Asimov’s Future History Volume 16

by Isaac Asimov

  “What sort of disturbance?” Hari asked.

  “I don’t know,” the warden said. “Nothing to worry about. We’re fine here. We’ve been given instructions to protect you at any cost–”

  Hari heard a sound from the eastern entrance of the hall. He turned and saw a woman standing there and gave a gasp–in the light, at this distance, her stance, her bearing–the dream–

  74.

  DORS VENABILI HAD kept her own list of codes and passages in the palace buildings, and remarkably, most of them still worked. No doubt the codes that let people out of the buildings were changed more frequently than those that let them in. When Hari had been arrested and charged with assault, decades before, she had made plans to break into the Courts Building and release him, and the work she had done then served her well now.

  It also possible that Joan had helped her... But how she had come here ultimately did not matter. She would have battered down walls to do so.

  She was the first to enter the Hall of Dispensation. She saw Hari and three men, standing near the center, lit by the dif. fuse glow of the skylight. She halted for a moment. The men were not threatening Hari. Quite the contrary; she judged they were there to protect him.

  Hari turned and looked in her direction. His mouth opened and she heard his intake of breath echo in the hall. The three men turned, and the eldest, a large, stocky fellow wearing the uniform of an Imperial warden, called out to her:

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  From the northern entrance came a sizzle and a flash of light. Dors knew that sound very well: a neural whip, fired from several dozen meters. The three men around Hari jerked and danced for a moment, then fell to the floor, moaning.

  Hari stood untouched.

  Dors ran as fast as she could toward the small, intense-looking woman standing near the northern entrance. This woman still held the neural whip, and seemed to have eyes only for Hari. In less than four seconds, Dors moved to within less than two meters of her.

  Vara Liso cried out with the effort of her persuasion. The hall seemed to fill with voices, ugly demanding voices. Hari clutched his hands over his ears and winced, and the men on the floor twitched even more violently, but the main force of the mentalic bolt went toward Dors.

  Dors had never felt such a blast, had never known humans were capable of such discharges. She had felt Daneel’s subtle persuasive abilities during her training period on Eos, nothing more.

  It seemed perfectly natural, in mid-stride, on her way to incapacitating and if necessary killing this woman who threatened Hari, simply to pull up her legs and attempt to fly. Her body of metal and synthetic flesh curled into a ball and she glanced off the woman’s upper shoulder, knocking her to one side.

  Dors caromed from the opposite wall and fell to the floor in a tangle. She could not move; she did not want to move, not at that moment, perhaps not ever again.

  75.

  DANEEL LEFT THE taxi at the Greys’ Entrance on the east side of the Imperial Courts Building, then stood by the small double metal doors. He wore the uniform of a lifetime bureaucrat, native to Trantor and not a student or pilgrim; he had reserved this identity decades ago, among many others, and if queried by any security guards, there would be files in the personnel computers to explain him and his duties, his right to be here.

  The doors were ornately inscribed with the general rules of public service. The first rule was Do no harm to your Emperor or his subjects.

  Even in the taxi, Daneel had felt the mentalic explosions, from the general vicinity of the palace, but did not know what they signified, if anything. It was easy to imagine his plans unraveling, now that they were almost complete. He had juggled for so long, keeping literally tens of millions of balls in the air at once...

  He shifted the small bureaucratic valise under his arm and entered a specific and reserved code for entry by a gray administrative officer.

  It was refused. The codes had all been changed; there was an emergency within the Courts Building, perhaps within the palace itself.

  Here. My Other is within the building. Joan, split into many Joans, many meme-minds, worked from both sides.

  The left-hand door opened, and he entered the building.

  It took him longer than he expected to make his way through the secure facilities, even with Joan’s help.

  On the last door, when he knew he was within two doors of joining Hari in the beautiful, high-ceilinged Hall of Dispensation, Joan distracted a human guard by sending him revised watch instructions.

  Daneel smelled electricity in the next segment of hallway. A neural whip had been discharged here in the last few minutes

  76.

  HARI FACED VARA Liso across the Hall of Dispensation. She stood for a moment with hands held out, fingers wriggling, as if she fought to keep her balance. Her head swayed from side to side. The woman who had entered before her–who had reminded him so much of Dors–lay in a heap, rolled up against the door, still, as if dead.

  Hari did not feel afraid; things had happened too quickly for that emotion to take hold. Everything seemed out of place, most of all himself; he did not belong there, and they did not belong there.

  The hall had been peaceful–now it smelled of electricity, of urine leaking from the pants of the three men supine on the floor around him.

  “I’m saving you...” Vara Liso said from across the hall. She took a step toward him, lowering her arms. “For last.”

  “Who are you?” Hari asked. He was concerned about the woman on the floor. He wanted above all else to make sure she was all right; tremors spread in his mind, memories, triggered responses, confusing and rich and evoking a sense both of intense promise and of horror, for he was sure that this woman was Dors. She’s come back. She wanted to protect me. The way she moved... like a springing tiger!

  And now she’s down like a squashed insect.

  This small, thin woman... an aberration. A monster!

  Hari then knew who the woman was. Wanda had mentioned her weeks ago, the woman who had not agreed to join the mentalics, who had allied instead with Farad Sinter.

  “You’re Vara Liso,” he said, and started to move toward her.

  “Good,” the woman said, her voice trembling. “I want you to know who I am. You’re the one to blame.”

  “Blame for what?” Hari asked.

  “You work with the robots.” Her expression twisted until it seemed her face might become a knot. “You’re their lackey, and they think they’ve won!”

  77.

  LODOVIK INVOKED THE last of the codes he knew, and the door to the transfer corridor from the Courts Building still refused to open. He worked the code around again on the finger pad beside the doorframe, and the tiny simplified face in the display proclaimed once again that the code was incomplete. It would be so like the palace security detail to add a few numbers, but not change the beginning numbers.

  I am working, Voltaire told him. There must be many security measures being triggered now–multiple intrusions, perhaps!

  The girl and the large young man behind him shifted from foot to foot.

  “It won’t be good to stay here,” Brann said. “Something feels very bad.”

  Voltaire’s features appeared in the display, simplified to cartoon detail. The mechanical voice now said, “Additional numbers are required under the revised security procedures.” The new face winked at Lodovik. “Test procedure fifteen A for verification,” the voice added. “You may enter code for personal use only during this test period. Upon completion of test period, a formal entry code or new password must be established and fixed.”

  Lodovik glanced over his shoulder at Klia as he entered seven new numbers. She stared at the display with furrowed brow.

  “Who is that?” she asked.

  “The sim,” Lodovik said.

  The door opened. Lodovik beckoned for them to pass through first.

  “Is Hari Seldon near?” Klia asked.

  He is v
ery near, Voltaire said. And he is in imminent danger.

  78.

  “I WANTED SO much,” Vara Liso said. “Do you understand?”

  Hari looked at her straight on. He stood perhaps four meters from her, seven meters from where the other woman lay against the half open door. He glanced at the other woman, and Liso raised the neural whip.

  “You don’t need that,” Hari said critically, as if lecturing a student. Vara Liso hesitated. “You’re mentalic. You stopped her...” He raised his arm toward the collapsed woman. Toward Dors.

  Vara Liso lowered her head but kept her eyes on Hari. She looked like a pouting child, but in her eyes was the purest hatred he had ever seen.

  “Everything I’ve ever believed in,” she said, “is dead. They’re going to kill me, just as they killed the men and women and children I found. My own people.”

  “Farad Sinter made you do that...” Hari said. “Didn’t he?”

  “The Emperor,” Vara Liso said. She seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept the whip high, and her finger lingered on the button. Hari could make out the setting: near lethality.

  “Yes, but Sinter was your–”

  “He loved me,” Vara moaned, then she dropped the whip. But a wave of grief came out of her that hit him square. The hall was filled with Vara Liso’s emotions, and they were the ugliest and bleakest Hari had ever known. They struck at his own centers of ambition and need, and he could feel the bones of his innermost self cracking.

  The woman on the floor stirred, and Vara Liso lifted her head and half turned toward her.

  Hari made his move, using the only chance he thought he would ever get. He had had years of training in self-defense on Helicon, but his body had long since refused to answer his instructions promptly. He had almost reached Liso when she cocked her head back and screamed again–silently, and within her mind.

  At Hari.

  Simultaneously, Brann and Lodovik pushed against the door, nudging Dors, who could not yet conjure up the will to move.

  Klia stumbled over Dors’ leg, fell into the Hall of Dispensation, saw Lodovik moving with inhuman speed toward her enemy, saw him raise his arm, hand open, to take the woman’s hand in his and spin her around

  To kill her if need be, exercising that human freedom–

  But he stopped before his fingers touched her, frozen by a glance.

  Vara Liso knelt, rubbing her wrists and hands, and faced Klia Asgar.

  79.

  DANEEL RAN PAST the empty guard station in the security vestibule. His relatively weak perceptions of human mental states was now a fortunate shield; the backwash of another explosion, like the final death cough of a huge volcano, left him reeling, skidding on hands and knees, tumbling into the Hall of Dispensation from the eastern entrance. He had an impression of Joan, and all her copies in the machines around him, coming apart like a rotten flag in a high wind, trying to stay together; but then that image was highly inconsequential, for his own patterns, his own mind, threatened to do the same thing.

  80.

  IF THE CRY of a child could have been made of knives, it could not have cut Klia any more deeply than the mentalic shock wave surrounding Vara Liso.

  Disappointment, grief, anger, an intense sense of misplaced justice, images of people long dead–parents, young friends, who had disappointed this small woman with the knotted face and crab-curled fists–batted against Klia, fragments of ruin in a flood of pain.

  The walls and pillars and panes of the Hall of Dispensation felt nothing. Vara Liso’s output was tuned to a purely human channel, to the roots of mind in matter. Because she had not focused her talents completely on him, Lodovik felt merely a buzzing and a pressure not dissimilar to the neutrino flux he had encountered between the stars.

  He did, however, sense what Daneel saw very clearly–the disintegration of the entity who had spoken in him and through him. Voltaire stood in simple nakedness before this flux, this human tempest, and broke apart like a child’s puzzle.

  For a moment, Klia’s sympathetic response nearly allowed her to die, to both drown and be burned by the outpouring. She felt the echoes of her own life, her own experiences, mesh with those of Vara Liso.

  There were differences, however, and they were her salvation. She saw the strength of her own will, opposed to the vacillation and indecision of Vara Liso. She saw the not-always-apparent strength of her father and, earlier, before memory began clearly, her mother, faced with a willful child, giving her enough leeway to be what she must be, however much it might discomfit or even hurt them.

  She was on the point of fighting back when the most dangerous similarity of all caught her unprepared.

  Vara Liso cried out for freedom.

  Her voice rose in a shriek to the highest reaches of the hall and echoed back: “Let us be what we must be! No robots, no killing metal hands, no conspiracies and shackles!”

  Klia felt something smoking, crisping, in her thoughts, It was her sense of self. She would willingly sacrifice all before this urgent scream of pain–had felt it herself, though never so clearly and powerfully expressed. She recognized insanity buried within it, the insanity of a powerful and even self. destructive immune response–

  as did Daneel, trying to recover and get to his feet, a few dozen meters away.

  –A rejection of twenty thousand years of benevolence and guidance, of patient and secret servitude.

  The cry of a child never allowed to mature, to feel its own pain and draw its own conclusions on life and death.

  Klia closed her eyes and crawled along the floor, trying to find Brann. She could neither see nor sense him. She dared not open her eyes, or she would be blinded, she was sure. Vara Lisa could not broadcast with such intensity for so long, and indeed the undirected flood was narrowing, finding a channel. It was concentrating, and even though it suddenly diminished by half, what Vara Lisa was throwing directly at Klia doubled in strength.

  Hari stood somehow on quivering legs and saw but did not quite comprehend these human forms, the small thin woman walking forward step by staggered step, features distorted as if seen through a broken lens, two others crawling along the floor, one a burly Dahlite male and the other a slender and not unattractive young woman, also dark.

  He did not see the tall humanlike figure on the east side of the hall.

  His mind filled with the waters of his own despair.

  He had been in error. It had all been for nothing, worse than nothing.

  Hari Seldon suddenly wanted to die, to be done with the pain and the realization of his failure.

  But there was that woman who had tried to tackle Vara Liso, who he was sure was Dors Venabili.

  Vara Liso was killing Klia Asgar and Brann. This much was clear to Lodovik. The buzz had diminished, but as he stepped toward the knotted and distorted woman, it increased again.

  Lodovik paid little attention to Daneel, or to Hari Seldon, or to Dors; both seemed out of the immediate focus of Liso’s lethal projections. The knotted woman was clearly going to scramble all the essential patterns of Klia and Brann, then turn on the others.

  Voltaire was no longer in place to advise.

  Lodovik stepped toward the woman, now twisted and gnarled like an ancient willow.

  Klia lifted her head, opened her eyes, prepared to be blinded, and saw down a short brilliant funnel of hatred to the eyes, all that were left of Vara Liso–a pair of desperate and hate-filled eyes.

  Brann will die, too.

  Never had she used her abilities to harm. Even making Lodovik dance had injured her sense of propriety and justice; she had never really believed she could do anything to Hari Seldon. She would think of her father, whom she had once made wet his pants... and the effort would collapse.

  Brann will die along with you, then they will all die, and she will be destroyed as well. Useless.

  She reached out for Brann. Alone she could do nothing against such naked and monstrous strength.

  Brann was a filament of c
lean light in the torrent of flaming hatred. She tugged at him, as if she would wake him up.

  Brann said yes, and they joined. She had almost felt this happen during their physical joining, but had pulled back, still wishing to preserve her own self as a lone and defiant place.

  Lodovik reached out with both hands, saw Vara Liso’s shoulders twitch in awareness of his presence. She swiveled her head suddenly, tears flying from her eyes.

  Lodovik was willing to hurt her, kill her if need be, if she did not stop. This was what humans had done to each other throughout their history, and it hurt him that he had such freedom as well: freedom to harm and to kill. But he was under no misapprehension that he was no better than this gnarled and hideous female. Quite clearly she was evil; she was antihuman.

  He made his judgment, his decision.

  He could feel a rumbling tidal wash coming. He grasped her shoulder and neck, and, with a sudden twist of his arms.

  Broke the woman’s neck like a matchstick.

  Poor small Vara Liso. At the age of five years, her mother had beaten her severely, venting anger against her father, who had not been in the small and immaculately clean apartment; her mother had held her down with a variety of persuasion that came only when she was enraged.

  She had beaten young Vara with a long, flexible plastic pole, until little welts rose on her bottom and along her back.

  And so there had come the day when she had caused her mother to die, a memory she sometimes grasped hard for strength. And she had taken her mother, perhaps just a memory but perhaps not, inside, to compensate. Held her in a little diamond cage in her dreams.

  Bringing out her mother for extra strength did not help. Actually, it weakened her, because it made her a child again, even more than she had been before.