Foundation and Chaos (23 page)

An undercurrent of tension flowed along the tiers of slideways of the Agora of Vendors, as if the people smelled some impossible storm coming.

Klia looked up as they walked beside a large courtyard rising through the agora. Her eyes followed a curving support at one side of the courtyard, past hundreds of levels, all the way to the distant ceil, perhaps three or four kilometers above, where the support seemed to blend into perfect golden-clouded sky. Then she looked down through dozens of more tiers, all crowded, the hum of hundreds of thousands of voices echoing up and down them until it became a low, constant roar. Had she ever heard a real ocean, she might have compared the sound to the roll of the waves and tides; but all she could compare it to was the endless bellow of the two rivers, One and Two, somehow channeled and subdued, but no less powerful.

Her nose wrinkled, and she followed Brann closely. The transport, tricked out with decorative wheel covers and a gaily colored tarp folded over its last remaining crate, rolled silently behind them.

They could never catch more than glimpses of the uppermost tiers through the courtyard air passages. The worlds of the baronial families were invisible from this far down in the hierarchy. One or two levels at the bottom of the agora were reserved for the citizens.

Along the lower and middle tiers, the multitudinous social ranks of Trantor’s essential Greys moved in their characteristic subdued clothes, men and women dressed very
much alike, only the numerous children allowed touches of bright color.

The Greys strolling the agora, off watch for the hour or perhaps on yearly two-day vacations, parted for Brann, Klia, and the floating transport, casting looks of dull curiosity at the crates, perhaps wondering if they carried something they could afford to buy, anything, to relieve the boredom…

Klia understood the Greys’ functions well enough—tenders of Trantor’s vast hierarchies of submission and response, allocators of resources and funding, administrators of data inflow, civic and planetary works. Her people had seldom dealt with Greys directly, for they had been overseen by the Municipal Progress Bureau of Dahl, whose ranks were filled with Dahlites handpicked each generation by the Greys of the Regional Works and Energy Council. Naturally, she felt contempt for all such, and had no doubt they would have felt contempt for her, had they even known of her existence.

But now she saw the Greys themselves watched and made uneasy. Police officers strolled this level in groups of three or four, not the officers of the district, but Imperial Specials, the same that had stalked Klia and forced her to seek out Kallusin, the man in dusty green. Families of Greys engaged in browsing the stalls of the vendors drew their children in close and observed the Specials with suspicious eyes, eyes characterized by a flat kind of bureaucratic intelligence. They knew law and social structure, it was in their blood, and they knew something was amiss here, forces out of balance. They withdrew from the arcades and lanes as fast as they could, and this level was quickly emptying of customers.

Brann grimly walked on.

“We should get out of here. They’re probably hunting
us
,” Klia said in a whisper, hanging on his shoulder briefly to bring her mouth closer to his ear.

He shook his head. “Don’t think so,” he said. “We have to deliver this order.”

“What if they catch us?” Klia asked, her face wrinkled with worry.

“Stay calm. They won’t,” Brann said. “I know a dozen secret passages out of here, a dozen shopkeepers right here”—he swung his hand loosely from the hip at the stalls and shops to their left and right—“who won’t mind our passing through.”

Klia drew up her shoulders, not at all reassured. She had been thinking of ways to shake free of Plussix’s control, but not into the arms of the police. And, in point of fact, in the last hour or so, as they had made their deliveries of Anacreon folk-dolls and other baubles, she had given less and less thought to escaping at all…

Brann provided such a masculine contrast to the ethereal, dry, and passionless Greys that he shone like a beacon in Klia’s eyes. She had been thinking, in that instinctive and youthful region below rational assessment, of being strongly tied to this large, powerful male, with his sympathetic black eyes and immense, agile hands. She had thought of the implied benefits of these ties—of privacy and intimacy—and she had wondered what she could do, in private, to impress him.

She felt sure he was thinking many of the same thoughts, and, for once, she believed him when he said he was trying none of his mentalic abilities on her.

The untidy collision of apprehension and passionate speculation gave her a headache. “Let’s hurry,” she said.

Brann shook his head stubbornly. “They’re not after us,” he said.

“How can you be so damned sure?” she whispered harshly.

“Listen—” He pointed into the crowds north of them, thickening and roiling where police were congregating. Klia listened with both her ears and her mind—and felt the unwanted, familiar trace of the woman who had hunted her before. She felt the woman’s awareness feather the
edges of her mind, and she reached out to grip Brann’s arm.

“It’s her!” she whispered. The crowds were moving this way. He drew close and nodded, put his arm around her as if to protect her. Without hesitation, Klia accepted his protection. Suddenly, from the middle of the surging Greys less than a dozen meters away, a small motor cart pushed through, floating a few centimeters above the causeway. On the cart sat a young, blond, clean-faced Imperial security officer, two armed guards, and a small, intense woman with dark frizzy red hair.

Klia felt the woman scanning the Greys to either side, saw her wizened, unattractive face turning back and forth as the cart floated slowly and deliberately through. There was no way out—no exit. Blank walls of closed shops flanked them.

They were within three meters, with only four or five Greys in between, when Vara Liso suddenly swiveled on her seat and stared directly at Klia. Their eyes locked. Klia felt the touch in her mind very strongly, rebuffed it, almost literally pushed the intruder out of her mind—and made Vara Liso jerk on the cart as if stung.

Liso continued to glare at her, then her face was wreathed with a sudden, beatific smile. She nodded briefly at Klia, as if acknowledging an equal, and looked away. The touch dropped to a mere feather again, passed without focusing, went elsewhere.

Brann pulled her gently to one side of the aisle. “She was the one who hunted you—wasn’t she?” he asked.

Klia nodded. “But—she ignored me!” Klia said, looking up at Brann in astonishment. “She found me—she could have had me—”

“Us,” Brann interjected.

“And she ignored us!”

Brann frowned deeply and shook his head. “Kallusin and
Plussix will want to know about this,” he said. “Who is she after now?”

“Are we going back?” Klia asked.

“We have two more deliveries,” Brann said, and grinned down at her with an expression not of stolidity or stubbornness, but of a massive kind of impishness. “Trantor has survived twelve thousand years. This news can wait a couple of hours.”

Lodovik approached the small, thick door in its darkened vestibule. A light flashed on as he touched the door, and a small voice asked for the appropriate code for entry. He spoke the code precisely, and the door opened to let him in.

Within, the library was cast in penumbrous spots of soft golden light. The first room was circular, less than three meters across, with an empty table in the middle. On the table was set a small, angled riser, like a lectern, but obviously meant to hold ancient information devices such as paper books. The table and riser were many thousands of years old, surrounded and protected by a surface-hugging conservation field, not unlike a personal shield.

Lodovik stood before the table and waited for several seconds. A melodious female voice, that of Huy Markin herself, now used by the collection’s automated server, then asked for a subject or subjects to search for.

“Calvin, Susan,” he said, and felt a small shiver within at that ancient and powerful name. He did not expect this blunt approach to work, and it did not. The server listed thirty-two entries on various Calvins, two Susans—all mere thousands of years old, and having nothing to do with the mother of robots. There was no record of Calvinians.

“Eternals,” he suggested, “with reference to conspiracies of immortal beings.” A few seconds later, the server projected a text manuscript onto the top of the table and the riser, giving the remarkable impression of a real and open book.

“‘Myths of the Eternals,’” the server said. “By a committee of three hundred authors, in ninety-two volumes of text with twenty-nine hours of other documentary media, compiled
G.E
. 8045–8068. This is the authoritative work on a subject little studied nowadays, and this is the only known copy on Trantor, or indeed on the prime thousand worlds of the Empire.”

Lodovik watched a chair rise from the floor, but as he did not need the chair, he told it to retract. He stood before the book and began to absorb the material at high speed.

There was a lot of information that seemed completely useless, probably untrue, legends and fabulous stories compiled over thousands of years. He noted with some interest that in the past few millennia, such legends and even this kind of storytelling seemed to have diminished considerably, and not just on the topics of the Eternals: humans on Trantor and most of the prime worlds had simply lost interest in fabulous tales of any kind, or even in the more spectacular episodes of history.

Humanity’s childhood had long since passed. Now, the concerns of the Imperial cultures were strictly practical.

Humor had declined as well; this, he found suggested in an afterword to this set, appended by a scholar less than fifteen hundred years before. Then, suddenly, the recorded image of Huy Markin herself appeared in the small chamber, frozen, with a caption glowing faintly at her feet:
Excerpt from spoken lecture. There was no date given.

“Retrieve and play,” Lodovik instructed.

The image moved and spoke. “The decline of humor and comedy in the myths and entertainments of the modern Imperial culture seems inevitable to the sober gentry and Greys of
our time. But certain meritocrats feel a peculiar lack in the present panoply of the fantastic arts. All has been subsumed by the immediate and the practical; modern humans of the ruling and imaginative classes dream less and laugh less than ever before in history. This does not hold for the citizens, but their humor, for thousands of years, has remained a raucous collection of generic jokes and tales at the expense of other classes, showing little insight and even less effectiveness as satire. All has been subsumed by the quest for stability and comfort…”

Lodovik pushed ahead through this rather long lecture until he found the link with the text he was searching, and his subject. “Some,” Huy Markin said, “have laid blame for these intellectual failures on the perfidious influence of brain fever, contracted by nearly all children at an early age, but somehow never more than lightly affecting the sturdy foundations of the citizens. The gentry and meritocrats, however, according to some statisticians, have apparently suffered substantial losses in intellectual capacity. Legends about the misty origins of brain fever abound. The most prominent myth is of an ancient war between the worlds
Earth
and
Solaria
. Robots, it is said, carried this disease from world to world. Some of these robots…”

Lodovik marveled that this analysis had been judged the product of an eccentric by the University’s finest scholars. Not even Hari Seldon had seen fit to look into the collection—perhaps because of some interdiction by Daneel.

He sped ahead. “…The most common explanation of brain fever in all these myths is that of human competition for the colonization of the Galaxy. Brain fever may have been a weapon in such a competition. But a persistent alternative explanation points to the Eternals, who fought with the servants of Solaria to prevent a hideous crime, the details of which have since been totally expunged from all known records. The Eternals, it has been said, created brain fever to control the destructive urges of a human race out of control.
The Eternals have been described as immortal humans, but have also been described as long-lived robots of extraordinary intelligence…”

There it was again, Lodovik thought. The attempt by robots to control the destructive tendencies of humans—but what was this great crime?

Was it the same crime hinted at by Daneel, supposedly carried out by those robots who, very early on, disagreed with Daneel’s plans?

Daneel was quite obviously an Eternal, perhaps
the
Eternal, the oldest thinking machine in the Galaxy…

The oldest and most dedicated puppet master.

Lodovik looked up from the projection he was reading and tried to find the source of this interjection. The words disturbed him; they did not seem to originate in any of the branches of his mentality.

He remembered the faint touches he had felt on the dying ship, the impressions of a ghostly intelligence interested in his plight. Until now, he had dismissed this as an effect of neutrino damage in his mind; but Yan Kansarv had found no detectable damage.

The memory could be replayed quite easily, and analyzed. The label
Volarr
or
Voldarr
was attached to these faint traces, these subliminal touches.

But nothing useful could be drawn from these memories.

Lodovik resumed his main search, and scanned the main volumes in less than three hours. He could have searched and absorbed the material much more rapidly, but the library displays had been set for human researchers, not robots.

Robots of human or superior intelligence, every volume and bit of documentation in Markin’s library suggested, had long since ceased to function, if they had ever existed at all.

Lodovik shut down the projectors and left the library. As he passed through the impressive doorway, the image of Huy Markin appeared.

“You’re the first visitor in two decades,” the image told him. “Please come again!”

Lodovik stared at the image as it faded. He stepped out from under the overhang that shielded the doorway and strolled along a mid-class tier of the Agora of Vendors, among the Greys. So many pieces to fit together—in a puzzle thousands of years old, with so many pieces missing or deliberately obscured.

What echoed through Lodovik’s positronic brain, cascading into conclusions that reinforced impressions and hypotheses already made, was the effect of Imperial culture (and brain fever?) on human nature. Where once the human race had laughed and reveled in the absurd, in the products of pure imagination, they now earnestly pursued stasis. The leading artists, scientists, engineers, philosophers, and politicians, were eager to confirm the discoveries of the past, not make new ones. And now, few even remembered the past well enough to know what had already been discovered! The past itself was no longer of interest—had not been for centuries, even thousands of years.

The light had gone out. Stability and stasis across millennia had led to stagnation.

Daneel uses his psychohistorian to confirm what he must already know—that the forest is overgrown, filled with rotten wood, desperately in need of a conflagration that he will not allow to happen!

Lodovik paused at a surge of the crowd through the agora, listened to murmurs and shouts. A retinue of Imperial Specials was pushing through the crowd. Lodovik backed away, found an alley of smaller shops. He wanted to avoid making himself conspicuous in any way. He could not know who might be watching—and who might be reporting back to Daneel, human or robot. While he was not yet behaving suspiciously—

Just outside the alley, he heard a woman’s shrill shouts, commands. “Don’t let it get away!”

He paused, turned, and saw two of the Specials turn into the alley, followed by a woman riding a small cart. He felt something brush through him, like a feather, and deduced instantly that the woman was a mentalic.

He knew a little of the mentalics assembled by Hari Seldon to provide a backup and alternative to his First Foundation, but none of them were as strong as this woman—and none of them would have dreamed of pursuing him!

Quite clearly, that was what the woman was doing. She pointed and screeched again. Lodovik knew it would make no difference if he altered his appearance—this woman was fixed on something below the surface.

She recognizes your difference.

Again the voice, the interior presence—producing a cascading conclusion he might not have reached by himself: the woman was feathering the fields associated with his iridium sponge brain!

When pressed, Lodovik could move very rapidly indeed. One moment, the shoppers in the narrow alley of antiques dealers and sellers of trinkets became aware that the Specials were approaching a plump and homely looking man—and the next, he was gone.

Vara Liso stood on her cart, her face flaming with anger and excitement. “He’s escaped!” she shouted, and she struck at the young police escort with her hand, as if he were a wayward child. “You let him escape!”

Then, from another alley, more Specials appeared.

The plump man walked quickly ahead of them, herded by the press of a crowd of shoppers, like unwanted fish pulled together in a dragnet. The Greys expressed their anger with shouts and threats of complaining to their class senate.

Lodovik dared not move too quickly among so many people. He might injure a bystander. This he wanted to avoid at all costs—though he realized that if the situation became dangerous enough, he could injure and even kill a Special—or
that woman—and not suffer grievous damage to his mind.
I am a monster here—a machine without restraints!

“That’s him!” Vara Liso cried. “He’s not human! Capture him—but don’t hurt him!”

Brann urged the transport into an empty alcove as the police pushed by again, hiding Klia with the bulk of his body. “She’s found somebody,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. His face twisted with hatred. “How could they let her loose? We’re citizens, aren’t we? We have rights!” He mumbled these words under his breath; not for some years had anyone from Dahl truly believed all the citizens of Trantor had rights. But the crowds of Greys were becoming uncharacteristically agitated by this going to and fro of Vara Liso and her Imperial Specials. More and more Greys shouted at the passing cordons. The Specials ignored them.

Klia could see their faces as they passed, feel their inner thoughts to some degree: the police liked this work no better than the Greys. They felt out of place; most Specials were recruited from the citizens.

Then her probing mind touched a very peculiar person indeed, some dozens of meters away. Time seemed to slow as she felt a sudden bright impression of thoughts moving at inhuman speed, a silvery glissando of memories, and sensations unlike anything she had experienced before. She let out her breath in a gasp, as if she had been lightly punched in the stomach.

“What is it?” Brann asked, staring down at her with some concern.

“I don’t know,” she said. He shook his head and frowned.

“Neither do I,” he said. “I feel it, too.”

Then, abruptly, all of the odd sensations passed, as if a shield had gone up between them and the source.

Of all things Lodovik needed just then, being detected by another pair of mentalics was not high on his list. He felt a bright triangle forming, with him at one of the vertices, the pursuing woman at another, and two more people—younger—at the third. Then, abruptly, a fog seemed to cover their traces.