It was essential that he not remain a prisoner of his hotel.

  In his fury he gave himself an ultimatum. Plan! Plan even the most elementary of chores! Predict and plan! Then he laughed that his fury had induced in him the most bland of psychohistoric approaches to the mundane. His cheer encouraged him out of his moping. Suppose he reviewed everything in the safety of his rooms, testing his organic brain for deficiencies? He might, that way, gain the courage to leave the hotel. The organic brain had been evolved to think and learn, and there was no reason he couldn’t still perform such essentials. Think! he commanded himself. Once he stepped outside of his hotel into the corridors, what would he have to do that his fam had always done for him?

  Eron began to flash on his famless early childhood, the only model he had for what was in store for him. Wryly he recalled the time he ran away from home when he was three, passionately wanting to see the waterfall dropping through thirty stories of magical shapes within the Imperialis Transport Ministry. Mama Osamin would not respond to his polite request or explain her refusal (the Transport Ministry was a third of the planet’s circumference away.) Neither was she willing to appease his temper tantrum. Resentful, he tricked the door lock with a candy wrapper, sneaked out, wandered up two levels, and cunningly hopped a pod, making magisterial demands of the control console. The pod had detected his youth and delivered him to the police. He smiled. This time, as an adult, perhaps he could outwit the pods.

  If he was remembering correctly (and that was doubtful), his wretched hotel was within free-transport range of the teeming Calimone Sector. A dozen-minute ride to the northwest? Calimone embraced the appurtenances of the Upper Lyceum of the Fellowship, whose levels he had once known very well with its ministries, academeries, scholariums, libraries, vast apartment conglomerates, clubs.

  Low-life hangouts such as Rigone’s Teaser’s Bistro lay on the distant borders of the Lyceum. It was a pleasure to him that he could still recall the energetic bustle of the Olibanum through which he had cruised extensively during his student days. Trust the organic brain to remember the lower pleasures with an uncritical glow.

  Think! Lacking a fam, he was electromagnetically blind, except in the visible spectrum, and so he would need some kind of groping skill to get around. Retinal overlays were out. That stumped him, since the warrens of Splendid Wisdom averaged out at seven hundred meters deep over the entire area of the planet—the crumb that was Calimone Sector had more mappable features than the whole of most planets. If the structure didn’t broadcast their features and he had no fam to make sense of it all, a man could wander forever without reaching his destination. Eron was sore tempted to use his common-issue fam with all its dangers of psychic control. No. He sighed; more research was in order.

  At his comm console he meandered through the Archives and discovered the ancient art of paper-mapmaking in an orgy of revelation. It was so obvious! Why hadn’t he thought of it himself? But maps needing to be viewed with eyes was a horrible thought. Such a map was passive. To read a paper map would require work! Not impossible, of course, but discouraging. There must be a better way!

  How had men found their way around Splendid Wisdom during the age of the First Empire, when the planet had been as teeming as it was now and there had been no fams? Eron Osa became inspired and sauntered into his apartment’s tiny manufacturum.

  Of course the damn hotel’s shopping library didn’t have a map-reader template on file. He felt his rage rising again, and with it that awful feeling, again, that he didn’t have his fam to poise him emotionally. He paused to compensate. He breathed deeply to compose himself.

  . . . and smelled the thickness of smothered layers of air half a kilometer beneath the free weather . . . felt the confining walls. He could almost hear the dripping of the pipes from above. Perhaps it was merely the hotel’s SeeOTwo decomposer on the blink again that gave him a heavy hand and the sense that the air itself was turgid from decay. Stop breathing, he told himself. Concentrate on locating maps!

  Eron netted around among the local antique warehouses until he found a template he could buy for cheap, grumbled at the tech implied by the First Empire date, imported it, spent hours finding the link that could translate its obsolete code, and waited some more while the nanomachines of the manufacturum assembled the device. It took time because he had asked for a high structural resolution, time enough to relax for a drink and a thought. He did not want to bother with a quick, low-resolution device—having his map machine break down in an unknown warren was not an adventure he wanted to live. Leisurely thoughts gave him opportunity for irony. What if the map files turned out to be as ancient as the reader itself!

  From the manufacturum (after two drinks) came (1) a delicate spiderlike crown that adjusted to his skull under his hair, (2) an almost invisible laser gun that wrote to his right retina, (3) a subvocal control pad—and (4) no instructions. The maps of Splendid Wisdom, freshly read and tortuously compiled to meet the constraints of this antique, arrived on, astonishingly, a thousand flimsies which, outrageously, had to be carried in a pocket pouch, each to be inserted manually. No wonder the First Empire had collapsed!

  Still he was afraid to venture into the metropolitan maze. He couldn’t talk his map reader into working smoothly. It had no brains and had to be instructed like some stubborn dolt and he didn’t know its language! With extreme patience he did manage to explore the immediate vicinity of his hotel, two corridors west and four levels deep. The device actually worked after a fashion—and, he supposed, would work better once he had fathomed its pretensions.

  Then for five days he spent the afternoons in a neighboring cafe that extended out into its corridor, minding his own business, talking with no one. His criminal’s pension was limited—it was like being a student again—so he was frugal with his drink and pastries while he did his people watching. To amuse himself he reinvented mental addition, multiplication, and division, skills that he had never learned because they were automatic functions of his fam. It was good discipline for his frazzled mind, and a soothing reminder that there was always a workaround, however clumsy, for the fam dependencies that he no longer controlled. Eight plus fourteen was twenty-two. He marveled that he was able to figure that out from scratch. Such work made him feel like a genius again.

  Eron had chosen a busy traverse for his doodling and idle contemplations. The space within view of the cafe was filled with pedestrians flowing from the level above and boiling out of the nearby pod stop. Whenever he decided to stop thinking, to rest his aching organic brain, he had before him a cornucopia of sights—today a boy with a bag of bread dragged by his mother, an old man followed by a cackling family of females in weird headdresses. One of the interesting effects of being famless was the extraordinarily heightened visual intensity. Even the simplest colors were magnificent.

  Take that tall woman who was waiting at the gracelessly vermilion pod stop for a friend, blue eyes flaked with a russet-gold, who glanced about her impatiently, swinging her black ringlets into a bobbing sway. Her broad-brimmed hat was of a textured fuchsia he had never seen before, topped by feathers. In this comer of the cosmos style was everything. No such hat could be useful this far underground from a blazing sun. Still her skin looked coddled. She would be one of these aristos who spent regular time in a body shop staving off death and decay. She was still young enough to think of herself as immortal. Was her fragrance as gay as she looked?

  The restless eyes caught him staring at her and she smiled with broad lips. He glanced away, sipped his punch, pushed a crumb across the table. And presently saw her feet standing in his gaze, motionless. He did not look up, afraid to sound like a moron. The shoes were of a scaled fish-leather, multihued, probably scalbeast from Tau-Nablus and why should he know that?

  “Eron Osa?”

  That she knew his name was a complete surprise. Had he been ignoring a friend? He looked up now, curiously trying to place her. Nothing but a pretty face. She smelled vaguely of cinnamon. “Do we know each other?” he groped pleasantly.

  Her smile broadened. “No. My spies told me you’ve been hanging out here in the afternoons and I thought I might catch you.” She was grinning. Her accent was aristo, perhaps a Frightfulperson of the Calmer Sea. “I’m a hopeless fan of yours. I’ve read your monograph.” She gave him her card. It carried no name or address—but could be used to send her a Personal Capsule before it self-destructed.

  A fan of mathematics in this crass world? “Which paper?” He was trying to place her as one of his colleagues.

  “The only one you ever published.”

  “Ah. My Early Disturbed Event Location by . . .”

  “Yes,” she interrupted.

  He was startled and suspicious. “You are a psychohistorian?”

  “Stars, no. But I have my pretensions as a historian.”

  On guard, he asked, “And did you enjoy my piece?” He was fishing for hints as to what he had actually written.

  “I didn’t understand a line of it.” She commanded a chair for herself. “But I’m smart enough to know that it was important.” The chair embraced her.

  “It’s been distinguished,” he said cautiously.

  “I noticed. I hadn’t intended to contact you, but since you’ve been censored that means you are in deep trouble. Am I right? You are in hiding here, or worse?”

  “Worse.”

  His serious tone surprised her. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m brain-damaged.”

  Now she was alarmed. “Deliberate?” She seemed to be genuinely grief stricken. “How?”

  “They executed my fam.”

  “How horrible!” Her concern for him suddenly transformed into a concern for herself—he watched her eyes dart about to see if they were being observed. “Are you safe?”

  “I’ve been punished and released, a future nipped in the bud.”

  She rose to go but he snapped a steel grip on her wrist as she was turning. She swung back to face him. “Release me!” she hissed.

  “We haven’t been introduced. Over dinner you can tell me what I wrote. I don’t remember. I have to know.”

  The Frightfulperson of the Calmer Sea was staring at him aghast. She uttered an oath in the name of the greatest psychohistorian who had ever lived, twisted her wrist free, and stepped backward into the cafe. When he went after her she was gone. Which way? He sniffed his gripping hand—cinnamon with a touch of persimmon—a perfume he would never forget. Why should a pleasant woman, who had seemed to want to make his acquaintance, suddenly become so afraid?

  Impulsively he guessed at her direction of flight and began a pursuit. He had one chance in a trillion of ever finding her again. Seven stadia and eight levels later he gave up trying, blocked by one of the massive earthquake absorbers. By then he was lost.

  He tried to work his way around the absorber and found himself in a service district that he recognized by its water tanks, a tiny internal ocean that certainly continued downward to rest on bedrock. Pumps throbbed, too big to be serving a residential sector, probably feeding a tower far above them, misting water into the atmosphere to deflect some detected deviation from the long-term dictates of the Splendid Weather Authority. No use going farther. Defeated, he fed the address of his hotel into his map device, having learned enough of its commands to allow it to guide him home.

  Her blank card was still in his pocket, the only link to his depublished dissertation.

  So, he thought while following directions absently, somebody had read his paper; he wondered what psychohistorical consequences that would have. Perhaps it would cause a deviation in the historical “weather,” alerting some psychological bureaucrat who would then trigger corrective input. Somewhere a “tower” would pump a critical “influence” into the “weather” of humanity and “the historical climate” would return to what the Fellowship’s “Almanac” had already “predicted” it was going to be.

  4

  Q: What is the aim of the Founders Plan?

  A: To establish a human civilization based on an orientation derived from Mental Science.

  Q: Why must such an orientation have a nonspontaneous origin?

  A: Only an insignificant minority of men are inherently able to lead Man by means of an understanding of Mental Science. Since such an orientation would lead to the development of a benevolent dictatorship of the mentally best—virtually a higher subdivision of Man—it would be resented and could not be stable. No natural form of homeostasis . . .

  Q: What, then, is the solution?

  A: To avoid the resentment of the masses, the first application of Psychohistory must be to prepare a galaxywide political climate during which Mankind will be readied for the leadership of Mental Science. This readiness involves the introduction of unusual homeostatic political structures first proposed by the Founder in his mathscript of the . . . The second application of Psychohistory must be to bring forth a group of Psychologists able to assume this leadership. The Founder’s Plan specifies that during a Millennium of Transition the Visible Arm of the Plan will be supplying the physical framework for a single political unit while a Shadow Arm supplies the mental framework for a ready-made ruling class.

  Q: Why must the Visible Arm be convinced during the Transition that the Shadow Arm does not exist?

  A: During the Transition, Psychohistory must still deal with a society which, if aware of a monitoring class of Psychologists, would resent them, fear their further development, and fight against their existence—thus introducing political forces which would destroy the necessary foundation of the homeostatic . . . The Plan would abort.

  —The First Speaker Questions a Student:

  Notes made during the Crisis of the Great Perturbation,

  fourth century Founder’s Era.

  Psychohistorian Nejirt Kambu was finding his jaunts to distant galactic hot spots more and more wearing. His overextended junket through Coron’s Wisp had been the least thrilling of those adventures, and the only one in which he had not been able to develop a field solution. The oddities in his findings there still bemused him. An outbreak of astrology! He rolled his eyes. But he had made a reputation for himself as an on-site trend analyzer, and the jobs kept coming.

  His new boss was going to be a challenge. Long ago, Second Rank Hahukum Kon had chosen to work only with intractable historical deviations. He had built up perhaps the best team of trouble-blasters at the Lyceum. Kon was called the Admiral behind his back because he was always at war, if one could make oneself think of impending crises as the enemy. He did not tolerate men who did not solve the problems he assigned.

  Of course, Nejirt chuckled, his weird problem was as nothing compared to the present trials of his fellow occupants of this cramped subcabin—all five of them were bored. They snoozed, or took entertainment bursts from their readers, or complained about the delay. Imperialis was a system that moved fifteen billion people to and from the stars every year in a hundred thousand flights a day. Hurry up and wait. Their four-thousand-passenger behemoth was waiting permission for the final inward hyperspace jump. The ship had already waited more than an hour for instructions while the short-range ultrawaves of the traffic controllers sizzled with chatter.

  Nejirt had been using the time to enjoy the sights. He had the sky-scanner all to himself; his bored cabinmates were uninterested. Here in the central regions of the galaxy the view was always impressive, even frightening—the ionized flames of ancient explosions attacked a sea of suns while time stood still.

  Finally . . . their terminal jump brought them to an immense outer docking station, girders and access tubes and modules exposed to space. Twenty irises dribbled them into the arms of customs where their sterilized baggage was penetrated and tasted by microscanners, their clothes dissolved, and their nude bodies invaded by nanosearchers. Nejirt used psychohistorian status to outrank a woman with a monkeyoid pet in a cage that he knew the machines weren’t going to recognize and that, worse, wasn’t going to be found anywhere in the customs rule-cache.

  It took two trillion humans in Imperialis space to maintain the galactic communications needed by the trillion planet dwellers of Splendid Wisdom. A conventional joke suggested wryly that most of those were needed in space to keep the useful ones from bumping into each other—a he—but it is humor that makes bearable the impotence of standing in line at the awesome center of galactic power.

  Two intersystem shuttles and a gravdrop later, much later, he was on Splendid Wisdom’s surface at a bustling transportation hub that was as big as a city, tiered into sixteen tapered levels that overlooked a domed plaza two full kilometers in diameter. Low velocity robo-taxis popped out of the levels like mad bees, darting across and around the concourse and, sometimes, landing on it to pick up passengers from the elevator kiosks. The colossal concourse was filled with transients who wanted to be someplace else. In the distance, Nejirt spotted a luckless couple, who had loaded all their baggage into a people-only chute, so straining the gravities of the chute that baggage and all were slowly being driven back down into a mass of upcoming passengers—causing pandemonium. He had to laugh. Chaos amused a man whose job was to manipulate chaos.

  Nearer at hand, a woman sat alone at a freshment island, sipping a meal between connections, playing a portable hologame to alleviate her ennui. Around her flowed a convoy of off-planet representatives—from some world with taste in clothes resembling woven armor—herding their baggage to keep it from straying, frantically trying to call down a bevy of robo-taxis to assist them. The efficiently moving Splendid natives could be spotted by their unwillingness to bring baggage with them—much preferring to manufacture what they needed when they arrived at where they were going, carrying the templates and other pertinent information in their fams.