Hari felt little but a pessimistic certainty. Life brought him nothing but defeats. No sign of his missing grandchild. No validity for psychohistory. And now, for the greater good, he had consented to the destruction of a treasure.
“Whatever you have in mind for us, Daneel…it had better be worth all of this. It had better be really special.”
A while later, after the explosions had been left far behind, Hari was dozing when someone dropped heavily into the seat next to his.
“Well, I’ll be damned if this universe makes the slightest bit of sense,” grumbled Biron Maserd.
Hari rubbed his eyes.
“Who is piloting-”
Maserd answered with a sour expression. “That fancypants artiste, Gornon Vlimt. Seems the controls won’t respond to me any more, only to him.”
“How…Where is he taking us?”
“Says he’ll explain later. I thought about giving him a knock on the head and trying to take back control. Then I realized.”
“What?”
“Vlimt must be responsible for what happened to Kers Kantun, back on the station. Vlimt was left drugged, like the others, but now look at him! I figure there’s just one explanation. He must be another-”
“-another kind of robot?”
This time the voice came from the passageway, where Gornon Vlimt stood, looking as foppish as ever, in the wild clothing of Ktlina’s New Renaissance.
“I apologize for the inconvenience, gentlemen. But the operation that has just been completed required great delicacy and timing. Clarifications had to wait until success was achieved.”
“What success?” Hari asked. “If your aim was to recover and use the archives, you failed! They’ve all been destroyed.”
“Perhaps not all of them. Anyway, the archives were never my principal objective,” Gornon answered. “First, I should elucidate one point. I am not the Gornon Vlimt whom you knew. That man is still in a drugged stupor, riding the Ktlina ship out to a false rendezvous, where he will tell his fellow chaos agents a hypnotically induced story.”
“Then youare a robot,” Biron Maserd growled.
The Gornon-duplicate nodded.
“As you might guess, I represent a different faction than the followers of R. Daneel Olivaw.”
“Are you one of theCalvinians?”
The robot did not answer directly.
“Let’s just say that what took place recently was another skirmish in a war that stretches beyond the reach of even the lost archives.”
“So you don’t share the aims of the human you replaced? The real Gornon Vlimt?”
“That’s right, Professor. Gornon wanted to copy and scatter the archives willy-nilly among vulnerable cultures of the empire, creating chaos infections in a million random locales. A catastrophic notion. Your own psychohistory equations would be utterly torn apart, and Daneel’s alternate destiny-whatever he has secretly planned-would be rendered useless. All hope for a strong transition to some bright new phase might be lost as madness ran wild. We’d spend half a million years digging humans out of the burrows they would flee into, once the fever ended.”
Maserd grunted. “Then you approve of destroying the archives?”
“It is not a matter of approval, but necessity.”
“Then what’s the difference between you and Kers Kantun!” the nobleman demanded. Maserd was evidently reaching the limit of his tolerance for mysteries.
“There are many sects and sub sects among robotkind, my lord. One faction believes we should not be closing doors or sealing our options right now. To this end, we have a favor to ask of Dr. Seldon.”
Hari laughed out loud.
“I don’t believe this! You all keep acting as if I’m your god-or at least a convenient representative for ten quadrillion gods-but all youreally want is for me to excuse and sanctify plans you’ve already chosen!”
The robot Gornon confirmed this with a nod.
“You were bred for such a role, Professor. On Helicon, ten thousand boys and girls were specially conceived, inoculated, and prepped as you were. And yet only a few hundred then qualified for a careful series of conditionings, from education to home environment, aimed toward a specific end. After a long winnowing process, just one remained.”
Hari shivered. He had long suspected, but never heard it confirmed.Perhaps this enemy of Daneel’s has a reason for revealing it right now? He decided to stay wary.
“So I was raised to be mathematically creative and unconventional, in a civilization whose every social characteristic encourages conservatism and conformity. But my creativity was guided, eh?”
Vlimt nodded. “You had to be immune to all the normal damping mechanisms in order for your creativity to flower, and yet a sense of direction was essential, guiding you always toward the same ideal.”
Hari nodded.
“Predictability.I hated the way my parents kept bouncing around. All emotions, no reason. I longed to predict what people would do. My lifelong obsession.” He sighed. “But even a neurotic can understand his neurosis. I knew this about myself decades ago, robot. Don’t you think I figured out that Daneel helped make me what I am? Do you imagine that revealing these facts will lessen my loyalty and friendship toward him?”
“Not at all, Doctor. What we have in mind will not put you in a position to betray Daneel Olivaw. However, we wonder-”
There came a pause, rather lengthy for a robot.
“-we wonder if you might relish an opportunity to judge him.”
4.
Dors Venabili spent the last part of the voyage transforming her looks. She wanted to conduct her business quickly and be gone without questions. It would do no good showing up on Trantor with the face of a woman everyone thought long dead-the wife of former First Minister Hari Seldon!
She parked her ship at a standard commercial tether and took the Orion elevator down to Trantor’s metal-sheathed surface. At customs, a simple coded phrase persuaded the immigration computers to pass her without a body scan. Daneel’s robots had been using this technique to slip onto the capital for untold generations.
Andsohere we are again, she thought,back in the steel caverns where I spent half my existence protecting Hari Seldon, guiding and nurturing his genius, becoming so good at wifely simulation that my ersatz feelings grew indistinguishable from genuine love.
And just as compelling.
Stifling crowds surrounded her, so unlike the languid pastoral life on most imperial worlds. Dors used to wonder why Daneel designed Trantor this way, to be a maze of metal corridors, whose people scarcely saw the sun. It certainly wasn’t necessary for administrative purposes, or to house Trantor’s forty billions. Many imperial worlds had even larger populations without flattening and merging every continent into a single steel-plated warren.
Only after helping Hari define the outlines of psychohistory did she understand the real underlying reason.
Way back in the dawn era, when Daneel himself had been made, a vast majority of humans-those on Earth-lived in cramped, artificial burrows, a lingering result of some horrible shock. And across the following millennia, whenever some planet passed through an especially bad chaos episode, traumatized folk often reacted in the same way-by cowering away from the light, in hivelike caverns.
By designing Trantor this way, Daneel had cleverlypreempted that pattern. Trantor was already-by design-just like a planet filled with chaos survivors! Inherent paranoia and conservatism made it the last place in the galaxy where anyone would attempt a renaissance.
And yet,she thought,a mini-renaissance did happen here once. Hari and I barely survived the consequences.
A voice jarred her, coming from behind.
“Supervisor Jenat Korsan?”
That was one of her aliases. She turned to see a gray-clad woman with mid-level insignia on her epaulets, offering Dors a bow just right for a functionary ranking two levels higher.