“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 intu ition 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 ambi tion.” A gleam of steel in the pale eyes.
“I was…unaware. Madam.”
“Science is simply an arbitrary construct. It perpetuates the dis credited 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 ‘lan guage 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 cat egory ‘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 struc tures—”
“—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-nar-ratives.”
He was sorely tempted to say, Then you are going to be surprised, but instead said, “We shall see.”
“We don’t see things as they are,” the learned lady said, “we see them as we are.”
With a touch of sadness, he realized that the republic of intellec tual inquiry was, like the Empire, not free of internal decay.
6.
The Academic Potentate led him out with ritual words to smooth the way, and Dors was standing attentively at the grand entrance. Still, Hari had gotten the essential message: the academic merito cracy would back him for First Minister if he at least paid lip service to prevailing orthodoxy.
Together, with the customary academic honor guard, they went down into the vast rotunda. This was a dizzying bowl with various scholarly disciplines represented by the full re galia and insignia, splashed across immense wall designs. Below them swirled a chattering mob, thousands of the finest minds gathered for speeches, learned reports, and of course much infight ing of the very finest sort.
“Think we can survive this?” Hari whispered.
“Don’t let go,” Dors said, seizing his hand.
He realized that she had taken his question literally.
A little later the Academic Potentate wasn’t making a show of savoring the bouquet of the stims anymore, just sucking them up like one of the major food groups. She steered Hari and Dors from one cluster of the learned to another. Occasionally she would re member her role as hostess and feign interest in him as more than a chess piece in a larger game. Unfortunately these blunt attempts fastened upon inquiries into his personal life.
Dors resisted these inquisitions, of course, smiling and shaking her head. When the Potentate turned to Hari and asked, “Do you exercise?” he could not resist replying, “I exercise restraint.”
The Protocol Officer frowned, but Hari’s remark went unnoticed in the jostling throng. He found the company of his fellow members of the professoriat oddly off-putting. Their conversations had a directionless irony, which conveyed with raised eyebrows and arch tones the speaker’s superiority to everything he was commenting upon.
Their acerbic paradoxes and stiletto humor struck Hari as irritat ing and beside the point. He knew well that the most savage con troversies are about matters for which there is no good evidence either way. Still, there was a mannered desperation even to the scientists.