It was promised that I could be with you just before you died, Hari.
That vow she intended, above all else in the universe, to keep.
During his last sunset on Earth, Hari Seldon watched gamma rays excite scintillations above Old Chicago. Ionized curtains glowed and rippled like polar auroras, only here the driving energy came not from a distant sun, but the ground itself. He thought he could almost see patterns in the luminous sheets-like the clever living artwork in the imperial gardens that day when Horis Antic offered him a data wafer filled with tempting clues. Then, as Hari watched, all semblance of organized structure vanished from the eerie horizon. Now the glow reminded him instead of Shoufeen Woods, where order had been banished and chaos was king.
Preparations for departure were complete. In a little while, Hari would board Wanda’s ship for the return to Trantor and his former life-hated by the men and women he was exiling to Terminus, feared by the present set of imperial rulers. and revered by a small cabal of psychics and mathists who felt certain they knew the future course of history.
Daneel would stay behind to settle matters with the Earthling inhabitants. There were arrangements to make. The cracked sarcophagus had to be buried so others could not misuse the fateful rift in the space-time continuum.
From his vantage point atop a pile of rubble, Hari could hear the voice of Horis Antic jabbering with excitement as he packed away his collection of soil types, acquired during this visit to a strange world. There could even be a scientific paper or two, something to brighten up his career profile, though nothing would erase the stigma associated with anyone who worked with dirt.
In any event, the fellow seemed happy. Daneel had done his job well.
Feeling tremors in his legs, Hari sat down again in the suspensor chair that Wanda had provided. He was needing it more, now that the rejuvenation treatments were wearing off. Soon he would be a frail old cripple again.
Soon I will be dead.
Seated, he could lean back, gazing toward the zenith where Earth’s radiation glow surrendered to a glitter of starlight-constellations that his ancestors no doubt knew by heart. Those stellar patterns had certainly changed in twenty thousand years, however, and he pondered how the sky might have looked if R. Gornon Vlimt had his way, sending Hari through time to a galaxy five hundred years older. Five hundred years more experienced with sorrow.
There were footsteps on the rubble path, too surefooted to be human. After a long pause, Daneel Olivaw asked, “What do you see up there, old friend?”
Hari felt a tautness in his throat.
“The future.”
“Indeed. Do you have a good view?”
Hari chuckled.
“A comfortable chair…a high place to look from… and of course, my equations. Oh yes, Daneel. I can see quite a bit from here.”
“And you are not disappointed? About missing a trip into that future?”
“Not very much. It might have been interesting. But you had reasons for preventing it, and I understand them. I probablywould have meddled.” Hari laughed again. “Besides, you’ll need a man who never makes mistakes, and I am anything but that.”
“Do you have any special regrets?”
“Just one. I can see it right now.” Hari gestured skyward, a bit to the left of zenith, but he wasn’t pointing to a constellation, rather, at a cluster of psychohistorical terms that floated in his sky, more real at this moment than the glittering stars.
“Please tell me,” Daneel entreated. “Explain what you see up there.”
Hari realized that his immortal friend, capable of extending his vision from X rays to the radio spectrum, was at the moment,envious. Hari derived a strange pleasure from that.
“I see my Foundation, right now being established on Terminus, beginning its bumpy path toward adventure and glory. The probabilities are strong for two centuries, at least. Psychosocial momentum has built up to a point where I can almost see the actors in this play. The Encyclopedists, politicians, traders, and charlatans will live in a time of great personal danger. And yet they’ll draw satisfaction from a sense of participating in something grand. Building a society that is preordained for success.”
Hari lifted his other hand, pointing toward a flickering in Earth’s ionized atmosphere.
“Ah! Did you see that? A perturbation! They are happening all the time, though most cancel each other out. Besides, we designed the Foundation to be robust, adapting to every flux and disturbance with great resiliency.
“And yet, with so much riding on the Plan, do we dare let human destiny depend on the reactions of a few million of our descendants? Can we trust them to respond with as much courage and determination as the equations predict?”
Hari shook his head. “No, we cannot. You convinced me of that, long ago, Daneel. Perturbations from the Plan must be corrected! The Plan must be kept on course. To do this, we shall need a guiding hand. ASecond Foundation, using mathematics to track every swerve and deviation, then applying pressure here and there, at just the right points, so that the First Foundation stays on its assigned trajectory.”
He sighed. “I was easy to persuade. After all, the Second Foundation is an extension ofme. A form of immortality. A way I can keep poking and meddling after this physical frame has been eaten by worms and turned into the soil Horis admires so much. The Second Foundation might have been Yugo Amaryl’s idea-did you inspire him though? In any event, vanity alone was enough to make me agree to it.
“But then you started demanding even more, Daneel.
“Will mathematics suffice? You worried that my successors wouldn’t be strong enough. A society of secret guides will need something more potent than equations. A superhuman power, enabling them to sway kings, mayors, and scientists away from perturbing thoughts, diverting them back toward the tracks they had been assigned. And 10, no sooner did you make this suggestion, than such a tool appears!”
Hari gestured toward the horizon, where Old Chicago flickered with a steady glow. “Your gift to the Seldon Plan, Daneel-mentalics! We really had to do a major reformulation of the Plan whenthat came to light. Fortunately, the mutation only appeared where you wanted it to. Some of the psychics will help seed your great universal mind, while others breed with my Fifty mathists, creating a new race that is capable of both calculation and magic.”
There was silence atop the rubble mound. Finally, Daneel commented, “You see a lot up there, my old friend.”
Hari nodded.
“Oh yes, I see all the adjustments we had to make in the equations, in order to deal with this new aristocracy that will be inbreeding for the next several centuries, developing its power and influence, relying ever more on mentalic dominance, and less on mathematics. If they are left in charge, even with a tradition of duty and noblesse oblige, they will eventually become a ruling class. A rulingrace. One that will make every prior priesthood or royal family seem like amateurs.”
Hari glanced up at Daneel.
“But what choice have we? Eventually the Foundation will stop being distracted by momentary crises, by galactic competitors and the challenge of expansion. In time, the civilization we establish on Terminus will reach a new height of confidence…and face its inevitable collision with chaos. At that point, our predictions grow more approximate. The psychohistorical equations show the Foundation’s odds of success will have winnowed down to only seventy percent or so.”