The Hyperlord was himself in a pragmatic mood as he gazed at the galactarium’s display. “Probably it was a gift to the Trader’s unpragmatic mistress. Omnipotent God has never been able to lay out the bounds of female belief! But”—he shrugged—“let us never mind the artistic license the gizmo takes with astronomy; are the stars it projects just pretty points, or can they be identified?” He was wondering if they came from a reliable database like those kept by the First Empire’s fanatically accurate Interstellar Spatio-analysis Bureau.
“Spectrograph, star motion, multiple star orbits, main planetary motions, survey data of the I.S.B.—all there.”
“Names? Or does it use the damn spectrograph for a name? Or some damn cultish naming convention we never heard of?”
Kargil fiddled with his fingers. “I.S.B. codes. Ah. Names—when the star_has one—and First Empire alpha-numerical classification.”
“Do the names use the Imperial alphabet?” queried Jama.
“The standardized Imperial alphabet was more than ten millennia old when this device was built.”
“Try Zural—use the spelling: Z-U-R-N-L .”
The starfield shifted, the constellations were re-formed, symbols winked in and out. Kargil displaced more wires. “Got it. Zural. Single star, cool, aging, three planets, one a giant, the current position is twenty-three of the device’s damn parsecs from Faraway. That would be about seventy leagues. No mention of a colony.”
“Bull’s-eye!” Hyperlord Kikaju Jama jumped about with his lace cuffs flapping. “Another dark secret of the Pscholars revealed!” He danced in dervish circles with virtual stars all around him. Kargil waited patiently for an explanation.
“Zural isn’t on the standard star charts of the Second Empire.”
10
THE CRAZY ADMIRAL VISITS A HAUNT OF HIS YOUTH, 14,790 GE
There is a substantive computational difference between
(1) macroevents such as wind or temperature or healthy economy, and (2) microevents like the velocity of an air molecule or a single bankruptcy
Microevents can be summed over to tell us all we need to know about a macroevent. The velocities of individual air molecules can add up to a wind or a cyclone or a temperature reading. The exchanges between buyer and seller can add up to an economy.
The process is not reversible. No macroevent can be broken down into its individual microevents. Important information is destroyed by summation and cannot be recovered. No weather report will tell you the velocity of a particular molecule. No economic index will tell you who bought what, when, and where. No psychohistorical prediction will tell you the fate of the individuals who will act together to generate that future.
—Excerpt from the Founder’s Psychohistorical Tools for Making a Future
After Hahukim Konn dropped Rhaver off at the dog kennel, the Admiral went back to diddling on his battleship for a few hours, then spent the rest of the watch reviewing new files on his trouble spots, working well into his sleep-watch. Nothing exciting, but the pattern wasn’t going away. This damn thinking all the time was keeping him awake. Even the reconstruction of his old Horezkor dreadnought wasn’t taking his mind off the developing crisis!
On the way home he took a detour to pick up a tonic his
doctor had recommended and found himself in the domed concourse twenty levels below his apartment watching a group of students joshing each other. Instead of catching a levitator and flopping into his bed underneath his mobiles of old warcraft, an impulse, perhaps prompted by the celebrants, sent him strolling to the tube end of the concourse. While he was grumpily nagging himself that he should be in bed, the old student roustabout in his soul called up a private transport pod from the dispatcher.
The black robopod flipped open its top for easy access and he climbed in.
“Comfort setting?” asked the dashboard.
“Firm.” Konn wanted a fast ride to nowhere. The top sealed and went opaque. An internal air supply began to circulate a standard invigorating mixture.
“Destination?” the pod asked when Konn had not volunteered the information.
“Doesn’t matter. Just take me on a fast roily-ride that gives me heart failure. For that I’d like the windows cleared.”
“My sensors detect a physical age which precludes my use of fast turns—do you have a medical waiver?”
“Oh, forget it!” snarled Konn.
Still they were not moving. “If you please, I require a destination,” demanded the robopod stubbornly.
“Make it the Olibanum.” Konn was unwilling to match wits with the sand-grain brain of a machine. If he wasn’t going to get his joyride, the marvels of the Olibanum were the next best thing.
“Your stop?” asked the pod reproachfully.
“Kermis Station.” It was the only one he remembered offhand without asking his fam for a list.
The pod did oblige him by clearing its windows while they passed through the conduits of the stygian betwixt-city. They swished at a respectable clip, past dark supports and air shafts, around grim water tanks and overdomes—but without finger-clenching speed it was no fun. Old habit was taking him back to the mecca of his youth, along the marvelous Corridor of the Olibanum, where the students of the Lyceum had always mixed with the Splendid masses in order to forget troubles and to bum time that could more profitably have been used to fuel their studying.
“Release your seat belt only on green permission!” warned his single-occupant pod, not mentioning that it would report him to the police for a fine if he disobeyed. They popped out into a sumptuous station. The pod’s dash padding went green. He unfolded himself to exit into the cathedral quiet of the Kermis Station.
A short walk took him through a twinkling sound barrier into the noisy bombardment of the Corridor. What a pleasure in the grin muscles to remember the wonderful times he had wasted in the bistros of this vast carnival strip when he was still as smug as that hotshot Nejirt had been this afternoon! Would a wiser Konn care to be seen in the Teaser’s Bistro in his aged incarnation? Futile task to try to keep up with himself as a juvenile! But the thought amused him—almost like a dare.
He jostled among the crowds, trying to decide which were the students and which the bureaucrats and which the lay players. Dress styles had shifted so much since he had been here last. The signals by which people identified each other remained a fluid language. It was of no use to fam-flash anyone to scan their vita—the probably altered ID would be a mask, a joke, a sly come-on. The Olibanum was traditionally a place of festive anonymity.
One famless musician caught his attention, surely a man from the deepest of the bedrock warrens or maybe a denizen of the corridors. How had he lost his fam? Or was he one of those unfortunates whose family had been unable to afford one for their child and charity had bypassed? He sighed. Hahukum was reminded of a grim time—earlier than his youth as a student—his mother had been an abandoned immigrant who did what she had to on the streets and lived where she could. The musician evoked his pity; he listened to the plaintive songs while other listeners came and went. The mendicant accompanied himself with a palm-size audiovib that was of far better quality than his voice.