“I make decisions about risk,” he said to her, eyeing the rubble in his office. “You will obey them unless there is an obvious physical danger. Understand?”
“I must use my judgment-”
“No! Involvement with these Sarkian simulations may teach us about shadowy, ancient times. That could affect psychohistory.” He wondered if she were carrying out an order from Olivaw. Why would the robots care so strongly?
“When you are plainly imperiling-”
“You must leave planning-and psychohistory!-to me.”
She batted her eyelashes rapidly, pursed her lips, opened her mouth…and said nothing. Finally, she nodded. Hari let out a sigh.
Then his secretary rushed in, followed by the Specials, and the scene dissolved into a chaos of explanations. He looked the Specials captain straight in the face and said that the ferrite cores had somehow fallen into each other and apparently struck some weak fracture point.
They were, he explained-making it up as he went along, with a voice of professorial authority he had mastered long ago-fragile structures which used tension to stabilize themselves, holding in vast stores of microscopic information.
To his relief the captain just screwed up his face, looked around at the mess, and said, “I should never have let old tech like this in here.”
“Not your fault,” Hari reassured him. “It’s all mine.”
There would have been more pretending to do, but a moment later his holo rang with a reception. He glimpsed Cleon’s personal officer, but before the woman could speak the scene dissolved. He slapped his filter-face command as Cleon’s image coalesced in the air out of a cottony fog.
“I have some bad news,” the Emperor said without any greeting.
“Ah, sorry to hear that,” Hari said lamely.
Below Cleon’s vision he called up a suite of body language postures and hoped they would cover the ferrite dust clinging to his tunic. The red frame that stitched around the holo told him that a suitably dignified face would go out, keyed with his lip movements.
“The High Council is stuck on this representation issue.” Cleon chewed at his lip in irritation. “Until they resolve that, the First Ministership will be set aside.”
“I see. The representation problem…?”
Cleon blinked with surprise. “You haven’t been following it?”
“There is much to do at Streeling.”
Cleon waved airily. “Of course, getting ready for the move. Well, nothing will happen immediately, so you can relax. The Dahlites have logjammed the Galactic low Council. They want a bigger voice-in Trantor and in the whole damned spiral! That Lamurk has sided against them in the High Council. Nobody’s budging.”
“I see.”
“So we’ll have to wait before the High Council can act. Procedural matters of representation take precedent over even ministerships.”
“Of course.”
“Damn Codes!” Cleon erupted. “I should be able to have who I want.”
“I quite agree.” But not me, Hari thought.
“Well, thought you’d like to hear it from me.”
“I do appreciate that, sire.”
“I’ve got some things to discuss, that psychohistory especially. I’m busy, but-soon.”
“Very good, sire.”
Cleon winked away without saying good-bye.
Hari breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m free!” he shouted happily, throwing his hands up.
The Specials stared at him oddly. Hari noticed again his desk and files and walls, all spattered with black grit. His office still looked like paradise to him, compared with the luxuriant snare of the palace.
9.
“The trip, it’ll be worth it just to get out of Streeling,” Yugo said.
They entered the grav station with the inevitable Specials trying to casually stroll alongside. To Hari’s eye they were as inconspicuous as spiders on a dinner plate.
“True enough,” Hari said. At Streeling, High Council members could solicit him, pressure groups could penetrate the makeshift privacy of the Math Department, and of course the Emperor could blossom in the air at any time. On the move, he was safe.
“Good connection comin’ up in two point six minutes.” Yugo consulted his retinal writer by looking to the far left. Hari had never liked the devices, but they were a convenient way of reading-in this case, the grav schedule-while keeping both hands free. Yugo was toting two bags. Hari had offered to help, but Yugo said they were “family jewels” and needed care.
Without breaking stride they passed through an optical reader which consulted seating, billed their accounts, and notified the autoprogram of the increased mass load. Hari was a bit distracted by some free-floating math ideas, and so their drop startled him.
“Oops,” he said, clutching at his armrests. Falling was the one signal that could interrupt even the deepest of meditations. He wondered how far back that alarm had evolved, and then paid attention to Yugo again, who was enthusiastically describing the Dahlite community where they would have lunch.
“You still wonderin’ about that political stuff?”
“The representation question? I don’t care about the infighting, factions, and so on. Mathematically, though, it’s a puzzle.”
“Seems to me it’s pretty clear,” Yugo said with a slight, though respectful, edge in his voice. “Dahlites been gettin’ the short end for too long.”
“Because they have only one Sector’s votes?”
“Right-and there are four hundred million of us in Dahl alone.”
“And more elsewhere.”
“Damn right. Averaged over Trantor, a Dahlite has only point-six-eight as much representation as the others.”
“And throughout the Galaxy-”
“Same damn thing! We got our Zone, sure, but except in the Galactic Low Council, we’re boxed in.”
Yugo had changed from the chattering friend out on a lark to sober-faced and scowling. Hari didn’t want the trip to turn into an argument. “Statistics require care, Yugo. Remember the classic joke about three statisticians who took up hunting ducks-”
“Which are?”
“A game bird, known on some worlds. The first shot a meter high, the second a meter low: When this happened, the third statistician cried, ‘We got it!”‘
Yugo laughed a bit dutifully. Hari was trying to follow Dors’ advice about handling people, using his humor more and logic less. The incident with Lamurk had rebounded in Hari’s favor among the media and even the High Council, the Emperor had said.
Dors herself, though, seemed singularly immune to both laughs and logic; the incident with the ferrite cores had put a strain in their relationship. Hari realized now that this, too, was why he had greeted Yugo’s suggestion of a day away from Streeling. Dors had two classes to teach and couldn’t go. She had grumbled, but conceded that the Specials could probably cover him well enough. As long as he did nothing “foolish.”
Yugo persisted. “Okay, but the courts are stacked against us, too.”
“Dahl is the largest Sector now. You will get your judgeships in time.”
“Time we don’t have. We’re getting shut out by blocs.”
Hari deeply disliked the usual circular logic of political griping, so he tried to appeal to Yugo’s mathist side. “All judging bodies are vulnerable to bloc control, my friend. Suppose a court had eleven judges. Then a cohesive group of six could decide every ruling. They could meet secretly and agree to be bound by what a majority of them thinks, then vote as a bloc in the full eleven.”
Yugo’s mouth twisted with irritation. “The High Tribunal’s eleven-that’s your point, right?”
“It’s a general principle. Even smaller schemes could work, too. Suppose four of the High Tribunal met secretly and agreed to be bound by their own ballot. Then they’d vote as a bloc among the original cabal of six. Then four would determine the outcome of all eleven.”
“Damn-all, it’s worse than I thought,” Yugo said.
“My point is that any finite representation can be corrupted. It’s a general theorem about the method.”
Yugo nodded and then to Hari’s dismay launched into reciting the woes and humiliations visited upon Dahlites at the hands of the ruling majorities in the Tribunal, the Councils both High and Low, the Diktat Directory…