Foundation’s Fear

1.

He had made enough enemies to acquire a nickname, Hari Seldon mused, and not enough friends to hear what it was.

He could feel the truth of that in the murmuring energy in the crowds. Uneasily he walked from his apartment to his office across the broad squares of Streeling University. “They don’t like me,” he said.

Dors Vanabili matched his stride easily, studying the massed faces. “I do not sense any danger.”

“Don’t worry your pretty head about assassination attempts-at least, not right away.”

“My, you’re in a fine mood today.”

“I hate this security screen. Who wouldn’t?”

The Imperial Specials had fanned out in what their captain termed “an engaging perimeter” around Hari and Dors. Some carried flash-screen projectors, capable of warding off a full heavy-weapons assault. Others looked equally dangerous bare-handed.

Their scarlet-and-blue uniforms made it easy to see where the crowd was impinging on the moving security boundary as Hari walked slowly across the main campus square. Where the crowd was thickest, the bright uniforms simply bulled their way through. The entire spectacle made him acutely uncomfortable. Specials were not noted for their diplomacy and this was, after all, a quiet place of learning. Or had been.

Dors clasped his hand in reassurance. “A First Minister can’t simply walk around without-”

“I’m not First Minister!”

“The Emperor has designated you, and that’s enough for this crowd.”

“The High Council hasn’t acted. Until they do”

“Your friends will assume the best,” she said mildly.

“These are my friends?” Hari eyed the crowd suspiciously.

“They’re smiling.”

So they were. One called, “Hail the Prof Minister!” and others laughed.

“Is that my nickname now?”

“Well, it’s not a bad one.”

“Why do they flock so?”

“People are drawn to power.”

“I’m still just a professor!”

To offset his irritation, Dors chuckled at him, a wifely reflex. “There’s an ancient saying, ‘These are the times that fry men’s souls.”‘

“You have a bit of historical wisdom for everything.”

“It’s one of the few perks that come with being an historian. “

Someone called, “Hey, Math Minister!”

Hari said, “I don’t like that name any better.”

“Get used to it. You’ll be called worse.”

They passed by the great Streeling fountain and Hari took refuge in a moment of contemplating its high, arching waters. The splashes drowned out the crowd and he could almost imagine he was back in his simple, happy life. Then he had only had to worry about psychohistory and Streeling University infighting. That snug little world had vanished, perhaps forever, the moment Cleon decided to make him a figure in Imperial politics.

The fountain was glorious, yet even it reminded him of the vastness that lay beneath such simplicities. Here the tinkling streams broke free, but their flight was momentary. Trantor’s waters ran in mournful dark pipes, down dim passages scoured by ancient engineers. A maze of fresh water arteries and sewage veins twined through the eternal bowels. These bodily fluids of the planet had passed through uncountable trillions of kidneys and throats, had washed away sins, been toasted with at marriages and births, had carried off the blood of murders and the vomit of terminal agonies. They flowed on in their deep night, never knowing the clean vapor joy of unfettered weather, never free of man’s hand.

They were trapped. So was he.

Their party reached the Mathist Department and ascended. Dors rose through the traptube beside him, a breeze fluttering her hair amiably, the effect quite flattering. The Specials took up watchful, rigid positions outside.

Just as he had for the last week, Hari tried again with the captain. “Look, you don’t really need to keep a dozen men sitting out here-”

“I’ll be the judge of that, Academician sir, if you please.”

Hari felt frustrated at the waste of it. He noticed a young Specialman eyeing Dors, whose uni-suit revealed while still covering. Something made him say, “Well then, I will thank you to have your men keep their eyes where they belong!”

The captain looked startled. He glared at the offending man and stomped over to reprimand him. Hari felt a spark of satisfaction. Going in the entrance to his office, Dors said, ‘‘I’ll try to dress more strictly.”

“No, no, I’m just being stupid. I shouldn’t let tiny things like that bother me.”

She smiled prettily. “Actually, I rather liked it.”

“You did? Me being stupid?”

“Your being protective.”

Dors had been assigned years before to watch over him, by Eto Demerzel. Hari reflected that he had gotten used to that role of hers, little noticing that it conflicted in a deep, unspoken way with her also being a woman. Dors was utterly self-reliant, but she had qualities which sometimes did not easily jibe with her duty. Being his wife, for example.

“I will have to do it more often,” he said lightly.

Still, he felt a pang of guilt about making trouble for the Specialmen. Their being here was certainly not their idea; Cleon had ordered it. No doubt they would far rather be off somewhere saving the Empire with sweat and valor.

They went through the high, arched foyer of the Mathist Department, Hari nodding to the staff. Dors went into her own office and he hurried into his suite with an air of an animal retreating into its burrow. He collapsed into his airchair, ignoring the urgent message holo that hung a meter from his face.

A wave erased it as Yugo Amaryl came in through the connecting e-stat portal. The intrusive, bulky portal was also the fruit of Cleon’s security order. The Specials had installed the shimmering weapons-nulling fields everywhere. They lent an irksome, prickly smell of ozone to the air. One more intrusion of Reality, wearing the mask of Politics.

Yugo’s grin split his broad face. “Got some new results.”

“Cheer me up, show me something splendid.”

Yugo sat on Hari’s broad, empty desk, one leg dangling. “Good mathematics is always true and beautiful.”

“Certainly. But it doesn’t have to be true in the sense that ordinary people mean. It can say nothing whatever about the world.”

“You’re making me feel like a dirty engineer.”

Hari smiled. “You were once, remember?”

“Don’t I!”

“Maybe you’d rather be sweating it out as a heatsinker?”

Hari had found Yugo by chance eight years ago, just after arriving on Trantor, when he and Dors were on the run from Imperial agents. An hour’s talk had shown Hari that Yugo was an untutored genius at trans-representational analysis. Yugo had a gift, an unconscious lightness of touch. They had collaborated ever since. Hari honestly thought he had learned more from Yugo than the other way around.

“Ha!” Yugo clapped his big hands together three times, in the Dahlite manner of showing agreeable humor. “You can grouse about doing filthy, real-world work, but as long as it’s in a nice, comfortable office, I’m in paradise.”

“I shall have to turn most of the heavy lifting over to you, I fear.” Hari deliberately put his feet up on his desk. Might as well look casual, even if he didn’t feel that way. He envied Yugo’s heavy-bodied ease.

“This First Minister stuff?”

“It is getting worse. I have to go see the Emperor again.”

“The man wants you. Must be your craggy profile.”

“That’s what Dors thinks, too. I figure it’s my disarming smile. Anyway, he can’t have me.”

“He will.”

“If he forces the ministership on me, I shall do such a lousy job, Cleon will fire me.”

Yugo shook his head. “Not wise. Failed First Ministers are usually tried and executed.”

“You’ve been talking to Dors again.”

“She is a historian.”

“Yes, and we’re psychohistorians. Seekers of predictability.” Hari threw up his hands in exasperation. “Why doesn’t that count for anything?”

“Because nobody in the citadels of power has seen it work.”

“And they won’t. Once people think we can predict, we will never be free of politics.”

“You’re not free now,” Yugo said reasonably.

“Good friend, your worse trait is insisting on telling me the truth in a calm voice.”

“It saves knocking sense into your head. That would take longer.”

Hari sighed. “If only muscles helped with mathematics. You would be even better at it.”

Yugo waved the thought away. “You’re the key. You’re the idea man.”

“Well, this font of ideas hasn’t got a clue.”

“Ideas, they’ll come.”

“I never get a chance to work on psychohistory anymore!”

“And as First Minister-”

“It will be worse. Psychohistory will go”

“Nowhere, without you.”

“There will be some progress, Yugo. I am not vain enough to think everything depends on me.”

“It does.”

“Nonsense! There’s still you, the Imperial Fellows, and the staff.”

“We need leadership. Thinking leadership.”

“Well, I could continue to work here part of the time…”

Hari looked around his spacious office and felt a pang at the thought of not spending every day here, surrounded by his tools, tomes, and friends. As First Minister he would have a minor palace, but to him it would be mere empty, meaningless extravagance.

Yugo gave him a mocking grin. “First Minister is usually considered a full-time job.”

“I know, I know. But maybe there’s a way-”

The office holo bloomed into full presentation a meter from his head. The office familiar was coded to pipe through only high-priority messages. Hari slapped a key on his desk and the picture gave the gathering image a red, square frame-the signal that his filter-face was on. “Yes?”

Cleon’s personal aide appeared in red tunic against a blue background. “You are summoned,” the woman said simply.

“Uh, I am honored. When?”

The woman went into details and Hari was immediately thankful for the filter-face. The personal officer was imposing, and he did not want to appear to be what he was, a distracted professor. His filter-face had a tailored etiquette menu. He had automatically thumbed in a suite of body language postures and gestures, tailored to mask his true feelings.

“Very well, in two hours. I shall be there,” he concluded with a small bow. The filter would render that same motion, shaped to the protocols of the Emperor’s staff.

“Drat!” He slapped his desk, making the holo dissolve. “My day is evaporating!”

“What’s it mean?”

“Trouble. Every time I see Cleon, it’s trouble.”

“I dunno, could be a chance to straighten out-”

“I just want to be left alone!”

“A First Ministership”

“ Yoube First Minister! I will take a job as a computational specialist, change my name-” Hari stopped and laughed wryly. “But I’d fail at that, too.”

“Look, you need to change your mood. Don’t want to walk in on the Emperor with that scowl.”

“Ummm. I suppose not. Very well-cheer me up. What was that good news you mentioned?”

“I turned up some ancient personality constellations.”

“Really? I thought they were illegal.”

“They are.” He grinned. “Laws don’t always work.”

“Truly ancient? I wanted them for calibration of psychohistorical valences. They have to be early Empire.”

Yugo beamed. “These are pre-Empire.”

“Pre-impossible.”

“I got ‘em. Intact, too.”

“Who are they?”

“Some famous types, dunno what they did.”

“What status did they have, to be recorded?”

Yugo shrugged. “No parallel historical records, either.”

“Are they authentic recordings?”

“Might be. They’re in ancient machine languages, really primitive stuff. Hard to tell.”

“Then they could be…sims.”

“I’d say so. Could be they’re built on a recorded underbase, then simmed for roundness.”

“You can kick them up to sentience?”

“Yeah, with some work. Got to stitch data languages. Y’know, this is, ah…”

“Illegal. Violation of the Sentience Codes.”

“Right. These guys I got it from, they’re on that New Renaissance world, Sark. They say nobody polices those old Codes anymore.”

“It’s time we kicked over a few of those ancient blocks.”

“Yessir.” Yugo grinned. “These constellations, they’re the oldest anybody’s ever found.”

“How did you…?” Hari let his question trail off. Yugo had many shady connections, built on his Dahlite origins.

“It took a little, ah, lubrication.”

“I thought so. Well, perhaps best that I don’t hear the details.”

“Right. As First Minister, you don’t want dirty hands.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“Sure, sure, you’re just a journeyman professor. Who’s going to be late for his appointment with the Emperor if he doesn’t hurry up.”

2.

Walking through the Imperial Gardens, Hari wished Dors was with him. He recalled her wariness over his coming again to the attention of Cleon. “They’re crazy, often,” she had said in a dispassionate voice. “The gentry are eccentric, which allows emperors to be bizarre.”

“You exaggerate,” he had responded.

“Dadrian the Frugal always urinated in the Imperial Gardens,” she had answered. “He would leave state functions to do it, saying that it saved his subjects a needless expense in water.”

Hari had to suppress a laugh; palace staff were undoubtedly studying him. He regained his sober manner by admiring the ornate, towering trees, sculpted in the Spindlerian style of three millennia before. He felt the tug of such natural beauty, despite his years buried in Trantor. Here, verdant wealth stretched up toward the blazing sun like outstretched arms. This was the only open spot on the planet, and it reminded him of Helicon, where he had begun.

He had been a rather dreamy boy in a laboring district of Helicon. The work in fields and factories was easy enough that he could think his own shifting, abstract musings while he did it. Before the Civil Service exams changed his life, he had worked out a few simple theorems in number theory and later was crushed to find that they were already known. He lay in bed at night thinking of planes and vectors and trying to envision dimensions larger than three, listening to the distant bleat of the puff-dragons who came drifting down the mountain sides in search of prey. Bioengineered for some ancient purpose, probably hunting, they were revered beasts. He had not seen one for many years…

Helicon, the wild-that was what he longed for. But his destiny seemed submerged in Trantor’s steel.

Hari glanced back and his Specials, thinking they were summoned, trotted forward. “No,” he said, his hands pushing air toward them-a gesture he was making all the time these days, he reflected. Even in the Imperial Gardens they acted as though every gardener was a potential assassin.

He had come this way, rather than simply emerge from the grav lifter inside the palace, because he liked the gardens above all else. In the distant haze a wall of trees towered, coaxed upward by genetic engineering until they obscured the ramparts of Trantor. Only here, on all the planet, was it possible to experience something resembling the out of doors.

What an arrogant term! Hari thought. To define all of creation by its lying outside the doorways of humanity.

His formal shoes crunched against gravel as he left the sheltered walkways and mounted the formal ramp. Beyond the forested perimeter rose a plume of black smoke. He slowed and estimated distance, perhaps ten klicks. Some major incident, surely.

Striding between tall, neopantheonic columns, he felt a weight descend. Attendants dashed out to welcome him, his Specials tightened up behind, and they made a little procession through the long corridors leading to the Vault of Audience. Here the accumulated great artworks of millennia crowded each other, as if seeking a constituency in the present to give them life.

The heavy hand of the Imperium lay upon most official art. The Empire was essentially about the past, its solidity, and so expressed its taste with a preference for the pretty. Emperors favored the clean straight lines of ascending slabs, the exact parabolas of arcing purple water fountains, classical columns and buttresses and arches. Heroic sculpture abounded. Noble brows eyed infinite prospects. Colossal battles stood frozen at climactic moments, shaped in glowing stone and holoid crystal.

All were entirely proper and devoid of embarrassing challenge. No alarming art here, thank you. Nothing “disturbing” was even allowed in public places on Trantor which the Emperor might visit. By exporting to the periphs all hint of the unpleasantness and smell of human lives, the Imperium achieved its final state, the terminally bland.

Yet to Hari, the reaction against blandness was worse. Among the galaxy’s twenty-five million inhabited planets endless variations appeared, but there simmered beneath the Imperial blanket a style based solely on rejection.

Particularly among those Hari termed “chaos worlds,” a smug avant-garde fumbled for the sublime by substituting for beauty a love of terror, shock, and the sickeningly grotesque. They used enormous scale, or acute disproportion, or scatology, or discord and irrational disjunction.

Both approaches were boring. Neither had any airy joy.

A wall dissolved, crackling, and they entered the Vault of Audience. Attendants vanished, his Specials fell behind. Abruptly Hari was alone. He padded over the cushiony floor. Baroque excess leered at him from every raised cornice, upjutting ornament, and elaborate wainscoting.

Silence. The Emperor was never waiting for anyone, of course. The gloomy chamber gave back no echoes, as though the walls absorbed everything.

Indeed, they probably did. No doubt every Imperial conversation went into several ears. There might be eavesdroppers halfway across the Galaxy.

A light, moving. Down a crackling grav column came Cleon. “Hari! So happy you could come.”

Since refusing a summons by the Emperor was traditionally grounds for execution, Hari could barely suppress a wry smile. “My honor to serve, sire.”

“Come, sit.”

Cleon moved heavily. Rumor had it that his appetite, already legendary, had begun to exceed even the skills of his cooks and physicians. “We have much to discuss.”

The Emperor’s constant attendant glow served to subtly enhance him with its nimbus. The contrast was mild, serving to draw him out from a comparative surrounding gloom. The room’s embedded intelligences tracked his eyes and shed added light where his gaze fell, again with delicate emphasis, subtly applied. The soft touch of his regard yielded a radiance which guests scarcely noticed, but which acted subconsciously, adding to their awe. Hari knew this, yet the effect still worked; Cleon looked masterful, regal.

“I fear we have hit a snag,” Cleon said.

“Nothing you cannot master, I am sure, sire.”

Cleon shook his head wearily. “Now don’t you, too, go on about my prodigious powers. Some… elements-” he drew the word out with dry disdain “ -object to your appointment.”

“I see.” Hari kept his face blank, but his heart leaped.

“Do not be glum! I do want you for my First Minister.”

“Yes, sire.”

“But I am not, despite commonplace assumption, utterly free to act.”

“I realize that many others are better qualified-”

“In their own eyes, surely.”

“-and better trained, and-”

“And know nothing of psychohistory.”

“Demerzel exaggerated the utility of psychohistory.”

“Nonsense. He suggested your name to me.”

“You know as well as] that he was exhausted, not in his best frame of-”

“His judgment was impeccable for decades.” Cleon eyed Hari. “One would almost think you were trying to avoid appointment as First Minister.”

“No, sire, but-”

“Men-and women, for that matter-have killed for far less.”

“And been killed, once they got it.”

Cleon chuckled. “True enough. Some First Ministers do get self-important, begin to scheme against their Emperor-but let us not dwell upon the few failures of our system.”

Hari recalled Demerzel saying, “The succession of crises has reached the point where the consideration of the Three Laws of Robotics paralyzes me.” Demerzel had been unable to make choices because there were no good ones left. Every possible move hurt someone, badly. So Demerzel, a supreme intelligence, a clandestine humaniform robot, had suddenly left the scene. What chance did Hari have?

“I will assume the position, of course,” Hari said quietly, “if necessary.”

“Oh, it’s necessary. If possible, you mean. Factions on the High Council oppose you. They demand a full discussion.”

Hari blinked, alarmed. “Will I have to debate?”

“-and then a vote.”

“I had no idea the Council could intervene.”

“Read the Codes. They do have that power. Typically they do not use it, bowing to the superior wisdom of the Emperor.” A dry little laugh. “Not this time.”

“If it would make it easier for you, I could absent myself while the discussion-”

“Nonsense! I want to use you to counter them.”

“I haven’t any ideas how to-”

“I’ll scent out the issues; you advise me on answers. Division of labor, nothing could be simpler.”

“Um.” Demerzel had said confidently, “If he believes you have the psychohistorical answer, he will follow you eagerly and that will make you a good First Minister.” Here, in such august surroundings, that seemed quite unlikely.

“We will have to evade these opponents, maneuver against them. “

“I have no idea how to do that.”

“Of course you do not! I do. But you see the Empire and all its history as one unfurling scroll. You have the theory.”

Cleon relished ruling. Hari felt in his bones that he did not. As First Minister, his word could determine the fate of millions. That had daunted even Demerzel.

“There is still the Zeroth law,” Demerzel had said just before they parted for the last time. It placed the well-being of humanity as a whole above that of any single human. The First law then read, A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, unless this would violate the Zeroth Law. Fair enough, but how was Hari to carry out a job which not even Demerzel could do? Hari realized that he had been silent for too long, and that Cleon was waiting. What could he say?

“Um, who opposes me?”

“Several factions united behind Betan Lamurk.”

“What’s his objection?”

To his surprise, the Emperor laughed heartily. “That you aren’t Betan Lamurk.”

“You can’t simply-”

“Overrule the Council? Offer Lamurk a deal? Buy him off?”

“I didn’t mean to imply, sire, that you would stoop to-”

“Of course I would ‘stoop,’ as you put it. The difficulty lies with Lamurk himself. His price to allow you in as First Minister would be too high.”

“Some high position?”

“That, and some estates, perhaps an entire Zone.”

Turning an entire Zone of the Galaxy over to a single man…”High stakes.”

Cleon sighed. “We are not as rich, these days. In the reign of Fletch the Furious, he bartered whole Zones simply for seats on the Council.”

“Your supporters, the Royalists, they can’t outmaneuver Lamurk?”

“You really must study current politics more, Seldon. Though I suppose you’re so steeped in history, all this seems a bit trivial?”

Actually, Hari thought, he was steeped in mathematics. Dors supplied the history he needed, or Yugo. “I will do so. So the Royalists-”

“Have lost the Dahlites, so they cannot muster a majority coalition.”

“The Dahlites are that powerful?”

“They have an argument popular with a broad audience, plus a large population.”

“I did not know they were so strong. My own close assistant, Yugo”

“I know, a Dahlite. Watch him.”

Hari blinked. “Yugo is a strong Dahlite, true. But he is loyal, a fine, intuitive mathist. But how did you-”

“Background check.” Cleon waved his hand in airy dismissal. “One must know a few things about a First Minister.”

Hari disliked being under an Imperial microscope, but he kept his face blank. “Yugo is loyal to me.”

“I know the story, how you uplifted him from hard labor, bypassing the Civil Service filters. Very noble of you. But I cannot overlook the fact that the Dahlites have a ready audience for their fevered outpourings. They threaten to alter the representation of Sectors in the High Council, even in the Lower Council. So” Cleon jabbed a finger “-watch him.”

“Yes, sire.” Cleon was getting steamed up about nothing, as far as Yugo was concerned, but no point in arguing.

“You will have to be as circumspect as the Emperor’s wife during this, ah, transitional period.”

Hari recalled the ancient saying, that above all the Emperor’s wife (or wives, depending upon the era) must keep her skirts clean, no matter what muck she walks above. The analogy was used even when the Emperor proved to be homosexual, or even when a woman held the Imperial Palace. “Yes, sire. Uh, ‘transitional’…?”

Cleon looked off in a distracted way at the towering, shadowy art forms looming around them. By now Hari understood that this pointed to the crux of why he had been summoned. “Your appointment will take a while, as the High Council fidgets. So I shall seek your advice…”

“Without giving me the power.”

“Well, yes.”

Hari felt no disappointment. “So I can stay in my office at Streeling?”

“I suppose it would seem forward if you came here.”

“Good. Now, about those Specials-”

“ Theymust remain with you. Trantor is more dangerous than a professor knows.”

Hari sighed. “Yes, sire.”

Cleon lounged back, his airchair folding itself about him elaborately. “Now I would like your advice on this Renegatum matter.”

“Renegatum?”

For the first time, Hari saw Cleon show surprise. “You have not followed the case? It is everywhere!”

“I am a bit out of the main stream, sire.”

“The Renegatum-the Society of Renegades. They kill and destroy.”

“For what?”

“For the pleasure of destruction!” Cleon slapped his chair angrily and it responded by massaging him, apparently a standard answer. “The latest of their members to ‘demonstrate their contempt for society’ is a woman named Kutonin. She invaded the Imperial Galleries, torch-melted art many millennia old, and killed two guards. Then she peacefully turned herself over to the officers who arrived.”

“You shall have her executed?”

“Of course. Court decided she was guilty quickly enough-she confessed.”

“Readily?”

“Immediately.”

Confession under the subtle ministrations of the Imperials was legendary. Breaking the flesh was easy enough; the Imperials broke the suspect’s psyche, as well. “So sentence can be set by you, it being a high crime against the Imperium.”

“Oh yes, that old law about rebellious vandalism.”

“It allows the death penalty and any special torture.”

“But death is not enough! Not for the Renegatum crimes. So I turn to my psychohistorian.”

“You want me to…?”

“Give me an idea. These people say they’re doing it to bring down the existing order and all that, of course. But they get immense planet-wide coverage, their names known by everyone as the destroyers of time-honored art. They go to their graves famous. All the psychers say that’s their real motivation. I can kill them, but they don’t care by that time!”

“Um,” Hari said uncomfortably. He knew full well he could never comprehend such people.

“So give me an idea. Something psychohistorical.” Hari was intrigued by the problem, but nothing came to mind. He had long ago learned to deliberately not concentrate on a vexing question immediately, letting his subconscious have first crack. To gain time he asked, “Sire, you saw the smoke beyond the gardens?”

“Um? No.” Cleon gave a quick hand signal to unseen eyes and the far wall blossomed with light. A full holo of the gardens filled the massive space. The oily black plume had grown. It coiled snakelike into the gray sky.

A soft, neutral voice spoke in midair. “A breakdown, with insurrection by mechanicals, has caused this unfortunate lapse in domestic order.”

“A tiktok riot?” This sort of thing Hari had heard about.

Cleon rose and walked toward the holo. “Ah yes, another recalcitrant riddle. For some reason the mechanicals are going awry. Look at that! How many levels are-burning?”

“Twelve levels are aflame,” the autovoice answered. “Imperial Analysis estimates a death toll of four hundred thirty-seven, within an uncertainty of eighty-four.”

“Imperial cost?” Cleon demanded.

“Minor. Some Imperial Regulars were hurt in subduing mechanicals.”

“Ah. Well then, it is a small matter.” Cleon watched as the wall close-upped. The view plunged down a smoking pit. To the side, like a blazing layer cake, whole floors curled up from the heat. Sparks shot between electrical boosters. Burst pipes showered the flames but had little effect.

Then a distant view, telescoping up into orbit. The program was giving the Emperor an eyeful, showing off its capabilities. Hari guessed that it didn’t often get the chance. Cleon the Calm was one derisive nickname for him, for he seemed bored with most matters that moved men.

From space, the only deep green was the Imperial Gardens-just a splotch amid the grays and browns of roofs and roof-agriculture. Charcoal-black solar collectors and burnished steel, pole to pole. The ice caps had dissipated long ago and the seas sloshed in underground cisterns.

Trantor supported forty billion people in a world-wrapping single city, seldom less than half a kilometer deep. Sealed, protected, its billions had long grown used to recycled air and short perspectives, and feared the open spaces a mere elevator ride away.

The view zoomed down into the smoky pit again. Hari could see tiny figures leaping to their deaths to escape the flames. Hundreds dying….Hari’s stomach lurched. In crowded stacks of humanity, accidents took a fearsome toll.

Still, Hari calculated, there were on average only a hundred people in a square kilometer of the planet’s surface. People jammed into the more popular Sectors out of preference, not necessity. With the seas pumped below, there was ample room for automated factories, deep mines, and immense, cavernous growing pods, where raw materials for food emerged with little direct human labor needed. These wearisome chores the tiktoks did. But now they were bringing mayhem to the intricacy that was Trantor, and Cleon fumed as he watched the disaster grow, eating away whole layers with fiery teeth.

More figures writhed in the orange flames. These were people, not statistics, he reminded himself. Bile rose in his throat. To be a leader meant that sometimes you had to look away from the pain. Could he do that?

“Another puzzle, my Seldon,” Cleon said abruptly. “Why do the tiktoks have these large-scale ‘disorders’ my advisers keep telling me about? Ah?”

“I do not-”

“There must be some psychohistorical explanation!”

“These tiny phenomena may well lie beyond-”

“Work on it! Find out!”

“Uh, yes, sire.”

Hari knew enough to let Cleon pad pointlessly around the vault, frowning at the continuing wall-high scenes of carnage, in utter silence. Perhaps, Hari thought, the Emperor was calm because he had seen so much calamity already. Even horrendous news palls. A sobering thought; would the same happen to the naive Hari Seldon?

Cleon had some way of dealing with disaster, though, for after a few moments he waved and the scenes vanished. The vault filled with cheerful music and the lighting rose. Attendants scampered out with bowls and trays of appetizers. A man at Hari’s elbow offered him a stim. Hari waved it away. The sudden shift in mood was heady enough. Apparently it was commonplace, though, for the Imperial Court.

Hari had felt something tickling at the back of his mind for several minutes now, and the quiet moments had given him a chance to finally pay attention to it. As Cleon accepted a stim, he said hesitantly, “Sire, I-?”

“Yes? Have one, ah?”

“Nossir, I, I had a thought about the Renegatum and the Kutonin woman.”

“Oh, my, I’d rather not think about-”

“Suppose you erase her identity.”

Cleon’s hand stopped with a stim halfway to his nose. “Ah?”

“They are willing to die, once they’ve attracted attention. They probably think they will live on, be famous. Take that away from them. Permit no release of their true names. In all media and official documents, give them an insulting name.”

Cleon frowned. “Another name…?”

“Call this Kutonin woman Moron One. The next one, Moron Thro. Make it illegal by Imperial decree to ever refer to her any other way. Then she as a person vanishes from history. No fame.”

Cleon brightened. “Now, that’s an idea. I’ll try it. I not merely take their lives, I can take their selves.”

Hari smiled wanly as Cleon spoke to an adjutant, giving instructions for a fresh Imperial Decree. Hari hoped it would work, but in any case, it had gotten him off the hook. Cleon did not seem to notice that the idea had nothing to do with psychohistory.

Pleased, he tried an appetizer. They were startlingly good.

Cleon beckoned to him. “Come, First Minister, I have some people for you to meet. They might prove useful, even to a mathist.”

“I am honored.” Dors had coached him on a few homilies to use when he could think of nothing to say and he trotted one out now. “Whatever would be useful in service to the people-”

“Ah, yes, the people,” Cleon drawled. “I hear so much about them.”

Hari realized that Cleon had spent a life listening to pat, predictable speeches. “Sorry, sire, I-”

“It reminds me of a poll result, assembled by my Trantorian specialists.” Cleon took an appetizer from a woman half his size. “They asked, ‘To what do you attribute the ignorance and apathy of the Trantorian masses?’ and the most common reply was ‘Don’t know and don’t care.”‘

Only when Cleon laughed did Hari realize this was a joke.

3.

He woke with ideas buzzing in his head.

Hari had learned to lie still, facedown in the gossamer e-field net that cradled his neck and head in optimum alignment with his spine…to drift… and let the flitting notions collide, merge, fragment.

He had learned this trick while working on his thesis. Overnight his subconscious did a lot of his work for him, if he would merely listen to the results in the morning. But they were delicate motes, best caught in the fine fabric of half-sleep.

He sat up abruptly and made three quick notes on his end table. The squiggles would be sent to his primary computer, for later recall at the office.

“Rooowwwrr,” Dors said, stretching. “The intellect is already up.”

“Um,” he said, staring into space.

“C’mon, before breakfast is body time.”

“See if you disagree with this idea I just had. Suppose-”

“I am not inclined, Academician Professor Seldon, to argue.”

Hari came out of his trance. Dors threw back the covers and he admired her long, slim legs. She had been sculpted for strength and speed, but such qualities converged in an agreeable concert of surfaces, springy to the touch, yielding yet resisting. He felt himself jerked out of his mood and into- “Body time, yes. You are inclined for other purposes.”

“Trust a scholar to put the proper definition to a word.”

In the warm, dizzying scuffle that followed there was some laughter, some sudden passion, and best of all, no time to think. He knew this was just what he needed, after the tensions of yesterday, and Dors knew it even better.

He emerged from the vaporium to the smell of kaff and breakfast, served out by the autos. The news flitted across the far wall and he managed to ignore most of it. Dors came out of her vaporium patting her hair and watched the wall raptly. “Looks like more stalling in the High Council,” she said. “They’re putting off the ritual search for more funding in favor of arguments over Sector sovereignty. If the Dahlites-”

“Not before I ingest some calories.”

“But this is just the sort of thing you must keep track of!”

“Not until I have to.”

“You know I don’t want you to do anything dangerous, but for now, not paying attention is foolish.”

“Maneuvering, who’s up and who’s down-spare me. Facts I can face.”

“Fond of facts, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“They can be brutal.”

“Sometimes they’re all we have.” He thought a moment, then grasped her hand. “Facts, and love.”

“Love is a fact, too.”

“Mine is. The undying popularity of entertainments devoted to romance suggests that to most people it is not a fact but a goal.”

“An hypothesis, you mathematicians would say.”

“Granted. ‘Conjecture,’ to be precise.”

“Preserve us from precision.”

He swept her suddenly into his arms, cupped her rump in his hands and, with some effort he took trouble to conceal, lifted her. “But this-this is a fact.”

“My, my.” She kissed him fiercely. “The man is not all mind.”

He succumbed to the seductive, multisensic news as he munched. He had grown up on a farm and liked big breakfasts. Dors ate sparingly; her twin religions, she said, were exercise and Hari Seldon-the first to preserve her strength for the second. He thumbed his own half of the wall to the infinitesimal doings of markets, finding there a better index of how Trantor was doing than in the stentorian bluster of the High Council.

As a mathist, he liked following the details. But after five minutes of it he slapped the table in frustration.

“People have lost their good sense. No First Minister can protect them from their own innocence.”

“My concern is protecting you from them.” Hari blanked his holo and watched hers, an ornate 3D of the factions in the High Council. Red tracers linked factions there with allies in the Low Council, a bewildering snake pit. “You don’t think this First Minister thing is going to work, do you?”

“It could.”

“They’re absolutely right-I’m not qualified.”

“Is Cleon?”

“Well, he has been reared to do the job.”

“You’re ducking the question.”

“Exactly.” Hari finished his steak and began on the egg-quhili souffle. He had left the e-stim on all night to improve his muscle tone and that made him hungry. That, and the delightful fact that Dors viewed sex as an athletic opportunity.

“I suppose your present strategy is best,” Dors said thoughtfully. “Remain a mathist, at a lofty remove from the fray.”

“Right. Nobody assassinates a guy with no power.”

“But they do ‘erase’ those who might get in the way of their taking power.”

Hari hated thinking of such things so early. He dug into the souffle. It was easy to forget, amid the tastes specially designed to fit his own well-tabulated likes, that the manufacturum built their meal from sewage. Eggs that had never known the belly of a bird. Meat appeared without skin or bones or gristle or fat. Carrots arrived without topknots. A food-manfac was delicately tuned to reproduce tastes, just short of the ability to actually make a live carrot. The minor issue of whether his souffle tasted like a real one, made by a fine chef, faded to unimportance compared with the fact that it tasted good to him-the only audience that mattered.

He realized that Dors had been talking for some moments about High Council maneuverings and he had not registered a word. She had advice on how to handle the inevitable news people, on how to receive calls, on everything. Everyone did, these days…

Hari finished, had some kaff, and felt ready to face the day as a mathist, not as a minister. “Reminds me of what my mother used to say. Know how you make God laugh?”

Dors looked blank, drawn out of her concentration. “How to…oh, this is humor?”

“You tell him your plans.”

She laughed agreeably.

Outside their apartment they acquired the Specials again. Hari felt they were unnecessary; Dors was quite enough. But he could scarcely explain that to Imperial officials. There were other Specials on the floors above and below as well, a full-volume defense screen. Hari waved to friends he saw on the way across the Streeling campus, but the presence of the Specials held them at too great a distance to speak.

He had a lot of Mathist Department business to tend to, but he followed his instinct and put his calculations first. Briskly he retrieved his ideas from the bedside notepad and stared at them, doodling absently in air, stirring symbols like a pot of soup, for over an hour.

When he was a teenager the rigid drills of schooling had made him think that mathematics was just felicity with a particular kind of minutiae, knowing things, a sort of high-grade coin collecting. You learned relations and theorems and put them together.

Only slowly did he glimpse the soaring structures above each discipline. Great spans joined the vistas of topology to the infinitesimal intricacies of differentials, or the plodding styles of number theory to the shifting sands of group analysis. Only then did he see mathematics as a landscape, a territory of the mind to rove and scout.

To traverse those expanses he worked in mind time-long stretches of uninterrupted flow when he could concentrate utterly on problems, fixing them like flies in timeless amber, turning them this way and that to his inspecting light, until they yielded their secrets.

Phones, people, politics-all these transpired in real time, snipping his thought train, killing mind time. So he let Yugo and Dors and others fend off the world throughout the morning.

But today Yugo himself snipped his concentration. “Just a mo,” he said, slipping through the crackling door field. “This paper look right?”

He and Yugo had developed a plausible cover for the psychohistory project. They regularly published research on the nonlinear analysis of “social nuggets and knots,” a sub field with an honorable and dull history. Their analysis applied to subgroups and factions in Trantor, and occasionally on other worlds.

The research was in fact useful to psychohistory, serving as a subset of equations to what Yugo insisted on calling the full “Seldon Equations.” Hari had given up being irked at this term, even though he wished to keep a personal distance from the theory.

Though scarcely a waking hour passed without his thinking about psychohistory, he did not want it to be a template for his own worldview. Nothing rooted in a particular personality could hope to describe the horde of saints and rascals revealed by human history. One had to take the longest view possible.

“See,” Yugo said, making lines of print and symbols coalesce on Hari’s holo. “I got all the analysis of the Dahlite crisis. Neat as you please, huh?”

“Um, what’s the Dahlite crisis?”

Yugo’s surprise was profound. “We’re not bein’ represented! “

“You live in Streeling.”

“Once a Dahlan, you’re always one. Just like you, from Helical.”

“Helicon. I see, you don’t have enough delegates in the Low Council?”

“Or the High!”

“The Codes allow-”

“They’re out of date.”

“Dahlites get a proportional share-”

“And our neighbors, the Ratannanahs and the Quippons, they’re schemin’ against us.”

“How so?”

“There’re Dahlans in plenty other Sectors. They don’t get represented.”

“You’re spoken for by our Streeling-”

“Look, Hari, you’re a Helical. Wouldn’t understand. Plenty Sectors, they’re just places to sleep. Dahl is a people.”

“The Codes set forth rules for accommodating separate subcultures, ethnicities-”

“They’re not workin’.”

Hari saw from Yugo’s jutting jaw that this was not a point for graceful debate. He did know something of the slowly gathering constitutional crisis. The Codes had maintained a balance of forces for millennia, but only by innovative adaptation. Little of that seemed available now. “We agree on that. So how does our research bear upon Dahl?”

“See, I took the socio-factor analysis and-”

Yugo had an intuitive grasp of nonlinear equations. It was always a pleasure to watch his big hands cut the air, slicing through points and pounding objections to pulp. And the calculations were good, if a bit simple.

The nuggets-and-knots work attracted little attention. It had made some in mathematics write him off as a promising young man who had never risen to his potential. This was perfectly all right with Hari. Some mathists guessed that his true core research went unpublished; these he treated kindly but gave no hint of confirmation.

“-so there’s a pressure-nugget buildin’ in Dahl, you bet,” Yugo finished.

“Of course, glancing at the news holos shows that.”

“Well, yeah-but I’ve proved it’s justified.”

Hari kept his face composed; Yugo was really worked up about this. “You’ve shown one of the factors. But there are others in the knot equations.”

“Well, sure, but everybody knows-”

“What everybody knows doesn’t need much proof. Unless, of course, it’s wrong.”

Yugo’s face showed a rush of emotions: surprise, concern, anger, hurt, puzzlement. “You don’t support Dahl, Hari?”

“Of course I do, Yugo.” Actually, the truth was that Hari didn’t care. But that was too bald a point to make, with Yugo seeming wounded. “Look, the paper is fine. Publish.”

“The three basic knot equations, they’re yours.”

“No need to call them that.”

“Sure, just like before. But your name goes on the paper.”

Something tickled Hari’s mind, but he saw the right answer now was to reassure Yugo. “If you like.”

Yugo went on about details of publication, and Hari let his eyes drift over the equations. Terms for representation in models of Trantorian democracy, value tables for social pressures, the whole apparatus. A bit stuffy. But reassuring to those who suspected that he was hiding his major results-as he was, of course.

Hari sighed. Dahl was a festering political sore. Dahlites on Trantor mirrored the culture of the Dahl Galactic Zone. Every powerful Zone had its own Sectors in Trantor, for influence-peddling and general pressuring.

But Dahl was minor on the scale that he wanted to explore-simple, even trivial. The knot equations which described High Council representation were truncated forms of the immensely worse riddle of Trantor.

Allof Trantor-one teeming world, baffling in its sheer size, its intricate connections, meaningless. coincidences, random juxtapositions, sensitive dependencies. His equations were still terribly inadequate for this shell which housed forty billion bustling souls.

How much worse was the Empire!

People, confronting bewildering complexity, tend to find their saturation level. They master the easy connections, local links, and rules of thumb. They push this until they meet a wall of complexity too thick and high and hard to grasp, to climb.

There they stall. Gossip, consult, fret-and finally, gamble.

The Empire of twenty-five million worlds was a problem greater even than understanding the whole rest of the universe-because at least the galaxies beyond did not have humans in them. The blind, blunt motions of stars and gas were child’s play, compared to the convoluted trajectories of people.

Sometimes it wore him down. Trantor was bad enough, eight hundred Sectors with forty billion people. What of the Empire, with twenty-five million planets of average four billion souls apiece? One hundred quadrillion people!

Worlds interacted through the narrow necks of wormholes, which at least simplified some of the economic issues. But culture traveled at the speed of light through wormholes, information without mass, zooming across the Galaxy in destabilizing waves. A farmer on Oskatoon knew that a duchy had fallen on the other side of the Galactic disk a few hours after the blood on the palace floor started turning brown.

How to include that?

Clearly, the Empire extended beyond the Complexity Horizon of any person or computer. Only sets of equations which did not try to keep track of every detail could work.

Which meant that an individual was nothing on the scale of events worth studying. Even a million made about as much difference as a single raindrop falling in a lake.

Suddenly Hari was even more glad that he had kept psychohistory secret. How would people react if they knew that he thought they didn’t matter?

“Hari? Hari?”

He had been musing again. Yugo was still in the office. “Oh, sorry, just mulling over-”

“The department meeting.”

“What?

“You called it for today.”

“Oh, no.” He was halfway through a calculation. “Can’t we delay…?”

“The whole department? They’re waiting.”

Hari dutifully followed Yugo into the assembly room. The three traditional levels were already filled. Cleon’s patronage had filled out an already high-ranked department until it was probably-how could one measure such things?-the best on Trantor. It had specialists in myriad disciplines, even areas whose very definitions Hari was a bit vague about.

Hari took his position at the hub of the highest level, at the exact center of the room. Mathists liked geometries which mirrored realities, so the full professors sat on a round, raised platform, in airchairs with ample arms.

Forming a larger annulus around them, a few steps lower, were the associate professors-those with tenure, but still at the middle rank in their careers. They had comfortable chairs, though without full computing and holo functions.

Below them, almost in a pit, were the untenured professors, on simple chairs of sturdy design. The oldest sat nearest the room’s center. In their outer ranks were the instructors and assistants, on plain benches without any computer capabilities whatever. Yugo rested there, scowling, plainly feeling out of place.

Hari had always thought it was either enraging or hilarious, depending on his mood, that one of the most productive members of the department, Yugo, should have such low status. This was the true price of keeping psychohistory secret. The pain of this he tried to soothe by giving Yugo a good office and other perks. Yugo seemed to care little for status, since he had already ascended so far. And all without the Civil Service exams, too.

Today, Hari decided to make a little mischief. “Thank you, colleagues, for attending. We have many administrative matters to engage. Yugo?”

A rustle. Yugo’s eyes widened, but he stood up quickly and climbed up to the speaker’s platform.

He always had someone else chair meetings, even though as chairman he had called them, chosen the hour, fixed the agenda. He knew that some regarded him as a strong personality, simply by dint of knowing the research agenda so deeply.

That was a common error, mistaking knowledge for command. He had found that if he presided, there was little dissent from his own views. To get open discussion demanded that he sit back and listen and take notes, intervening only at key moments.

Years ago Yugo had wondered why he did this, and Hari waved away the problem. “I’m not a leader,” he said. Yugo gave him a strange look, as if to say, Who do you think you’re kidding?

Hari smiled to himself. Some of the full professors around him were muttering, casting glances. Yugo launched into the agenda, speaking quickly in a strong, clear voice.

Hari sat back and watched irritation wash over some of his esteemed colleagues. Noses wrinkled at Yugo’s broad accent. One of them mouthed to another, Dahlite! and was answered, Upstart!

About time they got “a bit of the boot,” as his father had once termed it. And for Yugo to get a taste of running the department.

After all, this First Minister business could get worse. He could need a replacement.

4.

“We should leave soon,” Hari said, scribbling on his notepad.

“Why? The reception doesn’t start for ages.” She smoothed out her dress with great care, eyes critical.

“I want to take a walk on the way.”

“The reception is in Dahviti Sector.”

“Humor me.”

She pulled on the sheath dress with some effort. “I wish this weren’t the style.”

“Wear something else, then.”

“This is your first appearance at an Imperial affair. You’ll want to look your best.”

“Translation: you look your best and stand next to me.”

“You’re just wearing that Streeling professorial garb.”

“Appropriate to the occasion. I want to show that I’m still just a professor.”

She worked on the dress some more and finally said, “You know, some husbands would enjoy watching their wives do this.”

Hari looked up as she wriggled into the last of the clingy ensemble in amber and blue. “Surely you don’t want to get me all excited and then have to endure the reception that way.”

She smiled impishly. “That’s exactly what I want.”

He lounged back in his airchair and sighed theatrically. “Mathematics is a finer muse. Less demanding.”

She tossed a shoe at him, missing by a precise centimeter.

Hari grinned. “Careful, or the Specials will rush to defend me.”

Dors began her finishing touches and then glanced at him, puzzled. “You are even more distracted than usual.”

“As always, I fit my research into the nooks and crannies of life.”

“The usual problem? What’s important in history?”

“I’d prefer to know what’s not.”

“I agree that the customary mega-history approach, economics and politics and the rest, isn’t enough.”

Hari looked up from his pad. “There are some historians who think that the little rules of a society have to be counted, to understand the big laws that make it work.”

“I know that research.” Dors twisted her mouth doubtfully. “Small rules and big laws. How about simplifying? Maybe the laws are just all the rules, added up?”

“Of course not.”

“Example,” she persisted.

He wanted to think, but she would not be put off. She poked him in the ribs. “Example!”

“All right. Here’s a rule: Whenever you find something you like, buy a lifetime supply, because they’re sure to stop making it.”

“That’s ridiculous. A joke.”

“Not much of a joke, but it’s true.”

“Well, do you follow this rule?”

“Of course.”

“How?”

“Remember the first time you looked in my closet?”

She blinked. He grinned, recalling. She had been subtly snooping, and slid aside the large but feather-light door. In a rectangular grid of shelves were clothes sorted by type, then color. Dors had gasped. “Six blue suits. At least a dozen padshoes, all black. And shirts!-off-white, olive, a few red. At least fifty! So many, all alike.”

“And exactly what I like,” he had said. “This also solves the problem of choosing what to wear in the morning. I just reach in at random.”

“I thought you wore the same clothes day after day.”

He had raised his eyebrows, aghast. “The same? You mean, dirty clothes?”

“Well, when they didn’t change…”

“I change every day!” He chuckled, remembering, and said, “Then I usually put on the same outfit the next day, because I like it. And you will not find any of those available in the stores again.”

“I’ll say,” she said, fingering the weave on his shirts. “These are at least four seasons out of fashion.”

“See? The rule works.”

“To me, a week is twenty-one clothing opportunities. To you, it’s a chore.”

“You’re ignoring the rule.”

“How long did you dress that way?”

“Since I noticed how much time I spent making decisions about what to wear. And that what I really liked to wear wasn’t in the stores very often. I generalized a solution to both problems.”

“You’re amazing.”

“I’m simply systematic.”

“You’re obsessional.”

“You’re judging, not diagnosing.”

“You’re a dear. Crazy, but a dear. Maybe they go together.”

“Is that a rule, too?”

She kissed him. “Yes, professor.”

The inevitable Special screen formed about them the instant they left their apartment. By now he and Dors had trained the Specials to at least allow them the privacy of a single wedge in the drop tube.

The grav drop was in fact no miracle of gravitational physics; it came from advanced electromagnetics. Each instant over a thousand electrostatic fields supported him through intricate charge imbalances. He could feel them playing in his hair, small twinges skating across his skin, as the field configurations handed him off to each other, each lowering his mass infinitesimally down the chute.

When they left the wedge, thirteen floors higher, Dors passed a charge-programmed comb through her hair. It crackled and snapped obediently into its style: “smart” hair.

They entered a broad passageway lined with shops. Hari liked being in a place where he could see farther than a hundred meters.

Movement was quick because there was no cross traffic for any conveyance. A slidewalk ran at the center, going their way, but they stayed near the shop windows and browsed as they ambled.

To move laterally, one simply went up or down a level by elevator or escalator, then stepped on a moving belt or entered a robopod. In the corridors to both sides the slideway ran opposite. With no left or right turns, traffic mishaps were rare. Most people walked wherever was practical, for the exercise and for the indefinable exhilaration of Trantor itself. People who came here wanted the constant stimulation of humanity, ideas, and cultures rubbing against each other in productive friction. Hari was not immune to it, though it lost some savor if overdone.

People in the squares and park-hexagons wore fashions from the twenty-five million worlds. He saw self-shaping “leathers” from animals who could not possibly have resembled the mythical horse. A man sauntered by with leggings slit to his hip, exposing blue-striped skin that bunched and slid in a perpetual show. An angular woman sported a bodice of open-mouthed faces, each swallowing ivory-nippled breasts; he had to look twice to believe they weren’t real. Girls in outrageously cut pomp-vestments paraded noisily. A child-or was it a normal inhabitant of a strong-grav world?-played a photozither, strumming its laser beams.

The Specials fanned out and their captain came trotting over. “We can’t cover you well here, Academician sir.”

“These are ordinary people, not assassins. They had no way of predicting that I’d be here.”

“Emperor says cover you, we cover you.”

Dors rapped back smartly, “I’ll handle the close-in threats. I’m able, I assure you.”

The captain’s mouth twisted sourly, but he gave himself a moment before saying, “I heard something about that. Still-”

“Have your men use their range detectors vertically. A shaped charge on the layers below and above could catch us.”

“Uh, yes’m.” He trotted off.

They passed by the jigsaw walls of the Farhahal Quadrant. A wealthy ancient had become obsessed with the notion that as long as his estate was unfinished, he would not himself finish-that is, die. Whenever an addition neared completion, he ordered up more. Eventually the tangle of rooms, runways, vaults, bridges and gardens became an incoherent motley stuck into every cranny of the original, rather simple design. When Farhahal eventually did “finish,” a tower half built, bickering by his heirs and lawyerly plundering of the estate for their fees brought the quadrant low. Now it was a fetid warren, visited only by the predatory and the unwary.

The Specials pulled in tight and the captain urged them to get into a robo. Hari grudgingly agreed. Dors had the concentrated look that meant she was worried. They sped in silence through shadowy tunnels. There were two stops and in the brilliantly lit stations Hari saw rats scurrying for shelter as the pod eased to a halt. He silently pointed them out to Dors.

“Brrrr,” she said. “One would think that at the very center of the Empire we could eliminate pests.”

“Not these days,” Hari said, though he suspected the rats had thrived even at the height of Empire. Rodents cared little for grandeur.

“I suppose they’ve been our eternal companions,” Dors said somberly. “No world is free of them.”

“In these tunnels, the long-distance pods fly so fast that occasionally rats get sucked into the air-breathing engines.”

Dors said uneasily, “That could damage the engines, even crash the pods.”

“No holiday for the rat, either.”

They passed through a Sector whose citizens abhorred sunlight, even the wan splashes which came down through the layers by radiance tubes. Historically, Dors told him, this had arisen from fears of its ultraviolet component, but the phobia seemed to go deeper than a mere health issue.

Their pod slowed and passed along a high ramp above open, swarming vaults. No natural light shafts brought illumination, only artificial phosphor glows. The Sector was officially named Kalanstromonia, but its citizens were known worldwide as Spooks. They seldom traveled, and their bleached faces stood out in crowds. Gazing down at them, they looked to Hari like swarms of grubs feeding on shadowy decay.

The Imperial Zonal Reception was inside a dome in the Julieen Sector. He and Dors entered with the Specials, who then gave way to five men and women wearing utterly inconspicuous business dress. These nodded to Hari and then appeared to forget him, moving down a broad rampway and chatting with each other.

A woman at the grand doorway made too much of his entrance. Music descended around him in a sound cloud, an arrangement of the Streeling Anthem blended subtly with the Helicon Symphony; This attracted attention from the crowds below-exactly what he did not want. A protocol team smoothly took the handoff from the door attendants, escorting him and Dors to a balcony. He was happy for the chance to look at the view.

From the peak of the dome the vistas were startling. Spirals descended to plateaus so distant he could barely make out a forest and paths. The ramparts and gardens there had drawn millennia of spectators, including, a guide told him, 999,987 suicides, all carefully tabulated through many centuries.

Now that the number approached a million, the guide went on with relish, attempts occurred nearly every hour. A man had been stopped just short of leaping that very day, wearing a gaudy holosuit programmed to flash I MADE THE MILLION after he struck.

“They seem so eager,” the guide concluded with what seemed to Hari a kind of pride.

“Well,” Hari remarked, trying to get rid of the man, “suicide is the most sincere form of self-criticism.”

The guide nodded wisely, unperturbed, and added, “Also, it does give them something to contribute to. That must be a consolation.”

The protocol team had, all planned out for him, an orbit through the vast reception. Meet X, greet Y, bow to Z.

“Say nothing about the Judena Zone crisis,” an aide insisted. This was easy, since he had never heard of it.

The appetite-enhancers were excellent, the food that followed even better (or seemed so, which was the point of the enhancers), and he took a stim offered by a gorgeous woman.

“You could get through this entire evening just nodding and smiling and agreeing with people,” Dors said after the first half hour.

“It’s tempting to do just that,” Hari whispered as they followed the protocol lieutenant to the next bunch of Zonal figures. The air in the vast, foggy dome was freighted with negotiations advanced and bargains struck.

The Emperor arrived with full pomp. He would pay the traditional hour’s tribute, then by ancient custom leave before anyone else was permitted to. Hari wondered if the Emperor ever wanted to linger in the middle of an interesting conversation. Cleon was well schooled in emperorhood, though, so the issue probably never came up. Cleon greeted Hari effusively, kissed Dors’ hand, and then seemed to lose interest in them within two minutes, moving on with his entourage to another circle of expectant faces.

Hari’s next group proved different. Not the usual mix of diplomats, aristos, and anxious brownclad assistants, his lieutenant told him, but high figures. “People with punch,” the man whispered.

A large, muscular man was holding forth at the center of a circle, a dozen faces raptly following his every word. The protocol lieutenant tried to whisk them past, but Hari stopped her. “That’s…”

“Betan Lamurk, sir.”

“Knows how to hold a crowd.”

“Indeed, sir. Would you like a formal introduction?”

“No, just let me listen.”

It was always a good idea to size up an opponent before he knew he was being watched. Hari’s father had taught him that trick, just before his first matheletic competition. Such techniques had not managed to save his father, but they worked in the milder groves of academe.

Black hair invaded his broad brow like a pincer attack, two pointed wedges reaching down to nearly the end of his eyebrows. His hooded eyes were widely spaced and blazed intently from a rigging of mirth wrinkles. A slender nose seemed to point to his proudest feature, a mouth assembled from varying parts. The lower lip curled in full, impudent humor. The upper, thin and muscular, curled downward in a curve that verged on a sneer. A viewer would know the upper lip could overrule the lower at any moment, shifting mood abruptly-a disquieting effect which could not have been bettered if he had designed it himself.

Hari realized quickly that, of course, Lamurk had.

Lamurk was discussing some detail of interZonal trade in the Orion spiral arm, a hot issue before the High Council at the moment. Hari cared nothing about trade, except as a variable in stochastic equations, so he simply watched the man’s manner.

To underline a point Lamurk would raise his hands over his head, fingers open, voice rising. Then, his point made, his voice evened out and he lowered them to chest height, held precisely side by side. As his well-modulated voice became deeper and more reflective, he moved the hands apart. Then-voice rising again-his hands soared to head level and windmilled one around the other, the subject now complex, the listener thereby commanded to pay close attention.

He kept close eye contact with the whole audience, a piercing gaze sweeping the circle. A last point, a quick touch of humor, grin flashing, sure of himself-a pause for the next question.

He finished his point with, “-and for some of us, ‘Pax Imperium’ looks more like ‘Tax Imperium,’ eh?” Then he saw Hari. A quick furrowing of his brow, then, “Academician Seldon! Welcome! I’d been wondering when I was going to get to meet you.”

“Don’t let me interrupt your, ah, lecture.”

This provoked some titters and Hari saw that to accuse a member of the High Council of pontificating was a mild social jab. “I found it fascinating.”

“Pretty humdrum stuff, I’m afraid, compared to you mathists,” Lamurk said cordially.

“I am afraid my mathematics is even more dry than Zonal trade.”

More titters, though this time Hari could not quite see why.

“I just try to separate out the factions,” Lamurk said genially. “People treat money like it is a religion.”

This gained him some agreeing laughter. Hari said, “Fortunately, there are no sects in geometry.”

“We’re just trying to get the best deal for the whole Empire, Academician.”

“The best is the enemy of the good, I’d imagine.”

“I suppose then, you’ll be applying mathematical logic to our problems on the Council?” Lamurk’s voice remained friendly, but his eyes took on a veiled character. “Assuming you gain a ministership?”

“Alas, so far as the laws of mathematics are sharp and certain, they do not refer to reality. So far as they refer to reality, they are not certain.”

Lamurk glanced at the crowd, which had grown considerably. Dors grasped Hari’s hand and he realized from her squeeze that this had somehow turned into something important. He could not see why, but there was no time to size up the situation.

Lamurk said, “Then this psychohistory thing I hear about, it’s not useful?”

“Not to you, sir,” Hari said.

Lamurk’s eyes narrowed, but his affable grin remained. “Too tough for us?”

“Not ready for use, I’m afraid. I don’t have the logic of it yet.”

Lamurk chuckled, beamed at the still growing crowd, and said jovially, “A logical thinker!-what a refreshing contrast with the real world.”

General laughter. Hari tried to think of something to say. He saw one of his bodyguards block a man nearby, inspect something in the man’s suit, then let him go.

“Y’see, Academician, on the High Council we can’t be spending our time on theory.” Lamurk paused for effect, as though making a campaign speech. “We’ve got to be just….and sometimes, folks, we’ve got to be hard.”

Hari raised an eyebrow. “My father used to say, ‘It’s a hard man who’s only just, and a sad man who’s only wise.”‘

A few ooohs in the crowd told him he had scored a hit. Lamurk’s eyes confirmed the cut.

“Well, we do try on the Council, we do. No doubt we can use some help from the learned quarters of the Empire. I’LL have to read one of your books, Academician.” He shot a look with raised eyebrows at the crowd. “Assuming I can.”

Hari shrugged. “I will send you my monograph on transfinite geometric calculus.”

“Impressive title,” Lamurk said, eyes playing to the audience.

“It’s the same with books as with men-a very small number play great parts; the rest are lost in the multitude.”

“And which would you rather be?” Lamurk shot back.

“Among the multitudes. At least I wouldn’t have to attend so many receptions.”

This got a big laugh, surprising Hari. Lamurk said, “Well, I’m sure the Emperor won’t tire you out with too much socializing. But you’ll get invited everywhere. You’ve got a sharp tongue on you, Academician.”

“My father had another saying, too. ‘Wit is like a razor. Razors are more likely to cut those who use them when they’ve lost their edge.”‘

His father had also told him that in a public trade of barbs, the one who lost temper first lost the exchange. He had not recalled that until this instant. Hari remembered too late that Lamurk was known for his humor in High Council meetings. Probably scripted for him; certainly he displayed none here.

A quick tightening of the cheeks spread into a bloodless white line of lip. Lamurk’s features twisted into an expression of distaste-not a long way to go, for most of them-and he gave an ugly, wet laugh.

The crowd stood absolutely silent. Something had happened.

“Ah, there are other people who would like to meet the Academician,” Hari’s lieutenant said, sliding neatly into the growing, awkward silence.

Hari shook hands, murmured meaningless pleasantries, and let himself be whisked away.

5.

He had another stim to calm himself. Somehow he was more jittery afterward than during the social collision. Lamurk had given Hari a cold, angry stare as they parted.

“I’ll keep track of him,” Dors said. “You just enjoy your fame.”

To Hari this was a flat impossibility, but he tried. Seldom did one see such a variety of people, and he calmed himself by lapsing into a habitual role: polite observer. It was not as though the usual social chitchat demanded much concentration. A warm smile would do most of the work for him here.

The party was a microcosm of Trantorian society. In spare moments, Hari watched the social orders interact.

Cleon’s grandfather had reinstated many Ruellian traditions, and one of those customs required that members of all five classes be present at any grand Imperial function. Cleon seemed especially keen on this practice, as if it would raise his popularity among the masses. Hari kept his own doubts private.

First and obvious came the gentry-the inherited aristocracy. Cleon himself stood at the apex of a pyramid of rank that descended from the Imperium to mighty Quadrant Dukes and Spiral Arm Princes, past Life Peers, all the way down to the local barons Hari used to know back on Helicon.

Working in the fields, he had seen them pompously scudding overhead. Each governed a domain no larger than they could cross by flitter in a day. To a member of the gentry, life was busy with the Great Game-a ceaseless campaign to advance the fortunes of one’s noble house, arranging greater status for your family line through political alliances, or marriages for your many children.

Hari snorted in derision, masking it by taking another stim. He had studied anthropological reports from a thousand Fallen Worlds-those that had devolved in isolation, reverting to cruder ways of life. He knew this pyramid-shaped order to be among the most natural and enduring human social patterns. Even when a planet was reduced to simple agriculture and hand-forged metals, the same triangular format endured. People liked rank and order.

The endless competition of gentry families had been the first and easiest psychohistorological system Hari ever modeled. He had first combined basic game theory and kin selection. Then, in a moment of inspiration, he inserted them into the equations that described sand grains skidding down the slopes of a dune. That correctly described sudden transitions: social slippages.

So it was with the rise and fall of noble family lines. Long, smooth eras-then abrupt shifts.

He watched the crowd, picking out those in the second aristocracy, supposedly equal to the first: the meritocracy.

As department chairman at a major Imperial university, Hari was himself a lord in that hierarchy-a pyramid of achievement rather than of birth. Meritocrats had entirely different obsessions than the gentry’s constant dynastic bickerings. In fact, few in Hari’s class bothered to breed at all, so busy were they in their chosen fields. Gentry jostled for the top ranks of Imperial government, while second tier meritocrats saw themselves wielding the real power.

If only Cleon had such a role in mind for me,Hari thought. A vice minister position, or an advisory post. He could have managed that for a time, or else bungled it and got himself forced out of office. Either way, he would be safe back at Streeling within a year or two. They don’t execute vice ministers…not for incompetence, at least.

Nor did a vice minister feel the worst burden of rule-bearing responsibility for the lives of a quadrillion human beings.

Dors saw him drifting along in his own thoughts. Under her gentle urging, he sampled tasty savories and made small talk.

The gentry could be distinguished by their ostentatiously fashionable clothing, while the economists, generals and other meritocrats tended to wear the formal garb of their professions.

So he was making a political statement, after all, Hari realized. In wearing professor’s robes, he emphasized that there might be a non-gentry First Minister for the first time in forty years.

Not that he minded making that statement. Hari just wished he had done it on purpose.

Despite the official Ruellian ethos, the remaining three social classes seemed nearly invisible at the party.

The factotums wore somber costumes of brown or gray, with expressions to match. They seldom spoke on their own. Usually they hovered at the elbow of some aristo, supplying facts and even figures that the more gaily-dressed guests used in their arguments. Aristos generally were innumerate, unable to do simple addition. That was for machines.

Hari found that he actually had to concentrate in order to pick the fourth class, the Greys, out of the crowd. He watched them move, like finches among peacocks.

Yet their kind made up more than a sixth of Trantor’s population. Drawn from every planet in the Empire by the all-seeing Civil Service tests, they came to the Capital World, served their time like bachelor monks, and left again for outworld postings. Flowing through Trantor like water in the gloomy cisterns, the Greys were seldom thought of, as honest and commonplace and dull as the metal walls.

That might have been his life, he realized. It was the way out of the fields for many of the brighter children he had known at Helicon. Except that Hari had been plucked right over the bureaucracy, sent straight to academe by the time he could solve a mere eighth-order tensor defoliation, at age ten.

Ruellianism preached that “citizen” was the highest social class of all. In theory, even the Emperor shared sovereignty with common men and women.

But at a party like this, the most numerous Galactic group was represented mostly by the servants carrying food and drink around the hall, even more invisible than the dour bureaucrats. The majority of Trantor’s population, the laborers and mechanics and shopkeepers-the denizens of the 800 Sectors-had no station at a gathering like this. They lay outside the Ruellian ranking.

As for the Artes, that final social order was not meant to be invisible. Musicians and jugglers strolled among the guests, the smallest, most flamboyant class.

Even more dashing was an air-sculptor Hari spotted across the vast chamber, when Dors pointed him out. Hari had heard of the new art form. The “statues” were of colored smoke that the artist exhaled in rapid puffs. Shapes of eerie, ghostlike complexity floated among the bemused guests. Some figures clearly made fun of the courtly gentry, as puffy caricatures of their ostentatious clothes and poses.

To Hari’s eye, the smoke figures seemed entrancing…until they started drifting apart into tatters, without substance or predictability.

“It’s all the mode,” he heard one onlooker remark. “I hear the artist comes straight from Sark! “

“The Renaissance world?” another asked, wide-eyed. “Isn’t that a little daring? Who invited him?”

“The Emperor himself, it’s said.”

Hari frowned. Sark, where those personality simulations came from. “Renaissance world,” he muttered irritably, knowing now what he disliked about the smoke shapes: their ephemeral nature. Their intended destiny, to dissolve into chaos.

As he watched, the air-sculptor blew a satirical tableau. The first figure formed of crimson smoke, and he did not recognize it until Dors elbowed him and laughed. “It’s you!”

He clamped his gaping mouth shut, unsure how to handle the social nuances. A second cloud of coiling blue streamers formed a clear picture of Lamurk, eyebrows knotted in fury. The foggy figures hovered in confrontation, Hari smiling, Lamurk scowling.

And Lamurk looked the fool, with bulging eyes and pouting lips.

“Time for a graceful exit,” Hari’s lieutenant whispered. Hari was only too glad to agree.

When they got home, he was sure that there had been a bit extra in the stim he was handed, something that freed his tongue. Certainly it was not the slow-spoken, reflective Seldon who had traded jabs with Lamurk. He would have to watch that.

Dors simply shook her head. “It was you. Just a portion of you that doesn’t get out to play very much.”

6.

“Parties are supposed to cheer people up,” Yugo said, sliding a cup of kaff across Hari’s smooth mahogany desktop.

“Not this one,” Hari said.

“All that luxury, powerful people, beautiful women, witty hangers-on-I think I could have stayed awake.”

“That’s what depresses me, thinking back over it. All that power! And nobody there seems to care about our decline.”

“Isn’t there some old saying about-”

“Fiddling while Roma burns. Dors knew it, of course. She says it’s from pre-Empire, about a Zone with pretensions of grandeur. ‘ All worms lead to Roma’ is another one.”

“Never heard of this Roma.”

“Me either, but pomposity springs forth eternal. It looks comic in retrospect.”

Yugo moved restlessly around Hari’s office. “So they don’t care?”

“To them it’s just backdrop for their power games.” Already the Empire had worlds, Zones, and even whole arcs of spiral arms descended into squalor. Still worse, in a way, was a steady slide into garish amusements, even vulgarity. The media swarmed with the stuff. The new “renaissance” styles from worlds like Sark were popular.

To Hari the best of the Empire was its strands of restraint, of subtlety and discretion in manners, finesse and charm, intelligence, talent, and even glamour. Helicon had been crude and rural, but it knew the difference between silk and swine.

“What do the policy types say?” Yugo sat halfway on Hari’s desk, avoiding the control functions implanted beneath a woody veneer. He had come in with the kaff as a pretext, fishing for gossip about the exalted. Hari smiled to himself; people relished some aspects of hierarchy, however much they griped about it.

“They’re hoping some of the ‘moral rebirth’ movements-like revised Ruellianism, say-will take hold. Put spine into the Zones, one of them said.”

“ Ummm.Think it’ll work?”

“Not for long.”

Ideology was an uncertain cement. Even religious fervor could not glue an empire together for long. Either force could drive formation of an empire, but they could not hold against greater, steady tides-principally, economics.

“How about the war in the Orion Zone?”

“Nobody mentioned it.”

“Think we’ve got war figured right in the equations?” Yugo had a knack for suddenly putting his finger on what was bothering Hari.

“No. War was an overesteemed element in history.”

Certainly war often gained center stage; no one continued to read a beautiful poem when a fist fight broke out nearby. But fist fights did not last, either. Further, they joggled the elbows of those trying to make a living. To engineers and traders alike, war did not pay. So why did wars break out now, with all the economic weight of the Empire against them?

“Wars are simple. But we’re missing something basic-I can feel it.”

“We’ve based the matrices on all that historical data Dors dug out,” Yugo said a bit defensively. “That’s solid.”

“I don’t doubt it. Still…”

“Look, we’ve got over twelve thousand years of hard facts. I built the model on that.”

“I have a feeling what we’re missing isn’t subtle.”

Most collapses were not from abstruse causes. In the early days of Empire consolidation, local minor sovereignties flourished, then died. There were recurrent themes in their histories.

Again and again, star-spanning realms collapsed under the weight of excessive taxation. Sometimes the taxes supported mercenary armies which defended against neighbors, or which simply kept domestic order against centrifugal forces. Whatever the ostensible cause of taxes, soon enough the great cities became depopulated, as people fled the tax collectors, seeking “rural peace.”

But why did they do that spontaneously?

“People.” Hari sat up suddenly. “That’s what we’re missing. “

“Huh? You proved yourself-remember? the Reductionist Theorem?-that individuals don’t matter.”

“They don’t. But people do. Our coupled equations describe them in the mass, but we don’t know the critical drivers.”

“That’s all hidden, down in the data.”

“Maybe not. What if we were big spiders, instead of primates? Would psychohistory look the same?”

Yugo frowned. “Well…if the data were the same…”

“Data on trade, wars, population statistics? It wouldn’t matter whether we were counting spiders instead of people?”

Yugo shook his head, his face clouding, unwilling to concede a point that might topple years of work. “It’s gotta be there.”

“Your coming in here to get details of what the rich and famous do at their revels-where’s that in the equations?”

Yugo’s mouth twisted, irked now. “That stuff, it doesn’t matter.”

“Who says?”

“Well, history-”

“Is written by the winners, true enough. But how do the great generals get men and women to march through freezing mud? When won’t they march?”

“Nobody knows.”

“We need to know. Or rather, the equations do.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Go to the historians?”

Hari laughed. He shared Dors’ contempt for most of her profession. The current fashion in the study of the past was a matter of taste, not data.

He had once thought that history was simply a matter of grubbing in musty cyberfiles. Then, if Dors would show him how to track down data-whether encoded in ancient ferrite cylinders or polymer blocks or strandware -thenhe would have a firm basis for mathematics. Didn’t Dors and other historians simply add one more brick of knowledge to an ever-growing monument?

The current style, though, was to marshal the past into a preferred flavor. Factions fought over the antiquity, over “their” history vs. “ours.” Fringes flourished. The “spiral-centric” held that historical forces spread along spiral arms, whereas the “Hub-focused” maintained that the Galactic Center was the true mediating agency for causes, trends, movements, evolution. Technocrats contended with Naturals, who felt that innate human qualities drove change.

Among myriad facts and footnotes, specialists saw present politics mirrored in the past. As the present fractured and transfigured, there seemed no point of reference outside history itself-an unreliable platform indeed, especially when one realized how many mysterious gaps there were in the records. All this seemed to Hari to be more fashion than foundation. There was no uncontested past.

What contained the centrifugal forces of relativism-let me have my viewpoint and you can have yours-was an arena of broad agreement. Most people generally held that the Empire was good, overall. That the long periods of stasis had been the best times, for change always cost someone. That above the competing throng, through the factions shouting what were essentially family stories at each other, there was worth in comprehending where humanity had passed, what it had done.

But there agreement stopped. Few seemed concerned with where humanity, or even the Empire, was going. He had come to suspect that the subject was ignored, in favor of your-history-against-mine, because most historians unconsciously dreaded the future. They sensed the decline in their souls and knew that over the horizon lay not yet another shift-then-stasis but a collapse.

“So what do we do?” Hari realized that Yugo had said this twice now. He had drifted off into reverie.

“I…don’t know.”

“Add another term for basic instincts?”

Hari shook his head. “People don’t run on instinct. But they do behave like people-like primates, I suppose.”

“So…we should look into that?”

Hari threw up his hands. “I confess. I feel that this line of logic is leading somewhere-but I can’t see the end of it.”

Yugo nodded, grinned. “It’ll come out when it’s ripe.”

“Thanks. I’m not the best of collaborators, I know. Too moody.”

“Hey, never mind. Gotta think out loud sometimes, is all.”

“Sometimes I’m not sure I’m thinking at all.”

“Lemme show you the latest, huh?” Yugo liked to parade his inventions, and Hari sat back as Yugo accessed the office holo and patterns appeared in midair. Equations hung in space, 30-stacked and each term color-coded.

So many! They reminded Hari of birds, flocking in great banks.

Psychohistory was basically a vast set of interlocked equations, following the variables of history. It was impossible to change one and not vary any other. Alter population and trade changed, along with modes of entertainment, sexual mores, and a hundred other factors.

Some were undoubtedly unimportant, but which? History was a bottomless quarry of factoids, meaningless without some way of winnowing the hail of particulars. That was the essential first task of any theory of history-to find the deep variables.

“Post-diction rates-presto!” Yugo said, his hand computer suspending in air 30 graphs, elegantly arrayed. “Economic indices, variable-families, the works.”

“What eras?” Hari asked.

“Third millennia to seventh, G.E.”

The multidimensional surfaces representing economic variables were like twisted bottles filled with-as Yugo time-stepped them-sloshing fluids. The liquids of yellow and amber and virulent red flowed around and through each other in a supple, slow dance. Hari was perpetually amazed at how beauty arose in the most unlikely ways from mathematics. Yugo had plotted abstruse econometric quantities, yet in the gravid sway of centuries they made delicate arabesques.

“Surprisingly good agreement,” Hari allowed. The yellow surfaces of historical data merged cleanly with the other color skins, fluids finding curved levels. “And covering four millennia! No infinities?”

“That new renormalization scheme blotted them out.”

“Excellent! The middle Galactic Era data is the most solid, too, correct?”

“Yeah. The politicians got into the act after the seventh millennium. Dors is helpin’ me filter out the garbage.”

Hari admired the graceful blending of colors, ancient wine in transfinite bottles.

The psychohistorical rates linked together strongly. History was not at all like a sturdy steel edifice rigidly spanning time; it rather more resembled a rope bridge, groaning and flexing with every footfall. This “strong coupling dynamic” led to resonances in the equations, wild fluctuations, even infinities. Yet nothing really went infinite in reality, so the equations had to be fixed. Hari and Yugo had spent many years eliminating ugly infinites. Maybe their goal was in sight.

“How do the results look if you simply run the equations forward, past the seventh millennium?” Hari asked.

“Oscillations build up,” Yugo admitted.

Feedback loops were scarcely new. Hari knew the general theorem, ancient beyond measure: If all variables in a system are tightly coupled, and you can change one of them precisely and broadly, then you can indirectly control all of them. The system could be guided to an exact outcome through its myriad internal feedback loops. Spontaneously, the system ordered itself-and obeyed.

History, of course, obeyed no one. But for eras such as the fourth to seventh millennium, somehow the equations got matters right. Psychohistory could “post-dict” history.

In truly complex systems, how adjustments occur lay beyond the human complexity horizon, beyond knowing-and most important, not worth knowing.

But if the system went awry, somebody had to get down in the guts of it and find the trouble. “Any ideas? Clues?”

Yugo shrugged. “Look at this.”

The fluids lapped at the walls of the bottles. More warped volumes appeared, filled with brightly colored data-liquids. Hari watched as tides swept through the burnt-orange variable-space, driving answering waves in the purple layers nearby. Soon the entire holo showed furiously churning turbulence.

“So the equations fail,” Hari said.

“Yeah, big time, too. The grand cycles last about a hundred and twenty-five years. But smoothing out events shorter than eighty years gives a steady pattern. See-”

Hari watched turbulence build like a hurricane churning a multicolored ocean.

Yugo said, “That takes away scatter due to ‘generational styles,’ Dors calls it. I can take the Zones that consciously increased human lifespan. I time-step the equations forward, great-but then I run out of data. How come? I mine the history some, and it turns out those societies didn’t last long.”

Hari shook his head. “You’re sure? I’d imagine increasing the average age would bring a little wisdom into the picture.”

“Not so! I looked deeper and found that when the lifespan reached the social cycle time, usually about a hundred and ten Standard Years, instability rose. Whole planets had wars, depressions, general social illnesses.”

Hari frowned. “That effect-is it known?”

“Don’t think so.”

“This is why humans reached a barrier in improving their longevity? Society breaks down, ending the progress?”

“Yeah.”

Yugo wore a small, tight smile, by which Hari knew that he was rather proud of this result. “Growing irregularities, building to-chaos.”

This was the deep problem they had not mastered. “Damn!” Hari had a gut dislike of unpredictability.

Yugo gave Hari a crooked smile. “On that one, boss, I got no news.”

“Don’t worry,” Hari said cheerfully, though he didn’t feel it. “You’ve made good progress. Remember the adage-the Imperium wasn’t built in a day.”

“Yeah, but it seems to be fallin’ apart plenty fast.”

They seldom mentioned the deep-seated motivation for psychohistory: the pervasive anxiety that the Empire was declining, for reasons no one knew. There were theories aplenty, but none had predictive power. Hari hoped to supply that. Progress was infuriatingly slow.

Yugo was looking morose. Hari got up, came around the big desk, and gave Yugo a gentle slap on the back. “Cheer up! Publish this result.”

“Can I? We’ve got to keep psychohistory quiet.”

“Just group the data, then publish in a journal devoted to analytical history. Talk to Dors about selecting the journal.”

Yugo brightened. “I’ll write it up, show you-”

“No, leave me out of it. It’s your work.”

“Hey, you showed me how to set up the analysis, where-”

“It’s yours. Publish.”

“Well…”

Hari did not mention the fact that, now, anything published under his name would attract attention. A few might guess at the immensely larger theory lurking behind the simple lifespan-resonance effect. Best to keep a low profile.

When Yugo had gone back to work, Hari sat for a while and watched the squalls work through the data-fluids, still time-stepping in the air above his desk. Then he glanced at a favorite quotation of his, pointed out to him by Dors, given to him on a small, elegant ceramo-plaque:

Minimum force, applied at a cusp moment at the historical fulcrum, paves the path to a distant vision. Pursue only those immediate goals which serve the longest perspectives.

—Emperor Kamble’s 9th Oracle, Verse 17

“But suppose you can’t afford long perspectives?” he muttered, then went back to work.

7.

The next day he got an education in the realities of Imperial politics.

“You didn’t know the 3D scope was on you?” Yugo asked.

Hari watched the conversation with Lamurk replay on his office holo. He had fled to the University when the Imperial Specials started having trouble holding the media mob away from his apartment. They had called in reinforcements when they caught a team drilling an acoustic tap into the apartment from three layers above. Hari and Dors had gotten out with an escort through a maintenance grav drop.

“No, I didn’t. There was a lot going on.” He remembered his bodyguards accosting someone, checking and letting it pass. The 3D camera and acoustic tracker were so small that a media deputy could walk around with them under formal wear. Assassins used the same artful concealment. Bodyguards knew how to distinguish between the two.

Yugo said with Dahlite savvy, “Gotta watch ‘em, you gonna play in those leagues.”

“I appreciate the concern,” Hari said dryly.

Dors tapped a finger to her lips. “I think you came over rather well.”

“I didn’t want to seem as though I were deliberately cutting up a majority leader from the High Council,” Hari said heatedly.

“But that’s what you were doin’,” Yugo said.

“I suppose, but at the time it seemed like polite… banter,” he finished lamely. Edited for 3D, it was a quick verbal Ping-Pong with razor blades instead of balls.

“But you topped him at every exchange,” Dors observed.

“I don’t even dislike him! He has done good things for the Empire.” He paused, thinking. “But it was… fun.”

“Maybe you do have a talent for this,” she said.

“I’d rather not.”

“I don’t think you have much choice,” Yugo said. “You’re gettin’ famous.”

“Fame is the accumulation of misunderstandings around a well-known name,” Dors said.

Hari smiled. “Well put.”

“It’s from Eldonian the Elder, the longest-lived emperor. The only one of his clan to die of old age.”

“Makes the point,” Yugo said. “You gotta expect some stories, gossip, mistakes.”

Hari shook his head angrily. “No! Look, we can’t let this extraneous matter distract us. Yugo, what about those bootleg personality constellations you ‘acquired’?”

“I’ve got ‘em.”

“Machine translated? They will run?”

“Yeah, but they take an awful lot of memory and running volume. I’ve tuned them some, but they need a bigger parallel-processing network than I can give them.”

Dors frowned. “I don’t like this. These aren’t just constellations, they’re sims.”

Hari nodded. “We’re doing research here, not trying to manufacture a superrace.”

Dors stood and paced energetically. “The most ancient of taboos is against sims. Even personality constellations obey rigid laws! “

“Of course, ancient history. But-”

“ Prehistory.”Her nostrils flared. “The prohibitions go back so far, there are no records of how they started-undoubtedly, from some disastrous experiments well before the Shadow Age.”

“What’s that?” Yugo asked.

“The long time-we have no clear idea of how long it lasted, though certainly several millennia-before the Empire became coherent.”

“Back on Earth, you mean?” Yugo looked skeptical.

“Earth is more legend than fact. But yes, the taboo could go back that far.”

“These are hopelessly constricted sims,” Yugo said. “They don’t know anything about our time. One is a religious fanatic for some faith I never heard of. The other’s a smartass writer. No danger to anybody, except maybe themselves.”

Dors regarded Yugo suspiciously. “If they’re so narrow, why are they useful?”

“Because they can calibrate psychohistorical indices. We have modeling equations that depend on basic human perceptions. If we have a pre-ancient mind, even simmed, we can calibrate the missing constants in the rate equations.”

Dors snorted doubtfully. “I don’t follow the mathematics, but I know sims are dangerous.”

“Look, nobody savvy believes that stuff any more,” Yugo said. “Mathists have been running pseudo-sims for ages. Tiktoks-”

“Those are incomplete personalities, correct?” Dors asked severely.

“Well, yeah, but-”

“We could get into very big trouble if these sims are better, more versatile.”

Yugo waved away her point with his large hands, smiling lazily. “Don’t worry. I got them all under control. Anyway, I’ve already got a way to solve our problem of getting enough running volume, machine time-and I’ve got a cover for us.”

Hari arched his eyebrows. “What’s this?”

“I’ve got a customer for the sims. Somebody who’ll run them, cover all expenses, and pay for the privilege. Wants to use them for commercial purposes.”

“Who?” Hari and Dors asked together.

“Artifice Associates,” Yugo said triumphantly.

Hari looked blank. Dors paused as though searching for a distant memory, and then said, “A firm engaged in computer systems architecture.”

“Right, one of the best. They’ve got a market for old sims as entertainment.”

Hari said, “Never heard of them.”

Yugo shook his head in amazement. “You don’t keep up, Hari.”

“I don’t try to keep up. I try to stay ahead.”

Dors said, “I don’t like using any outside agency. And what’s this about paying?”

Yugo beamed. “They’re paying for license rights. I negotiated it all.”

“Do we have any control over how they use the sims?” Dors leaned forward alertly.

“We don’t need any,” Yugo said defensively. “They’ll probably use them in advertisements or something. How much use can you get out of a sim nobody will probably understand?”

“I don’t like it. Aside from the commercial aspects, it’s risky to even revive an ancient sim. Public outrage-”

“Hey, that’s the past. People don’t feel that way about tiktoks, and they’re getting pretty smart.”

Tiktoks were machines of low mental capacity, held rigorously beneath an intelligence ceiling by the Encoding Laws of antiquity. Hari had always suspected that the true, ancient robots had made those laws, so that the realm of machine intelligence did not spawn ever more specialized and unpredictable types.

The true robots, such as R. Daneel Olivaw, remained aloof, cool, and long-visioned. But in the gathering anxieties across the entire Empire, traditional cybernetic protocols were breaking down. Like everything else.

Dors stood. “I’m opposed. We must stop this at once.”

Yugo rose too, startled. “You helped me find the sims. Now you-”

“I did not intend this.” Her face tightened. Hari wondered at her intensity. Something else was at stake here, but what? He said mildly, “I see no reason to not make a bit of profit from side avenues of our research. And we do need increased computing capacity.”

Dors’ mouth worked with irritation, but she said nothing more. Hari wondered why she was so opposed. “Usually you don’t give a damn about social conventions.”

She said acidly, “Usually you are not a candidate for First Minister.”

“I will not let such considerations deflect our research,” he said firmly. “Understand?”

She nodded and said nothing. He instantly felt like an overbearing tyrant. There was always a potential conflict between being coworkers and lovers. Usually they waltzed around the problems. Why was she so adamant?

They got through some more work on psychohistory, and Dors mentioned his next appointment. “She’s from my history department. I asked her to look into patterns in Trantorian trends over the last ten millennia.”

“Oh, good, thanks. Could you show her in, please?”

Sylvin Thoranax was a striking woman, bearing a box of old data pyramids. “I found these in a library halfway around the planet,” she explained.

Hari picked one up. “I’ve never seen one of these. Dusty!”

“For some there’s no library index. I down-coded a few-and they’re good, still readable with a translation matrix.”

“Ummm.” Hari liked the musty feel of old technology from simpler times. “We can read these directly?”

She nodded. “I know how the reduced Seldon Equations function. You should be able to do a mat comparison and find the coefficients you need.”

Hari grimaced. “They’re not my equations; they come out of a body of research by many-”

“Come come, Academician, everyone knows you wrote down the procedures, the approach.”

Hari groused a little more, because it did irk him, but the Thoranax woman went on about using the pyramids and Yugo joined in enthusiastically and he let the point pass. She went off with Yugo to work and he settled into his usual academic grind.

His daily schedule hovered on the holo:

· Get Symposia speakers-sweeten the invitation for the reluctant

· Write nominations for Imperial Fellows

· Read student thesis, after it has been checked amp; passed by Logic Chopper program

These burned up the bulk of his day. Only when the Chancellor entered his office did he remember that he had promised to give a speech. The Chancellor had a quick, ironic smile and pursed lips, a reserved gaze-the scholar’s look. “Your…dress?” he asked pointedly.

Hari fumbled in his office closet, fetched forth the balloon-sleeved and ample-girted robe, and changed in the side room. His secretary handed him his all-purpose view cube as they quickly left the office. With the Chancellor he crossed the main square, his Specials in an inconspicuous formation fore and aft. A crowd of well-dressed men and women trained 3D cameras at them, one panning up and down to get the full effect of the Streeling blue-and-yellow swirl-stripes.

“Have you heard from Lamurk?”

“What about the Dahlites?”

“Do you like the new Sector Principal? Does it matter that she’s a trisexualist?”

“How about the new health reports? Should the Emperor set exercise requirements for Trantor?”

“Ignore them,” Hari said.

The Chancellor smiled and waved at the cameras. “They’re just doing their job.”

“What’s this about exercise?” Hari asked.

“A study found that electro-stim while sleeping doesn’t develop muscles as well as old-fashioned exercise.”

“Not surprising.” He had worked in the fields as a boy and never liked the idea of having his exertion stimmed while he slept.

A wedge of reporters pressed nearer, shouting questions.

“What does the Emperor think of what you said to Lamurk?”

“Is it true that your wife doesn’t want you to be First Minister?”

“What about Demerzel? Where is he?”

“What about the Zonal disputes? Can the Empire compromise?”

A woman rushed forward. “How do you exercise?”

Hari said sardonically, “I exercise restraint,” but his point sailed right past the woman, who looked at him blankly.

As they entered the Great Hall, Hari remembered to fetch forth the view cube and hand it to the hallmaster. A few 3Ds always made a talk pass more easily. “Big crowd,” he noted to the Chancellor as they took their places on the speech balcony above the bowl of seats.

“Attendance is compulsory. All class members are here.” The Chancellor beamed down at the multitude. “I wanted to be sure we looked good to the reporters outside.”

Hari’s mouth twisted. “How do they take attendance?”

“Everyone has a keyed seat. Once they sit, they’re counted, if their inboard ID matches the seat index.”

“A lot of trouble just to get people to attend.”

“They must! It’s for their own good. And ours.”

“They’re adults, or else why let them study advanced subjects? Let them decide what’s good for them.”

The Chancellor’s lips compressed as he rose to do the introduction. When Hari got up to talk, he said, “Now that you’re officially counted, I thank you for inviting me, and announce that this is the end of my formal address.”

A rustle of surprise. Hari’s gaze swept the hall and he let the silence build. Then he said mildly, “I dislike speaking to anyone who has no choice over whether to listen. Now I shall sit down, and anyone wishing to leave may do so.”

He sat. The auditorium buzzed. A few got up to leave. The other students booed them. When he rose to speak again they cheered.

He had never had an audience so on his side. He made the most of it, giving a ringing talk about the future of…mathematics. Not of the mortal Empire, but of beautiful, enduring mathematics.

8.

The woman from the Ministry of Interlocking Cultures looked down her nose at him and said, “Of course, we must have contributions from your group.”

Hari shook his head disbelievingly. “A…senso?”

She adjusted her formal suit by wriggling in his office’s guest chair. “This is an advanced program. All mathists are charged to submit Boon Behests.”

“We are completely unqualified to compose-”

“I understand your hesitation. Yet we at the Ministry feel these senso-symphonies will be just the thing needed to energize a, well, an art form which is showing little progress.”

“I don’t get it.”

She begrudgingly gave him a completely unconvincing, stilted smile. “The way we envision this new sort of senso-symphony, the artists-the mathists, that is-will transmogrify basic structures of thought, such as Euclidean conceptual edifices, or transfinite set theory fabrications. These will be translated by an art strainer-”

“Which is?”

“A computer filter which distributes conceptual patterns into a broad selection of sensory avenues.”

Hari sighed. “I see.” This woman had power and he had to listen to her. His psychohistory funding was secure, coming from the Emperor’s private largess. But the Streeling department could not ignore the Imperial Boon Board or its lackeys, such as the one before him. Such was boonmanship.

Far from being relaxed, meditative groves of quiet inquiry, research universities were intense, competitive, high-pressure marathons. The meritocrats-scholars and scientists alike-put in long hours, had stress-related health problems, high divorce rates, and few offspring. They cut up their results into bite-sized chunks, in pursuit of the Least Publishable Unit, so to magnify their lists of papers.

To gain a boon from the Imperial Offices one did the basic labor: Filling Out Forms. Hari knew well the bewildering maze of cross-linked questions. List and analyze type and “texture” of funding. Estimate fringe benefits. Describe kind of lab and computer equipment needed (can existing resources be modified to suit?). Elucidate philosophical stance of the proposed work.

The pyramid of power meant that the most experienced scholars did little scholarship. Instead, they managed and played the endless games of boonsmanship. The Greys grimly saw to it that no box went unchecked. About ten percent of boon petitions received funds, and then after two years’ delay, and for about half the requested money.

Worse, since the lead time was so great, there was a premium on hitting the nail squarely on the head with every boon. To be sure a study would work, most of it was done before writing the boon petition. This insured that there were no “holes” in the petition, no unexpected swerves in the work.

This meant scholarship and research had become mostly surprise-free, as well. No one seemed to notice that this robbed them of their central joy: the excitement of the unexpected.

“I will…speak to my department.” Order them to do it, would have been more honest. But one did try to preserve the amenities.

When she had left, Dors came into his office immediately, with Yugo right behind. “I will not work with these!” she said, eyes flaring.

Hari studied two large blocks of what seemed to be stone. Yet they could not be that heavy, for Yugo cradled one in each open palm. “The sims?” he guessed.

“In ferrite cores,” Yugo said proudly. “Stuck down in a rat’s warren, on a planet named Sark.”

“The world with that ‘New Renaissance’ movement?”

“Yeah-kinda crazy, dealin’ with them. I got the sims, though. They just came in, Worm Express. The woman in charge there, a Buta Fyrnix, wants to talk to you.”

“I said I didn’t want to be involved.”

“Part of the deal is she gets a face-to-face.”

Hari blinked, alarmed. “She’d come all the way here?”

“No, but they’re payin’ for a tightbeam. She’s standin’ by. I’ve routed her through. Just punch for the link.”

Hari had the distinct feeling that he was being hustled into something risky, far beyond the limits of his ordinary caution. Tightbeam time was expensive, because the Imperial wormhole system had been impacted with flow for millennia. Using it for a face-to-face was simply decadent, he felt. If this Fyrnix woman was paying for galactic-scale standby time, just to chat with a mathist…

Spare me from the enthused,Hari thought. “Well, all right.”

Buta Fyrnix was a tall, hot-eyed woman who smiled brightly as her image blossomed in the office. “Professor Seldon! I was so happy that your staff has taken an interest in our New Renaissance.”

“Well, actually, I gather it’s about those simulations.” For once, he was grateful for the two-second delay in transmission. The biggest wormhole mouth was a light-second from Trantor, and apparently Sark had about the same.

“Of course! We found truly ancient archives. Our progressive movement here is knocking over the old barriers, you’ll find.”

“I hope the research will prove interesting,” Hari said neutrally. How did Yugo get him into this?

“We’re turning up things that will open your eyes, Dr. Seldon.” She turned and gestured at the scene behind her, a large warren crammed with ancient ceramo storage racks. “We’re hoping to blow the lid off the whole question of pre-Empire origins, the Earth legend-the works!”

“I, ah, I will be very happy to see what results.”

“You’ve got to come and see it for yourself. A mathist like you will be impressed. Our Renaissance is just the sort of forward-looking enterprise that young, vigorous planets need. Do say you’ll pay us a visit-a state visit, we hope.”

Apparently the woman wanted to invest in a future First Minister. It took him more unbearable minutes to get away from her. He glowered at Yugo when at last her image wilted in the air.

“Hey, I got us a good deal, providing she got to do a li’l sell job on you,” Yugo said, spreading his hands.

“At considerable under-the-table cost, I hope?” Hari asked, getting up. Carefully he put a hand on one cube and found it surprisingly cool. Within its shadowy interior he could see labyrinths of lattices and winding ribbons of refracted light, like tiny highways through a somber city.

“Sure,” Yugo said with casual assurance. “Got some Dahlites to, ah, massage the matter.”

Hari chuckled. “I don’t think I should hear about it.”

“As First Minister, you must not,” Dors said.

“I am not First Minister!”

“You could be-and soon. This simulation matter is too risky. And you even spoke to the Sark source! I will not work on or with them.”

Yugo said mildly, “Nobody’s askin’ you to.”

Hari rubbed the cool, slick surface of a ferrite block, hefted it-quite light-and took the two from Yugo. He put them on his desk. “How old?”

Yugo said, “Sark says they dunno, but must be at least-”

Dors moved suddenly. She yanked up the blocks, one in each hand, turned to the nearest wall-and smashed them together. The crash was deafening. Chunks of ferrite smacked against the wall. Grains of debris spattered Hari’s face.

Dors had absorbed the explosion. The stored energy in the blocks had erupted as the lattice cracked.

In the sudden silence afterward Dors stood adamantly rigid, hands covered with grainy dust. Her hands were bleeding and she had a cut on her left cheek. She gazed straight at him. “I am charged with your safety.”

Yugo drawled, “Sure a funny way to show it.”

“I had to protect you from a potentially-”

“By destroying an ancient artifact?” Hari demanded.

“I smothered nearly all the eruption, minimizing your risk. But yes, I deem this Sark involvement as-’’

“I know, I know.” Hari raised his hands, palms toward her, recalling.

The night before he had come home from his rather well-received speech to find Dors moody and withdrawn. Their bed had been a rather chilly battleground, too, though she would not come out and say what had irked her so. Winning through withdrawal, Hari had once termed it. But he had no idea she felt this deeply.

Marriage is a voyage of discovery that never ends,he thought ruefully.

“I make decisions about risk,” he said to her, eyeing the rubble in his office. “You will obey them unless there is an obvious physical danger. Understand?”

“I must use my judgment-”

“No! Involvement with these Sarkian simulations may teach us about shadowy, ancient times. That could affect psychohistory.” He wondered if she were carrying out an order from Olivaw. Why would the robots care so strongly?

“When you are plainly imperiling-”

“You must leave planning-and psychohistory!-to me.”

She batted her eyelashes rapidly, pursed her lips, opened her mouth…and said nothing. Finally, she nodded. Hari let out a sigh.

Then his secretary rushed in, followed by the Specials, and the scene dissolved into a chaos of explanations. He looked the Specials captain straight in the face and said that the ferrite cores had somehow fallen into each other and apparently struck some weak fracture point.

They were, he explained-making it up as he went along, with a voice of professorial authority he had mastered long ago-fragile structures which used tension to stabilize themselves, holding in vast stores of microscopic information.

To his relief the captain just screwed up his face, looked around at the mess, and said, “I should never have let old tech like this in here.”

“Not your fault,” Hari reassured him. “It’s all mine.”

There would have been more pretending to do, but a moment later his holo rang with a reception. He glimpsed Cleon’s personal officer, but before the woman could speak the scene dissolved. He slapped his filter-face command as Cleon’s image coalesced in the air out of a cottony fog.

“I have some bad news,” the Emperor said without any greeting.

“Ah, sorry to hear that,” Hari said lamely.

Below Cleon’s vision he called up a suite of body language postures and hoped they would cover the ferrite dust clinging to his tunic. The red frame that stitched around the holo told him that a suitably dignified face would go out, keyed with his lip movements.

“The High Council is stuck on this representation issue.” Cleon chewed at his lip in irritation. “Until they resolve that, the First Ministership will be set aside.”

“I see. The representation problem…?”

Cleon blinked with surprise. “You haven’t been following it?”

“There is much to do at Streeling.”

Cleon waved airily. “Of course, getting ready for the move. Well, nothing will happen immediately, so you can relax. The Dahlites have logjammed the Galactic low Council. They want a bigger voice-in Trantor and in the whole damned spiral! That Lamurk has sided against them in the High Council. Nobody’s budging.”

“I see.”

“So we’ll have to wait before the High Council can act. Procedural matters of representation take precedent over even ministerships.”

“Of course.”

“Damn Codes!” Cleon erupted. “I should be able to have who I want.”

“I quite agree.” But not me, Hari thought.

“Well, thought you’d like to hear it from me.”

“I do appreciate that, sire.”

“I’ve got some things to discuss, that psychohistory especially. I’m busy, but-soon.”

“Very good, sire.”

Cleon winked away without saying good-bye.

Hari breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m free!” he shouted happily, throwing his hands up.

The Specials stared at him oddly. Hari noticed again his desk and files and walls, all spattered with black grit. His office still looked like paradise to him, compared with the luxuriant snare of the palace.

9.

“The trip, it’ll be worth it just to get out of Streeling,” Yugo said.

They entered the grav station with the inevitable Specials trying to casually stroll alongside. To Hari’s eye they were as inconspicuous as spiders on a dinner plate.

“True enough,” Hari said. At Streeling, High Council members could solicit him, pressure groups could penetrate the makeshift privacy of the Math Department, and of course the Emperor could blossom in the air at any time. On the move, he was safe.

“Good connection comin’ up in two point six minutes.” Yugo consulted his retinal writer by looking to the far left. Hari had never liked the devices, but they were a convenient way of reading-in this case, the grav schedule-while keeping both hands free. Yugo was toting two bags. Hari had offered to help, but Yugo said they were “family jewels” and needed care.

Without breaking stride they passed through an optical reader which consulted seating, billed their accounts, and notified the autoprogram of the increased mass load. Hari was a bit distracted by some free-floating math ideas, and so their drop startled him.

“Oops,” he said, clutching at his armrests. Falling was the one signal that could interrupt even the deepest of meditations. He wondered how far back that alarm had evolved, and then paid attention to Yugo again, who was enthusiastically describing the Dahlite community where they would have lunch.

“You still wonderin’ about that political stuff?”

“The representation question? I don’t care about the infighting, factions, and so on. Mathematically, though, it’s a puzzle.”

“Seems to me it’s pretty clear,” Yugo said with a slight, though respectful, edge in his voice. “Dahlites been gettin’ the short end for too long.”

“Because they have only one Sector’s votes?”

“Right-and there are four hundred million of us in Dahl alone.”

“And more elsewhere.”

“Damn right. Averaged over Trantor, a Dahlite has only point-six-eight as much representation as the others.”

“And throughout the Galaxy-”

“Same damn thing! We got our Zone, sure, but except in the Galactic Low Council, we’re boxed in.”

Yugo had changed from the chattering friend out on a lark to sober-faced and scowling. Hari didn’t want the trip to turn into an argument. “Statistics require care, Yugo. Remember the classic joke about three statisticians who took up hunting ducks-”

“Which are?”

“A game bird, known on some worlds. The first shot a meter high, the second a meter low: When this happened, the third statistician cried, ‘We got it!”‘

Yugo laughed a bit dutifully. Hari was trying to follow Dors’ advice about handling people, using his humor more and logic less. The incident with Lamurk had rebounded in Hari’s favor among the media and even the High Council, the Emperor had said.

Dors herself, though, seemed singularly immune to both laughs and logic; the incident with the ferrite cores had put a strain in their relationship. Hari realized now that this, too, was why he had greeted Yugo’s suggestion of a day away from Streeling. Dors had two classes to teach and couldn’t go. She had grumbled, but conceded that the Specials could probably cover him well enough. As long as he did nothing “foolish.”

Yugo persisted. “Okay, but the courts are stacked against us, too.”

“Dahl is the largest Sector now. You will get your judgeships in time.”

“Time we don’t have. We’re getting shut out by blocs.”

Hari deeply disliked the usual circular logic of political griping, so he tried to appeal to Yugo’s mathist side. “All judging bodies are vulnerable to bloc control, my friend. Suppose a court had eleven judges. Then a cohesive group of six could decide every ruling. They could meet secretly and agree to be bound by what a majority of them thinks, then vote as a bloc in the full eleven.”

Yugo’s mouth twisted with irritation. “The High Tribunal’s eleven-that’s your point, right?”

“It’s a general principle. Even smaller schemes could work, too. Suppose four of the High Tribunal met secretly and agreed to be bound by their own ballot. Then they’d vote as a bloc among the original cabal of six. Then four would determine the outcome of all eleven.”

“Damn-all, it’s worse than I thought,” Yugo said.

“My point is that any finite representation can be corrupted. It’s a general theorem about the method.”

Yugo nodded and then to Hari’s dismay launched into reciting the woes and humiliations visited upon Dahlites at the hands of the ruling majorities in the Tribunal, the Councils both High and Low, the Diktat Directory…

The endless busyness of ruling. What a bore!

Hari realized that his style of thought was a far cry from the fevered calculations of Yugo, and further still from the wily likes of Lamurk. How could he hope to survive as a First Minister? Why couldn’t the Emperor see that?

He nodded, put on his mask of thoughtful listening, and let the wall displays soothe him. They were still plunging down the long cycloidal curve of the grav drop.

This time the name was apt. Most long-distance travel on Trantor was in fact under Trantor, along a curve which let their car plunge down under gravity alone, suspended on magnetic fields a bare finger’s width from the tube walls. Falling through dark vacuum, there were no windows. Instead, the walls quieted any fears of falling.

Mature technology was discreet, simple, easy, quiet, sinuously classical, even friendly-while its use remained as obvious as a hammer, its effects as easy as a 3D. Both it and its user had educated each other.

A forest slid by all around him and Yugo. Many on Trantor lived among trees and rocks and clouds, as humans once had. The effects were not real, but they didn’t need to be. We are the wild, now, Hari thought. Humans shaped Trantor’s labyrinths to quiet their deep-set needs, so the mind’s eye felt itself flitting through a park. Technology appeared only when called forth, like magical spirits.

“Say, mind if I kill this?” Yugo’s question broke through his reverie.

“The trees?”

“Yeah, the open, y’know.”

Hari nodded and Yugo thumbed in a view of a mall with no great distances visible. Many Trantorians became anxious in big spaces, or even near images of them.

They had leveled out and soon began to rise. Hari felt pressed back into his chair, which compensated deftly. They were moving at high velocity, he knew, but there was no sign of it. Slight pulses of the magnetic throat added increments of velocity as they rose, making up for the slight losses. Otherwise, the entire trip took no energy, gravity giving and then taking away.

When they emerged in the Carmondian Sector his Specials drew in close. This was no elite university setting. Few buildings here could be seen as exteriors, so design focused on interior spectacle: thrusting slopes, airy transepts, soaring trunks of worked metal and muscular fiber. But amid this serene architecture milling crowds jostled and fretted, lapping like an angry tide.

Across an overhead bikepad a steady stream of cyclists hauled tow-cars. Jamming their narrow bays were bulky appliances, glistening sides of meat, boxes, and lumpy goods, all bound for nearby customers. Restaurants were little more than hotplates surrounded with tiny tables and chairs, all squeezed into the walkways. Barbers conducted business in the thoroughfare, working one end of the customer while beggars massaged the feet for a coin.

“Seems…busy,” Hari said diplomatically as he caught the tang of Dahlite cooking.

“Yeah, doncha love it?”

“Beggars and street vendors were made illegal by the last Emperor, I thought.”

“Right.” He grinned. “Don’t work with Dahlites. We’ve moved plenty people into this Sector. C’mon, I want some lunch.”

It was early, but they ate in a stand-up restaurant, drawn in by the odors. Hari tried a “bomber,” which wriggled into his mouth, then exploded into a smoky dark taste he could not identify, finally fading into a bittersweet aftertaste. His Specials looked quite uneasy, standing around in a crowded, busy hubbub. They were accustomed to more regal surroundings.

“Things’re really boomin’ here,” Yugo observed. His manners had reverted to his laboring days and he spoke with his mouth half full.

“Dahlites have a gift for expansion,” Hari said diplomatically. Their high birth rate pushed them into other Sectors, where their connections to Dahl brought new investment. Hari liked their restless energy; it reminded him of Helicon’s few cities.

He had been modeling all of Trantor, trying to use it as a shrunken version of the Empire. Much of his progress had come from unlearning conventional wisdom. Most economists saw money as simple ownership-a basic, linear power relationship. But it was a fluid, Hari found-slippery and quick, always flowing from one hand to the next as it greased the momentum of change. Imperial analysts had mistaken a varying flux for a static counter.

They finished and Yugo urged him into a groundpod. They followed a complicated path, alive with noise and smells and vigor. Here orderly traffic disintegrated. Instead of making an entire layer one way, local streets intersected at angles acute and oblique, seldom rectangular. Yugo seemed to regard traffic intersections as rude interruptions.

They sped by buildings at close range, stopped, and got out for a walk to a slideway. The Specials were right behind and without any transition Hari found himself in the middle of chaos. Smoke enveloped them and the acrid stench made him almost vomit.

The Specials captain shouted to him, “Stay down!” Then the man shouted to his men to arm with anamorphine. They all bristled with weapons.

Smoke paled the overhead phosphors. Through the muggy haze Hari saw a solid wall of people hammering toward them. They came out of side alleys and doorways and all seemed to bear down on him. The Specials fired a volley into the mass. Some went down. The captain threw a canister and gas blossomed farther away. He had judged it expertly; air circulation carried the fumes into the mob, not toward Hari.

But anamorphine wasn’t going to stop them. Two women rushed by Hari, carrying cobblestones ripped from the street. A third jabbed at Hari with a knife and the captain shot her with a dart. Then more Dahlites rushed at the Specials and Hari caught what they were shouting: incoherent rage against tiktoks.

The idea seemed so unlikely to him at first he thought he could not have heard rightly. That deflected his attention, and when he looked back toward the streaming crowd the captain was down and a man was advancing, holding a knife.

What any of this had to do with tiktoks was mysterious, but Hari did not have time to do anything except step to the side and kick the man squarely in the knee.

A bottle bounced painfully off his shoulder and smashed on the walkway. A man whirled a chain around and around and then toward Hari’s head. Duck. It whistled by and Hari dove at the man, tackling him solidly. They went down with two others in a swearing, punching mass. Hari took a slug in the gut.

He rolled over and gasped for air and clearly, only a few feet away, saw a man kill another with a long, curved knife.

Jab, slash, jab. It happened silently, like a dream. Hari gasped, shaken, his world in slow motion. He should be responding boldly, he knew that. But it was so overwhelming

—and then he was standing, with no memory of getting there, wrestling with a man who had not bothered with bathing for quite some while.

Then the man was gone, abruptly yanked away by the seethe of the crowd.

Another sudden jump-and Specials were all around him. Bodies sprawled lifeless on the walkway. Others held their bloody heads. Shouts, thumps

He did not have time to figure out what weapon had done that to them before the Specials were whisking him and Yugo along and the whole incident fled into obscurity, like a 30 program glimpsed and impatiently passed by.

The captain wanted to return to Streeling. “Even better, the palace.”

“This wasn’t about us,” Hari said as they took a slideway.

“Can’t be sure of that, sir.”

10.

Hari batted away all suggestions that they discontinue their journey. The incident had apparently begun when some tiktoks malfed.

“Somebody accused Dahlites of causing it,” Yugo related. “So our people stood up for themselves and, well, things got out of hand.”

Everyone near them was alive with excitement, faces glowing, eyes white and darting. He thought suddenly of his father’s wry saying, Never underestimate the power of boredom.

In human affairs, spirited action relieved dry tedium. He remembered seeing two women pummel a Spook, slamming away at the spindly, bleached-white man as though he were no more than a responsive exercise machine. A simple phobia against sunlight meant that he was of the hated Other, and thus fair game.

Murder was a primal urge. Even the most civilized felt tempted by it in moments of rage. But nearly all resisted and were better for the resistance. Civilization was a defense against nature’s raw power.

That was a crucial variable, one never considered by the economists with their gross products per capita, or the political theorists with their representative quotients, or the sociosavants and their security indices.

“I’ll have to keep that in, too,” he muttered to himself.

“Keep what?” Yugo asked. He, too, was still agitated.

“Things as basic as murder. We get all tied up in Trantor’s economics and politics, but something as gut-deep as that incident may be more important, in the long run.”

“We’ll pick it up in the crime statistics.”

“No, it’s the urge I want to get. How does that explain the deeper movements in human culture? It’s bad enough dealing with Trantor-a giant pressure cooker, forty billion sealed in together. We know there’s something missing, because we can’t get the psychohistorical equations to converge.”

Yugo frowned. “I was thinkin’ it was, well, that we needed more data.”

Hari felt the old, familiar frustration. “No, I can feelit. There’s something crucial, and we don’t have it.”

Yugo looked doubtful and then their off-disk came. They changed through a concentric set of circulating slideways, reducing their velocity and ending in a broad square. An impressive edifice dominated the high air shafts, slender columns blooming into offices above. Sunlight trickled down the sculpted faces of the building, telling tales of money: Artifice Associates.

Reception whisked them into a sanctum more luxurious than anything at Streeling. “Great room,” Yugo said with a wry slant of his head.

Hari understood this common academic reflection. Technical workers outside the university system earned more and worked in generally better surroundings. None of that had ever bothered him. The idea of universities as a high citadel had withered as the Empire declined, and he saw no need for opulence, particularly under an Emperor with a taste for it.

The staff of Artifice Associates referred to themselves as A2and seemed quite bright. He let Yugo carry the conversation as they sat around a big, polished pseudowood table; he still pulsed with the zest of the earlier violence. Hari sat back and meditated on his surroundings, his mind returning as always to new facets which might bear upon psychohistory.

The theory already had mathematical relationships between technology, capital accumulation, and labor, but the most important driver proved to be knowledge. About half the economic growth came from the increase in the quality of information, as embodied in better machines and improved skills, building efficiency.

Fair enough-and that was where the Empire had faltered. The innovative thrust of the sciences had slowly ground down. The Imperial Universities produced fine engineers, but no inventors. Great scholars, but few true scientists. That factored into the other tides of time.

Only independent businesses such as this, he reflected, continued the momentum which had driven the entire Empire for so long. But they were wildflowers, often crushed beneath the boot of Imperial politics and inertia.

“Dr. Seldon?” a voice asked at his elbow, startling Hari out of his rumination. He nodded.

“We do have your permission as well?”

“Ah, to do what?”

“To use these.” Yugo stood and lifted onto the table his two carry-cases. He unzipped them and two ferrite cores stood revealed.

“The Sark sims, gentlemen.”

Hari gaped. “I thought Dors-”

“Smashed ‘em? She thought so, too. I used two old, worthless data-cores in your office that day.”

“You knew she would-”

“I gotta respect that lady-quick and strong-minded, she is.” Yugo shrugged. “I figured she might get a little…provoked.”

Hari smiled. Suddenly he knew that he had been repressing real anger at Dors for her high-handed act. Now he released it in a fit of hearty laughter. “Wonderful! Wife or not, there are limits.”

He howled so hard tears sprang to his eyes. The guffaws spread around the table and Hari felt better than he had in weeks. For a moment all the nagging University details, the ministership, everything-fell away.

“Then we do have your permission, Dr. Seldon? To use the sims?” a young man at his elbow asked again.

“Of course, though I will want to keep close tabs on some, ah, research interests of mine. Will that be possible Mr…?”

“Marq Hofti. We’d be honored, sir, if you could spare the project some time. I’ll do my best-”

“And I.” A young woman stood at his other elbow. “Sybyl,” she said, and shook hands. They both appeared quite competent, neat, and efficient. Hari puzzled at the looks bordering on reverence they gave him. After all, he was just a mathist, like them.

Then he laughed again, heartily, a curiously liberating bark. He had just thought of what it would be like to tell Dors about the data-cores.