18.

He and Dors watched the great luminous spiral turn beneath them in its eternal night.

“I do appreciate such perks,” she said dreamily. They stood alone before the spectacle. Worlds and lives and stars, all like crushed diamonds thrown against eternal blackness.

“Getting into the palace just to look at the Emperor’s display rooms?” He had ordered all the halls cleared.

“Getting away from snoopers and eavesdroppers.”

“You…you haven’t heard from-?”

She shook her head. “Daneel pulled nearly all the rest of us off Trantor. He says little to me.”

“I’m pretty damn sure the alien minds won’t strike again. They’re afraid of robots. It took me a while to see that lay behind their talk about revenge.”

“Mingled hate and fear. Very human.”

“Still, I think they’ve had their revenge. They say the Galaxy was lush with life before we came. There are cycles of barren eras, then luxuriant ones. Don’t know why. Apparently that’s happened several times before, at intervals of a third of a billion years-great diebacks of intelligent life, leaving only spores. Now they’ve come to our Mesh and become digital fossils.”

“Fossils don’t kill,” she said sardonically.

“Not as well as we do, apparently.”

“Not you-us.”

“They do hate you robots. Not that they have any love of humans-after all, we made you, long ago. We’re to blame.”

“They are so strange…”

He nodded. “I believe they’ll stay in their digital preserve until Marq and Sybyl can get them transported into their ancient spore state. They once lived that way for longer than the Galaxy takes to make a rotation.”

“Your ‘pretty damn sure’ isn’t good enough for Daneel,” she said. “He wants them exterminated.”

“It’s a standoff. If Daneel goes after them, he’ll have to pull the plug on Trantor’s Mesh. That will wound the Empire. So he’s stuck, fuming but impotent.”

“I hope you have estimated the balance properly,” she said.

A glimmering, gossamer thought flitted across his mind. The tiktok attacks upon the Lamurk faction had discredited them in public opinion. Now they would be suppressed throughout the Galaxy. And in time, the meme-minds would leave Trantor.

Hari frowned. Daneel surely wanted both these outcomes.

He had undoubtedly suspected that the mememinds had survived, perhaps that they were in action on Trantor. So could Hari’s amateur maneuverings, including the Lamurk murders, have been deftly conjured up by Daneel? Could a robot so accurately predict what he, Hari, would do?

A chill ran through him. Such ability would be breathtaking. Superhuman.

With tiktoks now soon to be suppressed, Trantor would have trouble producing its own food. Tasks once done by men would have to be re-learned, taking generations to establish such laborers as a socially valued group again. Meanwhile, dozens of other worlds would have to send Trantor food, a lifeline slender and vulnerable. Did Daneel intend that, too? To what end?

Hari felt uneasy. He sensed social forces at work, just beyond his view.

Was such adroit thinking the product of millennia of experience and high, positronic intelligence? For just a moment, Hari had a vision of a mind both strange and measureless, in human terms. Was that what an immortal machine became?

Then he pushed the idea away. It was too unsettling to contemplate. Later, perhaps, when psychohistory was done…

He noticed Dors staring at him. What had she said? Oh, yes…

“Estimating the balance, yes. I’m getting the feel for these things. With Voltaire and Joan doing the scut work, and Yugo now chairman of the Mathist Department, I actually have time to think.”

“And suffer fools gladly?”

“The Academic Potentate? At least I understand her now.” He peered at Dors. “Daneel says he will leave Trantor. He’s lost a lot of his humaniforms. Does he need you?”

She looked up at him in the soft glow. Her expression worked with conflict. “I can’t leave you.”

“His orders?”

“Mine.”

He gritted his teeth. “The robots who died-you knew them?”

“Some. We trained together back, back when…”

“You don’t have to conceal anything from me. I know you must be at least a century old.”

Her mouth made an O of surprise, then quickly closed. “How?”

“You know more than you should.”

“So do you-in bed, anyway.” She chuckled.

“I learned it from a pan I met.”

She laughed bawdily, then sobered. “I’m one hundred sixty-three.”

“With the thighs of a teenager. If you had tried to leave Trantor, I’d have blocked you.”

She blinked. “Truly?”

He bit his lip, thinking. “Well, no.”

She smiled. “More romantic to say yes…”

“I have a habit of honesty-which I’d better drop if I want to stay First Minister.”

“So you would let me go? You still feel that you owe that to Daneel?”

“If he thought the danger to you was that great, then I would honor his judgment.”

“You still respect us so?”

“Robots work selflessly for the Empire-always. Few humans do.”

“You don’t wonder what we did to earn the aliens’ revenge?”

“Of course. Do you know?”

She shook her head, gazing out at the vast turning disk. Suns of blue and crimson and yellow swept along their orbits amid dark dust and disorder. “It was something awful. Daneel was there and he will not speak of it. There is nothing in our history of this. I’ve looked.”

“An empire lasting many millennia has manifold secrets.” Hari watched the slow spin of a hundred billion flaming stars. “I’m more interested in its future-in saving it.”

“You fear that future, don’t you?”

“Terrible things are coming. The equations show that.”

“We can face them together.”

He took her in his arms, but they both still watched the Galaxy’s shining marvels. “I dream of founding something, a way to help the Empire, even after we’re gone… “

“And you fear something, too,” she said into his neck.

“How did you know? Yes-I fear the chaos that could come from so many forces, divergent vector turmoil-all acting to bring down the order of the Empire. I fear for the very…” His face clouded. “For the very foundations themselves. Foundations…”

“Chaos comes?”

“I know we ourselves, our minds, come out of skating on the inner rim of chaos-states. The digital world shows that. You show that.”

She said soberly, “I do not think positronic minds understand themselves any better than human ones.”

“We-our minds and our Empire-both spring from an emergent order of inner, basically chaotic states, but…”

“You do not want the Empire to crash from such chaos.”

“I want the Empire to survive! Or at least, if it falls, to reemerge.”

Hari suddenly felt the pain of such vast movements. The Empire was like a mind, and minds sometimes went crazy, crashed. A disaster for one solitary mind. How colossally worse for an Empire.

Seen through the prism of his mathematics, humanity was on a long march pressing forward through surrounding dark. Time battered them with storms, rewarded them with sunshine-and they did not glimpse that these passing seasons came from the shifting cadences of huge, eternal equations.

Running the equations time-forward, then backward, Hari had seen humanity’s mortal parade in snips. Somehow that made it oddly touching. Steeped in their own eras, few worlds ever glimpsed the route ahead. There was no shortage of portentous talk, or of oafs who pretended with a wink and a nod to fathom the unseeable. Misled, whole Zones stumbled and fell.

He sought patterns, but beneath those vast sweeps lay the seemingly infinitesimal, living people. Across the realm of stars, under the laws that reigned like gods, lay innumerable lives in the process of being lost. For to live was to lose, in the end.