The Protocol Officer steered him down a spiral air ramp, electrostatics seizing them and gently lowering the party toward-he looked down with trepidation-the obligatory media people. He braced himself. Dors squeezed his hand. “Do you have to talk to them?”
He sighed. “If I ignore them, they will report that.”
“Let Lamurk amuse them.”
“No.” His eyes narrowed. “Since I’m in this, I might as well play to win.”
Her eyes widened with revelation. “You’ve decided, haven’t you?”
“To try? You bet.”
“What happened?”
“That woman back there, the Potentate. She and her kind think the world’s just a set of opinions.”
“What has that got to do with Lamurk?”
“I can’t explain it. They’re all part of the decay. Maybe that’s it.”
She studied his face. “I’ll never understand you.”
“Good. That would be dull, yes?”
The media pack approached, 30 snouts aimed like weapons.
Hari whispered to Dors, “Every interview begins as a seduction and ends as a betrayal.” They descended.
“Academician Seldon, you are known as a mathist, a candidate First Minister, and a Heliconian. You-”
“I only realized I was a Heliconian when I came to Trantor.”
“And your career as a mathist-”
“I only realized that I thought as a mathist when I began meeting politicians.”
“Well then, as a politician-”
“I am still a Heliconian.” This drew some laughter.
“You prize the traditional, then?”
“If it works.”
“We be not open to old ideas,” a willowy woman from the Fornax Zone said. “Future of Empire comes from people, not laws. Agree?”
She was a Rational, using their stripped-down, utterly orderly Galactic, free of irregular verbs and complex constructions. Hari could follow it well enough, but for him the odd swerves and turns of Classical Galactic embodied its charm.
To Hari’s delight, several people disagreed with her formulated question, shouting. In the noise he reflected on the infinity of human cultures, represented in this vast bowl and still united under Classical Galactic.
The language’s sturdy base had stitched together the early Empire. For many millennia now the language had sat on its laurels, admittedly. He had added a small interaction term to his equations to allow for the cultural ripples excited by the splashing of a new argot into the linguistic pool. The ancient ruffles and flourishes of Galactic allowed subtleties denied the Rationals-or Rats, as some called them-and the fun of puns as well.
He tried to make this case to the woman, but she retorted, “Not support oddity! Support order. Old ways failed. As mathist you will be too”
“Come now!” Hari said, irked. “Even in closed axiomatic systems, not all propositions are decidable. I suggest you cannot predict what I would do as a First Minister.”
“Think you Council submits to reason?” the woman asked haughtily.
“It is the triumph of reason to get on well with those who possess none,” Hari said. To his surprise, some applauded.
“Your theory of history denies God’s powers to intervene in human affairs!” a thin man from a low-grav planet asserted. “What say you to that?”
Hari was about to agree-it seemed to make no difference to him-when Dors stepped before him.
“Perhaps I can bring up a bit of research, since this is an academic proceeding.” She smiled smoothly. “I ran across an historian of about a thousand years ago who had tested for the power of prayer. “
Hari’s mouth made a surprised, skeptical 0. The thin man demanded, “How could one scientifically-”
“He reasoned that the people most prayed for were the most famous. Yet they had to be exalted, above the fray.”
“The emperors?” The thin man was rapt.
“Exactly. And their lesser family members. He analyzed their mortality rates.”
Hari had never heard this, but his innate skepticism demanded detail. “Allowing for their better medical care, and safety from ordinary accidents?”
Dors grinned. “Of course. Plus their risk of assassination.”
The thin man did not know where this line of attack was going, but his curiosity got the better of him. “And…?”
Dors said, “He found that emperors died earlier than unprayed-for people.”
The thin man looked shocked, angry. Hari asked Dors, “What was the root mean deviation?”
“Always the skeptic! Not sufficient to prove that prayer had an actually harmful effect.”
“Ah.” The crowd seemed to find this example of tag-team puffery entertaining. Best to leave them wanting more. “Thank you,” he said, and they melted away behind a screen of Specials.
That left the crowd itself. Cleon had urged him to mingle with these folk, supposedly his basic power base, the meritocrats. Hari wrinkled his nose and nonetheless plunged in.
It was a matter of style, he realized after the first thirty minutes.
He had learned early in rural Helicon to place great store in good manners and civility. Among the alert, hard-edged academics he had found many who seemed poorly socialized, until he realized that they were operating out of a different culture, where cleverness mattered more than grace. Their subtle shadings of voice carried arrogance and assurance in precarious balance, which in unguarded moments tilted into acerbic, cutting judgment, often without even the appealing veneer of wit. He had to make himself remember to say “With all due respect,” at the beginning of an argument, and even to mean it.
Then there were the unspoken elements.
Among the fast-track circles, body language was essential, a taught skill. There were carefully designed poses for Confidence, Impatience, Submission (four shadings), Threat, Esteem, Coyness and dozens more. Codified and understood unconsciously, each induced a specific desired neurological state in both self and others. The rudiments for a full-blown craft lay in dance, politics, and the martial arts. By being systematic, much more could be conveyed. As with language, a dictionary helped.
A nonlinear philosopher of Galaxy-wide fame gave Hari a beaming smile, body language screaming self-confidence, and said, “Surely, Professor, you cannot maintain that your attempt to import math into history can somehow work? People can be what they wish. No equations will make them otherwise.”
“I seek to describe, that’s all.”
“No grand theory of history, then?”
Avoid a direct denial, he thought. “I will know I’m on the right track when I can simply describe a bit of human nature.”
“Ah, but that scarcely exists,” the man said with assurance, arms and chest turned adroitly.
“Of course there’s a human nature!” Hari shot back.
A pitying smile, a lazy shrug. “Why should there be?”
“Heredity interacts with environment to tug us back toward a fixed mean. It gathers people in all societies, across millions of worlds, into the narrow statistical circle that we must call human nature.”
“I don’t think there are enough general traits-”
“Parent-child bonding. Division of labor between the sexes.”
“Well, surely that’s common among all animals. I-”
“Incest avoidance. Altruism-we call it ‘humanitarianism,’ a telling clue, eh?-toward our near kin.”
“Well, those are just normal family-”
“Look at the dark side. Suspicion of strangers. Tribalism-witness Trantor’s eight hundred Sectors! Hierarchies in even the smallest groups, from the Emperor’s court to a bowling team.”
“Surely you can’t make such leaps, such simplistic, grotesque comparisons-”
“I can and do. Male dominance, generally, and when resources are scarce, marked territorial aggression.”