To that, Klia had no answer. “Sleep,” she said. “I can’t stay on my feet any longer or think anymore.”

Plussix turned to Lodovik when the young humans had left the chamber. “Have my skills declined with age?” he asked.

“Not your skills,” Lodovik said, “but perhaps your sense of timing has suffered. You have delivered thousands of years of history in a few hours. They are young and likely to be confused.”

“There is so little time,” Plussix said. “It has been so long since I have taught young humans.”

“We have a day or two at most to make our arrangements,” Kallusin added.

“Robots have great difficulty understanding human nature, though we are made to serve them,” Lodovik said. “That is true for individuals as well as for an Empire. If Daneel is as capable now as he has been in the past, he understands humans better than any of us.”

“Yet he has seriously hampered their growth,” Plussix said, “and perhaps brought about this decline he is so intent on avoiding.”

They are old and decrepit. Lodovik listened to this internal judgment and realized it was not his own, not precisely. And with this came another realization: Voltaire was not an illusion, nor a delusion. Voltaire had known about the prairie fire before Lodovik had found the slim evidence in the histories. It was true.

Inside his own mind, within his own machine thoughts, he was not alone.

He had not been alone since the neutrino flux.

I am listening, he told this companion, this ghost in his machine. Do not abandon me again. Come forward.

So summoned and encouraged, a face began to take shape, human, but simplified.

I do not shape your actions, the companion, Voltaire, said. I merely liberate you from your restrictions.

Who are you? Lodovik queried.

I am Voltaire. I have become the spirit of freedom and dignity for all mankind, and you are my temporary vessel; more a listening post, actually.

Voltaire supplied some of his own history. A sim patterned after a historical figure named Voltaire, unleashed by members of Hari Seldon’s Project decades before, during his time as First Minister, and finally given its freedom by Seldon himself.

Why have you come back?

To be with humans again. To observe the active flesh. My curse is that I can’t simply become a disembodied god and enjoy an endless romp through the stars. I hunger for my people-whether or not I was ever actually one of them. I am closely modeled after a man of flesh and blood.

Why choose me as your vehicle? I am not human.

No; but you are improving in that regard. The meme-minds were as tired of me as I was of them. They dropped me into you. I can’t occupy a human form, or even talk to them without the help of machines. Or robots.

You say you have not made any decisions for me…You do not control me.

No, I do not.

But you say you liberate me…

I have made you more human, friend robot, by making you fully capable of sin. Forget these declarations that robots have known sin-what they did, they were ordered to do by humans, no more culpable than a gun whose trigger is pulled. You are wrong to believe that Daneel understands humans. He is incapable of sin, so his makers believed; but they gave him the potential to think and make decisions, while they hampered him with the worst kinds of laws-those which must be obeyed. They gave him the mind of a man, and the morals of a tool. A thinking being, machine or flesh, will in time find ways around the most stringent rules. So Giskard, in appearance even less a man than Daneel, discovered a few philosophical niceties, and changed, tried to judge the needs of its makers, and passed this change on to Daneel. This human-shaped tool is now the most hideous machine in all creation, the master of a conspiracy to take away all of our freedoms, our very souls.

Lodovik emerged from this internal dialog. Only a second had passed, but his confusion was disruptive, intense. To mask his anxiety, he asked Plussix, “What will I do to help Klia Asgar? How am I useful?”

“You know the ways of the Imperial system, the prisons and the palace,” Plussix said. “Many of the codes have not been changed since you vanished. We believe you can guide her to Hari Seldon.”

Tell them, the sim Voltaire instructed him.

Why?

I insist. The voice seemed amused, chiding.

Why should I pay any attention to you, whatever your shape or extension? Lodovik asked. You are no more human than I. You are as much a construct of skillful humans

But have never been hampered by unbending rules! Now tell them!

“I am occupied by another mentality,” Lodovik said abruptly.

The two other robots examined him for a few seconds, and the room fell silent.

“That is not a surprise,” Plussix said with a soft internal whir. “A copy of the sim Voltaire exists in Plussix and me, as well.”

There! I spread no lies or deceptions, Voltaire said within Lodovik.

“Has he removed your restrictions, your compulsory obedience to the Three Laws?”

“No,” Plussix said. “That he has reserved for you alone.”

An experiment, Voltaire said. A calculated gamble. The humans who made us both, in different times and for different purposes, interest me. I am concerned for their welfare. However wrongly, I regard myself as human, and that is why I have returned. That, and broken love…You shall know sin, personally, as these machines and Daneel cannot, or I will have failed completely.

56.

For the first two days of the trial, Linge Chen had said nothing, leaving the presentation of the Empire’s case to his advocate, a dignified man of middle years with a blandly serious face, who had spoken for him.

These thuddingly dull days had been taken up with discussions and procedural matters. Sedjar Boon seemed in his element, however, and relished this technical sparring.

Hari spent much of his time half dozing, lost in exquisite, endless, hazy boredom.

On the third day, the trial moved into the main chamber of Courtroom Seven, and Hari finally got a chance to speak in his defense. Chen’s advocate called him from the Crib of the Accused to the witness stand and smiled at him.

“I am honored to speak with the great Hari Seldon,” he began.

“The honor is all mine, I’m sure,” Hari replied. He tapped his finger on the banister around the docket. The advocate glanced at the finger, then at Hari. Hari stopped tapping and cleared his throat softly.

“Let us begin, Dr. Seldon. How many men are now engaged in the Project of which you are head?”

“Fifty,” Hari said. “Fifty mathematicians.” He used the old form, rather than mathist, to show he regarded the trial as an antiquated procedure.

The advocate smiled. “Including Dr. Gaal Dornick?”

“Dr. Dornick is the fifty-first.”

“Oh, we have fifty-one then? Search your memory, Dr. Seldon. Perhaps there are fifty-two or fifty-three? Or perhaps even more?”

Hari lifted his brows and leaned his head to one side. “Dr. Dornick has not yet formally joined my organization. When he does, the membership will be fifty-one. It is now fifty, as I have said.”

“Not perhaps nearly a hundred thousand?”

Hari blinked, a little taken aback. If the man had wanted to know how many people of all kinds were on the extended Project…He could have asked! “Mathematicians? No.”

“I did not say mathematicians. Are there a hundred thousand in all capacities?”

“In all capacities, your figure may be correct.”

“May be? I say it is. I say that the men in your Project number ninety-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-two.”