Psychohistorical Crisis Read online

Konn’s imposing title was the awesome one of Second Rank Pscholar in a commanding meritocracy that defined only one higher level. “Second” rankled him, and, from dread of his displeasure, he was more often called “Admiral” than “Second”—even though he had never held a military commission at any time in his long life. Only his enemies called him “Second.” He loved his hobby because it rested him from the deadly game of galactic sleuth. The history of military vehicles was so much simpler than tracking down a coming psychohistorical crisis.

  He wore simple naval uniforms—but deliberately chose them from a selection several eons out of date to fend off complaints by backbone-stiff naval regulars who felt in their staid hearts that the impersonation of a naval officer ought to be a capital crime. His skull was shaved in curious planter-rows of tuft and skin-shine, the legendary style of Kambal-the-First whose cabal of renegade ships had first conquered this planet of the central galactic glitter when it had been a minor world of farmers and tradesmen quietly innocent of their strategic location and meritorious climate. The gulfs of space had once been a moat that protected the castle planets of civilization. By Kambal’s time, the central galactic bulge was swarming with shipwise nomadic “barbarians” hungering for a better place to live than the desolate homeworlds settled by their unfortunate ancestors. Kambal was the archetype of an admiral.

  After a lifetime of looking, Konn had been able to collect only a few mementos of the Horezkor might of the sixth millennium, notably several precious photos of the war-craft’s immense interior by the warrior-mistress of Emperor Daigin-the-Jaw. The relevant design files for the ship had vanished from naval archives somewhen in the last nine millennia, perhaps destroyed during the Great Sack of Splendid Wisdom in the dark years, perhaps the victim of housecleaning.

  But now he had everything he needed for a full reconstruction, It had happened suddenly after years of frustration. To the delight of Hahukum Konn, his protoge, Nejirt, had reported back to Splendid Wisdom from his evaluation assignment in the obscure Ulmat Constellation with a grin on his face and (in his diplomatic pouch) working assembly virtuals evidently used to refurbish at least two of the legendary Horezkor dreadnoughts during the warlord period of the Interregnum. Of course it didn’t really matter if they ever got the model put together or not.

  What really mattered, and Hahukum knew it, was the stability of the Second Empire in an era of subtle cultural Complexification which made the old equations work slightly differently than they had in the past. The future was always branching, branching, branching—and there were more branches in this golden age than there had ever been before, some of them dangerous. Hahukum’s thoughts of the past bulkheads—still breathing—as if being stripped, exposed,, and flayed had not yet brought defeat, only the readiness to strike out with one last deadly flash at anyone from the stars who dared to attack.

  Beyond was the panorama of a mottled planet under siege.

  The Horezkor was a major warship of the Middle Empire period, produced in minor quantities, the first one being commissioned in the year 5517 GE. Almost three thousand were built during that century, many serving well beyond normal retirement age.

  “The Mad Admiral” had been working with pleasure on this unfinished model of the ancient Imperial dreadnought. The Horezkor dominated the ebony hover-space above the bridge’s workshop table. ,So formidable was this vast war-machine that it cast upon Konn an unreal aura, as if he were a giant placed among the stars. One might hardly notice that both ship and man were embedded in a vast scholarly maze deep inside the Lyceum metropolis where students were apprenticed to the psychohistorians of Splendid Wisdom’s Second Empire, a Lyceum itself embedded in a planetary city that regulated the commerce and life of the Galaxy.

  Konn’s imposing title was the awesome one of Second Rank Pscholar in a commanding meritocracy that defined only one higher level. “Second” rankled him, and, from dread of his displeasure, he was more often called “Admiral” than “Second”—even though he had never held a military commission at any time in his long life. Only his enemies called him “Second.” He loved his hobby because it rested him from the deadly game of galactic sleuth. The history of military vehicles was so much simpler than tracking down a coming psychohistorical crisis.

  He wore simple naval uniforms—but deliberately chose them from a selection several eons out of date to fend off complaints by backbone-stiff naval regulars who felt in their staid hearts that the impersonation of a naval officer ought to be a capital crime. His skull was shaved in curious planter-rows of tuft and skin-shine, the legendary style of Kambal-the-First whose cabal of renegade ships had first conquered this planet of the central galactic glitter when it had been a minor world of farmers and tradesmen quietly innocent of their strategic location and meritorious climate. The gulfs of space had once been a moat that protected the castle planets of civilization. By Kambal’s time, the central galactic bulge was swarming with shipwise nomadic “barbarians” hungering for a better place to live than the desolate homeworlds settled by their unfortunate ancestors. Kambal was the archetype of an admiral.

  After a lifetime of looking, Konn had been able to collect only a few mementos of the Horezkor might of the sixth millennium, notably several precious photos of the war-craft’s immense interior by the warrior-mistress of Emperor Daigin-the-Jaw. The relevant design files for the ship had vanished from naval archives somewhen in the last nine millennia, perhaps destroyed during the Great Sack of Splendid Wisdom in the dark years, perhaps the victim of housecleaning.

  But now he had everything he needed for a full reconstruction. It had happened suddenly after years of frustration. To the delight of Hahukum Konn, his protege, Nejirt, had reported back to Splendid Wisdom from his evaluation assignment in the obscure Ulmat Constellation with a grin on his face and (in his diplomatic pouch) working assembly virtuals evidently used to refurbish at least two of the legendary Horezkor dreadnoughts during the warlord period of the Interregnum. Of course it didn’t really matter if they ever got the model put together or not.

  What really mattered, and Hahukum knew it, was the stability of the Second Empire in an era of subtle cultural Complexification which made the old equations work slightly differently than they had in the past. The future was always branching, branching, branching—and there were more branches in this golden age than there had ever been before, some of them dangerous. Hahukum’s thoughts of the past mingled with his thoughts of present concerns. He could trust Nejirt to find for him the plans of an old battleship, but how far could he trust Nejirt to pick those futures for mankind that would keep the soul of the race alive?

  There was an unfortunate conservatism in this twenty-five-year-old boy. Rigidity? It was a worry. He always had potatoes with whatever he ate. He listened only to music that had a beat. Not that Konn wasn’t a conservative himself. The trick was in what you conserved. All successful radicals built their careers on a very carefully chosen foundation. The mathematical system of the Founder wasn’t a public info-machine that automatically answered questions it already had on file; psychohistory was an instrument that had to be strummed by a musician.

  One had to listen for, and pick out, futures as well as predict them.

  A good psychohistorian was as much a composer as he was a seer. Rigid musicians made bad music. Could Nejirt tell the difference between the traditions that actually buttressed the foundations of society and the thousands of trivial traditions, mere baroque decorations? Would he listen to beatless music and hear nonmusic?

  While the Admiral worked on his battleship model, his mind played with subversive scenarios of galactic politics. About trouble. About longings for action. It wasn’t enough to be intuitively sensitive to the subtle susurrous of dark hints unnoticed by ordinary ears like those of Jars Hanis. It wasn’t enough to be able to hear the rustle of armed malefactors somewhere out there in the jungle of stars. The kind of impalpable sensitivity that Konn was so proud of in himself was certainly the mark of genius—bu
t, as his enemies were quick to point out, it was also the mark of the superstitious fool and the mark of the wacky paranoid. He needed evidence more confrontable than subversion masquerading in the open as background noise.

  Damn it, he needed to be on the bridge of a modem Horzekor fighting an enemy he could get his teeth into.

  There was much to be said for sitting at a comfortable desk within a handwave of the most powerful simulators in the Galaxy while statistically filtering the data arriving via Splendid Wisdom's pervasive stellar bureaucracy-—but seeing a villain emerge as an unexpected pattern in false color overlays and slashing such a villain in- the flesh were two different things; in the end there would be no escaping the plunge into that tenebrous galactic maelstrom out there and returning with his culprits on a sling.

  But he needed bodies, plots, the location of bases. He needed his hands on an enemy agent who could be questioned at length. He needed loyal soldiers brilliant enough to do his dirty work.

  Not easy. Konn had long ago learned that to get results he often had to act without authorization. That made his work more difficult. He had no allies. The others—that grandiose Hanis—were all tramping down the path of greatest probability—the easy way to go that led who knew where, The most probable of futures could suddenly branch into a thousand pathways flying by too swiftly for deliberate mathematical choice. For twenty-seven centuries the psychohistorians had ruled, and they all seemed to think this had earned them an eternal ride.

  The whole of the Pscholarly collective adamantly believed there were no mysterious adversaries; they denied Konn’s analysis, unable to believe that the foundation of a crisis was already under construction—shouldn’t the Founder’s mathematics be predicting it?

  The Admiral cursed as he attached a part to his model and it fell off. Every generation had to relearn that its map of the universe was only a map, that no map contains all the details. For years, Konn was turning up contradictions that the Founder’s model couldn’t account for-—bizarre tiny effects drowned by the brilliance of the main model of psychohistory. The anomalies were so slim that even Konn had his doubts. Doubt didn’t deter him. To follow the course of rightness one has to be willing to be wrong. Those who were most certain of their rightness had the highest probability of being wrong.

  Would he dare deputize Nejirt for an unauthorized and dangerous ferreting mission? That was the question he was mulling at the back of his mind. Damn, but that boy was late. He picked up the fallen part with his microwaldo and repositioned it

  The Horezkor warship was an astonishing joy to rebuild. There were distinct advantages to being a powerful psychohistorian with spiderlike access to any part of the governed Galaxy! He could., even without majority consent, send out talented boys, anywhere, to carry out his desires. If he put these boys to serving the interests of his hobby, well, he could always say that he was “giving them valuable research experience.” With alert students like Nejirt pandering shamelessly for him, life lost part of its deadly seriousness, sometimes even becoming amusing. Power was always limited, but earned power was still power. From the very earliest months of his rule-confined youth, deep down in Splendid’s bedrock warrens, Hahukum had known how to use and abuse power without crossing the fatal line of self-destruction.

  He admired the half-completed dreadnought smugly. Nejirt had been indispensable. If this youth could be so brilliant at espionage when success didn’t matter, perhaps he was the ferret Konn could trust for the big job.

  This ship was such a find! Manipulators inserted a tiny bulkhead hatch. What a story! Dark Age brigands had plundered two colossal Horezkors from an abandoned Imperial Space Museum of an earlier age. The pirates had acted on commission from the warlords of a vanished kingdom called the Thrall of the Mighty. Priceless loot! Such ingenious scavengers, those Interregnum cutthroats! There seemed to be no record of the final fate of the two dreadnoughts—lost in the internecine battles of a violent age—but a third hull, ransacked for spare parts and thereby crippled, stoically rode on display at the Ulmat’s central hyperspace terminal in the Mowist System in the Ulmat, the last remains of a naval memorial to a fearsome emperor.

  The model’s savaged bridge was exposed to the depredations of Konn’s tweezers. Piping hung loose as if teased aside by a robosurgeon’s expert scalpel. From the workbench Konn stared at his creation, contemplating his next addition. He sat relaxed in a frozen pose with a cup of mint tea in one hand and a miniature hyperatomic motor in the other, his fingers doodling with its brilliant red and silver surface. The goggles of the microwaldo manipulator perched above his eyebrows. Skintight control gloves for the waldo, yellow, lay flopped across the weapons rigging.

  This was the mock-up of a warship so vast that even scaled to the length of two tall men, it had to be toured by miniature camera. Konn was deciding whether a virtual diagram would help him during the next stage of the restoration. Any tri-dim or cutaway or exploded view that he might need could be evoked from the wall emitters by the mnemonifiers.

  How could he best use Nejirt Kambu while hiding his purpose from Jars? He put that extraneous thought aside to concentrate on an immediate assembly problem.

  Though intended for psychohistorical inquiry, the workshop’s mnemonifiers had been blatantly loaded with arcane files of naval architectonics. It was another misuse of power, but a powerful psychohistorian was allowed his harmless foibles. His interest went as far back into the mists of time as hand could reach, to the confusing ocean, air, and space vessels of the prehyperflight cultures of the Sirius Sector who seemed to have enviously adopted and mixed each other’s histories in order to claim the role as the original forebears of galactic mankind.

  When the workshop walls weren’t in use to display the inner guts of eighty millennia of warcraft, they played fanfare to the Admiral’s spirits by championing the deeds and valor of the recent but bygone Empire. Konn enjoyed this chance to exhibit the masterpieces from his hoard of military art. All his life he had been culling through the long tradition of a bureaucracy that had obsessively commissioned panoramic spectacles to glorify the exploits of Imperial Grandeur. Some of it had survived the Sack.

  Behind the model Horezkor, to complete the illusion of awesome might, a surround screen radiated with the somber depths of an ancient artist’s vision: larger than life, a Middle Empire fleet—each ship emblazoned with the feared Stars&Ship—was palpably engrossed in its patrol over a pastel planet unruffled by signs of the fury which mankind’s fiercest navy had been able to drop upon it. The artist was a master of the kind of double-meanings that can be slipped past an arrogant Emperor. In his ironic vision, the Imperial Navy had been shrunk down to a mere swarm of insectoids whose annoying bites on the vast world below could be discerned only by a viewer’s most careful scrutiny.

  Nejirt arrived late, stepping through the workshop’s airseal shutter, but not uncomfortably late, and Konn showed off the newest details of the miniature dreadnought to his student, without whom the reconstruction would be nowhere. The meeting began with polite conversation.
  Nejirt seemed glad to postpone what he knew was going to turn into an intellectual sparring match of major proportions. He noticed in Konn’s hand the red and silver replica of the ship’s huge hyperatomic motor. “Nice motor. You’re sure of those? The hulk at Mowist that I saw has long been stripped of its motors. They have pretty fakes installed, but ones I wouldn’t trust for authenticity.”

  “Ah, but remember that I multisource my data! Look at this!” The larger-than-life panorama of the planetary siege winked out. It was replaced by a virtual training demo from the Middle Empire period. A guild technician’s inspection tour now rolled tridimensionally across t
he wall, zooming in for close-ups of every possible repair of a bulky hyperfield generator, a behemoth when compared with the elegant designs that had begun to appear during the Interregnum.

  Discussing ancient warships wasn’t the real business on the agenda. Hahukum Konn began to search for a way to break off his fan and get on with the serious tasks. He put his tools aside and washed his hands in the sprayer while he continued the irrelevant small talk.

  The students of the Lyceum knew him as a queer soul, and he suspected that he was not always liked—they looked askance at the political wars he waged within the Fellowship—-First Rank Jars Hanis was constantly at loggerheads with him—but he had earned his Second Rank status honestly via an uncanny ability to extract significant morsels out of almost noise-level data. His sifting skill with raw input had earned him subtle immunities, and he used immunity to violate custom whenever he damn well felt like it. He knew Nejirt was in awe of him. He was quite willing to exploit that awe.

  What to do?

  Decisions! He was faced with a promising acolyte who had spent a year knocking about the Ulmat and whose maturity required careful assessment before Jhe could be considered for any more critical assignment. Konn was not a man who trusted, on faith, a student fresh out of the Lyceum’s top institute, not even one who came with the highest recommendations, not even one who brought him delightful gifts—especially not when a henchman of Jars Hanis had been on his examination board. Nejirt was still only a promise in spite of all the formidable course work he had done. It was a delicate matter. There was grilling to be done.

  Perhaps he should delay. He could soften Nejirt by inviting him for this evening’s dog hunt through the wilderness tunnels—-but the dogs would be a distraction. There seemed to be no avoiding an arena duel across a stage of high-powered analytical tools.

  Konn finished washing his hands only after his meditations had taken the suds all the way up to the elbows. "Glad you came at my call. I’ve famfed your report.” He meant that he had scanned the boy’s report directly into his familiar, bypassing his eyes. “I’ve had time to think about it.” By which he meant that his quantronically sentient fam had done most of the work of assimilating the contents for his dual-brain. “We need to review some points together. I've set up a room for us.”