Isaac Asimov - Foundation's Edge

“What has that got to do with it? Gahyah?”

“It’s spelled G-A-I-A. It means ‘Earth.’ ”

“Why should it mean Earth, Janov, any more than anything else? The name is meaningless to me.”

Pelorat’s ordinarily expressionless face came close to a grimace. “I’m not sure you’ll believe this—If I go by my analysis of the myths, there were several different, mutually unintelligible, languages on Earth.”

“What?”

“Yes. After all, we have a thousand different ways of speaking across the Galaxy—”

“Across the Galaxy, there are certainly dialectical variations, but these are not mutually unintelligible. And even if understanding some of them is a matter of difficulty, we all share Galactic Standard.”

“Certainly, but there is constant interstellar travel. What if some world was in isolation for a prolonged period?”

“But you’re talking of Earth. A single planet. Where’s the isolation?”

“Earth is the planet of origin, don’t forget, where humanity must at one time have been primitive beyond imagining. Without interstellar travel, without computers, without technology at all, struggling up from nonhuman ancestors.”

“This is so ridiculous.”

Pelorat hung his head in embarrassment at that. “There is perhaps no use discussing this, old chap. I never have managed to make it convincing to anyone. My own fault, I’m sure.”

Trevize was at once contrite. “Janov, I apologize. I spoke without thinking. These are views, after all, to which I am not accustomed. You have been developing your theories for over thirty years, while I’ve been introduced to them all at once. You must make allowances. —Look, I’ll imagine that we have primitive people on Earth who speak two completely different, mutually unintelligible, languages—”

“Half a dozen, perhaps,” said Pelorat diffidently. “Earth may have been divided into several large land masses and it may be that there were, at first, no communications among them. The inhabitants of each land mass might have developed an individual language.”

Trevize said with careful gravity, “And on each of these land masses, once they grew cognizant of one another, they might have argued an ‘Origin Question’ and wondered on which one human beings had first arisen from other animals.”

“They might very well, Golan. It would be a very natural attitude for them to have.”

“And in one of those languages, Gaia means Earth. And the word ‘Earth’ itself is derived from another one of those languages.”

“Yes, yes.”

“And while Galactic Standard is the language that descended from the particular language in which ‘Earth’ means ‘Earth,’ the people of Earth for some reason call their planet ‘Gaia’ from another of their languages.”

“Exactly! You are indeed quick, Golan.”

“But it seems to me that there’s no need to make a mystery of this. If Gaia is really Earth, despite the difference in names, then Gaia, by your previous argument, ought to have a period of rotation of just one Galactic Day, a period of revolution of just one Galactic Year, and a giant satellite that revolves about it in just one month.”

“Yes, it would have to be so.”

“Well then, does it or doesn’t it fulfill these requirements?”

“Actually I can’t say. The information isn’t given in the tables.”

“Indeed? Well, then, Janov, shall we go to Gaia and time its periods and stare at its satellite?”

“I would like to, Golan,” Pelorat hesitated. “The trouble is that the location isn’t given exactly, either.”

“You mean, all you have is the name and nothing more, and that is your excellent possibility?”

“But that is just why I want to visit the Galactic Library!”

“Well, wait. You say the table doesn’t give the location exactly. Does it give any information at all?”

“It lists it in the Sayshell Sector—and adds a question mark.”

“Well, then—Janov, don’t be downcast. We will go to the Sayshell Sector and somehow we will find Gaia!”

Stor Gendibal jogged along the country road outside the University. It was not common practice for Second Foundationers to venture into the farming world of Trantor. They could do so, certainly, but when they did, they did not venture either far or for long.

Gendibal was an exception and he had, in times past, wondered why. Wondering meant exploring his own mind, something that Speakers, in particular, were encouraged to do. Their minds were at once their weapons and their targets, and they had to keep both offense and defense well honed.

Gendibal had decided, to his own satisfaction, that one reason he was different was because he had come from a planet that was both colder and more massive than the average inhabited planet. When he was brought to Trantor as a boy (through the net that was quietly cast throughout the Galaxy by agents of the Second Foundation on the lookout for talent), he found himself, therefore, in a lighter gravitational field and a delightfully mild climate. Naturally he enjoyed being in the open more than some of the others might.

In his early years on Trantor, he grew conscious of his puny, undersized frame, and he was afraid that settling back into the comfort of a benign world would turn him flabby indeed. He therefore undertook a series of self-developing exercises that had left him still puny in appearance but kept him wiry and with a good wind. Part of his regimen were these long walks and joggings—about which some at the Speaker’s Table muttered. Gendibal disregarded their chattering.

He kept his own ways, despite the fact that he was first-generation. All the others at the Table were second- and third-generation, with parents and grandparents who had been Second Foundationers. And they were all older than he, too. What, then, was to be expected but muttering?

By long custom, all minds at the Speaker’s Table were open (supposedly altogether, though it was a rare Speaker who didn’t maintain a corner of privacy somewhere—in the long run, ineffectively, of course) and Gendibal knew that what they felt was envy. So did they; just as Gendibal knew his own attitude was defensive, overcompensating ambition. And so did they.

Besides (Gendibal’s mind reverted to the reasons for his ventures into the hinterland) he had spent his childhood in a whole world—a large and expansive one, with grand and variegated scenery—and in a fertile valley of that world, surrounded by what he believed to be the most beautiful mountain ranges in the Galaxy. They were unbelievably spectacular in the grim winter of that world. He remembered his former world and the glories of a now-distant childhood. He dreamed about it often. How could he bring himself to be confined to a few dozen square miles of ancient architecture?

He looked about disparagingly as he jogged. Trantor was a mild and pleasant world, but it was not a rugged and beautiful one. Though it was a farming world, it was not a fertile planet.

It never had been. Perhaps that, as much as any other factor, had led to its becoming the administrative center of, first, an extensive union of planets and then of a Galactic Empire. There was no strong push to have it be anything else. It wasn’t extraordinarily good for anything else.

After the Great Sack, one thing that kept Trantor going was its enormous supply of metal. It was a great mine, supplying half a hundred worlds with cheap alloy steel, aluminum, titanium, copper, magnesium—returning, in this way, what it had collected over thousands of years; depleting its supplies at a rate hundreds of times faster than the original rate of accumulation.

There were still enormous metal supplies available, but they were underground and harder to obtain. The Hamish farmers (who never called themselves “Trantorians,” a term they considered ill-omened and which the Second Foundationers therefore reserved for themselves) had grown reluctant to deal with the metal any further. Superstition, undoubtedly.