Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  Just as Eron was getting excited because he could see how the solution was going to come out—Old Sledge stopped and leaned on his shovel. “So there you are; that’s twenty-five centuries of sniffing around the edges. Your assignment: State the problem clearly, then map out a campaign of attack. I want to see how your brains work when you are not copying from each other or from an old text you think I don’t know about.”

  Eron looked around. No one had a comment. Jak had slipped out ahead of the class. The rest of them—turned to stone—sat bedazzled in their silence. “But, sir, the solution is obvious,” said Eron in that tone of voice which had presaged his expulsion from three schools.

  “Oh?” The legendary sledgehammer came down full force on Eron’s head. “Explain ”

  Eron wrapped up his thesis in three sentences. More would have been redundant.

  The professor was amused. “That won’t do. Come here.” Eron rose and Old Sledge courteously erased the whiteboard with the flat of his hand while slipping Eron his lightpen.

  Eron filled up the board, adjusting the size of his writing so there would be no need of scrolling. He was impressed with himself but a litde nervous. “We’ll need a computer to work it through.” He did a mental calculation on the complexity of his expression. “That tired old thing the Physics Department calls a computer should be able to crank out the result in about three hours. A good computer would do it in less.”

  “I’m amazed by the audacity of your approach!” exclaimed the professor ambiguously with a two-edged bite in his voice. He stared at the whiteboard, deep in thought. Eron stared at the professor. Finally Old Sledge shook his head in triumph. “Nope. Won’t work.”

  “It will!” said Eron defiantly, not caring if they expelled him.

  “Won’t,” said the icy prof.

  “Why?”

  “That’s for you to tell me.” He then dismissed the class and left Eron alone and enraged.

  The Osa boy found himself walking down the Mall, oblivious of the city and its people. His mind was recalculating his conclusion, his attention alternately searching for his error, plotting the murder of professors, and planning to quit school for a career in pirating. He reached the Founder’s Mausoleum without noticing the length of the walk,.

  Inside, the magnificence distracted him. What a place to be buried! Did the intricately inlaid design of the floor conceal the Founder’s bones, perhaps gilded in gold leaf? Maybe they’d stuffed him and he was sitting in a back chamber inside a maze known only to the Fellowship where he could be consulted for auguries. Reverendy Eron touched the lacquered finish of the empty podium—it was here that the Great Man’s hologram had spoken from the grave after every psychohistorical crisis.

  The hall was a tomb; no anticipating audience sat in its sanctified tiers where his audiences had once been crammed. A couple strayed in, peeked, and left. Eron wondered if psychohistorical crises had to be confined to the Interregnum. For the fun of it he stood behind the podium box and delivered a speech to the expanse of chairs, explaining the first post-interregnum crisis. He spoke solemnly. A great conspiracy of professors had arisen in galactic basements everywhere to paralyze the fabric of civilization by whacking students over the head with sledgehammers. His eloquent speechmaking made him laugh. He was the Founder, laughing. Especially the part about the student uprising!

  Back in his room, his fury set him to proving himself right. He shifted his argument, shoring it, building it on an unassailable foundation before he began to extend a pillar up into the sky to support his conclusion. Another sleepless watch! He worked in a frenzy. Always so close... and yet... hints of a flaw... he failed at the last stage... A horrible flaw! Bitter negative insight was disheartening. The lack of sleep, the impending dawn, turned his mind into polymeriz-ing jelly, his fam’s safeties refusing to drive it further. He slept for an hour and dreamed of sirens who had lured him to destruction on the rocks.

  Then he shook himself awake and went back to work. It wasn’t going to be the victory he had visualized, conquering a problem that has taunted physicists for twenty-five centuries, but it was competent analysis, even clever. He was surely going to bring it to Old Sledge today, to show him that Eron Osa hadn’t been all wrong. The damn prof had probably seen the flaw in half a round of jiffs.

  It wouldn’t do to put it into a famfeed format. That was an insult, asking a man to fill up his mind with your junk. Murek was always trying to teach him humility even if his old tutor had damn little of it himself. Eron thought to print his analysis on good paper—but that was too humble. Acid-free paper based on cellulose only lasted for five hundred years before crumbling to sawdust. Eron set up the apartment’s manufacturum for cellomet, which would last at least ten millennia. Adding in a beautiful binding was only a few more commands. It was almost a book, Eron’s first.

  He didn’t quite have the courage to drop in on Sledgehammer unannounced so he went to Reinstone for encouragement. Reinstone listened patiently to his troubles and encouraged him. He wrote “Cogito ergo tormentum” on his whiteboard.

  “What does that mean?” asked Eron.

  “That’s for you to tell me.”

  “All you old codgers say that! You’re here to teach me!”

  “I beg your pardon, young man. You are here to teach yourself. I’m an advisor and sometimes I even manage to be a resource.” He smiled and went off for a trip down his shelves. “I have just what you need,” came his muffled voice, and then he reappeared holding a gold-embossed volume with a self-sealing cover and its own vacuum pump. “The Aeneid,” he said, “in the original—if you are naive enough to trust the Rithian copyists. I’ve found numerous errors in it myself, but nothing, I think, that would cause Virgil more than minor cringing.”

  Eron broke the seal to the pop of inrushing air. Some nice pictures of people who lived in stone houses. The text was gibberish. His fam co-opted his eyes to make a quick count of the text symbols. There weren’t enough to cover even a quarter of the sounds in a decent language. This must be from the time when Rithians spoke in grunts. Another language to learn! He already knew ten and had once been expelled from school for refusing to learn an eleventh— well—he had reformatted his teacher’s whole language library with a late-Empire military code for which he didn’t have the decryption tools.

  Reinstone could read his trepidation and called up the quantronic secretary at physics and made an appointment with Sledgehammer. When the confirmation came through he told Eron to skedaddle, first making sure that The Aeneid was in his student’s hands. Eron left to the faint whisper of the book’s vacuum pump.

  Old Sledge seated him cordially. “I hadn’t expected you so soon. Reinstone tells me you have something interesting for me .”

  “You were right,” said Eron dejectedly. He shoved his bound folder in front of him. “But I did some work. It was pretty exciting—for a while.”

  “I was right, was I? Awful problem, that one, a devilish ball-cracker which has seduced me and then blasted me to crisp carbon enough times so I know how you feel ” He picked up the folder and opened it. He read it in less time than Eron had taken for the print job. That made Eron nervous. Only once did he glance up. “This isn’t what you said in class.”

  “I had time to clean it up.”

  “You most certainly did. Who taught you Heraklians?” “My tutor.”

  Sledge held up a palm to indicate a pause, said, “Inamin,” and turned to his console, with quick deaf-mute hand gestures, checking through a storm of activity but sometimes pausing to think. He shut up Eron in midsentence when the boy tried to interrupt the silence. Then he swiveled around to face Eron. “You brought this for my comment, right?”

  “If it’s crazy, I want to know.”

  “You’ve vaulted right over my objection. Spacedamn it, I didn’t expect you to bypass my objection, I expected you to find it!”

  “You didn’t tell me what it was, sir.”

  “I know.” He swore by the gods
that physicists fear. “Do you know what you’ve just done? You marched right through a demon’s army without noticing them. You’ve done the best work on this problem in twenty-five centuries. I’m signing you up for my course.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not letting you get out of it! Students like you don’t wander into my class every semester.”

  “But I don’t want to be a physicist.”

  Stunned silence. The physicist’s sails were blown aback. How could anyone not want to be a physicist? He recovered and sailed on. “Is it that you’d rather dance and sing? Has Reinstone convinced you to write poetry? I see that he’s given you one of those fake books that Rithians publish for the tourist trade.” He took it and unsealed the cover. “I might have known! Another invented language. If you decode it you’ll discover the secrets of the ancients. That’s the blurb, eh? Don’t forget that it’s a bargain at a thousand credits.” He winked and laughed and resealed the book, activating the susurrus of its pump. “So what do you want to be?”

  “A psychohistorian.”

  Sledgehammer brought his face close to Eron’s, studying it for madness. “Do you really believe that those charlatans can predict the future?” He scoffed and swiveled his aerochair toward the window. “If psychohistory was a science, they’d tell us how they did it. Wouldn’t they? That’s what science is all about. Open disclosure. Sharing of methods. Cross-checking. Communication. The search for truth. The willingness to stand in front of one’s peers and confess one’s mistakes! I tell you about tough problems you never heard of and, puzzled, you go off and bring back to me an answer. What does a psychohistorian do? He mumbles mug-you-magic-cockamamie and pretends he can’t tell you what it means because it is all a secret that must be kept or the sky will fall. If Faraway hadn’t been driven by that kind of self-defeating superstition from the beginning, we’d still be ruling the Galaxy!”

  “Yeah, but if they are so dumb, why are they ruling the Galaxy?”

  “A good point, lad. Maybe we’re the dumb ones.” His anger gone, he became mellow. “And what appeals to you about psychohistory? The psycho part, or the history part?”

  “It can predict the future.”

  “I see.” Sledgehammer’s eyes became cunning. “There are no courses like that at Asinia

  “I know.”

  “Tragedy! You’ll have to take second best.”

  “You?”

  There was a little curl to his lips and a nod of the head. “We of the physics department humbly volunteer as second best” His voice was sarcastic. “What can I say? Test us. Second rate though we may be, we are willing to teach you what we know about how to predict, maybe not the future but at least a few of the minor if dazzling tricks of precognition. We aren’t the least bit secretive. Look up our sleeves. Don’t expect a performance equal to the claims of those meddling psychohistorians, but we can teach you how to predict when laminar flow will turn into turbulent flow; we can tell you which aerochair will hold you comfortably and which one will flip you over and crack your head against the floor; we can tell you where a star was when men were just forest nomads and where it will be a hundred millennia from now. And I can predict, within the bracket of a month, when a massive star will turn supernova.”

  “What grades am I going to get?”

  Sledge grinned happily. “Ah, students never change! I feel my own youth again whenever I hear that request! We don’t have the potion for immortality, either. But let me give you my best offer. I’ll teach you everything a physicist knows about predicting. Some of it ought to prove useful when you take up charlatanry.”

  So Eron signed on, not knowing that he was getting into a long-term relationship with a very demanding taskmaster. Predicting turned out to be learning how to repeat oneself with minimum error. He worked at simple stuff like how to use a phase-shift electron nanocalib, how to polish a surface to a sixteenth of a wave-length of violet light, how to build up a probability distribution from experimental repetition— and some even weirder stuff. Sledge once put him on a team of advanced students tinkering with a huge black energotron out in the desert that could, when it wasn’t sulking, make measurements to within a few planck lengths.

  When he wasn’t in the labs or at the space station facility Eron was chief designer, under Sledgehammer, of the class that built multivariate models and then performed perturba-

  tion analysis on each and every variable so they would all get a gut feel for the role which that variable played in the model. Sledge liked them to rank each variable by how the errors in its measurement contributed to error in the model’s final predictions. He had one ability that drove Eron wild with envy. He could unerringly look at a phenomenon and build a rule-of-thumb model of it that was more error free than any model Eron was able to assemble with sixtynes of variables. When Eron tried to wheedle out of him how he did it, Old Sledge would just laugh and mutter about complexity compression. If pressed further, he put his finger to his lips and hinted at a secret voodoo methodology.

  Eron was so exasperated he flung at his mentor the worst insult he could think of: “You’re no better than a Spacedamned psychohistorian!”

  For that, liege lord Sledgehammer assigned him to do high penance and cast him out into the desert. He was there requested to write a fifty-thousand-word essay on the irreducible uncertainties introduced into any prediction by the quantum mechanical equations. Sledge made clear that the essay was to cover everything: why such irreducible uncertainties made the strict repetition of any experiment impossible, why it dictated the irreversibility of any event, why it caused the gradual erasure of the past and blurred vision into the future, first by obscuring near-term details and then finally by swamping out larger and larger details. Eron completed the essay in a little air-conditioned office he usurped under the energotron. His twenty-five-year-old mistress, the desert Stationmaster, made him a present of a hair shirt, which he nailed to his door. She was an indispensable aid in editing the manuscript while kissing his ears.

  It was this brilliant essay which eventually clinched the interest of the Fellowship when Eron Osa was brought to their attention.

  28

  THE CORON’S WISP PENTAD, 14,792 GE

  A soothsayer, by consulting the entrails of the appropriate quantum wave equation, can predict your future because his vague pronouncements and hints contain within themselves all possible futures.

  —Anonymous

  The occultations and phases of Timdo’s sibling moons featured prominently in the local astrological charts. From a high porch of the tiered Hephaestion Monastery, Hiranimus found the moons merely beautiful. The orbs were rightly famous among Coron’s poets. Ample Succubus was a delicate pink, Seer smaller and more aloof. In the lean mountain sky, a host of celestial attendants had filled prime balcony seats to celebrate the stately parade.

  The Monastery’s guest leaned on the balustrade above and below man-size gargoyles whose gutters drained the tiered porches. All were carved as watchful monsters peering skyward. Two powerful stars of the Coron’s Wisp pentad were now ascendant—above Timdo’s volcanic peaks King Nechepso took his glaring midnight walk and moving into the Constellation of the Fates was Qin where the Emperor Huangdi forever chased after the Moons of Immortality. Timdo’s sun, Hephaestus, God of Fire, had long banked his forge, taking great Nestor and lesser Samash with him into the nether regions. These were the Five Moving Houses of Scogil’s designated domain.

  The Oversee’s new Agitator had already returned from his first inspection tour and had time to meditate. Hiranimus was weighing the concord between his astrological agents. They were from disparate worlds, connected mainly by their close proximity in the Coron’s gravitational pentad. The underground cities of the planet Nestor of the sun Nestor revered the stars because they seldom saw them—the bustling Samash system worlds, speaking their own language, revered the stars because they lived among them on worlds too small to hold an atmosphere—the peculiarly devout population of H
uangdi made good agents because they had a very usable tradition of loyalty—the delightful little family industries of the planet Nechepso of the sun Nechepso were the quantronic centers of Egg production— and Timdo of Hephaestus...

  Scogil had chosen Timdo to be his headquarters.

  Here in the Wisp it was Timdo’s Hephaestion monks who were the engine behind the growing passion for astrology. They had hired Hiranimus Scogil and Nemia of l’Amontag to build a new edition of the Coron’s Egg suitable for galactic distribution, wholly unaware that it was the Oversee whose covert manipulations had set up Timdo’s galactic ambitions.

  The monks were providing the perfect cover for an Agitator.

  Who else for the job of chief Eggman than a Helmarian? Helmarian exiles had designed the first Egg for them with a little technical and production help from the early Interregnum’s Faraway traders who were then having a hard time opening up suspicious markets so far from the Periphery in a region of space ravished by warlords. In those bygone times the Hephaestion astrologers had been ambitious underdogs on their own anarchic turf who saw the stars as natural allies of their earthly machinations. Rivals from the Celestial House of Arak, who insisted on drawing astrological charts by hand and handbook and compass, no longer existed.

  For now all was well. Scogil and his wife had been greeted with more enthusiasm than they might have expected—they were, after all, known to be giaour, infidels who did not believe. To be trusted to rebuild the most sacred of talismans...

  Probably the trust rested on astral reasons unfathomable to a layman unfamiliar with the great confluences. Scogil suspected his and Nemia’s aura here on Timdo derived from their Helmarian ancestry. They were the instruments of impeccably powerful stars. Legends that entwined the Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift with the high mysteries of Timdo reached farther back than any living monk’s memory. Monks who are ritualists do not question tradition.