Flux (15 page)

He worried—but his responsibility to his own people was clear. If this bipedal race was so proud they could not cope with inferiority, that was not Mklikluln's problem.

He opened the top drawer of his desk in the San Diego headquarters of Doghouses Unlimited, his latest refuge from the interview seekers, and pushed a button on a small box.

From the box, a powerful burst of electromagnetic energy went out to the eighty million doghouses in southern California. Each doghouse relayed the same signal in an unending chain that gradually spread all over the world—wherever doghouses could be found.

When the last doghouse was linked to the network, all the doghouses simultaneously transmitted something else entirely. A signal that only sneered at lightspeed and that crossed light-years almost instantaneously. A signal that called millions of encapsulated minds that slept in their mindfields until they heard the call, woke, and followed the signal back to its source, again at speeds far faster than poor pedestrian light.

They gathered around the larger binary in the third orbit from their new sun, and listened as Mklikluln gave a full report. They were delighted with his work, and commended him highly, before convicting him of murder of an Arabian political prisoner and ordering him to commit suicide. He felt very proud, for the commendation they had given him was rarely awarded, and he smiled as he shot himself.

And then the minds slipped downward toward the doghouses that still called to them.

“Argworfgyardworfl,” said Royce's dog as it bounded excitedly through the backyard.

“Dog's gone crazy,” Royce said, but his two sons laughed and ran around with the dog as it looped the yard a dozen times, only to fall exhausted in front of the doghouse.

“Griffwigrofrf,” the dog said again, panting happily. It trotted up to Royce and nuzzled him.

“Cute little bugger,” Royce said.

The dog walked over to a pile of newspapers waiting for a paper drive, pulled the top newspaper off the stack, and began staring at the page.

“I'll be humdingered,” said Royce to Junie, who was bringing out the food for their backyard picnic supper. “Dog looks like he's readin' the paper.”

“Here, Robby!” shouted Royce's oldest son, Jim. “Here, Robby! Chase a stick.”

The dog, having learned how to read and write from the newspaper, chased the stick, brought it back, and instead of surrendering it to Jim's outstretched hand, began to write with it in the dirt.

“Hello, man,” wrote the dog. “Perhaps you are surprised to see me writing.”

“Well,” said Royce, looking at what the dog had written. “Here, Junie, will you look at that. This is some dog, eh?” And he patted the dog's head and sat down to eat. “Now I wonder, is there anybody who'd pay to see a dog do that?”

“We mean no harm to your planet,” wrote the dog.

“Jim,” said Junie, slapping spoonfuls of potato salad onto paper plates, “you make sure that dog doesn't start scratching around in the petunias.”

“C'mere, Robby,” said Jim. “Time to tie you up.”

“Wrowrf,” the dog answered, looking a bit perturbed and backing away from the chain.

“Daddy,” said Jim, “the dog won't come when I call anymore.”

Impatiently, Royce got up from his chair, his mouth full of chicken salad sandwich. “Doggonit, Jim, if you don't control the dog we'll just have to get rid of it. We only got it for you kids anyway!” And Royce grabbed the dog by the collar and dragged it to where Jimmy held the other end of the chain.

Clip.

“Now you learn to obey, dog, cause if you don't I don't care what tricks you can do, I'll sell ya.”

“Owrf.”

“Right. Now you remember that.”

The dog watched them with sad, almost frightened eyes all through dinner. Royce began to feel a little guilty, and gave the dog a leftover ham.

That night Royce and Junie seriously discussed whether to show off the dog's ability to write, and decided against it, since the kids loved the dog and it was cruel to use animals to perform tricks. They were, after all, very enlightened people.

And the next morning they discovered that it was a good thing they'd decided that way—because all anyone could talk about was their dog's newfound ability to write, or unscrew garden hoses, or lay and start an entire fire from a cold empty fireplace to a bonfire. “I got the most talented dog in the world,” crowed Detweiler, only to retire into grim silence as everyone else in the bowling team bragged about his own dog.

“Mine goes to the bathroom in the toilet now, and flushes it, too!” one boasted.

“And mine can fold an entire laundry, after washing her little paws so nothing gets dirty.”

The newspapers were full of the story, too, and it became clear that the sudden intelligence of dogs was a nationwide—a worldwide—phenomenon. Aside from a few superstitious New Guineans, who burned their dogs to death as witches, and some Chinese who didn't let their dogs' strange behavior stop them from their scheduled appointment with the dinnerpot, most people were pleased and proud of the change in their pets.

“Worth twice as much to me now,” boasted Bill Wilson, formerly an up-and-coming executive with the damnpowercompany. “Not only fetches the birds, but plucks 'em and cleans 'em and puts 'em in the oven.”

And Kay Block smiled and went home to her mastiff, which kept her good company and which she loved very, very much.

“In the five years since the sudden rise in dog intelligence,” said Dr. Wheelwright to his class of graduate students in animal intelligence, “we have learned a tremendous amount about how intelligence arises in animals. The very suddenness of it has caused us to take a second look at evolution. Apparently mutations can be much more complete than we had supposed, at least in the higher functions. Naturally, we will spend much of this semester studying the research on dog intelligence, but for a brief overview:

“At the present time it is believed that dog intelligence surpasses that of the dolphin, though it still falls far short of man's. However, while the dolphin's intelligence is nearly useless to us, the dog can be trained as a valuable, simple household servant, and at last it seems that man is no longer alone on his planet. To which animal such a rise in intelligence will happen next, we cannot say, any more than we can be certain that such a change
will
happen to any other animal.”

Question from the class.

“Oh, well, I'm afraid it's like the big bang theory. We can guess and guess at the cause of certain phenomena, but since we can't repeat the event in a laboratory, we will never be quite sure. However, the best guess at present is that some critical mass of total dog population in a certain ratio to the total mass of dog brain was reached that pushed the entire species over the edge into a higher order of intelligence. This change, however, did not affect
all
dogs equally—primarily it affected dogs in civilized areas, leading many to speculate on the possibility that continued exposure to man was a contributing factor. However, the very fact that many dogs, mostly in uncivilized parts of the world, were
not
affected destroys completely the idea that cosmic radiation or some other influence from outer space was responsible for the change. In the first place, any such influence would have been detected by the astronomers constantly watching every wavelength of the night sky, and in the second place, such an influence would have affected all dogs equally.”

Another question from a student.

“Who knows? But I doubt it. Dogs, being incapable of speech, though many have learned to write simple sentences in an apparently mnemonic fashion somewhere between the blind repetition of parrots and the more calculating repetition at high speeds by dolphins—um, how did I get into this sentence? I can't get out!”

Student laughter.

“Dogs, I was saying, are incapable of another advance in intelligence, particularly an advance bringing them to equal intellect with man, because they cannot communicate verbally and because they lack hands. They are undoubtedly at their evolutionary peak. It is only fortunate that so many circumstances combined to place man in the situation he has reached. And we can only suppose that somewhere, on some other planet, some other species might have an even more fortunate combination leading to even higher intelligence. But let us hope not!” said the professor, scratching the ears of his dog, B. F. Skinner. “Right, B. F.? Because man may not be able to cope with the presence of a more intelligent race!”

Student laughter.

“Owrowrf,” said B. F. Skinner, who had once been called Hihiwnkn on a planet where white hexagons had telepathically conquered time and space; hexagons who had only been brought to this pass by a solar process they had not quite learned how to control. What he wished he could say was, “Don't worry, professor. Humanity will never be fazed by a higher intelligence. It's too damn proud to notice.”

But instead he growled a little, lapped some water from a bowl, and lay down in a corner of the lecture room as the professor droned on.

 

It snowed in September in Kansas in the autumn of the year 2000, and Jim (Don't call me Jimmy anymore, I'm grown up) was out playing with his dog Robby as the first flakes fell.

Robby had been uprooting crabgrass with his teeth and paws, a habit much encouraged by Royce and Junie, when Jim yelled, “Snow!” and a flake landed on the grass in front of the dog. The flake melted immediately, but Robby watched for another, and another, and another. And he saw the whiteness of the flakes, and the delicate six-sided figures so spare and strange and familiar and beautiful, and he wept.

“Mommy!” Jim called out. “It looks like Robby's crying!”

“It's just water in his eyes,” Junie called back from the kitchen, where she stood washing radishes in front of an open window. “Dogs don't cry.”

But the snow fell deep all over the city that night, and many dogs stood in the snow watching it fall, sharing an unspoken reverie.

“Can't we?” again and again the thought came from a hundred, a thousand minds.

“No, no, no,” came the despairing answer. For without fingers of
some
kind, how could they ever build the machines that would let them encapsulate again and leave this planet?

And in their despair, they cursed for the millionth time that fool Mklikluln, who had got them into this.

“Death was too good for the bastard,” they agreed, and in a worldwide vote they removed the commendation they had voted him. And then they all went back to having puppies and teaching them everything they knew.

The puppies had it easier. They had never known their ancestral home, and to them snowflakes were merely fun, and winter was merely cold. And instead of standing out in the snow, they curled up in the warmth of their doghouses and slept.

L
EYEL
F
ORSKA SAT
before his lector display, reading through an array of recently published scholarly papers. A holograph of two pages of text hovered in the air before him. The display was rather larger than most people needed their pages to be, since Leyel's eyes were no younger than the rest of him. When he came to the end he did not press the
PAGE
key to continue the article. Instead he pressed
NEXT
.

The two pages he had been reading slid backward about a centimeter, joining a dozen previously discarded articles, all standing in the air over the lector. With a soft beep, a new pair of pages appeared in front of the old ones.

Deet spoke up from where she sat eating breakfast. “You're only giving the poor soul
two pages
before you consign him to the wastebin?”

“I'm consigning him to oblivion,” Leyel answered cheerfully. “No, I'm consigning him to hell.”

“What? Have you rediscovered religion in your old age?”

“I'm creating one. It has no heaven, but it has a terrible everlasting hell for young scholars who think they can make their reputation by attacking my work.”

“Ah, you have a theology,” said Deet. “Your work is holy writ, and to attack it is blasphemy.”

“I welcome
intelligent
attacks. But this young tube-headed professor from—yes, of course, Minus University—”

“Old Minus U?”

“He thinks he can refute me, destroy me, lay me in the dust, and all he has bothered to cite are studies published within the last thousand years.”

“The principle of millennial depth is still widely used—”

“The principle of millennial depth is the confession of modern scholars that they are not willing to spend as much effort on research as they do on academic politics. I shattered the principle of millennial depth thirty years ago. I proved that it was—”

“Stupid and outmoded. But my dearest darling sweetheart Leyel, you did it by spending part of the immeasurably vast Forska fortune to search for inaccessible and forgotten archives in every section of the Empire.”

“Neglected and decaying. I had to reconstruct half of them.”

“It would take a thousand universities' library budgets to match what you spent on research for ‘Human Origin on the Null Planet.'”

“But once I spent the money, all those archives were open. They
have
been open for three decades. The
serious
scholars all use them, since millennial depth yields nothing but predigested, preexcreted muck. They search among the turds of rats who have devoured elephants, hoping to find ivory.”

“So colorful an image. My breakfast tastes much better now.” She slid her tray into the cleaning slot and glared at him. “Why are you so snappish? You used to read me sections from their silly little papers and we'd laugh. Lately you're just nasty.”

Leyel sighed. “Maybe it's because I once dreamed of changing the galaxy, and every day's mail brings more evidence that the galaxy refuses to change.”

“Nonsense. Hari Seldon has promised that the Empire will fall any day now.”

There. She had said Hari's name. Even though she had too much tact to speak openly of what bothered him, she was hinting that Leyel's bad humor was because he was still waiting for Hari Seldon's answer. Maybe so—Leyel wouldn't deny it. It
was
annoying that it had taken Hari so long to respond. Leyel had expected a call the day Hari got his application. At least within the week. But he wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of admitting that the waiting bothered him. “The Empire will be killed by its own refusal to change. I rest my case.”

“Well, I hope you have a wonderful morning, growling and grumbling about the stupidity of everyone in origin studies—except your esteemed self.”

“Why are you teasing me about my vanity today? I've always been vain.”

“I consider it one of your most endearing traits.”

“At least I make an effort to live up to my own opinion of myself.”

“That's nothing. You even live up to
my
opinion of you.” She kissed the bald spot on the top of his head as she breezed by, heading for the bathroom.

Leyel turned his attention to the new essay at the front of the lector display. It was a name he didn't recognize. Fully prepared to find pretentious writing and puerile thought, he was surprised to find himself becoming quite absorbed. This woman had been following a trail of primate studies—a field so long neglected that there simply
were
no papers within the range of millennial depth. Already he knew she was his kind of scholar. She even mentioned the fact that she was using archives opened by the Forska Research Foundation. Leyel was not above being pleased at this tacit expression of gratitude.

It seemed that the woman—a Dr. Thoren Magolissian—had been following Leyel's lead, searching for the
principles
of human origin rather than wasting time on the irrelevant search for one particular planet. She had uncovered a trove of primate research from three millennia ago, which was based on chimpanzee and gorilla studies dating back to seven thousand years ago. The earliest of these had referred to original research so old it may have been conducted before the founding of the Empire—but those most ancient reports had not yet been located. They probably didn't exist any more. Texts abandoned for more than five thousand years were very hard to restore; texts older than eight thousand years were simply unreadable. It was tragic, how many texts had been “stored” by librarians who never checked them, never refreshed or recopied them. Presiding over vast archives that had lost every scrap of readable information. All neatly catalogued, of course, so you knew
exactly
what it was that humanity had lost forever.

Never mind.

Magolissian's article. What startled Leyel was her conclusion that primitive language capability seemed to be inherent in the primate mind. Even in primates incapable of speech, other symbols could easily be learned—at least for simple nouns and verbs—and the nonhuman primates could come up with sentences and ideas that had never been spoken to them. This meant that mere production of language, per se, was prehuman, or at least not the determining factor of humanness.

It was a dazzling thought. It meant that the difference between humans and nonhumans—the real origin of humans in recognizably human form—was postlinguistic. Of course this came as a direct contradiction of one of Leyel's own assertions in an early paper—he had said that “since language is what separates human from beast, historical linguistics may provide the key to human origins”—but this was the sort of contradiction he welcomed. He wished he could shout at the other fellow, make him look at Magolissian's article. See? This is how to do it! Challenge my assumption, not my conclusion, and do it with new evidence instead of trying to twist the old stuff. Cast a light in the darkness, don't just churn up the same old sediment at the bottom of the river.

Before he could get into the main body of the article, however, the house computer informed him that someone was at the door of the apartment. It was a message that crawled along the bottom of the lector display. Leyel pressed the key that brought the message to the front, in letters large enough to read. For the thousandth time he wished that sometime in the decamillennia of human history, somebody had invented a computer capable of
speech
.

“Who is it?” Leyel typed.

A moment's wait, while the house computer interrogated the visitor.

The answer appeared on the lector: “Secure courier with a message for Leyel Forska.”

The very fact that the courier had got past house security meant that it was genuine—and important. Leyel typed again. “From?”

Another pause. “Hari Seldon of the Encyclopedia Galactica Foundation.”

Leyel was out of his chair in a moment. He got to the door even before the house computer could open it, and without a word took the message in his hands. Fumbling a bit, he pressed the top and bottom of the black glass lozenge to prove by fingerprint that it was he, by body temperature and pulse that he was alive to receive it. Then, when the courier and her bodyguards were gone, he dropped the message into the chamber of his lector and watched the page appear in the air before him.

At the top was a three-dimensional version of the logo of Hari's Encyclopedia Foundation. Soon to be my insignia as well, thought Leyel. Hari Seldon and I, the two greatest scholars of our time, joined together in a project whose scope surpasses anything ever attempted by any man or group of men. The gathering together of all the knowledge of the Empire in a systematic, easily accessible way, to preserve it through the coming time of anarchy so that a new civilization can quickly rise out of the ashes of the old. Hari had the vision to foresee the need. And I, Leyel Forska, have the understanding of all the old archives that will make the Encyclopedia Galactica possible.

Leyel started reading with a confidence born of experience; had he ever really desired anything and been denied?

Of course, thought Leyel. There
is
no other scholar of my stature, except Hari himself, and perhaps Deet, once her current work is published. At least we have no equals by the standards that Hari and I have always recognized as valid. Hari created the science of psychohistory. I transformed and revitalized the field of originism.

And yet the tone of Hari's letter was wrong. It sounded like—flattery. That was it. Hari was softening the coming blow. Leyel knew before reading it what the next paragraph would say.

Did Hari imagine Leyel to be so vain he would read these flattering words and preen himself contentedly? Did he think Leyel would believe that this was the real reason his application was being denied? Could Hari Seldon misknow a man so badly?

Impossible. Hari Seldon, of all people in the Empire, knew how to know other people. True, his great work in psychohistory dealt with large masses of people, with populations and probabilities. But Hari's fascination with populations had grown out of his interest in and understanding of individuals. Besides, he and Hari had been friends since Hari first arrived on Trantor. Hadn't a grant from Leyel's own research fund financed most of Hari's original research? Hadn't they held long conversations in the early days, tossing ideas back and forth, each helping the other hone his thoughts? They may not have seen each other much in the last—what, five years? Six?—but they were adults, not children. They didn't need constant visits in order to remain friends. And this was not the letter a true friend would send to Leyel Forska. Even if, doubtful as it might seem, Hari Seldon really meant to turn him down, he would not suppose for a moment that Leyel would be content with a letter like
this
.

Surely Hari would have known that it would be like a taunt to Leyel Forska. “Lesser men and women,” indeed! The Foundation on Terminus was so valuable to Hari Seldon that he had been willing to risk death on charges of treason in order to launch the project. It was unlikely in the extreme that he would populate Terminus with second-raters. No, this was the form letter sent to placate prominent scholars who were judged unfit for the Foundation. Hari would have known Leyel would immediately recognize it as such.

There was only one possible conclusion. “Hari could not have written this letter,” Leyel said.

“Of course he could,” Deet told him, blunt as always. She had come out of the bathroom in her dressing gown and read the letter over his shoulder.

“If
you
think so then I truly
am
hurt,” said Leyel. He got up, poured a cup of peshat, and began to sip it. He studiously avoided looking at Deet.

“Don't pout, Leyel. Think of the problems Hari is facing. He has so little time, so much to do. A hundred thousand people to transport to Terminus, most of the resources of the Imperial Library to duplicate—”

“He already
had
those people—”

“All in six months since his trial ended. No wonder we haven't seen him, socially or professionally, in—years. A decade!”

“You're saying that he no longer knows me? Unthinkable.”

“I'm saying that he knows you very well. He knew you would recognize his message as a form letter. He also knew that you would understand at once what this meant.”

“Well, then, my dear, he overestimated me. I do
not
understand what it means, unless it means he did not send it himself.”

“Then you're getting old, and I'm ashamed of you. I shall deny we are married and pretend you are my idiot uncle whom I allow to live with me out of charity. I'll tell the children they were illegitimate. They'll be very sad to learn they won't inherit a bit of the Forska estate.”

He threw a crumb of toast at her. “You are a cruel and disloyal wench, and I regret raising you out of poverty and obscurity. I only did it for pity, you know.”

This was an old tease of theirs. She had commanded a decent fortune in her own right, though of course Leyel's dwarfed it. And, technically, he
was
her uncle, since her stepmother was Leyel's older half sister Zenna. It was all very complicated. Zenna had been born to Leyel's mother when she was married to someone else—before she married Leyel's father. So while Zenna was well dowered, she had no part in the Forska fortune. Leyel's father, amused at the situation, once remarked, “Poor Zenna. Lucky you. My semen flows with gold.” Such are the ironies that come with great fortune. Poor people don't have to make such terrible distinctions between their children.