Foundation and Chaos - Bear Greg - Страница 47
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Lodovik shut down the projectors and left the library. As he passed through the impressive doorway, the image of Huy Markin appeared.
“You’re the first visitor in two decades,” the image told him. “Please come again!”
Lodovik stared at the image as it faded. He stepped out from under the overhang that shielded the doorway and strolled along a mid-class tier of the Agora of Vendors, among the Greys. So many pieces to fit together-in a puzzle thousands of years old, with so many pieces missing or deliberately obscured.
What echoed through Lodovik’s positronic brain, cascading into conclusions that reinforced impressions and hypotheses already made, was the effect of Imperial culture (and brain fever?) on human nature. Where once the human race had laughed and reveled in the absurd, in the products of pure imagination, they now earnestly pursued stasis. The leading artists, scientists, engineers, philosophers, and politicians, were eager to confirm the discoveries of the past, not make new ones. And now, few even remembered the past well enough to know what had already been discovered! The past itself was no longer of interest-had not been for centuries, even thousands of years.
The light had gone out. Stability and stasis across millennia had led to stagnation.
Daneel uses his psychohistorian to confirm what he must already know-that the forest is overgrown, filled with rotten wood, desperately in need of a conflagration that he will not allow to happen!
Lodovik paused at a surge of the crowd through the agora, listened to murmurs and shouts. A retinue of Imperial Specials was pushing through the crowd. Lodovik backed away, found an alley of smaller shops. He wanted to avoid making himself conspicuous in any way. He could not know who might be watching-and who might be reporting back to Daneel, human or robot. While he was not yet behaving suspiciously
Just outside the alley, he heard a woman’s shrill shouts, commands. “Don’t let it get away!”
He paused, turned, and saw two of the Specials turn into the alley, followed by a woman riding a small cart. He felt something brush through him, like a feather, and deduced instantly that the woman was a mentalic.
He knew a little of the mentalics assembled by Hari Seldon to provide a backup and alternative to his First Foundation, but none of them were as strong as this woman-and none of them would have dreamed of pursuing him!
Quite clearly, that was what the woman was doing. She pointed and screeched again. Lodovik knew it would make no difference if he altered his appearance-this woman was fixed on something below the surface.
She recognizes your difference.
Again the voice, the interior presence-producing a cascading conclusion he might not have reached by himself: the woman was feathering the fields associated with his iridium sponge brain!
When pressed, Lodovik could move very rapidly indeed. One moment, the shoppers in the narrow alley of antiques dealers and sellers of trinkets became aware that the Specials were approaching a plump and homely looking man-and the next, he was gone.
Vara Liso stood on her cart, her face flaming with anger and excitement. “He’s escaped!” she shouted, and she struck at the young police escort with her hand, as if he were a wayward child. “You let him escape!”
Then, from another alley, more Specials appeared.
The plump man walked quickly ahead of them, herded by the press of a crowd of shoppers, like unwanted fish pulled together in a dragnet. The Greys expressed their anger with shouts and threats of complaining to their class senate.
Lodovik dared not move too quickly among so many people. He might injure a bystander. This he wanted to avoid at all costs-though he realized that if the situation became dangerous enough, he could injure and even kill a Special-or that woman-and not suffer grievous damage to his mind. I am a monster here-a machine without restraints!
“That’s him!” Vara Liso cried. “He’s not human! Capture him-but don’t hurt him!”
Brann urged the transport into an empty alcove as the police pushed by again, hiding Klia with the bulk of his body. “She’s found somebody,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. His face twisted with hatred. “How could they let her loose? We’re citizens, aren’t we? We have rights!” He mumbled these words under his breath; not for some years had anyone from Dahl truly believed all the citizens of Trantor had rights. But the crowds of Greys were becoming uncharacteristically agitated by this going to and fro of Vara Liso and her Imperial Specials. More and more Greys shouted at the passing cordons. The Specials ignored them.
Klia could see their faces as they passed, feel their inner thoughts to some degree: the police liked this work no better than the Greys. They felt out of place; most Specials were recruited from the citizens.
Then her probing mind touched a very peculiar person indeed, some dozens of meters away. Time seemed to slow as she felt a sudden bright impression of thoughts moving at inhuman speed, a silvery glissando of memories, and sensations unlike anything she had experienced before. She let out her breath in a gasp, as if she had been lightly punched in the stomach.
“What is it?” Brann asked, staring down at her with some concern.
“I don’t know,” she said. He shook his head and frowned.
“Neither do I,” he said. “I feel it, too.”
Then, abruptly, all of the odd sensations passed, as if a shield had gone up between them and the source.
Of all things Lodovik needed just then, being detected by another pair of mentalics was not high on his list. He felt a bright triangle forming, with him at one of the vertices, the pursuing woman at another, and two more people-younger-at the third. Then, abruptly, a fog seemed to cover their traces.
He stood very still. The crowds of nervous Greys flowed around him with worried expressions, chivvied by the police presence. He modified his appearance yet again, as he covered his face, and shifted his body mass so that he appeared not so much plump as stocky.
Whatever the cause of this cessation of mentalic probes, he hoped to take advantage of it.
To the humans around him, Lodovik behaved like someone afraid, hiding his face, and few took any more notice of him than that. But one figure drew closer. He wore dusty green robes and a small floppy hat cocked to one side, and he seemed to know what he was doing-and for whom he was looking.
The cordons had passed by and the crowds were thinning, dispersing. Klia and Brann moved their transport back into an alleyway, still alert, but prepared to leave the Agora of Vendors and return to the warehouse.
Brann suddenly drew himself to his full height. “Kallusin calls,” he said. He pulled a small comm from his pocket. “We need to” He did not finish before he pulled off his coat and handed control of the transport to Klia.
Kallusin stood before Lodovik. “Excuse me,” Lodovik said, and pushed past him, but Kallusin stood his ground, and Lodovik bumped him hard, nearly knocking him over.
They stood in the middle of a concourse surrounded by larger shops. Here, there was no open well looking up to the higher levels, but the roof was vaulted to about seven meters, and ribbons of silvery light rippled without visible support overhead, illuminating the shop entrances, slideways, and a group of small fountains in nacreous splendor. Every detail of the faces around Lodovik seemed clear and precise. The man confronting him backed away and bowed slightly, then doffed his hat.
“It is a privilege, sir,” Kallusin said. “We had hoped you were not lost.”
“I don’t know you,” Lodovik said brusquely.
“We’ve never met,” Kallusin said with a smile. “I’m a collector of interesting individuals. You, sir, are in need of some assistance.”
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