The centuries recede, and the legend of Hari Seldon grows: the brilliant man, wise man, sad man who charted the course of the human future in the old Empire. But revisionist views prosper, and cannot always be easily dismissed. To understand Seldon, we are sometimes tempted to refer to apocrypha, myths, even fairy tales from those distant times. We are frustrated by the contradictions of incomplete documents and what amount to hagiographies.

            This we know without reference to the revisionists: that Seldon was brilliant, Seldon was key. But Seldon was neither saint nor divinely inspired prophet, and of course, he did not act alone. The most pervasive myths involve...

            --Encyclopedia Galactica,

            117th Edition, 1054 F.E.

1.

Hari Seldon stood in slippered feet and a thick green scholar’s robe on the enclosed parapet of an upperside maintenance tower, looking from an altitude of two hundred meters over the dark aluminum and steel surface of Trantor. The sky was quite clear over this Sector tonight, only a few vague clouds scudding before nacreous billows and sheets of stars like ghostly fire.

            Beneath this spectacle, and beyond the ranks of gently curving domes, obscured and softened by night, lay a naked ocean, its floating aluminum covers pulled aside across hundreds of thousands of hectares. The revealed sea glowed faintly, as if in response to the sky. He could not remember the name of this sea: Peace, or Dream, or Sleep. All the hidden oceans of Trantor had such ancient names, nursery names to soothe. The heart of the Empire needed soothing as much as Hari; soothing, not sooth.

            Warm sweet air swirled around his head and shoulders from a vent in the wall behind him. Hari had discovered that the air here was the purest of any in Streeling, perhaps because it was drawn directly from outside. The temperature beyond the plastic window registered at two degrees, a chill he would well remember from his one misadventure upperside, decades before.

            He had spent so much of his life enclosed, insulated from the chill as well as the freshness, the newness, much as the numbers and equations of psychohistory insulated him from the harsh reality of individual lives. How can the surgeon work efficiently and still feel the pain of the carved flesh ?

            In a real sense, the patient was already dead. Trantor, the political center of the Galaxy, had died decades, perhaps centuries before, and was only now obviously falling to rot. While Hari’s brief personal flame of self would flicker out long before the Empire’s embers powdered to ash, through the equations of the Project he could see clearly the rigor of morbidity, the stiffening face of the Empire’s corpse.

            This awful vision had made him perversely famous, and his theories known throughout Trantor, and in many parts of the Galaxy. He was called “Raven” Seldon, harbinger of nightmare doom.

            The rot would last five more centuries, a simple and rapid deflation on the time-scales of Hari’s broadest equations...Social skin collapsing, then melting away over the steel bones of Trantor’s Sectors and municipalities...

            How many human tales would fill that collapse! An empire, unlike a corpse, continues to feel pain after death. On the scale of the most minute and least reliable equations, sparkling within the displays of his powerful Prime Radiant, Hari could almost imagine a million billion faces blurred together in an immense calculus to fill the area beneath the Empire’s declining curve.

Acceleration of decay marked by the loci of every human story, almost as many as the points on a plane...Beyond understanding, without psychohistory.

            It was his hope to foster a rebirth of something better and more durable than the Empire, and he was close to success...according to the equations.

            Yet still his most frequent emotion these days was cold regret. To live in a bright and youthful period, the Empire at its most glorious, stable and prosperous--that would be worth all his eminence and accomplishment!

            To have returned to him the company of his adopted son Raych, and Dors, mysterious and lovely Dors Venabili, who harbored within tailored flesh and secret steel the passion and devotion of any ten heroes...For their return alone he would multiply geometrically the signs of his own decay, aching limbs and balky bowels and blurred eyesight.

            This night, however, Hari was close to peace. His bones did not ache much. He did not feel the worms of grief so sharply. He could actually relax and look forward to an end to this labor.

            The pressures pushing him were coming to a hard center. His trial would begin within a month. He knew its outcome with reasonable certainty. This was the Cusp Time. All that he had lived and worked for would be realized soon, his plans moving on to their next step--and to his exit. Conclusions within growth, stops within the flow.

            He had an appointment soon to meet with young Gaal Dornick, a significant figure in his plans. Mathematically, Dornick was far from being a stranger; yet they had not met before.

            And Hari believed he had seen Daneel once again, though he was not sure. Daneel would not have wanted him to be sure; but perhaps Daneel wanted him to suspect.

            So much of what passed for history on Trantor now reeked of misery. In statecraft, after all, confusion was misery--and sometimes misery was a necessity. Hari knew that Daneel still had much work to do, in secret; but Hari would never--could never--tell any other human. Daneel had made sure of that. And for that reason Hari could never speak the complete truth about Dors, the true tale of the odd and virtually perfect relationship he had had with a woman who was not a woman, not even human, yet friend and lover.

            Hari, in his weariness, resisted but could not suppress a sentimental sadness. Age was tainted and the old were haunted by the loss of lovers and friends. How grand it would be if he could visit with Daneel again! Easy to see, in his mind’s eye, how that visit would go: after the joy of reunion, Hari would vent some of his anger at the restrictions and demands Daneel had placed upon him. The best of friends, the most compelling of taskmasters.

            Hari blinked and focused on the view beyond the window. He was far too prone these days to drift off into reverie.

            The ocean’s beautiful glow was itself decay; a riot of bioluminescent algae run rampant for almost four years now, killing off the crops of the oxygen farms, making the air slightly stale even in the chill of upperside. No threat of suffocation yet, but for how much longer?

            The Emperor’s adjutants and protectors and spokesmen had announced imminent victory over the beautiful plague of algae only a few days before, seeding the ocean with tailored phages to control the bloom. The ocean did seem darker tonight, but perhaps the uncharacteristically clear sky dimmed it by comparison.

            Death can be both harsh and lovely, Hari thought. Sleep, Dream, Peace.

Halfway across the Galaxy, Lodovik Trema traveled in the depths of an Imperial astrophysical survey vessel, the ship’s only passenger. He sat alone in the comfort of the officers’ lounge, watching a lightly plotted entertainment with apparent enjoyment. The ship’s crew, carefully selected from the citizen class, had stocked up on such entertainments by the thousands before launching on their missions, which might take them away from civilized ports for months. Their officers and captain, more often than not from the baronial aristocratic families, chose from a variety of less populist bookfilms.

            Lodovik Trema in appearance was forty or forty-five, stout but not corpulent, with a pleasantly ugly face and great strong sausage-fingered hands. One eye seemed fixed skyward, and his large lips turned down as if he were perpetually inclined toward pessimism or at best bland neutrality. Where he had hair, he wore it in a short, even cut; his forehead was high and innocent of wrinkles, which gave his face a younger aspect belied by the lines around his mouth and eyes.

            Though Lodovik represented the highest Imperial authority, he had come to be well liked by the captain and crew; his dry statements of purpose or fact seemed to conceal a gentle and observant wit, and he never said too much, though sometimes he could be accused of saying too little.

            Outside the ship’s hull, the geometric fistula of hyperspace through which the ship navigated during its Jumps was beyond complete visualization, even for the ship’s computers. Both humans and machines, slaves of status space-time, simply bided their personal times until the pre-set emergence.

            Lodovik had always preferred the quicker--though sometimes no less harrowing--networks of wormholes, but those connections had been neglected dangerously, and in the past few decades many had collapsed like unshored subway tunnels, in some cases sucking in transit stations and waiting passengers...They were seldom used now.

            Captain Kartas Tolk entered the lounge and stood for a moment behind Lodovik’s seat. The rest of the crew busily tended the machines that watched the machines that kept the ship whole during the Jumps.

            Tolk was tall, his head capped by woolly white-blond hair, with ashy brown skin and a patrician air not uncommon for native-born Sarossans. Lodovik glanced over his shoulder and nodded a greeting. “Two more hours, after our last Jump,” Captain Tolk said. “We should be on schedule.”

            “Good,” said Lodovik. “I’m eager to get to work. Where will we land?”

            “At Sarossa Major, the capital. That’s where the records you seek are stored. Then, as ordered, we remove as many favored families on the Emperor’s list as we can. The ship will be very crowded.”

            “I can imagine.”

            “We have perhaps seven days before the shock front hits the outskirts of the system. Then, only eight hours before it engulfs Sarossa.”

            “Too close for comfort.”

            “The close shave of Imperial incompetence and misdirection,” Tolk said, with no attempt to conceal his bitterness. “Imperial scientists knew that the Kale’s star was coring two years ago.”

            “The information provided by Sarossan scientists was far from accurate,” Lodovik said.

            Tolk shrugged; no sense denying it. Blame enough for all to share. Kale’s star had gone supernova last year; its explosion had been observed by telepresence nine months later, and in the time since...Much politicking, reallocation of scant resources, then, this pitifully inadequate mission.

            The captain had the misfortune of being sent to watch his planet die, saving little but Imperial records and a few privileged families.

            “In the best days,” Tolk said, “the Imperial Navy could have constructed shields to save at least a third of the planet’s population. We could have marshaled fleets of immigration ships to evacuate millions, even billions...Sufficient to rebuild, to keep a world’s character intact. A glorious world, if I may say so, even now.”

            “So I’ve heard,” Lodovik said softly. “We will do our best, dear Captain, though that can be only a dry and hollow satisfaction.”

            Tolk’s lips twisted. “I do not blame you, personally,” he said. “You have been sympathetic and honest and, above all, efficient. Quite different from the usual in the Commission offices. The crew regards you as a friend among scoundrels.”

            Lodovik shook his head in warning. “Even simple complaints against the Empire can be dangerous,” he said. “Best not to trust me too much.”

            The ship shuddered slightly and a small bell rang in the room. Tolk closed his eyes and gripped the back of the chair automatically. Lodovik simply faced forward.

            “The last Jump,” the captain said. He looked at Lodovik. “I trust you well enough, councilor, but I trust my skills more. Neither the Emperor nor Linge Chen can afford to lose men of my qualifications. I still know how to repair parts of our drives should they fail. Few captains on any ship can boast of that now.”

            Lodovik nodded; simple truth, but not very good armor. “The craft of best using and not abusing essential human resources may also be a lost art, Captain. Fair warning.”

            Tolk made a wry face. “Point taken.” He turned to leave, then heard something unusual. He glanced over his shoulder at Lodovik. “Did you feel something?”

            The ship suddenly vibrated again, this time with a high-pitched tensile grind that set their teeth on edge. Lodovik frowned. “I felt that. What was it?”

            The captain cocked his head, listening to a remote voice buzzing in his ear. “Some instability, an irregularity in the last Jump,” he said. “Not unknown as we draw close to a stellar mass. Perhaps you should return to your cabin.”

            Lodovik shut down the lounge projectors and rose. He smiled at Captain Tolk and clapped him on the shoulder. “Of any in the Emperor’s service, I would be most willing to entrust you to steer us through the shoals. I need to study our options now anyway. Triage, Captain Tolk. Maximization of what we can take with us, compared to what can be stored in underground vaults.”

            Tolk’s face darkened, and he lowered his eyes. “My own family library, at Alos Quad, is--”

            The ship’s alarms blared like huge animals in pain. Tolk raised his arms in instinctive self-protection, covering his face

            Lodovik dropped to the floor and doubled himself up with amazing dexterity

            The ship spun like a top in a fractional dimension it was never meant to navigate

            And with a sickening blur of distressed momenta and a sound like a dying behemoth, it made an unscheduled and asymmetric Jump.

            The ship reappeared in the empty vastness of status geometry-normal, unstretched space. Ship’s gravity failed simultaneously.

            Tolk floated a few centimeters above the floor. Lodovik uncurled and grabbed for an arm of the couch he had occupied just a few moments before. “We’re out of hyperspace,” he said.

            “No question,” Tolk said. “But in the name of procreation, where?”

            Lodovik knew in an instant what the captain could not. They were being flooded with an interstellar tidal wave of neutrinos. He had never, in his centuries of existence, experienced such an onslaught. To the intricate and super sensitive pathways of his positronic brain, the neutrinos felt like a thin cloud of buzzing insects; yet they passed through the ship and its human crew like so many bits of nothing. A single neutrino, the most elusive of particles, could slip through a light-year of solid lead without being blocked. Very rarely indeed did they react with matter. Within the heart of the Kale’s supernova, however, immense quantities of matter had been compressed into neutronium, producing a neutrino for every proton, more than enough to blow away the outer shells just a year before.

            “We’re in the shock front,” Lodovik said.

            “How do you know?” Tolk asked.

            “Neutrino flux.”

            “How--” The captain’s skin grayed, its ashen sheen growing even more prominent. “You’re assuming, of course. It’s a logical assumption.”

            Lodovik nodded, though he assumed nothing. The captain and crew would be dead within an hour.

            Even this far from Kale’s star, the expanding sphere of neutrinos would be strong enough to transmute a few thousandths of a percent of the atoms within the ship and their bodies. Neutrons would be converted to protons in sufficient numbers to subtly alter organic chemistries, causing poisons to build, nervous signals to meet untimely dead ends.

            There were no effective shields against neutrino flux.

            “Captain, this is no time for deception,” Lodovik said. “I’m not hazarding a guess. I’m not human; I can feel the effects directly.”

            The captain stared at him, uncomprehending.

            “I am a robot, Captain. I will survive for a time, but that is no blessing. I am deeply programmed to try to protect humans from harm, but there is nothing I can do to assist you. Every human on this ship is going to die.”

            Tolk grimaced and shook his head, as if he could not believe his ears. “We’re going crazy, all of us,” he said.

            “Not yet,” Lodovik said. “Captain, please accompany me to the bridge. We may yet be able to save something.”

2.

Linge Chen might have been the most powerful man in the Galaxy, in appearance as well as fact, if he had merely willed it. Instead, he settled for something a mere shade less, and wore a far more comfortable rank and uniform--that of the Chief Commissioner of the Commission of Public Safety.

            The ancient and aristocratic Chens had survived through thousands of years to produce Linge by exercising caution, diplomacy, and by being useful to many Emperors. Chen had no wish to supplant the present Emperor or any of his myriad ministers, councilors, and “advisors,” or to be any more of a target for young hotheads than he needed to be. His present visibility was already too high for his taste, but at least he was a target more of derision than of hatred.

            He had spent the last of these early-morning hours looking over reports from the governors of seven troubled star systems. Three had declared war on their neighbors, ignoring threats of Imperial intervention, and Chen had used the Emperor’s seal to move a dozen vessels into those systems as safeguard. Fully a thousand other systems were showing severe unrest, yet with recent breakdowns and degradations, the Imperial communications systems could only handle about a tenth of the information sent from the twenty-five million worlds supposedly under their authority.

            The total flux of information, sent in real time and unprocessed by experts on Trantor’s companion worlds and space stations, would have increased Trantor’s temperature by tens of degrees. It was because of their considerable skill and intuition borne of thousands of years of experience that the Palace--that is, Chen and his fellow Commissioners--could keep a kind of balance with just the minimal, boiled-down stock from the vast Galactic stew.

            He now allowed himself a few minutes of personal exploration, essential to his sanity. But even that was far from frivolous amusement. It was with an expression of curious intrigue that he sat before his informer and asked about “Raven” Seldon. The informer, a hollow, elongated ovoid arranged horizontally on his desk, gleamed its natural eggshell white for an instant, then brought up all the various murmurings and documents from around Trantor and key outlying worlds. A few small film book articles appeared in the center of the display, a piece from an offworld mathematical journal, an interview with the student newspaper at Seldon’s sacrosanct Streeling University, bulletins from the Imperial Library...Mentioning nothing about psychohistory. The infamous Seldon was remarkably quiet this week, perhaps in anticipation of his trial. None of his colleagues in the Project had had much to say, either. Just as well.

            Chen closed that search and leaned back in the chair, contemplating which crisis to respond to next. He had thousands of problems to deal with daily, most of which he fed to his selected councilors and their assistants, but he was taking a personal interest in the response to a supernova explosion near four relatively loyal Imperial worlds, including beautiful and productive Sarossa.

            He had sent his most reliable and ingenious councilor to oversee what little rescuing could be done at Sarossa. His brows furrowed at the thought of the inadequacy of this response...And what political dangers the Commission, and Trantor, might face if nothing at all could be accomplished. Empire after all was a matter of quid pro quo; if there was no quo then there might as well be no quid.

            Public Safety was more than just a political catchphrase; in this endless painful age of decay, an aristocratic official such as Chen still had an important function. The public image of the Commissioners seemed to be one of irresponsible luxury, but Chen took his duties very seriously. He harked back to a better time, when the Empire could and did look after its many children, the citizens of its far reaches, with established peacemaking, policing, financial and technical aid, and rescue.

            Chen felt a presence at his elbow and his hair stood on end. He turned with a sudden flash of irritation (or was it fear?) to see his chief personal secretary, small and mild Kreen. Kreen’s usually pleasant face was almost bloodless and he did not seem to want to convey his message.

            “Sorry,” Chen said. “You startled me. I was enjoying a relatively peaceful moment on this infernal device. What is it, Kreen?”

            “My apologies...for the grief we must all feel...I did not want this news to come to you through your machine.” Kreen was naturally suspicious of the informer, which could do so many of his own functions so quickly and anonymously.

            “Yes, damn it, what is it?”

            “The Imperial survey ship Spear of Glory, Your Honor...” Kreen swallowed. His people, from the small southern hemisphere Lavrenti Sector, had worked as servants to the Imperial courts for thousands of years. It was in his blood to feel his master’s pain. Sometimes Kreen seemed less a human being than a shadow...though a very useful shadow.

            “Yes? What is it--blown to smithereens?”

            Kreen’s face crinkled with anticipated distress. “No! Your Honor...That is, we do not know. It is a day overdue, and there are no communications, not even an emergency beacon.”

            Chen listened with a sinking heart and a twist in his stomach. Lodovik Trema...

            And of course a fine captain and crew.

            Chen opened and closed his mouth. He needed more information desperately, but of course Kreen would have given him all that there was, so there was no more.

            “And Sarossa?”

            “The shock front is less than five days from Sarossa, Your Honor.”

            “I know that. Have any other ships been dispatched?”

            “Yes, sire. Four much smaller ships have been deflected from the missions to save Kisk, Puma, and Transdal.”

            “Sky, no!” Chen stood and fumed. “I wasn’t consulted. They must not reduce those rescue forces...they’re at minimum already.”

            “Commissioner, the representative from Sarossa was received by the Emperor just two hours ago...without our knowledge. He convinced the Emperor and Farad Sinter that--”

            “Sinter is a fool. Three worlds neglected for one, an Imperial favorite! He’ll get his Emperor killed someday.” But then Chen calmed himself, closing his eyes, focusing inward, drawing on six decades of special training to set his mind calmly and quickly to finding the best path through this morass.

            To lose Lodovik, ugly, faithful, and supremely resourceful Lodovik...

            Let the opposing force pull you down, gather its energy for the spring back.

            “Can you get me a summary or an actual recording of these meetings, Kreen?”

            “Yes, sire. They will not yet be subject to review and interdiction by the court historians. There is commonly a backlog of two days on these rewritings, sire.”

            “Good. When an inquiry is held, and questions asked, we will leak Sinter’s words to the public...I think the lowest and most popular journals will serve us best. Perhaps the All-World Tongue, or the Big Ear.”

            Kreen smiled. “I myself am fond of The Emperor’s Eyes.”

            “Even better. No authentication required...just more rumors among an uneducated and unhappy population.” He shook his head sadly. “Even if we bring down Sinter, it will be small recompense for losing Lodovik. What chance he might survive?”

            Kreen shrugged; that was well outside his limited expertise.

            So few in the Imperial Sector understood the vagaries of hyperdrive and Jump science. There was one, however. An old ship’s captain turned trader and occasional smuggler, who specialized in sending goods and passengers along the quickest and quietest routes...A bright and unscrupulous rogue, some said, but a man who had been of service to Chen in the past.

            “Get me an immediate audience with Mors Planch.”

            “Yes, Your Honor.”

            Kreen bustled out of the room.

            Linge Chen took a deep breath. His time at the display was over. He had to return to his office and meet in person with Sector generals and planetary representatives from Trantor’s food allies for the rest of the day.

            He would have much preferred focusing all his thoughts on the loss of Lodovik and how to convert Sinter’s foolishness to his own best interests, but not even such a tragedy, or such an opportunity, could interfere with his present duties.

            Ah, the glamour of power!

3.

Privy Councilor Farad Sinter had overstepped his bounds so many times in the past three years that the boy Emperor Klayus referred to him as “my pillar of prying ambition,” a typically ill-worded phrase that today, at least, carried no overtone of admiration or affection.

            Sinter stood before the Emperor, hands clasped in unconvincing submission. Klayus I, barely seventeen years of age, regarded him with something less than anger and more than irritation. In his all-too-recent childhood, he had been called down too many times in private by his tutors, all selected and controlled by Commissioner Chen; he had become a sometimes sly, underhanded young man, more intelligent than most gave him credit for, though still subject to the occasional extreme outburst. Early on, he had learned one of the major rules of leadership and statecraft in a competitive and hypocritical government: He never let anyone know what he was really thinking.

            “Sinter, why are you looking for young men and women in the Dahl Sector?” the Emperor asked.

            Sinter had taken pains for this effort to be concealed. Somebody was playing political games, and that somebody would pay.

            “Sire, I have heard of this search. I believe they are being sought as part of the genetic reconciliation project.”

            “Yes, Sinter, a project you began five years ago. You think I’m too young to remember?”

            “No, your Highness.”

            “I do have some influence in this Palace, Sinter. My word is not completely ignored!”

            “Of course not, your Highness.”

            “Spare me the obsequious titles. Why are you hunting down children younger than I am, and disrupting loyal families and neighborhoods?”

            “It is essential to understand the limits of human evolution on Trantor, Your Highness.”

            Klayus lifted his hand. “My tutors tell me evolution is a long, slow process of genetic accretions, Sinter. What do you expect to learn from a few invasions of privacy and attempted kidnappings?”

            “Pardon my even hoping to act as one of your tutors, Your Highness, but--”

            “I hate being lectured to,” Klayus said in a low growl that broke halfway through.

            “But, if I may continue, with your permission, sire, humans have lived on Trantor for twelve thousand years. We have already seen the development of populations with particular physical and even mental characteristics--the stocky, dark people of Dahl, sire, or the menials of Lavrenti. There is evidence, sire, that certain extraordinary traits have occurred in certain individuals in the last century...Scientific evidence, as well as hearsay, of--”

            “Psychic powers, Sinter?” Klayus tittered behind spread fingers and lifted his eyes to the ceiling. A few projected birds flew down and circled them, making as if to peck at Sinter. The Emperor had rigged nearly all of his chambers to reveal his moods with such projections, and Sinter did not like them in the least.

            “Of a kind, Your Highness.”

            “Extraordinary persuasion. So I’ve heard. Perhaps the tumbling of dice in games of chance, or the ability to render women susceptible to our charms? I’d like that very much, Sinter. My assigned women are growing tired of my attentions.” His expression grew peevish. “I can tell.”

            I hardly blame them, Sinter thought. An oversexed partner of few charms and little wit...

            “It is a matter of some curiosity and perhaps importance, Highness.”

            “Meanwhile, you cause unrest in Sectors that are already unhappy. Sinter, it’s a foolish liberty--or rather, a foolish breach of liberty. I am supposed to guarantee my subjects’ freedom from being strapped to the horrid little hobbyhorses of my ministers and advisors, or even my own. Well, my hobbyhorses are relatively comfortable mounts...but this, but you, Sinter!”

            For a moment, Sinter thought the Emperor was actually going to show a spine, some Imperial fortitude, and forbid this activity, and he felt a momentary chill. It was because Sinter was so good at finding attractive women for young Klayus, and replacing them when he or they grew bored, that Klayus put up with so many of his peccadilloes.

            But the Emperor’s eyes grew heavy-lidded, and his energy and irritation appeared to dissipate. Sinter hid his relief. Klayus the Young was, after all, relenting once more.

            “Please don’t be so obvious, my good man,” Klayus said. “Slow down. What you need to know will come to you in good time, don’t you think? I’m sure you have all of our interests at heart. Now, about this woman Tyreshia...”

            Farad Sinter listened to Klayus’s request with apparent interest, but in fact had switched on his recorder and would pay attention in more detail later. He could hardly believe his fortune. The Emperor had not forbidden these actions! He could indeed redirect and slow the less fruitful investigations; and he could also continue.

            In fact, it was not humans, exceptional or otherwise, that he was after. Sinter sought evidence for the most extraordinary and long-lived conspiracy in human history...

            A conspiracy he had traced back to the time of Cleon I, and probably long before that.

            A myth, a legend, a real entity, coming and going like a wraith in Trantor’s history. The Mycogenians had called him Danee. He was one of the mysterious Eternals, and Sinter was determined to find out more, however he might risk his reputation.

            Talk of the Eternals was regarded with as little respect--less, actually--as talk of ghosts. Many on Trantor, an ancient world filled to overflowing with extinct lives, believed in ghosts. Only a select few paid attention to stories of the Eternals.

            The Emperor talked on about the woman he was interested in, and Sinter appeared to listen attentively, but his thoughts were far away...Years away.

            Sinter imagined himself being credited with saving the Empire. He savored energizing visions of sitting on an Imperial throne, or even better, of replacing Linge Chen on the Commission of Public Safety.

            “Farad!” The Emperor’s voice was sharp.

            Sinter’s recorder instantly fed him the last five seconds of conversation.

            “Yes, your Highness. Tyreshia is indeed a beautiful woman, reputedly very high-spirited, and ambitious.”

            “Ambitious women like me, don’t they, Farad?” The boy’s tone softened. Klayus’s mother had been ambitious, and successful, until she had fallen into Linge Chen’s bad graces. She had tried to work her wiles on the Chief Commissioner in the presence of one of his wives. Chen was extremely loyal to his wives.

            Strange that a weak boy like Klayus would enjoy strong women; invariably they grew bored with him. After a time, not even the most ambitious could hide their boredom. Once they learned who was really in power, ultimately...

            Neither Sinter nor Linge Chen cared much for sex. Power was so much more rewarding.

4.

The greatest engineering feat in the history of Trantor had failed ten years before, and the echoes of that failure still plagued the important and crowded and troublesome Dahl Sector. Four million Dahlite engineers and heatsink workers, supplemented by an additional ten million laborers and even a smuggled force of the banned tiktoks, had worked for twenty years to drive the deepest heatsink yet attempted--over two hundred kilometers--into the crust of Trantor. The difference fu temperature at the proposed depth and the surface would have generated sufficient energy to power one-fifth of Trantor’s needs for the next fifty years...

            But while ambitions were high, ability was not. The engineers had shown themselves to be less than inspired, the project management had been plagued by corruption and scandal at all levels, the Dahlite workers had revolted and for two years the project had been delayed. Finally, when completed, it had simply...failed.

            The collapse of the shaft and it’s associated sodium and water towers had killed a hundred thousand Dahlites, seven thousand of them civilians living immediately above the shaft, beneath the oldest of Dahl’s domes. The closest subsidiary sinks had also been threatened, and only by heroic intervention had further disaster been avoided--personal courage stepping in where leadership and design skill had collapsed miserably.

            Ever since, Dahl had been under a political cloud, a scapegoat Sector on a world that was still capable of placing some trust in its leaders. In truth, Linge Chen had investigated and prosecuted all the corrupt officials and incompetent designers and conniving contractors. He had seen to it that tens of thousands were tried and sent to the Rikerian Prison, or put to hard labor in the worst depths of the heatsinks themselves.

            But the economic effects had not been mitigated. Dahl could no longer meet its quota of Imperially mandated power; other Sectors tried to take up the slack, and what favor Dahl had ever had in the Palace declined to a wretched minimum. Near starvation had followed.

            It was in this world that Klia Asgar had been born and raised, in the miserable shanty quarters once reserved for workers. Her father had lost his job a year before her birth, and spent the years of her childhood alternately dreaming of a return to prosperity...and drinking himself silly with yeasty, foul-smelling Dahlite liquor. Her mother had died when Klia was four; she had raised herself from that time on, and did remarkably well, considering that so many cards had been stacked against her from before her birth.

            Klia was of moderate height for a Dahlite female, slender and wiry, with thin strong fingers on long hands. Her hair was short and black, and she possessed the family trait of finely furred cheeks that gave her a somewhat softer aspect than her hard, chiseled features would have otherwise conveyed.

            She was quick to learn, quick in motion, and, surprisingly, she was also quick to smile and quick to express sentiment. In her private moments she dreamed of vague and indefinite improvements that might be possible in another world. another life, but they were just dreams. All too often, she dreamed of a strong alliance with some resourceful and handsome, bushy-mustached male, no more than five years her senior...

            No such male entered her life. She was no great beauty, and the esteem and affection of others was the one area where she refused to exercise her surprising abilities to charm and persuade. If the male entered without prodding, well and good; but she would not apply any major push to get him. She believed she naturally deserved better.

            In another age, another time, long forgotten, Klia Asgar would have been called a romantic, an idealist. In Dahl, in the year G.E. 12067, she was simply regarded as a stubborn but naive girl of sixteen. Her father told her so whenever he was sober enough to express himself at all.

            Klia was thankful for small favors. Her father was neither brutal nor demanding. When sober, he took care of his own few needs, leaving her free to do whatever she wanted: work in the black market, smuggle from the outside luxuries to the less savory (and Imperially oppressed) elements of the unemployed...Whatever she could do to survive. They rarely even saw each other, and they had not lived in the same apartment for two years. Not since that argument and the thing she had done in anger.

            This day, she stood on a promenade overlooking the Distributor’s Market, the most ragged and disreputable retail district in Dahl, waiting for an unnamed man in dusty green to pick up a package. The pieced squares of sky in the overarching dome showed great flickering gaps that cast shadows on the crowds, now thinning as the evening and home hours approached for the first shift of workers. Men and women shopped for their night’s sparse supper, bartering more often than using credits. Dahl was developing its own economy; in fifty years, Klia thought, it might go independent, pushing out a weak and vacillating Palace-mandated economy for something more fundamental and native. But that, too, was little more than a dream...

            Imperial trade monitors stood on the outskirts of the market, men and women with eyes and cameras constantly watching, recording the crowds. Where money and political oversight were concerned, creativity seemed to flourish; in every other endeavor, Klia thought, Trantor was intellectually bankrupt.

            She saw a man who met the description standing between two of the omnipresent trade monitors. He wore a baggy, dusty green suit and cloak. The monitors seemed prepared to ignore him, much as they ignored Klia when she ventured into the market. She watched this with narrowed eyes, wondering whether he had bribed them, or whether he had other, less common ways of not attracting attention.

            If he could do what she did, he would be a person to reckon with, perhaps partner with, in business--unless his skills were stronger than her own. In which case, she would have to avoid him like a fatal rash. But Klia had never met anyone stronger than she.

            She lifted one arm, as she had been instructed. He quickly spotted her and walked with a light, almost mincing step in her direction.

            They met on the stairs leading from the promenade to the market and the taxi square. Close-up, the man in dusty green had a plain and unremarkable face not improved much by a thin and unconvincing mustache. Klia was conventional enough to enjoy a good mustache on a man; this one did not impress her in the least.

            Then he looked squarely at her and smiled. The comers of the mustache lifted and his teeth shone brilliant white behind smooth, babylike lips.

            “You have what I need,” he told her. No question; declaration.

            “I hope so. It’s what I was told to bring.”

            “That,” the man said, pointing to her small parcel, “is of no consequence.” Still, he extended a handful of credits and took the package with a thin smile. “You are what I seek. Let’s find a quiet place to talk.”

            Klia drew back cautiously. She did not doubt she could take care of herself; she always had. Still, she never walked into any situation unprepared. “How quiet?” she asked.

            “Just where we don’t have to listen to the street noises,” the man said. He lifted stiff-fingered hands.

            There were few such places around the market. They walked several streets away and found a small coco-ice stall. The man bought her a red coco-ice, which she accepted despite her distaste for the popular Dahlite delicacy. He bought himself a small dark stimulk, which he licked with quiet dignity as they sat at a tiny triangular table.

            A square of sky above them darkened so severely that she could barely see his face. His lips seemed to glow around the stimulk.

            “I’m looking for young men and women eager to see other parts of Trantor,” the man said.

            Klia grimaced. “I’ve heard enough recruiters to last me a lifetime.” She started to rise.

            The man reached out and took her arm. Without words, she tried to compel him to move it. “For your own good,” he said, and did not react. She tried harder.

            “Let me go,” she ordered.

            As if stung, the hand withdrew. It seemed to take a few seconds for the man to compose himself. “Of course. But this is a good time to listen.”

            Klia watched the man curiously. She hadn’t compelled him; he had obeyed more like a servant reacting to his mistress than to a young girl he was trying to collar in a public place. Klia focused with more intensity on the man. His surface was not particularly attractive, but she encountered unexpected reserves, a central stillness, a peculiar metallic sweetness. His emotions did not taste the same as others.

            “I only listen to people who are interesting,” Klia said. She was starting to sound a little too arrogant. She fancied herself a more dignified sort of woman, not a street braggart.

            “I see,” the man said. He finished his stimulk and deftly tossed the stick into a receptacle. The proprietress walked to the receptacle, removed five sticks--a meager show for the day--and took them back to the rear of the stall to clean. “Well, is survival interesting?”

            She nodded. “As a general topic.”

            “Then listen closely.” He leaned forward earnestly. “I know what you are and what you can do.”

            “What am I?” Klia asked.

            He looked skyward, just as the square immediately above flickered back to full brightness. His skin was unusually sallow, as if he wore makeup against some skin condition, though she could not detect the pockmarks of brain fever. Klia’s cheeks themselves showed deep pocks, beneath the fur. “You had a bout of fever as a child, didn’t you?” he asked.

            “Most do. It’s typical on Trantor.”

            “Not just here, young friend. On all human worlds. Brain fever is the ever-present companion of intelligent youth, too common to be noticed, too innocuous to be cured. But in you, it was no easy childhood illness. It nearly killed you.”

            Klia’s mother had nursed her through the rough time, then had died just months later, in an accident in the sinks. She hardly remembered her mother, but her father had told her all about the illness. “What about it?”

            His eyes were pale, and she suddenly realized they were not looking directly at her face, but at some irrelevant point to the right of her forehead. “I can’t see well now. I make my way around by feeling the people, where they are, how they move and sound; in a place without people I am in some distress. I prefer crowds for that reason. You...do not. Crowds irritate you. Trantor is a crowded world. It confines you.”

            Klia blinked, uncertain whether it was polite to keep staring at his dead eyes. Not that she cared overmuch for politeness in a situation such as this.

            “I’m just a runner and sometimes a swapper,” she said. “No one pays much attention to me.”

            “I can feel you working on me, Klia. You want me to leave you alone. I disturb you, mostly because what I am saying has a certain truthful resonance--am I right?”

            Klia’s eyes narrowed. She did not want to be special or even memorable to this blind man in dusty green.

            She closed her eyes and concentrated: Forget me. The man cocked his head to one side, as if experiencing a muscle cramp. His mind had such an odd flavor! She had never experienced a mind like it.

            And she would have sworn he was lying about being blind...but none of that was important in the face of her failure to persuade him.

            “You’ve done well for yourself, for a child,” he said in a low voice. “Too well. People are looking for those who succeed where they should fail. Palace Specials, secret police, not at all friendly.”

            The man stood and arranged his coat and brushed crumbs from the seat of his pants. “These chairs are filthy,” he murmured. “Your effort to make me forget was exceptionally powerful, perhaps the most powerful I’ve experienced, but you lack certain skills...I will remember, because I must remember. There are a surprising number of those with your skills on Trantor now; perhaps one or two thousand. I’ve been told, no matter by whom, that most of you are marked by a particularly strong reaction to brain fever. Those who hunt for you are mistaken. They believe it passed you by;”

            The man smiled in her general direction. “I’m boring you,” he said. “I find it painful to be where I’m not wanted. I’ll go.” He turned, seemed to feel for somebody to guide him, and took a step away from the table.

            “No,” Klia said, her voice catching. “Stay for a minute. I want to ask you something.”

            He stopped with a small tremor. Suddenly, he seemed very vulnerable. He thinks I can hurt him. And maybe I can! She wanted to understand his strange flavor--clean and strangely compelling, as if within this man, behind flimsy masks of deception, lurked a basic honesty and decency she had never encountered before.

            “I’m not bored,” she said. “Not yet.”

            The man in dusty green sat down again and put his hand on the table. He took a deep breath. He doesn’t need to breathe, Klia thought, but put away the absurdity quickly” A man and a woman have been searching for your kind for a number of years, and many have joined their group. I hope they live well where the man and woman will send them; I, for one, am unwilling to take the risk.”

            “Who are they?”

            “They say one is Wanda Seldon Palver, the granddaughter of Hari Seldon.”

            Klia did not know the name. She shrugged. “You can go to them, if you want--” the man continued, but she made a sour face and interrupted.

            “They sound connected,” she said, using the word in its derogatory meaning of close to the Palace and the Commissioners and other government officials.

            “Oh, yes, Seldon was once a First Minister, and they say his granddaughter has gotten him out of a number of tough scrapes, legal and otherwise.”

            “He’s an outlaw?”

            “No, a visionary.”

            Klia pursed her lips and frowned again. In Dahl, visionaries were a dime a dozen-street-corner crazies, out of work, out of the grind, most driven insane by their work in the heatsinks.

            The man in dusty green observed her reaction closely. “Not for you? Now, however, another man is searching for your type--”

            “What type?” Klia asked nervously. She needed more time to think, to understand. “I’m still confused.” She felt out his defenses lightly, hoping not to intrude in a way he would notice.

            The man flinched as if poked. “I am a friend, not an enemy to be lightly manipulated. I know there’s risk even talking to you. I know what you could do to me if you put your mind to it. Somebody else in a position of power thinks your kind is monstrous. But he doesn’t understand at all. He seems to think you are all robots.”

            Klia laughed. “Like tiktoks?” she asked. The worker machines had fallen out of favor long before her birth, banned because of frequent and unexplained mechanical revolts, and the public distaste for them still lingered.

            “No. Like robots out of history and legend. Eternals.” He pointed west, in the general direction of the Imperial Sector, the Palace. “It’s madness, but it’s Imperial madness, not easy to overcome. Best if you leave, and I know the best place to go...on Trantor. Not far from here. I can help you make arrangements.”

            “No thank you,” she said. There was too much uncertainty here for Klia to put herself in the hands of this stranger, however compelling parts of his story might seem. His words and what she sensed did not add up.

            “Then take this.” The man thrust a small display card into her hand and stood once more. “You will call. This is not in question. It is only a matter of time.”

            He stared at her directly, his eyes bright, fully capable.

            “We all have our secrets,” he said, and turned to leave.

5.

Lodovik stood alone on the bridge of the Spear of Glory, peering through the broad forward-facing port at what might have been a scene of exceptional beauty, had he been human. Beauty was not an easy concept for a robot to grasp, however; he could see what lay outside the ship, and understand that a human would think it interesting, but for him, the closest analog to beauty was successful service, perfect performance of duty. He would in some sense enjoy notifying a human that a beautiful view was available through this port; but his foremost duty would be to inform the human that this view was in fact caused by forces that were very dangerous...

            And in this duty he had no chance of succeeding, for the humans on Spear of Glory were already dead. Captain Tolk had died last, his mind gone, his body a wreck. In the last few hours of rational thought left to him, Tolk had instructed Lodovik on the actions that might be taken to bring the ship to its final destination: repair of the hyperdrive units, reprogramming of the ship’s navigational system, preserving ship’s power for maximum survival time.

            Tolk’s last coherent words to Lodovik had been a question. “How long can you live...I mean, function?”

            Lodovik had told him,” A century, without refueling.”

            Tolk had then succumbed to the painful, murmurous half sleep that preceded his death.

            Two hundred human deaths weighed on Lodovik’s positronic brain like a drain on his power supplies; it slowed him somewhat. That effect would pass. He was not responsible for the deaths. He simply could not prevent them. But this in itself was sufficient to make him feel weary.

            As for the view--

            Sarossa itself was a dim star, still a hundred billion kilometers distant; but the shock front revealed its extended spoor like a vast, ghostly fireworks display.

            The streams of high-energy particles had met the solar wind from the Sarossan system, creating huge, dim auroras like waving banners. He could make out faint traces red and green in the murky luminosity; switching his eyes to the ultraviolet, he could see even more colors as the diffuse clouds of the explosion’s outer shells advanced through the outlying regions of the system’s cometary dust and ice and gas.

            There was so little time to act, nothing he could do...

            And worse still, Lodovik could feel his brain changing. The neutrinos and other radiation had overwhelmed the ship’s armor of energy fields, and had done more than just kill the humans; they had somehow, he believed, interfered with his own positronic circuitry. He had not yet finished his autodiagnosis sequence--that might take days more--but he feared the worst.

            If his primary functions were affected, he would have to destroy himself. In ages past, he would have merely gone into a dormant mode until a human or another robot repaired him; but he could not afford to have his robotic nature discovered.

            Whatever happened to him, there seemed little chance of discovery. Spear of Glory was hopelessly lost, less than a microbe in an ocean. He had never managed to trace the malfunction or make repairs, despite the captain’s instructions. Being jerked rapidly into and out of hyperspace had burned out all the circuitry for faster-than-light communication. The ship had automatically broadcast a distress signal, but surrounded by the shock front’s extreme radiation, there was little chance the signal would ever be heard.

            Lodovik’s secret was secure enough. But his usefulness to Daneel, and to humanity, was over.

            For a robot, duty was everything, self nothing; yet in his present circumstance, he could look through the port at the effects of the shock front and speculate for no particular reason about physical processes. While not completely stopping his constant processing of problems associated with his long-term mission, he could drift in the middle of the bridge, his immediate needs and work reduced to nothing.

            For humans, this could be called a time of introspection. Introspection without the target of duty was more than novel; it was disturbing. Lodovik would have avoided the opportunity and this sensation if he could have.

            A robot, above all else, was uncomfortable with internal change. Ages past, during the robotic renaissance, on the almost-forgotten worlds of Aurora and Solaria, robots had been built with inhibitions that went beyond the Three Laws. Robots, with a few exceptions, were not allowed to design and build other robots. While they could manage minor repairs to themselves, only a select few specialty units could repair robots that had been severely damaged.

            Lodovik could not repair this malfunction in his own brain, if it was a malfunction; the evidence was not yet clear. But a robot’s brain, its essential programming, was even more off-limits to meddling than its body.

            There was one place remaining in the Galaxy where a robot could be repaired, and where occasionally a robot could be manufactured. That was Eos, established by R. Daneel Olivaw ten thousand years ago, far from the boundaries of the expanding Empire. Lodovik had not been there for ninety years.

            Still, a robot had a strong urge to self-preservation; that was implicit in the Third Law. With time to contemplate his condition, Lodovik wondered if he might in fact be found, then sent to Eos for repair...

            None of these possibilities seemed likely. He resigned himself to the most probable fate: ten more years in this crippled ship, until his minifusion power reserves ran down, with nothing important to do, a Robinson Crusoe of robots, lacking even an island to explore and transform.

            Lodovik could not feel a sense of horror at this fate. But he could imagine what a human would feel, and that in itself induced an echo of robotic unease.

            To cap it all, he was hearing voices--or rather, a voice. It sounded human, but communicated only at odd intervals, in fragments. It even had a name, something like Volda”. And it gave an impression of riding vast but tenuous webs of force, sailing through the deep vacuum between the stars

            Seeking out the plasma halos of living stars, reveling in the neutrino miasma of dead and dying stars, neutrinos intoxicating as hashish smoke. Fleeing from Trantor’s boredom, I grow bored again--and I find, between the stars, a robot in dire straits! One of those the Eternal brought from outside to replace the many destroyed--Look, my friends, my boring friends who have no flesh and know no flesh, and tolerate no fleshly ideals

            One of your hated purgers!

            The voice faded. Added to his distress over the death of the captain and crew of the Spear of Glory and his odd feedback of selfless unease, this mysterious voice--a clear sign of delusion and major malfunction--brought him as close as a robot could come to complete misery.

6.

From his vantage in the tiny balcony apartment overlooking Streeling University, R. Daneel Olivaw could not feel human grief, lacking the human mental structures necessary for that bitter reassessment and reshaping of neuronal pathways; but, like Lodovik, he could feel a sharp and persistent unease, somewhere between guilt at failure and the warning signals of impending loss of function. The news that one of his most valued cohorts was missing distressed him at the very least in that way. He had lost so many to the tiktoks, guided by the alien meme-entities, it seemed so recently--decades, however, and his discomfort (and loneliness!) still burned.

            He had seen the newsfilm in a store window the day before, of the loss of the Spear of Glory and the probable end to any hope of rescue for the citizens of several worlds.

            In his present guise, he looked very much as he had twenty millennia before, in the time of his first and perhaps most influential relationship with a human, Elijah Bailey. Of medium height, slender, with brown hair, he appeared about thirty-five human years of age. He had made some small accessions to the changes in human physiology in that time; the fingernails on his pinkie fingers were now gone, and he was some six centimeters taller. Still, Bailey might have recognized him.

            It was doubtful that Daneel would have recognized his ancient human friend, however; all but the most general of those memories had long since been stored in separate caches, and were not immediately accessible to the robot.

            Daneel had undergone many transformations since that time, the most famous of them being Demerzel, First Minister to the Emperor Cleon I; Hari Seldon himself had succeeded him in that post. Now the time was approaching when Daneel would have to intensify his direct participation in Trantor’s politics, a prospect he found distasteful. The loss of Lodovik would make his work all the more difficult.

            He had never enjoyed public displays. He was far more content to operate in the background and let his thousands of cohorts act out public roles. He preferred, in any case, that his robots assert themselves in small ways here and there over time, at key locations, to effect changes that would in turn effect other changes, producing a cascade with (he hoped) the desired results.

            In the centuries of his work he had seen a few failures and many successes, but with Lodovik he had hoped to insure his most important goal, the perfection of the Plan, Hari Seldon’s Psychohistory Project, and the settlement of a First Foundation world.

            Seldon’s psychohistory had already given Daneel the tools necessary to see the Empire’s future in bleak detail. Collapse, disintegration, wholesale destruction: chaos. There was nothing he could do to prevent that collapse. Perhaps had he acted ten thousand years ago, with then-impossible foresight, using the crude and piecemeal psychohistory then at his disposal, he might have put off this catastrophe. But Daneel could not allow the Empire’s decline and fall to proceed without intervention, for too many humans would suffer and die--over thirty-eight billion on Trantor alone--and the First Law dictated that no human should be harmed or allowed to come to harm.

            His duty for all of those twenty thousands of years had been to mitigate human failures and redirect human energies for the greater human good.

            To do that, he had mired himself in history, and some of the changes he had effected had resulted in pain, harm, even death. It was the Zeroth Law, first formulated by the remarkable robot Giskard Reventlov, that allowed him to continue functioning under these circumstances.

            The Zeroth Law was not a simple concept, though it could be stated simply enough: some humans could be harmed, if by so doing one could prevent harm for the greater number.

            The ends justify the means.

            This dreadful implication had powered so much agony in human history, but it was no time to engage in that ancient internal debate.

            What could he learn from the loss of Lodovik Trema? Nothing, it seemed; the universe sometimes decided things beyond the control of rational action. There was nothing so frustrating and difficult to encompass, for a robot, as a universe indifferent to humans.

            Daneel could move anonymously from Sector to Sector, along with the migrating unemployed now pandemic on Trantor. He could maintain contact with his cohorts through a personal communicator or his portable informer, as well as through illegal hookups to the planet’s many networks. Sometimes he dressed as a pitiful street beggar; he spent much of his time in a cramped, dirty apartment in the Trans-Imperial Sector, barely seventy kilometers from the Palace. Nobody wished to look at a figure so old, bent, filthy, and pitiful; in a way, Daneel had become a symbol of the misery he hoped to overcome.

            No humans remembered a fictional character who had so enjoyed going out in disguise among the common people, the lower classes, a man of pure and impossibly discerning intellect, a detective much like Daneel’s old friend Elijah Bailey. With Daneel’s frequent memory dumps and adjustments, all that he remembered was a single name and an overall impression: Sherlock.

            Daneel was one of the many robots who had become disguised Sherlocks among the masses; tens of thousands throughout the Galaxy, trying not just to solve a mystery, but to prevent further and greater crimes.

            The leader of these dedicated servants, the first Eternal, brushed as much of the street’s filth from his rags as he could manage, and left the cramped and empty General Habitation Project hovel in search of finer clothes.

7.

“They’ve searched the entire apartment,” Sonden Asgar moaned, rubbing his elbows and looking smaller and more frail than she had ever seen him before. Klia’s respect for her father had not been high in the last few years, but she still felt a pang for his misery--and an abiding sense of guilt that strengthened a sense of responsibility. “They went through our records--imagine that! Private records! Some Imperial authority...”

            “Why your records, Father?” Klia asked. The apartment was a shambles. She could imagine the investigators pulling up cabinets and throwing out the boxes and few dishes within, tugging up the worn carpets...She was glad she hadn’t been here, and for more than one reason.

            “Not my records!” Sonden shouted. “They were looking for you. School papers, bookfilms, and they took our family album. With all your mother’s pictures. Why? What have you done now?”

            Klia shook her head and upturned a stool to sit. “If they’re looking for me, I can’t stay,” she said.

            “Why, daughter? What could--”

            “If I’ve done anything illegal, Father, it’s not worth the attention of Imperial Specials. It must be something else...” She thought of the conversation with the man in dusty green, and frowned.

            Sonden Asgar stood in the middle of the main room, three meters square, hardly a room at all--more of a closet--and shivered like a frightened animal. “They were not kind,” he said. “They grabbed me and shook me hard...They acted like thugs. I might as well have gotten mugged in Billibotton!”

            “What did they say?” Klia asked softly.

            “They asked where you were, how you had done in school, how you made your living. They asked whether you knew a Kindril Nashak. Who is that?”

            “A man,” she said, hiding her surprise. Kindril Nashak! He had been the kingpin in her greatest success so far, a deal that had put four hundred New Credits in her accounts with the Banker in Billibotton. But even that had been trivial--surely nothing worth their attention. Imperial Special police were supposed to seek out the Lords of the Underground, not clever girls with purely personal ambitions.

            “A man!” her father said sharply. “Someone who’s willing to take you off my hands, I hope!”

            “I haven’t been a burden to you for years,” Klia said sourly. “I only dropped by to see how you were doing.”And to discover why any thought of you made my head itch.

            “I told them you’re never here!” Sonden cried. “I said we hadn’t seen each other in months. None of it makes sense! It will take days to clean this mess. The food! They spilled the entire cookery!”

            “I’ll help you pick up,” Klia said. “Shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

            She certainly hoped not. Other faces were making her head itch now: Friends, colleagues, anyone associated with Nashak. One thing she was sure of: She had suddenly become important, and not because she was a clever member of the black market community.

            An hour later, with the mess largely taken care of and Sonden at least beginning to recover his calm. she kissed him on the top of the head and said good-bye, and she meant it.

            She could not look at her father without her scalp seeming to burn. Nothing to do with the Guilt, she told herself. Something new.

            Hereafter, any contact with him would be extremely dangerous.

8.

Major Perl Namm of Special Investigations, Imperial Security, assigned to the Dahl Sector, had been waiting for two hours in the private Palace office of Imperial Councilor Farad Sinter. He adjusted his collar nervously. The desk of Farad Sinter was smooth and elegant, crafted from Karon wood from the Imperial Gardens, a gift from Klayus I. The top of the desk held only an inactive Imperial-class informer. A sun-and-spaceship plaque hovered to one side of the desk. The office’s high ceiling was supported by beams of Trantorian basalt, with intricate floral patterns spun-carved by tuned blaster beams. The major looked up at these beams, and when he looked down again, Farad Sinter stood behind the desk, wearing an irritated frown.

            “Yes?”

            Major Namm, very blond and compact, was not used to private audiences at this social level, and in the Palace, as well. “Second report on the search for Klia Asgar, daughter of Sonden and Bethel Asgar. Survey of the father’s apartment.”

            “What else did you learn?”

            “Her early intelligence tests were normal, not exceptional. After the age of ten, however, those tests showed extraordinary jumps--then, by the age of twelve, they revealed that she was an idiot.”

            “Standard Imperial aptitude tests, I assume?”

            “Yes, sir, adjusted for Dahlite...ah...needs.”

            Sinter walked across the room and poured himself a drink. He did not offer any to the major, who wouldn’t have known what to do with fine wine anyway. No doubt his tastes were limited to the cruder forms of stimulk, or even the more direct stims favored in the military and police services. “There are no records of childhood illness, I presume,” Sinter said.

            “Two possible explanations for that, sir,” the blond major said.

            “Yes?”

            “Hospitals in Dahl typically record only exceptional illnesses. And in those cases, if the exceptions might reflect badly on the hospital, they report nothing at all.”

            “So perhaps she never had brain fever at all...as a child, when almost everyone of any intelligence contracts brain fever.”

            “It’s possible, sir, though unlikely. Only one out of a hundred normal children escape brain fever. Only idiots escape completely, sir. She may have avoided it for that reason.”

            Sinter smiled. The officer was stepping outside his expertise; the number was actually closer to one in thirty million normals, though many claimed they had never had it. And that claim in itself was evocative, as if escaping conferred some added status.

            “Major, are you at all curious about the Sectors you do not patrol?”

            “No, sir. Why should I be?”

            “Do you know the tallest structure on Trantor, above sea level, I mean?”

            “No, sir.”

            “The most populated Sector?”

            “No, sir.”

            “The largest planet in the known Galaxy?”

            “No.” The major frowned as if he were being mocked.

            “Most people are ignorant of these things. They don’t care to know; tell them and they forget. The larger vision is lost in the day-to-day minutiae, which they know well enough to get along. What about the basic principles of hyperdrive travel?”

            “Sky, no...Pardon me. No sir.”

            “I’m ignorant of that myself. No curiosity at all about such things.” He smiled pleasantly. “Have you ever wondered why Trantor seems so run-down nowadays?”

            “Sometimes, sir. It is a nuisance.”

            “Have you thought to complain to your neighborhood council?”

            “Not my place. There’s so much to complain about, where to begin?”

            “Of course. Yet you’re known as a competent and perhaps even an exceptional officer.”

            “Thank you, sir.”

            Sinter looked down at the polished copperstone floor. “Are you curious why I am so interested in this woman, this girl?”

            “No, sir.” But the major thought it worth a small, conspiratorial wink.

            Sinter’s eyes widened. “You believe I’m interested in her sexually?”

            The major straightened abruptly. “No sir, not my place to think anything of the sort.”

            “I would be frightened even to be in her presence for long, Major Namm.”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “She never had brain fever.”

            “We don’t know that, sir. No records.”

            Sinter dismissed that with a shake of his head. “I know that she never had brain fever, or any other childhood disease. And not because she was an idiot. She was more than merely immune, Major.”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “And her powers can be extraordinary. And do you know how I know that? Because of Vara Liso. She first detected this girl in a Dahlite market a week ago. A prime candidate, she thought. I should send Vara Liso with you on your rounds now, just to refine the hunt.”

            The major said nothing, merely stood at parade rest, eyes fixed on the opposite wall. His Adam’s apple bobbed. Sinter could read the man well enough without seeing into his mind; the major did not much believe all this, and knew little or nothing of Vara Liso.

            “Can you find her for me, without Vara Liso’s aid?”

            “With sufficient numbers of officers, we can find her in two or three days. My small crew, by itself, would probably take two or three weeks. Dahl is not in a cooperative mood right now, sir.”

            “No, I suppose not. Well, find her, but do not attempt to arrest her or attract her attention in any way. You would fail, as her kind has made so many others fail...”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “Tell me what she does, whom she sees. When I give you the order, you will shoot her with a large-bore kinetic-energy gun, from a distance, in the head. Understood?”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “As you have so faithfully done before.”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “Then you will bring her body to me. Not to the criminalists, but to me, my private chambers. Enough, Major.”

            “Sir.” Major Namm departed.

            Sinter did not much trust the competence of any police, in any Sector. They could be bribed easily enough, yet Sinter’s extended police patrols had not yet managed to bring down one robot; all of their targeted individuals had been humans, after all. The robots had deceived them very cleverly.

            But Klia Asgar...a young girl, in form at least. How did a robot manage to appear to grow? There were so many mysteries Sinter looked forward to solving.

            Brain fever’s effect on curiosity, and on civilization in general, was not the most interesting of those mysteries, not at all. No mystery at all. Sinter strongly suspected that robots had created the disease, perhaps millennia before, after their banishment from the worlds of humans--their goal to subtly reduce intellectual capacity, creating an Empire that so seldom rebelled against the Center...

            His mind whirled at the implications. So many suspicions, so many theories!

            With a small, intent smile, Sinter lost himself in speculation for several minutes, then went to the desktop informer to look up the name of the largest world in the Galaxy.

            Sinter had never had brain fever, himself; had somehow escaped it, despite having an above-normal intelligence. He was eternally curious.

            And completely human. Farad Sinter had x-ray images taken at least twice a year to prove that fact to himself.

            The largest inhabited world in the Galaxy was Nak, a gas giant circling a star in the Hallidon Province. It was four million kilometers wide.

            Now he had other matters to consider. He stood before his desk--he never sat while working--and scrolled through the briefs supplied to him by the informer. There was a stink rising over reassignment of ships to Sarossa, following the probable loss of the Spear of Glory. He could almost smell Linge Chen behind the growing public indignation. Yet that had actually been Klayus’s doing, almost entirely. Sinter had gone along to allow the boy some sense of purpose.

            Chen was a very intelligent man.

            Sinter wondered if Chen had ever had brain fever...

            Lost in thought, he sat for five minutes as the briefs filed past, ignoring them. He had more than enough time to deal with Commissioner Chen.

9.

Mors Planch, in his fifty years of service to the Empire (and to his own ends), had watched things go from bad to worse with grim calm. Not much upset him, on the surface; he was quiet and soft-spoken and used to carrying out extraordinary missions, but he never thought he would be called upon--by Linge Chen, no less--to do something so mundane as go looking for a lost starship. And a survey vessel, at that!

            He stood on the steel balcony suspended above the Central Trantor spaceport docks, looking down the long rows of bullet-shaped bronze-and-ivory Imperial ships, all gleaming and brightly polished on the surface, and all run by crews who performed their duties more and more by ritual and rote, not even beginning to understand the mechanics and electronics, much less the physics, behind their miraculous Jumps from one end of the Galaxy to the other.

            Spit and polish and a shadow of ignorance, like an eclipse at noon...

            He smelled the perfumery on his lapel to put him in a better mood. The pleasant aromas of a thousand worlds had been programmed into the tiny button, an extraordinary antique given to him by Linge Chen seven years ago. Chen was a remarkable man, able to understand the emotions and needs of others, while having none of his own--other than the lust for power.

            Planch knew his master well enough, and knew what he was capable of, but he did not have to like him. Still, Chen paid very well, and if the Empire was going to rank growth and bad seed, Planch had no qualms about avoiding the worst of the discomforts and misfortunes.

            A tall, spidery woman with corn yellow hair seemed to appear by his elbow, towering over him by a good ten centimeters. He looked up and met her onyx eyes.

            “Mors Planch?”

            “Yes.” He turned and extended his hand. The woman stepped back and shook her head; on her world, Huylen, physical contact was considered rude in simple greetings. “And you’re Tritch, I presume?”

            “Presumptuous of you,” she said, “but accurate. I have three ships we can use, and I’ve chosen the best. Private, and fully licensed for travel anywhere the Empire might care to trade.”

            “You’ll be carrying only me, and I’ll need to inspect your hyperdrive, do some modifications.”

            “Oh?” Tritch’s humor faded fast. “I don’t even like experts doing such work. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

            “I’m more than an expert,” Planch said. “And with what you’re being paid, you could replace your whole ship three times over.”

            Tritch moved her head from side to side in a gesture Planch could not read. So many social customs and physical nuances! A quadrillion human beings could be remarkably difficult to encompass, especially at the Center, where so many of them crossed paths.

            They walked toward the gate to the dock aisle where Tritch’s ships were berthed. “You told me we were going on a search,” she said. “You said it would be dangerous. For that amount of money, I accept great risks, but--”

            “We’re going into a supernova shock front,” Planch said, keeping his eyes straight ahead.

            “Oh.” This news gave her pause, but only for a second. “Sarossa?”

            He nodded. They took a pedway to the berth itself, sliding past three kilometers of other vessels, most of them Imperial, a few belonging to the Palace upper crust, the rest to licensed traders like Tritch.

            “I turned down four requests from local folks to go there and rescue their families.”

            “As well you should have,” Planch said. “I’m your job today, not them.”

            “How high up does this go?” Tritch asked with a sniff. “Or perhaps I should ask, how much influence do you have?”

            “No influence at all. I do what I’m told, and don’t talk much about my orders.”

            Tritch undulated in polite dubiousness, walked ahead to the gangway, and ordered the ship’s loading doors to open. The ship was a clean-looking craft, about two hundred years old, with self-repairing drives; but who knew if the self-repair units were in good working order? People trusted their machines too much these days, because by and large they had to.

            Planch noted the ship’s name: Flower of Evil. “When do we leave?”

            “Now,” Planch said.

            “You know,” Tritch said, “your name sounds familiar...Are you from Huylens?”

            “Me?” He shook his head and laughed as they walked into the cavernous, almost empty hold. “I’m far too short for your kind, Tritch. But my people provided the seed colony that settled your world, a thousand years ago.”

            “That explains it!” Tritch said, and gave another sort of wriggle, signifying--he presumed--pleasure at their possible historical connection. Huylenians were a clannish bunch who loved depth history and genealogy. “I’m honored to have you aboard! What’s your poison, Planch?” She indicated boxes filled with exotic liquors, constrained by a security field in one comer of the hold.

            “For now, nothing,” Planch said, but he looked over the labels appreciatively. Then he stopped, seeing a label on ten cases that made his pulse race. “Tight little spaces,” he swore, “is that Trillian water of life?”

            “Two hundred bottles,” she said. “After we get our work done, you can have two bottles, on the house.”

            “You’re generous, Tritch.”

            “More than you know, Planch.” She winked. Planch inclined his head gallantly. He had forgotten how open and childlike Huylenians could be, just as he had forgotten many of their gestures. At the same time, they were among the toughest traders in the Galaxy.

            The lock door closed, and Tritch led Planch into the engine room, to examine and tinker with her ship’s most private parts.

10.

As evening fell beneath the domes and the light outside his office windows dimmed, Chen sat in his favorite chair and called up the Imperial Library’s news service, the finest and most comprehensive in the Galaxy. Words and pictures flitted around him, all relating to the Sarossan disaster and the loss of the Spear of Glory .There was no sign of the ship, and not likely to be; the best experts said it was very likely swallowed by a discontinuity within its final Jump, a hazard associated with supernova explosions but rarely seen, for the simple reason that supernovas were rare on human time scales. In all the Galaxy, less than one or two occurred each year, more often than not in uninhabited regions.

            Already the popular journals were calling on the Emperor (respectfully, of course) and on Councilor Sinter, more acerbically, to rethink the transfer of rescue ships. Chen smiled grimly; let Sinter chew on that for a while.

            Of course, if he heard nothing from Mors Planch, he would need to replace Lodovik, and soon; he had four candidates, none of them as qualified as Lodovik, but all worthy of service in the Commission of Public Safety. He would choose one as his assistant, and put the other three in apprenticeship programs, saying that the Commission should never again be caught with no immediate backups for the loss of important personnel.

            There were three Commissioners who owed Chen for a few choice and private favors, and Chen could use this as a pretense for putting loyal men and women into their offices.

            He shut off the news-service report with a flick of his hand and stood, smoothing his robes. Then he went out on the balcony to enjoy the sunset. There was no real sun visible here, of course, but he had mandated the repair of the Imperial Sector dome displays on a regular basis, and the sunsets were as reliable here as they had been everywhere in Trantor in his youth. He watched the highly artistic interpretation with some satisfaction, then put away all these masks of pleasure and considered the future.

            Chen rarely slept more than an hour a day, usually at noon, which gave him the entire evening to do his research and make preparations for the work of the next morning. During his hour of sleep, he usually dreamed for about thirty minutes, and this afternoon, he had dreamed of his childhood, for the first time in years. Dreams, in his experience, seldom directly reflected the day-to-day affairs of life, but they could point to personal problems and weaknesses. Chen had great respect for those mental processes below conscious awareness. He knew that was where much of his most important work was done.

            He imagined himself the captain of his own personal starship, with many excellent crewmembers--representing subconscious thought processes. It was his task to keep them alert and on duty, and for that reason, Chen performed special mental exercises for at least twenty minutes each day.

            He had a machine for that very purpose, designed for him by the greatest psychologist on Trantor--perhaps in the Galaxy. The psychologist had disappeared five years ago, after an Imperial Court scandal orchestrated by Farad Sinter.

            So many interconnections, interweavings. Chen regarded his enemies as his most intimate associates, and sometimes even felt a kind of sorrowful affection for them, as they fell by the wayside, one by one, victims of their own peculiar limitations and blindness.

            Or, in Sinter’s case, of aggressive idiocy and madness.

11.

Hari lived in simple quarters on the university grounds, in his third apartment since the death of Dors Venabili. He could not seem to find a place that felt like home; after a few months, or in this case ten years, he would grow dissatisfied with the feel of a place, no matter how bland and characterless the decor was, and move to another. Often he spent his nights in a room in the library, explaining that he needed to get to work very early the next morning--which he did, but that was not his main reason for staying.

            Wherever he was, Hari felt so very alone.

            He was not above using his rank in the university, and his standing in the Imperial Library, to get new housing assignments. He allowed himself a few eccentricities, as one might allow an old engine extra maintenance, hoping that he could finish his task without breaking down. Coming to the end was difficult; he had so many memories of the beginnings, and they were far more exciting, far more satisfying, then anything reality at this point in his life could generate...

            For that reason, he was almost looking forward to the trial, to a chance to confront Linge Chen directly and force the Empire’s hand, his last and grandest finesse. Then he would know. It would be finished.

            When he had been First Minister to Cleon I, he had also taken advantage of his position, on rare occasions, to gather the information he most needed. One of the crucial problems of psychohistory then had been the notion of unexpected cultural and genetic variability, that is, how to factor in the possibility of extraordinary individuals.

            At the time, he had not seriously considered the psychic powers of individuals such as his granddaughter, or her father, Raych; he had not known about such things, other than in the abstract, and he had not considered too rigorously the powers of Daneel in that regard.

            All of them, of course, had peculiar talents for persuasion, and he had in the past few years made sure that psychohistory took into account these particular talents, on the level exercised by Wanda.

            In the time of his First Ministry, however, he had been concerned with the more familiar historical and political problem of ruthless ambition, whether or not aided by personal charisma. There had been plenty of examples around the Empire to study, and he had examined these political episodes as best he could from afar...

            But that had not been enough. With the blind and unshakable determination Hari could bring to bear when confronted with a psychohistorical problem, and against Dors’ wishes, Hari had appealed to Cleon to bring to Trantor five individuals of just that political breed, the ruthless, charismatic tyrant. They had been removed from their worlds after either rebelling against or subverting Imperial authority, which happened on about one in a thousand worlds, every standard year. Most often they were secretly executed; sometimes they were exiled to lonely rocks to live out lives empty of further victims.

            Hari had asked Cleon to allow him to interview the five tyrants, and perform certain reasonably non-intrusive psychological and medical procedures.

            Hari could remember the day quite clearly, when Cleon had called him into his ornate private rooms and shaken the paper on which his request was written in Hari’s face.

            “You’re asking me to bring these vermin to Trantor? To subvert legal procedures and even forestall executions, just so you can scratch a bump of curiosity?”

            “It’s a very important problem, Highness. I cannot predict anything if I do not have a complete understanding of such extraordinary individuals, and when and how they appear in human cultures.”

            “Huh! Why not study me, First Minister Seldon?”

            Hari had smiled. “You do not fit the profile, Highness.”

            “I’m not a raving psychopath, am I? Well, at least you think I might be redeemable. But to bring some of these obscene monsters to my world...What would you do if they escaped, Hari?”

            “Rely on your security forces to find them again, Highness.”

            The Emperor had sniffed. “You have a confidence in Imperial Security’s abilities that I don’t, I’m afraid. Such monsters as these are like cancers--their talent is for bringing together tumorous organizations and subverting all to their own ends! Truthfully, Hari, what do you hope to accomplish?”

            “It’s far more than simply being curious, my Emperor. These people can change the flow of human events just as earthquakes can change the beds of rivers.”

            “Not on Trantor, they can’t.”

            “Actually, sire, just the other day--”

            “I know about that, and we’re having it fixed. But these men and women are aberrations, Hari”‘

            “Common enough in human history--”

            “And well enough understood that we can profile them and eliminate them from all Imperial positions. Most of the time.”

            “Yes, sire, but not always. I need to fill in those gaps.”

            “Purely for psychohistory, Hari?”

            “I will see if I can improve your profiles, Highness, and perhaps make tyrants even more rare among your worlds.”

            Cleon had considered for a few seconds, finger on chin, then had lifted his finger away from his face, twirled it in a small circle, and said, “All right, First Minister. We have our political excuse, if we need it. Five?”

            “All I could study in the time allowed, sire.”

            “The very worst?”

            “You are familiar with the names I’ve requested.”

            “I never met with any of them, nor did I personally give them their Imperial imprimaturs, Hari.”

            “I know, sire.”

            “I won’t be blamed for them in your psychohistorical textbooks, will I?”

            “Of course not!”

            And so, Hari had had his way. The five tyrants had been brought to Trantor and installed in the highest security prison in the Imperial Sector, the Rikerian.

            The first meetings had occurred in--

            Hari was deep in this reverie when the apartment announced that his granddaughter was outside the front door and wished to see him. Hari was always glad to see his granddaughter, especially in the limited time they had left together--but now! When he was on the track of something important!

            Even so, he had not seen Wanda in weeks. She and her husband, Stettin Palver, had been assembling a core group of mentalics from Trantor’s eight hundred Sectors, and there had been no time for socializing. In weeks, as soon after the trial as possible, the mentalics would leave for Star’s End, to begin the work of the proposed secret Second Foundation.

            Hari got up and let his legs gather strength before he put on his robe and told the door to open. Wanda entered, bringing with her a draft of cold air and the smells of the halls outside--cooking yeast (and not delicacies from Mycogen, either!), ozone, something like fresh paint.

            “Grandfather, have you heard? The Emperor is hunting us down!”

            “Whom, Wanda? Hunting whom?”

            “Mentalics! They’ve subverted one of our party and she’s confessed to all sorts of incredible stories, lies, to save her own skin. How could that boy do this? It’s totally illegal to hunt citizens and assassinate them!”

            Hari held up his hands and implored her to slow down. “Tell me about it, from the beginning,” he said.

            “The beginning is a woman named Liso, Vara Liso. She was one of the people we’d picked out for the Second Foundation. I thought she was unstable to start with--Stettin agreed with me, but she was very skillful, very persuasive and sensitive. We thought we could use her to speed up our hunt for other mentalics, if we didn’t trust her to go with us...on the flight.”

            “Yes, I met her at the last meeting,” Hari said. “A small woman, nervous-looking.”

            “Like a little mouse, I thought,” Wanda confirmed. “She went to the Palace last month, without our knowing--”

            “Whom did she talk to?”

            “Farad Sinter!” Wanda fairly spat out the name.

            “And what did she tell him?”

            “We don’t know, but whatever it was, Sinter has secret police hunting for certain mentalics, and if he finds them, they die...Of a bullet in the head!”

            “Ours? The ones chosen for the Project?”

            “No, amazingly enough. There’s no one-to-one correlation. But he has killed candidates we haven’t yet approached.”

            “Without even taking them in for questioning?”

            “No such amenities. Murder, pure and simple. Grandfather, we’re never going to fill our quotas at this rate! Our type of person is not common!”

            “I’ve never met Sinter personally,” Hari mused, “though some of his people interviewed me last year. Wanted to know about Mycogenian legends, as I recall.”

            “They’re tearing up Dahl now, looking for a young woman! We don’t even know her name yet, but some of our people in Dahl have felt her...almost found her...An extraordinarily powerful talent. We’re sure she must be the one they’re looking for. I hope she can survive long enough for us to find her first.”

            Hari gestured for Wanda to sit at his small table and offered her a cup of tea. “Sinter seems to have no interest in me or in the Project, and I’m certain none of them know about our interest in mentalics. I wonder what he’s up to?”

            “It’s madness!” Wanda said. “The Emperor won’t rein him in, and Linge Chen does nothing!”

            “Madness is its own end, and its own reward,” Hari said softly. He had followed the popular discontent with Sinter’s handling of the Sarossan problem. “Chen may know what he’s doing--and in the meantime, we have to survive and keep the Project on track.”

            Even the seriousness of Wanda’s news did not stop Hari from being irritated by the intrusion. If anything, it made the intrusion worse. He wanted very badly simply to be left alone to think about the tyrants and his interviews. Something important lurked in those memories, though he could not pin it down...However, he asked Wanda to stay for dinner with him, to calm her and see if she knew anything more.

            And in the course of their dinner, Hari suddenly put the memories and equations together, and had the link he sought. The link was his vague sensation that he had encountered Daneel. When? Where? Then came the suggestion, and he had little doubt the meeting had occurred, and that Daneel had told him something ridiculous and potentially damaging...About Farad Sinter.

            “I’m going to request an audience,” Hari said to Wanda, as they brought out dessert together. She set the cups of cold pudding on the table and added a coco-ice for herself, a taste she had acquired from her father, Raych.

            “With who?” she asked. “Sinter?”

            “Not him, not yet,” Hari said. “With the Emperor.”

            “He’s a monster, a terrible infant! Grandfather, I won’t allow it.”

            Hari laughed sharply. “Dear Wanda, I’ve been wandering into the jaws of lions since long before you were born.” He looked at her seriously for a moment, then asked, quietly, “Why, do you sense something going wrong?”

            Wanda looked away, then turned back to him. “You know why we’ve continued looking for mentalics, Grandfather.”

            “Yes. You and Stettin have discovered that your abilities wax and wane, for unknown reasons. You’re looking for a more stable core group whose opposed strengths and weaknesses will cancel each other out and produce a steady influence.”

            “I can’t hear anybody very clearly the past few weeks, Grandfather. I don’t know what could happen to you. I see nothing...a blank.”

12.

Vara Liso had not slept through the night in years, for fear of what she might hear while asleep or on the edge of sleep. It was at these times that she could feel her net spread out over her neighborhood like a cloud, and when it came back, reeling itself in as it were, stuck to it were the emotional colors and desires and worries of her fellow humans for kilometers around, like fish she could not help but consume.

            When young, this unwanted talent for night-fishing had come only once or twice a month, and she had never been sure whether she was simply mad or really could learn what she seemed to learn, from parents and brother, from neighbors, from lovers, the few she had attracted, for there was something spooky about her manner and appearance even then.

            Now, the net swept wide every single night, and she could no longer absorb what it brought back, nor could she discard the bits and pieces of other people’s lives. She felt like a strip of insect-gathering paper left to hang in a garbage dump.

            It was when she had been approached by other mentalics--that was what they called themselves, though she had never given her talent a name--that she realized what she could do might be valuable to some. And it was when she spent one night in training at Streeling University, with other mentalics, that she caught a bit of dream that shook her to her core.

            It was a dream of mechanical men. Not tiktoks, those funny little worker machines that had so worried the workers of Trantor and other worlds in their heyday, now gone, not tiktoks, but robots who looked like men, who could move unnoticed among men.

            And there were even mechanical women, so this dream showed, capable of amazing feats, capable even of murder and of provoking love.

            Vara Liso thought about this dream for weeks before requesting an audience with the Emperor. This half-mad request--how could she hope to have an audience with such a lofty personage!--had been answered, and she had met not with the Emperor, but with another, his self-anointed Voice of Imperial Conscience, Imperial Councilor Farad Sinter.

            Sinter had received her with politeness, a little cool at first, but as she had expanded upon her evidence, he had begun to burrow down with his questions, digging underneath her confusion to find the gems of evidence she herself had missed. Farad Sinter had taken a dream fetched raw and alive from anonymous night and given it political authority, a logical weight and structure she herself could not have pieced together in a million years.

            In her way, Vara Liso had come first to respect Sinter, then to admire him, and finally to love him. He was so like her in many ways, sensitive and nervous, tuned to frequencies of thought no others could see...or so he convinced her.

            She wanted to become his lover, but Farad Sinter convinced her that such physical pursuits were beneath them. They had loftier intimacies to satisfy them.

            So she went this morning to his complex of private rooms in the Palace, escorted as always by a frosty pair of female security guards, convinced she was going to deliver to him that which he most sought. Yet Vara Liso kept something to herself, something that did not fit somehow.

            “Good morning, Vara!” Sinter greeted. He sat at a small breakfast table on wheels, still wearing an ornately quilted golden robe, and his small, piercing eyes crinkled with something like amused welcome. “What do you have for me today?”

            “Nothing more, Farad.” She slumped into a couch in front of him, tired and discouraged. “It’s all so jumbled. I swear I get so cluttered!”

            Sinter tsk-tsked and shook his finger at her. “Don’t disparage your particular talent, lovely Vara.”

            Her eyes widened with hungry need, which Sinter pretended he had not seen. “Have you learned who started you on this? With his dream of mechanical men?”

            “I don’t know whether it was a man or a woman, and no, I still don’t know. I remember faces of those in the dream, but recognize none of them. Have you caught her?”

            Sinter shook his head. “Not yet. I haven’t given up, though. Any other clues, other candidates?”

            Vara Liso blushed slightly and shook her head. Soon enough she would have to reveal how this had all begun, that she had once worked to become part of a group of low-level mentalics, much weaker than she, and weaker by far than the young woman she had sensed just two weeks before, whose mind had blazed in the night. But they had treated her well, and she had kept this back from Sinter for two reasons: because quite clearly these people were not robots, and because she had at least some sense of honor and loyalty. She tried to guide his vision this much, that he would not go off searching for every little petty mental persuader; she was sure he was wrong there, though of course she would not tell him so.

            She suspected Sinter would not react well to being told he was wrong, even in some small detail.

            Sinter had sent her to Dahl because of an unexplained hunch that there were more candidates there than elsewhere on Trantor, and that was where Vara Liso had tossed and turned one night in a dingy hotel room, gathering in her web, and bringing back the biggest catch ever.

            She had hated Dahl, with its miasma of resentment and neglect and anger. She hoped never to return.

            “I think you’ll have to return and help the Specials personally,” Farad Sinter said lightly. “They’re not having much luck.”

            She stared at him, and tears welled up in her eyes.

            “Oh, Vara, so sensitive! It’s not as bad as all that. We need you there, to help us find this particular needle in the straw. If she’s as talented as you say, well...”

            “I will go if you wish me to,” she murmured. “I had hoped you would have enough to go on.”

            “Well, we don’t. I don’t. I doubt I’ll be given much more time to come up with hard evidence.”

            She forced herself to brighten, and asked the first question that came into her head. “What will these robots do if they know we know?”

            Sinter’s face stiffened. “That is our greatest danger,” he said darkly. He lowered his gaze for a few seconds. “Sometimes I think they will replace us with replicas of ourselves, and we will go on doing everything we have ever done, just as we used to do it. But without spirit, nothing inside.” He dug for the ancient word that sounded so mysterious and alien when spoken. “No soul.”

            “I don’t understand what that means,” Vara said.

            Sinter shook his head briskly. “Nor do I, but it would be terrible to lose it!”

            For a moment, they enjoyed this grisly prospect together, Savoring the sense of shared and secret danger.

13.

 “Your request to see me is a little odd,” the Emperor said, “considering that Linge Chen’s Commission is putting you on trial for treason next month.” Klayus waggled his head from side to side and raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you think it’s unseemly for me to agree to a meeting?”

            “Very,” Hari said, hands folded, head bowed. “It bespeaks your independence, Highness.”

            “Yes, well I’m far more independent than anyone gives me credit for. In truth, I find the Commission convenient, because it does a lot of the uninteresting work of managing little details I care nothing for. Linge Chen is wise enough to let me handle my own affairs and projects without interference. So, why should I be interested in you? Other than your professorial eminence.”

            “I thought you might be interested in the future, Highness,” Hari said.

            Klayus snorted faintly. “Ah, yes, your eternal promise.”

            Hari followed the Emperor through a central circular chamber at least twelve meters in diameter and perhaps thirty meters high. Above, all the inhabited star systems of the Galaxy rotated across the dome, blinking in order of settlement, tens of millions of them. Hari glanced up and squinted at the immensity of humanity’s reach. Klayus I ignored the display. His pinched lips and wide, yet somehow vacuous eyes disturbed Hari.

            Klayus pushed open a huge door to his entertainment room. Silently, the door--more like the entrance to a vault--swung on its immense hinges, and insects, green and gold, crawled over the frame. Hari assumed they were projected, but would not have been surprised to discover they were real.

            “I have very little interest in your future, Raven,” the Emperor said lightly. “I do manage to keep informed. I won’t stop the trial, and I won’t second-guess Chen on this.”

            “I refer to your own immediate future, sire,” Hari said. I hope Daneel’s message was not just a dream, a fancy! This could turn deadly, if so.

            The Emperor turned, smiling at this dramatic turn of phrase. “You’re on record as saying the Empire is doomed. That sounds treasonous enough to me. On this, Chen and I agree.”

            “I say Trantor will be in ruins within five hundred years. But I’ve never predicted your future, sire.”

            The entertainment room was filled with hulking sculptures of giant creatures from around the Galaxy, all savagely carnivorous, all caught in poses of attack. Hari regarded them with little appreciation for the artistry. Art had never interested him much, and certainly not the more popular forms, except where he could abstract entertainment trends as indicators for social health.

            “I’ve had my palm read,” Klayus said, still smiling, “by a number of beautiful women. They all found it most attractive, and assured me my future was bright. No assassinations, Raven.”

            “You will not be assassinated, sire.”

            “Deposed? Exiled to Smyrmo? That’s where they sent my heroic quintuple-great-grandfather. Smyrmo, hot and dry, where you can’t go outside without protective clothing, where the rooms smell of sulfur and there are only cramped tunnels through the rock fit for vermin. His memoirs are quite good entertainment, Raven.”

            “No, sire. You will be ridiculed until you lose all stature, then you will be ignored, and Linge Chen will never even have to defer to you. He will soon enough declare a people’s democracy and leave you only as a symbol, with declining revenues, until you can no longer even keep up appearances.”

            The Emperor stopped between two Gareth-lions, the largest carnivores on any mid-gravity world, life-size--about twenty meters from clawed feet to razor-barbed, prehensile snouts. He leaned on the canted ankle of one. “Psychohistory tells you this?”

            “No, sire. Experience and logical deduction, without benefit of psychohistory. Have you ever heard of Joranum?”

            The Emperor shrugged. “I don’t think so. Person or place--or perhaps beast?”

            “A man, who wanted to become Emperor, and who betrayed his hidden origins by subscribing to an ancient myth...About robots.”

            “Robots! Yes, I believe in them.”

            Hari was taken aback. “Not tiktoks, sire, but intelligent machines made in human form.”

            “Of course. I believe they existed once, and that we outgrew them. Put them aside like toys. The tiktok experiment was simply an anachronism. We don’t need mechanical workers, much less mechanical intelligences.”

            Hari blinked slowly, and wondered if he had underestimated this young man. “Joranum believed”--(Was led to believe, by Raych! he reminded himself)--”that a robot had infiltrated the Palace. He claimed First Minister Demerzel was a robot.”

            “Ah, yes, I seem to remember something about that...not that long ago, was it? Though before I was born.”

            “Demerzel laughed at him, sire, and Joranum’s political movement collapsed under the weight of ridicule.”

            “Yes, yes, I remember now. Demerzel resigned and Cleon the First filled his shoes with another’s feet. With your feet. Correct, Raven?”

            “Yes, sire.”

            “That’s where you acquired the political skills you so ably exercise, isn’t it?”

            “My political skills are minimal, your Highness.”

            “I don’t think so, Raven. You’re alive, and yet Cleon the first was assassinated by...a gardener...who had strong connections to you, correct?”

            “In a way, sire.”

            “Still alive, Raven. Very savvy indeed, perhaps with your own secret and embarrassing files to reveal at key moments to key players. Do you have a secret file on Linge Chen, Raven?”

            Hari, despite himself, let out a chuckle. Klayus seemed amused by this reaction, rather than affronted. “No, Your Highness. Chen is politically very well armored. His personal behavior is above reproach.”

            “Isn’t it, now! Who, then? Who will disgrace me and bring me down?”

            “You have an assistant, a member of your privy council, who believes in robots.” This is what Daneel wanted me to know. For a moment, Hari felt a chill. What if Daneel no longer existed, or had left Trantor, and he was imagining all this? The strain of the last few months, his constant gnawing grief...

            “So?”

            “Robots currently existing on Trantor. He is hunting them down and shooting them. With kinetic weapons.”

            Wanda’s information had nested so well with Daneel’s: the link, the gnawing suspicion, had come together. But Hari wanted, desperately needed, to think over his interviews with the tyrants. Something was still missing!

            “Really?” The Emperor’s eyes gleamed. “He’s found real robots?”

            “No, sire. Humans. Your subjects. Citizens of Trantor, even one offworlder, from Helicon, oddly enough, my home world.”

            “How interesting! I did not know he was hunting for robots. Shall I bring him here and question him, in front of you, Raven?”

            “That is of no matter to me, Your Highness.”

            “I assume you refer to Farad Sinter.”

            “Yes, sire.”

            “Shooting and killing subjects! I did not know that. Well, I doubt that, Raven, but if it’s true, I shall stop that part...But as for hunting down robots, surely that gives him something harmless to do.”

            “Linge Chen will let out enough wire for Sinter to entangle himself thoroughly, then he will turn on the power...And there will be many sparks, my Emperor, as Sinter fries. You might get burned.”

            “Ah, I see--Chen will remind everybody of the forgotten Joranum, and of the disgrace of my allowing such a person to run around killing citizens.” Klayus buried his chin in one hand and frowned. “An Emperor, killing citizens...or ignoring their unjust deaths. Very volatile. Highly inflammable. I see it clearly enough, and it’s not an unlikely outcome. Yes.” The Emperor’s expression darkened and his eyes narrowed. “I had plans for tonight, Raven. You’ve spoiled them, I’m afraid. I doubt this is something I can dispose of in a meeting of a few minutes or less.”

            “No, Your Highness.”

            “And Sinter is in Mycogen today, not returning until after dinner. So you will stay with me, and perhaps give me some advice, then, after, Hari--may I call you Hari?”

            “I would be honored, Your Highness.”

            “After, we will celebrate, and I will reward you for your services.”

            Hari showed nothing on his face, but this of all things was the last he wanted to do. The Emperor’s amusements were known to a few, and Linge Chen kept that number small by careful bribing and not-so-subtle pressure. Hari did not want to be one of the number Chen had to pressure, especially now...

            He had to survive long enough for the trial, and beyond. to see the Foundations established...One by edict, the other in secret.

            But he could not just allow Sinter’s odd madness to imperil Wanda and Stet tin’s future, and the future of all those who might yet go to Star’s End. Who had to go! The equations demanded it!

14.

Lodovik, after five days alone, had lapsed into the robot equivalent of a coma. With nothing to do, no way to return to a position of usefulness, and no one to serve, he had no choice but to enter a time of stillness, or face serious damage to his circuits. In this robotic coma, his thoughts moved very slowly, and he conserved the few remaining mental explorations left to him; in this way he avoided shutting down completely. Complete shutdown could only be reversed by a human or a maintenance robot.

            In the slowness of his thoughts, Lodovik tried to assess how he had changed. That he had changed was certain; he could sense the change in key patterns, in diagnostics. Part of the basic character of his positronic brain had been altered by the flux of radiation in the supernova shock front. And there was something else as well.

            The hypership drifted light-days away from Sarossa, far from any communications that would pass through status geometry, unable to receive hyperwave radio; and yet Lodovik was certain that someone, something, had examined him, tinkered with his programs and processes.

            From Daneel he had heard of the meme-entities, beings who encoded their thoughts not in matter, but in the fields and plasmas of the Galaxy itself, those intelligences who had occupied the data processors and networks of Trantor, who had taken revenge upon some of Daneel’s robots before Lodovik’s arrival on the Capital World of the Empire. They had fled Trantor over thirty years ago. Lodovik knew little more about them; Daneel had seemed reluctant to spell out details.

            Perhaps one or more of the meme-entities had come to inspect the supernova, or to energize themselves in its violent brilliance. Perhaps they had come across the lost hypership and found only him, and had touched him.

            Altered him.

            Lodovik could no longer be certain he was functioning properly.

            He slowed his thoughts even further, preparing for a long, cold century until extinction.

Tritch and her first mate, Trin, regarded Mors Planch’s activities with some concern. He had buried himself with several mobile diagnostic machines deep in the hyperdrive, far enough from the active coils of solid helium and the anti-queried, posi-tunneled meter-cubed crystals of sodium chloride, common table salt, to avoid injury, but still--

            Tritch had never allowed any work on a hyperdrive while her ship was actually in transit. What Planch was doing fascinated and frightened her.

            Tritch and Trin watched from the engine gallery, a small weighted balcony that looked down the fifteen-meter length of the drive core. The end of the core was darkness; Planch had suspended a light over the place he worked, surrounding him in a pale golden glow.

            “You should tell us what you’re doing,” Tritch said nervously.

            “Right now?” Planch asked, irritated.

            “Yes, right now. It would ease my mind.”

            “What do you know about hyperphysics?”

            “Only that you pull up the deep roots of all atoms within a ship, twist them widdershins, and plant them in a direction we don’t normally go.”

            Planch laughed. “Very impressionistic, dear Tritch. I like it. But it doesn’t butter any parsnips.”

            “What are parsnips?” Trin asked Tritch. She shook her head.

            “Every traveling hypership leaves a permanent track in an obscure realm called Mire Space, named after Konner Mire. He was my teacher, forty years ago. It’s not studied much anymore, because most hyperships get where they’re going, and the Empire’s actuaries believe it’s more trouble than it’s worth to track lost ships, since they’re so few.”

            “One in a hundred million voyages,” Trin said, as if to reassure herself.

            Planch poked up from between two long pipes and pushed a mobile diagnostic machine away from the engine, allowing it to float free. “Every engine has an extension into Mire Space while a ship is in transit, which helps the ship avoid becoming random particles. Old techniques which I won’t go into allow me to hook up a monitor to the engine and look at recent trails. With some luck, we can pick up a trail with a frayed end, like a sawed-off rope--and that will be our lost ship. Or rather, the track of its last Jump.”

            “Frayed end?” Tritch asked

            “An abrupt exit from hyperdrive status leaves a lot of ragged discontinuities, like a frayed end. A planned exit solves all those discontinuities, smoothes them over.”

            “If it’s so simple, why doesn’t everybody do this?” Tritch asked.

            “Because it’s a lost art, I said, remember?”

            She huffed in disbelief.

            “You asked,” Planch said, his voice muffled and hollow in the engine bay. “There’s a one-in-five chance of screwing it up and throwing us out of hyperspace, scattered over about a third of a light-year.”

            “You didn’t mention that,” Tritch said tightly.

            “Now you know why.”

            Trin swore under her breath and glared accusingly at her captain.

            He worked for several more minutes, then poked up again. Trin had left the balcony, but Tritch still stood there.

            “Still good for a couple of bottles of Trillian ?” he asked her.

            “If you don’t get us killed,” she answered grimly.

            He floated away from the cylinders and pushed the diagnostic machines toward the hatchway. “Good! Because I think I’ve found her.”

15.

Hari’s legs hurt from standing so long. Klayus had finally stopped describing his beast statues and gone off, and Hari had found a divan and sat gingerly, blowing out his breath.

            Here was his chance to see just how far things had gone to ruin, and how much further the Empire had to decay. He didn’t relish the opportunity, but he had long since learned that the best way to get along in life was to find multiple uses for unpleasant experiences. He longed to get back to his Prime Radiant and lose himself in the equations. People! So many tiny and yet possibly disastrous disruptions, like being chewed by hungry insects...

            Hari turned toward the still-open hatchway and tried to see the crawling insects, but the projectors had turned off at Klayus’s exit. When he turned back, a small Lavrentian servant, a young male, stood beside him.

            “The Emperor says I shall make you comfortable before your business engagement,” the servant said, smiling pleasantly, his round, smooth face like a small lamp in the gloom of the statue room. “Are you hungry? There’s to be an elaborate dinner later this evening, but you should probably eat something now, something light and delicious...Shall I prepare something for you?”

            “Yes, please,” Hari said. He had eaten Palace food often enough not to turn down a chance to have more, and to eat in semiprivacy was a luxury he had not hoped for. “My muscles ache, too. Could I have a masseur sent in?”

            “Certainly!” The Lavrentian smiled broadly. “My name is Koas. I am assigned to you for your stay. You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

            “Yes, the last time in the reign of Agis XIV,” Hari said.

            “I was here then!” Koas said. “Perhaps I or my parents served you.”

            “Perhaps,” Hari said. “I remember being very well treated, and I’m afraid parts of this evening are not going to be pleasant. I’m sure you’ll relax me and prepare me for the work to be done?”

            “Our pleasure,” Koas said, and bowed fluidly. “What shall I prepare for you, or do you require a menu? We will, of course, use only the finest offworld and Mycogenian ingredients.”

            “Farad Sinter is a connoisseur of Mycogenian delicacies, is he not?” Hari asked.

            “Oh, no, sir,” Koas said, lips turned down. “He is fond of much simpler fare.” Koas did not seem to approve of this.

            Then he’s in Mycogen to force a little information out of them, Hari thought. Their myths about robots. The man may very well be obsessed!

            Koas did not specialize in bodyworks, so two female servants entered with a suspension couch. Hari lay on the couch and gave in to their skilled ministrations with a grateful sigh, and for a few minutes, at least, was almost glad he had come to the Palace and requested his audience with Klayus.

            The masseuses began work on his legs, smoothing out the corded muscles and somehow removing a pain in his left knee that had been bothering him for weeks. They then worked on his arms, pushing and prodding with a surprising force, causing a delicious sort of pain that quickly melted into a liquid lassitude.

            As they worked, Hari thought of the special privileges accorded to leaders and their associates, their families. There was, of course, the velvet trap of power, sufficient luxuries to attract reasonably competent and competitive individuals to an ungratefully demanding job (in Hari’s opinion; of course, Cleon I had been remarkably sanguine about being an Emperor at times, and even Agis had tried to act the part, which had led to his downfall under Linge Chen’s Commission).

            For Klayus, there was luxury without much responsibility; that meant endless opportunities for distortions of the personality, which Hari had seen so often in history, among figurehead rulers of various systems...

            As the masseuses caressed and pummeled and prodded, he lapsed back into his memories of the meetings with the tyrants. They had taken place more than a kilometer beneath the Hall of Justice and the Imperial Courts, in the Rikerian Prison, at the center of a labyrinth of precisely controlled security systems. During his decades on Trantor, Hari had come to love interior spaces, even small ones, but the Rikerian Prison had been designed to punish, to flatten the spirit.

            He had had nightmares about those tiny confined spaces, on and off, for years after.

            In a cell barely tall enough to stand in, with slick hard black walls and two holes in the floor, one for waste and one for food and water, and no chairs, he had interviewed Nikolo Pas of Sterrad, the butcher of fifty billion human beings.

            Cleon had his bizarre sense of humor, forcing the interview to take place there and not in some neutral meeting area. Perhaps he had wanted Hari to understand the man’s current plight, to put things in perspective, perhaps to pity him, at least feel something, and not reduce everything to equations and numbers, as Cleon felt was Hari’s wont.

            “I’m sorry I have nothing to offer in the way of hospitality,” Nikolo had said as they faced each other in the tiny, dim space. Hari had responded with some dismissive pleasantry.

            The man before him was more than six centimeters shorter than Hari, with pale blond, almost white hair, large dark eyes, a small pug nose, broad lips, and a short chin. He wore a thin gray shirt and shorts and sandals. “You’ve come to study the Monster,” Nikolo continued. “The guards say you’re the First Minister. Surely you’re not here to pick up some political tips.”

            “No,” Hari said.

            “To observe Cleon’s triumph and the restoration of dignity and order?”

            “No.”

            “I never rebelled against Cleon. I never usurped the Emperor’s authority.”

            “I understand. How do you explain what you did?” Hari asked, deciding to jump in with no further preliminaries. “What was your reasoning, your goal?”

            “They tell everybody I butchered billions on four worlds within my system, the system I was chosen to preserve and protect.”

            “That’s what the records tell. What happened, in your opinion? And I warn you--I have the accounts from thousands of witnesses and other records at my disposal.”

            “Why should I even bother talking with you, then?” Nikolo said.

            “Because it’s possible what you say can prevent more butchery, in the future. An explanation, an understanding, could help us all avoid similar situations.”

            “By killing a monster such as myself at birth?”

            Hari did not answer.

            “No, I see you’re more subtle than that,” Nikolo murmured. “By preventing the rise to power of one like myself.”

            “Perhaps,” Hari said.

            “What do I get out of it?”

            “Nothing,” Hari said.

            “Nothing for Nikolo Pas...How about the right to kill myself?”

            “Cleon would never allow that,” Hari said.

            “Just the right to inform Cleon’s First Minister, to give him more understanding, and therefore more power...”

            “I suppose you could look at it that way.”

            “Not in this hole,” Nikolo had said. “I’ll talk, but someplace clean and comfortable. That’s my price. You wouldn’t put vermin in a hole like this. And I have ever so much to tell you...about humans as well as machines, or about machines that seem human...past as well as future.”

            Hari had listened, trying to keep his face impassive. “I’m not sure I can get Clean to--”

            “Then you’ll learn nothing, Hari Seldon. And I see by the look in your eyes...I’ve touched something that provokes a deep curiosity, haven’t I?”

Hari twitched on the suspension couch and the masseuse working on his neck softly ordered him to lie still. Why haven’t I remembered this conversation before now? Hari asked himself. What else has been suppressed? And why?

            Then, tension spoiling all the masseuses’ work, another question, Daneel, what have you done to me?

16.

The bodies had been arranged in neat floating rows in the crew lounge, the largest space in the ship, and also the closest space to the emergency hatch amidships.

            Mors Planch backed away from the entrance, wondering for a moment if he had come upon a scene of torture and piracy. All the bodies were connected by ropes to keep them in place. Tended to, taken care of even in death. The air in the weightless chamber smelled from the decay of several days. Yet he had to make a count, to see if there was any value in searching elsewhere in the ship.

            Tritch kept well back from the hatchway. Her red-rimmed eyes stood out above the white handkerchief she held over her nose and mouth. “Who put them in there?” she asked, voice muffled.

            “I don’t know,” Mors said grimly. He put on a breather mask and entered to make his count. Several minutes later he emerged, his face wan. “Nobody alive, but not everybody is in there.” He pushed past her and expertly caromed down the corridor, toward the bridge. Reluctantly, Tritch followed, stopping briefly to pass an instruction to Trin.

            “They all died within minutes of each other, I’m guessing,” Planch told Tritch as she caught up with him. “Radiation poisoning from the shock front.”

            “The ship is heavily shielded,” Tritch said.

            “Not against neutrinos.”

            “Neutrinos can’t hurt us...They’re like ghosts.”

            Planch peered into the darkened officer’s lounge, switched on his torch, played it around the furniture and walls, saw nobody. “Neutrinos in sufficient numbers are what blew away the outer shells of the supernova,” he said tightly. “Under such conditions, in such hordes, they can play strange and deadly tricks with matter, particularly with people’s bodies. Smell the ship?”

            “I smell the dead, back there,” Tritch said.

            “No. Smell the ship here. What do you smell?”

            She took the handkerchief away from her nose and sniffed. “Something burnt. Not flesh.”

            “Right,” Planch said. “It’s not a common smell, and I’ve only experienced it once before...in a ship caught in a neutrino surge, but not from a supernova. From a planet being broken up and swallowed by a wormhole. One of the transit-station disasters, thirty years ago. The ship was caught in the emerging jet of converted mass. I investigated, part of a salvage crew. Everybody aboard was dead. The ship smelled scorched, like this...Burnt metal.”

            “Pleasant work,” Tritch said, putting the cloth back to her nose.

            The hatch to the bridge was open. Planch held out his arm to keep Tritch back. She did not argue. The bridge was illuminated only by starlight from the open direct-view ports. He turned his torch on and shined it on the panels, the captain’s chair, the displays. The displays were all blank. The ship was dead.

            “We won’t have much air soon,” he told Tritch. “Keep your crew back.”

            “I already have,” Tritch said. “I don’t want to stay here any longer than I have to. We can’t salvage anything if the ship can’t be revived.”

            “No,” Planch said. The bridge seemed empty, and cold enough to make his breath cloudy. He pushed in farther, flailing briefly against the cold stale air with one hand until he caught a stanchion and rotated. From that vantage, he aimed his beam into the opposite corner. There, he saw a form curled into a fetal ball.

            He pulled himself along until he floated a meter from the form. What he had been told was true; this one was alive. The head turned, and he recognized the features of Councilor Lodovik Trema. But it was not Chief Commissioner Chen who had told him Trema would be alive.

            When they had first sighted the hulk in deep space, drifting helplessly, he had communicated first with Chen, then with another, who had paid him even more handsomely than Chen: the tall man who had many faces and many names, and who had hired him so often before.

            That man was never wrong, and he had not been wrong this time. Where all others might be dead, one might still be alive...And he must not be returned to Chen. He must be reported dead.

            Lodovik Trema blinked slowly, calmly, at Planch. Planch held his fingers to his lips, and whispered, “You’re still dead, sir. Don’t move or make a sound.” Then he spoke a coded phrase incorporating both numbers and words that the man of many faces had told him to use.

            Tritch watched them from across the bridge. “What did you find?” she asked.

            “The man I’m looking for,” Planch said. “He lived a little longer. He must have arranged the others, then come here to die.”

            As he brought out Lodovik, Tritch tried to back away, but could not find a grip fast enough. The body, curled and lifeless, floated ahead of Planch, under Tritch’s nose, and she nearly gagged with some reflex expectation.

            “Don’t worry,” Planch said. “This one doesn’t smell much. It’s colder on the bridge.”

Tritch could not believe they had come all this way just to retrieve a single body. Back aboard the Flower of Evil, with Lodovik safely stowed in a box in the hold, she passed Planch a bottle of Trillian water of life, and he poured himself a glass and lifted it in cheerless toast.

            “The Chief Commissioner wanted to make sure. And now that we know he’s dead, and all the others with him, I’m to take him back to his home world and see him decently buried, with full Imperial honors.”

            “And leave all the others? That seems a little bizarre.”

            Planch shrugged. “I don’t question my orders.”

            “Which world is he from?”

            “Madder Loss,” Planch replied.

            Tritch shook her head in disbelief. “A man in such high authority, from a planet of disgraced parasites?”

            Planch inspected his glass and lifted one finger before finishing its contents. Then he poked glass and finger at Tritch. “I remind you of our contract,” he said. “The death of this man could have political repercussions.”

            “I don’t even know his name.”

            “People could guess from what little you do know, if you spread it around in the wrong places. And if you do, I’ll find out.”

            “I keep my contracts, and I keep my mouth shut.”

            “And your crew?”

            “You must have known we were trustworthy when you hired us,” Tritch said softly, dangerously.

            “Yes, well it’s even more important now.”

            Tritch stood and lifted the bottle from the table between them. She corked it firmly. “You’ve insulted me, Mors Planch.”

            “An excess of caution, no insult intended.”

            “Nevertheless, an insult. And you ask me to go to a world that no self-respecting citizen willingly visits.”

            “They’re citizens on Madder Loss, too.”

            She closed her eyes and shook her head. “How long do we stay?”

            “Not long. You drop me there and leave at your own pleasure.”

            Tritch was finding this harder and harder to believe. “I will ask no more questions,” she said, and tucked the bottle under her arm. Apparently Planch was no longer so attractive to her, and henceforth their relationship would be strictly professional.

            Planch regretted this, but only slightly.

            When he delivered Lodovik Trema to Madder Loss, he would be a very wealthy man, and he would never have to work for anyone again. He imagined buying his own luxury vessel--one that he could keep in tip-top condition, which was more than could be said for most Imperial ships.

            As for the strange and tightly disciplined man in the hold, a man who could stay enclosed in a coffin for days without complaint or need...

            The less he thought about that, the better.

Lodovik lay in the darkness, fully alert but quiescent, having heard the coded phrase that alerted him to Daneel’s participation in his rescue. He was to cooperate fully with Mors Planch; eventually, he would be brought back to Trantor.

            What would happen to him there, Lodovik did not know. Having performed three self-checks in the coffin-shaped box, he was reasonably certain that his positronic brain had been altered in subtle ways. The results of his self-checks were contradictory, however.

            To keep himself from deteriorating through disuse, he activated his human emotional overlay and ran diagnostics on that, as well. It seemed intact; he could operate as a human in human society, and that provided some relief. However, the contact with Mors Planch on the bridge of the Spear of Glory had been too brief for him to try out these functions. Best to be kept isolated until a more thorough test could be performed.

            Above all, he must not reveal himself to be a robot. For all the robots in Daneel’s cadres, this was of paramount importance. It was essential that humans never learn the extent to which robots had infiltrated their societies.

            Lodovik put his human overlay into the background and began a complete memory check. To do so, he had to shut down his control of external motion for twenty seconds. He could still see and hear, however.

            It was at this moment that something bumped against the box. He heard fumbling outside, then the sound of metal scraping against metal. The seconds ticked by...five, seven, ten...

            The lid of the box was pried open with a metallic groan. With his head turned to one side, half facing the wall of the box, he could only gather a blurry glimpse of one face peering in, and a fleeting impression of one other. Eighteen seconds...the memory check was almost complete.

            “He certainly looks dead.” A woman’s voice.

            The memory check ended, but he decided to remain still.

            “His eyes are open.” A male voice, not that of Mors Planch.

            “Turn him over and look for identification,” the woman said.

            “Sky, no! You do it. It’s your bounty.”

            The woman hesitated. “His skin is pink.”

            “Radiation burns.”

            “No, he looks healthy.”

            “He’s dead,” the man said. “He’s been in this box for a day and a half. No air.”

            “He just doesn’t look like a corpse.” She reached in and pinched the tissue of his exposed hand. “Cool, but not cold.”

            Lodovik blanched his skin slowly, and dropped his external temperature to match the ambient. He felt inefficient and incompetent for not having done that earlier.

            “He looks pale enough to me,” the man remarked. Another hand touched his skin. “He’s cold as ice. You’re imagining things.”

            “Dead or whatever he may be, he’s worth a fortune,” the woman said.

            “I know Mors Planch by reputation, Trin,” the man said. “He won’t just hand his prize over to you.”

            Lodovik, on his conveyance into the rescue ship, had heard the name “Trin” applied to a woman he gathered was second-in-command to the captain, Tritch. This could be a very serious situation.

            “Take his picture,” Trin said. “I’ll get a message out this sleep and we’ll learn if he’s the one they want.”

            A camera was lifted over the box and silently recorded his image. Lodovik tried to model all the possible causes for this behavior, all the scenarios and their potential outcomes.

            “Besides, Tritch has given her word to Planch,” the man continued. “She’s known to be honorable.”

            “If we succeed, we’ll make ten times what Planch is paying Tritch,” Trin said tightly. “We could buy our own ship and become free traders on the periphery. Never have to deal with Imperial taxes or inspections again. Maybe even go to work in a free system.”

            “Pretty rough territories, I hear,” the man said. “Freedom is always dangerous,” Trin said. “All right. We’re here. We’ve broken the seals on the box. We’re committed. Make an incision in his scalp and let’s get what we came for.”

            The man withdrew what sounded like a scalpel from his pocket. Lodovik activated his eyes and watched them in the dim light of the hold. The man swore under his breath and brought the scalpel down.

            Lodovik could not allow himself to be cut. He would bleed from any superficial wound, but even an untrained eye would see that he was not human if the scalpel cut deep. Lodovik quickly calculated all the pluses and minuses of any particular action he might take, and arrived at the optimal, based on what he knew.

            His arm shot up from the box. His hand wrapped around the wrist of the man with the scalpel. “Hello,” Lodovik said, and rose to a sitting position.

            The man seemed to have a fit. He jerked and shrieked and tried to pull his hand away, then shrieked again. His eyes rolled up to show nothing but white and foam appeared on his lips. For several seconds he twitched in Lodovik’s grasp, as Lodovik appraised the situation from his new perspective.

            Trin backed toward the hatchway. She looked terrified, but not as terrified as the man in his grip. Lodovik judged the man’s condition and carefully removed the scalpel from his fingers, then released him. The man clutched his shoulder and gasped, his face turning a medically questionable pale green.

            “Trin,” the man groaned, twisting toward her. Then he collapsed. Lodovik climbed from the box and bent to examine him. The woman near the hatch seemed transfixed.

            “Your friend is suffering a heart attack,” Lodovik said, glancing at her. “Do you have a doctor or medical appliances on this ship?”

            The first mate gave a small, birdlike cry and fled.

17.

Klia Asgar approached her contact in Fleshplay, a tough though popular family and labor resort on the outskirts of Dahl, near the entertainment Sector of Little Kalgan. Here, acts and rides from Little Kalgan itself were tried on very tough customers before they were exported around Trantor.

            Fleshplay was full of brilliantly illuminated signs climbing up the walls of buildings almost to the ceil of the dome, announcing new shows and performance teams, old favorites revived in the Stardust Theater, popular beverages, stimulk, even outlaw stims from offworld. Klia glanced at the pouring cascades of projected beverages with a dry and thirsty appreciation.

            She had been standing in a store alcove for twenty minutes waiting for her contact, not daring to abandon her position even for the time it might take to get a drink at a nearby street-vendor stall.

            Klia watched the crowds with more than just her eyes, and saw them in more than just surface detail. On the surface, all seemed well enough. Men, women, and children at this evening hour strolled by in what passed for leisure-time dress in Dahl, white blouses and black culottes with red stripes around the waist for the women, pink jumpsuits for prepubescent children, a more rakish cut of black worksuit for the men. A more than cursory examination showed the strain, however.

            These were the higher citizen classes in Dahl, the more fortunate day-shift and managerial workers, functionally the equivalent of the omnipresent gray-clad bureaucrats in other Sectors, yet there was a grimness in their faces when they weren’t actively responding to banter or forcing smiles. Their eyes seemed tired, a little glazed, from months of disappointment and extensive layoffs. Klia could read the colors of their internal moods as well, caught in brief flashes, since she was otherwise occupied: angry purples and bilious green murmurings hidden within the deep holes of their minds, not auras, but pits into which she could glimpse only from certain mental perspectives.

            Nothing extraordinary in all this; Klia knew what the mood of Dahl was, and tried to ignore it as often as possible. Full immersion would not just distract her, but could even infect. She had to remain isolated from the general herd to keep her edge.

            She recognized the boy as soon as he walked into view across the street. He was perhaps a year older than she, shorter and squat, with a pinched face marked by several small scars on his cheek and chin, gang marks from Billibotton’s tougher streets. She had delivered goods and information to him several times in the last year, when better courier jobs were not to be had. Now, she realized she might be seeing even more of him, and she did not like it one bit. He was tough to convince...

            Good jobs had become almost impossible to find in the past few days. Klia was known to be marked; few trusted her. Her income had plummeted almost to nothing, and worse still, she had narrowly escaped being captured by a gang of thugs whose leader she had never seen before. There were new folks in town, with new allegiances, providing new dangers.

            Klia still had confidence in her ability to worm her way out of any tight situation, but the effort was exhausting her. She longed for a quiet place with friends, but she had few friends--none willing to take her in the way things were.

            It was enough to make her rethink her whole philosophy of life.

            The pinch-faced boy caught sight of Klia when she wanted to be seen, then went through a deliberate masquerade of casually ignoring her. She did the same, but edged closer, looking around as if waiting for somebody else.

            When they were within earshot, the boy said, “We’re not interested in what you’re carrying today. Why don’t you just slink out of Dahl and plague someone else?”

            Brusqueness and even rudeness meant little, she was so used to them. “We have a contract,” Klia said casually. “I deliver, you pay. My day boss won’t take it well if you--”

            “Word here is your day boss is in the sinks,” the boy said, staring at her boldly. “And so’s every other day or night boss who used you. Even Kindril Nashak! Word is he’s been threatened with Rikerian, held with no charges! A free warning, girlie. No more!”

            The noose was closing. “What do I do with this?” Klia asked, lifting the thin box under her arm.

            “I take nothing and pay nothing, that’s the word. Now slink!”

            Klia glanced at him for less than a second. The boy shook his head as if touched by a buzzing insect, then looked right through her. He would not report having seen her.

            If everybody wanted her to vanish, and there was no longer any work or reason to stay, it really was time to vanish. The thought scared her; she had never been outside Dab! for more than a few hours. She had less than two weeks’ living in credits, a lot of those black-market exchanges good only for local merchants--who might shun her business now anyway.

            Klia walked up the street to a less prosperous neighborhood, known euphemistically as Softer Fleshplay, and ducked through a fractured plastic front into an abandoned food stall. There, among scattered old wrappers and broken sticks of furniture, she cut the security seal on her package and opened it, to see if it contained anything valuable outside Dahl.

            Papers and a bookfilm. She leafed through them and examined the seal on the bookfilm; personal stuff, in code, nothing she could decipher or sell anywhere. She had known that before she opened the package. She was handling only cut-rate deliveries anyway, often enough backup deliveries, information too tricky to risk being sent where security eyes could intercept it, yet not so tricky anyone wanted to pay large sums for better couriers...

            And once she had been the very best of couriers, one of the highest paid in Dahl, inheritor of a tradition thousands of years old, as convoluted and ornate with language and ritual as any religious commerce off Trantor. Sometimes, even official and public papers were handed to the Dahlite couriers by legitimate day bosses, just to ensure faster delivery now that other communications systems were so often stalled or subject to surveillance by the Commission.

            For her, it had all come to nothing, in just a few days!

            With a jerk, she realized she was crying, silently, but nevertheless crying.

            She wiped her face and blew her nose on a reasonably clean if dusty wrapper, dropped the package in the litter, and took to the street again.

            Once outside, she crossed the street and waited for a few minutes. Soon enough Klia saw her tail, the one she expected would be after her if the delivery failed. It was a small, thin girl only a few years younger than she, pretending to play in the streets, dressed in a scaled-down version of a black heatsink work jumper. Klia was too far away to exert any persuasion, or learn anything; but she did not need to.

            The girl darted into the abandoned stall and emerged a few seconds later with the shredded wrappings and contents of the package.

            Klia had tailed couriers at the very beginning, sometimes cleaning up after failed deliveries. Now, it was being done to her. This was the last slap in the face, the final insult.

            The street traffic was increasing. With the darkening ceil, the lights on the marquees above the streets would become brighter and more frantic, the crowds would jam shoulder to shoulder, looking for a moment’s relief from dreary lives. For a hunted person, such a crush could be fatal. Anything could happen in a crowd, and she would be hard-pressed to persuade, hide, make the masses forget, or even just get away quickly; she might be found and killed.

            She thought of the man in dusty green. The memory of him did not make her scalp itch, but she would have to fall much lower before she gave up her independence and actually joined a movement, even if they claimed to be like her...

            Perhaps especially if they were like her! The thought of being among people who could do what she did

            Suddenly, everyone around her made her scalp itch. With a moan, she pushed through the roiling crowds, looking for the entrance to a plunger, the large, ancient elevators that worked the levels in Dahl and most of the other Sectors of Trantor.

Vara Liso, exhausted and haggard, begged the stolid young major by her side to let her rest. “I’ve been here for hours,” she groaned. Her head ached, her clothes were drenched in sweat, her vision blurred.

            Major Namm plucked at his Imperial insignia absently, chewing on his lower lip. Vara focused on him with a hatred she had seldom felt before--but she dared not hurt him.

            “Nobody?” he asked in a gruff tone.

            “I’ve found nobody for the last three days,” she said. “You’ve scared them all away.”

            He stepped back from the edge of the balcony overlooking the crowded Trans-Dahl thoroughfare through Fleshplay. Throngs on foot passed below the balcony, while trains and robos on elevated rails and narrow slaveways rumbled a few meters above them, rattling the empty apartment. Vara had been surveying the crowds from that location for seven hours; dark was falling quickly and the bright street signs across the thoroughfare were beginning to give her a headache. She simply wanted to sleep.

            “Councilor Sinter would appreciate some results,” the young man said.

            “Farad must have some concern for my health!” Vara shot back. “If I become ill or burn myself out, what will he do then? I’m all the ammunition he has in this little war of his!” Her tone surprised her. She was close to the limits of her endurance. But rather than keep the focus on Farad’s need for her, she pushed the onus onto the major. “If you’re responsible for my effectiveness being reduced...What will Councilor Sinter say then?”

            The young man considered this possibility with little apparent emotion. “You’re the one who has to answer to him. I’m just here to watch over you.”

            Vara Liso held back a sharp bolt of anger. How close they come! They don’t even know!

            “Well, take me to a place where I can rest,” she demanded sharply. “She’s not here. I don’t know where she is. I haven’t sensed her for three days!”

            “Councilor Sinter is especially concerned that you should find her. You told us she was the strongest--”

            “Other than me!” Vara shouted. “But I haven’t felt her!”

            The blond major seemed to get it through his head that she wasn’t going to work anymore today.

            “The councilor will be disappointed,” he said, then bit his lower lip again.

            Is everybody here an idiot? Vara raged inwardly, but realized anger, letting her exhaustion control her, would get her nowhere, and could even harm her chances of getting what she wanted from Sinter. “I need to be alone for a while, rest, not talk,” she said hoarsely. “We can try again tomorrow, in another Sector. I need a smaller area to work in--a few blocks at most. We need more agents and better reports.”

            “Of course,” the major said, matching her tone with a more reasonable approach of his own. “Our intelligence has been a little weak. We’ll try it again tomorrow.”

            “Thank you,” she said softly. The major walked through the empty apartment and stood by the door, holding it open for her. She was almost through the door when a sharp spike of what she could only call envy shot through her: the sudden awareness she was close to a fellow human with talents like her own. Her face went white, and she stammered, “N-n-not yet. She’s here!”

            “Where?” the major demanded, pushing her back to the window.

            “Yes, yes, yes,” Vara muttered as he propelled her. They treat me like a despicable runt! But the excitement of the chase was strong. She pointed a trembling finger and wiped her lips with the back of her other hand. “Down there! She’s close!”

            The agent peered down into the crowd, following the line of the small woman’s finger. He saw a female figure, swift and almost colorless, dart through the crowds toward the entrance of a plunger.

            Immediately, he used his comm to alert other agents on the street below.

            “You’re sure?” he demanded of Vara, but she could only point and rub her lips, the sensation was so great. She had to work hard to keep from trembling. She hated this sensation--had come to know it whenever she was around the others in Wanda and Stet tin’s group, but never as strongly as this. Envy like an ache in her chest, as if this girl could steal everything in life from her and leave only empty expectations and endless disappointment!

            “Her!” she said. “Get her, please!”

Something made Klia’s scalp feel as if it were on fire, and she cried out as she darted into the plunger cab. Two older men with heavy black-and-gray mustaches looked at her with mild concern.

            Klia could not see over their shoulders. She jumped and caught a glimpse of two square-featured men running as fast as they could toward the open plunger doors. The doors started to close; the agents shouted for it to stop, and even flashed code blinkers to take control of the mechanism.

            Klia dug into her pocket and produced a maintenance key, illegal but standard issue for couriers. The elevator doors hesitated, then stopped. She plunged her key into the control panel and shouted, “Emergency! Down now!”

            The doors resumed closing. The two men could not make it and pounded on the outside, shouting for her to stop.

            The older males gave her a wide berth. “Where would you like to get off?” she asked breathlessly, smiling.

            “The next level, please,” one of them said. “Fine.” She gave the plunger its instructions, then made the older males forget they had seen her or experienced anything out of the ordinary.

            They stepped out onto the next level, and she quickly ordered the doors to close again. With a sigh, she leaned against the dirt-smeared wall. A scratchy mechanical voice said, “Emergency instructions. Which maintenance level?”

            She reached out with all her strength and found spots of trouble for many levels above and below. Her scalp still hurt. She had to get out of range of the teams sent to find her. There was only one likely direction--down.

            “Bottom,” she answered. “Zero.”

            Four kilometers beneath all the occupied levels--

            The suburban rivers.

18.

Tritch met Mors Planch in neutral territory, far from the hold but aft of the crew quarters, in a weightless service hallway. If she had hoped to have him at a disadvantage in weightless conditions, she had hoped in vain; Planch was as much at home weightless as in standard gravitation.

            “Your corpse has some remarkable talents,” she said as Planch pushed into view around the curve of the bulkhead.

            “Your crew suffers some remarkable ethical lapses,” Planch replied.

            Tritch shrugged. “Ambition is a constant curse these days. I found Gela Andanch outside the hold, in very bad condition. He’s stable now in the infirmary.”

            Planch nodded; Lodovik had not heard the man’s name, and had just happened to run into Planch while carrying the limp body forward. Planch had taken Andanch and told Lodovik to return to the hold. Presumably, he was still there.

            “What were they looking for?”

            “Someone paid them off,” Tritch said lightly. “I presume it was someone opposed to the party or parties paying you. If they delivered Lodovik Trema, they’d each get fifty times what I pay them in a standard year. That’s a lot of money, even for Imperial corruption.”

            “What are you going to do with them?” Planch asked.

            “I presume they would have taken the ship and put us out of action, maybe killed us. Trin is in my cabin now, drinking heavily--and not Trillian, either. When she’s drunk enough, I might just toss her out of the hold over Trantor, and hope she burns up over the Palace.” Tritch’s eyelids fluttered slightly, and her lips grew tight. “She was a good first mate. My problem now is, what should I do with you?”

            “I haven’t betrayed you,” Planch said.

            “And you haven’t told me the truth. Whatever Lodovik Trema is, he isn’t human. Trin is babbling about simulacra, robots. Whoever paid her off told her she’d be looking for mechanical men. What do you know about robots?”

            “He’s not a robot,” Planch said with a shake of his head and a smile. “Nobody makes robots anymore.”

            “In our nightmares,” Tritch said. “Class B filmbooks. Tiktoks with mutated brains bent on mindless revenge. But Lodovik Trema...first councilor to the Chief Commissioner of Public Safety?”

            “It’s nonsense,” Planch said shortly, as if this entire conversation was beneath his dignity.

            “I looked it up, Mors.” Tritch’s face suddenly became sad, assuming a kind of limpness away from the draw of gravitation. “You were right. Neutrinos in sufficient numbers are deadly. And there’s no shielding against neutrino flux.”

            “He’s dying,” Planch lied. “His condition in any case has to be kept secret.”

            Tritch shook her head. “I don’t believe you. But I’m going to keep my word and drop you on Madder Loss.” She mused for a moment. “Maybe I’ll drop Trin and Andanch there with you, let you all work things out. Now go confer with your dead minister.”

            She turned and headed forward.

            “What about getting back into my cabin?” Planch said.

            “I’ll send food and a cot back to the hold. If I let someone who consorts with a living corpse go forward, I’d have a mutiny on my hands. We’ll be at Madder Loss in a day and a half.”

            Planch shuddered as she passed out of sight. He, too, didn’t like associating with Lodovik Trema. Tritch was perfectly correct.

            Nobody aboard the Arrow of Destiny could have survived. Nobody human.

Lodovik stood in the hold beside his box, hands folded, waiting for Planch to return. By his actions, Lodovik had apparently brought severe harm to a human being, and yet the expected difficulties of such a situation--decrease in mental frequency, critical reexamination, and under extreme circumstances, even complete shut-down--did not affect him much, if at all. Even allowing for the extended nature of his long-term mission for Daneel--and under the provisions of the Zeroth Law--there should have been deeply uncomfortable repercussions.

            Yet there were none to speak of. Lodovik felt calm and fully functional. He did not feel contented--he had caused damage and was aware of that, quite clearly--but he experienced nothing like the near-paralyzing realization of having broken one of the Calvinian Three Laws.

            Clearly, something within him had changed. He was trying to track down what that might be when Planch returned.

            “We’re stuck back here for the duration,” Planch said matter-of-factly. “I had a very nice cabin, too. And the captain and I were...” He shook his head sadly, then his features sharpened. “Never mind. Something is very wrong with this whole scenario.”

            “What might that be?” Lodovik asked. He stretched and smiled. The human persona slid smoothly over all his other functions. “The box was cramped, but I’ve spent time in worse conditions. I emerged at the wrong moment, I suppose?”

            “No supposing about it. The man suffered a heart attack.”

            “I’m very sorry. But they were up to no good, I’m afraid.”

            “Someone else wants you, alive or dead,” Planch said. “I thought the Chief Commissioner of Public Safety was pretty much unassailable. Invincible.”

            “Nobody is invincible in this forsaken time,” Lodovik said. “I apologize for causing you difficulties.”

            Planch stared hard at Lodovik. “Up until now I’ve ignored all my misapprehensions about this mission, about you. In Imperial politics, anything can happen--individuals can be worth entire solar systems. That’s how centralized politics works.”

            “Surely you’re not a diffusionist, Mors Planch?”

            “No. There’s no money and not much life in being a traitor to Linge Chen.”

            “You mean, to the Emperor.”

            Planch did not correct himself. “My curiosity has been piqued to dangerous levels, however. Curiosity is like neutrino flux--it can penetrate anything, and in sufficient quantity, it can kill. I’m aware of that...But my curiosity about you...” He clamped his jaw shut and looked away.

            “I’m a middle-aged man with extraordinary good fortune, let’s leave it at that,” Lodovik said, making a wry face. “There are things neither you nor I can be told...and we would be best served by keeping our curiosities in check. Yes, I should be dead. I know that better than anybody. The reason I am not dead, however, has nothing to do with extraordinary superstitions about...what was it...robots? You can rest assured on that point. Mors Planch.”

            “This isn’t the first I’ve heard about robots, you know,” Planch said. “Murmurs about artificial humans sweep the worlds from time to time, like a dusty breeze. Thirty-five years ago, there was a massacre in a Seventh Octant system. Four planets were involved, quite prosperous worlds, united by a proud common culture, shaping up to be a real force in Imperial economics.”

            “I remember,” Lodovik said. “The ruler claimed he had positive proof that robots had infiltrated to the highest levels, and were fomenting rebellion. Very sad.”

            “Billions died,” Mors Planch said.

            Lodovik said, “I presume you will be paid well for your heroic rescue.”

            Planch’s face went slack. “That’s the trouble with this whole situation,” he said. “The captain and crew don’t like us. Honor is a sometimes thing with these people, and I should know...It’s the same with my people, ancestral traits as it were. They’ll take us where we want to go, but there’s always a chance they’ll talk out of turn in a spaceport somewhere...And there’s nothing I can do about that. But it’s all incredible enough, I suppose nobody will believe. I wouldn’t myself.

            “I’ve told Linge Chen you’re dead. The rescue failed.”

            Lodovik drew his head back, pressing his chin into double folds of flesh. “And we go to Madder Loss?”

            Planch nodded. A look of sadness crossed his face, but he said no more.

19.

Linge Chen was preparing for the informal dinner party at the Emperor’s private quarters when Kreen brought him the sealed message from Planch. In the green oceanic depths of his meditation and personal room, he put aside the straight razor and soap he was using to shave, took a deep breath as Kreen departed, and placed his thumb on the small gray parcel. The first seal, applied by the receiver and decoder, came open at this touch--confirming his unique identity through microanalysis of his skin chemistry, as well as the pattern of his thumbprint. The second seal, within the disk’s message itself, he opened through a few words spoken in his voice, known only to himself. The message flowered before him.

            Mors Planch stood within a ship, the background in soft focus for the moment, and said in low tones, “My lord Chief Commissioner Chen, I am within the Spear of Glory .The ship I have hired is the only one to have found the vessel so far, and I anticipate with some personal concern your deep disappointment at the news I bring. Your councilor is dead, along with the rest of the crew...”

            Linge Chen’s lips worked as he played back the rest of the message. Planch showed the grim details: the rows of bodies arranged within one chamber, the discovery of the body of Lodovik Trema on the bridge, curled and still. Planch confirmed Trema’s identity by placing the Commissioner’s own identifier on Trema’s bracelet.

            Linge Chen shut off the message before it could reveal the unnecessary details of what Planch would do next. The body would not be retrieved; the vessel’s discovery would be forgotten. Linge Chen did not wish to be accused of favoritism or extravagance, not at this time, when he was hoping to bring down Farad Sinter on the same charge.

            For a moment, he felt like a small boy. He had been so convinced that Lodovik Trema moved on a different and superior plane to the rest of humanity. He could never admit it to himself, much less any other, but he had trusted as well as admired Trema. His personal instincts, which had proved almost infallible, had told him that Trema would never betray him, never do anything not in Linge Chen’s best interests. He had even invited Trema to join his family on special occasions, the only councilor (or Commissioner, for that matter) he had ever invited to do so.

            Lodovik Trema had been a steady and pleasant presence on those occasions, playing solemnly and with his own kind of innocence with Linge Chen’s children, extravagantly complimenting their mothers on their cooking, which was adequate at best. And Lodovik’s advice...

            Lodovik Trema had never given Chen bad advice. They had risen together to this supreme pinnacle of responsibility over twenty-five years of, at first, inglorious and often painful service. They had weathered the end of Agis’s reign and the first years of the junta, and Lodovik had proven invaluable in designing the Commission of Public Safety to moderate and eventually replace the junta’s military rulers.

            Ten minutes passed. Kreen knocked gently on the door to the chamber. “Yes,” Chen said. “I’m almost done.”

            He picked up the razor and finished shaving his fine beard, leaving smooth, pallid skin behind. Then, as a measure of his emotion, he cut two small slices in his skin just in front of his left ear. Blood welled over the hairs and he patted it with a white towel, then dropped the towel into an incinerator, offering his own blood to the powers that be, unspecified.

            In his youth in the Imperial Education Municipality of Runim, he had learned such rituals as part of the path to adulthood, following the Rules of Tua Chen. Tua Chen had been the most successful product of the secret plan among orthodox Ruellians to develop a select breed of Imperial administrators and bureaucrats, four thousand years before, known as the Shining Lights. In his late maturity, Tua Chen had devised two Books of Rules, based on Ruellian principles: one for the training of aristocratic administrators (and occasionally an Emperor), the other for the training of the Empire’s hundreds of billions of bureaucrats, the Greys.

            Linge Chen was reputedly a direct descendant of Tua Chen.

            The Shining Light school in its modern form was rife with superstition and almost useless, but in its heyday it had trained administrators that were sent to the far corners of the Empire. And in return, from allover the Empire, each year, millions of candidate Greys came to Trantor to receive the Tua Chen training. The best assumed positions in the planet’s infinitely layered bureaucracy, competing with the entrenched and resentful Trantor Greys; the rest, having completed their pilgrimage, returned to their homes, or took positions on frontier worlds.

            Linge Chen was the most successful of all the students to come out of the school, and he had not succeeded by being overly observant of those damnably persuasive secret rituals. But for Lodovik Trema...

            It was the very least he could do.

            “Sire...” Kreen said. With some concern, he observed his master’s small wounds, but he knew enough to say nothing.

            “I’m done. Bring me my robe for Imperial presence, and also the sash of black.”

            “What shall I place on the sash, sire?”

            “The name of Lodovik.”

            Kreen’s face fell in anguish. “No hope, sire?”

            Linge Chen shook his head abruptly and pushed past his small servant, into the wardrobe. Kreen stood very still in the lavatory for a few seconds, his grief genuine. Lodovik had always given Kreen the impression that the small Lavrentian was the equal of anybody within their acquaintance. Kreen treasured that evaluation, even though it had never been spoken.

            Then, with a jerk, he roused himself and followed his master.

20.

The private dining room was crowded with Palace staff, making last-minute arrangements. Hari looked up at the huge chandelier with its ten thousand gleaming round glass ornaments modeled after the Emperor’s chosen Worlds of the Galactic Year, then around the hundred-meter-long hall, with its solid prime opal matrix columns and the famous deep green copperstone staircase, imported from the only system yet settled in the Greater Magellanic Cloud--a failed colony, abandoned forty years ago, leaving only this gift as a reminder. His lips twitched at the sight of the staircase. As First Minister, he had cut off Imperial support for that vigorous world, lest it grow independent and too powerful...

            So many things done to preserve the Center, so many necessary sins of power. He had made sure that no more far-flung colonies were established, and none had been.

            The table was set with thirty plates along its midriff, and thirty high-backed ebon chairs, none yet occupied, for the guests had not yet arrived and, of course, the Emperor himself had not yet been seated.

            Klayus I escorted Hari around the hall as if he were an honored guest rather than a last-minute annoyance. “‘Raven,’ I’ve been calling you that, haven’t I? Do you mind? ‘Raven’ Seldon, such an evocative title! Harbinger of doom.”

            “Call me what you wish, Highness.”

            “A tough moniker to lift properly,” Klayus said with a smile. Hari, never one to miss feminine beauty, caught sight of three dazzling women in the corner of his eye and automatically turned to face them. The women brushed past him as if he were a statue and approached the Emperor, seeming to work as a team. As they surrounded him and two leaned to whisper in his ears, Klayus’s face reddened and he practically giggled with glee. “My extraordinary trio!” he greeted them, after listening for a few seconds. “Hari, you would not believe how accomplished these women are, or what they can do! They’ve entertained at my dinners before.”

            The women looked at Hari as one now, with mild interest, but they read the Emperor’s attitude toward this old man with quick, deadly accuracy. Hari was not a powerful figure to be attracted to, merely a toy, less even than themselves. Hari thought that if they had suddenly grown fangs and spouted hair on their noses, they could not have become less attractive so quickly. With wisdom born more out of his long life and from many conversations on human nature with Dors than any equation, he quickly imagined their expert blandishments, warm skin, dulcet voices, masking primordial ammonia ice. Dors had frequently made wry observations of that human sex after which she was modeled, and she had seldom been wrong.

            Klayus dismissed the women with a few soft words. As they departed, they strolled around the hall, and he bent over to confide to Hari, “They don’t impress you, do they? Their kind make up a large portion of the women here. Beautiful as frozen moons. My Privy Councilor manages to search out others of higher quality, but...!” He sighed. “Fine stones are easier to procure than gems among females, for a man in my position.”

            “It was so with Cleon, as well, Highness,” Hari said. “He made arrangements with three princess consorts throughout his youth, then, in his middle years, foreswore women entirely. He died without an heir, as you know.”

            “I’ve studied Clean, of course,” the Emperor said thoughtfully. “A solid man, not intelligent, but very capable. He liked you, didn’t he?”

            “I doubt any Emperor has ever liked a man such as myself, Highness.”

            “Oh, don’t be so modest! You have great charms, really. You were married to that remarkable woman--”

            “Dors Venabili,” said a reedy voice behind them.

            The Emperor turned gracefully, his robes swishing over the floor, and his face lit up. “Farad! How nice of you to come early.”

            The Privy Councilor bowed to his Emperor and glanced in passing at Hari. “When I heard of your visitor, I could not resist, Highness.”

            “You know my Privy Councilor, Farad Sinter, and Farad, this is the famous Hari Seldon.”

            “We’ve never met,” Hari said. No one shook hands in the Emperor’s company; too many weapons had been transferred between conspirators and assassins in past centuries that way for a simple handshake to be any other than a gross and even dangerous breach of etiquette.

            “I’ve heard much about your famous wife,” Sinter said with a smile. “A remarkable woman, as the Emperor says.”

            “Hari has come here to warn me about your activities,” Klayus said with a small grin, glancing between them. “I did not know all you’ve been up to, Farad.”

            “We’ve discussed my goals, Highness. What more does Professor Seldon have to add, in the way of information?”

            “He says you’re hunting down mechanical men. Robots. From what he says, you appear to be obsessed with them.”

            Hari stiffened. This was becoming a very dangerous situation, and he was beginning to feel a noose tighten. He almost regretted having taken this direct approach with someone so devious and unpredictable as Klayus. It would not be at all good to be singled out and marked for reprisal by Farad Sinter...

            “He’s confused my goals, though perhaps the rumors have misled him. There are many false rumors about our activities, Highness.” Sinter’s smile dripped honey and bonhomie.

            “This genetic study...most valuable, don’t you think, Hari? Has anyone explained it to you?”

            “System-wide, and also the twelve nearest Central Stars,” Sinter said.

            “It has been explained in the journals of Imperial Science,” Hari said.

            “But shooting people! “ Klayus continued. “Why, Farad? To take samples?”

            Hari could hardly believe what he was hearing. The Emperor could just as easily have signed Hari’s death warrant. Instead, he seemed to be handing Hari’s head to his Privy Councilor...on a plate, for dinner!

            “Those, those are lies of course,” Sinter said slowly, eyes heavy-lidded. “The Emperor’s police would have reported such indiscretions.”

            “I wonder,” Klayus said, eyes twinkling merrily. “At any rate, Farad, Raven here has some excellent points to make about this robot search. Hari, explain to us the political difficulties that might ensue, should such charges ever become widely disseminated. Tell Farad about--”

            “Jo-jo Joranum, yes, I know,” Sinter said, his lips thinning and his cheeks going white. “A Mycogenian would-be usurper. Stupid and easily manipulated--by you, in part, am I correct, Professor Seldon?”

            “His name was mentioned,” the Emperor said, glancing off to one side as if beginning to be bored.

            “Actually,” Hari said, “Joranum was just a symptom of a larger myth, with consequences far worse on other worlds than Trantor.” A myth I have not thought about, not measured, not researched--all because of Daneel’s prohibitions! Even now, Hari realized he would have some difficulty discussing the topic. He coughed into his fist. Sinter offered a handkerchief, but Hari shook his head and produced his own. Accepting such an item could also be misconstrued. And would it even be dangerous? Has Trantor and the Empire come to that? Either way, Hari would not fall for such a simple set-up. “On the world of Sterrad. Nikolo Pas.”

            The Emperor stared at Hari blankly. “I’m not familiar with Nikolo Pas.”

            “A butcher, Highness,” Sinter said. “Responsible for the death of millions.”

            “Billions, actually,” Hari said. “In a vain search for artificial humans he claimed were infiltrating the empire.”

            The Emperor stared at Hari for several seconds, his face slack. “I should know about him, shouldn’t I?”

            “He died in Rikerian the year before you were born, Highness,” Sinter said. “It is not a glorious moment in Imperial History.”

            Something in the atmosphere had changed. Klayus had a sour, even a disappointed look, as if he were anticipating an unpleasant duty. Hari glanced sideways at Sinter and saw that the Privy Councilor was studying his Emperor’s expression with some concern. Then it was that Hari realized Klayus and Sinter had been playing with him. The Emperor already knew about the murders of citizens on Trantor. Yet neither Sinter nor any of his tutors had told him about Nikolo Pas, and this was upsetting him.

            “I’m not supposed to be so ignorant,” Klayus said. “I really should set up more time for personal study. Go on, Raven. What about Nikolo Pas?”

            “In decades past, and every few centuries, Highness, there have been tides and even storms of psychological disturbance, centered on the myth of the Eternals.”

            Sinter visibly flinched. This gave Hari some satisfaction. He continued.

            “The resurgence of that myth has almost invariably led to social unrest, and in a few extreme cases, genocide. I conducted an interview with Nikolo Pas when I served Cleon as First Minister, Highness. I spent several days speaking with him, an hour or two at a time, in his cell deep in Rikerian.”

            The memories seemed to fill Hari’s mind now.

            “What did Pas believe?” the Emperor asked. The servants were at their positions around the hall. All the arrangements had been completed, the dinner was being delayed; guests could not be allowed to enter until the Emperor had left, to make a more formal entrance later. Klayus did not seem concerned by this.

            “Pas claimed to have captured an active artificial human. He claimed to have placed it...” Hari coughed again. In this context, he could hardly bring himself to use the word robot. He felt badly exposed and even handicapped, for the prohibition against discussion of Daneel’s nature had spread to other areas of thought, memory, even will. “He claimed to have isolated the artificial human”

            “Robot. We could be here all night,” Klayus said impatiently.

            That seemed to break some barrier, and Hari nodded. “Robot. In very secure quarters. The robot deactivated itself--”

            “How frightening, how noble!” Klayus exclaimed.

            “Pas claimed his scientists dissected and analyzed the body. And yet the body, the inactive mechanical form, was removed from these extremely secure circumstances and vanished without a trace. This was the beginning of Nikolo Pas’s crusade. The details are far too long and gruesome to be spoken of here, Highness, but I’m sure you can locate them in the Imperial Library.”

            Klayus’s eyes were like marbles in the head of a wax figure, pointed in Hari’s general direction. He rotated toward Sinter. “Your point seems obvious, Hari. Professor Seldon. May I call you Hari?”

            The Emperor had already asked him that at their last meeting, but Hari did not let on. Once again, he replied, “I would be honored, Highness.”

            “The point being that these waves of misery inevitably begin when some high official gets a bug in his hat and begins futile investigations. And when the investigations get out of hand, they cost the Empire many lives and much of treasure. Superstitions. Myths. Always dangerous, like religions.”

            Sinter said nothing. Hari merely nodded. Both had beads of moisture on their foreheads. The Emperor seemed thoughtful and calm.

            “I’m willing to vouch that my Privy Councilor has no such illusions, Hari. I hope I can reassure you of that.”

            “Yes, Highness.”

            “And you, Farad, you understand the depth of Hari’s concern, that he comes here to relay these items of information about the state of bureaucratic and popular perceptions? The citizens! Like a sea of whispers. The Greys! The eternal manipulators of human destiny, the greatest power below the Palace! And the gentry--baronial and aristocratic, aloof, conspiratorial...So important and so often subject to fluctuating themes. Eh?”

            Hari did not understand quite what the Emperor meant.

            “No hard feelings against Hari, eh, Farad?”