Gregory Benford: Foundation’s Fear

“Yes? Have one, ah?”

“Nossir, I, I had a thought about the Renegatum and the Kutonin woman.”

“Oh, my, I’d rather not think about-”

“Suppose you erase her identity.”

Cleon’s hand stopped with a stim halfway to his nose. “Ah?”

“They are willing to die, once they’ve attracted attention. They probably think they will live on, be famous. Take that away from them. Permit no release of their true names. In all media and official documents, give them an insulting name.”

Cleon frowned. “Another name…?”

“Call this Kutonin woman Moron One. The next one, Moron Thro. Make it illegal by Imperial decree to ever refer to her any other way. Then she as a person vanishes from history. No fame.”

Cleon brightened. “Now, that’s an idea. I’ll try it. I not merely take their lives, I can take their selves.”

Hari smiled wanly as Cleon spoke to an adjutant, giving instructions for a fresh Imperial Decree. Hari hoped it would work, but in any case, it had gotten him off the hook. Cleon did not seem to notice that the idea had nothing to do with psychohistory.

Pleased, he tried an appetizer. They were startlingly good.

Cleon beckoned to him. “Come, First Minister, I have some people for you to meet. They might prove useful, even to a mathist.”

“I am honored.” Dors had coached him on a few homilies to use when he could think of nothing to say and he trotted one out now. “Whatever would be useful in service to the people-”

“Ah, yes, the people,” Cleon drawled. “I hear so much about them.”

Hari realized that Cleon had spent a life listening to pat, predictable speeches. “Sorry, sire, I-”

“It reminds me of a poll result, assembled by my Trantorian specialists.” Cleon took an appetizer from a woman half his size. “They asked, ‘To what do you attribute the ignorance and apathy of the Trantorian masses?’ and the most common reply was ‘Don’t know and don’t care.”‘

Only when Cleon laughed did Hari realize this was a joke.

He woke with ideas buzzing in his head.

Hari had learned to lie still, facedown in the gossamer e-field net that cradled his neck and head in optimum alignment with his spine…to drift… and let the flitting notions collide, merge, fragment.

He had learned this trick while working on his thesis. Overnight his subconscious did a lot of his work for him, if he would merely listen to the results in the morning. But they were delicate motes, best caught in the fine fabric of half-sleep.

He sat up abruptly and made three quick notes on his end table. The squiggles would be sent to his primary computer, for later recall at the office.

“Rooowwwrr,” Dors said, stretching. “The intellect is already up.”

“Um,” he said, staring into space.

“C’mon, before breakfast is body time.”

“See if you disagree with this idea I just had. Suppose-”

“I am not inclined, Academician Professor Seldon, to argue.”

Hari came out of his trance. Dors threw back the covers and he admired her long, slim legs. She had been sculpted for strength and speed, but such qualities converged in an agreeable concert of surfaces, springy to the touch, yielding yet resisting. He felt himself jerked out of his mood and into- “Body time, yes. You are inclined for other purposes.”

“Trust a scholar to put the proper definition to a word.”

In the warm, dizzying scuffle that followed there was some laughter, some sudden passion, and best of all, no time to think. He knew this was just what he needed, after the tensions of yesterday, and Dors knew it even better.

He emerged from the vaporium to the smell of kaff and breakfast, served out by the autos. The news flitted across the far wall and he managed to ignore most of it. Dors came out of her vaporium patting her hair and watched the wall raptly. “Looks like more stalling in the High Council,” she said. “They’re putting off the ritual search for more funding in favor of arguments over Sector sovereignty. If the Dahlites-”

“Not before I ingest some calories.”

“But this is just the sort of thing you must keep track of!”

“Not until I have to.”

“You know I don’t want you to do anything dangerous, but for now, not paying attention is foolish.”

“Maneuvering, who’s up and who’s down-spare me. Facts I can face.”

“Fond of facts, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“They can be brutal.”

“Sometimes they’re all we have.” He thought a moment, then grasped her hand. “Facts, and love.”

“Love is a fact, too.”

“Mine is. The undying popularity of entertainments devoted to romance suggests that to most people it is not a fact but a goal.”

“An hypothesis, you mathematicians would say.”

“Granted. ‘Conjecture,’ to be precise.”

“Preserve us from precision.”

He swept her suddenly into his arms, cupped her rump in his hands and, with some effort he took trouble to conceal, lifted her. “But this-this is a fact.”

“My, my.” She kissed him fiercely. “The man is not all mind.”

He succumbed to the seductive, multisensic news as he munched. He had grown up on a farm and liked big breakfasts. Dors ate sparingly; her twin religions, she said, were exercise and Hari Seldon-the first to preserve her strength for the second. He thumbed his own half of the wall to the infinitesimal doings of markets, finding there a better index of how Trantor was doing than in the stentorian bluster of the High Council.

As a mathist, he liked following the details. But after five minutes of it he slapped the table in frustration.

“People have lost their good sense. No First Minister can protect them from their own innocence.”

“My concern is protecting you from them.” Hari blanked his holo and watched hers, an ornate 3D of the factions in the High Council. Red tracers linked factions there with allies in the Low Council, a bewildering snake pit. “You don’t think this First Minister thing is going to work, do you?”

“It could.”

“They’re absolutely right-I’m not qualified.”

“Is Cleon?”

“Well, he has been reared to do the job.”

“You’re ducking the question.”

“Exactly.” Hari finished his steak and began on the egg-quhili souffle. He had left the e-stim on all night to improve his muscle tone and that made him hungry. That, and the delightful fact that Dors viewed sex as an athletic opportunity.

“I suppose your present strategy is best,” Dors said thoughtfully. “Remain a mathist, at a lofty remove from the fray.”

“Right. Nobody assassinates a guy with no power.”

“But they do ‘erase’ those who might get in the way of their taking power.”

Hari hated thinking of such things so early. He dug into the souffle. It was easy to forget, amid the tastes specially designed to fit his own well-tabulated likes, that the manufacturum built their meal from sewage. Eggs that had never known the belly of a bird. Meat appeared without skin or bones or gristle or fat. Carrots arrived without topknots. A food-manfac was delicately tuned to reproduce tastes, just short of the ability to actually make a live carrot. The minor issue of whether his souffle tasted like a real one, made by a fine chef, faded to unimportance compared with the fact that it tasted good to him-the only audience that mattered.

He realized that Dors had been talking for some moments about High Council maneuverings and he had not registered a word. She had advice on how to handle the inevitable news people, on how to receive calls, on everything. Everyone did, these days…

Hari finished, had some kaff, and felt ready to face the day as a mathist, not as a minister. “Reminds me of what my mother used to say. Know how you make God laugh?”