Jama always traveled light. In a shake of jiffs he put together a codpiece containing his few necessities: templates for a set of clothes that he could have made at any public manufacturum, some tie pins, a lace neckpiece, spare rings, six shades of perfume, and a shapechanger’s toolkit. Just in case, he included templates of best-selling antiques. The codpiece’s bulkiest item—uncondensable as a template— was the defunct galactarium.
His fam automatically reminded him of nonpostponable duties. He grumbled. But he did have to go back to set his water system for overhaul—the cuisinator’s last batch of wine carried a faint bouquet of piss. Further delay of repairs was not prudent. Probably his septic unit was due for replacement—an outrageous expense. These ancient abodes in questionably chic neighborhoods were never trouble-free! To think that there were planets in the'Galaxy with real running water gurgling out of mountain streams! The trick was to wait for the unit’s stuttering to subside before attempting an overhaul. The whole process was automated, but there always seemed to be final details left as an exercise for the user! Yes, like flushing that last batch of wine.
Even so; he couldn’t resist a few sips while he did so—after all, it was Hyperlord piss. Before winking out, the telesphere confirmed that his local appointments had been rescheduled and that all was in houseguard mode. And his fam confirmed that the check list was now done. Good. He could leave. He kicked a heel and floated up the levitator through the drop-in dome, into the safety airlock, and out into the stale public air of his hive-corridor.
Humiliating to have to live in a hive even if there was a cachet to being first among the wave of redevelopers! One could almost see the pipes and conduits and narrow robot-runs along the bare tunnel, bare now for more than a millennium, almost sanctified by time in its bareness—there had been no attempt to hide gutty nastiness behind some artful facade, such was the haste of the builders who had reconstructed Splendid Wisdom after the Sack, builders dead now for sixtyne centuries. Beauty is temporary; haste persists. No matter, the bustle of the main thoroughfare was a short walk away.
The Concourse of the Balasante! How Hyperlord Kikaju
Jama loved his strolls along this covered passageway of humanity. It stretched for a hundred kilometers. But he had no time now for a drink on the Plaza, or a leisurely promenade around the great airshaft that cut open the living layers of the city to dizzying wonder—if one had the stomach to look. His excuse was that he had a pod to catch. It would be almost two watches of cramped zooming through the transportation net before he could reach the Kirin Sovereignty—and then only if luck routed him around the tunnel maintenance crews. Flying was not an option for a poor nobleman.
Strapped into his too-narrow pod, jostled by the twists and turns of acceleration, he dreamed of an orange sun lost in some boondocks of the far periphery.
6
FARMAN AND GANDERIAN BOY, 14,790 GE
This particular Quandary-Chain of the Agander serfes, though in appearance highly stable, is susceptible to moderate Theac pumping. In Table-1 is a list of possible artificially generated Theac-Chaos Events that we can expect to bloom across time-ramps of... Rfote's theorem demands that the Post-Events stemming from any of these Events cannot be predicted by any method to a reliability coefficient greater than 0.4. If we are undetected during setup ...It should be possible to arrange the unpredictability zone to last from fifty years to two centuries before the advent of Kraniz restabilization. Such a psychohistorical time-shadow is more than adequate for our purpose.
... many examples of secondary links along the quandary-chain... for instance, it has become a ritual among Ganderfans to always carry weapons which must never be used, a manifestation of the unresolved (second-order) trauma activated during the Interregnum when Agan-deTs vulnerability again became acute.
—Oversee Probe Search code Report Orange-4: Possible Sites for a Forced Theac-Chaos Event
Dated Version: 14,642y/08m/37w/7h/78i
Author: CronCom
The night was well advanced. All traces of the spherical Personal Capsule were gone. The frenzy of activity at his release from the Kapor personality had subsided. A weary Hiranimus Scogil was ready for bed, and so he dimmed the walls and laid out a hand of cards from Agander’s Royal Deck of Fate for a relaxing game of solitaire. The Ax of Mercy was the first card he drew.
And at that moment the pellucid form of the tower’s Security Butler consolidated in his studio’s small foyer and made a slight guttural rumble to attract attention. “Eron Osa is requesting entrance,” the apparition said.
“He’s here? At this time of night?”
“He’s armed.”
“The usual?” The public order brought about by the resurgent Second Empire had been unable to uproot a long local tradition of suspicion. Since Agander’s murder rate remained a hundred times lower than galactic normal and violent crime was nearly nonexistent, the law had little incentive to make palm-size blasters illegal. Scogil had never been at ease with a kick in every shoulder holster, and never carried one himself, but that was only another thing that marked him as a peculiar farman. “Check the serial.” By law all weapons radiated their identity.
“Registered.” The butler provided diagrams and specifications—a children’s model, nonlethal beyond a range of one meter. “A toy.”
“Some toy.” One did not spank students who all brought blasters to class. The only benefit was a student body which tended to reason among themselves very carefully. It was probably the foundation of Ganderian politeness.
The apparition waited. It had no precedent upon which to act; Eron had never before visited his tutor’s home. When no instructions were forthcoming, it became impatient. “Shall I ask him to check his weapon?”
“Forget it. Let him in. Dismissed.”
The butler vanished, and a transport bodyform popped through the pod-lock, unfurling to release a small boy—before it, too, vanished. “You didn’t answer my call!” the boy accused.
T was making up your next assignment,” Hiranimus said affectionately, neglecting to mention all the other matters that had been occupying him. ‘Trouble with your father again?”
“We fought!”
“Did you blast him to smithereens?”
Eron looked up at him without comprehension. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to use a weapon on his father even though he was a deadly shot. He carried his kick like normal children of the Galaxy wore pocket flaps on their jackets, a matter of style and posture. “He wants to send me to, ugh, Vanhosen!”
Now that was a much worse crime than murder. Scogil smiled. “Vanhosen! He wouldn’t dare do that to a jolly fellow such as yourself!”
Eron Osa called upon the robowall to provide a layabout couch and threw himself down on it. “Oh, yes he would! My father is loathsomely nefarious!”
The conjured couch was a clashing purple and did not match Scogil’s elegant taste in color or shape. He made a resolution to sit down tomorrow at his studio’s console and drastically restrict the creative range of his appurtenancer. Perhaps he could teen-proof the device—but no use bothering with such trivialities now. He dimmed the lighting further to make the eyesore more palatable, “All right, Eron. Let’s get to the source of your horror. I don’t understand the problem. Vanhosen is probably the most prestigious school in the Ulmat. Mowist is a vibrant world. I would have liked an. assignment there myself.”