Psychohistorical Crisis

27

APPRENTICE MATHEMATICIAN, 14,791 TO 14,797 GE

There are uncertainties in any prediction, uncertainties due to errors in measurement and, less well understood by the layman, physically intrinsic uncertainties. The mathematician immediately sets out to define and measure such uncertainty. Let us make a first crude but useful definition:

The uncertainty of any outcome is the minimum average number of yes/no questions for which we must obtain answers in order to isolate the outcome. Is the cat-in-the-box alive? Are we north of the equatorial galactic plane? Is the electron in a state of spin-up? Certainty is running out of questions in need of an answer.

Suppose we have an opaque jar of white balls and wish to predict the color of a ball withdrawn at random. We need ask no questions— the answer is “white." The uncertainty of the outcome is zero.

If we have a jar of white and black balls and wish to predict the color of a ball withdrawn at random, the maximum uncertainty equals one because, to eliminate all uncertainty, we need the answer to oniy one question, namely “Is the ball white?ⁿ Four colors give a maximum uncertainty resolved by no more than two questions, eight colors give a maximum uncertainty resolved by no more than three questions, etc.

...in general, if the box contains n colors, a maximum average of H = log2(n) questions will be needed to clear up the uncertainty. .. If the colored balls in the jar are not represented in equal proportions, we have additional information called the redundancy and thus the uncertainty of an outcome is less than the maximum uncertainty. We must then compute H - 2SUM[p log2(p)] over all probabilities p,...

Put in simpler terms, the uncertainty of a prediction increases as

the number of alternate outcomes increase. In a deterministic system, which allows no alternate outcomes, the uncertainty H approaches zero as the measurement of the initial state is refined. On the other hand, a nondeterministic system, such as one governed by quantum mechanics, will have attached to it an irreducible uncertainty—always greater than zero—since every superposition will imply not one but a range of possible outcomes, all with a probability less than one.

For instance, when an electron passes through a double slit, we cannot predict where it will hit the target, only the probability distribution of a set of hits in a diffraction pattern—alternate outcomes—and so the final state of a single electron's journey is necessarily uncertain until the predictor answers the right questions after the fact

Note that uncertainty is a meaningless concept without a predictor and his specific prediction. The uncertainty associated with a single jar of colored balls is very different if we predict (1) that we will pull out a ball, (2) that we will pull out a white ball, or (3) that we will pull out a white ball weighing one gram. A sophist can turn quantum mechanics into a deterministic system simply by making the absolutely certain prediction that only outcomes specified by his wave equation will be realized. That is a useful prediction but it merely tells us with certainty what won't happen; what will happen still has a computable uncertainty. Certainty can become a taskmaster who requires more answers than quantum mechanics is able to extract from any set of initial conditions, no matter how accurately measured.

It is an instructive and deeply pleasurable exercise for the superior student to derive the irreducible uncertainty associated with any physical system he can formulate as a quantum wave equation— and this author strongly suggests that he do so. Hint: First specify all the outcomes and their probabilities. Use the integral form of H and...

A magical world opens to those who master the tools of uncertainty. For instance, it is then a trivial matter to derive the second law of thermodynamics from first principles. The student can go even further; by using the time-symmetry of the quantum wave equation, it will be possible for him to decant the second law's time-symmetric corollary from his first solution: if time is reversed, past events will NOT recapitulate themselves in reverse in such a way that entropy decreases; a time-reversed observer will still see a world of increasing entropy.

Can you build a convincing proof that a time-reversed traveler will continue to grow old and die? that, for a few moments after time-reversal, rivers might slosh uphill but will very soon reassert their downward flow to the sea? Show mathematically that the velocities and positions necessary for the water molecules to flow upriver, rise into the groundwater, and levitate upward into the sky as raindrops require an accuracy many orders of magnitude greater than allowed by the irreducible uncertainties imposed by quantum mechanics.

Explain why deductions about the past contain the same irreducible uncertainties as predictions about the future, the same proliferating branch-points. Prove that only in a universe with an unlimited capacity to store detail within volumes smaller than a quantum length cubed could time-reversal induce corpses to crawl out of the grave and grown men to shrivel up into babies and slip back into their womb and uranium to cease being radioactive.

Calculate the radius of a sphere such that the uncertainty of pi gives a ten percent probability that pi is less than 3.

—Elementary Physics Course, Asinia Pedagogic

Eron hardly knew where to begin his studies. He had no tutor creating a program for him and driving him through it. He had no regular classes. He had no exams. He belonged to no group. It was impossible to skip school because there was no school to skip. It was was very disconcerting and disorienting. Jak took pity on him, with a laugh, and hauled him off to a few lecture series, which were fascinating tours into obscure areas of high physics, the details of which were all incomprehensible. It was like having acrophobia and crawling to the rim of a precipice to look down upon normally large things reduced to a very tiny status—while a knowledgeable mountain climber stood behind you, firmly nudging your ass forward with his boot.

In desperation Eron went to his advisor to plot out a course for himself. Reinstone spoke about poetry. Eron listened to him patiently, dutifully posing as a student in awe of his master. Reinstone was so enthused by an audience that he began to quote large passages from his own Saga—recklessly developing his performance into a drama that first required him to stand and then to pace while wild gestures brought fire to his words. In time Eron got him back onto the subject of constructing a course of studies. It was no use. A happy Reinstone gave him some poems to read. “They will inspire you,” he said.

Marrae took pity on him and sat at his console guiding him through lists of possible course studies while mumbling encouragement. The tri-D screen was a cacophony of scrolling text advisements, scurrying between little animations intent upon competing with each other for his attention while still on stage, their frenzied antics made even more overwhelming by Marrae’s tendency to countermand his command gestures with her own so that the console was always aborting the ongoing performance to follow up a lead he hadn’t intended. Then Marrae spotted one of the new books Reinstone had lent him, a translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey into standard galactic, and disappeared with it into her own room.

Doggedly he persisted. He tried narrowing the glut down to the directions a student of psychohistory might profitably pursue. There were lots of opinions but no one was sure and the Fellowship wasn’t telling. That came as a shock to Eron. The Fellowship was picking up students from schools like Asinia and wasn’t prescribing any course of action to guide them? Absurd. He sulked for a round of watches, sleeping long hours and eating food. He skipped his meeting with Reinstone. He carefully avoided all presentations, programmed tutorials, lectures, and demonstrations. He left his console on idle. He was as mad as an inactive nova, erupting only occasionally.

Then he met a student in Asinia’s parkland while they sat on a bench together each lost in his own thoughts. The student happened to spot a tiny flowering weed in the grass and was so surprised that he commented aloud to Eron about the diffusion of life through the Galaxy. The home planet of this specimen, he knew for a fact, was seventy-seven thousand leagues distant. He wouldn’t let Eron pick the delicate flower.

“You’re a biologist?”

“No. My father is a florist who breeds the flower gengi-neered from that weed. I just dabble, really, in everything except botany.”

“I don *t dabble. I don’t do anything. Even the water in this damn university refuses to wet my hands. What’s your favorite dabble?”

“Really not much. This watch it’s real math. I really joined the math club because of a girl I make the bumps with. I’ll be doing math as long as we are bumping. It’s really interesting—the math, I mean. We’re working on this really difficult problem in tertiary kanite algebras which keeps my mind off her unreal boobs. It’s really driving us crazy—the problem, I mean. Nobody at Asinia seems to know anything. But we’ll solve it really soon now. We’re brainstorming it again this afternoon.”

“Really?” Eron mocked. He tagged along.

The math club met in a study room with its own mnemoni-fier and a clunky-looking link to Asinia’s symbolic manipulator. Eight members had brought their lunch in anticipation of a rowdy session. They gesticulated. They punched each other jocularly and talked at the same time. The club’s president, their “chairsucker,” as they called him, continually raised his voice to shout “Quiet!” or, when he was really exasperated, “Please be quiet, for crap’s sake!” Eron dutifully remained quiet while he observed and listened.

He heard a serious undercurrent of math beneath the joking. The girl with the boobs seemed to be the intellectual in charge. She had slipped out of her shoes and, silently, was rubbing her toes together—only when some male made a hopeful suggestion did she demolish him by quoting an exotic property of kanite algebras from memory. One dark youth with bushy eyebrows did strange things such as trying to yank out his hair when frustrated by his impotent attempt to “intrant homogamous kanite gnomoids,” which he was certain would eventually solve all their problems. “Quiet!” yelled their chairsucker. “Let Hasal have his say, for crap’s sake!” Eron didn’t have the slightest idea what a kanite algebra was. It sounded like one of those awful surprises Murek Kapor was always pulling on him.

He was beginning to notice that their enthusiasm was totally dispersed. Murek had taught him very methodical ways of organizing an approach to a problem that wasn’t providing easy answers. Their hop-around discipline grated on his nerves. After a full morning of watching, he began to explain his ideas about how the club might organize its attack on kanites. The chairsucker was now dodging artillery rounds of hard bread rolls and had commandeered a basket of rolls to return fire. His attention wasn’t on keeping order. Eron turned to the club’s doyenne, who merely crossed her arms. “Not now. I’m thinking.” Across the table three of the main arguers retorted that being organized was mentally restrictive. A hungry mathematician was under the table chasing after a bread roll that had missed its target.

All right. Reasoning and common sense wasn’t going to work on these anarchists.

They should be enlisted in the Imperial Shock Troops with Murek as their top sergeant. Eron grinned, remembering Murek’s diabolical ways. He relaxed and waited for an opening. The doyenne was still thinking. The chairsucker was busy with a sandwich in his left hand and a ready round or hard roll in his throwing hand. The boy under the table now rose with paws on the bench, roll devoured and stomach satiated, to take up the lapse in conversation, announcing to his companions on the right and left his latest bright idea. So...at the exact moment this scholar finished his speculation, Eron directed a question at him in the same voice Murek always used when demanding an answer. It was like unloosing a smelly rabbit across the path of a talking dog who had been thinking about rats. Eron let the dog run off at a gallop after the lure, then turned his total attention to the doyenne, armed with another question, this one crafted to ratde her pretentious authority. But the timing had to be right. She had to drift out of her loop first. He waited, ready to pounce.

He was interrupted. “Really!” his real friend complained in alarm from across the room. “Those are my boobs your eyes are coveting!” So far as Eron could see, he was boobless. “You’re too wet behind the ears for her!” Possessiveness had cleared away all visions of mathematics, and he was standing at attention near his abandoned whiteboard, eyes fixed on Eron. Eron ambled over. The doyenne would have to wait. “I’ve a question I’ve been meaning to ask you.” That was a ruse; what Eron “really” wanted to know was how to scroll and erase a whiteboard, since when he’d tried to use the damn thing it didn’t seem to have a visible tactile input, nor did it respond to verbal commands. But a question about kanite algebras would have to do as a diversion. “Clear up something for me,” he cajoled. “Why are we trying to use one of the kanite algebras to solve this problem? I don’t understand.” He put on his best woebegone air.

The florist’s son groaned but was only too happy to distract Eron. He began to scribble on the whiteboard, which turned out to be such a primitive device that it didn’t even correct his illegible handwriting. Eron watched hawk-eyed as the board filled, waiting to see what would happen when it was time to erase. “Got that?” chimed his friend, pausing just long enough for Eron to memorize the scribbles before wiping them away with the flat of his palm. It was the second time Eron had seen this, and it suddenly dawned on him that the whiteboard wasn’t defective! Ingenious! But there didn’t seem to be any way to scroll. Instead of scrolling, new symbols were added to odd blank comers and arrows guided one through the maze.

It was hopeless. Eron figured that it was going to take him at least a couple of turns on Faraway’s axis to bring this low-technology group under control. So back to his cave. As he left he whispered the special question he had saved for the doyenne’s ears alone—prudently first glancing to check that his really real friend was still puzzling over his own handwriting on the whiteboard.

Faraway had a leisurely rotation, and Eron stayed up all of a long night in his room with the plastic camel lamp he had found in the trash on one of his walks. Camels were reputedly mammals and so related to humans. Marrae didn’t believe it because they didn’t have hands and couldn’t climb trees; she was sure they couldn't have evolved on Rith and, maybe, were just gengineered freaks, even mythological beasts. But Eron thought their haughty expression was very human. He believed. “Anthropomorphism,” grumbled Marrae. At any rate the camel’s belly glowed comfortingly. The light wasn’t bright enough to read by, but he did all his reading at the console. After dinner he had been hard at work with a tutorial on kanite algebras. Its library use-log said it hadn’t been booted in almost a sixtyne of years. Perhaps that was a warning about the quality of the presentation, or perhaps just an indication that kanite algebras weren’t fashionable. The subject was exciting, the tutorial as bland as if its creators hadn’t quite grasped the power of the material they were teaching.

He allotted himself a modest nap before breakfast—it didn’t do to live without any sleep. Why hadn’t someone gengineered a bug-fix for sleep—it was such a waste of time. After all, those lazy gengineers had had seventy-odd millennia to perfect the human genome. Of course, maybe the original humans had been camels, and transmogrifying a camel would have taken some doing, especially for a camel!

Jak was the only one up for breakfast. Eron rattled off about the amazing properties of kanite algebras. Jak listened patiently while the cuisinator prepared him a plate of poached eggs on muffin topped by ham in a creamy sauce of butter, egg yolks, and darkmoon juice. He poured a jigger of ersatz Armazin over the benedictine concoction before interrupting Eron’s monolog. “What you need is a little practical math.”

“Ugh,” said Eron. “That’s your genteel word for physics. What do I need physics for? I’m interested in human beings!” He was calling up a sprinkling of ground cinnamon beetloid for the butter on his toast

“You need to know physics to know thyself. Right now you’re just a walking wave-function with a silly smile. Your fam is a quantum computer. Your penis is another swollen-wave function. Your conscious mind is a teeny-weeny quantum agent that can’t possibly keep track of all the things going on inside your head. Dismiss physics at your peril.”

“I want to solve problems that have never been solved before.”

Jak laughed with his face full of eggs and ham sauce. “Come to today’s problem seminar. Our chief prestidigitator, Prof Sledgehammer—”

“Sledgehammer?”

“His real name is unpronounceable. You don’t want to know. He comes from a planet where the larynx has devolved but the hands move quicker than the eye! He runs our problem sessions. Usually he’s kind-hearted and gives us problems we can solve if we cheat a bit by brainraiding our friends, but this watch he wants us to relax while he gives us a lecture on a problem that was posed back during the Interregnum. He’s going to give us tips on how to play with an intractable problem. He’s been working on it for thirty years—off and on, of course, not being deranged like you math freaks.”

A problem that hadn’t been solved? Eron was intrigued. After humanity’s eighty thousand years of number-juggling, a problem without an answer was hard to come by. Of course, humans were more ambitious now that they used fams instead of clay. He let Jak drag him to the lecture.

It was a class smaller than the math club, but more formal—no lunches allowed. No throwing rolls at the prof. Old Sledge lounged in his easy chair and chatted with wry humor about his love of sailing. He used that to segue into apocryphal tales about the legendary Faraway physicist Malcof who had also loved sailing, reputedly spending much time in his one-masted sloop creating conundrums. The one on today’s agenda had appeared twenty-five centuries ago in an early version of Asinia’s Encyclopedia under unsolved physics problems. No one knew if it was Malcof’s own problem or one he had purloined from a source now vanished into the chaos of the Dark Ages.

When Old Sledge finally tacked into the wind—after abandoning the telling of tall tales to return to the problem on the agenda—he still couldn’t keep his ship on course. He bobbed around at sea by using analogy rather than careful mathematical symbolism. Such euphemism annoyed Eron. Physicists! They pulled out of the bilgewater clunky concepts like standing waves in a cup of water or speeding bullets when what they meant was a space-time probability distribution! Sledge’s choices of analogy were always colorful, often startling, but like all analogies, each held an arsenal of potential traps. Analogies were never perfect. Eron’s mind drifted. He remembered an episode from that Rithian epic Reinstone had lent him—Rith must be quite some place if you could find on it winged women with three-toed claws and feathered boobs! He made an analogy of his own: listening to an analogy was about as safe as trying to sail past the island home of Rith’s sirens while at the same lime enjoying their singing.

The wakedream grew more complex—better than listening to a physicist talk—as his fam conjured an ocean with the fog of dawn drifting across a distant rocky shore, the beautiful sirens barely visible on their crag. He felt the ropes tying him to the mast. He felt himself strain against them as he harkened to those enchanting voices that drifted out to sea above the wind and the clunk of deaf sailors dipping their oars in the brine. How could a physicist compete with the lilting of a siren’s poetry?

Come, great Odysseus, Hero in thy Glory,

Stop, bring your Ship to rest and Hear our honeyed story.

Turn that black prow to Shore; Taste the Sweet Delights

Waiting here for heroes through Magic Days and Nights

We know the Noble Past, know the Future’s Plan.

Pause... then go thy way, a joyful, wiser man.

Old Sledge tired of farting around with the half-truths of analogy and suddenly he stood erect, spryly energetic, to attack the whiteboard. At last! Mathematical rigor! Eron began to pay close attention. The problem was new to him but its structure was familiar from his sparring matches with Murek. Eron had already set his fam to automatically clean up, memorize, organize, and cross-index the ramblings that these crazy Faraway types scribbled on their ubiquitous whiteboards. Now that thinking had turned precise, pieces fit together cleanly—except for the known contradictions and puzzles. He was able to translate Sledgehammer’s awkward perambulations into Murek’s categories while developing his own interpretations faster than the prof could scrawl out his thirty years of thinking. The one convenient thing about whiteboards was that they were ten times slower than disciplined thought. Fam-aided thought, of course. Maybe that fam upgrade they had cobbled into his old clunker was actually working! Or maybe he was pretematurally smart.

Just as Eron was getting excited because he could see how the solution was going to come out—Old Sledge stopped and leaned on his shovel. “So there you are; that’s twenty-five centuries of sniffing around the edges. Your assignment: State the problem clearly, then map out a campaign of attack. I want to see how your brains work when you are not copying from each other or from an old text you think I don’t know about.”

Eron looked around. No one had a comment. Jak had slipped out ahead of the class. The rest of them—turned to stone—sat bedazzled in their silence. “But, sir, the solution is obvious,” said Eron in that tone of voice which had presaged his expulsion from three schools.

“Oh?” The legendary sledgehammer came down full force on Eron’s head. “Explain ”

Eron wrapped up his thesis in three sentences. More would have been redundant.

The professor was amused. “That won’t do. Come here.” Eron rose and Old Sledge courteously erased the whiteboard with the flat of his hand while slipping Eron his lightpen.

Eron filled up the board, adjusting the size of his writing so there would be no need of scrolling. He was impressed with himself but a litde nervous. “We’ll need a computer to work it through.” He did a mental calculation on the complexity of his expression. “That tired old thing the Physics Department calls a computer should be able to crank out the result in about three hours. A good computer would do it in less.”

“I’m amazed by the audacity of your approach!” exclaimed the professor ambiguously with a two-edged bite in his voice. He stared at the whiteboard, deep in thought. Eron stared at the professor. Finally Old Sledge shook his head in triumph. “Nope. Won’t work.”

“It will!” said Eron defiantly, not caring if they expelled him.

“Won’t,” said the icy prof.

“Why?”

“That’s for you to tell me.” He then dismissed the class and left Eron alone and enraged.

The Osa boy found himself walking down the Mall, oblivious of the city and its people. His mind was recalculating his conclusion, his attention alternately searching for his error, plotting the murder of professors, and planning to quit school for a career in pirating. He reached the Founder’s Mausoleum without noticing the length of the walk,.

Inside, the magnificence distracted him. What a place to be buried! Did the intricately inlaid design of the floor conceal the Founder’s bones, perhaps gilded in gold leaf? Maybe they’d stuffed him and he was sitting in a back chamber inside a maze known only to the Fellowship where he could be consulted for auguries. Reverendy Eron touched the lacquered finish of the empty podium—it was here that the Great Man’s hologram had spoken from the grave after every psychohistorical crisis.

The hall was a tomb; no anticipating audience sat in its sanctified tiers where his audiences had once been crammed. A couple strayed in, peeked, and left. Eron wondered if psychohistorical crises had to be confined to the Interregnum. For the fun of it he stood behind the podium box and delivered a speech to the expanse of chairs, explaining the first post-interregnum crisis. He spoke solemnly. A great conspiracy of professors had arisen in galactic basements everywhere to paralyze the fabric of civilization by whacking students over the head with sledgehammers. His eloquent speechmaking made him laugh. He was the Founder, laughing. Especially the part about the student uprising!

Back in his room, his fury set him to proving himself right. He shifted his argument, shoring it, building it on an unassailable foundation before he began to extend a pillar up into the sky to support his conclusion. Another sleepless watch! He worked in a frenzy. Always so close... and yet... hints of a flaw... he failed at the last stage... A horrible flaw! Bitter negative insight was disheartening. The lack of sleep, the impending dawn, turned his mind into polymeriz-ing jelly, his fam’s safeties refusing to drive it further. He slept for an hour and dreamed of sirens who had lured him to destruction on the rocks.

Then he shook himself awake and went back to work. It wasn’t going to be the victory he had visualized, conquering a problem that has taunted physicists for twenty-five centuries, but it was competent analysis, even clever. He was surely going to bring it to Old Sledge today, to show him that Eron Osa hadn’t been all wrong. The damn prof had probably seen the flaw in half a round of jiffs.

It wouldn’t do to put it into a famfeed format. That was an insult, asking a man to fill up his mind with your junk. Murek was always trying to teach him humility even if his old tutor had damn little of it himself. Eron thought to print his analysis on good paper—but that was too humble. Acid-free paper based on cellulose only lasted for five hundred years before crumbling to sawdust. Eron set up the apartment’s manufacturum for cellomet, which would last at least ten millennia. Adding in a beautiful binding was only a few more commands. It was almost a book, Eron’s first.

He didn’t quite have the courage to drop in on Sledgehammer unannounced so he went to Reinstone for encouragement. Reinstone listened patiently to his troubles and encouraged him. He wrote “Cogito ergo tormentum” on his whiteboard.

“What does that mean?” asked Eron.

“That’s for you to tell me.”

“All you old codgers say that! You’re here to teach me!”

“I beg your pardon, young man. You are here to teach yourself. I’m an advisor and sometimes I even manage to be a resource.” He smiled and went off for a trip down his shelves. “I have just what you need,” came his muffled voice, and then he reappeared holding a gold-embossed volume with a self-sealing cover and its own vacuum pump. “The Aeneid,” he said, “in the original—if you are naive enough to trust the Rithian copyists. I’ve found numerous errors in it myself, but nothing, I think, that would cause Virgil more than minor cringing.”

Eron broke the seal to the pop of inrushing air. Some nice pictures of people who lived in stone houses. The text was gibberish. His fam co-opted his eyes to make a quick count of the text symbols. There weren’t enough to cover even a quarter of the sounds in a decent language. This must be from the time when Rithians spoke in grunts. Another language to learn! He already knew ten and had once been expelled from school for refusing to learn an eleventh— well—he had reformatted his teacher’s whole language library with a late-Empire military code for which he didn’t have the decryption tools.

Reinstone could read his trepidation and called up the quantronic secretary at physics and made an appointment with Sledgehammer. When the confirmation came through he told Eron to skedaddle, first making sure that The Aeneid was in his student’s hands. Eron left to the faint whisper of the book’s vacuum pump.

Old Sledge seated him cordially. “I hadn’t expected you so soon. Reinstone tells me you have something interesting for me .”

“You were right,” said Eron dejectedly. He shoved his bound folder in front of him. “But I did some work. It was pretty exciting—for a while.”

“I was right, was I? Awful problem, that one, a devilish ball-cracker which has seduced me and then blasted me to crisp carbon enough times so I know how you feel ” He picked up the folder and opened it. He read it in less time than Eron had taken for the print job. That made Eron nervous. Only once did he glance up. “This isn’t what you said in class.”

“I had time to clean it up.”

“You most certainly did. Who taught you Heraklians?” “My tutor.”

Sledge held up a palm to indicate a pause, said, “Inamin,” and turned to his console, with quick deaf-mute hand gestures, checking through a storm of activity but sometimes pausing to think. He shut up Eron in midsentence when the boy tried to interrupt the silence. Then he swiveled around to face Eron. “You brought this for my comment, right?”

“If it’s crazy, I want to know.”

“You’ve vaulted right over my objection. Spacedamn it, I didn’t expect you to bypass my objection, I expected you to find it!”

“You didn’t tell me what it was, sir.”

“I know.” He swore by the gods that physicists fear. “Do you know what you’ve just done? You marched right through a demon’s army without noticing them. You’ve done the best work on this problem in twenty-five centuries. I’m signing you up for my course.”

“What?”

“I’m not letting you get out of it! Students like you don’t wander into my class every semester.”

“But I don’t want to be a physicist.”

Stunned silence. The physicist’s sails were blown aback. How could anyone not want to be a physicist? He recovered and sailed on. “Is it that you’d rather dance and sing? Has Reinstone convinced you to write poetry? I see that he’s given you one of those fake books that Rithians publish for the tourist trade.” He took it and unsealed the cover. “I might have known! Another invented language. If you decode it you’ll discover the secrets of the ancients. That’s the blurb, eh? Don’t forget that it’s a bargain at a thousand credits.” He winked and laughed and resealed the book, activating the susurrus of its pump. “So what do you want to be?”

“A psychohistorian.”

Sledgehammer brought his face close to Eron’s, studying it for madness. “Do you really believe that those charlatans can predict the future?” He scoffed and swiveled his aerochair toward the window. “If psychohistory was a science, they’d tell us how they did it. Wouldn’t they? That’s what science is all about. Open disclosure. Sharing of methods. Cross-checking. Communication. The search for truth. The willingness to stand in front of one’s peers and confess one’s mistakes! I tell you about tough problems you never heard of and, puzzled, you go off and bring back to me an answer. What does a psychohistorian do? He mumbles mug-you-magic-cockamamie and pretends he can’t tell you what it means because it is all a secret that must be kept or the sky will fall. If Faraway hadn’t been driven by that kind of self-defeating superstition from the beginning, we’d still be ruling the Galaxy!”

“Yeah, but if they are so dumb, why are they ruling the Galaxy?”

“A good point, lad. Maybe we’re the dumb ones.” His anger gone, he became mellow. “And what appeals to you about psychohistory? The psycho part, or the history part?”

“It can predict the future.”

“I see.” Sledgehammer’s eyes became cunning. “There are no courses like that at Asinia

“I know.”

“Tragedy! You’ll have to take second best.”

“You?”

There was a little curl to his lips and a nod of the head. “We of the physics department humbly volunteer as second best” His voice was sarcastic. “What can I say? Test us. Second rate though we may be, we are willing to teach you what we know about how to predict, maybe not the future but at least a few of the minor if dazzling tricks of precognition. We aren’t the least bit secretive. Look up our sleeves. Don’t expect a performance equal to the claims of those meddling psychohistorians, but we can teach you how to predict when laminar flow will turn into turbulent flow; we can tell you which aerochair will hold you comfortably and which one will flip you over and crack your head against the floor; we can tell you where a star was when men were just forest nomads and where it will be a hundred millennia from now. And I can predict, within the bracket of a month, when a massive star will turn supernova.”

“What grades am I going to get?”

Sledge grinned happily. “Ah, students never change! I feel my own youth again whenever I hear that request! We don’t have the potion for immortality, either. But let me give you my best offer. I’ll teach you everything a physicist knows about predicting. Some of it ought to prove useful when you take up charlatanry.”

So Eron signed on, not knowing that he was getting into a long-term relationship with a very demanding taskmaster. Predicting turned out to be learning how to repeat oneself with minimum error. He worked at simple stuff like how to use a phase-shift electron nanocalib, how to polish a surface to a sixteenth of a wave-length of violet light, how to build up a probability distribution from experimental repetition— and some even weirder stuff. Sledge once put him on a team of advanced students tinkering with a huge black energotron out in the desert that could, when it wasn’t sulking, make measurements to within a few planck lengths.

When he wasn’t in the labs or at the space station facility Eron was chief designer, under Sledgehammer, of the class that built multivariate models and then performed perturba-

tion analysis on each and every variable so they would all get a gut feel for the role which that variable played in the model. Sledge liked them to rank each variable by how the errors in its measurement contributed to error in the model’s final predictions. He had one ability that drove Eron wild with envy. He could unerringly look at a phenomenon and build a rule-of-thumb model of it that was more error free than any model Eron was able to assemble with sixtynes of variables. When Eron tried to wheedle out of him how he did it, Old Sledge would just laugh and mutter about complexity compression. If pressed further, he put his finger to his lips and hinted at a secret voodoo methodology.

Eron was so exasperated he flung at his mentor the worst insult he could think of: “You’re no better than a Spacedamned psychohistorian!”

For that, liege lord Sledgehammer assigned him to do high penance and cast him out into the desert. He was there requested to write a fifty-thousand-word essay on the irreducible uncertainties introduced into any prediction by the quantum mechanical equations. Sledge made clear that the essay was to cover everything: why such irreducible uncertainties made the strict repetition of any experiment impossible, why it dictated the irreversibility of any event, why it caused the gradual erasure of the past and blurred vision into the future, first by obscuring near-term details and then finally by swamping out larger and larger details. Eron completed the essay in a little air-conditioned office he usurped under the energotron. His twenty-five-year-old mistress, the desert Stationmaster, made him a present of a hair shirt, which he nailed to his door. She was an indispensable aid in editing the manuscript while kissing his ears.

It was this brilliant essay which eventually clinched the interest of the Fellowship when Eron Osa was brought to their attention.