Psychohistorical Crisis

21

A FAMLESS ERON OSA GLIMPSES HIS PAST, 14,810 GE

Make no mistake about it, a future cannot be created without first being predicted. Otherwise the future just happens to very surprised naifs. What you cannot predict, you cannot control. Today, with our powerful tools, we see the coming collapse of galactic civilization and we are all united in our desire to shorten the coming interregnum of thirty millennia down to a more manageable ten centuries, but the real challenge to the Fellowship will come in the haze beyond our present ability to predict.

—Excerpt from the Founder’s Psychohistorical Tools for Making a Future

It was almost as if he had been manufactured without a past in the bowels of this incomprehensible Splendid Wisdom. What had it been like so long ago to be a young man with a past—if he had ever been young. Reclining in his aerochair, he drifted in a haze of loss, thrust into a distant future he didn’t understand. He was weary. On the morrow he would find more energy to flail at the mindless mist. This watch...

He snoozed. Ghosts formed out of the mist, adult ghosts who had taken away his fam, promising him a new one with galaxy-spanning powers—he felt a child’s trust, his own— but they had switched his fam for the entrails of a sheep, leaving him alone and famless to grow up with mere simian wits. The long dream-arms of a child tried to grab his mind back, but the scarified ghost kept him in restraints while carving up his fam, eating some pieces yet sharing choice morsels with his tall dark farman companion—a boy’s precious secrets slithering down hungry gullets. The farman was grinning drunkenly, promising all the time that the sheep entrails would generate for him all the auspices he would ever need...

The man woke in panic. Gripping the armrests. The struggle to learn how to read again was setting his mind off into phantom spaces, even while he napped.

He had been concentrating for hours, unsuccessfully, willing himself to focus on something he had forgotten. He adjusted the aerochair into an upright position, facing the wall that leaked urine, surrounded by the stark simplicity of a lower-level hotel apartment in some cheap catacomb of Splendid Wisdom. What was left of a vital memory was on the tip of his tongue, but maddeningly unavailable. Perhaps the dream had touched its substance in the roundabout way of dreams. He should rest. But he couldn’t. He was driven.

To recover from defeat.

It galled him that he had been defeated. But by whom? And about what? And when?

The half-memory had been driving him again and again to search through the distant files of Splendid Wisdom’s main Imperial Archive in a desperate attempt to jog the tenuous pieces into place. Pinned to the wall, Hahukum Konn’s meaningless picture of them grinning beside an ancient warrior’s flying machine seemed to be an intrusive decoy planted to lead him away from his important memories. The memories that would explain his situation. There had to be something out there that would fit together with the phantom fragments in his mind.

The effort wasn’t coming easily. For a quarter of a month, but especially for this exasperating watch, his awkward hands had been trying to work the lambent holograms of a comm console with finger gestures half controlled by the quantum matrices of a fam that no longer existed. Mistakes infuriated him. He had to fill in behavioral blanks by reason, by trial and error. He didn’t know for what he sought. He couldn’t remember what he had done as a psychohistorian.

He did remember the urgency. Was it something important that he had written/discovered?

Eron Osa might have called upon the aid of the “charity” fam that now rode in the high blue collar around his neck— for appearance sake—but he had left it unconnected, tempting though it might be to take it under his neural control. He was even beginning to resent this common-issue fam designed to parole a convicted criminal (treason) whose personal fam had been found guilty and executed. He wanted to use it, but he could only guess at what ersatz data such a standard-issue mind held, what habits, what directives, what spy-implants. Its motivations would not be Eron’s natural motivations. Whom would it serve? The men who had executed him? Better to run his archival quest using merely the limited abilities of his wetware.

He cursed himself for not having made, in the past, a more strategic use of his organic memory. That gray mush seemed to contain only the vaguest impression of grand strategic issues while being a register of unlimited trivial detail. As Eron jumped through the Archives, erratically bringing up holograms of this item and that item, guided by hunches he did not understand, straining to remember, he found that his mind delivered to him not what he wanted, not pertinent associations, but bizarre memories.

... a fugue of sexing with a sloe-eyed woman while playing truant from studying the physics of quantum foam. Were those the hills of Faraway beyond the ranch window? She was a wonderful tease. She had a full mouth that tapered into upturned lines and delicate fingers that seduced him into forgetting mathematics. They lay on linen with a border pattern of golden forsythia. Who was she?

... images of rafting down a river on the planet of his birth, the pyre-trees ablaze on rocky banks. What planet? Where was he bom? His three-year-old memories of it were especially vivid—but what three-year-old cares about the name of his planet or doesn’t mix it up with the name of his village or galactic sector?

... a boy wandering through the famous stone Library at

Sewinna that dated back to pre-interregnum times when it had been a military barracks for officers of the Empire. Why had his life taken him there?

Once, when his archival search led him into the rebuilding of Splendid Wisdom after the Sack, he was mentally flipped into what seemed to be his initiation as a Rank Seven Psychohistorian...

... under an enormous transept that rose five stories above the heads of his fellow robed acolytes. A wash of unnatural awe, overwhelming immensity. Upreaching arms of stone and fiber and metal, delicate hues of light, ethereal sounds that healed the spirit. Had such a drama happened? Was this “memory” real or a mere collage built out of his humiliating trial? Had he ever entered the Ranks?

None of these reveries sated him. They were too vague. Only when his search brought him near his fugitive goal did he feel ecstasy. The thrill came erratically, then was lost in illusive evasion. Sometimes he came close. Once when he was searching through a listing of Handler Theorems, he hallucinated upon the face of Hanis. Hanis of the Trial! He recognized Hanis, both furious and sarcastic, taking the lapse of his student Eron Osa as a personal affront, chastising his young protege for even thinking about publishing without first having his methodology reviewed by his superiors.

Eron’s organic brain flashed with insight! Psychohistorians did not publish. Then he was a psychohistorian! Slyly he even knew why psychohistorians did not publish. It had come to him as an odd footnote in his recent dream, an aside by the voracious farman ghost. The Fellowship was a secret society. If all men could predict history, then history became unpredictable and the Fellowship of Pscholars would lose its power to predict and control. To publish the methods of historical prediction was the ultimate sin. That felt exactly right—the ultimate sin. A man could lose his fam for committing such a sin!

He slept again, then woke up early to an ancient rhythm— though who knew in Splendid Wisdom what was day and what was night?—eager to pursue his spectral haunts. Perhaps he was making progress? For more than a watch of this session, the Archives taunted him with impalpable apparitions and with vivid events, perhaps from his life—few of them relevant. He was groping but he felt that he would be able to recognize “it” when he found “it” and so he continued to troll patiently. As if he had anything else to do. And on this watch, just as he was fatigued, just as the clock turned over and reminded him that this was his watch for sleep, still eager but at the same time almost ready to doze off, a sudden “hit” stirred a deep emotional dazzle.

He sat up with such alertness that his aerochair bobbed in the air.

He repeated the archived item.

Again the triggering image flowed in front of him in hologram—a gestalt of red symbols and multicolored action against a multigraph of a stable, self-perpetuating decision state. At first he was puzzled. Then he became cognizant of an unfamiliar mainstream mathematics that leaned heavily upon a notation commonly used by physical scientists. The math wasn’t easy to understand without his fam—but: He recognized it as a rudimentary account of stasis. He knew that the psychohistorians did it better because he had once known more about stasis than any man alive. This wasn’t what he was after, but it was a near miss that had triggered his mind.

Ah so!

The concomitant emotional rush came with a clear patter of babble as his organic mind intoned in a ponderous voice: “Early Disturbed Event Location by Forced Arekean Canonical Pre-posturing: An Analysis in Three Parts.” He grinned uncontrollably. That, whatever in Space it meant, would be his, Eron Osa’s, dissertation!

He pondered this miracle of precipitate memory, astonished. Wetware minds worked by peculiar magic! Where had such a revelation come from? He wasn’t sure what the babble was about, except that it had to do with... psychohistorical stasis brought on by... what? He didn’t know. All he knew was that this monograph was the object of his search and that he had to have a copy. It was going to be a “no” to sleep!

But being a vagued-out moron was utter frustration when you had memories of being a genius.

He paused before making a formal request for the monograph over the network. Were his actions being monitored? Doubtful. The Pscholars did not monitor people; they monitored trends. People acting alone had infinitesimal power. De-fammed criminals were a threat to no one.

Half a watch and a growling stomach later, he suspected with a growing certainty and a terrible disappointment that his monograph had vanished from the Archives of the whole Imperialis star system. For a wrenching moment he wondered if he had ever written such a document Yet he remained gut certain that he had! Was his certainty only an illusion brought on by the loss of his fam? Perhaps he had never gone past the intention to write.

Yet he could guess the real truth. His work had been erased. All copies were gone. Thoroughly gone; even his unique fam, with its ability to re-create the research, had been destroyed.

Now what?

Eron switched off the insubstantial console with a gesture of his finger and left his chair bobbing in midair. He paced about the strange apartment, too cramped for his aristo taste, wondering where he really was in relation to the rest of Splendid Wisdom. Where were his friends? Could that ancient psychohistorian who had sat on the very panel that had condemned him be a friend? He had only dared explore his immediate neighborhood. All else was a terrifying maze. Everything in the apartment folded into the wall, everything was white, not a trace of luxury or space. The dispozoria was leaking urine. This wasn’t home! He buried his head in his arms.

Ping! The tiny, gleaming sphere of a Personal Capsule appeared in the functional wall niche, unnoticed.

Of course this wasn't his apartment; he was no longer an acolyte of the Psychohistorian Fellowship; he was alone, disowned, friendless, possessions confiscated, tossed into the lower warrens of Splendid Wisdom where he was condemned to think with treacherously slow neurons! It was infuriating ... and for a moment he had a rush of uncontrolled rage that stunned him into an unbalanced mental fall because it was not resisted by the restraining calmness of fam input. He had shoved emotionally against a removed wall... flinging himself into emptiness.

The rage turned to instant consuming fear—without his fam he was a very asymmetrical animal. His zenoli training was useless, his brain-fam centering lost. He could no longer trust his own responses. This was worse than he had anticipated when he had been whole and accepting of the dangers inherent in his rash deeds. Being an asymmetrical animal didn't fit with his plans! Plans! Again his mind lurched out of control with a flash of joy at the thought of his brilliant agenda.

But, when he tried to remember the nature of such an agenda, he found only vacuum. He glanced about him in desperation. That was when he saw the Personal Capsule. It stopped him, reminding him of danger. He grumbled bitterly to himself—My orders from the police. Yet his eyes disclaimed such a conclusion; the omnipotent police, backed up by the certainties of psychology, had no need for supersecurity. A Personal Capsule? Here? How was he to read it without fam input?

Curiously he picked the small sphere from its niche. It opened in his hand and would not have opened for any other of the trillion inhabitants of Splendid Wisdom. There was no famfeed attachment A tiny screen scrolled its message with a flashing warning that whatever scrolled off the top was unrecoverable. It read:

See Master Rigone at the Teaser's Bistro, Calimone Sector, AQ-87345, Level 78. (The Corridor of Olibanum.) I’ve already told Rigone what you'll need. I’ve got myself in a

real fix and don’t know how much more I can help. Your benefactor.

Inessential words began to fade, leaving only a list of critical information. By then the screen and sphere were well on their way to dust.

Eron Osa didn’t even have to memorize the message. Rigone sounded like the name of a friend, or was it just a ghost figment of his dreams? From somewhere he knew of the Teaser’s Bistro—a tolerated black market came to mind, a dive where young Fellowship rakes hung out to drink and rollick and have illegal attachments added to their fams. He couldn’t recall ever having been in such a student den, but, for all he knew, he might have spent most of his idle time in just such a place.