They went through the high, arched foyer of the Mathist Depart­ ment, Hari nodding to the staff. Dors went into her own office and he hurried into his suite with an air of an animal retreating into its burrow. He collapsed into his airchair, ignoring, the urgent-message holo that hung a meter from his face.

 A wave erased it as Yugo Amaryl came in through the connecting e-stat portal. The intrusive, bulky portal was also the fruit of Cleon’s security order. The Specials had installed the shimmering weapons-nulling fields everywhere. They lent an irksome, prickly smell of ozone to the air. One more intrusion of Reality, wearing the mask of Politics.

 Yugo’s grin split his broad face. “Got some new results.”

 “Cheer me up, show me something splendid.”

 Yugo sat on Hari’s broad, empty desk, one leg dangling. “Good mathematics is always true and beautiful.”

 “Certainly. But it doesn’t have to be true in the sense that ordinary people mean. It can say nothing whatever about the world.”

 “You’re making me feel like a dirty engineer.”

 Hari smiled. “You were once, remember?”

 “Don’t I!”

 “Maybe you’d rather be sweating it out as a heat-sinker?”

 Hari had found Yugo by chance eight years ago, just after arriving on Trantor, when he and Dors were on the run from Imperial agents. An hour’s talk had shown Hari that Yugo was an untutored genius at trans-representational analysis. Yugo had a gift, an uncon­ scious lightness of touch. They had collaborated ever since. Hari honestly thought he had learned more from Yugo than the other way around.

 “Ha!” Yugo clapped his big hands together three times, in the Dahlite manner of showing agreeable humor. “You can grouse about doing filthy, real-world work, but as long as it’s in a nice, comfortable office, I’m in paradise.”

 “I shall have to turn most of the heavy lifting over to you, I fear.” Hari deliberately put his feet up on his desk. Might as well look casual, even if he didn’t feel that way. He envied Yugo’s heavy-bodied ease.

 “This First Minister stuff?”

 “It is getting worse. I have to go see the Emperor again.”

 “The man wants you. Must be your craggy profile.”

 “That’s what Dors thinks, too. I figure it’s my disarming smile. Anyway, he can’t have me.”

 “He will.”

 “If he forces the ministership on me, I shall do such a lousy job, Cleon will fire me.”

 Yugo shook his head. “Not wise. Failed First Ministers are usually tried and executed.”

 “You’ve been talking to Dors again.”

 “She is a historian.”

 “Yes, and we’re psychohistorians. Seekers of predictability.” Hari threw up his hands in exasperation. “Why doesn’t that count for anything?”

 “Because nobody in the citadels of power has seen it work.”

 “And they won’t. Once people think we can predict, we will never be free of politics.”

 “You’re not free now,” Yugo said reasonably.

 “Good friend, your worse trait is insisting on telling me the truth in a calm voice.”

 “It saves knocking sense into your head. That would take longer.”

 Hari sighed. “If only muscles helped with mathematics. You would be even better at it.”

 Yugo waved the thought away. “You’re the key. You’re the idea man.”

 “Well, this font of ideas hasn’t got a clue.”

 “Ideas, they’ll come.”

 “I never get a chance to work on psychohistory anymore!”

 “And as First Minister—”

 “It will be worse. Psychohistory will go—”

 “Nowhere, without you.”

 “There will be some progress, Yugo. I am not vain enough to think everything depends on me.”

 “It does.”

 “Nonsense! There’s still you, the Imperial Fellows, and the staff.”

 “We need leadership. Thinking leadership.”

 “Well, I could continue to work here part of the time…”

 Hari looked around his spacious office and felt a pang at the thought of not spending every day here, surrounded by his tools, tomes, and friends. As First Minister he would have a minor palace, but to him it would be mere empty, meaningless extravagance.

 Yugo gave him a mocking grin. “First Minister is usually con­ sidered a full-time job.”

 “I know, I know. But maybe there’s a way—”

 The office holo bloomed into full presentation a meter from his head. The office familiar was coded to pipe through only high-pri-ority messages. Hari slapped a key on his desk and the picture gave the gathering image a red, square frame—the signal that his filter-face was on. “Yes?”

 Cleon’s personal aide appeared in red tunic against a blue back­ ground. “You are summoned,” the woman said simply.

 “Uh, I am honored. When?”

 The woman went into details and Hari was immediately thankful for the filter-face. The personal officer was imposing, and he did not want to appear to be what he was, a distracted professor. His filter-face had a tailored etiquette menu. He had automatically thumbed in a suite of body language postures and gestures, tailored to mask his true feelings.

 “Very well, in two hours. I shall be there,” he concluded with a small bow. The filter would render that same motion, shaped to the protocols of the Emperor’s staff.

 “Drat!” He slapped his desk, making the holo dissolve. “My day is evaporating!”

 “What’s it mean?”

 “Trouble. Every time I see Cleon, it’s trouble.”

 “I dunno, could be a chance to straighten out—”

 “I just want to be left alone!”

 “A First Ministership—”

 “You be First Minister! I will take a job as a computational specialist, change my name—” Hari stopped and laughed wryly. “But I’d fail at that, too.”

 “Look, you need to change your mood. Don’t want to walk in on the Emperor with that scowl.”

 “Ummm. I suppose not. Very well—cheer me up. What was that good news you mentioned?”

 “I turned up some ancient personality constellations.”

 “Really? I thought they were illegal.”

 “They are.” He grinned. “Laws don’t always work.”

 “Truly ancient? I wanted them for calibration of psychohistorical valences. They have to be early Empire.”

 Yugo beamed. “These are pre-Empire.”

 “Pre—impossible.”

 “I got ’em. Intact, too.”

 “Who are they?”

 “Some famous types, dunno what they did.”

 “What status did they have, to be recorded?”

 Yugo shrugged. “No parallel historical records, either.”

 “Are they authentic recordings?”

 “Might be. They’re in ancient machine languages, really primitive stuff. Hard to tell.”

 “Then they could be…sims.”

 “I’d say so. Could be they’re built on a recorded underbase, then simmed for roundness.”

 “You can kick them up to sentience?”

 “Yeah, with some work. Got to stitch data languages. Y’know, this is, ah…”

 “Illegal. Violation of the Sentience Codes.”

 “Right. These guys I got it from, they’re on that New Renaissance world, Sark. They say nobody polices those old Codes anymore.”

 “It’s time we kicked over a few of those ancient blocks.”

 “Yessir.” Yugo grinned. “These constellations, they’re the oldest anybody’s ever found.”

 “How did you…?” Hari let his question trail off. Yugo had many shady connections, built on his Dahlite origins.

 “It took a little, ah, lubrication.”

 “I thought so. Well, perhaps best that I don’t hear the details.”

 “Right. As First Minister, you don’t want dirty hands.”

 “Don’t call me that!”

 “Sure, sure, you’re just a journeyman professor. Who’s going to be late for his appointment with the Emperor if he doesn’t hurry up.”

 2.

 Walking through the Imperial Gardens, Hari wished Dors was with him. He recalled her wariness over his coming again to the attention of Cleon. “They’re crazy, often,” she had said in a dispas­ sionate voice. “The gentry are eccentric, which allows emperors to be bizarre.”

 “You exaggerate,” he had responded.

 “Dadrian the Frugal always urinated in the Imperial Gardens,” she had answered. “He would leave state functions to do it, saying that it saved his subjects a needless expense in water.”

 Hari had to suppress a laugh; palace staff were undoubtedly studying him. He regained his sober manner by admiring the ornate, towering trees, sculpted in the Spindlerian style of three millennia before. He felt the tug of such natural beauty, despite his years buried in Trantor. Here, verdant wealth stretched up toward the blazing sun like outstretched arms. This was the only open spot on the planet, and it reminded him of Helicon, where he had begun.

 He had been a rather dreamy boy in a laboring district of Helic­ on. The work in fields and factories was easy enough that he could think his own shifting, abstract musings while he did it. Before the Civil Service exams changed his life, he had worked out a few simple theorems in number theory and later was crushed to find that they were already known. He lay in bed at night thinking of planes and vectors and trying to envision dimensions larger than three, listening to the distant bleat of the puff-dragons who came drifting down the mountain sides in search of prey. Bioengineered for some an­ cient purpose, probably hunting, they were revered beasts. He had not seen one for many years….

 Helicon, the wild—that was what he longed for. But his destiny seemed submerged in Trantor’s steel.

 Hari glanced back and his Specials, thinking they were summoned, trotted forward. “No,” he said, his hands pushing air toward them—a gesture he was making all the time these days, he reflected. Even in the Imperial Gardens they acted as though every gardener was a potential assassin.

 He had come this way, rather than simply emerge from the grav lifter inside the palace, because he liked the gardens above all else. In the distant haze a wall of trees towered, coaxed upward by ge­ netic engineering until they obscured the ramparts of Trantor. Only here, on all the planet, was it possible to experience something re­ sembling the out of doors.

 What an arrogant term! Hari thought. To define all of creation by its lying outside the doorways of humanity.

 His formal shoes crunched against gravel as he left the sheltered walkways and mounted the formal ramp. Beyond the forested perimeter rose a plume of black smoke. He slowed and estimated distance, perhaps ten klicks. Some major incident, surely.

 Striding between tall, neopantheonic columns, he felt a weight descend. Attendants dashed out to welcome him, his Specials tightened up behind, and they made a little procession through the long corridors leading to the Vault of Audience. Here the accumu­ lated great artworks of millennia crowded each other, as if seeking a constituency in the present to give them life.

 The heavy hand of the Imperium lay upon most official art. The Empire was essentially about the past, its solidity, and so expressed its taste with a preference for the pretty. Emperors favored the clean straight lines of ascending slabs, the exact parabolas of arcing purple water fountains, classical columns and buttresses and arches. Heroic sculpture abounded. Noble brows eyed infinite prospects. Colossal battles stood frozen at climactic moments, shaped in glowing stone and holoid crystal.

 All were entirely proper and devoid of embarrassing challenge. No alarming art here, thank you. Nothing “disturbing” was even allowed in public places on Trantor which the Emperor might visit. By exporting to the periphs all hint of the unpleasantness and smell of human lives, the Imperium achieved its final state, the terminally bland.

 Yet to Hari, the reaction against blandness was worse. Among the galaxy’s twenty-five million inhabited planets endless variations appeared, but there simmered beneath the Imperial blanket a style based solely on rejection.