Psychohistorical Crisis

17

YOUNG BOYS PREFER OLDER WOMEN, 14,791 GE

The psychohistoric equations are only symbols which map out futures; they cannot describe a future to an endlessly fine resolution— any more than the painting of a landscape will show, under a microscope, the crocus in the meadow on its distant mountain slope. Replace the crocus with a sparrow and the painting of the landscape has not been changed at all.

A psychohistoric prediction is a map of all the high-probability features on the lay of the land, placing the mountain and valley contours and the way the rivers and roads wander between them. It will give you the climate and the resources. It will populate your map with virtual houses and stores and spaceports but will not supply tenant names or lace curtains at the windows or the precise watch during which rain-puddles will appear.

Only one major word of caution: Check the critical branch-points; make sure that you are actually in the world described by your map. I had a friend once who tried for hours to locate himself on the wrong map. Now that man, we might say, was lost!

—Excerpt from the Founder’s Psychohistorical Tools for Making a Future

A meteor tore a white rip in the dark sky of Neuhadra. On a Glatim balcony, Eron counted each puff of breath through his light facemask.

He was also counting his blessings. For the first time in his life the Osa boy felt totally in command of his own destiny. He had observed many people who had the aura of command, like his father, and they wielded their authority with a kind of blas6 nonchalance, as if it were too ordinary to think about, but it wasn’t ordinary for Eron and he relished this ability to steer his life where he wanted it to go.

He calculated the drop to the courtyard beneath and decided it was too far down, so he worked his way over the balustrade and by careful handgrips lowered himself onto a foot-wide ledge from which he could jump. He didn’t want Murek to know he was going out this evening. Not if he valued his hide. He had a rendezvous with Murek’s new love who was, ahem, a delightfully mature woman; she seemed to have both the Ganderian penchant for the escapade and an attraction for young boys. Nemia was a boy’s gracious dream.

He had certainly complicated matters by (twice daily) making taboo penetration of his immature servant in violation of both Ganderian ethics and her contract. Still, Girl would cover for him; she seemed to be pleased to do everything he told her to do and disinclined to be jealous over class lines. Her unnatural obedience certainly made him uneasy—she even lied for him—but how could he reject that kind of uncompromising loyalty? He mustn’t take it for granted; he had already learned to be careful in the way he phrased his instructions; if he could think of eight ways to carry out an instruction, Girl could always think of the ninth.

Evening covered his hurried foray down to the lake-front—the most awesome of the meteor flashes weren’t bright enough to betray him. As he had anticipated, the boathouse was unmanned, its doors unlocked, and he was able to sneak a runabout onto the lake without much hinge squeaking. He threw his pants and boots aboard and for a while, just to be safe, waded and pushed with his feet against the sand until he was clear—but he knew the motor was superbly silent and when he threw himself back in the boat, dripping, to engage the power, at low throttle, only a burble followed his wake. It sounded more like a brook than a thruster.

He had loaded his fam with a sim-overlay of the lake and he watched as the elegant map rotated in his mind’s eye, virtual stars orienting themselves to match the starscape he could see. Once he had his directions, a dismissive thought shut off the see-through landscape ghost. He was certain, at the bottom of his heart, that he shouldn’t be doing this to his best friend, but he was becoming more and more confident of his ability to handle Murek.

A father’s guidance was sometimes even more useful than a tutor’s. From that blood source he’d learned a lot about sneaking and subterfuge. Out here on the lake, with four of Neuhadra’s arrogant stars peering at him, and, hopefully, his tutor asleep, he was glad to have learned those lessons well even if his father hadn’t been consciously participating in every lesson, many of which Eron had conducted in a covert spying mode. He didn’t question why Nemia was attracted to him. Mature women always liked young boys, and being as handsome and debonair as he was made it all that much easier.

He goosed the motor and practiced his helmsmanship, steering up ahead to the left of Ore-Nose Point, now showing in blacks and dark blues and twinkles of stardust off the water. A sharp breeze made him huddle inside his coat but he refused to take his hands off the wheel—he wasn’t in the mood for automatic. She was just around the point. Soon he’d have to swing right to leave behind him a lazy curving wake of starlit ripples.

A balance between persistence of goal and the flexible ability to modify goals in the face of obstacle was the secret of staying in command. Out around Ragmuk his tutor had begun to flag and lose direction. Here at Neuhadra he had become positively gloomy, even defeated, but Eron himself hadn’t lost direction. He was a good helmsman. He’d kept at Murek to honor his commitment, prodding: get me into school, get my fam enhanced. Every time Murek seemed ready to quit, Eron kept after him until he realigned—and just in case Murek did fail him, he was assembling a new set of contacts. It was working. Everything was working perfectly.

Nemia had taken a small cottage on the lakefront not far from the Glatim estate—to be near her friend, she said. (She had used the circumspect word “friend” to refer to Murek, but Eron’s delicate spying had confirmed that a more accurate word might have been “lover”) She was evidently in hiding from her parents, who, she explained, had other plans for her. Eron approved of women who fought with their parents. When he turned into the cove, as she had promised, a soft robobulb was illuminating the dock. In fact, as he slowed for his approach, he saw her sitting there with her legs hanging over the water, woman and spider-legged robobulb both waiting for him.

She grabbed the rope he tossed to her and lashed the runabout to a poured stone pile and took his hand to help him clamber up onto the jetty. “I wasn’t sure you had the audacity to come,” she teased.

He wished he was older and taller. “You invited me,” he replied firmly.

“But it’s past your bedtime .” She was grinning behind a transparent oxygen facemask, shaped by some artist to give her an alien mystique.

“I may be younger than you are but I have more brains,” he chided. “It isn’t very bright of you to have me here.” He could trade insult for insult. That was part of the romance. He noticed the reflection of the four brightest stars in her eyes.

“It’s night. Our mutual friend won’t notice.”

“With us gawking here in the open and four suns in the sky?”

“Oh, dear; we’ll have to hide,” she challenged, and headed uphill toward the cottage. The robobulb hesitated, not quite knowing to which human its duty lay.

Eron chased after her into the dark and the sentient bulb bounded behind with eight-legged leaps that threw goblin-armed shadows around them. She ran ahead in the zigzag swings of an evasive prey but finally trapped him, predator-like, in a little hedged alcove by a garden where they sat down on the bench to catch their breath. “You run pretty

good for an old lady,” he commented suavely. The robobulb, arriving late, dimmed and hid itself discreetly in the bushes. “You’re not afraid to be here, little pup?”

“Of course I’m afraid. Murek impounded my kick.”

“Your kick?”

“My blaster!”

“You don’t have your blaster with you? You’re defenseless?” She was grinning behind her fairy facemask again.

“I’m all mush,” he said. “But I can still fight feebly for my honor if circumstance demands it.”

“You’d win. If I tried to kiss you here with these masks on us, I’d never be able to overwhelm you.” And she was off again toward the house.

He followed her inside, through the vestibule’s pressure lock. The leggy bulb resumed its patrolling of the grounds. They hung up their masks.

But they didn’t kiss right away. She had music to play. He was astonished to hear the strains of the Eighth Rombo Cantata of Aiasin seeping out of her walls. Seventy-first-century Imperial Court music was a favorite of his mother and was rarely played anymore, so his mother claimed. Ah. Nemia had been pumping Murek about his lifestyle! Very casually she began to ask him leading questions. It was a setup. But it was nice to have a woman so interested in him that he couldn’t stop talking—and to have comfortable antiques to sink into while he chatted, even if they were hideously old fashioned to his more colorful taste. Nemia was an easy conversationalist—not like Girl, who had a very weird brain/fam. He didn’t even know how he got onto the topic of how much he hated his father’s secrecy. That topic! It must have been the couch and the frilled pillows. It had nothing to do with her eyes, which he couldn’t escape.

“And you never keep secrets?” she taunted.

“Never. Can’t you see how frank I’m being with you? And my nefarious father manipulates people while deliberately keeping them in the dark!”

“But you never manipulate people in the dark?”

“Only when they pull me under the covers,” he hinted, inching along the couch. “I prefer to do it with the lights on.” “I see,” she said, holding him at bay with a finger on his nose. The room lights, as if on signal, began to creep across the high ceiling, swinging on little silver legs, dimming the study as they retreated into far comer burrows.

He began to notice that he had been talking too much— gushing out secrets he wouldn’t have dared tell a fellow Gandarian. A good love affair shouldn’t be so vainly onesided. He had to think of her He thought of her. She had balm-scented breasts. Love required a sharing of minds, but was she ever going to let him get off the topic of himself? He ignored her last question—he had questions for her, too—for instance, how had her breasts become so round? But it wouldn’t be polite to ask about her body. Concentrate. Her mind. The secret was to flatter the mind of a woman with a beautiful body. Early on he had deduced that she was an expert on fams and knew more about that subject than anybody he had ever met before. It was a topic that interested him, too, so he began by generating—perhaps too quickly—a list of important intellectual questions. People who knew things liked to talk about them.

“Why can’t people switch fams when they make love?” She just laughed and used the finger with which she had been holding him off to give his nose an affectionate finger slap-tap, on both sides. Since she wasn’t able to push on his nose while she did this, he moved closer.

He knew he had led with a silly question, so he asked another, carefully selected for the seriousness of its content. Bad move. It gave her an excuse to leave the couch. Soon she was showing him some of her portable diagnostic equipment and explaining to him more about quantum switching probabilities than he could easily follow in his aroused state. He had such a stupid fam; he should be able to follow everything she said, never asking her to repeat herself, never losing the flow of argument. He didn’t mind so much asking clarifying questions, or asking her to pause while his fam conducted a search—but he did mind that he was so overwhelmed that he couldn’t even think of a clarifying question. Murek was a better teacher than Nemia, but she had the sharper mind. He became curious about how she got that way, and began asking her personal questions.

She talked for a long while. He wasn’t sure he even followed her then. She had secrets and she danced around them and he felt helpless trying to find a way to penetrate her secrecy. Sometimes she was very moody and then she’d jump out of it, again to flirt with him as if she didn’t have a care in the world. He wanted her to tell him secrets that no woman should be obliged to tell a man.

“I’m going to elope with him” she said out of the blue. He knew she meant Murek. They were back on the couch, slouched the way people doodle with their bodies when they are saying more than their voices can convey. She looked up at Eron, over his torso, with her teasing smile. “We’ll all elope together, the three of us.”

“He’d kill me,” said Eron, sobering, trying to sit up, but she wouldn’t let him.

“No, he wouldn’t! Why would I let him do that?” She fell back into her mood and snuggled her cheek on Eron’s stomach. “I haven’t told him that I’m going to elope with him. Does he ever talk to you about me? Does he like me?”

“Well,” said Eron honestly, “I think you are just another good lay to him.” At her stricken tenseness he added, “But he likes you a lot”

She relaxed again. “You’re probably right. He’s a wanderer, strangely closed into himself. I don’t think he thinks of ties at all.”

“He makes ties,” said Eron wryly, “but you don’t know where the other end of the string goes.”

“I want to elope with him to the most obscure part of the Galaxy where I have no competition and I can nail him down. You, my lovely boy-love, are going to have to help me.” She had his shirt pulled up and kissed his belly button.

“What can I do? You’ve already done everything. You’ve already seduced him!”

“Sex isn’t enough,” she admonished. “There is more to love than that even if you’re not mature enough to appreciate the finer nobilities of love. We’ll have to have the perfect honeymoon together. Then he’ll find his love. He will love me.” She cast a calculating glance at Eron. “I think I know the perfect honeymoon retreat. Can you share a secret?” She was easing him out of his shirt.

“Lakgan?” he guessed, recollecting certain porno vids he’d stolen from a classmate back on Agander.

Nemia shrieked with horror and laughter. “They breed dancing girls on Lakgan.”

“They have pleasure palaces, too.”

“I had in mind someplace more sedate. Zural. My Grandfa used to tell me stories about Zural. I picked Zural because you two are off to Faraway and Zural is on the way. If we are all eloping together to the Periphery, a little side trip could be interesting.”

“Never heard of it,” said Eron. Even his fam didn’t come up with a hit.

“It’s not on the charts.” She grinned. “That’s why it is such a good honeymoon spot.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know where it is. That’s what makes it so deliciously mysterious. But I have a lead. It just came in a few watches ago. There’s an old first edition of a star-map. It’s been lost for a long time. I think I’ll be able to find Zural in time.”

Galactic enigmas intrigued Eron. “What’s it like?”

“I don’t know. No one knows,” she said. “That’s the point. Obviously when a honeymooning couple gets there, they won’t be interrupted.” She was speaking to Eron firmly. “You’ll help me?” It was both a question and a command. “You have some strange power over your friend. I need your help.”

Eron just fingered her hair. She had a grip on him and he wasn’t able to inch away, even a centimeter. He didn’t know what to say.

“You have to answer me,” she commanded, moving up on him and staring down at his head, which was embedded in a pillow.

He stared up at her. “I don’t think I should be gazing into your eyes while I think about it.”

She took his jaw in her hand so that his eyes couldn’t escape. She laid her nose on his, just barely kissing him with her lips. “Will you help me?”

What was a farman to do? Farmen were supposed to have galactic adventures. When he tried to avoid her eyes all he saw was her smile. “What’s the worst that can happen?” He shrugged, trying to think rationally.

“Go on,” she prompted. “Tell me the worst.” She kissed him.

“We could get hurt,” he concluded.

She was now holding him by the shoulders and beaming. “Badly?”

“Two scraped knees is my limit.”

“It will be fun,” she said.

An ancient poem came to his mind. A bottle of wine, a mapless void, and thou. “Scary fun,” he said. “You’ll have to convince Murek to give me back my kick.”

“It’s a deal,” she said instantly.

Had he said yes? She seemed to think so. Her hand was feeling down to his buttocks. Control was like driving a fast car; first you were doing twenty meters a jiff, with the trees whizzing by delightfully—and then you were skidding. He tried hugging her in return. That only made it worse. She picked him up in her arms. He hadn’t actually realized until now that she was bigger than he was. “Where are we going?”

“To the bedroom.”

“Isn’t this of a sudden? I mean, we hardly know each other.”

“You’ve earned your reward.”

“Put me down! It is not supposed to be a reward! It’s supposed to be love!”

“Eron,” she said sweetly as she carried him over the threshold, “you can’t imagine how much I love you right now.” She set him gently on the already turned-down bed, and while he was still mute, degaussed his belt buckle, dropping his pants—and then her own. She filled two graven goblets from an antique urn. Then she did something totally preposterous. She took off her fam.

Her personality didn't seem to change at all. She just stood there smiling at him, more naked than any woman he had ever imagined in his most secret fantasy. Was she a witch? “We're going to do it the wild way,” she said. “Without a fam. You, too.”

He reached instinctively for his kick, which wasn’t there, not even a harness, and then reached up and touched his fam protectively. She had such round breasts. They jiggled.

‘The monkey in you will remember how to do it—believe me.” She came over and very gently removed his fam. Incredible that he let her commit this ultimate rudeness without even a whimper. He was shocked into a daredevil excitement.

The world changed. He could still question his surroundings but what he sensed no longer echoed with answers.

He was listening to music... suddenly void of culture or history or his stem musicology lessons... leaving him only...to hear...the bells, the gentle booms of the tym-panella, the acrobatics of the electrovibs. Who was the composer? He no longer knew. He looked to her question-ingly. Almost he panicked; he had also forgotten her name, too, and he wasn't sure why he was here. But certainly she must be the most beautiful woman he had ever seen with flaxblue eyes set in ebony. She had said the monkey would remember. He remembered that. He was swinging toward her through the aeneous green of sun-drenched trees with a gibbering joy. He had no intention of exchanging names. Something wasn’t controlling his chemistry as it should be. Lust. Where was his mind when he needed it? Was he all senses? It was raining emotions and the juices coursing through his body were at flood level.

She sat down on the bed beside him and he felt the sheets and the warmth of her thighs. She handed him one of the goblets and took one herself. They had transmogrified into marvelous miniature universes shaded in erbium glazes. The scripted designs were runes coding the wisdom of ages—but he no longer had a mind capable of decoding anything. He was raw animal sapiens from Rith. She dipped a finger into her goblet and offered it to his tongue. It tasted as might elixir from the lost cellar of an ancient emperor. Monkey see; monkey do. He dipped his finger into his goblet and offered it in sacrifice to her tongue. He was an apprentice far-man. So many galactic rituals he didn’t know.

They drank, elbows entwined, looking into each other’s eyes. It was like being her. What would really holding her be like? A frantic minority voice was urging him to get his fam back now. But all the action his toes desired was to reach up and wrap themselves around her. Every movement attracted him. She ran the palm of her hand against the wall behind her, drawing his attention to her face as if it were a portrait against that delicate aquarelle background. Then she reached over and ran her palm down his back. She kissed him where his fam had been. Nobody had ever kissed him there, not even his mother.

He wasn’t a monkey. He was paralyzed by his obsessive need to remember her name. Somehow a name would give him permission to embrace her. All he could think of was “Melinesa,” and he knew that wasn’t right. He needed to touch her so he invented a name, ‘Azalea,” and whispered it into her ear as he awkwardly took her down onto the bed. What kind of flower was an Azalea? It didn’t matter. He liked the name. He liked whispering into her ear.

“My sweet baby boy,” she whispered back into his ear. She wasn’t, he realized, as original a thinker as he was.

“Azalea,” he whispered tenderly, marveling at his intelligence, pleased that he still had it. She held his hips, not letting him make a mistake.

One hundred million years of famless evolution did the rest. He felt very normal for a hairless monkey who had taken to walking around on the forest floor. She giggled. He wasn’t sure that was normal. They hugged each other and grinned. That was good. Then he went to sleep with his nameless mate in his arms, struggling in his dreams to find the language of poetry that he had lost. It was an ancient dream of a garden of Eden, flowered, scented, textured, full of sensory delights, the tree of knowledge still forbidden.

He woke as the sunlight crossed his face. A lazy hand touched nothing, reached out and still touched nothing. He was alone! His eyes shot open. He sat up, one single thought on his mind; he was a mental cripple. Where was his fam? Find it! But his mind wasn’t answering with a strategy, just with a will. He ran from room to room like a headless chicken.

She wasn’t in the dispozoria. She wasn’t in the dressing room. Nor the study. He wheeled downstairs and found her in the underground workroom where she had shown him her diagnostic equipment. She was dressed—clinical clothes—and wearing her fam. She was at her console, and—horror of horrors—she was examining his fam, peering over some instrument, intent at her work. It was clipped to a board, the screens of multiple instruments reading excitedly.

“All is well,” she said without looking up. “I think I’m done.”

He resisted the impulse to run to her and snatch it away. She had his whole precious life in her hands. “I’m starting to miss myself,” he said, half in panic, frozen where he had first spotted his fam. Was she going to grab it and run, teasing, making him chase her all over the grounds to get it back? Or worse?

She turned and smiled, gently extricating his extra brain from her apparatus. “You are thinking that I would hurt you, sweet young boy. Never. At least not beyond skinning your knees. Come here. You’ll find that reintegration is as much of an experience as doing without.” She held up his fam for him. With awesome relief he let her reattach the transducers.

“Nemia.” That was her name. Of course. He knew that all along. It had been on the tip of his tongue. A flurry of other answers came as he did a wild, random, wide-ranging systems check. All there, it seemed. Undamaged. What had

she been doing? “Did you fix something? Am I more intelligent now?”

“I doubt it. Perhaps you’ve become wiser. I was only being curious. It’s my trade. It’s an unusual design.”

“It’s a stupid Faraway design. I’m condemned to be stupid ” complained Eron. “I want add-ons.”

Nemia became stem. “Never overreach. Your fam has above-average capacities. It is not state of the art, but it’s good. There is an old saying you should take to heart, ‘It’s not how versatile your fam is, it’s what you do with it.’” “That’s just a fancy way of telling me to get used to being stupid. You’re telling me that I’ll make a good monkey.” “You’re a genius for a monkey.” She laughed. “When you’re grown up, you’ll be a gorilla. Let’s get breakfast. I’ve been working hard all night and I’m famished.”

“You tricked me,” he said sullenly, refusing to move.

“Sex energizes women and puts overanxious boys to sleep,” she teased.

“You don’t love me. You just wanted my fam.”

“Eron my darling, you are a most lovable boy. How could I help but love you? Our mutual friend has told me that you have mathematical ambitions. He says you’re good. I hate to see people overreach themselves. I was just checking to see that your fam can actually take you where you want to go. I must say, you’re carrying around a very good mathematical machine, whatever you think. Make sure you use it. Waste is a terrible thing.”

“Can my fam be upgraded?” he asked resolutely.

“Yes,” she said sadly.