Eron Osa stretched out on the couch, hands clasped behind his head as he pulled up visuals of his old time-wasting fantasies. Staring eyes glazed over with pleasure. “No, nothing as dumb as that. That wouldn’t get you anywhere—too many of them,” he scoffed. “I’m smarter,” He grinned. “I secretly assassinate viceroys. Sometimes I take them prisoner and make ransom demands. It’s a silly game. I’m always a zenoli supersoldier, but the zenoli mercenaries didn’t appear until the Interregnum when all the viceroys were already dead. It’s fun, though; fiction is fiction and you’ve always said that Ganderians have never been able to keep their history straight.” Again Eron became the imp. “Your theory has a vast hole in it.”
“Oh?”
“Your Esfo-Naifin Whatchamacallit has an origin 2,500 years ago. You said yourself that the First Empire was already dead by then—so how could little me carrying a blaster be a memory of a trauma that happened umpteen millennia earlier?”
Scogil was beginning to regret the enthusiasm with which he had launched into this conversation. If he didn’t watch himself, he would blow his cover. “Let me answer with a lecture. Just sit. Don’t fidget. Listen. Put your fam on record.” “Here we go again. Don’t you ever run out of lectures?” Eron assumed a mock straitjacketed pose.
“Unresolved traumas reverberate. A prime-trauma can spin off new Esfo-Naifin ridges for thousands of years, a ffesh branch every time the culture hits a restimulative bump. The Interregnum was a powerful restimulator of the original First Empire conquest—Agander was finally free again, but again it was being attacked from outside by forces it couldn’t resist. For a culture like yours, with a remarkably low stability drift, sixty-seven centuries wasn’t enough to erase the most frightening event in its history.”
Eron raised his finger. “Point of information. You’re telling me that Ganderians never carried weapons before the Interregnum?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you—we were never wimps like you— but for the sake of argument, continue.”
Scogil rose to his full height. “Stop thinking like a pompous Ganderian and think about forcer He was now looming over a surprised Eron. With one sudden motion he lifted the boy bodily into the air by the fabric of his jacket, simultaneously disarming him and kicking the blaster across the floor—all before Eron even began to react. The boy hung from his tutor’s grip, stunned. “The Imperial Conquest wasn’t a game!” Scogil roared. Eron began to try to resist. “It wasn’t mythology!” continued Scogil relentlessly. “It was forcer He put one of Eron’s resisting arms out of commission. “The army that attacked the Ulmat was probably greater in numbers than the total population of Agander.” Scogil began to lock the boy in a death hold to counter his every struggle. “Do you think their occupying units would have tolerated personal blasters? Under the Imperium Ganderians never carried small arms because the viceroys wouldn’t permit it; the offense carried the death penalty. If you dared to carry a small weapon you were summarily executed!”
He laughed and tossed the shaken Eron back onto his ugly couch and continued in a now-calm voice. “And as far as I’ve been able to delve into pre-imperial times, Ganderians thought themselves above the use of all weapons. A peaceful people; a law-and-order sort of people, like you.
They thought their superior kind of civilization rendered them invulnerable. They thought the interstellar reaches put them in an unassailably high castle.” Scogil smiled with all of Kapor’s charm. He could still command that. “All of you still think of yourselves so!”
Eron was sitting bug-eyed. “Don’t ever do that again! You scared me witless.” He glanced at his kick on the floor but didn’t dare try to retrieve it.
“The conquest scared your people witless. It didn’t fit Agander’s gestalt of the universe. It was incomprehensible. It was alien to Ganderian experience. Different cultures handle traumas differently because they are built out of different collective experiences with different mathematical representations. Yours made the decision to hang on to the Ganderian assumption of invulnerability even though the Imperial occupation forcibly proved it false! To keep that illusion your ancestors had to lie outrageously to themselves to the point where they can no longer accurately remember their own history. They remember farmen as wimps. Never make that mistake! Your ancestors institutionalized the lie. A lie is a time-trap loop because it is an attempt to change an event that can’t be changed. Tell a lie and the original event remains the same, and so one is forced to loop back and tell the lie again... and again... like a running child with his foot nailed to the floor.”
Eron didn’t know whether he was a terrified animal or a participant in a rational discussion. “Next time you threaten me with an illustrated lecture, warn me a shake of inamins in advance and I’ll hyperjump out of here, maybe to some place safe like intergalactic space or the heart of a neutron star.” He glanced as his blaster again, started to reach for it, and then withdrew. “Can I have my kick back?”
“Sure.”
“I won’t blast you.”
Scogil grinned. “You aren’t fast enough to blast me.”
Then Eron’s fear turned to anger. “You lied to me! You told me that you were a nonviolent civilized citizen of the Galaxy! I believed you!”
“Things aren’t always what they seem. Now—are you going to lie to yourself and reconstruct that image of yourself as an invulnerable man who can take on the Galaxy with his toy? Go ahead, pick it up. It will make you invulnerable again.”
Eron just sat there. Then the shaking began. Scogil said nothing, giving the boy all the time he needed to digest what had happened. Eron tried to pick up his weapon but couldn’t make his body do so. He grinned sheepishly. “I’m scared,” he said. Then he went down to the floor, made sure the safety was latched, then holstered his kick. “Your history lessons make me green at the gills. I know that was a demo. I know you’re really a nice person. But that was scary.
“And Ganderians are still scared of the First Empire, nine thousand years after the fact. No matter how many times they relive the event, the First Empire still wins. And the old, unresolved fears keep coming back to shake them up. Every time that old fear of the old Empire is restimulated, Ganderians collectively make a new decision never to forget that they are invulnerable. Your useless toy is only one of a thousand harmonics of that fear. It can all be reduced to mathematical equations.”
An intrigued Eron Osa took on the expression of a child who has scented a cunning speculation. “Tell me the truth, you dirty old ugly fanged rat. Are you a psychohistorian? Maybe a spy from Splendid Wisdom?”
Hiranimus liked the directness of this kid. Eron wasn’t devious. He didn’t like to keep his opinions under cover like those wretched Pscholars. “Well, son, I would have liked to have been a jet-hot psychohistorian ” That much was true. He sighed before launching into his least favorite lie. “But I’m just an ordinary moon-run of a mathematician who is enthralled by the exotic practical uses of my trade. I don’t have access to the real tools that allow psychohistorians to predict the gross aspects of our future. The Pscholars of Splendid Wisdom keep their secrets well. Pscholars believe that if everyone could predict the future, Pscholars would no longer be able to govern.” And we Smythosians, who have dabbled in the art of prediction, hope they are right. “Let’s just say I’m a sinner who delights in playing with morsels of forbidden knowledge. That’s a theme from some of the older mythologies. I’m not very dangerous; I haven’t yet even reached the stage where I can predict whether a planet’s sun will rise tomorrow.”