“I’ve barely started.”
Zay laughed lightly. “Listen to him, Deet. I told you he was so caught up in this that he didn’t even know what day it was.”
“You’ve been doing this for three weeks, Leyel. For the last week you haven’t even come home. I bring you food, and you won’t eat. People talk to you, and you forget that you’re in a conversation, you just drift off into some sort of trance. Leyel, I wish I’d never brought you here, I wish I’d never suggested indexing-”
“No!” Leyel cried. He struggled to sit up.
At first Deet tried to push him back down, insisting he should rest. It was Zay who helped him sit. “Let the man talk,” she said. “Just because you’re his wife doesn’t mean you can stop him from talking.”
“The index is wonderful,” said Leyel. “Like a tunnel opened up into my own mind. I keep seeing light just that far out of reach, and then I wake up and it’s just me alone on a pinnacle except for the pages up on the lector. I keep losing it-”
“No, Leyel, we keep losing you. The index is poisoning you, it’s taking over your mind-“
“Don’t be absurd, Deet. You’re the one who suggested this, and you’re right. The index keeps surprising me, making me think in new ways. There are some answers already.”
“Answers?” asked Zay.
“I don’t know how well I can explain it. What makes us human. It has to do with communities and stories and tools and-it has to do with you and me, Deet.”
“I should hope we’re human,” she said. Teasing him, but also urging him on.
“We lived together all those years, and we formed a community-with our children, till they left, and then just us. But we were like animals. “
“Only sometimes,” she said.
“I mean like herding animals, or primate tribes, or any community that’s bound together only by the rituals and patterns of the present moment. We had our customs, our habits. Our private language of words and gestures, our dances, all the things that flocks of geese and hives of bees can do.”
“Very primitive. “
“Yes, that’s right, don’t you see? That’s a community that dies with each generation. When we die, Deet, it will all be gone with us. Other people will marry, but none of them will know our dances and songs and language and-”
“Our children will. “
“No, that’s my point. They knew us, they even think they know us, but they were never part of the community of our marriage. Nobody is. Nobody can be. That’s why, when I thought you were leaving me for this”
“When did you think that I-”
“Hush, Deet,” said Zay. “Let the man babble.”
“When I thought you were leaving me, I felt like I was dead, like I was losing everything, because if you weren’t part of our marriage, then there was nothing left. You see?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with human origins, Leyel. I only know that I would never leave you, and I can’t believe that you could think-”
“Don’t distract him, Deet.”
“It’s the children. All the children. They play Wrinkly Grandma Posey, and then they grow up and don’t play any more, so the actual community of these particular five or six children doesn’t exist any more-but other kids are still doing the dance. Chanting the poem. For ten thousand years!”
“This makes us human? Nursery rhymes?”
“They’re all part of the same community! Across all the empty space between the stars, there are still connections, they’re still somehow the same kids. Ten thousand years, ten thousand worlds, quintillions of children, and they all knew the poem, they all did the dance. Story and ritual-it doesn’t die with the tribe, it doesn’t stop at the border. Children who never met face-to-face, who lived so far apart that the light from one star still hasn’t reached the other, they belonged to the same community. We’re human because we conquered time and space. We conquered the barrier of perpetual ignorance between one person and another. We found a way to slip my memories into your head, and yours into mine. “
“But these are the ideas you already rejected, Leyel. Language and community and-”
“No! No, not just language, not just tribes of chimpanzees chattering at each other. Stories, epic tales that define a community, mythic tales that teach us how the world works, we use them to create each other. We became a different species, we became human, because we found a way to extend gestation beyond the womb, a way to give each child ten thousand parents that he’ll never meet face-to-face.”
Then, at last, Leyel fell silent, trapped by the inadequacy of his words. They couldn’t tell what he had seen in his mind. If they didn’t already understand, they never would.
“Yes,” said Zay. “I think indexing your paper was a very good idea. “
Leyel sighed and lay back down on the bed. “I shouldn’t have tried.”
“On the contrary, you’ve succeeded,” said Zay. Deet shook her head. Leyel knew why-Deet was trying to signal Zay that she shouldn’t attempt to soothe Leyel with false praise.
“Don’t hush me, Deet. I know what I’m saying. I may not know Leyel as well as you do, but I know truth when I hear it. In a way, I think Hari knew it instinctively. That’s why he insisted on all his silly holodisplays, forcing the poor citizens of Terminus to put up with his pontificating every few years. It was his way of continuing to create them, of remaining alive within them. Making them feel like their lives had purpose behind them. Mythic and epic story, both at once. They’ll all carry a bit of Hari Seldon within them just the way that children carry their parents with them to the grave. “
At first Leyel could only hear the idea that Hari would have approved of his ideas of human origin. Then he began to realize that there was much more to what Zay had said than simple affirmation.
“You knew Hari Seldon?”
“A little,” said Zay.
“Either tell him or don’t,” said Deet. “You can’t take him this far in, and not bring him the rest of the way.”
“I knew Hari the way you know Deet,” said Zay.
“No,” said Leyel. “He would have mentioned you.”
“Would he? He never mentioned his students.”
“He had thousands of students.”
“I know, Leyel. I saw them come and fill his lecture halls and listen to the half-baked fragments of psychohistory that he taught them. But then he’d come away, here to the library, into a room where the Pubs never go, where he could speak words that the Pubs would never hear, and there he’d teach his real students. Here is the only place where the science of psychohistory lives on, where Deet’s ideas about the formation of community actually have application, where your own vision of the origin of humanity will shape our calculations for the next thousand years. “
Leyel was dumbfounded. “In the Imperial Library? Hari had his own college here in the library?”
“Where else? He had to leave us at the end, when it was time to go public with his predictions of the Empire’s fall. Then the Pubs started watching him in earnest, and in order to keep them from finding us, he couldn’t ever come back here again. It was the most terrible thing that ever happened to us. As if he died, for us, years before his body died. He was part of us, Leyel, the way that you and Deet are part of each other. She knows. She joined us before he left.”
It stung. To have had such a great secret, and not to have been included. “Why Deet, and not me?”
“Don’t you know, Leyel? Our little community’s survival was the most important thing. As long as you were Leyel Forska, master of one of the greatest fortunes in history, you couldn’t possibly be part of this-it would have provoked too much comment, too much attention. Deet could come, because Commissioner Chen wouldn’t care that much what she did-he never takes spouses seriously, just one of the ways he proves himself to be a fool.”
“But Hari always meant for you to be one of us,” said Deet. “His worst fear was that you’d go off half-cocked and force your way into the First Foundation, when all along he wanted you in this one. The Second Foundation.”
Leyel remembered his last interview with Hari. He tried to remember-did Hari ever lie to him? He told him that Deet couldn’t go to Terminus-but now that took on a completely different meaning. The old fox! He never lied at all, but he never told the truth, either.
Zay went on. “It was tricky, striking the right balance, encouraging you to provoke Chen just enough that he’d strip away your fortune and then forget you, but not so much that he’d have you imprisoned or killed.”
“You were making that happen?”
“No, no, Leyel. It was going to happen anyway, because you’re who you are and Chen is who he is. But there was a range of possibility, somewhere between having you and Deet tortured to death on the one hand, and on the other hand having you and Rom conspire to assassinate Chen and take control of the Empire. Either of those extremes would have made it impossible for you to be part of the Second Foundation. Hari was convinced-and so is Deet, and so am I-that you belong with us. Not dead. Not in politics. Here.”