Foundation's Fear Read Free Page A

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 enormousscale, 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 wainscoting.
    Silence. The Emperor was never waiting for anyone, of course. The gloomy chamber gave back no echoes, as though the walls absorbed everything.
    Indeed, they probably did. No doubt every Imperial conversation went into several ears. There might be eavesdroppers halfway across the Galaxy.
    A light, moving. Down a crackling grav column came Cleon. “Hari! So happy you could come.”
    Since refusing a summons by the Emperor was traditionally grounds for execution, Hari could barely suppress a wry smile. “My honor to serve, sire.”
    “Come, sit.”
    Cleon moved heavily. Rumor had it that his appetite, already legendary, had begun to exceed even the skills of his cooks and physicians. “We have much to discuss.”
    The Emperor’s constant attendant glow served to subtly enhance him with its nimbus. The contrast was mild, serving to draw him out from a comparative surrounding gloom. The room’s embedded intelligences tracked his eyes and shed added light where his gaze fell, again with delicate emphasis, subtly applied. The soft touch of his regard yielded a radiance which guests scarcely noticed, but which acted subconsciously, adding to their awe. Hari knew this, yet the effect still worked; Cleon looked masterful, regal.
    “I fear we have hit a snag,” Cleon said.
    “Nothing you cannot master, I am sure, sire.”
    Cleon shook his head wearily. “Now don’t you, too, go on about my prodigious powers. Some…elements—” he drew the word out with dry disdain “—object to your appointment.”
    “I see.” Hari kept his face blank, but his heart leaped.
    “Do not be glum! I do want you for my First Minister.”
    “Yes, sire.”
    “But I am not, despite commonplace assumption, utterly free to act.”
    “I realize that many others are better qualified—”
    “In their own eyes, surely.”
    “—and better trained, and—”
    “And know nothing of psychohistory.”
    “Demerzel exaggerated the utility of psychohistory.”
    “Nonsense. He suggested your name to me.”
    “You know as well as I that he was exhausted, not in his best frame of—”
    “His judgment was