The Emperor had already asked him that at their last meeting, but Hari did not let on. Once again, he replied, “I would be honored, Highness.”
“The point being that these waves of misery inevitably begin when some high official gets a bug in his hat and begins futile investigations. And when the investigations get out of hand, they cost the Empire many lives and much of treasure. Superstitions. Myths. Always dangerous, like religions.”
Sinter said nothing. Hari merely nodded. Both had beads of moisture on their foreheads. The Emperor seemed thoughtful and calm.
“I’m willing to vouch that my Privy Councilor has no such illusions, Hari. I hope I can reassure you of that.”
“Yes, Highness.”
“And you, Farad, you understand the depth of Hari’s concern, that he comes here to relay these items of information about the state of bureaucratic and popular perceptions? The citizens! Like a sea of whispers. The Greys! The eternal manipulators of human destiny, the greatest power below the Palace! And the gentry--baronial and aristocratic, aloof, conspiratorial...So important and so often subject to fluctuating themes. Eh?”
Hari did not understand quite what the Emperor meant.
“No hard feelings against Hari, eh, Farad?”
“None, of course, sire.” Sinter smiled sunnily at Hari.
“Still...” Klayus put his chin in one hand and tapped his lips with a finger. “Amazing story! I shall have to look into it. What if the butcher’s notions were true? That would change everything. What then?”
Klayus turned to receive a message from the chief servant of the private dining chamber, an older and very somber Lavrentian. “My guests, including the Chief Commissioner, are waiting,” the Emperor said. “Hari, some day you must dine at table with me, as no doubt you did with the unfortunate Clean and the almost equally unfortunate Agis. However, since you are currently in disfavor with tinge Chen, tonight would not be a good time. My servants will see you off the Palace grounds. Both my Privy Councilor and I thank you, ‘Raven!’”
Hari bowed from the waist and two burly servants, more likely disguised Palace Specials, took positions at his flanks. As he was being escorted out of the chamber, passing beneath the amazing chandelier, the main doors opened to his right, and tinge Chen entered. His eyes met Hari’s, and Seldon felt a peculiar tremor of some emotion he could not identify. He despised Chen, yet the man was playing a very important role in the Plan.
They were intimately connected, both politically and historically, and it gave Hari no satisfaction to detect a certain sadness in the Commissioner’s features, As if he’s lost a friend, Hari thought.
Nearly all my friends and loved ones are dead, too, or just...gone. Vanished. And some I cannot even speak of!
Hari nodded cordially to Chen. The Chief Commissioner turned away as if Hari were of no importance whatsoever.
The two burly servants escorted him from the Palace, and Hari was left by a taxi stand to make his way back to the library and his far more comfortable, if far humbler, quarters.
In the taxi, pressed back into the cushions of the rear seat, Hari closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He might after all last no longer than the time it would take one of Sinter’s police assassins to shoot him. What would he tell Wanda? Had he succeeded, or had he simply made things worse?
It was impossible to know just how intelligent the Emperor actually was, how much control he exerted or wished to exert over his councilors and ministers. Klayus I was apparently a master at the art of concealing his true character and emotions, not to mention his intentions.
Still, Hari had long since known that Klayus was doomed to a short reign. His chances of being assassinated or deposed by Chen in the next two years were as high as sixty percent, no matter what his character or intelligence, according to the near-term glosses distilled from the equations in his Prime Radiant.
In his apartment within the library, Hari took off his clothes and showered quickly, then donned a thin night robe and sat on the edge of his simple frame bed. He checked through his messages. All could be taken care of when he returned to his offices tomorrow.
There were no windows in this apartment, no real luxuries at all; it was a simple two-room rectangle with a ceiling barely higher than his head. In all of Trantor, this was the only place where he could feel comfortable, safe, relaxed.
The only room where such illusions could prevail.
21.
Klia shivered in the vast hollow space and looked between her feet at the conjunction of two of Trantor’s greatest rivers. Once, twelve thousand years ago, they had had names; now they were designated simply by numbers, but even those numbers hinted at greatness: One and Two. One worked its way across half of Sirta, the continent which supported some of the most populated Sectors, including the Imperial Palace, Streeling, and Dahl. Thousands of years ago, as Trantor’s population grew and engineers contemplated accommodating additional billions, they had made the decision to cover over all the landmasses, to dig beneath the crust and burrow even into the shelves which lay beneath the ocean shores.
Those ancient engineers wisely decided against attempting to reroute and change the nature of Trantor’s watersheds. To have the metal skin of their new structures support so much water on its rush to the sea was wasteful, so they lined deep channels where natural rivers once had flowed, and let the rains gather and flow into them. Where early Sectors laid claim to natural aquifers, the engineers--with the mandate of the legendary Emperor Kwan Shonam--created new porous materials for the basins to allow the aquifers to remain useful.
Klia could no more understand the intricacies of water on Trantor than any normal citizen. What she knew was that here, fifty meters below where she stood, in the roaring maelstrom where the two rivers mated, lay power. She appreciated power, but she was too young to adequately fear it; and besides, she had an arrogance born of her abilities. She could not persuade rivers of water to change, but human rivers...That was something else again.
Klia was cold and hungry and angry. She felt abused; if they only knew! She took deep breaths and contemplated the day when she could hunt down those who were now making her run and hide like a rat.
Then she sat on the grating of the maintenance walkway, calves crossed in an easy X, and brought her all-too-negative emotions under control. She had to find a place to sleep; here, it was too moist and cold and loud. She had to find food. There would be little of that below ground; she could wait for a maintenance tram to rumble past, flag it down, steal foodboxes and persuade the crew to forget...She smiled at that. She would be a ghost, a phantom, the phantom of the two rivers...
Some in Dahl believed that those who lived good lives became part of the great rivers and flowed to the covered seas, there to live in perfect communes far from the knowledge of Empire. Those who lived badly went into the heatsinks to sweat and work forever. She did not believe such things, but they were interesting to contemplate while her subconscious mind worked through her problems and presented solutions.
The tram kept popping back into her thoughts. She imagined it a big wormlike thing on many wheels, with comfortable and well-lighted compartments within. She could make friends with the maintenance workers. Perhaps one of them would be exceptional, a native Dahlite with a huge mustache, far more manly than her father or any of the furtive black marketeers; he would comfort her gently at first, forcing nothing, until she decided what she wanted, what her body wanted...
These romantic visions only made her more lonely. She felt very vulnerable. She pounded her fist on a rail and listened to the hollow boom be swallowed by the vaster roar. No time for such dreams! She would be inhuman, above all passions and needs; she would take swift vengeance and live to create fear and respect. Children would be told her name to make them behave...
Suddenly, her moist eyes dried and she simply laughed at her own ridiculous imaginings. The laughter rose high and clear and, wondrously, the river’s rage did not swallow the sound: instead, the laughter echoed through the great vaults over the confluence, and returned to her, like the laughter of hundreds.
For the time being--barring the appearance of that large, gentle Dahlite maintenance worker--she was licked. She knew it. She would have to go back up into Dahl soon, and she would need a place to hide. If people were looking for those with her talents, she would pick the best party and cooperatefor a while.
She sighed at this necessity, but Klia knew she was not an idiot. She would not languish with her dying dreams down there in the dark and wet, with no company but the great rivers.
22.
Mors Planch listened to the sounds of a smooth, gentle landing from his pull-down emergency seat in the hold. Lodovik Trema sat beside him, eyes closed, face peacefully composed.
Planch knew something about Madder Loss that neither Tritch nor her crew understood. Fifty years ago, Madder Loss had been a promising jewel in the Emperor’s black robe of Galactic space, a Renaissance World where intellect and philosophy and science burned very bright indeed. The vast city-continents of Madder Loss had bid fair to outshine Trantor, even then revealing its age. And for a time, Trantor had tolerated Madder Loss as a grand dame might for a while tolerate the presence of a beautiful young woman in the court, watching her beauty mature with more amusement than envy.
But then the beautiful young woman, half unconscious of her effect, begins to attract the attentions of the grand dame’s paramours...and the tolerance turns into benign neglect, and finally comes the inexplicable cutting off of resources and the young woman finds herself a nonentity, shunned by the court, her name a blighted rumor.
Planch had visited Madder Loss thirty years before to gather information for Linge Chen. At that time Chen had served as First Grade Administrator of Second Octant trade. What Mors had seen then would have broken his younger heart if he hadn’t been prepared and forewarned by Chen himself: beautiful spaceports standing empty, gleaming new domes and plexes showing a certain air of decay, the listless officials in their out-of-date Imperial uniforms adhering to rules without enthusiasm. Flourishing black markets, and even crowds of hungry women and children outside the spaceport fence. Madder Loss had opened his eyes to the ebbs and flows of history and economics, and had also planted that seed of personal rebellion that had just flowered. He had from that moment looked for a way to counteract the cold, loveless rationality of Linge Chen and his gentry cohorts, commanding their suffocating hordes of Greys, drawing their lines and cutting off the bright young flesh of the empire for some obscure sense of Trantor’s place and pride...For political expedience.
Tritch came down to the hold and held out her register for him to place his code imprimatur upon. “Everything as agreed,” she murmured, not looking at him, and staying far away from Lodovik.
Lodovik rose from his seat and stood by the large hatch. Slight whirring noises and a change in pressure revealed it would be opening soon.
“As agreed,” Mors said, and marked the forms.
“May our world-lines never cross again,” Tritch said lightly, then held out her index finger. He hooked his index finger around hers, in the ancient common greeting of their mutual ancestors, and they tugged at each other gently. “Now get out,” she ordered, and the two of them quickly complied, stepping out into the stale air and ominous silence of a huge docking bay, devoid of any other ships.
