Read Online Foundation Fear by Gregory Benford - Free Book Online Page A

face clouding, unwilling to concede a point that might topple
     years of work. “It's gotta be there.”
    “Your coming in here to get details of what the rich and famous do at their levels --
     where's that in the equations?”
    Yugo's mouth twisted, irked now. “That stuff, it doesn't matter.”
    “Who says?”
    “Well, history -- ”
    “Is written by the winners, true enough. But how do the great generals get men and women
     to march through freezing mud? When won't they march?”
    “Nobody knows.”
    “We need to know. Or rather, the equations do.”
    “How?”
    “I don't know.”
    “Go to the historians?”
    Hari laughed. He shared Dors' contempt for most of her profession. The current fashion in
     the study of the past was a matter of taste, not data.
    He had once thought that history was simply a matter of grubbing in musty cyberfiles.
     Then, if Dors would show him how to track down data -- whether encoded in ancient ferrite
     cylinders or polymer blocks or strandware -- then he would have a firm basis for
     mathematics. Didn't Dors and other historians simply add one more brick of knowledge to an
     ever-growing monument?
    The current style, though, was to marshal the past into a preferred flavor. Factions
     fought over the antiquity, over “their” history vs. “ours.” Fringes flourished. The
     “spiral-centric” held that historical forces spread along spiral arms, whereas the
     “Hub-focused” maintained that the Galactic Center was the true mediating agency for
     causes, trends, movements, evolution. Technocrats contended with Naturals, who felt that
     innate human qualities drove change.
    Among myriad facts and footnotes, specialists saw present politics mirrored in the past.
     As the present fractured and transfigured, there seemed no point of reference outside
     history itself -- an unreliable platform indeed, especially when one realized how many
     mysterious gaps there were in the records. All this seemed to Hari to be more fashion than
     foundation. There was no uncontested past.
    What contained the centrifugal forces of relativism -- let me have my viewpoint and you
     can have yours -- was an arena of broad agreement. Most people generally held that the
     Empire was good, overall. That the long periods of stasis had been the best times, for
     change always cost someone. That above the competing throng, through the factions shouting
     what were essentially family stories at each other, there was worth in comprehending where
     humanity had passed, what it had done.
    But there agreement stopped. Few seemed concerned with where humanity, or even the Empire,
     was going. He had come to suspect that the subject was ignored, in favor of
     your-history-against-mine, because most historians unconsciously dreaded the future. They
     sensed the decline in their souls and knew that over the horizon lay not yet another
     shift-then-stasis but a collapse.
    “So what do we do?” Hari realized that Yugo had said this twice now. He had drifted off
     into reverie.
    “I ... don't know.”
    “Add another term for basic instincts?”
    Hari shook his head. “People don't run on instinct. But they do behave like people -- like
     primates, I suppose.”
    “So ... we should look into that?”
    Hari threw up his hands. “I confess. I feel that this line of logic is leading somewhere
     -- but I can't see the end of it.”
    Yugo nodded, grinned. “It'll come out when it's ripe.”
    “Thanks. I'm not the best of collaborators, I know. Too moody.”
    “Hey, never mind. Gotta think out loud sometimes, is all.”
    “Sometimes I'm not sure I'm thinking at all.”
    “Lemme show you the latest, huh?” Yugo liked to parade his inventions, and Hari sat back
     as Yugo accessed the office holo and patterns appeared in midair. Equations hung in space,
     3D-stacked and each term color-coded.
    So many! They reminded Hari of birds, flocking in great banks.
    Psychohistory was basically a