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Still meditating, he muttered the call-words for the house genie to vanish the Capsule’s ashes and went out to the balcony to retrieve his sherbet glass with its spoon now embedded in greenish sludge. It hit him then, under the stars, the meaning of the retreat. Splendid Wisdom had noticed them. The time of jockeying for position under a cloak of invisibility was over. An unpredictable era of open battles had begun. That was to Scogil’s liking, but it was frightening, too. When one is weak, the optimal strategy is to strike from hiding so defdy that the enemy does not even realize he has been hit. Briefly he regretted that he was not theoretician enough to

‘anticipate the Pscholars’ next move. He was, by nature, a man of action, and he already knew his drive would take him to Splendid Wisdom itself. Whether he was ordered there or not, he would go—no matter how many years it took or how many roundabouts.

In his mind he was already there, at the blaze of the galactic center.

5

HYPERLORD KIKAJU JAMA

AS DETECTIVE, 14,790 GE

...so much for business, my dear Kikaju. I'm not sure anything will ever come of it other than prison, but we can hope. I'm looking forward to my return to Splendid Wisdom and the mellow light of Imperials which has shone for so many eons upon the heart of the Galaxy. For an archaeologist like myself, fieid trips are the blood of life—but civilization down in the warrens becomes wonderfully appealing after so many months of rough living with the winds of space a mere skin thickness away.

I'll close this letter with an anecdote which you may find amusing since it belies your favorite theory, which I have never subscribed to, that however domineering the Pscholars may be in their political actions, they are basically honest i have never been impressed by their integrity. People who are so determined about their secrets always, always, always have deeds to hide. A man who needs his secrets is telling the universe that he is vulnerable.

Remember last year at Canarim’s party when you were insisting that nowhere in the Archives of Splendid Wisdom was there evidence that Faraway, during the whole span of the Interregnum, had detected the existence of the monitoring Pscholars? Even you believe half of the Pschofars’ lies. Canarim had made, I thought, a convincing case that Faraway had once detected a Pscholar’s nest in their midst and destroyed it—about the time of the final Lakgan War, he surmised. You scoffed, claiming total lack of evidence and seeing only the mythological hand of rumor at work, laying its false trail. I had to remind you, rather rudely I’m afraid, that victors always rewrite history to conform to some self-important image of their merit. Secrecy, to the Pscholars, is a virtue. They do not want any of us to believe that anyone has ever penetrated their secrecy—or even that it can be penetrated.

But is that true? Isn't it poppycock to claim that Faraway's “faith" in the Founder's Plan was an essential ingredient of its success during the Interregnum? Would Faraway's populace really have lost their nerve and drive had they known that Pscholars were monitoring and “adjusting" their history whenever they strayed from the Great Plan of Galactic Revival? To assume that Faraway's scientists—all familiar with the concepts of stability and feedback—would not have suspected the Founder of setting up an apparatus to monitor and stabilize his Plan has always seemed absurdly naive to me. Well, the scientists of Faraway DID suspect—and tremble!

The Pscholars' power is everywhere and Faraway is but a shadow of its former self. Who has a greater ability to slant the past in their favor and hide from us what they do. not want us to know? But even the powerful cannot lie well enough to coordinate all the many bits and pieces of flotsam floating loosely around the universe. You will be interested in the enclosed copy of some flotsam which the Pscholars have not been able to “rewrite" since it was only recently found on a ghastly mummy-crewed Faraway shipwreck (deepspace), a disaster which the salvaged iog places subsequent to the final Lakgan war (circa the first century after the Sack). I was serendipitously allowed to examine the ship's (damaged) memory module since I am one of the few experts on Faraway naval codes of that era.

Most of the fragments concern log entries or ship's manifest-supplies for an unnamed prison camp—dull—but one title that begins in the middle of a sentence hints at disciplinary action against a crewman. He seems to have given minor but unauthorized aid to a prisoner belonging to a group of “subversives" known as “the Fifty," identified openly as psychohistorians unmasked by a Faraway anti-espionage team. These “traitors" were evidently shipped in secrecy to a planet called Zural to be exiled or executed.

It is thus plain that the Faraway government of the time was aware of and very afraid of psychohistorical manipulations. The dates are... My star charts do not contain a planet or system under the Zural cognomen. Zural does not appear when I run correlations going back as far as the exploration of the Nacreome Periphery by the I.S.B. Strange11 will not be brave enough to publish the item, at least not until I find out why this piece of history has so conveniently “vanished" from our Splendid Archives. You may wish to pursue the matter discreetly—l know of your interest in such curiosities, i am attaching the relevant parts of the log, scanty though they be. if you ever locate the whereabouts of this “Zural" inform me.

with a joyous "So there!" I am yours faithfully igar

P.S. As a "bribe" to Insure my dedicated efforts on their behalf the salvagers included in my "pay" a bejeweled jade egg found with the captain’s effects. It is of no use to me or to my line of research so I am sending it on by devious:means since you seem to be able to profit from such baubles out of the past. It is not necessary—but if you do manage to sell this stone, I could use the twenty percent finder’s commission. It is pretty and should be worth something to the sort of clientèle you serve.

—Excerpt from a Capsule by Igar Gomoras to Hyperlord Kikaju Jama

 

The Hyperlords of the First Empire had, since an Order of Council in 6654 GE, been political procurators who controlled the military men of the navy for Imperialis. As comfortable in court as among the stellar intrigues of competing provinces, they had been willing and able to deploy force, even battleships, against the enemies of the Court when reason and protocol failed. But Hyperlord Kikaju Jama could no more imagine the open power that they had wielded than they could have imagined the labyrinthine shadow schemings of his Second Empire mind.

Hyperlord Kikaju Jama was a Lord in name alone, anointed by a feverish grandmother who was in love with old genealogical records. He lived invisibly among the masses in a world orchestrated by a coterie of psychologists who ruled the vastness of their empire not with battleships but with feathery leverings upon mathematically determined critical events. Jama dreamed of power but spent most of his life pretending to powers he did not have. He knew he was a blath-erer, but that amused him—who would suspect a pompous fop to wield real power? Supercilious fools never drew the kind of attention that was dangerous to life and limb!