Foundation Fear Read Free Page A

begun.
    He had been a rather dreamy boy in a laboring district of Helicon. The work in fields and
     factories was easy enough that he could think his own shifting, abstract musings while he
     did it. Before the Civil Service exams changed his life, he had worked out a few simple
     theorems in number theory and later was crushed to find that they were already known. He
     lay in bed at night thinking of planes and vectors and trying to envision dimensions
     larger than three, listening to the distant bleat of the puff-dragons who came drifting
     down the mountain sides in search of prey. Bioengineered for some ancient purpose,
     probably hunting, they were revered beasts. He had not seen one for many years ...
    Helicon, the wild -- that was what he longed for. But his destiny seemed submerged in
     Trantor's steel.
    Hari glanced back and his Specials, thinking they were summoned, trotted forward. “No,” he
     said, his hands pushing air toward them -- a gesture he was making all the time these
     days, he reflected. Even in the Imperial Gardens they acted as though every gardener was a
     potential assassin.
    He had come this way, rather than simply emerge from the grav lifter inside the palace,
     because he liked the gardens above all else. In the distant haze a wall of trees towered,
     coaxed upward by genetic engineering until they obscured the ramparts of Trantor. Only
     here, on all the planet, was it possible to experience something resembling the out of
     doors.
    What an arrogant term! Hari thought. To define all of creation by its lying outside the
     doorways of humanity.
    His formal shoes crunched against gravel as he left the sheltered walkways and mounted the
     formal ramp. Beyond the forested perimeter rose a plume of black smoke. He slowed and
     estimated distance, perhaps ten klicks. Some major incident, surely.
    Striding between tall, neopantheonic columns, he felt a weight descend. Attendants dashed
     out to welcome him, his Specials tightened up behind, and they made a little procession
     through the long corridors leading to the Vault of Audience. Here the accumulated great
     artworks of millennia crowded each other, as if seeking a constituency in the present to
     give them life.
    The heavy hand of the Imperium lay upon most official art. The Empire was essentially
     about the past, its solidity, and so expressed its taste with a preference for the pretty.
     Emperors favored the clean straight lines of ascending slabs, the exact parabolas of
     arcing purple water fountains, classical columns and buttresses and arches. Heroic
     sculpture abounded. Noble brows eyed infinite prospects. Colossal battles stood frozen at
     climactic moments, shaped in glowing stone and holoid crystal.
    All were entirely proper and devoid of embarrassing challenge. No alarming art here, thank
     you. Nothing “disturbing” was even allowed in public places on Trantor which the Emperor
     might visit. By exporting to the periphs all hint of the unpleasantness and smell of human
     lives, the Imperium achieved its final state, the terminally bland.
    Yet to Hari, the reaction against blandness was worse. Among the galaxy's twenty-five
     million inhabited planets endless variations appeared, but there simmered beneath the
     Imperial blanket a style based solely on rejection.
    Particularly among those Hari termed “chaos worlds,” a smug avant-garde fumbled for the
     sublime by substituting for beauty a love of terror, shock, and the sickeningly grotesque.
     They used enormous scale, or acute disproportion, or scatology, or discord and irrational
     disjunction. Both approaches were boring. Neither had any airy joy.
    A wall dissolved, crackling, and they entered the Vault of Audience. Attendants vanished,
     his Specials fell behind. Abruptly Hari was alone. He padded over the cushiony floor.
     Baroque excess leered at him from every raised cornice, upjutting ornament, and elaborate