Asimov’s Future History Volume 15

by Isaac Asimov

  He fought to control his breathing. Carefully he inched along the wall, holding to the slick cool glaze. The others had kept walking. They were somewhere ahead, but he did not dare look for them. Face the wall. Step, step–

  There. A door. He stepped before it and the slab slid aside. He stumbled in, weak with relief.

  “Hari, we were–what’s wrong?” Dors rushed over to him.

  “I, I don’t know. The sky–”

  “Ah, a common symptom,” a woman’s booming voice cut in. “You Trantorians do have to adjust, you know.”

  He looked up shakily into the broad, beaming face of Buta Fyrnix, the Principal Matron of Sark. “I... I was all right before.”

  “Yes, it’s quite an odd ailment,” Fyrnix said archly. “You Trantorians are used to enclosed city, of course. And you can often take well to absolutely open spaces, if you were reared on such worlds–”

  “As he was,” Dors put in sharply. “Come, sit.”

  Hari’s pride was already recovering. “No, I’m fine.”

  He straightened and thrust his shoulders back. Look firm, even if you don’t feel it.

  Fyrnix went on, “But a place in between, like Sarkonia’s ten-klick tall towers–somehow that excites a vertigo we have not understood.”

  Hari understood it all too well, in his lurching stomach. He had often thought that the price of living in Trantor was a gathering fear of large spaces, but Panucopia had seemed to dispel that idea. Now he felt the contrast. The tall buildings had evoked Trantor for him. But they drew his gaze upward, along steepening perspectives, into a sky that had suddenly seemed like a huge plunging weight.

  Not rational, of course. Panucopia had taught him that man was not merely a reasoning machine. This sudden panic had demonstrated how a fundamentally unnatural condition–living inside Trantor for decades–could warp the mind.

  “Let’s … go up,” he said weakly.

  The lift seemed comforting, even though the press of acceleration and popping ears as they climbed several klicks should–by mere logic–have unsettled him.

  A few moments later, as the others chatted in a reception lounge, Hari peered out at the stretching cityscape and tried to calm his unease.

  Sark had looked lovely on their approach. As the hyperspace cylinder skated down through the upper air, he had taken in a full view of its lush beauties.

  At the terminator, valleys sank into darkness while a chain of snowy mountains gleamed beyond. Late in the evening, just beyond the terminator, the fresh, peaked mountains glowed red-orange, like live coals. He had never been one to climb, but something had beckoned. Mountaintops cleaved the sheets of clouds, leaving a wake like that of a ship. Tropical thunderheads, lit by lightning flashes at night, recalled the blooming buds of white roses.

  The glories of humanity had been just as striking: the shining constellations of cities at night, enmeshed by a glittering web of highways. His heart filled with pride at human accomplishments. Unlike Trantor’s advanced control, here the hand of his fellow Empire citizens was still casting spacious designs upon the planet’s crust. They had shaped artificial seas and elliptical water basins, great plains of tiktok-cultivated fields, immaculate order arising from once-virgin lands.

  And now, standing in the topmost floor of an elegantly slim spire, at the geometric heart of Sarkonia, the capital city... he saw ruination coming.

  In the distance he saw stretching to the sky three twining columns–not majestic spires, but smoke.

  “That fits your calculations, doesn’t it?” Dors said behind him.

  “Don’t let them know!” he whispered.

  “I told them we needed a few moments of privacy, that you were embarrassed by your vertigo.”

  “I am–or was. But you’re right–the psychohistorical predictions I made are in that chaos out there.”

  “They do seem odd....”

  “Odd? Their ideas are dangerous, radical.” He spoke with real outrage. “Class confusions, shifting power axes. They’re shrugging off the very damping mechanisms that keep the Empire orderly.”

  “There was a certain, well, joy in the streets.”

  “And did you see those tiktoks? Fully autonomous!”

  “Yes, that was disturbing.”

  “They’re part and parcel of the resurrection of sims. Artificial minds are no longer taboo here! Their tiktoks will get more advanced. Soon–”

  “I’m more concerned with the immediate level of disruption,” Dors said.

  “That must grow. Remember my N-dimensional plots of psychohistorical space? I ran the Sark case on my pocket computer, coming down from orbit. If they keep on this way with their New Renaissance, this whole planet will whirl away in sparks. Seen in N-dimensions, the flames will be bright and quick, lurid–then smolder into ash. Then they’ll vanish from my model entirely, into a blur–the static of unpredictability.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “Calm down. They’ll notice.”

  He had not realized that he felt so deeply. The Empire was order, and here

  “Academician Seldon, do us the honor of gathering with some of our leading New Renaissance leaders.” Buta Fyrnix grasped his sleeve and tugged him back to the ornate reception. “They have so much to tell you!”

  And he had wanted to come here! To learn why the dampers that kept worlds stable had failed here. To see the ferment, pick up the scent of change. There was plenty of passionate argument, of soaring art, of eccentric men and women wedded to their grand projects. He had seen these at dizzying speed.

  But it was all too much. Something in him rebelled. The nausea he had suffered in the open streets was a symptom of some deeper revulsion, gut-deep and dark.

  Buta Fyrnix had been nattering on. “–and some of our most brilliant minds are waiting to meet you! Do come!”

  He suppressed a groan and looked beseechingly at Dors. She smiled and shook her head. From this hazard she could not save him.

  2.

  If Buta Fyrnix had begun as a grain of sand in his shoe, she was now a boulder.

  “She’s impossible! Yak, yak, yak. Look,” he said to Dors when they were at last alone, “I only came to Sark because of psychohistory, not for Imperial backslapping. How did the social dampers fail here? What social mechanism slipped, allowing this raucous Renaissance of theirs?”

  “My Hari, I fear that you do not have the nose to sniff out trends from life itself. It presses in on you. Data is more your province.”

  “Granted. It’s unsettling, all this ferment! But I’m still interested in how they recovered those old simulations. If I could get out of taking tours of their ‘Renaissance,’ through noisy streets–”

  “I quite agree,” Dors said mildly. “Tell them you want to do some work. We’ll stay in our rooms. I’m concerned about someone tracking us here. We’re just one worm-jump away from Panucopia.”

  “I’ll need to access my office files. A quick wormlink to Trantor–”

  “No, you can’t work using a link. Lamurk could trace that easily.”

  “But I haven’t the records–”

  “You’ll have to make do.”

  Hari stared out at the view, which he had to admit was spectacular. Great, stretching vistas. Riotous growth.

  But more fires boiled up on the horizon. There was gaiety in the streets of Sarkonia–and anger as well. The laboratories seethed with fresh energies, innovation bristled everywhere, the air seemed to sing with change and chaos.

  His predictions were statistical, abstract. To see them coming true so quickly was sobering. He did not like the swift, turbulent feel to this place at all–even if he did understand it. For now.

  The extremes of wealth and destitution were appalling. Change brought that, he knew.

  On Helicon he had seen poverty–and lived it, too. As a boy, his grandmother had insisted on buying him a raincoat several sizes too large, “to get more use out of it.” His mother didn’t like him playing kickball because he wore out his shoes too
quickly.

  Here on Sark, as on Helicon, the truly poor were off in the hinterlands. Sometimes they couldn’t even afford fossil fuels. Men and women peered over a mule’s ass all day as it plodded down a furrow.

  Some in his own family had fled the hardscrabble life for assembly lines. A generation or two after that, factory workers had scraped together enough money to buy a commercial driver’s license. Hari remembered his uncles and aunts accumulating injuries, just as his father had. Not having money, the pain came back to them years later in busted joints and unfixed legs, injuries staying with them in a way that a Trantorian would find astonishing.

  Heliconians in run-down shacks had worked on farm machinery that was big, powerful, dangerous, and cost more than any of them would earn in a lifetime. Their lives were obscure, far from the ramparts of haughty Empire. When dead and gone, they left nothing but impalpable memory, the light ash of a butterfly wing incinerated in a forest fire.

  In a stable society their pain would be less. His father had died while working overtime on a big machine. He had been wiped out the year before and was struggling to make a comeback.

  Economic surge and ebb had killed his father, as surely as the steel ground-pounder had when it rolled over on him. The lurch of distant markets had murdered–and Hari had known then what he must do. That he would defeat uncertainty itself, find order in seeming discord. Psychohistory could be, and hold sway.

  His father–

  “Academician!” Buta Fyrnix’s penetrating voice snatched him away from his thoughts.

  “Uh, that tour of the precincts. I, I really don’t feel–”

  “Oh, that is not possible, I fear. A domestic disturbance, most unfortunate.” She hurried on. “I do want you to speak with our tiktok engineers. They have devised new autonomous tiktoks. They say they can maintain control using only three basic laws–imagine!”

  Dors could not mask her surprise. She opened her mouth, hesitated, closed it. Hari also felt alarm, but Buta Fyrnix went right on, bubbling over new ventures on the Sarkian horizon. Then her eyebrows lifted and she said brightly, “Oh, yes–I do have even more welcome news. An Imperial squadron has just come to call.”

  “Oh?” Dors shot back. “Under whose command?”

  “A Ragant Divenex, sector general. I just spoke to him–”

  “Damn!” Dors said. “He’s a Lamurk henchman.”

  “You’re sure?” Hari asked. He knew her slight pause had been to consult her internal files.

  Dors nodded. Buta Fyrnix said calmly, “Well, I am sure he will be honored to take you back to Trantor when you are finished with your visit here. Which we hope will not be soon, of–”

  “He mentioned us?” Dors asked.

  “He asked if you were enjoying–”

  “Damn!” Hari said.

  “A sector general commands all the wormlinks, if he wishes–yes?” Dors asked.

  “Well, I suppose so.” Fyrnix looked puzzled.

  “We’re trapped,” Hari said.

  Fyrnix’s eyes widened in shock. “But surely you, a First Minister candidate, need fear no–”

  “Quiet.” Dors silenced the woman with a stern glance. “At best this Divenex will bottle us up here.”

  “At worst, there will be an ‘accident,” ‘Hari said.

  “Is there no other way to get off Sark?” Dors demanded of Fyrnix.

  “No, I can’t recall–”

  “Think!”

  Startled, Fyrnix said, “Well, of course, we do have privateers who at times use the wild worms, but–”

  3.

  In Hari’s studies he had discovered a curious little law. Now he turned it in his favor.

  Bureaucracy increases as a doubling function in time, given the resources. At the personal level, the cause was the persistent desire of every manager to hire at least one assistant. This provided the time constant for growth.

  Eventually this collided with the carrying capacity of society. Given the time constant and the capacity, one could predict a plateau level of bureaucratic overhead–or else, if growth persisted, the date of collapse. Predictions of the longevity of bureaucracydriven societies fit a precise curve. Surprisingly, the same scaling laws worked for microsocieties such as large agencies.

  The corpulent Imperial bureaus on Sark could not move swiftly. Sector General Divenex’s squadron had to stay in planetary space, since it was paying a purely formal visit. Niceties were still observed. Divenex did not want to use brute force when a waiting game would work.

  “I see. That gives us a few days,” Dors concluded.

  Hari nodded. He had done the required speaking, negotiating, dealing, promising favors–all activities he disliked intensely. Dors had done the background digging. “To...?”

  “Train.”

  Wormholes were labyrinths, not mere tunnels with two ends. The large ones held firm for perhaps billions of years–none larger than a hundred meters across had yet collapsed. The smallest could sometimes last only hours, at best a year. In the thinner worms, flexes in the wormwalls during passage could alter the end point of a traveler’s trajectory.

  Worse, worms in their last stages spawned transient, doomed young–the wild worms. As deformations in space-time, supported by negative energy-density “struts,” wormholes were inherently rickety. As they failed, smaller deformations twisted away.

  Sark had seven wormholes. One was dying. It hung a light-hour away, spitting out wild worms that ranged from a hand’s-width size, up to several meters.

  A fairly sizable wild worm had sprouted out of the side of the dying worm several months before. The Imperial squadron did not know of this, of course. All worms were taxed, so a free wormhole was a bonanza. Reporting their existence, well, often a planet simply didn’t get around to that until the wild worm had fizzled away in a spray of subatomic surf.

  Until then, pilots carried cargo through them. That wild worms could evaporate with only seconds’ warning made their trade dangerous, highly paid, and legendary.

  Wormriders were the sort of people who as children liked to ride their bicycles no-handed, but with a difference–they rode off rooftops.

  By an odd logic, that kind of child grew up and got trained and even paid taxes–but inside, they stayed the same.

  Only risk takers could power through the chaotic flux of a transient worm and take the risks that worked, not take those that didn’t, and live. They had elevated bravado to its finer points.

  “This wild worm, it’s tricky,” a grizzled woman told Hari and Dors. “No room for a pilot if you both go.”

  “We must stay together,” Dors said with finality.

  “Then you’ll have to pilot.”

  “We don’t know how,” Hari said.

  “You’re in luck.” The lined woman grinned without humor. “This wildy’s short, easy.”

  “What are the risks?” Dors demanded stiffly. “I’m not an insurance agent, lady.”

  “I insist that we know–”

  “Look, lady, we’ll teach you. That’s the deal.”

  “I had hoped for a more–”

  “Give it a rest, or it’s no deal at all.”

  4.

  In the men’s room, above the urinal he used, Hari saw a small gold plaque: Senior Pilot Joquan Beunn relieved himself here Octdent 4, 13,435.

  Every urinal had a similar plaque. There was a washing machine in the locker room with a large plaque over it, reading The entire 43rd Pilot Corps relieved themselves here Marlass 18, 13,675.

  Pilot humor. It turned out to be absolutely predictive. He messed himself on his first training run.

  As if to make the absolutely fatal length of a closing wormhole less daunting, the worm flyers had escape plans. These could only work in the fringing fields of the worm, where gravity was beginning to warp, and space-time was only mildly curved. Under the seat was a small, powerful rocket that propelled the entire cockpit out, automatically heading away from the worm.

  There is a li
mit to how much self-actuated tech one can pack into a small cockpit, though. Worse, worm mouths were alive with electrodynamic “weather”–writhing forks of lightning, blue discharges, red magnetic whorls like tornadoes. Electrical gear didn’t work well if a bad storm was brewing at the mouth. Most of the emergency controls were manual. Hopelessly archaic, but unavoidable.

  So he and Dors went through a training program. Quite soon it was clear that if he used the Eject command he had better be sure that he had his head tilted back. That is, unless he wanted his kneecaps to slam up into his chin, which would be unfortunate, because he would be trying to check if his canopy had gone into a spin. This would be bad news, because his trajectory might get warped back into the worm. To correct any spin he had to yank on a red lever, and if that failed he had to then very quickly–in pilot’s terms, this meant about half a second–punch two blue knobs. When the spindown came, he then had to be sure to release the automatic actuator by pulling down on two yellow tabs, being certain that he sit up straight with hands between knees to avoid...

  “. and so on for three hours. Everyone seemed to assume that since he was this famous mathematician he could of course keep an entire menu of instructions straight, timed to fractions of seconds.

  After the first ten minutes he saw no point in destroying their illusions, and simply nodded and squinted to show that he was carefully keeping track and absolutely enthralled. Meanwhile he solved differential equations in his head for practice.

  “I’m sure you will be all right,” Buta Fyrnix said fulsomely to them in the departure lounge.

  Hari had to admit this woman had proven better than he had hoped. She had cleared the way and stalled the Imperial offices’ Grey Men. Probably she shrewdly expected a payoff from him as First Minister. Very well; one’s life was worth a kickback.

  “I hope I can handle a wormship,” Hari said.

  “And I,” Dors added.

  “Our training is the very best,” Fyrnix said. “The New Renaissance encourages individual excellence–”