Asimov’s Future History Volume 15

by Isaac Asimov

  “Oh yes, that old law about rebellious vandalism.”

  “It allows the death penalty and any special torture.”

  “But death is not enough! Not for the Renegatum crimes. So I turn to my psychohistorian.”

  “You want me to …?”

  “Give me an idea. These people say they’re doing it to bring down the existing order and all that, of course. But they get immense planet-wide coverage, their names known by everyone as the destroyers of time-honored art. They go to their graves famous. All the psychers say that’s their real motivation. I can kill them, but they don’t care by that time!”

  “Um,” Hari said uncomfortably. He knew full well he could never comprehend such people.

  “So give me an idea. Something psychohistorical.” Hari was intrigued by the problem, but nothing came to mind. He had long ago learned to deliberately not concentrate on a vexing question immediately, letting his subconscious have first crack. To gain time he asked, “Sire, you saw the smoke beyond the gardens?”

  “Um? No.” Cleon gave a quick hand signal to unseen eyes and the far wall blossomed with light. A full holo of the gardens filled the massive space. The oily black plume had grown. It coiled snakelike into the gray sky.

  A soft, neutral voice spoke in midair. “A breakdown, with insurrection by mechanicals, has caused this unfortunate lapse in domestic order.”

  “A tiktok riot?” This sort of thing Hari had heard about.

  Cleon rose and walked toward the holo. “Ah yes, another recalcitrant riddle. For some reason the mechanicals are going awry. Look at that! How many levels are–burning?”

  “Twelve levels are aflame,” the autovoice answered. “Imperial Analysis estimates a death toll of four hundred thirty-seven, within an uncertainty of eighty-four.”

  “Imperial cost?” Cleon demanded.

  “Minor. Some Imperial Regulars were hurt in subduing mechanicals.”

  “Ah. Well then, it is a small matter.” Cleon watched as the wall close-upped. The view plunged down a smoking pit. To the side, like a blazing layer cake, whole floors curled up from the heat. Sparks shot between electrical boosters. Burst pipes showered the flames but had little effect.

  Then a distant view, telescoping up into orbit. The program was giving the Emperor an eyeful, showing off its capabilities. Hari guessed that it didn’t often get the chance. Cleon the Calm was one derisive nickname for him, for he seemed bored with most matters that moved men.

  From space, the only deep green was the Imperial Gardens–just a splotch amid the grays and browns of roofs and roof-agriculture. Charcoal-black solar collectors and burnished steel, pole to pole. The ice caps had dissipated long ago and the seas sloshed in underground cisterns.

  Trantor supported forty billion people in a world-wrapping single city, seldom less than half a kilometer deep. Sealed, protected, its billions had long grown used to recycled air and short perspectives, and feared the open spaces a mere elevator ride away.

  The view zoomed down into the smoky pit again. Hari could see tiny figures leaping to their deaths to escape the flames. Hundreds dying... Hari’s stomach lurched. In crowded stacks of humanity, accidents took a fearsome toll.

  Still, Hari calculated, there were on average only a hundred people in a square kilometer of the planet’s surface. People jammed into the more popular Sectors out of preference, not necessity. With the seas pumped below, there was ample room for automated factories, deep mines, and immense, cavernous growing pods, where raw materials for food emerged with little direct human labor needed. These wearisome chores the tiktoks did. But now they were bringing mayhem to the intricacy that was Trantor, and Cleon fumed as he watched the disaster grow, eating away whole layers with fiery teeth.

  More figures writhed in the orange flames. These were people, not statistics, he reminded himself. Bile rose in his throat. To be a leader meant that sometimes you had to look away from the pain. Could he do that?

  “Another puzzle, my Seldon,” Cleon said abruptly. “Why do the tiktoks have these large-scale ‘disorders’ my advisers keep telling me about? Ah?”

  “I do not–”

  “There must be some psychohistorical explanation!”

  “These tiny phenomena may well lie beyond–”

  “Work on it! Find out!”

  “Uh, yes, sire.”

  Hari knew enough to let Cleon pad pointlessly around the vault, frowning at the continuing wall-high scenes of carnage, in utter silence. Perhaps, Hari thought, the Emperor was calm because he had seen so much calamity already. Even horrendous news palls. A sobering thought; would the same happen to the naive Hari Seldon?

  Cleon had some way of dealing with disaster, though, for after a few moments he waved and the scenes vanished. The vault filled with cheerful music and the lighting rose. Attendants scampered out with bowls and trays of appetizers. A man at Hari’s elbow offered him a stim. Hari waved it away. The sudden shift in mood was heady enough. Apparently it was commonplace, though, for the Imperial Court.

  Hari had felt something tickling at the back of his mind for several minutes now, and the quiet moments had given him a chance to finally pay attention to it. As Cleon accepted a stim, he said hesitantly, “Sire, I–?”

  “Yes? Have one, ah?”

  “Nossir, I, I had a thought about the Renegatum and the Kutonin woman.”

  “Oh, my, I’d rather not think about–”

  “Suppose you erase her identity.”

  Cleon’s hand stopped with a stim halfway to his nose. “Ah?”

  “They are willing to die, once they’ve attracted attention. They probably think they will live on, be famous. Take that away from them. Permit no release of their true names. In all media and official documents, give them an insulting name.”

  Cleon frowned. “Another name...?”

  “Call this Kutonin woman Moron One. The next one, Moron Thro. Make it illegal by Imperial decree to ever refer to her any other way. Then she as a person vanishes from history. No fame.”

  Cleon brightened. “Now, that’s an idea. I’ll try it. I not merely take their lives, I can take their selves.”

  Hari smiled wanly as Cleon spoke to an adjutant, giving instructions for a fresh Imperial Decree. Hari hoped it would work, but in any case, it had gotten him off the hook. Cleon did not seem to notice that the idea had nothing to do with psychohistory.

  Pleased, he tried an appetizer. They were startlingly good.

  Cleon beckoned to him. “Come, First Minister, I have some people for you to meet. They might prove useful, even to a mathist.”

  “I am honored.” Dors had coached him on a few homilies to use when he could think of nothing to say and he trotted one out now. “Whatever would be useful in service to the people–”

  “Ah, yes, the people,” Cleon drawled. “I hear so much about them.”

  Hari realized that Cleon had spent a life listening to pat, predictable speeches. “Sorry, sire, I–”

  “It reminds me of a poll result, assembled by my Trantorian specialists.” Cleon took an appetizer from a woman half his size. “They asked, ‘To what do you attribute the ignorance and apathy of the Trantorian masses?’ and the most common reply was ‘Don’t know and don’t care.” ‘

  Only when Cleon laughed did Hari realize this was a joke.

  3.

  He woke with ideas buzzing in his head.

  Hari had learned to lie still, facedown in the gossamer e-field net that cradled his neck and head in optimum alignment with his spine... to drift... and let the flitting notions collide, merge, fragment.

  He had learned this trick while working on his thesis. Overnight his subconscious did a lot of his work for him, if he would merely listen to the results in the morning. But they were delicate motes, best caught in the fine fabric of half-sleep.

  He sat up abruptly and made three quick notes on his end table. The squiggles would be sent to his primary computer, for later recall at the office.

  “Ro
oowwwrr,” Dors said, stretching. “The intellect is already up.”

  “Um,” he said, staring into space.

  “C’mon, before breakfast is body time.”

  “See if you disagree with this idea I just had. Suppose–”

  “I am not inclined, Academician Professor Seldon, to argue.”

  Hari came out of his trance. Dors threw back the covers and he admired her long, slim legs. She had been sculpted for strength and speed, but such qualities converged in an agreeable concert of surfaces, springy to the touch, yielding yet resisting. He felt himself jerked out of his mood and into–“Body time, yes. You are inclined for other purposes.”

  “Trust a scholar to put the proper definition to a word.”

  In the warm, dizzying scuffle that followed there was some laughter, some sudden passion, and best of all, no time to think. He knew this was just what he needed, after the tensions of yesterday, and Dors knew it even better.

  He emerged from the vaporium to the smell of kaff and breakfast, served out by the autos. The news flitted across the far wall and he managed to ignore most of it. Dors came out of her vaporium patting her hair and watched the wall raptly. “Looks like more stalling in the High Council,” she said. “They’re putting off the ritual search for more funding in favor of arguments over Sector sovereignty. If the Dahlites–”

  “Not before I ingest some calories.”

  “But this is just the sort of thing you must keep track of!”

  “Not until I have to.”

  “You know I don’t want you to do anything dangerous, but for now, not paying attention is foolish.”

  “Maneuvering, who’s up and who’s down–spare me. Facts I can face.”

  “Fond of facts, aren’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “They can be brutal.”

  “Sometimes they’re all we have.” He thought a moment, then grasped her hand. “Facts, and love.”

  “Love is a fact, too.”

  “Mine is. The undying popularity of entertainments devoted to romance suggests that to most people it is not a fact but a goal.”

  “An hypothesis, you mathematicians would say.”

  “Granted. ‘Conjecture,’ to be precise.”

  “Preserve us from precision.”

  He swept her suddenly into his arms, cupped her rump in his hands and, with some effort he took trouble to conceal, lifted her. “But this–this is a fact.”

  “My, my.” She kissed him fiercely. “The man is not all mind.”

  He succumbed to the seductive, multisensic news as he munched. He had grown up on a farm and liked big breakfasts. Dors ate sparingly; her twin religions, she said, were exercise and Hari Seldon–the first to preserve her strength for the second. He thumbed his own half of the wall to the infinitesimal doings of markets, finding there a better index of how Trantor was doing than in the stentorian bluster of the High Council.

  As a mathist, he liked following the details. But after five minutes of it he slapped the table in frustration.

  “People have lost their good sense. No First Minister can protect them from their own innocence.”

  “My concern is protecting you from them.” Hari blanked his holo and watched hers, an ornate 3D of the factions in the High Council. Red tracers linked factions there with allies in the Low Council, a bewildering snake pit. “You don’t think this First Minister thing is going to work, do you?”

  “It could.”

  “They’re absolutely right–I’m not qualified.”

  “Is Cleon?”

  “Well, he has been reared to do the job.”

  “You’re ducking the question.”

  “Exactly.” Hari finished his steak and began on the egg-quhili soufflé. He had left the e-stim on all night to improve his muscle tone and that made him hungry. That, and the delightful fact that Dors viewed sex as an athletic opportunity.

  “I suppose your present strategy is best,” Dors said thoughtfully. “Remain a mathist, at a lofty remove from the fray.”

  “Right. Nobody assassinates a guy with no power.”

  “But they do ‘erase’ those who might get in the way of their taking power.”

  Hari hated thinking of such things so early. He dug into the soufflé. It was easy to forget, amid the tastes specially designed to fit his own well-tabulated likes, that the manufacturum built their meal from sewage. Eggs that had never known the belly of a bird. Meat appeared without skin or bones or gristle or fat. Carrots arrived without topknots. A food-manfac was delicately tuned to reproduce tastes, just short of the ability to actually make a live carrot. The minor issue of whether his soufflé tasted like a real one, made by a fine chef, faded to unimportance compared with the fact that it tasted good to him–the only audience that mattered.

  He realized that Dors had been talking for some moments about High Council maneuverings and he had not registered a word. She had advice on how to handle the inevitable news people, on how to receive calls, on everything. Everyone did, these days....

  Hari finished, had some kaff, and felt ready to face the day as a mathist, not as a minister. “Reminds me of what my mother used to say. Know how you make God laugh?”

  Dors looked blank, drawn out of her concentration. “How to … oh, this is humor?”

  “You tell him your plans.”

  She laughed agreeably.

  Outside their apartment they acquired the Specials again. Hari felt they were unnecessary; Dors was quite enough. But he could scarcely explain that to Imperial officials. There were other Specials on the floors above and below as well, a full-volume defense screen. Hari waved to friends he saw on the way across the Streeling campus, but the presence of the Specials held them at too great a distance to speak.

  He had a lot of Mathist Department business to tend to, but he followed his instinct and put his calculations first. Briskly he retrieved his ideas from the bedside notepad and stared at them, doodling absently in air, stirring symbols like a pot of soup, for over an hour.

  When he was a teenager the rigid drills of schooling had made him think that mathematics was just felicity with a particular kind of minutiae, knowing things, a sort of high-grade coin collecting. You learned relations and theorems and put them together.

  Only slowly did he glimpse the soaring structures above each discipline. Great spans joined the vistas of topology to the infinitesimal intricacies of differentials, or the plodding styles of number theory to the shifting sands of group analysis. Only then did he see mathematics as a landscape, a territory of the mind to rove and scout.

  To traverse those expanses he worked in mind time–long stretches of uninterrupted flow when he could concentrate utterly on problems, fixing them like flies in timeless amber, turning them this way and that to his inspecting light, until they yielded their secrets.

  Phones, people, politics–all these transpired in real time, snipping his thought train, killing mind time. So he let Yugo and Dors and others fend off the world throughout the morning.

  But today Yugo himself snipped his concentration. “Just a mo,” he said, slipping through the crackling door field. “This paper look right?”

  He and Yugo had developed a plausible cover for the psychohistory project. They regularly published research on the nonlinear analysis of “social nuggets and knots,” a sub field with an honorable and dull history. Their analysis applied to subgroups and factions in Trantor, and occasionally on other worlds.

  The research was in fact useful to psychohistory, serving as a subset of equations to what Yugo insisted on calling the full “Seldon Equations.” Hari had given up being irked at this term, even though he wished to keep a personal distance from the theory.

  Though scarcely a waking hour passed without his thinking about psychohistory, he did not want it to be a template for his own worldview. Nothing rooted in a particular personality could hope to describe the horde of saints and rascals revealed by human history. One had to take the longest view po
ssible.

  “See,” Yugo said, making lines of print and symbols coalesce on Hari’s holo. “I got all the analysis of the Dahlite crisis. Neat as you please, huh?”

  “Um, what’s the Dahlite crisis?”

  Yugo’s surprise was profound. “We’re not bein’ represented!”

  “You live in Streeling.”

  “Once a Dahlan, you’re always one. Just like you, from Helical.”

  “Helicon. I see, you don’t have enough delegates in the Low Council?”

  “Or the High!”

  “The Codes allow–”

  “They’re out of date.”

  “Dahlites get a proportional share–”

  “And our neighbors, the Ratannanahs and the Quippons, they’re schemin’ against us.”

  “How so?”

  “There’re Dahlans in plenty other Sectors. They don’t get represented.”

  “You’re spoken for by our Streeling–”

  “Look, Hari, you’re a Helical. Wouldn’t understand. Plenty Sectors, they’re just places to sleep. Dahl is a people.”

  “The Codes set forth rules for accommodating separate subcultures, ethnicities–”

  “They’re not workin’.”

  Hari saw from Yugo’s jutting jaw that this was not a point for graceful debate. He did know something of the slowly gathering constitutional crisis. The Codes had maintained a balance of forces for millennia, but only by innovative adaptation. Little of that seemed available now. “We agree on that. So how does our research bear upon Dahl?”

  “See, I took the socio-factor analysis and–”

  Yugo had an intuitive grasp of nonlinear equations. It was always a pleasure to watch his big hands cut the air, slicing through points and pounding objections to pulp. And the calculations were good, if a bit simple.

  The nuggets-and-knots work attracted little attention. It had made some in mathematics write him off as a promising young man who had never risen to his potential. This was perfectly all right with Hari. Some mathists guessed that his true core research went unpublished; these he treated kindly but gave no hint of confirmation.