David Brin - Foundation’s Triumph

The nobleman glanced at Seldon, clearly concerned about appearing too cozy with the enemy. But when Hari didn’t object, Maserd moved quickly to lean over Gornon’s shoulder, excited and impressed.

“You’ve improved the interface immensely. The images are crisp and the graphics legible.”

“It wasn’t hard,” Vlimt answered. “The designers made this archive so simple, even a dunce could figure it out, given enough time.”

With some reluctance, but driven by curiosity, Hari followed to get a better look. Many of the images he glimpsed had no meaning to him-mysterious objects posed against unknown backgrounds. A few leaped out with sudden familiarity from his recent studies in the little history primer. The pyramids of Egypt, he recognized at once. Others were flat portraits of ancient people and places. Hari knew that prehistoric peoples assigned great importance to such images, created by daubing a cloth surface with smears of natural pigment. Gornon Vlimt also seemed to vest these images with great value, though Hari found them surreal and strange.

Peering at a nearby set of screens, Sybyl gushed over a different panorama, featuring examples of science and technology.

“Of course much of this stuff is pretty crude,” she conceded. “After all, we’ve had twenty millennia to refine the rough edges through trial and error. But the basic theories have changed surprisingly little. And some of the forgotten material is brilliant! There are devices and techniques in here that I never heard of. A dozen Ktlinas would be kept busy for a generation, just absorbing all of this!”

“It’s…” Hari’s mouth worked, knowing his words would be useless, but still feeling compelled to try. “Sybyl, this is more dangerous than you can possibly imagine.”

She greeted his cautionary pleading with a snort.

“You forget who you’re talking to, Seldon. Don’t you recall that half-melted archive we worked on together? The one your mysterious contacts came up with, forty years ago? There was very little of it left intact, except for a pair of ancient simulated beings-those Joan and Voltaire entities we released, per your instructions.”

He nodded. “And do you remember the chaos they helped provoke? Both on Trantor and on Sark?”

“Hey, don’t blame me for that, Academician. You wanted data about human-response patterns from the sims, in order to help develop your psychohistory models. Marq Hillard and I never meant for them to escape into the datasphere.

“Anyway, these archives are something else entirely-carefully indexed accumulations of knowledge that people lovingly put together as a gift to their descendants. Isn’t that exactly what you’re trying to accomplish with the Encyclopedia Galactica Foundation your group is setting up on Terminus? A gathering of wisdom, safeguarding human knowledge against another dark age?”

Hari was caught in a logical trap. How could he explain that the “encyclopedia” part of his Foundation was only a ruse? Or that his Plan involved fighting the dark age with a lot more than mere books?

Of course there was plenty of irony to go around. The “mere books” on the table in front of him could destroy every bit of relevance that was left in the Seldon Plan. They presented a mortal danger to everything he had worked for.

“How many of these things are there?” He tried to ask Maserd, then noticed that the nobleman was leaning past Vlimt, transfixed by images.

“Wait! Go back a few frames. Yes, there! By great Franklin’s ghost, it’s America. I recognize that monument from a coin in our family collection! “

Gornon chuckled. “Phallic and obtrusive,” he commented. “Say, how do you know so much about-”

“I wonder if this archive has a copy of The Federalist,” the captain murmured, reaching for a controller pad. “Or possibly even…”

Maserd paused suddenly, shoulders hunched, as if realizing he had made a mistake. He turned to look at Seldon.

“Did you say something, Professor?”

Hari felt irritated that nobody was telling him the important things he needed to know.

“I asked how many archives there are, and what these people plan to do with them!”

This time Sybyl responded, taking manifest gusto in her victory.

“There are millions, Academician. All herded together and neatly tethered to a collection station for over a hundred and fifty centuries, just floating there, lonely and unread.

“But no longer! We’ve sent word to all the other agents of Ktlina who have been working in secret, across the galaxy, telling them to drop whatever they’re doing and converge here. Soon more than thirty ships will arrive to fill their holds with beautiful archives and depart, sharing them with all of humanity!”

Hari objected. “They are illegal. Police officers are trained to recognize these horrors by sight. So are Greys and members of the gentry class. They’ll catch your agents.”

“Maybe they will, here and there. Perhaps the tyrants and their lackeys will stop most of us. But it will be like an infection, Professor. All we need is a few receptive places… some sympathetic dissidents to make ships and industrial copying facilities available. Within a year there win be thousands of copies on every planet in the empire. Then millions!”

The image she presented, of a virulent infection, was more accurate than Sybyl could possibly imagine. Hari envisioned chaos tearing great holes in his carefully worked-out Plan. All of the predictability that had been his lifelong goal would unravel like images written in smoke. The same smoke that gagged the streets of Santanni when that “renaissance” ended in riots and bloodshed, taking poor Raych to the grave, along with a myriad hopes.

“Has it occurred to you…”

He had to pause and swallow before continuing.

“Has it occurred to you that your bold endeavor has already been tried, and failed?”

This time both Gornon and Sybyl looked at him.

“What do you mean?” Vlimt asked.

“I mean that these archives were clearly meant for deep space, for long endurance, and to be easily read after a long journey, using only very basic technology.

“What does that tell you about their purpose?”

Sybyl started shaking her head, then her eyes widened, and her face went pale.

“Gifts,” she said in a low voice. “Messages in a bottle. Sent out to people who had lost their past.”

Lord Maserd’s brow furrowed. “You mean some people still had knowledge…and they were trying hard to share it

“With everybody else. With distant settlements that had no memory.” Hari nodded. “But why would they have to do that? Data-storage cells were cheap and durable, even in the dawn ages. Any colony ship, setting forth to settle a new world, would have carried petabytes of information, and tools to maintain literacy. So why would anyone in the galaxy need to be reminded about all this?” He waved at the images from long-lost Earth.

A voice spoke from the doorway at the back of the room.

“You’re talking about the Amnesia Question,” said Mors Planch, who must have been listening for a while. “The issue of why we don’t remember our origins. And the answer is obvious. Something-or somebody- madeour ancestors forget.”

Planch nodded toward the relics. “But some of the ancients held out. They fought back. Tried to replace the erased knowledge. Tried to share what they knew.”

Maserd blinked. “The space lanes must have already been controlled by enemies, blockading their ships. So they tried sending the data this way, in fast little capsules.”

Sybyl looked down, her effusive mood replaced by gloom.

“We were so excited, looking ahead to using these as weapons…I didn’t think of what the archives implied. It means”