Zorma shook her head. “There are no more true Calvinians.”
Hari had no intention of letting the conversation dissolve into ideological arguments between robots. He also cared little whether Biron Maserd had been spying all along.
In fact, he wished the nobleman well. What really mattered right now was the decision he had to make. The immediacy of which was clear when R. Gornon’s assistant hurried into the tent.
“Preparations are complete. In less than an hour the moment will come. It is time to ascend the scaffolding.”
And so, with his decision still not made, Hari joined a procession leading through the lanes of the ancient university. His footsteps were partly illuminated by a crescent moon, and by a luminous skyglow emitted when oxygen atoms were struck by gamma rays rising from the ground below. As he moved along, feeling creaky with age, Hari felt a nagging need to talk to somebody he could trust.
Only one name came to mind, and he murmured it under his breath. “Dors!”
The last thing he expected was for this to turn into a ceremonial occasion. But a procession of Earthlings accompanied Hari and the others on their way to the sarcophagus. The natives chanted an eerie melody-at once both dirgelike yet strangely auspicious, as if expressing all their hopes for some eventual redemption. Perhaps the song was many thousands of years old, dating from even before humanity climbed out of its gentle cradle to assault the stars.
Accompanying R. Gornon and Hari were the “deviant” cyborgs, Zorma and Cloudia, with Biron Maserd now striding openly beside them. At Hari’s insistence, Wanda Seldon and Gaal Dornick had also been wakened to join the entourage, though Wanda had been warned not to attempt mentalic interference. Some of the robots present had similar abilities, enough to counter any efforts she might make.
Hari’s granddaughter looked unhappy, and he tried to reassure her with a gentle smile. Raised as a meritocrat, Hari had always expected to adopt rather than father children of his own. And yet, few joys in his life had matched that of being a parent to Raych, and then grandparent to this excellent young woman, who took so seriously her duties as an agent of destiny.
Horis Antic had asked to be excused-ostensibly to pursue his research-though Hari knew the real reason. The. glowing “space-time anomaly” terrified Horis. But Gornon did not want to leave anyone behind in camp, so Antic shuffled along, just behind the prisoner Mors Planch. Even the survivors of the Ktlina renaissance accompanied the procession, though Sybyl and the others seemed hardly aware of anything except a raucous murmur of voices in their own heads.
As they approached the anomaly, draped in scaffolding, Hari saw the rounded outline of the sarcophagus slide past each of the ancient cities in turn.
First, Old Chicago, with its battered skyscrapers still aiming adventurously toward the sky, recalling an age of openness and unfettered ambition. Next to vanish was New Chicago, that monstrous fortress where so many millions sealed themselves away from daylight, and a terror they could not understand. Finally, little Chica disappeared-the white porcelain village where Earth’s final civilization struggled in vain against irrelevance, in a galaxy that simply did not care about its origins anymore.
Rounding a bend in the ancient university campus, they came to a point where thecrack could be seen…splitting open thick walls that had been meant to seal away something dire. To entomb it forever. Hari glanced to his left, toward R. Gornon.
“If this anomaly truly gives you access to the fourth dimension, why hasn’t it been used during all of these centuries? Why did no one attempt to change the past?”
The robot shook its head. “Travel into the past is impossible, on many different levels, Dr. Seldon. Anyway, even if you could change the past, that would only create a new future in which someoneelse will be discontented. Those people, in turn, would send emissaries to changetheir past, and so on. No time track would have any more valid claim to reality than any other.”
“Then perhaps none of this matters,” Hari mused. “We all may be just parallel mirror images…or else little simulations, like the numbers we juggle in the Prime Radiant. Temporary. Ghosts who only exist while someone else is thinking about them.”
Hari had not been looking where he was going. His left foot snagged on some patch of uneven ground, and he started to pitch forward…but was caught by R. Gornon’s gentle, firm grasp. Even so, Hari’s body felt quakes of pain and fatigue. He missed his nurse, Kers Kantun, and the wheelchair he once hated. At one level, Hari could tell he was dying, as he had been sliding toward death for several years.
“I’m not in great condition for so long a journey,” he murmured, while his companions waited for him to recover.
“The one other human who traveled this way was also an old man,” Gornon assured Hari. “Tests show that the process is gentle, or else we would never risk harming you. And when you arrive, someone will be waiting.”
“I see. Still I wonder…”
“About what, Professor?”
“You have great powers of medical science available to you. Breakthroughs and techniques that robots have hoarded for millennia. These cyborgs”-he jerked a thumb toward Zorma and Cloudia-”appear able to duplicate bodies and extend life indefinitely. So I wonder why you didn’t boost my physical health, at least a bit more, before I made this journey.”
“It’s not allowed, Professor. There are strong reasons, moral, ethical, and-”
Harsh laughter interrupted, coming from the robot called Zorma.
“Except when it suits your purposes! You should give Seldon a better answer than that, Gornon.”
After a pause, Gornon said in a low voice, “We no longer have the organoforming apparatus. It was taken away at Pengia. The device was needed elsewhere to continue an important project…and that is all I will say about it.”
They resumed walking until the glow emanating from the cracked tomb filled the night just overhead, casting spiderweb shadows from the scaffolding across the ruined university. Most of the Earthlings and other onlookers climbed nearby rubble mounds to watch, while Hari and Gornon led a diminished procession onto a broad wooden platform that began rising on creaking ropes, hauling a dozen of them upward.
As Hari and his entourage ascended, he commented to Gornon, “It occurs to me that you may be going to a lot of unnecessary trouble. There’s another way of sending a person into the future, you know.”
This time, the robot did not answer. Instead, Gornon steadied Hari with an arm around his shoulders as the makeshift elevator reached its destination with a rattling bump. Hari had to shade his eyes against the glare pouring from within the broken containment shell.
To the awed murmurs of his guests, Gornon gave an explanation that was both poignant and brief.
“It began with a simple, well-meaning experiment, during the same brash era when humans were inventing both robots and hyperdrive. The researchers here had an incredible hunch and acted on it impulsively. Suddenly, a beam of fractured space-time shot forth, snaring a passing pedestrian, yanking Joseph Schwartz out of his normal life and hurling him forward ten thousand years.
“For Schwartz, a great adventure ensued. But back in the Chicago he left behind, a nightmare had just begun.” Hari watched the robot’s face, looking for the complex expressions of emotion that Dors and Daneel simulated so well. But this artificial man was grimly stoic.
“You sound as if you were there, when it happened.”
“Not I, but an early-model robot was. One whose memories I inherited. Those memories aren’t pleasant. Some of us believe this event marked the beginning of the end for humanity’s great time of youthful exuberance. Not long thereafter, amid international recriminations, the first waves of unreason began. Robots were banished from Earth. Acrimony built between nations and the colonial worlds, There were outbreaks of biological warfare. Some of us swore…”