Mors stifled a brief panic. If this was somehow connected with Lodovik

It must be! But why wouldn’t Linge Chen send the ship, then? He knew of no connection between Sinter and Chen.

Mors had a sudden foreboding. He was caught between an ancient, almost incomprehensible conspiracy, and the still tightly-meshed and broadly cast net of the Empire. His life as a free man-any life at all!-might very well be at an end.

All because of an attachment to this peculiar and vulnerable world!

Escape was highly unlikely.

Best to go calmly. These days, style was all that was left to a desperate man.

Drawing up his shoulders, Mors walked away from the gate, toward the two men in blue uniforms at the end of the long corridor.

The return to Trantor was both trauma and test for the robot who had been Dors Venabili. Soon she would have a new identity, and she would take a new role in the very long-range plans of R. Daneel Olivaw. But for now, this day of landing and disembarking was so similar to that time, decades before, when she had first arrived on Trantor…before she met the man she had been programmed to guard and nurture…

Before Hari.

Trantor had not changed much in the time since Dors’ death, but the few changes she was in a position to notice were not positive. Trantor looked seedier, less imposing and more decrepit. The ceil of the domes had become very noticeably more patchy, the slideways less efficient and more prone to breakdown. The smells were the same, however, and the people seemed much the same.

Even the circumstances were the same. The last time she had traveled to Trantor, it had been with Daneel. They had each gone their separate ways upon arrival, but now they stuck together, and Dors dreaded the plan she was sure Daneel was concocting. She was human enough in design to be able to feel humanlike emotions-dread among them, and love-but Daneel wanted to test her resolve, as a robot, and her strength. If she failed, she was of no use to him.

Daneel said little, but took her to the safe apartment near Streeling, where they picked up their change of clothes and new Trantorian identity papers. With a slight adjustment to her already altered physical appearance and external marks, including fingerprints and external tissue genetics, she would become Jenat Korsan, a teacher from the food ally Paskann. Lodovik would assume the identity of a merchant broker from the metals-rich province of Dau. As Rissik Numant of Dau of the Thousand Golden Suns, he would spend several years on Trantor, conducting a personal pilgrimage.

The safe apartment was small and located in the poor municipality of Fann, less than ten kilometers from Streeling. Dors knew the place a little-had passed through here several times before forming her liaison with Hari. What had then been shabby genteel was now truly just shabby, and unhappy; police seldom came here unless it was strictly necessary.

They stayed in the apartment for two days, just long enough for Daneel’s manipulations to spread throughout Trantor’s identity networks.

Then, they went forth…

Not, she hoped, to some catastrophic relapse, some unbearable return to her old mode. The great difficulty was that with Hari Seldon, she had felt truly useful for the first time in her existence, truly important, and to her human side, that importance had been translated into happiness. She was now all too aware that she was not human.

And not happy.

The first interview with Gaal Dornick had proceeded satisfactorily. Hari felt he had impressed the young man, and Dornick had taken the news of the current situation well enough. Good-the man had courage, and there was about him a hint of that outer-world youth and bravado that Hari remembered himself once having.

As a mathist, Dornick was talented, but there were many far more talented already connected with the Project. Dornick’s main use would be as a sharp observer, who would weather the present storm and help pave the way for Hari’s own peculiar method of helping the Project’s people weather future storms. And perhaps as another friend. I do like the man.

Hari could not stand the thought of just letting his two Foundations-one secret, one, he hoped-believed! Knew!-to be sanctioned by the Empire itself-proceed on their own, after his death. If he had learned anything from Demerzel/Daneel, it had been the necessity of leaving some trail of tidbits, some prodding and provocative part of himself to spur things on after his death. Daneel did this by popping up in person every few decades, a technique Hari would only be able to imitate in extension, as it were.

Dornick would be key to making Hari Seldon a legend, and to allowing him to appear at regular intervals, even after death, to shepherd things along.

Hari returned to his apartment in Streeling and once more availed himself of the services of a small security tracer Stettin had procured for him on one of his journeys off Trantor. The tracer, set down in the middle of the main room, spun a web of red lines across the walls and low ceiling, then pronounced, in the sweet voice of a girl, “This room is free of known Imperial listening devices.”

There had not been any new listening devices designed for some time. Linge Chen, for his own unknown reasons, was still allowing Hari a private personal space. Everywhere else, including his office in the Imperial Library, he was watched and listened to very carefully.

Hari could feel the forces building. Poor Dornick! He would hardly have time to get used to Trantor.

Hari smiled grimly, then pushed a button in the wall. A small entertainment center emerged. He instructed it to access to University music libraries-one of his privileges at Streeling-and playa selection of court music from the time of Jemmu IX. “Mostly Gand and Hayer, please,” he said. These two composers, the former male, the latter female, had competed with each other for court commissions for fifty years. After their death, it had been discovered they were secretly lovers. Music scholars had decided through exhaustive analysis that no one could tell which of their combined works had been written by Gand, and which by Hayer-or even if just one had written them all. They were elegant and soothing pieces, filled with a polite recognition of the Empire’s eternal order; music from an age when the Empire had worked, and worked well, vigorous and youthful even after thousands of years.

Daneel’s Golden Age, Hari thought as he settled into his oldest and favorite chair. The kind of age Linge Chen still believes in. rather foolishly. The Chief Commissioner has always seemed such a pompous fool to me-of aristocratic family, trained in ancient bureaucratic disciplines, aloof and disconnected…What if I’m wrong? What if my theories are inadequate to predict these short-term results? But they can’t be-the long-term results depend on what happens in these next few weeks!

He forced himself to relax, performed his breathing exercises, just as Dors had once taught him. The music played, soft and highly structured and very melodic. As Hari listened, beating time with one hand where it rested on the chair arm, he worked over in his mind the roles that would be played by the Chen and Divart families as Trantor continued its decline. The Commission of Public Safety would run the Empire for some time, until a strong leader emerged-very likely an Emperor and not a military man. Hari suspected-though he would never have recorded this prediction-that the Emperor would take on the name of Cleon, become Cleon II, to appeal to the Empire’s, and especially Trantor’s, sense of tradition and history.

It was when a society became the most distressed and antiquated that it would recreate an overwhelming fantasy of some Golden Age, a time when all was great and glorious, when people were more noble and causes more magnificent and honorable. Chivalry is the last refuge of a rotting corpse.