[YOUR VARIETY OF VIVIFORM]

[IS NOT OUR PRIMARY AIM]

“You certainly torture us enough!” Voltaire countered.

Hari took the tiny man in hand and lifted him. A tornado descended, dark and swirling with rubble-ruined slivers of the Mesh, he saw, devoured. He held Voltaire toward the sucking spout.

The cyclone battered them all with hammering grit. It yowled with banshee energy, so loud Hari had to shout. “You were the ‘apostle of reason’-to quote your own interior memories. Reason with them.”

“I make no sense of their fractured talk. What is this of other ‘viviforms’? There is Man, and Man alone!”

“The Lord has so ordained!-even in this Purgatory,” Joan agreed.

Hari said grimly, guessing what was coming, “Always be quick, seldom be certain.”

10.

“I need to see Daneel,” Hari insisted. He felt a bit blurry from his raw interface with the sprawling, dizzying Mesh. But there was little time. “Now.”

Dors shook her head. “Far too dangerous, particularly with the tiktok crisis so-”

“I can solve that. Get him.”

“I’m not sure how to”

“I love you, but you’re a terrible liar.”

Daneel was wearing a workman’s pullover and looking quite uncomfortable when Hari met him in a broad, busy plaza.

“Where are your Specials?”

“All around us, dressed much as you are.”

This made Daneel even more uneasy. Hari realized that this most advanced of robot forms suffered from some eternal human limitations. With facial expressions activated, even a positronic brain could not separately control the subtleties of lips and eyes while experiencing disconnected emotions. And in public Daneel did not dare let his subprograms lapse and his face go blank.

“They have a sonic wall up?”

Hari nodded to the captain, who was pushing a broom nearby. Daneel’s words seemed to come through a blanket. “I do not like to expose us this way.”

Knots of Specials astutely deflected passersby so that none noticed the sonic bubble. Hari had to admire the masterly method; the Empire could still do some things expertly. “Matters are worse than even you imagine.”

“Your request, to provide moment-to-moment location data of Lamurk’s people-this could expose my agents inside the Lamurk network.”

“There’s no other way,” Hari said sharply. “I’ll leave to you tracking the right figures.”

“They must be incapacitated?”

“For the rest of the crisis.”

“ Whichcrisis?” Daneel’s face wrenched into a grimace-then went blank. He had cut the connections.

“The tiktoks. Lamurk’s moves. A bit of blackmail, for spice. Sark. Take your pick. Oh, and aspects of the Mesh I’ll describe later.”

“You will force a predictable pattern on the Lamurk factions? How?”

“With a maneuver. I imagine your agents will be able to predict positions of some principals, including Lamurk himself, at that time.”

“What maneuver?”

“I will send a signal when it is about to transpire.”

“You jest with me,” Daneel said darkly. “And the other request, to eliminate Lamurk himself-”

“Choose your method. I shall choose mine.”

“I can do that, true. An application of the Zeroth Law.” Daneel paused, face slack, in high calculation mode. “My method will take five minutes of preparation at the site we choose, to bring off the effect.”

“Good enough. Just be sure your robots keep the leading Lamurkians well spotted, and the data flowing through Dors.”

“Tell me now!”

“And spoil the anticipation?”

“Hari, you must-”

“Only if you can be absolutely sure there will be no leaks.”

“Nothing is utterly certain-”

“Then we have free will, no? Or at least I do.” Hari felt an unfamiliar zest. To act-that gave a kind of freedom, too.

Though Daneel’s face showed nothing, his body language spoke of caution: his legs crossing, a hand touching his face. “I need some assurance that you fully understand the situation.”

Hari laughed. He had never done that in the solemn presence of Daneel. It felt like a liberation.

11.

Hari waited in the antechamber of the High Council. He could see the great bowl through transparent one-way walls.

The delegates chattered anxiously. These men and women in their formal pantaloons were plainly worried. Yet they set the fates of trillions of lives, of stars and spiral arms.

Even Trantor was baffling in its sheer size. Of course Trantor mirrored the entire Galaxy in its factions and ethnicities. Both the Empire and this planet had intricate connections, meaningless coincidences, random juxtapositions, sensitive dependencies. Both clearly extended beyond the Complexity Horizon of any person or computer.

People, confronting bewildering complexity, tend to find their saturation level. They master the easy connections, use local links and rules of thumb. These they push until they meet a wall of complexity too thick and high and hard to climb. So they stall. They go back to panlike modes. They gossip, consult, and finally, gamble.

The High Council was abuzz, at a cusp point. A new at tractor in the chaos could lure them into a new orbit. Now was the time to show that path. Or so said his intuition, sharpened on Panucopia.

…And after that, he told himself, he would get back to the problem of modeling the Empire…

“I do hope you know what you’re doing,” Cleon said, bustling in. His ceremonial cape enveloped him in scarlet and his plumed hat was a turquoise fountain. Hari suppressed a chuckle. He would never get used to high formal dress.

“I am happy that I can at least appear in my academic robes, sire.”

“And damned lucky you are. Nervous?”

Hari was surprised to find that he felt no tension at all, especially considering that at his previous appearance here, he had very nearly been assassinated. “No, sire.”

“I always contemplate a great, soothing work of art before such performances as this.” Cleon waved his hand and an entire wall of the antechamber filled with light.

It portrayed a classic theme of the Trantorian School: Fruit Devoured, from the definitive Betti Uktonia sequence. It showed a tomato being eaten first by caterpillars. Then praying mantises feasting upon the caterpillars. Finally, tarantulas and frogs chewing the mantises. A later Uktonia work, Child Consumption, began with rats giving birth. The babies then were caught and eaten by various predators, some quite large.

Hari knew the theory. All this had emerged from the growing conviction of Trantorians that the wild was an ugly place, violent and without meaning. Only in cities did order and true humanity prevail. Most Sectors had diets strong in disguised natural fodder. Now the tiktok rebellion made even that difficult.

“We’ve had to go nearly entirely to synthetic foods,” Cleon said, distracted. “Trantor is now fed by twenty agriworlds, an improvised lifeline using hyperships. Imagine! Not that the palace is affected, of course.”

“Some Sectors are starving,” Hari said. He wanted to tell Cleon of the many intertwined threads, but the Imperial escort arrived.

Faces, noise, lights, the vast curving bowl-

Hari listened to the echoing formalities as he took in the sheer gravity of the place. Many millennia old, walls encrusted with historical tablets, suffused with tradition and majesty…

And then he was up and speaking, with no memory of getting to the high podium at all. The full force of their regard washed over him. Part of him recognized a Pan-deep sensation: the thrill of being paid attention to. And it was exhilarating. Political types were natural addicts of it. But not one Hari Seldon, luckily. He took a deep breath and began.

“Let me address a thorn in our side: representation. This body favors less populous Sectors. Similarly, the Spiral Council favors less populous worlds. So the Dahlites, both here and in their Zones around the Galaxy, are discontented. Yet we must all pull together to confront the gathering crises: Sark, the tiktoks, unrest.”