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So he mortgaged more and planted more crops and followed his best judgment.
Every time chance played out against him, Dad got right back up and went at it
again. That worked for a while because he did know farming.
But then there was a big market fluctuation and he got caught and lost eve-
"
She smiled, but then the same penetrating cast came over her face.
"You fit some well-defined parameters. Men who are contained. They con-
trol themselves by letting very little in. They do not show a great deal or
talk too much. "
"Except to their woman. " He had stopped eating.
"You have little time for small talk people at Streeling comment on that yet
you speak freely with me. "
"I try not to blather. "
"Being male is complicated. "
"So is being female, though you've mastered it beautifully. "
"I'll take that as a rather formal compliment. "
"And so it was. Just plain being human is just plain hard. "
"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. "
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"This is awfully analytic. "
"I've skipped over the hard parts, but they will be on the homework as-
signment. "
"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.
"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 as-
signment. "
"You have something in mind. "
He grinned. "You have no idea. "
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: Primi-
tive 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: The-
ocracy, Transcendentalism, Macho Feudalism. This latter appeared when-
ever people had metallurgy and agriculture. Planets which had slid a long way
down the curve would manifest it.
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.
Their reigning model, Benign Imperial Feudalism, accepted that humans were
hierarchical. As well, they were dynastically ambitious, liking the con-
tinuity 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 as-
sumed superiority of those who rose to greatness. Beneath such impres-
The working rules of thumb were not the true laws of physics, built up from
fundamentals like maxion mechanics, or even from the simple New-
Town 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
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