Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  “Have you lost your fam? Teach laymen psychohistory? Never. You know the equations for that scene. I’d rather boil Hanis in oil! Have some more Armazin.” He took Osa-Scogil’s delicate goblet and poured a refill. “Well. Are you going to testify? We have to make a deal right now. I won’t force you. I can forge fake witnesses if I have to.”

  Eron stared at the blue light dancing over the etched scene on his goblet while he twisted it in his fingers, conversing in silence with Scogil. A thousand mock battles played themselves out in the goblet’s shimmering while the argument raged between man and ghoul, ending finally in accord. “We agree to testify—if afterward we get to play two versions of this hundred-year simulated war, the initial conditions those of the Galaxy as they stand today as determined by the Fellowship—but some of the initial conditions, by necessity, must be arbitrary, since we have already crossed the topo-zone and psychohistory will be unable to predict when and where the Eggs are first used. We can roll dice on that, so to speak. The first war is to be governed by the Founder’s classical rules, the second war by my Arekean modifications.” “The first is enough. A future viewed by your strange rules is a fantasy spun by a youthful dreamer of the impossible.” “I must insist on both simulations. It is necessary that these two possible futures be contrasted.”

  “The flaws in your method will be exposed.”

  “All the better. I must have your word of honor.”

  “Two wars then. Conceded.”

  “As well, Scogil would like to point out that, since he is not a command center and never was, errors will be introduced.” The Admiral was grumbling. “Error resolution can drag out the calculations interminably. May I suggest that each simulated year be limited to three or four watches? That should give us acceptable accuracy. At the end of that time we assume the outcomes with the highest probability and move on to the next year. If a hundred-year war were to last more than three or four months, my patience would be tried.”

  Eron nodded. “Scogil has asked me to remind you that in an enterprise of this complexity, we will need at least thirty of your best students as staff for our side if the game is to have any meaning at all. The galactic model handles predictions well, but with the introduction of so many new prediction nodes.. .”

  Konn did not let him finish. “Obviously you will need help. Thirty won’t save you. Conceded.” Eron did not mention that this would give him thirty students to train in the Arekean methodology of distributed iteration, thirty more than he had right now. The Admiral smiled, anticipating victory in all galactic theaters as a foregone conclusion of any such “war”—as if his opposition were mere rowdy deckhands to be brought to order by a little fatherly discipline. He called on Magda to bring out another decanter of Armazin. It was a deal.

  Eron also smiled softly. There was no way he could tell the Admiral what a predicament he faced. Hahukum Konn was brazen enough to think that he was a superior strategist even against an army of amateur psychohistorians. That was true. At present, the main tactic of Scogil’s mysterious people was to pump, from as many spigots as they could, the technical literature of psychohistory. That wasn’t enough. Neither Scogil nor the Admiral understood the long-term implications. The Founder had understood. Which was why he so adamantly insisted on secrecy.

  The trial of die ex-Rector went slowly. The Admiral used it adroitly to induce the supporters of Jars Hanis to attack where the Admiral was strongest. Being accustomed to following a martinet, and now deprived of that leadership, they fell into disagreeing factions. Konn’s smaller coterie decimated each faction, one at a time, counter-predicting their every move. In the old Imperial Navy, Hahukum would have risen to legendary status.

  In the meantime, while the Admiral was occupied with his own personal vendetta, Eron prepared for the decisive event. He picked his thirty warriors from among the younger students who were most intrigued by the challenge of psychohistorian versus psychohistorian, prediction versus counter-prediction. Testifying at the trial had been an interesting place to spread the seeds of heresy, but the soil was poor. His thirty students were a different matter. In training them, he relied on Scogil’s expertise as a tutor, giving them small conflicts to manage in which two sides, both wielding classical tools, converged to stalemate. Then Eron would join the team and show them how to use Arekean iteration to resolve the stalemate. He was only a step ahead of his students, since he was having to relearn his own methods as he went along as well as teach them to Scogil.

  The First Hundred Year War began only when the Admiral was ready to give it his full attention—after First Rank Jars Hanis had been tried, found guilty by his peers (carefully picked by Hahukum), and sentenced. Eron knew the time had come when he saw the Admiral’s beatific grin.

  “What have you done with him?” Meaning the ex-Rector.

  “Not what I wanted. I had to make deals. That’s politics. No boiling in oil. Execution would have created lingering problems. And much as I would have enjoyed it, shredding his fam was not an option; it is one of the unwritten rules of psychohistory that you do not do to an enemy what he has so heinously done to you. Bad form. You have to think of something worse.”

  Anything could be expected from a man who would willingly defossilize a Flying Fortress and pilot it. “Is that wise?” asked Eron cautiously.

  “Wisdom is for old men. I’m still young at heart! First we start with solitary confinement. For a social gadfly like Hanis, that’s a good beginning. I’ve found an unused lab in which the life-support system for the Andromeda expedition was designed, with its entertainment module already stripped out—but the bare facilities lack in imagination. Anything so grim would drive Hanis to such despair that he would wither away and die. We don’t want that to happen to our enemy. To prolong the torture, one has to provide hope where there is no hope. I have discovered an exemplary way of giving Hanis hope. Hence my good mood.” It was not the Admiral’s way to finish a story while he had an attentive audience. He enjoyed winning battles and prolonging his victory; he merely grinned and changed the subject. He was ready for the next big battle and eager to start. “So, Lord General Osa-Scogil, are your troops well trained and their boots polished?”

  “As much as a ragtag army of volunteers can be.”

  “Good. How do we begin this silly gentleman’s war of yours? Do we cut the Deck of Fate and high card gets to shoot first, or what?”

  Opening positions were strategically important, so they spent several watches haggling over initial conditions. Both sides agreed that realism was important, but they didn’t always agree on what was real. The Admiral was to begin with control of the entire bureaucracy of the Second Empire. That was a given. But who was receiving the Eggs? Who could use them? Where were they coming from? Scogil wouldn’t have told if he had known, and the Admiral understood and accepted that constraint.

  It was a matter of estimating probabilities, and from those probabilities allocating resources and attributes. The teams didn’t always concur. Eron insisted that there were more insects in the woodwork than the Admiral wanted to acknowledge or were known to Scogil, estimating that there were at least seven hundred independent precritical psychohistorical nodes about to emerge, all of which would go critical very quickly once they learned about (and found a source of) Coron’s Eggs. Scogil didn’t believe his mate, but the Admiral had been sobered by Eron’s prediction of a psychohistorical crisis that hadn’t even shown up on the Standard Model—and thus was willing to concede the point. The Hundred Year War began quietly as these things do, its basic strategies evident from the beginning.

  As the defender of the Second Empire, the Admiral was concerned with the total control of the Galaxy, the balanced and fair-minded control of a long tradition. Trade was regu-

  lated so that one region didn’t grow wealthy at the expense of another. Of thirty million inhabited systems, only seven were undergoing population crisis. Only three systems showed signs of a political crisis that might escalate out of hand w
ithin the century. Culture and cultural exchange were thriving. Galactic standards were regulated in a way that encouraged commerce. The scene was nothing like the desperate affair that the Founder had inherited while he was inventing psychohistory.

  The countervailing strategy emerged as different nodes began to develop their own centers of psychohistoric expertise. Local regions began to optimize their own futures with less and less regard for their neighbors. The level of conflict rose, most of it unintentional. What was very good for one star system might not be so good for the next. To compete, the less endowed systems made stronger alliances than normal with Splendid Wisdom or began to aggressively develop their own ability to counter-predict their neighbors.

  The Admiral’s staff valiantly tried to rebalance the Empire but normal corrective measures became less and less effective. Some systems acquiesced for the good of all, others counter-predicted the corrections on the theory that their psychohistorians could do a better job. The Admiral tried to bring all psychohistorians into the fold of the Fellowship— and failed. He tried to build alliances with the emerging states with only spotty success.

  The disintegration of the Fellowship’s monopoly brought swifter change than anyone had supposed possible. Osa-Scogil wasn’t at all sure of how the Admiral was taking the grinding down of all that he believed in and began to worry when he received a disturbing but cautiously worded message from his mother (Eron’s). She was quietly alarmed by an investigative team which had arrived on Agander and was methodically digging into Eron’s first twelve years.

  It took less than three months and only eighty-two simulated years on the most powerful historical computer in existence to predict a total alteration in the political face of the Galaxy. Over five hundred simulated interstellar wars, major and minor, were raging, confined only by the constraints of psychohistory. Arms production was up by three orders of magnitude. Eight billion youths were being drafted every year to study psychohistory in an effort by each faction to outmaneuver die others. Psychohistory had not become irrelevant; it was essential to the multitude of war efforts. Accurate prediction in conflict situations was just more difficult. There were 112 major centers of psychohistoric prediction and thousands of minor ones. The formidable stability of the Second Galactic Empire had long been reduced to shambles.

  At this advanced stage of the game the criminal conspirators of the Regulation were no longer under house arrest by a stunned Konn. Hanis’ old apartment was an open command center. Admiral Konn had assigned ten of his aides to work liaison with Osa-Scogil’s group. It made no sense anymore to break the game into a contest between two opponents—Konn’s staff, Eron, Scogil, Otaria all had to work together just to keep track of what was going on as the math churned out the changing constraints.

  Petunia had been picked up by Bama’s men and had been co-opted by a relieved Scogil to act as Osa-Scogil’s chief of staff and general gopher to beef up their undermanned group. She ran reconnaissance into enemy territory and flirted with their resolute rivals. Otaria of the Calmer Sea frantically plotted historical trends. Hiranimus worked overtime in his dungeon at full capacity. Eron, amazed by his ghoul, was now fully cognizant of why the living Scogil had made such heroic efforts to keep his fam out of enemy hands—its psychohistorical utilities alone were the equivalent of the brain power of ten men like the Founder.

  On the eighty-seventh simulated year Splendid Wisdom was sacked (virtually) by a vengeful alliance of enemies. Admiral Konn, ever the dramatist, brought a real sword, a genuine fake he had picked up on Rith, for the surrender ceremony.

  And his exhausted staff, which had grown over the campaign to include almost every available student of the Lyceum not working for Osa-Scogil, broke apart. With Splendid Wisdom sacked no one had the courage or wit or energy to continue. It was generally understood that errors had accumulated to the point where the game could only be describing a low-probability, if sobering, future.

  Instead of continuing the simulation to the hundredth year as originally planned, a spontaneous party began to happen in Konn’s main command center overlooking the simulacrum of the Galaxy, now half washed in blue. Desks were overturned. Decorations festooned the equipment. Dignified Pscholars could be found asleep on the floor. Others yelled and rioted and threw hard bread rolls in mock warfare. The Lyceum became, for a span of watches, a genteel madhouse, the final fling at life of a doomed bunker just before the enemy troops break through. With his game, Eron had pushed the whole Lyceum across the no-man’s-land of the mental topozones that represented familiar reality and into the chaotic neural activity of strange viewpoints and impossible stimuli. The results were so unsettling that no one involved had to be on drugs to behave outlandishly.

  What were the lessons of the surprising mathematical collapse of the Second Empire? The outcome was debated everywhere in an orgy of learning. The unexpected nature of the game had agitated the mind of each participant: to reject the collapse as “unreal” was to reject the underlying mathematics, but the rejection of the underlying mathematics was a rejection of the foundation stone of the Second Empire which...

  Osa-Scogil slipped among the groups, listening, dropping hints. He knew what had happened. He wanted his “students” to figure it out for themselves.

  Hadn’t the Pscholars persisted in tht fatalistic mind-set of the final hopeless centuries of the First Empire in spite of the fact that the math of psychohistory contained a plethora of alternate futures? Over the millennial Interregnum, hadn’t their Plan atrophied into a kind of supervised determinism? Wasn’t it true that the Plan was no longer seen as a vigorous alternate future that led away from the chaos of Imperial collapse but as the only true future—with the Fellowship as its guardian?

  A casual remark by Eron about Scogil’s Smythosian connection immoderately grew into a quicky discussion. This ad hoc seminar already knew how groups like the Smythosians could destroy the Second Empire with only a millionth of the Second Empire’s resources at their command. But no one knew who they were or where they had come from or why the Egg hadn’t been predicted.

  Scogil, through Eron, would say nothing about his home-worlds or his education, but he didn’t mind telling the story of Tamic Smythos, who had, after all, been trained at the Lyceum when it was a besieged fortress set in the shambled chaos of what was now called the “First” Sack.

  Nothing was known of the life and wanderings of Smythos for the twenty years between his escape from Zural and his appearance on Horan, not even the secret work he did for Faraway’s Chancellor Linus. On Horan Smythos took up mechanical engineering, then fell into an invisible life as a self-imposed recluse, appearing in public only to earn money, spending most of his time alone writing long rambling documents for his own edification, rants, philosophical musings, incomplete psychomathematical treatments of odd problems, all stuffed in boxes when he lost interest or found a new interest. He died a recluse. His boxes, in storage, remained unread. The warehouse changed hands. A foreman, in charge of cleaning out the warehouse... As a late product of the chaos surrounding the False Revival, an amorphous cult grew up very gradually in the region of the Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift around these astonishing relics of the embittered Tamic Smythos. Among the papers, developed in detail, were some of the seed ideas of psychohistory.

  Scogil related the tale as cautionary advice to anyone who was thinking of building his destiny upon a foundation of secrecy. Secrets have a way of slipping through the finest mesh. (But Scogil kept his own secret; he told no one how the Helmarian Oversee had stumbled upon a Smythosian cell and what they did with what they found.)

  When the lessons of the game were well on their way to assimilation within the Lyceum, Eron Osa gave his first speech to a quiet audience, his theme the failures of the Pscholars and the failures of groups like the Smythosians.

  The Pscholars had failed from too much power. They had ceased to mine psychohistory for low-probability futures worth exploring. The Plan was, after all, a low-
probability future discovered by the Founder. As an elite they had deliberately failed to explore the high probability that they would not be able to hold on to their monopoly of psychohistoric expertise. It was that decision which had produced the present crisis.

  Worse, they had neglected psychohistory as a tool to explore undesirable futures (such as the high probability that Splendid Wisdom would be resacked within the century). Back some time in the Interregnum, psychohistorians had forgotten that one of the main uses of prediction was to position the savant to falsify the prediction. They had used their power only to avoid deviations from the Plan. Mankind’s brain had evolved as a tool to predict undesirable futures in time to avoid them, not to predict highly probable futures that needed no intervention.

  Other emerging groups—like the Smythosians, like the Regulation—had fallen into the trap of opposition. For centuries they remained small, content to oppose the Fellowship locally in invisible ways, afraid to operate in the open because of the Pscholars’ known fiercely guarded monopoly. The more they tested the Plan, the more the Fellowship reacted—until the Lyceum had evolved a whole unit whose sole purpose was to oppose the actions of the diffuse Counter-Fellowships—the survivors being those groups who were best at counterevolving a secret mathematics of prediction of their own, and, inured to the role of opposition, eventually were driven to use their ultimate weapon against the Second Empire. The Pscholars had no defense against a populace who could now visit their local archive and find all they might want to know about psychohistory. Long before the present crisis, the goal had become the destruction of the Pscholar’s power rather than the implementation of a more flexible Plan.

  In his rounds and talks Eron was preparing the ground for the Second Hundred Year War in which he intended to teach the Lyceum a second lesson. He already had thirty students pretrained in his Arekean methodology, tools he had deliberately withheld from use in the First War, a purely classical event. During the Second Hundred Year War he hoped to sweep the entire simulated Galaxy; he could envisage no defense against a mathematics able to force conflict resolution. Arekean iteration did not contain within itself a lethal vulnerability like the need for secrecy built so integrally into the classical mathematics of the Founder. Even Scogil should be impressed enough to make his final break with the Oversee, and then...