Quite quickly Hari became bored with the aftermath. He had come early to get a stroll through the gardens and though he knew he was being irrational, his regret at missing the walk loomed larger than the assassination attempt.

Hari took a long, still moment and moved the incident aside. He visualized a displacement operator, an icy blue vector frame. It listed the snarled, angry red knot and pushed it out of view. Later, he would deal with it later.

He cut off the endless talk and ordered the Specials to fall in behind him. Shouted protests came, of course, which he ignored. Then he ambled across the gardens, relishing the open air. He inhaled eagerly. The blinding speed of the attack had erased its importance to him. For now.

The palace towers loomed like webwork of a giant spider. Between their bulks weaved airy walkways. Spires were veiled in silvery mist and aripple, apulse, shimmering with a silent, steady beat like a great unseen heart. He had been so long in the foreshortened views of Trantor’s corridors, his eyes did not quickly grasp the puzzling perspectives.

An upward rush caught his attention as he passed through a flowers cape. From the immense Imperial aviary, flocks of birds in the thousands oscillated in the vertical drafts. Their artful, ever-shifting patterns had a diaphanous, billowy quality, an immense, wispy dance.

Yet these had been shaped many millennia ago by bioengineering their genome. They formed drifts and billows like clouds, or even airy mountains, feasting on upwelling gnats, released from below by the gardeners. But a side draft could dissolve all their ornate sculptures, blow them away.

Like the Empire, he mused. Beautiful in its order, stable for fifteen millennia, yet now toppling. Cracking up like a slow-motion pod wreck. Or in spasms like the Junin riots.

Why? Even among Imperial loveliness, his mathist mind returned to the problem.

Entering the palace, he passed a delegation of children on their way to some audience with a lesser Imperial figure. With a sudden pang he missed his adopted son, Raych. He and Dors had decided to secretly send the boy away to school, after Yugo had his leg broken. “Deprive them of targets,” Dors had said.

Among the meritocracy, only those adults with commitment, stability, and talent could have children. Gentry or plain citizens could whelp brats by the shovelful.

Parents were like artists-special people with a special gift, given respect and privileges, left free to create happy and competent humans. It was noble work, well paid. Hari had been honored to be approved.

In immediate contrast, three oddly shaped courtiers ambled by him.

By biotech means people could turn their children into spindly towers, into flowerlike footbound dwarves, into green giants or pink pygmies. From throughout the Galaxy they were sent here to amuse the Imperial court, where novelty was always in vogue.

But such variants seldom lasted. There was a species norm. And stretching it was just as deeply ingrained. Hari had to admit that he would forever be among the unsophisticated, for he found such folk repulsive.

Someone had designed the reception room to look like anything but a room for receiving people. It resembled a lumpy pocket in molten glass, crisscrossed by polished shafts of ceramo-steel. These shafts in turn dripped into smooth lumps which-since there was nothing else in the room-must have been intended to be chairs and tables.

It seemed unlikely that he could ever get back out of any of the shapes, once he had worked out how to sit in them-so Hari stood. And wondered if that effect, too, was somehow intended…The palace was a subtle place of layered design.

This was to be a small, private meeting, Cleon’s staff had assured him. Still, there was a small army of attaches and protocol officers and aides who had introduced themselves as Hari had passed through several rooms of increasing ornamentation, on his way here. Their talk became more ornate, as well. Courtly life was dominated by puffed-up people who always acted as though they were coyly unveiling statues of themselves.

There was a lot of adornment and finery, the architectural equivalent of jewels and silk, and even the most minor attendants wore very dignified green uniforms. He felt as though he should lower his voice and realized, recalling Sundays on Helicon, that this place felt somehow like a church.

Then Cleon swept in and the staff vanished, silently draining away into concealed exits.

“My Seldon!”

“Yours, sire.” Hari followed the ritual.

The Emperor continued greeting him effusively, tut-tutting over the apparent assassination attempt-”Surely an accident, don’t you think?”-and led him to the large display wall. At Cleon’s gesture an enormous view of the entire Galaxy appeared, the work of a new artist. Hari murmured the required admiration and recalled his thoughts of only an hour before.

This was a time sculpture, tracing the entire Galactic history. The disk was, after all, a collection of debris, swirling at the bottom of a gravitational pothole in the cosmos. How it looked depended on which of mankind’s myriad eyes one used. Infrared could pierce and unmask dusty lanes. X rays sought pools of fiercely burning gas. Radio dishes mapped cold banks of molecules and magnetized plasma. All were packed with meaning.

In the carousel of the disk, stars bobbed and weaved under complicated Newtonian tugs. The major arms-Sagittarius, Orion, and Perseus, counting outward from the Center-bore names obscured by antiquity. Each contained a Zone of that name, hinting that perhaps here the ancient Earth orbited. But no one knew, and research had revealed no obvious single candidate. Instead, dozens of worlds vied for the title of the True Earth. Quite probably, none of them were.

Many bright signatures-skymarks, like landmarks?-blazed among the curving, barred spiral arms. Beauty beyond description-but not beyond analysis, Hari thought, whether physical or social. If he could find the key…

“I congratulate you on the success of my Moron Decree,” Cleon said.

Hari slowly withdrew from the immense perspective. “Oh, sire?”

“Your idea-first fruit of psychohistory.” To Hari’s blank incomprehension Cleon chuckled. “Forgotten already? The renegades who pillage, seeking renown for their infamy. You advised me to strip them of their identity by making them henceforth be called Morons.”

Hari had indeed forgotten the advice, but contented himself with a sage nod.

“It worked! Such crimes are much reduced. And those convicted go to their deaths full of anger, demanding to be made famous. I tell you, it is delicious.”

Hari felt a chill at the way the Emperor smacked his lips. An off-hand suggestion made suddenly, concretely real. It rattled him a bit.

He realized that the Emperor was asking about progress with psychohistory. His throat tightened and he remembered the Moonrose woman with her irritating questions. That seemed weeks ago. “Work is slow,” he managed to say.

Cleon said sympathetically, “Surely it requires a deep knowledge of every facet of civilized life.”

“At times.” Hari stalled, putting his mixed emotions firmly away.

“I was at a convocation recently and learned something you undoubtedly have factored into your equations.”

“Yes, sire?”

“It is said that the very foundation of the Empire-besides the wormholes of course-is the discovery of proton-Boron fusion. I had never heard of it, yet the speaker said it was the single greatest achievement of antiquity. That every starship, every planetary technology, depends upon it for power.”

“I suppose that is true, but I did not know it.”

“Such an elementary fact?”

“What is not of use to me does not concern me.”

Cleon’s mouth pouted in puzzlement. “But a theory of all history surely demands great detail.”