Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  “Is that so? For who? I remember a card game you and I played only last spring when we were relaxing from our studies at the Alcazar—a game of cards—we were using the Royal Deck of Fate—and your carefully sober face was molded to hide from me what you knew very well, that your four-hand held the Ax of Mercy, Ax&Stone, Executioner, and Barbarian ” The tutor laughed. “You were a rascal! You kept your secret and wiped out my high cards.”

  “You want me to keep secrets?” said Eron, appalled. “I’ve been doing that all my life. I hate it.”

  “Neither one nor the other. Isn’t your secret-free Galaxy only the white version of another black Galaxy in which, again, no thought is needed because this time the rules tell us that everything is a secret? If all information is dangerous and must be hoarded—no matter the consequence, paranoia rules. A lazy man’s social order. A machine with no memory could make the necessary decisions in that society flawlessly—whatever the circumstance, stay silent. It’s too simple. Such a black Galaxy would regress to animalhood.”

  “So I’m supposed to tell my secrets and, at the same time, keep them,” Eron complained sarcastically while holding his arms fully extended. “Reminds me of a famous old drama about Emperor Stanis-the-Careful. I found it in my copy of A Short History of Our Splendid Emperors. The play opens with the arrival of a mysterious brass-strapped box in which the Emperor finds something of empire-shattering consequence. The stage is silent while he holds up the box to the stars. ‘To speak or not to speak,’ he anguishes. Presently fleets are destroyed, ministers assassinated, his wife drowns herself, his enemies rise and fall—and by the end of his reign he still hasn’t made up his mind.”

  “Emperor Stanis-the-Careful lacked judgment.”

  Eron adjusted his helmet with impatient fingers. The rings on his fingers were broadcasting his skin resistance. “Rigone told me that young men are much better at making judgments than old men. That makes me smarter than you. I think Rigone was pulling my tail.”

  “For sure. Judgment—as much as youths like ourselves might aspire to it—is an old man’s game. The young sword lashes out mindlessly; the rules of a sword master might tell the apprentice how to wield the sword, but only experience will offer instruction on when and where to cut. Suppose you found a truth under some rock. No one else has it. Should you speak or remain silent? Only judgment can say. Should you offer some pieces of wisdom and withhold others? A matter for judgment. Can your truth be taken and used against you? Judgment again. Under pressure you may be tempted to lie. A lie about your found-treasure will have consequences. Is this a good lie or a bad lie? Judgment is never easy. If you always have to blab everything—on principle—it’s a trap. Likewise you’re in a trap if your rule book always tells you to keep a secret.”

  “Cut the guff-guff. I want to go out and do something, not listen to your boring lectures. Are we there yet?” Eron pointed through the opaque window.

  “When you do something”—the voice was acerbic—“it helps to know how to be effective.”

  “As a psychohistorian I’ll be effective.”

  A smile. “But will you still have the judgment of a twelve-year-old?”

  “That’s a trick question,” said Eron warily. He looked at the blind canopy of their robocar and the photo of the child stuck in the instrument panel. He cocked his ears and listened to his semicircular canals, not having his orientation distorted fam to advise him. “We’ve started to bank in circles. I can tell. I don’t need my fam for that.”

  “We’ve arrived but we won’t land until I say so.”

  “I’m not calm yet?”

  “Almost. Let me run this by you. When a rule fails, Eron, all you’ve got left is judgment Nothing will kill you faster than the combination of a failed rule and a bad judgment call. Rules are good, but no rule is complete enough to apply to all situations. That includes rules about secrecy.” He looked at the small physiodetector’s screen. “How are you feeling?”

  Eron checked his emotions. “Fine. I just made a twelve-year-old’s judgment. You’re okay for a monster. I’m sorry I went after Nemia.”

  “So you have a rule that tells you when to be sorry, eh?” his tutor commented wryly.

  “Am I calm yet?”

  Another glance at the screen. “You’re getting there.”

  “Can we go down?”

  “Just one more thing. We’ve been talking a lot about secrets. You seem to have lifted a lot off your chest. That’s good. It’s what I needed before we could go ahead.” He set the controls for descent. “But I want to leave you with a relevant conundrum to take away with you to Asinia Pedagogic. A riddle to ponder in those ancient halls. It is about secrets and judgment.”

  “You can never resist one last nail to hold your lecture together, can you? You should try abstinence sometime. You might qualify as a human being.”

  “While you are disqualifying yourself as a human being by becoming a psychohistorian?”

  Eron punched him affectionately. “Shoot with the lecture. I’ll give you one shot before we touch down. I can dodge one shot.”

  “Psychohistorians make a vow for the good of humanity. They vow to keep secret the methods of their prescience on theory that if their methods were known to all, their predictions would be invalidated and chaos would ensue, right?”

  “Right.”

  “For instance—if a criminal knows that the police will be at the scene of the crime, he commits his crime elsewhere— and the police knowing that he knows... it gets very complicated.” Murek had turned to remove the helmet and rings from Eron. He was looking his student in the eye. “There are unfortunate side consequences of this ‘noble’ vow of secrecy; it ensures that the society of psychohistorians remains an elite, one as arbitrary as the old Imperial Court We lesser galactic beings have to depend upon the Pscholars’ benevolence—while not being able to ensure it. But—and this is a big but—before you become a psychohistorian, before you know enough to make a sound judgment, you’ll be asked to take their vow of secrecy—and your vow will be enforced.”

  “And you want me to leave my mind open for later judgment?”

  “Not my call. I’m only the pilot.” As he touched the instruments the canopy went transparent. They were dropping into a mountain valley. Eron had no time to see anything before they were taxiing inside a hangar.

  “If I refused to take the vow, they wouldn’t take me as a student!”

  “Probably not.”

  “I could pretend.”

  “You don’t have to pretend. A vow is always subject to revision by later judgment—assuming that you haven’t, by then, become a rule-slave.”

  The canopy sprang open and Rigone was standing there on the black-and-yellow striped expanse of floor, his tattooed face grinning up at them. He had a hand for the boy as he dropped to the plasteel.

  “Where is this place?” asked Eron, looking around at the modest hangar, trying to see where they had come from before the high doors rolled fully shut

  “Not for you to know,” commented Murek as they led him into a side corridor of levitating verticules. He grinned. “A necessary secret.” The three rose on a platform, then were escorted to the hidden operating room where they were stripped and passed through a nonopening clean-door where almost alive clean-suits enveloped their bodies. The theater was illuminated in an eerie red light, presumably to protect some components from the energy of higher wavelengths.

  Eron was offered a seat, his head reexposed, and his fam gently removed, sans comforting words, as if he went fam-less regularly, while Rigone donned huge goggles. Surgeon machines wired Eron’s head to some sort of feedback net with other instruments in the room. Murek seemed to be there only as a guide to watch over his now-incompetent pupil. With perceptions unfiltered by his fam, Eron noticed the ascendancy of his senses—as during his escapade with Nemia. This time he was calm, with no rush of erotically driven feelings. The lines of the machines seemed too sharp, the colors too reddishly electr
ic, the precision motors that grasped and moved his strangely remote fam, too precise, the instrument readouts at the comer of his eyes fraught with mysterious meaning whose function he did not have the mind to question.

  Rigone worked at his station, standing, seemingly forever. Sometimes his hands were busy. Sometimes he passively watched the machines that were active under his command. Eron endured his wait stoically, the torture being the passage of time. His mind remained eerily at peace.

  Finally Rigone lifted his goggles and grinned. “That was easy. Now for the hard part. Hang onto your pants, boy! And don’t piss.” He replaced the troll’s goggles and went back to work without a pause. Eron wanted to get up to look; but he was restrained.

  “Let him work,” Murek advised. An hour went by. Eron dreamed animal thoughts while wide awake, knowing that his fantasies made no sense, fascinated by a dreamlike illogic that, famless, he couldn’t analyze.

  When they reattached his fam, he was floated to an elegant recovery room, chandeliers, entertainment console, beds and soft bedspreads, fine active murals with motion subdued to the pace of expected contemplation—but Eron wasn’t in a mood to notice; he was frantically testing for his new powers and finding them absent. He was asking himself outstanding questions and not getting answers! It was horrible. The operation had been a failure!

  Rigone seemed placid. Murek played with the room’s cuisinator until he came up with a syrupy alcoholic drink for himself, which he began to quaff in large gulps. That wasn’t like Murek at all. He was turning into such a strange man right before Eron’s eyes; the calculated restraint that Eron was so used to seemed to be disappearing for hours at a time, as if some wildman had taken possession of his tutor’s body. Maybe his vision was just the strain of the operation.

  The silence seemed unbearable to everyone. “So, kid,” said the farman into the silence after the first few gulps of his syrup had taken effect, “do you still remember the Pythagorean theorem?”

  “Of course!” Eron was indignant.

  “Don’t ‘of course’ me.” Murek activated the nearby wall. “Show me! What does A-squared plus B-squared equals C-squared mean?”

  To humor his tutor, Eron used the writer linked to his fam to conjure a blue triangle. He squared the sides with red squares and chopped them up into pieces which slid over and squared the hypotenuse. “What’s the deal? I can do baby games like that without a fam,” he said scornfully. His tutor mumbled happily, swallowing the rest of his drink while he moved over to spread himself out on one of the beds.

  Eron didn’t like anybody at that moment. These bungling fools had condemned him to live out his life as the same mediocre moron he’d always been. If life had been so cruel as to curse him with a stupid Ganderian father and a silly Ganderian mother, at least it ought to have provided him with an extraordinary fam that could see things invisible to everyone else in the Galaxy. Even that surcease was denied him. Worse, now he was probably stuck with crossed wires.

  Rigone was grinning at his obvious consternation. “Notice any difference?”

  “No! It didn’t work! You goofed!”

  Rigone’s tattooed grin only broadened into a laugh. “That’s good. If you were noticing a difference, your fam would have it all calibrated by now and would be busily erasing what I’d done. If I did it right you’ll never notice the difference until the very inamin that you outfox us all. Say hello to me when you reach Splendid Wisdom. I’ll still be on the Olibanum. The Teaser’s Bistro.”

  “We leave Neuhadra tomorrow for Faraway,” slurred a

  very drunk tutor under the shining chandelier. “Can’t promise you a good time. I’ve never been to Faraway, either.” He chuckled. “Heard about it though.”

  Eron stared at the writer-link and sulked.

  “Really, kid,” continued the drunk, “relax and get some sleep. There’s plenty of time for you to bring Our Sinning Galaxy down around our ears! You don’t have to do it tonight! Spacefire, you’re only twelve years old.” And he began to laugh and laugh at the pretty lights hanging from the ceiling.

  Eron tried to think positively about his chances for conquering the Galaxy with a possibly crippled fam. Famless Arum-the-Patient had conquered Agander and had then turned to the Center, storming the Imperial bureaucracy— but he hadn’t had to compete with fammed minds. Eron felt a frantic urgency. He needed a lecture on patience right now but his tutor, who was his only source for pedantic lectures, was already asleep. He turned morosely to Rigone instead. ‘Tell me about Splendid Wisdom.”

  21

  A FAMLESS ERON OSA GLIMPSES HIS PAST, 14,810 GE

  Make no mistake about it, a future cannot be created without first being predicted. Otherwise the future just happens to very surprised naifs. What you cannot predict, you cannot control. Today, with our powerful tools, we see the coming collapse of galactic civilization and we are all united in our desire to shorten the coming interregnum of thirty millennia down to a more manageable ten centuries, but the real challenge to the Fellowship will come in the haze beyond our present ability to predict.

  —Excerpt from the Founder’s Psychohistorical Tools for Making a Future

  It was almost as if he had been manufactured without a past in the bowels of this incomprehensible Splendid Wisdom. What had it been like so long ago to be a young man with a past—if he had ever been young. Reclining in his aerochair, he drifted in a haze of loss, thrust into a distant future he didn’t understand. He was weary. On the morrow he would find more energy to flail at the mindless mist. This watch...

  He snoozed. Ghosts formed out of the mist, adult ghosts who had taken away his fam, promising him a new one with galaxy-spanning powers—he felt a child’s trust, his own— but they had switched his fam for the entrails of a sheep, leaving him alone and famless to grow up with mere simian wits. The long dream-arms of a child tried to grab his mind back, but the scarified ghost kept him in restraints while carving up his fam, eating some pieces yet sharing choice morsels with his tall dark farman companion—a boy’s precious secrets slithering down hungry gullets. The farman was grinning drunkenly, promising all the time that the sheep entrails would generate for him all the auspices he would ever need...

  The man woke in panic. Gripping the armrests. The struggle to learn how to read again was setting his mind off into phantom spaces, even while he napped.

  He had been concentrating for hours, unsuccessfully, willing himself to focus on something he had forgotten. He adjusted the aerochair into an upright position, facing the wall that leaked urine, surrounded by the stark simplicity of a lower-level hotel apartment in some cheap catacomb of Splendid Wisdom. What was left of a vital memory was on the tip of his tongue, but maddeningly unavailable. Perhaps the dream had touched its substance in the roundabout way of dreams. He should rest. But he couldn’t. He was driven.

  To recover from defeat.

  It galled him that he had been defeated. But by whom? And about what? And when?

  The half-memory had been driving him again and again to search through the distant files of Splendid Wisdom’s main Imperial Archive in a desperate attempt to jog the tenuous pieces into place. Pinned to the wall, Hahukum Konn’s meaningless picture of them grinning beside an ancient warrior’s flying machine seemed to be an intrusive decoy planted to lead him away from his important memories. The memories that would explain his situation. There had to be something out there that would fit together with the phantom fragments in his mind.

  The effort wasn’t coming easily. For a quarter of a month, but especially for this exasperating watch, his awkward hands had been trying to work the lambent holograms of a comm console with finger gestures half controlled by the quantum matrices of a fam that no longer existed. Mistakes infuriated him. He had to fill in behavioral blanks by reason, by trial and error. He didn’t know for what he sought. He couldn’t remember what he had done as a psychohistorian.

  He did remember the urgency. Was it something important that he had written/di
scovered?

  Eron Osa might have called upon the aid of the “charity” fam that now rode in the high blue collar around his neck— for appearance sake—but he had left it unconnected, tempting though it might be to take it under his neural control. He was even beginning to resent this common-issue fam designed to parole a convicted criminal (treason) whose personal fam had been found guilty and executed. He wanted to use it, but he could only guess at what ersatz data such a standard-issue mind held, what habits, what directives, what spy-implants. Its motivations would not be Eron’s natural motivations. Whom would it serve? The men who had executed him? Better to run his archival quest using merely the limited abilities of his wetware.

  He cursed himself for not having made, in the past, a more strategic use of his organic memory. That gray mush seemed to contain only the vaguest impression of grand strategic issues while being a register of unlimited trivial detail. As Eron jumped through the Archives, erratically bringing up holograms of this item and that item, guided by hunches he did not understand, straining to remember, he found that his mind delivered to him not what he wanted, not pertinent associations, but bizarre memories.

  ... a fugue of sexing with a sloe-eyed woman while playing truant from studying the physics of quantum foam. Were those the hills of Faraway beyond the ranch window? She was a wonderful tease. She had a full mouth that tapered into upturned lines and delicate fingers that seduced him into forgetting mathematics. They lay on linen with a border pattern of golden forsythia. Who was she?

  ... images of rafting down a river on the planet of his birth, the pyre-trees ablaze on rocky banks. What planet? Where was he bom? His three-year-old memories of it were especially vivid—but what three-year-old cares about the name of his planet or doesn’t mix it up with the name of his village or galactic sector?

  ... a boy wandering through the famous stone Library at