Psychohistorical Crisis

30

PILGRIMAGE OF THE AGENT OF THE

OVERSEE, 14,797 GE

... millennia later even the early astronomer Kepler cast horoscopes on a square compass rose of eight outer houses and four inner houses whose geometry matched the beholding platform of the Great Pyramid Observatory as it was at the time of the completion of the Grand Gallery and before the construction of the King’s Chamber From such an artificial horizon, priests measured the rising times and azimuth of the stars that made up the thirty-six decans of the Egyptian calendar. .. An educated Egyptian saw life as a ceaseless battle to maintain exact order, math, in a world of encroaching chaos... by observing the stars and probing geometry he...

... that one entered the afterlife of mystery, protected by hike and preserved in a structure that embodied the orderliness of the universe brought one to the edge of the immortal: order was immortality.

...the uneducated Greek mercenaries of a later decadent era, hired by Egyptian and Persian alike to kill each other, carried back to their city-states the Egyptian fascination with number and geometry and degraded it into the pseudogeometry of a horoscope designed to plot personal destiny. By Hellenistic times...

—The Faraway Project for the Preservation of History,

19th Edition, 12,562 GE

Astrology was alive on Splendid Wisdom.

Hiranimus Scogil watched Kikaju Jama as he removed one of the ovoids from its coddled case of sixtyne and held it up to the eyelight. Beside him, the daughter of his security chief—and, it seemed, his constant helper—was briefly made immobile by awe. She begged until she was allowed to polish it. “Exquisite,” said the Hyperlord. “I won’t have trouble distributing these. You say this batch is active to the Prophet level? Please, how long will it take before we get the upgrade to the Monk level?”

“Patience has always been a virtue, Jama.”

“Do you hear that, Otaria? After nigh onto seven years he’s still questioning my patience.” He turned to Scogil. “You’ll notice how patient I am being with my little friend here.” And to Otaria: “Put it back—you’re not a hen.” The young girl reverently returned the talisman to its satin holder.

It was true; Scogil still didn’t trust Kikaju. But somehow seeing him here for the first time in his milieu on Splendid Wisdom made him seem less dangerous. It had never been the Hyperlord’s intentions which were worrisome, it was his competence. Scogil remembered him as a clumsy oaf who continually fell all over himself, but here on this mad world, his world, Jama possessed an effortless ease, never making mistakes. Even with thirteen-year-old Otaria of the Calmer Sea tearing recklessly about his carefully arranged dwelling, he seemed to be able to maintain his composure. It was eerie.

Splendid Wisdom was inhibiting Scogil’s reckless ways. If Jama was at ease in these corridors, to Scogil they were fraught with alien dangers. It wasn’t easy to separate the myth he had imbibed as a distant bystander from the casual immensity of the whole megalopolis. More than once he found himself almost humbly requesting Jama’s advice about some social triviality—like where to buy food. Marvelous as Splendid Wisdom was, leaving it by the end of the month would be Scogil’s pleasure. The Great Pilgrimage had lost its thrill.

To the cautious men of the Oversee—who were backing this scouting patrol—the whole expedition seemed ill-advised. Wary Oversee agents, preceding Scogil to Splendid Wisdom, had formed—even joined—cells in the Hyperlord’s organization in an attempt to penetrate it and test its weaknesses. They were already well entrenched, performing their assigned duties, but so far had learned nothing other than that this weird organization of discontent was being run professionally.

While Scogil thought his sober thoughts, Kikaju’s nubile playmate had been foraging in hidden spaces. In triumph she brought out her loot, one of Jama’s wigs, on her upraised arm, its fine hair black and youthful with a red ribboned pigtail. The brat’s other arm swooped mischievously to snatch up a second wig, the white one on his head. Revealed to all was a pate of crew-cut stubble which clashed with his dandy lace accoutrements. “You look terrible in white,” she teased. Onto his head she dropped his black wig, slightly askew. “If you’re going to be my escort to the dithyramb you need a wilder, more youthful look!”

“I never promised you anything of the kind! I promised I’d escort you to something reasonably sedate like that affair to be put on by my passacaglia friends, which is also scheduled for the eighth watch.”

“You promised!” She turned and eyed Scogil while she asked Jama (out of the side of her mouth), “Does your friend dance? Bring him along! Maybe if two of you old men spelled each other at the dithyramb both of you would survive my attentions?”

Kikaju coughed. “I doubt he could manage anything more elaborate than a chaconne. He’s from the provinces.”

“He’s from Space?” Her voice noticeably brightened and she took a new interest in Scogil.

“He’s married and just had his first child to whom he is anxious to return.”

The budding nymph straightened the black wig and kissed Kikaju on his rouged cheek. “Since when did anyone being married ever bother your appetites!”

“It should bother yours!”

“Oh, now really! Is that because you are unmarried and vociferously available to teach young virgins?” she teased. “Well, I’m not going to grow up to be a prude like my mother and stick to stuffy old bachelors. I like married men. I’ve been a woman for a whole year and have been preparing myself by learning every aspect of the trade ever since I was six. I think it is truly old-fashioned to atomize men just because they stray a little when they are off on a very long trip.” Henceforth she ignored the handsome Hiranimus without forgetting him. Adroitly she kept out of the reach of Kikaju’s grope, except when she deliberately let him fondle her.

Scogil watched the exchange, aghast. On such lecherous men an uprising depended! This barely mature child should be slapping his face and stalking off in indignation—but she loved him. It seemed that everyone loved Hyperlord Kikaju Jama. Impossible! But there it was.

The Hyperlord took time out to examine his new look in his magic mirror which gave him a full wraparound view of himself at a sedately slow pace. He didn’t even have to pirouette. He did have to adjust his wig. Then he excused himself for a moment, ostensibly to check out the protocol for distribution of the Eggs, but Scogil suspected that was a ruse to cover his selection of a perfume.

Fortunately, at this stage of the Oversee’s risky game, events had not yet reached a critical divide. The Hyperlord could fail them and it would be a setback—but it wouldn’t be lethal. The present shipment of astrological aids was harmless—nothing was contained in them that would inspire more than contempt in an industrious psychohistorian who was foolish enough to master their arcane workings. This batch of Eggs merely did astrology in ever more complicated layers through to a (fifth) “Prophet” level, which, though detailed enough to serve as a foundation for a galactic social model, by itself generated only convoluted astrological gibberish. It did not even contain the suspiciously advanced mathematics of the Monk level. A blaster without charge...

Scogil’s fully tested implementation of the (sixth) “Monk” level, to say nothing of the advanced seventh level, was long past due. It would come—hopefully by the time that user organizations, here and elsewhere, had matured enough to be able to profit from the procedures of such a seventh level in which the full methods of psychohistorical prediction had been embedded.

When the Hyperlord returned to the room he was magnificently composed; one might imagine him to be a Hyperlord of old, commanding billions while servant-lords carried out his orders with swift efficiency. In synchronous sympathy, the eyes of Kikaju’s dolls turned to stare at Scogil, and the Hyperlord’s eyelight turned to illuminate the outworlder. “Everything seems to be in order.” His tone said that it was not “I am pleased with our progress”—but a Hyperlord’s frown erased his pleasure—“except for one item. You did promise me that I would have access to the Martyr’s Cache. You chide me for my lack of patience, and I do appreciate what you have sent me already—but it is not enough. You are behind schedule.”

Scogil was annoyed to find that he actually felt like a servant in need of groveling to get back into the good graces of his master. Did Splendid Wisdom do this to everyone? “It is not easy to decipher the Founder’s lifework and to put it in communicable form,” Scogil countered lamely. That was only half of the problem. Bringing consistency and order to the system of fake mathematics behind which the Oversee would be hiding when they moved into the open was turning out to be every bit as hard as the real mathematics! Jama wasn’t yet soldier enough to uphold such an unfinished shield in battle. And maybe never would be. Strategy demanded that Scogil admit no such thing.

“You are stalling.” Kikaju was adamant.

“Should we be discussing... ?” Scogil gestured pointedly at the girl whose back was to them while her fingers, now bored, traced the pattern of an antique comer shelf.

“She is the daughter of my security chief,” said the Hyperlord icily. “She is better trained than you are. I believe in teaching her everything.” Meaning that Scogil was an out-world barbarian unable to appreciate either the niceties of convoluted security or the joys of kinky sex with minors.

Scogil gave up. He had no choice but to work with the Hyperlord, but more and more he felt the resolve to strengthen all parallel organizations, especially those well distanced from this stellar cauldron which served its Pscholar priests as the Command Center of Civilization—and harbored such men as Kikaju! Splendid Wisdom was an ideal place from which to attack the hegemony of the Pscholars, their heart, their soul, but it was not the only battlefield where a victory would lead to the final triumph. There was much more to the Project than the mere redesign of the Egg as an infective vector.

He sighed. He was years behind schedule and his current galactic gallivanting was a forced attempt to catch up, to nourish, by personal attention, the multiple loci that prudence had seeded. One strong locus was vulnerable to massive retaliation. Many weak loci were more robust. But such gallivanting was leading to an extension of delays already intolerable. Nothing was as advanced as it should be.

He chose retreat. “I shall do my best to accommodate you.” While he bowed he was thinking Damn muddled fool thinks he can tell the difference between mathematics and astrology! Contritely he promised to meet tomorrow with the Hyperlord’s best mathematicians. Best diddlers? The mathematicians of Splendid Wisdom (outside of psychohistory) were an underfed lot! He could at least sketch out for these diddlers how the specialized astrological math yet to be embedded in the Monk level was being deliberately designed for use as objects in a for-real seventh-level prognosticator. Gladly he backed into the apartment’s small levitator.

Up in the corridor his original optimism was gone. He had been feeling the pressure and the lack of sleep for months. He had even persuaded Nemia to give his fam a few boosts. That had helped—but not much. The reluctance of the Oversee to commit vastly more of their Fortress resources to the Project was as great as ever. Resources or no, a whole network of users had to be in place and fine-tuned at a pace he was not going to be able to keep. The growth in things to do seemed out of control. True, with each iteration he had further optimized the probabilities of success on a galactic scale—but the dice which actually made the calls had yet to be rolled.

The good came with the bad. He did seem to have a commitment from a reluctant Oversee because he was getting superb support from them if not nearly enough of it—coordinating this covert trip to Splendid Wisdom being an example. That was a pleasant surprise. At least he hoped it was support. Maybe the Oversee’s normal caution had been overbalanced by the riches he was slowly feeding them from his application of the methods of the Martyr’s Cache. After millennia of hiding, the leaders of the Oversee were smelling blood.

He had become a slave to his own perfectionism.

Finally—he emerged out into the Concourse of the Balas-ante, thinking he was free, at least until tomorrow, but he had been tailed silently and she sneaked up behind him, only letting him know she was there by taking his hand. It was the hand of a coquettish lover which prompted him to look, to his shock, down into wide sensual eyes. He was alarmed, supposing that she was about to proposition him—a dithyramb or something worse—but no; she was just going his way and wanted company. She asked about his baby.

“Her name is Petunia. She was about as long as my foot when I left her back on Timdo. I hope she’s not two feet long and on her own feet before I get home.”

“I hope for her sake that you had your gengineers delete the genes for your nose!”

He grinned. “Nothing as drastic as that! I’m a fundamentalist conservative when it comes to the creative science of tinkering with evolution. We just did some minor diddling with her neurotransmitters to allow her to link to a new high-performance fam when she is three.” That had only meant giving her five untried genes, each tested in sim by the Oversee, each meeting galactic standard specs so that as an adult she would be able to mate with any galactic standard hominid. There was no hurry. It was going to take thousands of years to optimize the human-fam interface.

“Have you run her horoscope?”

“Would I learn anything?”

“You’re the expert!”

“That’s why I didn't chart her horoscope.”

“How are you going to get psychohistory out of astrology, that’s what I want to know!”

It made him uneasy that this child knew so much, but after all that was the point of the game, sharing knowledge. “It isn’t easy,” he evaded.

“That’s why my mother rolls her eyes all the time. She thinks you’re all crazy. But how will you do it?”

“It’s a trick. It’s my way of getting lazy people to do math. First an apprentice astrologer (Aspirant level) has to draw lines and make curves and measure distances and do some baby geometry if he doesn’t want his clients to suspect him of fraud. Then he has to go out and measure things in the sky and translate those marking on his instruments into numbers. He has to sort things into different houses and relate them. Maybe even use his fam!” They stopped. It was the junction of corridors where they had to make a decision: to walk or to take a pod, perhaps to part. “I’ll take you home,” he offered gallantly.

She frowned. He waited, not knowing where she lived. “We walk!” she announced firmly. “That will give you time enough for a longer explanation. Continue.”

“By then,” Scogil continued, “our naive apprentice astrologer has put in too much effort to abandon his quest but realizes that his underused brain is pretty exhausted by his warm-up and he still hasn’t got the machinery to make a prediction. All he has learned is some uselessly abstract math. Time to retreat for a breather—some tea and a quick refresher course in mumbo-jumbo to cover for his ignorance.” “You’re a cynic!” she marveled. “My mother was right!”

“Splendid Wisdom brings out the cynic in me, I’m afraid. It doesn’t show on Timdo. But don’t think I don’t believe in what I’m doing. I’ve already laid my trap. At this point my apprentice astrologer has clients. And king-client is impatiently eyeing his head. If said astrologer values all that is above his eyebrows, he has to start flying by the flapping of his ears and get on with telling the king what the king wants to hear. That’s the hard part—pretending to knowledge one doesn’t have. That doesn’t satisfy the better Aspirants—they hurry on to the next level; they already know they have much more to learn. The dilettantes inevitable stop at first level, content with the mumbo-jumbo—and that’s all right. They’ll be there, en masse, for the psychohistorians to see and dismiss.”

“I’m Mentor level,” Otaria announced proudly.

“Really? So you’ve noticed how the Egg tempts the more ambitious to go on?”

“No such thing! I go on because my mother thinks it’s crazy.”

“She’s right. It is certainly a lot crazier now than when there were only twelve signs in the zodiac.”

“Twelve! A retarded monkey can count to twelve!”

“That figures; the early astrologers were retarded Rithians. When the Greeks set up the rules for astrology they were so clueless about astronomy that several thousand years later when the precession of Rith’s equinoxes had moved everybody’s sign into the next zodiac, not a single astrologer even noticed. By preinterstellar times they were plotting their horoscopes on birthdays that were months out of whack. The poor enthusiast who ran his life as an intellectual Aquarian was really an impulsive Capricomian. Youth is simple! Now there are billions of zodiac signs that have to be mastered!”

“I haven’t learned how to count that high yet.”

“But you have learned category theory.”

“Of course.”

“You see? I’ve arranged that while an astrologer is moving from Aspirant to Mentor, he has to learn his category theory to make sense out of it. He has to find relationships between the things in the multitudinous houses and the lines and the numbers. And it all changes with time! And though, as a Mentor with a Mentor’s training, you are better at bluffing than you were as an Aspirant, you still don’t command the machinery to make a prediction!”

“I noticed. Very frustrating.”

“You see? Luminant level beckons. More hordes give up and stay at the second level. You look bright enough to persevere. How is your category theory?”

“Still shaky.”

“The Egg doesn’t tell you that, in learning categories, you are mastering a tool that has critical uses at the seventh level when combined with..

“Should I give up?” The wonders of the Balisante were trying to distract them from their conversation.

“Of course not! The billion signs of the zodiac don’t matter a damn, but the category theory does. Imagine yourself in the same shoes as a little kid who wants to write a novel. The little kid is sprawled on the floor, sweating blood over the first three sentences, getting them just right and even fitting them onto the edge of the page.”

“I did that!” exclaimed Otaria. “It was a novel about the world at the bottom of the creaky stairs hidden at the back of the closet behind mom’s unused clothes.”

“Did you finish it?”

“No. I was too scared.”

“Of course not. By the third sentence the brain of our young novelist is wozzled, so he starts to scribble. He scribbles a nice neat imitation of script for page after page, getting happier all the time as his output accelerates. When he’s finished he proudly presents the five pages to his mama. ‘Mama, look! I wrote a novel!’ His mama, who wants to believe in his ability, can’t resist his smile and his sheer confidence. ‘Wonderful!’ she says, and puts his novel into her inlaid Osarian treasure chest. If that’s as far as it goes, fine, but if mama is serious and wants to transmogrify her child from a scribbling kid into a real novelist, she has a lot of guidance work ahead of her. You asked how I was going to squeeze a psychohistorian out of an astrologer. Well, that’s my answer. Whoever wants to transmogrify an astrologer into a psychohistorian must know how to set up astrology as a series of more and more difficult levels of math with greater and greater prestige attached to the levels-not-yet-mastered as well as arranging a comfortable living as a charlatan for those who don’t make it.”

“Stay away from my mama—she’d kill you for your sins of hypocrisy and deceit!”

“Yes, I’ve seen her collection of ears. Very sobering! But is it really a sin to offer a little candy to a child in exchange for some racy reading lessons describing the exploits of the old emperors—while sneaking in a little orbital geometry?”

“Do you have to know history to become a psychohistorian?”

“Naw,” said Scogil. “Maybe a little.” They were passing a sensorium whose fluid come-on ad was touting adventures in a history that had never been.

“I study history. I’ve heard that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

“You’re too young to know how ancient that aphorism is. If it’s true, we’re doomed. There’s too much history to know”

Otaria withdrew her hand from Scogil’s indignantly. “I can’t believe I heard you say that!” She stopped, hands on hips, staring him down, daring him to escape her wrathful enfilade, but there was no retreating except to step back into the hologram.

He glanced uneasily over his shoulder, deciding to make a stand rather than escape into a mythical past of no substance. “Suppose I was designing a sensorium,” he pleaded to the slowly advancing Valkyrie. “Would I have to own the plans of every sensorium ever built? No. I’d need to know a little materials science, some physics, and own a set of power tools. Actors don’t build theaters. Historians don’t make history.”

She took his hand again, forgivingly. “But don’t you like history just a little bit? I love it. It’s so full of adventure. Men saving the Galaxy and things like that.”

“Sometimes I indulge in history to drown my sorrows— but only when I’m crazy and despairing for humanity.”

“I’ve been studying the history of astrology.”

“Now there’s a tangled web. Have you been haunting the Lyceum Library? I tapped into it a triple of watches ago and went into famfeed overload. It was scary. Too much material and not enough links. I’ve been trying to clean out my fam ever since. There’s all sorts of garbage in there, and I don’t even know where it came from. Whoever it was who sacked Splendid Wisdom in the bad old days didn’t know the fine points of their business. Why don’t fams have better cleanout routines? Splendid Wisdom is a dangerous place for a voracious student like me.”

“Well,” replied Otaria, “I’m a discriminating student and I never go near the Lyceum Library. Stuffy old straight-down-the-line government librarians collect only the things that fit through the psychohistoric sieve. I’d end up thinking like a kept librarian.” She added sarcastically, “Not being a Pscholar, I don’t have access to the Restricted Library, which just might interest me. I’ve outgrown the baby pap that Rector Hanis and his likes condescend to provide for me. It’s like being a Catholic back in tribal times and having the temple priests refuse to allow me to read the Bible because my plebeian mind might be fried by the ideas God was whispering to me. Did you ever read the Bible? I read it once while I was hiding under the couch from my mama. The past is so romantic. Do you ever use private collections?”

“All the time.”

“I only use private libraries because they are wacky enough not to pretend to know the difference between fantasy and reality. That gives me a fighting chance.”

“Sounds like a good place to find a history of astrology.” “As well as other insubstantia—like the pom feelies of the fifth wife of Emperor Krang-the-Blind. Creepy. Real librarians never collect creepy-crawly skin-walking things with thirteen hairy fingers. I nearly fainted. For the history of astrology we have to go to one of the ancient wisdom cults.” She was struck by lightning and began to glow. “That’s a great idea! You’re coming with me. Forget the silly dithyramb; libraries are more fun. I’m dressing you up.”

“A disguise in a library?”

“Of course. You wouldn’t want to be recognized in a place like that! The shame would be too much. My mother taught me all about disguises, and I need to practice.”

“I thought I was very nicely anonymous among the vast crowds of Splendid Wisdom.”

“With that nose?”

The Frightfulperson, the youthful Otaria of the Calmer Sea, took him to her small apartment on the side corridor below her mother’s place. She had a manufacturum that specialized in recycling old clothes into daring new designs. For Scogil she conjured a flesh-pink hat with flappy brim that rendered his profile inaccessible. She made him a vaguely military jacket; no one would ever remember him as a civilian. “No mustache?” he complained.

“Of course not,” she mimicked. “That would make you too handsome. I don’t want the girls to follow you around. Without a profile you are already dangerously attractive.” For the next leg of their journey they took an endless ride through the tubes. Hungry, they had to leave their first pod for lunch at a dim place she knew where the proprietor went around polishing the glass lamps and refilling his customers’ cups so he could listen in on their conversations. Then they just had to visit a girlfriend she hadn’t seen in ages who was raising a mini-chicken inside her parlor furniture. Otaria got down on her knees and clucked. Scogil stood and maintained his dignity until they left. Their third pod zipped them to a tube station that emerged inside a vast public bathhouse. Fellow tube passengers wore sandals—some even strutted bathing suits—and carried things like flippers and goggles. None seemed interested in ancient wisdom since the crowd continued on to the baths while Otaria and Scogil mounted a secluded stairway.

“Remember. I’m Hasarta Nugood. They know me. They don’t know you. Let’s see. You’re Og and you’re not very bright. That will make it simple for you. If you don’t understand what is going on, grunt convincingly.” She smiled like an auteur who has created for her characters an especially deadly situation. “Don’t tell anyone, but one of His Hyper-lordship’s cells meets here. He doesn’t even know it exists. Security is so tight that even my mama doesn’t know it exists. I only discovered it by accident because I’m so curious. I got curious about the ancient wisdom cults so I joined one. And who should be more interested in ancient wisdom than a bunch of wacky astrologers! Promise me you won’t tell!”

At the top of the stairs they found the mansion housing Otaria’s cult behind two bronze doors three meters tall. Flat Assyrian warriors hunted lions inside the confines of a two-and-a-quarter-dimensional panel. The doors were so formidable Hiranimus expected to hear the crackle of a forcefield and heavy-duty motorization but found only manual operation and heavy-duty inertia.

Before entering he warned Otaria. “That door exudes Rithian mythology. You’ve got to keep your nose flared for that stuff. Ninety-nine percent of it, maybe all of it, is fakery manufactured for the tourist trade. As a kid I once owned a four hundred million-year-old Rithian fossil, just a shell embedded in rock, pretty, nothing spectacular. I carried it around with me in my pocket, and took it out and boasted about it all the time. My stories took on a life of their own so my father, a firm believer in the true truths, had it evaluated. It was a fake, maybe five hundred years old, and not even a copy of a real fossil. There were millions of them in circulation. It was a computer-designed fossil, probably from a program that mimicked evolution. After that I’ve had a hard time taking Rithian stories seriously. Be warned.”

“I know all that,” said Otaria disdainfully. “My mother was kidnapped by Rithians. Her Rithian souvenirs aren’t fake.”

Inside the Mausoleum, empty of people, were rows of startlingly lifelike exhibits, captured in their cubicles of frozen time. Most were prehypership from the Sirius Sector. Very few were from Rith. A collector would have had to scour hundreds of planets with an army to kidnap their like. It wasn’t the same as viewing holos. The displays were all as solid as the bronze doors—bowls to be tipped, swords to be hefted, muzzle-loaded cannon to be thumped, scrolls of sheepskin to be unrolled, machines that hummed menacingly, each object apparently irreplaceable but in fact an insubstantial nanofabrication from a compactly stored template, regenerated or destroyed at whim.

“I hope the Delphi exhibit is still up. That’s what I want to show you. It has an Egg and tells fortunes with quantum obscurity!” She looked around her. “Where is my Princess Seer?”

In the meantime an exhibit was being changed. Surveying the time-frozen carnage at his feet was an armored warrior-officer of the sword-and-crossbow era whose demeanor and red blade made one glad to have missed the action. Metal-visored eyes glared behind a hideous metal mask. Leather and steel plates defied attack. Martial artists had woven colored thread to hold the plates together, and metalsmith tailors had hammered out the breastplate making the warrior more manly than any warrior could ever be. Priests had decorated him with crosses to ward off evil. But no ancient religion was powerful enough to protect this defender of God’s and Mammon’s faith from museum curators. They had summoned a demon from its slumber in Hades to devour the warrior’s feet, to grab him down into the netherworld, to eat him alive with crunching grinds. On Splendid Wisdom there was no room to store a bulky artifact whose time had come.

Otaria knew where to find the attendant in a maze of discreet cubbyholes. She brought her Og to a lady with holy eyes and a horseshoe crown of golden filigree and feathers that surrounded her face in ancient runes unreadable by Scogil: “California’s Wisdom in the Solid State.” The priestess was dressed as a hip-hop shaman in animal skins worn off one shoulder in early Rithian style, her lips blood red, her comm tucked in a leather belt sewn together with twigs of mistletoe. Otaria curtsied as she introduced the woman, “the Princess of Wisebeings.” Her deference indicated that they were meeting the owner of the place. Scogil grunted convincingly.

“You’re early, Hasarta!” The Seer ignored Og.

“We’re researching ancient mysteries,” said Otaria.

“Good. You can report your findings to our study group.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“And your friend?” She glanced doubtfully at Og with the floppy hat and military deportment. “Remember, we’re all Mentors this watch. Mentor level is rather difficult for a beginner. Don’t you want to sign him up as an Aspirant?”

“Oh, don’t worry about him. Og is a divine astrologer. That’s why I brought him. He can see right into our souls!” she pronounced with genuine awe.

Og was tempted to grunt again but answered graciously, “I see the soul of a woman who truly knows her way among the stars.” He knew his lines.

The holy eyes crinkled into a grin. She was of the Lumi-nant level (the third) and suspicious of anyone who claimed more knowledge than she. “Even at the Mentor level you’ll have to do better than that,” she chided. “We’ll teach you. You’ll need to know some orbital mathematics.” She brought out her catalog, its cover decorated with the familiar golden horseshoe crown with runes. “I have just the right five-session course for you.”

Otaria stayed the gesture. “We’ll be looking at the Delphi exhibit.”

“Very well. Since you were last here I moved it to station 93. It’s more secluded that way, more mysterious.”

After the Princess of Wisebeings showed the way she abandoned them to go back to her cubbyhole. The little square anteroom of station 93 was dim, hiding gods. There was no procession of statues leading to a temple, nor even evidence of a Greek temple—no fake priestesses nor attendants to give the room a false air; only the simple apparatuses of an oracle and Apollo, the god of Delphi—with his lyre—strutting an arrogant handsomeness, a god who could gift Cassandra with the abilities of a prophetess in the hope of sexual favors and then petulantly deny her the belief of others when those amorous favors weren’t forthcoming—and then, as a god who always tells the truth, foretelling her murder and the murder of her companions who, by Apollo’s curse, would not be able to take her forewarning seriously.

Otaria was smug. “There’s your Egg of prophecy,” she said, pointing it out from the rest of the paraphernalia. “See, Eggs were around when the crabby old gods of Rith were still alive.” The netted half Egg stood between two birds, facing each other.

“Ah!” Scogil sighed gently, in obvious recognition.

“It’s a Coron’s Egg?” asked Otaria incredulously.

“No, but I’ve been told about it by an old monk of Timdo. I didn’t realize it was Rithian. It marks a place where there was a fountain of wisdom.”

“Not really.” Otaria was delighted that she knew something that the Hyperlord’s chief astrologer didn’t. “It’s very out of place here on Splendid Wisdom. It’s an Egyptian omphalos, one of their geographical position markers put in place at a site which had been carefully surveyed. They were very fond of permanent markers since they had to labor to resurvey their country every year after the floods came in from the tropical rain forest. Nobody was supposed to move an omphalos. You did that and you were snake food! The two birds are the Egyptian glyph for the long-distance laying out of parallels and meridians, probably homing pigeons or doves.”

“A bird as your navigator? That’s a pretty far-fetched story.”

“No it isn’t. You’re just too dumb to know your Rithian bird biology. A pigeon could cover the length of Egypt in one day. The ability of the old birds of Rith to orient themselves over long distances and maintain a steady flight pattern was amazing. So there. We don’t appreciate them because Rithian birds transplanted to other planets don’t orient well. What do you do when you don’t have quantronics? You use handy neural computers, slow but effective. Just because you are a savage Rithian doesn’t mean you aren’t smart.”

She gestured at the netlike decorations on the hemispherical omphalos. “Latitudes and longitudes. The same ones that are in the Egg. Isn’t that amazing? Egypt had a calendar of thirty-six decans of ten-day weeks, three decans to the month with five days of hoopla at the end. They divided the sky up the same way into 360 parts—sometimes 86,400 parts if they were using time measurements. I hope you’ve noticed that the Egg uses a horizon line divided into 86,400 parts. That’s a second. A second is about three jiffs. The omphalos represents the northern hemisphere of Rith. I don’t know if the early Egyptian priests knew about the southern hemisphere—but if they had gone as far as chopping up the pole to the equator into ninety parts of latitude, and they had 360 parts in their circle, they probably did.”

To Scogil it all sounded like a story some penurious Rithian had invented to make money. “So history is more than a passing fancy with you?”

“I will grow up to be a historian with robe and beard!” she insisted.

“And you’re learning about Greeks? So far as I know, Greece is all the way across the Ocean of the World from Egypt”

“Of course! We’re in Delphi!” she exclaimed incredulously. “Delphi was a very sacred place to the Egyptian surveyors. It is three-sevenths of the way from the equator to the north pole, at least Mount Parnassus is. The most important temple of their Second Empire was founded at exactly two-sevenths of the distance from the equator in Thebes, and it was built around an omphalos. When the Greeks were still barbarians, an Egyptian expedition established an astronomical observatory in the mountains at Delphi, probably to measure the local northern variation in the length of a degree of latitude—though, to their illiterate superstitious laborers, everything the aliens did was all magical ritual. That’s all speculation, but the later Greeks did have a legend recounting how Apollo had routed the Python when he took over

Delphi, which is a mere retelling of the Egyptian story of the sun god Ra being attacked by the snake Apepi at sunset, then winning the nightlong battle and resurrecting himself at dawn.” She smiled.

He smiled to indulge his precocious child.

“I can tell you don’t believe me. But look.” She pointed out a device with thirty-six spokes. ‘That’s the magic wheel used at Delphi. It’s a naive barbarian’s rendition of an Egyptian angle measuring device. The Greeks had seen the Egyptians prophesy with it and knew it had symbols on it, so they did mock astronomy by putting strange symbols on their own counterfeit and using it as a roulette wheel to generate inscrutable random sequences of letters which the priests of Apollo versified into divinations.”

“Magicians do keep forgetting that the symbols they use for variables are only dummy symbols,” Hiranimus said tolerantly.

“Ask a question!” demanded Otaria.

“Who asks?” intoned an aroused Apollo.

“Og,” said Otaria.

“Ask then, Og,” commanded Apollo.

Scogil’s response was mock. “How will the oblique students of the egg-shape fair against the masters of the golden ellipsoid?” He was surprised when his voice then activated the spinning of the thirty-six-spoked wheel. Balls, each carrying a Greek letter or obscure symbol, began to roll out of it into a hole in the shrine. Somewhere a reader was assembling this random output into some kind of weird grammatical sense.

“Listen,” said Otaria.

Apollo spoke his oracle. “The egg master’s student will wrack Og’s doom to tell the oblique chagrin of the fair golden ellipsoid.”

“Good old omniscient Apollo pretending to be Thoth,” commented Scogil with the same seriousness he gave any random number. “The highest Greek mathematical discovery was the mystical theorem that three equals one, which is one of the fundamental theorems of astrology.”

“You better be careful what you say,” Otaria admonished. “You are among believers in the mysteries of ancient wisdom. The Greeks are worshiped here.”

“We all have a fascination with our Rithian roots that won’t go away even though Rith has become nothing more than the desert rathole of the universe. I’ve picked up bits and pieces of the old history. No more than that. There’s not much left of Rithian history, really. Just fragments, mostly preserved via old starship libraries.” The Rithians, thought Scogil, had themselves done a good job of obliterating their own heritage. They bred a hundred times faster than they could ship colonists to the stars, and those who stayed behind had turned on each other. He gave Otaria a rueful look.

“Enough! From now on just grunt,” said Otaria, taking her erudite Og to the small conference room off the Mausoleum where students were gathering. Some of them had their own Coron’s Egg. One gentleman was selling Coron’s Eggs to three enthusiastic Aspirants. Og smiled a satisfied smile. It was nice to see deadly subversion in action.

The would-be Mentors of the second level settled into small teams, each sharing an Egg, working to perfect some mathematical manipulation needed for Mentor-level work. The shaman Wisebeing—Luminant—gave a brilliant astrological lecture with her Egg in projection mode. She was applauded enthusiastically. But afterward they were all assigned more slog work. Then each gave a presentation of their test horoscope. Scogil had never heard such flowery nonsense in his life. He was pleased. Maybe one in a hundred of these people could be brought up to seventh level— once the final level was codified and tested. That, his equations said, would be enough to topple the Pscholars. He already knew how the Founder’s equations would handle the emergence of an astrology cult—the data would be misconstrued—unless the Pscholars were harboring an unknown mathematical genius, which wasn’t likely. Their secrecy codes were the best insurance that their mathematical innovation would continue to remain damped.

The Wisebeing let him give his own demonstration. He dazzled them with a lesser-known aspect of the Mentor level. The thirteen-year-old Frightfulperson of the Calmer Sea mouthed her approval. Good grunting, Mister Og.