The Tyrant by Eric Flint and David Drake

He annoyed me a little, too, back in the days long ago when I was alive and he was my adviser. Damn know-it-all. And what’s worse is that you can’t really trust that knowledge—as he’s the first to point out.

of course.

Center’s “voice” had no emotional flavor or penumbra. It was always a bit of a shock, that. There was never the little moment of preparation that a human gave another when he was about to speak—a smile, perhaps; or a scowl, or a tilt of the eyebrow. Just . . . that flat, level voice. Blowing in as suddenly as a wind off the plain slams open an unlatched door, startling the occupant of the house within.

stochastic analysis deals with probabilities, not certainties. certainties do not exist, outside the fantasies of philosophers. neither do souls, as an objective reality subject to stochastic analysis. you humans have souls simply as referent points to yourselves.

Adrian wondered, for a moment, what his former teachers at the Grove would have said to that. Many of them, he suspected, would have agreed. With the proposition concerning certainty, at least, if not the rest. Privately, of course. In public, no professional philosopher would admit to any doubts on any subject in creation.

The thought was whimsical, not harsh. Whatever their faults, those teachers had shaped his mind. And, on balance, shaped it well. So, at least, he thought.

And so do we, lad, said Raj softly. Or we wouldn’t have selected you for your mission in the first place.

Ah, yes. “The Mission.”

Raj Whitehall and Center had come to Adrian two years earlier, manifesting themselves in his mind in a manner which Adrian never really had understood clearly. They were incorporeal “beings.” Projections, essentially, from a reality which existed on another planet. Center made reference to something he called “software” to explain it, but Adrian found the explanation too confusing to follow.

On that planet, Raj’s home world of Bellevue, Whitehall had stumbled across Center by accident. Center was a battle computer, created by the now-long-gone Federation of Man which had once ruled the stars. It had, miraculously, survived the great wars which destroyed the Federation. Wars, and a Federation, which were now so ancient that they had been completely forgotten on those planets which had not been destroyed outright.

Between them, centuries earlier, Raj and Center had transformed Bellevue and set it back on a track which would, eventually, lead toward the reconstruction of the Federation of Man. Since then, they—or, rather, their recorded mentalities projected onto other worlds—had been attempting to duplicate their success elsewhere. On Hafardine, they had chosen Adrian Gellert as the instrument for that mission. And he had, not without some trepidation, agreed to the project.

Through the slight trance-haze of his vision when he was “communing” with the two intelligences which shared his mind, Adrian’s gaze moved slowly across the landscape before him.

The heat and moisture struck him first—even physically, for all that his senses were somewhat shielded by the trance-haze. The southern half of the continent was mostly sub-tropical in climate, verging on full tropics in the southernmost regions. In the summer, as now, hot and humid.

Rain fell almost every day, this time of year, at least for a few hours. It had taken Adrian and his brother Esmond some time to grow accustomed to that. The Southrons seemed to take their semiaquatic existence for granted. But the Gellerts came from the northern half of the continent, whose climate was mild and generally dry. According to Center, much like places on Old Earth called “Greece” and “Italy.”

His eyes fell on a woman walking past at the base of the slope on which Adrian had pitched his tent. She was apparently returning to her own tent, somewhere in the sprawling mass of barbarians who had gathered here outside the port city of Marange for their great annual conclave. A clay-covered reed basket was balanced atop her head, presumably carrying water drawn from the nearby Blood River.

Adrian sensed a little smile on his face. No woman of the north, not even a prostitute, would have paraded about publicly in such a costume—bare from the waist up, and with nothing more than a string loincloth elsewhere. Watching her heavy buttocks sway as she waddled past, he sensed the smile widen. Certainly not a woman with such a dumpy figure.

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