Psychohistorical Crisis Read online

  “Yes, sir”

  The young Pscholar followed his older mentor out onto a mezzanine looking down on the Lyceum’s great yard, which was sometimes used for rallies but more often used to stage spectacular displays. Its four-story-tall illusions were controlled by a hundred million computers, awesome when the lights were dimmed and, say, the whole galactic spiral was on display. At the moment, they had no need for that kind of tool. They disappeared down a ramp into the maze of the operations complex, Konn’s territory, his hub, his neuron with its dendritic reach out into the stellar cortex of the civilization of man.

  It was a short walk from there to an augmented sanctum off one of the neutral corridors. The two psychohistorians took a moment to tune their fams into a slice of the Lyceum’s main computer mind. Konn called up the relevant reports into a virtual carousel for easy access. “Grab a seat,” he said over his shoulder while selecting the equipment he wanted. Five chairs surrounded a small amphitheater, and the Seventh Rank youth slipped into the nearest. Illumination faded to dark.

  The emplacement had the tense feel of a battle station; Hahukum Konn was, himself, fond of fantasizing this tiny arena into the fantasy turret of an imaginary Second Empire warship—one with magical hypersight that could zoom anywhere and weapons whose persuasive range was galactic— but he kept his silly whimsy to himself. He activated the projector. Above the central bowl appeared a holo summary of die Ulmat operation. Either of them had the option of superimposing their comments as a fam-generated overlay.

  In die lull that followed the holo bloom, Konn watched Nejirt cautiously analyze what had been done to his numbers. There was a strongly implied criticism of his work buried in Haliahim Komi’s compact summary. The young psychohistorian settled into a solid defensive posture and waited patieciy for Konn to initiate the first sortie. When the Admiral waited him out, the boy spoke, apparently only to break the silence, for his voice was bland, hardly listening to what he was. saying, mind focused on the display, storing up answers for the debate to come. “It was a lively field study you handed me, far more fascinating than any of those stereotypical cases we slaved over in sim.”

  “The Ulmat Constellation may be a mere field study to you,” Konn began gently,' “but I see it as a brewing disaster in a kettle. The site needs attention—even attack—now, long before it goes critical. I’ll tell you what’s bothering me. I’m not clear about your inference on the resonant pumping. You don’t seem to take the buildup toward crisis seriously. I’ve seen similar patterns of crisis in many different places. Please explain.”

  Konn was referring to the odd psychosocial interactions he had long detected between the Ulmat worlds, deadly pushes and pulls that were feeding on each other and seemed to lead with a high probability to what the Pscholars called a topozone crossing. In layman’s language that meant a region where the time-constant for reliable prediction became short—the Ulmat was moving into prophecy-shadow, a flash of historical turbulence that would temporarily blind psychohistory’s prescient eye.

  Nejirt was unperturbed, even amused by Konn’s concern. He spoke politely. “I made extensive use of the Hasef-Im test. The resonance has passed its maximum and has even been decoupled.” He communicated some mathematics directly through fam interchange, all of it too compact and modem for an old hand like Konn to grasp. “Consequently it isn’t liable to recur for centuries. The disturbance seems to have moved into a damped phase.” The tense young Pscholar accented his words by adding dashes of color to the holograph that hovered between them. Irrelevant—but pleasant formatting. Second Raters loved their formatting.

  He's trying to snow me, grumbled Konn to himself, wishing that these freshmen would at least attempt to talk less like pendants. The Admiral had never heard of the Hasef-Im test. Another damn thing he was going to have to blot up to keep abreast of these damn kids! He wasn’t rattled; the test was probably one of those arty-smarty things that saved students from boiling their own coffee so that they’d have more time for drinking. More power to them. What he did notice was that Nejirt was wary of him and not willing to talk outside of his orthodox report. Not good. It spoke of a mind unable to explore beyond the safety of preestablished umbilicals.

  Konn was blunt. “Damping? It doesn’t look like brakes to me. Maybe, but I’d be damn careful before I believed it. I check and double-check everything that has a bad consequence. I picked up the Ulmat effect ten years ago when no one else saw it. And we only began to apply decoupling efforts three years ago, my shot. I’d prefer to clobber a perturbation that dangerous when its snorkel is just peeking above the noise level, but standard operations call for countermeasures with minimal visibility. I’m outvoted and I agree that’s probably for the best. But here you are seriously suggesting that these gentle countermeasures have been effective already! All we’ve done so far in the Ulmat is start a five-man news group and an aggressive local cut-rate hypertrip service—it should be another decade before we can even measure our tampering!”

  “I haven’t claimed that the countermeasures have been effective at all-—-I agree, not enough time—I think the damping is a normal chaos intrusion. The Ulmat perturbation just fizzled. That’s normal. Most perturbations do fizzle.”

  “I’m not sure we even know what’s been driving the perturbation,” grumbled Konn.

  Nejirt Kambu tried to hide a smile. “You suspect a conspiracy?”

  “We do not need a conspiracy to account for the disturbance.” The “Crazy Admiral” was used to needling and never lost his temper. Konn was chided widely for his conspiracy theories. Jars Hanis and his crowd even made a regular issue of it “There’s an old saying that if you kiss a girl on Ixno you can start a chain of events that leads to violent revolution on Splendid Wisdom—it would be easy to assume that the whole Ulmat perturbation began with something as innocent as a kiss. Then the situation is not dangerous at all.” Konn couldn’t resist a note of sarcasm. “Then even a novice like you could handle it” He paused for emphasis. “But if it were a conspiracy...”

  “Highly improbable,” said Nejirt indulgently. What he meant was impossible. “You know that.”

  I do, do I? What Konn hadn’t told Nejirt Kambu was that the recently conceived Ulmat correctives were designed on the assumption that there was a conspiracy. A bluff, of course, but sometimes, when one took a shot in the dark at the sound of a twig snapping, one was rewarded with the discreetly muffled flight of surprised feet. That was, in itself, more information than could ever be deduced from the mere snapping of a twig. “Just for the sake of argument suppose someone was deliberately trying to move the Ulmat beyond the sight of all Pscholars in order to create a staging area for a major revolt”

  Nejirt’s polite amusement remained. “That someone would be so ineffective that we wouldn’t even notice. The deviation from normal fluctuation wouldn’t be measurable.” “Oh? Because...?”

  “Sir, you are trying to force me to say that the interference could be measurable because your conspirator could be utilizing some crude form of psychohistorical manipulation?” “Indulge me.”

  The boy backstepped. No traps for him. “The Founder set up Faraway so that as it developed politically the Pscholars could...”

  “... could do what we have done,” rumbled an annoyed Konn. “Set up a stable political climate in which the leadership of Splendid Wisdom is accepted because it is effective. We predict disasters and prevent them. I admit we are good at it, especially me. List me some disasters.”

  Nejirt laughed at an obviously rhetorical request.

  The Admiral ground on. “Let’s skip over mundane calamities and the ones we handle after the fact by managing their consequences. Let’s talk about a real upheaval—somebody confronting us with our own mathematics. Do you really expect that our methods will never be duplicated? Knowing what we expect to happen, they could counter us.” “But if they were that good, they would come to the same conclusions we do and implement the same solutions. Converging technology
. After seventy thousand years don’t all aircraft have the same optimal forms? There would be a period of discord, then the two groups would merge.”

  Konn was furious but did not challenge; he nodded in concession. It was not agreement he felt What he was concluding pained him—his mind had filled with an abrupt decision not to work with this brilliant young man in whom he had placed so much hope. He was bitterly disappointed. He is not my son. How many well-trained blind conservatives could the Lyceum graduate in one year? Too damn many.

  Still, Hahukum Konn couldn't have forced the discussion further even had he wanted to. The Admiral was an intuitive thinker, not a verbal one. The boy he disagreed with was right by all the symbolic arguments known to Konn. They had been through the same school and forged from the same curriculum, and, aside from a different level of maturity, they thought with the same words. Certainly the Founder had established the central result rather definitively.

  The overwhelming probability was that any infant group trying to duplicate the modus operandi of psychohistory would be subsumed by the parent body, the amalgamation being driven by self-interest. If two organizations were practicing psychohistory independently, their forecasts would countermand each other and thus become useless. What could be the incentive for mastering a very difficult subject only to choose to use it in a way that made it ineffective?

  If everyone were free to choose a different future for mankind, the tug-of-war would ensure the realization of nobody's future—all freedom would be lost in gridlock and all men would become the slaves of chaos. Total freedom ere-ates the ultimate dungeon. Whenever a man decides to expand his degrees of freedom by doing something really sassy, like taking up residence in a sunspot, he is soon locked into a situation in which he has no degrees of freedom at all. There are always boundaries to freedom.

  The Founder had chosen to pursue a political system that defined near-optimal boundaries. Then he had gone on to create a society that maximized general freedoms by eliminating foolish futures. He had never pretended that this was to be done by fatalizing the lives of individual men—any more than an engineer would try to force a deterministic path on each atom passing through an optimized heat engine.

  The Founder’s proof that only a single psychohistory would evolve (as a single physics had long ago evolved) was lengthy and tortured, but it had been refined by twenty-seven centuries of polishing. Konn of the Second Rank had been over the proof personally and whatever flaw it might contain, he was not the mathematician to find it—he was no theoretician; his talent was a nose that quivered when data smelled slighdy different than theory tasted.

  Long ago Konn had accepted the whole thesis that within the political system created by the Founder, it was impossible for any group out there among the stars to duplicate psychohistory. He would have said that the work of the Pscholars during the Interregnum had made it impossible. Eveifnow his best logic yielded the Founder’s scenario. But such traditional reasoning no longer moved him. Hahukum Konn had worked his way up from Splendid’s bedrock to Second Rank by never taking anything for granted. His eighty-three years had taught him to be a man of iron principle. He never, never finagled data to fit theory. And the data...

  The data contradicted the Founder!

  What disturbed Konn was that the Ulmat wasn’t the only anomaly. There were many more. There were fully thirty-seven perturbations he couldn’t account for to his liking. In a Galaxy of a hundred quadrillion humans, it was hardly surprising that some locations resisted the long-term direction of the Pscholars’ Fellowship. Yes, chance alone could be responsible. But psychohistory, a gambler who owned the house, had ages ago mastered the herding of chance. (Even the weather on Splendid Wisdom was managed by the deft application of manageable forces: evaporation towers, control of atmospheric perfluorocarbons, etc.) That made these thirty-seven trouble spots peculiar; for more than a century they had been maverick. It was as if the weather had developed its own goals and cunning. Meteorologists have no equations for intelligent weather.

  Mindless and unminded chaos will lunge out of its .masking cover at unpredictable times to wipe out the finest forecast of man and computer, creating vast regions of turbulent history requiring the finest of the Pscholars’ resources to calm. The Second Empire depended upon the vigilance and eye of men like Hahukum Konn for its very survival; he was one of those patient predators who scanned the Cimmerian borders of predictability with a cat’s green eye. And he was afraid that they were now facing a chaos which had evolved enough intelligence to oppose psychohistory. That was a chilling thought. Evil is no ally of morality. Evil would be willing to destroy the whole of the stability that the Founder had achieved.

  Konn found that he was recording Nejirt’s measured speeches but was no longer listening to them.

  The seriousness of the circumstances demanded that the Admiral choose his hunting dogs prudently. His standards were not going to permit Nejirt to become his trusted aide. Despair! Nejirt was the fifth promising student he’d had to reject. Whom could he rely on? Who was there to use in the field?

  Perhaps he’d have to go outside of the Lyceum. Catch them young, like the navy did. There were a thousand academies out among the reaches, pretraining aspiring psychohistorians. Take some youths, early, and shape their outlook years before the conservatives got to them. An Admiral’s cadre! He grumbled at the unlikeliness of it. Maybe. Desperate times brought desperate measures.

  Nejirt was a little upset, beginning to repeat himself in the way people will when they feel they no longer have an audience. Konn was a kind man; it was no use berating an acolyte for failing to meet high expectations. Use him for what he did well and let it go. Konn refocused. “Well, we’ve shaipened our wits on each other to the point where I’m very hungry. I know a place where we can sharpen our knives on roast pig. You haven’t said a word about your girlfriend yet. Last time you couldn’t stop talking about her. And when my belly is full you can clue me in on this Hasef-Im newfangle about which I know nothing.”

  It was Nejirt’s sleep-watch and so he went home to bed after a pleasant dinner and stroll on the Balasante Concourse with his mentor, but it was prime-watch for Konn—he was only beginning his “day.” He chose the rigor of the hunt to cool down his brain but never really stopped thinking about his student. During the yapping of the dogs through his Club’s meticulously groomed hydroponic wilderness he took the time to think up a promising dead-end job for his protege—a job that needed to be executed with great competence but one that did not require more talent than Nejirt possessed. The thirty million star systems to be monitored had plenty of places for boys like Nejirt.

  Thirty million was a comforting number. Those thirty million systems surely contained at least one hoy who could be molded into a master sleuth.

  Konn’s favorite dog, big-eared and black-spotted, trotted up and rose to his haunches, two succulent gessem in his jaw, one with a broken wing. Using his long gengineered fingers he handed the fat, bald cave-flyers to his human before settling back on his knuckles. Konn bagged the birds, patting his assistant on the head, “Atta boy, Rhaver!” and began to unholster the beast’s stun gun. “ICanDoItMyself,” grumbled the dog in a throaty dog accent that only dog lovers can understand. Konn smiled. The dog understood the smile as permission to take over the unstrapping of his weapon. He struck a pose of importance.

  It wasn’t impossible that someday Konn might hunt down

  a boy instead of cave-flying gessem. He would train the boy to be his prize hunter, as he had trained Rhaver. How could he let the Lyceum continue to deliver him mere wolves? “Does hunting please you, Rhaver?” Rhaver thumped his tail against the ground and licked the bejeweled rings on his tree-climbing fingers before swirling around to try to catch the itch on his tail.

  Ah, thought the psychohistorian, if only dogs had been bred for brains as well as for hunting prowess!

  3

  THE TWELVE-YEAR-OLD SON OF THE ADJUDICATOR, 14,790 GE

  Ag
ander developed in a difficult location nested between the roils of a messy nebular cloud and positioned off the natural interstellar trade routes. Socially it might have evolved into an eremitic world disjoint from the neighboring Ulmat stars, but its moderate climate and abundance of water formed an attractive haven that counterbalanced its isolation. For the first twenty-two thousand years after colonization Agander remained a free state, sure of its immunity from the flaws of the universe. As a paradise it was able to seduce the loyalty and lust and envy of the distant Ulmat peoples who claimed Agander as one of their own; as an island it was able to remain aloof from the “local" politics.

  Nine millennia ago, abrupt change swept the Ulmat Constellation.

  In5643 GE...

  All our mathematical studies of Ganderian society have shown a stable Esfo-Naifin Quandary-Chain installed at the time of Agandefs unexpected and forced subjugation to the First Empire, characterized by a violated sense of invulnerability and expressed as an unwillingness to be vulnerable.

  If we choose to exploit this Quandary-Chain, we can expect that within a century...

  —Oversee Probe Search code Report Orange-4:

  Possible Sites for a Forced Theac-Chaos Event

  Dated Version: 14,642y/08m/37w/7h/78i

  Author: CronCom

  Twelve-year-old Eron Osa, being the son of the Adjudicator to the Ulman of Agander, was allowed the run of the Ul-man’s summer Alcazar, He used his privilege to engage the unwary in charming conversation that always had an ulterior motive. His spying he disguised with innocence. He wasn’t malicious: just curious about the love lives of his elders, the political relationships of Ganderians to the stars of the night sky, and, most important, curious about who among his peers were going to get sent to the best schools. He had never met a school he liked and had been expelled from more than a few, which was why his father had hired a private tutor.