“One unwise decision, of course, leads to another,” he lamented. “The baby you saw chasing the boy was brought to me by a distraught neighbor—who labors under the misapprehension that I have a kind heart. I’ve been running an informal local government to handle events beyond the capacity of the bureaucracy. Baby Girl—we’ll have to give her a name—was evidently abandoned. She has no birth certificate, at least her gene class doesn’t match any of the trillion on planetary file. And she’s no immigrant because she has no nanocertification stamp in her cells to tell us that she’s been declared free of the horrors that plague our Galaxy. I checked that myself. About the boy, don’t ask.”
They were out on the balcony now, airseals hissing behind them, standing over a jumble of other balconies and unplanned stairs and arching breezeways that went up and up and down and down—and down. Carefully, very carefully, Hyperlord Kikaju Jama reached out and clenched the plasteel railing for dear life while settling himself into a plastic chair. He was pleased that it wasn’t an aerochair. There was no doubt in Jama’s mind that he was one of these Splendid Cowards who grew green around the gills when he saw something farther below him than the bottom of his feet. Kargil already had his shoes up on the railing while he waved at a neighbor who was beating the dust from her rug into public air. Amazingly antisocial! Such anarchy thrilled the Hyperlord. People like that could be led into revolution!
Kargil Linmax turned affably to his customer. “You were telling me about this interest of yours in Faraway antiques before I so rudely interrupted you.”
“The artistic achievements of the anarchic governments of our last Dark Age fascinate me.”
The old naval officer guffawed. “Governments? Dandies like you were out there during the Interregnum hacking up the planets for firewood because there were no governments.” “That is an unnecessarily extreme statement. There were many experiments in government at the time, many more than in today’s lethargic Galaxy. I was thinking of the interesting experiment in self-rule that the scientists of Faraway set up when they were exiled to the Periphery.”
“With all due respect, your Hyperlord, that was hardly an experiment. Democracy is as old as Rith of Sol, if we can believe mythology. It was invented by simian slave-holding homosexual misogynists who lived with their irascible gods up on Mount Olympus or Mount Vernon or someplace like that.”
“My dear man, I believe your mythology is incorrect. Democracy was invented by the slave Lincoln who led a great revolt against his Virginian masters, forcing them to come down from Mount Ararat to grant his people the Magna Charta. There is good reason to believe that this Lincoln was a real man and not some archetypical construct, though I’ve never researched the matter. It is not even certain that he was from Rith, according to several very trustworthy accounts.”
The door hissed, and the sad face of Sweet Toes protruded, allowing public and private air to mix. “We can’t get Baby Girl to take her nap! She’s dancing!”
“Well, now. Insubordination among the crew. It will have to be dealt with. Have you tried faster music?”
“Papa! Be serious! We’re desperate. Come help us,” she implored.
“Nope. A good ship runs itself. When I was captain, and a petty officer couldn’t get his charges to nap, I shipped him back to base without his pension. A captain’s only duty is to point the ship. That hardly includes supervising naps.”
“I could hold her head under a pillow!” sulked Sweet Toes. “... a violation of Regulation 43A!”
“Oh, Papa!” She saluted and whacked the door shut with a hiss.
Jama harumphed. “I see that you are not a great believer in the achievements of your simian mountain-dwelling homosexual misogynists!”
“Everything in its place. One can’t expect the famless ancients to have solved all the problems of the Galaxy. I suspect that they did very poorly when faced with naptime for a two-year-old—my study of military history indicates our planetbound ancestors, of every political persuasion, excelled in the art of massacring helpless children.”
“Mere time-honored slander. My opinion is that much useful wisdom has been lost over the ages.”
“Are you a Cryogenist?”
The Hyperlord scanned his famlist of cults and found nothing. “The name doesn’t register.”
“Cryogenists search the Galaxy for the icy corpse of an epic Rithian—I believe helium was first liquefied in the sixtieth millennium, pre-imperial or thereabouts, and used primarily to cool the coffins of sycophants; thawed, this primitive is to reveal to us the Lost Wisdom of the Ages, and, with his great perspective on time and his profound personal knowledge, is to save us from all our troubles. There is a great literature built around such revivals.” Kargil was smiling with genuine amusement while imagining this messianic Rithian in bearskin desperately searching the corridors of Splendid Wisdom for a tree upon which to piss. “I was actually approached in my naval capacity in the hopes that I might keep a lookout for our suspended savior. The cultists lased me a file which purported to have traced our ancestor’s shipping documents, bluntly pinpointing his location to within a thousand leagues of the position of my ship.” Hyperlord Kikaju Jama made a growling noise of disgust in his throat. “You’d think in these scientific times that such balderdash would long have been laid to rest!”
Kargil Linmax offered a morose reply. “It is the fault of the Pscholars that such nonsense persists, damn them.” The curse was followed by a throaty grumble.
Such an unexpected but welcome expression of heresy left Jama bolt upright in his seat, thus having to stare in fear down into the tenanted canyon below. He forced himself to relax, firmly planting his spinal cord against the back wall of their tiny balcony. “How so?” His eyes now watched every nuance of Kargil’s face, careful not to look away. In the political current of the Second Empire, one dared not step too readily into an undertow of discontent.
“The Pscholars keep secrets.” The old face showed lines of distaste and annoyance more than those of anger. “Their power to create order rests in the secrecy of their psychohistoric methods. They predict and guide. We mere mortals must never be allowed to know enough to contradict them lest we bring on consequences beyond our ken—but not theirs. The hoary myth of the woman and the apple tree— knowledge is dangerous, ignorance is bliss. By example the Pscholars teach us that secrecy is power. We must remain in our orderly garden, they instruct us, to forgo the larger dangers of knowledge. They cannot teach us that knowledge is power because then they would be obliged to share their knowledge. Is it any wonder that cultists abound who tout the virtues of hidden powers?”
“You speak boldly of your concerns!”
“I make no secret of the fact that 1 have no power”
A man with long sleeves—one red, the other green— hailed from a distant balcony, finally yodeling a call which Jama could not understand. Kargil yodeled back, then turned to his guest to translate. “You probably don’t understand our yodeling codes. I’ve invited him to drop down to my place for a visit. Town business. I think I told you that I’m the mayor of an informal group of locals who bypass our authorities when they procrastinate.”
They stood up, Jama close to the wall, his fingers discreetly clinging to the building stone, appalled to note, high above their tenanted canyon, a brightly colored balloon-man puttering past, perhaps having dropped from one of the canyon roof’s underslung cupolas. He, too, yodeled at Kargil but was too far away to be recognized. Jama’s host seemed to know everyone in this microcosm of Splendid Wisdom. As they retreated indoors, Kikaju was deciding that he had to recruit this man into his burgeoning conspiracy. Kargil’s confidence was beginning to impress him.