Asimov’s Future History Volume 15

by Isaac Asimov

  “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 postures 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. Procedural matters of representation take precedent over even ministerships.”

  “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 reading–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 attention 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 statistician 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 conceded 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 eleven–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 vacuum, 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 educated 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 reverie.

  “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 interior 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 surrounded 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 Emperor, 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.

  They finished and Yugo urged him into a groundpod. They followed a complicated path, alive with noise and smells and vigor. Here orderly traffic disintegrated. Instead of making an entire layer one way, local streets intersected at angles acute and oblique, seldom rectangular. Yugo seemed to regard traffic intersections as rude interruptions.

  They sped by buildings at close range, stopped, and got out for a walk to a slideway. The Specials were right behind and without any transition Hari found himself in the middle of chaos. Smoke enveloped them and the acrid stench made him almost vomit.

  The Specials captain shouted to him, “Stay down!” Then the man shouted to his men to arm with anamorphine. They all bristled with weapons.

  Smoke paled the overhead phosphors. Through the muggy haze Hari saw a solid wall of people hammering toward them. They came out of side alleys and doorways and all seemed to bear down on him. The Specials fired a volley into the mass. Some went down. The captain threw a canister and gas blossomed farther away. He had judged it expertly; air circulation carried the fumes into the mob, not toward Hari.

  But anamorphine wasn’t going to stop them. Two women rushed by Hari, carrying cobblestones ripped from the street. A third jabbed at Hari with a knife and the captain shot her with a dart. Then more Dahlites rushed at the Specials and Hari caught what they were shouting: incoherent rage against tiktoks.

  The idea seemed so unlikely to him at first he thought he could not have heard rightly. That deflected his attention, and when he looked back toward the streaming crowd the captain was down and a man was advancing, holding a knife.

  What any of this had to do with tiktoks was mysterious, but Hari did not have time to do anything except step to the side and kick the man squarely in the knee.

  A bottle bounced painfully off his shoulder and smashed on the walkway. A man whirled a chain around and around and then toward Hari’s head. Duck. It whistled by and Hari dove at the man, tackling him solidly. They went down with two others in a swearing, punching mass. Hari took a slug in the gut.

  He rolled over and gasped for air and clearly, only a few feet away, saw a man kill another with a long, curved knife.

  Jab, slash, jab. It happened silently, like a dream. Hari gasped, shaken, his world in slow motion. He should be responding boldly, he knew that. But it was so overwhelming

  –and then he was standing, with no memory of getting there, wrestling with a man who had not bothered with bathing for quite some while.

  Then the man was gone, abruptly yanked away by the seethe of the crowd.

  Another sudden jump–and Specials were all around him. Bodies sprawled lifeless on the walkway. Others held their bloody heads. Shouts, thumps

  He did not have time to figure out what weapon had done that to them before the Specials were whisking him and Yugo along and the whole incident fled into obscurity, like a 30 program glimpsed and impatiently passed by.

  The captain wanted to return to Streeling. “Even better, the palace.”

  “This wasn’t about us,” Hari said as they took a slideway.

  “Can’t be sure of that, sir.”

  10.

  Hari batted away all suggestions that they discontinue their journey. The incident had apparently begun when some tiktoks malfed.

  “Somebody accused Dahlites of causing it,” Yugo related. “So our people stood up for themselves and, well, things got out of hand.”

  Everyone near them was alive with excitement, faces glowing, eyes white and darting. He thought suddenly of his father’s wry saying, Never underestimate the power of boredom.

  In human affairs, spirited action relieved dry tedium. He remembered seeing two women pummel a Spook, slamming away at the spindly, bleached-white man as though he were no more than a responsive exercise machine. A simple phobia against sunlight meant that he was of the hated Other, and thus fair game.

  Murder was a primal urge. Even the most civilized felt tempted by it in moments of rage. But nearly all resisted and were better for the resistance. Civilization was a defense against nature’s raw power.

  That was a crucial variable, one never considered by the economists with their gross products per capita, or the political theorists with their representative quotients, or the sociosavants and their security indices.

  “I’ll have to keep that in, too,” he muttered to himself.

  “Keep what?” Yugo asked. He, too, was still agitated.

  “Things as basic as murder. We get all tied up in Trantor’s economics and politics, but something as gut-deep as that incident may be more important, in the long run.”

  “We’ll pick it up in the crime statistics.”

  “No, it’s the urge I want to get. How does that explain the deeper movements in human culture? It’s bad enough dealing with Trantor–a giant pressure cooker, forty billion sealed in together. We know there’s something missing, because we can’t get the psychohistorical equations to converge.”

  Yugo frowned. “I was thinkin’ it was, well, that we needed more data.”


  Hari felt the old, familiar frustration. “No, I can feel it. There’s something crucial, and we don’t have it.”

  Yugo looked doubtful and then their off-disk came. They changed through a concentric set of circulating slideways, reducing their velocity and ending in a broad square. An impressive edifice dominated the high air shafts, slender columns blooming into offices above. Sunlight trickled down the sculpted faces of the building, telling tales of money: Artifice Associates.

  Reception whisked them into a sanctum more luxurious than anything at Streeling. “Great room,” Yugo said with a wry slant of his head.

  Hari understood this common academic reflection. Technical workers outside the university system earned more and worked in generally better surroundings. None of that had ever bothered him. The idea of universities as a high citadel had withered as the Empire declined, and he saw no need for opulence, particularly under an Emperor with a taste for it.

  The staff of Artifice Associates referred to themselves as A2 and seemed quite bright. He let Yugo carry the conversation as they sat around a big, polished pseudowood table; he still pulsed with the zest of the earlier violence. Hari sat back and meditated on his surroundings, his mind returning as always to new facets which might bear upon psychohistory.

  The theory already had mathematical relationships between technology, capital accumulation, and labor, but the most important driver proved to be knowledge. About half the economic growth came from the increase in the quality of information, as embodied in better machines and improved skills, building efficiency.

  Fair enough–and that was where the Empire had faltered. The innovative thrust of the sciences had slowly ground down. The Imperial Universities produced fine engineers, but no inventors. Great scholars, but few true scientists. That factored into the other tides of time.

  Only independent businesses such as this, he reflected, continued the momentum which had driven the entire Empire for so long. But they were wildflowers, often crushed beneath the boot of Imperial politics and inertia.