Far futures, p.23
Far Futures, page 23
Nejirt’s fam, having sorted through the electromagnetic hum, passed into his consciousness the information that to get home he had a choice between a three-hour hypersonic flight, taking off in twenty minutes, or a slower four-hour tube ride. He chose the tube—much more relaxing, no distractions, no stressing connections. He’d be able to draft a preliminary report on Coron’s Wisp—and maybe even catch a snooze to wake him up for the family.
His fam located an obscure pod station, well below the hubbub, and the nearest concourse elevator dropped him down to it, almost in free fall—a homey lounge safely wedged between a cheap hotel and an instant tailor in a minor mall. He didn’t have to tarry—perfect timing— and hopped inside a waiting pod, plushly lined. There, a pleasant surprise. Fabric, in such a small space, was an agreeable change from the usual white plastic. The pod noted politely that he wished the surround-media offed, adjusted his reclining seat for relaxed comm with his fam, and sucked him into the tubes at an impressive acceleration.
Later he hardly noticed the clunk-thwap of their supersonic linkage to a train of the main trunk tube that was carrying thousands of other pods in mad haste through an imperial planet’s Brobdingnagian bowels. By then he was composing his report at a professional clip, eyes closed, fam exploring and checking out every nuance, his mind bouncing off intuition with fact, piecing together odd observations that hadn’t made sense at the time of collection. Yet it wasn’t jelling. He really didn’t have a relevant thing to say about astrology!
Here was the land of perversion that the galaxy loved to throw up to the gods. This variation of astrological science was based on eerie projections from an ovoid device that seemed to be made out of jade or marble. It was a crude adaptation of a sophisticated galactarium. The associated Timdo teachings claimed that every chart cast altered the future—one way if the client accepted the reading, and another if the reading was rejected. An astrology that incorporated free will!
Was the failing faith in psychohistory caused by an upsurge of belief in astrology, or was the upsurge in astrology caused by a lack of faith in psychohistory? The equations kept telling him that given the homeostatic conditions in place at Coron’s Wisp, something like astrology could only be a force to drive out mental science if it had a better method of predicting the future. Both theory and common sense said that the data he had observed were impossible.
He gave up trying to compose his report and went to sleep.
. . . and woke up to, “Arrival. You are now parked at . . .” He flipped up the lid before the pod could finish its spiel, and staggered to his feet, cramped, thankful he had no baggage. A glance showed him that it was his home station, unmistakable by its pompous wall of restored imperial mosaics, long and tiled, a salvage from an Early First Empire building boom. Large parts of this sector had survived the Sack. The station’s quaint ugliness was what he got for being snobby enough to choose to live in a hallowed domain that had once been built by the families of the Pupian Dynasty.
“Yoo-ha! Hoo!” He saw Wendi windmilling him from the far end of the station, all the while in a dead run. She looked deliriously happy. That meant that the sewers were probably running smoothly since she was an august member of the sewerocracy and couldn’t stop beaming when she had her local piping under control.
“How did you know I was coming?” Nejirt oofed as she collided with him.
“A little pod tipped me off.”
“Polite bugger. Must be a new model!”
“No, dear—you just lucked into one of the ones that work!”
Their home was a good walk away and they were in no hurry to reach it, strolling through the parts of the maze that they loved, chatting, catching up. They arrived from above, down a spiral staircase that surrounded a glass-enclosed park of steamy tropicals. Home was built into the circular courtyard at the base of the park. It had once been part of the residence of the family of Peurifoy, the greatest of the First Empire generals.
His welcoming supper was arrayed around an imported ham and a delicate drink from Ordiris bottled in chocolate jiggers. Nejirt was used to farm food, being an experienced traveler, but here in the warrens there were high-class delicacies from the special psychohistorians’ emporium, where rank had its privileges. She liked to shop there—he didn’t. But why shouldn’t a psychohistorian live as well as the dirt farmer on some outback planet of an unremembered sun? A leg of ham was a small price to pay for farsighted, honest government.
He spoke none of this while they ate. He had to admit that nothing tasted better on Splendid Wisdom than ham raised and cured on a pig farm forty light-years distant or juice from berries that needed an exotic sun. He lifted his jigger to Wendi’s lip. “To a desk job!”
“No,” she said, licking the Ordiris and taking a bite of chocolate. “You need your trips like I need my art. I have a surprise for you.”
She pulled him into a pillow-floored meditation room that now slumbered under the rose luminescence of hanging crystals, no form alike, no cut the same, tinkling, slowly changing in the motion of their breath. He mourned the Ming vases that had been there when he left. Wendi was so good at her reproductions—why did she bother with this original stuff? “Lovely,” he said. “Don’t take it away before I get used to it.”
She sat on the floor. “Come down here. It’s all prettier from here. We can lie on the pillows and look up!” She pulled him off his feet. “Tell me about your wildest adventure in the cold, hostile outside universe! We could take off our fams and be animalistic.”
He grinned. “Do we sit here naked, growling at each other, each trying to assassinate the other’s emperor first?”
“Animals don’t have emperors!”
“I forgot. Chickens are all equal on the assembly line.”
“Just shut up and tell me your wildest adventure. I never get to travel! So what happened? Something must have happened!”
“I had my astrological chart read. We were in a domed hovel stuck onto the side of the retaining wall of a warm wet rice paddy in the mountains of Timdo. There were two magnificent moons in the sky. My astrological seer was three times as old as I am and smelled of fermenting rice. She used a magical jade green ovoid that darkened her hovel and projected a skyful of stars that whispered to her everything about my future that she might want to know and I might be willing to pay for.” Wendi growled and shook him by his ears. “Why don’t you ever tell me the truth!”
“Because you wouldn’t believe a word of it!” He laughed and made love to his wife without telling her the rest of the story. What could a psychohistorian tell anyone about the truth? What was he even allowed to say?
Nejirt had been sent to the star systems of Coron’s Wisp to study a political perturbation—not a dangerous one, a small one, but large enough to have been picked up by Kon’s sieve. Within the confines of the Wisp’s five stellar systems, confidence in the leadership had taken a sudden ten-percent drop. On-site, nothing appeared to be amiss—no economic depression, no corruption crisis, no inability of the Council to meet its goals. Nothing seemed to be driving the perturbation. After months of puzzled study, Nejirt had only been able to make a correlation with a mild epidemic of astrology. Temporal coincidence is not evidence of either cause or effect, but . . .
He could sleep on it yet another night. He patted his wife and turned out the crystals. He did not sleep.
Coron’s Wisp had not been the best locale from which to tackle galactic history—and had been a terrible locale from which to study such an esoteric subject as astrological infection patterns from pre-imperial times to the present. He had been unable to turn up any easily identifiable source of contamination. No media imports. No latent memes—the planet’s entire sixteen-thousand-year history was bereft of any references to astrology . . .
. . . barring only one much reproduced manuscript from a monastery’s sealed library, the surviving copy on thin foils of archaic Early First Empire cellomet. Even Nejirt would not have bothered to translate (by machine) these Chinese brushings had they not contained an illustration of a vase just like the ones his wife had coaxed out of her artist’s manufacturum. But instead of a potter’s manual he had uncovered a series of algorithms for making political decisions based on the positions of the heavenly bodies in Terra’s ancient sky. More astrology!
Fodder for the hordes of cults who believed in the lost wisdom of the predawn wizards but not enlightening to Nejirt Kambu the psychohistorian. He had needed another such dead end like a draft of hemlock. The algorithms used by the Chinese astrologers were many orders of magnitude less complicated than those used on Timdo—and, though no better in their ability to make predictions, Nejirt had to admit that the court astrologers of China had subtler ways of generating ambiguous flattery than did the dour star-watching farmers of Timdo’s mountain ranges.
For a moment Nejirt had to remind himself that he was lying on pillows beside a slumbering wife at the star-studded center of galactic sanity. Then traveler’s fatigue took him . . .
. . . to be cast in a dream of ancient prespace times when Terra was a lush paradise not yet conscious of its destiny as a desert inferno. He was a temponaut disguised in greasy woven yak wool begging a Chinese court astrologer to tell his fortune. He had gold to offer. It wasn’t enough. He ripped the seams of his shirt and brought out more gold. The silk-robed astrologer grinned malevolently. It was enough. Since the astrologer’s head would not be riding on the blade of the message, he agreed to tell the truth without sleight of hand.
In the dead of night, atop the tower of the astrologer, Nejirt pointed out the star of his birth, a hidden nothing among the blur of the Sing Ki. “Ah,” said the astrologer, and a gong sounded and a giant bronze instrument began to move against the heavens across the horizon shadows of a walled imperial city. Ominously the bronze shaft creaked to a halt in the direction of Tseih She, which the astrologer obligingly translated for his visitor from the stars as The Piled Up Corpses. “That is your star.” It was nothing special, a white star, faintly blue, blazingly bright, an eclipsing variable about one hundred light-years from Terra.
“But what does it mean?” he asked with the exasperation of a man who is desperate for certainty.
“It means that you are living in the time of the slayer and the slain, that the battle takes place across the stars, and that the fates of empires are at stake.”
“But am I the slayer or the slain?”
“Ah,” said the malevolent astrologer, bowing not as politely as he might under the Chinese stars, “for more gold . . .”
Nejirt remembered the dream quite clearly, because that was the exact moment that his fam gently woke him to an emergency request. He opened his eyes to the darkly tinkling crystals and took the call.
“Cal Bama. Imperial Police.” There was no image but his fam had already verified the identification. The voice continued, “I’ve been informed that I have waked you from sleep after a long voyage. My apologies, sir. Our data tells us that you’ve just come in from a scout of Coron’s Wisp.”
“That’s correct.”
“Your report has not yet been filed and I need an opinion. We’ve got a fast breaker here and time is of the essence.”
“Ask away.”
“We’ve got a body.”
“A body?”
“A dead body. Nine days dead. We would have called you earlier but you weren’t home. The body carried contradictory identification, deliberate deception, so we’re poking in the dark but a lucky break on the name Scogil tells us that this man is from Coron’s Wisp.”
“That brings the odds down to one in ten billion,” said Nejirt sarcastically.
“We think the case is more important than that, sir. It was your boss, Second Rank Kon, who put us on to you. He said you’d be interested.”
“All right. What else do you know about your corpse?”
“Very little.”
“Have you been able to do a salvage on his fam?”
“Yeah, but no. His fam is missing.”
“So what have you got? He was murdered? Accident?”
“No, we killed him trying to take him alive. Miscalculated his interest in survival.”
“Why were you tracking him?”
“It’s a long story, sir. It doesn’t make sense. We don’t know why we were chasing him. It’s because he is an astrologer or an . . .”
“And you think he’s from Coron’s Wisp?”
“We do.”
“I’ll be right there. I just hope you gentlesouls aren’t stationed at my antipodes.”
They and the body were near the Lyceum from which Nejirt Kambu had been forged as a psychohistorian. He could never get away from the place and its hordes of students. Damn. That would mean a long hypersonic flight . . . at least hours of hassle; his fam was already making the arrangements. He rolled over to look at his sleeping wife. Should he wake her now—or leave a message with her fam? Before he decided, he let himself stare at the way her profile lay, eyes closed, face content because he was home.
5
At the time of the predatory Cainali Invasions during the Interregnum 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 to a mere fifty billion. We lived by selling layabout wealth to off-planet merchants with a fleet of relic jump ships, none of which survived the 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 Halfnose . . .
An alliance between Halfnose 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 Imperialis. 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 days of the Second Empire the Pscholars see us as petty criminals and tolerate us only because we . . .
—From The Cabal of the Brood of Half nose
On the ninth day of his exile, still smarting from his failed pursuit of the Frightfulperson, Eron Osa set out for the Corridor of Olibanum, his general-issue fam around his collar but inactive. Without a map-tutor he wandered a devious path, all the while struggling to find the right subvocal commands to make his map device obey him. He raged for the analytic powers of his destroyed fam at every wrong turn. He missed the ease of visual electromagnetic direction that came through the simplest of fams. He got lost and felt stupid. Once, when he was 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. From Rank Seven Psychohistorian of the Fellowship to this!
Slowly he learned his map reader’s idiosyncrasies, though he never did discover how to disable its enthusiastic tourist commentaries. The map proved to be primitive, but adequate. It didn’t draw through walls or play with three-dimensional 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.
With time on his hands and no hurry, he even came to enjoy the ebullient commentaries—too much of his life had been spent hurrying around the wealth of astonishments that lay all around 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 confreres 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 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 vividly remembered Rigone from his student days, 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 only the galaxy 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 favor in return.
But the man was so charismatic that Eron could not remember if he had only admired him from a distance or been his personal friend. Rigone’s magnitude of character erased the content in which it lived.
