Foundation and Chaos

Page 17

“I’m to take you to the private dwelling of a doctor living in the country,” Planch told Lodovik as they waited for transportation from the passenger terminal. Here, in a vast hall designed to hold tens of thousands, they stood alone. The lighted tiles of the ceil formed haphazard puzzle patterns, their condition far worse than any such yet seen on Trantor. The hall was cast in murky twilight, and there were times when Mors thought he might choke, the air was so stagnant.

They had encountered a single elderly Imperial official in the dusty passport docket, and he had waved them through with a sniff and something that might once have been a sneer. His world did not care, why should he?

The hall was littered with broken-down tiktoks, like victims of some mechanical plague. The plague had been lack of replacement parts; Madder Loss had embraced the mechanical laborers and retained them long after Trantor and most other Imperial worlds shrugged them off. They were no longer even being collected for scrap.

Lodovik looked at Planch sympathetically. “This is not pleasant for you,” he observed.

“No,” Planch said with a sigh. “Look what the Empire has done--a waste.”

“What do you mean?”

“Trantor did this because it feared it would lose its eminence. Squeezed the life out of an entire world.”

Lodovik looked away. “Do you blame Linge Chen? Is that why you have double-crossed him?”

Planch paled. “I never said anything about Linge Chen.”

“No,” Lodovik said. Planch looked at the man with sudden misgivings. If Chen ever learned, there was no place in the Galaxy where he would be safe.

A rickety, lozenge-shaped ground taxi approached on large white wheels. The driver was an elderly woman dressed in faded red livery. Her dialect was almost too thick to understand, but Planch managed to communicate with her. She seemed relieved to have paying passenger--in Imperial credits!--and even happier to be getting out of the urban center.

“I know that you have done work for Chen in the past,” Lodovik said as they lurched along a potholed expressway. Here, the expressways layout in the open, rather than being routed below domes or underground, as they were on Trantor. The morning sunshine dazzled Planch, and the air was tinted pink, giving everything a warm, nostalgic glow. “I was privy to some of the arrangements.”

“Of course,” Planch said.

“Now you work for a man named Posit,” Lodovik said.

Planch started in shock and looked particularly miserable. “I should shoot you right now and leave Madder Loss,” he murmured.

“Well, you know the proper codes,” Lodovik said. “That much is obvious. You became angry at Chen when he carried on the policies that strangled Madder Loss...and other Renaissance Worlds. Yet the squeezing, as you describe it, of the Renaissance Worlds was not Linge Chen’s policy initially. It began under the First Ministry of Hari Seldon, who implemented the policy to increase stability in the Empire.”

Planch grunted that he was well aware of the Seldon connection. “I don’t approve of a lot of Imperial actions, and Chen knew that when I worked for him. But I don’t work for him now.”

“You have no need to worry,” Lodovik said. “Chen will never know.”

Planch squirmed in his cracked seat.

“Twenty minutes,” the driver called back in a cheery voice.

The house was the most unusual Planch had ever seen--a single small building standing alone in a field covered with short green plants, forming a kind of living carpet beneath the warm sunshine. The outskirts of the city were ten kilometers away, and the nearest structure similar to this one was almost five kilometers distant. The land between consisted of low, rolling hills covered with planar bushy growths, purple or deep bluish green. The countryside seemed elegantly vivacious, quite gaudy in comparison with the crumbling, unkempt city.

The taxi let them out in a broad paved circle at the front of the dwelling. A single tall male figure stood beneath a cloth awning that flapped lazily in the warm, gentle breeze. He stepped forward and bowed toward Mors Planch.

“You’ve done your work well,” the man said.

Planch returned the bow, then awkwardly spread one arm toward Lodovik, and said blandly, “He wasn’t much trouble.” He stepped back as if they might do something unexpected, start fighting or perhaps just burst into flames.

“You’re free to go,” the man said.

“I need release papers. You seem to be the contact I met on Trantor, but...”

The man gestured and a worn but fully functional tiktok came out of the house carrying a small satchel. “This will complete our agreement, for now. The bag also contains any papers you might need to go wherever you wish to go, safely, in the territories still controlled by the Empire.”

“I want to get away from the empire, forever,” Planch said.

“You will find some documents that will help you do that, as well,” the man said.

Planch, despite his unease, seemed reluctant to return to the waiting taxi.

“What else can I offer you?” the man asked