Far futures, p.31
Far Futures, page 31
“Ah. You are his hostage?”
“No,” said Eron vehemently.
“You offer stalemate? We both sit here until we starve?”
“No. I’m dealing. You want to interrogate Scogil. I can talk to him. We talk; I keep Scogil. We talk with Hahukum Kon present. That’s the deal. My Frightfulfriend comes with me and she stays with me. You get our weapons now as a gesture of good faith.”
“A reasonable man. Thank you for the weapons. As a reciprocal gesture of good faith I will allow you to keep your shields. They are not a threat to us. I look forward to your stories about our mad Admiral.”
12
TAMIC SMYTHOS: . . . born 351 Founders Era . . . no childhood record until 366 F.E. , when he was brought to the Splendid Lyceum by his Scav godfather with a self-taught mathematics talent . . . not an outstanding student . . . volunteered for the group of fifty martyrs, 374 F.E. , during the Speakerhood of . . . transported to . . . captured in 377 F.E. at the end of the Lakganian War during the deception arranged by . . . escaped massacre of the seven at . . . sterilized and interned on Zoranel with the surviving forty-three martyrs by the edict of . . . Tamic Smythos spent his prison years on Zoranel, where the stars were thin and the hyperships infrequent, reconstructing in secret the Founder’s Prime Radiant as an act of defiance . . . false death certificate in 386 F.E. . . . smuggled off Zoranel for predictive work by corrupt Mayor Linus, 386 F.E. , who sought advantages in owning the only psychohistorian . . . disappeared . . . no record until 406 F.E. , when he settled on Horan of the Thousand Suns of the Helmar Rift to take up mechanical engineering . . . In later life he joined (or founded) the colony at . . . had no children or family or close friends . . . refused to teach . . . morbid recluse . . . His extensive hoard of psychohistorical memorabilia and personal writings, including a diatribe against the organizers of the martyrdom, was only discovered in a tailors warehouse 217 years after his death, by a computer-talented anarchist looking for a cause.
—Quick File of Galactic Biographies:
Edition 1898 F.E.
The arrest provided by Hahukum Kon was lavish. Locked in a suite fit for a Pscholar of the First Rank (all six rooms hastily outfitted to absorb a bomb explosion) Osa-Scogil and Otaria were treated as honored prisoners. They were allowed no visitors and no news.
Still, as the days passed, Eron chuckled at the thought of media mischief surely implemented by now. Rumors about a second group of psychohistorians would be multiplying rampantly all over Splendid Wisdom; he had done the psychomathematical diffusion estimate on the spread of the stories that Petunia was to distribute in case of his failure to return from the masked ball. The stories were designed to be passed by word of mouth with a high mutation factor and a ridiculous longevity.
Both prisoners were questioned often, but their polite interrogator pressed no topic they did not wish to pursue. In counterpoint, Nejirt Kambu arrived every day in the afternoon but did not question. Philosophical discourse seemed to be his main pursuit. He was witty, if conservative, and Otaria took pleasure in needling him. Eron was frustrated by their discussions. Nejirt was one of these men of great integrity who believed firmly in his duty as a member of the elite to give good government, but a blockhead on the subject of the right of a vassal of the Empire to negotiate his own future. He genuinely believed that a man untrained in psychohistory was a danger to himself and needed benevolent guidance.
These debates left no doubt that Nejirt Kambu was a brilliant Pscholar of the breed who knew how to modify futures to fit a plan. When on the theme of directed change, he lost his conservative veneer and became a wild player who had mastered all the tricks of discreet historical manipulation.
In the evening, the prisoners were given time to themselves. There was little to do but cook and talk and eat. Left alone with his two companions, Eron found that as a trio they had a love of history in common.
The forces that drove history were Eron’s obsession.
Otaria balanced this view with a lighter touch more interested in the inner energy that motivated mortal man over the vast span of galaxy and time.
Scogil was a game player with psychohistory as the rule book and a future as the winnings. Non-zero-sum, of course. Eron had never been asked to think that way before. To him psychohistory had always meant a single benign future determined by a single monolithic organization, i.e. history from the Imperial point of view. A trap. He was becoming very fond of Scogil’s mind as well as exasperated by his angry ghoul.
It was a week before Eron noticed that Second Rank Hahukum Kon must be setting them up for a grand entrance. He had a style. He wanted to make sure that Eron Osa knew that Kon had power and that Kon chose to exercise his power in a very different mode than did First Rank Jars Hanis. There was to be no relentless bullying, no ultimatum, no draconian solutions. Why had Eron ever left the Admiral to study under Jars?
When the curmudgeon finally came to visit, he entered with a tray of biscuits and tea from the commissary near the Lyceum study carrels. How could it be possible for him to have cared to remember that about one of his more obscure students? Eron smiled. But he still felt merciless. It was all a serious military campaign to this crusty old Admiral. Kon wasn’t going to enjoy defeat.
“Good that you found time to see us, sir.”
“And you, Eron, you’ve been acting more like an ambassador for the heathens than a prisoner of war,” admonished Kon.
“I am an ambassador. I’ve come here to accept the surrender of the Second Empire.” Scogil would blanch at that, if he still had a body.
A startled Kon blinked for a moment before recovering. “Unfortunately I’ve not brought my sword.” He grinned and grumbled. “I believe there will be another hundred years of hard war before we get to a finale. Youth equals impatience.” By war Eron knew he meant psychohistorical corrective action. Kon built intricate scale models of the immense First Empire dreadnoughts of the old Grand Fleet—but to win his battles he had never ordered into combat even the lightest of the Second Empire’s hypercruisers. He wielded more power than any First Empire admiral could have hoped to amass.
“A hundred-year war? You’ll lose that way,” said Eron. “Sometimes it is better to begin polite negotiations a century before a major defeat.”
Kon stared at Eron’s face. “You’re serious. By space, you’re dead serious!” He turned to Otaria in her floating recliner. “You’ve thrown in with a madman!” He turned back to Eron. “I’ll have you on the rack! I’ll squeeze what I want out of that homunculus on your back!” He sat down and ate a biscuit. “Eron, be serious. You know that fighting a hundred years down the line—and winning—is something we do all the time.”
“Against an enemy who is countering you with his own psychohistorical ploys?” countered Eron.
“That’s why we have to interrogate this Scogil of yours. He’s the first enemy psychohistorian we’ve ever captured. You promised to cooperate.” His voice became quietly ominous. “Have you changed your mind?”
“No. What better way to interrogate him than to play a psychohistorical war game? Your staff here are the galaxy’s experts on deviations from the Fellowship’s planned future history. Osa-Scogil hereby challenges you and your whole staff to a hundred-year-war game. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of months. You can’t win, sir.”
“I do believe you have lost your mind.”
“Scogil thinks so, too, but he’s stuck with me. And I’m stuck with you. Recall that I was valiantly attempting to avoid you when apprehended. You accept my challenge then? What you get out of it is to see Scogil in action.”
“There are only two of you. I couldn’t get along with a staff of two.”
“It’s enough. The war is already over. I can play out the endgame in my head. You’ve lost. Now it’s time to settle before you’ve lost everything.”
Kon was beginning to be intrigued by Eron’s boldness. “Your criteria of victory?”
“The immutable laws of psychohistory.” Eron deadpanned the cliché.
“You young scupper rat! I’ve been applying the laws of psychohistory successfully since before you were born!”
“No,” said Eron, enjoying himself. “You’ve been using blasters and atomic grenades against bows and arrows. Your army doesn’t have to know much strategy. Remember, your army is the one that executes the fam of any man who is willing to sell blasters to the warriors with the bows and arrows. Now I have to take off a few minutes to consult with Hiranimus. You’ll excuse me.” He left the room.
Otaria shifted herself to Eron’s seat. “He’s an unusual man.”
Kon grumbled. “He was always like that. Impossible. I thought a new fam might rattle his bones a bit. He actually talks to the ghoul of this Scogil?”
“To me it looks like he’s talking to himself. It’s a ponderous chat they share.”
“Do you think what remains of Scogil can actually play at psychohistory? Is this proposal of Osa’s for real?”
Otaria looked at her long hands wistfully. “Eron thinks highly of the abilities of Scogil’s ghoul, more so than the ghoul does of himself. I don’t know. His ghost seems to be missing much of Scogil’s judgment and fire—but I don’t talk to him directly. Have you ever met an engineer turned salesman of a technical product line? Do you really think you’ve caught a major psychohistorian? Scogil was a salesman! That’s what he did best. He knew more about my organization, the one you raided, than I did myself—because he was selling to it. You think you got us all.” There was malice in her voice. “I even thought you had us all!” She smiled and said no more, and Kon knew he would get no more short of torture.
“Sorry about the Hyperlord.”
“I’ll bet you are. He was crazy as a coot—but there were times when I loved him.”
Kon brought out a jade ovoid. “He would have wanted you to have this.” He handed the egg to Otaria. “We have forty others already.”
“And you still can’t play it?” Otaria fumbled with the ovoid. Stars burst forth that melted into charts. “Would you like your fortune read?” She made up one glibly. “Compromise with your enemies before stubbornness brings you disaster. That’s your reading for the day.”
Kon leaned over, fascinated. “I’ve seen Nejirt do something similar. How did you do that?”
She fumbled again—and the equations of the Founder began to scroll across a darkened air, symbolically describing what once had been future history but was now ancient history. “Can Nejirt do that? I doubt it. Scogil gave me lessons at the ovoid’s deeper levels. I recently asked him, through Eron, why he hid behind astrology. He said it was a simple way of giving people permission to hope that they can control their lives. You Pscholars have destroyed our willingness to predict and to choose which of our predicted futures we want to live. We have become fatalists. You choose for us!”
“We run good government. Our methodology doesn’t speak to individuals,” he admonished.
“If either of those statements were true,” she flared, “I wouldn’t be here in your comfortable prison!”
“And when the astrology doesn’t work?”
“What’s then to stop a failed astrologer from moving on to psychohistory? You? With your secret hoard of knowledge in your Lyceum archives?”
Eron returned, but he remained standing, even began to pace. “Scogil and I have come to an agreement after much argument. He will allow himself to act as the opposition command center if the interrogative questions come in the form of a realistic game with the initial conditions those of the galaxy as they stand today as determined by the Fellowship. He points out that, since he is not a command center and never was, errors will be introduced. At the end of each simulated year, we must assume that the outcomes with the highest probability have happened.”
“And you think you and your homuculus are a match for my whole staff?” Kon had weakened. His voice and his expression said that he was willing to accept the challenge. But he was incredulous.
Eron let himself smile softly. There was no way he could tell the Admiral what a predicament he faced. At present, the main tactic of Scogil’s mysterious people was to pump out, from as many spigots as they could, the technology of psychohistory. Even Scogil did not understand the long-term implications. The Founder had. They would learn.
It took only eighty-seven days at a year per day on the most powerful historical computers in existence to predict a total alteration in the political face of the galaxy. Over five hundred simulated interstellar wars, major and minor, were raging, confined only by the constraints of psychohistory. Arms production was up by four orders of magnitude. Eight billion youths were being drafted every year to study psychohistory in an effort by each faction to outmaneuver the others. Psychohistory had not become irrelevant; it was essential to the multitude of war efforts. Accurate prediction in conflict situations was just orders of magnitude more difficult. There were 112 major centers of psychohistoric prediction and thousands of minor ones. The formidable stability of the Second Galactic Empire had long been reduced to shambles.
On the eighty-seventh day, the simulated Splendid Wisdom was sacked by a vengeful alliance of enemies.
By this time Eron Osa was no longer under house arrest by a stunned Kon. His six-room apartment was an open command center. Admiral Kon had assigned ten of his aides to work with Eron. It made no sense anymore to break the game into a contest between two opponents— Kon’s staff, Eron, Scogil all had to work together just to keep track of what was going on as the math churned out the changing constraints.
Petunia was acting as Eron’s chief of staff and general gopher. Otaria of the Calmer Sea frantically plotted historical trends. Hiranimus Scogil worked overtime in his dungeon at full capacity. Eron, amazed by his ghoul, was now fully cognizant of why the living Scogil had made such heroic efforts to keep his fam out of enemy hands—its psychohistorical utilities alone were the equivalent of the brain power of ten men like the Founder.
On that eighty-seventy day Kon’s exhausted staff, which had grown over the campaign to include almost every student of the Lyceum, broke apart. With Splendid Wisdom sacked no one had the courage or wit or energy to continue. It was generally understood that errors had accumulated to the point where the game was describing a low-probability future.
Instead of continuing, they had a party in Kon’s main command center overlooking the simulacrum of the galaxy, now half washed in blue. Desks were overturned. Decorations festooned the equipment. A few psychohistorians could be found asleep on the floor. Others yelled and rioted and threw hard bread rolls in mock warfare. With his game, Eron had pushed the whole Lyceum across the no-man’s-land of the mental topozones they knew as reality into the chaotic neural activity of strange viewpoints and impossible stimuli.
The Lyceum became, for a few days, a genteel madhouse.
Normally brain activity flips back and forth across the boundaries twixt stability and chaos in the mind’s ever-active war between knowing and the need to learn—this outpost ridge temporarily chaotic, that beachhead stable for the moment, the front flowing in battle flux across the neural net.
On quiet days the mind stays stable by using old solutions. On other days some internal field marshal calls for an offensive and drives his troops against chaos. To conquer chaos one must learn. To maintain stability one must know.
What were the lessons of the surprising mathematical collapse of the Second Empire? The outcome was debated everywhere over the next week in an orgy of learning. The unexpected nature of the game had agitated the mind of each participant, blowing like a hurricane through the topozone sails of their neural barges, at the same time that the historical topozones of the galactic model were being battered and forced into recomputation by the same hurricane.
Eron slipped among the groups, listening, dropping hints. He knew what had happened. He wanted his “students” to figure it out for themselves.
Hadn’t the Pscholars persisted in the fatalistic mind-set of the final hopeless centuries of the First Empire in spite of the fact that the math of psychohistory contained a plethora of alternate futures? Over the millennial Interregnum, hadn’t their Plan atrophied into a land of supervised determinism? Wasn’t it true that the Plan was no longer seen as a vigorous alternate future that led away from the chaos of Imperial collapse, but as the only true future—with the Fellowship as its guardian?
A casual remark by Eron about Scogil’s Smythosian connection immoderately grew into a quicky seminar. This curious group already knew how the Smythosians could destroy the Second Empire with only a millionth of the Second Empire’s resources at its command. But no one knew who they were or where they had come from.
Even Eron relied on the stories by Petunia and Scogil. As a late product of the chaos surrounding the False Revival, an amorphous group grew up very gradually in the region of the Thousand Suns of the Helmar Rift around the astonishing relics of an embittered Tamic Smythos.
Smythos was a recluse. Smythosians adopted his reclusiveness out of fear of the Fellowship, their milieu only gradually expanding from the Thousand Suns of the Helmar Rift into the safety of the stellar bracken.
Smythos was caustic in his condemnation of the Pscholars’ lack of interest in things technical; he had acquired a love of machines from his Scav foster parents. Smythosians sympathized; their roots lay in the peoples of the Thousand Suns who had supplied sybaritic Lakgan with its pleasure machines, who had invented the tuned psychic probe under military contract with Lakgan, and been among the first builders of the personal familiar, who had been major suppliers of the legendary zenoli mercenaries. It was natural that they developed a technical expertise.
The Smythosians never operated from major centers of Second Empire bureaucracy. They never developed a Plan of their own. Loosely associated, they remained anarchists; every mm to his own local future, their only common goal an opposition to the rigid shackles of the Pscholars. They could not have developed otherwise. Every psychohistoric move they made to leave the Plan was statistically noted and opposed from Splendid Wisdom. They responded by using psychohistory to oppose the opposition and over the centuries became masters of mask and stealth and subterfuge. And masters of the short-term plan.
