Foundation's Fear (10 page)

Hari batted away all suggestions that they discontinue their journey. The incident had apparently begun when some tiktoks malfed.

“Somebody accused Dahlites of causing it,” Yugo related. “So our people stood up for themselves and, well, things got out of hand.”

Everyone near them was alive with excitement, faces glowing, eyes white and darting. He thought suddenly of his father’s wry saying,
Never underestimate the power of boredom.

In human affairs, spirited action relieved dry tedium. He remembered seeing two women pummel a Spook, slamming away at the spindly, bleached-white man as though he were no more than a responsive exercise machine. A simple phobia against sunlight meant that he was of the hated Other, and thus fair game.

Murder was a primal urge. Even the most civilized felt tempted by it in moments of rage. But nearly all resisted and were better for the resistance. Civilization was a defense against nature’s raw power.

That was a crucial variable, one never considered by the economists with their gross products per capita, or the political theorists with their representative quotients, or the sociosavants and their security indices.

“I’ll have to keep that in, too,” he muttered to himself.

“Keep what?” Yugo asked. He, too, was still agitated.

“Things as basic as murder. We get all tied up in Trantor’s economics and politics, but something as gut-deep as that incident may be more important, in the long run.”

“We’ll pick it up in the crime statistics.”

“No, it’s the
urge
I want to get. How does that explain the deeper movements in human culture? It’s bad enough dealing with Trantor—a giant pressure cooker, forty billion sealed in together. We know there’s something missing, because we can’t get the psychohistorical equations to converge.”

Yugo frowned. “I was thinkin’ it was, well, that we needed more data.”

Hari felt the old, familiar frustration. “No, I can
feel
it. There’s something crucial, and we don’t have it.”

Yugo looked doubtful and then their off-disk came. They changed through a concentric set of circulating slideways, reducing their velocity and ending in a broad square. An impressive edifice dominated the high air shafts, slender columns blooming into offices above. Sunlight trickled down the sculpted faces of the building, telling tales of money: Artifice Associates.

Reception whisked them into a sanctum more luxurious than anything at Streeling. “Great room,” Yugo said with a wry slant of his head.

Hari understood this common academic reflection. Technical workers outside the university system earned more and worked in generally better surroundings.
None of that had ever bothered him. The idea of universities as a high citadel had withered as the Empire declined, and he saw no need for opulence, particularly under an Emperor with a taste for it.

The staff of Artifice Associates referred to themselves as A
²
and seemed quite bright. He let Yugo carry the conversation as they sat around a big, polished pseudowood table; he still pulsed with the zest of the earlier violence. Hari sat back and meditated on his surroundings, his mind returning as always to new facets which might bear upon psychohistory.

The theory already had mathematical relationships between technology, capital accumulation, and labor, but the most important driver proved to be knowledge. About half the economic growth came from the increase in the quality of information, as embodied in better machines and improved skills, building efficiency.

Fair enough—and that was where the Empire had faltered. The innovative thrust of the sciences had slowly ground down. The Imperial Universities produced fine engineers, but no inventors. Great scholars, but few true scientists. That factored into the other tides of time.

Only independent businesses such as this, he reflected, continued the momentum which had driven the entire Empire for so long. But they were wildflowers, often crushed beneath the boot of Imperial politics and inertia.

“Dr. Seldon?” a voice asked at his elbow, startling Hari out of his rumination. He nodded.

“We do have your permission as well?”

“Ah, to do what?”

“To use these.” Yugo stood and lifted onto the table his two carry-cases. He unzipped them and two ferrite cores stood revealed.

“The Sark sims, gentlemen.”

Hari gaped. “I thought Dors—”

“Smashed ’em? She thought so, too. I used two old, worthless data-cores in your office that day.”

“You knew she would—”

“I gotta respect that lady—quick and strong-minded, she is.” Yugo shrugged. “I figured she might get a little…provoked.”

Hari smiled. Suddenly he knew that he had been repressing real anger at Dors for her high-handed act. Now he released it in a fit of hearty laughter. “Wonderful! Wife or not, there are limits.”

He howled so hard tears sprang to his eyes. The guffaws spread around the table and Hari felt better than he had in weeks. For a moment all the nagging University details, the ministership, everything—fell away.

“Then we do have your permission, Dr. Seldon? To use the sims?” a young man at his elbow asked again.

“Of course, though I will want to keep close tabs on some, ah, research interests of mine. Will that be possible, Mr.…?”

“Marq Hofti. We’d be honored, sir, if you could spare the project some time. I’ll do my best—”

“And I.” A young woman stood at his other elbow. “Sybyl,” she said, and shook hands. They both appeared quite competent, neat, and efficient. Hari puzzled at the looks bordering on reverence they gave him. After all, he was just a mathist, like them.

Then he laughed again, heartily, a curiously liberating bark. He had just thought of what it would be like to tell Dors about the data-cores.

Joan of Arc wakened inside an amber dream. Cool breezes caressed her, odd noises reverberated. She heard before she saw—

—and abruptly found herself sitting outdoors. She noted things one at a time, as though some part of herself were counting them.

Soft air. Before her, a smooth round table.

Pressing against her, an unsettling white chair. Its seat, unlike those in her home village of Domremy, was not hand-hewn of wood. Its smooth slickness lewdly aped her contours. She reddened.

Strangers. One, two, three…winking into being before her eyes.

They moved. Peculiar people. She could not tell woman from man, except for those whose pantaloons and tunics outlined their intimate parts. The spectacle was even more than she’d seen in Chinon, at the lewd court of the Great and True King.

Talk. The strangers seemed oblivious of her, though she could hear them chattering in the background
as distinctly as she sometimes heard her voices. She listened only long enough to conclude that what they said, having nothing to do with holiness or France, was clearly not worth hearing.

Noise. From outside. An iron river of self-moving carriages muttered by. She felt surprise at this—then somehow the emotion evaporated.

A long view, telescoping in—

Pearly mists concealed distant ivory spires. Fog made them seem like melting churches.

What
was
this place?

A vision, perhaps related to her beloved voices. Could such apparitions be holy?

Surely the man at a nearby table was no angel. He was eating scrambled eggs—through a straw.

And the women—unchaste, flagrant, gaudy cornucopias of hip and thigh and breast. Some drank red wine from transparent goblets, different from any she’d seen at the royal court.

Others seemed to sup from floating clouds—delicate, billowing
mousse
fogs. One mist, reeking of beef with a tangy Loire sauce, passed near her. She breathed in—and felt in an instant that she had experienced a meal.

Was this heaven? Where appetites were satisfied without labor and toil?

But no. Surely the final reward was not so, so…carnal. And perturbing. And embarrassing.

The fire some sucked into their mouths from little reeds—
those
alarmed her. A cloud of smoke drifting her way flushed birds of panic from her breast—although she could not smell the smoke, nor did it burn her eyes or sear her throat.

The fire, the fire!
she thought, heart fluttering in panic.
What had…?

She saw a being made of breastplate coming at her with a tray of food and drink—
poison from enemies,
no doubt, the foes of France!
she thought in churning fright—she at once reached for her sword.

“Be with you in a moment,” the breastplated thing said as it wheeled past her to another table. “I’ve only got four hands.
Do
have patience.”

An inn, she thought. It was some kind of inn, though there appeared to be nowhere to lodge. And yes…it came now…she was supposed to meet someone…a gentleman?

That one: the tall, skinny old man—much older than Jacques Dars, her father—the only one besides herself attired normally.

Something about his dress recalled the foppish dandies at the Great and True King’s court. His hair curled tight, its whiteness set off by a lilac ribbon at his throat. He wore a pair of mignonette ruffles with narrow edging, a long waistcoat of brown satin with colored flowers, and sported red velvet breeches, white stockings, and chamois shoes.

A silly, vain aristocrat, she thought. A fop accustomed to carriages, who could not so much as sit a horse, much less do holy battle.

But duty was a sacred obligation. If King Charles ordered her to advance, advance she would.

She rose. Her suit of mail felt surprisingly light. She hardly sensed the belted-on protective leather flaps in front and back, nor the two metal arm plates that left elbows free to wield the sword. No one paid the least attention to the rustle of her mail or her faint clank.

“Are you the gentleman I am to meet? Monsieur Arouet?”

“Don’t call me that,” he snapped. “Arouet is my father’s name—the name of an authoritarian prude, not mine. No one has called me that in
years.
”

Up close, he seemed less ancient. She’d been misled by his white hair, which she now saw was false, a
powdered wig secured by the lilac ribbon under his chin.

“What should I call you then?” She suppressed terms of contempt for this dandy—rough words learned from comrades-in-arms, now borne by demons to her tongue’s edge, but not beyond.

“Poet, tragedian, historian.” He leaned forward and with a wicked wink whispered, “I style myself Voltaire. Freethinker. Philosopher king.”

“Besides the King of Heaven and His son, I call but one man King. Charles VII of the House of Valois. And I’ll call you Arouet until my royal master bids me do otherwise.”

“My dear
pucelle,
your Charles is dead.”

“No!”

He glanced at the noiseless carriages propelled by invisible forces on the street. “Sit down, sit down. Much else has passed, as well. Do help me get that droll waiter’s attention.”

“You know me?” Led by her voices, she had cast off her father’s name to call herself
La Pucelle,
the Chaste Maid.

“I know you very well. Not only did you live centuries before me, I wrote a play about you. And I have curious memories of speaking with you before, in some shadowy spaces.” He shook his head, frowning. “Besides my garments—beautiful,
n’est ce pas
?—you’re the only familiar thing about this place. You and the street, though I must say you’re younger than I thought, while the street…hmmm…seems wider yet older. They finally got ’round to paving it.”

“I, I cannot fathom—”

He pointed to a sign that bore the inn’s name—
Aux Deux Magots.
“Mademoiselle Lecouvreur—a famous actress, though equally known as my mistress.” He blinked. “You’re blushing—how sweet.”

“I know
nothing
of such things.” She added with more than a trace of pride, “I am a maid.”

He grimaced. “Why one would be proud of such an unnatural state, I can’t imagine.”

“As I cannot imagine why you are so dressed.”

“My tailors will be mortally offended! But allow me to suggest that it is you, my dear
pucelle,
who, in your insistence on dressing like a man, would deprive civilized society of one of its most harmless pleasures.”

“An insistence I most dearly paid for,” she retorted, remembering how the bishops badgered her about her male attire as relentlessly as they inquired after her divine voices.

As if in the absurd attire members of her sex were required to wear, she could have defeated the English-loving duke at Orleans! Or led three thousand knights to victory at Jargeau and Meung-sur-Loire, Beaugency and Patay, throughout that summer of glorious conquests when, led by her voices, she could do no wrong.

She blinked back sudden tears. A rush of memory—

Defeat…Then the bloodred darkness of lost battles had descended, muffling her voices, while those of her English-loving enemies grew strong.

“No need to get testy,” Monsieur Arouet said, gently patting her knee plate. “Although I personally find your attire repulsive, I would defend to the death your right to dress any way you please. Or undress.” He eyed the near-transparent upper garment of a female inn patron nearby.

“Sir—”

“Paris has not lost its appetite for finery after all. Pale fruit of the gods, don’t you agree?”

“No, I do not. There is no virtue greater than chastity in women—or in men. Our Lord was chaste, as are our saints and priests.”

“Priests chaste!” He rolled his eyes. “Pity you weren’t at the school my father forced me to attend as a boy. You could have so informed the Jesuits, who daily abused their innocent charges.”

“I, I cannot believe—”

“And what of him?” Voltaire talked right over her, pointing at the four-handed creature on wheels rolling toward them. “No doubt such a creature is chaste. Is it then virtuous, too?”

“Christianity, France itself, is founded on—”

“If chastity were practiced in France as much as it’s preached, the race would be extinct.”

The wheeled creature braked by their table. Stamped on his chest was what appeared to be his name:
GARÇON
213-
ADM.
In a bass voice as clear as any man’s, he said, “A costume party, eh? I hope my delay will not make you late. Our mechfolk are having difficulties.”

It eyed the other tiktok bringing dishes forth—a honey-haired blond in a hairnet, approximately humanlike. A demon?

The Maid frowned. Its jerky glance, even though mechanical, recalled the way her jailers had gawked at her. Humiliated, she had cast aside the women’s garments that her Inquisitors forced her to wear. Resuming manly attire, she’d scornfully put her jailers in their place. It had been a fine moment.

The cook assumed a haughty look, but fussed with her hairnet and smiled at Garçon 213-ADM before averting her eyes. The import of this eluded Joan. She had accepted mechanicals in this strange place, without questioning their meaning. Presumably this was some intermediate station in the Lord’s providential order. But it
was
puzzling.

Monsieur Arouet reached out and touched the mechman’s nearest arm, whose construction the Maid could not help but admire. If such a creature
could be made to sit a horse, in battle it would be invincible. The possibilities…

“Where are we?” Monsieur Arouet asked. “Or perhaps I should ask, when? I have friends in high places—”

“And I in low,” the mechman said good-naturedly.

“—and I demand a full account of where we are, what’s going on.”

The mechman shrugged with two of his free arms, while the two others set the table. “How could a mechwait with intelligence programmed to suit his station, instruct monsieur, a human being, in the veiled mysteries of simspace? Have monsieur and mademoiselle decided on their order?”

“You have not yet brought us the menu,” said Monsieur Arouet.

The mechman pushed a button under the table. Two flat scrolls embedded in the table shimmered, letters glowing. The Maid let out a small cry of delight—then, in response to Monsieur Arouet’s censorious look, clapped her hand over her mouth. Her peasant manners were a frequent source of embarrassment.

“Ingenious,” said Monsieur Arouet, switching the button on and off as he examined the underside of the table. “How does it work?”

“I’m not programmed to know. You’ll have to ask a mechlectrician about that.”

“A what?”

“With all due respect, Monsieur, my other customers are waiting. I
am
programmed to take your order.”

“What will you have, my dear?” Monsieur Arouet asked her.

She looked down, embarrassed. “Order for me,” she said.

“Ah, yes. I quite forgot.”

“Forgot what?” asked the mechman.

“My companion is unlettered. She can’t read. I might as well be, too, for all the good this menu’s doing me.”

So this obviously learned man could not fathom the Table of House. Joan found that endearing, amid this blizzard of the bizarre.

The mechman explained and Voltaire interrupted.

“
Cloud
-food? Electronic cuisine?” He grimaced. “Just bring me the best you have for great hunger and thirst. What can you recommend for abstinent virgins—a plate of dirt, perhaps? Chased with a glass of vinegar?”

“Bring me a slice of bread,” the Maid said with frosty dignity. “And a small bowl of wine to dip it in.”

“Wine!” said Monsieur Arouet. “Your voices allow wine?
Mais quelle scandale!
If word got out that you drink wine, what would the priests say of the shoddy example you’re setting for the future saints of France?”

He turned to the mechman. “Bring her a glass of water, small.” As Garçon 213-ADM withdrew, Monsieur Arouet called out, “And make sure the bread is a crust! Preferably moldy!”