But he needed bodies, plots, the location of bases. He needed his hands on an enemy agent who could be questioned at length. He needed loyal soldiers brilliant enough to do his dirty work.
Not easy. Konn had long ago learned that to get results he often had to act without authorization. That made his work more difficult. He had no allies. The others—that grandiose Hanis—were all tramping down the path of greatest probability—the easy way to go that led who knew where, The most probable of futures could suddenly branch into a thousand pathways flying by too swiftly for deliberate mathematical choice. For twenty-seven centuries the psychohistorians had ruled, and they all seemed to think this had earned them an eternal ride.
The whole of the Pscholarly collective adamantly believed there were no mysterious adversaries; they denied Konn’s analysis, unable to believe that the foundation of a crisis was already under construction—shouldn’t the Founder’s mathematics be predicting it?
The Admiral cursed as he attached a part to his model and it fell off. Every generation had to relearn that its map of the universe was only a map, that no map contains all the details. For years, Konn was turning up contradictions that the Founder’s model couldn’t account for-—bizarre tiny effects drowned by the brilliance of the main model of psychohistory. The anomalies were so slim that even Konn had his doubts. Doubt didn’t deter him. To follow the course of rightness one has to be willing to be wrong. Those who were most certain of their rightness had the highest probability of being wrong.
Would he dare deputize Nejirt for an unauthorized and dangerous ferreting mission? That was the question he was mulling at the back of his mind. Damn, but that boy was late. He picked up the fallen part with his microwaldo and repositioned it
The Horezkor warship was an astonishing joy to rebuild. There were distinct advantages to being a powerful psychohistorian with spiderlike access to any part of the governed Galaxy! He could., even without majority consent, send out talented boys, anywhere, to carry out his desires. If he put these boys to serving the interests of his hobby, well, he could always say that he was “giving them valuable research experience.” With alert students like Nejirt pandering shamelessly for him, life lost part of its deadly seriousness, sometimes even becoming amusing. Power was always limited, but earned power was still power. From the very earliest months of his rule-confined youth, deep down in Splendid’s bedrock warrens, Hahukum had known how to use and abuse power without crossing the fatal line of self-destruction.
He admired the half-completed dreadnought smugly. Nejirt had been indispensable. If this youth could be so brilliant at espionage when success didn’t matter, perhaps he was the ferret Konn could trust for the big job.
This ship was such a find! Manipulators inserted a tiny bulkhead hatch. What a story! Dark Age brigands had plundered two colossal Horezkors from an abandoned Imperial Space Museum of an earlier age. The pirates had acted on commission from the warlords of a vanished kingdom called the Thrall of the Mighty. Priceless loot! Such ingenious scavengers, those Interregnum cutthroats! There seemed to be no record of the final fate of the two dreadnoughts—lost in the internecine battles of a violent age—but a third hull, ransacked for spare parts and thereby crippled, stoically rode on display at the Ulmat’s central hyperspace terminal in the Mowist System in the Ulmat, the last remains of a naval memorial to a fearsome emperor.
The model’s savaged bridge was exposed to the depredations of Konn’s tweezers. Piping hung loose as if teased aside by a robosurgeon’s expert scalpel. From the workbench Konn stared at his creation, contemplating his next addition. He sat relaxed in a frozen pose with a cup of mint tea in one hand and a miniature hyperatomic motor in the other, his fingers doodling with its brilliant red and silver surface. The goggles of the microwaldo manipulator perched above his eyebrows. Skintight control gloves for the waldo, yellow, lay flopped across the weapons rigging.
This was the mock-up of a warship so vast that even scaled to the length of two tall men, it had to be toured by miniature camera. Konn was deciding whether a virtual diagram would help him during the next stage of the restoration. Any tri-dim or cutaway or exploded view that he might need could be evoked from the wall emitters by the mnemonifiers.
How could he best use Nejirt Kambu while hiding his purpose from Jars? He put that extraneous thought aside to concentrate on an immediate assembly problem.
Though intended for psychohistorical inquiry, the workshop’s mnemonifiers had been blatantly loaded with arcane files of naval architectonics. It was another misuse of power, but a powerful psychohistorian was allowed his harmless foibles. His interest went as far back into the mists of time as hand could reach, to the confusing ocean, air, and space vessels of the prehyperflight cultures of the Sirius Sector who seemed to have enviously adopted and mixed each other’s histories in order to claim the role as the original forebears of galactic mankind.
When the workshop walls weren’t in use to display the inner guts of eighty millennia of warcraft, they played fanfare to the Admiral’s spirits by championing the deeds and valor of the recent but bygone Empire. Konn enjoyed this chance to exhibit the masterpieces from his hoard of military art. All his life he had been culling through the long tradition of a bureaucracy that had obsessively commissioned panoramic spectacles to glorify the exploits of Imperial Grandeur. Some of it had survived the Sack.
Behind the model Horezkor, to complete the illusion of awesome might, a surround screen radiated with the somber depths of an ancient artist’s vision: larger than life, a Middle Empire fleet—each ship emblazoned with the feared Stars&Ship—was palpably engrossed in its patrol over a pastel planet unruffled by signs of the fury which mankind’s fiercest navy had been able to drop upon it. The artist was a master of the kind of double-meanings that can be slipped past an arrogant Emperor. In his ironic vision, the Imperial Navy had been shrunk down to a mere swarm of insectoids whose annoying bites on the vast world below could be discerned only by a viewer’s most careful scrutiny.
Nejirt arrived late, stepping through the workshop’s airseal shutter, but not uncomfortably late, and Konn showed off the newest details of the miniature dreadnought to his student, without whom the reconstruction would be nowhere. The meeting began with polite conversation. <CI have the bridge well blocked out and accurately, too, I think—it should even stand up to a zoomscan—but I’m going to have trouble with armament. The Thrall of the Mighty wasn’t able to arm the Horezkors to more than a fifth of normal weaponry, so I have some blanks to fill in. Otherwise I’m in shipyard paradise.”
Nejirt seemed glad to postpone what he knew was going to turn into an intellectual sparring match of major proportions. He noticed in Konn’s hand the red and silver replica of the ship’s huge hyperatomic motor. “Nice motor. You’re sure of those? The hulk at Mowist that I saw has long been stripped of its motors. They have pretty fakes installed, but ones I wouldn’t trust for authenticity.”
“Ah, but remember that I multisource my data! Look at this!” The larger-than-life panorama of the planetary siege winked out. It was replaced by a virtual training demo from the Middle Empire period. A guild technician’s inspection tour now rolled tridimensionally across the wall, zooming in for close-ups of every possible repair of a bulky hyperfield generator, a behemoth when compared with the elegant designs that had begun to appear during the Interregnum.