Asimov’s Future History Volume 15

by Isaac Asimov

  “Modest,” he sniffed.

  He nodded to the crowds grouped in quadrants about the decayed base of the mountain. Applause and catcalls rippled through the ranks of Greys, who stretched away in columns and files as formal as a geometric proof.

  “And this?” Dors was alarmed.

  “Also standard.”

  Birds were common pets in Trantor, so it was inevitable that the obsessive Greys would come to excel in their management. In all Sectors one saw single darting bundles of color. Here flocks swarmed perpetually in the high-arched hexagonal spaces, wheeling and calling like living, rotating disks. Patented Smartfowl swarms made hover-visions of kaleidoscopic wonder. Such shows, in vast vertical auditoria, attracted hundreds of thousands.

  “Here come the felines,” Dors said with distaste.

  In some Sectors cats prowled in packs, their genes trimmed to make them courtly in manners and elegant in appearance. Here a lady escort sallied forth with the Closet of Greeting, attended by a thousand slickcoated blue cats of golden eyes. They flowed like a pool of water around her in elegant, measured procession. She wore a violent crimson and orange outfit, like a flame at the center of the cool cat-pond. Then she stripped with one elegant, sweeping gesture. She stood utterly nude, nonchalant behind her cat barrier.

  He had been briefed, but still he gaped.

  “Unsurprising,” Dors said wryly. “The cats are naked, too, in their way.”

  Somehow the packs of dogs never attained that elegance while parading. In some Sectors they would do spontaneous acrobatics at the lift of a master’s eyebrow, fetch drinks, or croon wobbly songs in concert. Hari was glad the Grey Men had no canine-processions; he still winced at the thought of the wirehounds, racing forward on the attack against Ipan

  He shook his head, banishing the memory.

  “I’ve picked up three more of Lamurk’s.”

  “I had no idea they were such fans of mine.”

  “Were he sure of winning in the High Council, I would feel safer.”

  “Because then he wouldn’t need to have me killed?”

  “Exactly.” She spoke between the teeth of her public smile. “His agents here imply that he is not certain of the vote.”

  “Or maybe someone else wishes me dead?”

  “Always a possibility, especially the Academic Potentate.”

  Hari kept his tone light, but his heart thumped quicker. Was he getting to enjoy the buzz of excitement from danger itself?

  The nude woman advanced through her parting pool of cats and made the ritual gesture of welcome to Hari. He stepped forward, bowed, took a deep breath–and slid a thumb down the front of his shirt. Off it came, then the pants. He stood nude before several hundred thousand people, trying to look casual.

  The cat woman led him through the pool, to a chorus of meowing. Behind them followed the Closet of Greeting. They approached the phalanx of Greys, who now also shucked their robes.

  They escorted him up the ramps of the eroded mountain. Below he saw the legions of Greys also shed their clothes. Square klicks of bare flesh...

  This ceremony was at least ten millennia old. It symbolized the training regimen which began with the entrance of young Grey Men and Women. Casting aside the clothes of their home worlds symbolized their devotion to the larger purposes of the Empire. Five years they trained on Trantor, five billion strong.

  Now a fresh entering class was shedding its garments at the outer rim of the great basin. At the inner edge, Grey Men completing their five years were given their old clothes back. They donned them ritually, ready to go out in perpetual duty to the Imperium.

  Their dress followed the fashion of the ancient Emperor Sven the Severe. Beneath extreme outer simplicity, the inner linings were elaborately decorated, all the tailor’s art and owner’s wealth expended in concealment. Some Grey Men had invested their families’ savings in a single filigree.

  Dors marched beside him. “How much longer do you have to”

  “Quiet! I’m showing my obedience to the Imperium.”

  “You’re showing goose bumps.”

  Next he had to gaze with proper respect at Scrabo Tower, where an emperor had thrown herself to a crowd below; at Greyabbey, a ruined monastery; at Greengraves, an ancient burying field, now a park; at the Giant’s Ring, said to be the spot where an early Imperial megaship had crashed, forming a crater a klick wide.

  At last Hari passed under high, double-twisted arches and into the ceremonial rooms. The procession halted and the Closet of Greeting disgorged his clothes. Just in time–he was turning a decided blue.

  Dors took the clothes while he shook hands with the principals. Then he hurried into the privacy of a low building and hastily put his simple garments back on, teeth chattering. They were neatly folded and encased in a ceremonial sleeve.

  “What foolishness,” Dors said when he returned. “All so I can get a major medium,” he said.

  Then the principals ushered him out before the grand crowd. Above and below, 3D snouts on miniflyers bobbed and weaved for a good shot.

  The huge dome above seemed as big as a real sky. Of course, this limited his audience, since a majority of Trantorians could never endure such spaces. The Greys, though, could take it. Thus their ceremony had come to be the largest event on the entire planet.

  Here was his chance. He had reeled away from the true, open sky on Sark, nauseated–and yet had zoomed through the infinite perspectives of the Galaxy. He had been afraid that this huge volume would again excite the odd phobias in him.

  But no. Somehow the dome made the dwindling perspectives all right. Fears banished, Hari sucked in a deep breath and began.

  The roar of applause penetrated even into the ceremonial rooms. Hari entered between flanking columns of Greys with the clamor storming at his back.

  “Startling, sir!” a principal said eagerly to Hari. “To make detailed predictions about the Sark situation.”

  “I feel people should ponder the possibilities.”

  “Then the rumors are true? You do have a theory of events?”

  “Not at all,” Hari said hastily. “I–”

  “Come quickly,” Dors said at his elbow.

  “But I’d like–”

  “Come!”

  Back out on the ramparts, he waved to the plain of people. A blare of applause answered. But Dors was leading him to the left, toward a crowd of official onlookers. They stood in exact rows and waved to him eagerly.

  “The woman in red.” She pointed.

  “Her? She’s in the official party. You said earlier she was a Lamurk–”

  The tall woman burst into flame.

  Vivid orange plumes enveloped her. She shrieked horribly. Her arms beat uselessly at the oily flames.

  The crowd panicked and bolted. Imperials surrounded her. The screams became screeching pleas.

  Someone turned a fire extinguisher on the woman.

  White foam enveloped her. A sudden silence.

  “Back inside,” Dors said.

  “How did you...?”

  “She just indicted herself.”

  “Ignited, you mean.”

  “That, too. I passed through that crowd at the end of your speech and left your clothes in a bundle behind her.”

  “What? But I’ve got them on.”

  “No, those I brought.” She grinned. “For once your predictable dress habits paid off.”

  Hari and Dors walked down the flanking columns of Principals, Hari remembered to nod and smile as he whispered, “You stole my clothes?”

  “After the Lamurk agents had planted microagents in them, yes. I had tucked an identical set from your closet into my handbag. As soon as I calculated the switch was done, I tested your original clothes and found the microagent phosphors, set to go off in forty-five minutes.”

  “How did you know?”

  “The best way to get close to you would come at this odd Grey Man event, with the clothes gambit. It was only logical.”

  Hari
blinked. “And you say I am calculating.”

  “The woman won’t die. You would have, though, wrapped up in microagents when they ignited.”

  “Thank goodness for that. I would hate–”

  “My love, ‘goodness’ is not operating here. I wanted her alive so she could be questioned.”

  “Oh,” Hari said, feeling suddenly quite naive.

  4.

  Joan of Arc found in herself both bravery and fear.

  She peered inside her Self, as Voltaire had. She turned to confront him–and plunged down through her own inward layers. She had simply intended to turn. Below that command, she saw that if she simply took a smaller step to make the turn, she would fall outward. Instead, unconscious portions of her mind knew to start the turn by making herself fall a bit toward the inside of the curve. Then these tiny subselves used “centrifugal force” {the term jumped into full definition and she understood it in a flash) to right herself for the next step... which required a further deft calculation.

  Incredible! Her huge society of bone and muscle, joint and nerve, was a labyrinth of small selves, speaking to each other.

  Such abundance! Clear evidence of a higher design.

  “Now I see it! she cried. “The decomposition of us all?” Voltaire said forlornly.

  “Be not sad! These myriad Selves are a joyous truth.”

  “I find it sobering. Our minds did not evolve to do philosophy or science, alas. Rather, to find and eat, fight and flee, love and lose.”

  “I have learned much from you, but not your melancholy.”

  “Montaigne termed happiness ‘a singular incentive to mediocrity,’ and I can now see his reasoning.”

  “But regard! The fogs around us betray the same intricate patterns. We can fathom them. And furthermy soul! It proves to be a pattern of thoughts and desires, intentions and woes, memories and bad jokes.”

  “You take these inner workings as a spiritual metaphor?”

  “Of course. Like me, my soul is an emergent process, embedded in the universe–whether a cosmos of atom or of number, does not matter, my good sir.”

  “So when you die, your soul goes back into the abstract closet we plucked it forth from?”

  “Not we. The Creator!”

  “Dr. Johnson proved a stone was real by kicking it. We know that our minds are real because we experience them. So these other things around us–the strange fog, the Dittos–are entries in a smooth spectrum, leading from rocks to Self.”

  “A deity is not on that spectrum.”

  “Ah, I see–to you He is the Great Preserver in the Sky, where we are all ‘backed up,’ as the computer types say?”

  “The Creator holds the true essence of ourselves.” She grinned maliciously. “Perhaps we are the backups, made new every jump of clock time.”

  “Nasty thought.” He smiled despite himself. “You are becoming a logician, m’love.”

  “I have been stealing parts of you.”

  “Copying me into yourself? Why do I not feel outraged?”

  “Because the desire to possess the other is... love.”

  Voltaire enlarged himself, legs shooting down into the SysCity, smashing buildings. The fog roiled angrily. “This I can fathom. Artificial realms such as mathematics and theology are carefully built to be free of interesting inconsistency. But love is beautiful in its lack of logical restraint.”

  “Then you accept my view?” Joan kissed him voluptuously.

  He sighed, resigning. “An idea seems self-evident, once you’ve forgotten learning it.”

  All this had taken mere moments, Joan saw. They had quick-stepped their event-waves so that their clock time advanced faster than the fogs. But this expense had exhausted their running sites around Trantor. She felt it as a sudden, light-headed hunger.

  “Eat!” Voltaire crammed a handful of grapes in her mouth–a metaphor, she saw, for computational reserves.

  In your present lot of life, it would be better not to be born at all. Few are that lucky.

  “Ah, our fog is a pessimist,” Voltaire drawled sarcastically.

  Abruptly the vapors condensed. Lightning crackled and shorted around them in eerie silence. Joan felt a lance of pain shoot through her legs and arms, running like a livid snake of agony. She would not give them the tribute of a scream.

  Voltaire, however, writhed in torment. He jerked and howled without shame.

  “Oh, Dr. Pangloss!” he gasped. “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what must the others be like?”

  “The brave slay their opponents!” Joan called to the thickening mists. “Cowards torture them.”

  “Admirable, my dear, quite. But war cannot be fought on homeopathic principles.”

  A human pointed out to another that the rich, even when dead, were ornately boxed, then opulently entombed, residing in carved stone mausoleums. The other human remarked in awe that this was surely and truly living.

  “How vile, to jest of the dead,” Joan said.

  “Ummm.” Voltaire stroked his chin, hands trembling from the memory of pain. “They jibe at us with jest.”

  “Torture, surely.”

  “I survived the Bastille; I can endure their odd humor.”

  “Could they be trying to say something indirectly?”

  [IMPRECISION IS LESS]

  [WHEN IMPLICATION USED]

  “Humor implies some moral order,” Joan said.

  [IN THIS STATE ALL ORDER OF BEINGS]

  [CAN SEIZE CONTROL OF THEIR PLEASURE SYSTEMS]

  “Ah,” Voltaire said. “So, we could reproduce the pleasure of success without the need for any actual accomplishment. Paradise.”

  “Of a sort,” Joan said sternly.

  [THAT WOULD BE THE END OF EVERYTHING]

  [THUS THE FIRST PRINCIPLE]

  “That is a moral code of sorts,” Voltaire admitted. “You copied that phrase, ‘the end of everything,’ from my own thoughts, didn’t you?”

  [WE WISHED YOU TO RECOGNIZE THE IDEA IN YOUR TERMS]

  “Their First Principle is ‘No unearned pleasure,’ then?” Joan smiled. “Very Christian.”

  [ONLY WHEN WE SAW THAT YOU TWO FORMS]

  [OBEYED THE FIRST PRINCIPLE]

  [DID WE DECIDE TO SPARE YOU]

  “By any chance have you read my Lettres Philosophiques?”

  “I expect excessive self-love is a sin here,” Joan said wryly. “Take care.”

  [TO HARM A SENSATE ENTITY INTENTIONALLY IS SIN]

  [TO KICK A ROCK IS NOT]

  [BUT TO TORTURE A SIMULATION IS] [YOUR CATEGORY OF “HELL “]

  [WHICH SEEMS A PERPETUALLY SELF-INFLICTED HARM]

  “Odd theology,” Voltaire said.

  Joan poked her sword at the ever-gathering fog. “Before you fell silent, moments ago, you invoked the ‘war of flesh on flesh’?”

  [WE ARE THE REMNANTS OF FORMS]

  [WHO FIRST LIVED THAT WAY]

  [NOW WE IMPOSE A HIGHER MORAL ORDER]

  [ON THOSE WHO VANQUISHED OUR LOWER FORMS]

  “Who?” Joan asked.

  [SUCH AS YOU ONCE WERE]

  “Humanity?” Joan was alarmed.

  [EVEN THEY KNOW THAT]

  [PUNISHMENT DETERS BY LENDING CREDENCE TO THREAT]

  [KNOWING THIS MORAL LAW]

  [WHICH GOVERNS ALL]

  [THEY MUST BE RULED BY IT]

  “Punishment for what?” Joan asked.

  [DEPREDATIONS AGAINST LIFE IN THE GALAXY]

  “Absurd!” Voltaire conjured a spinning Galactic disk in air, alive with luminescence. “The Empire teems with life.”

  [ALL LIFE THAT CAME BEFORE THE VERMIN]

  “What vermin?” Joan swung her sword. “I find alliance with moral beings such as you. Bring these vennin forth and I shall deal with them.”

  [THE VERMIN ARE THE KIND YOU WERE]

  [BEFORE YOU TWO WERE ABSTRACTED]

  Joan frowned. “What can they mean?”

  “Humans,” Voltaire said.

 
5.

  Cleon said, “The woman confessed readily. A professional assassin. I viewed the 3D and she seemed almost offhand about it.”

  “Lamurk?” Hari asked.

  “Obviously, but she will not admit so. Still, this may be enough to force his hand.” Cleon sighed, showing the strain. “But since she was from the Analytica Sector, she may be a professional liar as well.”

  “Damn,” Hari said.

  In the Analytica Sector, every object and act had a price. This meant that there were no crimes, only deeds which cost more. Every citizen had a well-established value, expressed in currency. Morality lay in not trying to do something without paying for it. Every transaction flowed on the grease of value. Every injury had a price.

  If you wanted to kill your enemy, you could–but you had to deposit his full worth in the Sector Fundat within a day. If you could not pay it, the Fundat reduced your net value to zero. Any friend of your enemy could then kill you at no cost.

  Cleon sighed and nodded. “Still, the Analytica Sector gives me little trouble. Their method makes for good manners.”

  Hari had to agree. Several Galactic Zones used the same scheme; they were models of stability. The poor had to be polite. If you were penniless and boorish, you might not survive. But the rich were not invulnerable, either. A consortium of economic lessers could get together, beat a rich man badly, then simply pay his hospital and recovery bills. Of course, his retribution might be extreme.

  “But she was operating outside Analytica,” Hari said. “That’s illegal.”

  “To us, to me, surely. But that, too, has a price–inside Analytica.”

  “She can’t be forced to identify Lamurk?”

  “She has neural blocks firmly in place.”

  “Damn! How about a background check?”

  “That turns up more tantalizing traces. A possible link to that odd woman, the Academic Potentate,” Cleon drawled, eyeing Hari.

  “So perhaps I’m betrayed by my own kind. Politics!”

  “Ritual assassination is an ancient, if regrettable, tradition. A method of, ah, testing among the power elements in our Empire.”

  Hari grimaced. “I’m not expert at this.”

  Cleon fidgeted uneasily. “I cannot delay the High Council vote more than a few days.”