Psychohistorical Crisis

13

NEUHADRA OF THE THOUSAND SUNS, LATE 14,790 GE

With the Even-Hand and Fair Mind of Our Just Emperor and in His Name we find that §145 of the Treaty of Sanahadra states, unequivocal, that the newly allegiant Heimarian people of the Thousand Suns Beyond the Heimar Rift have agreed to accept minority status on the planets terraformed and/or colonized and/or claimed by their ancestors as specified in §Appendix-P.

—Count Ism Nokin of the Splendid Praxis Court:

Ruling #AZ-243 ci 7992 GE

Something was awry. The young mind of Eron Osa sensed it. He had learned to read nuances in people’s expressions, learned to read the motive behind preoccupations and the meanings in sudden changes of plan. He hadn’t spent years spying on his father for nothing. Now cast from home, fatherless, he held under continuous surveillance only his tutor— who increasingly showed symptoms of secret motivations that...

Creeping up above the Great Arm, jump by jump, to a position where ninety-five percent of the galactic plane was below them like a great sparkling sea, it began to strike Eron how awesomely huge the Second Empire really was and how little he knew of it. After their third jump his curiosity was so demanding that the Chairman of the Bridge lent him the use of her telescope to zoom in on whatever features of the celestial sphere he might find while the idle ship recharged its hyperatomics.

The circular screen dominating the bridge was as expansive as a vanity mirror in an expensive brothel. Adding to the impression, the encircling baroque bronze frame sported leafy vines that modestly clothed voluptuously shy tree sprites. The control toggles were nymphs and undines and maenads and sylphs, sensual to the touch. A companion celestial roboconsultant sat beside it in the disguise of an open-mouthed sibyl with four breasts. Above the telescope were pinned two good-luck charms—one an icon of Emperor Kambal-the-First and the other, in full regalia, a tiny replica of Emperor Harkon-the-Traveler.

After start-up the telescope’s immense milky surface dissolved into life. Eron fiddled with its contrast and resolution and magnification like an eager four-year-old. What was fun was to toggle through some of the frequency filters. He had the whole electromagnetic spectrum at his command, picking a broad band from radio to gamma to see everything, or a narrow band of ultraviolet from 150 to 250 nanometers to see only suicidally hot stars, or he could filter out all the stars that didn’t have a specific set of, say, fraunhofer carbon lines. They were alone now, but he had been told that if he time-space linked up with the telescopes of other ships he could even see planets up to fifty leagues away. Wow! He imagined himself as a Stars&Ship general, with a thousand starship telescopes hooked together planning an attack on a remote solar system.

And he could aim the telescope wherever he wanted without asking the boss-witch to move the ship! Where to look? He happily famfed into the instrument a few choice coordinates from a stellar catalog he had once memorized on a winter’s evening while scanning Agander’s heaven with his binoculars. Wonderful! Even useless knowledge stuffed into his extra brain could come in handy at unexpected moments!

First he picked up Agander’s star and stared at it for a full inamin before he swung the image...

... to bring in the swirl of Andromeda. Was there another edacious empire across the vastness of intergalactic space eating up planetary systems? He imagined, in pastel color, intelligent lizards with eyes in their nose who wore coats of tanned mammal skin and kept their many-jeweled timepieces in pockets tooled of soft female breast leather, each closed by a brass ring in its nipple.

Grinning, he jumped his instrument to a local nebula called the Great Demiurge with its skein of exploding filaments, a solar system blasted, its history undecipherable, its records rendered into plasma... then bounced his aim in the direction of Splendid Wisdom’s Imperialis but could see nothing in the dazzle of the central confabulation of stellar voices.

There was a presence behind him. “Not that way! Are you looking for Splendid Wisdom?” It was the two-breasted mammalian Chairman of the Bridge, who maintained a live infrared link to monitor her cub’s use of her telescope, holding herself in free-fall behind him. When he got things wrong the old witch turned up and mussed his hair and corrected his hand—so that with only a few false starts...

This time she showed him how to simulate the main stars between here and Imperialis and to flick-toggle back and forth between sim and real in feedback overlay mode. He was able to see where Imperialis would be if only the dazzle didn’t get in the way. Dreamily he remembered the first millennium of emperors from his book—greedy as they were, in the first thousand years of their nascent human empire they had been able to conquer only a small fraction of the vastness included in this single telescopic view.

He wanted to know everything. Why hadn’t his tutor told him everything? His eyes strayed from the telescope. What was tutor Murek hiding? Why had they suddenly changed plans at Ragmuk? Was the money stick empty? Why had their credit dried up? A cautious distrust of farmen was preventing him from asking. But he intended to find out with a spider’s patience. All he had to do was feign innocence and wait for hints to flit too closely to his web. High on Eron’s priority list was an upgrade to more memory and a faster mind.

But that could wait at least until the maternal Chairman had pried him away from her telescope!

He didn’t have all the pieces yet. Was Murek Kapor this farman’s real name? Hints... slips... indicated otherwise— but he didn’t yet know why his tutor had changed names or what identity it masked. Was he running from the law? The masks out here in the empire were everywhere! If only he could see far enough, he could see the roofscape of trees that masked the Lyceum on Splendid Wisdom!

Never enough time for everything! The old witch brought out the watch cycle’s duty roster and gave him his next assignment. He sighed. No more telescope. He didn’t even plea. He knew this she-witch by now. She patted his bum with a firmness that gently propelled him off in the direction of his work.

Scrubbing gave him lots of time for further brooding. He had already deduced that his tutor’s promise of a scholarship was worthless. What could be more revealing than their accommodations for Neuhadra? His mentor and Rigone had a small double-bunked cabin, horrible enough—but he was relegated to sharing with a crewman. He dreamed of a morning sun pouring in over leafy vases of plants. Had he actually been gauche enough to grumble at his mother while she held onto his ears as he sullenly watered them? How had he failed to notice the glory of his luxurious room back in the highlands of Agander’s Great Island? Scraping centuries of neglected dirt from the encrusted walls of a dim ship’s corridor gave him a sudden respect for a mother’s taste in design and furniture and her insistence on their regular maintenance.

He was allowed to sleep only when his bunkmate was on duty-watch. It seemed to be a part of the contract Murek had negotiated that for Eron pay his way by cleaning and performing tasks too menial for a robocrab. Various parts of the ship were undergoing repair. When he dared complain, that scruffy matron, the witch, only smiled and found more work for him to do on that theory that a busy boy was a happy boy. She could afford theories like that! She wasn’t mean but he sometimes shocked her and she responded with an expression that implied You aren't by any chance under the delusion that you are, by some divine right, a passenger? Other than assigning him yucky work, the Chairman of the Bridge noticed him only when she had some ship’s arcana to teach. Like telescopes. Once she slipped him a cookie from the secret store she kept in her bra. It tasted better than the gruel in the mess.

Centijiffs added up to inamins, a hundred inamins by the gulp to hours. Watches passed. A hundred watches added up to a month. He was coming to a boil. Working with his hands, sleep, scrub, sleep, paint, sleep, hustle and defer! There was a limit to such indignity! He was the son of a Gandarian High Adjudicator!

But before Eron broke out in open revolt, Murek hastily restrained him with a curt “Do what you’re told. This is nothing. Where we’re going they have child labor contracts that make the Chairman of the Bridge look like your sainted mother.” And then his eyes twinkled but Eron wasn’t sure he was joking. “I can sell you for pocket credit when we get into port. Plans don’t always work out the way they are supposed to, and you, you little pest, ask too many questions. Yes, to answer you, I don't know exactly what I’m doing; but aren’t we still jumping by the grace of my wit? So keep your mouth full of potatoes and shut up with the whining.”

That didn’t exactly sound like master Murek Kapor knew what he was doing, wits or witless. Eron decided to postpone his revolt. They still had endless watches ahead of them to jump from one murky hell of a barren outpost to the next. That gave Eron time to plot—in his dreams—jail-breaks from dark interstellar worldlets. Would Murek really sell him into slavery? Wasn’t slavery illegal everywhere? Wasn’t this the Second Empire! The Founder help him if he had fallen back in time to the Glory Centuries of the Evil Empire!

After roundabout hyperspatial spelunking far from any sun, the tedium broken only by the trading stopovers at minor interworlds of the stellarways, the Chairman made the announcement that they had reached Neuhadra. At last! Eron was reassembling pipes that he had painfully polished inside and out. No more of such drudgery! But he wasn’t reassured. After all, this was the Planet-with-the-Child-Labor-Laws.

Eron knew his guardian had been reduced to pauper-hood—but by how much? He knew that a certain young boy was the only salable commodity that his tutor possessed— but would Murek really... ? Of course it was only logical to anticipate the worst. And then again, maybe not. It was true that he trusted Murek. Maybe he’d go along with him. Nevertheless he had contingency plans to take off on his own as soon as they hit dirt. Yes. Like a rocket on antiprotons!

But life never makes sense just at the moment when you think you have all the angles covered. The Chairman of the Bridge slipped him a last cookie from her bra. The roboskiff delivered the three of them, Murek and Rigone and Eron, to the high customs station where they were met by a golden yacht with huge decorative fins and two solicitous crewmen who bypassed them around customs procedures and brought them down to planet inside a wood-burnished cabin whose robocook served them champagne and soft-boiled eggs. With fresh egg in his mouth, Eron goggled out at the awesome twilight landscape below—which was rapidly expanding into a private spaceport between mountain peaks. It seemed to serve a single castle. Was this castle-on-a-lake the planet’s largest slave owner?

It was night and cold when they debarked. A fresh frost was on the ground, on the buildings, on the fields, on the trees, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, only stars. They were given electrical coats and Eron marveled that when he breathed, fog came out of his mouth. It was thin air. Their furry hats were oxygen concentrators that hid an optional face mask. Some kind of hardy bird was chirping an evening sleep call.

And wonder of wonder, stars were falling everywhere from the sky. He tugged at the brocaded sleeve of his tutor’s guest-coat.

It was Rigone who responded. “Looks like we arrived in time for a real shower.”

“Does this all the time, not every hour, but most months,” volunteered their uniformed escort, guiding them to a waiting aerocar.

“See those bright stars up there?” As they walked through the cold, Eron’s strange farman was being a teacher again, pointing toward two brilliant lights halfway up the sky and to a smaller blaze above the mountains where the Galactic Swirl powdered the horizon. The beacons looked like artificial searchlights but they didn’t move. They were stars! “Neuhadra is in a seven-system; we can’t see the other four from here. Our companions are far enough away so that Neuhadra is in a stable orbit even if it isn’t as circular as the climatologists might like—but our companions make it hard for the debris out there to settle down. That makes for good comet watching and brilliant shooting-star displays. I don’t think anyone on Neuhadra doesn’t keep an eye out for errant debris.”

“Have you been here before?” asked Eron.

“Nope, but my friend Mendor used to squawk about the sky falling when we were in school. All the time.”

“Is he a mathematician, too?”

“And a very good one. Also rich ” Murek stooped to whisper a final word in Eron’s ear. Eron couldn’t see the grin, but he could hear it. “I got us here just in time! How about that? Are you as hungry as I am?”

Their heated aerocar pressurized itself for the short hop to the gabled roof of a family mansion big enough to hold a hundred rooms. From the rooftop landing pad it looked even bigger. Chimneys! Eight of them. Did they have the same function as the huge chimneys on Splendid Wisdom that controlled the weather? “No,” said Rigone. His guess was that they were part of the air conditioning.

Eron tried to compose himself without saying much while he sat through a raucous late dinner with the Glatim clan. There were more servants than people! And the servants all had robots to attend them who morphed out of the walls on command. The bustle went on and on. Neuhadra had a long day and an equally long night, punctured by several twilights. For the whole of the dinner from roast fox to lady fingers in marmalade cream sauce, Murek was immersed in his reunion with his old friend, Mendor, getting behind in his eating—and then holding his palm up and out to stop the conversation while he caught up on the food with a quick fork and rapid munching.

Eron eventually mustered up enough courage to nudge his friend and ask quietly in his ear, “Is this where I’m to be sold?”

His tutor only grinned happily. He returned the nudge, slightly off target. “You’ll just have to put up with my sense of humor. Remember how I pulled your leg about the Horezkor?” he teased. His voice was slurred. “Maybe I just might buy a present for you. Have you ever owned an underage slave?”

It was all an astonishing transition from poverty to wealth. It hadn’t been more than two watches ago that Eron was breaking his back scrubbing down a wretched little starship that could have been the Alcazar’s lost dungeon of his childhood imagination. From that to a gravity that made his legs leap, to a table laden with too much food, in a room that was far too big and full of light-headed people, all overdressed, all strangers. It was outrageous that Murek forbade him to wear a holstered kick among so many unknown farmen! His mind was boggled at all the conflicting cues; by the time the clock boomed Neuhadra’s midnight hour he was woggy enough to welcome any kind of bed, even a starship’s closet. His sense of time was out of whack—they didn’t live by watches here, and their day wasn’t properly decimalized!

He hadn’t realized until trying to stand that he’d also been drinking too much of the sweet wine. Maybe it was the thin air. A young maid, probably his own age, supported him to his rooms with an amused forbearance, picking up his luggage on the way, not that there was much of it. She hefted his book as if she’d never seen one before. He didn’t feel comfortable with such a wisp of a child doing a man’s work, yet she became amused and uncooperative when he tried, out of Ganderian politeness, to unburden her.

“You’re drunk, sir,” she remonstrated with a smile. “Another stagger out of you and I’ll throw you over my shoulder.”

So he just complied. Murek had warned him about strange customs—and, after all, she was a farman. He was too tired to think more about it. With the maid’s gentle help—she was strong—he managed the stairs after only a single lapse of dignity. Their journey along a planked second-floor hallway (enormously wider than the ship’s corridors he’d been resurfacing) led them to the portal of a bedroom he couldn’t believe. But he had no zest left to explore; he went straight to the bed, big enough for a man four times his size, and in less than a jiff he was asleep. Facedown on the nearest pillow.

When Eron woke the next morning it was to the golden-red light of a dawn pouring over him. He’d had enough sleep; Neuhadra was a lazy planet with a long day, 37 percent greater than the galactic standard of three watches, but the slight girl, who should have been gone, was still in attendance. She must have undressed him for he was naked. She was in bed with him, and naked, too, still asleep, her warmth under the comforter close and erotic. That was all very un-Gandarian and unexpected. He was so shocked that he turned his head away, toward the oval window that was as big as the room—and saw the full magnitude of a humon-gous lake that was so huge one didn’t notice, at first, that it was a crater-lake.

A planet-buster on one side and a barely adolescent girl on the other. Very scary. He was between a rock and a soft place! He’d have to review his fam’s summary of an evening his organics hardly remembered through his hangover. Maybe, Space forbid, more had happened between him and the girl than he recalled.

“You’re awake,” she said, and because his head was turned away toward the window and he was absolutely immobile, she added, “I know you’re awake.” She touched his shoulders cautiously and Eron was appalled when his penis responded. She gently shook him, thought better of it, and paused for a breath. “Don’t you turn around and try something before we talk,” she admonished. “All you farmen are alike. I don’t trust you. My mother told me never, never to trust a farman when she signed my contract.”

“What a crater!” said Eron evasively, staring through the oval window at the only thing big enough to distract him. He was on his side and that didn’t give him the best view but he didn’t dare sit up. “It looks like a mountain range!” The Glatim Mansion was perched on the raised rim, situated to stare down into the impact basin and across. The spaceport must be behind them. Eron’s educated fam absorbed details of erosion and weathering and concluded that the cataclysm couldn’t have happened more than a million years ago, probably half that. He was impressed, but what he was feeling was the soft hand on his naked shoulder.

“It’s the biggest one on the planet but it’s just a dumb old crater,” she said. “We have lots of craters.” She began to try to shift him around toward her, his back to the bed, gently but with a peasant’s strength. “You aren’t paying attention, sir. You have to listen and seal our parley with your eyes.” She took his hair in a firm grip and twisted his head to face hers. “I told you not to try anything. You have to swear with your eyes not to try something.”

He found himself being forced to stare into an intent set of eyes, their blue speckled with slim dashes of henna, but his kept wandering. “What happened when it hit?” Eron was calculating energy of impact and extrapolating to the size of the asteroid that had made it. “Space! What did that thing do to Neuhadra?”

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking his head slightly, not sure that she had his attention. “I wasn’t bom then.”

He had dreamed often of his father’s mistress undressing him. Dreamed. Sweet Melinesa. She was at least a respectable forty; having a naive girl this age in bed with him was ridiculous. Boys like him were supposed to be educated by experienced married women! After being forced to face her, Eron couldn’t resist checking to see if she was actually wearing her fam—she was; a delicate Crafter design gracefully snuggled under her full hairdo. She sure wasn’t using it to advantage! There she was—all that brainpower concentrated to resist attack by a farman who was, at present, as frozen as a scared rabbit. It was a shock to find that he was now one of the intriguing-terrible farmen. He couldn’t help but try out one of Murek’s you-don’t-know-why-I’m-smiling smiles.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“That’s none of your business,” she explained gently. “Pm Girl to you, sir, if you don’t mind. You may address me as Young Girl if I have so displeased you that you have a reprimand ready.”

“Oh.” He wasn’t sure he knew what she was talking about—and it wasn’t the strange accent. Did farmen actually need both physical and social reorientation after living in a ship’s closet for months? “Is this your room or mine?” he asked in an initial attempt at clarifying his confusion. Nothing, it seemed, could be taken for granted.

“It’s yours, sir.” The inflection said of course.

“And why are you here?”

“Sir, I’m your servant. I’m here to serve you, obey your orders, and see that you come to no harm when you are drunk even if I have to risk my own life.” Then she added, with downcast eyes that were more flirtatious than afraid, “I’m at the mercy of your good behavior but I’m allowed to defend myself. It’s in my contract.”

Such a strange word, servant—even though it was in his vocabulary, it didn’t tell Eron anything; he had no context in which to place it. They didn’t have servants on Agander, only service that varied by circumstance and intricate game rules. ‘Then you’re to do anything I ask of you, Girl?”

“Only what is specified in my contract, sir,” she replied coyly. “You can famfeed a copy in the normal way—though I don't advise it. The contract automatically installs behavior constraints.” To say what was unspoken, her hidden hand teasingly poked his erect penis, which he was trying to hide under the covers. She giggled.

He began to see some of the disadvantages that beset a farmen—a farman was constantly having to learn new and amazing rules. “And what does this contract define as your duties?”

“I’m to please you.” There was the tone of catechism in what she said. She had her own private reservations—it was in her tone—and she had no intention of sharing them with him. He would have to guess.

What he was guessing disturbed him because it was so un-Gandarian. As best as he could read her, she was willing to make a flexible interpretation of her duties if he was able to choose a kind way in which to ignore the conditions of her contract. Kindness was one of mankind’s universal. He sensed that she didn’t know who he was and that scared her, but because he hadn’t yet done anything to scare her, she wasn’t doing whatever it was that she did when she felt the need to defend herself. It was her unspoken invitation that upset him—knowing that her desires would always remain unspoken. With the covers now more firmly under his arm-pits, he began to talk to the ceiling. It felt weird to shift into Murek’s valence and begin a tutor’s rhetorical approach to a new student. ‘‘You know what a man of Neuhadra would expect of you, am I right?”

She nodded.

“But you aren’t sure what might please a farman?” A frantic part of him was telling him to stop being an intellectual.

“I’m to please all whom I serve, sir,” she explained.

That kind of ambiguous phrasing drove him crazy. “So you’re here to please me even though I may have very strange demands? Would you be willing to please a farman like me whose greatest delight was eating spit-roasted girls for breakfast with a knife, fork, and teeth?”

She squeaked and pulled herself into a sitting position at the very comer of the bed, holding up the covers around her body until only her eyes showed. “That’s not in my contract!” But her voice rang with mirth.

“Fortunately for you, Girl, I forgot my knife and fork back on Agander!”

She was now staring under the covers to get a good look at the body she had already carefully undressed the night before. It was very much the curiosity of a young child. “It’s your teeth I’m worried about. Deflecting knives and forks is part of my training.” She dropped the covers so that he could see her. And she was beautiful, in a non-Ganderian sort of

way. He wasn’t sure if her breasts were fully formed yet. “After lugging you upstairs last night, I’m too salty to eat without a bath. I’d go for the eggs and sausage myself, if I were you.” She smiled shyly.

“Ah, hunger.” He sighed. “You have eggs?”

With the same squeak that she had used to wrap herself in the covers, she leaped out of bed. That was a request for which she knew the response. With a flick, a wall panel opened up to the cuisinator. “Eggs and sausage coming right up!”

A voluptuous servant to instruct a robocook which had been designed to replace a servant; there, thought Eron, was a new definition of luxury.

Her task quickly done, she asked, “Will you let me dress you now?”

“I’m used to doing it myself.”

“Sir! At that you are incompetent! The togs you were wearing were disgraceful. You have no taste. I put them in the dispozoria. You’ll have to let me dress you. I know everything about clothes! I measured you last night very carefully with my calip while you snorted in your sleep and, by now, the manufacturum in die closet has everything ready for you.”

“You measured me? Really?”

“I’m afraid you disappointed me as a farman, sir, I didn’t find any tentacles, sir. And you were very drunk; your penis only measured two centimeters. Sir.”

While he waited for his breakfast, he watched her spread out his new clothes—collars, even! This was worse than being attended by a robovalet! She hadn’t bothered to dress herself. And watching, he found himself inanely straining to feel like a forty-year-old married man (like his father) who had shouldered the duty of sexually training a young girl. But he wasn’t an older man, and he had no business being with this child and even thinking about sex; if he’d been caught on Agander with this she-sapling, the men of his class would have put him in the stocks for attempted ruination! Young men were not allowed to seduce young girls.

Young girls were reserved for men with already established careers. He had a moment of smug revolt now that he had left Agander forever; nobody on Agander trusted the maturity of their young, even ones who had a straight kick shot! And so much had happened in the last few months that he was now sure of his maturity.

Still, he felt he should have been given a mature woman as a servant. He tried to imagine Melinesa as his servant. And couldn’t. Lover maybe, servant, never. Well, this was Neuhadra and they did things differently—farmen were all crazy. Dingbat crazy! And woe, woe, woe, he was now a far-man himself!

Girl was chattering while she made intricate decisions about color and cut and texture. This was worse than trying to escape Kapor’s mathematical traps! How could anyone care that much about clothes? Now he knew what she used her exquisite little fam for! She probably had forty thousand years of fashion stuffed in there. Her naked back was made enticing by the fascinating curves of that fam. He stopped listening to her while he became more and more involved in coveting it. Maybe the next time they were in bed together and she was snoring away, he could switch with her. He knew it was an idle fantasy; it was already ten years too late. Fams take as long to mature as humans. It drove him crazy to be right in the heart of the worlds where they built such awesome fams. From here one could rule the Galaxy.

Maybe not. Cloun-the-Stubbom had already tried that with the Crafters working their magic for him. If rumor was right, these people had built the original visi-harmonars for Lakgan. “The First Citizen of the Galaxy” had designed his strategy around personal control of minds. That’s what “First” meant. First mind. It hadn’t worked. Why? Cloun-the-Stubbom had missed comprehending the number-one cliche: The Galaxy is a big place. What was it that tutor Ka-por had said about control-vanity? “Men who are obsessed with personal control because they trust no one with their vision end up out of control—like a single puppeteer trying to pull off a mob scene with multiple puppets on stage.” Maybe it wasn’t wise to do what he’d have to do to seduce Girl. 77/ resist her, he comforted himself virtuously, if he could get his penis to agree.

Nevertheless he let Girl dress him. The clothes she had selected were a comfortable fit, and if he didn’t look in a mirror he didn’t even feel conspicuous. He kissed her hand. Better not start his seduction with anything more complicated than that. Now that he was dressed, he wished she’d get dressed, too. He was finding her slim body more and more enticing. She had a peculiar surgically added organ along her ribs under her arm. He thought at first that it was merely decorative—the cicatrix signifying a servant perhaps—but it was the organ to which she attached her artificial lung when she went outside. Neuhadra’s atmosphere, of course.

Later in the morning Eron spent time at an archival terminal famfeeding himself some Neuhadran history, thousands of years of it, back to Imperial times, back to the first settlers who crossed the Helmarian Rift itself. He didn’t even need a tutor’s prodding anymore to immerse himself in that kind of labor.

Girl reappeared from nowhere when he decided to take a walk out along the crater wall. She insisted that he wear his oxygen supplementer with its annoying pull-down mask. Then she faded away again. Probably she could locate him with some gizmo in his clothes. Maybe she was even responsible to monitor his life-signs. Damned if he was going to use the sissy mask. He was well past the winter gardens into the wilderness, running down the slope, when he started to feel dizzy and the hat beeped. The mask dropped over his face automatically. Why did people try to settle planets like Neuhadra? He was beginning to guess what all farmen meant when they called Agander a heaven.

The mountain slope looked like any ordinary slope leading gently down into a lake—but there were all sorts of telltale signs of cataclysm. His famfed Neuhadran history wasn’t really available to him until cues keyed it in to help him understand what he was seeing. Ninety-six percent of the life on Neuhadra had been destroyed by this impact less than a million years ago. The local life was still scrambling to fill vacant niches.

He recognized the tripartite mouths of a red flowering plant in the thin snow that still showed vestiges of its former life in the Neuhadran seas. It crawled. A whole class of leafy sea-forms had always been mobile, but there had been no crawling land plants a million years ago. There had been no niche for them on land then, either. It was fascinating. Moments later he saw one of the strange native pulse-burrowers scamper out of a rotten fem trunk. A whole extinct class of large animals had yet to be replaced by evolution, perhaps the pulse-burrowers would grow into the vacant niche—if rats or rabbits or horses didn’t fill it first. Some might-have-been paths would never be taken because of mankind’s empire and invaders from the stars.

Eron saw daffodils. Or maybe they weren’t daffodils anymore? Would a daffodil recognize spring on a planet with an orbit as eccentric as Neuhadra’s? He spotted a cocoon waiting for the warmth to release its tiny being. Not native. A starfaring insect from who-knew-what planet, a hobo fresh off some careless ship?

Standing here on the slope of this cataclysm he did not have to wonder why the Glatim clan dominated the galactic meteoroid&comet deflection business. He could almost write the history himself from the hints he had heard around the feast table.

The original Glatim family had been driven to settle here around the crater during the forced “relocations” of Imperial times at the end of the Wars Across the Marche. Protection from the sky would not have been a worry at the time of the Dispersion—the Galactic Empire’s Omneity of Planetary Safety was the bureaucratic entity that handled errant asteroids and comets and meteoroids. But when the Empire died in paroxysm, the Omneity vanished. Not so the Helmarians of Neuhadra. The Glatims still lived on the edge of their crater, and the night sky was still full of falling stars and the frolicking seven suns were still out there playing with the local stability of planetary orbits. Theirs was a threat to keep thinking about.

Perhaps out in the Galaxy other worlds had tried to take the Omneity’s place, but the Glatims had been well situated. They were of the Helmarian Crafters and so culturally undaunted by the mere mechanical details of moving worldlets. They were survivors of the Wars Across the Marche and so bore the Empire particular malice and would be only too willing to take over territory vacated during the collapse. They soon found protection under the False Revival of Cloun-the-Stubbom who owed his power to them, and, after that, they were spatially situated to thrive under the suzerainty of Faraway’s peculiar interstellar-size city-state. All through the Interregnum they would have consolidated their business. Simple math.

Eron was amazed at how a little travel could so broaden one’s viewpoint, even if he had to manage his thinking with the crummy aid of that antiquated tech from the Periphery that burdened his shoulders.

He was turning up a slope of boulders to get a better view when a voice commanded him. “By the Ghosts of the Emperors, am I glad to see you!” said a puffing Rigone as he appeared from behind some bushes on the trail. “Slow down!” The Scav paused to take a deep puff from his mask. “This place gives me the willies. One can walk klom after klom without running into anyone. It’s worse than being lost in space; at least there you have a fifty/fifty chance of running into an ancient race once an episode!”

“Impressive, isn’t it?” commented Eron as he motioned out over the crater’s lake from their new height.

Rigone shrugged off the view. “How well do you know this Murek Kapor fellow of yours?”

“Well enough.” Eron thought about it. “But not as well as I once supposed.”

“I’ve been cooped up in a coffin with him for decawatches. He’s playing games, deep games. Nice chap—but shifty.”

“He likes to play games when he’s teaching me something,” said Eron warily.

Rigone softened. “I don’t think I’m referring to that kind of game. Some games are more deadly than others. I saw you headed out for a walk and I came out here after you— where there are no spies—to ask you something, kid. At least I’m assuming that there are no clever little Crafter devices hanging out here in the woods and we can talk man to man, or boy to boy—whatever the case may be. Damn, I wish they’d turn the heating up. But keep your mouth shut. Keep your own counsel. You’re old enough to start thinking for yourself. For your own good, you damn well better be!”

“On the planet I come from, you are being offensive,” said Eron in the gravelly voice his father used to dismiss overbearing clients.

“On the planet I come from, I’m talking too much. But we need to come to an understanding, in private—with only your problem and my problem at stake. I’ve decided to play your tutor’s game. I don’t know what it is, but I know I have no chance of ever finding out—so I’m not asking. You want a fam upgrade; you’ve told me so yourself—many times. Kapor wants you to have one and has asked me to do it. That makes two problems for you.

“One: Kapor is too insistent. That’s suspicious to me. Maybe he really thinks you need one, maybe he has an ulterior motive. That’s for you to figure out. Me, my best opinion is that you don't need one. Scorn Faraway tech all you want. I don’t. Obsolete? So what? I have a piece of obsolete tech in my antique collection that’s maybe a hundred thousand years old if it isn’t a damn fine fake. It is supposed to be a piece of flint from Old Rith. Fake or not, it’ll still skin a rabbit.”

In the interest of humor, Eron was about to protest the propriety of using flint technology to chip away at his fam when Rigone abruptly went off on another one of his tangents. He found a mossy log, freed of snow by the wind, its branches long rotten to nubs. He sat down. “Amazing place. They let a tree fall and don’t even use it! We’ll put it to use as a bench. Sit down.” He put up his hand to prevent Eron from interrupting. “Keep your mouth shut. You’re supposed to be listening to me.”

“I am listening.”

‘Two: Kapor thinks he has leads to someone who will train me, to put a modem edge on my skills. I think he does. That’s also suspicious, and you’ll have to think about it. Why isn’t the expert going to do the job himself and bypass a novice like me? That’s a game for which we don’t know the rules. But aside from that, I’m good. First off, I know my limits. Smart men know their limits. They’re going to train me how to upgrade your fam. I’ve done crazy things with fams in my life—even illegal things—but, mark this, I’ve never damaged a single mind, ever. I intend to keep that record. I’m not going to touch your fam until I’m absolutely certain of what I’m doing. I have too much at stake to do otherwise. My life. If you so much as end up cross-eyed, I end up dead. You understand? You can still refuse.”

“Sure. I want you to do it.”

“You want me to do it? You’re a space-crazed young fool in search of an El Dorado star. That’s a star any moth can’t miss—and if you get there it will fry you! I’ll help you if you insist. But remember, two men helping each other don’t always have the same goal. It’s like I’m the man with a ship’s hull and you’re the man with the hyperatomic motor. We need each other—but we may not have the same destination. Such trivia can lead to, ahem, a bit of a major fracas.” “We can ferry each other around.”

“You hope. Don’t look at me. Look at your sainted tutor. I’m just in this because it is a game move for me. I have to make points or I don’t play. But I don’t move blindly. Every move in a game has its consequences. A man not ready for the recoil doesn’t pull the trigger. If I decide I don’t like the consequences, I'm gone. He who doesn’t understand bad consequences gets clobbered just the same. Naive kids who don’t believe in death die anyway. The wide-eyed innocents get fried along with the guilty. Famfeed that. It’s your call. It’s your head.”

“Are you going to transmogrify me into a supergenius?” Rigone rose up off the log like one possessed. He raised his arms and roared to the sky. “No, no, no—a thousand times: No! You won’t even know your brain’s been upgraded! You’ll think like you always have. It is just that in some ways, when you least expect it, you’ll be a little faster, maybe even a little smarter.”

“Will I be able to roar like you?” Eron laughed.

“Space, kid! I can’t tell you how serious this is. Okay, you be the clown; I'll be serious. I’m here to make you a promise. I don’t care what you think of your tutor. If at any time I find out that this little operation is intended to do you harm, I’m jumping out of here. If I have to go back to Splendid Wisdom empty-handed, I’ll just tell my Space-damned Admiral to stuff himself into God’s airlock and hope my friends wear black gloves for my funeral. Why? Because if I harm your mini-microbrain that has consequences for you that 1 don’t want to face.”

Eron was throwing moss at the tripartite lips of a plant that might or might not be moving from the spot where it had rested when he was last awake. The moss was taken by the breeze and rolled along the snow and caught itself in blinds and on barren twigs. Eron already knew that Rigone had too much at stake to pull out. Power felt good.

Rigone watched the boy with increasing exasperation. “If you were my son I’d take a five-stranded leather whip to your moon for eighteen lashes!”

“But I’m not your son. I’m a farman. And I have to make my own destiny.”

“Or die!”

“I don’t think so. Young men are immortal. You know that. It is just old farts like you who die.”