Later an affable Kargil admitted the four “townsmen” when they arrived in his entranceway, one of them the man with red and green sleeves. Jama watched intently. The old naval captain didn’t offer seats but listened to his friends, interrupting only to sharpen the discussion. None of it was of interest to Jama—it was about local issues unfamiliar to him and about local people, among billions, unlikely to touch his life again—but Jama remained fascinated by the skill with which this man handled other men. Kargil was obviously pushing for decisions. He got three commitments in efficient succession—and a clear statement of an agenda item for the next meeting: ways to supplement weakening government financing for the rebuilding of a condemned sports stadium. With business complete, Kargil sent his visitors home on the excuse that he had an analysis in progress.
He turned to Jama with a gleam of expectation. “And I do have an analysis in progress. By now we must have collected all we presently need to know about your contraption. Come. The moment of truth.” Without opening the cleanbox containing the ovoid, he fed the data from it directly into his fam. He stood in inner contemplation, staring off into space for a few moments that caused Jama suspense, then nodded and, as almost an afterthought, transferred some of the data to a flatplate in order to show the Hyperlord the essentials of his conclusion.
“Your object is surely authentic.” He pointed at clumps in the hazy image on the flatplate. “I’m surprised. The tiny clusters surrounding those macroblobs are nanocomputers in a cross-redundant configuration. It’s a Faraway design pioneered in the third century and widely used during the fourth. Eccentric. But it’s a configuration that would strongly protect you against data loss.” He fingered in an amplification. “See that starlike imperfection? A rather violent cosmic ray hit. Not a problem. And I must recant on the Farliquar. It seems to have done yeoman’s service when briefly powered up from time to time to repair cosmic ray hits—there is no evidence of damage prior to three hundred years ago. So the atomo has been operational until recently. Astonishing. I can’t be sure, but your innards seem to have survived. Now all we need is a fresh atomo-unit.” He paused, looking at Kikaju Jama—undoubtedly speculating about an unemployed Hyperlord’s financial resources.
“The price?” asked the Hyperlord stoically.
Dispassionately Linmax quoted a substantial sum. “Can’t do it for less.”
Jama flinched. More comers to shave. Maybe he could start by canceling his accommodations and arranging to sleep in the workshop. “It’s a deal. Half now and half after the atomo has been installed?”
“It’s a deal. The deal is that I get paid for the eight atomos, not for the repair of your gizmo if it isn’t functional. The risk isn’t great. My best guess is that the galactarium itself is in functioning order.”
“A risk—but I’ll take it.” Right then and there they made the financial transaction.
“You’ll have dinner with us then, of course,” Kaigil said wryly. “But first I can do a work-around to alleviate some of your uncertainty. You seem about to shit an uncomfortable cannonball. Your device, I surmise, is missing only a power source. I can jury-rig that—it’s going to need about forty different voltages and a snake-pit of wires—that will allow us to conduct a test. It’s not going to be portable without an atomo, you understand.”
While Kargil worked, Jama waited anxiously, seated on a pile of old Faraway metal-forming tools, famfeeding himself the contents of catalog slabs and whatever else came to hand. He was an obsessive reader who read anything to keep his mind occupied when he was edgy. Finally the old man began to move back and forth between the main workshop and a side room from which he emerged after an interminable hiatus with a smile on his face. He held up his strange six-fingered hand in the full victory sweep. “It responds to finger pressure points, standard Faraway coding. I’ve been playing with it. With only five of my fingers, of course.” He grinned.
“Without me there?”
Before Jama could further express his anxiety, Kargil ushered him into the side room where unnatural wires snaked from the ovoid’s innards. He sealed the entrance. When he caressed the ovoid, the room magically darkened, replacing the shelves and wall screens and clutter—the floor, everything—with an ebony pantheon of stars that almost sent Jama clutching for spacesuit controls he was not wearing. It took moments to notice that the jury-rigged wiring left swaths of unnatural shadows across the virtual sky.
“The galactarium is in working order!” Jama exclaimed with visible relief.
“Maybe. It’s a strange device. Being a navy man, I’m familiar with navigational history, but this thing is far more an artifact of superstition than it is of navigation.” Deft squeezings on the ovoid superimposed a coordinate system over the celestial sphere. “You’d never see anything like it on a real ship. The equator is divided into twenty-four sections. From equator to poles it is ninety ‘degrees,’ plus or minus, with sixty-‘minute’ and sixty-‘second’ and then decimal subdivisions. Interstellar length is measured in parsecs, a nonstandard unit which requires an arcane knowledge of the distance between Old Rith and Sol—which, if you knew, you wouldn’t know how to apply to arc-seconds because you’d have to throw in the pi number.
“It all smacks of the kind of superstition one finds in a typical wisdom-of-the-ancients tract—certainly one trying to prove that the true lore comes down to us directly from Old Rith or Alphacen or wherever. Galaxy knows, there are enough of such cults. Parsecs went out of use seventy thousand years ago and date back to the dawn of counting but are periodically revived by new gospels looking for primordial authority. Certainly we aren't dealing with an ancient device; it couldn’t have been built prior to the Interregnum, and the finger coding is also a standard of fairly recent origin. Neither are we dealing with the usual navigational aid. The thing would have driven a real navigator crazy. Look at this.”
The captain pressed more sequences and the sphere of stars all around them was rapidly fragmented into constellations annotated with a weird symbolism that Jama had never seen before. “No matter what coordinate point you key in as the origin,” Kargil continued, “it can create baroquely artistic constellations. Useless flummery—but pretty.” Gracefully he pushed aside wires to show off the sky to better advantage. “The constellations don’t relate to the sky of Faraway but do seem to be associated with some kind of pentagonal mystery. Do you know any pentagonal systems philosophically inclined toward superstition?” The old navy captain obviously knew too many.
“Our Galaxy is a big place,” Jama repeated, using the oldest of worn cliches.
“You might check out inhabited pentagonal systems if you are really interested in the origins of the device. In any case you should make special note of its symbols. I recognize most of them. They date back to the first star-maps. All the symbols for the seven sacred planets are there though they seem to be employed in a different context. Every planet that claims to be the home of mankind has a theory to explain those seven symbols. The other symbols—I’ve counted forty-two of them—seem to be derived from the symbols that archaeohistorians believe were devised for the first interstellar planets discovered during the first millennium of the dispersion—before such coy nonsense became impractical. And look what I can project with this button configuration.” The sky was invaded by a mathematical design that collected the stars into a jewel-faceted setting. “For that chart, you need coordinates, a zenith, and a date. Your device is an astrological chart-maker based on a catalog of the ten billion stars most important to the Traders of Faraway. Space only knows how a man would read such a mishmash of lines and arcs! Why a pragmatic Faraway trader would have had it built eludes me.”