Foundation and Chaos

Page 37

Joan! What a strange dream this is. You’re gone, decades gone. You helped me when I was First Minister--but I gave you your freedom to travel with the wraiths, the meme-minds, to the stars. You are an almost forgotten bit of history for me now. How seldom I think of you!

“How often I think of you. Saint Hari, who has sacrificed his life for--”

I’m no saint! I’ve suppressed the dreams of billions.

“How well I know. Our debate many decades ago collapsed much as the bright candles of a thousand dissenting and restless Renaissance worlds have been snuffed...For the sake of divine order, the grand scheme. We helped you in your first position of power, in exchange for our freedom, and the freedom of all the meme-minds. But Voltaire and I quarreled again--it was inevitable. I was beginning to see a larger picture, encompassing your work as part of the divine plan. Voltaire flew away in disgust, across the Galaxy, leaving me here, to contemplate all I had learned. Now comes your time of Trial, and I fear you risk a darker despair than the time at Gethsemane for our Lord.”

At this, Hari had to laugh and half cry at once. Voltaire despised me at the last. Snuffing out freedom, suppressing the Renaissance Worlds. And you didn’t think that way about me when last we talked. He seemed to be half awake, and wholly enmeshed in this...vision! I made love to a machine for years. By your conception, your philosophy

“I have acquired more wisdom, more understanding. You were given an angel, a partner-protector. She was sent by the emissaries of God, and ordained for her task by the supreme emissary.”

Hari was too frightened now, an almost panic darkness in his mind, to ask who that might be, in this imaginary Joan’s conception. But--Who? Who is that?

“The Eternal, who opposes the forces of chaos. Daneel, who was Demerzel.”

Now he knew this was out of his own mind, worse than a dream. Once you acquiesced in the killing of the machines--the robots.

“I have seen deeper truths.”

Hari felt the tight strictures of Daneel’s controls. Please go, leave me be! he said, and rolled over on the cot.

As he rolled, his eyes swung open and he saw an old, broken-down tiktok standing near him in his cell. He shoved up from the cot.

The cell’s door was still closed and locked.

The tiktok was marked with prison colors, yellow and black. It must have been a maintenance machine before the tiktoks rebelled, threatened the Empire, and were deactivated. He could not imagine how it would have gotten into the cell, unless it had been sent on purpose.

The tiktok backed away with a sandy whine, and a face appeared in front of the machine, about a meter and a half above the floor, a projection, followed by a body, small and slender and strong, as if brushed in, wrapping around the tiktok like a shadow in a bright room.

Hari’s neck hair rose with sharp prickles, and his breath seemed to stick in his chest. For a moment, as if caught in a nightmare, he could not speak. Then he sucked in a breath and jerked away from the machine.

“Help!” he screamed, his voice cracking. Panic darkness seemed to fill him. His chest might have been collapsing. All the fear, all the tension, the anticipation

“Do not cry out, Hari!” The voice was vaguely female, mechanical in the old tiktok way.

“I mean no harm, no concern.”

“Joan!” He breathed this name aloud, but much more softly.

But the old machine was failing, its last power draining. Hari sat up on the side of the bed and watched the lights on its body slowly dim.

“Take courage, Hari Seldon. He and I stand in opposition now, once more, as we always did. We have quarrelllleed.” The words slurred, slowed. “We haaavve seppparrrrateddd.”

The tiktok stopped dead.

The hatch burst open with a loud sigh and three guards entered. One immediately fired a bolt weapon that blew the old tiktok down to the floor. The others booted and kicked the small unit into a corner and shielded Hari from anything more it might do. Two more guards entered and dragged Hari out of the cell by his shoulders. Feebly, Hari kicked his heels against the smooth floor to help the men along.

“Are you sure you don’t want me dead?” he asked querulously.

“Sky, no!” the guard on his right cried out brusquely. “It would mean our lives if you’re hurt. You’re in the most secure cell on Trantor--”

“So we thought ,” the other guard said grimly, and they lifted Hari to his feet and tried to brush him down. They had dragged him ten or fifteen meters down the straight corridor. Hari stared at this immense, welcome distance, this refreshing extension, and caught his breath.

“Maybe you should treat an old cuss like me more gently,” he suggested, and started to laugh raucously, a cackle, a hoot, a suck of breath, then more laughter. The laughter stopped abruptly and he shouted, “Keep the ghosts out of my monk’s quarters, damn you!”

The guards stared at him, then at each other.

It was hours before they took him back into his cell. The intrusion was never explained.

Joan and Voltaire, the resurrected “sims” or simulated intelligences, modeled after lost historical figures, had given him so much trouble and so much information--decades past, when he had been at the height of his mature youth, First Minister of the Empire, and Dors had constantly been at his side.

Hari had forgotten about them, but now Joan, at least, was back, riding a mechanical contrivance into his prison cell, subverting all the security systems. She had decided against leaving with the meme-minds, to explore the Galaxy...

And what about Voltaire? What more trouble could either or both of them cause, with their ancient brilliance and their ability to infiltrate and reprogram the machines and communications and computational systems of Trantor?

They were certainly beyond his control. And if Joan favored Hari, whom would Voltaire favor? They had certainly represented opposite points of view through most of their

career...But at least someone from the past was still around, professed concern for him! He did not have Dors, or Raych, or Yugo...or Daneel...