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In the layers of history far above the Eta Cumingan inven-don of the hyperdrive, expatriate mercenaries, having lost their war and commander, elected a young Kambal to extract their remnants from disaster. He chose a safe refuge in an increasingly competitive galactic core without knowing that he was laying the foundation for the First Galactic Empire. He only knew he was seizing a pacifist—and undefended—Splendid Wisdom because it was weak. Jama owned a prize comb from that Kambal Dynasty court, but who knew its maker or its wearer? The piratical Frightful-people who followed the Kambals and built a planetopolis to rule their stellar suzerainty had themselves been crushed beneath their monolithic architecture and pipe-tunnel mazes by the teeming bureaucratic culture that rose to power on top of them. Another layer. Other titles.

Give the invincible Hyperlords a couple of meters in the landfill for their bones and their seals of power. Titles. Fossil titles cluttered the stratified detritus of the Imperialis tradition, each reflecting a single transient moment on the galactic stage, some still remembered by pretenders like Jama, others lost and forgotten. The Sack of Splendid Wisdom was the dividing layer between modem and ancient history. But even the formidable Faraway Traders of recent origin were gone, their stories with them. Who would ever know the stories that this miraculous ovoid might tell?

Kikaju Jama had a moment of glee. All that remained of the eighty millennia of humanity’s grandeur was Jama’s grubby little antique trade!

He gave his lofty ancestors only these most casual passing thoughts. The distant power of once-mighty Hyperlords was too remote for him to envy. Kikaju Jama was passionately nostalgic for a much later time in history when complacency had taken the whole of civilization into the darkness of the (by now only dimly remembered) Black Interregnum. What thrills! What glory!

From a quiet domination by avaricious men who swarmed around the star called Imperialis, the whole Galaxy had fallen into chaos, war, collapse, massive die-offs, extinction, defeasance—fertilizing, alas only temporarily, a wonderful era of anarchic inventiveness. Who else could have, produced this exquisite ovoid of magical power? It had been a fabulous millennium! Kikaju dreamed of a new and better interregnum, the thirty thousand years of turbulence that the Founder had promised and taken away, chaos that might still drive mankind to new highs and new depths.

Who were these fifty Fellowship psychohistorians who had been transported to Zural in a Faraway ship that later vanished in deepspace? Why had they been written out of history by their own brothers, the Founder’s sons who spent a millennium at lethal infighting over dominance of the Galaxy? Intrigue lay out there on the Periphery where once had shone the greatest power of the Galaxy’s darkest night! A stab of thrill! He could sense another of his antique expeditions coming on. When the star-spanning Pscholars lied, wasn’t Igar right? Weren’t they exposing a weakness? In time, might not the sum of their weaknesses be used against them? It was a pointing compass! To the source!

And...if, while skulking about, he could scrounge up some articles for sale, so much the better for a poor working-class nobleman!

The mobile eyes of dolls farther along the hallway watched from their niches as Jama strutted up to the central drop-in with its recessed recliners and domed ceiling entrance. He finger-snapped. His telesphere bloomed dutifully in midair beside him, poised for service. He must get his galactarium repaired.

“Activate weasel,” he told the telesphere. ‘Tull security. Retrieval ability but no traceback. Repeat, no traceback.” The absence of Zural in the archives was a sure clue that Zural was a delicate subject connected to who-knew-what conspiracy of silence.

The Hyperlord was paranoid enough about his activities to use an expensive commercial trolling utility with full security capabilities. Less security was quicker, but he never used such degraded “shorts.” His probing weasel would be cleverly constructed. There would be no way to identify its source for its quantum nature was such that any attempt to follow a reply back to the source would erase the weasel before it was received.

“Touch active antique sites” he commanded in a subdued murmur. “Restrict to Splendid Wisdom.” With that command he was supplying his weasel with an address list. He decided the list was broader than necessary. “Review.”

Notices of current ateliers, fairs, conferences flashed inside the telesphere—fading if he showed indifference, expanding into graphical glory if he showed a flicker of heed. Of course, there were too many. With tiny gestures of his fingers he restricted the scan to cover the antiques of the Interregnum and then again, impafiendy, gave priority to the most convenient of the locations within an easy eight-watch travel range. In case that wasn’t enough, he supplied discretionary parameters so that the weasel might make its own decisions, even if it had to go off planet.

The weasel would touch and leave most sites without a trace. It had enough intelligence to match site to query, send back a scouting report if an item caught its attention, or wait for a reply, if appropriate, while continuing its search elsewhere. The query was keyed to find people who repaired specific kinds of early Faraway antiques. To make the weasel’s task less daunting, he gave it a date bracket to work within, covering the galactarium’s probable active life span as well as other parameters that listed the galactarium’s attributes.

“Send.”

Then he left to see if the cuisinator could whop up an egg sandwich without soaking the bread. Damn machine. Perhaps he should try a new bread recipe. Such a bother. One of these months he was going to buy an intelligent cuisinator that made meals on time without being told what to prepare. Sit down and eat. That’s the way Hyperlords used to do it!

When, munching his soggy sandwich, he returned to the telesphere, its surface was already flashing with a scout report, an advertisement. The address given was that of some culture-forsaken conurbation up north called the Kirin Sovereignty. The place seemed to have met all of his requirements.

FARAWAY MECHANICS

How did the magicians of the periphery do it?

Any Faraway device dissected, understood.

Study the laws of scaling.

Private workshop.

The trillion denizens of Splendid Wisdom were, relegated to hundreds of thousands of arrondissements, precincts, domains, jurisdictions—scattered through the depths and beneath the leafy rooftops, taking in tunneled rock, winding through the towers that rose over drained seabeds, and gerrymandered across the choice locations of mountain ranges whose height gave the rich an awesome view of the parks atop their plastic-metal planet. No man had memory enough for it all. Kirin? Never heard of it. It wasn’t even in his fam. But locationwise it was close enough.

His telesphere provided him with geopolitical and geographical overviews of the district. Jama deduced that Faraway Mechanics, full as it might be of enthusiasm, was probably not a wealthy group—the Kirin Sovereignty was constructed along the cleft of an old subduction zone and would therefore be a low-rent warren. He booked his rooms accordingly, in a monastery—he was, after all, not a wealthy antique dealer; he had to pay for his ostentation with discreet savings where he could.

In case Faraway Mechanics might fail him, he waited for his weasel to work up a series of secondary destinations. He picked and chose, ran a program to optimize travel time, storing the itinerary in his fam, then called up the tourmaps he might need. Without a tourmap to overlay labels, outlines, and directions upon one’s vision, at demand, a traveler was lost.