Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  I’ve had my doctor look at her and she isn’t going to last more than five or ten more years. I want you to be very kind to her. Girls like her shouldn’t be bom. Space-damned Rithian religions. Rith is the cesspool of every religion that was ever invented. Once some madman invents a religion, a Rithian never throws it away.”

  “That’s not really true,” Eron offered cautiously, ticking off the fatalities on his fingers. “There are no longer any Zoroastrians, Christians, Moslems, Jews, Scientologists, or temples built to honor Jupiter.” He paused, having already run out of fingers.

  “Except on Splendid Wisdom,” grumbled Konn. “The Currents of Space will forever waft the Wisdom of the Ancients down upon our heads. Thank Space for a roof that covers our whole planet!” Konn directed his attention at the soup. “I can’t get over that girl. She plays the violin, too. She’s a genius for a Rithian sapiens. You and I, we shall treat ourselves to a concert tonight—after we’ve discussed business.” He paused. “No. Before we’ve discussed business.”

  “A violin?”

  “You can buy violins by the truckload at the Pyramid. I myself have a Stradivarius. It is not a real Stradivarius, of course, I imagine those sirens-of-the-gods have all turned to dust by now, it is just another damn Rithian fake, but it is a good one, a fine mellow tone.”

  What kind of madman am I having supper with? thought Eron.

  When she brought in the second course, Konn demanded his concert.

  “What would you like me to play, sir?”

  “INowLeave,” said Rhaver, getting to his feet.

  “How about some Saramantin? You play him well. The Fifth?” Saramantin was one of the Rithian composers of the Etalun Dynasty period—about 5390 GE—when the Etaluns were nostalgically financing a renaissance of Rithian Art.

  “How can I play and cook at the same time?” she protested.

  “You are a genius who can afford to bum your candle at both ends. Come, my dear, you enjoy Saramantin as much as I do.”

  Konn was already drunk on wine and a brandy-flavored dessert before they got around to business. Rhaver snuck in for his bone while his master was indisposed and snuck out again. “Brilliant move that, ramming slide rules up the asses of my engineers to make them regret their sins of complication. I knew I was going to love you when I read all the black marks on your school record.” He reverted to his smirk of enjoyment about the slide rule. “The Romans used to do that. They set an enemy’s ass atop a pointed stake and let him contemplate his stupidity while the stake gradually worked its way up into his brain.” Konn laughed, but he was suddenly sober as he turned on his private mnemonifier. “I’ve been watching you struggle with that model of yours. You probably think I haven’t even noticed. I have been fascinated by the way you think. You’ve made every mistake in the beginner’s manual, but what interesting mistakes!”

  Eron didn’t know whether he was being complimented or chastised. “But it gets the right answers, sir.”

  “All of them, even to the wrong questions!” Konn chuckled. “You’re well on you way to discovering the formula for the Pharaoh’s face powder”

  Oh, oh, thought Eron tensely, here it comes.

  “The mistake that all beginning psychohistorians make is to generate too much detail. If your head is to be split open, it doesn’t matter whether it is an iron ax or a bronze ax that does the deed. Dramatists care about such detail, psychohistorians don’t. The brilliance of the Founder was his ability to strip away irrelevant detail. If he had hung onto the detail even he was tempted to hoard, all the computers in the Galaxy wouldn’t have held his plan or been able to indicate the numbers that had to be monitored to keep the Great Plan on course.”

  Konn’s voice became gentle. He brought up each of Eron’s assumptions and stripped off the irrelevancies. “Here’s

  one”—he tapped the screen—“that you are reluctant to edit because it is very insightful; it will tell you how trading organizations form and evolve but at the same time will tell you more than you need to know to follow the evolution of length-and-weight standards. I love it, but you have to take it out. Nothing bloats a psychohistorical prediction to unmanageable size more than the cute variable that has a minor role to play.”

  Eron had a pang at the loss of his favorite routine. “Will it still work?”

  Konn stood up and brought down from his cabinet a green bottle of wine in the shape of a pelican. “Of course it will still work. Trust me.” The cork popped.

  “Are you as good as they say you are?”

  “I can still beat the kids with the fam implants.” Eron shivered while Konn poured him wine in a ceramic cup that had once been extraordinarily beautiful before it had been left to weather for ten millennia. “I collect cups from which Rithian messiahs have been known to drink. They are plentiful.”

  ‘To your health,” toasted Eron.

  “And to your promotion. I don’t think I’m going to have the pleasure of nailing you up Roman style. I’m reluctantly forced to promote you to First Assistant.” He chuckled. “That’s a position you may or may not enjoy. I should warn you, though, that as soon as Nejirt Kambu finds out he will take you aside and give you his Konn lecture, everything you’ll need to know to survive me.”

  “Should I listen?”

  “Of course. He knows much. He’s my failed protege.”

  39

  HOMECOMING, 14,810 GE

  Onimofi-Asuran: What is the aim of the Founder’s Pian?

  Student: To establish a human civilization based on an orientation derived from Mental Science.

  Onimofi: Why must such an orientation have a nonspontaneous origin?

  Student: Only an insignificant minority of men are inherently able to lead Man by means of an understanding of Mental Science. Since such an orientation would lead to the development of a benevolent dictatorship of the mentally best—virtually a higher subdivision of Man—it would be resented and could not be stable. No natural form of homeostasis...

  Onimofi: What, then, is the solution?

  Student: To avoid the resentment of the masses, the first application of Psychohistory must be to prepare a Galaxy-wide political climate during which Mankind will be readied for the leadership of Mental Science. This readiness involves the introduction of unusual homeostatic political structures first proposed by the Founder in his mathscript of the... The second application of Psychohistory must be to bring forth a group of Psychologists able to assume this leadership. The Founder’s Plan specifies that during the Millennium of Transition the Visible Arm of the Plan will be supplying the physical framework for a single political unit while a Shadow Arm supplies the mental framework fora ready-made ruling class.

  Onimofi: Why must the Visible Arm be convinced during the Transition that the Shadow Arm does not exist?

  Student: During the Transition, Psychohistory must still deal with a society which, if aware of a monitoring class of Psychologists, would resent them, fear their further development, and fight against their

  existence—thus introducing political forces which would destroy the necessary foundation of the homeostatic... The Plan would abort.

  —A Student Answers the Questions of First Rank Onimofi-Asuran: Notes Made During the Crisis of the Great Perturbation, fourth century Founder’s Era

  Psychohistorian Nejirt Kambu was finding his jaunts to distant galactic hot spots more and more wearing. His overextended junket through Coron’s Wisp had been the least thrilling of those adventures and the only one in which he had not been able to develop a field solution. The oddities in his findings there still bemused him. An outbreak of astrology! He rolled his eyes. But he had made a reputation for himself as an on-site trend analyzer, and his crazy Admiral always had more work for him to do.

  Long ago, Second Rank Hahukum Konn had chosen to keep a paranoid eye on intractable historical deviations that no one else could even detect. Nejirt enjoyed working with what was perhaps the best team of trouble-blasters at the Lyceum.
Whether to take the Admiral’s constant state of war alert seriously was thus a moot point—he liked the job benefits and he had once liked the travel.

  Of course (Nejirt was chuckling) his weird problem was as nothing compared to the present trials of his fellow occupants in this cramped subcabin—all five of them were bored. They snoozed, or took entertainment bursts from their readers, or complained about the delay. Imperialis was a system that moved fifteen billion people to and from the stars every year in thirty thousand flights per watch. Hurry up and wait. Their four-thousand-passenger behemoth was waiting permission for the final inward hyperspace jump. The ship had already waited more than an hour for instructions while the short-range ultrawaves of the traffic controllers sizzled with chatter.

  Nejirt was using the time to enjoy the sights. He had the sky-scanner all to himself; his bored cabinmates were uninterested. Here in the central regions of the Galaxy the view was always impressive, even frightening—the ionized flames of ancient explosions attacked a sea of suns while time stood still.

  Finally... their terminal jump brought them to an immense outer docking station, girders and access tubes and modules exposed to space. Twenty irises dribbled them into the arms of customs, where their sterilized baggage was penetrated and tasted by microscanners, their clothes dissolved, and their nude bodies invaded by nanosearchers. Ne-jirt used psychohistorian status to outrank a woman with a simianoid pet in a cage that he knew the machines weren’t going to recognize and that, worse, wasn’t going to be found anywhere in the customs rule cache. No way he was going to wait while her problems were being handled!

  It took two trillion humans in Imperialis space to maintain the galactic communications needed by the trillion planet dwellers of Splendid Wisdom. A conventional joke suggested wryly that most of those two trillion were needed in space to keep the useful ones on the ground from bumping into each other—a lie—but it is humor that makes bearable the impotence of standing in line at the awesome center of galactic power.

  Two intersystem shuttles and a gravdrop later, much later, he was on Splendid Wisdom’s surface at a bustling transportation hub that was as big as a city, tiered into sixteen tapered levels that overlooked a domed plaza two full kilometers in diameter. Low-velocity robotaxis popped out of the levels like mad bees, darting across and around the concourse and, sometimes, landing on it to pick up passengers from the elevator kiosks. The colossal concourse was filled with transients who wanted to be someplace else. In the distance, Nejirt spotted a luckless couple, who had loaded all their baggage into a people-only upchute, so straining the gravities of the chute that baggage and all were slowly being driven back down into a mass of upcoming passengers—causing pandemonium. He had to laugh. Chaos amused a man whose job was to manipulate chaos.

  Nearer at hand, a woman sat alone at a freshment island, sipping a meal between connections, playing a portable holo-game to alleviate her ennui. Around her flowed a convoy of off-planet representatives—from some world where clothing resembled woven armor—herding their baggage to keep it from straying, frantically trying to call down a bevy of robotaxis to assist them. The efficiently moving Splendid natives could be spotted by their unwillingness to bring baggage with them—much preferring to manufacture their requirements when they arrived at their destinations, carrying only templates and, fam-memorized, whatever pertinent information they might need.

  Nejirt’s fam, having sorted through the electromagnetic hum, passed into his consciousness the information that to get home he had a choice between a three-hour hypersonic flight, taking off in forty inamins, or a slower four-hour tube ride. He chose the tube—much more relaxing, no distractions, no stressing connections. He’d be able to draft a preliminary report on Coron’s Wisp—and maybe even catch a snooze to wake him up for the family.

  His fam located an obscure pod station, well below the hubbub, and the nearest concourse elevator dropped him down to it, almost in free fall—a homey lounge safely wedged between a cheap hotel and an instant tailor in a minor mall. He didn’t have to tarry—perfect timing—and hopped inside a waiting pod, plushly lined. There, a pleasant surprise. Fabric, in such a small space, was an agreeable change from the usual white plastic. The pod noted politely that he wished the surround-media offed, adjusted his reclining seat for relaxed comm with his fam, and sucked him into the tubes at an impressive acceleration.

  Later he hardly noticed the clunk-thwap of their supersonic linkage to a train of the main trunk tube that was carrying thousands of other pods in mad haste through the planetopolis’ brobdingnagian bowels. By then he was composing his report at a professional clip, eyes closed, fam exploring and checking out every nuance, his mind bouncing off intuition with fact, piecing together odd observations

  that hadn’t made sense at the time of collection. Yet it wasn’t jelling. He really didn’t have a relevant thing to say about astrology.

  Here was the kind of perversion that the Galaxy loved to throw up to the gods. This variation of astrological science was based on eerie projections from an ovoid device that seemed to be made out of jade or marble. It was a crude adaption of a sophisticated galactarium. The associated Timdo teachings claimed that every chart cast altered the future—one way if the client accepted the reading, a darker way if the reading was rejected. An astrology that incorporated free will!

  Was the failing faith in psychohistory caused by an upsurge of belief in astrology, or was the upsurge in astrology caused by a lack of faith in psychohistory? The equations kept telling him that given the homeostatic conditions in place at Coron’s Wisp, something like astrology could be a force to drive out mental science only if it had a better method of predicting the future. Both theory and common sense said that the data he had observed was impossible.

  He gave up trying to compose his report and went to sleep.

  ... and woke up to “Arrival. You are now parked at..He flipped up the lid before the pod could finish its spiel and staggered to his feet, cramped, thankful he had no baggage. A glance showed him that it was his home station, unmistakable by its pompous wall of restored Imperial mosaics, a salvage from an Early First Empire building boom. Large parts of this sector had survived the Sack. The station’s quaint ugliness was what he got for being snobby enough to choose to live in a hallowed domain that had once been built by the families of the Pupian Dynasty.

  “Yoo-ha! Hoo!” He saw Wendi windmilling him from the far end of the station, all the while in a dead run. She looked deliriously happy. That meant that the sewers were probably running smoothly, since she was an august member of the sewerocracy and couldn’t stop beaming when she had her local piping under control.

  “How did you know I was coming?” Nejirt oofed as she collided with him.

  “A little pod tipped me off .”

  “Polite bugger. Must be a new model!”

  “No, dear—you just lucked into one of the ones that work!”

  Their home was a good walk away and they were in no hurry to reach it, strolling through the parts of the maze that they loved, chatting, catching up. They arrived from above, down a spiral staircase that surrounded a glass-enclosed park of steamy tropicals. Home was built into the circular courtyard at the base of the park. It had originally been part of the forty-seventh-century residence of the family of Peurifoy, who had produced the First Empire’s most remembered general. The modest estate, often renovated and cubicalized, was now shared by fifty other families.

  Nejirt’s welcoming supper was arrayed around an imported ham and a delicate drink from Ordiris bottled in chocolate jiggers. Nejirt was used to farm food, being an experienced traveler, but even here in the elite warrens these were high-class delicacies from the special psychohistorians’ emporium, where rank had its privileges. She liked to shop there—he didn’t. But why shouldn’t a psychohistorian live as well as the dirt farmer on some outback planet of an unremembered sun? A leg of ham was a small price to pay for farsighted, honest government He spoke none of this while t
hey ate. He had to admit that nothing tasted better on Splendid Wisdom than ham raised and cured on a pig farm forty light-years distant or juice from berries that needed an exotic sun. He lifted his jigger to Wendi’s lip. “To a desk job!”

  “No,” she said, licking the Ordiris and taking a bite of chocolate. “You need your trips like I need my art. I have a surprise for you.”

  She pulled him into a pillow-floored meditation room that now slumbered under the rose luminescence of hanging crystals, no form alike, no cut the same, tinkling, slowing changing in the motion of their breath. He mourned the Ming vases that had been there when he left. Wendi was so good at finding reproductions—why did she bother with this original stuff? Perhaps, after all these years, she thought it time to get over her fabulous Rithian adventure among the primitives. “Lovely,” he said. “Don’t take it away before I get used to it.”

  She sat on the floor. “Come down here. It’s all prettier from here. We can lie on the pillows and look up!” She pulled him off his feet. “Tell me about your wild escapade in the cold, hostile, outside universe! We could take off our fams and be animalistic.”

  He grinned. “Do we sit here naked, growling at each other, each trying to assassinate the other’s emperor first?”

  “Animals don’t have emperors!”

  “I forgot. Chickens are all equal on the assembly line.”

  “Just shut up and tell me about your latest escapade. I never get to travel anymore! Sometimes I miss Rith. So what happened? Something must have happened!”

  “I had my astrological chart read. We were in a domed hovel stuck onto the side of the retaining wall of a warm wet rice paddy in the mountains of Timdo where I had parked my bicycle to get my breath. There were two magnificent moons in the sky. My astrological seer was three times as old as I am and smelled of fermenting rice. She used a magical jade green ovoid that darkened her hovel and projected a skyful of stars that whispered to her everything about my future that she might want to know and I might be willing to pay for.”