Asimov’s Future History Volume 16 Read online

  “You will return to Eos. We will see what can be done there,” Daneel said. “I hope for your complete recovery.”

  “As do I,” Lodovik said.

  Planch sat without moving for most of the ride back to the spaceport. He looked through the front windscreen, over the shoulder of the driver, and tried to ignore her thickly accented chatter. Then, with a small shudder, he removed the tiny recorder from its hidden pocket in his jacket and stared at it. He could not make up his mind for several minutes whether to play back the recording or just throw it out the window.

  “This all war verra rich, co’ da flow fro’ tha por’, aaw the ships do come in har...” the elderly woman said, and glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes were pale blue, very alert, very wise. She smiled and her face wrinkled into a hundred river deltas. Planch nodded while only half hearing what she said.

  “Now it be col’ poverty, na ships, na work. I am har day in and ou’ for my wi’ and amusemen’, na more tha’ tha’!”

  She did not seem especially resentful, merely stating facts, yet her words rankled. There were worlds in the stellar neighborhood where the accent of Madder Loss was considered comic, used by entertainers portraying simpletons or charlatans. Tritch herself had referred to Madder Loss as a planet of parasites. Few from outside came here anymore; few knew what had really happened.

  Yet now, within this recorder, there might be proof of something extraordinary, a clue to the larger picture. His memory since yesterday seemed murky and full of gaps. He did not even know why he had brought the recorder–he had done nothing important since taking Lodovik Trema’s body to the transfer terminal and handing it over to Imperial agents. And why this ride into the country–just to relive old, sometimes painful memories?

  “We’ra here. Ya shou stay longer; there are still beautiful sigh’s i’ the countr’, lovely hostels whar to stay.” Her voice became sly, a little wheedling. “I coul’ show ya places o’ beautiful wimma, nat’ral farm garls, all verra poor an’ lone.”

  “No, thank you,” Planch said, though he was tempted. His last love had been a native of Madder Loss, thirty years before. He had had no taste for others since, yet he felt a hollow ache at the thought of leaving the planet without trying for another romance. He was somehow convinced that to stay, however, could be very dangerous.

  He paid the woman and thanked her in her own accent, then stood beneath the huge balloon roof of the immigration and transfer authority area. The blue skies and distant fields showed through gaps where buildings had been tom down and not replaced.

  He found a cool, secluded spot next to an empty restaurant and sat on a bench, holding the recorder display up to see how much it had captured.

  Five hours.

  For a few seconds, he simply sat and tapped the recorder against his chin, eyes heavy-lidded. Then, brows drawing in, fingers white where they gripped the tiny tube, he said, “Code: unforgivable. This is Planch, log in personal. Play back, all.”

  23.

  THE CANDIDATES FOR the Second Foundation did not meet in secret. Instead, they shared a plausible cover: they were a social club, interested in the history of certain games of chance, little different from other hobbyists around Trantor. Hobbies swept the planet with boring regularity, and even after their times had passed, small groups of adherents remained loyal.

  The mentalic candidates who could form part of the proposed Star’s End settlement met, with official approval, twice a week, in a social hall in one of the less fancy dormitories on the outskirts of Streeling University. In these run-down facilities, they were ignored by students who had come to Trantor from some of the less privileged worlds.

  The hall was not equipped with listening devices; Wanda herself had persuaded a caretaker to tell her of the older buildings whose bugs were either inactive or had been removed.

  Wanda stood beside her husband, Stettin Palver, in the crowded hall and waited for the 103 candidates to settle in to their seats. The sergeant-at-arms closed and locked the doors, and three sensitives stood watch to make sure they were not eavesdropped upon.

  In this core group of mentalics–the only one Wanda knew of, perhaps the only one there had ever been–there was little need for calls to order or other formal, spoken signals; the group tended to come to order with little overt fuss. She thought ruefully that this had nothing to do with politeness. There had been a large number of fractious outbreaks in the community since the beginning, but disorder manifested itself in different ways with her people.

  Stettin raised his hand. The group had already fallen quiet. They all faced front with deceptively placid expressions. Mentalics seldom exhibited their true emotions, certainly not in the presence of their peers.

  Wanda felt little ripples of uncontrolled persuasion; they made her neck itch. She could pick out a few distinct strands in the welter, like smells from a rich stew: currents of social and sexual tension, focused concern, even uncoordinated attempts to override Stet tin’s dominance. In mentalics, not just the conscious mind exerted its persuasive effects. My people, she thought. Heaven save me from my people!

  “We need the reports from our recruitment cells,” Stettin said quietly. “Next, I’ll give my report on mathematical and psychological training–to bring our candidates up to speed with the other groups preparing for the mission–then we’ll discuss the attrition.”

  “We need to discuss the murders now!” said a young woman historian with thick black hair cut in a wide bowl. Her green eyes blazed at Stettin and Wanda.

  Wanda deflected the woman’s automatic whip of persuasion. Her neck itched fiercely.

  The woman continued, voice calm but inner emotions raging. “Every recruit for the last three months–”

  “There’s a traitor among us!” interrupted a man from the back.

  Stettin pressed his lips together grimly and held up his hand again. “We know who the so-called traitor is,” he said softly. “Her name is Vara Liso.”

  The crowd instantly quieted. Wanda observed the waves of turmoil and calm with an intense but somehow distant interest. This is how we are. Grandfather chose us because we are this way–didn’t he?

  “Perhaps we know her name, now,” the young historian said. “But what good does that do us? She is stronger than any of us here.” She could barely be heard.

  “No one can persuade her,” said another voice, Wanda could not tell where in the crowd.

  “She smells us out like a tracker!”

  “We must assassinate her–”

  “Persuade somebody to kill her!”

  “Someone who is expendable–”

  Stettin waited for the suggestions to stop. Again, the crowd became unnaturally quiet. Even the ripples of persuasion seemed to still. All their lives, these people had used their talents to make their way in life. Finally, they were among their own kind, among equals, and their “luck” was distressingly ineffectual here.

  “Wanda has asked Professor Seldon for help,” Stettin said. “And he has gone to the Emperor himself... but we do not yet know the outcome of his visit. We should plan for the possibility of failure. We may have to do something we’ve only tried once before.”

  “What?” several asked.

  “A massed effort. Wanda and I once unwittingly pooled our talents, with some success... But only against a normal.”

  A judge, Wanda remembered. When Grandfather got in trouble with young toughs.

  “I think it is possible that ten or twenty of us, trained to operate in unison, may be effective against this woman.”

  The crowd of candidates absorbed this for a few seconds. “To kill her?” the black-haired historian asked.

  “That may not be necessary,” Wanda said. She and Stettin had argued this through early in the evening, with some heat. Stettin had maintained that killing Vara Liso was the only safe option. Wanda had maintained with equal force that murder could enervate their cause, drive them one against the other. The balance of so many persuaders was already
delicate.

  Even her own marriage was fraught with difficulties. Two persuaders, placed in proximity for years, intimate for hours on end, could find many unique ways to irritate and stymie each other.

  “I will not kill another human being, much less one of my own kind,” the young historian said firmly, eyes brimming with emotion at her own idealism. “No matter how much we may be endangered.”

  Stettin set his jaw. “That would be a last resort. We must begin training volunteers for such an effort. I have a list of those whose work puts them in places where they might encounter Liso...”

  Wanda listened as Stettin read out the names. The named stepped forward like guilty children, and Stettin took them to a separate room.

  “The rest of us have other matters to discuss,” Wanda said, hoping to distract the remainder. “There are more travel questions to be answered–health questions, family and financial situations to be tied up, and, of course, training in the Seldon disciplines–”

  The group calmed and focused on these matters with some relief, glad to be done with the problem of Liso, for the time being. Eager to look the other way.

  They were all like children, Wanda thought, every one of them, and the group as a whole: no better than awkward adolescents, stumbling along through life with powers they have only now recognized, for the first time fully aware of weaknesses they have never had to confront before.

  Weaknesses hidden by persuasion.

  We are all cripples! She kept her face calm, but her insides churned at the coming conflicts, so many and so dangerous. How could Hari have chosen such a strange and disorganized group to safeguard all of human history!

  Sometimes, Wanda felt as if she were wandering through a dream. Not even Stettin could reassure her at those times, and she was close to despair.

  Of course, she never confessed that to Hari.

  24.

  KLIA ASGAR EMERGED during the main sleep period. ten kilometers from where she had descended to the two rivers. The ceil above this neighborhood of Dahl glowed twilight blue-gray, and the streets were filled only with night laborers, about a third of the volume of waking maximum. Nobody challenged her.

  Rather than simply contact the number on the card given to her by the man in dusty green, Klia persuaded a small-time security scrambler in south Dahl to break the card’s code. The card then gave her an address and acted as a guide, glowing and humming faint directions as she took transit and taxi to Pentare, a small municipality in the shadow of Streeling. She bought an Imperial-grade filmbook reader, hooked it to a general communicator, and fed it material from public files, using data credits she had amassed on two small jobs months ago. She read up on Hari Seldon and his granddaughter, Wanda. Seldon. it seemed, was not a persuader, yet the man in dusty green had said that his granddaughter was. Where did she get her powers, then? Klia looked up Wanda Seldon Palver’s father: Raych. A Dahlite.

  This caused her a moment of both concern and wonder, and even momentary pride. She had always known Dahlites were special.

  The woman’s family connection with a Dahlite was not enough to dispel Klia’s suspicions about people connected to the Palace.

  Still, Hari Seldon predicted the end of the Empire, the destruction of Trantor; he had established quite a reputation as a doomsayer. That might put him in opposition to the Palace; there were even rumors that he was to be put on trial for treason.

  Yet Klia had an instinctive dislike for such visionary twaddle. Too often visionaries were trying to organize their own small cadres of totally obedient acolytes, little personal empires in the middle of a unimaginably bigger and almost completely impersonal Galactic Empire.

  She had heard of a spectacular incident just last year, in Temblar, on the equator. Fifty thousand followers of a schismatic Mycogenian had committed suicide, claiming to get messages telling them of Trantor’s imminent destruction. The messages had supposedly come from nonhuman intelligences parasitizing Imperial defense and information platforms in orbit around Trantor.

  Klia knew nothing about the defense platforms, but she was smart enough to see that Seldon was clearly akin to these fanatics, and would do someone like her no good at all.

  As the man in dusty green had indicated...

  At the card’s direction, Klia took a small slideway from the transit platform to a pedwalk artery dubiously called Brommus Fair. This led halfway across a district where goods were housed before distribution to retail shops, agoras, and markets around Streeling and the Imperial Sector.

  She approached a large warehouse that reached to the edge of the ceil, where it met its supporting wall; a less than desirable neighborhood, but clean and orderly. There were even fewer people about at this early-morning hour than there had been in south Dahl. Still, she kept her senses keenly tuned.

  The card directed her to a small side door. She looked at the door for several tens of seconds, biting her lower lip. What she was about to do seemed to be a very big step, and possibly a dangerous one. Still, everything the man in dusty green had told her rang true.

  And he had given her information about herself, her nature, that had bothered her–deeply affected her.

  She was about to knock on the small, featureless door when it opened inward with an abrupt squeal. A large, dark figure bent low to step out and almost bumped into her. Klia jumped back.

  “Sorry,” the figure said, and emerged in the twilight beneath the glow of a small lantern high up on the warehouse wall. It was a man, a very big man, with broad shoulders and glossy black hair and a magnificent mustache. A Dahlite! “The main entrance is around the corner,” the man said in a deep, velvety voice. “Besides, we’re closed.”

  She had never seen any male so handsome, and so compellingly... she tried to find the word: gentle. Klia swallowed and forced herself to speak. “I was told to come here. A man gave me this. Wears green. He never told me his name.” She held out the card.

  The huge Dahlite–fully two heads taller than any Dahlite she had ever seen before–took the card in large but dexterous fingers. He pulled it close to his face and squinted. “That would be Kallusin,” he grumbled. He lowered the card. Klia felt something brush against her like a light breeze, then depart. “He’s at home now, I think, or somewhere he can’t be reached. Can I help you?”

  “He... said he would find a... safe place for me. I think that’s what he meant.”

  “Yeah. All right.” The big Dahlite turned and pushed the door open again. “You can wait inside until he comes.”

  She hesitated.

  “It’s all right,” the giant said, and his voice almost compelled her full belief. “I certainly won’t hurt you. You’re a sister. My name is Brann. Come on in.”

  Brann shut the door behind them and rose to his full height. Despite his size, Klia did not feel afraid; he moved with a careful grace that could have been calculated not to alarm or offend, if it had not seemed so natural. He smiled down on her.

  “Dahl?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Most of us are from Dahl. Some come from Misaro, a few more from Lavrenti.”

  She lifted her eyebrows.

  “Whatever it is, it makes good servants,” Brann said with a small grin. “How long have you known?”

  “Since I was a child,” Klia said. “How long have you been here?”

  “Just a few months. Kallusin recruited me during the equinox. I left Dahl five years ago. I was too big to work in the heatsinks.”

  Klia looked around the large space they had entered and saw many tiers of industrial shelving covered with crates, lumbering old automated lift engines, belt delivery systems, all quiet now and shrouded in darkness.

  “What is this?” Klia asked.

  “Kallusin works for a man named Plussix. Plussix imports stuff from offworld and sells it here.” Brann walked down an aisle, glanced over his shoulder, and said, “It’ll be an hour before Kallusin gets here. He’s a late sleeper. Want to see some of the treasure?”
>
  “Sure,” Klia said with a shrug. She walked slowly after the big man, arms folded against the warehouse’s slight chill.

  “There’s stuff from a thousand worlds here,” Brann said, his voice barely audible in the vast spaces. The warehouse was larger than she thought–huge portals with massive rolling doors led to even more cavernous chambers. “Out there, where it comes from, it’s junk–and believe me, it wouldn’t impress the Emperor, either. But the Greys here on Trantor just gotta have it. Every little apartment nook needs a dried stingweed frond from Giacond, or a pre-Empire trance box from Dessemer. Plussix buys it for nothing, saves it from conversion and cycling. Buys empty space on food ships from the nutrient allies or from free traders with Imperial dispensation. Brings it here. Makes twenty percent per shipload, a lot better than the Trantor Bourse. In thirty years, he’s gotten very rich.”

  “I’ve never heard of Plussix.”

  “He doesn’t sell any of it himself. The bureaucrats like to have a story, and he’s pretty much no story at all. I’ve never seen him myself, and I don’t think Kallusin has, either.”

  “So he just hands it over to good story-tellers?”

  Brann rumbled softly, and with some pleasure, Klia realized he was laughing. “Yeah,” he said, glancing back at her appreciatively. He seemed to want to face away from her. She almost subconsciously tried to persuade him to turn around. She wanted to understand more clearly how he felt about her.

  “Stop that,” he said, and his shoulders tensed.

  “Stop what?”

  “Everybody around here tries that and I don’t like it. Don’t make me do anything. Just ask with words.”

  “I’m sorry,” Klia said, and genuinely meant it. His tone was more than offended–he sounded as if some friend had just betrayed him!