“I’m not ugly and I do dominate men!” Humility was defiant.
The old woman smiled, recalling herself in her prime. “And you do not have the goal to be beautiful and dominating. You are beautiful and dominating. Perhaps you dream about living longer than any se-Tufi has lived. Perhaps you dream of finding the man who can father a daughter who will found a great line with a better heart than your own. Perhaps you look for the ultimate poison. In ways your beauty may have fostered counter-goals. Sometimes you will seek ways to be ugly so that when you travel you will not be molested. One’s goals only reflect what one does not have.”
“I came here to kill Kaiel.”
The crone mother nodded. “So did I. And I found the most vigorous priest clan on all of Geta. They may break the stalemate. They have a magic ear which can go anywhere on the planet in a single heartbeat. They have delicate instrumentation beyond belief. Did you know that a Kaiel can transplant a single chromosome from an ovum with a success rate of one in a hundred? They even do genetic surgery on the chromosome while it is out of the cell with viruses they grow in beetles. Do you know what that means for us? We could forge sister lines that differ by a single chromosome!”
“Do you think the Kaiel will be the instrument of God’s will to unite Geta?” This was a somewhat horrifying thought for Humility.
“No, my child. They came on the scene far too late. God’s command has already been carried out.” The smile of wrinkles was there again. “Which clan is represented in every major city on Geta? Which clan has achieved access to all policy decisions and is present when they are made?”
“Mother!”
The hag cackled. “How easy it is to rule when you sneak into power as a man’s possession. We’re not a priest clan. Who would have suspected us? Who would have opposed us? What could seem more harmless than a woman for hire who does everything she is told to do?”
“But dear crone, we just lay them! We flatter them, and play them off against each other and, seeming to obey, make them give us what we want…” Her eyes widened.
“Go on.”
“But that’s not ruling a planet! There has to be policy. We’d have to be making momentous decisions!”
“Like which priest clan shall win Geta?”
Humility scoffed. “We aren’t going to do that! We’re going to side with the winners. We’re going to ride to power in their beds!”
“And what of the Timalie? that clan of priests who abhor mistresses? Would we allow them to win?”
Humility burst into the great laugh. “They haven’t got a chance!” She stared at herself as she would be five of her lifetimes from now. “Mother, I think you are serious!”
“Of course I am serious! But don’t think I am impressed with our power. We did all this without knowing we were doing it. Our relative strength is great on the planet as compared with any priest clan, but it is as if we commanded a bee’s brain in a human body. What could be more pitiful than a human whose brain takes all day to send a message to his hand? Rule and hand go together. We may be stronger than anyone else, even the Mnankrei, but we are weak. We must use our position, build on it, or in a single generation all could be lost.”
Humility scanned over her ambition and pride. In a sudden flash, it seemed trivial, bloated. “Will I ever be humble?” she cried out.
The old woman took the young girl and brought her down on the bed, holding her head against a dried bosom and caressing the flowing hair of youth. “Not if you grow up like me, you won’t.” She paused. “You have beautiful hair but it’s dry from your trip. We have superior hair tonics here in Kaiel-hontokae. I’ll buy some for you.”
Humility was sleepy. She struggled to get up, to wake up, to get back to her cell where she could sleep.
“No, no. Stay here. Your journey was enough asceticism for a purification. A night with me in this little room won’t spoil Aesoe’s Palace for you.”
“Why did you bring me to Kaiel-hontokae?”
“I need an assassin. I’m too old for that kind of job.”
But Humility was asleep.
27
There is a saying that in the western regions of the Kalamani Desert only a stone has kalothi.
READING OVER HIS old predictions, ineradicably and forever a part of the Archives, Hoemei was appalled by his naivety. Aesoe had taught him like Tae had taught Aesoe, and he had imitated his master, not always grasping the direction of Aesoe’s vision. Now suddenly he was seeing with a new clarity.
The rayvoice project had been a shock. Aesoe believed in a Geta where authority was centralized in Kaiel-hontokae. For such a structure to be viable, rapid communication to and from the city was a necessity. Yet Hoemei had established only forty-five rayvoice stations, fourteen along the Njarae coastline, and the information flow was already unmanageable. He was now sure Aesoe had miscalculated the complexity level of a centralized government by orders of magnitude.
Hoemei’s visions came erratically, in dreams, perhaps suddenly in the middle of a conversation, often in full color. Sometimes as he sat over his papers by candlelight, well past his bedtime, he heard Getans from many futures discussing trivial problems of their day. He saw strange machines whose purpose half-baffled him.
Once when he had been reading an aerodynamic report that related flyer skill to flyer size, prepared by sailplane enthusiasts and o’Tghalie, he was washed with the image of a clan of tiny sky people who could stay aloft almost indefinitely on their man-made wings. Another time he saw a rayvoice that carried a flickering picture. He saw a man standing beside a great wheeled vehicle worrying about a problem ten weeks’ march away as if it were his own.
When he disciplined his strange vision to peer into the specific future which would use Aesoe’s map of a united world, he saw, sluggish as the armored ice worms of the far south, a huge social creature ridden by vast clans that moved rivers of information with little real effect. The images disturbed Hoemei because Aesoe’s cause had been his world, too, his avowed goal.
An o’Tghalie friend calculated for him that a reasonably nimble central government, with modest responsibilities, might require hundreds of times as many decision makers as there were citizens. Hoemei had been astonished. Prediction, it seemed, was treacherous when one embraced the fuzzy pictures that lay beyond the range of one’s myopic eyes.
He used an increasingly focused vision to sift through centrally governed futures, sometimes a dozen alternate Getas a day, each of which had been founded on different organizing principles. The clogged snarl of their cultures finally drove him to find wider worldscapes. He often stared into space, unaware of the room he was in, or of the people he was with, as if he were of unsound mind. From those visionary travels along the bewildering branches of far tomorrows he brought back a simple conclusion.
Too much local authority leads a region’s priests to maximize local benefits sub-optimally at the expense of distant peoples. Such cases represent the situation where essential information sources remain far from the deliberation and execution points and so tend to be unused.
Central authority, which theoretically maximizes benefits for the whole by gathering and using all information, in practice quickly becomes so choked that wisdom breaks down, again leading to far less than optimal solutions. Carrying information from any large area to a central location, and there correlating it, takes longer than the useful life of the information. Data degrades as it travels, or it doesn’t arrive in time, or it gets lost in the incoming flood and is never used.