Foundations Fear

by Gregory Benford

Page 31

  “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 intu­ ition 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 ambi­ tion. ” A gleam of steel in the pale eyes.

  “I was…unaware. Madam. ”

  “Science is simply an arbitrary construct. It perpetuates the dis­ credited 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 ‘lan­ guage 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 cat­ egory ‘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 struc­ tures—”

  “—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-nar-ratives. ”

  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 intellec­ tual 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 merito­ cracy 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 re­ galia 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 infight­ ing 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 re­ member 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 irritat­ ing and beside the point. He knew well that the most savage con­ troversies 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 spir
al air ramp, electro­ statics 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, 3D snouts aimed like weapons.

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

  “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 Clas­ sical Galactic.

  The language’s sturdy base had stitched together the early Empire. For many millennia now the language had sat on its laurels, admit­ tedly. 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 hu­ man 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 O. The thin man de­ manded, “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 or­ dinary 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. ”