Asimov’s Future History Volume 15

by Isaac Asimov

  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.

  Cleon I

  12038 G.E

  CLEON I–... THOUGH OFTEN RECEIVING PANEGYRICS FOR BEING THE LAST EMPEROR UNDER WHOM THE FIRST GALACTIC EMPIRE WAS REASONABLY UNITED AND REASONABLY PROSPEROUS, THE QUARTER-CENTURY REIGN OF CLEON I WAS ONE OF CONTINUOUS DECLINE. THIS CANNOT BE VIEWED AS HIS DIRECT RESPONSIBILITY, FOR THE DECLINE OF THE EMPIRE WAS BASED ON POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC FACTORS TOO STRONG FOR ANYONE TO DEAL WITH AT THE TIME. HE WAS FORTUNATE IN HIS SELECTION OF FIRST MINISTERS-ETO DEMERZEL AND THEN HARI SELDON, IN WHOSE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOHISTORY THE EMPEROR NEVER LOST FAITH. CLEON AND SELDON, AS THE OBJECTS OF THE FINAL JORANUMITE CONSPIRACY, WITH ITS BIZARRE CLIMAX–

  - ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA

  1.

  MANDELL GRUBER WAS a happy man. He seemed so to Hari Seldon, certainly. Seldon stopped his morning constitutional to watch him.

  Gruber, perhaps in his late forties, a few years younger than Seldon, was a bit gnarled from his continuing work in the Imperial Palace grounds, b
ut he had a cheerful, smoothly shaven face, topped by a pink skull, not much of which was hidden by his thin sandy hair. He whistled softly to himself as he inspected the leaves of the bushes for any signs of insect infestation.

  He was not the Chief Gardener, of course. The Chief Gardener of the Imperial Palace grounds was a high functionary who had a palatial office in one of the buildings of the enormous Imperial complex, with an army of men and women under him. The chances are he did not inspect the Palace grounds more often than once or twice a year.

  Gruber was but one of that army. His title, Seldon knew, was Gardener First-Class and it had been well earned, with thirty years of faithful service.

  Seldon called to him as he paused on the perfectly level crushed gravel walk, “Another marvelous day, Gruber.”

  Gruber looked up and his eyes twinkled. “Yes, indeed, First Minister, and it’s sorry I am for those who be cooped up indoors.”

  “You mean as I am about to be.”

  “There’s not much about you, First Minister, for people to sorrow over, but if you’re disappearing into those buildings on a day like this, it’s a bit of sorrow that we fortunate few can feel for you.”

  “I thank you for your sympathy, Gruber, but you know we have forty billion Trantorians under the dome. Are you sorry for all of them?”

  “Indeed, I am. I am grateful I am not of Trantorian extraction myself so that I could qualify as a gardener. There be few of us on this world that work in the open, but here I be, one of the fortunate few.” ‘

  “The weather isn’t always this ideal.”

  “That is true. And I have been out here in the sluicing rains and the whistling winds. Still, as long as you dress fittingly.... Look–” And Gruber spread his arms open, wide as his smile, as if to embrace the vast expanse of the Palace grounds. “I have my friends–the trees and the lawns and all the animal life forms to keep me company–and growth to encourage in geometric form, even in the winter. Have you ever seen the geometry of the grounds, First Minister?”

  “I am looking at it right now, am I not?”

  “I mean the plans spread out so you can really appreciate it all–and marvelous it is, too. It was planned by Tapper Savand, over a hundred years ago, and it has been little changed since. Tapper was a great horticulturist, the greatest–and he came from my planet.”

  “That was Anacreon, wasn’t it?”

  “Indeed. A far-off world near the edge of the Galaxy, where there is still wilderness and life can be sweet. I came here when I was still an earwet lad, when the present Chief Gardener took power under the old Emperor. Of course, now they’re talking of redesigning the grounds.” Gruber sighed deeply and shook his head. “That would be a mistake. They are just right as they are now properly proportioned, well balanced, pleasing to the eye and spirit. But it is true that in history, the grounds have occasionally been redesigned. Emperors grow tired of the old and are always seeking the new, as if new is somehow always better. Our present Emperor, may he live long, has been planning the redesign with the Chief Gardener. At least, that is the word that runs from gardener to gardener.” This last he added quickly, as if abashed at spreading Palace gossip.

  “It might not happen soon.”

  “I hope not, First Minister. Please, if you have the chance to take some time from all the heart-stopping work you must be after doing, study the design of the grounds. It is a rare beauty and, if I have my way, there should not be a leaf moved out of place, nor a flower, nor a rabbit, anywhere in all these hundreds of square kilometers.”

  Seldon smiled. “You are a dedicated man, Gruber. I would not be surprised if someday you were Chief Gardener.”

  “May Fate protect me from that. The Chief Gardener breathes no fresh air, sees no natural sights, and forgets all he has learned of nature. He lives there”–Gruber pointed scornfully–” and I think he no longer knows a bush from a stream unless one of his underlings leads him out and places his hand on one or dips it into the other.”

  For a moment it seemed as though Gruber would expectorate his scorn, but he could not find any place on which he could bear to spit.

  Seldon laughed quietly. “Gruber, it’s good to talk to you. When I am overcome with the duties of the day, it is pleasant to take a few moments to listen to your philosophy of life.”

  “Ah, First Minister, it is no philosopher I am. My schooling was very sketchy.”

  “You don’t need schooling to be a philosopher. Just an active mind and experience with life. Take care, Gruber. I just might have you promoted.”

  “If you but leave me as I am, First Minister, you will have my total gratitude.”

  Seldon was smiling as he moved on, but the smile faded as his mind turned once more to his current problems. Ten years as First Minister–and if Gruber knew how heartily sick Seldon was of his position, his sympathy would rise to enormous heights. Could Gruber grasp the fact that Seldon’s progress in the techniques of psychohistory showed the promise of facing him with an unbearable dilemma?

  2.

  SELDON’S THOUGHTFUL STROLL across the grounds was the epitome of peace. It was hard to believe here, in the midst of the Emperor’s immediate domain, that he was on a world that, except for this area, was totally enclosed by a dome. Here, in this spot, he might be on his home world of Helicon or on Gruber’s home world of Anacreon.

  Of course, the sense of peace was an illusion. The grounds were guarded–thick with security.

  Once, a thousand years ago, the Imperial Palace grounds–much less palatial, much less differentiated from a world only beginning to construct domes over individual regions–had been open to all citizens and the Emperor himself could walk along the paths, unguarded, nodding his head in greeting to his subjects.

  No more. Now security was in place and no one from Trantor itself could possibly invade the grounds. That did not remove the danger, however, for that, when it came, came from discontented Imperial functionaries and from corrupt and suborned soldiers. It was within the grounds that the Emperor and his staff were most in danger. What would have happened if, on that occasion, nearly ten years before, Seldon had not been accompanied by Dors Venabili?

  It had been in his first year as First Minister and it was only natural, he supposed (after the fact), that there would be jealous heart-burning over his unexpected choice for the post. Many others, far better qualified in training–in years of service and, most of all, in their own eyes–could view the appointment with anger. They did not know of psychohistory or of the importance the Emperor attached to it and the easiest way to correct the situation was to corrupt one of the sworn protectors of the First Minister.

  Dors must have been more suspicious than Seldon himself was. Or else, with Demerzel’s disappearance from the scene, her instructions to guard Seldon had been strengthened. The truth was that, for the first few years of his First Ministership, she was at his side more often than not.

  And on the late afternoon of a warm sunny day, Dors noted the glint of the westering sun–a sun never seen under Trantor’s dome–on the metal of a blaster.

  “Down, Hari!” she cried suddenly and her legs crushed the grass as she raced toward the sergeant.

  “Give me that blaster, Sergeant,” she said tightly.

  The would-be assassin, momentarily immobilized by the unexpected sight of a woman running toward him, now reacted quickly, raising the drawn blaster.

  But she was already at him, her hand enclosing his right wrist in a steely grip and lifting his arm high. “Drop it,” she said through clenched teeth.

  The sergeant’s face twisted as he attempted to yank his arm loose.

  “Don’t try, Sergeant,” said Dors. “My knee is three inches from your groin and, if you so much as blink, your genitals will be history. So just freeze. That’s right. Okay, now open your hand. If you don’t drop the blaster right now, I will shatter your arm.”

  A gardener came running up with a rake. Dors motioned him away. The sergeant dropped the bla
ster to the ground.

  Seldon had arrived. “I’ll take over, Dors.”

  “You will not. Get in among those trees and take the blaster with you. Others may be involved–and ready to act.”

  Dors had not loosened her grip on the sergeant. She said, “Now, Sergeant, I want the name of whoever it was who persuaded you to make an attempt on the First Minister’s life–and the name of everyone else ho is in this with you.”

  The sergeant was silent.

  “Don’t be foolish,” said Dors. “Speak!” She twisted his arm and he sank down to his knees. She put her shoe on his neck. “If you think silence becomes you, I can crush your larynx and you will be silent forever. And even before that, I am going to damage you badly–I won’t leave one bone unbroken. You had better talk.”

  The sergeant talked.

  Later Seldon had said to her, “How could you do that, Dors? I never believed you capable of such... violence.”

  Dors said coolly, “I did not actually hurt him much, Hari. The threat was sufficient. In any case, your safety was paramount.”

  “You should have let me take care of him.”

  “Why? To salvage your masculine pride? You wouldn’t have been fast enough, for one thing. Secondly, no matter what you would have succeeded in doing, you are a man and it would have been expected. I am a woman and women, in popular thought, are not considered as ferocious its men and most, in general, do not have the strength to do what I did. The story will improve in the telling and everyone will be terrified of me. No one will dare to try to harm you for fear of me.”

  “For fear of you and for fear of execution. The sergeant and his cohorts are to be killed, you know.”

  At this, an anguished look clouded Dors’s usually composed visage, as if she could not stand the thought of the traitorous sergeant being put to death, even though he would have cut down her beloved Hari without a second thought.

  “But,” she exclaimed, “there is no need to execute the conspirators. Exile will do the job.”