Foundation's Fear (44 page)

The sky tumbled down. Hari Seldon reeled away from it.

No escape. The awful blue weight rushed at him, swarming down the flanks of the steepled towers. Clouds crushed like weights.

His stomach lurched. Acid burned his throat. The deep, hard blue of endless spaces thrust him downward like a deep ocean current. Spires scraped against the falling sky and his breath came in ragged gasps.

He spun away from the perpetual chaos of sky and buildings and faced a wall. A moment before he had been walking normally along a city street, when suddenly the weight of the blue bowl above had loomed and the panic had gathered him up.

He fought to control his breathing. Carefully he inched along the wall, holding to the slick cool glaze. The others had kept walking. They were somewhere ahead, but he did not dare look for them. Face the wall. Step, step—

There. A door. He stepped before it and the slab slid aside. He stumbled in, weak with relief.

“Hari, we were—what’s wrong?” Dors rushed over to him.

“I, I don’t know. The sky—”

“Ah, a common symptom,” a woman’s booming voice cut in. “You Trantorians do have to adjust, you know.”

He looked up shakily into the broad, beaming face of Buta Fyrnix, the Principal Matron of Sark. “I…I was all right before.”

“Yes, it’s quite an odd ailment,” Fyrnix said archly. “You Trantorians are used to enclosed city, of course. And you can often take well to absolutely open spaces, if you were reared on such worlds—”

“As he was,” Dors put in sharply. “Come, sit.”

Hari’s pride was already recovering. “No, I’m fine.”

He straightened and thrust his shoulders back.
Look firm, even if you don’t feel it.

Fyrnix went on, “But a place in between, like Sarkonia’s ten-klick tall towers—somehow that excites a vertigo we have not understood.”

Hari understood it all too well, in his lurching stomach. He had often thought that the price of living in Trantor was a gathering fear of large spaces, but Panucopia had seemed to dispel that idea. Now he felt the contrast. The tall buildings had evoked Trantor for him. But they drew his gaze upward, along steepening perspectives, into a sky that had suddenly seemed like a huge plunging weight.

Not rational, of course. Panucopia had taught him that man was not merely a reasoning machine. This sudden panic had demonstrated how a fundamentally unnatural condition—living inside Trantor for decades—could warp the mind.

“Let’s…go up,” he said weakly.

The lift seemed comforting, even though the press of acceleration and popping ears as they climbed several klicks should—by mere logic—have unsettled him.

A few moments later, as the others chatted in a reception lounge, Hari peered out at the stretching cityscape and tried to calm his unease.

Sark had looked lovely on their approach. As the hyperspace cylinder skated down through the upper air, he had taken in a full view of its lush beauties.

At the terminator, valleys sank into darkness while a chain of snowy mountains gleamed beyond. Late in the evening, just beyond the terminator, the fresh, peaked mountains glowed red-orange, like live coals. He had never been one to climb, but something had beckoned. Mountaintops cleaved the sheets of clouds, leaving a wake like that of a ship. Tropical thunderheads, lit by lightning flashes at night, recalled the blooming buds of white roses.

The glories of humanity had been just as striking: the shining constellations of cities at night, enmeshed by a glittering web of highways. His heart filled with pride at human accomplishments. Unlike Trantor’s advanced control, here the hand of his fellow Empire citizens was still casting spacious designs upon the planet’s crust. They had shaped artificial seas and elliptical water basins, great plains of tiktok-cultivated fields, immaculate order arising from once-virgin lands.

And now, standing in the topmost floor of an elegantly slim spire, at the geometric heart of Sarkonia, the capital city…he saw ruination coming.

In the distance he saw stretching to the sky three twining columns—not majestic spires, but smoke.

“That fits your calculations, doesn’t it?” Dors said behind him.

“Don’t let them know!” he whispered.

“I told them we needed a few moments of privacy, that you were embarrassed by your vertigo.”

“I am—or was. But you’re right—the psychohistorical predictions I made are in that chaos out there.”

“They do seem odd….”

“Odd? Their ideas are dangerous, radical.” He spoke with real outrage. “Class confusions, shifting power axes. They’re shrugging off the very damping mechanisms that keep the Empire orderly.”

“There was a certain, well, joy in the streets.”

“And did you see those tiktoks? Fully autonomous!”

“Yes, that was disturbing.”

“They’re part and parcel of the resurrection of sims. Artificial minds are no longer taboo here! Their tiktoks will get more advanced. Soon—”

“I’m more concerned with the immediate level of disruption,” Dors said.

“That must grow. Remember my
N
-dimensional plots of psychohistorical space? I ran the Sark case on my pocket computer, coming down from orbit. If they keep on this way with their New Renaissance, this whole planet will whirl away in sparks. Seen in
N
-dimensions, the flames will be bright and quick, lurid—then smolder into ash. Then they’ll vanish from my model entirely, into a blur—the static of unpredictability.”

She put a hand on his arm. “Calm down. They’ll notice.”

He had not realized that he felt so deeply. The Empire was
order,
and here—

“Academician Seldon, do us the honor of gathering with some of our leading New Renaissance leaders.” Buta Fyrnix grasped his sleeve and tugged him back to the ornate reception. “They have so much to tell you!”

And he had
wanted
to come here! To learn why the dampers that kept worlds stable had failed here. To see the ferment, pick up the scent of change. There was plenty of passionate argument, of soaring art, of eccentric men and women wedded to their grand projects. He had seen these at dizzying speed.

But it was all too much. Something in him rebelled. The nausea he had suffered in the open streets was a symptom of some deeper revulsion, gut-deep and dark.

Buta Fyrnix had been nattering on. “—and some of our most brilliant minds are waiting to meet you! Do come!”

He suppressed a groan and looked beseechingly at Dors. She smiled and shook her head. From this hazard she could not save him.