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“And how much will this escort and pampering service of yours cost me?”

While he was talking to Osa Senior, a mad plot began to hatch in Scogil’s mind, and, thinking fast, he began to negotiate its framework before he had even blocked out the details to himself. “You don’t understand, Honorable Osa. Circumstance forces me to leave your service. Honor obliges me to place a boy as endowed as your son in good hands. My hypership’s cabin is already paid for,” he lied. “It will cost me nothing to bring Eron with me.”

They haggled for a while longer. They made a deal that the senior Osa couldn’t afford to ignore. And a deal that presented intriguing possibilities to an ambitious Hiranimus Scogil.

When the connection was broken, he stayed in his aerochair without moving, examining those possibilities. The whole of his scheme was not yet well formed. Maybe he’d have to abort. But with a psychohistorian’s ability to see the nodes that had to be touched in order to advance into a particular future, he began to sketch out the critical details to himself. Somewhere along their route he would have to alter Eron’s fam in subtle ways. Even Splendid Wisdom was not privy to all that was known in the Thousand Suns about quantum-effect switching. Yes, it might work—and if it did work out, he would advance himself dramatically, and he would advance the cause of the Smythosian Oversee.

Scogil’s imagined machination hinged on the off chance that eventually it could be useful for the Oversee to have a primed and innocent traitor at the very heart of the Pscholar’s Fellowship—a long shot that might then propel a failed psychohistorian, who hadn’t even made it to the bottom level of thinkers, into a plum assignment on Splendid Wisdom. Hadn’t the Oversee already advertised that they didn’t have enough operatives in the Imperialis system?

He laughed. At the moment it was all just wild plotting on overdrive, a kind of aftereffect of the release from his Murek Kapor restraints. Space, was it good to be free to think again!

But what a rotten thing to do to a little kid, he condemned himself. He was appalled that he fully intended to feed his fam-altered victim to the Pscholars, a child sacrifice to the gods. It was probable that the Fellowship would accept this

genius. It was also probable that, in due time, Eron would find himself enrolled in the Lyceum at Splendid Wisdom. For what?

He liked Eron. Poor little devil If things went awry—and they would go awry—Eron might find himself waylaid in some gruesome hell. He shuffled the cards he had left scattered on his desk. Ah, if only a hand dealt from Agander’s Royal Deck of Fate, laid out in the mystical Matrix of Eight, might really be able to predict the boy’s future and guard him! Not even psychohistory could do that. Psychohistory was silent on the future of any one man.

But for all his qualms as he sat motionless in his study, Scogil felt a bitter envy. Eron Osa would get the real training. Eron Osa would graduate from the Lyceum. It would be Eron Osa who would operate out of Splendid Wisdom. It would be Eron Osa who mastered the true line of psychohistorical thought, not some twisted perversion of the Founder’s work built by madmen attempting to reconstruct psychohistory from inadequate data thousands of years old.

7

RECOVERING FROM CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, 14,810 GE

As psychohistorians we like to claim that our mathematical methods allow us to make predictions about the future when we start with a certain critical set of carefully measured initial conditions. Our detractors dispute this. Still others attack our philosophical stance. Is Thanelord Remendian correct when he portrays us as callous Determinists who view all men as automata performing the motions of some scripted fate? Thanelord Remendian, as self-appointed advocate of Total Freedom, sees quite the opposite: humanity as a noble collection of souls each applying Free Will to attain his own Special Destiny.

We need not answer Remendian, but we must have our philosophical position well thought out among ourselves. It is a gross mistake to believe that an accurate ability to predict implies determinism. It does not.

—The Eighth Speech” given by the Founder to the Group of Forty-six at the Imperial University, Splendid Wisdom,

12,061 GE

 

The first time Eron Osa opened Admiral Konn’s copy of the Founder's Selected Essays after being executed, he never got past the initial two paragraphs. Some of the words he had to sound out before he could recognize them. Without fam access to the instant “gestalt-meanings” of a ten-million-word dictionary, his effort was leaden. Often Eron just gazed blankly at the open book in frustration— half expecting the ghost of his dead fam to imbibe the page all in one glance, to project vivid images based on the contents, to run simulations while exploring the mathematical ramifications, to traipse with him down byways of associated thought.

None of this happened. He was left bobbing in his aerochair in a dim room, staring at squiggles on thin cellomet in a typeface no one had used for two millennia. It was a book laid out with pride and craft, some pages wondrously illustrated with presspoint animation and active equations. The room’s light glared harshly over his shoulder, having lost its baffles and half its lum-tiles. There were no famfeed jacks in the archaic book. The actual reading of the manuscript seemed to be a one-word-at-a-time chore. Real drudgery ! And he had to think about the words without any handy tools to think with. He would have given up but he still had the strong illusion that he was a psychohistorian and on the verge of understanding everything.

The concepts seemed familiar, but Eron wasn’t sure if he had actually read any of the Founder’s words in their original format. The baud rate of eyefeed was shockingly slow. He was used to a leisurely comprehension rate of something like 2,048 words per jiff by famfeed and vastly higher input for storage mode. Reading was horrible! He could live faster than he could read about it!

Unfortunately, large chunks of the information input during a famfeed—even the selected parts of it that was used by the organic brain—were cached in the fam. That, thought Eron sourly, was probably the reason his own brain was now so empty. He wondered how much storage space was actually available inside the human head. Not much, obviously! Neurons were gross macromachinery!

How was he going to learn without famfeed! Where was he going to store his thoughts—in his stomach? He glanced covetously at the government-issue fam tossed carelessly over the back of a chair. Not that one, but he was going to have to beg-borrow-steal a real fam somehow—and spend the painful years training it.

During his “rebirth” Eron’s wardens had arranged for him a cheap hotel room on one of the lower levels of Splendid Wisdom near the Lyceum. The furniture morphed from the

wall, stark white, old, used, cramped. The plumbing in the dispozoria needed replacing. The holographic projections made by the comm console were fading and didn’t seem to adjust to a sharp definition. The picture wall didn’t work.

All they had left him of his old life were his clothes and his little red metricator. He seemed to know what that was for. It was a physicist’s pocket tool, small enough to be gripped inside a fist. It would measure almost anything: hardness, distance, spectra, acceleration. Maybe he couldn’t recall all the things it could do. He had one vivid memory of sitting at a table eating a sandwich and using it to measure the local pull of gravity, but he couldn’t remember which planet or why.