David Brin - Foundation’s Triumph

It was Wanda.

Any unusual movement would certainly attract attention, so Dors put on an expression like the distracted gray-clad bureaucrat she resembled, boring and innocuous, as she obliquely crossed the courtyard.

Wanda’s countenance grew puzzled. Dors felt a mental probing as they passed each other. But her granddaughter’s talent wasn’t strong enough to penetrate a well-trained robotic outer guise. After time spent on Smushell, tending much stronger psychics, Dors easily foiled Wanda’s probes.

Still, it was a tense moment. Something in Dors-the part tuned to act and feel human-wanted to reach out to this person she had known and loved.

But Wanda doesn’t need an encounter with her late Grandma Dors right now. She’s content and busy with her role, certain that the Second Foundation will foster a great awakening of humankind, in just a thousand years.

It’s not my place to disturb such fulfillment, however illusory.

So Dors kept walking, her face and mind sufficiently different that Wanda finally shook her head, pushing aside those brief sensations of familiarity.

When she reached a safe distance, Dors let out a cathartic sigh.

Sybyl did not take the news well. After recovering consciousness aboard the Pride of Rhodia, she railed at Hari and Maserd for what they had done.

“You’ve destroyed the best hope for ten quadrillion people to escape tyranny!”

Next to her, Mors Planch accepted this latest defeat more calmly than Hari expected. The tall, dark-skinned pirate captain was more interested in grasping what had happened, and what the future might bring.

“So, let me get this straight,” Planch asked. “We were manipulated by one group of robots, lured to the archive site in order to give them an excuse to destroy the records, with Seldon here giving them the final nod.” Planch gestured toward Hari. “Only then we were all hijacked by another set of damn tiktoks?”

Hari, who had been trying to read, glanced up with some irritation from his copy of A Child’s Book of Knowledge.

“Human volition often proves less potent than we egotists imagine, Captain Planch. Free will is an adolescent concept that keeps cropping up, like an obstinate weed. But most people outgrow it.

“The essence of maturity,” he finished with a sigh, “is understanding how little force a single human can exert against a huge galaxy, or the momentum of destiny.”

Mors Planch stared at Hari across the ship’s lounge.

“You may have fantastic amounts of evidence and mathematics to back up that dour philosophy. Professor. But I shall never accept it, until the day I die.”

Sybyl kept pacing back and forth in agitation, making Horis Antic draw his legs back each time she approached his chair. The small bureaucrat took another blue pill, though he had calmed considerably since fleeing into a drugged stupor back in the nebula. He still chewed his nails incessantly.

Nearby, Jeni Cuicet sat curled at one end of a sofa, pressing a neural desensitizer against her brow. The girl made a brave front, but her headache and chills were clearly getting worse.

“We have to get her to a hospital,” Sybyl demanded of their abductor. “Or will you let the poor girl die just for your grudge against us?”

The robot who had been fashioned to resemble Gornon Vlimt reached behind his head and pulled out the cable that kept him linked to the ship’s computer, controlling the Pride of Rhodia as the yacht leaped across star lanes, racing toward some unknown destination.

“I never meant to take you and Jeni and Captain Planch on this phase of the journey,” the humanoid explained. “I would have off-loaded you with the real Gornon Vlimt, if there had been time.”

“And where did you send our ship?” Sybyl demanded. “Were you going to turn us over to the police? To some imperial prison? Or have us cured of our madness by the so-called Health and Sanitation Agency that’s laying siege to Ktlina?”

The robot shook his head.

“To a safe place, where none of you would be harmed, and where none of you could do any harm. But that opportunity passed, so we must make do. This ship will, therefore, stop along the way, at a convenient imperial world, where you three can be put ashore and Jeni will get medical care.”

Mors Planch, the tall raider, rubbed his chin. “I wonder what went wrong with your plan, back at the archive station. You slew Kers Kantun, yet you didn’t interfere with the job he was doing there. You won’t let us have the remaining archives, and now you’re scooting off as fast as you can. Are your enemies hot on your trail?”

Gornon did not answer. He didn’t have to. They all knew his faction of robots was much weaker than Kers Kantun’s, and could accomplish nothing except by speed and surprise.

Hari pondered what must become of the humans aboard this ship. Of course, he himself had already known most of the big secrets, for decades. But what about Sybyl, Planch, Antic, and Maserd? Might they blab as soon as they were released? Or would it matter what they said? The galaxy was always rife with unsupported rumors about so-called eternals-mechanical beings, immortal and all-knowing. Trantor had been abuzz with such talk many times over the years, and always the mania subsided as social damping mechanisms automatically kicked in.

He looked at Jeni, feeling guilty. Her case of adolescent brain fever had been made much worse by these adventures-having to confront frequent news about robots and fossils and archives filled with ancient history…all subjects that the fever’s infectious organism tuned human minds to find distasteful.

He had discussed this with Maserd, who was no slouch. Biron understood by now that brain fever could not possibly be natural. Though it predated all known cultures, it must have been designed, once upon a time. Targeted. Deliberately made both durable and virulent.

“Could it have been a weapon against humanity?” Maserd had asked. “Contrived by some alien race? Perhaps one that was just being destroyed by the terraformers?”

Hari recalled the meme-minds that had briefly raged on Trantor-mad software entities claiming to be ghosts of prehistoric civilizations, who blamed Daneel’s kind for some past devastation. Hari used to wonder if brain fever might be their work, designed for revenge against mankind…until psychohistory came into focus.

Thereafter he recognized brain fever as something else-one of the social “dampers” that kept human civilization stable and resistant to change.

It was designed, all right, but not to destroy humanity.

Brain fever was a medical innovation. A weapon against a much older and deadlier disease.

Chaos.

Soon, Sybyl was off on another tangent. Leaping to fresh subjects with the manic agility of a renaissance mind.

“These mentalic powers we’ve seen demonstrated are fantastic! Our scientists on Ktlina started out skeptical, but a few had theorized that a powerful computer, with superresponsive sensors, might trace and decipher all the electronic impulses given off by a human brain! I was dubious that such a vast and sophisticated analysis could be made, even with the new calculating engines. But these positronic robots appear to have been doing it for a very long time!”

She shook her head.

“Imagine that. We knew the ruling classes had lots of ways to control us. But I had no idea it included invading and altering our minds!”

Hari wished the woman would stop talking. Someone of her intelligence should realize the implications. The more she discovered, the more essential it would be to erase her entire memory of the last few weeks, before she could be let go. But renaissance types were like this. So wild and joyful in the liberated creativity of their chaos-drenched minds that addiction to the next fresh idea was more powerful than any drug.