Foundation's Triumph

by David Brin

  “By god, it’s a chimpanzee!” cried Maserd, raising the pistol.

  Hari motioned for him not to shoot. “A pan,” he corrected, using modern terminology. “Don’t frighten it. Maybe we can...”

  But the animal paid little heed to Hari or Maserd. Casually glancing their way, it strolled past, grabbed the severed head of Kers Kantun from the floor, then scurried onward around the next corner. Soon its scampering footsteps were heard no more.

  Hari and the nobleman exchanged a look of utter perplexity.

  “I have no idea what just happened. But I think right now we’d better hurry back to the ship.”

  3.

  They knew something was desperately wrong before reaching the final stretch of twisty passageway where the Pride of Rhodia was berthed. Half a dozen human figures milled aimlessly outside the airlock--Sybyl and Horis Antic, along with Maserd’s two crewmen and a pair of Ktlinans. They stared at the walls, moving on a few paces, muttering and apologizing as they bumped into each other.

  “We’d better get them aboard,” Maserd suggested

  “And get out of here as fast as possible. I’m not inclined to hang around, looking for explanations.”

  Both men ushered dazed humans toward the airlock. Fortunately, they seemed cheerful. Sybyl even cried out with joy, and tried to embrace Hari.

  Once aboard, they saw one reason for the confusion. All of the lesser mechanoid robots that Kers Kantun had left aboard as nursemaids now lay broken and scattered on the floor. Jeni Cuicet sat amid a jumble of parts, smiling as she tried to fit them together, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Two raiders from Ktlina bickered like small boys, fighting over a shiny eye-cell from one of the murdered machines.

  “I’ll warm up the engines,” Maserd told Hari. “You get everyone together and accounted for.”

  Hari nodded. The gentry class had been fine-tuning its tone of command for twenty millennia. When decisions had to be made without deliberation, one was better off going with a nobleman’s swift gut reaction. As Biron rushed forward, Hari nudged people aft toward the lounge, belting them in comfortable seats. His initial head count came up short by four. After hurrying to scour both ships, he found two more Ktlinans--a man and a woman--hidden in a storage closet, taking comfort in each other’s arms. With a few soothing words, he got them to join the others.

  “Hey, Professor!” Jeni waved, cheerfully. “You should’ve seen it. Tiktoks fighting tiktoks. Just the sight of it made my head feel like it’d split!”

  The young woman was brave and stoical, but Hari could tell that her fever was still bad, perhaps made worse by things she had recently witnessed.

  I’ve got to find the antidote to this stuff Kers used to drug them, so Sybyl can give the poor girl some medical attention. But first priority had to be getting out of here!

  Underfoot he felt the rising rhythms of well-tuned space engines. Maserd was playing his yacht like a musical instrument, skipping over the normal checklist and preparing for rapid takeoff.

  That leaves two unaccounted for, Hari pondered, and turned just as someone’s shadow crossed the portal behind him. Mors Planch stood there, groggily pinching the bridge of his nose. While the others had received some sort of happy juice, Planch was thoroughly sedated by Kers Kantun. He shouldn’t even be awake, let alone walking around!

  “What’s going on, Seldon? What’ve you done...with.?” my crew...my ship?”

  Hari almost tried to deny that this had anything to do with him, but he could not bring himself to lie. It has more to do with me than I ever have wanted.

  He took the dark spacer by his arm. “This way, Captain. I’ll make you comfortable.”

  Just then a blatting siren sounded as vibrations shook the space yacht. Hari and Planch stumbled. The big man was far heavier and stronger. As his muscles spasmed, Planch gripped Hari’s arm so tightly that waves of agony erupted, almost enough to make Seldon faint.

  Suddenly, someone was there, helping pull Mors Planch away, relieving Hari of the burden. Hari realized that the nobleman must still be in the control room, piloting the ship, so it could only be

  Sure enough, the newcomer wore fancy, fractal-plaid pants and an iridescent jacket. It was Gornon Vlimt, the eccentric artist from Ktlina. That’s everyone accounted for, Hari thought with some relief, but also puzzlement. Gornon wasn’t having any trouble focusing attention. Unlike the others, his gaze was steady.

  “Come along, Professor,” Vlimt urged. “We’ll get you settled in. It will be a bit rocky until we get away from this place.”

  Hari sat in a plush chair near the view screen while Gornon strapped Mors Planch in and quickly made sure of the others.

  “I have business in the control cabin, Professor. We’ll talk later. Meanwhile, why don’t you enjoy the view? Nothing like it has been seen for a thousand human generations, and perhaps nothing like it ever will.”

  With that, Vlimt left the lounge.

  Hari had a sudden, wild urge to shout a warning ahead to Biron Maserd, but then felt overwhelmed by fatigue. Anyway, if his guess was right, a warning wouldn’t make much difference.

  The spectacle outside was indeed memorable--a flare of individual archives exploding ever more rapidly to become a virtual fireworks display. Innumerable flashes, each one vaporizing a billion terabytes of information. It took some piloting skill to weave a path amid such coruscating bedlam. But soon Hari saw another mode of destruction ensue in the starship’s wake. The rickety space station that lay at the core of the great archive collection began to glow. Heat emanated from stovepipe tunnels and oblong storage chambers, as the contents of the vast warehouse began to melt.

  I wonder what happened to the other ship. Hari peered about until he spied the Ktlina vessel. It should just be lying there in space, a derelict with no one aboard. But as Hari watched, the sleek craft began to glow with pent-up energies. Maneuvering jets fired, and it began moving in the opposite direction from the course taken by the Pride of Rhodia. Soon its glimmering wake was all that remained. Then Hari lost sight even of that, as an entirely new zone of destruction came into view.

  The terraformers, he thought, staring, as gigantic tilling machines began their own cycle of demolition. Prehistoric starcraft, so ancient and primitive, and yet, so awesomely powerful that they had transformed whole planets, began to shrivel into dust as if they were being crushed by the weight of years.

  A moan escaped Horis Antic as the soils expert pointed at the vivid scene. He was recovered enough from the drugged stupor to understand what this meant. The proof of his hypothesis--a discovery that would be his sole claim to fame among quadrillions of anonymous galactic citizens--was vanishing before his eyes.

  Hari felt sympathy for the little man.

  It would have felt good and right for the truth about this to come out. Daneel claims the tillers were sent forth by a different kind of robot. Programmed by an Auroran fanatic whose fierce notion of service to humanity meant annihilating everything else, in order to prepare sweet places for settlers to land. Daneel disavowed those ancient Aurorans. Yet his logic differs only in that he’s more subtle.

  Hari felt little but a pessimistic certainty. Life brought him nothing but defeats. No sign of his missing grandchild. No validity for psychohistory. And now, for the greater good, he had consented to the destruction of a treasure.

  “Whatever you have in mind for us, Daneel...it had better be worth all of this. It had better be really special.”

  A while later, after the explosions had been left far behind, Hari was dozing when someone dropped heavily into the seat next to his.

  “Well, I’ll be damned if this universe makes the slightest bit of sense,” grumbled Biron Maserd.

  Hari rubbed his eyes.

  “Who is piloting--”

  Maserd answered with a sour expression. “That fancypants artiste, Gornon Vlimt. Seems the controls won’t respond to me any more, only to him.”

  “How...Where is he taking us?”

&nb
sp; “Says he’ll explain later. I thought about giving him a knock on the head and trying to take back control. Then I realized.”

  “What?”

  “Vlimt must be responsible for what happened to Kers Kantun, back on the station. Vlimt was left drugged, like the others, but now look at him! I figure there’s just one explanation. He must be another--”

  “--another kind of robot?”

  This time the voice came from the passageway, where Gornon Vlimt stood, looking as foppish as ever, in the wild clothing of Ktlina’s New Renaissance.

  “I apologize for the inconvenience, gentlemen. But the operation that has just been completed required great delicacy and timing. Clarifications had to wait until success was achieved.”

  “What success?” Hari asked. “If your aim was to recover and use the archives, you failed! They’ve all been destroyed.”

  “Perhaps not all of them. Anyway, the archives were never my principal objective,” Gornon answered. “First, I should elucidate one point. I am not the Gornon Vlimt whom you knew. That man is still in a drugged stupor, riding the Ktlina ship out to a false rendezvous, where he will tell his fellow chaos agents a hypnotically induced story.”

  “Then you are a robot,” Biron Maserd growled.

  The Gornon-duplicate nodded.

  “As you might guess, I represent a different faction than the followers of R. Daneel Olivaw.”

  “Are you one of the Calvinians?”

  The robot did not answer directly.

  “Let’s just say that what took place recently was another skirmish in a war that stretches beyond the reach of even the lost archives.”

  “So you don’t share the aims of the human you replaced? The real Gornon Vlimt?”

  “That’s right, Professor. Gornon wanted to copy and scatter the archives willy-nilly among vulnerable cultures of the empire, creating chaos infections in a million random locales. A catastrophic notion. Your own psychohistory equations would be utterly torn apart, and Daneel’s alternate destiny--whatever he has secretly planned--would be rendered useless. All hope for a strong transition to some bright new phase might be lost as madness ran wild. We’d spend half a million years digging humans out of the burrows they would flee into, once the fever ended.”

  Maserd grunted. “Then you approve of destroying the archives?”

  “It is not a matter of approval, but necessity.”

  “Then what’s the difference between you and Kers Kantun!” the nobleman demanded. Maserd was evidently reaching the limit of his tolerance for mysteries.

  “There are many sects and sub sects among robotkind, my lord. One faction believes we should not be closing doors or sealing our options right now. To this end, we have a favor to ask of Dr. Seldon.”

  Hari laughed out loud.

  “I don’t believe this! You all keep acting as if I’m your god--or at least a convenient representative for ten quadrillion gods--but all you really want is for me to excuse and sanctify plans you’ve already chosen!”

  The robot Gornon confirmed this with a nod.

  “You were bred for such a role, Professor. On Helicon, ten thousand boys and girls were specially conceived, inoculated, and prepped as you were. And yet only a few hundred then qualified for a careful series of conditionings, from education to home environment, aimed toward a specific end. After a long winnowing process, just one remained.”

  Hari shivered. He had long suspected, but never heard it confirmed. Perhaps this enemy of Daneel’s has a reason for revealing it right now? He decided to stay wary.

  “So I was raised to be mathematically creative and unconventional, in a civilization whose every social characteristic encourages conservatism and conformity. But my creativity was guided, eh?”

  Vlimt nodded. “You had to be immune to all the normal damping mechanisms in order for your creativity to flower, and yet a sense of direction was essential, guiding you always toward the same ideal.”

  Hari nodded.

  “Predictability. I hated the way my parents kept bouncing around. All emotions, no reason. I longed to predict what people would do. My lifelong obsession.” He sighed. “But even a neurotic can understand his neurosis. I knew this about myself decades ago, robot. Don’t you think I figured out that Daneel helped make me what I am? Do you imagine that revealing these facts will lessen my loyalty and friendship toward him?”

  “Not at all, Doctor. What we have in mind will not put you in a position to betray Daneel Olivaw. However, we wonder--”

  There came a pause, rather lengthy for a robot.

  “--we wonder if you might relish an opportunity to judge him.”

  4.

  Dors Venabili spent the last part of the voyage transforming her looks. She wanted to conduct her business quickly and be gone without questions. It would do no good showing up on Trantor with the face of a woman everyone thought long dead--the wife of former First Minister Hari Seldon!

  She parked her ship at a standard commercial tether and took the Orion elevator down to Trantor’s metal-sheathed surface. At customs, a simple coded phrase persuaded the immigration computers to pass her without a body scan. Daneel’s robots had been using this technique to slip onto the capital for untold generations.

  And so here we are again, she thought, back in the steel caverns where I spent half my existence protecting Hari Seldon, guiding and nurturing his genius, becoming so good at wifely simulation that my ersatz feelings grew indistinguishable from genuine love.

  And just as compelling.

  Stifling crowds surrounded her, so unlike the languid pastoral life on most imperial worlds. Dors used to wonder why Daneel designed Trantor this way, to be a maze of metal corridors, whose people scarcely saw the sun. It certainly wasn’t necessary for administrative purposes, or to house Trantor’s forty billions. Many imperial worlds had even larger populations without flattening and merging every continent into a single steel-plated warren.

  Only after helping Hari define the outlines of psychohistory did she understand the real underlying reason.

  Way back in the dawn era, when Daneel himself had been made, a vast majority of humans--those on Earth--lived in cramped, artificial burrows, a lingering result of some horrible shock. And across the following millennia, whenever some planet passed through an especially bad chaos episode, traumatized folk often reacted in the same way--by cowering away from the light, in hivelike caverns.

  By designing Trantor this way, Daneel had cleverly preempted that pattern. Trantor was already--by design--just like a planet filled with chaos survivors! Inherent paranoia and conservatism made it the last place in the galaxy where anyone would attempt a renaissance.

  And yet, she thought, a mini-renaissance did happen here once. Hari and I barely survived the consequences.

  A voice jarred her, coming from behind.

  “Supervisor Jenat Korsan?”

  That was one of her aliases. She turned to see a gray-clad woman with mid-level insignia on her epaulets, offering Dors a bow just right for a functionary ranking two levels higher.

  “I hope you had a pleasant journey, supervisor?”

  Dors responded with proper Ruellian courtesy. But as usual among Greys, there was little time wasted in pleasantries.

  “Thank you for meeting me here, Sub-Inspector Smeet. I’ve accessed your reports about the emigration to Terminus. Overall progress appears to be good; however, I observe certain discrepancies.”

  The Trantorian bureaucrat underwent a series of flickering facial expressions. Dors didn’t need mentalic powers to read her mind. Greys who lived on permanent assignment in the capital felt superior to functionaries from the outer spiral arms, especially one such as Dors pretended to be--a comptroller from the far periphery. Still, rank could not be ignored. Someone of Dors’ apparent stature could make trouble. Better to cooperate and make sure every box was properly checked off.

  “You are in luck, supervisor,” the local official told Dors. “A procession of emigran
ts can be seen just over there, entering capsules on the first leg of their long journey.”

  Dors followed Smeet’s extended arm, indicating a far portion of the vast transit chamber. There, a queue of subdued figures could be seen snaking back and forth between velvet guide ropes. Her acute robotic optics zoomed toward the scene, scanning several hundred men, women, and children, each of them carrying satchels or holding the tether of an automatic carryall. The mood was not entirely somber. She witnessed moments of levity, as spirited individuals tried to cheer up their companions. But the presence of Special Police proctors told the real storythat these were prisoners of a sort. Exiles being sent to the very farthest comer of the known universe, never to be let back into the metropolitan heart of the empire.

  The human price of Hari’s plan, Dors reflected. Bound for an inhospitable rock called Terminus, supposedly to create a new Encyclopedia, and thus stave off a looming dark age. None of them knows the next layer of truth, that their heirs will have generations of sensational glory. For some time, a civilization centered on Terminus--the Foundation--will shine brighter than the old empire ever did.

  Dors smiled, remembering her best years with Hari, back when the Seldon Plan was just taking shape, transforming from a mere glimmer in the equations to a fantastic promise--an apparent way out of humanity’s tragic quandary. A path to something bold and strong enough to withstand chaos, bridging the madness and bringing humanity to a new era.

  Those were exciting times. The small Seldon cabal worked frenetically, sharing intense hopes. Along the way, they created a grand design, a tremendous drama whose star players would be these very emigres and their posterity on obscure Terminus.

  Then she frowned, remembering the rest of it--the day Hari realized his design was flawed. No plan, no matter how perfect, could cover every eventuality or offer perfect predictability. In all likelihood, perturbations and surprises would throw the beautiful design off course. Yugo Amaryl insisted--and Hari accepted--that there would have to be a guiding force--a Second Foundation.