The Osa-Scogil being was evolving. The mere fact that ghoul and man had developed a language contact seemed to have catalyzed a process in which they were beginning to develop shared coding at a more machine-language level. The ghoul would eventually see through Eron’s eyes, and Eron would feel the emotions of Hiranimus, perhaps already doing so if loyalty to a family back in the Thousand Suns meant anything: when he was reunited with his wife(?), he was going to demand that she deactivate that damned tuned compulsion to love and protect Petunia. Their daughter(?) was reaching the age when girls resent being overprotected.
The extended party was winding down. There was less revelry, less debate, and, more important, less hysteria. People were still asleep in chairs and zonked out in comers against the wall, or quietly chatting in groups of two. Some had even retreated to their own beds. Eron was too exhausted for that; he commandeered an empty divan and went to sleep.
And that was where the Admiral found Eron hours later, hidden away and asleep. He made enough space for himself to sit down where Eron’s knees had been and shook his prodigy until he saw an open eye. “How can you sleep with your Second Hundred Year War coming up so close on the heels of the First?”
“Aren’t you glad we can set the clock back eighty-seven years?” said Eron sleepily.
“No. I’ve lost my enthusiasm. I’m too old for this game. I’m more comfortable living peacefully in real time with my dog. Are you really serious about this second war? Can’t I just buy you out? Another three months of this nonsense?”
“A contract is a contract. War it is. I don’t want to have to slap your face with my glove. The Reformation isn’t over yet.”
“I’ll have to bring Hanis in to help me. I need his brains.”
“Inquisitor Hanis? You’re not serious?” Eron sat upright, then rose to his full height.
“I might be.”
“You never told me where you sequestered him.”
“I did. He’s toughing it out in an old experimental life-support module, all alone.”
“Mitigating his torture with hope?” Eron was still curious. Enough time had passed for the Admiral to relent and relieve the suspense. “Come on. Tell us! What kind of hope did you devise?”
The mood of the Rector of the Galaxy rose to good cheer again, remembering his last and greatest victory. “I promised him a parole hearing once he finishes, to my satisfaction, a penitence task I have assigned him. It’s a life sentence, a Sisyphus sort of task; once he gets the rock to the top of the hill, I’ve promised to review his case and maybe grant him freedom.”
“And the rock?” asked Eron impatiently.
“Oh, that. I’ve set him to writing your biography. He raged at first, refusing. But hope has a way of seducing the soul. He hopes to finish your biography soon, but he’s never been my student and isn’t aware that I constantly raise my standards of excellence to ever more impossible heights.”
“Writing about me is his penitence?”
“Writing up your childhood is the easy part. I keep supplying him with new material; Agander seems to be a place addicted to the creation of poetic myths, and your childhood seems to have achieved mythical status. You’re going to be surprised at all the things you did as a boy that you’ve forgotten about. As I said, that’s the easy part. The torture part is studying your dissertation, your Early Disturbed Event Location by Forced Arekean Canonical Pre-posturing” The Admiral, for the moment, had become his old teasing self.
“I thought my dissertation was elegandy beautiful, a masterpiece of clarity.”
“Eron, I’ve tried to read it. I can’t get through it. I assure you it qualifies as the worst sort of torture! So I’ve assigned Hanis the task of rewriting it until it is crystal clear to an old fossilized man like me who is probably getting older faster than Hanis can improve his style.” The Admiral was now smiling diabolically. “Hope for Hanis rests on his ability to understand you, a sufficiendy Sisyphean task since he did do his best to destroy all records of your existence short of burning you at the stake.”
“So when can we start our next war?”
The Admiral lay down on the now-empty divan and invited Eron to sit on the cushion above his head. Uniform rumpled, his body flopped out in dejection, he confided, “Eron, I don’t think I can go through another war like the last one. It’s too much. First you present me with a galactic psychohistorical crisis that arrives unexpectedly like a spaceship out of a black hole. Then some damn Protestant steals the Founder’s Bible from my burglarproof safe and invents the printing press. Theory says all that can’t happen, but it did—and so the theory is wrong in that aspect I tried to adapt. I thought I could handle your little war with strategy. My mature math is better than your inexperienced math. It didn’t work. I might as well have tried walking on the sun in my bare feet. So here we are. I have awakened from a bad dream, a nightmare that never happened, surrounded by hysterical revelry. But what lies ahead? Must I live that nightmare in the real world, playing it out again exactly as it happened in the dream but at a painfully slow pace?”
Eron had never seen the Admiral in such a tragic mood. “Predicting is only half of the game; counter-predicting nightmares is the other half. You forget what the Founder said: Psychohistory is all about choosing your future.”
“No it isn’t!” snarled the old man. “Did I choose the Second Sack of Splendid Wisdom? Damn right I didn’t, I fought it off with all the resources I had.” His voice was that of a proud man in chains. “7 wasn't in control of anybody's willy-nilly destiny!"
Normally brain activity flips back and forth across the boundaries twixt stability and chaos in the mind’s ever active war between knowing and the need to learn—this outpost ridge temporarily chaotic, that beachhead stable for the moment, the front flowing in battle flux across the neural net.
On quiet days the mind stays stable by using old solutions. On other days some internal field marshal calls for an offensive and drives his troops against chaos. To conquer chaos one must learn. To maintain stability one must know. The dual struggle can be exhausting.
The Admiral was exhausted mentally, but Eron was sure he could goad him back to life again—in the months to come. He took the old man’s head onto his lap and ran his fingers through hair he had never before dared touch. “Hey, you’ve been a father to me, a strange one, and I ran away from home, but I’m still your copilot and we’re on the way home and we’re going to come in for a smooth landing. Just another hundred years of war to go. We’ll make it. I can see what you’ll be doing five years from now. You won’t believe this, but I’m good at predicting. You’ll be sending out your students to teach psychohistory to the unwashed. Maybe, if Hanis learns his Arekean lessons up to your high standards, you’ll be able to send him out with them. You’ll be the author of a renaissance that Hanis could never dream of. And best of all—you’ll be free from the burden of carrying around a deadly secret.” He wet his finger wiping a tear from the Admiral’s cheek.
“You and your starry-eyed astrological predictions. Son .”