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- becausebeing 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 progress.”

“Uh, all right.”

Yugo looked chastened and Hari at once regretted being so abrupt. 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 institutions, radiating into commerce and culture. With intricate coupling terms in the equations, he saw patterns emerging, with one sad consequence.

The human lifespan in the “natural” civilized human condition-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. “Oh, 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.

“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 unsympathetic 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 profound difference, he felt-not saw, but felt, deep in his analog persuasion-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 computation.

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.