Psychohistorical Crisis

19

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER AND A WALL WITH EARS, 14,791 GE

This is the excellent foppery of the world: that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence...An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!

—The SpearShaker of Old Rith

The mysterious owner of the Coron’s Egg, wherever in the Galaxy he resided, was obviously not a collector. From her coded correspondence with him, Nemia of P Amontag was convinced he did not know that he possessed a first edition or even that there had been many editions of what he called his “galactarium.” He valued it for some obscure reason; he was neither willing to sell it nor willing to reveal his identity, though he did seem ready to offer information contained within—for a price. She, however, had no intention of asking for the coordinates she desired—the location of the planet Zural II, which Grandfa was certain it held. Such a misstep could attract far too much attention. She needed help.

By night Nemia sneaked out by air to visit her mother, meticulously making sure that she had a backup story and that Hiranimus would not be able to trace her. The P Amontag estate and factory were built into the side of a cliff with an awesome view of the local badlands. That was why she was still good at rock climbing. The pitons she had zapped into the rock as a child were probably still there. Nemia was the family hiker and adventuress—she took after Grandfa. Her mother didn’t like to leave mansion or factory except for long trips and the occasional stellar adventure. Father was away, as usual, that extraordinary mathist and plotter always with his hand in dubious affairs, Grandfa’s son. She would have to deal with her mother. She would rather have dealt with her father.

The mansion’s disembodied robopresence greeted her warmly by sliding open the door before she could sneak up on it, a mutual game they had played since she was a child. She had never won. “Ah, so you’re back!” The robopresence had a cluttered archivist’s memory. “Ran away without even saying good-bye to me! Was that nice!”

“Grandfa kidnapped me,” she explained contritely.

“You’ve grown so! Of course, as usual with l’Amontag children, you’ve forgotten to comb your hair. Mama will be certain to remind you. I can have a brush ready for you in the refresher.”

Nemia sighed. There was no way to face down her old faceless friend. “Mama is waiting.”

“No she isn’t; she has your message that you’re coming but I haven’t yet told her that you’re here. You have time, little one. Now hurry with that hair fix-up before she gets impatient!”

Nemia gave up with a smile. In the refreshing room she put down her traveling case and decided on more than a hair fluffing; she stripped and took a mist shower, brushed her teeth, scrubbed her tongue, and spent all the strokes on her hair that the watchful robopresence expected. A silken robe embroidered with the cavorting figures of gengineered beasts was waiting for her when she was ready.

“Where is Mama?”

“Her boudoir. I will now announce your arrival.”

“No. I want to surprise her.”

“That wouldn’t be the proper protocol,” replied the stem voice.

“When I was a baby, you let me sneak up on her!” she pleaded. “Please?”

“She’ll disconnect me!”

“Ha! She’d forget her own name without you. Keep quiet and I’ll tell you a story tonight. Is it a bargain?”

“You’ll tell me a story? you little conniving rascal! I’m the storyteller around here!”

“I’m grown up now. I tell the stories!”

The robopresence sighed in capitulation. “Such respect I get for spoiling you!”

At her mother’s door Nemia set down her traveling case noiselessly and watched familiar matronly fingers engrossed in intricate embroidery. It was the same comfortable room, the same flickering fire. Mama never changed her furniture, or her ways, addicting herself to the special things which passed her demanding judgment. The huge screen upon which she wove her patterns hadn’t been upgraded in Ne-mia’s memory. The bed under which Nemia had played “cave” since she was two was still there; none of the tables and chairs and cushions—once metamorphosed into castles and ships and control rooms and dungeons—were missing, but now seemed to be arranged in their proper places. The rug was new, its baroque themes almost sacrilegious to Nemia, who had grown used to her mother’s timeless constants. The old rug had carried simple beige designs.

Nemia hesitated to interrupt the delicate weaving of quantronic magic, but she knew from long experience that this was merely the way her mother passed her quiet time, that she liked to be interrupted. “Mama.”

The Duchess of l’Amontag took only a moments’ hand gesture to dismiss her creation and turn to her daughter. “Ah, my runaway child.” The pleasantries thus aside, she moved on to business immediately. “Have you snared him yet?” “Yes, Mama.” She curtsied.

“Hmmm. I thought you’d rebel. You haven’t been the easiest child in the world to raise properly. Rebellion would have been the easy way out.”

“I wanted to.” Nemia smiled. “I would have—but I like him”

“His family entirely approves of you.”

“So does he!” Nemia answered hotly.

“He does, does he? He’s not altogether the best choice for you. But knowing you, I had to make compromises.”

“I thought Grandfa chose him?”

“Well, now!” said the Duchess indignantly. “That man certainly did his share of meddling! Your father’s side of the family is incorrigible! I had Hiranimus Scogil on my list before your grandfather even knew he existed. At the bottom of my list.”

‘That puts him up a notch on my list!” retorted Nemia. “Children,” came a placating disembodied voice, “no quarreling in my house!”

“Quiet! Or I’ll disconnect you.”

“Mama, treat her well! She’s an old friend!”

“Have you ever seen me beat her? She does need a brain transplant.”

“Mama, you wouldn’t know how to run the house without her!”

“There’s that,” conceded Nemia’s mother.

“Nemia, she’s right.” The voice sniffled. “After all,” it went on righteously, “servants are to be seen and not heard!” “May we be alone?” the mother demanded imperiously, and after a long enough silence she returned to her daughter. “So That meant back to business. “I presume you are here for a handout?”

“Mama! You arranged the wedding! Since we have to elope in the middle of the night, the least you can do is give us a glorious honeymoon.”

“Gambling on Lakgan?”

“No. A peaceful retreat on Zural n.”

Her mother froze. “You’ve been pursuing your Grandfa’s obsession? We don’t know where it is. Nobody in the Oversee knows where it is.”

“I do.”

In an entirely new mood, her mother moved to the bed. “Sit down, child.” This was serious clan business. “Explain yourself.”

“It was just chance. I wasn’t monitoring Grandfa’s search—but with all the things I’ve had to do to settle his affairs, I never disabled his weasels.” Nemia went to pick up her traveling case and sat down with it beside her mother. She fished out some correspondence. “I was taking all his mail and an alarm went off. It was this.” She produced a note, her response, and the' recent reply.

The Duchess of 1’Amontag read without being impressed. “I believe my husband’s father owned at least nine of these devices, none of which contain a star or planet listed as Zural under any conceivable spelling. Why should this one be any better?”

“It’s a first-edition. You’ll notice in my negotiation I asked him to check out and send to me the I.S.B. coordinates for the Imperial Starbase Dragontail updated to 14,791 GE.” “Yes, I noticed.” She recited the numbers from the correspondence to make her point.

“Those coordinates are way out of whack.”

“Oh?” Nemia’s mother was a woman who checked everything. The screen, which had a moment ago held her quantum-state embroidery, she now engaged in a search through some distant archive which had probably been captured in an ancient war and lay unused for centuries. The old I.S.B. star velocities were easily accurate enough to give correct coordinates for 14,791 GE. Presently the adjusted coordinates for Dragontail appeared. Her fam quickly compared the two number sets. “They are the same within half a gigameter,” she commented laconically.

Nemia smiled. “You used an old Imperial database.”

“The I.S.B. catalogs have never been bettered. The I.S.B. evolved independently of Splendid Wisdom and was never compromised by Imperial casualness.”

“Yet the Imperial Navy never permitted the coordinates of its major bases to be listed correctly. The errors were intentional.” She took out a Coron’s Egg from her case. “This is the oldest Egg Grandfa ever found. It is a second-edition fabrication. Let’s call up Dragontail. The system was still called Dragontail when this Egg was fabricated, though we were well into the Interregnum and Dragontail had been taken over by Faraway after the last Lakgan war.” She manipulated the surface of her Egg. The room went dark except for vague flickers from the direction of the fireplace.

Stars appeared in interstellar splendor, unnamed, unlabeled. Another tapping shifted the viewing coordinates through a rapid flashing of stars. Now a few of them had luminous names. “I’ve set it to provide the old I.S.B. names for every star within twelve leagues of our viewpoint.” Dragontail was the brightest star in this virtual celestial sphere. Another tap and its coordinates appeared. She entered 14,791 GE and the stars shifted to their present position. Conspicuously the coordinates of Dragontail did not match the I.S.B. numbers, nor the numbers which had been relayed to Nemia by the weasel of her mysterious correspondent.

“Oh,” said Nemia’s mother, now interested.

“Let me tell you the story Grandfa told me.” Nemia brought out some of her grandfather’s precious documents, the originals.

The special evidence pointing to first-edition status for the mystery Egg was a scrap of proof-notes from the Interregnum, archaeologically dated to about the time of Cloun-the-Stubbom, scribbled in pencil on a piece of fine goat parchment. As a youth Grandfa had been studying the high-mountain monasteries of Timdo, a planet he favored for Oversee attention because it harbored the most religious and eccentric culture of the peculiar Coron’s Wisp pentad. He had amused himself for a year by restoring a ruin about which the current monks, who had moved farther down the slopes, were still telling fairy tales of astrological power. Underneath a rubble of roof and collapsed bookcases (basic slate/resin laminations) he found a toppled row of imper-vium cabinets that contained bricks of time-bonded parchment, cellomet, paper, and tiny machines.

Uncompacted, with painstaking care, the documents which remained readable told the story of a bustling enclave low in technical expertise but one which seemed to have been carrying on lucrative sub-rosa dealings with crafty Faraway traders during a time when such contact with barbarian magicians was forbidden by the local customs regulations— but tolerated because the Eggs filled a longed-for local religious need. The monastery designed the Eggs while the industries of the Faraway trading worlds manufactured certain essential components for them, fine quantronics, atomics, etc.—a deal typical of those engineered by the early Faraway Traders. It was only after this archaeological discovery that Grandfa had begun to collect the Eggs of Coron’s Wisp.

The parchment with its startling mention of Zural was a simple proof-list in an obscure monk's shorthand of the time:

Duty: yul. ac. Marrano, 2nd Ed. Egg delete Galanrali, no such F2 str delete Zural (auth. begl.) delete Nahar and all comp, delete Torkan 2348 chart, replace ISB-48A chng coordinates of following defunct S&S bases:

(A list of 476 stars followed, including Dragontail, each with its false coordinates matched with Faraway supplied corrections.)

As a youth Nemia’s grandfather had surmised that he had unearthed the first substantial clue to the location of the mythical Martyr’s Cache. Tamic Smythos had mentioned the Martyr’s Cache only once in a cryptic paragraph—and that in relationship to Zural. The mysterious Zural he had mentioned only twice—but by now it was a Smythosian legend. The Martyr’s Cache might be filled with jars of rotting prison-made paper in an unfindable cave buried under the dunes of a Zural desert, it might be a vault emptied ages ago by Faraway wardens, but—who knew!—it might be a dungeon’s library filled with the golden mathematical wisdom of fifty of the finest of the early Pscholars who had been trained in the melancholy ruins of post-imperial Splendid Wisdom for glorious martyrdom at the hands of Faraway fanatics. Faraway had been driven by the Founder’s belief in their destiny yet simultaneously terrified of his psychohistory.

“So,” said the Duchess of l’Amontag, “your grandfather’s spirit still owns your soul. Even death doesn’t stop him!” She laughed. “You’ll get your money. When you arrive at Faraway, a charter will be awaiting your disposal. We have no choice. I suppose we can’t crew it with Neuhadrans. Scogil thinks he is saving you from a fate worse than death, poor boy, and I suppose we must continue to support his illusions, at least until he is mature enough to laugh about them.”

“Can we afford a charter?” Nemia asked anxiously.

“It won’t be our money. It will be Oversee money. This is Oversee business. This isn’t what I’d planned. The god of chaos has intervened.”

“Shall I tell your fortune?” Nemia was grinning, the Galaxy’s most formidable fortune-telling tool diamond-bright in her hand.

“So your beloved Grandfa also taught you the artistry of the charlatan? No thank you. An admirable evasion, to lay one’s goatish disposition on the charge of a star! Did I tell you that I never wanted to marry your father? Your grandfather insisted. Didn’t you find him insistent! He used that very Egg you are holding to cast my chart and prove to me with his diabolical reasoning that his son was inextricably wedded to my future. He was grinning the whole time, too.”

“Was he right?”

“Your Grandfa, shall we say, was as right as you can be in this information-starved human condition which is our fate.”

Nemia was grinning. She defied her mother—under the pressure of her fingers the stars spread out again across the bedroom in which, as a child, she had built so many castles out of the objects at hand. This time the Egg-enchanted sky wore the constellations of Neuhadra. Exotic symbols began to appear; lines drew themselves by some arcane formula

until the room’s heaven was filled by a marvelous chart “Oh my!” began Nemia. “By the Founder’s Nose!” Her eyes were enraptured by the chart. “You’ll never guess what your daughter is up to! Look!” She pointed. “See where the red lines intersect in the constellation of the Warrior—there at the Petunia—have I got a story for you! It begins with a granddaughter to melt your heart...”

The mother was listening in spite of herself. So were the walls.