Psychohistorical Crisis

39

HOMECOMING, 14,810 GE

Onimofi-Asuran: What is the aim of the Founder’s Pian?

Student: To establish a human civilization based on an orientation derived from Mental Science.

Onimofi: Why must such an orientation have a nonspontaneous origin?

Student: Only an insignificant minority of men are inherently able to lead Man by means of an understanding of Mental Science. Since such an orientation would lead to the development of a benevolent dictatorship of the mentally best—virtually a higher subdivision of Man—it would be resented and could not be stable. No natural form of homeostasis...

Onimofi: What, then, is the solution?

Student: To avoid the resentment of the masses, the first application of Psychohistory must be to prepare a Galaxy-wide political climate during which Mankind will be readied for the leadership of Mental Science. This readiness involves the introduction of unusual homeostatic political structures first proposed by the Founder in his mathscript of the... The second application of Psychohistory must be to bring forth a group of Psychologists able to assume this leadership. The Founder’s Plan specifies that during the Millennium of Transition the Visible Arm of the Plan will be supplying the physical framework for a single political unit while a Shadow Arm supplies the mental framework fora ready-made ruling class.

Onimofi: Why must the Visible Arm be convinced during the Transition that the Shadow Arm does not exist?

Student: During the Transition, Psychohistory must still deal with a society which, if aware of a monitoring class of Psychologists, would resent them, fear their further development, and fight against their

existence—thus introducing political forces which would destroy the necessary foundation of the homeostatic... The Plan would abort.

—A Student Answers the Questions of First Rank Onimofi-Asuran: Notes Made During the Crisis of the Great Perturbation, fourth century Founder’s Era

Psychohistorian Nejirt Kambu was finding his jaunts to distant galactic hot spots more and more wearing. His overextended junket through Coron’s Wisp had been the least thrilling of those adventures and the only one in which he had not been able to develop a field solution. The oddities in his findings there still bemused him. An outbreak of astrology! He rolled his eyes. But he had made a reputation for himself as an on-site trend analyzer, and his crazy Admiral always had more work for him to do.

Long ago, Second Rank Hahukum Konn had chosen to keep a paranoid eye on intractable historical deviations that no one else could even detect. Nejirt enjoyed working with what was perhaps the best team of trouble-blasters at the Lyceum. Whether to take the Admiral’s constant state of war alert seriously was thus a moot point—he liked the job benefits and he had once liked the travel.

Of course (Nejirt was chuckling) his weird problem was as nothing compared to the present trials of his fellow occupants in this cramped subcabin—all five of them were bored. They snoozed, or took entertainment bursts from their readers, or complained about the delay. Imperialis was a system that moved fifteen billion people to and from the stars every year in thirty thousand flights per watch. Hurry up and wait. Their four-thousand-passenger behemoth was waiting permission for the final inward hyperspace jump. The ship had already waited more than an hour for instructions while the short-range ultrawaves of the traffic controllers sizzled with chatter.

Nejirt was using the time to enjoy the sights. He had the sky-scanner all to himself; his bored cabinmates were uninterested. Here in the central regions of the Galaxy the view was always impressive, even frightening—the ionized flames of ancient explosions attacked a sea of suns while time stood still.

Finally... their terminal jump brought them to an immense outer docking station, girders and access tubes and modules exposed to space. Twenty irises dribbled them into the arms of customs, where their sterilized baggage was penetrated and tasted by microscanners, their clothes dissolved, and their nude bodies invaded by nanosearchers. Ne-jirt used psychohistorian status to outrank a woman with a simianoid pet in a cage that he knew the machines weren’t going to recognize and that, worse, wasn’t going to be found anywhere in the customs rule cache. No way he was going to wait while her problems were being handled!

It took two trillion humans in Imperialis space to maintain the galactic communications needed by the trillion planet dwellers of Splendid Wisdom. A conventional joke suggested wryly that most of those two trillion were needed in space to keep the useful ones on the ground from bumping into each other—a lie—but it is humor that makes bearable the impotence of standing in line at the awesome center of galactic power.

Two intersystem shuttles and a gravdrop later, much later, he was on Splendid Wisdom’s surface at a bustling transportation hub that was as big as a city, tiered into sixteen tapered levels that overlooked a domed plaza two full kilometers in diameter. Low-velocity robotaxis popped out of the levels like mad bees, darting across and around the concourse and, sometimes, landing on it to pick up passengers from the elevator kiosks. The colossal concourse was filled with transients who wanted to be someplace else. In the distance, Nejirt spotted a luckless couple, who had loaded all their baggage into a people-only upchute, so straining the gravities of the chute that baggage and all were slowly being driven back down into a mass of upcoming passengers—causing pandemonium. He had to laugh. Chaos amused a man whose job was to manipulate chaos.

Nearer at hand, a woman sat alone at a freshment island, sipping a meal between connections, playing a portable holo-game to alleviate her ennui. Around her flowed a convoy of off-planet representatives—from some world where clothing resembled woven armor—herding their baggage to keep it from straying, frantically trying to call down a bevy of robotaxis to assist them. The efficiently moving Splendid natives could be spotted by their unwillingness to bring baggage with them—much preferring to manufacture their requirements when they arrived at their destinations, carrying only templates and, fam-memorized, whatever pertinent information they might need.

Nejirt’s fam, having sorted through the electromagnetic hum, passed into his consciousness the information that to get home he had a choice between a three-hour hypersonic flight, taking off in forty inamins, or a slower four-hour tube ride. He chose the tube—much more relaxing, no distractions, no stressing connections. He’d be able to draft a preliminary report on Coron’s Wisp—and maybe even catch a snooze to wake him up for the family.

His fam located an obscure pod station, well below the hubbub, and the nearest concourse elevator dropped him down to it, almost in free fall—a homey lounge safely wedged between a cheap hotel and an instant tailor in a minor mall. He didn’t have to tarry—perfect timing—and hopped inside a waiting pod, plushly lined. There, a pleasant surprise. Fabric, in such a small space, was an agreeable change from the usual white plastic. The pod noted politely that he wished the surround-media offed, adjusted his reclining seat for relaxed comm with his fam, and sucked him into the tubes at an impressive acceleration.

Later he hardly noticed the clunk-thwap of their supersonic linkage to a train of the main trunk tube that was carrying thousands of other pods in mad haste through the planetopolis’ brobdingnagian bowels. By then he was composing his report at a professional clip, eyes closed, fam exploring and checking out every nuance, his mind bouncing off intuition with fact, piecing together odd observations

that hadn’t made sense at the time of collection. Yet it wasn’t jelling. He really didn’t have a relevant thing to say about astrology.

Here was the kind of perversion that the Galaxy loved to throw up to the gods. This variation of astrological science was based on eerie projections from an ovoid device that seemed to be made out of jade or marble. It was a crude adaption of a sophisticated galactarium. The associated Timdo teachings claimed that every chart cast altered the future—one way if the client accepted the reading, a darker way if the reading was rejected. An astrology that incorporated free will!

Was the failing faith in psychohistory caused by an upsurge of belief in astrology, or was the upsurge in astrology caused by a lack of faith in psychohistory? The equations kept telling him that given the homeostatic conditions in place at Coron’s Wisp, something like astrology could be a force to drive out mental science only if it had a better method of predicting the future. Both theory and common sense said that the data he had observed was impossible.

He gave up trying to compose his report and went to sleep.

... and woke up to “Arrival. You are now parked at..He flipped up the lid before the pod could finish its spiel and staggered to his feet, cramped, thankful he had no baggage. A glance showed him that it was his home station, unmistakable by its pompous wall of restored Imperial mosaics, a salvage from an Early First Empire building boom. Large parts of this sector had survived the Sack. The station’s quaint ugliness was what he got for being snobby enough to choose to live in a hallowed domain that had once been built by the families of the Pupian Dynasty.

“Yoo-ha! Hoo!” He saw Wendi windmilling him from the far end of the station, all the while in a dead run. She looked deliriously happy. That meant that the sewers were probably running smoothly, since she was an august member of the sewerocracy and couldn’t stop beaming when she had her local piping under control.

“How did you know I was coming?” Nejirt oofed as she collided with him.

“A little pod tipped me off .”

“Polite bugger. Must be a new model!”

“No, dear—you just lucked into one of the ones that work!”

Their home was a good walk away and they were in no hurry to reach it, strolling through the parts of the maze that they loved, chatting, catching up. They arrived from above, down a spiral staircase that surrounded a glass-enclosed park of steamy tropicals. Home was built into the circular courtyard at the base of the park. It had originally been part of the forty-seventh-century residence of the family of Peurifoy, who had produced the First Empire’s most remembered general. The modest estate, often renovated and cubicalized, was now shared by fifty other families.

Nejirt’s welcoming supper was arrayed around an imported ham and a delicate drink from Ordiris bottled in chocolate jiggers. Nejirt was used to farm food, being an experienced traveler, but even here in the elite warrens these were high-class delicacies from the special psychohistorians’ emporium, where rank had its privileges. She liked to shop there—he didn’t. But why shouldn’t a psychohistorian live as well as the dirt farmer on some outback planet of an unremembered sun? A leg of ham was a small price to pay for farsighted, honest government He spoke none of this while they ate. He had to admit that nothing tasted better on Splendid Wisdom than ham raised and cured on a pig farm forty light-years distant or juice from berries that needed an exotic sun. He lifted his jigger to Wendi’s lip. “To a desk job!”

“No,” she said, licking the Ordiris and taking a bite of chocolate. “You need your trips like I need my art. I have a surprise for you.”

She pulled him into a pillow-floored meditation room that now slumbered under the rose luminescence of hanging crystals, no form alike, no cut the same, tinkling, slowing changing in the motion of their breath. He mourned the Ming vases that had been there when he left. Wendi was so good at finding reproductions—why did she bother with this original stuff? Perhaps, after all these years, she thought it time to get over her fabulous Rithian adventure among the primitives. “Lovely,” he said. “Don’t take it away before I get used to it.”

She sat on the floor. “Come down here. It’s all prettier from here. We can lie on the pillows and look up!” She pulled him off his feet. “Tell me about your wild escapade in the cold, hostile, outside universe! We could take off our fams and be animalistic.”

He grinned. “Do we sit here naked, growling at each other, each trying to assassinate the other’s emperor first?”

“Animals don’t have emperors!”

“I forgot. Chickens are all equal on the assembly line.”

“Just shut up and tell me about your latest escapade. I never get to travel anymore! Sometimes I miss Rith. So what happened? Something must have happened!”

“I had my astrological chart read. We were in a domed hovel stuck onto the side of the retaining wall of a warm wet rice paddy in the mountains of Timdo where I had parked my bicycle to get my breath. There were two magnificent moons in the sky. My astrological seer was three times as old as I am and smelled of fermenting rice. She used a magical jade green ovoid that darkened her hovel and projected a skyful of stars that whispered to her everything about my future that she might want to know and I might be willing to pay for.”

Wendi growled and shook him by his ears. “Why don’t you ever tell me the truth!”

“Because you wouldn’t believe a word of it!” He laughed and made love to his wife without telling her the rest of the story. What could a psychohistorian tell anyone about the truth? What was he even allowed to say?

That old paranoiac Konn had sent Nejirt to the star systems of Coron’s Wisp to study a political perturbation—not a dangerous one, a small one, but large enough to have been picked up by the Admiral’s sieve. Within the confines of the Wisp’s five stellar systems, confidence in the galactic leadership had taken a sudden ten percent drop. On site, nothing appeared to be amiss—no economic depression, no corruption crisis, no inability of the Council to meet its goals. Nothing seemed to be driving the perturbation. After months of puzzled study, Nejirt had only been able to make a correlation with a mild epidemic of astrology. Temporal coincidence is not evidence of either cause or effect, but...

He could sleep on it yet another night. He patted his wife and turned out the crystals. He did not sleep.

Coron’s Wisp had not been the best locale from which to tackle galactic history—and a terrible locale from which to study such an esoteric subject as astrological infection patterns from pre-imperial times to the present. He had been unable to turn up any easily identifiable source of contamination. No media imports. No latent memes—though the planet’s entire sixteen-thousand-year history was spiced with references to the astrology of the first settlers, it was all innocently devoid of political context...

... barring only one much-reproduced manuscript from a monastery’s sealed library, the surviving copy on thin foils of archaic Early First Empire cellomet. Even Nejirt would not have bothered to translate (by machine) these Chinese brushings had they not contained an illustration of a vase just like the ones his wife had picked up at that Chinese souvenir factory outlet inside the Great Pyramid. But instead of a potter’s manual he had uncovered a series of algorithms for making political decisions based on the positions of the heavenly bodies in Old Rith’s ancient sky. More astrology!

It was fodder for the hordes of cults who believed in the lost wisdom of the predawn wizards but so much hokum to Nejirt Kambu the psychohistorian. He had needed another such dead-end find like a draft of hemlock. The algorithms used by the Chinese astrologers were many orders of magnitude less complicated than those used on Timdo—and, though no better in their ability to make predictions, Nejirt had to admit that the court astrologers of China had subtler ways of generating ambiguous flattery than did the dour star-watching farmers of Timdo’s mountain ranges.

For a moment Nejirt had to remind himself that he was lying on pillows beside a slumbering wife at the star-studded center of galactic sanity. Then traveler’s fatigue took him...

... to be cast in a dream of ancient prespace times when Rith was a lush paradise not yet conscious of its destiny as a desert inferno. He was a traveling temponaut from the Tien Chuen disguised in greasy woven yak wool begging a Chinese court astrologer to tell his fortune. He had gold to offer. It wasn’t enough. He ripped the seams of his shirt and brought out more Tien Chuen gold collected on their wanderings through the sky. The silk-robed astrologer grinned malevolently. It was enough. Since the astrologer’s head would not be riding on the blade of the message, he agreed to tell the truth without sleight-of-hand.

In the dead of night, atop the tower of the astrologer, Nejirt pointed out the star of his birth, a hidden nothing among the blur of the Sing Ki. “Ah,” said the astrologer, and a gong sounded and a giant bronze instrument began to move against the heavens across the horizon-shadows of a walled imperial city. Ominously the bronze shaft creaked to a halt in the direction of Tseih She, which the astrologer obligingly translated for his visitor from the stars as the Piled-Up Corpses. “That is your star.” It was nothing special, a white star, faintly blue, blazingly bright, an eclipsing variable about one hundred leagues from Rith.

“But what does it meanV his dream-self asked with the exasperation of a man who is desperate for certainty.

“It means that you are living in the time of the slayer and the slain, that the battle takes place across the stars and that the fates of empires are at stake.”

“But am I the slayer or the slain?”

“Ah,” said the malevolent astrologer, bowing under the Chinese stars, not as politely as before, “for more gold...”

Nejirt remembered the dream quite clearly because that was the exact moment that his fam gently woke him to an emergency request. He opened his eyes to the darkly tinkling crystals and took the call.

“Cal Bama. Imperialis Police.” There was no image but his fam had already verified the identification. The voice continued, “I've been informed that I have waked you from sleep after a long voyage. My apologies, sir. Our data tells us that you’ve just come in from a scout of Coron’s Wisp.” “That’s correct.”

“Your report has not yet been filed and I need an opinion. We’ve got a fast breaker here and time is of the essence.” “Ask away.”

“We’ve got a body.”

“A body?”

“A dead body. Twenty-seven watches dead. Illegally registered. We would have called you in earlier but you weren’t home. The body carried contradictory identification, deliberate deception, so we’re poking in the dark, but a lucky break on the name Scogil tells us that this man is from Coron’s Wisp.”

“That brings the odds of finding out who he is down to one in ten billion,” said Nejirt sarcastically.

“We think the case is more important than that, sir. It was your boss, Second Rank Konn, who put us onto you. He said you’d be interested.”

“All right. What else do you know about your corpse?” “Very little.”

“Have you been able to do a salvage on his fam?”

“Yeah, we would have. But his fam is missing.”

“So what have you got? He was murdered? Accident?” “No, we killed him trying to take him alive. Miscalculated his interest in survival.”

“Why were you tracking him?”

“It’s a long story, sir. It doesn’t make sense. We don’t know why we were chasing him. It’s because he is an astrologer or an—”

“And you think he’s from Coron’s Wisp?”

“We do.”

“I’ll be right there. I just hope you gentle souls aren’t stationed at my antipodes.”

They and the body were near the Lyceum from which Ne-jirt Kambu had been forged as a psychohistorian. He could never get away from that place and its hordes of students. Damn. That would mean a long hypersonic flight... at least hours of hassle; his fam was already making the arrangements. He rolled over to look at his sleeping wife. Should he wake her now—or leave a message with her fam? Before he decided, he let himself stare at the way her profile lay, eyes closed, face content because he was home.