“Or else he severs his old connections, gets away from you, and reconstructs himself in a different set of communities.”
“This would make him happy?”
“Sure. Useless to the Second Foundation, but happy. It would also turn you into a nasty-tempered old crone, not that you aren’t one already, mind you.”
“Oh, you think Leyel’s the only thing keeping me human?”
“Pretty much, yes. He’s your safety valve.”
“Not lately.”
“I know.”
“Have I been so awful?”
“Nothing that we can’t bear. Deet, if we’re going to be fit to govern the human race someday, shouldn’t we first learn to be good to each other?”
“Well, I’m glad to provide you all with an opportunity to test your patience.”
“You should be glad. We’re doing a fine job so far, wouldn’t you say?”
“Please. You were teasing me about the prognosis, weren’t you?”
“Partly. Everything I said was true, but you know as well as I do that there are as many different ways out of a B-B syndrome as there are people who have them.”
“Behavioral cause, behavioral effect. No little hormone shot, then?”
“Deet. He doesn’t know who he is.”
“Can’t I help him?”
“Yes.”
“What? What can I do?”
“This is only a guess, since I haven’t talked to him.”
“Of course.”
“You aren’t home much.”
“I can’t stand it there, with him brooding all the time.”
“Fine. Get him out with you.”
“He won’t go.”
“Push him.”
“We barely talk. I don’t know if I even have any leverage over him.”
“Deet. You’re the one who wrote, ‘Communities that make few or no demands on their members cannot command allegiance. All else being equal, members who feel most needed have the strongest allegiance. ‘ “
“You memorized that?”
“Psychohistory is the psychology of populations, but populations can only be quantified as communities. Seldon’s work on statistical probabilities only worked to predict the future within a generation or two until you first published your community theories. That’s because statistics can’t deal with cause and effect. Stats tell you what’s happening, never why, never the result. Within a generation or two, the present statistics evaporate, they’re meaningless, you have whole new populations with new configurations. Your community theory gave us a way of predicting which communities would survive, which would grow, which would fade. A way of looking across long stretches of time and space. “
“Hari never told me he was using community theory in any important way. “
“How could he tell you that? He had to walk a tightrope-publishing enough to get psychohistory taken seriously, but not so much that anybody outside the Second Foundation could ever duplicate or continue his work. Your work was a key-but he couldn’t say so.”
“Are you just saying this to make me feel better?”
“Sure. That’s why I’m saying it. But it’s also true-since lying to you wouldn’t make you feel better, would it? Statistics are like taking cross sections of the trunk of a tree. It can tell you a lot about its history. You can figure how healthy it is, how much volume the whole tree has, how much is root and how much is branch. But what it can’t tell you is where the tree will branch, and which branches will become major, which minor, and which will rot and fall off and die.”
“But you can’t quantify communities, can you? They’re just stories and rituals that bind people together-”
“You’d be surprised what we can quantify. We’re very good at what we do, Deet. Just as you are. Just as Leyel is.”
“Is his work important? After all, human origin is only a historical question. “
“Nonsense, and you know it. Leyel has stripped away the historical issues and he’s searching for the scientific ones. The principles by which human life, as we understand it, is differentiated from nonhuman. If he finds that-don’t you see, Deet? The human race is recreating itself all the time, on every world, in every family, in every individual. We’re born animals, and we teach each other how to be human. Somehow. It matters that we find out how. It matters to psychohistory. It matters to the Second Foundation. It matters to the human race.’“
“So-you aren’t just being kind to Leyel.”
“Yes, we are. You are, too. Good people are kind.”
“Is that all? Leyel is just one man who’s having trouble?”
“We need him. He isn’t important just to you. He’s important to us. “
“Oh. Oh.”
“Why are you crying?”
“I was so afraid-that I was being selfish-being so worried about him. Taking up your time like this. “
“Well, if that doesn’t-I thought you were beyond surprising me. “
“Our problems were just-our problems. But now they’re not.”
“Is that so important to you? Tell me, Deet-do you really value this community so much?”
“Yes.”
“More than Leyel?”
“No! But enough-that I felt guilty for caring so much about him.”
“Go home, Deet. Just go home.”
“What?”
“That’s where you’d rather be. It’s been showing up in your behavior for two months, ever since Hari’s death. You’ve been nasty and snappish, and now I know why. You resent us for keeping you away from Leyel.”
“No, it was my choice, I-”
“Of course it was your choice! It was your sacrifice for the good of the Second Foundation. So now I’m telling you-healing Leyel is more important to Hari’s plan than keeping up with your day-to-day responsibilities here.”
“You’re not removing me from my position, are you?”
“No. I’m just telling you to ease up. And get Leyel out of the apartment. Do you understand me? Demand it! Reengage him with you, or we’ve all lost him.”
“Take him where?”
“I don’t know. Theater. Athletic events. Dancing.”
“We don’t do those things.”
“Well, what do you do?”
“Research. And then talk about it.”
“Fine. Bring him here to the library. Do research with him. Talk about it.”
“But he’ll meet people here. He’d certainly meet you.”
“Good. Good. I like that. Yes, let him come here.”
“But I thought we had to keep the Second Foundation a secret from him until he’s ready to take part.”
“I didn’t say you should introduce me as First Speaker.”
“No, no, of course you didn’t. What am I thinking off Of course he can meet you, he can meet everybody. “
“Deet, listen to me.”
“Yes, I’m listening. “
“It’s all right to love him, Deet.”
“I know that.”
“I mean, it’s all right to love him more than you love us. More than you love any of us. More than you love all of us. There you are, crying again.”
“I’m so-”
“Relieved. “
“How do you understand me so well?”
“I only know what you show me and what you tell me. It’s all we ever know about each other. The only thing that helps is that nobody can ever lie for long about who they really are. Not even to themselves.”
For two months Leyel followed up on Magolissian’s paper by trying to find some connection between language studies and human origins. Of course this meant weeks of wading through old, useless point-of-origin studies, which kept indicating that Trantor was the focal point of language throughout the history of the Empire, even though nobody seriously put forth Trantor as the planet of origin. Once again, though, Leyel rejected the search for a particular planet; he wanted to find out regularities, not unique events.
Leyel hoped for a clue in the fairly recent work-only two thousand years old-of Dagawell Kispitorian. Kispitorian came from the most isolated area of a planet called Artashat, where there were traditions that the original settlers came from an earlier world named Armenia, now uncharted. Kispitorian grew up among mountain people who claimed that long ago, they spoke a completely different language. In fact, the title of Kispitorian’s most interesting book was No Man Understood Us; many of the folk tales of these people began with the formula “Back in the days when no man understood us…”
Kispitorian had never been able to shake off this tradition of his upbringing, and as he pursued the field of dialect formation and evolution, he kept coming across evidence that at one time the human species spoke not one but many languages. It had always been taken for granted that Galactic Standard was the up-to-date version of the language of the planet of origin-that while a few human groups might have developed dialects, civilization was impossible without mutually intelligible speech. But Kispitorian had begun to suspect that Galactic Standard did not become the universal human language until after the formation of the Empire-that, in fact, one of the first labors of the Imperium was to stamp out all other competing languages. The mountain people of Artashat believed that their language had been stolen from them. Kispitorian eventually devoted his life to proving they were right.