“You foresee no more disasters, feel no more need to interfere to prevent those disasters?”
“There will be disasters,” Daneel said. “And we may yet act to balance them out-but only indirectly. Our solutions will be human ones.”
“But Hari Seldon is himself a tool of robots-his influence is but an extension of you.”
“That is not so. Psychohistory was posited by humans tens of thousands of years ago, independently of robots. Hari is merely its highest expression, through his own innate brilliance. I have directed, yes, but not created. The creation of psychohistory is a human accomplishment.”
Lodovik considered for a few seconds, and across his very un-robotic and supple face flickered emotions both complex and forthright. Daneel saw this, and marveled, for in his experience, no robot had ever exhibited facial expression but through direct and conscious effort, with the exception of Dors Venabili-and then only in the presence of Hari. What they could have made us! What a race we could have been!
But he subdued this old sad thought.
“You will not remove Hari Seldon and his influence?”
“I know you well enough to entrust you with my deepest thoughts and doubts, Lodovik-”
Here Daneel reached out with his Giskardian talents, but not toward Lodovik…
For two minutes, Linge Chen and all those others who eavesdropped on this meeting stared blankly at their informers, neither hearing nor seeing.
When they recovered, the robots were finished, and Daneel was leaving the cell. The guards escorted Lodovik Trema from the cell minutes later.
Within the hour, all the prisoners within the Special Security Detention Center had been released: troublemakers from Dahl, Streeling, and other Sectors; the humaniform robots, including Dors Venabili; and the young mentalics from Plussix’s warehouse.
Only the robots who looked like robots remained in custody, at Chen’s suggestion, since their hiding places were no longer secret. Later, they would be given over to Daneel to do with as he saw fit. Chen did not worry about their fate, so long as they were removed from Trantor and no longer interfered in the Empire.
Days later, Linge Chen would remember some of the words Daneel had spoken to Lodovik in the cell, telling of a vast and age-long secret, but clearly the conversation had gone in another direction at that point, for he could not remember what the secret had been.
Lodovik considered what he had been told. Daneel had left him free to make his own decision.
“Psychohistory is its own defeat,”Daneel said to Lodovik in the cell, before the release. “Human history is a chaotic system. Where it is predictable, the prediction will shape the history-an inevitable circular system. And when the most important events occur-the biological upwelling of a Vara Liso or a Klia Asgar-such events are inherently unpredictable, and tend to work against any psychohistory. Psychohistory is a motivator for those who will create the First Foundation, a belief system of immense power and subtlety. And the First Foundation will prevail, in time; Hari Seldon’s science lets us see this far.
“But the distant future-when humanity outgrows all ancient systems of belief, all psychology and morphology, all of its yolk-sacs of culture and biology-the seeds of the Second Foundation….”
Daneel did not need to finish. Through the expression on Lodovik’s face, a kind of dreaming speculation and almost religious hope, he knew he had made his point.
“Transcendence, beyond any rational prediction, “ Lodovik said.
“As you realized, the forest is made healthy by the conflagrations,+-but not the huge burnings and wholesale, senseless winnowings that characterize the human past. Humanity is a biological force of such power that for many thousands of years, they could have quite literally destroyed the Galaxy, and themselves. They hate and fear so much, legacies originating in their difficult past, from those times when they were not yet human, scrabbling for survival among scaled monsters on the surface of their home world. Forced to live in night and darkness, fearing the light of day. A bitter upbringing.
“These inbred tendencies toward total disaster I have worked to avoid, and I have succeeded-at some cost to free human development!
“The function of psychohistory is to actively constrain human growth and variation, until the species achieves its long-delayed maturity. Klia Asgar and her kind will breed with and train others, and humans will at long last learn to think in unison-to communicate efficiently. Together they may help overcome future mutations, even more powerful than themselves-destructive side-effects of their immune response to robots.
“There are real risks in such a strategy-risks you have fully and accurately recognized. But the alternative is unthinkable.
“If Hari Seldon does not finish his work, the disasters may begin again. And this must not be allowed to happen.”
88.
All the arrangements had been made. R. Daneel Olivaw was prepared to render his final service to humanity. Yet to do this he would have to appear to an old and dear friend and offer him what was at most a partial truth to adjust his lifelong course.
Then, he would have to suppress that friend’s memory, hiding his tracks as it were. He had done this to others thousands of times before (and to Hari Seldon, a few times), but there was a peculiar melancholy to this particular moment, and Daneel faced it with no enthusiasm.
On the last day in his oldest dwelling on Trantor, the apartment high on an internal tower overlooking the ivory-and-steel structures of Streeling University, his mentality-he still hesitated to use the term “mind,” reserving that for human thought patterns-was troubled. He refused to put a clear label on this sensation, but from below a word welled up that was, in the end, unavoidable. Grief.
Daneel was finally, after more than twenty thousand years, grieving. Soon, he would have no use. His human friend would die. Things would go on without them, humanity would lumber into its future, and while Daneel would continue to exist, he would have no purpose.
Hard as his existence had been these millennia, deep and complex as his history had flowed, he had always known he was doing what robots inevitably had been constructed to do-to serve human beings.
He had awarded Lodovik with the honorific “human,” not to convince the robot to come over to his side-the circumstances had changed and his arguments were compelling enough. He could not guarantee that Lodovik would agree, but strongly suspected he would-and Daneel would proceed with his plan in any case. Lodovik was not key, though his presence would be useful.
But Daneel could not call himself “human,” whatever his service and his nature. In his own judgment, Daneel remained what he had always been, through so many physical changes and mental peregrinations. He was a robot, nothing more.
His status as a mythic Eternal meant little to him; it did not exalt him.
Another, any of a million or a billion human historians, judging Daneel on his long record, might have given him a place in history, a steely gray eminence, equal to that of any human leader, perhaps far greater.
But they knew nothing of Daneel, and would render no such judgment. Only Linge Chen knew the salient details, and Chen was, finally, too small a man to see this robot clearly. Chen cared little for the Galaxy beyond his own lifetime.
Hari knew much more, and was brilliant enough to place Daneel’s contribution in perspective, yet Daneel had actively forbidden him from spending much time thinking about robots.
The false sky mimicked sunset with a spottiness that seemed part of Trantor’s nature now. A mottled orange glow fell over Daneel’s impassive face. No human saw him; he had no need to contort his features to meet human expectations.