The Emperor nodded uncertainly. “Hari? What do you think?”
“I have doubts as well.”
Lamurk waved dismissively. “Failure of nerve.”
“Increased communication may worsen the Empire’s crisis.”
Lamurk’s mouth twisted derisively. “Nonsense. Contrary to every good executive rule.”
“The Empire isn’t ruled—” Hari made a half-bow to the Emperor “—alas, it’s let run.”
“More nonsense. We in the High Council—”
“Hear him out!” Cleon said. “He does not talk very much.”
Hari smiled. “Many people are grateful for that, sire.”
“No oblique answers, now. What does your psychohistory tell you about how the Empire runs?”
“It is millions of castles, webbed by bridges.”
“Castles?” Cleon’s famous nose rose skeptically.
“Planets. They have local concerns and run themselves as they like. The Empire doesn’t trouble itself over such details, unless a world begins making aggressive trouble.”
“True enough, and as it should be,” Cleon said. “Ah—and your bridges are the wormholes.”
“Exactly, sire.” Hari deliberately avoided looking at Lamurk and focused on the Emperor, while sketching in his vision.
Planets could have any number of lesser duchies, with disputes and wars and “microstructure” galore. The psychohistorical equa tions showed that none of that mattered.
What did matter was that physical resources could not be shared among indefinitely large numbers of people. Each solar system was a finite store of goods, and in the end, that meant local hierarchies to control access.
Wormholes could carry rather little mass, because the holes were seldom more than ten meters across. Massive hyperspace ships carried heavy cargoes, but they were slower and cumbersome. They distorted space-time, contracting it fore and expanding it aft, moving at super-light speeds in the Galaxy’s frame but not in its own. Trade among most stellar systems was constrained to light, compact, ex pensive items. Spices, fashions, technology—not bulky raw mater ials.
Wormholes could accommodate modulated light beams far more easily. The wormhole curvature refracted beams through to receivers at the other mouth. Data flowed freely, knitting together the Galaxy.
And information was the opposite of mass. Data could be moved, compressed, and leaked readily through copies. It was infinitely shareable. It blossomed like flowers in eternal spring, for as inform ation was applied to a problem, the resulting solution was new information. And it was cheap, meaning that it took few mass re sources to acquire it. Its preferred medium was light, quite liter-ally—the laser beam.
“That provided enough communication to make an Empire. But the odds of a native of the Puissant Zone ever voyaging to the Zaqulot Zone—or even to the next star, since by wormhole they are equivalent trips—were tiny,” Hari said.
“So every one of your ‘castles’ kept itself isolated—except for in formation flow,” Cleon said, absorbed.
“But now the MacroMesh will increase the information transfer rate a thousand-fold, using these ‘squeezers’ that compress inform ation.”
Cleon pursed his lips, puzzled. “Why is that bad?”
“It’s not,” Lamurk said. “Better data makes for better decisions, everybody knows that.”
“Not necessarily. Human life is a voyage on a sea of meaning, not a net of information. What will most people get from a close, personal flow of data? Detached, foreign logic. Uprooted details.”
“We can run things better!” Lamurk insisted. Cleon held up a finger and Lamurk choked off his next words.
Hari hesitated. Lamurk had a point, indeed.
There were mathematical relationships between technology, capital accumulation, labor, but the most important driver proved to be knowledge. About half the Empire’s economic growth came from the increase in the quality of information, as embodied in better machines and improved skills, leading to efficiency.
That was where the Empire had faltered. The innovative thrust of the sciences had slowly faltered. The Imperial universities pro duced fine engineers, but no inventors. Great scholars, but few true scientists. That factored into the other tides of time. But something other than data starvation had made that happen, and as yet, Hari did not know the cause.
But Hari saw the Emperor wavering, and pressed on. “Many on the High Council see the MacroMesh as an instrument of control. Let me point out a few facts well known to you, sire.”
Hari was in his favorite mode, a one-on-one lecture. Cleon leaned forward, eyes narrowed. Hari spun him a tale.
To get between worlds A and B, he said, one might have to take a dozen wormhole jumps—the Worm Nest was an astrophysical subway system with many transfers.
Each worm mouth imposed added fees and charges on every shipment. Control of an entire trade route yielded the maximum profit. The struggle for control was unending, often violent. From the viewpoint of economics, politics, and “historical momentum”—which meant a sort of imposed inertia on events—a local empire which controlled a whole constellation of nodes should be solid, enduring.
Not so. Time and again, regional satrapies went toes-up. It seemed natural to squeeze every worm passage for the maximum fee, by coordinating every worm mouth to optimize traffic. But that degree of control made people restive. In elaborately controlling the system, information flowed only from managers to wage slaves, with little feedback.
Extensive regulation did not deliver the best benefits. Instead, it yielded “short blanket economies”—when the collective shoulders got cold, the blanket got pulled up to cover them, and so the feet froze. Over-control failed.
“So the MacroMesh, if it lets the High Council really ‘run things,’ could decrease economic vitality.”
Lamurk smiled patronizingly. “A bunch of abstract theory, sire. Now, you listen to an old hand who’s been on the Council a good long time now…”
Hari attended to Lamurk’s famous balm and wondered why he was bothering with this. He had to admit that trading ideas with the Emperor had a certain quality of casual, almost sensual, power. Watching a man who could destroy a world with a gesture had a decided adrenaline edge.
But he didn’t really belong here, either by talent or drive. Trotting out his own views was amusing; every professor secretly thinks that what the world needs is a good, solid lecture—from him, of course.
But in this game, the pawns were real. The Moron Decree had unnerved him, even though he saw nothing morally wrong with it.
Lives hung in the balance here, among the finery. And not just the lives of others. He had to remind himself that this beaming, confident Lamurk across from him was the obvious source of the patch-weapon which had nearly killed him, just hours before.
3.
He entered their apartment and went straight to the kitchen. He punched in commands on the autoserver and then went to the range and began to heat up some oil. While it warmed he cut up onions and garlic and put them in to brown. His beer arrived and he opened one, not bothering with a glass.
“Something’s happened,” Dors said.
“We had a fine little chat. I eyed Lamurk, he eyed me.”
“That’s not why your shoulders are hunched up.”
“Um. Betrayed by my expressive body.”
So he told her about the possible assassination attempt.
After she had calmed down, she said tightly, “You also heard
about the smoke artist?”
“At that reception? He made the big cloud that looked like me?”
“He died today.”
“How?”
“Looks like an accident.”
“Too bad—he was funny.”
“Too funny. He made the cartoon of Lamurk, remember? Made Lamurk look like a blowhard. It was the hit of the reception.”
Hari blinked. “You don’t…”
“Quite orderly, both of you in one day.”
“So it could be Lamurk….”
Dors said grimly, “My dear Hari, always thinking in terms of probabilities.”
After his audience with Cleon, Hari had sat through a strict talk by the head of palace security. His Specials squad was doubled. More midget-flyers for forward perimeter warning. Oh, yes, and he was not to walk close to any walls.
This last bit had made Hari chuckle, which did not improve the palace staff’s attitude. Worse, Hari knew that he still had baggage to unpack. How to keep them from sniffing out Dors’ true nature?
The autoserver rang. He sat and forked up dark meat and onions and then opened another bottle of the cold beer and held it in one hand while he ate with the other.
“A hard day’s work,” Dors said.
“I always eat heartily after narrowly averting death. It’s an old family tradition.”
“I see.”
“Cleon ended up by commenting on the impasse in the High Council. Until that’s resolved, no vote on the First Minister can occur.”
“So you and Lamurk are still butting heads.”
“He’s butting. Me, I’m dodging.”
“I will never leave your side again,” she said firmly.
“It’s a deal. Could you get me something more from the autoserv er? Something warm and heavy and full of things that are bad for me?”
She went into the kitchen and he ate steadily and drank the beer and did not think about anything.
She brought back something steaming in a rich brown sauce. He ate it without asking what it was.
“You are an odd man, professor.”
“Things get to me a bit later than other people.”
“You learned how to delay thinking about them, reacting to them, until there was a time and a place.”
He blinked and drank some more beer. “Could be. Have to think about it.”
“You eagerly eat working-class food. And where did you learn this trick of deferring reactions?”
“Um. You tell me.”
“Helicon.”
He thought about that. “Um, the working class. My father got into trouble and there were plenty of hard times. About the only break I got as a boy was not getting brain fever. We couldn’t have afforded any hospital time.”
“I see. Financial trouble, I remember you saying.”
“Financial and then people muscling him to sell his land. He didn’t want to. So he mortgaged more and planted more crops and followed his best judgment. Every time chance played out against him, Dad got right back up and went at it again. That worked for a while because he did know farming. But then there was a big market fluctuation and he got caught and lost everything.” He was speaking quickly as he ate, and he didn’t know why but it felt right.
“I see. That was why he was doing that dangerous job—”
“Which killed him, yes.”
“I see. And you dealt with that. Submerged it to help your mother. Learned in the hard times that followed to reserve your reactions for a moment when it was all right to let it go.”
“If you say ‘I see’ again, I won’t let you watch later when I take a shower.”
She smiled, but then the same penetrating cast came over her face. “You fit some well-defined parameters. Men who are contained. They control themselves by letting very little in. They do not show a great deal or talk too much.”
“Except to their woman.” He had stopped eating.
“You have little time for small talk—people at Streeling comment
on that—yet you speak freely with me.”
“I try not to blather.”
“Being male is complicated.”
“So is being female, though you’ve mastered it beautifully.”
“I’ll take that as a rather formal compliment.”
“And so it was. Just plain being human is just plain hard.”