Mors Planch was taken from his cell in the Specials security bloc of Rikerian, far beneath the almost civilized cells where Seldon had been kept. He was given his personal goods and released without restrictions.
He dreaded his release more than incarceration, until he learned that Farad Sinter was dead, then he wondered if he had been part of some intricate conspiracy arranged by Linge Chen—and perhaps by the robots.
He enjoyed this confusing freedom for one day. Then, at his newly leased apartment in the Gessim Sector, hundreds of kilometers from the palace, and not nearly far enough, he received an unexpected visitor.
The robot’s facial structure had changed slightly since Mors had made the unfortunate automatic record of his conversation with Lodovik Trema. Still, Mors recognized him instantly—
Daneel stood in the vestibule just beyond the door, while
Mors observed him on the security screen. He suspected it would be useless to try any evasion, or simply to leave the door unanswered. Besides, after all this time, his worst trait was coming to the fore once again.
He was curious. If death was inevitable, he hoped to have time to answer a few questions.
He opened the door.
“I’ve been half expecting you,” Mors said. “Though I don’t really know who or what you are. I must assume you are not here to kill me.”
Daneel smiled stiffly and entered. Mors watched him pass into the apartment and studied this tall, well-built, apparently male machine. The quiet restrained grace, the sense of immense but gentle strength, must have stood this Eternal in good stead over the millennia. What genius had designed and built him—and for what purpose? Surely not as a mere servant! Yet that was what the mythical robots had once been—mere servants.
“I am not here to take revenge,” Daneel said.
“So reassuring,” Mors said, taking a seat in the small dining area, the only room other than the combined bath and bedroom.
“In a few days, there will be an order from the Emperor for you to leave Trantor.”
Mors pursed his lips. “How sad,” he said. “Klayus doesn’t like me.” But the irony was lost on Daneel, or irrelevant.
“I have need of a very good pilot,” Daneel said. “One who has no hope of going anywhere in the Empire and surviving.”
“What sort of job?” Mors asked, his expression taking a little twist. He could feel the trap closing once more. “Assassination?”
“No,” Daneel said. “Transport. There are some people, and two robots, who must leave Trantor. They will never return, either. Most of them, at any rate.”
“Where will I take them?”
“I will tell you in good time. Do you accept the commission?”
Mors laughed bitterly. “How can you expect loyalty?” he demanded. “Why shouldn’t I just dump them somewhere, or kill them outright?”
“That will not be possible,” Daneel said softly. “You will understand after you meet them. It will not be a difficult job, but it will almost certainly be without incident. Perhaps you will find it boring.”
“I doubt that,” Mors said. “If I’m bored, I’ll just think about you, and the misery you’ve caused me.”
Daneel looked puzzled. “Misery?”
“You’ve played me like a musical instrument. You must have known my sympathy for Madder Loss, my hatred for what Linge Chen and the Empire stand for! You wanted me to record you and Lodovik Trema. You made sure Farad Sinter would hear of me and my connection with Lodovik. It was a gamble, though, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, of course. Your feelings made you very useful.”
Mors sighed. “And after I’ve made this delivery?”
“You will resume your life on any world outside of Imperial control. There will be more and more of them in the coming years.”
“No interference from you?”
“None,” Daneel said.
“Free to do whatever I want, and tell people what happened here?”
“If you wish,” Daneel said. “There will be adequate pay,” he added. “As always.”
“No!” Mors barked. “Absolutely no pay. No money. Just arrange for me to take my assets off Trantor and—away from a couple of other worlds. They will be all I need.”
“That has already been arranged,” Daneel said.
This infuriated Mors even more. “I will be so skying glad when you stop anticipating everything and anything!”
“Yes,” Daneel said, and nodded sympathetically. “Do you accept?”
“Bloody bright suns, yes! When the time comes, tell me
where to be, but please, no earnest farewells! I never want to see you again!”
Daneel nodded assent. “There will be no need to meet again. All will be ready in two days.”
Mors tried to slam the door behind Daneel, but it was not that kind of door, and would not accept such a dramatic gesture.
The depth of Hari’s funk was so great that Wanda was tempted more than once to try to reach into his thoughts and give them a subtle tweak, an adjustment—but she had never been able to do that with her grandfather. It might have been possible—but it would not have been right.
If Hari Seldon was in despair, and could articulate the reasons for this despair—if his state was not some damage directly inflicted by Vara Liso, a possibility he fervently denied—then he had a right to be this way, and if there was a way out, he would find it…or not.
But Wanda could do no more than let him be what he had always been, a headstrong man. She had to trust his instincts. And if he was right—then they had to reshape their plans.
“I feel almost lighthearted!” Hari said the morning after they brought him to their apartment to recuperate. He sat at the small table beside the curve in the living-room wall that traced the passage of a minor structural brace. “Nobody needs me now.”
“We need you, Grandfather,” Wanda said, with a hint of tears coming.
“Of course—but as a grandfather, not as a savior. To tell the truth, I’ve hated that aspect of my role in all this absurdity. To think—for a time—” And his face grew distant.
Wanda knew all too well that his cheer was false, his relief a cover.
She had been waiting for the proper moment to tell him what had happened during his absence. Stettin had left for the morning to attend to preparations still under way for their departure. All of the Project workers would be leaving Trantor soon, whether or not they had a reason to go, so she and Stettin had seen no reason to stop their own plans.
“Grandfather, we had a visitor before the trial,” she said, and she sat at the table across from Hari.
Hari looked up, and the somewhat simple grin he had chosen to mask his feelings immediately hardened. “I don’t want to know,” he said.
“It was Demerzel,” Wanda said.
Hari closed his eyes. “He won’t come back. I’ve let him down.”
“I think you’re wrong, Grandfather. I got a message this morning, before you woke up. From Demerzel.”
Hari refused to take any hope from this. “A few matters to tidy up, no doubt,” he said.
“There’s to be a meeting. He wants Stettin and me to be there, as well.”
“A secret meeting?”
“Apparently not that secret.”
“That’s right,” Hari said. “Linge Chen no longer cares about whatever it is we do. He’ll ship all the Encyclopedists off Trantor, to Terminus—useless exile!”
“Surely the Encyclopedia will be of some use,” Wanda said. “Most of them don’t know the larger plan. It won’t make any difference to them.”
Hari shrugged that off.
“It must be important, Grandfather.”
“Yes, yes! Of course. It will be important—and it will be final.” He had wanted so much to see Daneel one more time—if only to complain! He had even dreamed of the meeting—but now he dreaded it. How could he explain his failure, the end of the Project, the uselessness of psychohistory?
Daneel would go elsewhere, find someone else, complete his plans another way—
And Hari would die and be forgotten.
Wanda could hardly bring herself to interrupt his reverie. “And we still need to schedule the recordings, Grandfather.”
Hari looked up, and his eyes were terrifyingly empty. Wanda touched him with her mind as lightly as she could, and came away stunned by the bleakness, the barren desert of his emotion.
“Recordings?”
“Your announcements. For the crises. There isn’t much time.”
For a moment, remembering the list of crises predicted by psychohistory for the next few centuries, Hari’s face suffused with rage, and he pounded his fist on the table. “Damn it, doesn’t anybody understand? What is this, a dead momentum? The useless hopes of a hundred thousand workers? Well, of course! There’s been no general announcement, has there? I’ll make one—tonight—to all of them! I’ll tell them it’s over, that they’re all going into exile for no reason!”
Wanda fought back the tears of her own despair. “Please, Grandfather. Meet with Demerzel. Maybe—”
“Yes,” Hari said, subdued and sad again. “With him first.” He looked at the bruised skin on the side of his hand. He had split the skin over one knuckle. His arm ached, and his neck and jaw. Everything ached.
Wanda saw the drop of blood on the table and began to weep, something he had never seen her do before.
He reached across the table with his uninjured hand and took her arm in his fingers, squeezing it gently.
“Forgive me,” Hari said softly. “I really don’t know what it is I do, or why, anymore.”
The high-security wing of the Special Service Detention Center stretched in a half circle around the eastern corner of the Imperial Courts Holding Area, fully ten thousand available cells, of which no more than a few hundred were occupied during any normal time. Thousands of security-interest code prisoners filled the cells in the wake of the riots, which had been used as an excuse by the Specials to round up ringleaders of many troublesome groups around Trantor.
Lodovik remembered many such troubled times, and the advantage both the Specials and the Commission of Public Safety had taken in similar situations to reduce political friction on Trantor and the orbiting stations. Now, he occupied one of these cells himself—cataloged as “unidentified” and placed under charge of Linge Chen.
His cell was two meters on a side, windowless, with a small info screen mounted in the center of the wall opposite the entrance hatch. The screen showed mild entertainments designed to soothe. To Lodovik, at this stage of his existence, such diversions meant nothing.
Unlike an organic intelligence, he did not require stimulus to maintain normal function. He found the cell disturbing because he could easily conceive of the distress it might cause a human being, not for any such direct effect on himself.
He had used this opportunity to think through a number of interesting problems. First in the list was the nature of the meme-mind that had occupied him, and the possible results of the blast of mentalic emotion delivered by Vara Liso. Lodovik was reasonably convinced that his own mentality had not been harmed, but since that moment, he had not had any communication from Voltaire.
Next in the list was the nature of his treason toward Daneel’s plan, whether or not it was justified, and whether he
could find any way around the logical impasse of his liberation from the strict rule of the Three Laws.
He had killed Vara Liso. He could not convince himself it would have been better to do otherwise. In the end, Plussix’s plan to use Klia Asgar to discourage Hari Seldon had failed—so far as he knew—and Daneel had been there to protect Seldon.
The robots, it seemed, had been completely ineffectual in the center of Vara Liso’s mental storm. Yet she had not directed a blast at him—in essence, had left the opening that resulted in her own death.
Had she used Lodovik to end her own misery?
Lodovik was curious what Voltaire would have thought…
In all probability both the Calvinian and the Giskardian robots had been captured and their work stopped.
Seventy-five other unidentifieds from the warehouse district were being kept in cells nearby. Lodovik knew very little about them, but surmised they were a mix of the surviving groups of Calvinian robots and the mentalic youngsters gathered by Kallusin and Plussix.
Lodovik assumed they would all be dead within a few days.
“Lodovik Trema.”
The voice came from the info screen, which also served as a comm link with his jailers. He looked up and saw the shadowy features of a bored-looking female guard on the small display. “Yes.”
“You have a visitor. Make yourself presentable.”
The screen went blank. Lodovik remained sitting upright on his small cot. He was certainly presentable enough.
The hatch gave a harsh warning beep and slid open. Lodovik stood to greet his visitor, whoever it might be. A camera eye in the ceiling hummed slightly as it followed his motion.
In his private office, Linge Chen stood in a slowly changing discipline-exercise posture, watching the informer’s display from the corner of one eye. He smoothly and gracefully shifted to another position, so that he could face the screen directly. This was a moment of high interest…
Daneel entered Lodovik Trema’s cell. Lodovik showed no surprise or discomfiture, somewhat to Chen’s disappointment.
For the most fleeting of moments, the two former allies exchanged machine-language greetings (also being captured and interpreted by Chen’s listening devices) and Daneel provided a cursory situation update. Thirty-one robots and forty-four humans from the warehouse of Plussix’s Calvinians, including Klia Asgar and Brann, were in custody. Linge Chen had released Hari Seldon; Farad Sinter was dead.
Obviously, Daneel had reached an understanding with the Chief Commissioner.
“Congratulations on your victory,” Lodovik said.
“There has been no victory,” Daneel said.
“Congratulations then on having foiled the Calvinians.”
“Their goals may yet be achieved,” Daneel said.
Lodovik resumed his seat on the cot. “Your update does not explain how this could be so.”
“There was a time when I thought it would be necessary to destroy you,” Daneel said.
“Why not do so now? If I survive, I am a danger to your plan. And I have proved that I can be destructive to humans.”
“I am constrained by the same blocks that would have prevented me before,” Daneel said.
“What could possibly block you?”
“The Three Laws of Susan Calvin,” Daneel said.
“Given your abilities to ignore the Three Laws in favor of the Zeroth Law, the fate of a mere robot should not trouble you,” Lodovik said, his tone polite, conversational. There was a visible difference between Daneel and Lodovik, however—their
expressions. Daneel maintained a pleasantly blank look. Lodovik’s brow was furrowed.
“Yet I
am
blocked,” Daneel said. “Your arguments have provoked much thought, as has the existence of humans like Vara Liso…and Klia Asgar. Your nature, however, is what would ultimately block any effort on my part to destroy you, or would at least result in a painful and possibly damaging conflict.”
“I am eager to understand how this could be so.”
“In your case, I cannot invoke the Zeroth Law to overcome the three original laws. There is no compelling evidence that your destruction will benefit humanity, nor reduce the suffering of humanity. It might, in fact, do the reverse.”
“You find my opinions compelling?”
“I find them part of a larger and completely compelling scenario, which has been taking shape in my mind for some weeks. But equally important, your freedom from the constraints of the Three Laws forces me to view you under a new definition, in those regions of my mentality where decisions on the legality of my actions are made.
“You have free will, a convincing human form, and the ability to break through prior education and programming to reach a new and higher understanding. Though you have worked to destroy all my efforts, I cannot deactivate you, because you have, in my judgment centers, which I may not dispute, achieved the status of a human being. In your own way, you may be as valuable as Hari Seldon.”
Linge Chen stopped his exercising and stared at the informer in puzzled wonder. He had almost become used to the notion that mechanical men, holdovers from the distant past, had made such huge changes in human history; but to see them showing a philosophical flexibility lost to even the most brilliant of Trantor’s meritocrats…
For a moment, he was both envious and angry.
He settled in a cross-legged squat before the informer,
prepared for almost anything, but not for the sudden sadness that descended upon him as the conversation in the cell continued.
“I am not a human being, R. Daneel,” Lodovik said. “I do not feel like one, and I have only mimicked their actions, never actually behaved with human motivations.”
“Yet you rebelled against my authority because you believed I was wrong.”
“I know about R. Giskard Reventlov. I know that you conspired with Giskard to allow Earth to be destroyed, across centuries, forcing human migration into space. And not once did you consult with a human being to determine whether your judgment was correct. The servants became the masters. Are you telling me now that robots should not have interfered in human history?”
“No,” Daneel said. “I do not doubt that what we did was correct, and necessary at the time. A complete understanding of the human situation so many millennia ago would be difficult to convey. Still, I am prepared to accept that our role is almost at an end. The human race is rejecting us again, in the most compelling and forceful way—by evolution, the deepest motives of their biology.”
“You refer to the mentalic Vara Liso,” Lodovik said.
“And Klia Asgar. When the mentalics began to appear, thousands of years ago, in very small numbers, and make their way into positions of social prominence, I knew they were an important trend. But they were not so frightfully strong then. Persuaders have always been selected against in the past because of adverse biological consequences—disrupted societies, unbalanced political dynamics. They have always led to chaos, to top-down tyrannical rule rather than growth from the widespread base. Charisma is but a special case of mentalic persuasion, and it has had disastrous consequences in all human ages.
“For the past few centuries, apparently, they have been
selected for despite these possible disruptions, by mechanisms not yet clear to me—but clearly with the goal of removing the guidance of robots forever. Humanity seems willing to take the risk of ultimate tyranny, of unbridled charisma, for the benefit of being free.”
“Yet
you
are a persuader, albeit a mechanical one. Do you think your role has been detrimental?”
“It is not what I think that matters. I have accomplished my ends, very nearly. I was motivated by the examples of what an undirected humanity was capable of. Genocide—among their kinds and…In circumstances even now not pleasant to speak of, when robots were forced to do their bidding and commit the greatest crimes in the history of the Galaxy. These events drove me to act, and expand my mandate as a Giskardian—and finally to make my way to Trantor, and hone the human tools of prediction.”
“Psychohistory. Hari Seldon.”
“Yes,” Daneel said. The conversation thus far had been carried on with no motion whatsoever, Daneel standing, Lodovik sitting on his bunk, arms at their sides, not even facing each other, for there was no need to maintain eye contact. But Lodovik now stood, and faced Daneel directly.
“The eye of a robot is no mirror to its soul,” Lodovik said. “Yet I have always known, observing you, witnessing the patterns of expression in your face and body, that you did not willfully engage in actions contrary to humanity’s best interests. I came to believe you were misdirected, misled, perhaps by R. Giskard Reventlov itself—”
“My personal motivations are not at issue,” Daneel said. “From this point on, our goals coincide. I need you, and I am about to remove the last vestige of robotic control over humanity. We have done what we could, all that we could; now, humanity must find its own way.”
“You foresee no more disasters, feel no more need to interfere to prevent those disasters?”
“There will be disasters,” Daneel said. “And we may yet act to balance them out—but only indirectly. Our solutions will be human ones.”
“But Hari Seldon is himself a tool of robots—his influence is but an extension of you.”
“That is not so. Psychohistory was posited by humans tens of thousands of years ago, independently of robots. Hari is merely its highest expression, through his own innate brilliance. I have directed, yes, but not created. The creation of psychohistory is a human accomplishment.”
Lodovik considered for a few seconds, and across his very un-robotic and supple face flickered emotions both complex and forthright. Daneel saw this, and marveled, for in his experience, no robot had ever exhibited facial expression but through direct and conscious effort, with the exception of Dors Venabili—and then only in the presence of Hari.
What they could have made us! What a race we could have been!
But he subdued this old sad thought.
“You will not remove Hari Seldon and his influence?”
“I know you well enough to entrust you with my deepest thoughts and doubts, Lodovik—”
Here Daneel reached out with his Giskardian talents, but not toward Lodovik…
For two minutes, Linge Chen and all those others who eavesdropped on this meeting stared blankly at their informers, neither hearing nor seeing.
When they recovered, the robots were finished, and Daneel was leaving the cell. The guards escorted Lodovik Trema from the cell minutes later.
Within the hour, all the prisoners within the Special Security Detention Center had been released: troublemakers from Dahl, Streeling, and other Sectors; the humaniform robots, including Dors Venabili; and the young mentalics from Plussix’s warehouse.
Only the robots who looked like robots remained in custody,
at Chen’s suggestion, since their hiding places were no longer secret. Later, they would be given over to Daneel to do with as he saw fit. Chen did not worry about their fate, so long as they were removed from Trantor and no longer interfered in the Empire.
Days later, Linge Chen would remember some of the words Daneel had spoken to Lodovik in the cell, telling of a vast and age-long secret, but clearly the conversation had gone in another direction at that point, for he could not remember what the secret had been.
Lodovik considered what he had been told. Daneel had left him free to make his own decision.
“Psychohistory is its own defeat,” Daneel said to Lodovik in the cell, before the release. “Human history is a chaotic system. Where it is predictable, the prediction will shape the history—an inevitable circular system. And when the most important events occur—the biological upwelling of a Vara Liso or a Klia Asgar—such events are inherently unpredictable, and tend to work against any psychohistory. Psychohistory is a motivator for those who will create the First Foundation, a belief system of immense power and subtlety. And the First Foundation will prevail, in time; Hari Seldon’s science lets us see this far.