Curiously he picked the small sphere from its niche. It opened in his hand and would not have opened for any other of the trillion inhabitants of Splendid Wisdom. There was no famfeed attachment A tiny screen scrolled its message with a flashing warning that whatever scrolled off the top was unrecoverable. It read:
See Master Rigone at the Teaser's Bistro, Calimone Sector, AQ-87345, Level 78. (The Corridor of Olibanum.) I’ve already told Rigone what you'll need. I’ve got myself in a
real fix and don’t know how much more I can help. Your benefactor.
Inessential words began to fade, leaving only a list of critical information. By then the screen and sphere were well on their way to dust.
Eron Osa didn’t even have to memorize the message. Rigone sounded like the name of a friend, or was it just a ghost figment of his dreams? From somewhere he knew of the Teaser’s Bistro—a tolerated black market came to mind, a dive where young Fellowship rakes hung out to drink and rollick and have illegal attachments added to their fams. He couldn’t recall ever having been in such a student den, but, for all he knew, he might have spent most of his idle time in just such a place.
22
SEDUCED BY HISTORY, 14,791 GE
On the death of that emperor [Caesar-of-August], his testament was publicly read to the senate. He bequeathed, as a valuable legacy to his successors, the advice of confining the empire within those limits, which Nature seemed to have placed as its permanent bulwarks and boundaries; on the west the Atlantic ocean; the Rhine and Danube on the north; the Euphrates on the east; and toward the south, the sandy deserts of Arabia and Africa.
Happily... the moderate system he recommended... was adopted by the fears and vices of his immediate successors. Engaged in the pursuit of pleasure, or in the exercise of tyranny, the first Caesars seldom showed themselves to the armies, or to the provinces; nor were they disposed to suffer, that those triumphs which their indolence neglected should be usurped by the conduct and valor of their lieutenants. The military fame of a subject was considered as an insolent invasion of the Imperial prerogative; and it became the duty, as well as interest, of every Roman general, to guard the frontier entrusted to his care, without aspiring to conquests which might have proved no less fatal to himself than to the vanquished barbarians.... Germanicus, Suetonius Paulinus, and Agricola, were checked and recalled in the course of their victories. Corbulo was put to death.
—Edward Gibbon in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volumes I-V, original editions (English)
1776-1788 AD, translation by Colmuni of Archaist Press 75,398 AD
Nothing had come of his fam upgrade and that had chastened Eron, giving him much to mull over on the trip out from Neuhadra. The first leg of their journey would take them to ancient Sewinna, one of the first worlds colonized in this arm of space. He kept to himself on the ship, suddenly conscious that soon he would no longer be under anyone’s tutorship. He practiced making decisions on his own—while he still had the indomitable Murek to run to. The fam mattered less and less; it was as if he had stopped grasping at flotsam to keep him afloat in the ocean and was now determined to learn how to swim. He kept away from Nemia, except to quiz her about her strange Egg which so fascinated him that he couldn’t keep his hands off it. He was resenting his tutor less and less.
He found himself ignoring the stars, indifferent to the shipboard telescope which had so recently fascinated him. One peek at a star and you’ve seen them all! Glatim’s odd group of roustabout sailors and meteoroid specialists teased him too much—once during a jump-stop they sent him after a left-handed nanowrench when he was trying to be helpful; so much for trying to be friends with motherless piss drinkers! And their snarks! The next time they set him up for laying traps to catch cable-eating shipsnarks he was going to put salt in their sugar!
He began to seclude himself at a spare console (found while looking for the left-handed nanowrench). It was scrunched up in a split-level storage closet off the library’s memory racks. Even in that confined lair, with only a screen connection to the library, ignoring the stars wasn’t easy. Ship’s memory was overstocked with the minutiae of millions of solar systems, almost as if the ship were a police catalog of all the rocks in the universe ever booked as troublemakers. Special attention was given to gargantuan planets that gathered gangs of whatever rabble passed by, scattering them helter-skelter.
Still, it was possible to skip over all the celestial mechanics because the archives had also accumulated huge gobs of history about the regions of space they were passing through. History just seemed to come along with the bookish weight of solar system mechanics like a laundrator accumulating lint—mapping expeditions, the details of political crises caused by astronomical events, the fracas around the Epsilon Oramaist nova, the weird jungles on the moon of an almost star-size planet, endless background detail. Sometimes the interesting lint was just a story that one of Glatim’s men had downloaded into the ship’s archive years ago for personal reasons and no one had bothered to erase.
Because their first destination was Sewinna, he did a search on the Sewinnese Archipelago to see what he could find. The most interesting item he turned up was a fictional account of the Sewinnese revolt. That was early Interregnum stuff when an especially greedy viceroy had done the unthinkable and broken his domain off from the First Empire.
The story, composed only years after the now-buried historical event it described, was told from the viewpoint of a young soldier of noble blood still committed to the old values—and as blind as the author to the grand significance of the unfolding events. Eron found the tale fascinating because it wasn’t a story built upon modem tropes and psy-chohistorical hindsight. Everything about it was strange, even the interwoven music was strange—blood-dancing stuff, primitively regal—yet accompanied by words so naive that Eron couldn’t believe he was hearing diem. He famfed the whole novel out of the library so that he could mull it over during “bunk-watch” and use his fam’s imaginator to blank out the underside of the upper bunk with the exotic images of battles and conflicts suggested by the adventure. He especially liked the lurid sex and the passionate men who were unafraid to use their blasters!
Viceroy Wisard (a historical figure) had ambitions on the throne. The author (probably correctly) supposed that Wisard took the newly crowned Boy Emperor to be too weak to reply to separatist audacity so far from the Center. Hadn’t the minor Precinct of Nacreome already been lost a century earlier to his great-uncle? A spineless dynasty. The Galactic Empire obviously needed new Imperial blood of a more ruthless kind. Wisard’s kind. Driving the Sewinnese into the hardship of war preparations, Wisard provoked only a revolt of his own people. (In the story the revolt is led by the fictional hero who rallies the Sewinnese to rejoin the Empire by carrying out their honorable duty, the obvious preference of the author.)
Meanwhile (as the hero drives Wisard and the remnants of his personal guard off planet) the Boy Emperor is marshaling his answer to insurrection through the Imperial Navy’s most pitiless Admiral. His armada arrives with soldiers intent upon loot and a leader intent upon seizing the viceroyalty himself. (These were dramatic scenes of struggle on a large stage capable of a graphic elaboration much more interesting than a view of the bunk above!)