Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  The wind gusted, blowing the odd pellet of hard snow against the skin of that part of his face that was exposed. His tutor led him to a blue aerocar with variable wings that seated four. Its sensors recognized Murek as a legal user— opening the canopy for him. A picture of a baby, forgotten by some admirer, smiled at them from the border of the instrument panel. They clambered into the four-seater, the canopy dropped shut, and the pressure pump cycled while the robocar inquired, “Destination, citizen?”

  “No destination,” Murek instructed, dropping his oxy-mask. “I’ll take her up on manual.” He turned to his student who was also dropping his mask. “How about a tour of the lake first? There hasn’t been time for much sightseeing.”

  Eron did not disagree; he had no desire, at this critical moment, to oppose this man upon whom he depended too much. He was regretting all the times he had defied him in the past. His mentor lifted at a steep climb, the boosted acceleration viciously forcing both of them back against the seat. The boy reflexively called upon the names of various old emperors for protection, items of language that millennia of psychohistory had not eradicated.

  Finally he quailed. “Couldn’t we try automatic?” He was surprised that the car didn’t have an override for foolish behavior.

  “Too dull,” said his tutor as he leveled out at a height above the tallest mountain. The icy blue lake filled out the landscape to the left of them; to the right were hills and arroyos covered with a greenish tint that looked unnatural to Eron where it showed through the clouds. The shades of the colors were all wrong. In the distance, navy-blue mountains rumpled the horizon. There were a few stars in the dark day sky. Eron wondered at the sanity of whoever would choose such a planet as home.

  His mad pilot banked around the lake once, pointing out the sights, then turned out over the desolation and said nothing, just flew. There were no signs of civilization down there. They dropped into a fantasy world of clouds, till the whiteness was swirling all around them, some wisps thicker than others. The farman’s fingers—Eron remembered them as faster than a blaster, faster at math than a mind could think—fooled with the clean instruments, obviously intending to put the aero on automatic while he attended to more pressing tasks. The canopy all around them went to an opaque white. They were chickens inside an egg.

  “Where are we going?” Was Murek aborting the upgrade?

  His tutor only smiled and brought to view, in the palm of his hand, a tiny podlike distorter, which he tapped with a finger. “To shut down your fam’s electronic motion sensors ” In another quick motion he left the distorter burred to Eron’s fam. “You don’t need to know where we’re going. The distorter won’t harm anything.” He added, perhaps by way of explanation, “What we’re doing isn’t strictly legal.”

  Eron was too intimidated to resist. He was boiling with questions. But he found it hard to use Nemia’s name in front of Murek. He’d been trying to ask about her for the whole trip. “Will Nemia be there?” he blurted. Right now he trusted Nemia more than he did his farman companion.

  “No. She’s strictly legit. Rigone will do the operation. He’s good. Don’t worry.” He paused. “I’m going to be reading for a while.” Then his eyes glazed over and he was obviously perusing something that had already been fed into his fam. After that the only disturbance was the whisper of the engines and the odd air pocket and the blind diffuse whiteness of the enclosing eggshell.

  Eron tried to distract himself by imagining the cities that they were passing over, or by conjuring old Imperial ruins, but all he could think about was a naked Nemia. He ordered the picture away, but his fam only solidified the image and slowly rotated it for Eron’s inspection.

  When his cuckolded tutor came out of his trance he had a nudge for Eron. “How’s the boy? You’ve been quiet.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re nervous.”

  “No.” Eron sensed a Nemia in the backseat but he resisted turning around to see. He knew she wasn’t there.

  “Come on. Tell me.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “I’ve been reviewing procedures. It’s essential that you be in a calm state of mind before the operation. I thought that might pose a problem so I brought with me an apparatus I can use to calm your emotions.”

  “I am calm!” he shouted.

  “Calm—as in not shouting. Let me review what you already know. Your fam’s security goes on the alert when your wetware is agitated by internal conflict or external meddling. If a fam’s transducers are then detached from physical contact with your alarmed body, it will do its best, after reunion, to rationalize all changes made during the detachment. If that’s not enough it will attempt a wetware/hardware backup. It’s an automatic defense. We need to take precautions to prevent your fam from erasing the work Rigone will do. So I’m going to have to hook you up.”

  “To what?” asked Eron unenthusiastically while Murek pulled, from beneath the seat, an elegant leather case that the boy hadn’t noticed, unpacking it. One of the objects from the case looked suspiciously like a helmet. “You’re not going to try to read my mind!”

  “No, no, this stuff just picks up on your emotions. It’s not a psychic probe; your fam wouldn’t allow that. It is a far more primitive device.”

  At the mention of psychic probe Eron’s heart began to pound, and he had visions of a grinning Kapor—after nailing him about Nemia—pressing a button that opened up a trapdoor in the aerocar’s floor to eject his mind-stripped body into the clouds. He made a vow of celibacy. With minor gestures of noncooperation he tried to discourage this evil farman from attaching the apparatus to his hands and head. He began to practice thinking about nothing. But he felt Nemia’s sexy fingers stroking his chin.

  Murek paused, reluctant to fight even the most passive of resistance. “You’ve got to do it, kid, or no upgrade.”

  “You’re going to kill me!”

  “This stuff works at the microvolt level, no danger. It only senses local brain temperature changes, skin resistance, and hormone levels.” The clamps went on Eron’s fingers and the helmet went on his head. He was defenseless! “Hmm,” said the Kapor-monster, reading the hand-size output screen, “you’re in a pretty agitated state.”

  “Just give me a moment to blank my mind.” This time Eron’s chin was well defended from Nemia’s fingers by an elite troop of his personal thought police, linked arm in arm at a safe five-centimeter buffer from his face. Then... in the midst of his concentration... with the gentlest touch... he felt Nemia’s hand do an end run and slip up the inside of his left leg. Space! Not that! Hastily he grabbed her wrist and lowered her down into the clutches of his steadfast ally, Lord Gravity, where he let her go tumbling into whatever was now below them. Because he loved her he gave her a pretend parachute. But eight tiny Nemias, naked, began to dance on the dashboard in synchrony.

  “What is that?” asked his relentless persecutor as he noticed blips on his screen.

  “Nothing. Just a flashback to something that has nothing to do with the operation.”

  “I see. You’re worried? Something you haven’t told me?”

  “Maybe I was thinking about my father,” he evaded.

  “Your father? I’ve never been clear on that relationship. Is there something about him you haven’t told me?” There was a pause. “Ah, yes!”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I got a big blip.”

  “So you are trying to read my mind!”

  “No, no. I want you in a calm state for your upgrade.” Eron said nothing. Neither did the monster from outer far-space. He just seemed to sit there, eyeing Eron, probably waiting to pounce, ready with the trapdoor switch in the aerocar’s passenger-side floor. “Some things we aren’t supposed to talk about,” Eron commented lamely.

  “Ah, Ganderian taboos. What might those be? I never did get all the details straight. Very convoluted.”

  “I don’t have to tell a Big Nose like you,” said Eron sulkily. “I’m not
supposed to tell a Big Nose like you. Big Noses are always poking into things that shouldn’t interest them.” “Is this something you could tell your father?”

  “I tried. He always slither-snaked out of it. He was good at changing the subject. Maybe he was right.”

  “What subject was he good at changing?”

  Eron shrugged. The questioning was getting too hot. He found his mind beginning to shut down in resistance. It was increasingly difficult to think. That was a mercy under the circumstances!

  “Okay. I’m reading resistance. We’re going to have to break through that before you get your upgrade. Just recall that I’m not your father and that you’ve always been able to talk to me. My machine is going to start reading syllables to you and combining them into words as it analyzes your emotional reactions to syllable-space. The procedure doesn’t require a response. You just have to listen.”

  Eron felt in a mood of total rebellion. He wasn’t going to speak. He was just going to order his fam to relax him and that would be that. While he resisted, the machine began to speak syllables to him, pausing between each syllable as if it were thinking. He wondered at the machine’s intelligence. After a while it started to combine syllables into words, sometimes repeating itself. Eron felt like a target. Every so often he would be hit by a word that struck with chemical impact. The hits grew more frequent. The words, at first general, began to get more specific. Dangerously specific. He could tell that with each hit the machine was learning something. Its targeting was beginning to upset him. Murek just sat there, staring, not reacting. Then the machine locked onto what it had been seeking, and each word was a hit. “Secret.” Pause. “Affair.” Pause. “Sex.” Pause. “Nemia.” Pause.

  The eyes of the Kapor-monster lifted from his machine to stare at his victim, lizardlike. Eron felt trapped. He was caught. He had to escape! A defensive explanation formed in his mind, but when he tried to speak it, his mouth opened while nothing came out. It was weird. The same thing had happened when he was with Nemia.

  “Okay,” the monster said with unexpected gentleness. “We have something to work with. We’ve run into your definition of ‘secret.’ Secrets don’t let you talk. A command installation. Let’s sidestep for a moment. Tell me something that isn *t a secret.”

  “Agander’s sky is blue,” he said inanely, relieved that he could actually make meaningful sounds.

  “Tell me something else that isn’t a secret.”

  “You are pissed at me and are about to push the button on the trapdoor under me.” That sounded foolish. “I know there isn’t a trapdoor under me.”

  “Eron, I come from a very different place than you do. I’m not pissed at you. I’m your friend, and in a few watches more or less we’ll be off to Faraway and you’ll be signed up for the program at Asinia Pedagogic. Nemia will be coming with us. She likes you. For the moment, I don’t want your secrets. I want your definition of ‘secret.’ Try this one on. How does your mind tell the difference between something that is a secret and something that is not a secret?”

  “Stop asking me tough questions!” Eron laughed but he felt like crying. He was damned if he would show tears.

  Murek glanced at his screen. “It’s not a secret that you want to cry right now.”

  Eron bawled for a short inamin, feeling astonishment at the outburst, and then calmly recited a definition right out of his fam dictionary. “A secret is something known only to a specific person or group and deliberately kept from the knowledge of others.”

  “Not good enough,” said the relentless tutor. “How do you know what to deliberately keep from the knowledge of others and what you can tell them? That’s your rule-base. Can’t keep a secret without it.”

  Eron thought for many jiffs, coming up on an inamin. “It has something to do with defense. A secret is to prevent information from being used to hurt yourself or someone under your protection. But that gets complicated. You have to know what hurts people.” He looked at his alien farman tutor. “Some things that don’t hurt you hurt other people.”

  “That’s possible.”

  For a while his tutor had him play an alternation game that clicked like a metronome back and forth across Eron’s fam. First he was asked to search across his memory for something that wasn't a secret and find a way to spin it into a story. That cycle complete, the devil at the truth-machine’s metronome sent him careening back across his life to locate a dark secret that he must withhold in spite of any temptation to reveal it—and Murek enforced the compulsion by requiring him to contemplate the “dark secret”—silently.

  Back and forth he went from story to silence, from banter to secret, from loud joke to silent recollection of spying on his father, from bright description of playmate Rameen’s extravagant birthday party to the never-told memory of young Eron’s innocent sexual groping with Rameen’s baby sister when they were playing hide-and-seek together in a box. On and on. The light from each nonsecret ended at the shadow-boundary of his world of secrecy until the shape of the secrets became so clearly defined that they were no longer secret. A man’s shadow has nowhere to hide in strong sunlight.

  Eron laughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks. The glow from the robocar’s instruments—the clock, the wing-light indicators, the red numerals of speed and altitude— seemed to travel outward to illuminate the whole of the unseen world beyond the featureless canopy. He had been transported by metronome into a psychological hyperspace where secrets were no longer invisible. With passionate in-sight he began to blabber about the marvelous nature of these weird hyperspatial concealments. The taciturn farman merely listened.

  A secret world revealed. In his rebellion against the strictures of Ganderian custom, Eron seemed to have created— in the cloister of his mind, hidden even from himself—a mental utopia where people actually spoke what they felt and saw. In his twelve-year-old soul he was convinced that such a place, made real, would usher in a better Galaxy. It was what he wanted to build with his life. But such utopian ideation had been taboo on Agander, relegated to the shadows of form and culture, where it was not even sanctified by his own approval. Before he could accept his heretical vision, he needed the approval of his elder tutor, who was the only man he had ever met who had listened to his ravings. A sudden passion was now directed at convincing his guru. He brought forth eloquent arguments.

  The farman continued to listen.

  But Eron didn’t get the approbation he sought. Murek only smiled his wiseman smile. “You’ll have to work that out for yourself, kid. I can only give you cynically bad advice.” “You’re not going to help me? You’re just another old fiiddy with antiquated ideas! I might have known!”

  “In the meantime listen to some bad advice. You don’t have to take it.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t!”

  “But you’ll listen?”

  “I might,” said Eron sullenly.

  “You’ve committed the sin of simplicity. It is not the worst sin in the universe. Every design is bom naive. Even the life that originates on a planet appears first in too simple a form, unable to survive except under the most benevolent of hothouse conditions. On Neuhadra life aborted five times before it took root. Ever play chess?”

  “Yes, I know,” Eron said with resignation. “At first sight chess feels complex but it’s too simple. Both kings always escape if the players pay attention to their attack and defense. I got bored with chess when I was six. Once you have the algorithm, it always ends in a draw.”

  “Exactly. Simple is good—as long as it’s not too simple. Let’s tackle this secrecy thing rationally, adding a little useful complexity to it. What makes secrecy possible?”

  “Boxes and locks.” Eron could tell from the stolid response that his tyrannical tutor wouldn’t comment on this facetious answer. But there was going to be no escape from the question, either—Murek had that look—so he set his fam on a cause-and-effect search. What makes secrecy possible? “The ability to communicate?” he guessed.<
br />
  “Well... yes.” A tutor’s nod, not quite satisfied. “Obviously without communication, secrecy is moot. But why would someone, able to communicate, want to keep a secret? We need a motive.”

  “Because your someone is stark crazy and wants to live his life tied up in knots!”

  At this bald assertion the cuckolded monster grinned and pounced. “Kid, suppose a handsome daredevil of a man stole away the girlfriend of a bad-tempered giant who was in the habit of slitting the throats of small people who annoyed him. Why might our handsome rake want to keep his liaison a secret?”

  “I hope you aren’t toting a knife. Are you?”

  “I’m not a bad-tempered giant, either.”

  Eron judiciously chose evasion. “But suppose education and love had mellowed all bad-tempered giants? Then no one would need secrets.”

  “Suppose I grant you that; imagine we’ve been magically transported to your sublimely mellow universe in which there are no secrets. None. Certainly in such a secrecy-free society no one will be thinking about the consequences of their chatter. Nary a thought wasted on soul searching. Who is to worry that their bit of gossip might hurt someone? Who is to ponder whether newly minted scientific information might boomerang in a destructive way? No one—if all information is considered boon. Who will gain by the dissemination of this information and who will lose? No one is burdened by such nags if dogma has imposed a Rule-for-All-Circumstances upon the galactic citizenry: Information is good and to be shared, no matter the consequence.” “Information is good!” insisted Eron.