Petunia had been picked up by Bama’s men and had been co-opted by a relieved Scogil to act as Osa-Scogil’s chief of staff and general gopher to beef up their undermanned group. She ran reconnaissance into enemy territory and flirted with their resolute rivals. Otaria of the Calmer Sea frantically plotted historical trends. Hiranimus 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 the eighty-seventh simulated year Splendid Wisdom was sacked (virtually) by a vengeful alliance of enemies. Admiral Konn, ever the dramatist, brought a real sword, a genuine fake he had picked up on Rith, for the surrender ceremony.
And his exhausted staff, which had grown over the campaign to include almost every available student of the Lyceum not working for Osa-Scogil, 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 could only be describing a low-probability, if sobering, future.
Instead of continuing the simulation to the hundredth year as originally planned, a spontaneous party began to happen in Konn’s main command center overlooking the simulacrum of the Galaxy, now half washed in blue. Desks were overturned. Decorations festooned the equipment. Dignified Pscholars could be found asleep on the floor. Others yelled and rioted and threw hard bread rolls in mock warfare. The Lyceum became, for a span of watches, a genteel madhouse, the final fling at life of a doomed bunker just before the enemy troops break through. With his game, Eron had pushed the whole Lyceum across the no-man’s-land of the mental topozones that represented familiar reality and into the chaotic neural activity of strange viewpoints and impossible stimuli. The results were so unsettling that no one involved had to be on drugs to behave outlandishly.
What were the lessons of the surprising mathematical collapse of the Second Empire? The outcome was debated everywhere in an orgy of learning. The unexpected nature of the game had agitated the mind of each participant: to reject the collapse as “unreal” was to reject the underlying mathematics, but the rejection of the underlying mathematics was a rejection of the foundation stone of the Second Empire which...
Osa-Scogil 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 tht 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 kind 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 discussion. This ad hoc seminar already knew how groups like the Smythosians could destroy the Second Empire with only a millionth of the Second Empire’s resources at their command. But no one knew who they were or where they had come from or why the Egg hadn’t been predicted.
Scogil, through Eron, would say nothing about his home-worlds or his education, but he didn’t mind telling the story of Tamic Smythos, who had, after all, been trained at the Lyceum when it was a besieged fortress set in the shambled chaos of what was now called the “First” Sack.
Nothing was known of the life and wanderings of Smythos for the twenty years between his escape from Zural and his appearance on Horan, not even the secret work he did for Faraway’s Chancellor Linus. On Horan Smythos took up mechanical engineering, then fell into an invisible life as a self-imposed recluse, appearing in public only to earn money, spending most of his time alone writing long rambling documents for his own edification, rants, philosophical musings, incomplete psychomathematical treatments of odd problems, all stuffed in boxes when he lost interest or found a new interest. He died a recluse. His boxes, in storage, remained unread. The warehouse changed hands. A foreman, in charge of cleaning out the warehouse... As a late product of the chaos surrounding the False Revival, an amorphous cult grew up very gradually in the region of the Thousand Suns Beyond the Helmar Rift around these astonishing relics of the embittered Tamic Smythos. Among the papers, developed in detail, were some of the seed ideas of psychohistory.
Scogil related the tale as cautionary advice to anyone who was thinking of building his destiny upon a foundation of secrecy. Secrets have a way of slipping through the finest mesh. (But Scogil kept his own secret; he told no one how the Helmarian Oversee had stumbled upon a Smythosian cell and what they did with what they found.)
When the lessons of the game were well on their way to assimilation within the Lyceum, Eron Osa gave his first speech to a quiet audience, his theme the failures of the Pscholars and the failures of groups like the Smythosians.
The Pscholars had failed from too much power. They had ceased to mine psychohistory for low-probability futures worth exploring. The Plan was, after all, a low-probability future discovered by the Founder. As an elite they had deliberately failed to explore the high probability that they would not be able to hold on to their monopoly of psychohistoric expertise. It was that decision which had produced the present crisis.
Worse, they had neglected psychohistory as a tool to explore undesirable futures (such as the high probability that Splendid Wisdom would be resacked within the century). Back some time in the Interregnum, psychohistorians had forgotten that one of the main uses of prediction was to position the savant to falsify the prediction. They had used their power only to avoid deviations from the Plan. Mankind’s brain had evolved as a tool to predict undesirable futures in time to avoid them, not to predict highly probable futures that needed no intervention.
Other emerging groups—like the Smythosians, like the Regulation—had fallen into the trap of opposition. For centuries they remained small, content to oppose the Fellowship locally in invisible ways, afraid to operate in the open because of the Pscholars’ known fiercely guarded monopoly. The more they tested the Plan, the more the Fellowship reacted—until the Lyceum had evolved a whole unit whose sole purpose was to oppose the actions of the diffuse Counter-Fellowships—the survivors being those groups who were best at counterevolving a secret mathematics of prediction of their own, and, inured to the role of opposition, eventually were driven to use their ultimate weapon against the Second Empire. The Pscholars had no defense against a populace who could now visit their local archive and find all they might want to know about psychohistory. Long before the present crisis, the goal had become the destruction of the Pscholar’s power rather than the implementation of a more flexible Plan.
In his rounds and talks Eron was preparing the ground for the Second Hundred Year War in which he intended to teach the Lyceum a second lesson. He already had thirty students pretrained in his Arekean methodology, tools he had deliberately withheld from use in the First War, a purely classical event. During the Second Hundred Year War he hoped to sweep the entire simulated Galaxy; he could envisage no defense against a mathematics able to force conflict resolution. Arekean iteration did not contain within itself a lethal vulnerability like the need for secrecy built so integrally into the classical mathematics of the Founder. Even Scogil should be impressed enough to make his final break with the Oversee, and then...