Foundation Fear (19 page)

“But people have to matter.” Dors' voice carried a note of forlorn hope. Hari knew that
somewhere deep in her lurked the stern directives of the Zeroth Law, but over that lay a
deep layer of true human feeling. She was a humanist who believed in the power of the
individual -- and here she met blunt, uncaring mechanism, in the large.

“They do, actually, but perhaps not in the way you want, ” Hari said gently. “We sought
out telltale groups, pivots about which events sometimes hinge.”

“The homosexuals, f'instance, ” Yugo said.

“They're about one percent of the population, a consistent minor variant in reproductive
strategies, ” Hari said.

Socially, though, they were often masters of improvisation, fashioning style to substance,
fully at home with the arbitrary. They seemed equipped with an internal compass that
pointed them at every social novelty, early on, so that they exerted leverage all out of
proportion to their numbers. Often they were sensitive indicators of future turns.

Yugo went on, “So we figured, could they be a crucial indicator? Turns out they are. Helps
out the equations.”

Dors said severely, “Why does history smooth out?”

Hari let Yugo carry the ball. “Y'see, that same sparrow effect had a positive side.
Chaotic systems could be caught at just the right instant, tilted ever so slightly in a
preferred way. A well-timed nudge could drive a system, yielding benefits all out of
proportion to the effort expended.”

“You mean control?” She looked doubtful.

“Just a touch,” Yugo said. “Minimal control -- the right nudge at the right time --
demands that the dynamics be intricately understood. Maybe that way, you could bias
outcomes toward the least damaging of several finely balanced results. At best, they could
drive the system into startlingly good outcomes.”

“Who's controlling?” Dors asked.

Yugo looked embarrassed. “Uh, we ... dunno.”

“Don't know? But this is a theory of all history.”

Hari said quietly, “There are elements, interplays, in the equations that we don't grasp.
Damping forces.”

“How can you not understand?”

Both men looked ill at ease. “We don't know how the terms interact. New features,” Hari
said, “leading to ... emergent order.”

She said primly, “Then you don't really have a theory, do you?”

Hari nodded ruefully. “Not in the sense of a deep understanding, no.”

Models followed the gritty, experienced world, he reflected. They echoed their times.
Clockwork planetary mechanics came after clocks. The idea of the whole universe as a
computation came after computers. A worldview of stable change came after nonlinear
dynamics ...

He had a glimmering of a metamodel, which would look at him and describe how he would then
select among models for psychohistory. Peering down from above, it could see which was
likely to be favored by Hari Seldon ...

“Who plans this control?” Dors persisted.

Hari caught at the idea he had, but it slipped away. He knew how to coax it back: ease up.
“Remember that joke?” he said. “How do you make God laugh?”

She smiled. “You tell him your plans.”

“Right. We will study this result, sniff out an answer.”

She smiled. “Don't ask you for predictions about the progress of your own predictions?”

“Embarrassing, but yes.”

His desksec chimed. “An Imperial summons,” it announced.

“Damn!” Hari slapped his chair. “Fun's over.”

Not quite time for the Specials to arrive, Hari thought. But getting any work done was
impossible while he was on edge.

He jiggled coins in his pocket, distracted, then fished one out. A five cred piece, amber
alloy, a handsome Cleon I head on one side -- treasuries always flattered emperors -- and
the disk of the Galaxy seen from above on the other. He held it on edge and thought.

Let the coin's width represent the disk's typical scale height. To be correct, the coin
would have to bulge at its center to depict the hub, but overall it was a good geometric
replica.

In the disk was a flaw, a minute blister in an outer spiral arm. He did the ratio in his
head, allowing that the galaxy was about 100,000 light-years across, and ... blinked. The
speck portrayed a volume about a thousand light years across. In the outer arms, that
would contain ten million stars.

To see so many worlds as a fleck adrift in immensity made him feel as though Trantor's
solidity had opened and he had plunged helplessly into an abyss.

Could humanity matter on such a scale? So many billions of souls, packed into a grainy dot.

Yet they had spanned the whole incomprehensible expanse of that disk in a twinkling.

Humanity had spread through the spiral arms, spilling through the wormholes, wrapping
itself around the hub in a mere few thousand years. In that time the spiral arms
themselves had not revolved a perceptible angle in their own gravid gavotte; that would
take half a billion years. Human hankering for far horizons had sent them swarming through
the wormhole webbing, popping out into spaces near suns of swelling red, virulent blue,
smoldering ruby.

The speck stood for a volume a single human brain, with its primate capacities, could not
grasp, except as mathematical notation. But that same brain led humans outward, until they
now strode the Galaxy, mastering the starlit abyss ... without truly knowing themselves.

So a single human could not fathom even a dot in the disk. But the sum of humanity could,
incrementally, one mind at a time, knowing its own immediate starry territory.

And what did he desire? To comprehend all of that humanity, its deepest impulses, its
shadowy mechanisms, its past, present, and future. He wanted to know the vagrant species
that had managed to scoop up this disk, and to make it a plaything.

So maybe one single human mind could indeed grasp the disk, by going one level higher --
and fathoming the collective effects, hidden in the intricacies of the Equations.

Describing Trantor, in this proportion, was child's play. For the Empire, he needed a far
grander comprehension.

Mathematics might rule the galaxy. Invisible, gossamer symbols could govern.

So a single man or woman could matter.

Maybe. He shook his head. A single human head.

Getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren't we? Dreams of godhood ...

Back to work.

Only he couldn't work. He had to wait. To his relief, the Imperial Specials arrived and
escorted him across Streeling University. By now he was used to the gawkers, the
embarrassment of plowing through the crowds which now accumulated everywhere, it seemed,
that he might frequent.

“Busy today,” he said to the Specials captain.

“Got to expect it, sir.”

“You get extra duty pay for this, I hope.”

“Yessir. 'Digs,' we call them.”

“For extra risk, correct? Dangerous duty.”

The captain looked flustered. “Well, yessir ... ”

“If someone starts shooting, what are your orders?”

“Uh, if they can penetrate the engaging perimeter, we're to get between them and you. Sir.”

“And you'd do that? Take a gauss pulse or a flechette?”

He seemed surprised. “Of course.”

“Truly?”

“Our duty, y'know.”

Hari was humbled by the man's simple loyalty. Not to Hari Seldon, but to the idea of
Empire. Order. Civilization.

And Hari realized that he, too, was devoted to that idea. The Empire had to be saved, or
at least its decline mitigated. Only by fathoming its deep structure could he do that.

Which was why he disliked the First Minister business. It robbed him of time,
concentration.

In the Specials' armored pods he salved his discontent by pulling out his tablet and
working on some equations. The captain had to remind him when they reached the palace
grounds. Hari got out and there was the usual security ritual, the Specials spreading out
and airborne sensors going aloft to sniff out the far perimeter. They reminded him of
golden bees, buzzing with vigilance.

He walked by a wall leading into the palace gardens and a tan, round sheet the size of his
fingernail popped off the wall. It stuck to his neck. He reached up and plucked it off.

He recognized it as a promotional trinket, a slap-on patch which gave you a pleasant rush
by diffusing endorphins into your bloodstream. It also subtly predisposed you to coherent
signals in corridor advertisements.

He pitched it aside. A Special grabbed at the patch and suddenly there was shouting and
movement all around him. The Special turned to throw the patch away.

An orange spike shot through the guard's hand, hissing hot, flaring and gone in a second.
The man cried, “Ah!” and another Special grabbed him and pushed him down. Then five
Specials blocked Hari from all sides and he saw no more.

The Special screamed horribly. Something cut off the wail of pain. The captain shouted,
“Move!” and Hari had to trot with the Specials around him into the gardens and down
several lanes.

It took a while to straighten out the incident. The patch was untraceable, of course, and
there was no way of knowing for sure whether it was targeted on Hari at all.

“Could be part of some Palace plot,” the captain said. “Just waiting for the next passerby
with a scent-signature like yours.”

“Not aimed for me at all?”

“Could be. That tab took couple extra seconds tryin' to figure out if it wanted you or
not.”

“And it did.”

“Body odor, skin smells -- they're not exact, sir.”

“I'll have to start wearing perfume.”

The captain grinned. “That won't stop a smart tab.”

Other protection specialists rushed in and there was evidence to measure and opinions and
a lot of talk. Hari insisted on walking back to see the Special who had taken the tab. He
was gone, already off to emergency care; they said he would lose his hand. No, sorry, Hari
could not see him. Security, y'know.

Quite quickly Hari became bored with the aftermath. He had come early to get a stroll
through the gardens and though he knew he was being irrational, his regret at missing the
walk loomed larger than the assassination attempt.

Hari took a long, still moment and moved the incident aside. He visualized a displacement
operator, an icy blue vector frame. It listed the snarled, angry red knot and pushed it
out of view. Later, he would deal with it later.

He cut off the endless talk and ordered the Specials to fall in behind him. Shouted
protests came, of course, which he ignored. Then he ambled across the gardens, relishing
the open air. He inhaled eagerly. The blinding speed of the attack had erased its
importance to him. For now.

The palace towers loomed like webwork of a giant spider. Between their bulks weaved airy
walkways. Spires were veiled in silvery mist and aripple, apulse, shimmering with a
silent, steady beat like a great unseen heart. He had been so long in the foreshortened
views of Trantor's corridors, his eyes did not quickly grasp the puzzling perspectives.

An upward rush caught his attention as he passed through a flowerscape. From the immense
Imperial aviary, flocks of birds in the thousands oscillated in the vertical drafts. Their
artful, ever-shifting patterns had a diaphanous, billowy quality, an immense, wispy dance.

Yet these had been shaped many millennia ago by bioengineering their genome. They formed
drifts and billows like clouds, or even airy mountains, feasting on upwelling gnats,
released from below by the gardeners. But a side draft could dissolve all their ornate
sculptures, blow them away.

Like the Empire, he mused. Beautiful in its order, stable for fifteen millennia, yet now
toppling. Cracking up like a slow-motion pod wreck. Or in spasms like the Junin riots.

Why? Even among Imperial loveliness, his mathist mind returned to the problem.

Entering the palace, he passed a delegation of children on their way to some audience with
a lesser Imperial figure. With a sudden pang he missed his adopted son, Raych. He and Dors
had decided to secretly send the boy away to school, after Yugo had his leg broken.
“Deprive them of targets, ” Dors had said.

Among the meritocracy, only those adults with commitment, stability, and talent could have
children. Gentry or plain citizens could whelp brats by the shovelful.

Parents were like artists -- special people with a special gift, given respect and
privileges, left free to create happy and competent humans. It was noble work, well paid.
Hari had been honored to be approved.

In immediate contrast, three oddly shaped courtiers ambled by him.

By biotech means people could turn their children into spindly towers, into flowerlike
footbound dwarves, into green giants or pink pygmies. From throughout the Galaxy they were
sent here to amuse the Imperial court, where novelty was always in vogue.

But such variants seldom lasted. There was a species norm. And stretching it was just as
deeply ingrained. Hari had to admit that he would forever be among the unsophisticated,
for he found such folk repulsive.

Someone had designed the reception room to look like anything but a room for receiving
people. It resembled a lumpy pocket in molten glass, crisscrossed by polished shafts of
ceramo-steel. These shafts in turn dripped into smooth lumps which -- since there was
nothing else in the room -- must have been intended to be chairs and tables.

It seemed unlikely that he could ever get back out of any of the shapes, once he had
worked out how to sit in them -- so Hari stood. And wondered if that effect, too, was
somehow intended ... The palace was a subtle place of layered design.

This was to be a small, private meeting, Cleon's staff had assured him. Still, there was a
small army of attaches and protocol officers and aides who had introduced themselves as
Hari had passed through several rooms of increasing ornamentation, on his way here. Their
talk became more ornate, as well. Courtly life was dominated by puffed-up people who
always acted as though they were coyly unveiling statues of themselves.

There was a lot of adornment and finery, the architectural equivalent of jewels and silk,
and even the most minor attendants wore very dignified green uniforms. He felt as though
he should lower his voice and realized, recalling Sundays on Helicon, that this place felt
somehow like a church.

Then Cleon swept in and the staff vanished, silently draining away into concealed exits.

“My Seldon!”

“Yours, sire. ” Hari followed the ritual.

The Emperor continued greeting him effusively, tut-tutting over the apparent assassination
attempt -- “Surely an accident, don't you think?” -- and led him to the large display
wall. At Cleon's gesture an enormous view of the entire Galaxy appeared, the work of a new
artist. Hari murmured the required admiration and recalled his thoughts of only an hour
before.

This was a time sculpture, tracing the entire Galactic history. The disk was, after all, a
collection of debris, swirling at the bottom of a gravitational pothole in the cosmos. How
it looked depended on which of mankind's myriad eyes one used. Infrared could pierce and
unmask dusty lanes. X-rays sought pools of fiercely burning gas. Radio dishes mapped cold
banks of molecules and magnetized plasma. All were packed with meaning.

In the carousel of the disk, stars bobbed and weaved under complicated Newtonian tugs. The
major arms -- Sagittarius, Orion, and Perseus, counting outward from the Center -- bore
names obscured by antiquity. Each contained a Zone of that name, hinting that perhaps here
the ancient Earth orbited. But no one knew, and research had revealed no obvious single
candidate. Instead, dozens of worlds vied for the title of the True Earth. Quite probably,
none of them were.

Many bright signatures -- skymarks, like landmarks? -- blazed among the curving, barred
spiral arms. Beauty beyond description -- but not beyond analysis, Hari thought, whether
physical or social. If he could find the key ...

“I congratulate you on the success of my Moron Decree, ” Cleon said.

Hari slowly withdrew from the immense perspective. “Uh, sire?”

“Your idea -- first fruit of psychohistory.” To Hari's blank incomprehension Cleon
chuckled. “Forgotten already? The renegades who pillage, seeking renown for their infamy.
You advised me to strip them of their identity by making them henceforth be called Morons.”

Hari had indeed forgotten the advice, but contented himself with a sage nod.

“It worked! Such crimes are much reduced. And those convicted go to their deaths full of
anger, demanding to be made famous. I tell you, it is delicious.”

Hari felt a chill at the way the Emperor smacked his lips. An off-hand suggestion made
suddenly, concretely real. It rattled him a bit.

He realized that the Emperor was asking about progress with psychohistory. His throat
tightened and he remembered the Moonrose woman with her irritating questions. That seemed
weeks ago. “Work is slow,” he managed to say.

Cleon said sympathetically, “Surely it requires a deep knowledge of every facet of
civilized life.”

“At times.” Hari stalled, putting his mixed emotions firmly away.

“I was at a convocation recently and learned something you undoubtedly have factored into
your equations.”

“Yes, sire?”

“It is said that the very foundation of the Empire -- besides the wormholes of course --
is the discovery of proton-Boron fusion. I had never heard of it, yet the speaker said it
was the single greatest achievement of antiquity. That every starship, every planetary
technology, depends upon it for power.”