Primate language. And the other questions, the old ones. Archaeological, historical
approaches. Biological. Kinship patterns. Customs. Everything you can think of. Just
put it together as questions. And then we'll have them index it."
"Index my questions?"
"It's what we do-- we read things and think of other things that might be related
somehow, and we connect them. We don't say what the connection means, but we know
that it means something, that the connection is real. We won't give you answers,
Leyel, but if you follow the index, it might help you to think of connections. Do
you see what I mean?"
"I never thought of that. Do you think a couple of indexers might have the time to
work on it?"
"Not a couple of us. All of us."
"Oh, that's absurd, Deet. I wouldn't even ask it."
"I would. We aren't supervised up here, Leyel. We don't meet quotas. Our job is to
read and think. Usually we have a few hundred projects going, but for a day we could
easily work on the same document."
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"It would be a waste. I can't publish anything, Deet."
"It doesn't have to be published. Don't you understand? Nobody but us knows what
we do here. We can take it as an unpublished document and work on it just the same.
It won't ever have to go online for the library as a whole."
Leyel shook his head. "And then if they lead me to the answer-- what, will we
publish it with two hundred bylines?"
"It'll be your paper, Leyel. We're just indexers, not authors. You'll still have
to make the connections. Let us try. Let us be part of this."
Suddenly Leyel understood why she was so insistent on this. Getting him involved
with the library was her way of pretending she was still part of his life. She could
believe she hadn't left him, if he became part of her new community.
Didn't she know how unbearable that would be? To see her here, so happy without
him? To come here as just one friend among many, when once they had been-- or he had
thought they were-- one indivisible soul? How could he possibly do such a thing?
And yet she wanted it, he could see it in the way she was looking at him, so
girlish, so pleading that it made him think of when they were first in love, on
another world-- she would look at him like that whenever he insisted that he had to
leave. Whenever she thought she might be losing him.
Doesn't she know who has lost whom?
Never mind. What did it matter if she didn't understand? If it would make her
happy to have him pretend to be part of her new home, part of these hbrarians-- if
she wanted him to submit his life's work to the ministrations of these absurd
indexers, then why not? What would it cost him? Maybe the process of writing down
all his questions in some coherent order would help him. And maybe she was right--
maybe a Trantorian index would help him solve the origin question.
Maybe if he came here, he could still be a small part of her life. It wouldn't be
like marriage. But since that was impossible, then at least he could have enough of
her here that he could remain himself, remain the person that he had become because
of loving her for all these years.
"Fine," he said. "I'll write it up and bring it in."
"I really think we can help."
"Yes," he said, pretending to more certainty than he felt. "Maybe." He started for
the door.
"Do you have to leave already?"
He nodded.
"Are you sure you can find your way out?"
"Unless the rooms have moved."
"No, only at night."
"Then I'll find my way out just fine." He took a few steps toward her, then
stopped.
"What?" she asked.
"Nothing."
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"Oh." She sounded disappointed. "I thought you were going to kiss me good-bye."
Then she puckered up like a three-year-old child.
He laughed. He kissed her-- like a three-year-old-- and then he left.
For two days he brooded. Saw her off in the morning, then tried to read, to watch
the vids, anything. Nothing held his attention. He took walks. He even went topside
once, to see the sky overhead-- it was night, thick with stars. None of it engaged
him. Nothing held. One of the vid programs had a moment, just briefly, a scene on a
semiarid world, where a strange plant grew that dried out at maturity, broke off at
the root, and then let the wind blow it around, scattering seeds. For a moment he
felt a dizzying empathy with the plant as it tumbled by-- am I as dry as that,
hurtling through dead land? But no, he knew even that wasn't true, because the
tumbleweed had life enough left in it to scatter seeds. Leyel had no seed left. That
was scattered years ago.
On the third morning he looked at himself in the mirror and laughed grimly. "Is
this how people feel before they kill themselves?" he asked. Of course not-- he knew
that he was being melodramatic. He felt no desire to die.
But then it occurred to him that if this feeling of uselessness kept on, if he
never found anything to engage himself, then he might as well be dead, mightn't he,
because his being alive wouldn't accomplish much more than keeping his clothes warm.
He sat down at the scriptor and began wtiting down questions. Then, under each
question, he would explain how he had already pursued that particular avenue and why
it didn't yield the answer to the origin question. More questions would come up
then-- and he was right, the mere process of summarizing his own fruitless research
made answers seem tantalizingly close. It was a good exercise. And even if he never
found an answer, this list of questions might be of help to someone with a clearer
intellect-- or better information-- decades or centuries or millennia from now.
Deet came home and went to bed with Leyel still typing away. She knew the look he
had when he was fully engaged in writing-- she did nothing to disturb him. He
noticed her enough to realize that she was carefully leaving him alone. Then he
settled back into writing.
The next morning she awoke to find him lying in bed beside her, still dressed. A
personal message capsule lay on the floor in the doorway from the bedroom. He had
finished his questions. She bent over, picked it up, took it with her to the
library.
***
"His questions aren't academic after all, Deet."
"I told you they weren't."
"Hari was right. For all that he seemed to be a dilettante, with his money and his
rejection of the universities, he's a man of substance."
"Will the Second Foundation benefit, then, if he comes up with an answer to his
question?"
"I don't know, Deet. Hari was the fortune-teller. Presumably mankind is already
human, so it isn't as if we have to start the process over."
"Do you think not?"
"What, should we find some uninhabited planet and put some newborns on it and let
them grow up feral, and then come back in a thousand years and try to turn them
human?"
"I have a better idea. Let's take ten thousand worlds filled with people who live
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their lives like animals, always hungry, always quick with their teeth and their
claws, and let's strip away the veneer of civilization to expose to them what they
really are. And then, when they see themselves clearly, let's come back and teach
them how to be really human this time, instead of only having bits and flashes of
humanity."
"All right. Let's do that."
"I knew you'd see it my way."
"Just make sure your husband finds out how the trick is done. Then we have all the
time in the world to set it up and pull it off."
***
When the index was done, Deet brought Leyel with her to the library when she went
to work in the morning. She did not take him to Indexing but rather installed him in
a private research room lined with vids-- only instead of giving the illusion of
windows looking out onto an outside scene, the screens filled all the walls from
floor to ceiling, so it seemed that he was on a pinnacle high above the scene,
without walls or even a railing to keep him from falling off. It gave him flashes of
vertigo when he looked around-- only the door broke the illusion. For a moment he
thought of asking for a different room. But then he remembered Indexing, and
realized that maybe he'd do better work if he too felt a bit off balance all the
time.
At first the indexing seemed obvious. He brought the first page of his questions
to the lector display and began to read. The lector would track his pupils, so that
whenever he paused to gaze at a word, other references would begin to pop up in the
space beside the page he was reading. Then he'd glance at one of the referenees.
When it was uninteresting or obvious, he'd skip to the next reference, and the first
one would slide back on the display, out of the way, but still there if he changed
his mind and wanted it.
If a reference engaged him, then when he reached the last line of the part of it
on display, it would expand to full-page size and slide over to stand in front of
the main text. Then, if this new material had been indexed, it would trigger new
references, and so on, leading him farther and farther away from the original
document until he finally decided to go back and pick up where he left off.
So far, this was what any index could be expected to do. It was only as he moved
farther into reading his own questions that he began to realize the quirkiness of
this index. Usually, index references were tied to important words, so that if you
just wanted to stop and think without bringing up a bunch of references you didn't
want, all you had to do was keep your gaze focused in an area of placeholder words,
empty phrases like "If this were all that could be..." Anyone who made it a habit to
read indexed works soon learned this trick and used it till it became reflex.
But when Leyel stopped on such empty phrases, references came up anyway. And
instead of having a clear relationship to the text, sometimes the references were
perverse or comic or argumentative. For instance, he paused in the middle of reading
his argument that archaeological searches for "primitiveness" were useless in the
search for origins because all "primitive" cultures represented a decline from a
star-going culture. He had written the phrase "All this primitivism is useful only
because it predicts what we might become if we're careless and don't preserve our
fragile links with civilization." By habit his eyes focused on the empty words "what
we might become if." Nobody could index a phrase like that.
Yet they had. Several references appeared. And so instead of staying within his
reverie, he was distracted, drawn to what the indexers had tied to such an absurd
phrase.
One of the references was a nursery rhyme that he had forgotten he knew:
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Wrinkly Grandma Posey
Rockets all are rosy.
Lift off, drift off,
All fall down.
Why in the world had the indexer put that in? The first thought that came to
Leyel's mind was himself and some of the servants' children, holding hands and
walking in a circle, round and round till they came to the last words, whereupon
they threw themselves to the ground and laughed insanely. The sort of game that only
little children could possibly think was fun.
Since his eyes lingered on the poem, it moved to the main document display and new
references appeared. One was a scholarly article on the evolution of the poem,
speculating that it might have arisen during the early days of starflight on the
planet of origin, when rockets may have been used to escape from a planet's gravity
well. Was that why this poem had been indexed to his article? Because it was tied to
the planet of origin?
No, that was too obvious. Another article about the poem was more helpful. It
rejected the early-days-of-rockets idea, because the earliest versions of the poem
never used the word "rocket." The oldest extant version went like this:
Wrinkle down a rosy,
Pock-a fock-a posy,
Lash us, dash us,
All fall down.
Obviously, said the commentator, these were mostly nonsense words-- the later
versions had arisen because children had insisted on trying to make sense of them.
And it occurred to Leyel that perhaps this was why the indexer had linked this
poem to his phrase-- because the poem had once been nonsense, but we insisted on
making sense out of it.
Was this a comment on Leyel's whole search for origins? Did the indexer think it
was useless?
No-- the poem had been tied to the empty phrase "what we might become if." Maybe
the indexer was saying that human beings are like this poem-- our lives make no
sense, but we insist on making sense out of them. Didn't Deet say something like
that once, when she was talking about the role of storytelling in community
formation? The universe resists causality, she said. But human intelligence demands
it. So we tell stories to impose causal relationships among the unconnected events
of the world around us.
That includes ourselves, doesn't it? Our own lives are nonsense, but we impose a
story on them, we sort our memories into cause-and-effect chains, forcing them to
make sense even though they don't. Then we take the sum of our stories and call it
our "self." This poem shows us the process-- from randomness to meaning-- and then
we think our meanings are "true."
But somehow all the children had come to agree on the new version of the poem. By
the year 2000 G.E., only the final and current version existed in all the worlds,
and it had remained constant ever since. How was it that all the children on every
world came to agree on the same version? How did the change spread? Did ten thousand
kids on ten thousand worlds happen to make up the same changes?
It had to be word of mouth. Some kid somewhere made a few changes, and his version
spread. A few years, and all the children in his neighborhood use the new version,
and then all the kids in his city, on his planet. It could happen very quickly, in
f
act, because each generation of children lasts only a few years-- seven-year-olds
might take the new version as a joke, but repeat it often enough that five-year-olds
think it's the true version of the poem, and within a few years there's nobody left
among the children who remembers the old way.
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A thousand years is long enough for the new version of the poem to spread. Or for
five or a dozen new versions to collide and get absorbed into each other and then
spread back, changed, to worlds that had revised the poem once or twice already.
And as Leyel sat there, thinking these thoughts, he conjured up an image in his
mind of a network of children, bound to each other by the threads of this poem,
extending from planet to planet throughout the Empire, and then back through time,
from one generation of children to the previous one, a three-dimensional fabric that
bound all children together from the beginning.
And yet as each child grew up, he cut himself free from the fabric of that poem.
No longer would he hear the words "Wrinkly Grandma Posey" and immediately join hands
with the child next to him. He wasn't part of the song any more.
But his own children were. And then his grandchildren. All joining hands with each
other, changing from circle to circle, in a never-ending human chain reaching back
to some long-forgotten ritual on one of the worlds of mankind-- maybe, maybe on the
planet of origin itself.
The vision was so clear, so overpowering, that when he finally noticed the lector
display it was as sudden and startling as waking up. He had to sit there, breathing
shallowly, until he calmed himself, until his heart stopped beating so fast.
He had found some part of his answer, though he didn't understand it yet. That
fabric connecting all the children, that was part of what made us human, though he
didn't know why. This strange and perverse indexing of a meaningless phrase had
brought him a new way of looking at the problem. Not that the universal culture of
children was a new idea, just that he had never thought of it as having anything to
do with the origin question.
Was this what the indexer meant by including this poem? Had the indexer also seen
this vision?
Maybe, but probably not. It might have been nothing more than the idea of becoming
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