“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…almost 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?”
Wanda looked away, then turned back to him. “You know why we’ve continued looking for mentalics, Grandfather.”
“Yes. You and Stettin have discovered that your abilities wax and wane, for unknown reasons. You’re looking for a more stable core group whose opposed strengths and weaknesses will cancel each other out and produce a steady influence.”
“I can’t hear anybody very clearly the past few weeks, Grandfather. I don’t know what could happen to you. I see nothing…a blank.”
12.
Vara Liso had not slept through the night in years, for fear of what she might hear while asleep or on the edge of sleep. It was at these times that she could feel her net spread out over her neighborhood like a cloud, and when it came back, reeling itself in as it were, stuck to it were the emotional colors and desires and worries of her fellow humans for kilometers around, like fish she could not help but consume.
When young, this unwanted talent for night-fishing had come only once or twice a month, and she had never been sure whether she was simply mad or really could learn what she seemed to learn, from parents and brother, from neighbors, from lovers, the few she had attracted, for there was something spooky about her manner and appearance even then.
Now, the net swept wide every single night, and she could no longer absorb what it brought back, nor could she discard the bits and pieces of other people’s lives. She felt like a strip of insect-gathering paper left to hang in a garbage dump.
It was when she had been approached by other mentalics-that was what they called themselves, though she had never given her talent a name-that she realized what she could do might be valuable to some. And it was when she spent one night in training at Streeling University, with other mentalics, that she caught a bit of dream that shook her to her core.
It was a dream of mechanical men. Not tiktoks, those funny little worker machines that had so worried the workers of Trantor and other worlds in their heyday, now gone, not tiktoks, but robots who looked like men, who could move unnoticed among men.
And there were even mechanical women, so this dream showed, capable of amazing feats, capable even of murder and of provoking love.
Vara Liso thought about this dream for weeks before requesting an audience with the Emperor. This half-mad request-how could she hope to have an audience with such a lofty personage!-had been answered, and she had met not with the Emperor, but with another, his self-anointed Voice of Imperial Conscience, Imperial Councilor Farad Sinter.
Sinter had received her with politeness, a little cool at first, but as she had expanded upon her evidence, he had begun to burrow down with his questions, digging underneath her confusion to find the gems of evidence she herself had missed. Farad Sinter had taken a dream fetched raw and alive from anonymous night and given it political authority, a logical weight and structure she herself could not have pieced together in a million years.
In her way, Vara Liso had come first to respect Sinter, then to admire him, and finally to love him. He was so like her in many ways, sensitive and nervous, tuned to frequencies of thought no others could see…or so he convinced her.
She wanted to become his lover, but Farad Sinter convinced her that such physical pursuits were beneath them. They had loftier intimacies to satisfy them.
So she went this morning to his complex of private rooms in the Palace, escorted as always by a frosty pair of female security guards, convinced she was going to deliver to him that which he most sought. Yet Vara Liso kept something to herself, something that did not fit somehow.
“Good morning, Vara!” Sinter greeted. He sat at a small breakfast table on wheels, still wearing an ornately quilted golden robe, and his small, piercing eyes crinkled with something like amused welcome. “What do you have for me today?”
“Nothing more, Farad.” She slumped into a couch in front of him, tired and discouraged. “It’s all so jumbled. I swear I get so cluttered!”
Sinter tsk-tsked and shook his finger at her. “Don’t disparage your particular talent, lovely Vara.”
Her eyes widened with hungry need, which Sinter pretended he had not seen. “Have you learned who started you on this? With his dream of mechanical men?”
“I don’t know whether it was a man or a woman, and no, I still don’t know. I remember faces of those in the dream, but recognize none of them. Have you caught her?”
Sinter shook his head. “Not yet. I haven’t given up, though. Any other clues, other candidates?”
Vara Liso blushed slightly and shook her head. Soon enough she would have to reveal how this had all begun, that she had once worked to become part of a group of low-level mentalics, much weaker than she, and weaker by far than the young woman she had sensed just two weeks before, whose mind had blazed in the night. But they had treated her well, and she had kept this back from Sinter for two reasons: because quite clearly these people were not robots, and because she had at least some sense of honor and loyalty. She tried to guide his vision this much, that he would not go off searching for every little petty mental persuader; she was sure he was wrong there, though of course she would not tell him so.