[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
"So I am finding. You... learned all this on Helicon. "
"I learned to deal with essentials. "
"Also to hate fluctuations. They can kill you. "
He took a swig of the beer, still cold and biting. "I hadn't thought of it
that way. "
"Why didn't you say all this in the first place?"
"I didn't know it in the first place. "
"A corollary, then: If you commit yourself to a woman you give away as much of
yourself as you can, inside that enclosed space. "
"The volume between the two of us. "
"A geometric analogy is as good as any. " The tip of her tongue made her lower
lip bulge out slightly, as it always did when she pondered a point. "And you
commit yourself wholly to averting the price life exacts. "
"The price of... fluctuations?"
"If you can predict, you can avoid. Correct. Manage. "
"This is awfully analytic. "
"I've skipped over the hard parts, but they will be on the homework
assignment. "
"Usually these kinds of talk use phrases like 'optimally consolidated self. '
I've been waiting for the jargon to come trotting out. " He had finished the
bowl and felt much better.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
"Food is one of the life-affirming experiences. "
"So that's why I do it. "
"Now you're making fun of me. "
"No, just working out the implications of the theory. I liked the part about
hating unpredictability and fluctuations because they hurt people. "
"So can Empires, if they fall. "
"Right. " He finished the beer and thought about having another. Any more
would dull him a little. He would prefer another way to take from him the edge
he still felt.
"Big appetite. " She smiled.
"You have no idea. And the prospect of death can stimulate more than one kind
of appetite. Let's go back to that part about the homework assignment. "
"You have something in mind. "
He grinned. "You have no idea. "
4.
He savored his work all the more, since he had less time for it.
Hari sat in his darkened office, absolutely still, watching the 3D numerics
evolve like luminous fogs in the air before him.
Empire scholars had known the root basics of psychohistory for millennia. In
ancient times, pedants had charted the twenty-six stable and meta-stable
social systems. There were plenty of devolved planets to study, fallen into
barbarism like the Porcos and their Raging Rituals, the Lizzies and their
Gyno-Governs.
He watched the familiar patterns form, as his simulation stepped through
centuries of Galactic evolution. Some social systems proved stable only on
small scales.
In the air hung the ranks of whole worlds, caught in stable Zones: Primitive
Socialism;
Femo-Pastoralism; Macho Tribalism. These were the "strong attractors" of human
sociology, islands in the chaos sea.
Some societies labored through their meta-stability, then crashed: Theocracy,
Transcendentalism, Macho Feudalism. This latter appeared whenever people had
metallurgy and agriculture. Planets which had slid a long way down the curve
would manifest it.
Page 108
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Imperial scholars had long justified the Empire, threaded by narrow wormholes
and lumbering hyperships, as the best human social structure. It had indeed
proved stable and benevolent.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
Their reigning model, Benign Imperial Feudalism, accepted that humans were
hierarchical. As well, they were dynastically ambitious, liking the continuity
of power and its pomp. They were quite devoted to symbols of unity, of
Imperial grandeur. Gossip about the great was, for most people, the essence of
history itself.
Imperial power was moderated by traditions of noble leadership, the assumed
superiority of those who rose to greatness. Beneath such impressive
resplendence, as Cleon well knew, lay the bedrock of an extremely honest,
meritocratic civil service. Without that, corruption would spread like a stain
across the stars, corroding the splendor.
He watched the diagram a complex 3D web of surfaces, the landscape of
social-space.
Slow-stepped, he could see individual event-waves washing through the sim.
Each cell in the grid got recomputed every clock cycle, readjusting every
nearest-neighbor interaction in 3D.
The working rules of thumb were not the true laws of physics, built up from
fundamentals like maxion mechanics, or even from the simple NewTown Laws.
Rather, they were rough algorithms that reduced intricate laws to trivial
arithmetic. Society seen raw this way was crude, not mysterious at all.
Then came chaos.
He was viewing the "policy-space, " with its family of variables: degree of
polarity, or power concentration; size of coalitions; conflict scale. In this
simple model, learning loops emerged. Starting from a plateau period of
seeming stability but not stasis, the system produced a Challenger Idea.
This threatened stability, which forced formation of coalitions to oppose the
challenge. Factions formed.
Then they gelled. The coalitions could be primarily religious, political,
economic, technological, even military though this last was a particularly
ineffective method, the data showed. The system then veered into a chaotic
realm, sometimes emerging to new stability, sometimes decaying.
In the dynamic system there was a pressure created by the contrast between
people's ideal picture of the world and the reality. Too big a difference
drove fresh forces for change. Often the forces were apparently unconscious;
people knew something was wrong, felt restive, but could not fix on a clear
cause.
So much for "rational actor" models, Hari thought. Yet some still clung to
that obviously dumb approximation.
Everyone thought the Empire was simple.
Not the bulk of the population, of course, dazzled by the mix of cultures and
exotica afforded by trade and communications from myriad worlds. They were
perpetually distracted an important damper on chaos.
Even to social theorists, though, the basic structure and interrelations
seemed to be predictable, with a moderate number of feedback loops, solid and
traditional. Conventional wisdom held that these could be easily separated out
and treated.
Most important, there was central decision-making, or so most thought. The
Emperor Knew Best, right?
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
In reality, the Empire was a nested, ordered hierarchy: Imperial Feudalism. At
the lower bound were the
Zones of the galaxy, sometimes only a dozen light-years across, up to a few
thousand light years diameter. Above that were Compacts of a few hundred
Page 109
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
nearby Zones. The Compacts interlocked into the Galactic cross-linked system.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]