Psychohistorical Crisis

34

ERON BUILDS A MODEL, 14,798 GE

My studies of ancient meteorology have led me to two general conclusions: first, that meteorology was bom mainly from the practices of the international merchant class of the ancient world and, second, that meteorology provided the foundation for the scientific rational vision of the world.

—Livio Catullo Stecchini (d. 1979 AD)

As the work of analyzing the flight dynamics of the fossilized Aerial Fortress went ahead, Eron began to spend his nights puzzling the pieces of his weights-and-measures diffusion problem into psychohistory’s scaffold. The difficulty was not only in absolving an alien mathematics so cavalierly archived in his fam but in trying, simultaneously, to empathize with another kind of alien humanity lost down there at the bottom of time. Even when he hewed to the Founder’s rules faithfully, the assumptions weren’t easy to follow. He kept trying to think like a physicist.

He took long walks in the desert to erase his preconceptions, sometimes even removing his fam while, of course, gripping it tightly in both hands. Famlessness induced a heady kind of godlike immediacy, his mind stupefied to the complexity of life. Nevertheless it granted him the distanced perspective he needed—gazing with the eyes of a Rith-bound sapiens fresh from the simian life.

Out here in the night air of Rith he was the spirit of a wave of settlers in the Nile Valley. He saw an arched heaven that couldn’t be higher than sixty times the highest mountain, a vault of glitter that rotated around an axis-point in a sky full of mystery and powers. The rising of the stars held the secret of life and death, commanding the immotile earth to renew when it was time for the flowering of life and commanding it to die when it was time for the cowering of death. Ra measured the sun’s day; Thoth measured the moon’s month; wandering stars made their rounds carrying cryptic messages; comets appeared out of nowhere, without pattern, warning of chaos.

Sometimes an adventurous urge took him—to see the mountains out of which the stars rose—to follow the rumors of distant riches told by the rare traveler, of gold, of marvels along the tin route, of pasture, of bustling towns, of strange people, of the terrible sea... sometimes it was merely the urge to be gone from the reach of an irate clan who were promising to murder him... sometimes he fell in with experienced merchants of his own kin or a cattleman grazing his herd... sometimes it was a craftsman’s trade that took him journeying. Metalsmith and artisan and surveyor had an easy mobility. Nomadic restlessness was not yet out of his blood. He had stories to bring with him to strange lands and stories to bring back; such is the delicious excitement of adventure in a world where talking-and-seeing and taking-and-bringing is the only form of communication.

Between the walks Eron wrote his inspiration into the equations of his mnemonifier, struggling with internal antagonisms, antilogy, error messages, and dead ends. And went back to walking under the stars.

Over the ages the Egyptian spirit reasoned how the laying of stones, aligned on certain heavenly events, allowed the prediction of an event’s repetition. Knowledge evolved into a profusion of calendars to determine the day, the month, the seasons, the year. The stones transmogrified into obelisks and wells to measure the shadows of the sun and into the sunbaked bricks of temples aligned to make a jewel glow with starlight in the sacred chamber at just the critical moment of the year’s cycle. Flash! The floods are coming. Prepare! Egyptians became masters of surveying in order to reestablish boundaries after the floods. Fixing a place in its relation to all other places became an obsession. Marker stones became jinn with occult powers, not to be moved—the priest-surveyors gave warning.

Strangers, sometimes men from beyond the sea’s horizon, mostly Sumerian traders with Semitic pack-animal tenders, brought ferment and ideas and took away with them the same.

The temples grew into the abode of priests whose curiosity nourished the spirit that had willy-nilly brought them power. The priests mastered the numerology of shadows and learned to predict the equinoxes and to discern destinies. They drew pictures on the walls of their observatories, displayed as easy-to-remember fantasies, prompts for the memory which now had to hold an accumulating number of facts, more than a mere mortal could remember without the mnemonic aid of an entertaining story. The story didn’t matter; its organization did. There was no contradiction in different accounts of the same event; the twists and variations added to the pleasure of telling. Who would be impudent enough to expect the gods to have a consistent history?

That evening Eron found himself walking alone in the desert with a ten-year-old imaginary acolyte, recounting to him the malevolent adventures of the Demon Star who blinked out a new curse every three days and must therefore remain nameless lest his attention be provoked. There were nine hundred stars to remember, all encoded in less than sixty episodic fabulations. Some were guide stars, some presaged recurring events, some were signposts to other stars.

During late-morning bouts up in the hangar nest of the Venteen Fortress, Eron began test runs on his cobbled program, adjusting and refining its parameters. It soon acquired a psychohistoric life of its own, correcting most internal errors without bothering to consult Eron, living lustily in an imaginary past on a diet of electrons. More and more he had to let it work out its results by itself so he could get on with his real job.

Engineers responsible for the reconstruction of Konn’s Flying Monstrosity were impatient for the facts they needed. It was Eron’s responsibility to decipher the exact metric by which that ancient battlecraft had been built so that the reconstruction could begin in earnest. His routine “day” job had him preparing fossil slices, then painfully measuring the surviving details, compensating for the distortions caused by geological pressures and by chemical diffusion and replacement. From those numbers a nonrandom statistical bias was appearing. Prominent was a dominant length peak, broken by twelve smaller peaks. After that it was hard to sort the peaks from the noise, but they were there, and all were binary: halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds. When an engineer asked him to hurry-it-up, he channeled that man’s eagerness to the task of classifying the dimensions of parts.

Close by, asking for advice only when necessary, Eron’s psychohistory experiment was iterating its way through imaginary accelerated time in the hangar’s mnemonifier. New measures were arising spontaneously, living and dying in the artificial post-simian melange. City-states came and went. Empires rose and fell. Eron read each new century’s summary every evening before he went to bed; it was both fascinating and appalling. Sometimes he had to reset the century because of a parameter he had obviously mistuned.

A constant potpourri of arguments had to be resolved. At first perhaps only over a day’s ration or some vicious land dispute. Then a gourd-cup, ingeniously used to solve a difficult volumetric dispute, became the tool for resolving the next similar dispute. The length of a sacred temple wand became the means of fixing boundaries. Each of these measures would take on only a temporary local authority while it competed in a lethal struggle with all the surrounding measures that were evolving, to live or die. The complications increased. Traders argued.

Which measure was to be used to consummate the sale? Transactions craved an undisputed measure everywhere unaffected by the ravages of time, distance, war, weather, or kingly ego. No one wanted to ask “By which gourd?” or “By which rod?” Floods washed away old markers. Rods wore out. Gourds broke. The king’s shoe size changed with every assassination, or coup, or death. Cheaters used variations in measures to grow wealthy. Landowners invented special measures to suit private greed. Where was the god of measures against whose rule no argument could prevail?

Yet all men lived under the same glory, slept under the same nightly drift, planted by the rule of the same equinox. A stream could be dammed, a river crossed, an enemy killed, a storm weathered, a plague survived—yet no hand could stay the precision of the sky ; every star cycled back to its place, by day and by season, at precisely the same place and at precisely the same time. And (as every nomad knew) the pivot-point of the stars rose in the sky as one went downriver—the dome of the earth underfoot mimicked the dome of the heavens above one’s head.

Konn visited. He put pressure on Eron. He wanted to fly his mythical battleship. Just as Nejirt had predicted, he did not ask about Eron’s problems with psychohistory’s mathematics and did not offer advice. The engineers began to ride Eron. He needed to give them a preliminary value of the foot just to get them off his back. Maybe there was a historical reference somewhere, an ancient engineer’s handbook, anything! When Rossum’s Universal Robot #26, as he called himself, turned up at the pad, Eron was ready for a ride with the expedition’s historian.

“You’ve told me you know everything,” he said, staring morosely at the instrument panel.

“That would be an exaggeration.”

“Konn put you in charge of all the historical documents he brought with him, is that right?”

‘The Master knows my weakness. I read a lot. I’m a bookaholic. I just finished off the collected works of Charles Dickens on the way over. These Rithians have no shame. When they are faking the past, they should at least try to learn some history. You should see what this Charles fellow tries to pull off on his readers. He fills Neolithic London with all sorts of anachronistic technology. But I must say, the series was a good read. We mustn’t always press for historical accuracy so seriously. Perhaps I might ask you for some pointers on Dickens’ sense of humor? If you have a day or two off, we could run up for a look at the London mound. You’ll find it as Naskala on the maps. It’s extraordinary. They’ve dug up a square kilometer of it, right down to the thirty-second-millennium level—AD, of course; no one here understands GE. The Marsallian artifacts—”

“I need a technical manual on ancient measures—very ancient measures. Anything you have. Scraps, ripped pages, manuscripts rotting in jars.”

“Well, now, please note that the Master just dumped his data on me, downloaded from Splendid Wisdom’s archives without much planning. I haven’t really had a chance to file it all. But I’ll look. That doesn’t mean I’ll find anything even if I have it. I was bom in the era of the messy virtual desktop, and that horror is still down there in my programming, lost along with the rest of it but not inactive, alas. Are we going somewhere?”

“Just a spin in the sky for a look at the sunset. Maybe a flight over the Nile. I want to see the river at night.”

So while they were in the air, Rossum’s #26 tried to be helpful. “A manual, you say?”

“Dull stuff. Conversion tables. Length measures mostly. Something an aeronautical artisan would use. I’m assuming that they could read. I know Romans could read, but I’m not sure if the Americs ever got that far along the civilization curve. I need cross-references to any measure I know about.”

“What era?”

“Konn says 59,400 BGE or thereabouts”—meaning Before the Galactic Era—“plus or minus a millennium. It's a pretty narrow window. Americs didn’t last all that long. A victory here, a victory there, then oblivion.”

“Oh, dear. That far back. I was a toddler then. I don’t remember it very well. The little memory I had was tied up in cardboard holes. I have to catch up on the more gossipy events of my early life by reading.”

“Yeah.”

“My favorite pre-civilization author of the moment is Dickens. He is always mentioning pounds and shillings and pence and troy weight and stones but not, alas, aeronautical artisans. The Brits used horses, so I suppose that would be the wrong millennium for your purposes. The Greeks had horses that could fly but not die staid old London gentlemen. The only Rithian measure I know anything about is the meter.”

“That’s no use to me. The meter didn’t get imposed on these stubborn Rithians until Eta Cuminga conquered them back in the forty-seventh millennium BGE. They’re still hanging onto their archaic seconds, all 86,400 of them. Rith was the last place that would have accepted standardized measures. And my stoned battleship of the air was built and died long before that. Way before.”

“I beg your pardon, sir. The meter is a Rithian measure. It goes back to the mists of antiquity when the land telescope was a novelty glass ball mounted in brass.”

“You’ve got your wires crossed!”

“Ask any Rithian.”

“So? They claim they invented everything. I’ll concede them the starship, murder, and poetry—but nothing else.” “Let me prove my point. Do you see the flatscreen in front of your nonperceptive eyes? Yes? Please access the navigational instruments. You do know how to do that?”

“Yes, you pile of salvaged junk.”

“Please compute the distance between the north pole of this planet and its equator.”

The result of this exercise surprised Eron by its almost roundness. ‘Ten million one thousand nine hundred and eighty-seven meters

“Exactly. It should have been ten million on the mark, but they evidently had a simian’s trouble with their glass balls and brass. I do believe the surveyors of Gaul weren’t even using identical rods. Haven’t you ever wondered why the meter is defined as 9,192,631,770 wavelengths of cesium and not 10 billion, even? It was bom before interferometry, that’s why. Don’t they teach you anything in school these days?”

Eron let his astonishment overwhelm him. An astronomical measure right under his feet, and he’d never noticed! Maybe psychohistory wasn’t bunk after all! Space alive! a meter that had not only conquered all the king’s feet and royal noses but had gone on to conquer the Galaxy! He smiled. It was pleasant to fly at such an altitude and look down at the river that flowed straight north all the way from the gullied deserts of the equator to the Inner Sea. The Egyptians had probably invented the stalwart meter. What a cool idea—straight up the river valley from equator to pole!

He was suddenly noticing the astronomy in the meter stick he had ignored all his life. He was 190 centimeters tall, he saw light by nanometers, and he traveled across space by leaps of a league’s ten petameters. To think that after an eon the stars of Rith still remained in command; the vast majority of mankind still measuring their spans— from vast galactic distances down to the tiniest quanta— against the piddling ten millionth part of the distance between the north pole of Rith and its equator, a full 180 days of hard march from beneath a zodiac that intersected the zenith to stand under the axle of the grindstone of the Norse gods!

Back at base, he thanked the aerocar and watched it take off again into the night sky’s stars, its running lights blinking their friendly warning.

The sky turned through many days. The earth under his toes stood still. Eron lost himself in reverie. No matter how he set up his model in the mnemonifier—tuned it, tried to bias it—any length once conceived of as the ratio of a celestial distance to a surface distance clobbered any measure unable to compete as reliably. It astonished Eron to watch an astronomically based length—originating in Egypt, or Mesopotamia, by whim or by chance—spread by word of mouth through the trade routes of his model. They reached places like the distant coastal islands beyond the sea’s gate long before the eastern shore of the Inner Sea could possibly have become aware that such islands existed. The spread did not even require a literate foundation, only show-and-tell. Measures that matched the fixed measures of the sky resonated with the human culture’s need for certainty, building, growing, while arbitrary measures like the length of a mortal king’s forearm traveled poorly and so lost vitality and died.

Because he didn’t quite believe his own math, he cheated and peeked into the answer book—though even the best of the ancient starship libraries had been sparse on the history of Rithian measures. He tried to find data on the foot by which the Venteen Flying Fortress had been built, which would be of immense use in its reconstruction, but that foot seemed to have vanished into mythology after a spacecraft, assembled by its rule, had crashed into Mars, initiating some kind of taboo against even mentioning conversion factors.

But... yes, within a few centuries after the Egyptians had built their pyramids and the Sumerians their ziggurats, the barbarians of Europe began a frenzied building of their own gigantic astronomical observatories. Amazed, Eron worked out the accuracy of the devices they would need, and it was quite within the capabilities of Neolithic craftsmanship. Copper helped, bronze tools were even better, but stone polished against stone was good enough. Information transfer was no problem. There were a thousand talkative traders working far outside of their own borders for every warrior impassioned to sack a Troy. Before they could write, the Sumerians had already established the long road by which Alexander the Great would invade Persia three thousand years later.

How was this happening? His equations were assuming a tool or tools able to measure length and time. What tools? Psychohistory wasn’t specifying. Certainly not an atomic clock or an electron nanocalib, not even anything as rudimentary as a quartz clock. The more he stared at the model, the more he could see the Founder’s equations working with the imperative of evolution. Eyes had evolved not because of invention and creativity, but because life was surrounded by light and made of chemicals that responded to light in different ways. Given the Founder’s definition of the human mind with its built-in sensitivity to cycles, the model was predicting the evolution of a system of stellar-based measurement, not because of invention and creativity but because it was the best possible system Of measures in a milieu of primitive constraints.

He couldn’t help but wonder: Was the strange foot he was extracting millimeter by millimeter from the ancient wreck of a flying chariot one of those strange measures his model was predicting? Not this particular measure, because psycho-history didn’t do that, but one of that class of astronomical measures? By now he had it pinned down to between 30.42 and 30.5 centimeters. He set up a program in his fam to examine the possibilities and soon came up with some wild conjectures.

The sky notched over every night by a factor of 1/365 days.

The ancients had divided a circle—and so their sky—into 360 parts.

According to his robot friend, the Egyptians liked to count by tens and thousands.

If Eron divided by 365,000 the number of meters in a degree of latitude at the London Mound—Naskala—he came up with a value of 30.479 centimeters, well within the bounds of his statistical peaks, and so, with a straight face, gave his engineers a foot of 30.48 cm to work with. Thar ought to hold the bastards for a few days while he caught up on his workload!

In the evening under a full desert moon a hanging bowl or potted flowers swinging in the breeze gave the budding psychohistorian the hint he needed.

There was only one periodic tool that a Neolithic man might build with his own hands which carried in its physi cal parameters an accuracy to match the stars: the pendulum. The same pendulum was both a rod and a clock that could be tuned to the rhythm of the sky. Nothing had to be invented.

After the yearly floods of the Nile, markers must be reestablished to connect stable landmarks with vanished points. That poses problems solved only by inventing basic straight-edge and compass geometry, one axiom, one theorem, one tool at a time. For determining the vertical dimension there is no surveying instrument more important than a plumb bob attached to a plumb line. But plumb bobs have the annoying habit of oscillating, and they always need to be stilled to get the vertical reading. Every priest-surveyor would know in his bones that a long plumb line oscillates slower than a short plumb line. He might not calibrate the frequencies numerically, but he would know.

Sitting there, a wakedream began to amuse Eron, his mind dwelling in the past, eavesdropping on two priests. Priest-One is a watcher of stars. He does the local forecasting about the seasons. The other is a surveyor, but it is not the time of year for him to be working. Tomorrow he will distribute seed.

Priest-One idly waits for a particular star to cross the horizon. Priest-Two is keeping him company.

“We have time enough for a beer,” says Priest-One, noticing that a particular precursor star has just broken the horizon, telling him that though the dawn star will be rising soon, it won’t be right away.

“How long is that?” challenges Priest-Two, to be contrary.

They argue while they sip beer. Still, they can’t agree on “having a beer” as a standard period by which to measure the difference in the rising times of two stars. Different people drink beer at different rates. They tell jokes about a drunken priest who can drink in one evening more beers than there are stars in the sky. Finally, to settle the argument, Priest-Two pulls out his plumb bob and line. He remembers once being mad at his assistant for dallying too long over lunch. He couldn’t whack the boy senseless because he was the son of an important village official, so he just sat there fuming, counting the swings of the plumb line that was already set up under the tripod and ready to go. He knows now exactly how long it takes a loafer to eat lunch. Fortunately stars, unlike assistants, are steady as you go; counting rising times should be a piece of nutcake. Priest-Two, impressed, excitedly reports the incident to Priest-Three the next evening. They try but can’t duplicate the results until they agree to use the same length of plumb line.

... a hundred years later there are special assistants at the temple, young apprentice priests, putting pebbles in jars to count pendulum swings and, once in a while, to man the small bellows that keeps the bob in motion. Accountants are inventing new symbols with which to record the accumulating data. A bright young theoretician has demonstrated to his satisfaction that no matter the length of the plumb line you start with, if on the next night you increase its length by four, you will halve the number of pebbles that it takes to count the bob-swings between the rising of your two stars. He has an argument going with a friend in the next temple down the valley about the optimal number of pebbles to use to count a complete circuit of the stars in heaven. If too few pebbles are used, the plumb line becomes impossibly long; if the plumb line is too short, the constant counting of pebbles becomes a tedious chore.

The model was beginning to scare Eron. He would have to present it to the Admiral soon and it was doing things he hadn’t anticipated, that just didn’t look right. It was even generating astronomers who could measure before they could write! Measuring was driving the invention of writing! They were a bunch of illiterates looking at scrawled pictures. They had to remember everything! And they didn’t even have a fam to remember with! Was that possible? He couldn’t even imagine functioning without being literate. Eron had learned to read before he even had a fam! Were these damn equations real?

Perhaps there had been no need for writing when all a man had to do was memorize whole heroic sagas. What peasant couldn’t recite at least sixtyne stories from his grandfather about how the world started or how the peacock got its tail? But when it came to counting sheep, and bars of gold, and rations of barley, and taxes due, and the amount of dirt to be excavated from a canal, and how many days of labor a tenant farmer owed, and what volume of beer to exchange for what volume of wheat—without being cheated—and how to lay up supplies for a ten-day donkey caravan, and how to count the swings of a pendulum, the sheer overload of information made writing a necessary evil. An illiterate man can move stones around a Stonehenge to keep track of the moon, can understand the necessity of standard rods to mark off equal parcels of land and know how to make them, can weave and hoe and sow and fashion cups that scoop out a day’s ration of wheat. What such a man can't do is keep records in his head for a thousand people so that it will all balance out in a year without starvation. That’s what the equations seemed to be saying. First the measure. Then comes writing.

His model was certainly generating hundreds of different lengths and volumes of the kind that a Neolithic man might need, most of them useful in the locale of their birth and nowhere else. Nothing marked which measure might overwhelm another—circumstance alone insisted that the winners needed wide appeal. Mediators who could work a large territory became important. If the opinion of a such a king was law, then the trading between families and clans and distant towns forced the winnowing and merging of measures by negotiation. Inattention to standards became fatal.

When Eron played god by adding artificial parameters that drove standards into a fluctuating mode, economic collapse was always the consequence. And, when he did, the stars fought back with almost an astrological mysticism; the stars had their silent veto.

The engineers began to build small replica parts, hydraulic pumps, electrical switches, and that attracted the Admiral in full uniform. Eron recognized the bronze and leather armor of a Roman centurion. He tried to remain invisible, afraid feat he would have to show off his model prematurely. But Konn seemed solely concerned with fee mechanics of his battleship of the air. But just when Eron thought he was going to be able to escape notice, Konn walked over and fixed Tlim with the eyes of a commander who is about to decimate his mutinous troops. “We need to talk.”

In Eron’s tiny office along the hangar’s high catwalk, fee Admiral sat down. That was bad news. He meant to stay. “Do you want a report on my psychomodel, sir?” He was fidgeting. “It’s working, but it’s still doing strange things feat I don’t understand.”

Konn held up his hand. “When you’re ready. Only when you’re ready.” He paused for emphasis. “I have a new assignment for you. You will, of course, continue with your old responsibilities.”

Eron already felt overburdened. He hadn’t had enough sleep for days. But he couldn’t refuse. “Yes, sir.”

“I’m putting you in charge of those boobs out there.”

Eron was horrified. “But, sir, I’m only a kid. I’m in trouble with them already!”

“Persistence in the face of adversity is a virtue. Such virtues built the Empire.”

“They won’t listen to me.”

“In that case”—Konn smiled mischievously—“we won’t tell them who is in charge. I’m sure those boobs are planning—against my direct orders—to install a few quantronic devices here and there. Just a little unobtrusive control—in the interest of my safety. When they are through, I’m not even sure that a pilot will be able to fly the Fortress by himself. I’ve flown in yachts before; why would I be interested?”

“They don’t believe it can fly without quantronics, sir. Light enough mechanical controls are impossible to design given the weight constraints of flying on a heavy planet like Rith.”

“It did fly!”

“It crashed, sir.”

“It had holes blown in it. You measured those yourself. Modem Rith is remarkably free of hostile fire. I want no argument. You are responsible to see that no quantronic devices are installed. Not even a thumbnail of semiconducting silicon. Not a pinhead! Fail me and I’ll nail you to a cross. Upside down.” He smiled. “The Romans did that.” He seemed delightedly sure of his information.

“No silicon? Not even a big transistor? The Americs didn’t have electronics?”

“Not what you’d call electronics. They caught their electrons in fishnets.”

“No wonder they are extinct!”

“Be that as it may. If I find any modem devices in the finished craft, you’ll be the one nailed. To ensure your diligence you will be flying copilot with me.”

“Yes, sir!”

Konn nodded on his way out. “Something to tell your grandchildren.”

“How I was nailed to a Roman cross in my disreputable youth?”

“No. How we flew together through a thunderstorm on manual in a dawn-age kite.”

While Eron was thinking that over, cursing by all the forty messiahs of Rith, a call chimed in on his fam because

he wasn’t censoring any calls about metrics. “Rossum’s #26 here. Coming in for a landing. I found you some data on pre-Galilean pendulums. Not much but you’ll be interested.”