Psychohistorical Crisis

41

ERON OSA MEETS A FAN, 14,810 GE

12.02.13 On a planet with a trillion residents, storage space and transportation space is at a premium.

12.02.14 The only commodity that can be stored and transported cheaply is information.

12.02.15 it is easier to manufacture devices from stored information, on site, as they are needed, and to destroy them after use, than to store them away in physical bulk, waiting fora second user. Exceptions may be made in the case of (1) devices utilizing exotic materials, (2) devices requiring exotic manufacturing methods for their duplication.

12.02.16 Water, air, and sewage must be purified and reused, on site, to avoid transportation through pipes, conduits, and through the atmosphere.

12.02.17 The transportation bulk-flow of any sector design should never exceed a Hafdmakie number of 43.

Splendid Planner's Guide,

AdminLevel-NR8 Issue-GA13758 SOP-12

The now-vanished message which had appeared in his hotel’s creaky Personal Capsule dispenser was engraved on Eron Osa’s memory by repeated review. “See Master Rigone at the Teaser’s Bistro, Calimone Sector, AQ-87345, Level 78 (The Corridor of Olibanum.)..It had been signed by a mysterious “benefactor” whose identity he had been unable to guess.

In spite of his missing fam and memories, Eron remem-

bered the tattooed face of Rigone—and remembered intensely mixed feelings of awe and respect and exasperation. He could not remember if they had been friends. He knew he had spent time at Rigone’s Teaser’s Bistro and knew he had seen him many times and perhaps had known him earlier. Something about books.

For six watches, petrified to leave his hotel, Eron had been trying to find the courage to wander up the Olibanum to see Rigone—as his strange “benefactor” had suggested. Trying to contact Rigone would be irrelevant if he was first going to find himself hopelessly disoriented in the corridors of the Calimone Sector. Such fears of losing his way astonished him. Facing the unknown out there seemed akin to interstellar adventuring in the era of sublight rafting.

The fuzzy memories he had of himself told of the old Eron as a confident, arrogant young man, a mathematician, a zenoli combat adept—but confidence has its foundation in abilities, and those had been shattered. He wasn’t sure anymore that he even had the wits for such a simple task as plying the corridors of Splendid Wisdom alone. His actions kept calling upon him for lore and skills that his mind did not know were gone—until his absent fam did not respond.

Nevertheless reason suggested that even if Splendid Wisdom were an incomprehensible hive to a famless man, there should be a solution to his lack of mobility. Splendid Wisdom had existed as a labyrinth long before the fam had become a universal symbiote.

It was essential that he not remain a prisoner of his hotel. The message was acting as a goad to drive him out. But he was “hanging onto the doorjamb” for dear life!

In his fury he gave himself an ultimatum. Plan! Plan even the most elementary of chores! Predict and plan! Then he laughed that his fury had induced in him the most bland of psychohistoric cliches. His cheer encouraged him out of his moping. Suppose he reviewed everything in the safety of his rooms, testing his organic brain for deficiencies? He might, that way, gain the courage to leave the hotel on an expedition. The organic brain had been evolved to think and learn, and there was no reason he couldn’t still perform such essentials. Think! he commanded himself. Once he stepped outside of his hotel into the corridors, what would he have to do that his fam had always done for him?

Eron began to flash on his famless early childhood, the only model he had for what was in store for him. Wryly he recalled the time he ran away from the family’s tourist suite when he was three. They had traveled by sea from Agander’s Great Island to the coast—he didn’t remember the name of the city because he hadn’t known it then—but he did remember his passion in wanting to see up close the fountain-waterfall at tie city’s center, marvelously rising up through a contained rapids for thirty stories and then gracefully dropping down through a series of magical shapes. Mama Os-amin, his governess, would not respond to his polite request or explain her refusal. Neither was she willing to appease his temper tantrum.

Resentful, he tricked the door lock with a candy wrapper, sneaked out, wandered down to the lower reaches of the hotel, and cunningly hopped a pod, knowing in his three-year-old mind that once having crossed the sea by boat, a person could use the landlocked pods to go anywhere on the continent. He made magisterial demands of the pod’s control console using the word “waterfall” prominently. The pod detected his youth and delivered him to the police station. He smiled. This time, as an adult, perhaps he could outwit the pods—though it was rumored that here on Splendid Wisdom the pods were the smartest in the Galaxy and intentionally surly with provincials.

A little research on his room’s console showed him that his wretched hotel was within free-transport range of the teeming Calimone Sector. Half an hour’s ride to the northwest? Cal-imone embraced the appurtenances of the Upper Lyceum of the Fellowship, whose levels he had once known very well with its ministries, academies, scholariums, libraries, vast apartment conglomerates, clubs. Lowlife hangouts such as Rigone’s Teaser’s Bistro lay on the distant borders of the Lyceum. It was a pleasure to him that he could still recall the energetic bustle of the Olibanum through which he had cruised extensively during his twenties. Trust the organic brain to remember the lower pleasures with an uncritical glow.

Think! Lacking a fam he was electromagnetically blind, except in the visible spectrum, and so he would need some kind of groping skill to get around. That stumped him since the warrens of Splendid Wisdom averaged out at seven hundred meters deep over the entire area of the planet—the crumb that was Calimone Sector had more mappable features than the whole of most planets. How did one grope that? The structures all broadcast their features, but he had no fam to make sense of their beacons. A man could wander forever without reaching his destination. Eron was sorely tempted to use his common-issue fam with all its dangers of psychic control. No. He sighed; more research was in order. Virtual overlays on the visual cortex were out, but something equivalent?

At his comm console he meandered through the Archives and discovered the ancient art of paper mapmaking in an orgy of revelation. It was so obvious! Why hadn’t he thought of it himself? But maps needing to be viewed with eyes was a horrible thought, and reading one while unlinked to a fam, unthinkable. A paper map was passive. It didn’t do anything. To read such a paper map would require work! Not impossible, of course, but discouraging. That was monkey business. There must be a better way!

How had men found their way around Splendid Wisdom during the age of the First Empire when the planet had been as teeming as it was now and there had been no fams? Eron Osa became inspired. Of course the damn hotel’s shopping library didn’t have a map-reader template on file. He felt his rage rising again and with it that awful feeling, again, that he didn’t have a fam to stabilize him emotionally. He paused to compensate. He breathed deeply to compose himself.

... and smelled the thickness of smothered layers of air half a kilometer beneath the free weather... felt the confining walls. He could almost hear the dripping of the pipes from above. Perhaps it was merely the hotel’s SeeOTwo decomposer on the blink again that gave him a heavy head and the sense that the air itself was turgid from decay. Somewhere up on the distant rooftop was a park’s crisp air misted by the water towers. Stop breathing, he told himself. Concentrate on locating maps!

Eron spliced into the world outside the hotel, netting around among the local antique warehouses until he found a template he could buy for cheap, grumbled at the tech implied by the First Empire date, imported it, spent hours finding the link that could translate its obsolete code, and waited some more while the nanomachines of his manufacturum assembled the device. It took time because he had asked for a high structural resolution, time enough to relax for a drink and a thought. He did not want to bother with a quick, low-resolution device—having his map machine break down in an unknown warren was not an adventure he wanted to live. Leisurely thoughts gave him opportunity for irony. What if the map files turned out to be as ancient as the reader and he found himself being guided around a pre-Sack Splendid Wisdom which no longer existed!

In time his room’s sometimes-malfunctioning manufacturum assembled:

(1) a delicate spiderlike crown that adjusted to his skull under his hair;

(2) an almost invisible laser gun that wrote to his right retina;

(3) a subvocal control pad;

(4) and—no instructions.

The maps of Splendid Wisdom, freshly read and tortuously compiled to meet the constraints of this antique, arrived on, astonishingly, a thousand flimsies which, outrageously, had to be carried in a pocket pouch, each to be inserted manually. No wonder the First Empire had collapsed!

Even equipped he was afraid to venture into the plane-topolitan maze. The memory of the first time he had tried was too vivid. He couldn’t talk his map-reader into working smoothly. It had no self-volition and had to be instructed like some stubborn dolt and he didn’t know its language and he didn’t have a fam to learn its language! With extreme patience he did manage to explore the immediate vicinity of his hotel, two corridors west and four levels deep. The device actually worked after a fashion—and, he supposed, would work better once he had fathomed its pretensions.

Then, carefully, he spent expeditionary afternoons in a neighboring cafe that had tables out along its corridor front, minding his own business, talking frugally, working up his skills for a more distant adventure. His criminal’s pension was limited—it was like being a student again—so he was stingy with his drink and pastries while he did his people watching. To amuse himself he reinvented mental addition, multiplication, and division, skills which he had never learned because they were automatic functions of his fam. It was good discipline for his frazzled mind, and a soothing reminder that there were always work arounds, however clumsy, for the fam dependencies which he no longer controlled. Eight plus fourteen was twenty-two. He marveled that he was able to figure that out from scratch. Such work made him feel like a genius again.

Eron had chosen a busy traverse for his arithmetical doodling and idle contemplations. The space within view of the cafe was filled with pedestrians flowing from the level above and boiling out of the nearby pod stop. Whenever he decided to stop thinking, to rest his aching organic brain, he had before him a cornucopia of sights—today a boy with a bag of bread dragged by his mother, an old man followed by a cackling family of females in weird headdresses. One of the interesting effects of being famless was the extraordinarily heightened visual intensity. Even the simplest colors were magnificent.

Take that tall woman who was waiting at the gracelessly vermilion pod stop for a friend, blue eyes flecked with a russet gold that glanced about her impatiently, swinging her black ringlets into a bobbing sway. Her broad-brimmed hat was of a textured fuchsia he had never seen before, topped by feathers. In this comer of the cosmos style was everything. No such hat could be useful this far underground from a blazing sun. Still, her skin looked coddled. She would be one of these aristos who spent regular time in a body shop staving off death and decay. She was still young enough to think of herself as immortal. Was her fragrance as gay as she looked?

The restless eyes caught him staring at her and she smiled with broad lips. He glanced away, sipped his punch, pushed a crumb across the table. And presently saw her feet standing in his gaze, motionless. He did not look up, afraid to sound like a moron. The shoes were of a scaled fish-leather, multihued, probably scalbeast from Tau-Nablus, and why should he know that?

“Eron Osa?”

That she knew his name was a complete surprise. Had he been ignoring a friend? He looked up now, curiously trying to place her. Nothing but a pretty face. She smelled vaguely of cinnamon. “Do we know each other?” he groped pleasantly.

Her smile broadened. “No. My spies told me you’ve been hanging out here in the afternoons and I thought I might catch you. You’re hard to find but I’m hard to discourage.” She was grinning. Her accent was aristo, perhaps an Etalun or a Frightfulperson. “I’m a hopeless fan of yours. I’ve read your monograph.” She gave him her card. “Otaria,” she said, but her card carried no name or address—being useful only to send her a Personal Capsule.

A fan of mathematics in this crass world? “Which paper?” He was trying to place her as one of his colleagues.

“The only one you ever published. I made a copy.”

“Ah. My Early Disturbed Event Location by...”

“Yes,” she interrupted.

He was startled and suspicious. “You are a psychohistorian?^,,

“Stars, no. But I have my pretensions as a historian.”

Was she police? On guard he asked, “And did you enjoy my piece?” He was fishing for hints as to what he had actually written.

“I didn’t understand a line of it” She commandeered a chair for herself. “But I’m smart enough to know its importance.” The chair was of a kind that embraced her.

“It’s been depublished,” he said cautiously.

“I noticed. I hadn’t intended to contact you, but since you’ve been censored, that means you are in deep trouble. Am I right? You are in hiding here, or worse? Is that why you were so hard to find?”

“Worse.”

His serious tone surprised her. “Are you all right?”

“No,” he said. “I’m brain-damaged.”

Now she was alarmed. “Deliberate?” She seemed to be genuinely grief-stricken. “How?”

“They executed my fam.”

“You’ve been tried and convicted? How horrible!” Her concern for him suddenly transformed into a concern for herself—he watched her eyes dart about to see if they were being observed. “Are you safe here?”

“I’ve been punished and released, a brilliant future nipped in the bud.”

“But they’ll be watching you.” Her alarm was increasing. He wanted to reassure her, but that involved telling her that he was so crippled that there would be no point in anyone watching him. She rose to go but he snapped a steel grip on her wrist as she was turning. Her sympathy evaporated. She swung back to face him. “Release me!” she hissed. The accent affected by the descendants of the Frightfulpeople was now crisp.

“We haven’t been introduced,” he went on smoothly. “Over dinner you can tell me what I wrote. I don’t remember. I have to know.”

The Frightfulperson was staring at him aghast. He was unaware that her wrist was now whitely bloodless. She uttered an oath in the name of the greatest psychohistorian who had ever lived, twisted her wrist free, and stepped backward into the caf6. When he went after her she had vanished up the stairs into an upper level. Which way? He sniffed his wrenched hand—cinnamon with a touch of persimmon—a perfume he would never forget Why should a pleasant woman, who had seemed to want to make his acquaintance, suddenly become so afraid?

Impulsively he guessed at her direction of flight and began a pursuit. He had one chance in a trillion of ever finding her again. Various crisscrosses and eight levels later he gave up trying, blocked by one of the massive earthquake absorbers. By then he was lost.

He tried to take a shortcut around the absorber and found himself in a service district which he recognized by its water tanks, a tiny internal ocean that certainly continued downward to rest on bedrock. Pumps throbbed, too big to be serving a residential sector, probably feeding a meteorological tower far above them, misting water into the atmosphere to deflect some detected deviation from the long-term dictates of the Splendid Weather Authority. Maybe the roofs were in need of rain. No use going farther. Defeated, he entered the address of his hotel into his map-device, having learned enough of its commands to allow it to guide him home.

Her blank card was still in his pocket, the only link to his depublished dissertation.

So, he thought while following directions absendy, somebody had read his paper; he wondered what psychohistorical consequences that would have. Perhaps it would cause a deviation in the historical “weather,” alerting some psychological bureaucrat who would then trigger corrective input. Somewhere a “tower” would pump a a critical “influence” into the “weather” of humanity and “the historical climate” would return to what the Fellowship’s “Almanac” had already “predicted” it was going to be.

He still had to find Rigone.