Psychohistorical Crisis

51

ADMIRAL KONN STRIKES, 14,810 GE

Isar Imakin: Do the equations demand that the monitoring Psychohistorians remain hidden indefinitely?

Smythos: No. Adherence to the Founder’s Plan provides that the establishment of a Second Galactic Empire will coincide with a political operandi in which Mankind understands the benefit of being governed by Mental Science. At that time invisibility may be cast aside with the proviso that the Laws of Psychohistory themselves cannot be revealed.

Imakin: Why the proviso?

Smythos: The Laws are statistical in nature and are rendered invalid if the action of individual men are not random in nature. If a sizable group of human beings were to team key details of how their future political situation was being predicted, their actions would be governed by that knowledge and would no longer be random.

Imakin: How is such concealment of the Laws to be maintained?

Smythos: A Galaxy approaching a population of 100 quadrillion will produce less than a hundred humans per billion with the mathematical, emotional, and ethical abilities necessary for the mastering of Mental Science. Many models, notably those of su’KIe and Giordom, indicate ways to attract all such talent into the ruling class.

—First Rank Isar Imakin Questions a Student: Notes Made During the Crisis of the Great Perturbation, fourth century Founder’s Era

Petunia had to talk to her daddy and grabbed the keyin of her machine. While Eron endured the “sledgehammer” of her input and then, with less stress, translated replies, daughter and Daddy made broken-language contact with each other. But when they fell into argument about why she was still on Splendid Wisdom, Eron gracefully retired from assisting the reunion, claiming headache. It was evident from this exchange that poor Hiranimus had been as disoriented by detachment from his organic half as Eron had been after losing his fam.

While Petunia slept Eron was haunted by images of his Gandarian farman going crazy inside his fam prison. He pulled out his metricator and with its small glow lamp crawled over to the girl’s makeshift probe and reluctantly donned the instrument of torture. What was a headache between student and tutor? He clanged and banged out an old private joke they shared.

W-a-i-t u-n-t-i-l y-o-u t-r-y t-o s-i-g-n h-e-r u-pf-o-r V-a-n-h-o-s-e-ru

All of these first conversations between ghoul and host were awkward collaborations—a little gossip and news but mostly compact exchanges of compatible protocols. It was a number-one priority of both ghoul and man to replace Petunia’s unpleasant device. Then they went on to trials of various dodges that promised to allow them to share fam space without Eron overwriting territory occupied by Scogil. Eron had the normal fast-access to the fam space he was beginning to colonize, but no ability to read Scogil’s space except via the language bridge they were establishing which was many orders of magnitude slower than normal fam-wetware exchange. Their situation reminded them of the pair whose legless member rode in a backpack on the shoulders of the armless member.

Once when Eron was taking some exercise out on the roof, Hiranimus broke in excitedly, I'm sure I see something to your left!

A ghoul is blind. He can receive sensory input from his new host but can’t make sense out of it because he is using the coding of the old host. He is essentially in the position of a man who has been blind all his life suddenly regaining his vision; he can now see but he can’t relate to what he is seeing. Scogil knew the difference between a square and a triangle, but he didn’t see the difference. “To my left is Imperialis,” said Eron, translating into the coding they had agreed upon. “The sun is low in the sky and lathering the clouds with a golden topping.” Language was again the bridge—Eron could give words to what his ghoul saw. It was slow, but there was no doubt that Scogil could be taught to see again through Eron’s eyes.

Sometimes silence between them was appropriate. Osa’s most pressing goal was to understand his dissertation. After all, he was scheduled to give an explanatoiy talk to the Ore-lians, whoever they were. Rediscovering his life’s work— with the help of his fam’s utilities—was like stumbling across another man’s astonishing outlook and becoming an instant disciple. His old style now seemed quaintly conservative but meticulously detailed. He remembered Konn’s rejection of his methods and conclusions as “sloppy” and was thankful that he had spent years reorganizing his approach to make it crystal clear so that Jars Hanis wouldn’t have the same negative reaction. That care now made it possible for him to understand himself. It was like coming across a pile of old poems and being pleasantly surprised that the handwriting was readable.

He wanted to keep Scogil abreast of his rediscovery but communication between them was still both time-consuming and frustrating—they hadn’t yet been able to achieve anything faster than talking—so they arranged a compromise; they pursued their independent thoughts but came together every watch to share conclusions. Eron found the comments of this seasoned mathist immensely stimulating. Scogil gloated a little bit at having put Eron on the right track as a young student and reminisced with a fascinated Eron about a youth his ex-student had difficulty recalling.

At her father’s suggestion Petunia returned from an excursion to one of their caches with an astrologer’s jade ovoid. “Daddy’s compliments.” She handed it to Eron. He recog-

nized the Coron’s Egg and, because motor memory was mostly a function of wetware, remembered the activation sequence. But it was Petunia who took his hand and proudly showed him how to access the new Predictor Level. “Every time I wanted to play with my Daddy, he was working on that,” she said somewhat petulantly.

It was an unauthorized library of psychohistorical functions ... hidden in an astrologer’s piece of flim-flam. In that moment of profound epiphany Eron Osa realized that he had been right—the Fellowship’s methodical secrecy had created a counterculture of rebel psychohistorians working in self-enforced darkness. This would be only one manifestation. Theory said there would be several hundred out there around the stars, covering all ranges of aptitude.

“Are you a psychohistorian?” he asked his ghoul.

We call ourselves Smythosians_y after Tamic Smythos who was one of the fifty martyrs.

“How many of these devices exist?”

There are millions out there in the Galaxy, but the latest version which goes to the seventh level has only been in production for a few months. I don't know how many. I'm not in charge of distribution.

“Your Smythosians have been pushing for a crisis?”

Yes. Our extrapolation gives us seventy to eighty years to prepare.

“You’re extrapolation is wrong. The psychohistorical crisis is happening right now. Splendid Wisdom has passed through a critical topozone boundary and the effect will shudder to the ends of the Galaxy within months. I think I studied under the Galaxy’s finest topozone analyst, but he was working with classical theory and missed this crisis by a league. It’s now,” Eron repeated.

How do you know?

That sounded like Murek Kapor’s old challenge to his know-it-all student. Eron laughed. “I was there. I saw this big huge rock standing on a tiny cup and I wondered why it didn’t fall over—so I touched it with my thumb. It fell over. Much to my chagrin. Actually, there are already two major groups here on Splendid Wisdom alone, both of whom know psychohistory very well and both of whom have been putting their weight behind different visions of mankind’s future, subtly opposing each other—so they will both fail. Rector Jars Hanis leads the largest faction, followed by the self-styled Admiral Hahukum Konn. I have talked with Konn once since Hanis so ruthlessly disposed of me, and it is my assessment that in the wake of my trial he no longer feels safe. Most of the lesser Pscholars aren’t even aware that the two major factions are, in effect, counter-predicting each other. In about a month they’ll be wishing that they lived in a simpler classical universe. They won’t be able to say that the Founder didn’t warn them. The classical universe, in essence, assumes the existence of only one psychohistorian. Yours is a third group. I predict hundreds of others.”

That is impossible. So much counter-prediction would have destroyed the Fellowship long ago.

Eron smiled. “How willing were you to stand behind a future for the Ulmat Constellation that went against the Master Plan?”

We weren’t ready to be discovered.

“You’re not ready now. You just suggested that you need seventy or eighty more years. The ability to predict is only half of the equation. The power to see your prediction to fruition is the other half. If my predictor is bigger than your predictor, I win.”

And you? Do you see a future?

“A topozone is a very dark place mathematically. A marble on a smooth hill can predict its future—as long as it isn’t sitting exactly at the top of the hill. I’m as blind as you, my friend. The old uncrippled me might have seen something.”

Eron had not mentioned his coming rendezvous with the irregulars of the Regulation at an Orelian masked ball, but, since the ghoul in his fam would be coming along for the ride, it felt it only fair to tell Scogil. An upset Scogil promptly warned him against attending any such clandestine caucus. Kikaju Jama or his Regulation be damned! Involvement had already cost him his organic life and put his daughter in grave danger for no real chance of gain. In the fury following his warning Scogil laid out a detailed plan for escaping the planet with Petunia. There was a Fortress he had in mind which would be safe for Eron and where his talents would be useful. Murek Kapor again. His plan had all the sound of an order.

It was a delicate situation. Scogil could not, of course, order him around. If it came to a clash of wills, Eron could simply stop communicating and permit his growing mind to overwrite Scogil’s. But the daughter was a different matter. Scogil’s fam carried illegal built-in devices which no one but a three-year-old (or a trusting husband) would accept. Eron was slaved to Petunia as much as if he were one of Cloun-the-Stubbom’s puppets.

Diplomacy was in order.

He had no way of knowing which course of action was best in terms of the greater politics. Neither did Scogil. Ironically the next step in this galactic saga would be determined entirely by trivial personal desires. Scogil was motivated by a need to protect his daughter. Eron was still fascinated by an encounter with the Frightfulperson who had saved his life’s work—and he fully intended to make contact with her again.

Osa prudently investigated the Orelians of which he had no knowledge. Old when Imperialis was an unexplored border system, Orelia was ancient, its denizens of three airless worlds necessarily master builders of sprawling airtight cities. The latter-day Orelians of Splendid Wisdom weren’t really Orelians anymore; they were the descendants of an imported construction crew who had stayed on after the great rebuilding—nostalgic in their lingering memory of a distant home’s wild carnival. They were harmlessly apolitical and glad to let moneyed fun-loving non-Orelians join their masked revelry. The Regulation must be using them as a cover.

By very subtly biasing Scogil’s conversations with Petunia he built up her confidence and simultaneously left her slightly antagonized by her father’s lack of faith in her ability to handle danger. She was an apprentice agent of the Oversee and had done very well on her own under fire and had saved her daddy’s ghoul, thank you. This was the adventure of her life. And so, much to Eron’s relief, this capricious daughter took sides against her father. Nevertheless for diplomacy’s sake, Eron humored every one of his ghoul’s exaggerated fears.

He sent Petunia on a sleepover trip to pick up supplies from an arms cache known to her daddy—illegal weapons that didn’t trigger a police report when activated, very illegal slap-on explosives, plus some antique personal force-shields of a pirated Faraway design and other doodads. She also acquired an edition of the zenoli manuals for burst loading. Eron chose from them the martial utilities he thought he might need, but only the ones his organic mind had once practiced with diligence.

Eron was eager to spread the message of his thesis, subver-sively if that was the only vehicle of expression that the Fellowship would allow. He was still angry at Jars. He and Petunia made the trip ten watches early and settled in at a local faceless hotel. That gave Eron enough time to case the locale, even die layout of the Orelians’ hall in the guise of a potential renter, and to appease Scogil by attending to all possible precautions.

At the hour of the ball, Petunia was stationed at a safe distance, by Scogil’s insistence, her duty to monitor the movements of the Helmarian fam. If tilings went awry, she had her instructions and a ticket off planet arranged by one of Scogil’s fake identities. She was enjoying her role.

Brazenly Eron arrived by pod at the front entrance, his illegal kick and explosives well hidden in his costume. Inside, the pillared hall of many chambers and stairwells was done in gold leaf and inlay. The disguises were everywhere. He found himself eagerly looking for that blue scaled mask with crocodile teeth and plumes—the unnamed Fright-fulperson he couldn’t resist even though she might place his life in danger.

But first, in a nondescript mask of his own design, cognizant of his ghoul’s stem warnings, he checked out the exits of three stories of the hall, forty in all, for possible newly installed obstructions. This was not a place meant to be easily guarded. That was good. The exits led from stairways or gardens, from an administrative corridor or a servant’s chute or a supply tunnel. He left unobtrusive shaped charges primed to open locked exits and hid sensors that had been his favorite tool of surprise during the wild zenoli military games at Asinia. He programmed his fam to optimize a retreat under any circumstance—Scogil being too slow and blind to be trusted with such an enterprise. A pod, illegally brainwashed by Petunia, sat waiting at a siding in charter mode.

These precautions made him wonder at his daring, but Eron Osa was aware that vanity disparaged danger. He was vain. He was proud. Here were men interested in his psychohistorical research after years of working alone! He had become ebulliently enthusiastic for his old cause. Pleasing a luminary like Jars Hanis was no longer a priority. Scogil’s dire warnings did not dampen his zeal. He wriggled his nose at common sense.

And love! At the bottom of a flared stairwell he spotted the crocodile teeth of his Frightfulperson in her simple gown. He turned immediately into an elegant comfort room to change into his black-furred, trihomed, red-eyed mask. Perhaps this time, with fam utilities to assist him, he wouldn’t make such a damn fool of himself in her delightful presence!

Before he could descend the stairs, two gentle fingers and a thumb grasped his wrist. They belonged to a coiffured man of elaborate costume and ebony mechanical mask able to mock all human expressions grotesquely. “Ah, our esteemed speaker for the evening,” said a voice from out of a rhapsodic smile. “You mimic well the Orelian verve.”

“Have we been introduced?”

“No, it is in the nature of my associates to remain invisible, but my elegance betrays me as a Hyperlord. You may address me thus.”

“I was to contact—”

“No, I am your contact.” The gentle pull of his three-pointed grip steered Eron away from the stairs toward the banquet tables. “I have a special interest in your presence. The impetuous mermaid of the Calmer Sea can keep her salty juice in check. You are here by my invitation. But first, the food.”

The tables were covered with exquisite bowls of delicacies, both imported and manufactured, steaming pots with lids and ladles, breads, flowering vines for decoration. A man beside Eron, defaced by a huge papier-mache nose, poured himself soup. They took their food to a dim raised alcove with a convenient teapoy that supplied hot drinks and a stand for their plates.

While Eron kept an eye cocked for his Frightfiilperson, the Hyperlord ate with restrained gusto. “You’re—shall I say the word—a psychohistorian? A rebel on the run?” These were rhetorical questions because the Lord at once produced from his purse a jade ovoid with the five-fingered key pattern that Petunia favored. “This is a bauble I was sold—quite expensive. It casts stars and astrological charts and other such arcane drivel. I was told confidentially that it contains a complete working model of the Founder’s Prime Radiant. But my peddler disappeared with my credits before giving me the codes. Perhaps you have the codes? Or,” he added wryly, “perhaps you can tell me if I am a naive collector of psy-chohistorical memorabilia who has been grievously duped?”

Eron took the ovoid in his left hand and let his mind spell out a rapid message to his blind companion. While he meditated upon the jade, he received his reply. You are talking to Hyperlord Kikaju Jama, He is a danger to you. Leave this place immediately, I was only able to work with one of his motley collection of mathists before the fracas with you interfered, He may be here. Cingal Svene. Avoid him. I was due to meet with Jama the same day the police took to my trail I’m sure the police made the connection. I repeat, assume that Jama is under police surveillance.

Eron slipped the smooth ovoid back into the Hyperlord’s hand. “I'll give you a demonstration after my talk. It is a genuine Prime Radiant, but I warn you, it is a thing difficult even for a good mathematician to use and read.”

The Hyperlord’s mechanical black mask twisted into a triumphant grimace. “I have the mathists who can use it once you show them how. They are all here to listen to your presentation.”

Two hands took two of his three horns from behind. “We meet again,” said the familiar voice. When he looked up he saw the smile of broad lips beneath the crocodile teeth and plumes. The Frightfulperson of his dreams.

Homed man and crocodile woman wandered back together toward the meeting chamber. His eyes were alert. A sloping floor. Two exits at the top. Two exits at the bottom on each side of the podium. A small holobeam room behind the podium. “Let’s walk while we wait for our audience. I’d like to thank you in private for salvaging my life’s work.” He found the wall behind the holobeam room and placed a wall-breaker without her knowing what he was doing. One could always distract the eyes with pleasant chitchat. A couple of sensor drops later, he wrapped a bejeweled belt around her waist. It was a personal forcefield generator built somewhere in the Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift, probably in imitation of an old Periphery design pioneered during the Interregnum, more elaborately disguised than the belt he wore to hold up the pants of his own costume. She didn’t have to know; he could activate her defenses at any time. “Thank you. And you don’t even know my name.”

“Your Hyperlord friend called you a Mermaid of the Calmer Sea.”

“I’m half fish, half fowl to him. You may call me Otaria.” “I wasn’t certain I’d be here. I’m not sure of your security.” That wasn’t true. Scogil wasn’t sure of the security. “If I suddenly decide to move fast, it will be for a good reason. Follow me instantly.”

“Our security is the best. The Hyperlord has been in this business a long time.”

“But you trusted me?”

“You’re desperate, like we are,” she said.

“I don’t understand your desperation.”

She smiled and, in the lonely corridor, tipped up her crocodile teeth so that he could see her face. “It’s an intellectual desperation. That can be as terrible as not having a fam or a house or food or air. I notice you have a new fam.”

“Black market. I like its math utilities.”

“You’re more sure of yourself.”

“Of course. I have a fam.”

While they walked back to the meeting, his fam read the scattered sensors. Nothing. Scogil was probably sweating in his dungeon for naught. He sent a reassuring message through to his alter ego.

Ushers were already at the entrances. Snooper dampers were in place. The black-masked Hyperlord brought the meeting to order and was enthusiastic in his sedition. He introduced Eron Osa as the prophet of a New Interregnum, the real one, the one that the Founder had delayed.

It wasn’t that simple. But Eron spoke anyway. He dispensed with his trihomed mask. He was here as Eron Osa. His specialty was the historical forces that led to instability—and unpredictable events.

He sketched for them the undulating topozones of historical phase space and how their multidimensional surfaces were calculated. He stressed the perturbations that elitist secrecy placed upon the topozone parameters. A topozone’s surface was the boundary between stability and chaos. While measurable social vectors remained inside their topozones, the sweep of the future could be foretold. But once these parameters moved across their abstract confines in any region of the Galaxy, the future became uncertain for that locale. Then, like wildfire, unchecked chaos could rage in a sudden conflagration, perhaps across the Galaxy—or die out for no apparent cause.

Psychohistorians were like firefighters. They could hose down areas, set standards and regulations, insure that fire never started. But there was danger in never having a fire. Flammables accumulated; when they went, whole regions went with them in an inferno at the whim of the wind. Stasis was the danger. Deadwood accumulated during stasis. Stable topozones collapsed in upon stasis like a wet forest drying out under months of sun.

Precise psychohistorical monitoring, with a single future as the goal, a Plan, could drive the social parameters safely inward from the chaos-touching boundaries of the historical topozone, but like a single kind of weather, such a relentless sun might dry out the forest and set the stage for a topozone collapse, followed by a fire, a conflagration, an interregnum. Eron detailed why no monolithic organization with a single mind could easily plan a history to suit everyone. The unsatisfied gathered slowly in the byways, spiritually dying, finally to become tinder, finally to produce secretly their own psychohistorians in an attempt to control their own future.

The Founder faced such a situation. The stasis of the First Empire had become so great that unpredictable historical chaos could be its only consequence. His best mathematics was blinded by turbulent visions of fire. He could not predict into the Interregnum. All he could do was find a distant firebreak, where the stars were thin, and set up a race of firemen who could build around themselves an expanding topozone of stability that slowly moved out to control the flames and replant the ashes. Inside that topozone the Founder could predict

Now conditions were different. Psychohistorical monitoring, itself, in the absence of psychohistorical knowledge, was creating the stasis. Eron had difficulty explaining this thesis to an audience composed of illiterates who had been forbidden to learn the elements of social prediction lest chaos prevail. He had to fall back on analogy.

Osa asked his masked group to consider a murderer swinging an ax at the head of his victim.

The victim judges the trajectory of the ax and predicts that it will divide his skull. He ducks. This falsifies his prediction, thus proving that predicting is a waste of effort, right? Eron noted that his new methods of Arekean iteration converged on a future that was acceptable to all predictors, disadvantaging only those who refused to predict. No matter how many predictors there were, no predictor could wield an advantage over any other predictor. He characterized this kind of iteration as the mathematics of negotiation.

Osa asked his listeners to consider a primitive planetary economy about to fall into economic disaster.

Suppose each citizen of the planet is capable of predicting the disaster by a cause-and-effect deduction—then it won’t happen. The prophecy fails, thus telling us that the ability to predict is useless—right?

On the other hand, suppose only one elite citizen has enough grasp of economics to predict the nature of the disaster. This single man is in no position to prevent the catastrophe—but he can use his knowledge to profit from it. He can carve out a fortune and from that commanding position dominate the new economy to be built on the ashes of the old. Prediction is then useful when it serves the interest of an elite who can predict—right?

Osa asked the assembly to consider a Galaxy about to fall into war and ignorance and chaos.

Suppose all men have the psychohistorical knowledge to predict a disaster abhorrent to them and to identify their coming part in it—then it won’t happen. The prediction fails, thus invalidating the methods of psychohistory and making them useless, right?

On the other hand, suppose a group of Pscholars have enough grasp of psychohistory to see into the nature of the imminent galactic disaster. Suppose this tiny group is able to apply minute forces at critical places so that a thousand years later they are in a commanding position to dominate the new order they have created from the rubble of the old. They have lied about their presence, hiding from the rest of us while they accumulate power and special privilege. They remain misers with their methodology, unwilling to share their predictions. But their predictions come true. Psychohistory works only when it serves the benevolent self-interest of an elite, right?

Eron ended his speech with an outburst. “Psychohistory lias served the interests of the Pscholars for too long! They lie to us in a self-serving way when they say that the gift of knowledge will drive us from paradise! Let the tools of psychohistory serve the needs of the galactic peoples! Let us negotiate our own future, not live out a future designed by men who hoard the tools of design claiming that they alone know what is best for us!”

Before Eron was even seated, the masked Hyperlord rose. He held a jade ovoid high in his hand. “I have here a Prime Radiant! It holds the secrets of psychohistory for us to tap. I have at the moment sixtyne copies of the Prime Radiant for sale! Eron Osa has promised us a demonstration!” He looked over toward another man who approached the podium in an iron mask and then spoke to Eron. “Here is the mathist I promised you, my boy.” The crowd waited in anticipation.

But Eron had been questioning his ghoul and was primed for an answer—there is no better state of general awareness than a zenoli pause—and what he saw from the comer of his eyes put him on instant danger alert. Under the iron mask and unkempt hair of Kikaju Jama’s mathist was Nejirt Kambu. Fams are good but it was Eron’s wetware which specialized in faces, jaw lines, gestures, gait, the first things a famless baby learns. How many hundreds of times had he and Kambu crossed? A workshop filled with ancient aero-ship design. Sneaking through the bat-infested caves of antiquity’s storehouse of radioactivity. Debating in a Lyceum seminar. Why was Konn’s right-hand man here? A quick fam check of the planted sensors detected a suspicious pattern of movements outside the caucus chamber. A police raid?

“I’ll have to set up a holo demo,” Eron said quickly. Then to Otaria: “Help me.” He took her into the holobeam booth behind the podium, closed the soundproof entrance, activated their shields, and detonated the “spare door” behind him with the device he had already planted there. With his peripheral vision he saw the police enter through all four portals. An usher raised a forbidden blaster. The police reacted.

At the sudden death of the usher, Kikaju Jama dropped his disguise as a fop and disappeared. All present, including the police, thought him true to form and assumed he was running. It was a tactical mistake by the raiders. An instant later the Hyperlord appeared on one of the tiny balconies and, in a flying leap, dropped on the policeman who had murdered his usher, yodeling the terrifying Hyperlord battle cry which hadn’t been heard in millennia. As the man collapsed under the falling impact, Kikaju’s mask radiated Kabuki anger, his left elbow locking around the man’s neck while his right lace-wristed hand grabbed the flying blaster. By the time they hit the floor, Jama was in command, issuing orders from behind the shield of his hostage. Chaos was his element. He was a Hyperlord in fact as well as in name.

The raid came to a standstill. Policemen are reluctant to attack one of their own.

But the mathist in the iron mask had no such scruples. With the reaction time of an experienced psychohistorian field agent he blasted both hostage and the Hyperlord behind him. Too much was at stake.

Under cover of the disturbance Eron and Otaria staggered their way through the imploded wall and were gone, following the optimal escape path that Eron’s fam was spawning with graphic overlays. They reached the doctored pod and were two kilometers along their way to freedom before a police dragnet grabbed them in a vice that killed their power. Eron made a quick assessment. “We surrender,” he said to Otaria. “No choice. But not right now. Don’t make a move till they settle down.”

Otaria saw the hidden men, blasters drawn. “They’ll kill your fam again. And mine, too.”

“That’s the optimistic scenario.” Eron tuned the pod’s frequency to the police band and spoke loudly and clearly. ‘Truce. We will consider surrender. We are armed and shield protected.” He wanted them to know about the shields. “We do not intend to use our weapons unless provoked.” While he was calming and cautioning the police, he relayed a quick briefing for Scogil, minus the apology he would give when he had the time.

Scogil replied by ordering Eron to order Petunia off planet immediately. No chance of that. She would stay until she knew her daddy’s ghoul was dead—or free. Her location readings on his fam must have already given her the cue that they wouldn’t be home for supper. At this moment she was probably fabricating wild media releases about the Orelian affair.

The pod’s speaker blared with a police response. “Truce confirmed. Weapons on safety. We have a negotiator on the way. The esteemed Third Rank Nejirt Kambu. Please maintain open communications. Over.”

“Who is Kambu?” Otaria whispered.

“Hahukum Konn’s man. That’s much better than being cornered by Hanis. Kambu was at the masquerade posing as the Hyperlord’s mathist. Actually, he’s an old friend, so we may get in some real negotiating.” He briefed Scogil.

The reply scrolled across Eron’s visual cortex in purple script— the trouble I have taken to escape interrogation by Konn. Death is preferable. I must tell you that I have a bomb in me and I will use it. I have no intention of being the first prisoner taken by my nemesis.

“Sorry,” said Eron aloud so that Otaria could hear, “Rigone has already nixed your bomb.” Abruptly he abandoned Scogil to his dungeon because...

Nejirt Kambu was arriving on the scene, well guarded. He and Eron spoke to each other from a respectful distance via their pod’s quantronics, Kambu first. “I have already noted that our famless psychohistorian is wearing the fam of the late agent Hiranimus Scogil. I have deduced the remarkable fact that you are in communication with the man’s ghost since your discussion this evening went beyond the scope of your original dissertation, rambling into recent galactic history—about which a Seventh Rank would know nothing. You possess certain facts which you could have obtained only from an enemy of the Second Empire.”

“I’m being accused of treason by an old friend?”

“No* You may be a traitor, but you’re being offered a deal by your old teacher—protection from Jars Hanis and a new top-of-the-pick fam in exchange for the one you are wearing.”

“Point one: How am I and my companion to be protected from Jars Hanis?”

“A natural sore point with you. Admiral Konn arrested Hanis about an hour ago in a general sweep-up. The situation is fluid. At the moment Konn is Rector of the Lyceum.”

“And king of the Galaxy?”

“If you say so.”

“Point two: My fam is wired with a suicide bomb over which I have no control.” Eron lied.

“Ah. You are his hostage?”

“No,” said Eron vehemently, “but he has veto power over my actions.”

“You offer stalemate? We both sit here until we starve?”

“No. I’m dealing. You want to interrogate Scogil. I can talk to him. We talk; I keep Scogil. We talk with Hahukum Konn present. That’s the deal. My Frightfulfriend comes with me and she stays with me. You get our weapons as a gesture of good faith.”

“A reasonable man. I’m glad our honorable friendship still stands. Thank you for the weapons. As a reciprocal gesture of good faith I will allow you to keep your shields. They are not a threat to us. You may be interested to know that our mad Admiral has obtained a copy of your dissertation. He still thinks it is full of crap but you have his attention.”