Gregory Benford - Foundation’s Fear

They had leveled out and soon began to rise. Hari felt pressed back into his chair, which compensated deftly. They were moving at high velocity, he knew, but there was no sign of it. Slight pulses of the magnetic throat added increments of velocity as they rose, making up for the slight losses. Otherwise, the entire trip took no energy, gravity giving and then taking away.

When they emerged in the Carmondian Sector his Specials drew in close. This was no elite university setting. Few buildings here could be seen as exteriors, so design focused on interior spectacle: thrusting slopes, airy transepts, soaring trunks of worked metal and muscular fiber. But amid this serene architecture milling crowds jostled and fretted, lapping like an angry tide.

Across an overhead bikepad a steady stream of cyclists hauled tow-cars. Jamming their narrow bays were bulky appliances, glistening sides of meat, boxes, and lumpy goods, all bound for nearby customers. Restaurants were little more than hotplates surrounded with tiny tables and chairs, all squeezed into the walkways. Barbers conducted business in the thoroughfare, working one end of the customer while beggars massaged the feet for a coin.

“Seems…busy,” Hari said diplomatically as he caught the tang of Dahlite cooking.

“Yeah, doncha love it?”

“Beggars and street vendors were made illegal by the last Emperor, I thought.”

“Right.” He grinned. “Don’t work with Dahlites. We’ve moved plenty people into this Sector. C’mon, I want some lunch.”

It was early, but they ate in a stand-up restaurant, drawn in by the odors. Hari tried a “bomber,” which wriggled into his mouth, then exploded into a smoky dark taste he could not identify, finally fading into a bittersweet aftertaste. His Specials looked quite uneasy, standing around in a crowded, busy hubbub. They were accustomed to more regal surroundings.

“Things’re really boomin’ here,” Yugo observed. His manners had reverted to his laboring days and he spoke with his mouth half full.

“Dahlites have a gift for expansion,” Hari said diplomatically. Their high birth rate pushed them into other Sectors, where their connections to Dahl brought new investment. Hari liked their restless energy; it reminded him of Helicon’s few cities.

He had been modeling all of Trantor, trying to use it as a shrunken version of the Empire. Much of his progress had come from unlearning conventional wisdom. Most economists saw money as simple ownership-a basic, linear power relationship. But it was a fluid, Hari found-slippery and quick, always flowing from one hand to the next as it greased the momentum of change. Imperial analysts had mistaken a varying flux for a static counter.

They finished and Yugo urged him into a groundpod. They followed a complicated path, alive with noise and smells and vigor. Here orderly traffic disintegrated. Instead of making an entire layer one way, local streets intersected at angles acute and oblique, seldom rectangular. Yugo seemed to regard traffic intersections as rude interruptions.

They sped by buildings at close range, stopped, and got out for a walk to a slideway. The Specials were right behind and without any transition Hari found himself in the middle of chaos. Smoke enveloped them and the acrid stench made him almost vomit.

The Specials captain shouted to him, “Stay down!” Then the man shouted to his men to arm with anamorphine. They all bristled with weapons.

Smoke paled the overhead phosphors. Through the muggy haze Hari saw a solid wall of people hammering toward them. They came out of side alleys and doorways and all seemed to bear down on him. The Specials fired a volley into the mass. Some went down. The captain threw a canister and gas blossomed farther away. He had judged it expertly; air circulation carried the fumes into the mob, not toward Hari.

But anamorphine wasn’t going to stop them. Two women rushed by Hari, carrying cobblestones ripped from the street. A third jabbed at Hari with a knife and the captain shot her with a dart. Then more Dahlites rushed at the Specials and Hari caught what they were shouting: incoherent rage against tiktoks.

The idea seemed so unlikely to him at first he thought he could not have heard rightly. That deflected his attention, and when he looked back toward the streaming crowd the captain was down and a man was advancing, holding a knife.

What any of this had to do with tiktoks was mysterious, but Hari did not have time to do anything except step to the side and kick the man squarely in the knee.

A bottle bounced painfully off his shoulder and smashed on the walkway. A man whirled a chain around and around and then toward Hari’s head. Duck. It whistled by and Hari dove at the man, tackling him solidly. They went down with two others in a swearing, punching mass. Hari took a slug in the gut.

He rolled over and gasped for air and clearly, only a few feet away, saw a man kill another with a long, curved knife.

Jab, slash, jab. It happened silently, like a dream. Hari gasped, shaken, his world in slow motion. He should be responding boldly, he knew that. But it was so overwhelming

—and then he was standing, with no memory of getting there, wrestling with a man who had not bothered with bathing for quite some while.

Then the man was gone, abruptly yanked away by the seethe of the crowd.

Another sudden jump-and Specials were all around him. Bodies sprawled lifeless on the walkway. Others held their bloody heads. Shouts, thumps

He did not have time to figure out what weapon had done that to them before the Specials were whisking him and Yugo along and the whole incident fled into obscurity, like a 30 program glimpsed and impatiently passed by.

The captain wanted to return to Streeling. “Even better, the palace.”

“This wasn’t about us,” Hari said as they took a slideway.

“Can’t be sure of that, sir.”

Hari batted away all suggestions that they discontinue their journey. The incident had apparently begun when some tiktoks malfed.

“Somebody accused Dahlites of causing it,” Yugo related. “So our people stood up for themselves and, well, things got out of hand.”

Everyone near them was alive with excitement, faces glowing, eyes white and darting. He thought suddenly of his father’s wry saying, Never underestimate the power of boredom.

In human affairs, spirited action relieved dry tedium. He remembered seeing two women pummel a Spook, slamming away at the spindly, bleached-white man as though he were no more than a responsive exercise machine. A simple phobia against sunlight meant that he was of the hated Other, and thus fair game.

Murder was a primal urge. Even the most civilized felt tempted by it in moments of rage. But nearly all resisted and were better for the resistance. Civilization was a defense against nature’s raw power.

That was a crucial variable, one never considered by the economists with their gross products per capita, or the political theorists with their representative quotients, or the sociosavants and their security indices.

“I’ll have to keep that in, too,” he muttered to himself.

“Keep what?” Yugo asked. He, too, was still agitated.

“Things as basic as murder. We get all tied up in Trantor’s economics and politics, but something as gut-deep as that incident may be more important, in the long run.”

“We’ll pick it up in the crime statistics.”

“No, it’s the urge I want to get. How does that explain the deeper movements in human culture? It’s bad enough dealing with Trantor-a giant pressure cooker, forty billion sealed in together. We know there’s something missing, because we can’t get the psychohistorical equations to converge.”