“I am an ambassador.” The crazy Admiral always tickled the sass in Eron. “I’ve come here to the Prime Residence of
Splendid Wisdom to accept the surrender of the Second Empire.” Scogil would blanch at that, if he still had a body. It was the kind of cheek that had caused Eron to be thrown out of all of Agander’s best schools, forcing his father to hire a tutor—and, finally, to be defammed and thrown out of Splendid Wisdom’s Lyceum in disgrace.
A startled Konn blinked for a moment before recovering. “Surrender, is it? Unfortunately I’ve not brought my sword.” He grinned and grumbled. “I believe there will be another hundred years of hard war before we get to the point of a surrender. Youth equals impatience.” By war Eron knew he meant psychohistorical corrective action. Though Konn built intricate scale models of the immense First Empire dreadnoughts of the old Grand Fleet, to win battles he never ordered into combat even the lightest of the Second Empire’s hypercruisers. He wielded more power than any First Empire admiral could have hoped to amass. And now, as Rector, he also commanded all of Hanis’ legions.
“You’re planning a hundred years of war?” In Rithian history the Hundred Year War was the name for that awful period of seesaw conflict where every death or assassination of a nobleman gave rise to a claim on his land by various distant relatives who had at their disposal an army willing to travel and loot. Female generals were burned at the stake when captured. “You’ll lose that way,” said Eron. “Sometimes it is better to begin polite talks a century before a major defeat. But you have to be able to see that far.”
Konn appraised Eron’s face. “You’re serious. You would actually negotiate with renegade psychohistorians! You know the equations! There has to be a central predictor. All else is chaos. Civilization will collapse.”
“Only when your strategy is governed by inferior mathematics,” rejoined Eron.
“Ha! Irresponsible youth! Arrogant! Driving without an autopilot! Sniffing the vacuum because papa said it was dangerous!” The Admiral reached into his briefcase and pulled out a heavy volume, printed on cellomet with a utility cover that was an active index, which he then slammed on the table. “I suppose you mean this! Your dissertation! Copies of it are appearing everywhere, not so erasable as virtual copies in the archives. I’ve scanned it. Studied it even. Slick math. You’ve cleaned up your sleight-of-hand since I last saw your act until you now look like a genuine magician, but it is still fraudulent deception! You pull an endless handkerchief out of your nose claiming you have a solution to all of mankind’s problems.” He turned to Otaria in her floating re-cliner. “You’ve thrown in with a mind-crippled madman!” He turned back to Eron. “I’ll have you on the rack till you’re a skinny giant! I’ll squeeze what I want out of that homunculus on your back!” He sat down and ate a bunny biscuit. “Eron, my son, be serious. You know that fighting a hundred years down the line—and winning—is something we do all the time.”
“Against a hidden enemy who ripostes with his own psy-chohistorical ploys?” countered Eron.
“That’s why we have to interrogate this Scogil of yours. He’s the first enemy psychohistorian we’ve ever captured. You promised to cooperate.” His voice became quietly ominous. “Have you changed your mind?”
“No. What better way to interrogate him than to play a psychohistorical war game? Your confrères have long been the Galaxy’s special experts on deviations from the Fellowship’s planned future history. A modem Inquisition. Osa-Scogil hereby challenges you and your whole staff to a hundred year war game. You can’t win, sir.” Scogil was vigorously protesting this speech at his highest rate of word composition.
The Admiral brought his tricorn to his lap out of respect for the future dead. “I do believe Hanis did succeed in taking away your mind.”
“Scogil thinks so, too, but he’s stuck with me. And I’m stuck with you. Recall that I was valiantly attempting to avoid you when apprehended. You accept my challenge then? What you get out of it is to see Scogil in action.”
“And you think you and your homunculus and your paramour are a match for my whole staff?” Konn had weakened His voice and his expression said that he was willing to accept the challenge. But he was incredulous. “/ couldn’t get along with a staff of three.”
“Great. So you intend to play fair? Assign me thirty of your best Lyceum students and I’ll train them up in my methods. If I’m remembering correctly, I’m sure you can find thirty students willing to take a crack at the Admiral!”
Konn was beginning to be intrigued by Eron’s boldness. “Your criteria of victory?”
“The immutable laws of psychohistory.” Eron dead-panned the cliche.
“You young scupper rat! I’ve been applying the laws of psychohistory successfully since before you were bom!”
“No,” said Eron, enjoying himself. “You’ve been using blasters and neutron grenades against bows and arrows, exotic math against the ignorant masses. Your army doesn’t have to know much strategy. Remember, your army is the one which executes the fam of any man who is willing to sell blasters to the warriors with the bows and arrows. Now I have to take off a few inamins to consult with Hiranimus. You’ll excuse me.” He left the room muttering and gesturing wildly to himself.
Otaria shifted herself to Eron’s seat. “He’s an unusual man.”
Konn grumbled. “He was always like that, even when he was sane. Totally impossible. Best copilot I ever had, but impossible. I thought a new fam might rattle his bones a bit. He actually talks to the ghoul of this Scogil?”
“To me it looks like he’s talking to himself. It’s a ponderous chat they share.”
“Do you think what remains of Scogil can actually play at psychohistory? Is this proposal of Osa for real?”
Otaria looked at her long hands wistfully. “Eron thinks highly of the abilities of Scogil’s ghoul, more so than the ghoul does of himself. I don’t know. The ghost seems to be missing much of Scogil’s judgment and fire—I knew him before he was killed—but I don’t talk to him directly. Have you ever met an engineer turned salesman of a technical product line? Do you really think you’ve caught a major psychohistorian? Scogil was a salesman! That’s what he did best. He knew more about my organization, the one you raided, than I did myself—because he was selling to it. You think you got us all.” There was malice in her voice. “I even thought, for a while, that you did have us all!” She smiled and said no more, and Konn knew he would get no more short of torture.
“Sorry about the accident with Hyperlord Jama.”
“Your clumsy people seem to be accident prone. He was crazy as a coot—but there were times when I loved him. He would have been furious about the blood on his lace—which you may not be able to wash away so easily.”
Konn brought out a jade ovoid as a gesture of reconciliation. “He would have wanted you to have this.” He handed the Egg to Otaria. “We’ve seized forty of them already.”
Otaria fumbled with the ovoid. Stars burst forth that melted into charts, the sky of Imperialis.
“How do you do that?”
“You still can’t play it? Would you like your fortune read?” Glibly she made up his fortune on the spot. “Compromise with your enemies before stubbornness brings you disaster. That’s your reading for the present position of the stars.”
Konn leaned over, fascinated. “I’ve seen Nejirt do something similar. But it was what Cingal Svene did with it that chilled my old bones.”
She ignored him. “I recently asked Hiranimus, through Eron, why he hid behind astrology. He said it was a simple way of giving people permission to hope that they can control their lives. You Pscholars have destroyed our willingness to predict and to choose which of our predicted futures we want to live. We have become fatalists. You choose for us!”