“They certainly seemed real and human to the audience,” Moonrose said, raising her eyebrows.
“I’m afraid I didn’t watch the performance,” Hari said. “I was busy.” Strictly true, at least.
Moonrose leaned forward, scowling. “With your mathematics? Well, then, tell us about psychohistory.”
He was still keeping his face wooden-which gave the wrong signal. He made himself smile. “A rumor.”
“I have it on good authority that you are favored by the Emperor because of this theory of history.”
“What authority?”
“Now sir, I should ask the questions here-”
“Who says? I’m still a public servant, a professor. And you, madam, are taking up time I could be devoting to my students.”
With a wave Hari cut off the link. He had learned, since bandying words with Lamurk in clear view of an unsuspected 3D snout, to chop off talk when it was going the wrong way.
Dors came through the door as he leaned back into his airchair. “I got a hail, said somebody important was grilling you.”
“She’s gone. Poked at me about psychohistory.”
“Well, it was bound to get out. It’s an exciting synthesis of terms. Appeals to the imagination.”
“Maybe if I’d called it ‘sociohistory’ people would think it more boring and leave me alone.”
“You could never live with so ugly a word.”
The electroshield sparkled and snapped as Yugo Amaryl came through. “Am I interrupting anything?”
“Not at all.” Hari leapt up and helped him to a chair. He was still limping. “How’s the leg?”
He shrugged. “Decent.”
Three thuggos had come to Yugo on the street a week ago and explained the situation very calmly. They had been commissioned to do him damage, a warning he would not forget. Some bones had to be broken; that was the specification, nothing he could do about it. The leader explained how they could do this the hard way. If he fought, he would get messed up. The easy way, they would break his shin bone in one clean snap.
Describing it afterward, Yugo had said, “I thought about it some, y’know, and sat down on the sidewalk and stuck my left leg out straight. Braced it against the curb, below the knee. The leader kicked me there. A good job; it broke clean and straight.”
Hari had been horrified. The media latched onto the story, of course. His only wry statement to them was, “Violence is the diplomacy of the incompetent.”
“Medtech tells me it’ll heal up in another week,” Yugo said as Hari helped him stretch out, the airchair shaping itself subtly.
“The Imperials still haven’t a clue who did it,” Dors said, pacing restlessly around the office.
“Plenty of people will do a job like this.” Yugo grinned, an effect somewhat offset by the big bruise on his jaw. The incident had not been quite as gentlemanly as he described it. “They kinda liked doing it to a Dahlite, too.”
Dors paced angrily. “If I’d been there…”
“You can’t be everywhere,” Hari said kindly. “The Imperials think it wasn’t really about you, anyway, Yugo.”
Yugo’s mouth twisted ruefully at Hari. “I figured. You right?”
Hari nodded. “A ‘signal,’ one of them said.”
Dors turned sharply from her pacing. “Of what?”
“A warning,” Yugo said. “Politics.”
“I see,” she said quickly. “Lamurk cannot strike at you directly, but he leaves-”
“An unsubtle calling card,” Yugo finished for her. Dors smacked her hands together. “We should tell the Emperor!”
Hari had to chuckle. “And you, a historian.
Violence has always played a role in issues of succession. It can never be far from Cleon’s mind.”
“For emperors, yes,” she countered. “But in a contest for First Minister-”
“Power is get tin’ scarce ‘round here,” Yugo drawled sarcastically. “Pesky Dahlites makin’ trouble, Empire itself slowin’ down, too. Or spinnin’ off into loony ‘renaissances.’ Probably a Dahlite plot, that, righto?”
Hari said, “When food gets scarce, table manners change.”
Yugo said, “I’ll just bet the Emperor’s got this all analyzed.”
Dors began pacing again. “One of history’s lessons is that emperors who overanalyze fail, while those who oversimplify succeed.”
“A neat analysis,” Hari said, but she did not catch his irony.
“Uh, I actually came in to get some work done,” Yugo said softly. “I’ve finished reconciling the Trantorian historical data with the modified Seldon Equations.”
Hari leaned forward, though Dors kept pacing, her hands clasped behind her back. “Wonderful! How far off are they?”
Yugo grinned as he slipped a ferrite cube into Hari’s desk display slot. “Watch.”
Trantor had endured at least eighteen millennia, though the pre-Empire period was poorly documented. Yugo had collapsed the ocean of data into a 3D. Economics lay along one axis, social indices along another, with politics making up the third dimension. Each contributed a surface, forming a solid shape that hung above Hari’s desk. The slippery-looking blob was man-sized and in constant motion-deforming, caves opening, lumps rising. Color-coded internal flows were visible through the transparent skin.
“It looks like a cancerous organ,” Dors said. When Yugo frowned, she added hastily, “Pretty, though.”
Hari chuckled; Dors seldom made social gaffes, but when she did, she had no idea of how to recover. The lumpy object hanging in air throbbed with life, capturing his attention. The writhing manifold summed up trillions of vectors, the raw data drawn from countless tiny lives.
“This early history had patchy data,” Yugo said. The surfaces jerked and lurched. “Low resolution, too, and even low population size-a problem we won’t have in Empire predictions.”
“See the two-dee socio-structures?” Hari pointed. “And this represents everything in Trantor?” Dors asked.
Yugo said, “To the model not all detail is equally important. You don’t need to know the owner of a starship to calculate how it will fly.”
Hari said helpfully, pointing at a quick jitter in social vectors, “Scientocracy arose here third millennium. Then an era in which stasis arose from monopolies. That fed rigidity.”
The forms steadied as the data improved. Yugo let it run, time-stepping quickly so that they saw fifteen millennia in three minutes. It was startling, the pulsing solid growing myriad offshoots, structure endlessly proliferating. The madly burgeoning patterns spoke of the Empire’s complexity far more than any emperor’s lofty speech.
“Now here’s the overlay,” Yugo said, “showing how the Seldon Equations post-dict, in yellow.”
“They aren’t my equations,” Hari said automatically. Long ago he and Yugo had seen that to pre dictwith psychohistory first demanded that they post- dict the past, for verification. “They were-”
“Just watch.”
Alongside the deep blue data-figure, a yellow lump congealed. It looked to Hari like an identical twin to the original. Each went through contortions, seething with history’s energy. Each ripple and snag represented many billions of human triumphs and tragedies. Every small shudder had once been a calamity.
“They’re…the same,” Hari whispered.
“Damn right,” Yugo said.
“The theory fits.”
“Yup. Psychohistory works.”
Hari stared at the flexing colors. “I never thought…”
“It could work so well?” Dors had walked behind his chair and now rubbed his scalp.
“Well, yes.”
“You have spent years including the proper variables. It must work.”
Yugo smiled tolerantly. “If only more people shared your faith in mathists. You’ve forgotten the sparrow effect.”
Dors was transfixed by the shimmering data-solids, now rerunning all Trantorian history, throbbing with different-colored schemes to show up differences between real history and the equations’ post-dictions. There were very few. What’s more, they did not grow with time.