Psychohistorical Crisis

6

FARMAN AND GANDERIAN BOY, 14,790 GE

This particular Quandary-Chain of the Agander serfes, though in appearance highly stable, is susceptible to moderate Theac pumping. In Table-1 is a list of possible artificially generated Theac-Chaos Events that we can expect to bloom across time-ramps of... Rfote's theorem demands that the Post-Events stemming from any of these Events cannot be predicted by any method to a reliability coefficient greater than 0.4. If we are undetected during setup ...It should be possible to arrange the unpredictability zone to last from fifty years to two centuries before the advent of Kraniz restabilization. Such a psychohistorical time-shadow is more than adequate for our purpose.

... many examples of secondary links along the quandary-chain... for instance, it has become a ritual among Ganderfans to always carry weapons which must never be used, a manifestation of the unresolved (second-order) trauma activated during the Interregnum when Agan-deTs vulnerability again became acute.

—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

The night was well advanced. All traces of the spherical Personal Capsule were gone. The frenzy of activity at his release from the Kapor personality had subsided. A weary Hiranimus Scogil was ready for bed, and so he dimmed the walls and laid out a hand of cards from Agander’s Royal Deck of Fate for a relaxing game of solitaire. The Ax of Mercy was the first card he drew.

And at that moment the pellucid form of the tower’s Security Butler consolidated in his studio’s small foyer and made a slight guttural rumble to attract attention. “Eron Osa is requesting entrance,” the apparition said.

“He’s here? At this time of night?”

“He’s armed.”

“The usual?” The public order brought about by the resurgent Second Empire had been unable to uproot a long local tradition of suspicion. Since Agander’s murder rate remained a hundred times lower than galactic normal and violent crime was nearly nonexistent, the law had little incentive to make palm-size blasters illegal. Scogil had never been at ease with a kick in every shoulder holster, and never carried one himself, but that was only another thing that marked him as a peculiar farman. “Check the serial.” By law all weapons radiated their identity.

“Registered.” The butler provided diagrams and specifications—a children’s model, nonlethal beyond a range of one meter. “A toy.”

“Some toy.” One did not spank students who all brought blasters to class. The only benefit was a student body which tended to reason among themselves very carefully. It was probably the foundation of Ganderian politeness.

The apparition waited. It had no precedent upon which to act; Eron had never before visited his tutor’s home. When no instructions were forthcoming, it became impatient. “Shall I ask him to check his weapon?”

“Forget it. Let him in. Dismissed.”

The butler vanished, and a transport bodyform popped through the pod-lock, unfurling to release a small boy—before it, too, vanished. “You didn’t answer my call!” the boy accused.

T was making up your next assignment,” Hiranimus said affectionately, neglecting to mention all the other matters that had been occupying him. ‘Trouble with your father again?”

“We fought!”

“Did you blast him to smithereens?”

Eron looked up at him without comprehension. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to use a weapon on his father even though he was a deadly shot. He carried his kick like normal children of the Galaxy wore pocket flaps on their jackets, a matter of style and posture. “He wants to send me to, ugh, Vanhosen!”

Now that was a much worse crime than murder. Scogil smiled. “Vanhosen! He wouldn’t dare do that to a jolly fellow such as yourself!”

Eron Osa called upon the robowall to provide a layabout couch and threw himself down on it. “Oh, yes he would! My father is loathsomely nefarious!”

The conjured couch was a clashing purple and did not match Scogil’s elegant taste in color or shape. He made a resolution to sit down tomorrow at his studio’s console and drastically restrict the creative range of his appurtenancer. Perhaps he could teen-proof the device—but no use bothering with such trivialities now. He dimmed the lighting further to make the eyesore more palatable, “All right, Eron. Let’s get to the source of your horror. I don’t understand the problem. Vanhosen is probably the most prestigious school in the Ulmat. Mowist is a vibrant world. I would have liked an. assignment there myself.”

Eron groaned.

“Your father is barely able to afford such a meritorious institution. Mowist isn’t far away, but even transportation off Agander isn’t cheap. He certainly won’t be able to treat your siblings as well. You’ll take your first interstellar trip. You’ll see places you can’t imagine. You’ll be taught by some very great scholars.”

“Yah, yah. And after five years I’ll get to join the ranks of all the other billions of Imperial lackeys!”

That’s what his father wanted for him, Scogil knew. He wanted a son in the Service of the Second Empire, a son who had made it, a son who might even work outside of the Ulmat. Eron was his most trying child, but far and away the most brilliant. “And you have other plans?”

“The toads at Vanhosen sit on their stools and croak to the sky! What can they teach me? They don’t even know mathematics as well as a dumbtop like you!”

Scogil was properly amused at the boy’s ferocity—and at the implied backhanded compliment. He called up an extension to the couch, black and shaped in better taste, before flopping out beside the boy. “And if you could have what you wanted?”

“The Academy at Kerkorian—or maybe”—the boy’s voice became plaintive—“the Lyceum on Splendid Wisdom.” Scogil’s heart chilled. Kerkorian was out of the question—Eron didn.’t even remotely meet the academic requirements, nor could his father afford access to that kind of elite. As for Splendid Wisdom—there were many Lyceums on Splendid Wisdom, but Eron meant the Lyceum—well, his father could afford it because tuition and expenses were free, but there were millions of applicants for every opening. Not a chance. “You have high hopes for yourself,” said Hiranimus soberly.

“You said—”

“I know I’ve told you that you were brilliant—part flattery, part truth. But brilliance isn’t all that counts.” He paused. What was this kid trying to tell him? Both Kerkorian and the Lyceum were known for their psychohistory schools and little else. But Eron had never hinted before that he was interested in psychohistory. And Hiranimus, as the mathematician Murek Kapor, had studiously avoided mentioning psychohistory as a mathematical discipline. Where had the boy picked up such an interest? Yet who didn’t recognize that the Second Empire was run by the laws of psychohistory? No one had to know what it was to be impressed by its power! Every boy who had been trained to dream of power before he had learned to talk would dream himself the master of psychohistoric technique. Best to be direct. “Are you telling me that you want to become a psychohistorian?”

“Of course! Why else would anyone beat his brains out on math!”

Psychohistory, the highest pinnacle of mathematics. Eron wouldn’t even know what that meant at his age, but his ambition would know. No wonder he and his father were locked in combat. His father would understand what an impossible goal his son had set himself. Eron would be too thick-headed to take such impossibilities seriously. The Pscholars guarded their secrets with an implacable fanaticism. “There are problems.. began Scogil tactfully.

“... because my fam isn’t good enough,” completed Eron resentfully.

That, you little monster, is the least of your worries. ^{When you were bom, young man, your father scoured the Ulmat for the very best fam that his sticks could buy. He paid a fortune for it, two years’ income for him. You had full use of that fam by the time you were three and mastery of it by the time you were five. It might have been fabricated in some forsaken shop—but it was a fam designed on Faraway, don’t forget.”}

The sullenness was suddenly gone from Eron. He became pragmatically impish. “But it’s still not good enough. And Faraway used to have a reputation.”

Faraway, on the galactic rim, had been the dominant civilizing force during the Interregnum, and its traders had reconquered three quarters of the domain of the old First Empire before its remote location had drained it of talent. Perhaps no other planet in all of human history had so revolutionized the physical sciences. But its technological leadership was long a thing of the past. “Sometimes a not-quitergood-enough fam can stimulate your wetware to perform above and beyond the call of duty,” Hiranimus admonished.

The boy bristled. “I don’t believe you said what I just heard slip off your vocals. You think like that mechanical book!” Eron had once been impressed by the reconstructed book in the historical alcove of the Ulman’s Summer Alcazar with its seven hundred gears and cams and push-rods that looked up sage aphorisms by the Penniless Peasant after industrious whir and clack. “I kotow better. You don’t get to be a psychohistorian with a second-rate fam like I’m stuck with! Why wasn’t I bom to a rich father! It’s disheartening!” Scogil was watching the golden highlights in Eron’s brown hair, a reflection from the ceiling lamp, almost a halo effect as if his brilliance had to leak out electrically. Intelligence appeared early in a child; judgment did not. “You were bom to a rich father.”

“Not as rich as the Ulman. Not as rich as he should be if I’m to achieve anything in this dumb Galaxy. Not as rich as he wants to be.” The sullenness was back.

Time for reassurance. “No man is rich enough to buy a fam that will make a psychohistorian out of his son. It’s the synergism between fam and brain that makes the difference.” Scogil was surprised at the rancor he felt. His fam had been crafted by the wizards of the Thousand Suns—and, in spite of that advantage, he had failed, at least as a theoretician. It was a marvelous conceit that this student of his might actually make it. Perhaps it could be arranged.

“Can a fam be upgraded?” asked the boy.

Scogil grinned. Most people never even asked that question—their enthusiasm for a fam upgrade was about equal to their ardor for a brain transplant. “It’s been done. Expensive. It’s not the sort of thing you fool around with lightly. A child’s brain fine-tunes to its fam. It’s a lifetime relationship, established early.”

“How much of a boost of my analytical powers could I get that way?”

“You could end up a moron. Have you ever talked with a famless adult, or with someone who has been fam-damaged? To make an analogy: how willing are you to let a surgeon use knives to rebuild your wetware?”

“I know a kid at school who fell off a roof. His fam got pierced. He had it repaired

“Was he any smarter afterward?”

A pause. “No.” More time to consider. “He was dumber,” conceded Eron before he changed the subject. “I can’t just wait around until I’m an old man before I get into a good school. The brain deteriorates after ten. From then on, it’s all downhill. At the school I go to I can already feel my mind turning to soup. I’m twelve”

“That’s why your father hired me.”

“He could have hired a good tutor!” Eron grumbled.

“Hey, I’m not that bad!”

“I’ll bet you only went to third-rate schools or you wouldn’t be working for a second-rate assistant accountant like my father!”

“Adjudicator to the Ulman, Eron; be fair. And how can you tell what my job really is? Can you be sure that I’m not the highest paid talent scout in this arm of the Galaxy? Really now, I have jumped around to a few marvelous worlds. I might even have pull at a few good schools. Perhaps it is possible to do something for you—but you’ll have to study hard.”

“I do study hard,” fumed Eron.

No use arguing. Scogil materialized a wall screen and began to pop algorithms into its controller via fam command. How might he introduce psychohistory to this too-bright child without calling it that? Certainly he couldn’t reveal his Smythosian connection. He skipped his prepared lesson, no longer inhibited by the Murek Kapor persona who never did anything dangerous. He decided to build an impromptu lesson around the Ganderian ritual that, in effect, placed a blaster in Eron’s hidden holster every morning.

Symbols began to trace onto the screen. “That mess is an Esfo-Naifin Quandary-Chain. What would you do with it?” “How would I know? I’ve never seen it before!”

“Hey, stay calm. This is not a test of what you know. I’m just probing to see how your mind works, if it works at all.” “Is this one of your traps?” asked Eron warily.

“No. Just think. You’ve seen dynamic equations before. What’s going on here?”

Eron did not like this kind of open-ended test. Defensively he turned to comedy and began to flap his elbows. “Cluck, cluck. I see bird tracks!”

“Sure. But what do they say about the bird?”

Eron pondered for a long time while Scogil made not the slightest sound. Finally: “I don’t know. You want me to guess? Along the time line it’s got to generate a self-stabilizing run. But I don’t know what the symbols mean. You’ve got to give me definitions before you give me equations. You told me that.”

Hiranimus refused to utter a word of comment.

Eron couldn’t stand the silence and strained for something more to say. “If you had a handle on the red parameter, you could tweak it into an unstable bloom up the time line.” Scogil was impressed. “Why the red parameter?”

“Your Esfo-Naifin Whatchamacallit isn’t sensitive to the other params—and don’t try to trick me! It is sensitive to the red, isn’t it?” He didn’t seem convinced and wanted confirmation. “I’m not familiar with crazy notations!”

“Quit telling me how stupid you are. You’re right. Now what could you use it for?”

Eron shook his head. “Space only knows. My fam’s lookup tables don’t even list Esfo-Naifin Whatchamacallits by name or form!”

Hiranimus, manipulating the screen through his fam, filled in some initial conditions and expanded the projected expression. “What’s that a description of?”

“How should I know? I’m only a twelve-year-old kid with pokey quantronics zived to my spinal.”

“Not so pokey.” He became the tutor again. “It’s a description of the arms-carrying customs of Agander. It’s a description of that little blaster there in your shoulder holster.” Eron looked down at his kick as if he had never seen it before. “You’re sewing eyelids to my cheek. You can’t describe customs with mathematics'” He was contemplating his mentor with disdain.

“And what in the Galaxy do you think psychohistory is all about?”

Eron glanced back in astonishment at the wall with its luminescent curlicues. He stared fixedly at the Esfo-Naifin Quandary-Chain, obviously computing with all fam and wetware resources. Then he grinned mischievously as his first answer came to him. “It’s wrong,” he said.

“Explain.”

“Backtracking gives a source-point only two thousand five hundred years ago. That’s wrong! We’ve always carried blasters.”

“So says the fine poetry of Ganderian mythology, but if you want to become a passable psychohistorian, you’ll have to be more careful with your history than a Ganderian troubadour. Two and a half millennia puts you back in the 124th century.” Scogil replaced the equation with an Imperial History Skeleton—12,338 GE was the date of the sack of Splendid Wisdom. “Early 124th puts you thirty or forty years before the final collapse. The First Empire is disintegrating. We’re in the Interregnum. That's when Ganderians first began to carry small arms. Not a trace of them in the whole of Ganderian records before that—and Ganderian history predates the Empire by about 165 centuries. A psychohistorian doesn’t believe myths; he investigates them.” The Esfo-Naifin Quandary-Chain reappeared. “The question is why did such a habit as yours persist long after the need for personal arms?”

“To defend ourselves!”

“Great Plasma Tongues of Space, against what? I’m a far-man. Who trusts a farman? Yet I could attack, unarmed, an octad of hostile Ganderians and not have to worry about their blasters. Using a blaster is taboo on Agander.”

“No it’s not! I know how to use one! I’m fast and accurate!” “Yes. Nevertheless, you’ve never used one to kill a man and neither has your father—or anyone else you know.”

“I could ”

“That’s the myth. But look at the equation. The temporal stability of the weapon-carrying ritual is strong, has been strong over millennia, but that very stability demands nonuse. Widespread employment of small arms would produce a bloom—see the red parameter again.” Scogil gave his student time to verify his statement. “I repeat, why did such a habit persist long after the need for personal arms? It takes energy to maintain such a habit—you’ve got to buy the weapon; you’ve got to keep it in working order, you’ve got to learn how to use it and keep your skill up to par. You’ve got to wear the damn thing all the time. But you can’t blast. What’s the utility?”

Eron was confused. “To defend myself!” he repeated with exasperation.

“No. The utility of the little kick sitting in your holster is to maintain the illusion that there is an enemy out there who must be kept at bay. A blaster is ineffective against an illusion—to try to use one against an illusion would only reveal one’s impotence. A Ganderian can't use a weapon without proving to himself that he is defenseless, and the only reason he carries a weapon is to prove to himself that he isn't defenseless. It’s called a ridge, something you can't use but have to own to feel secure. The old battleships carried planet-busters but I never heard of one being used.”

“You’re not making much sense,” complained the boy.

‘Take out your blaster and point it.” A part of Scogil made sure that his body was now more than a meter distant from the “toy.”

“No.” Eron was uncomfortably defiant.

“That’s an order!”

Eron slowly removed the tiny blaster from its shoulder holster and pointed it, the safety on, careful not to aim at his mentor. “This is silly.”

“All right. Now tell me who the enemy is?”

“I don’t see anything.”

“In your mind’s eye. It’s in your bones; every Ganderian can see the enemy standing in front of him. Let your imagination do the work for you.”

“An outsider?”

“Who might that outsider be?”

“The Second Empire?”

“The Second Empire is real time. You’re targeting an illusion. What’s the kick ready to take out?”

“I’ve got a bead on your cruddy wall!” exclaimed Eron angrily.

“Have you ever noticed that Ganderian stories, no matter how modem, are always retellings of the old mythology? Who is the enemy in the myths?”

Eron lowered his blaster. Carefully he slipped it back into the discreet holster that was part of his jacket. ‘The First Empire. The viceroys. The soldiers. The Emperor. That was a long time ago.”

“The vitality of those myths suggests strongly that Agan-der never recovered from the trauma of being conquered by the First Empire. When you wakedream, do you ever pop off Imperial Marines as they drop from the sky in the funny armor they wore in that bygone era?”

Eron Osa stretched out on the couch, hands clasped behind his head as he pulled up visuals of his old time-wasting fantasies. Staring eyes glazed over with pleasure. “No, nothing as dumb as that. That wouldn’t get you anywhere—too many of them,” he scoffed. “I’m smarter,” He grinned. “I secretly assassinate viceroys. Sometimes I take them prisoner and make ransom demands. It’s a silly game. I’m always a zenoli supersoldier, but the zenoli mercenaries didn’t appear until the Interregnum when all the viceroys were already dead. It’s fun, though; fiction is fiction and you’ve always said that Ganderians have never been able to keep their history straight.” Again Eron became the imp. “Your theory has a vast hole in it.”

“Oh?”

“Your Esfo-Naifin Whatchamacallit has an origin 2,500 years ago. You said yourself that the First Empire was already dead by then—so how could little me carrying a blaster be a memory of a trauma that happened umpteen millennia earlier?”

Scogil was beginning to regret the enthusiasm with which he had launched into this conversation. If he didn’t watch himself, he would blow his cover. “Let me answer with a lecture. Just sit. Don’t fidget. Listen. Put your fam on record.” “Here we go again. Don’t you ever run out of lectures?” Eron assumed a mock straitjacketed pose.

“Unresolved traumas reverberate. A prime-trauma can spin off new Esfo-Naifin ridges for thousands of years, a ffesh branch every time the culture hits a restimulative bump. The Interregnum was a powerful restimulator of the original First Empire conquest—Agander was finally free again, but again it was being attacked from outside by forces it couldn’t resist. For a culture like yours, with a remarkably low stability drift, sixty-seven centuries wasn’t enough to erase the most frightening event in its history.”

Eron raised his finger. “Point of information. You’re telling me that Ganderians never carried weapons before the Interregnum?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe you—we were never wimps like you— but for the sake of argument, continue.”

Scogil rose to his full height. “Stop thinking like a pompous Ganderian and think about forcer He was now looming over a surprised Eron. With one sudden motion he lifted the boy bodily into the air by the fabric of his jacket, simultaneously disarming him and kicking the blaster across the floor—all before Eron even began to react. The boy hung from his tutor’s grip, stunned. “The Imperial Conquest wasn’t a game!” Scogil roared. Eron began to try to resist. “It wasn’t mythology!” continued Scogil relentlessly. “It was forcer He put one of Eron’s resisting arms out of commission. “The army that attacked the Ulmat was probably greater in numbers than the total population of Agander.” Scogil began to lock the boy in a death hold to counter his every struggle. “Do you think their occupying units would have tolerated personal blasters? Under the Imperium Ganderians never carried small arms because the viceroys wouldn’t permit it; the offense carried the death penalty. If you dared to carry a small weapon you were summarily executed!”

He laughed and tossed the shaken Eron back onto his ugly couch and continued in a now-calm voice. “And as far as I’ve been able to delve into pre-imperial times, Ganderians thought themselves above the use of all weapons. A peaceful people; a law-and-order sort of people, like you.

They thought their superior kind of civilization rendered them invulnerable. They thought the interstellar reaches put them in an unassailably high castle.” Scogil smiled with all of Kapor’s charm. He could still command that. “All of you still think of yourselves so!”

Eron was sitting bug-eyed. “Don’t ever do that again! You scared me witless.” He glanced at his kick on the floor but didn’t dare try to retrieve it.

“The conquest scared your people witless. It didn’t fit Agander’s gestalt of the universe. It was incomprehensible. It was alien to Ganderian experience. Different cultures handle traumas differently because they are built out of different collective experiences with different mathematical representations. Yours made the decision to hang on to the Ganderian assumption of invulnerability even though the Imperial occupation forcibly proved it false! To keep that illusion your ancestors had to lie outrageously to themselves to the point where they can no longer accurately remember their own history. They remember farmen as wimps. Never make that mistake! Your ancestors institutionalized the lie. A lie is a time-trap loop because it is an attempt to change an event that can’t be changed. Tell a lie and the original event remains the same, and so one is forced to loop back and tell the lie again... and again... like a running child with his foot nailed to the floor.”

Eron didn’t know whether he was a terrified animal or a participant in a rational discussion. “Next time you threaten me with an illustrated lecture, warn me a shake of inamins in advance and I’ll hyperjump out of here, maybe to some place safe like intergalactic space or the heart of a neutron star.” He glanced as his blaster again, started to reach for it, and then withdrew. “Can I have my kick back?”

“Sure.”

“I won’t blast you.”

Scogil grinned. “You aren’t fast enough to blast me.”

Then Eron’s fear turned to anger. “You lied to me! You told me that you were a nonviolent civilized citizen of the Galaxy! I believed you!”

“Things aren’t always what they seem. Now—are you going to lie to yourself and reconstruct that image of yourself as an invulnerable man who can take on the Galaxy with his toy? Go ahead, pick it up. It will make you invulnerable again.”

Eron just sat there. Then the shaking began. Scogil said nothing, giving the boy all the time he needed to digest what had happened. Eron tried to pick up his weapon but couldn’t make his body do so. He grinned sheepishly. “I’m scared,” he said. Then he went down to the floor, made sure the safety was latched, then holstered his kick. “Your history lessons make me green at the gills. I know that was a demo. I know you’re really a nice person. But that was scary.

“And Ganderians are still scared of the First Empire, nine thousand years after the fact. No matter how many times they relive the event, the First Empire still wins. And the old, unresolved fears keep coming back to shake them up. Every time that old fear of the old Empire is restimulated, Ganderians collectively make a new decision never to forget that they are invulnerable. Your useless toy is only one of a thousand harmonics of that fear. It can all be reduced to mathematical equations.”

An intrigued Eron Osa took on the expression of a child who has scented a cunning speculation. “Tell me the truth, you dirty old ugly fanged rat. Are you a psychohistorian? Maybe a spy from Splendid Wisdom?”

Hiranimus liked the directness of this kid. Eron wasn’t devious. He didn’t like to keep his opinions under cover like those wretched Pscholars. “Well, son, I would have liked to have been a jet-hot psychohistorian ” That much was true. He sighed before launching into his least favorite lie. “But I’m just an ordinary moon-run of a mathematician who is enthralled by the exotic practical uses of my trade. I don’t have access to the real tools that allow psychohistorians to predict the gross aspects of our future. The Pscholars of Splendid Wisdom keep their secrets well. Pscholars believe that if everyone could predict the future, Pscholars would no longer be able to govern.” And we Smythosians, who have dabbled in the art of prediction, hope they are right. “Let’s just say I’m a sinner who delights in playing with morsels of forbidden knowledge. That’s a theme from some of the older mythologies. I’m not very dangerous; I haven’t yet even reached the stage where I can predict whether a planet’s sun will rise tomorrow.”

“Even I can predict that, you dumbtopr

“I am now predicting that you will be in my guest bed within the inamin.”

“What if I say no? Staying in the same house with you is going to give me nightmares.”

“I can always play the viceroy and make my prediction come true.”

Eron didn’t protest. He was enjoying his rebellion against his family and looked forward to sleeping in a strange bed. When the boy stood, Scogil discreetly dismissed the awful couch. He saw to it that Eron was comfortably established in the back room, tucking him into a special comforter Hiranimus had brought from some distant stellar bazaar. Eron was fascinated by its lightness and crazy-quilt design—and couldn’t believe that its warmth wasn’t some exotic electronic trick; how could such a miracle derive from physics so simple that even a goose would understand?

“We’ll discuss schools again in the morning after I’ve slumbered on it. Good sleep.”

Eron gave a last adulating glance at his mentor standing in the hall’s reflected light. “I feel like a traitor. I wish I had a farman for a father.” The door vanished.

Hiranimus retreated to his study where he set up a silent comm link through his fam to the elder Osa at the Ulman’s Alcazar. He was going to tell on his student and did not want to risk the kid’s wrath—his walls were soundproof but not immune to a good fam’s sensitive audio pickup. He made the call to his patron while setting the camera to show himself in the best possible light as he settled into his working chair in his most dignified pose. The screen acknowledged contact.

“Yes?” queried the Adjudicator.

“Osa, your son is here with me. I think it best that he stay here for the night.” The words were transmitted from an electronic simulation of Scogil’s voice box so there would be nothing for Eron to hear.

“So that’s where he went! That’s a relief. He left here in quite a huff—I wasn’t sure what he was going to do. How we spoil our eldest sons—is it out of naiveté? He has talked to you?”

“We discussed his school plans.”

The camera at the other end moved back for a long shot. The elder Osa was pacing in a large room with decorated mordants, prized relics of a grimmer age. “I thought I gave him very reasonable alternatives. I wasn’t prepared for his upset.”

“Vanhosen is an excellent choice. There are probably other places that would better match his peculiar talents.”

“Ah, as usual, Murek, you are the consummate diplomat.” A sober Osa sat down so that his camera could transmit a portrait shot. “You realize that I operate under financial constraints. Money matters don’t seem to impress the younger generation, at least not my son who thinks that because I am an intimate of the Ulman, I have unlimited resources which he is all too willing to exploit.”

“Perhaps I can suggest alternatives.”

“Expensive ones,” grumbled the Adjudicator.

“There are scholarships available. There are schools that pay highly to attract talent.”

“He’s too young and unseasoned. He’s only twelve. At that age one’s reasoning powers are rough and clumsy and lack judgment. There are huge gaps in his knowledge and maturity. I really don’t understand why he is insisting on going to university at his age.”

“I understand and I must agree with him. Mathematics is a young man’s game and early high-level training is essential. The choice of school can be critical.”

“So you think mathematics is his talent? You are not biased because you are a mathematician? It’s true that he’s been good with puzzles since he was a tike. I’ve always thought that was because of that damn jazzed-up fam I bought him.”

“His bent astonishes me. And the fam you gifted him, out of the mad loyalty of a father who wishes the best for his son, is only a small part of it. I strongly suspect that he is the best math student I’ll ever teach. I have no doubt that he’s going to outclass me before he’s twenty.”

“He’ll have to find work. We Ganderians don’t believe in aristocratic laziness no matter how refined the indolence.”

“I believe you want him prepared for the Empire’s bureaucracy?”

“That’s an ambition I’ve had for him that I’ve never advertised.”

“The Pscholars are all mathematicians.”

“I’m not fool enough to be that ambitious for my son.” “You should be. It is true that the probability of him becoming a psychohistorian is vanishingly small—but it is the conditional probability that counts. It is also highly improbable to find him in possession of talents which I discern in abundance. He has the caliber of a psychohistorian.”

“I wish I trusted you, farman.” The face on the screen was bleak with doubt and indecision, a father who wanted the best for his son but was unwilling to plunge the carrier of his genes into a disaster. “Eron was suggesting Kerkorian. You, too?” The expression was agony, a man desperately trying to find sacrifices he could make to afford such a luminous university.

Scogil called upon his most unctuous Kapor facade to quench the man’s agony. “Kerkorian is so famous that it can afford to bankrupt its supplicants. But this is a vast galaxy. There are better schools out there with lesser reputations most anxious to recruit students with Eron’s ability.”

“And you think I can afford to send him gallivanting about the Galaxy in search of a wraith? At his age?”

“No need. Urgent family business is taking me to Faraway. I could chaperone your son on a small adventure—the idea delights me. And I’m certain that I could arrange an interview with the registrar of the Asinia Pedagogic. My mathematical credentials are impeccable, as you well know. Asinia you will not have heard of; I doubt that it exists in any archive on Agander. It is a school accredited by the Pscholars. I have contacts in a fund that will settle all of his expenses. If he does well at Asinia for four or five years, he will be picked up by the Pscholars for final training.”

“Psychohistory at Faraway?” The father was incredulous. The Founder of the Second Empire had established Faraway as the leverage force to recivilize a Galaxy fallen into chaos. The mathematics of psychohistory had been a tool deliberately left out of that psychohistorically created culture. And poor Faraway was no longer even a minor galactic power. It was the stuff of legend—like the lush landscapes that once covered the deserts of a badly used Rith. Faraway was a quaint place for tourists, for antiquarians who revel in the ruins of ancient glory.

Scogil, alias Murek Kapor, only smiled. “You’ve forgotten that Faraway once produced mathematicians who revolutionized the physical sciences. Half of the devices we use today owe something in themselves to principles invented on Faraway. Even your son’s fam was designed and manufactured on Faraway. Those political skills that once illuminated the Galaxy have now dimmed to twentieth magnitude—but Faraway was never known for political sagacity; it was known for its physical science. You still can’t find finer teachers of math than at Asinia. They just aren’t rich anymore, and they have a hard time attracting worthy students. The Kerkorian staff are on the cutting edge of mathematics, but Asinia trains more qualified students. I assure you that the Pscholars pick over Asinia’s best graduates. Your son couldn’t be better placed.”

“And how much will this escort and pampering service of yours cost me?”

While he was talking to Osa Senior, a mad plot began to hatch in Scogil’s mind, and, thinking fast, he began to negotiate its framework before he had even blocked out the details to himself. “You don’t understand, Honorable Osa. Circumstance forces me to leave your service. Honor obliges me to place a boy as endowed as your son in good hands. My hypership’s cabin is already paid for,” he lied. “It will cost me nothing to bring Eron with me.”

They haggled for a while longer. They made a deal that the senior Osa couldn’t afford to ignore. And a deal that presented intriguing possibilities to an ambitious Hiranimus Scogil.

When the connection was broken, he stayed in his aerochair without moving, examining those possibilities. The whole of his scheme was not yet well formed. Maybe he’d have to abort. But with a psychohistorian’s ability to see the nodes that had to be touched in order to advance into a particular future, he began to sketch out the critical details to himself. Somewhere along their route he would have to alter Eron’s fam in subtle ways. Even Splendid Wisdom was not privy to all that was known in the Thousand Suns about quantum-effect switching. Yes, it might work—and if it did work out, he would advance himself dramatically, and he would advance the cause of the Smythosian Oversee.

Scogil’s imagined machination hinged on the off chance that eventually it could be useful for the Oversee to have a primed and innocent traitor at the very heart of the Pscholar’s Fellowship—a long shot that might then propel a failed psychohistorian, who hadn’t even made it to the bottom level of thinkers, into a plum assignment on Splendid Wisdom. Hadn’t the Oversee already advertised that they didn’t have enough operatives in the Imperialis system?

He laughed. At the moment it was all just wild plotting on overdrive, a kind of aftereffect of the release from his Murek Kapor restraints. Space, was it good to be free to think again!

But what a rotten thing to do to a little kid, he condemned himself. He was appalled that he fully intended to feed his fam-altered victim to the Pscholars, a child sacrifice to the gods. It was probable that the Fellowship would accept this

genius. It was also probable that, in due time, Eron would find himself enrolled in the Lyceum at Splendid Wisdom. For what?

He liked Eron. Poor little devil If things went awry—and they would go awry—Eron might find himself waylaid in some gruesome hell. He shuffled the cards he had left scattered on his desk. Ah, if only a hand dealt from Agander’s Royal Deck of Fate, laid out in the mystical Matrix of Eight, might really be able to predict the boy’s future and guard him! Not even psychohistory could do that. Psychohistory was silent on the future of any one man.

But for all his qualms as he sat motionless in his study, Scogil felt a bitter envy. Eron Osa would get the real training. Eron Osa would graduate from the Lyceum. It would be Eron Osa who would operate out of Splendid Wisdom. It would be Eron Osa who mastered the true line of psychohistorical thought, not some twisted perversion of the Founder’s work built by madmen attempting to reconstruct psychohistory from inadequate data thousands of years old.