Far futures, p.28
Far Futures, page 28
“No, we’ll have to consult Dad’s fam for help. I don’t see any other way.”
That meant she was suggesting a conversation with Scogil’s ghoul. “Kid, I can’t read or interact with the storage areas of my fam that were private to your father. All I can do is write over them. I can steal his bits for myself. Eventually even the best error-correcting routines won’t be able to salvage much of him.”
“But he’s in there, thinking. He can see with your eyes and hear with your ears.”
“But he can’t make any sense out of that input because we use different codes.”
“I’m really annoyed at myself,” she said. “When he split off with his fam, he gave me a ticket out and a new identity. He told me to run like a stellar flare was scorching my tail. I should have done that. Dad always told me that youth had to be extra careful because we lack judgment. I think he was right. I didn’t run. I disobeyed orders and now no one knows he’s in trouble. I couldn’t leave him. I’m the only one tuned to his fam. I can find it anywhere within a planet’s radius—my mommy’s doing. That’s why I was hanging around at the Teaser’s. Maybe I’ve made a terrible mistake and interfered. Were you involved with Dad in some great cosmic scheme?”
“I don’t know. Someone who identified himself only as my benefactor told me to pick up the fam from Rigone.”
“We have to talk to Dad!” she wailed. “He has contacts and I don’t know who they are!”
Eron felt a sudden pity for her—and for himself as her prisoner. “I have contacts, too. Let me use them.”
“No. I don’t trust you. Not with my dad on your back! You’re a criminal.”
“Petunia. I’ll make a contract with you. Let me send out one message that involves a personal professional matter of mine and in exchange I’ll work very hard to communicate with the fam half of your father. I was once a zenoli mind-adept and that may help. I can use that exotic stuff now that I own a fam.”
“You’ll work hard ’cause I tell you to!”
“Child, there is a subtle difference between a willing slave and a reluctant slave. In this case it makes all the difference in the galaxy. You are asking me to do something that has never been done before. If I’m willing, we may succeed. If I’m forced, we may only try.” It was a lie; there was no hope.
She considered. “I see the message and I pay for it!”
“We’ll have to buy a portable nonlocatable receiver. Cheapest model. And hide it in a secure place.”
The details were completed later that day. When the message was composed to his nameless fan, it read: “Dear woman of the broad-brimmed fuchsia hat: I desperately need a copy of the monograph you so fortuitously saved. Send it by Personal Capsule, if text still extant. I retain my coding for untraceable delivery. Eron Osa.”
“You better be leveling,” threatened Petunia, “or I’ll make an adjustment to mush your brain!”
9
Q: Unfortunately, at this junction in time, the Psychohistorical monitoring of the Founder’s Plan has inadvertently been exposed to view due to recent rebalancing of the unpredicted perturbations involving the military adventures of Cloun the Stubborn. It has been claimed that, with the Plan one-third complete, the Visible Arm of the Fellowship is so superstitiously addicted to the Plan that they will not care to interfere with it by attacking whatever monitors of the Plan might exist What are the mathematical consequences of allowing our exposure to persist?
A: All such computed courses of action indicate a rapid deterioration of the Plan, either because the Visible Arm finds and destroys its Mentalist monitors, or because an open conflict arises between the two and destroys their symbiosis. At the ninety-five-percent confidence level, both of these alternate historical branches either lead to a Second Empire that repeats the cycle of the First, or to a return of the chaotic galactic conditions extant prior to the First Empire.
Q: How then may the original design be restored?
A: If all those who now resent the monitoring of their actions by Mental Science were led to believe that all Mental Scientists with such power had been destroyed, the galactic situation would restabilize around the parameters of the original Plan, leaving only minor alternations in the probabilities of success. The window of opportunity is short. The apparent destruction of the Mentalists must occur within twenty-five years—before the Shadow Arm’s present group of adversaries fragments into thousands of independent sub-sociogroups.
—The First Speaker Questions a Student: Notes made during the Crisis of the Great Perturbation, fourth century Founders Era.
Second Rank Hahukum Kon soberly pointed out over the railing of the fourth-floor balcony of the domed Lyceum fortress, his finger sweeping across the galactic simulacrum that filled the whole of the enclosed bailey. Kon wore a sky-blue jumpsuit, unfashionable, of the sort that one might find on a naval mechanic.
Nejirt Kambu stood with him, a little embarrassed that he had dressed for the meeting in formal black frock coat with silver striped zoot pants. He had been hired by the eccentric old “Admiral,” sight unseen, and had signed on for the Coron’s Wisp assignment solely on the basis of Kon’s reputation as the best trouble-spotter at the Lyceum. Nejirt had been unsure of what he might expect at a first encounter with a man of such rank and reputation.
“The regions in blue are the full-scale battle theaters,” explained Kon.
Nejirt made a quick estimate that the blue covered perhaps one percent of the Second Empire, a realm more imposing in this huge model than it was from the dwarfed viewport of a spaceship. Kon had not yet defined what he meant by such an alarming phrase as “battle theater” but he was a man infamous for using alarming phrases. Coron’s Wisp was well within one of the designated regions. “And how do we determine what is to be classed as blue?”
“The blue are regions of intractable uncertainty, my specialty if you’ve followed my career,” said Kon with acerbity.
Nejirt nodded, not willing to make a second faux pas.
“I’ve been raving for years about war,” complained Kon. He squeezed at his remote console and the simulacrum changed. “This is as the Empire stood one hundred years ago. The pale yellow and the gold cover all areas where the probability of deviation from prediction was greater than five percent, the gold indicating sites of strategic dynamism where failure of our predictions would have consequences meeting the Founder’s criteria of direness. My predecessors, of course, sent rectifying teams into the gold regions. Now watch as I overlay the blue.” All of the blue appeared inside the gold. “It’s a statistical anomaly.”
Corrective measures had either not worked or been counterproductive, deduced Nejirt. Kon was going to be an interesting man to work for.
“As a young man I took such anomalies as my research project. It has always been assumed that these were random deviations. For my thesis in psychohistory I was going to prove that they were indeed random deviations.” He grumbled. “I kept coming up with nonrandom correlations, not big ones, mind you, but big enough to pique my interest. As a young man I thought, in my naiveté, that my research would be welcome. My research has not been welcome and I am considered somewhat of a wild man, but I’m also conservative and I never step on toes bigger than mine, and I always make sure that good hunks of my work are orthodox. So I have a solid reputation, notably in refinements of the Founder’s alexian tool to determine historical topozones. What would a region of intractable uncertainty mean to you?”
“Off the top of my head I would say that your blue sites have traits placing them adjacent to a local topozone surface,” said Nejirt.
“I sent you to sniffing in such a region, one of my pet test sites, and you came back to tell me that astrology is the main countervailing force at work in Coron’s Wisp. Do you believe that? I don’t. Does it make sense?”
“No, sir.”
“When I started my research, my measurements told me that it was only a twenty-percent probability that these regions were being driven toward the local topozone surface. Within the last year that probability has risen to ninety-five percent. What does that say to you?” Once any one of those regions spilled out of its topozone, the whole region became unpredictable.
“I’d suggest manipulation.”
“Good. I like the directness of your mind. That’s why I took you on my team. Damn few First Rank minds want to think about manipulation. They keep coming up with new natural psychological phenomena. I barf. A favorite is marginal effects of the fam that haven’t yet been measured to the nth decimal place. I barf. Ninety-five percent. Think about it. That’s no less than a declaration of war by someone. Some of those blue regions are going to go into crossover soon. We can still drive the social parameters back across the topozones into stability as we did after the Warlord Citizen of Lakgan bushwhacked us so many centuries ago with his tuned psychic probe. But chaos doesn’t make for pleasant times. They should be avoided. Incidentally, your suggested method for counteracting the astrology that is penetrating into Coron’s Wisp from Timdo won’t be effective.”
“Then you know something I don’t know.”
“Of course. At every one of the blue sites, there is a mask. At Coron’s Wisp it is astrology. We have been unable, over the last hundred years, to control the historical direction of any of the regions in which a mask is operating. They become less and less controllable—and, in the last year, at an alarming rate. My young man, think. I need you as an ally. The men my age refuse to face the evidence. What force is powerful enough to parry the meddling of a psychohistorical organization which commands all of the resources of the Second Empire? Remember, we are a thriving, rich empire not in decline. Come. An answer to my question. Who would need to hide behind a mask?”
Prefect Cal Bama had already given Nejirt Kambu the answer in his morgue. “A group of renegade psychohistorians.”
“Renegade is a perjurious word,” admonished Second Rank Kon. “Recall that in the days of the First Empire, we were the renegades.”
“Your surmise doesn’t seem logical. We live in a political climate where the Fellowship attracts all talent capable of the psychohistorical science.”
“So states the Founder’s Plan, but in the Founder’s Plan there was no tuned probe, no Cloun the Stubborn, and no quantum-state fams to alter human psychology. True, we’ve taken all this into account in the revised math. But don’t be blinded by the past or by any past master’s theory. Forty thousand years of science have taught us that much—if you look at its history and not at its magic rituals. Theory tells us that there should not be any non-Fellowship psychohistorians out there— but no other hypothesis fits the facts I have gathered, facts young men like you have helped me to gather.”
“But your evidence is still circumstantial. A weird astrology allowing free will could be driving the events at Coron’s Wisp. Your Hiranimus Scogil could be an astrologer . . .”
“. . . and the jade ovoid he has been selling could be a galactarium. My agent at Melba tells me he has a friend who claims it bolds the whole of the Founder’s Plan up to the time of Cloun the Stubborn, that it is a handheld Prime Radiant—if one has the access codes.”
Nejirt Kambu held on to the railing, looking out over a galaxy that spread itself under an ebony dome and floated above a slate stone floor. He could even see little people down there in the bailey who didn’t belong in his galaxy. It was disconcerting.
“I can’t find a source in all of psychohistorical theory for the origin of a second group of psychohistorians.” Nejirt was bemused. “That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen but . . .”
“Chaos,” said Kon. “Chaos can produce anything. Remember the chaos at the time of Cloun the Stubborn? Many of the parameters had been pushed well out of their topozones. There are rumors, stories, tales . . . first appearing perhaps a hundred years ago . . . a mythical hero . . . with mythical powers . . . but probably once a real man. He is said to have been on a quest during the dark following the False Revival. Smythos he is sometimes called. I think he must have been one of the fifty who were sacrificed to the death camps of the Fellowship to save our hides. I wish I had their names. That wasn’t in the original Plan. Perhaps one of the prisoners escaped . . . perhaps he became deluded by his terrible trial and set upon his own course . . .”
“What sacrifice are you talking about?” Nejirt was genuinely puzzled.
“Never mind. It’s ancient history. You don’t have to believe me,” sighed Hahukum Kon, “but just in case I’m right, you can help me save the Second Empire. I have damn few allies. I need bright young men who have proven their worth. It will take us a hundred years to destroy the machinations of the Third Fellowship, but it can be done.”
“And if they get a hold here on Splendid Wisdom? If you are right, they are certainly trying.”
“Jars Hanis is taking care of that. There is an underground. We had a lucky break while you were off planet and I believe that break led us to at least one non-Fellowship psychohistorian. It may lead us to others. I need hard evidence that they exist, dammit! Statistics convinces me, even rumor convinces me—but vapor doesn’t seem to convince anyone else. Do you remember Eron Osa, Seventh Rank?”
“I don’t recollect such a name.”
“If you are ever going to make Second Rank, you’d better keep a list of all psychohistorians and their specialties in fam storage.”
“Down to Seventh Rank?” anguished Nejirt with horror.
Kon laughed. “I do. My list has been a major element in my survival. Eron Osa was an old apprentice student of mine. His file is only a fam request away. I taught him all he knows about arekean transformations. He consumed biscuits and tea at the library. He was a history buff, more serious about the past than the future, a bit of a carouser and troublemaker, loved the underbelly of society. I had to give him his thesis subject, stasis, because he was too lazy to find a topic himself. He exasperated me but I was fond of him because of his brilliance. We were stuck together at a very boring conference one afternoon and I was telling him my troubles. I like to tell apprentices my troubles; in order to ingratiate themselves with me they spend hundreds of hours solving problems for which I need the solution but can’t afford the time. He didn’t want to bother but he was very good-natured about it and offered me an instant solution of the humorous kind. There are Gremlins out there in the Depths of Space who know enough psychohistory to bugger up your data.’ That set me to thinking the impossible. I am eternally grateful to Eron Osa.”
“You’re meandering, sir. You were starting to tell me about a covert organization here on Splendid Wisdom. And a lucky break.”
“Come into the office.” Kon’s office was behind them, five enormous rooms, staffed with researchers—and students working off their indemnity. The two men took aerochairs in a comfortable media theater. Kon called up an item from the Lyceum’s secret library and dropped a burst into Nejirt’s fam. “Read it someday. That was our lucky break.” Nejirt had his fam glance at the title. The usual pomposity. It was by Eron Osa. “Valuable data?”
“No, no.” Kon shrugged. “The break came from a monitoring program that recorded and forwarded the readership of works keyed to psychohistorical research. Didn’t you notice anything unusual about the tide?”
“No.”
“It was published in the Imperial Archive, not the Lyceum Archive. It’s right there on the tide credits. The readership of that piece was very specialized and ran to subversives.”
“He published publicly?” Nejirt was incredulous.
“When Eron left me, a man of mere Second Rank, he took up slavedom with Jars Hanis because only a First Rank was good enough for him. Hanis is a very harsh taskmaster and a perfectionist but not the land of daring mentor that Eron needed. After years of killing labor, Hanis rejected his thesis on the grounds that it needed reworking along more orthodox lines. Jars Hanis the Ruthless was critical of its free-flying. And Eron, being Eron, was insulted to the core and published in the public domain. There was always a streak of vanity in the boy.”
Nejirt wiped rhetorical sweat from his brow. “What dungeon did Hanis throw him into?”
“Worse than that. Hanis put him on trial and managed to get a sentence of execution on his fam which was carried out in spite of many raised brows, including mine. It was a shame. A hot-tempered mind, true, but brilliant. Read his dissertation. Weak in spots, but nevertheless marvelous. It solved a few of my hairier problems. Nobody noticed it had been placed in the public domain—until the first time it was activated by a young noblewoman.”
“One of the fakes?”
“Yes, yes. A Frightfulperson. You’ve heard of them.”
“So the Archival alarms went off?”
“Like neutron stars colliding. Hanis was ready to arrest this lady immediately, but wiser minds prevailed, mine for instance, and she was only watched. That led to other subversives like a Hyperlord Kikaju Jama, and the Hyperlord led us to Hiranimus Scogil when he bought one of those magic astrological ovoids of yours. If the police hadn’t bungled, we’d be working with our first prisoner of war, instead of with a corpse and a missing fam.”
“Why do you think he’s a psychohistorian and not a mystical astrologer? Astrology makes a simpler hypothesis.”
Hahukum Kon shook his head. “Because Scogil wasn’t selling to astrologers; he had a very different clientele. Statistical profile: ninety-five percent above eight-point-seven on the discontent scale.”
“If there is a war going on in your blue regions, how serious is the penetration of Splendid Wisdom?”
“Don’t worry about the underground; we have it all parametricized. Among a trillion people they have a maximum membership of about three hundred, all local. Recently they’ve organized an unusually large gathering, for them, to discuss Eron’s paper. I have a sense of humor and have arranged for you to replace their math expert, a man so secretive that no one in the organization has ever met him except on wire. At that time the whole crowd will be arrested. I suspect our raid will mark the death blow to any perturbing forces here on Splendid Wisdom. We still have the rest of the galaxy to worry about; that will take more time. I’m getting old. I’m thinking of training you up to be my replacement. That depends upon how well you master military strategy.”
