Foundation’s Fear

1.

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.

2.

If Buta Fyrnix had begun as a grain of sand in his shoe, she was now a boulder.

“She’s impossible! Yak, yak, yak. Look,” he said to Dors when they were at last alone, “I only came to Sark because of psychohistory, not for Imperial backslapping. How did the social dampers fail here? What social mechanism slipped, allowing this raucous Renaissance of theirs?”

“My Hari, I fear that you do not have the nose to sniff out trends from life itself. It presses in on you. Data is more your province.”

“Granted. It’s unsettling, all this ferment! But I’m still interested in how they recovered those old simulations. If I could get out of taking tours of their ‘Renaissance,’ through noisy streets-”

“I quite agree,” Dors said mildly. “Tell them you want to do some work. We’ll stay in our rooms. I’m concerned about someone tracking us here. We’re just one worm-jump away from Panucopia.”

“I’ll need to access my office files. A quick wormlink to Trantor-”

“No, you can’t work using a link. Lamurk could trace that easily.”

“But I haven’t the records-”

“You’ll have to make do.”

Hari stared out at the view, which he had to admit was spectacular. Great, stretching vistas. Riotous growth.

But more fires boiled up on the horizon. There was gaiety in the streets of Sarkonia-and anger as well. The laboratories seethed with fresh energies, innovation bristled everywhere, the air seemed to sing with change and chaos.

His predictions were statistical, abstract. To see them coming true so quickly was sobering. He did not like the swift, turbulent feel to this place at all-even if he did understand it. For now.

The extremes of wealth and destitution were appalling. Change brought that, he knew.

On Helicon he had seen poverty-and lived it, too. As a boy, his grandmother had insisted on buying him a raincoat several sizes too large, “to get more use out of it.” His mother didn’t like him playing kickball because he wore out his shoes too quickly.

Here on Sark, as on Helicon, the truly poor were off in the hinterlands. Sometimes they couldn’t even afford fossil fuels. Men and women peered over a mule’s ass all day as it plodded down a furrow.

Some in his own family had fled the hardscrabble life for assembly lines. A generation or two after that, factory workers had scraped together enough money to buy a commercial driver’s license. Hari remembered his uncles and aunts accumulating injuries, just as his father had. Not having money, the pain came back to them years later in busted joints and unfixed legs, injuries staying with them in a way that a Trantorian would find astonishing.

Heliconians in run-down shacks had worked on farm machinery that was big, powerful, dangerous, and cost more than any of them would earn in a lifetime. Their lives were obscure, far from the ramparts of haughty Empire. When dead and gone, they left nothing but impalpable memory, the light ash of a butterfly wing incinerated in a forest fire.

In a stable society their pain would be less. His father had died while working overtime on a big machine. He had been wiped out the year before and was struggling to make a comeback.

Economic surge and ebb had killed his father, as surely as the steel ground-pounder had when it rolled over on him. The lurch of distant markets had murdered-and Hari had known then what he must do. That he would defeat uncertainty itself, find order in seeming discord. Psychohistory could be, and hold sway.

His father-

“Academician!” Buta Fyrnix’s penetrating voice snatched him away from his thoughts.

“Uh, that tour of the precincts. I, I really don’t feel-”

“Oh, that is not possible, I fear. A domestic disturbance, most unfortunate.” She hurried on. “I do want you to speak with our tiktok engineers. They have devised new autonomous tiktoks. They say they can maintain control using only three basic laws-imagine! “

Dors could not mask her surprise. She opened her mouth, hesitated, closed it. Hari also felt alarm, but Buta Fyrnix went right on, bubbling over new ventures on the Sarkian horizon. Then her eyebrows lifted and she said brightly, “Oh, yes-I do have even more welcome news. An Imperial squadron has just come to call.”

“Oh?” Dors shot back. “Under whose command?”

“A Ragant Divenex, sector general. I just spoke to him-”

“Damn!” Dors said. “He’s a Lamurk henchman.”

“You’re sure?” Hari asked. He knew her slight pause had been to consult her internal files.

Dors nodded. Buta Fyrnix said calmly, “Well, I am sure he will be honored to take you back to Trantor when you are finished with your visit here. Which we hope will not be soon, of-”

“He mentioned us?” Dors asked.

“He asked if you were enjoying-”

“Damn!” Hari said.

“A sector general commands all the wormlinks, if he wishes-yes?” Dors asked.

“Well, I suppose so.” Fyrnix looked puzzled.

“We’re trapped,” Hari said.

Fyrnix’s eyes widened in shock. “But surely you, a First Minister candidate, need fear no-”

“Quiet.” Dors silenced the woman with a stern glance. “At best this Divenex will bottle us up here.”

“At worst, there will be an ‘accident,”‘ Hari said.

“Is there no other way to get off Sark?” Dors demanded of Fyrnix.

“No, I can’t recall-”

“Think!”

Startled, Fyrnix said, “Well, of course, we do have privateers who at times use the wild worms, but-”

3.

In Hari’s studies he had discovered a curious little law. Now he turned it in his favor.

Bureaucracy increases as a doubling function in time, given the resources. At the personal level, the cause was the persistent desire of every manager to hire at least one assistant. This provided the time constant for growth.

Eventually this collided with the carrying capacity of society. Given the time constant and the capacity, one could predict a plateau level of bureaucratic overhead-or else, if growth persisted, the date of collapse. Predictions of the longevity of bureaucracydriven societies fit a precise curve. Surprisingly, the same scaling laws worked for microsocieties such as large agencies.

The corpulent Imperial bureaus on Sark could not move swiftly. Sector General Divenex’s squadron had to stay in planetary space, since it was paying a purely formal visit. Niceties were still observed. Divenex did not want to use brute force when a waiting game would work.

“I see. That gives us a few days,” Dors concluded.

Hari nodded. He had done the required speaking, negotiating, dealing, promising favors-all activities he disliked intensely. Dors had done the background digging. “To…?”

“Train. “

Wormholes were labyrinths, not mere tunnels with two ends. The large ones held firm for perhaps billions of years-none larger than a hundred meters across had yet collapsed. The smallest could sometimes last only hours, at best a year. In the thinner worms, flexes in the wormwalls during passage could alter the end point of a traveler’s trajectory.

Worse, worms in their last stages spawned transient, doomed young-the wild worms. As deformations in space-time, supported by negative energy-density “struts,” wormholes were inherently rickety. As they failed, smaller deformations twisted away.

Sark had seven wormholes. One was dying. It hung a light-hour away, spitting out wild worms that ranged from a hand’s-width size, up to several meters.

A fairly sizable wild worm had sprouted out of the side of the dying worm several months before. The Imperial squadron did not know of this, of course. All worms were taxed, so a free wormhole was a bonanza. Reporting their existence, well, often a planet simply didn’t get around to that until the wild worm had fizzled away in a spray of subatomic surf.

Until then, pilots carried cargo through them. That wild worms could evaporate with only seconds’ warning made their trade dangerous, highly paid, and legendary.

Wormriders were the sort of people who as children liked to ride their bicycles no-handed, but with a difference-they rode off rooftops.

By an odd logic, that kind of child grew up and got trained and even paid taxes-but inside, they stayed the same.

Only risk takers could power through the chaotic flux of a transient worm and take the risks that worked, not take those that didn’t, and live. They had elevated bravado to its finer points.

“This wild worm, it’s tricky,” a grizzled woman told Hari and Dors. “No room for a pilot if you both go.”

“We must stay together,” Dors said with finality.

“Then you’ll have to pilot.”

“We don’t know how,” Hari said.

“You’re in luck.” The lined woman grinned without humor. “This wildy’s short, easy.”

“What are the risks?” Dors demanded stiffly. “I’m not an insurance agent, lady.”

“I insist that we know-”

“Look, lady, we’ll teach you. That’s the deal.”

“I had hoped for a more-”

“Give it a rest, or it’s no deal at all.”

4.

In the men’s room, above the urinal he used, Hari saw a small gold plaque: Senior Pilot Joquan Beunn relieved himself here Octdent 4, 13,435.

Every urinal had a similar plaque. There was a washing machine in the locker room with a large plaque over it, reading The entire 43rd Pilot Corps relieved themselves here Marlass 18, 13,675.

Pilot humor. It turned out to be absolutely predictive. He messed himself on his first training run.

As if to make the absolutely fatal length of a closing wormhole less daunting, the worm flyers had escape plans. These could only work in the fringing fields of the worm, where gravity was beginning to warp, and space-time was only mildly curved. Under the seat was a small, powerful rocket that propelled the entire cockpit out, automatically heading away from the worm.

There is a limit to how much self-actuated tech one can pack into a small cockpit, though. Worse, worm mouths were alive with electrodynamic “weather”-writhing forks of lightning, blue discharges, red magnetic whorls like tornadoes. Electrical gear didn’t work well if a bad storm was brewing at the mouth. Most of the emergency controls were manual. Hopelessly archaic, but unavoidable.

So he and Dors went through a training program. Quite soon it was clear that if he used the Eject command he had better be sure that he had his head tilted back. That is, unless he wanted his kneecaps to slam up into his chin, which would be unfortunate, because he would be trying to check if his canopy had gone into a spin. This would be bad news, because his trajectory might get warped back into the worm. To correct any spin he had to yank on a red lever, and if that failed he had to then very quickly-in pilot’s terms, this meant about half a second-punch two blue knobs. When the spindown came, he then had to be sure to release the automatic actuator by pulling down on two yellow tabs, being certain that he sit up straight with hands between knees to avoid…

“.and so on for three hours. Everyone seemed to assume that since he was this famous mathematician he could of course keep an entire menu of instructions straight, timed to fractions of seconds.

After the first ten minutes he saw no point in destroying their illusions, and simply nodded and squinted to show that he was carefully keeping track and absolutely enthralled. Meanwhile he solved differential equations in his head for practice.

“I’m sure you will be all right,” Buta Fyrnix said fulsomely to them in the departure lounge.

Hari had to admit this woman had proven better than he had hoped. She had cleared the way and stalled the Imperial offices’ Grey Men. Probably she shrewdly expected a payoff from him as First Minister. Very well; one’s life was worth a kickback.

“I hope I can handle a wormship,” Hari said.

“And I,” Dors added.

“Our training is the very best,” Fyrnix said. “The New Renaissance encourages individual excellence-”

“Yes, I’m quite impressed,” Dors said. “Perhaps you can explain to me the details of your Creativity Creation program? I’ve heard so much about it…”

Hari gave her a slight smile of thanks for distracting Fyrnix. He instinctively disliked the brand of rampant self-assurance common on Sark. It was headed for a crackup, of that he was sure. He ached to get back to his full psychohistorical resources, to simulate this Sark case. His earlier work needed refinement. He had secretly gathered fresh data here and yearned to apply it.

“I do hope you’re not worried about the wild worm. Academician?” Fyrnix spoke to him again, brow furrowed.

“It’s a tight fit,” he said.

They had to fly in a slender cylinder, Dors copiloting. Splitting the job had proved the only way to get them up to a barely competent level.

“I think it’s marvelous, how courageous you two are.”

“We have little choice,” Dors said. This was artful understatement. Another day and the sector general’s officers would have Hari and Dors under arrest.

“Riding in a little pencil ship. Such primitive means!”

“Uh, time to go,” Hari said behind a fixed smile.

She was wearing thin again.

“ Iagree with the Emperor. Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.”

So the Emperor’s ghost-written remark had already spread here. Minor sayings moved fast, with Imperial muscle behind it.

Still, Hari felt his stomach flutter with dread. “You’ve got a point.”

He had brushed off the remark.

Four hours later, closing at high velocity with the big wormhole complex, he saw her side of it.

He spoke on suitcomm to Dors. “In one of my classes-Nonlinear Philosophy, I believe-the professor said something I’ll never forget. ‘Ideas about existence pale beside the fact of existence.’ Quite true.”

“Bearing oh-six-nine-five,” she said rigorously. “No small talk.”

“Nothing’s small out here-except that wild worm mouth.”

The wild worm was a fizzing point of vibrant agitation. It orbited the main worm mouth, a distant bright speck.’

Imperial ships patrolled the main mouth, ignoring this wild worm. They had been paid off long ago and expected a steady train of slimships to slip through the Imperial guard.

Hari had passed through worm gates before, always in big cruisers plying routes through wormholes tens of meters across. Every hole of that size was the hub of a complex which buzzed with carefully orchestrated traffic. He could see the staging yards and injection corridors of the main route gleaming far away.

Their wild worm, a renegade spin-off, could vanish at any moment. Its quantum froth advertised its mortality. And maybe ours….Hari thought.

“Vector null sum coming up,” he called.

“Convergent asymptotes, check,” Dors answered.

Just like the drills they had gone through.

But coming at them was a sphere fizzing orange and purple at its rim. A neon-lit mouth. Tight, dark at the very center

Hari felt a sudden desire to swerve, not dive into that impossibly narrow gullet.

Dors called out numbers. Computers angled them in. He adjusted with a nudge here and a twist there.

It did not help that he knew some of the underlying physics. Wormholes were held open with layers of negative energy, skins of antipressure made in the first convulsion of the universe. The negative energy in the “struts” was equivalent to the mass needed to make a black hole of the same radius.

So they were plunging toward a region of space of unimaginable density. But the danger lurked only at the rim, where stresses could tear them into atoms.

A bull’s-eye hit was perfectly safe. But an error-

Thrusters pulsed. The wild worm was now a black sphere rimmed in quantum fire.

Growing.

Hari felt suddenly the helpless constriction of the pencil ship. Barely two meters across, its insulation was thin, safety buffers minimal. Behind him, Dors kept murmuring data and he checked…but part of him was screaming at the crushing sense of confinement, of helplessness.

He felt again the gut fear that had struck him in the streets of Sarkonia. Not claustrophobia, but something darker: a swampy fear of confusion, a riot of doubt. It seized him, squeezed his throat.

“Vectors summing to within zero-seven-three,” Dors called.

Her voice was calm, steady, a marvelous balm. He clung to its serene certainties and fought down his own panic.

Squeals of last-second corrections echoed in his cramped chamber. A quick kick of acceleration-

Lightning curling snakelike blue and gold at them-

—tumbling. Out the other end, in a worm complex fifteen thousand light years away.

“That old professor…damn right, he was,” he said.

Dors sighed, her only sign of stress. “Ideas about existence pale…beside the fact of existence. Yes, my love. Living is bigger than any talk about it.”

5.

A yellow-green sun greeted them. And soon enough, an Imperial picket craft.

They ducked and ran. A quick swerve, and they angled into the traffic train headed for a large wormhole mouth. The commercial charge-computers accepted his Imperial override without a murmur. Hari had learned well. Dors corrected him if he got mixed up.

Their second hyperspace jump took a mere three minutes. They popped out far from a dim red dwarf.

By the fourth jump they knew the drill. Having the code-status of Cleon’s court banished objections.

But being on the run meant that they had to take whatever wormhole mouths they could get. Lamurk’s people could not be too far behind.

A wormhole could take traffic only one way at a time. High-velocity ships plowed down the wormhole throats, which could vary from a finger’s length to a star’s diameter.

Hari had known the numbers, of course. There were a few billion wormholes in the Galactic disk. The average Imperial Zone was about fifty light-years in radius. A jump could bring you out many years from a far-flung world.

This influenced psychohistory. Some verdant planets were green fortresses against an isolation quite profound. For them the Empire was a remote dream, the source of exotic products and odd ideas. Hyperships flitted through wormholes in mere seconds, then exhausted themselves hauling their cargoes across empty voids, years and decades in the labor.

The worm web had many openings near inhabitable worlds, but also many near mysteriously useless solar systems. The Empire had positioned the smaller worm mouths-those massing perhaps as much as a mountain range-near rich planets. But some worm mouths of gargantuan mass orbited near solar systems as barren and pointless as any surveyed.

Was this random, or a network left by some earlier civilization? Certainly the wormholes themselves were leftovers from the Great Emergence, when space and time alike began. They linked distant realms which had once been nearby, when the galaxy was young and smaller.

They developed a rhythm. Pop though a worm mouth, make comm contact, get in line for the next departure. Imperial watchdogs would not pull anyone of high Trantorian class from a queue. So their most dangerous moments came as they negotiated clearance.

At this Dors became adept. She sent the WormMaster computers blurts of data and- whisk-theywere edging into orbital vectors, bound for their next jump.

Domains that encompassed thousands of light-years, spanning the width of a spiral arm, were essentially networks of overlapping worms, all organized for transfer and shipping.

Matter could flow only one way at a time in a wormhole. The few experiments with simultaneous two-way transport ended in disaster. No matter how ingenious engineers tried to steer ships around each other, the sheer flexibility of worm tunnels spelled doom. Each worm mouth kept the other “informed” of what it had just eaten. This information flowed as a wave, not in physical matter, but in the tension of the wormhole itself-a ripple in the “stress tensor,” as physicists termed it.

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 maximum 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 point.

6.

“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 grapplers beneath the Imperial picket ship. The wormhole 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 Femorustics, 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 at tractor in psychohistory-space.

Its opposite pole-claustrophobic, though reassuring societies-emerged from the same psychodynamic 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 at tractor groups: Macho, Socialist, Paternal. Even the odd thantocracies, 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 wormlink,” 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.”

7.

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 clotted 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 seen 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 of the cubes, guiding the pencil ship.

They thrust toward the smaller cube, gingerly inching 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 wormhole 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 slipping through the excruciating tight fit of the cube. The edges glowed like a lemony Euclidean construction-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 distant 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 experience 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 wormhole 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 psychohistory…

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?

8.

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 wormhole 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.

But to reach it, they had to venture where few did.

“The Galactic Center is dangerous,” Dors said as they coasted toward the decisive wormhole mouth. They curved above a barren mining planet. “But necessary.”

“Trantor worries me more-” The jump cut him off

—and the spectacle silenced him.

The filaments were so large the eye could not take them in. They stretched fore and aft, shot through with immense luminous corridors and dusky lanes. These arches yawned over tens of light-years. Immense curves descended toward the white-hot True Center. There matter frothed and fumed and burst into dazzling fountains.

“The black hole,” he said simply.

The small black hole they had seen only an hour before had trapped a few stellar masses. At True Center, a million suns had died to feed gravity’s gullet.

The orderly arrays of radiance were thin, only a light-year across. Yet they sustained themselves along hundreds of light-years as they churned with change. Hari switched the polarized walls to see in different frequency ranges. Though hot and roiling in the visible, human spectrum, the radio revealed hidden intricacy. Threads laced among convoluted spindles. He had a powerful impression of layers, of labyrinthine order descending beyond his view, beyond simple understanding.

“Particle flux is high,” Dors said tensely. “And rising.”

“Where’s our junction?”

“I’m having trouble vector-fixing-ah! There.”

Hard acceleration rammed him back into his flowcouch. Dors took them diving down into a mottled pyramid-shaped wormhole.

This was an even rarer geometry. Hari had time to marvel at how accidents of the universal birth pang had shaped these serene geometries, like exhibits in some god’s Euclidean museum of the mind.

And then they plunged through, erasing the stunning views.

They popped out above the gray-brown mottled face of Trantor. A glinting disk of satellites, factories and habitats fanned out in the equatorial plane.

The wild worm they had used fizzed and glowed behind them. Dors took them swiftly toward the ramshackle, temporary wormyard. He said nothing, but felt her tense calculations. They nudged into a socket, seals sighed, his ears popped painfully.

Then they were out, arms and legs wooden from the cramped pencil ship. Hari coasted in zero-g toward the flex-lock. Dors glided ahead of him. She motioned him for silence as pressures pulsed in the lock. She peeled her skinsuit down, exposing her breasts.

A finger’s touch opened a seam below her left breast. She plucked a cylinder out. A weapon? She resealed and had her skinsuit back in place before the staging diaphragm began to open.

Beyond the opening iris Hari saw Imperial uniforms.

He crouched against the lock wall, ready to launch himself backward to avoid capture-but the situation looked hopeless.

The Imperials looked grim, determined. They clasped pistols. Dors coasted between Hari and the squad. She tossed the cylinder at them-

—a pressure wave knocked him back against the wall. His ears clogged. The squad was an expanding cloud of…debris.

“What-?”

“Shaped implosion,” Dors called. “Move!”

The injured men had been slammed into each other. How anything could shape a pressure wave so compactly he could not imagine. In any case he had no time. They shot past the tangled cloud of men. Weapons drifted uselessly.

A figure erupted from the far diaphragm. A man in a brown work sheath, middle-sized, unarmed. Hari shouted a warning. Dors showed no reaction.

The man flicked his wrist and a snout appeared from his sleeve. Dors still coasted toward him.

Hari snagged a handhold and veered to his right.

“Stay still!” the man yelled.

Hari froze, dangling by one hand. The man fired-and a silvery bolt fried past Hari.

He turned and saw that one of the Imperials had recovered his weapon. The silver line scratched fire across the Imperial’s arm. He screamed. His weapon tumbled away.

“Let’s go. I have the rest of the way secured,” the man in the work sheath called.

Dors followed him without a word. Hari pushed off and caught up to them as the diaphragm irised for them.

“You return to Trantor at the crucial moment,” the man said.

“You-who-”

The man smiled. “I have changed myself. You do not recognize your old friend, R. Daneel?”