Hiranimus stood, relenting. “I have good news. We have passage to Faraway. And about your recent work—it was good; I’m more and more sure you’ll pass the entrance exams for Asinia Pedagogic. You handle pressure well. You have the talent. I’m proud of you.”
Eron looked up, almost pathetically relieved. Scogil left him without another word. It was a long walk across this overlarge guest room, and he barely escaped without a damaging smirk, self-approving that he had not broken down and teased the boy about Nemia. I can still be a good Gan-darian, he thought, re-relegating the Murek persona to his mental closet. Then his pace quickened, and without even a thought about changing clothes he headed out to see Nemia, his pace quickening as he approached the car pool. He chose the swiftest aerocar, the streaker which he wasn’t supposed to use except in an emergency.
From above, he followed the lakeshore by the dimness of the false twilight, beating out Neuhadra’s secondary sun before it dropped below the horizon, arriving in front of Ne-mia’s cottage after a direct-line gentle glide. The place seemed abandoned That panicked him. After trotting up to it, he tested the airlock. Unattended. Even the robobulbs were inactive. He entered, sealing the first door behind him, restively waiting the few moments it took the vestibule to match house pressure, then went inside, not knowing what to expect.
“An unguarded entrance!” he boomed to the high ceiling. “Your mother will catch you! You’ll be married before we can finish our business!”
“Grrmfle,” came a sleepy voice from the upper balcony bedroom.
He sighed. She’s just being careless again. Nemia didn’t even open her eyes when he sat down on the bed. He gently shook her shoulders. “How did my young muscled stud measure up?”
She turned her face up at him. “Where in the Galaxy did you unearth that little emperor?” Her eyes were still closed, and that allowed him to admire the beauty of her face with unabashed enthusiasm without having to hide his feelings.
“You’re looking top-of-the-mountain”—he smiled—“if somewhat worn out. I think you liked him.”
She made a face, still with her eyes closed. “It was tough keeping up with him but I got him out of his fam. Now let me sleep some more.” She rolled over, away from Hiran-imus. “I’ve been up all night. He just left.”
“It’s been longer than that. You’ve slept more than you think. It’s already night again and even Sinari is about to set. I met Eron at prenoon after he sneaked back. He was kind of woozy, like one is after a long night, but a secret grin suffused his demeanor so I assume something pleasant happened. He was even deferential toward me, which is highly unusual.”
“I always make men happy, even boys. Now join me for a snuggle in bed and let me sleep some more. I’m still exhausted.”
“Can’t. We’re on a time deadline. A passage to Faraway dropped out of the sky. I need details! Can you do anything and when?”
“It will take me five or six watches to set up the operation, maybe another to train Rigone. I’ve been working with the Scav. He’s technically naive but very competent and an incredibly fast learner.”
“So you did find something!”
“Your boy has the weirdest fam I’ve ever examined. Lucky for me we've had the specs on file or I’d have been lost. I’d rate its memory capacity at about eighty percent of a good Neuhadran design. It should be no trouble to give him auxiliary memory. And we can sneak in a good set of encrypted math modules that will key in when certain kinds of problems trigger them. That’s what Rigone really wants to know how to do, so we’ll go the whole way.”
“Except that we don’t have any of the Fellowship’s modules,” Hiranimus reminded with a bitter snarl.
Reluctantly she pulled herself out of bed and slipped on a housecoat. “So? The Oversee is a hotbed of very competent mathematics. For instance, I have Riote’s Compendium with me. I’ll give him that.”
“That’s tactical stuff! It’s for hit-and-run warfare! Guerrilla stings! You can’t manage an empire with Riote’s carnival tricks!”
She grinned, remembering her long tactical discussions with Grandfa. “Riote was master of the amplification of low-probability events. The Pscholars can’t match us in that area. They ignore unlikely events or set up machinery to damp them down. You’ve been assigned to Coron’s Wisp. Who but Riote could have found that crack in the dam? The Pscholars have too much ground to cover to focus on such dust-mote detail.”
“And we just give Riote’s work to the enemy?”
“Aren’t you hoping that Eron will rise to Second or First Rank status? To get there he needs an edge.”
“I’d be happy if he clawed up to Fourth Rank. But it won’t do us any good if he becomes a devout Pscholar groveling at the Founder’s Tomb. It’s up to you to give us a hook to keep a hold on him. Is it possible? He’s twelve already—fam freeze-up time—and, worse, nobody does fam security better than Faraway.”
“Even Faraway engineers don’t cover all the approaches. I’m the right genius to jimmie the works”—she grinned— “but I’ll need your help.”
“Ah.” He brightened, scurrying away to come back with a bowl of crushed fruit for her. “Okay. So how can I help?” There was a sexy twinkle in Nemia’s eye. “For us to fool his competent Faraway security we need to slip in a modification that’s in resonance with his wetware so the fam doesn’t self-detect undue influence.”
“I’ve assumed as much.”
“But it’s not enough to just modify his fam—we have to modify it in a way that will eventually be useful to us.”
“Of course,” said Scogil impatiently.
She sat back on the bed so she could shovel the red fruit into her mouth. “Let’s think strategically. What’s the real problem we have with the Pscholars? Isn’t it the secretiveness with which they surround their mathematical methods?” Scogil nodded. Certainly they had been able to impose that ethic on their acolytes—successfully—generation after generation.
“So,” Nemia continued, “if Eron survives their rites to become a Pscholar, what he learns will be denied us, despite any relationship he might have with you or debt he feels toward you. To be chosen as a Pscholar one has to become fanatical in the belief that the release of psychohistorical mathematics means an end to anyone ’s ability to predict the future well enough to control it.”
‘That’s false! Precognition just changes the feedback terms in the equations!”
“But they believe in its truth. And all of them can quote the Founder’s proof of its validity. And you know damn well that you’re not a competent enough psychohistorian to know what kind of computational strain those extra feedback terms will place on the whole predictive apparatus. Once Eron has become a Pscholar of whatever Rank, he, too, will have come to believe that psychohistory must be kept a secret from the masses.”
“You’ve figured out how to amplify his loyalty to us?”