Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  Most of the fragments concern log entries or ship's manifest-supplies for an unnamed prison camp—dull—but one title that begins in the middle of a sentence hints at disciplinary action against a crewman. He seems to have given minor but unauthorized aid to a prisoner belonging to a group of “subversives" known as “the Fifty," identified openly as psychohistorians unmasked by a Faraway anti-espionage team. These “traitors" were evidently shipped in secrecy to a planet called Zural to be exiled or executed.

  It is thus plain that the Faraway government of the time was aware of and very afraid of psychohistorical manipulations. The dates are... My star charts do not contain a planet or system under the Zural cognomen. Zural does not appear when I run correlations going back as far as the exploration of the Nacreome Periphery by the I.S.B. Strange11 will not be brave enough to publish the item, at least not until I find out why this piece of history has so conveniently “vanished" from our Splendid Archives. You may wish to pursue the matter discreetly—l know of your interest in such curiosities, i am attaching the relevant parts of the log, scanty though they be. if you ever locate the whereabouts of this “Zural" inform me.

  with a joyous "So there!" I am yours faithfully igar

  P.S. As a "bribe" to Insure my dedicated efforts on their behalf the salvagers included in my "pay" a bejeweled jade egg found with the captain’s effects. It is of no use to me or to my line of research so I am sending it on by devious:means since you seem to be able to profit from such baubles out of the past. It is not necessary—but if you do manage to sell this stone, I could use the twenty percent finder’s commission. It is pretty and should be worth something to the sort of clientèle you serve.

  —Excerpt from a Capsule by Igar Gomoras to Hyperlord Kikaju Jama

  The Hyperlords of the First Empire had, since an Order of Council in 6654 GE, been political procurators who controlled the military men of the navy for Imperialis. As comfortable in court as among the stellar intrigues of competing provinces, they had been willing and able to deploy force, even battleships, against the enemies of the Court when reason and protocol failed. But Hyperlord Kikaju Jama could no more imagine the open power that they had wielded than they could have imagined the labyrinthine shadow schemings of his Second Empire mind.

  Hyperlord Kikaju Jama was a Lord in name alone, anointed by a feverish grandmother who was in love with old genealogical records. He lived invisibly among the masses in a world orchestrated by a coterie of psychologists who ruled the vastness of their empire not with battleships but with feathery leverings upon mathematically determined critical events. Jama dreamed of power but spent most of his life pretending to powers he did not have. He knew he was a blath-erer, but that amused him—who would suspect a pompous fop to wield real power? Supercilious fools never drew the kind of attention that was dangerous to life and limb!

  He stood in front of the mirrored sanitor of his opulent dressing room, washing and perfuming his robo-illuminated genitals, while contemplating the difficulty of obtaining spare parts for antiques, an issue that every antique dealer always had to confront from time to time. Ah ordinary antique with an authenticated template was never a problem— if it malfunctioned, junk it and manufacture a new one. But those rare items of such delicate detail that they could not be duplicated in a manufacturum always posed a problem when they failed—such as, for instance, this jade egg that his friend Comoras had so naively posted to him and that had only arrived ten watches ago.

  He had thought of nothing else for the last million jiffs ticked out by his antique clocks.

  How could old meticulous Igar, an archaeologist specializing in the Interregnum, have mistaken it for mere polished, diamond-studded jade? But, alas, there was always too much to know, and Igar, after all, was a bit-master whose expertise was documents rather than knowledge of artifacts. Even Jama, himself, might not have recognized its true nature except that a customer had tried to buy one from him years ago. His fam never forgot an item that people had actually sought from him.

  Since Igar’s Personal Capsule of the month past, Jama had been frantically racking his fam for ways to locate the purported Zuml’s coordinates. To be able to catch the Pscholars in a lie of repression! Indeed, there was no trace of a Zural in the Splendid Stellar Archives—a prolonged trawl, carefully hidden within a round of routine “antique authentications,” had come up empty.

  Then, after abandoning this net of dead ends, came the ironical miracle right out of Space! Innocently he had opened up the package to examine the latest from his mad archaeologist friend, anticipating nothing, expecting only an amusing bauble, a jade egg of dubious value. After all, this was the man with whom he had conducted an irregular but profitable trade in contraband Interregnum items. Under the room’s dutiful gaze-following eyelight, his fingers undid the delicate wrap of “smuggler’s cloak,” revealing an ovoid whose surface was intricately etched and seemed to be embedded with fine diamonds.

  Great Founder!

  The shock of instant recognition assaulted his eyes, the eyelight dimming as his pupils enlarged. He knew this item, legendary among a tiny group of specialized antique dealers. Only a few of them had ever appeared in the catalogs and almost none ever came up for sale at any price. Could the awesome computing power of a galactarium really be locked in a green stone so small? It looked like just another gewgaw that could be made at whim in any simple manufac-turum. But he knew its innards remained too intricate to be recorded by even the best of template scanning technologies, an antique dealer’s dream. A galactarium. A galactarium which had been on a ship that had actually orbited Zural. What treasure might its charts reveal?

  Extracting stellar coordinates from the device proved not as easy as unwrapping Igar’s stealthy package; it took him five wakeful watches to decipher the controls and then, alas, when activated, the ancient galactarium threw off a shower of stars, fizzed, and died. Perhaps the malfunction wasn’t serious—he suspected that his ovoid needed only a replacement of its atomo-unit—the original Faraway atomos had a reputation for failing after as little as a decade of continuous operation. Such failures were unavoidable at their micro-operational temperature. This one had gone out in typical atomo failure mode. But the breakdown might be only the beginning of trouble. Was the rest of the circuitry still functioning? He dared to hope.

  Sheltered as it had been inside a dead spaceship at deep-space temperatures for 2300-plus years, the prognosis was good. Cosmic ray damage couldn’t have been that great considering the reputation of early Faraway engineers for six-dimensional connection-space redundancy—to say nothing of the reputation for quantum device self-repair agents active down to four degrees absolute. It was simple logic to check the atomics first—but finding a proper atomo replacement meant frustrating delays while rummaging at antique conventions and laboriously traveling through Splendid Wisdom’s maze of prefectures just to get to the gatherings. This was a seriously obsolete part! No ordinary manufacturum was licensed (or precision coded) to build atomic power stations that could be cradled in the cup of a tablespoon!

  Still, he was confident that the anticipated Zural data resided in this antique, since the galactarium had been in use by a Faraway trader of the 125th century GE—before Zural had achieved “special” status...and then (I) fortuitously lost to all possible after-the-fact historical revision. There was no way a Pscholar could have tampered with its database. It was only a toy with memory for a mere ten billion stars, but a Faraway toy of the right century would hardly neglect the coordinates of even trivial stars within Faraway’s then sphere of influence.

  Ah, the bother he was going to have to go through for a nonstandard atomo power thumb! As he rolled his eyes, the room’s eyelight—tuned to illuminate whatever caught its master’s attention—arced madly in sympathy. Before he could complete this gesture of exasperation the swinging eyelight caught a misplaced pink mopcap tossed up there on the outstretched arms of a blue-eyed doll. She was perched on her tiny balcony set into the
high wall. That’s what he would wear! The mopcap’s fat scales of velvet were a perfect match for the rest of his intended outfit.

  Off on the antique circuit again! There was no help for it. He selected his blatant clothes from the rotating wardrobe rack, slightly out of style as befitted an antique dealer, a jacket with bells along the seams and tight striped pants, then a proper light-purple wig with topknot and matching fingernails. The mopcap, of course. His most difficult decision was an ear perfume to match the fragrance of his genitals. Even when one went out among the masses in search of atomo-units, one had to be ready to make foil with the female sex.

  The eyes of three of his antique dolls, each from a different millennium, each from its own petite balcony, followed the Hyperlord as he stepped out of his dressing room. He paused for stage effect, practicing on the dolls. Ever in synchrony with his gaze, the auroral eyelight lingered on his miniature garden, flew across angular and pearly walls, touched a desk, shot down a hall. For a moment its soft beam settled on the hand-size jade ovoid sitting in the goldenlegged cup which the Hyperlord had chosen for its nest.

  He took the object in his hand. Kikaju had no manual but he was an antique dealer used to making do without instructions. He fiddled and poked with a prior knowledge of Faraway’s early Interregnum devices, and finally the little atomo-unit was revealed. Stuck, though. He whacked it out against the palm of his hand and peered at its shape in the eyelight. It was not of the same quality as the galactarium— different suppliers. The galactarium itself was an oddity— not the sort of practical thing one associated with the early generations of Faraway Traders. Perhaps it was a gift for a daughter or mistress, a one-of-a-kind crafted for a very rich trader. Who would ever know? The truth lay buried in the sedimentary layers of time. He held a fossil, preserved but stripped of its story.

  Where were all the stories? There was an old song, “Gone to flowers, every one!”

  Mankind’s potentates lay sandwiched within layers eighty thousand or more years thick: the Splendid Imperial Mausoleums set in the sedimentary crown, themselves perched atop rich layers of pre-imperial expansion that all but buried the sparse gravemounds of the first mysterious subluminal migrations in the Sirius Sector—silent potentates all the way down to the basement strata of tombs holding the mummified lives and riches of the post-simian despots of old Rith and Alphacen and Isua whose monuments were themselves raised upon the unmarked mass graves of luckless opponents. Who was left to tell the stories of the rings still wrapping those anonymous finger bones? Kikaju Jama liked to think of himself as an appreciative grave robber.

  In the layers of history far above the Eta Cumingan inven-don of the hyperdrive, expatriate mercenaries, having lost their war and commander, elected a young Kambal to extract their remnants from disaster. He chose a safe refuge in an increasingly competitive galactic core without knowing that he was laying the foundation for the First Galactic Empire. He only knew he was seizing a pacifist—and undefended—Splendid Wisdom because it was weak. Jama owned a prize comb from that Kambal Dynasty court, but who knew its maker or its wearer? The piratical Frightful-people who followed the Kambals and built a planetopolis to rule their stellar suzerainty had themselves been crushed beneath their monolithic architecture and pipe-tunnel mazes by the teeming bureaucratic culture that rose to power on top of them. Another layer. Other titles.

  Give the invincible Hyperlords a couple of meters in the landfill for their bones and their seals of power. Titles. Fossil titles cluttered the stratified detritus of the Imperialis tradition, each reflecting a single transient moment on the galactic stage, some still remembered by pretenders like Jama, others lost and forgotten. The Sack of Splendid Wisdom was the dividing layer between modem and ancient history. But even the formidable Faraway Traders of recent origin were gone, their stories with them. Who would ever know the stories that this miraculous ovoid might tell?

  Kikaju Jama had a moment of glee. All that remained of the eighty millennia of humanity’s grandeur was Jama’s grubby little antique trade!

  He gave his lofty ancestors only these most casual passing thoughts. The distant power of once-mighty Hyperlords was too remote for him to envy. Kikaju Jama was passionately nostalgic for a much later time in history when complacency had taken the whole of civilization into the darkness of the (by now only dimly remembered) Black Interregnum. What thrills! What glory!

  From a quiet domination by avaricious men who swarmed around the star called Imperialis, the whole Galaxy had fallen into chaos, war, collapse, massive die-offs, extinction, defeasance—fertilizing, alas only temporarily, a wonderful era of anarchic inventiveness. Who else could have, produced this exquisite ovoid of magical power? It had been a fabulous millennium! Kikaju dreamed of a new and better interregnum, the thirty thousand years of turbulence that the Founder had promised and taken away, chaos that might still drive mankind to new highs and new depths.

  Who were these fifty Fellowship psychohistorians who had been transported to Zural in a Faraway ship that later vanished in deepspace? Why had they been written out of history by their own brothers, the Founder’s sons who spent a millennium at lethal infighting over dominance of the Galaxy? Intrigue lay out there on the Periphery where once had shone the greatest power of the Galaxy’s darkest night! A stab of thrill! He could sense another of his antique expeditions coming on. When the star-spanning Pscholars lied, wasn’t Igar right? Weren’t they exposing a weakness? In time, might not the sum of their weaknesses be used against them? It was a pointing compass! To the source!

  And...if, while skulking about, he could scrounge up some articles for sale, so much the better for a poor working-class nobleman!

  The mobile eyes of dolls farther along the hallway watched from their niches as Jama strutted up to the central drop-in with its recessed recliners and domed ceiling entrance. He finger-snapped. His telesphere bloomed dutifully in midair beside him, poised for service. He must get his galactarium repaired.

  “Activate weasel,” he told the telesphere. ‘Tull security. Retrieval ability but no traceback. Repeat, no traceback.” The absence of Zural in the archives was a sure clue that Zural was a delicate subject connected to who-knew-what conspiracy of silence.

  The Hyperlord was paranoid enough about his activities to use an expensive commercial trolling utility with full security capabilities. Less security was quicker, but he never used such degraded “shorts.” His probing weasel would be cleverly constructed. There would be no way to identify its source for its quantum nature was such that any attempt to follow a reply back to the source would erase the weasel before it was received.

  “Touch active antique sites” he commanded in a subdued murmur. “Restrict to Splendid Wisdom.” With that command he was supplying his weasel with an address list. He decided the list was broader than necessary. “Review.”

  Notices of current ateliers, fairs, conferences flashed inside the telesphere—fading if he showed indifference, expanding into graphical glory if he showed a flicker of heed. Of course, there were too many. With tiny gestures of his fingers he restricted the scan to cover the antiques of the Interregnum and then again, impafiendy, gave priority to the most convenient of the locations within an easy eight-watch travel range. In case that wasn’t enough, he supplied discretionary parameters so that the weasel might make its own decisions, even if it had to go off planet.

  The weasel would touch and leave most sites without a trace. It had enough intelligence to match site to query, send back a scouting report if an item caught its attention, or wait for a reply, if appropriate, while continuing its search elsewhere. The query was keyed to find people who repaired specific kinds of early Faraway antiques. To make the weasel’s task less daunting, he gave it a date bracket to work within, covering the galactarium’s probable active life span as well as other parameters that listed the galactarium’s attributes.

  “Send.”

  Then he left to see if the cuisinator could whop up an egg sandwich without
soaking the bread. Damn machine. Perhaps he should try a new bread recipe. Such a bother. One of these months he was going to buy an intelligent cuisinator that made meals on time without being told what to prepare. Sit down and eat. That’s the way Hyperlords used to do it!

  When, munching his soggy sandwich, he returned to the telesphere, its surface was already flashing with a scout report, an advertisement. The address given was that of some culture-forsaken conurbation up north called the Kirin Sovereignty. The place seemed to have met all of his requirements.

  FARAWAY MECHANICS

  How did the magicians of the periphery do it?

  Any Faraway device dissected, understood.

  Study the laws of scaling.

  Private workshop.

  The trillion denizens of Splendid Wisdom were, relegated to hundreds of thousands of arrondissements, precincts, domains, jurisdictions—scattered through the depths and beneath the leafy rooftops, taking in tunneled rock, winding through the towers that rose over drained seabeds, and gerrymandered across the choice locations of mountain ranges whose height gave the rich an awesome view of the parks atop their plastic-metal planet. No man had memory enough for it all. Kirin? Never heard of it. It wasn’t even in his fam. But locationwise it was close enough.

  His telesphere provided him with geopolitical and geographical overviews of the district. Jama deduced that Faraway Mechanics, full as it might be of enthusiasm, was probably not a wealthy group—the Kirin Sovereignty was constructed along the cleft of an old subduction zone and would therefore be a low-rent warren. He booked his rooms accordingly, in a monastery—he was, after all, not a wealthy antique dealer; he had to pay for his ostentation with discreet savings where he could.