Asimov’s Future History Volume 17 Read online

  “Well, hello there, Professor,” said a voice from his right. “I guess it’s good to see you’re back amongst us.”

  He turned his head. Someone occupied another infirmary bed. Blinking, Hari saw it was the stowaway. The girl from Trantor who did not want to be exiled to Terminus. She wore a hospital gown and had a bowl of dark yellow soup before her on a tray.

  That’s what I’ve been smelling, Hari thought. Despite all his other questions and concerns, the first thing on his mind was to ask for some.

  She watched Hari, waiting for him to speak.

  “Are... you okay, Jeni?” he asked.

  Slowly, the girl responded with a grudging smile.

  “The others were betting what your first words would be, when you woke. I’ll have to tell’em they were wrong about you... and maybe I was, too.” She shrugged. “Anyway, don’t worry about me. I’ve just got a touch of the fever. I t was already coming on for a week or two before I skipped away on Maserd’s boat.”

  “Fever?” Hari asked.

  “Brain fever, of course!” Jeni gave Hari a defensive glare. “What did you think? That I wasn’t smart enough to catch it? With parents like mine? I’m fifteen, so it’s about time for my turn.”

  Hari nodded. Since the dawn ages, it had been a fact of life that nearly everyone with above-average intelligence experienced this childhood disease. He raised a placating hand.

  “No insult intended, Jeni. Who could doubt that you’d get brain fever, especially after the way you fooled all of us on Demarchia? Welcome to adulthood.”

  What Hari did not mention, and he had told no one but Dors, was the fact that he had never contracted the disease as a youth. Not even a touch, despite his renowned genius.

  Jeni’s arch expression searched for any sign of patronizing or sarcasm in his voice. Finding none, she switched to a smile.

  “Well I hope it’s a mild case. I want to get out of here! There’s been too much else going on.”

  Hari nodded. “I... guess I gave everybody a scare. But apparently nothing much happened to me.”

  This time the girl grinned.

  “Is that right, Doc? Why don’t you look in a mirror?”

  From the way she said it, Hari realized he had better do so at once.

  He slid gingerly forward to rest his feet on the floor. Both legs felt fine... almost certainly good enough to shuffle over to the wall mirror, a few meters away.

  Grab the bed railing and stand up carefully, so you’ll fall back onto the mattress if your senses are lying to you.

  But rising erect went smoothly, with only a few creaks and twinges. He slid one foot forward, shifted his weight, and pushed the other.

  Hari felt fine so far, though it did not help to hear Jeni behind him, chuckling with amusement and anticipation.

  The next footstep lifted a bit from the ground, and the following one higher still. By the time he reached the mirror, Hari was walking with more confidence than he had felt in

  He stared at the reflection, blinking rapidly as Jeni’s giggles turned into guffaws.

  A deeper voice cut in suddenly from the doorway. “Professor!”

  The shout came from Kers Kantun. Hari’s loyal servant ran forward to take his arm, but he shook the man off, still gaping at the image in the glass.

  Five years... at least. They’ve taken at least five years off my age. Maybe ten. I don’t look much over seventy-five or so.

  A low sound escaped his throat, and Hari felt so confused that he did not honestly know whether he was delighted, or offended by the effrontery of their act.

  “This is just one of the marvels that have emerged so far, out of that wonderful event you so contemptuously call a chaos world, Seldon.”

  Sybyl crooned happily as she finished Hari’s checkup and let him get dressed. “Ktlina has medical techniques that will be the envy of the empire, after we get the word out. It’s just one reason why we have confidence they won’t be able to keep our miracle bottled up, this time. Think of a quadrillion old folks, all across the galaxy, wishing they had access to a machine like this one.”

  She patted a long, coffin-shaped mechanism covered with readouts and instruments. Hari figured he must have been put inside while advanced techniques reduced and even reversed some of the ravages afflicting his worn-out body.

  “Of course this is only an early version,” she went on. “We can’t rejuvenate yet, only restore a bit of balance and strength to carry you along until the next treatment. Nevertheless, in theory there are no limits! In principle, we should even be able to create body duplicates, and infuse them with copies of our memories! Until then, consider what you have experienced to be a sampling. One of the practical benefits of a renaissance.”

  Hari spoke carefully.

  “My body and spirit thank you.”

  She glanced back at him. A stylishly colored eyebrow raised.

  “But not your intellect? You don’t approve of such innovations? Even when they could save so many lives?”

  “You blithely speak of balance, as if you know what you’re talking about, Sybyl. But the human body is nowhere near as complex an organism as human society. If a mistake is made in treating a single person, that is merely tragic. One individual can be replaced by another. But we only have one civilization.”

  “So you think we’re experimenting irresponsibly, without understanding what these methods will do to our patient in the long run.”

  He nodded. “I’ve been studying human society all my life. Only lately have the parameters clarified enough to offer a reasonably lucid picture. But now you’d introduce exotic new factors that just happen to feel good in the short term, even though they may prove ultimately lethal. What arrogance! For instance, have you considered the implications of human immortality on fragile economies? Or on planetary ecosystems? Or on the ability of young people to have their own chance –”

  Sybyl laughed.

  “Whoa, Academician! You needn’t argue with me. I say that human creativity, when it’s truly unleashed, will find solutions to every problem. The ones you just mentioned, plus a quintillion others that nobody has yet thought of. But anyway, there’s no point in debating anymore.

  “You see, the point is moot. It’s already settled. Our war is effectively over.”

  Hari sighed.

  “I expected this. I’m sorry your fond hopes had to end this way. Of course it was a fantasy to expect that just one planet might prevail against twenty-five million in the Human Consensus. But let me assure you that in the long run –”

  He stopped. Sybyl was grinning.

  “It may have been a fantasy, but that’s exactly what is about to happen. We’re going to win our war, Seldon. Within a few months – a year at most – the whole empire’s going to share the renaissance, like it or not. And we have you to thank for making it possible!”

  “What’s that? But...” Hari’s voice trailed off. He felt weak in the knees.

  Sybyl took his elbow.

  “Would you like to see our new weapon? Come along, Academician. See where your search has brought you across the vast desert of space. Then let me show you the tool you’ve provided. One that will bring total victory for our so-called chaos.”

  3.

  NO STARLIGHT PENETRATED the murky haze.

  Tens of thousands of huge, dusty molecular clouds speckled the galaxy’s spiral arms. Such places were often turbulent hothouses for newborn suns, but this one had been static and sterile for at least a million years – a barren tide pool with the color of a bottomless pit.

  And yet, probing sensors from the Pride of Rhodia had caught something lurking in its depths. A swarm of contacts showed up first on gravity meters and then deep radar. Later, searchlights set off glittering reflections, so near that some photons returned in mere seconds.

  Hari had been unconscious during the discovery. Now he strove to catch up, peering into the surrounding gloom with eyes that felt especially acute after the dimness of recent yea
rs. As the starship slowly rotated, he saw that rows of individual pinpoints lay ahead, each one illuminated by a small laser beam from the Pride of Rhodia.

  Soon he realized. There are hundreds of objects... possibly thousands.

  The sparkling reflections shimmered in neat rows. A few were even close enough to reveal details without magnification – strange oblong shapes with jutting projections that looked mechanical, and yet were unlike any starship he had ever seen.

  Glancing at a nearby view screen, Hari saw one of the targets revealed as a jumble of stark bright surfaces and pitch-black shadows. At first he felt a shiver, wondering if the craft might be alien in origin, a thought that echoed the strange story Horis Antic had told about his ancestor. Hari’s worry grew more ominous upon reading the on-screen scale figures. The machine depicted was vast. Bigger than even the greatest imperial starliners.

  Then some reassuring details came through. He saw the vessel’s array of hyperdrive units, spread across a spindly support structure, and recognized their pattern from illustrations he had seen in A Child’s Book of Knowledge, showing the crude starships of that bygone era.

  With some amazement, Hari realized the truth.

  This thing is huge... but primitive! Modern ships don’t need so many motivator sections, for instance. Our jump drives are more compact, after millennia of trial-and-error improvements.

  He was looking at something archaic, then. Perhaps many centuries older than the Galactic Empire of Man.

  “Yes, they are antiques,” commented Biron Maserd, when Hari shared this observation. “But have you noticed something else peculiar about them?”

  “Well, the shape seems all wrong. There are huge projector devices of some sort, arrayed on long gantries, as if meant to deploy immense amounts of power. But what could they possibly have been for?”

  “Hm.” Maserd rubbed his chin. “Our friend the Grey Man has a theory about that. But it is so bizarre that no one else aboard will admit to believing him. In fact, the consensus is that poor Horis has gone around his last corridor and hit bedrock, if you know what I mean.”

  The Trantorian slang phrase was used when someone had become more than a bit crazy. Although the news wasn’t entirely unexpected, it saddened Hari, who liked the little bureaucrat.

  “But tell me,” Maserd went on. “What else strikes you as odd about that ancient vessel out there?”

  “You mean other than how old it must be, or the weird configuration? Well... now that you mention it, I can’t locate any –”

  He paused.

  “Any habitats?” Maserd finished the sentence for him. “Ever since we found these things, I have been trying to find out where the crews lived. Without success. For the life of me, I cannot understand how they traveled without pilots to navigate them!”

  Hari’s breath caught. He held it, in order not to give sound to his sudden understanding. Stifling the thought, he moved to change the subject

  “Are these weapons? Warships? Do the Ktlinans hope to rouse an ancient arsenal and use it to defeat the empire? Those energy projectors –”

  “May have been formidable, once,” Maserd said. “Horis thinks they were used against the surface of planets. But rest assured, Dr. Seldon. These machines won’t be turned against the Imperial Fleet. Most of them are broken past repair. Activating even a few would be the labor of years. Anyway, the drive systems are so primitive that our naval units could fly rings around them, blasting the frail structures to bits.”

  Hari shook his head.

  “Then I don’t understand. Sybyl thinks we’ve given her side an unbeatable advantage. One that will make their victory over the empire inevitable.”

  Maserd nodded.

  “She may be right about that, Professor. But it doesn’t have anything to do with those giant derelicts. The reason for her optimism should be rotating into view soon.”

  Hari watched as the Pride of Rhodia kept turning. There was a sharp boundary to the orderly ranks of huge, ancient machines. As the formation passed out of sight, Hari pondered what he had just seen.

  Robot ships! Needing no habitats because they had no human crews. Positronic brains did the navigating, long ago. Perhaps only a few centuries after starflight was discovered.

  He felt glad when the flotilla passed out of view. The murky gloom of the nebula resumed – a field of dusty, stygian blackness.

  Then a new glimmer appeared. A more compact swarm of objects that sparkled madly under laser illumination from the Pride of Rhodia. Where the first group seemed like a ghost squadron, this one gave Hari an impression of diamond chips, heaped in a dense globe of twinkling brilliance.

  “There is the weapon that Sybyl and her friends are crowing about, Professor,” said Maserd. “They’ve already brought several samples aboard.”

  “Samples?”

  Hari looked around the bridge. Horis Antic could be seen hovering over his instruments, muttering to himself while he kept probing the armada outside. Mors Planch and one of his men were keeping watch, blasters ready in case any of the hostages tried anything. But Sybyl and Gornon Vlimt were nowhere in sight.

  “In the conference salon,” Captain Maserd said. “They’ve got several of the devices set up and working. I suspect you won’t like what you’re about to see.”

  Hari nodded. Whatever they had found, it could hardly shock him more than the fleet of robot ships.

  “Lead on, Captain.” He gestured courteously to the nobleman. With Kers Kantun following close behind, they made their way down the main corridor to an open doorway.

  Hari stopped, stared inside, and groaned.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Anything but that.”

  They were archives. Extremely old ones. He could tell just by glancing at the objects that lay gleaming on the conference table.

  The ancients had excellent data-storage systems, crystalline in nature, that could pack away huge amounts of information in durable containers. And yet, until Hari received from Daneel his own miniature copy of A Child’s Book of Knowledge, he had never seen a prehistoric unit that was not damaged or completely destroyed.

  Now, four of the things sat between Sybyl and Gornon, their shiny cylindrical surfaces perfectly intact, each one clearly large enough to hold A Child’s Book of Knowledge ten thousand times over.

  “Maserd, come over here and see what we’ve accomplished while you were away!” Gornon Vlimt commented without looking up from a holo display as he tapped into one archive. It flickered with a blinding array of wonders.

  The nobleman glanced at Seldon, clearly concerned about appearing too cozy with the enemy. But when Hari didn’t object, Maserd moved quickly to lean over Gornon’s shoulder, excited and impressed.

  “You’ve improved the interface immensely. The images are crisp and the graphics legible.”

  “It wasn’t hard,” Vlimt answered. “The designers made this archive so simple, even a dunce could figure it out, given enough time.”

  With some reluctance, but driven by curiosity, Hari followed to get a better look. Many of the images he glimpsed had no meaning to him – mysterious objects posed against unknown backgrounds. A few leaped out with sudden familiarity from his recent studies in the little history primer. The pyramids of Egypt, he recognized at once. Others were flat portraits of ancient people and places. Hari knew that prehistoric peoples assigned great importance to such images, created by daubing a cloth surface with smears of natural pigment. Gornon Vlimt also seemed to vest these images with great value, though Hari found them surreal and strange.

  Peering at a nearby set of screens, Sybyl gushed over a different panorama, featuring examples of science and technology.

  “Of course much of this stuff is pretty crude,” she conceded. “After all, we’ve had twenty millennia to refine the rough edges through trial and error. But the basic theories have changed surprisingly little. And some of the forgotten material is brilliant! There are devices and techniques in here that I never heard of. A dozen
Ktlinas would be kept busy for a generation, just absorbing all of this!”

  “It’s...” Hari’s mouth worked, knowing his words would be useless, but still feeling compelled to try. “Sybyl, this is more dangerous than you can possibly imagine.”

  She greeted his cautionary pleading with a snort.

  “You forget who you’re talking to, Seldon. Don’t you recall that half-melted archive we worked on together? The one your mysterious contacts came up with, forty years ago? There was very little of it left intact, except for a pair of ancient simulated beings – those Joan and Voltaire entities we released, per your instructions.”

  He nodded. “And do you remember the chaos they helped provoke? Both on Trantor and on Sark?”

  “Hey, don’t blame me for that, Academician. You wanted data about human-response patterns from the sims, in order to help develop your psychohistory models. Marq Hillard and I never meant for them to escape into the datasphere.

  “Anyway, these archives are something else entirely – carefully indexed accumulations of knowledge that people lovingly put together as a gift to their descendants. Isn’t that exactly what you’re trying to accomplish with the Encyclopedia Galactica Foundation your group is setting up on Terminus? A gathering of wisdom, safeguarding human knowledge against another dark age?”

  Hari was caught in a logical trap. How could he explain that the “encyclopedia” part of his Foundation was only a ruse? Or that his Plan involved fighting the dark age with a lot more than mere books?

  Of course there was plenty of irony to go around. The “mere books” on the table in front of him could destroy every bit of relevance that was left in the Seldon Plan. They presented a mortal danger to everything he had worked for.

  “How many of these things are there?” He tried to ask Maserd, then noticed that the nobleman was leaning past Vlimt, transfixed by images.

  “Wait! Go back a few frames. Yes, there! By great Franklin’s ghost, it’s America. I recognize that monument from a coin in our family collection!”

  Gornon chuckled. “Phallic and obtrusive,” he commented. “Say, how do you know so much about –”