Eron slipped the smooth ovoid back into the Hyperlord’s hand. “I'll give you a demonstration after my talk. It is a genuine Prime Radiant, but I warn you, it is a thing difficult even for a good mathematician to use and read.”
The Hyperlord’s mechanical black mask twisted into a triumphant grimace. “I have the mathists who can use it once you show them how. They are all here to listen to your presentation.”
Two hands took two of his three horns from behind. “We meet again,” said the familiar voice. When he looked up he saw the smile of broad lips beneath the crocodile teeth and plumes. The Frightfulperson of his dreams.
Homed man and crocodile woman wandered back together toward the meeting chamber. His eyes were alert. A sloping floor. Two exits at the top. Two exits at the bottom on each side of the podium. A small holobeam room behind the podium. “Let’s walk while we wait for our audience. I’d like to thank you in private for salvaging my life’s work.” He found the wall behind the holobeam room and placed a wall-breaker without her knowing what he was doing. One could always distract the eyes with pleasant chitchat. A couple of sensor drops later, he wrapped a bejeweled belt around her waist. It was a personal forcefield generator built somewhere in the Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift, probably in imitation of an old Periphery design pioneered during the Interregnum, more elaborately disguised than the belt he wore to hold up the pants of his own costume. She didn’t have to know; he could activate her defenses at any time. “Thank you. And you don’t even know my name.”
“Your Hyperlord friend called you a Mermaid of the Calmer Sea.”
“I’m half fish, half fowl to him. You may call me Otaria.” “I wasn’t certain I’d be here. I’m not sure of your security.” That wasn’t true. Scogil wasn’t sure of the security. “If I suddenly decide to move fast, it will be for a good reason. Follow me instantly.”
“Our security is the best. The Hyperlord has been in this business a long time.”
“But you trusted me?”
“You’re desperate, like we are,” she said.
“I don’t understand your desperation.”
She smiled and, in the lonely corridor, tipped up her crocodile teeth so that he could see her face. “It’s an intellectual desperation. That can be as terrible as not having a fam or a house or food or air. I notice you have a new fam.”
“Black market. I like its math utilities.”
“You’re more sure of yourself.”
“Of course. I have a fam.”
While they walked back to the meeting, his fam read the scattered sensors. Nothing. Scogil was probably sweating in his dungeon for naught. He sent a reassuring message through to his alter ego.
Ushers were already at the entrances. Snooper dampers were in place. The black-masked Hyperlord brought the meeting to order and was enthusiastic in his sedition. He introduced Eron Osa as the prophet of a New Interregnum, the real one, the one that the Founder had delayed.
It wasn’t that simple. But Eron spoke anyway. He dispensed with his trihomed mask. He was here as Eron Osa. His specialty was the historical forces that led to instability—and unpredictable events.
He sketched for them the undulating topozones of historical phase space and how their multidimensional surfaces were calculated. He stressed the perturbations that elitist secrecy placed upon the topozone parameters. A topozone’s surface was the boundary between stability and chaos. While measurable social vectors remained inside their topozones, the sweep of the future could be foretold. But once these parameters moved across their abstract confines in any region of the Galaxy, the future became uncertain for that locale. Then, like wildfire, unchecked chaos could rage in a sudden conflagration, perhaps across the Galaxy—or die out for no apparent cause.
Psychohistorians were like firefighters. They could hose down areas, set standards and regulations, insure that fire never started. But there was danger in never having a fire. Flammables accumulated; when they went, whole regions went with them in an inferno at the whim of the wind. Stasis was the danger. Deadwood accumulated during stasis. Stable topozones collapsed in upon stasis like a wet forest drying out under months of sun.
Precise psychohistorical monitoring, with a single future as the goal, a Plan, could drive the social parameters safely inward from the chaos-touching boundaries of the historical topozone, but like a single kind of weather, such a relentless sun might dry out the forest and set the stage for a topozone collapse, followed by a fire, a conflagration, an interregnum. Eron detailed why no monolithic organization with a single mind could easily plan a history to suit everyone. The unsatisfied gathered slowly in the byways, spiritually dying, finally to become tinder, finally to produce secretly their own psychohistorians in an attempt to control their own future.
The Founder faced such a situation. The stasis of the First Empire had become so great that unpredictable historical chaos could be its only consequence. His best mathematics was blinded by turbulent visions of fire. He could not predict into the Interregnum. All he could do was find a distant firebreak, where the stars were thin, and set up a race of firemen who could build around themselves an expanding topozone of stability that slowly moved out to control the flames and replant the ashes. Inside that topozone the Founder could predict
Now conditions were different. Psychohistorical monitoring, itself, in the absence of psychohistorical knowledge, was creating the stasis. Eron had difficulty explaining this thesis to an audience composed of illiterates who had been forbidden to learn the elements of social prediction lest chaos prevail. He had to fall back on analogy.
Osa asked his masked group to consider a murderer swinging an ax at the head of his victim.
The victim judges the trajectory of the ax and predicts that it will divide his skull. He ducks. This falsifies his prediction, thus proving that predicting is a waste of effort, right? Eron noted that his new methods of Arekean iteration converged on a future that was acceptable to all predictors, disadvantaging only those who refused to predict. No matter how many predictors there were, no predictor could wield an advantage over any other predictor. He characterized this kind of iteration as the mathematics of negotiation.
Osa asked his listeners to consider a primitive planetary economy about to fall into economic disaster.
Suppose each citizen of the planet is capable of predicting the disaster by a cause-and-effect deduction—then it won’t happen. The prophecy fails, thus telling us that the ability to predict is useless—right?
On the other hand, suppose only one elite citizen has enough grasp of economics to predict the nature of the disaster. This single man is in no position to prevent the catastrophe—but he can use his knowledge to profit from it. He can carve out a fortune and from that commanding position dominate the new economy to be built on the ashes of the old. Prediction is then useful when it serves the interest of an elite who can predict—right?
Osa asked the assembly to consider a Galaxy about to fall into war and ignorance and chaos.
Suppose all men have the psychohistorical knowledge to predict a disaster abhorrent to them and to identify their coming part in it—then it won’t happen. The prediction fails, thus invalidating the methods of psychohistory and making them useless, right?
On the other hand, suppose a group of Pscholars have enough grasp of psychohistory to see into the nature of the imminent galactic disaster. Suppose this tiny group is able to apply minute forces at critical places so that a thousand years later they are in a commanding position to dominate the new order they have created from the rubble of the old. They have lied about their presence, hiding from the rest of us while they accumulate power and special privilege. They remain misers with their methodology, unwilling to share their predictions. But their predictions come true. Psychohistory works only when it serves the benevolent self-interest of an elite, right?