Foundations Fear

by Gregory Benford

Page 57

  Voltaire saw suddenly, within his own inner workings, that the human experience of Beauty, standing inviolate before the boring background, was recognition of the deepest tendencies and themes of the universe as a whole.

  All considered, it was a marvelously parsimonious cortical world-making system.

  From an algorithmic seed sprouted Number and Order, holding sway above the Flux.

  Yet—the Bees.

  He felt overlaying geometries pressing in upon him, upon Joan. Shifting colors flattened into planes of intersecting geometries, perspectives dwindling, twisting, swelling again—into his face, blowing out the back of his Self-volume.

  Whirring, squeezing—They were not human in their patterns.

  Trantor’s Mesh was inhabited not merely by sims such as himself, renegade roustabouts on the run. It hosted a flora and fauna unseen, because the higher life forms hid.

  They had to. They were of alien cultures, ancient empires vast and slow.

  A broad vision unfolded before him, not in words but in strange, oblique…kinesthetics. Speeding sensations, accelerations, lofting lurches—all somehow merging into pictures, ideas. He could not remotely say how he knew and understood from such scattershot impulses—but they worked.

  He sensed Joan beside him—not spatially but conceptually—as they both watched and felt and knew.

  The ancient aliens in the Galaxy were computer-based, not “or­ ganic. ” They derived from vastly older civilizations, surviving their original founders, who perished in the long Darwinian run. Some computer cultures were billions of years old, others very recent.

  They spread, not via starship, but by electromagnetically broad­ casting their salient aspects into other computer-based societies. The Empire had been penetrated long ago, much as a virus enters an unknowing body.

  Humans had always thought of spreading their genes, using starships. These alien, self-propagating ideas spread their “memes”—their cultural truths.

  Memes can propagate between computers as easily as ideas flit between natural, organic brains. Brains are easier to infest than DNA.

  Memes evolved in turn far faster than genes. The organized constellations of information in computers evolved in computers, which are faster than brains. Not necessarily better or wiser, but faster. And speed was the issue.

  Voltaire reeled from the images—quick, vivid penetrations.

  “They are demons! Diseases!” Joan shouted. He heard fear and courage alike in her strained words.

  Indeed, the plain now crawled with malignant sores oozing rot. Pustules poked through the crusty soil. They bulged, sprouted cancerous heads like living blue-black bruises. These burst, spouting steaming pus. Eruptions vomited foulness over Voltaire and Joan. Stinking streams lapped at their dancing feet.

  “The sneezing, the coughs!” Joan shouted. “We have had them all along. They—”

  “Were viruses. These aliens were infecting us. ” Voltaire splashed through combers of filth. The streams had coagulated into a lake, then an ocean. Breakers curled over them, tumbling both in the scummy brown froth.

  “Why such horrible metaphor?” Voltaire cried out to the pewter sky. It filled with churning swarms of Bees as he bobbed in waves of putrefying wastes.

  [WE ARE NOT OF YOUR CORRUPT ORIGINS]

  [HIGHER REASON FOLLOW WE]

  [THE WAR OF FLESH UPON FLESH IS SOON TO END]

  [OF LIFE UPON LIFE]

  [ACROSS THE TURNING DISK OF SUNS]

  [WHICH ONCE WAS OURS]

  “So they have their own agenda for the Empire. ” Voltaire scowled. “I wonder how we shall like it, we of flesh?”

  R. Daneel Olivaw was alarmed. “I have underestimated Lamurk’s power. ”

  “We are few, they are many,” Dors said. She wanted to help this ancient, wise figure, but could think of nothing concrete to suggest. When in doubt, comfort. Or was that too human?

  Olivaw sat absolutely still, using none of his ordinary facial or body language, devoting all capacity to calculation. He had come slipping in on a private shuttle from the worm and now sat with Dors in a suite of the Station. “I cannot assess the situation here. That security officer—you are certain she was not an agent of the Academic Potentate?”

  “She aided us greatly after we had returned to our bodies. ”

  “With Vaddo dead, she could have been pretending innocence. ”

  “True. I cannot rule her out. ”

  “Your escape from Trantor went undetected?”

  Dors touched his hand. “I used every contact, every mechanism I knew. But Lamurk is devious. ”

  “So am I!—if need be. ”

  “You can’t be everywhere. I suspect Lamurk somehow corrupted that Vaddo character. ”

  “I believe he must have been planted in advance,” Daneel said adamantly, eyes narrowing. Evidently he had reached a decision and so had computational room for expres­ sion again.

  “I checked his records. He’s been here for years. No, Lamurk bribed him or persuaded him. ”

  “Not Lamurk himself, of course,” R. Daneel said precisely, lips severe. “An agent. ”

  “I tried to get a brain scan of Vaddo, but could not finesse the legal issues. ” She liked it when R. Daneel used his facial expression programs. But what had he decided?

  “I could extract more from him,” he said neutrally.

  Dors caught the implication. “The First Law, suspended because of the Zeroth Law?”

  “It must be. The great crisis approaches swiftly. ”

  Dors was suddenly quite glad that she did not know more about what was going on in the Empire. “We must get Hari away from here. That is the most important point. ”

  “Agreed. I have arranged highest priority for you two through the wormhole. ”

  “It shouldn’t be busy. We—”

  “I believe they expect extra traffic soon—more Lamurk agents, I fear. Or even the more insidious variety, as the Academic Potentate would employ. ”

  “Then we must hurry. Where shall we go?”

  “Not to Trantor. ”

  “But we live there! Hari won’t like being a vagabond—”

  “Eventually, yes, back to Trantor. Perhaps soon. But for now, anywhere else. ”

  “I’ll ask Hari if there is any special world he prefers. ”

  R. Daneel frowned, lost in thought. With absent-minded grace he scratched his nose, then his eyeball. Dors flinched, but appar­ ently R. Daneel had simply altered his neurocircuitry, and this was an ordinary gesture. She tried to imagine the use for such editing and could not. But then, he had come through millennia of win­ nowing she could not truly imagine, either.

  “Not Helicon,” he said suddenly. “Sentimentality and nostalgia might plausibly lead Hari there. ”

  “Very well. That leaves only twenty-five million or so choices of where to hide. ”

  R. Daneel did not laugh.

  PART 7

  STARS LIKE GRAINS OF SAND

  SOCIOMETRICS—…one of the most vital questions still un­ resolved is the general problem of Empire social stability. This research seeks to find how worlds keep from veering into cycles of boredom (a factor never to be underestimated in human affairs) and revitalization. No Imperial system could endure the jagged changes and maintain steady economic flows. How was this smoothing achieved?—and might such “dampers” that Imperial society had still somehow fail? No progress was made in this area until…

  —ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA

  1.

  The sky tumbled down. Hari Seldon reeled away from it.

  No escape. The awful blue weight rushed at him, swarming down the flanks of the steepled towers. Clouds crushed like weights.

  His stomach lurched. Acid burned his throat. The deep, hard blue of endless spaces thrust him downward like a deep ocean current. Spires scrape
d against the falling sky and his breath came in ragged gasps.

  He spun away from the perpetual chaos of sky and buildings and faced a wall. A moment before he had been walking normally along a city street, when suddenly the weight of the blue bowl above had loomed and the panic had gathered him up.

  He fought to control his breathing. Carefully he inched along the wall, holding to the slick cool glaze. The others had kept walking. They were somewhere ahead, but he did not dare look for them. Face the wall. Step, step—

  There. A door. He stepped before it and the slab slid aside. He stumbled in, weak with relief.

  “Hari, we were—what’s wrong?” Dors rushed over to him.

  “I, I don’t know. The sky—”

  “Ah, a common symptom,” a woman’s booming voice cut in. “You Trantorians do have to adjust, you know. ”

  He looked up shakily into the broad, beaming face of Buta Fyrnix, the Principal Matron of Sark. “I…I was all right before. ”

  “Yes, it’s quite an odd ailment,” Fyrnix said archly. “You Trant­ orians are used to enclosed city, of course. And you can often take well to absolutely open spaces, if you were reared on such worlds—”

  “As he was,” Dors put in sharply. “Come, sit. ”

  Hari’s pride was already recovering. “No, I’m fine. ”

  He straightened and thrust his shoulders back. Look firm, even if you don’t feel it.

  Fyrnix went on, “But a place in between, like Sarkonia’s ten-klick tall towers—somehow that excites a vertigo we have not under­ stood. ”

  Hari understood it all too well, in his lurching stomach. He had often thought that the price of living in Trantor was a gathering fear of large spaces, but Panucopia had seemed to dispel that idea. Now he felt the contrast. The tall buildings had evoked Trantor for him. But they drew his gaze upward, along steepening perspectives, into a sky that had suddenly seemed like a huge plunging weight.

  Not rational, of course. Panucopia had taught him that man was not merely a reasoning machine. This sudden panic had demon­ strated how a fundamentally unnatural condition—living inside Trantor for decades—could warp the mind.

  “Let’s…go up,” he said weakly.

  The lift seemed comforting, even though the press of acceleration and popping ears as they climbed several klicks should—by mere logic—have unsettled him.

  A few moments later, as the others chatted in a reception lounge, Hari peered out at the stretching cityscape and tried to calm his unease.

  Sark had looked lovely on their approach. As the hyperspace cylinder skated down through the upper air, he had taken in a full view of its lush beauties.

  At the terminator, valleys sank into darkness while a chain of snowy mountains gleamed beyond. Late in the evening, just beyond the terminator, the fresh, peaked mountains glowed red-orange, like live coals. He had never been one to climb, but something had beckoned. Mountaintops cleaved the sheets of clouds, leaving a wake like that of a ship. Tropical thunderheads, lit by lightning flashes at night, recalled the blooming buds of white roses.

  The glories of humanity had been just as striking: the shining constellations of cities at night, enmeshed by a glittering web of highways. His heart filled with pride at human accomplishments. Unlike Trantor’s advanced control, here the hand of his fellow Empire citizens was still casting spacious designs upon the planet’s crust. They had shaped artificial seas and elliptical water basins, great plains of tiktok-cultivated fields, immaculate order arising from once-virgin lands.

  And now, standing in the topmost floor of an elegantly slim spire, at the geometric heart of Sarkonia, the capital city…he saw ruination coming.

  In the distance he saw stretching to the sky three twining columns—not majestic spires, but smoke.

  “That fits your calculations, doesn’t it?” Dors said behind him.

  “Don’t let them know!” he whispered.

  “I told them we needed a few moments of privacy, that you were embarrassed by your vertigo. ”

  “I am—or was. But you’re right—the psychohistorical predictions I made are in that chaos out there. ”

  “They do seem odd…. ”