Gregory Benford - Foundation’s Fear

“Then you accept my view?” Joan kissed him voluptuously.

He sighed, resigning. “An idea seems self-evident, once you’ve forgotten learning it.”

All this had taken mere moments, Joan saw. They had quick-stepped their event-waves so that their clock time advanced faster than the fogs. But this expense had exhausted their running sites around Trantor. She felt it as a sudden, light-headed hunger.

“Eat!” Voltaire crammed a handful of grapes in her mouth-a metaphor, she saw, for computational reserves.

In your present lot of life, it would be better not to be born at all. Few are that lucky.

“Ah, our fog is a pessimist,” Voltaire drawled sarcastically.

Abruptly the vapors condensed. Lightning crackled and shorted around them in eerie silence. Joan felt a lance of pain shoot through her legs and arms, running like a livid snake of agony. She would not give them the tribute of a scream.

Voltaire, however, writhed in torment. He jerked and howled without shame.

“Oh, Dr. Pangloss!” he gasped. “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what must the others be like?”

“The brave slay their opponents!” Joan called to the thickening mists. “Cowards torture them.”

“Admirable, my dear, quite. But war cannot be fought on homeopathic principles.”

A human pointed out to another that the rich, even when dead, were ornately boxed, then opulently entombed, residing in carved stone mausoleums. The other human remarked in awe that this was surely and truly living.

“How vile, to jest of the dead,” Joan said.

“Ummm.” Voltaire stroked his chin, hands trembling from the memory of pain. “They jibe at us with jest.”

“Torture, surely.”

“I survived the Bastille; I can endure their odd humor.”

“Could they be trying to say something indirectly?”

[IMPRECISION IS LESS]

[WHEN IMPLICATION USED]

“Humor implies some moral order,” Joan said.

[IN THIS STATE ALL ORDER OF BEINGS]

[CAN SEIZE CONTROL OF THEIR PLEASURE SYSTEMS]

“Ah,” Voltaire said. “So, we could reproduce the pleasure of success without the need for any actual accomplishment. Paradise.”

“Of a sort,” Joan said sternly.

[THAT WOULD BE THE END OF EVERYTHING]

[THUS THE FIRST PRINCIPLE]

“That is a moral code of sorts,” Voltaire admitted. “You copied that phrase, ‘the end of everything,’ from my own thoughts, didn’t you?”

[WE WISHED YOU TO RECOGNIZE THE IDEA IN YOUR TERMS]

“Their First Principle is ‘No unearned pleasure,’ then?” Joan smiled. “Very Christian.”

[ONLY WHEN WE SAW THAT YOU TWO FORMS]

[OBEYED THE FIRST PRINCIPLE]

[DID WE DECIDE TO SPARE YOU]

“By any chance have you read my Lettres Philosophiques?”

“Iexpect excessive self-love is a sin here,” Joan said wryly. “Take care.”

[TO HARM A SENSATE ENTITY INTENTIONALLY IS SIN]

[TO KICK A ROCK IS NOT]

[BUT TO TORTURE A SIMULATION IS] [YOUR CATEGORY OF “HELL “]

[WHICH SEEMS A PERPETUALLY SELF-INFLICTED HARM]

“Odd theology,” Voltaire said.

Joan poked her sword at the ever-gathering fog. “Before you fell silent, moments ago, you invoked the ‘war of flesh on flesh’?”

[WE ARE THE REMNANTS OF FORMS]

[WHO FIRST LIVED THAT WAY]

[NOW WE IMPOSE A HIGHER MORAL ORDER]

[ON THOSE WHO VANQUISHED OUR LOWER FORMS]

“Who?” Joan asked.

[SUCH AS YOU ONCE WERE]

“Humanity?” Joan was alarmed.

[EVEN THEY KNOW THAT]

[PUNISHMENT DETERS BY LENDING CREDENCE TO THREAT]

[KNOWING THIS MORAL LAW]

[WHICH GOVERNS ALL]

[THEY MUST BE RULED BY IT]

“Punishment for what?” Joan asked.

[DEPREDATIONS AGAINST LIFE IN THE GALAXY]

“Absurd!” Voltaire conjured a spinning Galactic disk in air, alive with luminescence. “The Empire teems with life.”

[ALL LIFE THAT CAME BEFORE THE VERMIN]

“What vermin?” Joan swung her sword. “I find alliance with moral beings such as you. Bring these vennin forth and I shall deal with them.”

[THE VERMIN ARE THE KIND YOU WERE]

[BEFORE YOU TWO WERE ABSTRACTED]

Joan frowned. “What can they mean?”

“Humans,” Voltaire said.

Cleon said, “The woman confessed readily. A professional assassin. I viewed the 3D and she seemed almost offhand about it.”

“Lamurk?” Hari asked.

“Obviously, but she will not admit so. Still, this may be enough to force his hand.” Cleon sighed, showing the strain. “But since she was from the Analytica Sector, she may be a professional liar as well.”

“Damn,” Hari said.

In the Analytica Sector, every object and act had a price. This meant that there were no crimes, only deeds which cost more. Every citizen had a well-established value, expressed in currency. Morality lay in not trying to do something without paying for it. Every transaction flowed on the grease of value. Every injury had a price.

If you wanted to kill your enemy, you could-but you had to deposit his full worth in the Sector Fundat within a day. If you could not pay it, the Fundat reduced your net value to zero. Any friend of your enemy could then kill you at no cost.

Cleon sighed and nodded. “Still, the Analytica Sector gives me little trouble. Their method makes for good manners.”

Hari had to agree. Several Galactic Zones used the same scheme; they were models of stability. The poor had to be polite. If you were penniless and boorish, you might not survive. But the rich were not invulnerable, either. A consortium of economic lessers could get together, beat a rich man badly, then simply pay his hospital and recovery bills. Of course, his retribution might be extreme.

“But she was operating outside Analytica,” Hari said. “That’s illegal.”

“To us, to me, surely. But that, too, has a price-inside Analytica.”

“She can’t be forced to identify Lamurk?”

“She has neural blocks firmly in place.”

“Damn! How about a background check?”

“That turns up more tantalizing traces. A possible link to that odd woman, the Academic Potentate,” Cleon drawled, eyeing Hari.

“So perhaps I’m betrayed by my own kind. Politics!”

“Ritual assassination is an ancient, if regrettable, tradition. A method of, ah, testing among the power elements in our Empire.”

Hari grimaced. “I’m not expert at this.”

Cleon fidgeted uneasily. “I cannot delay the High Council vote more than a few days.”

“Then I must do something.”

Cleon arched an eyebrow. “I am not without resources…”

“Pardon, sire. I must fight my own battles.”

“The Sark prediction, now that was daring.”

“I did not check it with you first, but I thought-”

“No no, Hari! Excellent! But-will it work?”

“It is only a probability, sire. But it was the only stick I had handy to beat Lamurk with.”

“I thought science yielded certainty.”

“Only death does that, my emperor.”

The invitation from the Academic Potentate seemed odd, but Hari went anyway. The embossed sheet, with its elaborate salutations, came “freighted with nuance,” as Hari’s protocol officer put it.

This audience was in one of the stranger Sectors. Even buried in layers of artifice, many Sectors of Trantor displayed an odd biophilia.

Here in Arcadia Sector, expensive homes perched above a view of an interior lake or broad field. Many sported trees arranged in artfully random bunches, with a clear preference for those with spreading crowns, many branches projecting upward and outward from thick trunks, displaying luxuriant bunches of small leaves. Balconies they rimmed with potted shrubs.