Foundation Fear (38 page)

Now, yes. He let his anger spill.

Ipan pressed up with his forearms and got his feet under him. No time to get all the way
up. Ipan sprang at Vaddo, keeping low.

A tinny shot whisked by his head. Then he hit Vaddo in the hip and slammed the man against
the wall. The man's scent was sour, salty.

Hari lost all control. Ipan bounced Vaddo off the wall and instantly slammed his arms into
the man with full force.

Vaddo tried to deflect the impact. Ipan brushed the puny human arms aside. Vaddo's
pathetic attempts at defense were like spiderwebs brushed away.

He butted Vaddo and pounded his massive shoulders into the man's chest. The weapon
clattered on the tiles.

Ipan slammed himself into the man's body again and again.

Strength, power, joy.

Bones snapped. Vaddo's head snapped back, smacked the wall, and he went limp.

Ipan stepped back and Vaddo sagged to the tiles. Joy.

Blue-white flies buzzed at the rim of his vision.

Must move. That was all Hari could get through the curtain of emotions that shrouded the
pan mind.

The corridor lurched. Hari got Ipan to walk in a sideways teeter.

Down the corridor, painful steps. Two doors, three. Here? Locked. Next door. World moving
slower somehow.

The door snicked open. An antechamber that he recognized. Ipan blundered into a chair and
almost fell.

Hari made the lungs work hard. The gasping cleared his vision of the dark edges that had
crept in, but the blue-white flies were still there, fluttering impatiently, and thicker.

He tried the far door. Locked. Hari summoned what he could from Ipan. Strength, power, joy.

Ipan slammed his shoulder into the solid door. It held. Again. And again, sharp pain --
and it popped open.

Right, this was it. The immersion bay. Ipan staggered into the array of vessels. The walk
down the line, between banks of control panels, took an eternity. Hari concentrated on
each step, placing each foot. Ipan's field of view bobbed as the head seemed to slip
around on liquid shoulders.

Here. His own vessel.

Dors' tiktok was ready for him. It had seen him coming and latched itself to the board,
covering the vital controls.

Ipan bent to the tiktok's punch panel. He jabbed at the keys, remembering the access code.

Ipan's fingers were too broad. They could not hit a single key at a time.

The room of bleached light was getting fuzzy. He made Ipan try the code again, but the
stubby fingers mashed several keys at once.

The blue-white flies flapped at the edges of his vision. Ipan's hands whacked in
frustration at the punch-pad.

Think. Hari looked around. Ipan wasn't going to last much longer. A desk nearby had a
writing slate and pen.

Leave a note? Hope the right people find it ...

He made Ipan stagger to the desk, grasp the pen. An idea flickered as he tried to write: I
NEED ...

He turned and tottered back to the capsule. Concentrate.

Gripping the pen, he punched down with the butt. It struck a key cleanly. The blue flies
flickered in his vision.

The access code was hard to remember now. He worked on it one number at a time. Stab,
poke, jab -- and it was done. A light winked from red to green.

He fumbled with the latches. Popped it open.

There lay Hari Seldon, peaceful, eyes closed.

Emergency controls, yes. He knew them from the briefing.

He searched the polished steel surface and found the panel on the side. Ipan stared
woozily at the meaningless lettering.

Hari himself had trouble reading. The letters jumped and fused together.

He found several buttons and servo controls. Ipan's hands were worse now. It took three
stabs with the pen to get the reviving program activated. Lights cycled from green to
amber.

Ipan abruptly sat down on the cool floor. The blue-white flies were buzzing all around his
head and now they wanted to bite him. He sucked in the cool dry air, but there was no
substance in it, no help ...

Then, without any transition, he was looking at the ceiling. On his back. The lamps up
there were getting dark, fading. Then they went out.

Hari's eyes snapped open.

The recovery program was still sending electro-stims through his muscles. He let them jump
and tingle and ache while he thought. He felt fine. Not even hungry, as he usually did
after an immersion. How long had he been in the wilderness? At least five days.

He sat up. There was no one in the vessel room. Evidently Vaddo had gotten some silent
alarm but had not alerted anyone else. That pointed, again, to a tight little conspiracy.

He got out shakily. To get free he had to detach some feeders and probes, but they seemed
simple enough Ipan. The big body filled the walkway. He knelt and felt for a pulse. Rickety.

But first, Dors. Her vessel was next to his and he started the revival. She looked well.

Vaddo must have put some transmission block on the system, so that none of the staff could
tell by looking at the panel that anything was wrong. A simple cover story: a couple who
wanted a really long immersion. Vaddo had warned them, but no, they wanted it, so ... A
perfectly plausible story.

Dors' eyes fluttered. He kissed her. She gasped.

He made a pan sign, quiet, and went back to Ipan.

Blood was flowing steadily. Hari was surprised to find that he could not pick up the rich,
pungent elements in the pan's blood from smell alone. A human missed so much!

He took off his shirt and made a crude tourniquet. At least Ipan's breathing was regular.
Dors was ready to get out by then, and he helped her disconnect.

“I was hiding in a tree and then -- poof!” she said. “What a relief. How did you -- ”

“Let's get moving, ” he said.

As they left the room, she said, “Who can we trust? Whoever did this -- ” She stopped when
she saw Vaddo. “Oh.”

Somehow her expression made him laugh. She was very rarely surprised.

“You did this?”

“Ipan.”

“I never would have believed a pan could, could ... ”

“I doubt anyone's been immersed this long. Not under such stress, anyway. It all just --
well, it came out.”

He picked up Vaddo's weapon and studied the mechanism. A standard pistol, silenced. Vaddo
had not wanted to awaken the rest of the station. That was promising. There should be
people here who would spring to their aid. He started toward the building where the
station personnel lived.

“Wait, what about Vaddo?”

“I'm going to wake up a doctor.”

They did -- but Hari took him into the vessel room first, to work on Ipan. Some patchwork
and injections and the doctor said Ipan would be all right. Only then did he show the man
Vaddo's body.

The doctor got angry about that, but Hari had a gun. All he had to do was point it. He
didn't say anything, just gestured with the gun.

He did not feel like talking and wondered if he ever would again. When you couldn't talk
you concentrated more, entered into things. Immersed.

And in any case, Vaddo had been dead for some time.

Ipan had done a good job. The doctor shook his head at the severe damage.

Alarms were ringing. He got an instant headache. The security officer showed up. He could
see from her reaction that she had not been in on the plot. Can't connect it to the
Academic Potentate, then, he thought abstractly.

But how much did that prove? Imperial politics were subtle ... Dors looked at him oddly
the whole time. He did not understand why, until he realized that he had not even thought
about helping Vaddo first. Ipan was himself, in a sense he knew deeply but could not
explain.

But he understood immediately when Dors wanted to go to the station wall and call to
Sheelah. They brought her, too, in from the far wild darkness.

Ancient Fogs

GALACTIC PREHISTORY -- ... the destruction of all earlier records during the expansion of
humanity through the Galaxy, with the attendant eras of warfare, leaves in shadow the
entire problem of human origins. The enormous changes wrought on so many worlds also
erased any evidence for much older, alien civilizations. These societies may have existed,
though there is no firm evidence for them. Some early historians believed that at least
one type of remnant might have survived in the Galaxy: the electromagnetic records. These
would have to be lodged in plasma streams or the coronal loops of stars, and thus lie
beyond the detection of Expansionist technology. Even modern studies have found no such
sentient structures. However, the virulent radiation levels at the Galactic core -- where
energy densities might promise an hospitable abode for magnetically based forms -- make
such investigations difficult and ambiguous. Another theory holds that cultures might have
“written” themselves into pre-Empire computer codes, and thus now reside undetected in
some banks of ancient data. Such speculations met with no proof and were discounted. Thus
the entire problem of why the Galaxy was empty of advanced life when humanity ventured
into it has no resolution ...

-- ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA

Voltaire scowled, vexed.

Had she in fact yielded to him, given herself up? or was this a particularly fine
simulation? True Joan, art this thou?

Certainly this fit one of his favorites: a romping play in prickly dry hay, up in the
topmost loft of a big old barn, on a hot August day in long-lost Bordeaux. Twit-wheee
called a bird. Insects chirped, warm breezes blew woody scents. Her hair trailed over him
as she mounted. He felt her adroit twists, delivered with an erotic precision that made
him tremble with the need for release.

But ...

The instant he doubted, it all contracted, dwindled, fell away into blackness. This was
merely an exotic onanism, a self-love delusion requiring his commitment to its truth.
Contrived well, but fake.

So when he felt himself picked up in a giant feminine hand, soft palm cradling him aloft
into sunny air, he wondered if this were real, too. A hot breeze brushed him as she
exhaled.

Joan towered fifty times his height, murmuring to him. Fleshy huge lips kissed his whole
body in one lingering moment, her tongue licking him like a colossus savoring a lollipop.

“I suppose I've not had my irony programs omitted?” he asked.

The giant Joan shriveled.

“Too easy, ” he said. “All I need do is say something a bit jarring -- ”

This time the hand propelled him aloft with crushing acceleration. “You've still got your
precious irony. And this is me.”

He sniffed. “So large. You've made yourself a leviathan!”

“Too heavy?”

“I've always liked ... pig irony.”

He gave a disdainful sniff. She dropped him. He plunged toward a moat of boiling lava,
which had suddenly appeared below.

“Sorry, ” he said quietly. Just enough to get her to stop, not enough to lose every shred
of dignity.

“You should be.”

The lava pit evaporated, congealing into mud. He landed on solid ground and she stood
before him, standard size. Demure, fresh. Around her clung air scrubbed by a spring
rainstorm just past.

“We can invade each others' perceptual spaces at will. Marvelous ... ” He stopped,
considered. “In a way.”

“In Purgatory, all is meaningless. We dream while we await truth. ” She abruptly sneezed,
then coughed. Blinking, she reassembled her lofty, ladylike self.

“Ummm. I would appreciate something concretely ... ah ... concrete.”

He stepped off the porch of an elaborate Provencal country house. The fields beyond glowed
with lurid light. The foreground was accurate, but done in rather obvious brush strokes.

Clearly they were inhabiting a work of art. Even the scents of apple trees and horse
manure had a stilted quality. A frozen moment, cycled endlessly for as long as they needed
a backdrop? Inexpensive, even. Astounding what his subconscious -- let slip a bit -- could
conjure up.

What was to stop him -- them! -- from playing Caligula? Slaughtering digital millions?
Torturing virtual slaves? Nothing.

That was the problem: no constraints. How could anyone persist, given infinite temptation?

'Faith. Only faith can guide, can compel. " Joan took his hand, pleading with untouched
ardor.

“But our reality is in fact entire illusionl”

“The Lord must be somewhere, ” she said plainly.

-He is real."

“You do not quite follow, my dear. ” He struck an instructive pose. "Ontogenesis
algorithms can generate new people, drawn from ancient fields, or else

-: cooked up for the moment."

I know true people when I see them. Let them speak for a moment."

“You would look for wit? We have some subroutines here, yes, madam. Character? A mere set
of verbal posture-profiles. Sincerity? We can fake that.”

Voltaire knew, from viewing his own cerebral innards, that something termed a “reality
editor” offered ready-made conversation from the mouth of appararently “real” persons, who
had not existed sec- onds before. Assemblages of traits and verbal nuances stood ever
ready to trade aphorisms and sal- lies with him.

All these he had picked up in his endless forag- ing of the Mesh, its myriad Trantorian
sites open- ing to his touch. He had extracted and shaped these “customized” amusements.
Quick and zesty and all, ultimately, hollow.

“I realize you have greater capacities, ” Joan allowed. She hoisted her sword and swung it
at empty air. “Allow, sir, that I can still control my senses. I know some minions of
these parts are true and real, as authentic as animals were in our time on Earth.”

“You believe that you knew the inner states of horses?”

“Of course! I rode many into battle, felt their fear through my calves.”

“I see. ” He swept his lace sleeves through the air in a parody of her sword-swinging.
“Now -- bring you! -- judgment to bear upon a dog which has lost its master. The beast,
call him Phydeaux, has sought its master on every road with sorrowful cries and enters the
house agitated, uneasy, goes up and down the stairs, from room to room, and at last finds
in the study the master it loves, and shows him its joy by its cries of delight, by its
leaps. It must have feeling, longings, ideas.”

“Surely.”

Voltaire then produced the dog, plaintive and beautiful in its flop-eared digital sorrow.
To boot, he added the house, complete with furniture. As the poor dog's baying died away,
he said, “My demonstration, madam.”

“Tricks!” Mouth twisted angrily, she said no more.

“You must allow that mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they
translate into their own language, and forthwith, it is something entirely different.”

“I am waiting for my Lord. Or, as one devoted to large concepts, sir: for Meaning.”

“Sit and ponder, madam. ” He materialized a comfy Provencal kitchen, tables, the fetching
scent of cof-

fee. They sat. Inscribed on the coffee pot was his motto from a lost past:

Black as the devil, Hot as hell, Pure as an angel, Sweet as love.

Noir comme le diable Chaud comme l'enfer Pur comme un ange, Doux comme I'amour.

“My, it tastes so good, ” Joan said.

“I have mastered multiple-site access. ” Voltaire slurped his coffee noisily, one of the
few allowances he had found Parisian society gave to even a philosopher. “We are running
in the interstices of Trantor, splintered into many fragments. I can summon up sense-data
from the innumerable inventories of countless digital libraries.”

“I appreciate your giving me similar talents, ” she Èaid cautiously, adjusting her armor
for comfort and sipping her aromatic coffee with care. “But I feel a hollowness ... ”

Ruefully he nodded. “I, too.”

“We seem ... I hesitate to say ... ”

“Like divinities.”

“Blasphemy, but true. Though the Creator has wisdom and we do not.”

Voltaire's face stretched in despair. “Worse, we may not have even our own wills.”

“Well, / do.”

“If all we are is strings of digits -- zeros and ones, actually, no more, if you will but
look microscope-close -- then how can we be free? Are we not determined by those marching
numerals?”

-I feel free."

“Ah, but then, we would make it so in any case, yes?” He sprang to his feet. "One of my
best couplets:

One science only will one genius fit.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit."

“So we cannot know we are free? The Creator makes us so!”

“I would wish for that Creator, now.”

Joan kicked over the table, spattering him with coffee. He edited out its burns as he
fell. She swung her sword at the kitchen walls and sliced them into great sheets curving
away into a gray Euclidean space, reality curling like orange peel.

“How tiresome, ” he said. “The best argument against Christianity is certainly Christians.”

“I will not have -- ”

You like to think of yourself as a philosopher?

The words somehow filled space. Acoustic walls swelled and blew past them, like great
pages riffling in a giant book.

Voltaire took a deep breath and bellowed, “You address me?”

You also like to think of yourself as a shrewd judge of the quick opportunity. Or of
verbal nuance.

Joan drew her sword, but the passing slabs of sound brushed it away.

You like to think of yourself even in this distant time and place as famous.

Huge sheets of humming pressure fell upon them, as if a gargantuan deity were calling down
from the faceless ashen sky.

“You challenge me?” Voltaire shouted back.

You like, in short, to think of yourself.

Joan laughed heartily. Voltaire reddened.

“I defy you, insulterer!”

As if in reply, their Euclidean plane bulged --

And he was the landscape. He had a hot volcanic spine murmuring warmly beneath, while his
skin was moisture and grit. Winds beat his skin. Tinkling ; -earns caressed him. Mountains
rose from him like : raised carbuncles.

Joan cried out somewhere. He cast up a ridge line, strata buckling, shards flying. She was
a lofty cylindrical spire, snow-crowned and cracking with lava pus.

Above them roiled pewter clouds. He knew them somehow as alien minds, a fog of connections.

Hypermind? came the idea. Algorithms summing?

The shifting gray fog wrapped around all Trantor. Voltaire felt how he looked to that fog:
spattered life, electrical jolts in widely separated machines which computed subjective
moment-jumps. The present was a computational slide orchestrated by hundreds of separate
processors. Rather than living in the present, they persisted more accurately in the
post-past of the calculated step forward.

There was a profound difference, he felt -- not saw, rut felt, deep in his analog
persuasion -- between the digital and the smooth, the continuous. To the fog he was a
cloud of suspended moments, sliced numbers waiting to happen, implicit in the fundamental
computation.

Then he saw what the fog was.

He tried to run, but he was a mountain.

'They are -- others, " he called to Joan uselessly.

“How can they be more different than we?” she replied forlornly. “We, at least, were
conjured up from human stock. These are alien.”

They had escaped, somehow.

One moment the alien fog had enveloped the mountain ranges. The next, Voltaire had
extricated himself and Joan. But he kept saying, as they fled across a barren sea of
stinking liquid corpses, that they had to ... to give birth.

“We make ourselves into children?” she called to him, avoiding the sight of twisted,
bloated bodies below. Somehow the alien fog manifested its loathsome self by reminding
them of human mortality. Thus it dogged them.

“Bad metaphor. We must manufacture and hide some copies of ourselves.”

He raised a hand and shot her a bolt of knowing:

Termed variously Dittos, Duplicates, or Copies, all such hold a tenuous existence. Society
has decisively rejected what antiquity called the Copy Fallacy: the belief that a digital
Self was identical to the Original, and that an Original should feel that a Ditto itself
somehow carried them forward into immortality.

“We must do so to be sure we survive, when the fog catches us? I will slay them, instead!”

Voltaire laughed. “Your sword -- they can control it, if they like. They captured your
defense programming, and mine -- though, as they implied, I rely mostly upon wit.”

“Dittos ... ? I fail to understand.”

“Refuting the Copy Fallacy is straightforward, an exercise in the calculus of logic. A
simple exercise makes the point. Imagine yourself promised that you will be resurrected
digitally, immediately after your death. Assign a price tag you will pay for that,
insurance of a sort. Then imagine that, well, perhaps it would not be started right away,
but sometime in future ... we promise. As that date recedes, people's enthusiasm for
paying for Self Copies dims -- demonstrating that it was the hope of continuity they
unconsciously relished.”

“I see. ” She vomited into her hand with what she hoped was a ladylike reserve. The stench
of the bloated corpses was penetrating.

“In the end, Copies benefited themselves, not the dead. Thus on Trantor, and throughout
the Empire, it is illegal. ” Voltaire sighed. “Moralists! They never understand. To ban
something makes it enticing. That is why such entities inhabit this Mesh.”

“They are all illegal?”

“All but the fog. That is ... worse.”

“But if a Ditto is the same as a person, why not -- ”

“Ah. The contradiction of Copying, known in antiquity as Levinson's Paradox: To the degree
that a Copy approaches perfection, it defeats itself.”