Psychohistorical Crisis

46

SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS, 14,806 GE

When I look back to the time, already 20 years ago, when the concept and magnitude of the physical quantum of action began, for the first time, to unfold from the mass of experimental facts, and again, to the long and ever tortuous path which led, finally, to its disclosure, the whole development seems to provide a fresh illustration of the long-since proved saying of Goethe’s that man errs as long as he strives. And the whole strenuous intellectual work of an industrious research worker would appear, after all, to be in vain and hopeless, if he were not occasionally through some striking facts to find that he had, at the end of all his crisscross journeys, at last accomplished at least one step which was conclusively nearer the truth.

—Famous Unknown Theoreticians: Archive Galactica,

4,892 GE, from the Nobel Address of Max Planck,

59,433 BGE

Deep in the Lyceum in a circular room reminiscent of the spartan design of the battle theater of an ancient Imperial dreadnought, equations shifted across the visual fields of two linked fams as Eron Osa demonstrated his homemade indexer to a standing Admiral Konn. There was nothing original in the mathematics, but Eron had devised a quick way of ordering the key material that a psychohistorian had to have available in his mnemonifier. With a fam command Eron could trigger the displayed symbols to blossom into a definition or an expansion or an underlying proof—or he could feed the equation a meal of initial conditions and watch the transmogrification into a solution. With another command, related equations might be called to the surface or banished.

“You’ll love it,” said Eron proudly.

“As long as you leave me my old interface to go back to when I’ve been dead-ended,” commented Konn good-naturedly. “It will take me a while to get used to your fancy-dan way of doing things. I’m an old man. A nice simple Imperial battle theater of the Fifth Millennium is about my speed. Or maybe the instrument panel of a Flying Fortress. How long did it take you to build this maze?”

“About a year. I need it to keep up with old men like you.”

“Come. We have to go.”

“I haven’t showed you everything yet.”

“And I haven’t showed you everything you need to know to break Eighth Rank.” To indicate that he considered the demonstration over, he switched the panorama of windows circumnavigating the theater from black to a fade-up of an Imperial fleet in formation over a nebula.

Eron reluctantly left his aerochair bobbing. “Another seminar?”

“You might say that.”

On their way they passed onto the spiral balcony of the Lyceum’s oval-dome inner keep. Hahukum never took the verticule; he liked his little stroll around the giant-size galactic simulacrum. At this hour no programs were running and all overlays were absent—it was just the slowly wheeling Galaxy, shrunk to a manageable eight stories. They were facing into the Carina Arm, heading down toward the rim to less-populous clumps.

“When are you going to let me take a crack at your blues?” meaning the trouble spots Konn had identified through his wizard’s mastery of statistics.

“When you know more than you know now. Those are my toughies, and I’m handling them myself.” Something in the vast galactic display caught the Admiral’s eye, and he took out a hand device to flare the relevant stars so that Eron could see, too. “Now there’s a blue that’s been migrating across its topozone at a steady rate for two hundred years, centered, it seems, on a nothing pentad of stars called the Coron’s Wisp. A really big spurt in recent years. Nothing explains it, not a damn thing—and I’ve run all the tests. When I get desperate enough I’m going to send out a field expedition to find out what in the Founder’s Nose I’m missing.” “Like you did with the Ulmat?”

“Yes, like I did with the Ulmat.” Konn smiled. “And I’ll probably have to use Nejirt again. Good field agents are hard to come by. You’ll notice I did no harm to your homeworld. It’s called minimal force. I didn’t have to blow the place apart like a certain emperor’s son who later became known as Emperor Arum-the-Patient. On Agander they’ve never heard of me, and none of your people will ever remember my name. When you speak at my funeral extolling my virtues, that’s a point you’ll be able to make in my favor.” Suddenly Konn boxed off a cube of stars centered on Coron’s Wisp, expanded the view to the scale of thirty leagues per story, blotting out the Galaxy. The shifting gave Eron vertigo. Konn continued to muse. “I’ll have to run an analysis on flows in and out of there—but it probably won’t do me any good until I’ve identified the infection vector.”

“If you’ve got it classified as a danger how can you not know what the infection vector is?”

Konn was unperturbed by student ignorance. “You can wake up with a fever bad enough to keep you in bed without knowing what you’ve caught.” They turned into a small seminar room and Eron noted with shock the seven senior psychohistorians looking at him. Five he recognized as Konn’s closest associates of rank. “Your Eighth Rank orals. I thought it was time.”

“I’m not prepared,” said Eron, aghast.

“That’s not for you to decide.”

The hours of the next watch made a grim ordeal. Eron fielded question after question, fumbling large numbers of them, chagrined at how many things there were to know in which he had only dabbled, if that. Konn would occasionally bring the subject back into the areas of Osa’s competence, giving him brief reprieves.

“I flunked,” he said, alone again with Konn, trying to keep back the tears.

“Of course not! That was a mere formality. They wouldn’t dare flunk you. You’re my student.”

Moments later Konn herded him into a surprise party. Eron didn’t realize at first that it was in his honor, to celebrate his new Eighth Rank status. By tradition there were nine candles on the cake, and when the lights were doused, he had to take one of the candles and blow it out, leaving eight, and then parade around the room holding the lighted cake high over his head while doing a jig. They didn’t do silly things like that on Agander. But it was all right. One could feel foolish and happy at the same time.

At the end of the revelry, five students remained, plus Magda whom Konn had left in Eron’s charge. Two were good friends of Eron, the other three he had never met before. They all decided to cap off the evening on the Olibanum at the Teaser’s Bistro. Eron wondered why he had never looked up Rigone before. He had been meaning to for years now. They all crowded into the same small pod, having doctored its pea brain into thinking that they were all one fat man. Sitting on each other’s laps, they sang a loud rondel in contrapuntal harmony while the acceleration pressed their bodies together.

At this hour the Teaser’s was quiet but, as always, never empty. The long row of stout tables marched down the central hall, wood, each surface crowded with the carved wit of youths who liked their small tools; knives, i-drills, fusion cobblers. Some of the more solid tables had once graced the mansions of First Empire nobles whose line had perished during the Sack, some were of recent manufacture. Old table-tops served as wall paneling to preserve the wit and were replaced by fresh tables with virgin surfaces of hardwood.

Customer density began to increase. The central row was for a boisterous crowd who enjoyed the mob scene of dealing and repartee. Alcoves served the quieter interests; some even came equipped with sonic suppressors. Only Eron and

Magda had never been to the Teaser’s before. The other five celebrants knew everyone, young people with an intellectual bent, serious in their discussions, serious in the quality of their fam aids. Eron listened. Magda stayed close to Eron. The humor was witty rather than rowdy. And the whole coterie seemed uncomfortably impatient with the stolidness of their Splendid upbringing, restless for the adventure that none of them was quite sure they could handle if they ever found it.

The women, one even as young as fifteen, all wore clothing deliberately out of style but sensuously reminiscent of another era of blatant power or devil-take-it-all. They knew their history. The boy-men preferred a caricature of military style, not from the time of fighters like Peurifoy, or from the heroic Wars Across the Marche, or in imitation of the ragtag utilitarianism of the armies of the Interregnum, but uniforms of irony ; their clothing mocked the generals who had served as toad bodyguards to the weak Emperors of the Late First Empire. A question crossed Eron’s mind: What equation would predict clothing? And he laughed at the single-mindedness of his thoughts. Too much studenting.

Just sitting there with his thoughts, he was sure he would return for more Bistro. Perhaps as Eighth Rank he could relax a little and do something about his neglected social life. The waiter dropped by with two Gorgizons. “Compliments of the Boss,” he said, and went away. Magda was very suspicious of this milky cocktail, so Eron managed to drink them both. After that he wasn’t sure he could leave his seat, so he stayed after his friends had departed. Magda stayed with him, very close.

“So,” said a hefty man with curlicue tattoos who sneaked up on them after the melee had thinned, “you finally came.” He sat down at their table and explained himself to Magda. “The kid and I met in a bookstore, arguing over the same book. Name’s Rigone. And yours?”

“Magda,” she said quietly.

Rigone grinned at Eron. “You’ve grown up.” He glanced at Magda appreciatively. “You really know how to pick the exotic babes.”

The next time he dropped by at the Teaser’s, Rigone wouldn’t let him drink alone, insisting on taking the youth upstairs behind his forcecurtain for a chat about old times. He showed off the Helmarian apparatus he had smuggled into Splendid Wisdom on his return “to knock off a few credits here and there.” In the background his current teenage girlfriend leisurely slipped back into her underwear for company, her blue eyes never leaving Eron, even after she sat down and crossed her legs.

Rigone remained buoyantly attentive to his guest. “You okay? You’re sure you’re okay? I always worried about you. That job with you was way out of my element. I don’t like that. Scared me shitless. I didn’t know what I was doing; I was just following instructions and praying to the god of luck. You’re sure you’re okay? You didn’t seem happy when it was over. You expected to turn into some kind of superman and fly away flapping your ears. Did you ever notice a difference?”

“I think I noticed a difference at Asinia. The right algorithm always seemed to pop into my mind when I needed it. Math was a whiz.”

“Yeah,” Rigone enthused, “that I’m good at. Utilities. Sells better than beer. Of course, I don’t write the algorithms. Damned if I know what was in those tidbits I stuffed into your brain.” He shook his head. “Installing utilities was the easy part. Your fam was made for it. The rest...” He paused to shake his head. “I can still feel my pants being lubricating by blood-piss during the major operation! I was passionately wishing I’d done the usual Scav thing and stuck to song and joke upgrades. So! You’ve made Eighth Rank! Glad to hear it. Maybe I had something to do with that. Maybe not.”

“I’ve noticed a difference here at the Lyceum. The way Second Rank Konn’s mind works fascinates me, but I always seem to have my own approach to a problem. I know I have nonstandard reference works in my fam, because when I search the archives for what feels like a naturally standard math algorithm to me, it’s not there. Sometimes Konn’s way works better, sometimes my way works better.”

“You got to be careful with that Hahukum Konn. With a smile he’ll sell you a pair of red shoes... and then sell tickets to the dance performance.”

The underage girlfriend was feeling left out and sauntered over. “Is he gwana dance for us?” She had a northern accent, of the kind you found around Splendid Wisdom’s Chisin Ridge, an accent that probably predated the First Empire.

“No. Eron is not a dancer. That was an expression. Eron is a mathist.”

“Like to citch maself one of those. Introduce us.”

“Eron. Mattie.” Rigone felt he had to explain her presence. “Mattie is a runaway and I’m giving her a temporary home.”

“He means I cin stay as long as I stay useful.”

Rigone ignored her. “I remember that you like books. I have just the book for an enterprising math student. It has this wonderful account in it by the first man who thought up the hyperdrive motor. Couldn’t get past the other entries.” He went to his display collection, hunted a moment, and pulled out an ancient volume. “Sixth millennium. Pupian Dynasty, I think. First edition. Good stuff but most of it’s over my head. I want you to have it. I owe you one.” It seemed to have been published under some government make-work cultural program; there was nothing fancy about its plain blue cover with gold edging and big golden title: Famous Unknown Theoreticians.

“Hey, you gwana give me something, too?”

“You can’t read. You’re a downloader.”

“More ina world than books, big man.”

“Later, babe. Later I’ll put out something for you.”

“Later doan count—you tuck later back in your pants bout one inamin after you put it out. How bout him for a present?” Her blue eyes stripped Eron nude with a petite smile.

“No. He’s too young for you. He’d ruin your innocence with his untutoredness.”

Eron excused himself in the middle of the argument and spent the rest of the watch at home quietly famfeeding Rigone’s book with a cobbled-together reader that could decode the ancient formatting. It was sometimes highly amusing and always sobering to read how theoreticians down the ages went about proving their most sacred suppositions.

Eron’s favorite from the book of Famous Unknown Theoreticians was Ptolemy’s quite detailed, and correct, geometric proof that Rith was the center of the universe—the only flaw being his assumption that since no parallax of the stars was observed, the stars must be embedded in a celestial sphere whose radius was not too many orders of magnitude larger than the radius of Rith. As a theoretician woefully unfamiliar with the limits of experimental instrumentation, he didn’t realize (what the current state of Greek geometry would have told him had he been listening) that he had a proof of the lower bound on the distance to the nearest star, but no estimate at all of an upper bound.

Often Eron had to stop perusing to do something while he thought through an insight. He might water his thriving plants, which were confused enough by the splendor from their wall to behave as if they were growing in the garden of an Emperor. Two were in flower. Or he might just stare. His inlaid and runed Rithian Yorick rested stoically up-to-his-neck-in-table between the Ming aralia and the Osmanthus fragrans, there to remind Eron of the consequences of sloppy thinking, and never far from evoking Eron’s memory of Reinstone, the poet of Asinia, reciting with ecstatic melancholy from the incantations of the Shaker of Spears: “Alas, poor Yorick!... Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?”

One of the more amusing entries in Rigone’s book was the proof from the century of the Flying Fortress that Rith had no population problem, that overbreeding was going to go away of itself as a natural side effect of industrialization. It did go away as a natural side effect of sapiens stupidity. The mesmerizingly slow convergence of birth rate and death rate, unfortunately, was not the important variable to watch; the killer was the infrastructure stability of a population that had been stabilizing too slowly.

From skull to book again. As well as his proof that Rith was the center of the universe, Ptolemy produced a wonderful proof that Rith didn’t rotate—based upon the assumption that any object freed from contact with the planet would automatically and instantaneously assume zero velocity relative to some absolute frame of reference. Thus an army positioned to the east of their enemy (and with their feet firmly on the ground) might annihilate all opposition by casually freeing rocks and gravel that would then zoom off to the west at the speed of Apollo’s chariot. Ergo, since that did not happen, a nonrotating Rith must be sitting stationary at its central position in the universe.

One could be amused by such naiveté, but Eron wasn’t sure mankind had ever transcended the tendency to build houses upon a foundation of “self-evident truths.” The self-evident truth that most interested Eron was psychohistory’s cherished and firmly defended axiom: the assumption that any foreseen event could be neutralized if known to those affected by the prediction. Murek Kapor had originally planted the skepticism as to the truth of that axiom, a skepticism which had flowered almost to the point of blasphemy by the time Eron had been inducted into the Fellowship as a raw recruit, but which had now, with full knowledge of psychohistory’s methods, mellowed to the point of acceptance.

Still, the theorem had problems, and Eron, among his many interests, had dedicated a part of his endeavor to straightening out the mathematics of secrecy. In the first place, there were two distinct treatments of secrecy where there should be only one.

(1) an N methodology that applied to nonpsychohistorians who were not supposed to be cognizant of their future lest they disturb it;

(2) a P methodology that applied internally to the group of Pscholars themselves who were supposed to be cognizant of possible futures so they could change them.

That created problems. For instance, Eron was well aware that Second Rank Konn and First Rank Hanis disagreed upon which future mankind should be pursuing. That led to very strange internal secrets among the Fellowship.

(1) Konn kept secrets from Hanis in essentially an N methodological way which (incorrectly) assumed Hanis was not a psychohistorian, ostensibly to keep Hanis from sabotaging Konn’s vision of the future—and otherwise (correctly) dealt with Hanis by the usual P methodology.

(2) Likewise Hanis kept secrets from Konn, on the tacit (incorrect) assumption that Konn was not really a psychohistorian thus (he hoped) preventing Konn from sabotaging Hanis’ messianic vision. In all other respects Konn was treated by Hanis as a Pscholar.

This wry mix-up generated tiny internal contradictions which inevitably led to problems within the Fellowship, sometimes unimportant ones that could be looped around, as seemed to be the case here, yet—potentially—such careless ways of defining secrecy could create lethal problems, could even destroy galactic civilization.

During the execution of the Founder’s original Plan, this flaw in the law of secrecy had not been made manifest because all Pscholars were united in their desire to execute the One Great Plan and so had no need to keep secrets from each other. Today, with different subgroups of Pscholars vying to lead mankind into different visions, the law of secrecy was working to create incompatible groups of Pscholars, each thinking that they, and they alone, represented the true heir of the Founder. Inevitably this would lead to an attempt by one group of (supposedly correct) Pscholars to disenfranchise the other groups of (supposedly incorrect) Pscholars.

Shades of the ancient past. The Catholic (Truth) versus Protestant (Heresy) as it were.

Eron had already laid out the problem as a mathematical puzzle—which he was keeping secret until he understood it better. The trouble stemmed from a mathematical definition of secrecy that was inherently inconsistent. That was the easy part. Eron wasn’t sure he knew what to do about it except that the same rules had to apply to everyone—the inconsistency deriving from the false dichotomy between Pscholar and layman.

(1) Under what circumstances was the keeping of a secret benign?

(2) Under what circumstances did the keeping of a secret prove detrimental?

Sloppy group thinking, akin to that which had abruptly terminated poor Yorick’s life during the Great Rithian Die-off, was to be avoided at all costs. There were worse fates than being sent to heaven as an indoor garden decoration, but not many. Yet Eron was not going to be able to refine his thinking by conducting social experiments, say, in the grand manner of that Emperor-of-Everything-plus-Russia Napoleon or by mind-slaving k la Cloun-the-Stubbom. Young Osa was beginning to think of himself as an ancient astronomer he couldn’t test his ideas about the functioning of stars by building different kinds of stars—but what he could do was observe the stars that already existed. History was his sky.

Of the men in Rigone’s book, Eron took a liking to Max Planck. He had always assumed that Planck was one of those ancient Bronze-Age shamans who fooled around with black body radiation in a cave and, by the light of a gas lamp, used chalkboard and bronze piping and primitive electrical oven to come up with a curve which fit the experimental data, all without ever grasping the true meaning of the mysterious revelation gifted him by his Nordic gods. But reading Planck’s original papers uncovered a different story. Planck wasn’t an experimentalist at all. He was a paper-and-pencil theoretician who maintained roots in a rich soil of other people’s observations. Equations were carefully derived from first principles to match the best experimental results. When they didn’t he was brilliantly able to finagle a new equation to fit the experiment, but never satisfied until he could derive the finagle from first principles.

Planck’s finest finagle, the quantum of action, he fussed over until he had a convincing derivation from the simplest mechanical laws and a deep understanding of Boltzmann’s then-new statistical mechanics—which every student of psychohistory was familiar with as the ancient foundation stone of the Founder’s mathematics. (Boltzmann was often referred to by students at the Lyceum as the great-grandancestor of psychohistory.) In plain words—unmistakably clear over millennia of language change—Planck warned his students that they were not to use the quantum of action in any prediction that required reversibility since all quantum events were tied to an increase in entropy.

Eron was amazed and delighted by this piece of ancient wisdom!

Later generations of quantum theoreticians had ignored Planck (and had sidelined Boltzmann as underivable from first principles) and clung for dear life to their newtonian roots in the Law of Conservation of Information, a law about as valid as Ptolemy’s assumption that a released rock instantly reverts to a universal rest mode. During the heady pre-Yorick years of scientific prolificacy, armies of superstitious physicists hunted up new heavens for information gone missing: under rocks, on the surface of black holes, behind the locked doors of alternate worlds—all heavens where the physicists were sure to find their home after they died. The debate was only resolved by the Great Die-off when the physicists, as well as everyone else, fell off the top of the exponential curve to their silence or, if they lived, to more pressing questions of survival.

Yorick had nothing to say about the matter.

Perhaps because of Reinstone, certainly because of his adventures on Rith, Eron had taken up the hobby of teasing a psychohistorical thread through the shards of Rith’s history. His first five years at the Lyceum had been an ideal opportunity to collect all sorts of odd bits and pieces of ancient history which had languished in various archives. His psychohistorical manipulations of these pieces surprised him by regularly deviating from the standard Rithian stereotypes.

Building a model of some segment of Rith’s history was not the same as predicting the future. To predict the future one had to jump off the curve’s endpoint with the hope that you were jumping in the same direction as the curve. History was different. It was an interpolation between known points, a less acrobatic feat. For instance, with just the meager data he had about the era of the Flying Fortress, the equations gave a high probability of a devastating nuclear fusion-fission war—but the record showed no such event so Eron could prune off that branch and thus refine his analysis.

Connecting his thread through the topozone crossing of the Great Rithian Die-off was a more difficult extrapolation. There was enough material from the prior centuries of the Ramp-up to see the excitement of the early scientific revolution driving the population expansion, and plenty of evidence of the cavalier optimism of the richer nations, which were getting richer in their high-rise penthouse supported by the Atlas of an increasingly ignorant breeding population... And after the Die-off there was plenty of material to understand the strange cultures which had produced the sublight starships.

But in between the Die-off and the Rejuvenation? Only the shadows of illiterate men too busy dying and surviving to record their thoughts.

Every single one of the cultures that had fed the Ramp-up with its dynamism and energy simply vanished during the free-fall of infrastructure collapse as the population dropped by ten(?), fifteen(?) billion. The peoples who emerged from the disaster, and who later founded the first interstellar colonies, bore no kin to their parent cultures in languages, institutions, religions, or racial characteristics. It wasn’t an easy scene for a historian to sort out even with the splicing tools of psychohistory.

But it was good practice.

Eron divided his study of secret societies into three broad groups. Rithian history made up in longevity for what it lacked in depth. The ten thousand years of sublight expansion produced hundreds of examples of secret societies, each of the colonies isolated from all the others, so the influences which made and drove them were easy to model. The Hyperdrive Era contained a plethora of interstellar conflicts in which secrecy had been both a viable survival strategy for undergroups and a viable method of retaining power for overgroups.

There was no verdict in favor of secrecy or against it. Both strategies were valid responses to different kinds of challenge. Both were fatal when improperly applied.

Eron’s methodology was very Planckian. He set up a complete mathematical model governing secrecy and disclosure. Then he fed some historical event into it, comparing the model’s output and the historical record. That gave him the flaws in his model—and sometimes the bias in the historical record. (How reliable was the Inquisition’s account of the Catholic extermination of the Albigensians since at the end of that conflict there were no Albigensians left to leave an account of their own?)

From the results of the comparison between theory and observation Eron then finagled his model to give the results it should have given—after which he lived a few months of frustration figuring out the underlying psychohistorical basis of the finagle. Then he applied the new model to a new set of historical events for a new iteration of theory.

During this trying exercise Eron was consoled by reading in Latin the works of Johann Kepler, who wrote in the 598th century BGE, during the time of the bloody collapse of the

Ptolemaic cosmology. Kepler published amusing accounts of his sustained effort, through seventy different hypotheses, to fit Tycho Brahe’s measurements of the path of Mars to a theoretical curve, chiding himself in print for first having exhausted all possible variations of the circle before trying something sensible—merely because he was caught up in the universal dogma, held by Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Galileo, the Jesuits, die Inquisition, and an infallible Pope, which took for granted that circleness was the one true perfect shape befitting God’s perfect design for the Solar System. But God had preferred ellipses.

Kepler doggedly continued his research, his mind full of hypotheses to be tested, even as the holocaust of the Thirty Year Religious War engulfed everything about him. Men began to doubt creeds that preached a Savior but practiced wholesale fratricide. The psychohistorical seeds of the distrust of all religion ripened, ready to take root in the centuries ahead. Kepler found the means to publish Tycho’s star-maps in spite of the chaos, but long before the war was over Kepler perished, one among ten million as sapiens Catholic and sapiens Protestant slaughtered, maimed, raped, pillaged, and burned men, women, children, witches, and heretics in the name of their Christ.

Eron’s refined model of galactic civilization and the Founder’s classical model almost always gave the same historical outcome—except under one circumstance, where Eron’s formulation of die laws seemed to give remarkably better results.

The Founder’s model wasn’t self-referential. By the very nature of his mathematics he had to assume that his Pschol-ars would be living in a universe isolated from history. That worked very well if the job was back-predicting a past they couldn’t influence. But when predicting the future it became the source of their need for secrecy. Yet because secrecy was never perfect, the Founder’s mathematics carried in its retina a blind spot. During the Interregnum the Pscholars’ arm of the Fellowship was a tiny underfunded group that had the resources to keep track of only a very few critical leverage points. In effect, it was isolated from history, and thus the Founder’s math was a very good approximation to the real situation.

However, since the establishment of the Pax Pscholaris of 13,157 GE, the situation had subtly changed. At the end of the Interregnum the Pscholars’ power had been mostly symbolic, but sixteen centuries later that power was real; they were the single most powerful group in galactic history. They were no longer outside of history, they rode history— and secrecy was steadily weakening as a vehicle by which to maintain the fiction of isolation required by the Founder’s equations. So far as Eron could tell, this once-useful approximation was now dangerously close to failure. Another Ptolemaic system.

It was time to take his math out of his private mnemoni-fier and put it to test in the huge galactic model maintained by the Lyceum. Second Rank Konn gladly provided him with the machine space and gave him higher than normal runtime priority for a Rank Eight student. He wasn’t allowed to modify the sacrosanct model himself but he could use any of its routines, up to the full set, or, for experimental purposes, flag out what he didn’t want to use and flag in his own alterations.

Because he was amending some of the basic rules, he made up different sets of initial conditions that were critically designed to highlight his modifications. Using a revamped model with the Galaxy’s real initial conditions could come later when he had a revision he could trust

The secrecy assumptions were so strongly built into the standard model that Eron spent months tracking them down and rephrasing the affected codes. It was a hermit’s existence with zero social life. His waking-sleeping cycle became erratic until he was out of tune with the corridor world around him. Sometimes he didn’t notice that he was wearing mixed pairs of colored socks, even mismatched shoes. He was known to appear at odd hours barefoot and in pajamas. Konn once sent Magda over to trim his hair.

His adversary and archfiend was the galactic model’s intelligent compiler. Cavalierly it might reject his code with polite little scolds. “Code syntactically correct. However, suggest you try instead:.. .” and its suggestion comprised only seven percent of the code Eron had spent a whole watch writing and ran in two percent of the time. “Danger: Matrix sem246 is near singular to level epsilon in regions... Suggest adding branch to routine Az34mask to avoid probability 0.000072 that run will balloon to unacceptable error levels.” “Job terminated: Do not use this code before reading ARcmvE-doc-274/12/13476 by First Rank Pscholar Yem Esonu, attached. Comprehension test required.” A whole textbook! “Syntactic error in your use of morads, automatically corrected. Any disagreements with this decision to be filed in log-morad.” Sometimes the complier even ran his program with polite reluctance, ending in: “Job Terminated,” a title appended to a thousand-line analysis of the problem. Once Eron got the dreaded ciyptic termination message: “Outside the parameters of human nature.” Deep in imagined retorts, Eron slipped a red sock on one foot and a green sock on the other.

Slowly, slowly he beat the compiler into a state of respectful submission. But it was the simulations which began to run without compiler comment that gave him the most intellectual distress. Sometimes he felt like a twelve-year-old novice god; whenever he thought he had his universe elegantly designed to perfection, the damn thing would blow up on him and he’d have to go back to scratch and build a new universe.

His method was simple. He developed and tested definitions of info exchange between intelligent nodes: secrets having viscous flow, open info having fluid flow. He allowed no node a privileged position. For instance, in Eron’s math there was no absolute resting place for psychohistorical knowledge and so no need to differentiate between prediction as a tool used by generals or physicists or biologists or parents raising children and prediction as a tool used by psychohistorians.

Thus Eron avoided the conundrum: “If the Fellowship node is the natural resting place of all psychohistorical knowledge, what happens when we resolve this Fellowship into its component nodes, the individual psychohistorians? Where is the natural resting place of psychohistorical knowledge now? Who is Pope? And how does he keep the secret of psychohistory unto himself without murdering all the other psychohistorians?” In another version of the conundrum it was possible to ask: “How did the Founder preserve the secret methods of psychohistory by teaching them to his disciples?” And in still another version: “If the Fellowship cannot predict its own internal behavior because all of its members know the methods of psychohistory, then how can it know itself well enough to lead the Galaxy?” Under the squabbling leadership of the Olympian gods, the squabbling Greeks first became vassals of Rome and then vassals of Turkey.

Eron’s new and precise definitions, as they always do, opened up a whole new field of mathematics: a vista from which to view the starry ecumen without the obstruction of corridor walls. He named his methodology Arekean iteration after the famous Galactic folk hero Arek who, in countless different versions, began his tribulations by formulating a disastrous plan that escalated into frightful trouble which he fast-danced his way out of by the cunning creation of a new and worse plan that... until finally, at the very last in-amin, a hair’s breadth from disease, death, and disgrace, he made a final plan that saved him for a happy ending and the story could end.

Law-1: Any observed change in circumstance initiates a prediction by the observer.

Law-2: If the prediction indicates good fortune, prediction ceases.

Law-3: If the prediction indicates an unpleasant outcome, die observer actively seeks to falsify the prediction by initiating further changes to his circumstances.

Law-4: Prediction/action is an interative process that continues until good fortune is predicted.

The dynamics of those simple laws were interesting.

When Eron attached (to the methods of prediction) a high coefficient of secrecy, each node, whether community or individual, tended to optimize only its own future. Nonoptimal falsification of negative predictions dominated.

A rancher predicts good fortune raising cows.

The farmer, noting the arrival of cows, predicts them eating his wheat and falsifies this prediction by poisoning the rancher's cattle so that he can predict a profit raising wheat.

The rancher, noting this change in his circumstances, predicts bankruptcy but falsifies this dire prediction by burning the farmer’s bam, which allows him to predict a profit in cattle next year.

The farmer then rolls out the barbed wire and builds a machine-gun nest in his water tower, enabling him to predict a profit in wheat next year.

Eron watched this high-secrecy version of his model with fascination. Armies with secret archives of contingency plans mushroomed. Brother assassinated brother. Counterproductive falsification of negative prediction was the rule. A Time of Troubles? An Interregnum? Whatever you wanted to call it, power gradually accumulated in the hands of the best predictors who continued to maintain their advantage through secrecy while the number of distinct nodes dwindled. No matter how small or large the stage, in the final state one predictor ruled in a sea of enemies. Splendid Wisdom?

When Eron set the same coefficient of secrecy low enough so that all nodes were sharing each other’s negative predictions, quite another dynamic took over: predictive iteration accelerated faster than falsifying action. The farmer planning to poison the cows iterated to the burning of his barn before he bought the poison, each new iteration leading to another negative prediction in an endless sequence— which could be terminated only by a falsification which resulted in good fortune for both rancher and farmer.

The equations converged to either of two stable states:

(1) a semistable state in which a prime node managed the future of all other nodes.

(2) a stable state in which distributed iterative predicting (a) damped out, over all subgroups of nodes, predictions which had negative consequences while (b) leaving generally positive predictions to run their course.

Eron didn’t know whether it was possible to make a nonviolent transition between these two end states. However, there wasn’t any reason he couldn’t try out different methods of transition on the Fellowship’s gigantic psychohistorical model using current data. The Founder’s mathematics was restricted to the conditions which led to state (1), but Eron had made the generalizations necessary to allow psychohistory to operate in state (1) or (2) or any state in between.

Since his revised model treated all the conditions leading up to state (1) in essentially the same way as did the Founder’s math, he expected that when he ran his revised model with real-life input he would get the same output as everyone else was getting: a stable Galaxy with minor problems needing corrective action, a long-term prognosis of continued stability with a slow tendency toward stagnation that wouldn’t become a critical problem for centuries, if ever. First Rank Hanis already had a solution for that in the works.

What he got was something very discouraging: a Galaxy at the cusp point of a historical crisis that dropped off into a chaos with characteristics that looked very much like an Interregnum. That was impossible. That was in the category of predicting that the next time he saw Konn, the Admiral would have blue skin, four arms, and an elephant snout. The math must be wrong. What was there to say but to quote Planck: “Man errs as long as he strives.” Back to scratch. Again. What a downer!

For a month after that he worked at dissecting his model to find the flaw. It couldn’t be the logic of the program, because the compiler was mercifully silent. The flaw must be in his assumptions, or in his iterative methods, or in some ballooning error he had missed. But he couldn’t find it. The dilemma was driving him crazy! He was too proud to take the mess to Konn. It was too embarrassing.

Yorick gave him the answer, breaking a long silence. Where did his revamped model break down? Try the past!

So, expecting the worst, he input the conditions of the last century into his model. It worked perfectly. Why should he be so stunned at that? A month ago he had expected it to work perfectly, had thought of his creation that it was the marvel of the millennium. With the utmost caution he stepped his simulacrum forward, a year at a time, simultaneously generating a report of the differences between his model and the standard model. They were minimal—except perhaps in Konn’s blue regions.

But then, as he approached the present, the slopes of the singularity began to appear.

And this time the reason was obvious. The wall of secrecy that the Pscholars had built around their methodology of prediction was breaking down. Bits and pieces of high-grade predicting were appearing here and there in the oddest of places. In spite of the general decline in mathematical scholarship under the Pscholars, the Pscholars were, occasionally, being counter-predicted! It was going to get worse. Much worse. Quickly.

Nor was this outcome a future danger. Twenty percent of the indicators had already crossed the topozone. But because it was a topozone crossing, the error bars around the time determiners were large. Eron couldn’t predict the moment of eruption—but the marble was sitting at the top of the hill, and the slightest disturbance... Eron didn’t have time to tidy up his thesis. Urgency and tidiness don’t go together; he’d have to tell Konn right away.

That very hour Eron vibro-cleaned his teeth, took the trouble to have his hair cut, put on a pair of socks, both black, had his manufacturum weave a brand-new businesslike outfit, donned it, and rushed back to the Lyceum to call on the Admiral. Thank Space he worked for the Pscholar who was certainly the greatest psychohistorian since the Founder and certainly the Galaxy’s finest trouble-sniffer.

Hahukum Konn listened, with great patience, to his student’s babble. He studied the collection of unorganized papers Eron brought him and the hasty scratch work. He shared visuals with Eron as Eron put on an amazing display of apocalypse. Carefully the old Master prepared his reply, while pondering the documentation, saying nothing until Eron ran down and fell silent, waiting. “Hmmm. Here’s an error you’ll have to fix. A Boltok oversum can’t be diminutive in these particular circumstances. You’ll have to—”

“I know; I know, but that doesn’t change anything. I—”

“Eron, my son. You’ve been working too hard. Take a vacation. This is an interesting hypothesis”—meaning it was wrong—“but you’ve gone at it with a machete. I’d go back and take it from the point where you have, rather arbitrarily ..

It occurred to Eron that the Admiral hadn’t followed his argument. He began again from the beginning. The Admiral continued to listen, this time not so patiently—he had a way of brushing the dust off his braid when he had gone beyond his boundary of tolerance. Eventually he stopped the exposition and began a ruthless deconstruction of Eron’s work. And Eron began to understand: the Admiral was committed to his own interpretation of the universe, and nothing else qualified as real. How many times in Eron’s life had he collided with that wall? He felt nine years old again, back in that stupid school on Agander with Professor... ? He was ready to sass the Admiral, get himself expelled from the Lyceum, maybe thrown off Splendid

Wisdom. Old habits die hard. But new habits can come into play, too. He had zenoli training. Never attack an opponent’s strongest position.

“Sir! I think you’ve given me enough pointers for a starter. I’ll do a thorough workover.” He had no intention of doing a workover. “The results were a little strange and maybe I got overexcited.” This was exactly what the Admiral had been hoping to hear; he smiled and nodded.

Eron despaired at this agreement—that his teacher didn’t react to such a retreat, didn’t grab him and make him sit down again, didn’t beg him to continue his penetrating line of reasoning, was confirmation that he had scouted well past the stars of the Admiral’s farthest picket ship. Eron was fighting beyond the pale and the Admiral wasn’t bold enough to follow. It was a shock.

They parted on good terms. Eron went home and slept right through three watches. He got up, trimmed his plants, wolfed down a huge supper, and paced. Of course the Galaxy was right on top of a major crisis if the greatest mind that the Pscholars had produced couldn’t tell his toes from the Founder’s Nose! Since the beginning of time men had been clobbered when they let themselves be blinded by an old false assumption that had been around so long it was the only comfortable way to think. Even the Admiral! Even the Admiral who never hesitated to twist his wit in the guts of a faint-hearted Pscholar! Eron felt strangely betrayed.

Eventually he went drinking at the Teaser’s Bistro. Nothing else to do! It was early. Only a couple of students sat in the comer, cramming some course. Rigone came over and sat down, probably sensing Eron’s depression. Because Eron was depressed he began to mumble about mankind’s fidelity to outmoded ideas. That reminded Rigone of an ancient philosophy book he had been reading from pre-First Empire times whose metaphysics had propelled the Rismall-ians into two centuries of fatal warfare.

In reply Eron glumly related a story from the Rithian mythology about how the folk hero Galileo Galilei took up a valiant crusade to enlist his Church in the reasoned creation of a new cosmology, knowing that his beloved Church would fall into oblivion without it, and how he had failed— his books burned, himself forced by the Inquisition to recant, on his knees, begging not to be tortured. “... and I held and still hold Ptolemy’s opinion—that the earth is motionless and that the sun moves... I abjure, curse, and detest the said errors and heresies... contrary to the Holy Church, and I swear that I will nevermore in future say or assert anything ... which will give rise to suspicion of... and if I know any heretic or anyone suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office.” It was with this certainty in a truth that need not be searched out, certainty that faith could be forced, and certainty that the threat of torture would make men holy that the Church launched the Thirty Years War to extinguish all dissent.

Rigone listened. He added to the conversation a disparaging comment about the Mithraic Priesthood’s insistence on loyalty to the king. It did not matter that he had the wrong religion. Eron didn’t bother to correct him; Rigone never would be able to tell the difference between any of the dead Rithian religions, whether they nailed their kings to a cross or ate hearts to propitiate the gods.

Alone again, defiant, Eron stared at a tempting blank space on the tabletop between a love ditty and a witticism which suggested that it was good policy to love one’s enemies in case one’s friends turned out to be bastards. Eron took out his little metricator. With the beam on high he burned an Italian phrase into the available space: “Eppur si muove!” which in galactic translated to something like Nevertheless, it moves. Meaning Rith. Galileo Galilei may or may not have muttered that final judgment on the relevance of Catholic philosophy, but he certainly thought it for his remaining eight years of life under arrest in his villa at Arcetri.

Staring at that phrase, Eron resolved to leave Hahukum Konn and to work for First Rank Jars Hanis on the Rector’s monumental project. A New Renaissance. Good. He could deal with that. And meanwhile he would polish his thesis until it gleamed so brightly that no psychohistorian, no matter how blockheaded, could deny its validity.

He felt the pride of Kepler: “It is not eighteen months since the unveiled sun burst upon me. Nothing holds me; I will indulge my sacred joy!” And the quieter pride of Planck: “ .. at the end of all his criss-cross journeys, he at last accomplished at least one step which was conclusively nearer the truth ”