Foundation’s Friends

by Ben Bova

  “But we all have opportunities now,” Tiffany said. “Don’t you understand?” She almost did. She was closing in on it all the time, she was on the verge of terrific insight. Insight was all you needed to function in this world now, all the rest was just stuff “It’s getting so easy it’s boring. It’s almost like it doesn’t count any more.”

  “I count,” the thug said. Some people kept on insisting. Who could blame them?

  “That’s because you think any of this old stuff still matters,” Tiffany said. She went through the window. This is a reasonable approximation of how it was, I think.

  “Come away, Caroline,” Arnold said. His whisper, sepulchral and unexpected behind her, was a gunshot. She trembled, shook, turned toward him, saw his features suddenly grotesque and brutalized in the odd and terrible flickering light of the chronoscope.

  “Get away!” she said. She felt fear course through her; oddly it energized rather than shriveled, she wanted to leap at him suddenly. If they could finally touch

  He reached forward, touched her wrist, pulled at it. “It’s horrible, Caroline,” he whispered. “You must stop this, you can’t hide, you can’t go away, you have to face this-Carthage burned,” he said. “I know it now, they set fires, they killed-”

  “Go away!” she said again. “I want to look-”

  “She’s dead,” Arnold said. “I didn’t know it at first, I had to look too, yes I did, I went to the library even after everything I told you and I stared for hours, but there comes a time, Caroline, you have to let it go; she’s no longer ours, she’s no one’s, she’s lost to us, lost to everything but the machine. Caroline, we can’t be like so many, we have to get out of the room, we have to have a life”

  He reached forward to disconnect the machine and she did something then, moved, began to deal with him as she must, but after this her recollection was not as clear and she did not want to use the machine to recover that moment, she would let it rest, let all of it rest, only Laurel, his Carthage, his burning…

  You do not have to give so many details, they tell me. They have looked at this and in some ways they make the good sounds and in other ways the bad sounds but what they want to make most clear is that it is not necessary to be as precise as I have been-that is the word they use, “precise”-it is only important to give what they call “an overview.” “Give an overview,” they say. “We have no time, no space, no room for history, we have only an ever-living and continual present, but that present, although it serves us well, must have the slightest amount of justification. If you can give us this, you have given enough.” Who knows “enough”? I have my own plans and abilities.

  I am the first and the last, the only one to give this history, they tell me, the only one to “write” as “writing” is understood in the oldstyle, but I must keep it tightly confined, must control. I do what I can. “Give an overview,” they say, but it is not the over but the under which possesses me, the weight of all that has happened almost obliterating (that is a tough word, “obliterating”) that tiny corridor of light I cast toward our history.

  It took what remained of law enforcement (that which hadn’t gone crooked itself) quite a while to catch up with the outlaws, but when they did, it was all over for the criminal element. No unsolved crimes, no unresolved, unidentifiable remains. You couldn’t even skip school…that is, if your settlement still had access to instruction of any kind. They knew when you were sleeping. They knew when you were awake. They knew if you’d been bad or good.

  “Late meeting. That Ryan account. Should have been here hours ago, I’m sorry. “

  “Don’t tell me ‘Ryan account.’ Who is that blond bitch on the third floor of 242 Oak Street?”

  “What? What?”

  “For someone who says he can’t do a lot of things any more, you can do a lot of things, can’t you?”

  “But the account-the Ryan meeting-”

  “Forget it, Frank. You’re trying to live in a world which doesn’t exist any more. Buy a chronoscope and get out of the house. Because tomorrow the locks are changed and you can’t pick up that kind of detail work on any cheap set you ‘re likely to get. “

  When the feelings passed, when she could focus again, see where she was, Caroline saw something had happened to Arnold, something dreadful had happened, he was lying on the floor in a quiescence she had never known him to have before. But even as she struggled with the impulse to kneel, comfort, hold, help him in some way, call for emergency aid, get the university services there, even as she thought of this, a small and infinitely wise voice within her said, He’s never looked this peaceful before, he has been granted perfect peace, the peace that Laurel has. Go to her, go to her again now, understand her peace and try to make it her own, and the voice was so utterly attuned to her own necessity, Caroline knew she could do no more, could do nothing for Arnold that had not perished long ago, in the fire, beyond the fire, and turned instead toward the chronoscope, the chronoscope where Laurel, infinitely young, tender, wise, patient

  Where Laurel would tell her what; if anything, to do.

  Procreation became limited, hurried, and-for those who persisted-bizarre. The governments, all of them, China and the Soviet Union and Burundi and Burma, South Africa and Zaire collapsed. Government of any kind was simply unimaginable. There was a futile attempt in some of the countries to confiscate chronoscopes, but that is when the murders began and, having made their point, soon enough stopped: the systems, such as they were, had become invested in the chronoscope, behavior had become circumscribed by its existence. Sixty years after Ralph Nimmo, uncle of the luckless Foster, had turned loose the plans, fled to Australia to successfully impersonate a keeper of aboriginal kangaroos (Foster meanwhile reinventing chronoscopy in custody, creating it over and over again), there wasn’t much public left, and that which lasted was old, decrepit, and resentful of medical facilities and research which had become bare holding operations. There were localities with severely deteriorated communications. There was, always, the chronoscope. “Here it is,” Foster said, handing scribblings to the attendants. “Take it. “

  After a century and a quarter, only a few clots and clans existed in the southern regions of the northern hemispheres, the northern regions of the southern. For this remainder, subsistence level in a subsistence society wasn’t all that oppressive, and there was, of course, the chronoscope, whose limited range was nonetheless able to disclose in all of its fury and chiaroscuro beauty the collapse of Eastern and Western civilizations the century before, and all of the fragmentary, diminished copulation and confrontation associated with that collapse.

  And so, hunched against circumstance, appalled by the news of her father’s death but nonetheless loving and filled with tenderness, Laurel reached out from the interstices of the machine, reached from the dark metal and said to Caroline, “I’ll tell you what to do, oh mother, I’ll tell you just what you need to do but you have to come closer, come closer-”

  As Caroline crept down that corridor of informative light.

  I am the first of a long line to come who again will be able to compose our history. But our history is tense and exhausting, narrow and dangerous, and I see now why they wished me to be explicit, to compress, to hurry along; there is only a little left to tell but nonetheless

  “Remember how you loved him,” Laurel said. “Remember how it was when you came to him for the first time, remember that mantle of love and warmth-”

  “What we’ll do,” said Joan, an impassioned sixteen-year-old, “is run away. “

  “The others will see us. They’ll be able to watch every move.” Bill was eighteen, the levelheaded, farseeing part of the relationship. Or so he told Joan. There weren’t enough their age around to argue for much differences, though. Anyone between fifteen or twenty was mostly the same. Timorous. Except for Joan who had a kind of spirit which was unaccountable and who had plans.

  “We’ll go so far away the old bastards won’t be able to get there. No one
will even look, all they want to do is stare and remember, anyway. We’ll climb mountains.”

  “No matter how far we go, they’ll still be able to watch anything we do. They’ll see everything.”

  “I don’t care. Who cares? Let them watch! They can watch us until I die if they want to. I want kids,” she said passionately, looking at him in that way which so dangerously upset him. “I want a family. I want to have”-she paused-”abandoned sex. Real sex.”

  Bill was timorous but needful. “Yes,” he said. “I do, too. But-”

  “If you don’t go with me, I’ll ask someone else. I’ll ask Dave.”

  “Dave? He’s thirty years old. He’s one of them. All he wants to do is look. “

  “I’ll teach him a few things. He can be taught. There aren’t many of us left, don’t you know that? Do you want the whole world to die?”

  “It’s already dead.”

  “I mean really die. Die out. No more children, nothing. Not even the machines. Most of those damned viewers don’t even work any more, they haven’t been tended in years.”

  “There are probably fertile individuals in other clans. It doesn’t fall only to us. There have got to be others-”

  “Do you want it to end this way, then? Don’t you want me-”

  “Well, sure I want you,” Bill said hopelessly. “I guess I do, anyway. But there will always be someone looking at us, even after everyone here dies. “

  “No there won’t.”

  “Our own children will. “

  “Those machines are breaking down, I told you. We won’t even take one. Let me tell you a secret. I smashed all of them around I could find.”

  “Joan! When?”

  “Just before.”

  “They’ll kill us when they find out.”

  “So I don’t care,” she said. She seized his wrists. “Now you know we’ve got to do something. You know we’ve got to go away.”

  “How many did you break?”

  “A lot. Rust will take care of the rest of them, and I don’t think any of the clan are smart enough to build them again. Don’t you understand? I think they’re really finished with them, now. I think it’s run out.”

  Bill felt her pulling him along. Soon they would be out of the hutch, on level ground, and they could run. Forage from the land, build a settlement. Well, it sounded possible. Anything was possible. Joan was right, no one was going to follow them. They just weren’t that interested. “No more of them?” Bill said hopefully. ”You mean, no more of the machines?”

  “I think not. But to be extra specially certain, just in case any instructions do survive in our new place, we won’t teach our kids to read.”

  “Will it work?”

  She smiled. “Oh, for a while,” she said. “Eventually one of them will learn to write and maybe put all of this down again, but by then it will be too late. And we’ll be free.”

  And in the machine, in that swath of light Laurel had helped her cleave from the darkness Caroline saw them as it had been that night, the first night Arnold had known her, the night Arnold had loved her. She watched the bodies struggle, then slide in and amongst the shining spokes of light and then, in slow and terrible concert, the scene shifted, reassembled, and Caroline saw herself huge and arched against that wedge of vision as she struck the blow which killed Arnold, watched him collapse against her in that parody of embrace, and then the two of them locked, were rolling and rolling on the floor in and amongst the plans, the diagrams, the wires, the nest of that awful machinery. “Oh Laurel,” Caroline Potterly said. “Oh Laurel, oh Laurel…”

  And the fires of Carthage came.

  PAPPI

  by Sheila Finch

  The first thing tim noticed when he entered his old home was the visorphone in the hall flashing to warn him of an incoming call. It had to be for Karin, of course. But who wouldn’t already know she was dead? Karin didn’t have a very wide circle of friends.

  The visorphone’s shrill call noise was irritating. He was tired from the shuttle flight, obscurely annoyed by the obsequious robot attendants, and feeling the pull of Earth’s excessive gravity already. He punched the receive button. The operator’s voice instructed Mr. Tim Garroway to stand by for a call from Mr. Howard Rathbone III.

  Too late to worry about how Rathbone had figured where he’d be going to in such a hurry. He wasn’t cut out to play James Bond games, but he’d felt confident that Earth was the one place Rathbone would never think of looking for him if he made a run for it, since it was where Rathbone had wanted him to go. Obviously he’d under-estimated the man.

  While he waited for the connection to be completed between Earth and the space station up at the Lagrange point that was Rathbone’s corporate headquarters, he glanced through the doorway into the living room to see what Beth was doing. She was sitting cross-legged on the rug, building a tower of books, her small plump face raised to the warm spring sunshine that flooded in through the undraped window. Sunlight sparked her curls to gold, and Tim’s heart lurched as he saw for the thousandth time how like her mother his little daughter was.

  If only Sylvia could’ve seen her now.

  If only the damned emergency-team robots had functioned as they were supposed to.

  He’d gone over and over the options on the shuttle trip from the moon. There weren’t very many in his favor. Running had been an impulse that he’d begun to see might cause him a lot of nasty problems. He waited sullenly for the phone link to be completed.

  The visorphone crackled, pulling his attention back, and the screen cleared. Howard Rathbone III gazed at him from the elegantly paneled office where he kept the helm of his billion-dollar enterprises. Tim had speculated once, on first seeing this magnificent room, how much it had cost to lob all that rare and expensive teak and mahogany and rosewood into space to reconstruct the look of a luxury ocean liner from the 1920s. Sylvia had giggled at his estimate. “Way, way under!” she’d said.

  “Tim. You and Beth had a pleasant shuttle trip, I hope? Of course, you should have consulted me before you took the child along.”

  So the old man wasn’t going to call it kidnapping just yet. Mr. Rathbone was a big man with a big man ‘s hearty voice and manner. And a heart made out of pure moon rock. Obviously he figured on gaining some advantage from playing along with Tim.

  “Fine, thanks, Mr. Rathbone. I would’ve called you to-”

  Rathbone overrode his words. “You and Beth will need some time to recover. Tomorrow will be plenty of time to do what we talked about. You will do it, of course. You have so much to gain!”

  Uneasily, Tim considered how often the man seemed to read his mind. Or was it just that he himself was totally predictable, at least where Mercury Mining and Manufacturing was concerned? Maybe Rathbone was right; there was too much money involved to be squeamish, enough to buy Beth everything her heart desired now and for a long time to come. And was the price really so unreasonable?

  “I’m relying on you, Tim,” Rathbone said. “Triple M’s future is in your hands. But I’m confident you’ll come through for us.”

  Even when he was handing out praise and flattery, Rathbone’s words came out as orders. That was why he’d been so phenomenally successful, building his huge empire in less than two decades since the Second Mercury Expedition.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m a reasonable man, Tim. I’d like to have your willing cooperation. So I’m prepared to explain it all one more time. We must stop this now, before it goes any further. No telling what’ll happen if he gets away with it. Do you understand my position, Tim?”

  Tim nodded, his throat dry.

  “We can’t have all those machines out there thinking they’re entitled to rights and privileges same as humans. And they will, you know, if he gets away with this.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re a bright man. But you’ve been squandering your talents. “

  Not half as vicious as the things he’d said about Tim when he�
��d first learned of Sylvia’s marriage to a penniless student, and her pregnancy, Tim thought. But if he played his cards right…

  Rathbone leaned back in his leather swivel chair, steepled his fingers, and gazed at the father of his daughter’s child. On the wall behind him a map of the inner solar system showed the Rathbone empire in scattered twinkling lights. “I have no heirs except for little Beth.”

  Tim swallowed. His hunger to own and control what the map represented fought another battle with the cautious part of him. The outcome was indecisive again. Yet each time, the hungry side of him crept a little closer to victory. Especially here, in this house.

  “I still wonder if it wouldn’t be better to try public exposure,” Tim said. “You know-subject him to public scrutiny-put him through tests he can’t pass-”

  In the delay that followed, he knew what Rathbone’s answer would be.

  “That’s been tried already!” Rathbone scowled at him across space. “ And failed. There’s no time left for pussyfooting here. He has to be removed. “

  Tim shrugged uneasily.

  “It’s not like killing a man, Tim. Stephen Byerley’s a robot!”

  Rathbone spat the word out, loaded with all the contempt, the hatred, and the fear Tim knew that he felt for robots.

  “Sleep on it, son,” his father-in-law said. In spite of the term he’d used, the threatening tone came through clearly. “I should think the consequences if you fail easily outweigh the demise of one robot.”

  That was the other factor in the equation. If he refused to do what Rathbone wanted, then Rathbone would take Beth away from him. He couldn’t go back to the moon or the space station, and he sure couldn’t stay on Earth any more. There was no place he could hide that his father-in-law’s thugs couldn’t find him. And he certainly couldn’t take up the freelance life of an asteroid prospector, not with a three-year-old to raise.

  The visorphone screen clouded over, and Tim turned heavily toward the living room to retrieve his daughter.