by Greg Bear
“Mors Planch?”
“Yes.” He turned and extended his hand. The woman stepped back and shook her head; on her world, Huylen, physical contact was considered rude in simple greetings. “And you’re Tritch, I presume?”
“Presumptuous of you,” she said, “but accurate. I have three ships we can use, and I’ve chosen the best. Private, and fully licensed for travel anywhere the Empire might care to trade.”
“You’ll be carrying only me, and I’ll need to inspect your hyperdrive, do some modifications.”
“Oh?” Tritch’s humor faded fast. “I don’t even like experts doing such work. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
“I’m more than an expert,” Planch said. “And with what you’re being paid, you could replace your whole ship three times over.”
Tritch moved her head from side to side in a gesture Planch could not read. So many social customs and physical nuances! A quadrillion human beings could be remarkably difficult to encompass, especially at the Center, where so many of them crossed paths.
They walked toward the gate to the dock aisle where Tritch’s ships were berthed. “You told me we were going on a search,” she said. “You said it would be dangerous. For that amount of money, I accept great risks, but-”
“We’re going into a supernova shock front,” Planch said, keeping his eyes straight ahead.
“Oh.” This news gave her pause, but only for a second. “Sarossa?”
He nodded. They took a pedway to the berth itself, sliding past three kilometers of other vessels, most of them Imperial, a few belonging to the Palace upper crust, the rest to licensed traders like Tritch.
“I turned down four requests from local folks to go there and rescue their families.”
“As well you should have,” Planch said. “I’m your job today, not them.”
“How high up does this go?” Tritch asked with a sniff. “Or perhaps I should ask, how much influence do you have?”
“No influence at all. I do what I’m told, and don’t talk much about my orders.”
Tritch undulated in polite dubiousness, walked ahead to the gangway, and ordered the ship’s loading doors to open. The ship was a clean-looking craft, about two hundred years old, with self-repairing drives; but who knew if the self-repair units were in good working order? People trusted their machines too much these days, because by and large they had to.
Planch noted the ship’s name: Flower of Evil. “When do we leave?”
“Now,” Planch said.
“You know,” Tritch said, “your name sounds familiar…Are you from Huylens?”
“Me?” He shook his head and laughed as they walked into the cavernous, almost empty hold. “I’m far too short for your kind, Tritch. But my people provided the seed colony that settled your world, a thousand years ago.”
“That explains it!” Tritch said, and gave another sort of wriggle, signifying-he presumed-pleasure at their possible historical connection. Huylenians were a clannish bunch who loved depth history and genealogy. “I’m honored to have you aboard! What’s your poison, Planch?” She indicated boxes filled with exotic liquors, constrained by a security field in one comer of the hold.
“For now, nothing,” Planch said, but he looked over the labels appreciatively. Then he stopped, seeing a label on ten cases that made his pulse race. “Tight little spaces,” he swore, “is that Trillian water of life?”
“Two hundred bottles,” she said. “After we get our work done, you can have two bottles, on the house.”
“You’re generous, Tritch.”
“More than you know, Planch.” She winked. Planch inclined his head gallantly. He had forgotten how open and childlike Huylenians could be, just as he had forgotten many of their gestures. At the same time, they were among the toughest traders in the Galaxy.
The lock door closed, and Tritch led Planch into the engine room, to examine and tinker with her ship’s most private parts.
10.
As evening fell beneath the domes and the light outside his office windows dimmed, Chen sat in his favorite chair and called up the Imperial Library’s news service, the finest and most comprehensive in the Galaxy. Words and pictures flitted around him, all relating to the Sarossan disaster and the loss of the Spear of Glory .There was no sign of the ship, and not likely to be; the best experts said it was very likely swallowed by a discontinuity within its final Jump, a hazard associated with supernova explosions but rarely seen, for the simple reason that supernovas were rare on human time scales. In all the Galaxy, less than one or two occurred each year, more often than not in uninhabited regions.
Already the popular journals were calling on the Emperor (respectfully, of course) and on Councilor Sinter, more acerbically, to rethink the transfer of rescue ships. Chen smiled grimly; let Sinter chew on that for a while.
Of course, if he heard nothing from Mors Planch, he would need to replace Lodovik, and soon; he had four candidates, none of them as qualified as Lodovik, but all worthy of service in the Commission of Public Safety. He would choose one as his assistant, and put the other three in apprenticeship programs, saying that the Commission should never again be caught with no immediate backups for the loss of important personnel.
There were three Commissioners who owed Chen for a few choice and private favors, and Chen could use this as a pretense for putting loyal men and women into their offices.
He shut off the news-service report with a flick of his hand and stood, smoothing his robes. Then he went out on the balcony to enjoy the sunset. There was no real sun visible here, of course, but he had mandated the repair of the Imperial Sector dome displays on a regular basis, and the sunsets were as reliable here as they had been everywhere in Trantor in his youth. He watched the highly artistic interpretation with some satisfaction, then put away all these masks of pleasure and considered the future.
Chen rarely slept more than an hour a day, usually at noon, which gave him the entire evening to do his research and make preparations for the work of the next morning. During his hour of sleep, he usually dreamed for about thirty minutes, and this afternoon, he had dreamed of his childhood, for the first time in years. Dreams, in his experience, seldom directly reflected the day-to-day affairs of life, but they could point to personal problems and weaknesses. Chen had great respect for those mental processes below conscious awareness. He knew that was where much of his most important work was done.
He imagined himself the captain of his own personal starship, with many excellent crewmembers-representing subconscious thought processes. It was his task to keep them alert and on duty, and for that reason, Chen performed special mental exercises for at least twenty minutes each day.
He had a machine for that very purpose, designed for him by the greatest psychologist on Trantor-perhaps in the Galaxy. The psychologist had disappeared five years ago, after an Imperial Court scandal orchestrated by Farad Sinter.
So many interconnections, interweavings. Chen regarded his enemies as his most intimate associates, and sometimes even felt a kind of sorrowful affection for them, as they fell by the wayside, one by one, victims of their own peculiar limitations and blindness.
Or, in Sinter’s case, of aggressive idiocy and madness.
11.
Hari lived in simple quarters on the university grounds, in his third apartment since the death of Dors Venabili. He could not seem to find a place that felt like home; after a few months, or in this case ten years, he would grow dissatisfied with the feel of a place, no matter how bland and characterless the decor was, and move to another. Often he spent his nights in a room in the library, explaining that he needed to get to work very early the next morning-which he did, but that was not his main reason for staying.
Wherever he was, Hari felt so very alone.
He was not above using his rank in the university, and his standing in the Imperial Library, to get new housing assignments. He allowed himself a few eccentricities, as one might allow an old engine ex
tra maintenance, hoping that he could finish his task without breaking down. Coming to the end was difficult; he had so many memories of the beginnings, and they were far more exciting, far more satisfying, then anything reality at this point in his life could generate…
For that reason, he was almost looking forward to the trial, to a chance to confront Linge Chen directly and force the Empire’s hand, his last and grandest finesse. Then he would know. It would be finished.
When he had been First Minister to Cleon I, he had also taken advantage of his position, on rare occasions, to gather the information he most needed. One of the crucial problems of psychohistory then had been the notion of unexpected cultural and genetic variability, that is, how to factor in the possibility of extraordinary individuals.
At the time, he had not seriously considered the psychic powers of individuals such as his granddaughter, or her father, Raych; he had not known about such things, other than in the abstract, and he had not considered too rigorously the powers of Daneel in that regard.
All of them, of course, had peculiar talents for persuasion, and he had in the past few years made sure that psychohistory took into account these particular talents, on the level exercised by Wanda.
In the time of his First Ministry, however, he had been concerned with the more familiar historical and political problem of ruthless ambition, whether or not aided by personal charisma. There had been plenty of examples around the Empire to study, and he had examined these political episodes as best he could from afar…
But that had not been enough. With the blind and unshakable determination Hari could bring to bear when confronted with a psychohistorical problem, and against Dors’ wishes, Hari had appealed to Cleon to bring to Trantor five individuals of just that political breed, the ruthless, charismatic tyrant. They had been removed from their worlds after either rebelling against or subverting Imperial authority, which happened on about one in a thousand worlds, every standard year. Most often they were secretly executed; sometimes they were exiled to lonely rocks to live out lives empty of further victims.
Hari had asked Cleon to allow him to interview the five tyrants, and perform certain reasonably non-intrusive psychological and medical procedures.
Hari could remember the day quite clearly, when Cleon had called him into his ornate private rooms and shaken the paper on which his request was written in Hari’s face.
“You’re asking me to bring these vermin to Trantor? To subvert legal procedures and even forestall executions, just so you can scratch a bump of curiosity?”
“It’s a very important problem, Highness. I cannot predict anything if I do not have a complete understanding of such extraordinary individuals, and when and how they appear in human cultures.”
“Huh! Why not study me, First Minister Seldon?”
Hari had smiled. “You do not fit the profile, Highness.”
“I’m not a raving psychopath, am I? Well, at least you think I might be redeemable. But to bring some of these obscene monsters to my world…What would you do if they escaped, Hari?”
“Rely on your security forces to find them again, Highness.”
The Emperor had sniffed. “You have a confidence in Imperial Security’s abilities that I don’t, I’m afraid. Such monsters as these are like cancers-their talent is for bringing together tumorous organizations and subverting all to their own ends! Truthfully, Hari, what do you hope to accomplish?”
“It’s far more than simply being curious, my Emperor. These people can change the flow of human events just as earthquakes can change the beds of rivers.”
“Not on Trantor, they can’t.”
“Actually, sire, just the other day-”
“I know about that, and we’re having it fixed. But these men and women are aberrations, Hari”‘
“Common enough in human history-”
“And well enough understood that we can profile them and eliminate them from all Imperial positions. Most of the time.”
“Yes, sire, but not always. I need to fill in those gaps.”
“Purely for psychohistory, Hari?”
“I will see if I can improve your profiles, Highness, and perhaps make tyrants even more rare among your worlds.”
Cleon had considered for a few seconds, finger on chin, then had lifted his finger away from his face, twirled it in a small circle, and said, “All right, First Minister. We have our political excuse, if we need it. Five?”
“All I could study in the time allowed, sire.”
“The very worst?”
“You are familiar with the names I’ve requested.”
“I never met with any of them, nor did I personally give them their Imperial imprimaturs, Hari.”
“I know, sire.”
“I won’t be blamed for them in your psychohistorical textbooks, will I?”
“Of course not!”
And so, Hari had had his way. The five tyrants had been brought to Trantor and installed in the highest security prison in the Imperial Sector, the Rikerian.
The first meetings had occurred in-
Hari was deep in this reverie when the apartment announced that his granddaughter was outside the front door and wished to see him. Hari was always glad to see his granddaughter, especially in the limited time they had left together-but now! When he was on the track of something important!
Even so, he had not seen Wanda in weeks. She and her husband, Stettin Palver, had been assembling a core group of mentalics from Trantor’s eight hundred Sectors, and there had been no time for socializing. In weeks, as soon after the trial as possible, the mentalics would leave for Star’s End, to begin the work of the proposed secret Second Foundation.
Hari got up and let his legs gather strength before he put on his robe and told the door to open. Wanda entered, bringing with her a draft of cold air and the smells of the halls outside-cooking yeast (and not delicacies from Mycogen, either!), ozone, something like fresh paint.
“Grandfather, have you heard? The Emperor is hunting us down!”
“Whom, Wanda? Hunting whom?”
“Mentalics! They’ve subverted one of our party and she’s confessed to all sorts of incredible stories, lies, to save her own skin. How could that boy do this? It’s totally illegal to hunt citizens and assassinate them!”
Hari held up his hands and implored her to slow down. “Tell me about it, from the beginning,” he said.
“The beginning is a woman named Liso, Vara Liso. She was one of the people we’d picked out for the Second Foundation. I thought she was unstable to start with-Stettin agreed with me, but she was very skillful, very persuasive and sensitive. We thought we could use her to speed up our hunt for other mentalics, if we didn’t trust her to go with us…on the flight.”
“Yes, I met her at the last meeting,” Hari said. “A small woman, nervous-looking.”
“Like a little mouse, I thought,” Wanda confirmed. “She went to the Palace last month, without our knowing-”
“Whom did she talk to?”
“Farad Sinter!” Wanda fairly spat out the name.
“And what did she tell him?”
“We don’t know, but whatever it was, Sinter has secret police hunting for certain mentalics, and if he finds them, they die…Of a bullet in the head!”
“Ours? The ones chosen for the Project?”
“No, amazingly enough. There’s no one-to-one correlation. But he has killed candidates we haven’t yet approached.”
“Without even taking them in for questioning?”
“No such amenities. Murder, pure and simple. Grandfather, we’re never going to fill our quotas at this rate! Our type of person is not common!”
“I’ve never met Sinter personally,” Hari mused, “though some of his people interviewed me last year. Wanted to know about Mycogenian legends, as I recall.”
“They’re tearing up Dahl now, looking for a young woman! We don’t even know her name yet, but some of our people in Dahl have felt her…al
most found her…An extraordinarily powerful talent. We’re sure she must be the one they’re looking for. I hope she can survive long enough for us to find her first.”
Hari gestured for Wanda to sit at his small table and offered her a cup of tea. “Sinter seems to have no interest in me or in the Project, and I’m certain none of them know about our interest in mentalics. I wonder what he’s up to?”
“It’s madness!” Wanda said. “The Emperor won’t rein him in, and Linge Chen does nothing!”
“Madness is its own end, and its own reward,” Hari said softly. He had followed the popular discontent with Sinter’s handling of the Sarossan problem. “Chen may know what he’s doing-and in the meantime, we have to survive and keep the Project on track.”
Even the seriousness of Wanda’s news did not stop Hari from being irritated by the intrusion. If anything, it made the intrusion worse. He wanted very badly simply to be left alone to think about the tyrants and his interviews. Something important lurked in those memories, though he could not pin it down…However, he asked Wanda to stay for dinner with him, to calm her and see if she knew anything more.
And in the course of their dinner, Hari suddenly put the memories and equations together, and had the link he sought. The link was his vague sensation that he had encountered Daneel. When? Where? Then came the suggestion, and he had little doubt the meeting had occurred, and that Daneel had told him something ridiculous and potentially damaging…About Farad Sinter.
“I’m going to request an audience,” Hari said to Wanda, as they brought out dessert together. She set the cups of cold pudding on the table and added a coco-ice for herself, a taste she had acquired from her father, Raych.
“With who?” she asked. “Sinter?”
“Not him, not yet,” Hari said. “With the Emperor.”
“He’s a monster, a terrible infant! Grandfather, I won’t allow it.”
Hari laughed sharply. “Dear Wanda, I’ve been wandering into the jaws of lions since long before you were born.” He looked at her seriously for a moment, then asked, quietly, “Why, do you sense something going wrong?”
