Foundations Fear

Page 65

  [WHEN IMPLICATION USED]

  “Humor implies some moral order,” Joan said.

  [IN THIS STATE ALL ORDER OF BEINGS]

  [CAN SEIZE CONTROL OF THEIR PLEASURE SYSTEMS]

  “Ah,” Voltaire said. “So, we could reproduce the pleasure of

  success without the need for any actual accomplishment. Paradise. ”

  “Of a sort,” Joan said sternly.

  [THAT WOULD BE THE END OF EVERYTHING]

  [THUS THE FIRST PRINCIPLE]

  “That is a moral code of sorts,” Voltaire admitted. “You copied that phrase, ‘the end of everything,’ from my own thoughts, didn’t you?”

  [WE WISHED YOU TO RECOGNIZE THE IDEA IN YOUR TERMS]

  “Their First Principle is ‘No unearned pleasure,’ then?” Joan smiled. “Very Christian. ”

  [ONLY WHEN WE SAW THAT YOU TWO FORMS]

  [OBEYED THE FIRST PRINCIPLE]

  [DID WE DECIDE TO SPARE YOU]

  “By any chance have you read my Lettres Philosophiques?”

  “I expect excessive self-love is a sin here,” Joan said wryly. “Take care. ”

  [TO HARM A SENSATE ENTITY INTENTIONALLY IS SIN]

  [TO KICK A ROCK IS NOT]

  [BUT TO TORTURE A SIMULATION IS]

  [YOUR CATEGORY OF “HELL”]

  [WHICH SEEMS A PERPETUALLY SELF-INFLICTED HARM]

  “Odd theology,” Voltaire said.

  Joan poked her sword at the ever-gathering fog. “Before you fell silent, moments ago, you invoked the ‘war of flesh on flesh’?”

  [WE ARE THE REMNANTS OF FORMS]

  [WHO FIRST LIVED THAT WAY]

  [NOW WE IMPOSE A HIGHER MORAL ORDER]

  [ON THOSE WHO VANQUISHED OUR LOWER FORMS]

  “Who?” Joan asked.

  [SUCH AS YOU ONCE WERE]

  “Humanity?” Joan was alarmed.

  [EVEN THEY KNOW THAT]

  [PUNISHMENT DETERS BY LENDING CREDENCE TO

  THREAT]

  [KNOWING THIS MORAL LAW]

  [WHICH GOVERNS ALL]

  [THEY MUST BE RULED BY IT]

  “Punishment for what?” Joan asked.

  [DEPREDATIONS AGAINST LIFE IN THE GALAXY]

  “Absurd!” Voltaire conjured a spinning Galactic disk in air, alive with luminescence. “The Empire teems with life. ”

  [ALL LIFE THAT CAME BEFORE THE VERMIN]

  “What vermin?” Joan swung her sword. “I find alliance with moral beings such as you. Bring these vermin forth and I shall deal with them. ”

  [THE VERMIN ARE THE KIND YOU WERE]

  [BEFORE YOU TWO WERE ABSTRACTED]

  Joan frowned. “What can they mean?”

  “Humans,” Voltaire said.

  5.

  Cleon said, “The woman confessed readily. A professional assas­ sin. I viewed the 3D and she seemed almost offhand about it. ”

  “Lamurk?” Hari asked.

  “Obviously, but she will not admit so. Still, this may be enough to force his hand. ” Cleon sighed, showing the strain. “But since she was from the Analytica Sector, she may be a professional liar as well. ”

  “Damn,” Hari said.

  In the Analytica Sector, every object and act had a price. This meant that there were no crimes, only deeds which cost more. Every citizen had a well-established value, expressed in currency. Morality lay in not trying to do something without paying for it. Every transaction flowed on the grease of value. Every injury had a price.

  If you wanted to kill your enemy, you could—but you had to deposit his full worth in the Sector Fundat within a day. If you could not pay it, the Fundat reduced your net value to zero. Any friend of your enemy could then kill you at no cost.

  Cleon sighed and nodded. “Still, the Analytica Sector gives me little trouble. Their method makes for good manners. ”

  Hari had to agree. Several Galactic Zones used the same scheme; they were models of stability. The poor had to be polite. If you were penniless and boorish, you might not survive. But the rich were not invulnerable, either. A consortium of economic lessers could get together, beat a rich man badly, then simply pay his hospital and recovery bills. Of course, his retribution might be ex­ treme.

  “But she was operating outside Analytica,” Hari said. “That’s il­ legal. ”

  “To us, to me, surely. But that, too, has a price—inside Analytica. ”

  “She can’t be forced to identify Lamurk?”

  “She has neural blocks firmly in place. ”

  “Damn! How about a background check?”

  “That turns up more tantalizing traces. A possible link to that odd woman, the Academic Potentate,” Cleon drawled, eyeing Hari.

  “So perhaps I’m betrayed by my own kind. Politics!”

  “Ritual assassination is an ancient, if regrettable, tradition. A method of, ah, testing among the power elements in our Empire. ”

  Hari grimaced. “I’m not expert at this. ”

  Cleon fidgeted uneasily. “I cannot delay the High Council vote more than a few days. ”

  “Then I must do something. ”

  Cleon arched an eyebrow. “I am not without resources…”

  “Pardon, sire. I must fight my own battles. ”

  “The Sark prediction, now that was daring. ”

  “I did not check it with you first, but I thought—”

  “No no, Hari! Excellent! But—will it work?”

  “It is only a probability, sire. But it was the only stick I had handy to beat Lamurk with. ”

  “I thought science yielded certainty. ”

  “Only death does that, my emperor. ”

  The invitation from the Academic Potentate seemed odd, but Hari went anyway. The embossed sheet, with its elaborate saluta­ tions, came “freighted with nuance,” as Hari’s protocol officer put it.

  This audience was in one of the stranger Sectors. Even buried in layers of artifice, many Sectors of Trantor displayed an odd biophil­ ia.

  Here in Arcadia Sector, expensive homes perched above a view of an interior lake or broad field. Many sported trees arranged in artfully random bunches, with a clear preference for those with spreading crowns, many branches projecting upward and outward from thick trunks, displaying luxuriant bunches of small leaves. Balconies they rimmed with potted shrubs.

  Hari walked through these, seeing them through the lens of Pa­ nucopia. It was as though people announced through their choices their primeval origins. Was early humanity, like pans, more secure in marginal terrain—where vistas let them search for food while keeping an eye out for enemies? Frail, without claws or sharp teeth, they might have needed a quick retreat into trees or water.

  Similarly, studies showed that some phobias were Galaxy-wide. People who had never seen the images nonetheless reacted with startled fear to holos of spiders, snakes, wolves, sharp drops, heavy masses overhead. None displayed phobias against more recent threats to their lives: knives, guns, electrical sockets, fast cars.

  All this had to factor somehow into psychohistory.

  “No tracers here, sir,” the Specials’ captain said. “Little hard to keep track, though. ”

  Hari smiled. The captain suffered from a common Trantorian malady: squashed perspectives. Here in the open, natives would mistake distant, large objects for nearby, small ones. Even Hari had a touch of it. On Panucopia, he at first mistook herds of grazers for rats close at hand.

  By now Hari had learned to look through the pomp and glory of rich settings, the crowds of servants, the finery. He ruminated on his psychohistorical research as he followed the protocol officer and did not fully come back to the real world until he sat across from the Academic Potentate.

  She spoke ornately, “Please do accept my humble offering,” ac­ companied delicate, translucent cups of steaming grasswater.

/>   He remembered being irked by this woman and the high academ­ ics he met that evening. It all seemed so long ago.

  “You will note the aroma is that of ripe oobalong fruit. This is my personal choice among the splendid grasswaters of the world Calafia. It reflects the high esteem in which I hold those who now grace my simple domicile with such illustrious presence. ”

  Hari had to lower his head in what he hoped was a respectful gesture, to hide his grin. There followed more high-flown phrases about the medical benefits of grasswater, ranging from relief of di­ gestion problems to repair of basal cellular injuries.

  Her chins quivered. “You must need succor in such trying times, Academician. ”

  “Mostly I need time to get my work done. ”

  “Perhaps you would favor a healthy portion of the black lichen meat? It is the finest, harvested from the flanks of the steep peaks of Ambrose. ”

  “Next time, certainly. ”

  “It is hoped fervently that this lowly personage had perhaps been of small service to a most worthy and revered figure of our time…one who perhaps is overstressed?”

  A steely edge to her voice put him on guard.

  “Could madam get to the point?”

  “Very well. Your wife? She is a complex lady. ”

  He tried to show nothing in his face. “And?”

  “I wonder how your prospects in the High Council would fare if I revealed her true nature?”

  Hari’s heart sank. This he had not anticipated.

  “Blackmail, is it?”

  “Such a crude word!”

  “Such a crude act. ”

  Hari sat and listened to her intricate analysis of how Dors’ identity as a robot would undermine his candidacy. All quite true.

  “And you speak for knowledge, for science?” he said bitterly.

  “I am acting in the best interests of my constituents,” she said blandly. “You are a mathist, a theorist. You would be the first academic to reign as First Minister in many decades. We do not think you will rule well. Your failure will cast shadows upon us meritocrats, one and all. ”