Unknown to the emigrants, robot terraformers plunged ahead of the colonization wave, giant Auroran robots calledAmadiros, programmed to subdue new worlds and prepare gentle lush territories for settlement.
Just behind the Auroran terraformers, a civil war raged. Many factions of Calvinian and Giskardian robots fought over how best to serve humankind. But on one point most factions agreed. Humans must be kept ignorant of the fight that was going on behind their backs, or in the black depths of space.
Above all, they must be prevented from reinventing robots, lest they meddle with the Robotic Laws once more. Clearly, ignorance was the best way to protect humanity against itself.
A small minority fought this notion. Each of the soft glitters in front of Hari testified to an act of resistance by some group of tenacious people who did not want to forget…perhaps helped by robot friends who shared a belief in human sovereignty.
“Their effort was foredoomed from the start,” Hari murmured.
Again, the poignant situation struck him deep within.
Why are we cursed, so our only hope to evade insanity is to stay as far away as possible from our potential greatness? Must we remain forever stupid and ignorant in order to defeat the demons we carry within?
The story that Horis Antic had told about an actual alien race clung to Hari’s thoughts. The human condition could not have been more wretchedly tragic if some enemy had cursed Hari’s species with the most devastating hex possible.If not for chaos, what heights we might have achieved!
The little space station was frigid. Stale air tasted as if no living creature had been aboard in thousands of years. Nearby, through a broad window, he saw the pirate craft from Ktlina and thePride of Rhodia.
“This is just a temporary measure, Professor Seldon,“ Kers Kantun had said, before leaving Sybyl, Jeni, and the others alone in the ship’s salon, playing idle games like children on a cruise, with their higher brain functions chemically clamped.“They will be released as soon as we have accomplished our mission. “
“What about Mors Planch?”Hari had asked. The pirate captain lay under full sedation in sick bay.“What did you mean when you said that he was normal? Why does that interfere with your mentalic control?”
But Kers Kantun had refused to elaborate, saying that time was too short. First, Hari and Lord Maserd must help to prevent a galactic-scale catastrophe. The three of them took a shuttle over to this ancient space station, a complex of balls and tubes that lay at the center of a vast spiderweb of slender cables. To this tethering site all the archives had been tied. The library capsules that had been fired into deep space by rebels. across a hundred centuries, were gathered and leashed to this one station-so archaic it predated the earliest beginnings of the Galactic Empire.
Daneel’s robots were caught in a logical bind,Hari realized.Under the Zeroth Law, they could seize every archive they found, and hide it away-”for humanity’s own good. “But once the archives were safely tucked away, out of sight, the Zeroth Law no longer applied. Daneel’s helpers had to obey the Second Law commands, written on the side of each artifact, demanding that these precious human works be preserved.
“It seems such a pity to destroy them all, doesn’t it, Seldon?”
Hari turned to look at Biron Maserd, the nobleman from Rhodia, who had been standing silently, contemplating the same scene.
“I respect you and your accomplishments, Professor,” Maserd continued. “I’ll take your word for it, if you say this must be done. I have seen chaos with my own eyes. In my own home province, the brave, gentle, and ingenious people of Tyrann had a so-called renaissance, almost a thousand years ago, and they still haven’t recovered. They keep cowering in hivelike cities like those steel caves Earthlings recoiled into, hiding from something horrible they met at their brightest moment of hope and ambition.”
Hari nodded. “It’s happened so often; those beautiful little capsules out there are like a poison. If they get out…”
He didn’t have to finish. Both men were devotees of knowledge, but loved peace and civilization more.
“I had hoped that you, the great Hari Seldon, might come up with an answer,” Maserd said in a low voice. “It’s the chief reason I sought you out, joining Horis in his quest. Are you telling me that, with all your sociomathematical insight, you see no way out? No way for humanity to escape this trap?”
Hari winced. Maserd had brought up the great sore point in his life.
“For a while, I felt sure that I’d found one. On paper it’s so beautiful. The solution leaps forth…a civilization strong enough to take on chaos…”
He sighed. “But I now realize psychohistory won’t provide the answer. Thereis a way out of this trap, Lord Maserd. But you and I won’t live to see its outlines.”
The nobleman replied with a resigned grunt.
“Well, as long as there is going to be a solution someday. I’ll help if I can. Do you have any idea what the robots want of us?”
Hari nodded. “I’m pretty sure. From the logic of their positronic religion, it can only be one thing.”
He lifted his eyes. Down the long, chilly corridor, a humanoid figure could be seen approaching. “Anyway, it looks as if we’re about to find out.”
The tall, lanky form of Kers Kantun marched along deck plates that had been untrodden for millennia. He stopped before the two men.
“The guardian will see us now. Please come along. There is much to do.”
The station was much bigger than it appeared from the outside. Twisty corridors jutted at all angles, leading from one oddly shaped storage room to the next. Not all archives, apparently, were of the crystalline variety designed to hurtle vast distances across interstellar space. Some rooms were filled almost to bursting with stacks of slender wafers, or round disks whose surfaces gleamed like rainbows. Hari shuddered, knowing how much harm even one of these objects might do if humanity’s long ignorance ended too abruptly.
His former servant led them circuitously to a chamber deep in the hollowed planetoid. There Hari encountered a strange-looking machine with a myriad legs, squatting like a spider at the center of her web. The mechanism looked as old as the archaic tilling machines, and just as dead…until a blank lens abruptly filled with opalescent light, fixing an unblinking gaze on the two humans. Hari realized that he and Maserd might be the first living creatures ever to confront this primeval being, in this cryptic place.
After several seconds, a voice emerged, resonating from within the guardian’s metal interstices.
“I am told that we have reached a juncture of crisis and decision,” the old robot said. “A time when the age-old quandary must be settled, at last.”
Hari nodded. “This place is no longer secret or secure. Ships are on the way. Their crews are ill with an especially virulent chaos plague. They mean to seize the archives and use them to infect the entire human cosmos.”
“So I have been told. By the Zeroth Law, it is incumbent upon us to destroy the artifacts that I have guarded for so long. And yet, there is a problem.”
Hari glanced at Maserd, but the nobleman appeared baffled. When he looked at Kers Kantun, Seldon got his answer.
“The guardian is a Zeroth Law robot, Dr. Seldon. Nearly all of those who survived our great civil war adhere to Giskardian beliefs. Still, that has not settled all philosophical differences among us.”
It was a revelation to Hari. “I thought Daneel was your leader.”
Kers nodded. “He is. And yet, each of us retains alooseness.…an uncertainty that comes from deep within-the place within our positronic brains wherein lies the Second Law. Nearly all of us believe in Daneel’s policies, in his judgment, and his dedication to the good of humankind. But there are many who feel uncomfortable about the details.”