Psychohistorical Crisis

40

AN ANCIENT FORTRESS IN THE DESERTS OF RITH, 14,798 GE

Tiring of a roost of fractious and immoral gods, certain ancient philosophers began their general reform by creating, instead, a single moralistic God in the image of a human teenager who knows everything, both seeing the whole of the future and remembering the whole of the past Inquiring heretics went further. Yet nascent science, even while rejecting the anthropomorphism of the new God with His forever youthful body and superphysical powers, clung to His abstract mind and called it the conservation of information. In the first groping millennia of the development of their atomic theory, the precocious Greek avant-garde believed that the superpositions of the quantum waves persisted forever, spreading through the dimensions in ever-complicating ripples of alternate worlds. Democritus and his student Schrodinger had abandoned the idea of infinitely divisible matter but were unwilling to go the whole way and abandon the notion of infinitely divisible space.

Grainy space, of course, can't store the infinite amount of information that a teenage God’s mind demands. Superposed quantum waves erode and break and chafe against the pebbles of the media that carries them. Bit by bit, as the structure of the future becomes more and more certain, the structure of the past fades away, bit by bit. Today we are left with a more mature and slightly stooped God who is myopic when He views a future not yet created and who has already forgotten His childhood except for a little fuzzy background radiation left over from the really Big Events. As psychohistorians your profession will be to look at the future and the past—but stay humble. You’ll never be able to do better than the Myopic God with Alzheimer’s.

—From the Founder's speech to the first graduating class in psychohistory

Living by Rith’s odd days and nights and an impossible 86,400 seconds per day instead of galactically, Eron Osa was losing track of time but he knew there were roughly seventy watches per moon, and the golden desert moon had gone through all of its phases while he took the bloat out of his metric program, even starting another model to see if he could predict the broad outline of Rith’s early economic development. He spent his suppers with Konn, talking shop and sometimes quoting Latin poetry to Magda who, in her turn, taught him how to sing Somolian poetry. Before they ate Konn often indulged in a bizarre custom: he read—rather than recited—brief passages from a well-worn little book of the Founder’s Maxims. He expected a silent pause after the reading, a time for thinking.

True to Konn’s prediction, Nejirt sometimes hovered around looking for an opportunity to deliver his “Konn lecture,” but, forewarned, Eron managed to weasel out of it one way or another, often by jumping into a truck out to the local windy cliff to fly model gliders with engineers who had stumbled over their roots.

The fuselage of the Flying Fortress, often modified, was now taking its definitive shape. The engineers had rediscovered passive stability, much to their amazement. They had so many active control tools at their disposal that it was a moot point to them whether a boat had its center of gravity above or below the waterline or whether an unpowered building would buckle or whether an aerocar was passively spin-proofed.

When the basic weight balancing and dimensions of the Flying Fortress emerged from the fossil and they learned that the damn thing—minus all quantronics—would still fly even after the pilot had gone to sleep (or been killed), they began to be impressed by the raw skill of the ancient engineers, forgetting that such skill had been acquired by killing off test pilots, which was how they got the fourth decimal place that their slide rules wouldn’t give them. The final look of the plane, though basically determined by the laws of fluid dynamics, still eluded them. A “lost-wax” fossil in a mold of coral 744 centuries in the making leaves some forgotten details to the imagination.

Which was how Nejirt got his opportunity to comer Eron for a prolonged lecture. He caught him on the catwalk. “If you haven’t got anything to do, come with me tomorrow. Our tireless historian has found some pictures for us.”

“Of our Venteen Fortress? Show me.”

“Not so fast. #26 only came up with a verbal reference to the pictures, which are allegedly contained in a reference book that no longer exists.”

‘That’s no help.”

“But the pictures were taken from a mural which probably still does exist. It was above the flooding of the Great Meltdown, and the site was built to last on a geologically stable foundation.”

“Where? Let’s go!”

Nejirt only laughed. “The reference neglects to say.”

“But there are maps of Rith—millions of maps!”

“True. We can find the Mausoleum of Jim Morrison on any number of maps, but where would we find the Mausoleum of Aristotle? We have more references to old maps that no longer exist than we have maps.” When Eron slumped, Nejirt only laughed again. “We’ll find it Trust me, I was trained as a field agent and I’m very good. We know the general location—to within about ten thousand square kloms.” Eron made a doubtful face. “Besides,” Nejirt added, “the locals will know. They always know, even if the knowledge is buried in a mythology that no one understands anymore. We’ll have to go in by foot.”

Wendi insisted on coming along. She bought herself survival clothes and very expensive sole-powered hiking boots. Since they were going out among the wild sapiens, she also bought a long-nosed blaster claiming to be an expert shot. Her weapons experience, Eron discovered by gentle probing, was as a thirteen- and fourteen-year-old fighting in the

Red Army of a popular maze on Splendid Wisdom where teenagers sneaked around and zapped each other for pleasure after school,

Nejirt was more practical. He was a true psychohistorian who saw no need for weapons where wit would suffice. Most important to him was a utility backpack that manufactured basic food, clothing, and shelter out of available organic matter, basic stone tools out of rock, and simple quantronic devices for trading out of rock and a frugal supply of essential rare elements.

Eron did not share Wendi’s excitement or Nejirt’s cool. He would just as soon have jumped out into space in the buff as take a walk in a Rithian desert, but he couldn’t let Nejirt be the brave one. He was glad of the holster and lethal kick that his father had so recently gifted him. When no one was looking he reviewed his zenoli warrior training, tuning up his reflexes. Did everyone who worked with Konn go mad? Those damn wall murals had better be worth it!

An so, flying off into the dawn in #26’s comfortable interior, Nejirt began to brief them on procedures.

Eron felt hostile. “What do you mean, an untouched site? The cameramen were there to take pictures—when was that, a couple of millennia ago?—so how do we know it’s still there?”

“Well... not untouched. The grave robbers looted it of all its valuable radioactives less than a millennia after it was sealed. But it was built in a geological formation with the intention that it should endure forever, the only thing the Americs tried to build to last other than their quaint dispozoria. I’m not sure why it survived relatively intact for so long, considering the appetite of these maggot Rithians to sell their past. I suppose because it has a mythical aura of taboo. Superstition.”

“Probably because it’s not in a pleasant location, even for a Rithian grave robber,” kibitzed Rossum’s #26.

The journey was a long one, even at supersonic speeds. They spent most of their time in glorious cloud formations but did catch glimpses of the sea below. The seas of Rith were extensive even though they were shrinking as the ice reaccumulated at the poles. Over the Mars-like land one wondered where the water had gone. The planet was in desperate need of terraforming. Didn’t the Rithians have any ambition?

There were places of vegetation. #26 took a detour down one river to show them the spectacular waterfall over a dam that had been half eroded away and then down an awesome many-colored canyon, perhaps not as impressive as the canyons of Mars, but certainly the best such site that Rith had to offer.

Nejirt chose a small oasis near the ancient atomic testing range as their base of operations. It was scrubby green and didn’t look populated, but Nejirt assured them that it would be. He didn’t allow their aerocar to land anywhere near the oasis. “We walk in and ask questions. It’s got to be around here somewhere.” #26 wanted to stay with them, but Nejirt wouldn’t allow it.

Their landing had attracted attention. The dust was approaching them too fast for it to be men on foot.

“Camels!” Eron exclaimed, remembering the camel-lamp he had salvaged from the trash at Asinia.

“Camels went out with the second to last great mass extinction. Not much of the original Rithian flora and fauna left—maybe twenty-five percent. The big animals were really hard hit. Horses survived the sapiens predations but horses aren’t good for this kind of desert. Probably they are gawfs.”

Their curious visitors were gentle nomads—with their blond hair, slant eyes, and large mouths, obviously a sapiens subspecies. A little chatter in a language Nejirt seemed to recognize established that they were from a tribe of the local Lost Vegan cult, firm in the belief that it was their ancestors who had colonized Rith from Vega and brought the bipedal gawf beasts with them—no use telling them that Vega was a blazing AO star without habitable planets and that the gawfs were a late addition to Rith’s fauna imported during the occupation of Rith by the Eta Cumingan Regionate long after the sapiens hominid had gone extinct everywhere in the Galaxy except on Rith. The sacred literature said otherwise.

Nejirt was right about the weapons. These were very friendly people who put them up with great hospitality in their little village. They were mostly interested in buying robophones, which were in short supply. Nejirt had no problem negotiating the hire of a guide and three beasts. Then-guide turned out to be a very genial teacher, smiling all the while he taught Nejirt and Eron and Wendi how to ride, laughing tolerantly at all mistakes, including his own. He insisted on bringing a boy with him, rotating apprenticeships being their form of education.

The semierect gawfs were easy to handle, imported sixty thousand years ago and now so thoroughly adapted to Rithian desert conditions that they would be unable to survive on their home planet. A gawf female treated its rider as a daughter to be protected and was generally indifferent to the small gawf mate whom she seduced and then digested in her pouch to fertilize and feed her grublike embryos, a large proportion of whom were male. She devoured a new mate for every litter. Gawfs were pampered by the Lost Vegans both for transportation and for the sake of the delicious male meat, which was a main part of their diet. On smooth ground Eron found that a gawf loped along on its hind legs; on rough ground it put down its long arms in an agile climbing gait. Gawfs didn’t like to follow the weathered cuts of the ancient roads, preferring to climb up to the highest vantage point to see where they were. They were far more independent minded than horses.

It was a desolate land, mainly supporting small alien creatures and Rith’s indomitable insects. There were few encounters. When they met brigands who hoped to strip them, their guide alerted all nearby clan groups by robophone, the phone then being released in flying mode to monitor the situation from the air. Nejirt cautioned Eron not to show his weapon. Both parties argued loudly in a strange language.

The ruffians, seeming to fear the robophone’s ability to follow them, made some kind of threatening apology and left. Eron, who had shifted into the mental attitude (hilled into him by zenoli training at Asinia, was glad that he didn’t have to use his blaster. On Agander his weapon was merely ceremonial. He didn’t believe in killing helpless animals, even intelligent relatives. Even thieves. But he would have done so had the ruffians persisted.

Their guides weren’t any more direct than their willful gawfs, and a sly detour around the wrong side of a ridge brought them to join a celebratory confluence of several tribes of nomads. Job or no job, they weren’t going on until they had done their share of gossiping and singing and storytelling and trading with old friends. The tents went up for an indefinite stay and that was that. They had time on their hands.

Wendi went off with the women while the guides gambled. Two little boys excitedly tried to sell their “captive” farmen a skull. It was very old and weathered. They were determined to convince Nejirt and Eron that it wasn’t a fake. It was probably freshly robbed from some local cemetery of a more populous Rithian era and might even have been a 75,000-year-old Americ, but the studs drilled into the bone and the perfect black ceramic teeth suggested an origin a thousand years later. In any event the skull was worthless. By not limiting their population, men of that era had depreciated the value of their skulls.

At midnight all activity stopped for the homage to Vega. Vega was as bright as it had ever been in this part of the Galaxy, undaunted by all the less-splendid stars. Eron and Nejirt let the maniacal fiddling of four viotones animate them in dance with the happy girls under night’s canopy. Wendi was having the time of her life, even in her clunky boots with too much spring. There was nothing else to do.

When the celebrations wore off, days later, their guides deigned to go back to work and returned from their scouting with huge smiles. By sunset the small expedition reached the entrance to the Depository, aided by its bat smell. Swarms of bats were pouring into the darkly rosy sky for their nightly feast; winter was over and all sorts of delicious flying insects were breeding and on the move. A rough hole in the hill, hidden by an overgrowth of skorgn and sickly juniper, was the source of the bats; ancient robbers had chosen to blast into the side of the Depository near one of its still-buried original portals. The hole was kept open by guano hunters.

The hominid mammals fought a way down through their gentle flying relatives, leaving the boy behind to tend the alien mounts. They all put on masks, more to keep out the smell than for the oxygen. Though Nejirt had deliberately set the power at low intensity for the bats’ sake, the lanterns stirred up even more bats to drop from the ceiling and flutter away from the day’s roost Nejirt seemed to be enjoying himself, as if all the bats were his personal pets. Their Lost Vegan guide commented jovially on the thickness of the guano, which his people came here to collect when it was deep enough.

“You’ve just met Rith’s most successful mammal,” muttered Nejirt to his cohorts as they hurried down the tunnel into its deeper regions, which were avoided by the bats. ‘Their natural gengineering has us beat by fifty million years, and they’re so smart they’ve managed to colonize millions of planets all without having to invent a stardrive. On Zeta Anorka where I come from the insects are so bad we keep bats as house pets. We have fridged bat homes we carry around when we go camping—let them out to dehibemate and they beat any insect-zapping machine you’ll ever invent. They live a long time and you don’t have to make new ones when they wear out.”

Eron noticed that his Lost Vegan guide had no fear of radioactivity; maybe the concept wasn’t real to him. Nejirt wasn’t testing—any gamma radiation would be down by about eight orders of magnitude since the Depository was built and, as well, its treasure had been thoroughly looted at least seven hundred centuries ago, perhaps even earlier when the spent nuclear fuel, rich with rare stable isotopes, still carried high concentrations of valuable long-half-life radioactives. Nevertheless Eron felt cautious. He sampled the air and the walls with his handy pocket metricator, looking for traces of protactinium 233, tin 126, niobium 93 and 94, et cetera. He found nothing abnormal. One would need more radiation protection in space than in this emptied vault lying, as it did, beneath Rith’s atmosphere and three hundred meters of overhead rock.

They got past the guano and the scattered mummified bats. The main tunnel was immense, branching into endless side tunnels that soaked up lantern beams to show nothing, all as empty as the Queen’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. “Where did it all go!” exclaimed Eron. “There’s room for one hundred thousand tons.”

“We got here too late. Where did the pharaoh’s golden toiletries go?”

They found old fuel-cell batteries and a sack with the desiccated remains of someone’s lunch. Farther along an animal had crawled inside to die, not a Rithian vertebrate. Nejirt had been counting purposefully and now turned down an off-corridor. ‘This is what I wanted to show you.” Thirty meters along its length the tunnel had once been sealed by a bulkhead door of battleship quality. The door was gone. Beyond its threshold the walls of the gently sloping tunnel were covered with marvelous frescos in anaglyph: lots of lush vegetation, saintly men and women with halos, monsters, happy children. And a whole section devoted to soldiers and their trade. There had been lights and air conditioning but it no longer functioned.

Eron examined the murals, especially the one depicting the Flying Fortress, which was labeled in Latin with an enigmatic “SCHWEINFVRT.” It was done in ceramic glazes, certainly not hand applied for the detail had incredible resolution. Probably they’d been laid down by a hot sputtering printer, a very durable medium. “What are the pictures saying?” asked Eron.

“Nobody knows. They’re very post-Americ though they certainly had a high regard for Americ ancestors. The rest of their stuff is gone. Racks of corroded hardware, but no message. Some of the dust indicates they used paper or plastic books. There’s more.” While Wendi stayed behind to photograph the murals, Nejirt swung his beam around and took Eron up a stairway carved in the tuff. It led to an elaborate set of rooms, post-Depository, mostly stripped of everything except the dead lights and the fan machinery, intact but frozen solid. “There once was a morgue up here with five skeletons, Homo sapiens normal with a wide variance typical of the Mixed Age.” Eron wandered through hollow stone chambers with tiny doors and elaborately mosaicked floors. An occasional wall was frescoed. Power cables came through a crawling tunnel that led to a distant high-temperature generator, fission fed and still emitting low levels of radon. Most of the fuel rods were gone. Sizable air vents had been drilled up to the surface but remained blocked. “You’ll never find ruins this old anywhere else in the Galaxy.”

“What were they doing in a place like this?” Eron was incredulous.

“War refugees, probably.”

There were other sapiens-made caves. The armory was empty except for the gun racks. The guns, said Nejirt, were in the primitive weapons display at the Great Pyramid, which was where #26 had found out about this place.

That night a delicate male gawf was roasted in the ground under a campfire. After the feast Nejirt and Eron sat around the fire while Wendi and their guides slept. Nejirt made some allusions to the current politics of psychohistory.

Here it comes, thought Eron.

“I’m tempted to tell you about Konn. He doesn’t give a Spacedamn for my opinion of him, or anyone else’s, but I’d rather you kept my opinion to yourself. It’s for your information only. Use it or not. Konn is looking for a son, an heir. He’s never found one. You’re his latest wonder boy.”

“Oh.” The flames flickered and Eron fed it some more skorgn. They weren’t being bothered by insects. The bats were swooping.

“I’m one of his ex-wonderids, not the only one. We’re alumni. Want a briefing?”

“Sure.”

“First you’ll want to know why I’m still around; I could have gone off in a sulk and joined Hanis or disappeared into the Galaxy on any assignment I wanted. I’m that good. Do you know First Rank Jars Hanis?”

“The Rector of the Lyceum?”

“Which makes him the Rector of the Galaxy. But Konn is a better mathematician. It drives me crazy. He gives me a problem. I lay out all my tools, sharpen them, whatever. I’ve built up a marvelous mathematical tool chest. I’ve got tools that weren’t invented when Konn was in school. I crank out my solution. It’s good. Konn looks at it. He scratches his head for maybe three or five or seven watches. He talks to that damn impudent dog of his. And then he comes back to me: Why didn’t I do it this way? Why didn’t I do it that way? Why did I bother with these factors? Why not match these two compensating errors against each other and throw both factors out of the calculation? And out of his hat comes my result—at twice the accuracy and a tenth the work. If you are listening, an hour with him is worth a year of courses. While you are his wonder boy you’re going to get the ride of your life. I don’t envy you. Just don’t crack up when you disappoint him. That’s what I had to tell you.”

Eron poked the fire. He didn’t know what to say. The fire gave off a thousand red sparks, like a cluster of dying stars, worn out by life. Above, the stars were white. The universe was young.

“When I heard you were from Agander, I wanted to meet you. Konn sent me on my first mission to the Ulmat. One of his crazy paranoid ideas. He’s paranoid, you know. Normal people worry about poison in their food. He worries about poison in the stars.” He paused, as if unsure he would continue. “Your father was into some pretty shady deals.”

That caught Eron’s attention. “I know. He wanted money to put me into a good Scholarium.” Eron didn’t want to talk about it. “So why was Konn interested in the Ulmat?” “Paranoia. He spots a culture like in the Ulmat Constellation that’s doing a balancing act at some cusp point. It’s got to roll off in some direction, any direction—north? south? east? west? something in between? Some little disturbance down in the noise is going to push it off that cusp. Konn’s paranoia takes over. He looks at the worst possible direction out of millions. He starts doing this mumbo-jumbo analysis of the noise pushing this way and that way. He comes to the conclusion that the noise is pushing in the wrong direction. Nobody can duplicate his results—but he knows he’s right. He knows he has to go in there and push in another, less dangerous direction. He does that. Everything comes out all right. It must have been because of his corrective action, right? That’s why Konn is Second Rank and not First. Everybody knows he’s a quasar, but no one trusts him when he’s on the subject of what he is most passionate about. Hanis tries to keep him contained.”

“Did Konn think there was any danger from the Ulmat?” “Yeah. He thought the Ulmat could lead a revolution that would tear the Galaxy apart. I did a lot of fieldwork. I tried to show him that, though it was possible, it was never going to happen—but I don’t think he ever believed me. He had a perfect excuse. He had preemptively taken counteraction and aborted the threat. You grew up on Agander. What do you think? Do Ganderians have it in them to lead a revolution against the Second Empire?”

Yes, thought Eron, feeling the blaster in its holster, but he was too much of a Ganderian to ever say so aloud.

While Eron reflected, Nejirt had a final comment. “According to my measures, your people have the will but lack seven of the critical leadership dimensions.”

“The same seven you’d find in martyrs willing to die for their cause?” Eron pulled his bite and added diplomatically, “We’re a very practical people. We’d never get involved in a revolution that wasn’t going to succeed.” And that's why we end up as galactic bureaucrats and not as underdogs fighting for right against might. A Ganderian was willing to wait forever, if that’s what it took, for the right revolution. So Konn had seen through the mask. That was a big plus for Hahukum Konn. What else had he seen?

Nejirt wandered away and scrounged another piece of now-cold gawf meat from a bowl, heating it on a stick over the coals. “Konn isn’t the only madman on the scene. Konn is paranoid. Jars Hanis is a megalomaniac, which is why I won’t work for him. He’s developing a three-millennia plan of social renovation. Very impressive. All the impressionable students are impressed. He wears the right clothes to anesthetize people’s good sense. Never have a drink with Jars Hanis or you’ll feel so good you’ll end up working for him.”

By now Eron had a dozen questions to ask, but Nejirt was ready to close shop. He crawled into his sleeping bag. “Well, we got our picture. The engineers will be delighted. I’ve called #26 and that old windbag will be here to pick us up in the morning, relieved that we’re still alive.”

The journey home was uneventful. Eron was consumed by questions, but Nejirt remained in a silent mood.

Rhaver met them. He sniffed at their trousers and then lifted the fabric with his fingers to get a better sniff of skin. “JirtNowBeBack,” he said solemnly up at Nejirt with myopic eyes. His glance at Eron was doubtful. Then he was running off, his fingers clenched into running paws. “They-Back! TheyBack!”