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Eternals, he suggested, with reference to conspiracies of immortal beings.
A few seconds later, the server projected a text manuscript onto the top of
the table and the riser, giving the remarkable impression of a real and open
book.
Myths of the Eternals, the server said. By a committee of three hundred
authors, in ninety-two volumes of text with twenty-nine hours of other
documentary media, compiled G.E.
8045-8068. This is the authoritative work on a subject little studied
nowadays, and this is the only known copy on Trantor, or indeed on the prime
thousand worlds of the Empire.
Lodovik watched a chair rise from the floor, but as he did not need the chair,
he told it to retract.
He stood before the book and began to absorb the material at high speed.
There was a lot of information that seemed completely useless, probably
untrue, legends and fabulous stories compiled over thousands of years. He
noted with some interest that in the past few millennia. such legends and even
this kind of storytelling seemed to have diminished considerably, and not just
on the topics of the Eternals: humans on Trantor and most of the prime worlds
had simply lost interest in fabulous tales of any kind, or even in the more
spectacular episodes of history.
Humanity s childhood had long since passed. Now, the concerns of the Imperial
cultures were strictly practical.
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Humor had declined as well; this, he found suggested in an afterword to this
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set, appended by a scholar less than fifteen hundred years before. Then,
suddenly, the recorded image of Huy Markin herself appeared in the small
chamber, frozen, with a caption glowing faintly at her feet:
Excerpt from spoken lecture. There was no date given.
Retrieve and play, Lodovik instructed.
The image moved and spoke. The decline of humor and comedy in the myths and
entertainments of the modern Imperial culture seems inevitable to the sober
gentry and Greys of our time.
But certain meritocrats feel a peculiar lack in the present panoply of the
fantastic arts. All has been subsumed by the immediate and the practical;
modern humans of the ruling and imaginative classes dream less and laugh less
than ever before in history. This does not hold for the citizens, but their
humor, for thousands of years, has remained a raucous collection of generic
jokes and tales at the expense of other classes, showing little insight and
even less effectiveness as satire. All has been subsumed by the quest for
stability and comfort...
Lodovik pushed ahead through this rather long lecture until he found the link
with the text he was searching, and his subject. Some, Huy Markin said,
have laid blame for these intellectual failures on the perfidious influence
of brain fever, contracted by nearly all children at an early age, but somehow
never more than lightly affecting the sturdy foundations of the citizens. The
gentry and meritocrats, however, according to some statisticians, have
apparently suffered substantial losses in intellectual capacity. Legends about
the misty origins of brain fever abound. The most prominent myth is of an
ancient war between the worlds
Earth and
Solaria.
Robots, it is said, carried this disease from world to world. Some of these
robots...
Lodovik marveled that this analysis had been judged the product of an
eccentric by the
University s finest scholars. Not even Hari Seldon had seen fit to look into
the collection--perhaps because of some interdiction by Daneel.
He sped ahead. ...The most common explanation of brain fever in all these
myths is that of human competition for the colonization of the Galaxy. Brain
fever may have been a weapon in such a competition. But a persistent
alternative explanation points to the Eternals, who fought with the servants
of Solaria to prevent a hideous crime, the details of which have since been
totally expunged from all known records. The Eternals, it has been said,
created brain fever to control the destructive urges of a human race out of
control. The Eternals have been described as immortal humans, but have also
been described as long-lived robots of extraordinary intelligence...
There it was again, Lodovik thought. The attempt by robots to control the
destructive tendencies of humans--but what was this great crime?
Was it the same crime hinted at by Daneel, supposedly carried out by those
robots who, very early on, disagreed with Daneel s plans?
Daneel was quite obviously an Eternal, perhaps the
Eternal, the oldest thinking machine in the
Galaxy...
The oldest and most dedicated puppet master.
Lodovik looked up from the projection he was reading and tried to find the
source of this interjection. The words disturbed him; they did not seem to
originate in any of the branches of his
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mentality.
He remembered the faint touches he had felt on the dying ship, the impressions
of a ghostly intelligence interested in his plight. Until now, he had
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dismissed this as an effect of neutrino damage in his mind; but Yan Kansarv
had found no detectable damage.
The memory could be replayed quite easily, and analyzed. The label
Volarr or
Voldarr was attached to these faint traces, these subliminal touches.
But nothing useful could be drawn from these memories.
Lodovik resumed his main search, and scanned the main volumes in less than
three hours. He could have searched and absorbed the material much more
rapidly, but the library displays had been set for human researchers, not
robots.
Robots of human or superior intelligence, every volume and bit of
documentation in Markin s library suggested, had long since ceased to
function, if they had ever existed at all.
Lodovik shut down the projectors and left the library. As he passed through
the impressive doorway, the image of Huy Markin appeared.
You re the first visitor in two decades, the image told him. Please come
again!
Lodovik stared at the image as it faded. He stepped out from under the
overhang that shielded the doorway and strolled along a mid-class tier of the
Agora of Vendors, among the Greys. So many pieces to fit together--in a puzzle
thousands of years old, with so many pieces missing or deliberately obscured.
What echoed through Lodovik s positronic brain, cascading into conclusions
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