Courtship Rite

27

READING OVER HIS old predictions, ineradicably and forever a part of the Archives, Hoemei was appalled by his naivety. Aesoe had taught him like Tae had taught Aesoe, and he had imitated his master, not always grasping the direction of Aesoe’s vision. Now suddenly he was seeing with a new clarity.

The rayvoice project had been a shock. Aesoe believed in a Geta where authority was centralized in Kaiel-hontokae. For such a structure to be viable, rapid communication to and from the city was a necessity. Yet Hoemei had established only forty-five rayvoice stations, fourteen along the Njarae coastline, and the information flow was already unmanageable. He was now sure Aesoe had miscalculated the complexity level of a centralized government by orders of magnitude.

Hoemei’s visions came erratically, in dreams, perhaps suddenly in the middle of a conversation, often in full color. Sometimes as he sat over his papers by candlelight, well past his bedtime, he heard Getans from many futures discussing trivial problems of their day. He saw strange machines whose purpose half-baffled him.

Once when he had been reading an aerodynamic report that related flyer skill to flyer size, prepared by sailplane enthusiasts and o’Tghalie, he was washed with the image of a clan of tiny sky people who could stay aloft almost indefinitely on their man-made wings. Another time he saw a rayvoice that carried a flickering picture. He saw a man standing beside a great wheeled vehicle worrying about a problem ten weeks’ march away as if it were his own.

When he disciplined his strange vision to peer into the specific future which would use Aesoe’s map of a united world, he saw, sluggish as the armored ice worms of the far south, a huge social creature ridden by vast clans that moved rivers of information with little real effect. The images disturbed Hoemei because Aesoe’s cause had been his world, too, his avowed goal.

An o’Tghalie friend calculated for him that a reasonably nimble central government, with modest responsibilities, might require hundreds of times as many decision makers as there were citizens. Hoemei had been astonished. Prediction, it seemed, was treacherous when one embraced the fuzzy pictures that lay beyond the range of one’s myopic eyes.

He used an increasingly focused vision to sift through centrally governed futures, sometimes a dozen alternate Getas a day, each of which had been founded on different organizing principles. The clogged snarl of their cultures finally drove him to find wider worldscapes. He often stared into space, unaware of the room he was in, or of the people he was with, as if he were of unsound mind. From those visionary travels along the bewildering branches of far tomorrows he brought back a simple conclusion.

Too much local authority leads a region’s priests to maximize local benefits sub-optimally at the expense of distant peoples. Such cases represent the situation where essential information sources remain far from the deliberation and execution points and so tend to be unused.

Central authority, which theoretically maximizes benefits for the whole by gathering and using all information, in practice quickly becomes so choked that wisdom breaks down, again leading to far less than optimal solutions. Carrying information from any large area to a central location, and there correlating it, takes longer than the useful life of the information. Data degrades as it travels, or it doesn’t arrive in time, or it gets lost in the incoming flood and is never used.

Between the local/central extremes Hoemei saw many balanced worlds. Slowly he began to formulate his “short-path” theory of government that forever changed Getan history. There was a way to construct the decision nodes of a network so that the most optimal decision path tended to cause the atrophy of less economical ones. Nodes had to be connected in such a way that there were no unique paths to the top of the hierarchy. A man maintained his power within the system only by being on the most effective decision route through the multiple pathways leading to a solution.

Hoemei had much help from his o’Tghalie staff in formulating his notion of an ideal government. His basic model derived from the information flow theory which described an evolving biological ecology.

Not all of Hoemei’s efforts were serious. One evening he had a free-wheeling discussion with Noe about a world run by manifold governments, each layer’s fate being subject to kalothi ratings and Ritual Suicide obligations. Noe brought out a bottle of whisky. Before the bottle was finished, their imaginations were buying choice cuts of their least-liked agencies at the local butcher shop and concocting recipes to disguise the foul taste.

The amount of work Hoemei was learning to handle in one day was extraordinary. He was researching the consequences of different styles of governing, managing the rayvoice project, planning a famine relief program for the coast, monitoring the production of skrei-wheels, and designing a strategy to foil the Mnankrei, plus responsibilities on the new aqueduct design, and a small genetics hypothesis he was pursuing. However, he had his limits. He could falter and he did.

A clerk of the Clei, that indispensable underclan, entered the inner sanctum of Hoemei’s office where he was never to be disturbed and bowed deeper than usual because of the gravity of the interruption. “Yes?” Hoemei was curt, even though he knew that no one would enter here without having considered the urgency of his cause.

“We have just received a rayvoice message concerning Joesai.”

“Is he all right? And news of Teenae?”

“The information was relayed by our Soebo station, maran.” He spoke that half-formal form of address with another bow, reluctant to go on. ‘The message lacks completeness,“ he said trying to soften the blow, ”but it is unpleasant. Here is the transcript.”

Hoemei scanned the paper in great leaps. A Kaiel ship had been captured by the Mnankrei and brought to the port at Soebo. The identity of those manning the ship was not available but it was a number consistent with the party Joesai had taken to Sorrow.

“What in the Firestream of Getasun is he doing there!” Hoemei’s fear exploded as anger. “He’s supposed to be in Sorrow playing dandiman!”

“Joesai is an unusual priest, maran. He may have disliked the role of dandiman and taken it upon himself to investigate odors drifting from the north.”

Hoemei slumped. “That’s my brother.” Oh my God, and they will have Teenae, too. The report did not say they were dead, but a clan willing to starve thousands for political advantage would not be a kind captor. With a will he quenched himself — hot iron to steel. Death. Life had always been thus. A Getan protected himself with a large family so the loss would never be as great. But two at once!

He remembered the naked child, Joesai, saving him in his first Trial of Strength at the creche when he had been too young to really understand the danger. He had always been of small stature and unable to repay Joesai in kind, but many were the times he had anticipated Joesai’s troubles and thus prevented them — Joesai whose flashes of energy were too quick for sound judgment. Everyone had always said that this brother of theirs courted death, that his rashness lacked kalothi. Hoemei had expected him to die and had long ago prepared his stomach for that event, but not, it seems, prepared it well.

My brother! screamed his grief. Hoemei remembered Gaet laughing in the creche after the particularly harrowing Trial of the Knife and Puzzle. “When Joesai falls into the soup he makes a boat with the noodles.” How they laughed together as Death shaved their eyebrows!

While the man of Clei stood watch over the increasing shock of his respected priest, reluctant to leave until his maran seemed less shaken, a remembrance came to Hoemei of Teenae in the early morning of their wedding feast, he frozen by the door, his mind anxious for his child bride so vigorously taken by three young husbands who, affectionate as they might feel, had shown no real control over their lust. For a long time he stared at her, his guilt imagining her dead, desperate for signs of life in the wan predawn moonlight.

Her head lay against the pillow where they had left her, her nose in sharp profile, like sculptor’s wax, her body sprawled, one leg up, hand clutching his gift of lace nightdress above her hips so that her navel was shadowed. She was too young for a woman’s hips and showed but the barest signs of the high breasts she was later to carry. And she was so still Hoemei had hated Joesai for those overwhelming thrusts while they took her virginity; she was as still as death, her kalothi leached by pale Scowlmoon.

Then, it seemed, she breathed. Such relief. He went closer to watch her, to hold his fingers below her nose to feel the truth of her breath. Her head turned and her eyes opened serenely. “Um,” she said, remembering. “What was that all about? Am I really married now?” She pulled Hoemei to the pillows with her, curling around him, already asleep again. He left his hand cupped to her child’s breast, feeling the breathing, happy.

I need her, he thought now, unable to weep.

Dismissing the worried clerk, he paced about his office, the careful draft of his speculations about different governmental structures left in mid-sentence. Then he walked up through the ovoid levels of the Palace to the communications room and took command of the rayvoice and tried to reach Gaet who was in the hills supervising the laying of the new skrei-wheel road to Sorrow. Gaet could not be found. He left an anguished message to be relayed on foot by some Ivieth runner.

On the way home, he slogged for centuries through a berserkly giant kolgame in the city streets of Kaiel-hontokae laid out by cruel players, a wooden piece moved for some obscure strategic advantage. Noe knew when she saw his face. He never told her; he just cried. She refused to believe that Joesai and Teenae were dead; she questioned him and held out hope, barring her own shock, but Hoemei was sure and he bawled.

Noe would not cry. She did have a beloved co-wife with whom she could share her men, and little Teenae was not dead and Noe would not cry for nothing as long as she could force all her emotion into comforting Hoemei. Yet when her man slept, the tears burst forth, silently, rolling down the cicatrice designs of her cheeks like a flood upon plowed ground.