Hari Seldon bestrode the world.
The immediacy he had felt while being Ipan now returned-enhanced along perspectives he could not name. He tingled with total immersion.
He stamped and marched across the muddy field of chaotic Mesh interactions. His boot heels left deep scars. These healed immediately: subprograms at work, like cellular repair.
A landscape opened like the welcome of a mother’s lap.
Already he had used psychohistory to “postdict” pan tribal movements, behavior, outcomes. Hari had generalized this to the fitness/economic/ social topology of N-space landscapes. Now he applied it to the Mesh.
Fractal tentacles spread through the networks with blinding speed, penetrating. Trantor’s digital world yawned, a planetary spiderweb…with something brooding and swollen at its center.
Trantor’s electric jungle worked with prickly light below him. Somehow it was beneath the panoramas he traversed. From a distance the forty billion lives were like a carnival, neon-bright on the horizon, amid a black, cool desert: the colossal night of the Galaxy itself.
Hari strode across the tortured landscape of storm and ruin, toward a colossal thunderhead. Two tiny humans stood below it. Hari stooped and picked them up.
“You took your time!” the little man called. “I waited less for the King of France.”
“Our deliverer! Did Saint Michael send you?” called the small Joan. “Oh, yes-do beware the clouds.”
“More’s to the point-here,” the man said/sent.
Hari stood frozen while an engorged chunk of data/learning/history/wisdom seeped through him. Panting, he sped himself to his max. The glowering cumulus-creature, Joan and Voltaire-all now slow-stepped. He could see individual event-waves washing through their sims.
They were dispersed minds, hopping portions of themselves endlessly around Trantor. Clicking, clacking, zigzag computations. With the resources of a full brain running in a central location, his billions of microefficiencies added up.
“You…know…Trantor…” Joan droned. “Use…that…against…them.”
He blinked-and knew.
Streams of raw, squeezed recollectionspun through him. Memories he could not claim but which instructed him instantly, reviewing all that had transpired.
His speed and supple grace felt wonderful. He was like an ice skater, zooming over the wrecked plain as the others lumbered like thick-headed beasts.
And he saw why.
Plaster holo screens against a mountain a full kilometer high, covering it until it glitters with a half million dancing images. Each holo used a quarter of a million pixels to shape its image, so the array musters immense representational power.
Now compress those screens on a sheet of aluminum foil a millimeter thick. Crumple it. Stuff it into a grapefruit. That is the brain, a hundred billion neurons firing at varying intensities. Nature had accomplished that miracle, and now machines labored to echo it.
The squirt of insight came to him directly from some hidden collaboration of himself with the Mesh. Information lashed up from dozens of libraries and merged with audible snaps.
He knew and felt in the same instant of comprehension. Data as desire…
Staggering, he spun light-headed and faced the angry clouds. They pressed in like buzzing virulent bees.
He cast amazed eyes at the thunderhead, which lashed burnt-orange lightning at him, frying the air.
The sting doubled him over.
“That’s all…they can…do for…the moment,” the dwarf/Voltaire called.
“Seems…enough,” Hari gasped.
“Together…we…can…do…battle!” Joan shouted.
Hari staggered. Convulsions wrenched his muscles. He devoted all his attention to mastering the shooting spasms.
This served to speed the sim-world relative to him. Voltaire spoke normally: “I suspect he came pursuing a spot of help himself.”
“We fight the grand and holy battle here,” Joan insisted. “All else must give way-”
Hari rasped, “Diplomacy…?”
Joan bridled. “ Negotiate?What? With enemies vile and-”
“He has a point,” Voltaire murmured judiciously.
“Your experience-philosopher-from more turbulent times-should prove useful here,” Hari coughed out.
“Ah! Experience-much overvalued. If I could but live my life over again, I would no doubt make the same mistakes-but sooner.”
Hari said, “If I knew what this storm wanted-”
[YOUR VARIETY OF VIVIFORM]
[IS NOT OUR PRIMARY AIM]
“You certainly torture us enough!” Voltaire countered.
Hari took the tiny man in hand and lifted him. A tornado descended, dark and swirling with rubble-ruined slivers of the Mesh, he saw, devoured. He held Voltaire toward the sucking spout.
The cyclone battered them all with hammering grit. It yowled with banshee energy, so loud Hari had to shout. “You were the ‘apostle of reason’-to quote your own interior memories. Reason with them.”
“I make no sense of their fractured talk. What is this of other ‘viviforms’? There is Man, and Man alone!”
“The Lord has so ordained!-even in this Purgatory,” Joan agreed.
Hari said grimly, guessing what was coming, “Always be quick, seldom be certain.”
10.
“I need to see Daneel,” Hari insisted. He felt a bit blurry from his raw interface with the sprawling, dizzying Mesh. But there was little time. “Now.”
Dors shook her head. “Far too dangerous, particularly with the tiktok crisis so-”
“I can solve that. Get him.”
“I’m not sure how to”
“I love you, but you’re a terrible liar.”
Daneel was wearing a workman’s pullover and looking quite uncomfortable when Hari met him in a broad, busy plaza.
“Where are your Specials?”
“All around us, dressed much as you are.”
This made Daneel even more uneasy. Hari realized that this most advanced of robot forms suffered from some eternal human limitations. With facial expressions activated, even a positronic brain could not separately control the subtleties of lips and eyes while experiencing disconnected emotions. And in public Daneel did not dare let his subprograms lapse and his face go blank.
“They have a sonic wall up?”
Hari nodded to the captain, who was pushing a broom nearby. Daneel’s words seemed to come through a blanket. “I do not like to expose us this way.”
Knots of Specials astutely deflected passersby so that none noticed the sonic bubble. Hari had to admire the masterly method; the Empire could still do some things expertly. “Matters are worse than even you imagine.”
“Your request, to provide moment-to-moment location data of Lamurk’s people-this could expose my agents inside the Lamurk network.”
“There’s no other way,” Hari said sharply. “I’ll leave to you tracking the right figures.”
“They must be incapacitated?”
“For the rest of the crisis.”
“ Whichcrisis?” Daneel’s face wrenched into a grimace-then went blank. He had cut the connections.
“The tiktoks. Lamurk’s moves. A bit of blackmail, for spice. Sark. Take your pick. Oh, and aspects of the Mesh I’ll describe later.”
“You will force a predictable pattern on the Lamurk factions? How?”
“With a maneuver. I imagine your agents will be able to predict positions of some principals, including Lamurk himself, at that time.”
“What maneuver?”
“I will send a signal when it is about to transpire.”
“You jest with me,” Daneel said darkly. “And the other request, to eliminate Lamurk himself-”
“Choose your method. I shall choose mine.”
“I can do that, true. An application of the Zeroth Law.” Daneel paused, face slack, in high calculation mode. “My method will take five minutes of preparation at the site we choose, to bring off the effect.”