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  Already the cocks were looking up, reacting to Finesse’s voice. They strutted about, as if girding themselves, displaying their fighting plumage. They were reminiscent of tassel-festooned knights in armor.

  “If that’s meant to impress me, it’s succeeding,” Knot said. “I can practically see the muscles rippling under that bright plumage.”

  “They use Bladewings in lieu of houndcats on worlds where game is scarce and seed is plentiful,” Finesse said. “They don’t much care; they can handle themselves.”

  The cocks charged. Knot met the first with his fork, but the metallic wing feathers struck first, and the bird bounced off with a scream of rage. One wing was entangled in the tines, preventing Knot from meeting the next bird squarely.

  The second cock jumped straight at Knot’s face, talons stretched forward. Knot wrenched up his fork, and it came free of the other bird. Blood showed on one tine. He swung it awkwardly across in a clumsy attempt to bat the bird aside.

  The cock screamed piercingly and dropped to the floor, then scrambled away. Knot held the fork, surprised. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of blood!” Knot said incredulously.

  Another bird charged—and sheered off. “It’s true!” Knot exclaimed. “These fighters don’t like blood! Who would have believed it?’

  “Nonsense,” Finesse said. “Fighting cocks are crazed by the sight and smell of blood. They go berserk.”

  “Maybe it’s different when it’s their own blood,” Knot conjectured, fending off other birds by waving the bloody tine at them, “Maybe the milk of paradise affected their reaction.” But he wondered. The cock who had cut him before, in the other future sequence, had showed no fear of blood. It simply wasn’t reasonable that such a thing could stop creatures bred for fighting and killing. There was something going on here that he didn’t understand.

  Then men appeared in the chamber. They carried stun pistols. Methodically they shot down the cocks, stunning the valuable birds harmlessly, picking them up and setting them carefully in a cart. In moments men and birds were gone.

  “Well, that was fun while it lasted,” Knot said, pushing down the top bales so that he could climb out. He hadn’t thought ahead; now the fallen top row of bales filled the space nearest the impromptu fortification. He had to lean over to push the next bale beyond them, so that he wouldn’t merely form another wall barring his way. If that was the type of planning he did, no wonder his future was opaque!

  As he leaned over, Finesse turned about and boosted him onto the bales with a tremendous goose. Knot did a clumsy somersault and landed on his back on the floor, just missing the spilled milk of paradise saucer. It seemed Hermine had indeed informed Finesse.

  Ooo, naughty girl! Hermine was thinking gleefully.

  Knot laughed weakly. “Hey, let’s do that again!”

  Finesse climbed over the bales and put her face down to kiss him. “I’m sorry.”

  He kissed her back. “I was mad because you told me about your prior family—oops, I wasn’t going to mention—”

  “It doesn’t exist,” she said firmly. “I made the decision, I knew what it entailed, and I couldn’t have told you. For two years—”

  “I’ll take them,” he said, kissing her again. He had been offered half a loaf—but what a loaf!

  The CC Mombot holograph appeared. “Are you satisfied, Emperor?”

  Knot sat up, using Finesse for support. Symbolism there, perhaps. “No, I’d rather make love the regular way,” he muttered.

  Finesse, in a fit of mock outrage, dumped him down again, then spread herself on top of him for another kiss. She might love another man, he reflected, but she certainly had some feeling for Knot now.

  “I referred to your power over me,” CC said. “Have you had sufficient proof?”

  Knot put his right arm around Finesse’s body, embracing several tufts of hay in the process, and held her to him. The hay had a pleasant, sweet smell, and so did her hair. “You have hay-hair,” he murmured.

  “Answer the machine,” she breathed into his ear. “CC has gone to a lot of effort to convert you.”

  “And you haven’t?” But he decided not to push that aspect at the moment. “No, CC. I have concluded that there is no sufficient proof. All I have done is get myself in trouble with chickens. But for the sake of whatever—” He hugged Finesse again. “I will operate on the assumption that it is so. That I really do have control over you, instead of vice versa. That being the case, where do I go from here?”

  “Well,” Finesse murmured. “You might move your hand down and across—”

  “You must direct the operations of the human galaxy,” CC said, while Knot moved his hand as directed and found her soft buttock. “So that civilization will not be destroyed.”

  “Oh, that,” Knot said, squeezing. He considered, moving his head to shake a stray shred of hay from his face. It refused to budge. Hay was like that. In a moment Finesse lifted her head, saw it—and kissed him right through it, so that the hay got on both their lips.

  Knot had come here to argue his case with CC, and had been met with incredible acquiescence. It seemed CC, rather than debate, preferred to provide him with ample opportunity to try his way. CC believed that he would be converted long before he had the chance to do any real damage. That was the trap. Yet if he did not try, what use was it to have an opinion? If he thought he could direct galactic policy better than the Concord could, this was his challenge to do so.

  And if he satisfied himself, and became converted to CC’s cause, he would have up to two years with Finesse. He knew he should not allow himself to be unduly moved by this prospect, but it was very hard to keep that in mind with Finesse’s buttock under his hand, her breast against his chest, and her lips kneading his ear. He wanted her—on any terms.

  You fell into the trap before you ever started, Hermine thought. Yet you keep struggling to break free.

  Sad but true, he agreed.

  “Are you thinking with the weasel again?” Finesse inquired, nipping his ear.

  Don’t tell her my thoughts, Knot thought.

  Don’t worry. I’ll tell her you are thinking about goosing her again.

  “Hermine is about to think a lie at you,” Knot murmured to Finesse.

  “It better be a lie, or I’ll bite your ear off,” she replied.

  Knot rose to the challenge by tightening his grip on her posterior—and she responded by setting her teeth in his ear lobe. He relaxed hastily. They both laughed. She was great fun to be with.

  “Let’s see if I have this straight,” he said to CC. “I give the orders, you implement them, and I visit the future to see how my policy turned out. If I don’t like the result, I try something else.”

  “Correct,” CC agreed.

  “Yet if my future is opaque while I associate with you, there should be nothing to see.”

  “It should not be opaque to you. You are now the principal, and should have a far better notion. Perhaps portions will remain inscrutable, but our perception of your futures should be greatly expanded.”

  It made a certain sense. If he could not experience his future, who else could? It might be like orienting the telescope on the right star; chances of observation certainly were better than with telescopes oriented on the wrong stars. Also, this futures exploration did seem to differ from precognition; most precogs could not see their own futures well, because of the problems of mutability; but this particular type of exploration did not seem to suffer as much from that limitation. CC had not been able to explore Knot’s futures well, but Knot himself might do so.

  “Very well. My first directive is for you to wait one hour, then turn yourself entirely off, as far as the galaxy is concerned. Close down all your terminals, primary, secondary, tertiary and whatever, and refuse to acknowledge any input from any person.”

  “Zero minus one hour,” CC agreed.

  “I don’t like this,” Finesse whispered.

  “I haven’t even done anything to you,”
he whispered back, giving her a tweak.

  “Shutting down CC.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s just a trial run.” Then, louder: “Drem, are you there?”

  “I wouldn’t be elsewhere,” the mutant replied. “That cockfight was quite a show, and there’ll be an even prettier one if you hike her skirt up any farther.”

  “He’s watching!” Finesse hissed in Knot’s ear.

  “It’s worth watching,” Knot said, hiking her skirt up another notch. “Drem, jump me five years into my present future, for one hour. Can you do that?”

  Suddenly Knot was in darkness. The air was chill, and the background sounds had cut off, and there was now no warm girl in his arms. He reached for a bale of hay—and found a clammy wall instead.

  Of course. His prison was stone. What had made him think of hay? After all these years of—

  No, he thought. No use to rehash that again! It only aggravated his misery.

  Except—this time he should review it. Because—but of course that was only another example of the delusions his mind fostered, to provide hope where there was in fact none. The notion that in one hour he could leave it all, make it never have happened—

  Well, what else was there? If a construct of imagination could ease his misery for even one hour—

  Knot reviewed the past five years, looking for the flaw that had to be in his new notion, hoping he would not find it. He had been secure as an officer in his enclave on Planet Nelson. Then Finesse had come, with her physical allure and impish mental rages—

  Finesse. Image of the warlord of Proctor B, or rather his clanking robot, carrying her away. News of the warlord’s later suicide, flinging himself in apparent terror from his tower-palace parapet. So the warlord’s minions had executed Finesse without trial, shooting her from a distance with cross bow shafts.

  Knot had fought, injuring a robot. Justice had been swift and direct: two flashes of a laser, one for each eye. Then prison. He didn’t know whether there was any light here, and it didn’t matter. Light had passed out of his life forever, on that day.

  They wouldn’t let him die. He was an example. He had tried to set his will against that of the warlord. Now they took him out once a month to show him off to the populace: the former Emperor of the Galaxy, ha-ha.

  When he had gone to Chicken Itza to interview the Coordination Computer, and made CC turn itself off, chaos had erupted all across the galaxy. They had watched it on the computer’s inputs, while those devices still operated. Ships had stopped their crossdisk voyages. Only small systems whose planets happened to be close enough for non-psi navigation on old-style fuels had maintained fragments of the empire. Local strong men had sprung up, each ruling a few planets or over a single planet. Picayune dictators. And why not? There was nothing to stop them, no higher authority that could compel them to answer. No interstellar coordination or communication, for the Coordination Computer had been turned off.

  Knot concentrated. What had happened to his animal associates? More fighting cocks had escaped, as the supply system of Planet Chicken Itza had broken down, and the weasel and crab had disappeared. They had of course forgotten him when they separated from him, and must have become food for the birds.

  The chickens had set up some sort of refuge of their own, with its own savage pecking order, so that human beings had had to vacate the planet.

  There was a clanking in the hall beyond his cell, disturbing his reverie. The robot was bringing his afternoon ration of food and water. Since his blinding he had never had contact with a human being; only with machines. Thus his psi had not been operative. Did the new warlord know about the forgetting, or was the robot-warden merely his way of showing contempt for his victim? Probably the latter.

  The robot set the staples in the meal alcove and departed. Knot rose wearily to eat. There was nothing else to do. If he delayed, the rats would get it instead, and he hated them almost as much as be hated the current warlord. If they got his food, they would be stronger and he weaker, and eventually they would consume him too, and he did not want to give the rats that satisfaction. He might be better off dead, except for the faint hope of eventual escape, freedom, and vengeance. If the robots ever broke down, and human beings were substituted as prison guards, and they forgot Knot; if he ever had the chance to get close to the warlord, close enough to score with a stone or sharp chip of metal...

  But he knew it was hopeless, the stone cell was beyond his power to escape. All he could do was eat, and sleep, and think. He was not certain how much of his sanity he retained, now; no doubt it had been eroding with every year that passed. Sanity was no longer a survival trait.

  He bit into the nutrient wafer. There was pain in his teeth, for they were rotting. But that sensation substituted for taste. He could no longer taste, because he had no tongue. When they had hauled him up, that first year, to address the populace via a microphone, and he had balked, they had made him pay in their barbaric fashion. He had thought they could do nothing more to him, after the blinding; he had been mistaken. They had rendered him mute.

  Mute. The irony had long since ceased to be amusing. He had begun as a psi-mute, and become a mute-mute.

  He chewed methodically, savoring the pain. Taste, too, was a superfluous thing. He had learned to live without it. Like his wasted life, it—

  The light came on. Knot blinked. He could see!

  Finesse put her hand against his head, steadying him. “That must have been some future,” she said.

  “You mean—there really was an escape?” Now he could speak, too; his tongue was back. “This isn’t just another dream?”

  “The future was the dream, if you could call it that. What happened?”

  His eyes took in the scattered bales of hay, the weasel, the crab, the holograph. He felt the woman, warm against him. They must have stayed on the floor beside the bales, for an hour. It would have been dull for her.

  “We can’t turn CC off,” he said.

  “Of course we can’t!” she agreed. “There would be absolute chaos.”

  Error, Hermine thought.

  What?

  CC is already off. It turned off several minutes ago, in accordance with your directive.

  “Already off!” Knot cried. “CC, turn on again!”

  “As directed,” CC replied. “My terminals have resumed operation. However, the brief period of malfunction has alerted the monitors of the Galactic Concord, who are initiating an investigation.”

  “Can they find us here?”

  “Not within days, unless I advise them.”

  “Obfuscate in your inimitable fashion,” Knot said.

  “Let’s not do that again, huh?” Finesse murmured.

  “Not that particular turn-off, no,” Knot said with a shudder. “I never want to experience that future again!”

  “Are you ready to try another future?” Drem inquired.

  Knot’s perspective was steadying as the bleak immediacy of the last future faded. His memories were now derivative—his memories of his prior memories, five years hence. That was a relief. Blinded, imprisoned, his friends dead—no, he would never set that future in motion, not for anything! He no longer suspected CC of faking the vision for him; his experience had been too internal, too real. He had known—and now would not forget. The details he would gladly let go, but not the fundamental belief.

  “CC, you are trying to teach me something, aren’t you,” he said, finally disengaging from Finesse. He loved holding her like this, and from the feel of it he had made love to her in the past hour while he was out, but the memory of her awful death was too ugly. What had that warlord been afraid of, that he should kill himself? Not of her, surely—unless there was a side of her he had not seen. Maybe Hermine had been with her, after all, and relayed a nova, or some terrible mental monster.

  “Correct,” CC had replied while Knot’s thoughts rambled.

  “It’s some course!” But what would he gain by delaying? He had made another decision of
policy. “CC, institute a program of automatic temporary 30-day sterilization of all male space travelers,” he said. “We’re going to eliminate the mutants.” He turned to Drem. “Send me five years forward again, for one hour.”

  Knot suffered abrupt vertigo, a sickening sensation of falling through space, turning end over end, his substance simultaneously compacting and diffusing. Then he was back with the others. He blinked. Things seemed unchanged. “This is the future?”

  “No,” Finesse said. “Only fifteen seconds have passed.”

  “You bounced,” Drem said. “That means you have no future, along this line.”

  “No future?” Knot asked blankly. “There has to be—”

  “It means you are dead five years from now on this track,” Drem said. “I can’t send you beyond your own death.”

  “I’m dead—as the result of this sensible, modest reform?” Knot had braced himself for something, anything, but not nothing. “How do I know that’s true?”

  “You could verify it by isolating the moment of your demise.”

  “Not likely!” Then Knot reconsidered. “I wouldn’t actually be dead?”

  “You would revert to the present the instant life expired. You die permanently only if you follow the present along the particular track leading to that death.”

  “Which I won’t do,” Knot said. “But I certainly want to unriddle the mystery. I can’t see how my policy can eliminate me. All right, CC—prior policy stands. Drem, send me one year into the future, for five minutes. I don’t want to waste a lot of time until I—”

  He was standing on a planetary plain, searching for any sign of pursuit, as he always did. He had avoided them for several hours, so they should have forgotten him by now—unless they had a machine scan on him. “...locate the moment of my own expiration,” he finished. This time he maintained his equilibrium better; he knew this was only a future.

  It seemed he was in trouble. His psi talent became almost valueless once it was known; all they had to do was apply machines to the chase, and he might as well be an ordinary man. Which had made CC’s choice of him for a galaxy-saving mission seem foolish. But—