Gregory Benford - Foundation’s Fear

“We can do the same for the holoball averages.”

“What? I don’t-”

“Set the statistics so that the average hitter strikes 500, rather than the hard-to-remember 446 of the present. “

“But I don’t think a principle of social justice-”

“And the intelligence scores. Those need to be renormed as well, I can see that. Agreed?”

“Well, I’m not sure, First Minister. We only intended-”

“No no, this is a big idea. I want a thorough look at all possible re-norming agendas. You have to think big!”

“We aren’t prepared-”

“Then get prepared! I want a report. Not a skimpy one, either. A fat, full report. Two thousand pages, at least.”

“That would take-”

“Hang the expense. And the time. This is too important to relegate to the Imperial Examinations. Let me have that report.”

“It would take years, decades-”

“Then there’s no time to waste!”

The Action Front delegation left in confusion. Hari hoped they would make it a very big report, indeed, so that he was no longer First Minister when it arrived.

Part of maintaining the Empire involved using its own inertia against itself. Some aspects of this job, he thought, could be actually enjoyable.

He reached Voltaire before leaving the office. “Here’s your list of impersonations.”

“I must say I am having trouble handling all the factions,” Voltaire said. He presented as a swain in elegant velvet. “But the chance to venture out, to be a presence-it is like acting! And I was always one for the stage, as you know.”

Hari didn’t, but he said, “That’s democracy for you-show business with daggers. A mongrel breed of government. Even if it is a big stable at tractor in the fitness landscape.”

“Rational thinkers deplore the excesses of democracy; it abuses the individual and elevates the mob.” Voltaire’s mouth flattened into a disapproving line. “The death of Socrates was its finest fruit.”

“Afraid I don’t go back that far,” Hari said, signing off. “Enjoy the work.”

He and Dors watched the great luminous spiral turn beneath them in its eternal night.

“I do appreciate such perks,” she said dreamily. They stood alone before the spectacle. Worlds and lives and stars, all like crushed diamonds thrown against eternal blackness.

“Getting into the palace just to look at the Emperor’s display rooms?” He had ordered all the halls cleared.

“Getting away from snoopers and eavesdroppers.”

“You…you haven’t heard from-?”

She shook her head. “Daneel pulled nearly all the rest of us off Trantor. He says little to me.”

“I’m pretty damn sure the alien minds won’t strike again. They’re afraid of robots. It took me a while to see that lay behind their talk about revenge.”

“Mingled hate and fear. Very human.”

“Still, I think they’ve had their revenge. They say the Galaxy was lush with life before we came. There are cycles of barren eras, then luxuriant ones. Don’t know why. Apparently that’s happened several times before, at intervals of a third of a billion years-great diebacks of intelligent life, leaving only spores. Now they’ve come to our Mesh and become digital fossils.”

“Fossils don’t kill,” she said sardonically.

“Not as well as we do, apparently.”

“Not you-us.”

“They do hate you robots. Not that they have any love of humans-after all, we made you, long ago. We’re to blame.”

“They are so strange…”

He nodded. “I believe they’ll stay in their digital preserve until Marq and Sybyl can get them transported into their ancient spore state. They once lived that way for longer than the Galaxy takes to make a rotation.”

“Your ‘pretty damn sure’ isn’t good enough for Daneel,” she said. “He wants them exterminated.”

“It’s a standoff. If Daneel goes after them, he’ll have to pull the plug on Trantor’s Mesh. That will wound the Empire. So he’s stuck, fuming but impotent.”

“I hope you have estimated the balance properly,” she said.

A glimmering, gossamer thought flitted across his mind. The tiktok attacks upon the Lamurk faction had discredited them in public opinion. Now they would be suppressed throughout the Galaxy. And in time, the meme-minds would leave Trantor.

Hari frowned. Daneel surely wanted both these outcomes.

He had undoubtedly suspected that the mememinds had survived, perhaps that they were in action on Trantor. So could Hari’s amateur maneuverings, including the Lamurk murders, have been deftly conjured up by Daneel? Could a robot so accurately predict what he, Hari, would do?

A chill ran through him. Such ability would be breathtaking. Superhuman.

With tiktoks now soon to be suppressed, Trantor would have trouble producing its own food. Tasks once done by men would have to be re-learned, taking generations to establish such laborers as a socially valued group again. Meanwhile, dozens of other worlds would have to send Trantor food, a lifeline slender and vulnerable. Did Daneel intend that, too? To what end?

Hari felt uneasy. He sensed social forces at work, just beyond his view.

Was such adroit thinking the product of millennia of experience and high, positronic intelligence? For just a moment, Hari had a vision of a mind both strange and measureless, in human terms. Was that what an immortal machine became?

Then he pushed the idea away. It was too unsettling to contemplate. Later, perhaps, when psychohistory was done…

He noticed Dors staring at him. What had she said? Oh, yes…

“Estimating the balance, yes. I’m getting the feel for these things. With Voltaire and Joan doing the scut work, and Yugo now chairman of the Mathist Department, I actually have time to think.”

“And suffer fools gladly?”

“The Academic Potentate? At least I understand her now.” He peered at Dors. “Daneel says he will leave Trantor. He’s lost a lot of his humaniforms. Does he need you?”

She looked up at him in the soft glow. Her expression worked with conflict. “I can’t leave you.”

“His orders?”

“Mine.”

He gritted his teeth. “The robots who died-you knew them?”

“Some. We trained together back, back when…”

“You don’t have to conceal anything from me. I know you must be at least a century old.”

Her mouth made an O of surprise, then quickly closed. “How?”

“You know more than you should.”

“So do you-in bed, anyway.” She chuckled.

“I learned it from a pan I met.”

She laughed bawdily, then sobered. “I’m one hundred sixty-three.”

“With the thighs of a teenager. If you had tried to leave Trantor, I’d have blocked you.”

She blinked. “Truly?”

He bit his lip, thinking. “Well, no.”

She smiled. “More romantic to say yes…”

“I have a habit of honesty-which I’d better drop if I want to stay First Minister.”

“So you would let me go? You still feel that you owe that to Daneel?”

“If he thought the danger to you was that great, then I would honor his judgment.”

“You still respect us so?”

“Robots work selflessly for the Empire-always. Few humans do.”

“You don’t wonder what we did to earn the aliens’ revenge?”

“Of course. Do you know?”

She shook her head, gazing out at the vast turning disk. Suns of blue and crimson and yellow swept along their orbits amid dark dust and disorder. “It was something awful. Daneel was there and he will not speak of it. There is nothing in our history of this. I’ve looked.”

“An empire lasting many millennia has manifold secrets.” Hari watched the slow spin of a hundred billion flaming stars. “I’m more interested in its future-in saving it.”