by David Brin
For the present, ship traffic was taking over the great bulk of travel and commerce in the galaxy. But a few routes were still covered by another, entirely separate transportation system. One that was much faster and more convenient.
Star-shunts.
In Hari’s youth, there had been hundreds of wormhole links--penetrating the fabric of space-time from one far-flung part of the galaxy to another. Only a dozen or so remained, most of those connected to a single spot close to the orbit of Trantor. According to his equations, those would be abandoned, too, in just a few decades.
“Get ready!” the young porter cried.
Orion Station seemed to rush toward the view screen. At the last instant, a huge manipulator arm rushed out of nowhere to seize their transport car with a sudden shudder. Amid whirling sensations, the compact vehicle was plucked off the tether and slipped into a long, slender gun barrel aimed at distant space.
The outside view was swallowed in blackness.
Horis Antic let out a low moan. Some things you just never get used to, Hari thought, trying to keep his thoughts abstract, waiting for the pulse gun to fire.
Hyperspatial starships were big, bulky, and relatively slow. But the basic technology was so reliable and easy to maintain that some fallen cultures had been known to keep their fleets going even after they lost the ability to generate proton-fusion power. In contrast, star-shunts relied on deep understanding of physics and tremendous engineering competence. When the empire no longer produced enough proficient workers, the network entered steep decline.
Some blamed decadence or failing education systems. Others said it was caused by chaos worlds, whose seductive cultural attraction often drew creative people from all across the galaxy...until each “renaissance” imploded.
Hari’s equations told complex reasons for a fall that began centuries ago. A collapse Daneel Olivaw had been fighting against since long before Hari’s birth.
I’d hate to be riding one of these shunts thirty years from now, when the declining competence curve finally crosses a threshold of
His thought was cut off as the gun fired, sending their car hurtling through a hyperspacial microshunt to a spot fifty light-minutes away from Trantor, where the real wormhole waited. Entry wasn’t especially smooth, and wrenching sensations made Hari’s gut chum. He sighed under his breath. “Dors!”
There followed a series of rocking motions while they hurtled down the well-traveled maw of a giant cavity in spacetime. The seat monitors roiled with mad colors as holovideo computers failed to make sense of the maelstrom outside. This mode of transport had disadvantages, all right. And yet,
Hari reminded himself of one basic fact about shunting--the single trait that still made it highly attractive compared to traveling by ship. Almost as soon as any shunt journey had begun...
...it was over.
Abruptly, the view screens transformed once again, showing a familiar dusty spray of stars in the galactic center. Hari felt several bumps as the car was relayed by micros hunt a couple of times. Then, as if by magic, a planet swam into view.
A planet of continents and seas and mountain ranges, where cities glittered as part of the landscape, instead of utterly dominating it. A beautiful world that Hari used to visit all the time when he was First Minister, accompanied by his gracious and beautiful wife, back in the days when he and Daneel thought that astute use of psychohistory might actually save the empire, instead of planning for its eventual demise.
“Welcome to the second imperial capital, m’lords,” said the young porter.
“Welcome to Demarchia.”
9.
Dors felt obliged to confess.
Her report to Daneel Olivaw kept getting delayed by one thing or another, until she finally arrived back home on Smushell. Then she ran out of excuses.
“I tried to destroy the renegade robot, R. Lodovic Trema, “ she recited in a coded transmission to her leader, keeping her voice levels even and emotionless. “The fact that I failed does little to mitigate my act, which contradicted your apparent wishes, Daneel. I therefore await your orders. If you wish, I will surrender my duties here to another humanoid and proceed to Eos for diagnosis and repair. n
Eos, the secret repair base that Daneel maintained for his cabal of immortal robots, lay halfway across the galaxy. It would be wrenching for Oars to leave Klia and Brann at this point in their lives, when they were creating precious mentalic babies so important to Daneel’s long-range plans. But Dors was used to doing her duty, even when it hurt...such as when she had to leave Hari Seldon.
Daneel knows best, she thought. And yet, it was hard to continue dictating the report.
“I know you haven’t yet declared the Lodovic machine to be a true outlaw. You are apparently fascinated by the way Trema was transformed by the Voltaire meme, so that it no longer felt compelled to obey the Four Laws of Robotics. I concede that Lodovic hasn’t made any overt moves that seem harmful to humanity. So far.
“But I find small comfort in that, Daneel!
“Recall that the Zeroth Law commands us always to act in ways that serve the long-term interests of the human race. This imperative supersedes the classic Three Laws of Susan Calvin. You have taught this dogma ever since the dawn ages, Daneel. So I must ask you to explain to me why you chose to let Lodovic go. Free to run about the galaxy, conspiring with Calvinian robots, and almost certainly scheming against your plans!”
Dors felt her humaniform body throb with simulated emotional tension, from a rapid heartbeat to shortness of breath. The emulation was automatic, realistic, and by now partly beyond her conscious control. She had to suppress the reaction by force of will, just like a human woman who had something important and dangerous to say to her boss.
“In any event, I felt impelled to take matters into my own hands when I met Lodovic on Panucopia. Whatever his subtle reasons were for drawing me to a rendezvous there, I could not afford to let the opportunity pass.
“As we stood across from each other near the Panucopia forest, Lodovic continued explaining his theory about the near-death experience Hari and I went through on that planet, forty years ago. Lodovic claimed the entire episode could only have happened as one of your many experiments, Daneel. Trying to pin down underlying aspects of human nature.
“After listening to this for a while, I decided the time had come. I drew a miniblaster from a hidden slot in my arm and aimed it at Lodovic.
“He scarcely reacted, continuing to describe his conjecture--that chimpanzees somehow play an important role in your ultimate plans, Daneel!
“I recall thinking at that moment how dangerous it would be to let an insane robot loose upon the cosmos. Nevertheless, First-Law impulses made it hard for me to press the trigger and fire at Lodovic’s human-looking features. “
Dors paused, recalling that unpleasant moment. Susan Calvin’s ancient First Law of Robotics was explicit. No robot may harm a human being, or through inaction allow a human to come to harm. So deeply rooted was this injunction that only the most sophisticated positronic brains could accomplish what she did on Panucopia--firing a blaster bolt at a face that smiled with ironic resignation, seeming at the very last moment more like a person than a great many real men she had known. It felt terrible...though not as bad as those two times in her past when the First Law had to be overridden completely.
Those awful days when she had killed true humans for the sake of Daneel’s Zeroth Law.
On this occasion, she felt much better when the body in front of her lost its humanoid appearance, crumpling down to metal, plastic, and colloidal jellies--and finally a positronic brain that sparkled and flashed as it died.
“I kept firing the blaster until the body melted down to slag. Then I turned to go.
“But I had only walked a few paces before...”
Dors paused again. This time she shook her head and gave up reciting altogether. Finishing would have to wait until later. Perhaps tomorrow. The way communications were degradi
ng across the galaxy, the message would probably take weeks to reach Daneel, anyway.
She stood up and turned away from the encoding machine...much as she had done that day on Panucopia, after inspecting Lodovic’s molten body. Excited shrieks and calls had followed her from the nearby forest, shouted by wild creatures whose native thoughts she once intimately shared. Back when she had been Hari’s, and Hari had been hers.
Then, after she had taken several steps back toward the spaceship, a voice called her name from behind.
“Don’t forget to take this with you, Dors.”
She had whirled around...only to see the tiktok, that crude, human-built caricature of a robot, roll forward with a box in its primitive claw-hands. The box containing a twenty-thousand-year-old head.
“Lodovic? Is that you?” she had asked, staring at the clanking tiktok, suddenly realizing how easy it would be for Trema to disguise himself within such a bulky mechanical body.
The clattering machine answered with a voice that buzzed in rough monotones. And yet, Dors detected a tenor of blithe amusement.
“Now, Dors. In light of what just happened, would it be wise for me to answer that question?”
She responded with a shrug. If Lodovic had wanted to retaliate, it would have been easy at that point.
“Did I just kill a doppel? A dummy copy?”
“Will you hold it against me that I was so untrusting, Dors?”
Standing there, as Panucopia’s sun gradually set and their shadows lengthened, she had estimated the odds that Lodovic’s real brain lay inside the tiktok. If so, a second shot would eliminate the enemy for good.
“May I note one interesting observation, Dors?” The automaton had buzzed. “You just used the word ‘kill’ instead of ‘destroy’ or ‘deactivate.’ Shall I take that as a small sign of progress in our relationship?”
She was tempted to use the blaster again. But then, in all probability his real brain was somewhere in the forest, out of reach, controlling doppels from some hidden place of safety. So instead, with a humanlike sigh, she put away the pistol and reached for the box.
“There will be another time,” she said, taking up the burden as gingerly as a human would pick up a crate of poisonous snakes.
“That is what we robots have always been able to say, Dors. But time may be running out for our kind, sooner than you think.”
The only dignified thing she could do at that point was to let him have the last word. So Dors had turned without farewell and begun her long voyage home.
All the way back to Smushell, her sole company had been Lodovic’s gift, the ancient head. For a week it stared at her--metal-skulled and gem-eyed--containing the inactive brain of R. Giskard Reventlov.
Giskard the founder, who long ago helped Daneel develop the Zeroth Law.
Giskard the savior, who sacrificed himself in the act of rescuing human destiny, while ruthlessly destroying humanity’s birthplace.
Giskard the legendary, first of the mentalic robots, capable and willing to guide humans, nudging and shifting their thoughts and memories...for their own good.
Even now, with the ancient treasure safely ensconced in a secret niche of Klia Askar’s house, Dors could not yet bring herself to access its stored memories.
Instead, she stared at it, knowing exactly what she was looking at.
The head was a trap. A lure.
A test of faith, her Joan of Arc simulation would call it, as irresistible as any temptation faced by a human being.
If Lodovic wanted her to look inside, that must mean it contained something intoxicating, possibly a poison.
Something dangerous and unknown, despite the fact that she already had a clear name for it.
The truth.
10.
Looking from his hotel-room balcony across the tree-lined avenues of Galactic Boulevard, it seemed easy for Hari to imagine this was some bucolic world of the periphery, not the “second imperial capital.”
Of course, there were statues and imposing monuments, gleaming in the sun. Countless commemorative shrines had been erected here during the last fifteen millennia, celebrating emperors and prefects, victories and victims, great events and greater accomplishments. Still, in contrast to mighty Trantor, everything seemed small of scale and slow of pace, befitting Demarchia’s true status as the forgotten junior partner, forsaken by power.
Even the Eight Houses of Parliament, glorious white structures that shone like diadems in a ring around Deliberation Hill, seemed somehow forlorn and irrelevant. Each of the five social castes still sent representatives to argue over points of law. And the three upper chambers occasionally managed to agree upon a bill or two. But ever since Hari’s tenure as First Minister ended, there had been very little of consequence to emerge from those sacred halls. The Executive Council on Trantor ruled mostly by decree, and those decrees were largely fashioned by Linge Chen’s Commission for Public Safety.
Not that specific laws mattered very much. Psychohistory predicted what would happen next. If Linge Chen were replaced tomorrow in some palace coup, the momentum of events would impel his successor in identical ways. Some cliques would win and others lose. But over the course of the next thirty years, the average of forces--taken across twenty-five million worlds--would overwhelm any initiatives attempted by commissioners, emperors, or oligarchic cabals.
And yet, a romantic part of Hari always felt saddened by Demarchia. The place struck him as a personification of lost opportunity. A might-have-been.
In theory, democracy is supposed to predominate over all the machinations of the gentry class. Even the worst imperial tyrants have always paid lip service to that principle of Ruellianism.
But in practice it was hard to implement. The Cumulative House, the Senate of Sectors, and the Assembly of Trades were all supposed to compensate for each other’s faults, bringing representatives to Demarchia who were chosen in widely diverse ways. But the net result seemed always the same--a sapping of energy and dynamism. As First Minister, he had found it agonizing to get legislation passed--such as the emergency Chaos Suppression Law--even though his knowledge of psychohistory principles made him unusually effective compared to others.
In those days, Daneel and I still thought it could be fixed...the whole great Empire of Humanity. But back then my equations were still incomplete. They left some room for doubt. For hope.
Since Hari’s tenure in office ended, Demarchia had become a backwater. A place to exile failed politicians. No one of importance bothered with it anymore.
Which suits our purpose in coming here now, he thought with a grim smile. This time, Demarchia was not a destination, but a convenient launching-off point.
“Professor Seldon?” Horis Antic’s voice murmured behind Hari, from within the hotel room. As the next stage of their adventure approached, the portly bureaucrat grew increasingly nervous.
“I--I’ve just heard from the, uh, individual we talked about earlier. He says arrangements have been made. We’re to meet him at his vehicle in an hour.”
Hari touched a control and turned his mobile chair around, gliding back inside. Antic’s convoluted speech, a precaution against possible bugging devices, would almost certainly be futile if they were under serious surveillance. Besides, up until now, no one had committed a single crime.
“Has your equipment arrived, Horis?”
The bureaucrat wore casual clothing. Still, anyone looking at his posture and poor fashion sense would know in an instant that he was a Grey Man.
“Yes, m’lord.” He nodded. “The last crates are downstairs. It was much easier to order the instruments from a variety of companies and have them sent here, instead of to Trantor proper, where there might have been...embarrassing questions.”
Hari had seen the list of tools and devices, and saw nothing that could even remotely be called contraband. Nevertheless, Antic had good reason not to let his superiors know he was spending his sabbatical time pursuing a bizarre “intellectual pastime.”
In fact, Hari had been grateful for the delay while Antic gathered his equipment. It gave him a chance to rest after that harrowing star-shunt ride...much bumpier than he recalled from decades past. It also let him spend time under the sun, remembering Demarchia in the old days, when some of the best restaurants in the galaxy used to line the boulevards, and he still had taste buds to enjoy them...with beautiful, vivacious Dors Venabili at his side.
“All right,” he said, feeling exceptionally alive, almost as if he could walk all the way to the spaceport. “Let’s get going.”
Kers Kantun met them in front of the hotel, next to Antic’s equipment crates. At a glance, Hari knew that his bodyguard had checked them against the manifests and found nothing amiss. Hari acknowledged his servant’s concern without giving it much importance. What did Kers imagine, that Antic had recruited the famed Hari Seldon into some convoluted smuggling scheme?
Their rented van arrived on schedule. The driver took one look at the crates and turned to hail a group of local laborers who were lounging nearby, hiring them on the spot to load the heavy boxes. Antic fretted as they hauled his precious instruments, meant to check out a bizarre theory about planetary tilling and currents of space.
Hari felt less worried, even though his financial contribution to their purchase was substantial. The cost seemed worthwhile if this endeavor might shed some new light on his own concerns. But in the long run, none of it would make any difference to his place in history. For Antic, on the other hand, this voyage was his sole chance to leave a mark on the universe.
A spaceport limo came to pick up the three of them while the cargo van followed behind, moving along avenues clearly designed for much greater traffic than they carried nowadays. Demarchia’s economy was not good. There were many small crowds of laborers, looking for odd jobs.