Far futures, p.21
Far Futures, page 21
Otaria frowned haughtily. “I’ve never heard of such a reprehensible incident. It has the feel of historical revision to me. Such besmirching of the reputation of our galactic leadership will serve our cause badly; our benevolent elite embody enough flaws without our having to stoop to invent disgusting sins. Truth is our only reliable servant.”
Jama grinned. “I, too, thought as you do now when I first caught whiff of the story twenty years ago. Yet . . . there are pieces to that story that assemble neatly. I’ve even located the graves of those sacrificial heroes on a Peripheral hellhole called Zoranel—well erased to all but the most exacting archaeological methods, as has been the site of their prison camp in a rocky valley under a red sun. Evidence keeps arriving. Only last week . . . Check out the mathematical appendix trailing my Little burst.”
“I’m not a mathematical illiterate—but your equations are not readable by me, even with all the options of my fam.”
“Nevertheless they are the psychohistorical equations which outline how a perturbation in the Plan can be eliminated by a lie involving the death of fifty young students. Those equations have been lifted from the Prime Radiant as it existed in the fourth century.”
“Nonsense! The Pscholars guard the Prime Radiant with unbreakable code! You of all people don’t have access to it!”
Jama was enjoying himself. “The poor excuse for psychohistorical talent that I have to work with could never write such equations or work out their consequences—but my idiots can read scrawls quite effectively, I assure you. I have no doubt that this fragment of the Prime Radiant is authentic. I’ve wondered about the source. My strong suspicion is that my modest fragment has drifted into my hands over a circuitous trail that is tens of centuries cold—via one of our fifty heroes who died that a lie might persist. There is no lie so small that it does not leave a trace behind.” He glanced for only a flicker of eyelash at the small jade ovoid sitting in its legged golden cup.
Otaria paused for a moment of reverie while her organic-fam mind stopped rejecting the data and readjusted itself around the thought that an enemy who lied was a very different land of opponent than was an honest foe. She recomputed her entire position.
“I still think you should meet my psychohistorian.”
“You have already contacted this man?” Disapproval.
“No.” She was amused that Kikaju would suppose her so bold. “Then he contacted you?” Greater disapproval.
“No!” Now Otaria felt called upon to defend herself and reacted to Jama’s suspicion with formal disdain. “Hyperlord Jama, I found him— he doesn’t even know I exist—I’m not stupid. Why should I take unilateral action? I know the stakes! Who trained me? Who seduced me into his wicked world when I was too young to know the difference? A baby I was! And before you say it, I do know that the psychohistorians are the most dangerous people in the Empire! Of course I know that!”
“Ah.” He smiled, relaxing because of her fury. “What rank is this mathematician of yours?”
“Seventh.”
As the newest conquerors of the galaxy, the Pscholars disdained tides among themselves. They were egalitarians. They were a psychological elite who ruled by merit. Tides, they insisted, were the refuse of First Empire, of women like Otaria and men like Jama—but the Pscholars’ plain designations of rank had become, in time, tides of force to be feared. First Speaker sounded simple enough—yet any sane man tried never to come to the notice of such a man. But a Rank Seven? There must be tens of billions of Rank Seven Psychohistorians scattered from here to the Periphery.
“Phwogh! He knows nothing, then. He’s still nourished by the blood from his umbilical cord. He’s useless.”
“He’s unusual. Singular.”
“Handsome? Beddable?”
“So now you suppose me to be infatuated by commoners, do you?” she replied to his innuendo, sarcastically indignant. She cocked her red hat, and peeked around the brim, suggesting a comedy of immature lust. An uplifted hand-sign, a command to the house sensors, materialized one of the Hyperlord’s floating recliners; she curled into its black arms while they molded to her shape. Languidly she hugged the arms, ignoring Jama. His eyes called all illumination to her body; her eyes fixed themselves upon the shadows of his miniature garden.
She’s sulking! Now what do I do? Damn, I shouldn’t have alluded to sex so soon after last week’s fight. She’s going to tease me! He tensed.
Indeed she was, and she began by changing the subject. “I love your topiary.” With a delighted cry she kicked off from the floor and floated over the ferns, beyond them, into the arms of a gnarled tree, whose uppermost limbs reached for the conduits that were now feeding the rosy dawn light of Imperialis down into the dungeon below. “You work so hard here! You always have the slight smell of manure about you.” She was grinning. “You do use real manure, don’t you? Your garden is so green, so lush, so beautiful! That’s one thing we never seem to run out of here on Splendid Wisdom—the manure, I mean. There are so many of our assholes!”
Spare me the twaddling of the aristocracy, he thought, wishing desperately for his wig and eyeshadow—and a bath and a sanitized robe and a young body.
Well, if he couldn’t flirt, he could attack. Attack was more fun than sex, anyway. A command, through the tuned probe that connected his brain with his fam, called up the house telesphere. Once it had bloomed, he willed the floating apparition toward her, enlarged its diameter, and filled its ghostly pallor with images drawn from his auxiliary brain.
The visions he loaded into the globe had been secretly recorded at a party of roistering midlevel bureaucrats. A swift flow of graphics commands—by fam direction—rebuilt the scene to center on Otaria, altering the record subtly to suit Jama’s kinky taste: a brighter color here, an added satyr there, a knowing grin from an observer lounging in the folds. His miniature Otaria lay on the floor of the globe, in dishabille, the only noblewoman at this uncouth gathering, hugging some commoner’s leg.
“You Wog, Kikaju! You haven’t the morals of a leering Makorite! Why do I work for you! You spy on me!”
“So do the psychohistorians.”
“They’re not interested in me—nor in you. They’re interested in summed vectors,” she said defiantly.
“Their interest is called ‘sampling,’ ” replied Jama, dryly, “and you are not immune from it. They take quadrillions of samples every day. When they detect a trend that threatens the stability of the Empire, do you think they don’t take action on it?”
The Excellent Frightfulperson was watching, with distaste, her own behavior in the hovering sphere. “I’m allowed to have fun! Now, turn it off!” She wasn’t angry yet, but she was ready to be angry.
“Is that where you ‘found’ your psychohistorian?”
“Well now, I do believe the old He Goat has itching horns! You amaze me—jealous you are—after throwing me forcibly out of your bed!”
And he remembered—it seemed long ago—their amorous jousting. He didn’t remember throwing her out of bed. How could he have loved such an irritating woman? “Pleasure and intrigue don’t mix well. I question you to protect the Regulations,” he insisted. The word “Regulations” was safe code for another word nobody had the courage to say aloud. Revolution.
She sighed. “All right, Hyperlord Sober Buttocks my darling, we’ll be serious. I found my psychohistorian—his name is Eron Osa—via a routine library scan while engaged in dry-ass-dust research for the good of your beloved Regulations. I’ve been studying stasis. Rates of change of behavior.”
“Stasis,” he said morosely. “The Sleeping Beauty stays alive by never changing.” He meant the Empire. It was a constant complaint of his. “Over what time period!” she shot back.
“Certainly over my lifetime—and I’m not young. By sleeping, the Empire refuses to die!”
“Old men have such a myopic viewpoint. Weak legs which take their eyes nowhere! But youth isn’t so decrepit that it can’t travel more freely! I’m talking a hundred thousand generations! I’ve been imbibing records, some of them probably eighteen thousand years old. You can’t imagine the changes in every variable you can conceive of over that time span! You only think of today’s trade and exchange—that’s all you care to think of! You don’t understand the past.”
“Nothing from eighteen thousand years ago is reliable. Splendid Wisdom hadn’t even been settled eighteen thousand years ago. Even ten-thousand-year-old information is unreliable!”
“I beg your pardon, old man! When I was a child I visited the museum at Chanaria, deep in the stable rock of the Timeless Shield. I saw a bronze plate under helium that was more than forty thousand years old, cast on Terra with the names of heroes raised in this weird angular alphabet and illustrated in relief with armored vehicles and bi-winged sky-craft. Before hyperspace travel! It wasn’t a reproduction! I was awed! I saw records scratched onto clay tablets—real clay from old Terra—by men hardly literate who even had to depend upon their own brains to advise them. We know these things! I saw the fossilized bones of animals who lived and died before man, two million generations old, priceless fossils from Terra, not reproductions. I was awed.”
“Terra is a desert planet. It counts for nothing.” His gesture swept over his own green garden, implying that this small grotto-world of rock with tree and ferns and blooming flowers was worth more than all of Terra. “That old place is good for camels. On Terra even the camels manufacture fraudulent antiques for the Empire’s tourists, bronze tablets and baked clay.”
“Oh, bother your skepticism!” She pursed her lips and threw up her arms so violently that her chair rocked in the air above the ferns. “That’s not the point! Think of the changes since then! Do you deny the changes? Doesn’t that give you hope that change is possible? You taught me hope!” She was indignant. Now she was angry!
He laughed because indeed he did work for upheaval, yet in his heart did not believe that the galactic disorder he craved was possible. “Your bloody ancestors—pirates, brigands!” he sneered, “conquered Splendid Wisdom in a local interstellar war that brought our noble trading founders to ruin—but within three generations had become such traders, being raised by trader slaves, that they no longer thought of themselves as pirates but as traders. Change? They rewrote history by substituting their names for the names of their predecessors. And went on to conquer half the galaxy—not as military predators but in the style of the wiliest of the traders they conquered—just as the traders would have done without your bloody ancestors on the starship bridges. Change? When your ancestors were deposed the Empire continued its mighty growth under new administration. The vices were the same, the strengths were the same, the bureaucracy was the same. Only the people were different. Social inertia has always been formidable—even before the psychohistorians.”
Otaria dismissed this version of ancient history. “That’s your way of seeing events, my melancholy romantic whose late ancestors were forged in a more recent, vaster era when no mere soldier or trader could have survived. There were more specialists in one army group of the Spaceship and Sun than all the soldiers in the greatest army ever raised before the Pax Imperialis. Nothing changes in a lifetime, but every thousand years of human history has brought a major upheaval. A thousand years ago there were no fams as we know them today and men had to live by their wet wits. You’re so strange, Kikaju—you taught me to believe in a dream you don’t believe in yourself.”
“But you’ve found me a psychohistorian who will light my fire again, so it is all right,” he added sarcastically.
She grinned. “I’ve been plotting the galactic patterns of scholarship. It is always the same curve. Flat, then a sharp increase, then flat again when knowledge matures. During the explosion, scholars always think that the explosion will go on forever. They do not value what is known.
Their pleasure is to seek new discoveries. During the mature phase, scholars always think that everything is known and see scholarship as the art of applying the known. Psychohistory has been a mature science for less than a thousand years. They’ve had no rival in the galaxy for two millennia—and it is time, Kikaju, it is time that a rival appears.”
“So what is so unique about your Eron Osa?”
“During the last session of the Fellowship he published a thesis in mathematics at his own expense, not a unique event, but an unusual one.” She flashed a copy in midair, squeezing its long title, for lack of space, into a condensed holographic Imperial Font. Early Disturbed Event Location by Forced Arekean Canonical Preposturing: An Analysis in Three Parts. “I copied it the same day it appeared because I was researching stasis. A day later it had been erased.”
“He published through the Lyceum?” asked Hyperlord Jama incredulously. Pscholar psychohistorians did not publish research; they had never published their research even in that long-ago epoch when they still did research. They had always claimed, with self-serving pedanticism, that a prediction of the future was invalidated if the predictive methods by which it was obtained became widely known.
“No, he did not publish through the Lyceum. He was pretending it was mathematics, not psychohistory. He published in the public realm in the Imperial Archives.”
“With no sponsor! Then this Osa is a crackpot! What else could he be? He’s decapitating himself!”
“Perhaps,” she went on earnestly, “but that is, again, not the point.”
“Your point is moot,” he interrupted. “My point is that your Eron Osa, being a psychohistorian, being a member of the Fellowship, is a dangerous man who should be avoided at all costs.”
She continued doggedly. “You’re building up your own handpicked group of independent psychologists. Your men don’t have access to the main body of knowledge.”
“Of course they don’t!” He raged because it was a sore spot. How could his people know what was so fanatically hidden away by the Psychohistorian Fellowship? The Fellowship feared nothing more than that the lower classes might learn how to predict the future and so destroy the Splendid Galactic Empire of the Pscholars, rendering the Great Plan impotent by creating an unmanageable chaos of alternate futures.
Otaria continued to make her points on her long fingers, one by one. “Your men are having to reinvent psychohistory all by themselves. You’ve told me it’s not going well. You’ve told me it has been going badly! Your group isn’t research-oriented. But Kikaju, obviously, that doesn’t apply to this Eron Osa! He knows how to do research and he’s certain to be in trouble with his masters for daring to publish! He’s our land of man. Something in him is attacking! We can use him!”
“But he’s a real psychohistorian!” exclaimed Jama in horror. “I don’t want to have anything to do with a real one! They’re programmed to destroy”—he was so upset that he actually uttered the taboo word— “revolutions!” The horror in his voice mounted. “It’s built into their fams to protect us all! They are death on Dark Ages. They aren’t, ever, allowed to harm people—anybody—even if that means their own selfdestruction, so they’ve found the equations that give us the living, painless death. And they must at all costs use their powers to protect civilization from collapsing! And so civilization has been frozen at the height of decay! Cryogenocide! They aren’t even allowed to be passive when we try to put ourselves in a dangerous place! You want to deal with such monsters? You’re mad!”
“Kikaju, I am proceeding in this case with utmost caution. And I do not want you protecting me from any dangers.”
“I forbid you to have anything to do with this man! I forbid it! I won’t allow you to destroy my world!” he raged.
“You are throwing me out of your bed again,” she smiled.
“I’ve never thrown you out of my bed. I try to make you listen to reason!”
“Let me follow this man,” she pleaded. “I will not recruit him without your approval, I swear by the ferocity of my ancestors.”
3
12.02.13 On a planet with a trillion residents, storage space and transportation space is at a premium.
12.02.14 The only commodity that can be stored and transported cheaply is information.
12.02.15 It is easier to manufacture devices from stored information, on site, as they are needed, and to destroy them after use, than to store them away in physical bulk, waiting for a second user. Exceptions may be made in the case of (1) devices utilizing exotic materials, (2) devices using exotic manufacturing methods.
12.02.16 Water, air, and sewage must be purified and reused, on site, to avoid transportation through pipes, conduits, and through the atmosphere.
The transportation bulk-flow of any sector design should never exceed a Haldmakie number of 43.
—Splendid Planners Guide:
AdminLevel-NR8 Issue-GA13758 SOP-12
Eron Osa, in spite of his missing memories, remembered the face of Rigone—and remembered his intensely mixed feelings of awe and respect and exasperation. He could not remember if they had been friends. He knew he had spent time at Rigone’s Teaser’s Bistro.
For two days, unable to leave his hotel, Eron had been trying to find the courage to wander up the Olibanum to see Rigone—as his strange “benefactor” had suggested in his stranger message. But the manner in which he might choose to ask Rigone for help was irrelevant if he was first going to find himself hopelessly disoriented in the corridors of the Calimone Sector. Such fears of losing his way astonished him.
The memories he had of himself told of the old Eron as a confident, arrogant young man, a mathematician, a zenoli combat adept—but confidence has its foundation in abilities, and those had been shattered. He wasn’t sure anymore that he even had the wits for such a simple task as plying the corridors of Splendid Wisdom alone. His mind kept calling upon himself for lore and skills that he didn’t seem to know were no longer there—until his absent fam did not respond.
Nevertheless, reason suggested that even if Splendid Wisdom was an incomprehensible hive to a famless man, there should be a solution to his lack of mobility. Splendid Wisdom had existed as a labyrinth long before the fam had become a universal symbiote.
