“Particle flux is high,” Dors said tensely. “And rising.”
“Where’s our junction?”
“I’m having trouble vector-fixing-ah! There.”
Hard acceleration rammed him back into his flowcouch. Dors took them diving down into a mottled pyramid-shaped wormhole.
This was an even rarer geometry. Hari had time to marvel at how accidents of the universal birth pang had shaped these serene geometries, like exhibits in some god’s Euclidean museum of the mind.
And then they plunged through, erasing the stunning views.
They popped out above the gray-brown mottled face of Trantor. A glinting disk of satellites, factories and habitats fanned out in the equatorial plane.
The wild worm they had used fizzed and glowed behind them. Dors took them swiftly toward the ramshackle, temporary wormyard. He said nothing, but felt her tense calculations. They nudged into a socket, seals sighed, his ears popped painfully.
Then they were out, arms and legs wooden from the cramped pencil ship. Hari coasted in zero-g toward the flex-lock. Dors glided ahead of him. She motioned him for silence as pressures pulsed in the lock. She peeled her skinsuit down, exposing her breasts.
A finger’s touch opened a seam below her left breast. She plucked a cylinder out. A weapon? She resealed and had her skinsuit back in place before the staging diaphragm began to open.
Beyond the opening iris Hari saw Imperial uniforms.
He crouched against the lock wall, ready to launch himself backward to avoid capture-but the situation looked hopeless.
The Imperials looked grim, determined. They clasped pistols. Dors coasted between Hari and the squad. She tossed the cylinder at them-
—a pressure wave knocked him back against the wall. His ears clogged. The squad was an expanding cloud of…debris.
“What-?”
“Shaped implosion,” Dors called. “Move!”
The injured men had been slammed into each other. How anything could shape a pressure wave so compactly he could not imagine. In any case he had no time. They shot past the tangled cloud of men. Weapons drifted uselessly.
A figure erupted from the far diaphragm. A man in a brown work sheath, middle-sized, unarmed. Hari shouted a warning. Dors showed no reaction.
The man flicked his wrist and a snout appeared from his sleeve. Dors still coasted toward him.
Hari snagged a handhold and veered to his right.
“Stay still!” the man yelled.
Hari froze, dangling by one hand. The man fired-and a silvery bolt fried past Hari.
He turned and saw that one of the Imperials had recovered his weapon. The silver line scratched fire across the Imperial’s arm. He screamed. His weapon tumbled away.
“Let’s go. I have the rest of the way secured,” the man in the work sheath called.
Dors followed him without a word. Hari pushed off and caught up to them as the diaphragm irised for them.
“You return to Trantor at the crucial moment,” the man said.
“You-who-”
The man smiled. “I have changed myself. You do not recognize your old friend, R. Daneel?”
Rendezvous
R. Daneel gazed at Dors without expression, letting his body go slack.
Dors said, “We must defend him against Lamurk. You could reappear, come out in favor of him. As former First Minister, your public endorsement and support-”
“I cannot reappear as Eto Demerzel, ex-important person. That would compromise my other tasks.”
“But Hari has to have-”
“As well, you mistake my power as Demerzel. I am now history. Lamurk will care nothing about me, for I have no legions to command.”
Dors fumed silently. “But you must-”
“I shall move more of us into Lamurk’s inner circle.”
“It’s too late to infiltrate.”
Daneel activated his expressive programs and smiled. “I planted several of our kind decades ago. They shall all be in position soon.”
“You’re using…us?”
“I must. Though your implication is correct: we are few.”
“I need help protecting him, too.”
“Quite right.” He produced a thick disk, this time from a compartment beneath his armpit. “This will identify the Lamurk agents for you.”
She looked doubtful. “How? This looks like a chem snooper.”
“I have agents of my own. They can in turn label Lamurk’s agents. This device will pick up their tags. Other encoded messages will ride on the marking signal.”
“And Lamurk’s specialists won’t pick up the tags?”
“This device uses methods lost for six millennia. Install it in your right arm, at station cut six. Interface with apertures two and five.”
“How will I-”
“Specs and expertise will flow to your long-term memory upon connection.”
She installed the device as he watched. His grave presence made silence natural. Olivaw never wasted a movement or made idle conversation. Finally, intricacies done, she sighed and said, “He’s interested in those simulations, the ones which escaped.”
“He is following the best line of attack for psychohistory.”
“There’s this tiktok problem, too. Do you understand-”
“The social taboos against simulations inevitably break down during cultural resurgences,” Daneel said.
“So tiktoks-?”
“They are inherently destabilizing if they become too developed. After all, we cannot condone a new generation of robots, or the rediscovery of the positronic process.”
“There are signs in the historical record that this has happened before.”
“You are an insightful scholar.”
“There were only a few traces, but I suspect-”
“Suspect no further. You are correct. I could not expunge every scrap of data.”
“ Youdisguised such events?”
“And much else.”
“Why? As an historian-”
“I had to. Humanity is best served by Imperial stability. Tiktoks, sims-these accompany movements such as this ‘New Renaissance,’ feeding the fire.”
“What’s to be done?”
“I do not know. Matters are slipping beyond my ability to predict.”
She frowned. “How do you predict?”
“In the first millennia of the Empire, our kind developed the simple theory I have mentioned before. Useful, but crude. It led me to expect the reemergence of these simulations as a side effect of the Sarkian ‘Renaissance’ and its turmoil.”
“Does Hari understand this?”
“Hari’s psychohistory is vastly superior to our models. He lacks certain vital historical data, however. When it is eventually included, he will be able to accurately anticipate the Empire’s devolution.”
“You do not mean ‘evolution’?”
“Quite. That is a major reason why we devote such resources to helping Hari.”
“He is crucial.”
“Of course. Why do you think I assigned you to him?”
“Does it matter that I’ve fallen in love with him?”
“No. But it helps.”
“Helps me? Or him?”
Daneel smiled thinly. “Both, I should hope. But mostly, it helps me.”
Part 8. The Eternal Equations
The general theory of psychohistory. Part 8a: Mathematical Aspects as the crisis deepens, the deep systemic learning loops falter. The system drifts out of tune. Such drifts, particularly if diffusive, call for fundamental systemic restructuring. This is termed the “macro decision phase” in which the loops must find fresh configurings in the N-dimensional landscape.
“…All visualizations can be understood in thermodynamic terms. The statistical mechanics involved are not those of particles and collisions, as in a gas, but in the language of social macro-groups, acting through “collisions” with other such macro-groups. Such impacts produce much human debris…