Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  “Nonsense! The Pscholars guard their sacred texts with unbreakable code! You of all people don’t have access to it! Even your penis can’t get in that deep!”

  Jama was enjoying himself. “My penis has slithered around in lots of dark forbidden places—and been chopped off more than once by youths such as yourself. Which accounts for its present small size. That be as it may, you must admit that the poor excuse for psychohistorical talent that I have at my disposal could never write such equations or work out their consequences—nevertheless, I assure you, my idiots can read such scrawls quite effectively.”

  A sudden revelation struck her. “You’re getting all of your material from Scogil!”

  “And he gets his by mining the memoirs of the Martyrs, my discovery. I have no doubt that these fragments of the Great Plan are authentic. There is no lie so small that it does not leave a trace behind. It is a fact that the Pscholars have lied to us for millennia.” He glanced for only a flicker of eyelight at the small jade ovoid sitting in its legged golden cup.

  Otaria paused to let her organic-fam mind cease rejecting the data in order to readjust itself around the thought that an enemy who lied to create a deception was a very different kind of opponent than an open foe. After an almost instant gestalt-wide neural-fam review, she was ready with her comment. “I still think you should meet my psychohistorian”

  “You have already contacted this man?” Disapproval.

  “No.” She was amused that Kikaju would suppose her so bold.

  “Then he contacted you?” Greater disapproval.

  “No!” Now Otaria felt called upon to defend herself and reacted to Jama’s suspicion with formal disdain. “Hyperlord Jama, I found him—he doesn’t even know I exist—I’m not stupid. Why should I take unilateral action? I know the stakes! Who trained me? Who seduced me into his wicked world when I was too young to know the difference? a baby I was! And before you say it, I do know that the psychohistorians are the most dangerous people in the Empire! Whether they tell the truth or whether they lie. Of course I know that!”

  “Ah.” He smiled, relaxing because of her fury. “What rank is this mathematician of yours?”

  “Seventh.”

  “Phwogh! He knows nothing, then. He’s still nourished by the blood from his umbilical cord. He’s useless.”

  “He’s unusual. Singular”

  “Handsome? Beddable?”

  “So now you suppose me to be infatuated by commoners, do you?” she replied to his innuendo, sarcastically indignant. She cocked her red hat and peeked around the brim, suggesting a comedy of immature lust. Languidly she hugged the arms of her recliner, ignoring Jama. His eyes called all illumination to her body while her eyes fixed themselves upon the shadows of his miniature garden, shy flora one might find at the bottom of a jungle’s canopy.

  She *s sulking! Now what do I do? Damn, / shouldnyt have alluded to sex so soon after our last fight She's going to tease me! He tensed.

  Indeed she was, and she began by changing the subject. “I love your topiary.” With a delighted cry she kicked off from the floor, chair and all, to float over the ferns, and beyond them, into the arms of a gnarled bush whose uppermost limbs reached for the conduits that were now feeding the rosy dawn light of Imperialis down into this dungeon. “You work so hard here at your cultivation! You always have the slight smell of manure about you.” She was grinning. “You do use real manure, don’t you? Your garden is so green, so lush, so beautiful! That’s one thing we never seem to run out of here on Splendid Wisdom—the manure, I mean. There are so many of our assholes!”

  Spare me the twaddling of the aristocracy, he thought, wishing desperately for his wig and eyeshadow—and a bath and a sanitized robe... And a young body.

  Well, if he couldn’t flirt, he could attack. Attack was more fun than sex, anyway. A command, through the tuned probe that connected his brain with his fam, called up the house telesphere. Once it had bloomed, he willed the floating apparition toward her, enlarged its diameter, and filled its ghostly pallor with images drawn from his auxiliary brain.

  The visions he loaded into the globe had been secretly recorded at a party of roistering midlevel bureaucrats. A swift flow of graphics commands—by fam direction—rebuilt the scene to center on Otaria, altering the record subtly to suit Jama’s kinky taste: a brighter color here, an added satyr there, a knowing grin from an observer lounging in the folds. His miniature Otaria lay on the floor of the globe, in deshabille, the only noblewoman at this uncouth gathering, hugging some commoner’s leg.

  “You Wog, Kikaju! You haven’t the morals of a leering Makorite! Why do I work for you! You spy on me!”

  “So do the psychohistorians

  “They’re not interested in me—nor in you. They’re interested in summed vectors,” she said defiantly.

  “Their interest is called ‘sampling,’” replied Jama dryly, “and you are not immune from it. They take quadrillions of samples every watch. When they detect a trend that threatens the stability of the Empire, do you think they don’t take action on it?”

  The Excellent Frightfulperson was watching, with distaste, her own behavior in the hovering sphere. “I’m allowed to have fun! Now turn it off!” She wasn’t angry yet, but she was ready to be angry.

  “Is that where you ‘found’ your psychohistorian?”

  “Well now, I do believe the old He Goat has itching horns! You amaze me—jealous you are—after throwing me forcibly out of your bed!”

  And he remembered—it seemed long ago—their amorous jousting. He didn’t remember throwing her out of bed. How could he have loved such an irritating woman? “Pleasure and intrigue don’t mix well. I question you to protect the Regulations,” he insisted. The word “Regulations” was safe code for another word nobody had the courage to say aloud: revolution.

  She sighed. “All right, Hyperlord Sober Buttocks my darling, we’ll be serious. I found my young rebel psychohistorian via a routine library scan while engaged in dry-as-dust research for the good of your beloved Regulations. I’ve been studying stasis. Rates of change of behavior. My dabbling in history.”

  “Stasis,” he said morosely. “The Sleeping Beauty stays alive by never changing.” He meant the Empire. It was a constant complaint of his.

  “Over what time period!” she shot back.

  “Certainly over my lifetime—and I’m not young. By sleeping, the Empire refuses to die!”

  “Old men have such a myopic viewpoint. Weak legs which take their eyes nowhere! But youth isn’t so decrepit that it can’t travel more freely! I'm talking four thousand generations! I’ve been imbibing records, some of them probably seventy to eighty thousand years old. You can’t imagine the changes in every variable you can conceive of over that time span! You only think of today's trade and exchange— that’s all you care to think of! You don’t understand the past”

  “Nothing from eighty thousand years ago is reliable. Nothing useful survives from that era. Splendid Wisdom was settled only thirty-three thousand years ago. Even ten-thousand-year-old information is unreliable!”

  “I beg your pardon, old man! When I was a child I visited, with my mother, the museum at Chanaria, deep in the stable rock of the Timeless Shield. I saw a bronze plate under helium that was more than seventy-four thousand years old, cast on Rith with the names of heroes raised in this weird angular alphabet and illustrated in relief with armored vehicles and bi-winged skycraft. Before hyperspace travel! It wasn’t a reproduction! I was awed! I saw records scratched onto clay tablets—real clay from Old Rith—by men hardly literate who even had to depend upon their own brains to advise them. We know these things! I saw the fossilized bones of animals who lived and died before man, two million generations old, priceless fossils from Rith, not reproductions. I was awed.”

  “Rith is a semidesert planet. Wasteland. The only monkeys left are the sapiens. It counts for nothing.” His gesture swept over his own green garden implying that this small grotto-world of roc
k with bush and fern and blooming flowers was worth more than all of Rith. “In that old place even the camels die of thirst! On Rith even the children manufacture fraudulent antiques for the Empire’s tourists, bronze tablets and baked clay, polluting my market.”

  “Oh, bother your skepticism!” She pursed her lips and threw up her arms so violendy that her chair rocked in the air above the ferns. “Authenticity is not the point! Think of the changes since our intrepid subhuman ancestors left Rith! Do you deny the changes? Doesn’t that give you hope that change is possible? You taught me hope!” She was indignant. Now she was angry!

  He laughed because indeed he did work for upheaval yet in his heart did not believe that the galactic disorder he craved was possible. “Your bloody ancestors—pirates, brigands”—he sneered—“conquered Splendid Wisdom in a local interstellar war that brought our noble trading founders to ruin—but within three generations had themselves become such proficient traders, being raised by trader slaves, that they no longer thought of themselves as pirates but as traders. Change? They rewrote history by substituting their names for the names of their Kambal predecessors. And went on to conquer millions of stars—not as military predators but in the style of the wiliest of the traders they conquered—just as die traders would have done without your bloody ancestors on the starship bridges. Change? When your ancestors were deposed the Empire continued its mighty growth under new administration. The vices were the same, the strengths were the same, the bureaucracy was the same. Ask my ancestors. Only the people were different. Social inertia has always been formidable—even before the psychohistorians.”

  Otaria dismissed this version of ancient history. ‘That’s your way of seeing events, my melancholy romantic! Your late ancestors were forged in a more recent, vaster era when no mere soldier or trader could have survived. There were more specialists in one army group of the Stars&Ship than all the soldiers in the greatest army ever raised before the Pax Imperialis. Nothing changes in a lifetime, but every thousand years of human history has brought a major upheaval. Two thousand years ago there were no fams as we know them and men were forced to live by their bare wet wits. You’re so strange, Kikaju—you taught me to believe in a dream you don’t believe in yourself.”

  “But you’ve found me a psychohistorian who will light my fire again, so it is all right,” he added sarcastically.

  She grinned. “I’ve been plotting the galactic patterns of scholarship. It is always the same curve. Flat, then a sharp increase, then flat again when knowledge matures. During the explosion, scholars always think that the explosion will go on forever. They do not value what is known. Their pleasure is to seek new discoveries. During the mature phase, scholars always think that everything is known and see scholarship as the art of applying the known. Psychohistory has been a mature science for less than a thousand years. They’ve had no rival in the Galaxy for two millennia—and it is time, Kikaju, it is time that a rival appears.”

  “So what is so unique about your young man?”

  “During the last session of the Fellowship he published a thesis in mathematics at his own expense. I don’t think that has ever been done before.” She flashed a copy in midair, a holograph, squeezing its long title, for lack of space, into a condensed Imperial Font. Early Disturbed Event Location by Forced Arekean Canonical Pre-posturing: An Analysis in Three Parts. “I copied it the same watch it appeared because I was researching stasis and it is about stasis. When I went back to look for more, it had been erased.”

  “He published through the Lyceum?” asked Hyperlord Jama incredulously. Pscholar psychohistorians did not publish research; they had never published their research, even in that long-ago epoch when they still did research. They had always claimed, with self-serving pedanticism, that a prediction of the future was invalidated if the predictive methods by which it was obtained were to become widely known.

  “No, he did not publish through the Lyceum. He was pretending it was mathematics, not psychohistory. He published in the public realm in the Imperial Archives.”

  “With no sponsor! Then this young man of yours is a crackpot! What else could he be? He’s decapitating himself!”

  “Perhaps,” she went on earnestly. “But that is, again, not the point.”

  “Your point is moot,” he interrupted. “My point is that your man, being a psychohistorian, being a member of the Fellowship, is a dangerous man who should be avoided at all costs”

  She continued doggedly. “You’re building up your own hand-picked group of independent psychologists. Your men don’t have access to the main body of knowledge.”

  “Of course they don’t!” He raged because it was a sore spot How could his people know what was so fanatically hidden away by the Psychohistorian Fellowship? The Fellowship feared nothing more than that the lower classes might learn how to predict the future and so destroy the Splendid Galactic Empire of the Pscholars, rendering the Great Plan impotent by creating an unmanageable chaos of alternate futures. And even worse—the Pscholars might go the way of the Hyperlords.

  Otaria continued to make her points on her long fingers, one by one. “Your men are having to re-invent psychohistory all by themselves. You’ve told me it’s not going well. You’ve told me it has been going badly Your group isn’t research oriented. But, Kikaju, obviously, that doesn’t apply to this upstart! He knows how to do research and he’s certain to be in trouble with his masters for daring to publish! He’s our kind of man. Something in him is rebelling against his restrictions! We can use him!”

  Jama might once have thought so—but by now he had received a handful of Coron’s Eggs updated to the seventh level and a promise of many more. Now it was even more important to maintain security. “You’re talking about enlisting a real psychohistorian!” exclaimed Jama in horror. “I don’t want to have anything to do with a real one! They’re programmed to destroy”—he was so upset that he actually uttered the taboo word—“revolutions!” The horror in his voice mounted. “It’s built into their fams to protect us all! They are Death on Dark Ages. They aren’t, ever, allowed to harm people—anybody—even if that means their own self-

  destruction, so they’ve found the equations that give us the living, painless death. And they must at all costs use their powers to protect civilization from collapsing! And so civilization has been frozen at the height of decay! Cryogeno-cide! They aren’t even allowed to be passive when we try to put ourselves in a dangerous place! You want to deal with such monsters? You’re mad!”

  “Kikaju, I am proceeding in this case with utmost caution. And I do not want you protecting me from any dangers. Eron Osa is himself a rebel.”

  “Eron Osa!” The Hyperlord went into shock. “Him! I forbid you to have anything to do with this man! I forbid it! I won’t allow you to destroy my world!” he raged. “I’ll have your mother whip you!”

  “You are throwing me out of your bed again.” She smiled.

  “I’ve never thrown you out of my bed. I try to coddle you with the pleasures of reason!”

  “Let me follow this man,” she pleaded. “I will not recruit him without your approval, I swear by the ferocity of my ancestors.”

  “I met him on Faraway when he was a young student. Space alone knows what mischief he’s been into since then! I heard that he joined the study faction of Jars Hanis after falling out with some Second Rank mentor of his. And his morals are—”

  He almost made the mistake of telling Otaria that as a youth Eron had made a pass at her mother—but that would only intrigue her prurient interest. He certainly wasn’t going to tell her that Eron Osa was also a friend of Hiranimus Scogil and that Hiranimus Scogil was missing.

  36

  ERON OSA AND ROSSUM’S #26 EXPLORE THE PAST, 14,798 GE

  ...the vertically tapering shape of the Niche [in the Queen's Chamber of the Great Pyramid] suggests itself as the housing for a pendulum clock capable of timing Target Star transits... The Niche is high enough to accommodate a pendulum som
e four meters in length (height) with about two thirds of a meter to spare for clearance...

  —Keith P. Johnson in “The Niche,”

  fragments circa twentieth or twenty-first century AD

  As a byproduct of its taxiing profession and its garrulous nature, Rossum’s #26 had a prolific number of useful contacts. That, combined with obsessive reading while waiting on the tarmac for clients, made Konn’s aerocar a fine research assistant. Eron Osa was back inside the Malls of the Great Pyramid following the new lead. His fam steered him to the Artiste’s Skull Emporium at the end of a rundown corridor of shops. The swinging half-door triggering a little chime when he ducked through an entrance designed for simian hunchbacks.

  “Not now,” came a squeaky voice from an adjoining workshop. It was piled high with crates of unfinished skulls and makeshift benches assembled out of “eternal” coffins. Probably their contents had long ago been sold off to the tourist trade. “You wait. I’m in the middle. Gotta finish. Browse a while.” Eron could hardly understand the accent. The proprietor evidently had no more to say for the whine of a grinding polisher followed his statement.

  The finished skulls were indeed works of art. They lined a whole set of glass shelves bolted into genuine Great Pyramid limestone. Rossum’s #26 had told him about the negotiations, via net, with the gentleman who ran this hole-in-the-wall. He had access to a cheap supply of really old skulls being mined from a mass grave dating to the Great Die-off centuries. Eron examined some of the skulls carefully: original purebred nongengineered sapiens for sure. But the exquisite surface engravings did not hide the fact that these poor souls had not lived at a time in Rith’s history when health was a primary concern. Evidently the proprietor was in the habit of renewing their mouths if their teeth had rotted. A strange profession that: dentist for the dead.