Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  “What does Konn do for a living when he’s not dallying?” “He keeps the lid on. Pretty dull work. It is Jars Hanis who is into all the ideas and all the action. Not that the likes of you and me can get close to Rector Hanis.”

  Eron stared blankly at Konn’s beginner’s list while Nejirt relentlessly continued—the senior, who’d been through it all, hazing the freshman. “Your aerial companion was probably briefing you on a multitude of subjects. Did anything strike your fancy?”

  Eron reviewed his adventures since landing on Rith. “Flying inside that animated mouthpiece was like being tossed into a sixty-four-dimensional universe. Artabas, aturs, degrees, cubits, cubic barley feet, pints, arshins, scruples, grains, fingers, shekels, librae, qedets, hours, talents. My mind spins. He was telling me that the Great Pyramid was originally both a standard of length and time, east-west length being determined by the distance the stars moved in one second and north-south distance by the difference in the culmination angle of a star measured at two latitudes. I do remember that sixty laps around its original base—a day’s march by foot—times 360 was equivalent to a journey halfway around Rith.”

  “Ah-ha! You noticed the numbers. Weights and measures. Now we know how your mind works! I know the problem for you.” Kambu then commanded the mnemonifier to display on the office screen a map of the earliest cradle of humanity contoured in layers by ease-of-travel—wiggly lines, pastel colors, different layers for different modes of transport. “Your physics courses at Asinia must have taught you the laws of diffusion?”

  “Yeah. But nothing about social diffusions.”

  “I’ll outline Konn’s ticktacktoe problem. How do weight-and-measure standards establish themselves across political boundaries? It happened here at the dawn of civilization.” He swept his hand over the eastern end of the Inner Sea region. “It also happened in the Galaxy where measurement standards drifted during the sublight diaspora but became universal again long before the rise of Splendid Wisdom’s empire. What’s the diffusion mechanism?”

  Eron stared at the map and thought of it as a wet surface upon which colored dyes of “length” and “time” and “weight” had been dropped, tendrils of dye snaking out to entwine with each other. But that analogy was simple physics and chemistry. Psychodynamics would be different—more like dynamic populations, more like evolution with the standards of measure emerging as the dominant life-form. A challenge. “What initial conditions are we assuming?”

  “Konn doesn’t want you to worry about that just yet. The scutch work has already been done; what you do with those numbers is Konn’s main interest. Konn wants to see how you think—not how well you ferret. There’s one thing you can count on from him—he’s not going to tell you what you need to know, he’s going to observe the style by which you make a fool of yourself so he’ll know how to train you.”

  Eron sighed.

  Nejirt laughed. “Don’t worry so much. When it comes to the important work of fossil extraction”—he waved at the rocks—“you’ll be using tools more advanced than Egyptian fingernails!”

  The young apprentice did meet Hahukum Konn briefly to receive his first famfeed—in exchange for his formal vow of secrecy. He vaguely remembered warnings about this moment, but the thrill of being offered what he had struggled so long to attain muted all caution.

  He was led into a private room to an elaborate high-backed chair that was obviously used only for ritual affairs, mechanical tentacles sprouting from its headrest, damascene adorned and rustling in excitement at sensing the presence of his fam. Just another machine.

  Second Rank Hahukum Konn appeared in robes hastily donned, ready to do the formal honors. Eron had been ready, impatient, for months, and, though the coming confirmation wasn’t voluntary, he wasn’t thinking much about it; he wanted the proffered knowledge too much. Konn explained the contract carefully and articulately, his speech a detailed proof of the Founder’s theorem that secrecy was a vital adjunct of a successful prediction. It made mathematical sense and Eron responded with the right noises—mouthing formalisms he hardly took seriously was a small price to pay.

  It was the sentient chair which acted as priest—enfolding Eron while lying down, in the depths of his fam, a quantum neural structure that would not lend itself to any simple sequential data access. Eron would not be able to unmix from his memories what he was now absorbing—the cream was in the coffee—erasure could only be by nonuse, by the grad-ual cannibalization of information bits—or by the outright destruction of his fam under the laws governing treason. Nobody other than Eron could tap into the unique coding. Nor would he be able to export any of it in readable format. Even to use it himself he would have to spend years of effort “remembering” what he had never known.

  When the ritual sacrifice was over, the youth made one concession of respect to his old Ganderian tutor, muttering his doubts by alluding to the oath of secrecy-unto-death sworn by iron-age Pythagoreans—who had thereby earned a reputation as elitists and so, when they became politically active, were slaughtered by the irate citizens of Crotona.

  But the great Konn wasn’t fazed by the intended irony of his newest student—he riposted amiably by counting up all the quadrillions of humans able to quote, but not prove, the sage Pythagorean theorem. Eron found that a weird viewpoint—equivalent to the statement that a gag vow was a moot point for a mathematician pledged to keep the methods of geometry secret from a colony of monkeys. Eron absorbed the High Pscholar’s thrust, it not being politic to continue his dissent. But he was remembering Murek’s cautionary story...

  ... during the renaissance of Egypt’s Sixteenth Dynasty, between the Assyrian and Persian occupations, Greeks and Greek merchants had been welcome and honored—in Sais and Naukratis. Pythagoras, an adventurous youth, left the island of Samos to spend half his life in Egypt studying as an acolyte in a cult of priest-cosmologists who forgave him his Greekness in the light of his brilliance. For two thousand years these priest-surveyors of Egypt had been accumulating the tenets of straight-edge and compass geometry in a horde of tools intended for their exclusive use. He was warned. No blabbermouthing about geometry to the superstitious laity—on pain of death.

  But ancestral continuity is no guarantee of immunity from fate’s foibles.

  The Persian conquest broke the cult’s back, carting off its adepts to Babylon and Persepolis to serve on Persian astronomical and geodesic projects. Persia intended to conquer the known world—from Thinai to the Table of the Sun—and the reconnoitering teams of King Cambyses recruited the world’s best mapmakers, who were all Egyptian geometers. Pythagoras escaped, first to Samos and then by ship, ahead of the Persian army, to the Greek colony of Crotona in Italy where he founded his own secretive school in the Egyptian tradition—modified by his Greek dreams of creating a new world order under the leadership of an elite cadre of “math-ematikoi.” To the end of his days Pythagoras enforced a vow of secrecy. Mathematics was not for the common masses.

  All this Eron kept to himself. He found that he liked Second Rank Konn but at the same time wished that he was not so awed into silence by the old man—or so reduced to silence by the exalted tech his imagination saw within Splendid Wisdom’s tentacled chair. None of it mattered. He had passed through the gate.

  34

  ERON BUILDS A MODEL, 14,798 GE

  My studies of ancient meteorology have led me to two general conclusions: first, that meteorology was bom mainly from the practices of the international merchant class of the ancient world and, second, that meteorology provided the foundation for the scientific rational vision of the world.

  —Livio Catullo Stecchini (d. 1979 AD)

  As the work of analyzing the flight dynamics of the fossilized Aerial Fortress went ahead, Eron began to spend his nights puzzling the pieces of his weights-and-measures diffusion problem into psychohistory’s scaffold. The difficulty was not only in absolving an alien mathematics so cavalierly archived in his fam but in trying, simultaneously, to empath
ize with another kind of alien humanity lost down there at the bottom of time. Even when he hewed to the Founder’s rules faithfully, the assumptions weren’t easy to follow. He kept trying to think like a physicist.

  He took long walks in the desert to erase his preconceptions, sometimes even removing his fam while, of course, gripping it tightly in both hands. Famlessness induced a heady kind of godlike immediacy, his mind stupefied to the complexity of life. Nevertheless it granted him the distanced perspective he needed—gazing with the eyes of a Rith-bound sapiens fresh from the simian life.

  Out here in the night air of Rith he was the spirit of a wave of settlers in the Nile Valley. He saw an arched heaven that couldn’t be higher than sixty times the highest mountain, a vault of glitter that rotated around an axis-point in a sky full of mystery and powers. The rising of the stars held the secret of life and death, commanding the immotile earth to renew when it was time for the flowering of life and commanding it to die when it was time for the cowering of death. Ra measured the sun’s day; Thoth measured the moon’s month; wandering stars made their rounds carrying cryptic messages; comets appeared out of nowhere, without pattern, warning of chaos.

  Sometimes an adventurous urge took him—to see the mountains out of which the stars rose—to follow the rumors of distant riches told by the rare traveler, of gold, of marvels along the tin route, of pasture, of bustling towns, of strange people, of the terrible sea... sometimes it was merely the urge to be gone from the reach of an irate clan who were promising to murder him... sometimes he fell in with experienced merchants of his own kin or a cattleman grazing his herd... sometimes it was a craftsman’s trade that took him journeying. Metalsmith and artisan and surveyor had an easy mobility. Nomadic restlessness was not yet out of his blood. He had stories to bring with him to strange lands and stories to bring back; such is the delicious excitement of adventure in a world where talking-and-seeing and taking-and-bringing is the only form of communication.

  Between the walks Eron wrote his inspiration into the equations of his mnemonifier, struggling with internal antagonisms, antilogy, error messages, and dead ends. And went back to walking under the stars.

  Over the ages the Egyptian spirit reasoned how the laying of stones, aligned on certain heavenly events, allowed the prediction of an event’s repetition. Knowledge evolved into a profusion of calendars to determine the day, the month, the seasons, the year. The stones transmogrified into obelisks and wells to measure the shadows of the sun and into the sunbaked bricks of temples aligned to make a jewel glow with starlight in the sacred chamber at just the critical moment of the year’s cycle. Flash! The floods are coming. Prepare! Egyptians became masters of surveying in order to reestablish boundaries after the floods. Fixing a place in its relation to all other places became an obsession. Marker stones became jinn with occult powers, not to be moved—the priest-surveyors gave warning.

  Strangers, sometimes men from beyond the sea’s horizon, mostly Sumerian traders with Semitic pack-animal tenders, brought ferment and ideas and took away with them the same.

  The temples grew into the abode of priests whose curiosity nourished the spirit that had willy-nilly brought them power. The priests mastered the numerology of shadows and learned to predict the equinoxes and to discern destinies. They drew pictures on the walls of their observatories, displayed as easy-to-remember fantasies, prompts for the memory which now had to hold an accumulating number of facts, more than a mere mortal could remember without the mnemonic aid of an entertaining story. The story didn’t matter; its organization did. There was no contradiction in different accounts of the same event; the twists and variations added to the pleasure of telling. Who would be impudent enough to expect the gods to have a consistent history?

  That evening Eron found himself walking alone in the desert with a ten-year-old imaginary acolyte, recounting to him the malevolent adventures of the Demon Star who blinked out a new curse every three days and must therefore remain nameless lest his attention be provoked. There were nine hundred stars to remember, all encoded in less than sixty episodic fabulations. Some were guide stars, some presaged recurring events, some were signposts to other stars.

  During late-morning bouts up in the hangar nest of the Venteen Fortress, Eron began test runs on his cobbled program, adjusting and refining its parameters. It soon acquired a psychohistoric life of its own, correcting most internal errors without bothering to consult Eron, living lustily in an imaginary past on a diet of electrons. More and more he had to let it work out its results by itself so he could get on with his real job.

  Engineers responsible for the reconstruction of Konn’s Flying Monstrosity were impatient for the facts they needed. It was Eron’s responsibility to decipher the exact metric by which that ancient battlecraft had been built so that the reconstruction could begin in earnest. His routine “day” job had him preparing fossil slices, then painfully measuring the surviving details, compensating for the distortions caused by geological pressures and by chemical diffusion and replacement. From those numbers a nonrandom statistical bias was appearing. Prominent was a dominant length peak, broken by twelve smaller peaks. After that it was hard to sort the peaks from the noise, but they were there, and all were binary: halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds. When an engineer asked him to hurry-it-up, he channeled that man’s eagerness to the task of classifying the dimensions of parts.

  Close by, asking for advice only when necessary, Eron’s psychohistory experiment was iterating its way through imaginary accelerated time in the hangar’s mnemonifier. New measures were arising spontaneously, living and dying in the artificial post-simian melange. City-states came and went. Empires rose and fell. Eron read each new century’s summary every evening before he went to bed; it was both fascinating and appalling. Sometimes he had to reset the century because of a parameter he had obviously mistuned.

  A constant potpourri of arguments had to be resolved. At first perhaps only over a day’s ration or some vicious land dispute. Then a gourd-cup, ingeniously used to solve a difficult volumetric dispute, became the tool for resolving the next similar dispute. The length of a sacred temple wand became the means of fixing boundaries. Each of these measures would take on only a temporary local authority while it competed in a lethal struggle with all the surrounding measures that were evolving, to live or die. The complications increased. Traders argued.

  Which measure was to be used to consummate the sale? Transactions craved an undisputed measure everywhere unaffected by the ravages of time, distance, war, weather, or kingly ego. No one wanted to ask “By which gourd?” or “By which rod?” Floods washed away old markers. Rods wore out. Gourds broke. The king’s shoe size changed with every assassination, or coup, or death. Cheaters used variations in measures to grow wealthy. Landowners invented special measures to suit private greed. Where was the god of measures against whose rule no argument could prevail?

  Yet all men lived under the same glory, slept under the same nightly drift, planted by the rule of the same equinox. A stream could be dammed, a river crossed, an enemy killed, a storm weathered, a plague survived—yet no hand could stay the precision of the sky ; every star cycled back to its place, by day and by season, at precisely the same place and at precisely the same time. And (as every nomad knew) the pivot-point of the stars rose in the sky as one went downriver—the dome of the earth underfoot mimicked the dome of the heavens above one’s head.

  Konn visited. He put pressure on Eron. He wanted to fly his mythical battleship. Just as Nejirt had predicted, he did not ask about Eron’s problems with psychohistory’s mathematics and did not offer advice. The engineers began to ride Eron. He needed to give them a preliminary value of the foot just to get them off his back. Maybe there was a historical reference somewhere, an ancient engineer’s handbook, anything! When Rossum’s Universal Robot #26, as he called himself, turned up at the pad, Eron was ready for a ride with the expedition’s historian.

  “You’ve told m
e you know everything,” he said, staring morosely at the instrument panel.

  “That would be an exaggeration.”

  “Konn put you in charge of all the historical documents he brought with him, is that right?”

  ‘The Master knows my weakness. I read a lot. I’m a bookaholic. I just finished off the collected works of Charles Dickens on the way over. These Rithians have no shame. When they are faking the past, they should at least try to learn some history. You should see what this Charles fellow tries to pull off on his readers. He fills Neolithic London with all sorts of anachronistic technology. But I must say, the series was a good read. We mustn’t always press for historical accuracy so seriously. Perhaps I might ask you for some pointers on Dickens’ sense of humor? If you have a day or two off, we could run up for a look at the London mound. You’ll find it as Naskala on the maps. It’s extraordinary. They’ve dug up a square kilometer of it, right down to the thirty-second-millennium level—AD, of course; no one here understands GE. The Marsallian artifacts—”

  “I need a technical manual on ancient measures—very ancient measures. Anything you have. Scraps, ripped pages, manuscripts rotting in jars.”

  “Well, now, please note that the Master just dumped his data on me, downloaded from Splendid Wisdom’s archives without much planning. I haven’t really had a chance to file it all. But I’ll look. That doesn’t mean I’ll find anything even if I have it. I was bom in the era of the messy virtual desktop, and that horror is still down there in my programming, lost along with the rest of it but not inactive, alas. Are we going somewhere?”