Foundation and Chaos

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.