Kargil was ready to interrupt but Jama snatched a breath and did not allow it. “Why is current mathematical research in such an utter shambles outside of the Pscholars’ Lyceums? Hmmmm? Could it be too dangerous for the Pscholars to include a renaissance of mathematics in their great plan for our future? I’ll wager my hat that a simple survey of the bits and pieces of mathematics that have disappeared from the Galaxy’s archives would give us critical hints as to which analytical methods would be most productive for a reconstructionist to stalk. If an enemy fleet has mysteriously disappeared from its known locale in space, doesn’t that reveal its admiral’s intentions? We must recruit mathematicians for our task!”
Kargil had his opening. “Why do you dress like you do?” he asked.
“Because I’m a very vain man.” The Hyperlord’s carefully constructed logic derailed while he brushed his collar and checked the alignment of his hosiery. “Why should I mask my preening vanity? It gets me misclassified. How could I ask for more? Misclassified as a cipher in the wrong database, I am lost in the analysis of the doings of millions of harmless fops who never had a revolutionary thought in their lives. People who think they know a man by the way he dresses are easily misled. Being able to mislead people pleases my vanity as much as any piece of scented Osarian lace.”
“You will pardon me if I spend a few watches examining your misleading arguments.”
“If you do take up the cause of fighting tyranny, your most felicitous occupation would be to spend some time designing a covert organization which does not depend upon the clownish way I dress for its invisibility.”
They laughed and then broke up their watch for sleep, the captain to his stateroom, the Hyperlord to a child’s bed beneath faintly glowing personifications of suns—happy giant reds and scowling blues and hardworking golden dwarfs. He shared the bed with a lovable multilegged stuffy who could manage a semi-intelligent conversation if you pressed
the wrong part of its anatomy and were incautious enough to talk back to its sand-grain of a brain.
Stripped to his flamboyant underwear, his pink mopcap perched upon the stuffy’s head, the Hyperlord began a whispered conversation with the child’s companion. He shared with it, in confidential allusions, his dream of adventuring out among the worlds of the Periphery—to Zural specifically—there to find the primal lie. The prince who knows the lies of his enemy, he informed the stuffy, has the keys to his enemy’s lands. To be invulnerable, one must never lie— even when a Cloun-the-Stubbom pops up out of his box. That was impossible, of course. Jama lied all the time—but in a good cause: his own. He liked to live dangerously.
13
NEUHADRA OF THE THOUSAND SUNS, LATE 14,790 GE
With the Even-Hand and Fair Mind of Our Just Emperor and in His Name we find that §145 of the Treaty of Sanahadra states, unequivocal, that the newly allegiant Heimarian people of the Thousand Suns Beyond the Heimar Rift have agreed to accept minority status on the planets terraformed and/or colonized and/or claimed by their ancestors as specified in §Appendix-P.
—Count Ism Nokin of the Splendid Praxis Court:
Ruling #AZ-243 ci 7992 GE
Something was awry. The young mind of Eron Osa sensed it. He had learned to read nuances in people’s expressions, learned to read the motive behind preoccupations and the meanings in sudden changes of plan. He hadn’t spent years spying on his father for nothing. Now cast from home, fatherless, he held under continuous surveillance only his tutor— who increasingly showed symptoms of secret motivations that...
Creeping up above the Great Arm, jump by jump, to a position where ninety-five percent of the galactic plane was below them like a great sparkling sea, it began to strike Eron how awesomely huge the Second Empire really was and how little he knew of it. After their third jump his curiosity was so demanding that the Chairman of the Bridge lent him the use of her telescope to zoom in on whatever features of the celestial sphere he might find while the idle ship recharged its hyperatomics.
The circular screen dominating the bridge was as expansive as a vanity mirror in an expensive brothel. Adding to the impression, the encircling baroque bronze frame sported leafy vines that modestly clothed voluptuously shy tree sprites. The control toggles were nymphs and undines and maenads and sylphs, sensual to the touch. A companion celestial roboconsultant sat beside it in the disguise of an open-mouthed sibyl with four breasts. Above the telescope were pinned two good-luck charms—one an icon of Emperor Kambal-the-First and the other, in full regalia, a tiny replica of Emperor Harkon-the-Traveler.
After start-up the telescope’s immense milky surface dissolved into life. Eron fiddled with its contrast and resolution and magnification like an eager four-year-old. What was fun was to toggle through some of the frequency filters. He had the whole electromagnetic spectrum at his command, picking a broad band from radio to gamma to see everything, or a narrow band of ultraviolet from 150 to 250 nanometers to see only suicidally hot stars, or he could filter out all the stars that didn’t have a specific set of, say, fraunhofer carbon lines. They were alone now, but he had been told that if he time-space linked up with the telescopes of other ships he could even see planets up to fifty leagues away. Wow! He imagined himself as a Stars&Ship general, with a thousand starship telescopes hooked together planning an attack on a remote solar system.
And he could aim the telescope wherever he wanted without asking the boss-witch to move the ship! Where to look? He happily famfed into the instrument a few choice coordinates from a stellar catalog he had once memorized on a winter’s evening while scanning Agander’s heaven with his binoculars. Wonderful! Even useless knowledge stuffed into his extra brain could come in handy at unexpected moments!
First he picked up Agander’s star and stared at it for a full inamin before he swung the image...
... to bring in the swirl of Andromeda. Was there another edacious empire across the vastness of intergalactic space eating up planetary systems? He imagined, in pastel color, intelligent lizards with eyes in their nose who wore coats of tanned mammal skin and kept their many-jeweled timepieces in pockets tooled of soft female breast leather, each closed by a brass ring in its nipple.
Grinning, he jumped his instrument to a local nebula called the Great Demiurge with its skein of exploding filaments, a solar system blasted, its history undecipherable, its records rendered into plasma... then bounced his aim in the direction of Splendid Wisdom’s Imperialis but could see nothing in the dazzle of the central confabulation of stellar voices.
There was a presence behind him. “Not that way! Are you looking for Splendid Wisdom?” It was the two-breasted mammalian Chairman of the Bridge, who maintained a live infrared link to monitor her cub’s use of her telescope, holding herself in free-fall behind him. When he got things wrong the old witch turned up and mussed his hair and corrected his hand—so that with only a few false starts...
This time she showed him how to simulate the main stars between here and Imperialis and to flick-toggle back and forth between sim and real in feedback overlay mode. He was able to see where Imperialis would be if only the dazzle didn’t get in the way. Dreamily he remembered the first millennium of emperors from his book—greedy as they were, in the first thousand years of their nascent human empire they had been able to conquer only a small fraction of the vastness included in this single telescopic view.