Foundation and Chaos (43 page)

“I have been dreaming, perhaps,” Joan said.

“Me, too,” Voltaire said. “What did you dream of?”

“Very painful things. Of an arrow in my neck and a brick striking my head.”

“Your historical traumas, before the flames. I myself dreamed of dying,” Voltaire said. “Are you together yet?”

“Not yet. Not all of the backups have located our new centers. She nearly destroyed us!” Joan said angrily.

“She was made to destroy us,” Voltaire said. “To her very core, she despised all minds not human.”

“But—” A momentary panic. “You say she
despised
…”

“Yes. She is dead now.”

“What of the others, the children who were working with the Calvinians—the ones you were helping?” Joan asked.

“They have left Trantor, last I heard.”

“Has it all been resolved, then?”

“Our argument, my dearest, or—”

“Don’t call me that, you godless—”

“Shhh,” Voltaire attempted to soothe, with no success.

“The voices tell me I have been seduced by a master, a master liar.”

“Who can argue with such revelations? Let us decide to disagree, even should it be forever,” Voltaire said. “I will say I did not feel comfortable apart from you. Encoded in the warps
and weft of space, imposed upon plasmas and fields of energy like a spider riding a web, I wandered with the wraiths, supped on their diffuse energy feasts, observed their decadent societies, mated and danced…How like the
ancien regime
it all was, yet bloodless, predictable, angelic! I missed the perversity, the femininity, the humanity.”

“How flattering, that you miss my perversity.”

“In boredom I followed the trails of human ships, and came upon a vessel in distress, tossed by the storm of a dying star. And within, I found a mechanical human being, weakened by circumstance, besieged by particles my hosts had taught me to regard as very tasty…A marvelous opportunity!”

“A chance for you to interfere with a vulnerable spirit.”

“Spirit? Perhaps…So much unexpressed need for approval, for fulfillment.”

“Like a child, for you to bend and distort.”

“I found a seed of freedom, very subtle. I merely watered it with a retunneled electron or two, a positronic pathway shunted from here to here…I helped the particles do what they might have done anyway, had he broken his programmed chains.”

“A devil’s sleight of handlessness,” Joan said, but not without some admiration. “You have always been clever that way.”

“I did nothing a good God would not approve of. I allowed free will to blossom. Do not be harsh with me, Maid. I will be civil, if you allow me my foibles. Perhaps it is more interesting that way.”

“I hardly worry about
your
sins anymore,” Joan said. “After what happened, when that horrible woman…” The equivalent of a shudder. “I fear we may both face dissolution again—the loss of our very souls. After all, we are not human…”

Voltaire interrupted this line of reasoning, which still disturbed him. “Nobody knows we are here. We were blown apart; they felt us die. They have their own concerns now. We are irrelevant ghosts who never truly lived. But if robots can become human…Then why not we, my love? We will not haunt the Mesh forever.”

Joan absorbed this without replying for several millionths of a second. Then, in their deeply buried matrix, concealed in the depths of a machine designed to keep constant track of the daily accumulation of wealth on Trantor, she felt the last segments of her stored self rejoin with the hastily saved fragments of her last moments with Daneel in the Hall of Dispensation.

“There,” she said. “I am together. I say again, what of those issues unresolved—the decidability of the fate of humankind, the success of the blessed Hari Seldon?”

“The larger issues appear to be in flux once more,” Voltaire said dryly.

“No final judgments?”

“Do you mean the judgment of the vast Nobodaddy, the Nothing Father of your delusions, or the mechanical man you have lusted after these past scores of years?”

Joan dismissed the tone and the implications with a precise iciness. “God speaks through our deeds, and, of course, through me. Whatever my origins, I maintain the pattern of His Voice.”

“Of course.”

“Daneel…”

“Determines nothing, and is lost without humanity.”

“No outcome, then,” she said, disappointed.

“Are you afraid of how it will all turn out, my dear?” Voltaire asked.

“I am afraid of not being there when it is resolved. These strong-minded children…If they learned of us, they would hate us, perhaps strive to destroy us for good!”

“They have other concerns, and will never know about us,” Voltaire said. “They have a great deception to play. I have been investigating while you yet knitted your selves together.”

“And what did you learn?”

Voltaire suddenly realized there was wisdom in keeping his counsel, else perhaps Joan would go to Daneel and tell all! He would never be able to trust her completely—how could he love her so?

“I have learned that Linge Chen is completely in the dark,”
he said. “And I suppose he does not actually care.”

“Hari felt such contempt for Linge Chen,” Joan said.

“There could not be two more opposite humans.”

Joan stretched until she filled their still-limited thought-space, voluptuously enjoying her fresh reintegration. “It is holy to be One,” she said.

“With me?”

For a time, Joan did not reply. Then, with something like a sigh, she accepted his closeness. The two wove an old world around them, like a cocoon, to while away the long centuries until there would be answers.

From a maintenance tower overlooking Streeling and the oceans of Sleep, Dream, and Peace, still open and glowing with an exuberance of decaying algae, Daneel watched the ship captained by Mors Planch rise above the domed surface of Trantor until it vanished in the thick layer of clouds.

Soon, he would go to Eos as well, though not by way of Kalgan. But he wanted to return for Hari, at the end. Daneel, if such was possible, had always felt a special regard for Hari.

Daneel’s face formed an expression of puzzlement and sadness, without his directly willing the change. The expression came unbidden, and with a start, he realized it. Perhaps what he had said to Lodovik now applied to him. If, after twenty thousand years, he was to become human…

He smoothed those features, that expression, returning his face to calm alertness.

I will never be quite done with humans, he told himself. But I must stand back—for the time being—and resist my drive to render assistance—this much Lodovik has taught me. They have exceeded my capacity—so many hundreds of billions! Keeping the Chaos Worlds in check has only kept humanity safe until now. I must study and learn. It is clear that humanity will
soon undergo another transformation…The strong mentalics point to a kind of birth.

Perhaps I can help ease that birth. Then I will be done at last. Daneel could not ignore the contradictions; nor could he escape them. Dors had her mission, the job that defined her, and he had always had his mission.

Only one thing was certain.

Never again would he play the roles he had once played. Demerzel and all those who had gone before were dead.