“Could you ever duplicate this body?” she asked.
Maltzer glanced down at his shaking hands. “I don’t know. I doubt it. I—”
“Could anyone else?”
He was silent. Deirdre answered for him. “I don’t believe anyone could. I think I was an accident. A sort of mutation, halfway between flesh and metal. Something accidental and… and unnatural, turning off on a wrong course of evolution that never reaches a dead end. Another brain in a body like this might die or go mad, as you thought I would. The synapses are too delicate. You were — call it lucky — with me. From what I know now, I don’t think a… a baroque like me could happen again.” She paused a moment. “What you did was kindle the fire for the Phoenix, in a way. And the Phoenix rises perfect and renewed from its own ashes. Do you remember why it had to reproduce itself that way?”
Maltzer shook his head?”
“I’ll tell you,” she said. “It was because there was only one Phoenix. Only one in the whole world.”
They looked at each other in silence. Then Deirdre shrugged a little.
“He always came out of the fire perfect, of course. I’m not weak, Maltzer. You needn’t let that thought bother you any more. I’m not vulnerable and helpless. I’m not sub-human.” She laughed dryly. “I suppose,” she said, “that I’m — superhuman.”
“But — not happy.”
“I’m afraid. It isn’t unhappiness, Maltzer — it’s fear. I don’t want to draw so far away from the human race. I wish I needn’t. That’s why I’m going back on the stage — to keep in touch with them while I can. But I wish there could be others like me. I’m… I’m lonely, Maltzer.”
Silence again. Then Maltzer said, in a voice as distant as when he had spoken to them through glass, over gulfs as deep as oblivion:
“Then I am Frankenstein, after all.”
“Perhaps you are,” Deirdre said very softly. “I don’t know. Perhaps you are.”
She turned away and moved smoothly, powerfully, down the room to the window. Now that Harris knew, he could almost hear the sheer power purring along her limbs as she walked. She leaned the golden forehead against the glass — it clinked faintly, with a musical sound — and looked down into the depths Maltzer had hung above. Her voice was reflective as she looked into those dizzy spaces which had offered oblivion to her creator.
“There’s one limit I can think of,” she said, almost inaudibly. “Only one. My brain will wear out in another forty years or so. Between now and then I’ll learn… I’ll change… I’ll know more than I can guess today. I’ll change. That’s frightening. I don’t like to think about that.” She laid a curved golden hand on the latch and pushed the window open a little, very easily. Wind whined around its edge. “I could put a stop to it now, if I wanted,” she said. “If I wanted. But I can’t, really. There’s so much still untried. My brain’s human, and no human brain could leave such possibilities untested. I wonder, though… I do wonder—”
Her voice was soft and familiar in Harris’ ears, the voice Deirdre had spoken and sung with, sweetly enough to enchant a world. But as preoccupation came over her a certain flatness crept into the sound. When she was not listening to her own voice, it did not keep quite to the pitch of trueness. It sounded as if she spoke in a room of brass, and echoes from the walls resounded in the tones that spoke there.
“I wonder,” she repeated, the distant taint of metal already in her voice.
THE BIG AND THE LITTLE
Isaac Asimov
1
TRADERS — … With psychohistoric inevitability, economic control of the Foundation grew. The traders grew rich; and with riches came power….
It is sometimes forgotten that Hober Mallow began life as an ordinary trader. It is never forgotten that he ended it as the first of the Merchant Princes….
Jorane Sutt put the tips of carefully-manicured fingers together and said, “It’s something of a puzzle. In fact — and this is in the strictest confidence — it may be another one of Hari Seldon’s crises.”
The man opposite felt in the pocket of his short Smyrnian jacket for a cigarette. “Don’t know about that, Sutt. As a general rule, politicians start shouting ‘Seldon crisis’ at every mayoralty campaign.”
Sutt smiled very faintly, “I’m not campaigning, Mallow. We’re facing atomic weapons, and we don’t know where they’re coming from.”
Hober Mallow of Smyrno, Master Trader, smoked quietly, almost indifferently. “Go on. If you have more to say get it out.” Mallow never made the mistake of being overpolite to a Foundation man. He might be an Outlander, but a man’s a man for a’ that.
Sutt indicated the trimensional star-map on the table. He adjusted the controls and a cluster of some half-dozen stellar systems blazed red.
“That,” he said quietly, “is the Korellian Republic.”
The trader nodded, “I’ve been there. Stinking rathole! I suppose you can call it a republic but it’s always someone out of the Argo family that gets elected Commdor each time. And if you ever don’t like it — things happen to you.” He twisted his lip and repeated, “I’ve been there.”
“But you’ve come back, which hasn’t always happened. Three trade ships, inviolate under the Conventions, have disappeared within the territory of the Republic in the last year. And those ships were armed with all the usual nuclear explosives and force-field defenses.”
“What was the last word heard from the ships?”
“Routine reports. Nothing else.”
“What did Korell say?”
Sutt’s eyes gleamed sardonically, “There was no way of asking. The Foundation’s greatest asset throughout the Periphery is its reputation of power. Do you think we can lose three ships and ask for them?”
“Well, then, suppose you tell me what you want with me.”
Jorane Sutt did not waste his time in the luxury of annoyance. As secretary to the mayor, he had held off opposition councilmen, jobseekers, reformers, and crackpots who claimed to have solved in its entirety the course of future history as worked out by Hari Seldon. With training like that, it took a good deal to disturb him.
He said methodically, “In a moment. You see, three ships lost in the same sector in the same year can’t be accident, and atomic power can be conquered only by more atomic power. The question automatically arises: if Korell has atomic weapons, where is it getting them?”
“And where does it?”
“Two alternatives. Either the Korellians have constructed them themselves—”
“Far-fetched!”
“Very! But the other possibility is that we are being afflicted with a case of treason.”
“You think so?” Mallow’s voice was cold.
The secretary said calmly, “There’s nothing miraculous about the possibility. Since the Four Kingdoms accepted the Foundation Convention, we have had to deal with considrable groups of dissident populations in each nation. Each former kingdom has its pretenders and its former noblemen, who can’t very well pretend to love the Foundation. Some of them are becoming active, perhaps.”
Mallow was a dull red. “I see. Is there anything you want to say to me? I’m a Smyrnian.”
“I know. You’re a Smyrnian — born in Smyrno, one of the former Four Kingdoms. You’re a Foundation man by education only. By birth, you’re an Outlander and a foreigner. No doubt your grandfather was a baron at the time of the wars with Anacreon and Loris, and no doubt your family estate were taken away when Sef Sermak redistributed the land.”