“Grandfa!”
And even this last little bit of him was crumbling into powder.
Too many shocks at once! Death. The threat of marriage. A wrenchingly new off-Fortress destiny. She whacked her head and headed for the bed. She thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep, but the thought wasn’t finished before she was sound asleep in her clothes with shoes still on her feet. Dreams resolved her grief. Dreams plotted a hilariously amazing off-Fortress adventure. When the hour for her prime-watch chimed, she rose with a light heart, said her thirty-two theorems in prayer position, and had breakfast. To a Smythosian acolyte, duty was the foundation of every good life. She chose to sing in the morning network-choir; then—to work.
She organized those duties of Grandfa that he had bequeathed to her, rebuilding key nodes in her fam to prioritize her new obligations, famfeeding the files that Grandfa’s will had tagged for her, and actually sorting his few physical possessions.
He had kept Grandma’s love letters. She was killed tragically under circumstances unclear to Nemia; Grandfa never liked to talk about it. The letters were on real homemade paper that Grandma had whomped up in her manufacturum, written with a naive ink that was already fading.
The biggest box was Grandfa’s template collection of antiques. He was forever rearranging his apartment, destroying this antique so that he would have room for some striking masterpiece he had just remanufactured. Nothing ever matched. Nothing was ever conveniently arranged. She had memories as a little child of negotiating her way between— what she had never dared say aloud—his junk. No object in Grandfa’s whole collection had an esthetic relationship to any other object, but all had historical import. History was everything to the old man. He liked to stumble over it while he wandered about, his mind’s eye lost in contemplative visions of some past or future era.
Then there was his precious collection of Coron’s Eggs, eight of them, nine if you counted the one he had given her that sat prominently on its wooden stand in her atrium, none of them a first edition, all too complicated to be stored on a template. He had first become interested in the Eggs when the Oversee had assigned him as a young man to work on the outré6 mathematics of the Coron’s Wisp project.
He had been inspired to a mad belief that a “first-edition” Egg would lead to the lost Martyr’s Cache. Second-edition and later Eggs hadn’t met their promise. Grandfa had been undeterred and still had quantronic agents touring the Galaxy looking for a “first-edition” copy, Eggs by now probably all victims of entropy or, if extant, buried in the rubble of some Interregnum war. His search agents had become, by the machinery of Grandfa’s will, her servants. Nemia had heard a zillion ‘lost treasure” stories and put little stock in this one. Men had been wandering around the Galaxy for seventy-four millennia littering space with their mysteries. The Protocols of Eta Cuminga. The Lost Mine of the Mi-radeas. She sighed. Why did Grandfa think she was going to pick up on all of his obsessions? She’d have to cancel those agents, but that was not easy from the Fortress. For that she’d have to wait until she reached Neuhadra.
Extraordinarily proud of his collection, he’d kept every Egg in good repair and often used one of them to cozen or dazzle people at his parties. He had been, in her mind, the Galaxy’s fastest-talking astrologer. His favorite trick was to take some young Smythosian, fresh from his heretical seminary studies of forbidden psychohistory, full of a mathematical belief in the unreadability of personal destiny, and con him into an Egg reading. The room would go dark, the stellar panorama would unfold, and, with Grandfa’s simple chitchat, prompted by increasingly complex star-charts, his mark’s past would be revealed in a way that led surreptitiously into his personal future. Everyone would smile at the sagacity of the reading—and its superficiality—until the morrow, when it would all start to come true. Grandfa had tried to teach her the tricks and deceptions of fortune-telling, but she had never quite mastered the art at his level of dissimulation.
Her prime-watch coincided with the eleventh watch. Nemia spent the time at the Lion’s den being instructed in the nuances of her assignment. Grandfa had been thorough on his deathbed. It became obvious that the whole idea of Scogil’s introduction into the Coron’s Wisp venture was based upon a very chancy gamble. When she complained that the probability of success was small, the Lion reminded her archly that the Oversee had its eye on many antelope in the herd. It did not matter if they were pursuing a hundred independent events, each with a mere one percent probability of materializing, because then there was a sixty-three percent probability that at least one of those events would come to pass.
The Smythosians liked to work with low-probability events because those were the kind that the Pscholars had the most trouble tracking. More specifically, the modeling of high-probability events was beyond the Oversee’s computational resources. They didn’t have the Pscholars’ twenty-seven centuries of psychohistorical practice behind them nor the full resources of the Second Empire.
And the work she would be doing to modify the fam of Scogil’s protege? That was a another low-probability gamble. They were giving him an ace he could play or not play as circumstance demanded. She was not to implement the kind of modifications that Scogil had asked for; her modifications were to be to the Oversee’s specifications.
That angered Nemia. “I can’t just modify a fam to order! It doesn’t work that way! I’ll be hacking under enormous constraints. I won’t even know what the constraints are until I do tests!”
“He’s only twelve years old,” reminded the Lion.
“Twelve is an adult!” she snapped. “His fam has jelled”
“If you fail, it is of small consequence. Scogil will just have to play our game without that particular ace.”
She cooled down. They went on to discuss the professional minutiae of event-fulcrums and how this particular event-fulcrum related to some of the finer points of fam design. The Lion jumped from general psychohistorical principles to the finicky details of how quantum-state design parameters, in this kind of case, could alter the predictive equations. He often went beyond her competence, then caught himself, to turn back to the specific items relevant to her mission. She had the impression that she wasn’t dealing with one person even though the Lion’s persona was seamless; his knowledge base was too broad. The Lion, she suspected, was an artificial coordinator-mind for a very heavy-duty committee.
She was in up to her eyeballs. Nemia took off the next cycle for partying with her friends in the gardens of the Presidio.
Within a ten-watch she was deep aboard a jumprunner, commanded by one of the mysterious men with the tide of Starmaster, any view of the interstellar sky forbidden to her. She spent the time with her mnemonifier doing homework, planning. Half of her mind was working seriously; the other half was churning out an escape path from the marriage trap set up by her relentless Grandfa. Marrying one of her teenage crushes in Service to the Greater Good! Ridiculous! Even if he did have nice ears.
They had even supplied her with material on Coron’s Wisp, material deliberately withheld from Scogil so that it would be she who briefed him on key aspects of his next assignment. That twist, she thought ironically, hadn’t been necessary. That was just another item in Grandfa’s ploy to marry her to Scogil!