Far futures, p.24
Far Futures, page 24
At this hour the Teaser’s was quiet but, as always, never empty. The long row of tables marched down the central hall, wood, each of them carved over, to the last fragment of flatness, with the wit of a perennial “tool”-carrying youth: knives, drills, atomic cobblers. Some of the more solid tables had once graced the mansions of First Empire nobles whose line had perished during the Sack; some were of recent manufacture. Old tabletops served as wall paneling to preserve the wit, and were replaced by fresh tables with virgin surfaces of hardwood.
The central row was for the boisterous crowd who enjoyed the mob scene of dealing and repartee. Alcoves served the quieter interests; some even came equipped with sonic suppressors. The ambience of the Teaser’s crowd hadn’t changed. They were young people with an intellectual bent, serious in their discussions, serious in the quality of their fam aids. Their humor was witty rather than rowdy. And they were all uncomfortably impatient with the stolidness of their Splendid upbringing, restless for the adventure that none of them were quite sure they could handle if they ever found it.
The women, one even as young as fifteen, all wore clothing that was out of style but sensuously reminiscent of another era of blatant power or devil-take-it-all. They knew their history. The boy-men preferred a caricature of military style, not from the days of fighters like Peurifoy, or from the heroic Wars of the Marches, or even in imitation of the ragtag utilitarianism of the armies of the Interregnum, but uniforms of irony; their clothing mocked the generals who had served as toad bodyguards to the weak Emperors of the Late First Empire.
As much as this had once been his element, Eron Osa was out of place. He kept to a table by himself, afraid to enter conversations without a fam that would give him instant access to the quip that would outwit his challenger. There were hand signals by which a wall-spy would take his order, but he didn’t order and finally a lean waiter approached him tentatively.
“Are you all right, sir?”
“Thinking.” Eron smiled wanly. “Haven’t been here for a while. Do you still carry the Gorgizon?” That had always been his order, Gorgizon. It was an obscure Imperial Navy drink, milky and thick, that booted its imbiber into a long high-energy drive. The bastard civilianized version contained a dram of sweet liqueur. It had taken him through many an exam.
“Gang-hu!” grinned the waiter, giving the Old Navy flat-handed salute.
But it was Rigone who appeared from a back room and picked up the drink from the bar. He held it as his own and talked his way down the row of tables, ruffling heads with his free hand, exchanging affectionate insults, staying conversations in midstream till he was past.
He paused at Eron’s table, as if it were a simple visit on his rounds, plunked down the drink, and made himself comfortable. “Ah, the prodigy is back.”
“I’m on vacation,” said Eron, staring at the tattooed face of the Scav in fascination.
Rigone was grinning. “As if you ever took out time from your permanent vacation to work up a lather. Drink up.” He nudged the mug. “A special on the house.” His eyes glinted at the word “special” and locked on to Eron’s with a commanding insistence, waiting.
Eron sipped a taste. The drink was milky white—but no Gorgizon—a different brew with a different kick. His instinct was to resist it. He hesitated, but Rigone’s gaze did not falter until he took a good first gulp. Then Rigone’s stare relaxed.
“Well—so you’re back.” It was a statement that demanded an answer.
“Just cruising.” Eron was no longer comfortable. “Taking it easy.” The drink had a quick-acting knifelike urgency to it, moving his mind somewhere in a rush. Danger. “Cruising. Navigating without charts.” Did he trust this man?
“No, no,” said Rigone. “I detect the nervous shiftiness of a man on the make. There’s an aura of quiet desperation about you. You’re in a hurry for your good time.”
Eron’s mental machinery was racing. Slow down. “I’m . . . not . . . in a hurry.”
Rigone took his arm in an iron grip, squeezing, saying: you’re coming with me now. He let go in a gesture that added: but not by force. The wrinkles about his intense eyes told of an old friendship that was not going to give Eron any choice. “I know your tastes, aristo Osa. It is our business to know our clientele. That allows us to make fast deals at the Teaser’s. It so happens that right now I have just the girl for you. She’s thirteen, new to the place, and looking for adventure. A brash kid. You have just the level of maturity she needs to keep her under control. And she has just the right level of insouciance not to know that the world is a dangerous place—or she wouldn’t be upstairs right now, snoozing in my bedroom. I want you to meet her.” He stood up.
It was a command. Eron was to follow him. Eron, in response, hastily downed the last of his drink while rising, then let Rigone herd him, without seeming to be herded, toward the back of the bar, and up the stairs, and slowly past force barriers into Rigone’s private quarters.
The door closed with a vaultlike sigh, and its force field flickered on at maximum strength. The room held the spacious luxury of a man used to wealth. One wall was even reserved for the ultimate in space wasting—four shelves of worn antiques that were not the reproductions of any manufacturum. They were black-ivroid boxes, books from the Middle First Empire. On those shelves, Eron knew, were more antiquarian titles than any one man could absorb through his eyes in one lifetime. Few citizens of Splendid Wisdom could understand the Scavs’ penchant for collecting originals, but collect they did. The better museums were all run by Scavs.
Rigone noticed his glance and tapped on a box, disguised in its own black-ivroid casing. “A modem reader. Projects a book in any desired format and translates the archaisms if you wish. I like the books. The original reader is not up to my standards.”
“And where is your collection of thirteen-year-old virgins?” asked Eron dryly.
Rigone laughed. “Any spy-beam that tries to penetrate my sanctum will only hear a frivolous conversation between me and you and a silly young girl—but she only exists in the imagination of my script-writing software. The real thirteen-year-old is asleep on the floor of my water room and she is no virgin. I sincerely hope that, by now, the robo-maids have cleaned up her vomit. She has been a curious pest of the kind who has to pick up every tool she sees and flick it into active mode just because it’s there. You will do me the favor of taking her with you when you go, firmly.” He swung open the bookcase. “But here is what you came for.”
On a velvet-lined tray was a fam. “Not a standard manufacture” was Eron’s first surprised comment.
“No. And I don’t know who in the galaxy did make it. It’s hot and I’m glad you’re here to take it off my hands—to say nothing of that thirteener. I thought you’d never arrive.”
“Can I use it? Is it safe?”
“Of course it’s not safe!” Rigone roared. “But it wasn’t built by the men who executed your old fam, and that is in your interest.”
Gingerly, Eron picked up the device off the black velvet, turning it over quizzically, longingly. “Your price?”
“I’ve been paid.”
“By who?”
“I assure you that’s not a detail I want to know about.”
Eron guessed. “Somebody who knows you is trying to cut into the market here on Splendid Wisdom, get to the kids early. Does it come with specs?”
“Specs? You’re dreaming. It’s a one-of-a-kind. I did do a rough probe of its routines; not bad. I didn’t like the fam-controlled bomb I had to defuse. But I was impressed by its full range of math abilities.” Eron’s heart leaped. “It can do math?” He wanted it badly.
“Not in any language you or I ever learned. But cleanly done. You’ll be years getting used to its hailing codes. But it has a fine daydreaming mode that patiently cycles you through the hooks into its routines. While I was at it I probed for kickers and traps. Seems clean, but I only know most of the tricks. I don’t know everything. The techies who built that sweet familiar know more head-spinners than I ever will. It’s got power claws.”
“Would you chance it?”
“I’d as soon stick my head in a buzz saw. You’re the one who has no choice.” Rigone grinned.
“Give me a rundown on the worst I’ll have to watch for.”
“It’s not new,” Rigone scowled. He patted the machine and it seemed to cling to his fingers, molding itself to them before he shook it off. “There’s a man in there. It’s haunted.”
“You’ve been grave-robbing again?” said Eron with some sternness, but also a muted disgust, because he knew horribly that he was in no position to turn down a ghoul.
Rigone laughed hollowly. “Me? I only grave-rob for spare parts, not ghouls. The young man in there was murdered.” And before Eron could even think it, Rigone’s voice hardened. “Not by me, not by any Scav— your people murdered him.”
Eron was past taking that as an insult. Eron’s people had murdered Eron’s fam. “Tell me the story.”
“You think I know the story? I don’t know the story. I’m a Scav. I’m a middleman. I don’t want to know the story. I’m a Scav and I’ve never been dumb enough even to want to take on the Pscholars. They run the galaxy. I stay alive. So be it. But I don’t like what they did to you. What I’m doing for you is a personal favor, not a blow against the Fellowship. You and I were friends of a sort, as much as a Scav and a Pscholar ever get to be—and you don’t even remember. That horrifies me. I’ll tell you what little I know but it’s not much. A young man going by the name of Scogil—don’t know what he looks like—never met him—was running some kind of astrology scam. Big deal. More power to him. Where in the galaxy can you find more suckers in one place than on Splendid Wisdom?”
“Astrology?”
“The same racket you’re in—predicting the future—amazing people with the mystery of your sublime vision.”
Eron ran his fingers over the holster of his inactive fam. “I can’t cross-reference my feelings anymore but my feeling is that astrology died out long ago.”
Rigone shrugged. “It’s been through its mutations. Don’t know much about the subject myself. Predicting the future is not my thing— we’ve never been able to compete with the Pscholars on that so we do other things. Who’s ever met a Pscholar who could clean out a clogged shower head? So that’s the kind of thing we do.” After reading a few titles on his ivroid boxes, Rigone reached for one to pop into the reader. “Haven’t I heard that astrology was Terra’s first science? Probably. Astronomy is the easiest of the sciences and gives one the authority to commit all lands of flimflam. Did it die out? Not likely!” He called up the search menu and chattered keywords at it in the Old Imperial Dialect. “There are eight thousand plus volumes in that single box and I’m sure . . .” The search flicker stopped. “Ah, we have the Navigators.” He grinned. “Perfect!”
What appeared in front of Eron’s eyes was a page of Imperial Court history from the reign of Kassam the Farsighted, year 7763G.E. Kassam had run his galactic affairs by the mysteries of the Navigators, who could predict anybody’s future given (1) his birth date, (2) the galactic coordinates of his birthplace, and (3) the direction in which his head had been pointed during his first bawling cries.
Rigone flipped through the text and brought up a smug holo of Navigator Cundy Munn, Court Panjandrum and Splendid Wisdom’s master Imperial Advisor for twelve heady years, regally dressed with the portable controls of his galactarium held under one arm. He had been executed after the Battle of Thirty Suns, an unmitigated disaster for Imperialis which led directly to the two hundred years of the endless Wars of the Marches. Kassam had perished the same night and the new rational-minded Emperor henceforth reduced the appeal of the Navigators by having them tortured for entertainment at his coronation.
“The popularity of foolishness waxes and wanes,” philosophized Rigone as he switched off the reader, chuckling.
“You’re pretty sanguine for a man who is setting me up to share the mind of an astrologer,” said Eron morosely.
Rigone was still chuckling. “Am I listening to a superstitious Pscholar? Did your brother tell you the tale of Monto Salicedes under the covers when your mother thought you were asleep?” Monto Salicedes was a famous story, popular among children as a spine-tingling tale of horror set in the mythical world of Old Empire. Monto was a social-climbing fam, the ghoul of a bitter old man who stole the life of each new host and had him murdered in such a way that it was able to parasite the body of someone in a higher station than its last host. Finally reaching the position of Emperor, it went mad, lacking any higher station to which it might aspire. That there was no such thing as a familiar in the distant days of Old Empire was a mere matter of poetic license that bothered the trembling children not one whit.
“Ah, Monto,” sighed Eron. He took off his shirt and undid from its collar the general-issue fam that he’d never activated. He lifted the ghoul from the velvet, warmer and more fluid than any fam he’d ever touched, slipped it into place on his neck—it needed no holster—then re-donned the jacket-shirt. It took another moment of courage to give the locking commands. He felt a dizzying surge, nothing else.
However horrible the story, Monto Salicedes was just a fable to stir emotions. For sure, there was a man trapped in this new fam who was now activated, but the poor soul could exist only in his own hell, half his mind gone; there was no way that this ghoul in the machine could ever communicate with his host, Eron Osa. Eron and alien fam had been created apart, each maturing with its own uniquely uncrackable neuronal-neurodal code, forever incommunicado.
Eron’s mind would gradually invade the old and now powerless personality of the fam, subsuming its assets and memory space, crowding it out, creating a new symbiosis of fam and man by the slow process of learning. Eron had become Eron Osa the Second—his old memories and abilities forever gone with his original fam—but now a man no longer limited to the barbarous vicissitudes of a famless organic life. He had ceased to be a psychohistorian, or even a mathematician—he didn’t even have a position in society—but he was whole and could learn again.
And yet—there was a crippled man in there, imprisoned for life in a dungeon without windows or doors. “This Scogil; you haven’t finished your story. How did he die?”
“The police were hunting him.”
“The police don’t usually kill.”
“The fox doesn’t usually run so well. I don’t know. He was trapped and just ahead of capture. There is something in that fam of yours that Scogil didn’t want to fall into their hands. He pulled the oldest trick in the game—the split: the decoy goes yapping one way while the treasure skedaddles off in another direction. He was the decoy. The treasure is here, on a cold trail, and you’ve become responsible for keeping it hidden—without knowing what you are hiding. He thought he might be able to come back for it . . . but I heard with my ears on the water pipes that yesterday . . .”
“I wonder . . .”
Rigone interrupted the reverie. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you are in charge of something valuable—it might be just another astrological algorithm that a dead fanatic was willing to give his life for. No one will ever know.”
Eron changed the subject to an immediate concern. “You’ve doped me,” he said. It wasn’t an adrenaline rush he was feeling, but his mind was unnaturally eager.
“Yeah. A P-drug cocktail. You’ll need them. Don’t sweat. You’ve got big learning problems right now. Recall that the tuned probe is a subtle variant of the psychic probe. The psychic probe was once used to extract information from men with the sad side effect of reducing them to idiots. P-drugs were originally developed to make the victims last longer under interrogation. For the first hours under a tuned probe you need drugs.”
“I’ve used a fam all my life!” retorted Eron.
“Believe me, you need the drugs. You’re used to being in symbiosis with your fam. That power pack on your neck isn’t your old familiar fam—it doesn’t know you. Its tuned probe is going wild right now trying to make connections it thinks are there but can t find. You two will be months in a calibration roller-spin ride. I should keep you doped up and in bed for two days. Don’t push yourself for a while.”
Rigone swung in a dissection kit for quantum-electronic devices. He was dismantling pieces of Eron’s common-issue fam. “You’re going to need your old identity module to access your bank accounts.” He attached a small machine to the fragment and put it near Eron’s skull. “Okay. Done. That new fam of yours is fancy illegal. It can mimic identities. It has ten identities of its own each with a history and a bank account. I’ve disabled the two that Scogil used up before he was killed. You’ve got eight identities to use, as well as your own. My advice is to take the Emperor’s Vacation.” That meant to sneak off-planet incognito. That said, he began the careful process of obliterating the remains of the common-issue fam.
“There’s an awful buzz in my head,” said Eron. “Is that the drugs?”
Rigone laughed. “No, kid, that’s the ghoul. Scogil is frantically pounding on the walls of his prison trying to speak to you but talking in a code that only the organic Scogil could understand. Mathematicians tell me there are more possible neural-neurode network codes than there are atoms in the universe. Good luck cracking it!”
“The fam seems dead to me. I can’t seem to call up any of its routines—or copy any memories for recall. It’s all a buzzing blank.”
“Relax. You’re trying to work at the macro level. Forget it. His macros aren’t your macros. And whatever world this fam comes from, it doesn’t use Splendid Wisdom’s common-issue macros. Totally different interface. Go back to basics; you didn’t have any macros when you were three. The world was a strange place and you had to figure it out.”
Eron slumped down into an aerochair. “This will take years!”
Rigone pulled him up out of the chair. “I’m sure. But not here. You’ll have to leave. Now. And you can’t ever come back, kid. I have my neck to consider. So far as I’m concerned, I haven’t seen you for years before today. I hear a rumor that you are in trouble with the Fellowship for publishing. You turn up looking for a girl. I give you one. My opinion, if asked, is that you were a very stupid boy to publish. My true opinion.”
