“Did you know me back then?” asked Eron with an eager curiosity.
“When you were unspoiled and empty-headed? No,” said Konn wryly. “I tested a few ideas in the Ulmat Constellation during your youth and so chance might have put us together then—but it didn’t. It’s a big Galaxy. Maybe even I couldn’t have saved you.”
“I can save myself.” From where his defiance came, he did not know. It seemed to be an integral part of his personality. “I’m going to reestablish myself as a psychohistorian ” “No.” The negative wasn’t a refusal; it was just sadness and a sigh. “No, you’re not. Forget it!”
<cWere you my friend?”
“More than you ever knew.”
Overwhelming grief. “Help me. I have to start somewhere.” Eron was suddenly bawling and it shocked him, to be shaking like that, real tears running down a convulsing face. He had expected his fam to modulate his grief, and again his fam wasn’t there. How weird to be an animal. “There must..he said between sobs w... be something...” he took a breath “... I can do.”
Hahukum didn’t have the heart to discourage the boy with more good advice. He didn’t know what to do or say. He pulled out a small printed book that he often carried with him.
“Try this. You were fond of books when I knew you. I often read this one when I’m fam-disconnected. Exercise for the raw brain. Makes it work. Takes me back to my animal roots. Dissociation is not popular but my belief has always been that disconnecting from one’s fam is healthy once in a while. I do it regularly” He grinned. “Of course, maybe I’m just getting ready to survive the time when Hanis gets to do to me what he did to you.” Eron did not take the book and so Konn pressed it into his hands. “I’m serious. Read it.”
“With my eyes?” The tears were gone as quickly as they had come. He had gone from grief to being appalled.
“You’re expecting to download?” asked Hahukum sarcastically.
Eron stared at the slim book. He was used to scanning them in with his fam; it was hundreds of times faster that way. The book wore a gold title in an obsolete typeface. Selected Essays by the Founder Eron was shocked by how difficult it was to read even that much.
“People quote the Master a lot,” said Konn wryly. “They talk about him in grand terms—but they never read him. Obsolete. But I like his stuff.” He waited until he had caught Eron’s direct gaze. “I’ve always been impressed by how much our Founder did with so little. Pretty good stuff for a mere famless mind.” He held Eron’s gaze commandingly. It was his way of giving Eron hope, though he had none himself. The Founder, famless, had taught himself psychohistory.
“Thanks. I wish I could remember having worked with you.”
“My mother gave me the book a long, long time ago.
Down in the nether worlds ” He pointed at his feet, referring to the lower depths of Splendid Wisdom. “She was barely making grade as a tax clerk. She wanted me to be somebody. Mothers are like that.” He smiled wistfully. “Fathers, too.”
2
IN THE LAIR DFTHE ADMIRAL, 14,790 GE
"Death haunts an Emperor as he grows wise in mind and feeble in body. Haunted he seeks a king/y son out among this starry expanse of suns—where there are no sons "
—Soliloquy of the Emperor Maximoy-the-Polite, from Act 3 of Valodian’s last play, The Twilight of an Emperor. Valodian is credited with reviving the tradition of the Lament as it was perfected in the 98th century GE.
When Eron Osa was twelve years old and the Founder had been dead for more than twenty-seven centuries, “Admiral” Hahukum Konn was already a feisty eighty-three. For decades he had been trolling the ocean of galactic space in search of the Second Empire’s mysterious adversary whose shadow self skulked through his ocean of numbers. This year he had a first nibble, but wasn’t sure the fish (or the flotsam) was still hooked. The Ulmat Constellation seemed to be the first of the anomalous regions to have reacted to one of his discrete probes.
He paced patiently to and fro across the shining floor of “Hahukum’s Bridge” waiting for his then most valuable student to arrive—Nejirt Kambu was brilliant, a possible successor, often late for appointments. But the “Admiral” never waited or paced with an idle mind; now his attention bided the time by focusing itself on the needs of his wounded battleship.
Behind sleeping forcefield spires, the colossal warship brooded in defiance of its terrible dismemberment, a black and skinless superstructure of spars and ribs and breakup-bulkheads—still breathing—as if being stripped, exposed, and flayed had not yet brought defeat, only the readiness to strike out with one last deadly flash at anyone from the stars who dared to attack*
Beyond was the panorama of a mottled planet under siege.
The Horezkor was a major warship of the Middle Empire period, produced in minor quantities, the first one being commissioned in the year 5517 GE. Almost three thousand were built during that century, many serving well beyond normal retirement age.
“The Mad Admiral” had been working with pleasure on this unfinished model of the ancient Imperial dreadnought The Horezkor dominated the ebony hover-space above the bridge’s workshop table. So formidable was this vast war-machine that it cast upon Konn an unreal aura, as if he were a giant placed among the stars. One might hardly notice that both ship and man were embedded in a vast scholarly maze deep inside the Lyceum metropolis where students were apprenticed to the psychohistorians of Splendid Wisdom’s Second Empire, a Lyceum itself embedded in a planetary city that regulated the commerce and life of the Galaxy.
Konn’s imposing title was the awesome one of Second Rank Pscholar in a commanding meritocracy that defined only one higher level. “Second” rankled him, and, from dread of his displeasure, he was more often called “Admiral” than “Second”—even though he had never held a military commission at any time in his long life. Only his enemies called him “Second.” He loved his hobby because it rested him from the deadly game of galactic sleuth. The history of military vehicles was so much simpler than tracking down a coming psychohistorical crisis.
He wore simple naval uniforms—but deliberately chose them from a selection several eons out of date to fend off complaints by backbone-stiff naval regulars who felt in their staid hearts that the impersonation of a naval officer ought to be a capital crime. His skull was shaved in curious planter-rows of tuft and skin-shine, the legendary style of Kambal-the-First whose cabal of renegade ships had first conquered this planet of the central galactic glitter when it had been a minor world of farmers and tradesmen quietly innocent of their strategic location and meritorious climate. The gulfs of space had once been a moat that protected the castle planets of civilization. By Kambal’s time, the central galactic bulge was swarming with shipwise nomadic “barbarians” hungering for a better place to live than the desolate homeworlds settled by their unfortunate ancestors. Kambal was the archetype of an admiral.