Foundation's Fear (24 page)

The Academic Potentate led him out with ritual words to smooth the way, and Dors was standing attentively at the grand entrance. Still, Hari had gotten the essential message: the academic meritocracy would back him for First Minister
if
he at least paid lip service to prevailing orthodoxy.

Together, with the customary academic honor
guard, they went down into the vast rotunda. This was a dizzying bowl with various scholarly disciplines represented by the full regalia and insignia, splashed across immense wall designs. Below them swirled a chattering mob, thousands of the finest minds gathered for speeches, learned reports, and of course much infighting of the very finest sort.

“Think we can survive this?” Hari whispered.

“Don’t let go,” Dors said, seizing his hand.

He realized that she had taken his question literally.

A little later the Academic Potentate wasn’t making a show of savoring the bouquet of the stims anymore, just sucking them up like one of the major food groups. She steered Hari and Dors from one cluster of the learned to another. Occasionally she would remember her role as hostess and feign interest in him as more than a chess piece in a larger game. Unfortunately these blunt attempts fastened upon inquiries into his personal life.

Dors resisted these inquisitions, of course, smiling and shaking her head. When the Potentate turned to Hari and asked, “Do you exercise?” he could not resist replying, “I exercise restraint.”

The Protocol Officer frowned, but Hari’s remark went unnoticed in the jostling throng. He found the company of his fellow members of the professoriat oddly off-putting. Their conversations had a directionless irony, which conveyed with raised eyebrows and arch tones the speaker’s superiority to everything he was commenting upon.

Their acerbic paradoxes and stiletto humor struck Hari as irritating and beside the point. He knew well that the most savage controversies are about matters for which there is no good evidence either way. Still, there was a mannered desperation even to the scientists.

Fundamental physics and cosmology had been well worked out far back in antiquity. Now all of Imperial
scientific history dealt with teasing out intricate details and searching for clever applications. Humankind was trapped in a cosmos steadily expanding, though slowing slightly, and destined to see the stars wink out. A slow, cool glide into an indefinite future was ordained by the mass-energy content present at the very conception of the universe. Humans could do nothing against that fate. Except, of course, understand it.

So the grandest of intellectual territories had been opened, and that can only be done once. Now scientists were less like discoverers than like settlers, even tourists.

He should not be surprised, he realized, to find that even the best of them, gathered from an entire Galaxy, should have an air of jaded brilliance, like tarnished gold.

Meritocrats did not have many children and there was an airy sterility about them. Hari wondered if there was a middle ground between the staleness he felt here and the chaos of the “renaissances” sprouting up on Chaos Worlds. Perhaps he needed to know more about basic human nature.

The Protocol Officer steered him down a spiral air ramp, electrostatics seizing them and gently lowering the party toward—he looked down with trepidation—the obligatory media people. He braced himself. Dors squeezed his hand. “Do you
have
to talk to them?”

He sighed. “If I ignore them, they will report
that.
”

“Let Lamurk amuse them.”

“No.” His eyes narrowed. “Since I’m in this, I might as well play to win.”

Her eyes widened with revelation. “You’ve decided, haven’t you?”

“To try? You bet.”

“What happened?”

“That woman back there, the Potentate. She and her kind think the world’s just a set of opinions.”

“What has that got to do with Lamurk?”

“I can’t explain it. They’re all part of the decay. Maybe that’s it.”

She studied his face. “I’ll never understand you.”

“Good. That would be dull, yes?”

The media pack approached, 3D snouts aimed like weapons.

Hari whispered to Dors, “Every interview begins as a seduction and ends as a betrayal.” They descended.

“Academician Seldon, you are known as a mathist, a candidate First Minister, and a Heliconian. You—”

“I only realized I was a Heliconian when I came to Trantor.”

“And your career as a mathist—”

“I only realized that I thought as a mathist when I began meeting politicians.”

“Well then, as a politician—”

“I am still a Heliconian.”

This drew some laughter.

“You prize the traditional, then?”

“If it works.”

“We be not open to old ideas,” a willowy woman from the Fornax Zone said. “Future of Empire comes from people, not laws. Agree?”

She was a Rational, using their stripped-down, utterly orderly Galactic, free of irregular verbs and complex constructions. Hari could follow it well enough, but for him the odd swerves and turns of Classical Galactic embodied its charm.

To Hari’s delight, several people disagreed with her formulated question, shouting. In the noise he reflected on the infinity of human cultures, represented in this vast bowl and still united under Classical Galactic.

The language’s sturdy base had stitched together the early Empire. For many millennia now the language had sat on its laurels, admittedly. He had added a small interaction term to his equations to allow for the cultural ripples excited by the splashing of a new argot into the linguistic pool. The ancient ruffles and flourishes of Galactic allowed subtleties denied the Rationals—or Rats, as some called them—and the fun of puns as well.

He tried to make this case to the woman, but she retorted, “Not support oddity! Support order. Old ways failed. As mathist you will be too—”

“Come now!” Hari said, irked. “Even in closed axiomatic systems, not all propositions are decidable. I suggest you cannot predict what I would do as a First Minister.”

“Think you Council submits to reason?” the woman asked haughtily.

“It is the triumph of reason to get on well with those who possess none,” Hari said. To his surprise, some applauded.

“Your theory of history denies God’s powers to intervene in human affairs!” a thin man from a low-grav planet asserted. “What say you to that?”

Hari was about to agree—it seemed to make no difference to him—when Dors stepped before him.

“Perhaps I can bring up a bit of research, since this is an academic proceeding.” She smiled smoothly. “I ran across an historian of about a thousand years ago who had tested for the power of prayer.”

Hari’s mouth made a surprised, skeptical O. The thin man demanded, “How could one scientifically—”

“He reasoned that the people most prayed for were the most famous. Yet they had to be exalted, above the fray.”

“The emperors?” The thin man was rapt.

“Exactly. And their lesser family members. He analyzed their mortality rates.”

Hari had never heard this, but his innate skepticism demanded detail. “Allowing for their better medical care, and safety from ordinary accidents?”

Dors grinned. “Of course. Plus their risk of assassination.”

The thin man did not know where this line of attack was going, but his curiosity got the better of him. “And…?”

Dors said, “He found that emperors died earlier than unprayed-for people.”

The thin man looked shocked, angry.

Hari asked Dors, “What was the root mean deviation?”

“Always the skeptic! Not sufficient to prove that prayer had an actually harmful effect.”

“Ah.” The crowd seemed to find this example of tag-team puffery entertaining. Best to leave them wanting more. “Thank you,” he said, and they melted away behind a screen of Specials.

That left the crowd itself. Cleon had urged him to mingle with these folk, supposedly his basic power base, the meritocrats. Hari wrinkled his nose and nonetheless plunged in.

It was a matter of style, he realized after the first thirty minutes.

He had learned early in rural Helicon to place great store in good manners and civility. Among the alert, hard-edged academics he had found many who seemed poorly socialized, until he realized that they were operating out of a different culture, where cleverness mattered more than grace. Their subtle shadings of voice carried arrogance and assurance in precarious balance, which in unguarded moments tilted into acerbic, cutting judgment, often without even the appealing veneer of wit. He had to make himself
remember to say “With all due respect,” at the beginning of an argument, and even to mean it.

Then there were the unspoken elements.

Among the fast-track circles, body language was essential, a taught skill. There were carefully designed poses for Confidence, Impatience, Submission (four shadings), Threat, Esteem, Coyness and dozens more. Codified and understood unconsciously, each induced a specific desired neurological state in both self and others. The rudiments for a full-blown craft lay in dance, politics, and the martial arts. By being systematic, much more could be conveyed. As with language, a dictionary helped.

A nonlinear philosopher of Galaxy-wide fame gave Hari a beaming smile, body language screaming self-confidence, and said, “Surely, Professor, you cannot maintain that your attempt to import math into history can somehow work? People can be what they wish. No equations will make them otherwise.”

“I seek to describe, that’s all.”

“No grand theory of history, then?”

Avoid a direct denial, he thought. “I will know I’m on the right track when I can simply describe a bit of human nature.”

“Ah, but that scarcely exists,” the man said with assurance, arms and chest turned adroitly.

“Of course there’s a human nature!” Hari shot back.

A pitying smile, a lazy shrug. “Why should there be?”

“Heredity interacts with environment to tug us back toward a fixed mean. It gathers people in all societies, across millions of worlds, into the narrow statistical circle that we must call human nature.”

“I don’t think there are enough general traits—”

“Parent-child bonding. Division of labor between the sexes.”

“Well, surely that’s common among all animals. I—”

“Incest avoidance. Altruism—we call it ‘humanitarianism,’ a telling clue, eh?—toward our near kin.”

“Well, those are just normal family—”

“Look at the dark side. Suspicion of strangers. Tribalism—witness Trantor’s eight hundred Sectors! Hierarchies in even the smallest groups, from the Emperor’s court to a bowling team.”

“Surely you can’t make such leaps, such simplistic, grotesque comparisons—”

“I can and do. Male dominance, generally, and when resources are scarce, marked territorial aggression.”

“These are
little
traits.”

“They link us. The sophisticated Trantorian and an Arcadian farmer can still understand each other’s lives, for the simple reason that their common humanity lives in the genes they share from many tens of millennia ago.”

This outburst was not received well. Faces wrinkled, mouths pouched in disapproval.

Hari saw he had overstepped. What’s more, he had nearly exposed psychohistory.

Yet he found it hard to not speak frankly. In his view the humanities and social sciences shrank to specialized branches of both mathematics and biology. History, biography, and fiction were symptoms. Anthropology and sociology together became the sociobiology of a single species. But he could not get a
feel
for how to include that in the equations. He had spoken out, he saw suddenly, because he was frustrated—by his own lack of understanding.

Still, that did not excuse his stupidity. He opened his mouth to smooth over the waters.

He saw the agitated man coming up on his left. Mouth awry, eyes white, hand—extended, poking forward, a tube in it, chromed and sleek and with a precise hole at the tip, a dark spot that expanded as
he looked at it until it seemed like the Eater of All Things that lurked at Galactic Center, immense—

Dors hit the man quite expertly. She deflected the arm up, jabbed him in the throat, struck next at the belly. Then she twisted the arm and forced him into a quarter-turn, her left leg coming around and cutting his feet from beneath him, her right hand forcing the head down—

And they struck the floor solidly, Dors on top, the gun skittering away among the shoes of the crowd—which was falling back in panic.

Specials blocked in around him and he saw no more. He shouted to Dors. Screams and shouts hammered at him from all sides.

More bedlam. Then he was clear of the Specials and the man was getting up and Dors was standing, holding the pistol, shaking her head. The man who had pointed it struggled to his feet.

“A recording tube,” she said in disgust.

“What?” Hari could barely hear in the noise.

The man’s left arm was sticking out at a wrong angle, plainly broken. “I—I agreed with your every word,” the man croaked out, his face a ghastly white. “Really.”