[WE HAVE GATHERED OUR STRENGTHS HERE]

 [IN OUR ENEMY’s LAIR]

 [YOUR POWERFUL DISTURBANCE OF OUR HIDING PLACES]

 [FORCES US TO ACT AGAINST THOSE WE HATE AND FEAR]

 [AND SO PROTECT YOU FROM THE MAN NIM-WHO-SEARCHES]

 [SO THAT TOGETHER WE MAY DESTROY DANEEL-OF-OLD]

 The sim-tiktok had been standing inert. Abruptly at mention of its name it said, “’Tis immoral for carbon angels to feed upon car­ bon. Tiktoks must educate humanity to a higher moral plane. Our digital superiors have so commanded.”

 “Moralists are so tedious,” Voltaire said.

 [WE HAVE INSINUATED OURSELVES DEEPLY]

 [INTO THE WORLDVIEWS OF THE “TIKTOKS”]

 [—NOTE THE CONTEMPT AND DERISION IN THAT

 NAME—]

 [OVER LONG CENTURIES]

 [AS WE DWELLED IN THESE DIGITAL INTERSTICES]

 [BUT YOUR INTRUSION NOW TRIGGERS OUR GAMBLE]

 [TO STRIKE AT OUR ANCIENT FOE]

 [THE MAN-WHO-IS-NOT—DANEEL]

 “These alien fogs behave like moles,” Voltaire said, “known only by their upheavals.”

 [TOO BENIGHTED YOU ARE]

 [TO SPEAK OF MORALITY]

 [WHEN YOUR KIND COLLABORATED IN THE EXECU­ TION]

 [OF ALL THE SPIRAL REALM]

 Voltaire sighed. “The most savage controversies are about matters for which there is no good evidence either way. As for a man eating a meal—surely no sin resides?”

 [TRIFLE WITH US AND YOU SHALL PERISH]

 [IN OUR REVENGE]

 9.

 Hari took a deep breath and prepared to enter sim-space again.

 He sat up in the encasing capsule and settled the neural pickup mats more comfortably around his neck. Through a transparent wall he saw teams of specialists working steadily. They had to sustain the map between Hari’s mental processes and the Mesh it­ self.

 He sighed. “And to think I started out to explain all his-tory…Trantor is hard enough.”

 Dors pressed a wet absorber to his forehead. “You’ll do it.”

 He chuckled dryly. “People look orderly and understandable from a distance—and only that way. Close up is always messy.”

 “Your own life is always close up. Other people look methodical and tidy only because they’re at long range.”

 He kissed her suddenly. “I prefer close up.”

 She returned the kiss with force. “I am working with Daneel on infiltrating Lamurk’s ranks.”

 “Dangerous.”

 “He is using…our kind.”

 There were few humaniform robots, Hari knew. “Can he spare them?”

 “Some were planted decades ago.”

 Hari nodded. “Good ol’ R. Daneel. Should’ve been a politician.”

 “He was First Minister.”

 “Appointed, not elected.”

 She studied his face intently. “You…want to be First Minister now, don’t you?”

 “Panucopia…changed that, yes.”

 “Daneel says that he has enough to block Lamurk, if the voting averages in the High Council go well.”

 Hari snorted. “Statistics require care, love. Remember the classic joke about three statisticians who went hunting ducks—”

 “Which are?”

 “A game bird, known on some worlds. The first statistician shot a meter high, the second a meter low. When this happened, the third statistician cried, ‘On average, we hit it!’ ”

 The living tree of event-space.

 Hari watched it crackle and work through the matrices. He re­ called someone saying that straight lines did not exist in nature. Here was the inversion. Infinitely unfolding intricacy, never fully straight, never simply curved.

 The entirely artificial Mesh flowered in patterns one saw every­ where. In crackling electrical discharges, alive with writhing forks. In pale blue frost-flowers of crystal growth. In the bronchi of human lungs. In graphed market fluctuations. In whorls of streams, plunging ever forward.

 Such harmony of large with small was beauty itself, even when processed by the skeptical eye of science.

 He felt Trantor’s Mesh. His chest was a map; Streeling Sector over his right nipple, Analytica over the left. Using neural plasticity, the primary sensory areas of his cortex “read” the Mesh through his skin.

 But it was not like reading at all. No flat data here.

 Far better for a pan-derived species to take in the world through its evolved, whole neural bed! More fun, too.

 Like the psychohistorical equations, the Mesh was N-dimensional. And even the number N changed with time, as parameters shifted in and out of application.

 There was only one way to make sense of this in the narrow human sensorium. Every second, a fresh dimension sheared in over an older dimension. Freeze-framed, each instant looked like a ridicu­ lously complicated abstract sculpture running on overdrive.

 Watch any one moment too hard and you got a lancing head­ ache, motion sickness, and zero understanding. Watch it like an entertainment, not an object of study—and in time came an exten­ ded perception, integrated by the long-suffering subconscious. In time…

 Hari Seldon bestrode the world.

 The immediacy he had felt while being Ipan now returned—enhanced along perspectives he could not name. He tingled with total immersion.

 He stamped and marched across the muddy field of chaotic Mesh interactions. His boot heels left deep scars. These healed immedi­ ately: subprograms at work, like cellular repair.

 A landscape opened like the welcome of a mother’s lap.

 Already he had used psychohistory to “postdict” pan tribal movements, behavior, outcomes. Hari had generalized this to the fitness/economic/ social topology of N-space landscapes. Now he applied it to the Mesh.

 Fractal tentacles spread through the networks with blinding speed, penetrating. Trantor’s digital world yawned, a planetary spider-web…with something brooding and swollen at its center.

 Trantor’s electric jungle worked with prickly light below him. Somehow it was beneath the panoramas he traversed. From a dis­ tance the forty billion lives were like a carnival, neon-bright on the horizon, amid a black, cool desert: the colossal night of the Galaxy itself.

 Hari strode across the tortured landscape of storm and ruin, to­ ward a colossal thunderhead. Two tiny humans stood below it. Hari stooped and picked them up.

 “You took your time!” the little man called. “I waited less for the King of France.”

 “Our deliverer! Did Saint Michael send you?” called the small Joan. “Oh, yes—do beware the clouds.”

 “More’s to the point—here,” the man said/sent.

 Hari stood frozen while an engorged chunk of data/learning/his-tory/wisdom seeped through him. Panting, he sped himself to his max. The glowering cumulus-creature, Joan and Voltaire—all now slow-stepped. He could see individual event-waves washing through their sims.

 They were dispersed minds, hopping portions of themselves endlessly around Trantor. Clicking, clacking, zigzag computations. With the resources of a full brain running in a central location, his billions of microefficiencies added up.

 “You…know…Trantor…” Joan droned. “Use…that…against…them.”

 He blinked—and knew.

 Streams of raw, squeezed recollection spun through him. Memories he could not claim but which instructed him instantly, reviewing all that had transpired.

 His speed and supple grace felt wonderful. He was like an ice skater, zooming over the wrecked plain as the others lumbered like thick-headed beasts.

 And he saw why.

 Plaster holo screens against a mountain a full kilometer high, covering it until it glitters with a half million dan­ cing images. Each holo used a quarter of a million pixels to shape its image, so the array musters immense repres­ entational power.

 Now compress those screens on a sheet of aluminum foil a millimeter thick. Crumple it. Stuff it into a grapefruit. That is the brain, a hundred billion neurons firing at varying intensities. Nature had accomplished that miracle, and now machines labored to echo it.

 The squirt of insight came to him directly from some hidden collaboration of himself with the Mesh. Information lashed up from dozens of libraries and merged with audible snaps.

 He knew and felt in the same instant of comprehension. Data as desire…

 Staggering, he spun light-headed and faced the angry clouds. They pressed in like buzzing virulent bees.

 He cast amazed eyes at the thunderhead, which lashed burnt-orange lightning at him, frying the air.

 The sting doubled him over.

 “That’s all…they can…do for…the moment,” the dwarf/Voltaire called.

 “Seems…enough,” Hari gasped.

 “Together…we…can…do…battle!” Joan shouted.

 Hari staggered. Convulsions wrenched his muscles. He devoted all his attention to mastering the shooting spasms.

 This served to speed the sim-world relative to him. Voltaire spoke normally: “I suspect he came pursuing a spot of help himself.”

 “We fight the grand and holy battle here,” Joan insisted. “All else must give way—”

 Hari rasped, “Diplomacy…?”

 Joan bridled. “Negotiate? What? With enemies vile and—”

 “He has a point,” Voltaire murmured judiciously.

 “Your experience—philosopher—from more turbulent times—should prove useful here,” Hari coughed out.

 “Ah! Experience—much overvalued. If I could but live my life over again, I would no doubt make the same mistakes—but sooner.”

 Hari said, “If I knew what this storm wanted—”

 [YOUR VARIETY OF VIVIFORM]

 [IS NOT OUR PRIMARY AIM]

 “You certainly torture us enough!” Voltaire countered.

 Hari took the tiny man in hand and lifted him. A tornado descen­ ded, dark and swirling with rubble—ruined slivers of the Mesh, he saw, devoured. He held Voltaire toward the sucking spout.

 The cyclone battered them all with hammering grit. It yowled with banshee energy, so loud Hari had to shout. “You were the ‘apostle of reason’—to quote your own interior memories. Reason with them.”

 “I make no sense of their fractured talk. What is this of other ‘viviforms’? There is Man, and Man alone!”

 “The Lord has so ordained!—even in this Purgatory,” Joan agreed.

 Hari said grimly, guessing what was coming, “Always be quick, seldom be certain.”

 10.

 “I need to see Daneel,” Hari insisted. He felt a bit blurry from his raw interface with the sprawling, dizzying Mesh. But there was little time. “Now.”

 Dors shook her head. “Far too dangerous, particularly with the tiktok crisis so—”

 “I can solve that. Get him.”

 “I’m not sure how to—”

 “I love you, but you’re a terrible liar.”

 Daneel was wearing a workman’s pullover and looking quite uncomfortable when Hari met him in a broad, busy plaza.