Asimov’s Future History Volume 15

by Isaac Asimov

  Some societies labored through their meta-stability, then crashed: Theocracy, Transcendentalism, Macho Feudalism. This latter appeared whenever people had metallurgy and agriculture. Planets which had slid a long way down the curve would manifest it.

  Imperial scholars had long justified the Empire, threaded by narrow wormholes and lumbering hyperships, as the best human social structure. It had indeed proved stable and benevolent.

  Their reigning model, Benign Imperial Feudalism, accepted that humans were hierarchical. As well, they were dynastically ambitious, liking the continuity of power and its pomp. They were quite devoted to symbols of unity, of Imperial grandeur. Gossip about the great was, for most people, the essence of history itself.

  Imperial power was moderated by traditions of noble leadership, the assumed superiority of those who rose to greatness. Beneath such impressive resplendence, as Cleon well knew, lay the bedrock of an extremely honest, meritocratic civil service. Without that, corruption would spread like a stain across the stars, corroding the splendor.

  He watched the diagram–a complex 3D web of surfaces, the landscape of social-space.

  Slow-stepped, he could see individual event-waves washing through the sim. Each cell in the grid got recomputed every clock cycle, readjusting every nearest-neighbor interaction in 3D.

  The working rules of thumb were not the true laws of physics, built up from fundamentals like maxion mechanics, or even from the simple NewTown Laws. Rather, they were rough algorithms that reduced intricate laws to trivial arithmetic. Society seen raw this way was crude, not mysterious at all.

  Then came chaos.

  He was viewing the “policy-space,” with its family of variables: degree of polarity, or power concentration; size of coalitions; conflict scale. In this simple model, learning loops emerged. Starting from a plateau period of seeming stability but not stasis, the system produced a Challenger Idea.

  This threatened stability, which forced formation of coalitions to oppose the challenge. Factions formed. Then they gelled. The coalitions could be primarily religious, political, economic, technological, even military–though this last was a particularly ineffective method, the data showed. The system then veered into a chaotic realm, sometimes emerging to new stability, sometimes decaying.

  In the dynamic system there was a pressure created by the contrast between people’s ideal picture of the world and the reality. Too big a difference drove fresh forces for change. Often the forces were apparently unconscious; people knew something was wrong, felt restive, but could not fix on a clear cause.

  So much for “rational actor” models, Hari thought. Yet some still clung to that obviously dumb approximation.

  Everyone thought the Empire was simple.

  Not the bulk of the population, of course, dazzled by the mix of cultures and exotica afforded by trade and communications from myriad worlds. They were perpetually distracted–an important damper on chaos.

  Even to social theorists, though, the basic structure and interrelations seemed to be predictable, with a moderate number of feedback loops, solid and traditional. Conventional wisdom held that these could be easily separated out and treated.

  Most important, there was central decision-making, or so most thought. The Emperor Knew Best, right?

  In reality, the Empire was a nested, ordered hierarchy: Imperial Feudalism. At the lower bound were the Zones of the galaxy, sometimes only a dozen light-years across, up to a few thousand light years diameter. Above that were Compacts of a few hundred nearby Zones. The Compacts interlocked into the Galactic cross-linked system.

  But the whole thing was sliding downhill. In the complex diagram, sparkling flickers came and went. What were those?

  Hari close-upped the flares. Zones of chaos, where predictability becomes impossible. These fiery eruptions might be the clue to why the Empire was failing.

  Hari felt in his soul that unpredictability was bad–for humanity, for his mathematics. But it was inescapable.

  This was the secret the Emperor and others must never know. That until he could rule chaos–or at least peer into it–psychohistory was a fraud.

  He decided to look at a single case. Maybe that would be cleaner.

  He selected Sark, the world which had found and developed the Voltaire and Joan sims. It billed itself as the Home of the New Renaissance–a common rhetorical posture, often adopted. They seemed bright and creative as he reviewed the status-grids.

  Hari yawned despite himself. Sure, Sark looked good for now. A booming economy. A leader in styles and fashion.

  But its profile classed it among the Chaos Worlds. They rose for a while, seeming to defy the damping mechanisms that held planets in the Imperial Equilibrium.

  Then their social fabric dissolved. They plummeted back into one of the Stasis States: Anarcho-Industrial for Sark, he would predict, from the data. No great fleets made this happen. The Empire did not, despite impressions, rule by force. Social evolutions made the Chaos Worlds falter and die. Usually, the Galaxy as a whole suffered few repercussions.

  But lately, there had been more of them. And the Empire was visibly decaying. Productivity was down, incoherence in the social-spaces on the rise.

  Why?

  He got up and went for a workout at the gymnasium. Enough of the mind! Let his body sweat out the frustrations wrought by his intellect.

  5.

  He did not want to go to the Grand Imperial Universities Colloquy, but the Imperial Protocol Office leaned on him... A First Ministerial candidate has obligations,” the officious woman had informed him.

  So he and Dors dutifully appeared at the enormous Imperial Festival Hall. His Specials wore discreet formal business suits, complete with the collar ruffles of mid-level meritocrats.

  “All the better to blend into the crowd,” Dors joked. Hari saw that everyone sized up the men in an instant and gingerly edged away. He would have been fooled.

  They entered a high, double-arched corridor, lined with ancient statuary which invited the passersby to lick them. Hari tried it, after carefully reading the glow-sign, which reassured him there was no biological risk. A long, succulent lick gave him a faint, odd flavor of oil and burnt apples, a hint of what the ancients found enticing.

  “What’s first on the agenda?” he asked his Protocol Officer.

  “An audience with the Academic Potentate,” she answered, adding pointedly, “Alone.”

  Dors disagreed and Hari negotiated a compromise. Dors got to stand at the doorway, no more. “I’ll have appetizers served to you there,” the Protocol Officer said testily.

  Dors gave her an icy smile. “Why is this, ah, ‘audience’ so important?”

  The Protocol Officer gave her a pitying look. “The Potentate carries much weight in the High Council.”

  Hari said soothingly, “And can throw a few votes my way.”

  “A bit of polite talk,” the Protocol Officer said.

  “I shall promise to–let me put this delicately–smooch his buttocks. Or hers, as the case may be.”

  Dors smiled. “Better not be hers.”

  “Intriguing, how the implications of the act switch with sex.”

  The Protocol Officer coughed and ushered him deftly through snapping screen curtains, his hair sizzling. Apparently even an Academic Potentate had need of personal security measures.

  Once within the formal staterooms, Hari found he was alone with a woman of considerable age and artificial beauties. So that was why the Protocol Officer had coughed.

  “How very nice of you to come.” She stood motionless, one hand extended, limp at the wrist. A waterfall effect spattered behind her, framing her body well.

  He felt as if he were walking into a still-life museum display. He didn’t know whether to shake her hand or kiss it. He shook it, and her look made him think he had chosen wrong.

  She wore a lot of embedded makeup, and from the way she leaned forward to make a point, he gathered that her pale eyes got her a lot of things
other people did not receive.

  She had once been an original thinker, a nonlinear philosopher. Now meritocrats across the spiral arms owed her fealty.

  Before they had sat down, she gestured. “Oh, would you tune that wall haze?” The waterfall effect had turned into a roiling, thick fog. “Somehow it gets wrong all the time and the room doesn’t adjust it.”

  A way of establishing a hierarchy, Hari suspected. Get him used to doing little tasks at her bidding. Or maybe she was like some other women, who if they couldn’t get you to do minor services felt insecure. Or maybe she was just inept and wanted her waterfall back. Or maybe he just analyzed the hell out of everything, a mathist’s pattern.

  “I’ve heard remarkable things about your work,” she said, shifting from High Figure Used to Snappy Obedience to Gracious Lady Putting an Underling at Ease. He said something noncommittal. A tiktok brought a stim which was barely liquid, drifting down his throat and into his nostrils like a silken, sinister cloud.

  “You believe yourself practical enough for the ministership?”

  “Nothing is more practical, more useful, than a sound theory.”

  “Said like a true mathist. Speaking for all meritocrats, I do hope you are equal to the task.”

  He thought of telling her–she did have a certain charm, after all–that he didn’t give a damn for the ministership. But some intuition held him back. She was another power broker. He knew she had been vindictive in the past.

  She gave him a shrewd smile. “I understand you have charmed the Emperor with a theory of history.”

  “At the moment it is little better than a description.”

  “A sort of summary?”

  “Breakthroughs for the brilliant, syntheses for the driven.”

  “Surely you know there is an air of futility about such an ambition.” A gleam of steel in the pale eyes.

  “I was... unaware. Madam.”

  “Science is simply an arbitrary construct. It perpetuates the discredited notion that progress is always possible. Let alone desirable.”

  “Oh?” He had plastered a polite smile on his face and was damned if he would let it slip.

  “Only oppressive social orders emerge from such ideas. Science’s purported objectivity hides the plain fact that it is simply one ‘language game’ among others. All such arbitrary configurations sit in a conceptual universe of competing discourses.”

  “I see.” The smile was getting heavier. His face felt like it would crack.

  “To elevate scientific–” she sniffed disdainfully “–so-called ‘truths’ over other constructions is tantamount to colonizing the intellectual landscape. To enslaving one’s opposition!”

  “Ummm.” He had a sinking feeling that he was not going to last long as a door mat. “Before you even consider the subject, you claim to know the best way to study it?”

  “Social theory and linguistic analysis have the final power, since all truths have quite limited historical and cultural validity. Therefore, this ‘psychohistory’ of all societies is absurd.”

  So she knew the term; word was spreading. “Perhaps you have insufficient regard for the rough rub of the real.”

  A slight thawing. “Clever phrasing, Academician. Still, the category ‘real’ is a social construction.”

  “Look, of course science is a social process. But scientific theories don’t merely reflect society.”

  “How charming to still think so.” A wan smile failed to conceal the icy gleam in her eyes.

  “Theories are not mere changes of fashion, like shifting men’s skirts from short to long.”

  “Academician, you must know that there is nothing knowable beyond human discourses.”

  He kept his voice level, courteous. Point out that she had used “know” in two contradictory ways in the same sentence? No, that would be playing word games, which would subtly support her views. “Sure, mountain climbers might argue and theorize about the best route to the top–”

  “Always in ways conditioned by their history and social structures–”

  “–but once they get there, they know it. Nobody would say they ‘constructed the mountain.” ‘

  She pursed her lips and had another foggy-white stim. “Ummm. Elementary realism. But all of your ‘facts’ embody theory. Ways of seeing.”

  “I can’t help noticing that anthropologists, sociologists–the whole gang–get a delicious rush of superiority by denying the objective reality of the hard sciences’ discoveries.”

  She drew herself up. “There are no elemental truths that exist independent of the people, languages, and cultures that make them.”

  “You don’t believe in objective reality, then?”

  “Who’s the object?”

  He had to laugh. “Language play. So linguistic structures dictate how we see?”

  “Isn’t that obvious? We live in a galaxy rich in cultures, all seeing the Galaxy their way.”

  “But obeying laws. Plenty of research shows that thought and perception precede talk, exist independent of language.”

  “What laws?”

  “Laws of social movement. A theory of social history–if we had one.”

  “You attempt the impossible. And if you wish to be First Minister, enjoying the support of your fellow academics and meritocrats, you shall have to follow the prevailing view of our society. Modern learning is animated by a frank incredulity toward such meta-narratives.”

  He was sorely tempted to say, Then you are going to be surprised, but instead said, “We shall see.”

  “We don’t see things as they are,” the learned lady said, “we see them as we are.”

  With a touch of sadness, he realized that the republic of intellectual inquiry was, like the Empire, not free of internal decay.

  6.

  The Academic Potentate led him out with ritual words to smooth the way, and Dors was standing attentively at the grand entrance. Still, Hari had gotten the essential message: the academic meritocracy would back him for First Minister if he at least paid lip service to prevailing orthodoxy.

  Together, with the customary academic honor guard, they went down into the vast rotunda. This was a dizzying bowl with various scholarly disciplines represented by the full regalia and insignia, splashed across immense wall designs. Below them swirled a chattering mob, thousands of the finest minds gathered for speeches, learned reports, and of course much infighting of the very finest sort.

  “Think we can survive this?” Hari whispered.

  “Don’t let go,” Dors said, seizing his hand.

  He realized that she had taken his question literally.

  A little later the Academic Potentate wasn’t making a show of savoring the bouquet of the stims anymore, just sucking them up like one of the major food groups. She steered Hari and Dors from one cluster of the learned to another. Occasionally she would remember her role as hostess and feign interest in him as more than a chess piece in a larger game. Unfortunately these blunt attempts fastened upon inquiries into his personal life.

  Dors resisted these inquisitions, of course, smiling and shaking her head. When the Potentate turned to Hari and asked, “Do you exercise?” he could not resist replying, “I exercise restraint.”

  The Protocol Officer frowned, but Hari’s remark went unnoticed in the jostling throng. He found the company of his fellow members of the professoriat oddly off-putting. Their conversations had a directionless irony, which conveyed with raised eyebrows and arch tones the speaker’s superiority to everything he was commenting upon.

  Their acerbic paradoxes and stiletto humor struck Hari as irritating and beside the point. He knew well that the most savage controversies are about matters for which there is no good evidence either way. Still, there was a mannered desperation even to the scientists.

  Fundamental physics and cosmology had been well worked out far back in antiquity. Now all of Imperial scientific history dealt with teasing out intricate details and searching for clever applications.
Humankind was trapped in a cosmos steadily expanding, though slowing slightly, and destined to see the stars wink out. A slow, cool glide into an indefinite future was ordained by the mass-energy content present at the very conception of the universe. Humans could do nothing against that fate. Except, of course, understand it.

  So the grandest of intellectual territories had been opened, and that can only be done once. Now scientists were less like discoverers than like settlers, even tourists.

  He should not be surprised, he realized, to find that even the best of them, gathered from an entire Galaxy, should have an air of jaded brilliance, like tarnished gold.

  Meritocrats did not have many children and there was an airy sterility about them. Hari wondered if there was a middle ground between the staleness he felt here and the chaos of the “renaissances” sprouting up on Chaos Worlds. Perhaps he needed to know more about basic human nature.

  The Protocol Officer steered him down a spiral air ramp, electrostatics seizing them and gently lowering the party toward–he looked down with trepidation–the obligatory media people. He braced himself. Dors squeezed his hand. “Do you have to talk to them?”

  He sighed. “If I ignore them, they will report that.”

  “Let Lamurk amuse them.”

  “No.” His eyes narrowed. “Since I’m in this, I might as well play to win.”

  Her eyes widened with revelation. “You’ve decided, haven’t you?”

  “To try? You bet.”

  “What happened?”

  “That woman back there, the Potentate. She and her kind think the world’s just a set of opinions.”

  “What has that got to do with Lamurk?”

  “I can’t explain it. They’re all part of the decay. Maybe that’s it.”

  She studied his face. “I’ll never understand you.”

  “Good. That would be dull, yes?”

  The media pack approached, 30 snouts aimed like weapons.

  Hari whispered to Dors, “Every interview begins as a seduction and ends as a betrayal.” They descended.