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 meritocracy 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
regalia 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 infighting 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 remember 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 professorial 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 irritating and beside the point.
He knew well that the most savage controversies 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 spiral air ramp, electrostatics 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 35 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 -- "
“1 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 O. 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 -- ” i “Incest avoidance. Altruism -- we
call it 'humanitarianism, ' a telling clue, eh? -- toward pur near kin. ” I “Well, those
are just normal family -- ”
"Look at the dark side. Suspicion of strangers.
-realism -- witness Tranter'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, immense --
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.”
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 in 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 undent 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 look 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 signarures 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. The 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.”