Foundations Fear Page 11

Page 11

  The night before he had come home from his rather well-received speech to find Dors moody and withdrawn.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

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

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

  “I must use my judgment—”

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

  “When you are plainly imperiling—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I see. The representation problem…?”

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

  “There is much to do at Streeling. ”

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

  “I see. ”

  “So we’ll have to wait before the High Council can act. Proced­ ural matters of representation take precedent over even minister-ships. ”

  “Of course. ”

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

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

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

  “I do appreciate that, sire. ”

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

  “Very good, sire. ”

  Cleon winked away without saying good-bye.

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

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

  9.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You still wonderin’ about that political stuff?”

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

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

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

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

  “And more elsewhere. ”

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

  “And throughout the Galaxy—”

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

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

  “Which are?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The endless busyness of ruling. What a bore!

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “The trees?”

  “Yeah, the open, y’know. ”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yeah, doncha love it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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