Foundation and Empire - Isaac Asimov [82]
“My lady,” he addressed himself exclusively to Bayta, “if this captain had, like us, escaped with a ship; if he, like us, were on a trip for a purpose of his own devising; if he blundered upon us—he would suspect us of following and waylaying him, as we suspect him of the like. What wonder he played this comedy to enter our ship?”
“Why would he want us in his ship, then?” demanded Toran. “That doesn’t fit.”
“Why, yes, it does,” clamored the clown, with a flowing inspiration. “He sent an underling who knew us not, but who described us into his microphone. The listening captain would be struck at my own poor likeness—for, of a truth, there are not many in this great Galaxy who bear a resemblance to my scantiness. I was the proof of the identity of the rest of you.”
“And so he leaves us?”
“What do we know of his mission, and the secrecy thereof? He has spied us out for not an enemy and having it done so, must he needs think it wise to risk his plan by widening the knowledge thereof?”
Bayta said slowly, “Don’t be stubborn, Torie. It does explain things.”
“It could be,” agreed Mis.
Toran seemed helpless in the face of united resistance. Something in the clown’s fluent explanations bothered him. Something was wrong. Yet he was bewildered and, in spite of himself, his anger ebbed.
“For a while,” he whispered, “I thought we might have had one of the Mule’s ships.”
And his eyes were dark with the pain of Haven’s loss.
The others understood.
NEOTRANTOR . . . . The small planet of Delicass, renamed after the Great Sack, was for nearly a century the seat of the last dynasty of the First Empire. It was a shadow world and a shadow Empire and its existence is only of legalistic importance. Under the first of the Neotrantorian dynasty . . .
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
22
DEATH ON NEOTRANTOR
Neotrantor was the name! New Trantor! And when you have said the name you have exhausted at a stroke all the resemblances of the new Trantor to the great original. Two parsecs away, the sun of Old Trantor still shone and the Galaxy’s Imperial Capital of the previous century still cut through space in the silent and eternal repetition of its orbit.
Men even inhabited Old Trantor. Not many—a hundred million, perhaps, where fifty years before, forty billions had swarmed. The huge, metal world was in jagged splinters. The towering thrusts of the multitowers from the single world-girdling base were torn and empty—still bearing the original blast-holes and firegut—shards of the Great Sack of forty years earlier.
It was strange that a world which had been the center of a Galaxy for two thousand years—that had ruled limitless space and been home to legislators and rulers whose whims spanned the parsecs—could die in a month. It was strange that a world which had been untouched through the vast conquering sweeps and retreats of a millennia, and equally untouched by the civil wars and palace revolutions of other millennia—should lie dead at last. It was strange that the Glory of the Galaxy should be a rotting corpse.
And pathetic!
For centuries would yet pass before the mighty works of fifty generations of humans would decay past use. Only the declining powers of men, themselves, rendered them useless now.
The millions left after the billions had died tore up the gleaming metal base of the planet and exposed soil that had not felt the touch of sun in a thousand years.
Surrounded by the mechanical perfections of human efforts, encircled by the industrial marvels of mankind freed of the tyranny of environment—they returned to the land. In the huge traffic clearings, wheat and corn grew. In the shadow of the towers, sheep grazed.
But Neotrantor existed—an obscure village of a planet drowned in the shadow of mighty Trantor, until a heart-throttled royal family, racing before the fire and flame of the Great Sack sped to it as its last refuge—and held out