Konn found that he was recording Nejirt’s measured speeches but was no longer listening to them.
The seriousness of the circumstances demanded that the Admiral choose his hunting dogs prudently. His standards were not going to permit Nejirt to become his trusted aide. Despair! Nejirt was the fifth promising student he’d had to reject. Whom could he rely on? Who was there to use in the field?
Perhaps he’d have to go outside of the Lyceum. Catch them young, like the navy did. There were a thousand academies out among the reaches, pretraining aspiring psychohistorians. Take some youths, early, and shape their outlook years before the conservatives got to them. An Admiral’s cadre! He grumbled at the unlikeliness of it. Maybe. Desperate times brought desperate measures.
Nejirt was a little upset, beginning to repeat himself in the way people will when they feel they no longer have an audience. Konn was a kind man; it was no use berating an acolyte for failing to meet high expectations. Use him for what he did well and let it go. Konn refocused. “Well, we’ve shaipened our wits on each other to the point where I’m very hungry. I know a place where we can sharpen our knives on roast pig. You haven’t said a word about your girlfriend yet. Last time you couldn’t stop talking about her. And when my belly is full you can clue me in on this Hasef-Im newfangle about which I know nothing.”
It was Nejirt’s sleep-watch and so he went home to bed after a pleasant dinner and stroll on the Balasante Concourse with his mentor, but it was prime-watch for Konn—he was only beginning his “day.” He chose the rigor of the hunt to cool down his brain but never really stopped thinking about his student. During the yapping of the dogs through his Club’s meticulously groomed hydroponic wilderness he took the time to think up a promising dead-end job for his protege—a job that needed to be executed with great competence but one that did not require more talent than Nejirt possessed. The thirty million star systems to be monitored had plenty of places for boys like Nejirt.
Thirty million was a comforting number. Those thirty million systems surely contained at least one hoy who could be molded into a master sleuth.
Konn’s favorite dog, big-eared and black-spotted, trotted up and rose to his haunches, two succulent gessem in his jaw, one with a broken wing. Using his long gengineered fingers he handed the fat, bald cave-flyers to his human before settling back on his knuckles. Konn bagged the birds, patting his assistant on the head, “Atta boy, Rhaver!” and began to unholster the beast’s stun gun. “ICanDoItMyself,” grumbled the dog in a throaty dog accent that only dog lovers can understand. Konn smiled. The dog understood the smile as permission to take over the unstrapping of his weapon. He struck a pose of importance.
It wasn’t impossible that someday Konn might hunt down
a boy instead of cave-flying gessem. He would train the boy to be his prize hunter, as he had trained Rhaver. How could he let the Lyceum continue to deliver him mere wolves? “Does hunting please you, Rhaver?” Rhaver thumped his tail against the ground and licked the bejeweled rings on his tree-climbing fingers before swirling around to try to catch the itch on his tail.
Ah, thought the psychohistorian, if only dogs had been bred for brains as well as for hunting prowess!
3
THE TWELVE-YEAR-OLD SON OF THE ADJUDICATOR, 14,790 GE
Agander developed in a difficult location nested between the roils of a messy nebular cloud and positioned off the natural interstellar trade routes. Socially it might have evolved into an eremitic world disjoint from the neighboring Ulmat stars, but its moderate climate and abundance of water formed an attractive haven that counterbalanced its isolation. For the first twenty-two thousand years after colonization Agander remained a free state, sure of its immunity from the flaws of the universe. As a paradise it was able to seduce the loyalty and lust and envy of the distant Ulmat peoples who claimed Agander as one of their own; as an island it was able to remain aloof from the “local" politics.
Nine millennia ago, abrupt change swept the Ulmat Constellation.
In5643 GE...
All our mathematical studies of Ganderian society have shown a stable Esfo-Naifin Quandary-Chain installed at the time of Agandefs unexpected and forced subjugation to the First Empire, characterized by a violated sense of invulnerability and expressed as an unwillingness to be vulnerable.
If we choose to exploit this Quandary-Chain, we can expect that within a century...
—Oversee Probe Search code Report Orange-4:
Possible Sites for a Forced Theac-Chaos Event
Dated Version: 14,642y/08m/37w/7h/78i
Author: CronCom
Twelve-year-old Eron Osa, being the son of the Adjudicator to the Ulman of Agander, was allowed the run of the Ul-man’s summer Alcazar, He used his privilege to engage the unwary in charming conversation that always had an ulterior motive. His spying he disguised with innocence. He wasn’t malicious: just curious about the love lives of his elders, the political relationships of Ganderians to the stars of the night sky, and, most important, curious about who among his peers were going to get sent to the best schools. He had never met a school he liked and had been expelled from more than a few, which was why his father had hired a private tutor.
On this bright day he sat in the entertainment room forcing an animated chat with four Hasani money smiths, none of whom would have spoken to a child had he been one of their own people. But they were newly arrived by starship on business with the Ulman’s Adjudicator and felt obliged to humor the man’s son. To remind themselves that he was a mere child, they made allusions to events which they “knew” could mean nothing to Eron. By deliberately talking over his head they felt less demeaned to be caught with a child, unaware that Eron had already collected critical pieces of a puzzle that no one was supposed to be able to fit together. He understood all that they said.
Why had a cut-rate hyperspace transport line suddenly constructed new berths at Agander’s hyperstation when Gan-derian policy had always been to semi-isolate their planet from the rest of the Ulmat and especially from the interstellar commerce that connected the Ulmat with the heartbeat of the Empire? For reasons of location, the operation couldn’t possibly be profitable. Eron Osa’s young mind had noted this curiosity long before he had connected it to his father.
He had been spying on his father for years, partly because his father was taciturnly unreadable, partly out of anger. He kept track of the old satyr’s love life but carefully never informed his mother because then his patriarch would find out about his spying and that would precipitate doomsday. He’d probably be packed up and sent off to Star’s End without an allowance.
Once, directly in the eye of Eron’s spy beam, his father had fought bitterly with Melinesa, his mistress, about sins a grown man should have outgrown, all to Eron’s hidden fascination, especially because she was nude. But when the father then stalked boorishly from her rooms, his uncontrolled anger had appalled Eron: he who carried a gun had no need of anger! Worse, his father’s stupid “honor” had not even allowed the man to grace himself with an apology. What a klutz! Without bothering to ask permission, Eron gleefully forged an eloquent plea for forgiveness in his father’s stead and delivered it at the darkest moonset, dropping the missive in between two buds of a strategically placed star-rosebush where Melinesa would be sure to find it on her morning’s walk. Then he skedaddled away on fast, silent feet. He had an adult (and very secret) flare for the romantic idiom.