Foundation's Fear Read Free

be they’re built on a recorded underbase, then simmed for roundness.”
    “You can kick them up to sentience?”
    “Yeah, with some work. Got to stitch data languages. Y’know, this is, ah…”
    “Illegal. Violation of the Sentience Codes.”
    “Right. These guys I got it from, they’re on that New Renaissance world, Sark. They say nobody polices those old Codes anymore.”
    “It’s time we kicked over a few of those ancient blocks.”
    “Yessir.” Yugo grinned. “These constellations, they’re the oldest anybody’s ever found.”
    “How did you…?” Hari let his question trail off. Yugo had many shady connections, built on his Dahlite origins.
    “It took a little, ah, lubrication.”
    “I thought so. Well, perhaps best that I don’t hear the details.”
    “Right. As First Minister, you don’t want dirty hands.”
    “Don’t call me that!”
    “Sure, sure, you’re just a journeyman professor. Who’s going to be late for his appointment with the Emperor if he doesn’t hurry up.”

2.
    Walking through the Imperial Gardens, Hari wished Dors was with him. He recalled her wariness over his coming again to the attention of Cleon. “They’re crazy, often,” she had said in a dispassionate voice. “The gentry are eccentric, which allows emperors to be bizarre.”
    “You exaggerate,” he had responded.
    “Dadrian the Frugal always urinated in the Imperial Gardens,” she had answered. “He would leave state functions to do it, saying that it saved his subjects a needless expense in water.”
    Hari had to suppress a laugh; palace staff were undoubtedly studying him. He regained his sober manner by admiring the ornate, towering trees, sculpted in the Spindlerian style of three millennia before. He felt the tug of such natural beauty, despite his years buried in Trantor. Here, verdant wealth stretched up toward the blazing sun like outstretched arms. This was the only open spot on theplanet, and it reminded him of Helicon, where he had 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 formalramp. 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