Discussing ancient warships wasn’t the real business on the agenda. Hahukum Konn began to search for a way to break off his fan and get on with the serious tasks. He put his tools aside and washed his hands in the sprayer while he continued the irrelevant small talk.
The students of the Lyceum knew him as a queer soul, and he suspected that he was not always liked—they looked askance at the political wars he waged within the Fellowship—-First Rank Jars Hanis was constantly at loggerheads with him—but he had earned his Second Rank status honestly via an uncanny ability to extract significant morsels out of almost noise-level data. His sifting skill with raw input had earned him subtle immunities, and he used immunity to violate custom whenever he damn well felt like it. He knew Nejirt was in awe of him. He was quite willing to exploit that awe.
What to do?
Decisions! He was faced with a promising acolyte who had spent a year knocking about the Ulmat and whose maturity required careful assessment before Jhe could be considered for any more critical assignment. Konn was not a man who trusted, on faith, a student fresh out of the Lyceum’s top institute, not even one who came with the highest recommendations, not even one who brought him delightful gifts—especially not when a henchman of Jars Hanis had been on his examination board. Nejirt was still only a promise in spite of all the formidable course work he had done. It was a delicate matter. There was grilling to be done.
Perhaps he should delay. He could soften Nejirt by inviting him for this evening’s dog hunt through the wilderness tunnels—-but the dogs would be a distraction. There seemed to be no avoiding an arena duel across a stage of high-powered analytical tools.
Konn finished washing his hands only after his meditations had taken the suds all the way up to the elbows. "Glad you came at my call. I’ve famfed your report.” He meant that he had scanned the boy’s report directly into his familiar, bypassing his eyes. “I’ve had time to think about it.” By which he meant that his quantronically sentient fam had done most of the work of assimilating the contents for his dual-brain. “We need to review some points together. I've set up a room for us.”
“Yes, sir”
The young Pscholar followed his older mentor out onto a mezzanine looking down on the Lyceum’s great yard, which was sometimes used for rallies but more often used to stage spectacular displays. Its four-story-tall illusions were controlled by a hundred million computers, awesome when the lights were dimmed and, say, the whole galactic spiral was on display. At the moment, they had no need for that kind of tool. They disappeared down a ramp into the maze of the operations complex, Konn’s territory, his hub, his neuron with its dendritic reach out into the stellar cortex of the civilization of man.
It was a short walk from there to an augmented sanctum off one of the neutral corridors. The two psychohistorians took a moment to tune their fams into a slice of the Lyceum’s main computer mind. Konn called up the relevant reports into a virtual carousel for easy access. “Grab a seat,” he said over his shoulder while selecting the equipment he wanted. Five chairs surrounded a small amphitheater, and the Seventh Rank youth slipped into the nearest. Illumination faded to dark.
The emplacement had the tense feel of a battle station; Hahukum Konn was, himself, fond of fantasizing this tiny arena into the fantasy turret of an imaginary Second Empire warship—one with magical hypersight that could zoom anywhere and weapons whose persuasive range was galactic— but he kept his silly whimsy to himself. He activated the projector. Above the central bowl appeared a holo summary of die Ulmat operation. Either of them had the option of superimposing their comments as a fam-generated overlay.
In die lull that followed the holo bloom, Konn watched Nejirt cautiously analyze what had been done to his numbers. There was a strongly implied criticism of his work buried in Haliahim Komi’s compact summary. The young psychohistorian settled into a solid defensive posture and waited patieciy for Konn to initiate the first sortie. When the Admiral waited him out, the boy spoke, apparently only to break the silence, for his voice was bland, hardly listening to what he was. saying, mind focused on the display, storing up answers for the debate to come. “It was a lively field study you handed me, far more fascinating than any of those stereotypical cases we slaved over in sim.”
“The Ulmat Constellation may be a mere field study to you,” Konn began gently,' “but I see it as a brewing disaster in a kettle. The site needs attention—even attack—now, long before it goes critical. I’ll tell you what’s bothering me. I’m not clear about your inference on the resonant pumping. You don’t seem to take the buildup toward crisis seriously. I’ve seen similar patterns of crisis in many different places. Please explain.”
Konn was referring to the odd psychosocial interactions he had long detected between the Ulmat worlds, deadly pushes and pulls that were feeding on each other and seemed to lead with a high probability to what the Pscholars called a topozone crossing. In layman’s language that meant a region where the time-constant for reliable prediction became short—the Ulmat was moving into prophecy-shadow, a flash of historical turbulence that would temporarily blind psychohistory’s prescient eye.
Nejirt was unperturbed, even amused by Konn’s concern. He spoke politely. “I made extensive use of the Hasef-Im test. The resonance has passed its maximum and has even been decoupled.” He communicated some mathematics directly through fam interchange, all of it too compact and modem for an old hand like Konn to grasp. “Consequently it isn’t liable to recur for centuries. The disturbance seems to have moved into a damped phase.” The tense young Pscholar accented his words by adding dashes of color to the holograph that hovered between them. Irrelevant—but pleasant formatting. Second Raters loved their formatting.
He's trying to snow me, grumbled Konn to himself, wishing that these freshmen would at least attempt to talk less like pendants. The Admiral had never heard of the Hasef-Im test. Another damn thing he was going to have to blot up to keep abreast of these damn kids! He wasn’t rattled; the test was probably one of those arty-smarty things that saved students from boiling their own coffee so that they’d have more time for drinking. More power to them. What he did notice was that Nejirt was wary of him and not willing to talk outside of his orthodox report. Not good. It spoke of a mind unable to explore beyond the safety of preestablished umbilicals.
Konn was blunt. “Damping? It doesn’t look like brakes to me. Maybe, but I’d be damn careful before I believed it. I check and double-check everything that has a bad consequence. I picked up the Ulmat effect ten years ago when no one else saw it. And we only began to apply decoupling efforts three years ago, my shot. I’d prefer to clobber a perturbation that dangerous when its snorkel is just peeking above the noise level, but standard operations call for countermeasures with minimal visibility. I’m outvoted and I agree that’s probably for the best. But here you are seriously suggesting that these gentle countermeasures have been effective already! All we’ve done so far in the Ulmat is start a five-man news group and an aggressive local cut-rate hypertrip service—it should be another decade before we can even measure our tampering!”
“I haven’t claimed that the countermeasures have been effective at all-—-I agree, not enough time—I think the damping is a normal chaos intrusion. The Ulmat perturbation just fizzled. That’s normal. Most perturbations do fizzle.”
“I’m not sure we even know what’s been driving the perturbation,” grumbled Konn.