PSYCHOHIST0RICAL
CRISIS
. . . . .
DONALD KINGSBURY
TOR®
ATOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK
“A deep and thoughtful re-exploration, shining fresh light on one of science-fiction’s biggest ideas” David Brin
“Galactic empire imagined with twenty-first century insight... Donald Kingsbury has revisited a twentieth century epic—and produced a new masterpiece filled with wit and invention.”
—Vemor Yinge
“He takes on the central problems of a science fiction master-work, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, envisioning it anew for our time. The agenda of control in Asimov’s psychohistory, here only lightly disguised, Kingsbury sees as a challenge to free will and to the practical uses of prediction itself. Forecasts can be immensely useful, especially if we can make sure they do not come true.” —Gregory Benford
“A bold and fascinating attempt to reimagine a science fiction classic ” —Kirkus Reviews
“A convincing and fresh simulacrum of the world of the 761st century.” —Publishers Weekly
“Kingsbury continues exploration of the universe in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels in his own imposing book. . . . The real strength [is] ... all the fascinating characters (e.g., Pscholar Hahukum Komi, with his flying replica of a B-17, and Frighfulpersons Katana and her daughter Otaria, who live up to their tides) and settings... not to mention the number of satirical touches Kingsbury scores on history and sex. ... a very good, very absorbing [novel].” —Booklist
“Kingsbury has succeeded brilliantly in catching the flavor of his honored model, and matches the best of it in pacing and in utilization of his conceptual resources. Isaac would have enjoyed this story and so will you.”
—Asimov's SF on “Historical Crisis,” from which Psychohistorical Crisis was expanded.
NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed*’ to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
PSYCHOHSTORICAL CRISIS
Copyright © 2001 by Donald Kingsbury
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
www.donaldkingsbury.com
Edited by David G. Hartwell
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN: 0-765-34195-6
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001041540
First edition: December 2001
First mass market edition: October 2002
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Viola
who dropped into my life like a song from the stars.
Acknowledgments
A. E. van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, and Poul Anderson opened up the avid mind of a teenager to the vast reaches of Galactic Empire. Jim Lambek taught me enough mathematics to think about the problems that psychohistory posed. David Hartwell collared me at Readercon and convinced me to take this story off the shelf where it had been moldering. Gregory Bedford had useful suggestions for the short version that appeared in his Far Futures anthology. While I wrote this longer version David’s insights into the craft of novel writing proved invaluable. He also induced me into feeding his cats at Pleasantville, where I might write undistracted—except for his vast collection of books. Moshe Feder took on the hard job of keeping my slow hand moving with comments and suggestions as he watched over my shoulder via e-mail. And bless the unsung heroes in the Tor production group who gracefully taught me the grammar rules my rebellious teenage mind had refused to learn and who managed to find a way to display an impossibly long title. And Tom Doherty for being there and making books like mine possible.
PROLOG
In all of the more than seven hundred centuries of mankind's recorded interstellar wanderings and the more than six hundred centuries since the discovery of the first crude hyperdrives, there have been many regional stellar interregnums. But there has been only one galaxy-wide disintegration which leaves us in awe of its breadth and scope. No part of the Galactic Ecumen escaped.
The Dark Interregnum between the First and Second Galactic Empires—-beginning with the Nacreome Revolt in the 12,116th year of the Galactic Era and ending with the Pax Pscholaris of 13,157 GE—is often referred to as the Dismal Intellectual Age but, in fact, was a period of renascent, even unexpected, scientific achievement...Many centers of... notably on the Periphery world of Faraway...
Introduced by exiled Imperial scientists, the walnut-size atomic power pod revolutionized... Faraway's transmutator was a fundamentally new... The levitator...
But the dynamism of Faraway was not the only source of innovation. During the last three centuries of the disastrous deciine of Splendid Wisdom’s twelve millennia of Empire, the list of scientific inventions of non-imperial and supposedly barbarous...
...the Warlords of sybaritic Lakgan, making an abrupt entrance onto the galactic stage in the fourth century of the Dark Interregnum, disturbed the smooth flow of history... while reuniting more than three million stellar systems. It is little realized that the overextended conquests of the False Re viva! were driven by the achievements of the secluded Crafters of the Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift who, for centuries, had held a Lakgan contract to dabble in the science of pleasure-center stimulation. Their totally unforeseen development of a tuned form of the psychic probe, allowing a high-bandwidth linkage between the human brain and an exterior transducer, caused a major perturbation in our Founder’s Great Plan of Galactic Revival by moving human behavior, en masse, outside of the original parameters of human psychology.
During the early centuries of its debut, the tuned probe’s major utility was unappreciated—it was used mainly as a method to control the emotions of one’s opponents, notably by the brilliant Warlord Citizen of Lakgan, Cloun-the-Stubbom, who unleashed upon the Galaxy a cadre of minstrels adept at playing a visi-harmonar instrument that controlled and set human motivation. Only gradually did the tuned probe come into use as a tool to access a portable quantum-state device that has come to be known to us as the personal familiar. Today such a linkage with a lam” seems obvious; a modem man can hardly understand how, for eighty millennia, the unaided mind...
Hidden from the tumultuous politics of the Interregnum, a covert group of psychohistorians, whom the Founder left to monitor his work in secret, spent the greater part of the two centuries that followed the Deviation exploring the limits of the tuned probe and integrating its effects into the mathematics of a Revised Plan. This work by the Founder’s elite Pscholars eventually became the basis of the Second Empire, which. .