Psychohistorical Crisis

4

THE AGENT OF THE OVERSEE, 14,790 GE

... surprising countermeasures used by the Second Empire Pscholars to restabilize the local long-range politics in the isolated stellar region of the Ulmat are not traditional and suggest that our interference has been detected... unorthodox mathematics... Within sixty years there is a fifty percent probability of...unless...Recommend stealthy abandonment of the Ulmat Offensive... Our lack of effective operatives on Splendid Wisdom can no longer be tolerated.

—Overseer Inspectorate HICode Report Red-75

Dated Version: 14,790y/02m/92w/3h/10i

Author: SeliCom

It was fatal for a seditionist to let his identity find its way into the data’ banks of Splendid Wisdom’s Second Empire, and so Hiranimus Scogil guarded his true name behind aliases and his true biology behind genetic masks—not a particularly difficult task in a Galaxy of multitudes so vast that the roving proctors of the Empire chose to maintain order by ignoring individuals in favor of management by statistical aggregate. This slim youth of twenty-five did not even exist in any High database, not on Splendid Wisdom or in any Sector Central. But as Murek Kapor...

Most people carried their fam at the base of the neck or as a collar or headpiece and thought of it simply as an auxiliary information source that communicated with their brain via tuned probe when they needed fast data or detailed graphics or heavy-duty analytical faculties. Scogil’s was different. His unique “familiar” had been modified to hold a second personality.

After four years, Hiranimus Scogil half believed he was Murek Kapor, a star-wandering tutor who had found a comfortable position in the highlands of Agander’s Great Island, teaching genteel mathematics to the precocious Osa boy. He chafed, not pleased that the Ulmat’s Oversee Group had cursed him with a complacent cover persona more inclined to observation than action. We become what we do. He chafed as a mere observer. It wasn’t enough to monitor a plan whose script had been computed a 150 years ago. A field agent also needed to be responsive. All successful plans are fine-tuned on the battlefield.

This Murek Kapor thing was annoyingly capable of overriding Scogil’s more daring initiatives* if not his thoughts. Scogil could overwhelm this parasite in cases of dire emergency, even in cases of whim, but such an effort was far too exhausting to be carried out on a daily basis—it was easier to leave “him” in control. And Kapor was the kind of character who couldn’t even imagine adding a faster spin to the Galaxy; he was a viewer of life, reluctant to commit to the hurly-burly, an earnest wretch whose seriousness extended no further than an interest in his afternoon walks.

What better place to stroll, today, than down a slope of ruins among the thrust of pyre-trees rooted in stones and rubble so rounded by age and redolent with ferns that no one any longer remembered their ancient purpose? Naturally, grumbled Hiranimus Scogil to himself, his damn Kapor. identity was content to take his damn strolls alone.

He pushed his way under a carmine pyre-branch—and emerged into a spectacularly tranquil copse. Delightful. It surprised him. Sometimes Scogil had to admit to himself that he was beginning to enjoy these walks, too; damn, damn, and Spacedamn, it was becoming easier and easier to fall into Kapor’s demoralizing habit of contentment.

This hallowed ground, in the middle of the True City, was thought to be too sacred to build upon. Few Ganderians could agree on the reasons. Kapor wasn’t the type even to ask but Scogil liked to keep his mind busy by fitting every curious detail of this culture into its psychohistorical context. After all, he was a trained Smythosian even if he had been drafted for less demanding fieldwork because he hadn’t qualified as a theoretician.

Over the years he must have walked through this park a hundred times but he had never been able to learn much about its antiquity. A surreptitious dig-and-dating had allowed him to place the catastrophe nine thousand years ago, at a time when the First Empire had already spread itself across half the Galaxy, a date in good agreement with the results of the Esfo-Naifin cultural analysis. Didn’t that date place the Conquest near the great campaigns of Emperor Daigin-the-Jaw? Some drastic shock of confidence—it can't happen here— had been dealt to Agander’s pride by their defeat.

By now normal dispersion and immigration should have weakened the reverberations to a whisper below the noise level, but not here. Agander’s high isolation index seemed to dominate the important equations. Ganderian culture had been frozen in time at a moment of profound loss.

The associated tales of the trauma were conflicting, depending upon the source. Some of the stories couldn’t be true or were bits and pieces of events that had happened thousands of years apart. Agander’s historians cared little for the truth. Plot and drama and feeling were everything. After centuries of polishing and retelling, a rousing tale took on the patina of truth and was believed—even when the final story was obviously crafted out of boldly contradictory materials. Such mutable legends continuously found ways to garrison this culture’s mental fortress with the archetypical recalcitrance that so served the ends of the Oversee.

Scogil had often vowed that starting early some prime-watch he would delve into more reliable sources for details of the old battles. Perhaps a scholar would have to journey to the very hub of the great galactic arms, there rooting among the archives in the catacombs of Splendid Wisdom. But had the relevant records survived the Great Sack? Splendid Wisdom was itself a cauldron of deceptive myth. Who could take seriously the wild stories that were told of that world?

Here the thunderous sagas of Agander spoke their poetry of an attacking swarm of Imperials ...of heroic battles... of long sieges... of a rear guard suicidal stand... of defiant resistance to the interstellar armies of the First Empire...of ghosts who still whispered their valorous tales to children. The real story was probably simpler—a minor fleet carrying the insignia of the Stars&Ship dispatched against Agander as a local mop-up operation during the pacification of the Ulmat... a command center bombarded from space by a single battleship... perhaps fifty inamins of ferocity... massacre. Time had obliterated the facts.

Now—nine thousand years after—Immortal ferns and tall pyre-trees reigned over just another one of mankind’s lost graveyards. Sunbeams leaked through the mantle of leaves like swords of light dipped in respect to the gravestones. Irony. Who had been the winners? Even the First Empire was long dead, its ghost emperors raised to the godhood of myth.

On passing out of the bloom of the pyre-woods Hiranimus Scogil wandered downhill through tall grasses, attracted by a distant fast-paced melody. The music radiated from the park’s sunken arena. Down there the ruins weren’t associated with Empire—this was a more youthful site than the higher slopes—the tiered arena dated from the Interregnum when Agander, briefly, had answered to no Empire.

Scogil selected an upper perch atop the stone steps that served as seats, an audience of one, watching the young rousters practice their act On Agander nearly everyone was a musician. They tended to insist on building their own harmony backpacks, or on molding their own string violers from resin recipes transmitted by family ritual, or on strumming some heirloom visi-harmonar. Even a distrusted far-man was welcome to listen to their ancient music—from some outer echelon.

Ah, how natural it was, ears cocked to mellow sounds at twilight’s approach. Tempting. A man of Kapor’s disposition might, in fact, have chosen to settle here in this galactic no place. Many had. Agander wasn’t the most powerful world of the Ulmat Constellation—but it was the most pleasant.

His tutor’s salary was good; Squire Osa was a fair if distant patron; the weather (for an open atmosphere) was invigorating—and Agander’s strange inbred ways held enough riches to fascinate a man for a whole lifetime. Even Hiranimus was fascinated.

But he didn’t approve of the man he was becoming who wasted his time being mesmerized by musicians while the newer Second Empire slithered its lines of force around ever more distant stars. This time there were no armadas to oppose. The Pax Pscholaris was enforced by psychohistory, and to contravene its power one had to be a cleverly placed mathematician. Why had he allowed-himself to opt for this damned slow-paced assignment? Why was he letting the languid persona of Kapor rot his soul? There were worlds to conquer!

Yet the music was good, and how gaily the musicians jigged while they played down there! Why was it that watching joy could make a man so sad.and separate? He was-too far above the stage for them to see his weepy eyes. How melancholy to be a soldier on the peaceful fringes of a roiling civilization. Could he really give up the battle that was developing beyond the star-clouds to settle in this quiet utopia? The Ganderians didn’t really like farmen—that was the rub—and that in itself was a good enough reason not to make a home on Agander, a good enough reason to hate the place—if one valued a sense of belonging.

But, of course, that was why he was here.

The Ganderian cultural distinctness, by the laws of psychohistory, made this world a fertile breeding field for sedition. Its people, unique among the systems of the Uhnat, had always refused to perceive themselves as a part of any Imperium—while at the same time, for century after century of contradiction, producing far more than their normal share of galactic functionaries. To escape assimilation one may imitate the strongest group in sight while at the same time despising them. Fecund soil indeed. Any seed of sedition, drifting in from space, needed only to root and adopt the patience of a Kapor.

With twilight the mood turned—from playing, to ram-bunction and, from harmony, to the chatter of gossip. Hiran-imus ambled down the steps and sauntered in among the performers while they packed their instruments. He was always willing to make affable conversation with these Gan-derians even though they always seemed to change the subject when he intruded. It didn’t matter. In time one got used to the way a Ganderian distanced himself. They might not be at ease with a farman but they were always polite. It was enough—if, like Kapor, one had been conditioned not to need friends.

The red-haired violist took the least trouble to fake her politeness. While she smiled thinly and joked with him about the weather, she touched the light weapon in her built-in jacket holster, a silent signal of contempt for a man she believed would not bear arms because he had already capitulated. Murek Kapor, well rehearsed, disarmed the hostility by not being offended. But Scogil, watching his own act, was surprised that he was actually feeling what this artifact, Murek, was designed to feel—aloofness. He really didn’t care. The hostility really didn’t matter. Space and Damnation, he wasn’t even acting anymore!

Unable to attract a companion from the musicians, he broke off by himself, working his way farther down the slope. There the park abutted the city. He hopped on the slithering ridepath toward his tower. Four years was surely too long a time to live someone else’s life. Kapor had been designed to wear the subtle persona of a loyal citizen of the Second Empire: would the erosion continue until Scogil woke up at the end of a nondescript sleep-watch, his loyalties reversed, worshiping in awe the distant oligarchy? Was he destined to become Murek Kapor, while the passionate rebel faded into an artificial existence? He smiled as the ridepath carried him along willy-nilly. A man forever without close company began to talk sophistry to himself!

During jagged moments when he felt alienated by his aloneness, he found it easy to blame his sour mood on the haughtiness of every Ganderian who had ever snubbed a far-man; it was still too painful for a man as young as Scogil to concede that a secret life of sedition might create its own alienation.

He owned an apartment inside the walls of the Black Tower, To discourage unwanted visitors, there were neither corridors, nor lobby, nor levitator. At the receiver in the tower’s gate, a sleek bodyform enveloped him, zipping him through passageways he never saw and then up into the patio of his studio habitat where it unfolded to release him, then vanished, leaving him to a farman’s privacy.

He was expected—by the machines. Already his cuisinator had prepared him an excellent meal. He smelled the bay leaf that was said to be of old Rith though its tree seemed to be native to fourteen other worlds—a smell which meant stew. The fonepad was blinking with a call. When decoded by his fam, it turned out to be a frantic plea from his youthfully impetuous student who could never understand why he didn’t just attach a phone to his fam so that he could be of service when he was needed. Father trouble again.

Scogil smiled as he ladled out meat and vegetables in thick brown sauce. These family crises of galactic proportions! Such was life! Scogil’s duties often called for him to be an advisor and confidant as well as mathematician. No matter—that boy was the best part of his job, even if... He sighed. First, food for his stomach!

He ate while he assembled from his archives the next lesson for young Eron Osa. Hiranimus Scogil tended to make his students sweat intellectually before pandering to their lesser needs. With layered merges he constructed a trap—a mathematical problem that could be solved only painfully within Eron’s range of knowledge—but could be solved quickly by means yet unknown to Eron. Would the boy plunge ahead, trying eagerly to conquer the morass of computation by brute force? Or was he ready to be wary of Scogil’s traps? Think first, pounce later. It was never simple to teach reason to an energetic child who already “knew” the answer before he got there.

What was he to do about the boy’s war with his father? Should he call now with soothing words or let the kid fry in his socket until morning? Thoughtfully Scogil carried his sherbet out onto the black marble balcony. There were several things he could try—but the unhurried personality of Murek Kapor took over his thoughts. He dabbled with the simple pleasure of small spoonfuls of the tasty ice and relaxed as the soft sun descended between mountain clefts in a splash of reds and yellows. Enjoy the sunset. Scogil tried to fret but Murek knew Eron would survive at least until dusk.

As he watched, the stars of the Ulmat began to appear in the sky along the eastern horizon, some sharp, some dimmed by the local interstellar clouds. The brightest constellation in the sky was the nebular blaze of eleven protosuns whose disks provided the Ulmat with its wealth. Then, as the sky grew darker, the stars of the Second Empire began to overwhelm the heavens from the boundary of the clouds all the way up to the blazing zenith.

Few such sacred moments ever went uninterrupted...

With an unobtrusive whisper, the fam at the base of his neck began to alert him to a second message of far higher priority than the tantrums of a mere student: a Personal Capsule, coded for Murek Kapor, had just arrived for him back in his studio.

He sighed. The part of him that was Kapor was disinclined to move. It was a slow planet; he was content to let the message wait, at least until the last of the stars were out and the night breeze was drifting through the towers. But Scogil was restless. It could only be instructions from the stars. He was starved for contact Scogil forcefully overrode his Kapor and set his sherbet glass under the chair. Deliberately he got up and took himself inside.

In the communication’s alcove his hand fetched the iridescent sphere from the velvet robogrip of the transporter, holding it between four fingertips and thumb in front of his face. He was both excited to be receiving a Capsule and annoyed at the sender, not because a Capsule’s contents might be intercepted, but because the reception of a Personal Capsule from beyond the Ulmat left a man of his station conspicuous—ripe for rumor in a culture pathologically willing to invent rumors about farmen. Why would a mere tutor of the son of a minor flunky of the Ulman of the Ulmat be conniving with who-knew-what? His role was to remain invisible.

The Capsule, by tasting his fingertips, checked the key gene sequences set into its address record-—status: true. It took an infrared scan of the flow pattern of blood in his face—status: true. Was he alive?—status: true. It gave itself permission to deliver its coded message.

The communique was accepted directly by the fam leeched to the spinal cord at the base of Hiranimus Scogils skull. It was decoded, then fed directly into Scogils brain via a linked tuned probe. He stood there, stunned. First was a command sequence that released him from his Murek Kapor construct. He felt no immediate difference—but he was free, he was himself again. Second came a promotion in rank. Only then was he told that the whole offensive in the Ulmat Constellation was being terminated. One hundred and fifty years of effort aborted! His four years here had come to naught!

No reply to the Capsule was possible. It carried no source. It could have come from anywhere in the Galaxy—probably from a nearby ship that had since jumped to a new location. For a moment of desperation Scogil thought about what he could salvage of the operation—and his fam automatically began to review the whole of the works-in-progress. He canceled the scan. It was too late. The seditionist cells grafted into the fabric of the Ulmat by the Oversee were by now already scattered. Even the Agander contingent had lifted off-planet twenty watches ago—he was now the senior man of a rear guard. It galled him that the bulk .of the departure had been completed without his knowledge—but that’s the way it was in a covert operation. The less you knew that didn’t concern you directly, the better.

But why such a sudden retreat now? Futile to ask himself;

he wasn’t going to be able to answer such a question; he had neither the relevant psychohistorical equations nor the input data-matrix. His duty was to act; later perhaps he could find answers to his questions.

Foremost, he had to arrange for a smooth departure of the remaining technical support groups. The Oversee couldn’t instantly remove all units of its invisible army without creating discontinuities that might attract the attention of the Pscholars. What grew unobtrusively in place tended to go unnoticed—but the sudden vanishing of a large landmark might generate a curious ripple of transients. The ubiquitous agents of Splendid Wisdom had the minds of frogs: they weren’t able to see a sitting fly, but they swiftly lapped up bugs dumb enough to flit across their visual background.

With the crumbling Capsule still in his hand he began to plot a course of action—and his fam took up the suggestions and began to flesh out the details and to compute psychohistorical probabilities on the alternatives. It was going to take him at least 120 to 140 watches before he could find his own excuse to leave Agander. In the meantime... He made a few calls. He set up the beginnings of a bankruptcy and sale. He canceled a publishing contract and accelerated the printing of another document to the public archives. He enjoyed being the swiftly decisive Scogil again. Kapor, thank Space, was now inactive—except as a passport name.

Still meditating, he muttered the call-words for the house genie to vanish the Capsule’s ashes and went out to the balcony to retrieve his sherbet glass with its spoon now embedded in greenish sludge. It hit him then, under the stars, the meaning of the retreat. Splendid Wisdom had noticed them. The time of jockeying for position under a cloak of invisibility was over. An unpredictable era of open battles had begun. That was to Scogil’s liking, but it was frightening, too. When one is weak, the optimal strategy is to strike from hiding so defdy that the enemy does not even realize he has been hit. Briefly he regretted that he was not theoretician enough to

‘anticipate the Pscholars’ next move. He was, by nature, a man of action, and he already knew his drive would take him to Splendid Wisdom itself. Whether he was ordered there or not, he would go—no matter how many years it took or how many roundabouts.

In his mind he was already there, at the blaze of the galactic center.