Foundation's Fear (9 page)

The woman from the Ministry of Interlocking Cultures looked down her nose at him and said, “Of course, we must have contributions from your group.”

Hari shook his head disbelievingly. “A…senso?”

She adjusted her formal suit by wriggling in his office’s guest chair. “This is an advanced program. All mathists are charged to submit Boon Behests.”

“We are completely unqualified to compose—”

“I understand your hesitation. Yet we at the Ministry feel these senso-symphonies will be just the
thing needed to energize a, well, an art form which is showing little progress.”

“I don’t get it.”

She begrudgingly gave him a completely unconvincing, stilted smile. “The way we envision this new sort of senso-symphony, the artists—the mathists, that is—will transmogrify basic structures of
thought,
such as Euclidean conceptual edifices, or transfinite set theory fabrications. These will be translated by an art strainer—”

“Which is?”

“A computer filter which distributes conceptual patterns into a broad selection of sensory avenues.”

Hari sighed. “I see.” This woman had power and he had to listen to her. His psychohistory funding was secure, coming from the Emperor’s private largess. But the Streeling department could not ignore the Imperial Boon Board or its lackeys, such as the one before him. Such was boonmanship.

Far from being relaxed, meditative groves of quiet inquiry, research universities were intense, competitive, high-pressure marathons. The meritocrats—scholars and scientists alike—put in long hours, had stress-related health problems, high divorce rates, and few offspring. They cut up their results into bite-sized chunks, in pursuit of the Least Publishable Unit, so to magnify their lists of papers.

To gain a boon from the Imperial Offices one did the basic labor: Filling Out Forms. Hari knew well the bewildering maze of cross-linked questions. List and analyze type and “texture” of funding. Estimate fringe benefits. Describe kind of lab and computer equipment needed (can existing resources be modified to suit?). Elucidate philosophical stance of the proposed work.

The pyramid of power meant that the most experienced scholars did little scholarship. Instead,
they managed and played the endless games of boonsmanship. The Greys grimly saw to it that no box went unchecked. About ten percent of boon petitions received funds, and then after two years’ delay, and for about half the requested money.

Worse, since the lead time was so great, there was a premium on hitting the nail squarely on the head with every boon. To be sure a study would work, most of it was done
before
writing the boon petition. This insured that there were no “holes” in the petition, no unexpected swerves in the work.

This meant scholarship and research had become mostly surprise-free, as well. No one seemed to notice that this robbed them of their central joy: the excitement of the unexpected.

“I will…speak to my department.”
Order them to do it,
would have been more honest. But one did try to preserve the amenities.

When she had left, Dors came into his office immediately, with Yugo right behind. “I will not work with these!” she said, eyes flaring.

Hari studied two large blocks of what seemed to be stone. Yet they could not be that heavy, for Yugo cradled one in each open palm. “The sims?” he guessed.

“In ferrite cores,” Yugo said proudly. “Stuck down in a rat’s warren, on a planet named Sark.”

“The world with that ‘New Renaissance’ movement?”

“Yeah—kinda crazy, dealin’ with them. I got the sims, though. They just came in, Worm Express. The woman in charge there, a Buta Fyrnix, wants to talk to you.”

“I said I didn’t want to be involved.”

“Part of the deal is she gets a face-to-face.”

Hari blinked, alarmed. “She’d come all the way here?”

“No, but they’re payin’ for a tightbeam. She’s
standin’ by. I’ve routed her through. Just punch for the link.”

Hari had the distinct feeling that he was being hustled into something risky, far beyond the limits of his ordinary caution. Tightbeam time was expensive, because the Imperial wormhole system had been impacted with flow for millennia. Using it for a face-to-face was simply decadent, he felt. If this Fyrnix woman was paying for galactic-scale standby time, just to chat with a mathist…

Spare me from the enthused,
Hari thought. “Well, all right.”

Buta Fyrnix was a tall, hot-eyed woman who smiled brightly as her image blossomed in the office. “Professor Seldon! I was so happy that your staff has taken an interest in our New Renaissance.”

“Well, actually, I gather it’s about those simulations.” For once, he was grateful for the two-second delay in transmission. The biggest wormhole mouth was a light-second from Trantor, and apparently Sark had about the same.

“Of course! We found truly ancient archives. Our progressive movement here is knocking over the old barriers, you’ll find.”

“I hope the research will prove interesting,” Hari said neutrally. How did Yugo get him into this?

“We’re turning up things that will open your eyes, Dr. Seldon.” She turned and gestured at the scene behind her, a large warren crammed with ancient ceramo storage racks. “We’re hoping to blow the lid off the whole question of pre-Empire origins, the Earth legend—the works!”

“I, ah, I will be very happy to see what results.”

“You’ve got to come and see it for yourself. A mathist like you will be impressed. Our Renaissance is just the sort of forward-looking enterprise that
young, vigorous planets need. Do say you’ll pay us a visit—a state visit, we hope.”

Apparently the woman wanted to invest in a future First Minister. It took him more unbearable minutes to get away from her. He glowered at Yugo when at last her image wilted in the air.

“Hey, I got us a good deal, providing she got to do a li’l sell job on you,” Yugo said, spreading his hands.

“At considerable under-the-table cost, I hope?” Hari asked, getting up. Carefully he put a hand on one cube and found it surprisingly cool. Within its shadowy interior he could see labyrinths of lattices and winding ribbons of refracted light, like tiny highways through a somber city.

“Sure,” Yugo said with casual assurance. “Got some Dahlites to, ah, massage the matter.”

Hari chuckled. “I don’t think I should hear about it.”

“As First Minister, you must not,” Dors said.

“I am not First Minister!”

“You could be—and soon. This simulation matter is too risky. And you even spoke to the Sark source! I will not work on or with them.”

Yugo said mildly, “Nobody’s askin’ you to.”

Hari rubbed the cool, slick surface of a ferrite block, hefted it—quite light—and took the two from Yugo. He put them on his desk. “How old?”

Yugo said, “Sark says they dunno, but must be at least—”

Dors moved suddenly. She yanked up the blocks, one in each hand, turned to the nearest wall—and smashed them together. The crash was deafening. Chunks of ferrite smacked against the wall. Grains of debris spattered Hari’s face.

Dors had absorbed the explosion. The stored energy in the blocks had erupted as the lattice cracked.

In the sudden silence afterward Dors stood adamantly rigid, hands covered with grainy dust. Her
hands were bleeding and she had a cut on her left cheek. She gazed straight at him. “I am charged with your safety.”

Yugo drawled, “Sure a funny way to show it.”

“I had to protect you from a potentially—”

“By
destroying
an ancient artifact?” Hari demanded.

“I smothered nearly all the eruption, minimizing your risk. But yes, I deem this Sark involvement as—”

“I know, I know.” Hari raised his hands, palms toward her, recalling.

The night before he had come home from his rather well-received speech to find Dors moody and withdrawn. Their bed had been a rather chilly battleground, too, though she would not come out and say what had irked her so. Winning through withdrawal, Hari had once termed it. But he had no idea she felt this deeply.

Marriage is a voyage of discovery that never ends,
he thought ruefully.

“I make decisions about risk,” he said to her, eyeing the rubble in his office. “You will obey them unless there is an obvious
physical
danger. Understand?”

“I must use my judgment—”

“No! Involvement with these Sarkian simulations may teach us about shadowy, ancient times. That could affect psychohistory.” He wondered if she were carrying out an order from Olivaw. Why would the robots care so strongly?

“When you are plainly imperiling—”

“You
must
leave planning—and psychohistory!—to me.”

She batted her eyelashes rapidly, pursed her lips, opened her mouth…and said nothing. Finally, she nodded. Hari let out a sigh.

Then his secretary rushed in, followed by the
Specials, and the scene dissolved into a chaos of explanations. He looked the Specials captain straight in the face and said that the ferrite cores had somehow fallen into each other and apparently struck some weak fracture point.

They were, he explained—making it up as he went along, with a voice of professorial authority he had mastered long ago—fragile structures which used tension to stabilize themselves, holding in vast stores of microscopic information.

To his relief the captain just screwed up his face, looked around at the mess, and said, “I should never have let old tech like this in here.”

“Not your fault,” Hari reassured him. “It’s all mine.”

There would have been more pretending to do, but a moment later his holo rang with a reception. He glimpsed Cleon’s personal officer, but before the woman could speak the scene dissolved. He slapped his filter-face command as Cleon’s image coalesced in the air out of a cottony fog.

“I have some bad news,” the Emperor said without any greeting.

“Ah, sorry to hear that,” Hari said lamely.

Below Cleon’s vision he called up a suite of body language postures and hoped they would cover the ferrite dust clinging to his tunic. The red frame that stitched around the holo told him that a suitably dignified face would go out, keyed with his lip movements.

“The High Council is stuck on this representation issue.” Cleon chewed at his lip in irritation. “Until they resolve that, the First Ministership will be set aside.”

“I see. The representation problem…?”

Cleon blinked with surprise. “You haven’t been following it?”

“There is much to do at Streeling.”

Cleon waved airily. “Of course, getting ready for the move. Well, nothing will happen immediately, so you can relax. The Dahlites have logjammed the Galactic Low Council. They want a bigger voice—in Trantor
and
in the whole damned spiral! That Lamurk has sided against them in the High Council. Nobody’s budging.”

“I see.”

“So we’ll have to wait before the High Council can act. Procedural matters of representation take precedent over even ministerships.”

“Of course.”

“Damn Codes!” Cleon erupted. “I should be able to have who I want.”

“I quite agree.”
But not me,
Hari thought.

“Well, thought you’d like to hear it from me.”

“I do appreciate that, sire.”

“I’ve got some things to discuss, that psychohistory especially. I’m busy, but—soon.”

“Very good, sire.”

Cleon winked away without saying good-bye.

Hari breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m free!” he shouted happily, throwing his hands up.

The Specials stared at him oddly. Hari noticed again his desk and files and walls, all spattered with black grit. His office still looked like paradise to him, compared with the luxuriant snare of the palace.

“The trip, it’ll be worth it just to get out of Streeling,” Yugo said.

They entered the grav station with the inevitable
Specials trying to casually stroll alongside. To Hari’s eye they were as inconspicuous as spiders on a dinner plate.

“True enough,” Hari said. At Streeling, High Council members could solicit him, pressure groups could penetrate the makeshift privacy of the Math Department, and of course the Emperor could blossom in the air at any time. On the move, he was safe.

“Good connection comin’ up in two point six minutes.” Yugo consulted his retinal writer by looking to the far left. Hari had never liked the devices, but they were a convenient way of reading—in this case, the grav schedule—while keeping both hands free. Yugo was toting two bags. Hari had offered to help, but Yugo said they were “family jewels” and needed care.

Without breaking stride they passed through an optical reader which consulted seating, billed their accounts, and notified the autoprogram of the increased mass load. Hari was a bit distracted by some free-floating math ideas, and so their drop startled him.

“Oops,” he said, clutching at his armrests. Falling was the one signal that could interrupt even the deepest of meditations. He wondered how far back that alarm had evolved, and then paid attention to Yugo again, who was enthusiastically describing the Dahlite community where they would have lunch.

“You still wonderin’ about that political stuff?”

“The representation question? I don’t care about the infighting, factions, and so on. Mathematically, though, it’s a puzzle.”

“Seems to me it’s pretty clear,” Yugo said with a slight, though respectful, edge in his voice. “Dahlites been gettin’ the short end for too long.”

“Because they have only one Sector’s votes?”

“Right—and there are four hundred million of us in Dahl alone.”

“And more elsewhere.”

“Damn right. Averaged over Trantor, a Dahlite has only point-six-eight as much representation as the others.”

“And throughout the Galaxy—”

“Same damn thing! We got our Zone, sure, but except in the Galactic Low Council, we’re boxed in.”

Yugo had changed from the chattering friend out on a lark to sober-faced and scowling. Hari didn’t want the trip to turn into an argument. “Statistics require care, Yugo. Remember the classic joke about three statisticians who took up hunting ducks—”

“Which are?”

“A game bird, known on some worlds. The first shot a meter high, the second a meter low. When this happened, the third statistician cried, ‘We got it!’ ”

Yugo laughed a bit dutifully. Hari was trying to follow Dors’ advice about handling people, using his humor more and logic less. The incident with Lamurk had rebounded in Hari’s favor among the media and even the High Council, the Emperor had said.

Dors herself, though, seemed singularly immune to both laughs and logic; the incident with the ferrite cores had put a strain in their relationship. Hari realized now that this, too, was why he had greeted Yugo’s suggestion of a day away from Streeling. Dors had two classes to teach and couldn’t go. She had grumbled, but conceded that the Specials could probably cover him well enough. As long as he did nothing “foolish.”

Yugo persisted. “Okay, but the courts are stacked against us, too.”

“Dahl is the largest Sector now. You will get your judgeships in time.”

“Time we don’t have. We’re getting shut out by blocs.”

Hari deeply disliked the usual circular logic of political griping, so he tried to appeal to Yugo’s mathist side. “All judging bodies are vulnerable to bloc control, my friend. Suppose a court had eleven judges. Then a cohesive group of six could decide every ruling. They could meet secretly and agree to be bound by what a majority of them thinks, then vote as a bloc in the full eleven.”

Yugo’s mouth twisted with irritation. “The High Tribunal’s eleven—that’s your point, right?”

“It’s a general principle. Even smaller schemes could work, too. Suppose four of the High Tribunal met secretly and agreed to be bound by their own ballot. Then they’d vote as a bloc among the original cabal of six. Then four would determine the outcome of all eleven.”

“Damn-all, it’s worse than I thought,” Yugo said.

“My point is that any finite representation can be corrupted. It’s a general theorem about the method.”

Yugo nodded and then to Hari’s dismay launched into reciting the woes and humiliations visited upon Dahlites at the hands of the ruling majorities in the Tribunal, the Councils both High and Low, the Diktat Directory…

The endless busyness of ruling. What a bore!

Hari realized that his style of thought was a far cry from the fevered calculations of Yugo, and further still from the wily likes of Lamurk. How could he hope to survive as a First Minister? Why couldn’t the Emperor see that?

He nodded, put on his mask of thoughtful listening, and let the wall displays soothe him. They were still plunging down the long cycloidal curve of the grav drop.

This time the name was apt. Most long-distance travel on Trantor was in fact
under
Trantor, along a curve which let their car plunge down under gravity alone, suspended on magnetic fields a bare finger’s width from the tube walls. Falling through dark vacuum, there were no windows. Instead, the walls quieted any fears of falling.

Mature technology was discreet, simple, easy, quiet, sinuously classical, even friendly—while its use remained as obvious as a hammer, its effects as easy as a 3D. Both it and its user had educated each other.

A forest slid by all around him and Yugo. Many on Trantor lived among trees and rocks and clouds, as humans once had. The effects were not real, but they didn’t need to be.
We are the wild, now,
Hari thought. Humans shaped Trantor’s labyrinths to quiet their deep-set needs, so the mind’s eye felt itself flitting through a park. Technology appeared only when called forth, like magical spirits.

“Say, mind if I kill this?” Yugo’s question broke through his reverie.

“The trees?”

“Yeah, the open, y’know.”

Hari nodded and Yugo thumbed in a view of a mall with no great distances visible. Many Trantorians became anxious in big spaces, or even near images of them.

They had leveled out and soon began to rise. Hari felt pressed back into his chair, which compensated deftly. They were moving at high velocity, he knew, but there was no sign of it. Slight pulses of the magnetic throat added increments of velocity as they rose, making up for the slight losses. Otherwise, the entire trip took no energy, gravity giving and then taking away.

When they emerged in the Carmondian Sector his
Specials drew in close. This was no elite university setting. Few buildings here could be seen as exteriors, so design focused on interior spectacle: thrusting slopes, airy transepts, soaring trunks of worked metal and muscular fiber. But amid this serene architecture milling crowds jostled and fretted, lapping like an angry tide.

Across an overhead bikepad a steady stream of cyclists hauled tow-cars. Jamming their narrow bays were bulky appliances, glistening sides of meat, boxes, and lumpy goods, all bound for nearby customers. Restaurants were little more than hotplates surrounded with tiny tables and chairs, all squeezed into the walkways. Barbers conducted business in the thoroughfare, working one end of the customer while beggars massaged the feet for a coin.

“Seems…busy,” Hari said diplomatically as he caught the tang of Dahlite cooking.

“Yeah, doncha love it?”

“Beggars and street vendors were made illegal by the last Emperor, I thought.”

“Right.” He grinned. “Don’t work with Dahlites. We’ve moved plenty people into this Sector. C’mon, I want some lunch.”

It was early, but they ate in a stand-up restaurant, drawn in by the odors. Hari tried a “bomber,” which wriggled into his mouth, then exploded into a smoky dark taste he could not identify, finally fading into a bittersweet aftertaste. His Specials looked quite uneasy, standing around in a crowded, busy hubbub. They were accustomed to more regal surroundings.

“Things’re really boomin’ here,” Yugo observed. His manners had reverted to his laboring days and he spoke with his mouth half full.

“Dahlites have a gift for expansion,” Hari said diplomatically. Their high birth rate pushed them into other Sectors, where their connections to Dahl
brought new investment. Hari liked their restless energy; it reminded him of Helicon’s few cities.

He had been modeling all of Trantor, trying to use it as a shrunken version of the Empire. Much of his progress had come from unlearning conventional wisdom. Most economists saw money as simple ownership—a basic, linear power relationship. But it was a fluid, Hari found—slippery and quick, always flowing from one hand to the next as it greased the momentum of change. Imperial analysts had mistaken a varying flux for a static counter.

They finished and Yugo urged him into a ground-pod. They followed a complicated path, alive with noise and smells and vigor. Here orderly traffic disintegrated. Instead of making an entire layer one way, local streets intersected at angles acute and oblique, seldom rectangular. Yugo seemed to regard traffic intersections as rude interruptions.

They sped by buildings at close range, stopped, and got out for a walk to a slideway. The Specials were right behind and without any transition Hari found himself in the middle of chaos. Smoke enveloped them and the acrid stench made him almost vomit.

The Specials captain shouted to him, “Stay down!” Then the man shouted to his men to arm with anamorphine. They all bristled with weapons.

Smoke paled the overhead phosphors. Through the muggy haze Hari saw a solid wall of people hammering toward them. They came out of side alleys and doorways and all seemed to bear down on him. The Specials fired a volley into the mass. Some went down. The captain threw a canister and gas blossomed farther away. He had judged it expertly; air circulation carried the fumes into the mob, not toward Hari.

But anamorphine wasn’t going to stop them. Two
women rushed by Hari, carrying cobblestones ripped from the street. A third jabbed at Hari with a knife and the captain shot her with a dart. Then more Dahlites rushed at the Specials and Hari caught what they were shouting: incoherent rage against tiktoks.

The idea seemed so unlikely to him at first he thought he could not have heard rightly. That deflected his attention, and when he looked back toward the streaming crowd the captain was down and a man was advancing, holding a knife.

What any of this had to do with tiktoks was mysterious, but Hari did not have time to do anything except step to the side and kick the man squarely in the knee.

A bottle bounced painfully off his shoulder and smashed on the walkway. A man whirled a chain around and around and then toward Hari’s head.
Duck.
It whistled by and Hari dove at the man, tackling him solidly. They went down with two others in a swearing, punching mass. Hari took a slug in the gut.

He rolled over and gasped for air and clearly, only a few feet away, saw a man kill another with a long, curved knife.

Jab, slash, jab. It happened silently, like a dream. Hari gasped, shaken, his world in slow motion. He should be responding boldly, he knew that. But it was so overwhelming—

—and then he was standing, with no memory of getting there, wrestling with a man who had not bothered with bathing for quite some while.

Then the man was gone, abruptly yanked away by the seethe of the crowd.

Another sudden jump—and Specials were all around him. Bodies sprawled lifeless on the walkway. Others held their bloody heads. Shouts, thumps—

He did not have time to figure out what weapon had
done that to them before the Specials were whisking him and Yugo along and the whole incident fled into obscurity, like a 3D program glimpsed and impatiently passed by.

The captain wanted to return to Streeling. “Even better, the palace.”

“This wasn’t about us,” Hari said as they took a slideway.

“Can’t be sure of that, sir.”