by Isaac Asimov
“And your histories give the full details concerning the original world? The one world?”
“Oh yes, it is all in a book and we all have it. Every one of us. We carry it at all times so that there is never a moment when any one of us cannot open it and read it and remember who we are and who we were and resolve that someday we will have our world back.”
“Do you know where this world is and who lives on it now?”
Raindrop Forty-Three hesitated, then shook her head fiercely. “We do not, but someday we will find it.”
“And you have this book in your possession now?”
“Of course.”
“May I see that book?”
Now a slow smile crossed the face of the Sister. She said, “So that’s what you want. I knew you wanted something when you asked to be guided through the microfarms by me alone.” She seemed a little embarrassed. “I didn’t think it was the Book.”
“It is all I want,” said Seldon earnestly. “I really did not have my mind on anything else. If you brought me here because you thought—”
She did not allow him to finish. “But here we are. Do you or don’t you want the Book?”
“Are you offering to let me see it?”
“On one condition.”
Seldon paused, weighing the possibility of serious trouble if he had overcome the Sister’s inhibitions to a greater extent than he had ever intended. “What condition?” he said.
Raindrop Forty-Three’s tongue emerged lightly and licked quickly at her lips. Then she said with a distinct tremor in her voice, “That you remove your skincap.”
46
Hari Seldon stared blankly at Raindrop Forty-Three. There was a perceptible moment in which he did not know what she was talking about. He had forgotten he was wearing a skincap.
Then he put his hand to his head and, for the first time, consciously felt the skincap he was wearing. It was smooth, but he felt the tiny resilience of the hair beneath. Not much. His hair, after all, was fine and without much body.
He said, still feeling it, “Why?”
She said, “Because I want you to. Because that’s the condition if you want to see the Book.”
He said, “Well, if you really want me to.” His hand probed for the edge, so that he could peel it off.
But she said, “No, let me do it. I’ll do it.” She was looking at him hungrily.
Seldon dropped his hands to his lap. “Go ahead, then.”
The Sister rose quickly and sat down next to him on the cot. Slowly, carefully, she detached the skincap from his head just in front of his ear. Again she licked her lips and she was panting as she loosened the skincap about his forehead and turned it up. Then it came away and was gone and Seldon’s hair, released, seemed to stir a bit in glad freedom.
He said, troubled, “Keeping my hair under the skincap has probably made my scalp sweat. If so, my hair will be rather damp.”
He raised his hand, as though to check the matter, but she caught it and held it back. “I want to do that,” she said. “It’s part of the condition.”
Her fingers, slowly and hesitantly, touched his hair and then withdrew. She touched it again and, very gently, stroked it.
“It’s dry,” she said. “It feels . . . good.”
“Have you ever felt cephalic hair before?”
“Only on children sometimes. This . . . is different.” She was stroking again.
“In what way?” Seldon, even amid his embarrassment, found it possible to be curious.
“I can’t say. It’s just . . . different.”
After a while he said, “Have you had enough?”
“No. Don’t rush me. Can you make it lie any way you want it to?”
“Not really. It has a natural way of falling, but I need a comb for that and I don’t have one with me.”
“A comb?”
“An object with prongs . . . uh, like a fork . . . but the prongs are more numerous and somewhat softer.”
“Can you use your fingers?” She was running hers through his hair.
He said, “After a fashion. It doesn’t work very well.”
“It’s bristly behind.”
“The hair is shorter there.”
Raindrop Forty-Three seemed to recall something. “The eyebrows,” she said. “Isn’t that what they’re called?” She stripped off the shields, then ran her fingers through the gentle arc of hair, against the grain.
“That’s nice,” she said, then laughed in a high-pitched way that was almost like her younger sister’s giggle. “They’re cute.”
Seldon said a little impatiently, “Is there anything else that’s part of the condition?”
In the rather dim light, Raindrop Forty-Three looked as though she might be considering an affirmative, but said nothing. Instead, she suddenly withdrew her hands and lifted them to her nose. Seldon wondered what she might be smelling.
“How odd,” she said. “May I . . . may I do it again another time?”
Seldon said uneasily, “If you will let me have the Book long enough to study it, then perhaps.”
Raindrop Forty-Three reached into her kirtle through a slit that Seldon had not noticed before and, from some hidden inner pocket, removed a book bound in some tough, flexible material. He took it, trying to control his excitement.
While Seldon readjusted his skincap to cover his hair, Raindrop Forty-Three raised her hands to her nose again and then, gently and quickly, licked one finger.
47
“Felt your hair?” said Dors Venabili. She looked at Seldon’s hair as though she was of a mind to feel it herself.
Seldon moved away slightly. “Please don’t. The woman made it seem like a perversion.”
“I suppose it was—from her standpoint. Did you derive no pleasure from it yourself?”
“Pleasure? It gave me gooseflesh. When she finally stopped, I was able to breathe again. I kept thinking: What other conditions will she make?”
Dors laughed. “Were you afraid that she would force sex upon you? Or hopeful?”
“I assure you I didn’t dare think. I just wanted the Book.”
They were in their room now and Dors turned on her field distorter to make sure they would not be overheard.
The Mycogenian night was about to begin. Seldon had removed his skincap and kirtle and had bathed, paying particular attention to his hair, which he had foamed and rinsed twice. He was now sitting on his cot, wearing a light nightgown that had been hanging in the closet.
Dors said, eyes dancing, “Did she know you have hair on your chest?”
“I was hoping earnestly she wouldn’t think of that.”
“Poor Hari. It was all perfectly natural, you know. I would probably have had similar trouble if I was alone with a Brother. Worse, I’m sure, since he would believe—Mycogenian society being what it is—that as a woman I would be bound to obey his orders without delay or demur.”
“No, Dors. You may think it was perfectly natural, but you didn’t experience it. The poor woman was in a high state of sexual excitement. She engaged all her senses . . . smelled her fingers, licked them. If she could have heard hair grow, she would have listened avidly.”
“But that’s what I mean by ‘natural.’ Anything you make forbidden gains sexual attractiveness. Would you be particularly interested in women’s breasts if you lived in a society in which they were displayed at all times?”
“I think I might.”
“Wouldn’t you be more interested if they were always hidden, as in most societies they are? —Listen, let me tell you something that happened to me. I was at a lake resort back home on Cinna . . . I presume you have resorts on Helicon, beaches, that sort of thing?”
“Of course,” said Seldon, slightly annoyed. “What do you think Helicon is, a world of rocks and mountains, with only well water to drink?”
“No offense, Hari. I just want to make sure you’ll get the point of the story. On our beaches at Cinna,
we’re pretty lighthearted about what we wear . . . or don’t wear.”
“Nude beaches?”
“Not actually, though I suppose if someone removed all of his or her clothing it wouldn’t be much remarked on. The custom is to wear a decent minimum, but I must admit that what we consider decent leaves very little to the imagination.”
Seldon said, “We have somewhat higher standards of decency on Helicon.”
“Yes, I could tell that by your careful treatment of me, but to each its own. In any case, I was sitting at the small beach by the lake and a young man approached to whom I had spoken earlier in the day. He was a decent fellow I found nothing particularly wrong with. He sat on the arm of my chair and placed his right hand on my left thigh, which was bare, of course, in order to steady himself.
“After we had spoken for a minute and a half or so, he said, impishly, ‘Here I am. You know me hardly at all and yet it seems perfectly natural to me that I place my hand on your thigh. What’s more, it seems perfectly natural to you, since you don’t seem to mind that it remains there.’
“It was only then that I actually noticed that his hand was on my thigh. Bare skin in public somehow loses some of its sexual quality. As I said, it’s the hiding from view that is crucial.
“And the young man felt this too, for he went on to say, ‘Yet if I were to meet you under more formal conditions and you were wearing a gown, you wouldn’t dream of letting me lift your gown and place my hand on your thigh on the precise spot it now occupies.’
“I laughed and we continued to talk of this and that. Of course, the young man, now that my attention had been called to the position of his hand, felt it no longer appropriate to keep it there and removed it.
“That night I dressed for dinner with more than usual care and appeared in clothing that was considerably more formal than was required or than other women in the dining room were wearing. I found the young man in question. He was sitting at one of the tables. I approached, greeted him, and said, ‘Here I am in a gown, but under it my left thigh is bare. I give you permission. Just lift the gown and place your hand on my left thigh where you had it earlier.’
“He tried. I’ll give him credit for that, but everyone was staring. I wouldn’t have stopped him and I’m sure no one else would have stopped him either, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It was no more public then than it had been earlier and the same people were present in both cases. It was clear that I had taken the initiative and that I had no objections, but he could not bring himself to violate the proprieties. The conditions, which had been hand-on-thigh in the afternoon, were not hand-on-thigh in the evening and that meant more than anything logic could say.”
Seldon said, “I would have put my hand on your thigh.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Even though your standards of decency on the beach are higher than ours are?”
“Yes.”
Dors sat down on her own cot, then lay down with her hands behind her head. “So that you’re not particularly disturbed that I’m wearing a nightgown with very little underneath it.”
“I’m not particularly shocked. As for being disturbed, that depends on the definition of the word. I’m certainly aware of how you’re dressed.”
“Well, if we’re going to be cooped up here for a period of time, we’ll have to learn to ignore such things.”
“Or take advantage of them,” said Seldon, grinning. “And I like your hair. After seeing you bald all day, I like your hair.”
“Well, don’t touch it. I haven’t washed it yet.” She half-closed her eyes. “It’s interesting. You’ve detached the informal and formal level of respectability. What you’re saying is that Helicon is more respectable at the informal level than Cinna is and less respectable at the formal level. Is that right?”
“Actually, I’m just talking about the young man who placed his hand on your thigh and myself. How representative we are as Cinnians and Heliconians, respectively, I can’t say. I can easily imagine some perfectly proper individuals on both worlds—and some madcaps too.”
“We’re talking about social pressures. I’m not exactly a Galactic traveler, but I’ve had to involve myself in a great deal of social history. On the planet of Derowd, there was a time when premarital sex was absolutely free. Multiple sex was allowed for the unmarried and public sex was frowned upon only when traffic was blocked. And yet, after marriage, monogamy was absolute and unbroken. The theory was that by working off all one’s fantasies first, one could settle down to the serious business of life.”
“Did it work?”
“About three hundred years ago that stopped, but some of my colleagues say it stopped through external pressure from other worlds who were losing too much tourist business to Derowd. There is such a thing as overall Galactic social pressure too.”
“Or perhaps economic pressure, in this case.”
“Perhaps. And being at the University, by the way, I get a chance to study social pressures, even without being a Galactic traveler. I meet people from scores of places inside and outside of Trantor and one of the pet amusements in the social science departments is the comparison of social pressures.
“Here in Mycogen, for instance, I have the impression that sex is strictly controlled and is permitted under only the most stringent rules, all the more tightly enforced because it is never discussed. In the Streeling Sector, sex is never discussed either, but it isn’t condemned. In the Jennat Sector, where I spent a week once doing research, sex is discussed endlessly, but only for the purpose of condemning it. I don’t suppose there are any two sectors in Trantor—or any two worlds outside Trantor—in which attitudes toward sex are completely duplicated.”
Seldon said, “You know what you make it sound like? It would appear—”
Dors said, “I’ll tell you how it appears. All this talk of sex makes one thing clear to me. I’m simply not going to let you out of my sight anymore.”
“What?”
“Twice I let you go, the first time through my own misjudgment and the second because you bullied me into it. Both times it was clearly a mistake. You know what happened to you the first time.”
Seldon said indignantly, “Yes, but nothing happened to me the second time.”
“You nearly got into a lot of trouble. Suppose you had been caught indulging in sexual escapades with a Sister?”
“It wasn’t a sexual—”
“You yourself said she was in a high state of sexual excitement.”
“But—”
“It was wrong. Please get it through your head, Hari. From now on, you go nowhere without me.”
“Look,” said Seldon freezingly, “my object was to find out about Mycogenian history and as a result of the so-called sexual escapade with a Sister, I have a book—the Book.”
“The Book! True, there’s the Book. Let’s see it.”
Seldon produced it and Dors thoughtfully hefted it.
She said, “It might not do us any good, Hari. This doesn’t look as though it will fit any projector I’ve ever encountered. That means you’ll have to get a Mycogenian projector and they’ll want to know why you want it. They’ll then find out you have this Book and they’ll take it away from you.”
Seldon smiled. “If your assumptions were correct, Dors, your conclusions would be inescapable, but it happens that this is not the kind of book you think it is. It’s not meant to be projected. The material is printed on various pages and the pages are turned. Raindrop Forty-Three explained that much to me.”
“A print-book!” It was hard to tell whether Dors was shocked or amused. “That’s from the Stone Age.”
“It’s certainly pre-Empire,” said Seldon, “but not entirely so. Have you ever seen a print-book?”
“Considering that I’m a historian? Of course, Hari.”
“Ah, but like this one?”
He handed over the Book and Dors, smiling, opened it—then turned to another
page—then flipped the pages. “It’s blank,” she said.
“It appears to be blank. The Mycogenians are stubbornly primitivistic, but not entirely so. They will keep to the essence of the primitive, but have no objection to using modern technology to modify it for convenience’s sake. Who knows?”
“Maybe so, Hari, but I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“The pages aren’t blank, they’re covered with microprint. Here, give it back. If I press this little nubbin on the inner edge of the cover—Look!”
The page to which the book lay open was suddenly covered with lines of print that rolled slowly upward.
Seldon said, “You can adjust the rate of upward movement to match your reading speed by slightly twisting the nubbin one way or the other. When the lines of print reach their upward limit—when you reach the bottom line, that is—they snap downward and turn off. You turn to the next page and continue.”
“Where does the energy come from that does all this?”
“It has an enclosed microfusion battery that lasts the life of the book.”
“Then when it runs down—”
“You discard the book, which you may be required to do even before it runs down, given wear and tear, and get another copy. You never replace the battery.”
Dors took the Book a second time and looked at it from all sides. She said, “I must admit I never heard of a book like this.”
“Nor I. The Galaxy, generally, has moved into visual technology so rapidly, it skipped over this possibility.”
“This is visual.”
“Yes, but not with the orthodox effects. This type of book has its advantages. It holds far more than an ordinary visual book does.”
Dors said, “Where’s the turn-on? —Ah, let me see if I can work it.” She had opened to a page at random and set the lines of print marching upward. Then she said, “I’m afraid this won’t do you any good, Hari. It’s pre-Galactic. I don’t mean the book. I mean the print . . . the language.”