Foundation’s Fear

1.

Hari Seldon’s desksec chimed and announced, “Margetta Moonrose desires a conversation.”

Hari looked up at the 3D image of a striking woman hovering before him. “Urn? Oh. Who’s she?” His sec would not interrupt him amid his calculations unless this were somebody important.

“Cross-check reveals that she is the leading interviewer and political maven in the multimedia complex-”

“Sure, sure, but why is she consequential?”

“She is considered by all cross-cultural monitors to be among the fifty most influential figures on Trantor. I suggest-”

“Never heard of her.” Hari sat up, brushed at his hair. “I suppose I should. Full filter, though.”

“I fear my filters are down for recalibration. If-”

“Damn it, they’ve been out for a week.”

“I fear the mechanical in charge of the new calibrations has been defective.”

Mechs, which were advanced tiktoks, were failing often these days. Since the Junin riots, some had even been attacked. Hari swallowed and said, “Put her through anyway.”

He had used filters on holophones for so long, he could not now disguise his feelings. Cleon’s staff had installed software to render the fitting, preselected body language for him. With some sprucing up by the Imperial Advisors, it now modulated his acoustic signature for a full, confident, resonant tone. And if he wanted, it edited his vocabulary; he was always lapsing into technospeak when he should be explaining simply.

“Academician!” Moonrose said brightly. “I would so much like to have a little talk with you.”

“About mathematics?” he said blandly.

She laughed merrily. “No no!-that would be far over my head. I represent billions of inquiring minds who would like to know your thoughts on the Empire, the Quathanan questions, the-”

“The what?”

“Quathanan-the dispute over Zonal alignment.”

“Never heard of it.”

“But-you’re to be First Minister.” She seemed genuinely surprised, though Hari reminded himself that this was probably a superbly adept filter-face.

“So I am-perhaps. Until then, I will not bother.”

“When the High Council selects, they must know the views of the candidates,” she said rather primly.

“Tell your viewers that I do my homework only just before it’s due.”

She looked charmed, which made him certain that she was filtered. He had learned from many collisions with them that media mavens were easily irked when brushed aside. They seemed to feel it quite natural that, since an immense audience saw through their eyes, they carried all the moral heft of that audience.

“What about a subject you certainly must know-the Junin disaster? And the loss-some say escape- of the Voltaire and Joan of Arc sims?”

“Not my department,” Hari said. Cleon had advised him to keep his distance from the entire sim issue.

“Rumors suggest that they came from your department.”

“Certainly, one of our research mathists found them. We leased rights to those people-what was their name…?”

“Artifice Associates, as I am sure you know.”

“Um, yes.”

“This distracted professor role is not convincing, sir.”

“You’d rather I spent my time running for office-and then, presumably, running for cover?”

“The world, the whole Empire, has a right to know-”

“So I should stand only for what the people will fall for?”

Her mouth twisted, coming through her filters, so apparently she had decided to play this interview as a contest of wills. “You’re hiding the peoples’ business from-”

“My research is my own business.”

She waved this aside. “What do you say, as a mathematician, to those who feel that deep sims of real people are immoral?”

Hari wished fervently for his own face filters. He was sure he was giving away something, so he forced his face to stay blank. Best to deflect the argument. “How real were those sims? Can anybody know?”

“They certainly seemed real and human to the audience,” Moonrose said, raising her eyebrows.

“I’m afraid I didn’t watch the performance,” Hari said. “I was busy.” Strictly true, at least.

Moonrose leaned forward, scowling. “With your mathematics? Well, then, tell us about psychohistory.”

He was still keeping his face wooden-which gave the wrong signal. He made himself smile. “A rumor.”

“I have it on good authority that you are favored by the Emperor because of this theory of history.”

“What authority?”

“Now sir, I should ask the questions here-”

“Who says? I’m still a public servant, a professor. And you, madam, are taking up time I could be devoting to my students.”

With a wave Hari cut off the link. He had learned, since bandying words with Lamurk in clear view of an unsuspected 3D snout, to chop off talk when it was going the wrong way.

Dors came through the door as he leaned back into his airchair. “I got a hail, said somebody important was grilling you.”

“She’s gone. Poked at me about psychohistory.”

“Well, it was bound to get out. It’s an exciting synthesis of terms. Appeals to the imagination.”

“Maybe if I’d called it ‘sociohistory’ people would think it more boring and leave me alone.”

“You could never live with so ugly a word.”

The electroshield sparkled and snapped as Yugo Amaryl came through. “Am I interrupting anything?”

“Not at all.” Hari leapt up and helped him to a chair. He was still limping. “How’s the leg?”

He shrugged. “Decent.”

Three thuggos had come to Yugo on the street a week ago and explained the situation very calmly. They had been commissioned to do him damage, a warning he would not forget. Some bones had to be broken; that was the specification, nothing he could do about it. The leader explained how they could do this the hard way. If he fought, he would get messed up. The easy way, they would break his shin bone in one clean snap.

Describing it afterward, Yugo had said, “I thought about it some, y’know, and sat down on the sidewalk and stuck my left leg out straight. Braced it against the curb, below the knee. The leader kicked me there. A good job; it broke clean and straight.”

Hari had been horrified. The media latched onto the story, of course. His only wry statement to them was, “Violence is the diplomacy of the incompetent.”

“Medtech tells me it’ll heal up in another week,” Yugo said as Hari helped him stretch out, the airchair shaping itself subtly.

“The Imperials still haven’t a clue who did it,” Dors said, pacing restlessly around the office.

“Plenty of people will do a job like this.” Yugo grinned, an effect somewhat offset by the big bruise on his jaw. The incident had not been quite as gentlemanly as he described it. “They kinda liked doing it to a Dahlite, too.”

Dors paced angrily. “If I’d been there…”

“You can’t be everywhere,” Hari said kindly. “The Imperials think it wasn’t really about you, anyway, Yugo.”

Yugo’s mouth twisted ruefully at Hari. “I figured. You right?”

Hari nodded. “A ‘signal,’ one of them said.”

Dors turned sharply from her pacing. “Of what?”

“A warning,” Yugo said. “Politics.”

“I see,” she said quickly. “Lamurk cannot strike at you directly, but he leaves-”

“An unsubtle calling card,” Yugo finished for her. Dors smacked her hands together. “We should tell the Emperor!”

Hari had to chuckle. “And you, a historian.

Violence has always played a role in issues of succession. It can never be far from Cleon’s mind.”

“For emperors, yes,” she countered. “But in a contest for First Minister-”

“Power is get tin’ scarce ‘round here,” Yugo drawled sarcastically. “Pesky Dahlites makin’ trouble, Empire itself slowin’ down, too. Or spinnin’ off into loony ‘renaissances.’ Probably a Dahlite plot, that, righto?”

Hari said, “When food gets scarce, table manners change.”

Yugo said, “I’ll just bet the Emperor’s got this all analyzed.”

Dors began pacing again. “One of history’s lessons is that emperors who overanalyze fail, while those who oversimplify succeed.”

“A neat analysis,” Hari said, but she did not catch his irony.

“Uh, I actually came in to get some work done,” Yugo said softly. “I’ve finished reconciling the Trantorian historical data with the modified Seldon Equations.”

Hari leaned forward, though Dors kept pacing, her hands clasped behind her back. “Wonderful! How far off are they?”

Yugo grinned as he slipped a ferrite cube into Hari’s desk display slot. “Watch.”

Trantor had endured at least eighteen millennia, though the pre-Empire period was poorly documented. Yugo had collapsed the ocean of data into a 3D. Economics lay along one axis, social indices along another, with politics making up the third dimension. Each contributed a surface, forming a solid shape that hung above Hari’s desk. The slippery-looking blob was man-sized and in constant motion-deforming, caves opening, lumps rising. Color-coded internal flows were visible through the transparent skin.

“It looks like a cancerous organ,” Dors said. When Yugo frowned, she added hastily, “Pretty, though.”

Hari chuckled; Dors seldom made social gaffes, but when she did, she had no idea of how to recover. The lumpy object hanging in air throbbed with life, capturing his attention. The writhing manifold summed up trillions of vectors, the raw data drawn from countless tiny lives.

“This early history had patchy data,” Yugo said. The surfaces jerked and lurched. “Low resolution, too, and even low population size-a problem we won’t have in Empire predictions.”

“See the two-dee socio-structures?” Hari pointed. “And this represents everything in Trantor?” Dors asked.

Yugo said, “To the model not all detail is equally important. You don’t need to know the owner of a starship to calculate how it will fly.”

Hari said helpfully, pointing at a quick jitter in social vectors, “Scientocracy arose here third millennium. Then an era in which stasis arose from monopolies. That fed rigidity.”

The forms steadied as the data improved. Yugo let it run, time-stepping quickly so that they saw fifteen millennia in three minutes. It was startling, the pulsing solid growing myriad offshoots, structure endlessly proliferating. The madly burgeoning patterns spoke of the Empire’s complexity far more than any emperor’s lofty speech.

“Now here’s the overlay,” Yugo said, “showing how the Seldon Equations post-dict, in yellow.”

“They aren’t my equations,” Hari said automatically. Long ago he and Yugo had seen that to pre dictwith psychohistory first demanded that they post- dict the past, for verification. “They were-”

“Just watch.”

Alongside the deep blue data-figure, a yellow lump congealed. It looked to Hari like an identical twin to the original. Each went through contortions, seething with history’s energy. Each ripple and snag represented many billions of human triumphs and tragedies. Every small shudder had once been a calamity.

“They’re…the same,” Hari whispered.

“Damn right,” Yugo said.

“The theory fits.”

“Yup. Psychohistory works.”

Hari stared at the flexing colors. “I never thought…”

“It could work so well?” Dors had walked behind his chair and now rubbed his scalp.

“Well, yes.”

“You have spent years including the proper variables. It must work.”

Yugo smiled tolerantly. “If only more people shared your faith in mathists. You’ve forgotten the sparrow effect.”

Dors was transfixed by the shimmering data-solids, now rerunning all Trantorian history, throbbing with different-colored schemes to show up differences between real history and the equations’ post-dictions. There were very few. What’s more, they did not grow with time.

Not taking her eyes from the display, Dors asked slowly, “Sparrow? We have birds as pets, but surely-”

“Suppose a sparrow flaps its wings at the equator, out in the open. That shifts the air circulation a tiny amount. If things break just right, the sparrow could trigger a tornado up at the poles.”

Dors was startled. “Impossible!”

Hari said, “Don’t confuse it with the fabled nail in the shoe of a horse, that a legendary beast of burden. Remember?-its rider lost a battle and then a kingdom. That was failure of a small, critical component. Fundamental, random phenomena are democratic. Tiny differences in every coupled variable can produce staggering changes.”

It took a while to get the point through. Like any other world, Trantor’s meteorology had a daunting sensitivity to initial conditions. A sparrow’s wingflutter on one side of Trantor, amplified through fluid equations over weeks, could drive a howling hurricane a continent away. No computer could model all the tiny details of real weather to make exact predictions possible.

Dors pointed at the data-solids. “So-this is all wrong?”

“I hope not,” Hari said. “Weather varies, but climate holds steady.”

“Still…no wonder Trantorians prefer indoors. Outdoors can be dangerous.”

“The fact that the equations describe what happened-well, it means that small effects can smooth out in history,” Hari said.

Yugo added, “Stuff on a human scale can average away.”

She stopped massaging Hari’s scalp. “Then… people don’t matter?”

Hari said carefully, “Most biography persuades us that people-that we-are important. Psychohistory teaches that we aren’t.”

“As a historian, I cannot accept-”

“Look at the data,” Yugo put in.

They watched as Yugo brought up detail, showed off features. For ordinary people, history endured through art, myth, and liturgy. They felt it through concrete examples, close up: a building, a custom, a historical name. He and Yugo and the others were like sparrows themselves, hovering high over a landscape unguessed by the inhabitants below. They saw the slow surge of terrain, glacial and unstoppable.

“But people have to matter.” Dors’ voice carried a note of forlorn hope. Hari knew that somewhere deep in her lurked the stern directives of the Zeroth Law, but over that lay a deep layer of true human feeling. She was a humanist who believed in the power of the individual-and here she met blunt, uncaring mechanism, in the large.

“They do, actually, but perhaps not in the way you want,” Hari said gently. “We sought out telltale groups, pivots about which events sometimes hinge.”

“The homosexuals, f’instance,” Yugo said.

“They’re about one percent of the population, a consistent minor variant in reproductive strategies,” Hari said.

Socially, though, they were often masters of improvisation, fashioning style to substance, fully at home with the arbitrary. They seemed equipped with an internal compass that pointed them at every social novelty, early on, so that they exerted leverage all out of proportion to their numbers. Often they were sensitive indicators of future turns.

Yugo went on, “So we figured, could they be a crucial indicator? Turns out they are. Helps out the equations.”

Dors said severely, “Why does history smooth out?”

Hari let Yugo carry the ball. “Y’see, that same sparrow effect had a positive side. Chaotic systems could be caught at just the right instant, tilted ever so slightly in a preferred way. A well-timed nudge could drive a system, yielding benefits all out of proportion to the effort expended.”

“You mean control?” She looked doubtful.

“Just a touch,” Yugo said. “Minimal control-the right nudge at the right time-demands that the dynamics be intricately understood. Maybe that way, you could bias outcomes toward the least damaging of several finely balanced results. At best, they could drive the system into startlingly good outcomes.”

“Who’s controlling?” Dors asked.

Yugo looked embarrassed. “Oh, we…dunno.”

“Don’t know? But this is a theory of all history.”

Hari said quietly, “There are elements, interplays, in the equations that we don’t grasp. Damping forces.”

“How can you not understand?”

Both men looked ill at ease. “We don’t know how the terms interact. New features,” Hari said, “leading to…emergent order.”

She said primly, “Then you don’t really have a theory, do you?”

Hari nodded ruefully. “Not in the sense of a deep understanding, no.”

Models followed the gritty, experienced world, he reflected. They echoed their times. Clockwork planetary mechanics came after clocks. The idea of the whole universe as a computation came after computers. A worldview of stable change came after nonlinear dynamics…

He had a glimmering of a metamodel, which would look at him and describe how he would then select among models for psychohistory. Peering down from above, it could see which was likely to be favored by Hari Seldon…

“Who plans this control?” Dors persisted.

Hari caught at the idea he had, but it slipped away. He knew how to coax it back: ease up. “Remember that joke?” he said. “How do you make God laugh?”

She smiled. “You tell him your plans.”

“Right. We will study this result, sniff out an answer.”

She smiled. “Don’t ask you for predictions about the progress of your own predictions?”

“Embarrassing, but yes.”

His desksec chimed. “An Imperial summons,” it announced.

“Damn!” Hari slapped his chair. “Fun’s over.”

2.

Not quite time for the Specials to arrive, Hari thought. But getting any work done was impossible while he was on edge.

He jiggled coins in his pocket, distracted, then fished one out. A five cred piece, amber alloy, a handsome Cleon I head on one side-treasuries always flattered emperors-and the disk of the Galaxy seen from above on the other. He held it on edge and thought.

Let the coin’s width represent the disk’s typical scale height. To be correct, the coin would have to bulge at its center to depict the hub, but overall it was a good geometric replica.

In the disk was a flaw, a minute blister in an outer spiral arm. He did the ratio in his head, allowing that the galaxy was about 100,000 light-years across, and…blinked. The speck portrayed a volume about a thousand light years across. In the outer arms, that would contain ten million stars.

To see so many worlds as a fleck adrift in immensity made him feel as though Trantor’s solidity had opened and he had plunged helplessly into an abyss.

Could humanity matter on such a scale? So many billions of souls, packed into a grainy dot.

Yet they had spanned the whole incomprehensible expanse of that disk in a twinkling.

Humanity had spread through the spiral arms, spilling through the wormholes, wrapping itself around the hub in a mere few thousand years. In that time the spiral arms themselves had not revolved a perceptible angle in their own gravid gavotte; that would take half a billion years. Human hankering for far horizons had sent them swarming through the wormhole webbing, popping out into spaces near suns of swelling red, virulent blue, smoldering ruby.

The speck stood for a volume a single human brain, with its primate capacities, could not grasp, except as mathematical notation. But that same brain led humans outward, until they now strode the Galaxy, mastering the starlit abyss…without truly knowing themselves.

So a single human could not fathom even a dot in the disk. But the sum of humanity could, incrementally, one mind at a time, knowing its own immediate starry territory.

And what did he desire? To comprehend all of that humanity, its deepest impulses, its shadowy mechanisms, its past, present, and future. He wanted to know the vagrant species that had managed to scoop up this disk, and to make it a plaything.

So maybe one single human mind could indeed grasp the disk, by going one level higher-and fathoming the collective effects, hidden in the intricacies of the Equations.

Describing Trantor, in this proportion, was child’s play. For the Empire, he needed a far grander comprehension.

Mathematics might rule the galaxy. Invisible, gossamer symbols could govern.

So a single man or woman could matter.

Maybe. He shook his head. A single human head.

Getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren’t we? Dreams of godhood….

Back to work.

Only he couldn’t work. He had to wait. To his relief, the Imperial Specials arrived and escorted him across Streeling University. By now he was used to the gawkers, the embarrassment of plowing through the crowds which now accumulated everywhere, it seemed, that he might frequent.

“Busy today,” he said to the Specials captain.

“Got to expect it, sir.”

“You get extra duty pay for this, I hope.”

“Yessir. ‘Digs,’ we call them.”

“For extra risk, correct? Dangerous duty.”

The captain looked flustered. “Well, yessir…”

“If someone starts shooting, what are your orders?”

“Uh, if they can penetrate the engaging perimeter, we’re to get between them and you. Sir.”

“And you’d do that? Take a gauss pulse or a flechette?”

He seemed surprised. “Of course.”

“Truly?”

“Our duty, y’know.”

Hari was humbled by the man’s simple loyalty. Not to Hari Seldon, but to the idea of Empire. Order. Civilization.

And Hari realized that he, too, was devoted to that idea. The Empire had to be saved, or at least its decline mitigated. Only by fathoming its deep structure could he do that.

Which was why he disliked the First Minister business. It robbed him of time, concentration.

In the Specials’ armored pods he salved his discontent by pulling out his tablet and working on some equations. The captain had to remind him when they reached the palace grounds. Hari got out and there was the usual security ritual, the Specials spreading out and airborne sensors going aloft to sniff out the far perimeter. They reminded him of golden bees, buzzing with vigilance.

He walked by a wall leading into the palace gardens and a tan, round sheet the size of his fingernail popped off the wall. It stuck to his neck. He reached up and plucked it off.

He recognized it as a promotional trinket, a slap-on patch which gave you a pleasant rush by diffusing endorphins into your bloodstream. It also subtly predisposed you to coherent signals in corridor advertisements.

He pitched it aside. A Special grabbed at the patch and suddenly there was shouting and movement all around him. The Special turned to throw the patch away.

An orange spike shot through the guard’s hand, hissing hot, flaring and gone in a second. The man cried, “Ah!” and another Special grabbed him and pushed him down. Then five Specials blocked Hari from all sides and he saw no more.

The Special screamed horribly. Something cut off the wail of pain. The captain shouted, “Move!” and Hari had to trot with the Specials around him into the gardens and down several lanes.

It took a while to straighten out the incident. The patch was untraceable, of course, and there was no way of knowing for sure whether it was targeted on Hari at all.

“Could be part of some Palace plot,” the captain said. “Just waiting for the next’ passerby with a scent-signature like yours.”

“Not aimed for me at all?”

“Could be. That tab took couple extra seconds tryin’ to figure out if it wanted you or not.”

“And it did.”

“Body odor, skin smells-they’re not exact, sir.”

“I’ll have to start wearing perfume.”

The captain grinned. “That won’t stop a smart tab.”

Other protection specialists rushed in and there was evidence to measure and opinions and a lot of talk. Hari insisted on walking back to see the Special who had taken the tab. He was gone, already off to emergency care; they said he would lose his hand. No, sorry, Hari could not see him. Security, y’know.

Quite quickly Hari became bored with the aftermath. He had come early to get a stroll through the gardens and though he knew he was being irrational, his regret at missing the walk loomed larger than the assassination attempt.

Hari took a long, still moment and moved the incident aside. He visualized a displacement operator, an icy blue vector frame. It listed the snarled, angry red knot and pushed it out of view. Later, he would deal with it later.

He cut off the endless talk and ordered the Specials to fall in behind him. Shouted protests came, of course, which he ignored. Then he ambled across the gardens, relishing the open air. He inhaled eagerly. The blinding speed of the attack had erased its importance to him. For now.

The palace towers loomed like webwork of a giant spider. Between their bulks weaved airy walkways. Spires were veiled in silvery mist and aripple, apulse, shimmering with a silent, steady beat like a great unseen heart. He had been so long in the foreshortened views of Trantor’s corridors, his eyes did not quickly grasp the puzzling perspectives.

An upward rush caught his attention as he passed through a flowers cape. From the immense Imperial aviary, flocks of birds in the thousands oscillated in the vertical drafts. Their artful, ever-shifting patterns had a diaphanous, billowy quality, an immense, wispy dance.

Yet these had been shaped many millennia ago by bioengineering their genome. They formed drifts and billows like clouds, or even airy mountains, feasting on upwelling gnats, released from below by the gardeners. But a side draft could dissolve all their ornate sculptures, blow them away.

Like the Empire, he mused. Beautiful in its order, stable for fifteen millennia, yet now toppling. Cracking up like a slow-motion pod wreck. Or in spasms like the Junin riots.

Why? Even among Imperial loveliness, his mathist mind returned to the problem.

Entering the palace, he passed a delegation of children on their way to some audience with a lesser Imperial figure. With a sudden pang he missed his adopted son, Raych. He and Dors had decided to secretly send the boy away to school, after Yugo had his leg broken. “Deprive them of targets,” Dors had said.

Among the meritocracy, only those adults with commitment, stability, and talent could have children. Gentry or plain citizens could whelp brats by the shovelful.

Parents were like artists-special people with a special gift, given respect and privileges, left free to create happy and competent humans. It was noble work, well paid. Hari had been honored to be approved.

In immediate contrast, three oddly shaped courtiers ambled by him.

By biotech means people could turn their children into spindly towers, into flowerlike footbound dwarves, into green giants or pink pygmies. From throughout the Galaxy they were sent here to amuse the Imperial court, where novelty was always in vogue.

But such variants seldom lasted. There was a species norm. And stretching it was just as deeply ingrained. Hari had to admit that he would forever be among the unsophisticated, for he found such folk repulsive.

Someone had designed the reception room to look like anything but a room for receiving people. It resembled a lumpy pocket in molten glass, crisscrossed by polished shafts of ceramo-steel. These shafts in turn dripped into smooth lumps which-since there was nothing else in the room-must have been intended to be chairs and tables.

It seemed unlikely that he could ever get back out of any of the shapes, once he had worked out how to sit in them-so Hari stood. And wondered if that effect, too, was somehow intended…The palace was a subtle place of layered design.

This was to be a small, private meeting, Cleon’s staff had assured him. Still, there was a small army of attaches and protocol officers and aides who had introduced themselves as Hari had passed through several rooms of increasing ornamentation, on his way here. Their talk became more ornate, as well. Courtly life was dominated by puffed-up people who always acted as though they were coyly unveiling statues of themselves.

There was a lot of adornment and finery, the architectural equivalent of jewels and silk, and even the most minor attendants wore very dignified green uniforms. He felt as though he should lower his voice and realized, recalling Sundays on Helicon, that this place felt somehow like a church.

Then Cleon swept in and the staff vanished, silently draining away into concealed exits.

“My Seldon!”

“Yours, sire.” Hari followed the ritual.

The Emperor continued greeting him effusively, tut-tutting over the apparent assassination attempt-”Surely an accident, don’t you think?”-and led him to the large display wall. At Cleon’s gesture an enormous view of the entire Galaxy appeared, the work of a new artist. Hari murmured the required admiration and recalled his thoughts of only an hour before.

This was a time sculpture, tracing the entire Galactic history. The disk was, after all, a collection of debris, swirling at the bottom of a gravitational pothole in the cosmos. How it looked depended on which of mankind’s myriad eyes one used. Infrared could pierce and unmask dusty lanes. X rays sought pools of fiercely burning gas. Radio dishes mapped cold banks of molecules and magnetized plasma. All were packed with meaning.

In the carousel of the disk, stars bobbed and weaved under complicated Newtonian tugs. The major arms-Sagittarius, Orion, and Perseus, counting outward from the Center-bore names obscured by antiquity. Each contained a Zone of that name, hinting that perhaps here the ancient Earth orbited. But no one knew, and research had revealed no obvious single candidate. Instead, dozens of worlds vied for the title of the True Earth. Quite probably, none of them were.

Many bright signatures-skymarks, like landmarks?-blazed among the curving, barred spiral arms. Beauty beyond description-but not beyond analysis, Hari thought, whether physical or social. If he could find the key…

“I congratulate you on the success of my Moron Decree,” Cleon said.

Hari slowly withdrew from the immense perspective. “Oh, sire?”

“Your idea-first fruit of psychohistory.” To Hari’s blank incomprehension Cleon chuckled. “Forgotten already? The renegades who pillage, seeking renown for their infamy. You advised me to strip them of their identity by making them henceforth be called Morons.”

Hari had indeed forgotten the advice, but contented himself with a sage nod.

“It worked! Such crimes are much reduced. And those convicted go to their deaths full of anger, demanding to be made famous. I tell you, it is delicious.”

Hari felt a chill at the way the Emperor smacked his lips. An off-hand suggestion made suddenly, concretely real. It rattled him a bit.

He realized that the Emperor was asking about progress with psychohistory. His throat tightened and he remembered the Moonrose woman with her irritating questions. That seemed weeks ago. “Work is slow,” he managed to say.

Cleon said sympathetically, “Surely it requires a deep knowledge of every facet of civilized life.”

“At times.” Hari stalled, putting his mixed emotions firmly away.

“I was at a convocation recently and learned something you undoubtedly have factored into your equations.”

“Yes, sire?”

“It is said that the very foundation of the Empire-besides the wormholes of course-is the discovery of proton-Boron fusion. I had never heard of it, yet the speaker said it was the single greatest achievement of antiquity. That every starship, every planetary technology, depends upon it for power.”

“I suppose that is true, but I did not know it.”

“Such an elementary fact?”

“What is not of use to me does not concern me.”

Cleon’s mouth pouted in puzzlement. “But a theory of all history surely demands great detail.”

“Technology enters only in its effects on other large issues,” Hari said. How to explain the intricacies of nonlinear calculus? “Often its limitations are the important point.”

“Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced,” Cleon said airily.

“Well put, sire.”

“You like it? That fellow Draius gave it to me. It has a ring, doesn’t it? True, too. Perhaps I’ll-” He broke off and said to the air, “Transcription officer! Give that line about magic to the Presepth for general distribution.”

Cleon sat back. “They’re always after me for ‘Imperial wisdom.’ A bother!”

A faint musical note announced Betan Lamurk. Hari stiffened at first sight of the man, but Lamurk had eyes only for the Emperor as he went smoothly through a litany of court ritual. As a prime member of the High Council he had to recite some time-honored and empty phrases, bow with a curious swoop, and never avert his gaze from the Emperor. That done, he could relax.

“Professor Seldon! So good to meet again.”

Hari shook hands in the formal manner. “Sorry about that little dustup. I really didn’t know the 3D was there.”

“No matter. One can’t help what the media make of things.”

“My Seldon gave me excellent advice about the Moron Decree,” Cleon said. He went on, his delight deepening the twist of Lamurk’s mouth.

Cleon led them to luxuriant chairs that popped out of the walls. Hari found himself swept immediately into a detailed discussion of Council matters. Resolutions, measures of appropriation, abstracts of proposed legislation. This stuff had been flowing through Hari’s office, as well. He had dutifully set his autosec to text-analyzing it, breaking the sea of jargon down into Galactic and smoothing out the connections. This got him through the first hour. Most of the material he had ignored, tipping piles of to-be-scanned documents into his recycler when nobody was looking.

The arcane workings of the High Council were not in principle difficult to follow-they were just boring. As Lamurk deftly conferred with the Emperor, Hari watched them as he would watch a bodyball game: a curious practice, no doubt fascinating in a narrow sort of way.

That the Council set general standards and directions, while below them mere legal mavens worked out the details and passed legislation, did not change his bemused disinterest. People spent their lives doing such things!

For tactics he cared little. Even mankind did not matter. On the Galactic chessboard the pieces were the phenomena of humanity, the rules of the game were the laws of psychohistory. The player on the other side was hidden, perhaps did not exist.

Lamurk needed an opposite player, a rival. Subtly, Hari saw that he was the inevitable foe.

Lamurk’s career had aimed him for the First Ministership and he meant to get it. At every turn Lamurk curried favor with the Emperor and waved away Hari’s points, of which there were few.

He did not directly counter Lamurk; the man was a master. He kept quiet, confining himself to an occasional expressively (he hoped) raised eyebrow. He had rarely regretted keeping quiet.

“This MacroMesh thing, do you favor it?” the Emperor abruptly asked Hari.

He barely remembered the idea. “It will alter the Galaxy considerably,” he stalled.

“Productively!” Lamurk slapped a table. “All the econ-indicators are falling. The MacroMesh will speed up info-flow, boost productivity.”

The Emperor’s mouth tilted with doubt. “I’m not altogether happy with the idea of linking so many, so easily.”

“Just think,” Lamurk pressed, “the new squeezers will let an ordinary person in, say, Eqquis Zone talk every day with a friend in the Far Reaches-or anywhere else.”

The Emperor nodded uncertainly. “Hari? What do you think?”

“I have doubts as well.”

Lamurk waved dismissively. “Failure of nerve.”

“Increased communication may worsen the Empire’s crisis.”

Lamurk’s mouth twisted derisively. “Nonsense. Contrary to every good executive rule.”

“The Empire isn’t ruled-” Hari made a half-bow to the Emperor “-alas, it’s let run.”

“More nonsense. We in the High Council-”

“Hear him out!” Cleon said. “He does not talk very much.”

Hari smiled. “Many people are grateful for that, sire.”

“No oblique answers, now. What does your psychohistory tell you about how the Empire runs?”

“It is millions of castles, webbed by’ bridges.”

“Castles?” Cleon’s famous nose rose skeptically.

“Planets. They have local concerns and run them selves as they like. The Empire doesn’t trouble itself over such details, unless a world begins making aggressive trouble.”

“True enough, and as it should be,” Cleon said. “Ah-and your bridges are the wormholes.”

“Exactly, sire.” Hari deliberately avoided looking at Lamurk and focused on the Emperor, while sketching in his vision.

Planets could have any number of lesser duchies, with disputes and wars and “microstructure” galore. The psychohistorical equations showed that none of that mattered.

What did matter was that physical resources could not be shared among indefinitely large numbers of people. Each solar system was a finite store of goods, and in the end, that meant local hierarchies to control access.

Wormholes could carry rather little mass, because the holes were seldom more than ten meters across. Massive hyperspace ships carried heavy cargoes, but they were slower and cumbersome. They distorted space-time, contracting it fore and expanding it aft, moving at super-light speeds in the Galaxy’s frame but not in its own. Trade among most stellar systems was constrained to light, compact, expensive items. Spices, fashions, technology-not bulky raw materials.

Wormholes could accommodate modulated light beams far more easily. The wormhole curvature refracted beams through to receivers at the other mouth. Data flowed freely, knitting together the Galaxy.

And information was the opposite of mass. Data could be moved, compressed, and leaked readily through copies. It was infinitely shareable. It blossomed like flowers in eternal spring, for as information was applied to a problem, the resulting solution was new information. And it was cheap, meaning that it took few mass resources to acquire it. Its preferred medium was light, quite literally-the laser beam.

“That provided enough communication to make an Empire. But the odds of a native of the Puissant Zone ever voyaging to the Zaqulot Zone-or even to the next star, since by wormhole they are equivalent trips-were tiny,” Hari said.

“So every one of your ‘castles’ kept itself isolated-except for information flow,” Cleon said, absorbed.

“But now the MacroMesh will increase the information transfer rate a thousand-fold, using these ‘squeezers’ that compress information.”

Cleon pursed his lips, puzzled. “Why is that bad?”

“It’s not,” Lamurk said. “Better data makes for better decisions, everybody knows that.”

“Not necessarily. Human life is a voyage on a sea of meaning, not a net of information. What will most people get from a close, personal flow of data? Detached, foreign logic. Uprooted details.”

“We can run things better!” Lamurk insisted. Cleon held up a finger and Lamurk choked off his next words.

Hari hesitated. Lamurk had a point, indeed.

There were mathematical relationships between technology, capital accumulation, labor, but the most important driver proved to be knowledge. About half the Empire’s economic growth came from the increase in the quality of information, as embodied in better machines and improved skills, leading to efficiency.

That was where the Empire had faltered. The innovative thrust of the sciences had slowly faltered. The Imperial universities produced fine engineers, but no inventors. Great scholars, but few true scientists. That factored into the other tides of time. But something other than data starvation had made that happen, and as yet, Hari did not know the cause.

But Hari saw the Emperor wavering, and pressed on. “Many on the High Council see the MacroMesh as an instrument of control. Let me point out a few facts well known to you, sire.”

Hari was in his favorite mode, a one-on-one lecture. Cleon leaned forward, eyes narrowed. Hari spun him a tale.

To get between worlds A and B, he said, one might have to take a dozen wormhole jumps-the Worm Nest was an astrophysical subway system with many transfers.

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

Not so. Time and again, regional satrapies went toes-up. It seemed natural to squeeze every worm passage for the maximum fee, by coordinating every worm mouth to optimize traffic. But that degree of control made people restive. In elaborately controlling the system, information flowed only from managers to wage slaves, with little feedback.

Extensive regulation did not deliver the best benefits. Instead, it yielded “short blanket economies”-when the collective shoulders got cold, the blanket got pulled up to cover them, and so the feet froze. Over-control failed.

“So the MacroMesh, if it lets the High Council really ‘run things,’ could decrease economic vitality.”

Lamurk smiled patronizingly. “A bunch of abstract theory, sire. Now, you listen to an old hand who’s been on the Council a good long time now…”

Hari attended to Lamurk’s famous balm and wondered why he was bothering with this. He had to admit that trading ideas with the Emperor had a certain quality of casual, almost sensual, power. Watching a man who could destroy a world with a gesture had a decided adrenaline edge.

But he didn’t really belong here, either by talent or drive. Trotting out his own views was amusing; every professor secretly thinks that what the world needs is a good, solid lecture-from him, of course.

But in this game, the pawns were real. The Moron Decree had unnerved him, even though he saw nothing morally wrong with it.

Lives hung in the balance here, among the finery. And not just the lives of others. He had to remind himself that this beaming, confident Lamurk across from him was the obvious source of the patch-weapon which had nearly killed him, just hours before.

3.

He entered their apartment and went straight to the kitchen. He punched in commands on the autoserver and then went to the range and began to heat up some oil. While it warmed he cut up onions and garlic and put them in to brown. His beer arrived and he opened one, not bothering with a glass.

“Something’s happened,” Dors said.

“We had a fine little chat. I eyed Lamurk, he eyed me.”

“That’s not why your shoulders are hunched up.”

“Um. Betrayed by my expressive body.”

So he told her about the possible assassination attempt.

After she had calmed down, she said tightly, “You also heard about the smoke artist?”

“At that reception? He made the big cloud that looked like me?”

“He died today.”

“How?”

“Looks like an accident.”

“Too bad-he was funny.”

“Too funny. He made the cartoon of Lamurk, remember? Made Lamurk look like a blowhard. It was the hit of the reception.”

Hari blinked. “You don’t…”

“Quite orderly, both of you in one day.”

“So it could be Lamurk…”

Dors said grimly, “My dear Hari, always thinking in terms of probabilities.”

After his audience with Cleon, Hari had sat through a strict talk by the head of palace security. His Specials squad was doubled. More midget-flyers for forward perimeter warning. Oh, yes, and he was not to walk close to any walls.

This last bit had made Hari chuckle, which did not improve the palace staffs attitude. Worse, Hari knew that he still had baggage to unpack. How to keep them from sniffing out Dors’ true nature?

The autoserver rang. He sat and forked up dark meat and onions and then opened another bottle of the cold beer and held it in one hand while he ate with the other.

“A hard day’s work,” Dors said.

“I always eat heartily after narrowly averting death. It’s an old family tradition.”

“I see.”

“Cleon ended up by commenting on the impasse in the High Council. Until that’s resolved, no vote on the First Minister can occur.”

“So you and Lamurk are still butting heads.”

“He’s butting. Me, I’m dodging.”

“I will never leave your side again,” she said firmly.

“It’s a deal. Could you get me something more from the autoserver? Something warm and heavy and full of things that are bad for me?”

She went into the kitchen and he ate steadily and drank the beer and did not think about anything.

She brought back something steaming in a rich brown sauce. He ate it without asking what it was.

“You are an odd man, professor.”

“Things get to me a bit later than other people.”

“You learned how to delay thinking about them, reacting to them, until there was a time and a place.”

He blinked and drank some more beer. “Could be. Have to think about it.”

“You eagerly eat working-class food. And where did you learn this trick of deferring reactions?”

“Um. You tell me.”

“Helicon.”

He thought about that. “Urn, the working class. My father got into trouble and there were plenty of hard times. About the only break I got as a boy was not getting brain fever. We couldn’t have afforded any hospital time.”

“I see. Financial trouble, I remember you saying.”

“Financial and then people muscling him to sell his land. He didn’t want to. So he mortgaged more and planted more crops and followed his best judgment. Every time chance played out against him, Dad got right back up and went at it again. That worked for a while because he did know farming. But then there was a big market fluctuation and he got caught and lost everything.” He was speaking quickly as he ate, and he didn’t know why but it felt right.

“I see. That was why he was doing that dangerous job-”

“Which killed him, yes.”

“I see. And you dealt with that. Submerged it to help your mother. learned in the hard times that followed to reserve your reactions for a moment when it was all right to let it go.”

“If you say ‘I see’ again, I won’t let you watch later when I take a shower.”

She smiled, but then the same penetrating cast came over her face. “You fit some well-defined parameters. Men who are contained. They control themselves by letting very little in. They do not show a great deal or talk too much.”

“Except to their woman.” He had stopped eating.

“You have little time for small talk-people at Streeling comment on that-yet you speak freely with me.”

“I try not to blather.”

“Being male is complicated.”

“So is being female, though you’ve mastered it beautifully.”

“I’ll take that as a rather formal compliment.”

“And so it was. Just plain being human is just plain hard.”

“So I am finding. You…learned all this on Helicon.”

“I learned to deal with essentials.”

“Also to hate fluctuations. They can kill you.”

He took a swig of the beer, still cold and biting. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“Why didn’t you say all this in the first place?”

“I didn’t know it in the first place.”

“A corollary, then: If you commit yourself to a woman you give away as much of yourself as you can, inside that enclosed space.”

“The volume between the two of us.’

“A geometric analogy is as good as any.” The tip of her tongue made her lower lip bulge out slightly, as it always did when she pondered a point. “And you commit yourself wholly to averting the price life exacts.”

“The price of…fluctuations?”

“If you can predict, you can avoid. Correct. Manage.”

“This is awfully analytic.”

“I’ve skipped over the hard parts, but they will be on the homework assignment.”

“Usually these kinds of talk use phrases like ‘optimally consolidated self.’ I’ve been waiting for the jargon to come trotting out.” He had finished the bowl and felt much better.

“Food is one of the life-affirming experiences.”

“So that’s why I do it.”

“Now you’re making fun of me.”

“No, just working out the implications of the theory. I liked the part about hating unpredictability and fluctuations because they hurt people.”

“So can Empires, if they fall.”

“Right.” He finished the beer and thought about having another. Any more would dull him a little. He would prefer another way to take from him the edge he still felt.

“Big appetite.” She smiled.

“You have no idea. And the prospect of death can stimulate more than one kind of appetite. Let’s go back to that part about the homework assignment.”

“You have something in mind.”

He grinned. “You have no idea.”

4.

He savored his work all the more, since he had less time for it.

Hari sat in his darkened office, absolutely still, watching the 3D numerics evolve like luminous fogs in the air before him.

Empire scholars had known the root basics of psychohistory for millennia. In ancient times, pedants had charted the twenty-six stable and meta-stable social systems. There were plenty of devolved planets to study, fallen into barbarism-like the Porcos and their Raging Rituals, the Lizzies and their GynoGoverns.

He watched the familiar patterns form, as his simulation stepped through centuries of Galactic evolution. Some social systems proved stable only on small scales.

In the air hung the ranks of whole worlds, caught in stable Zones: Primitive Socialism; FemoPastoralism; Macho Tribalism. These were the “strong at tractors” of human sociology, islands in the chaos sea.

Some societies labored through their meta-stability, then crashed: Theocracy, Transcendentalism, Macho Feudalism. This latter appeared whenever people had metallurgy and agriculture. Planets which had slid a long way down the curve would manifest it.

Imperial scholars had long justified the Empire, threaded by narrow wormholes and lumbering hyperships, as the best human social structure. It had indeed proved stable and benevolent.

Their reigning model, Benign Imperial Feudalism, accepted that humans were hierarchical. As well, they were dynastically ambitious, liking the continuity of power and its pomp. They were quite devoted to symbols of unity, of Imperial grandeur. Gossip about the great was, for most people, the essence of history itself.

Imperial power was moderated by traditions of noble leadership, the assumed superiority of those who rose to greatness. Beneath such impressive resplendence, as Cleon well knew, lay the bedrock of an extremely honest, meritocratic civil service. Without that, corruption would spread like a stain across the stars, corroding the splendor.

He watched the diagram-a complex 3D web of surfaces, the landscape of social-space.

Slow-stepped, he could see individual event-waves washing through the sim. Each cell in the grid got recomputed every clock cycle, readjusting every nearest-neighbor interaction in 3D.

The working rules of thumb were not the true laws of physics, built up from fundamentals like maxion mechanics, or even from the simple NewTown Laws. Rather, they were rough algorithms that reduced intricate laws to trivial arithmetic. Society seen raw this way was crude, not mysterious at all.

Then came chaos.

He was viewing the “policy-space,” with its family of variables: degree of polarity, or power concentration; size of coalitions; conflict scale. In this simple model, learning loops emerged. Starting from a plateau period of seeming stability but not stasis, the system produced a Challenger Idea.

This threatened stability, which forced formation of coalitions to oppose the challenge. Factions formed. Then they gelled. The coalitions could be primarily religious, political, economic, technological, even military-though this last was a particularly ineffective method, the data showed. The system then veered into a chaotic realm, sometimes emerging to new stability, sometimes decaying.

In the dynamic system there was a pressure created by the contrast between people’s ideal picture of the world and the reality. Too big a difference drove fresh forces for change. Often the forces were apparently unconscious; people knew something was wrong, felt restive, but could not fix on a clear cause.

So much for “rational actor” models,Hari thought. Yet some still clung to that obviously dumb approximation.

Everyone thought the Empire was simple.

Not the bulk of the population, of course, dazzled by the mix of cultures and exotica afforded by trade and communications from myriad worlds. They were perpetually distracted-an important damper on chaos.

Even to social theorists, though, the basic structure and interrelations seemed to be predictable, with a moderate number of feedback loops, solid and traditional. Conventional wisdom held that these could be easily separated out and treated.

Most important, there was central decision-making, or so most thought. The Emperor Knew Best, right?

In reality, the Empire was a nested, ordered hierarchy: Imperial Feudalism. At the lower bound were the Zones of the galaxy, sometimes only a dozen light-years across, up to a few thousand light years diameter. Above that were Compacts of a few hundred nearby Zones. The Compacts interlocked into the Galactic cross-linked system.

But the whole thing was sliding downhill. In the complex diagram, sparkling flickers came and went. What were those?

Hari close-upped the flares. Zones of chaos, where predictability becomes impossible. These fiery eruptions might be the clue to why the Empire was failing.

Hari felt in his soul that unpredictability was bad-for humanity, for his mathematics. But it was inescapable.

This was the secret the Emperor and others must never know. That until he could rule chaos-or at least peer into it-psychohistory was a fraud.

He decided to look at a single case. Maybe that would be cleaner.

He selected Sark, the world which had found and developed the Voltaire and Joan sims. It billed itself as the Home of the New Renaissance-a common rhetorical posture, often adopted. They seemed bright and creative as he reviewed the status-grids.

Hari yawned despite himself. Sure, Sark looked good for now. A booming economy. A leader in styles and fashion.

But its profile classed it among the Chaos Worlds. They rose for a while, seeming to defy the damping mechanisms that held planets in the Imperial Equilibrium.

Then their social fabric dissolved. They plummeted back into one of the Stasis States: Anarcho-Industrial for Sark, he would predict, from the data. No great fleets made this happen. The Empire did not, despite impressions, rule by force. Social evolutions made the Chaos Worlds falter and die. Usually, the Galaxy as a whole suffered few repercussions.

But lately, there had been more of them. And the Empire was visibly decaying. Productivity was down, incoherence in the social-spaces on the rise.

Why?

He got up and went for a workout at the gymnasium. Enough of the mind! Let his body sweat out the frustrations wrought by his intellect.

5.

He did not want to go to the Grand Imperial Universities Colloquy, but the Imperial Protocol Office leaned on him…A First Ministerial candidate has obligations,” the officious woman had informed him.

So he and Dors dutifully appeared at the enormous Imperial Festival Hall. His Specials wore discreet formal business suits, complete with the collar ruffles of mid-level meritocrats.

“All the better to blend into the crowd,” Dors joked. Hari saw that everyone sized up the men in an instant and gingerly edged away. He would have been fooled.

They entered a high, double-arched corridor, lined with ancient statuary which invited the passersby to lick them. Hari tried it, after carefully reading the glow-sign, which reassured him there was no biological risk. A long, succulent lick gave him a faint, odd flavor of oil and burnt apples, a hint of what the ancients found enticing.

“What’s first on the agenda?” he asked his Protocol Officer.

“An audience with the Academic Potentate,” she answered, adding pointedly, “Alone.”

Dors disagreed and Hari negotiated a compromise. Dors got to stand at the doorway, no more. “I’ll have appetizers served to you there,” the Protocol Officer said testily.

Dors gave her an icy smile. “Why is this, ah, ‘audience’ so important?”

The Protocol Officer gave her a pitying look. “The Potentate carries much weight in the High Council.”

Hari said soothingly, “And can throw a few votes my way.”

“A bit of polite talk,” the Protocol Officer said.

“I shall promise to-let me put this delicately-smooch his buttocks. Or hers, as the case may be.”

Dors smiled. “Better not be hers.”

“Intriguing, how the implications of the act switch with sex.”

The Protocol Officer coughed and ushered him deftly through snapping screen curtains, his hair sizzling. Apparently even an Academic Potentate had need of personal security measures.

Once within the formal staterooms, Hari found he was alone with a woman of considerable age and artificial beauties. So that was why the Protocol Officer had coughed.

“How very nice of you to come.” She stood motionless, one hand extended, limp at the wrist. A waterfall effect spattered behind her, framing her body well.

He felt as if he were walking into a still-life museum display. He didn’t know whether to shake her hand or kiss it. He shook it, and her look made him think he had chosen wrong.

She wore a lot of embedded makeup, and from the way she leaned forward to make a point, he gathered that her pale eyes got her a lot of things other people did not receive.

She had once been an original thinker, a nonlinear philosopher. Now meritocrats across the spiral arms owed her fealty.

Before they had sat down, she gestured. “Oh, would you tune that wall haze?” The waterfall effect had turned into a roiling, thick fog. “Somehow it gets wrong all the time and the room doesn’t adjust it.”

A way of establishing a hierarchy, Hari suspected. Get him used to doing little tasks at her bidding. Or maybe she was like some other women, who if they couldn’t get you to do minor services felt insecure. Or maybe she was just inept and wanted her waterfall back. Or maybe he just analyzed the hell out of everything, a mathist’s pattern.

“I’ve heard remarkable things about your work,” she said, shifting from High Figure Used to Snappy Obedience to Gracious Lady Putting an Underling at Ease. He said something noncommittal. A tiktok brought a stim which was barely liquid, drifting down his throat and into his nostrils like a silken, sinister cloud.

“You believe yourself practical enough for the ministership?”

“Nothing is more practical, more useful, than a sound theory.”

“Said like a true mathist. Speaking for all meritocrats, I do hope you are equal to the task.”

He thought of telling her-she did have a certain charm, after all-that he didn’t give a damn for the ministership. But some intuition held him back. She was another power broker. He knew she had been vindictive in the past.

She gave him a shrewd smile. “I understand you have charmed the Emperor with a theory of history.”

“At the moment it is little better than a description.”

“A sort of summary?”

“Breakthroughs for the brilliant, syntheses for the driven.”

“Surely you know there is an air of futility about such an ambition.” A gleam of steel in the pale eyes.

“ I was…unaware. Madam.”

“Science is simply an arbitrary construct. It perpetuates the discredited notion that progress is always possible. Let alone desirable.”

“Oh?” He had plastered a polite smile on his face and was damned if he would let it slip.

“Only oppressive social orders emerge from such ideas. Science’s purported objectivity hides the plain fact that it is simply one ‘language game’ among others. All such arbitrary configurations sit in a conceptual universe of competing discourses.”

“I see.” The smile was getting heavier. His face felt like it would crack.

“To elevate scientific-” she sniffed disdainfully “-so-called ‘truths’ over other constructions is tantamount to colonizing the intellectual landscape. To enslaving one’s opposition!”

“Ummm.” He had a sinking feeling that he was not going to last long as a door mat. “Before you even consider the subject, you claim to know the best way to study it?”

“Social theory and linguistic analysis have the final power, since all truths have quite limited historical and cultural validity. Therefore, this ‘psychohistory’ of all societies is absurd.”

So she knew the term; word was spreading. “Perhaps you have insufficient regard for the rough rub of the real.”

A slight thawing. “Clever phrasing, Academician. Still, the category ‘real’ is a social construction.”

“Look, of course science is a social process. But scientific theories don’t merely reflect society.”

“How charming to still think so.” A wan smile failed to conceal the icy gleam in her eyes.

“Theories are not mere changes of fashion, like shifting men’s skirts from short to long.”

“Academician, you must know that there is nothing knowable beyond human discourses.”

He kept his voice level, courteous. Point out that she had used “know” in two contradictory ways in the same sentence? No, that would be playing word games, which would subtly support her views. “Sure, mountain climbers might argue and theorize about the best route to the top-”

“Always in ways conditioned by their history and social structures-”

“-but once they get there, they know it. Nobody would say they ‘constructed the mountain.”‘

She pursed her lips and had another foggy-white stim. “Ummm. Elementary realism. But all of your ‘facts’ embody theory. Ways of seeing.”

“I can’t help noticing that anthropologists, sociologists-the whole gang-get a delicious rush of superiority by denying the objective reality of the hard sciences’ discoveries.”

She drew herself up. “There are no elemental truths that exist independent of the people, languages, and cultures that make them.”

“You don’t believe in objective reality, then?”

“Who’s the object?”

He had to laugh. “Language play. So linguistic structures dictate how we see?”

“Isn’t that obvious? We live in a galaxy rich in cultures, all seeing the Galaxy their way.”

“But obeying laws. Plenty of research shows that thought and perception precede talk, exist independent of language.”

“What laws?”

“Laws of social movement. A theory of social history-if we had one.”

“You attempt the impossible. And if you wish to be First Minister, enjoying the support of your fellow academics and meritocrats, you shall have to follow the prevailing view of our society. Modern learning is animated by a frank incredulity toward such meta-narratives.”

He was sorely tempted to say, Then you are going to be surprised, but instead said, “We shall see.”

“We don’t see things as they are,” the learned lady said, “we see them as we are.”

With a touch of sadness, he realized that the republic of intellectual inquiry was, like the Empire, not free of internal decay.

6.

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

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

“Think we can survive this?” Hari whispered.

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

He realized that she had taken his question literally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let Lamurk amuse them.”

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

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

“To try? You bet.”

“What happened?”

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

“What has that got to do with Lamurk?”

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

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

“Good. That would be dull, yes?”

The media pack approached, 30 snouts aimed like weapons.

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

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

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

“And your career as a mathist-”

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

“Well then, as a politician-”

“I am still a Heliconian.” This drew some laughter.

“You prize the traditional, then?”

“If it works.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hari’s mouth made a surprised, skeptical 0. The thin man demanded, “How could one scientifically-”

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

“The emperors?” The thin man was rapt.

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

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

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

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

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

The thin man looked shocked, angry. Hari asked Dors, “What was the root mean deviation?”

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

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

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

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

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

Then there were the unspoken elements.

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

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

“I seek to describe, that’s all.”

“No grand theory of history, then?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, those are just normal family-”

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

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

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

“These are little traits.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A recording tube,” she said in disgust.

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

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

7.

Hari’s father had derisively referred to most public affairs as “dust-ups” -a big cloud on the horizon, a tiny speck underneath. His lip had curled back in a farmer’s disdain for making more of a thing than it was.

The incident at the Grand Imperial Universities Colloquy had become a grand dustup. Fully 3D’d, the scandal-PROF’S WIFE SOCKS FAN-burgeoned with each replaying.

Cleon called, tsk-tsking, and commenting broadly on how wives could be a burden in high office. “This will hurt your candidacy, I fear,” he had said. “I must do some mending.”

Hari did not report this to Dors. Cleon’s hint was clear. It was common practice among Imperial circles to divorce on grounds of general unsuitability-which meant unfashionability. In matters of vast power, appetite for more often overwhelmed all other emotions, even love.

He went home, irked by this conversation, to find Dors at work in the kitchen. She had her arms open-literally, not in greeting.

The epidermis hung loose, as if she had pulled a tight glove halfway off. Veins interlaced with the artificial neural net and she was working with tiny tools among them. Supple skin peeled back in a curved line down from elbow to wrist, moist crimson and intricate electronics. She was working on the augmented wrist, a thin yellow collar that did not look as though it could take three times the normal human’s impact.

“That fellow damaged you?”

“No, I did it to myself-or rather, overdid it.”

“A sprain?”

She smiled without humor. “My pivots don’t sprain. The collar mounts don’t mend. I’m replacing them.”

“Jobs like this, it’s not the parts, it’s the labor.”

She looked at him quizzically and he decided not to pursue the joke. He normally put from his mind the fact that his true love was a robot-or more accurately, a humaniform, vastly technically assisted, human-robot synthesis.

She had come to him through R. Daneel Olivaw, the ancient positronic robot who had saved Hari when he first came to Trantor and ran afoul of nasty political forces. She had been assigned at first as a bodyguard. He had known what she was from the start, at least approximately, but that did not prevent him from falling in love with her. Intelligence, character, charm, a simmering sexuality-these were not purely human facets, he had learned-by direct example.

He got her a drink as she worked, biding his time. He had ceased to be amazed by her repair work, often carried out on an utterly unsanitized field. There were antimicrobial methods available to the humaniform robots that could not work for ordinary humans, she had said. He had no idea how this could be. She discouraged further discussion, often deflecting him with passion. He had to admit that as a ploy this was completely effective.

She rolled her skin back into place, grimacing at the pain. She could shut off whole sections of her superficial nervous system, he knew, but kept a few strands alert as a diagnostic. The tabs self-sealed with pops and purrs.

“Let’s see.” She paused, feeling each wrist in turn. Two quick snaps. “They lock in fine.”

“Most people, you know, would find this sight quite unsettling.”

“That’s why I don’t do it on the way to work.”

“Very public spirited of you.”

They both knew she would be hounded down if there were any suspicion of her true nature. Robots of advanced capability had been illegal for millennia. Tiktoks were acceptable precisely because they were low-grade intelligences, rigorously held below the threshold of legally defined sentience. Violating those standards in manufacture was a capital crime, an Imperial violation, no exceptions. And strong, ancient emotions backed up the law: the Junin Sector riots had proved that.

Numerical simulations were similarly restricted. That was why the Voltaire and Joan sims, developed by the “New Renaissance” hotheads on Sark, had been carefully tailored to squeeze through algorithmic loopholes. Apparently that Marq fellow at Artifice Associates had souped up the Voltaire at the last minute. Since the sim was then erased, the violation had escaped detection.

Hari did not like having even a slight connection to crime, but he now realized that this was foolishness. Already his entire life revolved around Dors, a hidden pariah.

“I’m going to withdraw from the First Minister business,” he said decisively.

She blinked. “Me.”

She was always quick. “Yes.”

“We had agreed that the risk of increased scrutiny was worth gaining some power.”

“To protect psychohistory. But I expected very little of the spotlight to fall upon you. Now-”

“I am an embarrassment.”

“Coming in downstairs, there were a dozen 3D snouts pointing at me. They’re waiting for you.”

“I will stay here, then.”

“For how long?”

“The Specials can take me out through a new entrance. They’ve cut one and installed an agrav shaft.”

“You can’t avoid them forever, darling.”

She got up and embraced him. “Even if they find me out, I can go away.”

“If you’re lucky and escape. Even if you do, I can’t live without you. I won’t-”

“I could be transformed.”

“Another body?”

“A different one. Skin, corneas, some neural signatures changed.”

“File the serial numbers off and send you back?”

She stiffened in his arms. “Yes.”

“What can’t your…kind…do?”

“We cannot invent psychohistory.”

He whirled away from her in frustration and smacked his palm against a wall. “Damn it, nothing is as important as us.”

“I feel the same. But now I think it is even more important for you to remain a candidate for First Minister.”

“Why?” He paced around their living room, eyes darting.

“You are a player for very high stakes. Whoever wishes to assassinate you-”

“Lamurk, Cleon believes.”

“-will probably see that merely withdrawing your candidacy is no firm solution. The Emperor could reintroduce you into the game at any later time.”

“I don’t like being treated as a chess piece.”

“A knight?-yes, I can see you that way. Do not forget that there are other suspects, factions which may wish you out of the way.”

“Such as?’’

“The Academic Potentate.”

“But she’s a scholar, like me!”

“ Was.She is now a player on the chessboard.”

“Not the queen, I hope.”

Dors kissed him lightly. “I should mention that my ferret programs turned up a plausibility matrix for Lamurk’s behavior, based on his past. He has eliminated at least half a dozen rivals on his rise to the top. He is something of a traditionalist in method, as well.”

“My, that’s comforting.”

She gave him an odd, pensive glance. “His rivals were all knifed. The classic dispatch of historical intrigue.”

“I wouldn’t suspect Lamurk to have such an eye for our Imperial heritage.”

“He is a classicist. In his view, you are a pawn, one best swept from the board.”

“A rather bloodless way to put it.”

“I am taught-and built-to assess and act coolly.”

“How do you reconcile your ability-in fact, let’s not put too fine a point on it, your relish-at the prospect of killing a person in my defense?”

“The Zeroth Law. “

“Um.” He recited, “Humanity as a whole is placed above the fate of a single human.”

“I do feel pain from First Law interaction…”

“So the First Law, now modified, is,, 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 of Robotics’?”

“Exactly. “

“This is another game you play. With very tough rules.”

“It is a larger game.”

“And psychohistory is a potential new set of game plans?”

“In a way.” Her voice softened and she embraced him. “You should not trouble yourself so. What we have is a private paradise.”

“But the damned games, they always go on.”

“They must.”

He kissed her longingly, but something inside him seethed and spun, an armature whirring fruitlessly in surrounding darkness.

8.

Yugo was waiting in his office the next morning. Face flushed, wide-eyed, he demanded, “What can you do?”

“Uh, about what?”

“The news! The Safeguards stormed the Bastion.”

“Uh, oh.” Hari vaguely recalled that a Dahlite faction had staged a minor revolt and holed up in a redoubt. Negotiations had dragged on. Yes, and Yugo had told him about it, several times. “It’s a local Trantorian issue, isn’t it?”

“That’s the way we kept it!” Yugo’s hands flew in elaborate gestures, like birds taking frenzied flight. “Then the Safeguards came in. No warning. Killed over four hundred. Blew ‘em apart, blasters on full, no warning.”

“Astonishing,” Hari said in what he hoped was a sympathetic tone.

In fact he did not care a microgram for one side of this argument or the other-and did not know the arguments, anyway. He had never cared for the world’s day-to-day turbulence, which agitated the mind without teaching anything. The whole point of psychohistory, which emerged from his personality as much as his analytic ability, was to study climate and ignore weather.

“Can’t you do something?”

“What?”

“Protest to the Emperor!”

“He will ignore me. This is a Trantorian issue and-”

“This is an insult to you, too.”

“It can’t be.” To not appear totally out of it, he added, “I’ve deliberately kept well away from the issue-”

“But Lamurk did this!”

That startled him. “What? Lamurk has no power on Trantor. He’s an Imperial Regent.”

“C’mon, Hari, nobody believes that old separation of powers stuff. It broke down long ago.”

Hari almost said, It did?, but just in time realized that Yugo was right. He had simply not added up the effects of the long, slow erosion in the Imperial structures. Those entered as factors on the right-hand side of the equations, but he never thought of the decay in solid, local terms. “So you think it’s a move to gain influence on the High Council?”

“Must be,” Yugo fumed. “Those Regents, they don’t like unruly folk livin’ near ‘em. They want Trantor nice and orderly, even if people get trampled.”

Hari ventured, “The representation issue again, is it?”

“Damn right! We got Dahlites all over Muscle Shoals Sector. But can we get a representative? Hell, no! Got to beg and plead-”

“I…I will do what I can.” Hari held up his hands to cut off the tirade.

“The Emperor, he’ll straighten things out.”

Hari knew from direct observation that the Emperor would do no such thing. He cared nothing of how Trantor was run, as long as he could see no burning districts from the palace. Cleon had often remarked, “I am Emperor of a galaxy, not a city.”

Yugo left and Hari’s desk chimed. “Imperial Specials’ captain to see you, sir.”

“I told them to remain outside.”

“He requests audience, bearing a message.”

Hari sighed. He had meant to get some thinking done today.

The captain entered stiffly and refused a chair. “I am here to respectfully forward the recommendations of the Specials Board, Academician.”

“A letter would suffice. In fact, do that-send me a note. I have work to-”

“Sir, most respectfully, I must discuss this.”

Hari sank into his chair and waved permission. The man looked uncomfortable, standing stiffly as he said, “The board requests that the Academician’s wife not accompany him to state functions.”

“Ah, so someone has yielded to pressure.”

“It is further directed that your wife not be allowed into the palace at all.”

“What? That seems extreme.”

“I am sorry to bear such a message, sir. I was there and I told the board that the lady had good reason to become alarmed.”

“And to break the fellow’s arm.”

The captain almost allowed himself a smile. “Got to admit, she’s faster than anybody I’ve ever seen.”

And you’re wondering why, aren’t you?“Who was the fellow?”

The captain’s brow furrowed. “Looks to be a Spiral Academician, one grade above you, sir. But some say he’s more a political type.”

Hari waited, but the man said no more, just looked as though he wanted to. “Allied with what faction?”

“Might be that Lamurk, sir.”

“Any evidence?”

“Nossir.”

Hari sighed. Politics was not only an inexact craft, it seldom had any reliable data, either. “Very well. Message received.”

The captain left quickly, with visible relief. Before Hari could wave his computer into life, a delegation from his own faculty showed up. They filed in silently, the portal crackling as it inspected each of them. Hari caught himself smiling at the procedure. If there was a profession least likely to yield an assassin, it had to be the mathists.

“We are here to submit our considered opinion,” a Professor Aangon said formally.

“Do so,” Hari said. Normally he would deploy his skimpy skills and do a bit of social mending; he had been neglecting university business lately, stealing time from bureaucratic chores to devote to equations.

Aangon said, “First, rumors of a ‘theory of history’ have brought scorn to our department. We-”

“There is no such theory. Only some descriptive analysis.”

An outright denial confused Aangon, but he plowed ahead. “Uh, second, we deplore the apparent choice of your assistant, Yugo Amaryl, as department head, should you resign. It is an affront to senior faculty-vastly senior-above a junior mathist of, shall we say, minimal social bearing.”

“Meaning?” Hari said ominously.

“We do not believe politics should enter into academic decisions. The insurrection of Dahlites, which Amaryl has vocally supported, and which has now been put down only through Imperial resolve, and actual armed force, makes him unsuitable-”

“Enough. Your third point.”

“There is the matter of the assault upon a member of our profession.”

“A member-oh, the fellow my wife…?”

“Indeed, an indignity without parallel, an outrage, by a member of your family. It makes your position here untenable.”

If someone had planned the incident, they were certainly getting their mileage out of it. “I reject that.”

Professor Aangon’s eyes became flinty. The other faculty had been shuffling around, uneasy, and now were bunched behind him. Hari had no doubts about who this group wanted to be the next chairman. “I should think that a vote of no confidence by the full faculty, in a formal meeting-”

“Don’t threaten me.”

“I am merely pointing out that while your attention is directed elsewhere”

“The First Ministership.”

“-you can scarcely be expected to carry out your duties-”

“Skip it. To hold a formal meeting, the chairman must call one.”

The bunch of professors rustled, but nobody said anything.

“And I won’t.”

“You can’t go for long without carrying out business which requires our consent,” Aangon said shrewdly.

“I know. Let’s see how long that can be.”

“You really must reconsider. We-”

“Out.”

“What? You cannot-”

“Out. Go.”

They went.

9.

It is never easy to deal with criticism, especially when there is every chance that it might be right.

Aside from the eternal maneuvering for position and status, Hari knew that his fellow meritocrats from the Academic Potentate to the members of his own department, with legions in between-had deeply felt grounds for objecting to what he was doing.

They had caught a whiff of psychohistory, wafted by rumor. That alone put their hackles up, stiff and sensitive. They could not accept the possibility that humanity could not control its own future-that history was the result of forces acting beyond the horizons of mere mortal men. Could they already be sniffing at a truth Hari knew from elaborate, decades-long study-that the Empire had endured because of its higher, metanature, not the valiant acts of individuals, or even of worlds?

People of all stripes believed in human selfdetermination. Usually they started from a gut feeling that they acted on their own, that they had reached their opinions on the basis of internal reasoning-that is, they argued from the premises of the paradigm itself. This was circular, of course. but that did not make such arguments wrong or even ineffectual. As persuasion, the feeling of being in control was powerful. Everyone wanted to believe they were masters of their own fate. Logic had nothing to do with it.

And who was he to say they were wrong?

“Hari?”

It was Yugo, looking a bit timid. “Come in, friend.”

“We got a funny request just a minute ago. Some research institute I never heard of offerin’ us significant money.”

“For what?” Money was always handy.

“In return for the base file on those sims from Sark.”

“Voltaire and Joan? The answer is no. Who wants them?”

“Dunno. We got ‘em, all filed away. The originals.”

“Find out who’s asking.”

“I tried. Can’t trace the prompt.”

“Ummm. That’s odd.”

“That’s why I thought I’d tell you. Smells funny.”

“Keep up a tracing program, in case they ask again.”

“Yessir. And about the Dahlite Bastion-”

“Give it a rest.”

“I mean, look at how the Imperials squashed that Junin mess!”

Hari let Yugo go on. He had long ago mastered the academic art of appearing to pay rapt attention while his mind worked a spiral arm away.

He knew he would have to speak to the Emperor about the Dahlite matter, and not only to counter Lamurk’s move-an audacious one, within the traditionally inviolate realm of Trantor. A quick, bloody solution to a tough issue. Clean, brutal.

The Dahlites had a case: they were underrepresented. And unpopular. And reactionary.

The fact that Dahlites-except for prodigies lifted up by the scruff of their neck, like Yugo-were hostile to the usual instincts of a scientific mind made no difference.

In fact, Hari was beginning to doubt whether the stiff, formal scientific establishment was worthy of high regard any longer. All around him he saw corruption of the impartiality of science, from the boonsmanship networking to the currying of Imperial scraps which passed for a promotion system.

Just yesterday he had been visited by a Dean of Adjustments who had advised, with oily logic, that Hari use some of his Imperial power to confer a boon upon a professor who had done very little work, but who had family ties to the High Council.

The dean had said quite sincerely, “Don’t you think it is in the better interests of the university that you grant a small boon to one with influence?” When Hari did not, he nonetheless called the fellow to tell him why.

The dean was astonished with such honesty. Only later did Hari decide that the dean was right, within his own logic system. If boons were mere benefits, simple largess, then why not confer them wholly on political grounds? It was an alien way of thinking, but consistent, he had to admit.

Hari sighed. When Yugo paused in his vehement tirade, Hari smiled. No, wrong response. A worried frown-there, that did it. Yugo launched back into rapid talk, arms taking wing, epithets stacked to improbable heights.

Hari realized that the mere exposure to politics as it truly was, the brutal struggle of blind swarms in shadow, had raised doubts about his own, rather smug, positions. Was the science he had so firmly believed in back on Helicon truly as useful to people like the Dahlites as he imagined?

So his musing came around to his equations: Could the Empire ever be driven by reason and moral decision, rather than power and wealth? Theocracies had tried, and failed. Scientocracies, rather more rarely, had been too rigid to last.

“-and I said, sure, Hari can do that,” Yugo finished.

“Uh, what?”

“Back the Alphoso plan for Dahlite representation, of course.”

“I will think about it,” Hari said to cover. “Meanwhile, let’s hear a report on that longevity angle you were pursuing.”

“I gave it to three of those new research assistants,” Yugo said soberly, his Dahlite energies expended. “They couldn’t make sense of it.”

“If you’re a lousy hunter, the woods are always empty.”

Yugo’s startled look made Hari wonder if he was getting a bit crusty. Politics was taking its toll.

“So I worked the longevity factor into the equations, just to see. Here-” he slid an ellipsoidal data-core into Hari’s desk reader “-watch what happens.”

One persistent heritage of pre-antiquity was the standard Galactic Year, used by all worlds of the Imperium in official business. Hari had always wondered: Was it a signature of Earth’s orbital period? With its twelve-based year of twelve months, each of twenty-eight days, it suggested as candidate worlds a mere 1,224,675 from the 25 million of the Empire. Yet spins, precessions, and satellite resonances perturbed all planetary periods. Not a single world of those 1,224,675 fit the G.E. calendar exactly. Over 17,000 came quite close.

Yugo started explaining his results. One curious feature of Empire history was the human lifespan. It was still about l00 years, but some early writings suggested that these were nearly twice as long as the “primordial year” (as one text had it), which was “natural” to humans. If so, people lived nearly twice as long as in pre-Imperial eras. Indefinite extension of the lifespan was impossible; biology always won, in the end. New maladies moved into the niche provided by the human body.

“I got the basics on this from Dors-sharp lady,” Yugo said. “Watch this data-flash.” Curves, 30 projections, sliding sheets of correlations.

The collision between biological science and human culture was always intense, often damaging. It usually led to a free-market policy, in which parents could select desirable traits for their children.

Some opted for longevity, increasing to 125, then even 150 years. When a majority were long-lived, such planetary societies faltered. Why?

“So I traced the equations, watching for outside influences,” Yugo went on. Gone was the fevered Dahlite; here was the brilliance that had made Hari pluck Yugo out of a sweltering deep-layer job, decades ago.

Through the equations’ graceful, deceptive sinuosity, he had found a curious resonance. There were underlying cycles in economics and politics, well understood, of about 120 to 150 years.

When the human life span reached those ranges, a destructive feedback began. Markets became jagged landscapes, peaking and plunging. Cultures lurched from extravagant excess to puritanical constriction. Within a few centuries, chaos destroyed most of the bioscience capability, or else religious restrictions smothered it. The mean lifespan slid down again.

“How strange,” Hari said, observing the severe curves of the cycles, their arcs crashing into splintered spokes. “I’ve always wondered why we don’t live longer.”

“There’s great social pressure against it. Now we know where it comes from.”

“Still…I’d like to have a centuries-long, productive life.”

Yugo grinned. “Look at the media-plays, legends, holos. The very old are always ugly, greedy misers, trying to keep everything for themselves.”

“Ummm. True, usually.”

“And myths. Those who rise from the dead. Vampires. Mummies. They’re always evil.”

“No exceptions?”

Yugo nodded. “Dors pulled some really old ones out for me. There was that ancient martyr-Jesu, wasn’t it?”

“Some sort of resurrection myth?”

“Dors says Jesu probably wasn’t a real person. That’s what the scattered, ancient texts say. The whole myth is prob’ly a collective psychodream. You’ll notice, once he was back from the dead, he didn’t stay around very long.”

“Rose into heaven, wasn’t it?”

“Left town in a hurry, anyway. People don’t want you around, even if you’ve beaten the Reaper.”

Yugo pointed at the curves, converging on disaster. “At least we can understand why most societies learn not to let people live too long.”

Hari studied the event-surfaces. “Ah, but who learns?”

“Huh? People, one way or the other.”

“But no single person ever knew-” his finger jabbed “-this.”

“The knowledge gets embedded in taboos, legends, laws.”

“Ummm.” There was an idea here, something larger looming just beyond his intuitions…and it slipped away. He would have to wait for it to revisit him-if he ever, these days, got the time to listen to the small, quiet voice that slipped by, whispering, like a shadowy figure on a foggy street…

Hari shook himself. “Good work, this. I’m considerably impressed. Publish it.”

“Thought we were keepin’ psychohistory quiet.”

“This is a small element. People will think the rumors are tarted-up versions of this.”

“Psychohistory can’t work if people know.”

“It’s safe. The longevity element will get plenty of coverage and stop speculation.”

“It’ll be a cover, then, against the Imperial snoops?”

“Exactly. “

Yugo grinned. “Funny, how they spy even on an ‘ornament to the Imperium’-that’s what Cleon called you before the Regal Reception last week.”

“He did? I didn’t catch that.”

“Workin’ too much on those Boon Deeds. You got to hand off that stuff.”

“We need more resources for psychohistory.”

“Why not just get some money funneled through from the Emperor?”

“Lamurk would find out, use it against me. Favoritism in the High Council proceedings and so on. You could write the story yourself.”

“Um, maybe so. Sure would be a whole lot easier, though.”

“The idea is to keep our heads down. A void scandal, let Cleon do his diplomatic dance.”

“Cleon also said you were a ‘flower of intellect.’ I recorded it for you.”

“Forget it. Flowers that grow too high get picked.”

10.

Dors got as far as the palace high vestibule. There the Imperial Guard turned her back.

“Damn it, she’s my wife,” Hari said angrily.

“Sorry, it’s a Peremptory Order,” the bland court official said. Hari could hear the capital letters. The phalanx of Specials around Hari did not intimidate this fellow; he wondered if anyone could.

“Look,” he said to Dors, “there’s a bit of time before the meeting. Let’s eat a bit at the High Reception.”

She bristled. “You’re not going in?”

“I thought you understood. I have to. Cleon’s called this meeting-”

“At Lamurk’s instigation.”

“Sure, it’s about this Dahlite business.”

“And that man I knocked down at the reception, he might have been instigated to do it by-”

“Right, Lamurk.” Hari smiled. “All wormholes lead to Lamurk.”

“Don’t forget the Academic Potentate.”

“She’s on my side!”

“ She wants the ministership, Hari. All the rumor mills say so.”

“She can damn well have it,” he grumbled.

“I can’t let you go in there.”

“This is the palace.” He swept his arm at the ranks of blue-and-gold in the vast portal. “Imperials all around.”

“I do not like it.”

“Look, we agreed I’d try to bluster past-and it failed, just as I said. Fair enough. You would never pass the weapons checks, anyway.”

Her teeth bit delicately into her lower lip, but she said nothing. No humaniforrn could ever get through the intense weapons screen here.

He said calmly, “So I go in, argue, meet you out here”

“You have the maps and data I organized?”

“Sure, chip embedded. I can read it with a triple blink.”

He had a carrychip embedded in his neck for data hauling, an invaluable aid at mathist conferences. Standard gear, readily accessed. A microlaser wrote an image on the back of the retina-colors, 3D, a nifty graphics package. She had installed a lot of maps and background on the Imperium, the palace, recent legislation, notable events, anything that might come up in discussions and protocols.

Her severe expression dissolved and he saw the woman beneath. “I just…please…watch yourself.”

He kissed her on the nose. “Always do.”

They patrolled among the legions of hangers-on who thronged the vestibule, snagging the appetizers which floated by on platters. “Empire’s going bankrupt and they can afford this,” Hari sniffed.

“It is time-honored,” Dors said. “Beaumunn the Bountiful disliked delay in consuming meals, which was indeed his principal activity. He ordered that each of his estates prepare all four daily meals for him, on the chance that he might be there. The excess is given out this way.”

Hari would not have believed such an unlikely story had it not come from an historian. There were knots of people who plainly lived here, using some minor functionary position for an infinite banquet. He and Dors drifted among them, wearing refractory vapors which muddled the appearance. Recognition would bring parasites.

“Even amid all this swank, you’re thinking about that Voltaire problem, aren’t you?” she whispered.

“Trying to figure out how somebody copied him-it-out of our files.”

“And someone had requested it, just hours before?” She scowled. “When you turned it down, they simply stole it.”

“Probably Imperial agents.”

“I don’t like it. They may be trying to implicate you further in the whole Junin scandal.”

“Still, the old anti-sim taboo is breaking down.” He toasted her. “Let’s forget it. These days, it’s either sims or stims.”

There were several thousand people beneath the sculpted dome. To test the man-woman team shadowing them, Dors led him on a random path. Hari tired rapidly of such skullduggery. Dors, ever the student of society, pointed out the famous. She seemed to think this would thrill him, or at least distract him from the meeting to come. A few recognized him, despite the refraction vapors, and they had to stop and talk. Nothing of substance was ever said at such functions, of course, by long tradition.

“Time to go in,” Dors warned him.

“Spotted the shadows?”

“Three, I think. If they follow you into the palace, I’ll tell the Specials captain.”

“Don’t worry. No weapons allowed in the palace, remember.”

“Patterns bother me more than possibilities. The assassination tab delayed detonation just long enough for you to discard it. But it did make me wary enough to attack that professor.”

“Which got you banned from the palace.” Hari completed the thought. “You’re giving people a lot of credit for intricate maneuvers.”

“You haven’t read very much history of Imperial politics, have you?”

“Thank God, no.”

“It would only trouble you,” she said, kissing him with sudden, surprising fervor. “And worry is my job.”

“I’ll see you in a few hours,” Hari said as casually as he could manage, despite a dark premonition. He added to himself, I hope.

He entered the palace proper through the usual arms checks and protocol officers. Nothing, not even a carbon knife or implosion nugget, could escape their many-snouted sniffers and squinters. Millennia before, Imperial assassination had become so common as to resemble a sport. Now tradition and technology united to make these formal occasions uniquely safe. The High Council was meeting for the Emperor’s review, so inevitably there were battalions of officials, advisors, Magisterials Extraordinary and yellow-jacketed hangers-on. Parasites attached themselves to him with practiced grace.

Outside the Lyceum was the traditional Benevolent Bountiful-originally one long table, now dozens of them, all groaning beneath rich foods.

Largess even before business meetings was mandatory, an acceptance of the Emperor’s beneficence. Passing it by would be an insult. Hari nibbled at a few oddments on his way across the Sagittarius Domeway. Noisy crowds milled restlessly, mostly in the series of ceremonial cloisters that rimmed the domeway, each cut off by acoustic curtains.

Hari stepped into a small sound chamber and found a sudden release from the din. There he quickly reviewed his notes on the Council agenda, not wanting to appear an utter rube. High Court types watched every deviation from protocol with scorn. The media, though not allowed in the Lyceum, buzzed for weeks after such meetings, reading every gaffe for its nuances. Hari hated all this, but as long as he was in the game, he might as well play.

He recalled Dors’ casual mention earlier of Leon the Libertine, who had once arranged an entire faux-banquet for his ministers. The fruit could be bitten, but then snagged the unwary guests’ teeth, which remained firmly embedded until released by a digital command. The command came, of course, only from the Emperor, after some amusing begging and groveling before the other guests. Rumors persisted of darker delights obtained by Leon from similar traps, though in private quarters.

Hari brushed through the sound curtains and into the older side halls leading to the Lyceum. His retinal map highlighted these ancient, unfashionable routes because few came this way. His entourage followed obediently, though some frowned.

He knew their sort by now. They wanted to be seen, their processional parting the crowds of mere Sector executives. Sauntering through dim halls without the jostle of the crowds did nothing for the ego.

There was a life-sized statue of Leon at the end of a narrow processional corridor, holding a traditional executioner’s knife. Hari stopped and looked at the heavy-browed man, his right hand showing thick veins where it held the knife. In his left, a crystal globe of fogwine. The work was flawless and no doubt flattering to the Emperor when sculpted. The knife was quite real enough, its double edges gleaming.

Some considered Leon’s reign the most ancient of the Good Old Days, when order seemed natural and the Empire expanded into fresh worlds without trouble. Leon had been brutal yet widely loved. Hari wanted psychohistory to work, but what if it turned into a tool to rekindle such a past?

Hari shrugged. Time enough to calculate whether the Empire could be saved on any terms at all, once psychohistory actually existed.

He went into the High Imperial chambers, escorted by the ritual officers. Ahead lay Cleon, Lamurk, and the panoply of the High Council.

He knew he should be impressed by all this. Somehow, though, the air of high opulence only made him more impatient to truly understand the Empire. And if he could, alter its course.

11.

Hari wobbled slightly as he left the Lyceum three hours later. Debate was still in full cry, but he needed a break. A lesser Minister for Sector Correlation offered to take him to the refreshment baths, and Hari gratefully accepted.

“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” he said.

“You must accommodate to tedium,” the minister said cheerfully.

“Maybe I will duck out.”

“No, come-rest!”

His ceremonial robes, required in the Lyceum, were close and sweaty. The ornate buckle dug into his belly. It was big and gaudy, with a chromed receiver for his ritual stylus, equally embellished and used only in voting.

The minister chatted on about Lamurk’s attack on Hari, which Hari had tried to ignore. Even so, he had been forced to rise to defend or explain himself. He had made a point of keeping his speeches short and clear, though this was far from the style of the Lyceum. The minister politely allowed that he thought this was rather an error.

They went through the refresher, where blue gouts of ions descended. Hari was grateful that talk was impossible through all this, and let an electrostat breeze massage him until they evolved into decidedly erotic caresses; apparently Council members preferred their vices readily to hand.

The minister went in pursuit of some private amusement, his face alive with anticipation. Hari decided he would rather not know what was about to transpire and moved farther, into a vapor cell. He rested, thinking, as a ginger-colored mat cleaned his chamber; elementary biomaintenance. His muscles stretched as he reflected on the gulf between him and the professionals of the Lyceum.

To Hari, human knowledge was largely the unarticulated experiences of myriads, not the formal learning of a vocal elite. Markets, history showed, conveyed the preferences and ideas of the many. Generally, these were superior to grandiose policies handed down from the talent and wisdom of the few. Yet Imperial logic asked if a given action were good, not whether it was affordable, or how much was even desirable.

He truly did not know how to speak to these people. Clever verbal turns and artful dodges had served well enough today, but surely that could not last.

These ruminations had distracted him. With a start he realized he should get back.

Leaving the refresher, he angled off the obvious route, which was thronged with functionaries, on through acoustic veils and into the small processional hall, consulting his palace maps. He had used Dors’ carrychip a dozen times already, mostly to follow the quick, cryptic Council discussions. The microlaser-written 3D map on his retina rotated if he rolled his eyes, providing perspective. There were few staff around; most clustered in attendance outside the Lyceum.

Hari reached the end of the hall and glanced up at the statue of Leon. The executioner’s knife was gone.

Why would anyone…?

Hari turned and hurried back the way he had come.

Before he could reach the acoustic veils, a man stepped through their ivory luminescence. There was nothing unusual about the man except the way his eyes flicked around, finally fastening on Hari.

There was about thirty meters between them. Hari turned as though he were admiring the baroquely festooned walls and walked away. He heard the other man’s boots crisply follow.

Maybe he was being paranoid and maybe not. He had only to get back to a crowd and all this would dissolve away, he told himself. The footsteps behind him got sharper, closer.

He turned and ducked down a side passage. Ahead was a ritual room. The footsteps sped up. Hari trotted across the circular room and into an ancient foyer. No one there.

Down a long hallway he could see two men who seemed to be casually talking. He started toward them, but they both broke off and looked at him. One reached into his pocket and produced a comm and began speaking into it.

Hari backed away, found a side passage. He bolted down it.

What about the surveillance cameras? Even the palace had them. But the one at the end of this passage had an unusual cap on it. Running a fake view, he realized.

The ancient portions of the Lyceum perimeter were not only unfashionable, they were unpopulated. He trotted through another extravagant ritual room. Boots were coming fast behind him. He turned to the right and saw a crowd down a long ramp.

“Hey! “ he yelled. Nobody looked his way. He realized they were behind a sound veil. He started toward them.

A man stepped out of an alcove to block the way. This one was tall and lean and started toward Hari with a muscular nonchalance. Like the others he said nothing, drew no attention to himself. Just kept coming.

Hari angled left and broke into a trot. Ahead lay the refresher; he had circled back. Plenty of people there. If he could reach it.

One long passageway led directly toward the refreshers. He took it and halfway down saw that a party of three women were talking in a decorative niche. He slowed and they stopped talking. They wore familiar staff robes. Probably they worked in the refreshers.

They turned toward him, looking a little surprised. He opened his mouth to say something, and the nearest woman stepped smartly forward and grabbed his arm.

He jerked back. She was strong. She grinned at the others and said, “Fell right into our-”

He yanked his arm to the side and broke her grip. She came off balance and he took advantage of that to shove her into the other two. One lashed a kick at him. She twisted her hip to get momentum into it, but she could not get fully around her companion and it stopped short, futile.

Hari turned and ran. The women were obviously well trained and he did not have much hope of getting away. He plunged ahead down the long passageway. When he glanced back, however, all three were standing and watching him go.

This was so odd that he slowed, thinking. They and the men were not attacking him, just boxing him in.

In these public corridors, casual witnesses could easily pass by. They wanted him somewhere private.

Hari called up his palace map. It placed him as a red dot in the nearby floor plan. He could see two side alleys up ahead before the end of the passageway

—where now two men stepped into view, arms folded.

Hari still had two ways out. He went left into a narrow lane lined with antique testaments. Each winked on and began its narration of vast events and great victories, now buried beneath millennia of indifference. The 3Ds flickered with colorful spectacles as he pounded past them. Sonorous voices implored him to attend to their tales. He was puffing heavily now and trying to focus his thoughts.

Intersection coming up. He shot through it and saw men closing in from the right.

He dodged down a slight side exit, under a participatory mausoleum to Emperor Elinor IV, and sprinted toward a set of doorways he recognized. These were the refresher booths, pale doors marked only with numbers. The Minister for Sector Correlation had pointed them out as the very best, suitable for private appointments.

Hari had to cross a small piazza to reach the nearest door. A man came running from the right, saying nothing. Hari tried the first door; it was locked. So was the second. The man was nearly on top of him. The handle on the third door turned and Hari went through.

It was a traditional door on hinges. He threw his weight back into it to slam it shut. The man hit the door heavily and got a hand around the edge. Hari heaved against the door. The man held fast and jammed his right foot between the door and the casing.

Hari shoved hard. The gap between door and casing narrowed, trapping the hand.

The other man was strong. He grunted and shoved back hard and the gap widened.

Hari put his back against the door and thrust with his legs. He had nothing to help him and the ridiculous ceremonial robes didn’t help. Nothing in the refresher was nearby, no tool-

Hari reached into his buckle. The ancient voting stylus slipped into his palm. He took it in his right hand and twisted against the door, shoving with his right shoulder. Then he passed the stylus to his left hand and brought it down with a savage stab into the man’s hand.

The stylus was inscribed and embellished, but it tapered to a slender point. Hari struck between the third and fourth knuckles. Hard.

A small arterial pumper squirted. Short pulsating arcs shot onto the door, vivid red. The man cried “Ah!” and let go of the door.

Hari slammed the door shut and fumbled with the lock. Magnetic grids clicked on. Panting, he turned to survey the refresher.

It was one of the best, ample. Two soothing booths, a lift couch, an ample stock of refreshments. Several vapor wells-where luxuriant dalliances often occurred, as rumor had it. Against the far wall, a percussive nook for the athletic. And a thin slit-window, also traditional, open to a ceramic-and-sand garden. It was kept as a reminder of eras when being trapped in here with unsavory persons was best avoided by a quick exit.

Hari heard a slight snick against the door. Probably a depolarizer fitting into place to unlock the magnetics. He considered the slit-window.

12.

A man came carefully into the refresher chamber. He wore a simple Imperial servant’s tunic, which allowed freedom of movement. Perfect for quick work. He carried the knife from the Leon statue.

He closed the door behind him with one hand and locked it, all the while keeping his eyes on the room and the knife at the ready. Though he was large he moved with an easy grace. Methodically he checked in the booths and vapor wells and even the percussive nook. No one there. He leaned out the slit-window, which was thrown fully open. The narrow window was not large enough to let him pass; he was massive beneath his light blue staff uniform.

He stood back and spoke into his wrist comm. “He got out into the garden. Can’t see him from here. You got that blocked?”

He paused a moment, listening to an internal voice, and said curtly, “Can’t find him? ‘Course you can’t, I told you we shouldn’t cut the snoops in this area.”

Another pause. “Sure I know it’s a secure job, even got its own RD number and all, no recording snoops, but-”

The man paced angrily. “Well, you just be damn sure all the ways out are covered. Those gardens are all connected.”

Another pause. “Got the sniffers on? Cameras? Good. You guys mess this up, I’ll…” He let his voice trail off into a growl.

He gave the room one last look and unlocked the magnetics. A man with a blood-soaked sleeve stood outside, just within view.

“You’re drippin’, stupid,” the knife-carrier said. “Hold that arm up high and get away from here. Send a cleanup crew, too.”

The other man said, “Where’d he-”

“Knew I shouldn’t have you on this one. Goddamn amateur.” The knife man left at a run.

All this had seemed to take forever. Seconds ticked by as Hari held onto a ceiling tile with all his strength.

In darkness he was lying across support struts directly over a soothing booth. He could see down through a narrow slit. From below, he hoped, the slit was the only sign that the ceiling had been pushed up, a square dislocated. He could see the scuff marks on the top of the booth, where he had climbed up and knocked the ceiling tile out of its clamps.

Now he had to hold the thing in place. His hands were starting to ache from gripping it.

Below he saw a leg and foot enter the refresher, turn, walk out of view. Someone else, a backup team?

If the tile slipped away from him, anyone below would notice the noise, see the dark slit widen. Maybe it would get away from him completely and fall.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on his fingers, willing them to grasp. They were numb now. Getting worse. Starting to tremble.

The tile was heavy, triple-layered for acoustic privacy. It was getting away from him, he could feel it. Slipping. It was going to

The feet below walked out and then came the swish of the door closing. Its lock clicked.

He did not will it, but his fingers let the tile slip. It smacked the floor loudly. Hari froze, listening.

No click of the door lock reopening. Just the soft slur of the air circulators.

So he was safe for a while. Safe in a trap.

Nobody knew he was here. Only a thorough search would bring any trustworthy Imperials this far from the Lyceum area.

And why should they? Nobody would notice that he was missing right away. Even then, they would probably think he had simply gotten fed up with the Council and gone home. He had said as much to the Minister for Sector Correlation.

Which meant the assassins could quietly search for hours. The knife carrier had sounded systematic, determined. He would inevitably think of checking back here, starting over on the trail. There were probably scent-snoops they could muster. And by now the array of cameras throughout the palace would be looking for him.

Luckily there were none in the refresher. He climbed down, nearly slipping on the curved top of the soothing booth. Getting the heavy ceiling tile back up into place took agility and strength. He was puffing by the time he replaced it above the refresher. He lay along the struts and got the tile secured again.

He lay in the darkness and thought. Dors’ palace map popped up in his eye on command, its colors and details more vivid in the gloom. Of course it showed nothing as utilitarian as this crawl space. He could see he was deeply embedded in the Lyceum’s fringe areas. Perhaps his best bet would be to walk boldly out of this refresher. If he could reach a crowd…

If. He did not like leaving his fate to chance. That included the strategy of lying here, hoping they did not come back with snoopers that could sense him up here.

Anyway, he knew that he could not simply do nothing. That was not in his nature. When patience was needed, fine-but waiting did not necessarily improve his odds.

He looked off into the murky space. Gloom stretched away. He could move around up here. But which way?

Dors’ map told him that the Gardens of Respite Cormed an artful tangle around the refresher area. No doubt the competent assassins would have ushered away any potential witnesses outside the window of this refresher room.

If he could somehow get far enough into the gardens…

Hari realized he was thinking in two dimensions. He could reach more public areas by moving up through a few layers of the palace. Outside this refresher room, down the hallway, Dors’ map showed a lift shaft.

He got his bearings and peered in that direction. He had no idea how an e-lift fit into a building. The map simply showed a rectangular enclosure with a lift symbol. But a burning fear made his muscles clench and fret.

He started crawling that way, not because he knew what to do, but because he didn’t. Upright cerami-form studs provided support and he had to be careful to not knock ceiling tiles out of their mounts. He slipped and jammed a knee into one and it gave threateningly, then popped back up. Dim threads of phosphor glow seeped between the tiles. Dust tickled his nostrils and coated his lips. He was getting dirty with the grime of millennia.

Up ahead a blue gleam came from roughly where the lift should be. As he drew closer the going got harder because ducts, pipes, optical conduits, and cross-joints thickened, converging on the hallway. Long minutes passed while he threaded his way among them. He touched a pipe that scorched his arm, a searing jolt so surprising he almost cried out. He smelled burnt flesh.

The blue radiance leaked around the edges of a panel. Suddenly it flared, then died again as he edged closer. A sharp crackling told him that an e-cell had just passed in the lift. He could not tell whether it was going up or down.

The panel was ceramo-steel, about a meter on a side, with electrical ribbons attached at all four sides. He did not know in detail how an e-lift worked, only that it charged the carrier compartment and then handed the weight off among a steady wave of electrodynamic fields.

He got his feet around and kicked at the panel. It held but dented. He kicked again and it loosened. He grunted with the effort of a third, a fourth-the panel popped out and fell away.

Hari brushed aside the thick electrical ribbons and poked his head into the shaft. It was dark, lit only by a dull radiance along a thin vertical phosphor which tapered away into obscurity, both above and below.

The palace was more than a kilometer thick in this ancient section. Mechanical elevators using cables could not serve even small passenger lifts like this one, over heights of a kilometer. Charge coupling from the shaft walls to the e-cell handled the dynamics with ease. The technology was aged and reliable. This shaft must be at least ten millennia old, and smelled like it.

He did not like the prospect before him. The map told him that three layers above him were spacious public rooms used to process supplicants to the Imperium. He would be in safe company there. Below were eight Lyceum layers, which he must assume were dangerous. Easier, certainly, to climb down-but also farther.

It would not be that tricky, he reassured himself. In the shadowy shaft he saw regular electrostatic emitters sunken into the walls. He found a strand of electrical ribbon and poked into one. No sparks, no discharge. That checked with his sketchy knowledge; the emitters went on only when a cell passed. They were deep enough to get his feet halfway into.

He listened carefully. No sound. E-cells were nearly silent, but these ancient ones were also slow. Was the risk of climbing into the shaft that great?

He wondered if he was doing the right thing, and then a voice far behind him said loudly, “Hey! Hey there!”

He glanced back. A head stuck up through an open panel. He could not make out features, but he did not try. He was already rolling awkwardly over the last cross-beam beside the shaft wall, twisting, thrusting himself out into the air. He felt downward with his feet, found an emitter hole, and stuck his foot into it.

No discharge. From memory he felt for another hole. His foot went in. He slipped over the casing, holding on tight with his hands.

His feet dangled above black nothingness. Vertigo. Sudden bile rushed in his throat.

Shouting from above. Several voices, male. Probably someone had seen the scrapes on top of the soothing booth. The light from the open ceiling tile was some help now, sending pale radiance into the shaft.

He swallowed and the bile eased.

Can’t think about that now. lust go on.

To his right he saw another regularly spaced emitter hole. He got his foot into it and worked his way around to the next face of the shaft. He started climbing. It was surprisingly easy because the holes were closely spaced and about the right size for his hands and feet. Hari went up swiftly, driven by the scuffling sounds behind him.

He passed the doors of the next level. Beside them was a flat-plate emergency switch. He could open the doors, but onto what?

Several minutes had passed since he saw the head. Word was undoubtedly spreading and they might have gotten up here, using stairs or another lift.

He decided to climb higher. Deep gulps of the dusty air threatened to make him cough, but he fought it down. His hands grasped the emitters and found them solid, easily held, while his legs did the real work of getting him up the sheer face.

He came to the second layer and made the same argument: only one more to go. That was when he heard the whisper. Faint, but gathering.

A cool downward brush of air made him look up. Something was blotting out the dim line of blue phosphor, coming down fast.

A clear crackling got louder. He could not possibly reach the above set of doors before it got here.

Hari froze. He could scramble back down, but he did not think he could reach the next level below in time. The black mass of the e-cell swooped down, swelling huge and fast, terrifying him.

A quick snap of blue arcs, a swoosh of air-and it stopped. At the level above.

The sound buffers cut off even the whisk of the doors opening. Hari yelled, but there was no response. He started down, feet seeking the holes, puffing.

A sharp crackling from above. The e-cell descended again.

He could see the undercarriage swooping down. Thin blue-white arcs shot from the emitter holes as it passed them, adding charge. Hari clambered down with a sinking dread.

An idea flashed across his mind, quick intuition. Wind fluttered his hair. He made himself study the undercarriage. Four rectangular clasps hung below. They were metal and would hold charge.

The e-cell was nearly upon him. No more time to think. Hari leaped toward the nearest clasp as the massive weight fell toward him.

He grabbed the thick rim of the clasp. A sharp, buzzing jolt snapped his eyes wide with pain. Crackling current coursed through him. His hands and forearms seized tight in electro-muscular shock. That kept him secured to the thick metal while his legs kicked involuntarily.

He had acquired some of the charge of the e-cell. Now the electrodynamic fields of the shaft played across his body, supporting him. His arms did not have to carry all his weight.

His hands and arms ached. Quick, sharp pains shot through the trembling muscles. But they held.

But currents were coursing through his chest-his heart. Muscles convulsed across his upper body. He was just another circuit element.

He let go with his left hand. That stopped current flowing, but he still held charge. The sharp pains in his chest muscles eased, but they still ached.

Levels flashed by Hari’s dazed eyes. At least, he thought, he was getting away from his pursuers.

His right arm tired and he switched to his left. He told himself that hanging by one arm at a time probably did not tire them any faster than using two arms. He didn’t believe it, but he wanted to.

But how was he going to get out of this shaft? The e-cell stopped again. Hari peered up at the shadowy mass looming like a black ceiling. Levels were far apart in this archaic part of the palace. It would take several minutes to climb down to the one below.

The e-cell could ratchet up and down the length of this shaft for a long time before getting a call from the lowest level. Even then, he had no idea how the shaft terminated. He could be crushed against a safety buffer.

So his clever leap had in fact bought him no escape. He was trapped here in a particularly ingenious way, but still trapped.

If he did manage to slap one of the emergency door openers as they passed, he would again feel a jolt of current as charge leaped from him to the shaft walls. His muscles would freeze in agony. How could he then hold on to anything?

The e-cell rose two floors, descended five, stopped, descended again. Hari switched hands again and tried to think.

His arms were tiring. The jolt of charge had strained them, and now surges of current through the shell of the e-cell made them jump with twinges of pain.

He had not acquired precisely the right charge to assure neutral buoyancy, so there was some residual downward pull on his arms. Like silken fingers, tingling electrostatic waves washed over him. He could feel weak surges of current from the e-cell, adjusting charge to offset gravity. He thought of Dors and how he had gotten here, and it all surged past him in a strange, dreamlike rush.

He shook his head. He had to think.

Currents passed through him as though he were part of the conducting shell. The passengers inside felt nothing, for the net charge remained on the outside, each electron getting as far away from its repulsing neighbors as possible.

The passengers inside.

He switched hands again. They both hurt a lot now. Then he swung himself back and forth like a pendulum, into longer oscillations. On the fifth swing he kicked hard against the undercarriage. A solid thunk-it was massive. He smacked the hard metal several more times and then hung, listening. Ignoring the pain in his arm.

No response. He yelled hoarsely. Probably anything he did was inaudible inside.

These ancient e-cells were ornately decorated inside, he remembered, with an atmosphere of velvet comfort. Who would notice small sounds from below?

The e-cell was moving again, upward. He flexed his arms and swung his feet aimlessly above the shadowy abyss. It was an odd sensation as the fields sustained him, playing across his skin. His hair stood on end all over his body. That was when the realization struck him.

He had approximately the same buoyant charge as the e-cell-so he did not need the cell at all anymore.

A pleasant theory, anyway. Did he have the courage to try it?

He let go of the clasp rim. He fell. But slowly, slowly. A breeze swept by him as he drifted down a level, then two. Both arms shouted in relief.

Letting go, he still kept his charge. The shaft fields wrapped around him, absorbing his momentum, as though he were an e-cell himself.

But an imperfect one. With the constant feedback between an e-cell and the shaft walls, he would not be exactly buoyant for long.

Above him, the real e-cell ascended. He looked up and saw it depart, revealing more of the blue phosphor line tapering far overhead.

He rose a bit, stopped, began to fall again. The shaft was trying to compensate both for its e-cell and for him, an intruder charge. The feedback control program was unable to solve so complicated a problem.

Quite soon the limited control system would probably decide that the e-cell was its business and he was not. It would stop the e-cell, secure it on a level-and dispense with him.

Hari felt himself slow, pause-then fall again. Rivulets of charge raced along his skin. Electrons sizzled from his hair. The air around him seemed elastic, alive with electric fields. His skin jerked in fiery spasms, especially over his head and along his lower legs-where charge would accumulate most.

He slowed again. In the dim phosphor glow he saw a level coming up from below. The walls rippled with charges and he felt a spongy sidewise pressure from them.

Maybe he could use that. He stretched to the side, curling his legs up and thrusting against the rubbery stretch of the electrostatic fields.

He stroked awkwardly against the cottony resistance. He was picking up speed, falling like a feather. He stretched out to snag an emission hole-and a blue-white streamer shot into his hand. It convulsed and he gasped with the sudden pain. His entire lower arm and hand went numb.

He inhaled to clear his suddenly watery vision. The wall was going by faster. A level was coming up and he was hanging just a meter away from the shaft wall. He flailed like a bad swimmer against the pliant electrostatic fields.

The tops of the doors went by. He kicked at the emergency door opener, missed, kicked again-and caught it. The doors began to wheeze open. He twisted and gripped the threshold with his left hand as it went by.

Another jolt through the hand. The fingers clamped down. He swung about the rigid arm and slammed into the wall. Another electrical discharge coursed through him. Smaller, but it made his right leg tighten up. In agony, he got his right hand onto the threshold and hung on.

His full weight had returned and now he hung limply against the wall. His left foot found an emission hole, propped him up. He pulled upward slightly and found he had no more strength. Pain shot through his protesting muscles.

Shakily he focused. His eyes were barely above the threshold. Distant shouts. Shoes in formal Imperial blues were running toward him.

Hold…hold on… A woman in a Thurban Guards uniform reached him and knelt, eyebrows knitted. “Sir, what are you-?”

“Call…Specials…” he croaked. “Tell them I’ve…dropped in.”