Humans had always thought of spreading their genes, using starships. These alien, self-propagating ideas spread their “memes”-their cultural truths.
Memes can propagate between computers as easily as ideas flit between natural, organic brains. Brains are easier to infest than DNA.
Memes evolved in turn far faster than genes. The organized constellations of information in computers evolved in computers, which are faster than brains. Not necessarily better or wiser, but faster. And speed was the issue.
Voltaire reeled from the images-quick, vivid penetrations.
“They are demons! Diseases!” Joan shouted. He heard fear and courage alike in her strained words.
Indeed, the plain now crawled with malignant sores oozing rot. Pustules poked through the crusty soil. They bulged, sprouted cancerous heads like living blue-black bruises. These burst, spouting steaming pus. Eruptions vomited foulness over Voltaire and Joan. Stinking streams lapped at their dancing feet.
“The sneezing, the coughs!” Joan shouted. “We have had them all along. They-”
“Were viruses. These aliens were infecting us.” Voltaire splashed through combers of filth. The streams had coagulated into a lake, then an ocean. Breakers curled over them, tumbling both in the scummy brown froth.
“Why such horrible metaphor?” Voltaire cried out to the pewter sky. It filled with churning swarms of Bees as he bobbed in waves of putrefying wastes.
[WE ARE NOT OF YOUR CORRUPT ORIGINS]
[HIGHER REASON FOLLOW WE]
[THE WAR OF FLESH UPON FLESH IS SOON TO END]
[OF LIFE UPON LIFE]
[ACROSS THE TURNING DISK OF SUNS]
[WHICH ONCE WAS OURS]
“So they have their own agenda for the Empire.” Voltaire scowled. “I wonder how we shall like it, we of flesh?”
Rendezvous
R. Daneel Olivaw was alarmed. “I have underestimated Lamurk’s power.”
“We are few, they are many,” Dors said. She wanted to help this ancient, wise figure, but could think of nothing concrete to suggest. When in doubt, comfort. Or was that too human?
Olivaw sat absolutely still, using none of his ordinary facial or body language, devoting all capacity to calculation. He had come slipping in on a private shuttle from the worm and now sat with Dors in a suite of the Station. “I cannot assess the situation here. That security officer-you are certain she was not an agent of the Academic Potentate?”
“She aided us greatly after we had returned to our bodies.”
“With Vaddo dead, she could have been pretending innocence.”
“True. I cannot rule her out.”
“Your escape from Trantor went undetected?” Dors touched his hand. “I used every contact, every mechanism I knew. But Lamurk is devious.”
“So am I!-if need be.”
“You can’t be everywhere. I suspect Lamurk somehow corrupted that Vaddo character.”
“I believe he must have been planted in advance,” Daneel said adamantly, eyes narrowing. Evidently he had reached a decision and so had computational room for expression again.
“I checked his records. He’s been here for years. No, Lamurk bribed him or persuaded him.”
“Not Lamurk himself, of course,” R. Daneel said precisely, lips severe. “An agent.”
“I tried to get a brain scan of Vaddo, but could not finesse the legal issues.” She liked it when R. Daneel used his facial expression programs. But what had he decided?
“I could extract more from him,” he said neutrally.
Dors caught the implication. “The First Law, suspended because of the Zeroth Law?”
“It must be. The great crisis approaches swiftly.”
Dors was suddenly quite glad that she did not know more about what was going on in the Empire. “We must get Hari away from here. That is the most important point.”
“Agreed. I have arranged highest priority for you two through the wormhole.”
“It shouldn’t be busy. We-”
“I believe they expect extra traffic soon-more Lamurk agents, I fear. Or even the more insidious variety, as the Academic Potentate would employ.”
“Then we must hurry. Where shall we go?”
“Not to Trantor.”
“But we live there! Hari won’t like being a vagabond-”
“Eventually, yes, back to Trantor. Perhaps soon. But for now, anywhere else.”
“I’ll ask Hari if there is any special world he prefers.”
R. Daneel frowned, lost in thought. With absentminded grace he scratched his nose, then his eyeball. Dors flinched, but apparently R. Daneel had simply altered his neurocircuitry, and this was an ordinary gesture. She tried to imagine the use for such editing and could not. But then, he had come through millennia of winnowing she could not truly imagine, either.
“Not Helicon,” he said suddenly. “Sentimentality and nostalgia might plausibly lead Hari there.”
“Very well. That leaves only twenty-five million or so choices of where to hide.”
R. Daneel did not laugh.
Part 7. Stars Like Grains Of Sand
Sociometrics-… one of the most vital questions still unresolved is the general problem of Empire social stability. This research seeks to find how worlds keep from veering into cycles of boredom (a factor never to be underestimated in human affairs) and revitalization. No Imperial system could endure the jagged changes and maintain steady economic flows. How was this smoothing achieved?-and might such “dampers” that Imperial society had still somehow fail? No progress was made in this area until…
1.
The sky tumbled. down. Hari Seldon reeled away from it.
No escape. The awful blue weight rushed at him, swarming down the flanks of the steepled towers. Clouds crushed like weights.
His stomach lurched. Acid burned his throat. The deep, hard blue of endless spaces thrust him downward like a deep ocean current. Spires scraped against the falling sky and his breath came in ragged gasps.
He spun away from the perpetual chaos of sky and buildings and faced a wall. A moment before he had been walking normally along a city street, when suddenly the weight of the blue bowl above had loomed and the panic had gathered him up.
He fought to control his breathing. Carefully he inched along the wall, holding to the slick cool glaze. The others had kept walking. They were somewhere ahead, but he did not dare look for them. Face the wall. Step, step-
There. A door. He stepped before it and the slab slid aside. He stumbled in, weak with relief.
“Hari, we were-what’s wrong?” Dors rushed over to him.
“I, I don’t know. The sky-”
“Ah, a common symptom,” a woman’s booming voice cut in. “You Trantorians do have to adjust, you know.”
He looked up shakily into the broad, beaming face of Buta Fyrnix, the Principal Matron of Sark. “I…I was all right before.”
“Yes, it’s quite an odd ailment,” Fyrnix said archly. “You Trantorians are used to enclosed city, of course. And you can often take well to absolutely open spaces, if you were reared on such worlds-”
“As he was,” Dors put in sharply. “Come, sit.”
Hari’s pride was already recovering. “No, I’m fine.”
He straightened and thrust his shoulders back. Look firm, even if you don’t feel it.
Fyrnix went on, “But a place in between, like Sarkonia’s ten-klick tall towers-somehow that excites a vertigo we have not understood.”
Hari understood it all too well, in his lurching stomach. He had often thought that the price of living in Trantor was a gathering fear of large spaces, but Panucopia had seemed to dispel that idea. Now he felt the contrast. The tall buildings had evoked Trantor for him. But they drew his gaze upward, along steepening perspectives, into a sky that had suddenly seemed like a huge plunging weight.