Psychohistorical Crisis

8

YOUNG ERON BEGINS HIS ADVENTURE, 14,790 GE

Emperor Daigin-the-Jaw

b: 5561 GE d: 5632 GE

reign: 5578 GE to 5632 GE

... during the midphase of Our Awesome Empire's inexorably patient sweep across the Galaxy, Daigin-the-Jaw ascended at seventeen. ..A charismatic mover, he sought to abandon Splendid Wisdom’s centuries old policy of sly political assimilation for an impetuous strategy of rapid conquest. The Imperial bureaucracy flushed with millennia of successful expansion, saw this youth as the embodiment of its ambition. They assembled and deployed for him the most formidable array of armies ever to swarm the human starways.

... only thirty-four when his strike forces numbered seven billion soldiers... exploits legendary. At forty-eight, personally in command of the Thirteenth Fleet...

...a stellar tide of rebellion marred his final victories, ending only with his death by perfidious ambush at the second battle of Blackamoor Cross...more than six thousand planned invasions put on hold...

—A Short History of Our Splendid Emperors

In a weaker gravity than Agander’s, Eron Osa bounded down the stairs of the narrow street with his newly acquired Short History gripped in both hands under one arm. He had been running all morning up and down the hillwalks and over the rideways of the Ulmat Constellation’s capital metropolis, poking into stores and botanical gardens, even exploring the hallowed grounds of the Vanhosen Scholarium at a lickety-split pace that no registrar would be able to match. (Having narrowly escaped the fate of being forced to study at Vanhosen, he was in no mood to be tapped inside its halls for years by unhappy lackeys in the thrall of his father.)

He did stop once at a collegiate caf£ to memorize the faces of the students he would never mix with long enough to know—silly girls with golden finger claws and arrogant boys with funny hats. Then he ran on. He had embraced as much strangeness as he could soak up before lunchtime. Down the stairs! Leap and fly!

Tutor Kapor sat, unsweating, at the appointed table in the little caf§ in the square across from their hotel. Eron plunked his book on the tabletop. “I’m not late!” He sank down in his seat with relief.

“A book?” queried his mild tutor.

“I bought it at a used-data emporium. Chip displays, all upstaging each other! I was bogglefied! You’ll never find such stuff trawling through an archive! It was enough to transmute the brain! I was staggering around the aisles dazed when I bumped into a bookshelf on the third terrace. Books are a lot quieter. What a relief!”

“You’ve never seen a book in your life!” admonished his tutor.

“I know!” Eron exclaimed happily. “That’s why I bought one.” He added defensively, “It’s not on your money stick— it was my credit. It’s all about the lives of emperors.” He saw less than approval in the eyes of Murek so he added accusingly, “You told me to study history!”

Eron’s elder companion nudged die volume. “I’m thinking about the freight charges. You didn’t, by any lucky chance, pick up the book’s template? With a piece of junk this massive, it’s easier to manufax a new copy every time you want to read it than to lug it around with you between the stars.”

“I can’t keep it?” Eron was stricken.

Tutor Kapor spun the tome a half turn on the tabletop to read the title. A Short History of Our Splendid Emperors: Kambal-the-First to Zcuikatal-the-Pious. He hefted it to make a more scholarly assessment. “Ooof. My arm exercises for the morning,” he added dryly. He examined the title page. “It’s an old book.” He sniffed it. “Cellomet. Old for sure. If I recall right, Zankatal-the-Noose predates our Founder by about a century.” A tip of the head meant that Eron’s tutor was about to elaborate on his comment. “‘Noose’ is not his official name, of course—it’s just what Zankatal was called out here in the nether reaches of the Galaxy where he was not thought to be so pious.”

He leaned back and slapped the heavy cover. “Sure, you can keep your book, Eron—as long as you learn what every young traveler has to learn: the freight to Faraway on this book is far more than the book will ever be worth. Since those charges will be on my stick, I’m going to ask a favor of you; you’re going to have to read the damn book. And it’s an old book—there’s no famfeed; it’s all eyefeed, page by page.” He laughed. “That’ll teach you to buy books!”

“It’s not really a book!” sulked Eron. “It’s automated!” He flipped out a fold-in back-cover flatplate. “It’s got an index. Press a button and it flips open to the right pages in sequence. There aren’t any pictures on the pages, but the flatplate will give you any picture you want.” He produced the animated vizeo of some emperor who offered them a posed benediction against a Splendid palatial interior. “Hot zits!” he exclaimed while looking at the grand architecture, which dwarfed even the majestic furniture. “They lived like that?”

“Look at the words, the words,'' admonished his tutor, who couldn’t stop for a jiff being a teacher.

“You don’t know what I’ve already read,” replied the stung student. “You think it was Daigin-the-Jaw who conquered the Ulmat. You told me that. You’re wrong. It was his son, Arum, in the reign of Daigin-the-Mild, who dropped in with his fleet and cut off our balls and then went home to Splendid Wisdom and cut off the Emperor’s balls just to show the Galaxy who was boss. When I found that, that’s when I bought the book. They don’t put stuff like that in the archives on Agander! Here!” He opened the pages at the right section, just to prove that he had found out something his tutor did not know.

Emperor Daigin-the-Mild b: 5597 GE d: 5671 GE reign: 5632 GE to 5641 GE

...bom aboard the warship Santaemo to an unknown Imperial concubine during the full fury of his father’s Persean-Cara Campaign. A music scholar and dilettante, the youngest and least favored son of Daigin-the-Jaw was raised to power—only watches after his father’s suspicious death—by a war-weary court desperately ready to pursue a hasty policy of galactic reconciliation and consolidation.

... was probably unaware of the arrest and execution of six of his half brothers during the prefatory rituals before his coronation. The seventh and wiser brother, Arum, a popular commander in his father’s armada, refused to return to Splendid Wisdom for the accession, pleading urgent military duties. Two years and three assassination attempts later, Arum answered the court’s vile actions by ordering the Eighteenth Mobile Fleet out along the Persean Arm to a swift subjugation of the Ulmat Constellation. The flawlessly executed attack had no other purpose than as a warning to the bloodily pacifist court to mind its own business or suffer slit throats.

Daigin-the-Mild ruled ineffectively with repeated attempts to reconcile with Arum until his impatient brother, weary of a game that required him to pretend loyalty to a brother he despised, returned to Splendid Wisdom at the head of his fleet, there to publically castrate the Emperor and send him off to exile, the flow of Empire now safely in his own hands.

Emperor Arum-the-Patient b: 5591 GE d: 5662 GE reign: 5641 GE to 5662 GE

As Emperor... maintained a fondness for his haven in the Ulmat. He used the Ulmat Constellation as his major naval base and later established there an Orbital War Museum in honor of his father. His nostalgic poems, especially “Ode to Agander’s Night,” was very popular at court until he was poisoned by his mother...

Eron stopped reading with a wistful smile on his face, still astonished that an Emperor had noticed his home planet. “Arum must have liked Agander. To have written a poem about us...but I couldn’t find the poem. I looked! Everything should be connected to everything else, so you can find things!”

A robotray brought the two intent scholars their lunch and waited patiently for them to remove the book before it would set the table. Murek took a bite of smoked fish, imported, probably Frisan; Mowist life had never evolved as far as fish. “There are a hundred quadrillion people out there all writing their memoirs and taking cubes of their newest baby, and you expect everything to be linked with everything else, and instantaneously, all the way back to the cave paintings of Lascaux? That a student’s life should be so easy! The Galaxy is a vast place,” he said tritely.

“A biography of the Emperors ought at least to have a reference to an Emperor’s poems!”

“I’ll bet that if you let me teach you a few of the tricks of historical research, you could find that poem within a year.” “I hate it when you make curiosity sound like work! I know something easier to look for. As emperor, Arum set up a war museum out here in the Constellation somewhere. Battleships and everything. To honor his father. What happened to it? Did all that super blasting power go into orbital decay and bum up, or what?”

This was just an offhand question that Eron wanted his omnipotent tutor to answer at once, but what he got for a reply made him wish he’d kept his mouth shut. “That’s a good question to practice one’s wits on,” said Murek in the voice he used when outlining an assignment.

They had only ten watches on Mowist before they were to ship out of the Ulmat Constellation entirely, and Eron found himself trapped into long bouts of historical research about a museum that wasn’t even there anymore! He was given a whole list of things to do, not all of which made sense. Eron could understand a few stints of frantic archival searching on the hotel’s obsolete equipment, but... interviewing people he didn’t know? checking out naval hobby shops? famfeed-ing museum management consultant brochures?

But he actually did find out what had happened to the Orbital War Museum. Daigin-the-Jaw’s surplus military artifacts, after millennia of preservation, had been pirated during the Interregnum and sold off to local warlords. This he reported glumly to his tutor. The man was not sympathetic, as was his dry nature. “What did you expect? An ancient Imperial dreadnought of the Horezkor class sitting out there waiting for you to inspect it?”

“Yeah,” said Eron dreamily, “that would have been nice.” “Then why didn’t you talk to the local tourist bureau?” Eron looked up quickly. When he saw the twinkle in his mentor’s eye, he knew instantly that he had been had and rushed off to the hotel’s comm to check out all the tourist attractions. Yes, there was a Horezkor dreadnought on display, the only ship of Arum’s Museum armada that had not been sold or stolen—lacking at the time any functioning hyper-drive motors or weapons. A few hundred years ago the restored hulk had been incorporated as a part of the Greater Station, which served the Ulmat’s distant interstellar traffic.

Eron had missed it only because, from Agander, he and Kapor had hypered into Mowist’s Lesser Station, which served the local Ulmat routes. Belatedly Eron checked their outbound reservations from the Greater Station, and much to his chagrin found a full-color advertisement for the “astonishing” Horezkor tour.

He thought about the enigma of his tutor, the young far-man who was taking him, miraculously, on the adventure of his life from which he would probably never return. His father expected him to return, but once Eron had seen Agander from orbit—a blue-green wispy white ball against the spectacular clouds of space from which it had “recently” formed—he had made the conscious decision never to return. Was such a decision revokable?

He wandered back to their hotel room and found Kapor asleep, but he didn’t care. Nefarious humor didn’t deserve consideration. “Are we going to take the Horezkor tour before we board our ship?” he demanded in a loud voice. “It’s two kilometers long. It’s got everything! When it was built it had the largest hyperatomic motors in the universe! Please.”

A half-opened eye looked up at him. “Wouldn’t miss it. It’s on our itinerary.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? You rat!” Eron was angry enough now to shake his mentor fully awake—but he didn’t.

“I’m dumping you at Faraway,” said the sleepy voice from the bed. “You can’t expect me to do your research for you forever. A lot of Pscholars think their math is so powerful that they can ignore the past when they predict the future—but they lose the kind of insight that makes for the elegant use of their tools. If you want to get as far as Splendid Wisdom and make your mark there, you’ve got to know a million years of history well enough to dream through the rise and fall of any civilization before breakfast.”

“A million years! We haven’t been around that long! The Empire is still a baby!”

“You don’t think we were bom in the sublight ships of the first expansion wave, do you? Home is a cave, food consists of slugs that live under rocks, and the starry sky is a shining cave roof just out of reach. A lot between then and your own civilization. You’ll have to know it all, and I’m not going to learn it for you. I’m going back to sleep. It’s the middle of my sleep-watch! You’re on your own.” Then in the direction of the light he said, “Off!” before turning back to Eron. “Your next assignment,” he continued in the darkness, “is to find out what was in the Ulmat before mankind arrived.”

Eron reluctantly let his taskmaster sleep, but thought indignantly hurt thoughts nevertheless. He already knew the

decolonization history of the Ulmat! Nothing! All the plants in the Ulmat Constellation were young, the oldest having coalesced no more than two billion years ago. Agander was he youngest of them all. Soup! That’s what the colonists lad found. Yeach, and soup that probably didn’t even taste very good. Only Mowist had once supported multicellular life, little nondescript spiny things that had been a kind of a water pump. Rakal hadn’t even had soup—no water. Dumb-top Kapor thinks I don't know anything.

But he soon forgot the slight and was, in his imagination, marching through the guts of a battleship in all the full-color glory that an active fam could provide to the mind’s eye. He gave the orders on the bridge. He reviewed tier after tier of battle stations. He was the commander who had once conquered Agander!