Foundation And Chaos (4 page)

Klia blinked, uncertain whether it was polite to keep staring at his dead eyes. Not that
she cared overmuch for politeness in a situation such as this.

“I'm just a runner and sometimes a swapper, ” she said. “No one pays much attention to me.
”

“I can feel you working on me, Klia. You want me to leave you alone. I disturb you, mostly
because what I am saving has a certain truthful resonance-am I right?”

Klia's eyes narrowed. She did not want to be special or even memorable to this blind man
in dusty green.

She closed her eyes and concentrated: Forget me. The man

cocked his head to one side, as if experiencing a muscle cramp. His mind had such an odd
flavor! She had never experienced a mind like it.

And she would have sworn he was lying about being blind... but none of that was important
in the face of her failure to persuade him.

“You've done well for yourself, for a child, ” he said in a low voice. “Too well. People
are looking for those who succeed where they should fail. Palace Specials, secret police,
not at all friendly. ”

The man stood and arranged his coat and brushed crumbs from the seat of his pants. “These
chairs are filthy, ” he murmured. “Your effort to make me forget was exceptionally
powerful, perhaps the most powerful I've experienced, but you lack certain skills... I
will remember, because I must remember. There are a surprising number of those with your
skills on Tran-tor now; perhaps one or two thousand. I've been told, no matter by whom,
that most of you are marked by a particularly strong reaction to brain fever. Those who
hunt for you are mistaken. They believe it passed you by. ”

The man smiled in her general direction. “I'm boring you, ” he said. “I find it painful to
be where I'm not wanted. I'll go. ” He turned, seemed to feel for somebody to guide him,
and took a step away from the table.

“No, ” Klia said, her voice catching. “Stay for a minute. I want to ask you something. ”

He stopped with a small tremor. Suddenly, he seemed very vulnerable. He thinks I can hurt
him. And maybe I can! She wanted to understand his strange flavor-clean and strangely
compelling, as if within this man, behind flimsy masks of deception, lurked a basic
honesty and decency she had never encountered before.

“I'm not bored, ” she said. “Not yet. ”

The man in dusty green sat down again and put his hand on the table. He took a deep
breath. He doesn't need to breathe,

Klia thought, but put away the absurdity quickly.

“A man and a woman have been searching for your kind for a number of years, and many have
joined their group. I hope they live well where the man and woman will send them; I, for
one, am unwilling to take the risk. ”

“Who are they?”

“They say one is Wanda Seldon Palver, the granddaughter of Hari Seldon. ”

Klia did not know the name. She shrugged.

“You can go to them, if you want-” the man continued, but she made a sour face and
interrupted.

“They sound connected, ” she said, using the word in its derogatory meaning of close to
the Palace and the Commissioners and other government officials.

“Oh, yes, Seldon was once a First Minister, and they say his granddaughter has gotten him
out of a number of tough scrapes, legal and otherwise. ”

“He's an outlaw?”

“No, a visionary. ”

Klia pursed her lips and frowned again. In Dahl, visionaries were a dime a
dozen-street-corner crazies, out of work, out of the grind, most driven insane by their
work in the heatsinks.

The man in dusty green observed her reaction closely. “Not for you? Now, however, another
man is searching for your type-”

“What type?” Klia asked nervously. She needed more time to think, to understand. “I'm
still confused. ” She felt out his defenses lightly, hoping not to intrude in a way he
would notice.

The man flinched as if poked. “I am a friend, not an enemy to be lightly manipulated. I
know there's risk even talking to you. I know what you could do to me if you put your mind
to it. Somebody else in a position of power thinks your kind is monstrous. But he doesn't
understand at all. He seems to think you are all robots. ”

Klia laughed. “Like tiktoks?” she asked. The worker machines had fallen out of favor long
before her birth, banned because of frequent and unexplained mechanical revolts, and the
public distaste for them still lingered.

“No. Like robots out of history and legend. Eternals. ” He pointed west, in the general
direction of the Imperial Sector, the Palace. “It's madness, but it's Imperial madness,
not easy to overcome. Best if you leave, and I know the best place to go... on Trantor.
Not far from here. I can help you make arrangements. ”

“No thank you, ” she said. There was too much uncertainty here for Klia to put herself in
the hands of this stranger, however compelling parts of his story might seem. His words
and what she sensed did not add up.

“Then take this. ” The man thrust a small display card into her hand and stood once more.
“You will call. This is not in question. It is only a matter of time. ”

He stared at her directly, his eyes bright, fully capable.

“We all have our secrets, ” he said, and turned to leave.

Lodovik stood alone on the bridge of the Spear of Glory, peering through the broad
forward-facing port at what might have been a scene of exceptional beauty, had he been
human. Beauty was not an easy concept for a robot to grasp, however; he could see what lay
outside the ship, and understand that a human would think it interesting, but for him, the
closest analog to beauty was successful service, perfect performance of duty. He would in
some sense enjoy notifying a human that a beautiful view was available through this port;
but his foremost duty would be to inform the human that this view was in fact caused by
forces that were very dangerous...

And in this duty he had no chance of succeeding, for the humans on Spear of Glory were
already dead. Captain Tolk had

died last, his mind gone, his body a wreck. In the last few hours of rational thought left
to him, Tolk had instructed Lodovik on the actions that might be taken to bring the ship
to its final destination: repair of the hyperdrive units, reprogramming of the ship's
navigational system, preserving ship's power for maximum survival time.

Tolk's last coherent words to Lodovik had been a question. “How long can you live... I
mean, function?”

Lodovik had told him, “A century, without refueling. ”

Tolk had then succumbed to the painful, murmurous half sleep that preceded his death.

Two hundred human deaths weighed on Lodovik's positronic brain like a drain on his power
supplies; it slowed him somewhat. That effect would pass. He was not responsible for the
deaths. He simply could not prevent them. But this in itself was sufficient to make him
feel weary.

As for the view-

Sarossa itself was a dim star, still a hundred billion kilometers distant; but the shock
front revealed its extended spoor like a vast, ghostly fireworks display.

The streams of high-energy particles had met the solar wind from the Sarossan system,
creating huge, dim auroras like waving banners. He could make out faint traces red and
green in the murky luminosity; switching his eyes to the ultraviolet, he could see even
more colors as the diffuse clouds of the explosion's outer shells advanced through the
outlying regions of the system's cometary dust and ice and gas.

There was so little time to act, nothing he could do...

And worse still, Lodovik could feel his brain changing. The neutrinos and other radiation
had overwhelmed the ship's armor of energy fields, and had done more than just kill the
humans; they had somehow, he believed, interfered with his own positronic circuitry. He
had not yet finished his autodiag-nosis sequence-that might take days more-but he feared
the worst.

If his primary functions were affected, he would have to destroy himself. In ages past, he
would have merely gone into a dormant mode until a human or another robot repaired him;
but he could not afford to have his robotic nature discovered.

Whatever happened to him, there seemed little chance of discovery. Spear of Glory was
hopelessly lost, less than a microbe in an ocean. He had never managed to trace the
malfunction or make repairs, despite the captain's instructions. Being jerked rapidly into
and out of hyperspace had burned out all the circuitry for faster-than-light
communication. The ship had automatically broadcast a distress signal, but surrounded by
the shock front's extreme radiation, there was little chance the signal would ever be
heard.

Lodovik's secret was secure enough. But his usefulness to Daneel, and to humanity, was
over.

For a robot, duty was everything, self nothing; yet in his present circumstance, he could
look through the port at the effects of the shock front and speculate for no particular
reason about physical processes. While not completely stopping his constant processing of
problems associated with his long-term mission, he could drift in the middle of the
bridge, his immediate needs and work reduced to nothing.

For humans, this could be called a time of introspection. Introspection without the target
of duty was more than novel; it was disturbing. Lodovik would have avoided the opportunity
and this sensation if he could have.

A robot, above all else, was uncomfortable with internal change. Ages past, during the
robotic renaissance, on the almost-forgotten worlds of Aurora and Solaria, robots had been
built with inhibitions that went beyond the Three Laws. Robots, with a few exceptions,
were not allowed to design and build other robots. While they could manage minor repairs
to themselves, only a select few specialty units could repair robots that had been
severely damaged.

Lodovik could not repair this malfunction in his own

brain, if it was a malfunction; the evidence was not yet clear. But a robot's brain, its
essential programming, was even more off-limits to meddling than its body.

There was one place remaining in the Galaxy where a robot could be repaired, and where
occasionally a robot could be manufactured. That was Eos, established by R. Daneel Olivaw
ten thousand years ago, far from the boundaries of the expanding Empire. Lodovik had not
been there for ninety years.

Still, a robot had a strong urge to self-preservation; that was implicit in the Third Law.
With time to contemplate his condition, Lodovik wondered if he might in fact be found,
then sent to Eos for repair...

None of these possibilities seemed likely. He resigned himself to the most probable fate:
ten more years in this crippled ship, until his minifusion power reserves ran down, with
nothing important to do, a Robinson Crusoe of robots, lacking even an island to explore
and transform.

Lodovik could not feel a sense of horror at this fate. But he could imagine what a human
would feel, and that in itself induced an echo of robotic unease.

To cap it all, he was hearing voices-or rather, a voice. It sounded human, but
communicated only at odd intervals, in fragments. It even had a name, something like
Voldarr. And it gave an impression of riding vast but tenuous webs of force, sailing
through the deep vacuum between the stars-

Seeking out the plasma halos of living stars, reveling in the neutrino miasma of dead and
dying stars, neutrinos intoxicating as hashish smoke. Fleeing from Trantor's boredom, I
grow bored again-and I find, between the stars, a robot in dire straits! One of those the
Eternal brought from outside to replace the many destroyed-Look, my friends, my boring
friends who have no flesh and know no flesh, and tolerate no fleshly ideals-

One of your hated purgers!

The voice faded. Added to his distress over the death of the

captain and crew of the Spear of Glory and his odd feedback of selfless unease, this
mysterious voice-a clear sign of delusion and major malfunction-brought him as close as a
robot could come to complete misery.

From his vantage in the tiny balcony apartment overlooking Streeling University, R. Daneel
Olivaw could not feel human grief, lacking the human mental structures necessary for that
bitter reassessment and reshaping of neuronal pathways; but, like Lodovik, he could feel a
sharp and persistent unease, somewhere between guilt at failure and the warning signals of
impending loss of function. The news that one of his most valued cohorts was missing
distressed him at the very least in that way. He had lost so many to the tiktoks, guided
by the alien meme-entities, it seemed so recently-decades, however, and his discomfort
(and loneliness!) still burned.

He had seen the newsfilm in a store window the day before, of the loss of the Spear of
Glory and the probable end to any hope of rescue for the citizens of several worlds.

In his present guise, he looked very much as he had twenty millennia before, in the time
of his first and perhaps most influential relationship with a human, Elijah Bailey. Of
medium height, slender, with brown hair, he appeared about thirty-five human years of age.
He had made some small accessions to the changes in human physiology in that time; the
fingernails on his pinkie fingers were now gone, and he was some six centimeters taller.
Still, Bailey might have recognized him.

It was doubtful that Daneel would have recognized his ancient human friend, however; all
but the most general of those memories had long since been stored in separate caches, and
were not immediately accessible to the robot.

Daneel had undergone many transformations since that time, the most famous of them being
Demerzel, First Minister to the Emperor Cleon I; Hari Seldon himself had succeeded him in
that post. Now the time was approaching when Daneel would have to intensify his direct
participation in Tranter's politics, a prospect he found distasteful. The loss of Lodovik
would make his work all the more difficult.