“Damn,” Hari said.
In the Analytica Sector, every object and act had a price. This meant that there were no crimes, only deeds which cost more. Every citizen had a well-established value, expressed in currency. Morality lay in not trying to do something without paying for it. Every transaction flowed on the grease of value. Every injury had a price.
If you wanted to kill your enemy, you could-but you had to deposit his full worth in the Sector Fundat within a day. If you could not pay it, the Fundat reduced your net value to zero. Any friend of your enemy could then kill you at no cost.
Cleon sighed and nodded. “Still, the Analytica Sector gives me little trouble. Their method makes for good manners.”
Hari had to agree. Several Galactic Zones used the same scheme; they were models of stability. The poor had to be polite. If you were penniless and boorish, you might not survive. But the rich were not invulnerable, either. A consortium of economic lessers could get together, beat a rich man badly, then simply pay his hospital and recovery bills. Of course, his retribution might be extreme.
“But she was operating outside Analytica,” Hari said. “That’s illegal.”
“To us, to me, surely. But that, too, has a price-inside Analytica.”
“She can’t be forced to identify Lamurk?”
“She has neural blocks firmly in place.”
“Damn! How about a background check?”
“That turns up more tantalizing traces. A possible link to that odd woman, the Academic Potentate,” Cleon drawled, eyeing Hari.
“So perhaps I’m betrayed by my own kind. Politics!”
“Ritual assassination is an ancient, if regrettable, tradition. A method of, ah, testing among the power elements in our Empire.”
Hari grimaced. “I’m not expert at this.”
Cleon fidgeted uneasily. “I cannot delay the High Council vote more than a few days.”
“Then I must do something.”
Cleon arched an eyebrow. “I am not without resources…”
“Pardon, sire. I must fight my own battles.”
“The Sark prediction, now that was daring.”
“I did not check it with you first, but I thought-”
“No no, Hari! Excellent! But-will it work?”
“It is only a probability, sire. But it was the only stick I had handy to beat Lamurk with.”
“I thought science yielded certainty.”
“Only death does that, my emperor.”
The invitation from the Academic Potentate seemed odd, but Hari went anyway. The embossed sheet, with its elaborate salutations, came “freighted with nuance,” as Hari’s protocol officer put it.
This audience was in one of the stranger Sectors. Even buried in layers of artifice, many Sectors of Trantor displayed an odd biophilia.
Here in Arcadia Sector, expensive homes perched above a view of an interior lake or broad field. Many sported trees arranged in artfully random bunches, with a clear preference for those with spreading crowns, many branches projecting upward and outward from thick trunks, displaying luxuriant bunches of small leaves. Balconies they rimmed with potted shrubs.
Hari walked through these, seeing them through the lens of Panucopia. It was as though people announced through their choices their primeval origins. Was early humanity, like pans, more secure in marginal terrain-where vistas let them search for food while keeping an eye out for enemies? Frail, without claws or sharp teeth, they might have needed a quick retreat into trees or water.
Similarly, studies showed that some phobias were Galaxy-wide. People who had never seen the images nonetheless reacted with startled fear to holos of spiders, snakes, wolves, sharp drops, heavy masses overhead. None displayed phobias against more recent threats to their lives: knives, guns, electrical sockets, fast cars.
All this had to factor somehow into psychohistory.
“No tracers here, sir,” the Specials’ captain said. “Little hard to keep track, though.”
Hari smiled. The captain suffered from a common Trantorian malady: squashed perspectives. Here in the open, natives would mistake distant, large objects for nearby, small ones. Even Hari had a touch of it. On Panucopia, he at first mistook herds of grazers for rats close at hand.
By now Hari had learned to look through the pomp and glory of rich settings, the crowds of servants, the finery. He ruminated on his psychohistorical research as he followed the protocol officer and did not fully come back to the real world until he sat across from the Academic Potentate.
She spoke ornately, “Please do accept my humble offering,” accompanied delicate, translucent cups of steaming grasswater.
He remembered being irked by this woman and the high academics he met that evening. It all seemed so long ago.
“You will note the aroma is that of ripe oobalong fruit. This is my personal choice among the splendid grasswaters of the world Calafia. It reflects the high esteem in which I hold those who now grace my simple domicile with such illustrious presence.”
Hari had to lower his head in what he hoped was a respectful gesture, to hide his grin. There followed more high-flown phrases about the medical benefits of grasswater, ranging from relief of digestion problems to repair of basal cellular injuries.
Her chins quivered. “You must need succor in such trying times, Academician.”
“Mostly I need time to get my work done.”
“Perhaps you would favor a healthy portion of the black lichen meat? It is the finest, harvested from the flanks of the steep peaks of Ambrose.”
“Next time, certainly.”
“It is hoped fervently that this lowly personage had perhaps been of small service to a most worthy and revered figure of our time…one who perhaps is overstressed?”
A steely edge to her voice put him on guard.
“Could madam get to the point?”
“Very well. Your wife? She is a complex lady.”
He tried to show nothing in his face. “And?”
“I wonder how your prospects in the High Council would fare if I revealed her true nature?”
Hari’s heart sank. This he had not anticipated.
“Blackmail, is it?”
“Such a crude word!”
“Such a crude act.”
Hari sat and listened to her intricate analysis of how Dors’ identity as a robot would undermine his candidacy. All quite true
“And you speak for knowledge, for science?” he said bitterly.
“I am acting in the best interests of my constituents,” she said blandly. “You are a mathist, a theorist. You would be the first academic to reign as First Minister in many decades. We do not think you will rule well. Your failure will cast shadows upon us meritocrats, one and all.”
Hari bristled. “Who says?”
“Our considered opinion. You are impractical. Unwilling to make hard decisions. All our psychers agree with that diagnosis.”
“Psychers?” Hari snorted derisively. Despite calling his theory psychohistory, he knew there was no good model of the individual human personality.
“ I would make a far better candidate, just for exampie.”
“Some candidate. You’re not even loyal to your kind.”
“There you have it! You’re unable to rise above your origins.”
“And the Empire has become the war of all against all.”
Science and mathematics was a high achievement of Imperial civilization, but to Hari’s mind, it had few heroes. Most good science came from bright minds at play. From men and women able to turn an elegant insight, to find beguiling tricks in arcane matters, deft architects of prevailing opinion. Play, even intellectual play, was fun, and that was good in its own right. But Hari’s heroes were those who stuck it out against hard opposition, drove toward daunting goals, accepting pain and failure and keeping on anyway. Perhaps, like his father, they were testing their own character, as much as they were being part of the suave scientific culture.