Foundation and Chaos

65.

Daneel stood on the parapet of an apartment that had once been a secret hideaway for Demerzel, and beside him stood the tiktok that had come with the apartment. The apartment had been sealed decades before and left unoccupied, its lease paid for a century. This morning, when Daneel had returned to it, to utilize its secret data links to the courts and the palace, he had found the tiktok activated. He knew immediately who was responsible.

“You have become a major irritation,” Daneel told the former sim. Though this meme-mind seemed now to be on his side, it-she-was far too changeable and humanlike to be trusted completely.

The tiktok hummed quietly. “It is so very hard to manifest in this world,” Joan said. “Are you here to await news of Hari Seldon?”

“Yes,” Daneel said.

“Why not go to the palace, in disguise, and enter the courts?”

“I will learn more here,” Daneel said.

“Are you irritated that I regard you as an angel of the Lord?”

“I have been called many things,” Daneel said. “None of them disturbs me.”

“I would consider it a privilege to ride with you into battle. These…riots…They speak to me of many political currents. They trouble me.”

They could hear the noise of people in the streets far below, marching, waving banners, calling for the resignation of all responsible for the recent police searches.

“Will they blame Hari Seldon or his people, his family?”

“No,” Daneel said.

“How can you be so sure?”

Daneel looked at the tiktok, and for a moment, the image of a young woman with intense features and short hair, dressed in ancient buffed and inscribed iron armor, flickered around the old machine.

“I have been working for thousands of years, making alliances, arranging accounts, thinking far in advance of things which might be advantageous at some time. By now, there are so many arrangements made, that I have my choice of where to exert pressure, and when to initiate certain automatic procedures. But that is not all.”

“You behave like a general,” Joan said. “A general in the army of God.”

Daneel said, “Once, humans were my God.”

“By assignment of the Lord…!” Joan seemed shocked and a little confused. She had grown greatly since her reconstruction and her dialogues, virtual affair, and estrangement from Voltaire, but old faith dies very hard indeed.

“No. By programming, by innate nature of my construction.”

“Men must receive God by listening to their inmost souls,” Joan said. “The dictates and rules of God are in the tiniest atom of nature, and in the programs of scripture.”

“You are not human,” Daneel said, “yet you have a humanlike authority. I warn you, however, do not distract me. Now is a very delicate time.”

“The fiery danger of an angel, the compulsion of a general on the field,” Joan said. “Voltaire will lose. I almost feel sorry for him.”

“How strange that you have chosen me, when once you opposed my efforts,” Daneel said. “You represent faith, something I will never know. Voltaire represents the power of cold intellect. I am that, or nothing.”

“You are far from cold,” Joan said. “You have your faith, as well.”

“My faith is in humanity,” Daneel said. “I recognize laws made by humanity.”

The voice from the tiktok fell silent for a moment, then, softly, the mechanical tone conveying little of what must have been the entity’s passion, Joan said, “The forces acting through you are clear to me. What you know or do not know means little. I knew very little in my time, but felt those forces. They acted through me. I trusted them.”

Daneel ignored the tiktok and waited for the courts to make their report. One thing in his plan had gone awry, but he had more than half expected this to happen.

Dors Venabili was not at her assigned post.

Daneel had long ago learned the art of letting certain parts of a plan, even key parts, act outside of his immediate control, so long as he knew very well what their direction would be. He had seen that potential in Dors from the moment she emerged from her refurbishment on Eos.

And he had seen a similar potential in Lodovik, as well.

The risk was great-but the potential gains were enormously greater. He had almost gotten used to this kind of gambling, but waiting still induced an unpleasant sensation in his mechanical form that he would have isolated and eliminated, could he have done so.

The tiktok’s passenger had fallen into a reverent silence.

Daneel touched the machine on its small metal sensor head. “How do you exist on Trantor now?” he asked.

“I permeate the computational and connection systems, the interstices in the Mesh, as before,” the entity said.

“How thoroughly?” Daneel asked.

“As thoroughly as before, perhaps more so.”

Daneel considered the risks of relying on Joan, and also the potential of Voltaire. “Does Voltaire permeate the system as well?”

“I would think so,” Joan said. “We are trying to avoid each other, but his traces are a constant irritation.”

“Do you have access to security codes, encrypted channels?”

“With some effort, they are available to me.”

“And to Voltaire?”

“He is not stupid, whatever his other flaws,” Joan replied.

Daneel considered for a few seconds, his brain working at its greatest speed and capacity, then said, “You can place an extension of your patterns into me. I suggest-”And he passed on, using machine-language, a certain address within his higher reasoning centers.

An instant later, Joan was within him. She filled out and acquired detail as the minutes passed.

“I am privileged to be your ally,” she said.

“I would not want my opponents to have an advantage,” Daneel said, and turned away from the parapet, preparing to leave the apartment.