Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  “And what in the Galaxy do you think psychohistory is all about?”

  Eron glanced back in astonishment at the wall with its luminescent curlicues. He stared fixedly at the Esfo-Naifin Quandary-Chain, obviously computing with all fam and wetware resources. Then he grinned mischievously as his first answer came to him. “It’s wrong,” he said.

  “Explain.”

  “Backtracking gives a source-point only two thousand five hundred years ago. That’s wrong! We’ve always carried blasters.”

  “So says the fine poetry of Ganderian mythology, but if you want to become a passable psychohistorian, you’ll have to be more careful with your history than a Ganderian troubadour. Two and a half millennia puts you back in the 124th century.” Scogil replaced the equation with an Imperial History Skeleton—12,338 GE was the date of the sack of Splendid Wisdom. “Early 124th puts you thirty or forty years before the final collapse. The First Empire is disintegrating. We’re in the Interregnum. That's when Ganderians first began to carry small arms. Not a trace of them in the whole of Ganderian records before that—and Ganderian history predates the Empire by about 165 centuries. A psychohistorian doesn’t believe myths; he investigates them.” The Esfo-Naifin Quandary-Chain reappeared. “The question is why did such a habit as yours persist long after the need for personal arms?”

  “To defend ourselves!”

  “Great Plasma Tongues of Space, against what? I’m a far-man. Who trusts a farman? Yet I could attack, unarmed, an octad of hostile Ganderians and not have to worry about their blasters. Using a blaster is taboo on Agander.”

  “No it’s not! I know how to use one! I’m fast and accurate!” “Yes. Nevertheless, you’ve never used one to kill a man and neither has your father—or anyone else you know.”

  “I could ”

  “That’s the myth. But look at the equation. The temporal stability of the weapon-carrying ritual is strong, has been strong over millennia, but that very stability demands nonuse. Widespread employment of small arms would produce a bloom—see the red parameter again.” Scogil gave his student time to verify his statement. “I repeat, why did such a habit persist long after the need for personal arms? It takes energy to maintain such a habit—you’ve got to buy the weapon; you’ve got to keep it in working order, you’ve got to learn how to use it and keep your skill up to par. You’ve got to wear the damn thing all the time. But you can’t blast. What’s the utility?”

  Eron was confused. “To defend myself!” he repeated with exasperation.

  “No. The utility of the little kick sitting in your holster is to maintain the illusion that there is an enemy out there who must be kept at bay. A blaster is ineffective against an illusion—to try to use one against an illusion would only reveal one’s impotence. A Ganderian can't use a weapon without proving to himself that he is defenseless, and the only reason he carries a weapon is to prove to himself that he isn't defenseless. It’s called a ridge, something you can't use but have to own to feel secure. The old battleships carried planet-busters but I never heard of one being used.”

  “You’re not making much sense,” complained the boy.

  ‘Take out your blaster and point it.” A part of Scogil made sure that his body was now more than a meter distant from the “toy.”

  “No.” Eron was uncomfortably defiant.

  “That’s an order!”

  Eron slowly removed the tiny blaster from its shoulder holster and pointed it, the safety on, careful not to aim at his mentor. “This is silly.”

  “All right. Now tell me who the enemy is?”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “In your mind’s eye. It’s in your bones; every Ganderian can see the enemy standing in front of him. Let your imagination do the work for you.”

  “An outsider?”

  “Who might that outsider be?”

  “The Second Empire?”

  “The Second Empire is real time. You’re targeting an illusion. What’s the kick ready to take out?”

  “I’ve got a bead on your cruddy wall!” exclaimed Eron angrily.

  “Have you ever noticed that Ganderian stories, no matter how modem, are always retellings of the old mythology? Who is the enemy in the myths?”

  Eron lowered his blaster. Carefully he slipped it back into the discreet holster that was part of his jacket. ‘The First Empire. The viceroys. The soldiers. The Emperor. That was a long time ago.”

  “The vitality of those myths suggests strongly that Agan-der never recovered from the trauma of being conquered by the First Empire. When you wakedream, do you ever pop off Imperial Marines as they drop from the sky in the funny armor they wore in that bygone era?”

  Eron Osa stretched out on the couch, hands clasped behind his head as he pulled up visuals of his old time-wasting fantasies. Staring eyes glazed over with pleasure. “No, nothing as dumb as that. That wouldn’t get you anywhere—too many of them,” he scoffed. “I’m smarter,” He grinned. “I secretly assassinate viceroys. Sometimes I take them prisoner and make ransom demands. It’s a silly game. I’m always a zenoli supersoldier, but the zenoli mercenaries didn’t appear until the Interregnum when all the viceroys were already dead. It’s fun, though; fiction is fiction and you’ve always said that Ganderians have never been able to keep their history straight.” Again Eron became the imp. “Your theory has a vast hole in it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Your Esfo-Naifin Whatchamacallit has an origin 2,500 years ago. You said yourself that the First Empire was already dead by then—so how could little me carrying a blaster be a memory of a trauma that happened umpteen millennia earlier?”

  Scogil was beginning to regret the enthusiasm with which he had launched into this conversation. If he didn’t watch himself, he would blow his cover. “Let me answer with a lecture. Just sit. Don’t fidget. Listen. Put your fam on record.” “Here we go again. Don’t you ever run out of lectures?” Eron assumed a mock straitjacketed pose.

  “Unresolved traumas reverberate. A prime-trauma can spin off new Esfo-Naifin ridges for thousands of years, a ffesh branch every time the culture hits a restimulative bump. The Interregnum was a powerful restimulator of the original First Empire conquest—Agander was finally free again, but again it was being attacked from outside by forces it couldn’t resist. For a culture like yours, with a remarkably low stability drift, sixty-seven centuries wasn’t enough to erase the most frightening event in its history.”

  Eron raised his finger. “Point of information. You’re telling me that Ganderians never carried weapons before the Interregnum?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe you—we were never wimps like you— but for the sake of argument, continue.”

  Scogil rose to his full height. “Stop thinking like a pompous Ganderian and think about forcer He was now looming over a surprised Eron. With one sudden motion he lifted the boy bodily into the air by the fabric of his jacket, simultaneously disarming him and kicking the blaster across the floor—all before Eron even began to react. The boy hung from his tutor’s grip, stunned. “The Imperial Conquest wasn’t a game!” Scogil roared. Eron began to try to resist. “It wasn’t mythology!” continued Scogil relentlessly. “It was forcer He put one of Eron’s resisting arms out of commission. “The army that attacked the Ulmat was probably greater in numbers than the total population of Agander.” Scogil began to lock the boy in a death hold to counter his every struggle. “Do you think their occupying units would have tolerated personal blasters? Under the Imperium Ganderians never carried small arms because the viceroys wouldn’t permit it; the offense carried the death penalty. If you dared to carry a small weapon you were summarily executed!”

  He laughed and tossed the shaken Eron back onto his ugly couch and continued in a now-calm voice. “And as far as I’ve been able to delve into pre-imperial times, Ganderians thought themselves above the use of all weapons. A peaceful people; a law-and-order sort of people, like you.

  They thought the
ir superior kind of civilization rendered them invulnerable. They thought the interstellar reaches put them in an unassailably high castle.” Scogil smiled with all of Kapor’s charm. He could still command that. “All of you still think of yourselves so!”

  Eron was sitting bug-eyed. “Don’t ever do that again! You scared me witless.” He glanced at his kick on the floor but didn’t dare try to retrieve it.

  “The conquest scared your people witless. It didn’t fit Agander’s gestalt of the universe. It was incomprehensible. It was alien to Ganderian experience. Different cultures handle traumas differently because they are built out of different collective experiences with different mathematical representations. Yours made the decision to hang on to the Ganderian assumption of invulnerability even though the Imperial occupation forcibly proved it false! To keep that illusion your ancestors had to lie outrageously to themselves to the point where they can no longer accurately remember their own history. They remember farmen as wimps. Never make that mistake! Your ancestors institutionalized the lie. A lie is a time-trap loop because it is an attempt to change an event that can’t be changed. Tell a lie and the original event remains the same, and so one is forced to loop back and tell the lie again... and again... like a running child with his foot nailed to the floor.”

  Eron didn’t know whether he was a terrified animal or a participant in a rational discussion. “Next time you threaten me with an illustrated lecture, warn me a shake of inamins in advance and I’ll hyperjump out of here, maybe to some place safe like intergalactic space or the heart of a neutron star.” He glanced as his blaster again, started to reach for it, and then withdrew. “Can I have my kick back?”

  “Sure.”

  “I won’t blast you.”

  Scogil grinned. “You aren’t fast enough to blast me.”

  Then Eron’s fear turned to anger. “You lied to me! You told me that you were a nonviolent civilized citizen of the Galaxy! I believed you!”

  “Things aren’t always what they seem. Now—are you going to lie to yourself and reconstruct that image of yourself as an invulnerable man who can take on the Galaxy with his toy? Go ahead, pick it up. It will make you invulnerable again.”

  Eron just sat there. Then the shaking began. Scogil said nothing, giving the boy all the time he needed to digest what had happened. Eron tried to pick up his weapon but couldn’t make his body do so. He grinned sheepishly. “I’m scared,” he said. Then he went down to the floor, made sure the safety was latched, then holstered his kick. “Your history lessons make me green at the gills. I know that was a demo. I know you’re really a nice person. But that was scary.

  “And Ganderians are still scared of the First Empire, nine thousand years after the fact. No matter how many times they relive the event, the First Empire still wins. And the old, unresolved fears keep coming back to shake them up. Every time that old fear of the old Empire is restimulated, Ganderians collectively make a new decision never to forget that they are invulnerable. Your useless toy is only one of a thousand harmonics of that fear. It can all be reduced to mathematical equations.”

  An intrigued Eron Osa took on the expression of a child who has scented a cunning speculation. “Tell me the truth, you dirty old ugly fanged rat. Are you a psychohistorian? Maybe a spy from Splendid Wisdom?”

  Hiranimus liked the directness of this kid. Eron wasn’t devious. He didn’t like to keep his opinions under cover like those wretched Pscholars. “Well, son, I would have liked to have been a jet-hot psychohistorian ” That much was true. He sighed before launching into his least favorite lie. “But I’m just an ordinary moon-run of a mathematician who is enthralled by the exotic practical uses of my trade. I don’t have access to the real tools that allow psychohistorians to predict the gross aspects of our future. The Pscholars of Splendid Wisdom keep their secrets well. Pscholars believe that if everyone could predict the future, Pscholars would no longer be able to govern.” And we Smythosians, who have dabbled in the art of prediction, hope they are right. “Let’s just say I’m a sinner who delights in playing with morsels of forbidden knowledge. That’s a theme from some of the older mythologies. I’m not very dangerous; I haven’t yet even reached the stage where I can predict whether a planet’s sun will rise tomorrow.”

  “Even I can predict that, you dumbtopr

  “I am now predicting that you will be in my guest bed within the inamin.”

  “What if I say no? Staying in the same house with you is going to give me nightmares.”

  “I can always play the viceroy and make my prediction come true.”

  Eron didn’t protest. He was enjoying his rebellion against his family and looked forward to sleeping in a strange bed. When the boy stood, Scogil discreetly dismissed the awful couch. He saw to it that Eron was comfortably established in the back room, tucking him into a special comforter Hiranimus had brought from some distant stellar bazaar. Eron was fascinated by its lightness and crazy-quilt design—and couldn’t believe that its warmth wasn’t some exotic electronic trick; how could such a miracle derive from physics so simple that even a goose would understand?

  “We’ll discuss schools again in the morning after I’ve slumbered on it. Good sleep.”

  Eron gave a last adulating glance at his mentor standing in the hall’s reflected light. “I feel like a traitor. I wish I had a farman for a father.” The door vanished.

  Hiranimus retreated to his study where he set up a silent comm link through his fam to the elder Osa at the Ulman’s Alcazar. He was going to tell on his student and did not want to risk the kid’s wrath—his walls were soundproof but not immune to a good fam’s sensitive audio pickup. He made the call to his patron while setting the camera to show himself in the best possible light as he settled into his working chair in his most dignified pose. The screen acknowledged contact.

  “Yes?” queried the Adjudicator.

  “Osa, your son is here with me. I think it best that he stay here for the night.” The words were transmitted from an electronic simulation of Scogil’s voice box so there would be nothing for Eron to hear.

  “So that’s where he went! That’s a relief. He left here in quite a huff—I wasn’t sure what he was going to do. How we spoil our eldest sons—is it out of naiveté? He has talked to you?”

  “We discussed his school plans.”

  The camera at the other end moved back for a long shot. The elder Osa was pacing in a large room with decorated mordants, prized relics of a grimmer age. “I thought I gave him very reasonable alternatives. I wasn’t prepared for his upset.”

  “Vanhosen is an excellent choice. There are probably other places that would better match his peculiar talents.”

  “Ah, as usual, Murek, you are the consummate diplomat.” A sober Osa sat down so that his camera could transmit a portrait shot. “You realize that I operate under financial constraints. Money matters don’t seem to impress the younger generation, at least not my son who thinks that because I am an intimate of the Ulman, I have unlimited resources which he is all too willing to exploit.”

  “Perhaps I can suggest alternatives.”

  “Expensive ones,” grumbled the Adjudicator.

  “There are scholarships available. There are schools that pay highly to attract talent.”

  “He’s too young and unseasoned. He’s only twelve. At that age one’s reasoning powers are rough and clumsy and lack judgment. There are huge gaps in his knowledge and maturity. I really don’t understand why he is insisting on going to university at his age.”

  “I understand and I must agree with him. Mathematics is a young man’s game and early high-level training is essential. The choice of school can be critical.”

  “So you think mathematics is his talent? You are not biased because you are a mathematician? It’s true that he’s been good with puzzles since he was a tike. I’ve always thought that was because of that damn jazzed-up fam I bought him.”

  “His bent astonishes me. And the fam you gifted him, out o
f the mad loyalty of a father who wishes the best for his son, is only a small part of it. I strongly suspect that he is the best math student I’ll ever teach. I have no doubt that he’s going to outclass me before he’s twenty.”

  “He’ll have to find work. We Ganderians don’t believe in aristocratic laziness no matter how refined the indolence.”

  “I believe you want him prepared for the Empire’s bureaucracy?”

  “That’s an ambition I’ve had for him that I’ve never advertised.”

  “The Pscholars are all mathematicians.”

  “I’m not fool enough to be that ambitious for my son.” “You should be. It is true that the probability of him becoming a psychohistorian is vanishingly small—but it is the conditional probability that counts. It is also highly improbable to find him in possession of talents which I discern in abundance. He has the caliber of a psychohistorian.”

  “I wish I trusted you, farman.” The face on the screen was bleak with doubt and indecision, a father who wanted the best for his son but was unwilling to plunge the carrier of his genes into a disaster. “Eron was suggesting Kerkorian. You, too?” The expression was agony, a man desperately trying to find sacrifices he could make to afford such a luminous university.

  Scogil called upon his most unctuous Kapor facade to quench the man’s agony. “Kerkorian is so famous that it can afford to bankrupt its supplicants. But this is a vast galaxy. There are better schools out there with lesser reputations most anxious to recruit students with Eron’s ability.”

  “And you think I can afford to send him gallivanting about the Galaxy in search of a wraith? At his age?”

  “No need. Urgent family business is taking me to Faraway. I could chaperone your son on a small adventure—the idea delights me. And I’m certain that I could arrange an interview with the registrar of the Asinia Pedagogic. My mathematical credentials are impeccable, as you well know. Asinia you will not have heard of; I doubt that it exists in any archive on Agander. It is a school accredited by the Pscholars. I have contacts in a fund that will settle all of his expenses. If he does well at Asinia for four or five years, he will be picked up by the Pscholars for final training.”