Psychohistorical Crisis

20

ERON OSA GETS UPGRADED, 14,791 GE

Constraints only limit our freedom of motion, they do not determine our destiny

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

Eron Osa fiddled with the fit of his mask, adjusting it, as he was hurried from behind into the thin air toward the car pool by a silent Murek Kapor. His tutor had been behaving with a strange aggressiveness—as if he wasn’t himself. Maybe not. Maybe, Eron thought, it was just a small boy’s nervous eyes seeing new dangers. Within hours his precious fam would be in some machine for an upgrade. He shivered. No—wrong fear. Since that evening when he had seduced his tutor’s girlfriend he had never been able to regain his insolent composure around Murek. Regret. If his father hadn’t been such an infuriating old reprobate, he might have, should have, adhered to the old blockhead’s advice about sex. Hadn’t his father continually warned him about the high tax on escapades—in spite of his own escapades? Fathers shouldn’t be allowed to be right!

He was a bit frantic for his tutor’s approval. He knew a fam upgrade was dangerous—and knew that he was doing this at his own stubborn insistence, against all advice. His father, for one, would be furious. Everyone was probably right. Eron was most likely wrong. He also knew that an ambitious star-child who was to grow up and make a mark on this huge Galaxy was going to need every advantage he could wangle. He felt alone. He wanted Murek to say that it was all right—but that stupid farman wouldn't because he knew, yes he knew, about that night with Nemia. How could he know? Nemia would never confess. He couldn't know but he did; his eyes betrayed suspicion. No matter what, Eron was going to admit nothing. Murek had to go along with the operation. But now that the hour of the upgrade was upon them, it was scary. He wanted to be told that everything would be all right.

The wind gusted, blowing the odd pellet of hard snow against the skin of that part of his face that was exposed. His tutor led him to a blue aerocar with variable wings that seated four. Its sensors recognized Murek as a legal user— opening the canopy for him. A picture of a baby, forgotten by some admirer, smiled at them from the border of the instrument panel. They clambered into the four-seater, the canopy dropped shut, and the pressure pump cycled while the robocar inquired, “Destination, citizen?”

“No destination,” Murek instructed, dropping his oxy-mask. “I’ll take her up on manual.” He turned to his student who was also dropping his mask. “How about a tour of the lake first? There hasn’t been time for much sightseeing.”

Eron did not disagree; he had no desire, at this critical moment, to oppose this man upon whom he depended too much. He was regretting all the times he had defied him in the past. His mentor lifted at a steep climb, the boosted acceleration viciously forcing both of them back against the seat. The boy reflexively called upon the names of various old emperors for protection, items of language that millennia of psychohistory had not eradicated.

Finally he quailed. “Couldn’t we try automatic?” He was surprised that the car didn’t have an override for foolish behavior.

“Too dull,” said his tutor as he leveled out at a height above the tallest mountain. The icy blue lake filled out the landscape to the left of them; to the right were hills and arroyos covered with a greenish tint that looked unnatural to Eron where it showed through the clouds. The shades of the colors were all wrong. In the distance, navy-blue mountains rumpled the horizon. There were a few stars in the dark day sky. Eron wondered at the sanity of whoever would choose such a planet as home.

His mad pilot banked around the lake once, pointing out the sights, then turned out over the desolation and said nothing, just flew. There were no signs of civilization down there. They dropped into a fantasy world of clouds, till the whiteness was swirling all around them, some wisps thicker than others. The farman’s fingers—Eron remembered them as faster than a blaster, faster at math than a mind could think—fooled with the clean instruments, obviously intending to put the aero on automatic while he attended to more pressing tasks. The canopy all around them went to an opaque white. They were chickens inside an egg.

“Where are we going?” Was Murek aborting the upgrade?

His tutor only smiled and brought to view, in the palm of his hand, a tiny podlike distorter, which he tapped with a finger. “To shut down your fam’s electronic motion sensors ” In another quick motion he left the distorter burred to Eron’s fam. “You don’t need to know where we’re going. The distorter won’t harm anything.” He added, perhaps by way of explanation, “What we’re doing isn’t strictly legal.”

Eron was too intimidated to resist. He was boiling with questions. But he found it hard to use Nemia’s name in front of Murek. He’d been trying to ask about her for the whole trip. “Will Nemia be there?” he blurted. Right now he trusted Nemia more than he did his farman companion.

“No. She’s strictly legit. Rigone will do the operation. He’s good. Don’t worry.” He paused. “I’m going to be reading for a while.” Then his eyes glazed over and he was obviously perusing something that had already been fed into his fam. After that the only disturbance was the whisper of the engines and the odd air pocket and the blind diffuse whiteness of the enclosing eggshell.

Eron tried to distract himself by imagining the cities that they were passing over, or by conjuring old Imperial ruins, but all he could think about was a naked Nemia. He ordered the picture away, but his fam only solidified the image and slowly rotated it for Eron’s inspection.

When his cuckolded tutor came out of his trance he had a nudge for Eron. “How’s the boy? You’ve been quiet.”

“Okay.”

“You’re nervous.”

“No.” Eron sensed a Nemia in the backseat but he resisted turning around to see. He knew she wasn’t there.

“Come on. Tell me.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“I’ve been reviewing procedures. It’s essential that you be in a calm state of mind before the operation. I thought that might pose a problem so I brought with me an apparatus I can use to calm your emotions.”

“I am calm!” he shouted.

“Calm—as in not shouting. Let me review what you already know. Your fam’s security goes on the alert when your wetware is agitated by internal conflict or external meddling. If a fam’s transducers are then detached from physical contact with your alarmed body, it will do its best, after reunion, to rationalize all changes made during the detachment. If that’s not enough it will attempt a wetware/hardware backup. It’s an automatic defense. We need to take precautions to prevent your fam from erasing the work Rigone will do. So I’m going to have to hook you up.”

“To what?” asked Eron unenthusiastically while Murek pulled, from beneath the seat, an elegant leather case that the boy hadn’t noticed, unpacking it. One of the objects from the case looked suspiciously like a helmet. “You’re not going to try to read my mind!”

“No, no, this stuff just picks up on your emotions. It’s not a psychic probe; your fam wouldn’t allow that. It is a far more primitive device.”

At the mention of psychic probe Eron’s heart began to pound, and he had visions of a grinning Kapor—after nailing him about Nemia—pressing a button that opened up a trapdoor in the aerocar’s floor to eject his mind-stripped body into the clouds. He made a vow of celibacy. With minor gestures of noncooperation he tried to discourage this evil farman from attaching the apparatus to his hands and head. He began to practice thinking about nothing. But he felt Nemia’s sexy fingers stroking his chin.

Murek paused, reluctant to fight even the most passive of resistance. “You’ve got to do it, kid, or no upgrade.”

“You’re going to kill me!”

“This stuff works at the microvolt level, no danger. It only senses local brain temperature changes, skin resistance, and hormone levels.” The clamps went on Eron’s fingers and the helmet went on his head. He was defenseless! “Hmm,” said the Kapor-monster, reading the hand-size output screen, “you’re in a pretty agitated state.”

“Just give me a moment to blank my mind.” This time Eron’s chin was well defended from Nemia’s fingers by an elite troop of his personal thought police, linked arm in arm at a safe five-centimeter buffer from his face. Then... in the midst of his concentration... with the gentlest touch... he felt Nemia’s hand do an end run and slip up the inside of his left leg. Space! Not that! Hastily he grabbed her wrist and lowered her down into the clutches of his steadfast ally, Lord Gravity, where he let her go tumbling into whatever was now below them. Because he loved her he gave her a pretend parachute. But eight tiny Nemias, naked, began to dance on the dashboard in synchrony.

“What is that?” asked his relentless persecutor as he noticed blips on his screen.

“Nothing. Just a flashback to something that has nothing to do with the operation.”

“I see. You’re worried? Something you haven’t told me?”

“Maybe I was thinking about my father,” he evaded.

“Your father? I’ve never been clear on that relationship. Is there something about him you haven’t told me?” There was a pause. “Ah, yes!”

“Why do you say that?”

“I got a big blip.”

“So you are trying to read my mind!”

“No, no. I want you in a calm state for your upgrade.” Eron said nothing. Neither did the monster from outer far-space. He just seemed to sit there, eyeing Eron, probably waiting to pounce, ready with the trapdoor switch in the aerocar’s passenger-side floor. “Some things we aren’t supposed to talk about,” Eron commented lamely.

“Ah, Ganderian taboos. What might those be? I never did get all the details straight. Very convoluted.”

“I don’t have to tell a Big Nose like you,” said Eron sulkily. “I’m not supposed to tell a Big Nose like you. Big Noses are always poking into things that shouldn’t interest them.” “Is this something you could tell your father?”

“I tried. He always slither-snaked out of it. He was good at changing the subject. Maybe he was right.”

“What subject was he good at changing?”

Eron shrugged. The questioning was getting too hot. He found his mind beginning to shut down in resistance. It was increasingly difficult to think. That was a mercy under the circumstances!

“Okay. I’m reading resistance. We’re going to have to break through that before you get your upgrade. Just recall that I’m not your father and that you’ve always been able to talk to me. My machine is going to start reading syllables to you and combining them into words as it analyzes your emotional reactions to syllable-space. The procedure doesn’t require a response. You just have to listen.”

Eron felt in a mood of total rebellion. He wasn’t going to speak. He was just going to order his fam to relax him and that would be that. While he resisted, the machine began to speak syllables to him, pausing between each syllable as if it were thinking. He wondered at the machine’s intelligence. After a while it started to combine syllables into words, sometimes repeating itself. Eron felt like a target. Every so often he would be hit by a word that struck with chemical impact. The hits grew more frequent. The words, at first general, began to get more specific. Dangerously specific. He could tell that with each hit the machine was learning something. Its targeting was beginning to upset him. Murek just sat there, staring, not reacting. Then the machine locked onto what it had been seeking, and each word was a hit. “Secret.” Pause. “Affair.” Pause. “Sex.” Pause. “Nemia.” Pause.

The eyes of the Kapor-monster lifted from his machine to stare at his victim, lizardlike. Eron felt trapped. He was caught. He had to escape! A defensive explanation formed in his mind, but when he tried to speak it, his mouth opened while nothing came out. It was weird. The same thing had happened when he was with Nemia.

“Okay,” the monster said with unexpected gentleness. “We have something to work with. We’ve run into your definition of ‘secret.’ Secrets don’t let you talk. A command installation. Let’s sidestep for a moment. Tell me something that isn *t a secret.”

“Agander’s sky is blue,” he said inanely, relieved that he could actually make meaningful sounds.

“Tell me something else that isn’t a secret.”

“You are pissed at me and are about to push the button on the trapdoor under me.” That sounded foolish. “I know there isn’t a trapdoor under me.”

“Eron, I come from a very different place than you do. I’m not pissed at you. I’m your friend, and in a few watches more or less we’ll be off to Faraway and you’ll be signed up for the program at Asinia Pedagogic. Nemia will be coming with us. She likes you. For the moment, I don’t want your secrets. I want your definition of ‘secret.’ Try this one on. How does your mind tell the difference between something that is a secret and something that is not a secret?”

“Stop asking me tough questions!” Eron laughed but he felt like crying. He was damned if he would show tears.

Murek glanced at his screen. “It’s not a secret that you want to cry right now.”

Eron bawled for a short inamin, feeling astonishment at the outburst, and then calmly recited a definition right out of his fam dictionary. “A secret is something known only to a specific person or group and deliberately kept from the knowledge of others.”

“Not good enough,” said the relentless tutor. “How do you know what to deliberately keep from the knowledge of others and what you can tell them? That’s your rule-base. Can’t keep a secret without it.”

Eron thought for many jiffs, coming up on an inamin. “It has something to do with defense. A secret is to prevent information from being used to hurt yourself or someone under your protection. But that gets complicated. You have to know what hurts people.” He looked at his alien farman tutor. “Some things that don’t hurt you hurt other people.”

“That’s possible.”

For a while his tutor had him play an alternation game that clicked like a metronome back and forth across Eron’s fam. First he was asked to search across his memory for something that wasn't a secret and find a way to spin it into a story. That cycle complete, the devil at the truth-machine’s metronome sent him careening back across his life to locate a dark secret that he must withhold in spite of any temptation to reveal it—and Murek enforced the compulsion by requiring him to contemplate the “dark secret”—silently.

Back and forth he went from story to silence, from banter to secret, from loud joke to silent recollection of spying on his father, from bright description of playmate Rameen’s extravagant birthday party to the never-told memory of young Eron’s innocent sexual groping with Rameen’s baby sister when they were playing hide-and-seek together in a box. On and on. The light from each nonsecret ended at the shadow-boundary of his world of secrecy until the shape of the secrets became so clearly defined that they were no longer secret. A man’s shadow has nowhere to hide in strong sunlight.

Eron laughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks. The glow from the robocar’s instruments—the clock, the wing-light indicators, the red numerals of speed and altitude— seemed to travel outward to illuminate the whole of the unseen world beyond the featureless canopy. He had been transported by metronome into a psychological hyperspace where secrets were no longer invisible. With passionate in-sight he began to blabber about the marvelous nature of these weird hyperspatial concealments. The taciturn farman merely listened.

A secret world revealed. In his rebellion against the strictures of Ganderian custom, Eron seemed to have created— in the cloister of his mind, hidden even from himself—a mental utopia where people actually spoke what they felt and saw. In his twelve-year-old soul he was convinced that such a place, made real, would usher in a better Galaxy. It was what he wanted to build with his life. But such utopian ideation had been taboo on Agander, relegated to the shadows of form and culture, where it was not even sanctified by his own approval. Before he could accept his heretical vision, he needed the approval of his elder tutor, who was the only man he had ever met who had listened to his ravings. A sudden passion was now directed at convincing his guru. He brought forth eloquent arguments.

The farman continued to listen.

But Eron didn’t get the approbation he sought. Murek only smiled his wiseman smile. “You’ll have to work that out for yourself, kid. I can only give you cynically bad advice.” “You’re not going to help me? You’re just another old fiiddy with antiquated ideas! I might have known!”

“In the meantime listen to some bad advice. You don’t have to take it.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t!”

“But you’ll listen?”

“I might,” said Eron sullenly.

“You’ve committed the sin of simplicity. It is not the worst sin in the universe. Every design is bom naive. Even the life that originates on a planet appears first in too simple a form, unable to survive except under the most benevolent of hothouse conditions. On Neuhadra life aborted five times before it took root. Ever play chess?”

“Yes, I know,” Eron said with resignation. “At first sight chess feels complex but it’s too simple. Both kings always escape if the players pay attention to their attack and defense. I got bored with chess when I was six. Once you have the algorithm, it always ends in a draw.”

“Exactly. Simple is good—as long as it’s not too simple. Let’s tackle this secrecy thing rationally, adding a little useful complexity to it. What makes secrecy possible?”

“Boxes and locks.” Eron could tell from the stolid response that his tyrannical tutor wouldn’t comment on this facetious answer. But there was going to be no escape from the question, either—Murek had that look—so he set his fam on a cause-and-effect search. What makes secrecy possible? “The ability to communicate?” he guessed.

“Well... yes.” A tutor’s nod, not quite satisfied. “Obviously without communication, secrecy is moot. But why would someone, able to communicate, want to keep a secret? We need a motive.”

“Because your someone is stark crazy and wants to live his life tied up in knots!”

At this bald assertion the cuckolded monster grinned and pounced. “Kid, suppose a handsome daredevil of a man stole away the girlfriend of a bad-tempered giant who was in the habit of slitting the throats of small people who annoyed him. Why might our handsome rake want to keep his liaison a secret?”

“I hope you aren’t toting a knife. Are you?”

“I’m not a bad-tempered giant, either.”

Eron judiciously chose evasion. “But suppose education and love had mellowed all bad-tempered giants? Then no one would need secrets.”

“Suppose I grant you that; imagine we’ve been magically transported to your sublimely mellow universe in which there are no secrets. None. Certainly in such a secrecy-free society no one will be thinking about the consequences of their chatter. Nary a thought wasted on soul searching. Who is to worry that their bit of gossip might hurt someone? Who is to ponder whether newly minted scientific information might boomerang in a destructive way? No one—if all information is considered boon. Who will gain by the dissemination of this information and who will lose? No one is burdened by such nags if dogma has imposed a Rule-for-All-Circumstances upon the galactic citizenry: Information is good and to be shared, no matter the consequence.” “Information is good!” insisted Eron.

“Is that so? For who? I remember a card game you and I played only last spring when we were relaxing from our studies at the Alcazar—a game of cards—we were using the Royal Deck of Fate—and your carefully sober face was molded to hide from me what you knew very well, that your four-hand held the Ax of Mercy, Ax&Stone, Executioner, and Barbarian ” The tutor laughed. “You were a rascal! You kept your secret and wiped out my high cards.”

“You want me to keep secrets?” said Eron, appalled. “I’ve been doing that all my life. I hate it.”

“Neither one nor the other. Isn’t your secret-free Galaxy only the white version of another black Galaxy in which, again, no thought is needed because this time the rules tell us that everything is a secret? If all information is dangerous and must be hoarded—no matter the consequence, paranoia rules. A lazy man’s social order. A machine with no memory could make the necessary decisions in that society flawlessly—whatever the circumstance, stay silent. It’s too simple. Such a black Galaxy would regress to animalhood.”

“So I’m supposed to tell my secrets and, at the same time, keep them,” Eron complained sarcastically while holding his arms fully extended. “Reminds me of a famous old drama about Emperor Stanis-the-Careful. I found it in my copy of A Short History of Our Splendid Emperors. The play opens with the arrival of a mysterious brass-strapped box in which the Emperor finds something of empire-shattering consequence. The stage is silent while he holds up the box to the stars. ‘To speak or not to speak,’ he anguishes. Presently fleets are destroyed, ministers assassinated, his wife drowns herself, his enemies rise and fall—and by the end of his reign he still hasn’t made up his mind.”

“Emperor Stanis-the-Careful lacked judgment.”

Eron adjusted his helmet with impatient fingers. The rings on his fingers were broadcasting his skin resistance. “Rigone told me that young men are much better at making judgments than old men. That makes me smarter than you. I think Rigone was pulling my tail.”

“For sure. Judgment—as much as youths like ourselves might aspire to it—is an old man’s game. The young sword lashes out mindlessly; the rules of a sword master might tell the apprentice how to wield the sword, but only experience will offer instruction on when and where to cut. Suppose you found a truth under some rock. No one else has it. Should you speak or remain silent? Only judgment can say. Should you offer some pieces of wisdom and withhold others? A matter for judgment. Can your truth be taken and used against you? Judgment again. Under pressure you may be tempted to lie. A lie about your found-treasure will have consequences. Is this a good lie or a bad lie? Judgment is never easy. If you always have to blab everything—on principle—it’s a trap. Likewise you’re in a trap if your rule book always tells you to keep a secret.”

“Cut the guff-guff. I want to go out and do something, not listen to your boring lectures. Are we there yet?” Eron pointed through the opaque window.

“When you do something”—the voice was acerbic—“it helps to know how to be effective.”

“As a psychohistorian I’ll be effective.”

A smile. “But will you still have the judgment of a twelve-year-old?”

“That’s a trick question,” said Eron warily. He looked at the blind canopy of their robocar and the photo of the child stuck in the instrument panel. He cocked his ears and listened to his semicircular canals, not having his orientation distorted fam to advise him. “We’ve started to bank in circles. I can tell. I don’t need my fam for that.”

“We’ve arrived but we won’t land until I say so.”

“I’m not calm yet?”

“Almost. Let me run this by you. When a rule fails, Eron, all you’ve got left is judgment Nothing will kill you faster than the combination of a failed rule and a bad judgment call. Rules are good, but no rule is complete enough to apply to all situations. That includes rules about secrecy.” He looked at the small physiodetector’s screen. “How are you feeling?”

Eron checked his emotions. “Fine. I just made a twelve-year-old’s judgment. You’re okay for a monster. I’m sorry I went after Nemia.”

“So you have a rule that tells you when to be sorry, eh?” his tutor commented wryly.

“Am I calm yet?”

Another glance at the screen. “You’re getting there.”

“Can we go down?”

“Just one more thing. We’ve been talking a lot about secrets. You seem to have lifted a lot off your chest. That’s good. It’s what I needed before we could go ahead.” He set the controls for descent. “But I want to leave you with a relevant conundrum to take away with you to Asinia Pedagogic. A riddle to ponder in those ancient halls. It is about secrets and judgment.”

“You can never resist one last nail to hold your lecture together, can you? You should try abstinence sometime. You might qualify as a human being.”

“While you are disqualifying yourself as a human being by becoming a psychohistorian?”

Eron punched him affectionately. “Shoot with the lecture. I’ll give you one shot before we touch down. I can dodge one shot.”

“Psychohistorians make a vow for the good of humanity. They vow to keep secret the methods of their prescience on theory that if their methods were known to all, their predictions would be invalidated and chaos would ensue, right?”

“Right.”

“For instance—if a criminal knows that the police will be at the scene of the crime, he commits his crime elsewhere— and the police knowing that he knows... it gets very complicated.” Murek had turned to remove the helmet and rings from Eron. He was looking his student in the eye. “There are unfortunate side consequences of this ‘noble’ vow of secrecy; it ensures that the society of psychohistorians remains an elite, one as arbitrary as the old Imperial Court We lesser galactic beings have to depend upon the Pscholars’ benevolence—while not being able to ensure it. But—and this is a big but—before you become a psychohistorian, before you know enough to make a sound judgment, you’ll be asked to take their vow of secrecy—and your vow will be enforced.”

“And you want me to leave my mind open for later judgment?”

“Not my call. I’m only the pilot.” As he touched the instruments the canopy went transparent. They were dropping into a mountain valley. Eron had no time to see anything before they were taxiing inside a hangar.

“If I refused to take the vow, they wouldn’t take me as a student!”

“Probably not.”

“I could pretend.”

“You don’t have to pretend. A vow is always subject to revision by later judgment—assuming that you haven’t, by then, become a rule-slave.”

The canopy sprang open and Rigone was standing there on the black-and-yellow striped expanse of floor, his tattooed face grinning up at them. He had a hand for the boy as he dropped to the plasteel.

“Where is this place?” asked Eron, looking around at the modest hangar, trying to see where they had come from before the high doors rolled fully shut

“Not for you to know,” commented Murek as they led him into a side corridor of levitating verticules. He grinned. “A necessary secret.” The three rose on a platform, then were escorted to the hidden operating room where they were stripped and passed through a nonopening clean-door where almost alive clean-suits enveloped their bodies. The theater was illuminated in an eerie red light, presumably to protect some components from the energy of higher wavelengths.

Eron was offered a seat, his head reexposed, and his fam gently removed, sans comforting words, as if he went fam-less regularly, while Rigone donned huge goggles. Surgeon machines wired Eron’s head to some sort of feedback net with other instruments in the room. Murek seemed to be there only as a guide to watch over his now-incompetent pupil. With perceptions unfiltered by his fam, Eron noticed the ascendancy of his senses—as during his escapade with Nemia. This time he was calm, with no rush of erotically driven feelings. The lines of the machines seemed too sharp, the colors too reddishly electric, the precision motors that grasped and moved his strangely remote fam, too precise, the instrument readouts at the comer of his eyes fraught with mysterious meaning whose function he did not have the mind to question.

Rigone worked at his station, standing, seemingly forever. Sometimes his hands were busy. Sometimes he passively watched the machines that were active under his command. Eron endured his wait stoically, the torture being the passage of time. His mind remained eerily at peace.

Finally Rigone lifted his goggles and grinned. “That was easy. Now for the hard part. Hang onto your pants, boy! And don’t piss.” He replaced the troll’s goggles and went back to work without a pause. Eron wanted to get up to look; but he was restrained.

“Let him work,” Murek advised. An hour went by. Eron dreamed animal thoughts while wide awake, knowing that his fantasies made no sense, fascinated by a dreamlike illogic that, famless, he couldn’t analyze.

When they reattached his fam, he was floated to an elegant recovery room, chandeliers, entertainment console, beds and soft bedspreads, fine active murals with motion subdued to the pace of expected contemplation—but Eron wasn’t in a mood to notice; he was frantically testing for his new powers and finding them absent. He was asking himself outstanding questions and not getting answers! It was horrible. The operation had been a failure!

Rigone seemed placid. Murek played with the room’s cuisinator until he came up with a syrupy alcoholic drink for himself, which he began to quaff in large gulps. That wasn’t like Murek at all. He was turning into such a strange man right before Eron’s eyes; the calculated restraint that Eron was so used to seemed to be disappearing for hours at a time, as if some wildman had taken possession of his tutor’s body. Maybe his vision was just the strain of the operation.

The silence seemed unbearable to everyone. “So, kid,” said the farman into the silence after the first few gulps of his syrup had taken effect, “do you still remember the Pythagorean theorem?”

“Of course!” Eron was indignant.

“Don’t ‘of course’ me.” Murek activated the nearby wall. “Show me! What does A-squared plus B-squared equals C-squared mean?”

To humor his tutor, Eron used the writer linked to his fam to conjure a blue triangle. He squared the sides with red squares and chopped them up into pieces which slid over and squared the hypotenuse. “What’s the deal? I can do baby games like that without a fam,” he said scornfully. His tutor mumbled happily, swallowing the rest of his drink while he moved over to spread himself out on one of the beds.

Eron didn’t like anybody at that moment. These bungling fools had condemned him to live out his life as the same mediocre moron he’d always been. If life had been so cruel as to curse him with a stupid Ganderian father and a silly Ganderian mother, at least it ought to have provided him with an extraordinary fam that could see things invisible to everyone else in the Galaxy. Even that surcease was denied him. Worse, now he was probably stuck with crossed wires.

Rigone was grinning at his obvious consternation. “Notice any difference?”

“No! It didn’t work! You goofed!”

Rigone’s tattooed grin only broadened into a laugh. “That’s good. If you were noticing a difference, your fam would have it all calibrated by now and would be busily erasing what I’d done. If I did it right you’ll never notice the difference until the very inamin that you outfox us all. Say hello to me when you reach Splendid Wisdom. I’ll still be on the Olibanum. The Teaser’s Bistro.”

“We leave Neuhadra tomorrow for Faraway,” slurred a

very drunk tutor under the shining chandelier. “Can’t promise you a good time. I’ve never been to Faraway, either.” He chuckled. “Heard about it though.”

Eron stared at the writer-link and sulked.

“Really, kid,” continued the drunk, “relax and get some sleep. There’s plenty of time for you to bring Our Sinning Galaxy down around our ears! You don’t have to do it tonight! Spacefire, you’re only twelve years old.” And he began to laugh and laugh at the pretty lights hanging from the ceiling.

Eron tried to think positively about his chances for conquering the Galaxy with a possibly crippled fam. Famless Arum-the-Patient had conquered Agander and had then turned to the Center, storming the Imperial bureaucracy— but he hadn’t had to compete with fammed minds. Eron felt a frantic urgency. He needed a lecture on patience right now but his tutor, who was his only source for pedantic lectures, was already asleep. He turned morosely to Rigone instead. ‘Tell me about Splendid Wisdom.”