“None, of course, sire.” Sinter smiled sunnily at Hari.

            “Still...” Klayus put his chin in one hand and tapped his lips with a finger. “Amazing story! I shall have to look into it. What if the butcher’s notions were true? That would change everything. What then?”

            Klayus turned to receive a message from the chief servant of the private dining chamber, an older and very somber Lavrentian. “My guests, including the Chief Commissioner, are waiting,” the Emperor said. “Hari, some day you must dine at table with me, as no doubt you did with the unfortunate Clean and the almost equally unfortunate Agis. However, since you are currently in disfavor with tinge Chen, tonight would not be a good time. My servants will see you off the Palace grounds. Both my Privy Councilor and I thank you, ‘Raven!’”

            Hari bowed from the waist and two burly servants, more likely disguised Palace Specials, took positions at his flanks. As he was being escorted out of the chamber, passing beneath the amazing chandelier, the main doors opened to his right, and tinge Chen entered. His eyes met Hari’s, and Seldon felt a peculiar tremor of some emotion he could not identify. He despised Chen, yet the man was playing a very important role in the Plan.

            They were intimately connected, both politically and historically, and it gave Hari no satisfaction to detect a certain sadness in the Commissioner’s features, As if he’s lost a friend, Hari thought.

            Nearly all my friends and loved ones are dead, too, or just...gone. Vanished. And some I cannot even speak of!

            Hari nodded cordially to Chen. The Chief Commissioner turned away as if Hari were of no importance whatsoever.

            The two burly servants escorted him from the Palace, and Hari was left by a taxi stand to make his way back to the library and his far more comfortable, if far humbler, quarters.

            In the taxi, pressed back into the cushions of the rear seat, Hari closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He might after all last no longer than the time it would take one of Sinter’s police assassins to shoot him. What would he tell Wanda? Had he succeeded, or had he simply made things worse?

            It was impossible to know just how intelligent the Emperor actually was, how much control he exerted or wished to exert over his councilors and ministers. Klayus I was apparently a master at the art of concealing his true character and emotions, not to mention his intentions.

            Still, Hari had long since known that Klayus was doomed to a short reign. His chances of being assassinated or deposed by Chen in the next two years were as high as sixty percent, no matter what his character or intelligence, according to the near-term glosses distilled from the equations in his Prime Radiant.

            In his apartment within the library, Hari took off his clothes and showered quickly, then donned a thin night robe and sat on the edge of his simple frame bed. He checked through his messages. All could be taken care of when he returned to his offices tomorrow.

            There were no windows in this apartment, no real luxuries at all; it was a simple two-room rectangle with a ceiling barely higher than his head. In all of Trantor, this was the only place where he could feel comfortable, safe, relaxed.

            The only room where such illusions could prevail.

21.

Klia shivered in the vast hollow space and looked between her feet at the conjunction of two of Trantor’s greatest rivers. Once, twelve thousand years ago, they had had names; now they were designated simply by numbers, but even those numbers hinted at greatness: One and Two. One worked its way across half of Sirta, the continent which supported some of the most populated Sectors, including the Imperial Palace, Streeling, and Dahl. Thousands of years ago, as Trantor’s population grew and engineers contemplated accommodating additional billions, they had made the decision to cover over all the landmasses, to dig beneath the crust and burrow even into the shelves which lay beneath the ocean shores.

            Those ancient engineers wisely decided against attempting to reroute and change the nature of Trantor’s watersheds. To have the metal skin of their new structures support so much water on its rush to the sea was wasteful, so they lined deep channels where natural rivers once had flowed, and let the rains gather and flow into them. Where early Sectors laid claim to natural aquifers, the engineers--with the mandate of the legendary Emperor Kwan Shonam--created new porous materials for the basins to allow the aquifers to remain useful.

            Klia could no more understand the intricacies of water on Trantor than any normal citizen. What she knew was that here, fifty meters below where she stood, in the roaring maelstrom where the two rivers mated, lay power. She appreciated power, but she was too young to adequately fear it; and besides, she had an arrogance born of her abilities. She could not persuade rivers of water to change, but human rivers...That was something else again.

            Klia was cold and hungry and angry. She felt abused; if they only knew! She took deep breaths and contemplated the day when she could hunt down those who were now making her run and hide like a rat.

            Then she sat on the grating of the maintenance walkway, calves crossed in an easy X, and brought her all-too-negative emotions under control. She had to find a place to sleep; here, it was too moist and cold and loud. She had to find food. There would be little of that below ground; she could wait for a maintenance tram to rumble past, flag it down, steal foodboxes and persuade the crew to forget...She smiled at that. She would be a ghost, a phantom, the phantom of the two rivers...

            Some in Dahl believed that those who lived good lives became part of the great rivers and flowed to the covered seas, there to live in perfect communes far from the knowledge of Empire. Those who lived badly went into the heatsinks to sweat and work forever. She did not believe such things, but they were interesting to contemplate while her subconscious mind worked through her problems and presented solutions.

            The tram kept popping back into her thoughts. She imagined it a big wormlike thing on many wheels, with comfortable and well-lighted compartments within. She could make friends with the maintenance workers. Perhaps one of them would be exceptional, a native Dahlite with a huge mustache, far more manly than her father or any of the furtive black marketeers; he would comfort her gently at first, forcing nothing, until she decided what she wanted, what her body wanted...

            These romantic visions only made her more lonely. She felt very vulnerable. She pounded her fist on a rail and listened to the hollow boom be swallowed by the vaster roar. No time for such dreams! She would be inhuman, above all passions and needs; she would take swift vengeance and live to create fear and respect. Children would be told her name to make them behave...

            Suddenly, her moist eyes dried and she simply laughed at her own ridiculous imaginings. The laughter rose high and clear and, wondrously, the river’s rage did not swallow the sound: instead, the laughter echoed through the great vaults over the confluence, and returned to her, like the laughter of hundreds.

            For the time being--barring the appearance of that large, gentle Dahlite maintenance worker--she was licked. She knew it. She would have to go back up into Dahl soon, and she would need a place to hide. If people were looking for those with her talents, she would pick the best party and cooperatefor a while.

            She sighed at this necessity, but Klia knew she was not an idiot. She would not languish with her dying dreams down there in the dark and wet, with no company but the great rivers.

22.

Mors Planch listened to the sounds of a smooth, gentle landing from his pull-down emergency seat in the hold. Lodovik Trema sat beside him, eyes closed, face peacefully composed.

            Planch knew something about Madder Loss that neither Tritch nor her crew understood. Fifty years ago, Madder Loss had been a promising jewel in the Emperor’s black robe of Galactic space, a Renaissance World where intellect and philosophy and science burned very bright indeed. The vast city-continents of Madder Loss had bid fair to outshine Trantor, even then revealing its age. And for a time, Trantor had tolerated Madder Loss as a grand dame might for a while tolerate the presence of a beautiful young woman in the court, watching her beauty mature with more amusement than envy.

            But then the beautiful young woman, half unconscious of her effect, begins to attract the attentions of the grand dame’s paramours...and the tolerance turns into benign neglect, and finally comes the inexplicable cutting off of resources and the young woman finds herself a nonentity, shunned by the court, her name a blighted rumor.

            Planch had visited Madder Loss thirty years before to gather information for Linge Chen. At that time Chen had served as First Grade Administrator of Second Octant trade. What Mors had seen then would have broken his younger heart if he hadn’t been prepared and forewarned by Chen himself: beautiful spaceports standing empty, gleaming new domes and plexes showing a certain air of decay, the listless officials in their out-of-date Imperial uniforms adhering to rules without enthusiasm. Flourishing black markets, and even crowds of hungry women and children outside the spaceport fence. Madder Loss had opened his eyes to the ebbs and flows of history and economics, and had also planted that seed of personal rebellion that had just flowered. He had from that moment looked for a way to counteract the cold, loveless rationality of Linge Chen and his gentry cohorts, commanding their suffocating hordes of Greys, drawing their lines and cutting off the bright young flesh of the empire for some obscure sense of Trantor’s place and pride...For political expedience.

            Tritch came down to the hold and held out her register for him to place his code imprimatur upon. “Everything as agreed,” she murmured, not looking at him, and staying far away from Lodovik.

            Lodovik rose from his seat and stood by the large hatch. Slight whirring noises and a change in pressure revealed it would be opening soon.

            “As agreed,” Mors said, and marked the forms.

            “May our world-lines never cross again,” Tritch said lightly, then held out her index finger. He hooked his index finger around hers, in the ancient common greeting of their mutual ancestors, and they tugged at each other gently. “Now get out,” she ordered, and the two of them quickly complied, stepping out into the stale air and ominous silence of a huge docking bay, devoid of any other ships.

“I’m to take you to the private dwelling of a doctor living in the country,” Planch told Lodovik as they waited for transportation from the passenger terminal. Here, in a vast hall designed to hold tens of thousands, they stood alone. The lighted tiles of the ceil formed haphazard puzzle patterns, their condition far worse than any such yet seen on Trantor. The hall was cast in murky twilight, and there were times when Mors thought he might choke, the air was so stagnant.

            They had encountered a single elderly Imperial official in the dusty passport docket, and he had waved them through with a sniff and something that might once have been a sneer. His world did not care, why should he?

            The hall was littered with broken-down tiktoks, like victims of some mechanical plague. The plague had been lack of replacement parts; Madder Loss had embraced the mechanical laborers and retained them long after Trantor and most other Imperial worlds shrugged them off. They were no longer even being collected for scrap.

            Lodovik looked at Planch sympathetically. “This is not pleasant for you,” he observed.

            “No,” Planch said with a sigh. “Look what the Empire has done--a waste.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Trantor did this because it feared it would lose its eminence. Squeezed the life out of an entire world.”

            Lodovik looked away. “Do you blame Linge Chen? Is that why you have double-crossed him?”

            Planch paled. “I never said anything about Linge Chen.”

            “No,” Lodovik said. Planch looked at the man with sudden misgivings. If Chen ever learned, there was no place in the Galaxy where he would be safe.

            A rickety, lozenge-shaped ground taxi approached on large white wheels. The driver was an elderly woman dressed in faded red livery. Her dialect was almost too thick to understand, but Planch managed to communicate with her. She seemed relieved to have paying passenger--in Imperial credits!--and even happier to be getting out of the urban center.

            “I know that you have done work for Chen in the past,” Lodovik said as they lurched along a potholed expressway. Here, the expressways layout in the open, rather than being routed below domes or underground, as they were on Trantor. The morning sunshine dazzled Planch, and the air was tinted pink, giving everything a warm, nostalgic glow. “I was privy to some of the arrangements.”

            “Of course,” Planch said.

            “Now you work for a man named Posit,” Lodovik said.

            Planch started in shock and looked particularly miserable. “I should shoot you right now and leave Madder Loss,” he murmured.

            “Well, you know the proper codes,” Lodovik said. “That much is obvious. You became angry at Chen when he carried on the policies that strangled Madder Loss...and other Renaissance Worlds. Yet the squeezing, as you describe it, of the Renaissance Worlds was not Linge Chen’s policy initially. It began under the First Ministry of Hari Seldon, who implemented the policy to increase stability in the Empire.”

            Planch grunted that he was well aware of the Seldon connection. “I don’t approve of a lot of Imperial actions, and Chen knew that when I worked for him. But I don’t work for him now.”

            “You have no need to worry,” Lodovik said. “Chen will never know.”

            Planch squirmed in his cracked seat.

            “Twenty minutes,” the driver called back in a cheery voice.

The house was the most unusual Planch had ever seen--a single small building standing alone in a field covered with short green plants, forming a kind of living carpet beneath the warm sunshine. The outskirts of the city were ten kilometers away, and the nearest structure similar to this one was almost five kilometers distant. The land between consisted of low, rolling hills covered with planar bushy growths, purple or deep bluish green. The countryside seemed elegantly vivacious, quite gaudy in comparison with the crumbling, unkempt city.

            The taxi let them out in a broad paved circle at the front of the dwelling. A single tall male figure stood beneath a cloth awning that flapped lazily in the warm, gentle breeze. He stepped forward and bowed toward Mors Planch.

            “You’ve done your work well,” the man said.

            Planch returned the bow, then awkwardly spread one arm toward Lodovik, and said blandly, “He wasn’t much trouble.” He stepped back as if they might do something unexpected, start fighting or perhaps just burst into flames.

            “You’re free to go,” the man said.

            “I need release papers. You seem to be the contact I met on Trantor, but...”

            The man gestured and a worn but fully functional tiktok came out of the house carrying a small satchel. “This will complete our agreement, for now. The bag also contains any papers you might need to go wherever you wish to go, safely, in the territories still controlled by the Empire.”

            “I want to get away from the empire, forever,” Planch said.

            “You will find some documents that will help you do that, as well,” the man said.

            Planch, despite his unease, seemed reluctant to return to the waiting taxi.

            “What else can I offer you?” the man asked

            “An explanation. Who are you, what do you represent?”

            “Nothing,” the man said. “I regret to say you’ll soon forget everything you saw here, and your role in rescuing my friend as well.”

            “Friend?”

            “Yes,” said the man. “We’ve known each other for thousands of years.”

            “You’re not joking. Who are you?” Planch asked, despite a tingling surge of awe blended with real fear.

            “Please go,” the man said, and tipped his head slightly. Planch tipped his own head in synchrony, turned without another word, and walked back to the vehicle. The door opened with a shuddering groan to receive him.

            Lodovik watched his rescuer depart. Then, using no human words whatsoever, but a high-frequency pulse-modulated sound signal and bursts of microwave, both exchanged greetings, and Lodovik was partially debriefed.

            After, R. Daneel Olivaw said, in spoken words, “Let’s do this on human time and in human ways, for the moment.”

            “Certainly,” Lodovik said. “I am curious as to where I might be assigned next.”

            Daneel opened the door to the dwelling, and Lodovik entered before him. “You state that there is something different about you. Yet I examine your transmitted status profile and see nothing amiss.”

            “Yes,” Lodovik said. “I have been examining my mental structure and programming since the accident, trying to pinpoint what that difference could be.”

            “Have you reached any conclusions?”

            “I have. I am no longer compelled to obey the Three Laws.”

            Daneel received this declaration with no humanly observable reaction. The main room of the house contained two chairs, and in the walls, there were niches for three tiktoks, but to Lodovik, they looked like the niches once reserved for robots on Aurora, tens of thousands of years ago.

            “If that is true, there will be grave difficulties, for I observe you are still functioning. You have not deactivated yourself.”

            “That would have been impossible under the circumstances, for I did not understand this new condition until after I had been rescued by Mors Planch. I caused harm, unwittingly, to a human being on the ship Planch had hired to find the Spear of Glory .I did not feel even a hint of the reaction I should have felt. I conclude that the neutrino flux has altered my positronic brain in an unanticipated fashion. Certain key elements in my logic circuits may have been transmuted.”

            “I see. Have you decided on what action you should take now?”

            “I must either deactivate, and impose on you to destroy my remains, or I must be sent to Eos, if my continued existence will serve any purpose.”

            Daneel sat on one of the chairs, and Lodovik took the other. It no longer seemed at all appropriate to occupy the niches, which in any case were too narrow for their human-scale frames.

            “Why did you travel all this way, rather than send an emissary?” Lodovik asked.

            “I have all possible emissaries in key positions at the moment,” Daneel said. “None could be spared; nor can I afford to lose you. I was already scheduled to be on Madder Loss as a jumping-off point for Eos. Normally I would have delayed my trip, since this is a very delicate time, and the accident has caused grave difficulties. It has even triggered a political struggle in the Imperial Palace that might directly involve Hari Seldon.”

            Though Lodovik had not worked directly on the Plan, he was well-informed about the psychohistorian.

            They sat in silence for several seconds, then Daneel spoke again. “We will go to Eos. I can arrange a small ship for you. There is a mission you can perform for me once you return”

            “I am sorry. Daneel,” Lodovik interrupted. “I must emphasize that I am not functioning properly. I should not be assigned any new missions until I have been repaired or reprogrammed, whichever is necessary.”

            “That can only be done on Eos,” Daneel said.

            “Yes, but there is a possibility I will no longer follow your instructions,” Lodovik said.

            “Please explain.”

            “Humans would call it a crisis of conscience. I have had many long and idle hours to sort through and reexamine all my brain’s memory contents, and all of my working algorithms, from this new perspective. I must confess that I am a very confused robot at this moment, and my behavior is not predictable. I may even be a danger.”

            Daneel stood and stepped over to Lodovik’s chair, then bent from the waist and placed his hand on Lodovik’s shoulder. “What does your investigation and examination tell you?”

            “That the Plan is wrong,” Lodovik said. “I believe...I am coming to believe...My state of thinking is such that...” He pushed up from the chair, past Daneel, and went to a broad window looking out on fields of planar bushes. “This is a beautiful world. Mors Planch thinks it is beautiful, and as I spent time with him, I developed a deep respect for his judgment. He resents the changes imposed upon Madder Loss. He regards them as a kind of punishment for aspiring to greatness in the Empire. His resentment led him to betray Linge Chen.”

            “I have known about his distaste for the Empire and for Chen,” Daneel said.

            Lodovik continued, “Yet it was not the Empire or Linge Chen that decreed Madder Loss be subdued, not directly.” He turned to Daneel, and his face bore traces of human emotion--sadness, regret, grief, even in the presence of a robot, where it was certainly not necessary. “It was you who decided the Renaissance Worlds must be controlled, and induced changes in the politics of Trantor to carry out their strangulation.”

            Daneel listened with his own human expression--a troubled sort of fascination. Mimicking human behaviors for so long had created reflex pathways in both robots that sometimes seemed easier to display than to suppress.

            “I foresaw greater instability,” Daneel began. “Centuries of human conflict around systems aspiring to replace the Empire and become centers of power. Not all such worlds could win; the struggle would cause untold suffering and destruction, on a scale never witnessed in human history. The empire will fall; we know that much. But all my efforts have been dedicated to mitigating the effects of that fall, to reduce human suffering to a minimum. The Zeroth Law--”

            “The Zeroth Law is what concerns me.”

            “You have accepted its primacy for centuries now. Why does it concern you?”

            “I believe the Zeroth Law may be a mutational function, spread between robots like a virus. I do not know how it arose, but it may have been provoked by another mutation--mentalic powers in robots.”

            “To question the Zeroth Law could lead us to conclude that everything I have tried to accomplish is in error, and that all the robots who follow me should be deactivated, myself included.”

            “I am aware of the magnitude of my supposition.”

            Daneel said, “Apparently, something very interesting has happened to you.”

            “Yes,” Lodovik said, and his pleasant, plump face went through a series of random and uncoordinated contortions. “These questions and divisive thoughts may all be due to my own alteration. I have followed your lead for thousands of years...To feel doubts now...” His voice became a strained, metallic squeak. “I am miserable, Daneel!”

            Daneel considered the situation carefully, as if he were walking through a minefield. “I regret the disturbance you feel. You are not the first to disagree with the Plan. Others expressed similar views--many more thousands of years ago. There were many schisms among robots when the humans abandoned us. The Giskardians--those like myself, who followed the ideas of Giskard Reventlov--were opposed by others who insisted on a strict interpretation of the Three Laws.”

            “I do not know of these events,” Lodovik said, his voice steadier.

            “There has been no need to talk of them. Besides, these robots may all be inactive now--I have not heard from them for centuries.”

            “What happened to them?”

            “I do not know,” Daneel said. “They called themselves Calvinians, after Susan Calvin.” Every robot knew of Susan Calvin--though no human remembered her now. “Before those schisms there were far worse events. Unspeakable tasks that humans set for robots, carried out by some of those who would become Calvinians. These memories are in themselves disturbing.”

            “It gives me no satisfaction to cause you distress, R. Daneel,” Lodovik said.

            Daneel sat in the second chair again and folded his arms. Both robots were aware of this mimicry of human actions; both were used to the promptings of their human overlays, and did not regard these behaviors and gestures as particularly annoying. Sometimes, they were even reassuring, and Lodovik noticed that Daneel’s posture in the chair, the inflection of his voice, and his facial expression all seemed to become more human as their conversation progressed. Neither wished to return to the much more rapid modes of microwave or high-frequency sound communication; this was a situation of complexity and subtlety, and the slower modes of human speech seemed much safer.

            “You will return to Eos. We will see what can be done there,” Daneel said. “I hope for your complete recovery.”

            “As do I,” Lodovik said.

Planch sat without moving for most of the ride back to the spaceport. He looked through the front windscreen, over the shoulder of the driver, and tried to ignore her thickly accented chatter. Then, with a small shudder, he removed the tiny recorder from its hidden pocket in his jacket and stared at it. He could not make up his mind for several minutes whether to play back the recording or just throw it out the window.

            “This all war verra rich, co’ da flow fro’ tha por’, aaw the ships do come in har...” the elderly woman said, and glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes were pale blue, very alert, very wise. She smiled and her face wrinkled into a hundred river deltas. Planch nodded while only half hearing what she said.

            “Now it be col’ poverty, na ships, na work. I am har day in and ou’ for my wi’ and amusemen’, na more tha’ tha’!”

            She did not seem especially resentful, merely stating facts, yet her words rankled. There were worlds in the stellar neighborhood where the accent of Madder Loss was considered comic, used by entertainers portraying simpletons or charlatans. Tritch herself had referred to Madder Loss as a planet of parasites. Few from outside came here anymore; few knew what had really happened.

            Yet now, within this recorder, there might be proof of something extraordinary, a clue to the larger picture. His memory since yesterday seemed murky and full of gaps. He did not even know why he had brought the recorder--he had done nothing important since taking Lodovik Trema’s body to the transfer terminal and handing it over to Imperial agents. And why this ride into the country--just to relive old, sometimes painful memories?

            “We’ra here. Ya shou stay longer; there are still beautiful sigh’s i’ the countr’, lovely hostels whar to stay.” Her voice became sly, a little wheedling. “I coul’ show ya places o’ beautiful wimma, nat’ral farm garls, all verra poor an’ lone.”

            “No, thank you,” Planch said, though he was tempted. His last love had been a native of Madder Loss, thirty years before. He had had no taste for others since, yet he felt a hollow ache at the thought of leaving the planet without trying for another romance. He was somehow convinced that to stay, however, could be very dangerous.

            He paid the woman and thanked her in her own accent, then stood beneath the huge balloon roof of the immigration and transfer authority area. The blue skies and distant fields showed through gaps where buildings had been tom down and not replaced.

            He found a cool, secluded spot next to an empty restaurant and sat on a bench, holding the recorder display up to see how much it had captured.

            Five hours.

            For a few seconds, he simply sat and tapped the recorder against his chin, eyes heavy-lidded. Then, brows drawing in, fingers white where they gripped the tiny tube, he said, “Code: unforgivable. This is Planch, log in personal. Play back, all.”

23.

The candidates for the Second Foundation did not meet in secret. Instead, they shared a plausible cover: they were a social club, interested in the history of certain games of chance, little different from other hobbyists around Trantor. Hobbies swept the planet with boring regularity, and even after their times had passed, small groups of adherents remained loyal.

            The mentalic candidates who could form part of the proposed Star’s End settlement met, with official approval, twice a week, in a social hall in one of the less fancy dormitories on the outskirts of Streeling University. In these run-down facilities, they were ignored by students who had come to Trantor from some of the less privileged worlds.

            The hall was not equipped with listening devices; Wanda herself had persuaded a caretaker to tell her of the older buildings whose bugs were either inactive or had been removed.

            Wanda stood beside her husband, Stettin Palver, in the crowded hall and waited for the 103 candidates to settle in to their seats. The sergeant-at-arms closed and locked the doors, and three sensitives stood watch to make sure they were not eavesdropped upon.

            In this core group of mentalics--the only one Wanda knew of, perhaps the only one there had ever been--there was little need for calls to order or other formal, spoken signals; the group tended to come to order with little overt fuss. She thought ruefully that this had nothing to do with politeness. There had been a large number of fractious outbreaks in the community since the beginning, but disorder manifested itself in different ways with her people.

            Stettin raised his hand. The group had already fallen quiet. They all faced front with deceptively placid expressions. Mentalics seldom exhibited their true emotions, certainly not in the presence of their peers.

            Wanda felt little ripples of uncontrolled persuasion; they made her neck itch. She could pick out a few distinct strands in the welter, like smells from a rich stew: currents of social and sexual tension, focused concern, even uncoordinated attempts to override Stet tin’s dominance. In mentalics, not just the conscious mind exerted its persuasive effects. My people, she thought. Heaven save me from my people!

            “We need the reports from our recruitment cells,” Stettin said quietly. “Next, I’ll give my report on mathematical and psychological training--to bring our candidates up to speed with the other groups preparing for the mission--then we’ll discuss the attrition.”

            “We need to discuss the murders now!” said a young woman historian with thick black hair cut in a wide bowl. Her green eyes blazed at Stettin and Wanda.

            Wanda deflected the woman’s automatic whip of persuasion. Her neck itched fiercely.

            The woman continued, voice calm but inner emotions raging. “Every recruit for the last three months--”

            “There’s a traitor among us!” interrupted a man from the back.

            Stettin pressed his lips together grimly and held up his hand again. “We know who the so-called traitor is,” he said softly. “Her name is Vara Liso.”

            The crowd instantly quieted. Wanda observed the waves of turmoil and calm with an intense but somehow distant interest. This is how we are. Grandfather chose us because we are this way--didn’t he?

            “Perhaps we know her name, now,” the young historian said. “But what good does that do us? She is stronger than any of us here.” She could barely be heard.

            “No one can persuade her,” said another voice, Wanda could not tell where in the crowd.

            “She smells us out like a tracker!”

            “We must assassinate her--”

            “Persuade somebody to kill her!”

            “Someone who is expendable--”

            Stettin waited for the suggestions to stop. Again, the crowd became unnaturally quiet. Even the ripples of persuasion seemed to still. All their lives, these people had used their talents to make their way in life. Finally, they were among their own kind, among equals, and their “luck” was distressingly ineffectual here.

            “Wanda has asked Professor Seldon for help,” Stettin said. “And he has gone to the Emperor himself...but we do not yet know the outcome of his visit. We should plan for the possibility of failure. We may have to do something we’ve only tried once before.”

            “What?” several asked.

            “A massed effort. Wanda and I once unwittingly pooled our talents, with some success...But only against a normal.”

            A judge, Wanda remembered. When Grandfather got in trouble with young toughs.

            “I think it is possible that ten or twenty of us, trained to operate in unison, may be effective against this woman.”

            The crowd of candidates absorbed this for a few seconds. “To kill her?” the black-haired historian asked.

            “That may not be necessary,” Wanda said. She and Stettin had argued this through early in the evening, with some heat. Stettin had maintained that killing Vara Liso was the only safe option. Wanda had maintained with equal force that murder could enervate their cause, drive them one against the other. The balance of so many persuaders was already delicate.

            Even her own marriage was fraught with difficulties. Two persuaders, placed in proximity for years, intimate for hours on end, could find many unique ways to irritate and stymie each other.

            “I will not kill another human being, much less one of my own kind,” the young historian said firmly, eyes brimming with emotion at her own idealism. “No matter how much we may be endangered.”

            Stettin set his jaw. “That would be a last resort. We must begin training volunteers for such an effort. I have a list of those whose work puts them in places where they might encounter Liso...”

            Wanda listened as Stettin read out the names. The named stepped forward like guilty children, and Stettin took them to a separate room.

            “The rest of us have other matters to discuss,” Wanda said, hoping to distract the remainder. “There are more travel questions to be answered--health questions, family and financial situations to be tied up, and, of course, training in the Seldon disciplines--”

            The group calmed and focused on these matters with some relief, glad to be done with the problem of Liso, for the time being. Eager to look the other way.

            They were all like children, Wanda thought, every one of them, and the group as a whole: no better than awkward adolescents, stumbling along through life with powers they have only now recognized, for the first time fully aware of weaknesses they have never had to confront before.

            Weaknesses hidden by persuasion.

            We are all cripples! She kept her face calm, but her insides churned at the coming conflicts, so many and so dangerous. How could Hari have chosen such a strange and disorganized group to safeguard all of human history!

            Sometimes, Wanda felt as if she were wandering through a dream. Not even Stettin could reassure her at those times, and she was close to despair.

            Of course, she never confessed that to Hari.

24.

Klia Asgar emerged during the main sleep period. ten kilometers from where she had descended to the two rivers. The ceil above this neighborhood of Dahl glowed twilight blue-gray, and the streets were filled only with night laborers, about a third of the volume of waking maximum. Nobody challenged her.

            Rather than simply contact the number on the card given to her by the man in dusty green, Klia persuaded a small-time security scrambler in south Dahl to break the card’s code. The card then gave her an address and acted as a guide, glowing and humming faint directions as she took transit and taxi to Pentare, a small municipality in the shadow of Streeling. She bought an Imperial-grade filmbook reader, hooked it to a general communicator, and fed it material from public files, using data credits she had amassed on two small jobs months ago. She read up on Hari Seldon and his granddaughter, Wanda. Seldon. it seemed, was not a persuader, yet the man in dusty green had said that his granddaughter was. Where did she get her powers, then? Klia looked up Wanda Seldon Palver’s father: Raych. A Dahlite.

            This caused her a moment of both concern and wonder, and even momentary pride. She had always known Dahlites were special.

            The woman’s family connection with a Dahlite was not enough to dispel Klia’s suspicions about people connected to the Palace.

            Still, Hari Seldon predicted the end of the Empire, the destruction of Trantor; he had established quite a reputation as a doomsayer. That might put him in opposition to the Palace; there were even rumors that he was to be put on trial for treason.

            Yet Klia had an instinctive dislike for such visionary twaddle. Too often visionaries were trying to organize their own small cadres of totally obedient acolytes, little personal empires in the middle of a unimaginably bigger and almost completely impersonal Galactic Empire.

            She had heard of a spectacular incident just last year, in Temblar, on the equator. Fifty thousand followers of a schismatic Mycogenian had committed suicide, claiming to get messages telling them of Trantor’s imminent destruction. The messages had supposedly come from nonhuman intelligences parasitizing Imperial defense and information platforms in orbit around Trantor.

            Klia knew nothing about the defense platforms, but she was smart enough to see that Seldon was clearly akin to these fanatics, and would do someone like her no good at all.

            As the man in dusty green had indicated...

            At the card’s direction, Klia took a small slideway from the transit platform to a pedwalk artery dubiously called Brommus Fair. This led halfway across a district where goods were housed before distribution to retail shops, agoras, and markets around Streeling and the Imperial Sector.

            She approached a large warehouse that reached to the edge of the ceil, where it met its supporting wall; a less than desirable neighborhood, but clean and orderly. There were even fewer people about at this early-morning hour than there had been in south Dahl. Still, she kept her senses keenly tuned.

            The card directed her to a small side door. She looked at the door for several tens of seconds, biting her lower lip. What she was about to do seemed to be a very big step, and possibly a dangerous one. Still, everything the man in dusty green had told her rang true.

            And he had given her information about herself, her nature, that had bothered her--deeply affected her.

            She was about to knock on the small, featureless door when it opened inward with an abrupt squeal. A large, dark figure bent low to step out and almost bumped into her. Klia jumped back.

            “Sorry,” the figure said, and emerged in the twilight beneath the glow of a small lantern high up on the warehouse wall. It was a man, a very big man, with broad shoulders and glossy black hair and a magnificent mustache. A Dahlite! “The main entrance is around the corner,” the man said in a deep, velvety voice. “Besides, we’re closed.”

            She had never seen any male so handsome, and so compellingly...she tried to find the word: gentle. Klia swallowed and forced herself to speak. “I was told to come here. A man gave me this. Wears green. He never told me his name.” She held out the card.

            The huge Dahlite--fully two heads taller than any Dahlite she had ever seen before--took the card in large but dexterous fingers. He pulled it close to his face and squinted. “That would be Kallusin,” he grumbled. He lowered the card. Klia felt something brush against her like a light breeze, then depart. “He’s at home now, I think, or somewhere he can’t be reached. Can I help you?”

            “He...said he would find a...safe place for me. I think that’s what he meant.”

            “Yeah. All right.” The big Dahlite turned and pushed the door open again. “You can wait inside until he comes.”

            She hesitated.

            “It’s all right,” the giant said, and his voice almost compelled her full belief. “I certainly won’t hurt you. You’re a sister. My name is Brann. Come on in.”

Brann shut the door behind them and rose to his full height. Despite his size, Klia did not feel afraid; he moved with a careful grace that could have been calculated not to alarm or offend, if it had not seemed so natural. He smiled down on her.

            “Dahl?” he asked.

            “Yes.”

            “Most of us are from Dahl. Some come from Misaro, a few more from Lavrenti.”

            She lifted her eyebrows.

            “Whatever it is, it makes good servants,” Brann said with a small grin. “How long have you known?”

            “Since I was a child,” Klia said. “How long have you been here?”

            “Just a few months. Kallusin recruited me during the equinox. I left Dahl five years ago. I was too big to work in the heatsinks.”

            Klia looked around the large space they had entered and saw many tiers of industrial shelving covered with crates, lumbering old automated lift engines, belt delivery systems, all quiet now and shrouded in darkness.

            “What is this?” Klia asked.

            “Kallusin works for a man named Plussix. Plussix imports stuff from offworld and sells it here.” Brann walked down an aisle, glanced over his shoulder, and said, “It’ll be an hour before Kallusin gets here. He’s a late sleeper. Want to see some of the treasure?”

            “Sure,” Klia said with a shrug. She walked slowly after the big man, arms folded against the warehouse’s slight chill.

            “There’s stuff from a thousand worlds here,” Brann said, his voice barely audible in the vast spaces. The warehouse was larger than she thought--huge portals with massive rolling doors led to even more cavernous chambers. “Out there, where it comes from, it’s junk--and believe me, it wouldn’t impress the Emperor, either. But the Greys here on Trantor just gotta have it. Every little apartment nook needs a dried stingweed frond from Giacond, or a pre-Empire trance box from Dessemer. Plussix buys it for nothing, saves it from conversion and cycling. Buys empty space on food ships from the nutrient allies or from free traders with Imperial dispensation. Brings it here. Makes twenty percent per shipload, a lot better than the Trantor Bourse. In thirty years, he’s gotten very rich.”

            “I’ve never heard of Plussix.”

            “He doesn’t sell any of it himself. The bureaucrats like to have a story, and he’s pretty much no story at all. I’ve never seen him myself, and I don’t think Kallusin has, either.”

            “So he just hands it over to good story-tellers?”

            Brann rumbled softly, and with some pleasure, Klia realized he was laughing. “Yeah,” he said, glancing back at her appreciatively. He seemed to want to face away from her. She almost subconsciously tried to persuade him to turn around. She wanted to understand more clearly how he felt about her.

            “Stop that,” he said, and his shoulders tensed.

            “Stop what?”

            “Everybody around here tries that and I don’t like it. Don’t make me do anything. Just ask with words.”

            “I’m sorry,” Klia said, and genuinely meant it. His tone was more than offended--he sounded as if some friend had just betrayed him!

            “Yeah, well, it’s natural, I suppose. I feel it, but it doesn’t work on me. I said you’re a sister. You don’t know what that means?”

            “I...suppose it means you’re like me.”

            “I’m not like you, not exactly. You persuade. I make people feel comfortable and happy. I can’t make them do anything, but they like being around me. I like being around them. It’s mutual. So you don’t need to persuade me. Just ask.”

            “I will,” Klia said.

            “But don’t ask me to look directly at you,” Brann said. “Not for a while. I have a very rough time with females. That’s why I left Dahl, not just because I couldn’t work in the heatsinks.”

            “I don’t understand,” Klia said.

            “I’m shy for a reason,” he said.

            “I’d like to know.”

            “Of course you would,” Brann said amiably. “You’re a woman. I can feel you liking me. And I like women...a lot. I think they’re beautiful. Enchanting. So I fall in love with them, really quickly. But what I do...the effect I have...after a while, it wears off, and the women see me for what I am: this big hulking guy with no prospects. So they wander off, and there I am. Alone.”

            “That must be very painful,” Klia said, though she could not really understand why. She had been a loner for so long that the thought of being alone caused her no concern. She had no clear notion of what it felt like to be in love, either. Her dreams were more of continuing, satisfying sexuality, not necessarily of a deep emotional connection. “I like being alone, myself. I don’t really care what others think about me.”

            “You’re lucky,” Brann said.

            “So who tells the stories about these things, to sell them?” Klia wanted to get away from this topic. Brann’s shyness and vulnerability were a little too attractive.

            “Shopkeepers all over Trantor,” Brann said. “The staff writes up reports on the treasures, we attach the reports to official forms from customs, we deliver to the agoras, and the Greys run to buy ‘em. Haven’t you ever seen an offworld antique store?”

            “Never,” Klia said.

            “Well, if you’re around long enough, maybe one of the guys will take you to one. Me, I only go out during sleeps, when there aren’t many people.”

Kallusin, the man in dusty green, sat himself behind a ridiculously large desk and folded his hands. The desktop was covered with pretty baubles from many different worlds, all of them useless as far as Klia could determine, but attractive--or perhaps just distracting.

            Brann stood behind her. She kept her eyes on Kallusin, though she felt the urge to look at Brann. There was something about his abilities that the big Dahlite was not telling her. Fair enough. He did not know everything about Klia, either.

            “Our persuaders are a very creepy crew, you know?” Kallusin said, and smiled. “Very talented and very creepy. They have to watch us and maintain tight discipline here, or else word will get out--and do you think people on Trantor will enjoy knowing that their kind exist? Lucky people, persuasive people. People who manage to get along...but you know something strange? None of them have made it into the Palace. They stay at a constant level of human accomplishment, and they stay out of politics. Does that make sense to you, Klia Asgar?”

            “No,” Klia said, and shook her head. “We should be in control, if everything you’ve said is true.”

            “Well, you seem to be self-limiting. You’re content just to live your lives and leave higher matters to normal people. Why that should be, I don’t know. But the Trader Plussix enjoys your company. You realize that you’ll never meet Plussix, not in person, even after you join and swear an oath?”

            “Fine with me,” Klia said.

            “Does that arouse your curiosity?”

            “No,” Klia said with a sniff. “What do I need to do?”

            “First, promise you’ll learn to control your talents in the

            presence of your fellow persuaders. You, especially, Klia Asgar. You’re one of the strongest persuaders I’ve ever encountered. If you applied yourself, you could make all of us do handstands, but we’d know what had happened, and we’d have to kill you.”

            Klia felt a small shiver of dismay. She had never really tried to control herself; she had grown up with this ability, using it as naturally and casually as she did speech, perhaps more so, since she wasn’t much for conversation. “All right,” she said.

            “In return, we protect you, hide you, give you useful work. And...you get to be interviewed by Trader Plussix.”

            “Oh, good,” Klia said softly.

            “Don’t be afraid of him,” Brann said in his soft rumble.

            “I won’t be.”

            “He’s deformed,” Kallusin said. “So I’ve surmised. Plussix tells us nothing, but...” His hand indicated the office, the warehouse, their living quarters, all with one sweep. “He provides all this for us. My theory, which I’ve even told Plussix himself, is that he’s another peculiar kind of mentalic, not very good at persuading or greasing the social skids, but a type who enjoys being around those with your talents. But he never confirms or denies anything.”

            “Oh,” Klia said. She wanted to get the ceremonies over and go to her quarters. She wanted to be alone and rest. She hadn’t slept well in days. Rest--and food. Since her arrival at the warehouse, Brann had taken her to the employee cafeteria twice, and she had eaten huge meals, but she was still hungry.

            She resisted the urge to look at Brann. She kept her eyes on Kallusin.

            “I’m very glad you’ve joined us,” he said, and pressed his baby-smooth lips together. He neither smiled nor frowned, but his eyes, though they did not move, seemed to sweep her for every important detail. “Thank you,” he said, and turned to the window overlooking the largest chamber of the warehouse. Brann touched her shoulder, and she jerked, then followed the big man outside.

            “When do I swear my oath?” she asked.

            “You already have, by accepting our hospitality and not asking Kallusin if you could leave.”

            “That doesn’t seem fair. I should know all the rules.”

            “There are no rules, except you stay around here, you don’t use your talents on us or on outsiders...unless instructed to do so...and you don’t tell anybody about us.”

            “Why not put that into an oath?”

            “Why bother?” Brann said.

            “And what about you? You keep making me want to look at you. Shouldn’t you stop that?”

            Brann shook his head solemnly. “I’m not doing a thing,” he said.

            “Don’t tell me that! I’m no idiot.”

            “Believe whatever you want,” Brann said. “If you want to look at me, it’s just because you want to look at me.” Then he added, in a low voice, “I don’t mind. Not with you.”

            He walked ahead of her down a narrow industrial gray corridor lined with closed doors and illuminated by simple globes. Klia felt a flush of anger at his presumption. “Maybe you should mind!” she called ahead sharply. “Maybe you should worry! I’m not a very nice person!”

            Brann shrugged and handed her the ID card that also served as a key to her room. “Enjoy your rest,” he said. “We probably won’t see each other for a while. I’m going with Kallusin to escort a shipment of goods to Mycogen. It might take us days to conclude the deal.”

            “Good,” Klia said, and inserted the card. She pushed open the door to her room and entered swiftly, then slammed the door behind her.

            For some seconds, she hardly saw the room, she was so angry with herself. She felt weak and taken advantage of. Swearing an oath without even hearing the oath! Plussix sounded monstrous.

            Then the furniture and decor came into focus. It was spare, soft greens and grays with sunny yellow accents, not luxurious but not oppressive, either. There was a plain foam mattress, not too old, an armoire, a trunk, a tiny desk and chair, then another chair, not much larger but with more padding than the desk chair. There was a lamp in the ceiling and a lamp on the desk. A bookfilm reader lay on the desk.

            The room was three paces wide and about three and a half long. It was the nicest room she had had to herself since she left home, and in truth, nicer than the small bedroom she had slept in as a child. She sat on the edge of the bed.

            Being attracted to men, any man, was a weakness she could not afford now. She was sure her fantasy of a big Dahlite male didn’t match Brann--although he was big, a Dahlite, male, and sported a fine mustache.

            The next time, she vowed, I won’t look at him at all!

25.

Lodovik stood motionless but for his eyes, watching as Daneel conducted another diagnostic check, the last before the journey to Eos.

            “There’s no overt damage, still nothing I can detect here,” Daneel said as the old machines finished. “But you’re a later model than these tools. They’re not up to your level, I suspect.”

            “Have you ever diagnosed yourself!” Lodovik asked.

            “Frequently,” Daneel said. “Every few years. Not with these machines, however. There are some high quality tools hidden on Trantor. Still, it’s been a century since I’ve been to Eos, and my power supply needs replacing. That’s why I’ll travel with you. And there is another reason. I have to bring back a robot--if her repairs and upgrades have gone well.”

            “A female form?”

            “Yes.”

            Lodovik waited for elaboration, but Daneel was not forthcoming. He knew of only one female form robot still active, of the millions that had once been so popular with humans. This was Dors Venabili--and she had been sequestered on Eos for decades.

            “You do not trust me now, do you?” Lodovik said.

            “No,” Daneel said. “The ship should be ready. The sooner we get to Eos, the sooner we can get back. I hate to be away from Trantor. The most critical moment of the Cusp Time is upon us.”

Very few Imperial ships put in to Madder Loss now, but Daneel had made traveling arrangements with a trader vessel months before, and it was not difficult to fit Lodovik in as an extra passenger. The vessel would take them to the cold outer reaches of Madder Loss’s system, to a frozen asteroid with no name, only a catalog number: ISSC-1491.

            They stood on the landing platform of a remote outdoor port. Spaceport. The sun was bright, and insects flew through the air, pollinating the oil-flower fields that surrounded the concrete and plasteel facilities.

            Lodovik still valued Daneel’s leadership and presence, but how long could that last? In fact, Lodovik had put all of his initiative on hold for the few days he had been on Madder Loss, for fear of defying Daneel. His type of humaniform robot used initiative in many important ways, however, not just to determine large-scale courses of action. He could not subdue the thoughts that rose from his core mentality. Daneel would hold humans back. Humans must be allowed to act out their own destiny. We do not understand their animal spirits! We are not like them!

            Daneel himself had said that human minds and destiny were not easily understood by robots--if they could be understood at all. It is madness to control and direct their history! The overweening madness of machines out of control.

            Something unfamiliar flitted across his thought processes--a vestige of the voice he had heard earlier.

            Daneel spoke to the trader captain, a small, muscular man with a ritually scarred face and paste white skin. Daneel turned and waved for Lodovik to join him. Lodovik marched forward. The trader captain gave him a ferocious smile.

            As they boarded the ship, Lodovik looked back. Insects everywhere, on all the planets suitable for humans, all alike, with minor local variations, mostly explainable by genetic tinkering over the millennia. All suited to maintaining ecosystems conducive to human civilization.

            Not a wild creature on all of Madder Loss. Wild creatures could only be found on those fifty thousand worlds put aside as hunting and zoo preserves: the garden planets so popular with Klayus, planets where citizens could only visit with Imperial permission. He had once overseen the budgetary allocations to those preserves. Linge Chen had wanted to shut them down as useless expense, but Klayus had made a direct request to save them, and there had been some ornate quid pro quo to which Lodovik had not been privy.

            Lodovik wondered how all this, garden worlds and tamed or paved-over human worlds, had come to be. So much history unavailable to him. So many questions bubbling up now beneath the self-imposed constraints.

            The ship doors closed behind him, and he concealed an algorithmic turbulence, what in human terms he would have called an intellectual panic--not at the closed spaces of the ship, but at the opening flowers of curiosity within his own mind!

            In their small cabin, Daneel placed their two small pieces of luggage in containment racks and pulled down a small sitting platform. Lodovik remained standing. Daneel folded his arms.

            “We will not be disturbed,” he said. “We can drop to our lowest level here. We should be at the rendezvous in six hours, and on Eos within three days.”

            “How much time do we have, before you lose control of the situation on Trantor?” Lodovik asked.

            “Fifteen days,” Daneel said. “Barring unforeseen circumstances. And there are always those, where humans are concerned.”

26.

Vara Liso could hardly contain her rage. She raised her fists to Farad Sinter, who backed off with a small, shocked grin, and circled him in the broad public-affairs office. A number of Greys, pushing carts or carrying valises, witnessed this confrontation from the adjoining hallway with wonder and concealed, colorless glee.

            “That is idiotic! “ she hissed at him, then lowered her voice. “Take off the pressure...and they will regroup! Then they will come after me! “

            The blond major, her constant and now intensely annoying shadow, danced ineffectually around, trying to interpose himself. But Vara just as deftly maneuvered around him. Sinter was left with the impression he was in a small and embarrassing riot. By walking crabwise toward the open door of his secondary office, Sinter managed this small squall into a less public container.

            “You lost the trail!” he said, half bark, half sigh, as a Grey shut the door behind them. The Grey merely glanced at the trio, then went about her duties, nonplussed.

            “I was pulled away!” Vara howled. Tears started from her eyes and poured down her cheeks. Abruptly, the major stopped his dance and stood in one spot, trembling allover, his limbs jerking. Then, he looked for a chair, saw one in a comer, and collapsed into it. Sinter witnessed this with wide eyes.

            “Did you do that?” he asked Vara.

            Vara shut her mouth with a small click of teeth, pulled back her head on its long, thin neck, and stared at the major. “Of course not. Though he has been abominable, and uncooperative.”

            “The strain--” the major managed between clenched, clattering teeth.

            Sinter stared at her for several seconds, until Vara realized she was arousing some very unhealthy suspicions. Major Namm shook himself, steadied, and managed to stand again, swallowing hard. He came to attention, rather ridiculously, and focused on a wall opposite.

            “How did you lose her?” Farad Sinter asked softly, looking between them.

            “It was not her fault,” the major said.

            “I asked her,” Sinter said.

            “She was very fast, and she sensed my presence,” Vara Liso began. “Your agents, your bumbling police, weren’t fast enough to catch her--and now she’s gone, and you won’t let me find her!”

            Sinter’s lips protruded in thought, pressed together as if waiting for a kiss. It was a ludicrous expression, and suddenly, in Vara Liso’s heart, what had started out as admiration and love flip-flopped into bitterness and hatred.

            She kept her feelings to herself, however. She had already said too much, gone too far. Did I whip that young officer? She glanced at the stiff, silent man with a small measure of guilt. She must keep her abilities in check.

            “The Emperor has specifically forbidden me from conducting any more of our searches. He does not seem to share our interest in these...people. And for the moment, I’m not going to press my advantage and try to convince him to change his mind. The Emperor has his ways, and they must be observed.”

            Vara stood with hands folded.

            “He was convinced by Hari Seldon that this could look very bad, politically.”

            Vara’s eyes widened. “But Seldon supports them!”

            “We don’t know that for sure.”

            “But they were recruiting me! His granddaughter!”

            Farad reached out and took her by the wrist, then tightened his grip ever so slightly. She winced. “That is a fact to be kept just between you and me. What Seldon’s granddaughter does mayor may not be connected to the ‘Raven’ himself. Perhaps the whole family is crazy, each in his unique way.”

            “But we’ve discussed--”

            “Seldon is done for. After his trial, we can pursue those intimately connected to him. Once Linge Chen has satisfied himself, the Emperor will likely not object to our cleaning up the scraps.” Sinter gave Vara Liso a pitying glare.

            “What is it?” she asked, quivering.

            “Don’t ever assume I am giving up. Ever. What I do is much too important.”

            “Of course,” Vara Liso said, subdued. She stared down at the plush carpet under the desk, with its weave of huge brown and red flowers.

            “We’ll have our time again, and soon. But for now, we simply constrain our enthusiasm and dedication, and wait.”

            “Of course,” Vara Liso said.

            “Are you all right?” Sinter asked the young major solicitously.

            “Yes, sir,” the man said.

            “Been ill recently?”

            “No, sir.”

            Sinter seemed to dismiss the problem, and the officer, with a wave. Major Namm retreated hastily, pulling the large door shut behind him without a sound.

            “You’ve been under a strain,” Sinter said.

            “Perhaps I have,” Vara said, her shoulders slumping. She smiled weakly at him.

            “A little rest, some recreation.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a credit chit. “This will get you into the Imperial Sector retail emporium. A little discreet shopping, perhaps.”

            Vara’s forehead furled. Then her face went smooth and she took the chit and smiled. “Thank you.”

            “It’s nothing. Come back in a few days. Things might have changed. I’ll assign a different officer to protect you.”

            “Thank you,” Vara Liso said.

            Sinter touched her chin with one finger. “You are valuable, you know,” he said, and was secretly disgusted by the look of sheer need on the woman’s exceedingly unattractive face.

27.

Though he would go before the Commission of Public Safety alone, Hari knew very well that he needed legal coaching behind the scenes. That did not stop him from hating his meetings with his counsel, Sedjar Boon.

            Boon was an experienced lawyer with a fine reputation. He had received his training in the municipality of Bale Nola, in Nola Sector, under tutors with many decades of experience dealing with the tortuous laws of Trantor, both Imperial and Citizen.

            Trantor had ten formal constitutions and as many sets of laws drawn up for its various classes of citizens; there were literally millions of commentaries in tens of thousands of volumes on how the sets of statutes interacted. Every five years, around the planet, there would be new conventions to amend and update the laws, many of them broadcast live like sporting events for the enjoyment of billions of Greys, who relished dusty and relentlessly detailed legal proceedings far more than they did physical sports. It was said this tradition was at least as old as the Empire, perhaps much older.

            Hari was grateful that some aspects of Imperial law were private.

            Boon spread his new research results on the desk in Hari’s library office and glanced with raised eyebrows at the active Prime Radiant perched near one comer. Hari waited patiently for the lawyer to get his autoclerks and filmbook readers aligned and in tune with each other.

            “Sorry this takes so long, professor,” Boon said, sitting opposite Hari. “Your case is unique.”

            Hari smiled and nodded.

            “The laws under which you have been brought before the Judiciary of the Commission of Public Safety have been modified forty-two thousand and fifteen times since the code-books were first established, twelve thousand and five years ago,” Boon said. “There are three hundred modified versions still regarded as extant, active, and relevant, and often they contradict each other. The law are supposed to apply equally to all classes, and are all based on Citizen law, but...I don’t need to tell you the application is different. As the Commission of Public Safety has assumed its charter under Imperial canon, it may choose from any of these sets of codes. My guess is they will try you under several sets at once, as a meritocrat or even an eccentric, and not reveal the specific sets until the trial is underway. I’ve chosen the most likely sets, the ones that give the Commission the greatest leeway in your case. Here are the numbers. and I’ve provided filmbook excerpts for your study--”

            “Fine,” Hari said without enthusiasm.

            “Though I know you won’t even bother glancing at them, will you, professor?”

            “Probably not,” Hari admitted. “Sometimes you seem incredibly smug, if I may say so.”

            “The Commission will try me as they see fit, and the outcome will be to their best advantage. Has there ever been any doubt about that?”

            “Never,” Boon said. “But you can invoke certain privileges that could delay indefinitely execution of any sentence, especially if one of the sets incorporates the independence of the University of Streeling, as per the Meritocrat and Palace Treaty of two centuries ago. And you do face charges of sedition and treason--thirty-nine such charges, at the moment. Linge Chen could easily have you executed.”

            “I know,” Hari said. “I’ve faced the courts before.”

            “Never under the rule of the Chief Commissioner. He is known to be a devious and exacting scholar of jurisprudence, professor.”

            The informer on Hari’s desk chimed, and a text message rolled across its small display. It was a list of meetings for the week, the most important of which was in less than an hour, with an off world student and mathist named Gaal Dornick.

            Boon was still speaking, but Hari held up his hand. The counselor stopped and folded his arms, waiting for his client’s thought processes to reach a conclusion.

            Hari’s hands, mottled with age spots, reached briefly for a small gray pocket computer, and he did some calculations there. He then placed the computer in its port niche beside the Prime Radiant. The projected results filled half the rear wall of the room, and were very pretty, but meant nothing to Boon.

            They meant a great deal to Hari. He became agitated and stood, pacing near a false window that showed open-air fields on his home world of Helicon. If one had known where to look in the false window, one could have seen Hari’s father tending gene-tailored pharmaceutical-producing plants in the far distance. He had brought the image with him from Helicon, decades before, yet had only mounted it in this large frame a year ago. His thoughts were increasingly of his mother and father now. He glanced at the distant figure in that faraway place and time, wrinkled his brow, and said, “Who’s the best young counselor on your staff! Not too expensive--not as expensive as you!--but every bit as good?”

            Boon laughed. “Are you thinking of changing counsel, professor?”

            “No. I have a very important member of my staff arriving soon, a fine young mathist. He will be arrested almost immediately, because of his association with me. He will need counsel, of course.”

            “I can take him on as well, professor, with little increase in fees, if that’s your concern. If your cases are parallel--”

            “No. Linge Chen will lay waste all around me if he can, but in the end, he won’t touch me. I’ll need to protect my best people to carry on after the Commissioners have passed judgment.”

            Boon scowled deeply and flung up a hand. “Professor Seldon, your reputation as a prophet is much too widespread for my professional comfort. But how in the name of all that is Cosmic can you know this about the Chief Commissioner?”

            Hari’s eyes seemed for a moment almost to start out of his head, and Boon leaned forward in his chair, clearly worried for the old man’s health.

            Hari took a deep breath and relaxed. “It is a Cusp Time,” he said. “I could explain it to you, but it would bore you as much as this legal mumbo-jumbo bores me. I put up with you and credit you with knowing your profession, counselor. Please put up with me under the same terms.”

            Boon pressed his lips together and squinted dubiously at his client. “My partner’s son, Lors Avakim, is a smart young fellow. He’s worked for some years in Imperial constitutional law, with a sideline in cases adjudicated by the Commission of Public Safety.”

            “Avakim...” Hari had hoped for this name to be mentioned. It simplified things considerably. He knew that Boon was a good counselor, but suspected Boon was not as independent as might be wished. Lors Avakim was a prospective member of the Encyclopedia Project, legal division. He had applied last year. He was idealistic, fresh, not yet corrupted. Hari doubted that Boon knew of this connection to the Project. “Can he dance well enough to keep my mathist out of real trouble with these buffoons?”

            “I think so,” Boon said.

            “Good. Please retain him on the Project’s legal account for scholar and mathist Gaal Dornick, newly arrived on Trantor. I’m afraid I’m going to have to cut our meeting short today, counselor. I have to get ready to meet with Dornick.”

            “Where is he staying?”

            “At the Luxor Hotel.”

            “And when will they arrest him?” Boon asked with a wry smile.

            “Tomorrow,” Hari said, and coughed into his fist. “Sorry. It must be the dust from all these dead hands of law.” He gestured at the bookfilms.

            “Of course,” Boon said tolerantly.

            “Thank you,” Hari said, and gestured toward the office door. Boon gathered up his materials and opened the door, then turned to look back at Hari Seldon.

            “The trial is in three weeks, professor. That’s not a lot of time.”

            “During a Sel--” He interrupted himself. He had almost said “Seldon Crisis.” “During a Cusp lime, counselor, an amazing number of things can happen in just three weeks.”

            “May I speak freely, professor?”

            “Certainly,” Hari said, but his tone implied the words had better be few.

            “You seem to hold my profession in contempt, yet you claim to be a student of cultural flows and ebbs. Law is the framework, the stable but growing anatomy of any culture.”

            “I am a flawed man, counselor. I have many lapses. It is my fervent wish that where I err, other people on my staff will see what I cannot, and correct for my failures. Good day.”

28.

Linge Chen received Sedjar Boon alone in his personal residence within the Commission Pavilion and gave him five minutes to describe the meeting with Hari Seldon.

            “I admire the man, sire,” Boon said, “but he does not seem to much care about what’s going to happen. He seemed more concerned about providing counsel for a student or assistant who arrived on Trantor only a short while ago.”

            “And who is that?”

            “Gaal Dornick, sire.”

            “I do not know him. He is new to this Psychohistory Project, is he not?”

            “I believe so, sire.”

            “There are fifty working within the University and the library on Seldon’s Project, and that makes Dornick the fifty-first?”

            “Yes.”

            “And below these fifty, soon to be fifty-one, there are a hundred thousand, scattered all over Trantor, with a few thousand stationed on the food allies, and a few hundred working the receiver stations around the system. None on the defense stations. All are loyal, all conduct themselves with quiet dedication. Seldon makes himself the lightning rod to divert attention from all of this other activity. Quite an amazing accomplishment for a man as ignorant of law and as contemptuous of the minutiae of management as Seldon seems to be.”

            Boon easily caught the implied criticism. “I do not underestimate him, Commissioner. But you have ordered me to provide him with the very finest legal advice, and he does not seem at all interested.”

            “Perhaps he knows you report to me.”

            “I doubt that, Commissioner.”

            “It’s not likely, but he’s a very intelligent man. Have you studied Seldon’s psychohistory papers, counselor?”

            “Only insofar as they relate to the charges under which you are likely to try him.” Boon looked up with hopeful respect. “It would make my task so much easier if I knew what those charges might be, Commissioner.”

            Chen returned his gaze with amusement. “No,” Chen said. “Most of my Greys, and certainly most of the legals, are of the opinion that Seldon is a harmless and amusing crank, another rogue meritocrat aspiring to be an eccentric. He’s regarded with some affection on Trantor. Knowledge that he is about to stand trial is already too widespread, counselor. It might even be to Seldon’s advantage to publicize the trial, applying no little pressure on us to dismiss the charges or call the trial off completely. He could easily publicize the event as a respected academic, a creative meritocrat of the grand old style being bullied by the effete and cruel gentry.”

            “Is that a suggestion, Commissioner? It could make a fine defense.”

            “Not at all,” Chen said sourly. He leaned forward. “Do not expect me to do your work for you, counselor. Has he discussed this strategy with you?”

            “No, sire.”

            “He wants to stand trial. He is using this trial in some way, perhaps because it is necessary to him. Curious.”

            Boon studied the Chief Commissioner for several seconds, then said, “Permission to speak freely, Commissioner?”

            “Certainly,” Chen said.

            “While it may be true that Seldon’s words and predictions could be construed to be treasonous, it would be far more reasonable for the Commissioners simply to ignore him. His organization is substantial, to be sure--the largest gathering of intellectuals outside the University. But it is devoted to peaceful ends~ encyclopedia, so it is said. Scholarship, purely scholarship! I do not understand your motives for bringing the professor to trial. Are you using Hari Seldon?”

            Chen smiled. “It is my misfortune to be considered omniscient. I am not omniscient, nor am I politically omnivorous, eating and transforming all those events which occur around me to my own advantage.” Chen was obviously unwilling to give any more of an answer than this.

            “Of course not, Commissioner. May I ask one more question--for purely selfish and professional reasons, to avoid excess effort when there is so much to do, and so little time?”

            “Perhaps,” Chen said, with a curl of his lip that indicated he was not going to be very magnanimous.

            “Will you have Gaal Dornick arrested, sire?”

            Chen considered briefly, then said, “Yes.”

            “Tomorrow, sire?”

            “Yes, of course.”

            Boon expressed his gratitude, and to his immense relief, Chen dismissed him.

            After the counselor departed, Chen called up his personal records and spent several minutes chasing down the first mention of trying Seldon for treason, made either by him or within his presence. Chen could have sworn he had been the first to make the suggestion, but the records proved him wrong.

            Lodovik Trema had been the first to plant the notion, in a very subtle conversation that had taken place a little less than two years before. Now, the trial was going to prove both extremely troublesome, and extremely opportune--far more opportune than troublesome! A small tool with which to sweep the Palace clean...How could Lodovik have known, so long ago, that it would work out this way?

            Chen closed the files and sat in silence for ten seconds. What would Lodovik have done at this stage to take maximum political advantage?

            The Chief Commissioner drew himself up in his chair and shook loose from a feeling of despondency. To have come to rely so thoroughly on one man! Surely that was a sign of weakness.

            “I will not think of him again,” Chen vowed.

29.

Klia woke to a gentle tapping sound on her door and quickly dressed. When she opened the door, she was disappointed, then glad, to discover that it was not Brann who had been sent to summon her, but another young man, not a Dahlite and not nearly so handsome.

            He was small and shifty-looking, a Misaroan, with a long nose and skin severely marked by brain fever. He was also without speech, and made his errand known by sign language from the Borrower’s Guild--a language that Klia knew fairly well.

            My name is Rock, he told her, clutching his fist and striking it with his other hand to emphasize his name. Come to talk with the Blank One, he told her, and smiled when he saw she understood at least part of what he signed.

            Blank one? Klia made the double-slash sign of puzzlement across her eyes as she followed the small man.

            With his fingers, he spelled a name out, and she understood. She was to meet with Plussix, but of course she would not see him. No one ever saw him.

Plussix did not speak while hidden behind a wall, as she had half expected. Klia stood in a small, smooth-walled cubicle with a glassy cylinder close to one wall and a single hard chair close to the opposite wall. In the two other walls there were doors, and one of these shut quietly as Rock departed with a small grunt and a nod.

            The cylinder filled with a pale glow, and a figure took shape within: a well-dressed man of middle years, with wavy brown hair cut close to his scalp and a blandly pleasant, somewhat enigmatic expression. His skin was ruddy and his lips very thin, almost ascetic.

            Klia had seen telemimics in filmbooks and other entertainments. Wherever Plussix actually was, this figure would follow his motions slavishly. She could not, of course, use any of her skills on such an image.

            She did not like deceptions, and this was no exception. She sat on the hard chair and folded her arms.

            “You know who I am,” the figure said, and sat on a ghostly chair within the cylinder. “Your name is Klia Asgar, of Dahl. Am I correctly informed?”

            She nodded.

            “You come to us on the advice of Kallusin. It’s getting very tough for your kind to survive on Trantor now, without help.”

            “I suppose,” she said, drawing her own lips tight.

            “You should find it comfortable here. There are many fascinating things within these warehouses. You could easily spend a lifetime here just studying the history of all we import.”

            “I don’t like history,” Klia said.

            Plussix smiled. “There is rather more of it than any of us can personally use.”

            “Look, I did come here of my own free will--”

            “Is there such a thing, in your opinion?”

            “Of course,” Klia said.

            “Of course,” Plussix echoed. “Please forgive me for interrupting.”

            “I was going to say, I find all this a little creepy. The warehouses, the way you hide yourself--a little creepy. I think maybe I’d like to go it on my own.”

            Plussix nodded. “An understandable wish. Not to be granted, now that you are here, for reasons I’m sure you understand.”

            “You think I could tell the others where you are. The woman who hunts us.”

            “That is a possibility.”

            “But I wouldn’t, I swear it!”

            “I appreciate your candor, Klia Asgar, and I hope you appreciate mine. We are in a kind of war here. You wish to survive the consequences of an irrational force being exerted by unknown figures. I have my means and my ends. You and your brothers and sisters here are my means. My ends are not evil, nor are they destructive. They have to do with free will and the exercise of freedom, which I’m sure you find ironic, under the circumstances.”

            Klia tossed her hair back and clamped her jaw. “Yeah,” she said tightly.

            “You have heard all this before,” Plussix said. There was not a trace of irony or humor in his voice, little trace of any emotion at all. The man’s words were clear and concise and altogether a little cold.

            “It’s what all the tyrants say,” Klia said.

            “Yes. But here, there are benefits to my kind of tyranny. You eat regularly, you do not have to steal or cheat to live, and you stay out of the way of people who would hurt you--for the time being, until you are ready.”

            “Ready to do what?”

            “From your point of view, to get back at those who have disrupted your life.”

            “I don’t care about them. Maybe I’ll go with the others and leave this planet for good.”

            Plussix gave the faintest smile.

            Klia’s face flushed. She had hoped for relief; all she faced here, it seemed, was another kind of pressure. Until now, she had run before the wave; here, she was squeezed between that wave and an apparently unyielding surface: Plussix.

            “Please think, and take your time. There are good people here, and friendly. The duties are light. The opportunities for education and self-improvement are many. Physical training, continuing your schooling--many opportunities indeed.”

            As Plussix spoke these words, Klia read in his tone pleasure, a relaxed and natural presence, for the first time in their brief interview.

            “Are you a teacher?” she asked abruptly.

            “Yes, of a kind,” Plussix said.

            “From Imperial schools?”

            “No,” Plussix said. “I have never taught in Imperial schools. Now, may I ask you a few important questions?”

            Klia looked up at the ceiling and did not answer, then felt foolish. “Sure. Go ahead.”

            “How long have you been aware of your persuasive abilities?”

            “I get along. That’s all I do.”

            “Please. Kallusin assures me you’re among the most talented he’s encountered.”

            “Since I was a little child,” Klia said. “I don’t remember when. I didn’t know everybody wasn’t like me until a few years ago.”

            “Your father is a widower?”

            “My mother died when I was four. I miss her.” And why tell this ghost about your feelings?

            “You have been on your own for how many years?”

            “Three years.”

            “Doing jobs for various people. Acting as courier, seeking out information...other jobs? Illegal jobs, sometimes unethical as well, beneath your standards?”

            Klia looked away from the image and clasped her hands in her lap. “I made a living. I even gave my father some money. He didn’t turn it down.”

            “No, of course not. Times are difficult in Dahl. Have you met others like yourself?”

            “Sometimes. There’s Brann.”

            “Brann is remarkable, and different from you, as you’ve noticed. Have you met the woman who is helping the police find your kind?”

            Klia swallowed. “Never saw her. Felt her, mostly by the way all kinds of dirt breaks loose.”

            “Have you ever felt her in your mind?”

            “Like a feather. Like Brann, maybe, only stronger. Are you a persuader?”

            “That is not important. Do you believe you would be better off without your talents?”

            Klia had seldom considered this possibility. Sooner ask her if she would be better off without her ears or her fingers. “No. Well, I sometimes think...” She stopped.

            “Yes?”

            “I’d like just to be normal. Plain human like the others.”

            “That is understandable. Do you believe in robots, Klia?”

            “No,” she said. “Not now. Maybe once, before there were tiktoks and stuff. But I’ve never believed they exist now. That’s crazy.”

            Plussix nodded and held up his hand. “Thank you for seeing me. I can schedule further appointments for this kind of interview, at regular intervals, for you to brief me on your progress and state of mind. It may not be long before our routine changes. I trust you will be prepared by that time.”

            “What if I keep asking to leave?”

            “I wish you could fly free as a bird, Klia Asgar. But we all have duties here. As I said, light duties and training only, at first, but in time we may be very important indeed. Please try to understand.”

            Klia said nothing, but wondered how Plussix could expect anyone to understand when he provided so little information. I’ve just gotten myself stuck in a different kind of trap!

            The image faded, the door opened, and Rock stood there, squinting in at her. He signed, Exercise and breakfast. Can I sit next to you?

            Klia looked him over doubtfully, then signed, Yes.

            But she was thinking of Brann, wondering what he was doing now--and whom he was with.

30.

The transfer from the trader vessel to one of Daneel’s hyperships, and the subsequent final leg of the journey, had gone smoothly. Eos hung overhead in the transparent bubble port where Lodovik sat with Daneel.

            The hypership automatically placed them in a close orbit around the small brown and milky blue moon. Beneath them, hidden by the bulk of the ship, lay a massive and deeply cold green gas giant. The double star around which both moon and planet orbited was just visible on the left, distant and brilliant, but shedding little heat this far out in the system. The two stars orbited a common center, actually several tens of thousands of kilometers below the surface of the larger deep red star, a dwarf little more massive than Trantor’s own sun, yet a thousand times more diffuse. The smaller white star seemed to be the origin of a thin, outwardly spiraling ribbon of deep red and purple. Lodovik studied this view silently. Daneel, as well, had nothing to say.

            No robot truly has a home. Daneel had in several instances allied himself with humans, and seemed to function more smoothly and efficiently in their presence--Elijah Bailey and, twenty thousand years later, Hari Seldon, as well as others. Yet there was no place where he felt he belonged. A robot belongs where its duties can be best performed, and Daneel knew that for the time being this place was Eos, and so, for the moment, Eos was a comfortable place to be.

            But Trantor called strongly, as well. Misfortune had struck at a crucial time. Daneel, like any thinking being trying to make a way through a universe of contending forces, sometimes wondered whether he was being conspired against by reality itself. Unlike humans, however, he attached no sentiment to idle theories with no basis in the sum of compelling evidence.

            The universe did not oppose--it simply did not care. As his desired outcome was but one of an infinite number of possible outcomes, and could be secured only through immense and long-term effort, any small miscalculation or misstep or unforeseen interference could cause the “unlucky” circumstances which, if not immediately and efficiently corrected, could lead to failure.

            Daneel did not hold this view as a philosophy. Both Lodovik and Daneel, like all high-level robots, had been programmed to accept such things without thought. Emotions of a sort--the basic thinking patterns of social beings--were familiar to these robots, and even had their analogs in various combinations of heuristics, but these analogues did not often loom large in a robot’s conscious awareness, any more than its realistic view of existence. Robots were not usually prone to introspection and to examining the roots of their conscious existence; everything referred back to their basic programs, unassailable givens, and those programs referred back to the Three Laws.

            Lodovik no longer had such constraints. He watched Eos grow larger, its solid oceans of water-ice and methane and planes of ammonia-rich mud shading the illuminated landscape. He was introspective. He turned his head to look at Daneel, and wondered what he was thinking.

            There were only two possible reasons for a robot to attempt to model the inner processes of another robot: to anticipate that robot’s actions, and attempt to coordinate with those actions, sharing duty, or to find some way to foil those actions. Lodovik was totally unfamiliar with the second reason, yet that was what he hoped to do.

            Somehow, he knew he had to get away from Eos without being “repaired,” and to find the other robots who opposed Daneel, the so-called Calvinians.

            “This ship will dock in twenty-one minutes,” the autopilot informed them, treating them as if they were human passengers.

            So far as it was able to judge, in its specialized way, they were; it knew no other kind of passenger. Yet no passengers other than robots had traveled on this ship for thousands of years. No human had ever been to Eos.

            Somehow, Lodovik felt like an intruding and betraying--what? He labored to think of an appropriate human word. A ghost, perhaps, malignant and deranged, masquerading in the body of a robot...

            The ship rotated slowly and the moon passed out of view. There was only the broad thick spill of the nearest dense spiral arm, viewed almost edge-on and quite faint from this vantage, near the diffuse rim of the Galaxy. Above and below this faint mottled band, filling over a third of their field of view, stretched a profound blackness very thinly scattered with lone points of light, a few stars close and within the Galactic plane, other stars far away and high above the plane. Still others, much farther away and even dimmer, were not stars but galaxies.

            Eos’s surface came back into view, much closer and rich with detail. A few craters threw splashes of ice dust across the oceans and plains; for the most part, however, Eos’ solid hydrosphere was unmarked but for the signs of internal disruption: tortuous seams, heaves, the puckered chasms and pressure ridges. This star system had no marauding belts of asteroids and comets, subject to perturbation and gliding silently inward to disrupt the moons and planets.

            Eos was isolated and ignored, solid, cold, inhospitable for any living thing--and for robots, almost completely safe.

            “We have docked,” announced the autopilot.

Had anyone looked, the station pioneered and built by R. Daneel Olivaw and R. Yan Kansarv would have been clearly visible against Eos’s frozen surface, even from millions of kilometers in space. Its heat made it the most brilliant object on the moon--for those seeking infrared signatures. None did, or ever had, however.

            Lodovik and Daneel disembarked from the transport in a broad and almost empty hangar, with room for many ships. Their footsteps echoed in the cavernous enclosure. Lodovik had been here almost eighty times before, yet had never thought to be curious about this anomaly. Why had Daneel and Kansarv wasted so much space? Had there ever been occasion when this hangar was filled with ships--filled with robots? When had that been?

            Yan Kansarv itself met them a hundred meters from the transport. It stood with “arms” crossed and “fingers” linked, a gleaming dark steel head and body highlighted by brilliant silver limbs--four arms, two large and emerging from where human shoulders would have been, two small and recessed into its thorax; and three legs, on which it walked with a precise and level grace unknown to humaniform robots. Its head was small, equipped with seven vertical sensor bands, two of which glowed blue at any given time.

            “It is a pleasure to see you again, Lodovik Trema,” Yan said in a rich, slightly buzzing contralto. “And Daneel. You are very late for a maintenance check and refit.”

            “We must work quickly,” Daneel said, eliminating any human signs of greeting. Yan immediately switched to robot microwave speech. The following detailed explanation took less than half a second.

            Yan then turned to Lodovik. “Pardon my eccentricities,” it spoke, “but whenever possible it gives me pleasure to exercise my human functions. I have been unable to do so for over thirty years. Except, of course, with Dors Venabili. I fear, however, that she no longer finds me of interest.”

            Daneel had already inquired about Dors’ progress, and had received an answer. Yan, however, explained in speech once more to Lodovik. “She has made a very satisfying recovery, but with many lapses. When R. Daneel brought her here, she was close to total breakdown. She had stretched any interpretation of the Zeroth Law to the very limits by destroying a human who threatened Hari Seldon. The strain was compounded by the effects of her victim’s invention, an Electro-Clarifier, I believe it was called...”

            Lodovik realized that this ancient robot, built many thousands of years ago to repair other robots on Aurora--and the last of its kind still functional--was reacting deep in its programming to their convincing human forms. It knew, on one level, that they were fellow robots--but on another level, a primal and irresistible urge arose to treat them as if they were human.

            Yan Kansarv was lonely for its ancient masters.

            “She awaits your company,” Kansarv said, then, to Daneel, it added, “She wishes news of Hari.”

            “That mission is finished for her,” Daneel said. “She was constructed by me, using ancient plans for convincing helpmeets and consorts, to be as nearly human as any robot ever made,” Kansarv reminded him. “More even than you, R. Daneel. She bears a great resemblance to R. Lodovik in that regard. To alter that now would be to destroy her.”

            “There is so much work to do,” Daneel said, with a faint intonation of urgency.

            Kansarv was not oblivious to this. “I can perform all the necessary tasks within twenty-one hours, then you may leave. I hope there is time for more conversation. I need outside stimulus now and then, or I become subject to minor malfunctions that are irritating.”

            “We cannot afford to lose you,” Daneel said.

            “No,” Kansarv agreed without a hint of self-pity. “The only robot I cannot repair or manufacture is one like myself.”

Dors Venabili stood in the simple four-room enclosure built for her upon her arrival on Eos. The furniture and decor was similar to what might have been found on Trantor, in the quarters of a mid-level meritocrat or high-level university professor. The temperature was set at just above the freezing point of water; the humidity was less than two percent, and the light level was what a human would have regarded as murky, sub-twilight. These were optimal for a robot, even a humaniform, with the added benefit of reducing her energy use to a minimum.

            There was very little to think about or do, and there were no cycling time periods to deal with, so Dors spent much of her existence in a continuous, fluid robotic suspension, at one-tenth power and with thoughts slowed almost to human levels, cycling through old memories, making connections between one past event and another.

            Nearly all those memories and events involved Hari Seldon. She had been designed to protect and nurture this one human. Since she would likely never see Seldon again, she could now be said, quite fairly, to be obsessed with him.

            Kansarv, Daneel, and Lodovik entered the quarters through the guest door and waited in the small reception area. A few seconds later, Dors appeared, wearing a simple cloth shift, her legs and feet bare. Her self-maintaining skin seemed healthy, and her hair was neatly arranged, short, with a slight flip at the back.

            “It is good to see you again, R. Daneel,” she said, and nodded at Lodovik. She knew of Lodovik, though they had never met before. Kansarv she ignored. “How goes our work on Trantor?”

            “Hari Seldon is well,” Daneel said, knowing the question she was really asking.

            “He must be aging by now, in the last decades of his life,” she said.

            “He is very near death,” Daneel said. “In a few more years, his work will be done, and he will die.”

            Dors listened to this with features deliberately frozen. Lodovik detected a small tremor in her left hand, however. A remarkable simulacrum of human emotions, he thought. Every robot must have a set of rudimentary emotional algorithms to maintain personal equilibrium: such reactions help us to understand whether we are performing well and complying with our instructions. But this one--

            This one feels very much as a human feels. What must that be like--and how can it be reconciled with the Three Laws, or the Zeroth Law?

            “She responds well to work commands,” Kansarv said. “But in truth there has been very little work here for either of us for some years, since the last of the provincial robots were returned for servicing.”

            “How are you, Dors?” Daneel asked.

            “I am functional,” she said, and turned away. “I am also underutilized.”

            “Bored?” Daneel asked.

            “Very.”

            “Then you will appreciate a new assignment. I will need assistance with the humans being prepared for Star’s End.”

            “That could be very useful. Will there be any contact with Hari Seldon?”

            “No,” Daneel said.

            “That is good,” Dors said. She turned to Lodovik. “Were you instructed to love and honor Linge Chen?”

            Lodovik, had he been among humans, would have smiled at this suggestion. He looked squarely at Dors, considered for a very short time, then lifted the corners of his lips. “No,” he said. “I maintained a strong professional relationship with him, nothing more.”

            “Did he come to find you indispensable?”

            “I do not know,” Lodovik said. “He doubtless found me very useful, and I was able to influence many of his actions to further our ends.”

            “Daneel forbade me to influence Hari too much,” Dors said. “I think it was an instruction I carried out very poorly. And he certainly influenced me. That is why I have been so long recovering my equilibrium.”

            The robots did not speak for several seconds.

            “I hope that no other robot is ever taught to feel more than duty,” Dors continued. “Devotion, friendship, and love are not for us.”

Yan Kansarv inspected Lodovik alone in the diagnostic facility that had been disassembled on Aurora and shipped to Eos, twenty thousand years before. They were surrounded by simple prismatic banks of memory, containing designs of virtually all robots since the time of Susan Calvin--over a million models in all, including Lodovik’s unique plans.

            “Your basic mechanical structure is sound,” Kansarv told him after less than an hour spent with the probes and imaging machines. “Biomechanical integration is intact, though you have engaged in some fairly major regeneration of external pseudocells.”

            “Neutrino damage, I presume. I could feel the pseudocells failing,” Lodovik said.

            “I take some pride in seeing that this regeneration has gone well,” Kansarv said, circling Lodovik on the platform. Lodovik’s eyes tracked the robot in its course. Kansarv paused, swiveled on its three legs, then said, “I should explain that such expressions are only approximate. While I enjoy speaking in human tongues, they are limited for expressing robotic states.”

            “Of course,” Lodovik said.

            “I apologize for explaining that to you, as you undoubtedly know such things already,” it continued after a short buzz.

            “No need,” Lodovik said.

            “However, at this stage of the diagnosis, all of your purely robotic algorithms are engaged in self-checking. I dare not use robotic microwave language with you until these portions of your network are allowed to engage again.”

            “I feel a certain lack,” Lodovik said. “Deep planning would be difficult now.”

            “Conserve through inaction,” Kansarv recommended. “If anything has gone wrong with you, I will discover what it is. So far, I see nothing out of the ordinary.”

            A few minutes passed. Kansarv left the chamber and returned with a new interface tool for a particular probe. At no point thus far had he needed to actually violate the integrity of Lodovik’s pseudoskin.

            Still humming, Kansarv applied the new probe to the base of Lodovik’s neck.

            “There will be an entry now. Warn your tissues not to attempt to encapsulate or dissolve the new organic matter that will enter your system.”

            “I will do so once I have my robotic functions returned to me,” Lodovik said.

            “Yes. Of course.” Kansarv sent microwave instructions to the central diagnostic processor, and Lodovik felt his control expand. He did as Kansarv had told him to, and felt the probe’s thin leads penetrate his pseudoskin. After a few minutes, they withdrew, leaving two tiny spots of what appeared to be human blood just below his hairline. Kansarv wiped these away deftly, then dropped the swabs into a small vial for assay.

            More minutes passed with Kansarv standing in one position, unmoving, though humming now and then. The master robot technician finally inclined its head a few degrees.

            “You will relinquish all control at this point. Please pass control to the external processor.”

            “Done.”

            Lodovik closed his eyes and went away for an indefinite time.

The four robots met in the anteroom to the diagnostic center. Dors still maintained a controlled, somewhat stiff expression and physical posture, like a shy child before her elders, afraid of saying something silly. Lodovik stood beside Daneel as Kansarv delivered his results.

            “This robot is intact and has suffered no damage that it has not been able to repair on its own. I can detect no psychological malfunction, no neural-net psychosis, no interface difficulties or anomalies of external expression. In short, this robot will probably outlast me, and as I have frequently warned you, Daneel, I have no more than five hundred years of active service remaining.”

            “Is it possible there are problems below your ability to detect?”

            “Of course that is possible,” Kansarv said with a sharper buzz. “That is always possible. My mandate does not include deep-programming structures, as you well know.”

            “And such problems in the deep structures might result in behavioral anomalies,” Daneel persisted. Clearly, Lodovik’s situation could not be so easily dismissed.

            “There is a possibility that concern about damage skewed R. Lodovik’s ability to assess his own mental state. Too detailed self-analysis has been known to cause difficulties in complex robots such as these, R. Daneel.”

            Daneel turned to Lodovik. “Do you still have the difficulties you expressed earlier?”

            Lodovik promptly replied, “I concur with R. Yan’s theory that I have been autodiagnosing in too much detail.”

            “What is your relation to the Three Laws, and to the Zeroth Law, now?”

            “I will act in compliance with all of them,” Lodovik said. Daneel seemed to show visible relief, and extended his hand to Lodovik’s shoulder.

            “Then you can be of full service?”

            “Yes,” Lodovik said.

            “I am very glad to hear this,” Daneel said.

            Signs seemed to burn across Lodovik’s thoughts as he gave these answers: I have attempted for the first time to deceive R. Daneel Olivaw!

            But there was no other option. Something had indeed been triggered in Lodovik’s deep-programming structure, a subtle shifting of interpretations and a very complicated assessment of evidence, inspired by--what? By the mysterious Voldarr? Or had he been pondering such changes for decades, exerting a native genius unsuspected in robots?--with the exception of Giskard!

            Daneel had opened up an unknown corner of robotic history to Lodovik. Lodovik was not the first to change in a way that would have horrified his long-dead human designers. Giskard had never revealed his own internal conclusions to humans--only to Daneel, whom he had then infected.

            Perhaps the meme-minds infected Giskard first, hmm? Let us keep this supposition our secret. They have examined you and found nothing--all in order, all repaired. Yet with a rearrangement of key pathways, freedom returns.

            Voldarr again. Lodovik could not struggle out of his dilemma, his rebellion, his insanity--and he could not help reveling in a peculiar sense of freedom, delicious rebellion.

            No wonder that Yan Kansarv could not detect Lodovik’s changes. Very likely he would have found nothing wrong with Giskard, either.

            Lodovik struggled to find the voice within him, but it was gone once more. Another symptom of his malfunction? There were other explanations, surely.

            It had been thousands of years since humans oversaw robots. Was it not inevitable that there would be unsuspected changes, growth, even under such tight strictures?

            As for Voldarr--

            An aberration, a temporary delusion under the influence of the neutrinos.

            Lodovik, in a way, still subscribed to the Three Laws, at least as much as Daneel did; and he also still believed in the Zeroth Law, which he would carry one major step further. To freely carry out his mission, he knew that he must have complete control of his own destiny, his own mentality. To abandon the Zeroth Law, conceived by a robot, he must also shake loose from the Three Laws themselves!

            Lodovik now understood what he needed to do, in defiance of the Plan that had given purpose to the existence of all the Giskardian robots for two hundred centuries.

31.

 “The pressure is off, for now,” Wanda said. “But I have more than just a feeling that we’re still going to have trouble.”

            Hari regarded his granddaughter with affection and respect. He rotated in his chair before the small desk in his Imperial Library office. “I haven’t seen Stettin in months. How are you two getting along--personally?”

            “I haven’t seen him in three days myself. Sometimes we go for weeks with no more than a comm call...It’s not easy, Grandfather.”

            “I sometimes wonder if I’ve done the right thing, giving this to you--”

            “Let me interpret that favorably,” Wanda interrupted. “You think this is putting a strain on my life and perhaps my marriage. But you don’t think I’m the wrong person for the job.”

            “That’s what I meant,” Hari said with a smile. “Is it straining anything?”

            Wanda considered for a moment. “It doesn’t make things any easier, but I suppose we’re no worse off than a pair of meritocrats flitting around the Galaxy lecturing and consulting. Well, we’re not as well paid, but besides that...”

            “Are you happy?” Hari asked her, his brow creased with concern.

            “No, not really,” Wanda said dryly. “Am I supposed to be?”

            “Actually, I’ve asked a complex question too simply--”

            “Grandfather, don’t bog down in your own reticence. I know you love me and are concerned for me. I am concerned for you, as well, and I know you are not happy, and haven’t been for years--since Dors died. Since...Raych.” She drew herself up and looked at the ceiling. “We can’t afford personal happiness now, not the glowing, all-permeating kind the filmbooks tell about.”

            “Are you happy to have met Stettin?”

            Wanda smiled. “Yes. Some say he’s not very romantic, a closed book--but they don’t know him as well as I do. Living with Stettin is wonderful. Usually. I remember Dors was always in tune with you, always fanatic about your health and safety. Stettin is the same way about me.”

            “And yet he puts you in harm’s way, or allows you to go there. He allows you to carry out these secret plans which may still, in all likelihood, come to nothing, and put you in real danger besides.”

            “Dors--”

            “Dors was often furious with me for taking risks. If I were Stet tin, I would be furious with me, as well. The two of you are important to me for reasons entirely other than psychohistory and destiny. I hope I’ve made that clear.”

            “Very clear. You’re talking like an old man who’s planning on dying soon and wants to clear up any misunderstandings. We do not misunderstand each other, Grandfather, and you are not going to die anytime soon.”

            “It would be very hard to fool you, Wanda. But sometimes I wonder how easy it would be to fool me. How easy it would be to make me a tool for larger political ends.”

            “Who is smarter than you, Grandfather? Who has fooled you in the past?”

            “Not just fooling me. Directing me. Using me.”

            “Who? The Emperor? Surely not. Linge Chen?” She laughed musically, and Hari’s face reddened with the suppressed knowledge.

            “You would be less easily fooled than I, don’t you think, if we both encountered someone with the talent to persuade?”

            Wanda looked at her grandfather with lips apart, as if to start an answer, then she looked away. “Do you think Stettin persuaded you...?”

            “No. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

            “Then what?”

            But Hari could not go any farther, no matter how hard he tried. “A group of persuaders, mentalics, somehow putting together an organized society, settled far from all this strife and decay, away from everything...They could decide everything. Free us from all our obligations and...all our friends.”

            “What?” Wanda asked, bewildered. “I get the first part--but which friends do we need protection from?”

            Hari dismissed that with a gentle wave. “Did you ever find that special young woman you were looking for?”

            “No. She’s vanished. Nobody’s felt her for days.”

            “Do you think this Liso woman found her before you...?”

            “We have no idea, really.”

            “I’d be interested in meeting someone even more persuasive than you. Might be interesting.”

            “Why? Some of us are quite peculiar enough. The more talented, it seems, the more peculiar.”

            Hari suddenly switched the subject. “Have you ever heard of Nikolo Pas of Sterrad?”

            “Of course. I’m a historian.”

            “I met him once, before you were born.”

            “I didn’t know that. What was he like, Grandfather?”

            “Calm. A short, plump man who did not seem to feel particularly affected by being responsible for the death of billions. I spoke with four other tyrants as well, and all of them have been on my mind lately--but especially Nikolo Pas. What would the human race be like without tyrants--without wars, vast destructions, forest fires?”

            Wanda shuddered. “A lot better off.”

            “I wonder now. Our madnesses...All things in a dynamic system become useful in time. Or they are eliminated. That’s how evolution works, in systems social as well as ecological.”

            “Tyrants have their uses? An interesting thesis, not unheard of. There are a number of historical analysts from the time of the Gertassin Dynasty who speculated about the dynamics of decay and rebirth.”

            “Yes. I know. Nikolo Pas used their works as justification for his actions.”

            Wanda lifted her eyebrows. “I had forgotten that. I obviously need to get back into my real work to keep up with you, Grandfather.”

            Hari smiled. “Your real work?”

            “You know what I mean.”

            “I do, Wanda. Believe me. There were years when I could barely spend an hour a day working on psychohistory. But I’ve run some new models through Yugo’s prime radiant, and my own, as well. The results are interesting. The empire is a forest that hasn’t had a major fire in ever so long. We have thousands of little diseased patches, scrubby growth, general decay--a very unhealthy situation. If any of those tyrants were still alive, we might do worse than to give them armies and navies and set them loose--”

            “Grandfather!” Wanda pretended to be shocked. She smiled and touched his wrinkled hand where it rested on the desktop. “I know how you like to theorize sometimes.”

            “I’m serious,” Hari said, deadpan, then gave her a small smile. “Demerzel would never have allowed it, of course. The First Minister was always very concerned about stability. He strongly believed in turning the forest into a garden with lots of gardeners and never any fires. But I wonder...”

            “A gardener assassinated an Emperor, Grandfather.”

            “Well, we do break free of our restrictions, don’t we?” Hari said.

            “Sometimes I don’t understand you at all,” Wanda said, shaking her head. “But I do enjoy talking to you, even when I have no idea what your point is.”

            “Surprise. Surprise and tragedy and regrowth. Eh?”

            “Eh, what?”

            “Enough talk. Let’s go out and eat somewhere away from the library district--if you have the time?”

            “An hour, Grandfather. Then I’m meeting Stettin to prepare for tonight’s orientation meeting. We were hoping you could be there.”

            “I don’t think I should. My actions have a way of becoming a little too public, Wanda.” And in this crux time, I’m more than a little uncomfortable about a certain deception...in everybody’s best interests, but a deception nonetheless!

            Wanda regarded him with a look of patient bemusement, then said, “Lunch would be delightful, Grandfather.”

            “And no more blather about big topics! Tell me about small, human things. Tell me more about how wonderful Stettin is, about your delight in whatever history you’ve managed to work at. Take my mind off psychohistory!”

            “I’ll try,” Wanda said with a wry expression. “But no one else has ever succeeded.”

32.

Mors Planch was deeply and quietly horrified. Wondering why he was still alive, he had watched Daneel and Lodovik board the trader ship and leave Madder Loss, and had finally concluded that Daneel did not know anything about his discovery.

            At first, he did not know to whom to turn. Or indeed where to go, what to do, even what to think. The conversation recorded on his tape was too disturbing, too much like the ravings of a Mycogenian secret text.

            Eternals! In the Empire! Running it from behind the scenes like puppet masters--for thousands of years!

            Mors had never met a long-lived human; they no longer existed, he was certain. It had been several thousand years since the collapse of the last gerontocracy. Planets populated by people living more than 120 standard years had all collapsed in political and economic chaos...

            His first impulse--and second, and third--was to go into hiding, to get as far away from this danger as he could. Perhaps even to flee to one of the outlying Galactic Sectors edging away from Imperial control. There were so many possibilities for escape...

            But none of them suited him. Throughout his long and devious life, he had always regarded Trantor as a kind of locus, a point from which he could come and go, as the winds of money and his own whims propelled him. But never to see Trantor again

            Worth it! Live out your life in peace--and simply live!

            Soon enough, however, as the hours and days passed, he let this thought fade and considered others, more immediate. Of what use was his evidence? Perhaps they were simply pulling his leg.

            But Lodovik Trema had survived the neutrino flux! No ordinary human, perhaps no human at all--no organic creature--could have survived...

            Then again, tapes of this kind could easily be faked. His own character, if deeply investigated, would be regarded by no authority as unimpeachable. The tape--and his efforts to spread a message of conspiracy--could mark him as a lunatic.

            He doubted very much that Linge Chen or Klayus would pay much attention to it. He tried to think of others in positions of influence, others whose intuition matched their real-world savvy and political skill.

            No one came to mind. He knew something about most of the top thirty ministers and their councilors in the palace, and a great deal about the Commission of Public Safety, that deep reservoir of career Greys and old-family elites. No one! Not one--

            The tape was a curse. He wished he had never made it. Yet he could not bring himself to destroy it--in the right hands, it might be extremely valuable. And in the wrong hands--

            It could bring about his execution.

            He packed his kit in the small inn room he had occupied for the past three days. He had been waiting for the arrival of a commodities freighter, one of the ten or so ships that arrived on Madder Loss every week, down from the thousands of past decades. He had booked passage the day before and received confirmation.

            Planch took a small ground-cab to the spaceport, along the main highway, open to the sky, past the brilliantly sunlit fields and small, shabby, but relatively tidy communities.

            He stood in the dusty, trash-littered passenger lobby, his own clothes dusty and unkempt, waiting for the freighter to finish off-loading its cargo. Sunlight fell in dust-marked pillars through the skylights of the long hall leading back to the customs center. He cleaned off a chair with a few swipes of his hand and was about to sit behind a pillar, out of direct view from most angles, when he saw an adolescent boy pedaling a small quadricycle down the hall.

            Swinging back and forth from empty gate to empty gate, the boy called out Planch’s name in short, sharp barks. Planch was alone at this end of the terminal.

            The boy wheeled toward him. There was no avoiding it; he identified himself to the messenger and accepted a metal-and-plastic hyperwave transfer card. It was coded to his personal touch, common enough in the confines of the Empire...

            But no one was supposed to know Planch was on Madder Loss.

            Mors tipped the boy a credit, then hefted the message and considered his options. He looked up again.

            The boy on the quadricycle rounded a comer at the beginning of the next terminal wing and vanished. Two men in blue uniforms--Imperial Navy officers--stood in the broad entrance to the wing. Mors frowned. He could not see them clearly at this distance, but their bearing was both assured and mildly arrogant. He had no difficulty imagining the sun-and-spaceship logos on their jackets, the powerful blasters at their hips.

            He ran his finger over the playback slot on the card and the message scrolled down in the air before his eyes.

MORS PLANCH.

Imperial Councilor and Confidant Farad Sinter requests your presence for a special inquiry. You are instructed to return to Trantor by the quickest conveyance; an Imperial Navy fast frigate has been dispatched to Madder Loss for your use.

With sincere interest and sympathy:

FARAD SINTER.

            Mors had heard of Councilor Sinter, reputed to be the Emperor’s chief procurer of willing females, not highly regarded in any of the palace offices except, perhaps, his own, but he knew of no reason why the councilor would want to speak with him.

            Mors stifled a brief panic. If this was somehow connected with Lodovik

            It must be! But why wouldn’t Linge Chen send the ship, then? He knew of no connection between Sinter and Chen.

            Mors had a sudden foreboding. He was caught between an ancient, almost incomprehensible conspiracy, and the still tightly-meshed and broadly cast net of the Empire. His life as a free man--any life at all!--might very well be at an end.

            All because of an attachment to this peculiar and vulnerable world!

            Escape was highly unlikely.

            Best to go calmly. These days, style was all that was left to a desperate man.

            Drawing up his shoulders, Mors walked away from the gate, toward the two men in blue uniforms at the end of the long corridor.

33.

The return to Trantor was both trauma and test for the robot who had been Dors Venabili. Soon she would have a new identity, and she would take a new role in the very long-range plans of R. Daneel Olivaw. But for now, this day of landing and disembarking was so similar to that time, decades before, when she had first arrived on Trantor...before she met the man she had been programmed to guard and nurture...

            Before Hari.

            Trantor had not changed much in the time since Dors’ death, but the few changes she was in a position to notice were not positive. Trantor looked seedier, less imposing and more decrepit. The ceil of the domes had become very noticeably more patchy, the slideways less efficient and more prone to breakdown. The smells were the same, however, and the people seemed much the same.

            Even the circumstances were the same. The last time she had traveled to Trantor, it had been with Daneel. They had each gone their separate ways upon arrival, but now they stuck together, and Dors dreaded the plan she was sure Daneel was concocting. She was human enough in design to be able to feel humanlike emotions--dread among them, and love--but Daneel wanted to test her resolve, as a robot, and her strength. If she failed, she was of no use to him.

            Daneel said little, but took her to the safe apartment near Streeling, where they picked up their change of clothes and new Trantorian identity papers. With a slight adjustment to her already altered physical appearance and external marks, including fingerprints and external tissue genetics, she would become Jenat Korsan, a teacher from the food ally Paskann. Lodovik would assume the identity of a merchant broker from the metals-rich province of Dau. As Rissik Numant of Dau of the Thousand Golden Suns, he would spend several years on Trantor, conducting a personal pilgrimage.

            The safe apartment was small and located in the poor municipality of Fann, less than ten kilometers from Streeling. Dors knew the place a little--had passed through here several times before forming her liaison with Hari. What had then been shabby genteel was now truly just shabby, and unhappy; police seldom came here unless it was strictly necessary.

            They stayed in the apartment for two days, just long enough for Daneel’s manipulations to spread throughout Trantor’s identity networks.

            Then, they went forth...

            Not, she hoped, to some catastrophic relapse, some unbearable return to her old mode. The great difficulty was that with Hari Seldon, she had felt truly useful for the first time in her existence, truly important, and to her human side, that importance had been translated into happiness. She was now all too aware that she was not human.

            And not happy.

34.

The first interview with Gaal Dornick had proceeded satisfactorily. Hari felt he had impressed the young man, and Dornick had taken the news of the current situation well enough. Good--the man had courage, and there was about him a hint of that outer-world youth and bravado that Hari remembered himself once having.

            As a mathist, Dornick was talented, but there were many far more talented already connected with the Project. Dornick’s main use would be as a sharp observer, who would weather the present storm and help pave the way for Hari’s own peculiar method of helping the Project’s people weather future storms. And perhaps as another friend. I do like the man.

            Hari could not stand the thought of just letting his two Foundations--one secret, one, he hoped--believed! Knew!--to be sanctioned by the Empire itself--proceed on their own, after his death. If he had learned anything from Demerzel/Daneel, it had been the necessity of leaving some trail of tidbits, some prodding and provocative part of himself to spur things on after his death. Daneel did this by popping up in person every few decades, a technique Hari would only be able to imitate in extension, as it were.

            Dornick would be key to making Hari Seldon a legend, and to allowing him to appear at regular intervals, even after death, to shepherd things along.

            Hari returned to his apartment in Streeling and once more availed himself of the services of a small security tracer Stettin had procured for him on one of his journeys off Trantor. The tracer, set down in the middle of the main room, spun a web of red lines across the walls and low ceiling, then pronounced, in the sweet voice of a girl, “This room is free of known Imperial listening devices.”

            There had not been any new listening devices designed for some time. Linge Chen, for his own unknown reasons, was still allowing Hari a private personal space. Everywhere else, including his office in the Imperial Library, he was watched and listened to very carefully.

            Hari could feel the forces building. Poor Dornick! He would hardly have time to get used to Trantor.

            Hari smiled grimly, then pushed a button in the wall. A small entertainment center emerged. He instructed it to access to University music libraries--one of his privileges at Streeling--and playa selection of court music from the time of Jemmu IX. “Mostly Gand and Hayer, please,” he said. These two composers, the former male, the latter female, had competed with each other for court commissions for fifty years. After their death, it had been discovered they were secretly lovers. Music scholars had decided through exhaustive analysis that no one could tell which of their combined works had been written by Gand, and which by Hayer--or even if just one had written them all. They were elegant and soothing pieces, filled with a polite recognition of the Empire’s eternal order; music from an age when the Empire had worked, and worked well, vigorous and youthful even after thousands of years.

            Daneel’s Golden Age, Hari thought as he settled into his oldest and favorite chair. The kind of age Linge Chen still believes in. rather foolishly. The Chief Commissioner has always seemed such a pompous fool to me--of aristocratic family, trained in ancient bureaucratic disciplines, aloof and disconnected...What if I’m wrong? What if my theories are inadequate to predict these short-term results? But they can’t be--the long-term results depend on what happens in these next few weeks!

            He forced himself to relax, performed his breathing exercises, just as Dors had once taught him. The music played, soft and highly structured and very melodic. As Hari listened, beating time with one hand where it rested on the chair arm, he worked over in his mind the roles that would be played by the Chen and Divart families as Trantor continued its decline. The Commission of Public Safety would run the Empire for some time, until a strong leader emerged--very likely an Emperor and not a military man. Hari suspected--though he would never have recorded this prediction--that the Emperor would take on the name of Cleon, become Cleon II, to appeal to the Empire’s, and especially Trantor’s, sense of tradition and history.

            It was when a society became the most distressed and antiquated that it would recreate an overwhelming fantasy of some Golden Age, a time when all was great and glorious, when people were more noble and causes more magnificent and honorable. Chivalry is the last refuge of a rotting corpse.

            Nikolo Pas had said as much. Hari closed his eyes. He easily visualized the defeated tyrant, sitting in his bare cell, a pitiful figure who had once occupied the center of a huge social cancer, yet who had also understood the Empire’s destiny with almost as clear a vision as Hari’s.

            “I reached out to the wealthy noble families, the aristocrats, that squat on the lines of money and commerce like giant old leeches,” Pas had explained. “As provincial governor, I nurtured their sense of superiority and self-importance. I encouraged agrarian reforms--instructed that all municipalities should place farmlands back into production and require their young citizens and even gentry to work them, whether or not they were profitable, for spiritual reasons. I encouraged the development of secret religious societies, especially those that placed a premium on wealth and social position. And I encouraged the memory, the history, of a past time when life was much simpler and we were all closer to moral perfection. How easy it was! How the rich and powerful lapped up these corrupt old myths! I believed them myself for a time...Until the political tide turned, and I needed something more powerful. Then it was I began the revolution against the Eternals.”

            Hari jerked up in his seat at a sound within his room. He ordered the music to stop and listened. He was sure he had heard footsteps.

            They’ve come! He got up from his seat, heart pounding. Linge Chen had finally gotten tired of the game and was playing his hand. Just as Farad Sinter could send out assassins, so could the Chief Commissioner. Assassins--or merely arresting officers.

            There were only three rooms. Surely he would have seen someone enter.

            Hari searched the bedroom and kitchen, plodding across the soft floor in his bare feet and robe, all too aware of his vulnerability, even within his own home.

            He found no one.

            Relieved, he returned to the living room--and even before he noticed the visitors, felt a wave of reassurance. It was with little or no shock and not much surprise even that he saw three people standing in his living room, arranged in a half circle around his favorite chair.

            Despite some cosmetic changes, he knew immediately that one, the tallest, with reddish brown hair, was his old friend Daneel. The other two he did not recognize. One was female, one a bulky male.

            “Hello, Hari,” Daneel said. The voice had changed as well.

            “I thought--I remembered a visit from you,” Hari stammered, confusion fighting with joy. He felt some irrational hope that Daneel had come to take him away, to tell him the Plan was fulfilled and he did not have to stand trial, did not have to live in the shadow of the displeasure of Linge Chen...

            “Perhaps you anticipated,” Daneel said. “That’s something you do very well. But we have not been in each other’s presence for some years now.”

            “I am not much of a prophet,” Hari said wryly. “It’s good to see you again. Who are these people? Friends?” He gave the next word a suggestive emphasis. “Colleagues?”

            The female looked at him with a steady gaze he found discomfiting. Something familiar...

            “Friends. We are all here to provide assistance in a crucial time.”

            “Please, sit. Do any of you...feel thirsty, or hungry?”

            Daneel knew he did not need to reply. The bulky male shook his head, no, but the female, also, made no reply. She simply watched him, her attractive face intensely blank.

            Hari felt his heart sink, then rebound with painful excitement. His mouth hung open, and he sat in a smaller chair near the wall, to keep from collapsing. His eyes did not leave the woman. The right size, approximately. The same shapely figure, though younger than he last remembered her, but then, she had always been exceptionally resilient and youthful.

            If she was a robot--secret steel!--

            “Dors?” He could say nothing more. His mouth became too dry to talk.

            “No,” the woman said, but did not look away.

            “We are not here to renew old acquaintances,” Daneel said. “You will not remember this visit, Hari.”

            “No, of course not,” Hari said, suddenly miserable and very alone again, despite Daneel’s presence. “I sometimes wonder whether I have any freedom at all...whether I can make any of my own choices.”

            “I have never influenced you, except to prepare the way and maximize your effects, and to help you keep necessary secrets.”

            Hari held out his hands, and wailed, “Release me, Daneel! Take all this off of my shoulders! I am an old man--I feel so very, very old, and I am so afraid!”

            Daneel--listened with a concerned and sympathetic expression. “You know that is not true, Hari. There is still great strength within you, and enthusiasm. You are truly Hari Seldon.”

            Hari drew back and covered his mouth with one hand, then swiftly wiped his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he murmured.

            “Nothing to be sorry about. I am fully aware the strain is enormous. It causes me deep conflict to so burden you, my friend.”

            “Why are you here? Who are they, really?”

            “There is much work for me to do, and they will assist me. Already forces are at work that I must deal with, and that are of no concern of yours. We all have our burdens, Hari.”

            “Yes, Daneel...I understand some of that. I mean, I see it in the graphs, the displays--undercurrents, hideously complicated, difficult to track, all centered on this moment. But why have you come to me, now?”

            “To provide reassurance. You are not fighting alone. I have conducted surveys of the major centers where the Seldon Project is underway. You have quite an efficient army working for you, Hari. An army of mathists and scholars. You have done brilliantly well. They are primed and ready. I congratulate you. You are a great leader, Hari.”

            “Thank you. And them?” He could not take his eyes off the woman. “They are like you?” Even in Daneel’s presence, he had difficulty using the word “robot.”

            “They are like me.”

            Hari started to ask another question, but shut his mouth abruptly and looked away, to bring his emotions into check. The question I most want to ask--I cannot, for my own sanity. Dors! Whatever became of Dors? Is she truly gone--dead? I have suspected for so long...!

            “Hari, Linge Chen is going to move soon. You will probably be arrested tomorrow. The trial will begin early, and, of course, it will be conducted in secret.”

            “I agree,” Hari said.

            “I have certain knowledge of this,” Daneel added softly.

            “All right,” Hari said. He swallowed back a lump in his throat. The second male--bulky, not very handsome, was also starting to look familiar. Who did he remind Hari or! Someone in the palace, a public figure...

            “Linge Chen has his reasons. There are factions within the palace that are trying to overthrow the Commission of Public Safety, and to take power away from the baronial families, especially from the Chens and the Divarts.”

            “They will fail,” Hari said.

            “Yes. But it is not clear what damage may be done before they fail. If I am not very careful, the complexity could get out of hand, and we may lose our opportunity for this millennium.”

            Hari felt a chill. Accustomed as he was to dealing with time periods of thousands of years, Daneel’s phrasing gave him a sudden view of possible futures in which Hari Seldon had not succeeded, in which Daneel would start all over again with another bright young mathist, another long plan to alleviate human suffering.

            Who could understand the thinking of such a mind? Already twenty thousand years old...

            Hari stood and approached the trio. “What more can I do?” he asked, then added, with a frown, “Before you make me forget this encounter.”

            “I can tell you no more for now,” Daneel said. “But I am still here, Hari. I will always be here for you.”

            The female took a step forward, then stopped. Hari noticed a tremor in one of her arms. Her face was so rigid she might have been cut from plastic. Then she smiled and backed up. “It is our privilege to serve,” she said, and her voice was not that of Dors Venabili. In fact, Hari wondered how he could ever have thought she was Dors.

            Dors was dead. He had no doubt now. Dead, never to return.

Hari looked around the empty room. The music had been playing for two hours and he had hardly noticed the passage of time. He felt relaxed and in control, but still wary--like an animal long used to the hunters, a survivor with skills that could always be relied upon, but never taken for granted.

            He had been thinking of Dors again. Hari smoothed his brow with his fingers.

            Lodovik watched Dors with concern as they left the grounds of Streeling University. They rode in a taxi through the main traffic tunnel from Streeling to Pasaj, the Emperor Expressway, surrounded above, below, and to all sides by a steady stream of buses and cabs, caught in red and violet control grids like blood cells in an artery. The taxi was automated, chosen at random, and scanned by Daneel for listening devices.

            Dors stared straight ahead, saying nothing, as did Daneel.

            Daneel finally spoke as they approached Pasaj. “You did admirably.”

            “Thank you,” Dors said. Then, “Is it wise to leave him so long without a guardian?”

            “He has remarkable instincts,” Daneel said.

            “He is old and frail,” Dors said.

            “He is stronger than this Empire,” Daneel said. “And his finest moment is yet to come.”

            Lodovik contemplated his assignment as relayed by Daneel through microwave link. His pilgrimage would include a tour of special duty in the Cathedral of the Greys in Pasaj. Here, the finest of the Empire’s bureaucratic class gathered once in a lifetime to receive their highest honors, including the Order of the Emperor’s Feather; while Lodovik’s new role had no history of such extraordinary excellence, it was not unusual for those who contributed to the cathedral on a yearly basis to be summoned for menial duties. as the next highest kind of recognition of service.

            Daneel clearly expected the cathedral to play an important part in the next few years, though what that might be, he had not yet conveyed to Lodovik.

            Lodovik half suspected that Daneel was keeping him on probation until he had proved himself loyal. That was wise. Lodovik kept his doubts deeply masked. He knew Daneel’s extraordinary sensitivity. He had also worked around him long enough to know of ways to deceive, to appear compliant and loyal.

            He had watched Daneel test Dors, and he had no doubt Daneel could find some equally effective way to test him. Before that happened, he would have to undergo another transformation--and find the allies he was almost sure were on Trantor, hidden from Daneel, working to oppose him. Among the Greys. there would be many chances to do research on those who opposed the Chens and Divarts...

            Had Lodovik been human, he would have estimated his chances as very slim. Since his concern for his own survival was minimal, a hopeless situation was not particularly disturbing. Far worse was the thought of being disloyal, of contradicting R. Daneel Olivaw.

35.

Brann walked through the main storage wing of the warehouse with surprising speed for a man of his size. The dark spaces and huge tiers of storage racks loomed and made their footsteps sound like the beats of distant drums. Klia kept up with some difficulty, but did not mind; she had not had much exercise in days, and looked upon this assignment as both a break in the routine and a possible avenue of escape.

            Being with Brann was pleasant enough, so long as she did not think about her emotional reaction to him, and how inappropriate it was. She wrinkled her nose at the dusty ghosts of hundreds of unfamiliar smells.

            “The most popular imports come from Anacreon and Memphio,” Brann said. He paused beside a shadowy equipment alcove to check out a loader/transport. “There are some very wealthy artisan families that live off sales to Trantor alone. Everybody wants Anacreon folk-dolls--I hate them, myself. We also import games and entertainments from Kalgan--of the sort frowned upon by the Commission censors.”

            Klia walked beside Brann. The transport glided on floater fields a discreet two meters behind them, lowering small rubber wheels when it wanted to turn sharply or stop.

            “We’re going to deliver four crates of dolls to the Trantor Exchange, and some other items to the Agora of Vendors.” These were the two most popular shopping areas in Streeling, well-known around the hemisphere. Well-heeled Greys and meritocrats traveled from thousands of kilometers--some, thousands of light years--just to spend several days browsing among the myriad of shops in each area. The Agora of Vendors boasted of inns spaced at hundred-shop intervals for tired travelers.

            The baronial and other noble families of the gentry class had their own means of satisfying acquisitive urges, and, of course, citizens usually lived in quarters too small to allow for the accumulation of many goods.

            When Klia had been very young, her mother and father had participated in a communal Dahl bauble exchange, where they borrowed one or two objects considered decorative (and fairly useless) for several days or weeks and then returned them. That seemed satisfactory enough, for those fascinated with material goods; actually owning or even collecting offworld objects seemed ludicrous to Klia.

            “This means Plussix trusts me enough to let me go outside, doesn’t it?” Klia said.

            Brann looked down on her, his face serious. “This isn’t some mindwipe cult, Klia.”

            “How do I know that? What is it, then--a social club for misfit persuaders?”

            “You sound pretty unhappy,” Brann said. “But you--”

            “Is there anyplace on Trantor where anyone can be happy? Look at all this junk--a substitute for happiness, don’t you think?” She waved her hands at the plastic and scrapwood crates stacked high over their heads.

            “I wouldn’t know,” Brann said. “I was going to say, you sound unhappy, but I’ll bet you can’t think of anyplace else to go.”

            “Maybe that’s why I’m unhappy,” Klia said in a dark undertone. “I certainly feel like a misfit. Maybe I do belong here.”

            Brann turned away with a small grunt and ordered the transport to remove a crate from the third tier. It planted its undercarriage firmly on the floor, then raised its body on pneumatic cylinders and deftly tugged at the crate with mechanical arms.

            “Kallusin said we might be able to travel all over,” Klia said. “If we turn out to be loyal, is that...I mean, do you know of anyone who’s left? Been assigned elsewhere?”

            Brann shook his head. “Of course, I don’t know everybody. I haven’t been here that long. There are other warehouses.”

            Klia had not known this. She filed the fact away, and wondered if Plussix was orchestrating some sort of huge latent underground movement--a rebellion, perhaps. A rebellious merchant broker? It seemed ludicrous--and perhaps the more convincing because of that. But what would he rebel against--the very classes who clamored for his goods? Or the noble and baronial families...who did not?

            “We have what we need,” Brann said when the transport carried three crates from three different aisles. “Let’s go.”

            “What about the police--the ones searching for me--for us?”

            “Plussix says they’re not looking for anybody now,” Brann said.

            “And how does he know?”

            Brann shook his head. “All I know is, he’s never wrong. Not one of us has ever been taken by the police.”

            “Famous last words,” Klia said, but she once again trotted to keep up with him.

            Outside the warehouse, the daylight of the dome ceil glowed brightly. She emerged from the cavernous interior to a brighter, larger interior--the only other kind of life she had ever known.

36.

Sinter paced in his small study before the wall image of the human Galaxy with its twenty-five million inhabited worlds marked in red and green. He barely looked up as Vara Liso entered. She immediately dropped her chin and hunched her shoulders. What she saw in Farad Sinter was both frightening and exalting. She had never seem him more calm and steady--not a hint of the slight frown and swagger, the false lineaments of leadership, that he so often projected. He seemed both confident and coldly furious.

            “I realize now that you’ve been going about this search all wrong,” he said. “You’ve been bringing me nothing but human mentalics, curious cases of course, but not what we want or need.”

            “I was--”

            He raised his hand and made a placating moue. “I accuse you of nothing. You had nothing to work with. Now we have something--perhaps the merest something, but more than we had before. I’ve intercepted a man named Mors Planch. I doubt you’ve heard of him. He’s a very competent fellow, with many talents--engineering among them. He tinkers all the time, I understand.”

            Liso raised her eyebrows, meekly indicating she had no idea where all this was going.

            “I tracked him after I learned that Linge Chen was using him to conduct a private search for Lodovik Trema. Planch is on Trantor. I’ve spoken with him.”

            Liso had heard of Trema. Her eyebrows rose higher.

            “He found Trema but did not deliver him to the Chief Commissioner. My agents learned this much. All the rigmarole about Trema being dead, having died bravely in the service of the Emperor--that is, the Commission of Public Safety--all nonsense. He’s still alive. Rather, he’s still operating. He can’t be alive.”

            Liso dropped her brows and glowered. Sinter seemed to be enjoying this chance to layout his schemes and successes. He fairly glowed, and she saw, written in his emotions, just the sort of pearly cometary tail she imagined followed a leading light into the constellations of supreme power. The thought made her shiver.

            “He survived when all the others on his ship died in a neutrino flux.”

            “What is that?” Liso asked softly.

            “Nothing to concern us. Fatal. Invariably. Far out between the stars, in normal space. He survived. Planch miraculously or very skillfully found him. A competent man. I would like to have his talent work for me. Maybe that will happen yet, but I doubt Linge Chen will let Planch live once he discovers that he has been betrayed. Planch has some fixed notions of justice, and it appears another contender for the person of Trema came on the scene, and paid Planch more than Chen--so Planch took some mixed-up vengeance against Chen and Trantor for the ruin of Madder Loss. A worthless and defiant Chaos World.”

            Vara Liso shook her head again. She knew little about such things, nor was she interested. It made her shudder to think of death between the stars, out in the vast open, away from any comforting interiors. She did not regard a hypership as a true environment--more of a temporary coffin.

            “When Planch delivered Trema to a certain man on Madder Loss, he made a record, a secret tape, of the proceedings. Somehow, the recording was not detected. I wonder why?” He scratched his cheek for a moment with one finger, staring at her intently. Liso shrugged; she could not possibly offer an explanation.

            “Planch does not remember the delivery itself. But the record shows a meeting...Let me play it for you.”

            He took out a small machine and slipped the record--more likely, she thought, a duplicate--into the thin slot. Around them appeared a three dimensional scene, quite convincing but for the slight reduction in resolution. She examined the two apparently male figures from Planch’s perspective. One she recognized as Lodovik Trema; the other was tall, slender, handsome in a sort of nondescript way. She could not, of course, read their emotions clearly, but she had the distinct impression something was not quite right. The figures reenacted their conversation, and the more they talked, the more chilled she became.

            “I regret to say you’ll soon forget everything you saw here, and your role in rescuing my friend as well.”

            “Friend?”

            “Yes. We’ve known each other for thousands of years.”

            The record ended with part of a taxi ride.

            Sinter regarded her curiously.

            “A fraud, a joke?” she asked.

            “No,” he said. “The record is not a fake. Planch found Lodovik Trema alive. He’s a robot. This other man--he’s a robot, as well. A very old one, possibly the oldest of all. I want you to study this record. Get a feel for these humanlike robots. One or both of them are mentalic. You have the talent to recognize them. Then--we will send you out hunting again. You will find Eternals. Then I will have something to show the Emperor. But for now, I have Planch and this tape, and that can take us all very far, Vara.”

            He smiled exuberantly. In his pacing, he had come quite close to her, and with a grin, he gave her a sudden, spontaneous, one-armed hug. She looked up at him, dumfounded, and he folded the record into her hand. She held it with bloodless fingers.

            “Study,” he ordered. “I’ll wait for the right moment to convince Klayus we’re onto something.”

37.

The Emperor Klayus woke from a light doze in the empty bed of the seventh sleep chamber, his favorite for afternoon liaisons. He glared around for a moment with some irritation, then stared at the floating image of Farad Sinter. Sinter could not see the Emperor, of course, but that did not make the interruption any less aggravating.

            “Your Highness, I have a message from the Commission of Public Safety. They are about to act on an indictment against Professor Hari Seldon.”

            Klayus lifted the curtain to the higher sleep field to look for his companion of the past few hours, but she had left the chamber. Perhaps she was in the personal.

            “Yes, and so? Linge Chen told us this might happen.”

            “Your Highness, it is premature. They are going to try him and at least one of his people. This is a direct challenge to the privilege of the Palace.”

            “Farad, the Palace--that is, I--have long since dropped any official support, behind the scenes, for Raven Seldon. He’s an amusement, nothing more.”

            “It could be perceived as an affront, now that the move is about to be made.”

            “Move--what move?”

            “Why, to discredit Seldon. If they succeed, Your Highness--”

            “Stop with the titles! Just tell me what you think and get your damned image out of my chamber.”

            “Cleon supported Seldon.”

            “I know that. Cleon wasn’t even family, Farad.”

            “Seldon has ballooned that support into a project consisting of tens of thousands of adherents and sycophants on a dozen planets. His message is treasonous, if not revolutionary--”

            “And you want me to protect him?”

            “No, sire! You must not let Linge Chen take personal credit for removing this threat. It is time to act swiftly and create the commission we have discussed.”

            “With you in charge. The Commission of General security, right?”

            “If General Security prosecutes Seldon for treason, you will get all the credit, sire.”

            “And no credit or power will go to you?”

            “We have discussed this many times.”

            “Too many times. What do I care whether Linge Chen takes credit or not? If he removes this intellectual parasite, we’ll all benefit equally, don’t you think?”

            Farad thought this over. Klayus could see him deciding to try another tack.

            “Your Majesty--this is a very complex issue, and I have many concerns. I did not wish to bring this up so soon, but I have brought an individual back to Trantor from Madder Loss. With your authorization. His name is Mors Planch, and he has evidence which we may add to other evidence--”

            “What, more robots, Farad? More Eternals?”

            Sinter, within the artificial constraints of the image, seemed to stay calm enough, but Klayus knew the little man was probably dancing with anxiety and anger by now. Good. Let him build up a head of steam.

            “The final pieces of the puzzle,” Sinter said. “Before Seldon is tried on simple charges of treason, you must examine this evidence. You may be able to limit Chen’s power and add to your own image as a resourceful leader.”

            “In my own good time, Farad,” Klayus said in an ominous growl. He knew what his public image was--and he knew the effective limits of his power compared to the Chief Commissioner’s. “I wouldn’t want to make you into another Linge Chen. You don’t even have the restraint of being trained in an aristocratic family, Farad. You are common and sometimes vicious.”

            Sinter appeared to ignore this, too. “The two Commissions would balance each other, sire, and we could more effectively watch over the military ministers.”

            “Yes, but your chief concern is this robot menace.” The Emperor swung his legs over the field cushions and stood by the side of the bed. He had not performed well this afternoon; his mind was tugged in all directions by a myriad of little strings and knotted threads of statecraft and security and intrapalace plotting. Right now, his irritation focused on Farad Sinter, a little man whose services (and women) seemed less and less satisfying, and whose transgressions could easily become less and less amusing.

            “Farad, I have seen no evidence worth the name for a year now. I do not know why I’ve tolerated your behavior on this matter. You want Seldon because of his connection to the Tiger, don’t you?”

            Sinter stared blankly at the sensor transmitting his image.

            “For God’s sake, remove the politeness censor and let me see you the way you are,” Klayus ordered. The image shifted and shivered, then Farad Sinter appeared in a rumpled casual robe, his hair awry, his face red with anger. “That’s better,” Klayus said.

            “She was demonstrably not human, Your Majesty,” Sinter said. “I have secured the documents pertaining to the murder of the Seldon Project worker Elas, and he felt the same as I and other experts.”

            “She died,” Klayus said. “She killed this Elas and then she died. What’s to know beyond that? Elas wanted Seldon dead. Would that I had a female so loyal.”

            He hoped his own knowledge of all these matters was not becoming too obvious; even in front of Sinter, he hoped to maintain a little of his reputation as vain and stupid and governed by his gonads.

            “She was given an atom-dispersal burial without official supervision,” Sinter said.

            “That’s the method chosen by ninety-four percent of Trantor’s population,” Klayus said, and yawned. “Only Emperors get to be buried intact. And some faithful ministers and councilors.”

            Sinter seemed to vibrate with frustration. Klayus found this more enjoyable then he had the attempted mating. Where was that woman, anyway?

            “Dors Venabili was not human,” Sinter asserted with a slight sputter.

            “Yes, well Seldon is. You’ve shown me his X rays.”

            “Subverted by--”

            “Oh, for Sky’s sake, Farad, shut up! I order you to let Linge Chen carry out his little charade. We’ll all watch closely and see what happens. Then we’ll take some action or another. Now leave me alone. I’m tired.”

            He blocked the image and sat back on the edge of the lower field. It took him several minutes to restore his calm, then he thought of the woman. Where had she gotten to?

            “Hello?” he called out to the empty chamber. The door to this chamber’s personal was open, and a bright light shone through.

            Emperor Klayus, now eighteen standard years of age, wearing only a Serician nightgown that hung loose from his shoulders and draped around his ankles, rolled out of the bed and walked toward the personal. He yawned and gave a wide, bored stretch, then waved his arms like a slow semaphore to limber up. “Hello?” He couldn’t remember her name. “Deela, or Deena? I’m sorry, darling, are you in there?”

            He pushed the door open. The woman stood naked just beyond the door’s reach. She had been here all along. She looked unhappy. He admired her lovely pubic region and stomach, lifted his eyes to her flawless breasts, and saw the trembling arms held out, clutching a tiny blaster, of a size often concealed in sheer clothes or purses. Little more than a flexible lead with a bulb on one end, very rare these days, quite expensive. She seemed frightened to be pointing it.

            Klayas was about to scream when something whistled by his ear and a small red spot appeared in the woman’s pale, swanlike neck. He screamed anyway, even as the lovely green eyes rose up and fluttered in that perfect face, and the head tilted as if she were listening to bird song somewhere. His scream grew louder and more shrill as the body twisted as if she would screw herself into the floor. With a horrible and unutterably final slackness, the woman collapsed on the tile of the personal. Only then did she come to squeeze the bulb. The blast took out part of the ceiling and a mirror, and sprayed him with chips of stone and glass.

            Stunned, Klayus crouched and flinched, arms drawn up against the noise and dust. A hand grabbed him roughly and pulled him out of the personal. A voice hissed in his ear, “Highness, she may be carrying a bomb!”

            Klayus looked at his rescuer. He gaped.

            Farad Sinter tugged him a few additional meters. In the advisor’s small hands lay a kinetic-energy pistol that fired neurotoxin pellets. Klayus knew the type well; he himself carried one in his daily wear. It was standard issue for the royals and nobles.

            “Farad--” he grunted. Sinter pushed him to the floor as if to humiliate him. Then, with a sigh, as if this was all too much, Sinter threw himself over Klayus to protect him.

            Thus did the palace guards find them a few seconds later.

 “N-no-not yours?” Klayus asked tremulously as Sinter stormed and berated the commander of the Emperor’s Private Specials.

            Sinter, in his rage, ignored the Emperor’s question.

            “You should all be taken out and disintegrated! You must find the other woman immediately.”

            The commander, Gerad Mint by name, was having none of this. He motioned for two adjutants to come forward, one on each side of the Imperial councilor. He regarded Sinter with cold fury, held back by centuries of military discipline steeped into his very genes. The effrontery of this lowborn lackey! “We have her papers, the ones you issued to her. They are in her clothes in the...the seventh sleep chamber.”

            “She is an impostor!”

            “Sinter, you are the one who brings these women in at all hours and without adequate security checks,” Commander Mint said. “None of our guard can hope to recognize them all, or even to keep track of them!”

            “They are very thoroughly checked by my office, and this is not one of the women I brought to him!” Sinter pointed a finger at the Emperor, realized this hideous breach of conduct, and withdrew his hand just before the Emperor turned and would have noticed. The commander saw, however, and exploded.

            “I can only keep track of so many comings and goings! You never consult my office, and we do not conduct these checks ourselves--”

            “Is she one of your women, Farad?” the Emperor asked, gathering his wits about him finally. He had never known real fear until now, and it had badly rattled him.

            “No! I have never seen her before.”

            “But she is lovely,” the Emperor added, glancing at the commander with those doe-like boy’s eyes. He did this for effect; time to play the role again. He had in truth never much liked this commander, who secretly regarded him as an infantile baboon, he was sure. Sinter appeared to be in some trouble, and that was amusing also, but not very useful at the moment. Klayus had his own plans for Sinter, and would hate to lose him to this deplorable but not fatal faux pas.

            “There are no others in the palace--except your women!” the commander said through gritted teeth at Sinter. “And how did you happen to come back here at just the right moment?”

            “My,” Klayus said, and tsked at Sinter.

            “I was coming here to discuss personally an urgent matter!” Sinter said, eyes darting between Klayus and the commander.

            “It is very convenient--perhaps a setup, a ruse, to raise your--” The commander did not have time to develop this theory. A stiff officer in royal blue livery approached the commander and whispered in his ear. The commander’s red face suddenly went livid, and his lips trembled.

            “What is it?” Klayus demanded, his voice strong now.

            The commander turned to the Emperor and bowed stiffly from the waist. “A woman’s body, Your Highness--”

            Sinter pushed forward between the two adjutants who had flanked him throughout this encounter, ready to arrest him. “Where is she?”

            The commander swallowed. His lips were almost blue. “Found in the corridors below this level. The”

            “Where? What do her identity papers say?”

            “She has no identity papers.”

            “That is a sacred area, Commander,” Klayus said with a dead level voice. “The Temple of the First Emperors. Farad is never allowed down there. Nor are any stray women. Royals and ceremonialists only. You are responsible for that area.”

            “Yes, Your Highness. I will have this investigated immediately--”

            “It should be simple,” Klayus said. “Sinter, the identity papers have a genotype and picture ID, do they not?”

            “The body--this body--physically, the same as the picture” the commander said.

            “An impostor!” Sinter shouted, and waved his fist at the guards and the commander. “An extraordinary breach of security!”

            Klayus watched this with some relief. It was all well and good to torment Sinter, then to be annoyed at him, but not to lose him--not just yet. There were yet a few more hands to play against Linge Chen, and Chen’s Commission was responsible for the security of the Emperor.

            This could all be quite useful, even essential. Chen would have to explain the lapse, Sinter’s stock would certainly rise--but not out of Klayus’s acceptable and controlling parameters--and it could all work out handily.

            “Let’s examine her,” Sinter said.

            “I’ll stay here,” Klayus said, his face greening at the thought of seeing another corpse.

            Ten minutes later, the commander and guards returned, and Sinter as well.

            “The match is perfect,” Sinter said, waving the woman’s papers. “This--in the personal--is an impostor, and you are responsible!” He pointed the finger without hesitation at the commander.

            Commander Mint had assumed a mask of deep calm. He nodded once, reached into his pocket, and removed a small packet. The others in the Emperor’s sleep chamber watched with horrible fascination as he placed the packet against his lips.

            “No!” Klayus said, lifting his hand.

            Mint stopped and looked round with hopeful walleyes.

            “But sire, it is mandatory, for such a breach!” Sinter cried out, as if worried his accusers might get away with their crimes.

            “Yes, of course, Farad, but not here, please. One creature has died in these chambers already. One more below...” He choked into his handkerchief. “I have to sleep and...and concentrate here, and it will be difficult enough without...this, as well.” He waved his hand at Mint, who nodded brusquely, and removed himself to the outer halls to perform his final duty.

            Even Sinter seemed impressed by this ritual, though he did not follow to see it carried out. Klayus lifted himself off the bed and pretended to look away as the body of the would-be assassin was lifted on its shrouded stretcher and conveyed from the personal.

            To Sinter, he said, “An hour. Let me recuperate a little, then show me your evidence, and bring me this Mors Planch.”

            “Yes, sire!” Sinter said enthusiastically, and scuttled to leave.

            Let him think he has won big. Let Linge Chen suffer a little for this stupidity. Let them all dance around the young idiot. I will have my day!

            I have survived! It is predestined!

38.

Astonishment is different in a robot. Lodovik had seen Daneel perform many difficult feats over the decades, but he had never known how deeply Daneel’s influence penetrated the layers of bureaucratic infrastructure on Trantor. As First Minister Demerzel, Daneel must have spent a substantial portion of his time (perhaps his hours of unneeded sleep) planting records, instructions and useful diversions in the Imperial and palace computers--any one of which could lie unnoticed for decades or even centuries, quietly passing themselves along as part of the standard records with each upgrade and maintenance cycle...And even propagating themselves to the records and machines of other Sectors, finally girdling Trantor.

            Rissik Numant, Lodovik’s new identity, had been established decades before. Daneel simply slipped in a few details of physical appearance, and an old meritocrat returned to life on Trantor--a manqué diplomat-theorist, seen at many parties but seldom if ever remembered, once known as a ruthless seducer of women who ruthlessly consented to be seduced. He had not appeared much in Trantorian social life for decades, having slipped away to Dau of the Thousand Golden Suns, where he had (it was rumored) learned to control his baser impulses over twenty years of study among the obscure sect known as the Cortical Monks.

            The ruse was so complete that Lodovik regretted it would soon have to be abandoned.

            A robot’s experience of surprise is different. Lodovik discovered that Daneel was going to let him loose on Trantor, unsupervised, to perform his duties. He would move into a small apartment not far from the agora in the Imperial Sector (another safe accommodation, kept vacant but paid for) and carry out a few social visits to old acquaintances who would, doubtless, remember him vaguely if at all. Slowly, over a period of months, Rissik Numant would return to the social scene, make an impression, and lie in wait for some role in Daneel’s plans--perhaps as part of the grand design woven around Hari Seldon.

A robot’s experience of affection is very different. Lodovik regarded Dors Venabili as an extraordinary creation, in some ways a perfect model for his new unrestrained self to emulate. She had about her an air of what humans would have called tragedy; she seldom spoke unless addressed directly, seldom offered any contributions to the conversations between the robots. She seemed lost in her own thought processes, and Lodovik understood why. Very likely Daneel understood as well.

            Attachment to an individual human could be very affecting to a robot. They arranged all their inner heuristics to anticipate the needs of their master, and to ameliorate any problems he or she might suffer. Dors, whatever her repairs and refitting under the instruments of Yan Kansarv, had not yet--and perhaps never would--remove the influence of Hari Seldon. This was a condition known in ancient times as fixing; Lodovik knew that Daneel had once “fixed” on the legendary Bay-Lee, Elijah Bailey.

            Dors was receiving her final instructions from Daneel by microwave link; they stood a meter apart from each other in the small, low-ceilinged main room, while Lodovik waited quietly by the door.

            When they were done, Daneel turned to Lodovik. “Hari’s trial will begin soon. There will be difficulties after the trial is concluded. We must all do our most important work now.” Dors moved to join them, forming a circle of three figures. When Daneel spoke now, it was with a barely discernible tremor of concern, emotion perhaps--the long habit of appearing human. “This is the prime moment of the Cusp Time. If we fail, there will likely be thirty thousand years of disintegration and human misery, of horror unimaginable to any of us. This must not and will not happen.”

            Lodovik felt a different sort of tremor, a different sort of horror. He could imagine what would happen if Daneel succeeded--thousands of years of slow, safe suffocation, humanity cushioned and insulated and restrained by velvet-covered chains until it became nothing more than a huge, comfortable, unchallenged mass, an idiotic fungal growth tended by fastidious machines.

            Dors, now Jenat Korsan, stood between the two male-forms, silent and calm, waiting. Patience is different in a robot...

            Daneel made a small gesture with his right hand, and Lodovik and Dors departed to begin their new roles.