Today, Hari decided to make a little mischief. “Thank you, colleagues, for attending. We have many administrative matters to engage. Yugo?”
A rustle. Yugo’s eyes widened, but he stood up quickly and climbed up to the speaker’s platform.
He always had someone else chair meetings, even though as chairman he had called them, chosen the hour, fixed the agenda. He knew that some regarded him as a strong personality, simply by dint of knowing the research agenda so deeply.
That was a common error, mistaking knowledge for command. He had found that if he presided, there was little dissent from his own views. To get open discussion demanded that he sit back and listen and take notes, intervening only at key moments.
Years ago Yugo had wondered why he did this, and Hari waved away the problem. “I’m not a leader,” he said. Yugo gave him a strange look, as if to say, Who do you think you’re kidding?
Hari smiled to himself. Some of the full professors around him were muttering, casting glances. Yugo launched into the agenda, speaking quickly in a strong, clear voice.
Hari sat back and watched irritation wash over some of his esteemed colleagues. Noses wrinkled at Yugo’s broad accent. One of them mouthed to another, Dahlite! and was answered, Upstart!
About time they got “a bit of the boot,” as his father had once termed it. And for Yugo to get a taste of running the department.
After all, this First Minister business could get worse. He could need a replacement.
4.
“We should leave soon,” Hari said, scribbling on his notepad.
“Why? The reception doesn’t start for ages.” She smoothed out her dress with great care, eyes critical.
“I want to take a walk on the way.”
“The reception is in Dahviti Sector.”
“Humor me.”
She pulled on the sheath dress with some effort. “I wish this weren’t the style.”
“Wear something else, then.”
“This is your first appearance at an Imperial affair. You’ll want to look your best.”
“Translation: you look your best and stand next to me.”
“You’re just wearing that Streeling professorial garb.”
“Appropriate to the occasion. I want to show that I’m still just a professor.”
She worked on the dress some more and finally said, “You know, some husbands would enjoy watching their wives do this.”
Hari looked up as she wriggled into the last of the clingy ensemble in amber and blue. “Surely you don’t want to get me all excited and then have to endure the reception that way.”
She smiled impishly. “That’s exactly what I want.”
He lounged back in his airchair and sighed theatrically. “Mathematics is a finer muse. Less demanding.”
She tossed a shoe at him, missing by a precise centimeter.
Hari grinned. “Careful, or the Specials will rush to defend me.”
Dors began her finishing touches and then glanced at him, puzzled. “You are even more distracted than usual.”
“As always, I fit my research into the nooks and crannies of life.”
“The usual problem? What’s important in history?”
“I’d prefer to know what’s not.”
“I agree that the customary mega-history approach, economics and politics and the rest, isn’t enough.”
Hari looked up from his pad. “There are some historians who think that the little rules of a society have to be counted, to understand the big laws that make it work.”
“I know that research.” Dors twisted her mouth doubtfully. “Small rules and big laws. How about simplifying? Maybe the laws are just all the rules, added up?”
“Of course not.”
“Example,” she persisted.
He wanted to think, but she would not be put off. She poked him in the ribs. “Example!”
“All right. Here’s a rule: Whenever you find something you like, buy a lifetime supply, because they’re sure to stop making it.”
“That’s ridiculous. A joke.”
“Not much of a joke, but it’s true.”
“Well, do you follow this rule?”
“Of course.”
“How?”
“Remember the first time you looked in my closet?”
She blinked. He grinned, recalling. She had been subtly snooping, and slid aside the large but feather-light door. In a rectangular grid of shelves were clothes sorted by type, then color. Dors had gasped. “Six blue suits. At least a dozen padshoes, all black. And shirts!-off-white, olive, a few red. At least fifty! So many, all alike.”
“And exactly what I like,” he had said. “This also solves the problem of choosing what to wear in the morning. I just reach in at random.”
“I thought you wore the same clothes day after day.”
He had raised his eyebrows, aghast. “The same? You mean, dirty clothes?”
“Well, when they didn’t change…”
“I change every day!” He chuckled, remembering, and said, “Then I usually put on the same outfit the next day, because I like it. And you will not find any of those available in the stores again.”
“I’ll say,” she said, fingering the weave on his shirts. “These are at least four seasons out of fashion.”
“See? The rule works.”
“To me, a week is twenty-one clothing opportunities. To you, it’s a chore.”
“You’re ignoring the rule.”
“How long did you dress that way?”
“Since I noticed how much time I spent making decisions about what to wear. And that what I really liked to wear wasn’t in the stores very often. I generalized a solution to both problems.”
“You’re amazing.”
“I’m simply systematic.”
“You’re obsessional.”
“You’re judging, not diagnosing.”
“You’re a dear. Crazy, but a dear. Maybe they go together.”
“Is that a rule, too?”
She kissed him. “Yes, professor.”
The inevitable Special screen formed about them the instant they left their apartment. By now he and Dors had trained the Specials to at least allow them the privacy of a single wedge in the drop tube.
The grav drop was in fact no miracle of gravitational physics; it came from advanced electromagnetics. Each instant over a thousand electrostatic fields supported him through intricate charge imbalances. He could feel them playing in his hair, small twinges skating across his skin, as the field configurations handed him off to each other, each lowering his mass infinitesimally down the chute.
When they left the wedge, thirteen floors higher, Dors passed a charge-programmed comb through her hair. It crackled and snapped obediently into its style: “smart” hair.
They entered a broad passageway lined with shops. Hari liked being in a place where he could see farther than a hundred meters.
Movement was quick because there was no cross traffic for any conveyance. A slidewalk ran at the center, going their way, but they stayed near the shop windows and browsed as they ambled.
To move laterally, one simply went up or down a level by elevator or escalator, then stepped on a moving belt or entered a robopod. In the corridors to both sides the slideway ran opposite. With no left or right turns, traffic mishaps were rare. Most people walked wherever was practical, for the exercise and for the indefinable exhilaration of Trantor itself. People who came here wanted the constant stimulation of humanity, ideas, and cultures rubbing against each other in productive friction. Hari was not immune to it, though it lost some savor if overdone.
People in the squares and park-hexagons wore fashions from the twenty-five million worlds. He saw self-shaping “leathers” from animals who could not possibly have resembled the mythical horse. A man sauntered by with leggings slit to his hip, exposing blue-striped skin that bunched and slid in a perpetual show. An angular woman sported a bodice of open-mouthed faces, each swallowing ivory-nippled breasts; he had to look twice to believe they weren’t real. Girls in outrageously cut pomp-vestments paraded noisily. A child-or was it a normal inhabitant of a strong-grav world?-played a photozither, strumming its laser beams.