Asimov’s Future History Volume 15

by Isaac Asimov

  “But people have to matter.” Dors’ voice carried a note of forlorn hope. Hari knew that somewhere deep in her lurked the stern directives of the Zeroth Law, but over that lay a deep layer of true human feeling. She was a humanist who believed in the power of the individual–and here she met blunt, uncaring mechanism, in the large.

  “They do, actually, but perhaps not in the way you want,” Hari said gently. “We sought out telltale groups, pivots about which events sometimes hinge.”

  “The homosexuals, f’instance,” Yugo said.

  “They’re about one percent of the population, a consistent minor variant in reproductive strategies,” Hari said.

  Socially, though, they were often masters of improvisation, fashioning style to substance, fully at home with the arbitrary. They seemed equipped with an internal compass that pointed them at every social novelty, early on, so that they exerted leverage all out of proportion to their numbers. Often they were sensitive indicators of future turns.

  Yugo went on, “So we figured, could they be a crucial indicator? Turns out they are. Helps out the equations.”

  Dors said severely, “Why does history smooth out?”

  Hari let Yugo carry the ball. “Y’see, that same sparrow effect had a positive side. Chaotic systems could be caught at just the right instant, tilted ever so slightly in a preferred way. A well-timed nudge could drive a system, yielding benefits all out of proportion to the effort expended.”

  “You mean control?” She looked doubtful.

  “Just a touch,” Yugo said. “Minimal control–the right nudge at the right time–demands that the dynamics be intricately understood. Maybe that way, you could bias outcomes toward the least damaging of several finely balanced results. At best, they could drive the system into startlingly good outcomes.”

  “Who’s controlling?” Dors asked.

  Yugo looked embarrassed. “Oh, we... dunno.”

  “Don’t know? But this is a theory of all history.”

  Hari said quietly, “There are elements, interplays, in the equations that we don’t grasp. Damping forces.”

  “How can you not understand?”

  Both men looked ill at ease. “We don’t know how the terms interact. New features,” Hari said, “leading to... emergent order.”

  She said primly, “Then you don’t really have a theory, do you?”

  Hari nodded ruefully. “Not in the sense of a deep understanding, no.”

  Models followed the gritty, experienced world, he reflected. They echoed their times. Clockwork planetary mechanics came after clocks. The idea of the whole universe as a computation came after computers. A worldview of stable change came after nonlinear dynamics...

  He had a glimmering of a metamodel, which would look at him and describe how he would then select among models for psychohistory. Peering down from above, it could see which was likely to be favored by Hari Seldon...

  “Who plans this control?” Dors persisted.

  Hari caught at the idea he had, but it slipped away. He knew how to coax it back: ease up. “Remember that joke?” he said. “How do you make God laugh?”

  She smiled. “You tell him your plans.”

  “Right. We will study this result, sniff out an answer.”

  She smiled. “Don’t ask you for predictions about the progress of your own predictions?”

  “Embarrassing, but yes.”

  His desksec chimed. “An Imperial summons,” it announced.

  “Damn!” Hari slapped his chair. “Fun’s over.”

  2.

  Not quite time for the Specials to arrive, Hari thought. But getting any work done was impossible while he was on edge.

  He jiggled coins in his pocket, distracted, then fished one out. A five cred piece, amber alloy, a handsome Cleon I head on one side-treasuries always flattered emperors–and the disk of the Galaxy seen from above on the other. He held it on edge and thought.

  Let the coin’s width represent the disk’s typical scale height. To be correct, the coin would have to bulge at its center to depict the hub, but overall it was a good geometric replica.

  In the disk was a flaw, a minute blister in an outer spiral arm. He did the ratio in his head, allowing that the galaxy was about 100,000 light-years across, and... blinked. The speck portrayed a volume about a thousand light years across. In the outer arms, that would contain ten million stars.

  To see so many worlds as a fleck adrift in immensity made him feel as though Trantor’s solidity had opened and he had plunged helplessly into an abyss.

  Could humanity matter on such a scale? So many billions of souls, packed into a grainy dot.

  Yet they had spanned the whole incomprehensible expanse of that disk in a twinkling.

  Humanity had spread through the spiral arms, spilling through the wormholes, wrapping itself around the hub in a mere few thousand years. In that time the spiral arms themselves had not revolved a perceptible angle in their own gravid gavotte; that would take half a billion years. Human hankering for far horizons had sent them swarming through the wormhole webbing, popping out into spaces near suns of swelling red, virulent blue, smoldering ruby.

  The speck stood for a volume a single human brain, with its primate capacities, could not grasp, except as mathematical notation. But that same brain led humans outward, until they now strode the Galaxy, mastering the starlit abyss... without truly knowing themselves.

  So a single human could not fathom even a dot in the disk. But the sum of humanity could, incrementally, one mind at a time, knowing its own immediate starry territory.

  And what did he desire? To comprehend all of that humanity, its deepest impulses, its shadowy mechanisms, its past, present, and future. He wanted to know the vagrant species that had managed to scoop up this disk, and to make it a plaything.

  So maybe one single human mind could indeed grasp the disk, by going one level higher–and fathoming the collective effects, hidden in the intricacies of the Equations.

  Describing Trantor, in this proportion, was child’s play. For the Empire, he needed a far grander comprehension.

  Mathematics might rule the galaxy. Invisible, gossamer symbols could govern.

  So a single man or woman could matter.

  Maybe. He shook his head. A single human head.

  Getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren’t we? Dreams of godhood...

  Back to work.

  Only he couldn’t work. He had to wait. To his relief, the Imperial Specials arrived and escorted him across Streeling University. By now he was used to the gawkers, the embarrassment of plowing through the crowds which now accumulated everywhere, it seemed, that he might frequent.

  “Busy today,” he said to the Specials captain.

  “Got to expect it, sir.”

  “You get extra duty pay for this, I hope.”

  “Yessir. ‘Digs,’ we call them.”

  “For extra risk, correct? Dangerous duty.”

  The captain looked flustered. “Well, yessir...”

  “If someone starts shooting, what are your orders?”

  “Uh, if they can penetrate the engaging perimeter, we’re to get between them and you. Sir.”

  “And you’d do that? Take a gauss pulse or a flechette?”

  He seemed surprised. “Of course.”

  “Truly?”

  “Our duty, y’know.”

  Hari was humbled by the man’s simple loyalty. Not to Hari Seldon, but to the idea of Empire. Order. Civilization.

  And Hari realized that he, too, was devoted to that idea. The Empire had to be saved, or at least its decline mitigated. Only by fathoming its deep structure could he do that.

  Which was why he disliked the First Minister business. It robbed him of time, concentration.

  In the Specials’ armored pods he salved his discontent by pulling out his tablet and working on some equations. The captain had to remind him when they reached the palace grounds. Hari got out and there was the usual security ritual, the
Specials spreading out and airborne sensors going aloft to sniff out the far perimeter. They reminded him of golden bees, buzzing with vigilance.

  He walked by a wall leading into the palace gardens and a tan, round sheet the size of his fingernail popped off the wall. It stuck to his neck. He reached up and plucked it off.

  He recognized it as a promotional trinket, a slap-on patch which gave you a pleasant rush by diffusing endorphins into your bloodstream. It also subtly predisposed you to coherent signals in corridor advertisements.

  He pitched it aside. A Special grabbed at the patch and suddenly there was shouting and movement all around him. The Special turned to throw the patch away.

  An orange spike shot through the guard’s hand, hissing hot, flaring and gone in a second. The man cried, “Ah!” and another Special grabbed him and pushed him down. Then five Specials blocked Hari from all sides and he saw no more.

  The Special screamed horribly. Something cut off the wail of pain. The captain shouted, “Move!” and Hari had to trot with the Specials around him into the gardens and down several lanes.

  It took a while to straighten out the incident. The patch was untraceable, of course, and there was no way of knowing for sure whether it was targeted on Hari at all.

  “Could be part of some Palace plot,” the captain said. “Just waiting for the next’ passerby with a scent-signature like yours.”

  “Not aimed for me at all?”

  “Could be. That tab took couple extra seconds tryin’ to figure out if it wanted you or not.”

  “And it did.”

  “Body odor, skin smells–they’re not exact, sir.”

  “I’ll have to start wearing perfume.”

  The captain grinned. “That won’t stop a smart tab.”

  Other protection specialists rushed in and there was evidence to measure and opinions and a lot of talk. Hari insisted on walking back to see the Special who had taken the tab. He was gone, already off to emergency care; they said he would lose his hand. No, sorry, Hari could not see him. Security, y’know.

  Quite quickly Hari became bored with the aftermath. He had come early to get a stroll through the gardens and though he knew he was being irrational, his regret at missing the walk loomed larger than the assassination attempt.

  Hari took a long, still moment and moved the incident aside. He visualized a displacement operator, an icy blue vector frame. It listed the snarled, angry red knot and pushed it out of view. Later, he would deal with it later.

  He cut off the endless talk and ordered the Specials to fall in behind him. Shouted protests came, of course, which he ignored. Then he ambled across the gardens, relishing the open air. He inhaled eagerly. The blinding speed of the attack had erased its importance to him. For now.

  The palace towers loomed like webwork of a giant spider. Between their bulks weaved airy walkways. Spires were veiled in silvery mist and a ripple, a pulse, shimmering with a silent, steady beat like a great unseen heart. He had been so long in the foreshortened views of Trantor’s corridors, his eyes did not quickly grasp the puzzling perspectives.

  An upward rush caught his attention as he passed through a flowers cape. From the immense Imperial aviary, flocks of birds in the thousands oscillated in the vertical drafts. Their artful, ever-shifting patterns had a diaphanous, billowy quality, an immense, wispy dance.

  Yet these had been shaped many millennia ago by bioengineering their genome. They formed drifts and billows like clouds, or even airy mountains, feasting on upwelling gnats, released from below by the gardeners. But a side draft could dissolve all their ornate sculptures, blow them away.

  Like the Empire, he mused. Beautiful in its order, stable for fifteen millennia, yet now toppling. Cracking up like a slow-motion pod wreck. Or in spasms like the Junin riots.

  Why? Even among Imperial loveliness, his mathist mind returned to the problem.

  Entering the palace, he passed a delegation of children on their way to some audience with a lesser Imperial figure. With a sudden pang he missed his adopted son, Raych. He and Dors had decided to secretly send the boy away to school, after Yugo had his leg broken. “Deprive them of targets,” Dors had said.

  Among the meritocracy, only those adults with commitment, stability, and talent could have children. Gentry or plain citizens could whelp brats by the shovelful.

  Parents were like artists–special people with a special gift, given respect and privileges, left free to create happy and competent humans. It was noble work, well paid. Hari had been honored to be approved.

  In immediate contrast, three oddly shaped courtiers ambled by him.

  By biotech means people could turn their children into spindly towers, into flowerlike footbound dwarves, into green giants or pink pygmies. From throughout the Galaxy they were sent here to amuse the Imperial court, where novelty was always in vogue.

  But such variants seldom lasted. There was a species norm. And stretching it was just as deeply ingrained. Hari had to admit that he would forever be among the unsophisticated, for he found such folk repulsive.

  Someone had designed the reception room to look like anything but a room for receiving people. It resembled a lumpy pocket in molten glass, crisscrossed by polished shafts of ceramo-steel. These shafts in turn dripped into smooth lumps which–since there was nothing else in the room–must have been intended to be chairs and tables.

  It seemed unlikely that he could ever get back out of any of the shapes, once he had worked out how to sit in them–so Hari stood. And wondered if that effect, too, was somehow intended... The palace was a subtle place of layered design.

  This was to be a small, private meeting, Cleon’s staff had assured him. Still, there was a small army of attaches and protocol officers and aides who had introduced themselves as Hari had passed through several rooms of increasing ornamentation, on his way here. Their talk became more ornate, as well. Courtly life was dominated by puffed-up people who always acted as though they were coyly unveiling statues of themselves.

  There was a lot of adornment and finery, the architectural equivalent of jewels and silk, and even the most minor attendants wore very dignified green uniforms. He felt as though he should lower his voice and realized, recalling Sundays on Helicon, that this place felt somehow like a church.

  Then Cleon swept in and the staff vanished, silently draining away into concealed exits.

  “My Seldon!”

  “Yours, sire.” Hari followed the ritual.

  The Emperor continued greeting him effusively, tut-tutting over the apparent assassination attempt–” Surely an accident, don’t you think?”–and led him to the large display wall. At Cleon’s gesture an enormous view of the entire Galaxy appeared, the work of a new artist. Hari murmured the required admiration and recalled his thoughts of only an hour before.

  This was a time sculpture, tracing the entire Galactic history. The disk was, after all, a collection of debris, swirling at the bottom of a gravitational pothole in the cosmos. How it looked depended on which of mankind’s myriad eyes one used. Infrared could pierce and unmask dusty lanes. X rays sought pools of fiercely burning gas. Radio dishes mapped cold banks of molecules and magnetized plasma. All were packed with meaning.

  In the carousel of the disk, stars bobbed and weaved under complicated Newtonian tugs. The major arms–Sagittarius, Orion, and Perseus, counting outward from the Center–bore names obscured by antiquity. Each contained a Zone of that name, hinting that perhaps here the ancient Earth orbited. But no one knew, and research had revealed no obvious single candidate. Instead, dozens of worlds vied for the title of the True Earth. Quite probably, none of them were.

  Many bright signatures–skymarks, like landmarks?–blazed among the curving, barred spiral arms. Beauty beyond description–but not beyond analysis, Hari thought, whether physical or social. If he could find the key...

  “I congratulate you on the success of my Moron Decree,” Cleon said.

  Hari slowly withdrew from the immense pe
rspective. “Oh, sire?”

  “Your idea–first fruit of psychohistory.” To Hari’s blank incomprehension Cleon chuckled. “Forgotten already? The renegades who pillage, seeking renown for their infamy. You advised me to strip them of their identity by making them henceforth be called Morons.”

  Hari had indeed forgotten the advice, but contented himself with a sage nod.

  “It worked! Such crimes are much reduced. And those convicted go to their deaths full of anger, demanding to be made famous. I tell you, it is delicious.”

  Hari felt a chill at the way the Emperor smacked his lips. An off-hand suggestion made suddenly, concretely real. It rattled him a bit.

  He realized that the Emperor was asking about progress with psychohistory. His throat tightened and he remembered the Moonrose woman with her irritating questions. That seemed weeks ago. “Work is slow,” he managed to say.

  Cleon said sympathetically, “Surely it requires a deep knowledge of every facet of civilized life.”

  “At times.” Hari stalled, putting his mixed emotions firmly away.

  “I was at a convocation recently and learned something you undoubtedly have factored into your equations.”

  “Yes, sire?”

  “It is said that the very foundation of the Empire–besides the wormholes of course–is the discovery of proton-Boron fusion. I had never heard of it, yet the speaker said it was the single greatest achievement of antiquity. That every starship, every planetary technology, depends upon it for power.”

  “I suppose that is true, but I did not know it.”

  “Such an elementary fact?”

  “What is not of use to me does not concern me.”

  Cleon’s mouth pouted in puzzlement. “But a theory of all history surely demands great detail.”

  “Technology enters only in its effects on other large issues,” Hari said. How to explain the intricacies of nonlinear calculus? “Often its limitations are the important point.”