Secure ultrawave channels did not seem to be a good medium for subtle verbal argumentation. The logic was lost when passed through secondaries to shadow men whose priority was hiding. The devious scheme hastily plotted on Agander had unraveled spectacularly. So much for assumptions made during a high state of enthusiasm! They didn’t trust a man as young as he. Chary dunderheads! No wonder they’d had to pull out of the Ulmat. Or, he thought, maybe the right man hadn’t yet received his proposal. If ever. He had to laugh because he had already used the credit he wasn’t going to get.
In any event, the Oversee would not approve his plans in time, and, at least on the lower levels, his shadowy bosses were disputing even his right to make plans. Scogil noted sourly his reassignment to Coron’s Wisp where his youthful enthusiasm for the cause could be kept under restraint, and under budget. Nothing he had suggested had been accepted. No response; just orders. That’s what the ultrawave exchange had been about. Duty. Return for instructions and retraining. They would arrange a blind pickup.
He still had no idea where in the Galaxy his old school was located. He had once been sure that the Fortresses were around here somewhere, perhaps in the Rift, perhaps in the darker recesses between the Thousand Suns. After all, they were Helmarian—but maybe the rumor was true that they weren’t located anywhere in Helmarian space. Maybe the forge of his Smythosian soul was thousands of leagues off the galactic plane. It might be hidden on some lost planet tossed into the darkness a billion years ago by eccentric binary parents. He’d never seen its sky. For all he knew, it might be smack in the middle of some provincial capital.
At least, face-to-face, his old mentors would have to listen to his objections about this new assignment of theirs. Face-to-face they’d have to talk back—if you could call a virtual confrontation with an immortal mask, worn by a carousel of mortal men, a face-to-face anything. If they wanted to bind him, they’d have to be convincing. He’d have to see the math. Or... he’d have to be eloquent enough to sway them.
Where in Space was Coron’s Wisp? His orders only mentioned a five-star pentad system with one habitable planet around each star. Twenty-seven Wisps were mentioned in his fam’s huge database—but no Coron’s Wisp. It must be a very minor place. Was it just another Ulmat to be abandoned tomorrow? For all their calls for more operatives to work at the heart of the Empire, they didn’t seem anxious to send a seasoned man anywhere near Splendid Wisdom, nor had anyone been willing to support his clever plot to place Eron Osa as an unknowing mole inside the Pscholar’s Fellowship. Too dangerous a plan for cautious cowards?
Worse, they did not take seriously the scholarship he had promised the Osa boy. Those funds he needed now l What was he going to tell Eron? He had hauled the boy out onto the adventure of his life and there wasn’t going to be a scholarship, nor even a fam upgrade. Nor funds to continue the trip to Faraway. So... a conflict of integrity. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Was he supposed to abandon a twelve-year-old child?
He would take the boy to Faraway. Scogil was Helmarian and bound by Helmarian ethics even if they contradicted Helmarian orders. He laughed again. He would be able to claim that he had been stranded for lack of cash. The Galaxy was a big place, so they said—an easy maze in which to get lost for a few months. He had no intention of disobeying orders, but there was no help for it—he would be delayed. He would turn up after he had squared his commitment to Eron. How? He didn’t know. Damn, Damn, and Spacedamn!
He hoofed it back aboard the hyperfreighter in a frenzied effort to get their baggage all together and off ship. No use going on without a full money stick. He had to stuff Eron’s book under his arm, his hands full. Where was that boy? The insanity of it—carrying books on an interstellar voyage! What would these children think of next! With baggage decked and book in hand, he made a frantic appeal to the jwrser for the return of credit that the purser was loath to refund on such short notice. But the purser connected him with a waiting couple who seemed as frantic to leave Rag-inuk behind as he was to stay, and so he was able to sell—at a profit—the last legs of their passage.
What now? In all of the vast concourse he couldn’t spot a seat He chose an out-of-the-way comer to sit (on the book) With their baggage in sight. With Eron nowhere in view, he had time to think. The heavens wheeled across the station’s observation domes. Problem number one: they needed a destination. Perhaps his little exchange had provided funds (enough to get Eron safely into the nearest friendly port. He jaeeded a friend right now. Thank the stars for friends! When normal channels of authority don’t function to one’s desire, backtrack and call on a friend. But which friend? After the isolation of Agander, did he still have any friends? And did he have a friend who could laugh at life’s impetuous blunders!
It was gloomy thinking. Family? Good people but no possible help there. To find powerful friends he had to hark back to those good-bad old seminary semesters when he had been training in secret as a Smythosian, interminable hours and watches and months of grind whose main reward had been the promise of high adventure. Gadzac was as good a friend as he’s ever had—but he was too conservative. Nels was reserved but could always be tapped for a loan if Hiranimus made his case look desperate enough.
How about the triumvirate? Mendor and Jaisy and Hiranimus. They had spent endless watches debating—and mathematically probing—the small changes they could make in the fabric of a society, changes with the potential to avalanche into galactic significance. Jaisy was gone somewhere on assignment. Mendor was far above Scogil’s social class. But what was Mendor up to now? Certainly Mendor Glatim still operated from Neuhadra of the Thousand Suns, which no more belonged to the original Thousand Suns than did Ragmuk. How could that mild boy who loved his luxuries have walked away from the setup he had been destined to inherit? He’d be there—if luck and probability were the same thing. Hiranimus cringed to think of reducing his friendship with Mendor to a machination to get his hands on Glatim money, but it looked like his best option.
Neuhadra would add a roundabout into their jump-path to Faraway, an awkward jag off the Main Arm’s commercial routes. Its location above the galactic plane, well away from conventional Helmarian space, had been the main reason it had not been settled until the eightieth century when it became irresistibly attractive to the refugees displaced by the Wars Across the Marche. The Imperial victors had uprooted the Helmarians en masse—from Sanahadra, alone, almost half the population. This detour to an extremity of the Thousand Suns seemed like a good risk to Scogil. Mendor was wealthy enough to indulge a friend who had never before asked of him a favor.
Wealthy wasn’t an adequate word to describe Mendor’s situation. The Glatim family was in the meteoroid deflection business. Inhabited planets were seldom threatened by rogue objects big enough to destroy a civilization—maybe once in ten-twenty million years—but in an empire of thirty million worlds, even such improbable business came up frequently enough to require expert service. And the peoples of a doomed planet faced with a millions-to-one unplanned catastrophe don’t quibble about price—nor do they easily trust inexperienced would-be saviors. And when you are in the meteoroid deflection business, what do you do to keep in practice? You deliver comets to countless water-starved worlds and make a stick on every barrel of water! The Glatim clan was very wealthy.