Far futures, p.26
Far Futures, page 26
Then she waited. No one had more than a piece of the communications ritual. It had been designed by an expert: rumor told of a military man who had once been involved in the maintenance of secret naval hyperwave combat protocols that could not be taken out by any sort of enemy victory short of total annihilation.
7
Eventually she received her reply. The small spherical capsule located the Frightfulperson Otaria of the Calmer Sea in her dismal rented room. When she cracked it open, trembling, the terse message gave her a time and a place and an event before dissolving. But who were the Orelians?
Little is known of the first dynasty that led to the rise of Imperial Splendid Wisdom other than KambaVs only book, from which we date Galactic Era time. It was not a literate age. Almost fourteen thousand years ago, under the coruscating sky of the teeming central star reaches, some twenty-seven millennia after mankind ventured into the far galactic wilderness, Kambal appeared from nowhere over Splendid Wisdom with enough strength to establish an isolated home base on what were then the unpopulated islands of the Calmer Sea.
Perhaps Kambal was a young hyperfleet commander displaced from his home system by a defeat in war, forcing an alliance of convenience on the Splendid colonists. So say the references by Joradan to KambaVs lost War Logs. In any event, Kambal never returned to combat. In deference to his new hosts, whom he needed as willing (rather than reluctant) allies, he gave up looting and took to stellar trading to supply his loyal armies.
Perhaps the soothing breezes of the Calmer Sea calmed KambaVs fire-bred heart. During his long life he lost the desire to conquer. Old age brought him to a more serene philosophy which has come down to us as his Oracles of Patience. In that ancient time of strife—in a galaxy of myriad competing empires, all more powerful than Splendid Wisdom—who could have predicted that over the next ten millennia KambaVs seed would gradually assimilate all rivals into a First Empire of thirty million stars that stretched to the galactic periphery? Or that KambaVs spirit would have been able to hold such an immense organism together for another full two thousand years through the sheer power of a patient and tempered bureaucracy brought up on the Oracles?
Before the Fall, the Founder of Psychohistory has quoted KambaVs Ninth Oracle, Verse Seventeen as the major inspiration of his youth. “It is minimum force, applied at a chosen moment in the arena of historical focus, that paves the path to a distant vision. Abandon all immediate goals that do not serve your farthest purpose.”
—Solomoni’s Dynastic Histories,
5645th Edition
When Nejirt Kambu arrived at the Palace of the Police of the Lyceum Prefecture, the entrance chute to the waiting room shimmered, expanded, and he dropped through—like a fish into an aquarium done up complete with a sunlight-from-above-through-water decor. There was no visible floor, only marine plants swaying below his feet. Brightly colored holographic fish circled the room curiously. It was disconcerting. The Splendid bureaucrats were known to be mad, but some were madder than others. While he was making sure that he could still breathe, a sleek robo-fish with luminous scales received him gracefully and led him to a side grotto with delicate swishes of her tail. “It won’t be long,” she burbled.
Waiting never appealed to Nejirt, however long, and since he had the clearance, he downloaded the report on the dead man into his fam for review while he paced. The Case of the Police Killing. That did not please him. It was an exercise in farce to chase a petty con artist as if he were the galaxy’s top criminal, comer him after nine days of comedy, then accidentally execute him in a clumsy pratfall. Splendid Wisdom should be a sacred example of dignity and order to the rest of the galaxy.
He didn’t have time for more than a cursory review before a uniformed receptionist (human) arrived to guide him around office mazes and down through force-field-guarded bulkheads into a long lighted hall that led to the morgue dissectium. The headless man, identified as Hiranimus Scogil, lay like wax in a cylindrical stasis analyzer, ignored by the staff. Prefect Cal Bama was deferentially pleased to see Nejirt.
“Good of you to come so quickly, sir.”
Nejirt was not ready for easy camaraderie. “What have we got here, a headless corpse? The head was damaged?”
Bama bowed slightly in respect, his lace collar flopping too quickly. “No, sir. It was necessary for us to dissect the head. We’ve been modeling the brain. While you were flying in we got a full simulation running.”
Nejirt smiled wryly with the wisdom of a mathematician who knows more than can be communicated to common people. He had a natural grasp of neural systems, because much of their math overlapped the mathematical methodology of psychohistory. Simulation of a dead man’s brain was a technological triumph—but it wouldn’t do them much good.
The human brain is a very chaos-sensitive instrument, its though surfing on the edge of chaos and order in a multidimensional phase space. Such an edge, called a topozone surface, was defined by the boundary between “reality” stimuli (those which generate predictable responses) and “unknown” stimuli (those which sire chaotic responses). Whenever a brain was learning to reclassify stimuli, i.e. adjusting its reality, the topozones were reorienting their surfaces in phase space like some undulating aurora borealis.
Let a dying mind be sliced and probed by a dissectium. Error-sensitive coefficients determining the topozone surfaces are being critically altered. When death hasn’t already done so, the probes themselves disturb the data to be recorded. The translation between wet neuron and quantum-state neuron is never exact during reconstruction into an electronic simulation. Each error adds to the entropy. Critical phase space information no longer exists. The simulation “looks” like the original and is connected like the original—but out-of-whack topozones guarantee bizarre behavior.
A careful bureaucrat, like Prefect Bama, the kind of man who had ploddingly followed Kambal’s Oracles of Patience over the time span of two Galactic Empires, lived on the stable side of his topozones—but even he was only a neural no-man’s-land away from the chaotic excitement of a wildly creative mind like Nejirt’s. All it would take to shake him up and push his mind into the confusion and agony of rapid learning would be to put him into a world of alien stimuli—and seal the door.
“Have you learned anything?” asked Nejirt, already knowing the answer.
Prefect Cal Bama shrugged. “Not to be expected. But we have deduced many of Scogil’s motor skills. We know how he walks and”—the Prefect’s eyes twinkled—“we know the accent with which he spoke Standard Galactic.” They had the resonant cavities of Scogil’s skull. Talking was a motor-driven skill, and basic motor skills tended to survive quantum-state reconstruction. “Unfortunately he doesn’t talk sense.” Bama gestured and a holographic Hiranimus Scogil began to speak a standard text. It was worse than bad acting. “Do you recognize the accent?”
“Turn off the visual. It gives him all the likeness of an animated corpse.”
“Of course, sir.” A disembodied voice repeated the message with the same inflections. “How’s the accent?” implored Bama again.
“You mean, does it sound like someone from Coron’s Wisp?”
“Yeah.”
“It might and it might not. The Coronese are very idiomatic.” With resignation, Nejirt decided to humor this idiot. “Have you picked up any other motor skills?”
Prefect Bama laughed. “We thought we had something, but it turned out to be his ability to screw tops on bottles. The only unusual thing we’ve identified is his ability to balance a moving bicycle.”
“Bicycle?”
“A bicycle is a two-wheeled gyroscopic device. It might be useful for high-speeding down corridors and bouncing off pedestrians.”
“Wire frame? Wheels in-line? High seat? Muscle-powered?”
“Yeah,” said Cal.
“On the planets of Coron’s Wisp they are called whizzies. Never saw one in my life before my last adventure. I was told they became popular during the Fall when power was short. There are whizzy trails in the forest and around mountains and all through the metropolises. Good for the body, they say. But I think corruption is setting in; ten percent of them are powered.”
“Ummm. We’ve determined that this Scogil had at least twenty years of experience on them.” He paused. “So this could really be a link to Coron’s Wisp?”
“Timdo, most likely.”
Cal stripped off his lace collar, showing a hairy chest, and mopped his brow, then tossed his lace beside the corpse. “Well, well, well,” he said with satisfaction. “Follow me. Second Rank Hahukum Kon wants me to show you something.”
Together they found an unused conference room with stuffed autopsies on the walls. The Prefect removed, from the carved ivory case he was carrying, a jade-pale ovoid with indented five-finger press points. Nejirt gasped. Such objects were legendary on the Wisp’s Timdo, yet he had believed not a word surrounding this superstition until a day when such an ovoid cast its magic in the air of an old woman’s hovel—predicting nonsense, of course, but doing it beautifully. The hag whispered to him that he would live long enough to witness the Second Fall . . . and like all women of her breed had refused to tell him how long that would be.
“From your expression I take it you recognize the object?”
“They are used on Timdo—but hidden from outsiders. I’ve seen only one.”
“One!” exclaimed Bama. “Our Hiranimus Scogil has been on Splendid Wisdom for months now selling thousands of these things to astrology buffs. They seem to be transshipped from Coron’s Wisp.”
“You’re sure he wasn’t churning them out in his hotel room from some template he picked up in the Wisp?”
The Prefect was affronted that anyone would think the police so inept as to make such a mistake. “This isn’t jade, sir.” Jade was an object that could be manufactured in any household. “These ovoids are imported. A manufacturum hasn’t the resolution needed for replication. We’ve put a few through the lab and we cannot fabricate a template of a functional ovoid with our best copiers. Same problem as the one we have with Scogil’s brain.”
Cal continued, bemused. “This one we acquired during a recent raid on Scogil’s headquarters authorized by Second Rank Kon. Beautiful, isn’t it? How in space do they work? We’ve been reduced to tapping random code into the press points and intimidating ourselves when magic happens. We lack a fundamental picture of the device’s function or an operating manual. Kon tells me you’ve picked up some queer stuff about astrologers on your recent jaunt.”
Nejirt raised the ovoid, carefully fitting his fingers and thumb to the indentations. He thought and his fam remembered the finger-code sequences that he had bribed from his Timdo contact. Darkness blossomed until even the face of Prefect Bama faded. Then—bedazzling stars. It was quite a piece of fakery, the best handheld galactarium Nejirt had ever witnessed. This version had been preadjusted to view the stars from the coordinates of Imperialis, but that could be changed to any point in the galaxy with deft finger pressure.
With irony psychohistorian Nejirt Kambu asked the questions and adjusted the sky to produce Prefect Cal Bama’s astrological chart. “Birth” stars appeared in blue, “danger” stars smoldered red, “decision” stars flared yellow, and “wild card” stars turned green. All nonsense. Then an awesome program began to paint Bama’s personal constellations across this brilliant sky: heroic robots who herded man’s destiny, a chain gang of grieving virgins put there in penance by a guilty emperor suffering regrets, a stream of life to nourish all the fishes of the galaxy, a fate-worse-than-death, a mooning joker, the knife that separated good from evil, a monster of the galactic deeps. Bama’s birth constellation turned out to be the stone well. His fate was easy to determine—providing one knew whether the stone well was draining or replenishing. Nejirt smiled to himself at that touch.
“Why did you kill Hiranimus Scogil?” he asked when he was done with the reading and the stars had faded.
“We intended to take him alive.”
“Of course. Why did you kill him?”
Bama glanced over at the body ruefully. “We have a certain Hyperlord Kikaju Jama under surveillance for subversion. He advocates the purloining of state secrets, and the methodical dismantling of the Empire. He even blasphemes the Founder by advocating the establishment of a thirty-thousand-year interregnum.”
Psychohistorian Nejirt Kambu smiled. “That is hardly a crime.”
The Prefect huffed. “Sir, it is if he takes measures to put his theories into effect. If he is planting nuclear bombs to vaporize the Lyceum, that is my business. We have every intention of cleaning out the Hyperlord’s group and in all probability would have done so already had Scogil not tripped our wires.”
“Go on.”
“Jama purchased a device from Hiranimus Scogil which is illegal to own or possess. That is how we began our investigation of Scogil. Kon,” he nodded deferentially, “ordered the raid on Scogil’s base of operations and the arrest of Scogil. Much to our surprise, we found ourselves chasing him for nine days. He played the shell game, and blast him, every time we’d pounce on a shell, he’d be under the other one. Nine days! Eventually we cornered the rat but by then we were conditioned to expect him to escape . . . so we got, shall we say, overenthusiastic, to use a lame euphemism. And we didn’t get what we wanted. Shame! We were after his fam. And he wasn’t wearing one. Space, what a shock that was! We’d been conned! We couldn’t imagine a man evading us for nine days—nine days—without the use of his fam! Galaxy knows where it is now. We’ve lost it.”
“Explain something to me,” said Nejirt. “Why am I here?”
“Second Rank Hahukum Kon suggested that you would be invaluable in the analysis of events.”
“I’m not at all convinced that a minor ring of astrologers and charlatans is my business—unless I’m being demoted. Why am I here to view this astrologer’s corpse?”
“Astrologer? Didn’t Kon tell you? He suspects that Scogil was a psychohistorian—and an able one.”
What? Nejirt walked over to the body inside its cylinder of instruments. His mind was racing in astonishment. All the data at Coron’s Wisp suddenly made sense. A rebel psychohistorian. Old and well-worn theorems of the Founder rose to the conscious awareness of his fam as their unassailable assumptions were being checked out in panic. It was impossible! This couldn’t . . .
He stopped.
He remembered what he had been thinking while Bama was explaining to him the hastily constructed quantum-state simulation of Sco-gil’s mind. About topozones. About the mathematical explanation of the panic and uncertainty and disbelief he was now feeling.
Ceaselessly the activity in an organic net flips back and forth across the boundaries twixt stability and chaos in the mind’s 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 net.
Circumstance, curiosity, boredom, the hope of adventure propel the mind into places where it must contend with unfamiliar stimuli. Unfamiliar stimuli drive the mind across various points along the no-man’s-land of the topozone into chaotic neural activity. Confusion and uncertainly appear, contradictions in one’s worldview emerge, even desperation haunts the battlefield. What to do?
Learning is the neural mechanism by which the chaotic responses sired by unfamiliar stimuli are disciplined into an appropriate known. The mind seeks a readjustment in the shape of the topozones. If learning’s troops prevail, the strange stimuli come to be included within the new regions of stability. If learning fails, the troops flee back across the old topozone, the man flees from what once stirred his curiosity back into the known.
The battle never ends. Victory for one side is the only danger. If a brain lives only in the known it begins to suffer rigor mortis on the stable side of the topozones; if it lives only in the unknown it becomes insane on the chaotic side of the topozones.
Chaos and panic in his mind. It was a challenge. Were there really other psychohistorians out there?
8
Appearing during the collapse following the False Revival, soon after the fam became one of the more prized commodities of interstellar commerce, an elite military caste calling itself the Order of Zenoli Warriors was probably the first group of fully jam-equipped mobile soldiers immune to the emotional control of the original tuned psychic probe. They had a reputation for winning their contracted battles with quick, lethal strikes. Warlords who used them paid heavy fees, and Warlords who did not, lost their battles. The zenoli alliance with Coman in the Circus Wars of the Orion Arm . . .
Such was their reputation that all zenoli mercenary contracts were bought by the Founder’s Navy in 1089 F.E. as part of the peace treaties of the Second Pax Galactica. The zenoli soldiers were dispersed throughout the regular fleet, and the organization disbanded in 1138 F.E. Zenoli mind-training techniques remain popular today.
The tuned psychic probe is a double-edged sword. Control it, and it will protect you. Lose control and you open the way to . . .
—Fleet Manual 3-456:
The Military Usage of the Tuned Probe
Dizzily Eron Osa led a sick thirteen-year-old Petunia down the Olibanum. She wore the elegant metamorphic leathers of some obscure 113th-century-G.E. off-spiral culture—thigh-splits to the rib cage, lizard clasps, with a tight bodice sporting two grotesquely openmouthed, rubyeyed snake heads that had just gorged on pink-nippled plastic breasts much too large for a teener. For a moment she withdrew her concentration from the point along the walkway one meter in front of her feet. She flicked her fam into advertisement mode and let her eyes scan the distant huckstering.
