Far futures, p.29
Far Futures, page 29
10
At the moment of combat the zenoli soldier must be free of all prior thoughts and emotions. Priors always unbalance any thrust or response. Priors will kill you. Active preconceptions will kill you. Fixed intentions will kill you. Old emotions, grudges, resentments, angers, hatreds, loves, enthusiasms will kill you.
A soldier who enters combat hating his enemy is already a soldier doomed to failure; his hatred will blind him to the thrust that kills him or blind him in victory so that his victory is taken from him. A soldier who is afraid of his enemy is doomed. A soldier who loves his enemy is doomed. A soldier who is thinking about his enemy is doomed.
At the moment of combat the zenoli soldier is poised, inertialess, ready to act in any direction—like a marble at the top of a smooth multidimensional hill.
To achieve this null state of mind AT WILL the following eighteen brain-fam exercises are recommended . . .
—The Zenoli Combat Manual
edition 18
Founder’s Era 873
They had traveled by devious route to the most alien place Eron had ever seen, and they were able to view it from the very roof of Splendid Wisdom, a prodigious gash beyond which the distant city-encrusted Coriander Mountains gleamed in metallic hues. The great quake shouldn’t have destroyed as much as it did and it shouldn’t have killed one hundred and eighty thousand people, but it was an old First Empire sector that had been salvaged during the rebuilding under the Pscholars. Minor structural damage from the Great Sack, unnoticed in the hurry of reconstruction, hadn’t gone unnoticed by the later earthquake.
Out of the wreckage, construction engineers had already cleared a canyon to bedrock and below, a ravine too colossal for a single eye to encompass. Antlike teams of thousands were now strip-mining the tunneled fault block. Nothing had yet been rebuilt except for essential piping, transportation tubes, and a few giant weather towers that pumped water vapor into the atmosphere at the command of the central weather-control computers.
Most of the surviving structures on either side of the gash had been condemned and evacuated, services discontinued. These abysmal depths of abandoned city invited torch-carrying squatters—not many, for Splendid people were gregarious. Petunia seemed to know the place. She had been here before and they set up house in a stygian apartment that had to be illuminated with the occasional atomic torch hung about the walls.
Eron offered to help her reclaim the sewage and water systems of their chosen apartment—she declined. Her fam had inherited her mother’s engineering know-how and she had been privy to such skills for thirteen years. He was still mostly inept. The repair was not an arduous task because all Splendid housing was erected around self-contained recycling units. Distant water reservoirs and central sewage just weren’t practical on a planet of a trillion residents.
Living in a luxury dwelling without power and a functional manufacturum strained Eron’s tolerance. They had to build a bed-nest out of abandoned curtains. They had to hike in food. They had to wash the same clothes over and over. They had to power the portable hypercapsule receiver. The simplest tasks required time out for patches of wild ingenuity. Petunia didn’t seem to mind the inconvenience—which would have led Eron to guess at barbarous origins if her engineering talent hadn’t so shamed him.
She snuggled up with him in the curtains at the end of an exhausting day after voice-dimming the torches. “I’ve made a place for you away from the hubbub. You’re safe from the police. But you haven’t kept your end of the bargain,” she accused. “You’re to be talking with my dad!”
“Hiranimus and I aren’t on speaking terms because of our differences . . . so to speak. That’s just the way it is.”
“Not so fast with your cliché drivel! We’re burrowed in; now’s work time. Let’s take it from the top. You Pscholars were never mech adepts, right? You tell me why you and Dad can’t chat and then I’ll tell you why you’re wrong. My people are an offshoot of the Crafters of the Thousand Suns of the Helmar Rift. My ancestors built the first tuned psychic probe on military contract with the Warlord of Lakgan. We built our own versions of the fam as a countermeasure to emotional control since before Cloun died. Maybe we even invented the fam. I know a few things about ghouls. Enough prologue. Why do you think you can’t talk to my father?”
He looked at the dim ceiling and heard the un-Splendid silence broken only by her breathing. It was as if they were alone in the universe. “For the same reason telepathy never works.”
“What’s telepathy?”
“An old superstition. Never mind. Why can’t I talk to your father? Any complex neural network can be trained in zillions of ways to think the same thought—each person thinks a thought in a unique way. A brain develops code to decipher its own thoughts, and no one else’s. When organic brain and fam grow up together in co-communication they learn to talk to each other because they have spent time co-creating a shared code.”
“Yaah! And the code is uncrackable and all that barf. I can zap your argument with one question. Are you ready to be dragged out of hyperspace?”
“Fire away.”
She kissed him on the cheek. “Oh, my doomed wise man, all snuggled up in dusty old curtains, tell me then, why is it that you and I, each thinking his mundane thoughts with his own unique and undecipherable code, are right this very moment talking to each other without any trouble? Ha!” She punched him in the arm.
He couldn’t see her smile but he knew it was there. She had derailed his logic. Language. Telepathy was impossible—but as a child her mind had built a unique translator between her thoughts and the Galactic Standard tongue. She translated “Petunia” thoughts into Galactic Standard sentences; he took her Galactic Standard sentences and, using his own unique translator, recorded them into “Eron” thoughts, which he could understand. Neat.
“Do your people talk to ghouls?” he asked incredulously.
“No,” she replied with sadness. “My grief goads me. I want to talk to him.”
“What would you say?”
“I’d ask him how to get out of this predicament.”
“Why not ask me, instead of bossing me around?”
“You’re a criminal. You don’t know beans from turnips.”
“I’m a bona-fide psychohistorian, albeit a handicapped one. That means, at the least, that I have a very good organic brain, even if it is criminal. Do you want your father’s fam sent to a safe place?” He was desperately looking for a common goal. “I’m probably better able to get us out of our fix than any astrologer.”
“You’re a psychohistorian? Of the Fellowship?” she said, aghast.
He had never bothered to mention that detail. “And a criminal,” he added.
Petunia began to pound her skull with both fists. “Space, am I stupid. Of course Dad wanted you to take over his fam!”
“Why?”
“Do you think I’d tell you? You’re worse than a criminal. Now I’ve got to figure a way to make you his slave! You’re fried meat if I ever catch you sleeping! I’m already conjuring dire fam adjustments. Maybe I should just cocoon-tie you right now and get to it, if I only had some string. Talk to my dad! That’s a direct order!”
Did men who had been bonded in slavery go mad when they were given impossible orders? It amazed him how relentlessly his mind worked; it was actually beginning to apply itself to the problem. “Let’s do a weakness analysis of the isolated fam; I’ll be in charge of the math, you handle the technical aspects.”
A fam was designed as an intelligent but passive helper. The initiative lay with the organic brain, which had millions of years of evolution behind its behavior. Initiative was critical to survival. Scogil’s fam would lack initiative as an entity separate from Scogil. But it would still be thinking and scheming.
A memory came to him of the ornate hall in which he had taken his zenoli training; young men embrace fervently their fads for ancient wisdom, perhaps to revitalize, in the safety of a cathedral, times when men lived dangerously. Zenoli was all about fam-mind integration. Long after Petunia had gone to sleep he lay in the dark, deep in meditation, recalling what he could of this arcane wisdom, trying to reconstruct what he couldn’t. What was useful to him now, what was not?
He kept cycling back to the zenoli way of drawing out a passive opponent. It required absolute mental silence. He wondered if he could still create that state—the roiling positive image from his organic mind overlaid by a soothing negative image created and projected by the fam until all thought went quiescent. Had he attained enough control over his new fam to do that? He tried unsuccessfully.
In the morning—which meant torches and shadows—Petunia brewed him tea. “Did you pick up anything?”
“No. My mind was too active. Hiranimus may be thinking—but he’s off in a comer muttering to himself and not trying to trigger anything I can understand. He won’t even know that I’m listening.”
“You’re discouraged,” she reproached.
“Sure. I’m trying to get my fam to broadcast a negative thought field and it wavers. Too much of my stuff gets through. I’ve been zenoli-adapted—but my fam hasn’t.”
She grinned. “That’s a built-in utility. You’ve got an advanced model. I told you—we’re the best fam builders in the galaxy. Brain shutdown is easy. A fam doesn’t have to read a thought to blank it. I’ll give you the code.” She wiggled her fingers gaily. “But be careful with the wake-up routine you choose—don’t put yourself into a full coma. Or else I’ll have to rescue you!” She finished her tea and stood. “Got to go. Scrounge time.”
Eron was stunned at how well the commands worked. After half an hour he had a fully quiescent mind. He could even blank his visual field with his eyes open. But nothing happened for hours. Until . . .
Something noticed that his intention lay dormant, that he wasn’t calling on any of his fam’s critical abilities. Suddenly a set of math equations formed—and activated. It was weird to watch the standard routines of his fam set about solving a problem that he hadn’t posed. He didn’t even know what the problem was. Vigilantly he observed and recorded. Long silences, to which he was not privy, were followed by spates of mathematical calculation in a half-familiar, half-alien notation. Contact. Scogil was an accomplished mathist, trapped in a dark brig, alone, writing on the walls to keep himself sane.
Eron stirred himself. He took a torch and wandered through the abandoned city, pensively. When he came to a section that had been broken off and half welded shut by the demolition crews, he clambered outside along the side of the catacombed canyon and found a perch. Imperials was low in the sky, casting purple shadows. Aridia, in crescent, was rising to the east. How fragile Splendid Wisdom seemed among this jumble and open firmament.
He was mulling over the math that had passed across his mind, unable to question a deaf Hiranimus. The doodling contained clear traces of the Founder’s Hand, anachronisms even, yet there were odd twists of thought and notation, an intriguing surmise, and one brilliant shortcut that astonished Osa. Scogil had to be a psychohistorian who had been cut off from the main line of development for centuries.
And he rides my back! There was joy in the assertion.
Home again, he found a Personal Capsule waiting for him in the receiver. The message read: “I have found you! Irregulars of the Regulation will be discussing your dissertation at the Orelian Masked Ball.” He skipped details of location and time. “Important that you be there. Wear a black fur mask, tri-horned with red eyes, template 212, Orelian Masks Cat-#234764.1 will be the one in blue scales with plumes and an upper jaw sprouting crocodile teeth. Sorry I ran. My name can wait.” Included with the message was a fine-print manuscript of his precious work.
Eron smiled and relaxed. The beautiful Frightfulperson. Suddenly more alien mathematics began to stream into his mind. He froze attentively. Hours later when he broke from zenoli trance, Petunia was sitting in front of him, legs twined. “Anything?”
“One-way contact.”
“With my dad?”
“When I withdraw into zenoli mute-mind he seems to be able to use the utilities. I can’t tap his thinking, but I certainly can watch his call-ups.”
She was excited. “Do you think he can watch your call-ups?”
“No. Different architecture. His call-ups are supposed to be available to me. But my call-ups are only backloaded to the fam through my cognition codes. That’s the problem with me being the priority mind.” She shrugged. “We’ve got to set up two-way comm. Otherwise the conversation will be as futile as broadcast video.” She emitted an unpleasant bleating sound. “I’ve been scrounging something that might work.” She held up a five-node keyboard for the right hand. “These are hard to come by on Splendid Wisdom. We use them all the time. You’ve already learned five-finger typing.”
Eron frowned. “He can’t read my fingers; he isn’t connected to the utilities the same way I am—and he can’t see through my eyes no matter what kind of typeface I build for him.”
Petunia grinned. ‘Taah, the code. I know. Keep it simple, Mommy always said. Dad knows the Helmar binary code for the augmented Galactic Standard alphabet.”
“Augmented alphabet?”
“We augment everything. It’s a tinkerer’s disease. Now, listen. Dad’s ghoul can read your mind; it’s just your private code that’s boggling him. So we use the signal that carries the code and modulate it with a couple of transducers for your skull.” She showed him a handful of circular plates stripped out of a psychic probe. “Quick and dirty.”
Eron paled. “That’s going to introduce errors into my thinking, maybe bad ones. How am I to carry on a rational conversation while I’m distracted by, say, the odor of colors?”
“You’ll survive.” She cocked her head. “If not, I can always scrounge another slave. But I know what I’m doing. I’ve fooled with this stuff— meaning my school chums and I. It’s better than drugs. We had to stop when Mommy caught us. Don’t worry! Neural networks are wonderful for their error-correcting robustness. You look robust to me.”
“Why don’t we try some kind of transduction on the fam directly?” Eron pleaded hopefully.
“And violate its shielding? You want to destroy my dad? You’re forgiven. I know you Splendid psychohistorians are tech dummies.”
When they had the device rigged, Eron simply finger-typed a Galactic Standard message. The haywire then translated so that his mind wogged in Helmar binary flashes. It was awful. Just typing hello was like being kicked out of a high-flying aerocraft without a grav-chute.
Hello. Use the math utilities to reply. Hello . . . When he could no longer stand his binary broadcasting, he went into zenoli mute-mind to listen. Calm again, he tried typing the alphabet—and blasting his mind with the binary output of Petunia’s device. He listened. He broadcast. He waited. He tapped on the walls of his ghoul’s dungeon. It was during a meal anxiously prepared by Petunia that the reply came via the symbol generator of the math utilities.
To whom . . .
Eron, impatient with the slowness of the communication, typed, Eron Osa. Suppressing his excitement, he returned to his zenoli calmness.
A pause. The symbol generator began to write across Eron’s visual cortex in a happy yellow typeface, Your benefactor is pleased that his last desperate gesture was of assistance to you. What remains of Hiranimus Scogil is at your service—minus various endearing biological quirks. How much psychohistory does the rebel Eron Osa remember?
Thus began a remarkable conversation between two crippled minds.
11
Q: Do the equations demand that the monitoring Psychohistorians remain hidden indefinitely?
A: No. Adherence to the Founders Plan provides that the establishment of a Second Galactic Empire will coincide with a political operandi in which Mankind understands the benefit of being governed by Mental Science. At that time invisibility may be cast aside with the proviso that the Laws of Psychohistory themselves cannot be revealed.
Q: Why the proviso?
A: The Laws are statistical in nature and are rendered invalid if the actions of individual men are not random in nature. If a sizable group of human beings were to learn key details of how their future political situation was being predicted, their actions would be governed by that knowledge and would no longer be random.
Q: How is such concealment of the Laws to be maintained?
A: A galaxy approaching a population of one hundred quadrillion will produce less than a hundred humans per billion with the mathematical, emotional, and ethical abilities necessary for the mastering of Mental Science. Many models, notably those of su’Kle and Giorclom, indicate ways to attract all such talent into the ruling class.
—The First Speaker Questions a Student: Notes made during the Crisis of the Great Perturbation, fourth century Founder’s Era
After the ghoul of Scogil warned Eron against attending any clandestine caucus of the Regulation, Osa prudently investigated the Orelians. Old when Imperialis was an unexplored border system, Orelia was ancient, its denizens of three airless worlds necessarily master builders of sprawling airtight cities. The latter-day Orelians of Splendid Wisdom weren’t really Orelians anymore; they were the descendants of an imported construction crew who had stayed on after the great rebuilding—nostalgic in their lingering memory of a distant home’s wild carnival. They were harmlessly apolitical and glad to invite moneyed fun-loving non-Orelians to join their masked revelry.
Scogil’s vehement harangue was to no avail once his capricious daughter sided with Eron. Because a fam personality was the more subservient one, the ghoul acquiesced to Eron’s carnival adventure as a second-best survival strategy. The man found it easy to humor what he suspected were his ghoul’s exaggerated fears; in his psychohistorical research he had always delighted in making allowances for the remotest of probabilities.
