Foundation’s Friends

by Ben Bova

  Was that a look of dread that crossed her face?

  “We’re alone,” Deet said quietly. “Zay saw to that. Truly alone, as we can’t be even in the apartment. “

  It took Leyel a moment to realize what she was asserting. He dared not even speak the word. So he mouthed his question: Pubs?

  “They never bother with the library in their normal spying. Even if they set up something special for you, there’s now an interference field blocking out our conversation. Chances are, though, that they won’t bother to monitor you again until you leave here.“

  She seemed edgy. Impatient. As if she didn’t like having this conversation. As if she wanted him to get on with it, or maybe just get it over with.

  “If you don’t mind,” he said. “I haven’t interrupted you here before, I thought that just this once-”

  “Of course, “ she said. But she was still tense. As if she feared what he might say.

  So he explained to her all his thoughts about language. All that he had gleaned from Kispitorian’s and Magolissian’s work. She seemed to relax almost as soon as it became clear he was talking about his research. What did she dread, he wondered. Was she afraid I came to talk about our relationship? She hardly needed to fear that. He had no intention of making things more difficult by whining about things that could riot be helped.

  When he was through explaining the ideas that had come to him, she nodded carefully-as she had done a thousand times before, after he explained an idea or argument. “I don’t know,” she finally said. As so many times before, she was reluctant to commit herself to an immediate response.

  And, as he had often done, he insisted. “But what do you think?”

  She pursed her lips. “Just offhand-I’ve never tried a serious linguistic application of community theory, beyond jargon formation, so this is just my first thought-but try this. Maybe small isolated populations guard their language-jealously, because it’s part of who they are. Maybe language is the most powerful ritual of all, so that people who have the same language are one in a way that people who can’t understand each other’s speech never are. We’d never know, would we, since everybody for ten thousand years has spoken Standard.”

  “So it isn’t the size of the population, then, so much as-’’

  “How much they care about their language. How much it defines them as a community. A large population starts to think that everybody talks like them. They want to distinguish themselves, form a separate identity. Then they start developing jargons and slangs to separate themselves from others. Isn’t that what happens to common speech? Children try to find ways of talking that their parents don’t use. Professionals talk in private vocabularies so laymen won’t know the passwords. All rituals for community definition.”

  Leyel nodded gravely, but he had one obvious doubt.

  Obvious enough that Deet knew it, too. “Yes, yes, I know, Leyel. I immediately interpreted your question in terms of my own discipline. Like physicists who think that everything can be explained by physics. “

  Leyel laughed. “I thought of that, but what you said makes sense. And it would explain why the natural tendency of communities is to diversify language. We want a common tongue, a language of open discourse. But we also want private languages. Except a completely private language would be useless-whom would we talk to? So wherever a community forms, it creates at least a few linguistic barriers to outsiders, a few shibboleths that only insiders will know. “

  “And the more allegiance a person has to a community, the more fluent he’ll become in that language, and the more he’ll speak it.”

  “Yes, it makes sense,” said Leyel. “So easy. You see how much I need you?”

  He knew that his words were a mild rebuke-why weren’t you home when I needed you-but he couldn’t resist saying it. Sitting here with Deet, even in this strange and redolent place, felt right and comfortable. How could she have withdrawn from him? To him, her presence was what made a place home. To her, this place was home whether he was there or not.

  He tried to put it in words-in abstract words, so it wouldn’t sting. “I think the greatest tragedy is when one person has more allegiance to his community than any of the other members. “

  Deet only half smiled and raised her eyebrows. She didn’t know what he was getting at.

  “He speaks the community language all the time,” said Leyel. “Only nobody else ever speaks it to him, or not enough anyway. And the more he speaks it, the more he alienates the others and drives them away, until he’s alone. Can you imagine anything more sad? Somebody who’s filled up with a language, hungry to speak, to hear it spoken, and yet there’s no one left who understands a word of it.”

  She nodded, her eyes searching him. Does she understand what I’m saying? He waited for her to speak. He had said all he dared to say.

  “But imagine this,” she finally said. “What if he left that little place where no one understood him, and went over a hill to a new place, and all of a sudden he heard a hundred voices, a thousand, speaking the words he had treasured all those lonely years. And then he realized that he had never really known the language at all. The words had hundreds of meanings and nuances he had never guessed. Because each speaker changed the language a little just by speaking it. And when he spoke at last, his own voice sounded like music in his ears, and the others listened with delight, with rapture, his music was like the water of life pouring from a fountain, and he knew that he had never been home before. “

  Leyel couldn’t remember hearing Deet sound so-rhapsodic, that was it, she herself was singing. She is the person she was talking about. In this place, her voice is different, that’s what she meant. At home with me, she’s been alone. Here in the library she’s found others who speak her secret language. It isn’t that she didn’t want our marriage to succeed. She hoped for it, but I never understood her. These people did. Do. She’s home here, that’s what she’s telling me.

  “I understand,” he said.

  “Do you?” She looked searchingly into his face.

  “I think so. It’s all right.”

  She gave him a quizzical look.

  “I mean, it’s fine. It’s good. This place. It’s fine.”

  She looked relieved, but not completely. “You shouldn’t be so sad about it, Leyel. This is a happy place. And you could do everything here that you ever did at home.”

  Except love you as the other part of me, and have you love me as the other part of you. “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “No, I mean it. What you’re working on-I can see that you’re getting close to something. Why not work on it here, where we can talk about it?”

  Leyel shrugged.

  “You are getting close, aren’t you?”

  “How do I know? I’m thrashing around like a drowning man in the ocean at night. Maybe I’m close to shore, and maybe I’m just swimming farther out to sea.”

  “Well, what do you have? Didn’t we get closer just now?”

  “No. This language thing-if it’s just an aspect of community theory, it can’t be the answer to human origin.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because many primates have communities. A lot of other animals. Herding animals, for instance. Even schools of fish. Bees. Ants. Every multicelled organism is a community, for that matter. So if linguistic diversion grows out of community, then it’s inherent in prehuman animals and therefore isn’t part of the definition of humanity.”

  “Oh. I guess not.”

  “Right.”

  She looked disappointed. As if she had really hoped they would find the answer to the origin question right there, that very day.

  Leyel stood up. “Oh well. Thanks for your help. “

  “I don’t think I helped.”

  “Oh, you did. You showed me I was going up a dead-end road. You saved me a lot of wasted-thought. That’s progress, in science, to know which answers aren’t true.”

  His words had a double meaning, of course. She had also s
hown him that their marriage was a dead-end road. Maybe she understood him. Maybe not. It didn’t matter-he had understood her. That little story about a lonely person finally discovering a place where she could be at home-how could he miss the point of that?

  “Leyel,” she said. “Why not put your question to the indexers?”

  “Do you think the library researchers could find answers where I haven’t?”

  “Not the research department. Indexing. “

  “What do you mean?”

  “Write down your questions. All the avenues you’ve pursued. Linguistic diversity. Primate language. And the other questions, the old ones. Archaeological, historical approaches. Biological. Kinship patterns. Customs. Everything you can think of. Just put it together as questions. And then we’ll have them index it.”

  “Index my questions?”

  “It’s what we do-we read things and think of other things that might be related somehow, and we connect them. We don’t say what the connection means, but we know that it means something, that the connection is real. We won’t give you answers, Leyel, but if you follow the index, it might help you to think of connections. Do you see what I mean?”

  “I never thought of that. Do you think a couple of indexers might have the time to work on it?”

  “Not a couple of us. All of us. “

  “Oh, that’s absurd, Deet. I wouldn’t even ask it.”

  “I would. We aren’t supervised up here, Leyel. We don’t meet quotas. Our job is to read and think. Usually we have a few hundred projects going, but for a day we could easily work on the same document.”

  “It would be a waste. I can’t publish anything, Deet.”

  “It doesn’t have to be published. Don’t you understand? Nobody but us knows what we do here. We can take it as an unpublished document and work on it just the same. It won’t ever have to go online for the library as a whole.”

  Leyel shook his head. “ And then if they lead me to the answer-what, will we publish it with two hundred bylines?”

  “It’ll be your paper, Leyel. We’re just indexers, not authors. You’ll still have to make the connections. Let us try. Let us be part of this.”

  Suddenly Leyel understood why she was so insistent on this. Getting him involved with the library was her way of pretending she was still part of his life. She could believe she hadn’t left him, if he became part of her new community.

  Didn’t she know how unbearable that would be? To see her here, so happy without him? To come here as just one friend among many, when once they had been-or he had thought they were-one indivisible soul? How could he possibly do such a thing?

  And yet she wanted it, he could see it in the way she was looking at him, so girlish, so pleading that it made him think of when they were first in love, on another world-she would look at him like that whenever he insisted that he had to leave. Whenever she thought she might be losing him.

  Doesn’t she know who has lost whom?

  Never mind. What did it matter if she didn’t understand? If it would make her happy to have him pretend to be part of her new home, part of these librarians-if she wanted him to submit his life’s work to the ministrations of these absurd indexers, then why not? What would it cost him? Maybe the process of writing down all his questions in some coherent order would help him. And maybe she was right-maybe a Trantorian index would help him solve the origin question.

  Maybe if he came here, he could still be a small part of her life. It wouldn’t be like marriage. But since that was impossible, then at least he could have enough of her here that he could remain himself, remain the person that he had become because of loving her for all these years.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll write it up and bring it in.”

  “I really think we can help.”

  “Yes,” he said, pretending to more certainty than he felt. “Maybe.” He started for the door.

  “Do you have to leave already?”

  He nodded.

  “Are you sure you can find your way out?”

  “Unless the rooms have moved.”

  “No, only at night.”

  “Then I’ll find my way out just fine.” He took a few steps toward her, then stopped.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “I thought you were going to kiss me goodbye.” Then she puckered up like a three-year-old child.

  He laughed. He kissed her-like a three-year-old-and then he left.

  For two days he brooded. Saw her off in the morning, then tried to read, to watch the vids, anything. Nothing held his attention. He took walks. He even went topside once, to see the sky overhead-it was night, thick with stars. None of it engaged him. Nothing held. One of the vid programs had a moment, just briefly, a scene on a semiarid world, where a strange plant grew that dried out at maturity, broke off at the root, and then let the wind blow it around, scattering seeds. For a moment he felt a dizzying empathy with the plant as it tumbled by-am I as dry as that, hurtling through dead land? But no, he knew even that wasn’t true, because the tumbleweed had life enough left in it to scatter seeds. Leyel had no seed left. That was scattered years ago.

  On the third morning he looked at himself in the mirror and laughed grimly. “Is this how people feel before they kill themselves?” he asked. Of course not-he knew that he was being melodramatic. He felt no desire to die.

  But then it occurred to him that if this feeling of uselessness kept on, if he never found anything to engage himself, then he might as well be dead, mightn’t he, because his being alive wouldn’t accomplish much more than keeping his clothes warm.

  He sat down at the scriptor and began writing down questions. Then, under each question, he would explain how he had already pursued that particular avenue and why it didn’t yield the answer to the origin question. More questions would come up then-and he was right, the mere process of summarizing his own fruitless research made answers seem tantalizingly close. It was a good exercise. And even if he never found an answer, this list of questions might be of help to someone with a clearer intellect-or better information-decades or centuries or millennia from now.

  Deet came home and went to bed with Leyel still typing away. She knew the look he had when he was fully engaged in writing-she did nothing to disturb him. He noticed her enough to realize that she was carefully leaving him alone. Then he settled back into writing.

  The next morning she awoke to find him lying in bed beside her, still dressed. A personal message capsule lay on the floor in the doorway from the bedroom. He had finished his questions. She bent over, picked it up, took it with her to the library.

  “His questions aren’t academic after all, Deet.”

  “I told you they weren’t.”

  “Hari was right. For all that he seemed to be a dilettante, with his money and his rejection of the universities, he’s a man of substance.”

  “Will the Second Foundation benefit, then, if he comes up with an answer to his question?”

  “I don’t know, Deet. Hari was the fortune-teller. Presumably mankind is already human, so it isn’t as if we have to start the process over.”

  “Do you think not?”

  “What, should we find some uninhabited planet and put some newborns on it and let them grow up feral, and then come back in a thousand years and try to turn them human?”

  “I have a better idea. Let’s take ten thousand worlds filled with people who live their lives like animals, always hungry, always quick with their teeth and their claws, and let’s strip away the veneer of civilization to expose to them what they really are. And then, when they see themselves clearly, let’s come back and teach them how to be really human this time, instead of only having bits and flashes of humanity.”

  “All right. Let’s do that.”

  “I knew you’d see it my way.”

  “Just make sure your husband finds out how the trick is done. Then we have all the time in the world to
set it up and pull it off.”

  When the index was done, Deet brought Leyel with her to the library when she went to work in the morning. She did not take him to Indexing, but rather installed him in a private research room lined with vids-only instead of giving the illusion of windows looking out onto an outside scene, the screens filled all the walls from floor to ceiling, so it seemed that he was on a pinnacle high above the scene, without walls or even a railing to keep him from falling off. It gave him flashes of vertigo when he looked around-only the door broke the illusion. For a moment he thought of asking for a different room. But then he remembered Indexing, and realized that maybe he’d do better work if he too felt a bit off balance all the time.

  At first the indexing seemed obvious. He brought the first page of his questions to the lector display and began to read. The lector would track his pupils, so that whenever he paused to gaze at a word, other references would begin to pop up in the space beside the page he was reading. Then he’d glance at one of the references. When it was uninteresting or obvious, he’d skip to the next reference, and the first one would slide back on the display, out of the way, but still there if he changed his mind and wanted it.

  If a reference engaged him, then when he reached the last line of the part of it on display, it would expand to full-page size and slide over to stand in front of the main text. Then, if this new material had been indexed, it would trigger new references-and so on, leading him farther and farther away from the original document until he finally decided to go back and pick up where he left off.

  So far, this was what any index could be expected to do. It was only as he moved farther into reading his own questions that he began to realize the quirkiness of this index. Usually, index references were tied to important words, so that if you just wanted to stop and think without bringing up a bunch of references you didn’t want, all you had to do was keep your gaze focused in an area of placeholder words, empty phrases like “If this were all that could be…” Anyone who made it a habit to read indexed works soon learned this trick and used it till it became reflex.

  But when Leyel stopped on such empty phrases, references came up anyway. And instead of having a clear relationship to the text, sometimes the references were perverse or comic or argumentative. For instance, he paused in the middle of reading his argument that archaeological searches for “primitiveness” were useless in the search for origins because all “primitive” cultures represented a decline from a star-going culture. He had written the phrase “ All this primitivism is useful only because it predicts what we might become if we’re careless and don’t preserve our fragile links with civilization. “ By habit his eyes focused on the empty words “what we might become if.” Nobody could index a phrase like that.