“These are little traits.”
“They link us. The sophisticated Trantorian and an Arcadian farmer can still understand each other’s lives, for the simple reason that their common humanity lives in the genes they share from many tens of millennia ago.”
This outburst was not received well. Faces wrinkled, mouths pouched in disapproval.
Hari saw he had overstepped. What’s more, he had nearly exposed psychohistory.
Yet he found it hard to not speak frankly. In his view the humanities and social sciences shrank to specialized branches of both mathematics and biology. History, biography, and fiction were symptoms. Anthropology and sociology together became the sociobiology of a single species. But he could not get a feel for how to include that in the equations. He had spoken out, he saw suddenly, because he was frustrated-by his own lack of understanding.
Still, that did not excuse his stupidity. He opened his mouth to smooth over the waters.
He saw the agitated man coming up on his left. Mouth awry, eyes white, hand-extended, poking forward, a tube in it, chromed and sleek and with a precise hole at the tip, a dark spot that expanded as he looked at it until it seemed like the Eater of All Things that lurked at Galactic Center, immense
Dors hit the man quite expertly. She deflected the arm up, jabbed him in the throat, struck next at the belly. Then she twisted the arm and forced him into a quarter-turn, her left leg coming around and cutting his feet from beneath him, her right hand forcing the head down-
And they struck the floor solidly, Dors on top, the gun skittering away among the shoes of the crowd-which was falling back in panic.
Specials blocked in around him and he saw no more. He shouted to Dors. Screams and shouts hammered at him from all sides.
More bedlam. Then he was clear of the Specials and the man was getting up and Dors was standing, holding the pistol, shaking her head. The man who had pointed it struggled to his feet.
“A recording tube,” she said in disgust.
“What?” Hari could barely hear in the noise.
The man’s left arm was sticking out at a wrong angle, plainly broken. “I-I agreed with your every word,” the man croaked out, his face a ghastly white. “Really.”
7.
Hari’s father had derisively referred to most public affairs as “dust-ups” -a big cloud on the horizon, a tiny speck underneath. His lip had curled back in a farmer’s disdain for making more of a thing than it was.
The incident at the Grand Imperial Universities Colloquy had become a grand dustup. Fully 3D’d, the scandal-PROF’S WIFE SOCKS FAN-burgeoned with each replaying.
Cleon called, tsk-tsking, and commenting broadly on how wives could be a burden in high office. “This will hurt your candidacy, I fear,” he had said. “I must do some mending.”
Hari did not report this to Dors. Cleon’s hint was clear. It was common practice among Imperial circles to divorce on grounds of general unsuitability-which meant unfashionability. In matters of vast power, appetite for more often overwhelmed all other emotions, even love.
He went home, irked by this conversation, to find Dors at work in the kitchen. She had her arms open-literally, not in greeting.
The epidermis hung loose, as if she had pulled a tight glove halfway off. Veins interlaced with the artificial neural net and she was working with tiny tools among them. Supple skin peeled back in a curved line down from elbow to wrist, moist crimson and intricate electronics. She was working on the augmented wrist, a thin yellow collar that did not look as though it could take three times the normal human’s impact.
“That fellow damaged you?”
“No, I did it to myself-or rather, overdid it.”
“A sprain?”
She smiled without humor. “My pivots don’t sprain. The collar mounts don’t mend. I’m replacing them.”
“Jobs like this, it’s not the parts, it’s the labor.”
She looked at him quizzically and he decided not to pursue the joke. He normally put from his mind the fact that his true love was a robot-or more accurately, a humaniform, vastly technically assisted, human-robot synthesis.
She had come to him through R. Daneel Olivaw, the ancient positronic robot who had saved Hari when he first came to Trantor and ran afoul of nasty political forces. She had been assigned at first as a bodyguard. He had known what she was from the start, at least approximately, but that did not prevent him from falling in love with her. Intelligence, character, charm, a simmering sexuality-these were not purely human facets, he had learned-by direct example.
He got her a drink as she worked, biding his time. He had ceased to be amazed by her repair work, often carried out on an utterly unsanitized field. There were antimicrobial methods available to the humaniform robots that could not work for ordinary humans, she had said. He had no idea how this could be. She discouraged further discussion, often deflecting him with passion. He had to admit that as a ploy this was completely effective.
She rolled her skin back into place, grimacing at the pain. She could shut off whole sections of her superficial nervous system, he knew, but kept a few strands alert as a diagnostic. The tabs self-sealed with pops and purrs.
“Let’s see.” She paused, feeling each wrist in turn. Two quick snaps. “They lock in fine.”
“Most people, you know, would find this sight quite unsettling.”
“That’s why I don’t do it on the way to work.”
“Very public spirited of you.”
They both knew she would be hounded down if there were any suspicion of her true nature. Robots of advanced capability had been illegal for millennia. Tiktoks were acceptable precisely because they were low-grade intelligences, rigorously held below the threshold of legally defined sentience. Violating those standards in manufacture was a capital crime, an Imperial violation, no exceptions. And strong, ancient emotions backed up the law: the Junin Sector riots had proved that.
Numerical simulations were similarly restricted. That was why the Voltaire and Joan sims, developed by the “New Renaissance” hotheads on Sark, had been carefully tailored to squeeze through algorithmic loopholes. Apparently that Marq fellow at Artifice Associates had souped up the Voltaire at the last minute. Since the sim was then erased, the violation had escaped detection.
Hari did not like having even a slight connection to crime, but he now realized that this was foolishness. Already his entire life revolved around Dors, a hidden pariah.
“I’m going to withdraw from the First Minister business,” he said decisively.
She blinked. “Me.”
She was always quick. “Yes.”
“We had agreed that the risk of increased scrutiny was worth gaining some power.”
“To protect psychohistory. But I expected very little of the spotlight to fall upon you. Now-”
“I am an embarrassment.”
“Coming in downstairs, there were a dozen 3D snouts pointing at me. They’re waiting for you.”
“I will stay here, then.”
“For how long?”
“The Specials can take me out through a new entrance. They’ve cut one and installed an agrav shaft.”
“You can’t avoid them forever, darling.”
She got up and embraced him. “Even if they find me out, I can go away.”
“If you’re lucky and escape. Even if you do, I can’t live without you. I won’t-”
“I could be transformed.”
“Another body?”
“A different one. Skin, corneas, some neural signatures changed.”
“File the serial numbers off and send you back?”
She stiffened in his arms. “Yes.”
“What can’t your…kind…do?”
“We cannot invent psychohistory.”
He whirled away from her in frustration and smacked his palm against a wall. “Damn it, nothing is as important as us.”