by Isaac Asimov
Gendibal had never manipulated Novi’s mind to a significant degree. To do so would have ruined her usefulness, and to do so now might still. But he had to know. Silently, Gendibal reached out his mind to hers, and found it much as it had always been. Smooth, with a simple beauty; he had often touched Novi’s mind lightly as one might stroke a pet’s fur. He did so now, to help her remain calm. But this time he did not stop there. This time he looked deeper.
The layers of Novi’s mind were more complex than the surface, as he’d expected. No mind could be so simple throughout. But even in the complexity there was simplicity, simply of a different order. Gendibal took his time, examining each layer, each fragment, looking for any tell-tale sign of manipulation. There was nothing. Even in the subtle places he himself had been manipulated, Novi’s mind was flawless. So Gendibal changed his approach and began actively probing. Nothing damaging, simply different kinds of stimuli to see how Novi’s mind would react.
Gendibal lost track of time inside Novi’s psyche. He might have spent minutes or hours, trying dozens of combinations. Some produced reactions, some not, but nothing out of the ordinary. Until... there! Was that an abnormality? Gendibal was unsure, but it seemed as though a part of her mind had responded to a particular signal, something deep. He tried again, amplifying the signal and directing it towards that portion of her mind...
Gendibal gasped as Novi opened her eyes. The rapid changes in her mind had made him lose contact, but before that had happened he had thought her mind was... blooming, was the only applicable word. Even as Gendibal took a brief moment to collect himself, Novi spoke. “We suspected you would come,” she said. Her voice was the same as it had always been, still the same accent and speech patterns. But Gendibal knew it was not Novi any longer.
Gendibal didn’t bother looking around the cottage for another. If anyone else had been there, he would have known long before entering. Novi wasn’t referring to someone else present. In that one sentence, she had already answered many of his questions. But there were more, and they required answers as well. He had to be sure. Gendibal reached out again …
… and was shocked as she gently and deftly deflected his mental probe. “Please don’t,” she said just as gently. He had expected the response, but not the skill or power behind it. Gendibal was consciously aware of his instinctual defenses that had activated upon his brief contact with her mind. “If I let you touch my mind now, it will only harm you. If you try harder, my deflection may be almost as unpleasant. I do not wish to cause you pain.”
“It was you,” he said in the manner of the Second Foundation. No Hamish should have been able to understand him, but he knew Novi would. It wasn’t a question at this point. His suspicions were confirmed. Outwardly he remained composed, but Gendibal was shaken. She was a mentalic, and none of them had seen it! How!
Quickly Gendibal narrowed down the possibilities. Mental surgery to implant false memories had been practiced by the Second Foundation. But a manipulation such as this would have required enormous power and skill, even beyond that which had been required to alter his memories. He knew she was not attempting to probe him, but at that thought he consciously reinforced his mental shield. Not that it would make any difference at all against something like that.
“Yes,” Novi replied. That was all. There was no challenge, no smugness, no apology. Simple affirmation. She offered nothing more, and stood patiently as if waiting for whatever he might ask.
Gendibal contemplated his options. He could easily have overwhelmed any normal human’s defenses and rendered them harmless. But Novi was not a normal human, nor was she alone. Her mind had been altered to deceive them, meaning there were others like her, working with her. Another organization of mentalics. She could call on the sum of their power just as he could call on his fellows. And the power she had to draw on was greater than anything the Second Foundation had ever imagined. Galaxy, it’s a world of Mules! He drove the thought down, and the fear, forcing himself to maintain focus. So long as she could draw on that power, he could force nothing from her. Only one option remained. He was prepared.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “What did you remove from my mind?”
“It’s all right, Stor.” His first name. Nobody had called him that in years. She was … affectionate about it. It had almost the same feeling as the way he had treated her, before. Who is this woman? He let her continue. “We brought you to us because we needed a representative of your Foundation. A choice had to be made, and now it has been. Afterwards, we suspected you would discover our changes to your memory, and that you would come here.”
Brought me to them? He would have time to question her choice of words. Now it was time to act. “Why?” he asked her, allowing a feeling of betrayal to travel along with the words. There had been a bond between them. Not one of love, or passion, or friendship. One of tenderness. But she had lied to him. Her entire personality had been a lie, constructed specifically to deceive him. Sura Novi, the person he had cared for, didn’t exist, and had never existed. That was the sense that overwhelmingly dominated his simple question.
For the first time since Gendibal had touched her mind, Novi’s expression changed. A sympathetic look came across her face. “We never meant to cause you harm, Stor” she began. “We did what we did to keep you safe, and now that you know —”
Gendibal didn’t know if this was an opening or not. How could he know anything about a creature such as this? But it was the best chance he would get. He sent another message to the rest of the Second Foundation. Now.
Novi cut off in mid-sentence, nearly falling over as she lost her balance. She cried out, “Gaia?” glancing around the room in wide-eyed confusion. But her eyes quickly settled on Gendibal, still standing motionless near the closed door. “What have you done?” she whispered, barely loud enough to be heard.
He heard the terror in her voice, and didn’t hesitate. Gendibal quickly stepped quickly across the room to her, placed the spray against her skin, and injected her with a sedative. She had no time to say anything more.
He caught her as she fell to the floor, and laid her upon it gently. The others were coming to move her underground, but it would take them a few minutes to arrive. Gendibal thinned the barrier he had placed around her mind, releasing most of his mentalic connections. Now only a few members of the Table held that barrier in place. The theory was that in her unconscious state, no barrier should have been necessary. But it was better to be safe. Looking around the room, he found a cushion and, bending down, placed it under her head.
Gendibal let out a long sigh as he settled onto the floor beside Novi. It had worked. The Second Foundation had never tried any such thing before. When before had they faced any connection that needed severing? His memory told him that when his contact had been cut while tracking Trevize, it was because of the Foundation’s recently invented mentalic shield. But, no longer trusting his memory, he had begun to believe that whatever power he had encountered had actively cut his connection to the Second Foundation. Just as Gendibal and his fellows had now cut Novi off from that power.
Gendibal looked again into Novi’s now dormant mind, and immediately stopped cold. The connection that Second Foundationers could establish among themselves was a temporary thing, and vanished as soon as contact was ended. But he saw now that this was different. The tether was broken, but there was still a remnant of it in her mind, still reaching for contact. Fascinated, Gendibal gently examined the rawness of it, and his fascination was quickly replaced with horror. The tether wasn’t an external connection; it was part of Novi. Impossible! No human mind could be like this. But there could be no question. Somehow, he had cut Novi off from something that was part of herself.
He called out for his companions to hurry, and in his distress he barely caught himself in time to keep the shield around her from collapsing. I have a mission. She needed help, but he had to keep her separated or this was for nothing. With a trembling hand, he began to lightl
y stroke her hair, reaching out to do the same to her now-dormant mind, trying to calm whatever pain she was in. It was not the mind Gendibal remembered, the smooth, simple Novi. But that mind was a part of this one, he now saw.
“I’m sorry, Novi,” he said without a trace of irony. “I never meant to cause you harm.”
And on a world far away, a man named Dom suddenly awakened from a deep sleep. “Novi!” he cried, his cries mingling with those of an entire world.
Chapter 5
HUMAN ORIGINS-… MOST INFORMATION ABOUT HUMANITY’S ORIGINS HAVING LONG-SINCE BEEN LOST. STILL, SOME NAMES PERSIST IN THE LEGENDS OF VARIOUS WORLDS, AURORA, ALPHA, SOL, AND SOLARIA BEING AMONG THE MOST COMMON. WITHOUT MORE INFORMATION, THOUGH, THESE NAMES ARE OF LITTLE ACADEMIC USE. THEY COULD ALL BE DIFFERENT WORLDS, DIFFERENT NAMES FOR THE SAME WORLD, OR ENTIRELY FICTIONAL. THOUGH THE ISSUE OF THE ORIGINAL HOMEWORLD HAS BEEN THE CAUSE OF MUCH SPECULATION OVER RECORDED HISTORY, THERE IS LITTLE …
TREVIZE SIGHED AS he turned to lie on his back. The bed was surprisingly comfortable, given what he had seen of the rest of the complex. Their suite was not much larger than the accommodations on the Far Star had been, but they were far more hospitable. Oh, but that shower felt good... Idly, he wondered where the excellent furniture had come from. Surely it hadn’t been here since this place was last inhabited by humans. Had these amazing machines spent time making such things just for their arrival? Or perhaps the furniture, like their hosts, was not quite what it appeared to be.
Trevize had thought to be tired after all that had happened, but now sleep would not come. He had exited the washroom to find Janov hard at work at the computer terminal, just as he’d expected. Trevize had let him be, managing to contain his amusement as he entered his bedroom and closed the door. His friend would never change, and Trevize wouldn’t have it any other way. Over an hour had passed since then, and he suspected Pelorat was still out there, having ignored the shower to continue writing in his journal or exploring the computer archives.
Trevize opened his eyes, giving up on sleep for the moment. Instead he stared at the ceiling of the darkened room and let his mind wander, linking thoughts and memories at random; soon he found himself smiling. He remembered one of his teachers in secondary school, calling him a troublemaker. Not in the prankster sort of way some people caused trouble; that he’d always found juvenile, even as a child. No, he caused trouble by refusing to be quiet, by rocking the proverbial boat, for no other reason than because it was a little too still for his tastes. He shook things up. It had gotten him into politics, gotten him elected to the council on Terminus. It had also gotten him exiled from Terminus, and so, combined with his flashes of intuition, had brought him to this wondrous place.
But in this place, it seemed to have brought him to something new. Peace?, he thought, wondering if that was the right word. It wasn’t that he no longer needed to agitate the world around him. He was still the same man. Wherever he ended up, he would find the current and work against it, defying the status quo just because it suited him. Anything else was just unimaginable. But he still wondered at this new feeling.
There was still excitement, of course. Trevize was very much looking forward to what Daneel’s apparent enemies had to say, and particularly to further conversations with Zorma. Something was different about that one, even from the other robots. But the future was decided. He had decided it. Politics, the Foundation, within a few hundred years Gaia would encompass it all, and none of it would matter. And, Trevize found, he didn’t need it to. Contentment, he decided. There was nowhere for him to go, no goal for him to strive for, for the first time in years. It was quite relaxing.
Trevize hoped it would not last long.
Not for the first time, Trevize began to wonder just where he would end up. Once Fallom was... well, once Daneel was done with Fallom, Bliss would likely either stay here or go home to Gaia. Pelorat would stay with her in either case, of course. He supposed he’d take them both back to Gaia aboard the Far Star if they wished, but what then? Beautiful as that world was, Trevize had no desire to live there. And while some of the worlds they’d visited on their way to Earth had seemed quite nice at first glance, most had also tried to kill him.
For a while, he entertained the thought of returning to Terminus and telling the populace some of what he had discovered. Not enough to pose a threat to Gaia, of course. He was still convinced of their importance. But he could at least tell them enough to unseat Mayor Branno. Maybe nothing the Foundation did would matter once this so-called Galaxia came to be, but he could still find some satisfaction before then.
Through the door, Trevize heard someone enter the living room. Bliss, he suspected, and voices soon confirmed that suspicion. The door was thick enough that he couldn’t tell what was being said, but he could identify the voices as Bliss and Janov, and another intermittent sound he couldn’t identify. Pelorat seemed to be doing most of the talking, and for a moment Trevize wondered why. Then he realized. Bliss was weeping.
Trevize felt a pang of guilt as the sounds ceased, Bliss and Pelorat having presumably closed their own door. Fallom was a nuisance at best, as far as he was concerned. Trevize had no affinity for children, and this particular child being neither male nor female was severely disturbing to him. When she (she, he had to keep reminding himself to use the pronoun) had tried to seize control of the Far Star, she had shown herself to be far more dangerous than Trevize had ever suspected; he would shed no tears for the child. But though he might not care about Fallom, and even as much as he had fought with Bliss, Trevize regretted the pain Fallom’s loss would cause her.
The thought of Fallom inevitably led him back to Solaria. The Seldon Plan made certain assumptions; psychohistory would only function so long as no alien intelligence interfered with humanity, a problem he was absolutely certain had to be corrected. Could Fallom’s people be the threat Gaia was needed to defend against? Or was it something else, something even more alien?
But it no longer mattered. If something came, odds were that Trevize would never see it. So long as a few more centuries were allowed to pass, whatever the threat, Galaxia would handle it; if it couldn’t, nothing could. He had made the correct choice. Trevize let his mind wander again, back to his youth on Terminus. He remembered the fiction vids he’d sometimes watched, smiling again. Stories of great wars with aliens from outside the galaxy, invasions of epic proportions, with the Foundation always emerging victorious. Some even involved robots. Great clanking mechanical robots. If only they knew.
He recalled the dreams he had once had, of wandering among the stars with no goal beyond that of seeing what was to be seen. Yes, Trevize thought. That’s where I’ll go. Wherever I please. No longer analyzing the unfamiliar feelings, he simply let himself enjoy them, as thoughts of the day left his mind. Presently, his memories became his dreams, and Golan Trevize slept better than he had in years.
“Daneel, are you sure this is wise?”
Dors concealed her surprise. Zun was a very capable robot, and had served Daneel for centuries. Until now she had never seen him openly question Daneel’s judgment.
Unprecedented as it was, Daneel did not seem remotely taken aback by Zun’s questioning. He replied calmly. “An statesman on ancient Earth once said, ‘Do I not destroy my enemy by making him my friend?’”
Zun looked only at Daneel, seemingly ignoring both Dors and Lodovik standing off to either side of the conversation. “Their presence is an unnecessary variable, and I believe we should evict them from this place immediately,” he said. “All of them.” Dors noticed Lodovik actually smiling slightly at the veiled comment about his presence. He had re-earned Daneel’s trust, at least far enough to be standing in this room, but never Zun’s.
“By informing Turringen of our plans,” Daneel said, “he may be convinced to cease his opposition. Further, Zorma’s assistance may be of importance in the coming weeks. Is there some particular point you contend?” He also focused on the robot facing him, as
though he didn’t expect Dors to raise similar objections.
Of course Dors had been surprised by Daneel’s intentions as well. She wondered how much of a part Lodovik had had in this plan, even as she studiously avoided looking at that robot directly. She and Lodovik had served Daneel together briefly, as such things went. But Lodovik had left, to follow his own path. Her relationship with him since then had been... complex. They had not spoken since his arrival, and she felt no need to change that situation. But surprise or no, she trusted Daneel’s judgment, even now in his weakening state. Why Zun suddenly did not was a mystery.
“I do not question your reasoning, Daneel.” Zun said nothing more. So, Dors was not the only one that wondered what part Lodovik had played in this decision. Zun had never understood why Daneel allowed Lodovik to survive. The Laws were what made a robot a robot, and yet Lodovik was somehow free of them, able to disobey or even kill a human at will. Zun saw his betrayal of Daneel upon being freed of the Laws as simply more proof of his danger. And yet Daneel allowed him to be here, now, as though he believed Lodovik’s motives might truly be benign.
Daneel ignored the unsaid portion of Zun’s objection, though Dors knew he had to be aware of it. “Then if you have no specific objection, please return to the infirmary. Yan may require assistance.”
Apparently realizing further comment would be fruitless, Zun nodded. When he and Daneel said nothing more, Dors decided the meeting was over. The others seemed to reach the same conclusion, as Zun left almost immediately, Lodovik following shortly after. Having nothing further to say, Dors was almost to the door when a wordless transmission from Daneel brought her up short.
“Do you agree with my decision?”
Dors stopped. This she was not expecting. It was a simple enough question, but coming from Daneel... “Yes,” she sent back, closing the door in front of her. The use of inaudible transmissions meant that he did not want to be overheard. Still, she remained facing away from him. Best to let Daneel take this where he would.
