David Brin: Foundation’s Triumph

This time, one snared his attention.

-I seem to have found correlations between your psychohistory technique and the mathematical models used in forecasting patterns in the flow of spacio-molecular currents in deep space! This, in turn, corresponds uncannily with the distribution of soil types on planets sampled across a wide range of galactic locales. I thought you might be interested in discussing this in person. If so, please indicate by

Hari barked a laugh, making Kers Kantun glance over from the kitchen. This certainly was a cute one, all right! He scanned rows of mathematical symbols, finding the approach amateurish, if primly accurate and sincere. Not a kook, then. A well-meaning aficionado, compensating for poor talent with strangely original ideas. He ordered this letter sent to the juniormost member of the Fifty, instructing that it be answered with gentle courtesy-a knack that young Saha Lorwinth ought to learn, if she was going to be one of the secret rulers of human destiny.

With a sigh, he turned his wheelchair away from the wall monitor, toward his shielded private study. Pulling Daneel’s gift from his robe, he laid it on the desk, in a slot specially made to read the ancient relic. The readout screen rippled with two-dimensional images and archaic letters that the computer translated for him.

A Child’s Book of Knowledge

Britannica Publishing Company

New Tokyo, Bayleyworld, 2757 C.E.

The info-store in front of him was highly illegal, but that would hardly stop Hari Seldon, who had once ordered the revival of those ancient simulated beings, Joan of Arc and Voltaire, from another half-melted archive. That act wound up plunging parts of Trantor into chaos when the pair of sims escaped their programmed bonds to run wild through the planet’s data corridors. In fact, the whole episode ended rather well for Hari, though not for the citizens of Junin or Sark. Anyway, he felt little compunction over breaking the Archives Law once again.

Close to twenty thousand years ago. He pondered its publication date, just as awed as the first time he’d activated Daneel’s gift. This may have been written for children of that age, but it holds more of our deep history than all of today’s imperial scholars could pool together.

It had taken Hari half a year to peruse and get a feel for the sweep of early human existence, which began on distant Earth, on a continent called Africa, when a race of clever apes first stood upright and blinked with dull curiosity at the stars.

So many words emerged from that little stone cube. Some were already familiar, having come down to the present in murky form, through oral tales and traditions-

Rome

China

Shake Spear

Hamlet

Buddha

Apollo

The Spacer Worlds

Oddly enough, some fairy tales seemed to have survived virtually unchanged after two hundred centuries. Popular favorites like Pinocchio…and Frankenstein…were apparently far older than anyone imagined.

Other items in the archive Hari had first heard of just a few decades ago, when they were mentioned by the ancient sims, Voltaire and Joan.

France

Christianity

Plato

But far greater was the list of things Hari never had an inkling of, until he first activated this little book. Facts about the human past that had only been known by Daneel Olivaw and other robots. People and places that once rang with vital import for all humanity.

Columbus

America

Einstein

The Empire of Brazil

Susan Calvin

And everything from the limestone caves of Lascaux to the steel catacombs where Earthlings cowered in the twenty-sixth century.

Especially humbling to Hari had been one short essay about an ancient shaman named Karl Marx, whose crude incantations bore no similarity to psychohistory, except the blithe confidence that believers invested in their precious model of human nature. Marxists, too, once thought they had reduced history to basic scientific principles.

Of course, we know better. We Seldonists.

Hari smiled at the irony.

Ostensibly, Daneel Olivaw had presented Hari with this relic for a simple reason-to give him a task. Something to occupy his mind during these final months before his frail body finally gave out. Although the brain had gone too brittle to help Gaal Dornick and the Fifty, he could still handle a simple psychohistorical project-fitting a few millennia of data from a single world into the overall Plan. Tabulating Earth’s early history might help extend the baselines-the boundary conditions-of the Prime Radiant by a decimal place or two.

Anyway, it gave Hari a way to keep feeling useful.

I thought this would also help answer my deepest questions, he pondered. Alas, the chief result had only been to tease his curiosity. It seems that Earth itself went through several periods as a chaos world. One of those episodes spawned Daneel’s kind. A time when humaniform robots like Dors were invented.

A tremor shook Hari’s left hand, provoking worry that he was about to suffer another attack…until the trembling finally passed.

Daneel had better come soon, or else I’ll never get the explanations that I’ve earned, doing his bidding all these years!

Kers brought him dinner, a sampling of Mycogenian delicacies that Hari barely tasted. His attention was immersed in A Child’s Book of Knowledge, a chapter telling about the great migration- whenEarth’s vast population strove to flee a world that was fast growing uninhabitable for some mysterious reason. Through heroic effort, nearly a billion people made it off-planet in time, streaking outward in crude hyperships to establish colonies throughout Sirius Sector.

By the time this archive was published, the editors of A Child’s Book of Knowledge could only guess how many worlds had been settled. Reports from the frontier told of wars among human subcultures. And some rumors were even more strange. Space-ghost legends. Tales of mysterious explosions in the night, vast and worrisome, sparkling just beyond the forward wave of human exploration.

A process of dissolution had begun, when humanity’s remote portions would lose contact. A long dark age of hard struggles and petty squabbles would soon commence, when memories would fade as barbarism swallowed countless minor kingdoms-until peace finally returned to the human universe. A peace brought by the dynamic and rising Trantorian Empire.

Peering across that vast gulf, Hari felt struck by something odd.

If this archive was meant for youngsters-it shows that our ancestors weren’t idiots.

Of course Hari had been reading much more challenging tomes by age six. But this “children’s book” would have gone over the heads of nearly all his peers on Helicon. The ancients weren’t dummies. And yet, their civilization dissolved into madness and amnesia.

So far, the psychohistorical equations did not offer any help. Hari probed the archive for explanations. But he had a lurking suspicion that answers-real answers-would have to be found elsewhere.

Ten minutes before landing on Panucopia, Dors retreated to her shielded cabin. She reached into her shirt and unfolded a piece of dark fabric. It lay on the small table, creaseless and passive, until her positronic brain sent a coded microwave burst. Then the surface flickered, and a human face suddenly shimmered to life, resembling a young woman with close-cropped hair, stern-visaged and experienced beyond her apparent years. Blue eyes scanned Dors, evaluating, before the image finally spoke.

“ Months have passed since you last summoned me, Dors Venabili. Does my presence make you so uncomfortable?”