... a fugue of sexing with a sloe-eyed woman while playing truant from studying the physics of quantum foam. Were those the hills of Faraway beyond the ranch window? She was a wonderful tease. She had a full mouth that tapered into upturned lines and delicate fingers that seduced him into forgetting mathematics. They lay on linen with a border pattern of golden forsythia. Who was she?
... images of rafting down a river on the planet of his birth, the pyre-trees ablaze on rocky banks. What planet? Where was he bom? His three-year-old memories of it were especially vivid—but what three-year-old cares about the name of his planet or doesn’t mix it up with the name of his village or galactic sector?
... a boy wandering through the famous stone Library at
Sewinna that dated back to pre-interregnum times when it had been a military barracks for officers of the Empire. Why had his life taken him there?
Once, when his archival search led him into the rebuilding of Splendid Wisdom after the Sack, he was mentally flipped into what seemed to be his initiation as a Rank Seven Psychohistorian...
... under an enormous transept that rose five stories above the heads of his fellow robed acolytes. A wash of unnatural awe, overwhelming immensity. Upreaching arms of stone and fiber and metal, delicate hues of light, ethereal sounds that healed the spirit. Had such a drama happened? Was this “memory” real or a mere collage built out of his humiliating trial? Had he ever entered the Ranks?
None of these reveries sated him. They were too vague. Only when his search brought him near his fugitive goal did he feel ecstasy. The thrill came erratically, then was lost in illusive evasion. Sometimes he came close. Once when he was searching through a listing of Handler Theorems, he hallucinated upon the face of Hanis. Hanis of the Trial! He recognized Hanis, both furious and sarcastic, taking the lapse of his student Eron Osa as a personal affront, chastising his young protege for even thinking about publishing without first having his methodology reviewed by his superiors.
Eron’s organic brain flashed with insight! Psychohistorians did not publish. Then he was a psychohistorian! Slyly he even knew why psychohistorians did not publish. It had come to him as an odd footnote in his recent dream, an aside by the voracious farman ghost. The Fellowship was a secret society. If all men could predict history, then history became unpredictable and the Fellowship of Pscholars would lose its power to predict and control. To publish the methods of historical prediction was the ultimate sin. That felt exactly right—the ultimate sin. A man could lose his fam for committing such a sin!
He slept again, then woke up early to an ancient rhythm— though who knew in Splendid Wisdom what was day and what was night?—eager to pursue his spectral haunts. Perhaps he was making progress? For more than a watch of this session, the Archives taunted him with impalpable apparitions and with vivid events, perhaps from his life—few of them relevant. He was groping but he felt that he would be able to recognize “it” when he found “it” and so he continued to troll patiently. As if he had anything else to do. And on this watch, just as he was fatigued, just as the clock turned over and reminded him that this was his watch for sleep, still eager but at the same time almost ready to doze off, a sudden “hit” stirred a deep emotional dazzle.
He sat up with such alertness that his aerochair bobbed in the air.
He repeated the archived item.
Again the triggering image flowed in front of him in hologram—a gestalt of red symbols and multicolored action against a multigraph of a stable, self-perpetuating decision state. At first he was puzzled. Then he became cognizant of an unfamiliar mainstream mathematics that leaned heavily upon a notation commonly used by physical scientists. The math wasn’t easy to understand without his fam—but: He recognized it as a rudimentary account of stasis. He knew that the psychohistorians did it better because he had once known more about stasis than any man alive. This wasn’t what he was after, but it was a near miss that had triggered his mind.
Ah so!
The concomitant emotional rush came with a clear patter of babble as his organic mind intoned in a ponderous voice: “Early Disturbed Event Location by Forced Arekean Canonical Pre-posturing: An Analysis in Three Parts.” He grinned uncontrollably. That, whatever in Space it meant, would be his, Eron Osa’s, dissertation!
He pondered this miracle of precipitate memory, astonished. Wetware minds worked by peculiar magic! Where had such a revelation come from? He wasn’t sure what the babble was about, except that it had to do with... psychohistorical stasis brought on by... what? He didn’t know. All he knew was that this monograph was the object of his search and that he had to have a copy. It was going to be a “no” to sleep!
But being a vagued-out moron was utter frustration when you had memories of being a genius.
He paused before making a formal request for the monograph over the network. Were his actions being monitored? Doubtful. The Pscholars did not monitor people; they monitored trends. People acting alone had infinitesimal power. De-fammed criminals were a threat to no one.
Half a watch and a growling stomach later, he suspected with a growing certainty and a terrible disappointment that his monograph had vanished from the Archives of the whole Imperialis star system. For a wrenching moment he wondered if he had ever written such a document Yet he remained gut certain that he had! Was his certainty only an illusion brought on by the loss of his fam? Perhaps he had never gone past the intention to write.
Yet he could guess the real truth. His work had been erased. All copies were gone. Thoroughly gone; even his unique fam, with its ability to re-create the research, had been destroyed.
Now what?
Eron switched off the insubstantial console with a gesture of his finger and left his chair bobbing in midair. He paced about the strange apartment, too cramped for his aristo taste, wondering where he really was in relation to the rest of Splendid Wisdom. Where were his friends? Could that ancient psychohistorian who had sat on the very panel that had condemned him be a friend? He had only dared explore his immediate neighborhood. All else was a terrifying maze. Everything in the apartment folded into the wall, everything was white, not a trace of luxury or space. The dispozoria was leaking urine. This wasn’t home! He buried his head in his arms.
Ping! The tiny, gleaming sphere of a Personal Capsule appeared in the functional wall niche, unnoticed.
Of course this wasn't his apartment; he was no longer an acolyte of the Psychohistorian Fellowship; he was alone, disowned, friendless, possessions confiscated, tossed into the lower warrens of Splendid Wisdom where he was condemned to think with treacherously slow neurons! It was infuriating ... and for a moment he had a rush of uncontrolled rage that stunned him into an unbalanced mental fall because it was not resisted by the restraining calmness of fam input. He had shoved emotionally against a removed wall... flinging himself into emptiness.
The rage turned to instant consuming fear—without his fam he was a very asymmetrical animal. His zenoli training was useless, his brain-fam centering lost. He could no longer trust his own responses. This was worse than he had anticipated when he had been whole and accepting of the dangers inherent in his rash deeds. Being an asymmetrical animal didn't fit with his plans! Plans! Again his mind lurched out of control with a flash of joy at the thought of his brilliant agenda.
But, when he tried to remember the nature of such an agenda, he found only vacuum. He glanced about him in desperation. That was when he saw the Personal Capsule. It stopped him, reminding him of danger. He grumbled bitterly to himself—My orders from the police. Yet his eyes disclaimed such a conclusion; the omnipotent police, backed up by the certainties of psychology, had no need for supersecurity. A Personal Capsule? Here? How was he to read it without fam input?