He didn’t fully relax until they were sitting on a verandah of the Excursion Station, some six thousand light years away from Trantor.

Warily Dors gazed out at the view beyond the formidable walls. “We’re safe here from the animals?”

“I imagine so. Those walls are high and there are guard canines. Wirehounds, I believe.”

“Good.” She smiled in a way that he knew implied a secret was about to emerge. “I believe I have covered our tracks-to use an animal metaphor. I had records of our departure concealed.”

“I still think you are exaggerating-”

“Exaggerating an attempted assassination?” She bit her lip in ill-concealed irritation. This was a well-frayed argument between them by now, but something about her protectiveness always sat poorly with him.

“I only agreed to leave Trantor in order to study pans.”

He caught a flicker of emotion in her face and knew that she would now try to ease off. “Oh, that might be useful-or better still, fun. You need a rest.”

“At least I won’t have to deal with Lamurk.”

Cleon had instituted what he lightly termed “traditional measures” to track down the conspirators. Some had already wormholed away to the far reaches of the Galaxy. Others had committed suicide-or so it seemed.

Lamurk was staying low, pretending shock and dismay at “this assault on the very fabric of our Imperium.” But Lamurk still held enough votes in the High Council to block Cleon’s move to make Hari his First Minister, so the deadlock continued. Hari was numbed by the entire matter.

“And you’re right,” Dors continued with a brittle brightness, ignoring his moody silence, “not everything is available on Trantor-or even known about. My main consideration was that if you had stayed on Trantor you would be dead.”

He stopped looking at the striking scenery. “You think the Lamurk faction would persist…?”

“They could, which is a better guide to action than trying to guess woulds.”

“I see.” He didn’t, but he had learned to trust her judgment in matters of the world. Then, too, perhaps he did need a thoroughgoing vacation.

To be on a living, natural world-he had forgotten, in his years buried in Trantor, how vivid wild things could be. The greens and yellows leaped out, after decades amid matted steel, cycled air, and crystal glitter.

Here the sky yawned impossibly deep, unmarked by the graffiti of aircraft, wholly alive to the flapping wonder of birds. Bluffs and ridges looked like they had been shaped hastily with a putty knife. Beyond the station walls he could see a sole tree thrashed by an angry wind. Its topknot finally blew off in a pocket of wind, fluttering and fraying over somber flats like a fragmenting bird. Distant, eroded mesas had yellow streaks down their shanks, which as they met the forest turned a burnt orange tinge that suggested the rot of rust. Across the valley, where the pans ranged, lay a dusky canopy hidden behind low gray clouds and raked by winds.

A thin cold rain fell there, and Hari wondered what it was like to cower as an animal beneath those sheets of moisture, without hope of shelter or warmth. Perhaps Trantor’s utter predictability was better, but he wondered.

He pointed to the distant forest. “We’re going there?” He liked this fresh place, though the forest was foreboding. It had been a long time since he had even worked with his hands, alongside his father, back on Helicon. To live in the open

“Don’t start judging.”

“I’m anticipating.”

She grinned. “You always have a longer word for it, no matter what I say.”

“The treks look a little, well-touristy.”

“Of course. We’re tourists.”

The land here rose up into peaks as sharp as torn tin. In the thick trees beyond, mist broke on gray smooth rocks. Even here, high up the slope of an imposing ridge, the Excursion Station was hemmed in by slimy, thick-barked trees standing in deep drifts of dead, dark leaves. With rotting logs half buried in the wet layers, the air swarmed so close it was like breathing damp opium.

Dors stood, her drink finished. “Let’s go in, socialize.”

He followed dutifully and right away knew it was a mistake. Most of the indoor stim-party crowd was dressed in rugged safari-style gear. They were ruddy folk, faces flushed with excitement, or perhaps just enhancers. Hari waved away the bubbleglass-bearing waiter; he disliked the way it sharpened his wits in uncontrolled ways. Still, he smiled and tried to make small talk.

This turned out to be not merely small, but microscopic. Where are you from? Oh, Trantor-what’s it like? We’re from (fill in the planet)-have you ever heard of it? Of course he had not. Twenty-five million worlds…

Most were Primitivists, drawn by the unique experience available here. It seemed to him that every third word in their conversation was natural or vital, delivered like a mantra.

“What a relief, to be away from straight lines,” a thin man said.

“Um, how so?” Hari said, trying to seem interested.

“Well, of course straight lines don’t exist in nature. They have to be put there by humans.” He sighed. “I love to be free of straightness!”

Hari instantly thought of pine needles; strata of metamorphic rock; the inside edge of a half-moon; spider-woven silk strands; the line along the top of a breaking ocean wave; crystal patterns; white quartz lines on granite slabs; the far horizon of a vast calm lake; the legs of birds; spikes of cactus; the arrow dive of a raptor; trunks of young, fast-growing trees; wisps of high windblown clouds; ice cracks; the two sides of the V of migrating birds; icicles.

“Not so,” he said, but no more.

His habit of laconic implication was trampled in the headlong talk, of course; the enhancers were taking hold. They all chattered on, excited by the prospect of immersing themselves in the lives of the creatures roaming the valleys below. He listened, not commenting, intrigued. Some wanted to share the worldview of herd animals, others of hunters, some of birds. They spoke as though they were entering some athletic event, and that was not his view at all. Still, he stayed silent.

He finally escaped with Dors, into the small park beside the Excursion Station, designed to make guests familiar with local conditions before their immersion. Panucopia, as this world was called, apparently had little native life of large size. There were animals he had seen as a boy on Helicon, and whole kraals of domestic breeds. All had sprung from common stock, less than a hundred thousand years ago, on the legendary “Earth.”

The unique asset of Panucopia was nowhere near, of course. He stopped and stared at the kraals and thought again about the Galaxy. His mind kept attacking what he thought of as the Great Problem, diving at it from many angles. He had learned to just stand aside and let it run. The psychohistorical equations needed deeper analysis, terms which accounted for the bedrock properties of humans as a species. As…