Psychohistorical Crisis

by Unknown Author

  Eron was not intending to buy a souvenir of his Rithian pilgrimage, but one of the artifacts—expensive—was so appealing he couldn’t resist it. Not a square centimeter of the skull had been spared the artistic hand; glyphs and precious inlay were woven in among the carved runes of wisdom that the man might have thought but probably hadn’t. On this one the original teeth were in superb shape, the pearly enameled gold having outlasted their user by at least seventy millennia. He had been a rich, well-fed man living a separate life from the poor around him. But his wealth had not spared him from the common mass grave. Now he would spend the rest of his life as an ornament staring out on an incomprehensible future from empty sockets.

  The shop owner’s main love was books, but he couldn’t make a living at it so he decorated skulls for the tourists. He emerged from his crowded studio. “The inspiration. Gotta go with it,” he apologized unapologetically. “Yes?”

  “A friend tells me you have a book on metrics that I need.” “You the one? You got the book on roses he promised'me? No book on roses, no deal. That was the deal.”

  Eron produced the template that had found its way into the hodge-podge library that the Admiral had hastily downloaded from the Splendid Wisdom collection of materials from the bibliotheca of ancient Rithian starships. It was a genuine Rithian book of the twelfth millennium AD with a chapter on every rose that had ever been bred, including a picture, a commentary on the rose’s origin, and a listing of its genetic code.

  “I gotta make a copy first. Check it out. Good business. You star types are all thieves and robbers.” The store’s ancient manufacturum chugged away, even jiggled a bit as it labored to grind out a copy. “Devil machine!” He kicked it. “You work right! None of those blurred pages!” He grabbed the book, still warm from its birthing, and tapped on the screen with a silent intensity for about ten jiffs. “Holy Messiah!” “Which one?” asked Eron.

  “It’s for the godless atheist to shuddup!” he replied without looking up while he continued to scroll and flip and search, muttering every time he hit something astonishing about roses. “The Messiah’s mother!” Then he found the lost rose of his dreams. “By the Messiah’s bloody hand!”

  Ah, thought Eron, already recognizing bits of Rithian history, the Messiah whose hands had been chopped off for robbing the rich and giving to the poor, 7,324 AD.

  “It’s all here,” exclaimed the proprietor in awe. “The whole caboodle! My father storied me about this book! My grandfather letched me about this book! My greatgrandfather raved: not a copy left on Rith! Have I got customers! Roses! Roses! Roses!”

  Gratefully he decanted his own incunabulum from his library, a piddling back-catalog item which none of his ancestors had ever been able to sell, and set the manufacturum to chugging out a copy of the book that Rossum’s #26 had lucked onto. It was a thirteenth- or fourteenth-millennium AD compendium of all the ancient metric documents that had survived through the Great Die-off when all but a tiny fraction of Rith’s pre-third-millennium literature had vanished in the chaos of a culture terminally ill of population cancer.

  Eron eagerly activated the book the instant his hands touched the cover—but all he could call up on the screen was an incomprehensible language in an unknown script of an unknown barbarian era. His heart sank.

  “What? They don’t teach you how to read at scholia nomore?” The proprietor reached over and fingered the book’s border unsuccessfully. “Devil-damned Cathusians! Never did know how to make things simple! They could’ve tried writing on clay!” He cursed by all the messiahs he didn’t believe in, finally getting the right combination. Carefully he showed Eron how to toggle between the language translators. “But don’t expect support for old galactic.” When the Cathusian Excalifate was building its power base on the repatriation of Rith’s lost literature via the new hyper-drive technology, the language of the Cumingan Regionate was shunned as the language of oppression. “You want to read archaic books like this mishmash, you gotta ken the ancient languages. I got all the downloads. Cheap. How about Chinese?”

  “I already read Chinese. I had a weird professor who loved Chinese poetry. I once wrote a program to write Chinese poetry to help me with my homework.”

  The proprietor grumbled. “The fourth incarnation of Christ had sayings to cover guys like you, none of them good. How about Sumerian?”

  “I was hoping to avoid that one.”

  “Have I got a program for you! Cheap. Already copied. Gotta get rid of it. It’s cluttering up the place.” He scuttled off to his shop and rummaged around inside a coffin and came out holding up his prize in the air. “How’s that for service!” Eron groaned. He had already doubled the number of languages he could speak since reaching Rith, none of them in modem use. “I’m pretty saturated. I don’t want to have to carry my fam around in a suitcase.”

  “You don’t know what you’re missing. You gotta have it. Cheap.” To prove his point, he brought up the index of Eron’s compendium, toggled through some strange languages, and came up with a set of pages that looked like the wet clay dance floor of a ballet company of miniature birds.

  “For that, translation don’t cut it. I’ll show you. Pick a language, nothing modern.”

  ‘Try Englic or Latin.”

  The proprietor called up the Englic translator. Eron noticed how painfully slow it was, a couple of jiffs per page. He sighed. Pre-quantronic tech. But trying to read the tortured Englic was even worse. Every sentence suggested six-tyne different meanings.

  “See? Doesn’t make sense. Not the translator’s fault. Sumerian you gotta read in the original.”

  “All right.” Eron sighed. “You’ve got a sale. This isn’t all a fake, is it?”

  The proprietor shrugged his stooped shoulders. “How could I know? Just because I’m probably buying and selling the skulls of Cathusian Excalifs don’t mean I know what their ugly minds were up to when they compiled your book. Myself, I is never trust them. They ate pigs and birds! But you’re an atheist from the stars, so what do you care?”

  Eron bought the compendium. And the skull. And the Sumerian language famfeed. Not cheaply. While he emptied his money stick his upgraded simian ancestor grinned. Then Eron ducked out into the corridor to the good-bye of chimes. He would have gone back to the comfort of #26’s posh interior but that loquacious machine would have talked him to death, so he opted for a rolled sandwich of hummus, lettuce, and pig slices at an interior plaza which had been excavated after the earthquake and redecorated as an Egyptian tomb. The plasteel pillar replacements for the ancient stones were tastefully camouflaged.

  He had found his book! He had no intention of showing his crazy model of Rith’s misty past to the Ruthless Admiral without at least a major attempt to compare it with ancient documents. A quiet table in a nook dedicated—in colorful hieroglyphics—to victory over the Nubians made a reasonable work surface. As a student physicist his taskmasters back at Faraway had trained him emphatically: always reality-test your ideas.

  Psychohistorians seemed to stress careful theoretics because reality-testing was a luxury they couldn’t afford. By the time the future had arrived and a reality-check was possible, it was too late. Physicists were much more sloppy in their approach. Wild hunches and numerology were permitted if these were immediately submitted to Mother Nature’s Kindly Court for trial by combat, torture test, thumbscrew, sarcasm, and riddling. She was prosecuting attorney, defense counsel, judge, jury, and lawmaker all in one and blind to boot. Still, doing the psychohistory of the past, which allowed realitytesting in her court, was more amenable to a physicist’s casual approach than a psychohistorian’s stem Get-It-Right-the-First-Time mode. Eron was a mature physicist, but he was history’s raw recruit.

  Mother Nature’s Court never made it easy. In this case she had been meticulous about destroying all the evidence. Entropy was her favorite game, as Eron well knew, being on the team trying to reconstruct the history of Konn’s latest obsession. Aside from the inscriptions on moon
machines and perhaps the golden apocrypha from the fairy ruins of Mars, the vanished Americs had never put their trust in durable copy, first marrying themselves to biodegradable paper which turned to dust after a century, then fickly falling in love with holes in biodegradable plastic that died after sixty years, and finally eloping with magnetic surfaces whose contents evaporated into a magnetospheric heaven within a dog’s life span. If only they’d had sense enough to preserve their culture by engraving it into their skulls when they died, or even carving it onto their ubiquitous excrement bowls...

  First Eron famfed his course in Sumerian. People still remembered the Sumerians! Burning down their libraries only preserved their books. He set up a subroutine in his fam to fast-study the language lessons while he did something else. No use wasting the hour it would take before he could begin to read Sumerian in the original. To keep busy he skimmed his find, randomly, to see if he really did have a treasure.

  One item caught his attention, evoking a cry of triumph jthat attracted the notice of nearby patrons. His Englic wasn’t good but he could read this fragment of a law on measures. It had been enacted here on Rith by a clearly important group of functionaries with clout because they met within walking distance of their emperor’s White Palace. The law dated to the pre-space year 59,424 BGE—only seven or eight years prior to the design work on Konn’s Flying Battleship. He couldn’t believe his eyes. The Intercourse of Commingled Bodies had legislated the foot of their Continent-State to be exactly 30.48 centimeters and their inch to be exactly 2.54 centimeters, rounding off whatever the real value had been! So! Even while the Rithians were still planet bound the meter was nibbling away on its rivals! By the Founder’s Nose, that meter was exactly the aggressive animal that psychohistory’s equations were predicting!

  Next he scanned for pendulums. The entries mostly concerned the pendulum-driven mechanical clocks that came after 59,700 BGE, about the time of the mythical Newton—too recent. He perked up when he spotted a fragment by a Lehmann-Haupt because it indicated that this scholar had once been particularly adept at translating difficult Sumerian mathematical tablets. The book’s brain was having its own problems translating from Lehmann-Haupt’s Girman into Englic, but Eron caught the gist—Lehmann-Haupt had deduced that the Sumerian system of measures derived from the pendulum that beats the second at latitude 30 degrees, though his mathematical model of a pendulum had been so poor that he had been unable to confirm his hypothesis.

  With nothing to do while his mind was learning Sumerian, Eron set about constructing his own quick-and-dirty pendulum model. He set up his red pocket metricator on the table next to his sandwich plate and read out the local gravitic acceleration, converting from meters per jiff-squared to meters per local sidereal second-squared. The details followed quickly, with the help of his precious compendium.

  Since the standard foot of the one sidereal-second pendulum approximately divided a degree of latitude into 450,000 parts, the Egyptian astronomers took the latitude where that was exactly true as their reference, giving them a rule of thumb that Rith’s circumference was 162 million standard feet. Everything else followed.

  To divide Rith’s circumference into 90 million parts to make navigation easy, one multiplied the standard foot by 9/5ths and got the Roman cubit. To divide it into 75 million parts one multiplied the standard foot by 2.16 to get the Great Cubit. To divide it into 81 million parts one doubled the standard foot and got the Sassanian-Arabic cubit. Then to get the famous geographical foot that divided the degree into 360,000 parts, one multiplied the standard foot by 5/4. Et cetera.

  He was chagrined to find that he had computed the foot of their Flying Fortress wrong. It was just the geographic foot shortened by the factor 75/76 and computed by a pendulum at the London Mound through the Egyptians sacred latitude of 360/7 degrees. It came out to .3047997 meters and very fortunately for Eron the lazy Americ’s had metricized it to .3048 meters.

  After hours of working with the details and satisfying himself, Eron switched off his book and folded it up with reverence. He had to see what he had come to see. He wandered around the maze of the Mall looking for the administrative center. When he found a distracted official and asked for special admittance to the Room of the Queen, he was refused curtly.

  He fumed out in the corridor for a while—but there were advantages to being the lackey of one of the most powerful psychohistorians in the Galaxy. There was such a thing as privacy—so long as it didn’t get in the way of a psychohistorian’s need to polish a coefficient used by one of his equations. Eron made a coded call to Rossum’s #26 who, as Konn’s librarian and expert on all things Rithian, had authorization to access any public contract.

  “Find out who’s in charge here,’’ Eron requested.

  The official turned out to be a nonsapiens, of distant Eta Cumingan ancestry. Not much could be learned by #26 in the few inamins he’d had to work on the project, but the current chief functionary had been shunted off into a job with no future after serving a minor jail term for accepting bribes while in a sensitive administrative post. That was interesting. Eron had never had enough wealth to indulge in bribery before, but now he was on an expense account. It was worth a try.

  He didn’t make an appointment. He just appeared in the man’s office and made it known that he was on business for Hahukum Konn. The factotum’s name was Sinar, a word vaguely related to the ancient Eta Cumingan word for governor, but this man was a mongrel, perhaps a quarter sapiens by the cast of his face, yet Cumingan by the almost clawlike shape of his hands. What showed was his worry. How was it that he had come to the attention of the madman from Splendid Wisdom who was here as uninvited guest? The rumor factories were active about the psychohistorian’s life and intentions. Romantics had bestowed Konn with mystery, malcontents with evil intentions, gossips swore he was having a love affair with his maid, and the factotum was now busy trying to figure out which of the stories were true.

  Eron made his interest in the Room of the Queen discreetly known. It was under renovations, he was discreetly informed. Eron changed the subject to Rith’s past glories until the man was at ease, then began bargaining. Sinar immediately understood but, like every man once stung, was careful to betray no emotion. Eron suggested—a lie— that Second Rank Konn wished to bestow a modest amount toward the refurbishing of Rith’s staggeringly important legacy. Sinar scoffed at the proposal—the red tape involved would not be worth the effort, he claimed. “Give the money to the beggar children!” Meaning the offer was too dangerous for him personally. Eron counter offered by suggesting ways around the authorities. No one would need to know. “It should be up to you to spend the money; you who are here and know best the needs of this great monument to Rithian genius”

  Eron suspected that he had won when the man began to consider ways to sneak them into the Room of the Queen. They struck a bargain, both men piously pretending that no bribery was involved. Eron duly noted how the power that emanated from Konn was beginning to corrupt him even before he had been graded on his first psychohistorical lesson!

  Thus by passion and bribery Eron Osa found himself stooping through a dwarf’s passageway and into a dark and gloomy stone vault that was as old as man’s civilization. It had been untouched even by the earthquake that had collapsed the King’s Room above them. Not so by man. The walls of the room were of once-unblemished limestone, engraved now with the regimental insignia of Eta Cumingan soldiers of the Regionate and a life-size bas-relief gnome with his enormous tongue hanging out, of unknown origin, all carefully treated with surface preservatives. This millennial spanning farrago of graffiti was in horrible taste, but so was the hole in the Queen’s Niche where al-Mamun’s men had used fire and water to probe for treasure. These Rithians thought nothing of stripping the limestone off their Great Pyramid to build some mosques and millennia later regirding it with a massive superstructure of plasteel and tempered glass—yet they would feel blasphemed if the littlest of the irreverent carvings in the Room o
f the Queen was erased—barracks talk and gross vandalism had become sanctified by time.

  The room was almost square, ten by eleven cubits with ample room for an office staff of timekeepers and astronomers. It was as high as three men standing on each other’s shoulders. Awesome. The roof wasn’t arched to prevent crushing but was made from two gabled limestone blocks of enormous mass which had their center of gravity in the right place. By what trick of the Devils had they ever gotten them in place? It was more impressive to Eron than the building of the first starships, which was, after all, only routine engineering that any schooled sapiens could have managed.

  The recent restoration had given the vault some nice touches. A simple but effective system of primitive mirrors had been installed so that star transits could be performed through the optically straight southern “ventilator” by an astronomer timing his transits with the low-tech pendulum that had been modestly installed in the Queen’s Niche. Rossum’s #26 was an incredible resource. How had he ever found this wonder!

  The Niche, Eron estimated, could hold at maximum a pendulum of 20 of the standard sidereal-second lengths, which would be exactly ten Sassanian-Arabic cubits according to his handy little book. Eighteen standard lengths would be 10 Roman cubits; 17 would be 8 Royal cubits; 16 with a period of 4 seconds would be 8 Sassanian-Arabic cubits again; 15 would be 8 of the famous nautical cubits that divided Rith into 86,400 parts at the reference latitude; 12 would be ten Roman feet; 10 would give 8 nautical feet; 9 would give 8 of the Oscan feet used by the Mycenaean navigators in the Trojan Wars. Et cetera.

  The Niche was about two cubits deep and had four corbeled courses that flared toward the bottom to accommodate the pendulum’s swing. Eron examined the Rithian reproduction. It was a finely crafted piece of workmanship, not based on any original, but showing in loving detail how a superb scientific instrument might have been built by a nontechnical society. It was so well made it didn’t even use wheels!