Psychohistorical Crisis

14

AT THE FORTRESS OF THE OVERSEE, 14,791 GE

How orderly seems the majestic procession of the planets around the Galaxy's legion of suns! Each sun has mastered a different juggling act, but the awesome cyclic symmetry is always there as if the Emperor of the Universe had once commanded the dancers at His Coronation Ball to pirouette forever in His honor.

But this order is a seasoned conjurer's illusion. Because our commercial ships avoid the roiling nurseries of the Galaxy, what audience gets to see a youthful sun at practice with his balls? Who gets to gasp when a bungling sun drops a planet while learning to juggle? It is to the major theaters we flock! From our unctuous jumpship purser we demand a ticket to some marvel and expect to be transported to a far off virtuoso artist who has had billions of years to perfect his solar showmanship. His failures are already lost to the dark thicket

Have you not noticed that the surviving balls of these experienced galactic jugglers are pimpled by collisions with lesser balls that didn't make it through the early rehearsal? Are your eyes so mesmerized by the brilliance of these jugglers that you've never noticed the droves of lonely refugees who litter interstellar space because they were flung beyond reach by some inept sun-in-training?

Nothing stays for long in an unstable orbit around a star without being eaten or ejected. Eons pass. Lo! When tardy man arrives in his finery, he finds the last, grand residue of stable orbits and marvels in attestation to the orderly mind of the Emperor of the Universe—whose hidden face is that of the Lord of Chaos!

—From the Dance of the Thousand Suns, stanza 498

For 207 years between 7774 and 7981 GE, the bloody Wars Across the Marche pitted the long-independent Thousand Suns and their allies against the encroaching Splendid Empire. During the war an elite group of Helmarian commanders built secret fallback bases on unfindable planetesimal outcasts deep in the remote darkness. The Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift eventually lost their war; the Helmarian people were decimated, forced to re-gengineer their children to the galactic hominid standard, dispersed, their thousand planets diluted with immigrants loyal to the Empire—but their war bases were never found, never suspected, never conquered. Long ago these redoubts lost the name of war base and became...

The chamber had wondrous acoustics. While her grandfather was being freeze-dried for the zero-g catacombs—his waters dripping into the flagon from the glass figurines of the ritual condenser—Nemia sang the solo canto of his requiem with a passionate devotion. Some of the words she composed out of memories as she went along, inspiring other singers to weave into the song contrapuntal poetry that complemented her emotion. During the silent interludes between cantos they sipped of his pure water. The elegy could not respectfully be ended until the last drips of condensate from his sublimation had been distributed from catch-pool to goblet to the bloodstreams of those who mourned him.

Later, alone, in private tribute, she gave the desiccated corpse a last farewell, a gentle touch of the hand not to mar his porous fragility, a wet tear, and the gift of a golden rose from the bronze rosepot of her parlor atrium. She had personally carved the lid of his sarcophagus, a pentagon of brilliantly colored petunias shaped from many woods. She closed the familiar lid, feeling a youth’s first pangs of mortality.

For a while she just wandered through the Fortress.

It was still too trying for Nemia to go back to work. She turned toward the labs along Coldfire but instead retreated east to her rooms. When she arrived she didn’t know what to do. In a somber mood, she lingered by the central rosepot in the atrium, not seeing the roses, only images of the grandfather who had adopted her to live the life of a Fortress acolyte. The room was immaculate except for wood-carving tools and chips that hadn’t yet settled in the slow gravity. From the central table she picked up and played with one of Grandfa’s Coron’s Eggs, not activating its stellar show. He was always searching for older versions, unhappy that he’d never found a first edition. Funny man. He was devoted to the past as well as the future.

From above and below, noise she had never noticed before sifted through the walls and ceiling and floor of her embedded apartment, though the doors were sealed, her communer shut down. She needed absolute silence, absolute isolation. Absently she ordered the vestibule closet to deliver an oxy-mask and headbeam and, after arguing with the stowwall to release her tool kit, took that, too. Off she went down the corridors to the nearest pullway. She didn’t bother to ask for a pullcar; she just took one, small and open, requesting the robodispatcher to route her by its most unused paths to the northern barrier. At top speed. It did not accelerate until after she was comfortably clamped.

The wind played with her hair like life played with changes. After a wild flight—zipping images of floors and ceilings and windows and shops and passageway offshoots—the pullcar reversed thrust, nudging her to a stop. Even life had its stops, where one took inventory to claim a new direction. She paused before uncoupling the body clamps—wrapped more in contemplation than in her physical restraints. For the first time in her life she had a restless need for something older than Grandfa to think about.

Nemia shoved off from the pullway with a glide that sent her down a vacant corridor to a landing near one of the border hatches. It was monitored but unguarded. The caves beyond its sealoff were not forbidden territories, just unused. She cracked the seal and muscled the barrier open. The hatch closed behind her of its own will. Thunk! Carefully she checked to make sure that the reseal had passed roboin-spection—otherwise alarms would go off and screaming fire teams would arrive within a few inamins.

And there she was, drifting through the abandoned portions of the Fortress. Silent darkness. She had only her beam to guide her. These older digs, untouched by recent concern, intrigued her the most. She came upon other seals, and other locks, even airlocks. Sometimes one of the internal pressure locks was jammed, but she had her tool kit with her and nothing much could stop a skilled hand that held both tinker-tools and instruments of brute strength. The preservation gas was helium, compliments of the atmosphere of their medium-size mother world who towed them through the sunless void, hydrogen oceans lit only by the stars.

Her beam animated shadow-beings who fled ahead of her down tunnel after tunnel and into rooms of strangely obsolete equipment... late First Empire it looked like. The Hel-marians builders were famless. Amazing what primitive brains could do! It appeared to be an enormous construction effort and yet—seven thousand years of chipping had hardly perforated a worldlet that was big enough to mask the energy output of its small colony but not big enough to field serious gravitic muscle. She did a brief calculation in her fam just to amuse herself: if the whole of this tiny rock were to be carved into catacombs, the Helmarians here would have enough crypt space for the entire hundred quadrillion people of the Second Empire. So much for the illusion of human pretension!

She worked her way deeper and deeper into the abandoned shafts and drifts until she was peeking, mouselike, from the floor of the original command center up at all of its First Empire hardware. How had her ancestors escaped detection with energy-inefficient ultrawave generators of such monstrous size! All of the hokey accessories were perfectly preserved in the helium. Embroidered chairs. Even old strategy maps thousands of years obsolete.

She knelt beneath the main machine and said a prayer to the Old Ones, elders of a culture no empire could crush. Her prayer was the prime cry that every Helmarian knew by heart: “To die once is to live forever!” spoken with arms raised, elbows at her side, palms facing outward. And then she bowed for her beloved grandfather, wistfully recalling that it had been he who crawled with her on their polished stone floor back on Neuhadra before she’d ever learned to walk or glide or build fams. What a way with children he had! He had stolen her from her parents with his Smythosian zeal.

She stayed in that holy place all afternoon, tinkering with the failed electrical shunts until she had the old lights glowing again—so that she could play out, via fam, Hisgoold’s tragic opera against these vast machines so awesomely right for this ancient drama. Her fam created the hallucinatory singers, their voices, their movements. Hisgoold’s Family was magnificent with noble superhumanity. The chorus of the doomed Helmarian army fought its way heroically across a stage more grim and real than any she’d ever seen in live theater.

She wept at the Remonstration. Her arms cheered the Hal-lel. Her lips smiled with the Madrigal as Pani and Laura and their jokers flirted in a coy chase among the ultrawave projectors. She laughed like a child at the pyrotechnics of the Prothalamion, helplessly remembering the emotions of the naive three-year-old whom Grandfa first took to see His-goold. The Battlehymn of the Thousand Suns inspired her as it always did. The Aubade filled her with hope. She hissed when the Splendid Emperor appeared for his Triumph. And the final Lament brought her to tears as Kaggan grieved over the bodies of Pani and Laura.

Sorrow, terrible sorrow. She extinguished the lights so she could cry and cry in the blackness like she had never before bawled in her whole young life. She had to switch on the dry-blow to clear her faceplate. The evaporating wetness on her cheeks was all that her exhausted mind could feel.

When she returned home, a Personal Capsule was waiting for her in the atrium.

It tasted her fingertips while reading her retinal pattern— but instead of delivering an encrypted message to her fam, the Capsule produced a tiny black speaker that began to chat in the voice... of her grandfather. It had two simple toggles: forward/stop and retreat-one-sentence-at-a-time. The voice was, in places, fam-simulated, as if it had been too much effort for Grandfa to record with his vocal chords. The destruct was a manual toggle.

“Nemia, ah, Nemia. When death is on our mind we think only of unfinished business. So. Here I am dead and you haven’t married yet. I’ve been working on it with your mother and father.”

She laughed. He was going to leave her one last nag about that. It was a favorite subject of his that she’d never been able to terminate. She’d bawled him out quite angrily the last time he had mentioned it, hoping to shut him up forever, and henceforth had stuffed her ears at the mere mention of marriage—but he always had to have the last word. Now he was having the last word.

“I know how you feel on the subject so I haven’t kept you apprised of my actions; I’ve just been making all the arrangements behind your back. A surprise party. Now I won’t be able to finish what I’ve started so you’ll have to carry out the last details on your own. Don’t worry about the boy. I haven’t told him, either. Only his parents. They approve of you. It was to be his surprise party, too.”

“Well!” thought Nemia.

“You already know the boy. You constructed the monitor-persona we installed for his last assignment. I believe you liked him. Think back. You met him at that Reaffirmation Gala I arranged for you. The boy with the ears. I’ve never heard you rave so about a boy’s ears. I can’t, for sure, attest that you fell in love with him, but it was certainly infatuation at first sight. I always thought it was a shame that he had to leave so soon—otherwise I might have been more persistent in my meddling, which, up until his assignment, had been one of my better efforts.”

Grandfa had a hand in that adventure? She was mortified. Nemia hadn’t thought about Hiranimus Scogil for years, but she certainly remembered him. Did Grandfa know about the shower they took together? And her mash letter? She groaned with her new maturity. Poor Hiranimus had probably been relieved to be shipped out!

“He’s been haggling with the Oversee lately about an adventure he’s been trying to orchestrate. I was the only ally he had, mainly because I want to many him off to you. I like to bend psychohistorical necessity to fit my own personal needs.”

“You old goat!” But he wasn’t listening.

“The Oversee’s consensus was negative. His scheme computed out as hopelessly high risk with an extremely low probability of success. Worse, it was immoral. I had to agree. But, quite recently, these few watches before I had my attack, he turned up at Neuhadra—and there’s a new angle. I worked it up while I was dying... to keep myself busy. There’s a couple of ways to jiggle the probabilities, ways that perhaps the Founder wouldn’t have approved. It’s yours to follow up. Talk to the Lion for details. Our Scogil..

She stabbed the “stop” button. The Lion! But it was Grandfa who was the Lion! She’d figured that out years ago. Now she was confused. She stood and made herself dinner while she pondered the conundrum. The puzzle finally fell in place only after the fourth course as she whipped the chiffon pie out of the cuisinator. She mouthed the fluff, appalled at her stupidity. Of course Grandfa was the Lion—but the Lion was only a quantum-state “hat.” The Lion might... could... would be shared by many members of the Oversee, an immortal personality who took on mortal components to maintain his human perspective. Immortal wasn’t really the right word; the Lion wasn’t any older than Grandfa—that’s what had fooled her. Probably Grandfa had created the Lion. Who would she... ?

She put in a call. One never had to worry about disturbing the Lion; he had a submind that could take a thousand calls at once, none of which he handled consciously. His submind was merely a convenient executive secretary. The Lion appeared in her atrium as a fam-induced hallucination. He wasn’t the kind to bother with holographic tricks; the Lion took the direct route into the visual cortex.

“Nemia of 1’ Amontag,” he said with a graceful gesture of his paw. He’d been expecting her.

She bowed respectfully to what only she could see—a tall and not very lionlike figure. Real felines didn’t stand erect. She tried to see Grandfa 1’Amontag in him. There must be something of Grandfa there, but the Lion had always been a good disguise. “My grandfather suggested an appointment,” she said to the receptionist persona.

“About the Scogil affair. Yes.” There was a gleam in the Lion’s eye; she was sure he must know everything! Damn Grandfa’s love of storytelling to whoever would listen! Did all the Smythosians who wore the Lion’s hat know that she had showered in the nude with Hiranimus Scogil? And how could a lion look so diabolically human with his bushy orange head and black nose and carnivorous grin!

But then, how could this hallucination even exist? The four-legged lion had been the victim of one of Rith’s mass extinctions—she wasn’t sure if it had been that infamous meteor or mankind’s first massive overuse of ammonia fertilizer. The nitrous oxide of ammonia’s decomposition train was nasty stuff when it worked its way up to the upper atmosphere and started gobbling ozone. Of course, lions weren’t really extinct; gengineering had re-created them out of housecats. Grandfa’s Helmarian sense of irony. Kill me and I shall rise again. That’s what this creature of the Oversee symbolized. Who animated him now? One man? two men? a sixtyne?

“You have questions?” the Lion asked.

“I haven’t finished listening to his Capsule,” she confessed.

“We will meet again when you are ready. Come in person to my den at the eleventh watch, on the morrow after you have slept. Your passage to Neuhadra has already been arranged.”

The Lion vanished—but he left behind him a quick flash of Rith’s ancient predesert savanna and a whiff of sun-rotted antelope.

Nemia sat down and took up the tiny black speaker again, toggling it to the beginning of the last sentence and then to “forward.”

“Our Scogil has been doing some fast legwork,” the voice of Grandfa continued. “He thinks he has it arranged with Beucalin of Neuhadra—you’ve never met Beucalin—to train a butcher from Splendid Wisdom to modify his charge’s fam—he has a young boy in tow. Beucalin sent us a report. There are surprises in it. Tests confirm that Scogil’s charge does indeed have a remarkable talent for mathematics.

“His fam is even more unusual: an aborted Caltronic prototyped on Faraway. Not a model farmed out to a Sigel or Rosh Hanna foundry. It’s surprising that we even have the specs except that keeping the specs on rival fam designs is a Helmarian fetish. Less than seventy were made—an ambitious hi-end failure discontinued prior to production. A full century ago. His father must have picked up a remaindered unit that got misplaced on some high shelf—or was simply shunned. Ethically its Faraway engineers should have scrapped it but they were probably short of credit—and it is perfectly functional, significantly above average, though not easy to sell in its unfinished form except to a stellar bumpkin in a backeddy like Agander. Two hundred and sixty-two thousand hooks were built into it—but the designers couldn’t develop a stable overlay able to use the hooks. So they started over with a different design. Their second attempt was the famous Caltronic 4Z, now also obsolete.”

Ah, thought Nemia. This was just the kind of “special” problem she’d been trained to exploit. Two hundred sixty-two thousand unused hooks! Perhaps unusable hooks, perhaps not. An interesting challenge.

“Beucalin has been instructed to decline Scogil’s unseemly request—but out of friendship for Mendor Glatim will find a surrogate to do the work on the sly. And”—he chuckled—“out of sight of the Oversee.” Nemia’s grandfather liked his little jokes on the young people of the world who thought that they and their fams were too smart to be outsmarted. “The surrogate will be you. It might even be possible to bring you in without involving Beucalin. You have the perfect motive. Love and Sex over Duty and Honor.”

“Watch it, old man,” she said aloud, “or I’ll have your mummy cremated!”

The voice of the dead man ignored her. “Scogil’s ideas for the modification are far too crude and detectable.” His voice had broken and there was a pause before he spoke again. “Oeyy! The pain gets to me sometimes. I’ll be back.”

Her heart jumped. But she didn’t have time to anguish; the splice in the recording, to her, was immediate and when he returned, he was calmer, more relaxed. It was his own voice, not a smoother simulation. “This has to be one of your special jobs, little girl. The Lion will give you the details. You won’t do the fam surgery yourself—that is, you will not directly hack Scogil’s youngster. Have I lost you? All the work on him must be executed by the butcher from Splendid Wisdom whom Scogil has so conveniently brought with him. If the project fails and the Pscholars lay on a trace, we want it to point at the butcher. It will all be his doing. Your hand has to be invisible.” The pain was back in Grandfa’s voice. Then, suddenly, he skipped whatever else he wanted to say in order to blurt out what was really important. “Hey, big girl, there’s plenty of water on Neuhadra for showers. You won’t have to be sneaky.” And he was gone.

“Grandfa!”

And even this last little bit of him was crumbling into powder.

Too many shocks at once! Death. The threat of marriage. A wrenchingly new off-Fortress destiny. She whacked her head and headed for the bed. She thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep, but the thought wasn’t finished before she was sound asleep in her clothes with shoes still on her feet. Dreams resolved her grief. Dreams plotted a hilariously amazing off-Fortress adventure. When the hour for her prime-watch chimed, she rose with a light heart, said her thirty-two theorems in prayer position, and had breakfast. To a Smythosian acolyte, duty was the foundation of every good life. She chose to sing in the morning network-choir; then—to work.

She organized those duties of Grandfa that he had bequeathed to her, rebuilding key nodes in her fam to prioritize her new obligations, famfeeding the files that Grandfa’s will had tagged for her, and actually sorting his few physical possessions.

He had kept Grandma’s love letters. She was killed tragically under circumstances unclear to Nemia; Grandfa never liked to talk about it. The letters were on real homemade paper that Grandma had whomped up in her manufacturum, written with a naive ink that was already fading.

The biggest box was Grandfa’s template collection of antiques. He was forever rearranging his apartment, destroying this antique so that he would have room for some striking masterpiece he had just remanufactured. Nothing ever matched. Nothing was ever conveniently arranged. She had memories as a little child of negotiating her way between— what she had never dared say aloud—his junk. No object in Grandfa’s whole collection had an esthetic relationship to any other object, but all had historical import. History was everything to the old man. He liked to stumble over it while he wandered about, his mind’s eye lost in contemplative visions of some past or future era.

Then there was his precious collection of Coron’s Eggs, eight of them, nine if you counted the one he had given her that sat prominently on its wooden stand in her atrium, none of them a first edition, all too complicated to be stored on a template. He had first become interested in the Eggs when the Oversee had assigned him as a young man to work on the outré6 mathematics of the Coron’s Wisp project.

He had been inspired to a mad belief that a “first-edition” Egg would lead to the lost Martyr’s Cache. Second-edition and later Eggs hadn’t met their promise. Grandfa had been undeterred and still had quantronic agents touring the Galaxy looking for a “first-edition” copy, Eggs by now probably all victims of entropy or, if extant, buried in the rubble of some Interregnum war. His search agents had become, by the machinery of Grandfa’s will, her servants. Nemia had heard a zillion ‘lost treasure” stories and put little stock in this one. Men had been wandering around the Galaxy for seventy-four millennia littering space with their mysteries. The Protocols of Eta Cuminga. The Lost Mine of the Mi-radeas. She sighed. Why did Grandfa think she was going to pick up on all of his obsessions? She’d have to cancel those agents, but that was not easy from the Fortress. For that she’d have to wait until she reached Neuhadra.

Extraordinarily proud of his collection, he’d kept every Egg in good repair and often used one of them to cozen or dazzle people at his parties. He had been, in her mind, the Galaxy’s fastest-talking astrologer. His favorite trick was to take some young Smythosian, fresh from his heretical seminary studies of forbidden psychohistory, full of a mathematical belief in the unreadability of personal destiny, and con him into an Egg reading. The room would go dark, the stellar panorama would unfold, and, with Grandfa’s simple chitchat, prompted by increasingly complex star-charts, his mark’s past would be revealed in a way that led surreptitiously into his personal future. Everyone would smile at the sagacity of the reading—and its superficiality—until the morrow, when it would all start to come true. Grandfa had tried to teach her the tricks and deceptions of fortune-telling, but she had never quite mastered the art at his level of dissimulation.

Her prime-watch coincided with the eleventh watch. Nemia spent the time at the Lion’s den being instructed in the nuances of her assignment. Grandfa had been thorough on his deathbed. It became obvious that the whole idea of Scogil’s introduction into the Coron’s Wisp venture was based upon a very chancy gamble. When she complained that the probability of success was small, the Lion reminded her archly that the Oversee had its eye on many antelope in the herd. It did not matter if they were pursuing a hundred independent events, each with a mere one percent probability of materializing, because then there was a sixty-three percent probability that at least one of those events would come to pass.

The Smythosians liked to work with low-probability events because those were the kind that the Pscholars had the most trouble tracking. More specifically, the modeling of high-probability events was beyond the Oversee’s computational resources. They didn’t have the Pscholars’ twenty-seven centuries of psychohistorical practice behind them nor the full resources of the Second Empire.

And the work she would be doing to modify the fam of Scogil’s protege? That was a another low-probability gamble. They were giving him an ace he could play or not play as circumstance demanded. She was not to implement the kind of modifications that Scogil had asked for; her modifications were to be to the Oversee’s specifications.

That angered Nemia. “I can’t just modify a fam to order! It doesn’t work that way! I’ll be hacking under enormous constraints. I won’t even know what the constraints are until I do tests!”

“He’s only twelve years old,” reminded the Lion.

“Twelve is an adult!” she snapped. “His fam has jelled”

“If you fail, it is of small consequence. Scogil will just have to play our game without that particular ace.”

She cooled down. They went on to discuss the professional minutiae of event-fulcrums and how this particular event-fulcrum related to some of the finer points of fam design. The Lion jumped from general psychohistorical principles to the finicky details of how quantum-state design parameters, in this kind of case, could alter the predictive equations. He often went beyond her competence, then caught himself, to turn back to the specific items relevant to her mission. She had the impression that she wasn’t dealing with one person even though the Lion’s persona was seamless; his knowledge base was too broad. The Lion, she suspected, was an artificial coordinator-mind for a very heavy-duty committee.

She was in up to her eyeballs. Nemia took off the next cycle for partying with her friends in the gardens of the Presidio.

Within a ten-watch she was deep aboard a jumprunner, commanded by one of the mysterious men with the tide of Starmaster, any view of the interstellar sky forbidden to her. She spent the time with her mnemonifier doing homework, planning. Half of her mind was working seriously; the other half was churning out an escape path from the marriage trap set up by her relentless Grandfa. Marrying one of her teenage crushes in Service to the Greater Good! Ridiculous! Even if he did have nice ears.

They had even supplied her with material on Coron’s Wisp, material deliberately withheld from Scogil so that it would be she who briefed him on key aspects of his next assignment. That twist, she thought ironically, hadn’t been necessary. That was just another item in Grandfa’s ploy to marry her to Scogil!

Scogil! She was filled with outrage again and was half tempted to use one of the Eggs to plot an astrological chart of her own future. But with an iron will she shrugged off this temptation toward the irrational. To be afflicted by superstitious impulse was the price one paid for being condemned to the use of cheap wetware that had mindlessly evolved in an ancient ocean! Anon they would learn how to scoop out the wetware and replace it with quantronics that weren’t limited by robotic laws laid in by the environmental demands on fish.

But—back to the real problem she had been given, upgrading the fam of Scogil’s protoge. Her main task was to construct a single-purpose module—one that enhanced the kid’s mathematical intuition. Almost routine. That he was still a child young enough to make use of such flexible structures would greatly simplify her work—a fam modification to be utilized by an adult brain necessitated a very different (and difficult) design philosophy more akin to building an expert computer program activated by primitive organic triggers. Still, it wouldn’t be easy.

Her secondary task, not usually feasible with Faraway designs, was to implement an undetectable persona shift that would prime the boy to traitorous behavior at key trigger points in his life. Because of Faraway’s notorious “safe-walls” design philosophy, she was here allowed to operate under an “if possible” clause. But given the electronic failings of this particular uncertified design, she thought she might be able to... The unused hooks that had stymied a whole team of Faraway engineers weren’t the big challenge, though they opened up unexpected avenues of attack. Hel-marian Crafters routinely fabricated quantum-state devices that were only theoretical dreams to other engineers; the Neuhadran foundries were adequate to build whatever weave she needed. Linking into die hooks was a piece of fancy footwork she could do—but bypassing the walls...

The starship cabin wasn’t large enough for her and her mnemonifier. She tried working with her heels on top of her “mnemy,” and then with her toes peeking around, and then with the damn machine strapped to the ceiling—but nothing was comfortable. Thank Space for zero-g! No adequate solution presented itself until she implemented a scheme to worm their stellar coordinates out of the Second Watchman. She didn’t succeed, alas, because he didn’t know—the ship’s officers used unshared partial-keys to navigate—but she did find out that his cabin was larger than hers.

Immediately she conned the Second Watchman into exchanging cabins, a deal she paid for by looking at the holos of his family and teasing stories out of his mouth that he’d always wanted to tell but lacked an audience. She also stroked the stubble on his head and ran her finger down the ridge of his nose. But, sadly, in the endgame her brilliant strategy failed. The finale saw her stowing her mnemonifier out in die corridor while the Second Watchman stayed in his cabin and held her in his arms. He whispered poetry into her ears in between nibbling at them. She kept thinking about her bulky mnemonifier.

I'm not very good at predicting, she told herself ruefully. A Second Watchman didn’t fit very well into any psychohistorical equation she knew... now, if she’d had to deal with ten thousand men like him, all at the same time, it would have been a snap!

Thus Nemia had to postpone her work on the persona modification until she arrived at Neuhadra. Beucalin briefed her in his office while her attention was fixated on the landscape beyond the Institute’s lofty windows—there were green fields and endless stretches of forest that had taken over the hills as far as eye could see into the morning mists. Nearby she could see shellback hickory and mountain oak and hardy tramontanes from Zeta Tigones. And wind that blew clouds across the sky! She hadn’t been here since she was a small child. More than once she asked Beucalin to repeat himself.

“You’ll have plenty to do before tackling Scogil. Wait until you hear from me before you try to contact him,” he was saying. “I’ll have to soften up Scogil with bad news about how I can’t help him. Let him stew for a gaggle of watches before you serendipitously arrive as his savior. Play innocent. A couple of hints, maybe. Don’t offer him anything. Let him pry out of you—very slowly—what you can do for his scheme.”

While she waited she again took up her ideas for Eron Osa’s persona-change package—the still-unsolved side of her assignment. She couldn’t fix the final parameters. She’d have to meet this child first. She always worked with traits that were already there—otherwise it was hopeless—tweaking this, damping that, exaggerating, redirecting. It took a lot of observation. And all changes had to be compatible with the hardware and wetware constraints. For now all she had to work with were the known hardware weaknesses.

No two fam’s architectures were exactly the same. Faraway designs, for instance, emphasized security. Cloun-the-Stubbom had conquered a good bite of the Galaxy with a Crafter-devised mentality-altering machine based upon the very same tuned probe that, in its modem incarnation, transduced information between fam and wetware. Cloun’s weapon of conquest had been devastating. The survivors had been impressed. Since then a great deal of thought had gone

into protecting personality integrity. The first Faraway fams had been nothing more than devices that detected and countered tuned probe attacks and concentrated on monitoring the emotional feedback loops—neural and chemical— among cortex, hypothalamus, locus ceruleus, pituitary, amygdala, etc.

The original Faraway designs had had their limitations. If the fam was removed, by guile or force or neglect, the organic brain again became defenseless against alteration; the absent fam could then be replaced, but the personality changes induced in its absence would remain. Modem designs, like the one that this Eron Osa child wore, kept a stack of persona parameters that it tagged when it detected decoupling and, upon recoupling, set about reversing any changes made during the separation. Faraway, whose hegemony had been the chief victim of Cloun-the-Stubbom, soon became, and remained, particularly good at implementing defensive protocols in fam design—the famous “safe-walls.”

The problem-solving aids, the data stores, the search engines, die graphics engines, the monitoring agents, and sophisticated internal regulation of emotion all came later—but in Faraway designs these “features” remained subservient to the goal of security. Under certain circumstances, that in itself was a weakness. When Beucalin called and gave her the all-clear that Scogil had been set up, she had already postulated more than sixtyne ways to attack Eron Osa’s brain, all with a high probability of success. First, of course, she had to test-drive his fam before she could finalize the surgery. That fam, having been a child’s constant companion for almost a decade now, was already well outside of its original specs.