I’ve noticed this all my life. It’s mostly meritocrats and eccentrics-the two “genius” castes-who react adversely to certain subjects. Norisit just dirt and rocks that academic sages avoid discussing. There are many others subjects….including history!
In contrast, most gentry and citizens hardly notice.
Actually, Hari was himself a high noble in the Meritocratic Order, yet he had never felt personal repugnance toward any intellectual topic whatsoever. His reflex reaction to Antic’s dirt fixation was just a mild habit, from moving so long in polite society. Indeed,historywas one of the central foci of his life! Unfortunately, that had made the first half of his career difficult, pitting him in constant battle against the distaste felt by most other scholars toward examining the past. It used to be a steady drain on his time and energy, until he became too famous and powerful for stodgy department heads to thwart his research anymore.
Also, the aversion is apparently much weaker than it used to be.
In his studies of the imperial archives, Hari had found whole millennia when historical inquiry was virtually nonexistent. People told lots ofstories about the past, but almost never investigated it, as if a great blind spot had existed in human intellectual life. Only in the last half dozen generations had real history departments been established at most universities, and they were poor cousins even now.
This roused mixed feelings. If not for the mysterious aversion, psychohistory might have been developed long before this, on one or more of the twenty-five million settled worlds. Hari felt possessive gladness thathe got to be the one to make these discoveries, even though he knew it was selfish to feel so. After all, the breakthrough might have helped save the empire if it came much earlier.
Now it’s too late for that. There is too much momentum. Other plans must be set in motion. Other plans….
He shook himself from ruminating. The last thing Hari wanted was to be caught in the spiral of an aging mind. Dwelling on might-have-beens.
He looked at the others, and found that their conversation had shifted back to an old question…the diversity of galactic life.
“I suppose my interest comes from the fact that I was born on one of the anomaly worlds,” Captain Maserd confessed. “Our estate on Widemos had cattle and horses, of course, like on most other planets. But there were also great herds of clingers and jiffts, roaming the northern plains much as they did when the first settlers came.”
“I saw some jiffts in a zoo on Willemina,” commented Jeni Cuicet, who paused from her assigned task, using a vibro-scrubber on the floor nearby. “They were weird things! Six legs and buggy eyes, with heads that look upside down!”
“They are native to the old Nebular Kingdoms, and were seen nowhere else until the Trantorian Empire spread through our area,” Maserd said, as if it had happened just yesterday. “So you can see why I’m interested in this research. I grew up around nonstandard life-forms, and then made a passion of studying others, such as the tunnel-queens of Kantro, the kyrt-silk plants of Florina, and the lisp-singers of Zlling. I’ve even been to far Anacreon, where Nyak dragons cruise the sky like giant-winged fortresses. And yet, these exceptions are so rare! It always struck me as strange that the galaxy lacks more diversity.
“Why should human beings be the only intelligent species? This question used to be raised in ancient literature…though much less since the imperial age began.”
“Well, now that you mention it…” Antic began answering. He paused, glancing at Hari and Kers before continuing. “I have only told this story a few times in my life. But on this ship-as we strive together to examine this very topic-I cannot refrain from telling you all about my ancestor.
“Antyok was his name, and he was a bureaucrat like me, way back in the earliest days of the empire.”
“That’d be thousands and thousands of years ago!” Jeni objected.
“So? Many families have genealogies stretching even farther. Isn’t that right, Lord Maserd? I know for certain this Antyok fellow existed because his name appears on the wall of our clan crypt, along with a brief microglyph description of his career.
“Anyway, according to the story I was told as a child, Antyok was one of the few humans who ever actually met…others.”
Amid the silence that followed, Hari blinked several times.
“You mean…”
“Fully intelligent nonhumans.” Horis nodded. “Creatures who stood upright, and spoke, and thought about their place in the universe, but who were almost nothing like us. They came from a desert planet that was desperately hot and dry. In fact, they weredying when the early imperial institutes found and rescued them, taking them to a ‘better’ world, though one that was still quite intolerable to human beings. It is said that the emperor himself became passionately interested in their welfare. And yet, within a human generation, they were gone.”
“Gone!” Maserd blinked with evident dismay. The mere possibility of such beings existing seemed to energize him. Meanwhile, Hari saw Kers Kantun smirk with sardonic disbelief, not swallowing the notion, even for a second.
“The story is filled with ambiguity-as you’d expect from something that old,” Antic went on. “Some versions contend that the nonhumans died of despair, looking up at the stars and knowing that every one of them would be forever human, not theirs. Another account suggests that my ancestor helped them steal several starships, which they used to escape from the galaxy, toward the Magellanic Clouds! Apparently-and I know this is hard to follow-that act led the emperor to personallydecorate Antyok, for some reason.
“Naturally, I dug into imperial archives as soon as an opportunity presented itself, and I found enough confirming evidence to show thatsomething definitely happened back then…but efforts were made subsequently to erase the details. I had to use every bureaucratic trick, hunting down ghost duplicates of spare file copies that had slipped into atypical places. One gave a detailed genetic summary that’s unlike any currently existing life-form. These are tantalizing clues, though there remain lots of gaps.”
“So you actually believe the story?”
“I am naturally biased. And yet, the glyphs in our family vault do indicate that my ancestor received an imperial Rose Cluster for‘services to guests in and beyond the empire. ‘ An unusual citation that I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere else.”
Hari stared at the dour bureaucrat, who was momentarily animated, not at all like a typical Grey Man. Of course the tale sounded like a lot of hokum. But what if it contained a core of truth? After all, Maserd came from a region that had strange animal types. Why not other kinds ofthinking creatures, as well?
Unlike his fellow passengers, Hari already knew for a fact that there existed another sapient race. One that had shared the stars with humans in secret ever since the dawn centuries. Positronic robots.
The galaxy is twelve billion years old,he thought.I suppose anything is possible.
He recalled the vicious meme-entities that had caused such havoc on Trantor, a year or so before he was chosen to be First Minister. Dwelling as software clusters within the Trantor data network, those self-organizing programs had surged into violent activity soon after Hari released the Joan and Voltaire simulated beings from their crystal prison. But unlike those two human sims, the memes claimed to be ancient. Older than the planet-city. Older than the Imperium. Far older than humankind itself.
They were angry. They said humans were destructive. That we had killed a universe of possibilities. Above all, they hated Daneel.
In defeating those software mentalities, and getting them exiled to deep space, Hari had done the empire a great service. He also breathed a sigh of relief, having eliminated one more unstable element that might have mucked up his beloved psychohistorical formulas.