Eron groaned.
“Your father is barely able to afford such a meritorious institution. Mowist isn’t far away, but even transportation off Agander isn’t cheap. He certainly won’t be able to treat your siblings as well. You’ll take your first interstellar trip. You’ll see places you can’t imagine. You’ll be taught by some very great scholars.”
“Yah, yah. And after five years I’ll get to join the ranks of all the other billions of Imperial lackeys!”
That’s what his father wanted for him, Scogil knew. He wanted a son in the Service of the Second Empire, a son who had made it, a son who might even work outside of the Ulmat. Eron was his most trying child, but far and away the most brilliant. “And you have other plans?”
“The toads at Vanhosen sit on their stools and croak to the sky! What can they teach me? They don’t even know mathematics as well as a dumbtop like you!”
Scogil was properly amused at the boy’s ferocity—and at the implied backhanded compliment. He called up an extension to the couch, black and shaped in better taste, before flopping out beside the boy. “And if you could have what you wanted?”
“The Academy at Kerkorian—or maybe”—the boy’s voice became plaintive—“the Lyceum on Splendid Wisdom.” Scogil’s heart chilled. Kerkorian was out of the question—Eron didn.’t even remotely meet the academic requirements, nor could his father afford access to that kind of elite. As for Splendid Wisdom—there were many Lyceums on Splendid Wisdom, but Eron meant the Lyceum—well, his father could afford it because tuition and expenses were free, but there were millions of applicants for every opening. Not a chance. “You have high hopes for yourself,” said Hiranimus soberly.
“You said—”
“I know I’ve told you that you were brilliant—part flattery, part truth. But brilliance isn’t all that counts.” He paused. What was this kid trying to tell him? Both Kerkorian and the Lyceum were known for their psychohistory schools and little else. But Eron had never hinted before that he was interested in psychohistory. And Hiranimus, as the mathematician Murek Kapor, had studiously avoided mentioning psychohistory as a mathematical discipline. Where had the boy picked up such an interest? Yet who didn’t recognize that the Second Empire was run by the laws of psychohistory? No one had to know what it was to be impressed by its power! Every boy who had been trained to dream of power before he had learned to talk would dream himself the master of psychohistoric technique. Best to be direct. “Are you telling me that you want to become a psychohistorian?”
“Of course! Why else would anyone beat his brains out on math!”
Psychohistory, the highest pinnacle of mathematics. Eron wouldn’t even know what that meant at his age, but his ambition would know. No wonder he and his father were locked in combat. His father would understand what an impossible goal his son had set himself. Eron would be too thick-headed to take such impossibilities seriously. The Pscholars guarded their secrets with an implacable fanaticism. “There are problems.. began Scogil tactfully.
“... because my fam isn’t good enough,” completed Eron resentfully.
That, you little monster, is the least of your worries. <cWhen you were bom, young man, your father scoured the Ulmat for the very best fam that his sticks could buy. He paid a fortune for it, two years’ income for him. You had full use of that fam by the time you were three and mastery of it by the time you were five. It might have been fabricated in some forsaken shop—but it was a fam designed on Faraway, don’t forget.”
The sullenness was suddenly gone from Eron. He became pragmatically impish. “But it’s still not good enough. And Faraway used to have a reputation.”
Faraway, on the galactic rim, had been the dominant civilizing force during the Interregnum, and its traders had reconquered three quarters of the domain of the old First Empire before its remote location had drained it of talent. Perhaps no other planet in all of human history had so revolutionized the physical sciences. But its technological leadership was long a thing of the past. “Sometimes a not-quitergood-enough fam can stimulate your wetware to perform above and beyond the call of duty,” Hiranimus admonished.
The boy bristled. “I don’t believe you said what I just heard slip off your vocals. You think like that mechanical book!” Eron had once been impressed by the reconstructed book in the historical alcove of the Ulman’s Summer Alcazar with its seven hundred gears and cams and push-rods that looked up sage aphorisms by the Penniless Peasant after industrious whir and clack. “I kotow better. You don’t get to be a psychohistorian with a second-rate fam like I’m stuck with! Why wasn’t I bom to a rich father! It’s disheartening!” Scogil was watching the golden highlights in Eron’s brown hair, a reflection from the ceiling lamp, almost a halo effect as if his brilliance had to leak out electrically. Intelligence appeared early in a child; judgment did not. “You were bom to a rich father.”
“Not as rich as the Ulman. Not as rich as he should be if I’m to achieve anything in this dumb Galaxy. Not as rich as he wants to be.” The sullenness was back.
Time for reassurance. “No man is rich enough to buy a fam that will make a psychohistorian out of his son. It’s the synergism between fam and brain that makes the difference.” Scogil was surprised at the rancor he felt. His fam had been crafted by the wizards of the Thousand Suns—and, in spite of that advantage, he had failed, at least as a theoretician. It was a marvelous conceit that this student of his might actually make it. Perhaps it could be arranged.
“Can a fam be upgraded?” asked the boy.
Scogil grinned. Most people never even asked that question—their enthusiasm for a fam upgrade was about equal to their ardor for a brain transplant. “It’s been done. Expensive. It’s not the sort of thing you fool around with lightly. A child’s brain fine-tunes to its fam. It’s a lifetime relationship, established early.”
“How much of a boost of my analytical powers could I get that way?”
“You could end up a moron. Have you ever talked with a famless adult, or with someone who has been fam-damaged? To make an analogy: how willing are you to let a surgeon use knives to rebuild your wetware?”
“I know a kid at school who fell off a roof. His fam got pierced. He had it repaired
“Was he any smarter afterward?”
A pause. “No.” More time to consider. “He was dumber,” conceded Eron before he changed the subject. “I can’t just wait around until I’m an old man before I get into a good school. The brain deteriorates after ten. From then on, it’s all downhill. At the school I go to I can already feel my mind turning to soup. I’m twelve”
“That’s why your father hired me.”
“He could have hired a good tutor!” Eron grumbled.
“Hey, I’m not that bad!”
“I’ll bet you only went to third-rate schools or you wouldn’t be working for a second-rate assistant accountant like my father!”
“Adjudicator to the Ulman, Eron; be fair. And how can you tell what my job really is? Can you be sure that I’m not the highest paid talent scout in this arm of the Galaxy? Really now, I have jumped around to a few marvelous worlds. I might even have pull at a few good schools. Perhaps it is possible to do something for you—but you’ll have to study hard.”