by Isaac Asimov
But the Pride of Rhodia’s captain seemed as surprised as anybody. His unarmed yacht had been ill prepared for any sort of attack, let alone one launched by such a powerful ship.
As the airlock cycled, Hari kept a hand on Kers Kantun’s sleeve. This situation called for patient waiting. I’ve been around a long time, he thought. There’s no type of person I haven’t learned to handle by now.
But when their captors came aboard, they looked nothing at all like what Hari expected.
Maserd stared in surprise. Horis Antic gasped, and tension rippled along Kers Kantun’s arm.
But Jeni Cuicet clapped her hands and murmured in clear admiration.
“Cool!”
The first one wore a segmented garment that shimmered like an oil slick, flowing across her exaggeratedly pneumatic torso like something erotically alive.
“I am Sybyl,” she said. “We have met before, Dr. Seldon, though I’m convinced you won’t remember me.”
Hari squinted at the unpleasant confusion of colors. A luminescent motif extended even to the woman’s hair, which shifted and gently writhed of its own accord, like a sleeping pet draped across her head. Her face had a stretched look, and he guessed that advanced surgical microadjustments had been used to smooth out age wrinkles, at the cost of giving her skin a paper-thin translucence.
“I would surely remember, madam, if I ever beheld an entrance like the one you just performed. But as your appearance is utterly unmatched in my experience, you’ll have to remind me where and when we knew each other.”
Her eyelids closed, and briefly Hari saw them flash, as if for the barest moment they had become miniature holo screens.
“All in good time, Academician. But first, let me introduce my collaborator, Gornon Vlimt.”
She lifted a hand languidly toward the airlock, through which stepped an exaggeratedly male figure, lithe where Maserd was hefty, but wiry and evidently augmented in ways that bulged through his tight clothes. His garments did not gyre and move the way hers did. But their pattern of weave was complex to a degree that made Hari recall the fractal lichen artwork in the imperial gardens. The mathematical corners of his mind felt instantly drawn, as if to a singularity.
“I am Biron Maserd,” the captain replied. “Since you know the name of my ship, I assume you are also aware that it’s unarmed. We are on a peaceful scientific survey mission. I demand to know why you murdered those policemen and seized us in this way.”
The woman named Sybyl scanned Maserd up and down.
“Why you pompous aristo-throwback! Is that the gratitude we get for rescuing you from arrest? How dare you call it murder for the combat forces of a free republic to destroy their sworn enemies!”
When silence greeted her, she sneered. “Do you mean to say that you really have no idea what this is about? You haven’t heard about the war?”
Maserd glanced at Hari, who shrugged and looked at Horis. Evidently none of them had the slightest idea what she was talking about.
“The war that’s being waged by the whole damned Galactic Empire of Humanity against planet Ktlina!” shouted the man in the fractal bodysuit. Gornon Vlimt grew more agitated when no one seemed to comprehend. “By great Baley’s beard. Sybyl, it’s worse than we thought. There’s been a total news blackout!”
“I figured. But these three, with their contacts, should have heard by now. Seldon has stringers allover the galaxy, feeding him data for his sociomathematical models. The Grey Man and the aristo would have their own sources. I can’t understand how –”
“Oh!” Jeni Cuicet cried. “I’ve heard of Ktlina. It’s the latest chaos world!”
Hari blinked, feeling a dawn of recognition.
“I think... there may have been something about it in one of Gaal Dornick’s reports.”
“Oh, yes.” Horis Antic snapped two fingers. “A notice came down, for star-level executives and above. There’s been a sanitary embargo of sorts... out in far Demeter Sector.”
Maserd made a small nod and grunt of recognition, but no more. It was a big galaxy. Who could be expected to follow every planet-scale event?
Gornon Vlimt uttered frustrated oaths.
“You see, Sybyl? Even at such high levels. They have heard, but they just don’t care. So much for the notion that we only had to get the word out in order for justice to prevail!”
The woman sighed. “That was just a slim hope. Clearly we must try other means, if this war is to be won. The galaxy will be transformed. It just may take a little longer.”
Jeni took a step forward, clearly enthralled by the pair.
“Some of my friends heard rumors about Ktlina from travelers on the Orion elevator. Did you truly escape through a blockade around your planet? What’s it like?”
Gornon Vlimt smiled. “You mean blasting our way out through a cordon of imperial patrol clippers? Outracing all but the best of them, then losing the rest in an ionization cloud? Zigzagging through space to make contact with our spies, and then –”
Jeni shook her head. “No. What’s it like on Ktlina! Tell me about the... renaissance.”
Hari winced. There it was. The word. The rationalization. The name that victims of a devastating social plague often gave their horrible disease, a beloved addiction that swarmed suddenly across a world, filling it with excitement and vividness, just before bringing death, or worse.
Gornon Vlimt chuckled, clearly delighted by her question.
“Where would I find time to describe the wonders! You cannot begin to imagine, dear girl. Think of the stodgy old rules, the repressive traditions, the stifling rituals, all swept away! Suddenly, people have the liberty to speak openly about anything, to stretch their minds in new directions. To be free.”
“No more waiting half a lifetime for endless committees to approve your experiments,” Sybyl added. “No more lists of forbidden subjects or banned technologies.”
“Original art blossoms everywhere,” her partner continued. “Assumptions shatter. Truth becomes marvelously malleable. People follow their interests, change professions, and even social classes, as they see fit!”
“Really?” whispered Horis Antic, who then took a step backward when Hari glanced at him sharply.
Biron Maserd cut in before the two intruders could go on, endlessly praising their new society.
“What was that you said about a war? Surely you aren’t fighting the Imperial Decontamination Service?”
“Aren’t we?” Sybyl and Vlimt glanced at each other and laughed. “IDS ships don’t approach our planet closer than two million kilometers anymore. We’ve already shot down fourteen, just like those Impies who were about to arrest you a while ago.”
“Fourteen!” Horis gasped. “Shot down? You mean killed? Just because they were enforcing the law?”
Sybyl moved closer to Hari.
“The Seldon Law, you mean. A horrid act of legalized oppression, passed when our gentle professor here was First Minister of the Empire, requiring that all so-called chaos worlds be put under strict quarantine. Cut off from trade. And above all, prevented from sharing their breakthroughs with the rest of humanity!”
Hari nodded.
“I helped push for tighter seclusion and decontamination rules, it’s true. But this tradition is over ten thousand years old. No system of government can permit open rebellion, and some kinds of madness are contagious. Any schoolchild knows this.”
“You mean any child who gets brainwashed by the system’ parroting exactly the same rote lessons that are taught in every imperial school!” She smirked at Hari. “Come now, professor. This isn’t about rebellion. It’s about maintaining the status quo. We’ve seen it happen too often. Something new and wonderful starts on some planet, like Madder Loss or Santanni. Or on Sark. Or even in Junin Quarter, on Trantor itself! Wherever a renaissance begins, it winds up being crushed by reactionary forces of fear and subjugation, who then hide the truth under malicious propaganda.”
Hari felt a twinge when Sybyl ref
erred to Sark... and especially Junin Quarter. Something about this woman struck him as familiar.
“Well, this time we made some preparations,” she continued. “There’s a secret network of people from all across the galaxy who escaped earlier repressions in time. Plans were made, so that when Ktlina started showing early signs of a bold new spirit, we all rushed in with the best inventions and techniques that people had saved from earlier renaissances. We urged folks on Ktlina to keep a low profile for as long as possible, while stockpiling trade goods and preparing secret defenses.
“Of course you can’t keep a renaissance hidden for long. People use freedom to speak up. That’s what it’s for! Only this time we were ready before the quarantine ships arrived. We blasted those that approached low enough to drop their infernal poisons!”
Captain Maserd shook his head, evidently confused by the suddenness of this revelation, upending his conservative universe.
“Poisons? But the IDS is charged with helping planets who suffer from –”
“Oh yeah! Helping, you say?” This time it was Gornon Vlimt who answered hotly. “Then why does every renaissance end the same way? In orgies of madness and destruction? It’s all a big conspiracy, that’s why! Agents provocateurs land in secret to start stirring up hatred, turning simple interest groups into fanatical sects and pitting them against each other. Then ships come swooping down to dump drugs into the water supplies and incendiaries to start fires. They pass over cities, beaming psychotropic rays, inciting hatred and triggering riots.”
“No!” Horis Antic shouted, defending his fellow Grey Men. “I know some IDS people. Many of them are survivors from past chaos outbreaks, fellow sufferers who’ve volunteered to help others recover from the same fever. They would never do the things you describe. You have no proof for these insane charges!”
“Not yet. But we will. How else can you explain it when such great hopes and so many bright things suddenly turn to ash?”
Hari slumped a little in his mobile chair while the others kept shouting at each other.
How to explain it? He pondered. As a curse of basic human nature? In the equations, it appears as an undamped oscillation. An at tractor state that always lurks, waiting to pull humanity toward chaos whenever conditions are exactly right. It almost destroyed our ancestors, about the time starflight and robots were invented. According to Daneel, it is the biggest reason why the Galactic Empire had to be invented... and why the empire is about to fail at last.
Hari knew all of this. He had known it for a long time. There was just one quandary left.
He still didn’t really understand the curse. Not at its core. He could not grasp why such an undamped at tractor lay, coiled and deadly, inside the soul of his race.
Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a missing piece came to him. Not a solution to the greater puzzle, but to a lesser one.
“Junin Quarter...” he murmured. “A woman named Sybyl...”
Sitting up, he pointed at her.
“You... helped activate the sims! The ancient simulations of Joan and Voltaire.”
She nodded.
“It was I and a few others whom you hired to help with your ‘experiment.’ Partly at your bidding, and partly through our own arrogant stupidity, we unleashed those two provocative sims at just the wrong moment – or the right one for your purposes – into the volatile stew of poor Junin, just when two major factions were trying to work out their philosophical differences short of violence. In so doing, we unwittingly helped wreck a mini-renaissance that was taking place in the very heart of the capital planet.”
Maserd and Antic looked confused. Hari explained with three brief words.
“The Tiktok Revolt.”
They nodded at once. Although it had happened forty years ago, no one could forget how a new type of robot (far more primitive than Daneel’s secretive positronic kind) suddenly went berserk on Trantor, doing great harm until they were all dismantled and outlawed. Officially, the whole episode was blamed on the chaos in Junin Quarter, just before Hari became First Minister.
“That’s right,” Vlimt said. “By helping incite the so-called revolt, you helped discredit the whole concept of mechanical helpers and servants. Of course it was all a plot by the ruling class to keep the proletarians subjugated forever and in their place –”
Fortunately, Vlimt’s next stream of fanatical invective was cut short, interrupted by a sound from behind – someone clearing his throat by the airlock.
Everyone turned. A dark-haired, dusky man stood there, dressed in a normal gray ship suit, with an efficient-looking blaster loosely holstered at his side. Hari quickly recognized the third member of the raiding party.
“Mors Planch,” he said, recalling their meeting just a year ago, around the time of his trial by the Commission for Public Safety. “So. I knew there had to be somebody competent aboard that ship.”
Sybyl and Vlimt hissed. But the newcomer nodded at Hari.
“Hello, Seldon.” Then he turned to his garishly dressed partners.
“Didn’t I ask you two not to get into a quarrel with the hostages? It’s pointless and tiresome.”
“We hired you and your crew, pilot Planch –” Vlimt began. But Jeni Cuicet burst in at that moment, interrupting with evident excitement.
“Is that what we are? Hostages?”
“Not you, child,” answered Sybyl, whose motherly smile seemed incongruous on her gaudy, made-up face. “You have the makings of a fine recruit for the revolution!
“But as for these others” – she gestured especially toward Hari –” we plan on using them to help win a war of liberation. First for a planet, and then for all humankind.”
10.
THERE WERE PREPARATIONS to make. Plans to coordinate with distant agents of the New Renaissance. Other guerrilla teams had been sent to kidnap important peers of the realm, who would offer much better leverage than a disgraced and forgotten former First Minister. According to Hari’s own self-appraisal, he was about as valuable a bargaining chip as a crooked half credit piece.
Sybyl and Planch chose me for personal reasons, he felt certain. They want revenge for Junin and Sark and Madder Loss. I’ll never convince them that psychohistorical factors doomed those cultural revolutions before they began.
He could foresee one benefit coming from the fall of the Galactic Empire. Although many of the factors leading to chaos outbreaks were still mysterious, peace, trade, and prosperity were among the essential preconditions, and those would be scarce during the Interregnum. People living in the coming harsh millennium would face other kinds of problems. But at least they would be spared this peculiar madness.
Poor Daneel, Hari thought. You set up the empire to be as benign and gentle as possible – distracting the ambitious with harmless games while setting nitpickers like Horis to work shuffling papers and keeping ships in motion. Everything ran smoothly, yet that underlying smoothness created an ideal breeding ground for the thing you feared most.
And the thing that I understand least.
While Sybyl and her colleagues waited to coordinate their actions with other agents across the galaxy, Horis Antic begged to be allowed to continue the research.
“What harm could it do? We’re in deep space, far from any planets or shipping lanes. Instead of just hanging around, we could be discovering something that’s of value to everybody! What if my correlations and Seldon’s equations let us predict where chaos worlds... or renaissances... are likely to appear next?”
“Why? So you could squelch them faster, Grey Man?” Gornon Vlimt sneered.
“May I point out that you people are the ones with guns?” Captain Maserd commented at that point.
“Hmm.” Mors Planch rubbed his chin. “I see what you’re saying. We get the results first. So we might use this breakthrough to find nascent freedom-worlds early and foster their change, preparing so far in advance that the momentum can’t be stopped or quarantined.”
Hari felt a shiver, wonderin
g what Maserd was up to. But the big nobleman wore a poker face. I hope he knows what he’s doing. My formulas aren’t very good at dealing with individuals and groups on a small scale. At this level, Maserd’s political cunning may be sharper than my own rusty skills.
For the first time in many years, he experienced something like fear. His plan to salvage civilization faced one paramount threat – a sudden unleashing of chaos across the galaxy. Hari envisioned this as a splatter of horrid blotches, etching holes in the Prime Radiant, unraveling the gorgeous tapestry of equations, erasing every vestige of the predictability that had been his life’s work.
After some discussion, the Ktlinans agreed to Antic’s proposal. Mors Planch posted some of his crew as guards, and Maserd was told to set a trajectory, continuing their search spiral along a curve denoted in red on the holo charts.
A few hours later, Horis Antic grew excited and approached Hari with news.
“Guess what, Professor! I just added Ktlina to my database of chaos outbreaks, and that one datum refined the model by over five percent! I think I can predict, with some degree of confidence, that we’ll reach the center of a really big probability nexus in just another day!”
The little man had just accomplished, laboring over a computer, what Hari figured out within moments after first hearing the planet’s name. Still, I’m impressed, Hari thought.
“This adjustment will take us straight into a giant molecular cloud,” Maserd commented, when he saw the proposed course change.
“Is that a problem?”
“Not really. In fact, it makes sense. If someone was hiding a boojum, and I had a hankering to find one, that’s where I’d go searching.”
So the Pride of Rhodia accelerated alongside the rebel spacecraft and under the watchful eye of Mors Planch, while others aboard the yacht continued bickering, posing, or evaluating, according to their natures. Hari kept quiet for a while, learning a lot about the Ktlina “renaissance” just by watching its onboard representatives.
Although they claimed that all class distinctions had been erased in their new society, Sybyl still talked and walked like a middle-ranking meritocratic scientist. Her extravagant clothes and cosmetic prettifications were clearly excessive overcompensations, pretending a stylishness she just wasn’t made for. Despite all her shouted tributes to equality, Sybyl kept preening before the aristocrat, Maserd, while barely acknowledging the mere bureaucrat, Horis Antic.