Foundation Fear (41 page)

Flying ships through both mouths sent stress waves propagating toward each other, at
speeds which depended on the location and velocity of the ships. The stress constricted
the throat, so that when the waves met, a clenching squeezed down the walls.

The essential point was that the two waves moved differently after they met. They
interacted, one slowing and the other speeding up, in a highly nonlinear fashion.

One wave could grow, the other shrink. The big one made the throat clench down into
sausage links. When a sausage neck met a ship, the craft might slip through -- but
calculating that was a prodigious job. If the sausage neck happened to meet the two ships
when they passed -- crunch.

This was no mere technical problem. It was a real limitation, imposed by the laws of
quantum gravity. From that firm fact arose an elaborate system of safeguards, taxes,
regulators, and hangers-on -- all the apparatus of a bureaucracy which does indeed have a
purpose and makes the most of it.

Hari learned to dispel his apprehension by watching the views. Suns and planets of great,
luminous beauty floated in the blackness.

Behind the resplendence, he knew, lurked necessity.

From the wormhole calculus arose blunt economic facts. Between worlds A and B there might
be half a dozen wormhole jumps; the Nest was not simply connected, a mere astrophysical
subway system. Each worm mouth imposed added fees and charges on each shipment.

Control of an entire trade route yielded the maxi- mum profit. The struggle for control
was unending, often violent. From the viewpoint of economics, politics, and “historical
momentum” -- which meant a sort of imposed inertia on events -- a local empire which
controlled a whole constellation of nodes should be solid, enduring.

Not so. Time and again, regional satrapies went toes-up.

Many perished because they were elaborately controlled. It seemed natural to squeeze every
worm passage for the maximum fee, by coordinating every worm mouth to optimize traffic.
But that degree of control made people restive.

The system could not deliver the best benefits. Overcontrol failed.

On their seventeenth jump, they met a case in Doint.

“Vector aside for search, ” came an automatic command from an Imperial vessel.

They had no choice. The big-bellied Imperial scooped them up within seconds after their
emergence from a medium-sized wormhole mouth.

“Transgression tax, ” a computerized system announced. “Planet Obejeeon demands that
special carriers pay -- ” A blur of computer language followed.

“Let's pay it, ” Hari said.

“I wonder if it will provide a tracer for Lamurk?” Dors said over the internal comm.

“What is our option?”

“I shall use my own personal indices.”

“For a wormhole transit? That will bankrupt you!”

“It is safer.”

Hari fumed while they floated in magnetic grap-plers beneath the Imperial picket ship. The
worm-hole orbited a heavily industrialized world. Gray cities sprawled over the continents
and webbed across the seas in huge hexagonals.

The Empire had two planetary modes: rural and urban. Helicon was a farm world, socially
stable because of its time-honored lineages and stable economic modes. Such worlds, and
the similar Femo-rustics, lasted.

Obejeeon, on the other hand, seemed to cater to the other basic human impulse: clumping,
seeking the rub of one's fellows. Trantor was the pinnacle of city clustering.

Hari had always thought it odd that humanity broke so easily into two modes. Now, though,
his pan experience clarified these proclivities.

Pan love of the open and natural had its parallel in the rustic worlds. This included a
host of possible societies, especially the Femo-pastoral attractor in psychohistory-space.

Its opposite pole -- claustrophobic, though reassuring societies -- emerged from the same
psychody-namic roots as the pans' tribal gathering. Pans' obsessive grooming expressed
itself in humans as gossip and partying. Pan hierarchies gave the basic shape to the
various Feudalist attractor groups: Macho, Socialist, Paternal. Even the odd
thantocra-cies, of some of the Fallen Worlds, fit the pattern. They had Pharaoh-figures
promising admission to an afterlife and detailed rankings descending from his exalted peak
in the rigid social pyramid.

These categories he now felt in his gut. That was the element he had been missing. Now he
could include nuances and shadings in the psychohistorical equations which reflected
earned experience. That would be much better than the dry abstractions which had led him
so far.

“They're paid off, ” Dors sent over the comm. “Such corruption!”

“Ummm, yes, shocking. ” Was he getting cynical? He wanted to turn and speak with her, but
their pencil ship allowed scant socializing.

“Let's go.”

“Where to?”

“To ... ” He realized that he had no idea.

“We have probably eluded pursuit. ” Dors' voice came through stiff and tight. He had
learned to recognize signs of her own tension.

“I'd like to see Helicon again.”

“They would expect that.”

He felt a stab of disappointment. Until now he had not realized how close to his heart his
early years still were. Had Trantor dulled him to his own emotions?

“Where, then?”

“I took advantage of this pause to alert a friend, by comlink, ” she said. “We may be able
to return to Trantor, though through a devious route.”

“Trantor! Lamurk -- ”

“May not expect such audacity.”

“Which recommends the idea.”

It was dizzying -- leaping about the entire galaxy trapped in a casket-sized container.
They jumped and dodged and jumped again. At several more wormhole yards Dors made “deals.
” Payoffs, actually. She deftly dealt combinations of his cygnets, the Imperial Passage
indices, and her private numbers.

“Costly, ” Hari fretted. “How will I ever pay -- ”

“The dead do not worry about debts, ” she said.

“You have such an engaging way of putting matters.”

“Subtlety is wasted here.”

They emerged from one jump in close orbit about a sublimely tortured star. Streamers lush
with light raced by them.

“How long can this worm last here?” he wondered.

“It will be rescued, I'm sure. Imagine the chaos in the system if a worm mouth begins to
gush hot plasma.”

Hari knew the wormhole system, though discovered in pre-Empire ages, had not always been
used. After the underlying physics of the wormhole calculus came to be known, ships could
ply the Galaxy by invoking wormhole states around themselves. This afforded exploration of
reaches devoid of wormholes, but at high energy costs and some danger. Further, such
ship-local hyperdrives were far slower than simply slipping through a worm.

And if the Empire eroded? Lost the worm network? Would the slim attack fighters and
snakelike weapons fleets give way to lumbering hypership dreadnoughts?

The next destination swam amid an eerie black void, far out in the halo of red dwarfs
above the Galactic plane. The disk stretched in luminous splendor. Hari remembered holding
a coin and thinking of how a mere speck on it stood for a vast volume, like a large Zone.
Here such human terms seemed pointless. The Galaxy was one serene symphony of mass and
time, grander than any human perspective or pan-shaped vision.

“Ravishing, ” Dors said.

“See Andromeda? It looks nearly as close.”

The twin spiral hung above them. Its lanes of clot-ted dust framed stars azure and crimson
and emerald. “Here comes our connection, ” Hari warned.

This wormhole intersection afforded five branches. Three black spheres orbited closely
together, blaring bright by their quantum rim radiation. Two cubic wormholes circled
farther out. Hari knew that one of the rare variant forms was cubical, but he had never
^en any. Two together suggested that they were born at the edge of galaxies, but such
matters were beyond his shaky understanding.

“We go -- there. ” Dors pointed a laser beam at one ;: the cubes, guiding the pencil ship.

They thrust toward the smaller cube, gingerly inch-Big up. The wormyard here was automatic
and no one hailed them.

“Tight fit, ” Hari said nervously.

“Five fingers to spare.”

He thought she was joking, then realized that she was underestimating the fit. At this
less-used worm-hole intersection slow speeds were essential. Good physics; unfortunate
economics. The slowdown cut the net flux of mass, making them backwater crossroads.

He gazed at Andromeda to take his mind off the piloting. Narrow wormholes did not emerge
in other galaxies for arcane reasons of quantum gravity. Extremely narrow ones might, but
if the throat had other mass coming through, the squeeze wave could kill. Few had ever
ventured down them in search of extragalactic emergent points.

Except, that is, for Steffno's Ride, a legendary risky expedition which had popped out in
the galaxy cataloged as M87. Steffno had gotten data on the spectacular jet emerging from
the black hole at M87's center, majestic strands twisting into helical arabesques. The
lone rider had not tarried, returning only seconds before the worm snapped shut in a spray
of radiant particles.

No one knew why. Something in wormhole physics discouraged extragalactic adventures.

The cubic worm took them quickly to several wormyards in close orbit about planets. One
Hari recognized as a rare type with an old but ruined biosphere. Like Panucopia, it
supported advanced life-forms. On most inhabitable worlds early explorers had found algae
mats that never developed further.

“Why no interesting aliens, then?” Hari mused while Dors dealt with the local wormyard
Grey Men.

Occasionally Dors reminded him that she was, after all, an historian. “The shift from
one-celled to many-celled creatures took billions of years, theory says. We just came from
a fast, tougher biosphere, that's all.”

“We came from a planet with at least one big moon, too.”

“Why?” she asked.

“We've got repeating patterns of twenty-eight days built in. Female menstruation, for
instance -- unlike pans, incidentally. We're designed by biology. We made it, these
biospheres didn't. There are plenty of ways to kill a world. Glaciers advancing when an
orbit alters. Asteroids slamming in, bam-bam-bam!” He slapped the side of the pencil ship
loudly. “Chemistry of the atmosphere goes wrong. It runs away into a hothouse planet, or a
frozen-out world.”

“I see.”

“Humans are tougher -- and smarter -- than anybody. We're here, they aren't.”

“Who says?”

“Standard knowledge, ever since the sociotheorist, Kampfbel -- ”

I'm sure you're right, " she said quickly. Something in her voice made him hesitate -- he
loved a good argument -- but by then they were slip -- g through the excruciating tight
fit of the cube. The edges glowed like a lemony Euclidean construc-tion -- and then they
popped into an orbit above a black hole.

He watched the enormous energy-harvesting disks glow with fermenting scarlets and virulent
purples. The Empire had stationed great conduits of magnetic field around the hole. These
sucked and drew in interstellar dust clouds. The dark cyclones narrowed toward the
brilliant accretion disk around the hole. Radiation from the friction and infalling was in
turn captured by vast grids and reflectors. The crop of raw photon energy itself became
trapped and flushed into the waiting maws of wormholes. These carried the flux to dis-
tant worlds in need of cutting lances of light, for the business of planet-shaping,
world-raking, moon-carving.

But even amid this spectacle he could not forget the tone in Dors' voice. She knew
something he did not. He wondered ...

Nature, some philosophers held, was itself only before humanity touched it. We did not
then belong In -- the very idea of Nature, and so we could experierence it only as it was
disappearing. Our presence alone was enough to make Nature into something else, a
compromised impersonation. These ideas had unexpected implications. One world named
Arcadia had been deliberately left with a mere caretaker population of humans, partly
because it was difficult to reach. The nearest worm-hole mouth was half a light-year away.
An early emperor -- so obscure his or her very name was lost -- had decreed that the
forests and plains of the benign planet be left “original. ” But ten thousand years later,
a recent report announced, some forests were not regenerating, and plains were giving way
to scrubby brush.

Study showed that the caretakers had taken too much care. They had put out wild fires,
suppressed species transfer. They had even held the weather nearly constant through
adjustments in how much sunlight the ice poles reflected back into space.

They had tried to hold onto a static Arcadia, so the forest primeval was revealed as, in
part, a human product. They had not understood cycles. He wondered how such an insight
might fold into psy-chohistory ...

Forget theory for the moment, he reminded himself. It was a fact that the Galaxy had
seemed empty of high alien life-forms in the early, pre-Empire times. With so many fertile
planets, did he truly believe that only humanity had emerged into intelligence?

Somehow, surveying the incomprehensible wealth of this lush, immense disk of stars ...
somehow, Hari could not believe it.

But what was the alternative?

The Empire's twenty-five million worlds supported an average of only four billion people
per planet. Trantor had forty billion. A mere thousand light years from Galactic Center,
it had seventeen worm- hole mouths orbiting within its solar system -- the highest density
in the Galaxy. The Trantorian system had originally held only two, but a gargantuan
technology of brute interstellar flight had tugged the rest there to make the nexus.

Each of the seventeen spawned occasional wild worms. One of these was Dors' target.