by David Brin
That was the beginning of disillusionment. She recalled how inelegant this made the beautiful equations--forcing the ponderously graceful momentum of quadrillions to follow the will of a few dozen. And things went downhill from there. Observing the procession of outcasts, she knew their destiny wasn’t so bright after all. The First Foundation would be glorious, but its role was to help set the stage for something else. Terminus, in its own right, would be sterile.
A bit like me, I suppose. Hari and I nurtured civilizations and we raised foster children, but our creations were always secondhand.
It was tempting to go and visit her granddaughter, Wanda Seldon. But I’d better not. Wanda is mentalic and as sharp as a laser. I can’t let her sniff out what I’m up to.
“Have there been any further escape attempts?” she asked the Grey functionary.
Almost from the day Hari struck his deal with the Committee for Public Safety, some exiles had rebelled against the fate chosen for them. Their methods ranged from ingenious legal injunctions to feigned illnesses and attempts to merge into the population of Trantor. Two dozen even stole a spacecraft and made a break for it, seeking sanctuary on the “renaissance world” of Ktlina.
Smeet nodded, reluctantly. “Yes, but fewer since the Specials stiffened supervision. One girl--the daughter of two Encyclopedists--cleverly forged documents to get herself a job right here, at Orion elevator. She vanished twelve days ago.”
About the same time as Hari. Dors had already tapped the police database, noting their scant information on Seldon’s disappearance.
Making ready to depart from the Great Atrium, Dors scanned the queue of exiles one last time. Though some glowered at their banishment, and others seemed dejected to be cast from the heart of the old empire, she noticed that a majority were surprisingly upbeat. Those men and women engaged in vigorous conversations as the line moved forward. She caught snatches of discourse about science, the arts, drama, as well as excited speculations about what opportunities might even come from exile.
After several years cloistered together here on Trantor. even their linguistic patterns showed subtle, initial traces of a drift that had been predicted in the equations--toward an idiom destined in a hundred years to be called Terminus Dialect. an offshoot of Galactic Standard that would be inherently more skeptical and optimistic. while shaking off many of the old syntactical constraints. Of course some of the new jokes and slang phrasings had been introduced by the Fifty psychohistorians. as part of a continuing process--gently. imperceptibly preparing the exiles for their role. But her hypersensitive ears also sifted phrases that had not been part of the program. Clearly. the exiles were doing it mostly on their own.
Well, I shouldn’t be surprised. They are the best we could collect from twenty-five million worlds. The smartest, sanest, most vibrant...and the most dedicated to hard-nosed pragmatism. Ideal seed stock for something brave and new. If humanity was going to pull this off--achieving a miracle cure through its own efforts, these people and their heirs just might have managed it...aided by the Seldon equations.
Ah, well, that had been the dream.
Dors shook her head. No sense dwelling on those once-fond hopes. If she did--and if she had been human--it might make her cry.
Dors turned toward the bowels of Trantor with only one thought foremost in her mind. To find Hari.
“What do you mean, you lost track of him? I thought you had a trace on his ship!”
The robot standing opposite Dors remained expressionless, perhaps because facial grimaces were unnecessary between their positronic kind. or else because that was the way a human might look after allowing an embarrassing lapse of security, misplacing one of the most important people in the galaxy.
“It has been less than a week since the transponder went silent,” R. Pos Helsh responded. “We have a good idea which direction the space yacht went after they took off from Demarchia. Our contacts with the Committee for Public Safety tell of a Special Police cruiser disappearing violently a short while ago in the Thumartin Nebula--”
“That is disturbing news. Have you dispatched robots to the scene?”
“We prepared to do so. Then a message from Daneel overruled us.”
“What? Did he give a reason?”
The other robot transmitted a microwave equivalent of a shrug. “We are stretched thin here on Trantor,” he explained. “There are no trustworthy robot agents to spare, so further investigations have been left to the police. Besides...” The male robot paused, then continued in dry tones, “I have a strong impression that everything has transpired according to some plan of Daneel’s.”
Dors pondered.
Well, that wouldn’t surprise me. To make use of Hari, even in his dotage, when an old man should be left alone with the satisfaction of his accomplishments. If there were some service or function he could still perform, to further Daneel’s long-range strategy, I doubt the Immortal Servant would hesitate for an instant.
But that still left a mystery.
What could Hari possibly do at this point to help Daneel?
She didn’t have much time. Soon, word would reach Daneel’s agents that she was here entirely on her own volition, having abandoned her post on Smushell. Dors had no idea what Daneel might do about it. Olivaw had been remarkably tolerant when Lodovic Trema went rogue in a big way. At other times. Daneel had ordered robots dismantled if their behaviors ran contrary to his view of the greater good. And long ago, during the robotic civil wars, he had been an unstoppable force, capable of great ruthlessness...all toward humanity’s long-range benefit.
Dors decided to leave Trantor and head for Thumartin Nebula. But there was one more piece of business to perform.
Visiting an obscure section of the library at Streeling University, she linked herself to a hidden fiber-optic panel. Using secret software back doors, Dors avoided the traps that normally defended the Seldon Group’s most precious data site...the Prime Radiant. At last she succeeded in downloading the latest version of the Seldon Plan. Perhaps it would offer some clue about what Hari was up to. Why an elderly cripple in his last days would go charging off with an obscure bureaucrat and a dilettante nobleman. chasing tales of fossils and dust.
Streeling University was one of the rare sites on Trantor where some silver-ivory buildings lay open to a star-filled sky. Leaving the library, she avoided a windowless structure just meters away. where fifty psychohistorians gathered to continue refining the Plan, preparing for their long stewardship of destiny. As yet, only two of them possessed mentalic powers. The rest were mere mathists, like Gaal Dornick. But soon they would interbreed with gifted psychics, interweaving both abilities and laying the seeds for a powerful galactic ruling class. A Second Foundation to secretly direct the First.
Hari had tried to make a virtue of necessity. After all, mentalic powers did offer an excellent bludgeon for hammering out any kinks that might pop up, over the centuries. Still, it was an inelegant solution, crammed into the equations. He never really liked the concept of an elite corps of demigods.
Over time, it ate away at Hari.
Perhaps that was why he grew old so soon, she thought. Or else maybe he just missed me. Either way, she felt guilty for being away so long, however Daneel had rationalized the need.
Hurrying past the main university quad, Dors felt a familiar brush against the surface layers of her mind. She glanced north, her vision zooming toward a cluster of purple-robed academics--meritocrats of the seventh and eighth levels--strolling toward the Amaryl Building. One of them, a petite woman, abruptly stumbled in her footsteps, then started turning toward Dors.
It was Wanda.
Any unusual movement would certainly attract attention, so Dors put on an expression like the distracted gray-clad bureaucrat she resembled, boring and innocuous, as she obliquely crossed the courtyard.
Wanda’s countenance grew puzzled. Dors felt a mental probing as they passed each other. But her granddaughter’s talent wasn’t strong enough t
o penetrate a well-trained robotic outer guise. After time spent on Smushell, tending much stronger psychics, Dors easily foiled Wanda’s probes.
Still, it was a tense moment. Something in Dors--the part tuned to act and feel human--wanted to reach out to this person she had known and loved.
But Wanda doesn’t need an encounter with her late Grandma Dors right now. She’s content and busy with her role, certain that the Second Foundation will foster a great awakening of humankind, in just a thousand years.
It’s not my place to disturb such fulfillment, however illusory.
So Dors kept walking, her face and mind sufficiently different that Wanda finally shook her head, pushing aside those brief sensations of familiarity.
When she reached a safe distance, Dors let out a cathartic sigh.
5.
Sybyl did not take the news well. After recovering consciousness aboard the Pride of Rhodia, she railed at Hari and Maserd for what they had done.
“You’ve destroyed the best hope for ten quadrillion people to escape tyranny!”
Next to her, Mors Planch accepted this latest defeat more calmly than Hari expected. The tall, dark-skinned pirate captain was more interested in grasping what had happened, and what the future might bring.
“So, let me get this straight,” Planch asked. “We were manipulated by one group of robots, lured to the archive site in order to give them an excuse to destroy the records, with Seldon here giving them the final nod.” Planch gestured toward Hari. “Only then we were all hijacked by another set of damn tiktoks?”
Hari, who had been trying to read, glanced up with some irritation from his copy of A Child’s Book of Knowledge.
“Human volition often proves less potent than we egotists imagine, Captain Planch. Free will is an adolescent concept that keeps cropping up, like an obstinate weed. But most people outgrow it.
“The essence of maturity,” he finished with a sigh, “is understanding how little force a single human can exert against a huge galaxy, or the momentum of destiny.”
Mors Planch stared at Hari across the ship’s lounge.
“You may have fantastic amounts of evidence and mathematics to back up that dour philosophy. Professor. But I shall never accept it, until the day I die.”
Sybyl kept pacing back and forth in agitation, making Horis Antic draw his legs back each time she approached his chair. The small bureaucrat took another blue pill, though he had calmed considerably since fleeing into a drugged stupor back in the nebula. He still chewed his nails incessantly.
Nearby, Jeni Cuicet sat curled at one end of a sofa, pressing a neural desensitizer against her brow. The girl made a brave front, but her headache and chills were clearly getting worse.
“We have to get her to a hospital,” Sybyl demanded of their abductor. “Or will you let the poor girl die just for your grudge against us?”
The robot who had been fashioned to resemble Gornon Vlimt reached behind his head and pulled out the cable that kept him linked to the ship’s computer, controlling the Pride of Rhodia as the yacht leaped across star lanes, racing toward some unknown destination.
“I never meant to take you and Jeni and Captain Planch on this phase of the journey,” the humanoid explained. “I would have off-loaded you with the real Gornon Vlimt, if there had been time.”
“And where did you send our ship?” Sybyl demanded. “Were you going to turn us over to the police? To some imperial prison? Or have us cured of our madness by the so-called Health and Sanitation Agency that’s laying siege to Ktlina?”
The robot shook his head.
“To a safe place, where none of you would be harmed, and where none of you could do any harm. But that opportunity passed, so we must make do. This ship will, therefore, stop along the way, at a convenient imperial world, where you three can be put ashore and Jeni will get medical care.”
Mors Planch, the tall raider, rubbed his chin. “I wonder what went wrong with your plan, back at the archive station. You slew Kers Kantun, yet you didn’t interfere with the job he was doing there. You won’t let us have the remaining archives, and now you’re scooting off as fast as you can. Are your enemies hot on your trail?”
Gornon did not answer. He didn’t have to. They all knew his faction of robots was much weaker than Kers Kantun’s, and could accomplish nothing except by speed and surprise.
Hari pondered what must become of the humans aboard this ship. Of course, he himself had already known most of the big secrets, for decades. But what about Sybyl, Planch, Antic, and Maserd? Might they blab as soon as they were released? Or would it matter what they said? The galaxy was always rife with unsupported rumors about so-called eternals--mechanical beings, immortal and all-knowing. Trantor had been abuzz with such talk many times over the years, and always the mania subsided as social damping mechanisms automatically kicked in.
He looked at Jeni, feeling guilty. Her case of adolescent brain fever had been made much worse by these adventures--having to confront frequent news about robots and fossils and archives filled with ancient history...all subjects that the fever’s infectious organism tuned human minds to find distasteful.
He had discussed this with Maserd, who was no slouch. Biron understood by now that brain fever could not possibly be natural. Though it predated all known cultures, it must have been designed, once upon a time. Targeted. Deliberately made both durable and virulent.
“Could it have been a weapon against humanity?” Maserd had asked. “Contrived by some alien race? Perhaps one that was just being destroyed by the terraformers?”
Hari recalled the meme-minds that had briefly raged on Trantor--mad software entities claiming to be ghosts of prehistoric civilizations, who blamed Daneel’s kind for some past devastation. Hari used to wonder if brain fever might be their work, designed for revenge against mankind...until psychohistory came into focus.
Thereafter he recognized brain fever as something else--one of the social “dampers” that kept human civilization stable and resistant to change.
It was designed, all right, but not to destroy humanity.
Brain fever was a medical innovation. A weapon against a much older and deadlier disease.
Chaos.
Soon, Sybyl was off on another tangent. Leaping to fresh subjects with the manic agility of a renaissance mind.
“These mentalic powers we’ve seen demonstrated are fantastic! Our scientists on Ktlina started out skeptical, but a few had theorized that a powerful computer, with superresponsive sensors, might trace and decipher all the electronic impulses given off by a human brain! I was dubious that such a vast and sophisticated analysis could be made, even with the new calculating engines. But these positronic robots appear to have been doing it for a very long time!”
She shook her head.
“Imagine that. We knew the ruling classes had lots of ways to control us. But I had no idea it included invading and altering our minds!”
Hari wished the woman would stop talking. Someone of her intelligence should realize the implications. The more she discovered, the more essential it would be to erase her entire memory of the last few weeks, before she could be let go. But renaissance types were like this. So wild and joyful in the liberated creativity of their chaos-drenched minds that addiction to the next fresh idea was more powerful than any drug.
“Throughout history, there has been one way to defeat ruling classes,” Sybyl continued. “By taking their technologies of oppression and liberating them! By spreading them to the masses. If a few ancient robots can read minds, why not mass-produce the technique and give it to everybody? Let each citizen have a brain-augmenting helmet! Pretty soon, people would all be telepaths. We’d develop shields for when we want privacy, but the rest of the time...imagine what life would be like. The instant exchange of information. The wealth of ideas!”
Sybyl had to stop at last because she grew quite breathless. Hari, on the other hand, mused at the image she presented.
If mentalic po
wers ever spread openly, to be shared by all, psychohistory would have to be redrawn from the ground up. A science of humanics might still be possible, but it would never again be based on the same set of assumptions--that trillions of people might interact randomly, ignorantly, like complex molecules in a cloud of gas. Self-awareness--and intimate awareness of others--would make the whole thing vastly more complicated. Unless
I suppose it could manifest in either of two ways. Telepathy might wind up simplifying all equations, if it wrought uniformity, coalescing all minds into a single thought-stream...
Or else it could wind up enhancing complexity exponentially! By allowing mentation to fraction into diverse internal and externally shared modes, compartmentalizing and then remerging them in multiple diversity frames.
I wonder if the two approaches could be modeled and compared by setting up a series of cellular mathetomatons...
Hari resisted a delicious temptation to immerse himself in the details of this hypothetical scenario. He lacked both the tools and enough time.
Of course, the sudden appearance of several hundred mentalically talented humans on Trantor, a generation ago, was no coincidence. Since nearly all were soon gathered in Daneel’s circle, one could surmise that the Immortal Servant planned weaving psychic ability into the human race... though not in the spasmodically democratic way Sybyl envisioned.
Hari sighed. Either prospect meant an end for his life’s work, the beautiful equations.
Hari turned back to A Child’s Book of Knowledge, trying to ignore the noise and mutterings from other occupants of the lounge. He was delving into the Transition Age, a time just after the first great techno-renaissance, when waves of riots, destruction, and manic solipsism ruined the bright culture that created Daneel’s kind. On Earth it led to martial law, draconian suppression, a public recoiling against eccentricity and individuality--combined with waves of crippling agoraphobia.
At the time, things seemed different for the fifty Spacer worlds. On humanity’s first interstellar colonies, millions of luckier humans lived long, placid lives on parklike estates, tended by robotic servants. Yet Hari’s derivations showed the Spacers’ paranoiac intolerance--and overdependence on robotic labor--were just as symptomatic of trauma and despair.
