Not rational, of course. Panucopia had taught him that man was not merely a reasoning machine. This sudden panic had demonstrated how a fundamentally unnatural condition-living inside Trantor for decades-could warp the mind.
“Let’s…go up,” he said weakly.
The lift seemed comforting, even though the press of acceleration and popping ears as they climbed several klicks should-by mere logic-have unsettled him.
A few moments later, as the others chatted in a reception lounge, Hari peered out at the stretching cityscape and tried to calm his unease.
Sark had looked lovely on their approach. As the hyperspace cylinder skated down through the upper air, he had taken in a full view of its lush beauties.
At the terminator, valleys sank into darkness while a chain of snowy mountains gleamed beyond. Late in the evening, just beyond the terminator, the fresh, peaked mountains glowed red-orange, like live coals. He had never been one to climb, but something had beckoned. Mountaintops cleaved the sheets of clouds, leaving a wake like that of a ship. Tropical thunderheads, lit by lightning flashes at night, recalled the blooming buds of white roses.
The glories of humanity had been just as striking: the shining constellations of cities at night, enmeshed by a glittering web of highways. His heart filled with pride at human accomplishments. Unlike Trantor’s advanced control, here the hand of his fellow Empire citizens was still casting spacious designs upon the planet’s crust. They had shaped artificial seas and elliptical water basins, great plains of tiktok-cultivated fields, immaculate order arising from once-virgin lands.
And now, standing in the topmost floor of an elegantly slim spire, at the geometric heart of Sarkonia, the capital city…he saw ruination coming.
In the distance he saw stretching to the sky three twining columns-not majestic spires, but smoke.
“That fits your calculations, doesn’t it?” Dors said behind him.
“Don’t let them know!” he whispered.
“I told them we needed a few moments of privacy, that you were embarrassed by your vertigo.”
“I am-or was. But you’re right-the psychohistorical predictions I made are in that chaos out there.”
“They do seem odd…”
“Odd? Their ideas are dangerous, radical.” He spoke with real outrage. “Class confusions, shifting power axes. They’re shrugging off the very damping mechanisms that keep the Empire orderly.”
“There was a certain, well, joy in the streets.”
“And did you see those tiktoks? Fully autonomous!”
“Yes, that was disturbing.”
“They’re part and parcel of the resurrection of sims. Artificial minds are no longer taboo here! Their tiktoks will get more advanced. Soon-”
“I’m more concerned with the immediate level of disruption,” Dors said.
“That must grow. Remember my N-dimensional plots of psychohistorical space? I ran the Sark case on my pocket computer, coming down from orbit. If they keep on this way with their New Renaissance, this whole planet will whirl away in sparks. Seen in N-dimensions, the flames will be bright and quick, lurid-then smolder into ash. Then they’ll vanish from my model entirely, into a blur-the static of unpredictability.”
She put a hand on his arm. “Calm down. They’ll notice.”
He had not realized that he felt so deeply. The Empire was order, and here
“Academician Seldon, do us the honor of gathering with some of our leading New Renaissance leaders.” Buta Fyrnix grasped his sleeve and tugged him back to the ornate reception. “They have so much to tell you!”
And he had wanted to come here! To learn why the dampers that kept worlds stable had failed here. To see the ferment, pick up the scent of change. There was plenty of passionate argument, of soaring art, of eccentric men and women wedded to their grand projects. He had seen these at dizzying speed.
But it was all too much. Something in him rebelled. The nausea he had suffered in the open streets was a symptom of some deeper revulsion, gut-deep and dark.
Buta Fyrnix had been nattering on. “-and some of our most brilliant minds are waiting to meet you! Do come!”
He suppressed a groan and looked beseechingly at Dors. She smiled and shook her head. From this hazard she could not save him.
2.
If Buta Fyrnix had begun as a grain of sand in his shoe, she was now a boulder.
“She’s impossible! Yak, yak, yak. Look,” he said to Dors when they were at last alone, “I only came to Sark because of psychohistory, not for Imperial backslapping. How did the social dampers fail here? What social mechanism slipped, allowing this raucous Renaissance of theirs?”
“My Hari, I fear that you do not have the nose to sniff out trends from life itself. It presses in on you. Data is more your province.”
“Granted. It’s unsettling, all this ferment! But I’m still interested in how they recovered those old simulations. If I could get out of taking tours of their ‘Renaissance,’ through noisy streets-”
“I quite agree,” Dors said mildly. “Tell them you want to do some work. We’ll stay in our rooms. I’m concerned about someone tracking us here. We’re just one worm-jump away from Panucopia.”
“I’ll need to access my office files. A quick wormlink to Trantor-”
“No, you can’t work using a link. Lamurk could trace that easily.”
“But I haven’t the records-”
“You’ll have to make do.”
Hari stared out at the view, which he had to admit was spectacular. Great, stretching vistas. Riotous growth.
But more fires boiled up on the horizon. There was gaiety in the streets of Sarkonia-and anger as well. The laboratories seethed with fresh energies, innovation bristled everywhere, the air seemed to sing with change and chaos.
His predictions were statistical, abstract. To see them coming true so quickly was sobering. He did not like the swift, turbulent feel to this place at all-even if he did understand it. For now.
The extremes of wealth and destitution were appalling. Change brought that, he knew.
On Helicon he had seen poverty-and lived it, too. As a boy, his grandmother had insisted on buying him a raincoat several sizes too large, “to get more use out of it.” His mother didn’t like him playing kickball because he wore out his shoes too quickly.
Here on Sark, as on Helicon, the truly poor were off in the hinterlands. Sometimes they couldn’t even afford fossil fuels. Men and women peered over a mule’s ass all day as it plodded down a furrow.
Some in his own family had fled the hardscrabble life for assembly lines. A generation or two after that, factory workers had scraped together enough money to buy a commercial driver’s license. Hari remembered his uncles and aunts accumulating injuries, just as his father had. Not having money, the pain came back to them years later in busted joints and unfixed legs, injuries staying with them in a way that a Trantorian would find astonishing.
Heliconians in run-down shacks had worked on farm machinery that was big, powerful, dangerous, and cost more than any of them would earn in a lifetime. Their lives were obscure, far from the ramparts of haughty Empire. When dead and gone, they left nothing but impalpable memory, the light ash of a butterfly wing incinerated in a forest fire.
In a stable society their pain would be less. His father had died while working overtime on a big machine. He had been wiped out the year before and was struggling to make a comeback.
Economic surge and ebb had killed his father, as surely as the steel ground-pounder had when it rolled over on him. The lurch of distant markets had murdered-and Hari had known then what he must do. That he would defeat uncertainty itself, find order in seeming discord. Psychohistory could be, and hold sway.