Psychohistorical Crisis

2

IN THE LAIR DFTHE ADMIRAL, 14,790 GE

"Death haunts an Emperor as he grows wise in mind and feeble in body. Haunted he seeks a king/y son out among this starry expanse of suns—where there are no sons "

—Soliloquy of the Emperor Maximoy-the-Polite, from Act 3 of Valodian’s last play, The Twilight of an Emperor. Valodian is credited with reviving the tradition of the Lament as it was perfected in the 98th century GE.

When Eron Osa was twelve years old and the Founder had been dead for more than twenty-seven centuries, “Admiral” Hahukum Konn was already a feisty eighty-three. For decades he had been trolling the ocean of galactic space in search of the Second Empire’s mysterious adversary whose shadow self skulked through his ocean of numbers. This year he had a first nibble, but wasn’t sure the fish (or the flotsam) was still hooked. The Ulmat Constellation seemed to be the first of the anomalous regions to have reacted to one of his discrete probes.

He paced patiently to and fro across the shining floor of “Hahukum’s Bridge” waiting for his then most valuable student to arrive—Nejirt Kambu was brilliant, a possible successor, often late for appointments. But the “Admiral” never waited or paced with an idle mind; now his attention bided the time by focusing itself on the needs of his wounded battleship.

Behind sleeping forcefield spires, the colossal warship brooded in defiance of its terrible dismemberment, a black and skinless superstructure of spars and ribs and breakup-bulkheads—still breathing—as if being stripped, exposed, and flayed had not yet brought defeat, only the readiness to strike out with one last deadly flash at anyone from the stars who dared to attack*

Beyond was the panorama of a mottled planet under siege.

The Horezkor was a major warship of the Middle Empire period, produced in minor quantities, the first one being commissioned in the year 5517 GE. Almost three thousand were built during that century, many serving well beyond normal retirement age.

“The Mad Admiral” had been working with pleasure on this unfinished model of the ancient Imperial dreadnought The Horezkor dominated the ebony hover-space above the bridge’s workshop table. So formidable was this vast war-machine that it cast upon Konn an unreal aura, as if he were a giant placed among the stars. One might hardly notice that both ship and man were embedded in a vast scholarly maze deep inside the Lyceum metropolis where students were apprenticed to the psychohistorians of Splendid Wisdom’s Second Empire, a Lyceum itself embedded in a planetary city that regulated the commerce and life of the Galaxy.

Konn’s imposing title was the awesome one of Second Rank Pscholar in a commanding meritocracy that defined only one higher level. “Second” rankled him, and, from dread of his displeasure, he was more often called “Admiral” than “Second”—even though he had never held a military commission at any time in his long life. Only his enemies called him “Second.” He loved his hobby because it rested him from the deadly game of galactic sleuth. The history of military vehicles was so much simpler than tracking down a coming psychohistorical crisis.

He wore simple naval uniforms—but deliberately chose them from a selection several eons out of date to fend off complaints by backbone-stiff naval regulars who felt in their staid hearts that the impersonation of a naval officer ought to be a capital crime. His skull was shaved in curious planter-rows of tuft and skin-shine, the legendary style of Kambal-the-First whose cabal of renegade ships had first conquered this planet of the central galactic glitter when it had been a minor world of farmers and tradesmen quietly innocent of their strategic location and meritorious climate. The gulfs of space had once been a moat that protected the castle planets of civilization. By Kambal’s time, the central galactic bulge was swarming with shipwise nomadic “barbarians” hungering for a better place to live than the desolate homeworlds settled by their unfortunate ancestors. Kambal was the archetype of an admiral.

After a lifetime of looking, Konn had been able to collect only a few mementos of the Horezkor might of the sixth millennium, notably several precious photos of the war-craft’s immense interior by the warrior-mistress of Emperor Daigin-the-Jaw. The relevant design files for the ship had vanished from naval archives somewhen in the last nine millennia, perhaps destroyed during the Great Sack of Splendid Wisdom in the dark years, perhaps the victim of housecleaning.

But now he had everything he needed for a full reconstruction, It had happened suddenly after years of frustration. To the delight of Hahukum Konn, his protoge, Nejirt, had reported back to Splendid Wisdom from his evaluation assignment in the obscure Ulmat Constellation with a grin on his face and (in his diplomatic pouch) working assembly virtuals evidently used to refurbish at least two of the legendary Horezkor dreadnoughts during the warlord period of the Interregnum. Of course it didn’t really matter if they ever got the model put together or not.

What really mattered, and Hahukum knew it, was the stability of the Second Empire in an era of subtle cultural Complexification which made the old equations work slightly differently than they had in the past. The future was always branching, branching, branching—and there were more branches in this golden age than there had ever been before, some of them dangerous. Hahukum’s thoughts of the past bulkheads—still breathing—as if being stripped, exposed,, and flayed had not yet brought defeat, only the readiness to strike out with one last deadly flash at anyone from the stars who dared to attack.

Beyond was the panorama of a mottled planet under siege.

The Horezkor was a major warship of the Middle Empire period, produced in minor quantities, the first one being commissioned in the year 5517 GE. Almost three thousand were built during that century, many serving well beyond normal retirement age.

“The Mad Admiral” had been working with pleasure on this unfinished model of the ancient Imperial dreadnought. The Horezkor dominated the ebony hover-space above the bridge’s workshop table. ,So formidable was this vast war-machine that it cast upon Konn an unreal aura, as if he were a giant placed among the stars. One might hardly notice that both ship and man were embedded in a vast scholarly maze deep inside the Lyceum metropolis where students were apprenticed to the psychohistorians of Splendid Wisdom’s Second Empire, a Lyceum itself embedded in a planetary city that regulated the commerce and life of the Galaxy.

Konn’s imposing title was the awesome one of Second Rank Pscholar in a commanding meritocracy that defined only one higher level. “Second” rankled him, and, from dread of his displeasure, he was more often called “Admiral” than “Second”—even though he had never held a military commission at any time in his long life. Only his enemies called him “Second.” He loved his hobby because it rested him from the deadly game of galactic sleuth. The history of military vehicles was so much simpler than tracking down a coming psychohistorical crisis.

He wore simple naval uniforms—but deliberately chose them from a selection several eons out of date to fend off complaints by backbone-stiff naval regulars who felt in their staid hearts that the impersonation of a naval officer ought to be a capital crime. His skull was shaved in curious planter-rows of tuft and skin-shine, the legendary style of Kambal-the-First whose cabal of renegade ships had first conquered this planet of the central galactic glitter when it had been a minor world of farmers and tradesmen quietly innocent of their strategic location and meritorious climate. The gulfs of space had once been a moat that protected the castle planets of civilization. By Kambal’s time, the central galactic bulge was swarming with shipwise nomadic “barbarians” hungering for a better place to live than the desolate homeworlds settled by their unfortunate ancestors. Kambal was the archetype of an admiral.

After a lifetime of looking, Konn had been able to collect only a few mementos of the Horezkor might of the sixth millennium, notably several precious photos of the war-craft’s immense interior by the warrior-mistress of Emperor Daigin-the-Jaw. The relevant design files for the ship had vanished from naval archives somewhen in the last nine millennia, perhaps destroyed during the Great Sack of Splendid Wisdom in the dark years, perhaps the victim of housecleaning.

But now he had everything he needed for a full reconstruction. It had happened suddenly after years of frustration. To the delight of Hahukum Konn, his protege, Nejirt, had reported back to Splendid Wisdom from his evaluation assignment in the obscure Ulmat Constellation with a grin on his face and (in his diplomatic pouch) working assembly virtuals evidently used to refurbish at least two of the legendary Horezkor dreadnoughts during the warlord period of the Interregnum. Of course it didn’t really matter if they ever got the model put together or not.

What really mattered, and Hahukum knew it, was the stability of the Second Empire in an era of subtle cultural Complexification which made the old equations work slightly differently than they had in the past. The future was always branching, branching, branching—and there were more branches in this golden age than there had ever been before, some of them dangerous. Hahukum’s thoughts of the past mingled with his thoughts of present concerns. He could trust Nejirt to find for him the plans of an old battleship, but how far could he trust Nejirt to pick those futures for mankind that would keep the soul of the race alive?

There was an unfortunate conservatism in this twenty-five-year-old boy. Rigidity? It was a worry. He always had potatoes with whatever he ate. He listened only to music that had a beat. Not that Konn wasn’t a conservative himself. The trick was in what you conserved. All successful radicals built their careers on a very carefully chosen foundation. The mathematical system of the Founder wasn’t a public info-machine that automatically answered questions it already had on file; psychohistory was an instrument that had to be strummed by a musician.

One had to listen for, and pick out, futures as well as predict them.

A good psychohistorian was as much a composer as he was a seer. Rigid musicians made bad music. Could Nejirt tell the difference between the traditions that actually buttressed the foundations of society and the thousands of trivial traditions, mere baroque decorations? Would he listen to beatless music and hear nonmusic?

While the Admiral worked on his battleship model, his mind played with subversive scenarios of galactic politics. About trouble. About longings for action. It wasn’t enough to be intuitively sensitive to the subtle susurrous of dark hints unnoticed by ordinary ears like those of Jars Hanis. It wasn’t enough to be able to hear the rustle of armed malefactors somewhere out there in the jungle of stars. The kind of impalpable sensitivity that Konn was so proud of in himself was certainly the mark of genius—but, as his enemies were quick to point out, it was also the mark of the superstitious fool and the mark of the wacky paranoid. He needed evidence more confrontable than subversion masquerading in the open as background noise.

Damn it, he needed to be on the bridge of a modem Horzekor fighting an enemy he could get his teeth into.

There was much to be said for sitting at a comfortable desk within a handwave of the most powerful simulators in the Galaxy while statistically filtering the data arriving via Splendid Wisdom's pervasive stellar bureaucracy-—but seeing a villain emerge as an unexpected pattern in false color overlays and slashing such a villain in- the flesh were two different things; in the end there would be no escaping the plunge into that tenebrous galactic maelstrom out there and returning with his culprits on a sling.

But he needed bodies, plots, the location of bases. He needed his hands on an enemy agent who could be questioned at length. He needed loyal soldiers brilliant enough to do his dirty work.

Not easy. Konn had long ago learned that to get results he often had to act without authorization. That made his work more difficult. He had no allies. The others—that grandiose Hanis—were all tramping down the path of greatest probability—the easy way to go that led who knew where, The most probable of futures could suddenly branch into a thousand pathways flying by too swiftly for deliberate mathematical choice. For twenty-seven centuries the psychohistorians had ruled, and they all seemed to think this had earned them an eternal ride.

The whole of the Pscholarly collective adamantly believed there were no mysterious adversaries; they denied Konn’s analysis, unable to believe that the foundation of a crisis was already under construction—shouldn’t the Founder’s mathematics be predicting it?

The Admiral cursed as he attached a part to his model and it fell off. Every generation had to relearn that its map of the universe was only a map, that no map contains all the details. For years, Konn was turning up contradictions that the Founder’s model couldn’t account for-—bizarre tiny effects drowned by the brilliance of the main model of psychohistory. The anomalies were so slim that even Konn had his doubts. Doubt didn’t deter him. To follow the course of rightness one has to be willing to be wrong. Those who were most certain of their rightness had the highest probability of being wrong.

Would he dare deputize Nejirt for an unauthorized and dangerous ferreting mission? That was the question he was mulling at the back of his mind. Damn, but that boy was late. He picked up the fallen part with his microwaldo and repositioned it

The Horezkor warship was an astonishing joy to rebuild. There were distinct advantages to being a powerful psychohistorian with spiderlike access to any part of the governed Galaxy! He could., even without majority consent, send out talented boys, anywhere, to carry out his desires. If he put these boys to serving the interests of his hobby, well, he could always say that he was “giving them valuable research experience.” With alert students like Nejirt pandering shamelessly for him, life lost part of its deadly seriousness, sometimes even becoming amusing. Power was always limited, but earned power was still power. From the very earliest months of his rule-confined youth, deep down in Splendid’s bedrock warrens, Hahukum had known how to use and abuse power without crossing the fatal line of self-destruction.

He admired the half-completed dreadnought smugly. Nejirt had been indispensable. If this youth could be so brilliant at espionage when success didn’t matter, perhaps he was the ferret Konn could trust for the big job.

This ship was such a find! Manipulators inserted a tiny bulkhead hatch. What a story! Dark Age brigands had plundered two colossal Horezkors from an abandoned Imperial Space Museum of an earlier age. The pirates had acted on commission from the warlords of a vanished kingdom called the Thrall of the Mighty. Priceless loot! Such ingenious scavengers, those Interregnum cutthroats! There seemed to be no record of the final fate of the two dreadnoughts—lost in the internecine battles of a violent age—but a third hull, ransacked for spare parts and thereby crippled, stoically rode on display at the Ulmat’s central hyperspace terminal in the Mowist System in the Ulmat, the last remains of a naval memorial to a fearsome emperor.

The model’s savaged bridge was exposed to the depredations of Konn’s tweezers. Piping hung loose as if teased aside by a robosurgeon’s expert scalpel. From the workbench Konn stared at his creation, contemplating his next addition. He sat relaxed in a frozen pose with a cup of mint tea in one hand and a miniature hyperatomic motor in the other, his fingers doodling with its brilliant red and silver surface. The goggles of the microwaldo manipulator perched above his eyebrows. Skintight control gloves for the waldo, yellow, lay flopped across the weapons rigging.

This was the mock-up of a warship so vast that even scaled to the length of two tall men, it had to be toured by miniature camera. Konn was deciding whether a virtual diagram would help him during the next stage of the restoration. Any tri-dim or cutaway or exploded view that he might need could be evoked from the wall emitters by the mnemonifiers.

How could he best use Nejirt Kambu while hiding his purpose from Jars? He put that extraneous thought aside to concentrate on an immediate assembly problem.

Though intended for psychohistorical inquiry, the workshop’s mnemonifiers had been blatantly loaded with arcane files of naval architectonics. It was another misuse of power, but a powerful psychohistorian was allowed his harmless foibles. His interest went as far back into the mists of time as hand could reach, to the confusing ocean, air, and space vessels of the prehyperflight cultures of the Sirius Sector who seemed to have enviously adopted and mixed each other’s histories in order to claim the role as the original forebears of galactic mankind.

When the workshop walls weren’t in use to display the inner guts of eighty millennia of warcraft, they played fanfare to the Admiral’s spirits by championing the deeds and valor of the recent but bygone Empire. Konn enjoyed this chance to exhibit the masterpieces from his hoard of military art. All his life he had been culling through the long tradition of a bureaucracy that had obsessively commissioned panoramic spectacles to glorify the exploits of Imperial Grandeur. Some of it had survived the Sack.

Behind the model Horezkor, to complete the illusion of awesome might, a surround screen radiated with the somber depths of an ancient artist’s vision: larger than life, a Middle Empire fleet—each ship emblazoned with the feared Stars&Ship—was palpably engrossed in its patrol over a pastel planet unruffled by signs of the fury which mankind’s fiercest navy had been able to drop upon it. The artist was a master of the kind of double-meanings that can be slipped past an arrogant Emperor. In his ironic vision, the Imperial Navy had been shrunk down to a mere swarm of insectoids whose annoying bites on the vast world below could be discerned only by a viewer’s most careful scrutiny.

Nejirt arrived late, stepping through the workshop’s airseal shutter, but not uncomfortably late, and Konn showed off the newest details of the miniature dreadnought to his student, without whom the reconstruction would be nowhere. The meeting began with polite conversation. ^{I have the bridge well blocked out and accurately, too, I think—it should even stand up to a zoomscan—but I’m going to have trouble with armament. The Thrall of the Mighty wasn’t able to arm the Horezkors to more than a fifth of normal weaponry, so I have some blanks to fill in. Otherwise I’m in shipyard paradise.”}

Nejirt seemed glad to postpone what he knew was going to turn into an intellectual sparring match of major proportions. He noticed in Konn’s hand the red and silver replica of the ship’s huge hyperatomic motor. “Nice motor. You’re sure of those? The hulk at Mowist that I saw has long been stripped of its motors. They have pretty fakes installed, but ones I wouldn’t trust for authenticity.”

“Ah, but remember that I multisource my data! Look at this!” The larger-than-life panorama of the planetary siege winked out. It was replaced by a virtual training demo from the Middle Empire period. A guild technician’s inspection tour now rolled tridimensionally across the wall, zooming in for close-ups of every possible repair of a bulky hyperfield generator, a behemoth when compared with the elegant designs that had begun to appear during the Interregnum.

Discussing ancient warships wasn’t the real business on the agenda. Hahukum Konn began to search for a way to break off his fan and get on with the serious tasks. He put his tools aside and washed his hands in the sprayer while he continued the irrelevant small talk.

The students of the Lyceum knew him as a queer soul, and he suspected that he was not always liked—they looked askance at the political wars he waged within the Fellowship—-First Rank Jars Hanis was constantly at loggerheads with him—but he had earned his Second Rank status honestly via an uncanny ability to extract significant morsels out of almost noise-level data. His sifting skill with raw input had earned him subtle immunities, and he used immunity to violate custom whenever he damn well felt like it. He knew Nejirt was in awe of him. He was quite willing to exploit that awe.

What to do?

Decisions! He was faced with a promising acolyte who had spent a year knocking about the Ulmat and whose maturity required careful assessment before Jhe could be considered for any more critical assignment. Konn was not a man who trusted, on faith, a student fresh out of the Lyceum’s top institute, not even one who came with the highest recommendations, not even one who brought him delightful gifts—especially not when a henchman of Jars Hanis had been on his examination board. Nejirt was still only a promise in spite of all the formidable course work he had done. It was a delicate matter. There was grilling to be done.

Perhaps he should delay. He could soften Nejirt by inviting him for this evening’s dog hunt through the wilderness tunnels—-but the dogs would be a distraction. There seemed to be no avoiding an arena duel across a stage of high-powered analytical tools.

Konn finished washing his hands only after his meditations had taken the suds all the way up to the elbows. "Glad you came at my call. I’ve famfed your report.” He meant that he had scanned the boy’s report directly into his familiar, bypassing his eyes. “I’ve had time to think about it.” By which he meant that his quantronically sentient fam had done most of the work of assimilating the contents for his dual-brain. “We need to review some points together. I've set up a room for us.”

“Yes, sir”

The young Pscholar followed his older mentor out onto a mezzanine looking down on the Lyceum’s great yard, which was sometimes used for rallies but more often used to stage spectacular displays. Its four-story-tall illusions were controlled by a hundred million computers, awesome when the lights were dimmed and, say, the whole galactic spiral was on display. At the moment, they had no need for that kind of tool. They disappeared down a ramp into the maze of the operations complex, Konn’s territory, his hub, his neuron with its dendritic reach out into the stellar cortex of the civilization of man.

It was a short walk from there to an augmented sanctum off one of the neutral corridors. The two psychohistorians took a moment to tune their fams into a slice of the Lyceum’s main computer mind. Konn called up the relevant reports into a virtual carousel for easy access. “Grab a seat,” he said over his shoulder while selecting the equipment he wanted. Five chairs surrounded a small amphitheater, and the Seventh Rank youth slipped into the nearest. Illumination faded to dark.

The emplacement had the tense feel of a battle station; Hahukum Konn was, himself, fond of fantasizing this tiny arena into the fantasy turret of an imaginary Second Empire warship—one with magical hypersight that could zoom anywhere and weapons whose persuasive range was galactic— but he kept his silly whimsy to himself. He activated the projector. Above the central bowl appeared a holo summary of die Ulmat operation. Either of them had the option of superimposing their comments as a fam-generated overlay.

In die lull that followed the holo bloom, Konn watched Nejirt cautiously analyze what had been done to his numbers. There was a strongly implied criticism of his work buried in Haliahim Komi’s compact summary. The young psychohistorian settled into a solid defensive posture and waited patieciy for Konn to initiate the first sortie. When the Admiral waited him out, the boy spoke, apparently only to break the silence, for his voice was bland, hardly listening to what he was. saying, mind focused on the display, storing up answers for the debate to come. “It was a lively field study you handed me, far more fascinating than any of those stereotypical cases we slaved over in sim.”

“The Ulmat Constellation may be a mere field study to you,” Konn began gently,' “but I see it as a brewing disaster in a kettle. The site needs attention—even attack—now, long before it goes critical. I’ll tell you what’s bothering me. I’m not clear about your inference on the resonant pumping. You don’t seem to take the buildup toward crisis seriously. I’ve seen similar patterns of crisis in many different places. Please explain.”

Konn was referring to the odd psychosocial interactions he had long detected between the Ulmat worlds, deadly pushes and pulls that were feeding on each other and seemed to lead with a high probability to what the Pscholars called a topozone crossing. In layman’s language that meant a region where the time-constant for reliable prediction became short—the Ulmat was moving into prophecy-shadow, a flash of historical turbulence that would temporarily blind psychohistory’s prescient eye.

Nejirt was unperturbed, even amused by Konn’s concern. He spoke politely. “I made extensive use of the Hasef-Im test. The resonance has passed its maximum and has even been decoupled.” He communicated some mathematics directly through fam interchange, all of it too compact and modem for an old hand like Konn to grasp. “Consequently it isn’t liable to recur for centuries. The disturbance seems to have moved into a damped phase.” The tense young Pscholar accented his words by adding dashes of color to the holograph that hovered between them. Irrelevant—but pleasant formatting. Second Raters loved their formatting.

He's trying to snow me, grumbled Konn to himself, wishing that these freshmen would at least attempt to talk less like pendants. The Admiral had never heard of the Hasef-Im test. Another damn thing he was going to have to blot up to keep abreast of these damn kids! He wasn’t rattled; the test was probably one of those arty-smarty things that saved students from boiling their own coffee so that they’d have more time for drinking. More power to them. What he did notice was that Nejirt was wary of him and not willing to talk outside of his orthodox report. Not good. It spoke of a mind unable to explore beyond the safety of preestablished umbilicals.

Konn was blunt. “Damping? It doesn’t look like brakes to me. Maybe, but I’d be damn careful before I believed it. I check and double-check everything that has a bad consequence. I picked up the Ulmat effect ten years ago when no one else saw it. And we only began to apply decoupling efforts three years ago, my shot. I’d prefer to clobber a perturbation that dangerous when its snorkel is just peeking above the noise level, but standard operations call for countermeasures with minimal visibility. I’m outvoted and I agree that’s probably for the best. But here you are seriously suggesting that these gentle countermeasures have been effective already! All we’ve done so far in the Ulmat is start a five-man news group and an aggressive local cut-rate hypertrip service—it should be another decade before we can even measure our tampering!”

“I haven’t claimed that the countermeasures have been effective at all-—-I agree, not enough time—I think the damping is a normal chaos intrusion. The Ulmat perturbation just fizzled. That’s normal. Most perturbations do fizzle.”

“I’m not sure we even know what’s been driving the perturbation,” grumbled Konn.

Nejirt Kambu tried to hide a smile. “You suspect a conspiracy?”

“We do not need a conspiracy to account for the disturbance.” The “Crazy Admiral” was used to needling and never lost his temper. Konn was chided widely for his conspiracy theories. Jars Hanis and his crowd even made a regular issue of it “There’s an old saying that if you kiss a girl on Ixno you can start a chain of events that leads to violent revolution on Splendid Wisdom—it would be easy to assume that the whole Ulmat perturbation began with something as innocent as a kiss. Then the situation is not dangerous at all.” Konn couldn’t resist a note of sarcasm. “Then even a novice like you could handle it” He paused for emphasis. “But if it were a conspiracy...”

“Highly improbable,” said Nejirt indulgently. What he meant was impossible. “You know that.”

I do, do I? What Konn hadn’t told Nejirt Kambu was that the recently conceived Ulmat correctives were designed on the assumption that there was a conspiracy. A bluff, of course, but sometimes, when one took a shot in the dark at the sound of a twig snapping, one was rewarded with the discreetly muffled flight of surprised feet. That was, in itself, more information than could ever be deduced from the mere snapping of a twig. “Just for the sake of argument suppose someone was deliberately trying to move the Ulmat beyond the sight of all Pscholars in order to create a staging area for a major revolt”

Nejirt’s polite amusement remained. “That someone would be so ineffective that we wouldn’t even notice. The deviation from normal fluctuation wouldn’t be measurable.” “Oh? Because...?”

“Sir, you are trying to force me to say that the interference could be measurable because your conspirator could be utilizing some crude form of psychohistorical manipulation?” “Indulge me.”

The boy backstepped. No traps for him. “The Founder set up Faraway so that as it developed politically the Pscholars could...”

“... could do what we have done,” rumbled an annoyed Konn. “Set up a stable political climate in which the leadership of Splendid Wisdom is accepted because it is effective. We predict disasters and prevent them. I admit we are good at it, especially me. List me some disasters.”

Nejirt laughed at an obviously rhetorical request.

The Admiral ground on. “Let’s skip over mundane calamities and the ones we handle after the fact by managing their consequences. Let’s talk about a real upheaval—somebody confronting us with our own mathematics. Do you really expect that our methods will never be duplicated? Knowing what we expect to happen, they could counter us.” “But if they were that good, they would come to the same conclusions we do and implement the same solutions. Converging technology. After seventy thousand years don’t all aircraft have the same optimal forms? There would be a period of discord, then the two groups would merge.”

Konn was furious but did not challenge; he nodded in concession. It was not agreement he felt What he was concluding pained him—his mind had filled with an abrupt decision not to work with this brilliant young man in whom he had placed so much hope. He was bitterly disappointed. He is not my son. How many well-trained blind conservatives could the Lyceum graduate in one year? Too damn many.

Still, Hahukum Konn couldn't have forced the discussion further even had he wanted to. The Admiral was an intuitive thinker, not a verbal one. The boy he disagreed with was right by all the symbolic arguments known to Konn. They had been through the same school and forged from the same curriculum, and, aside from a different level of maturity, they thought with the same words. Certainly the Founder had established the central result rather definitively.

The overwhelming probability was that any infant group trying to duplicate the modus operandi of psychohistory would be subsumed by the parent body, the amalgamation being driven by self-interest. If two organizations were practicing psychohistory independently, their forecasts would countermand each other and thus become useless. What could be the incentive for mastering a very difficult subject only to choose to use it in a way that made it ineffective?

If everyone were free to choose a different future for mankind, the tug-of-war would ensure the realization of nobody's future—all freedom would be lost in gridlock and all men would become the slaves of chaos. Total freedom ere-ates the ultimate dungeon. Whenever a man decides to expand his degrees of freedom by doing something really sassy, like taking up residence in a sunspot, he is soon locked into a situation in which he has no degrees of freedom at all. There are always boundaries to freedom.

The Founder had chosen to pursue a political system that defined near-optimal boundaries. Then he had gone on to create a society that maximized general freedoms by eliminating foolish futures. He had never pretended that this was to be done by fatalizing the lives of individual men—any more than an engineer would try to force a deterministic path on each atom passing through an optimized heat engine.

The Founder’s proof that only a single psychohistory would evolve (as a single physics had long ago evolved) was lengthy and tortured, but it had been refined by twenty-seven centuries of polishing. Konn of the Second Rank had been over the proof personally and whatever flaw it might contain, he was not the mathematician to find it—he was no theoretician; his talent was a nose that quivered when data smelled slighdy different than theory tasted.

Long ago Konn had accepted the whole thesis that within the political system created by the Founder, it was impossible for any group out there among the stars to duplicate psychohistory. He would have said that the work of the Pscholars during the Interregnum had made it impossible. Eveifnow his best logic yielded the Founder’s scenario. But such traditional reasoning no longer moved him. Hahukum Konn had worked his way up from Splendid’s bedrock to Second Rank by never taking anything for granted. His eighty-three years had taught him to be a man of iron principle. He never, never finagled data to fit theory. And the data...

The data contradicted the Founder!

What disturbed Konn was that the Ulmat wasn’t the only anomaly. There were many more. There were fully thirty-seven perturbations he couldn’t account for to his liking. In a Galaxy of a hundred quadrillion humans, it was hardly surprising that some locations resisted the long-term direction of the Pscholars’ Fellowship. Yes, chance alone could be responsible. But psychohistory, a gambler who owned the house, had ages ago mastered the herding of chance. (Even the weather on Splendid Wisdom was managed by the deft application of manageable forces: evaporation towers, control of atmospheric perfluorocarbons, etc.) That made these thirty-seven trouble spots peculiar; for more than a century they had been maverick. It was as if the weather had developed its own goals and cunning. Meteorologists have no equations for intelligent weather.

Mindless and unminded chaos will lunge out of its .masking cover at unpredictable times to wipe out the finest forecast of man and computer, creating vast regions of turbulent history requiring the finest of the Pscholars’ resources to calm. The Second Empire depended upon the vigilance and eye of men like Hahukum Konn for its very survival; he was one of those patient predators who scanned the Cimmerian borders of predictability with a cat’s green eye. And he was afraid that they were now facing a chaos which had evolved enough intelligence to oppose psychohistory. That was a chilling thought. Evil is no ally of morality. Evil would be willing to destroy the whole of the stability that the Founder had achieved.

Konn found that he was recording Nejirt’s measured speeches but was no longer listening to them.

The seriousness of the circumstances demanded that the Admiral choose his hunting dogs prudently. His standards were not going to permit Nejirt to become his trusted aide. Despair! Nejirt was the fifth promising student he’d had to reject. Whom could he rely on? Who was there to use in the field?

Perhaps he’d have to go outside of the Lyceum. Catch them young, like the navy did. There were a thousand academies out among the reaches, pretraining aspiring psychohistorians. Take some youths, early, and shape their outlook years before the conservatives got to them. An Admiral’s cadre! He grumbled at the unlikeliness of it. Maybe. Desperate times brought desperate measures.

Nejirt was a little upset, beginning to repeat himself in the way people will when they feel they no longer have an audience. Konn was a kind man; it was no use berating an acolyte for failing to meet high expectations. Use him for what he did well and let it go. Konn refocused. “Well, we’ve shaipened our wits on each other to the point where I’m very hungry. I know a place where we can sharpen our knives on roast pig. You haven’t said a word about your girlfriend yet. Last time you couldn’t stop talking about her. And when my belly is full you can clue me in on this Hasef-Im newfangle about which I know nothing.”

It was Nejirt’s sleep-watch and so he went home to bed after a pleasant dinner and stroll on the Balasante Concourse with his mentor, but it was prime-watch for Konn—he was only beginning his “day.” He chose the rigor of the hunt to cool down his brain but never really stopped thinking about his student. During the yapping of the dogs through his Club’s meticulously groomed hydroponic wilderness he took the time to think up a promising dead-end job for his protege—a job that needed to be executed with great competence but one that did not require more talent than Nejirt possessed. The thirty million star systems to be monitored had plenty of places for boys like Nejirt.

Thirty million was a comforting number. Those thirty million systems surely contained at least one hoy who could be molded into a master sleuth.

Konn’s favorite dog, big-eared and black-spotted, trotted up and rose to his haunches, two succulent gessem in his jaw, one with a broken wing. Using his long gengineered fingers he handed the fat, bald cave-flyers to his human before settling back on his knuckles. Konn bagged the birds, patting his assistant on the head, “Atta boy, Rhaver!” and began to unholster the beast’s stun gun. “ICanDoItMyself,” grumbled the dog in a throaty dog accent that only dog lovers can understand. Konn smiled. The dog understood the smile as permission to take over the unstrapping of his weapon. He struck a pose of importance.

It wasn’t impossible that someday Konn might hunt down

a boy instead of cave-flying gessem. He would train the boy to be his prize hunter, as he had trained Rhaver. How could he let the Lyceum continue to deliver him mere wolves? “Does hunting please you, Rhaver?” Rhaver thumped his tail against the ground and licked the bejeweled rings on his tree-climbing fingers before swirling around to try to catch the itch on his tail.

Ah, thought the psychohistorian, if only dogs had been bred for brains as well as for hunting prowess!