Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  “Of course. When the Great Monster Albris”—Nemia nodded to the slithering figure all around them—“set fire to his mother to create the dancing dervish-universe of exploding energy, he so admired himself for inventing light that he glued together discarded claw parings he had lying around to manufacture the first astrologer, whose life was to be devoted to singing praises to his creator for having made such perfect stars. Instead the first astrologer muttered under his breath that the universe had looked better as a mother.”

  “Oh, oh,” said Hiranimus, “astrology is in trouble. Was Albris mad?”

  “Oh, yes. He was provoked into a terrible rage. The Great Monster Albris chopped off his astrologer’s head and made the planets out of it. Still raging, he conjured men from the lice in the astrologer’s hair in order that he might forever be surrounded by more servile admirers. Men were very impressed by his ravings. Thus it became the tradition of all mortal kings to chop off the head of every astrologer not able to tell a king what a king wants to hear. After eons of such breeding, astrologers carry in their genes a wisdom in the ways of kings equal to their wisdom in stellar matters, which allows them to veil their readings in words that only men more intelligent than kings can understand.”

  By this time their astrologer was back with her Egg on its cushion, this one a grotto green ovoid streaked in bloodred stone, tiny diamond eyes sparkling. An afternoon glow from the archway vanished, the room went dark, Albris faded, and the stars came out. She scattered a tiny thimble of rice. The artificial sky filled with strange stellar groupings and a floating moon.

  “The moon is a good omen,” she said, holding her hand up in the ancient human sign for silence. Slowly the stick figures suggested by joining up the stars matured into fleshed-out constellations: a two-headed man, an upside-down woman embracing a goat, a ten-legged lizard, a monster, a fleet of Imperial warships, a sword and heart, two babies on a scale, a cyclops whose handless arms ended in an agonized male head and a frightened woman’s head. The moon began to drift across the lizard. “The lizard of earth and water is your constellation,” she intoned. All the stars went out except those of the lizard. The stars had cryptic names, glowing in red alphascript when directly engaged by an eye. “Pick your star,” she commanded.

  He chose at random. “Teiid” he read.

  The sky whirled dizzily in hypeijump and a new set of stars and their figures emerged, now from Teiid’s viewpoint. “Interesting,” she said. “You are a man of strong ambitions.”

  “How can you read that?” asked Scogil—gently so as not to show his disbelief.

  “You have chosen a sky that contains the constellation of the Atman. He is powerful and occurs in the sky of a myriad of planets who were conceived while in the House of Attainment. Sometimes he is curled and asleep. Sometimes he battles with an adversary. Sometimes he rides the Princess. I have seen him drink from the Water Jug. Here he points but does not act. He knows what he wants to do but is indecisive. At what does he point?”

  “He’s not pointing at a constellation; I see only a clump of stars.” Scogil shrugged.

  The Luminant chided him. “The Atman’s vision is not yet clear. Perhaps that is why he is indecisive. Are you content to be one of the blind ones who leads an ordinary life? The Lizard tells me otherwise. Look closer, lest you be blinded forever to what is in front of you. What do you see?

  “Well, there are two clumps of stars, one tighter, more focused; the other is a kind of nebulosity that seems to be flying apart.”

  “Only the rare perceptive man sees both these Faces as separate Exigents. Whose faces?”

  “The face of doubt and the face of certainty.” Scogil didn’t know why he found himself saying that.

  The farmer woman grinned, wrapping her shawl about herself and stroking the Egg so that the stars flickered. “You have chosen for yourself the Face of Certainty, I can see. Which is it? The focused group or the nebulosity?”

  “Focused. I see a man on a horse.” He really did.

  They were whisked by another “jump” through hyper-space to a place where there were no delineated constellations, just a jumble of stars.

  “Do you recognize the sky?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, then tritely: “The Galaxy is a big place.”

  “You are among the stars of the Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift This is not a planetary lookout. You have chosen to look out from a point far from any star. This view has never been seen before. Here is the place from which you abandon doubt and choose the certainty of a new viewpoint that will take you home to your Helmarian roots and then away again.” Constellations began to form. A horseman, his scarf flowing in the wind, the hoofs actually trotting. Then other horsemen appeared, perhaps two sixtyne of them, all engaged in some ancient cavalry battle, the chaos of a battle undecided, the first horseman alone in his certainty.

  How in all the hells of Space did she find that configuration of constellations?

  “Pick the star to lead you through this,” she commanded.

  “I’ll take Splendid Wisdom,” he said instantly.

  “No.” She smiled as she might to a famless child who was about ready to buy out the whole toy store. “Splendid Wisdom is far from you now and will not guide you. You must pick from the stars around us.”

  “The eyes of the rider, then.” He looked and the eyes had names.

  One eye was the sun Sanahadra, builder of the Fortresses of Darkness, whose magi had led the armies resisting the Empire in the Wars Across the Marche and whose peoples had been scattered by their failure to win the war. The other was Oenadra, homeworld of Nemia’s most ancient ancestors before they, too, suffered brutal exile during the Dispersion.

  The full-time rice farmer and part-time Luminant had finished her reading. “Your destiny has been chosen. Honor your guiding stars and they will lead you.” She paused, urgently needing to say something. ‘Two stars!” she exclaimed. Her arms opened out as if she were holding more than they could carry. She seemed indignant at the universe’s generosity. “It is not often that the alignments bring forth two stars to aid a man’s action.” Then her hands came down, palms up and together, suddenly bereft, supporting her ritual money stick parallel to her body in the ritual alms request. The stick had been coated in myrrh, the favorite scent of Albris. Nemia paid her by touching money stick to money stick, but the woman didn’t seem satisfied. Her stiff alms-pose lasted a few jiffs after download; clearly she expected a tip for midwifing two guiding stars. Nemia declined but Hiranimus added the little extra something with a touch of his own money stick. He was in a good mood.

  He had made his decision.

  29

  OLD BOYS' NETWORK, LATE 14,797 GE

  Mathematics is the Queen of Science but she isn't very Pure; she keeps having babies by handsome young upstarts and various frog princes—DK

  —Engraving carved into a 21st-century AD skull

  purchased at the Artiste’s Skull Emporium on Rith

  Eron Osa had been too busy over the years to have girlfriends, except for occasional flings with the sensual Stationmaster of the energotron when the odd assignment sent him out to the desert. He had as a poor substitute a comer of his room hung with his favorite touchy-feely that came from a subterranean media shop off campus. She looked like an ordinary nude until your hands were close enough to be immersed in a delicate illusion—the touch of a real woman. Her thirty poses zoomed on command from a petite doll to a scrollable giantess four times normal size. She lived beside his books and never complained when he recited theorems at her.

  Jak and Bari had graduated to better things, their places in the student apartment filled by a freshman and an Advanced Mucky-Muck in hyperspatial engineering. Bari willed Eron the job of House Manager (Ogre) in charge of Training Up Sloths to Keep Things Reasonably Neat, and Eron had become ruthless at dragging their unhousebroken freshman out of bed or jolting him from his wakedreaming to clean up the crumbs he had left in the kitchen or the pi
le of datasquares he had abandoned on the common room table.

  Eron wasn’t quite so cavalier with the new engineer who worked out every decawatch at the local zenoli club. Osa had always been fascinated by the legend of the zenoli warders and once made the mistake of asking for a demonstration. It had been an awesome experience to be tossed around helplessly like a rag doll, sure that the whirling furniture was going to connect with his head only to be saved by a deft zenoli grab at his ankle which jerked him off in a new direction. He signed up for zenoli training immediately, putting on hold his calibration of an instrument that measured the velocity of tiny breezes by the rate of cooling in the radioactive head of a pin.

  Most of the time Eron was at his own console, studying. It was a grueling habit he had ceased to question. He had already learned enough about the difficulties of measurement and error estimation to daunt a young man planning to make a life’s work out of predicting an essentially unpredictable future. But there was always more to learn. He spent extra watches in the physics lab building exotic measuring devices, and that, more than anything else, had introduced him to the mischievous boss of the universe, the god of chaos, a shapechanger who destroyed repeatability and disassembled order. Chaos would gladly lie to you about your future.

  But chaos wasn’t an omnipotent viceroy; there were tiny long-term effects that kept slipping through chaos’ disorganized fingers to lose themselves in some back eddy of the universe where they grew up into things like the human brain—which then invented science to study such improbably persistent phenomena. Eron began to love the painfully acquired traditions of science whose refined strategies of guerrilla warfare used control-of-order as its means of resisting and defying chaos.

  Eron was appreciating more and more the teachings of the phlegmatic but sometimes explosive Murek Kapor, who was now only a memory. That man had taught him a skewed way of attacking problems with a toolbox that didn’t seem to be used at Asinia, though the tools drilled into him by the Asin-ian mathematicians and physicists and engineers bridged chasms he had not been able to cross as a student on Agan-der. With the right forks and spoons curiosity became more than mouth-watering—it became belly-filling. Eron had an insatiable curiosity.

  He dissected the order in human neural circuits. He pored over the math of the quantum effects used by a fam to accumulate information. He toadied up to Reinstone by analyzing how the memetic assumptions of a culture were stored in poetry—not letting on to Reinstone that he was using mathematical tools for the analysis and not the language dialectics that his tutor was so passionately fond of. From time to time he brought and recited for his mentor’s pleasure original poetry composed in a sixtyne of Old Rith styles. Their rhythm and their clever use of ancient tongues often brought tears to the old man’s eyes. Eron was careful not to mention that they came out of a rule-based machine program he had designed—Poetaster—to organize gibberish into pleasing concepts—in any of ten forgotten languages. Math was amazing. When you treated it like a Muse, it would do anything for you, even write poetry. He could understand how the Founder had captured die human soul in his equations.

  At the same time it shocked Eron to find out that his mother’s favorite maxim was wrong. She must have repeated to him a thousand times her theories of the mind’s fundamental logical processes—but the human brain wasn’t logical at all. When you broke it down to its atomic processes, it was merely a statistical machine that cleverly filtered out the chaos so that a man might see whatever faint order lay behind the overwhelming noise. Evolution had taught man’s brain to ignore what it couldn’t control.

  Eron was reminded of the way a frog’s eye was blind to stillness, seeing only motion. Mankind was blind to chaos. He saw only order. And if there was no order an undisciplined mind would frantically begin to correlate random events, seeing order in the shadows where none existed. An undiciplined mind wasn’t logical.

  A man might find order in a perfectly random gambling machine and try to beat it. Chaos can produce a jackpot which looks like order to a human mind unexposed to a large enough sample space.

  A man might find order in the wheeling stars and then create astrology in the hope that stellar order would rub off onto his chaotic life.

  Eron knew men who could stare at a lightning bolt and then correlate gaze and bolt—weren’t they simultaneous?— to create for themselves a mentalic superstition explaining how a naked gaze carried the strength to bring lightning down upon the heads of others. If lightning could cause a man to think, then thinking could cause lightning, and from there it was only a step away to use thought to curdle milk and seduce young women and erase the evil in politician’s minds. Concentrate hard enough, and such a man could rule the Galaxy, blow up stars, create new universes. Powerless men have their dreams of power.

  Not for Eron. The mind was a statistical machine ready to make correlations at the moment of emergence from the womb. But statistics without logic will tell you any lie you want to hear. It will correlate things that have no cause/effect relationship. It will confuse effect with cause and cause with effect. Logic has to be taught at the white heat of passion, then tempered in a cauldron of oil and put to the grindstone to get its final edge. It takes years.

  And at the end of those years, Eron’s life was changed forever. He heard Marrae arguing with the hyperspace engineer and felt obliged to intervene. By now he had the seniority to end arguments. But when he opened his door into the central living space, Marrae was holding the sphere of a Personal Capsule. “He thinks it’s his and has been chasing me around the couch. It’s yours.” And she tossed it to him.

  Eron disappeared back inside his room and closed the door, wishing that people would be a little less dramatic in their play. Why did he have to be exposed to heart failure

  just because Marrae was flirting with the newbie? So—who would be sending him a Capsule? His parents? Murek Ka-por? But when it fell open he found a message from a man he had never expected to meet again. The Scav, Rigone.

  Eron Osa: I hope you survived the operation of a couple of years back. It scared the tattoos off me but, it seems, I had good mentors. The experience saved my butt from the flame back here on SW. Thanks. To business. I have a friend who scares the remaining tattoos off me every time he drops by for a drink. You may or may not hear from him: Second Rank Pscholar Hahukum Konn. 1 run a place mostly frequented by students, and he is always asking me wistfully for the names of a few students who are also intelligent. Those he takes to his heart go far. I always think of you. You've had time by now to become seasoned. So... I have given him your name and location. If you ever reach Splendid Wisdom call on me at the Teaser's Bistro on the Olibanum. Fondly; Rigone.

  30

  PILGRIMAGE OF THE AGENT OF THE

  OVERSEE, 14,797 GE

  ... millennia later even the early astronomer Kepler cast horoscopes on a square compass rose of eight outer houses and four inner houses whose geometry matched the beholding platform of the Great Pyramid Observatory as it was at the time of the completion of the Grand Gallery and before the construction of the King’s Chamber From such an artificial horizon, priests measured the rising times and azimuth of the stars that made up the thirty-six decans of the Egyptian calendar. .. An educated Egyptian saw life as a ceaseless battle to maintain exact order, math, in a world of encroaching chaos... by observing the stars and probing geometry he...

  ... that one entered the afterlife of mystery, protected by hike and preserved in a structure that embodied the orderliness of the universe brought one to the edge of the immortal: order was immortality.

  ...the uneducated Greek mercenaries of a later decadent era, hired by Egyptian and Persian alike to kill each other, carried back to their city-states the Egyptian fascination with number and geometry and degraded it into the pseudogeometry of a horoscope designed to plot personal destiny. By Hellenistic times...

  —The Faraway Project for the Preservation of History,

  19th Edition, 12,562 GE<
br />
  Astrology was alive on Splendid Wisdom.

  Hiranimus Scogil watched Kikaju Jama as he removed one of the ovoids from its coddled case of sixtyne and held it up to the eyelight. Beside him, the daughter of his security chief—and, it seemed, his constant helper—was briefly made immobile by awe. She begged until she was allowed to polish it. “Exquisite,” said the Hyperlord. “I won’t have trouble distributing these. You say this batch is active to the Prophet level? Please, how long will it take before we get the upgrade to the Monk level?”

  “Patience has always been a virtue, Jama.”

  “Do you hear that, Otaria? After nigh onto seven years he’s still questioning my patience.” He turned to Scogil. “You’ll notice how patient I am being with my little friend here.” And to Otaria: “Put it back—you’re not a hen.” The young girl reverently returned the talisman to its satin holder.

  It was true; Scogil still didn’t trust Kikaju. But somehow seeing him here for the first time in his milieu on Splendid Wisdom made him seem less dangerous. It had never been the Hyperlord’s intentions which were worrisome, it was his competence. Scogil remembered him as a clumsy oaf who continually fell all over himself, but here on this mad world, his world, Jama possessed an effortless ease, never making mistakes. Even with thirteen-year-old Otaria of the Calmer Sea tearing recklessly about his carefully arranged dwelling, he seemed to be able to maintain his composure. It was eerie.

  Splendid Wisdom was inhibiting Scogil’s reckless ways. If Jama was at ease in these corridors, to Scogil they were fraught with alien dangers. It wasn’t easy to separate the myth he had imbibed as a distant bystander from the casual immensity of the whole megalopolis. More than once he found himself almost humbly requesting Jama’s advice about some social triviality—like where to buy food. Marvelous as Splendid Wisdom was, leaving it by the end of the month would be Scogil’s pleasure. The Great Pilgrimage had lost its thrill.