Nejirt Kambu tried to hide a smile. “You suspect a conspiracy?”
“We do not need a conspiracy to account for the disturbance.” The “Crazy Admiral” was used to needling and never lost his temper. Konn was chided widely for his conspiracy theories. Jars Hanis and his crowd even made a regular issue of it “There’s an old saying that if you kiss a girl on Ixno you can start a chain of events that leads to violent revolution on Splendid Wisdom—it would be easy to assume that the whole Ulmat perturbation began with something as innocent as a kiss. Then the situation is not dangerous at all.” Konn couldn’t resist a note of sarcasm. “Then even a novice like you could handle it” He paused for emphasis. “But if it were a conspiracy...”
“Highly improbable,” said Nejirt indulgently. What he meant was impossible. “You know that.”
I do, do I? What Konn hadn’t told Nejirt Kambu was that the recently conceived Ulmat correctives were designed on the assumption that there was a conspiracy. A bluff, of course, but sometimes, when one took a shot in the dark at the sound of a twig snapping, one was rewarded with the discreetly muffled flight of surprised feet. That was, in itself, more information than could ever be deduced from the mere snapping of a twig. “Just for the sake of argument suppose someone was deliberately trying to move the Ulmat beyond the sight of all Pscholars in order to create a staging area for a major revolt”
Nejirt’s polite amusement remained. “That someone would be so ineffective that we wouldn’t even notice. The deviation from normal fluctuation wouldn’t be measurable.” “Oh? Because...?”
“Sir, you are trying to force me to say that the interference could be measurable because your conspirator could be utilizing some crude form of psychohistorical manipulation?” “Indulge me.”
The boy backstepped. No traps for him. “The Founder set up Faraway so that as it developed politically the Pscholars could...”
“... could do what we have done,” rumbled an annoyed Konn. “Set up a stable political climate in which the leadership of Splendid Wisdom is accepted because it is effective. We predict disasters and prevent them. I admit we are good at it, especially me. List me some disasters.”
Nejirt laughed at an obviously rhetorical request.
The Admiral ground on. “Let’s skip over mundane calamities and the ones we handle after the fact by managing their consequences. Let’s talk about a real upheaval—somebody confronting us with our own mathematics. Do you really expect that our methods will never be duplicated? Knowing what we expect to happen, they could counter us.” “But if they were that good, they would come to the same conclusions we do and implement the same solutions. Converging technology. After seventy thousand years don’t all aircraft have the same optimal forms? There would be a period of discord, then the two groups would merge.”
Konn was furious but did not challenge; he nodded in concession. It was not agreement he felt What he was concluding pained him—his mind had filled with an abrupt decision not to work with this brilliant young man in whom he had placed so much hope. He was bitterly disappointed. He is not my son. How many well-trained blind conservatives could the Lyceum graduate in one year? Too damn many.
Still, Hahukum Konn couldn't have forced the discussion further even had he wanted to. The Admiral was an intuitive thinker, not a verbal one. The boy he disagreed with was right by all the symbolic arguments known to Konn. They had been through the same school and forged from the same curriculum, and, aside from a different level of maturity, they thought with the same words. Certainly the Founder had established the central result rather definitively.
The overwhelming probability was that any infant group trying to duplicate the modus operandi of psychohistory would be subsumed by the parent body, the amalgamation being driven by self-interest. If two organizations were practicing psychohistory independently, their forecasts would countermand each other and thus become useless. What could be the incentive for mastering a very difficult subject only to choose to use it in a way that made it ineffective?
If everyone were free to choose a different future for mankind, the tug-of-war would ensure the realization of nobody's future—all freedom would be lost in gridlock and all men would become the slaves of chaos. Total freedom ere-ates the ultimate dungeon. Whenever a man decides to expand his degrees of freedom by doing something really sassy, like taking up residence in a sunspot, he is soon locked into a situation in which he has no degrees of freedom at all. There are always boundaries to freedom.
The Founder had chosen to pursue a political system that defined near-optimal boundaries. Then he had gone on to create a society that maximized general freedoms by eliminating foolish futures. He had never pretended that this was to be done by fatalizing the lives of individual men—any more than an engineer would try to force a deterministic path on each atom passing through an optimized heat engine.
The Founder’s proof that only a single psychohistory would evolve (as a single physics had long ago evolved) was lengthy and tortured, but it had been refined by twenty-seven centuries of polishing. Konn of the Second Rank had been over the proof personally and whatever flaw it might contain, he was not the mathematician to find it—he was no theoretician; his talent was a nose that quivered when data smelled slighdy different than theory tasted.
Long ago Konn had accepted the whole thesis that within the political system created by the Founder, it was impossible for any group out there among the stars to duplicate psychohistory. He would have said that the work of the Pscholars during the Interregnum had made it impossible. Eveifnow his best logic yielded the Founder’s scenario. But such traditional reasoning no longer moved him. Hahukum Konn had worked his way up from Splendid’s bedrock to Second Rank by never taking anything for granted. His eighty-three years had taught him to be a man of iron principle. He never, never finagled data to fit theory. And the data...
The data contradicted the Founder!
What disturbed Konn was that the Ulmat wasn’t the only anomaly. There were many more. There were fully thirty-seven perturbations he couldn’t account for to his liking. In a Galaxy of a hundred quadrillion humans, it was hardly surprising that some locations resisted the long-term direction of the Pscholars’ Fellowship. Yes, chance alone could be responsible. But psychohistory, a gambler who owned the house, had ages ago mastered the herding of chance. (Even the weather on Splendid Wisdom was managed by the deft application of manageable forces: evaporation towers, control of atmospheric perfluorocarbons, etc.) That made these thirty-seven trouble spots peculiar; for more than a century they had been maverick. It was as if the weather had developed its own goals and cunning. Meteorologists have no equations for intelligent weather.
Mindless and unminded chaos will lunge out of its .masking cover at unpredictable times to wipe out the finest forecast of man and computer, creating vast regions of turbulent history requiring the finest of the Pscholars’ resources to calm. The Second Empire depended upon the vigilance and eye of men like Hahukum Konn for its very survival; he was one of those patient predators who scanned the Cimmerian borders of predictability with a cat’s green eye. And he was afraid that they were now facing a chaos which had evolved enough intelligence to oppose psychohistory. That was a chilling thought. Evil is no ally of morality. Evil would be willing to destroy the whole of the stability that the Founder had achieved.