Psychohistorical Crisis

45

POLITICS AS USUAL, 14,810 GE

Isar Imakin: You have familiarized yourself with our efforts to rebalance the unpredicted perturbations in the Plan caused by the military adventures of Cfoun-the-Stubbom?

Smythos: Barker's analysis, and the recent Cvas update, yes.

imakin: Then you know the details of how the psychohistorical monitoring of the Plan has inadvertently been exposed to Faraway's eyes. Comment.

Smythos: (agitated) The exposure was unnecessary! We... (buzz) ...had the... (unintelligible)...

Imakin: Please confine yourself to the situation as is.

Smythos: (recovering his composure) Well, the Cfoun is dead and the Chancellors of Faraway seem to have remembered their lines after a little bit of prompting from the box. The Plan is already one third complete and apparently successful in spite of all the setbacks. So it’s not surprising that Berker’s elaborate summing confirms that the bounce-back has only reinforced the popular superstitious confidence in the Founder's Plan. The knowledge of monitors isn’t even widespread and, where appreciated, has only reinforced belief in the Plan’s inevitability. In particular the general populace will resist any effort to attack monitors of the Plan whether visible or invisible. Pissing on the gods has never been a popular pastime.

Imakin: And you have also worked through the Cvas Report?

Smythos: I didn’t want to believe a word of it. The devil is in the details. But it’s hard to argue back at the math. Cvas ran a tight committee—for sure he didn’t let his people leave any holes to wiggle out of.

Imakin: If you haven’t yourself found any flaws in the argument,

confine your comments to the Cvas conclusions.

Smythos: Yes, sir. The Cvas group has collected data on the small minority of Faraway citizens who feel threatened by the existence of a monitoring over which they have no control. They don’t see us as allies but as competition, to wit: Faraway sweats to dig the gold; we kibitz and in the endgame walk off with all the loot. This core group of doubters mixes a dangerous composition of attributes: (1) they belong to the old Faraway mentality that produced the Chancellery dictatorships—they don’t care what the general population thinks; they see themselves as intellectuals and scientists duty bound to act by themselves in Faraway’s interest on the basis of their superior knowledge; (2) they have access at least to five leverages to move the government; (3) they contain a critical mass of aligned opinion, therefore they will act; (4) action will bring this small group both power and riches.

Imakin: So how do you assess the mathematical consequences of allowing our exposure to persist?

Smythos: I have to concur with the main conclusion of the Cvas amendation. All the computed courses of action which I have personally checked indicate a rapid deterioration of the Plan because of internal conflict inside the Fellowship, either because: (1) the Overt Arm of the Fellowship, manifested by Faraway, finds and destroys its Covert Arm, manifested by us, or; (2) an open conflict arises between these two aspects of our Fellowship and destroys their current symbiosis. At the ninety-five percent confidence level, both of these alternate historical branches either lead to a Second Empire that repeats the cycle of the First, or to a return of the chaotic galactic conditions extant prior to the First Empire.

Imakin: How then may the original design be restored?

Smythos: Ah, the arguments I’ve been in lately! We have dozens of options, only one, I believe, with good probabilities attached. If all those who now resent the monitoring of their actions by Historical Science were led to believe that all mental meddlers with such power had been destroyed, the galactic situation would restabilize around the parameters of the original Plan, leaving only minor alternations in the probabilities of success. The window of opportunity is short. The apparent destruction of us SuperDangerous Mentalists must occur within twenty-five years...

—From the transcript of the oral exam given by

First Rank Isar Imakin to student Tamic Smythos,

the 18th of Flowers, 12,440 GE

Sometimes those involved in a crisis seek communion with a successful ancestor. A worried Hahukum Konn was listening to a sampling of recordings made by legendary First Rank Imakin during the endgame of the Crisis of the Great Perturbation, fourth-century Founder’s Era—the kind of material seldom referenced even by scholars, but thought provoking. The buzzing soundtrack testified to a time only a century after the Sack when Splendid Wisdom was still in desperate shape and good equipment was not always available. In those dire days a psychohistorian’s options were limited.

Chimes announcing a visitor gently interrupted Konn’s melancholy meditation, then transformed into a voice which added softly, “Nejirt Kambu, by appointment.”

Konn shut off the archive replay and went out to meet Nejirt in the corridor. “So we got you out of bed, did we! I see you had time to dress.”

“What in Spacefire are we doing with a corpse? And what did that crazy Bama mean when he said you think our headless wonder was some kind of psychohistorian?” Kambu stood with feet apart, a little embarrassed that he had dressed so hurriedly in a formal black frock coat and unmatching silver striped zoot pants and was nowhere near a place where he could change.

The Admiral, in an unfashionable sky-purple jumpsuit of the sort that one might find on a naval mechanic, hardly noticed. “Have you had time for breakfast?”

“On a turned stomach? What’s happening? Our sainted Rector Hanis is going to be after your ass with a vengeance. Does he know about the corpse? This is just the excuse he’s been waiting for. And when you go down, we all go down.”

Konn steered his disciple toward the commissary. “You’ve been away. Lots has happened. Hanis has seized the initiative, but I’m still one move ahead of him. And no, he doesn’t know about our corpse yet. Calm down.”

“Messiah!” grumbled Nejirt, using an expression he had picked up on Rith, but he accepted the croissant and mug of steaming lift which Konn handed him after pushing him down into a seat.

“Has anyone told you about Eron Osa yet?”

Nejirt gazed up at the Admiral. “I see you’ve waited until I was seated before delivering the worst news. What could be worse than a corpse?”

Konn’s old eyes crinkled. “Where should I start?”

“Eron Osa, eh? That egotistical little ingrate. Has he been trying to get you into trouble with Hanis?”

“Worse. He got himself into trouble with Hanis, who is now poised to use Eron’s gaffe to dispose of me because I was his sponsor.”

“Ridiculous. Eron walked out on you five years ago.” “Major gaffes have an illuminating way of casting shadows.”

“What did he do?”

“Self-published his mathematical dabblings.”

“Big deal. The journals publish a lot of pimples on the Founder’s Nose.”

“You don’t understand. Eron published in the public archives.”

Nejirt choked on his croissant. “That’s illegal,” he said with awe.

Konn nodded negatively. “Not illegal. It’s just never been done. One doesn’t have to make the unthinkable an illegal act.”

“Eron never struck me as suicidal. What did he publish? Is it still up?”

“Hanis had it deleted within the watch.”

“Let me have a copy. I’m fascinated.”

“I’ve never seen a copy. Hanis had it destroyed. Entropy happens.”

Nejirt sipped on his drink. “So the little shit must be in prison. Would it be too dangerous for me to drop by and visit him? We could have a discreet chat—unobtrusive suppressors and all that. I’m curious.”

“Eron can tell you nothing. He’s free. Hanis also destroyed his fam.”

“Slow down! The Rector can’t legally do that without consulting you!”

“He did consult me; I was a judge at Eron’s trial.”

“And you agreed?” Nejirt was appalled. “I don’t think I like you anymore.”

“Afraid for your own fam, are you? Me, too. Recall my limits. Hanis is, after all, Rector. We mustn’t confuse morality with strategy. To take a grievous loss where one is weak may create a fallback position from which one can counterattack in force.”

“The Admiral of Platitudes strikes again.”

“Watch your tongue, boy. I have an immediate job for you requiring extreme diplomacy. While we go down to the lab where I can tell you more bad news, you can update me on astrology.”

They left the commissary, arguing, Nejirt’s mouth full of croissant, a mug of half-finished lift in his hand. “How can I tell you about astrology when you’ve just promoted our headless astrologer to the status of psychohistorical prognosticator?”

At the lab Konn showed his associate the recordings of some very strange signals. “I didn’t get my hands on these until the trial. Bama’s boys cleaned them up for me. I’ve got better samples than Hanis.”

“In code? Unbreakable?”

“Yes. But very economical.” The Admiral was thoughtful. “It can’t carry much information.”

“That’s a very short burst. It would be invisible inside all the other signals floating around. It looks to me like only a precoded receiver could pick it up. They are from Eron? He must have been under very close observation. He’s talking to who?”

“You’re ahead of my story. Right after the publication fiasco, the Lyceum Police, who happen to be directly under the command of the Rector, took Eron in for heavy questioning, then put him under house arrest and observation while Hanis decided what to do with him. Meanwhile this signal came flying out of Eron’s fam. He has been a low-power pulse broadcaster all the time we’ve known him.”

“Oh, shit!” Nejirt took a very intense second look at the recording.

“That’s what Hanis said. But before Hanis was informed, someone tried to contact Eron by Personal Capsule, obviously the person who received the burst. Eron never got the message. Hanis still doesn’t know about it. I intercepted the message; my police are better than the Lyceum Police—I haven’t been topping off Bama’s budget for the last twenty years for nothing.”

“You can read someone else’s Personal Capsule?” asked Nejirt in awe.

“No. Even Bama is not that good. But interception is another matter if you are looking in the right place. We’ll never know what it said because it self-destructed when it wasn’t delivered on time. But we got a lead on where it came from.”

“Our headless corpse?”

“Yeah. Bad luck there. I really need to get my hands on his fam. A fam can’t just walk away from a corpse.”

“How are you going to cross-examine a ghoul? All of its coding intermesh is in a dead man’s head. Bama’s apparatus is pretty slick but half of a terabyte of password is no password at all.”

“I’m interested in the fam’s make. First I want to compare it with Eron’s fam, which was a very unusual piece of hardware.” A tri-dim holo appeared above the desk. It could be sliced or peeled in a variety of ways. “Take a look at these nondestructive scans. I got these images from the trial evidence. He had this fam since he was about three-years-old.”

The specs were listed and Nejirt scrolled through them casually. “A Faraway design. Limited production. Recalled due to defects.”

“Very suspicious,” said the old paranoid. “The outfit who made them went out of business. I don’t have Faraway in my bad-boy book, but they were always producing talented maniacs, and Faraway was once the most deadly enemy of the Pscholars. Eron attended school there; Space alone knows what happened to him as a student. Look.” He pointed to some faint spots. “I’m no fam techie but I’ve been briefed on this one by an expert. Those are ‘hooks,’ ten times more than normal. Eron’s fam was built to take upgrade add-ons, but the architecture is evidently totally nonstandard. You couldn’t find an upgrade that would work with it. Nevertheless it’s been custom upgraded.”

“Very immoral.”

“Nejirt, you prude; you started out life with a top-of-the-line fam, full featured. Some of our students aren’t so lucky. It’s not upgrade plug-ins that worry me, it’s surgery.”

“Any sign of surgery here?”

“Only indirectly. If we could see it, the fam would be crippled, and Eron was no cripple.”

“A transponder implies surgery,” Nejirt growled.

“Indeed it does.” The Admiral peeled away different layers of the image. “Nobody would have noticed it if we didn’t know what we were looking for. There it is. Tiny, eh? Minimalist design. Can’t be very powerful. It only taps into his eyes. It seems to have its own visual processor.” Konn did a zoom and a cube rose out of the image. He pointed by changing the color of whatever part he wanted to emphasize. “See that? The fam itself has no input into the transponder. Eron would not have been aware that it existed. He couldn’t have controlled it if he wanted to. Whoever put that transponder into his fam didn’t trust him. Of course, that way he would pass all of our loyalty tests; we can’t lie about what we don’t know, can we?”

“Do you think he was loyal?”

“Oh, absolutely. He was trying to warn me when we broke up.”

“About what?”

“Don’t I wish I knew. When you are as old as I am, you develop a very efficient filing system. Garbage bypasses throughput on the way out. I remember he was very excited. Manic. Students get that way when they have been brooding too long by themselves and an idea takes over their mind and pushes out all reason. He had—to use his words—discovered that we were in the middle of some vast psychohistorical crisis that only he and the little mnemoni-fier in his room knew about. I tried to bring him down to reason. But it didn’t matter that the whole of the star-spanning apparatus of psychohistorical machinery saw nothing. He saw.”

Konn shut down his apparatus. “Come on, let’s go. We’re on a tight schedule this watch.”

“Eron was usually obsessively cautious,” mused Nejirt.

“I know. He always had his own ideas, but he always took my advice. I’m probably the best trouble sniffer that psychohistory has ever produced, but in the last analysis what am I doing? We live in peaceful times. I’m fretting over molehills that might, just might, turn into volcanoes if left untended for a few centuries. You know what a mole is, don’t you? I think they are extinct. It was a little animal that dug tunnels underground and piled up dirt outside in little tiny mounds. If you didn’t go after the buggers with a club, the mound gradually turned into a hill, and if you were lazy the hill turned into a mountain range. That all happened before our Founder. I think the mole was a Rithian animal. A mammal. Psychohistory is now so advanced that crises are handled hundreds of years before they happen.”

“I’ll remember that story the next time you send me out after a molehill in places like the Coron Pentad. Molehills grow into mountains. I complain too much. So, you humored Eron?”

“What else could I do? As tactfully as I could, I pointed out all the errors in his math so that he could think things over and work them out. I remember the errors he was making in his excitement, exactly, but I’ll be a monkey if I remember his line of reasoning. Psychohistories were springing up like poison mushrooms all over the Galaxy, wild stuff. He never mentioned it again. And he kept doing good work. And then, boff, he went to work for the project of our glorious Rector.”

“You grieved,” said Nejirt.

“Yeah. He was a son to me.”

“So you think he delivered the same thesis to Hanis?”

“I can’t suppose anything else. It must have been very convincing—that’s what worries me—because Hanis went berserk and Hanis usually just runs over people with his charm, ignoring all unpleasantness. I think Eron published as his last defiant resort.”

“Hahukum, be honest with me. You mentioned to Bama your nightmare that our corpse might be a psychohistorian. Was that based on your half memories of Eron’s wild conjecture?”

“Of course. I’m a professional paranoid. Nobody else wants the job.”

“Then he was probably just an astrologer.”

“Probably.”

‘Thank Space! For an inamin, there, you almost had me paranoid.”

“Wait until you meet my other psychohistorian.” “Another!”

“A local I have under detention. Cingal Svene.”

“I know him. He’s a nut case. He pretends to be a mathist, but he’s more a numerologist. For the last twenty years he has come out with a new pseudorandom number sequence that he claims can be used to generate the primes.”

The Admiral laughed. “That was last year. This year he’s a psychohistorian.”

“They are springing up like poison mushrooms, are they?” “How do you think you’ll look in a scraggly beard and comfortable brimmed cap with food stains—and, perhaps, protruding false ears?”

“Is that the new psychohistorian’s uniform?”

“We’ll have your fam programmed with a new voice and a new gait by next watch. You’re my best field agent. You’ll be taking over Cingal Svene’s life. At least you won’t have to fake the psychohistorian gig.”

“Can’t I just go to work for Hanis?”

They had emerged onto the fourth floor of the balcony that spiraled along the inner walls of the oval-domed central keep of the West Wing of the Lyceum. Eight stories tall, it served as the display-well for a galactic simulacrum that was, at the moment, running a trade-route optimization, lightning flashes passing between stars as new combinations were tested. Konn gripped the parapet in the straight-armed pose of a man who owns all that he beholds.

“Just some thoughts I want to share while we’re here.” His gaze wavered as he asked permission of some unseen source. Then he squeezed at a palm-size console that he had magically retrieved from his coveralls. The optimization program continued but was no longer displayed while Konn took over the simulacrum with his own files. “This is as the Empire stood a century ago. The pale yellow and the gold cover all areas where the probability of deviation from prediction was greater than five percent, the gold indicating sites of strategic dynamism where failure of our predictions would have consequences meeting the Founder’s criteria of direness. My predecessors, of course, sent rectifying teams into the gold regions. Now watch as I overlay the blue.” All of the blue appeared inside the gold. Corrective measures had either not worked or been counterproductive.

“I’ve seen your molehills before,” said Nejirt with amusement.

“Certainly, but right now let’s look at them from a new viewpoint. The blues cover the current battle theaters of intractable uncertainty.”

‘That you see and nobody else sees,” amended Nejirt.

“Because statistics tries harder for me. She loves me.”

Nejirt Kambu made a quick visual estimate that the blue covered perhaps one percent of the Second Empire, a realm more imposing in this huge model than it was from the dwarfed viewport of a spaceship. Konn had never defined what he meant by such an alarming phrase as “battle theater,” but he was a man infamous for using alarming phrases. Coron’s Wisp was well within one of the designated regions.

“As a student I took such anomalies as my research project. For my thesis in psychohistory I was going to prove the conventional wisdom, that any deviation which did not respond to remediation was a random effect not driven by intelligence.” He grumbled. “But I kept coming across correlations with intelligent opposition, not big ones, mind you, but big enough to pique my interest.”

Nejirt knew the story. As a young man Hahukum had assumed that his research would be welcome and, later, that his ability to contain the blue zones would be appreciated. But his research was not welcomed and the Admiral was still considered to be a wild man who had reached high rank only because he was an unscrupulously fast and wily politician.

Men like Hanis continued to deny the existence of blue zones, attributing Konn’s success to the absence of a problem in the first place—just as a skeptical Nejirt had, himself, done in his youth. Briefly Kambu’s memory flashed on a neat little bot of his early childhood which scurried around cleaning up after the messes children made. Why bother to put things back into toy boxes? why deign to pick up crayons after drawing a picture? The world around him cleaned up by itself. But there was this annoying little bot that was always messing with Nejirt’s things—so he broke it. Perhaps therein lay his loyalty to Konn; his mother had had a draconian sense of discipline, refusing to replace the bot even under the duress of Nejirt’s most capillary-popping temper tantrums.

“So do you see the differences?” asked an enraptured Konn.

“It looks like the same old Galaxy I saw last time I was here. There are thirty-seven blue topozone crossovers driven by locally independent factors. Shall I recite the factors?” Nejirt was teasing Konn.

“Why independent?”

“Because you told me so—in detail.”

“But they could all be connected by one giant conspiracy. How could I have missed it? That’s what I’m seeing that’s different.”

Nejirt was grinning at this new paranoid twist. “An appealing idea.”

“Think about it. When you were in the Ulmat mopping up, putting things to their final right, Eron Osa was there. When the forces of evil vanished, Eron went with them— and reappeared on Faraway. For training. He has an exotic limited-edition Faraway fam designed for fancy upgrade. The source of that fam conveniently no longer exists. His fam acquires, or had built-in, a transponder connected to the eyes of the user, and Space knows what else. Probing finds no signs of surgery. After training the way is paved for him to be sent to Splendid Wisdom, to the very heart of psychohistorical power where he can spy on me, the victor of the Battle of the Ulmat. We catch a falsely identified man from Coron’s Wisp activating Eron’s transponder... Of all my hot spots, Coron’s Wisp has risen to be the most active. A Faraway plot? Something even more sinister? How many other connections are there between all the blue zones?”

Nejirt let his boss lose himself among the possible permutations of intrigue within this vast galactic simulacrum that rose before them for eight stories. He counted to five. “Admiral, Rector Hanis is sneaking up behind you with a knife.” That broke Konn’s concentration. “Ah, yes. Politics before pleasure.” He muttered again to some unseen source and the blue zones faded. Tiny lightning flashes reappeared. “Off to the dungeon. Follow me.”

“Dungeon!”

“Of course. Every castle has a dungeon with a skeleton reaching through the bars for a bowl of water just out of reach. In this case, it is one of my offices hastily converted for the comfort of Cingal Svene. By the way, don’t shave for the next watch or so. My associates tell me that our beardgrowing nanosalve works best with a good stubble as substrate. You’ll have to tell Wendi you are off on a trip again. You’ll be operating out of Svene’s old apartment.”

“And when someone checks my retinal pattern?”

“As of the current watch the real Cingal Svene would be living a nightmare if he tried to prove he was Cingal Svene. When you were with Bama I had his identifiers globally replaced by yours.”

“Is that legal?”

“If you stretch the emergency power laws. But I didn’t go through channels.”

“I could get into trouble. Impersonation is illegal.”

“You are already in trouble. Hanis has you on his exile list—or worse. You may want to keep your Svene identity indefinitely.”

“Let’s start from the beginning.”

They had arrived at the little briefing room not far from the dungeon. One of Bama’s lieutenants instructed Nejirt in the communication protocols used by Svene’s revolutionary cell. Ordinarily these protocols would be useless to the police because they required a fail-safe identifier; if Svene was captured and forced to communicate, he would just leave out that identifier and thus clue in his correspondent to break off contact. But Svene was not only a very sloppy mathist, he was a sloppy housekeeper and had left the fail-safe identifier in a convenient place for reference, behind a book,

“We’ve already gone through a few cycles of communication,” said the lieutenant. “No suspicion on the other end. They just wanted a few simple psychohistorical predictions, which were easy enough for us to supply. They praised his progress and signed off.” The lieutenant took him through Svene’s routine, where he shopped, where he ate. He ate mostly at automats but had a few favorite spots where it was the job of the waitress to sit down and chat with her male clients. The lieutenant was thorough, supplying pictures of the waitresses and a profile of their interests.

“I don’t look like Svene.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said the lieutenant. “They’ll notice your beard and your puffy ears. The accent will be right, and so will the funny way you pick up a cup. Best of all, your credit stick will go through without a hassle with a slightly better than usual tip. Half a month of watches like that, and the real Svene could walk in and they’ll think he was the fake.”

Konn cut in. “The org we’re penetrating doesn’t know who he is because he wanted it that way and because they wanted it that way. Makes it harder on us police.”

Nejirt took Konn aside for a quiet chat “What has this sting got to do with Hanis? I know you very well. You don’t give a jellybean for helpless little conspiracies of malcontents. You go for things like a vast tidal wave of taxpayer rage, or the meme of defiance that has penetrated a whole society and is passed down from generation to generation. Guys like Cingal Svene you’ve ignored all your life.”

Konn grinned. “This is internal politics, not defense of the Empire. Recall that Hanis has called off his truce. Right now he’s maneuvering out of sight to get the whole lot of us excised out of psychohistory. He could exile us—he has enough people in his thrall to do that—but would he dare scatter the seeds of a thousand disgruntled psychohistorians all over the Galaxy? I doubt it. I think he has something more extreme in mind.”

“He wouldn’t dare.”

“Let me think about that. I’m the professional paranoid. Right now you are just a bearded, big-eared malcontent who tried three times to pass the Lyceum entrance exams and failed and after all these years still harbors a grudge against all things psychohistorical.”

“I’ve got to know the game plan.”

“Okay. Here’s what Hanis doesn’t yet know. He doesn’t know my agents intercepted a Personal Capsule for Eron when he was under house arrest. He doesn’t know we tracked down the source of that Capsule and chased him a merry chase that ended in both disaster for him and for us. When we raided our corpse’s apartment we picked up a few very good leads. It is only a matter of time before Hanis clues into all this, so we have to act fast without my usual subtlety and patience. The main item led us to a man out of the past who calls himself Hyperlord Kikaju Jama. He’s an antique dealer who has been selling Eggs brought in from Coron’s Wisp. He is not a big player because we know our corpse brought in huge numbers of Eggs, only a few of them going through Jama. So far, not a trace of the other Eggs. We should wait. But it is Hanis’ schedule, so we have no option but to sting this Hyperlord before we have the full picture. Not easy. I’m amazed at the professional level of his security—which is another sign that this is not just a simple commercial venture.”

“It could be just a fad,” mused Nejirt. ‘The Egg is a very impressive gadget. It is too fine-textured to be duplicated in a manufacturum so whoever knows how to distribute it could make a fortune. They’d want to keep their distribution network a secret.”

“And put a transponder right in the middle of the Lyceum?” “All right. My role?”

“Arresting only this Jama wouldn’t create a ripple. It has got to be a big sting. Then I can turn around and tell the Ranks that Eron was warning Rector Hanis of a major conspiracy and that Hanis immediately suppressed all of the evidence right down to the contents of Eron’s fam. He can’t produce evidence to contradict me, because he had all the evidence destroyed.”

“Suppose he kept a private record?”

Konn grinned. “Does it matter? I know the nature of Eron’s warning because he warned me. I will have no trouble showing that this Hyperlord is part of a dangerous galactic conspiracy whether it is true or not.”

“That’s not good psychohistory.”

“But this isn’t psychohistory. It’s politics.”

The lieutenant wanted their attention. “Beg pardon, but the honorable Kambu should spend a few hours with our subject if he is to fine-tune his imitation.”

Cingal Svene was alternately afraid, defiant, angry, propitiative, whining, and sometimes everything a cornered hero should be. Konn left his claws sheathed, even when Cingal made blatantly erroneous mathematical statements; his was a buttery friendliness that was not the kind of friendship he would have offered a friend. Nejirt decided he might as well like this guy if he was going to have to be him, scraggly beard and all. He took on a sorry-about-the-inconvenience demeanor, “let me fluff your pillow.” Cingal eventually broke down into hysterical crying, which turned into defiance as he brushed away the tears, and finally into a cheerful slyness. Konn had kept the man’s Egg in his hand, prominently displayed, so that the conversation would keep revolving around it.

“Shall I tell you gentlemen thieves your fortune?”

“By all means,” said Konn, handing over the astrological tool.

Nejirt was bored. He had seen this nonsense before. The light dimmed. Even the comers of the room disappeared as the stars came out. Cingal was good, much better than Ni-jert’s clumsy effort with Bama. He also knew all the little tidbits that astrologers throw out to make their clients believe that they have a secret mainline into the client’s psyche. He made veiled references to Zeta Anorka, the home system of Nejirt, and the constellations of Zeta Anorka actually appeared with the planets in the sky exactly as they had been on the day of Nejirt’s birth. That was creepy. He wove into his story the three failed love affairs that had tormented Nejirt before he met Wendi. That was unnerving. But true to the astrological craft, he used the changing sky above to puff up their egos, finding all the fine secret features of their personalities that made them uniquely outstanding citizens of the Galaxy. Both Nejirt and Konn knew that it was all conjured flattery but were smiling at their astrologer’s sagacity just the same.

And then Cingal peered at them above his beard with a little boy’s sly and innocent eyes. “And would you like to know your final doom? Only the courageous need proceed.”

“Of course,” said the Admiral. Nejirt, more reluctant, said nothing but nodded.

The stars flew by. They dived into a spectacular nebula and lost themselves within its tendrils. The nebula hazed over and faded to the darkness of an interstellar dust cloud. “Your future universe approaches,” their seer intoned. Nothing happened. It became so dark that faces were invisible. And then, slowly, majestically the Founder’s red equations began to scroll across the sky, page after page after page, rolling endlessly in mute silence...