Psychohistorical Crisis

50

ERON OSA AND THE GHOUL, 14,810 GE

At the moment of combat the zenoli soldier must be free of all prior thoughts and emotions. Priors unbalance any thrust or response. Priors will kill you. Active preconceptions will kill you. Fixed intentions will kill you. Old emotions, grudges, resentments, angers, hatreds, loves, enthusiasms will kill you.

A soldier who enters combat hating his enemy is already a soldier doomed to failure; his hatred will blind him to the thrust that kills him or blind him in victory so that his victory is taken from him. A soldier who is afraid of his enemy is doomed. A soldier who loves his enemy is doomed. A soldier who is thinking about his enemy is doomed.

At the moment of combat the zenoli soldier is poised, inertiatess, ready to act in any direction—like a marble at the top of a smooth multidimensional hill.

To achieve this null state of mind AT WILL the following eighteen brain-fam exercises are recommended...

—The Zenoli Combat Manual,

18th Edition, Founder’s Era 873

Viewed from the roof of Splendid Wisdom, nine hundred kloms from the Lyceum, a prodigious gash slashed through the planetopolis beyond which the distant city-encrusted Coriander Mountains gleamed in metallic and black hues. The great quake shouldn’t have destroyed as much as it did and it shouldn’t have killed 180,000 people, but it was an old First Empire sector that had been salvaged during the rebuilding under the Pscholars. Minor structural damage from the Sack, unnoticed in the hurry of reconstruction, hadn’t gone unnoticed by the later earthquake. Splendid Wisdom was stoic about such disasters. There were great power stations to tame the heat of potential volcanoes as well as undercity mining operations along the major fault lines—but preventive measures weren’t always enough.

Nobody was in a hurry to rebuild. The slash had been there for more than a century. Out of the wreckage, construction engineers had already cleared a canyon to bedrock and below, demolishing even the old tunneled maze, leaving a ravine too colossal for a single eye to encompass. Antlike teams of thousands were still strip-mining the fault block. Nothing had yet been rebuilt except for the ubiquitous antiquake mounts, wormlike elevated transportation tubes, essential piping, and a few giant weather towers that pumped water vapor into the atmosphere at the command of the central weather control computers.

A few yellow dandelions colonized isolated crannies of windbome dust, and Eron collected some of the lusher specimens in a discarded container so that he might take flowers down into his new abode.

For kloms on either side of the gash the surviving structures had been condemned, evacuated, and sealed, their rooms firecoated in a centimeter of SeeOTwo plastic. All services were discontinued. These abysmal depths of abandoned city invited torch-carrying squatters—not many, for it was a water less desert without power or air circulation and Splendid people were spoiled by the plenitude of public services, city folk to the core.

Petunia knew the place, having been here before. They set up house twenty meters below the Splendid roof in a preprepared stygian apartment that could be reached only through a descending maze of seeming dead ends. It had to be illuminated with the occasional etemo-torch hung about the deplasticized walls. Eron dedicated one to his dandelions. If it was daytime, lightpipes provided a tenebrous gloom. The rooms were bare except for an atomo-unit that sucked in air from a nearby shaft and squeezed from the air a meager water supply supplemented by rain. The dispozoria was a camper’s unit imported from some planet where camping was possible.

Eron had waited to ask his question. “Scogil worked with others?”

“Obviously.”

“Can you contact them for help?”

“No.” She smiled. “Agents don’t work that way. Two’s the max. Me and my Daddy. We don’t see the others. You’re a sloppy criminal if you don’t know that\”

Eron had a flash vision of himself from his distant life as a Pscholar talking to a very secretive skull while he worked out the mathematics showing how political power, based on carefully guarded secrets, inevitably catalyzed—like his brilliantly blooming dandelion—the evolution of thousands of other secretive groups. And here he was, so to speak, in the secret room of one sneaky dandelion seed that had taken root in this weed-hostile place on a planet which religiously guarded the greatest guild secret in galactic history.

Sometimes Petunia visited hidden caches and was gone for hours. She never left on one of those expeditions without threatening Eron. “You have to be here when I get back. If you run away, I can find you, and you don’t want to know what I’ll do to your brain when I catch you.”

“Yes, Miss Cloun.”

“I’m only stubborn.” She glared.

But she was all smiles when she got back with whatever supplies she had gone after. “You’re still here! So you can share the delicious naval chow I brought for us.”

“I love you.”

“Ha. As if I trust that kind of love!”

Living in a once-luxurious dwelling which had been without power and a functional manufacturum for centuries— without even a physicist’s rudimentary machine shop— strained Eron’s tolerance. He depended upon Petunia too much. Her fam had inherited her mother’s engineering know-how and she had been privy to such skills for ten years. He was still mostly inept, the basic physical concepts from his education surviving in his organic brain, but the fine technical details lost.

On the other hand, he was glad to leave the details of their survival to Petunia. He was occupied with the nontrivial task of training his fam to respond to his own uniquely coded requests. Trying to use this new fam was like hiring a bright child to take over the business, more trouble than it was worth at the moment—but the future benefits were great.

They had to build a bed-nest out of abandoned curtains. They had to wash the same clothes over and over in an inadequate water supply. They had to rig power for their portable Personal Capsule receiver. The simplest tasks required time out for patches of wild ingenuity. Petunia spent hours reconditioning a backpack-size manufacturum to obtain a source for small spare parts. She didn’t seem to mind the inconvenience—which would have led Eron to guess at barbarous origins if her engineering talent hadn’t so shamed him.

After a dozen watches of frenzy she admitted that she was exhausted. She voice-dimmed the torches and snuggled up with Eron in the curtains. “We’re done. I officially declare that we’re burrowed in and safe from the police. Except for the daily emergencies. I’ve made a place for you away from the hubbub. But so far you haven’t kept your end of the bargain,” she accused. “You’re to be talking with my Daddy! You haven’t got any more excuses.”

“Hiranimus and I aren’t on speaking terms because of our differences... so to speak. That’s just the way it is. I’ve tried.”

“Not so fast with your cliche drivel! Let’s take it from the top. You Pscholars were never mech adepts, right? You tell me why you and Daddy can’t chat and then I’ll tell you why you’re wrong. My people are an offshoot of the Crafters of the Thousand Suns of the Helmar Rift. My ancestors built the first tuned psychic probe on military contract with the Warlord of Lakgan. We built our own versions of the fam as a countermeasure to emotional control since before Cloun died. Maybe we even invented the fam. I know a few things about ghouls. Enough prolog. Why does that sloppy wet-ware of yours think it can’t talk to my father?”

Eron looked at the dim ceiling and heard the un-Splendid silence broken only by her breathing. It was as if they were alone in the universe. “For the same reason telepathy never works.”

“What’s telepathy?”

“An old superstition. Never mind. Why can’t I talk to your father? Any complex neural network can be trained in zillions of ways to think the same thought—each person thinks a thought in a unique way. The same thought has innumerable representations. A brain develops code to decipher its own thoughts, and no one else’s. A fam is basically an analog device built on such a tiny scale that the individual resistances and capacitances and quantronic switch characteristics vary all over the map. That makes it impossible to transfer a memory from one fam to another. Crazy novelists who don’t know their physics are always inventing digital fams as a plot device for thought transfer—but then your fam would be as big as a house and not very portable. When organic brain and fam grow up together in co-communication, they learn to talk to each other because they have spent a lifetime co-creating a shared code.”

“Yaah! And the code is uncrackable and all that barf. I can zap your argument with one question. Are you ready to be dragged out of hyperspace?”

“Fire away.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “Oh, my doomed wise man, all snuggled up in dusty old curtains, tell me then, why is it that you and I, each thinking his mundane thoughts with his own unique and undecipherable code, are right this very moment talking to each other without any trouble? Ha!” She punched him in the arm. “Are we the dumb/illiterate bear and fox?”

He couldn’t see her smile but he knew it was there. She had derailed his logic. Language. Telepathy was impossible—but as a child her mind had built a unique translator between her thoughts and the galactic standard tongue.

She translated “Petunia” thoughts into galactic standard sentences (or a close approximation); he took her galactic standard sentences and, using his own unique translator, recoded them into “Eton” thoughts which he could understand. Neat.

“Do your people talk to ghouls?” he asked incredulously.

“No,” she replied with sadness. “It is considered sacrilegious. Fams are never reused any more than you’d zombie the dead body of your mother to do housework. Back home you would be considered an abomination. But my grief goads me. I want to talk to Daddy.”

“What would you say?”

“I’d ask him how to get out of this predicament.”

“I see. Ancestor worship. Why not ask me, instead of bossing me around?”

“You’re a criminal. You don’t know beans from turnips.”

“I’m a bona fide psychohistorian, albeit a handicapped one. That means, at the least, that I have a very good organic brain, even if it is criminal. Do you want your father’s fam sent to a safe place?” He was desperately looking for a common goal. “I’m probably better able to get us out of our fix than any mere astrologer.” That was a dig at her father.

“You’re a psychohistorian? Of the Fellowship?” she said, aghast.

Eron had never bothered to mention that detail. “And a criminal,” he added.

Petunia began to pound her skull with both fists. “Space, am I stupid. Of course Daddy wanted you to take over his fam!”

“Why?”

“Do you think I’ll tell you? You’re worse than a criminal. Now I’ve got to figure a way to make you his slave! You’re fried meat if I ever catch you sleeping! I’m already conjuring dire fam adjustments. Maybe I should just cocoon-wrap you right now and get to it, if I only had some string. Talk to my Daddy! That’s a direct order!”

Did men who had been bonded in slavery go mad when they were given impossible orders? It amazed him how his mind was motivating itself to the pursuit of Petunia’s hopeless problem. “Let’s do a weakness analysis of the isolated fam; you handle the technical aspects, I’ll be in charge of the math.”

“I’m already building a machine,” she said ominously.

Eron could well believe that this Scogil had been his tutor; the mathematical reference algorithms of this new fam were identical with those which had been installed in Eron’s architecturally very different Faraway fam: convenient in that he didn’t have to learn how to use them—but very mysterious. It might make an interesting common ground between two totally unmatched personae.

A fam was designed as an intelligent but subservient helper. The initiative lay with the organic brain which had millions of centuries of evolution behind its behavior, initiative being critical to survival. Scogil’s fam would lack initiative, wouldn’t even perceive itself as a separate entity any more than a thumb perceives itself as separate from the eye—but it was designed to assume delegated authority, and so a fam wasn’t passive when working out problems beyond the interest or capacity of its organic companion. The ghoul was that part of the fam which was still carrying out the duties assigned to it by the previous user. It dreamed and schemed, trying to act in its old body’s interest much the same way a man paralyzed from the neck down might try to walk or scratch his head.

An image came to Eron of the ornate hall in which he had taken his zenoli training on Faraway; rows of young men embracing fervently their fad for ancient wisdom, perhaps to reconstruct, in the safety of a cathedral, times when men lived dangerously. Zenoli was all about fam-mind integration. Surely some of that was applicable now. Long after Petunia had gone to sleep he lay in the dark, deep in meditation, recalling what he could of this arcane wisdom, trying to reconstruct what he couldn’t. What was useful to him now, what was not?

He kept cycling back to the zenoli way of drawing out a passive opponent. It required absolute mental silence. He wondered if he could still create that state—the positive image of an active organic mind overlaid by a negative image deliberately created and projected by the fain’s tuned probe so that the total would sum to quiescence. Had he attained enough rapport with his new fam to do that? He tried unsuccessfully.

In the morning—which meant the light of Imperialis struggling in through a lightpipe—Petunia brewed him navy tea. “Any progress?”

“No. My mind was too active. Hiranimus may be thinking—but he’s off in a comer muttering to himself and not able to understand anything I’m thinking. He won’t even know that I’m listening.”

“You’re discouraged,” she reproached.

“Sure. I’m trying to get my fam to broadcast a negative thought-field to cancel mine and it wavers. Too much of my stuff gets through. I’ve been zenoli adapted—but the part of the fam I’ve learned to control hasn’t. It’s a long training process. I did it once, so I suppose I can do it again.”

She grinned. “You were jacked to Faraway junk. Daddy and I blank with a built-in utility. No fam training necessary. I told you—we’re the best fam builders in the Galaxy. Brain shut-down is easy. My fam doesn’t have to read a thought to null it. Never learn what you can buy as a built-in resource. I’ll give you the code.” She wiggled her fingers gaily. “But be careful with the wake-up routine you choose—don’t put yourself into a full coma. Or else I’ll have to rescue you!” She finished her tea and stood. “Got to go. Scrounge time. Remember, your brain goes to mush if you’re not here when I get back. I’ll give my Daddy to someone else.”

Eron was stunned at how well the commands worked. Within half an hour he had drifted into a fully quiescent state. He could even blank his visual field with his eyes open. But nothing else happened for hours. Until...

Something filled his dormant intention, like a rabbit sniffing the air when the snake is gone, a dream calling up his resident math utilities without being willed to do so. It was weird to watch the standard routines of his fam set about solving a problem that he hadn’t posed, and even weirder to be part of a tranced mind so inactive that he couldn’t understand what appeared to be elegantly organized logic. The Scogil symbiont was an accomplished mathist, trapped in a dark brig, alone, writing on the walls to keep himself sane— in a dream-code rich with the illusion of meaning that would mean nothing to Eron when he came out of his trance.

Eron stirred himself. All that he retained from the dream was the conviction that Murek Kapor, whoever he had been, was far better at math than his young student had ever realized. He took a torch and wandered through the abandoned ruins pensively, promising himself to be home before Petunia returned. When he came to a section that had been broken off and half-welded shut by the demolition crews, he clambered outside along the side of the catacombed canyon and found a perch. Imperialis was low in the sky, casting purple shadows. Aridia, in crescent, was rising to the east. How fragile Splendid Wisdom seemed among this jumble and open firmament. Evening was only beginning, the sky barely darkened, but already a hundred giant stars were out.

He was mulling over the dream-math that had passed across his mind, unable to question a deaf Hiranimus. Had he only imagined that the doodling contained clear traces of the Founder’s Hand, anachronisms even, yet also full of odd twists of thought and notation? Inspired, he used his increasing control of the fam’s workings to set up a shunt that would record all calls to the math routines while he was in trance, which he would be able to analyze when he came out of trance.

A mathist rides my back! There was joy in the assertion.

Home again, he found a Personal Capsule waiting for him in the receiver. The message read: “I have found you! Irregulars of the Regulation will be discussing your dissertation at the Orelian Masked ball.” He skipped details of location and time. “Important that you be there. I, for one, have questions. You will be needed to interpret your work. Wear a black fur mask, trihomed with red eyes, template 212, Orelian Masks Cat-#234764. I will be the one in blue scales with plumes and an upper jaw sprouting crocodile teeth. Sorry I ran. My name can wait.” Unbelievably included with the message was a template file containing his precious work, set to remain permanent. The rest of the sphere disintegrated.

Eron smiled. The beautiful Frightfulperson. Another piece of the puzzle! He relaxed into a zenoli pleasure trance to relish his luck. Suddenly the alien was there again calling up routines and getting coded answers that were beyond comprehension. He froze, drifting as far as he dared into endless peace. Hours later when he broke from zenoli trance, Petunia was sitting in front of him, legs twined. “Anything?”

“One-way contact.”

“With my Daddy?”

“When I withdraw into zenoli mute-mind he seems to be able to use the utilities. I can’t tap his thinking, but I certainly can watch his call-ups.”

She was excited. “Do you think he can watch your callups?”

“No. Different architecture. His call-ups are supposed to be available to me. But my call-ups are only back-loaded to the fam through my cognition codes. That’s the problem with me being the priority mind.”

She shrugged. “We’ve got to set up two-way comm. Otherwise the conversation will be as futile as broadcast video.” She emitted an unpleasant gloating sound. “I’ve been scrounging something that might work.” She held up a five-node keyin for the right hand. “These are hard to come by on Splendid Wisdom. We use them all the time. You’ve already learned five-finger typing.”

Eron frowned. “He can’t read my fingers; he isn’t connected to the utilities the same way I am—and he can’t see through my eyes no matter what kind of typeface I build for him.”

Petunia grinned. “Yaah, the code. I know. Keep it simple, Mommy always said. Daddy knows the Helmar binary code for the augmented galactic standard alphabet.”

“Augmented alphabet?”

“Helmarians augment everything. It’s a tinkerer’s disease. Now listen. Daddy’s ghoul can read your mind, providing we don’t use normal channels; it’s just your private code that’s boggling him. So we use everyday language. How does he get his input? We use the signal that carries the code and modulate it with a couple of transducers for your skull.” She showed him a handful of circular plates stripped out of a psychic probe and a haywire of chips that looked like a bad hairdo. “Quick and dirty.”

Eron paled. “That’s going to introduce errors into my thinking, maybe bad ones. How am I to carry on a rational conversation while I’m distracted by, say, the odor of colors and the screaming of tortured babies?”

“You’ll survive.” She cocked her head. “If not, I can always scrounge another slave.” She grinned. “But I know what I’m doing. I’ve fooled with this stuff—meaning my school chums and I. It’s better than drugs. We had to stop when Mommy caught us. Don’t worry! Neural networks are wonderful for their error-correcting robustness. You look robust to me. You’ll be okay. It’s Daddy who isn’t going to enjoy this. It is going to sound to him like he is in a metal cage and someone is pounding on it with two iron bars, the bang for one and the crash for zero ”

“Why don’t we try some kind of transduction on the fam directly?” Eron pleaded hopefully.

“And violate its shielding? You want to destroy my Daddy? You’re forgiven. I know you Splendid psychohistorians are tech dummies.”

When they had the device rigged, Eron simply finger-typed a galactic standard message. The haywire then translated so that his mind wogged in Helmarian binary flashes. It was awful. Just typing hello was like being kicked out of a high-flying aerocraft into a supersonic set of turbine blades.

H-e-l-l-o. U-s-e t-h-e m-a-t-h u-t-i-l-i-t-i-e-s t-o r-e-p-l-y. H-e-l-l-o... When he could no longer stand his binary broadcasting, he went into zenoli mute-mind to listen. Calm again, he tried typing the alphabet—blasting his mind with the binary output of Petunia’s device. He listened. He broadcast. He waited. He banged and crashed on the walls of his ghoul’s dungeon. It was during a meal anxiously prepared by

Petunia that the reply came via the symbol generator of the math utilities.

To whom...

Eron, impatient with the slowness of the communication, typed E-r-o-n O-s-a. Suppressing his excitement, he returned to his zenoli calmness.

A pause. The symbol generator began to write across Eron’s visual cortex in a happy yellow typeface: Your benefactor is pleased that his last desperate gesture was of assistance to you. What remains of Hiranimus Scogil is at your service—minus various endearing biological quirks. How much psychohistory does the rebel Eron Osa remember?

Thus began a remarkable conversation between two crippled minds.