Foundation's Fear (45 page)

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—”

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 bureaucracy-driven 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.”

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 limit 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—”

“Yes, I’m quite impressed,” Dors said. “Perhaps
you can explain to me the details of your Creativity Creation program? I’ve heard so much about it….”

Hari gave her a slight smile of thanks for distracting Fyrnix. He instinctively disliked the brand of rampant self-assurance common on Sark. It was headed for a crackup, of that he was sure. He ached to get back to his full psychohistorical resources, to simulate this Sark case. His earlier work needed refinement. He had secretly gathered fresh data here and yearned to apply it.

“I do hope you’re not worried about the wild worm. Academician?” Fyrnix spoke to him again, brow furrowed.

“It’s a tight fit,” he said.

They had to fly in a slender cylinder, Dors copiloting. Splitting the job had proved the only way to get them up to a barely competent level.

“I think it’s
marvelous,
how courageous you two are.”

“We have little choice,” Dors said. This was artful understatement. Another day and the sector general’s officers would have Hari and Dors under arrest.

“Riding in a little pencil ship.
Such
primitive means!”

“Uh, time to go,” Hari said behind a fixed smile. She was wearing thin again.

“
I
agree with the Emperor. Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.”

So the Emperor’s ghost-written remark had already spread here. Minor sayings moved fast, with Imperial muscle behind it.

Still, Hari felt his stomach flutter with dread. “You’ve got a point.”

He had brushed off the remark.

Four hours later, closing at high velocity with the big wormhole complex, he saw her side of it.

He spoke on suitcomm to Dors. “In one of my classes—Nonlinear Philosophy, I believe—the professor said something I’ll never forget. ‘Ideas about existence pale beside the fact of existence.’ Quite true.”

“Bearing oh-six-nine-five,” she said rigorously. “No small talk.”

“Nothing’s small out here—except that wild worm mouth.”

The wild worm was a fizzing point of vibrant agitation. It orbited the main worm mouth, a distant bright speck.

Imperial ships patrolled the main mouth, ignoring this wild worm. They had been paid off long ago and expected a steady train of slimships to slip through the Imperial guard.

Hari had passed through worm gates before, always in big cruisers plying routes through wormholes tens of meters across. Every hole of that size was the hub of a complex which buzzed with carefully orchestrated traffic. He could see the staging yards and injection corridors of the main route gleaming far away.

Their wild worm, a renegade spin-off, could vanish at any moment. Its quantum froth advertised its mortality.
And maybe ours
…Hari thought.

“Vector null sum coming up,” he called.

“Convergent asymptotes, check,” Dors answered.

Just like the drills they had gone through.

But coming at them was a sphere fizzing orange and purple at its rim. A neon-lit mouth. Tight, dark at the very center—

Hari felt a sudden desire to swerve, not dive into that impossibly narrow gullet.

Dors called out numbers. Computers angled them in. He adjusted with a nudge here and a twist there.

It did not help that he knew some of the underlying
physics. Wormholes were held open with layers of negative energy, skins of antipressure made in the first convulsion of the universe. The negative energy in the “struts” was equivalent to the mass needed to make a black hole of the same radius.

So they were plunging toward a region of space of unimaginable density. But the danger lurked only at the rim, where stresses could tear them into atoms.

A bull’s-eye hit was perfectly safe. But an error—

Thrusters pulsed. The wild worm was now a black sphere rimmed in quantum fire.

Growing.

Hari felt suddenly the helpless constriction of the pencil ship. Barely two meters across, its insulation was thin, safety buffers minimal. Behind him, Dors kept murmuring data and he checked…but part of him was screaming at the crushing sense of confinement, of helplessness.

He felt again the gut fear that had struck him in the streets of Sarkonia. Not claustrophobia, but something darker: a swampy fear of confusion, a riot of doubt. It seized him, squeezed his throat.

“Vectors summing to within zero-seven-three,” Dors called.

Her voice was calm, steady, a marvelous balm. He clung to its serene certainties and fought down his own panic.

Squeals of last-second corrections echoed in his cramped chamber. A quick kick of acceleration—

Lightning curling snakelike blue and gold at them—

—tumbling. Out the other end, in a worm complex fifteen thousand light years away.

“That old professor…damn right, he was,” he said.

Dors sighed, her only sign of stress. “Ideas about
existence pale…beside the fact of existence. Yes, my love. Living is bigger than any talk about it.”