Far Futures by Gregory Benford

Author:Gregory Benford [Benford, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0312856393
Publisher: Tor
Published: 1995-11-30T21:00:00+00:00

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[Editor’s note: Two hundred and seventy historical studies by Eron Osa were seized from his workspace during the hectic time when he was expelled from the Upper Lyceum of the Fellowship by his mentor Jars Hanis. Osa, as a matter of routine, constantly checked his mathematics against reality, his habit being to select surviving bits of recorded history, feed them into his equations, then compare results with the known historical outcome. Osa’s carefully annotated thesis-testing cases cover an extreme range of conditions of scope, location, and time. In only five cases did the retro-mathematics fail: in two because the input data was inadequate and in three where the historical outcome had evidently been falsified in the records by the participants to protect their future reputation.

[The robustness of Osa’s arekean transformations is illustrated by the most interesting of his extreme cases, which takes us back forty-one thousand years. Osa picked pre-space-technology Terra for his remotest time example because Terran historical sources, being the most highly prized and most widely dispersed of all the early histories, have suffered the least degradation over that enormous time span. Of course, the small total size of the human prespace population leads to inevitable inaccuracies in any psychohistorical calculation, but the existence of a known outcome allows the error to be calibrated. Osa chose the medieval European reign of Pope Innocent III for his input boundary conditions and attempted a psychohistorical projection for the next three hundred years. What follows is his quirky summary of the calculation. Eron Osa was known for an ironic sense of humor and its ability to get him into trouble.]

The Fate of the Ancient Priests of the Secret Word:

A Cautionary Tale for All Psychohistorians

Imagine an immense old Terra at the center of the universe, its Lord of Evil living underground with his vassal demons in their dark world of sulfurous fumaroles and screaming sinners, its surface crowded with suffering humanity in need of a priest class to guide and direct their lives. Above vast Terra, a mere day away by the soaring of angel wings, are the Crystal Spheres of the sun and moon and five planets and the outer Celestial Sphere upon which the stars of heaven are projected by the machinery of some frozen galactarium.

These Crystal Spheres are the centerpiece of The Creator’s Great Hall of Heaven. The Lord of the Solar System holds court with His only Bastard Son and His pious Paramour and His Loyal Angels who stare in Awesome contemplation of His Work, praising it. From time to time He raises up from the surface of Terra pure saints and saved souls to join in the celebration of the epicyclic dance within the Spheres.

Down below, on error-prone Terra, only the priests of the Catholic Church have been granted the right to interpret the Creator’s Old and New Words to the ignorant masses—who, if allowed to listen to the Creators Truth with their own sinning ears, would misapply It to the work of the Devil. For His purposes, He needs some trevize-like person on Terra—with a talent for rightness.

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