—Famous Unknown Theoreticians: Archive Galactica,
4,892 GE, from the Nobel Address of Max Planck,
59,433 BGE
Deep in the Lyceum in a circular room reminiscent of the spartan design of the battle theater of an ancient Imperial dreadnought, equations shifted across the visual fields of two linked fams as Eron Osa demonstrated his homemade indexer to a standing Admiral Konn. There was nothing original in the mathematics, but Eron had devised a quick way of ordering the key material that a psychohistorian had to have available in his mnemonifier. With a fam command Eron could trigger the displayed symbols to blossom into a definition or an expansion or an underlying proof—or he could feed the equation a meal of initial conditions and watch the transmogrification into a solution. With another command, related equations might be called to the surface or banished.
“You’ll love it,” said Eron proudly.
“As long as you leave me my old interface to go back to when I’ve been dead-ended,” commented Konn good-naturedly. “It will take me a while to get used to your fancy-dan way of doing things. I’m an old man. A nice simple Imperial battle theater of the Fifth Millennium is about my speed. Or maybe the instrument panel of a Flying Fortress. How long did it take you to build this maze?”
“About a year. I need it to keep up with old men like you.”
“Come. We have to go.”
“I haven’t showed you everything yet.”
“And I haven’t showed you everything you need to know to break Eighth Rank.” To indicate that he considered the demonstration over, he switched the panorama of windows circumnavigating the theater from black to a fade-up of an Imperial fleet in formation over a nebula.
Eron reluctantly left his aerochair bobbing. “Another seminar?”
“You might say that.”
On their way they passed onto the spiral balcony of the Lyceum’s oval-dome inner keep. Hahukum never took the verticule; he liked his little stroll around the giant-size galactic simulacrum. At this hour no programs were running and all overlays were absent—it was just the slowly wheeling Galaxy, shrunk to a manageable eight stories. They were facing into the Carina Arm, heading down toward the rim to less-populous clumps.
“When are you going to let me take a crack at your blues?” meaning the trouble spots Konn had identified through his wizard’s mastery of statistics.
“When you know more than you know now. Those are my toughies, and I’m handling them myself.” Something in the vast galactic display caught the Admiral’s eye, and he took out a hand device to flare the relevant stars so that Eron could see, too. “Now there’s a blue that’s been migrating across its topozone at a steady rate for two hundred years, centered, it seems, on a nothing pentad of stars called the Coron’s Wisp. A really big spurt in recent years. Nothing explains it, not a damn thing—and I’ve run all the tests. When I get desperate enough I’m going to send out a field expedition to find out what in the Founder’s Nose I’m missing.” “Like you did with the Ulmat?”
“Yes, like I did with the Ulmat.” Konn smiled. “And I’ll probably have to use Nejirt again. Good field agents are hard to come by. You’ll notice I did no harm to your homeworld. It’s called minimal force. I didn’t have to blow the place apart like a certain emperor’s son who later became known as Emperor Arum-the-Patient. On Agander they’ve never heard of me, and none of your people will ever remember my name. When you speak at my funeral extolling my virtues, that’s a point you’ll be able to make in my favor.” Suddenly Konn boxed off a cube of stars centered on Coron’s Wisp, expanded the view to the scale of thirty leagues per story, blotting out the Galaxy. The shifting gave Eron vertigo. Konn continued to muse. “I’ll have to run an analysis on flows in and out of there—but it probably won’t do me any good until I’ve identified the infection vector.”
“If you’ve got it classified as a danger how can you not know what the infection vector is?”
Konn was unperturbed by student ignorance. “You can wake up with a fever bad enough to keep you in bed without knowing what you’ve caught.” They turned into a small seminar room and Eron noted with shock the seven senior psychohistorians looking at him. Five he recognized as Konn’s closest associates of rank. “Your Eighth Rank orals. I thought it was time.”
“I’m not prepared,” said Eron, aghast.
“That’s not for you to decide.”
The hours of the next watch made a grim ordeal. Eron fielded question after question, fumbling large numbers of them, chagrined at how many things there were to know in which he had only dabbled, if that. Konn would occasionally bring the subject back into the areas of Osa’s competence, giving him brief reprieves.
“I flunked,” he said, alone again with Konn, trying to keep back the tears.
“Of course not! That was a mere formality. They wouldn’t dare flunk you. You’re my student.”
Moments later Konn herded him into a surprise party. Eron didn’t realize at first that it was in his honor, to celebrate his new Eighth Rank status. By tradition there were nine candles on the cake, and when the lights were doused, he had to take one of the candles and blow it out, leaving eight, and then parade around the room holding the lighted cake high over his head while doing a jig. They didn’t do silly things like that on Agander. But it was all right. One could feel foolish and happy at the same time.
At the end of the revelry, five students remained, plus Magda whom Konn had left in Eron’s charge. Two were good friends of Eron, the other three he had never met before. They all decided to cap off the evening on the Olibanum at the Teaser’s Bistro. Eron wondered why he had never looked up Rigone before. He had been meaning to for years now. They all crowded into the same small pod, having doctored its pea brain into thinking that they were all one fat man. Sitting on each other’s laps, they sang a loud rondel in contrapuntal harmony while the acceleration pressed their bodies together.
At this hour the Teaser’s was quiet but, as always, never empty. The long row of stout tables marched down the central hall, wood, each surface crowded with the carved wit of youths who liked their small tools; knives, i-drills, fusion cobblers. Some of the more solid tables had once graced the mansions of First Empire nobles whose line had perished during the Sack, some were of recent manufacture. Old table-tops served as wall paneling to preserve the wit and were replaced by fresh tables with virgin surfaces of hardwood.
Customer density began to increase. The central row was for a boisterous crowd who enjoyed the mob scene of dealing and repartee. Alcoves served the quieter interests; some even came equipped with sonic suppressors. Only Eron and
Magda had never been to the Teaser’s before. The other five celebrants knew everyone, young people with an intellectual bent, serious in their discussions, serious in the quality of their fam aids. Eron listened. Magda stayed close to Eron. The humor was witty rather than rowdy. And the whole coterie seemed uncomfortably impatient with the stolidness of their Splendid upbringing, restless for the adventure that none of them was quite sure they could handle if they ever found it.
The women, one even as young as fifteen, all wore clothing deliberately out of style but sensuously reminiscent of another era of blatant power or devil-take-it-all. They knew their history. The boy-men preferred a caricature of military style, not from the time of fighters like Peurifoy, or from the heroic Wars Across the Marche, or in imitation of the ragtag utilitarianism of the armies of the Interregnum, but uniforms of irony ; their clothing mocked the generals who had served as toad bodyguards to the weak Emperors of the Late First Empire. A question crossed Eron’s mind: What equation would predict clothing? And he laughed at the single-mindedness of his thoughts. Too much studenting.
Just sitting there with his thoughts, he was sure he would return for more Bistro. Perhaps as Eighth Rank he could relax a little and do something about his neglected social life. The waiter dropped by with two Gorgizons. “Compliments of the Boss,” he said, and went away. Magda was v
ery suspicious of this milky cocktail, so Eron managed to drink them both. After that he wasn’t sure he could leave his seat, so he stayed after his friends had departed. Magda stayed with him, very close.
“So,” said a hefty man with curlicue tattoos who sneaked up on them after the melee had thinned, “you finally came.” He sat down at their table and explained himself to Magda. “The kid and I met in a bookstore, arguing over the same book. Name’s Rigone. And yours?”
“Magda,” she said quietly.
Rigone grinned at Eron. “You’ve grown up.” He glanced at Magda appreciatively. “You really know how to pick the exotic babes.”
The next time he dropped by at the Teaser’s, Rigone wouldn’t let him drink alone, insisting on taking the youth upstairs behind his forcecurtain for a chat about old times. He showed off the Helmarian apparatus he had smuggled into Splendid Wisdom on his return “to knock off a few credits here and there.” In the background his current teenage girlfriend leisurely slipped back into her underwear for company, her blue eyes never leaving Eron, even after she sat down and crossed her legs.
Rigone remained buoyantly attentive to his guest. “You okay? You’re sure you’re okay? I always worried about you. That job with you was way out of my element. I don’t like that. Scared me shitless. I didn’t know what I was doing; I was just following instructions and praying to the god of luck. You’re sure you’re okay? You didn’t seem happy when it was over. You expected to turn into some kind of superman and fly away flapping your ears. Did you ever notice a difference?”
“I think I noticed a difference at Asinia. The right algorithm always seemed to pop into my mind when I needed it. Math was a whiz.”
“Yeah,” Rigone enthused, “that I’m good at. Utilities. Sells better than beer. Of course, I don’t write the algorithms. Damned if I know what was in those tidbits I stuffed into your brain.” He shook his head. “Installing utilities was the easy part. Your fam was made for it. The rest...” He paused to shake his head. “I can still feel my pants being lubricating by blood-piss during the major operation! I was passionately wishing I’d done the usual Scav thing and stuck to song and joke upgrades. So! You’ve made Eighth Rank! Glad to hear it. Maybe I had something to do with that. Maybe not.”
“I’ve noticed a difference here at the Lyceum. The way Second Rank Konn’s mind works fascinates me, but I always seem to have my own approach to a problem. I know I have nonstandard reference works in my fam, because when I search the archives for what feels like a naturally standard math algorithm to me, it’s not there. Sometimes Konn’s way works better, sometimes my way works better.”
“You got to be careful with that Hahukum Konn. With a smile he’ll sell you a pair of red shoes... and then sell tickets to the dance performance.”
The underage girlfriend was feeling left out and sauntered over. “Is he gwana dance for us?” She had a northern accent, of the kind you found around Splendid Wisdom’s Chisin Ridge, an accent that probably predated the First Empire.
“No. Eron is not a dancer. That was an expression. Eron is a mathist.”
“Like to citch maself one of those. Introduce us.”
“Eron. Mattie.” Rigone felt he had to explain her presence. “Mattie is a runaway and I’m giving her a temporary home.”
“He means I cin stay as long as I stay useful.”
Rigone ignored her. “I remember that you like books. I have just the book for an enterprising math student. It has this wonderful account in it by the first man who thought up the hyperdrive motor. Couldn’t get past the other entries.” He went to his display collection, hunted a moment, and pulled out an ancient volume. “Sixth millennium. Pupian Dynasty, I think. First edition. Good stuff but most of it’s over my head. I want you to have it. I owe you one.” It seemed to have been published under some government make-work cultural program; there was nothing fancy about its plain blue cover with gold edging and big golden title: Famous Unknown Theoreticians.
“Hey, you gwana give me something, too?”
“You can’t read. You’re a downloader.”
“More ina world than books, big man.”
“Later, babe. Later I’ll put out something for you.”
“Later doan count—you tuck later back in your pants bout one inamin after you put it out. How bout him for a present?” Her blue eyes stripped Eron nude with a petite smile.
“No. He’s too young for you. He’d ruin your innocence with his untutoredness.”
Eron excused himself in the middle of the argument and spent the rest of the watch at home quietly famfeeding Rigone’s book with a cobbled-together reader that could decode the ancient formatting. It was sometimes highly amusing and always sobering to read how theoreticians down the ages went about proving their most sacred suppositions.
Eron’s favorite from the book of Famous Unknown Theoreticians was Ptolemy’s quite detailed, and correct, geometric proof that Rith was the center of the universe—the only flaw being his assumption that since no parallax of the stars was observed, the stars must be embedded in a celestial sphere whose radius was not too many orders of magnitude larger than the radius of Rith. As a theoretician woefully unfamiliar with the limits of experimental instrumentation, he didn’t realize (what the current state of Greek geometry would have told him had he been listening) that he had a proof of the lower bound on the distance to the nearest star, but no estimate at all of an upper bound.
Often Eron had to stop perusing to do something while he thought through an insight. He might water his thriving plants, which were confused enough by the splendor from their wall to behave as if they were growing in the garden of an Emperor. Two were in flower. Or he might just stare. His inlaid and runed Rithian Yorick rested stoically up-to-his-neck-in-table between the Ming aralia and the Osmanthus fragrans, there to remind Eron of the consequences of sloppy thinking, and never far from evoking Eron’s memory of Reinstone, the poet of Asinia, reciting with ecstatic melancholy from the incantations of the Shaker of Spears: “Alas, poor Yorick!... Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?”
One of the more amusing entries in Rigone’s book was the proof from the century of the Flying Fortress that Rith had no population problem, that overbreeding was going to go away of itself as a natural side effect of industrialization. It did go away as a natural side effect of sapiens stupidity. The mesmerizingly slow convergence of birth rate and death rate, unfortunately, was not the important variable to watch; the killer was the infrastructure stability of a population that had been stabilizing too slowly.
From skull to book again. As well as his proof that Rith was the center of the universe, Ptolemy produced a wonderful proof that Rith didn’t rotate—based upon the assumption that any object freed from contact with the planet would automatically and instantaneously assume zero velocity relative to some absolute frame of reference. Thus an army positioned to the east of their enemy (and with their feet firmly on the ground) might annihilate all opposition by casually freeing rocks and gravel that would then zoom off to the west at the speed of Apollo’s chariot. Ergo, since that did not happen, a nonrotating Rith must be sitting stationary at its central position in the universe.
One could be amused by such naiveté, but Eron wasn’t sure mankind had ever transcended the tendency to build houses upon a foundation of “self-evident truths.” The self-evident truth that most interested Eron was psychohistory’s cherished and firmly defended axiom: the assumption that any foreseen event could be neutralized if known to those affected by the prediction. Murek Kapor had originally planted the skepticism as to the truth of that axiom, a skepticism which had flowered almost to the point of blasphemy by the time Eron had been inducted into the Fellowship as a raw recruit, but which had now, with full knowledge of psychohistory’s methods, mellowed to the point of acceptance.
Still, the theorem had problems, and Eron, among his many interests, had dedicated
a part of his endeavor to straightening out the mathematics of secrecy. In the first place, there were two distinct treatments of secrecy where there should be only one.
(1) an N methodology that applied to nonpsychohistorians who were not supposed to be cognizant of their future lest they disturb it;
(2) a P methodology that applied internally to the group of Pscholars themselves who were supposed to be cognizant of possible futures so they could change them.
That created problems. For instance, Eron was well aware that Second Rank Konn and First Rank Hanis disagreed upon which future mankind should be pursuing. That led to very strange internal secrets among the Fellowship.
(1) Konn kept secrets from Hanis in essentially an N methodological way which (incorrectly) assumed Hanis was not a psychohistorian, ostensibly to keep Hanis from sabotaging Konn’s vision of the future—and otherwise (correctly) dealt with Hanis by the usual P methodology.
(2) Likewise Hanis kept secrets from Konn, on the tacit (incorrect) assumption that Konn was not really a psychohistorian thus (he hoped) preventing Konn from sabotaging Hanis’ messianic vision. In all other respects Konn was treated by Hanis as a Pscholar.
This wry mix-up generated tiny internal contradictions which inevitably led to problems within the Fellowship, sometimes unimportant ones that could be looped around, as seemed to be the case here, yet—potentially—such careless ways of defining secrecy could create lethal problems, could even destroy galactic civilization.
During the execution of the Founder’s original Plan, this flaw in the law of secrecy had not been made manifest because all Pscholars were united in their desire to execute the One Great Plan and so had no need to keep secrets from each other. Today, with different subgroups of Pscholars vying to lead mankind into different visions, the law of secrecy was working to create incompatible groups of Pscholars, each thinking that they, and they alone, represented the true heir of the Founder. Inevitably this would lead to an attempt by one group of (supposedly correct) Pscholars to disenfranchise the other groups of (supposedly incorrect) Pscholars.
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