Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  In case Faraway Mechanics might fail him, he waited for his weasel to work up a series of secondary destinations. He picked and chose, ran a program to optimize travel time, storing the itinerary in his fam, then called up the tourmaps he might need. Without a tourmap to overlay labels, outlines, and directions upon one’s vision, at demand, a traveler was lost.

  Jama always traveled light. In a shake of jiffs he put together a codpiece containing his few necessities: templates for a set of clothes that he could have made at any public manufacturum, some tie pins, a lace neckpiece, spare rings, six shades of perfume, and a shapechanger’s toolkit. Just in case, he included templates of best-selling antiques. The codpiece’s bulkiest item—uncondensable as a template— was the defunct galactarium.

  His fam automatically reminded him of nonpostponable duties. He grumbled. But he did have to go back to set his water system for overhaul—the cuisinator’s last batch of wine carried a faint bouquet of piss. Further delay of repairs was not prudent. Probably his septic unit was due for replacement—an outrageous expense. These ancient abodes in questionably chic neighborhoods were never trouble-free! To think that there were planets in the'Galaxy with real running water gurgling out of mountain streams! The trick was to wait for the unit’s stuttering to subside before attempting an overhaul. The whole process was automated, but there always seemed to be final details left as an exercise for the user! Yes, like flushing that last batch of wine.

  Even so; he couldn’t resist a few sips while he did so—after all, it was Hyperlord piss. Before winking out, the telesphere confirmed that his local appointments had been rescheduled and that all was in houseguard mode. And his fam confirmed that the check list was now done. Good. He could leave. He kicked a heel and floated up the levitator through the drop-in dome, into the safety airlock, and out into the stale public air of his hive-corridor.

  Humiliating to have to live in a hive even if there was a cachet to being first among the wave of redevelopers! One could almost see the pipes and conduits and narrow robot-runs along the bare tunnel, bare now for more than a millennium, almost sanctified by time in its bareness—there had been no attempt to hide gutty nastiness behind some artful facade, such was the haste of the builders who had reconstructed Splendid Wisdom after the Sack, builders dead now for sixtyne centuries. Beauty is temporary; haste persists. No matter, the bustle of the main thoroughfare was a short walk away.

  The Concourse of the Balasante! How Hyperlord Kikaju

  Jama loved his strolls along this covered passageway of humanity. It stretched for a hundred kilometers. But he had no time now for a drink on the Plaza, or a leisurely promenade around the great airshaft that cut open the living layers of the city to dizzying wonder—if one had the stomach to look. His excuse was that he had a pod to catch. It would be almost two watches of cramped zooming through the transportation net before he could reach the Kirin Sovereignty—and then only if luck routed him around the tunnel maintenance crews. Flying was not an option for a poor nobleman.

  Strapped into his too-narrow pod, jostled by the twists and turns of acceleration, he dreamed of an orange sun lost in some boondocks of the far periphery.

  6

  FARMAN AND GANDERIAN BOY, 14,790 GE

  This particular Quandary-Chain of the Agander serfes, though in appearance highly stable, is susceptible to moderate Theac pumping. In Table-1 is a list of possible artificially generated Theac-Chaos Events that we can expect to bloom across time-ramps of... Rfote's theorem demands that the Post-Events stemming from any of these Events cannot be predicted by any method to a reliability coefficient greater than 0.4. If we are undetected during setup ...It should be possible to arrange the unpredictability zone to last from fifty years to two centuries before the advent of Kraniz restabilization. Such a psychohistorical time-shadow is more than adequate for our purpose.

  ... many examples of secondary links along the quandary-chain... for instance, it has become a ritual among Ganderfans to always carry weapons which must never be used, a manifestation of the unresolved (second-order) trauma activated during the Interregnum when Agan-deTs vulnerability again became acute.

  —Oversee Probe Search code Report Orange-4: Possible Sites for a Forced Theac-Chaos Event

  Dated Version: 14,642y/08m/37w/7h/78i

  Author: CronCom

  The night was well advanced. All traces of the spherical Personal Capsule were gone. The frenzy of activity at his release from the Kapor personality had subsided. A weary Hiranimus Scogil was ready for bed, and so he dimmed the walls and laid out a hand of cards from Agander’s Royal Deck of Fate for a relaxing game of solitaire. The Ax of Mercy was the first card he drew.

  And at that moment the pellucid form of the tower’s Security Butler consolidated in his studio’s small foyer and made a slight guttural rumble to attract attention. “Eron Osa is requesting entrance,” the apparition said.

  “He’s here? At this time of night?”

  “He’s armed.”

  “The usual?” The public order brought about by the resurgent Second Empire had been unable to uproot a long local tradition of suspicion. Since Agander’s murder rate remained a hundred times lower than galactic normal and violent crime was nearly nonexistent, the law had little incentive to make palm-size blasters illegal. Scogil had never been at ease with a kick in every shoulder holster, and never carried one himself, but that was only another thing that marked him as a peculiar farman. “Check the serial.” By law all weapons radiated their identity.

  “Registered.” The butler provided diagrams and specifications—a children’s model, nonlethal beyond a range of one meter. “A toy.”

  “Some toy.” One did not spank students who all brought blasters to class. The only benefit was a student body which tended to reason among themselves very carefully. It was probably the foundation of Ganderian politeness.

  The apparition waited. It had no precedent upon which to act; Eron had never before visited his tutor’s home. When no instructions were forthcoming, it became impatient. “Shall I ask him to check his weapon?”

  “Forget it. Let him in. Dismissed.”

  The butler vanished, and a transport bodyform popped through the pod-lock, unfurling to release a small boy—before it, too, vanished. “You didn’t answer my call!” the boy accused.

  T was making up your next assignment,” Hiranimus said affectionately, neglecting to mention all the other matters that had been occupying him. ‘Trouble with your father again?”

  “We fought!”

  “Did you blast him to smithereens?”

  Eron looked up at him without comprehension. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to use a weapon on his father even though he was a deadly shot. He carried his kick like normal children of the Galaxy wore pocket flaps on their jackets, a matter of style and posture. “He wants to send me to, ugh, Vanhosen!”

  Now that was a much worse crime than murder. Scogil smiled. “Vanhosen! He wouldn’t dare do that to a jolly fellow such as yourself!”

  Eron Osa called upon the robowall to provide a layabout couch and threw himself down on it. “Oh, yes he would! My father is loathsomely nefarious!”

  The conjured couch was a clashing purple and did not match Scogil’s elegant taste in color or shape. He made a resolution to sit down tomorrow at his studio’s console and drastically restrict the creative range of his appurtenancer. Perhaps he could teen-proof the device—but no use bothering with such trivialities now. He dimmed the lighting further to make the eyesore more palatable, “All right, Eron. Let’s get to the source of your horror. I don’t understand the problem. Vanhosen is probably the most prestigious school in the Ulmat. Mowist is a vibrant world. I would have liked an. assignment there myself.”

  Eron groaned.

  “Your father is barely able to afford such a meritorious institution. Mowist isn’t far away, but even transportation off Agander isn’t cheap. He certainly won’t be able to treat your siblings as well. You’ll take your f
irst interstellar trip. You’ll see places you can’t imagine. You’ll be taught by some very great scholars.”

  “Yah, yah. And after five years I’ll get to join the ranks of all the other billions of Imperial lackeys!”

  That’s what his father wanted for him, Scogil knew. He wanted a son in the Service of the Second Empire, a son who had made it, a son who might even work outside of the Ulmat. Eron was his most trying child, but far and away the most brilliant. “And you have other plans?”

  “The toads at Vanhosen sit on their stools and croak to the sky! What can they teach me? They don’t even know mathematics as well as a dumbtop like you!”

  Scogil was properly amused at the boy’s ferocity—and at the implied backhanded compliment. He called up an extension to the couch, black and shaped in better taste, before flopping out beside the boy. “And if you could have what you wanted?”

  “The Academy at Kerkorian—or maybe”—the boy’s voice became plaintive—“the Lyceum on Splendid Wisdom.” Scogil’s heart chilled. Kerkorian was out of the question—Eron didn.’t even remotely meet the academic requirements, nor could his father afford access to that kind of elite. As for Splendid Wisdom—there were many Lyceums on Splendid Wisdom, but Eron meant the Lyceum—well, his father could afford it because tuition and expenses were free, but there were millions of applicants for every opening. Not a chance. “You have high hopes for yourself,” said Hiranimus soberly.

  “You said—”

  “I know I’ve told you that you were brilliant—part flattery, part truth. But brilliance isn’t all that counts.” He paused. What was this kid trying to tell him? Both Kerkorian and the Lyceum were known for their psychohistory schools and little else. But Eron had never hinted before that he was interested in psychohistory. And Hiranimus, as the mathematician Murek Kapor, had studiously avoided mentioning psychohistory as a mathematical discipline. Where had the boy picked up such an interest? Yet who didn’t recognize that the Second Empire was run by the laws of psychohistory? No one had to know what it was to be impressed by its power! Every boy who had been trained to dream of power before he had learned to talk would dream himself the master of psychohistoric technique. Best to be direct. “Are you telling me that you want to become a psychohistorian?”

  “Of course! Why else would anyone beat his brains out on math!”

  Psychohistory, the highest pinnacle of mathematics. Eron wouldn’t even know what that meant at his age, but his ambition would know. No wonder he and his father were locked in combat. His father would understand what an impossible goal his son had set himself. Eron would be too thick-headed to take such impossibilities seriously. The Pscholars guarded their secrets with an implacable fanaticism. “There are problems.. began Scogil tactfully.

  “... because my fam isn’t good enough,” completed Eron resentfully.

  That, you little monster, is the least of your worries.
  The sullenness was suddenly gone from Eron. He became pragmatically impish. “But it’s still not good enough. And Faraway used to have a reputation.”

  Faraway, on the galactic rim, had been the dominant civilizing force during the Interregnum, and its traders had reconquered three quarters of the domain of the old First Empire before its remote location had drained it of talent. Perhaps no other planet in all of human history had so revolutionized the physical sciences. But its technological leadership was long a thing of the past. “Sometimes a not-quitergood-enough fam can stimulate your wetware to perform above and beyond the call of duty,” Hiranimus admonished.

  The boy bristled. “I don’t believe you said what I just heard slip off your vocals. You think like that mechanical book!” Eron had once been impressed by the reconstructed book in the historical alcove of the Ulman’s Summer Alcazar with its seven hundred gears and cams and push-rods that looked up sage aphorisms by the Penniless Peasant after industrious whir and clack. “I kotow better. You don’t get to be a psychohistorian with a second-rate fam like I’m stuck with! Why wasn’t I bom to a rich father! It’s disheartening!” Scogil was watching the golden highlights in Eron’s brown hair, a reflection from the ceiling lamp, almost a halo effect as if his brilliance had to leak out electrically. Intelligence appeared early in a child; judgment did not. “You were bom to a rich father.”

  “Not as rich as the Ulman. Not as rich as he should be if I’m to achieve anything in this dumb Galaxy. Not as rich as he wants to be.” The sullenness was back.

  Time for reassurance. “No man is rich enough to buy a fam that will make a psychohistorian out of his son. It’s the synergism between fam and brain that makes the difference.” Scogil was surprised at the rancor he felt. His fam had been crafted by the wizards of the Thousand Suns—and, in spite of that advantage, he had failed, at least as a theoretician. It was a marvelous conceit that this student of his might actually make it. Perhaps it could be arranged.

  “Can a fam be upgraded?” asked the boy.

  Scogil grinned. Most people never even asked that question—their enthusiasm for a fam upgrade was about equal to their ardor for a brain transplant. “It’s been done. Expensive. It’s not the sort of thing you fool around with lightly. A child’s brain fine-tunes to its fam. It’s a lifetime relationship, established early.”

  “How much of a boost of my analytical powers could I get that way?”

  “You could end up a moron. Have you ever talked with a famless adult, or with someone who has been fam-damaged? To make an analogy: how willing are you to let a surgeon use knives to rebuild your wetware?”

  “I know a kid at school who fell off a roof. His fam got pierced. He had it repaired

  “Was he any smarter afterward?”

  A pause. “No.” More time to consider. “He was dumber,” conceded Eron before he changed the subject. “I can’t just wait around until I’m an old man before I get into a good school. The brain deteriorates after ten. From then on, it’s all downhill. At the school I go to I can already feel my mind turning to soup. I’m twelve”

  “That’s why your father hired me.”

  “He could have hired a good tutor!” Eron grumbled.

  “Hey, I’m not that bad!”

  “I’ll bet you only went to third-rate schools or you wouldn’t be working for a second-rate assistant accountant like my father!”

  “Adjudicator to the Ulman, Eron; be fair. And how can you tell what my job really is? Can you be sure that I’m not the highest paid talent scout in this arm of the Galaxy? Really now, I have jumped around to a few marvelous worlds. I might even have pull at a few good schools. Perhaps it is possible to do something for you—but you’ll have to study hard.”

  “I do study hard,” fumed Eron.

  No use arguing. Scogil materialized a wall screen and began to pop algorithms into its controller via fam command. How might he introduce psychohistory to this too-bright child without calling it that? Certainly he couldn’t reveal his Smythosian connection. He skipped his prepared lesson, no longer inhibited by the Murek Kapor persona who never did anything dangerous. He decided to build an impromptu lesson around the Ganderian ritual that, in effect, placed a blaster in Eron’s hidden holster every morning.

  Symbols began to trace onto the screen. “That mess is an Esfo-Naifin Quandary-Chain. What would you do with it?” “How would I know? I’ve never seen it before!”

  “Hey, stay calm. This is not a test of what you know. I’m just probing to see how your mind works, if it works at all.” “Is this one of your traps?” asked Eron warily.

  “No. Just think. You’ve seen dynamic equations before. What’s going on here?”

  Eron did not like this
kind of open-ended test. Defensively he turned to comedy and began to flap his elbows. “Cluck, cluck. I see bird tracks!”

  “Sure. But what do they say about the bird?”

  Eron pondered for a long time while Scogil made not the slightest sound. Finally: “I don’t know. You want me to guess? Along the time line it’s got to generate a self-stabilizing run. But I don’t know what the symbols mean. You’ve got to give me definitions before you give me equations. You told me that.”

  Hiranimus refused to utter a word of comment.

  Eron couldn’t stand the silence and strained for something more to say. “If you had a handle on the red parameter, you could tweak it into an unstable bloom up the time line.” Scogil was impressed. “Why the red parameter?”

  “Your Esfo-Naifin Whatchamacallit isn’t sensitive to the other params—and don’t try to trick me! It is sensitive to the red, isn’t it?” He didn’t seem convinced and wanted confirmation. “I’m not familiar with crazy notations!”

  “Quit telling me how stupid you are. You’re right. Now what could you use it for?”

  Eron shook his head. “Space only knows. My fam’s lookup tables don’t even list Esfo-Naifin Whatchamacallits by name or form!”

  Hiranimus, manipulating the screen through his fam, filled in some initial conditions and expanded the projected expression. “What’s that a description of?”

  “How should I know? I’m only a twelve-year-old kid with pokey quantronics zived to my spinal.”

  “Not so pokey.” He became the tutor again. “It’s a description of the arms-carrying customs of Agander. It’s a description of that little blaster there in your shoulder holster.” Eron looked down at his kick as if he had never seen it before. “You’re sewing eyelids to my cheek. You can’t describe customs with mathematics'” He was contemplating his mentor with disdain.