He did not want to go to the Grand Imperial Universities Colloquy, but the Imperial Protocol Office leaned on him…A First Ministerial candidate has obligations,” the officious woman had informed him.

So he and Dors dutifully appeared at the enormous Imperial Festival Hall. His Specials wore discreet formal business suits, complete with the collar ruffles of mid-level meritocrats.

“All the better to blend into the crowd,” Dors joked. Hari saw that everyone sized up the men in an instant and gingerly edged away. He would have been fooled.

They entered a high, double-arched corridor, lined with ancient statuary which invited the passersby to lick them. Hari tried it, after carefully reading the glow-sign, which reassured him there was no biological risk. A long, succulent lick gave him a faint, odd flavor of oil and burnt apples, a hint of what the ancients found enticing.

“What’s first on the agenda?” he asked his Protocol Officer.

“An audience with the Academic Potentate,” she answered, adding pointedly, “Alone.”

Dors disagreed and Hari negotiated a compromise. Dors got to stand at the doorway, no more. “I’ll have appetizers served to you there,” the Protocol Officer said testily.

Dors gave her an icy smile. “Why is this, ah, ‘audience’ so important?”

The Protocol Officer gave her a pitying look. “The Potentate carries much weight in the High Council.”

Hari said soothingly, “And can throw a few votes my way.”

“A bit of polite talk,” the Protocol Officer said.

“I shall promise to-let me put this delicately-smooch his buttocks. Or hers, as the case may be.”

Dors smiled. “Better not be hers.”

“Intriguing, how the implications of the act switch with sex.”

The Protocol Officer coughed and ushered him deftly through snapping screen curtains, his hair sizzling. Apparently even an Academic Potentate had need of personal security measures.

Once within the formal staterooms, Hari found he was alone with a woman of considerable age and artificial beauties. So that was why the Protocol Officer had coughed.

“How very nice of you to come.” She stood motionless, one hand extended, limp at the wrist. A waterfall effect spattered behind her, framing her body well.

He felt as if he were walking into a still-life museum display. He didn’t know whether to shake her hand or kiss it. He shook it, and her look made him think he had chosen wrong.

She wore a lot of embedded makeup, and from the way she leaned forward to make a point, he gathered that her pale eyes got her a lot of things other people did not receive.

She had once been an original thinker, a nonlinear philosopher. Now meritocrats across the spiral arms owed her fealty.

Before they had sat down, she gestured. “Oh, would you tune that wall haze?” The waterfall effect had turned into a roiling, thick fog. “Somehow it gets wrong all the time and the room doesn’t adjust it.”

A way of establishing a hierarchy, Hari suspected. Get him used to doing little tasks at her bidding. Or maybe she was like some other women, who if they couldn’t get you to do minor services felt insecure. Or maybe she was just inept and wanted her waterfall back. Or maybe he just analyzed the hell out of everything, a mathist’s pattern.

“I’ve heard remarkable things about your work,” she said, shifting from High Figure Used to Snappy Obedience to Gracious Lady Putting an Underling at Ease. He said something noncommittal. A tiktok brought a stim which was barely liquid, drifting down his throat and into his nostrils like a silken, sinister cloud.

“You believe yourself practical enough for the ministership?”

“Nothing is more practical, more useful, than a sound theory.”

“Said like a true mathist. Speaking for all meritocrats, I do hope you are equal to the task.”

He thought of telling her-she did have a certain charm, after all-that he didn’t give a damn for the ministership. But some intuition held him back. She was another power broker. He knew she had been vindictive in the past.

She gave him a shrewd smile. “I understand you have charmed the Emperor with a theory of history.”

“At the moment it is little better than a description.”

“A sort of summary?”

“Breakthroughs for the brilliant, syntheses for the driven.”

“Surely you know there is an air of futility about such an ambition.” A gleam of steel in the pale eyes.

“ I was…unaware. Madam.”

“Science is simply an arbitrary construct. It perpetuates the discredited notion that progress is always possible. Let alone desirable.”

“Oh?” He had plastered a polite smile on his face and was damned if he would let it slip.

“Only oppressive social orders emerge from such ideas. Science’s purported objectivity hides the plain fact that it is simply one ‘language game’ among others. All such arbitrary configurations sit in a conceptual universe of competing discourses.”

“I see.” The smile was getting heavier. His face felt like it would crack.

“To elevate scientific-” she sniffed disdainfully “-so-called ‘truths’ over other constructions is tantamount to colonizing the intellectual landscape. To enslaving one’s opposition!”

“Ummm.” He had a sinking feeling that he was not going to last long as a door mat. “Before you even consider the subject, you claim to know the best way to study it?”

“Social theory and linguistic analysis have the final power, since all truths have quite limited historical and cultural validity. Therefore, this ‘psychohistory’ of all societies is absurd.”

So she knew the term; word was spreading. “Perhaps you have insufficient regard for the rough rub of the real.”

A slight thawing. “Clever phrasing, Academician. Still, the category ‘real’ is a social construction.”

“Look, of course science is a social process. But scientific theories don’t merely reflect society.”

“How charming to still think so.” A wan smile failed to conceal the icy gleam in her eyes.

“Theories are not mere changes of fashion, like shifting men’s skirts from short to long.”

“Academician, you must know that there is nothing knowable beyond human discourses.”

He kept his voice level, courteous. Point out that she had used “know” in two contradictory ways in the same sentence? No, that would be playing word games, which would subtly support her views. “Sure, mountain climbers might argue and theorize about the best route to the top-”

“Always in ways conditioned by their history and social structures-”

“-but once they get there, they know it. Nobody would say they ‘constructed the mountain.”‘

She pursed her lips and had another foggy-white stim. “Ummm. Elementary realism. But all of your ‘facts’ embody theory. Ways of seeing.”

“I can’t help noticing that anthropologists, sociologists-the whole gang-get a delicious rush of superiority by denying the objective reality of the hard sciences’ discoveries.”

She drew herself up. “There are no elemental truths that exist independent of the people, languages, and cultures that make them.”

“You don’t believe in objective reality, then?”

“Who’s the object?”

He had to laugh. “Language play. So linguistic structures dictate how we see?”

“Isn’t that obvious? We live in a galaxy rich in cultures, all seeing the Galaxy their way.”

“But obeying laws. Plenty of research shows that thought and perception precede talk, exist independent of language.”

“What laws?”

“Laws of social movement. A theory of social history-if we had one.”

“You attempt the impossible. And if you wish to be First Minister, enjoying the support of your fellow academics and meritocrats, you shall have to follow the prevailing view of our society. Modern learning is animated by a frank incredulity toward such meta-narratives.”