New Celebrations: The Adventures of Anthony Villiers by Alexei Panshin

Author:Alexei Panshin [Panshin, Alexei]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-11-07T16:00:00+00:00

6

THE NASHUITE EMPIRE IS VAST. There are enough planets within its nebulous and fluid borders that merely to number and name them all would be the occupation of months, the hobby of years. Most of these planets, of course, are uninteresting, undistinguished, and uninhabited. However, the only man to attempt to visit those remaining, the legendary Kazumatsu Ohno, died at the age of seventy-three of nervous exhaustion and chronic acute diarrhea with his life’s work only half done. Now, that is vast.

The Nashuite Empire is diverse. It contains planets occupied by single families, and planets that are population sinks to rival Old Earth. Each planet is an individual. Each has its own history. Each joined the Empire in its own way, in its own time, under its own particular conditions. Within the Empire there are free planets, and trusts, and fiefs, and satrapies, and provinces, and semi-autonomic dependencies. Diversity for every taste.

Through all human history the practice of governments has been to gather information, to assess it, to make reasonable predictions from it, and finally to act. This is patently impossible for the Nashuite Empire. In many cases there simply is no information. Where there is information it is often inaccurate or dated. In consequence it has been necessary to invent non-statistical methods of self-description as a basis for policy. Chief amongst these is the pantograph.

In the Central Administrative Offices on Nashua there is an immense building filled with pantographs, three-dimensional homologues of the distribution patterns of the Empire. The pantograph is based on the two ancient principles that the present implies the future, and that the part implies the whole. The rest is wave mechanics.

The flaw of the pantograph is that cultures and occupations and migration patterns and the rest do not exist in isolation. They interconnect and interconnect and interconnect. To treat them separately is to be inevitably inaccurate. Still, no one has yet invented a better descriptive device, and some day the Universal Pantograph will be complete and for the first time man will know definitely what is going to happen next.

In 1457, the first pantograph to come into private hands was delivered to one Clifford Morgenstern, who put it to very different use. This pantograph described the present and future distribution of artistic traditions. However, Morgenstern cared nothing for what these might be. Instead, he chose to regard the pantograph as a form of fluid art in itself and he wrote a book defining the effective use of color within the model.

It was this book that disturbed and stimulated Fillmore Djaha. He cared nothing for pantography or color selection, and still the book spoke to him. It said, grandly, gloriously, that not only was change possible, it was inevitable. In those days, in the Tanner Trust, that was exciting news.

* * *

Sir Thomas Edmund Fanshawe-IV pedaled a wobbly bicycle up the path that led from the road to the occupied campsite. Pressed into the job of Mercury, but lacking Mercury’s winged paraphernalia, his motto was necessarily, “I Will Contrive.

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