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"Of course it was your choice! It was your sacrifice for the good of the Second Foundation.
So now I'm telling you-- healing Leyel is more important to Hari's plan than keeping up with
your day-to-day responsibilities here."
"You're not removing me from my position, are you?"
"No. I'm just telling you to ease up. And get Leyel out of the apartment. Do you understand
me? Demand it! Reengage him with you, or we've all lost him."
"Take him where?"
"I don't know. Theater. Athletic events. Dancing."
"We don't do those things."
"Well, what do you do?"
"Research. And then talk about it."
"Fine. Bring him here to the library. Do research with him. Talk about it."
"But he'll meet people here. He'd certainly meet you."
"Good. Good. I like that. Yes, let him come here."
"But I thought we had to keep the Second Foundation a secret from him until he's ready to
take part."
"I didn't say you should introduce me as First Speaker."
"No, no, of course you didn't. What am I thinking of? Of course he can meet you, he can
meet everybody."
"Deet, listen to me."
"Yes, I'm listening."
"It's all right to love him, Deet."
"I know that."
"I mean, it's all right to love him more than you love us. More than you love any of us. More
than you love all of us. There you are, crying again."
"I'm so--"
"Relieved."
"How do you understand me so well?"
"I only know what you show me and what you tell me. It's all we ever know about each other.
The only thing that helps is that nobody can ever lie for long about who they really are. Not
even to themselves."
***
For two months Leyel followed up on Magolissian's paper by trying to find some connection
between language studies and human origins. Of course, this meant weeks of wading
through old, useless point-of-origin studies, which kept indicating that Trantor was the focal
point of language throughout the history of the Empire, even though nobody seriously put
forth Trantor as the planet of origin. Once again, though, Leyel rejected the search for a
particular planet; he wanted to find out regularities, iiot unique events.
Leyel hoped for a clue in the fairly recent work-- only two thousand years old-- of Dagawell
Kispitorian. Kispitorian came from the most isolated area of a planet called Artashat, where
there were traditions that the original settlers came from an earlier world named Armenia,
now uncharted. Kispitorian grew up among mountain people who claimed that long ago,
they spoke a completely different language. In fact, the title of Kispitorian's most interesting
book was No Man Understood Us; many of the folk tales of these people began with the
formula "Back in the days when no man understood us..."
Kispitorian had never been able to shake off this tradition of his upbringing, and as he
pursued the field of dialect formation and evolution, he kept coming across evidence that at
one time the human species spoke not one but many languages. It had always been taken
for granted that Galactic Standard was the up-to-date version of the language of the planet
of origin-- that while a few human groups might have developed dialects, civilization was
impossible without mutually intelligible speech. But Kispitorian had begun to suspect that
Galactic Standard did not become the universal human language until *after* the formation
of the Empire-- that, in fact, one of the first labors of the Imperium was to stamp out all other
competing languages. The mountain people of Artakshat believed that their language had
been stolen from them. Kispitorian eventually devoted his life to proving they were right.
He worked first with names, long recognized as the most conservative aspect of language.
He found that there were many separate naming traditions, and it was not until about the
year 6000 G.E. that all were finally amalgamated into one Empire-wide stream. What was
interesting was that the farther back he went, the more complexity he found.
Because certain worlds tended to have unified traditions, and so the simplest explanation
of this was the one he first put forth-- that humans left their home world with a unified
language, but the normal forces of language separation caused each new planet to develop
its own offshoot, until many dialects became mutually unintelligible. Thus, different languages
would not have developed until humanity moved out into space; this was one of the reasons
why the Galactic Empire was necessary to restore the primeval unity of the species.
Kispitorian called his first and most influential book Tower of Confusion, using the
widespread legend of the Tower of Babble as an illustration. He supposed that this story
might have originated in that pre-Empire period, probably among the rootless traders
roaming from planet to planet, who had to deal on a practical level with the fact that no two
worlds spoke the same language. These traders had preserved a tradition that when
humanity lived on one planet, they all spoke the same language. They explained the
linguistic confusion of their own time by recounting the tale of a great leader who built the
first "tower," or starship, to raise mankind up into heaven. According to the story, "God"
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