Выбрать главу

52

FINALE, 14,810 GE

TAMIC SMYTHOS:... born 351 Founder’s Era... no childhood record until 366 FE when he was brought to the Splendid Lyceum by his Scav godfather with a self-taught mathematics talent... not an outstanding student... volunteered for the group of fifty martyrs, 374 FE, during the rectorship of... transported to... captured in 377 FE at the end of the Lakganian War during the deception arranged by... escaped massacre of the seven at... sterilized and interned on Zural with the surviving 43 martyrs by the edict of... Tamic Smythos spent his prison years on Zural, where the stars were thin and the hyperships infrequent, reconstructing in secret the Founder’s Prime Radiant as an act of defiance... false death certificate in 386 FE... smuggled off Zural for predictive work by corrupt Chancellor Linus, 386 FE, who sought advantages in owning the only psychohistorian... disappeared... no record until 406 FE when he settled on Horan of the Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift to take up mechanical engineering... In later life he joined (or founded) the colony at... had no children or family or close friends...refused to teach...morbid recluse...His extensive hoard of psychohistorical memorabilia and personal writings, including a diatribe against the organizers of the martyrdom, was only discovered long after his death in a tailor’s warehouse...

—Quick File of Galactic Biographies, 1898th Revised Edition

 

The eight-chambered apartment that the new Lord and Rector of the Galaxy provided for the house arrest of Osa-Scogil and his Frightfulperson was a paradigm of luxury. In one of those touches of irony that the Admiral loved, it was the ex-residence of First Rank Jars Hanis. As his lieutenant Nejirt Kambu wryly put it, “This was the only prison we could find on short notice that had all the proper security features required to hold recidivist criminals/’

The apartment might well have served as the tomb for a 784th Dynasty Rithian pharaoh, excepting perhaps the improbable dispozoria decorated with a goldsmith’s abstract Foawan birds and equipped with such items as a penis holder and shaker for urination. Every article needed for a comfortable afterlife had been provided, including toy-size artificial servants fit for a pharaoh. Hanis’ private mnemoni-fiers dominated their own special room, the machines paneled in bas-relief scenes depicting marshland reeds and grass done in gold foil and platinum and ceramic alloy, replete with extinct Rithian ducks and herons and geese and pterosaurs and various other flying beasts whose galactic origin Osa-Scogil could not identify. All devices were disconnected from the world of the living.

They were not being allowed either news of, or contact with, the mortal sphere.

Eron cased the mansion room by room for possible escape scenes, even the domed roof of the spiral staircase, while Scogil advised caution and grumbled that their predicament was the price Eron was paying for incomplete planning and let’s not have more of the same. Communication between ghoul and host improved hourly as a mutual mathematical ingenuity invented more efficient protocols. There was no way around using words, but they had managed to up the word rate to a hundred times normal verbal speed. It made heated arguing easier.

With Eron’s help Scogil had learned to see at about the level of a five-month-old child and, keen for more meaning in his images, kept insisting that Eron touch everything he saw and hinting that putting things in his mouth would add to the useful data. With Scogil’s help, Eron’s limited (defammed) vocabulary was being added to at about the rate of ten thousand words per watch.

‘This wall is hollow,” said Eron, after slapping the location where the air-conditioning ducts must be passing through.

Forget it! Well have to con our way out of this one.

Under such conditions of isolation it was a major event when Magda arrived with a porter and a package of Eron’s old possessions which the Admiral had slyly salvaged from the general destruction of Osa’s records during the time of his trial. Included was his carved and inlaid Rithian skull. “Ah, my friend Yorick” He was strongly touched by Hahukum’s thoughtfulness. He's fattening us up for the slaughter was Scogil’s cautionary comment.

“When is the Admiral coming for dinner?”

Magda merely smiled and went off to prepare her best supper. Eron hadn’t seen her since leaving Konn to work with Hanis, and he was saddened to note that she now wore stylish inertial bracelets around her wrists which had the function of actively damping the tremor in her hands. She could no longer play the violin. Probably she would only last a few more years—the victim of a fatalistic Rithian culture that accepted as natural a random assassination lottery for ridding its gene pool of accumulated mutations, believing, perhaps, that it was Destiny’s will to let kind atheists pick up the pieces. The Admiral was, as always, a contradiction.

Otaria, starved for company and news, invited Magda to stay for supper, but she gracefully declined. It was against orders. When they tried to steal tidbits of news from her, she confined herself to small talk. “Will you let me see the rest of your apartment? It’s fabulous.” Then she shook her head. “But it’s too full for me.” When asked again about the Admiral, Magda offered only an incomprehensible Rithian idiom about men who danced with horses. Then she was gone. The Rector’s personal search agent supplied unhelpful translations of her oblique idiom: (1) cavalry, (2) the circus, (3) when horses dance the polka under a blue moon, (4) good time partying by bovine farmhands.

All the while Scogil’s ghoul kept up a worried dialogue about his daughter. Had she safely escaped Splendid Wisdom? What might have gone wrong? Eron didn’t have heart to tell him that she was certainly still here, probably writing and distributing mischief to underground rumor mills claiming inside knowledge of multiple (and mythical) groups of psychohistorians plotting against the government. It had been her idea of what to do in case her father failed to return from the masked ball; Eron had humored her by working out a psychomathematical diffusion estimate for the spread of such colorful stories, showing her the design parameters needed if they were to be passed by word of mouth with a high mutation factor and a ridiculous longevity. He hadn’t known then that Jars Hanis would be arrested in a coup d’etat That by itself would amplify the diffusion rate of such rumors by a factor of ten.

Specialists from the office of Cal Bama came to question, but these polite interrogators pressed no topic the two did not wish to pursue. In counterpoint Nejirt Kambu arrived late in every third or sixth watch but did not question. He always began his visit by offered Konn’s apology for not making an appearance due to the press of “political events.” Philosophical probing seemed to be Kambu’s main pursuit He was witty, if conservative, and Otaria took pleasure in needling him. Eron was frustrated by their discussions. Nejirt was one of these men of great integrity who believed firmly in his duty as a member of the elite to give good government but a blockhead on the subject of the right of vassals of the Empire to negotiate their own future. He genuinely believed that a man untrained in psychohistory was a danger to himself and needed benevolent guidance la Galileo.

These debates left no doubt that Nejirt Kambu was a brilliant Pscholar of the breed who knew how to modify futures to fit a plan. When on the theme of directed change, he lost his conservative veneer and became a wild player who had mastered all the tricks of discreet historical manipulation. It was also obvious that he had been shaken by the appearance of astrological galactaria with a seventh layer that contained an unauthorized compendium of the Founder’s lifework. At one point he tried to draw out Scogil’s comment by mentioning that a task force, escorted by the navy, had been sent to investigate the Coron’s Wisp Pentad.