But even amid this spectacle he could not forget the tone in Dors’ voice. She knew something he did not. He wondered…

Nature, some philosophers held, was itself only before humanity touched it. We did not then belong in the very idea of Nature, and so we could experience it only as it was disappearing. Our presence alone was enough to make Nature into something else, a compromised impersonation.

These ideas had unexpected implications. One world named Arcadia had been deliberately left with a mere caretaker population of humans, partly because it was difficult to reach. The nearest wormhole mouth was half a light-year away. An early emperor-so obscure his or her very name was lost-had decreed that the forests and plains of the benign planet be left “original.” But ten thousand years later, a recent report announced, some forests were not regenerating, and plains were giving way to scrubby brush.

Study showed that the caretakers had taken too much care. They had put out wild fires, suppressed species transfer. They had even held the weather nearly constant through adjustments in how much sunlight the ice poles reflected back into space.

They had tried to hold onto a static Arcadia, so the forest primeval was revealed as, in part, a human product. They had not understood cycles. He wondered how such an insight might fold into psychohistory…

Forget theory for the moment, he reminded himself. It was a fact that the Galaxy had seemed empty of high alien life-forms in the early, pre-Empire times. With so many fertile planets, did he truly believe that only humanity had emerged into intelligence?

Somehow, surveying the incomprehensible wealth of this lush, immense disk of stars…somehow, Hari could not believe it.

But what was the alternative?

The Empire’s twenty-five million worlds supported an average of only four billion people per planet. Trantor had forty billion. A mere thousand light years from Galactic Center, it had seventeen wormhole mouths orbiting within its solar system-the highest density in the Galaxy. The Trantorian system had originally held only two, but a gargantuan technology of brute interstellar flight had tugged the rest there to make the nexus.

Each of the seventeen spawned occasional wild worms. One of these was Dors’ target.

But to reach it, they had to venture where few did.

“The Galactic Center is dangerous,” Dors said as they coasted toward the decisive wormhole mouth. They curved above a barren mining planet. “But necessary.”

“Trantor worries me more-” The jump cut him off

—and the spectacle silenced him.

The filaments were so large the eye could not take them in. They stretched fore and aft, shot through with immense luminous corridors and dusky lanes. These arches yawned over tens of light-years. Immense curves descended toward the white-hot True Center. There matter frothed and fumed and burst into dazzling fountains.

“The black hole,” he said simply.

The small black hole they had seen only an hour before had trapped a few stellar masses. At True Center, a million suns had died to feed gravity’s gullet.

The orderly arrays of radiance were thin, only a light-year across. Yet they sustained themselves along hundreds of light-years as they churned with change. Hari switched the polarized walls to see in different frequency ranges. Though hot and roiling in the visible, human spectrum, the radio revealed hidden intricacy. Threads laced among convoluted spindles. He had a powerful impression of layers, of labyrinthine order descending beyond his view, beyond simple understanding.

“Particle flux is high,” Dors said tensely. “And rising.”

“Where’s our junction?”

“I’m having trouble vector-fixing-ah! There.”

Hard acceleration rammed him back into his flowcouch. Dors took them diving down into a mottled pyramid-shaped wormhole.

This was an even rarer geometry. Hari had time to marvel at how accidents of the universal birth pang had shaped these serene geometries, like exhibits in some god’s Euclidean museum of the mind.

And then they plunged through, erasing the stunning views.

They popped out above the gray-brown mottled face of Trantor. A glinting disk of satellites, factories and habitats fanned out in the equatorial plane.

The wild worm they had used fizzed and glowed behind them. Dors took them swiftly toward the ramshackle, temporary wormyard. He said nothing, but felt her tense calculations. They nudged into a socket, seals sighed, his ears popped painfully.

Then they were out, arms and legs wooden from the cramped pencil ship. Hari coasted in zero-g toward the flex-lock. Dors glided ahead of him. She motioned him for silence as pressures pulsed in the lock. She peeled her skinsuit down, exposing her breasts.

A finger’s touch opened a seam below her left breast. She plucked a cylinder out. A weapon? She resealed and had her skinsuit back in place before the staging diaphragm began to open.

Beyond the opening iris Hari saw Imperial uniforms.

He crouched against the lock wall, ready to launch himself backward to avoid capture-but the situation looked hopeless.

The Imperials looked grim, determined. They clasped pistols. Dors coasted between Hari and the squad. She tossed the cylinder at them-

—a pressure wave knocked him back against the wall. His ears clogged. The squad was an expanding cloud of…debris.

“What-?”

“Shaped implosion,” Dors called. “Move!”

The injured men had been slammed into each other. How anything could shape a pressure wave so compactly he could not imagine. In any case he had no time. They shot past the tangled cloud of men. Weapons drifted uselessly.

A figure erupted from the far diaphragm. A man in a brown work sheath, middle-sized, unarmed. Hari shouted a warning. Dors showed no reaction.

The man flicked his wrist and a snout appeared from his sleeve. Dors still coasted toward him.

Hari snagged a handhold and veered to his right.

“Stay still!” the man yelled.

Hari froze, dangling by one hand. The man fired-and a silvery bolt fried past Hari.

He turned and saw that one of the Imperials had recovered his weapon. The silver line scratched fire across the Imperial’s arm. He screamed. His weapon tumbled away.

“Let’s go. I have the rest of the way secured,” the man in the work sheath called.

Dors followed him without a word. Hari pushed off and caught up to them as the diaphragm irised for them.

“You return to Trantor at the crucial moment,” the man said.

“You-who-”

The man smiled. “I have changed myself. You do not recognize your old friend, R. Daneel?”

R. Daneel gazed at Dors without expression, letting his body go slack.

Dors said, “We must defend him against Lamurk. You could reappear, come out in favor of him. As former First Minister, your public endorsement and support-”

“I cannot reappear as Eto Demerzel, ex-important person. That would compromise my other tasks.”

“But Hari has to have-”

“As well, you mistake my power as Demerzel. I am now history. Lamurk will care nothing about me, for I have no legions to command.”

Dors fumed silently. “But you must-”

“I shall move more of us into Lamurk’s inner circle.”

“It’s too late to infiltrate.”

Daneel activated his expressive programs and smiled. “I planted several of our kind decades ago. They shall all be in position soon.”

“You’re using…us?”

“I must. Though your implication is correct: we are few.”

“I need help protecting him, too.”

“Quite right.” He produced a thick disk, this time from a compartment beneath his armpit. “This will identify the Lamurk agents for you.”