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This hallowed ground, in the middle of the True City, was thought to be too sacred to build upon. Few Ganderians could agree on the reasons. Kapor wasn’t the type even to ask but Scogil liked to keep his mind busy by fitting every curious detail of this culture into its psychohistorical context. After all, he was a trained Smythosian even if he had been drafted for less demanding fieldwork because he hadn’t qualified as a theoretician.

Over the years he must have walked through this park a hundred times but he had never been able to learn much about its antiquity. A surreptitious dig-and-dating had allowed him to place the catastrophe nine thousand years ago, at a time when the First Empire had already spread itself across half the Galaxy, a date in good agreement with the results of the Esfo-Naifin cultural analysis. Didn’t that date place the Conquest near the great campaigns of Emperor Daigin-the-Jaw? Some drastic shock of confidence—it can't happen here— had been dealt to Agander’s pride by their defeat.

By now normal dispersion and immigration should have weakened the reverberations to a whisper below the noise level, but not here. Agander’s high isolation index seemed to dominate the important equations. Ganderian culture had been frozen in time at a moment of profound loss.

The associated tales of the trauma were conflicting, depending upon the source. Some of the stories couldn’t be true or were bits and pieces of events that had happened thousands of years apart. Agander’s historians cared little for the truth. Plot and drama and feeling were everything. After centuries of polishing and retelling, a rousing tale took on the patina of truth and was believed—even when the final story was obviously crafted out of boldly contradictory materials. Such mutable legends continuously found ways to garrison this culture’s mental fortress with the archetypical recalcitrance that so served the ends of the Oversee.

Scogil had often vowed that starting early some prime-watch he would delve into more reliable sources for details of the old battles. Perhaps a scholar would have to journey to the very hub of the great galactic arms, there rooting among the archives in the catacombs of Splendid Wisdom. But had the relevant records survived the Great Sack? Splendid Wisdom was itself a cauldron of deceptive myth. Who could take seriously the wild stories that were told of that world?

Here the thunderous sagas of Agander spoke their poetry of an attacking swarm of Imperials ...of heroic battles... of long sieges... of a rear guard suicidal stand... of defiant resistance to the interstellar armies of the First Empire...of ghosts who still whispered their valorous tales to children. The real story was probably simpler—a minor fleet carrying the insignia of the Stars&Ship dispatched against Agander as a local mop-up operation during the pacification of the Ulmat... a command center bombarded from space by a single battleship... perhaps fifty inamins of ferocity... massacre. Time had obliterated the facts.

Now—nine thousand years after—Immortal ferns and tall pyre-trees reigned over just another one of mankind’s lost graveyards. Sunbeams leaked through the mantle of leaves like swords of light dipped in respect to the gravestones. Irony. Who had been the winners? Even the First Empire was long dead, its ghost emperors raised to the godhood of myth.

On passing out of the bloom of the pyre-woods Hiranimus Scogil wandered downhill through tall grasses, attracted by a distant fast-paced melody. The music radiated from the park’s sunken arena. Down there the ruins weren’t associated with Empire—this was a more youthful site than the higher slopes—the tiered arena dated from the Interregnum when Agander, briefly, had answered to no Empire.

Scogil selected an upper perch atop the stone steps that served as seats, an audience of one, watching the young rousters practice their act On Agander nearly everyone was a musician. They tended to insist on building their own harmony backpacks, or on molding their own string violers from resin recipes transmitted by family ritual, or on strumming some heirloom visi-harmonar. Even a distrusted far-man was welcome to listen to their ancient music—from some outer echelon.

Ah, how natural it was, ears cocked to mellow sounds at twilight’s approach. Tempting. A man of Kapor’s disposition might, in fact, have chosen to settle here in this galactic no place. Many had. Agander wasn’t the most powerful world of the Ulmat Constellation—but it was the most pleasant.

His tutor’s salary was good; Squire Osa was a fair if distant patron; the weather (for an open atmosphere) was invigorating—and Agander’s strange inbred ways held enough riches to fascinate a man for a whole lifetime. Even Hiranimus was fascinated.

But he didn’t approve of the man he was becoming who wasted his time being mesmerized by musicians while the newer Second Empire slithered its lines of force around ever more distant stars. This time there were no armadas to oppose. The Pax Pscholaris was enforced by psychohistory, and to contravene its power one had to be a cleverly placed mathematician. Why had he allowed-himself to opt for this damned slow-paced assignment? Why was he letting the languid persona of Kapor rot his soul? There were worlds to conquer!

Yet the music was good, and how gaily the musicians jigged while they played down there! Why was it that watching joy could make a man so sad.and separate? He was-too far above the stage for them to see his weepy eyes. How melancholy to be a soldier on the peaceful fringes of a roiling civilization. Could he really give up the battle that was developing beyond the star-clouds to settle in this quiet utopia? The Ganderians didn’t really like farmen—that was the rub—and that in itself was a good enough reason not to make a home on Agander, a good enough reason to hate the place—if one valued a sense of belonging.

But, of course, that was why he was here.

The Ganderian cultural distinctness, by the laws of psychohistory, made this world a fertile breeding field for sedition. Its people, unique among the systems of the Uhnat, had always refused to perceive themselves as a part of any Imperium—while at the same time, for century after century of contradiction, producing far more than their normal share of galactic functionaries. To escape assimilation one may imitate the strongest group in sight while at the same time despising them. Fecund soil indeed. Any seed of sedition, drifting in from space, needed only to root and adopt the patience of a Kapor.

With twilight the mood turned—from playing, to ram-bunction and, from harmony, to the chatter of gossip. Hiran-imus ambled down the steps and sauntered in among the performers while they packed their instruments. He was always willing to make affable conversation with these Gan-derians even though they always seemed to change the subject when he intruded. It didn’t matter. In time one got used to the way a Ganderian distanced himself. They might not be at ease with a farman but they were always polite. It was enough—if, like Kapor, one had been conditioned not to need friends.

The red-haired violist took the least trouble to fake her politeness. While she smiled thinly and joked with him about the weather, she touched the light weapon in her built-in jacket holster, a silent signal of contempt for a man she believed would not bear arms because he had already capitulated. Murek Kapor, well rehearsed, disarmed the hostility by not being offended. But Scogil, watching his own act, was surprised that he was actually feeling what this artifact, Murek, was designed to feel—aloofness. He really didn’t care. The hostility really didn’t matter. Space and Damnation, he wasn’t even acting anymore!

Unable to attract a companion from the musicians, he broke off by himself, working his way farther down the slope. There the park abutted the city. He hopped on the slithering ridepath toward his tower. Four years was surely too long a time to live someone else’s life. Kapor had been designed to wear the subtle persona of a loyal citizen of the Second Empire: would the erosion continue until Scogil woke up at the end of a nondescript sleep-watch, his loyalties reversed, worshiping in awe the distant oligarchy? Was he destined to become Murek Kapor, while the passionate rebel faded into an artificial existence? He smiled as the ridepath carried him along willy-nilly. A man forever without close company began to talk sophistry to himself!