Psychohistorical Crisis

35

OTARIA OF THE CALMER SEAS FINDS A CAUSE, 14,8IO GE

By 1300 GE... evaporation and circulation patterns on Splendid Wisdom were no longer providing enough rain—the weather had already been set awry by an excessive building zeal driven by the hugely profitable interstellar ventures established by the previous Kambal Dynasty. Doomsayers were talking of atmospheric collapse. Cities had replaced forest, desert, and klotk-prairie. The natural water table was disastrously low and the aquifers dry.

The One-Eyed Frightfulperson, known to us as Tanis-the-First (ruled 1378-1495 GE, the longest reign in Imperial history), was displeased by the ferocity of the civil war that followed his usurpation of the Imperial Throne. To bring the planet back under his control, he cynically confiscated the Oceans and Seas of Splendid Wisdom and turned their assets over to a new military command, the Diligence of Frightfulbarons, whose job it was to ration water to a water-short populace so that they might be held ransom by their thirst.

The Frightfulbarons of the Diligence built the desalination plants and the pumping stations. Of the five Major and thirty Minor Frightfulbarons, the first Frightfulbaron of the Calmer Sea was probably the most ruthless. Executing all who opposed... fie commanded the Fourth Frightful Army and his own Brine Commandos, plus half a billion forced laborers, retaining control through a system of... His children by eighty wives and countless concubines were loyal, industrious, and prolific, all disciplined by... His Frightfulgrandchildren drove the original piles and tunnels along the shore of the Calmer Sea, reclaiming land from the sea for a building boom financed by the sale and control of water...

—From the Explanatorily at the Calmer Pumping Station

The light of the sun Imperialis twisted into the upper levels of the synthetic skin of the planet Splendid Wisdom through arteries of guide-pipes, some of which branched off into the apartment of Hyperlord Kikaju Jama, shining mostly on his atrium’s topiary garden. Kikaju had been brooding all morning in a comfortably raggy robe. He hadn’t even bothered to vibro-clean his teeth or put on a wig.

That damn pest from outer space was back again. And this time meddling behind Jama’s back with affairs of intrigue none of his business. For—what was it? twenty years now?—Jama had been toyed with by that Scogil fellow, a bit here, a piece there. Not that the man didn’t keep his promises. It was just that his reasonable promises always, always, turned out to be more lace than gold. Bluff, sweet talk! Homey pictures of his teenage daughter when he needed a diversion. The “lace” arrived on time, as promised, but when you wore it, your private parts remained uncovered. And Scogil had never really given Jama credit for finding the Martyr’s Cache—instead stealing it for his own, not even providing a readable copy—sweet talking Jama’s mathists but in the end leaving them bewildered. It was outrageous! It rankled. Without more respect, how could a Hyperlord run an efficient conspiracy?

Gloomy though Hyperlord Kikaju Jama’s interior residence appeared during Splendid Wisdom’s daytime, its dim luminance was enhanced by a hidden robolight of cunning mechanism which haloed the Hyperlord, that he might be seen, and, upon demand, became a diffuse beam impaling the target of his gaze, that he might see. In meditation, with eyes closed, Jama was surrounded by an electro-nimbus—all else remained spectral, dark, hidden. A personal vanity.

There was no inner eyelight to brighten his dark thoughts.

This arrogant Scogil fellow’s failure to make his scheduled supply run—and, worse, his failure to explain, with not even a coded apology—was making it impossible for Jama to deliver the sixtyne or so of Coron’s Eggs he had promised to various contacts in the antique trade. Not that they were antiques. He smiled to himself. It was a very Rithian scam. The Eggs were fresh out of the factory—embodying the full seven levels—but cosmetically in the style of past millennia with an appropriately aged patina. My simian ancestors are chattering in glee from Rith’s trees, he gloated before resuming his sulk. Where were those Eggs?

Then he opened his eyes and a sly eyelight followed his glance to the mounted galactarium in his atrium. Jama enjoyed adulation. He did not appreciate not being able to deliver those perverse Eggs. He had promised them for too long now! For twenty years he had been building his conspiracy, successfully enough so that by now he felt he deserved the adulation. At the wise age of eighty-four a titled mensch could dispense with youthful modesty. It was a shame that security procedures forced him to lead so many different lives that no one man was ever in a position to fully appreciate him. How much greater their adulation would be if they knew. Now, how was he going to get hold of Scogil? That exasperating man tended to wander around Splendid Wisdom incognito.

Suddenly...

His telesphere formed in the air to the left of his head with an unusual urgency, blooming from invisible to opalescent—there to warn its master. “Apparently uninvited, we have with us the Excellent Frightfulperson Otaria of the Calmer Sea.” Only after formally identifying the intruder did the sphere become less urgent, speaking in the manner of a peevish butler. “She is impatient, excited,” intoned the telesphere. “She is violating protocol. Advice is to be alert.”

Since the Hyperlord was anticipating no interruption of his treasonous meditations, he had dressed for comfort rather than spectacle. “Let me see her.” A fairy-size image appeared within his guardian globe—there she was in miniature: Lord Jama’s sometime pupil and occasional erotic companion. The girl with the indispensable—but troublesome—mother who always slapped his hand when he reached for a nubile breast.

Hyperlord Jama nodded absently to his wraithlike servant in dismissal. Acknowledged, it disappeared abruptly. The Lord did not bother to activate his weapons, though he no longer held this impetuous woman in full confidence now that she was grown and, unfortunately, had a mind of her own and a fam to go with it. Activating weapons automatically registered them with the police. But he was displeased and set the entrance’s damping-field high enough to inhibit any fast moves. Moderately viscous. High viscosity would have been an insult.

The Excellent Frightfulperson Otaria of the Calmer Sea, indeed, he thought, remembering her as a child riding about on his shoulders and steering him by the ears. How quaint the old titles sounded when one stopped a moment to think upon what must have been their original meaning. Perhaps once there had been real ocean over that vast area of Splendid Wisdom called the Calmer Sea—perhaps in ancient times when Otaria’s unwashed ancestors had been brutal conquerors from hyperspace and Jama’s ancestors had not yet intrigued their way to high position.

Now every seabed of Splendid Wisdom was as dry as its moon, Aridia—enclosed, built over, sucked barren by time’s multiplying bureaucrats. Whatever currents of the noachian oceans had once flowed within the Calmer Sea, such waters had long ago been siphoned off into the life-support piping of the planet, some of it breaking out during the Interregnum in a flood that drowned billions only to be recaptured by Dark Age engineers, hence forever to wander mournfully through a planetary maze of arterial fresh-water and veined sewers, alternately becoming champagne and piss, blind to class, bathing the rich and poor alike, mixing with the blood of long-gone rebellions and the blood of commercial traffic from thirty million suns that bowed to Splendid Wisdom as the center of galactic power. One of Frightfulperson Otaria’s distant kith must have ordered the final taming of the Calmer Sea.

In spite of being a longtime associate of Otaria’s mother,

Jama was not sure when the Frightfulpeople had themselves been pushed aside. History was not his forte, though, to rattle him, Otaria pretended it was hers. There were too many conflicting histories, a quantum ripple of alternate pasts. There were too many wars and too many intrigues and too many stars and too vast a span of time for one human with a single fam to comprehend. He did know that his own title had arisen during the seventh millennium under the reign of the Som Dynasty while the Empire sorely needed the cunning, the tech expertise, the ability to inspire fear, the diplomatic subtlety, and the legendary bureaucratic talent of the Hyperlords to consolidate the hasty conquests of Daigin-the-Jaw whose awesome campaigns had led the sons and ships of Imperialis to galactic ascendancy over the peoples of five million new stars in one generation—creating management problems of staggering complexity. In that glorious era the busy Hyperlords had traveled. How they had traveled!

He grinned. Throughout the ceaselessly turbulent rise and fall of fortunes, lofty titles never seemed to perish. He was Hyperlord Kikaju Jama, reduced to grubby commercialism, about to entertain Otaria who still proudly called herself a Frightfulperson of the Calmer Sea to honor the brutally luxurious dregs of some barbarian past she would find offensive if forced to live it.

The chute to his atrium shimmered, winked expansively, and Otaria dropped through, facing the skyless garden of his metal grotto, moving out of the damping-field with a swimming stride. She had to stoop slightly to pass under the overhang because she wore her fam in a silly brimmed hat of feathers instead of gracefully on her shoulders. Why this silly fad to hide the damned fams? The eyelight followed his gaze and she was illuminated, a tall woman with luxurious black hair coiffured in the ringlet style, elegantly dressed. How she had grown up from her sexy adolescence! She looked more like her foully murdered father than Katana.

“Well?” he asked, mildly annoyed—Otaria knew he liked time to prepare for any meeting—and she had given him no time to change out of the threadbare lounging robe he had thrown on this morning. Her appearance without an appointment was an outrageous invasion of privacy, but she did have the correct entry codes—he had given them to her willingly, fondly, and not very long ago. Foolish man! Regretting his sexual peccadilloes with a woman did not stop a misused old codger from liking her. How could he dislike a nubile youth he had spent so much time grooming! But she was not as pliable as she had been as a wild teenager.

Otaria smiled with broad lips. “I have a man for you, a unique man!”

Jama did not speak. Ah, youth, he thought, an edge of irritation still in his emotions, vexed that this youngster should have caught him looking so old when a modest preannouncement would have allowed him time for wig and makeup and decent silks. He stared at her, making her wait.

A man, eh? As if one man could solve my problems. By the happy-puzzled expression on her face, he was probably a man “found” to solve her problems. Did young women think of nothing else? This one wouldn’t even discuss politics in bed when she had sex on her mind! So hard to teach them the cunning discipline necessary for major subversion. And she was vain, too. By hiding her fam, did she suppose that people would presume she could think without one? It was appalling the talent he was forced to work with. At least she had her mother’s melons!

But yes, he did need unique men—so she had his attention. He wasn’t going to show it.

A conspiracy required thousands of men, competent men, incorruptible, dedicated men, moving behind screens, shielded from each other by deception and code, invisible to the masses, because they had to remain invisible to the Pschol-ars’ machines which monitored all trends. Never be part of a trend. Safety lay only in being a unique individual who fit no pattern. Space! The strain of training up a cadre of invisible mathematicians when he knew no mathematics himself.

Otaria was staring at him, not very respectfully, waiting for a reply. But she was used to his petulant silences, and when he did not answer, an uplifted hand-sign, a command to the house sensors, materialized one of the Hyperlord’s floating recliners, whence she curled into its black arms while they molded to her shape. Then gracefully she tended to her nails.

Such vanity appalled Jama. Could the noble blood of revolutionaries like Otaria bring back the bad old days? Interregna, filled with violence, were more interesting than utopian stasis. The last Dark Age, for all its years of chaos, had been the most creative period in human history since the times when the wily Homo sapiens subhumans had first rafted across interstellar space. He stared back at her, seeing the burden of her inexperience, that she, herself, was not even aware of. He was too old. His dream to smash the Second Empire was hopeless in spite of his noble efforts and self-sacrifice. All he had to work with were naifs like Otaria.

He pretended to consider her statement by pacing.

What had he done wrong? Hyperlord Kikaju Jama suspected that he should not be building a conspiracy to destroy civilization here, in the heart of this awesome solar system of psychohistorical power, three trillion people swarming around the star Imperialis, almost a trillion of those on Splendid Wisdom itself. He should be building his pathetic little cabal out in some obscure comer of the galactic reaches—some miner’s ice world in the Empty Sweep, perhaps. But his wealth was here at the teeming center so here must be the core of his dissent. Yes, under the eyes of the observers. The game had all the wrong odds—but still it was an interesting one, which was why it amused him to play.

Sometimes Jama didn’t think it was hopeless. He was sure that he had found the weakness of the Second Empire. The Pscholars knew only statistical mechanics and chaos, megamath and conformal caletrics, miniform numerical modeling, etc., etc.—dullards all—they cared nothing for individuals. Their police did not even monitor individuals. Individuals were no more to them than the atoms of a vast gas engine being regulated for maximum efficiency, the engine of galactic civilization. The Galaxy would be unmanageable if the bureaucrats had to administer its thirty million worlds at the level of the individual. And so—the invisible individuals were Kikaju Jama’s weapon. And the Eggs of Timdo.

He tried staring through his Frightfulperson, wondering if she was invisible enough. She was a cymbalistic dresser. Where did these youngsters get their styles!

Otaria returned the gaze of her old seducer with increasing impatience. Since this crazy coot Kikaju had not replied to her announcement and was staring rudely into the space behind her head, she decided, rudely, to repeat herself. “I said I found a man. The man I’ve found,” she said with steely emphasis, “he’s a psychohistorian.”

The Hyperlord’s brain went from irritation to sudden alarm. He tripped a warning analysis search in the fam buried in the humped shoulders of his lounging robe. The Pscholars’ psychohistorians were worse than their teeming police.

His fam calmly supplied him with silent commentary: requests for information, questions, suggestions which might be used for a proper interrogation of the girl.

“We do not deal with psychohistorians,” he said sternly.

“Come now, they may be a pompous, overbearing elite who have limited aspirations, but you must admit that they’ve run our galactic affairs with an iron-handed honesty.”

“So they want us to believeJama smiled wickedly. “When they lie to us they have the tools to do so very cleverly and then the tools to make the lie disappear.”

“Kikaju...”

“I see that you doubt me.” He had never told her the story of Zural, nor had her mother. Never trust a youth under thirty. “You think of me as a crotchety old man who makes unfounded allegations to puff up the importance of my cause and who is deathly afraid of your mother whom you aren’t afraid of at all. Let me share a detail—one of the items that has come to my attention over my inquisitive life. I’ll download it into your fam from mine and you’ll be able to judge for yourself.”

Jama made a gesture while he muttered commands and Otaria went into receiver mode. He waited while her fam digested the burst. He censored certain details, but not the essence of the story.

Long ago, in the fourth century of the Founder’s Era, fifty young psychohistorians were sacrificed to heal a major deviation in the Founder’s Plan. The catastrophe began with Cloun-the-Stubbom of Lakgan, the first warlord of the Interregnum to get his hands on the tuned psychic probe. He was smart enough to be able to use it to bend minds to his will in a way that changed the psychological laws of human interaction enough to derail the normal course of history.

The covert psychohistorians who had been monitoring the Plan from the wreckage of Splendid Wisdom, in the fortress they had created out of the old Imperial University, were forced by these unhappy circumstances to act in the open to restabilize the Plan. But the Plan as they conceived it required that its monitors remain invisible, invisible even to die citizens of Faraway, the fulcrum of their efforts. In order to redisappear after the crisis—so that they might continue to control without having to be accountable for their actions—the Pscholars constructed an elaborate hoax of self-immolation. A lie. Pretending to be the whole of the monitoring group, fifty young psychohistorians went to the prison camps of Faraway and death as martyrs.

Otaria frowned haughtily. “I’ve never heard of such a reprehensible incident. It has the feel of historical revision to me. Such besmirching of the reputation of our galactic leadership for no other reason than to blacken their name will serve our cause badly; our benevolent elite embody enough flaws without our having to stoop to invent disgusting sins. Truth is our only reliable servant.”

Jama rolled his eyes and the eyelight rolled around the room. “I, too, thought as you do now when I first caught whiff of the story twenty years ago. Yet.. .there are pieces to that story that assemble neatly. Do you remember a time when you were very young and your mother left Splendid Wisdom for an extended vacation? Your mother and I actually located the graves of those sacrificial heroes on a Periphery hellhole called Zural—well erased to all but the most exacting archaeological methods. I have a distant group working for me to decipher what I found in an old mine. Perhaps you remember my friend Hiranimus Scogil? He visits us from time to time. Evidence keeps arriving as it is decoded. Only twelve watches past.. .” No, he shouldn’t tell her that.

“I remember Hiranimus Scogil very well. He was with you when my mother was away?”

Jama didn’t choose to answer. “It has been the mainstay of my hope that our little group can re-create psychohistory. Check out the mathematical appendix trailing my little burst.”

“I’m not a mathematical illiterate—I’ve been studying— but your equations are not readable by me, even with all the options of my fam.”

“Nevertheless they contain many of the psychohistorical equations which outline how a perturbation in the Plan can be eliminated by a lie involving the death of fifty young students. Those equations have been lifted from the Great Plan as it existed in the fourth century Founder’s Era.”

“Nonsense! The Pscholars guard their sacred texts with unbreakable code! You of all people don’t have access to it! Even your penis can’t get in that deep!”

Jama was enjoying himself. “My penis has slithered around in lots of dark forbidden places—and been chopped off more than once by youths such as yourself. Which accounts for its present small size. That be as it may, you must admit that the poor excuse for psychohistorical talent that I have at my disposal could never write such equations or work out their consequences—nevertheless, I assure you, my idiots can read such scrawls quite effectively.”

A sudden revelation struck her. “You’re getting all of your material from Scogil!”

“And he gets his by mining the memoirs of the Martyrs, my discovery. I have no doubt that these fragments of the Great Plan are authentic. There is no lie so small that it does not leave a trace behind. It is a fact that the Pscholars have lied to us for millennia.” He glanced for only a flicker of eyelight at the small jade ovoid sitting in its legged golden cup.

Otaria paused to let her organic-fam mind cease rejecting the data in order to readjust itself around the thought that an enemy who lied to create a deception was a very different kind of opponent than an open foe. After an almost instant gestalt-wide neural-fam review, she was ready with her comment. “I still think you should meet my psychohistorian”

“You have already contacted this man?” Disapproval.

“No.” She was amused that Kikaju would suppose her so bold.

“Then he contacted you?” Greater disapproval.

“No!” Now Otaria felt called upon to defend herself and reacted to Jama’s suspicion with formal disdain. “Hyperlord Jama, I found him—he doesn’t even know I exist—I’m not stupid. Why should I take unilateral action? I know the stakes! Who trained me? Who seduced me into his wicked world when I was too young to know the difference? a baby I was! And before you say it, I do know that the psychohistorians are the most dangerous people in the Empire! Whether they tell the truth or whether they lie. Of course I know that!”

“Ah.” He smiled, relaxing because of her fury. “What rank is this mathematician of yours?”

“Seventh.”

“Phwogh! He knows nothing, then. He’s still nourished by the blood from his umbilical cord. He’s useless.”

“He’s unusual. Singular”

“Handsome? Beddable?”

“So now you suppose me to be infatuated by commoners, do you?” she replied to his innuendo, sarcastically indignant. She cocked her red hat and peeked around the brim, suggesting a comedy of immature lust. Languidly she hugged the arms of her recliner, ignoring Jama. His eyes called all illumination to her body while her eyes fixed themselves upon the shadows of his miniature garden, shy flora one might find at the bottom of a jungle’s canopy.

She *s sulking! Now what do I do? Damn, / shouldn^yt have alluded to sex so soon after our last fight She's going to tease me! He tensed.

Indeed she was, and she began by changing the subject. “I love your topiary.” With a delighted cry she kicked off from the floor, chair and all, to float over the ferns, and beyond them, into the arms of a gnarled bush whose uppermost limbs reached for the conduits that were now feeding the rosy dawn light of Imperialis down into this dungeon. “You work so hard here at your cultivation! You always have the slight smell of manure about you.” She was grinning. “You do use real manure, don’t you? Your garden is so green, so lush, so beautiful! That’s one thing we never seem to run out of here on Splendid Wisdom—the manure, I mean. There are so many of our assholes!”

Spare me the twaddling of the aristocracy, he thought, wishing desperately for his wig and eyeshadow—and a bath and a sanitized robe... And a young body.

Well, if he couldn’t flirt, he could attack. Attack was more fun than sex, anyway. A command, through the tuned probe that connected his brain with his fam, called up the house telesphere. Once it had bloomed, he willed the floating apparition toward her, enlarged its diameter, and filled its ghostly pallor with images drawn from his auxiliary brain.

The visions he loaded into the globe had been secretly recorded at a party of roistering midlevel bureaucrats. A swift flow of graphics commands—by fam direction—rebuilt the scene to center on Otaria, altering the record subtly to suit Jama’s kinky taste: a brighter color here, an added satyr there, a knowing grin from an observer lounging in the folds. His miniature Otaria lay on the floor of the globe, in deshabille, the only noblewoman at this uncouth gathering, hugging some commoner’s leg.

“You Wog, Kikaju! You haven’t the morals of a leering Makorite! Why do I work for you! You spy on me!”

“So do the psychohistorians

“They’re not interested in me—nor in you. They’re interested in summed vectors,” she said defiantly.

“Their interest is called ‘sampling,’” replied Jama dryly, “and you are not immune from it. They take quadrillions of samples every watch. When they detect a trend that threatens the stability of the Empire, do you think they don’t take action on it?”

The Excellent Frightfulperson was watching, with distaste, her own behavior in the hovering sphere. “I’m allowed to have fun! Now turn it off!” She wasn’t angry yet, but she was ready to be angry.

“Is that where you ‘found’ your psychohistorian?”

“Well now, I do believe the old He Goat has itching horns! You amaze me—jealous you are—after throwing me forcibly out of your bed!”

And he remembered—it seemed long ago—their amorous jousting. He didn’t remember throwing her out of bed. How could he have loved such an irritating woman? “Pleasure and intrigue don’t mix well. I question you to protect the Regulations,” he insisted. The word “Regulations” was safe code for another word nobody had the courage to say aloud: revolution.

She sighed. “All right, Hyperlord Sober Buttocks my darling, we’ll be serious. I found my young rebel psychohistorian via a routine library scan while engaged in dry-as-dust research for the good of your beloved Regulations. I’ve been studying stasis. Rates of change of behavior. My dabbling in history.”

“Stasis,” he said morosely. “The Sleeping Beauty stays alive by never changing.” He meant the Empire. It was a constant complaint of his.

“Over what time period!” she shot back.

“Certainly over my lifetime—and I’m not young. By sleeping, the Empire refuses to die!”

“Old men have such a myopic viewpoint. Weak legs which take their eyes nowhere! But youth isn’t so decrepit that it can’t travel more freely! I'm talking four thousand generations! I’ve been imbibing records, some of them probably seventy to eighty thousand years old. You can’t imagine the changes in every variable you can conceive of over that time span! You only think of today's trade and exchange— that’s all you care to think of! You don’t understand the past”

“Nothing from eighty thousand years ago is reliable. Nothing useful survives from that era. Splendid Wisdom was settled only thirty-three thousand years ago. Even ten-thousand-year-old information is unreliable!”

“I beg your pardon, old man! When I was a child I visited, with my mother, the museum at Chanaria, deep in the stable rock of the Timeless Shield. I saw a bronze plate under helium that was more than seventy-four thousand years old, cast on Rith with the names of heroes raised in this weird angular alphabet and illustrated in relief with armored vehicles and bi-winged skycraft. Before hyperspace travel! It wasn’t a reproduction! I was awed! I saw records scratched onto clay tablets—real clay from Old Rith—by men hardly literate who even had to depend upon their own brains to advise them. We know these things! I saw the fossilized bones of animals who lived and died before man, two million generations old, priceless fossils from Rith, not reproductions. I was awed.”

“Rith is a semidesert planet. Wasteland. The only monkeys left are the sapiens. It counts for nothing.” His gesture swept over his own green garden implying that this small grotto-world of rock with bush and fern and blooming flowers was worth more than all of Rith. “In that old place even the camels die of thirst! On Rith even the children manufacture fraudulent antiques for the Empire’s tourists, bronze tablets and baked clay, polluting my market.”

“Oh, bother your skepticism!” She pursed her lips and threw up her arms so violendy that her chair rocked in the air above the ferns. “Authenticity is not the point! Think of the changes since our intrepid subhuman ancestors left Rith! Do you deny the changes? Doesn’t that give you hope that change is possible? You taught me hope!” She was indignant. Now she was angry!

He laughed because indeed he did work for upheaval yet in his heart did not believe that the galactic disorder he craved was possible. “Your bloody ancestors—pirates, brigands”—he sneered—“conquered Splendid Wisdom in a local interstellar war that brought our noble trading founders to ruin—but within three generations had themselves become such proficient traders, being raised by trader slaves, that they no longer thought of themselves as pirates but as traders. Change? They rewrote history by substituting their names for the names of their Kambal predecessors. And went on to conquer millions of stars—not as military predators but in the style of the wiliest of the traders they conquered—just as die traders would have done without your bloody ancestors on the starship bridges. Change? When your ancestors were deposed the Empire continued its mighty growth under new administration. The vices were the same, the strengths were the same, the bureaucracy was the same. Ask my ancestors. Only the people were different. Social inertia has always been formidable—even before the psychohistorians.”

Otaria dismissed this version of ancient history. ‘That’s your way of seeing events, my melancholy romantic! Your late ancestors were forged in a more recent, vaster era when no mere soldier or trader could have survived. There were more specialists in one army group of the Stars&Ship than all the soldiers in the greatest army ever raised before the Pax Imperialis. Nothing changes in a lifetime, but every thousand years of human history has brought a major upheaval. Two thousand years ago there were no fams as we know them and men were forced to live by their bare wet wits. You’re so strange, Kikaju—you taught me to believe in a dream you don’t believe in yourself.”

“But you’ve found me a psychohistorian who will light my fire again, so it is all right,” he added sarcastically.

She grinned. “I’ve been plotting the galactic patterns of scholarship. It is always the same curve. Flat, then a sharp increase, then flat again when knowledge matures. During the explosion, scholars always think that the explosion will go on forever. They do not value what is known. Their pleasure is to seek new discoveries. During the mature phase, scholars always think that everything is known and see scholarship as the art of applying the known. Psychohistory has been a mature science for less than a thousand years. They’ve had no rival in the Galaxy for two millennia—and it is time, Kikaju, it is time that a rival appears.”

“So what is so unique about your young man?”

“During the last session of the Fellowship he published a thesis in mathematics at his own expense. I don’t think that has ever been done before.” She flashed a copy in midair, a holograph, squeezing its long title, for lack of space, into a condensed Imperial Font. Early Disturbed Event Location by Forced Arekean Canonical Pre-posturing: An Analysis in Three Parts. “I copied it the same watch it appeared because I was researching stasis and it is about stasis. When I went back to look for more, it had been erased.”

“He published through the Lyceum?” asked Hyperlord Jama incredulously. Pscholar psychohistorians did not publish research; they had never published their research, even in that long-ago epoch when they still did research. They had always claimed, with self-serving pedanticism, that a prediction of the future was invalidated if the predictive methods by which it was obtained were to become widely known.

“No, he did not publish through the Lyceum. He was pretending it was mathematics, not psychohistory. He published in the public realm in the Imperial Archives.”

“With no sponsor! Then this young man of yours is a crackpot! What else could he be? He’s decapitating himself!”

“Perhaps,” she went on earnestly. “But that is, again, not the point.”

“Your point is moot,” he interrupted. “My point is that your man, being a psychohistorian, being a member of the Fellowship, is a dangerous man who should be avoided at all costs”

She continued doggedly. “You’re building up your own hand-picked group of independent psychologists. Your men don’t have access to the main body of knowledge.”

“Of course they don’t!” He raged because it was a sore spot How could his people know what was so fanatically hidden away by the Psychohistorian Fellowship? The Fellowship feared nothing more than that the lower classes might learn how to predict the future and so destroy the Splendid Galactic Empire of the Pscholars, rendering the Great Plan impotent by creating an unmanageable chaos of alternate futures. And even worse—the Pscholars might go the way of the Hyperlords.

Otaria continued to make her points on her long fingers, one by one. “Your men are having to re-invent psychohistory all by themselves. You’ve told me it’s not going well. You’ve told me it has been going badly \ Your group isn’t research oriented. But, Kikaju, obviously, that doesn’t apply to this upstart! He knows how to do research and he’s certain to be in trouble with his masters for daring to publish! He’s our kind of man. Something in him is rebelling against his restrictions! We can use him!”

Jama might once have thought so—but by now he had received a handful of Coron’s Eggs updated to the seventh level and a promise of many more. Now it was even more important to maintain security. “You’re talking about enlisting a real psychohistorian!” exclaimed Jama in horror. “I don’t want to have anything to do with a real one! They’re programmed to destroy”—he was so upset that he actually uttered the taboo word—“revolutions!” The horror in his voice mounted. “It’s built into their fams to protect us all! They are Death on Dark Ages. They aren’t, ever, allowed to harm people—anybody—even if that means their own self-

destruction, so they’ve found the equations that give us the living, painless death. And they must at all costs use their powers to protect civilization from collapsing! And so civilization has been frozen at the height of decay! Cryogeno-cide! They aren’t even allowed to be passive when we try to put ourselves in a dangerous place! You want to deal with such monsters? You’re mad!”

“Kikaju, I am proceeding in this case with utmost caution. And I do not want you protecting me from any dangers. Eron Osa is himself a rebel.”

“Eron Osa!” The Hyperlord went into shock. “Him! I forbid you to have anything to do with this man! I forbid it! I won’t allow you to destroy my world!” he raged. “I’ll have your mother whip you!”

“You are throwing me out of your bed again.” She smiled.

“I’ve never thrown you out of my bed. I try to coddle you with the pleasures of reason!”

“Let me follow this man,” she pleaded. “I will not recruit him without your approval, I swear by the ferocity of my ancestors.”

“I met him on Faraway when he was a young student. Space alone knows what mischief he’s been into since then! I heard that he joined the study faction of Jars Hanis after falling out with some Second Rank mentor of his. And his morals are—”

He almost made the mistake of telling Otaria that as a youth Eron had made a pass at her mother—but that would only intrigue her prurient interest. He certainly wasn’t going to tell her that Eron Osa was also a friend of Hiranimus Scogil and that Hiranimus Scogil was missing.