“Meanwhile, by observing them, I have learned much that was never known before, about what went into the making of us.”

  “I could have believed that. I could have believed that your interferences and your ultimate annihilations of history after history were acts of pity as well as science. You claimed they could be restarted if ever you determined what conditions would better them. It did seem strange that you set one line of them—or more?—not in Earth’s goodly past but in the hard world of today. It seemed twice strange that you were reluctant to have this particular essay brought to light. But I assumed that you, with your long experience and superior mentality, had reasons. Your attempt at secrecy might have been to avoid lengthy justifications to your kindred. I did not know, nor venture to judge. I would have left that to them.

  “But then Kalava arrived.”

  Another mind-silence falls. At last Gaia says, very softly through the night, “Yes. Again humans live in the material universe.”

  “How long has it been?” asks Wayfarer with the same quietness.

  “I made the first of them about fifty thousand years ago. Robots in human guise raised them from infancy. After that they were free.”

  “And, no doubt, expanding across the planet in their Stone Age, they killed off those big game animals. Yes, human. But why did you do it?”

  “That humankind might live once more.” A sigh as of time itself blowing past. “This is what you and those whom you serve will never fully understand. Too few humans went into them; and those who did, they were those who wanted the stars. You,” every other node in the galactic brain, “have not felt the love of Earth, the need and longing for the primordial mother, that was in these many and many who remained with me. I do.”

  How genuine is it? wonders Wayfarer. How sane is she? “Could you not be content with your emulations?” he asks.

  “No. How possibly? I cannot make a whole cosmos for them. I can only make them, the flesh-and-blood them, for the cosmos. Let them live in it not as machines or as flickerings within a machine, but as humans.”

  “On a planet soon dead?”

  “They will, they must forge survival for themselves. I do not compel them, I do not dominate them with my nearness or any knowledge of it. That would be to stunt their spirits, turn them into pet animals or worse. I simply give guidance, not often, in the form of divinities in whom they would believe anyway at this stage of their societies, and simply toward the end of bringing them to a stable, high-technology civilization that can save them from the sun.”

  “Using what you learn from your shadow folk to suggest what the proper course of history may be?”

  “Yes. How else should I know? Humankind is a chaotic phenomenon. Its actions and their consequences cannot be computed from first principles. Only by experiment and observation can we learn something about the nature of the race.”

  “Experiments done with conscious beings, aware of their pain. Oh, I see why you have kept most of your doings secret.”

  “I am not ashamed,” declares Gaia. “I am proud. I gave life back to the race that gave life to us. They will make their own survival, I say. It may be that when they are able, they will move to the outer reaches of the Solar System, or some of them somehow even to the stars. It may be they will shield Earth or damp the sun. It is for them to decide, them to do. Not us, do you hear me? Them.”

  “The others yonder may feel differently. Alarmed or horrified, they may act to put an end to this.”

  “Why?” Gaia demands. “What threat is it to them?”

  “None, I suppose. But there is a moral issue. What you are after is a purely human renascence, is it not? The former race went up in the machines, not because it was forced but because it chose, because that was the way by which the spirit could live and grow forever. You do not want this to happen afresh. You want to perpetuate war, tyranny, superstition, misery, instincts in mortal combat with each other, the ancient ape, the ancient beast of prey.”

  “I want to perpetuate the lover, parent, child, adventurer, artist, poet, prophet. Another element in the universe. Have we machines in our self-sureness every answer, every dream, that can ever be?” Wayfarer hesitates. “It is not for me to say, it is for your peers.”

  “But now perhaps you see why I have kept my secrets and why I have argued and, yes, fought in my fashion against the plans of the galactic brain. Someday my humans must discover its existence. I can hope that then they will be ready to come to terms with it. But let those mighty presences appear among them within the next several thousand years—let signs and wonders, the changing of the heavens and the world, be everywhere—what freedom will be left for my children, save to cower and give worship? Afterward, what destiny for them, save to be animals in a preserve, forbidden any ventures that might endanger them, until at last, at best, they too drain away into the machines?” Wayfarer speaks more strongly than before. “Is it better, what they might make for themselves? I cannot say. I do not know. But neither, Gaia, do you. And . . . the fate of Christian and Laurinda causes me to wonder about it.”

  “You know,” she says, “that they desired humanness.”

  “They could have it again.”

  Imagine a crowned head shaking. “No. I do not suppose any other node would create a world to house their mortality, would either care to or believe it was right.”

  “Then why not you, who have so many worlds in you?”

  Gaia is not vindictive. A mind like hers is above that. But she says, “I cannot take them. After such knowledge as they have tasted of, how could they return to me?” And to make new copies, free of memories that would weigh their days down with despair, would be meaningless. “Yet—there at the end, I felt what Christian felt.”

  “And I felt what Laurinda felt. But now they are at peace in us.”

  “Because they are no more. I, though, am haunted,” the least, rebellious bit, for a penalty of total awareness is that nothing can be ignored or forgotten. “And it raises questions which I expect Alpha will want answered, if answered they can be.”

  After a time that may actually be measurable less by quantum shivers than by the stars, Wayfarer says: “Let us bring those two back.”

  “Now it is you who are pitiless,” Gaia says.

  “I think we must.”

  “So be it, then.”

  The minds conjoin. The data are summoned and ordered. A configuration is established.

  It does not emulate a living world or living bodies. The minds have agreed that that would be too powerful an allurement and torment. The subjects of their inquiry need to think clearly; but because the thought is to concern their inmost selves, they are enabled to feel as fully as they did in life.

  Imagine a hollow darkness, and in it two ghosts who glimmer slowly into existence until they stand confronted before they stumble toward a phantom embrace.

  “Oh, beloved, beloved, is it you?” Laurinda cries.

  “Do you remember?” Christian whispers.

  “I never forgot, not quite, not even at the heights of oneness.”

  “Nor I, quite.”

  They are silent awhile, although the darkness shakes with the beating of the hearts they once had.

  “Again,” Laurinda says. “Always.”

  “Can that be?” wonders Christian.

  Through the void of death, they perceive one speaking: “Gaia, if you will give Laurinda over to me, I will take her home with Christian— home into Alpha.”

  And another asks: “Child, do you desire this? You can be of Earth and of the new humanity.”

  She will share in those worlds, inner and outer, only as a memory borne by the great being to whom she will have returned; but if she departs, she will not have them at all.

  “Once I chose you, Mother,” Laurinda answers.

  Christian senses the struggle she is waging with herself and tells her, “Do whatever you most wish, my dearest.”

  She turns back to him. “I will be with you. Forever with you.”

  And that too will be only as a memory, like him; but what they were will be together, as one, and will live on, unforgotten.

  “Farewell, child,” says Gaia.

  “Welcome,” says Wayfarer.

  The darkness collapses. The ghosts dissolve into him. He stands on the mountaintop ready to bear them away, a part of everything he has gained for those whose avatar he is.

  “When will you go?” Gaia asks him.

  “Soon,” he tells her: soon, home to his own oneness.

  And she will abide, waiting for the judgment from the stars.

  Donald Kingsbury is a mathematician and a former professor at McGill University. Now retired, he returns to a career noted for its originality and oblique views of humanity, as in such novels as Courtship Rite, The Moon Goddess and the Son, and in his trenchant short stories.

  In “Historical Crisis” he takes on the central problems of a science-fiction masterwork, 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.

  HISTORICAL CRISIS

  Donald Kingsbury

  1

  THE MILLENIAL INTERREGNUM between the First and Second Galactic Empires is often thought of as a Dark Intellectual Age, but, in fact, was a period of renascent, even unexpected, scientific achievement . . .

  First introduced on the Nacreome Periphery, the walnut-sized atomic power pod . . . In the next three centuries the list of scientific inventions . . .

  . . . the Warlords of sybaritic Lakgan, making an abrupt entrance onto the galactic stage in the fourth century, disturbed . . . while reuniting more than three million stellar systems. It is little realized that the overextended conquests of the False Revival were driven by the achievements of the secluded Crafters of the Thousand Suns of the Helmar Rift who, for centuries, had held a 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-band-width linkage between the human brain and an exterior transducer, caused a major perturbation in the 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 Stubborn, who unleashed upon the galaxy a cadre of minstrels adept at playing a visi-aural 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 fam seems obvious; a modem man can hardly understand how an unaided mind . . .

  The Shadow Pscholars spent the greater part of the next two centuries exploring the limits of the tuned probe and integrating its effects into the mathematics of a Revised Plan.

  —From the Interregnum Exhibit

  at the Bureau of Historical Sciences

  With eleven-twelfths of his mind gone, with only the wetware inside his skull, Eron Osa was struggling to focus on something he had forgotten. He sat upright in an aerochair, facing a wall that leaked urine, surrounded by the stark simplicity of a lower-level hotel apartment. What was left of a vital memory was on the tip of his tongue, but maddeningly unavailable.

  It galled him that he had been defeated. But about what?

  A search through the distant files of Splendid Wisdom’s main Imperial Archive was a desperate attempt to jog the tenuous pieces into place. Even that didn’t come easily. His hands were trying to work the lambent holograms of a comm console with awkward finger gestures. Mistakes infuriated him. He had to fill in behavioral blanks by reason, by trial and error. He couldn’t even remember what he was attempting to do. He did remember the urgency. Was it something important that he had written/discovered?

  Eron Osa might have called upon the aid of the “charity” fam that now rode in the high blue collar around his neck—indeed, the tuned probe that connected him to this auxiliary computer through the transducer at the back of his skull was under his neural control and could never make a slave of him—but that didn’t matter. It wouldn’t connect him to his fam; it was in symbiosis with theirs—a common-issue fam to aid a convicted criminal (treason) whose personal fam had been found guilty and executed. He could only guess what ersatz data this standard-issue mind held, what habits, what directives, what spy implants. Its motivations would not be Eron’s natural motivations. Better to run the archival quest using merely the limited abilities of his wetware.

  He cursed himself for not having made, in the past, a more strategic use of his organic memory. That gray mush seemed to contain only the vaguest impression of grand strategic issues—but unlimited details of the trivial. As Eron jumped through the Archives, erratically bringing up holograms of this item and that item, guided by hunches he did not understand, straining to remember, he found that his mind delivered to him not what he wanted, not pertinent associations, but bizarre memories.

  —a fugue of sexing with a sloe-eyed woman while playing truant from studying psychohistory. She was a wonderful tease. She had a full mouth that tapered into upturned lines and delicate fingers that seduced him into forgetting mathematics. They lay on linen with a border pattern of golden forsythia. Who was she?

  —images of rafting down a river on the planet of his birth, the pyre-trees ablaze on rocky banks. What planet?

  —a boy wandering through the famous stone library at Sewina that dated back to pre-interregnum times, when it had been a military barracks for officers of the Empire. Why had his life taken him there?

  Once, when his archival search led him into the rebuilding of Splendid Wisdom after the Sack, he was mentally flipped into what seemed to be his initiation as a Rank Seven Psychohistorian.

  —under an enormous transept that rose five stories above the heads of his fellow robed acolytes. A wash of unnatural awe, overwhelming. Immensity. Upreaching arms of stone and fiber and metal, delicate hues of light, ethereal sounds that healed the spirit. The architects put the whole of their souls into their magnificent interiors, because no building on crowded Splendid Wisdom could ever be viewed from its exterior. Had such a drama happened? Was this “memory” a wish or an accomplishment? Was he a psychologist?

  None of these reveries satisfied him. They were too vague, too unreal. Only when his search brought him near his fugitive goal did he feel ecstasy. The thrill came erratically, then was lost in illusive evasion. Sometimes he came close. Once when he was searching through a listing of Handler Theorems, he hallucinated upon the face of Hanis. Hanis! He recognized Hanis, both furious and sarcastic, taking the lapse of his student Eron Osa as a personal affront, chastising his young protégé for even thinking about publishing without first having his methodology reviewed by his superiors.

  Eron’s organic brain flashed with insight! Psychohistorians did not publish. Then he was a psychohistorian! Slyly he even knew why psychohistorians did not publish. The Fellowship was a secret society. If all men could predict history, then history became unpredictable and the Fellowship of Pscholars would lose its power to predict and control. To publish one’s methods of historical prediction was the ultimate sin. That felt just right—the ultimate sin. A man could lose his fam for committing such a sin!

  For half a day the Archives continued to stimulate impalpable phantoms and vivid events from his life—few of them relevant. He was groping, but he knew that he would be able to recognize “it” when he found “it” and so he continued to troll patiently. Almost when he was asleep a sudden “hit” stirred a deep emotional dazzle. He sat up with such alertness that his aerochair bobbed in the air.

  He repeated the archived item.

  Again the triggering image flowed in front of him in hologram—a gestalt of red symbols and multicolored action against a diagraph of a stable, self-perpetuating decision state. At first he was puzzled. Then he became cognizant of an unfamiliar mainstream mathematics that leaned heavily upon a notation commonly used by physical scientists. The math wasn’t easy to understand without his fam—but: he recognized it as a rudimentary account of stasis. He knew that the psychohistorians did it better because he had once known more about stasis than any man alive.

  Ah so!

  This time the concomitant emotional rush came with a clear patter of babble as his organic mind intoned in a ponderous voice: Early Disturbed Event Location by Forced Arekean Canonical Preposturing: An Analysis in Three Parts. He grinned uncontrollably. That, whatever in Space it meant, was his, Eron Osa’s, dissertation!

  He pondered this miracle of precipitate memory, astonished. Wet-ware minds worked by peculiar conundrum! Where had such a revelation come from? He wasn’t sure what the babble was about, except that it had to do with . . . psychohistorical stasis brought on by . . . what? He didn’t know. All he knew was that this monograph was the object of his search and that he had to have a copy.

  Being a vagued-out moron was utter frustration when you had memories of being a genius.

  He paused before making a formal request for the monograph over the network. Were his actions being monitored? Doubtful. The Pscholars did not monitor people; they monitored trends. People acting alone were powerless.

  One-tenth of a day and a growling stomach later, he knew with a terrible disappointment that his monograph had vanished from the Imperial Archives. For a wrenching moment he wondered if he had ever written such a document. Yet he remained certain that he had! Was his certainty only an illusion brought on by the loss of his fam? Perhaps he had never gone past the intention to write.