Nevertheless, there remained a problem. None of it was sufficient. Nothing yet explained how twenty-five million worlds could stay static and serene for so long.
“Are you saying…that thing out there”
Hari reached up and lifted one edge of the skullcap. A wave of emotions fluxed. He suddenly resented the robot deeply, and wanted nothing better than to turn away from this panorama. To return to his friends at the west-facing view port.
Hari let the flap drop back in place. The irritation vanished. In a hoarse voice, he whispered, “Mentalic suasion! Of course. If Daneel and some of his comrades can do it, why not mass-produce a specialized positronic brain for each world? twenty-five million isn’t such a great number, especially if you have thousands of years.”
He turned to look archly at Gornon. “But how could such a thing be possible? To sway the population of an entire planet?”
The robot smiled. “It is not only possible, Professor. The method was tried by the very earliest mentalic robot. R. Giskard Reventlov first thought of using this device to influence whole planetary populations, by detecting and sifting neural electrical patterns and then gently nudging repeatedly, building slowly toward the kinds of resonance patterns that encourage tranquility. Equanimity. Goodwill. In fact, these machines arenamed after Giskard. They are guardians of human serenity and peace.
“I assume there is already a place for them in your equations?”
Hari nodded, staring, but his eyes did not see. Rather, his mind gyred with mathematics. He saw at once how this provided much of what had been missing! An explanation for why most eruptions of chaos simply dissipated harmlessly, like a fire that had been quenched for lack of oxygen. A reason, also, why so few human beings lived outside of planets, even though asteroid outposts or those placed in strange environments had proved possible. Space life was hardly compatible with this damping mechanism! So it would naturally be discouraged.
And yet these “Giskards” aren’t working as well as they used to, once upon a time. Chaos outbreaks are more frequent, despite everything done to repress them. Only the empire’s fall will bring the recent wave of infections to a halt. These obsolete methods will be useless in a few years, no matter what.
He imagined what might happen if such a mental-suasion device were ever placed in orbit over Terminus.
It would never work on that bunch for long. We selected them for resistance against the pressures of a dark age-from feudalism to fanaticism. Even if this mentalic device affected a majority of Foundation citizens, they would never let themselves be kept in line for very long. Individuals would rankle at the conformity message and sniff at every anomaly, eventually tracking this thing down.
Daneel must plan to have all the Giskard machines self-destruct during the next hundred years or so. Otherwise, my Foundationers will find them!
At that moment, it surprised Hari to feel fierce pride in his first and greatest creation. Funny, he had expected that discovering the last big damping coefficient would be exciting. But this technique for social control was nothing elegant. Hardly worthy of psychohistory. Rather it was a bludgeon, used to trim and prune the mathematical branchings and force the humanics equations back in line.
A bit like my Second Foundation,he thought, enjoying a little obsessive self-criticism.
“I know you must have some agenda. Gornon. Some convoluted reason for showing me this. Nevertheless. please accept my thanks. It’s always good to glimpse the truth before you die.”
Their pilot promised that the next phase of the journey would be brief. Gornon refused to be more specific, but their flight path toward Sirius Sector made it blatantly evident to Hari where they must be heading.
He passed the time poring throughA Child’s Book of Knowledge. Browsing semi-randomly, guided only by a perverse desire to sample forbidden ideas. those he had long considered irrelevant or wrong.
Almost equally dangerous is the Gospel of Uniformity. The differences between the nations and races of mankind are required to preserve the conditions under which higher development is possible. One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering…Physical wandering is still important, but greater still is the power of man’s spiritual adventures-adventures of thought, adventures of passionate feeling, adventures of aesthetic experience. A diversification among human communities is essential for the provision of the inventive material for the Odyssey of the human spirit. Other nations of different habits are not enemies; they are godsends.
What a bizarre way of looking at things! It was the sort of statement that one heard from preachers of chaos, singing the praises of each “renaissance” before it tumbled into broiling violence and. finally, solipsism. These notions sounded alluring. There were even versions of the psychohistorical equations that suggested a kind of truthought to lie therein. But with chaos as an enemy, all such benefits were lost. Anyone betting on diversity and boldness of spirit would almost certainly wind up losing everything.
As they approached their destination, Hari kept probing through garbled accounts for clues as to what the very first chaos outbreak might have been like, when the vigorous, self-confident civilization of Susan Calvin tumbled into such horror that Earthlings fled into metal caves, and Spacers turned their backs on love.
Hari wondered.Might it have something to do with the invention of robots themselves?
He had discussed this a couple of times with Daneel and Dors. They told him that the original Three Laws of Robotics were created in order to assuage human fears about artificial beings. But the original designers had meant the laws to be only a stopgap measure leading to something better.
“Quite a few variations were tried,“ Daneel told Hari one evening, perhaps ten years ago.“On some colony worlds, a few centuries after the diaspora from Earth, certain groups tried to introduce what were called New Laws, giving robots more autonomy and individuality. But soon our civil war caught up with these experiments. Calvinians could not abide the equality heresy, which they considered even worse than my Zeroth Law. My faction saw the innovations as unnecessary and redundant.
“All of the New-Law robots were exterminated, of course.“
That evening, over dinner, Gornon admitted what Hari had suspected-that their destination was the mother world, where both robots and humans began.
Horis bit a fingernail. “But isn’t it poisonous, covered with radioactive soil? I thought you tiktoks weren’t supposed to put humans in danger.”
Hari recalled images from the old archives, depicting a dying world…a beach awash with dead fish…a forest populated by skeletal trees and crumbling leaves…a city, nearly empty, filling with blowing dust and detritus.
“I’m sure a brief visit won’t harm us,” Biron Maserd commented. The nobleman’s eyes shone with eager curiosity. “Anyway, don’t some people still live on the planet? According to tradition, it once had an excellent university, even several thousand years after the diaspora. A school one of my ancestors is said to have attended.”
Gornon nodded. “A local population endured until well into the age when the Trantorian Empire became pan-galactic. They were an odd breed, however. Resentful over being forgotten and ignored by the descendants of cousins who had fled for the stars. Eventually most of the remaining people were evacuated, when Earthlings were discovered plotting a war of revenge, to destroy the empire they hated.”