Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  The captain smiled sadly. “I found that the most a ship could teach me was how to run a good ship. As captain I felt like a damn psychohistorian: I made the decisions about destiny and I postured to command the loyalty of the crew. They carried out my decisions. But...what I learned doesn’t scale—any analogy one might make between a ship’s crew and the galactic commonalty is like hoping to understand an elephant’s walk by watching a microbe swim.” Kargil laughed at his analogy as if that is exactly what he had been trying to do.

  He continued, “I thought I might learn more about large-scale governing when I retired to the swarming trillions of the Imperialis Star System and set up residence among the warrens of Splendid Wisdom.” He smiled more mellowly. “I even thought my wife would return to me! So far I’ve learned how to keep a motherless family going, and as mayor of my little nonterritorial village I’ve learned an efficient form of democracy that just might scale as high as a thousand people before it broke down.” His smile had grown to a grin. “For eighty thousand years we’ve been bred to survive in political groups larger than the village but, as yet, I don’t see much evidence of it in our genes. Ah, the squabbles!”

  Kikaju was listening to Kargil intently but the assembler he was watching was thoroughly as fascinating as any scheme to seduce the old man into creating a security system for the revolution. His eyes were being mesmerized by the unit that was building the atomos.

  Mildly cross at the seeming inattention to his speech, Kargil pulled at the Lord’s sleeve. “Watching isn’t going to make them grow faster. It will be a spell yet. Building a hydrogen annihilator isn’t as easy as duplicating antique artwork. Come. I don’t know how I’d handle all the squabbles without my robot. Have I told you about my robot? Come. I’ll show you. He’s far from having the cunning abilities of an old Imperial viceroy, but he’s the best statesman I’ve ever enlisted in my cause. Comer Finally he pulled Jama away from his hypnotic vigil.

  Kikaju followed his host to a neatly stacked clutter of boxes where he was shown a bronze buddha that was humanoid from the waist up and a giant insect from the waist down—dressed in one of the more blatant striped styles of the ninety-fifth century with ruffles of lace fendering his six legs.

  “Meet Danny-Boy,” said Kargil proudly, “the savior of my sanity. He’s not powered so don’t expect him to be polite. Actually, he’s never polite. He’s been programmed with a Robot’s Ritual Rundown, which states simply:

  “Law 1—a robot must be able to recite twenty thousand human jokes in context.

  “Law 2—a robot must listen to a human patiently until that human makes his first move to derail the agenda.

  “Law 3—a robot must know how to bang a gavel.

  “He’s our chairbot for democratic meetings that require a quorum. He has all our bylaws and decisions memorized and, believe me, he can check for contradictions in real time. Within his round little belly are the Galaxy’s finest set of rules of order. He can stick tenaciously to an agenda. His simulated gavel is a marvelous gong that rings from his skull with an authority that will hypnotically stop any diversionary thought in midflight. Minutes are ready by meeting’s end and are supplied out of his behind in verbal famfeed format since if we try to link him to a printer he only recites an incomprehensible error message. Sometimes we get so mad at Danny-Boy’s rulings that we turn him off—but by the time we get down to debating how many infinitives should appear in the second paragraph of some unpopular amendment to a critically unimportant motion, we turn him back on. Mostly we put up with him. We don’t really like to cut his power because it takes Danny-Boy all of sixty jiffs to reinitialize his operating system.”

  “An actual chairbot! Impressive! Is Danny-Boy an antique?” Jama knew where he could sell sixtynes of such devices.

  “He’s supposed to be the creation of Emperor Hagwith-the-Ingenious, who hated staff meetings, but nobody is sure because Hagwith had the unfortunate habit of stealing inventions and executing the inventor—perhaps just a myth invented by his successor who achieved the Robes by assassinating Hagwith. I personally think Danny-Boy’s guts predate Imperial times, perhaps from that mythical era before time when there were dwarfs who forged robots to last. We joke that his operating system was written back on old Rith where a cave full of hereditary slaves are still trying to clean up the code. But he still works.”

  “Amazing!” exclaimed Jama, who loved all functioning antiques. “Are you going to turn him on for me?”

  “No!”

  “No?”

  “He has a strong personality,” said Kargil ruefully. “Animated iron! He tends to come up with complaints. He’s old.” “Problems?”

  Kargil wiggled his six fingers. “We have our work arounds. He’s built like a plasteel commode. His logic-modals are huge, about the size of a neuron—how could they fail? A hundred fams would fit in his braincase. He’s certainly stupid enough to date from antiquity; for all his massively crude quantronics he has no more brainpower than an unaided human teenager. Maybe fifty or eighty giga-switches at most. We might try to smarten him up with a fam”—Kargil laughed—“but he’d just reply with one of his device-unknown error messages.” Kargil paused. “He’s a good chairbot.”

  “So he’s a one-function wonder.” Even with such a limitation he was valuable.

  “One function! He has thousands of features we can’t figure out: network manager, detective, you name it—all tacked on as brilliant afterthoughts! How about his telescope-managing mode? When we tried to hook him into a telescope, he asked for one of forty different telescope protocols we’ve never heard of. That’s Danny-Boy! We once tried to hook him into a flatplate after he asked for a screen so he could communicate with us visually, but no matter what screen we tried he kvetched with error message 2247. Don’t ask him what that means—he never knew—he’ll refer you to the manual. When we found him at the local flea market he was cheap because he was paralyzed from the waist down so we sawed off his bi-legs and tried to plug him into the six-legged walking platform you see. Error messages galore! He’s quite a complainer! But we finally taught him how to talk to his legs to make them move. Talk he can do! He has a philosopher mode you don’t want to know about. He would run the Galaxy if he could; forever if he had the spare parts. He does not lack for ego.”

  “A robot megalomaniac!”

  The nanomechanic patted his insect-legged buddha on the head. “Not a modest thought in this piece of iron. He’d even have an opinion about your hats! I believe him when he says he was once Emperor Hagwith’s Prime Minister. How good a job he’d do, I don’t know. He has a funny way of thinking in zeros and ones. To Danny-Boy everything is either true or false. He can’t begin to handle contradictions. When we get mired in all these human contradictions at a meeting, he has a fit. He can’t find his way out of the most commonplace contradiction, but he certainly insists that we do so, and the faster the better! There’s not a subtle electron in his wires, but he’s lovable because he makes parliamentary democracy sound as simple as the mind of a politician!”

  “So. In spite of your sourness, you are a true democrat! Remarkable!”

  Kargil had maintained his steady good humor. “Don’t get excited. I’m afraid Danny-Boy is the only true democrat I know. / haven’t graduated even as far as representative democracy yet, but I did once calculate how many centuries it would take to pass a one-page bill in a galactic parliament of a hundred million on the assumption that every member represented a constituency of a mere billion. And it would take a thousand years, at least, just to replace one elected galactic government by another—assuming they could agree upon who had won the election without recounting a quadrillion votes several different ways! Sound familiar? A millennial-long Dark Age while we throw out the rascals! Scaling problems again. Small things are fast. A galaxy is slow. You ask for my conclusion? My conclusion is simple: Every time the population of citizenry is increased by an order of magnitude, government must be reinvented. What works at one
population size won’t work at the next. Don’t even try.”

  “You would make an excellent revolutionary leader,” mused the Hyperlord, following Kargil back into the workshop. “You realize, of course, that you possess the perfect set of revolutionist abilities. A group opposed to an organization that thrives on secrecy would need a man who could build his own uncrackably secret organization.”

  “Revolution—as in destruction? Don’t mention that word! The Empire has ears! I’m willing to build. I am not willing to destroy! To what purpose?”

  “May I offer you irresistible bait?”

  Kargil was stunned by this sudden effrontery. “You are trying to bribe me? Get out of my house, you overdressed fop!” He puffed up into a threatening pose.

  Jama immediately slouched into the slightly hangdog demeanor of the overused victim. “Really, my dear friend, such blows to my fragile ego are entirely unnecessary and unworthy of a gentleman.” The Hyperlord was quite able to fake indignation, nor was he the least bit perturbed by Kargil’s anger. Anger was the last defense of a weakening rampart. “‘To what purpose?’ you ask. Why”—he smiled— “what else—the purpose of pirates! We land in force with magnetic boots clanging upon the outer shell of their battleship while we blast through the hull to steal the secret of psychohistory from the rich so that we may enhance the wealth of the poor.”

  “Steal psychohistory?”

  “Of course.”

  “Preposterous! They have guarded their secret for... what is it now, two and a half millennia? Your impulsive clanging boots are a metaphor for ineptness! The Pscholars are centuries ahead of any thought you can think or move you can make! Opposition is suicide. How could anyone possibly get through their security!”

  Jama knew he had won the game; he had challenged Kargil to break his own unbreakable protocols to reach a prize big enough to wipe out his shame. Now all he had to do was bring the captain down from anger to the logic of action. “Think like a military man. Am I such a fool that I would suggest we go against them via a frontal assault upon their strongest guns? They must be attacked sneakily at a point where they are weak. And where are they weak? You yourself mentioned that secrecy always hides weakness. They are deathly afraid that they will become powerless if their predictive methods are exposed to the sight of the common man. Strike boldly at their weak point! Stealing their secret names will render them magically impotent.”

  Kargil was suddenly laughing. “I shall have to power up Danny-Boy to gavel you down and bring order to this conversation!”

  “Think. Firstly there are many forms of stealing. Was the Founder a god that only he could create psychohistory? Consider: Today it has become almost impossible to patent any new invention, not because of law but because of circumstance. The most abstruse creations are simultaneously duplicated and registered in a thousand different places. Even coeval invention isn’t relevant. The Galaxy is so vast that often an invention is independently discovered thousands of years apart. Reinventing a secret is the cheapest form of thievery, and, from a military point of view, the safest and surest mode of attack by which a minority force can win an overwhelming victory against impossible odds.”

  “You are equating the work of the Founder with mere invention of geared gadgetry?”

  Jama was amused at Kargil’s lapse into indignation at blasphemy. Even those who were critical of the Pscholars seemed to feel a mystical reverence for the Founder. To question the uniqueness of his ideas was a heresy so fundamental to this galactic culture that one might as well question the existence of atoms and expect a serious audience. Jama replied with unctuous soothing. “And can you say why the advent of psychohistory is so different from mere perfection of a machine? Machine design can be almost intractable. It took a creeping interstellar culture in the Sirius Sector ten thousand years to bring together all the pieces necessary to build the hyperdrive motor—surely an astonishing invention—but not a result unique to one man.”

  He paused to give Kargil time to think before continuing. “Why did a full forty-eight millennia of galactic social evolution follow the invention of the hyperdrive before the seeds of the First Empire could even take root? Wisdom takes time to mature before it can be seized. Kambal-the-First was surely a genius equal to the Founder. Consider the truly formidable tradition upon which he built, Splendid Wisdom’s engineers, Splendid Wisdom’s uncommon trading skills— only the beginning of the formidable tradition he fostered. Could the First Empire have survived so long had it not been able to carry out a crude form of psychohistory on an automatic intuitive level?” Jama raised a finger dramatically before continuing.

  “The Founder had to rely heavily on the wisdom accumulated during twelve thousand years of bureaucratic Empire, sorting the protein from the chaff, formalizing eons of scattered bureaucratic rules of thumb into a compactly manageable theory. It’s nonsense that psychohistory all sprang from the head of the Founder! He was merely the great codifier! All the pieces of the puzzle lie scattered before our eyes, just as they once lay scattered before his, all waiting to be picked up by anyone!”

  “Blasphemy!” said Kargil with the naughty smile of a child who has had revealed to him his first dirty word and is preparing himself to try it out.

  “We could steal psychohistory” pursued Jama relentlessly. “But why waste our time? You and I with our fams are an intellectual match for the Founder—but we are so caught up in a hurricane of mental augmentations that we don’t even know it! Let us steal what we can steal, all the while remembering that whatever can’t be stolen from a guarded fortress can be rediscovered. More gems lie scattered under the ground than ever sat in a viceroy’s locked and guarded vault”

  Kargil was ready to interrupt but Jama snatched a breath and did not allow it. “Why is current mathematical research in such an utter shambles outside of the Pscholars’ Lyceums? Hmmmm? Could it be too dangerous for the Pscholars to include a renaissance of mathematics in their great plan for our future? I’ll wager my hat that a simple survey of the bits and pieces of mathematics that have disappeared from the Galaxy’s archives would give us critical hints as to which analytical methods would be most productive for a reconstructionist to stalk. If an enemy fleet has mysteriously disappeared from its known locale in space, doesn’t that reveal its admiral’s intentions? We must recruit mathematicians for our task!”

  Kargil had his opening. “Why do you dress like you do?” he asked.

  “Because I’m a very vain man.” The Hyperlord’s carefully constructed logic derailed while he brushed his collar and checked the alignment of his hosiery. “Why should I mask my preening vanity? It gets me misclassified. How could I ask for more? Misclassified as a cipher in the wrong database, I am lost in the analysis of the doings of millions of harmless fops who never had a revolutionary thought in their lives. People who think they know a man by the way he dresses are easily misled. Being able to mislead people pleases my vanity as much as any piece of scented Osarian lace.”

  “You will pardon me if I spend a few watches examining your misleading arguments.”

  “If you do take up the cause of fighting tyranny, your most felicitous occupation would be to spend some time designing a covert organization which does not depend upon the clownish way I dress for its invisibility.”

  They laughed and then broke up their watch for sleep, the captain to his stateroom, the Hyperlord to a child’s bed beneath faintly glowing personifications of suns—happy giant reds and scowling blues and hardworking golden dwarfs. He shared the bed with a lovable multilegged stuffy who could manage a semi-intelligent conversation if you pressed

  the wrong part of its anatomy and were incautious enough to talk back to its sand-grain of a brain.

  Stripped to his flamboyant underwear, his pink mopcap perched upon the stuffy’s head, the Hyperlord began a whispered conversation with the child’s companion. He shared with it, in confidential allusions, his dream of adventuring out among the worlds of the Periphery—to Zural s
pecifically—there to find the primal lie. The prince who knows the lies of his enemy, he informed the stuffy, has the keys to his enemy’s lands. To be invulnerable, one must never lie— even when a Cloun-the-Stubbom pops up out of his box. That was impossible, of course. Jama lied all the time—but in a good cause: his own. He liked to live dangerously.

  13

  NEUHADRA OF THE THOUSAND SUNS, LATE 14,790 GE

  With the Even-Hand and Fair Mind of Our Just Emperor and in His Name we find that §145 of the Treaty of Sanahadra states, unequivocal, that the newly allegiant Heimarian people of the Thousand Suns Beyond the Heimar Rift have agreed to accept minority status on the planets terraformed and/or colonized and/or claimed by their ancestors as specified in §Appendix-P.

  —Count Ism Nokin of the Splendid Praxis Court:

  Ruling #AZ-243 ci 7992 GE

  Something was awry. The young mind of Eron Osa sensed it. He had learned to read nuances in people’s expressions, learned to read the motive behind preoccupations and the meanings in sudden changes of plan. He hadn’t spent years spying on his father for nothing. Now cast from home, fatherless, he held under continuous surveillance only his tutor— who increasingly showed symptoms of secret motivations that...

  Creeping up above the Great Arm, jump by jump, to a position where ninety-five percent of the galactic plane was below them like a great sparkling sea, it began to strike Eron how awesomely huge the Second Empire really was and how little he knew of it. After their third jump his curiosity was so demanding that the Chairman of the Bridge lent him the use of her telescope to zoom in on whatever features of the celestial sphere he might find while the idle ship recharged its hyperatomics.