“Overt opposition from me at this delicate time would be…un-

 politic.”

 “Even though he might be behind the attempts on my life?”

 “Alas, there is no proof of that. As ever, several factions would benefit were you to…” Cleon coughed uncomfortably.

 “Withdraw—involuntarily?”

 Cleon’s mouth worked uneasily. “An Emperor is father to a per­ petually unruly family.”

 If even the Emperor were tip-toeing around Lamurk, matters were indeed bad. “Couldn’t you position squadrons for quick use should the opportunity arise?”

 Cleon nodded. “I shall. But if the High Council votes for Lamurk, I shall be powerless to move against so prominent and, well, excit­ ing a world as Sark.”

 “I believe strife will spread throughout Sark’s entire Zone.”

 “Truly? What would you advise me to do against Lamurk?”

 “I have no political skills, sire. You knew that.”

 “Nonsense. You have psychohistory!”

 Hari was still uncomfortable owning up to the theory, even with Cleon. If it were ever to be useful, word of psychohistory could not be widespread, or else everyone would use it. Or try to.

 Cleon went on, “And your solution to the terrorist problem—it is working well. We just executed Moron One Hundred.”

 Hari shuddered, thinking of the lives obliterated by a mere passing idea of his. “A…a small issue, surely, sire.”

 “Then turn your calculations to the Dahlite Sector matter, Hari. They are restive. Everyone is, these days.”

 “And the Zones of Dahlite persuasion throughout the Galaxy?”

 “They back the local Dahlites in the Councils. It’s about this representation question. The plan we follow on Trantor will be mirrored throughout the Galaxy. Indeed, in the votes of whole Zones.”

 “Well, if most people think—”

 “Ah, my dear Hari, you still have a mathist’s myopia. History is determined not by what people think, but by what they feel.”

 Startled—for this remark struck him as true—Hari could only say, “I see, sire.”

 “We—you and I, Hari—must decide this issue.”

 “I’ll work on the decision, sire.”

 How he had come to hate the very word! Decide had the same root as suicide and homicide. Decisions felt like little killings. Somebody lost.

 Hari now knew why he was not cut out for these matters. If his skin was too thin, he would have too ready empathy with others, with their arguments and sentiments. Then he would not make decisions which he knew could only be approximately right and would cause some pain.

 On the other hand, he had to steel himself against the personal need to be liked. In a natural politician, that would lead to a posture that said he cared about others, when in fact he cared what they thought of him—because being liked was what counted, far down in the shadowy psyche. It also came in handy for staying in office.

 Cleon brought up more issues. Hari dodged and stalled as much as he could. When Cleon abruptly ended the talk, he knew he had not come over well. He had no chance to reflect on this, for Yugo came in.

 “I’m so glad you’re back!” Yugo grinned. “The Dahl issue really needs your attention—”

 “Enough!” Hari could not vent his ire at the Emperor, but Yugo would do nicely. “No political talk. Show me your research pro­ gress.”

 “Uh, all right.”

 Yugo looked chastened and Hari at once regretted being so ab­ rupt. Yugo hurried to set up his latest data displays. Hari blinked; for a moment, he had seen in Yugo’s haste an odd similarity to pan gestures.

 Hari listened, thinking along two tracks at once. This, too, seemed easier since Panucopia.

 Plagues were building across the entire Empire. Why?

 With rapid transport between worlds, diseases thrived. Humans were the major petri dish. Ancient maladies and virulent new plagues appeared around distant stars. This inhibited Zonal integration, another hidden factor.

 Diseases filled an ecological niche, and for some, humanity was a snug nook. Antibiotics knocked down infections, which then mutated and returned, more virulent still. Humanity and microbes made an intriguing system, for both sides fought back quickly.

 Cures propagated quickly through the wormhole system, but so did disease carriers. The entire problem, Yugo had found, could be described by a method known as “marginal stability,” in which disease and people struck an uneasy, ever-shifting balance. Major plagues were rare, but minor ones became common. Afflictions rose and inventive science damped them within a generation. This oscillation sent further ripples spreading among other human insti­ tutions, radiating into commerce and culture. With intricate coup­ ling terms in the equations, he saw patterns emerging, with one sad consequence.

 The human lifespan in the “natural” civilized human condi-tion—living in cities and towns—had an equally “natural” limit. While some few attained 150 years, most died well short of 100. The steady hail of fresh disease insured it. In the end, there was no lasting shelter from the storm of biology. Humans lived in troubled balance with microbes, an unending struggle with no final victories.

 “Like this tiktok revolt,” Yugo finished.

 Hari jerked to attention. “What?”

 “It’s like a virus. Dunno what’s spreading it, though.”

 “All over Trantor?”

 “That’s the focus, seems like. Others Zones are getting tiktok troubles, too.”

 “They refuse to harvest food?”

 “Yup. Some of the tiktoks, mostly the recent models, 590s and higher—they say it’s immoral to eat other living things.”

 “Good grief.”

 Hari remembered breakfast. Even after the exotica of Panucopia, the autokitchen’s meager offering had been a shock. Trantorian food had always been cooked or ground, blended or compounded. Properly, fruit was presented as a sauce or preserve. To his surprise, breakfast appeared to have come straight from the dirt. He had wondered if it had been washed—and how he would know for sure. Trantorians hated their meals to remind them of the natural world.

 “They’re refusing to work the Caverns, even,” Yugo said.

 “But that’s essential!”

 “Nobody can fix ’em. There’s some tiktok meme invading them.”

 “Like these plagues you’re analyzing.”

 Hari had been shocked at Trantor’s erosion in just a few months. He and Dors had slipped into Streeling with Daneel’s help, amid messy, trash-strewn corridors with phosphors malfunctioning, lifts dead. Now this.

 Yugo’s stomach suddenly rumbled. “Uh, sorry. People are having to work the Caverns for the first time in centuries! They have no hands-on experience. Everybody but the gentry’s on slim rations.”

 Hari had helped Yugo escape that sweltering work years before. In vast vaults, wood and coarse cellulose passed automatically from the solar caverns to vats of weak acid. Passing through deep rivers of acid hydrolyzed this to glucose. Now people, not rugged tiktoks, had to mix niter suspensions and ground phosphate rock in a carefully calculated slurry. With prepared organics stirred in, a vast range of yeasts and their derivatives emerged.

 “The Emperor has to do somethin’!” Yugo said.

 “Or I,” Hari said. But what?

 “People’re sayin’ we have to scrap all the tiktoks, not just the Five Hundred series, and do everything ourselves.”

 “Without them, we would be reduced to hauling bulk foods across the Galaxy by hypership and worms—an absurdity. Trantor will fall.”

 “Hey, we can do better than tiktoks.”

 “My dear Yugo, that is what I call Echo-Nomics. You’re repeating conventional wisdom. One must consider the larger picture. Trantorians aren’t the same people who built this world. They’re softer.”

 “We’re as tough and smart as the men and women who built the Empire!”

 “They didn’t stay indoors.”

 “Old Dahlite sayin’.” Yugo grinned. “If you don’t like the grand picture, just apply dog logic to life. Get petted, eat often, be lovable and loved, sleep a lot, dream of a leash-free world.”

 Despite himself, Hari laughed. But he knew he had to act, and soon.

 2.

 “We are trapped between tin deities and carbon angels,” Voltaire rasped.

 “These…creatures?” Joan asked in a thin, awed voice.

 “This alien fog—quite godlike in a way. More dispassionate than real, carbon-based humans. You and I are like neither…now.”

 They floated above what Voltaire termed SysCity—the system representation of Trantor, its cyberself. For Joan’s human referents he had transformed the grids and layers into myriad crystalline walkways, linking saber-sharp towers. Dense connections webbed the air. Motes connected to other motes in intricate cross-bonds and filmed the ground. This yielded a cityscape like a brain. A visual pun, he thought.

 “I hate this place,” she said.

 “You’d prefer a Purgatory simulation?”

 “It is so…chilling.”

 The alien minds above them were a murky mist of connections. “They seem to be studying us,” Voltaire said, “with decidedly un­ sympathetic eyes.”

 “I stand ready, should they attack.” She swung a huge sword.

 “And I, should their weapons of choice be syllogisms.”

 He could now reach any library in Trantor, read its contents in less time than he had once taken to write a verse. He worked his mind—or was it minds, now?—around the clotted, cold mist.

 Once some theorists had thought that the global net would give birth to a hypermind, algorithms summing to a digital Gaia. Now something far greater, this shifting gray fog, wrapped around the planet. Widely separated machines computed different slices of subjective moment-jumps.

 To these minds, the present was a greased computational slide orchestrated by hundreds of separate processors. There was a pro­ found difference, he felt—not saw, but felt, deep in his analog per-suasion—between the digital and the smooth, the continuous.

 The fog was a cloud of suspended moments, sliced numbers waiting to happen, implicit in the fundamental computa­ tion.

 And within it all…the strangeness.

 He could not comprehend these diffuse spirits. They were the remnants of all the computational-based societies, throughout the Galaxy, who had somehow—but why?—condensed here on Trantor.

 They were truly alien minds. Convoluted, byzantine. (Voltaire knew the origin of that word, from a place of spires and bulbous mosques, but all that was dust, while the useful word remained.) They did not have human purposes. And they used the tiktoks.

 The thrust of the mechanicals’ agenda, Voltaire saw, was rights—the expansion of liberty to the digital wilderness.

 Even Dittos might fall under such a rule. Were not copies of di­ gital people still people? So the argument went. Immense free-dom—to change your own clock speed, morph into anything, re­ build your own mind from top to bottom—came along with the admitted liability of not being physically real. Unable to literally walk the streets, all digital presences were like ghosts. Only with digital prosthetics could they reach feebly into the concrete universe.

 So “rights” for them were tied up with deep-seated fears, ideas which had provoked dread many millennia ago. He now recalled sharply that he and Joan had debated such issues over 8,000 years ago. To what end? He could not retrieve that. Someone—no, something, he suspected—had erased the memory.

 Ancient indeed (he gleaned from myriad libraries) were people’s terrors: of digital immortals who amassed wealth; who grew like fungus; who reached into every avenue of natural, real lives. Para­ sites, nothing less.

 Voltaire saw all this in a flash as he absorbed data and history from a billion sources, integrated the streams, and passed them on to his beloved Joan.

 That was why humans had rejected digital life for so long…but was that all? No: a larger presence lurked beyond his vision. An­ other actor on this shadowy stage. Beyond his resolution, alas.

 He swerved his world-spanning vision from that shadowy essence. Time was essential now and he had much to comprehend.