Foundation's Fear by Gregory Benford

meaningless pleasantries, and let himself be whisked away.

5.
    He had another stim to calm himself. Somehow he was more jittery afterward than during the social collision. Lamurk had given Hari a cold, angry stare as they parted.
    “I’ll keep track of him,” Dors said. “You just enjoy your fame.”
    To Hari this was a flat impossibility, but he tried. Seldom did one see such a variety of people, and he calmed himself by lapsing into a habitual role: polite observer. It was not as though the usual social chitchat demanded much concentration. A warm smile would do most of the work for him here.
    The party was a microcosm of Trantorian society. In spare moments, Hari watched the social orders interact.
    Cleon’s grandfather had reinstated many Ruellian traditions, and one of those customs required that members of all five classes be present at any grand Imperial function. Cleon seemed especially keen on this practice, as if it would raise his popularity among the masses. Hari kept his own doubts private.
    First and obvious came the gentry—the inherited aristocracy. Cleon himself stood at the apex of a pyramid of rank that descended from the Imperium to mighty Quadrant Dukes and Spiral Arm Princes, pastLife Peers, all the way down to the local barons Hari used to know back on Helicon.
    Working in the fields, he had seen them pompously scudding overhead. Each governed a domain no larger than they could cross by flitter in a day. To a member of the gentry, life was busy with the Great Game—a ceaseless campaign to advance the fortunes of one’s noble house, arranging greater status for your family line through political alliances, or marriages for your many children.
    Hari snorted in derision, masking it by taking another stim. He had studied anthropological reports from a thousand Fallen Worlds—those that had devolved in isolation, reverting to cruder ways of life. He knew this pyramid-shaped order to be among the most natural and enduring human social patterns. Even when a planet was reduced to simple agriculture and hand-forged metals, the same triangular format endured. People liked rank and order.
    The endless competition of gentry families had been the first and easiest psychohistorological system Hari ever modeled. He had first combined basic game theory and kin selection. Then, in a moment of inspiration, he inserted them into the equations that described sand grains skidding down the slopes of a dune. That correctly described sudden transitions: social slippages.
    So it was with the rise and fall of noble family lines. Long, smooth eras—then abrupt shifts.
    He watched the crowd, picking out those in the second aristocracy, supposedly equal to the first: the meritocracy.
    As department chairman at a major Imperial university, Hari was himself a lord in that hierarchy—a pyramid of achievement rather than of birth. Meritocrats had entirely different obsessions thanthe gentry’s constant dynastic bickerings. In fact, few in Hari’s class bothered to breed at all, so busy were they in their chosen fields. Gentry jostled for the top ranks of Imperial government, while second tier meritocrats saw themselves wielding the real power.
    If only Cleon had such a role in mind for me, Hari thought. A vice minister position, or an advisory post. He could have managed that for a time, or else bungled it and got himself forced out of office. Either way, he would be safe back at Streeling within a year or two. They don’t execute vice ministers…not for incompetence, at least.
    Nor did a vice minister feel the worst burden of rule—bearing responsibility for the lives of a quadrillion human beings.
    Dors saw him drifting along in his own thoughts. Under her gentle urging, he sampled tasty savories and made small talk.
    The gentry could be distinguished by their ostentatiously fashionable clothing, while the economists, generals and other meritocrats tended to wear the formal garb of their professions.
    So he was making