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tions of Genus Homo. But the age-old taboos against artificial intelligences
of high order had kept the processses marginal. As well, nobody considered
Homo Digital to be an equal manifestation to Natural Man.
Hari knew all this, but his immersion on Panucopia an allied technol-
ogy had taught him much.
Two days after meeting Marq in the restaurant which had been sur-
prisingly good, and in the food crisis had cost him a month's salary Hari lay
silent and slack in a tubular receptacle... and plunged into psychohis-
tory.
First he noticed that his right foot itched from toe to heel. Detailed
twitches told him of instability in the population-driver terms. Must correct
that.
He continued falling into a cosmos which yawned below.
This was system-space, an infinite vault defined by the parameters of
psychohistory. The complete expanse had twenty-eight dimensions. His nervous
system could only see this in slices. With a conceptual shift, Hari could peer
along several parameter-ixes and see events unfold as geomet-
ric shapes.
Down, down into the entire history of the Empire.
Social forms rose like peaks. These stable alps had arisen as the Em-
litical animals, feeling animals, social animals, power-polarized animals,
sick animals, machinelike animals, even rational ones. Over and over, er-
roneous theories of human nature yielded failed political systems. Many simply
generalized from the basic human family and saw the State as ei-
ther Mother Figure or Father
Figure.
Mommy States stressed support and comfort, often giving cradle-to-
grave security though only for a generation or two, when the expenses
collapsed the economy.
Daddy States featured a strict, competitive economy, with stern controls over
behavior and private lives. Typically, Daddy States fell to periodic per-
sonal liberation movements and demands for Mommy State succor.
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Slowly, order emerged. Stability. Tens of millions of planets, weakly linked
by wormholes and hyper-ships, found their many ways. Some crashed down into
Feudal or Macho swamps. Usually technology eventu-
ally pulled them out of it.
Planetary societies differed in their topologies. Plodding sorts dwelled far
on the stable side. Wildly creative types could venture swiftly across the
topozone, skate into true chaos, gather what they needed though how they
"knew" this was unclear.
As centuries ticked on, a society could ski down the erratic slopes of the
ideas built up hills of innovation only to be seared by lava from an ad-
joining volcano. Seemingly sturdy ridge lines eroded into landslides. Hari
understood this now.
When the Empire was young, people seemed to see the galaxy as infi-
nite in its bounty. The spiral arms held myriad planets barely visited, the
Galactic Center was poorly mapped because of its intense radiation, and vast
dark clouds bid much promised wealth.
Slowly, slowly, the entire disk was mapped, its resources tallied.
A blandness settled on the landscape. The Empire had changed from brawling
conqueror to careful steward. A psychological shift underlay it all, a
constricting of the sense of human purpose. Why?
He witnessed clouds forming over even the highest social peaks, cutting off
the sense of openness above them. A complacent murk settled.
Hari reminded himself that as appealing as such pictures were, all sci-
ence was metaphor. Appealing superpan pictures, no more. Electric circuits
were like water flows, gas molecules behaved like tiny elastic balls moving
randomly. Not really, but as permissible portraits of a world of confusing
complication. And a further rule: '7s " cannot imply "ought. " Psychohistory
did not predict what should happen, but what would however tragic. And the
equations yielded how but not why. Was some deeper agency at work?
Perhaps, Hari thought, this stupor was like the feeling humans had once
Sark? He vectored through the Galaxy's swarms and found it, twelve thousand
light years from True Center. Its social matrix accelerated.
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