Psychohistorical Crisis

23

THE HYPERLORD MAKES A RENDEZVOUS, 14,791 GE

In the Salki version of the Chronicles of Early Splendid Wisdom during the turbulent twilight of the Kambal Dynasty in the mid-second millennium of the Galactic Era... 1346-1378 GE... it is told that the villas surrounding the harbors of the Calmer Sea were sacred shrines of meditation, a haven within the hectic ardor of a local interstellar trading mecca, where Splendid Wisdom’s minor empire controlled 90,000 central star systems and its influence extended far beyond its borders.

By the malfeasance of late-dynasty emperors and the bribes taken by Emperor Kambal-the-Eighth, all was forfeited to the nomadic armadas of the Frightfulpeople who were then forcibly entwining themselves into the central galactic trade routes, even to the establishment of their main base of operations on the shores of the Calmer Sea of Splendid Wisdom. Disguised as a spiritual movement offering an alternative to a wealth-mad economy, they blatantly usurped Imperial prerogatives and finally named one of their own as Emperor during the Time of Two Emperors.

The ancient Kambal nobility eventually led a retaliation that cost six billion Splendid lives and an annoying million Frightful Soldiers before it was crushed by the Frightful usurper. [The casualty figures are probably exaggerations—moderation not being a feature of the Frightful-terror’s “beatification" of the Empire. The earliest secondary accounts date from three hundred years later. All surviving records contradict one another. Ed.] Frightfulperson Tanis-the-First, 1378-1495 GE, familiarly referred to as Tanis One-Eye, reigned for 117 years, dominating the indigenous population by a truly massive immigration policy and control of water. It was he who apportioned the Seas of Splendid Wisdom among his barons so that...

... after grinding miiiennia of political maneuvering, the power of the Frightfulpeopie faded. By 9892 GE, when Splendid Wisdom openly proclaimed its suzerainty over the whole of the Galaxy via the Pax Imperials, memory of the Frightful conquest, of the Frightfulpeople’s mighty draining of the oceans, etc., remained only in the minds of a loyal Imperial subclass of petty nobles. ..and... by the end of the interregnum the Frightfulpeopie had essentially disappeared from the peerage. Today...

—From the Explanatorium at the Calmer Pumping Station

Such a backtracking out-of-the-way circuitous route! Jama looked at the deceptive lines Katana had been sketching on the tabletop. How could this meandering scheme possibly get them from the center of galactic power to the legendary Telomere City of peripheral Faraway, all of 65,000 leagues distance along light’s vector? The Hyperlord was not amused.

They were awaiting their ship’s docking over a snack of pastry and hot himu tea. In an alcove of the star-station above Splendid Wisdom, Kikaju Jama’s female companion and newly assigned bodyguard set down her cup and pointed with her stylus at the ship symbols scrolling across the ribbon screen out in the corridor. “We’re on,” she said, rising and stabbing the table’s service menu for a printout of her crude diagram. “Let’s go.” She pocketed the map and erased the table’s mind.

Kargil Linmax had insisted that Jama bring her and that it be she who arranged not only the evasive details of their journey but all their subsequent contacts—her expertise being that of an ex-officer of Naval Intelligence. When Jama did not move at her command, the Frightfulperson Katana of the Calmer Sea turned to catch his eyes. She threw out a glimmer of humor. “You’re not coming? Is an old man like you afraid to bunk with a free girl like me now that our flirtation is past its public stage?”

“I was thinking of the soulful eyes of your daughter as we said good-bye.”

“And”—beamed Katana—“I’m thanking Space that, for a while, my six-year-old Otaria is going to be tens of thousands of leagues beyond your ever-lecherous clutches. I’m appalled by how much she likes you!”

He rose with offended dignity. His special attention to the delightful Otaria was no more than a recognition that recruitment to the cause did have to begin when a candidate was young. Teaching her how to count kisses was hardly lechery. After all, she was only ten years away from being sixteen! His mind refocused upon immediate concerns.

Faraway was a convenient destination for Jama in that, once there, he would be within striking distance of Zural— albeit it was somehow a suspicious destination because of that proximity. Did the seeker-after-the-galactarium already know Jama’s purpose? He/she had deposited enough money in blind escrow at Telomere City to pay for luxury accommodation to Faraway, access conditional upon the production and demonstration of the ovoid in working order; only then would the guarantor reveal him-/herself and release the fares and the fee. Such a deal, sweet as it was, left Jama feeling ill at ease—too much was unknown, too much could go wrong. But maybe the deal wasn’t that unusual; the ovoid was, after all, an artifact of the ancient Faraway renaissance and was certainly of Faraway manufacture even if it did contain components alien to the early Faraway culture. One might expect the main interest in such an exotic galactarium to come from citizens of Faraway with historical sentiments.

Risks aside, how else was he to finance this expedition?

But it did make Jama paranoid to have to meet strangers at so distant a place from his own friends and protectors. Suppose he was robbed? But the Red Sun Bank brokering the deal had once been the most powerful bank in the Galaxy and had a ridiculously conservative reputation. And the sale (less the finder’s fee for Igor Comoras) would finance his expedition to Zural. Did it even matter if he were to be robbed of his jade artifact? He had made a copy of the important astronomical data contained therein. There was, of course, the matter of the undeciphered material embedded in a deeper layer.

They were wafted weightless through their boarding tube and asked to strip naked at a medical node bulked to the end of the tube, their clothes fed through a decontami-nator while they were routed along an assembly path where nanomechanical invasions, via painless injection, exterminated whatever unwanted and invisible hitchhikers they carried. At the end of their naked trek, their clothes were restored to them. Jama was embarrassed by the holes in his hose but at least he didn’t have to shake hands with the receiving purser while in the nude. The purser alternately checked off names and pointed passengers in a helpful direction.

After ducking under the pipes in the corridor that led to their cabin, the Hyperlord regretted aloud the third-class accommodations he had bought. Their contract specified first-class fares for the bearers of the galactarium, and first-class payment was in escrow, but Jama had always tended toward thrift in things which didn’t show and Katana had insisted on the anonymity. It was probably for the better. They had no way of knowing how much a charter to off-route Zural was going to cost them—and that expense was not in the contract. He bumped his head a fourth time.

Katana shrugged off the gray bulkhead barrenness. “I’m navy. I came up from the ranks. In fact, I think you’re brave to wedge into such a tiny berth with a murderess.” She guffawed innocently and when he didn’t share her amusement, she chided him. “You must laugh at my macabre sense of humor; I require it for a long journey. Otherwise, I transmogrify into a Jon Salasbee.” That was a reference to the popular drama Knife Alive about a lower-corridor medic’s fam&wetware struggles, Jon’s fam desperately trying to pass Jon off as a sane humanitarian, bringing surcease to the unfortunate, while, all the time, Jon is terrorizing his community with a knife in the darkness during his wetware’s

slow descent into psychosis.

“My dear, laughter should be no problem for a man of my fortitude.” They turned around, careful to avoid the overhanging storage space, and hunched down on the bunk. “I promise faithfully, on pain of death, to laugh every time you tickle my flesh with a knife.” Gossip held that she was a Jon Salasbee who had murdered her husband with a knife, perhaps slowly—though Kargil’s opinion differed.

“A man of my dreams. In such close quarters you should become hairless from your prolonged laughter before we reach Faraway,” she nudged.

This was a woman who enjoyed teasing men’s fears, thought Jama, and a woman to play along with if one could remember to flirt first and be afraid afterward. “All the better: if there is naught between you and me to cause you to itch in irritation, my sleep will be sounder!”

“I think we’ll do nicely.” She grinned. “I’ll sleep on top of you the first night and you can sleep on top of me the second. I suspect you’re safe even if you snore—it doesn’t seem that I’m going to have room enough to use my knife!”

“Do you suppose we’ll be able to move our hips?” he said, getting back to the important subject.

“We can try.”

The trip went uneventfully. They spent most of their cabin time exploring the capabilities of Jama’s jade ovoid. It projected the stars so well that it gave them the illusion of space—as long as they didn’t extend their hands into the starry blackness to feel for bulkhead or pipe. The Hyperlord was intrigued by the artifact’s obvious astrological versatility, though he didn’t have a clue how to use it to make a reading. Katana’s curiosity located the coordinates of thirteen once-secret military bases of the ancient Faraway stellarpolitical sphere and forty-nine of the false coordinates for Stars&Ship bases—cryptically annotated with their true coordinates ages ago in a Faraway military script that was obviously meant for use by someone’s naval reconnaissance teams. For what purpose? So much history had been lost! And why had their

benefactor been interested in military bases?

Frightfulperson Katana of the Calmer Sea, for all her bluster, turned out to be a good lover, efficient and affectionate. He decided that she only pretended to be fierce because of her overwhelming name. What a name to have to live with! Nevertheless he was happy not to be her husband.

Their transfer to a second and larger vehicle for the next jag of their journey was routine except that Hyperlord Jama lost all his wigs. That gave the Frightfulperson an excuse to shave his head and dress him in the black garb and silver buttons of a jackleg. She even slapped a neural fibulator on his backbone to change his walk. No one would remember seeing a fop. Jama had disappeared.

The third transfer, to an undistinguished short-run tramp, turned out to be a con racket in which they were gently informed that “an unfortunate mistake” had been made in their reservations and that therefore the ship was “reluctantly” forced to “drop them off’ at an “inconvenient location” unless an additional “service fee” was forthcoming to ensure their well-being. In his guise of jackleg Jama felt compelled to vent his rage. The skipper became appropriately apologetic—but remained uncooperative.

Katana fumed in a different way. She muttered under her breath about cheating Rithian scum. Aloud she promised to pay the additional fee—and indeed it arrived within a decawatch—in the form of a naval boarding party. The carrier’s skipper, an upper-caste Rithian of galactic stock mongrelized by sapiens lineage, was indicted by the commander of the boarding party under an obscurely ancient Imperial law which had never been rescinded by the Pschol-ars. His trial lasted a mere thirty-two inamins, whereupon he was summarily executed in front of his dimwit sapiens crew, all rigidly at attention.

Katana cheered as the execution proceeded and afterward sliced off the dead skipper’s ears as a souvenir. Teach the Rithians a lesson. It was an old Stars&Ship custom from the harsh campaigns of the First Empire, probably originating in the customs of the Frightfulpeople. Jama made a rapid reevaluation of his companion’s character.

She wasn't joking!

How could such bloodlust have survived into modem enlightened times? No longer playing the victimized jackleg, he was appalled in his inner soul at this wholly unexpected display of violence even though he was an admirer—an advocate—of the stimulating violence engendered by the Interregnum. How could such ferocious genes have been passed on through her family for ten millennia, undiluted? What kind of people was he now attracting to his revolution? How could this woman have such an angelic daughter who sat in his lap and teased his nose? Did Katana have an ear of her husband mounted somewhere as a souvenir of recompense for his insults? Jama was going to ask her the next time they made love. And how did one get ears past the eyes of the customs bureaucrats?

The Frightfulperson proceeded to review the chastised crew, souvenir ears between forefinger and thumb, while with the fingers of the other hand she playfully tweaked their ears, chiding them for malicious stupidity with a politeness that mocked their previously hypocritical politeness. When she saw Jama’s pale face, she grinned. “I don’t like the Rithian sense of humor,” she said of her kidnappers. “Let them sweat!”

“Now, is it fair to judge all Rithians by the standards of this miscreant crew?”

Gallantly, three members of the boarding party agreed to pilot the ship to its original destination as a free naval service granted to law-abiding citizens of the Second Empire. There the jackleg and his hussy vanished. Whereupon an itinerant spaceman and meek wife appeared to take steerage passage in a transport bound for the inner planets of a dim red star, Rhani, which was a minor dependent system of the Sewinnese Archipelago.

Finally a chartered yacht, registered at Rhani, brought businessman and secretary into Faraway orbit. The yacht, not planetworthy, docked at a space station where they transferred to a ferry. The ferry aerobraked in a graceful glide over a river’s meanderings across thousands of kilometers of reddish desert, the whole countryside devoid of bureaucratic warrens! How had Faraway ever ruled? The scenery lacked even the ruins of a bureaucracy! Then came megahectares of forest with scant signs of habitation! Only at the last mo-ment did they collide with civilization as the ferry descended in a sickening drop down to the outskirts of Faraway’s Telomere City.

From there the mad scramble into the City through underground tunnels was a more homey adventure. It almost reminded Kikaju of the comforts of Splendid Wisdom. But that wasn’t to last. They had rented a room in the imposing Hober Hostel. For a Hyperlord used to ever-present ceilings, the nearby buildings were very tall and the drop from the hostel window sickening—and distances! From the luxury of their fortieth-floor aerie, they overlooked the Mall of Knowledge, which had been laid out by the original colonists after a sketch by the Founder himself. Kikaju hung on to the curtains for safety while he let his eyes stray down the Mall. Open-air skyscrapers offended his sense of balanced architecture.

To the left end of that extended plaza was the Palace of the Chancellor. It was hard to believe that the Chancellor of this unimpressive university town of only twenty million had once held sway over the Galaxy. The signs of boon-docks were everywhere. Trees along the great Mall open to the air!

To the right, far across the haze at the other end of the Mall, the fading light of Faraway’s reddish sun cast shadows on the columns of the Mausoleum of the Founder, seeming to radiate the power of that mythical figure who had continued to make pronouncements from there long after his death. Jama was startled to find that the vast scene inspired reverence in his cynical soul. The Founder’s dead hand still wound up the clockwork of the Galaxy. There was an exclamatory expression they all used when overwhelmed by sudden insight. By the eyes of the Founder! Yes, the sight impacted one’s emotions—and if indeed there were a second focal point to the Galaxy outside of Splendid Wisdom, it was here in that magnificent Mausoleum.

While Kikaju held onto the curtains for dear life and paid his silent respects to the majesty of an ancient man, Katana had been working the room’s console to contact their guarantor. But the agreed-upon coded message was evoking no response. “Nothing,” she said.

Jama’s heart dropped a full forty floors. Had they come all this way for nothing? Ah, but he had already made allowance for that. He was impressed by his perspicacity at having included a clause in their contract which forced a default payment in case of nonappearance. “I suppose that means they wish us to show respect by cooling our heels for a few revolutions of Faraway.” To relieve his anxiety he closed the curtains.

“No.” She smiled. “It means they haven’t arrived yet. They cannot be Faraway citizens. So. We wait. I’ve already set up a watch-screen to catch likely off-planet visitors. We are now spiders. By a jerk in the web we’ll know who they are and when they arrive—before they contact us. An old Naval Intelligence trick. If they turn out to be police, we just vanish. How do you like our room? Two beds! We can have sex twice in one night!”

“I’ve been more taken by the decor. Such taste!” He was admiring the rear of his head inside the gilded frame of a magic mirror. He switched to profile view and tried a cocky rising-of-the-nose. “If I denuded these magnificent walls of their ornamentation and sneaked off into the dark of space with my loot, I’d make a fortune back on Splendid Wisdom.”

“They’re only replicas of beau mondesaid Katana disdainfully, unwilling to admit that any provincial this far out on the Rim could have expensive taste, no matter how adept they might once have been at gauche conquest.

“You don’t have my eyes or my savvy for antiques. Of course such priceless artifacts are replicas, though you can’t have any guarantee of that without a nanometric examination—but I’d wager good betting odds that on all of Splendid Wisdom no dealer has templates for these particular delights. It’s a subtle theme the hostel has running across the walls of our rooms.” His arm swept out to include the whole hallway and adjoinments.

“First,” he continued, “there isn’t a single item enshrined here that isn’t pre-Empire. Pre-Kambal-the-First. These artifacts were old when Splendid Wisdom was just another upstart trading world battling its way out of an agricultural age on the labor of farmers playing at engineer, dwarfed by the resources of the Sotamas and the Machan Confederacy. Why—when glorious aboriginal craftsmen were working the genesis of these astonishments, your sanctimonious Frightfulpeople weren’t even a gleam in your ancestors’ eyes, they being busy scrabbling out a life as raucous comet-belt thieves.” He hooked a thumb in his sash for effect.

“Second: Though no single item presented here for our pleasure came out of the same cultural stew or time, they all have a grand affinity. They were picked by a person of immense artistic sensibilities to embellish each other. That adds immeasurably to their value. My compliments to the Hober’s staff.” He marveled. “Look at the shade of this glaze against the texture of that tapestry in the shifting light of the auroral piece over the beds!” His roving eyes went round as they met a small painting set in its own alcove. “Look at thisl” He examined the icon carefully at short distance. “I’ve heard of these. I’ve never seen one. It predates the hypership. Gummurgy, probably. Look how it simply radiates its isolation! Imagine gazing at the sky, knowing that your ancestors had come from the stars and that the stars were still unreachable! How clever to hide such a lonely icon away in this little alcove. Why... there couldn’t have been more than two thousand settled worlds at that time—all in the Sirius Sector—linked by only the most tenuous sublight contact. Such exquisite savagery in its expression!”

“Where’s our bank?” asked Katana.

The Hyperlord readjusted to present time, somewhat irritably. At the spaceport he had bought and famfed a tri-vid map of Telomere City for reference. Reluctantly he re-

opened the curtains and set the map to active from the viewpoint of their room’s coordinates, zooming the wireframe outlines, fam-imposed upon his visual cortex, to match those features he saw naturally from their high window. Once oriented, he faded the wireframe. He colored their branch of the Red Sun Bank in bright polka dots to make it easy to spot, noted its real position, then canceled his fam’s overlay. “Over there,” he said, pointing with his finger in a way that even a lightspeed-shackled barbarian of sixty-five thousand years ago would have understood.

“Well,” said Katana, “at least the building appears to be too solid to collapse into the street in the next month or so. How these free-standing structures ever hold up so long against an atmospheric breeze has always been a mystery to me. It is counter-intuitive but I suppose we can trust Faraway engineering even if we won’t be able to sleep!”