Foundation And Chaos (51 page)

“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-haw could
he love her so?

“/ 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 byway of Kal-gan. But he wanted to return for
Hari, at the end. Daneel, if such was possible, had always felt a special regard for Hari.

Dancers 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.

Look for the final volume in

THE SECOND FOUNDATION TRILOGY

Foundation's Triumph

DAVID BRIN

Published by HarperPrism

Parti

Little is known about the final days of Hari Seldon, though many romanticized accounts
exist, some of them purportedly by his own hand. None has any proved validity.

What appears evident, however, is that Seldon spent his last months uneventfully, no doubt
enjoying satisfaction in his life's work. For with his gift of mathematical insight, and
the powers of psychohistory at his command, he must surely have seen the panorama of
history stretching before him, confirming the great path of destiny that he had already
mapped out.

Although death would soon claim him, no other mortal ever knew with such confidence and
certainty the bright promise that the future would hold in store.

Encyclopedia Galactica, 117th Edition, 1054 RE. “As for me... I am finished. ”

Those words resonated in his mind. They clung, like the relentless blanket that Hari's
nurse kept straightening across his legs, though it was a warm day in the imperial gardens.

/ am finished.

The relentless phrase was his constant companion.

... finished.

In front of Hari Seldon lay the rugged slopes of Shoufeen Woods, a wild portion of the
Imperial Palace grounds where plants and small animals from across the galaxy mingled in
rank disorder, clumping and spreading unhindered. Tall trees even blocked from view the
ever-present skyline of metal towers. The mighty world-city surrounding this little island
forest.

Trantor.

Squinting through failing eyes, one could almost pretend to be sitting on a different
planet-one that had not been flattened and subdued in service to the Galactic Empire of
Humanity.

The forest teased Hari. Its total absence of straight lines seemed perverse, a riot of
greenery that defied any effort to decipher or decode. The geometries seemed
unpredictable, even chaotic.

Mentally, he reached out to the chaos, so vibrant and undisciplined. He spoke to it as an
equal. His great enemy.

All my life I fought against you, using mathematics to overcome nature's vast complexity.
With tools of psychohistory, I probed the matrices of human society, wresting order from
that murky tangle. And when my victories still felt incomplete, I used politics and guile
to combat uncertainty, driving you like an enemy before me.

So why now, at my time of supposed triumph, do I hear you calling out to me? Chaos, my old
foe?

Hari's answer came in the same phrase that kept threading his thoughts.

Because I am finished.

Finished as a mathematician.

It was more than a year since Stettin Palver or Gaal Dornick or any other member of the
Fifty had consulted Hari with a serious permutation or revision to the “Seldon Plan. ”
Their awe and reverence for him was unchanged. But urgent tasks kept them busy. Besides,
anyone could tell that his mind no longer had the suppleness to juggle a myriad
abstractions at the same time. It took a youngster's mental agility, concentration, and
arrogance to challenge the hyperdimensional algorithms of psychohistory. His successors,
culled from among the best minds on twenty-five million worlds, had all these traits in
superabundance.

But Hari could no longer afford conceit. There remained too little time.

Finished as a politician.

How he used to hate that word! Pretending, even to himself, that he wanted only to be a
meek academic. Of course, that had just been a marvelous pose. No one could rise to become
First Minister of the entire human universe without the talent and audacity of a master
manipulator. Oh, he had been a genius in that field, too, wielding power with flair,
defeating enemies, altering the lives of trillions-while complaining the whole time that
he hated the job.

Some might look back on that youthful record with ironic pride. But not Hari Seldon.

Finished as a conspirator.

He had won each battle, prevailed in every contest. A year ago, Hari subtly maneuvered
today's imperial rulers into creating ideal circumstances for his secret psychohistorical
design to flourish. Soon a hundred thousand exiles would be stranded on a stark planet,
faraway Terminus, charged with producing a great Encyclopedia Galactica. But that
superficial goal would peel away in half a

century, revealing the true aim of that Foundation at the galaxy's rim-to be the embryo of
a more vigorous empire as the old one fell. For years that had been the focus of his daily
ambitions, and his nightly dreams. Dreams that reached ahead, across a thousand years of
social collapse-past an age of suffering and violence-to a new human fruition. A better
destiny for humankind.

Only now his role in that great enterprise was ended. Hari had just finished taping
messages for the Time Vault on Terminus-a series of subtle bulletins that would
occasionally nudge or encourage members of the Foundation as they plunged toward a bright
morrow preordained by psychohistory. When the final message was safely stored, Hari felt a
shift in the attitudes of those around him. He was still esteemed, even venerated. But he
wasn't necessary anymore.

One sure sign had been the departure of his bodyguards-a trio of humaniform robots that
Daneel Olivaw had assigned to protect Hari, until the recordings were finished. It
happened right there, at the recording studio. One robot-artfully disguised as a burly
young medical technician-had bowed low to speak in Hari's ear.

“We must go now, Daneel has urgent assignments for us. But he bade me to give you his
promise. Daneel will visit soon. The two of you will meet again, before the end. ”

Perhaps that wasn't the most tactful way to put it. But Hari always preferred blunt
openness from friends and family.

Unbidden, a clear image from the past swept into mind-of his wife, Dors Venabili, playing
with Raych, their son. He sighed. Both Dors and Raych were long gone-along with nearly
every link that ever bound him closely to another private soul.

This brought a final coda to the phrase that kept spinning through his mind-

Finished as a person.

The doctors despaired over extending his life, even though eighty was rather young to die
of decrepit age nowadays. But Hari saw no point in mere existence for its own sake.
Especially if he could no longer analyze or affect the universe.

Is that why I drift here, to this grove? He pondered the wild, unpredictable forest-a mere
pocket in the Imperial Park, which measured a hundred miles on a side-the only expanse of
greenery on Trantor's metal-encased crust. Most visitors preferred the hectares of prim
gardens open to the public, filled with extravagant and well-ordered blooms.

But Shoufeen Woods seemed to beckon him.

Here, unmasked by Trantor's opaque walls, I can see chaos in the foliage by day, and in
brittle stars by night. I can hear chaos taunting me... telling me I haven't won.

That wry thought provoked a smile, cracking the pursed lines of his face.

Who would have imagined, at this late phase of life, that I'd acquire a taste for justice ?

Kers Kantun straightened the lap blanket again, asking solicitously, “Are you o'right, Dr.
Seldon? Should we be headin' back now?”

Hari's servant had the rolling accent-and greenish skin pallor-of a Valmoril, a subspecies
of humanity that had spread through the isolated Corithi Cluster, living secluded there
for so long that by now they could only interbreed with other races by pretreating sperm
and eggs with enzymes. Kers had been chosen as Hari's nurse and final guardian after the
robots departed. He performed both roles with quiet determination.

“This wild place makes me o'comfortable, Doc. Surely you don' like the breeze gustin' like
this?”

Hari had been told that Kantun's parents arrived on Trantor as young Greys-members of the
bureaucratic caste-expecting to spend a few years' service on the capital planet, training
in monkish dormitories, then heading back out to the galaxy as administrators in the vast
civil service. But flukes of talent and promotion intervened to keep them here, raising a
son amid the steel caverns they hated. Kers inherited his parents' famed Valmoril sense of
duty-or else Daneel Olivaw would never have chosen the fellow to tend Hari in these final
days.

I may no longer be useful, but some people still think I'm worth looking after.

In Hari's mind, the word “person” applied to R. Daneel Olivaw, perhaps more than most of
the humans he ever knew.

For decades, Hari had carefully kept secret the existence of “eternals”-robots who had
shepherded human destiny for twenty thousand years-immortal machines that helped create
the first Galactic Empire, then encouraged Hari to plan a successor. Indeed, Hari spent
the happiest part of his life married to one of them. Without the affection of Dors
Venabili-or the aid and protection of Daneel Olivaw-he could never have created
psychohistory, setting in motion the Seldon Plan.

Or discovered how useless it would all turn out to be, in the long run.

Wind in the surrounding trees seemed to mock Hari. In that sound, he heard hollow echoes
of his own doubts.

The Foundation cannot achieve the task set before it. Somewhere, sometime during the next
thousand years, a perturbation will nudge the psychohistorical parameters, rocking the
statistical momentum, knocking your Plan off course.

True enough, he wanted to shout back at the zephyr. But that had been allowed for! There
would be a Second Foundation, a secret one, led by his successors, who would adjust the
Plan as years passed, providing counternudges to keep it on course!

Yet, the nagging voice came back.

A tiny hidden colony of mathematicians and psychologists will do all that, in a galaxy
fast tumbling to violence and ruin?

For years this had seemed a flaw... until fortuitous fate provided an answer. Mentalics, a
mutant strain of humans with uncanny ability to sense and alter the emotions and memories
of others. These powers were still weak, but heritable. Hari's own adopted son, Raych,
passed the talent to a daughter, Wanda, now a leader in the Seldon Project. Every mentalic
they could find had been recruited, to intermarry with the descendants of the
psychohistorians. After a few generations of genetic mingling, the clandestine Second
Foundation should have potent tools to protect his Plan against deviations during the
coming centuries.

And so?

The forest sneered once more.

What will you have then? Will the Second Empire be ruled by a shadowy elite? A secret
cabal of human psychics? An aristocracy of mentalic demigods?

Even if kindness motivated this new elite, the prospect left him feeling cold.

The shadow of Kers Kantun bent closer, peering at him with concern. Hari tore his
attention away from the singing breeze and finally answered his servant.

“Ah... sorry. Of course you're right. Let's go back. I'm fatigued. ”

But as Kers guided the wheelchair toward a hidden transit station, Hari could still hear
the forest, jeering at his life's work.

The mentalic elite is just one layer though, isn't it? The Second Foundation conceals yet
another truth, then another.

Beyond your own Plan, a different one has been crafted by a greater mind than yours. By
someone stronger, more dedicated, and more patient by far. A plan that uses yours, for a
while... but which will eventually make psychohistory meaningless.