The Decline and Fall... was printed on delicate cellomet with elaborate typography for the headings. It had a sturdy binding with an electronic back cover addendum that contained all the previous copies from which it had been translated and many of the documents that had been original sources, all in the original alphabets with correlation dictionaries. And alphabets he’d never seen before! He couldn’t tell how old the history was, but it was about really old stuff!
When his tutor saw the three new books in a sack he grumbled, but Eron offered no apology for that. He did try to apologize for running away without a word. His pseudoparent only shut him up. “We’re almost there. At Faraway you’ll be your own master. You might as well start now. Asinia Pedagogic doesn’t run its school in loco parentis; you study or you don’t—it doesn’t matter if you are twelve or fifty. You can be sure of only two things: one, they’ll deduct their due from your credit stick every semester and, two, if you aren’t certifiable due to lack of study, they won’t certify you. Run away and they won’t chase you. There is nothing to run away from anymore.” He picked out the fat book and thumbed through it like he wasn’t used to handling pages of cellomet. “Looks like you got stung on this one! Look when it was purported to have been written.” He pointed at the dates 1776-1788 AD, and laughed.
“That’s pretty early in Imperial history,” Eron said apprehensively.
“No, no. It’s a Rithian book. They never adopted Imperial Time. Being Rithians they date events from the birthday of a Rithian who, after being murdered, ascended into chaos with a bang and created the galaxies for man to inhabit. And seeing that it was good, named it heaven. Whatever con shop on Rith published your book to catch some naive tourist is claiming that it was written”—he paused—“some 743 Imperial centuries ago.” Eron’s tutor guffawed. “I doubt if any Rithian could read back then or even walk upright. To this day they still have the bewildered gait of tree-swingers who have chopped down all their trees and are looking for something to climb. Some historians think the entire body of their ancient literature is a forgery, and wasn’t created until after they mongrelized with their Eta Cumingan conquerors and figured out how to count money on their fingers.” He shook his finger at the book by Gibbon. “It damn well better be a copy—I don’t think cellomet will last that long if it’s not kept under helium.”
“Aren’t we descended from Rith?”
“So they claim—along with every other planet in the Sirius Sector.”
“You don’t think it’s true?”
His tutor shrugged. “It could be. They certainly have the simian genes and the backbone of an animal who walks on all fours to prove it. Why shouldn’t we be descended from a planetful of blowhards? A good joke, if true. It’s hard to tell because Rith produces half of the Galaxy’s con artists. Their favorite scam is to sell you an artifact that they will swear predates hyperspatial travel and, if you look especially gullible, will swear on the head of their mother that it predates space travel. They have factories producing the stuff. Some poor guy chained to a table probably wrote your charming book no more than five hundred years ago.”
“It’s real. Just read a page and you’ll see!” Eron thrust the book at his tutor and opened to a page at random.
Scogil had never downloaded Englic but he could read the first page of the introduction in the archaic but eminently standard galactic of a pedantic editor. “It must have been forged no earlier than the last couple of thousand years— sounds like a rip-off of the plot of the Interregnum. Kid, the Rithians are the Galaxy’s most adept forgers, right down to the radioactive traces... anyway... who’s going to read your book to check on them? You can’t famfeed it.” He flipped to the end. “It’s three thousand pages long!”
“I can read it in an afternoon!”
“By eye? Good luck. And in case you ever let Nemia do an astrological reading of your unpromising future, you were bom, Rith time”—he paused to do a calculation in his head, converting at the ratio of 1057 Rithian years for every galactic standard millennium—“on the second hour, third of februan, 80,362 AD. Don’t ask me under what constellation—that’s Nemia’s department.”
Eron took his book back, firmly, and started to slink away. “Not so fast, young man. I owe you a spanking. Did you think we would have gallivanted all over Sewinna tracking you down?”
“No.”
“We would have left you stranded. Of necessity.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here,” said Eron contritely. “I did some thinking.”
“Good.”
23
THE HYPERLORD MAKES A RENDEZVOUS, 14,791 GE
In the Salki version of the Chronicles of Early Splendid Wisdom during the turbulent twilight of the Kambal Dynasty in the mid-second millennium of the Galactic Era... 1346-1378 GE... it is told that the villas surrounding the harbors of the Calmer Sea were sacred shrines of meditation, a haven within the hectic ardor of a local interstellar trading mecca, where Splendid Wisdom’s minor empire controlled 90,000 central star systems and its influence extended far beyond its borders.
By the malfeasance of late-dynasty emperors and the bribes taken by Emperor Kambal-the-Eighth, all was forfeited to the nomadic armadas of the Frightfulpeople who were then forcibly entwining themselves into the central galactic trade routes, even to the establishment of their main base of operations on the shores of the Calmer Sea of Splendid Wisdom. Disguised as a spiritual movement offering an alternative to a wealth-mad economy, they blatantly usurped Imperial prerogatives and finally named one of their own as Emperor during the Time of Two Emperors.
The ancient Kambal nobility eventually led a retaliation that cost six billion Splendid lives and an annoying million Frightful Soldiers before it was crushed by the Frightful usurper. [The casualty figures are probably exaggerations—moderation not being a feature of the Frightful-terror’s “beatification" of the Empire. The earliest secondary accounts date from three hundred years later. All surviving records contradict one another. Ed.] Frightfulperson Tanis-the-First, 1378-1495 GE, familiarly referred to as Tanis One-Eye, reigned for 117 years, dominating the indigenous population by a truly massive immigration policy and control of water. It was he who apportioned the Seas of Splendid Wisdom among his barons so that...
... after grinding miiiennia of political maneuvering, the power of the Frightfulpeopie faded. By 9892 GE, when Splendid Wisdom openly proclaimed its suzerainty over the whole of the Galaxy via the Pax Imperials, memory of the Frightful conquest, of the Frightfulpeople’s mighty draining of the oceans, etc., remained only in the minds of a loyal Imperial subclass of petty nobles. ..and... by the end of the interregnum the Frightfulpeopie had essentially disappeared from the peerage. Today...
—From the Explanatorium at the Calmer Pumping Station
Such a backtracking out-of-the-way circuitous route! Jama looked at the deceptive lines Katana had been sketching on the tabletop. How could this meandering scheme possibly get them from the center of galactic power to the legendary Telomere City of peripheral Faraway, all of 65,000 leagues distance along light’s vector? The Hyperlord was not amused.
They were awaiting their ship’s docking over a snack of pastry and hot himu tea. In an alcove of the star-station above Splendid Wisdom, Kikaju Jama’s female companion and newly assigned bodyguard set down her cup and pointed with her stylus at the ship symbols scrolling across the ribbon screen out in the corridor. “We’re on,” she said, rising and stabbing the table’s service menu for a printout of her crude diagram. “Let’s go.” She pocketed the map and erased the table’s mind.