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Center had been released:
troublemakers from Dahl, Streeling, and other Sectors; the humaniform robots,
including Dors Venabili;
and the young mentalics from Plussix s warehouse.
Only the robots who looked like robots remained in custody, at Chen s
suggestion, since their hiding places were no longer secret. Later, they would
be given over to Daneel to do with as he saw fit.
Chen did not worry about their fate, so long as they were removed from Trantor
and no longer interfered in the Empire.
Days later, Linge Chen would remember some of the words Daneel had spoken to
Lodovik in the cell, telling of a vast and age-long secret, but clearly the
conversation had gone in another direction at that point, for he could not
remember what the secret had been.
Lodovik considered what he had been told. Daneel had left him free to make his
own decision.
Psychohistory is its own defeat, Daneel said to Lodovik in the cell, before
the release.
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Human history is a chaotic system. Where it is predictable, the prediction
will shape the
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history--an inevitable circular system. And when the most important events
occur--the biological upwelling of a Vara Liso or a Klia Asgar--such events
are inherently unpredictable, and tend to work against any psychohistory.
Psychohistory is a motivator for those who will create the First
Foundation, a belief system of immense power and subtlety. And the First
Foundation will prevail, in time; Hari Seldon s science lets us see this far.
But the distant future--when humanity outgrows all ancient systems of belief,
all psychology and morphology, all of its yolk-sacs of culture and
biology--the seeds of the Second
Foundation..
.
Daneel did not need to finish. Through the expression on Lodovik s face, a
kind of dreaming speculation and almost religious hope, he knew he had made
his point.
Transcendence, beyond any rational prediction, Lodovik said.
As you realized, the forest is made healthy by the conflagrations,+--but not
the huge burnings and wholesale, senseless winnowings that characterize the
human past. Humanity is a biological force of such power that for many
thousands of years, they could have quite literally destroyed the Galaxy, and
themselves. They hate and fear so much, legacies originating in their
difficult past, from those times when they were not yet human, scrabbling for
survival among scaled monsters on the surface of their home world. Forced to
live in night and darkness, fearing the light of day. A bitter upbringing.
These inbred tendencies toward total disaster I have worked to avoid, and I
have succeeded--at some cost to free human development!
The function of psychohistory is to actively constrain human growth and
variation, until the species achieves its long-delayed maturity. Klia Asgar
and her kind will breed with and train others, and humans will at long last
learn to think in unison--to communicate efficiently. Together they may help
overcome future mutations, even more powerful than themselves--destructive
side-effects of their immune response to robots.
There are real risks in such a strategy--risks you have fully and accurately
recognized.
But the alternative is unthinkable.
If Hari Seldon does not finish his work, the disasters may begin again. And
this must not be allowed to happen.
88.
All the arrangements had been made. R. Daneel Olivaw was prepared to render
his final service to humanity. Yet to do this he would have to appear to an
old and dear friend and offer him what was at most a partial truth to adjust
his lifelong course.
Then, he would have to suppress that friend s memory, hiding his tracks as it
were. He had done this to others thousands of times before (and to Hari
Seldon, a few times), but there was a peculiar melancholy to this particular
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moment, and Daneel faced it with no enthusiasm.
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On the last day in his oldest dwelling on Trantor, the apartment high on an
internal tower overlooking the ivory-and-steel structures of Streeling
University, his mentality--he still hesitated to use the term mind,
reserving that for human thought patterns--was troubled. He refused to put a
clear label on this sensation, but from below a word welled up that was, in
the end, unavoidable.
Grief.
Daneel was finally, after more than twenty thousand years, grieving. Soon, he
would have no use.
His human friend would die. Things would go on without them, humanity would
lumber into its future, and while Daneel would continue to exist, he would
have no purpose.
Hard as his existence had been these millennia, deep and complex as his
history had flowed, he had always known he was doing what robots inevitably
had been constructed to do--to serve human beings.
He had awarded Lodovik with the honorific human, not to convince the robot
to come over to his side--the circumstances had changed and his arguments were
compelling enough. He could not guarantee that Lodovik would agree, but
strongly suspected he would--and Daneel would proceed with his plan in any
case. Lodovik was not key, though his presence would be useful.
But Daneel could not call himself human, whatever his service and his
nature. In his own judgment, Daneel remained what he had always been, through
so many physical changes and mental peregrinations. He was a robot, nothing
more.
His status as a mythic Eternal meant little to him; it did not exalt him.
Another, any of a million or a billion human historians, judging Daneel on his
long record, might have given him a place in history, a steely gray eminence,
equal to that of any human leader, perhaps far greater.
But they knew nothing of Daneel, and would render no such judgment. Only Linge
Chen knew the salient details, and Chen was, finally, too small a man to see
this robot clearly. Chen cared little for the Galaxy beyond his own lifetime.
Hari knew much more, and was brilliant enough to place Daneel s contribution
in perspective, yet
Daneel had actively forbidden him from spending much time thinking about
robots.
The false sky mimicked sunset with a spottiness that seemed part of Trantor s
nature now. A
mottled orange glow fell over Daneel s impassive face. No human saw him; he
had no need to contort his features to meet human expectations.
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