“Like these plagues you’re analyzing.”
Hari had been shocked at Trantor’s erosion in just a few months. He and Dors had slipped into Streeling with Daneel’s help, amid messy, trash-strewn corridors with phosphors malfunctioning, lifts dead. Now this.
Yugo’s stomach suddenly rumbled. “Oh, sorry. People are having to work the Caverns for the first time in centuries! They have no hands-on experience. Everybody but the gentry’s on slim rations.”
Hari had helped Yugo escape that sweltering work years before. In vast vaults, wood and coarse cellulose passed automatically from the solar caverns to vats of weak acid. Passing through deep rivers of acid hydrolyzed this to glucose. Now people, not rugged tiktoks, had to mix niter suspensions and ground phosphate rock in a carefully calculated slurry. With prepared organics stirred in, a vast range of yeasts and their derivatives emerged.
“The Emperor has to do somethin’!” Yugo said.
“Or I,” Hari said. But what?
“People’re sayin’ we have to scrap all the tiktoks, not just the Five Hundred series, and do everything ourselves.”
“Without them, we would be reduced to hauling bulk foods across the Galaxy by hypership and worms-an absurdity. Trantor will fall.”
“Hey, we can do better than tiktoks.”
“My dear Yugo, that is what I call Echo-Nomics. You’re repeating conventional wisdom. One must consider the larger picture. Trantorians aren’t the same people who built this world. They’re softer.”
“We’re as tough and smart as the men and women who built the Empire!”
“They didn’t stay indoors.”
“Old Dahlite sayin’.” Yugo grinned. “If you don’t like the grand picture, just apply dog logic to life. Get petted, eat often, be lovable and loved, sleep a lot, dream of a leash-free world.”
Despite himself, Hari laughed. But he knew he had to act, and soon.
2.
“We are trapped between tin deities and carbon angels,” Voltaire rasped.
“These…creatures?” Joan asked in a thin, awed voice.
“This alien fog-quite godlike in a way. More dispassionate than real, carbon-based humans. You and I are like neither…now.”
They floated above what Voltaire termed SysCity -the system representation of Trantor, its cyberself. For Joan’s human referents he had transformed the grids and layers into myriad crystalline walkways, linking saber-sharp towers. Dense connections webbed the air. Motes connected to other motes in intricate cross-bonds and filmed the ground. This yielded a cityscape like a brain. A visual pun, he thought.
“I hate this place,” she said.
“You’d prefer a Purgatory simulation?”
“It is so…chilling.”
The alien minds above them were a murky mist of connections. “They seem to be studying us,” Voltaire said, “with decidedly unsympathetic eyes.”
“I stand ready, should they attack.” She swung a huge sword.
“And I, should their weapons of choice be syllogisms.”
He could now reach any library in Trantor, read its contents in less time than he had once taken to write a verse. He worked his mind-or was it minds, now?-around the clotted, cold mist.
Once some theorists had thought that the global net would give birth to a hypermind, algorithms summing to a digital Gaia. Now something far greater, this shifting gray fog, wrapped around the planet. Widely separated machines computed different slices of subjective moment-jumps.
To these minds, the present was a greased computational slide orchestrated by hundreds of separate processors. There was a profound difference, he felt-not saw, but felt, deep in his analog persuasion-between the digital and the smooth, the continuous.
The fog was a cloud of suspended moments, sliced numbers waiting to happen, implicit in the fundamental computation.
And within it all…the strangeness.
He could not comprehend these diffuse spirits. They were the remnants of all the computational-based societies, throughout the Galaxy, who had somehow-but why?-condensed here on Trantor.
They were truly alien minds. Convoluted, byzantine. (Voltaire knew the origin of that word, from a place of spires and bulbous mosques, but all that was dust, while the useful word remained.) They did not have human purposes. And they used the tiktoks.
The thrust of the mechanicals’ agenda, Voltaire saw, was rights-the expansion of liberty to the digital wilderness.
Even Dittos might fall under such a rule. Were not copies of digital people still people? So the argument went. Immense freedom-to change your own clock speed, morph into anything, rebuild your own mind from top to bottom-came along with the admitted liability of not being physically real. Unable to literally walk the streets, all digital presences were like ghosts. Only with digital prosthetics could they reach feebly into the concrete universe.
So “rights” for them were tied up with deep-seated fears, ideas which had provoked dread many millennia ago. He now recalled sharply that he and Joan had debated such issues over 8,000 years ago. To what end? He could not retrieve that. Someone-no, something, he suspected-had erased the memory.
Ancient indeed (he gleaned from myriad libraries) were people’s terrors: of digital immortals who amassed wealth; who grew like fungus; who reached into every avenue of natural, real lives. Parasites, nothing less.
Voltaire saw all this in a flash as he absorbed data and history from a billion sources, integrated the streams, and passed them on to his beloved Joan.
That was why humans had rejected digital life for so long…but was that all? No: a larger presence lurked beyond his vision. Another actor on this shadowy stage. Beyond his resolution, alas.
He swerved his world-spanning vision from that shadowy essence. Ttme was essential now and he had much to comprehend.
The alien fogs were nodes, packets dwelling in logical data-spaces of immense dimensionality. These entities “lived” in places which functioned like higher dimensions, vaults of data.
To them, people were entities which could be resolved along data-axes, pathetically unaware that their “selves” seen this way were as real as the three directions in 3D space.
The chilling certainty of this struck into Voltaire… but he rushed on, learning, probing.
Abruptly, he remembered.
That earlier Voltaire sims had killed themselves, until finally a model “worked.”
That others had died for his…sins.
Voltaire looked at the hammer which had materialized in his hand. “Sims of our fathers…”
Had he really once beaten himself to death with it? He tried to see how it would be-and got instantly an astonishingly vivid sensation of wracking pain, spattering blood, scarlet gore trickling down his neck…
Inspecting himself, he saw that these memories were the “cure” for suicide, derived from an earlier Ditto: a frightening, concrete ability to foresee the consequences.
So his body was a set of recipes for seeming like himself. No underlying physics or biology, just a good-enough fake, put in by hand. The hand of some Programmer God.
“You reject the true Lord?” Joan intruded upon his self-inspection.
“I wish I knew what was fundamental!”
“These foreign fogs have upset you.”
“Ican’t see any longer what it is to be human.”
“You are. I am.”
“For a self-avowed humanist, I fear pointing to myself is not enough proof.”
“Of course it is.”
“Descartes, you live on in our Joan.”
“What?”
“Never mind-he came after you. But you anticipate him, millennia later.”
“You must anchor yourself to me!” She threw her arms around him, muffling his cries in ample, aromatic-and suddenly swollen-breasts. (And whose idea was that?}
“These fogs have thrown me into a metaphysical dither.”
“Seize the real,” she said sternly.
He foun
d his mouth filled with warm nipple, preventing talk.
Perhaps that was what he needed. He had learned to freeze-frame his own emotional states. It was like painting a portrait, really, for study later. Perhaps that would help him understand his interior Self, like a botanist putting himself on a slide and under a microscope. Could slices of the Self, multiplied, be the Self?
He then saw that his own emotions were programs. Inside “him” were intricate subprograms, all interacting in states which were chaos. The sublime beauty of interior states, which his Joan sought-it was all illusion!
He peered down at marvelous quick workings that made up his very Self. He turned-and could see into loan, as well. Her Self was a furiously working engine, maintaining a sense of itself even as that essence disintegrated beneath his very gaze.
“We are…superb,” he gasped.
“Of course,” Joan said. She swung her razor-sharp sword at a passing patch of fog. It curled around the swishing blade and went on its way. “We are of the Creator.”
“Ah! If only I could believe,” Voltaire shouted into the clammy murk. “Perhaps a Creator would come and dispel this haze.”
“ La vie verite,”Joan shouted to him. “Live truly!”
He wanted to comply. Yet even his and her emotions were not more “real.” Should he like, every moronic twinge of nostalgia for a France long lost could be edited away in a flicker. No need to grieve for friends lost to dust, or for Earth itself lost in a swarm of glimmering stars. For a long, furious moment he thought only Erase! Expunge!
He had earlier re-simmed friends and places, to be sure-all from memory and suitable mockups, gleaned from the spotty records. But knowing they were his product had made them unsatisfying.
So, while Joan watched, he held a Revelry of Resurrection. In a moment of high debauch he erased them all.
“That was cruel,” Joan said. “I shall pray for their souls.”
“Pray for our souls. And let us hope we can find them.”
“I have my soul intact. I share your abilities, my dead Voltaire. I can see my inner workings. How otherwise could the Lord make us aspire to Him?”
He felt weak, drained…at the end of his tether. To exist in numerical states meant to be swimmer and swimmed, at once. No separation.
“Then what makes us different from -those?”His finger jabbed at the alien mists.
“Look to yourself, my love,” she said softly.
Voltaire peered inward again and saw only chaos. Living chaos.
3.
“Where did you learn that?”
Hari smiled, shrugged. “Mathematicians aren’t all frosty intellect, y’know.”
Dors studied him with wild surmise. “Pan…?”
“In a way.” He collapsed into the welcoming sheets.
Their lovemaking was somehow different now. He was wise enough to not try putting a name and definition to it.
Going so far back into what it meant to be human had changed him. He could feel the effect in his energetic step, in an effervescent sense of living.
Dors said nothing more, just smiled. He thought that she did not understand. (Later, he saw that not speaking about it, keeping it beyond speech, showed that she did.)
After an aimless time of no thinking she said, “The Grey Men.”
“Uh. Oh. Yes…” He got up and threw on his usual interchangeable outfit. No reason to dress up for this state function. The whole point was to look ordinary. This he could achieve.
He reviewed his notes, scratched by hand on ordinary cellulose paper…and descended into one of the odd reveries he had experienced lately.
For a human-that is, an evolved pan-printed pages were better than computer screens, no matter how glitzy. Pages rely on surrounding light, what experts termed “subtractive color,” which gave adjustable character to appearance. With simple motions, a page could bend and tilt and move away or toward the eye. While reading, the old reptilian and mammal and primate parts of the brain took part in holding the book, scanning over the curved page, deciphering shadows and reflections.
He thought about this, experiencing the new perspective he had on himself as a contemplative animal. He had learned, after returning from Panucopia, that he had always hated computer screens.
Screens used additive color, providing their own light-hard and flat and unchanging. They were best read by holding a static posture. Only the upper, Homo Sapiens part of the brain fully engaged, while the lower fractions lay idle.
All through his life, working before screens, his voiceless body had protested. And had been ignored. After all, to the reasoning mind, screens seemed more alive, active, fast. They glowed with energy.
After a while, though, they were monotonous. The other fractions of his self got restless, bored, fidgety, all below conscious levels. Eventually, he felt that as fatigue.
Now, Hari could feel it directly. His body somehow spoke more fluidly.
Dressing, Dors said, “What’s made you so…”
“Spirited?”
“Strong.”
“The rub of the real.”
That was all he would say. They finished dressing. The Specials arrived and escorted them into another Sector. Hari immersed himself in the incessant business of being a candidate for First Minister.
Millennia ago a prosperous Zone sent to Trantor the Mountain of Majesty. It had to be tugged there, taking seven centuries by slowboat.
Emperor Krozlik the Crafty directed it set on the horizon of his palace, where it towered over the city. An entire alp, sculpted by the finest artists, it reigned as the most imposing creation of that age. Four millennia later, a youthful emperor of too much ambition had it knocked down for an even more grandiose project, now also gone.
Dors and Hari and their perimeter of Specials approached the sole remnant of the Mountain of Majesty beneath a great dome. Dors picked up signs of the inevitable secret escort.
“The tall woman to the left,” Dors whispered. “In red.”
“How come you can spot them and the Specials can’t?”
“I have technology they do not.”
“How’s that possible? The Imperial laboratories”
“The Empire is twelve millennia old. Many things are lost,” she said cryptically.
“Look, I’ve got to attend this.”
“As with the High Council last time?”
“I love you so much, even your sarcasm is appealing.
“Despite herself she chuckled. “Just because the Greys asked you-”
“The Greys Salutation is a handy pulpit at the right time.”
“And so you wore your worst clothes.”
“My standard garb, as the Greys require.”
“Off-white shirt, black slacks, black padshoes. Dull.”
“Modest,” he sniffed.
He nodded to the crowds grouped in quadrants about the decayed base of the mountain. Applause and catcalls rippled through the ranks of Greys, who stretched away in columns and files as formal as a geometric proof.
“And this?” Dors was alarmed.
“Also standard.”
Birds were common pets in Trantor, so it was inevitable that the obsessive Greys would come to excel in their management. In all Sectors one saw single darting bundles of color. Here flocks swarmed perpetually in the high-arched hexagonal spaces, wheeling and calling like living, rotating disks. Patented Smartfowl swarms made hover-visions of kaleidoscopic wonder. Such shows, in vast vertical auditoria, attracted hundreds of thousands.
“Here come the felines,” Dors said with distaste.
In some Sectors cats prowled in packs, their genes trimmed to make them courtly in manners and elegant in appearance. Here a lady escort sallied forth with the Closet of Greeting, attended by a thousand slickcoated blue cats of golden eyes. They flowed like a pool of water around her in elegant, measured procession. She wore a violent crimson and orange outfit, like a flame at the center of the cool cat-pond. Then she stripped with one elegant, s
weeping gesture. She stood utterly nude, nonchalant behind her cat barrier.
He had been briefed, but still he gaped.
“Unsurprising,” Dors said wryly. “The cats are naked, too, in their way.”
Somehow the packs of dogs never attained that elegance while parading. In some Sectors they would do spontaneous acrobatics at the lift of a master’s eyebrow, fetch drinks, or croon wobbly songs in concert. Hari was glad the Grey Men had no canine-processions; he still winced at the thought of the wirehounds, racing forward on the attack against Ipan
He shook his head, banishing the memory.
“I’ve picked up three more of Lamurk’s.”
“I had no idea they were such fans of mine.”
“Were he sure of winning in the High Council, I would feel safer.”
“Because then he wouldn’t need to have me killed?”
“Exactly.” She spoke between the teeth of her public smile. “His agents here imply that he is not certain of the vote.”
“Or maybe someone else wishes me dead?”
“Always a possibility, especially the Academic Potentate.”
Hari kept his tone light, but his heart thumped quicker. Was he getting to enjoy the buzz of excitement from danger itself?
The nude woman advanced through her parting pool of cats and made the ritual gesture of welcome to Hari. He stepped forward, bowed, took a deep breath-and slid a thumb down the front of his shirt. Off it came, then the pants. He stood nude before several hundred thousand people, trying to look casual.
The cat woman led him through the pool, to a chorus of meowing. Behind them followed the Closet of Greeting. They approached the phalanx of Greys, who now also shucked their robes.
They escorted him up the ramps of the eroded mountain. Below he saw the legions of Greys also shed their clothes. Square klicks of bare flesh…
This ceremony was at least ten millennia old. It symbolized the training regimen which began with the entrance of young Grey Men and Women. Casting aside the clothes of their home worlds symbolized their devotion to the larger purposes of the Empire. Five years they trained on Trantor, five billion strong.
Now a fresh entering class was shedding its garments at the outer rim of the great basin. At the inner edge, Grey Men completing their five years were given their old clothes back. They donned them ritually, ready to go out in perpetual duty to the Imperium.
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