“With you throwing support to me-right.”
Two insects left a big rosy flower and hovered beside Lamurk. He glanced at them, swatted at one. It whirred away. “Could be something in it for you, too.”
“Other than my life?”
Lamurk smiled. “And your wife’s, don’t forget her.”
“I never forget threats against my wife.”
“A man’s got to be realistic.”
Both insects were back. “So I keep hearing.”
Lamurk smirked and sat back, sure of himself now. He opened his mouth
Lightning connected the insects-through Lamurk’s head.
Hari hit the floor as the burnt-yellow electrical discharge snaked and popped in the air. Lamurk half rose. The bolt arced into both ears. His eyes bulged. A thin cry escaped his gaping mouth.
Then it was gone. The insects fell like exhausted cinders.
Lamurk toppled forward. As he fell his arms reached out. His hands opened and closed convulsively. They failed to grasp anything. The body thumped and sprawled on the carpet. Arm muscles still jumped and twitched.
Frozen, Hari realized that even in Lamurk’s last moment the man had been reaching out to grab at him.
13.
He hovered in an N-dimensional space, far from politics.
As soon as Hari returned to Streeling, he went into seclusion. The pandemonium following Lamurk’s assassination were the worst hours he had ever spent.
Daneel’s advice had proved useful-”No matter what I do, remain in your role: a mathist, troubled but above the fray.” But the fray was jarring anarchy. Shouts, accusations, panics. Hari had endured fingers pointed at him, threats. Lamurk’s personal escort drew weapons when Hari finally left the assassination room. His Specials stunned five of them.
Now all of Trantor, and soon enough the Empire, would be rife with rage and speculation. The insect-shockers had carried energies stored in tiny positronic traps, a technology thought to be extinct. Attempts to trace it led nowhere.
In any case, there was no link to Hari. Yet.
By tradition, assassinations were kept at a distance, done by intermediaries. They were also safer that way. Hari’s presence was thus an argument against his involvement-just as Daneel had predicted. Hari liked that aspect of the matter particularly: a prediction holding true. In the mob hysteria which followed, no one assumed he was implicated.
Hari also knew his limits, and here they were. He could not deal with such chaos, except in the broader context of mathematics.
So it was to his familiar, supple abstractions that he fled.
He fanned through dimensions, watching the planes of psychohistory evolve. The entire Galaxy spread before him, not in its awesome spiral, but in parameter-space. Fitness peaks rose like ridges and crests. Here were societies which lasted, while those dwelling in the valleys perished.
Sark.He close-upped the Sark Zone and stepped the dynamical equations at blurring speed. The New Renaissance would effervesce into lurid cultural eruptions. Conflicts arose like orange spikes in the fitness-landscape. Stable peaks collapsed. Runoff from them clogged the valleys, making paths between peaks impassable.
This meant that not merely people but whole planets would be unable to evolve out of a depressive valley. Those worlds would steep in the mire, trapped for eons. Then
Crimson flares. Nova triggers. Once used, these made war far more dangerous.
A solar system could be “cleansed”-a horrifyingly bland term used by ancient aggressors-by inducing a mild nova burst in a balmy sun. This roasted worlds just enough to kill all but those who could swiftly find caverns and store food for the few years of the nova stage.
Hari froze with horror. He had fled into his abstract spaces, but death and irrationality dogged him even here.
In the value-free parameter spaces of the equations, war itself was simply another way to decide among paths. It was wasteful, certainly, highly centralized-and quick.
If war increased the “throughput efficiency” parameters, then the Galactic system would have selected for more wars. Instead, Zonal wars had sputtered along, becoming less frequent. In Sark’s future, glaring red war-stains shrank as time stepped forward, jumping whole years in a flicker. Pink and soft yellow splashes replaced them.
These were more continuous, decentralized decision-trees, operating to defuse conflicts. Microscopic bringers of peace, these processes. Yet the people involved probably never guessed that the long, slow undulations were bettering their lives. They never glimpsed vast agencies outside the blunt agonies and ecstasy of human life.
The “expected utility” model failed to predict this outcome. In that view, each war arose from a perfectly rational calculation by Zonal “actors,” independent of previous experience. Yet wars became unusual, so the Sarkian Zonal system was learning.
It came to him in a flash. Societies were an intricate set of parallel processors.
Each working on its own problem. Each linked to the other.
But no single processor would know that it was learning.
As Sark, so the Empire. The Empire could “know” things that no person grasped. And far more-know things that no organization, no planet, no Zone knew.
Until now. Until psychohistory.
This was new, profound.
It meant that for all these millennia, the Empire had grown a kind of self-knowing unlike any way of comprehending that a mere human had-or even could have. A deep knowing other than the self consciousness which humans bore.
Hari panted with surprise. He tried to see if he could possibly be wrong…
After all, feedback loops were scarcely new. Hari knew the general theorem, ancient beyond measure: If all variables in a system are tightly coupled, and you can change one of them precisely, then you can indirectly control all of them. The system could be guided to an exact outcome through its myriad internal feedback loops. Spontaneously, the system ordered itself-and obeyed.
In truly complex systems, how adjustments occur was beyond the human complexity horizon. Beyond knowing-and most important, not worth knowing.
But this….He expanded the N-dimensional landscape, horizons thrusting away along axes he could barely grasp.
Everywhere, the Empire bristled with…life. Patterns the equations picked out, luminous snaking pathways of data/knowledge/wisdom. All unknown to any human.
To anyone, until this moment.
Psychohistory had discovered an entity greater than human, though of humanity.
He saw suddenly that the Empire had its own landscape, greater and more subtle than anything he had suspected. The Empire’s complex adaptive system had achieved a “poised” state, hovering in the margin between order and full-spectral chaos. There it had sat for millennia, accomplishing ends and tasks that no one knew. It could adapt, evolve. Its apparent “stasis” was in fact evidence that the Empire had found the peak in a huge fitness-landscape.
And as Hari watched, the Empire veered toward the canyons of disorder.
Hari! Terrible things are happening. Come!
He yearned to stay, to learn more…but the voice was Dors’.
14.
Daneel said bleakly, “My agents, my brethren… all dead.”
The robot sat slumped over in Hari’s office. Dors comforted him. Hari rubbed his eyes, still recovering from the digital immersion. Things were moving too fast, far too-
“Tiktoks! They attacked my, my…” Daneel could not go on.
“Where?” Dors asked.
“Allover Trantor! You and I, and a few dozen others, only we survive…” Daneel buried his face in his hands.
Dors grimaced. “This must have something to do with Lamurk, his death.”
“Indirectly, yes.”