Psychohistorical Crisis

26

DEALS AND OITHER INTRIGUES, 14,791 GE

Hasten slowly.

- Emperor Caesar-of-August, 61,273-61,235 BGE

After the second jump the bald Starmaster sent for Scogil. Hiranimus left a sleeping Nemia and his meditations, propelling himself through the iris of his cabin with a sigh. He monkeyed up the tube to the cramped bridge. As he arrived, the ship’s commander unstuck a bulb from under his cabinet where he kept his ample supply of refreshments. He was known to dislike multiple returns to the galley. “Have a drink. Lemonade.” His voice implied that lemonade was the ambrosia of the universe. “Do you have what you need to work? I’ll be floating here in space for maybe sixtyne to twenty watches checking that we’re not being followed.”

“Who could follow us?” Scogil glanced at the sparse drama of lonely stars, the distant Milky Way rising slowly across their false horizon as the starship turned. It was a rhetorical question. They were doing zigzags again, routine security for the Oversee even though there were probably no humans within a radius of sixtyne leagues. For all of the hundred quadrillion human beings linked by tenuous hyper-travel between the oases of the Galaxy, the expanse of the human empire was mostly empty desert.

The Starmaster rubbed his hand over his naked head. “How well do you know this Katana? I sense that she kens naval procedure more than makes me comfortable. Theirs, not ours ”

Scogil broke the seal on the lemonade bulb and let his body hang in front of the panoramic view. “She’s here to keep his Lordship out of trouble. You don’t think he needs a leash?”

“Likely. But whose leash? Maybe she has her own business. What do you make of him?”

“He needs someone at his side to keep him out of trouble. You’ll do me a favor when you see him coming my way to engage him in conversation or at least to stick out your foot and somersault him. When I’m staring off into space he thinks I’m bored and in need of company.”

“And I was thinking of palming him off on you. Just this morning he was telling me how to run my ship. What are we going to do about the Hyperlord?”

Scogil noticed the “we.” The Starmaster was a taciturn diplomat, but there was no denying his authority. He was probably here as Scogil’s boss, assigned by the Oversee. He was just too polite to say so. One would be wise to pay attention to his suggestions. Cross a boundary of unwritten command and his politeness would cease. “I’m open to your opinions.”

“The appearance is that you have made a deal with that nobleman.”

“A mutually profitable one. He’s dogged. Without him we wouldn’t have found what we were after.”

“Dogged, yes he is.”

“You disapprove of my promise to give him a copy of the Martyr’s Cache?”

“He’s a blabbermouth. Maybe it doesn’t matter. It depends upon what is etched into those documents etched in stone. You’ve had a better look than the rest of us. We’ve noticed that you’ve been turning up to dinner glazed and taciturn and then disappearing again into your thoughts. What have you found? I need to know.”

Keeping counsel with himself was no longer useful. Scogil composed his thoughts. “Everything’s there. It looks like the whole of the Founder’s Plan to navigate through the Interregnum as well as the mathematics that justifies it as seen by two score of the early Fellowship’s brightest minds. The methods he devised to monitor and tweak his vision are a fascinating exercise in the art and science of minimalist manipulation. Frankly, his techniques look orders of magnitude better than ours. Maybe this Cache is of more value than a burglarized copy of the Collected Works of the Founder. The martyrs were bom into a culture that already had three hundred years to digest the Founder’s message and clean it up. On Zural maybe they even had time on their hands to do a little of their own polishing. It looks that way. But I’m only beginning to get into it.”

“So there is new stuff?”

Scogil sipped for a while. The Starmaster, who was probably a high-ranking mathematician in disguise, meant “new” in the sense of something that the Oversee’s psychohistorians had failed to rediscover. “I’ve only had a chance to skim, but every place I touch down I find mathematics I’ve never seen before. I may not be the Oversee’s best psychohistorian, but I know what’s being done.”

“We’re that behind, eh?”

“No. We’re very advanced in some areas. The Founder’s work is.. .just different. I’ll tell you more within the decawatch. We’ve been trying to re-create psychohistory—because we know it can be done—but we think at the problem from the viewpoint of someone trying to grapple with an empire run by psychohistory while the Founder was looking at an empire that didn’t understand the functioning of the bureaucracy that had been created by twelve millennia of expansion. Two different problems which generate very different elans. And, it appears, a very different kind of math. I’m shocked.”

“So this is important. It’s going to give our mathematicians a celebratory meal to digest?”

“Yes. And a hangover.”

“Your deal with blabbermouth is off. My call. Too dangerous.”

The command startled Scogil, and it was a command. So the Oversee had overruled him again. Fury welled in him but he was unwilling to show his anger. “A deal is a deal,” he said calmly. “We’re a bug living in the cracks of a giant’s boot. Integrity is all we’ve got!”

“Not all Integrity is always important but it is a small part of strategy. Can our blabbermouth Hyperlord really use this stuff in any other way than to call massive amounts of attention to himself—and us? Suppose you found yourself in a deal with a baby to give him a blaster to play with? Say, when you made the deal, you thought it was a toy blaster. Would your integrity demand that you go through with the deal?”

“On Agander children use live blasters as teething rings,” Scogil answered truculently.

“Well, now,” said the Starmaster, “I don’t know Agander, but I know humans. If Agander lets their children play with live blasters, I’ll bet you a lemonade that Agander has the best blaster training program in the whole of the Galaxy and that it starts the very watch a baby is bom. Am I right?”

“You’re right.” Scogil wished his anger hadn’t dropped him into that trap.

“But you’re right, too,” conceded the Starmaster. “If we don’t give old blabbermouth a copy of the treasure he found for us, he’ll be mad and blabber about it. That’s not good strategy, either. Perhaps we should hire the good people of your Agander to teach our baby how to hold a blaster?”

“You jest!”

“Let’s meet again at thirty-two hundred tomorrow. Have an alternate deal ready, one that will be acceptable to me and one that will be acceptable to the Hyperlord.”

“Just like that?”

“Your reputation for wild-eyed creativity sends shudders down the collective spine at the upper levels of the Oversee. You’ll come up with something. I don’t guarantee that I’ll approve.”

Later, when Scogil met Nemia in their cabin, he pounded his head symbolically. She brought him tomato slices and martz-leaves wrapped inside a bread and cheese roll. While

PS^CHOHISTDRICAL CRISIS • 341

he delegated part of his fam to work on the Hyperlord problem, he shared his troubles with Nemia.

“I can’t get these nursemaid nannies out of my hair! Everywhere I turn, they pop up and close doors on me like in a nightmare! ‘Bad little boykins; can’t go in there till you grow up, naughty, naughty, naughty.’” He sighed with a shake of his head and twist of his wrist to indicate screws being tightened. “You know why I love you, Nemia?”

“Because I nursemaid you so well?”

He felt an irrational wave of love and loyalty—unusual for a man whose ambition had made loyalty to others a secondary issue. “I don’t have to fight you.”

“So far.” She grinned.

He cast his eyes back toward the bridge. “Old Baldy is zigzagging out of the way of phantoms again. Do you suppose he’s good enough to dodge your mother? I half expect an impossible rendezvous out here in the void—grappling hooks, tractor beams, the works—and then your mother comes in through the airlock with your fianc6 and takes you away.”

“Aw, that won’t happen.” She ruffled a lock of his hair. “We’ll change your hair color to purple and give you a big false nose with warts and then my mother will never notice you.”

“We hope.”

She shifted into advice mode. ‘Talk to Katana before you talk to Jama.” She meant about withholding a copy of the Martyr’s Cache.

He returned to his well-equipped cubicle and hunkered down to the grind. He was still the python digesting the goat For now he was finished with sampling. The sheer magnitude of material was demanding a more methodical treatment. So he started with simple tasks. To build up a ready glossary of unfamiliar terms, he scanned the document for items whose meaning might have shifted over the centuries, dumping them into a buffer. Each term there had to be analyzed separately. He felt like a bored computer dealing with records at the excruciating rate of no more than one per jiff. It was slow work—too many of the records were being bumped up to his conscious mind where he actually had to think about them, researching definitions, using his judgment, composing definitions, building links. On and on it went. How was he to find the time to learn some of this stuff!

He bogged down. For a while he crawled into his bunk and dreamed they had jumped to Splendid Wisdom. A dreamlike Katana escorted him down a enormous hallway of giant eyes, touching each with the nail of her forefinger to expand its iris, then looking inside, shaking her head and saying “Not in there!” before she went to the next eye. When Scogil tried to peek at what she was seeing, she bumped him away with her hips and flashed her smile to close the iris. “I told you, it’s not in there!” she scolded.

Having nightmares was not the way to sleep.

He roused himself to commiserate in the mirror. His hair was messy. Zero-g was terrible for hair. No wonder the Star-master was bald as a gourd. He slithered out of his cabin, feet first, and did a roll maneuver that sent him headed down toward Katana’s cabin. The door’s iris was the same as the irises in his dream. He hesitated. He knocked. If she wasn’t alone he was going to flee.

“Yes?”

“Scogil here. Are you alone?”

She opened the iris with a smile. “Don’t worry, he’s not here. I think he’s in the galley eating and reading up on Hel--marian artifacts. Come in.”

“You two are a strange couple.”

“We have had some adventures together. Kidnappings, ransom, crawling around in ten thousand-year-old mines. I haven’t had such an adrenaline rush since I murdered my husband. He’s a friend.”

“A friend, you say?” he fished.

She smiled a lady’s smile which barely concealed her bawdy good nature. She quoted from a nursery rhyme popular on Splendid Wisdom: “‘Come in,’ said the crocodile, rolling out the red carpet of his tongue.” It was immediately obvious to Katana from his blank expression that Scogil was one of these outworld barbarians too uncouth ever to have been read crocodile stories by his parents. She pulled Hiran-imus inside. “Let me translate my baffling crack. You’re still suspicious of us, aren’t you? I’m reading your narrow, squinty eyes which are more squinty than usual.”

“Protocol demands it,” he answered frankly.

“Your boss demands it,” she corrected. “Who is your boss?”

“Who’s yours? Your friend?”

“My boss is a good man. Ex-navy, like me. I’m surprised to see him involved in Kikaju’s intrigues.”

“The Hyperlord is capable of intrigue?” Scogil’s comment was more astonished than sarcastic.

She passed over his bait and returned to the subject of her naval comrade. “I don’t understand my boss but I’m very loyal to him, irrationally loyal. He was the only person who stood by me when it was an open-and-shut case to have my fam burned. He saved my ass. Got me five years of rehab instead. They tinkered with my fam but they didn’t take it away. Rehab is worse than the military. I didn’t enjoy it.” “Rehab must have done a good job.”

She twirled around in the small cabin with mock mirth. “You think you’re complimenting me? You think I’ve returned to normal! How wrong you are. I escaped because my boss has pull. I survived rehab. Of course they did teach me some emotional control. But my late mother was a weirdo who believed that attaching a baby to a fam gives it a head start. It doesn’t. It retards a baby. Emotions go undeveloped and the fam never learns to handle die real stuff. That’s me. A kid like me grows up with weird ideas about emotion. I was an out-of-control brat. Still am.”

“But your boss considers you competent?”

“I’m good at naval work.”

“Keeping the Hyperlord out of trouble?”

“That and keeping my boss out of trouble.”

“Maybe we can work together. I have a hard decision to make. And I need your help,” admitted Scogil. “I can’t give the Hyperlord his copy of the Martyr’s Cache. I’m looking for a way around my orders.”

Now she was alert. “What’s the problem?”

“Can’t have the Pscholars coming down on us.”

“So what’s the problem? You’re a rebel. Kikaju, bless him, is a crazy rebel. I’m not a rebel. I look after me because I never got past a child’s selfishness. But my boss is a rebel and he’s joined up with Kikaju, and I’d turn into a machine with saw-teeth if the Pscholars tried to take out my boss. I’m of the line of Frightfulpeople. I hope you’ve noticed that you and I are on the same side.”

“Granted. Can the Hyperlord be discreet?”

“Are you asking me that question? Or is your boss asking the question? Let me tell you something about Kikaju and never forget it. He looks like a fool, he is a fool, but he’s the smartest Spacedamn fool you’ll ever meet, and if you treat him like a fool, you lose. But to answer your question—no, he’s not going to be discreet; yes, he has to be muzzled. So what can I do for you? It would be stupid to upset him. And don’t you dare try to murder him! I won’t stand for that. I’ll have your ears first!”

“Easy. We’re dealing. Jama said something about bringing a group of mathematicians together and reinventing psychohistory. He doesn’t have the least idea how hard that is, or how long that would take.” Hiranimus held up his hand to keep Katana from interrupting. “I would say his dream was impossible, but no one can say it is impossible—it was done once—so it is possible. If your Hyperlord can put together a group of mathematicians who know how to live like rats in the walls of Splendid Wisdom, I can feed them stuff as fast as they can assimilate it”

The Frightfiilperson was not pleased. “In the original deal we got it all now”

“Citizen Katana, the Martyr’s Cache is useless to Jama as it stands. Jama knows no one who could read it. Neither do you. There’s this mythology—and people believe it—a mythology that supposes the old empire was degenerate at

the time of its collapse. Of course that’s true, but pieces of an organism don’t all start to die at the same rate. Your kidneys can kill you when your brain is doing its best work. Pure mathematics was at its height during the century of the Founder. How could he have done what he did if that weren’t so? It’s never been the same since. The Pscholars, great applied mathematicians that they are, are afraid of mathematics, afraid to nurture and cultivate it. Math is the only thing that could take them off their throne. Outside of the Pscholar’s Lyceums, mathematics is in a pitiful state. Over the whole of the Galaxy, mathematics is in a dark age.”

“And you can do better than Kikaju? You’re smarter and faster at reading bird tracks scratched in stone?” She was being sarcastic.

“I’m a mathematician, not the best, but one of the best outside of the Fellowship.”

She didn’t dispute the point but dropped down into clarification. “You are offering Jama bits and pieces over maybe decades instead of the whole bag at once?”

“Yeah. Bits and pieces at a rate his people can assimilate. It’s the fastest way.”

“How do we know you’ll honor your deal?”

“My word.”

She became furious, hot in a way he had never seen from a fammed mind. “You’ve already broken your word! Your boss could break your second word, just like he has broken your first!” Something in her reached out and controlled her rage, damping it, but the struggle was nakedly visible. Her face calmed. The rage became simple reproach.

Scogil slowly let his calming hand drop. “Maybe I could offer to put something in escrow. I can’t commit now, because I haven’t personally got the resources, but I can ask.”

She was already smiling, her mind quick. “Could you see to the financing of a small college for the mathematically talented? Say while we’re waiting for the ‘content’ to come through?”

“I can ask.” For the first time Scogil noticed a string of dried human ears hung up in her cabin as decoration.

She saw his glance and turned on the same crocodile smile that she’d met him with at her cabin’s iris. “Just a bond in escrow from some Rithian scummers who didn’t keep a deal with me. Forfeited. I don’t like con men.” She smiled more gently. “You’ve been fair with us, more than fair. I don’t dislike the turn of your new offer. It would solve our mutual problem—if you’re honest. I’ve been looking for a lid to clamp on Kikaju’s skull. I’ve been worried, too, and I am in charge of security. My boss is depending upon me. He’s taking risks I wouldn’t take if I were him.”

At thirty-two hundred the Starmaster heard Scogil’s proposition and nodded. “He’ll keep the faith as long as there’s more coming to hold his interest. I have something to add to the pot.” What the Starmaster had in mind as entirely to the Oversee’s advantage—but it would serve Kikaju’s purpose, too. The Starmaster intended to debark their loquacious Hyperlord and his sidekick at a very special spaceport. By “coincidence” they would find themselves enrolled in one of the Oversee’s very special security courses. Jama needed more training.

Hiranimus relaxed with Nemia that evening. Space, she was good to talk to! He told her everything. He had put his worries aside and was back to doing what he liked most. “I took a sixtyne of inamins after my chat with the Starmaster to sketch out one of the Founder’s neat tricks as it might apply to the situation at Coron’s Wisp. Just a first cut. I’m riding out a brainstorm. Maybe I’ve found a way to make a direct attack on Splendid Wisdom. I don’t think I’ll need help.”

“Go it alone? You wouldn’t dare!”

“They probably won’t let me but it’s worth a try. We’ll have to operate out of the Coron’s Wisp systems. That’s a pretty low station from which to be effective. I don’t even know who my new boss is going to be. He might be an iron star, Space help us! I need a better feel for the place. Start telling me all of Grandfa’s stories about the Wisp, the ones you remember.”

“It’s the real boondocks. Half of the population believes in astrology.”

“I know.” Scogil grinned. “That’s what is exciting.”

“It is not exciting for me! What will I do?”

“I have a perfect job for my Nemia.”

‘Taking care of you can be finished right after dawn. What will I do with the rest of my time?” she wailed.

“All wrapped up if you can convince the powers that be to back my mad scheme.”

Nemia snuggled up to him. “We’re not even married yet.” “How can we? We’ll need your mother for that ceremony. Maybe I can get my boss at the Wisp to fire me, and I can take an assignment at the other end of the Galaxy. I’m sure we could find an exotic place where the marriage ritual doesn’t require mothers.”

Nemia gestured to dim the light. For a long time she lay in silence debating with herself, listening to the breathing of her Hiranimus. “I know something you don’t know,” she whispered in the dark.

“I’m sure of that, Miss Psychoquantronics.”

“I’m not supposed to tell you till we get there.”

“Well, tell me then!”

“I’m relishing the last moments of having such a delicious secret to myself.”

Scogil turned his back to her in their net and grumbled. She wrapped herself around his back, contouring herself to his floating body. “You aren’t going to have a boss when we get to Coron’s Wisp. You’re the new boss.”

Scogil exploded out of the cocoon. “How do you know that!”

“It all comes from having the right grandfather.”

“He told you? He arranged it before he died?”

“Why do you think I’m marrying you? You don’t think I’d marry someone’s flunky,” she teased. “Grandfa took pity on me,” she lied, “and helped me escape that horrible ninny my mother picked out for me. We’re going to be very happy.” She was afraid they weren’t going to be happy be-

cause of her sins, so she whispered the key words she had programmed into his fam when he thought she was taking out his Kapor persona. “My Guzbee darling.” His response was wonderful. She was a very good programmer. Cloun-the-Stubbom would have understood.