Psychohistorical Crisis Read online

  PSYCHOHIST0RICAL

  CRISIS

  . . . . .

  DONALD KINGSBURY

  TOR®

  ATOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

  “A deep and thoughtful re-exploration, shining fresh light on one of science-fiction’s biggest ideas” David Brin

  “Galactic empire imagined with twenty-first century insight... Donald Kingsbury has revisited a twentieth century epic—and produced a new masterpiece filled with wit and invention.”

  —Vemor Yinge

  “He takes on the central problems of a science fiction master-work, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, envisioning it anew for our time. The agenda of control in Asimov’s psychohistory, here only lightly disguised, Kingsbury sees as a challenge to free will and to the practical uses of prediction itself. Forecasts can be immensely useful, especially if we can make sure they do not come true.” —Gregory Benford

  “A bold and fascinating attempt to reimagine a science fiction classic ” —Kirkus Reviews

  “A convincing and fresh simulacrum of the world of the 761st century.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Kingsbury continues exploration of the universe in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels in his own imposing book. . . . The real strength [is] ... all the fascinating characters (e.g., Pscholar Hahukum Komi, with his flying replica of a B-17, and Frighfulpersons Katana and her daughter Otaria, who live up to their tides) and settings... not to mention the number of satirical touches Kingsbury scores on history and sex. ... a very good, very absorbing [novel].” —Booklist

  “Kingsbury has succeeded brilliantly in catching the flavor of his honored model, and matches the best of it in pacing and in utilization of his conceptual resources. Isaac would have enjoyed this story and so will you.”

  —Asimov's SF on “Historical Crisis,” from which Psychohistorical Crisis was expanded.

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed*’ to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  PSYCHOHSTORICAL CRISIS

  Copyright © 2001 by Donald Kingsbury

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  www.donaldkingsbury.com

  Edited by David G. Hartwell

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN: 0-765-34195-6

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001041540

  First edition: December 2001

  First mass market edition: October 2002

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Viola

  who dropped into my life like a song from the stars.

  Acknowledgments

  A. E. van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, and Poul Anderson opened up the avid mind of a teenager to the vast reaches of Galactic Empire. Jim Lambek taught me enough mathematics to think about the problems that psychohistory posed. David Hartwell collared me at Readercon and convinced me to take this story off the shelf where it had been moldering. Gregory Bedford had useful suggestions for the short version that appeared in his Far Futures anthology. While I wrote this longer version David’s insights into the craft of novel writing proved invaluable. He also induced me into feeding his cats at Pleasantville, where I might write undistracted—except for his vast collection of books. Moshe Feder took on the hard job of keeping my slow hand moving with comments and suggestions as he watched over my shoulder via e-mail. And bless the unsung heroes in the Tor production group who gracefully taught me the grammar rules my rebellious teenage mind had refused to learn and who managed to find a way to display an impossibly long title. And Tom Doherty for being there and making books like mine possible.

  PROLOG

  In all of the more than seven hundred centuries of mankind's recorded interstellar wanderings and the more than six hundred centuries since the discovery of the first crude hyperdrives, there have been many regional stellar interregnums. But there has been only one galaxy-wide disintegration which leaves us in awe of its breadth and scope. No part of the Galactic Ecumen escaped.

  The Dark Interregnum between the First and Second Galactic Empires—-beginning with the Nacreome Revolt in the 12,116th year of the Galactic Era and ending with the Pax Pscholaris of 13,157 GE—is often referred to as the Dismal Intellectual Age but, in fact, was a period of renascent, even unexpected, scientific achievement...Many centers of... notably on the Periphery world of Faraway...

  Introduced by exiled Imperial scientists, the walnut-size atomic power pod revolutionized... Faraway's transmutator was a fundamentally new... The levitator...

  But the dynamism of Faraway was not the only source of innovation. During the last three centuries of the disastrous deciine of Splendid Wisdom’s twelve millennia of Empire, the list of scientific inventions of non-imperial and supposedly barbarous...

  ...the Warlords of sybaritic Lakgan, making an abrupt entrance onto the galactic stage in the fourth century of the Dark Interregnum, disturbed the smooth flow of history... while reuniting more than three million stellar systems. It is little realized that the overextended conquests of the False Re viva! were driven by the achievements of the secluded Crafters of the Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift who, for centuries, had held a Lakgan contract to dabble in the science of pleasure-center stimulation. Their totally unforeseen development of a tuned form of the psychic probe, allowing a high-bandwidth linkage between the human brain and an exterior transducer, caused a major perturbation in our Founder’s Great Plan of Galactic Revival by moving human behavior, en masse, outside of the original parameters of human psychology.

  During the early centuries of its debut, the tuned probe’s major utility was unappreciated—it was used mainly as a method to control the emotions of one’s opponents, notably by the brilliant Warlord Citizen of Lakgan, Cloun-the-Stubbom, who unleashed upon the Galaxy a cadre of minstrels adept at playing a visi-harmonar instrument that controlled and set human motivation. Only gradually did the tuned probe come into use as a tool to access a portable quantum-state device that has come to be known to us as the personal familiar. Today such a linkage with a lam” seems obvious; a modem man can hardly understand how, for eighty millennia, the unaided mind...

  Hidden from the tumultuous politics of the Interregnum, a covert group of psychohistorians, whom the Founder left to monitor his work in secret, spent the greater part of the two centuries that followed the Deviation exploring the limits of the tuned probe and integrating its effects into the mathematics of a Revised Plan. This work by the Founder’s elite Pscholars eventually became the basis of the Second Empire, which. .

  —From the Interregnum Exhibit at the Bureau of Historical Sciences

  1

  THE 87TH OF CLOVES, 14,810 GE

  In the Long Ago and Far Away, when the first of our mystically inspired ancestors rose from their animalhood to grope after civilization, our priests declared that the Highest Moral Authority commands a man to refrain from murderering another man. And yet... since those misty times, as mankind scattered its seed among the stars, seeking enlightenment, that very priesthood has always taken upon itself the onerous task of redefining murder to exclude whatever current methods are being used by the pee
rage-of-the-moment to kill their fellow men.

  —Emperor Ojaisun-the-Adrolt, 3231-3245 GE, prior to his execution for depraved malthanatostomy by an ambitious daughter, after being defeated at Lalaw il

  Emit Osa? He should at least—at least—be certain of his own name. He spoke the mental sound. “Eron Osa.” He listened carefully to its echo. EErroonn OOssaa. Until it faded away on a whisper. Eron Osaaaaa...He couldn’t be sure. The resonance was familiar only in a distant way, as if it was an identity he had used as a child. Then who was he now? He was damned if he was going to ask the robed men on the podium.

  A helmeted court crier announced that it was the 87th watch of the month of Cloves of the 14,810th year of the Galactic Era, sixteen centuries and fifty-three years after the establishment of the Second Empire. A court formality.

  Such linear facts, unlike his identity, were water-clear in his mind. Physically he was inside the dermis of invincible Splendid Wisdom, a place he had feared and sought all his life though he couldn’t remember why now that he was here in this teeming vortex of power whose people were so introverted upon themselves that they were hardly conscious of their planet’s rotation around a sun. The 14,810th year On Splendid Wisdom the year was merely the time it took for light to travel one league, and a league saw no dawn or sunset and passed through no seasons. For an unreachable moment Eron was a child staring up at the slow rotation of stars through trees somewhere else in the Galaxy. A league was only the cold 16th power of the meter, another unit so ancient that most scholars believed it had been created by the almost mythical Eta Cumingans—though Eron’s mindless-mind suspected that it was even more primordial than that and in doing so gave him a stabbing hint of a place he had been—in a fully adult body. But the image was gone before he could resolve it.

  All these thoughts were comically inappropriate for a man who was on trial for his life, whose mind was locked up in custody and destined for destruction. Why? For what? It was puzzling. Without his mind, he didn’t even understand the charges.

  Disorientation was evoking a mad mixture of base fear and astonished awe. He was a dumb animal thrust into captivity. Essentials about the nature of his plight were continually eluding his consciousness while trivial physical details received by his senses struck him in unnaturally splendid ways that distracted from some vital quest. Though he recognized this marvelous interior as the revered star chamber of the psychohistorian’s Lyceum—maddeningly, he was never able to recall what failing had brought him here to judgment—if what was going on was a judgment ritual. He was certain that the nobly dressed men in front of him were powerful psychohistorians even while their identities were as hard to bethink as his own.

  His accusers—yes, they were accusing him—had forcibly sundered him from his quantronic “familiar”—and its absence from the back of his neck left vertiginous gaps in his past that staggered him when he tried to perform mentally— the abilities of his “fam” had been part of his mind ever since he had learned how to hug his father’s knees. Did he even remember it being taken? Yet, in spite of mysteries confounding his past, even his recent past, the present remained vivid. The meaning of many things eluded him, but the immediacy of color and shape filled the void, astounding his senses.

  Baroque balcony-stalls, inlaid with carved wood, bridged the plasteel pillars. The pillars rose up, level after level, until they branched into transverse arches and buttresses that blossomed around stained luminescent splendor. In a planet like Splendid Wisdom, crusted over with city, architecture had gone wild with its interior decor. He recognized the famous Cross of the Arkhein, an artifact of Splendid Wisdom predating the Empire by eighteen millennia. Why should he remember so well those hardy settlers who had carved it but remember little else from more recent history?

  Richly surrounded, his famlessness anguished him. When he asked himself simple questions like who had conceived this vast architectural magnificence, his mind received no answer— had the construction predated the Great Sack of Splendid Wisdom? ... but what was this intrusive idea of a devastating Sack?... something to do with the Interregnum?... but just how long ago had this Interregnum blighted the Galaxy?... a century?..^ millennium?...ten millennia?... the numbers, the details, wouldn’t come. No matter. The chamber was beautiful. Why did he think that those brilliant transparencies up there glowed so unnaturally?

  No, no. Avoid these glorious distractions. Focus on the rostrum. Not easy. Though he was sure he was understanding most of the words, the strings of words themselves seemed to meld into gibberish. Half his thoughts could not be completed because large domains of his mind remained unresponsive. Still, some intents formed clearly. When he concentrated, he could follow the emotional tone of the trial well enough to sense that things were proceeding in an ominous way which he was in no position to control. The strategic mistakes he seemed to have made were evidently lethal. He was at the mercy...

  On the carved dais sat an ancient machine, quaint, scuffed, now elevated to ceremonial tasks. It had once hummed unobtrusively in a comer of the Founder’s office, a nondescript disintegrator for debonding unwanted desktop trivia into constituent atoms. The fmstratingly anonymous rulers of this court floated above the rostrum in aerochairs, respectfully girding their machine. Did it serve as their holy executioner?

  He felt strongly that he should be able to attach names to the faces of his accusers. He was certain that he had once known them, every one, powerful psychohistorians all. Every face was familiar. But each face—almost with a name— flickered beyond the reach of his scrutiny. Were they... ?

  Probing the past, trying to give it meaning, became too much of a strain and his attention was drawn, in fascination, to the court’s formal robes—viridian and safranine silken chasubles embroidered with camelian symbols. Unexpectedly those symbols reminded him that he was a mathematician—but the mathematics itself was tantalizingly out of reach. It occurred to him that it must be the loss of the mathematics that he was regretting with such pain.

  A stately Pscholar of the psychohistorians left his chair to stand solemnly beside the Founder’s ancient atomizer. He seemed to be the court’s spokesman, there to announce the collective will. But when he spoke, it was with the voice of a man who made his decisions independently of counsel. “The matter is settled. Eron Osa...”

  The defendant went into alert. So Eron Osa was his name! It annoyed him that the court knew his name well enough to condemn him but that he did not know theirs to condemn them. Still, it was exciting to hear his name verified. It took away one question mark.

  “... is to be executed by disintegrator—his Doom to be carried out immediately.” Evidently this superannuated god liked bare decisions better than any pretty verbal frills of justification that might be attached to them—the old master had no more to say. With a flick of two fingers he called in the bailiffs from the shadows of the balconies and then waited, wearing a long face as he did so. Somehow it was distasteful for him to be personally involved in... murder? But his face showed that he was not thinking of it as murder. As... cleansing?

  The boot-clack of the bailiffs came up behind Eron. A lesser Pscholar on the far end of the rostrum raised his aerochair above the others. He was old, too. He seemed frustrated by the bluntness of the sentence—perhaps preferring a more flowery prelude to execution. “Jars.. ” he began his plea. But the spokesman-judge lifted his hand in a staying motion and the protest went silent. The offending chair sank back to the common level.

  Three bailiffs took their prisoner from behind, their arms replacing the damping-field which had been keeping Eron viscously in place.

  Jars. The thrust of a second recognition elated Eron. It seemed more important to be able to attach a name to this face than to have been sentenced to death. Jars Hanis, of course. A First Ranking psychohistorian. Rector. Had he remembered more than the name? How could a final appeal be made to this man? And in a hurry!

  The name had the confusing ring of solid friend and mentor—but latel
y... did enemy fit? How could old Jars be his enemy? Struggle as Eron might, the name brought up no real memories of conflict, no rationale for the present situation, only bewilderment. Another damn hole in his mind, information he must once have off-loaded into his fam. Or accessed via a fam index.

  When he tried to compose an appeal, no coherent statement formed in his mind.

  The bailiffs stripped him of his robes and advanced him up the stairs onto die elaborately carved podium. He offered no resistance. They were armed with neuronic whips; he could go willingly or go paralyzed. He stared implacably at his scourger, with half an eye on the disintegrator. A young Pscholar was supposed to die with dignity, but, at the moment, Eron Osa couldn’t even remember what dignity meant.

  First Rank psychohistorian Jars Hanis met his gaze with the expressive face of the very experienced who did his duty no matter how great the pain. Eron was not able to read the expression—disdain? fury? triumph? fear of the unknown? It could have been any of these things. Eron’s attention was compellingly turned to the leathery fam that Jars had produced in his hand, Eron’s fam, the mental wealth of one short lifetime, stolen, still whole. He stared at it, coveting all the precious experiences he no longer remembered.

  The First Ranker spoke. “By an infamous act you have violated the conditions of the covenant, Eron Osa, and our duty to mankind calls for us to deal with that offense quickly.” Jars’ hand flicked through a code-gesture, probably the same one that the Founder had used when in a mood to clear his desk. The ancient disintegrator activated, petals opening. Centered within its bronze maw was a light hardly brighter than the ambient illumination, but moving slowly in chaotic turbulence.