“All of it? All of it? Your parents have picked out your wife already?”
“Presumably.”
“And you are blackhole bent on thwarting their plans?” “Presumably.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing what you seem to be saying. You are actually going to ignore their wishes?” That was heresy—but tempting heresy. It was something that she wanted to believe that she could do—wanted to believe that she was doing.
He laughed unnaturally. “Ignore their wishes? What a sweet sound that has. Nothing so bold. My revenge is going to be more subtle. I’m going to do better than they expect— better in ways they could never dream. Better in ways which
will make a mockery of their preparations. My only hope is that I can run faster than they do! Hey, do you think you could keep up?”
Why was she attracted to this man? In her mind’s eye she saw a Coron’s Egg spreading out its stars across the sky while the charts grew and wrote symbols in fire. She even saw in the geometric designs a child named Petunia—after the pentagon of petunias she had carved on her grandfather’s sarcophagus. Her child by Grandfa’s command! She could see everything as if the foretold astrological fate had just now been sealed forever.
She became angrier at her beloved Grandfa than she had ever been in her life. She knew that she wasn’t going to be able to escape the tyrant. She had fallen in love. She knew that she was willingly going to marry Hiranimus Scogil and bear his children and endure whatever strange life he made for them. Had she been poisoned? Poor Hiranimus! She was exactly what his parents wanted for him. It was what her parents wanted for her. There was no escape. She felt tears and had to call in the iron emotional control of her fam to suppress them. She could feel her fam triggering the love-changes in her brain chemistry. She laughed. It was all worse than this young man could possibly imagine.
She had her instructions to modify his fam, too. And she would—for the sake of keeping him.
16
THE HYPERLORD FRETS OVER A MESSAGE, 14,791 GE
Deadlines requiring action will arrive before you’ve had time to get answers to all of your urgent questions. This is how one is forced to learn that action precedes knowledge. Never hesitate from lack of knowledge. Act when action is required, but never before. Since action without full knowledge will often precipitate error, choose your actions so as to grant yourself idle time in which to learn from your mistakes. Only the dead make no mistakes.
—The Zenoli Warrior
Hyperlord Kikaju Jama wasn’t sure whether he’d caught a fish or been caught himself. The weasel’s message that had bloomed on his telesphere was too terse. Somebody out there wanted to purchase his galactarium. Was it a real nibble? Or an alert policeman’s barbed hook?
The recent organizational expansion of his conspiracy came with a paranoia that was a new affliction for Jama. When he was just a fop, openly spouting ideas that no man could take seriously from the mouth of a fool, he had not only felt safe—he had been safe. Noblemen pretenders just didn’t rate as a probable psychohistorical infection. But now that he had positioned himself to menace the Pscholars, a sense of safety eluded him. Wasn’t it odd for a star-spanning weasel to find him just after he had expanded his opposition to the Pscholars—and while he was in the throes of planning his expedition to Zural?
Who could possibly know that he owned a marvelous jade ovoid except Igar Comoras and the ephemeral man who had
slipped it to Igar as a bribe—and Kargil Linmax? Only Kargil knew its nature. Was Kargil double-crossing him? If so, Jama’s head was in the executioner’s bucket because it was Kargil who had put in place the new security system. What if Kargil had given a key to the police and was sitting back in his shop in the Kirin Sovereignty enjoying his perfidy? After all, Kargil had worked a good part of his life for Naval Intelligence, a group which was just another arm of the Pscholars. Annoyed with himself, Jama mentally stamped on his suspicions. Hadn’t his reliable people-instincts been consistently telling him that Kargil had never betrayed anyone in his life?
He sent off a coded message to Kargil. “An untraceable weasel has inquired as to the price of my galactarium. Why? Where did that come from at this time?”
Kargil’s reply was transmitted almost immediately back through Jama’s blacked-out telesphere directly into the Hyperlord’s fam by coded famfeed. “You forget that you put out your own weasel recently to find a repairman for your galactarium. You clearly specified the probable manufacture date and the nature of the device. Your weasel is no longer in circulation, but these things get archived by strange libraries and can be accessed by other weasels for a small fee. It may be that you have only found the police, yet consider: there are billions of patient collectors both on this planet and elsewhere who are looking for all sorts of incredible items— from the cryogenized messiah of Rith to the electronic eyeballs of Emperor Krang-the-Blind, to say nothing of an authenticated signature of the Founder. Weasels are one of their best tools.”
The Hyperlord was, at that moment, changing into his afternoon attire. Instantly angry that his friend so dangerously dismissed the cunning police, he took the opportunity to throw the buckled shoe in his hand at the telesphere, which, assuming itself unwanted, vanished. Only reason and practical matters calmed Jama’s rage. His toes needed manicuring. How could he have let his toenails grow so long that they had worked a hole in his hose?
But maybe his fear of the police had blinded him to the obvious? While he trimmed the toes’ overgrowth he wondered if his jade ovoid might indeed be merely another valued item. Or could a second mysterious detective be searching out the location of Zural in a game that would thwart Jama’s purpose? Probably not. Do not panic. Look for simple explanations. He looked. Maybe a little girl had been dazzled by such a galactarium as was his and now, as a rich old lady, sought to recapture that experience? Maybe there was a mad astrologer out there desperate to know his fate? Who could fathom the reasons of collectors?—certainly not a dealer in antiquities! Drat! His toenail polish was now chipped. He decided to renew it with a darker sparkle.
Should he reply to the weasel’s request? He thought back. His own weasel, designed to probe for an atomo-unit repairman, had been constructed to be untraceable. A secure response to the stranger’s probe would be similarly untraceable by its quantum mechanical magic; therefore an answer wasn’t dangerous—but would it serve any purpose?
Well, there was always the money. He had some accounts laid away for an airless month and some highly charged iridium sticks and those scholarium bonds—but he really did need a cheap way to finance his expedition to Zural. If only he had a clue from whence the inquiry had come! He appreciated that the recipients of any weasel he sent out wouldn’t be able to detect its source, but he certainly didn’t like the mutual finesse with which this trick was executed.
Even with quantum security he didn’t feel safe. It was all too easy to imagine police on the other end of the reply, helmets hiding their eyes, fingers playing over the banked consoles of interrogation machines, waiting patiently while their sting accumulated enough evidence to arrest him. A message itself couldn’t be traced, but the information in it was subject to analysis.