Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  “I’ve been studying the history of astrology.”

  “Now there’s a tangled web. Have you been haunting the Lyceum Library? I tapped into it a triple of watches ago and went into famfeed overload. It was scary. Too much material and not enough links. I’ve been trying to clean out my fam ever since. There’s all sorts of garbage in there, and I don’t even know where it came from. Whoever it was who sacked Splendid Wisdom in the bad old days didn’t know the fine points of their business. Why don’t fams have better cleanout routines? Splendid Wisdom is a dangerous place for a voracious student like me.”

  “Well,” replied Otaria, “I’m a discriminating student and I never go near the Lyceum Library. Stuffy old straight-down-the-line government librarians collect only the things that fit through the psychohistoric sieve. I’d end up thinking like a kept librarian.” She added sarcastically, “Not being a Pscholar, I don’t have access to the Restricted Library, which just might interest me. I’ve outgrown the baby pap that Rector Hanis and his likes condescend to provide for me. It’s like being a Catholic back in tribal times and having the temple priests refuse to allow me to read the Bible because my plebeian mind might be fried by the ideas God was whispering to me. Did you ever read the Bible? I read it once while I was hiding under the couch from my mama. The past is so romantic. Do you ever use private collections?”

  “All the time.”

  “I only use private libraries because they are wacky enough not to pretend to know the difference between fantasy and reality. That gives me a fighting chance.”

  “Sounds like a good place to find a history of astrology.” “As well as other insubstantia—like the pom feelies of the fifth wife of Emperor Krang-the-Blind. Creepy. Real librarians never collect creepy-crawly skin-walking things with thirteen hairy fingers. I nearly fainted. For the history of astrology we have to go to one of the ancient wisdom cults.” She was struck by lightning and began to glow. “That’s a great idea! You’re coming with me. Forget the silly dithyramb; libraries are more fun. I’m dressing you up.”

  “A disguise in a library?”

  “Of course. You wouldn’t want to be recognized in a place like that! The shame would be too much. My mother taught me all about disguises, and I need to practice.”

  “I thought I was very nicely anonymous among the vast crowds of Splendid Wisdom.”

  “With that nose?”

  The Frightfulperson, the youthful Otaria of the Calmer Sea, took him to her small apartment on the side corridor below her mother’s place. She had a manufacturum that specialized in recycling old clothes into daring new designs. For Scogil she conjured a flesh-pink hat with flappy brim that rendered his profile inaccessible. She made him a vaguely military jacket; no one would ever remember him as a civilian. “No mustache?” he complained.

  “Of course not,” she mimicked. “That would make you too handsome. I don’t want the girls to follow you around. Without a profile you are already dangerously attractive.” For the next leg of their journey they took an endless ride through the tubes. Hungry, they had to leave their first pod for lunch at a dim place she knew where the proprietor went around polishing the glass lamps and refilling his customers’ cups so he could listen in on their conversations. Then they just had to visit a girlfriend she hadn’t seen in ages who was raising a mini-chicken inside her parlor furniture. Otaria got down on her knees and clucked. Scogil stood and maintained his dignity until they left. Their third pod zipped them to a tube station that emerged inside a vast public bathhouse. Fellow tube passengers wore sandals—some even strutted bathing suits—and carried things like flippers and goggles. None seemed interested in ancient wisdom since the crowd continued on to the baths while Otaria and Scogil mounted a secluded stairway.

  “Remember. I’m Hasarta Nugood. They know me. They don’t know you. Let’s see. You’re Og and you’re not very bright. That will make it simple for you. If you don’t understand what is going on, grunt convincingly.” She smiled like an auteur who has created for her characters an especially deadly situation. “Don’t tell anyone, but one of His Hyper-lordship’s cells meets here. He doesn’t even know it exists. Security is so tight that even my mama doesn’t know it exists. I only discovered it by accident because I’m so curious. I got curious about the ancient wisdom cults so I joined one. And who should be more interested in ancient wisdom than a bunch of wacky astrologers! Promise me you won’t tell!”

  At the top of the stairs they found the mansion housing Otaria’s cult behind two bronze doors three meters tall. Flat Assyrian warriors hunted lions inside the confines of a two-and-a-quarter-dimensional panel. The doors were so formidable Hiranimus expected to hear the crackle of a forcefield and heavy-duty motorization but found only manual operation and heavy-duty inertia.

  Before entering he warned Otaria. “That door exudes Rithian mythology. You’ve got to keep your nose flared for that stuff. Ninety-nine percent of it, maybe all of it, is fakery manufactured for the tourist trade. As a kid I once owned a four hundred million-year-old Rithian fossil, just a shell embedded in rock, pretty, nothing spectacular. I carried it around with me in my pocket, and took it out and boasted about it all the time. My stories took on a life of their own so my father, a firm believer in the true truths, had it evaluated. It was a fake, maybe five hundred years old, and not even a copy of a real fossil. There were millions of them in circulation. It was a computer-designed fossil, probably from a program that mimicked evolution. After that I’ve had a hard time taking Rithian stories seriously. Be warned.”

  “I know all that,” said Otaria disdainfully. “My mother was kidnapped by Rithians. Her Rithian souvenirs aren’t fake.”

  Inside the Mausoleum, empty of people, were rows of startlingly lifelike exhibits, captured in their cubicles of frozen time. Most were prehypership from the Sirius Sector. Very few were from Rith. A collector would have had to scour hundreds of planets with an army to kidnap their like. It wasn’t the same as viewing holos. The displays were all as solid as the bronze doors—bowls to be tipped, swords to be hefted, muzzle-loaded cannon to be thumped, scrolls of sheepskin to be unrolled, machines that hummed menacingly, each object apparently irreplaceable but in fact an insubstantial nanofabrication from a compactly stored template, regenerated or destroyed at whim.

  “I hope the Delphi exhibit is still up. That’s what I want to show you. It has an Egg and tells fortunes with quantum obscurity!” She looked around her. “Where is my Princess Seer?”

  In the meantime an exhibit was being changed. Surveying the time-frozen carnage at his feet was an armored warrior-officer of the sword-and-crossbow era whose demeanor and red blade made one glad to have missed the action. Metal-visored eyes glared behind a hideous metal mask. Leather and steel plates defied attack. Martial artists had woven colored thread to hold the plates together, and metalsmith tailors had hammered out the breastplate making the warrior more manly than any warrior could ever be. Priests had decorated him with crosses to ward off evil. But no ancient religion was powerful enough to protect this defender of God’s and Mammon’s faith from museum curators. They had summoned a demon from its slumber in Hades to devour the warrior’s feet, to grab him down into the netherworld, to eat him alive with crunching grinds. On Splendid Wisdom there was no room to store a bulky artifact whose time had come.

  Otaria knew where to find the attendant in a maze of discreet cubbyholes. She brought her Og to a lady with holy eyes and a horseshoe crown of golden filigree and feathers that surrounded her face in ancient runes unreadable by Scogil: “California’s Wisdom in the Solid State.” The priestess was dressed as a hip-hop shaman in animal skins worn off one shoulder in early Rithian style, her lips blood red, her comm tucked in a leather belt sewn together with twigs of mistletoe. Otaria curtsied as she introduced the woman, “the Princess of Wisebeings.” Her deference indicated that they were meeting the owner of the place. Scogil grunted convincingly.

  “You’re early, Hasarta!” The Seer igno
red Og.

  “We’re researching ancient mysteries,” said Otaria.

  “Good. You can report your findings to our study group.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “And your friend?” She glanced doubtfully at Og with the floppy hat and military deportment. “Remember, we’re all Mentors this watch. Mentor level is rather difficult for a beginner. Don’t you want to sign him up as an Aspirant?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about him. Og is a divine astrologer. That’s why I brought him. He can see right into our souls!” she pronounced with genuine awe.

  Og was tempted to grunt again but answered graciously, “I see the soul of a woman who truly knows her way among the stars.” He knew his lines.

  The holy eyes crinkled into a grin. She was of the Lumi-nant level (the third) and suspicious of anyone who claimed more knowledge than she. “Even at the Mentor level you’ll have to do better than that,” she chided. “We’ll teach you. You’ll need to know some orbital mathematics.” She brought out her catalog, its cover decorated with the familiar golden horseshoe crown with runes. “I have just the right five-session course for you.”

  Otaria stayed the gesture. “We’ll be looking at the Delphi exhibit.”

  “Very well. Since you were last here I moved it to station 93. It’s more secluded that way, more mysterious.”

  After the Princess of Wisebeings showed the way she abandoned them to go back to her cubbyhole. The little square anteroom of station 93 was dim, hiding gods. There was no procession of statues leading to a temple, nor even evidence of a Greek temple—no fake priestesses nor attendants to give the room a false air; only the simple apparatuses of an oracle and Apollo, the god of Delphi—with his lyre—strutting an arrogant handsomeness, a god who could gift Cassandra with the abilities of a prophetess in the hope of sexual favors and then petulantly deny her the belief of others when those amorous favors weren’t forthcoming—and then, as a god who always tells the truth, foretelling her murder and the murder of her companions who, by Apollo’s curse, would not be able to take her forewarning seriously.

  Otaria was smug. “There’s your Egg of prophecy,” she said, pointing it out from the rest of the paraphernalia. “See, Eggs were around when the crabby old gods of Rith were still alive.” The netted half Egg stood between two birds, facing each other.

  “Ah!” Scogil sighed gently, in obvious recognition.

  “It’s a Coron’s Egg?” asked Otaria incredulously.

  “No, but I’ve been told about it by an old monk of Timdo. I didn’t realize it was Rithian. It marks a place where there was a fountain of wisdom.”

  “Not really.” Otaria was delighted that she knew something that the Hyperlord’s chief astrologer didn’t. “It’s very out of place here on Splendid Wisdom. It’s an Egyptian omphalos, one of their geographical position markers put in place at a site which had been carefully surveyed. They were very fond of permanent markers since they had to labor to resurvey their country every year after the floods came in from the tropical rain forest. Nobody was supposed to move an omphalos. You did that and you were snake food! The two birds are the Egyptian glyph for the long-distance laying out of parallels and meridians, probably homing pigeons or doves.”

  “A bird as your navigator? That’s a pretty far-fetched story.”

  “No it isn’t. You’re just too dumb to know your Rithian bird biology. A pigeon could cover the length of Egypt in one day. The ability of the old birds of Rith to orient themselves over long distances and maintain a steady flight pattern was amazing. So there. We don’t appreciate them because Rithian birds transplanted to other planets don’t orient well. What do you do when you don’t have quantronics? You use handy neural computers, slow but effective. Just because you are a savage Rithian doesn’t mean you aren’t smart.”

  She gestured at the netlike decorations on the hemispherical omphalos. “Latitudes and longitudes. The same ones that are in the Egg. Isn’t that amazing? Egypt had a calendar of thirty-six decans of ten-day weeks, three decans to the month with five days of hoopla at the end. They divided the sky up the same way into 360 parts—sometimes 86,400 parts if they were using time measurements. I hope you’ve noticed that the Egg uses a horizon line divided into 86,400 parts. That’s a second. A second is about three jiffs. The omphalos represents the northern hemisphere of Rith. I don’t know if the early Egyptian priests knew about the southern hemisphere—but if they had gone as far as chopping up the pole to the equator into ninety parts of latitude, and they had 360 parts in their circle, they probably did.”

  To Scogil it all sounded like a story some penurious Rithian had invented to make money. “So history is more than a passing fancy with you?”

  “I will grow up to be a historian with robe and beard!” she insisted.

  “And you’re learning about Greeks? So far as I know, Greece is all the way across the Ocean of the World from Egypt”

  “Of course! We’re in Delphi!” she exclaimed incredulously. “Delphi was a very sacred place to the Egyptian surveyors. It is three-sevenths of the way from the equator to the north pole, at least Mount Parnassus is. The most important temple of their Second Empire was founded at exactly two-sevenths of the distance from the equator in Thebes, and it was built around an omphalos. When the Greeks were still barbarians, an Egyptian expedition established an astronomical observatory in the mountains at Delphi, probably to measure the local northern variation in the length of a degree of latitude—though, to their illiterate superstitious laborers, everything the aliens did was all magical ritual. That’s all speculation, but the later Greeks did have a legend recounting how Apollo had routed the Python when he took over

  Delphi, which is a mere retelling of the Egyptian story of the sun god Ra being attacked by the snake Apepi at sunset, then winning the nightlong battle and resurrecting himself at dawn.” She smiled.

  He smiled to indulge his precocious child.

  “I can tell you don’t believe me. But look.” She pointed out a device with thirty-six spokes. ‘That’s the magic wheel used at Delphi. It’s a naive barbarian’s rendition of an Egyptian angle measuring device. The Greeks had seen the Egyptians prophesy with it and knew it had symbols on it, so they did mock astronomy by putting strange symbols on their own counterfeit and using it as a roulette wheel to generate inscrutable random sequences of letters which the priests of Apollo versified into divinations.”

  “Magicians do keep forgetting that the symbols they use for variables are only dummy symbols,” Hiranimus said tolerantly.

  “Ask a question!” demanded Otaria.

  “Who asks?” intoned an aroused Apollo.

  “Og,” said Otaria.

  “Ask then, Og,” commanded Apollo.

  Scogil’s response was mock. “How will the oblique students of the egg-shape fair against the masters of the golden ellipsoid?” He was surprised when his voice then activated the spinning of the thirty-six-spoked wheel. Balls, each carrying a Greek letter or obscure symbol, began to roll out of it into a hole in the shrine. Somewhere a reader was assembling this random output into some kind of weird grammatical sense.

  “Listen,” said Otaria.

  Apollo spoke his oracle. “The egg master’s student will wrack Og’s doom to tell the oblique chagrin of the fair golden ellipsoid.”

  “Good old omniscient Apollo pretending to be Thoth,” commented Scogil with the same seriousness he gave any random number. “The highest Greek mathematical discovery was the mystical theorem that three equals one, which is one of the fundamental theorems of astrology.”

  “You better be careful what you say,” Otaria admonished. “You are among believers in the mysteries of ancient wisdom. The Greeks are worshiped here.”

  “We all have a fascination with our Rithian roots that won’t go away even though Rith has become nothing more than the desert rathole of the universe. I’ve picked up bits and pieces of the old history. No more than that. There’s not much left of Rithian
history, really. Just fragments, mostly preserved via old starship libraries.” The Rithians, thought Scogil, had themselves done a good job of obliterating their own heritage. They bred a hundred times faster than they could ship colonists to the stars, and those who stayed behind had turned on each other. He gave Otaria a rueful look.

  “Enough! From now on just grunt,” said Otaria, taking her erudite Og to the small conference room off the Mausoleum where students were gathering. Some of them had their own Coron’s Egg. One gentleman was selling Coron’s Eggs to three enthusiastic Aspirants. Og smiled a satisfied smile. It was nice to see deadly subversion in action.

  The would-be Mentors of the second level settled into small teams, each sharing an Egg, working to perfect some mathematical manipulation needed for Mentor-level work. The shaman Wisebeing—Luminant—gave a brilliant astrological lecture with her Egg in projection mode. She was applauded enthusiastically. But afterward they were all assigned more slog work. Then each gave a presentation of their test horoscope. Scogil had never heard such flowery nonsense in his life. He was pleased. Maybe one in a hundred of these people could be brought up to seventh level— once the final level was codified and tested. That, his equations said, would be enough to topple the Pscholars. He already knew how the Founder’s equations would handle the emergence of an astrology cult—the data would be misconstrued—unless the Pscholars were harboring an unknown mathematical genius, which wasn’t likely. Their secrecy codes were the best insurance that their mathematical innovation would continue to remain damped.

  The Wisebeing let him give his own demonstration. He dazzled them with a lesser-known aspect of the Mentor level. The thirteen-year-old Frightfulperson of the Calmer Sea mouthed her approval. Good grunting, Mister Og.

  31

  GOOD-BYE TO ASINIA PEDAGOGIC, 14,798 GE

  Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.