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Daneel must plan to have all the Giskard machines self-destruct during the next hundred years or so. Otherwise, my Foundationers will find them!
At that moment, it surprised Hari to feel fierce pride in his first and greatest creation. Fu
A bit like my Second Foundation,he thought, enjoying a little obsessive self-criticism.
“I know you must have some agenda. Gornon. Some convoluted reason for showing me this. Nevertheless. please accept my thanks. It’s always good to glimpse the truth before you die.”
Their pilot promised that the next phase of the journey would be brief. Gornon refused to be more specific, but their flight path toward Sirius Sector made it blatantly evident to Hari where they must be heading.
He passed the time poring throughA Child’s Book of Knowledge. Browsing semi-randomly, guided only by a perverse desire to sample forbidden ideas. those he had long considered irrelevant or wrong.
Almost equally dangerous is the Gospel of Uniformity. The differences between the nations and races of mankind are required to preserve the conditions under which higher development is possible. One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering…Physical wandering is still important, but greater still is the power of man’s spiritual adventures-adventures of thought, adventures of passionate feeling, adventures of aesthetic experience. A diversification among human communities is essential for the provision of the inventive material for the Odyssey of the human spirit. Other nations of different habits are not enemies; they are godsends.
What a bizarre way of looking at things! It was the sort of statement that one heard from preachers of chaos, singing the praises of each “renaissance” before it tumbled into broiling violence and. finally, solipsism. These notions sounded alluring. There were even versions of the psychohistorical equations that suggested a kind of truthought to lie therein. But with chaos as an enemy, all such benefits were lost. Anyone betting on diversity and boldness of spirit would almost certainly wind up losing everything.
As they approached their destination, Hari kept probing through garbled accounts for clues as to what the very first chaos outbreak might have been like, when the vigorous, self-confident civilization of Susan Calvin tumbled into such horror that Earthlings fled into metal caves, and Spacers turned their backs on love.
Hari wondered.Might it have something to do with the invention of robots themselves?
He had discussed this a couple of times with Daneel and Dors. They told him that the original Three Laws of Robotics were created in order to assuage human fears about artificial beings. But the original designers had meant the laws to be only a stopgap measure leading to something better.
“Quite a few variations were tried,“ Daneel told Hari one evening, perhaps ten years ago.“On some colony worlds, a few centuries after the diaspora from Earth, certain groups tried to introduce what were called New Laws, giving robots more autonomy and individuality. But soon our civil war caught up with these experiments. Calvinians could not abide the equality heresy, which they considered even worse than my Zeroth Law. My faction saw the i
“All of the New-Law robots were exterminated, of course.“
That evening, over di
Horis bit a fingernail. “But isn’t it poisonous, covered with radioactive soil? I thought you tiktoks weren’t supposed to put humans in danger.”
Hari recalled images from the old archives, depicting a dying world…a beach awash with dead fish…a forest populated by skeletal trees and crumbling leaves…a city, nearly empty, filling with blowing dust and detritus.
“I’m sure a brief visit won’t harm us,” Biron Maserd commented. The nobleman’s eyes shone with eager curiosity. “Anyway, don’t some people still live on the planet? According to tradition, it once had an excellent university, even several thousand years after the diaspora. A school one of my ancestors is said to have attended.”
Gornon nodded. “A local population endured until well into the age when the Trantorian Empire became pan-galactic. They were an odd breed, however. Resentful over being forgotten and ignored by the descendants of cousins who had fled for the stars. Eventually most of the remaining people were evacuated, when Earthlings were discovered plotting a war of revenge, to destroy the empire they hated.”
Horis Antic stared blankly. “One planet hoped todestroy twenty million?”
“According to our records, the threat was quite serious. Earthling radicals got their hands on an ancient biological weapon of enormous power, one so sophisticated that even the best Trantorian biologists felt helpless before its virulence. By unleashing this attack through a volley of hyperspatial missiles, fanatics hoped to render the empire inoperable.”
“What did the disease do to people?” Horis asked in hushed tones.
“Its effect would be to cause a sudden and catastrophic drop of IQ on every planet within reach.” The robot looked pained even to describe it. “Many would simply die, while the rest would feel an implanted compulsion to spread out, seeking to findmore potential victims, and embrace them.”
“Horrific!” Captain Maserd murmured.
But Hari was already thinking two steps ahead.Gornon would not be telling us this now, unless it has immediate significance. The Earthlings’ weapon must have come from much earlier. From an era of great genius.
The implications made Hari shiver.
Only a few hours later, they arrived.
From a great distance, beyond its fabled moon, Earth looked like any other living world-a rich muddle of browns and whites, blues and greens. Only through a long-range viewer could they tell that most of the life ashore consisted of primitive ferns and scrubgrasses, which had evolved to survive the radiation that came sleeting upward from the poisoned ground. In one of the great ironies of all time, Earth, which had provided most of the galaxy’s fecundity, was now an almost barren wasteland. A coffin for all too many species that never made it into space, as humanity fled the spreading doom. As they spiraled closer, Hari knew that he would soon face something even more disturbing than the “Giskard” mentalic device circling Pengia.
He went to his room to fetch his talismans. One was Daneel’s gift-AChild’s Book of Knowledge. But even more important, he wanted to carry the Seldon Plan Prime Radiant, containing his life’s work. That gorgeous psychohistorical design, to which he had devoted the latter half of his existence.
So it was with mounting worry that he searched his tiny stateroom, rummaging through drawers and luggage.
The Prime Radiant was nowhere to be found.
At that moment, he desperately missed his former aide and nurse, Kers Kantun, who had been murdered by fellow robots, only a week or so ago.
Kers would know where I misplaced it,Hari thought… until he realized there was an even better explanation than absentmindedness.
The Prime Radiant had been stolen!