Foundations Fear

Page 58

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

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

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

  “Yes, that was disturbing. ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “But I haven’t the records—”

  “You’ll have to make do. ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  His father—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  to consult her internal files.

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

  “He mentioned us?” Dors asked.

  “He asked if you were enjoying—”

  “Damn!” Hari said.

  “A sector general commands all the wormlinks, if he

  wishes—yes?” Dors asked.

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

  “We’re trapped,” Hari said.

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

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

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

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

  “No, I can’t recall—”

  “Think!”

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

  3.

  In Hari’s studies he had discovered a curious little law. Now he turned i
t in his favor.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Train. ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Then you’ll have to pilot. ”

  “We don’t know how,” Hari said.

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

  “What are the risks?” Dors demanded stiffly.

  “I’m not an insurance agent, lady. ”

  “I insist that we know—”

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

  “I had hoped for a more—”

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

  4.

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

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

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

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