Psychohistorical Crisis

52

FINALE, 14,810 GE

TAMIC SMYTHOS:... born 351 Founder’s Era... no childhood record until 366 FE when he was brought to the Splendid Lyceum by his Scav godfather with a self-taught mathematics talent... not an outstanding student... volunteered for the group of fifty martyrs, 374 FE, during the rectorship of... transported to... captured in 377 FE at the end of the Lakganian War during the deception arranged by... escaped massacre of the seven at... sterilized and interned on Zural with the surviving 43 martyrs by the edict of... Tamic Smythos spent his prison years on Zural, where the stars were thin and the hyperships infrequent, reconstructing in secret the Founder’s Prime Radiant as an act of defiance... false death certificate in 386 FE... smuggled off Zural for predictive work by corrupt Chancellor Linus, 386 FE, who sought advantages in owning the only psychohistorian... disappeared... no record until 406 FE when he settled on Horan of the Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift to take up mechanical engineering... In later life he joined (or founded) the colony at... had no children or family or close friends...refused to teach...morbid recluse...His extensive hoard of psychohistorical memorabilia and personal writings, including a diatribe against the organizers of the martyrdom, was only discovered long after his death in a tailor’s warehouse...

—Quick File of Galactic Biographies, 1898th Revised Edition

The eight-chambered apartment that the new Lord and Rector of the Galaxy provided for the house arrest of Osa-Scogil and his Frightfulperson was a paradigm of luxury. In one of those touches of irony that the Admiral loved, it was the ex-residence of First Rank Jars Hanis. As his lieutenant Nejirt Kambu wryly put it, “This was the only prison we could find on short notice that had all the proper security features required to hold recidivist criminals/’

The apartment might well have served as the tomb for a 784th Dynasty Rithian pharaoh, excepting perhaps the improbable dispozoria decorated with a goldsmith’s abstract Foawan birds and equipped with such items as a penis holder and shaker for urination. Every article needed for a comfortable afterlife had been provided, including toy-size artificial servants fit for a pharaoh. Hanis’ private mnemoni-fiers dominated their own special room, the machines paneled in bas-relief scenes depicting marshland reeds and grass done in gold foil and platinum and ceramic alloy, replete with extinct Rithian ducks and herons and geese and pterosaurs and various other flying beasts whose galactic origin Osa-Scogil could not identify. All devices were disconnected from the world of the living.

They were not being allowed either news of, or contact with, the mortal sphere.

Eron cased the mansion room by room for possible escape scenes, even the domed roof of the spiral staircase, while Scogil advised caution and grumbled that their predicament was the price Eron was paying for incomplete planning and let’s not have more of the same. Communication between ghoul and host improved hourly as a mutual mathematical ingenuity invented more efficient protocols. There was no way around using words, but they had managed to up the word rate to a hundred times normal verbal speed. It made heated arguing easier.

With Eron’s help Scogil had learned to see at about the level of a five-month-old child and, keen for more meaning in his images, kept insisting that Eron touch everything he saw and hinting that putting things in his mouth would add to the useful data. With Scogil’s help, Eron’s limited (defammed) vocabulary was being added to at about the rate of ten thousand words per watch.

‘This wall is hollow,” said Eron, after slapping the location where the air-conditioning ducts must be passing through.

Forget it! Well have to con our way out of this one.

Under such conditions of isolation it was a major event when Magda arrived with a porter and a package of Eron’s old possessions which the Admiral had slyly salvaged from the general destruction of Osa’s records during the time of his trial. Included was his carved and inlaid Rithian skull. “Ah, my friend Yorick” He was strongly touched by Hahukum’s thoughtfulness. He's fattening us up for the slaughter was Scogil’s cautionary comment.

“When is the Admiral coming for dinner?”

Magda merely smiled and went off to prepare her best supper. Eron hadn’t seen her since leaving Konn to work with Hanis, and he was saddened to note that she now wore stylish inertial bracelets around her wrists which had the function of actively damping the tremor in her hands. She could no longer play the violin. Probably she would only last a few more years—the victim of a fatalistic Rithian culture that accepted as natural a random assassination lottery for ridding its gene pool of accumulated mutations, believing, perhaps, that it was Destiny’s will to let kind atheists pick up the pieces. The Admiral was, as always, a contradiction.

Otaria, starved for company and news, invited Magda to stay for supper, but she gracefully declined. It was against orders. When they tried to steal tidbits of news from her, she confined herself to small talk. “Will you let me see the rest of your apartment? It’s fabulous.” Then she shook her head. “But it’s too full for me.” When asked again about the Admiral, Magda offered only an incomprehensible Rithian idiom about men who danced with horses. Then she was gone. The Rector’s personal search agent supplied unhelpful translations of her oblique idiom: (1) cavalry, (2) the circus, (3) when horses dance the polka under a blue moon, (4) good time partying by bovine farmhands.

All the while Scogil’s ghoul kept up a worried dialogue about his daughter. Had she safely escaped Splendid Wisdom? What might have gone wrong? Eron didn’t have heart to tell him that she was certainly still here, probably writing and distributing mischief to underground rumor mills claiming inside knowledge of multiple (and mythical) groups of psychohistorians plotting against the government. It had been her idea of what to do in case her father failed to return from the masked ball; Eron had humored her by working out a psychomathematical diffusion estimate for the spread of such colorful stories, showing her the design parameters needed if they were to be passed by word of mouth with a high mutation factor and a ridiculous longevity. He hadn’t known then that Jars Hanis would be arrested in a coup d’etat That by itself would amplify the diffusion rate of such rumors by a factor of ten.

Specialists from the office of Cal Bama came to question, but these polite interrogators pressed no topic the two did not wish to pursue. In counterpoint Nejirt Kambu arrived late in every third or sixth watch but did not question. He always began his visit by offered Konn’s apology for not making an appearance due to the press of “political events.” Philosophical probing seemed to be Kambu’s main pursuit He was witty, if conservative, and Otaria took pleasure in needling him. Eron was frustrated by their discussions. Nejirt was one of these men of great integrity who believed firmly in his duty as a member of the elite to give good government but a blockhead on the subject of the right of vassals of the Empire to negotiate their own future. He genuinely believed that a man untrained in psychohistory was a danger to himself and needed benevolent guidance h la Galileo.

These debates left no doubt that Nejirt Kambu was a brilliant Pscholar of the breed who knew how to modify futures to fit a plan. When on the theme of directed change, he lost his conservative veneer and became a wild player who had mastered all the tricks of discreet historical manipulation. It was also obvious that he had been shaken by the appearance of astrological galactaria with a seventh layer that contained an unauthorized compendium of the Founder’s lifework. At one point he tried to draw out Scogil’s comment by mentioning that a task force, escorted by the navy, had been sent to investigate the Coron’s Wisp Pentad.

It does not matter, Scogil briefed Eron. The Eggs with the final Predictor's seventh level are not being released in the Wisp and are not being manufactured there. There are no plans to upgrade the Coronesefrom astrologer to psychohistorian. They are being used only as an astrological infection vector. Others of the Oversee are in charge of elevating talented members of the target population to advanced status. Konn’s task force will find in the Wisp only astrologers. Scogil was a game player with psychohistory as the rule book and futures as the winnings.

Even though Eron had reworked predictive mathematics to eliminate its main contradiction, he had been brought up within a worldview where psychohistory meant a single benign future determined by a single monolithic organization, i.e., history from the Founder’s necessarily Imperial point of view. A trap. He was becoming very fond of Scogil’s mind as well as exasperated by his angry ghoul. He remembered his tutor as a mellower man, almost too mellow. Perhaps the old Murek had achieved that mellowness only by burying his anger in his fam.

Otaria balanced the three male views of Osa-Scogil and Kambu with a lighter touch more interested in the inner energy that motivated mortal man over the vast span of galaxies and time. She knew her history. When she judged one of Eron’s moral monologs to be pretentious she offered a funny historical anecdote to blunt his sharpness. Scogil she teased because she had known him as a man. And for every point that Nejirt made, she had a mischievous counterexample, delighting in being contrary.

Nejirt threw her only once. Without disputing a particularly cutting barb, he brought out a black card. “May I contradict you with a simple gift?”

She took the card with a puzzled distrust.

“The encryption codes to Hanis’ personal archives.” He read the incredulity in Eron’s face. “No, the Admiral shouldn’t have those in his possession, but then”—he shrugged—“he’s been tracking Hanis for a long time.”

“You can’t be suggesting unlimited access?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I’m not privy to the Admiral’s mind. He wants you to have full recourse to the past.”

“But not the present?”

“The pace of present events would distract you.”

As a result Eron-Hiranimus spent hours rooting about with Otaria in Hanis’ old study. The deposed Rector’s files consisted mainly of annotated pointers to the restricted library of the Pscholars. He was an organizer more than an original thinker. Otaria loved this kind of wallow with the relish of a gossip and a historian who has lucked into a musty store of documents unseen by man for ages. Eron, on the other hand, took the opportunity to roam over the full range of the official future history. As a Seventh Rank student he had worked with only a tiny part of it of which he remembered little. Scogil had a special interest in the plans Hanis had made for certain regions of the Galaxy, his mind almost automatically working up counter-predictions to futures he found disagreeable, some aspects of which he shared with Eron. A program whose inevitable result would be the hybridizing of Helmarian culture with it neighbors brought out the most indignation.

The renaissance Jars had intended to impose upon the Empire was awesome in its scope. Eron was reminded of a book he had once seen, a collection of sketches of architectural marvels which had never been built. He felt a stab of sympathy for the old codger—how else could a man of such lofty dreams have reacted to Eron’s dissertation outlining in the clearest mathematical terms why his life’s work was doomed?

With trepidation Eron decided to attempt activation of his own personal student files. In all likelihood they were wiped. They had once resided as a symbiotic subroutine of the Great Galactic Model. Though he had never been of high enough rank himself to revise that vast model, a student was allowed to test modifications from within a walled domain. He couldn’t remember his entrance code, but it seemed that foresight had inserted it as a riddle in the index of his dissertation based on the poetry of Emperor Arum-the-Patient.

Otaria peered over his shoulder. Instead of receiving a notification of erasure, his call triggered a secondary startling security check: “Authority level uncertain. Additional information requested. What city was bombed on the 53rd watch of Parsley, 14,798?”

Konn must have blocked erasure at the time of Eron’s trial! What a strange man!

His befuddled organic brain was going to have to find an answer to that question. Scogil might contain libraries but not that bit of information. Was it “B”? What began with “B”? Recklessly he input the name “Bremen” and—miraculously—opened up access to the currently defined state function of the galactic civilization. He tested. His own tools were still intact. That took a big strain off his brain; he knew he could use his old tools, but he didn’t know if he had enough left of his mind, even with Scogil’s assistance, to recreate them. Immediately he began to demonstrate to his ghoul why the Oversee would fail to achieve their goals. They, too, were using classical mathematics to predict their way through a peculiar psychohistorical crisis for which the mathematics of the Founder did not apply.

He got the same reaction from Scogil as he had first from Konn and then from Hanis. He shrugged; every century had its cardinals.

Eron calculated that it was just about time for the Admiral to make his grand entrance. Keeping the people who were important to him waiting and sweating a little was his style. He wanted to make sure that Eron Osa knew that Konn had power and that Konn chose to exercise his power via a very different mode than had First Rank Jars Hanis. There was to be no relentless bullying, no ultimatum, no conflagration of fams, no draconian solutions. That was the method by which the Admiral got his way.

When the curmudgeon finally came to dinner (on schedule), he appeared in the uniform of Ultimate Sam’s Amazing Air Fangs: gold-braided knee-length bluecoat with the tricorn headpiece of a thirteen-star general. He held under his arm a box of Eron’s favorite biscuits from the commissary near the Lyceum study carrels—as well as a heavy briefcase, which meant a long work session after the wine. It was so like Konn to remember the little details which were much more powerful than logic. Eron smiled and sneaked open the biscuits. Vanilla bunny rabbits with cherry eyes. But he still felt merciless. It was all a serious military campaign to this crusty old Admiral. Konn wasn’t going to enjoy defeat. But he had never, to Eron’s knowledge, burned anybody at the stake for disagreeing with orthodox reasoning.

“Good that you found time to see us, sir.”

“That has to wait! First my bladder urges me to see the facilities. Pissing with Hanis has always been an extraordinary affair.” When the Admiral returned from the dispozoria he picked up the conversation with Eron. “You’ve made an astonishing recovery for a young man shot down in flames without a parachute. For the sake of the rest of us, I was hoping you’d remain in a semicoma for a few more years.” Magda emerged from the dining room. “No fights! It will collapse my souffle.”

“How can I not fight? In dire emergencies, that’s what cunning Admirals do.” He turned to Eron. “Can that thing in your head hear me?”

“He’s still sorting out the babble.”

“Good. Then I can insult him, and you can diplomatically soften my remarks since you’ve been acting more like an ambassador for the heathen enemy than as my humble prisoner of war,” admonished Konn.

“I am an ambassador.” The crazy Admiral always tickled the sass in Eron. “I’ve come here to the Prime Residence of

Splendid Wisdom to accept the surrender of the Second Empire.” Scogil would blanch at that, if he still had a body. It was the kind of cheek that had caused Eron to be thrown out of all of Agander’s best schools, forcing his father to hire a tutor—and, finally, to be defammed and thrown out of Splendid Wisdom’s Lyceum in disgrace.

A startled Konn blinked for a moment before recovering. “Surrender, is it? Unfortunately I’ve not brought my sword.” He grinned and grumbled. “I believe there will be another hundred years of hard war before we get to the point of a surrender. Youth equals impatience.” By war Eron knew he meant psychohistorical corrective action. Though Konn built intricate scale models of the immense First Empire dreadnoughts of the old Grand Fleet, to win battles he never ordered into combat even the lightest of the Second Empire’s hypercruisers. He wielded more power than any First Empire admiral could have hoped to amass. And now, as Rector, he also commanded all of Hanis’ legions.

“You’re planning a hundred years of war?” In Rithian history the Hundred Year War was the name for that awful period of seesaw conflict where every death or assassination of a nobleman gave rise to a claim on his land by various distant relatives who had at their disposal an army willing to travel and loot. Female generals were burned at the stake when captured. “You’ll lose that way,” said Eron. “Sometimes it is better to begin polite talks a century before a major defeat. But you have to be able to see that far.”

Konn appraised Eron’s face. “You’re serious. You would actually negotiate with renegade psychohistorians! You know the equations! There has to be a central predictor. All else is chaos. Civilization will collapse.”

“Only when your strategy is governed by inferior mathematics,” rejoined Eron.

“Ha! Irresponsible youth! Arrogant! Driving without an autopilot! Sniffing the vacuum because papa said it was dangerous!” The Admiral reached into his briefcase and pulled out a heavy volume, printed on cellomet with a utility cover that was an active index, which he then slammed on the table. “I suppose you mean this! Your dissertation! Copies of it are appearing everywhere, not so erasable as virtual copies in the archives. I’ve scanned it. Studied it even. Slick math. You’ve cleaned up your sleight-of-hand since I last saw your act until you now look like a genuine magician, but it is still fraudulent deception! You pull an endless handkerchief out of your nose claiming you have a solution to all of mankind’s problems.” He turned to Otaria in her floating re-cliner. “You’ve thrown in with a mind-crippled madman!” He turned back to Eron. “I’ll have you on the rack till you’re a skinny giant! I’ll squeeze what I want out of that homunculus on your back!” He sat down and ate a bunny biscuit. “Eron, my son, be serious. You know that fighting a hundred years down the line—and winning—is something we do all the time.”

“Against a hidden enemy who ripostes with his own psy-chohistorical ploys?” countered Eron.

“That’s why we have to interrogate this Scogil of yours. He’s the first enemy psychohistorian we’ve ever captured. You promised to cooperate.” His voice became quietly ominous. “Have you changed your mind?”

“No. What better way to interrogate him than to play a psychohistorical war game? Your confrères have long been the Galaxy’s special experts on deviations from the Fellowship’s planned future history. A modem Inquisition. Osa-Scogil hereby challenges you and your whole staff to a hundred year war game. You can’t win, sir.” Scogil was vigorously protesting this speech at his highest rate of word composition.

The Admiral brought his tricorn to his lap out of respect for the future dead. “I do believe Hanis did succeed in taking away your mind.”

“Scogil thinks so, too, but he’s stuck with me. And I’m stuck with you. Recall that I was valiantly attempting to avoid you when apprehended. You accept my challenge then? What you get out of it is to see Scogil in action.”

“And you think you and your homunculus and your paramour are a match for my whole staff?” Konn had weakened His voice and his expression said that he was willing to accept the challenge. But he was incredulous. “/ couldn’t get along with a staff of three.”

“Great. So you intend to play fair? Assign me thirty of your best Lyceum students and I’ll train them up in my methods. If I’m remembering correctly, I’m sure you can find thirty students willing to take a crack at the Admiral!”

Konn was beginning to be intrigued by Eron’s boldness. “Your criteria of victory?”

“The immutable laws of psychohistory.” Eron dead-panned the cliche.

“You young scupper rat! I’ve been applying the laws of psychohistory successfully since before you were bom!”

“No,” said Eron, enjoying himself. “You’ve been using blasters and neutron grenades against bows and arrows, exotic math against the ignorant masses. Your army doesn’t have to know much strategy. Remember, your army is the one which executes the fam of any man who is willing to sell blasters to the warriors with the bows and arrows. Now I have to take off a few inamins to consult with Hiranimus. You’ll excuse me.” He left the room muttering and gesturing wildly to himself.

Otaria shifted herself to Eron’s seat. “He’s an unusual man.”

Konn grumbled. “He was always like that, even when he was sane. Totally impossible. Best copilot I ever had, but impossible. I thought a new fam might rattle his bones a bit. He actually talks to the ghoul of this Scogil?”

“To me it looks like he’s talking to himself. It’s a ponderous chat they share.”

“Do you think what remains of Scogil can actually play at psychohistory? Is this proposal of Osa for real?”

Otaria looked at her long hands wistfully. “Eron thinks highly of the abilities of Scogil’s ghoul, more so than the ghoul does of himself. I don’t know. The ghost seems to be missing much of Scogil’s judgment and fire—I knew him before he was killed—but I don’t talk to him directly. Have you ever met an engineer turned salesman of a technical product line? Do you really think you’ve caught a major psychohistorian? Scogil was a salesman! That’s what he did best. He knew more about my organization, the one you raided, than I did myself—because he was selling to it. You think you got us all.” There was malice in her voice. “I even thought, for a while, that you did have us all!” She smiled and said no more, and Konn knew he would get no more short of torture.

“Sorry about the accident with Hyperlord Jama.”

“Your clumsy people seem to be accident prone. He was crazy as a coot—but there were times when I loved him. He would have been furious about the blood on his lace—which you may not be able to wash away so easily.”

Konn brought out a jade ovoid as a gesture of reconciliation. “He would have wanted you to have this.” He handed the Egg to Otaria. “We’ve seized forty of them already.”

Otaria fumbled with the ovoid. Stars burst forth that melted into charts, the sky of Imperialis.

“How do you do that?”

“You still can’t play it? Would you like your fortune read?” Glibly she made up his fortune on the spot. “Compromise with your enemies before stubbornness brings you disaster. That’s your reading for the present position of the stars.”

Konn leaned over, fascinated. “I’ve seen Nejirt do something similar. But it was what Cingal Svene did with it that chilled my old bones.”

She ignored him. “I recently asked Hiranimus, through Eron, why he hid behind astrology. He said it was a simple way of giving people permission to hope that they can control their lives. You Pscholars have destroyed our willingness to predict and to choose which of our predicted futures we want to live. We have become fatalists. You choose for us!”

“We run good government. Our methodology doesn’t speak to individuals,” he admonished.

“If either of those statements were true,” she flared, “I wouldn’t be here in your comfortable prison and you wouldn’t be the illegitimate Rector of the Galaxy!”

“And when the astrology doesn’t work?”

“What’s then to stop a failed astrologer from moving on to psychohistory? You? With your secret hoard of knowledge in your guarded Lyceum archives?”

Magda called them to dinner. She was always a calming influence. Osa-Scogil arrived at the table in a good mood, seeming to have settled his internal dissension. There were no further discussions of politics or psychohistory. Magda’s rule.

Later, over sips of Armazin in the study suite, the Admiral confided in Eron the real reason for his visit. “Hanis goes on trial on the 38th watch of Salt. That’s a bit early, too soon to get all of the evidence together properly, a bit of a kangaroo court, but the hard-core Hanis faction is beginning to react and reorganize, and I can’t afford that. Press the attack while the enemy is in disarray. From the view up here at the top I can see that I have nowhere to go but down, fast. I must dispose of Hanis quickly. I need you as my prime witness.” “Oh?”

The Admiral thumped Eron’s dissertation. “The charge is treason. As good as any other trumped-up charge. He has been willfully—and for personal gain—suppressing from his colleagues all knowledge of a coming psychohistorical crisis. That’s as deadly a sin as we can scrape up from the bottom of the bin. You are to testify that you warned him.” “I think he panicked,” said Eron.

To that the Admiral replied with spoofing humor. “You take pride in yourself as an alarming scarecrow, do you, straw brains and all?” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. No one will believe he panicked. Hanis is seen to be a charming man with a calculated purpose behind his every action. All you have to do is testify that when you warned him of crisis, his response was to erase the messenger. We have the proof.” He thumped the thesis again. “And Hyperlord Jama’s group is in irons. We’ve had to manufacture evidence that Hanis knew about them. Since I’m making the rules, I don’t have to be fair. And we have this.” He produced another Coron’s Egg from his bluecoat. “Every juror will be taken to a secret room to see the Founder’s equations scrolling across the heavens. That will make them shit in their pants, like I did in mine. Then we tell them that a million such Eggs have already been scattered to Star’s End. After which they can complete their evacuation by pissing in their pants, like I did in mine. What do you say? I’m calculating here. I suspect that you don’t harbor any love for Hanis but—more than that—you want an audience for your thesis. I’ll give you a roomful of audience. I want to nail Hanis in the upside-down position, Roman style. An old grudge. You pass me the nails. Is it a deal?”

“You’ll back me up? You’ll say there’s a real crisis?”

“Of course.”

“So you’ve finally come to believe what I’ve written?” This time the Admiral banged on the dissertation angrily. “That? Are you asking me to sign my name to the bottom of that rubbish paper of yours? It is utter nonsense. I told you that years ago. But if it helps me to cut Hanis’ throat, I’ll swear the situation is ten times worse than you say it is and with candles on top—while my fingers are crossed.”

“You want me to lie to a court of law?” Eron’s sense of moral outrage was growing.

“No, no. You won’t be lying. You believe every word you’ve written. I want your sincerity to shine through in the courtroom. I want tears in their eyes when they hear your story. I’ll be the one who is lying to save my skin.”

“What will you do with Hanis if he is convicted?”

“Boil him in oil. But I think you’ve earned first priority on that. What would you do with him?”

“He has interesting dreams. I remember being caught up in his dreams. He won’t give them up easily.”

“Tell that to your fam.” The Admiral touched his own; had Hanis’ methods scared him to act?

Eron had a suggestion. “Ship him off to a distant cluster he has picked out as one of his renaissance foci. He could teach the laymen there psychohistory and if they liked his dream they’d then have the power to make it real without asking permission of Splendid Wisdom—and Hanis could die happy.”

“Have you lost your fam? Teach laymen psychohistory? Never. You know the equations for that scene. I’d rather boil Hanis in oil! Have some more Armazin.” He took Osa-Scogil’s delicate goblet and poured a refill. “Well. Are you going to testify? We have to make a deal right now. I won’t force you. I can forge fake witnesses if I have to.”

Eron stared at the blue light dancing over the etched scene on his goblet while he twisted it in his fingers, conversing in silence with Scogil. A thousand mock battles played themselves out in the goblet’s shimmering while the argument raged between man and ghoul, ending finally in accord. “We agree to testify—if afterward we get to play two versions of this hundred-year simulated war, the initial conditions those of the Galaxy as they stand today as determined by the Fellowship—but some of the initial conditions, by necessity, must be arbitrary, since we have already crossed the topo-zone and psychohistory will be unable to predict when and where the Eggs are first used. We can roll dice on that, so to speak. The first war is to be governed by the Founder’s classical rules, the second war by my Arekean modifications.” “The first is enough. A future viewed by your strange rules is a fantasy spun by a youthful dreamer of the impossible.” “I must insist on both simulations. It is necessary that these two possible futures be contrasted.”

“The flaws in your method will be exposed.”

“All the better. I must have your word of honor.”

“Two wars then. Conceded.”

“As well, Scogil would like to point out that, since he is not a command center and never was, errors will be introduced.” The Admiral was grumbling. “Error resolution can drag out the calculations interminably. May I suggest that each simulated year be limited to three or four watches? That should give us acceptable accuracy. At the end of that time we assume the outcomes with the highest probability and move on to the next year. If a hundred-year war were to last more than three or four months, my patience would be tried.”

Eron nodded. “Scogil has asked me to remind you that in an enterprise of this complexity, we will need at least thirty of your best students as staff for our side if the game is to have any meaning at all. The galactic model handles predictions well, but with the introduction of so many new prediction nodes.. .”

Konn did not let him finish. “Obviously you will need help. Thirty won’t save you. Conceded.” Eron did not mention that this would give him thirty students to train in the Arekean methodology of distributed iteration, thirty more than he had right now. The Admiral smiled, anticipating victory in all galactic theaters as a foregone conclusion of any such “war”—as if his opposition were mere rowdy deckhands to be brought to order by a little fatherly discipline. He called on Magda to bring out another decanter of Armazin. It was a deal.

Eron also smiled softly. There was no way he could tell the Admiral what a predicament he faced. Hahukum Konn was brazen enough to think that he was a superior strategist even against an army of amateur psychohistorians. That was true. At present, the main tactic of Scogil’s mysterious people was to pump, from as many spigots as they could, the technical literature of psychohistory. That wasn’t enough. Neither Scogil nor the Admiral understood the long-term implications. The Founder had understood. Which was why he so adamantly insisted on secrecy.

The trial of die ex-Rector went slowly. The Admiral used it adroitly to induce the supporters of Jars Hanis to attack where the Admiral was strongest. Being accustomed to following a martinet, and now deprived of that leadership, they fell into disagreeing factions. Konn’s smaller coterie decimated each faction, one at a time, counter-predicting their every move. In the old Imperial Navy, Hahukum would have risen to legendary status.

In the meantime, while the Admiral was occupied with his own personal vendetta, Eron prepared for the decisive event. He picked his thirty warriors from among the younger students who were most intrigued by the challenge of psychohistorian versus psychohistorian, prediction versus counter-prediction. Testifying at the trial had been an interesting place to spread the seeds of heresy, but the soil was poor. His thirty students were a different matter. In training them, he relied on Scogil’s expertise as a tutor, giving them small conflicts to manage in which two sides, both wielding classical tools, converged to stalemate. Then Eron would join the team and show them how to use Arekean iteration to resolve the stalemate. He was only a step ahead of his students, since he was having to relearn his own methods as he went along as well as teach them to Scogil.

The First Hundred Year War began only when the Admiral was ready to give it his full attention—after First Rank Jars Hanis had been tried, found guilty by his peers (carefully picked by Hahukum), and sentenced. Eron knew the time had come when he saw the Admiral’s beatific grin.

“What have you done with him?” Meaning the ex-Rector.

“Not what I wanted. I had to make deals. That’s politics. No boiling in oil. Execution would have created lingering problems. And much as I would have enjoyed it, shredding his fam was not an option; it is one of the unwritten rules of psychohistory that you do not do to an enemy what he has so heinously done to you. Bad form. You have to think of something worse.”

Anything could be expected from a man who would willingly defossilize a Flying Fortress and pilot it. “Is that wise?” asked Eron cautiously.

“Wisdom is for old men. I’m still young at heart! First we start with solitary confinement. For a social gadfly like Hanis, that’s a good beginning. I’ve found an unused lab in which the life-support system for the Andromeda expedition was designed, with its entertainment module already stripped out—but the bare facilities lack in imagination. Anything so grim would drive Hanis to such despair that he would wither away and die. We don’t want that to happen to our enemy. To prolong the torture, one has to provide hope where there is no hope. I have discovered an exemplary way of giving Hanis hope. Hence my good mood.” It was not the Admiral’s way to finish a story while he had an attentive audience. He enjoyed winning battles and prolonging his victory; he merely grinned and changed the subject. He was ready for the next big battle and eager to start. “So, Lord General Osa-Scogil, are your troops well trained and their boots polished?”

“As much as a ragtag army of volunteers can be.”

“Good. How do we begin this silly gentleman’s war of yours? Do we cut the Deck of Fate and high card gets to shoot first, or what?”

Opening positions were strategically important, so they spent several watches haggling over initial conditions. Both sides agreed that realism was important, but they didn’t always agree on what was real. The Admiral was to begin with control of the entire bureaucracy of the Second Empire. That was a given. But who was receiving the Eggs? Who could use them? Where were they coming from? Scogil wouldn’t have told if he had known, and the Admiral understood and accepted that constraint.

It was a matter of estimating probabilities, and from those probabilities allocating resources and attributes. The teams didn’t always concur. Eron insisted that there were more insects in the woodwork than the Admiral wanted to acknowledge or were known to Scogil, estimating that there were at least seven hundred independent precritical psychohistorical nodes about to emerge, all of which would go critical very quickly once they learned about (and found a source of) Coron’s Eggs. Scogil didn’t believe his mate, but the Admiral had been sobered by Eron’s prediction of a psychohistorical crisis that hadn’t even shown up on the Standard Model—and thus was willing to concede the point. The Hundred Year War began quietly as these things do, its basic strategies evident from the beginning.

As the defender of the Second Empire, the Admiral was concerned with the total control of the Galaxy, the balanced and fair-minded control of a long tradition. Trade was regu-

lated so that one region didn’t grow wealthy at the expense of another. Of thirty million inhabited systems, only seven were undergoing population crisis. Only three systems showed signs of a political crisis that might escalate out of hand within the century. Culture and cultural exchange were thriving. Galactic standards were regulated in a way that encouraged commerce. The scene was nothing like the desperate affair that the Founder had inherited while he was inventing psychohistory.

The countervailing strategy emerged as different nodes began to develop their own centers of psychohistoric expertise. Local regions began to optimize their own futures with less and less regard for their neighbors. The level of conflict rose, most of it unintentional. What was very good for one star system might not be so good for the next. To compete, the less endowed systems made stronger alliances than normal with Splendid Wisdom or began to aggressively develop their own ability to counter-predict their neighbors.

The Admiral’s staff valiantly tried to rebalance the Empire but normal corrective measures became less and less effective. Some systems acquiesced for the good of all, others counter-predicted the corrections on the theory that their psychohistorians could do a better job. The Admiral tried to bring all psychohistorians into the fold of the Fellowship— and failed. He tried to build alliances with the emerging states with only spotty success.

The disintegration of the Fellowship’s monopoly brought swifter change than anyone had supposed possible. Osa-Scogil wasn’t at all sure of how the Admiral was taking the grinding down of all that he believed in and began to worry when he received a disturbing but cautiously worded message from his mother (Eron’s). She was quietly alarmed by an investigative team which had arrived on Agander and was methodically digging into Eron’s first twelve years.

It took less than three months and only eighty-two simulated years on the most powerful historical computer in existence to predict a total alteration in the political face of the Galaxy. Over five hundred simulated interstellar wars, major and minor, were raging, confined only by the constraints of psychohistory. Arms production was up by three orders of magnitude. Eight billion youths were being drafted every year to study psychohistory in an effort by each faction to outmaneuver die others. Psychohistory had not become irrelevant; it was essential to the multitude of war efforts. Accurate prediction in conflict situations was just more difficult. There were 112 major centers of psychohistoric prediction and thousands of minor ones. The formidable stability of the Second Galactic Empire had long been reduced to shambles.

At this advanced stage of the game the criminal conspirators of the Regulation were no longer under house arrest by a stunned Konn. Hanis’ old apartment was an open command center. Admiral Konn had assigned ten of his aides to work liaison with Osa-Scogil’s group. It made no sense anymore to break the game into a contest between two opponents—Konn’s staff, Eron, Scogil, Otaria all had to work together just to keep track of what was going on as the math churned out the changing constraints.

Petunia had been picked up by Bama’s men and had been co-opted by a relieved Scogil to act as Osa-Scogil’s chief of staff and general gopher to beef up their undermanned group. She ran reconnaissance into enemy territory and flirted with their resolute rivals. Otaria of the Calmer Sea frantically plotted historical trends. Hiranimus worked overtime in his dungeon at full capacity. Eron, amazed by his ghoul, was now fully cognizant of why the living Scogil had made such heroic efforts to keep his fam out of enemy hands—its psychohistorical utilities alone were the equivalent of the brain power of ten men like the Founder.

On the eighty-seventh simulated year Splendid Wisdom was sacked (virtually) by a vengeful alliance of enemies. Admiral Konn, ever the dramatist, brought a real sword, a genuine fake he had picked up on Rith, for the surrender ceremony.

And his exhausted staff, which had grown over the campaign to include almost every available student of the Lyceum not working for Osa-Scogil, broke apart. With Splendid Wisdom sacked no one had the courage or wit or energy to continue. It was generally understood that errors had accumulated to the point where the game could only be describing a low-probability, if sobering, future.

Instead of continuing the simulation to the hundredth year as originally planned, a spontaneous party began to happen in Konn’s main command center overlooking the simulacrum of the Galaxy, now half washed in blue. Desks were overturned. Decorations festooned the equipment. Dignified Pscholars could be found asleep on the floor. Others yelled and rioted and threw hard bread rolls in mock warfare. The Lyceum became, for a span of watches, a genteel madhouse, the final fling at life of a doomed bunker just before the enemy troops break through. With his game, Eron had pushed the whole Lyceum across the no-man’s-land of the mental topozones that represented familiar reality and into the chaotic neural activity of strange viewpoints and impossible stimuli. The results were so unsettling that no one involved had to be on drugs to behave outlandishly.

What were the lessons of the surprising mathematical collapse of the Second Empire? The outcome was debated everywhere in an orgy of learning. The unexpected nature of the game had agitated the mind of each participant: to reject the collapse as “unreal” was to reject the underlying mathematics, but the rejection of the underlying mathematics was a rejection of the foundation stone of the Second Empire which...

Osa-Scogil slipped among the groups, listening, dropping hints. He knew what had happened. He wanted his “students” to figure it out for themselves.

Hadn’t the Pscholars persisted in tht fatalistic mind-set of the final hopeless centuries of the First Empire in spite of the fact that the math of psychohistory contained a plethora of alternate futures? Over the millennial Interregnum, hadn’t their Plan atrophied into a kind of supervised determinism? Wasn’t it true that the Plan was no longer seen as a vigorous alternate future that led away from the chaos of Imperial collapse but as the only true future—with the Fellowship as its guardian?

A casual remark by Eron about Scogil’s Smythosian connection immoderately grew into a quicky discussion. This ad hoc seminar already knew how groups like the Smythosians could destroy the Second Empire with only a millionth of the Second Empire’s resources at their command. But no one knew who they were or where they had come from or why the Egg hadn’t been predicted.

Scogil, through Eron, would say nothing about his home-worlds or his education, but he didn’t mind telling the story of Tamic Smythos, who had, after all, been trained at the Lyceum when it was a besieged fortress set in the shambled chaos of what was now called the “First” Sack.

Nothing was known of the life and wanderings of Smythos for the twenty years between his escape from Zural and his appearance on Horan, not even the secret work he did for Faraway’s Chancellor Linus. On Horan Smythos took up mechanical engineering, then fell into an invisible life as a self-imposed recluse, appearing in public only to earn money, spending most of his time alone writing long rambling documents for his own edification, rants, philosophical musings, incomplete psychomathematical treatments of odd problems, all stuffed in boxes when he lost interest or found a new interest. He died a recluse. His boxes, in storage, remained unread. The warehouse changed hands. A foreman, in charge of cleaning out the warehouse... As a late product of the chaos surrounding the False Revival, an amorphous cult grew up very gradually in the region of the Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift around these astonishing relics of the embittered Tamic Smythos. Among the papers, developed in detail, were some of the seed ideas of psychohistory.

Scogil related the tale as cautionary advice to anyone who was thinking of building his destiny upon a foundation of secrecy. Secrets have a way of slipping through the finest mesh. (But Scogil kept his own secret; he told no one how the Helmarian Oversee had stumbled upon a Smythosian cell and what they did with what they found.)

When the lessons of the game were well on their way to assimilation within the Lyceum, Eron Osa gave his first speech to a quiet audience, his theme the failures of the Pscholars and the failures of groups like the Smythosians.

The Pscholars had failed from too much power. They had ceased to mine psychohistory for low-probability futures worth exploring. The Plan was, after all, a low-probability future discovered by the Founder. As an elite they had deliberately failed to explore the high probability that they would not be able to hold on to their monopoly of psychohistoric expertise. It was that decision which had produced the present crisis.

Worse, they had neglected psychohistory as a tool to explore undesirable futures (such as the high probability that Splendid Wisdom would be resacked within the century). Back some time in the Interregnum, psychohistorians had forgotten that one of the main uses of prediction was to position the savant to falsify the prediction. They had used their power only to avoid deviations from the Plan. Mankind’s brain had evolved as a tool to predict undesirable futures in time to avoid them, not to predict highly probable futures that needed no intervention.

Other emerging groups—like the Smythosians, like the Regulation—had fallen into the trap of opposition. For centuries they remained small, content to oppose the Fellowship locally in invisible ways, afraid to operate in the open because of the Pscholars’ known fiercely guarded monopoly. The more they tested the Plan, the more the Fellowship reacted—until the Lyceum had evolved a whole unit whose sole purpose was to oppose the actions of the diffuse Counter-Fellowships—the survivors being those groups who were best at counterevolving a secret mathematics of prediction of their own, and, inured to the role of opposition, eventually were driven to use their ultimate weapon against the Second Empire. The Pscholars had no defense against a populace who could now visit their local archive and find all they might want to know about psychohistory. Long before the present crisis, the goal had become the destruction of the Pscholar’s power rather than the implementation of a more flexible Plan.

In his rounds and talks Eron was preparing the ground for the Second Hundred Year War in which he intended to teach the Lyceum a second lesson. He already had thirty students pretrained in his Arekean methodology, tools he had deliberately withheld from use in the First War, a purely classical event. During the Second Hundred Year War he hoped to sweep the entire simulated Galaxy; he could envisage no defense against a mathematics able to force conflict resolution. Arekean iteration did not contain within itself a lethal vulnerability like the need for secrecy built so integrally into the classical mathematics of the Founder. Even Scogil should be impressed enough to make his final break with the Oversee, and then...

The Osa-Scogil being was evolving. The mere fact that ghoul and man had developed a language contact seemed to have catalyzed a process in which they were beginning to develop shared coding at a more machine-language level. The ghoul would eventually see through Eron’s eyes, and Eron would feel the emotions of Hiranimus, perhaps already doing so if loyalty to a family back in the Thousand Suns meant anything: when he was reunited with his wife(?), he was going to demand that she deactivate that damned tuned compulsion to love and protect Petunia. Their daughter(?) was reaching the age when girls resent being overprotected.

The extended party was winding down. There was less revelry, less debate, and, more important, less hysteria. People were still asleep in chairs and zonked out in comers against the wall, or quietly chatting in groups of two. Some had even retreated to their own beds. Eron was too exhausted for that; he commandeered an empty divan and went to sleep.

And that was where the Admiral found Eron hours later, hidden away and asleep. He made enough space for himself to sit down where Eron’s knees had been and shook his prodigy until he saw an open eye. “How can you sleep with your Second Hundred Year War coming up so close on the heels of the First?”

“Aren’t you glad we can set the clock back eighty-seven years?” said Eron sleepily.

“No. I’ve lost my enthusiasm. I’m too old for this game. I’m more comfortable living peacefully in real time with my dog. Are you really serious about this second war? Can’t I just buy you out? Another three months of this nonsense?”

“A contract is a contract. War it is. I don’t want to have to slap your face with my glove. The Reformation isn’t over yet.”

“I’ll have to bring Hanis in to help me. I need his brains.”

“Inquisitor Hanis? You’re not serious?” Eron sat upright, then rose to his full height.

“I might be.”

“You never told me where you sequestered him.”

“I did. He’s toughing it out in an old experimental life-support module, all alone.”

“Mitigating his torture with hope?” Eron was still curious. Enough time had passed for the Admiral to relent and relieve the suspense. “Come on. Tell us! What kind of hope did you devise?”

The mood of the Rector of the Galaxy rose to good cheer again, remembering his last and greatest victory. “I promised him a parole hearing once he finishes, to my satisfaction, a penitence task I have assigned him. It’s a life sentence, a Sisyphus sort of task; once he gets the rock to the top of the hill, I’ve promised to review his case and maybe grant him freedom.”

“And the rock?” asked Eron impatiently.

“Oh, that. I’ve set him to writing your biography. He raged at first, refusing. But hope has a way of seducing the soul. He hopes to finish your biography soon, but he’s never been my student and isn’t aware that I constantly raise my standards of excellence to ever more impossible heights.”

“Writing about me is his penitence?”

“Writing up your childhood is the easy part. I keep supplying him with new material; Agander seems to be a place addicted to the creation of poetic myths, and your childhood seems to have achieved mythical status. You’re going to be surprised at all the things you did as a boy that you’ve forgotten about. As I said, that’s the easy part. The torture part is studying your dissertation, your Early Disturbed Event Location by Forced Arekean Canonical Pre-posturing” The Admiral, for the moment, had become his old teasing self.

“I thought my dissertation was elegandy beautiful, a masterpiece of clarity.”

“Eron, I’ve tried to read it. I can’t get through it. I assure you it qualifies as the worst sort of torture! So I’ve assigned Hanis the task of rewriting it until it is crystal clear to an old fossilized man like me who is probably getting older faster than Hanis can improve his style.” The Admiral was now smiling diabolically. “Hope for Hanis rests on his ability to understand you, a sufficiendy Sisyphean task since he did do his best to destroy all records of your existence short of burning you at the stake.”

“So when can we start our next war?”

The Admiral lay down on the now-empty divan and invited Eron to sit on the cushion above his head. Uniform rumpled, his body flopped out in dejection, he confided, “Eron, I don’t think I can go through another war like the last one. It’s too much. First you present me with a galactic psychohistorical crisis that arrives unexpectedly like a spaceship out of a black hole. Then some damn Protestant steals the Founder’s Bible from my burglarproof safe and invents the printing press. Theory says all that can’t happen, but it did—and so the theory is wrong in that aspect I tried to adapt. I thought I could handle your little war with strategy. My mature math is better than your inexperienced math. It didn’t work. I might as well have tried walking on the sun in my bare feet. So here we are. I have awakened from a bad dream, a nightmare that never happened, surrounded by hysterical revelry. But what lies ahead? Must I live that nightmare in the real world, playing it out again exactly as it happened in the dream but at a painfully slow pace?”

Eron had never seen the Admiral in such a tragic mood. “Predicting is only half of the game; counter-predicting nightmares is the other half. You forget what the Founder said: Psychohistory is all about choosing your future.”

“No it isn’t!” snarled the old man. “Did I choose the Second Sack of Splendid Wisdom? Damn right I didn’t, I fought it off with all the resources I had.” His voice was that of a proud man in chains. “7 wasn't in control of anybody's willy-nilly destiny!"

Normally brain activity flips back and forth across the boundaries twixt stability and chaos in the mind’s ever active war between knowing and the need to learn—this outpost ridge temporarily chaotic, that beachhead stable for the moment, the front flowing in battle flux across the neural net.

On quiet days the mind stays stable by using old solutions. On other days some internal field marshal calls for an offensive and drives his troops against chaos. To conquer chaos one must learn. To maintain stability one must know. The dual struggle can be exhausting.

The Admiral was exhausted mentally, but Eron was sure he could goad him back to life again—in the months to come. He took the old man’s head onto his lap and ran his fingers through hair he had never before dared touch. “Hey, you’ve been a father to me, a strange one, and I ran away from home, but I’m still your copilot and we’re on the way home and we’re going to come in for a smooth landing. Just another hundred years of war to go. We’ll make it. I can see what you’ll be doing five years from now. You won’t believe this, but I’m good at predicting. You’ll be sending out your students to teach psychohistory to the unwashed. Maybe, if Hanis learns his Arekean lessons up to your high standards, you’ll be able to send him out with them. You’ll be the author of a renaissance that Hanis could never dream of. And best of all—you’ll be free from the burden of carrying around a deadly secret.” He wet his finger wiping a tear from the Admiral’s cheek.

“You and your starry-eyed astrological predictions. Son .”

Later Eron’s lover Otaria found them, brought in tow by Scogil’s Petunia. “Is he all right?” Otaria asked.

“He’s asleep.”

Osa-Scogil felt very peculiar about having a wife and a Frightfulperson. And a daughter standing behind him with her arms wrapped affectionately around his neck. And an Admiral’s head in his lap who was also a madman and a father. “Life isn’t very predictable,” he said.

“I know,” replied the Mermaid of the Calmer Sea.