He stood in front of the mirrored sanitor of his opulent dressing room, washing and perfuming his robo-illuminated genitals, while contemplating the difficulty of obtaining spare parts for antiques, an issue that every antique dealer always had to confront from time to time. Ah ordinary antique with an authenticated template was never a problem— if it malfunctioned, junk it and manufacture a new one. But those rare items of such delicate detail that they could not be duplicated in a manufacturum always posed a problem when they failed—such as, for instance, this jade egg that his friend Comoras had so naively posted to him and that had only arrived ten watches ago.
He had thought of nothing else for the last million jiffs ticked out by his antique clocks.
How could old meticulous Igar, an archaeologist specializing in the Interregnum, have mistaken it for mere polished, diamond-studded jade? But, alas, there was always too much to know, and Igar, after all, was a bit-master whose expertise was documents rather than knowledge of artifacts. Even Jama, himself, might not have recognized its true nature except that a customer had tried to buy one from him years ago. His fam never forgot an item that people had actually sought from him.
Since Igar’s Personal Capsule of the month past, Jama had been frantically racking his fam for ways to locate the purported Zuml’s coordinates. To be able to catch the Pscholars in a lie of repression! Indeed, there was no trace of a Zural in the Splendid Stellar Archives—a prolonged trawl, carefully hidden within a round of routine “antique authentications,” had come up empty.
Then, after abandoning this net of dead ends, came the ironical miracle right out of Space! Innocently he had opened up the package to examine the latest from his mad archaeologist friend, anticipating nothing, expecting only an amusing bauble, a jade egg of dubious value. After all, this was the man with whom he had conducted an irregular but profitable trade in contraband Interregnum items. Under the room’s dutiful gaze-following eyelight, his fingers undid the delicate wrap of “smuggler’s cloak,” revealing an ovoid whose surface was intricately etched and seemed to be embedded with fine diamonds.
Great Founder!
The shock of instant recognition assaulted his eyes, the eyelight dimming as his pupils enlarged. He knew this item, legendary among a tiny group of specialized antique dealers. Only a few of them had ever appeared in the catalogs and almost none ever came up for sale at any price. Could the awesome computing power of a galactarium really be locked in a green stone so small? It looked like just another gewgaw that could be made at whim in any simple manufac-turum. But he knew its innards remained too intricate to be recorded by even the best of template scanning technologies, an antique dealer’s dream. A galactarium. A galactarium which had been on a ship that had actually orbited Zural. What treasure might its charts reveal?
Extracting stellar coordinates from the device proved not as easy as unwrapping Igar’s stealthy package; it took him five wakeful watches to decipher the controls and then, alas, when activated, the ancient galactarium threw off a shower of stars, fizzed, and died. Perhaps the malfunction wasn’t serious—he suspected that his ovoid needed only a replacement of its atomo-unit—the original Faraway atomos had a reputation for failing after as little as a decade of continuous operation. Such failures were unavoidable at their micro-operational temperature. This one had gone out in typical atomo failure mode. But the breakdown might be only the beginning of trouble. Was the rest of the circuitry still functioning? He dared to hope.
Sheltered as it had been inside a dead spaceship at deep-space temperatures for 2300-plus years, the prognosis was good. Cosmic ray damage couldn’t have been that great considering the reputation of early Faraway engineers for six-dimensional connection-space redundancy—to say nothing of the reputation for quantum device self-repair agents active down to four degrees absolute. It was simple logic to check the atomics first—but finding a proper atomo replacement meant frustrating delays while rummaging at antique conventions and laboriously traveling through Splendid Wisdom’s maze of prefectures just to get to the gatherings. This was a seriously obsolete part! No ordinary manufacturum was licensed (or precision coded) to build atomic power stations that could be cradled in the cup of a tablespoon!
Still, he was confident that the anticipated Zural data resided in this antique, since the galactarium had been in use by a Faraway trader of the 125th century GE—before Zural had achieved “special” status...and then (I) fortuitously lost to all possible after-the-fact historical revision. There was no way a Pscholar could have tampered with its database. It was only a toy with memory for a mere ten billion stars, but a Faraway toy of the right century would hardly neglect the coordinates of even trivial stars within Faraway’s then sphere of influence.
Ah, the bother he was going to have to go through for a nonstandard atomo power thumb! As he rolled his eyes, the room’s eyelight—tuned to illuminate whatever caught its master’s attention—arced madly in sympathy. Before he could complete this gesture of exasperation the swinging eyelight caught a misplaced pink mopcap tossed up there on the outstretched arms of a blue-eyed doll. She was perched on her tiny balcony set into the high wall. That’s what he would wear! The mopcap’s fat scales of velvet were a perfect match for the rest of his intended outfit.
Off on the antique circuit again! There was no help for it. He selected his blatant clothes from the rotating wardrobe rack, slightly out of style as befitted an antique dealer, a jacket with bells along the seams and tight striped pants, then a proper light-purple wig with topknot and matching fingernails. The mopcap, of course. His most difficult decision was an ear perfume to match the fragrance of his genitals. Even when one went out among the masses in search of atomo-units, one had to be ready to make foil with the female sex.
The eyes of three of his antique dolls, each from a different millennium, each from its own petite balcony, followed the Hyperlord as he stepped out of his dressing room. He paused for stage effect, practicing on the dolls. Ever in synchrony with his gaze, the auroral eyelight lingered on his miniature garden, flew across angular and pearly walls, touched a desk, shot down a hall. For a moment its soft beam settled on the hand-size jade ovoid sitting in the goldenlegged cup which the Hyperlord had chosen for its nest.
He took the object in his hand. Kikaju had no manual but he was an antique dealer used to making do without instructions. He fiddled and poked with a prior knowledge of Faraway’s early Interregnum devices, and finally the little atomo-unit was revealed. Stuck, though. He whacked it out against the palm of his hand and peered at its shape in the eyelight. It was not of the same quality as the galactarium— different suppliers. The galactarium itself was an oddity— not the sort of practical thing one associated with the early generations of Faraway Traders. Perhaps it was a gift for a daughter or mistress, a one-of-a-kind crafted for a very rich trader. Who would ever know? The truth lay buried in the sedimentary layers of time. He held a fossil, preserved but stripped of its story.
Where were all the stories? There was an old song, “Gone to flowers, every one!”
Mankind’s potentates lay sandwiched within layers eighty thousand or more years thick: the Splendid Imperial Mausoleums set in the sedimentary crown, themselves perched atop rich layers of pre-imperial expansion that all but buried the sparse gravemounds of the first mysterious subluminal migrations in the Sirius Sector—silent potentates all the way down to the basement strata of tombs holding the mummified lives and riches of the post-simian despots of old Rith and Alphacen and Isua whose monuments were themselves raised upon the unmarked mass graves of luckless opponents. Who was left to tell the stories of the rings still wrapping those anonymous finger bones? Kikaju Jama liked to think of himself as an appreciative grave robber.