During jagged moments when he felt alienated by his aloneness, he found it easy to blame his sour mood on the haughtiness of every Ganderian who had ever snubbed a far-man; it was still too painful for a man as young as Scogil to concede that a secret life of sedition might create its own alienation.
He owned an apartment inside the walls of the Black Tower, To discourage unwanted visitors, there were neither corridors, nor lobby, nor levitator. At the receiver in the tower’s gate, a sleek bodyform enveloped him, zipping him through passageways he never saw and then up into the patio of his studio habitat where it unfolded to release him, then vanished, leaving him to a farman’s privacy.
He was expected—by the machines. Already his cuisinator had prepared him an excellent meal. He smelled the bay leaf that was said to be of old Rith though its tree seemed to be native to fourteen other worlds—a smell which meant stew. The fonepad was blinking with a call. When decoded by his fam, it turned out to be a frantic plea from his youthfully impetuous student who could never understand why he didn’t just attach a phone to his fam so that he could be of service when he was needed. Father trouble again.
Scogil smiled as he ladled out meat and vegetables in thick brown sauce. These family crises of galactic proportions! Such was life! Scogil’s duties often called for him to be an advisor and confidant as well as mathematician. No matter—that boy was the best part of his job, even if... He sighed. First, food for his stomach!
He ate while he assembled from his archives the next lesson for young Eron Osa. Hiranimus Scogil tended to make his students sweat intellectually before pandering to their lesser needs. With layered merges he constructed a trap—a mathematical problem that could be solved only painfully within Eron’s range of knowledge—but could be solved quickly by means yet unknown to Eron. Would the boy plunge ahead, trying eagerly to conquer the morass of computation by brute force? Or was he ready to be wary of Scogil’s traps? Think first, pounce later. It was never simple to teach reason to an energetic child who already “knew” the answer before he got there.
What was he to do about the boy’s war with his father? Should he call now with soothing words or let the kid fry in his socket until morning? Thoughtfully Scogil carried his sherbet out onto the black marble balcony. There were several things he could try—but the unhurried personality of Murek Kapor took over his thoughts. He dabbled with the simple pleasure of small spoonfuls of the tasty ice and relaxed as the soft sun descended between mountain clefts in a splash of reds and yellows. Enjoy the sunset. Scogil tried to fret but Murek knew Eron would survive at least until dusk.
As he watched, the stars of the Ulmat began to appear in the sky along the eastern horizon, some sharp, some dimmed by the local interstellar clouds. The brightest constellation in the sky was the nebular blaze of eleven protosuns whose disks provided the Ulmat with its wealth. Then, as the sky grew darker, the stars of the Second Empire began to overwhelm the heavens from the boundary of the clouds all the way up to the blazing zenith.
Few such sacred moments ever went uninterrupted...
With an unobtrusive whisper, the fam at the base of his neck began to alert him to a second message of far higher priority than the tantrums of a mere student: a Personal Capsule, coded for Murek Kapor, had just arrived for him back in his studio.
He sighed. The part of him that was Kapor was disinclined to move. It was a slow planet; he was content to let the message wait, at least until the last of the stars were out and the night breeze was drifting through the towers. But Scogil was restless. It could only be instructions from the stars. He was starved for contact Scogil forcefully overrode his Kapor and set his sherbet glass under the chair. Deliberately he got up and took himself inside.
In the communication’s alcove his hand fetched the iridescent sphere from the velvet robogrip of the transporter, holding it between four fingertips and thumb in front of his face. He was both excited to be receiving a Capsule and annoyed at the sender, not because a Capsule’s contents might be intercepted, but because the reception of a Personal Capsule from beyond the Ulmat left a man of his station conspicuous—ripe for rumor in a culture pathologically willing to invent rumors about farmen. Why would a mere tutor of the son of a minor flunky of the Ulman of the Ulmat be conniving with who-knew-what? His role was to remain invisible.
The Capsule, by tasting his fingertips, checked the key gene sequences set into its address record-—status: true. It took an infrared scan of the flow pattern of blood in his face—status: true. Was he alive?—status: true. It gave itself permission to deliver its coded message.
The communique was accepted directly by the fam leeched to the spinal cord at the base of Hiranimus Scogils skull. It was decoded, then fed directly into Scogils brain via a linked tuned probe. He stood there, stunned. First was a command sequence that released him from his Murek Kapor construct. He felt no immediate difference—but he was free, he was himself again. Second came a promotion in rank. Only then was he told that the whole offensive in the Ulmat Constellation was being terminated. One hundred and fifty years of effort aborted! His four years here had come to naught!
No reply to the Capsule was possible. It carried no source. It could have come from anywhere in the Galaxy—probably from a nearby ship that had since jumped to a new location. For a moment of desperation Scogil thought about what he could salvage of the operation—and his fam automatically began to review the whole of the works-in-progress. He canceled the scan. It was too late. The seditionist cells grafted into the fabric of the Ulmat by the Oversee were by now already scattered. Even the Agander contingent had lifted off-planet twenty watches ago—he was now the senior man of a rear guard. It galled him that the bulk .of the departure had been completed without his knowledge—but that’s the way it was in a covert operation. The less you knew that didn’t concern you directly, the better.
But why such a sudden retreat now? Futile to ask himself;
he wasn’t going to be able to answer such a question; he had neither the relevant psychohistorical equations nor the input data-matrix. His duty was to act; later perhaps he could find answers to his questions.
Foremost, he had to arrange for a smooth departure of the remaining technical support groups. The Oversee couldn’t instantly remove all units of its invisible army without creating discontinuities that might attract the attention of the Pscholars. What grew unobtrusively in place tended to go unnoticed—but the sudden vanishing of a large landmark might generate a curious ripple of transients. The ubiquitous agents of Splendid Wisdom had the minds of frogs: they weren’t able to see a sitting fly, but they swiftly lapped up bugs dumb enough to flit across their visual background.
With the crumbling Capsule still in his hand he began to plot a course of action—and his fam took up the suggestions and began to flesh out the details and to compute psychohistorical probabilities on the alternatives. It was going to take him at least 120 to 140 watches before he could find his own excuse to leave Agander. In the meantime... He made a few calls. He set up the beginnings of a bankruptcy and sale. He canceled a publishing contract and accelerated the printing of another document to the public archives. He enjoyed being the swiftly decisive Scogil again. Kapor, thank Space, was now inactive—except as a passport name.