A robotray brought the two intent scholars their lunch and waited patiently for them to remove the book before it would set the table. Murek took a bite of smoked fish, imported, probably Frisan; Mowist life had never evolved as far as fish. “There are a hundred quadrillion people out there all writing their memoirs and taking cubes of their newest baby, and you expect everything to be linked with everything else, and instantaneously, all the way back to the cave paintings of Lascaux? That a student’s life should be so easy! The Galaxy is a vast place,” he said tritely.
“A biography of the Emperors ought at least to have a reference to an Emperor’s poems!”
“I’ll bet that if you let me teach you a few of the tricks of historical research, you could find that poem within a year.” “I hate it when you make curiosity sound like work! I know something easier to look for. As emperor, Arum set up a war museum out here in the Constellation somewhere. Battleships and everything. To honor his father. What happened to it? Did all that super blasting power go into orbital decay and bum up, or what?”
This was just an offhand question that Eron wanted his omnipotent tutor to answer at once, but what he got for a reply made him wish he’d kept his mouth shut. “That’s a good question to practice one’s wits on,” said Murek in the voice he used when outlining an assignment.
They had only ten watches on Mowist before they were to ship out of the Ulmat Constellation entirely, and Eron found himself trapped into long bouts of historical research about a museum that wasn’t even there anymore! He was given a whole list of things to do, not all of which made sense. Eron could understand a few stints of frantic archival searching on the hotel’s obsolete equipment, but... interviewing people he didn’t know? checking out naval hobby shops? famfeed-ing museum management consultant brochures?
But he actually did find out what had happened to the Orbital War Museum. Daigin-the-Jaw’s surplus military artifacts, after millennia of preservation, had been pirated during the Interregnum and sold off to local warlords. This he reported glumly to his tutor. The man was not sympathetic, as was his dry nature. “What did you expect? An ancient Imperial dreadnought of the Horezkor class sitting out there waiting for you to inspect it?”
“Yeah,” said Eron dreamily, “that would have been nice.” “Then why didn’t you talk to the local tourist bureau?” Eron looked up quickly. When he saw the twinkle in his mentor’s eye, he knew instantly that he had been had and rushed off to the hotel’s comm to check out all the tourist attractions. Yes, there was a Horezkor dreadnought on display, the only ship of Arum’s Museum armada that had not been sold or stolen—lacking at the time any functioning hyper-drive motors or weapons. A few hundred years ago the restored hulk had been incorporated as a part of the Greater Station, which served the Ulmat’s distant interstellar traffic.
Eron had missed it only because, from Agander, he and Kapor had hypered into Mowist’s Lesser Station, which served the local Ulmat routes. Belatedly Eron checked their outbound reservations from the Greater Station, and much to his chagrin found a full-color advertisement for the “astonishing” Horezkor tour.
He thought about the enigma of his tutor, the young far-man who was taking him, miraculously, on the adventure of his life from which he would probably never return. His father expected him to return, but once Eron had seen Agander from orbit—a blue-green wispy white ball against the spectacular clouds of space from which it had “recently” formed—he had made the conscious decision never to return. Was such a decision revokable?
He wandered back to their hotel room and found Kapor asleep, but he didn’t care. Nefarious humor didn’t deserve consideration. “Are we going to take the Horezkor tour before we board our ship?” he demanded in a loud voice. “It’s two kilometers long. It’s got everything! When it was built it had the largest hyperatomic motors in the universe! Please.”
A half-opened eye looked up at him. “Wouldn’t miss it. It’s on our itinerary.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? You rat!” Eron was angry enough now to shake his mentor fully awake—but he didn’t.
“I’m dumping you at Faraway,” said the sleepy voice from the bed. “You can’t expect me to do your research for you forever. A lot of Pscholars think their math is so powerful that they can ignore the past when they predict the future—but they lose the kind of insight that makes for the elegant use of their tools. If you want to get as far as Splendid Wisdom and make your mark there, you’ve got to know a million years of history well enough to dream through the rise and fall of any civilization before breakfast.”
“A million years! We haven’t been around that long! The Empire is still a baby!”
“You don’t think we were bom in the sublight ships of the first expansion wave, do you? Home is a cave, food consists of slugs that live under rocks, and the starry sky is a shining cave roof just out of reach. A lot between then and your own civilization. You’ll have to know it all, and I’m not going to learn it for you. I’m going back to sleep. It’s the middle of my sleep-watch! You’re on your own.” Then in the direction of the light he said, “Off!” before turning back to Eron. “Your next assignment,” he continued in the darkness, “is to find out what was in the Ulmat before mankind arrived.”
Eron reluctantly let his taskmaster sleep, but thought indignantly hurt thoughts nevertheless. He already knew the
decolonization history of the Ulmat! Nothing! All the plants in the Ulmat Constellation were young, the oldest having coalesced no more than two billion years ago. Agander was he youngest of them all. Soup! That’s what the colonists lad found. Yeach, and soup that probably didn’t even taste very good. Only Mowist had once supported multicellular life, little nondescript spiny things that had been a kind of a water pump. Rakal hadn’t even had soup—no water. Dumb-top Kapor thinks I don't know anything.
But he soon forgot the slight and was, in his imagination, marching through the guts of a battleship in all the full-color glory that an active fam could provide to the mind’s eye. He gave the orders on the bridge. He reviewed tier after tier of battle stations. He was the commander who had once conquered Agander!
9
TWO MEN FIND EACH OTHER, 14,790 GE
When atomic power was discovered by our feral ancestors seventy-four millennia ago, the apparatus was simple enough—but both monstrous and dangerous. The fires were blocks of carbon alternated with uranium slugs, piping, and control rods. Naturally unstable isotopes were extracted as bomb ingredients. The first crude city-destroyers were carted to their targets by twelve men in huge aluminum flying fortresses powered by air-breathing engines. There are hints in the record that a whole continent was once made radioactive by the failure of a fission power generator...At the time of the original sublight starships, when isolated stellar cultures diverged over ten millennia for lack of power to maintain communications... a slow process of evolution was perfecting a mass-to-energy technology that could deliver both a high-energy density and a vanishing gamma emission rate... ushering in the era of expansion based on Eta Cuminga’s hyperspace technology...After forty-eight millennia of inefficient double-pole hyperdrive design, the engineers of Splendid Wisdom began building the first massive Oerstan hyperdrive motors that tapped into the parallel energy of the... probably the major factor giving Splendid Wisdom’s navy an... At the other end of the scale, during the decline of Imperial... the magicians of Faraway mastered the process of local phased charge-flipping, using these hydrogen-fueled microannihilation devices to...