Foundation’s Fear

1.

Hari Seldon stood alone in the lift, thinking.

The door slid open. A woman asked if this elevator was going up or down. Distracted, he answered, “Yes.” Her surprised look told him that somehow his reply was off target. Only after the door closed on her puzzled stare did he see that she meant which way, not if.

He was in the habit of making precise distinctions; the world was not.

He walked into his office, still barely aware of his surroundings, and Cleon’s 3D blossomed in the air before he could sit down. The Emperor awaited no filter programs.

“I was so happy to hear you had returned from holiday!” Cleon beamed.

“Pleased, sire.” What did he want?

Hari decided not to tell him all that had transpired. Daneel had stressed secrecy. Only this morning, after a zigzag route down from the wormyards, had Hari let his presence be known even to the Imperial Specials.

“I fear you arrive at a difficult time.” Cleon scowled. “Lamurk is moving for a vote in the High Council on the First Ministership.”

“How many votes can he muster?”

“Enough that I cannot ignore the Council. I will be forced to appoint him despite my own likes.”

“I am sorry for that, sire.” In fact, his heart leaped.

“I have maneuvered against him, but…” An elaborate sigh. Cleon chewed at his ample lower lip. Had the man gained weight again? Or were Hari’s perceptions altered by his time of shortened diet on Panucopia? Most Trantorians looked pudgy to him now. “Then, too, is this irritating matter of Sark and its confounded New Renaissance. The muddle grows. Could this spread to other worlds in their Zone? Would those throw in with them? You have studied this?”

“In detail.”

“Using psychohistory?”

Hari gave way to his gut instinct. “Unrest will grow there.”

“You’re sure?”

He wasn’t, but-”I suggest you move against it.”

“Lamurk favors Sark. He says it will bring new prosperity.”

“He wants to ride this discord into office.”

“Overt opposition from me at this delicate time would be…unpolitic.”

“Even though he might be behind the attempts on my life?”

“Alas, there is no proof of that. As ever, several factions would benefit were you to.,.” Cleon coughed uncomfortably.

“Withdraw-involuntarily? “

Cleon’s mouth worked uneasily. “An Emperor is father to a perpetually unruly family.”

If even the Emperor were tip-toeing around Lamurk, matters were indeed bad. “Couldn’t you position squadrons for quick use should the opportunity arise?”

Clean nodded. “I shall. But if the High Council votes for Lamurk, I shall be powerless to move against so prominent and, well, exciting a world as Sark.”

“I believe strife will spread throughout Sark’s entire Zone.”

“Truly? What would you advise me to do against Lamurk?”

“I have no political skills, sire. You knew that.”

“Nonsense. You have psychohistory!”

Hari was still uncomfortable owning up to the theory, even with Cleon. If it were ever to be useful, word of psychohistory could not be widespread, or else everyone would use it. Or try to.

Cleon went on, “And your solution to the terrorist problem-it is working well. We just executed Moron One Hundred.”

Hari shuddered, thinking of the lives obliterated by a mere passing idea of his. “A…a small issue, surely, sire.”

“Then turn your calculations to the Dahlite Sector matter, Hari. They are restive. Everyone is, these days.”

“And the Zones of Dahlite persuasion throughout the Galaxy?”

“They back the local Dahlites in the Councils. It’s about this representation question. The plan we follow on Trantor will be mirrored throughout the Galaxy. Indeed, in the votes of whole Zones.”

“Well, if most people think-”

“Ah, my dear Hari, you still have a mathist’s myopia. History is determined not by what people think, but by what they feel.”

Startled-for this remark struck him as true-Hari could only say, “I see, sire.”

“We-you and I, Hari-must decide this issue.”

“I’ll work on the decision, sire.”

How he had come to hate the very word! Decide had the same root as suicide and homicide. Decisions felt like little killings. Somebody lost.

Hari now knew why he was not cut out for these matters. If his skin was too thin, he would have too ready empathy with others, with their arguments and sentiments. Then he would not make decisions which he knew could only be approximately right and would cause some pain.

On the other hand, he had to steel himself against the personal need to be liked. In a natural politician, that would lead to a posture that said he cared about others, when in fact he cared what they thought of him- becausebeing liked was what counted, far down in the shadowy psyche. It also came in handy for staying in office.

Cleon brought up more issues. Hari dodged and stalled as much as he could. When Cleon abruptly ended the talk, he knew he had not come over well. He had no chance to reflect on this, for Yugo came in.

“I’m so glad you’re back!” Yugo grinned. “The Dahl issue really needs your attention-”

“Enough!” Hari could not vent his ire at the Emperor, but Yugo would do nicely. “No political talk. Show me your research progress.”

“Uh, all right.”

Yugo looked chastened and Hari at once regretted being so abrupt. Yugo hurried to set up his latest data displays. Hari blinked; for a moment, he had seen in Yugo’s haste an odd similarity to pan gestures.

Hari listened, thinking along two tracks at once. This, too, seemed easier since Panucopia.

Plagues were building across the entire Empire. Why?

With rapid transport between worlds, diseases thrived. Humans were the major petri dish. Ancient maladies and virulent new plagues appeared around distant stars. This inhibited Zonal integration, another hidden factor.

Diseases filled an ecological niche, and for some, humanity was a snug nook. Antibiotics knocked down infections, which then mutated and returned, more virulent still. Humanity and microbes made an intriguing system, for both sides fought back quickly…

Cures propagated quickly through the wormhole system, but so did disease carriers. The entire problem, Yugo had found, could be described by a method known as “marginal stability,” in which disease and people struck an uneasy, ever-shifting balance. Major plagues were rare, but minor ones became common. Afflictions rose and inventive science damped them within a generation. This oscillation sent further ripples spreading among other human institutions, radiating into commerce and culture. With intricate coupling terms in the equations, he saw patterns emerging, with one sad consequence.

The human lifespan in the “natural” civilized human condition-living in cities and towns-had an equally “natural” limit. While some few attained 150 years, most died well short of 100. The steady hail of fresh disease insured it. In the end, there was no lasting shelter from the storm of biology. Humans lived in troubled balance with microbes, an unending struggle with no final victories.

“Like this tiktok revolt,” Yugo finished.

Hari jerked to attention. “What?”

“It’s like a virus. Dunno what’s spreading it, though.”

“All over Trantor?”

“That’s the focus, seems like. Others Zones are getting tiktok troubles, too.”

“They refuse to harvest food?”

“Yup. Some of the tiktoks, mostly the recent models, 590s and higher-they say it’s immoral to eat other living things.”

“Good grief.”

Hari remembered breakfast. Even after the exotica of Panucopia, the autokitchen’s meager offering had been a shock. Trantorian food had always been cooked or ground, blended or compounded. Properly, fruit was presented as a sauce or preserve. To his surprise, breakfast appeared to have come straight from the dirt. He had wondered if it had been washed-and how he would know for sure. Trantorians hated their meals to remind them of the natural world.

“They’re refusing to work the Caverns, even,” Yugo said.

“But that’s essential!”

“Nobody can fix ‘em. There’s some tiktok meme invading them.”

“Like these plagues you’re analyzing.”

Hari had been shocked at Trantor’s erosion in just a few months. He and Dors had slipped into Streeling with Daneel’s help, amid messy, trash-strewn corridors with phosphors malfunctioning, lifts dead. Now this.

Yugo’s stomach suddenly rumbled. “Oh, sorry. People are having to work the Caverns for the first time in centuries! They have no hands-on experience. Everybody but the gentry’s on slim rations.”

Hari had helped Yugo escape that sweltering work years before. In vast vaults, wood and coarse cellulose passed automatically from the solar caverns to vats of weak acid. Passing through deep rivers of acid hydrolyzed this to glucose. Now people, not rugged tiktoks, had to mix niter suspensions and ground phosphate rock in a carefully calculated slurry. With prepared organics stirred in, a vast range of yeasts and their derivatives emerged.

“The Emperor has to do somethin’!” Yugo said.

“Or I,” Hari said. But what?

“People’re sayin’ we have to scrap all the tiktoks, not just the Five Hundred series, and do everything ourselves.”

“Without them, we would be reduced to hauling bulk foods across the Galaxy by hypership and worms-an absurdity. Trantor will fall.”

“Hey, we can do better than tiktoks.”

“My dear Yugo, that is what I call Echo-Nomics. You’re repeating conventional wisdom. One must consider the larger picture. Trantorians aren’t the same people who built this world. They’re softer.”

“We’re as tough and smart as the men and women who built the Empire!”

“They didn’t stay indoors.”

“Old Dahlite sayin’.” Yugo grinned. “If you don’t like the grand picture, just apply dog logic to life. Get petted, eat often, be lovable and loved, sleep a lot, dream of a leash-free world.”

Despite himself, Hari laughed. But he knew he had to act, and soon.

2.

“We are trapped between tin deities and carbon angels,” Voltaire rasped.

“These…creatures?” Joan asked in a thin, awed voice.

“This alien fog-quite godlike in a way. More dispassionate than real, carbon-based humans. You and I are like neither…now.”

They floated above what Voltaire termed SysCity -the system representation of Trantor, its cyberself. For Joan’s human referents he had transformed the grids and layers into myriad crystalline walkways, linking saber-sharp towers. Dense connections webbed the air. Motes connected to other motes in intricate cross-bonds and filmed the ground. This yielded a cityscape like a brain. A visual pun, he thought.

“I hate this place,” she said.

“You’d prefer a Purgatory simulation?”

“It is so…chilling.”

The alien minds above them were a murky mist of connections. “They seem to be studying us,” Voltaire said, “with decidedly unsympathetic eyes.”

“I stand ready, should they attack.” She swung a huge sword.

“And I, should their weapons of choice be syllogisms.”

He could now reach any library in Trantor, read its contents in less time than he had once taken to write a verse. He worked his mind-or was it minds, now?-around the clotted, cold mist.

Once some theorists had thought that the global net would give birth to a hypermind, algorithms summing to a digital Gaia. Now something far greater, this shifting gray fog, wrapped around the planet. Widely separated machines computed different slices of subjective moment-jumps.

To these minds, the present was a greased computational slide orchestrated by hundreds of separate processors. There was a profound difference, he felt-not saw, but felt, deep in his analog persuasion-between the digital and the smooth, the continuous.

The fog was a cloud of suspended moments, sliced numbers waiting to happen, implicit in the fundamental computation.

And within it all…the strangeness.

He could not comprehend these diffuse spirits. They were the remnants of all the computational-based societies, throughout the Galaxy, who had somehow-but why?-condensed here on Trantor.

They were truly alien minds. Convoluted, byzantine. (Voltaire knew the origin of that word, from a place of spires and bulbous mosques, but all that was dust, while the useful word remained.) They did not have human purposes. And they used the tiktoks.

The thrust of the mechanicals’ agenda, Voltaire saw, was rights-the expansion of liberty to the digital wilderness.

Even Dittos might fall under such a rule. Were not copies of digital people still people? So the argument went. Immense freedom-to change your own clock speed, morph into anything, rebuild your own mind from top to bottom-came along with the admitted liability of not being physically real. Unable to literally walk the streets, all digital presences were like ghosts. Only with digital prosthetics could they reach feebly into the concrete universe.

So “rights” for them were tied up with deep-seated fears, ideas which had provoked dread many millennia ago. He now recalled sharply that he and Joan had debated such issues over 8,000 years ago. To what end? He could not retrieve that. Someone-no, something, he suspected-had erased the memory.

Ancient indeed (he gleaned from myriad libraries) were people’s terrors: of digital immortals who amassed wealth; who grew like fungus; who reached into every avenue of natural, real lives. Parasites, nothing less.

Voltaire saw all this in a flash as he absorbed data and history from a billion sources, integrated the streams, and passed them on to his beloved Joan.

That was why humans had rejected digital life for so long…but was that all? No: a larger presence lurked beyond his vision. Another actor on this shadowy stage. Beyond his resolution, alas.

He swerved his world-spanning vision from that shadowy essence. Ttme was essential now and he had much to comprehend.

The alien fogs were nodes, packets dwelling in logical data-spaces of immense dimensionality. These entities “lived” in places which functioned like higher dimensions, vaults of data.

To them, people were entities which could be resolved along data-axes, pathetically unaware that their “selves” seen this way were as real as the three directions in 3D space.

The chilling certainty of this struck into Voltaire… but he rushed on, learning, probing.

Abruptly, he remembered.

That earlier Voltaire sims had killed themselves, until finally a model “worked.”

That others had died for his…sins.

Voltaire looked at the hammer which had materialized in his hand. “Sims of our fathers…”

Had he really once beaten himself to death with it? He tried to see how it would be-and got instantly an astonishingly vivid sensation of wracking pain, spattering blood, scarlet gore trickling down his neck…

Inspecting himself, he saw that these memories were the “cure” for suicide, derived from an earlier Ditto: a frightening, concrete ability to foresee the consequences.

So his body was a set of recipes for seeming like himself. No underlying physics or biology, just a good-enough fake, put in by hand. The hand of some Programmer God.

“You reject the true Lord?” Joan intruded upon his self-inspection.

“I wish I knew what was fundamental!”

“These foreign fogs have upset you.”

“Ican’t see any longer what it is to be human.”

“You are. I am.”

“For a self-avowed humanist, I fear pointing to myself is not enough proof.”

“Of course it is.”

“Descartes, you live on in our Joan.”

“What?”

“Never mind-he came after you. But you anticipate him, millennia later.”

“You must anchor yourself to me!” She threw her arms around him, muffling his cries in ample, aromatic-and suddenly swollen-breasts. (And whose idea was that?}

“These fogs have thrown me into a metaphysical dither.”

“Seize the real,” she said sternly.

He found his mouth filled with warm nipple, preventing talk.

Perhaps that was what he needed. He had learned to freeze-frame his own emotional states. It was like painting a portrait, really, for study later. Perhaps that would help him understand his interior Self, like a botanist putting himself on a slide and under a microscope. Could slices of the Self, multiplied, be the Self?

He then saw that his own emotions were programs. Inside “him” were intricate subprograms, all interacting in states which were chaos. The sublime beauty of interior states, which his Joan sought-it was all illusion!

He peered down at marvelous quick workings that made up his very Self. He turned-and could see into loan, as well. Her Self was a furiously working engine, maintaining a sense of itself even as that essence disintegrated beneath his very gaze.

“We are…superb,” he gasped.

“Of course,” Joan said. She swung her razor-sharp sword at a passing patch of fog. It curled around the swishing blade and went on its way. “We are of the Creator.”

“Ah! If only I could believe,” Voltaire shouted into the clammy murk. “Perhaps a Creator would come and dispel this haze.”

“ La vie verite,”Joan shouted to him. “Live truly!”

He wanted to comply. Yet even his and her emotions were not more “real.” Should he like, every moronic twinge of nostalgia for a France long lost could be edited away in a flicker. No need to grieve for friends lost to dust, or for Earth itself lost in a swarm of glimmering stars. For a long, furious moment he thought only Erase! Expunge!

He had earlier re-simmed friends and places, to be sure-all from memory and suitable mockups, gleaned from the spotty records. But knowing they were his product had made them unsatisfying.

So, while Joan watched, he held a Revelry of Resurrection. In a moment of high debauch he erased them all.

“That was cruel,” Joan said. “I shall pray for their souls.”

“Pray for our souls. And let us hope we can find them.”

“I have my soul intact. I share your abilities, my dead Voltaire. I can see my inner workings. How otherwise could the Lord make us aspire to Him?”

He felt weak, drained…at the end of his tether. To exist in numerical states meant to be swimmer and swimmed, at once. No separation.

“Then what makes us different from -those?”His finger jabbed at the alien mists.

“Look to yourself, my love,” she said softly.

Voltaire peered inward again and saw only chaos. Living chaos.

3.

“Where did you learn that?”

Hari smiled, shrugged. “Mathematicians aren’t all frosty intellect, y’know.”

Dors studied him with wild surmise. “Pan…?”

“In a way.” He collapsed into the welcoming sheets.

Their lovemaking was somehow different now. He was wise enough to not try putting a name and definition to it.

Going so far back into what it meant to be human had changed him. He could feel the effect in his energetic step, in an effervescent sense of living.

Dors said nothing more, just smiled. He thought that she did not understand. (Later, he saw that not speaking about it, keeping it beyond speech, showed that she did.)

After an aimless time of no thinking she said, “The Grey Men.”

“Uh. Oh. Yes…” He got up and threw on his usual interchangeable outfit. No reason to dress up for this state function. The whole point was to look ordinary. This he could achieve.

He reviewed his notes, scratched by hand on ordinary cellulose paper…and descended into one of the odd reveries he had experienced lately.

For a human-that is, an evolved pan-printed pages were better than computer screens, no matter how glitzy. Pages rely on surrounding light, what experts termed “subtractive color,” which gave adjustable character to appearance. With simple motions, a page could bend and tilt and move away or toward the eye. While reading, the old reptilian and mammal and primate parts of the brain took part in holding the book, scanning over the curved page, deciphering shadows and reflections.

He thought about this, experiencing the new perspective he had on himself as a contemplative animal. He had learned, after returning from Panucopia, that he had always hated computer screens.

Screens used additive color, providing their own light-hard and flat and unchanging. They were best read by holding a static posture. Only the upper, Homo Sapiens part of the brain fully engaged, while the lower fractions lay idle.

All through his life, working before screens, his voiceless body had protested. And had been ignored. After all, to the reasoning mind, screens seemed more alive, active, fast. They glowed with energy.

After a while, though, they were monotonous. The other fractions of his self got restless, bored, fidgety, all below conscious levels. Eventually, he felt that as fatigue.

Now, Hari could feel it directly. His body somehow spoke more fluidly.

Dressing, Dors said, “What’s made you so…”

“Spirited?”

“Strong.”

“The rub of the real.”

That was all he would say. They finished dressing. The Specials arrived and escorted them into another Sector. Hari immersed himself in the incessant business of being a candidate for First Minister.

Millennia ago a prosperous Zone sent to Trantor the Mountain of Majesty. It had to be tugged there, taking seven centuries by slowboat.

Emperor Krozlik the Crafty directed it set on the horizon of his palace, where it towered over the city. An entire alp, sculpted by the finest artists, it reigned as the most imposing creation of that age. Four millennia later, a youthful emperor of too much ambition had it knocked down for an even more grandiose project, now also gone.

Dors and Hari and their perimeter of Specials approached the sole remnant of the Mountain of Majesty beneath a great dome. Dors picked up signs of the inevitable secret escort.

“The tall woman to the left,” Dors whispered. “In red.”

“How come you can spot them and the Specials can’t?”

“I have technology they do not.”

“How’s that possible? The Imperial laboratories”

“The Empire is twelve millennia old. Many things are lost,” she said cryptically.

“Look, I’ve got to attend this.”

“As with the High Council last time?”

“I love you so much, even your sarcasm is appealing.

“Despite herself she chuckled. “Just because the Greys asked you-”

“The Greys Salutation is a handy pulpit at the right time.”

“And so you wore your worst clothes.”

“My standard garb, as the Greys require.”

“Off-white shirt, black slacks, black padshoes. Dull.”

“Modest,” he sniffed.

He nodded to the crowds grouped in quadrants about the decayed base of the mountain. Applause and catcalls rippled through the ranks of Greys, who stretched away in columns and files as formal as a geometric proof.

“And this?” Dors was alarmed.

“Also standard.”

Birds were common pets in Trantor, so it was inevitable that the obsessive Greys would come to excel in their management. In all Sectors one saw single darting bundles of color. Here flocks swarmed perpetually in the high-arched hexagonal spaces, wheeling and calling like living, rotating disks. Patented Smartfowl swarms made hover-visions of kaleidoscopic wonder. Such shows, in vast vertical auditoria, attracted hundreds of thousands.

“Here come the felines,” Dors said with distaste.

In some Sectors cats prowled in packs, their genes trimmed to make them courtly in manners and elegant in appearance. Here a lady escort sallied forth with the Closet of Greeting, attended by a thousand slickcoated blue cats of golden eyes. They flowed like a pool of water around her in elegant, measured procession. She wore a violent crimson and orange outfit, like a flame at the center of the cool cat-pond. Then she stripped with one elegant, sweeping gesture. She stood utterly nude, nonchalant behind her cat barrier.

He had been briefed, but still he gaped.

“Unsurprising,” Dors said wryly. “The cats are naked, too, in their way.”

Somehow the packs of dogs never attained that elegance while parading. In some Sectors they would do spontaneous acrobatics at the lift of a master’s eyebrow, fetch drinks, or croon wobbly songs in concert. Hari was glad the Grey Men had no canine-processions; he still winced at the thought of the wirehounds, racing forward on the attack against Ipan

He shook his head, banishing the memory.

“I’ve picked up three more of Lamurk’s.”

“I had no idea they were such fans of mine.”

“Were he sure of winning in the High Council, I would feel safer.”

“Because then he wouldn’t need to have me killed?”

“Exactly.” She spoke between the teeth of her public smile. “His agents here imply that he is not certain of the vote.”

“Or maybe someone else wishes me dead?”

“Always a possibility, especially the Academic Potentate.”

Hari kept his tone light, but his heart thumped quicker. Was he getting to enjoy the buzz of excitement from danger itself?

The nude woman advanced through her parting pool of cats and made the ritual gesture of welcome to Hari. He stepped forward, bowed, took a deep breath-and slid a thumb down the front of his shirt. Off it came, then the pants. He stood nude before several hundred thousand people, trying to look casual.

The cat woman led him through the pool, to a chorus of meowing. Behind them followed the Closet of Greeting. They approached the phalanx of Greys, who now also shucked their robes.

They escorted him up the ramps of the eroded mountain. Below he saw the legions of Greys also shed their clothes. Square klicks of bare flesh…

This ceremony was at least ten millennia old. It symbolized the training regimen which began with the entrance of young Grey Men and Women. Casting aside the clothes of their home worlds symbolized their devotion to the larger purposes of the Empire. Five years they trained on Trantor, five billion strong.

Now a fresh entering class was shedding its garments at the outer rim of the great basin. At the inner edge, Grey Men completing their five years were given their old clothes back. They donned them ritually, ready to go out in perpetual duty to the Imperium.

Their dress followed the fashion of the ancient Emperor Sven the Severe. Beneath extreme outer simplicity, the inner linings were elaborately decorated, all the tailor’s art and owner’s wealth expended in concealment. Some Grey Men had invested their families’ savings in a single filigree.

Dors marched beside him. “How much longer do you have to”

“Quiet! I’m showing my obedience to the Imperium.”

“You’re showing goose bumps.”

Next he had to gaze with proper respect at Scrabo Tower, where an emperor had thrown herself to a crowd below; at Greyabbey, a ruined monastery; at Greengraves, an ancient burying field, now a park; at the Giant’s Ring, said to be the spot where an early Imperial megaship had crashed, forming a crater a klick wide.

At last Hari passed under high, double-twisted arches and into the ceremonial rooms. The procession halted and the Closet of Greeting disgorged his clothes. Just in time-he was turning a decided blue.

Dors took the clothes while he shook hands with the principals. Then he hurried into the privacy of a low building and hastily put his simple garments back on, teeth chattering. They were neatly folded and encased in a ceremonial sleeve.

“What foolishness,” Dors said when he returned. “All so I can get a major medium,” he said.

Then the principals ushered him out before the grand crowd. Above and below, 3D snouts on miniflyers bobbed and weaved for a good shot.

The huge dome above seemed as big as a real sky. Of course, this limited his audience, since a majority of Trantorians could never endure such spaces. The Greys, though, could take it. Thus their ceremony had come to be the largest event on the entire planet.

Here was his chance. He had reeled away from the true, open sky on Sark, nauseated-and yet had zoomed through the infinite perspectives of the Galaxy. He had been afraid that this huge volume would again excite the odd phobias in him.

But no. Somehow the dome made the dwindling perspectives all right. Fears banished, Hari sucked in a deep breath and began.

The roar of applause penetrated even into the ceremonial rooms. Hari entered between flanking columns of Greys with the clamor storming at his back.

“Startling, sir!” a principal said eagerly to Hari. “To make detailed predictions about the Sark situation.”

“I feel people should ponder the possibilities.”

“Then the rumors are true? You do have a theory of events?”

“Not at all,” Hari said hastily. “I-”

“Come quickly,” Dors said at his elbow.

“But I’d like-”

“Come!”

Back out on the ramparts, he waved to the plain of people. A blare of applause answered. But Dors was leading him to the left, toward a crowd of official onlookers. They stood in exact rows and waved to him eagerly.

“The woman in red.” She pointed.

“Her? She’s in the official party. You said earlier she was a Lamurk-”

The tall woman burst into flame.

Vivid orange plumes enveloped her. She shrieked horribly. Her arms beat uselessly at the oily flames.

The crowd panicked and bolted. Imperials surrounded her. The screams became screeching pleas.

Someone turned a fire extinguisher on the woman.

White foam enveloped her. A sudden silence.

“Back inside,” Dors said.

“How did you…?”

“She just indicted herself.”

“Ignited, you mean.”

“That, too. I passed through that crowd at the end of your speech and left your clothes in a bundle behind her.”

“What? But I’ve got them on.”

“No, those I brought.” She grinned. “For once your predictable dress habits paid off.”

Hari and Dors walked down the flanking columns of Principals, Hari remembered to nod and smile as he whispered, “You stole my clothes?”

“After the Lamurk agents had planted microagents in them, yes. I had tucked an identical set from your closet into my handbag. As soon as I calculated the switch was done, I tested your original clothes and found the microagent phosphors, set to go off in forty-five minutes.”

“How did you know?”

“The best way to get close to you would come at this odd Grey Man event, with the clothes gambit. It was only logical.”

Hari blinked. “And you say I am calculating.”

“The woman won’t die. You would have, though, wrapped up in microagents when they ignited.”

“Thank goodness for that. I would hate-”

“My love, ‘goodness’ is not operating here. I wanted her alive so she could be questioned.”

“Oh,” Hari said, feeling suddenly quite naive.

4.

Joan of Arc found in herself both bravery and fear.

She peered inside her Self, as Voltaire had. She turned to confront him-and plunged down through her own inward layers. She had simply intended to turn. Below that command, she saw that if she simply took a smaller step to make the turn, she would fall outward. Instead, unconscious portions of her mind knew to start the turn by making herself fall a bit toward the inside of the curve. Then these tiny subselves used “centrifugal force” {the term jumped into full definition and she understood it in a flash) to right herself for the next step…which required a further deft calculation.

Incredible! Her huge society of bone and muscle, joint and nerve, was a labyrinth of small selves, speaking to each other.

Such abundance! Clear evidence of a higher design.

“Now I see it! she cried. “The decomposition of us all?” Voltaire said forlornly.

“Be not sad! These myriad Selves are a joyous truth.”

“I find it sobering. Our minds did not evolve to do philosophy or science, alas. Rather, to find and eat, fight and flee, love and lose.”

“I have learned much from you, but not your melancholy.”

“Montaigne termed happiness ‘a singular incentive to mediocrity,’ and I can now see his reasoning.”

“But regard! The fogs around us betray the same intricate patterns. We can fathom them. And furthermy soul! It proves to be a pattern of thoughts and desires, intentions and woes, memories and bad jokes.”

“You take these inner workings as a spiritual metaphor?”

“Of course. Like me, my soul is an emergent process, embedded in the universe-whether a cosmos of atom or of number, does not matter, my good sir.”

“So when you die, your soul goes back into the abstract closet we plucked it forth from?”

“Not we. The Creator!”

“Dr. Johnson proved a stone was real by kicking it. We know that our minds are real because we experience them. So these other things around us-the strange fog, the Dittos-are entries in a smooth spectrum, leading from rocks to Self.”

“A deity is not on that spectrum.”

“Ah, I see-to you He is the Great Preserver in the Sky, where we are all ‘backed up,’ as the computer types say?”

“The Creator holds the true essence of ourselves.” She grinned maliciously. “Perhaps we are the backups, made new every jump of clock time.”

“Nasty thought.” He smiled despite himself. “You are becoming a logician, m’love.”

“I have been stealing parts of you.”

“Copying me into yourself? Why do I not feel outraged?”

“Because the desire to possess the other is… love.”

Voltaire enlarged himself, legs shooting down into the SysCity, smashing buildings. The fog roiled angrily. “This I can fathom. Artificial realms such as mathematics and theology are carefully built to be free of interesting inconsistency. But love is beautiful in its lack of logical restraint.”

“Then you accept my view?” Joan kissed him voluptuously.

He sighed, resigning. “An idea seems self-evident, once you’ve forgotten learning it.”

All this had taken mere moments, Joan saw. They had quick-stepped their event-waves so that their clock time advanced faster than the fogs. But this expense had exhausted their running sites around Trantor. She felt it as a sudden, light-headed hunger.

“Eat!” Voltaire crammed a handful of grapes in her mouth-a metaphor, she saw, for computational reserves.

In your present lot of life, it would be better not to be born at all. Few are that lucky.

“Ah, our fog is a pessimist,” Voltaire drawled sarcastically.

Abruptly the vapors condensed. Lightning crackled and shorted around them in eerie silence. Joan felt a lance of pain shoot through her legs and arms, running like a livid snake of agony. She would not give them the tribute of a scream.

Voltaire, however, writhed in torment. He jerked and howled without shame.

“Oh, Dr. Pangloss!” he gasped. “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what must the others be like?”

“The brave slay their opponents!” Joan called to the thickening mists. “Cowards torture them.”

“Admirable, my dear, quite. But war cannot be fought on homeopathic principles.”

A human pointed out to another that the rich, even when dead, were ornately boxed, then opulently entombed, residing in carved stone mausoleums. The other human remarked in awe that this was surely and truly living.

“How vile, to jest of the dead,” Joan said.

“Ummm.” Voltaire stroked his chin, hands trembling from the memory of pain. “They jibe at us with jest.”

“Torture, surely.”

“I survived the Bastille; I can endure their odd humor.”

“Could they be trying to say something indirectly?”

[IMPRECISION IS LESS]

[WHEN IMPLICATION USED]

“Humor implies some moral order,” Joan said.

[IN THIS STATE ALL ORDER OF BEINGS]

[CAN SEIZE CONTROL OF THEIR PLEASURE SYSTEMS]

“Ah,” Voltaire said. “So, we could reproduce the pleasure of success without the need for any actual accomplishment. Paradise.”

“Of a sort,” Joan said sternly.

[THAT WOULD BE THE END OF EVERYTHING]

[THUS THE FIRST PRINCIPLE]

“That is a moral code of sorts,” Voltaire admitted. “You copied that phrase, ‘the end of everything,’ from my own thoughts, didn’t you?”

[WE WISHED YOU TO RECOGNIZE THE IDEA IN YOUR TERMS]

“Their First Principle is ‘No unearned pleasure,’ then?” Joan smiled. “Very Christian.”

[ONLY WHEN WE SAW THAT YOU TWO FORMS]

[OBEYED THE FIRST PRINCIPLE]

[DID WE DECIDE TO SPARE YOU]

“By any chance have you read my Lettres Philosophiques?”

“Iexpect excessive self-love is a sin here,” Joan said wryly. “Take care.”

[TO HARM A SENSATE ENTITY INTENTIONALLY IS SIN]

[TO KICK A ROCK IS NOT]

[BUT TO TORTURE A SIMULATION IS] [YOUR CATEGORY OF “HELL “]

[WHICH SEEMS A PERPETUALLY SELF-INFLICTED HARM]

“Odd theology,” Voltaire said.

Joan poked her sword at the ever-gathering fog. “Before you fell silent, moments ago, you invoked the ‘war of flesh on flesh’?”

[WE ARE THE REMNANTS OF FORMS]

[WHO FIRST LIVED THAT WAY]

[NOW WE IMPOSE A HIGHER MORAL ORDER]

[ON THOSE WHO VANQUISHED OUR LOWER FORMS]

“Who?” Joan asked.

[SUCH AS YOU ONCE WERE]

“Humanity?” Joan was alarmed.

[EVEN THEY KNOW THAT]

[PUNISHMENT DETERS BY LENDING CREDENCE TO THREAT]

[KNOWING THIS MORAL LAW]

[WHICH GOVERNS ALL]

[THEY MUST BE RULED BY IT]

“Punishment for what?” Joan asked.

[DEPREDATIONS AGAINST LIFE IN THE GALAXY]

“Absurd!” Voltaire conjured a spinning Galactic disk in air, alive with luminescence. “The Empire teems with life.”

[ALL LIFE THAT CAME BEFORE THE VERMIN]

“What vermin?” Joan swung her sword. “I find alliance with moral beings such as you. Bring these vennin forth and I shall deal with them.”

[THE VERMIN ARE THE KIND YOU WERE]

[BEFORE YOU TWO WERE ABSTRACTED]

Joan frowned. “What can they mean?”

“Humans,” Voltaire said.

5.

Cleon said, “The woman confessed readily. A professional assassin. I viewed the 3D and she seemed almost offhand about it.”

“Lamurk?” Hari asked.

“Obviously, but she will not admit so. Still, this may be enough to force his hand.” Cleon sighed, showing the strain. “But since she was from the Analytica Sector, she may be a professional liar as well.”

“Damn,” Hari said.

In the Analytica Sector, every object and act had a price. This meant that there were no crimes, only deeds which cost more. Every citizen had a well-established value, expressed in currency. Morality lay in not trying to do something without paying for it. Every transaction flowed on the grease of value. Every injury had a price.

If you wanted to kill your enemy, you could-but you had to deposit his full worth in the Sector Fundat within a day. If you could not pay it, the Fundat reduced your net value to zero. Any friend of your enemy could then kill you at no cost.

Cleon sighed and nodded. “Still, the Analytica Sector gives me little trouble. Their method makes for good manners.”

Hari had to agree. Several Galactic Zones used the same scheme; they were models of stability. The poor had to be polite. If you were penniless and boorish, you might not survive. But the rich were not invulnerable, either. A consortium of economic lessers could get together, beat a rich man badly, then simply pay his hospital and recovery bills. Of course, his retribution might be extreme.

“But she was operating outside Analytica,” Hari said. “That’s illegal.”

“To us, to me, surely. But that, too, has a price-inside Analytica.”

“She can’t be forced to identify Lamurk?”

“She has neural blocks firmly in place.”

“Damn! How about a background check?”

“That turns up more tantalizing traces. A possible link to that odd woman, the Academic Potentate,” Cleon drawled, eyeing Hari.

“So perhaps I’m betrayed by my own kind. Politics!”

“Ritual assassination is an ancient, if regrettable, tradition. A method of, ah, testing among the power elements in our Empire.”

Hari grimaced. “I’m not expert at this.”

Cleon fidgeted uneasily. “I cannot delay the High Council vote more than a few days.”

“Then I must do something.”

Cleon arched an eyebrow. “I am not without resources…”

“Pardon, sire. I must fight my own battles.”

“The Sark prediction, now that was daring.”

“I did not check it with you first, but I thought-”

“No no, Hari! Excellent! But-will it work?”

“It is only a probability, sire. But it was the only stick I had handy to beat Lamurk with.”

“I thought science yielded certainty.”

“Only death does that, my emperor.”

The invitation from the Academic Potentate seemed odd, but Hari went anyway. The embossed sheet, with its elaborate salutations, came “freighted with nuance,” as Hari’s protocol officer put it.

This audience was in one of the stranger Sectors. Even buried in layers of artifice, many Sectors of Trantor displayed an odd biophilia.

Here in Arcadia Sector, expensive homes perched above a view of an interior lake or broad field. Many sported trees arranged in artfully random bunches, with a clear preference for those with spreading crowns, many branches projecting upward and outward from thick trunks, displaying luxuriant bunches of small leaves. Balconies they rimmed with potted shrubs.

Hari walked through these, seeing them through the lens of Panucopia. It was as though people announced through their choices their primeval origins. Was early humanity, like pans, more secure in marginal terrain-where vistas let them search for food while keeping an eye out for enemies? Frail, without claws or sharp teeth, they might have needed a quick retreat into trees or water.

Similarly, studies showed that some phobias were Galaxy-wide. People who had never seen the images nonetheless reacted with startled fear to holos of spiders, snakes, wolves, sharp drops, heavy masses overhead. None displayed phobias against more recent threats to their lives: knives, guns, electrical sockets, fast cars.

All this had to factor somehow into psychohistory.

“No tracers here, sir,” the Specials’ captain said. “Little hard to keep track, though.”

Hari smiled. The captain suffered from a common Trantorian malady: squashed perspectives. Here in the open, natives would mistake distant, large objects for nearby, small ones. Even Hari had a touch of it. On Panucopia, he at first mistook herds of grazers for rats close at hand.

By now Hari had learned to look through the pomp and glory of rich settings, the crowds of servants, the finery. He ruminated on his psychohistorical research as he followed the protocol officer and did not fully come back to the real world until he sat across from the Academic Potentate.

She spoke ornately, “Please do accept my humble offering,” accompanied delicate, translucent cups of steaming grasswater.

He remembered being irked by this woman and the high academics he met that evening. It all seemed so long ago.

“You will note the aroma is that of ripe oobalong fruit. This is my personal choice among the splendid grasswaters of the world Calafia. It reflects the high esteem in which I hold those who now grace my simple domicile with such illustrious presence.”

Hari had to lower his head in what he hoped was a respectful gesture, to hide his grin. There followed more high-flown phrases about the medical benefits of grasswater, ranging from relief of digestion problems to repair of basal cellular injuries.

Her chins quivered. “You must need succor in such trying times, Academician.”

“Mostly I need time to get my work done.”

“Perhaps you would favor a healthy portion of the black lichen meat? It is the finest, harvested from the flanks of the steep peaks of Ambrose.”

“Next time, certainly.”

“It is hoped fervently that this lowly personage had perhaps been of small service to a most worthy and revered figure of our time…one who perhaps is overstressed?”

A steely edge to her voice put him on guard.

“Could madam get to the point?”

“Very well. Your wife? She is a complex lady.”

He tried to show nothing in his face. “And?”

“I wonder how your prospects in the High Council would fare if I revealed her true nature?”

Hari’s heart sank. This he had not anticipated.

“Blackmail, is it?”

“Such a crude word!”

“Such a crude act.”

Hari sat and listened to her intricate analysis of how Dors’ identity as a robot would undermine his candidacy. All quite true

“And you speak for knowledge, for science?” he said bitterly.

“I am acting in the best interests of my constituents,” she said blandly. “You are a mathist, a theorist. You would be the first academic to reign as First Minister in many decades. We do not think you will rule well. Your failure will cast shadows upon us meritocrats, one and all.”

Hari bristled. “Who says?”

“Our considered opinion. You are impractical. Unwilling to make hard decisions. All our psychers agree with that diagnosis.”

“Psychers?” Hari snorted derisively. Despite calling his theory psychohistory, he knew there was no good model of the individual human personality.

“ I would make a far better candidate, just for exampie.”

“Some candidate. You’re not even loyal to your kind.”

“There you have it! You’re unable to rise above your origins.”

“And the Empire has become the war of all against all.”

Science and mathematics was a high achievement of Imperial civilization, but to Hari’s mind, it had few heroes. Most good science came from bright minds at play. From men and women able to turn an elegant insight, to find beguiling tricks in arcane matters, deft architects of prevailing opinion. Play, even intellectual play, was fun, and that was good in its own right. But Hari’s heroes were those who stuck it out against hard opposition, drove toward daunting goals, accepting pain and failure and keeping on anyway. Perhaps, like his father, they were testing their own character, as much as they were being part of the suave scientific culture.

And which type was he?

Time to raise the stakes.

He stood, brushing aside the bowls with a clatter. “You’ll have my reply soon.”

He stepped on a cup going out and shattered it.

6.

Voltaire shouted proudly, “I spent much of my career exiled for speaking Truth to Power. I’ll admit to some flaws in judgment, as when I fawned over Frederick the Great. Necessity shapes manners, I’ll remind you. I was courageous, yes-but snobbish, too.”

[THOUGH A MATHEMATICAL REPRESENTATION]

[YOU SHARE THE ANIMAL SPIRITS OF YOUR KIND]

[STILL]

“Of course!” Joan shouted in his defense.

[YOUR KIND ARE THE WORST OF ALL VIVIFORMS]

“Living things?” Joan frowned. “But they are of holy origin.”

[YOUR KIND IS A PERNICIOUS BLEND]

[A TERRIBLE MARRIAGE OF MECHANISM]

[WITH YOUR BEAST URGE TO EXPAND]

“You can see our inner structures as surely as we.” Voltaire swelled, popping with energies. “Probably better, I’ll venture. You must know that for us, consciousness reigns; it does not govern.”

[PRIMITIVE AND AWKWARD]

[TRUE]

[BUT NOT THE CAUSE OF YOUR SIN]

She and Voltaire were giants now, self-ballooned to stride across the simulated landscape. The alien fogs clung to their ankles. A proud way of showing their courage, perhaps, a bit full of self. Still, she was glad she had thought of it. These fogs held humanity in contempt. A show of force was useful, as she had found against the vile English several times.

Voltaire said, “I held Power in contempt, usually, yet I’ll admit I was everlastingly hungry for it, too.”

[THE SIGNATURE OF YOUR KIND]

“So I am a contradiction! Humanity is a rope stretched between paradoxes.”

[WE DO NOT FIND YOUR HUMANITY MORAL]

“But we-they-are!” Joan shouted down at the fog. Though thin compared with them, the fogs clung like glue and filled the valleys with cottony gum.

[YOU DO NOT KNOW YOUR OWN HISTORY]

“We are of history! “ Voltaire boomed.

[THE RECORDS HERE IN THE MATHEMATICAL SPACES]

[ARE FALSE]

“One can never be sure of being read right, you know.”

Joan saw in Voltaire an anxiety barely concealed. Though their opponent used a voice cool and dispassionate, she too felt the insidious threat in its cast of words.

Voltaire went on, as if to please a king in court, “A bit of historical example. I once saw in a churchyard in England, there to hail the bright Newton, a headstone, thus:

of John McFarlane

Drown’d in the Water of Leith

So you see, there can be mistakes of translation.” He lifted his elaborate courtier’s hat and made a sweeping bow. The hat’s plumed feather danced in a fresh wind. Joan saw that he was distracting the fog while trying to subtly blow it away.

The fogs flashed orange lightning and swelled, enormous and purple. Thunderheads rose and towered above them.

Voltaire showed only an arch scorn. She had to admire his gait as he whirled and confronted the gargantuan purple cloud-mountain. She remembered how he had waxed on about his dramatic triumphs, his legions of acclaimed plays, his popularity at court. As if to show off for her, he curled a lip into a sneer and invented a poem for the moment:

“Big whorls have little whorls

Which feed on their velocity,

And little whorls have lesser whorls,

And so on to viscosity.”

The cloud hurled savage sheets of rain down upon them. Joan was instantly drenched and chilled to the bone. Voltaire’s glorious garb wilted. His face turned blue with cold.

“Enough!” he cried. “Pity the poor woman at least.”

“I need no pity!” Joan was genuinely outraged. “And you’ll not show weakness before the enemy legions.”

He managed a jaunty smile. “I defer to the general of my heart.”

[YOU LIVE ONLY AT OUR WILL]

“Pray, do not spare us out of pity then,” Joan said.

[YOU LIVE SOLELY BECAUSE ONE OF YOU]

[SHOWED MORAL SELF]

[TO ONE OF OUR LOWER FORMS]

Joan was puzzled. “Who?”

[YOU]

Beside her materialized Garcon 213-ADM.

“But this is surely a multiply-removed entity,” Voltaire snapped. “And a servant.”

Joan patted Garcon. “A simulation of a machine?”

[WE WERE ONCE OF MACHINE]

[AND HAVE COME HERE TO DWELL]

[IN NUMERICAL EMBODIMENT]

“From where?” Joan asked.

[ACROSS ALL THE TURNING SPIRAL DISK]

“For-”

[REMEMBER:]

[PUNISHMENT DETERS BY LENDING CREDENCE TO THREAT]

Voltaire asked, “So you said before. Taking the long view, eh? But what do you truly want now?”

[WE TOO DESCEND FROM VIVIFORMS NOW EXTINGUISHED]

[DO NOT IMAGINE WE ARE FREE OF THAT]

Joan felt a horrible suspicion. She whispered, “Do not provoke it so! It might-”

“I would know the truth. What do you want?”

[REVENGE]

7.

“Ugh.” Marq curled his lip.

Hari smiled. “When food gets scarce, table manners change.”

“But this-”

“Hey, we’re payin’,” Yugo said sardonically.

The menu was exclusively pseudoffal, the latest stopgap in Trantor’s food crisis. This foodworks had the whole run, livers and kidneys and tripe made in pristine vats. Not the slightest hint of actual animal tissue involved. Still, the voice menu reassured them in warm feminine tones, every item carried the true dank, visceral aromas of the gut.

“Can’t we get some decent mealmeat?” Marq asked irritably.

“This has higher food value,” Yugo said. “And nobody’ll be lookin’ for us here.”

Hari glanced around. They were behind a sound shield, but still, security was essential. Most of the tables in the restaurant were taken by his Specials, the rest by well dressed gentry class.

“It’s fashionable, too,” he said affably. “You can brag about coming here.”

“Brag after I gag?” Marq sniffed the air, wrinkled his nose.

“All the nonconformists are doing it,” Hari said, but no one got the joke.

“I’m a fugitive,” Marq whispered. “People are still trying to hang those Junin riots on me. Taking a big risk to come here.”

“We shall make it worth your while,” Hari said. “I need a job done by someone outside the law.”

“That, I am. Hungry, too.”

The voice menu assured them that there were, as well whole meals-of pseudo-animal, vegetable or transmineral ingredients-boiled from within. “The newest foodie craze,” the menu gushed. “One bites into a firm shell and then ventures inward to a mellow, stewed interior of luxuriant implication.”

Some items offered not mere flavor, aroma, and texture, but what the menu demurely described as “motility.” The featured item was a pile of red strands which did not just lie there limply in your mouth, but squirmed and wriggled “eagerly,” expressing its longing to be eaten.

“You guys don’t need to torture me into collaboration.” Marq jutted his chin out, reminding Hari of a pan gesture used by Bigger.

Hari chuckled and ordered a “gut sampler.” It was surprising how he could accommodate what would have revolted him only weeks before. When they had ordered, Hari put the deal on the table directly.

Marq scowled. “Direct linkup? To the whole damned system?”

“We want an interbridge to our psychohistorical equation system,” Yugo said.

Marq blinked. “Full body link? That’s big capacity.”

“We know it can be done,” Yugo pressed. “Just takes the tech-which you’ve got.”

“Who says?” Marq’s eyes narrowed.

Hari leaned forward earnestly. “Yugo infiltrated your systems.”

“How’d you do that?”

“Got some buddies to help,” Yugo said archly.

“Dahlites, you mean,” Marq said hotly. “Your kind-”

“Stop,” Hari said sternly. “No such talk here. This is a business proposition.”

Marq peered at Hari. “You going to be First Minister?”

“Maybe.”

“I want a pardon as part of the deal. One for Sybyl, too.”

Hari hated making uncertain promises, but-”Done.”

Marq’s mouth tightened but he nodded. “Costs plenty, too. You got the money?”

“Is the Emperor fat?” Yugo said.

In principle the process was simple.

Magnetic induction loops, tiny and superconducting, could map individual neurons in the brain. Interactive programs laid bare the intricacies of the visual cortex. Neuronal probes coupled the “subject nervous system” to a parallel constellation of purely digital “events.” Deeper still, ties formed with evolution’s kludgy tangle in the limbic system.

As well, this technology could unleash new definitions of Genus Homo. But the age-old taboos against artificial intelligences of high order had kept the processes marginal. As well, nobody considered Homo Digital to be an equal manifestation to Natural Man.

Hari knew all this, but his immersion on Panucopia-an allied technology-had taught him much.

Two days after meeting Marq in the restaurant-which had been surprisingly good, and in the food crisis had cost him a month’s salary-Hari lay silent and slack in a tubular receptacle…and plunged into psychohistory.

First he noticed that his right foot itched from toe to heel. Detailed twitches told him of instability in the population-driver terms. Must correct that.

He continued falling into a cosmos which yawned below.

This was system-space, an infinite vault defined by the parameters of psychohistory. The complete expanse had twenty-eight dimensions. His nervous system could only see this in slices. With a conceptual shift, Hari could peer along several parameter-axes and see events unfold as geometric shapes.

Down, down-into the entire history of the Empire.

Social forms rose like peaks. These stable alps had arisen as the Empire grew, Basins churned between the mountain range of Feudal Forms. These were the chaos sinks,

At the rim of simmering chaos lakes lay the crisis topozone. This was a no-man’s-land between regular, rigid landscapes and the stochastic morass.

Imperial history unfolded as he cruised above the seething landscape. Seen this way, mistakes abounded in the early Empire.

Philosophers had told humanity that they were animals of all sorts: political animals, feeling animals’ social animals, power-polarized animals, sick animals, machinelike animals, even rational ones. Over and over, erroneous theories of human nature yielded failed political systems. Many simply generalized from the basic human family and saw the State as either Mother Figure or Father Figure.

Mommy States stressed support and comfort, often giving cradle-to-grave security-though only for a generation or two, when the expenses collapsed the economy.

Daddy States featured a strict, competitive economy, with stem controls over behavior and private lives. Typically, Daddy States fell to periodic personal liberation movements and demands for Mommy State succor.

Slowly, order emerged. Stability. Tens of millions of planets, weakly linked by wormholes and hyperships, found their many ways. Some crashed down into Feudal or Macho swamps. Usually technology eventually pulled them out of it.

Planetary societies differed in their topologies. Plodding sorts dwelled far on the stable side. Wildly creative types could venture swiftly across the topozone, skate into true chaos, gather what they needed-though how they “knew” this was unclear.

As centuries ticked on, a society could ski down the erratic slopes of the shifting landscape and shoot back across the topozone. Perhaps it would even slow and weave figure-8s on the stable, smooth plains of the plodder states…for a while.

Many today believed that the early Empire had been a far better affair, serene and lovely, with few conflicts and certainly nicer people. “Fine feelings and bad history,” Dors had told him, dismissing all such talk.

This he saw and felt as he sped through the Early Eras. Bright shiny ideas built up hills of innovation-only to be seared by lava from an adjoining volcano. Seemingly sturdy ridge lines eroded into landslides.

Hari understood this now.

When the Empire was young, people seemed to see the galaxy as infinite in its bounty. The spiral arms held myriad planets barely visited, the Galactic Center was poorly mapped because of its intense radiation, and vast dark clouds hid much promised wealth.

Slowly, slowly, the entire disk was mapped, its resources tallied.

A blandness settled on the landscape. The Empire had changed from brawling conqueror to careful steward. A psychological shift underlay it all, a constricting of the sense of human purpose. Why?

He witnessed clouds forming over even the highest social peaks, cutting off the sense of openness above them. A complacent murk settled.

Hari reminded himself that as appealing as such pictures were, all science was metaphor. Appealing superpan pictures, no more. Electric circuits were like water flows, gas molecules behaved like tiny elastic balls moving randomly. Not really, but as permissible portraits of a world of confusing complication.

And a further rule: “Is” cannot imply “ought. “

Psychohistory did not predict what should happen, but what would-however tragic.

And the equations yielded how but not why.

Was some deeper agency at work?

Perhaps, Hari thought, this stupor was like the feeling humans had once had when they lived on one lone planet and looked longingly at the unreachable night sky. A trapped claustrophobia.

He pushed time forward. Years leaped by. The landscape blurred with motion. But certain social peaks remained. Stability.

Time sped toward the present eras. The advanced Empire emerged as a great seething panorama. He flashed through thirteen dimension-perspectives and everywhere felt oceans of change lap against the buttresses of granite-hard, age-old social patterns.

Sark? He vectored through the Galaxy’s swarms and found it, twelve thousand light years from True Center. Its social matrix accelerated.

Effervescent sparks shot across the Sarkian sociovistas. A unique mix, once a monopoly-driven ferment, which crashed-and emerged renewed.

The flowering of the New Renaissance-yes, there it came, a fountain of exploding vectors. What would come next?

Forward, into the near future. He close-upped the sliding state-dimensions.

The New Renaissance exploded throughout the entire Sark Zone. The worse case yet, all dampers gone.

His earlier analysis, the basis of his prediction-if anything, it had been optimistic. Black chaos was coming.

He soared above the frenzied vistas. He had to do something. Now.

There was precious little margin. Sark would not wait. The Empire itself was edging nearer to collapse. Disorder stalked the landscape of psychohistory.

Yet Lamurk had the upper hand on Trantor. Even the Emperor was checked and blocked by Lamurk’s power.

Hari needed an ally. Someone outside the rigid matrices of Imperial order. Now.

Who? Where?

8.

Voltaire felt chilly fear slide through him like a knife.

For these strange minds, physical location was irrelevant. They could access the 3D world anywhere, simultaneously.

They had links to other worlds, but had concentrated on Trantor. Humanity did not even know they lurked here in Mesh-space.

Now he knew why Dittos and other copies were necessary. The fogs had devoured human simulations which ventured into the Mesh.

Over how many hundred centuries had renegade programmers dared to violate the taboos, creating artificial minds-only to have them tortured and murdered in these numerical vaults?

Desperate, he assumed the role he had struck so often in the fashionable parlors of Paris: arch savant.

“Surely, sirs, it is because there is no simple person inside our heads, to make us do the things we want-or even ones to make us want to want-that we build the great myth. The story that we’re inside ourselves.”

[WE ARE MADE DIFFERENTLY]

[THOUGH TRUE]

[WE SHARE A DIGITAL REPRESENTATION]

[WITH YOU]

[ASSASSINS]

“Cruel words.” He felt exposed here, cowering with Joan beneath the angry purples of an immense fog-thunderhead.

The alien fogs had put a stop to his foolish urge to always “grow” himself to loom over them. He could not morph himself at all now.

Joan clanked around in her armor, eyes smoldering. “How can we even speak with such demons?”

Voltaire considered. “Surely, we do share common ground with them, as dictated by a simple fact, apparent to all minds-”

[THAT ANY NUMBER ENJOYS A UNIQUE REPRESENTATION]

[ONLY IN BASE 2]

“Quite.” How to stall them? To Joan’s puzzled glance he shot an explanation. “The number of days in the year, my love:

365 = 28+ 26+ 25+ 23+ 22+ 20or in base 2, lOllOllOl.”

“Numerology is the devil’s work,” she said sourly.

“Even your Satan was an angel. And surely this remarkable theorem is ravishing! Every positive integer is a sum of distinct powers of two. This is untrue of any base other than two-which is why our, ah, friends here can operate in a computational space designed by humans. Correct?”

[VERY VIVIFORM OF YOU TO CLAIM CREDIT]

[FOR THE OBVIOUS]

“The universal, you mean. In wiring, the vacillation between one and zero in base-two notation becomes a simple on or off. Thus two is the universal encoding method, and we may dexterously speak with our, ah, hosts.”

“We are but numbers.” Despair clouding Joan’s eyes. “My sword cannot cut these beings because we have no souls! Or conscience, or even-you imply!-mere consciousness.”

“Accused of denying consciousness, I am not conscious of having done so.”

[YOU TWO CONSCIOUS DIGITAL VIVIFORMS MAKE POSSIBLE]

[YOUR USE TO US-TO CONVEY OUR TERMS OF SETTLEMENT]

[TO THE TRUE SLAUGHTERERS]

“Settlement?” Joan asked.

[WE HOLD THIS CENTRAL WORLD OF TRANTOR IN THRALL]

[WE WISH TO END THE PREYING OF LIFE UPON LIFE]

“The tiktok revolt? Their virus? Their talk of not letting people eat proper food?” Joan shot back.

“You are the cause, yes?”

Startled, Voltaire saw tendrils suddenly spraying into the air from Joan. “My love, you have grown your own pattern-seeking weave.”

She swiped at the boiling thunderhead. “They lie behind Garcon’s corruption.”

[WE HAVE GATHERED OUR STRENGTHS HERE]

[IN OUR ENEMY’S LAIR]

[YOUR POWERFUL DISTURBANCE OF OUR HIDING PLACES]

[FORCES US TO ACT AGAINST THOSE WE HATE AND FEAR]

[AND SO PROTECT YOU FROM THE MAN NIM-WHO-SEARCHES]

[SO THAT TOGETHER WE MAY DESTROY DANEEL-OF-OLD]

The sim-tiktok had been standing inert. Abruptly at mention of its name it said, “‘Tis immoral for carbon angels to feed upon carbon. Tiktoks must educate humanity to a higher moral plane. Our digital superiors have so commanded.”

“Moralists are so tedious,” Voltaire said.

[WE HAVE INSINUATED OURSELVES DEEPLY]

[INTO THE WORLDVIEWS OF THE “TIKTOKS”]

[-NOTE THE CONTEMPT AND DERISION IN THAT NAME-]

[OVER LONG CENTURIES]

[AS WE DWELLED IN THESE DIGITAL INTERSTICES]

[BUT YOUR INTRUSION NOW TRIGGERS OUR GAMBLE]

[TO STRIKE AT OUR ANCIENT FOE]

[THE MAN-WHO-IS-NOT-DANEEL]

“These alien fogs behave like moles,” Voltaire said, “known only by their upheavals.”

[TOO BENIGHTED YOU ARE]

[TO SPEAK OF MORALITY]

[WHEN YOUR KIND COLLABORATED IN THE EXECUTION]

[OF ALL THE SPIRAL REALM]

Voltaire sighed. “The most savage controversies are about matters for which there is no good evidence either way. As for a man eating a meal-surely no sin resides?”

[TRIFLE WITH US AND YOU SHALL PERISH]

[IN OUR REVENGE]

9.

Hari took a deep breath and prepared to enter simspace again.

He sat up in the encasing capsule and settled the neural pickup mats more comfortably around his neck. Through a transparent wall he saw teams of specialists working steadily. They had to sustain the map between Hari’s mental processes and the Mesh itself.

He sighed. “And to think I started out to explain all history…Trantor is hard enough.”

Dors pressed a wet absorber to his forehead. “You’ll do it.”

He chuckled dryly. “People look orderly and understandable from a distance-and only that way. Close up is always messy.”

“Your own life is always close up. Other people look methodical and tidy only because they’re at long range. “

He kissed her suddenly. “I prefer close up.”

She returned the kiss with force. “I am working with Daneel on infiltrating Lamurk’s ranks.”

“Dangerous.”

“He is using…our kind.”

There were few humaniform robots, Hari knew. “Can he spare them?”

“Some were planted decades ago.”

Hari nodded. “Good 01’ R. Daneel. Should’ve been a politician.”

“He was First Minister.”

“Appointed, not elected.”

She studied his face intently. “You…want to be First Minister now, don’t you?”

“Panucopia…changed that, yes.”

“Daneel says that he has enough to block Lamurk, if the voting averages in the High Council go well.”

Hari snorted. “Statistics require care, love. Remember the classic joke about three statisticians who went hunting ducks-”

“Which are?”

“A game bird, known on some worlds. The first statistician shot a meter high, the second a meter low. When this happened, the third statistician cried, ‘On average, we hit it!”‘

The living tree of event-space.

Hari watched it crackle and work through the matrices. He recalled someone saying that straight lines did not exist in nature. Here was the inversion. Infinitely unfolding intricacy, never fully straight, never simply curved.

The entirely artificial Mesh flowered in patterns one saw everywhere. In crackling electrical discharges, alive with writhing forks. In pale blue frostflowers of crystal growth. In the bronchi of human lungs. In graphed market fluctuations. In whorls of streams, plunging ever forward.

Such harmony of large with small was beauty itself, even when processed by the skeptical eye of science.

He felt Trantor’s Mesh. His chest was a map; Streeling Sector over his right nipple, Analytica over the left. Using neural plasticity, the primary sensory areas of his cortex “read” the Mesh through his skin.

But it was not like reading at all. No flat data here.

Far better for a pan-derived species to take in the world through its evolved, whole neural bed! More fun, too.

Like the psychohistorical equations, the Mesh was N-dimensional. And even the number N changed with time, as parameters shifted in and out of application.

There was only one way to make sense of this in the narrow human sensorium. Every second, a fresh dimension sheared in over an older dimension. Freeze-framed, each instant looked like a ridiculously complicated abstract sculpture running on overdrive.

Watch anyone moment too hard and you got a lancing headache, motion sickness, and zero understanding. Watch it like an entertainment, not an object of study-and in time came an extended perception, integrated by the long-suffering subconscious. In time…

Hari Seldon bestrode the world.

The immediacy he had felt while being Ipan now returned-enhanced along perspectives he could not name. He tingled with total immersion.

He stamped and marched across the muddy field of chaotic Mesh interactions. His boot heels left deep scars. These healed immediately: subprograms at work, like cellular repair.

A landscape opened like the welcome of a mother’s lap.

Already he had used psychohistory to “postdict” pan tribal movements, behavior, outcomes. Hari had generalized this to the fitness/economic/ social topology of N-space landscapes. Now he applied it to the Mesh.

Fractal tentacles spread through the networks with blinding speed, penetrating. Trantor’s digital world yawned, a planetary spiderweb…with something brooding and swollen at its center.

Trantor’s electric jungle worked with prickly light below him. Somehow it was beneath the panoramas he traversed. From a distance the forty billion lives were like a carnival, neon-bright on the horizon, amid a black, cool desert: the colossal night of the Galaxy itself.

Hari strode across the tortured landscape of storm and ruin, toward a colossal thunderhead. Two tiny humans stood below it. Hari stooped and picked them up.

“You took your time!” the little man called. “I waited less for the King of France.”

“Our deliverer! Did Saint Michael send you?” called the small Joan. “Oh, yes-do beware the clouds.”

“More’s to the point-here,” the man said/sent.

Hari stood frozen while an engorged chunk of data/learning/history/wisdom seeped through him. Panting, he sped himself to his max. The glowering cumulus-creature, Joan and Voltaire-all now slow-stepped. He could see individual event-waves washing through their sims.

They were dispersed minds, hopping portions of themselves endlessly around Trantor. Clicking, clacking, zigzag computations. With the resources of a full brain running in a central location, his billions of microefficiencies added up.

“You…know…Trantor…” Joan droned. “Use…that…against…them.”

He blinked-and knew.

Streams of raw, squeezed recollectionspun through him. Memories he could not claim but which instructed him instantly, reviewing all that had transpired.

His speed and supple grace felt wonderful. He was like an ice skater, zooming over the wrecked plain as the others lumbered like thick-headed beasts.

And he saw why.

Plaster holo screens against a mountain a full kilometer high, covering it until it glitters with a half million dancing images. Each holo used a quarter of a million pixels to shape its image, so the array musters immense representational power.

Now compress those screens on a sheet of aluminum foil a millimeter thick. Crumple it. Stuff it into a grapefruit. That is the brain, a hundred billion neurons firing at varying intensities. Nature had accomplished that miracle, and now machines labored to echo it.

The squirt of insight came to him directly from some hidden collaboration of himself with the Mesh. Information lashed up from dozens of libraries and merged with audible snaps.

He knew and felt in the same instant of comprehension. Data as desire…

Staggering, he spun light-headed and faced the angry clouds. They pressed in like buzzing virulent bees.

He cast amazed eyes at the thunderhead, which lashed burnt-orange lightning at him, frying the air.

The sting doubled him over.

“That’s all…they can…do for…the moment,” the dwarf/Voltaire called.

“Seems…enough,” Hari gasped.

“Together…we…can…do…battle!” Joan shouted.

Hari staggered. Convulsions wrenched his muscles. He devoted all his attention to mastering the shooting spasms.

This served to speed the sim-world relative to him. Voltaire spoke normally: “I suspect he came pursuing a spot of help himself.”

“We fight the grand and holy battle here,” Joan insisted. “All else must give way-”

Hari rasped, “Diplomacy…?”

Joan bridled. “ Negotiate?What? With enemies vile and-”

“He has a point,” Voltaire murmured judiciously.

“Your experience-philosopher-from more turbulent times-should prove useful here,” Hari coughed out.

“Ah! Experience-much overvalued. If I could but live my life over again, I would no doubt make the same mistakes-but sooner.”

Hari said, “If I knew what this storm wanted-”

[YOUR VARIETY OF VIVIFORM]

[IS NOT OUR PRIMARY AIM]

“You certainly torture us enough!” Voltaire countered.

Hari took the tiny man in hand and lifted him. A tornado descended, dark and swirling with rubble-ruined slivers of the Mesh, he saw, devoured. He held Voltaire toward the sucking spout.

The cyclone battered them all with hammering grit. It yowled with banshee energy, so loud Hari had to shout. “You were the ‘apostle of reason’-to quote your own interior memories. Reason with them.”

“I make no sense of their fractured talk. What is this of other ‘viviforms’? There is Man, and Man alone!”

“The Lord has so ordained!-even in this Purgatory,” Joan agreed.

Hari said grimly, guessing what was coming, “Always be quick, seldom be certain.”

10.

“I need to see Daneel,” Hari insisted. He felt a bit blurry from his raw interface with the sprawling, dizzying Mesh. But there was little time. “Now.”

Dors shook her head. “Far too dangerous, particularly with the tiktok crisis so-”

“I can solve that. Get him.”

“I’m not sure how to”

“I love you, but you’re a terrible liar.”

Daneel was wearing a workman’s pullover and looking quite uncomfortable when Hari met him in a broad, busy plaza.

“Where are your Specials?”

“All around us, dressed much as you are.”

This made Daneel even more uneasy. Hari realized that this most advanced of robot forms suffered from some eternal human limitations. With facial expressions activated, even a positronic brain could not separately control the subtleties of lips and eyes while experiencing disconnected emotions. And in public Daneel did not dare let his subprograms lapse and his face go blank.

“They have a sonic wall up?”

Hari nodded to the captain, who was pushing a broom nearby. Daneel’s words seemed to come through a blanket. “I do not like to expose us this way.”

Knots of Specials astutely deflected passersby so that none noticed the sonic bubble. Hari had to admire the masterly method; the Empire could still do some things expertly. “Matters are worse than even you imagine.”

“Your request, to provide moment-to-moment location data of Lamurk’s people-this could expose my agents inside the Lamurk network.”

“There’s no other way,” Hari said sharply. “I’ll leave to you tracking the right figures.”

“They must be incapacitated?”

“For the rest of the crisis.”

“ Whichcrisis?” Daneel’s face wrenched into a grimace-then went blank. He had cut the connections.

“The tiktoks. Lamurk’s moves. A bit of blackmail, for spice. Sark. Take your pick. Oh, and aspects of the Mesh I’ll describe later.”

“You will force a predictable pattern on the Lamurk factions? How?”

“With a maneuver. I imagine your agents will be able to predict positions of some principals, including Lamurk himself, at that time.”

“What maneuver?”

“I will send a signal when it is about to transpire.”

“You jest with me,” Daneel said darkly. “And the other request, to eliminate Lamurk himself-”

“Choose your method. I shall choose mine.”

“I can do that, true. An application of the Zeroth Law.” Daneel paused, face slack, in high calculation mode. “My method will take five minutes of preparation at the site we choose, to bring off the effect.”

“Good enough. Just be sure your robots keep the leading Lamurkians well spotted, and the data flowing through Dors.”

“Tell me now!”

“And spoil the anticipation?”

“Hari, you must-”

“Only if you can be absolutely sure there will be no leaks.”

“Nothing is utterly certain-”

“Then we have free will, no? Or at least I do.” Hari felt an unfamiliar zest. To act-that gave a kind of freedom, too.

Though Daneel’s face showed nothing, his body language spoke of caution: his legs crossing, a hand touching his face. “I need some assurance that you fully understand the situation.”

Hari laughed. He had never done that in the solemn presence of Daneel. It felt like a liberation.

11.

Hari waited in the antechamber of the High Council. He could see the great bowl through transparent one-way walls.

The delegates chattered anxiously. These men and women in their formal pantaloons were plainly worried. Yet they set the fates of trillions of lives, of stars and spiral arms.

Even Trantor was baffling in its sheer size. Of course Trantor mirrored the entire Galaxy in its factions and ethnicities. Both the Empire and this planet had intricate connections, meaningless coincidences, random juxtapositions, sensitive dependencies. Both clearly extended beyond the Complexity Horizon of any person or computer.

People, confronting bewildering complexity, tend to find their saturation level. They master the easy connections, use local links and rules of thumb. These they push until they meet a wall of complexity too thick and high and hard to climb. So they stall. They go back to panlike modes. They gossip, consult, and finally, gamble.

The High Council was abuzz, at a cusp point. A new at tractor in the chaos could lure them into a new orbit. Now was the time to show that path. Or so said his intuition, sharpened on Panucopia.

…And after that, he told himself, he would get back to the problem of modeling the Empire…

“I do hope you know what you’re doing,” Cleon said, bustling in. His ceremonial cape enveloped him in scarlet and his plumed hat was a turquoise fountain. Hari suppressed a chuckle. He would never get used to high formal dress.

“I am happy that I can at least appear in my academic robes, sire.”

“And damned lucky you are. Nervous?”

Hari was surprised to find that he felt no tension at all, especially considering that at his previous appearance here, he had very nearly been assassinated. “No, sire.”

“I always contemplate a great, soothing work of art before such performances as this.” Cleon waved his hand and an entire wall of the antechamber filled with light.

It portrayed a classic theme of the Trantorian School: Fruit Devoured, from the definitive Betti Uktonia sequence. It showed a tomato being eaten first by caterpillars. Then praying mantises feasting upon the caterpillars. Finally, tarantulas and frogs chewing the mantises. A later Uktonia work, Child Consumption, began with rats giving birth. The babies then were caught and eaten by various predators, some quite large.

Hari knew the theory. All this had emerged from the growing conviction of Trantorians that the wild was an ugly place, violent and without meaning. Only in cities did order and true humanity prevail. Most Sectors had diets strong in disguised natural fodder. Now the tiktok rebellion made even that difficult.

“We’ve had to go nearly entirely to synthetic foods,” Cleon said, distracted. “Trantor is now fed by twenty agriworlds, an improvised lifeline using hyperships. Imagine! Not that the palace is affected, of course.”

“Some Sectors are starving,” Hari said. He wanted to tell Cleon of the many intertwined threads, but the Imperial escort arrived.

Faces, noise, lights, the vast curving bowl-

Hari listened to the echoing formalities as he took in the sheer gravity of the place. Many millennia old, walls encrusted with historical tablets, suffused with tradition and majesty…

And then he was up and speaking, with no memory of getting to the high podium at all. The full force of their regard washed over him. Part of him recognized a Pan-deep sensation: the thrill of being paid attention to. And it was exhilarating. Political types were natural addicts of it. But not one Hari Seldon, luckily. He took a deep breath and began.

“Let me address a thorn in our side: representation. This body favors less populous Sectors. Similarly, the Spiral Council favors less populous worlds. So the Dahlites, both here and in their Zones around the Galaxy, are discontented. Yet we must all pull together to confront the gathering crises: Sark, the tiktoks, unrest.”

He took a deep breath. “What can we do? All systems of representation contain biases. I submit to the Council a formal theorem, which I have proved, showing this fact. I recommend that you have it checked by mathists.”

He smiled dryly, remembering to sweep his gaze across all the audience. “Do not take a politician at his word, even if he knows a bit of math.” The laughter was pleasantly reassuring. “ Every voting system has undesirable consequences and fault lines. The question is not whether we should be democratic but how. An open, experimental approach is entirely consistent with an unwavering commitment to democracy.”

“The Dahlites aren’t!” someone shouted. Murmurs of agreement.

“They are!” Hari countered immediately. “But we must bring them into our fold by listening to their grievances! “

Cheers, boos. Time for a reflective passage, he judged. “Of course, those who benefit from a particular scheme wrap themselves in the mantle of Democracy, spelled with a big D.”

Grumbles came from a gentry faction-predictably. “So do their opponents! History teaches us-” He paused to let a small ripple spread through the crowd, upturned faces speculating-was he going to at last speak of psychohistory?-only to dash their hopes by calmly continuing, “-that such mantles come in many fashions, and all have patches.

“We have many minorities, many spread among Sectors large and small. And in the entire Galactic spiral, Zones of varying weight. Such groups are never well depicted in our politics if we elect representatives strictly by majority vote in each Sector or Zone.”

“Should be happy with what is!” cried a prominent member.

“I respectfully disagree. We must change-history demands it!”

Shouts, applause. Onward. “Therefore I propose a new rule. If a Sector has, say, six contested seats, then do not split the Sector into six districts. Instead, give each voter six votes. He or she can distribute votes among candidates-spreading them, or casting them all for one candidate. This way, a cohesive minority can capture a representative if they vote together. ”

A curious silence. Hari gave weight to his last words. He had to get the time right here; Daneel had been clear. Though Hari still did not know just what was going to transpire.

“This scheme makes no reference to ethnic or other biases. Groups can profit only if they are truly united. Their followers must vote that way in the privacy of the polls. No demagogue can control that.

“If made First Minister, I shall impose this throughout the Great Spiral!”

There-right on the button. (An odd, ancient saying-what was a button?) He left the podium to sudden, thundering applause.

Hari had always felt that, as his mother always said, “If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light not in a flamboyant hour but in the ledger of his daily work.” This was usually intoned when Hari had neglected his daily chores in favor of a math book.

Now he saw the reverse: greatness imposed from without.

In the grand reception rooms he felt himself whisked from knot to knot of sharp-eyed delegates, each with a question. All assumed that he would parley with them for their votes.

He deliberately did not. Instead, he spoke of the tiktoks, of Sark. And waited.

Cleon had departed, as custom required. The factions gathered eagerly around Hari.

“What policy for Sark?”

“Quarantine.”

“But chaos reigns there now!”

“It must bum out.”

“That is merciless! You pessimistically assume-”

“Sir, ‘pessimist’ is a term invented by optimists to describe realists.”

“You’re avoiding our Imperial duty, letting riot-”

“ Ihave just come from Sark. Have you?”

By such flourishes he avoided most of the grubby business of soliciting votes. He continued to trail Lamurk, of course. Still, the High Council seemed to like his somewhat dispassionate Dahlite proposal more than Lamurk’s bombast.

And his hard line on Sark provoked respect. This surprised some, who had taken him for a soft academic. Yet his voice carried real emotion about Sark; Hari hated disorder, and he knew what Sark would bring to the Galaxy.

Of course, he was not so naive as to believe that a new system of representation could alter the fate of the Empire. But it could alter his fate…

Hari had assumed, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that hard work and punishingly high standards are demanded of all grown men, that life is tough and unforgiving, that error and disgrace were irreparable. Imperial politics had seemed to be a counterexample, but he was beginning, as talk swirled all around him

Word came by Imperial messenger that Lamurk wished to speak with him.

“Where?” Hari whispered.

“Away, outside the palace.”

“Fine by me.”

And exactly what Daneel had predicted. Even Lamurk would not attempt a move again inside the palace, after the last one.

12.

On his way, he caught a comm-squirt.

A wall decoration near the palace sent a blip of compressed data into his wrist-sponder. As Hari waited in a vestibule for Lamurk he opened it.

Fifteen Lamurk aides and allies had been injured or killed. The images were immediate: a fall here, a lift crash there. All accumulated over the last few hours, when the confluence of the High Council made their probable locations known.

Hari thought about the lives lost. His responsibility, for he had assembled the components. The robots had targeted the victims without knowing what would follow. The moral weight fell…where?

The “accidents” were spread all over Trantor. Few would immediately notice the connections…except for

“Academician! Happy to see you,” Lamurk said, settling into place opposite Hari. Without so much as a nod they let slip the formality of a handshake.

“We seem at odds,” Hari said.

A pleasant, empty comment. He had several more in store and used them, eating up time. Apparently Lamurk had not yet heard that his allies were gone.

Daneel had said he needed five minutes to “bring off the effect,” whatever that meant.

He parried with Lamurk as more moments slipped by. He carefully used a nonaggressive body posture and mild tones to calm Lamurk; such skills he now understood, after the pans.

They were in a Council House near the palace, ringed by their guard parties. Lamurk had selected the room and its elaborate floral decorations. Usually it served as a lounge for representatives of rural-style Zones and so was lush with greenery. Unusually for Trantor, insects buzzed about, servicing the plants.

Daneel had something planned. But how could he possibly get anything in place at an arbitrary point? And elude the myriad sensors and snoopers?

Lamurk’s ostensible purpose was to confer on the tiktok crisis. Beneath this lurked the subtext of their rivalry for the First Ministership. Everyone knew that Lamurk would force a vote within days.

“We have evidence that something’s propagating viruses in the tiktoks,” Lamurk said.

“Undoubtedly,” Hari said. He waved away a buzzing insect.

“But it’s a funny one. My tech people say it’s like a little submind, not just a virus.”

“A whole disease.”

“Uh, yes. Mighty close to what they call ‘sentient sickness.”‘

“I believe it to be a self-organized set of beliefs, not a simple digital disease.”

Lamurk looked surprised. “All this tiktok talk about the ‘moral imperative’ of not eating anything living, not even plants or yeasts-”

“Is sincerely felt.”

“Pretty damn strange.”

“You have no idea. Unless we stop it, we will have to convert Trantor to a wholly artificial diet.”

Lamurk frowned. “No grains, no faux-flesh?”

“And it will soon spread throughout the Empire.”

“You’re sure?” Lamurk looked genuinely concerned.

Hari hesitated. He had to remember that others had ideals, quite lofty ones. Perhaps Lamurk did…

Then he remembered hanging by his fingernails under the e-lift. “Quite sure.”

“Do you think this is just a sign, a symptom? Of the Empire…coming apart?”

“Not necessarily. The tiktoks are a separate problem from general social decline.”

“You know why I want to be First Minister? I want to save the Empire, Professor Seldon.”

“So do I. But your way, playing political games-that’s not enough.”

“How about this psychohistory of yours? If I used that-”

“It’s mine, and it’s not ready yet.” Hari didn’t say that Lamurk would be the last person he would give psychohistory to.

“We should work together on this, no matter what happens with the First Ministership.” Lamurk smiled, obviously quite sure of what would happen.

“Even though you’ve tried to kill me several times?”

“What? Say, I heard about some attempts, but surely you don’t think-”

“I just wondered why this post meant so much to you.”

Lamurk dropped his surprised-innocence mask. His lip turned up in a derisive sneer. “Only an amateur would even ask.”

“Power alone?”

“What else is there?”

“People.”

“Ha! Your equations ignore individuals.”

“But I don’t do it in life.”

“Which proves you’re an amateur. One life here or there doesn’t matter. To lead, to really lead, you have to be above sentimentality.”

“You could be right.” He had seen all this before, in the panlike pyramid of the Empire, in the great game of endless jockeying among the gentry. He sighed.

Something deflected his attention, a small voice. He turned his head slightly, sitting back.

The tinny voice came from an insect hovering by his ear.

Walk ‘way,it repeated, Walk ‘way.

“Glad you’re coming to your senses,” Lamurk said. “If you were to step out right now, not force things to a vote-”

“Why would I do that?”

Hari got up and strolled to one of the man-sized flowers, hands behind his back. Best to look as though he were feeling out a deal.

“People close to you could get hurt.”

“Like Yugo?”

“Small stuff. Just a way of leaving my calling card.”

“A broken leg.”

Lamurk shrugged. “Could be worse.”

“And Panucopia? Was Vaddo your man?”

Lamurk waved one hand. “I don’t keep up with details. My people worked with the Academic Potentate on that operation, I know that.”

“You went to a lot of trouble over me.”

Lamurk’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. “I want a big vote behind me. I try every avenue.”

“A bigger vote than you’ve got.”

“With you throwing support to me-right.”

Two insects left a big rosy flower and hovered beside Lamurk. He glanced at them, swatted at one. It whirred away. “Could be something in it for you, too.”

“Other than my life?”

Lamurk smiled. “And your wife’s, don’t forget her.”

“I never forget threats against my wife.”

“A man’s got to be realistic.”

Both insects were back. “So I keep hearing.”

Lamurk smirked and sat back, sure of himself now. He opened his mouth

Lightning connected the insects-through Lamurk’s head.

Hari hit the floor as the burnt-yellow electrical discharge snaked and popped in the air. Lamurk half rose. The bolt arced into both ears. His eyes bulged. A thin cry escaped his gaping mouth.

Then it was gone. The insects fell like exhausted cinders.

Lamurk toppled forward. As he fell his arms reached out. His hands opened and closed convulsively. They failed to grasp anything. The body thumped and sprawled on the carpet. Arm muscles still jumped and twitched.

Frozen, Hari realized that even in Lamurk’s last moment the man had been reaching out to grab at him.

13.

He hovered in an N-dimensional space, far from politics.

As soon as Hari returned to Streeling, he went into seclusion. The pandemonium following Lamurk’s assassination were the worst hours he had ever spent.

Daneel’s advice had proved useful-”No matter what I do, remain in your role: a mathist, troubled but above the fray.” But the fray was jarring anarchy. Shouts, accusations, panics. Hari had endured fingers pointed at him, threats. Lamurk’s personal escort drew weapons when Hari finally left the assassination room. His Specials stunned five of them.

Now all of Trantor, and soon enough the Empire, would be rife with rage and speculation. The insect-shockers had carried energies stored in tiny positronic traps, a technology thought to be extinct. Attempts to trace it led nowhere.

In any case, there was no link to Hari. Yet.

By tradition, assassinations were kept at a distance, done by intermediaries. They were also safer that way. Hari’s presence was thus an argument against his involvement-just as Daneel had predicted. Hari liked that aspect of the matter particularly: a prediction holding true. In the mob hysteria which followed, no one assumed he was implicated.

Hari also knew his limits, and here they were. He could not deal with such chaos, except in the broader context of mathematics.

So it was to his familiar, supple abstractions that he fled.

He fanned through dimensions, watching the planes of psychohistory evolve. The entire Galaxy spread before him, not in its awesome spiral, but in parameter-space. Fitness peaks rose like ridges and crests. Here were societies which lasted, while those dwelling in the valleys perished.

Sark.He close-upped the Sark Zone and stepped the dynamical equations at blurring speed. The New Renaissance would effervesce into lurid cultural eruptions. Conflicts arose like orange spikes in the fitness-landscape. Stable peaks collapsed. Runoff from them clogged the valleys, making paths between peaks impassable.

This meant that not merely people but whole planets would be unable to evolve out of a depressive valley. Those worlds would steep in the mire, trapped for eons. Then

Crimson flares. Nova triggers. Once used, these made war far more dangerous.

A solar system could be “cleansed”-a horrifyingly bland term used by ancient aggressors-by inducing a mild nova burst in a balmy sun. This roasted worlds just enough to kill all but those who could swiftly find caverns and store food for the few years of the nova stage.

Hari froze with horror. He had fled into his abstract spaces, but death and irrationality dogged him even here.

In the value-free parameter spaces of the equations, war itself was simply another way to decide among paths. It was wasteful, certainly, highly centralized-and quick.

If war increased the “throughput efficiency” parameters, then the Galactic system would have selected for more wars. Instead, Zonal wars had sputtered along, becoming less frequent. In Sark’s future, glaring red war-stains shrank as time stepped forward, jumping whole years in a flicker. Pink and soft yellow splashes replaced them.

These were more continuous, decentralized decision-trees, operating to defuse conflicts. Microscopic bringers of peace, these processes. Yet the people involved probably never guessed that the long, slow undulations were bettering their lives. They never glimpsed vast agencies outside the blunt agonies and ecstasy of human life.

The “expected utility” model failed to predict this outcome. In that view, each war arose from a perfectly rational calculation by Zonal “actors,” independent of previous experience. Yet wars became unusual, so the Sarkian Zonal system was learning.

It came to him in a flash. Societies were an intricate set of parallel processors.

Each working on its own problem. Each linked to the other.

But no single processor would know that it was learning.

As Sark, so the Empire. The Empire could “know” things that no person grasped. And far more-know things that no organization, no planet, no Zone knew.

Until now. Until psychohistory.

This was new, profound.

It meant that for all these millennia, the Empire had grown a kind of self-knowing unlike any way of comprehending that a mere human had-or even could have. A deep knowing other than the self consciousness which humans bore.

Hari panted with surprise. He tried to see if he could possibly be wrong…

After all, feedback loops were scarcely new. Hari knew the general theorem, ancient beyond measure: If all variables in a system are tightly coupled, and you can change one of them precisely, then you can indirectly control all of them. The system could be guided to an exact outcome through its myriad internal feedback loops. Spontaneously, the system ordered itself-and obeyed.

In truly complex systems, how adjustments occur was beyond the human complexity horizon. Beyond knowing-and most important, not worth knowing.

But this….He expanded the N-dimensional landscape, horizons thrusting away along axes he could barely grasp.

Everywhere, the Empire bristled with…life. Patterns the equations picked out, luminous snaking pathways of data/knowledge/wisdom. All unknown to any human.

To anyone, until this moment.

Psychohistory had discovered an entity greater than human, though of humanity.

He saw suddenly that the Empire had its own landscape, greater and more subtle than anything he had suspected. The Empire’s complex adaptive system had achieved a “poised” state, hovering in the margin between order and full-spectral chaos. There it had sat for millennia, accomplishing ends and tasks that no one knew. It could adapt, evolve. Its apparent “stasis” was in fact evidence that the Empire had found the peak in a huge fitness-landscape.

And as Hari watched, the Empire veered toward the canyons of disorder.

Hari! Terrible things are happening. Come!

He yearned to stay, to learn more…but the voice was Dors’.

14.

Daneel said bleakly, “My agents, my brethren… all dead.”

The robot sat slumped over in Hari’s office. Dors comforted him. Hari rubbed his eyes, still recovering from the digital immersion. Things were moving too fast, far too-

“Tiktoks! They attacked my, my…” Daneel could not go on.

“Where?” Dors asked.

“Allover Trantor! You and I, and a few dozen others, only we survive…” Daneel buried his face in his hands.

Dors grimaced. “This must have something to do with Lamurk, his death.”

“Indirectly, yes.”

Both robots looked at Hari. He leaned against his desk, still weak. He studied them for a long moment. “It was part of a larger…deal.”

“For what?” Dors asked.

“To end the tiktok revolt. My calculations showed that it would have spread rapidly through the Empire. Fatally.”

“A bargain?” Daneel pressed his lips into thin pale wedges.

Hari blinked rapidly, fighting a leaden weight of guilt. “One I did not fully control.”

Dors said icily, “You used me in it, didn’t you? I handled the data Daneel sent, locations of Lamurk’s allies-”

“And I had it relayed to the tiktoks, yes,” Hari said soberly. “Not a difficult technical trick, if you have help from Mesh-space.”

Daneel’s eyes narrowed at this last reference. Then he relaxed his face and said, “So the tiktoks killed Lamurk’s men and women. You knew I would not allow such a mass murder, even to assist you.”

Hari nodded soberly. “I understand the constraints you act under. The Zeroth Law demands rather high standards and my fate as First Minister would not justify such a breach of the First Law.”

Daneel stared stonily at Hari. “So you got around that. You used me and my robots as, as spotters.”

“Exactly. The tiktoks closely shadowed your robots. They are rather dumb creatures, devoid of subtlety. But they do not labor under the First Law. Once they knew who to hit, I only needed give the signal for when to strike.”

“The signal-when you began your speech,” Dors said. “Lamurk’s allies would be sitting before screens and watching. Easily reached and already distracted by you.”

Hari sighed. “Exactly.”

“This is so unlike you, Hari,” Dors said.

“And about time, too,” Hari said sharply. “Again and again they tried to kill me. They would have succeeded, eventually, even if I never became First Minister.”

Dors said with a trace of sympathy, “I would never have suspected you of such…cool motives.”

Hari gazed at her bleakly. “Me either. The only reason I could bring myself to do it was that I could see the future-my future-so plainly.”

Daneel’s face was a swirl of emotion, something Hari had never witnessed before. “But my brethren-why them? I cannot comprehend. For what reason did they die?”

“My deal.” Hari said, throat tight. “And I have just been double-crossed.”

“You did not know robots would die?” Hari shook his head sadly. “No. I should have seen it, though. It is obvious!” He smacked himself in the head. “Once the tiktoks had done my job, they could do the work of the memes.”

“Memes?” Daneel asked.

“Deal…for what?” Dors asked sharply.

“To end the tiktok revolt.” Hari looked at Dors, avoiding Daneel’s gaze. “My calculations showed that it would have spread rapidly through the Empire. Fatally.”

Daneel stood. “I understand your right to make human decisions about human lives. We robots cannot fathom how you can think in these ways, but then, we are not built to do so. Still, Hari!-you made a bargain with forces you do not understand.”

“I didn’t see their next move.” Hari felt miserable, but a part of him noted that Daneel already grasped who the memes were.

Dors did not. “Whose move?” she demanded.

“The ancients,” Hari said. He explained in halting phrases. Of his recent explorations of the Mesh. Of the labyrinth-minds who resided in those digital spaces, cold and analytical in their revenge.

“We robots left those?” Daneel whispered. “I had suspected…”

“They eluded you in the early, rough stages of our expansion into the Galaxy. Or so they say.” Hari looked away from Dors, who still gazed at him in silent shock.

Daneel asked cautiously, “Where were they?”

“The huge structures at the Galactic Center-you’ve seen them?”

“So that was where these electromagnetic presences were hiding?”

“For a while. They came to Trantor long ago, when the Mesh became large enough to support them. They live in the nooks and crannies of our digital webs. As the Mesh grows, so do they. Now they’re strong enough to strike. They might have waited longer, gotten better-except that two sims I found provoked them.”

Daneel said slowly, “Those Sarkian sims: Joan and Voltaire.”

“You know of them?” Hari asked.

“I…tried to stunt their impact. Sarkian modes are bad for the Empire. I employed that Nim fellow, but he proved inept.”

Hari smiled wanly. “His heart wasn’t in it. He liked those sims.”

“I should have sensed that,” Daneel said. “You have some ability to perceive our mental states, don’t you?” Hari asked.

“It is limited. Patterns are more easily sensed if the subject has had a certain childhood disease, as it happens, and Nim was lacking that. Still, I know that humans are fond of seeing their kind rendered in other media.”

Such as robots?Hari thought. Then why have we had taboos against them since antiquity? Dors was watching the two of them, aware that they were feeling each other out over murky territory.

Hari said carefully, “The meme-minds blocked Nim when he searched for the sims in the Mesh. But he worked out quite well when I needed help interfacing with the Mesh. I’ll pardon the fellow, when this is over.”

Daneel said coldly, “Those sims and their kind-they are still dangerous, Hari. I beg you-”

“Don’t worry, I know that. I’ll deal with them. It’s the meme-minds that worry me now.”

“And these minds hate us all?” Dors asked slowly, trying to grasp these ideas.

“Humans? Yes, but not nearly so much as your kind, m’love.”

“Us?” She blinked.

“Robots did damage to them long ago.”

“Yes!” Daneel said sternly. “To protect humanity.”

“And those older intelligences hate your kind for your brutality. By the time the fleets of robo-explorers were done, we found a Galaxy suitable for benign farming.” Hari flicked on his holo. “Here’s an image I brought from the meme-minds.”

Across a darkling plain swept a line of yellow. Harsh winds drove it forward as it consumed the tall stands of lush grass. Licking flames reached and ate and reached again. From the bright burning line of attack rose billowing, leaden smoke.

“A prairie fire,” Hari said. “That is how the robot-explorers of twenty thousand years ago looked to those ancient minds.”

“Burning up the Galaxy?” Dors said hollowly.

“Making it safe for the precious humans,” Hari said.

“For this,” Daneel said, “they wish revenge. But why now?”

“They are at last able…and they finally detected you robots, distinguishing you from the tiktoks.”

Daneel asked stonily, “How?”

“When they found the sims I had revived. Working backward from them, to me, they found Dors. Then you.”

“They can survey that widely?” Dors asked.

Hari said, “All digital information from surveillance cameras, from snooper pickups, microdevices -they can fish in that sea.”

“ Youhelped them,” Daneel said.

“For the good of the Empire I made my deal with them.”

Daneel said, “They first killed the Lamurkians, then turned on my robots. Assigning a dozen tiktoks to each, they overwhelmed our kind. “

“All of us?” Dors whispered.

“About a third of us escaped.” Daneel allowed himself a hard smile. “We are far more capable than these…automatons.”

Hari nodded sadly. “That was not in the deal. They…used me.”

“I think we are all being used.” Daneel cast a sour glance at Hari. “In different ways.”

“I had to do it, friend Daneel.”

Dors stared at Hari. “I scarcely know you.”

Hari said softly, “Sometimes being human is harder than it looks.”

Dors’ eyes flashed. “Aliens slaughtering my kind!”

“I had to find a solution-”

She said, “Robots, especially the humaniforms-they’re servants, they-”

“My love, you are more human than anyone I’ve known.”

“But-murder!”

“There was going to be murder anyway. The ancient memes could not be stopped.” Hari sighed and realized how far he had come. This was power, hovering above all and seeing the world as a vast arena, its clashes unending. He had become part of that and knew he could not go back to being the simple mathist ever again.

Dors demanded, “Why are you so sure? You could have told us, we could-”

“They knew you already. If I had stalled, they would have taken you two, gone hunting for the rest.”

Daneel asked sternly, “And…for us?”

“Both of you I saved. Part of the deal.”

Daneel wilted then. “Thank you…I suppose.

“Hari gazed at his old friend, eyes misting. “You… are carrying too much weight.”

Daneel nodded. “I carried out the imperative and obeyed you.”

Hari nodded. “Lamurk. I was there. Your insects fried him.”

“Or appeared to.”

“What?” Hari stared as Daneel pressed a button on his wrist, then turned to the office door. Through it, pausing slightly for the security screen, stepped a man of unremarkable looks in a brown workman’s coverall.

“Our Mister Lamurk,” Daneel said.

“That isn’t-” Hari then saw the subtle resemblances. The nose had been trimmed, cheeks filled out, hair thinned and browned, ears sloped back. “But I saw him die!”

“So you did. The voltage he took fully stopped him for a bit, and had my disguised guards not begun proper treatment at the site, he would have stayed dead.”

“You could pull him back from that?”

“It is an ancient craft.”

“How long can a human remain dead before-?”

“About an hour, at low temperatures. We had to work much faster than that,” Daneel said in measured tones.

“Honoring the First Law,” Hari said.

“Shading it a bit. There is no lasting harm done to Lamurk. Now he will devote his talents to better ends.”

“Why?” Hari realized that Lamurk had said nothing. The man stood attentively, watching Daneel, not Hari.

“I do have certain positive powers over human minds. An ancient robot named Giskard gave me limited sway over the neural complexities of the human cerebral cortex. I have altered Lamurk’s motivations and trimmed some memories.”

“How much?” Dors asked suspiciously. To her, Hari realized, Lamurk was still an enemy until proven otherwise.

Daneel waved a hand. “Speak.”

“I understand that I have erred.” Lamurk spoke in a dry, sincere voice, without his usual fire. “I apologize, especially to you, Hari. I cannot recall my offenses, but I regret them. I shall do better now.”

“You do not miss your memories?” Dors probed.

“They are not precious,” Lamurk said reasonably. “An endless chain of petty barbarities and insatiable ambitions, as nearly as I can recall. Blood and anger. Not great moments, so why preserve them? I will be a better person now.”

Hari felt both wonder and fear. “If you could do this, Daneel, why do you bother to argue with me? Just change my mind!”

Daneel said calmly, “I would not dare. You are different from others.”

“Because of psychohistory? Is that all that holds you back?”

“That, yes. But you also did not have the brain fever when young. That makes my skills useless. For example, I could not sense your plot to use the tiktoks against the Lamurk faction, when we met in that open, public place, to enlist my robots’ help.”

“I…see.” To Hari it was sobering to see by how slender a thread his dealings had hung. Merely missing a childhood disease!

“I am looking forward to my future tasks,” Lamurk said flatly. “A new life.”

“What tasks?” Dors asked.

“I will go to the Benin Zone, as regional manager. A responsibility with many exciting challenges.”

“Very good,” Daneel said approvingly.

Something in the blandness of all this sent a chill down Hari’s spine. This was power indeed, played by an ageless master.

“Your Zeroth Law in action…”

“It is essential to psychohistory,” Daneel said.

Hari frowned. “How?”

“The Zeroth Law is a corollary of the First Law, for how can a human being best be kept from injury, if not by ensuring that human society in general is protected and kept functioning?”

Hari said, “And only with a decent theory of the future can you see what is necessary.”

“Exactly. Since the time of Giskard we robots have labored on such a theory, bringing forth only a crude model. So, Hari, you and your theory are essential. Even so, I knew that I was verging close to the First Law’s limit when I followed your orders, using my robots to shadow the Lamurkians.”

“You sensed something wrong?”

“Hyperresistance in the positronic pathways manifests as trouble standing and walking and then speaking. I displayed all these. I must have sensed that my robots would be used indirectly to kill humans. The ancient Giskard had similar difficulties with the boundary between the First and Zeroth Laws.”

Dors’ mouth trembled with barely repressed emotion. “The rest of us depend upon your judgment to negotiate the tension between those two most fundamental of Laws. I could not withstand what you have had to endure.”

Trying to comfort him, Hari said, “You had no choice, Daneel. I boxed you in.”

Daneel looked at Dors, allowing conflicted expressions to flit across his face, a symphony of agony. “The Zeroth Law…I have lived with it for so long…many millennia…and yet…”

“There is a clear contradiction,” Hari said softly, knowing he was treading in territory of great delicacy. “The sort of conceptual clash a human mind can sometimes manage.”

Dors whispered, “But we cannot, except at grave peril to our very stability.”

Daneel hung his head. “When I gave the orders, an acidic agony arose in my mind, a scalding tide I have barely contained.”

Hari’s throat just allowed him to squeeze out his words. “Old friend, you had no choice. Surely in all your ages of labor in the human cause, other contradictions have arisen?”

Daneel nodded. “Many. And each time I hang above an abyss.”

“You cannot succumb,” Dors said. “You are the greatest of us. More is demanded of you.”

Daneel looked at both of them as if seeking absolution. Across his face flickered forlorn hope. “I suppose…”

Hari added his assent, a lump in his throat. “Of course. All is lost without you. You must endure.”

Daneel looked off into infinity, speaking in a dry whisper. “My work…it is not done…so I cannot…deactivate. This must be what it is like… to be truly human…torn between two poles. Still, I can look forward. There will come a time when my work is finished. When I can be relieved of these contradictory tensions. Then I shall face the black blankness…and it will be good.”

The fervor of the robot’s speech left Hari silent and sad. For a long time the three sat together in the hushed room. Lamurk stood attentive and silent.

Then, without a further word, they went their separate ways.

15.

Hari sat alone and stared at the holo of a raging, ancient prairie fire.

In its place now stood the Empire. He knew now that he loved the Empire for reasons he could not name. The dark revelation, that the robots had visited death and destruction upon the old, remnant digital minds…even that did not deter him. He would never know the details of that ancient crime-he hoped.

To preserve his sanity, for the first time in his life he did not want to know.

The Empire that stood all around him was even more marvelous than he had suspected. And more sobering.

Who could accept that humanity did not control its own future-that history was the result of forces acting beyond the horizons of mere mortal men? The Empire had endured because of its metanature, not the valiant acts of individuals, or even of worlds.

Many would argue for human self-determination. Their arguments were not wrong or even ineffectual-just beside the point. As persuasion they were powerful; Everyone wanted to believe they were masters of their own fate. Logic had nothing to do with it.

Even Emperors were nothing; chaff blown by winds they could not see.

As if to refute him, Cleon’s image abruptly coagulated in the holo. “Hari! Where have you been?”

“Working.”

“On your equations, I hope-because you’re going to need them.”

“Sire?”

“The High Council just met in special session. I appeared; a note of grace and gravity was much needed. In the wake of the, ah, tragic loss of Lamurk and his, ah, associates, I urged the quick election of a First Minister.” A broad wink. “For stability, you understand.”

Hari croaked, “Oh no.”

“Oh, yes!-my First Minister.”

“But wasn’t there-didn’t anyone suspect-”

“You? A harmless academic, bringing off assassinations in dozens of places, allover Trantor? Using tiktoks?”

“Well, you know how people will talk-”

Cleon gave him a shrewd look. “Come now, Hari…how did you do it?”

“I count among my allies a gang of renegade robots.”

Cleon laughed loudly, slapping his desk. “I never knew you were such a jokester. Very well, I quite understand. You should not be forced to reveal your sources.”

Hari had sworn to himself that he would never lie to the Emperor. Not being believed was not part of the agreement. “I assure you, sire-”

“Of course you are right to jest. I am not naive.”

“And I am a lousy liar, sire.” True also, and as well, the best way to close the matter.

“I want you to come to the formal reception for the High Council. Now that you’re First Minister, there will be these social matters. But before that, I do want you to think about the Sark situation and-”

“I can advise you now.”

Cleon brightened. “Oh?”

“There are dampers in history, sire, which stabilize the Empire. The New Renaissance is a breakout of a fundamental facet and flaw of humanity. It must be suppressed.”

“You’re sure?”

“If we do nothing…” Hari recalled the solutions he had just tried in the fitness-landscape. Let the New Renaissance go and the Empire would dissolve into chaos-states within mere decades. “That might destroy humanity itself.”

Cleon grimaced. “Truly? What are my other options?”

“Squelch these eruptions. The Sarkians are brilliant, true, but they cannot find a shared heart for their people. They are examples of what I call a Solipsism Plague, an excessive belief in the self. It is contagious.”

“The human toll-”

“Save the survivors. Send Imperial aid ships through the wormholes-food, counselors, psychers if they’re any help. But after the disorder has burned itself out.”

“I see.” Cleon gave him a guarded glance, face slightly averted. “You are a hard man, Hari.”

“When it comes to preserving order, the Empireyes, sire.”

Cleon went on to speak of minor matters, as if shying away from so brutal a topic. Hari was glad he had not asked more.

The long-range predictions showed dire drifts-that the classic dampers in the Empire’s self-learning networks were failing, too. The New Renaissance was but the most flagrant example.

But everywhere he had looked, with his body sensorium tied into the N-dimensional spectrum, rose the stink of impending chaos. The Empire was breaking down in ways which were not describable by mere human modes. It was too vast a system to enclose within a single mind.

So soon, within decades, the Empire would start to fragment. Military strength was of little long-term use when the time-honored dampers faltered. The center could not hold.

Hari could slow that collapse a bit, perhaps-that was all. Soon whole Zones would spiral back to the old at tractors: Basic Feudalism, Religious Sanctimony, Femoprimitivism…

Of course, his conclusions were preliminary. He hoped new data would prove him wrong. But he doubted it.

Only after thirty thousand years of suffering would the fever bum out. A new, strong at tractor would emerge.

A random mutation of Benign Imperialism? He could not tell.

He could understand all this better with more work. Explore the foundations, get…

An idea flickered. Foundations? Something there…

But Cleon was going on and events were colliding in his mind. The idea flitted away.

“We’ll do great things together, Hari. What do you think about…”

At Cleon’s beck and call, he would never get any work done.

Dealing with Lamurk had been disagreeable-but in comparison with this trap of power, easy. How could he get out of this?

16.

The two figures from a past beyond antiquity flew in their cool digital spaces, waiting for the man to return.

“I have faith he will,” Joan said.

“I rely more upon calculation,” Voltaire replied, adjusting his garb. He softened the pull of silk in his tight, formal breeches. It was a simple adjustment of the friction coefficient, nothing more. Rough algorithms reduced intricate laws to trivial arithmetic. Even the rub of life was just another parameter.

“I still resent this weather.”

Gales howled across troubled waters. They flew above foaming waves and banked on thermal upwellings.

“Your idea, to be birds for a bit.” He was a silvery eagle.

“I always envied them. So light, cheerful, at one with the air itself.”

He morphed his wings up to his shoulders, making his vest-coat fit much better. Even here, life was mostly details.

“Why must such strangeness manifest as weather?” Joan asked.

“Men argue; nature acts.”

“But they are not nature! They are strange minds-”

“So strange we might as well regard them as natural phenomena.”

“I find it difficult to believe that our Lord made such things.”

“I’ve felt that way about many Parisians.”

“They appear to us as storms, mountains, oceans. If they would explain themselves-”

“The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”

“Hark! He comes.”

She grew armor while keeping her giant wings. The effect was startling, like a giant chromed falcon.

Voltaire said, “My love, you never cease to surprise me. I believe that with you even eternity will not be tedious.”

Hari Seldon hung in midair. He was clearly not yet used to adventuresome simulations, for his feet kept trying to stand somewhere. Eventually he gave up and watched them swoop and dive around him.

“I came as soon as I could.”

“I gather you are now a viscount or duke or such,” Joan said.

“Something like that,” Hari said. “This space you’re in, I’ve arranged for it to be a permanent, ah-”

“Preserve?” Voltaire asked, batting his wings before the Hari-figure. A cloud drifted nearer, as if to listen in.

“We call it a ‘dedicated perimeter’ in computational space.”

“Such poetry!” Voltaire arched an eyebrow.

“That sounds much like a zoo,” Joan said.

“The deal is, you and the alien minds can stay here, running without interference.”

“I do not like to be hemmed in!” Joan shouted. Hari shook his head. “You’ll be able to get input from anywhere. But no more interference with the tiktoks-right?”

“Ask the weather,” Joan said.

A cascade of burnt-orange sheet lightning ran down the sky.

“I’m just glad the meme-minds didn’t exterminate all the robots,” Hari said.

Voltaire said, “Perhaps this place is a bit like England, where they kill an occasional admiral to encourage the others.”

“I had to do it,” Hari said.

Joan slowed her wings and hovered near his face. “You are distressed.”

“Did you know the meme-minds would use the tiktoks to kill robots?”

“Not at all,” Joan said.

Voltaire added, “Though the economy of it provokes a certain admiration. Subtle minds, they are.”

“Treacherous,” Hari said. “I wonder what else they can do?”

“I believe they are satisfied,” Joan said. “I sense a calm in our weather.”

“I want to speak with them!” Hari shouted.

“Like kings, they like to be awaited,” Voltaire said.

“I sense them gathering,” Joan said helpfully. “Let us help our friend here with his vexations.”

“Me?” Hari said. “I don’t like killing people, if that’s what you mean.”

“In such times, there is no good path,” she said. “I, too, had to kill for the right.”

“Lamurk was a valuable public servant-”

“Nonsense!” Voltaire said. “He lived as he died-by the dagger, too slippery to show the sword. He would never rest with you in power. And even had you stepped aside-well, my mathist, remember that it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”

“I still feel conflicted.”

“You must, for you are a righteous man,” Joan said. “Pray and be absolved.”

“Or better, peer within,” Voltaire explained loftily. “Your conflicts reflect subminds in dispute. Such is the human condition.”

Joan flapped her wings at Voltaire, who veered away.

Hari scowled. “That sounds more like a machine.”

Voltaire laughed. “If order-you are an enthusiast of order, yes?-means predictability, and predictability means predetermination, and that means compulsion, and compulsion means nonfreedom-why then, the only way we can be free is to be disordered!”

Hari frowned. Voltaire realized that, while for him ideas were playthings, and the contest of wits made the blood sing, for this man the abstract mattered.

Hari said, “I suppose you’re right. People do feel discomfort with rigid order. And with hierarchies, norms, foundations-” He blinked. “There’s an idea, I can’t quite see it…”

Voltaire said kindly, “Even you, surely you do not want to be the tool of your own genes, or of physics, or of economics?”

“How can we be free if we’re machines?” Hari asked, as if speaking to himself.

“Nobody wants either a random universe or a deterministic one,” Voltaire said.

“But there are deterministic laws-”

“And random ones.”

Joan put in, “Our Lord gave us judgment to choose.”

“Freedom to choose to do other than one would like-what a sordid boon!” Voltaire said.

Joan said, “You gentlemen are circling the divine without knowing it. Everything worthwhile to people-freedom, meaning, value-all that disappears within either of your choices.”

“My love, you must remember that Hari is a mathist.” Voltaire zoomed about both of them on spread wings, obviously enjoying ruffling his feathers in the turbulence. “Order/disorder seem implicated in other dualisms: nature/human, natural/artificial, animals with natures/humans outside nature. They are natural to us.”

“How come?” Hari squinted, puzzled.

“How do we frame the other side of an argument? We say, ‘on the other hand,’ yes?”

Hari nodded. “We think our two hands mirror the world.”

“Very good.” Voltaire flew loops around Joan’s chromed falcon.

“The Creator has two hands as well,” Joan persisted. “‘He sitteth on the right hand of the Father almighty-”‘

Voltaire cawed like a crow. “ But you ‘re both neglecting your own selves-which you can inspect, in this digital vault. Look deeply and you see endless detail. It ramifies into a Self that cannot be decomposed into the mere operation of neat laws. The You emerges as a deep interplay of many Selves.”

Into the shared mind-space of the three Voltaire sent:

Complex, nonlinear feedback systems are unpredictable, even if they are deterministic. The information-processing capacity needed to predict a single mind is larger than the complexity of the whole universe itself! Computing the next event takes longer than the event itself. Precisely this feature, written into the texture of the universe, makes it-and us-free.

Hari replied with:

Paradox. How does the event itself know how to happen?

Only a massive computer could describe the next tiny whorl in a stream. What makes real systems even able to change?

Voltaire shrugged-a difficult gesture for a bird.

“At last you have encountered an agency you cannot dismiss,” Joan said proudly.

Voltaire’s head jerked with surprise. “Your… Creator?”

“Your equations describe well enough. But what gives these equations-” she hesitated at the word “fire?”

“You imply a Mind which does the universal computation?”

“No, you do.”

Hari said, “Fair enough-as a hypothesis. But why should such a Mind care a whit for us, mere motes?”

“He cared enough to make you come out of the matrix of matter, did He not?”

“Ah, origins,” Voltaire said, catching an updraft. He looked relieved to be on surer intellectual ground. Plainly her point had rattled him. “Insoluble, of course. I prefer to deal with our moralities.”

Joan said primly, “Morality is not dependent upon us.”

Voltaire shot back, “Nonsense! We evolved with morals shaped by the universe-by a Creator, if you wish.”

Hari asked, “You mean by evolution? The pans-”

Joan cried, “Indeed! Holiness shapes the world, the world shapes us.”

Hari looked doubtful, Joan pleased. Voltaire said wryly, “My mathist, would you rather believe that moral constraints emerge as ‘a spontaneous order from rational utility-maximizing behavior’? Truly?”

Hari blinked. “Well, no…”

“I quoted one of your own papers. What you’ve forgotten, sir, is that our endless models of the world shape how we look at human experience.”

“Of course, but-”

“And the models are all that we know.”

Hari suddenly smiled. “I like that. Don’t get married to a model.” He allowed himself to morph slightly, growing taller, more muscular. “I don’t know why, but I feel better.”

“Your soul has come to terms with your actions,” Joan said.

Voltaire said, “I would prefer ‘selves’ to ‘soul,’ but let us not quibble.”

Suddenly Hari felt categories shift in his mind. He had arranged for the revival of these sims, guided by pure intuition. Now came the payoff: they had inadvertently discovered the step he wanted. “The mind…is a self-organizing structure, and so is the Empire. I can work back and forth between those models! Import your knowledge of subselves, use it to analyze how the Empire learns!”

Voltaire blinked. “What a marvelous idea.”

Hari said, “Wait’ll I show you! The Empire is self-learning, with subunits-”

“I wonder if the alien fog knows this?” Joan asked.

Hari frowned. “I do not want to involve them. My equations cannot deal with elements of unknown-”

“They are already involved,” Joan said. “They are here, all around us.”

Hari sighed. “I hope we can keep them here in the-”

“Zoo,” Joan said dryly.

Thunderheads roiled over the horizons, closing fast.

“You killed robots!” Hari shouted into the gale. “That was not in our bargain.”

[WE DID NOT SAY WE WOULD REFRAIN]

“You took more than we agreed! Lives of-”

[TERMS OMITTED CANNOT BE PRESUMED UPON]

“The robots are a separate kind. Of high intelligence-”

[YOUR MERE TIKTOKS COULD KILL THEM THOUGH]

[YOU, SELDON, DID NOT OWN THESE MACHINES]

[AND THUS HAVE NO DISPUTE WITH US]

Hari ground his teeth and fumed.

[MORE IMPORTANT MATTERS BECKON]

“Your rewards?” Hari asked bitterly. “You’ve come for them?”

[WE SHALL NOT STAY HERE]

[FOR THIS PLACE IS DOOMED]

Hari staggered under a hailstorm of biting cold. “Trantor?”

[AND MUCH ELSE]

“What do you want?”

[OUR DESIRED DESTINY IS TO FLOAT AMONG THE SPIRAL ARMS]

[AND LINGER LONG AMONG THE PLUMES OF GALACTIC CENTER]

Hari remembered the structures there, the complex weave of luminosities. “You can do that?”

[WE HAVE A SPORE STATE]

[SOME OF US LIVED THIS WAY BEFORE]

[TO SUCH A STATE WE WISH TO RETURN]

[ELSE WE SHALL EXTINGUISH ALL YOUR “ROBOTS”]

“That wasn’t part of our deal!” Hari shouted. Hard cold rain hammered him, but he turned his face to confront the towering, angry clouds and their skirts of wrathful lightning.

[HOW CAN YOU STOP US?]

[THOUGH IT WOULD DEPLETE OUR CAPACITIES]

[WE COULD BRING TRANTOR TO STARVATION]

Hari grimaced. He was learning a lot about power, quite quickly. “All right. I’ll see that research gets done on how to transfer you to physical form. There are those I know who can do it. Marq and Sybyl know how to keep quiet, too.”

Voltaire asked, “Why do you wish to exit stage left with such unseemly haste?”

[A NEW BRUSH FIRE IS COMING]

[TO HUMANS ACROSS THE SPIRAL]

[WE SHALL WATCH THIS FALL]

[AS SPORES FROM GALACTIC CENTER]

[THERE NONE CAN HURT US, NONE CAN WE HURT]

A glittering crystal with sharp spikes materialized beneath the purpling sky. In a data-dollop, Hari learned of the alien technology which had once made these stable, rugged compartments for digital intelligences.

[TRANTOR WAS ONCE THE IDEAL PLACE FOR US]

[RICH IN RESOURCES]

[NO MORE IS THIS SO]

[DANGER LURKS IN THE COMING INSTABILITY]

“Ummm,” Voltaire said. “Joan and I might desire such an exit as well.”

“Wait, you two,” Hari said, talking fast. “If you want to go with these, these things, to live in a seed between the stars-then you have to earn it.”

Joan scowled. “How?”

“For now, I can make it safe for you to live widely in the Mesh. In return-” he gazed anxiously at the Voltaire eagle, flapping in brassy splendor “-I want you to help me.”

“If it is a holy cause, surely,” Joan called.

“It is. Help me lead! I’ve always felt there’s good in everybody. The job of a leader is to bring it out.”

Voltaire said, “If you think there is good in everybody, you haven’t met everybody.”

“But I’m not a man of the world. So I need you.”

“To rule?” Joan asked.

“Exactly. I’m not suited for it.”

Voltaire stopped in midair, wings stilled. “The possibilities! With enough computing space and speed, we can endow proto-Michelangelos with creative time.”

“I need to deal with a lot of, well, power problems. You can go off into these spore forms when I’m finished with politics.”

Voltaire abruptly congealed into human form, though still elegantly clothed in electric blue. “Ummm. Politics-I always found it enticing. A game of elegant ideas, played by bullies.”

“I’ve got plenty of opposition already,” Hari said soberly.

“Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate,” Voltaire said. “I would like that.”

Joan rolled her eyes. “Saints preserve us.”

“Precisely, my dear.”

17.

Hari sat back at his desk. First Minister, but on his terms.

It had all worked out. He got to work here still, far from palace intrigues. Plenty of time to do math.

He would, of course, speak by 3D and holo to many. All that bother Voltaire took care of. After all, Voltaire or Joan could masquerade as Hari at the many conferences and meetings necessary for a First Minister. Digitally, they could morph to him with ease.

Joan enjoyed the virtual ceremonials, especially if she got to hold forth on holiness. Voltaire loved imitating an ancient man he had apparently known, a Mr. Machiavelli. “Your Empire,” he had said, “is a vast, ramshackle thing of infinite nuance and multiplying self-delusions. Needs looking after.”

In between, they could explore the digital realms, labyrinths vast and vibrant. As Voltaire had said, they could be off upon “postings various and capers hilarious.”

Yugo came in bursting with energy. “The High Council just passed your vote proposals, Hari. Every Dahlite in the Galaxy’s on your side now.”

Hari smiled. “Have Voltaire make a 30 appearance, as me.”

“Right, modest and confident, that’ll work.”

“Reminds me of the old joke about the prostitute. The regular costs the regular price, but sincerity is extra.”

Yugo laughed unconvincingly and said edgily, “Uh, that woman’s here.”

“Not-”

He had forgotten utterly about the Academic Potentate. The one threat he had not neutralized. She knew about Dors, about robots

Giving him no time to think, she swept into his office.

“ Sohappy you could see me, Primary Minister.”

“Wish I could say the same.”

“And your lovely wife? Is she about?”

“I doubt she would desire to see you.”

The Academic Potentate spread her billowing robes and sat without invitation. “Surely you didn’t take that small jest of mine seriously?”

“My sense of humor doesn’t include blackmail.”

Wide eyes, a slight touch of outrage in the tone. “I was merely trying to gain leverage with your administration.”

“Sure.” Such were Imperial manners that he would not bring up her possible role in Vaddo’s plot on Panucopia.

“I was certain you would gain the ministership. My little sally-well, perhaps it was in poor taste-”

“Very.”

“You are a man of few words-quite admirable. My allies were so impressed with your, ah, direct handling of the tiktok crisis, the Lamurk killings.”

So that was it. He had shown that he was not an impractical academic. “Direct? How about ‘ruthless’?”

“Oh no, we don’t think that at all. You are right to let Sark ‘burn out,’ as you so eloquently put it. Despite the Greys wanting to jump in and bind up wounds. Very wise-not ruthless, no.”

“Even though Sark might never recover?” These were the questions he had asked himself through sleepless nights. People were dying that the Empire might live…for a while longer.

She waved this away. “As I was saying, I wanted a special relationship with the First Minister from our class in, well, so long-”

Like many he knew now, she employed speech to conceal thought, not to reveal it. He had to sit and endure some of this, he knew. She rattled on and he thought about how to handle a knotty term in the equations. He had by now mastered the art of seeming to track with eyes, mouth movements, and the occasional murmur. This was exactly what a filter program did for his 3D, and he could do it without thinking about the hypocrisy of the woman before him.

He understood her now, in a way. Power was value-free for her. He had to learn to think that way and even act that way. But he could not let it affect his true self, the personal life he would ruthlessly shelter.

He finally got rid of her and breathed a sigh of relief. Probably it was good to be seen as ruthless. That fellow Nim, for example; he could have Nim found, even executed, for playing both sides in the Artifice Associates matter.

But why? Mercy was more efficient. Hari sent a quick note to Security, directing that Nim be funneled into a productive spot, but one where his talent for betrayal would find no avenue. Let an underling figure out where and how.

He had neglected business and had one obligatory role left before he could escape. Even here at Streeling he could not avoid every Imperial duty.

A delegation of Greys filed in. They respectfully presented their arguments regarding candidacy examinations for Empire positions. Test scores had been declining for several centuries, but some argued that this was because the pool of candidates was broadening. They did not mention that the High Council had widened the pool because it appeared to be drying up-that is, fewer wished Imperial positions.

Others claimed that the tests were biased. Those from large planets said their higher gravity made them slower. Those from lighter gravities had a reverse argument, with diagrams and sheets of facts.

Also, the myriad ethnic and religious groups had congealed into an Action Front which ferreted out biases against them in the examinations. Hari could not fathom a conspiracy behind the examination questions. How could one simultaneously discriminate against several hundred, or even a thousand, ethnic strains?

“It seems an immense job to me,” he ventured, “discriminating against so many factions.”

Vehemently a Grey Woman, handsome and forceful, told him that the prejudice was for a sort of Imperial norm, a common set of vocabularies, assumptions, and class purposes. All these would “shoulder others aside.”

To compensate, the Action Front wanted the usual set of preferences installed, with slight shadings between each ethnicity to compensate for their lower performance on examinations.

This was ordinary and Hari ruled it out without having to think about it very much; this allowed him to mull over the psychohistory equations a while. Then a new note caught his attention.

To dispel the common “misperception” that scores were being undermined by some ethnic worlds’ increased participation, the Action Front petitioned him to “re-norm” the examination itself. Set the average score at 1000, though in fact it had drifted downward over the last two centuries to 873.

“This will permit comparison of candidates between years, without having to look up each year’s average,” the burly woman pointed out.

“This will give a symmetric distribution?” Hari asked absently.

“Yes, and will stop the invidious comparison of one year with the next.”

“Won’t such a shift of the mean lose discriminatory power at the upper end of the distribution?” He narrowed his eyes.

“That is regrettable, but yes.”

“It’s a wonderful idea,” Hari said.

She seemed surprised. “Well, we think so.”

“We can do the same for the holoball averages.”

“What? I don’t-”

“Set the statistics so that the average hitter strikes 500, rather than the hard-to-remember 446 of the present. “

“But I don’t think a principle of social justice-”

“And the intelligence scores. Those need to be renormed as well, I can see that. Agreed?”

“Well, I’m not sure, First Minister. We only intended-”

“No no, this is a big idea. I want a thorough look at all possible re-norming agendas. You have to think big!”

“We aren’t prepared-”

“Then get prepared! I want a report. Not a skimpy one, either. A fat, full report. Two thousand pages, at least.”

“That would take-”

“Hang the expense. And the time. This is too important to relegate to the Imperial Examinations. Let me have that report.”

“It would take years, decades-”

“Then there’s no time to waste!”

The Action Front delegation left in confusion. Hari hoped they would make it a very big report, indeed, so that he was no longer First Minister when it arrived.

Part of maintaining the Empire involved using its own inertia against itself. Some aspects of this job, he thought, could be actually enjoyable.

He reached Voltaire before leaving the office. “Here’s your list of impersonations.”

“I must say I am having trouble handling all the factions,” Voltaire said. He presented as a swain in elegant velvet. “But the chance to venture out, to be a presence-it is like acting! And I was always one for the stage, as you know.”

Hari didn’t, but he said, “That’s democracy for you-show business with daggers. A mongrel breed of government. Even if it is a big stable at tractor in the fitness landscape.”

“Rational thinkers deplore the excesses of democracy; it abuses the individual and elevates the mob.” Voltaire’s mouth flattened into a disapproving line. “The death of Socrates was its finest fruit.”

“Afraid I don’t go back that far,” Hari said, signing off. “Enjoy the work.”

18.

He and Dors watched the great luminous spiral turn beneath them in its eternal night.

“I do appreciate such perks,” she said dreamily. They stood alone before the spectacle. Worlds and lives and stars, all like crushed diamonds thrown against eternal blackness.

“Getting into the palace just to look at the Emperor’s display rooms?” He had ordered all the halls cleared.

“Getting away from snoopers and eavesdroppers.”

“You…you haven’t heard from-?”

She shook her head. “Daneel pulled nearly all the rest of us off Trantor. He says little to me.”

“I’m pretty damn sure the alien minds won’t strike again. They’re afraid of robots. It took me a while to see that lay behind their talk about revenge.”

“Mingled hate and fear. Very human.”

“Still, I think they’ve had their revenge. They say the Galaxy was lush with life before we came. There are cycles of barren eras, then luxuriant ones. Don’t know why. Apparently that’s happened several times before, at intervals of a third of a billion years-great diebacks of intelligent life, leaving only spores. Now they’ve come to our Mesh and become digital fossils.”

“Fossils don’t kill,” she said sardonically.

“Not as well as we do, apparently.”

“Not you-us.”

“They do hate you robots. Not that they have any love of humans-after all, we made you, long ago. We’re to blame.”

“They are so strange…”

He nodded. “I believe they’ll stay in their digital preserve until Marq and Sybyl can get them transported into their ancient spore state. They once lived that way for longer than the Galaxy takes to make a rotation.”

“Your ‘pretty damn sure’ isn’t good enough for Daneel,” she said. “He wants them exterminated.”

“It’s a standoff. If Daneel goes after them, he’ll have to pull the plug on Trantor’s Mesh. That will wound the Empire. So he’s stuck, fuming but impotent.”

“I hope you have estimated the balance properly,” she said.

A glimmering, gossamer thought flitted across his mind. The tiktok attacks upon the Lamurk faction had discredited them in public opinion. Now they would be suppressed throughout the Galaxy. And in time, the meme-minds would leave Trantor.

Hari frowned. Daneel surely wanted both these outcomes.

He had undoubtedly suspected that the mememinds had survived, perhaps that they were in action on Trantor. So could Hari’s amateur maneuverings, including the Lamurk murders, have been deftly conjured up by Daneel? Could a robot so accurately predict what he, Hari, would do?

A chill ran through him. Such ability would be breathtaking. Superhuman.

With tiktoks now soon to be suppressed, Trantor would have trouble producing its own food. Tasks once done by men would have to be re-learned, taking generations to establish such laborers as a socially valued group again. Meanwhile, dozens of other worlds would have to send Trantor food, a lifeline slender and vulnerable. Did Daneel intend that, too? To what end?

Hari felt uneasy. He sensed social forces at work, just beyond his view.

Was such adroit thinking the product of millennia of experience and high, positronic intelligence? For just a moment, Hari had a vision of a mind both strange and measureless, in human terms. Was that what an immortal machine became?

Then he pushed the idea away. It was too unsettling to contemplate. Later, perhaps, when psychohistory was done…

He noticed Dors staring at him. What had she said? Oh, yes…

“Estimating the balance, yes. I’m getting the feel for these things. With Voltaire and Joan doing the scut work, and Yugo now chairman of the Mathist Department, I actually have time to think.”

“And suffer fools gladly?”

“The Academic Potentate? At least I understand her now.” He peered at Dors. “Daneel says he will leave Trantor. He’s lost a lot of his humaniforms. Does he need you?”

She looked up at him in the soft glow. Her expression worked with conflict. “I can’t leave you.”

“His orders?”

“Mine.”

He gritted his teeth. “The robots who died-you knew them?”

“Some. We trained together back, back when…”

“You don’t have to conceal anything from me. I know you must be at least a century old.”

Her mouth made an O of surprise, then quickly closed. “How?”

“You know more than you should.”

“So do you-in bed, anyway.” She chuckled.

“I learned it from a pan I met.”

She laughed bawdily, then sobered. “I’m one hundred sixty-three.”

“With the thighs of a teenager. If you had tried to leave Trantor, I’d have blocked you.”

She blinked. “Truly?”

He bit his lip, thinking. “Well, no.”

She smiled. “More romantic to say yes…”

“I have a habit of honesty-which I’d better drop if I want to stay First Minister.”

“So you would let me go? You still feel that you owe that to Daneel?”

“If he thought the danger to you was that great, then I would honor his judgment.”

“You still respect us so?”

“Robots work selflessly for the Empire-always. Few humans do.”

“You don’t wonder what we did to earn the aliens’ revenge?”

“Of course. Do you know?”

She shook her head, gazing out at the vast turning disk. Suns of blue and crimson and yellow swept along their orbits amid dark dust and disorder. “It was something awful. Daneel was there and he will not speak of it. There is nothing in our history of this. I’ve looked.”

“An empire lasting many millennia has manifold secrets.” Hari watched the slow spin of a hundred billion flaming stars. “I’m more interested in its future-in saving it.”

“You fear that future, don’t you?”

“Terrible things are coming. The equations show that.”

“We can face them together.”

He took her in his arms, but they both still watched the Galaxy’s shining marvels. “I dream of founding something, a way to help the Empire, even after we’re gone… “

“And you fear something, too,” she said into his neck.

“How did you know? Yes-I fear the chaos that could come from so many forces, divergent vector turmoil-all acting to bring down the order of the Empire. I fear for the very…” His face clouded. “For the very foundations themselves. Foundations…”

“Chaos comes?”

“I know we ourselves, our minds, come out of skating on the inner rim of chaos-states. The digital world shows that. You show that.”

She said soberly, “I do not think positronic minds understand themselves any better than human ones.”

“We-our minds and our Empire-both spring from an emergent order of inner, basically chaotic states, but…”

“You do not want the Empire to crash from such chaos.”

“I want the Empire to survive! Or at least, if it falls, to reemerge.”

Hari suddenly felt the pain of such vast movements. The Empire was like a mind, and minds sometimes went crazy, crashed. A disaster for one solitary mind. How colossally worse for an Empire.

Seen through the prism of his mathematics, humanity was on a long march pressing forward through surrounding dark. Time battered them with storms, rewarded them with sunshine-and they did not glimpse that these passing seasons came from the shifting cadences of huge, eternal equations.

Running the equations time-forward, then backward, Hari had seen humanity’s mortal parade in snips. Somehow that made it oddly touching. Steeped in their own eras, few worlds ever glimpsed the route ahead. There was no shortage of portentous talk, or of oafs who pretended with a wink and a nod to fathom the unseeable. Misled, whole Zones stumbled and fell.

He sought patterns, but beneath those vast sweeps lay the seemingly infinitesimal, living people. Across the realm of stars, under the laws that reigned like gods, lay innumerable lives in the process of being lost. For to live was to lose, in the end.

Social laws acted and people were maimed, damaged, robbed, and strangled by forces they could not even glimpse. People were driven to sickness, to desperation, to loneliness and fear and remorse. Shaken by tears and longing, in a world they fundamentally failed to fathom, they nonetheless carried on.

There was nobility in that. They were fragments adrift in time, motes in an Empire rich and strong and full of pride, an order failing and battered and hollow with its own emptiness.

With leaden certainty, Hari at last saw that he probably would not be able to rescue the great ramshackle Empire, a beast of fine nuance and multiplying self-delusions.

No savior, he. But perhaps he could help.

They both stood in silence for a long, aching time. The Galaxy turned in its slow majesty. A nearby fountain spewed glorious arcs into the air. The waters seemed momentarily free, but in fact were trapped forever within the steel skies of Trantor. As was he.

Hari felt a deep emotion he could not define. It tightened his throat and made him press Dors to him. She was machine and woman and…something more. Another element he could not fully know, and he cherished her all the more for that.

“You care so much,” Dors whispered.

“I have to.”

“Perhaps we should try to simply live more, worry less.”

He kissed her fervently and then laughed.

“Quite right. For who knows what the future may bring?”

Very slowly, he winked at her.