble blood of revolutionaries like Otaria bring back the bad old days? Interregnums, filled with violence, were more interesting than utopian stasis. The last Dark Age, for all its years of chaos, had been the most creative period in human history since the days of wily Homo erectus.
Hyperlord Kikaju Jama knew he should not be building a conspiracy to destroy civilization here, in the heart of this awesome solar system of imperial power, three trillion people swarming around the star Imperials, almost a trillion of those on Splendid Wisdom itself. He should be building his pathetic little cabal out in some obscure comer of the galactic reaches—some miner’s iceworld in the Empty Sweep, perhaps. But his wealth was here at the teeming center, so here must be the core of his dissent. Yes, under the eyes of the observers. The game was hopeless—but still an interesting one, which was why it amused him to play.
Jama was sure that he had found the weakness of the Second Empire. The Pscholars knew only statistical mechanics and chaos, megamath and conformal caletrics, miniform numerical modeling, etc., etc.—they cared nothing for individuals. Their police did not even monitor individuals. Individuals were no more to them than the atoms of a vast gas-engine being regulated for maximum efficiency, the engine of galactic civilization. The galaxy would be unmanageable if the bureaucrats had to administer its thirty million worlds at the level of the individual. And so—the invisible individuals were Kikaju Jama’s weapon.
He did not chose to stare back at his Frightfulperson; he was staring through her, wondering if she was invisible enough.
Otaria contemplated her old teacher with increasing impatience. Since this crazy coot Kikaju had not replied to her statement, and was staring off into the space behind her head, she decided, rudely, to repeat herself. “I said I found a man. The man I’ve found,” she said with steely emphasis, “he’s a psychohistorian.”
The Hyperlord’s brain went from irritation to alarm. He tripped a warning analysis search in the fam buried in the humped shoulders of his lounging robe. The Pscholars’ psychohistorians were worse than their teeming police.
His fam calmly supplied him with silent thoughts, requests for information, questions, suggestions that might be used for a proper interrogation of the girl.
“We do not deal with psychohistorians,” he said sternly.
“Come now, they may be a pompous, overbearing elite who have limited aspirations, but you must admit that they’ve run our galactic affairs with an ironhanded honesty.”
“So they want us to believe,” Jama smiled wickedly. “When they lie to us they have the tools to do so very cleverly, and then the tools to make the lie disappear.”
“Kikaju . . .”
“I see that you doubt me. You think of me as a crotchety old man who makes unfounded allegations to puff up the importance of my cause. Let me share a detail—one of the items that have come to my attention over my inquisitive life. I’ll download it into your fam from mind and you’ll be able to judge my precision.”
Jama made a gesture while he muttered commands and Otaria went into receiver mode. He waited while her fam digested the burst. Long ago, in the fourth century of the Founder’s Era, fifty young psychohistorians were sacrificed to heal a major deviation in the Founder’s Plan. The catastrophe began with Cloun the Stubborn of Lakgan, the first Warlord of the Interregnum to get his hands on the tuned psychic probe. He was smart enough to be able to use it to bend minds to his will in a way that changed the psychological laws of human interaction over a galactic span.
The hidden psychohistorians who had been monitoring the Plan from the wreckage of Splendid Wisdom, in the fortress they had created out of the old Imperial University, were forced by these unhappy circumstances to act in the open to restabilize the Plan. But the Plan required that its monitors remain invisible. In order to redisappear, so that they might continue to control without having to be accountable for their actions, the Pscholars constructed an elaborate ruse of self-destruction. A lie. Pretending to be the whole of the monitoring group, fifty young psychohistorians went to the prison camps and death as martyrs.
