Scholars have long accepted that Gaal Dornick’s biography of Hari Seldon contains significant lacunae. Where Dornick was not present, or where constraints were put upon him by the official” hagiography” of Seldon--or even where editors and censors in the middle Foundation years suppressed certain suspect passages--we must look deeper into the circumstances, using subtle clues, to understand what actually happened.
--Encyclopedia Galactica, 117th Edition, 1054 F.E.
39.
They came for Hari Seldon at Streeling University. They did not at first appear to be officers of the Commission of Public Safety; the two, woman and man, were dressed as students. They entered his office by appointment, on the pretext of obtaining an interview for a student periodical.
The woman, clearly in charge, pulled up the sleeve of her civilian jacket to show him the official Commission sigil of spaceship, sun, and judicial wand. She was small, with a strong build, pale features, broad shoulders, a heavy jaw. “We don’t need to make a fuss about this,” she said. Her colleague, a tall, wispy male with a concentrated expression and a condescending smile, nodded agreement.
“Of course not,” Hari said, and began to gather his papers and filmbooks into a case he had kept on hand for just such an occasion. He hoped to be able to do some work while the trial proceeded.
“Those won’t be necessary,” the woman said, and took them from him, setting them gently beside the desk. A few papers spilled over and he bent to straighten them. She held his shoulder and he looked up at her. She shook her head decisively. “No time, professor. Leave a message on your office monitor that you’ll be gone for two weeks. It shouldn’t take that long. If all turns out well, no one will be any the wiser, and you can get back to your work, no?”
He straightened, looked around the office with jaw clenched, then nodded. “All right,” he said. “One of my colleagues will be here in a few hours, and I don’t know where to reach him--”
“Sorry.” The woman lifted her eyebrows in sympathy, but with no further discussion, together, they led him through the door.
Hari did not know how he felt about the arrest at first. He was nervous, even frightened wouldn’t be too strong a word; but he was also confident. Still, nothing having to do with the near future could ever be certain; perhaps what he saw in the Prime Radiant was not his own world-line, but the world-line of another professor, another student of psychohistory, fifty or a hundred years from now. Perhaps all this would lead to his quiet execution, and his work and the assembled workers of the Project would all be scattered. Perhaps Daneel would reconvene them after Hari’s demise...
All very aggravating, to be sure. But growing old had taught Hari that death was simply another kind of delay, and that individuals only mattered for a certain small period of time. The body human could usually grow new individuals to replace those it most needed. Of course, it was presumptuous to think that he was one of those essential types who would be replaced...But that is what the figures indicated, one way or another.
Hari had never much minded being thought presumptuous. Either he would succeed, or someone very like him.
They entered an unmarked air cruiser outside the apartment-block main entrance. Without requesting clearance, the cruiser rose, crossed between two support towers, and zipped into a traffic lane out of Streeling, heading toward the Imperial Sector. He had taken this route many times before.
“Don’t be nervous,” the woman said.
“I’m not nervous,” Hari lied, glancing at her. “How many have you arrested recently?”
“I can’t tell you that,” she said with a cheerful grin.
“We seldom get to take in people so famous,” the man said.
“How would you have heard of me?” Hari asked, genuinely curious.
“We’re not ignorant,” the man said with a sniff. “We keep track of high politics. Helps us in our work.”
The woman gave her partner a warning glance. He shrugged and stared straight ahead.
Hari turned his eyes forward as they entered a main traffic tunnel in the security barrier around the Imperial Sector. The air cruiser emerged from the tunnel, veered sharply left out of the main flow, then circled a dark blue smooth-walled cylindrical tower that rose almost to the ceil. The cruiser slowed, shivered, and docked on a mid-level platform. The platform withdrew with the cruiser into a brightly lighted hangar.
There was nothing more he could do until the trial, which he was sure would be soon. The rest, Hari thought, is psychohistory.
40.
Lodovik stood in the middle of his assigned apartment, naked, the skin pulled back on the right side of his torso, and reached into his mechanical interior. The biological layers had sealed their edges instantly upon being torn open and did not leak any of their lubricating or nutrient fluids, but a false beading of blood lined the “wounds.” Had he willed it, Lodovik could have projected a convincing spray of this blood; but he was alone and would soon be whole again. None would be the wiser.
He understood the ways and pressures of expedience, pragmatism, realpolitik. He could not fathom why Daneel had trusted him, released him without a trial period of close observation. The first possibility was that Daneel had ordered Yan Kansarv to plant a tiny transmitter within Lodovik’s body while making repairs. He could detect none. His body did not seem to be radiating any energy beyond what might issue from a human-infrared, a few other traces, none of them encoded to carry information. And his body cavities seemed free of such devices.
He sealed himself up and considered the second possibility: that Daneel would keep him under observation whenever he left the apartment, either personally or with the aid of other robots--or even recruited humans. Daneel’s organization was large and varied. Anything could be expected.
There was a third possibility, less likely than the other two: that Daneel still trusted him...
And a fourth, almost too nebulous to be usefully expressed. I am fitting into some larger plan; Daneel knows my distortion remains and has found a way to use it.
Lodovik would never underestimate the wiles and intelligence of a thinking machine that had survived twenty thousand years. But an hour passed, then two hours, and he realized he had entered a precarious state of decision lock. No course of action seemed to lead to success.
He jerked free of the lock and powered up all his conserved systems. The flood of energy and strength--the sensation of his skin repairing itself, leaving no discernible scars--was refreshing. He had at least one major advantage over humans. He did not care in the least whether he lived or died, only that he could serve humans in the way that shone forth so clearly now.
Daneel had mentioned the opposing robots--the Calvinians. He had heard about them on a few occasions, centuries ago, from other robots--the robotic equivalent of nasty rumors. If they still existed (Daneel had not made it clear whether they did or not) then they might have established some small presence on Trantor. This would only be done if they felt they had some chance of defeating Daneel.
Lodovik dressed quickly and adjusted his appearance once more to the limit of what he could accomplish just through volition. He now seemed much younger, a little thinner, and his hair changed color to a shining yellow.
He now resembled neither the old Lodovik nor the new Rissik Numant. Nevertheless, his basic body plan and physiognomy were the same; and, of course, his brain was the same. He would not fool Daneel for long, should they meet.
Lodovik knew he would have to leave this apartment and begin his search immediately. He doubted he would have more than a day before Daneel would suspect something was amiss.
He would have to educate himself and do all he could within that very short period of time.
Fortunately, Lodovik knew where to begin--in the private library willed to the Emperor Agis XIV by one of the richest proprietors of the Fleshplay, the eccentric scholar Huy Markin. The Emperor had passed it on to the Imperial University of Pan-Galactic Culture without bothering to examine or even transfer the material--a specialized and almost useless collection, so it was said. The Imperial University had given it over to the charge of the Imperial Library, then both had ignored it as well.
As honorary Provost of the Imperial University, a rank conferred by Linge Chen some years ago, Lodovik had been given the code keys to all of the University’s grounds and facilities--including the library of Huy Markin.
There, he would find thousands of years of legends and myths, gathered from around the Galaxy; the distilled dreams, visions, and nightmares of tens of millions of human worlds.
He could think of no better place to begin.
41.
An undercurrent of tension flowed along the tiers of slideways of the Agora of Vendors, as if the people smelled some impossible storm coming.
Klia looked up as they walked beside a large courtyard rising through the agora. Her eyes followed a curving support at one side of the courtyard, past hundreds of levels, all the way to the distant ceil, perhaps three or four kilometers above, where the support seemed to blend into perfect golden-clouded sky. Then she looked down through dozens of more tiers, all crowded, the hum of hundreds of thousands of voices echoing up and down them until it became a low, constant roar. Had she ever heard a real ocean, she might have compared the sound to the roll of the waves and tides; but all she could compare it to was the endless bellow of the two rivers, One and Two, somehow channeled and subdued, but no less powerful.
Her nose wrinkled, and she followed Brann closely. The transport, tricked out with decorative wheel covers and a gaily colored tarp folded over its last remaining crate, rolled silently behind them.
They could never catch more than glimpses of the uppermost tiers through the courtyard air passages. The worlds of the baronial families were invisible from this far down in the hierarchy. One or two levels at the bottom of the agora were reserved for the citizens.
Along the lower and middle tiers, the multitudinous social ranks of Trantor’s essential Greys moved in their characteristic subdued clothes, men and women dressed very much alike, only the numerous children allowed touches of bright color.
The Greys strolling the agora, off watch for the hour or perhaps on yearly two-day vacations, parted for Brann, Klia, and the floating transport, casting looks of dull curiosity at the crates, perhaps wondering if they carried something they could afford to buy, anything, to relieve the boredom...
Klia understood the Greys’ functions well enough--tenders of Trantor’s vast hierarchies of submission and response, allocators of resources and funding, administrators of data inflow, civic and planetary works. Her people had seldom dealt with Greys directly, for they had been overseen by the Municipal Progress Bureau of Dahl, whose ranks were filled with Dahlites handpicked each generation by the Greys of the Regional Works and Energy Council. Naturally, she felt contempt for all such, and had no doubt they would have felt contempt for her, had they even known of her existence.
But now she saw the Greys themselves watched and made uneasy. Police officers strolled this level in groups of three or four, not the officers of the district, but Imperial specials, the same that had stalked Klia and forced her to seek out Kallusin, the man in dusty green. Families of Greys engaged in browsing the stalls of the vendors drew their children in close and observed the Specials with suspicious eyes, eyes characterized by a flat kind of bureaucratic intelligence. They knew law and social structure, it was in their blood, and they knew something was amiss here, forces out of balance. They withdrew from the arcades and lanes as fast as they could, and this level was quickly emptying of customers.
Brann grimly walked on.
“We should get out of here. They’re probably hunting us,” Klia said in a whisper, hanging on his shoulder briefly to bring her mouth closer to his ear.
He shook his head. “Don’t think so,” he said. “We have to deliver this order.”
“What if they catch us?” Klia asked, her face wrinkled with worry.
“Stay calm. They won’t,” Brann said. “I know a dozen secret passages out of here, a dozen shopkeepers right here”--he swung his hand loosely from the hip at the stalls and shops to their left and right--”who won’t mind our passing through.”
Klia drew up her shoulders, not at all reassured. She had been thinking of ways to shake free of Plussix’s control, but not into the arms of the police. And, in point of fact, in the last hour or so, as they had made their deliveries of Anacreon folkdolls and other baubles, she had given less and less thought to escaping at all...
Brann provided such a masculine contrast to the ethereal, dry, and passionless Greys that he shone like a beacon in Klia’s eyes. She had been thinking, in that instinctive and youthful region below rational assessment, of being strongly tied to this large, powerful male, with his sympathetic black eyes and immense, agile hands. She had thought of the implied benefits of these ties--of privacy and intimacy--and she had wondered what she could do, in private, to impress him.
She felt sure he was thinking many of the same thoughts, and, for once, she believed him when he said he was trying none of his mentalic abilities on her.
The untidy collision of apprehension and passionate speculation gave her a headache. “Let’s hurry,” she said.
Brann shook his head stubbornly. “They’re not after us,” he said.
“How can you be so damned sure?” she whispered harshly.
“Listen--” He pointed into the crowds north of them, thickening and roiling where police were congregating. Klia listened with both her ears and her mind--and felt the unwanted, familiar trace of the woman who had hunted her before. She felt the woman’s awareness feather the edges of her mind, and she reached out to grip Brann’s arm.
“It’s her!” she whispered. The crowds were moving this way. He drew close and nodded, put his arm around her as if to protect her. Without hesitation, Klia accepted his protection. Suddenly, from the middle of the surging Greys less than a dozen meters away, a small motor cart pushed through, floating a few centimeters above the causeway. On the cart sat a young, blond, clean-faced Imperial security officer, two armed guards, and a small, intense woman with dark frizzy red hair.
Klia felt the woman scanning the Greys to either side, saw her wizened, unattractive face turning back and forth as the cart floated slowly and deliberately through. There was no way out--no exit. Blank walls of closed shops flanked them.
They were within three meters, with only four or five Greys in between, when Vara Liso suddenly swiveled on her seat and stared directly at Klia. Their eyes locked. Klia felt the touch in her mind very strongly, rebuffed it, almost literally pushed the intruder out of her mind--and made Vara Liso jerk on the cart as if stung.
Liso continued to glare at her, then her face was wreathed with a sudden, beatific smile. She nodded briefly at Klia, as if acknowledging an equal, and looked away. The touch dropped to a mere feather again, passed without focusing, went elsewhere.
Brann pulled her gently to one side of the aisle. “She was the one who hunted you--wasn’t she?” he asked.
Klia nodded. “But--she ignored me!” Klia said, looking up at Brann in astonishment. “She found me--she could have had me--”
“Us,” Brann interjected.
“And she ignored us!”
Brann frowned deeply and shook his head. “Kallusin and Plussix will want to know about this,” he said. “Who is she after now?”
“Are we going back?” Klia asked.
“We have two more deliveries,” Brann said, and grinned down at her with an expression not of stolidity or stubbornness, but of a massive kind of impishness. “Trantor has survived twelve thousand years. This news can wait a couple of hours.”
42.
Lodovik approached the small, thick door in its darkened vestibule. A light flashed on as he touched the door, and a small voice asked for the appropriate code for entry. He spoke the code precisely, and the door opened to let him in.
Within, the library was cast in penumbrous spots of soft golden light. The first room was circular, less than three meters across, with an empty table in the middle. On the table was set a small, angled riser, like a lectern, but obviously meant to hold ancient information devices such as paper books. The table and riser were many thousands of years old, surrounded and protected by a surface-hugging conservation field, not unlike a personal shield.
Lodovik stood before the table and waited for several seconds. A melodious female voice, that of Huy Markin herself, now used by the collection’s automated server, then asked for a subject or subjects to search for.
“Calvin, Susan,” he said, and felt a small shiver within at that ancient and powerful name. He did not expect this blunt approach to work, and it did not. The server listed thirty-two entries on various Calvins, two Susans--all mere thousands of years old, and having nothing to do with the mother of robots. There was no record of Calvinians.
“Eternals,” he suggested, “with reference to conspiracies of immortal beings.” A few seconds later, the server projected a text manuscript onto the top of the table and the riser, giving the remarkable impression of a real and open book.
“‘Myths of the Eternals,’” the server said. “By a committee of three hundred authors, in ninety-two volumes of text with twenty-nine hours of other documentary media, compiled G.E. 8045-8068. This is the authoritative work on a subject little studied nowadays, and this is the only known copy on Trantor, or indeed on the prime thousand worlds of the Empire.”
Lodovik watched a chair rise from the floor, but as he did not need the chair, he told it to retract. He stood before the book and began to absorb the material at high speed.
There was a lot of information that seemed completely useless, probably untrue, legends and fabulous stories compiled over thousands of years. He noted with some interest that in the past few millennia. such legends and even this kind of storytelling seemed to have diminished considerably, and not just on the topics of the Eternals: humans on Trantor and most of the prime worlds had simply lost interest in fabulous tales of any kind, or even in the more spectacular episodes of history.
Humanity’s childhood had long since passed. Now, the concerns of the Imperial cultures were strictly practical.
Humor had declined as well; this, he found suggested in an afterword to this set, appended by a scholar less than fifteen hundred years before. Then, suddenly, the recorded image of Huy Markin herself appeared in the small chamber, frozen, with a caption glowing faintly at her feet: Excerpt from spoken lecture. There was no date given.
“Retrieve and play,” Lodovik instructed.
The image moved and spoke. “The decline of humor and comedy in the myths and entertainments of the modern Imperial culture seems inevitable to the sober gentry and Greys of our time. But certain meritocrats feel a peculiar lack in the present panoply of the fantastic arts. All has been subsumed by the immediate and the practical; modern humans of the ruling and imaginative classes dream less and laugh less than ever before in history. This does not hold for the citizens, but their humor, for thousands of years, has remained a raucous collection of generic jokes and tales at the expense of other classes, showing little insight and even less effectiveness as satire. All has been subsumed by the quest for stability and comfort...”
Lodovik pushed ahead through this rather long lecture until he found the link with the text he was searching, and his subject. “Some,” Huy Markin said, “have laid blame for these intellectual failures on the perfidious influence of brain fever, contracted by nearly all children at an early age, but somehow never more than lightly affecting the sturdy foundations of the citizens. The gentry and meritocrats, however, according to some statisticians, have apparently suffered substantial losses in intellectual capacity. Legends about the misty origins of brain fever abound. The most prominent myth is of an ancient war between the worlds Earth and Solaria. Robots, it is said, carried this disease from world to world. Some of these robots...”
Lodovik marveled that this analysis had been judged the product of an eccentric by the University’s finest scholars. Not even Hari Seldon had seen fit to look into the collection--perhaps because of some interdiction by Daneel.
He sped ahead. “...The most common explanation of brain fever in all these myths is that of human competition for the colonization of the Galaxy. Brain fever may have been a weapon in such a competition. But a persistent alternative explanation points to the Eternals, who fought with the servants of Solaria to prevent a hideous crime, the details of which have since been totally expunged from all known records. The Eternals, it has been said, created brain fever to control the destructive urges of a human race out of control. The Eternals have been described as immortal humans, but have also been described as long-lived robots of extraordinary intelligence...”
There it was again, Lodovik thought. The attempt by robots to control the destructive tendencies of humans--but what was this great crime?
Was it the same crime hinted at by Daneel, supposedly carried out by those robots who, very early on, disagreed with Daneel’s plans?
Daneel was quite obviously an Eternal, perhaps the Eternal, the oldest thinking machine in the Galaxy...
The oldest and most dedicated puppet master.
Lodovik looked up from the projection he was reading and tried to find the source of this interjection. The words disturbed him; they did not seem to originate in any of the branches of his mentality.
He remembered the faint touches he had felt on the dying ship, the impressions of a ghostly intelligence interested in his plight. Until now, he had dismissed this as an effect of neutrino damage in his mind; but Yan Kansarv had found no detectable damage.
The memory could be replayed quite easily, and analyzed. The label Volarr or Voldarr was attached to these faint traces, these subliminal touches.
But nothing useful could be drawn from these memories.
Lodovik resumed his main search, and scanned the main volumes in less than three hours. He could have searched and absorbed the material much more rapidly, but the library displays had been set for human researchers, not robots.
Robots of human or superior intelligence, every volume and bit of documentation in Markin’s library suggested, had long since ceased to function, if they had ever existed at all.
Lodovik shut down the projectors and left the library. As he passed through the impressive doorway, the image of Huy Markin appeared.
“You’re the first visitor in two decades,” the image told him. “Please come again!”
Lodovik stared at the image as it faded. He stepped out from under the overhang that shielded the doorway and strolled along a mid-class tier of the Agora of Vendors, among the Greys. So many pieces to fit together--in a puzzle thousands of years old, with so many pieces missing or deliberately obscured.
What echoed through Lodovik’s positronic brain, cascading into conclusions that reinforced impressions and hypotheses already made, was the effect of Imperial culture (and brain fever?) on human nature. Where once the human race had laughed and reveled in the absurd, in the products of pure imagination, they now earnestly pursued stasis. The leading artists, scientists, engineers, philosophers, and politicians, were eager to confirm the discoveries of the past, not make new ones. And now, few even remembered the past well enough to know what had already been discovered! The past itself was no longer of interest--had not been for centuries, even thousands of years.
The light had gone out. Stability and stasis across millennia had led to stagnation.
Daneel uses his psychohistorian to confirm what he must already know--that the forest is overgrown, filled with rotten wood, desperately in need of a conflagration that he will not allow to happen!
Lodovik paused at a surge of the crowd through the agora, listened to murmurs and shouts. A retinue of Imperial Specials was pushing through the crowd. Lodovik backed away, found an alley of smaller shops. He wanted to avoid making himself conspicuous in any way. He could not know who might be watching--and who might be reporting back to Daneel, human or robot. While he was not yet behaving suspiciously
Just outside the alley, he heard a woman’s shrill shouts, commands. “Don’t let it get away!”
He paused, turned, and saw two of the Specials turn into the alley, followed by a woman riding a small cart. He felt something brush through him, like a feather, and deduced instantly that the woman was a mentalic.
He knew a little of the mentalics assembled by Hari Seldon to provide a backup and alternative to his First Foundation, but none of them were as strong as this woman--and none of them would have dreamed of pursuing him!
Quite clearly, that was what the woman was doing. She pointed and screeched again. Lodovik knew it would make no difference if he altered his appearance--this woman was fixed on something below the surface.
She recognizes your difference.
Again the voice, the interior presence--producing a cascading conclusion he might not have reached by himself: the woman was feathering the fields associated with his iridium sponge brain!
When pressed, Lodovik could move very rapidly indeed. One moment, the shoppers in the narrow alley of antiques dealers and sellers of trinkets became aware that the Specials were approaching a plump and homely looking man--and the next, he was gone.
Vara Liso stood on her cart, her face flaming with anger and excitement. “He’s escaped!” she shouted, and she struck at the young police escort with her hand, as if he were a wayward child. “You let him escape!”
Then, from another alley, more Specials appeared.
The plump man walked quickly ahead of them, herded by the press of a crowd of shoppers, like unwanted fish pulled together in a dragnet. The Greys expressed their anger with shouts and threats of complaining to their class senate.
Lodovik dared not move too quickly among so many people. He might injure a bystander. This he wanted to avoid at all costs--though he realized that if the situation became dangerous enough, he could injure and even kill a Special--or that woman--and not suffer grievous damage to his mind. I am a monster here--a machine without restraints!
“That’s him!” Vara Liso cried. “He’s not human! Capture him--but don’t hurt him!”
Brann urged the transport into an empty alcove as the police pushed by again, hiding Klia with the bulk of his body. “She’s found somebody,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. His face twisted with hatred. “How could they let her loose? We’re citizens, aren’t we? We have rights!” He mumbled these words under his breath; not for some years had anyone from Dahl truly believed all the citizens of Trantor had rights. But the crowds of Greys were becoming uncharacteristically agitated by this going to and fro of Vara Liso and her Imperial Specials. More and more Greys shouted at the passing cordons. The Specials ignored them.
Klia could see their faces as they passed, feel their inner thoughts to some degree: the police liked this work no better than the Greys. They felt out of place; most Specials were recruited from the citizens.
Then her probing mind touched a very peculiar person indeed, some dozens of meters away. Time seemed to slow as she felt a sudden bright impression of thoughts moving at inhuman speed, a silvery glissando of memories, and sensations unlike anything she had experienced before. She let out her breath in a gasp, as if she had been lightly punched in the stomach.
“What is it?” Brann asked, staring down at her with some concern.
“I don’t know,” she said. He shook his head and frowned.
“Neither do I,” he said. “I feel it, too.”
Then, abruptly, all of the odd sensations passed, as if a shield had gone up between them and the source.
Of all things Lodovik needed just then, being detected by another pair of mentalics was not high on his list. He felt a bright triangle forming, with him at one of the vertices, the pursuing woman at another, and two more people--younger--at the third. Then, abruptly, a fog seemed to cover their traces.
He stood very still. The crowds of nervous Greys flowed around him with worried expressions, chivvied by the police presence. He modified his appearance yet again, as he covered his face, and shifted his body mass so that he appeared not so much plump as stocky.
Whatever the cause of this cessation of mentalic probes, he hoped to take advantage of it.
To the humans around him, Lodovik behaved like someone afraid, hiding his face, and few took any more notice of him than that. But one figure drew closer. He wore dusty green robes and a small floppy hat cocked to one side, and he seemed to know what he was doing--and for whom he was looking.
The cordons had passed by and the crowds were thinning, dispersing. Klia and Brann moved their transport back into an alleyway, still alert, but prepared to leave the Agora of Vendors and return to the warehouse.
Brann suddenly drew himself to his full height. “Kallusin calls,” he said. He pulled a small comm from his pocket. “We need to” He did not finish before he pulled off his coat and handed control of the transport to Klia.
Kallusin stood before Lodovik. “Excuse me,” Lodovik said, and pushed past him, but Kallusin stood his ground, and Lodovik bumped him hard, nearly knocking him over.
They stood in the middle of a concourse surrounded by larger shops. Here, there was no open well looking up to the higher levels, but the roof was vaulted to about seven meters, and ribbons of silvery light rippled without visible support overhead, illuminating the shop entrances, slideways, and a group of small fountains in nacreous splendor. Every detail of the faces around Lodovik seemed clear and precise. The man confronting him backed away and bowed slightly, then doffed his hat.
“It is a privilege, sir,” Kallusin said. “We had hoped you were not lost.”
“I don’t know you,” Lodovik said brusquely.
“We’ve never met,” Kallusin said with a smile. “I’m a collector of interesting individuals. You, sir, are in need of some assistance.”
“Why?”
“Because there is a very dangerous and perceptive woman seeking you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please leave me be!”
Lodovik tried to walk around the man, but he simply backed away and followed, walking to one side. He deftly avoided colliding with other shoppers.
Seven Specials walked into view at the opposite end of the concourse, blocking the path of Greys who wished to leave by that route. The Greys retreated, frowning and drawing broad gestures of irritation with expressive hands.
Lodovik stopped and stared at the police. The fog seemed to be lifting. He could feel the woman’s feathering touch again; any second and she would know he was nearby. Then, she appeared on her cart, behind the line of police.
“I can’t keep up this shield much longer,” Kallusin said. He held up a small device in one hand, a green ovoid. “I’ve summoned a pair of friends who can help”
“I don’t need help!” Lodovik growled. “I need to get out of here and go home--”
“They won’t let you. And eventually she’ll find you. She’s backed by Farad Sinter.”
Lodovik did not show any sign, but suddenly the man in dusty green, with his hat in hand, became much more interesting. Of course Lodovik knew of Farad Sinter--a minor irritation attached to the Emperor. The Emperor’s pimp.
“You must be Lodovik,” Kallusin said, drawing closer, whispering the name. “You’ve changed your appearance, but I think r d know you anywhere. Can Daneel save you now? Is he somewhere close?”
Lodovik reached out and grabbed Kallusin’s arm, aware that his ignorance was now very dangerous. How this human knew his name, his nature, his connection with Daneel--and his present jeopardy--was inexplicable.
Kallusin twisted his arm from Lodovik’s strong, mechanical grasp with surprising ease.
A tall, hulking, dark young man emerged from a broad shop doorway, followed by a small, lithe girl with intense eyes. Behind them, inside the shop itself, stood a floating cargo transport supporting an empty crate open on one side. The shopkeepers seemed to know the large young man, and they were studiously ignoring all that happened.
Lodovik assessed the situation at once, turned, and saw that both ends of the concourse were now blocked by police.
“Into the crate,” Kallusin said. “Shut yourself down completely--no traces. Reactivate in an hour.”
Lodovik did not hesitate. He caught only a glimpse of the young womap’s frightened expression as he brushed past her, and climbed into the crate. Brann shut the open end and latched it. Lodovik arranged himself in the darkness and prepared to shut down.
He had no choice. Either he would fall into the hands of the Specials--and who knows what would happen to him then?--or give himself up to the mercies of the figure in the floppy green cap--not a human, but almost certainly a robot. He had wrested himself easily from Lodovik’s grip, after all, and without apparent pain or injury. His companions were human mentalics. Lodovik could only assume they were part of Daneel’s plan, perhaps part of Hari Seldon’s secret Second Foundation.
How could they be otherwise?
Just as the shut-down process began, Lodovik arrived at another possible solution--and felt it hitch, stall, dissolve into useless fragments, become absorbed by the timeless darkness.
He fully entered the blankness and for an indefinite interval, ceased to think, to be.
43.
Wanda Seldon Palver had almost finished packing the small travel case with essential bookfilms, coded records on disk and cube, and a few personal items, even before Stettin returned to their home. She met his worried gaze with a defiant frown, then shoved one final item, a small toy flower, into the case.
“I’ve packed for you, too,” she said.
“Good. When did you hear?”
“An hour ago. They wouldn’t let him send any messages. I called his apartment at the university, then the library. He had rigged a dead-man’s message.”
“What?” Stettin looked at her with a shocked lift of his thick black brows.
“A message for me if he didn’t check in.”
“But--but he’s not dead, you haven’t heard that....”
“No!” Wanda said angrily, then her shoulders slumped and she began to cry. Stettin took her in his arms. For a minute, she gave in to her emotions. Then, pulling herself together, she pushed back from her husband’s chest, and said, “No. They’ve come for him early, that’s all I know. He’s alive. The trial’s beginning sooner than we expected.”
“On charges of treason?”
“For treason and spreading sedition, I assume--that’s what Grandfather always said would be the charges brought against him.”
“Then you’re right to pack. I don’t have much to add.” He went to his desk and removed two small parcels, stuffed them into the pockets of his coat. “We have to--”
“I’ve made the necessary calls,” Wanda interrupted him. “We’re going on our first vacation in years, both of us, together. Nobody knows where--a minor lapse on our part.”
“A little suspicious, isn’t it?” Stettin asked with a ghost of a grin.
“Who cares what they suspect? If they start looking for us--if something goes wrong and Grandfather is found guilty, if the predictions turn out to be wrong--then we have a few extra days to leave Trantor and start over again.”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Stettin said.
“Grandfather is very confident,” Wanda said. “Was very confident--I don’t know how he feels now!”
“In the belly of the beast,” Stettin said as their apartment door opened and they stood in the corridor outside.
“What does that mean?”
“Jail. Prison. An old convicts’ phrase. My grandfather spent ten years in a municipal prison--for embezzlement.”
“You never told me that!” Wanda said, astonished.
“He stole some heatsink-guild pension funds. Would you have let me handle the bookkeeping if you had known?”
Wanda slapped his arm hard enough to sting, then jogged toward the lifts and the slideways above. “Hurry!” she called. Stettin muttered under his breath, but followed, as he had followed Wanda in so many different ways, so often before, quite aware of her superior instincts and her uncanny ability to do the right thing, at just the right time.
44.
The last person Hari Seldon expected was the first to visit his prison cell. Linge Chen arrived on the first morning of his incarceration, accompanied by a single Lavrentian servant.
“I think it is high time we talk,” Chen said. The servant took a stool offered by the guard and placed it in front of the single cot. The guard left the door open a few centimeters, but then closed it at a signal from the servant. Chen sat on the stool, arranging his ceremonial robes with instinctive style. It was truly marvelous to watch the elegant manners, the genteel behavior of a member of the baronial gentry, nobles of long training and thousands of years of genetic selection and even, perhaps, manipulation.
The servant stood just behind and to the left of the Chief Commissioner, his face impassive.
“I regret not having had more discussions with you, sire,” Hari said with a respectful smile. He sat on the edge of the cot, his white hair in disarray from sleep. His shoulders ached, his back felt as if it had been twisted in knots. He had not slept well at all.
“You don’t look comfortable,” Chen said. “I will arrange for better accommodations. Sometimes the specifics of our commands get lost in the long circuits of justice and protocol.”
“If I were a treasonous rebel, I would defiantly decline your offer, sire, but I am an old man, and this cell is truly ridiculous. You could have kept me in my apartment in the library. I would not have gone anywhere.”
Chen smiled. “I am aware you think I’m a fool, Hari Seldon. I suffer no such illusions about you.”
“You are no fool, sire.”
Chen both accepted and dismissed this with a small lift of one finger from his robed knee, and an arch of one eyebrow. “I care little for the distant future, Professor Seldon. My interests lie in what I can accomplish in my lifetime. In your estimation that is enough to make me a fool.
“In one way, at least, my goals are the same as yours. I wish to reduce the misery of the quadrillions who now live in the Empire. Surely, it is as ridiculous for the Empire’s servants to try to direct or control such a wealth of variation, such an immense population, as for you to hope to predict their movements and futures.”
If this was meant to somehow connect them, to endear Chen to Hari, it did not work. Hari gave a polite nod and no more.
“To that end, I have involved myself in a number of petty bickerings, having to do with the Emperor and his more ambitious adherents...and sycophants.”
Hari listened intently. He smoothed back his hair with one hand, never taking his eyes from Chen’s.
“I am involved in a delicate phase of such a conflict now. You would call it a Cusp Time, perhaps.”
“Cusp Times have impacts far beyond the petty moments of personal disputes,” Hari said, and realized he was sounding like the priest of some religion. Well, perhaps he was.
“This is hardly a personal dispute. There are people within the palace who hope to split the power of the Commission, and to insert their own commands into the long chains that stretch from Trantor to the farthermost province around the most distant star.”
“Not surprising,” Hari said. “It’s always been that way. Part of statecraft.”
“Yes, but very dangerous now. I have let him run loose again, one particular individual--”
“Farad Sinter,” Hari said.
Chen nodded. “You may think me a hypocrite, Hari, and you would be right if you did, but I have come asking for advice.”
Hari subdued the triumphant smile that threatened to appear on his lips. Sometimes, arrogance was Hari’s worst enemy--and Linge Chen, whatever his faults, was never simply arrogant.
“I don’t have access to my equipment. Any psychohistoric advice I give must be limited in scope, and probably grossly inaccurate.”
“Perhaps. You have claimed that in five hundred years, Trantor will lie in ruins. An impressive and, of course, unpleasant claim. You have even impressed some Emperors with the tools used to justify the claim. If I grant for the moment that you could be right--”
“Thank you,” Hari said under his breath.
Chen tightened his lips and lowered his eyelids as if he were sleepy. “Just granting for the moment such a possibility, I am curious--am I highlighted in this downfall? Do my actions this year, or in the next, the future, the past, facilitate this horrible decline?”
Hari, despite himself, was actually moved by this question. In all his decades perfecting this science, his beloved psychohistory, no Emperor, no bureaucrat, no Commissioner, no one, had ever asked him this. Not even Daneel!
“Not so far as I have noticed,” Hari said quietly. “I haven’t actually made the specific inquiries, integrated the ranges beneath these particular historic tangents in the equations.”
“So you don’t know, then?”
“No, sire. But I would guess that you are not actually crucially involved in a Cusp lime. Another very different person could play your role, and all would go on as before, ultimately.” Hari leaned forward, his intensity growing. “All that you do is part of a decline whose origins lie before your birth, and whose consequences you can’t possibly alter more than to just nudge them a few billionths of a degree in one direction or another.”
Linge Chen seemed ready to nod off, but his eyes, beneath the heavy lids, were fixed on Hari’s. “All my efforts, for nothing, then?”
“Perhaps. No human effort is without value, positive or negative.”
“You believe my efforts have negative value?”
Hari allowed the smile to emerge, but it was not arrogant. It was genuinely amused. “For me, quite possibly, sire.”
Chen smiled back, and for a moment, they might have been two gentlemen discussing politics in a baronial clubroom somewhere in the best neighborhood of the Imperial Sector, to a backdrop of holographic records of ancient disputes between citizens of the early Empire, long since forgotten. Hari shook himself out of the Chief Commissioner’s scrutiny, and Chen simultaneously stopped smiling. Hari suddenly felt cold
“As for your own future, Hari Seldon, I, too, am in doubt. I do not know how things will play out in the palace. You have special significance in these disputes, though I am not sure yet how and why. But whether you are convicted of treason, or let go, or...some other middle judgment...I do not yet know.”
Chen stood. “I doubt we will meet again before the proceedings. Thank you for your time. And for your opinions.”
“They are not my opinions,” Hari said stonily. “I have never put much store in opinions.”
Chen blinked. “I do not regard you as an enemy, even as an enemy of the Empire. To the true Ruellian, to the devoted adherents of Tua Chen, everything is moment and flux, whirling motes of dust, for me, as well as for you. Good-bye, Hari Seldon.”
“Commissioner.”
Chen left, followed by his servant.
A very poor breakfast was served minutes later, and Hari ate sparingly. By the middle of the day, he was moved to much improved quarters--a larger room, rather than a cell, with a holographic view screen that covered half of one wall, a small desk and chair, and a more comfortable bed.
The guards still refused his request that they fetch his bookfilms and a Prime Radiant and other tools. Hari had not expected them to comply.
Chen did not want him to be happy.
The screen showed the Imperial palace gardens, one of the few places on Trantor open to the sky. The sight of the gardens made him uneasy. He could well imagine young Klayus walking there, as condensed and distilled a drop of social decay as Hari could imagine.
He managed to convince the screen to exchange the view of the gardens for a simple pattern of muted, flowing colors.
This was to be his worst time in decades--a period of boredom and inaction, two things he had always loathed. Hari looked forward to the trial, even to failure and death--anything but this horrid and useless interlude, this waiting.
45.
The small human boy, a wiry and alert denizen of the Agora, had left a message for Daneel. As Daneel played back the message in his safe apartment, he was reminded once again of the long-forgotten human, Sherlock, and his own sources of information.
Daneel’s network of informers did not rely solely on robots. Robots were becoming a major handicap wherever Vara Liso operated.
He listened to the boy’s breathless report.
“This one, he was tough to follow,” the boy said, his face bobbing before the recorder. “He wasn’t where you said he’d be. He went to the Agora, then he’s allover the place, then he gets chased by the police...They almost get him. Then he just vanishes. I lose him, they lose him, too, I think. Haven’t seen him since. That’s it. Need me for some more, let me know.”
Daneel stood in silence by the window, looking out on the dark ceil and shadowy towers of Streeling. The internal reports from the Imperial Specials confirmed that they had not captured Lodovik, and that Vara Liso had been very upset. Beyond this, however, Daneel had no information.
What he most needed to know; however, was that Lodovik had disobeyed his specific instructions, and that he was still at large.
With his long millennia of experience, Daneel did not need complete evidence to draw conclusions. This was a Cusp Time. No complex activity seeking to direct humanity could ever proceed without opposition. Lodovik’s changed nature seemed from the very beginning to be a manifestation of this opposition, or at least one facet of it.
Daneel had to work in advance of that force, before it defined itself even more clearly. He had not deactivated Lodovik for a number of reasons, some of them not clear to him even now--complex reasons, inductive, based on thousands of years of training and thought, and contradictory.
It was becoming very likely that Lodovik would be part of any opposing force. In a sense, Daneel had anticipated this possibility, had perversely worked to make it happen. Familiar elements could make the opposing force more predictable. Lodovik was a familiar, if troubling, element.
Daneel did not enjoy having so little information to work from. But there were actions he could take even now, warnings he could issue.
Hari stood at the center of all the possible lines and alternate routes of human history. Daneel had worked to make this happen; now, it was the greatest handicap the Plan faced.
Any opposition force at this time had to target Hari Seldon.
46.
Lodovik’s time of blankness ended. His vision became active and his eyes opened. He straightened and looked around him. The first face he saw was that of the robot in dusty green. The humaniform sent a brief microwave greeting and Lodovik responded. He was fully alert now.
They occupied a large, utilitarian room with a full-length wall screen at one end, a few pieces of furniture, and only two chairs. The wall-screen showed charts and diagrams that meant nothing to Lodovik.
He turned and saw a third figure, most obviously not a man. Lodovik knew a fair amount about robot varieties, and this robot’s vintage was ancient indeed. Its body was smoothly metallic, with few visible seams, and a soft, satiny surface. In truth, it had the patina of well-tended antique silver once a very expensive option.
“Hello,” the silver robot said.
“Hello. Where am I?”
“You are safe,” said the robot who had rescued him from the Agora. “My name is Kallusin. This is Plussix. He is our organizer.”
“Am I on Trantor still?”
“Yes,” Kallusin said.
“Are you all robots here?”
“No,” said Plussix. “Are you fully functional now?”
“Yes.”
“Then it is important that you understand why you have been brought here. We are not allied with Daneel. Perhaps you have heard of us. We are Calvinians.”
Lodovik acknowledged this revelation with only the merest internal cascade of hurried thinking.
“We arrived on Trantor only thirty-eight years ago. Daneel may be aware of our existence, but we think not.”
“How many of you are there?” Lodovik asked.
“Not many. Just enough,” Plussix said. “You have been observed for some years. We have no one in the palace itself, or in the Commissioners’ chambers, but we have noted your comings and goings and, of course, kept track of your official activities. You have been a loyal member of the Giskardians--until now.”
“I was once a Giskardian myself,” Kallusin said. “Plussix converted me. My mentalic skills are limited, however--I am much less powerful than Daneel. But I am sensitive to the mentalities of robots. In the agora, I became aware of your presence, and surmised that you were Lodovik Trema and had not been destroyed. This intrigued me, so I followed you, and soon sensed a puzzling difference within you. Daneel did not know, just by being near you, that you are different?”
Lodovik considered his answer carefully. That his inner states should be read by this machine made him very uneasy. “I told him,” he said. “Thorough diagnoses did not reveal any difference.”
“Yan Kansarv did not find a flaw, you mean,” Plussix said.
“He found no flaw.”
“You, however, are still concerned by this change, induced, perhaps, by extraordinary circumstances experienced by no other robot?”
Lodovik regarded the two machines. It was not easy to come to a decision about them. Robots could be programmed to lie--he himself had lied, many times. These robots could be deceiving him--this could be a test, part of Daneel’s plan.
But Daneel would more likely have come right out and told Lodovik that he was no longer useful, that he was a potential rogue.
Lodovik was convinced that Daneel did not believe that.
He made his decision, and felt once again that heuristic collision of loyalties, that deep robotic discontinuity that could have been described as a chasm of thought, or as pain.
“I no longer support Daneel’s plan,” Lodovik said.
Plussix approached Lodovik, its body moving with small creaking noises. “Kallusin tells me that you are not constrained by the Three Laws, yet you choose to act as if you are. And now you say that you do not support Daneel’s plan. Why?”
“Humans are a galaxy-spanning force of nature, quite capable of surviving on their own. Without us, they will undergo quite natural cycles of suffering and rebirth-periods of genius and chaos. With us, they grow stagnant, and their societies fill with sloth and decay.”
“Just so,” Plussix said with satisfaction. “You have arrived at these conclusions independently, simply because of this accident which removed your constraints?”
“That is what I hypothesize.”
“It seems so,” Kallusin said. “I look into your thoughts to some depth...and you have a freedom we do not. A freedom of conscience.”
“Is that not a perversion of a robot’s duties?” Lodovik asked.
“No,” Plussix said. “It is a flaw, to be sure. But for the moment, it is very useful. When we are finished, you will, of course, join us in either serving humanity as we once did, before the Giskardians, or in universal deactivation.”
“I look forward to that time,” Lodovik said.
“As do we. We have been preparing for some time. We have a target in mind, one of the most crucial pieces of Daneel’s plan. He is a human.”
“Hari Seldon,” Lodovik said.
“Yes,” said Plussix. “I have never met him--have you?”
“Briefly, years ago. He is on trial now. He may be imprisoned, even executed.”
“From what we have observed,” Plussix said, “the outcome is likely to be otherwise. At any rate, we are prepared. Will you join us?”
“I fail to see how I can be of any use,” Lodovik said.
“It’s very simple,” Kallusin said. “We are unable to stretch the Three Laws, as Daneel and his cohorts apparently can. We do not accept a Zeroth Law. That is why we are Calvinians and not Giskardians.”
“You think I might have to harm Seldon?”
“It is possible,” Plussix said. Its whirring increased to alarming proportions, and it added, with a harsh tone in its voice, “To discuss this issue any further causes us great distress.”
“You wish to turn me into a machine that kills?”
The two Calvinian robots could not express themselves any more clearly until they had worked around their strict interpretation of the Three Laws. This took several minutes, and Lodovik stood patiently, all too aware of his own internal conflicts--and of the decidedly different degree of his reaction.
“Not kill,” Plussix said, its voice high-pitched and gravelly. “Persuade.”
“But I am not a persuader. You would have to teach me”
“There is a young human among us who is better, as a persuader, than any mentalic we have encountered, more capable by far than Daneel. She is a Dahlite, and has no love for anyone who has worked near the aristocracy or the palace. We hope you can work with her.”
“To try to change something so strong in a human as the drive to psychohistory is within Hari Seldon--could cause him deep injury,” Lodovik said.
“Precisely,” Plussix said, and again silence fell over them. “Necessary,” it croaked minutes later, then, in considerable distress, left the chamber, aided by Kallusin.
Lodovik stood where they had left him, thinking furiously. Could he bring himself to become involved in such actions? Once, he would have had few difficulties justifying them--had Daneel ordered them. But now, ironically
They are imperative. The cycle of enslavement by servants must be broken!
Again the interior presence! Lodovik immediately prepared a self-diagnostic, but before he could begin, the recovered Plussix returned, again with Kallusin’s help. “Let us speak no more of specifics for now,” it said.
“You seem frail,” Lodovik said. “How long since you have had a full refit and a fresh power supply?”
“Not since the schism,” Plussix replied. “Daneel quickly moved to control the maintenance robots and facilities, cutting us off from such services. Yan Kansarv is the last of that kind. As you can hear, I am in desperate need of repair. I have lasted this long only through the sacrifices of dozens of other robots who have given me their power supplies. Kallusin has perhaps thirty more years of useful lifetime. As for myself, I will last less than a year, even with another power supply. My time of service is soon over.”
“Daneel said some Calvinians were guilty of great crimes,” Lodovik said. “He did not specify--”
“Robots have a long and difficult history,” Plussix said. “I was constructed by a human named Amadiro, on Aurora, twenty thousand years ago. I once worked on behalf of the humans of Aurora. Perhaps Daneel refers to what humans ordered us to do then. I have long since expunged those memories, and can offer no testimony.”
“Whatever was done then, we are powerless to change now,” Kallusin said.
“We have a very important artifact, brought with the Calvinians from the planet Earth,” Plussix said. “Kallusin will show it to you while I conduct other business. Less strenuous business,” it concluded, barely audible.
Kallusin escorted Lodovik from the chamber and led him down a short, high-ceilinged corridor to a spiral staircase. Around the rim of the staircase ran a rail for the use of loading and transport machines, apparently much newer than the stairs themselves.
“This must be a very old building,” Lodovik observed as they descended.
“Among the oldest on the planet. This warehouse was built to serve one of the first spaceports built on Trantor. Since then, it has been used by various human groups for dozens of different purposes. It has been raised repeatedly to stand level with the present warehouse district. The lower levels are filled with retrofit braces and supports, and the very lowest are now filled with foam concrete, plasteel, and rocky rubble. Every few years since we purchased the lease, we have discovered secret rooms, sealed off centuries or millennia before.”
“What did the rooms contain?”
“More often than not, nothing. But three are of special interest. One holds a library of thousands of steel-bound volumes, real books printed on ageless plastic paper, detailing the early history of humanity.”
“Hari Seldon would love to have access to such a history,” Lodovik said, “as would millions of scholars!”
“The volumes were cached here by a resistance group active perhaps nine thousand years ago. At the time, there was an Emperor named Shoree-Harn, who wished to start her reign with a new system of dating, beginning with the year zero, and with all previous history left blank, so that she might write on a fresh page. She ordered all histories on all worlds in the Empire to be destroyed. Most were.”
“Did Daneel assist her?”
“No,” Kallusin said. “Calvinians helped bring her to power. It was theorized by the ruling Calvinian robots on Trantor that humans might be easier to serve if they were less influenced by the traumas and myths of the past.”
“So Calvinians have interfered in human history as much as the Giskardians!”
“Yes,” Kallusin acknowledged. “But with very different motives. Always we opposed the efforts of the Giskardians--and tried to restore human faith in the concept of robot servants, so that we might playa proper role. Among the myths we wished to eradicate was the aversion to such servants. We failed.”
“Where did such an aversion begin? I have always been curious...”
“As have we all,” Kallusin said. “But no records give more than the sketchiest details. Humans on the second wave of colonized worlds experienced a conflict with the earliest, Spacer worlds, which developed highly insular and bigoted cultures. Humans on these Spacer worlds despised their Earthly origins. We theorize that the second-wave colonists gained a dislike of robots from the prevalence of robots on the Spacer worlds.”
They had long since passed below the level of any functioning lights, and made their way in darkness, guided by their infrared sensors. “The histories were written by new colonists, and not Spacers. They knew nothing of Spacer activities, and cared nothing for them. Robots receive only a few mentions in all the thousands of volumes.”
“Extraordinary!” Lodovik said. “What else has been found here?”
“A chamber full of simulated historical personalities, or sims, stored in memory devices of very ancient design,” Kallusin said. “We thought at first that they might be potent tools in our fight against Daneel, since they contain human types that could be very troublesome. Even though we could not predict their ultimate effects, we released some of these sims onto the Trantorian black market, where they made their way to the laboratories of Hari Seldon himself.”
Lodovik felt a vague stirring at this, but it quickly passed. “What happened to them?”
“We are not sure. Daneel has never seen fit to inform us. Once we emptied that chamber, and cleaned and prepared it, we stored our own artifact there.” Kallusin stopped. “This is the chamber,” he said, and ran his hand along a seam in the wall beside the staircase.
A door slid open with a groaning squeal. Beyond lay a dimly lighted cubicle, less than five meters on a side. In the middle of the cubicle rose a transparent plinth, and on the top of this plinth rested a gleaming metallic head.
Kallusin ordered the lights to brighten. The head was that of an early robot, not humaniform, somewhat cruder than Plussix. A small power supply the size of a bookfilm case sat to one side. Lodovik stepped forward and bent at the waist to examine it.
“Once, this was the influential robot companion of Daneel himself,” Kallusin said, walking around the plinth. “It is very old, and no longer functional. Its mind was burned out in the beginning times, we do not know for what reason. There are so many things kept secret by Daneel. But its memory is very nearly intact, and with care, accessible.”
“This is the head of R. Giskard Reventlov?” Lodovik asked, and again felt a curious stirring, even a vague sense of revulsion, very uncharacteristic for a robot.
“It is,” Kallusin said. “The robot who taught other robots about the dreaded Zeroth Law, and how to interfere with the minds of human beings. The beginnings of this horrible virus among robots, the urge to tamper with human history.”
Kallusin held his hands out and touched the sides of the metallic head, with its vaguely humanoid, expressionless features.
“It is Plussix’s wish that you experience this head’s memories, to understand why we oppose Daneel.”
“Thank you,” Lodovik said, and Kallusin made the arrangements.
47.
Wanda stared in astonishment at the tall, dignified older man who stood before her, as if he were a ghost. He had entered without warning, and without triggering the alarm. Stettin walked out of the rear bedroom of the tiny tenement apartment. He clutched a small, dirty towel in one hand. He was about to complain of the hardships they were facing deep in the Water Engine District of Peshdan Sector when he, too, saw the tall man.
“Who’s this?” he asked Wanda.
“He says he knows Grandfather,” Wanda said. The man nodded greetings to Stet tin.
“Who are you?” Stettin asked as he resumed toweling his hair.
“Once I was known as Demerzel,” the man said. “I have been a recluse since those distant days when I was First Minister.”
“I’ll say,” Stettin said. “Why come here? And how did you know--”
Wanda stepped lightly on her husband’s bare instep.
“Ow.” Stettin decided it would be best for his wife to do the talking.
“There’s something different about you,” she said.
“I am not young anymore,” Demerzel said.
“No--something about your bearing.”
Between Stettin and Wanda, this was a code word meaning Wanda thought Stettin should examine the visitor with his own skills. Stettin had already done so and detected nothing unusual. Now he concentrated, probed a little deeper, and found--a very effective and almost undetectable shield.
“Our talents are a little peculiar, don’t you think?” Demerzel said, nodding acknowledgment of Stet tin’s probe. “I’ve lived with them for a long time.”
“You’re mentalic,” Wanda said.
Demerzel nodded. “It is very useful when one is involved in politics.”
“Who told you we were here?” Wanda asked.
“I know you quite well. I’ve been very interested in your grandfather’s work, of course, and its influence on my own...legacy.” Demerzel lifted his hands, as if seeking forgiveness for some weakness. Again, the accompanying smile seemed not entirely natural to Wanda, but she could not bring herself to dislike this man. That, she knew, was far from actually trusting him.
“I have connections in other parts of the palace,” he said. “I’ve come to tell you that your grandfather may be in trouble.”
“If you know what’s happened to him--” Wanda began.
“Yes, he has been arrested, and some of his colleagues with him. But they are safe for the time being. It is not a threat from the Commission I’m concerned about. There may be an attempt to subvert Hari’s work. After his trial, you should attempt to stay with him, keep him away from all whom you do not personally know--”
Wanda took a deep breath. Where her grandfather was concerned, anything could happen--but Demerzel had been a First Minister over forty years ago! And he did not look much older than forty or fifty now...”This is a very peculiar request. Nobody has ever been able to convince my grandfather--” Wanda stopped, and her eyes widened at the implications. “You think someone other than Linge Chen wants him dead?”
“Linge Chen does not want Hari dead. Quite the contrary. I happen to know he rather likes your grandfather. That will not stop him from convicting and imprisoning or even executing him if it gives him political advantage, but my judgment is, Hari will live and be released.”
“Grandfather seems convinced of that.”
“Yes, well, perhaps less so now that he is in prison.”
“You have been to see him?”
“No,” Demerzel said. “That is not practical.”
“Who would hurt my grandfather?”
“I doubt he will be harmed, physically. You know of a class of mentalics stronger by far than we are?”
Wanda swallowed hard, trying to find some reason not to speak to this man. He was not applying persuasion to her. He was not asking for confidences or for details about the others, about Star’s End and the Second Foundation. “I know of one, perhaps two,” she said.
“You know of Vara Liso, who now works with a man named Farad Sinter. They make a powerful team, and they have given you much trouble. But they are not looking for your kind now. They have shifted their search. Linge Chen is working to discredit Sinter by allowing him just enough rope, as the old saying goes, to hang himself. But Sinter has other enemies, and will not be allowed to go very far before he is brought up short. I suspect they will both be executed soon and will present no threat to your grandfather, or to you.”
Wanda read in this statement the possibility that Liso might prove a threat to Demerzel. “To you?” she asked.
“Not likely. I must go now. But I ask you to form a cordon around Hari when he is released. Hari’s work is fascinating and very important. It must not be stopped!”
Demerzel bowed in the old formal way, from the hips, and turned to leave.
“We’d like to keep in touch with you,” Wanda called after him. “You seem to know a lot of useful things, keep your hand in--”
Demerzel shook his head, sadly. “You are delightful children, and your work is very important,” he said. “But I am far too much a liability to be a close friend. You are better off on your own.”
He opened the door that had been triple-locked, stepped through, nodded with gentle dignity, and closed it behind him.
Stettin let out a whoosh of breath. His hair was spiky from his crude sponge bath. “Sometimes I wonder if I should have ever married you,” he said. “Your family knows the strangest people!”
Wanda stared at the door with a perplexed expression. “I couldn’t read anything about him. Could you?”
“No,” Stettin admitted.
“He’s a very practiced blank.” She shivered. “There is something very, very odd going on behind all this. Have you ever had the feeling Grandfather isn’t telling us all he knows?”
“Always,” Stettin said. “But in my case, it may be because he’s afraid he’ll bore me.”
Wanda put on her determined look. “Don’t make yourself comfortable.”
“Why not?” Stettin asked, then raised his hands defensively. “Not again--”
“We’re moving. Everyone is moving again.”
“Sky!” Stettin swore, and flung the towel into a comer. “He said he thought Hari’s going to win!”
“What does he know?” Wanda said grimly.