Foundations Fear

Page 28

  He recognized it as a promotional trinket, a slap-on patch which gave you a pleasant rush by diffusing endorphins into your blood­ stream. 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 un­ traceable, 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 in­ sisted 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 be­ hind him. Shouted protests came, of course, which he ignored. Then he ambled across the gardens, relishing the open air. He in­ haled eagerly. The blinding speed of the attack had erased its im­ portance 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 fore­ shortened 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 flowerscape. 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 hu­ mans. 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 attachès 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 equi­ valent 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 ob­ scured 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 descrip-tion—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. “Uh, sire?”

  “Your idea—first fruit of psychohistory. ” To Hari’s blank incom­ prehension Cleon chuckled. “Forgotten already? The renegades who pill
age, 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 un­ doubtedly 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 ad­ vanced,” 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, ab­ stracts of proposed legislation. This stuff had been flowing through Hari’s office, as well. He had dutifully set his autosec to text-ana-lyzing 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 be­ low them mere legal mavens worked out the details and passed le­ gislation, 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 consid­ erably,” he stalled.

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

  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. ”