Foundation and Chaos

25.

Lodovik stood motionless but for his eyes, watching as Daneel conducted another diagnostic check, the last before the journey to Eos.

“There’s no overt damage, still nothing I can detect here,” Daneel said as the old machines finished. “But you’re a later model than these tools. They’re not up to your level, I suspect.”

“Have you ever diagnosed yourself!” Lodovik asked.

“Frequently,” Daneel said. “Every few years. Not with these machines, however. There are some high quality tools hidden on Trantor. Still, it’s been a century since I’ve been to Eos, and my power supply needs replacing. That’s why I’ll travel with you. And there is another reason. I have to bring back a robot-if her repairs and upgrades have gone well.”

“A female form?”

“Yes.”

Lodovik waited for elaboration, but Daneel was not forthcoming. He knew of only one female form robot still active, of the millions that had once been so popular with humans. This was Dors Venabili-and she had been sequestered on Eos for decades.

“You do not trust me now, do you?” Lodovik said.

“No,” Daneel said. “The ship should be ready. The sooner we get to Eos, the sooner we can get back. I hate to be away from Trantor. The most critical moment of the Cusp Time is upon us.”

Very few Imperial ships put in to Madder Loss now, but Daneel had made traveling arrangements with a trader vessel months before, and it was not difficult to fit Lodovik in as an extra passenger. The vessel would take them to the cold outer reaches of Madder Loss’s system, to a frozen asteroid with no name, only a catalog number: ISSC-1491.

They stood on the landing platform of a remote outdoor port. Spaceport. The sun was bright, and insects flew through the air, pollinating the oil-flower fields that surrounded the concrete and plasteel facilities.

Lodovik still valued Daneel’s leadership and presence, but how long could that last? In fact, Lodovik had put all of his initiative on hold for the few days he had been on Madder Loss, for fear of defying Daneel. His type of humaniform robot used initiative in many important ways, however, not just to determine large-scale courses of action. He could not subdue the thoughts that rose from his core mentality. Daneel would hold humans back. Humans must be allowed to act out their own destiny. We do not understand their animal spirits! We are not like them!

Daneel himself had said that human minds and destiny were not easily understood by robots-if they could be understood at all. It is madness to control and direct their history! The overweening madness of machines out of control.

Something unfamiliar flitted across his thought processes-a vestige of the voice he had heard earlier.

Daneel spoke to the trader captain, a small, muscular man with a ritually scarred face and paste white skin. Daneel turned and waved for Lodovik to join him. Lodovik marched forward. The trader captain gave him a ferocious smile.

As they boarded the ship, Lodovik looked back. Insects everywhere, on all the planets suitable for humans, all alike, with minor local variations, mostly explainable by genetic tinkering over the millennia. All suited to maintaining ecosystems conducive to human civilization.

Not a wild creature on all of Madder Loss. Wild creatures could only be found on those fifty thousand worlds put aside as hunting and zoo preserves: the garden planets so popular with Klayus, planets where citizens could only visit with Imperial permission. He had once overseen the budgetary allocations to those preserves. Linge Chen had wanted to shut them down as useless expense, but Klayus had made a direct request to save them, and there had been some ornate quid pro quo to which Lodovik had not been privy.

Lodovik wondered how all this, garden worlds and tamed or paved-over human worlds, had come to be. So much history unavailable to him. So many questions bubbling up now beneath the self-imposed constraints.

The ship doors closed behind him, and he concealed an algorithmic turbulence, what in human terms he would have called an intellectual panic-not at the closed spaces of the ship, but at the opening flowers of curiosity within his own mind!

In their small cabin, Daneel placed their two small pieces of luggage in containment racks and pulled down a small sitting platform. Lodovik remained standing. Daneel folded his arms.

“We will not be disturbed,” he said. “We can drop to our lowest level here. We should be at the rendezvous in six hours, and on Eos within three days.”

“How much time do we have, before you lose control of the situation on Trantor?” Lodovik asked.

“Fifteen days,” Daneel said. “Barring unforeseen circumstances. And there are always those, where humans are concerned.”