Foundation and Chaos - Bear Greg - Страница 70

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Farad Sinter shook his head sadly. “Then Chen knows we don’t have anything-yet.” He pulled Klayus’s hands from his shoulders. “I must go. We are so close-I had hoped to corner an entire cell of robots-”

He ran from the Hall of Beasts, leaving the young Emperor standing with hands outstretched and eyes wild.

“Prothon! Sinter, Prothon!” Klayus screamed.

The last two days had been so unutterably boring, and he had been away for so long from his instruments and team of mathists, that Hari Seldon welcomed the brief blanknesses provided by short naps. The naps never lasted long enough, and far worse were the waking hours with their own painful blankness: frozen frustration, gelid anxiety, frightful speculations slumping into tense nightmare with the slowness of glass over ages.

Hari came out of his doze with an unusual shortness of breath, and a question seeming to echo in his ears:

“Does God truly tell you what is the fate of men?”

He listened for the question to be asked again. He knew who asked it; the tone was unmistakable.

“Joan?” he asked. His mouth was dry. He looked around the cell for some agency by which the entity might communicate with him, something mechanical, electronic, by which she might

Nothing. The room had been scoured after the visit from the old tiktok. The voice was in his own imagination.

The chime on his cell door sounded, and the door slid open swiftly. Hari rose from his chair, smoothed his robe with two wrinkled, bony hands, and stared at the man before him. For a moment he did not recognize him. Then, he saw it was Sedjar Boon.

“I’m hearing things again,” Hari said with a wry twist in his lips.

Boon examined Hari with concern. “They want you in the court. Gaal Dornick will be there as well. They may be willing to strike a deal.”

“What about the Commission of General Security?”

“Something’s happening. They’re busy.”

“What is it?” Hari asked, eager for news.

“Riots,” Boon said. “In parts of the Imperial Sector, throughout Dahl. Apparently Sinter let his Specials go too far.”

Hari looked around the room. “After we’re done, will they bring me back here?”

“I don’t think so,” Boon said. “You’ll go to the Hall of Dispensation to get your papers of release. There’s going to be a waiver of meritocratic rights to sign, too. A formality.”

“Did you know this all along?” Hari asked Boon, old eyes boring into the lawyer’s with no-nonsense intensity.

“No,” Boon said nervously. “I swear it.”

“If I had lost, would you be here now, or would you be standing in line, waiting for more work from Linge Chen?”

Boon did not answer, merely held his hand toward the door. “Let’s go.”

In the hall, Hari said, “Linge Chen is one of the most carefully studied men in my records. He seems the embodiment of aristocratic atrophy. Yet he always wins and gets his way-until now.”

“Let’s not be too hasty,” Boon said. “A good rule for lawyers is never to count your victories before the ink is dry.”

Hari turned to Boon and held out his hand. “Have you been contacted by someone named Joan?”

Boon seemed surprised. “Why, yes,” he said. “There’s some sort of virus in our legal-office records. The computers keep bringing up briefs from a case that doesn’t exist. Something about a woman burned at the stake. That hasn’t happened on Trantor in twelve thousand years-as far as I know.”

Hari paused in the hall. The guards grew impatient. “Put a message in your records, for this virus,” he said. “Tell her-it-that I have never talked with God and do not know what He intends for humanity.”

Boon smiled. “A joke, right?”

“Just put the message in your files. That’s an order from your client.”

“God-you mean, a supernatural being, a supreme creator?”

“Yes,” Hari said. “Just tell her this-‘Hari Seldon does not represent divine authority.’ Tell her she’s got the wrong man. Tell her to leave me alone. I’m done with her. I fulfilled my promise long ago.”

The guards looked at one another in pity, obviously thinking this trial had gone on far too long.

“Consider it done,” Boon said.

Daneel stood on the parapet of an apartment that had once been a secret hideaway for Demerzel, and beside him stood the tiktok that had come with the apartment. The apartment had been sealed decades before and left unoccupied, its lease paid for a century. This morning, when Daneel had returned to it, to utilize its secret data links to the courts and the palace, he had found the tiktok activated. He knew immediately who was responsible.

“You have become a major irritation,” Daneel told the former sim. Though this meme-mind seemed now to be on his side, it-she-was far too changeable and humanlike to be trusted completely.

The tiktok hummed quietly. “It is so very hard to manifest in this world,” Joan said. “Are you here to await news of Hari Seldon?”

“Yes,” Daneel said.

“Why not go to the palace, in disguise, and enter the courts?”

“I will learn more here,” Daneel said.

“Are you irritated that I regard you as an angel of the Lord?”

“I have been called many things,” Daneel said. “None of them disturbs me.”

“I would consider it a privilege to ride with you into battle. These…riots…They speak to me of many political currents. They trouble me.”

They could hear the noise of people in the streets far below, marching, waving banners, calling for the resignation of all responsible for the recent police searches.

“Will they blame Hari Seldon or his people, his family?”

“No,” Daneel said.

“How can you be so sure?”

Daneel looked at the tiktok, and for a moment, the image of a young woman with intense features and short hair, dressed in ancient buffed and inscribed iron armor, flickered around the old machine.

“I have been working for thousands of years, making alliances, arranging accounts, thinking far in advance of things which might be advantageous at some time. By now, there are so many arrangements made, that I have my choice of where to exert pressure, and when to initiate certain automatic procedures. But that is not all.”

“You behave like a general,” Joan said. “A general in the army of God.”

Daneel said, “Once, humans were my God.”

“By assignment of the Lord…!” Joan seemed shocked and a little confused. She had grown greatly since her reconstruction and her dialogues, virtual affair, and estrangement from Voltaire, but old faith dies very hard indeed.

“No. By programming, by innate nature of my construction.”

“Men must receive God by listening to their inmost souls,” Joan said. “The dictates and rules of God are in the tiniest atom of nature, and in the programs of scripture.”

“You are not human,” Daneel said, “yet you have a humanlike authority. I warn you, however, do not distract me. Now is a very delicate time.”

“The fiery danger of an angel, the compulsion of a general on the field,” Joan said. “Voltaire will lose. I almost feel sorry for him.”

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