by David Brin
While Gaal Dornick piloted, the nobleman Biron Maserd engaged in futile argument with Wanda Seldon.
“Doesn’t the whole premise of your grand Plan depend upon secrecy? Yet you’re casual about leaving Horis and the others behind on Earth. If they are rescued, or manage to repair their ship, they’ll talk.”
“One can presumeso,” Wanda answered.
Maserd shook his head. “Even if that doesn’t happen, there will be other leaks! Across the centuries, nothing like this can be kept continuously secret. Professor Seldon even recorded messages to be delivered on Terminus long after his death. You can’t be certain that people in the future will lack the means to snoop them ahead of time. I guess I don’t understand your confidence, in the face of such inevitable revelations.”
With nothing else to do at the moment, Wanda took on the aspect of a patient schoolteacher, even though her pupil would very likely forget all of it by the time the ship reached Trantor.
“Inevitable. That’s right, my lord. But psychohistory is largely a study of mass populations. Only under special circumstances do the actions of individuals make that much difference. Under the empire, dozens of social mechanisms have long acted to maintain conservatism and peace, despite frequent perturbations. After the empire falls, different factors will operate. But throughout most of the galaxy the effect will be the same. A vast majority of people will dismiss rumors about robots and humans with mind-control powers. There may be a few paranoid entertainment shows or news exposes-some of them might possibly be accurate in every detail! And yet, these will be nulled out, as people are distracted by everyday needs. All of this is accounted for in the Plan.”
“So you are saying that history’s momentum is unstoppable. In that case, why is your guidance needed? Why a secret group of controllers? Don’t you have faith in your own equations?”
Maserd’s question penetrated Hari’s mathematical trance. It felt like a knife, stabbing an old familiar wound. Wanda’s confident response didn’t ease the pang.
“There may be perturbations that require such guidance. We have run a great many scenarios, speculating about factors that might come in out of the blue, rocking the Plan off its tracks.”
Hari had participated in those computerized extrapolations. The most powerful outside factor to threaten the plan’s stability had been the discovery of humans with mentalic powers. It threatened to make everything completely unworkable-until Hari’s secret sponsor, Daneel Olivaw, offered a solution-to incorporate every known mentalic within the Second Foundation, converting a small society of mathists into a potent force for steering the new society of Terminus past every bump and detour.
“I suppose that’s one approach, and you mathematical geniuses clearly know more about it than I do. But if you’ll forgive an ignorant member of the gentry class for asking-I wonder if you’ve considered an alternative.”
“What alternative is that, my lord?”
“The alternative of sharing the secret with everybody!” Maserd leaned a little closer to Wanda, opening his hands wide. “Publishing the entire Plan, spreading knowledge of psychohistory all across the galaxy, so that members of every social class, from gentry and bureaucrat to common citizen, could run computer models-”
“And what good would that possibly do?”
“It would let every living person deal with their neighbors on a basis of much better understanding! A grasp of human nature that you people are now hoarding for yourselves.”
Wanda stared at Maserd for a moment and laughed. “You are quite right, Lord Biron. The reasonsare too technical to explain. But surely, even on a gut level, you can see how foolish that notion would be! If everyone knew the laws of humanics, and could access them on a pocket computer, the resulting interactions would become vastly too complex for us to model. The Plan itself would vanish.”
Hari agreed with Wanda at one level, and yet was amused-even a bit enthralled-by the young nobleman’s brash notion. It had a flavor of utopianism that one often saw during the early phases of some chaos-renaissance. And yet, there was something aesthetically appealing about its symmetry. Might a population avoid the chaos trap if all its members could use psychohistory to see the pitfalls looming just ahead? If they could recognize the symptoms of chaos, such as solipsism, well in advance?
Of course, Wanda was right. The ramifications could not be modeled. It was just too risky to try Maserd’s idea in the real world. And yet…
Someone sat down nearby, distracting Hari. Mors Planch wore constraint manacles, but was free to move about the cabin. The dark-skinned pirate captain sidled close.
“I don’t want my memory erased again, Dr. Seldon. Your granddaughter just said that your wonderful Plan can withstand it if some individuals know too much. If that is so, why can’t you just let me go when we get to Trantor?”
“You are an extremely dynamic individual, Captain Planch. Naturally you would find some clever way to use the knowledge against us.”
Planch smiled grimly. “So now you’ve become a heretic against your own psychohistory? A believer in the power of individuals?”
Hari shrugged, refusing to answer the pirate’s impudence.
“What if I could offer you something in exchange for my freedom?” Planch said in a low voice.
Hari felt fatigued by the man’s restless motion and relentless scheming. He pretended to concentrate instead on the conversation between Biron and Wanda.
“But will that matter?” Maserd grew increasingly enthusiastic. “Imagine if all of the galaxy’s quadrillions of people could accurately project human behavior, planning to advance their own self-interest, while taking into account the overall health of society. Wouldn’t that be more robust than any single model or plan? Even I can see that most people’s individual strategies will cancel each other’s out. But the net result should be a humanity that’s wiser, more potent, and better able to take care of itself…”
Biron’s voice trailed off. At first Hari thought it was because of the expression on Wanda’s face. He loved his granddaughter dearly, but sometimes she seemed altogether too assured, even patronizing in her confidence as an agent of destiny.
Then Hari saw that Maserd wasn’t even looking at Wanda. The nobleman’s jaw had dropped in an expression of blank surprise. Nearby, Mors Planch stiffened with sudden tension.
Hari sat up straight. Even the equations still darting through comers of his mind abruptly fled, like swarms of skittish flying creatures driven off by an approaching predator. He blinked, staring across the starship cabin at an intruder that had just emerged from a storage compartment… smaller than any adult human, wearing only a pair of shorts on a body covered with altogether too much brown hair. Bony eye ridges protruded from a forehead that vaulted in a way that looked neither human nor animal.
Hari instantly recognized the pan-or chimpanzee-whose feral grin exposed intimidating ranks of yellow teeth. In its right hand, the creature held a bulbous object, a rounded cylinder ending in a flared nozzle. Although not a blaster, anyone could tell it was a weapon on sight. In its other hand, the creature held a recording device, which it activated in playback mode.
“Hello, dear friends,“ spoke the unmistakable voice of R. Gornon Vlimt.“I urge you to remain calm. The creature standing before you, who was undetectable to any mentalics-either robot or human-will not harm anybody. I would never allow that, though you must all now be rendered temporarily helpless to prevent further interference with our plans.
“Please try to relax. We shall speak in person soon…when you stand once again on the surface of the world that engendered us all. “
Gornon’s voice finished, and the playback unit halted with an audible click. At that point, the pan grinned wider, appearing to relish what was about to happen.
Mors Planch and Biron Maserd stepped toward the creature. Men of action, they had silently and swiftly agreed to attack it from opposite directions. Meanwhile, Wanda frowned, concentrating with a furrowed brow, at
tempting with mentalic power to contact and quash the thoughts of an alien mind.
Hari could have warned them not to bother. The chimp pressed the weapon’s firing stub, and a burst of gas jetted into the room, colorless but with a heavy index of refraction, billowing toward every crevice. Hari noticed that the pan wore filters in each nostril.
It’s just as well,he thought.There was unfinished business to settle back on Earth.
That unfinished business had waited twenty thousand years or more. He figured it wouldn’t matter if he must abide a little longer.
Surprised by his own equanimity, with a faint smile spreading across his lips, Hari settled into his chair while everyone else struggled, gasped, and collapsed to the floor. He closed his eyes, letting go of consciousness with a sense of serene expectation.
7.
He dreamed about an old legend he had read once. The tale of a man-doomed to die-who had a rib taken from him as he slept, and who thereby achieved an oblique form of immortality.
Somehow, Hari realized the story applied to him. While he lay helpless, only semi-conscious, someone seemed to reach deep inside and remove a piece of him. An important part. Something precious.
He started to rouse, in order to protest. But a familiar voice soothed.
“Fear not. We are only borrowing. Venerating. Copying.
“You won’t miss a thing.
“Return to sleep, and dream of pleasant things.“
He had no reason to doubt that assurance. So, doing as the voice bid, he relaxed back into slumber, imagining that beloved Dors lay by his side. Sleek and restored. Ever patient and steadfast.
For a little while, it felt as if he, too, had found the trick of living forever.
Having slept through the return trip and much of the next day, Hari stepped down the ship’s gangplank into a chill afternoon on planet Earth. Moving gingerly (because sciatica twinges had returned to his left leg), he shaded his eyes against the glare of distant buildings several kilometers away. The most recent ruins, dating from the early imperial era, shone under the sun like white porcelain.Chica could only have held fifty thousand or so inhabitants, in its heyday. Yet the little ghost town was positively homey next to its neighbor-a mountain of metal, larger than an asteroid-a windowless cave-city where millions sealed themselves away from some unbearable nightmare during the early days of Daneel Olivaw.
Much nearer at hand, nestled among the most ancient university buildings, some of today’s Earthlings had set up a makeshift encampment in order to work for their latest employer, R. Gornon Vlimt. Two of Gornon’s Calvinian assistants directed local laborers who toiled next to a tomblike sarcophagus, more than a hundred meters wide. New scaffolding arose, climbing to a crack in the containment shell. Within, Hari glimpsed the remains of a building more ancient than any he had ever seen. Older than starflight perhaps.
Through the crack poured a throbbing glow, visible even by daylight.
The Earthlings who labored to lash timbers and planks together were pitiful-looking creatures, shabbily dressed and painfully thin, as if they survived on little more than murky air. Their faces were gaunt, and something lurked in their eyes…a flickering that seemed like distraction, until Hari watched carefully. Then he realized the natives were constantlylistening, paying heed to the slightest sounds-the rolling of a pebble or the passing flight of a bee. These people hardly struck one as dangerous up close, though he remembered feeling different when they were shadowy shapes on surrounding hilltops, hurling jagged stone missiles through the night.
“They feel bad about the attack,” R. Gornon explained, introducing Hari to the local headman, a tall, slender being whose speech poured forth in some incomprehensible dialect. “He has asked me to apologize for his people. The urge to attack came over them suddenly and inexplicably. To expiate their inhospitality, the headman wants to know how many lives should be forfeited.”
“None!” Hari felt appalled at the very idea. “Please tell them that it’s over. What’s done is done.”
“I shall certainly try, Professor. But you have no idea how seriously Earthlings take such matters. Their current religion is one of total responsibility. They believe that all of this”-Gornon indicated the radioactive desolation-”was caused by the sins of their own ancestors, and that they remain partly at fault.”
Hari blinked. “They’ve paid off any guilt, just by living here. No one could deserve this, no matter how great the crime.”
Gornon spoke briefly in the harsh local dialect, and the headman grunted tones of acceptance. He bowed once to Gornon and again to Hari, then backed away.
“It wasn’t always like this,” the robot told Hari, as they continued walking. “Even ten thousand years after the planet was poisoned, a few million people still lived on Earth, farming patches of good land, living in modest cities. They had technology, a few universities, and some pride. Perhaps too much pride.”
“What do you mean?”
“Back when the Galactic Empire was first taking hold, bringing peace after a hundred centuries of war and disunion, nearly all planets avidly joined the new federation. But fanatical Earthlings thought it blasphemy for any other world to rule. Their Cult of the Ancients plotted war against the empire.”
“Ah, I recall you spoke of this before. One world against millions-but with horrid germs as allies.”
“Indeed, a biological weapon of unrivaled virulence, derived from disease organisms found right here on Earth. A contagion that made its victimswant to spread it further.”
Hari grimaced. Plague was a factor that could make psychohistorical projections frail…and even crumble. “Still, the plot was foiled.”
R. Gornon nodded. “One of Daneel’s agents resided here, charged with keeping an eye on the mother world. Fortuitously, that agent had a special device, able to enhance neural powers in certain types of humans. By good luck, he found a subject with the right characteristics-especially a strong moral compass-and gave that fellow some primitive but effective mentalic powers.”
“A human mentalic, so long ago? Then why-”
“That man successfully foiled the plot. Thus, indirectly, Daneel’s agent prevented catastrophe.”
Hari pondered.
“Was that the end of Earth civilization? Was the population removed to prevent more rebellion?”
“Not in the beginning. At first the empire offered compassion. There were even efforts taken to restore Earth’s fertility. But that soon proved expensive. Policies changed. Attitudes hardened. Within a century orders were given to evacuate. Only those Earthers hiding in the wilderness remained.”
Hari winced, recalling Jeni Cuicet, who strove so hard to avoid exile on Terminus.
The winds of destiny aren’t ours to control,he thought.
The starship Pride of Rhodia still lay where it had been parked a few days earlier, beyond the north side of the sarcophagus. Only now an encampment of shabby tents stood nearby, living quarters for the laborers. Some tribal folk could be seen gathered around a stewpot, cooking. A whiff made Hari’s nose wrinkle in disgust.
Not far away, he spotted a woman much stouter than any Earthling, dressed in torn garments that shimmered like the radioactive horizon. She paced, lifting a hand in front of her face, uttering some rapid statement, then raising the other hand, in turn. Hari recognized Sybyl, the scientist-philosopher from Ktlina, now evidently snared in a terminal stage of chaos rapture-the solipsism phase, in which the hapless victim becomes enthralled by his or her own uniqueness, severing all connection with the outside world.
Everything becomes relative,Hari mused.To a solipsist there is no such thing as objective reality. Only the subjective. A raging, self-righteous assertion of individual opinion against the entire cosmos.
R. Gornon Vlimt spoke in a hushed voice, so low that Hari barely made out the words.
“Thatwas what the Cult of the Ancients planned unleashing on the galaxy.”
Hari turned to stare at the robot.
&n
bsp; “You mean the Chaos Syndrome?”
Gornon nodded. “The plotters developed an especially virulent form that could overwhelm every social damping mechanism Daneel Olivaw had developed for his new empire. Fortunately, that scheme was thwarted by heroic intervention. But weaker strains of the same disease had already become endemic in the galaxy, perhaps carried by the first starships.”
Hari shook his head. But it all made too much sense. He realized at once-chaoshad to be a contagious plague!
The first time it struck, they couldn’t have realized what hit them. All they knew was that, at the very zenith of their confident civilization, madness was abruptly spreading everywhere.
It was one thing for a renaissance to spoil a modern world like Ktlina, one of millions. But when it happened the first time, humanity had only spread to a few other planets. The pandemic must have affected every human being then alive.
All of a sudden nothing could be relied upon anymore. Anarchy ripped apart the great Technic Cosmopolity. By the time the riots ended and the dust cleared, Earth’s populace had fled underground, cowering in psychotic agoraphobia. Meanwhile, the Spacers turned away from sex, love, and every wholesome joy.
Hari turned to look back at the robot.
“Of course you realize what this means?”
R. Gornon nodded. “It is one of the last keys to a puzzle you’ve been trying to solve all your life. The reason why humanity can’t be allowed to govern itself, or permitted to strive unfettered toward its full potential. Whenever your race grows too ambitious, this illness surges out of dormancy, wrecking everything.”
They were now among the tents. Hari saw that other members of the Ktlina crew weren’t faring any better than Sybyl. One of the surviving soldiers stared blankly into space, while a native woman tried to spoon-feed him. Another sat cross-legged on the ground, enthusiastically explaining to a small crowd of infants, no more than two years old, why nano-transcendentalism was superior to neo-Ruellianism.