“Psychohistory at Faraway?” The father was incredulous. The Founder of the Second Empire had established Faraway as the leverage force to recivilize a Galaxy fallen into chaos. The mathematics of psychohistory had been a tool deliberately left out of that psychohistorically created culture. And poor Faraway was no longer even a minor galactic power. It was the stuff of legend—like the lush landscapes that once covered the deserts of a badly used Rith. Faraway was a quaint place for tourists, for antiquarians who revel in the ruins of ancient glory.
Scogil, alias Murek Kapor, only smiled. “You’ve forgotten that Faraway once produced mathematicians who revolutionized the physical sciences. Half of the devices we use today owe something in themselves to principles invented on Faraway. Even your son’s fam was designed and manufactured on Faraway. Those political skills that once illuminated the Galaxy have now dimmed to twentieth magnitude—but Faraway was never known for political sagacity; it was known for its physical science. You still can’t find finer teachers of math than at Asinia. They just aren’t rich anymore, and they have a hard time attracting worthy students. The Kerkorian staff are on the cutting edge of mathematics, but Asinia trains more qualified students. I assure you that the Pscholars pick over Asinia’s best graduates. Your son couldn’t be better placed.”
“And how much will this escort and pampering service of yours cost me?”
While he was talking to Osa Senior, a mad plot began to hatch in Scogil’s mind, and, thinking fast, he began to negotiate its framework before he had even blocked out the details to himself. “You don’t understand, Honorable Osa. Circumstance forces me to leave your service. Honor obliges me to place a boy as endowed as your son in good hands. My hypership’s cabin is already paid for,” he lied. “It will cost me nothing to bring Eron with me.”
They haggled for a while longer. They made a deal that the senior Osa couldn’t afford to ignore. And a deal that presented intriguing possibilities to an ambitious Hiranimus Scogil.
When the connection was broken, he stayed in his aerochair without moving, examining those possibilities. The whole of his scheme was not yet well formed. Maybe he’d have to abort. But with a psychohistorian’s ability to see the nodes that had to be touched in order to advance into a particular future, he began to sketch out the critical details to himself. Somewhere along their route he would have to alter Eron’s fam in subtle ways. Even Splendid Wisdom was not privy to all that was known in the Thousand Suns about quantum-effect switching. Yes, it might work—and if it did work out, he would advance himself dramatically, and he would advance the cause of the Smythosian Oversee.
Scogil’s imagined machination hinged on the off chance that eventually it could be useful for the Oversee to have a primed and innocent traitor at the very heart of the Pscholar’s Fellowship—a long shot that might then propel a failed psychohistorian, who hadn’t even made it to the bottom level of thinkers, into a plum assignment on Splendid Wisdom. Hadn’t the Oversee already advertised that they didn’t have enough operatives in the Imperialis system?
He laughed. At the moment it was all just wild plotting on overdrive, a kind of aftereffect of the release from his Murek Kapor restraints. Space, was it good to be free to think again!
But what a rotten thing to do to a little kid, he condemned himself. He was appalled that he fully intended to feed his fam-altered victim to the Pscholars, a child sacrifice to the gods. It was probable that the Fellowship would accept this
genius. It was also probable that, in due time, Eron would find himself enrolled in the Lyceum at Splendid Wisdom. For what?
He liked Eron. Poor little devil If things went awry—and they would go awry—Eron might find himself waylaid in some gruesome hell. He shuffled the cards he had left scattered on his desk. Ah, if only a hand dealt from Agander’s Royal Deck of Fate, laid out in the mystical Matrix of Eight, might really be able to predict the boy’s future and guard him! Not even psychohistory could do that. Psychohistory was silent on the future of any one man.
But for all his qualms as he sat motionless in his study, Scogil felt a bitter envy. Eron Osa would get the real training. Eron Osa would graduate from the Lyceum. It would be Eron Osa who would operate out of Splendid Wisdom. It would be Eron Osa who mastered the true line of psychohistorical thought, not some twisted perversion of the Founder’s work built by madmen attempting to reconstruct psychohistory from inadequate data thousands of years old.
7
RECOVERING FROM CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, 14,810 GE
As psychohistorians we like to claim that our mathematical methods allow us to make predictions about the future when we start with a certain critical set of carefully measured initial conditions. Our detractors dispute this. Still others attack our philosophical stance. Is Thanelord Remendian correct when he portrays us as callous Determinists who view all men as automata performing the motions of some scripted fate? Thanelord Remendian, as self-appointed advocate of Total Freedom, sees quite the opposite: humanity as a noble collection of souls each applying Free Will to attain his own Special Destiny.
We need not answer Remendian, but we must have our philosophical position well thought out among ourselves. It is a gross mistake to believe that an accurate ability to predict implies determinism. It does not.
—The Eighth Speech” given by the Founder to the Group of Forty-six at the Imperial University, Splendid Wisdom,
12,061 GE
The first time Eron Osa opened Admiral Konn’s copy of the Founder's Selected Essays after being executed, he never got past the initial two paragraphs. Some of the words he had to sound out before he could recognize them. Without fam access to the instant “gestalt-meanings” of a ten-million-word dictionary, his effort was leaden. Often Eron just gazed blankly at the open book in frustration— half expecting the ghost of his dead fam to imbibe the page all in one glance, to project vivid images based on the contents, to run simulations while exploring the mathematical ramifications, to traipse with him down byways of associated thought.
None of this happened. He was left bobbing in his aerochair in a dim room, staring at squiggles on thin cellomet in a typeface no one had used for two millennia. It was a book laid out with pride and craft, some pages wondrously illustrated with presspoint animation and active equations. The room’s light glared harshly over his shoulder, having lost its baffles and half its lum-tiles. There were no famfeed jacks in the archaic book. The actual reading of the manuscript seemed to be a one-word-at-a-time chore. Real drudgery ! And he had to think about the words without any handy tools to think with. He would have given up but he still had the strong illusion that he was a psychohistorian and on the verge of understanding everything.
The concepts seemed familiar, but Eron wasn’t sure if he had actually read any of the Founder’s words in their original format. The baud rate of eyefeed was shockingly slow. He was used to a leisurely comprehension rate of something like 2,048 words per jiff by famfeed and vastly higher input for storage mode. Reading was horrible! He could live faster than he could read about it!
Unfortunately, large chunks of the information input during a famfeed—even the selected parts of it that was used by the organic brain—were cached in the fam. That, thought Eron sourly, was probably the reason his own brain was now so empty. He wondered how much storage space was actually available inside the human head. Not much, obviously! Neurons were gross macromachinery!
How was he going to learn without famfeed! Where was he going to store his thoughts—in his stomach? He glanced covetously at the government-issue fam tossed carelessly over the back of a chair. Not that one, but he was going to have to beg-borrow-steal a real fam somehow—and spend the painful years training it.
During his “rebirth” Eron’s wardens had arranged for him a cheap hotel room on one of the lower levels of Splendid Wisdom near the Lyceum. The furniture morphed from the
wall, stark white, old, used, cramped. The plumbing in the dispozoria needed replacing. The holographi
c projections made by the comm console were fading and didn’t seem to adjust to a sharp definition. The picture wall didn’t work.
All they had left him of his old life were his clothes and his little red metricator. He seemed to know what that was for. It was a physicist’s pocket tool, small enough to be gripped inside a fist. It would measure almost anything: hardness, distance, spectra, acceleration. Maybe he couldn’t recall all the things it could do. He had one vivid memory of sitting at a table eating a sandwich and using it to measure the local pull of gravity, but he couldn’t remember which planet or why.
He needed to get out of this prison, take a walk maybe— not too far. Timidly he left the tiny apartment. Out in the city corridor he felt bolder and began a quick-paced exploration romp.
Eron spent the next terrifying interim trying to relocate his hotel. Had he gone down a level? Up? One clothing shop seemed familiar until he discovered that it was a common franchise in this neighborhood. He had completely lost his sense of orientation. The discreet signs seemed mostly to be of the fam-readable kind, where information was overlaid in tri-D on the visual cortex when needed—and he wore no fam. He asked directions and got answers in the off-planet dialect of some recent immigrant. Perhaps a fam could have deciphered the well-intentioned garble of sounds and gestures.
In the whole of this vertical neighborhood, there were no multilevel spaces that he could find, no reckless use of vegetation. Not everybody was working. Some residents were old and vacant and even sat in the corridors or the levitator lounges to watch the world flow by. Two tough youths assessed his wealth. Or maybe it only seemed that way because here was a class of people of whom he had been oblivious in his previous life. Maybe, just maybe, they were all right. Maybe they were dangerous only to strangers. Maybe they weren’t dangerous at all. Still, he fled from them in a kind of childish panic that took him down corridors and zigzagging commercial alleys and well-lit levita-tors that lost him completely but miraculously delivered him “home” again. The surprise of finding himself in front of his hotel astonished him into a burst of tearful thanks.
After awakening from a restless sleep, he remembered— and chose safety over adventure, spending the next multiple watches alone in his apartment—doors sealed, averse even to a brief restocking excursion—while he continued to struggle with the Founder’s first essay, polishing his painful reading skills. His troubles did not stem only from a lack of the utilities usually provided by a fam—he didn’t even command all of his organically based faculties. His mind was used to the brain/fam dialog, and some critical areas of his wetware seemed to be accessible only by key stimulation via fam-cue. The mental paths leading into these sepulchers were effectively blocked by his famlessness—and, to find their barricaded treasures, he had to guess his way blindly through neural codes. Being a moron was hard labor. Well, back to his studies!
Determinism. And more determinism. He reread the opening of the Founder’s “Eighth Speech” many times. Psychohistory was a science of prediction. Did an ability to predict imply determinism? In this Galaxy where an elite controlled the future in which the society was destined to live, people were apt to debate such philosophical points. Did it matter?
To distract himself from the reading, Eron sniffed the pages of this book that had been shaped into pocket size for carrying close to the heart by someone who loved to read. It smelled as if it had been printed a thousand years ago, and the title page said so. That spoke of a time well after the Founder had been reduced to a holographic glimmer in some vault and well past the farthest reach of that great man’s primitive mathematical vision—yet still centuries before the birth of anyone presently alive.
Enough sniffing. Keep the book open and try to read. Eron did his best to imagine the ancient debate between Thanelord Remendian and the Founder. There would be flamboyant clothes, snuff, perfume, gestures, and admonitions—but without his fam’s visualizers he saw only ghosts on a darkened stage. He plodded on.
The essay began its demolition of Thanelord Remendian’s thesis by fielding a clear definition of determinism, one that struck Eron as weirdly familiar. At the same time, it startled him—the way things do that have been around for a long time, unnoticed. He concentrated. He was still enough of a mathematician to realize that definitions are the framework of sound argument. They must be understood. He tried.
A deterministic universe requires One Future and One Past, immutable. It requires that every governing equation of motion have a Unique Solution whether worked forward or backward in time—even if we can only approximate that Solution in ever refinable steps. Choices become illusions. Determinism allows no branches, no random events, no errors, no noise. In such a universe even an omnipotent god is powerless to intervene. A universe cannot, by definition, be deterministic when man or god has choice, or if the guiding equations, given the same initial conditions, can be made to yield more than one result through branching, randomities, quantum superposition, error, or noise.
Remendian is mistaken to tar us as determinists. Psychohistory fails as a deterministic system simply because NONE of its probabilistic equations have unique solutions. This should not surprise us. After all, even the most rigorous equations of physics have long been framed in such a way that two identical initial states will not lead to exactly the same outcome. The neomystic philosopher Bohr...
At this point in his discourse the Founder went off into a technical discussion of the mathematical underpinnings that a deterministic physics would require. Eron had the comfortable illusion that he understood all the symbols and how the meanings were related, but when he actually got excited and tried to manipulate the dynamic symbols...he could do nothing. It was humiliating. Not to be able to follow the Founder when he was glossing over the easiest of the conundrums of primordial physics! Eron summarized the Founder’s points for himself to get a grip on them, using the apartment’s decrepit console as a doodle-pad.
All viable physical descriptions of our universe seem to require:
1] Time-symmetry. The physical equations determining state change are unaltered by the substitution of negative-t for t, where t is time. (The laws of our physics cannot be modified by a time reversal.)
Imposing determinism as an additional constraint then implies:
2] Reversibility. The physical equations determining state change cannot contain traps. (The system will not be determinable if it can dispatch information to conveniently inaccessible states like alternate worlds or black holes.)
The (perhaps apocryphal) father of physics, Newton, had been claimed by no less than eighteen worlds of the Sirius Sector. The great synthesis of the ancient newtonian theur-gists was deterministic because it naively contained no information traps. Being that, newtonianism failed to derive entropy from first principles; thermodynamics requires a built-in mechanism for lossy information compression. Even after careful experimentation by the mystical heisen-bergians had established the uncertainty of position/momentum, many of these dawn theurgists still clung to theological dogma that all information about the past was somehow retained in the positions and momenta of the current superposed states of the universe; nothing could be forgotten. The universe has mostly forgotten these men.
The Founder speculated that this stubborn conception of the universe as an all-remembering entity had been inherited from a then-common belief in an all-knowing God whose eye saw the whole of eternity. The tacit (and false) assumption that the underlying fabric of the universe was described by the artificial mathematical entity called a manifold fostered the illusion because a manifold has no upper limit on the amount of information that can be impressed upon it.
Gripped by a fit of industry, Eron confirmed the Founder’s careful proof that a deterministic universe requires more info storage space than the physical nature of die universe allows—using a marker on the cleanable wall because his holopad was down. Neat. He left it there as wallpaper.
In the real world, information about past states is con
tinually being lost—quantum wave-functions decohere, things fall into black holes—and so present initial conditions never contain enough information to reconstruct the past (except on a probabilistic basis). Because of time-symmetry, an inability to reconstruct the past is mirrored as an inability to predict the future (except on a probabilistic basis). The job of accumulating information about a future time is never complete until the moment when that future becomes the present.
Our “now” contains neither the whole of the past nor the whole of the future, or, to put it another way, “now” contains the roots of all possible pasts—but won’t tell us which particular root is ours—and contains all possible futures in the branches of its tree—but won’t tell us which of those limbs we are about to climb out on.
No psychohistorian, no matter what godlike powers he might acquire, can predict an absolute future—too much information about the future is missing in the initial conditions of the present; no historian, no matter how meticulous, can write the definitive history—too much information about the past has been irretrievably lost.
That established, the Founder went on to describe how mathematics could determine the maximum upper limit on the amount of information that the present held about the future. Once the limits were known, mathematical method was free to give its best estimates of which futures we faced and what variables controlled the probability attached to a future.
The Master began to play amusing games with his audience—“the Group of Forty-six,” long dead, plus Eron, recently dead. They were asked to pretend that every Past Event was trying to encode itself in digital form to be transmitted through time to be filed by a harried Present in its bulging storage cabinets. He made it sound like he was chatting with the past over a wire. Eron grimaced. “Hello. This is the past. Get out your decrypter and I’ll tell you what really happened back here—hope you have enough storage room.”
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