Psychohistorical Crisis

33

INITIATION, 14,798 GE

... inaudible and noiseless foot of time.

The SpearShaker of Old Rith

It was already dark when Kambu arrived to escort Eron. They traveled by wheeled hydrocart that shook Eron’s teeth (Rithian design?) to the foamed domicile assigned to new students. Then Nejirt instructed the cart to return itself to the depot and walked Eron over to another oddly shaped dwelling to meet wife Wendi and have dinner. Dinner was a salad that Wendi had chopped together from vegetables picked up at the local village—one leafy ingredient, at least, being aboriginal. The dressing came from the communal cuisinator and, according to Wendi, was a good ersatz of a local recipe. Eron was desperate to learn from his guide more of the encampment’s purpose. But Wendi was the talker.

The Kambu temp was decorated modestly with items she had picked up at the Great Pyramid boutiques. Wendi raved about her Pyramid though she had spent only a decawatch— maybe four Rithian days—in the seaside metropolis which now engulfed it. Obviously the event had been the high point of her vacation.

Wendi depreciated her decorative taste insincerely. There were simple tapestries to emphasize four of the sixteenth-century AD Ming vases which she had bought dearly at the Pyramid’s Ching-te-chen factory. Against the wall a sea sailor’s pirate chest, brass banding and all, promised treasures. A bronze Egyptian clepsydra held a prominent place atop a central table, its water flow calibrated into twenty-four hieratic symbols, and those into sixty minutes, the minutes further being graduated down to the tenth part. Wendi gave their guest a lesson about how to tell local time. “You might as well get used to it—Rith isn’t likely to go Imperial any time soon. No Rithian will ever give up a bad habit once established.”

Eron became fascinated by the machine’s clever calibration gizmo, everything giant size and visible. “Is it accurate?” “Well, it runs slow,” Wendi complained. “It only tells Fourth Dynasty sidereal time—I mean, Egyptian Fourth Dynasty, not ours! And sometimes I don’t top it off with water. It is easy to forget that it only runs on gravitic energy.” Nejirt was grinning at Eron’s admiration. His accent was more clipped and assured than Wendi’s loquaciousness. “These Rithian anachronists save everything. You should get the specs on some of the hoary genes they are preserving in the sapiens gene pool in the name of the preservation of the last relics of the great monkeys!”

Nejirt eventually rescued Eron from Wendi’s enthusiasm by taking him out for a walk under the stars. Rith had wobbled almost three times around its axis since the raising of the Great Pyramid, but the stars of Rith’s many deserts were just as awesome now as they had been then. A six-legged rodoid from outer space scampered away among the skorgn bushes to dodge the light of Kambu’s beamlamp. “With all of my Wendi’s talk I didn’t get to hear what you thought of the Great Pyramid.”

“Hard to believe primitives could built something huge enough to create Wendi’s kind of ardor with only twenty years of hustle!”

The young psychohistorian smiled at Eron’s tease, then scoffed. “You must have been reading Herodotus. The Greeks were the first of a long line of gullible tourists ending in my wife. Herodotus wrote about the pyramids two millen-ilia after the fact. But I suppose he had a better chance of getting it right than we do!”

“I thought his history had been lost during Rith’s Great Collapse?”

“Probably was. But the Galaxy is a big place. I snared me a copy. Interesting once you get the hang of the Greek lan guage’s charming simplicity.”

“You’re sure you didn’t buy one of those Rithian forgeries that are marketed as amazing discoveries?”

Nejirt smiled smugly. “Mine dates from a prehyperage starship library captured as booty during the Regionate wars, shipped off to storage at some boondocks depot and forgotten for millennia until the Pax Pscholaris. Konn brought exabytes of stuff with him that dates back to ancient Rith, most of it unreadable and unread.” He was ducking under some dusty-leaved branches to lead Eron through a shortcut. “Herodotus did say it took twenty years to build the Great Pyramid. Two-and-a-half-million two-and-a-half-ton stones is a lot of stone. Herodotus also said that the area of each of its faces was equal to the square of its height, which is true, so he may be right on the first count. You can get all of the details from Rossum’s Universal Comedian, as you probably noticed on the way over. Did you like Konn’s toy?” “That crazy aerocar was saturating my mind with numbers. I can no longer think straight! He belongs to Konn? Does Konn actually teach his machines history?”

“Konn collects very strange creatures,” mused Nejirt, “like you and me. Wait till you meet his dog!”

“When do I get to work?” asked Eron, unable to contain his curiosity.

“You’re already working. Didn’t you just complain that your mind had been filled with numbers to overflowing? You’ve been briefed on your first assignment by an exnightclub master of ceremonies who has taken to flying in his old age.” Hahukum Konn’s assistant flopped down on a huge outcropping of graffiti-weathered rock that was perfectly shaped to his body. Eron remained standing while Nejirt explained to him how he was to be involved in a pedantic exercise, not predicting a future but predicting Rith’s past. Then he shrugged, obviously questioning the utility of “predicting” a past so huge and so far away that no one could even remember it well enough to check the “prediction ” Nejirt was as full of chatter as his wife, praising Konn and undermining him at the same time. He began to wax philosophical about mathematical points which made no sense to the recruit...

“What assignment?” Eron cut in.

“Sit down. Relax. You won’t get a view like this when they put you in chains down in the depths of Splendid Wisdom—unless you’re some kind of a pervert nocturnal roof-freak. You’ll soon be too busy trying to please Konn to enjoy the stars.” He extended his arms and his eyes to the sky.

“I’ve seen stars before,” said Eron.

“Well, I can’t get enough of them. I was bom a blind mole deep in the heart of Splendid Wisdom. This is elixir for my soul!”

“You forgot to open your eyes while en route?”

“Looking at the stars from inside a spacesuit helmet isn’t die same thing.”

‘There are portholes.” Smiling, Eron sat down on the rock, more stiffly than his companion, his buttocks obscuring a polished curse carved in some bygone epoch by the laser pistol of an unhappy Eta Cumingan sergeant.

Nejirt continued his musing. “I think Konn brought us here—even the aerocar and the dog—to marinate in the glorious history of mankind. He wants to mature our mean little souls with a little vastness. Amazing that most of those stars up there—except the really big, bright ones—were visited in the ten millennia of space travel before the hyperdrive. Can you even imagine Rith when it was a thriving hive of twenty-seven billions? Noble madmen. Look.” He pointed. ‘There’s Sintea! jewel of the prehyperspace era, gone to weeds under Eta Cuminga.”

Eta Cumingan technology marked the transition between the Interstellar Age and the Galactic Age. Those ancient empire builders had returned to Rith long after the Great Collapse had silenced the teeming cities of the First Men. It went without saying that their once-mighty armies also belonged as much to the mists of history as did the Assyrian and Persian and Macedonian waves which had ravenously washed over Egypt during the twilight of the Nile civilization. Only the Nile was still flowing. Nejirt relaxed with his hands behind his head while his captive audience listened.

“You’ve been edging me toward the hangar,” said Eron to nudge the subject back again into a more immediate channel. “I think the whole secret of what we’re doing here is in there. What is it?”

Nejirt Kambu grinned again. “You don’t want to know. The main thing you have to know is that the Admiral is a madman.” He rose as if whipped to attention and they were on their way again. “Come. I’ll show you inside.” They began to work their way down the hill past the station that desalinated the brackish water from their well. “Did you crawl around inside that Horezkor getting the photos and measures Konn wanted?”

“Yeah. It was a lot of fun.”

“Wait till you see what the Admiral has in his hangar henel”

A growling dog loped over. “WhatlsDo?” asked the dog, ready for a fight. He sat up on his haunches and his front paws uncurled into fingers.

“Easy, Rhaver!” Nejirt stuck out his fingers for the dog to smell. “It’s only me. I work here. And you aren’t a guard dog.”

“AmSo,” said the dog, but having lost interest, ran away after some other smell.

The hangar door rumbled open. No one was inside. Nejirt ordered the watchbot to create light, then powered the idle mnemonifier. Eron couldn’t quite make out what they’d walked into. There were offices along a balcony and broken stones neatly laid out on the floor with equipment probably meant to chip, slice, and analyze stone. And a mock-up of a large fuselage propped on scaffolding.

“The Monster from the Deep!” announced Nejirt. “Some geophysicist diver found it. Komi heard the rumors, dropped everything, and organized an expedition. It took our Mad Admiral to fish the fossil up out of the sea.”

“An old Rithian sea monster?” asked Eron in confusion. “Sea monster! No. Space help us, Hahukum kens batde-ships like that Horezkor—any kind of mobile weapon. A long time ago contemporary with the Great Pyramid this one used to fly. It came with... well, a skeleton crew—a broken wing, calcified—four motors, calcified—bent propellers, calcified—the ghosts of bullet holes. Also an empty bomb womb. Konn is pretty sure it was once the weapon mentioned in some of the surviving lit as the Venteen Flying Fortress. Konn is all excited about reconstructing a full-size copy. He’s going to fly it. Want to join the air crew? Me, I’m hanging onto the skorgn bushes! Skorgn bushes have gripping roots that go way, way down looking for water. Not for me risking my ass in a contraption as old as flying! Might as well try cattle herding on a Tyrannosaurus mount.”

Eron walked over to the rocky fossils. “Nothing can be preserved in there after seventy-five thousand years!” “Reconstructions are Konn’s specialty. What’s driving his engineers crazy is how these guys got away with not using quantronic controllers. Space, even basic electronics is missing—we thought we’d find at least traces of silicon. And a good mechanical controller would be too heavy to fly.”

“But the metal is all gone! Surely the airframe wasn’t ceramic! They didn’t know how to work ceramics yet!”

“No aluminum left for sure, but enough oxide traces so we can tell you the exact alloy. We already have the basic dimensions and have shown it to be airworthy—if controlled by modem guidance. How they controlled it is still a mystery, but we have hints. Now it’s mostly a matter of building the parts. Tricky. Hard to believe the work arounds those shamans used. You wouldn’t expect Rithians to be that intelligent, and certainly not Rithians who were still unclear on the basic concepts of quantum engineering! They thought pi was twenty-two sevenths or maybe even three!”

Eron wasn’t listening. He was examining slices of what had once been airframe and the tri-dim reconstructions on one of the mnemonifier screens. “What does this have to do with psychohistory?”

“Nothing. Not a damn thing! Recall that I never attested to Konn’s sanity” Kambu took Eron over to the fuselage mock-up. “Can you believe Konn intends to fly this thing?”

“What am / doing here?”

“You know some fluid dynamics—our Konn grinned when he spotted that in your resume. Haven’t you noticed that you are a physicist? That’s why you’ve been brought here in such a rush. Maybe you know how to ensorcell a Fortress into flight mode? Hard to get the weight down to work with such underpowered motors. Chemical motors! Wheels, crankshafts, gears—you won’t believe the stuff that’s in there! They used sheet metal for skin that takes projectiles like it was a kid’s play papier-mach6 armor!”

“How was it controlled?”

“Evidently by hidden wires and mirrors from the cockpit. Not a brain in the beast. Not a neuron! Not a chip! There were some traces of tiny electrically goosed genies-in-a-bottle but they weren’t in the control loop. When that Fortress needs a brain, the pilot better not be asleep ” He showed Eron the mounted skull of the pilot, obviously a Homo sapiens of low intellect “He’s been asleep for a long time. Maybe he died in his sleep.”

“And you want me to decode the fluid dynamics of an ancient aerocar?” Eron asked, appalled.

Kambu was blithe. “Aerodynamicist looks good on your job description for the accountants. Of course, what we really need is a graduate student to carry heavy weights. Like lifting rocks to the slicer. Rock chipping, too. You’re a strong young fellow.” Nejirt led Eron up the plasteel stairs to a row of office cubicles. “Yours.” Inside, there was barely room for two people and their tools. Eron especially noticed the red mask to protect a face from flying debris. Nejirt’s grin widened. “Oh yes, and after a Rithian day’s work—sunrise to sunset— of carrying rocks and a little aerodynamic finger-counting,

Konn expects you to slave away solving those history problems to advance your education. I’ve already mentioned that. At night. After sundown. By candlelight. Konn has a set of sixtyne or so projects for you to teethe on. You can pick which idea appeals to you. No rest for you serfs,” he added with the joy of an Interregnum slaver.

It sounded terrible. But the thought of being taught some psychohistory was cheering. “History being a euphemism for psychohistory?” asked Eron hopefully.

“Not by the Founder’s Nose!” Nejirt brought Konn’s beginner list of problems to the wall’s mnemonifier terminal. “You probably won’t see any psychohistory until you get back to Splendid Wisdom. First you have to scrabble around sorting out simpler-known historical events into their causes and effects in a way that allows you to predict what has already happened—nothing complicated—warm-up exercises—just ticktacktoe pieces where the outcome is so obvious that high prognostication isn’t really necessary—for example, extrapolating the fate of a prestellar Rithian two-faction nation-state where the main issue is whether republican or democratic adultery is permissible to a politician.” ‘That sounds like psychohistory to me.”

“No! No! No!” Nejirt paused to let his negative exclamations have their effect. “The full mathematics of psychohistory is incredibly more complex. The real stuff involves knowing how to manipulate the key events which make a prediction come true. Hein-Ricova analysis, et cetera, et cetera. For now Konn just wants you to simulate a known primitive history. Predicting the past to tell you what you already know is instructive but it is far simpler than manipulating a future to tell you what you want to hear.”

“What does Konn do for a living when he’s not dallying?” “He keeps the lid on. Pretty dull work. It is Jars Hanis who is into all the ideas and all the action. Not that the likes of you and me can get close to Rector Hanis.”

Eron stared blankly at Konn’s beginner’s list while Nejirt relentlessly continued—the senior, who’d been through it all, hazing the freshman. “Your aerial companion was probably briefing you on a multitude of subjects. Did anything strike your fancy?”

Eron reviewed his adventures since landing on Rith. “Flying inside that animated mouthpiece was like being tossed into a sixty-four-dimensional universe. Artabas, aturs, degrees, cubits, cubic barley feet, pints, arshins, scruples, grains, fingers, shekels, librae, qedets, hours, talents. My mind spins. He was telling me that the Great Pyramid was originally both a standard of length and time, east-west length being determined by the distance the stars moved in one second and north-south distance by the difference in the culmination angle of a star measured at two latitudes. I do remember that sixty laps around its original base—a day’s march by foot—times 360 was equivalent to a journey halfway around Rith.”

“Ah-ha! You noticed the numbers. Weights and measures. Now we know how your mind works! I know the problem for you.” Kambu then commanded the mnemonifier to display on the office screen a map of the earliest cradle of humanity contoured in layers by ease-of-travel—wiggly lines, pastel colors, different layers for different modes of transport. “Your physics courses at Asinia must have taught you the laws of diffusion?”

“Yeah. But nothing about social diffusions.”

“I’ll outline Konn’s ticktacktoe problem. How do weight-and-measure standards establish themselves across political boundaries? It happened here at the dawn of civilization.” He swept his hand over the eastern end of the Inner Sea region. “It also happened in the Galaxy where measurement standards drifted during the sublight diaspora but became universal again long before the rise of Splendid Wisdom’s empire. What’s the diffusion mechanism?”

Eron stared at the map and thought of it as a wet surface upon which colored dyes of “length” and “time” and “weight” had been dropped, tendrils of dye snaking out to entwine with each other. But that analogy was simple physics and chemistry. Psychodynamics would be different—more like dynamic populations, more like evolution with the standards of measure emerging as the dominant life-form. A challenge. “What initial conditions are we assuming?”

“Konn doesn’t want you to worry about that just yet. The scutch work has already been done; what you do with those numbers is Konn’s main interest. Konn wants to see how you think—not how well you ferret. There’s one thing you can count on from him—he’s not going to tell you what you need to know, he’s going to observe the style by which you make a fool of yourself so he’ll know how to train you.”

Eron sighed.

Nejirt laughed. “Don’t worry so much. When it comes to the important work of fossil extraction”—he waved at the rocks—“you’ll be using tools more advanced than Egyptian fingernails!”

The young apprentice did meet Hahukum Konn briefly to receive his first famfeed—in exchange for his formal vow of secrecy. He vaguely remembered warnings about this moment, but the thrill of being offered what he had struggled so long to attain muted all caution.

He was led into a private room to an elaborate high-backed chair that was obviously used only for ritual affairs, mechanical tentacles sprouting from its headrest, damascene adorned and rustling in excitement at sensing the presence of his fam. Just another machine.

Second Rank Hahukum Konn appeared in robes hastily donned, ready to do the formal honors. Eron had been ready, impatient, for months, and, though the coming confirmation wasn’t voluntary, he wasn’t thinking much about it; he wanted the proffered knowledge too much. Konn explained the contract carefully and articulately, his speech a detailed proof of the Founder’s theorem that secrecy was a vital adjunct of a successful prediction. It made mathematical sense and Eron responded with the right noises—mouthing formalisms he hardly took seriously was a small price to pay.

It was the sentient chair which acted as priest—enfolding Eron while lying down, in the depths of his fam, a quantum neural structure that would not lend itself to any simple sequential data access. Eron would not be able to unmix from his memories what he was now absorbing—the cream was in the coffee—erasure could only be by nonuse, by the grad-ual cannibalization of information bits—or by the outright destruction of his fam under the laws governing treason. Nobody other than Eron could tap into the unique coding. Nor would he be able to export any of it in readable format. Even to use it himself he would have to spend years of effort “remembering” what he had never known.

When the ritual sacrifice was over, the youth made one concession of respect to his old Ganderian tutor, muttering his doubts by alluding to the oath of secrecy-unto-death sworn by iron-age Pythagoreans—who had thereby earned a reputation as elitists and so, when they became politically active, were slaughtered by the irate citizens of Crotona.

But the great Konn wasn’t fazed by the intended irony of his newest student—he riposted amiably by counting up all the quadrillions of humans able to quote, but not prove, the sage Pythagorean theorem. Eron found that a weird viewpoint—equivalent to the statement that a gag vow was a moot point for a mathematician pledged to keep the methods of geometry secret from a colony of monkeys. Eron absorbed the High Pscholar’s thrust, it not being politic to continue his dissent. But he was remembering Murek’s cautionary story...

... during the renaissance of Egypt’s Sixteenth Dynasty, between the Assyrian and Persian occupations, Greeks and Greek merchants had been welcome and honored—in Sais and Naukratis. Pythagoras, an adventurous youth, left the island of Samos to spend half his life in Egypt studying as an acolyte in a cult of priest-cosmologists who forgave him his Greekness in the light of his brilliance. For two thousand years these priest-surveyors of Egypt had been accumulating the tenets of straight-edge and compass geometry in a horde of tools intended for their exclusive use. He was warned. No blabbermouthing about geometry to the superstitious laity—on pain of death.

But ancestral continuity is no guarantee of immunity from fate’s foibles.

The Persian conquest broke the cult’s back, carting off its adepts to Babylon and Persepolis to serve on Persian astronomical and geodesic projects. Persia intended to conquer the known world—from Thinai to the Table of the Sun—and the reconnoitering teams of King Cambyses recruited the world’s best mapmakers, who were all Egyptian geometers. Pythagoras escaped, first to Samos and then by ship, ahead of the Persian army, to the Greek colony of Crotona in Italy where he founded his own secretive school in the Egyptian tradition—modified by his Greek dreams of creating a new world order under the leadership of an elite cadre of “math-ematikoi.” To the end of his days Pythagoras enforced a vow of secrecy. Mathematics was not for the common masses.

All this Eron kept to himself. He found that he liked Second Rank Konn but at the same time wished that he was not so awed into silence by the old man—or so reduced to silence by the exalted tech his imagination saw within Splendid Wisdom’s tentacled chair. None of it mattered. He had passed through the gate.