unpublished; these he treated kindly but gave no hint of confirmation.
“ -- so there's a pressure-nugget buildin' in Dahl, you bet,” Yugo finished.
“Of course, glancing at the news holos shows that.”
“Well, yeah -- but I've proved it's justified.”
Hari kept his face composed; Yugo was really worked up about this. “You've shown one of
the factors. But there are others in the knot equations.”
“Well, sure, but everybody knows -- ”
“What everybody knows doesn't need much proof. Unless, of course, it's wrong.”
Yugo's face showed a rush of emotions: surprise, concern, anger, hurt, puzzlement. “You
don't support Dahl, Hari?”
“Of course I do, Yugo.” Actually, the truth was that Hari didn't care. But that was too
bald a point to make, with Yugo seeming wounded. “Look, the paper is fine. Publish.”
“The three basic knot equations, they're yours.”
“No need to call them that.”
“Sure, just like before. But your name goes on the paper”
Something tickled Hari's mind, but he saw the right answer now was to reassure Yugo. “If
you like.”
Yugo went on about details of publication, and Hari let his eyes drift over the equations.
Terms for representation in models of Trantorian democracy, value tables for social
pressures, the whole apparatus. A bit stuffy. But reassuring to those who suspected that
he was hiding his major results -- as he was, of course.
Hari sighed. Dahl was a festering political sore. Dahlites on Trantor mirrored the culture
of the Dahl Galactic Zone. Every powerful Zone had its own Sectors in Trantor, for
influence-peddling and general pressuring.
But Dahl was minor on the scale that he wanted to explore -- simple, even trivial. The
knot equations which described High Council representation were truncated forms of the
immensely worse riddle of Trantor.
All of Trantor -- one teeming world, baffling in its sheer size, its intricate
connections, meaningless coincidences, random juxtapositions, sensitive dependencies. His
equations were still terribly inadequate for this shell which housed forty billion
bustling souls.
How much worse was the Empire!
People, confronting bewildering complexity, tend to find their saturation level. They
master the easy connections, local links, and rules of thumb. They push this until they
meet a wall of complexity too thick and high and hard to grasp, to climb.
There they stall. Gossip, consult, fret -- and finally, gamble.
The Empire of twenty-five million worlds was a problem greater even than understanding the
whole rest of the universe -- because at least the galaxies beyond did not have humans in
them. The blind, blunt motions of stars and gas were child's play, compared to the
convoluted trajectories of people.
Sometimes it wore him down. Trantor was bad enough, eight hundred Sectors with forty
billion people. What of the Empire, with twenty-five million planets of average four
billion souls apiece? One hundred quadrillion people!
Worlds interacted through the narrow necks of wormholes, which at least simplified some of
the economic issues. But culture traveled at the speed of light through wormholes,
information without mass, zooming across the Galaxy in destabilizing waves. A farmer on
Oskatoon knew that a duchy had fallen on the other side of the Galactic disk a few hours
after the blood on the palace floor started turning brown.
How to include that?
Clearly, the Empire extended beyond the Complexity Horizon of any person or computer. Only
sets of equations which did not try to keep track of every detail could work.
Which meant that an individual was nothing on the scale of events worth studying. Even a
million made about as much difference as a single raindrop falling in a lake.
Suddenly Hari was even more glad that he had kept psychohistory secret. How would people
react if they knew that he thought they didn't matter?
“Hari?
“ -- so there's a pressure-nugget buildin' in Dahl, you bet,” Yugo finished.
“Of course, glancing at the news holos shows that.”
“Well, yeah -- but I've proved it's justified.”
Hari kept his face composed; Yugo was really worked up about this. “You've shown one of
the factors. But there are others in the knot equations.”
“Well, sure, but everybody knows -- ”
“What everybody knows doesn't need much proof. Unless, of course, it's wrong.”
Yugo's face showed a rush of emotions: surprise, concern, anger, hurt, puzzlement. “You
don't support Dahl, Hari?”
“Of course I do, Yugo.” Actually, the truth was that Hari didn't care. But that was too
bald a point to make, with Yugo seeming wounded. “Look, the paper is fine. Publish.”
“The three basic knot equations, they're yours.”
“No need to call them that.”
“Sure, just like before. But your name goes on the paper”
Something tickled Hari's mind, but he saw the right answer now was to reassure Yugo. “If
you like.”
Yugo went on about details of publication, and Hari let his eyes drift over the equations.
Terms for representation in models of Trantorian democracy, value tables for social
pressures, the whole apparatus. A bit stuffy. But reassuring to those who suspected that
he was hiding his major results -- as he was, of course.
Hari sighed. Dahl was a festering political sore. Dahlites on Trantor mirrored the culture
of the Dahl Galactic Zone. Every powerful Zone had its own Sectors in Trantor, for
influence-peddling and general pressuring.
But Dahl was minor on the scale that he wanted to explore -- simple, even trivial. The
knot equations which described High Council representation were truncated forms of the
immensely worse riddle of Trantor.
All of Trantor -- one teeming world, baffling in its sheer size, its intricate
connections, meaningless coincidences, random juxtapositions, sensitive dependencies. His
equations were still terribly inadequate for this shell which housed forty billion
bustling souls.
How much worse was the Empire!
People, confronting bewildering complexity, tend to find their saturation level. They
master the easy connections, local links, and rules of thumb. They push this until they
meet a wall of complexity too thick and high and hard to grasp, to climb.
There they stall. Gossip, consult, fret -- and finally, gamble.
The Empire of twenty-five million worlds was a problem greater even than understanding the
whole rest of the universe -- because at least the galaxies beyond did not have humans in
them. The blind, blunt motions of stars and gas were child's play, compared to the
convoluted trajectories of people.
Sometimes it wore him down. Trantor was bad enough, eight hundred Sectors with forty
billion people. What of the Empire, with twenty-five million planets of average four
billion souls apiece? One hundred quadrillion people!
Worlds interacted through the narrow necks of wormholes, which at least simplified some of
the economic issues. But culture traveled at the speed of light through wormholes,
information without mass, zooming across the Galaxy in destabilizing waves. A farmer on
Oskatoon knew that a duchy had fallen on the other side of the Galactic disk a few hours
after the blood on the palace floor started turning brown.
How to include that?
Clearly, the Empire extended beyond the Complexity Horizon of any person or computer. Only
sets of equations which did not try to keep track of every detail could work.
Which meant that an individual was nothing on the scale of events worth studying. Even a
million made about as much difference as a single raindrop falling in a lake.
Suddenly Hari was even more glad that he had kept psychohistory secret. How would people
react if they knew that he thought they didn't matter?
“Hari?
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