Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  A little research on his room’s console showed him that his wretched hotel was within free-transport range of the teeming Calimone Sector. Half an hour’s ride to the northwest? Cal-imone embraced the appurtenances of the Upper Lyceum of the Fellowship, whose levels he had once known very well with its ministries, academies, scholariums, libraries, vast apartment conglomerates, clubs. Lowlife hangouts such as Rigone’s Teaser’s Bistro lay on the distant borders of the Lyceum. It was a pleasure to him that he could still recall the energetic bustle of the Olibanum through which he had cruised extensively during his twenties. Trust the organic brain to remember the lower pleasures with an uncritical glow.

  Think! Lacking a fam he was electromagnetically blind, except in the visible spectrum, and so he would need some kind of groping skill to get around. That stumped him since the warrens of Splendid Wisdom averaged out at seven hundred meters deep over the entire area of the planet—the crumb that was Calimone Sector had more mappable features than the whole of most planets. How did one grope that? The structures all broadcast their features, but he had no fam to make sense of their beacons. A man could wander forever without reaching his destination. Eron was sorely tempted to use his common-issue fam with all its dangers of psychic control. No. He sighed; more research was in order. Virtual overlays on the visual cortex were out, but something equivalent?

  At his comm console he meandered through the Archives and discovered the ancient art of paper mapmaking in an orgy of revelation. It was so obvious! Why hadn’t he thought of it himself? But maps needing to be viewed with eyes was a horrible thought, and reading one while unlinked to a fam, unthinkable. A paper map was passive. It didn’t do anything. To read such a paper map would require work! Not impossible, of course, but discouraging. That was monkey business. There must be a better way!

  How had men found their way around Splendid Wisdom during the age of the First Empire when the planet had been as teeming as it was now and there had been no fams? Eron Osa became inspired. Of course the damn hotel’s shopping library didn’t have a map-reader template on file. He felt his rage rising again and with it that awful feeling, again, that he didn’t have a fam to stabilize him emotionally. He paused to compensate. He breathed deeply to compose himself.

  ... and smelled the thickness of smothered layers of air half a kilometer beneath the free weather... felt the confining walls. He could almost hear the dripping of the pipes from above. Perhaps it was merely the hotel’s SeeOTwo decomposer on the blink again that gave him a heavy head and the sense that the air itself was turgid from decay. Somewhere up on the distant rooftop was a park’s crisp air misted by the water towers. Stop breathing, he told himself. Concentrate on locating maps!

  Eron spliced into the world outside the hotel, netting around among the local antique warehouses until he found a template he could buy for cheap, grumbled at the tech implied by the First Empire date, imported it, spent hours finding the link that could translate its obsolete code, and waited some more while the nanomachines of his manufacturum assembled the device. It took time because he had asked for a high structural resolution, time enough to relax for a drink and a thought. He did not want to bother with a quick, low-resolution device—having his map machine break down in an unknown warren was not an adventure he wanted to live. Leisurely thoughts gave him opportunity for irony. What if the map files turned out to be as ancient as the reader and he found himself being guided around a pre-Sack Splendid Wisdom which no longer existed!

  In time his room’s sometimes-malfunctioning manufacturum assembled:

  (1) a delicate spiderlike crown that adjusted to his skull under his hair;

  (2) an almost invisible laser gun that wrote to his right retina;

  (3) a subvocal control pad;

  (4) and—no instructions.

  The maps of Splendid Wisdom, freshly read and tortuously compiled to meet the constraints of this antique, arrived on, astonishingly, a thousand flimsies which, outrageously, had to be carried in a pocket pouch, each to be inserted manually. No wonder the First Empire had collapsed!

  Even equipped he was afraid to venture into the plane-topolitan maze. The memory of the first time he had tried was too vivid. He couldn’t talk his map-reader into working smoothly. It had no self-volition and had to be instructed like some stubborn dolt and he didn’t know its language and he didn’t have a fam to learn its language! With extreme patience he did manage to explore the immediate vicinity of his hotel, two corridors west and four levels deep. The device actually worked after a fashion—and, he supposed, would work better once he had fathomed its pretensions.

  Then, carefully, he spent expeditionary afternoons in a neighboring cafe that had tables out along its corridor front, minding his own business, talking frugally, working up his skills for a more distant adventure. His criminal’s pension was limited—it was like being a student again—so he was stingy with his drink and pastries while he did his people watching. To amuse himself he reinvented mental addition, multiplication, and division, skills which he had never learned because they were automatic functions of his fam. It was good discipline for his frazzled mind, and a soothing reminder that there were always work arounds, however clumsy, for the fam dependencies which he no longer controlled. Eight plus fourteen was twenty-two. He marveled that he was able to figure that out from scratch. Such work made him feel like a genius again.

  Eron had chosen a busy traverse for his arithmetical doodling and idle contemplations. The space within view of the cafe was filled with pedestrians flowing from the level above and boiling out of the nearby pod stop. Whenever he decided to stop thinking, to rest his aching organic brain, he had before him a cornucopia of sights—today a boy with a bag of bread dragged by his mother, an old man followed by a cackling family of females in weird headdresses. One of the interesting effects of being famless was the extraordinarily heightened visual intensity. Even the simplest colors were magnificent.

  Take that tall woman who was waiting at the gracelessly vermilion pod stop for a friend, blue eyes flecked with a russet gold that glanced about her impatiently, swinging her black ringlets into a bobbing sway. Her broad-brimmed hat was of a textured fuchsia he had never seen before, topped by feathers. In this comer of the cosmos style was everything. No such hat could be useful this far underground from a blazing sun. Still, her skin looked coddled. She would be one of these aristos who spent regular time in a body shop staving off death and decay. She was still young enough to think of herself as immortal. Was her fragrance as gay as she looked?

  The restless eyes caught him staring at her and she smiled with broad lips. He glanced away, sipped his punch, pushed a crumb across the table. And presently saw her feet standing in his gaze, motionless. He did not look up, afraid to sound like a moron. The shoes were of a scaled fish-leather, multihued, probably scalbeast from Tau-Nablus, and why should he know that?

  “Eron Osa?”

  That she knew his name was a complete surprise. Had he been ignoring a friend? He looked up now, curiously trying to place her. Nothing but a pretty face. She smelled vaguely of cinnamon. “Do we know each other?” he groped pleasantly.

  Her smile broadened. “No. My spies told me you’ve been hanging out here in the afternoons and I thought I might catch you. You’re hard to find but I’m hard to discourage.” She was grinning. Her accent was aristo, perhaps an Etalun or a Frightfulperson. “I’m a hopeless fan of yours. I’ve read your monograph.” She gave him her card. “Otaria,” she said, but her card carried no name or address—being useful only to send her a Personal Capsule.

  A fan of mathematics in this crass world? “Which paper?” He was trying to place her as one of his colleagues.

  “The only one you ever published. I made a copy.”

  “Ah. My Early Disturbed Event Location by...”

  “Yes,” she interrupted.

  He was startled and suspicious. “You are a psychohistorian?,,

  “Stars, no. But I have my pretensions as
a historian.”

  Was she police? On guard he asked, “And did you enjoy my piece?” He was fishing for hints as to what he had actually written.

  “I didn’t understand a line of it” She commandeered a chair for herself. “But I’m smart enough to know its importance.” The chair was of a kind that embraced her.

  “It’s been depublished,” he said cautiously.

  “I noticed. I hadn’t intended to contact you, but since you’ve been censored, that means you are in deep trouble. Am I right? You are in hiding here, or worse? Is that why you were so hard to find?”

  “Worse.”

  His serious tone surprised her. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m brain-damaged.”

  Now she was alarmed. “Deliberate?” She seemed to be genuinely grief-stricken. “How?”

  “They executed my fam.”

  “You’ve been tried and convicted? How horrible!” Her concern for him suddenly transformed into a concern for herself—he watched her eyes dart about to see if they were being observed. “Are you safe here?”

  “I’ve been punished and released, a brilliant future nipped in the bud.”

  “But they’ll be watching you.” Her alarm was increasing. He wanted to reassure her, but that involved telling her that he was so crippled that there would be no point in anyone watching him. She rose to go but he snapped a steel grip on her wrist as she was turning. Her sympathy evaporated. She swung back to face him. “Release me!” she hissed. The accent affected by the descendants of the Frightfulpeople was now crisp.

  “We haven’t been introduced,” he went on smoothly. “Over dinner you can tell me what I wrote. I don’t remember. I have to know.”

  The Frightfulperson was staring at him aghast. He was unaware that her wrist was now whitely bloodless. She uttered an oath in the name of the greatest psychohistorian who had ever lived, twisted her wrist free, and stepped backward into the caf6. When he went after her she had vanished up the stairs into an upper level. Which way? He sniffed his wrenched hand—cinnamon with a touch of persimmon—a perfume he would never forget Why should a pleasant woman, who had seemed to want to make his acquaintance, suddenly become so afraid?

  Impulsively he guessed at her direction of flight and began a pursuit. He had one chance in a trillion of ever finding her again. Various crisscrosses and eight levels later he gave up trying, blocked by one of the massive earthquake absorbers. By then he was lost.

  He tried to take a shortcut around the absorber and found himself in a service district which he recognized by its water tanks, a tiny internal ocean that certainly continued downward to rest on bedrock. Pumps throbbed, too big to be serving a residential sector, probably feeding a meteorological tower far above them, misting water into the atmosphere to deflect some detected deviation from the long-term dictates of the Splendid Weather Authority. Maybe the roofs were in need of rain. No use going farther. Defeated, he entered the address of his hotel into his map-device, having learned enough of its commands to allow it to guide him home.

  Her blank card was still in his pocket, the only link to his depublished dissertation.

  So, he thought while following directions absendy, somebody had read his paper; he wondered what psychohistorical consequences that would have. Perhaps it would cause a deviation in the historical “weather,” alerting some psychological bureaucrat who would then trigger corrective input. Somewhere a “tower” would pump a a critical “influence” into the “weather” of humanity and “the historical climate” would return to what the Fellowship’s “Almanac” had already “predicted” it was going to be.

  He still had to find Rigone.

  42

  FLYING SCHOLARIUM, 14,798 GE

  The sudden appearance of hominid sapiens struck the thriving Rithian biosphere with the impact of a major asteroid.

  —Hahukum Konn

  The afternoon when he was out in the village buying vegetables and passion fruit for one of Magda’s treats, Eron ran into a group of young desert ruffians who good-naturedly followed him around pestering him for largess, as Rithians were wont to do. He asked them about the stars. They knew less than the original Neolithic settlers of the region—not even names. The nameless stars were the abode of strange fortune-tellers and golden streets. He was appalled. He bought them all ice cream and told them tales about ancestral exploits while the ice cream lasted. They poohed the parts about surveying the Nile without magical quantum instruments. The pendulum he made for them was used as a sling to whack each other. They hooted and shouted. One of the boys, with ice cream on his chin, suggested with a deadpan twinkle that the ancients could also fly by flapping their ears. How about magic carpets with a nav-sys woven in, suggested another with a grin that lasted until a playful punch brought him back to ground and set off a round of tussling aimed at reestablishing the solidity of their village world. Eron sighed and haggled over the vegetables for Magda. His mind drifted until he could almost hear her playing the violin.

  On the way back he took a detour. The Flying Fortress was now sitting out on its field, the majestic mother of every galactic strike battleship. Its aluminum skin shone in the setting rays of Sol. Konn had not been able to convince any of his engineers to fly with him, so he had hired a Rithian crew, much to Eron’s horror. Konn reasoned that sapiens minds had built and flown the first ones, and so were quite capable of doing so again. Eron was sure that such reasoning was a dangerous seventy-four millennia out of date—monkeys were all right, but to trust one’s life to the wits of a chimpanzee’s brother in a brainless aeroantique? Nevertheless he had been co-opted as copilot and wasn’t going to be able to escape. Thank Fortune that some of the monkeys Konn had corraled were more equal than other monkeys. He stared at the Fortress for a long time, just to reassure himself that there were no flaws in the hydrodynamics of her lines.

  “You’re going to fly that thing all over Rith?” Eron had once asked Konn when he hadn’t yet wholly accepted the idea.

  “Sure. Do you think I should try flying her on Mars?” Konn’s sarcasm was jovial.

  Eron’s troubles with the Admiral’s engineers lasted until the final days before the Queen was rated as airworthy. They wanted to put two small antigravity units in the wings—just in case. The answer was no. Eron worked off his nervousness by spending time in the flight simulator mocking up dangerous events which would need a pilot’s attention. Magda, who was joining the air crew as cook, took the secondary job as ball-turret gunner in charge of the brainless inertial weaponry which protected their belly. She carefully kept count of all the simulated attackers she managed to shoot to pieces during training. Her two half-inch-caliber machine guns were just another kind of violin to be played with skill. The battleship carried its complete ordnance of defensive weapons except that the two machine guns in the chin turret had been replaced with two efficient rocket engines to aid an emergency landing on a short field.

  Eron managed to be in hiding for the maiden flight of the Queen. But Konn took her up for a very gentle level flight, with all testing monitors active, and immediately brought her down for a landing—on wheels at high speed! He was beaming. It was the very first of his antique battle wagons that he’d been able to fly himself. Eron was put in charge of the minor tuning modifications that the tests indicated and Konn insured his active interest in that job by scheduling him as copilot for the second flight. The main change that Eron authorized was a rebuilding of the engines by specs that would double their life span and allow the Queen to fly as fast as fifty meters per jiff in a (short-term) emergency. Perhaps there was a little cheating in the alloys, but... they didn’t really know what the original alloys had been.

  Since they wouldn’t be carrying bombs, the bomb bay opened up to an efficient maintenance workshop—a compact manufacturum for making spare parts on demand with templates for every component. The maintenance work itself was to be done by the Rithian crew. Because gasoline was no longer a standard commodity,
the bomb bay also included a synthesizer which could reload the fuel tanks of the Queen within the hour if fed hydrogen and carbon compounds.

  The Admiral wasn’t always consistent in his demand for authenticity or able to impose it. The built-in instrumentation was primitive if adequate: a crude pressure-sensitive altimeter, an inaccurate airspeed indicator, basic tachometer, and the like, even a sextant for navigation, but the ancient autopilot was both obsolete and illegal. The law frowned on human pilots and required a robopilot to authorize, and report, any human at the controls so that the Rithian Air Command could take special precautions. A robopilot never authorized human instrument flying and religiously reported any deviations from the filed flight plan. Konn himself didn’t feel comfortable with the token altimeter and had installed a zoomable ranging screen that gave him a contour map, in blues and greens of the land below him and in reds of the land above his horizontal plane. Self-repairing Rossum’s #26, whose navigational instrumentation was top

  of the line, gifted Admiral Konn with a pocket navigator of its own manufacture that kept track of position within ten meters and could locate the fourteen million historical sites whose surface and chronological coordinates it had been able to scrounge from searchable databases in its spare time.

  Second Rank Hahukum Konn was the most senior psychohistorian who had ever visited Rith during the whole of the Second Empire, and he was treated royally. In planning his Rithian odyssey he had only to ask—and send a small delegation—and a mesh aerodrome long enough to accommodate the Flying Fortress was laid out along his route. The battleship had been designed as a short-range weapon requiring refueling after three thousand kilometers of flight, and so Konn’s round-the-world itinerary required careful planning—in spite of its land being mostly deserts of sand and ice, Rith had vast watery expanses to fly over.