Grandfa had a hand in that adventure? She was mortified. Nemia hadn’t thought about Hiranimus Scogil for years, but she certainly remembered him. Did Grandfa know about the shower they took together? And her mash letter? She groaned with her new maturity. Poor Hiranimus had probably been relieved to be shipped out!
“He’s been haggling with the Oversee lately about an adventure he’s been trying to orchestrate. I was the only ally he had, mainly because I want to many him off to you. I like to bend psychohistorical necessity to fit my own personal needs.”
“You old goat!” But he wasn’t listening.
“The Oversee’s consensus was negative. His scheme computed out as hopelessly high risk with an extremely low probability of success. Worse, it was immoral. I had to agree. But, quite recently, these few watches before I had my attack, he turned up at Neuhadra—and there’s a new angle. I worked it up while I was dying... to keep myself busy. There’s a couple of ways to jiggle the probabilities, ways that perhaps the Founder wouldn’t have approved. It’s yours to follow up. Talk to the Lion for details. Our Scogil..
She stabbed the “stop” button. The Lion! But it was Grandfa who was the Lion! She’d figured that out years ago. Now she was confused. She stood and made herself dinner while she pondered the conundrum. The puzzle finally fell in place only after the fourth course as she whipped the chiffon pie out of the cuisinator. She mouthed the fluff, appalled at her stupidity. Of course Grandfa was the Lion—but the Lion was only a quantum-state “hat.” The Lion might... could... would be shared by many members of the Oversee, an immortal personality who took on mortal components to maintain his human perspective. Immortal wasn’t really the right word; the Lion wasn’t any older than Grandfa—that’s what had fooled her. Probably Grandfa had created the Lion. Who would she... ?
She put in a call. One never had to worry about disturbing the Lion; he had a submind that could take a thousand calls at once, none of which he handled consciously. His submind was merely a convenient executive secretary. The Lion appeared in her atrium as a fam-induced hallucination. He wasn’t the kind to bother with holographic tricks; the Lion took the direct route into the visual cortex.
“Nemia of 1’ Amontag,” he said with a graceful gesture of his paw. He’d been expecting her.
She bowed respectfully to what only she could see—a tall and not very lionlike figure. Real felines didn’t stand erect. She tried to see Grandfa 1’Amontag in him. There must be something of Grandfa there, but the Lion had always been a good disguise. “My grandfather suggested an appointment,” she said to the receptionist persona.
“About the Scogil affair. Yes.” There was a gleam in the Lion’s eye; she was sure he must know everything! Damn Grandfa’s love of storytelling to whoever would listen! Did all the Smythosians who wore the Lion’s hat know that she had showered in the nude with Hiranimus Scogil? And how could a lion look so diabolically human with his bushy orange head and black nose and carnivorous grin!
But then, how could this hallucination even exist? The four-legged lion had been the victim of one of Rith’s mass extinctions—she wasn’t sure if it had been that infamous meteor or mankind’s first massive overuse of ammonia fertilizer. The nitrous oxide of ammonia’s decomposition train was nasty stuff when it worked its way up to the upper atmosphere and started gobbling ozone. Of course, lions weren’t really extinct; gengineering had re-created them out of housecats. Grandfa’s Helmarian sense of irony. Kill me and I shall rise again. That’s what this creature of the Oversee symbolized. Who animated him now? One man? two men? a sixtyne?
“You have questions?” the Lion asked.
“I haven’t finished listening to his Capsule,” she confessed.
“We will meet again when you are ready. Come in person to my den at the eleventh watch, on the morrow after you have slept. Your passage to Neuhadra has already been arranged.”
The Lion vanished—but he left behind him a quick flash of Rith’s ancient predesert savanna and a whiff of sun-rotted antelope.
Nemia sat down and took up the tiny black speaker again, toggling it to the beginning of the last sentence and then to “forward.”
“Our Scogil has been doing some fast legwork,” the voice of Grandfa continued. “He thinks he has it arranged with Beucalin of Neuhadra—you’ve never met Beucalin—to train a butcher from Splendid Wisdom to modify his charge’s fam—he has a young boy in tow. Beucalin sent us a report. There are surprises in it. Tests confirm that Scogil’s charge does indeed have a remarkable talent for mathematics.
“His fam is even more unusuaclass="underline" an aborted Caltronic prototyped on Faraway. Not a model farmed out to a Sigel or Rosh Hanna foundry. It’s surprising that we even have the specs except that keeping the specs on rival fam designs is a Helmarian fetish. Less than seventy were made—an ambitious hi-end failure discontinued prior to production. A full century ago. His father must have picked up a remaindered unit that got misplaced on some high shelf—or was simply shunned. Ethically its Faraway engineers should have scrapped it but they were probably short of credit—and it is perfectly functional, significantly above average, though not easy to sell in its unfinished form except to a stellar bumpkin in a backeddy like Agander. Two hundred and sixty-two thousand hooks were built into it—but the designers couldn’t develop a stable overlay able to use the hooks. So they started over with a different design. Their second attempt was the famous Caltronic 4Z, now also obsolete.”
Ah, thought Nemia. This was just the kind of “special” problem she’d been trained to exploit. Two hundred sixty-two thousand unused hooks! Perhaps unusable hooks, perhaps not. An interesting challenge.
“Beucalin has been instructed to decline Scogil’s unseemly request—but out of friendship for Mendor Glatim will find a surrogate to do the work on the sly. And”—he chuckled—“out of sight of the Oversee.” Nemia’s grandfather liked his little jokes on the young people of the world who thought that they and their fams were too smart to be outsmarted. “The surrogate will be you. It might even be possible to bring you in without involving Beucalin. You have the perfect motive. Love and Sex over Duty and Honor.”
“Watch it, old man,” she said aloud, “or I’ll have your mummy cremated!”
The voice of the dead man ignored her. “Scogil’s ideas for the modification are far too crude and detectable.” His voice had broken and there was a pause before he spoke again. “Oeyy! The pain gets to me sometimes. I’ll be back.”
Her heart jumped. But she didn’t have time to anguish; the splice in the recording, to her, was immediate and when he returned, he was calmer, more relaxed. It was his own voice, not a smoother simulation. “This has to be one of your special jobs, little girl. The Lion will give you the details. You won’t do the fam surgery yourself—that is, you will not directly hack Scogil’s youngster. Have I lost you? All the work on him must be executed by the butcher from Splendid Wisdom whom Scogil has so conveniently brought with him. If the project fails and the Pscholars lay on a trace, we want it to point at the butcher. It will all be his doing. Your hand has to be invisible.” The pain was back in Grandfa’s voice. Then, suddenly, he skipped whatever else he wanted to say in order to blurt out what was really important. “Hey, big girl, there’s plenty of water on Neuhadra for showers. You won’t have to be sneaky.” And he was gone.