The silence seemed unbearable to everyone. “So, kid,” said the farman into the silence after the first few gulps of his syrup had taken effect, “do you still remember the Pythagorean theorem?”
“Of course!” Eron was indignant.
“Don’t ‘of course’ me.” Murek activated the nearby wall. “Show me! What does A-squared plus B-squared equals C-squared mean?”
To humor his tutor, Eron used the writer linked to his fam to conjure a blue triangle. He squared the sides with red squares and chopped them up into pieces which slid over and squared the hypotenuse. “What’s the deal? I can do baby games like that without a fam,” he said scornfully. His tutor mumbled happily, swallowing the rest of his drink while he moved over to spread himself out on one of the beds.
Eron didn’t like anybody at that moment. These bungling fools had condemned him to live out his life as the same mediocre moron he’d always been. If life had been so cruel as to curse him with a stupid Ganderian father and a silly Ganderian mother, at least it ought to have provided him with an extraordinary fam that could see things invisible to everyone else in the Galaxy. Even that surcease was denied him. Worse, now he was probably stuck with crossed wires.
Rigone was grinning at his obvious consternation. “Notice any difference?”
“No! It didn’t work! You goofed!”
Rigone’s tattooed grin only broadened into a laugh. “That’s good. If you were noticing a difference, your fam would have it all calibrated by now and would be busily erasing what I’d done. If I did it right you’ll never notice the difference until the very inamin that you outfox us all. Say hello to me when you reach Splendid Wisdom. I’ll still be on the Olibanum. The Teaser’s Bistro.”
“We leave Neuhadra tomorrow for Faraway,” slurred a
very drunk tutor under the shining chandelier. “Can’t promise you a good time. I’ve never been to Faraway, either.” He chuckled. “Heard about it though.”
Eron stared at the writer-link and sulked.
“Really, kid,” continued the drunk, “relax and get some sleep. There’s plenty of time for you to bring Our Sinning Galaxy down around our ears! You don’t have to do it tonight! Spacefire, you’re only twelve years old.” And he began to laugh and laugh at the pretty lights hanging from the ceiling.
Eron tried to think positively about his chances for conquering the Galaxy with a possibly crippled fam. Famless Arum-the-Patient had conquered Agander and had then turned to the Center, storming the Imperial bureaucracy— but he hadn’t had to compete with fammed minds. Eron felt a frantic urgency. He needed a lecture on patience right now but his tutor, who was his only source for pedantic lectures, was already asleep. He turned morosely to Rigone instead. ‘Tell me about Splendid Wisdom.”
21
A FAMLESS ERON OSA GLIMPSES HIS PAST, 14,810 GE
Make no mistake about it, a future cannot be created without first being predicted. Otherwise the future just happens to very surprised naifs. What you cannot predict, you cannot control. Today, with our powerful tools, we see the coming collapse of galactic civilization and we are all united in our desire to shorten the coming interregnum of thirty millennia down to a more manageable ten centuries, but the real challenge to the Fellowship will come in the haze beyond our present ability to predict.
—Excerpt from the Founder’s Psychohistorical Tools for Making a Future
It was almost as if he had been manufactured without a past in the bowels of this incomprehensible Splendid Wisdom. What had it been like so long ago to be a young man with a past—if he had ever been young. Reclining in his aerochair, he drifted in a haze of loss, thrust into a distant future he didn’t understand. He was weary. On the morrow he would find more energy to flail at the mindless mist. This watch...
He snoozed. Ghosts formed out of the mist, adult ghosts who had taken away his fam, promising him a new one with galaxy-spanning powers—he felt a child’s trust, his own— but they had switched his fam for the entrails of a sheep, leaving him alone and famless to grow up with mere simian wits. The long dream-arms of a child tried to grab his mind back, but the scarified ghost kept him in restraints while carving up his fam, eating some pieces yet sharing choice morsels with his tall dark farman companion—a boy’s precious secrets slithering down hungry gullets. The farman was grinning drunkenly, promising all the time that the sheep entrails would generate for him all the auspices he would ever need...
The man woke in panic. Gripping the armrests. The struggle to learn how to read again was setting his mind off into phantom spaces, even while he napped.
He had been concentrating for hours, unsuccessfully, willing himself to focus on something he had forgotten. He adjusted the aerochair into an upright position, facing the wall that leaked urine, surrounded by the stark simplicity of a lower-level hotel apartment in some cheap catacomb of Splendid Wisdom. What was left of a vital memory was on the tip of his tongue, but maddeningly unavailable. Perhaps the dream had touched its substance in the roundabout way of dreams. He should rest. But he couldn’t. He was driven.
To recover from defeat.
It galled him that he had been defeated. But by whom? And about what? And when?
The half-memory had been driving him again and again to search through the distant files of Splendid Wisdom’s main Imperial Archive in a desperate attempt to jog the tenuous pieces into place. Pinned to the wall, Hahukum Konn’s meaningless picture of them grinning beside an ancient warrior’s flying machine seemed to be an intrusive decoy planted to lead him away from his important memories. The memories that would explain his situation. There had to be something out there that would fit together with the phantom fragments in his mind.
The effort wasn’t coming easily. For a quarter of a month, but especially for this exasperating watch, his awkward hands had been trying to work the lambent holograms of a comm console with finger gestures half controlled by the quantum matrices of a fam that no longer existed. Mistakes infuriated him. He had to fill in behavioral blanks by reason, by trial and error. He didn’t know for what he sought. He couldn’t remember what he had done as a psychohistorian.
He did remember the urgency. Was it something important that he had written/discovered?
Eron Osa might have called upon the aid of the “charity” fam that now rode in the high blue collar around his neck— for appearance sake—but he had left it unconnected, tempting though it might be to take it under his neural control. He was even beginning to resent this common-issue fam designed to parole a convicted criminal (treason) whose personal fam had been found guilty and executed. He wanted to use it, but he could only guess at what ersatz data such a standard-issue mind held, what habits, what directives, what spy-implants. Its motivations would not be Eron’s natural motivations. Whom would it serve? The men who had executed him? Better to run his archival quest using merely the limited abilities of his wetware.
He cursed himself for not having made, in the past, a more strategic use of his organic memory. That gray mush seemed to contain only the vaguest impression of grand strategic issues while being a register of unlimited trivial detail. As Eron jumped through the Archives, erratically bringing up holograms of this item and that item, guided by hunches he did not understand, straining to remember, he found that his mind delivered to him not what he wanted, not pertinent associations, but bizarre memories.