Nemia grimaced. “Loyalty to what? We are just as secretive as the Pscholars, and our secretive rituals have a far longer history. We’ve lasted half as long as both Empires put together. We panic if a single Pscholar dreams about us. Even Eron isn’t permitted to know your real name, Mister tutor Murek Kapor.”
Scogil scratched his head. “I once took a fascinating course on the equations of secrecy from Cas Ratil. Made me think.”
‘That secretive old drillmaster! I avoided his courses like the plague!”
“Secrecy certainly challenged the mathematician in him. Secret societies are intrinsically unstable, with all the nice characteristics of a ten-kilometer-high tower. They have to be balanced by active control—in the case of the tower, little electromagnets that read and counter all bending moments. A tower like that can stand until even its builders are forgotten—but the hour the electricity fails or the freak wind comes that is stronger than the electromagnets...”
“Do you think they will discover us?” There was almost a shudder in Nemia’s voice.
“The Pscholars? They already have. Our Smythosian secret won’t last another lifetime. Neither will theirs. I predict open warfare within the next couple of generations. Let’s get back to tactics. You were hinting as if you’d found an angle to protect our access to Eron.”
“Don’t you see?”
“No.”
“What if Eron developed an aversion to secrecy? What if he was a closet blabbermouth, primed to break only after he was a full-fledged Pscholar?”
“Can you do that?' Hiranimus asked, awed.
“No,” she blazed, “but you can!”
He was delighted at this turn in the argument. “All right. Brief me.”
“I’m not sure we can pull it off. Eron must have a major psychological revelation about secrecy—while wearing his fam—no more than an hour before Rigone performs the fam modification. Do you know what happens in the brain during enlightenment? We’ve got to strike during the emotional flux of the neural reorganization.”
“Hold on. Are you actually suggesting that / can give him an enlightening lecture on the evils of secrecy while he’s psyching himself up for a major fam operation?”
She assumed the pedantic poise of an authoritarian professor. “Not a lecture. Please, it has to be all emotion. The original psychic probe, you’ll recall, was a surface emotional whip, a control weapon, and not a gentle one. The tuned psychic probe that Cloun-the-Stubbom used so effectively during the Interregnum to dominate his enemies worked at a deeper wetware level of emotional judgment—it left fewer conflict scars and no neural lesions—but it was still a control weapon. The modem fam has much better bandwidth in the two-way communication of nuanced information but is still basically the same emotional device merely reengineered so that the user can control his own emotions, rather than having emotional control imposed by an outside source. To fool a fam, its internal logic, which has been conditioned by a lifetime of symbiosis, has to remain convinced that any emotional turmoil it senses is internal How well do you understand Eron’s emotions?”
“No one is a telepath, but I’m a trained observer and I’ve known him a long time.”
“So? What are his underlying assumptions about secrecy?
Scogil groped about for an analogy. “At this point he’s still a routine product of Ganderian socialization. There are things he will talk about and things his ethics won’t permit him to talk about.”
“And some things he wants to talk about but can't Or couldn’t. Sex things.” A wistful look crossed her eyes, and she held her robe close to herself. That worried Scogil. She continued, almost in awe. “He had a stuck switch in him. He tried to talk and couldn’t—his mouth moved like his head was detached from his larynx—but after he touched me he entered some alien world. The switch melted and he blabbered.”
“You got secrets out of him?” Scogil was instantly jealous. Whenever he’d tried to oil-ease Eron’s secrets out of him, he’d only created an iron resistance in the boy.
Nemia was staring at her memories of last night. “Some. The veil was always there. He’s in full restimulation of a strong internal conflict that he’s trying to figure out. It’s our big opportunity. Conflict resolution is driven by emotion. If he solves this problem himself and the solution is still in wetware flux when we modify his hardware fam—altering its judgment tree about what is, and what is not, a secret— the fam will conclude that its internal changes derive from Eron’s turmoil rather than from anything we’ve done and it won’t have ‘motivation’ to undo our work. When it looks for modifications to Eron’s emotional state, it won’t find any— because we aren’t going to modify him. When it looks for modifications to itself, it won’t find anything that can’t be reconciled as its own response to Eron’s turmoil.” She smiled. “His sexual conflict is a perfect attack vector. We’ll have to work through that.”
“He certainly hasn’t got any problem with humping an older woman,” Hiranimus commented wryly. “A young Ganderian boy is supposed to get himself seduced by an older woman so he won’t fall prey to the naive wiles of an inexperienced girl.” That last was aimed with a intonation which just might have indicted Nemia.
She dodged his jab. ‘Tell me, did he rush to divulge to you all about last night, or did he keep it a secret?
Scogil sighed. “That’s one Ganderian taboo that’s laced up tight. Sexual affairs are secret. It’s not a taboo he would even question.”
“I agree. That means he’ll make an excellent Pscholar, doesn’t it? They’ll have a solid foundation of early-life secrecy considerations upon which to build their elitist ethics of silence. That's what I’m suggesting we break, that emotional foundation, now, while we can.”
Scogil tried to think in those terms. “Eron has always been an unhappy Ganderian,” he mused. “He’s confided to me many of his unspoken hopes, and though he hasn’t been one to break any cultural taboos with me—at least as regards secrets—he has more than once ranted and raved in frustration about the secrecy of his peers. He does not like secrets though he seems psychocondemned to keep them. If there is an internal contradiction here, it is the burning need he has to know what he knows he has no business knowing. He has the mind of a spy.”
Nemia nodded. “Did he ever tell you that he regularly spied on the clandestine meetings of father and mistress?”
“Never!”
“Last night he confessed—in a rush of emotion he wasn’t really able to control—that he had once tried to confront his father with some details of his affair with the woman—did you know her?—Melinesa—but, in the end, never dared. He was frantic to give his father advice, and it drove him crazy that he couldn’t. I think he was in love with Melinesa. He certainly disapproves—and disapproved—of the way his father handled her.”
Scogil recalled the fights Eron picked with his father, much to that harried man’s discomfort. Scogil had never been able to pinpoint the source of the boy’s rage. So—he had harbored visions of giving his father advice about secret matters of state and boudoir, eh? ‘That sounds like Eron.” He reflected. “I only met Melinesa twice .” She was wearing a flowing sarong of birds printed on orange. He saw in his mind’s eye Melinesa in a hallway at a conference bringing him cakes. She had wanted an excuse to discuss Eron’s prospects, glancing fondly at Eron once, while the boy stood across the room, staring at her. She was indeed charming and indecently young, probably too young for Eron by Gan-derian standards, only a decade his senior. “I didn’t know she was involved with Osa Senior, not surprisingly. On Agander one knows these things happen, but even a dilated eye will see scant evidence of any cross-generational liaisons. Everything looks like a ritual, and anything can be hidden in a ritual.”