you weren't part of our marriage, then there was nothing left. You see?"
"I don't see what that has to do with human origins, Leyel. I only know that I would never leave you, and I can't believe that you could think--"
"Don't distract him, Deet."
"It's the children. All the children. They play Wrinkly Grandma Posey, and then they grow up and don't play anymore, so the actual community of these particular five or six children doesn't exist any more-- but other kids are still doing the dance. Chanting the poem. For ten thousand years!"
"This makes us human? Nursery rhymes?"
"They're all part of the same community! Across all the empty space between the stars, there are still connections, they're still somehow the same kids. Ten thousand years, ten thousand worlds, quintillions of children, and they all knew the poem, they all did the dance. Story and ritual-- it doesn't die with the tribe, it doesn't stop at the border. Children who never met face-to-face, who lived so far apart that the light from one star still hasn't reached the other, they belonged to the same community. We're human because we conquered time and space. We conquered the barrier of perpetual ignorance between one person and another. We found a way to slip my memories into your head, and yours into mine."
"But these are the ideas you already rejected, Leyel. Language and community and--"
"No! No, not just language, not just tribes of chimpanzees chattering at each other. Stories, epic tales that define a community, mythic tales that teach us how the world works, we use them to create each other. We became a different species, we became human, because we found a way to extend gestation beyond the womb, a way to give each child ten thousand parents that he'll never meet face-to-face." Then, at last, Leyel fell silerit, trapped by the inadequacy of his words. They couldn't tell what he had seen in his mind. ff they didn't already understand, they never would.
"Yes," said Zay. "I think indexing your paper was a very good idea."
Leyel sighed and lay back down on the bed. "I shouldn't have tried."
"On the contrary, you've succeeded," said Zay.
Deet shook her head. Leyel knew why-- Deet was trying to signal Zay that she shouldn't attempt to soothe Leyel with false praise.
"Don't hush me, Deet. I know what I'm saying. I may not know Leyel as well as you do, but I know truth when I hear it. In a way, I think Hari knew it instinctively. That's why he insisted on all his silly holodisplays, forcing the poor citizens of Terminus to put up with his pontificating every few years. It was his way of continuing to create them, of remaining alive within them. Making them feel like their lives had purpose behind them. Mythic and epic story, both at once. They'll all carry a bit of Hari Seldon within them just the way that children carry their parents with them to the grave."
At first Leyel could only hear the idea that Hari would have approved of his ideas of human origin. Then he began to realize that there was much more to what Zay had said than simple affirmation.
"You knew Hari Seldon?"
"A little," said Zay.
"Either tell him or don't," said Deet. "You can't take him this far in, and not bring him the rest of the way."
"I knew Hari the way you know Deet," said Zay.
"No," said Leyel. "He would have mentioned you."
"Would he? He never mentioned his students."
"He had thousands of students."
"I know, Leyel. I saw them come and fill his lecture halls and listen to the half- baked fragments of psychohistory that he taught them. But then he'd come away, here to the library, into a room where the Pubs never go, where he could speak words that the Pubs would never hear, and there he'd teach his real students. Here is the only place where the science of psychohistory lives on, where Deet's ideas about the formation of community actually have application, where your own visions of the origin of humanity will shape our calculations for the next thousand years."
Leyel was dumbfounded. "In the Imperial Library? Hari had his own college in the library?"
"Where else? He had to leave us at the end, when it was time to go public with his predictions of the Empire's fall. Then the Pubs started watching him in earnest, and in order to keep them from finding us, he couldn't come back here again. It was the most