The trial of die ex-Rector went slowly. The Admiral used it adroitly to induce the supporters of Jars Hanis to attack where the Admiral was strongest. Being accustomed to following a martinet, and now deprived of that leadership, they fell into disagreeing factions. Konn’s smaller coterie decimated each faction, one at a time, counter-predicting their every move. In the old Imperial Navy, Hahukum would have risen to legendary status.
In the meantime, while the Admiral was occupied with his own personal vendetta, Eron prepared for the decisive event. He picked his thirty warriors from among the younger students who were most intrigued by the challenge of psychohistorian versus psychohistorian, prediction versus counter-prediction. Testifying at the trial had been an interesting place to spread the seeds of heresy, but the soil was poor. His thirty students were a different matter. In training them, he relied on Scogil’s expertise as a tutor, giving them small conflicts to manage in which two sides, both wielding classical tools, converged to stalemate. Then Eron would join the team and show them how to use Arekean iteration to resolve the stalemate. He was only a step ahead of his students, since he was having to relearn his own methods as he went along as well as teach them to Scogil.
The First Hundred Year War began only when the Admiral was ready to give it his full attention—after First Rank Jars Hanis had been tried, found guilty by his peers (carefully picked by Hahukum), and sentenced. Eron knew the time had come when he saw the Admiral’s beatific grin.
“What have you done with him?” Meaning the ex-Rector.
“Not what I wanted. I had to make deals. That’s politics. No boiling in oil. Execution would have created lingering problems. And much as I would have enjoyed it, shredding his fam was not an option; it is one of the unwritten rules of psychohistory that you do not do to an enemy what he has so heinously done to you. Bad form. You have to think of something worse.”
Anything could be expected from a man who would willingly defossilize a Flying Fortress and pilot it. “Is that wise?” asked Eron cautiously.
“Wisdom is for old men. I’m still young at heart! First we start with solitary confinement. For a social gadfly like Hanis, that’s a good beginning. I’ve found an unused lab in which the life-support system for the Andromeda expedition was designed, with its entertainment module already stripped out—but the bare facilities lack in imagination. Anything so grim would drive Hanis to such despair that he would wither away and die. We don’t want that to happen to our enemy. To prolong the torture, one has to provide hope where there is no hope. I have discovered an exemplary way of giving Hanis hope. Hence my good mood.” It was not the Admiral’s way to finish a story while he had an attentive audience. He enjoyed winning battles and prolonging his victory; he merely grinned and changed the subject. He was ready for the next big battle and eager to start. “So, Lord General Osa-Scogil, are your troops well trained and their boots polished?”
“As much as a ragtag army of volunteers can be.”
“Good. How do we begin this silly gentleman’s war of yours? Do we cut the Deck of Fate and high card gets to shoot first, or what?”
Opening positions were strategically important, so they spent several watches haggling over initial conditions. Both sides agreed that realism was important, but they didn’t always agree on what was real. The Admiral was to begin with control of the entire bureaucracy of the Second Empire. That was a given. But who was receiving the Eggs? Who could use them? Where were they coming from? Scogil wouldn’t have told if he had known, and the Admiral understood and accepted that constraint.
It was a matter of estimating probabilities, and from those probabilities allocating resources and attributes. The teams didn’t always concur. Eron insisted that there were more insects in the woodwork than the Admiral wanted to acknowledge or were known to Scogil, estimating that there were at least seven hundred independent precritical psychohistorical nodes about to emerge, all of which would go critical very quickly once they learned about (and found a source of) Coron’s Eggs. Scogil didn’t believe his mate, but the Admiral had been sobered by Eron’s prediction of a psychohistorical crisis that hadn’t even shown up on the Standard Model—and thus was willing to concede the point. The Hundred Year War began quietly as these things do, its basic strategies evident from the beginning.
As the defender of the Second Empire, the Admiral was concerned with the total control of the Galaxy, the balanced and fair-minded control of a long tradition. Trade was regu-
lated so that one region didn’t grow wealthy at the expense of another. Of thirty million inhabited systems, only seven were undergoing population crisis. Only three systems showed signs of a political crisis that might escalate out of hand within the century. Culture and cultural exchange were thriving. Galactic standards were regulated in a way that encouraged commerce. The scene was nothing like the desperate affair that the Founder had inherited while he was inventing psychohistory.
The countervailing strategy emerged as different nodes began to develop their own centers of psychohistoric expertise. Local regions began to optimize their own futures with less and less regard for their neighbors. The level of conflict rose, most of it unintentional. What was very good for one star system might not be so good for the next. To compete, the less endowed systems made stronger alliances than normal with Splendid Wisdom or began to aggressively develop their own ability to counter-predict their neighbors.
The Admiral’s staff valiantly tried to rebalance the Empire but normal corrective measures became less and less effective. Some systems acquiesced for the good of all, others counter-predicted the corrections on the theory that their psychohistorians could do a better job. The Admiral tried to bring all psychohistorians into the fold of the Fellowship— and failed. He tried to build alliances with the emerging states with only spotty success.
The disintegration of the Fellowship’s monopoly brought swifter change than anyone had supposed possible. Osa-Scogil wasn’t at all sure of how the Admiral was taking the grinding down of all that he believed in and began to worry when he received a disturbing but cautiously worded message from his mother (Eron’s). She was quietly alarmed by an investigative team which had arrived on Agander and was methodically digging into Eron’s first twelve years.
It took less than three months and only eighty-two simulated years on the most powerful historical computer 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 three orders of magnitude. Eight billion youths were being drafted every year to study psychohistory in an effort by each faction to outmaneuver die others. Psychohistory had not become irrelevant; it was essential to the multitude of war efforts. Accurate prediction in conflict situations was just 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.
At this advanced stage of the game the criminal conspirators of the Regulation were no longer under house arrest by a stunned Konn. Hanis’ old apartment was an open command center. Admiral Konn had assigned ten of his aides to work liaison with Osa-Scogil’s group. It made no sense anymore to break the game into a contest between two opponents—Konn’s staff, Eron, Scogil, Otaria all had to work together just to keep track of what was going on as the math churned out the changing constraints.