Psychohistorical Crisis

29

OLD BOYS' NETWORK, LATE 14,797 GE

Mathematics is the Queen of Science but she isn't very Pure; she keeps having babies by handsome young upstarts and various frog princes—DK

—Engraving carved into a 21st-century AD skull

purchased at the Artiste’s Skull Emporium on Rith

Eron Osa had been too busy over the years to have girlfriends, except for occasional flings with the sensual Stationmaster of the energotron when the odd assignment sent him out to the desert. He had as a poor substitute a comer of his room hung with his favorite touchy-feely that came from a subterranean media shop off campus. She looked like an ordinary nude until your hands were close enough to be immersed in a delicate illusion—the touch of a real woman. Her thirty poses zoomed on command from a petite doll to a scrollable giantess four times normal size. She lived beside his books and never complained when he recited theorems at her.

Jak and Bari had graduated to better things, their places in the student apartment filled by a freshman and an Advanced Mucky-Muck in hyperspatial engineering. Bari willed Eron the job of House Manager (Ogre) in charge of Training Up Sloths to Keep Things Reasonably Neat, and Eron had become ruthless at dragging their unhousebroken freshman out of bed or jolting him from his wakedreaming to clean up the crumbs he had left in the kitchen or the pile of datasquares he had abandoned on the common room table.

Eron wasn’t quite so cavalier with the new engineer who worked out every decawatch at the local zenoli club. Osa had always been fascinated by the legend of the zenoli warders and once made the mistake of asking for a demonstration. It had been an awesome experience to be tossed around helplessly like a rag doll, sure that the whirling furniture was going to connect with his head only to be saved by a deft zenoli grab at his ankle which jerked him off in a new direction. He signed up for zenoli training immediately, putting on hold his calibration of an instrument that measured the velocity of tiny breezes by the rate of cooling in the radioactive head of a pin.

Most of the time Eron was at his own console, studying. It was a grueling habit he had ceased to question. He had already learned enough about the difficulties of measurement and error estimation to daunt a young man planning to make a life’s work out of predicting an essentially unpredictable future. But there was always more to learn. He spent extra watches in the physics lab building exotic measuring devices, and that, more than anything else, had introduced him to the mischievous boss of the universe, the god of chaos, a shapechanger who destroyed repeatability and disassembled order. Chaos would gladly lie to you about your future.

But chaos wasn’t an omnipotent viceroy; there were tiny long-term effects that kept slipping through chaos’ disorganized fingers to lose themselves in some back eddy of the universe where they grew up into things like the human brain—which then invented science to study such improbably persistent phenomena. Eron began to love the painfully acquired traditions of science whose refined strategies of guerrilla warfare used control-of-order as its means of resisting and defying chaos.

Eron was appreciating more and more the teachings of the phlegmatic but sometimes explosive Murek Kapor, who was now only a memory. That man had taught him a skewed way of attacking problems with a toolbox that didn’t seem to be used at Asinia, though the tools drilled into him by the Asin-ian mathematicians and physicists and engineers bridged chasms he had not been able to cross as a student on Agan-der. With the right forks and spoons curiosity became more than mouth-watering—it became belly-filling. Eron had an insatiable curiosity.

He dissected the order in human neural circuits. He pored over the math of the quantum effects used by a fam to accumulate information. He toadied up to Reinstone by analyzing how the memetic assumptions of a culture were stored in poetry—not letting on to Reinstone that he was using mathematical tools for the analysis and not the language dialectics that his tutor was so passionately fond of. From time to time he brought and recited for his mentor’s pleasure original poetry composed in a sixtyne of Old Rith styles. Their rhythm and their clever use of ancient tongues often brought tears to the old man’s eyes. Eron was careful not to mention that they came out of a rule-based machine program he had designed—Poetaster—to organize gibberish into pleasing concepts—in any of ten forgotten languages. Math was amazing. When you treated it like a Muse, it would do anything for you, even write poetry. He could understand how the Founder had captured die human soul in his equations.

At the same time it shocked Eron to find out that his mother’s favorite maxim was wrong. She must have repeated to him a thousand times her theories of the mind’s fundamental logical processes—but the human brain wasn’t logical at all. When you broke it down to its atomic processes, it was merely a statistical machine that cleverly filtered out the chaos so that a man might see whatever faint order lay behind the overwhelming noise. Evolution had taught man’s brain to ignore what it couldn’t control.

Eron was reminded of the way a frog’s eye was blind to stillness, seeing only motion. Mankind was blind to chaos. He saw only order. And if there was no order an undisciplined mind would frantically begin to correlate random events, seeing order in the shadows where none existed. An undiciplined mind wasn’t logical.

A man might find order in a perfectly random gambling machine and try to beat it. Chaos can produce a jackpot which looks like order to a human mind unexposed to a large enough sample space.

A man might find order in the wheeling stars and then create astrology in the hope that stellar order would rub off onto his chaotic life.

Eron knew men who could stare at a lightning bolt and then correlate gaze and bolt—weren’t they simultaneous?— to create for themselves a mentalic superstition explaining how a naked gaze carried the strength to bring lightning down upon the heads of others. If lightning could cause a man to think, then thinking could cause lightning, and from there it was only a step away to use thought to curdle milk and seduce young women and erase the evil in politician’s minds. Concentrate hard enough, and such a man could rule the Galaxy, blow up stars, create new universes. Powerless men have their dreams of power.

Not for Eron. The mind was a statistical machine ready to make correlations at the moment of emergence from the womb. But statistics without logic will tell you any lie you want to hear. It will correlate things that have no cause/effect relationship. It will confuse effect with cause and cause with effect. Logic has to be taught at the white heat of passion, then tempered in a cauldron of oil and put to the grindstone to get its final edge. It takes years.

And at the end of those years, Eron’s life was changed forever. He heard Marrae arguing with the hyperspace engineer and felt obliged to intervene. By now he had the seniority to end arguments. But when he opened his door into the central living space, Marrae was holding the sphere of a Personal Capsule. “He thinks it’s his and has been chasing me around the couch. It’s yours.” And she tossed it to him.

Eron disappeared back inside his room and closed the door, wishing that people would be a little less dramatic in their play. Why did he have to be exposed to heart failure

just because Marrae was flirting with the newbie? So—who would be sending him a Capsule? His parents? Murek Ka-por? But when it fell open he found a message from a man he had never expected to meet again. The Scav, Rigone.

Eron Osa: I hope you survived the operation of a couple of years back. It scared the tattoos off me but, it seems, I had good mentors. The experience saved my butt from the flame back here on SW. Thanks. To business. I have a friend who scares the remaining tattoos off me every time he drops by for a drink. You may or may not hear from him: Second Rank Pscholar Hahukum Konn. 1 run a place mostly frequented by students, and he is always asking me wistfully for the names of a few students who are also intelligent. Those he takes to his heart go far. I always think of you. You've had time by now to become seasoned. So... I have given him your name and location. If you ever reach Splendid Wisdom call on me at the Teaser's Bistro on the Olibanum. Fondly; Rigone.