Isaac Asimov: Foundation's Edge

Trevize was aware of the neuronic whips with which they were armed. He rose with what he hoped was dignity. “To my home, then. —Or will I find out that you are going to take me to prison?”

“We have not been instructed to lie to you, sir,” said the lieutenant with a pride of his own. Trevize became aware that he was in the presence of a professional man who would require a direct order before he would lie—and that even then his expression and his tone of voice would give him away.

Trevize said, “I ask your pardon, Lieutenant. I did not mean to imply that I doubted your word.”

A ground-car was waiting for them outside. The street was empty and there was no sign of any human being, let alone a mob—but the lieutenant had been truthful. He had not said there was a mob outside or that one would form. He had referred to “any mob that may gather.” He had only said “may.”

The lieutenant had carefully kept Trevize between himself and the car. Trevize could not have twisted away and made a run for it. The lieutenant entered immediately after him and sat beside him in the back.

The car moved off.

Trevize said, “Once I am home, I presume I may then go about my business freely—that I may leave, for instance, if I choose.”

“We have no order to interfere with you, Councilman, in any way, except insofar as we are ordered to protect you.”

“Insofar? What does that mean in this case?”

“I am instructed to tell you that once you are home, you may not leave it. The streets are not safe for you and I am responsible for your safety.”

“You mean I am under house arrest.”

“I am not a lawyer, Councilman. I do not know what that means.”

He gazed straight ahead, but his elbow made contact with Trevize’s side. Trevize could not have moved, however slightly, without the lieutenant becoming aware of it.

The car stopped before Trevize’s small house in the suburb of Flexner. At the moment, he lacked a housemate—Flavella having wearied of the erratic life that Council membership had forced upon him—so he expected no one to be waiting for him.

“Do I get out now?” Trevize asked.

“I will get out first, Councilman. We will escort you in.”

“For my safety?”

“Yes, sir.”

There were two guards waiting inside his front door. A night-light was gleaming, but the windows had been opacified and it was not visible from outside.

For a moment, he was indignant at the invasion and then he dismissed it with an inward shrug. If the Council could not protect him in the Council Chamber itself, then surely his house could not serve as his castle.

Trevize said, “How many of you do I have in here altogether? A regiment?”

“No, Councilman,” came a voice, hard and steady. “Just one person aside from those you see, and I have been waiting for you long enough.”

Harla Branno, Mayor of Terminus, stood in the door that led into the living room. “Time enough, don’t you think, for us to talk?”

Trevize stared. “All this rigmarole to—”

But Branno said in a low, forceful voice, “Quiet, Councilman. —And you four, outside. Outside! —All will be well in here.”

The four guards saluted and turned on their heels. Trevize and Branno were alone.

Branno had been waiting for an hour, thinking wearily. Technically speaking, she was guilty of breaking and entering. What’s more, she had violated, quite unconstitutionally, the rights of a Councilman. By the strict laws that held Mayors to account—since the days of Indbur III and the Mule, nearly two centuries before—she was impeachable.

On this one day, however, for twenty-four hours she could do no wrong.

But it would pass. She stirred restlessly.

The first two centuries had been the Golden Age of the Foundation, the Heroic Era—at least in retrospect, if not to the unfortunates who had lived in that insecure time. Salvor Hardin and Hober Mallow had been the two great heroes, semideified to the point of rivaling the incomparable Hari Seldon himself. The three were a tripod on which all Foundation legend (and even Foundation history) rested.

In those days, though, the Foundation had been one puny world, with a tenuous hold on the Four Kingdoms and with only a dim awareness of the extent to which the Seldon Plan was holding its protective hand over it, caring for it even against the remnant of the mighty Galactic Empire.

And the more powerful the Foundation grew as a political and commercial entity, the less significant its rulers and fighters had come to seem. Lathan Devers was almost forgotten. If he was remembered at all, it was for his tragic death in the slave mines, rather than for his unnecessary but successful fight against Bel Riose.

As for Bel Riose, the noblest of the Foundation’s adversaries, he too was nearly forgotten, overshadowed by the Mule, who alone among enemies had broken the Seldon Plan and defeated and ruled the Foundation. He alone was the Great Enemy—indeed, the last of the Greats.

It was little remembered that the Mule had been, in essence, defeated by one person—a woman, Bayta Darell—and that she had accomplished the victory without the help of anyone, without even the support of the Seldon Plan . So, too, was it almost forgotten that her son and granddaughter, Toran and Arkady Darell, had defeated the Second Foundation, leaving the Foundation, the First Foundation, supreme.

These latter-day victors were no longer heroic figures. The times had become too expansive to do anything but shrink heroes into ordinary mortals. Then, too, Arkady’s biography of her grandmother had reduced her from a heroine to a figure of romance.

And since then there had been no heroes—not even figures of romance. The Kalganian war had been the last moment of violence engulfing the Foundation and that had been a minor conflict. Nearly two centuries of virtual peace! A hundred and twenty years without so much as a ship scratched.

It had been a good peace—Branno would not deny that—a profitable peace. The Foundation had not established a Second Galactic Empire—it was only halfway there by the Seldon Plan—but, as the Foundation Federation, it held a strong economic grip on over a third of the scattered political units of the Galaxy, and influenced what it didn’t control. There were few places where “I am of the Foundation” was not met with respect. There was no one who ranked higher in all the millions of inhabited worlds than the Mayor of Terminus.

That was still the title. It was inherited from the leader of a single small and almost disregarded city on a lonely world on the far edge of civilization, some five centuries before, but no one would dream of changing it or of giving it one atom more glory-in-sound. As it was, only the all-forgotten title of Imperial Majesty could rival it in awe.

—Except on Terminus itself, where the powers of the Mayor were carefully limited. The memory of the Indburs still remained. It was not their tyranny that people could not forget but the fact that they had lost to the Mule.

And here she was, Harla Branno, the strongest to rule since the Mule’s death (she knew that) and only the fifth woman to do so. On this day only had she been able to use her strength openly.

She had fought for her interpretation of what was right and what should be—against the dogged opposition of those who longed for the prestige-filled Interior of the Galaxy and for the aura of Imperial power—and she had won.

Not yet, she had said. Not yet! Jump too soon for the Interior and you will lose for this reason and for that. And Seldon had appeared and had supported her in language almost identical with her own.