Asimov’s Future History Volume 15

by Isaac Asimov

  “Academician Seldon, you are known as a mathist, a candidate First Minister, and a Heliconian. You–”

  “I only realized I was a Heliconian when I came to Trantor.”

  “And your career as a mathist–”

  “I only realized that I thought as a mathist when I began meeting politicians.”

  “Well then, as a politician–”

  “I am still a Heliconian.” This drew some laughter.

  “You prize the traditional, then?”

  “If it works.”

  “We be not open to old ideas,” a willowy woman from the Fornax Zone said. “Future of Empire comes from people, not laws. Agree?”

  She was a Rational, using their stripped-down, utterly orderly Galactic, free of irregular verbs and complex constructions. Hari could follow it well enough, but for him the odd swerves and turns of Classical Galactic embodied its charm.

  To Hari’s delight, several people disagreed with her formulated question, shouting. In the noise he reflected on the infinity of human cultures, represented in this vast bowl and still united under Classical Galactic.

  The language’s sturdy base had stitched together the early Empire. For many millennia now the language had sat on its laurels, admittedly. He had added a small interaction term to his equations to allow for the cultural ripples excited by the splashing of a new argot into the linguistic pool. The ancient ruffles and flourishes of Galactic allowed subtleties denied the Rationals–or Rats, as some called them–and the fun of puns as well.

  He tried to make this case to the woman, but she retorted, “Not support oddity! Support order. Old ways failed. As mathist you will be too”

  “Come now!” Hari said, irked. “Even in closed axiomatic systems, not all propositions are decidable. I suggest you cannot predict what I would do as a First Minister.”

  “Think you Council submits to reason?” the woman asked haughtily.

  “It is the triumph of reason to get on well with those who possess none,” Hari said. To his surprise, some applauded.

  “Your theory of history denies God’s powers to intervene in human affairs!” a thin man from a low-grav planet asserted. “What say you to that?”

  Hari was about to agree–it seemed to make no difference to him–when Dors stepped before him.

  “Perhaps I can bring up a bit of research, since this is an academic proceeding.” She smiled smoothly. “I ran across an historian of about a thousand years ago who had tested for the power of prayer.”

  Hari’s mouth made a surprised, skeptical 0. The thin man demanded, “How could one scientifically–”

  “He reasoned that the people most prayed for were the most famous. Yet they had to be exalted, above the fray.”

  “The emperors?” The thin man was rapt.

  “Exactly. And their lesser family members. He analyzed their mortality rates.”

  Hari had never heard this, but his innate skepticism demanded detail. “Allowing for their better medical care, and safety from ordinary accidents?”

  Dors grinned. “Of course. Plus their risk of assassination.”

  The thin man did not know where this line of attack was going, but his curiosity got the better of him. “And...?”

  Dors said, “He found that emperors died earlier than unprayed-for people.”

  The thin man looked shocked, angry. Hari asked Dors, “What was the root mean deviation?”

  “Always the skeptic! Not sufficient to prove that prayer had an actually harmful effect.”

  “Ah.” The crowd seemed to find this example of tag-team puffery entertaining. Best to leave them wanting more. “Thank you,” he said, and they melted away behind a screen of Specials.

  That left the crowd itself. Cleon had urged him to mingle with these folk, supposedly his basic power base, the meritocrats. Hari wrinkled his nose and nonetheless plunged in.

  It was a matter of style, he realized after the first thirty minutes.

  He had learned early in rural Helicon to place great store in good manners and civility. Among the alert, hard-edged academics he had found many who seemed poorly socialized, until he realized that they were operating out of a different culture, where cleverness mattered more than grace. Their subtle shadings of voice carried arrogance and assurance in precarious balance, which in unguarded moments tilted into acerbic, cutting judgment, often without even the appealing veneer of wit. He had to make himself remember to say “With all due respect,” at the beginning of an argument, and even to mean it.

  Then there were the unspoken elements.

  Among the fast-track circles, body language was essential, a taught skill. There were carefully designed poses for Confidence, Impatience, Submission (four shadings), Threat, Esteem, Coyness and dozens more. Codified and understood unconsciously, each induced a specific desired neurological state in both self and others. The rudiments for a full-blown craft lay in dance, politics, and the martial arts. By being systematic, much more could be conveyed. As with language, a dictionary helped.

  A nonlinear philosopher of Galaxy-wide fame gave Hari a beaming smile, body language screaming self-confidence, and said, “Surely, Professor, you cannot maintain that your attempt to import math into history can somehow work? People can be what they wish. No equations will make them otherwise.”

  “I seek to describe, that’s all.”

  “No grand theory of history, then?”

  Avoid a direct denial, he thought. “I will know I’m on the right track when I can simply describe a bit of human nature.”

  “Ah, but that scarcely exists,” the man said with assurance, arms and chest turned adroitly.

  “Of course there’s a human nature!” Hari shot back.

  A pitying smile, a lazy shrug. “Why should there be?”

  “Heredity interacts with environment to tug us back toward a fixed mean. It gathers people in all societies, across millions of worlds, into the narrow statistical circle that we must call human nature.”

  “I don’t think there are enough general traits–”

  “Parent-child bonding. Division of labor between the sexes.”

  “Well, surely that’s common among all animals. I–”

  “Incest avoidance. Altruism–we call it ‘humanitarianism,’ a telling clue, eh?–toward our near kin.”

  “Well, those are just normal family–”

  “Look at the dark side. Suspicion of strangers. Tribalism–witness Trantor’s eight hundred Sectors! Hierarchies in even the smallest groups, from the Emperor’s court to a bowling team.”

  “Surely you can’t make such leaps, such simplistic, grotesque comparisons–”

  “I can and do. Male dominance, generally, and when resources are scarce, marked territorial aggression.”

  “These are little traits.”

  “They link us. The sophisticated Trantorian and an Arcadian farmer can still understand each other’s lives, for the simple reason that their common humanity lives in the genes they share from many tens of millennia ago.”

  This outburst was not received well. Faces wrinkled, mouths pouched in disapproval.

  Hari saw he had overstepped. What’s more, he had nearly exposed psychohistory.

  Yet he found it hard to not speak frankly. In his view the humanities and social sciences shrank to specialized branches of both mathematics and biology. History, biography, and fiction were symptoms. Anthropology and sociology together became the sociobiology of a single species. But he could not get a feel for how to include that in the equations. He had spoken out, he saw suddenly, because he was frustrated–by his own lack of understanding.

  Still, that did not excuse his stupidity. He opened his mouth to smooth over the waters.

  He saw the agitated man coming up on his left. Mouth awry, eyes white, hand-extended, poking forward, a tube in it, chromed and sleek and with a precise hole at the tip, a dark spot that expanded as he looked at it until it seemed like the Eater of All Things that lurked at Galactic Center, im
mense

  Dors hit the man quite expertly. She deflected the arm up, jabbed him in the throat, struck next at the belly. Then she twisted the arm and forced him into a quarter-turn, her left leg coming around and cutting his feet from beneath him, her right hand forcing the head down–

  And they struck the floor solidly, Dors on top, the gun skittering away among the shoes of the crowd–which was falling back in panic.

  Specials blocked in around him and he saw no more. He shouted to Dors. Screams and shouts hammered at him from all sides.

  More bedlam. Then he was clear of the Specials and the man was getting up and Dors was standing, holding the pistol, shaking her head. The man who had pointed it struggled to his feet.

  “A recording tube,” she said in disgust.

  “What?” Hari could barely hear in the noise.

  The man’s left arm was sticking out at a wrong angle, plainly broken. “I–I agreed with your every word,” the man croaked out, his face a ghastly white. “Really.”

  7.

  Hari’s father had derisively referred to most public affairs as “dust-ups”–a big cloud on the horizon, a tiny speck underneath. His lip had curled back in a farmer’s disdain for making more of a thing than it was.

  The incident at the Grand Imperial Universities Colloquy had become a grand dustup. Fully 3D’d, the scandal–PROF’S WIFE SOCKS FAN–burgeoned with each replaying.

  Cleon called, tsk-tsking, and commenting broadly on how wives could be a burden in high office. “This will hurt your candidacy, I fear,” he had said. “I must do some mending.”

  Hari did not report this to Dors. Cleon’s hint was clear. It was common practice among Imperial circles to divorce on grounds of general unsuitability–which meant unfashionability. In matters of vast power, appetite for more often overwhelmed all other emotions, even love.

  He went home, irked by this conversation, to find Dors at work in the kitchen. She had her arms open–literally, not in greeting.

  The epidermis hung loose, as if she had pulled a tight glove halfway off. Veins interlaced with the artificial neural net and she was working with tiny tools among them. Supple skin peeled back in a curved line down from elbow to wrist, moist crimson and intricate electronics. She was working on the augmented wrist, a thin yellow collar that did not look as though it could take three times the normal human’s impact.

  “That fellow damaged you?”

  “No, I did it to myself–or rather, overdid it.”

  “A sprain?”

  She smiled without humor. “My pivots don’t sprain. The collar mounts don’t mend. I’m replacing them.”

  “Jobs like this, it’s not the parts, it’s the labor.”

  She looked at him quizzically and he decided not to pursue the joke. He normally put from his mind the fact that his true love was a robot–or more accurately, a humaniform, vastly technically assisted, human-robot synthesis.

  She had come to him through R. Daneel Olivaw, the ancient positronic robot who had saved Hari when he first came to Trantor and ran afoul of nasty political forces. She had been assigned at first as a bodyguard. He had known what she was from the start, at least approximately, but that did not prevent him from falling in love with her. Intelligence, character, charm, a simmering sexuality–these were not purely human facets, he had learned–by direct example.

  He got her a drink as she worked, biding his time. He had ceased to be amazed by her repair work, often carried out on an utterly unsanitized field. There were antimicrobial methods available to the humaniform robots that could not work for ordinary humans, she had said. He had no idea how this could be. She discouraged further discussion, often deflecting him with passion. He had to admit that as a ploy this was completely effective.

  She rolled her skin back into place, grimacing at the pain. She could shut off whole sections of her superficial nervous system, he knew, but kept a few strands alert as a diagnostic. The tabs self-sealed with pops and purrs.

  “Let’s see.” She paused, feeling each wrist in turn. Two quick snaps. “They lock in fine.”

  “Most people, you know, would find this sight quite unsettling.”

  “That’s why I don’t do it on the way to work.”

  “Very public spirited of you.”

  They both knew she would be hounded down if there were any suspicion of her true nature. Robots of advanced capability had been illegal for millennia. Tiktoks were acceptable precisely because they were low-grade intelligences, rigorously held below the threshold of legally defined sentience. Violating those standards in manufacture was a capital crime, an Imperial violation, no exceptions. And strong, ancient emotions backed up the law: the Junin Sector riots had proved that.

  Numerical simulations were similarly restricted. That was why the Voltaire and Joan sims, developed by the “New Renaissance” hotheads on Sark, had been carefully tailored to squeeze through algorithmic loopholes. Apparently that Marq fellow at Artifice Associates had souped up the Voltaire at the last minute. Since the sim was then erased, the violation had escaped detection.

  Hari did not like having even a slight connection to crime, but he now realized that this was foolishness. Already his entire life revolved around Dors, a hidden pariah.

  “I’m going to withdraw from the First Minister business,” he said decisively.

  She blinked. “Me.”

  She was always quick. “Yes.”

  “We had agreed that the risk of increased scrutiny was worth gaining some power.”

  “To protect psychohistory. But I expected very little of the spotlight to fall upon you. Now–”

  “I am an embarrassment.”

  “Coming in downstairs, there were a dozen 3D snouts pointing at me. They’re waiting for you.”

  “I will stay here, then.”

  “For how long?”

  “The Specials can take me out through a new entrance. They’ve cut one and installed an agrav shaft.”

  “You can’t avoid them forever, darling.”

  She got up and embraced him. “Even if they find me out, I can go away.”

  “If you’re lucky and escape. Even if you do, I can’t live without you. I won’t–”

  “I could be transformed.”

  “Another body?”

  “A different one. Skin, corneas, some neural signatures changed.”

  “File the serial numbers off and send you back?”

  She stiffened in his arms. “Yes.”

  “What can’t your … kind … do?”

  “We cannot invent psychohistory.”

  He whirled away from her in frustration and smacked his palm against a wall. “Damn it, nothing is as important as us.”

  “I feel the same. But now I think it is even more important for you to remain a candidate for First Minister.”

  “Why?” He paced around their living room, eyes darting.

  “You are a player for very high stakes. Whoever wishes to assassinate you–”

  “Lamurk, Cleon believes.”

  “–will probably see that merely withdrawing your candidacy is no firm solution. The Emperor could reintroduce you into the game at any later time.”

  “I don’t like being treated as a chess piece.”

  “A knight?–yes, I can see you that way. Do not forget that there are other suspects, factions which may wish you out of the way.”

  “Such as?’’

  “The Academic Potentate.”

  “But she’s a scholar, like me!”

  “Was. She is now a player on the chessboard.”

  “Not the queen, I hope.”

  Dors kissed him lightly. “I should mention that my ferret programs turned up a plausibility matrix for Lamurk’s behavior, based on his past. He has eliminated at least half a dozen rivals on his rise to the top. He is something of a traditionalist in method, as well.”

  “My, that’s comforting.”

  She gave him an odd, pensive glance. “His rivals were all knifed. T
he classic dispatch of historical intrigue.”

  “I wouldn’t suspect Lamurk to have such an eye for our Imperial heritage.”

  “He is a classicist. In his view, you are a pawn, one best swept from the board.”

  “A rather bloodless way to put it.”

  “I am taught–and built–to assess and act coolly.”

  “How do you reconcile your ability–in fact, let’s not put too fine a point on it, your relish–at the prospect of killing a person in my defense?”

  “The Zeroth Law.”

  “Um.” He recited, “Humanity as a whole is placed above the fate of a single human.”

  “I do feel pain from First Law interaction...”

  “So the First Law, now modified, is,, A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, unless this would violate the Zeroth Law of Robotics’?”

  “Exactly.”

  “This is another game you play. With very tough rules.”

  “It is a larger game.”

  “And psychohistory is a potential new set of game plans?”

  “In a way.” Her voice softened and she embraced him. “You should not trouble yourself so. What we have is a private paradise.”

  “But the damned games, they always go on.”

  “They must.”

  He kissed her longingly, but something inside him seethed and spun, an armature whirring fruitlessly in surrounding darkness.

  8.

  Yugo was waiting in his office the next morning. Face flushed, wide-eyed, he demanded, “What can you do?”

  “Uh, about what?”

  “The news! The Safeguards stormed the Bastion.”

  “Uh, oh.” Hari vaguely recalled that a Dahlite faction had staged a minor revolt and holed up in a redoubt. Negotiations had dragged on. Yes, and Yugo had told him about it, several times. “It’s a local Trantorian issue, isn’t it?”

  “That’s the way we kept it!” Yugo’s hands flew in elaborate gestures, like birds taking frenzied flight. “Then the Safeguards came in. No warning. Killed over four hundred. Blew ’em apart, blasters on full, no warning.”

  “Astonishing,” Hari said in what he hoped was a sympathetic tone.