Psychohistorical Crisis

42

FLYING SCHOLARIUM, 14,798 GE

The sudden appearance of hominid sapiens struck the thriving Rithian biosphere with the impact of a major asteroid.

—Hahukum Konn

The afternoon when he was out in the village buying vegetables and passion fruit for one of Magda’s treats, Eron ran into a group of young desert ruffians who good-naturedly followed him around pestering him for largess, as Rithians were wont to do. He asked them about the stars. They knew less than the original Neolithic settlers of the region—not even names. The nameless stars were the abode of strange fortune-tellers and golden streets. He was appalled. He bought them all ice cream and told them tales about ancestral exploits while the ice cream lasted. They poohed the parts about surveying the Nile without magical quantum instruments. The pendulum he made for them was used as a sling to whack each other. They hooted and shouted. One of the boys, with ice cream on his chin, suggested with a deadpan twinkle that the ancients could also fly by flapping their ears. How about magic carpets with a nav-sys woven in, suggested another with a grin that lasted until a playful punch brought him back to ground and set off a round of tussling aimed at reestablishing the solidity of their village world. Eron sighed and haggled over the vegetables for Magda. His mind drifted until he could almost hear her playing the violin.

On the way back he took a detour. The Flying Fortress was now sitting out on its field, the majestic mother of every galactic strike battleship. Its aluminum skin shone in the setting rays of Sol. Konn had not been able to convince any of his engineers to fly with him, so he had hired a Rithian crew, much to Eron’s horror. Konn reasoned that sapiens minds had built and flown the first ones, and so were quite capable of doing so again. Eron was sure that such reasoning was a dangerous seventy-four millennia out of date—monkeys were all right, but to trust one’s life to the wits of a chimpanzee’s brother in a brainless aeroantique? Nevertheless he had been co-opted as copilot and wasn’t going to be able to escape. Thank Fortune that some of the monkeys Konn had corraled were more equal than other monkeys. He stared at the Fortress for a long time, just to reassure himself that there were no flaws in the hydrodynamics of her lines.

“You’re going to fly that thing all over Rith?” Eron had once asked Konn when he hadn’t yet wholly accepted the idea.

“Sure. Do you think I should try flying her on Mars?” Konn’s sarcasm was jovial.

Eron’s troubles with the Admiral’s engineers lasted until the final days before the Queen was rated as airworthy. They wanted to put two small antigravity units in the wings—just in case. The answer was no. Eron worked off his nervousness by spending time in the flight simulator mocking up dangerous events which would need a pilot’s attention. Magda, who was joining the air crew as cook, took the secondary job as ball-turret gunner in charge of the brainless inertial weaponry which protected their belly. She carefully kept count of all the simulated attackers she managed to shoot to pieces during training. Her two half-inch-caliber machine guns were just another kind of violin to be played with skill. The battleship carried its complete ordnance of defensive weapons except that the two machine guns in the chin turret had been replaced with two efficient rocket engines to aid an emergency landing on a short field.

Eron managed to be in hiding for the maiden flight of the Queen. But Konn took her up for a very gentle level flight, with all testing monitors active, and immediately brought her down for a landing—on wheels at high speed! He was beaming. It was the very first of his antique battle wagons that he’d been able to fly himself. Eron was put in charge of the minor tuning modifications that the tests indicated and Konn insured his active interest in that job by scheduling him as copilot for the second flight. The main change that Eron authorized was a rebuilding of the engines by specs that would double their life span and allow the Queen to fly as fast as fifty meters per jiff in a (short-term) emergency. Perhaps there was a little cheating in the alloys, but... they didn’t really know what the original alloys had been.

Since they wouldn’t be carrying bombs, the bomb bay opened up to an efficient maintenance workshop—a compact manufacturum for making spare parts on demand with templates for every component. The maintenance work itself was to be done by the Rithian crew. Because gasoline was no longer a standard commodity, the bomb bay also included a synthesizer which could reload the fuel tanks of the Queen within the hour if fed hydrogen and carbon compounds.

The Admiral wasn’t always consistent in his demand for authenticity or able to impose it. The built-in instrumentation was primitive if adequate: a crude pressure-sensitive altimeter, an inaccurate airspeed indicator, basic tachometer, and the like, even a sextant for navigation, but the ancient autopilot was both obsolete and illegal. The law frowned on human pilots and required a robopilot to authorize, and report, any human at the controls so that the Rithian Air Command could take special precautions. A robopilot never authorized human instrument flying and religiously reported any deviations from the filed flight plan. Konn himself didn’t feel comfortable with the token altimeter and had installed a zoomable ranging screen that gave him a contour map, in blues and greens of the land below him and in reds of the land above his horizontal plane. Self-repairing Rossum’s #26, whose navigational instrumentation was top

of the line, gifted Admiral Konn with a pocket navigator of its own manufacture that kept track of position within ten meters and could locate the fourteen million historical sites whose surface and chronological coordinates it had been able to scrounge from searchable databases in its spare time.

Second Rank Hahukum Konn was the most senior psychohistorian who had ever visited Rith during the whole of the Second Empire, and he was treated royally. In planning his Rithian odyssey he had only to ask—and send a small delegation—and a mesh aerodrome long enough to accommodate the Flying Fortress was laid out along his route. The battleship had been designed as a short-range weapon requiring refueling after three thousand kilometers of flight, and so Konn’s round-the-world itinerary required careful planning—in spite of its land being mostly deserts of sand and ice, Rith had vast watery expanses to fly over.

Inside, the vehicle had the original spartan look of a ribbed tunnel held together by its skin, except for the area directly behind the bomb bay. There Konn had relented and installed an efficient bachelor kitchen for Magda and, for himself, a compact office around a beautiful hickory table on top of his field mnemonifier. Back on Splendid Wisdom Konn had more computing power at his disposal than had been available to the whole bureaucracy of the First Empire, but he liked to do all of his preliminary work on this toy, which, though limited, had enough capacity to have run the planning, logistics, and record keeping of every industrial nation extant during the war for which the Flying Fortress had been designed. Behind his table and chairs were the four bunks for the crew of ten.

After a few shake-down flights which reassured Eron of the sturdiness of their vessel they were ready for Konn’s mad adventure. It was just one notch up from planning to walk around the damn planet. The petroleum engines beat their eardrums to a pulp, hour after hour, crawling along at thirty-five meters per jiff. You could go between stars faster! Eron was even required to wear one of those silly double-twelve clocks on his wrist, “bearskin” jumpsuit, fur hat, massive earphones, and an oxygen mask that would have suffocated a pig. The Admiral was having the time of his life.

But on their first long night flight he seemed to change into a more serious mood. They were flying at a modest altitude with an almost full moon shining on a fantasy world of clouds, the desert lost beneath them, when the Admiral left Eron at the controls and brought back a couple of silencer helmets with direct famlinks that could handle the thundering engines without requiring them to shout. That meant he wanted to talk.

“I was a big fan of the Kenoran Sagas when I was a boy,” Konn began, sliding back into the pilot’s seat. “Ever read them?”

“It’s a big Galaxy,” said Eron, meaning no.

“When we get back to Splendid Wisdom and you have some dreamtime, I’ll give you a copy. Whoever wrote the Sagas was one of the greatest storytellers who ever lived, or maybe it’s only the boy in me remembering. They were written long, long ago back in the sublight era by a Bitherian prose poet, before the Bitherians were conquered by Eta Cuminga’s Regionate. When you are a kid wondering about the past your imagination almost won’t stretch farther back than that, and when you get your hands on a story written by a man who was there it is a wild thrill.”

There was a long silence while Konn slipped back into his own world. Eron said nothing, waiting.

‘The Kenoran Sagas of Bitheria are all about adventures to the stars extended over generations, but what is utterly charming about them is the rich mythology of the past woven into the story. Each scene carries the tacit assumption that Bitheria has to be the home planet of mankind. We pop in and out of that pre-space flight eon. Every page is saturated with references to days of yore so distant that only hints are left of a mysterious beginning prior to the rise and fall of eldritch empires themselves already lost in an overgrown jungle. It never occurs to the enthralled reader that Bitheria of the Sirius Sector has become so old a world only because the author of the Sagas can no longer remember what really happened a mere ten thousand years past.”

Konn almost had tears in his eyes. Eron was amazed when he stopped talking and made an excuse to go to the galley to dig out two of Magda’s snacks, careful not to wake her though thundering engines did not seem to bother her sleep. Rhaver was also asleep under the bunk. He hated flying and solved his problem by staying asleep all the while they were in the air.

Back in the cockpit, Hahukum handed Eron a sandwich wrapped in flexible bread, having composed himself. They had to shout at each other because you can’t eat and hide behind a soundproof bubble at the same time. “The hardest thing I had to do as a budding psychohistorian was to disabuse myself of that fabulous Bitherian history of man. Logic and evidence said it had to go, but emotions didn’t want to let go and neither did my fam. Perhaps that’s why I’m here. An ancient flying weapon that predated anything found on Bitheria! Nothing could have kept me away. And you?” Eron laughed into the roar of the engines. “I don’t think I thought about the origins of man. I was too busy fighting with my father. Perhaps I just took the simple-minded way out and assumed that the universe had popped into existence four thousand years ago. Mythology was mythology. Big deal. One homeworld was as good as another. It didn’t matter. I don’t think I ever noticed Rith until I ran into a crazy professor who was in love with alleged Rithian poetry.” “Reinstone, eh? He sent me all of your better doggerel. He thought highly of you.”

Eron wasn’t sure he had heard right through the engine growl. “He sent you my poetry?” He was horrified at Reinstone’s presumption. “I deliberately didn’t include my poetry in my application because I didn’t write it!” he screamed.

“Oh, is that so?” The Admiral was being sarcastically amused. “I suppose you had a computer program write them for you to butter up the old advisor into working for you, like giving you good recommendations to the Lyceum.”

Eron sputtered because it was true. “I polished them a little bit,” he said in a voice that was taken away by the thunder.

Hahukum waited to reply until the sandwiches were eaten and they could replace their sound bubbles. “I have your poetry programs, too,” he went on with a grin. “Special police download. I didn’t bother to disillusion Reinstone about your perfidy. Interesting programs. They impressed me almost more than anything else you had done. You were simulating the tradition of culture after culture. At least forty-seven of them. Didn’t Reinstone ever suspect?”

“Well, sometimes he thought a poem of mine was a substandard effort.” Eron was chagrined and had to remind himself to look up from Konn’s knees and out at the clouds and moon. “Then I’d revise my program. Reinstone kept trying to convince me to do original work, but I was more interested in the context and structure of other people’s styles than in my own.”

“Poetic styles change rapidly,” commented Konn.

“Not always. Sometimes a poetic style stays stable for thousands of years. I was interested in the rate of change of style and correlating that with the nonpoetic history of the culture. My feeble attempt at psychohistory.”

They were passing through a huge valley in the clouds that had caused the moon to set. “Which reminds me,” said Konn. “I have a thesis topic for you. I’ve been saving it for a really good student. It will take you about five years or so to work it up.”

Eron paused apprehensively. “How do you know I’ll like the topic?”

“You will. You were fascinated by the fact that poetic forms can stay stable for thousands of years and still remain viable. I want you to explore stasis.”

“Stasis?”

“You know: things that don’t change.” His thumb pointed at the floor of the Hying Fortress, but he meant the planet below them. “That shit hole down there. And don’t you dare tell anyone in our crew that I said that.”

“You want me to study Rith?”

“No, no. Stasis. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Rith is only the oldest example, a simple enough example for a young mathematician to teethe on.” Eron wasn’t sure he knew what Konn meant by stasis. “Why aren’t we changing it?” He meant the shit hole. And he was surprised to hear himself say “we.”

Konn sighed. “The trouble with being able to predict the future is that you then have the power to change it. But in what direction? Aie, there’s the rub. We could do to them what they did to the Neanderthals? What the Sea Raiders did to the original Americs? We could do to them what the First Empire did to the Helmarians? We could force gengineering on them to build in solutions that they can’t arrive at by use of their brains? Any other suggestions?”

“You want me to study stasis. Would such knowledge help?”

“Let me define stasis for you.” He took his napkin and drew a curve on it that went up. “This is a Rithian problem that they’ve lived with for a thousand centuries. Through all that vast expanse of time all of their cultures, without exception, wealthy or poor, have clung to the belief that population is self-regulatory. True. It is. And Rithians have become goats down there on their island keeping their population self-regulated by stripping the land so bare that only a handful of goats can survive at one time.”

He slapped the back of his hand against his napkin graph. “Our Queen was built to kill off excess Girmani who were spilling out of their territory in search of more breeding space. In that century alone the population of Rith quadrupled—with the inevitable result that the rich got richer and the poor transmogrified into centers of cultural cancer.

“In the next century it was better—the average doubling rate went up to seventy years. At the localities where it stayed at a doubling rate of thirty to forty years, there was genocide and massacre and war and unpredictable die-offs. Half of all the mammal species went extinct, and the general extinction rate was higher than it had been for sixty million years. The average sapiens became poorer in the necessities than he had been in Neolithic times though agricultural and physical science were at their height. It became increasingly difficult for the rich to hire police and military protection.

“In the century after that reliable records are nonexistent. Things don’t really come into focus again until the Renaissance, which produced the starships. By then we know that the Rithian population was down to less than a billion and living quite well off the released resources. But they hadn’t learned their lesson. The population steadily increased at a faster rate than the recovery of the planet. The ensuing collapse was slower in coming than the first disaster and it wasn’t as severe—the scenario you would expect to be played out on a depleted stage. By the time the Eta Cumin-gans arrived with their hyperdrive things had essentially stabilized at the present equilibrium point—the sapiens kill off nature faster than nature can regroup and a hostile nature kills them off faster than they can multiply. The whole of the hyperdrive expansion into the Galaxy passed them by. Stasis.”

“Do you have a mini-Founder’s Plan for Rith?”

“No. I’ve got bigger problems.”

The Admiral didn’t say what he meant by that Hahukum Konn continued to give Eron lessons in psychohistory by bits and pieces, airborne and on the ground, sometimes in the cockpit, sometimes with the mnemonifier when the robopilot was exercising its authority by taking over control during instrument flying conditions. Sometimes Eron thought Konn was chatting about history when he was really musing about psychohistory. Sometimes Eron thought he was getting a psychohistory lecture while all the time the Admiral was just debunking someone’s cockeyed slant on history. The Admiral never gave a lecture in math without a philosophical preamble. It was soon evident to Eron that there were two major schools of psychohistory, Konn being in the minority.

They were holding course at twelve thousand meters, a red sun setting into clouds. Below them the sun had already set. Night lights illuminated the instrument panels. Because the noise of the four reciprocating engines was, as always, deafening, they were communicating through their direct fam links. “Hanis is primarily interested in the destination. He’s charted it and the rest of us are coming along for the ride. He’s a good planner. To make a crude analogy, Hanis knows how much petroleum is in the tanks and how far we can fly and where we will come down for refueling. His flight plan takes the weather into account and fills the locker with sandwiches. It’s all predicted.” He grinned. “Me, I don’t really care where we’re going as long as our wings don’t fall off along the way. There are many good futures out there, and true, they don’t just happen, somebody has to make decisions at the branching nodes—well, let Hanis do that. I’m the maintenance man. Will this old aeroweapon get us there without losing an engine or spraying hydraulic fluid all over our dead bodies? The tragedy is that too many Pscholars have an eye on the destination—they revere the Founder’s destination mania—and not enough of them have an eye on the engines.”

Konn could abruptly change the subject. “Have you ever heard of Haskeen weaving?”

“No. I don’t know much psychohistory.”

“I suppose that’s not the sort of thing they teach at Asinia.” Without further discussion he put the machine on robopilot and took Eron back to the mnemonifier and began to teach. He gave Eron the basic methodology of weaving and why Haskeen weaving was so powerful. It didn’t make any sense to Eron until Konn put out puzzles and problems which Eron had to solve. There were few educational aids in the Fort; Eron had to prompt the mnemonifier and feel like a jackass every time he took the analysis down an absurd path. Konn was a contradictory mixture of extreme patience and impatience. If Eron was too slow, the Admiral frowned and dropped an obscure hint, then relapsed back into patience. But after a while he got itchy to be at the flight controls. They went forward again.

On the other side of the ocean, low on fuel, they had to negotiate an unpredicted storm before they could land. The air was dropping and buffeting them at will. The Admiral enjoyed that. Eron kept glancing at the robo-pilot, wondering what it considered to be a dangerous situation—but it only stayed aloof, its algorithms evidently unworried.

Their prolonged tour of Rith was fascinating to Eron, but they never stayed in one place long enough to allow him to assimilate what he was seeing. They visited the magnificent stumps of the Imperial city of Etalundia, which had been built by the Emperors of the Etalun Dynasty in the fifty-third Imperial century after the First Empire had taken over the guardianship of Rith. The city, as the chief center of Imperial power on Rith, had long survived the Etaluns but had gone into decline in late dynastic times and had been abandoned to the desert the same year as the founding of the Faraway colony. Only a square block of it was under excavation by a tiny crew of scholars whose graduate students were assembling a cultural history of the period. Beyond the ruins the snowcapped heads of eight Etalun Emperors still towered over the landscape, carved into the tallest mountain on Rith. Orr-of-Etalun had lost his regal nose and half of his fantastic headdress but his father and grandfather remained intact.

The oldest excavation they visited was at Racuna (named after a small colonial village inland of the site). For centuries now the Racuna ruins had been emerging from the sea, the tides first revealing glimpses of her past glory and then covering her up again. By now enough ice had accumulated at the poles to allow excavation in earnest. The formidable dikes once put in place to keep out the ocean were still in place though long past any functionality. It was a very exciting dig for the archaeologists. Here was a city which hadn’t been burned or pillaged by soldiers, which hadn’t gone through a long decline of misuse, disuse, and vandalism. It had been abandoned in haste, victim to a horrendous tropical storm which broke through the dikes, flooding and, in a single night, sealing away forever its treasures, a remarkable museum of rare twenty-third-century AD artifacts. The disaster had occurred at the height of the Great Die-off; resources and manpower to rebuild New Orleans were probably not available, and, as well, the dreaded sea, year by year, was still rising...

There was more, much more. Too much to pack into a single around-the-world trip. Eron would be thundering along in the cockpit of the Queen, at an altitude of total serenity, only to find himself in the next hour stooping through the labyrinthine palace caves of fifty thousand freeze-dried mummies where, for a thousand years after the last departure of the last starship, the last of the Christians would flock to achieve enlightenment through the decorative art of cave sculpting and, upon achieving enlightenment, would hang themselves and, choking in penance, leave for the starry heavens by astral projection.

They flew to the island off Urope in a pilgrimage along the northern route where thousands of Flying Fortresses had once flown from their oversize manufacturums, across ice floes and stormy seas to reach the aerodromes within striking distance of the ancient battlefields. Rossum’s #26 tailed along behind, worried about them. When they reached land safely #26 took Eron on the long-promised trip to the London Mound. He had a special favor to ask of Eron; he gave him a holocam to record his adventures in the renovated Londoh Underground, complete with graffiti and ads, a place 6f exotic mystery to a creature of the air.

Meanwhile Admiral Hahukum Konn was organizing a last farewell to Rith, a commemorative bombing run on Gir-mani. Of course, the expiration date on the Thousand-Year Reich was long up and the Aryan race had gone the way of its Neanderthal predecessors. But that didn’t matter; history is to be celebrated lest we forget everything. Admiral Konn outfitted his crew with new Ultimate Sam’s Amazing Air Fangs bluecoats complete with tricorns sporting the circular thirteen stars and appropriate saber sidearms. Twenty-three aerocars and one Flying Fortress formed up over the pastured countryside and slowly rose to altitude out at sea beyond the White Teeth along the Throat’s coastline and headed inland. Their combat box was a bit ragged, but then their flight leader was only an amateur admiral. Target: the Bremmen Mound, near the small city of Kryskt.

Along the route no ghost Wulfs of the Luftwaffe appeared to attack them. A few aerial sightseers watched but kept their distance. The crew was in high humor, their morale hardly lagging hours later as they reached the objective. But no lead bomber triggered a high-altitude cascade of bombs in a death walk through the target. It was a milk run. Konn brought his gasoline-powered Fort down from altitude in a modest glide. From the bombardier’s seat in the nose Eron could see to the horizon, auburn hills, trees clustered along the river, some farmhouses, a dirt road. As Konn buzzed the Bremen Mound a few crows rose into the air, squawking. Then it was follow the river up to Kryskt.

They mock-bombed the dastards of Kryskt back to the stone age by making six buzzing passes over the city. In turn the Karelians below, by prearrangement, pretended to be the same fierce Girmani tribes that had given so much trouble to the Romans. They sent up a brilliant display of gunpowder rockets. Mostly the Karelians stood on their rooftops in droves to watch the fireworks and to cheer on the antique aircraft, some entering into the spirit of the event by waving swastikas. It wasn’t everyday that a Rithian got bombed by a mad Second Rank Psychohistorian from Splendid Wisdom. The pretend tribesmen, of course, saw and heard only one four-motored aluminum Fort with wings. On the other hand, Eron, inside the bare fuselage, was letting his imagination run away and conjuring a formation of a thousand Flying Battleships wheeling over the city in a slow requiem of death.

Kryskt was only a fraction of the size of the original Bremen and, when they landed, put on a small town’s show of hospitality. There was an outdoor podium for speeches. Dark-haired little girls threw bouquets of flowers. The local dance-drama teacher, who was also the town’s most dedicated historian, dressed up her ten male dancers in the black tights of SS supermen complete with stiff-necked collars carrying the yellow, five-pointed star of the Norse God David which, the teacher had determined, all citizens of the Third Reich were required to wear to proclaim their superiority. The SS supermen performed a traditional Karelian box dance for the crowd in which eight of them formed a box and two of them, never the same two, were tossed through the air in a marvelous display of acrobatics.

The party went on for three days with big outdoor feasts and visitors from as far as a hundred kilometers. Costumes were everywhere, little hitlers with thumbnail-size mustaches being the favorite. Thirteen-starred tricorns began to appear after the second day. Everybody wanted a walk through the flying battleship, and, obligingly, Konn replaced the maintenance center with real papier-mach6 bombs and bomb rack. The half-inch-caliber machine guns were a favorite with the kids, although one kid kept coming back every day to be bombardier. Rossum’s #26 did very well by himself telling tales of his desperate past life as a Wehrmacht armored car.

During the long trip back to the Nile, Eron tried to assimilate his entire Rithian experience. He had been silent for the whole flight but on the ground and in the silence of the stilled motors, he asked his pilot about something that had been mulling in his mind for a long time. Were the vows of secrecy made by every psychohistorian contributing to the stasis that worried Konn?

Konn only laughed. “Secrets? The myth has been exaggerated. How do you tell a secret to a sparrow? Find a sparrow who will understand my secrets, and I’ll hire him. We can watch over our sparrows, and we can feed sparrows, and we can nurse sparrows who have fallen—but to share secrets with a sparrow?”

Eron might have objected to a role as keeper of sparrows from the hatching hour unto that sparrow’s fall, but he was too much in awe of Hahukum Konn to say more. Later at base camp he was too busy. They were all leaving for Splendid Wisdom and he was going with them!