Greg Bear - Foundation and Chaos

Sinter fell silent, but his lips worked, and his brow seemed almost to double up on itself. “There’s a plan…a plan at work here…” he gasped.

“Prothon insists he has your order, the imprimatur and sigil of the new Commission-he has offered his resignation as a Protector of the Empire, his suicide and the besmirching of the honorable name of his family, if anyone can prove otherwise!”

“Your Highness-Klayus, please, listen to me-”

But Klayus was beside himself. “I don’t know what will happen if-”

“Listen, my Emperor-”

“Sinter!” the Emperor shrieked, and grabbed his shoulders and shook him fiercely. “ Prothon escorted Agis into exile! He has not conducted any official campaign since!”

Suddenly, Sinter’s face went blank, and he closed his mouth. The wrinkles vanished from his brow.

“Chen,” he said, almost too softly to be heard.

“Linge Chen is sequestered for Seldon’s trial! Public Safety has come to a standstill. It’s Seldon he’s after, not robots, not-”

“Chen controls Prothon,” Sinter said.

“Who can prove that? Does it matter? Does any of that matter? My throne is very fragile, Sinter. Everyone thinks I’m a fool. You told me we could make it strong-that I could make my reputation as the savior of Trantor, protect the Empire from a vast conspiracy-”

Sinter let the Emperor screech, and endured the spittle flying into his face. He was thinking furiously how to withdraw and regroup, how to dissociate himself from what was obviously a catastrophe in the making.

“Why didn’t I receive the report before you, sire?” he asked, and Klayus shut up long enough to glare at him.

“What does that matter?”

“I should have received the report first, to interpret it. That was my instruction.”

“I countermanded your instruction! I felt I should know as soon as possible.”

Sinter considered coldly what he had just been told, then squinted at Klayus. “Have you told anybody, sire?”

“Yes! I told Prothon’s adjutant that his orders were ridiculous, that we’d, that we’d just conducted our own investigation-I was grabbing at details, to get you off the hook, Sinter-I said that you would never have ordered such a large-scale police and security action-not when our evidence was as yet not definite” Klayus sucked in his breath.

Farad Sinter shook his head sadly. “Then Chen knows we don’t have anything-yet.” He pulled Klayus’s hands from his shoulders. “I must go. We are so close-I had hoped to corner an entire cell of robots-”

He ran from the Hall of Beasts, leaving the young Emperor standing with hands outstretched and eyes wild.

“ Prothon! Sinter, Prothon!” Klayus screamed.

The last two days had been so unutterably boring, and he had been away for so long from his instruments and team of mathists, that Hari Seldon welcomed the brief blanknesses provided by short naps. The naps never lasted long enough, and far worse were the waking hours with their own painful blankness: frozen frustration, gelid anxiety, frightful speculations slumping into tense nightmare with the slowness of glass over ages.

Hari came out of his doze with an unusual shortness of breath, and a question seeming to echo in his ears:

“Does God truly tell you what is the fate of men?”

He listened for the question to be asked again. He knew who asked it; the tone was unmistakable.

“Joan?” he asked. His mouth was dry. He looked around the cell for some agency by which the entity might communicate with him, something mechanical, electronic, by which she might

Nothing. The room had been scoured after the visit from the old tiktok. The voice was in his own imagination.

The chime on his cell door sounded, and the door slid open swiftly. Hari rose from his chair, smoothed his robe with two wrinkled, bony hands, and stared at the man before him. For a moment he did not recognize him. Then, he saw it was Sedjar Boon.

“I’m hearing things again,” Hari said with a wry twist in his lips.

Boon examined Hari with concern. “They want you in the court. Gaal Dornick will be there as well. They may be willing to strike a deal.”

“What about the Commission of General Security?”

“Something’s happening. They’re busy.”

“What is it?” Hari asked, eager for news.

“Riots,” Boon said. “In parts of the Imperial Sector, throughout Dahl. Apparently Sinter let his Specials go too far.”

Hari looked around the room. “After we’re done, will they bring me back here?”

“I don’t think so,” Boon said. “You’ll go to the Hall of Dispensation to get your papers of release. There’s going to be a waiver of meritocratic rights to sign, too. A formality.”

“Did you know this all along?” Hari asked Boon, old eyes boring into the lawyer’s with no-nonsense intensity.

“No,” Boon said nervously. “I swear it.”

“If I had lost, would you be here now, or would you be standing in line, waiting for more work from Linge Chen?”

Boon did not answer, merely held his hand toward the door. “Let’s go.”

In the hall, Hari said, “Linge Chen is one of the most carefully studied men in my records. He seems the embodiment of aristocratic atrophy. Yet he always wins and gets his way-until now.”

“Let’s not be too hasty,” Boon said. “A good rule for lawyers is never to count your victories before the ink is dry.”

Hari turned to Boon and held out his hand. “Have you been contacted by someone named Joan?”

Boon seemed surprised. “Why, yes,” he said. “There’s some sort of virus in our legal-office records. The computers keep bringing up briefs from a case that doesn’t exist. Something about a woman burned at the stake. That hasn’t happened on Trantor in twelve thousand years-as far as I know.”

Hari paused in the hall. The guards grew impatient. “Put a message in your records, for this virus,” he said. “Tell her-it-that I have never talked with God and do not know what He intends for humanity.”

Boon smiled. “A joke, right?”

“Just put the message in your files. That’s an order from your client.”

“God-you mean, a supernatural being, a supreme creator?”

“Yes,” Hari said. “Just tell her this-‘Hari Seldon does not represent divine authority.’ Tell her she’s got the wrong man. Tell her to leave me alone. I’m done with her. I fulfilled my promise long ago.”

The guards looked at one another in pity, obviously thinking this trial had gone on far too long.

“Consider it done,” Boon said.

Daneel stood on the parapet of an apartment that had once been a secret hideaway for Demerzel, and beside him stood the tiktok that had come with the apartment. The apartment had been sealed decades before and left unoccupied, its lease paid for a century. This morning, when Daneel had returned to it, to utilize its secret data links to the courts and the palace, he had found the tiktok activated. He knew immediately who was responsible.

“You have become a major irritation,” Daneel told the former sim. Though this meme-mind seemed now to be on his side, it-she-was far too changeable and humanlike to be trusted completely.