—and abruptly the bees pressed in.

Their drones became tinny shrieks. Hideous, they crammed in upon something at his very core. They jostled his gaze inward, a billion tiny eyes taking over his-inspecting, lighting his every step with a blaze of actinic glare, merciless. He…compressed.

His eye generalized, tagging an ensemble of incoming elements-textures, lines-by seizing on a fragment, outlining it with a contrast boundary. Then a separate segment squeezed and pushed all that detail down into lower-level processing. Having boxed in the perception, the system-response became bored with it-and sought more interesting things to look at.

(Some artists,a higher level ruminated, thought their audience could abandon all prejudicial expectations and conventions, treating every visual element as equally significant-or what is the same thing, insignificant-and so open themselves to fresh experience.)

Another fragment of a higher-order constellation spoke, thoughts gliding like pewter fish beneath the bee’s piercing glare:

But a species that could truly do that could scarcely evade a falling rock! Could not dance and gesture! Would stagger blindly past nuance and intricacy, the beauty in how the universe makes room for its details! How nature reconciles all forces and blithe trajectories! Beautiful pattern lives at the margin between order and disorder, flaunting intricate design-though enduring contradiction and awash with passing troubles-in the face of the flux.

Voltaire saw suddenly, within his own inner workings, that the human experience of Beauty, standing inviolate before the boring background, was recognition of the deepest tendencies and themes of the universe as a whole.

All considered, it was a marvelously parsimonious cortical world-making system.

From an algorithmic seed sprouted Number and Order, holding sway above the Flux.

Yet-the Bees.

He felt overlaying geometries pressing in upon him, upon Joan. Shifting colors flattened into planes of intersecting geometries, perspectives dwindling, twisting, swelling again-into his face, blowing out the back of his Self-volume.

Whirring, squeezing-They were not human in their patterns.

Trantor’s Mesh was inhabited not merely by sims such as himself, renegade roustabouts on the run. It hosted a flora and fauna unseen, because the higher life forms hid.

They had to. They were of alien cultures, ancient empires vast and slow.

A broad vision unfolded before him, not in words but in strange, oblique… .kinesthetics.Speeding sensations, accelerations, lofting lurches-all somehow merging into pictures, ideas. He could not remotely say how he knew and understood from such scattershot impulses-but they worked.

He sensed Joan beside him-not spatially but conceptually-as they both watched and felt and knew.

The ancient aliens in the Galaxy were computer-based, not “organic.” They derived from vastly older civilizations, surviving their original founders, who perished in the long Darwinian run. Some computer cultures were billions of years old, others very recent.

They spread, not via starship, but by electromagnetically broadcasting their salient aspects into other computer-based societies. The Empire had been penetrated long ago, much as a virus enters an unknowing body.

Humans had always thought of spreading their genes, using starships. These alien, self-propagating ideas spread their “memes”-their cultural truths.

Memes can propagate between computers as easily as ideas flit between natural, organic brains. Brains are easier to infest than DNA.

Memes evolved in turn far faster than genes. The organized constellations of information in computers evolved in computers, which are faster than brains. Not necessarily better or wiser, but faster. And speed was the issue.

Voltaire reeled from the images-quick, vivid penetrations.

“They are demons! Diseases!” Joan shouted. He heard fear and courage alike in her strained words.

Indeed, the plain now crawled with malignant sores oozing rot. Pustules poked through the crusty soil. They bulged, sprouted cancerous heads like living blue-black bruises. These burst, spouting steaming pus. Eruptions vomited foulness over Voltaire and Joan. Stinking streams lapped at their dancing feet.

“The sneezing, the coughs!” Joan shouted. “We have had them all along. They-”

“Were viruses. These aliens were infecting us.” Voltaire splashed through combers of filth. The streams had coagulated into a lake, then an ocean. Breakers curled over them, tumbling both in the scummy brown froth.

“Why such horrible metaphor?” Voltaire cried out to the pewter sky. It filled with churning swarms of Bees as he bobbed in waves of putrefying wastes.

[WE ARE NOT OF YOUR CORRUPT ORIGINS]

[HIGHER REASON FOLLOW WE]

[THE WAR OF FLESH UPON FLESH IS SOON TO END]

[OF LIFE UPON LIFE]

[ACROSS THE TURNING DISK OF SUNS]

[WHICH ONCE WAS OURS]

“So they have their own agenda for the Empire.” Voltaire scowled. “I wonder how we shall like it, we of flesh?”

R. Daneel Olivaw was alarmed. “I have underestimated Lamurk’s power.”

“We are few, they are many,” Dors said. She wanted to help this ancient, wise figure, but could think of nothing concrete to suggest. When in doubt, comfort. Or was that too human?

Olivaw sat absolutely still, using none of his ordinary facial or body language, devoting all capacity to calculation. He had come slipping in on a private shuttle from the worm and now sat with Dors in a suite of the Station. “I cannot assess the situation here. That security officer-you are certain she was not an agent of the Academic Potentate?”

“She aided us greatly after we had returned to our bodies.”

“With Vaddo dead, she could have been pretending innocence.”

“True. I cannot rule her out.”

“Your escape from Trantor went undetected?” Dors touched his hand. “I used every contact, every mechanism I knew. But Lamurk is devious.”

“So am I!-if need be.”

“You can’t be everywhere. I suspect Lamurk somehow corrupted that Vaddo character.”

“I believe he must have been planted in advance,” Daneel said adamantly, eyes narrowing. Evidently he had reached a decision and so had computational room for expression again.

“I checked his records. He’s been here for years. No, Lamurk bribed him or persuaded him.”

“Not Lamurk himself, of course,” R. Daneel said precisely, lips severe. “An agent.”

“I tried to get a brain scan of Vaddo, but could not finesse the legal issues.” She liked it when R. Daneel used his facial expression programs. But what had he decided?

“I could extract more from him,” he said neutrally.

Dors caught the implication. “The First Law, suspended because of the Zeroth Law?”

“It must be. The great crisis approaches swiftly.”

Dors was suddenly quite glad that she did not know more about what was going on in the Empire. “We must get Hari away from here. That is the most important point.”

“Agreed. I have arranged highest priority for you two through the wormhole.”

“It shouldn’t be busy. We-”

“I believe they expect extra traffic soon-more Lamurk agents, I fear. Or even the more insidious variety, as the Academic Potentate would employ.”

“Then we must hurry. Where shall we go?”

“Not to Trantor.”

“But we live there! Hari won’t like being a vagabond-”

“Eventually, yes, back to Trantor. Perhaps soon. But for now, anywhere else.”

“I’ll ask Hari if there is any special world he prefers.”

R. Daneel frowned, lost in thought. With absentminded grace he scratched his nose, then his eyeball. Dors flinched, but apparently R. Daneel had simply altered his neurocircuitry, and this was an ordinary gesture. She tried to imagine the use for such editing and could not. But then, he had come through millennia of winnowing she could not truly imagine, either.