Psychohistorical Crisis

47

A HALF-REMEMBERED FRIEND LOADS OFF TWO HOT PROPERTIES, 14,810 GE

At the time of the predatory Cainali Invasions after the Sack we Scavs were of no great force on Splendid Wisdom, being simple survivalist scavengers amid the ruins of a planet whose population had been decimated from five hundred billion down to a starving fifty billion. We lived by selling layabout wealth to off-planet merchants with a fleet of relic jumpships, none of which survived the final siege. Such havoc was done to our economic engine by the amalgamation of mercenaries hired by the Cainali Thronedom that a confederation of Scavs under Leoin Half nose...

An alliance between Half nose and the beleaguered Pscholars of the still-functioning Imperial Lyceum proved fruitful. The Pscholars maintained, for their own secret purpose, remnant elements of the Light Imperial Couriers and were the only reliable source of information about political intrigue beyond the boundaries of Imperials. With this information and their strategic genius they were always able to ferret out the weaknesses of the Thronedom to the benefit of Scav survival.

In turn we provided the Pscholars with rotating hideaways, a military guard, technical assistance, and a fount of scarce supply... The legacy of this alliance...

Make no mistake: in these years of the Second Empire the Pscholars see us as petty criminals and tolerate us only because we...

—From the 112th Report of the Cabal of the Brood of Halfnose

After sleeping on his failed pursuit of the Frightfulperson. Eron Osa set out on the 17th watch of Fennel for the Corridor of the Olibanum, in search of the half-remembered

Rigone.-He wandered a devious path, all the while struggling with the subvocal commands that made his antique map device obey him. The map proved to be primitive but adequate. It didn’t draw through walls or play with tri-dim images, understanding only addresses. But when properly assuaged, it became quite good at suggesting alternate routes. It painted arrows on his vision and properly labeled corridors and pod stations in large readable retinal type.

He had donned his general-issue fam but, heeding Konn’s advice, left it inactive. He raged for the analytic powers of his destroyed fam at every wrong turn. He missed die ease of visual direction that came through the simplest of fams. He got lost and felt stupid. Once when staring up at a great heat pipe that rose through tiers of shops, a woman, thinking him demented, directed him to a free kitchen. He just laughed and thanked her. Hanis had honored him with Rank Seven status and then demoted him to this! But he knew he was recovering. For millions of years his wetware had been designed to walk around brain damage, and it was beginning to bypass the loops which had once gone through his fam—at* vastly reduced intellectual power.

Though he had learned most of his map reader’s idiosyncrasies, he was never able to discover how to block its ebullient tourist commentaries. After the initial annoyance, he even came to enjoy the huckstering—too much of his life had been spent hurrying around the wealth of astonishments that lay all about him. He became again the child who longed for waterfalls that fell thirty stories through the wild crystalline shapes of an artist’s dreams. When the map suggested the Valley of Galactic Seas, and he found out that it was only a pod’s short ride from the Olibanum, he was tempted to take the detour... but business first.

From a high-ceilinged pod station with ornate backlit windows that illustrated galactic wonders in all shades of cobalt blue, he walked out onto the Olibanum—and memories flooded his mind. Directly in front of him was the little cabaret where his confrères had solved the problems of the universe over lunch and maybe laid the odd minor love sorrow to rest, all in the long hours before the evening show began. Strange, he could remember the conversations and the passion but not what they were about. Perhaps such details he had left to his fam. The cabaret’s clientèle had changed— older now, some sightseers, a group of tourists. The students were gone, or maybe only tied up in class. The show this evening was titled “The Blue Tyrantiles of Singdom.”

Up and down the corridor, bistros were scattered everywhere among the entertainment come ons and the marvels and the mausoleums of popular culture. He paused. Even with all the changes he knew exactly where the Teaser’s Bistro was: walk to the Deep Shaft and around its great promenade, and then, two blocks farther, was a little alley...

Eron was sure that he placed a Rigone from his student years, a beefy man older than his student associates, a blatant Scav, tattooed on his face, a boisterous reveler who could dance with iron legs and flip himself through loops if the music touched him, a man who couldn’t be bought, who liked to cavort more than he liked to work. He’d turn down your most abject request with a grin—but if you were his friend he had miraculous ways of upgrading your fam.

Rigone used parts that couldn’t have been built by any manufacturum; from where in space he got them, the Galaxy only knew. He could bypass protocols seamlessly. He could add thought processes to a fam that the best students vied for. He never pretended to be legal, yet the police were unwilling to touch him. An inconsistent devil, a cruel one if he thought you were imposing upon him, Rigone just laughed at you if you did him a favor expecting a return on your investment.

But the man was so charismatic that Eron could not remember if he had only admired the man from a distance or been his personal friend. Rigone’s magnitude of character erased the content in which it lived.

As much as this had been his element, Eron Osa felt out of place once he entered the Teaser’s. He kept to a table by himself, afraid to enter conversations without a fam that would give him instant access to a quip that would outwit his challenger. There were hand-signals by which a wall-spy would take his order, but he didn’t order and finally a lean waiter approached him tentatively.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Thinking.” Eron smiled wanly. “Haven’t been here for a while. Do you still carry the Gorgizon?”

“Gang-hu!” The waiter grinned, giving the Old Navy flathanded salute.

Vivid memories came in spots. That had always been his order, Gorgizon. It was an obscure Imperial Navy drink, milky and thick, booting its imbiber into a long high-energy drive. The bastard civilianized version contained a dram of sweet liqueur. It had taken him through many an exam.

But it was Rigone who appeared from a back room and picked up the drink from the bar. He held it as his own and talked his way down the row of tables, ruffling heads with his free hand, exchanging affectionate insults, staying conversations in midstream till he was past.

He paused at Eron’s table, as if it were a simple visit on his rounds, plunked down the drink, and made himself comfortable. “Ah, the prodigy is back.”

“I’m on vacation,” said Eron, staring at the tattooed face of the Scav in fascination.

Rigone was grinning. “As if you ever took out time from your permanent vacation to work up a lather. Drink up.” He nudged the mug. “A special on the house.” His eyes glinted at the word “special” and locked onto Eron’s with a commanding insistence, waiting.

Eron sipped a taste. The drink was milky white—but no Gorgizon—a different brew with a different kick. His instinct was to resist it. He hesitated but Rigone’s gaze did not falter until he took a good first gulp. Then Rigone’s stare relaxed.

‘‘Well—so you’re back.” It was a statement that demanded an answer.

“Just cruising.” Eron was no longer comfortable. “Taking it easy.” The drink had a quick-acting knifelike urgency to it, moving his mind somewhere in a rush. Danger. “Cruising. Navigating without charts .” Did he really trust this man?

“No, no,” said Rigone. “I detect the nervous shiftiness of a man on the make. There’s an aura of quiet desperation about you. You’re in a hurry for your good time.”

Eron’s mental machinery was racing. Slow down. “I’m... not... in a hurry.”

Rigone took his arm in an iron grip, squeezing, saying: You’re coming with me now. He let go in a gesture that added: but not by force. The wrinkles about his intense eyes told of an old friendship that was not going to give Eron any choice. “I know your tastes, aristo Osa. It is our business to know our clientèle. That allows us to make fast deals at the Teaser’s. It so happens that right now I have just the girl for you. She’s thirteen, new to the place and looking for adventure. A brash kid. You have just the level of maturity she needs to keep her under control. And she has just the right level of insouciance not to know that the world is a dangerous place—or she wouldn’t be upstairs right now, snoozing in my bedroom. I want you to meet her.” He stood up.

It was a command. Eron was to follow him. Eron, in response, hastily downed the last of his drink while rising, then let Rigone herd him, without seeming to be herded, toward the back of the bar, and up the stairs, and through a massive door that closed with a vaultlike sigh while its forcefield flickered on at maximum strength.

Rigone’s private quarters held the spacious luxury of a man used to wealth. One wall was even reserved for the ultimate in space-wasting—four shelves of worn antiques that were not the reproductions of any manufacturum. They were black ivroid boxes, books from the Middle First Empire. Rigone’s legendary collection. Few citizens of Splendid Wisdom could understand the Scavs’ penchant for collecting originals, but collect they did. Eron didn’t know where these odd bits of information came from.

Rigone noticed his glance and tapped on a box, disguised in its own black ivroid casing. “A modem reader. The original readers often not up to my standards. This one projects a

book in any desired format and translates the archaisms if you wish .” He added pointedly, “You don’t need a fam.” “And where is your collection of thirteen-year-old virgins?” asked Eron dryly, to the point, wondering what Rigone had meant, remembering that Rigone’s taste ran to underage girls.

Rigone laughed. “Any spy beam that tries to penetrate my sanctum will hear only a frivolous conversation between me and you and a silly young girl—but she exists only in the imagination of my script-writing software. The real thirteen-year-old is asleep on the floor of my water room, and she is no virgin. I sincerely hope that, by now, the robomaids have cleaned up her vomit. She has been a curious pest of the kind who has to pick up every tool she sees and flick it into active mode just because it’s there. You will do me the favor of taking her with you when you go, firmly.” It was a command. He swung open the bookcase. “But here is what you came for.” On a velvet-lined tray behind the books was a fam. “Not a standard manufacture” was Eron’s first surprised comment.

“No. And I don’t know who in the Galaxy did make it. It’s hot and I’m glad you’re here to take it off my hands—very glad—to say nothing of that thirteener. I thought you’d never arrive. I was informed that you had been sent a message. I dared not seek you out—not that I knew where you were.” “Can I use it? Is it safe?”

“Of course it’s not safe!” Rigone roared. “But it wasn't built by the men who executed your old fam, and that is in your interest.”

Gingerly Eron picked up the device off the black velvet, turning it over quizzically, longingly. “Your price?”

“I’ve been paid.”

“By who?”

“I assure you that’s not a detail you want to know about.” “Does it come with specs?”

“Specs? You’re dreaming. It’s a one of a kind. I did do a rough probe of its routines; not bad. I didn’t like the fam-controlled bomb I had to defuse. Would have taken out the room. But I was impressed by its full range of math abilities.”

Eron’s heart leaped. “It can do math?” He wanted it badly. “Not in any language you or I ever learned. But cleanly done. You’ll be years getting used to its hailing codes. But it has a fine wakedreaming mode that patiently cycles you through the hooks into its routines. While I was at it I probed for kickers and traps. Seems clean, but I only know most of the tricks. I don’t know everything. The techies who built that sweet familiar know more head-spinners than I ever will. It’s got power claws.”

“Would you chance it?”

“I’d as soon stick my head in a buzz saw. You’re the one who has no choice.” Rigone grinned.

“Give me a rundown on the worst I’ll have to watch for.” “It’s not a new model.” Rigone scowled. He patted the machine and it seemed to cling to his fingers, molding itself to them before he shook it off. “There’s a man in there. It’s haunted.”

“You’ve been grave-robbing again?” said Eron with some sternness, but also with a muted disgust because he knew horribly that he was in no position to turn down a ghoul.

Rigone laughed hollowly. “Me? I only grave-rob for spare parts, not ghouls. The man in there was murdered.” And before Eron could even think it, Rigone’s voice hardened. “Not by me, not by any Scav—your people murdered him.”

Eron was past taking that as an insult. Eron’s people had murdered Eron’s fam. “Tell me the story.”

“You think I know the story? I don’t know the story. I’m a Scav. I’m a middleman. I don’t want to know the story. I’m a Scav and I’ve never been dumb enough to want to take on the Pscholars. They run the Galaxy. I stay alive. So be it. But I don’t like what they did to you. What I’m doing for you is a personal favor, not a blow against the Fellowship. You and I were friends of a sort, as much as a Scav and a Pscholar ever get to be—and you don’t even remember. That horrifies me. I’ll tell you what little I know, but it’s not much. You won’t like it. The ghoul in there is your old tutor. He was running some kind of astrology scam. Big deal. More power to him. Where in the Galaxy can you find more suckers in one place than on Splendid Wisdom?”

“My tutor?”

“Murek Kapor. You don’t remember him?”

“Vaguely. It rings a bell. I’d have to dream on the name. Astrology? Doesn’t sound right.”

‘The same racket you were in—predicting the future— amazing people with the mystery of your sublime vision. I don’t know what he was when you knew him. He wasn’t honest, but whoever he was scamming, it wasn’t me.”

Eron ran his fingers over the form of his inactive fam. “I can’t cross-reference my feelings anymore but my feeling is that astrology degenerated into a parlor game long ago.” Rigone shrugged. “It’s been through its mutations. Don’t know much about the subject myself. Predicting the future is not my thing—we’ve never been able to compete with the Pscholars on that so we do other things. Who’s ever met a Pscholar who could clean out a clogged shower head? So that’s the kind of thing we do.” After reading a few titles on his ivroid boxes, Rigone reached for one to pop into the reader. “Haven’t I heard that astrology was Rith’s first science? Probably. Astronomy is the easiest of the sciences and gives one the authority to commit all kinds of flim-flam. Did it die out? Not likely!” He called up the search menu and chattered key words at it in the Old Imperial dialect. “There are eight thousand plus volumes in that single box and I’m sure...” The search flicker stopped. “Ah, we have the Navigators.” He grinned. “Perfect!”

What appeared in front of Eron’s eyes was a page of Imperial Court history from the reign of Kassam-the-Farsighted, year 7763 GE. Kassam had run his galactic affairs by the mysteries of the Navigators who could predict anybody’s future given (1) his birth date, (2) the galactic coordinates of his birthplace, and (3) the direction in which his head had been pointed during his first bawling cries.

Rigone flipped through the text and brought up a smug holo of Navigator Cundy Munn, Court Panjandrum and

Splendid Wisdom’s master Imperial Advisor for twelve heady years, regally dressed with the portable controls of his galactarium held under one arm. He had been executed after the Battle of Thirty Suns, an unmitigated disaster for Imperi-alis which led direcdy to the two hundred years of the endless Wars Across the Marche. Kassam had perished the same night, and the new rational-minded Emperor henceforth reduced the appeal of the Navigators by having them tortured for entertainment at his coronation.

“The popularity of foolishness waxes and wanes,” philosophized Rigone as he switched off the reader, chuckling.

“You’re pretty sanguine for a man who is setting me up to share the mind of an astrologer,” said Eron morosely.

Rigone was still chuckling. “Am I listening to a superstitious Pscholar? Did you run the tale of Monto Salicedes through your fam under the covers when your mother thought you were asleep?” Monto Salicedes was a famous story, popular among children as a spine-tingling tale of horror set in the mythical world of the long-gone Old Empire. Monto was a social-climbing fam, the ghoul in the fam of a bitter old man who had died in prison. The discarded fam now stole the life of each of its new hosts and had them murdered in a drama that allowed it to parasite upon the body of someone in a higher station than the last host. Finally reaching the position of Emperor, Monto went mad, lacking any higher station to which it might aspire. That there was no such thing as a familiar in the distant realms of Old Empire was a mere matter of poetic license that bothered trembling children not one whit.

“Ah, Monto.” Eron sighed. He took off his shirt and undid from its collar the general-issue fam that he’d never activated. He lifted the ghoul from the velvet, warmer and more fluid than any fam he’d ever touched, slipped it into place on his neck—it needed no holster—then redonned the jacket-shirt. It took another moment of courage to give the joining commands. He felt a dizzying surge, nothing else.

However horrible the story, Monto Salicedes was just a fable to stir emotions. For sure, there was a man trapped in this new fam and he was now activated, but the poor soul could exist only in hell, half its mind gone—there was no way that this ghoul in the machine could ever communicate with its new host, Eron Osa. Eron and alien fam had been created apart, each maturing with a uniquely uncrackable neuron-neurode code, forever incommunicado, two beings who used a mutually incomprehensible protocol.

Eron’s mind would gradually invade the old and now-powerless personality of the fam, subsuming its assets and memory space, crowding it out, creating a new symbiosis of fam and man by the slow process of learning. Eron had become Eron Osa the Second—his old memories and abilities forever gone with his original fam—but now a man no longer limited to the barbarous vicissitudes of a famless organic life. He had ceased to be a psychohistorian, or even a mathematician—he didn’t even have a position in society—but he was whole and could learn again, half man, half baby.

And yet—there was a crippled man in there, imprisoned for life in a dungeon without windows or doors. “This tutor of mine; you haven’t finished your story. How did he die?”

“The police were hunting him.”

“The police don’t usually kill.”

“The fox doesn’t usually run so well. I don’t know. He was trapped and just ahead of capture. There is something in that fam of yours he didn’t want to fall into their hands. He pulled the oldest trick in the game—the split: the decoy goes yapping one way while the treasure skedaddles off in another direction. He was the decoy. The treasure is here, on a cold trail, and you’ve become responsible for keeping it hidden— without knowing what you are hiding. I think when he sent you his last message he thought he might be able to come back for it... but he won’t, take my word for it, and don’t ask me how I know..

“I wonder—”

Rigone interrupted the reverie. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you are in charge of something valuable—it might be just another astrological algorithm that a dead fanatic was willing to give his life for. No one will ever know—even you don’t have access to whatever information he was hiding. You have access to the dumb routines of his reference algorithms and his memory space and nothing else.”

Eron changed the subject to an immediate concern. “You’ve doped me,” he said. It wasn’t an adrenaline rush he was feeling, but his mind was unnaturally eager.

“Yeah. A P-drug cocktail. Loaded. You’ll need every last molecule. Don’t sweat. You’ve got big learning problems right now. Recall that the tuned probe is a subtle variant of the psychic probe. The psychic probe was once used to extract information from men with the sad side effect of reducing them to idiots. P-drugs were originally developed to make the victims last longer under interrogation. For the first hours under a tuned probe you need drugs.”

“I’ve used a fam all my life!” retorted Eron.

“Believe me, you need the drugs. You’re used to being in symbiosis with your fam. That power pack on your neck isn’t your old familiar fam—it doesn’t know you. Its tuned probe senses you and is going wild right now trying to make connections it thinks are there but can’t find. You two will be months in a calibration roller-spin ride. I should keep you doped up and in bed for at least five watches. Don’t push yourself for a while.”

Rigone swung down a dissection kit for quantum-electronic devices. He was dismantling pieces of Eron’s common-issue fam. “You’re going to need your old identity module to access your bank accounts.” He attached a small machine to the fragment he had liberated and placed it near Eron’s skull. “Okay. Done. You can move it but it has got to stay close to your fam. By the way, that new fam of yours is fancy illegal. It can mimic identities. I detected ten identities, each with a history and a bank account. I’ve disabled the two that your tutor used up before he was killed. You’ve got eight identities to use, as well as your own. My advice is to take the Emperor’s Vacation.” That meant to sneak off-planet incognito. That said, he began the careful process of obliterating the remains of the common-issue fam.

‘There’s an awful buzz in my head,” said Eron. “Is that the drugs?”

Rigone laughed. “No, young man, that’s the ghoul. Your ghoul is frantically pounding on the walls of its prison—that’s you—trying to speak to you but talking in a code that only the organic brain it grew up with could understand. Mathists tell me there are more possible neuron-neurode network codes than there are atoms in the universe. Good luck cracking it!”

“The fam seems dead to me. I can’t seem to call up any of its routines—or copy any memories for recall. It’s all a buzzing blank.”

“Relax. You’re trying to work at the macrolevel. Forget it. Your tutor’s macros aren’t your macros. And whatever world this fam comes from it doesn’t use Splendid Wisdom’s common-issue macros. Totally different interface. Go back to basics; you didn’t have any macros when you were three. The world was a strange place. You and your fam had to figure it out together from zip.”

Eron slumped down into an aerochair. “This will take years!”

Rigone pulled him up out of the chair. “I’m sure. But not here. You’ll have to leave. Now. And you can’t ever come back, my friend. I have my neck to consider. So listen to the story I’ll be telling if anybody asks: I haven’t seen you for years before this watch, not since you went with Hanis; I’ve heard the rumor that you’re in trouble with the Fellowship for publishing. You turn up looking for a girl. I give you one. My opinion, if asked, is that you were a very stupid boy to publish. That’s my true opinion.”

“Leave now? I’m getting dizzier.”

“Dizzy doesn’t count. You’re hot. Out.” At this imperative command, Eron decided he had no choice. He got up and staggered toward the door but Rigone caught his arm. “You can’t leave without your date.” He was grinning. “That’s my alibi for even talking to you. Her name is Petunia.”

They found Petunia in the water room, naked, with her head fast asleep in the gentle arms of the dispozoria, unhappy face as white as alabaster, a spider-armed robomaid fussily trying to clean her up. “She must weight forty kilos.” Eron groaned.

Rigone lifted her up easily and forceably put her through an ice-cold shower—to her feeble protests—then towel-dried her, blow-set her hair, and dressed her in the outrageous package in which she had come. He propped her up against the wall to see if she could stand. She stared at them both vacantly, then wandered off.

“Take her to the nearest spaceport, conspicuously spend some of Eron’s credit on her, then dump her. Switch to a new identity and get lost while you reintegrate. Be a student or something.”

“And Petunia?”

“Ah, the youth of the Second Empire,” mourned Rigone not very sympathetically.