Psychohistorical Crisis

49

ERON OSA AND HIS PETUNIA, 14,810 GE

Appearing during the collapse following the False Revival, soon after the fam became one of the more prized commodities of interstellar commerce, an elite military cast calling themselves the Order of Zenoli Warriors were probably the first group of fully fam-equipped mobile soldiers immune to the emotional control of the original tuned psychic probe. They had a reputation for winning their contracted battles with quick, lethal strikes. Warlords who used them paid heavy fees, and warlords who did not lost their battles. The zenoli alliance with Coman in the Circus Wars of the Orion Arm...

Such was their reputation that all zenoli mercenary contracts were bought by the Consolidated Navy in 13,157 GE as part of the peace treaties of the Pax Pscholaris. The zenoli soldiers were dispersed throughout the regular fleet, and the organization disbanded in 13,206 GE. Zenoli mind training techniques remain popular today

The tuned psychic probe is a double-edged sword. Control it, and it will protect you. Lose control, and you open the way to...

—Fleet Manual 3-456, ‘The Military Usage of the Tuned Probe”

Dizzily Eron Osa led a sick thirteen-year-old Petunia down the Olibanum. She wore the elegant metamorphic leathers of some obscure 113th-century off-spiral culture—thigh-splits to the rib cage, lizard clasps, with a tight bodice sporting two grotesquely open-mouthed, ruby-eyed snake heads which were gorging on pink-nippled (padded) plastic breasts much too large for a teener. For a moment she withdrew her concentration from the point along the walkway one meter in front of her feet. She flicked her fam into advertisement mode and let her eyes scan the distant huckstering, ahead and for several vertical levels.

“Couple of blocks straight is a posh hotel,” she hinted. “Us crapulous wobblers need a cozy bed.”

Rigone’s advice to dump this vixen at the nearest spaceport was sounding more and more like an excellent suggestion—but her grip on his wrist was a tourniquet, partly to support her tipsy balance, partly because she was very afraid. Nevertheless she was unnaturally happy. What drug was she on? He wasn’t sure she would make it to the next corridor, much less the next hotel.

Worse, he was lost. Not knowing where you were in the Olibanum was not smart. He had abandoned his map device at the Teaser’s, thinking he was immediately going to be able to tap into his new fam’s navigational aids, but nothing about his new fam worked. Whatever obscure streamer of the Galaxy it came from, its operating system was bizarre. No matter what he thought, all he could get was a frantic buzz even though his organic mind was well trained in the methods by which a fam might be used to access nonstandard utilities.

“Petunia, we’ve been staggering along the Olibanum until I don’t recognize it anymore. Do you know where we are?” “I’m just a goggle-eyed following girl. I forgot to ask: that man who just went by on stilts, was he hawking an animal zoo or a human zoo? I’ve never seen an elephant. And did you gawk that shaft we passed? I shouldn’t have done that. Never look down a shaft when you’re all zink-zanged!” “Stop. We need a plan.”

“I have a plan, big man. I follow you to the nearest hotel, you lead. On the morrow the plates are washed.” Eron didn’t always understand her idioms but he was trying. “Rigone said you’d be happy to take me to the local jump-off. I had an off-planet ticket but I unzipped it. You’ll have to buy me starside. We could get a cabin together. Do you kit-bag the credit for first class? Rigone said you were a very generous trick.” Her eyes narrowed thinking about that. “We can’t just stand here. Thinking sets my stomach up for puke again.”

He was still dizzy and it was getting worse. The desperation didn’t help. He wasn’t going to make it to the nearest hotel. “We find a cafe. Then we sit down and drink juice until we are both sober.”

She turned unsteadily to take a careful look at his face. “Big man, I think your fam’s squawking at the switch-in rider.” People streamed around them a little quickly to avoid proximity to her gluttonous snakes. “I’ve been figuring on you. You’re a criminal. Your fam was diced. You cop a gray appliance from Rigone and now you have to go to ground— only on some other planet far, far away. Hey, I’ll go with you for the punch—got no ties.” She nudged him with her hips. She grinned.

Eron was no longer listening to Petunia’s babble. Slowly he moved over to the wall, hanging on—to keep from fainting. Nothing made sense. He saw the colors. Pedestrians had fingernails and hairs on their hands. He was aware of the hand gripping his wrist. His zenoli training in mind-balance was useless without a fam to...

“Confused man,” Petunia said kindly. “I’ll eye for you.” She started to drag him. “Fam’s killing you.” She pushed. “Get along, big man. We get that monkey off your back quick.” He sank to the walk. “Hey, comrade. None of that. We don’t need the bleeding corridor police. Up, up.” She pulled him to his feet, fiercely, never having let go of his wrist. He followed her to a rent-by-the-hour hotel. “Not the dream hotel I had zoomed on. Don’t even have time to ask if they double distill their piss.” She paused, white-faced, woeful, punching in their registration, all false information. She used Eron’s credit stick. “Crumbling place has no grav-chute!” She pushed him up the stairs.

Petunia eased Eron through the paired security doors, manhandling him because he was so much bigger than a tiny girl. She maneuvered him to face the bed—then shoved and watched him fall. Very gently, almost reverently, she disconnected his fam and took care to find a place for it. He shuddered with convulsive relief. She poured a cup of water and slipped one of her knockout pills into it, cradling him in her arms against her soft plastic breasts while she fed him the potent drink. “Rigone told me to give you this” She lay him down again, too weak to pull the covers aside and tuck him in, then queasily snuggled beside him, arms around him. For a while she had forgotten how smashed she was. “If I barf, wake me up,” she whispered into his ear—but he was unconscious.

Eron opened his eyes. It was good to feel sane again. He gazed straight up, not really ready yet to find Petunia. One could always tell the cheapness of a hotel by the height of the ceiling. If she was still asleep, he was going to be a coward, take his fam, and sneak away on tiptoes. When he dared look... a shock.

Petunia was nude at the desk, using a small instrument on his fam. He jumped out of bed like a shot. “Sons of a sun! what the...” He stopped in midstride—the delicate fam on her back was the same make as his new acquisition. And where in Space had she put his clothes?

“Hi. Just tuning your fam to cure that buzz. I filched one of Rigone’s instruments when he wasn’t looking, that old tattooed prick! Pillage has priority over being sick. It’s amazing what you can stuff in a fake bosom that no one dares look at!” She brought over his fam. ‘Try it on now. The buzz is gone. My hangover isn’t.”

“Your fam is just like mine,” he announced suspiciously, glancing about the tiny room for his garments and spotting only the shoes.

“I know the model. I hail from a pov planet where jerk class can’t afford fams. Mommy lifted one out of a hot shipment passing through and made me a gift. Gave me a boost. So I ran away and set out across the Galaxy for adventure.”

“You’re lying,” said Eron sternly, hiding his genitals with a pillow. “I can predict backward to the truth. At least as far as thirteen years.”

To that insult she took umbrage. “Every ass-faced citizen of Splendid Wisdom thinks he’s a psychohistorian who can predict backward and forward with the greatest of ease, tra-la-la. I don’t think you can predict me from straw.”

Eron continued to gaze at her reproachfully.

She met his stare, vacillating between defiance and capitulation. “So I’m lying. Mommy was rich. I stole her jewelry and set out across the Galaxy for adventure. Is that a better lie?”

“Get some clothes on and we’ll discuss it.”

“Try your fam first. I want to see if I shot the buzz. And no sass from you. My mommy is a whiz quantronics crafter, and I have all her routines in my fam, and mine’s the best fam made in the Galaxy, and I Spacedamn well know how well I can gerrymander quantum domains because I’ve been doing it since I was three.”

Meekly he put on the fam and activated it. The buzz was gone but he still didn’t have access to its basic functions. He watched Petunia slip into the manufacturum closet for a new outfit which had been in production. She has a child's body; he thought. Suddenly he knew he wasn’t going to dump her. She was only a kid. She was going to need help. Her sass was probably defensive. Come to think of it, he actually felt extremely loyal to her. If he only had some clothes himself.

Petunia stepped out of the manufacturum wearing an electrospun all-weather chastity, tastefully tailored to make her look like a young woman, something for the spaceways. “Ghaaa. It itches. I forgot the underwear. Do you like it?” She pirouetted.

He found her attractive. “Attractive,” he said.

“Am I adorable, too?”

“Of course!”

“Tell me more,” she insisted.

Eron was observing his emotions with a reluctant amazement. He shouldn’t be feeling that fond of her. And he hardly knew her! “I find you a delightfully entertaining young woman,” he ground out through his teeth.

“Girl. Not woman,” she demanded. “Don’t patronize me. How much do you admire me?”

There was a rational answer to that—but the words forming in his mind were very different. “My admiration would follow you across the Galaxy to Star’s End,” he said impulsively, against all attempts to restrain his tongue. He was beginning to wonder where his conversation was coming from. Had he inherited his fam from a lady killer whose twaddle was somehow leaking through?

“Yeech! And will you love me till the End of the Stars?”

Eron grinned. “We have to stop this nonsense,” he said, alarmed.

“Oh, no. Not yet. Tell me if you are sincere or just impressed by the subtleness of my sexy outfit. Are you my slave?”

He was her slave. Astonishing. When had that transformation happened? It had happened between the time he had activated his fam and the time she had emerged from the manufacturum, that’s when it had happened. He paled. As unobtrusively as possible, he tried to deactivate the fam— and couldn’t.

His delinquent child was watching his every twitch with a fathomless amusement. “Hey, you’ve caught on. You get the nicotine; I get the money.”

He had not expected to be attacked by the tuned probe driving his own familiar. All his life he had been taught many clever ways of using a fam to counter the emotional control of a Cloun-type tuned-probe—the fam in its original form had been designed as protection against Cloun-the-Stubbom’s early device. What was he to do now? He couldn’t very well strangle someone he loved.

She stood in a defiant pose, almost ready to run, unsure that she really had control. “Hit me,” she demanded.

“No,” he said gently, though that was exactly what he wanted to do.

Now she was triumphant. “They say it’s a fool who thinks he can take a girl of the Olibanum to a hotel room without getting rolled.” Then with vituperation: “Thought you could abandon me, did you?”

Her anger triggered his anger. “I’m a poor tool right now, of little use to you or anyone else. I don’t even have access to the basic functions of my fam.”

She shrugged. “I can teach you. Couple hours. Do you know any zing places on this Spaceforsaken planet? We can amuse ourselves by doing the tourist gig while we work. That’s what I’d like. But no drinking! / might take a few snorts, but you have to stay sober! That’s an order. You’re my protector. I feel absolutely safe with a strong man like you—provisio on your sobriety.” She took his arm. “Let’s go, lover boy.”

“My clothes?” he said pitiably.

“Your new duds are hanging in the manufacturum. Something more my style than the rags you were wearing.”

While he dressed in an outrageously loud pompfrock he continued their conversation. “As a matter of politeness, you might inform me of the rules I am working under. Then I won’t run up against them and get zanged while I’m attempting to do something normal like flaying you alive.”

“You’re not allowed to hurt me and you have to come to my defense when I’m being threatened. You have to obey my orders, no matter how frivolous, but you’re allowed to disagree with me if you think my orders will harm me or you. You still have to obey. After taking care of me, you’re allowed to take care of yourself. You can fight it but you can’t win. Those were the rules my mother invented for my father.”

“I can tell such rules were devised by a female hand!” grumbled Eron the slave.

“Pretty good, huh? I think she salvaged them out of the guts of her defunct housebot, but that was before I was bom.”

Since his owner wanted to be a goggle-eyed tourist in the middle of his life’s worst crisis he suggested that Petunia take them to the Valley of Galactic Seas. The uninterruptible guide attachment of his antique map device had recommended the site profusely. Since Splendid Wisdom had coopted its oceans for industrial and domestic use, aquarium theme parks were as close as you could get to an outing by the sea. She agreed. “Yea, sharks!” she said flapping her hands like fins. “Will they let us in the tank for wrestling?”

The multistoried corridor was one vast aquarium. Stairs led up and through the sea past fish and bottom-walking monsters and down and around the abode of starfish, seaweed vines, sleek carnivores, school fish, eels, stalkers. There were vast malls to view the ensnared sea from a distance and small parks in which to sit surrounded by the sea life of the Galaxy.

In a bright park facing an underwater jungle of vines and flowering seaweed that harbored brilliantly painted sea darters and the occasional slumbering shelled monster, she taught him how to control his fam; it was primed to a finger manipulation code read from the motor centers of the brain. He wondered how he had come into possession of a fam once belonging to one of his tutors, a Murek Kapor. Rigone hadn’t had enough time to tell Eron much about himself—such as when he’d had a relationship with a tutor, or how long it had lasted, presumably a part of his now fuzzy boyhood.

To get any results at all Eron had to play like a musician diddling on an invisible flute in his own schizophrenic fairyland, but Petunia told him that the fam would soon learn to sensitize itself to read the thought expressing a particular fingering so that his fingers could remain quiescent, or even involve themselves in other tasks. The fam’s learning mode seemed to operate with pleasing rapidity—or was that the teaching skills of his vixen?

It took him only hours to establish linkages so that the fam could paint pictures in his brain, create sounds, kinesthetics, feelings. The fam would already be contrived to do those things at a very sophisticated level but only in interne-tion with the prior organic brain. Eron’s brain needed to train the fam’s circuits to a different code, and worse, he had to fight his fam’s natural tendency to interact with a man who was no longer there.

They were climbing shallowly inclined stairs that ran beside the transparent cross section of a mountain stream— iteming with fish and other life that lived in melting snow— when he asked her a question he had been pondering. “Did Kigone set you up as my tutor?”

“Have you lashed your noodle? I was there to abscond with his property. I was planning to lift the fam you are wearing and run. I’d been stalking it for maybe six watches. course, it’s paucious good to me without an operator, so I’m glad you materialized. Even Rigone doesn’t ken the value of your fam. Imagine how much a fam with a built-in slaver is worth on the pimp market!” She chattered on. “I drank myself silly getting into position—never try to drink a lecherous bartender under the table, but how was I to know? I’m only thirteen. Talk about zanged! When he carried me through his vault’s teeth and past the forcecurtain into his inner sanctum, I thought I was making it big as a pirate. But I couldn’t even crawl out of his bed onto the floor! You blew in—while I was decorating the dispozoria—and claimed my prize. I couldn’t believe it when he cold-showered me and set you up as my trick. He gave me what I was trying to steal. You lose some, you win some, as my beloved Daddy used to say.”

“How did you know Rigone had it?”

“Wise up, hick. You don’t know half of what’s in that monkey on your back. It’s built to be located. You run away from me; I find you. Me. Nobody else.”

“You’re a thief? Who do you work for?”

“Myself. I do lots of things for a living, even go to school.”

For the rest of the afternoon Eron was delighted with the results of his finger twitches—aside from the strange stares that he evoked. To alleviate his embarrassment he bought, from an odds-n-ends dealer under the sharks, the template for an overshoulder photozither (complete with dead earphones)—an instrument played by plucking laser beams. The dealer’s manufacturum provided him with a solid copy in wood and brass. While he “played” no one noticed the lack of lasers or the lack of sound.

He began to feel human again. He had revived his ability to do long division in his head; he could locate himself in Splendid Wisdom’s labyrinth, search and filter the local advertisements, monitor the maxwell spectrum, integrate and graph in n-dimensions, and actually recall long lists after placing them in storage, even remember people’s names. The math functions of his fam sent him into deliriums of joy. Now if he were ever to locate a copy of his dissertation! Idly he checked to see that he still had the card given to him by the strange Frightfulperson with the russet-gold flecked eyes who was a fan of his math. The possibilities took on a new urgency.

Because Petunia was in a quixotic mood, they spent the evening sleeping inside the substructure of a huge plastic whale which had a broken entrance used for electrical maintenance. It was not your normal dwelling. Eron drafted his photozither for a pillow and took the time out to consider his plight. He really didn’t mind doing whatever sparked this girl’s fancy—but he knew his lack of rebellion was an illusion and a deadly one. Fighting it would probably not work. Somehow he had to enlist Petunia in his cause so that it would be her cause, too. He had to discover why his mathematics had provoked such an extreme reaction in Jars Hanis.

At her first stirrings in the morning, he began his attack. “Petunia?”

“Ho-hum. You’re still awake? You’ve been very restless all night, big man. Can’t sleep on concrete? Sissy.”

“The police will be after me. That’s serious. If I just wander around in aquariums and zoos, something bad will catch up with me—and you.”

“Not just wandering around,” she snarked, “you practiced accessing your fam. I conduct under-the-sky seminars ’cause I come from a planet where we have a sky, not crescents carved in a shit-house roof. Lighten up. When desperate, have some fun.”

“What are your goals?” he asked. “We probably have goals in common.”

“Oh, shut up! Do you think I’m catching hook on that line? My goals are yours right now. I’m smarter than you are. I’ve had my fam for ten years and you’re only a toddler who’s been twiddling with yours a couple hours!”

After such a command there was very little he was allowed to say. He tried and nothing came forth. It was frightening. "‘Permission to speak?” asked Eron dutifully with Calvinistic fatalism.

“Go ahead. Make it short.”

“I’m suspecting that you know who once symbiosed with my fam.”

“You bet. I’m searching for him.”

“How will you find him?”

“Your fam will know where he is. You’re going to talk to it and ask.”

Eron sighed. Dealing with a naive girl wasn’t going to be easy. ‘That’s not possible. No one can talk to a ghoul but his partner.”

She flared, her widened nostrils breathing fire. “Don’t call him a ghoul. He’s locked up in there. It’s a prison. Fams are conscious, you know. He’s suffering! He’s a human being!”

“Not quite. He’s a symbiont.”

“What do you know about anything! I’m the expert.” “What do you want me to call him?”

She shrugged. She wouldn’t say anything. A tear rolled down her cheek.

“Rigone told me I knew him,” he said gently.

“A lot of good that does us. Your fam knew him.”

She obviously loved the man. Ah, Eron realized, he had been her tutor, too. Perhaps that provided a way to toady up to this girl. “I remember some things.” He was ready to drop the name to see what effect it had. “Murek Kapor was one of my idols.” The sentiment felt true enough.

“If you knew him as Murek Kapor, you didn’t know him at all. That was one of his fake names. He dealt with some strange people, even criminals, and with criminals he always used a fake name.”

For some reason, Eron was shocked.

“All this trouble is your fault! When he learned you were going to go into the illegit publishing biz—”

“Nobody knew that!”

“He did. He tried to send you a warning but evidently you’d already zink-zanged or lost your planets or whatever. He only sends out smart code. It pinged him back that it had been intercepted and had destroyed itself. The police were onto you! Then he found out that you were already under house arrest for publishing. That’s when the toad grew hairs! The damn police had back-sourced us! We had to do some fancy dancing.” She skipped her fingers about in a parody of a cops-and-robbers chase. “I’m really annoyed at myself,” she said. “He set me up with a ticket starside and a new identity. He told me to run like a stellar flare was scorching my tail. I should have jumped. He always told me that youth had to be extra careful because we lack judgment.”

In a sudden moment of dej^-vu, Eron Osa was thirteen years old again. “He was your tutor, too?”

Petunia looked up at him askance. “That would be a peculiar way of nailing the tail.”

“So you disobeyed his good judgment?”

“Yeah. Now no one knows he’s in trouble. How stupid can a girl be! But I couldn’t leave him. I’m the only one tuned to his fam. I can find it anywhere if I’m near enough—my Mommy’s doing. Mommy told me never to let him out of my sight. That’s why I was hanging around at the Teaser’s. But I can’t find him. I’m only tuned to find his fam.”

“You seem to have done that!”

“You have to help me find him. How can he keep ahead of the police without his fam? I’m going to be mean and make that an order. Don’t worry. When we find him, my family will give you the best fam you could ever think about. I promise!”

“Petunia. He’s dead.”

“No he’s not! How do you know?”

“Rigone told me.”

He heard the sobs. “I... wanted to get... his fam back to him,” she wailed. Eron tried to comfort her but she shoved him away. “Get away from me. Get away!”

“He was more than your tutor. A friend?”

“Yeah. My Daddy." She lapsed into a silence punctuated only by the occasional resonant sob. He shared her silence because he had much to think about. So—he was the slave of a ghoul’s daughter. Finally she spoke again, tersely. “Let’s go.”

They crawled out when no one was looking, pretended to admire the great plastic whale, and began to stroll until they found a seafood restaurant Even with all the fresh fish abounding in the neighborhood, Eron noted wryly, the fish they ate would be manufactured. It was cheaper to build a fish out of sewage than to grow one—and the template could leave out heads and bones and tail. The manufacturing process was just good enough to get the taste right but not good enough to build a live fish.

“We eat on my credit,” she said stonily. “I have an account they can’t trace. Eron Osa has to disappear. I’ll figure out which of our secret identities you can use. And don’t go sober-face. It’s my Daddy riding on your back, not yours.” My ghoul he thought. “Respect doesn’t permit me the g-word, and he’s not my daddy, so what do I call him?”

“His name was Hiranimus Scogil, but you’re not allowed to repeat that.”

Over delicious fillets made from Splendid sewage, Petunia recounted the rest of the story. “Mommy hated me flying with him on his sorties—he took me everywhere; I loved it—nobody suspects a nice man with a child—so, being overprotective, she rigged his fam’s driving probe with some Cloun side-resoners to enforce his care of me. Mommy is a witch. That was before I knew quantronics. If you fancy me a hot-shot fam modifier, I’m not that good. To hit you, I just calibrated what was already there. Daddy never knew he was my slave ’cause he already loved me. Not like you,” she said resentfully.

“The fish you are feeding me is delicious, and it is a lovely first watch to do nothing—but we still need a plan,” he countered.

“You win. We switch plans.” But it was to be her plan and she wasn’t bothering to consult Eron. After an hour’s thought, the remnants of the meal gone, their napkins twisted, she confessed that she was stumped. “I don’t know what to do next.” She snuggled against Eron in the booth, not the slightest bit afraid that her slave would take advantage of her.

“Are you asking for my input?” he asked hopefully.

“No, we’ll have to consult Daddy’s fam for help. Daddy is the smart one. You’re just a cripple. I don’t see any other way.”

That meant she was suggesting a conversation with a ghoul. “Kid, I can’t read or interact with the storage areas that were private to your father. All I can do is write over them. I can steal him bit by bit for myself. Eventually even the best error-correcting routines won’t be able to salvage much of him.”

“But he’s in there, thinking. He can see with your eyes and hear with your ears.”

“But he can’t make any sense out of that input because we use different codes. He’ll be seeing flashes and hearing noise.”

“We have to talk to Daddy!” she wailed. “He has contacts and I don’t know who they are!”

Eron felt a sudden pity for her—and for himself as her prisoner. “I have contacts, too. Let me use them.”

“No. I don’t trust you. Not with my Daddy on your back! You’re some kind of a criminal.”

“Petunia. I’ll make a contract with you. Let me send out one message that involves a personal professional matter of mine and in exchange I’ll work very hard to communicate with the fam half of your father. I was once a zenoli mind-adept, and that may help. I can use that exotic stuff now that I own a fam.”

“You’ll work hard ’cause I tell you to!”

“Child, there is a subtle difference between a willing slave

and a reluctant slave. In this case it makes all the difference in the Galaxy. You are asking me to do something that has never been done before. If I’m willing, we may succeed. If I’m forced, we may only try.” It was a lie; there was no hope. She considered. “I see the message and I pay for it!” “We’ll have to buy a portable nonlocatable receiver. Cheapest model with security. And hide it in a secure place.” “We don’t have to buy it. I know all about sneaky. I’m a trained covert agent. It runs in the family. That’s why I’m here. I’m in training. He didn’t think this mission was dangerous.”

The message to Eron’s nameless fan read: “Dear woman of the broad-brimmed fuchsia hat: I desperately need a copy of the monograph you so fortuitously saved. Send it by Personal Capsule, manual fade, if text still extant. Wait five watches. Secure receiver still to be procured. Eron Osa.” “You better be leveling,” threatened Petunia, “or I’ll make an adjustment to mush your brain!”