“I haven’t betrayed you,” Planch said.
“And you haven’t told me the truth. Whatever Lodovik Trema is, he isn’t human. Trin is babbling about simulacra, robots. Whoever paid her off told her she’d be looking for mechanical men. What do you know about robots?”
“He’s not a robot,” Planch said with a shake of his head and a smile. “Nobody makes robots anymore.”
“In our nightmares,” Tritch said. “Class B filmbooks. Tiktoks with mutated brains bent on mindless revenge. But Lodovik Trema...first councilor to the Chief Commissioner of Public Safety?”
“It’s nonsense,” Planch said shortly, as if this entire conversation was beneath his dignity.
“I looked it up, Mors.” Tritch’s face suddenly became sad, assuming a kind of limpness away from the draw of gravitation. “You were right. Neutrinos in sufficient numbers are deadly. And there’s no shielding against neutrino flux.”
“He’s dying,” Planch lied. “His condition in any case has to be kept secret.”
Tritch shook her head. “I don’t believe you. But I’m going to keep my word and drop you on Madder Loss.” She mused for a moment. “Maybe I’ll drop Trin and Andanch there with you, let you all work things out. Now go confer with your dead minister.”
She turned and headed forward.
“What about getting back into my cabin?” Planch said.
“I’ll send food and a cot back to the hold. If I let someone who consorts with a living corpse go forward, I’d have a mutiny on my hands. We’ll be at Madder Loss in a day and a half.”
Planch shuddered as she passed out of sight. He, too, didn’t like associating with Lodovik Trema. Tritch was perfectly correct.
Nobody aboard the Arrow of Destiny could have survived. Nobody human.
Lodovik stood in the hold beside his box, hands folded, waiting for Planch to return. By his actions, Lodovik had apparently brought severe harm to a human being, and yet the expected difficulties of such a situation--decrease in mental frequency, critical reexamination, and under extreme circumstances, even complete shut-down--did not affect him much, if at all. Even allowing for the extended nature of his long-term mission for Daneel--and under the provisions of the Zeroth Law--there should have been deeply uncomfortable repercussions.
Yet there were none to speak of. Lodovik felt calm and fully functional. He did not feel contented--he had caused damage and was aware of that, quite clearly--but he experienced nothing like the near-paralyzing realization of having broken one of the Calvinian Three Laws.
Clearly, something within him had changed. He was trying to track down what that might be when Planch returned.
“We’re stuck back here for the duration,” Planch said matter-of-factly. “I had a very nice cabin, too. And the captain and I were...” He shook his head sadly, then his features sharpened. “Never mind. Something is very wrong with this whole scenario.”
“What might that be?” Lodovik asked. He stretched and smiled. The human persona slid smoothly over all his other functions. “The box was cramped, but I’ve spent time in worse conditions. I emerged at the wrong moment, I suppose?”
“No supposing about it. The man suffered a heart attack.”
“I’m very sorry. But they were up to no good, I’m afraid.”
“Someone else wants you, alive or dead,” Planch said. “I thought the Chief Commissioner of Public Safety was pretty much unassailable. Invincible.”
“Nobody is invincible in this forsaken time,” Lodovik said. “I apologize for causing you difficulties.”
Planch stared hard at Lodovik. “Up until now I’ve ignored all my misapprehensions about this mission, about you. In Imperial politics, anything can happen--individuals can be worth entire solar systems. That’s how centralized politics works.”
“Surely you’re not a diffusionist, Mors Planch?”
“No. There’s no money and not much life in being a traitor to Linge Chen.”
“You mean, to the Emperor.”
Planch did not correct himself. “My curiosity has been piqued to dangerous levels, however. Curiosity is like neutrino flux--it can penetrate anything, and in sufficient quantity, it can kill. I’m aware of that...But my curiosity about you...” He clamped his jaw shut and looked away.
“I’m a middle-aged man with extraordinary good fortune, let’s leave it at that,” Lodovik said, making a wry face. “There are things neither you nor I can be told...and we would be best served by keeping our curiosities in check. Yes, I should be dead. I know that better than anybody. The reason I am not dead, however, has nothing to do with extraordinary superstitions about...what was it...robots? You can rest assured on that point. Mors Planch.”
“This isn’t the first I’ve heard about robots, you know,” Planch said. “Murmurs about artificial humans sweep the worlds from time to time, like a dusty breeze. Thirty-five years ago, there was a massacre in a Seventh Octant system. Four planets were involved, quite prosperous worlds, united by a proud common culture, shaping up to be a real force in Imperial economics.”
“I remember,” Lodovik said. “The ruler claimed he had positive proof that robots had infiltrated to the highest levels, and were fomenting rebellion. Very sad.”
“Billions died,” Mors Planch said.
Lodovik said, “I presume you will be paid well for your heroic rescue.”
Planch’s face went slack. “That’s the trouble with this whole situation,” he said. “The captain and crew don’t like us. Honor is a sometimes thing with these people, and I should know...It’s the same with my people, ancestral traits as it were. They’ll take us where we want to go, but there’s always a chance they’ll talk out of turn in a spaceport somewhere...And there’s nothing I can do about that. But it’s all incredible enough, I suppose nobody will believe. I wouldn’t myself.
“I’ve told Linge Chen you’re dead. The rescue failed.”
Lodovik drew his head back, pressing his chin into double folds of flesh. “And we go to Madder Loss?”
Planch nodded. A look of sadness crossed his face, but he said no more.
19.
Linge Chen was preparing for the informal dinner party at the Emperor’s private quarters when Kreen brought him the sealed message from Planch. In the green oceanic depths of his meditation and personal room, he put aside the straight razor and soap he was using to shave, took a deep breath as Kreen departed, and placed his thumb on the small gray parcel. The first seal, applied by the receiver and decoder, came open at this touch--confirming his unique identity through microanalysis of his skin chemistry, as well as the pattern of his thumbprint. The second seal, within the disk’s message itself, he opened through a few words spoken in his voice, known only to himself. The message flowered before him.
Mors Planch stood within a ship, the background in soft focus for the moment, and said in low tones, “My lord Chief Commissioner Chen, I am within the Spear of Glory .The ship I have hired is the only one to have found the vessel so far, and I anticipate with some personal concern your deep disappointment at the news I bring. Your councilor is dead, along with the rest of the crew...”
Linge Chen’s lips worked as he played back the rest of the message. Planch showed the grim details: the rows of bodies arranged within one chamber, the discovery of the body of Lodovik Trema on the bridge, curled and still. Planch confirmed Trema’s identity by placing the Commissioner’s own identifier on Trema’s bracelet.
Linge Chen shut off the message before it could reveal the unnecessary details of what Planch would do next. The body would not be retrieved; the vessel’s discovery would be forgotten. Linge Chen did not wish to be accused of favoritism or extravagance, not at this time, when he was hoping to bring down Farad Sinter on the same charge.
For a moment, he felt like a small boy. He had been so convinced that Lodovik Trema moved on a different and superior plane to the rest of humanity. He could never admit it to himself, much less any other, but he had trusted as well as admired Trema. His personal instincts, which had proved almost infallible, had told him that Trema would never betray him, never do anything not in Linge Chen’s best interests. He had even invited Trema to join his family on special occasions, the only councilor (or Commissioner, for that matter) he had ever invited to do so.
Lodovik Trema had been a steady and pleasant presence on those occasions, playing solemnly and with his own kind of innocence with Linge Chen’s children, extravagantly complimenting their mothers on their cooking, which was adequate at best. And Lodovik’s advice...
Lodovik Trema had never given Chen bad advice. They had risen together to this supreme pinnacle of responsibility over twenty-five years of, at first, inglorious and often painful service. They had weathered the end of Agis’s reign and the first years of the junta, and Lodovik had proven invaluable in designing the Commission of Public Safety to moderate and eventually replace the junta’s military rulers.
Ten minutes passed. Kreen knocked gently on the door to the chamber. “Yes,” Chen said. “I’m almost done.”
He picked up the razor and finished shaving his fine beard, leaving smooth, pallid skin behind. Then, as a measure of his emotion, he cut two small slices in his skin just in front of his left ear. Blood welled over the hairs and he patted it with a white towel, then dropped the towel into an incinerator, offering his own blood to the powers that be, unspecified.
In his youth in the Imperial Education Municipality of Runim, he had learned such rituals as part of the path to adulthood, following the Rules of Tua Chen. Tua Chen had been the most successful product of the secret plan among orthodox Ruellians to develop a select breed of Imperial administrators and bureaucrats, four thousand years before, known as the Shining Lights. In his late maturity, Tua Chen had devised two Books of Rules, based on Ruellian principles: one for the training of aristocratic administrators (and occasionally an Emperor), the other for the training of the Empire’s hundreds of billions of bureaucrats, the Greys.
Linge Chen was reputedly a direct descendant of Tua Chen.
The Shining Light school in its modern form was rife with superstition and almost useless, but in its heyday it had trained administrators that were sent to the far corners of the Empire. And in return, from allover the Empire, each year, millions of candidate Greys came to Trantor to receive the Tua Chen training. The best assumed positions in the planet’s infinitely layered bureaucracy, competing with the entrenched and resentful Trantor Greys; the rest, having completed their pilgrimage, returned to their homes, or took positions on frontier worlds.
Linge Chen was the most successful of all the students to come out of the school, and he had not succeeded by being overly observant of those damnably persuasive secret rituals. But for Lodovik Trema...
It was the very least he could do.
“Sire...” Kreen said. With some concern, he observed his master’s small wounds, but he knew enough to say nothing.