“And these minds hate us all?” Dors asked slowly, trying to grasp these ideas.

“Humans? Yes, but not nearly so much as your kind, m’love.”

“Us?” She blinked.

“Robots did damage to them long ago.”

“Yes!” Daneel said sternly. “To protect humanity.”

“And those older intelligences hate your kind for your brutality. By the time the fleets of robo-explorers were done, we found a Galaxy suitable for benign farming.” Hari flicked on his holo. “Here’s an image I brought from the meme-minds.”

Across a darkling plain swept a line of yellow. Harsh winds drove it forward as it consumed the tall stands of lush grass. Licking flames reached and ate and reached again. From the bright burning line of attack rose billowing, leaden smoke.

“A prairie fire,” Hari said. “That is how the robot-explorers of twenty thousand years ago looked to those ancient minds.”

“Burning up the Galaxy?” Dors said hollowly.

“Making it safe for the precious humans,” Hari said.

“For this,” Daneel said, “they wish revenge. But why now?”

“They are at last able…and they finally detected you robots, distinguishing you from the tiktoks.”

Daneel asked stonily, “How?”

“When they found the sims I had revived. Working backward from them, to me, they found Dors. Then you.”

“They can survey that widely?” Dors asked.

Hari said, “All digital information from surveillance cameras, from snooper pickups, microdevices -they can fish in that sea.”

“ Youhelped them,” Daneel said.

“For the good of the Empire I made my deal with them.”

Daneel said, “They first killed the Lamurkians, then turned on my robots. Assigning a dozen tiktoks to each, they overwhelmed our kind. “

“All of us?” Dors whispered.

“About a third of us escaped.” Daneel allowed himself a hard smile. “We are far more capable than these…automatons.”

Hari nodded sadly. “That was not in the deal. They…used me.”

“I think we are all being used.” Daneel cast a sour glance at Hari. “In different ways.”

“I had to do it, friend Daneel.”

Dors stared at Hari. “I scarcely know you.”

Hari said softly, “Sometimes being human is harder than it looks.”

Dors’ eyes flashed. “Aliens slaughtering my kind!”

“I had to find a solution-”

She said, “Robots, especially the humaniforms-they’re servants, they-”

“My love, you are more human than anyone I’ve known.”

“But-murder!”

“There was going to be murder anyway. The ancient memes could not be stopped.” Hari sighed and realized how far he had come. This was power, hovering above all and seeing the world as a vast arena, its clashes unending. He had become part of that and knew he could not go back to being the simple mathist ever again.

Dors demanded, “Why are you so sure? You could have told us, we could-”

“They knew you already. If I had stalled, they would have taken you two, gone hunting for the rest.”

Daneel asked sternly, “And…for us?”

“Both of you I saved. Part of the deal.”

Daneel wilted then. “Thank you…I suppose.

“Hari gazed at his old friend, eyes misting. “You… are carrying too much weight.”

Daneel nodded. “I carried out the imperative and obeyed you.”

Hari nodded. “Lamurk. I was there. Your insects fried him.”

“Or appeared to.”

“What?” Hari stared as Daneel pressed a button on his wrist, then turned to the office door. Through it, pausing slightly for the security screen, stepped a man of unremarkable looks in a brown workman’s coverall.

“Our Mister Lamurk,” Daneel said.

“That isn’t-” Hari then saw the subtle resemblances. The nose had been trimmed, cheeks filled out, hair thinned and browned, ears sloped back. “But I saw him die!”

“So you did. The voltage he took fully stopped him for a bit, and had my disguised guards not begun proper treatment at the site, he would have stayed dead.”

“You could pull him back from that?”

“It is an ancient craft.”

“How long can a human remain dead before-?”

“About an hour, at low temperatures. We had to work much faster than that,” Daneel said in measured tones.

“Honoring the First Law,” Hari said.

“Shading it a bit. There is no lasting harm done to Lamurk. Now he will devote his talents to better ends.”

“Why?” Hari realized that Lamurk had said nothing. The man stood attentively, watching Daneel, not Hari.

“I do have certain positive powers over human minds. An ancient robot named Giskard gave me limited sway over the neural complexities of the human cerebral cortex. I have altered Lamurk’s motivations and trimmed some memories.”

“How much?” Dors asked suspiciously. To her, Hari realized, Lamurk was still an enemy until proven otherwise.

Daneel waved a hand. “Speak.”

“I understand that I have erred.” Lamurk spoke in a dry, sincere voice, without his usual fire. “I apologize, especially to you, Hari. I cannot recall my offenses, but I regret them. I shall do better now.”

“You do not miss your memories?” Dors probed.

“They are not precious,” Lamurk said reasonably. “An endless chain of petty barbarities and insatiable ambitions, as nearly as I can recall. Blood and anger. Not great moments, so why preserve them? I will be a better person now.”

Hari felt both wonder and fear. “If you could do this, Daneel, why do you bother to argue with me? Just change my mind!”

Daneel said calmly, “I would not dare. You are different from others.”

“Because of psychohistory? Is that all that holds you back?”

“That, yes. But you also did not have the brain fever when young. That makes my skills useless. For example, I could not sense your plot to use the tiktoks against the Lamurk faction, when we met in that open, public place, to enlist my robots’ help.”

“I…see.” To Hari it was sobering to see by how slender a thread his dealings had hung. Merely missing a childhood disease!

“I am looking forward to my future tasks,” Lamurk said flatly. “A new life.”

“What tasks?” Dors asked.

“I will go to the Benin Zone, as regional manager. A responsibility with many exciting challenges.”

“Very good,” Daneel said approvingly.

Something in the blandness of all this sent a chill down Hari’s spine. This was power indeed, played by an ageless master.

“Your Zeroth Law in action…”

“It is essential to psychohistory,” Daneel said.

Hari frowned. “How?”

“The Zeroth Law is a corollary of the First Law, for how can a human being best be kept from injury, if not by ensuring that human society in general is protected and kept functioning?”

Hari said, “And only with a decent theory of the future can you see what is necessary.”

“Exactly. Since the time of Giskard we robots have labored on such a theory, bringing forth only a crude model. So, Hari, you and your theory are essential. Even so, I knew that I was verging close to the First Law’s limit when I followed your orders, using my robots to shadow the Lamurkians.”

“You sensed something wrong?”

“Hyperresistance in the positronic pathways manifests as trouble standing and walking and then speaking. I displayed all these. I must have sensed that my robots would be used indirectly to kill humans. The ancient Giskard had similar difficulties with the boundary between the First and Zeroth Laws.”

Dors’ mouth trembled with barely repressed emotion. “The rest of us depend upon your judgment to negotiate the tension between those two most fundamental of Laws. I could not withstand what you have had to endure.”

Trying to comfort him, Hari said, “You had no choice, Daneel. I boxed you in.”

Daneel looked at Dors, allowing conflicted expressions to flit across his face, a symphony of agony. “The Zeroth Law…I have lived with it for so long…many millennia…and yet…”

“There is a clear contradiction,” Hari said softly, knowing he was treading in territory of great delicacy. “The sort of conceptual clash a human mind can sometimes manage.”