Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  rigor mortis on the stable side of the topozones; if it lives only in the unknown, it becomes insane on the chaotic side of the topozones. The eternal war between good order and evil chaos.

  Chaos and panic in his mind. It was a challenge. Were there really other psychohistorians out there?

  44

  THE MASTER OF MEASURES, 14,799-14,805 GE

  In Hebrew and Greek myths, based on Mesopotamian and Egyptian traditions, the master of measures lives in danger: for is it not true that he who can ken the numbers by which the universe is built has, in so doing, attained the power to build in competition with the Gods? He must take care to honor the Gods lest he earn Their envy and bring down Their wrath. Thus the master of measures dares not share his wisdom with any untutored layman who may, in his ignorance, use unsanctified numbers to provoke the Heavens.

  The builders say: "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in heaven; let us make a name for ourselves lest we be scattered all over the earth, ” and the Lord observes: ‘This is only the beginning of what they will do: and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. Therefore let us go down..."

  A clay tablet meant only for the eyes of a master of measures was found in the rubble of Babylon containing:

  (1) the perfect dimensions of the ziggurat Etemenanki, a foundation Kigal set in the earth to hold up the sky,

  (2) instructions for the rebuilding of Etemenanki if that should ever be necessary,

  (3) a plea that Etemenanki should be rebuilt to the proportions specified,

  (4) a dire warning of the dangers risked if these numerical specifications were revealed to the uninitiated.

  After a thousand years of building, of being overrun by barbarians of a strange tongue under the instigation of a jealous heaven, of unrepentant rebuilding, of abandonment, of renewal, of sack by Sennacherib and revival by Chaldeans, Etemenanki was completed by Nebuchadrezzar If to the seventh story and “by the correct cane of 12 cubits” exactly as its original architects had specified. Alexander the Great, as master of measures for his newly conquered world, chose to improve upon the original plans and was promptly struck down by the Gods in the palace complex next to Etemenanki. Nothing of the ziggu-rat remains. The cuneiform measurements and warning, baked eternally into clay, were taken to the stars by the Eta Cumingan general Esasa Tobenga where they were lost after Tobenga’s untimely death. Somewhere out there a tablet lurks to tempt an uninitiated master of measures into defying the Gods.

  —From The Secret Book of the Wisdom of the Ages

  On the return to Splendid Wisdom with the Admiral’s entourage, Eron Osa found himself haunting the view room of their chartered luxury liner, already seated like an eager novice whenever the plasteel shutter-lids were rolled back to give the passengers a local view of the Galaxy while navigation prepared for the next jump. He wasn’t really interested in starscape, but he wanted to catch that first eyeball glimpse of Imperialis. He had absorbed so many stories about this preposterous solar system that he was eager to see the real thing.

  But nothing in Eron’s life had prepared him for Splendid Wisdom. Once they passed from the arms into the central cluster, the blaze hid Imperialis until the final jump inward to rendezvous with their tugboat. There the twinkle-storming eddies of stars surrounding the most important sun in the Galaxy was enough to impress anyone, but it was only background for a sky full of ships in parking orbit. Their transport had to be escorted to its place in the docking station to keep them from bumping into the other ships!

  Inside that giant receiving station it was obvious that Konn was getting special treatment and was so used to it that he didn’t notice. Magda clung to her savior’s arm, frightened more than awed. They were whisked through medical and orientation and baggage by a special team, a government gravdrop shuttle already waiting to take them down. Eron was no longer surprised that the Admiral had not brought his Flying Fortress with him, content to rebuild it from templates at his leisure.

  During the station-to-surface transfer, Nejirt noticed Eron’s interest. “You can have my seat .” But the tiny porthole wasn’t much help. The body of the planet was obscured by the ship except for brief maneuvers where it banked or turned up its nose to brake against the atmosphere. Eron had his best, but brief, glimpse of the “roof’ of Splendid Wisdom as they taxied across it to the shuttle elevator—as barren an expanse as any desert on Rith, cluttered with parked and incoming shuttles.

  In the distance there were hemispherical mounds of different sizes, even louvered ziggurats (ventilators? skylights? radiators?), but mostly just runoff gullies to take the rain and snow. The surface not in use as runway or maintenance road was covered with a weird adaptive skin that could change its reflective and radiative and electrical properties on command, so that some of it was silvery and some black and the sections that were collecting electricity a weird opalescent. He counted five weather stalks, some of them slender towers tall enough to hold up the sky. Imagine a planet of people so obsessed with power and its control of nature that they could issue weather repents covering the year in advance because they knew the critical leverage points by which the atmosphere could be manipulated to make their predictions come true! As he sat, enthralled, their shuttle was swallowed up and elevated down into the bowels of the planet...

  ... where they emerged into the valley of a debarkation terminal. Its dome was almost lost in the heights. Underneath was a clear “day” but Eron could imagine clouds forming up there—and rain. Robotaxis flitted in and out of the walls, swooping down to snatch up travelers who were carried off to cliff aeries. Swarms of people emerged from and descended into the elevator kiosks. He was lost already, mainly because he was following Konn’s group and not finding his own way. Eventually the group broke up to seek their separate kiosks and Eron found himself with Konn and Magda and Rhaver, who was very patient even if he was not enjoying himself. “We Go Home,” he grumbled, trotting at Konn’s feet.

  They took a pod for four, luxuriously upholstered, which had been waiting for them by appointment. Silence was part of its luxury—it did not need to be instructed as to their destination. Konn lived in a palace above the Lyceum with its own pod-siding and ample guest rooms. Eron was invited to stay until he got oriented and found a place of his own. Then Konn disappeared, anxious to catch up on his work, leaving Magda in a panic because she was responsible for the meal Konn had planned for the third watch and had no idea how to go about buying vegetables. She was valiantly holding in her tears, her eyes darting, trying to make sense of what she saw.

  Eron laughed to cheer her up. “Don’t look at me—I’m from the boondocks, too. We’ll find a way. But I’ve heard horrible rumors that on Splendid Wisdom they don’t grow vegetables—they manufacture them.”

  For a moment Magda was stricken by this new burden, but she caught Eron’s good cheer and smiled mischievously, releasing her tears in a flood over her cheeks at the same time. “We can steal pears from the Emperor’s garden.” There were no more Emperors, but the Emperor’s garden had been lovingly re-created as a people’s park. The pears grew on a hidden hillock surrounded by golden shimmer-wisps clambering out of the rocks. Magda of the desert had seen a picture when she was six years old. After famfeeding the local maps, their expedition through the neighborhood of the Lyceum was a quest that produced small adventures but no source of legumes. That didn’t matter—Konn’s telesphere, when they finally asked, knew how to make the vegetables appear. It searched for only a moment before recommending the fresh asparagus.

  Later Hahukum arrived home, haggard, but with a present for Magda, a few jars of precious dandelion jelly. At dinner he opened up a bottle of wine to drown his sorrows. “I’d forgotten all about politics. It never ends. Now, if we still had our Flying Fortress, we could go for a bombing run by the light of Aridia. I know just the target But alas, that cannot be. I know why I like dogs.” Rhaver thumped his tail under the table. “Ah, Eron. It’s
not enough to know psychohistory. You are going to have to learn politics, too.”

  “I’ve seen the very fascinating equations for that!” Eron spoke with enthusiasm.

  “No you haven’t. You forget the Founder’s prime theorem. You cannot predict the moves of an opponent who knows how to predict yours. How to deal with the politics inside the Fellowship is more than you’ll ever want to know. It’s a separate field of study!”

  “Jars Hanis?” volunteered Eron, remembering Konn’s hints and discussions with Nejirt.

  “You have a good nose, young man.”

  “RhaverHasBetterNose,” muttered Rhaver from under the table where he was waiting for something that smelled tastier than vegetables.

  Magda brought in the creamed asparagus and Konn brightened enough to change the subject from politics to hedonism, leaving Eron curious and a little frustrated.

  He was given a graduate student’s residence: three rooms, plus an ample office with a wall of quantronic storage space. The ventilation was adequate—Splendid Wisdom made one think about such details. The appurtenancer worked. Otherwise the apartment was bare. Suddenly he acquired his mother’s predilection in furnishings, his wild teenage taste forgotten. The first thing he added was a view. After much deliberation he had one of the walls display a quiet comer of the Imperial Gardens. He adjusted the light to suit the real plants he was going to display along the wall. Where he would get them was a problem. He would ask Konn’s telesphere.

  But before he could do more the apartment announced a guest, a well-dressed man with lace cuffs and a small pin for his high-flowing collar that identified him as a member of the Fellowship. He was from the Fellowship’s welcoming committee. Fortunately he knew how to call up chairs out of a floor which didn’t seem to respond to the commands Eron was familiar with. The chairs blossomed. It had never occurred to Eron that floors spoke different languages in different parts of the Galaxy.

  “This is a student’s apartment,” his guest explained, “a nice one, your sponsor is doing well by you—but the better apartments are multilingual.” Once they were seated in the bare room this very direct young man got to the point, and it wasn’t hospitality. “Should you wish it, I can offer you two more rooms and a better-equipped den. What is your present salary? No, don’t tell me. That’s confidential.” He made a “guess,” which was correct to the last credit, meaning he was connected to efficient spies. “I can double that.”

  Suddenly Eron became very much the Ganderian. He wasn’t armed, having given up that habit, but he could almost feel his kick in its holster, and it felt as if he were negotiating, politely, with another armed man. “I’m not on salary. I’m on a scholarship.”

  “No hurry. The offer will always be open. We have a very interesting program and we welcome talent such as yours.”

  It was an opening—and Eron coaxed out of his welcoming committee a description of the work he would be asked to do. The name of Hanis was not mentioned, but the program was his, and it was a grandiose plan for the next millennium. The Founder himself would have been awed.

  Eron teased. “But the next millennium is two centuries away.”

  “It takes time—and talent—to lay the foundations for such a renaissance.” He went further into his pitch, and Eron listened intently, but the program was all come-on, and whatever substance it had was for the initiated to know and the newcomer to find out by making a commitment.

  “I’ll consider your offer. Let me get settled first.” The rules of politeness suggest that it is impolitic to outrightly refuse an armed man.

  At dinner that night, Eron mentioned the offer to Konn, who gazed at him with dark disapproval. “Maybe we could find you a sponsor who would give you seven rooms and a harem” he said sarcastically.

  “I remember flying copilot with you and shitting profusely in my pants. More than once I thought about bailing out. But, you’ll recall, I never did .”

  “Youthful cowardice,” grumbled Konn. Magda was staring at them, horrified that they might be getting into a fight.

  “Not really. It was a calculated cost-benefit analysis. The pilot I knew versus the promise of a barely possible El Dorado down there beneath the clouds, which I suspected was buried under a parched desert anyway.”

  “Were you flattered to have received such a fine offer so early in your career?”

  “No.” Eron made a wry face. “They aren’t interested in me at all. They are interested in crippling you.”

  “Ah, you already have a glimmering of the politics.”

  “It’s my Ganderian senses. But I don’t understand why they would want to keep you understaffed.”

  “It’s a difference of opinion. Hanis and I both agree that it’s a sunny day in the Galaxy but I want to lie on the beach and drink wine and he, well, he insists we all go swimming. I think it is a bad idea for him to take the children out into the bay where the long-toothed shipsnarks live and he is horrified to see me lazing on the beach with the children and acquiring a third-degree bum in the sun while we enjoy ourselves. And I’m right and he’s wrong.”

  “Of course. But can you prove it?”

  “Of course not! That’s your job. I’ve already given you your thesis project.”

  “I see. Stasis has something to do with all this?”

  “That’s the endless sunny day. Hanis has seen it. So have I. We’re not alone. Among all the upper-echelon psychohistorians there is a general agreement on the potential for problems inherent in sunny days. But we don’t know what to make of the danger signals that the equations are suggesting. By all measures the Galaxy is more prosperous right now than it ever was at any period in the First Empire’s history. We appeared at the end of a thousand years of the Interregnum, at a time when the whole of the Galaxy was tired, tired, tired of chaos. We planned it that way. And we were the ones with the tools to reestablish order. So the peoples of the Galaxy followed us en masse. Again, as we planned. The desire and the tools were present simultaneously. But that was long ago. Today we have a more subtle mood. And we don’t have the tools.”

  “Stasis?”

  “That’s not even the right word. The situation has to be described in mathematical terms, and we haven’t got a word for it yet so ‘stasis’ has to do. It will take you a couple of years of study before you are able to read phenomena at that level of complexity. Maybe you’ll come up with a catchy name. But the situation is clear. Which future to choose to forestall all dangers is not. The Founder’s genius wasn’t in noticing that the galactic order was falling apart, that was the easy part, obvious even—his genius was in seeing Faraway among all the possible futures as a fulcrum to address the problem.”

  “And right now there are too many choices?”

  “There are always too many choices. That doesn’t stop us from picking a future we both approve and have the tools to make real. But that takes wisdom. I’m disliked because I advocate wisdom, which is hard to quantify. I’m accused of being paranoid and stamping out phantom dangers that no one else can verify and at the same time of being too cautious to commit myself to a future before I’ve received divine revelation.”

  “So you’re sending me off in a quest for wisdom?”

  “Of course. But you’re too young to notice it when you’ve found it. That’s my job, and why I’m going to keep close tabs on you.”

  Eron laughed. Straight-faced Hahukum was always pulling his leg, and he was always falling into the trap. It was time for pear pie—this one, Magda’s joke.

  When it came to signing up for courses, Eron was given no choice at all. Konn was a strict disciplinarian who knew what he wanted Eron to know. He assured Eron that he would have all the time in the world for dilly-dallying around—when he got to be an old man.

  It was a grueling schedule.

  But Eron Osa had always been a very private person. As a child, curious as all youth is about the lives that adults lead, he didn’t take the direct route and ask his father; he spied on him and mad
e an elaborate game of it that lasted for years. With Murek his game had been to read books that he deliberately never discussed with his tutor. With Reinstone he kept his poetry-making machine a secret.

  His relationship with Konn easily took the same turn. He was content to pursue, enthusiastically, his thesis topic on stasis from every angle that Konn proposed—but at the same time chose to follow his own wild agenda on the same topic down undisciplined pathways that he never wanted to share with Konn. It was fun to have a world that existed apart from the real world. Where he was never wrong and never right. Where he was a lonely god who had been smart enough not to populate his most delightful planet with creatures who looked like him and had free will.

  Between studies he found a place that sold small housebro-ken trees. He could have ordered some from the holos, but he preferred to take the long trip of eight hundred kloms to make his own selection. When he reached the arboretum he lusted to buy the whole fairy forest but he could only afford three: a tall, perhaps Rithian, conifer that came up to his chin; a miniature Iral IV grabber with thousands of nine-fingered “hands,” pale green, and a smell that blended with conifer like faint incense; and a flowering clown that generated a sequence of unique blossoms over a cycle of seven months because it had evolved to cater to the lifestyles of different waves of insects—its present elegant form perhaps enhanced by a touch of gengineering. The resident botanist gave explicit instructions about wall lumens and nourishment.

  Eron had exceeded his frivolity budget on the trees so the rest of his plant life had to be coaxed from seed, fastgrowing varieties to fill up the immediate blanks and slower varieties for a rich later texture. That meant pots, and he was glad to have bought an assortment of templates for significant Rithian ceramic pots while given the opportunity; it fit in with his new interest in Rithian history. Pots, of course, meant tables. He didn’t have the whole Imperial Garden to play with, just the comer of a room. But tables meant more shopping; the apartment’s taste in tables, though adequate, was not his mother’s taste, and that’s what he wanted. He was going to need a special little table to set off his decorative sapiens skull.