David Brin - Foundation’s Triumph

When Horis Antic stormed into the salon, spilling angry words, the Pride of Rhodia’s captain reacted with disarming friendliness, pulling out the chair next to him and inviting the Grey Man to sit down.

“Well then, come and tell us about it, old fellow! I assume you are talking about the tremendous ancient machines that stand dead and derelict beyond our starboard side? Be assured that I, for one, haven’t forgotten them. Please, slake your thirst and then speak!”

Hari quashed a grin of admiration at the way Maserd defused a tense moment. The gentry weren’t unskilled in their own arts. Outside their endless “Great Game” of clan feuds and courtly one-upmanship, they were also responsible for the galactic system of civic charity, making sure that no individuals slipped through cracks in the bureaucratic-democratic welfare system anywhere in the empire. Under the highminded tenets of Ruellianism, the lord or lady of any township, county, planet, or sector was charged with making sure that everybody felt included in the domain. It had been going on this way for so long that graciousness arose out of the gentry as naturally as oxygen from a green plant.

That is, so long as you did not make one of them your enemy. Hari had learned this lesson from hard experience in the political maelstrom of Trantor. He also knew that Ruellianism would be one of the first victims to be killed off, once the empire collapsed. True feudalism, one of the most basic psychohistorical patterns of all, would reestablish itself across the galaxy, as both old and new lordlings abandoned symbolic games and began asserting real tyrannical power.

Somewhat mollified by Maserd’s gentility, Antic threw himself into the chair and grabbed a wineglass, washing down one of his anxiety pills with several impressive gulps before sagging back with a sigh.

“Well, maybe you remember, Biron! But our professor companion seems to have forgotten the whole reason why we came out here in the first place.” The bureaucrat turned to face Hari. “The tilling question, Seldon! We were hot on the trail of an answer. The reason why so many worlds were scraped and churned sometime in the past. Why the surface rocks were pulverized, turning them into rich black soils! I-”

Horis was interrupted by a sharp cry.

“Ow!”

Hari turned to see Jeni Cuicet, still wearing an infirmary gown, clutch her head and gasp repeatedly. Her face scrunched, and she squinted through what had to be spasms of severe pain.

“Are you all right, dear?” Sybyl asked with concern, as the sudden fit began to ebb. Jeni made a brave show of downplaying the episode, taking a long drink of water from a crystal goblet that she held with both shaking hands, then waving away Sybyl’s offer of a hypo spray.

“It just hit me all of a sudden. You know. One of those twinges people my age sometimes get, right after having the fever. I’m sure you all recollect what it was like.”

That was a gallant and courteous thing for Jeni to say, especially while she was in such pain. Of course Antic and Kers almost certainly never suffered from this particular teen ailment. Nor, in all probability had Maserd, since most victims of brain fever later went on to become either eccentrics or meritocrats.

Sybyl and Gornon, on the other hand, knew exactly what Jeni was going through. They both glared at Horis Antic.

“Must you spout obscenities in front of the poor child? It’s bad enough we have to listen to them while we’re trying to eat.”

The Grey Man blinked in evident confusion. “I was just talking about how we might finally know why millions of planets almost simultaneously got new soils-”

This time, Jeni let out a wail of agony, throwing both arms around her head and nearly toppling off her chair. Sybyl made a hurried injection, then motioned for Kers Kantun to help carry the girl back to bed. On their way out, the woman from Ktlina shot a dagger look at Horis, who pretended he had no idea what had just happened.

Perhaps he honestly doesn’t know, Hari thought, charitably. Antic probably spent little time around adolescents. Older folks, even meritocrats who had suffered from severe brain fever as youths, tended to forget how intensely taboo words and themes used to affect them. That initial response ebbed quickly. By their thirties most simply considered it bad taste to talk of dirt or other vulgar topics.

“She has a nasty case,” Maserd commented sympathetically. “We seldom see it this severe, back home. I would have her hospitalized, if I could.”

“People don’t die of brain fever,” Horis Antic murmured.

Gornon Vlimt looked up from his drink. “Oh, don’t they? Maybe not in the empire. But on Ktlina it’s been a major killer since the renaissance began, despite all our efforts to isolate the viroid at fault.”

“You think it’s produced by an infectious agent?” Maserd asked. “But by all accounts this syndrome was extant even in the dawn ages. We always assumed the cause was intrinsic. A price of having high intelligence.”

Vlimt barked a bitter laugh.

“Nonsense. It’s yet another tool for keeping most of the human race down. Ever notice how few of the gentry get it? But don’t worry, aristo. We’ll figure it out eventually, and defeat it, like all the other ploys and repressions invented by the ruling class.”

Hari did not like the direction things were going. So far, he had managed to steer their discussions and investigations away from robots, aided by the fact that artificial intelligence was another reflexively taboo subject. Now he must do the same thing with brain fever.

That is a topic I must sort out for myself, he thought. Somewhere in his subconscious, he felt an idea chum… transforming itself into mathematical terms…preparing to fill a waiting niche in the equations. That left his surface thoughts free for some practical diplomacy.

“Now that Jeni is gone, I’d like to hear what Horis came to tell us. Something about all the lovely dirt that our good farmers plant their seeds in, on millions of worlds. That rich soil came from somewhere, didn’t it, Horis? Most planets only had primitive sea life until just before human colonists came. So you’re implying that something was done to create all the beautiful dirt?”

Gornon Vlimt stood up so quickly that his chair toppled.

“You people are disgusting. When I think of the fine thoughts and great art we could discuss, and all you want to talk about is…” He could not bring himself to finish. More than a little tipsy, the eccentric from Ktlina stumbled off, leaving only Maserd, Hari, and Mors Planch to hear Antic’s theory. Even Planch seemed relieved to see Gornon depart.

“Yes!” The Grey Man answered Hari’s question enthusiastically. “Do you remember how I mentioned that over ninety percent of planets with seas and oxygen atmospheres only had primitive types of life on them? Some think it was because they had insufficient mutating radiation to ensure fast evolution. So their continents were mostly bare, except for mosses and ferns and stuff. Not enough complexity to develop the fantastic living skin of soil that a world needs, in order to really thrive

“And yet, twenty-five million settled worlds do have soils! Vast, rich blankets of pulverized stone, mixed with organic material to an average depth of about…” He shook his head. “That doesn’t matter. The point is that something must’ve happened to make these soils. And quite recently!”

“How recently?” Mors Planch asked, his feet propped up on the edge of Biron Maserd’s fine oak table. If he was repulsed by the topic, the dark raider captain hid it well.

“It’s been hard to gather enough data,” Antic demurred. “And official resistance against this research is incredible. Mostly it’s been pursued as a side interest, passed on from one soil man to the next, for the last-”