Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  “Ready for food?” he asked an elated Kikaju Jama. “I imagine you’re starved by now, but let’s start the assembly of the atomos before we relax. It’s a long job and the sooner we begin the sooner we’ll have your device portable again.” He led Jama out and up metallic stairs onto the workshop’s gallery, to pick up the tools he’d need. In passing he peeked into a little cubicle decorated to appeal to a child’s bright curiosity about the Galaxy—but at the moment it was empty of children. “This is going to be an overnight job. You can stay here in Sweet Toes’ room. For one night she can share with Baby Girl.”

  As they passed down the plasteel plankway, Kargil quietly glanced through another door. The three children were there, all curled together, asleep. He smiled, remembering how upset Sweet Toes had been that the baby wouldn’t slow down for her nap. “Some problems resolve themselves easier than others. The nice thing about two-year-olds is that they can’t revolt for any length of time without having their afternoon nap sneak up and clobber them.”

  Back down in the shop, Linmax was silent but busy as he set up equipment to grow his octad of atomos. Jama watched. Then, absently, the retired naval officer launched into a lecture without taking his eyes or his hands off his delicate work.

  “The First Empire engineers could never have built one of these. Their power plants were always monstrous enough to drive a whole city or a kilometer-long battleship. They thought huge and vast and monstrous. Their ships were a hundred times faster than any other vessel in the Galaxy. They thought nothing of draining seas. Once they even attempted to power Splendid Wisdom with geothermal heat! It’s not that the old Imperial engineers weren’t good; I admire them. How can you disparage twelve thousand years of a technology that met and swept aside every galactic rival? They showed astonishing ingenuity when context eventually demanded that they shrink a standard multipole power plant into the body of a light hypership—beyond any skill I’ll ever have. Huge they could do. But they did not seem able to fathom scaling. And scaling, my Hyperlord friend, is everything.”

  “Scaling?”

  Kargil made adjustments, nudging a delicate assembler that required slippage by some small multiple of hydrogen diameters. “When you build a charge-inverter this size to make antiprotons, you can’t just use your computers and your brains and your technical artistry to shrink what you have; you must reinvent physics. Stars and man and ant and nanomachine all live by different laws. Scale up a nanomotor to ant size and it will fly apart. Scale up an ant to man size and he won’t be able to walk or breathe. Scale up a man to moon size and he will collapse into a sphere. Of course, scaling the other way gets you into the same morass of troubles.” Kargil stabilized his setup behind a forcefield glimmer before dismissing Jama. “Be a good soul and go help Sweet Toes with dinner while I finish up here.”

  “Isn’t she asleep with the others?”

  “Nope. I just caught her wandering along the gallery from the edge of my eye. I signaled her that you’d be having dinner with us—she and I share a hand-waving code. We can continue our discussion over food. Be patient. I’m leading up to a chat about scaling and politics because you seem to light up like a torch whenever I mention politics. I like people who wish to improve our Second Empire, but I’m not impressed when the enormity of the task is underestimated. A government, working well at, say, the thousand or million or even billion population level, will simply not function at the quadrillion level.”

  “But...”

  “Sweet Toes needs your help,” commanded the captain of the ship.

  So Hyperlord Kikaju Jama found himself in the service chamber with a young lady huddled over the cuisinator muttering to herself “Decisions... decisions... decisions.” When he sat down beside her, she switched on a nearby flat-plate so that he could see the recipe she was contemplating. “I’ve got almost everything I need for Rustamese Chicken Casserole Concoction. I haven’t got ginger. What’s ginger?” “I imagine it’s some kind of spice. My fam informs me that it’s some kind of rootstalk.”

  “But what does it taste like?”

  “The Galaxy is a big place.”

  “I know what that means; it means you don’t knowShe smiled mischievously. “Shall we risk it? The cuisinator says it can fabricate enough gingercells for the recipe in only two or three inamins.” An inamin was the time it took for light to sprint ten billion meters. “We’ll risk it!”

  “As long as we have a quaffable beverage standing by for emergencies in case it happens to be a strong spice.”

  “The drinking mugs are on the top shelf,” she suggested. “At just your height.”

  Later Kargil arrived with his boy in tow. “Freidi, meet

  Hyperlord Kikaju Jama. You do not have to salute him, but you do have to show proper respect and pass him the salt when he asks for it.” Freidi gave Jama a shy smile. Not far behind him was the youngest on her three-wheeled pusher pretending that she was a swooshing vac-train. They all sat down in the dining alcove while the Hyperlord served steaming plates.

  “Good! I see the ship’s stores are still holding out!” That was the captain’s own manner of saying grace. The ginger turned out to be a success—only Baby Girl demanded cereal flakes instead.

  From inside his coat, as if by magic, Kargil produced a round melon for dessert, much to the delight of the children for whom such a succulent treat was a rarity. While he carved it up into slices, he fixed his eyes on Jama but spoke to Sweet Toes as Captain Kargil Linmax. “I’m pleased to hear that you’ve been studying Faraway.”

  “You stuffed my fam with Faraway history. How could I avoid it!” she replied scornfully. “I know more about Faraway antiques than you do, I’ll bet you a Mallow Credit Note.”

  “Tell our Hyperlord what you know about the original government. He seems to be interested in its forms.”

  “You mean when all those scientists were exiled?”

  “Yes. How did they manage their affairs?”

  “An academic variation of democracy,” she said with her spoon poised over the melon slice.

  “How does that work?”

  “When there’s too many people to fill an auditorium,” she said with her mouth full, “you elect a representative to sit in the hall for you. The academic variation is when you have tenured representatives.”

  “How well did it work?”

  “It worked fine. When you’re tenured you don’t have to worry about making a fool of yourself to get reelected. You can make whatever laws you choose.”

  “How did it work out in the long run?”

  “It didn’t. By the time Cloun-the-Stubbom clobbered Faraway, it was already a tyranny. The Founder predicted that so it doesn’t matter.” She caught her superior officer at just the moment when he was ready to interrupt her with another questioning prompt, and witheringly silenced him by eye-flash before she turned to address their Hyperlord guest. “Has he given you his ‘scaling’ lecture yet?”

  “I do believe he has,” said Kikaju. His voice was gentle. She went on doggedly, “So you know what Pm yapping about. Democracy doesn’t scale. Once you’ve conquered a few cubic leagues of space, it is a wheezing ant blown up to elephant size who can’t even lift himself off the floor. I know what an elephant is. Once you’ve conquered a hunk of the Galaxy—that’s ten quadrillion zillion people—a representative doesn’t represent anybody but himself, and that’s the definition of a tyrant.” She didn’t want to say anymore. She wanted to eat her melon so she came to a quick conclusion. “That’s why the First Empire ended up with emperors and why we ended up with Pscholars.”

  Hyperlord Kikaju Jama fully understood that the authoritarian old captain had meant this child’s recitation for him as a dig at his interest in quaint political systems of the past. He weighed his answer, more to the man than the young girl. “I’ve always felt the need to explore new forms of government. I think the present tyranny will have to be replaced.” There; he had said it. He watched the old man’s expressive face for a
reaction and was willing to continue only when he caught the glint of agreement and a reserved half-smile.

  Nevertheless caution ruled Jama’s next sentences. The Fellowship’s eyes were everywhere, feeding samples into psychohistory’s statistical machine. “After fifteen centuries, I believe the Pscholars have lost their vitality. What can we do? When looking for alternatives, it is always wise to review the wisdom of the past. There are myriad forms of possible government, many of them having already been tried. Previously I mentioned to you my interest in the Founder’s early Faraway experiment in government from which the Pscholars have so grievously deviated.”

  “It failed” said Kargil, “and the Founder knew in advance that it would fail. Therefore he prepared for us the Pscholars who have not failed. He conceived and shaped this group as merit elitists, the best of the best. They have at no time even pretended to be democratic and will indeed argue compellingly, and accurately in my opinion, that democratic forms will not work on a galactic scale.” He shrugged fatalistically. “Will our Pscholars fail too? Come entropy’s cold watch, they might.”

  Later at evensong, when the children had been formally relieved of watch duty in full naval tradition (and by being tucked into bed and kissed), the two men of the incoming watch gathered in the eerie light of the workshop to stare at the growing atomos. After a period of contemplative silence the talk began again, abruptly, at Hyperlord Jama’s instigation. He had decided that an aggressive gambit was needed to open up a whole new phase in the sly game they were playing. “And if they do fail?” he asked, breaking the silence. Jama meant, of course, the psychohistorians.

  The immediate response was an impeccable example of a logical defense. “You do not first destroy what you cannot imagine replacing.” Trust a naval captain to open battle from an unassailable position. ^

  Jama was ready. “So trumpets the Credo of the Conservative. / am a radical. I would see the whole Splendid edifice crumble to dust so that we might witness a new season. Dust makes good fertilizer. Trees sprout from the cracks of ruins.” Kargil grumbled. “... and the Road of Fate is paved with the skulls of poets who forgot to fill their bellies while reciting a litany of praise to the restorative powers of our lost trees.” “Such cynicism! And at the expense of helpless poets!” “Hardly cynicism. I’m just a centenarian who’s lived too long to relish destruction. Can we forget that innocent trees sprouted out of the eye sockets of the skulls that littered Splendid Wisdom after the Sack? In the old Imperial gardens the farmers used sawed-off craniums of bureaucrats as starting planters for their vegetables.”

  Kikaju Jama smiled nostalgically. “The best sale I ever made in my life was a set of seven carved and embossed

  Splendid skulls from the Sack Period. Lovingly sculpted by some Scav idler—beautiful inlays of pearl plastic—delicate gold foil—the intaglio depicting the sins of the seven ages of man done wondrously well. Perhaps the engraved heads were even those of Hyperlords.” He laughed happily.

  “You see, you are die child of our soft times. You have been so protected by the farsightedness of the psychohistorians that you have romanticized misery, never having experienced it. The psychohistorians feel a compassionate need to protect people like you from yourself.”

  Jama was enjoying the opportunity to speak freely. “But their powers are statistical. They cannot protect me, an individual, from myself. I could jump off your balcony in the next jiffy. I am my own government.”

  “Brown-talk from a brainless anus!” Kargil jerked his thumb at the red light over the naval-style dispozoria at the other end of the workshop. “There is no such thing as a government of one. We are by nature animals who communicate. We depend upon those with whom we communicate, and therefore they depend upon us—which all leads to mutual responsibility, unless one is content with the role of parasite” Kargil nodded, approving of his own speech. “Mutual responsibility inescapably leads to government.” “But does not lead to any particular variety of government. There we have more choices than one man can comprehend.” “And wars have been fought over those too many choices,” snarled the old warrior.

  Play was now fast and cunning, but Jama had an immediate reply. “The ability of a government to conduct itself without war is indeed a positive attribute—but hardly an item of the highest priority. History is replete with examples of tyrannies which excelled at avoiding war. Slaves can be driven to an early grave without ever having to serve in anybody’s army.”

  “So? Does our argument reduce to the particular kind of government you or I, in our wisdom, might choose to inflict upon the Galaxy?”

  “Do I have to remind you, my dear Kargil, that, in the millennium we find ourselves, the likes of you and I have no choices ?”

  Kargil sighed peevishly, “Psychohistory says nothing about our personal choices. It allows us to choose all we want. It just sums our choices and spits out the future.”

  “And if our choices sum to a future which does not please our masters, they, and they alone, have the tools to generate countervailing choices which will cancel ours and reinforce theirs.”

  Kargil grumbled a simultaneous aye and nay. “I would be inclined to disagree heartily with your Lordship but for an incident that still rankles in my memory, the mere reminder of which leaves me in a cold boil even after all these years. I am a passionate believer in good government by honest men, and have been so since my first decade. Both my parents were honest bureaucrats.” The old man became lost in a thoughtful stare that locked his eyes on the flicker inside his atomo assembler.

  A jiff passed before a curious Jama prodded him impatiently. “You may not have stopped thinking but you have stopped speaking.”

  “Sorry. I was remembering my wife. She has nothing to do with the story ; she was just the companion who made life exciting during the time I worked at Naval Central. She didn’t leave me until I took to captaining ships. As an officer in naval research on Splendid Wisdom I commanded far more men than I ever did later in my promotion to captain of ships. My group was responsible for reworking and polishing secrecy protocols. You understand that when a navy fights it is important to remain unpredictable? If at all possible, strength, position, plans, strategy must all remain unknown to the enemy.”

  “Deception.” Jama nodded. “I know. One must appear to be strong when one is weak, weak when one is strong; feint here when one is there. Yes, of course. For years all that has been part of my lifestyle.”

  “We had a brilliant psychohistorian assigned to our group: Jars Hanis. Is the name familiar?”

  “Not particularly. Isn’t he the Rector?”

  “I have followed his career. Wherever suns rise, he is more powerful than any elder Emperor, though he is only one among many who wield such power. He has attained the unlikely: First Rank. Then Rector. When I knew him the brilliance was evident and a prediction that he would go so far would have been a plausible one—though I made no such prediction. On the project he was neither my superior nor my subordinate. He was just there—privy to our work and an advisor when he thought the methods of psychohistory could be useful to us. It seemed innocent enough.” Kargil paused.

  Jama listened.

  “I once asked him why the Pscholars maintained a navy which they never used. I suggested that the vast wealth consumed by the navy could be better spent elsewhere. He gave me the obvious answer: Psychohistorical equations have their own version of the maxim that the one who is willing and equipped to fight is the one who never finds himself in a fight. And its corollary: An unarmed pacifist will never be able to find peace. Thus the Stars&Ship of the Old Empire lives on, resurrected. It is less expensive to maintain a peaceful navy than to fight wars without one.”

  “You came into conflict with this man?”

  “Never. I took his help and appreciated it. His suggestions always made my life easier. I learned half of what I know about good government from him. It was only years later as the captain of a ship—with time on my hands—that I figured out
what he had done and why he was working with us.” “Some criminal act?” asked Jama eagerly.

  “No, no. I suspect that it would be impossible for Hanis to think like a criminal. It was our work that began to puzzle me. The secrecy protocols we devised were far more stringent than any peacetime navy would ever need. It is good to be prepared for anything, but any preparation can be carried to extremes. I spent the evenings between stars without my wife thinking about that. Months and years. Think about it with me now. I’ve never shared my musings.” He slammed his fist into his knees. He looked up at Jama, then continued his speech, face downcast, as if his half-clenched fingers were his only audience.

  “In the Galaxy in which you and I live, what group has a strategic need for secrecy? What group fears exposure of their plans? Who regards their mathematical methodology as a secret which must be withheld from the enemy at all costs lest their great plans be thwarted? And who is their enemy if not us! I spent twenty years of my life helping to entomb the secrets of psychohistorical prediction. I was not working for the navy; I was working against myself. I was helping to place beyond reach the finest methods of social forecast that the human race has ever inherited.” He spoke bitterly. “Forecasting must be safely beyond the grasp of ‘potential robbers’—like you and me—who, by some act of ‘vandalism,’ might upset the destiny that has been preordained for us.” His bitterness evaporated into a laugh. “The worst of it is that I was so enthusiastically thorough that I’m sure even I couldn’t penetrate my own protocols if my life depended upon success.”

  And so the pieces were laid out. Hyperlord Kikaju Jama could now see his own closing move to clinch the arrangement he wanted to make. He v/as elated. No hurry. Bring this old spaceman aboard the revolution with deft diplomacy. Wait months, even years, before broaching the subject of conspiracy. “You have obviously been a staunch supporter of good government. My own cerebrations on the subject have never satisfied me. I would appreciate your conclusions. What kind of government do you subscribe to if not that of the Pscholars?”