Psychohistorical Crisis

18

PARTNERS IN CRIME, 14,791 GE

You can’t cross a galaxy merely by standing and staring at the sky and wishing upon a star. Flap your wings, and if that fails, try something else. I did and here I am an interesting distance from home

—Epitaph on a tombstone found on Iral IV

The corridor lights along the eastern window-wall of the Glatim mansion were dimming as the dawn glory peeked above the lake’s surface. Hiranimus Scogil was up early and pacing. He glanced out the tall windows for the hundredth time at the ruffled blue water, golden streaked by the primary sun, his eyes fam-set to high magnification, searching for the wake of Eron’s runabout—not that he expected Eron home so soon from his escapade. Nemia had given Scogil a surprise call last evening telling him to stay away as she had arranged a critical rendezvous with her young admirer, an unlikely story; it would be Eron who had arranged the rendezvous. The little brat took after his homy father in more ways than one!

Scogil wouldn’t even be able to tease Eron about it—the boy remained wrapped in a Ganderian ethic which allowed one to banter humorously about one’s legal mate at any level of sexual detail but deemed it taboo to nudge, gossip, ask, or comment about any extramarital liaison. Cross-generational affairs, permitted in the interest of a proper “erotic education” for the young, nevertheless dwelled in a strictly invisible domain. Agander was a very strange place.

He had to grin at the whole situation. Nemia was such an unscrupulous woman! He might have been shocked at the way she had been flirting with Eron—except that it served his purposes. She made a good partner in crime. He was half tempted to thwart his family’s matrimonial plans for him, whatever diabolical form they were taking, with a preemptive marriage to this high-energy vortex... but stealing her from her fianc£ would mean he’d have to deal with Ne-mia’s family as enemies, and her family was a very powerful one indeed; to annoy them was to live under a sword of retribution, perhaps a worse fate than annoying his own extended family, which was suicide. Life offered up sobering alternatives.

Damn that boy! He should be sneaking back into his room by now. Scogil was dying of curiosity to find out from Ne-mia if Eron’s fam was modifiable in any interesting way. Rigone couldn’t wait much longer, and the Oversee would have Scogil’s hide if he didn’t soon turn up for his assignment in Coron’s Wisp. He looked out again but saw nothing on the lake, only the morning glint of a ferry descending from space.

When Glatim’s gruff Assessor sauntered by and invited him for breakfast, he took the invitation. He was hungry. In the empty dining hall, the smells of frying yamums and jam and cinnamon beckoned them both back into the kitchen to the cozy staff table where the cook and his helper, together, concocted a sumptuous meal faster than any cuisinator— good food and small talk with the servants always took one’s mind off serious concerns. Mendor himself joined them before they had finished their second helpings, popping an extra chair out of the floor to face Hiranimus. As usual, he brought up business before he joined the banter.

“You and the boy are looking for a ride to Faraway, right?” Faraway was at least twenty thousand leagues from Neuhadra by pythagorean line, more like thirty thousand leagues along any usable trade route, a greater distance than Scogil could afford.

“You have a berth?”

“It fell into my lap; it seems destiny has been looking at you favorably for the last ten million years, working up to your salvation.” Mendor’s humor tended to be deadpan.

“I’ve been patient,” said Scogil, although, at the moment, he was anything but.

“A contract from Trefia came in last evening—Trefia is a sparse planetary system only four hundred and eleven leagues from Faraway, dynamically very stable and un-chaotic”—Mendor began to chuckle—“with a political elite so clueless about meteoroid impacts that they’ve been trying to contact the Omneity of Planetary Safety to ask about their problem.” The Omneity of Planetary Safety— long ago vanished into the early Interregnum—had once been a powerful department of the First Empire’s bureaucracy. “Some schoolboy had to refer them to ms.” Everyone joined the laughter, even the cook. Mendor went on to explain that Trefia hadn’t been impacted seriously for the last two hundred million years and so evidently wasn’t geared up to deal with such a problem. Their Assembly was in a panic.

“Poor jokers haven’t even had their astronomers on a small-body watch and were only warned by a curious star-ship captain. The villain is an interstellar rogue, a biggy on a bull’s-eye orbit. Probably ejected by some coalescing planetary system billions of years ago. Not an emergency, but it will be a lot cheaper to take care of now than a few years down the orbit. I’ll be sending off an expedition as soon as I can organize one. That might be faster than you can pack your sack. Can’t go myself. The crew will have to stop at Sewinna for supplies and then on to Faraway for some of the more specialized machinery—our meteoroid seems to be just a huge pile of rubble cemented together by a prayer and a little ice, so the extra machinery is to be sure we don’t turn it into buckshot when we do the deflection. The ride will be free for you and Eron, if you want it, compliments of the Trefians who are too scared shitless right now to balk at a few extra expenses like passage for a second-rate mathematician and his apprentice. We have you on the payroll as an orbital mechanic.”

He waited a moment while he assessed how well his friend was taking his needling, then smiled. “I’ve asked for a little under-the-table bribe to be paid directly as a charitable grant to Asinia Pedagogic’s scholarship fund for needy mathematics students—with invisible strings attached to the Osa boy in such a way that no one there will question his qualifications too seriously. How’s that? It’ll take some worries off your shoulder.”

“I was just about ready to hit you for a contribution to Eron’s maintenance fund.”

“Who, me? That’s why I struck first. The Glatims didn’t get rich by giving charity to twelve-year-old paupers. We got rich by being stingy. Speaking of stingy, you’ll be on your own getting back.” That didn’t really sound right to him even if it did fit his cherished family image; Hiranimus was one of his oldest friends. He slapped the table. “Maybe I can charge the poor Trefians your return fare, too, though it’s not liable to be on one of my ships. We don’t make regular runs out that way.” Business done, Mendor turned to food. “What do you recommend: the hen’s eggs or the fish eggs au gratin? Maybe I’m just in the mood for cinnamon toast.”

Scogil scurried up and off to bring back a plate of the marvelous fish-egg recipe, plus the cinnamon toast—whereupon he rattled off an aside to the Assessor, who had been left out of the conversation, loudly enough for Mendor to hear. “Mendor has just paid off the debt he owes me for saving his life innumerable times while he was a wayward youth.” He spoke happily, all the while factoring in the extra time pressure of an early departure.

“Hey, always willing to help out a friend when he’s out of line.”

“Mendor! I’m never out of line. I’m just off the road picking up herbs to liven up our standard evening chow.”

“Don’t try to swab out my ears, you worthless nitwit. You’re always out of line. Why do you think they sent you to

Agander? It was the only secure, out-of-the-way prison they could find.”

“I escaped. Shut up and eat your fish eggs!”

“Say, where’s the kid? He’s usually an early riser with a big appetite, out spying as soon as the sun is up.”

“He’s off doing research for me,” said Scogil glumly. Indeed, Eron wasn’t back until late morning. Scogil watched him, from a distance, silently bring in his runabout, then keep to the shadows while he snuck back inside the mansion. A wait was appropriate. Give the brat time enough to pretend he’d been sleeping. He waited impatiently. He paced. He thought about Nemia. Had she, maybe, taken a shower with the impudent brat? He rapped heavily on Eron’s door, ignoring the delicate chimes, reminding himself to pretend that nothing had happened.

“Time for your math lesson!” he shouted through the suite’s portal. Eron answered, all innocently willing to please. That was good. Scogil, almost forgetting to mock up his mild Murek persona, gave Eron the workout of his life, oral exam, prompting, prodding, challenging, tripping, patiently repeating what Eron did not understand, diagramming around misunderstandings, then demanding that Eron reproduce exactly what had been implied. Eron gave him no lip. That was a wonderful change. The brat worked harder to please than Scogil had ever seen him work. Scogil never let up. He took Eron past suppertime, right up to first sunset. Refusing to break, the boy used fam stimulation to push body and brain well past die exhaustion point. He’d sleep well. No dallying tonight!

Hiranimus stood, relenting. “I have good news. We have passage to Faraway. And about your recent work—it was good; I’m more and more sure you’ll pass the entrance exams for Asinia Pedagogic. You handle pressure well. You have the talent. I’m proud of you.”

Eron looked up, almost pathetically relieved. Scogil left him without another word. It was a long walk across this overlarge guest room, and he barely escaped without a damaging smirk, self-approving that he had not broken down and teased the boy about Nemia. I can still be a good Gan-darian, he thought, re-relegating the Murek persona to his mental closet. Then his pace quickened, and without even a thought about changing clothes he headed out to see Nemia, his pace quickening as he approached the car pool. He chose the swiftest aerocar, the streaker which he wasn’t supposed to use except in an emergency.

From above, he followed the lakeshore by the dimness of the false twilight, beating out Neuhadra’s secondary sun before it dropped below the horizon, arriving in front of Ne-mia’s cottage after a direct-line gentle glide. The place seemed abandoned That panicked him. After trotting up to it, he tested the airlock. Unattended. Even the robobulbs were inactive. He entered, sealing the first door behind him, restively waiting the few moments it took the vestibule to match house pressure, then went inside, not knowing what to expect.

“An unguarded entrance!” he boomed to the high ceiling. “Your mother will catch you! You’ll be married before we can finish our business!”

“Grrmfle,” came a sleepy voice from the upper balcony bedroom.

He sighed. She’s just being careless again. Nemia didn’t even open her eyes when he sat down on the bed. He gently shook her shoulders. “How did my young muscled stud measure up?”

She turned her face up at him. “Where in the Galaxy did you unearth that little emperor?” Her eyes were still closed, and that allowed him to admire the beauty of her face with unabashed enthusiasm without having to hide his feelings.

“You’re looking top-of-the-mountain”—he smiled—“if somewhat worn out. I think you liked him.”

She made a face, still with her eyes closed. “It was tough keeping up with him but I got him out of his fam. Now let me sleep some more.” She rolled over, away from Hiran-imus. “I’ve been up all night. He just left.”

“It’s been longer than that. You’ve slept more than you think. It’s already night again and even Sinari is about to set. I met Eron at prenoon after he sneaked back. He was kind of woozy, like one is after a long night, but a secret grin suffused his demeanor so I assume something pleasant happened. He was even deferential toward me, which is highly unusual.”

“I always make men happy, even boys. Now join me for a snuggle in bed and let me sleep some more. I’m still exhausted.”

“Can’t. We’re on a time deadline. A passage to Faraway dropped out of the sky. I need details! Can you do anything and when?”

“It will take me five or six watches to set up the operation, maybe another to train Rigone. I’ve been working with the Scav. He’s technically naive but very competent and an incredibly fast learner.”

“So you did find something!”

“Your boy has the weirdest fam I’ve ever examined. Lucky for me we've had the specs on file or I’d have been lost. I’d rate its memory capacity at about eighty percent of a good Neuhadran design. It should be no trouble to give him auxiliary memory. And we can sneak in a good set of encrypted math modules that will key in when certain kinds of problems trigger them. That’s what Rigone really wants to know how to do, so we’ll go the whole way.”

“Except that we don’t have any of the Fellowship’s modules,” Hiranimus reminded with a bitter snarl.

Reluctantly she pulled herself out of bed and slipped on a housecoat. “So? The Oversee is a hotbed of very competent mathematics. For instance, I have Riote’s Compendium with me. I’ll give him that.”

“That’s tactical stuff! It’s for hit-and-run warfare! Guerrilla stings! You can’t manage an empire with Riote’s carnival tricks!”

She grinned, remembering her long tactical discussions with Grandfa. “Riote was master of the amplification of low-probability events. The Pscholars can’t match us in that area. They ignore unlikely events or set up machinery to damp them down. You’ve been assigned to Coron’s Wisp. Who but Riote could have found that crack in the dam? The Pscholars have too much ground to cover to focus on such dust-mote detail.”

“And we just give Riote’s work to the enemy?”

“Aren’t you hoping that Eron will rise to Second or First Rank status? To get there he needs an edge.”

“I’d be happy if he clawed up to Fourth Rank. But it won’t do us any good if he becomes a devout Pscholar groveling at the Founder’s Tomb. It’s up to you to give us a hook to keep a hold on him. Is it possible? He’s twelve already—fam freeze-up time—and, worse, nobody does fam security better than Faraway.”

“Even Faraway engineers don’t cover all the approaches. I’m the right genius to jimmie the works”—she grinned— “but I’ll need your help.”

“Ah.” He brightened, scurrying away to come back with a bowl of crushed fruit for her. “Okay. So how can I help?” There was a sexy twinkle in Nemia’s eye. “For us to fool his competent Faraway security we need to slip in a modification that’s in resonance with his wetware so the fam doesn’t self-detect undue influence.”

“I’ve assumed as much.”

“But it’s not enough to just modify his fam—we have to modify it in a way that will eventually be useful to us.”

“Of course,” said Scogil impatiently.

She sat back on the bed so she could shovel the red fruit into her mouth. “Let’s think strategically. What’s the real problem we have with the Pscholars? Isn’t it the secretiveness with which they surround their mathematical methods?” Scogil nodded. Certainly they had been able to impose that ethic on their acolytes—successfully—generation after generation.

“So,” Nemia continued, “if Eron survives their rites to become a Pscholar, what he learns will be denied us, despite any relationship he might have with you or debt he feels toward you. To be chosen as a Pscholar one has to become fanatical in the belief that the release of psychohistorical mathematics means an end to anyone ’s ability to predict the future well enough to control it.”

‘That’s false! Precognition just changes the feedback terms in the equations!”

“But they believe in its truth. And all of them can quote the Founder’s proof of its validity. And you know damn well that you’re not a competent enough psychohistorian to know what kind of computational strain those extra feedback terms will place on the whole predictive apparatus. Once Eron has become a Pscholar of whatever Rank, he, too, will have come to believe that psychohistory must be kept a secret from the masses.”

“You’ve figured out how to amplify his loyalty to us?”

Nemia grimaced. “Loyalty to what? We are just as secretive as the Pscholars, and our secretive rituals have a far longer history. We’ve lasted half as long as both Empires put together. We panic if a single Pscholar dreams about us. Even Eron isn’t permitted to know your real name, Mister tutor Murek Kapor.”

Scogil scratched his head. “I once took a fascinating course on the equations of secrecy from Cas Ratil. Made me think.”

‘That secretive old drillmaster! I avoided his courses like the plague!”

“Secrecy certainly challenged the mathematician in him. Secret societies are intrinsically unstable, with all the nice characteristics of a ten-kilometer-high tower. They have to be balanced by active control—in the case of the tower, little electromagnets that read and counter all bending moments. A tower like that can stand until even its builders are forgotten—but the hour the electricity fails or the freak wind comes that is stronger than the electromagnets...”

“Do you think they will discover us?” There was almost a shudder in Nemia’s voice.

“The Pscholars? They already have. Our Smythosian secret won’t last another lifetime. Neither will theirs. I predict open warfare within the next couple of generations. Let’s get back to tactics. You were hinting as if you’d found an angle to protect our access to Eron.”

“Don’t you see?”

“No.”

“What if Eron developed an aversion to secrecy? What if he was a closet blabbermouth, primed to break only after he was a full-fledged Pscholar?”

“Can you do that?' Hiranimus asked, awed.

“No,” she blazed, “but you can!”

He was delighted at this turn in the argument. “All right. Brief me.”

“I’m not sure we can pull it off. Eron must have a major psychological revelation about secrecy—while wearing his fam—no more than an hour before Rigone performs the fam modification. Do you know what happens in the brain during enlightenment? We’ve got to strike during the emotional flux of the neural reorganization.”

“Hold on. Are you actually suggesting that / can give him an enlightening lecture on the evils of secrecy while he’s psyching himself up for a major fam operation?”

She assumed the pedantic poise of an authoritarian professor. “Not a lecture. Please, it has to be all emotion. The original psychic probe, you’ll recall, was a surface emotional whip, a control weapon, and not a gentle one. The tuned psychic probe that Cloun-the-Stubbom used so effectively during the Interregnum to dominate his enemies worked at a deeper wetware level of emotional judgment—it left fewer conflict scars and no neural lesions—but it was still a control weapon. The modem fam has much better bandwidth in the two-way communication of nuanced information but is still basically the same emotional device merely reengineered so that the user can control his own emotions, rather than having emotional control imposed by an outside source. To fool a fam, its internal logic, which has been conditioned by a lifetime of symbiosis, has to remain convinced that any emotional turmoil it senses is internal How well do you understand Eron’s emotions?”

“No one is a telepath, but I’m a trained observer and I’ve known him a long time.”

“So? What are his underlying assumptions about secrecy?

Scogil groped about for an analogy. “At this point he’s still a routine product of Ganderian socialization. There are things he will talk about and things his ethics won’t permit him to talk about.”

“And some things he wants to talk about but can't Or couldn’t. Sex things.” A wistful look crossed her eyes, and she held her robe close to herself. That worried Scogil. She continued, almost in awe. “He had a stuck switch in him. He tried to talk and couldn’t—his mouth moved like his head was detached from his larynx—but after he touched me he entered some alien world. The switch melted and he blabbered.”

“You got secrets out of him?” Scogil was instantly jealous. Whenever he’d tried to oil-ease Eron’s secrets out of him, he’d only created an iron resistance in the boy.

Nemia was staring at her memories of last night. “Some. The veil was always there. He’s in full restimulation of a strong internal conflict that he’s trying to figure out. It’s our big opportunity. Conflict resolution is driven by emotion. If he solves this problem himself and the solution is still in wetware flux when we modify his hardware fam—altering its judgment tree about what is, and what is not, a secret— the fam will conclude that its internal changes derive from Eron’s turmoil rather than from anything we’ve done and it won’t have ‘motivation’ to undo our work. When it looks for modifications to Eron’s emotional state, it won’t find any— because we aren’t going to modify him. When it looks for modifications to itself, it won’t find anything that can’t be reconciled as its own response to Eron’s turmoil.” She smiled. “His sexual conflict is a perfect attack vector. We’ll have to work through that.”

“He certainly hasn’t got any problem with humping an older woman,” Hiranimus commented wryly. “A young Ganderian boy is supposed to get himself seduced by an older woman so he won’t fall prey to the naive wiles of an inexperienced girl.” That last was aimed with a intonation which just might have indicted Nemia.

She dodged his jab. ‘Tell me, did he rush to divulge to you all about last night, or did he keep it a secret?

Scogil sighed. “That’s one Ganderian taboo that’s laced up tight. Sexual affairs are secret. It’s not a taboo he would even question.”

“I agree. That means he’ll make an excellent Pscholar, doesn’t it? They’ll have a solid foundation of early-life secrecy considerations upon which to build their elitist ethics of silence. That's what I’m suggesting we break, that emotional foundation, now, while we can.”

Scogil tried to think in those terms. “Eron has always been an unhappy Ganderian,” he mused. “He’s confided to me many of his unspoken hopes, and though he hasn’t been one to break any cultural taboos with me—at least as regards secrets—he has more than once ranted and raved in frustration about the secrecy of his peers. He does not like secrets though he seems psychocondemned to keep them. If there is an internal contradiction here, it is the burning need he has to know what he knows he has no business knowing. He has the mind of a spy.”

Nemia nodded. “Did he ever tell you that he regularly spied on the clandestine meetings of father and mistress?”

“Never!”

“Last night he confessed—in a rush of emotion he wasn’t really able to control—that he had once tried to confront his father with some details of his affair with the woman—did you know her?—Melinesa—but, in the end, never dared. He was frantic to give his father advice, and it drove him crazy that he couldn’t. I think he was in love with Melinesa. He certainly disapproves—and disapproved—of the way his father handled her.”

Scogil recalled the fights Eron picked with his father, much to that harried man’s discomfort. Scogil had never been able to pinpoint the source of the boy’s rage. So—he had harbored visions of giving his father advice about secret matters of state and boudoir, eh? ‘That sounds like Eron.” He reflected. “I only met Melinesa twice .” She was wearing a flowing sarong of birds printed on orange. He saw in his mind’s eye Melinesa in a hallway at a conference bringing him cakes. She had wanted an excuse to discuss Eron’s prospects, glancing fondly at Eron once, while the boy stood across the room, staring at her. She was indeed charming and indecently young, probably too young for Eron by Gan-derian standards, only a decade his senior. “I didn’t know she was involved with Osa Senior, not surprisingly. On Agander one knows these things happen, but even a dilated eye will see scant evidence of any cross-generational liaisons. Everything looks like a ritual, and anything can be hidden in a ritual.”

Nemia escorted Hiranimus down to her study where she displayed for him diagrams and Crowe maps of Eron’s fam, none of which meant anything to him, but he nodded sagely while she pointed and zoomed in on critical features as she jabbered.

Eventually he had to put his hand on her wrist to slow her down. “Keep it simple. If I’m going to help you I have to understand what you need me to do.”

She broke off. “I keep forgetting that you’re only a mathematician.” She looked down at her toes, still bare, and curled them. “Okay. We skip the electroquantum physiology. You’ll just have to take my word and do what I say. Accept my assurances that the physiological consequences will be exactly the ones we want.” She met his gaze. “This is the point I want to make: Your emotions don’t count; his mind has to be in exactly the right state of emotional turmoil just before he undergoes the operation. Fail and, postoperation, his fam’s security will kick in and erase what we’ve done and, worse, warn him that we’ve been tampering.”

He gave her the old Imperial salute of a Stars&Ship Assistant Gunner. “Mine is to do and not reason why; I’m good at that.” He’d been trained as an operative and not as a thinker. It made him sad. In time he’d surprise them all.

She took his arm. She didn’t have to say anything sympathetic, but she did anyway, “You’re good at what you do do. I wouldn’t know how to be you. Your mind fascinates me. I’m tempted to throw off my traces and run away with you and Eron to Faraway. Maybe I would if you’d offer me some bait.”

He smiled. He liked this woman. “It wouldn’t work,” he growled. “Too many complications. Maybe we can toil pleasurably together again anon. Right now we have to work out the details of the job we’re going to do on Eron.”

“I’ll miss you,” she said sadly.

“It can’t be helped. I’m doomed to be on the move.” “There is a last something I can do for you while we’re here in my makeshift lab. I shouldn’t—but I will. You hate that Murek Kapor persona, don’t you?”

“He’s not me; he’s a wimp. I’m glad he’s gone.”

“He’s not gone. He’s just deactivated. The Oversee can re-activate Murek Kapor again anytime they need him. From a distance, too. I was the one who installed him; I know. Let me erase him for you.”

“Without authorization?”

“Why not? Who will ever suspect? It’s easy. Your specialized fam was built from the ground up to be meddled with. Your parents had plans for you. Tailored persona on demand, that’s you. Subaltern, that’s you. All I need to destroy Murek are the special Oversee access codes—and I have those since I already used them once.”

He stood indecisively. She said nothing. He said nothing. It was tempting. He had already vowed that he’d never allow the Oversee to install another persona in that special organ of his fam that was designed to host possessor agents. But it was true; all the information that defined Murek Kapor was still intact and could be reactivated. It didn’t stop there. Once activated, Murek was just the kind of passive fop who, if asked, would offer up Scogil’s fam for repossession by a new agent. There was no way Scogil could destroy the Murek-parasite by himself—it would take more than a lifetime in tandem with major computing resources to break the

code. But Nemia had the code. This might be the last few watches he’d ever see her.

Ah, the risks a man took to be free! Nobody was more loyal to the purpose of the Oversee than Hiranimus Scogil. They had told him that the persona machine in his fam was only a means for rapid disguise—but it was also the means for enslavement. At the Oversee’s whim, he was as much a slave as any controlled sycophant of Cloun-the-Stubbom. He’d been that once on Agander. Never again!

“Can you kill him now?”

“Promise you won’t rat on me?” she stalled.

“I’ll be in your debt.”

“In that case...” She reached back and gently removed his fam.

He watched her fit his warmly fluid pad into her diabolical machines. This was a more dangerous game than taking a shower with her. He couldn’t watch. He had a paranoid need to run and lock up the cottage, uninhibited by logic. Famless, he wasn’t really oriented, though all agents of the Oversee had been trained to operate famless in an emergency. Each room seemed familiar but wasn’t organized in a rational manner. He had to reason out his location. The long gadget at the base of each window he perceived as a lock that he should know how to activate but didn’t. He had to deduce the function by trying various settings. Success delighted him. He wandered through the rooms repeating the action that seemed to lock each window. He missed his fam’s mental house map. Surely he should have been able to set up a windows check list to reassure himself that he had locked them all! He stood there counting the windows his mind remembered, astonished that he didn’t even know what the total should be.

‘The house panel is in the kitchen, oaf,” she said. It was a sweet voice. He let it reverberate in his head so that he could understand each word. The house panel Of course. It would control the door lock, too.

But that created a problem. He reasoned carefully. If the house was locked from the inside via the panel, how would he get out? He gave up. It was simpler manually. He found a mask, figured out the airlock door mechanism, and stepped outside—to a vivid emotional rush, the memory of being adolescent. Half-grown boys did silly things like run around houses without their fams, pretending to be animals. So did agents in training. The tension of muscle. Sights. Smells.

How green the fragrant garden. Weird layout. Wild slopes. Stone fences. Damn! A pesky robobulb was following him on its spider legs. He wondered if he could outrun the bulb. Could those bots even see in what for them would be the brilliant dazzle of day? He ran. The bulb kept up with him, not even bothering to stay on the path. He ran faster. But Ha! Could the bot climb?

“Yahoo!” shouted Hiranimus as he monkeyed up a tree. No, the bulb couldn’t follow! He swung from a branch, flailing his legs gaily while bellowing down at the robocreature. “Yahoo!” Here in the sky he was already free! From everything! Even the Oversee couldn’t send Murek scrambling up a tree. “Nanny, nanny, boo-boo!” he singsonged down to his enemies with the age-old child’s taunt. Then he snuggled into a crotch of the tree to enjoy the spectacular scenery. For a long time he just stared. It was fascinating how the shadows crept across the landscape like a timorous army trying not to be noticed. The colors changed and deepened. Had he ever seen such blue mountains!

When Nemia finally arrived at the trunk of the tree, he refused to notice her and she had to climb up to meet him. He let her position his head—her leg awkwardly hooked in a branch—while she reattached his soft leathery external brains.

“Space save me!” he exclaimed, suddenly sober. “What am I doing up here in a tree?”

“You’re a new man. Murek is gone; I erased him down to the last bit.”

He let her hug him. He had never felt happier with anyone in his life. “I love you.” Freedom was exalting. “I’m

taking you with me. Why didn’t I think of that before? I’ve just decided that I’m willing to defy your parents. I’ll never let you go.”

“That’s just what I’ve been planning all along,” she cooed.

“I’m awed by my stupidity. Where will we hide!”

“I have another secret I shouldn’t have kept from you. I’ve located a honeymoon retreat that’s not on our family charts.”