Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  These Crystal Spheres are the centerpiece of the Creator’s Great Hall of Heaven. The Lord of the Solar System holds court with His only Bastard Son and His pious Paramour and His Loyal Angels who stare at His Work in Awesome contemplation, praising it with song and adulation. From time to time He raises up from the corrupt surface of Rith pure saints and saved souls to join in the celebration of the epicyclic dance within the Spheres.

  Down below, on impure Rith, only the priests of the Catholic Church have been granted the right to interpret the Creator’s Old and New Words to the ignorant masses—who, if allowed to listen to the Creator’s Truth with their own sinning ears, would misapply Them to the work of the Devil. For His purposes, He needs some instrument for His Voice on Rith—a man with a talent for always being right. He finds and elevates Lotario di Segni who as Pope Innocent III, humble, moral, and always right, does God’s Truth upon the Albigensians to the last man, woman, and child.

  But time flies...

  In a time far removed from Innocent’s eternity, in a sun-and-spaceship- drenched Galaxy dwarfing mankind’s early universe of crystal spheres, sits a psychohistorian pondering the meager data which has survived the relentless entropy of temporal information loss. He feeds those bits which remain into his model of history, knowing that under the celestial spheres and the crazy planetary

  epicycles, ancient Rith did not yet swarm with enough of mankind to form an adequate statistical sample size. But accuracy isn’t at stake here. His math tells him that, at the high point of European Catholic power under Pope innocent III, the stasis arising from the Catholic monopoly of the Word will be shattered within three hundred and twenty years (plus or minus thirty) by a protesting reformation of men lusting to listen to God’s Truth with their own minds.

  In our Rithian beginnings it was never enough to be on top, humble, moral, and always right if one wished to maintain a monopoly on the truth. And in every era since that time when an ambitious group has...

  —Eron Osa

  The Frightfulperson Otaria of the Calmer Sea had not recovered from her panic. One simple fact had shaken all of her assumptions. The Pscholars had destroyed Eron Osa's fanu She had noticed that even Eron did not comprehend the implications of that depredation—and, given his drastically reduced analytic powers, she could not have expected him to do so. How stupid she had been to contact this leper! Hyperlord Kikaju Jama had called that one correctly! She couldn’t be sure that the police hadn’t been watching Eron when she sought him out and now, by contagion, were watching her. Thus she could lead the police to the whole movement and its destruction.

  It was also possible that no one had noticed her with Eron. But to be safe, Otaria was staying away from her apartment. She was shifting her whereabouts hourly through a complex of business quarters, sometimes taking a long pod ride to operate in a distant district where she was unknown. She had assumed the identity of a small “charity” company she maintained for covert purposes, using its credits, not hers, to do what she was being driven to do, even though it was a panic response and not rational.

  While her mind ran in circles, fixated on her dilemma, physically she was acting with a repetitive obsessiveness. Over and over again she duplicated Eron Osa’s detailed thesis. It had been thoroughly erased from the archives. How could she be sure that she didn’t possess the only copy? So on her rounds she attached it as a codicil to obscure law treatises while she was researching her legal predicament. She did crazy things like loosen the tiles in a public dispozoria and recement the tile over a copy. She spent one morning pirating copies of off-planet recipes and registering her cookbook as a public access document. Eron’s monograph served unobtrusively, and unindexed, as one of the longer recipes.

  She spent a great deal of time in antique shops, buying and trading antique manufacturum templates. Some of the templates she would modify to include Eron’s monograph, then retrade them. It was a market no one could trace. Valuable template collections from all over the Galaxy were prized and bartered and sold and copied and lost in a frenzied market of collectors and decorators and the curious.

  When Otaria was through tampering with a rare template gatherium of folding screens from the Cotoya Court of the Etalun Dynasty period, one template labeled “Group of Serene Lake Herons in Four Panels” no longer manufactured a restful scene of cranes fishing in the marshes, but rolled out, instead, Eron’s monograph on the four ebony surfaces of the screen in inlaid mother-of-pearl. Deep in a music fascicle, Otaria used Eron’s monograph to replace the prelude to the recordings of the Third Rombo Cantatas of the composer Aiasin (seventy-first century GE), then returned copies of the template to the hectic world of public domain commerce.

  She did all this to use up the energy of anxiety—while the emphasis of her mind was directed at one question: Why would the Pscholars be so afraid of one man? They ruled a whole galaxy with enormous confidence. They had guided mankind, successfully, through the Fall of Empire out into an era of unprecedented galactic power. Sometimes they stopped an enemy by parading overwhelming military force, but they never chose to defeat an enemy with overt might— their control was more devious. From a foundation laid down centuries earlier, subtle social armadas would reach a crescendo and roll over the enemy from some unsuspected direction, while the Pscholars watched aloofly, knowingly, armies and navies unused.

  To attack a single man, to ruthlessly destroy his fam and works without regard to their most sacred principle—free will to operate within the psychohistoric constraints— meant that someone up there was reacting to a crisis that psychohistory had not anticipated and was striking out— rashly. But what kind of crisis would cause such an extreme reaction?

  Fatigue caught her after sleepless watches of drifting and dodging and replication of Eron’s dissertation. The scalbeast shoes she had thought fashionable when she first made them seemed rough on her feet now. She rid herself of them in her rented room’s small dispozoria closet and wriggled her toes. She was tempted to do the same with her clothes—it was dangerous to keep wearing the same outfit in which she might have been seen with Eron—but prudently she first tested the room’s manufacturum closet to see that its clothing mode was functioning. Caution before nudity. Then the clothes disappeared in a flash, everything but the contents of her purse—even the hat. Wearing her fam in her hat was a silly affectation, she decided—and too conspicuous.

  Peeking to see that no one was in sight, she dashed to the public water room down the hall, took a quick steam sauna and a quicker snow shower. Her black hair was a mess, the ringlets gone, but she blew it out with hair-care and let it settle carelessly as unruly curls. It didn’t look like the groomed Otaria she knew, and that was good. Still nude, she sneaked back into her pathetic rented room.

  There, with barely enough space for a desk and a couch and a console, she spent a few hours poring over some of her collection of antique costume templates which she always carried in her purse. She was a history buff and styles of clothing intrigued her. You could tell a lot about a society by its clothes. Did the peasants dare imitate the colors of the elite? Did the soldiers wear distinctive uniforms, or did they stick to battle dress in battle and hide their bloody trade in civilian guise when on leave? Did businessmen and lawyers copy each other’s uniform, or did they vie to be different? Did the men dress pompously and the women in gray, or did the men all pretend they were the same while the women competed outrageously with each other for female attention?

  After sitting cross-legged on the couch, gorging on the gorgeous images until her feet went to sleep, she finally sighed and put in a sober search across the templates for something she could wear. She was a noblewoman so she deselected for elite fashion. She didn’t want to be conspicuous so she deselected for sexual attraction and the eccentric parameters of current Splendid society. That left her with a satisfyingly manageable collection. What finally took her breath away was an elegant gray-blue jumper of fluted trousers that tied in with lace at the ankles and
left only a hint of throat from the same collar of lace. As an added benefit the hands-off purse was hidden in a way that did nice things for her hips. The design came from the trader service of an Orion Arm Regionate that had opposed and then been swallowed by the Empire in the sixth millennium GE.

  She slept while the room’s manufacturum wove the outfit to specifications and cobbled dainty high-laced shoes to match. In what passed for wake-up watch in the corridors— the lights were brighter—the new Otaria took a quiet place in a student cafe overlooking an air shaft where the food was free but the tables rented by the hour. She had decided to take Eron Osa’s damnable work seriously and slog through it. The table came equipped with an ancient but serviceable archival console.

  Eron’s mathematics was dense. Eron Osa was, after all, a psychohistorian. But she could see that he had at least made an attempt to translate from Pscholarly notation into the more common symbolism of engineering, not always successfully. She would have been lost without the sophisticated mathematical functions of her fam, which ran the equation examples effortlessly, drew graphs in her head, and compactified logical expansions. Sometimes Eron was so brief that she had to search through sixtynes of archived math texts to find an underpinning for the point he was making. She made progress at the rate of about two paragraphs an hour. She had forgotten what it was like to be a hard-core student.

  The students around her shifted and changed, filling the booths, emptying them, chatting, leaving their garbage to be whisked away by robomaids. At third watch’s end she had eaten as much of the student food as she could stomach. Despair pleaded with her to quit but fascination drove her to take a stimulant and push on through the evening shift. Student caf6s never closed. She was tired and began to skip what she could not understand. Sometimes she just stopped trying to comprehend and fell to listening in on conversations at nearby booths. A girl cried, wondering if she should have an abortion, while her boyfriend held her hand. Two boys were having an animated discussion about the merits of specializing in eighty-third-century economic history as opposed to eighty-fourth-century economic history.

  Slowly her fatigue dissolved into her mental background. A second level of energy blanked her awareness of her surroundings as her fam took control of her emotions and optimized the broth in her organic mind for a steady long-paced stride. She fell into the old student habit of exam-night triage: abandon what she couldn’t understand, skip arguments relevant to a proof but not relevant to a conclusion, concentrate on the conclusion. And as the crowd moved from studiousness to third-watch revelry, the brilliance of the dissertation began to take a conscious shape.

  He built up his thesis with generous mathematical case studies of past historical crises involving stasis—often a stasis induced by secrecy. She wasn’t always able to follow the monograph’s rigorous treatment—but Otaria was a history adept and knew how to track down his examples in the Imperial Archives without wasting time on elaborate searches. Her fam already carried a huge knowledge of the location of primary sources. A quick mundane scan of the original data filled in for her lack of comprehension of the math. Otaria was amazed at how the Arekean transforms isolated the essential institutions of the target time-and-place and the magnitudes of the historical momenta.

  Intrigued, she began a serious study of his eclectic collection of case histories.

  The first was a tour de force in which Eron was showing off the power of his tools even under conditions of sketchy initial input, poor data, low resolution, and inadequate population size. Prespace Rith of seventy-five thousand years ago (thirteenth-century AD) supported only the simplest examples of two-dimensional sociostructures, and that made for the sparse data points. In mathematics all details are not equally important. One does not have to know the color of a boat to know whether it will upend and how it will steer.

  But Otaria spent little effort on Pope Innocent Ill’s simplistic world. Its assumptions were too naive to hold her interest. She sampled later magical times and nearer places to feed her curiosity about how stasis coalesced, shone, then collapsed, even novaed.

  Long before the Galactic Era, a Coactinate of ten new suns on the Orion Spiral Front fell into the control of a secret society of terraformers. And then a renegade eleventh solar system duplicated their methods...

  The Mystery Cult of Janara thrived for more than a thousand years until...

  During the mid-era of Imperialis expansion there was a Boronian League on its then borders. It was an efficiently run scientocracy with a fatal flaw. The Ministry of Education controlled the school curriculum of 428 star systems to the last standard module. It was a monopoly without secrets, maintained by a dedicated Learning Corps that had the power to enforce the decisions of the Ministry whose job was defined as knowing what people should know. The Boronians shattered under attack by Imperialis; all their generals were thinking alike and became prey to...

  In the twilight of the First Empire when the bureaucracy of Splendid Wisdom had an effective monopoly on...

  During the Dark Ages when the Crafters of the Thousand

  Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift maintained a secret monopoly on the technology of the tuned psychic probe until Cloun-the-Stubbom...

  Stripped to its bare bulkheads, Eron’s mathematics was saying that stasis derived from artificial monopoly: what kind of monopoly was of no matter; benevolent monopoly, tyrannical monopoly, any kind of special monopoly, led to a rigidity that had a measurable shattemess coefficient. In his long tedious conclusion, Eron buried a chilling analysis of the Pscholars’ monopoly of psychohistorical methods. He had abandoned his clear style and was hiding his message in a forest of obtuse conundrums, perhaps in the hope that only those who were brilliant enough to understand the profound implications of the message would be able to pick their way through his equations. Otaria was no longer able to follow his reasoning—but if what he was saying was true, then...

  Then the Second Empire was in the middle of a historical crisis that had not been predicted because of a biasing assumption of the Pscholars that psychohistorical methods by their very nature had to be limited to a group of elite practitioners. Hyperlord Kikaju Jama’s revolution wasn’t an impossible dream—it was happening. Now. Otaria didn’t have the strength to recheck her last manic fly through the dissertation’s conclusion, to step through it again and make sure that she had read what she thought she had read, she just folded her arms on the desk and went to sleep.

  She had no memory of how she reached her room’s bed, but she awoke to the slowly brightening alarm. She had dreamed and she was fresh. She knew what she was going to do.

  Calling an executive meeting of the leaders of the “Regulation” was not an easy task. No one had a list of the members. Otaria knew only five personally even though she was highly placed. The rest were code names to her, invisible functionaries who could be called upon to make things happen in mysteriously untraceable ways.

  Because the “Regulation” was organized like an organic brain, it had a consciousness all its own, quite independent of any expendable member. Such a command structure made the organization quite resilient to police raiding. Any “neuron” could be cut out of the circuit and the brain would continue to function. Since each “neuron” was aware only of the “neurons” to which it was directly connected, capturing the whole of the “Regulation” in one swoop was impossible. And there were chokes built into the connections. Even if one “ganglion” were totally penetrated, the probability was small that such a penetration would overflow into adjacent cells. Of course, it was a very tiny brain, delicate; Otaria estimated its total membership at about three hundred. It didn’t dare lose too many members at a time.

  At a hole-in-the-wall pharmacy, along the Corridor of Smoky Dreams, Otaria bought a palm-size gene-making kit that was guaranteed to change one’s hair or skin color permanently. Frivolity always distracted her from serious business. What she had come in looking for was the transgalactic postal outlet that the pharmacy ran as a sid
eline. There from a black booth she transmitted a single Personal Capsule explaining her research into Osa’s work. She asked for a caucus to discuss a possible historical crisis, requesting that the best mathematicians of the “Regulation” be present so that her conclusion could be checked.

  Then she waited. No one had more than a piece of the communications ritual—it had been designed by an expert, rumor told of a military man who had once been involved in the maintenance of secret naval hyperwave combat protocols that could not be taken out by any sort of enemy victory short of total annihilation.

  Eventually she received her reply. The small spherical Capsule located Frightfulperson Otaria of the Calmer Sea in her dismal rented room. When she cracked it open, trembling, the terse message gave her a time and a place and a code event. The sphere dissolved. But who were the Orelians?

  49

  ERON OSA AND HIS PETUNIA, 14,810 GE

  Appearing during the collapse following the False Revival, soon after the fam became one of the more prized commodities of interstellar commerce, an elite military cast calling themselves the Order of Zenoli Warriors were probably the first group of fully fam-equipped mobile soldiers immune to the emotional control of the original tuned psychic probe. They had a reputation for winning their contracted battles with quick, lethal strikes. Warlords who used them paid heavy fees, and warlords who did not lost their battles. The zenoli alliance with Coman in the Circus Wars of the Orion Arm...