Sinter hustled over to Klayus, arms folded into the long sleeves of his Commissioner's
robes.
“What's going on?” Klayus demanded, his voice shrill.
Sinter bowed and looked up from under lifted brows. “I've begun a selective search for
more evidence, as we agreed, ” he said. “Sire, I've been in meeting with the planners for
the expansion of our authority over the Commission of Public Safety-”
“You called out the Dragons, damn you! This is not a state emergency!”
“I have done no such thing, Your Highness. ”
“Sinter, they're all over Dahl and the Imperial Sector and Streeling, thousands of them!
They've put on their guidance helmets, and General Prothon is directing them personally!”
“I know nothing about this!”
Klayus spluttered, “Why don't you know... something? Anything! They've already arrested
four thousand children in Dahl alone, and they're bringing them to the Rikerian Prison for
processing!”
“They would only-I mean, Prothon can only do this, has authorization to do this, if there
is a general insurrection-”
“I've talked with him, you fool!”
Farad's brow creased and he stared at the Emperor with an expression of mixed dread and
curiosity. “What did he say?”
“The Commission of General Security has issued a proclamation of imminent danger to the
throne! The proclamation has your imprimatur, your sigil, as Chief Commissioner!”
“It's a forgery!” Sinter cried out. “I have a select group of Specials searching for
robots. Vara Liso, sire. Nothing more! We are concentrating in Streeling. We have a very
suspicious group cornered in an old warehouse near the retail districts-”
Klayus almost shrieked with frustration. “I've ordered the general to pull back his troops
immediately. He said he will comply-I still have that power, Sinter! But-”
“Of course you do, Your Highness! We must immediately find out who is responsible-”
“Nobody cares by now! Dahl is seething-there's been a lot of economic pressure, social
pressure, and they've always been volatile. My social watchmen tell me they've never seen
so much unrest-four thousand children, Sinter! This is extraordinary!”
“Not my doing, my Emperor!”
“It has your marks all over it. Paranoid delusions-”
“Sire, we have the robot! We're having her memory checked now!”
“I've seen the report-Chen sent it to me fifteen minutes ago. She-it's been in Mycogen for
years, hidden in a private house, kept by a family loyal to the old rituals, the old
myths... it's thousands of years old, and its memory is almost a blank! The family claims
she is the last functioning robot in the Galaxy! It has absolutely no memory of Hari
Sol-don!”
Sinter fell silent, but his lips worked, and his brow seemed almost to double up on
itself. “There's a plan... a plan at work here... ” he gasped.
“Prothon insists he has your order, the imprimatur and sigil of the new Commission-he has
offered his resignation as a Protector of the Empire, his suicide and the besmirching of
the honorable name of his family, if anyone can prove otherwise!”
“Your Highness-Klayus, please, listen to me-”
But Klayus was beside himself. “I don't know what will happen if-”
“Listen, my Emperor-”
“Sinter!” the Emperor shrieked, and grabbed his shoulders and shook him fiercely. “Prothon
escorted Agis into exile! He has not conducted any official campaign since!”
Suddenly, Sinter's face went blank, and he closed his mouth. The wrinkles vanished from
his brow.
“Chen, ” he said, almost too softly to be heard.
“Linge Chen is sequestered for Seldon's trial! Public Safety has come to a standstill.
It's Seldon he's after, not robots, not-”
“Chen controls Prothon, ” Sinter said.
“Who can prove that? Does it matter? Does any of that matter? My throne is very fragile,
Sinter. Everyone thinks I'm a fool. You told me we could make it strong-that I could make
my reputation as the savior of Trantor, protect the Empire from a vast conspiracy-”
Sinter let the Emperor screech, and endured the spittle flying into his face. He was
thinking furiously how to withdraw and regroup, how to dissociate himself from what was
obviously a catastrophe in the making.
“Why didn't I receive the report before you, sire?” he asked, and Klayus shut up long
enough to glare at him.
“What does that matter?”
“I should have received the report first, to interpret it. That was my instruction. ”
“I countermanded your instruction! I felt I should know as soon as possible. ”
Sinter considered coldly what he had just been told, then squinted at Klayus. “Have you
told anybody, sire?”
“Yes! I told Prothon's adjutant that his orders were ridiculous, that we'd, that we'd just
conducted our own investigation-I was grabbing at details, to get you off the hook,
Sinter-I said that you would never have ordered such a large-scale police and security
action-not when our evidence was as yet not definite-” Klayus sucked in his breath.
Farad Sinter shook his head sadly. “Then Chen knows we don't have anything-yet. ” He
pulled Klayus's hands from his shoulders. “I must go. We are so close-I had hoped to
corner an entire cell of robots-”
He ran from the Hall of Beasts, leaving the young Emperor standing with hands outstretched
and eyes wild.
“Prothon! Sinter, Prothon!” Klayus screamed.
There is virtually no information regarding Hari Sel-don's so-called recantation, his
“dark days. ” They may be pure legend, but we have circumstantial evidence from a number
of sources-including Wanda Seldon Palver's autobiographical notes-to suspect that Seldon
did indeed encounter a crisis of confidence, even a crisis of self.
This crisis may have begun immediately after the trial, in the chambers of Chief
Commissioner Linge Chen, though of course we shall never know...
-Encyclopedia Galactica, 117th Edition, 1054 F. E.
The last two days had been so unutterably boring, and he had been away for so long from
his instruments and team of mathists, that Hari Seldon welcomed the brief blanknesses
provided by short naps. The naps never lasted long enough, and far worse were the waking
hours with their own painful blankness: frozen frustration, gelid anxiety, frightful
speculations slumping into tense nightmare with the slowness of glass over ages.
Hari came out of his doze with an unusual shortness of breath, and a question seeming to
echo in his ears:
“Does God truly tell you what is the fate of men?”
He listened for the question to be asked again. He knew who asked it; the tone was
unmistakable.
“Joan?” he asked. His mouth was dry. He looked around the cell for some agency by which
the entity might communicate with him, something mechanical, electronic, by which she
might-
Nothing. The room had been scoured after the visit from the old tiktok. The voice was in
his own imagination.
The chime on his cell door sounded, and the door slid open swiftly. Hari rose from his
chair, smoothed his robe with two wrinkled, bony hands, and stared at the man before him.
For a moment he did not recognize him. Then, he saw it was Sedjar Boon.
“I'm hearing things again, ” Hari said with a wry twist in his lips.
Boon examined Hari with concern. “They want you in the court. Gaal Dornick will be there
as well. They may be willing to strike a deal. ”
“What about the Commission of General Security?”
“Something's happening. They're busy. ”
“What is it?” Hari asked, eager for news.
“Riots, ” Boon said. “In parts of the Imperial Sector, throughout Dahl. Apparently Sinter
let his Specials go too far. ”
Hari looked around the room. “After we're done, will they bring me back here?”
“I don't think so, ” Boon said. “You'll go to the Hall of Dispensation to get your papers
of release. There's going to be a waiver of meritocratic rights to sign, too. A formality.
”
“Did you know this all along?” Hari asked Boon, old eyes boring into the lawyer's with
no-nonsense intensity.
“No, ” Boon said nervously. “I swear it. ”
“If I had lost, would you be here now, or would you be standing in line, waiting for more
work from Linge Chen?”
Boon did not answer, merely held his hand toward the door. “Let's go. ”
In the hall, Hari said, “Linge Chen is one of the most carefully studied men in my
records. He seems the embodiment of aristocratic atrophy. Yet he always wins and gets his
way-until now. ”
“Let's not be too hasty, ” Boon said. “A good rule for lawyers is never to count your
victories before the ink is dry. ”
Hari turned to Boon and held out his hand. “Have you been contacted by someone named Joan?”
Boon seemed surprised. “Why, yes, ” he said. “There's some sort of virus in our
legal-office records. The computers keep bringing up briefs from a case that doesn't
exist. Something about a woman burned at the stake. That hasn't happened on Trantor in
twelve thousand years-as far as I know. ”
Hari paused in the hall. The guards grew impatient. “Put a message in your records, for
this virus, ” he said. “Tell her- it-that I have never talked with God and do not know
what He intends for humanity. ”
Boon smiled. “A joke, right?”
“fust put the message in your files. That's an order from your client. ”
“God-you mean, a supernatural being, a supreme creator?”
“Yes, ” Hari said. “Just tell her this-'Hari Seldon does not represent divine authority. '
Tell her she's got the wrong man. Tell her to leave me alone. I'm done with her. I
fulfilled my promise long ago. ”
The guards looked at one another in pity, obviously thinking this trial had gone on far
too long.
“Consider it done, ” Boon said.
Daneel stood on the parapet of an apartment that had once been a secret hideaway for
Demerzel, and beside him stood the tiktok that had come with the apartment. The apartment
had been sealed decades before and left unoccupied, its lease paid for a century. This
morning, when Daneel had returned to it, to utilize its secret data links to the courts
and the palace, he had found the tiktok activated. He knew immediately who was responsible.
“You have become a major irritation, ” Daneel told the former sim. Though this meme-mind
seemed now to be on
his side, it-she-was far too changeable and humanlike to be trusted completely.
The tiktok hummed quietly. “It is so very hard to manifest in this world, ” Joan said.
“Are you here to await news of Hari Seldon?”
“Yes, ” Daneel said.
“Why not go to the palace, in disguise, and enter the courts?”
“I will learn more here, ” Daneel said.
“Are you irritated that I regard you as an angel of the Lord?”
“I have been called many things, ” Daneel said. “None of them disturbs me. ”
“I would consider it a privilege to ride with you into battle. These... riots... They
speak to me of many political currents. They trouble me. ”
They could hear the noise of people in the streets far below, marching, waving banners,
calling for the resignation of all responsible for the recent police searches.
“Will they blame Hari Seldon or his people, his family?”
“No, ” Daneel said.
“How can you be so sure?”
Daneel looked at the tiktok, and for a moment, the image of a young woman with intense
features and short hair, dressed in ancient buffed and inscribed iron armor, flickered
around the old machine.
“I have been working for thousands of years, making alliances, arranging accounts,
thinking far in advance of things which might be advantageous at some rime. By now, there
are so many arrangements made, that I have my choice of where to exert pressure, and when
to initiate certain automatic procedures. But that is not all. ”
“You behave like a general, ” Joan said. “A general in the army of God. ”
Daneel said, “Once, humans were my God. ”
“By assignment of the Lord... !” Joan seemed shocked and a little confused. She had grown
greatly since her reconstruction and her dialogues, virtual affair, and estrangement from
Voltaire, but old faith dies very hard indeed.
“No. By programming, by innate nature of my construction. ”
“Men must receive God by listening to their inmost souls, ” Joan said. “The dictates and
rules of God are in the tiniest atom of nature, and in the programs of scripture. ”
“You are not human, ” Daneel said, “yet you have a humanlike authority. I warn you,
however, do not distract me. Now is a very delicate time. ”
“The fiery danger of an angel, the compulsion of a general on the field, ” Joan said.
“Voltaire will lose. I almost feel sorry for him. ”
“How strange that you have chosen me, when once you opposed my efforts, ” Daneel said.
“You represent faith, something I will never know. Voltaire represents the power of cold
intellect. I am that, or nothing. ”
“You are far from cold, ” Joan said. “You have your faith, as well. ”
“My faith is in humanity, ” Daneel said. “I recognize laws made by humanity. ”
The voice from the tiktok fell silent for a moment, then, softly, the mechanical tone
conveying little of what must have been the entity's passion, Joan said, “The forces
acting through you are clear to me. What you know or do not know means little. I knew very
little in my time, but felt those forces. They acted through me. I trusted them. ”
Daneel ignored the tiktok and waited for the courts to make their report. One thing in his
plan had gone awry, but he had more than half expected this to happen.
Dors Venabili was not at her assigned post.
Daneel had long ago learned the art of letting certain parts of a plan, even key parts,
act outside of his immediate
control, so long as he knew very well what their direction would be. He had seen that
potential in Dors from the moment she emerged from her refurbishment on Eos.