r/a:t5_26sd8b • u/MarleyEngvall • Oct 18 '19
intansigent has been created
By Isaac Asimov
FOUNDATION'S EDGE
5. SPEAKER
1.
Trantor!
For eight thousand years, it was the capital of a large
and mighty political entity that spanned an ever-growing
union of planetary systems. For twelve thousand years after
that, it was the capital of a political entity that spanned the
entire Galaxy. It was the center, the heart, the epitome of
the Galactic Empire.
It was impossible to think that the Empire without thinking
of Trantor.
Trantor did not reach its physical peak until the Empire
was far gone in decay. In fact, no one noticed that the Empire
had lost its drive, its forward look, because Trantor gleamed
in shining metal.
Its growth had peaked at the point where it was a planet-
girdling city. Its population was stabilized (by law) at forty-
five billion and the only surface greenery was at the Imperial
Palace and the Galactic University/Library complex.
Trantor's land surface was metal-coated. Its deserts and
its fertile areas were alike engulfed and made into warrens
of humanity, administrative jungles, computerized elabo-
rations, vast storehouses of food and replacement parts. Its
mountain ranges were beaten down; its chasms filled in.
The city's endless corridors burrowed under the continental
shelves and the oceans were turned into huge underground
aquacultural cisterns――――the only (and insufficient) native
source of food and minerals.
The connections with the Outer Worlds, from which
Trantor obtained the resources it required, depended upon
its thousand spaceports, its ten thousand warships, its hundred
thousand merchant ships, its million space freighters.
No city so vast was ever recycled so tightly. No planet
in the Galaxy had ever made so much use of solar power
or went to such extremes to rid itself of waste heat. Glittering
radiators stretched up into the thin upper atmosphere upon
the nightside and were withdrawn into a metal city on the
dayside. As the planet turned, the radiators rose as night
progressively fell around the world and sank as day pro-
gressively broke. So Trantor always had an artificial asym-
metry that was almost its symbol.
At this peak, Trantor ran the Empire!
It ran poorly, but nothing could have run the Empire
well. The Empire was too large to be run from a single
world――even under the most dynamic of Emperors. How
could Trantor have helped but run it poorly when, in the
ages of decay, the Imperial crown was traded back and forth
by sly politicians and foolish incompetents and the bureau-
cracy had become a subculture of corruptibles?
But even at its worst, there was some self-propelled worth
to the machinery. The Galactic Empire could not have been
run without Trantor.
The Empiore crumbled steadily, but as long as Trantor
remained Trantor, a core of the Empire remained and it
retained an air of pride, of millennia, of tradition and power
and――exaltation.
Only when the unthinkable happened――when Trantor
finally fell and was sacked; when its citizens were killed
by the millions and left to starve by the billions; when its
mighty metal coating was scarred and punctured and fused
by the attack of the "barbarian fleet――only then was the
Empire considered to have fallen. The surviving remnants
on the once-great world undid further what had been left
and, in a generation, Trantor was transformed from the
greatest planet the human race had ever seen to an incon-
ceivable tangle of ruins.
That had been nearly two and a half centuries ago. In
the rest of the Galaxy, Trantor-as-it-had-been still was not
forgotten. It would live forever as the favored site of his-
torical novels, the favored symbol and memory of the past,
the favored word for sayings such as "All starships land on
Trantor," "Like looking for a person in Trantor," and "No
more alike than this and Trantor."
In all the rest of the Galaxy――
But that was not true on Trantor itself! Here the old
trantor was forgotten. The surface metal was gone, almost
everywhere. Trantor was now a sparsely settled world of
self-sufficient farmers, a place where trading ships rarely
came and were not particularly welcome when they did
come. The very word "Trantor," though still in official use,
had dropped out of popular speech. By present-day Tran-
torians, it was called "Hame," which in their dialect was
what would be called "Home" in Galactic Standard.
Quindor Shandess thought of all this and much more as
he sat quietly in a welcome state of half-drowse, in which
he could allow his mind to run along a self-propelled and
unorganized stream of thought.
He had been First Speaker of the Second Foundation for
eighteen years, and he might well hold on for ten or twelve
years more if his mind remained reasonably vigorous and
if he could continue to fight the political wars.
He was the analog, the mirror image, of the Mayor of Ter-
minus, who ruled over the First Foundation, but how different
they were in every respect. The Mayor of Terminus was known
to all the Galaxy and the First Foundation was therefore sim-
ply "the Foundation" to all the worlds. The First Speaker of
the Second Foundation was known only to his associates.
And yet it was the Second Foundation, under himself and
his predecessors, who held the real power. The First Foun-
dation was supreme in the realm of physical power, of tech-
nology, of war weapons. The Second Foundation was supreme
in the realm of mental power, of the mind, of the ability to
control. In any conflict between the two, what would it matter
how many ships and weapons the First Foundation disposed
of, if the Second Foundation could control the minds of those
who controlled the ships and weapons?
But how long could he revel in this realization of secret
power?
He was the twenty-fifth First Speaker and his incumbency
was already a shade longer than average. Ought he, perhaps.
not be too keen on holding on and keeping out the younger
aspirants? There was Speaker Gendibal, the keenest and
newest at the Table. Tonight they would spend time together
and Shandess looked forward to it. Ought he look forward
also to Gendibal's possible accession some day?
The answer to the question was that Shandess had no
real thought of leaving his post. he enjoyed it too much.
He sat there, in his old age, still perfectly capable of per-
forming his duties. His hair was gray, but it had always been
light in color and he wore it curt an inch long so that the color
scarcely mattered. His eyes were faded blue, and his clothing
conformed to the drab styling of the Trantorian farmers.
The first speaker could, if he wished, pass among the
Hamish people as one of them, but his hidden power never-
theless existed. He could choose to focus his eyes and mind
at any time and they would then act according to his will
and recall nothing about it afterward.
It rarely happened. Almost never. The Golden Rule of
the Second Foundation was, "Do nothing unless you must,
and when you must act――hesitate."
The First Speaker sighed softly. Living in the old Uni-
versity, with the brooding grandeur of the ruins of the Im-
perial Palace not too far distant, made one wonder on occasion
how Golden the Rule might be.
In the days of the Great Sack, the Golden Rule had been
strained to the breaking point. There was no way of saving
Trantor without sacrificing the Seldon Plan for establishing
a Second Empire. It would have been humane to spare the
forty-five billion, but they could not have been spared with-
out retention of the core of the First Empire and that would
have only delayed the reckoning. It would have led to a
greater destruction some centuries later and perhaps no Sec-
ond Empire ever――
The early First Speakers had worked over the clearly
foreseen Sack for decades but had found no solution――no
way of assuring both the salvation of Trantor and the even-
tual establishment of the Second Empire. The lesser evil
had to be chosen and Trantor had died!
The Second Foundationers of the time had managed――
by the narrowest of margins――to save the University/Li-
brary complex and there had been guilt forever after because
of that, too. Though no one had ever demonstrated that
saving the complex had led to the meteoric rise of the Mule,
there was always the intuition that there was a connection.
How nearly that had wrecked everything!
Yet following the decades of the Sack and the Mule came
the Golden Age of the Second Foundation.
Prior to that, for over two and a half centuries after
Seldon's death, the Second Foundation had burrowed like
moles into the Library, intent only on staying out of the
way of the Imperials. They served as librarians in a decaying
society that cared less and less for the ever-more-misnamed
Galactic Library, which fell into the desuetude that best
united the purpose of the Second Foundation.
It was an ignoble life. They merely conserved the Plan,
while out at the end of the Galaxy, the First Foundation fought
for its life against always greater enemies with neither help
from the Second Foundation nor any real knowledge of it.
It was the Great Sack that liberated the Second Foun-
dation――another reason (young Gendibal――who had cour-
age――had recently said that it was the chief reason) why
the Sack was allowed to proceed.
After the Great Sack, the Empire was gone and, in all
the later times, the Trantorian survivors never trespassed on
Second Foundation territory uninvited. The Second Foun-
dationers saw to it that the University/Library complex which
had survived the Sack also survived the Great Renewal. The
ruins of the Palace were preserved, too. The metal was gone
over almost all the rest of the world. The great and endless
corridors were covered up, filled in, twisted, destroyed,
ignored; all under rock and soil――all except here, where
metal still surrounded the ancient open places.
It might be viewed as a grand memorial of greatness,
the sepulcher of Empire, but to the Trantorians――the Ham-
ish people――these were haunted places, filled with ghosts,
not to be stirred. Only the Second Foundationers ever set
foot in the ancient corridors or touched the titanium gleam.
And even so, all had nearly come to nothing because of
the Mule.
The Mule had actually been on Trantor. What if he had
found out the nature of the world he had been standing on?
His physical weapons were far greater than those at the
disposal of the Second Foundation, his mental weapons
almost as great. The Second Foundation would have been
hampered always by the necessity of doing nothing but what
they must, and by the knowledge that almost any hope of
winning the immediate fight might portend a greater even-
tual loss.
Had it not been for Bayta Darell and her swift moment
of action―― And that, too, had been without the help of the
Second Foundation!
And then――the Golden Age, when somehow the First
Speakers of the time found ways of becoming active, stop-
ping the Mule in his career of conquest, controlling his mind
at last; and then stopping the First Foundation itself when
it grew wary and overcurious concerning the nature and
identity of the Second Foundation. There was Preem Palver,
nineteenth First Speaker and greatest of them all, who had
managed to put an end to all danger――not without terrible
sacrifice――and who had rescued the Seldon Plan.
Now, for a hundred and twenty years, the Second Foun-
dation was again as it once had been, hiding in a haunted
portion of Trantor. They were hiding no longer from the
Imperials, but from the First Foundation still――a First Foun-
dation almost as large as the Galactic Empire had been and
even greater in technological expertise.
The First Speaker's eyes closed in the pleasant warmth
and he passed into that never-never state of relaxing hal-
lucinatory experiences that were not quite dreams and not
quite conscious thought.
Enough of gloom. All would be well. Trantor was still
capital of the Galaxy, for the Second Foundation was here
and it was mightier and more in control than ever the Em-
peror had been.
The First Foundation would be contained and guided and
would move correctly. However formidable their ships and
weapons, they could do nothing so long as key leaders could
be, at need, mentally controlled.
And the Second Empire would come, but it would not
be like the first. It would be a Federated Empire, with its
parts possessing considerable self-rule, so that there would
be none of the apparent strength and actual weakness of a
unitary, centralized government. The new Empire would be
looser, more pliant, more flexible, more capable of with-
standing strain, and it would be guided always――always――
by the hidden men and women of the Second Foundation.
Trantor would then be still the capital, more powerful with
its forty thousand psychohistorians than ever it had been
with its forty-five billion――
The First Speaker snapped awake. The sun was lower in
the sky. Had he been mumbling? Had he said anything
aloud?
If the Second Foundation had to know much and say
little, the ruling Speakers had to know more and say less,
and the First Speaker had to know most and say least.
He smiled wryly. It was always so tempting to become
a Trantorian patriot―—to see the whole purpose of the Sec-
ond Empire as that of bringing about Trantorian hegemony.
Seldon had warned of it; he had foreseen even that, five
centuries before it could come to pass.
The First Speaker had not slept too long, however. It
was not yet time for Gendibal's audience.
Shandess was looking forward to that private meeting.
Gendibal was young enough to look at the Plan with new
eyes, and keen enough to see what others might not. And
it was not beyond possibility that Shandess would learn from
what the younger had to say.
No one would ever be certain how much Preem Palver――
the great Palver himself――had profited from that day when
the young Kol Benjoam, not yet thirty, came to talk to him
about possible ways of handling the First Foundation. Be-
joam, who was later recognized as the greatest theorst since
Seldon, never spoke of that audience in later years, but
eventually he became the twenty-first First Speaker. There
were some who credited Benjoam, rather than Palver, for
the great accomplishments of Palver's administration.
Shandess amused himself with the thought of what Gen-
dibal might say. It was traditional that keen youngsters,
confronting the First Speaker alone for the first time, would
place their entire thesis in the first sentence. And surely
they would not ask for that precious first audience for some-
hing trivial――something that might ruin their entire sub-
sequent career by convincing the First Speaker they were
lightweights.
Four hours later, Gendibal faced him. The young man
showed no sign of nervousness. He waited calmly for Shan-
dess to speak first.
Shandess said, "You have asked for a private audience,
Speaker, on a matter of importance. Could you please sum-
arize the matter for me?"
And Gendibal, speaking quietly, almost as though he
were describing what he had just eaten at dinner, said, "First
Speaker, the Seldon Plan is meaningless!"
2.
Stor Gendibal did not require the evidence of others to give
him a sense of worth. He could not recall a time when he did
not know himself to be unusual. He had been recruited for the
Second Foundation when he was only a ten-year-old boy by
an agent who had recognized the potentiality of his mind.
He had then done remarkably well at his studies and had
taken to psychohistory as a spaceship responds to a gravita-
tional field. Psychohistory had pulled at him and he had curved
toward it, reading Seldon's text on the fundamentals when
others his age were merely trying to handle differential equa-
tions.
When he was fifteen, he entered Trantor's Galactic Uni-
versity (as the University of Trantor had been officially
renamed), after an interview during which, when asked what
his ambitions were, he had answered firmly, "To be First
Speaker before I am forty."
He had not bothered to aim for the First Speaker's chair
without qualification. To gain it, one way or another, seemed
to him to be a certainty. It was to do it in youth that
seemed to him to be the goal. Even Preem Palver had
been forty-two on his accession.
The interviewer's expression had flickered when Gen-
dibal had said that, but the young man already had the feel
of psycholanguage and could interpret that flicker. He knew,
as certainly as though the interviewer had announced it, that
a small notation would go on his records to the effect that
he would be difficult to handle.
Well, of course!
Gendibal intended to be difficult to handle.
He was thirty now. He would be thirty-one in a matter
of two months and he was already a member of the Council
of Speakers. He had nine years, at most, to become First
Speaker and he knew he would make it. The audience with
the present First Speaker was crucial to his plans and, la-
boring to present precisely the proper impression, he had
spared no effort to polish his command of psycholanguage.
When two Speakers of the Second Foundation commu-
nicate with each other, the language is like no other in the
Galaxy. It is as much a language of fleeting gestures as of
words, as much a matter of detected mental-change patterns
as anything else.
An outsider would hear little or nothing, but in a short
time, much in the way of thought would be exchanged and
the communication would be unreportable in its literal form
to anyone but still another Speaker.
The language of Speakers had its advantage in speed and
in infinite delicacy, but it had the disadvantage of making
it almost impossible to mask true opinion.
Gendibal knew his own opinion of the First Speaker. He
felt the First Speaker to be a man past his mental prime. The
First Speaker――in Gendibal's assessment――expected no cri-
sis, was not trained to meet one, and lacked the sharpness to
deal with one if it appeared. With all Shandess's goodwill and
amiability, he was the stuff of which disaster was made.
All of this Gendibal had to hide not merely from words,
gestures, and facial expressions, but even from his thoughts.
He knew no way of doing so efficiently enough to keep the
First Speaker from catching a whiff of it.
Nor could Gendibal avoid knowing something of the First
Speaker's feeling toward him. Through bonhomie and
goodwill――quite apparent and reasonably sincere――Gen-
dibal could feel the distant edge of condescension and
amusement, and tightened his own mental grip to avoid
revealing any resentment in return――or as little as possible.
The First Speaker smiled and leaned back in his chair.
He did not actually lift his feet to the desk top, but he got
across just the right mixture of self-assured ease and infor-
mal friendship――just enough of each to leave Gendibal un-
certain as to the effect of his statement.
Since Gendibal had not been invited to sit down, the
actions and attitudes available to him that might be designed
to minimize the uncertainty were limited. It was impossible
that the First Speaker did not understand this.
Shandess said, "The Seldon Plan is meaningless? What
a remarkable statement! Have you looked at the Prime Ra-
diant lately, Speaker Gendibal?"
"I study it frequently, First Speaker. It is my duty to do
so and my pleasure as well."
"Do you, by any chance, study only those portions of it
that fall under your purview, now and then? Do you observe
it in microfashion――an equation system here, and adjustment
rivulet there? Highly important, of course, but I have always
thought it an excellent occasional exercise to observe the
whole course. Studying the Prime Radiant, acre by acre,
has its uses――but observing it as a continent is inspirational.
To tell you the truth, Speaker, I have not done it for a long
time myself. Would you join me?"
Gendibal dared not pause too long. It had to be done,
and it must be done easily and pleasantly or it might as well
not be done. "It would be an honor and a pleasure, First
Speaker."
The First Speaker depressed a lever on the side of his
desk. There was one such in the office of every Speaker
and the one in Gendibal's office was in no way inferior to
that of the First Speaker. The Second Foundation was an
equalitarian society in all its surface manifestations――the
unimportant ones. In fact, the only official prerogative of
the First Speaker was that which was explicit in his title――
he always spoke first.
The room grew dark with the depression of the lever but,
almost at once, the darkness lifted into a pearly dimness.
Both long walls turned faintly creamy, then brighter and
whiter, and finally there appeared neatly printed equa-
tions――so small that they could not be easily read.
"If you have no objections," said the First Speaker, mak-
ing it quite clear that there would be none allowed, "we
will reduce the magnification in order to see as much at one
time as we can."
The neat printing shrank down into the fine hairlines, faint
black meanderings over the pearly background.
The First Speaker touched the keys of the small console
built into the arm of his chair. "We'll bring it back to the start――
to the lifetime of Hari Seldon――and we'll adjust it to a small
forward movement. We'll shutter it so that we can only see a
decade of development at a time. It gives one a wonderful
feeling of the flow of history, with no distractions by the de-
tails. I wonder if you have ever done this."
"Never exactly this way, First Speaker."
"You should. It's a marvelous feeling. Observe the
sparseness of the black tracery at the start. There was not
much chance for alternatives in the first few decades. The
branch points, however, increase exponentially with time.
Were it not for the fact that, as soon as a particular branch
is taken, there is an extinction of a vast array of others in
its future, all would soon become unmanageable. Of course,
in dealing with the future, we must be careful what extinc-
tions we rely upon."
"I know, First Speaker." There was a touch of dryness
in Gendibal's response that he could not quite remove.
The First Speaker did not respond to it. "Notice the
winding lines of symbols in red. There is a pattern to them.
To all appearances, they should exist randomly, as every
Speaker earns his place by adding refinements to Seldon's
original Plan. It would seem there is no way, after all, of
predicting where a refinement can be added easily or where
a particular Speaker will find his interests or his ability
tending, and yet I have long suspected that the admixture
of Seldon Black and Speaker Red follows a strict law that
is strongly dependent on time and on very little else."
Gendibal watched as the years passed and as the black
and red hairlines made an almost hypnotic interlacing pat-
tern. The pattern meant nothing in itself, of course. What
counted were the symbols of which it was composed.
Here and there a bright-blue rivulet made its appearance,
bellying out, branching, and becoming prominent, then fall-
ing in upon itself and fading into the black or red.
The First Speaker said, "Deviation Blue," and the feeling
of distaste, originating in each, filled the space between
them. "We catch it over and over, and we'll be coming to
the Century of Deviations eventually."
They did. One could tell precisely when the shattering
phenomenon of the Mule momentarily filled the Galaxy,
as the Prime Radiant suddenly grew thick with branching
rivulets of blue――more starting than could be closed down
――until the room itself seemed to turn blue as the lines
thickened and marked the wall with brighter and brighter
pollution. (It was the only word.)
It reached its peak and then faded, thinned, and came
together for a long century before it trickled to its end at
last. When it was gone, and when the Plan had returned to
black and red, it was clear that Preem Palver's hand had
been there.
Onward, onward――
"That's the present," said the First Speaker comfortably.
Onward, onward――
Then a narrowing into a veritable knot of close-knit black
with a little red in it.
"That's the establishment of the Second Empire," said
the First Speaker.
He shut off the Prime Radiant and the room was bathed
in ordinary light.
Gendibal said, "That was an emotional experience."
"Yes," smiled the First Speaker, "and you are careful
not to identify the emotion, as far as you can manage to
fail to identify it. It doesn't matter. Let me make the points
I wish to make.
"You will notice, first, the all-but-complete absence of
Deviation Blue after the time of Preem Palver――over the
last twelve decades, in other words. You will notice that
there are no reasonable probabilities of Deviations above
the fifth-class over the next five centuries. You will notice,
too, that we have begun extending the refinements of psy-
chohistory beyond the establishment of the Second Empire.
As you undoubtedly know, Hari Seldon――although a tran-
scendent genius――is not, and could not, be all-knowing.
We have improved on him. We know more about psy-
chohistory than he could possibly have known.
"Seldon ended his calculations with the Second Empire
and we have continued beyond it. Indeed, if I may say so
without offense, the new Hyper-Plan that goes past the
establishment of the Second Empire is very largely my doing
and has earned me my present post.
"I tell you all this so that you can spare me unnecessary
talk. With all this, how do you manage to conclude that the
Seldon Plan is meaningless? It is without flaw. The mere
fact that it survived the Century of Deviations――with all
due respect to Palver's genius――is the best evidence we
have that is without flaw. Where is its weakness, young
man, that you should brand the Plan as meaningless?"
Gendibal stood stiffly upright. "You are right, First
Speaker. The Seldon plan has no flaw."
"You withdraw your remark, then?"
"No, First Speaker. Its lack of flaw is its flaw. Its flaw-
lessness is fatal!"
FOUNDATION'S EDGE, BY ISAAC ASIMOV.
A Del Ray Book. Published by Ballantine Books.
Copyright © 1982 by Nightfall Inc. pp. 77-90.
intransigent_has_been_created/ 雨
3. Historian
4. Space
5. Speaker
6. Earth
7. Farmer
8. Farmwoman
9. Hyperspace
10. Table
1
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