Poor Daneel,Hari thought.You set up the empire to be as benign and gentle as possible-distracting the ambitious with harmless games while setting nitpickers like Horis to work shuffling papers and keeping ships in motion. Everything ran smoothly, yet that underlying smoothness created an ideal breeding ground for the thing you feared most.
And the thing that I understand least.
While Sybyl and her colleagues waited to coordinate their actions with other agents across the galaxy, Horis Antic begged to be allowed to continue the research.
“What harm could it do? We’re in deep space, far from any planets or shipping lanes. Instead of just hanging around, we could be discovering something that’s of value to everybody! What if my correlations and Seldon’s equations let us predict where chaos worlds…or renaissances…are likely to appear next?”
“Why? So you could squelch them faster, Grey Man?” Gornon Vlimt sneered.
“May I point out that you people are the ones with guns?” Captain Maserd commented at that point.
“Hmm.” Mors Planch rubbed his chin. “I see what you’re saying. We get the results first. So we might use this breakthrough to find nascent freedom-worlds early andfoster their change, preparing so far in advance that the momentum can’t be stopped or quarantined.”
Hari felt a shiver, wondering what Maserd was up to. But the big nobleman wore a poker face.I hope he knows what he’s doing. Myformulas aren’t very good at dealing with individuals and groups on a small scale. At this level, Maserd’s political cunning may be sharper than my own rusty skills.
For the first time in many years, he experienced something like fear. His plan to salvage civilization faced one paramount threat-a sudden unleashing of chaos across the galaxy. Hari envisioned this as a splatter of horrid blotches, etching holes in the Prime Radiant, unraveling the gorgeous tapestry of equations, erasing every vestige of the predictability that had been his life’s work.
After some discussion, the Ktlinans agreed to Antic’s proposal. Mors Planch posted some of his crew as guards, and Maserd was told to set a trajectory, continuing their search spiral along a curve denoted in red on the holo charts.
A few hours later, Horis Antic grew excited and approached Hari with news.
“Guess what, Professor! I just added Ktlina to my database of chaos outbreaks, and that one datum refined the model by over five percent! I think I can predict, with some degree of confidence, that we’ll reach the center of a really big probability nexus in just another day!”
The little man had just accomplished, laboring over a computer, what Hari figured out within moments after first hearing the planet’s name.Still, I’m impressed, Hari thought.
“This adjustment will take us straight into a giant molecular cloud,” Maserd commented, when he saw the proposed course change.
“Is that a problem?”
“Not really. In fact, it makes sense. If someone was hiding a boojum, and I had a hankering to find one, that’s where I’d go searching.”
So thePride of Rhodia accelerated alongside the rebel spacecraft and under the watchful eye of Mors Planch, while others aboard the yacht continued bickering, posing, or evaluating, according to their natures. Hari kept quiet for a while, learning a lot about the Ktlina “renaissance” just by watching its onboard representatives.
Although they claimed that all class distinctions had been erased in their new society, Sybyl still talked and walked like a middle-ranking meritocratic scientist. Her extravagant clothes and cosmetic prettifications were clearly excessive overcompensations, pretending a stylishness she just wasn’t made for. Despite all her shouted tributes to equality, Sybyl kept preening before the aristocrat, Maserd, while barely acknowledging the mere bureaucrat, Horis Antic.
Old habits die hard,Hari thought.Despite your dogma of rebellion.
Gornon Vlimt seemed more relaxed in his role as envoy from a bold renaissance, perhaps because he was already a member of the fifth and smallest social caste-the Eccentric Order. Creative misfits of all kinds slipped into the eighty approved artistic modes, including several that were sanctioned to satirize the hidebound and shake up the stodgy… within the confines of good taste, that is.
Although Vlimt was clearly pleased to be free of those traditional limits, he wore his unconventionality with more natural grace than Sybyl did, as if he had been born to it.
As much as the two radicals shared an overall mission, Hari could tell that something jagged lay between them. Was it a philosophical issue, perhaps? Like the dilemma that had torn apart Junin Quarter, long ago? One feature of chaos outbreaks was a remarkable tendency for enthusiasts to transform into fanatics, so utterly sure of their own righteousness that they were willing to die…or slaughter others…over fine points of ideology. This was one of many failure modes that brought such worlds crashing down.
Hari wondered if such a flaw might be exploited somehow, to thwart these radical kidnappers.
It didn’t take much probing to find the sore point between Sybyl and Vlimt. As in Junin, forty years ago, it had to do withdestiny.
“Picture what’s happening on Ktlina, only multiplied a thousand, a million times over,” Sybyl urged. “We’ve already invented much better computers than they have on Trantor, passing and correlating information across the planet with incredible speed. Researchers get instant response to their info-requests, bringing back a torrent of useful data. Folks in one field quickly make use of advances made in another. New kinds of tiktoks take care of the drudge jobs, freeing us to concentrate on creative tasks, learning more and more!
“Some people have plotted this steepening upward curve,” she went on enthusiastically. “They suggest that it looks like the graph you get by dividing any finite number by x-squared, as x approaches zero. That’s called asingularity. Soon it heads almost straight up, which implies there may be no limit to the speedup of progress! If that’s true, imagine what we could become, within just a human lifetime. Assingularity beings, we’d be effectively immortal, omniscient, omnipotent. There’s nothing humans could not accomplish!”
Gornon Vlimt snorted derisively.
“This obsession with physical power and factual knowledge will get you nowhere, Sybyl. The vital fact about this new kind of culture is its essentialrandomness. Take the belittling word that Seldon and others keep using to attack us. ‘Chaos.’ We should embrace it! When arts and ideas roar in a myriad directions, sooner or later somebody is going to hit on the right formula for conversing with the Godhead, with the eternal-or eternals-that permeate the cosmos. From then on, we’ll be one with them! Our deification will be total and complete.”
While Jeni Cuicet listened to all of this, entranced, Hari pondered several things.
First, the two concepts were essentially similar, in both their transcendental vision and the zealous means prescribed to achieve it.
Second, the more they heard of each other’s specific descriptions, the more Sybyl and Gornon grew to despise each other.
If only I could find a way to use that fact,Hari contemplated.
While their argument raged on nearby, he sat deep in thought, pondering the roots of their disagreement. Each of the five castes had a basis in essential human personality types, far more than inheritance. Citizens and gentry were rather basic. Their ambitious efforts to get ahead were based on normal competition and self-interest-which also reflected their high birth rates. Both classes were contemptuously called breeders by the other three.
Meritocrats and eccentrics also competed-sometimes fiercely-but their sense of self-importance was based more on what they did or accomplished than on money or power or social aggrandizement for their heirs. Each felt a need to stand out…though not too far ahead. They seldom had offspring of their own, though sometimes, like Hari, they adopted.