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CHAPTER FIVE SPEAKER
SPEAKER
Trantor! For eight thousand years, it was the capital of a large andunion 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 i of Trantor
Trantor did not reach its physical peak until the Eone in decay In fact, no one noticed that the Elea 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 ulfed and les, computerized elaborations, vast storehouses of food and replacees 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 hters
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 extre radiators stretched up into the thin upper athtside and ithdrawn into the metal city on the dayside As the planet turned, the radiators rose as night progressively fell around the world and sank as day progressively broke So Trantor always had an artificial asymmetry that was almost its symbol
At this peak, Trantor ran the Empire?
It ran it poorly, but nothing could have run the Ele 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 croas traded back and forth by sly politicians and foolish incompetents and the bureaucracy 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 E 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 htywas scarred and punctured and fused by the attack of the "barbarian" fleet - only then was the E rereat world undid further what had been left and, in a generation, Trantor was transforreatest planet the hule 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 historical novels, the favored sys 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 one, almost everywhere Trantor was now a sparsely settled world of self-sufficient far ships rarely came and were not particularly welcoh still in official use, had dropped out of popular speech By present-day Trantorians, it was called "Hame," which in their dialect ould 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 anized streaht
He had been First Speaker of the Second Foundation for eighteen years, and he ht well bold on for ten or twelve years orous and if he could continue to fight the political wars
He was the analog, the e, of the Mayor of Terminus, 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 simply "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 Foundation was suprey, of eapons The Second Foundation was supreme in the realm of mental power, of the mind, of the ability to control In any conflict between the tould 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 incuht 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 tiht 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 perforht in color and he wore it cut an inch long so that the color scarcelyconfor of the Trantorian farmers
The First Speaker could, if he wished, pass a the Hamish people as one of them, but his hidden power nevertheless existed He could choose to focus his eyes andto 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 University, with the brooding grandeur of the ruins of the Imperial Palace not too far distant, ht 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 without retention of the core of the First E If would have led to a greater destruction some centuries later and perhaps no Second 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 eventual establishment of the Second Empire The lesser evil had to be chosen and Trantor had died!
The Second Foundatianers of the tiins - to save the University/Library couilt forever after because of that, too Though no one had ever de the complex had led to the 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 acrd the Mule cae of the Second Foundation
Prior to that, for over two and a half centuries after Seldon's death, the Second Foundation had burrowed likeout of the way of the I society that cared less and less for the ever-more-misnamed Galactic Library, which fell into the desuetude that best suited the purpose of the Second Foundationers
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 froe of it
It was the Great Sack that liberated the Second Foundation - another reason (young Gendibal - who had courage - had recently said that it was the chief reason) why the Sack was allowed to proceed
After the Great Sack, the Eone and, in all the later times, the Trantorian survivors never trespassed on Second Foundation territory uninvited The Second Foundationers 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 reat 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 reatness, the sepulcher of Empire, but to the Trantorians - the Hahosts, not to be stirred Only the Second Foundationers ever set foot in the ancient corridors or touched the titaniuleam
And even so, all had nearly co 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 reat The Second Foundation would have been ha but what theythe ireater eventual loss
Had it not been for Banta 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 so active, stopping the Mule in his career of conquest, controlling histhe First Foundation itself when it greary and overcurious concerning the nature and identity of the Second Foundation There was Preereatest of theer - not without terrible sacrifice - and who had rescued the Seldon Plan
Now, for a hundred and twenty years, the Second Foundation 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 Foundation alreater in technological expertise
The First Speaker's eyes closed in the pleasant war hallucinatory experiences that were not quite dreaht
Enough of gloom All would be well Trantor was still capital of the Galaxy, for the Second Foundation was here and it was htier and more in control than ever the Emperor had been
The First Foundation would be contained and guided and would move correctly However for 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 E 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,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 beenaloud?
If the Second Foundation had to knowSpeakers had to know mere and say less, and the First Speaker lead to know mist and say least
He s to become a Trantorian patriot - to see the whole purpose of the Second Eemony 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 h to look at the Plan with new eyes, and keen enough to see what others ht not And it was not beyond possibility that Shandess would learn froster had to say
No one would ever be certain how reat Palver hi Kol Benjoam, not yet thirty, ca the First Foundation Benjoareatest theorist since Seldon, never spoke of that audience in later years, but eventually he became the twenty-first First Speaker There were soreat accomplishments of Palver's administration
Shandess aht 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 soht ruin their entire subsequent career by convincing the First Speaker they were lightweights
Four hours later, Gendibal faced hin of nervousness He waited calmly for Shandess to speak first
Shandess said, "You have asked for a private audience, Speaker, on a matter of importance Could you please summarize the matter for me?"
And Gendibal, speaking quietly, al what he had just eaten at dinner, said, "First Speaker, the Seldon Plan is less!"
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 potentialities of his mind
He had then done remarkably well at his studies and had taken to psychohistory as a spaceship responds to a gravitational field Psychohistory had pulled at hi Seldon's text on the funda to handle differential equations
When he was fifteen, he entered Trantor's Galactic University (as the University of Trantor had been officially rena which, when asked what his ambitions were, he had answered firmly, "To be First Speaker before I am forty"
He had not bothered to aiain it, one way or another, seemed to him to be a certainty It was to do it in youth that seeoal Even Preem Palver bad been forty-two on his accession
The interviewer's expression had flickered when Gendibal had said that, but the young e and could interpret that flicker He knew, as certainly as though the interviewer had announced it, that a so 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 kneould make it This audience with the present First Speaker was crucial to his plans and, laboring to present precisely the proper impression, he had spared no effort to polish his coe
When two Speakers of the Second Foundation coe is like no other in the Galaxy It is as estures as of words, aselse
An outsider would hear little or nothing, but in a short tied 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 ofit 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 crisis, 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 estures, and facial expressions, but even froh to keep the First Speaker fro a whiff of it
Nor could Gendibal avoid knowing soh bonhooodwill - quite apparent and reasonably sincere - Gendibal could feel the distant edge of condescension and a 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 inforh of each to leave Gendibal uncertain as to the effect of his statement
Since Gendibal had not been invited to sit down, the actions and attitudes available to hined to minimize the uncertainty were limited It was impossible that the First Speaker did not understand this
Shandess said, "The Seldon Plan is less? What a remarkable statement! Have you looked at the Prime Radiant 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 purvie and then? Do you observe it in microfashion - an equation systehly iht it an excellent occasional exercise to observe the whole course Studying the Pri 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 ht 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 T here 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 uniative of the First Speaker was that which was explicit in his title he always spoke first
The roorew dark with the depression of the lever but, almost at once, the darkness lifted into a pearly dihter and whiter, and finally there appeared neatly printed equations - so small that they could not be easily read
"If you have no objections," said the First Speaker,it quite clear that there would be none allowed, "ill reduce the nification in order to see as much at one time as we can"
The neat printing shrank down into fine hairlines, faint black round
The First Speaker touched the keys of the s 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 develop of the flow of history, with no distractions by the details I wonder if you have ever done this"
"Never exactly this way, First Speaker"
"You should It's aObserve 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 beco with the future, we must be careful what extinctions we rely upon"
"I know, First Speaker" There was a touch of dryness in Gendibal's response that he could not quire 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 rando refineinal Plan It would see 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 hairlinespattern The patternin itself, of course What counted were the symbols of which it was composed
Here and there a bright-blue rivuletpro into the black or red
The First Speaker said, "Deviation Blue," and the feeling of distaste, originating in each, filled the space between the to the Century of Deviations eventually"
They did One could tell precisely when the shattering phonemenon of the Mule rew thick with branching rivulets of blue -than could be closed down - until the room itself seemed to turn blue as the lines thickened and hter pollution (It was the only word)