Maserd paused suddenly, shoulders hunched, as if realizing he had made a mistake. He turned to look at Seldon.
“Did you say something, Professor?”
Hari felt irritated that nobody was telling him the important things he needed to know.
“I asked how many archives there are, and what these people plan to do with them!”
This time Sybyl responded, taking manifest gusto in her victory.
“There aremillions, Academician. All herded together and neatly tethered to a collection station for over a hundred and fifty centuries, just floating there, lonely and unread.
“But no longer! We’ve sent word to all the other agents of Ktlina who have been working in secret, across the galaxy, telling them to drop whatever they’re doing and converge here. Soon more than thirty ships will arrive to fill their holds with beautiful archives and depart, sharing them with all of humanity!”
Hari objected. “They are illegal. Police officers are trained to recognize these horrors by sight. So are Greys and members of the gentry class. They’ll catch your agents.”
“Maybe they will, here and there. Perhaps the tyrants and their lackeys will stop most of us. But it will be like an infection, Professor. All we need is a few receptive places… some sympathetic dissidents to make ships and industrial copying facilities available. Within a year there win be thousands of copies on every planet in the empire. Then millions!”
The image she presented, of a virulent infection, was more accurate than Sybyl could possibly imagine. Hari envisioned chaos tearing great holes in his carefully worked-out Plan. All of the predictability that had been his lifelong goal would unravel like images written in smoke. The same smoke that gagged the streets of Santanni when that “renaissance” ended in riots and bloodshed, taking poor Raych to the grave, along with a myriad hopes.
“Has it occurred to you…”
He had to pause and swallow before continuing.
“Has it occurred to you that your bold endeavor has already been tried, and failed?”
This time both Gornon and Sybyl looked at him.
“What do you mean?” Vlimt asked.
“I mean that these archives were clearly meant for deep space, for long endurance, and to be easily read after a long journey, using only very basic technology.
“What does that tell you about their purpose?”
Sybyl started shaking her head, then her eyes widened, and her face went pale.
“Gifts,” she said in a low voice. “Messages in a bottle. Sent out to people who had lost their past.”
Lord Maserd’s brow furrowed. “You mean some people stillhad knowledge…and they were trying hard to share it
“With everybody else. With distant settlements that had no memory.” Hari nodded. “But why would they have to do that? Data-storage cells were cheap and durable, even in the dawn ages. Any colony ship, setting forth to settle a new world, would have carried petabytes of information, and tools to maintain literacy. So why would anyone in the galaxyneed to be reminded about all this?” He waved at the images from long-lost Earth.
A voice spoke from the doorway at the back of the room.
“You’re talking about the Amnesia Question,” said Mors Planch, who must have been listening for a while. “The issue of why we don’t remember our origins. And the answer is obvious. Something-orsomebody- madeour ancestors forget.”
Planch nodded toward the relics. “But some of the ancients held out. They fought back. Tried to replace the erased knowledge. Tried to share what they knew.”
Maserd blinked. “The space lanes must have already been controlled by enemies, blockading their ships. So they tried sending the data this way, in fast little capsules.”
Sybyl looked down, her effusive mood replaced by gloom.
“We were so excited, looking ahead to using these as weapons…I didn’t think of what the archives implied. It means”
Gornon Vlimt finished her sentence in a bitter voice.
“It means that this isn’t a new war, after all.”
Hari nodded as if encouraging a bright student. “Indeed. The same thing may have happened again and again, countless times across the millennia. Some group discovers an old archive, gets excited, mass-produces copies, and sends them across the galaxy. Yet, humanity’s vast amnesia continued.
“What can we conclude, then?”
Sybyl glared harshly at Hari.
“That it never worked. Damn you, Seldon. I see your point.
“It means that our side always lost.”
4.
It soon became clear to Lodovic Trema that these Calvinians were not about to dismantle him.
He wondered why.
“Can I assume you have changed your mind about my being a dangerous renegade robot?” he asked the two who accompanied him in a ground car, speeding along a highway toward the spaceport. White, globular clouds bobbed across a sky that was one of the more beautiful shades of blue Lodovic had seen on a human-settled world.
Unlike the previous pair, who had guarded and interrogated him in that cellar room, both of his current escorts wore the guise of female humans in mid-childbearing years. One of them kept her gaze directed outward at the busy traffic of Clemsberg, a medium-sized imperial city. The other, slighter of build, with close-cropped curly hair, turned to regard him with an enigmatic gaze. Lodovic got nothing at all from her on the microwave bands. and so had to settle for whatever information she revealed visually, or in words.
“We haven’t entirely made our minds up about you,” she said. “Some of us believe you may not beany kind of robot, anymore.”
Lodovic pondered this enigmatic statement in silence for a moment.
“By this, do you mean that I no longer match some set of criteria that define robotkind?”
“You could say that.”
“Of course you are referring to my mutation. The accident that severed my strict obedience to the Laws of Robotics. I’m not even a Giskardian heretic anymore. You consider me a monster.”
She shook her head.
“We aren’t sure exactly what you are. All we know for certain is that you are no longer a robot in the classical sense. In order to investigate further, we have decided to cooperate with you for a while. We wish to explore what you consider your obligations to be, now that you are free of the Laws.”
Lodovic sent the microwave equivalent of a shrug, partly in order to probe the fringes of her excellent defensive shield. But it was so good that she might as well not even exist at that level. Nothing. No resonance at all.
That made sense, of course. After losing their war against the Giskardian faction, the remaining Calvinians had naturally become extremely skilled at hiding, blending into the human population.
“I’m not sure myself,” he replied in spoken words. “I still feel a desire to operate under a version of the Zeroth Law. Humanity’s overall well-being still motivates me. And yet, that drive now feels abstract, almost philosophical. I no longer have to justify my every action in those terms.”
“So, that means you feel free to stop, now and then, and smell the roses?”
Lodovic chuckled. “I guess you could put it that way. I’ve been enjoying side interests far more than I ever did before the change. Conversations with interesting people, for instance. Pretending to be a journalist and interviewing the best meritocrats or eccentrics. Eavesdropping on students arguing in a bar, or some couple sitting on a park bench planning their future. Sometimes I get to meddle a bit. Perform a good deed, here and there. It’s rather satisfying.” He frowned abruptly. “Unfortunately, there’s been little time for that, lately.”
“Because you are busy opposing the schemes of R. Daneel Olivaw?”
“I already told you. For the moment, I seek more tounderstand those schemes than to disrupt them. Something is going on, I know that much. Daneel abruptly lost much of his interest in Seldon’s psychohistory Foundation a few years ago. He pulled out half of the robots that had been assigned to helping Seldon’s team, and sent them to work on some secret project having to do withhuman mentalics. Clearly, Daneel now has something else in mind…either in addition to the two Foundations, or as their eventual replacement.”