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"I can't compete with that."
"No, you can't, Leyel. But you complete it. Because it would all mean nothing, it would be more frustrating than exhilarating if I couldn't come back to you every day and tell you what happened. You always understand what it means, you're always excited for me, you validate my experience."
"I'm your audience. Like a parent."
"Yes, old man. Like a husband. Like a child. Like the person I love most in all the world. You are my root. I make a brave show out there, all branches and bright leaves in the sunlight, but I come here to suck the water of life from your soil."
"Leyel Forska, the font of capillarity. You are the tree, and I am the dirt."
"Which happens to be full of fertilizer." She kissed him. A kiss reminiscent of younger days. An invitation, which he gladly accepted.
A softened section of floor served them as an impromptu bed. At the end, he lay beside her, his arm across her waist, his head on her shoulder, his lips brushing the skin of her breast. He remembered when her breasts were small and firm, perched on her chest like small monuments to her potential. Now when she lay on her back they were a ruin, eroded by age so they flowed off her chest to either side, resting wearily on her arms.
"You are a magnificent woman," he whispered, his lips tickling her skin.
Their slack and flabby bodies were now capable of greater passion than when they were taut and strong. Before, they were all potential. That's what we love in youthful bodies, the teasing potential. Now hers is a body of accomplishment. Three fine children were the blossoms, then the fruit of this tree, gone off and taken root somewhere else. The tension of youth could now give way to a relaxation of the flesh. There were no more promises in their lovemaking. Only fulfillment.
She murmured softly in his ear, "That was a ritual, by the way. Community maintenance."
"So I'm just another experiment?"
"A fairly successful one. I'm testing to see if this little community can last until one of us drops."
"What if you drop first? Who'll write the paper then?"
"You will. But you'll sign my name to it. I want the Imperial medal for it.
Posthumously. Glue it to my memorial stone."
"I'll wear it myself. If you're selfish enough to leave all the real work to me, you don't deserve anything better than a cheap replica."
She slapped his back. "You are a nasty selfish old man, then. The real thing or nothing."
He felt the sting of her slap as if he deserved it. A nasty selfish old man. If she only knew how right she was. There had been a moment in Hari's office when he'd almost said the words that would deny all that there was between them. The words that would cut her out of his life. Go to Terminus without her! I would be more myself if they took my heart, my liver, my brain.
How could I have thought I wanted to go to Terminus, anyway? To be surrounded by academics of the sort I most despise, struggling with them to get the encyclopedia properly designed. They'd each fight for their petty little province, never catching the vision of the whole, never understanding that the encyclopedia would be valueless if it were compartmentalized. It would be a life in hell, and in the end he'd lose, because the academic mind was incapable of growth or change.
It was here on Trantor that he could still accomplish something. Perhaps even solve the question of human origin, at least to his own satisfaction-- and perhaps he could do it soon enough that he could get his discovery included in the Encyclopedia Galactica before the Empire began to break down at the edges, cutting Terminus off from the rest of the Galaxy.
It was like a shock of static electricity passing through his brain; he even saw an afterglow of light around the edges of his vision, as if a spark had jumped some synaptic gap.
"What a sham," he said.
"Who, you? Me?"
"Hari Seldon. All this talk about his Foundation to create the Encyclopedia, Galactica."
"Careful, Leyel." It was almost impossible that the Pubs could have found a way to listen to what went on in Leyel Forska's own apartments. Almost.
"He told me twenty years ago. It was one of his first psychohistorical projections. The Empire will crumble at the edges first. He projected it would happen within the next generation. The figures were crude then. He must have it down to the year now. Maybe even the month. Of course he put his Foundation on Terminus.
A place so remote that when the edges of the Empire fray, it will be among the first threads lost. Cut off from Trantor. Forgotten at once!"
"What good would that do, Leyel? They'd never hear of any new discoveries then."
"What you said about us. A tree. Our children like the fruit of that tree."
"I never said that."
"I thought it, then. He is dropping his Foundation out on Terminus like the fruit of Empire. To grow into a new Empire by and by."
"You frighten me, Leyel. If the Pubs ever heard you say that--"
"That crafty old fox. That sly, deceptive-- he never actually lied to me, but of course he couldn't send me there. If the Forska fortune was tied up with Terminus, the Empire would never lose track of the place. The edges might fray elsewhere, but never there. Putting me on Terminus would be the undoing of the real project." It was such a relief. Of course Hari couldn't tell him, not with the Pubs listening, but it had nothing to do with him or Deet. It wouldn't have to be a barrier between them after all. It was just one of the penalties of being the keeper of the Forska fortune.
"Do you really think so?" asked Deet.
"I was a fool not to see it before. But Hari was a fool too if he thought I wouldn't guess it."
"Maybe he expects you to guess everything."
"Oh, nobody could ever come up with everything Hari's doing. He has more twists and turns in his brain than a hyperpath through core space. No matter how you labor to pick your way through, you'll always find Hari at the end of it, nodding happily and congratulating you on coming this far. He's ahead of us all. He's already pla
"Is it doom?"
"Once I thought Hari Seldon was God. Now I know he's much less powerful than that.
He's merely Fate."
"No, Leyel. Don't say that."
"Not even Fate. Just our guide through it. He sees the future, and points the way."
"Rubbish." She slid out from under him, got up, pulled her robe from its hook on the wall. "My old bones get cold when I lie about naked."
Leyel's legs were trembling, but not with cold. "The future is his, and the present is yours, but the past belongs to me. I don't know how far into the future his probability curves have taken him, but I can match him, step for step, century for century into the past."
"Don't tell me you're going to solve the question of origin. You're the one who proved it wasn't worth solving."
"I proved that it wasn't important or even possible to find the planet of origin.
But I also said that we could still discover the natural laws that accounted for the origin of man. Whatever forces created us as human beings must still be present in the universe."
"I did read what you wrote, you know. You said it would be the labor of the next mille
"Just now. Lying here, just now, I saw it, just out of reach. Something about your work and Hari's work, and the tree."
"The tree was about me needing you, Leyel. It wasn't about the origin of humanity."
"It's gone. Whatever I saw for a moment there, it's gone. But I can find it again.
It's there in your work, and Hari's Foundation, and the fall of the Empire, and the damned pear tree."
"I never said it was a pear tree."
"I used to play in the pear orchard on the grounds Of the estate in Holdwater. To me the word 'tree' always means a pear tree. One of the deep-worn ruts in my brain."