Foundation and Earth

never even occurred to me to put on weapons at Comporellon. —But I can’t allow myself to trip into the trap of feeling it was magic, either. It couldn’t have been. I suspect that once we began talking about unbalanced ecologies earlier, I somehow had an unconscious glimpse of animals grown dangerous in the absence of human beings. That is clear enough in hindsight, but I might have had a whiff of it in foresight. Nothing more than that.”

Bliss said, “Don’t dismiss it that casually. I participated in the same conversation concerning unbalanced ecologies and I didn’t have that same foresight. It is that special trick of foresight in you that Gaia values. I can see, too, that it must be irritating to you to have a hidden foresight the nature of which you cannot detect; to act with decision, but without clear reason.”

“The usual expression on Terminus is ‘to act on a hunch.’?”

“On Gaia we say, ‘to know without thought.’ You don’t like knowing without thought, do you?”

“It bothers me, yes. I don’t like being driven by hunches. I assume the hunch has reason behind it, but not knowing the reason makes me feel I’m not in control of my own mind—a kind of mild madness.”

“And when you decided in favor of Gaia and Galaxia, you were acting on a hunch, and now you seek the reason.”

“I have said so at least a dozen times.”

“And I have refused to accept your statement as literal truth. For that I am sorry. I will oppose you in this no longer. I hope, though, that I may continue to point out items in Gaia’s favor.”

“Always,” said Trevize, “if you, in turn, recognize that I may not accept them.”

“Does it occur to you, then, that this Unknown World is reverting to a kind of savagery, and perhaps to eventual desolation and uninhabitability, because of the removal of a single species that is capable of acting as a guiding intelligence? If the world were Gaia, or better yet, a part of Galaxia, this could not happen. The guiding intelligence would still exist in the form of the Galaxy as a whole, and ecology, whenever unbalanced, and for whatever reason, would move toward balance again.”

“Does that mean that dogs would no longer eat?”

“Of course they would eat, just as human beings do. They would eat, however, with purpose, in order to balance the ecology under deliberate direction, and not as a result of random circumstance.”

Trevize said, “The loss of individual freedom might not matter to dogs, but it must matter to human beings. —And what if all human beings were removed from existence, everywhere, and not merely on one world or on several? What if Galaxia were left without human beings at all? Would there still be a guiding intelligence? Would all other life forms and inanimate matter be able to put together a common intelligence adequate for the purpose?”

Bliss hesitated. “Such a situation,” she said, “has never been experienced. Nor does there seem any likelihood that it will ever be experienced in the future.”

Trevize said, “But doesn’t it seem obvious to you, that the human mind is qualitatively different from everything else, and that if it were absent, the sum total of all other consciousness could not replace it. Would it not be true, then, that human beings are a special case and must be treated as such? They should not be fused even with one another, let alone with nonhuman objects.”

“Yet you decided in favor of Galaxia.”

“For an overriding reason I cannot make out.”

“Perhaps that overriding reason was a glimpse of the effect of unbalanced ecologies? Might it not have been your reasoning that every world in the Galaxy is on a knife-edge, with instability on either side, and that only Galaxia could prevent such disasters as are taking place on this world—to say nothing of the continuing interhuman disasters of war and administrative failure.”

“No. Unbalanced ecologies were not in my mind at the time of my decision.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I may not know what it is I’m foreseeing, but if something is suggested afterward, I would recognize it if that were indeed what I foresaw. —As it seems to me I may have foreseen dangerous animals on this world.”

“Well,” said Bliss soberly, “we might have been dead as a result of those dangerous animals if it had not been for a combination of our powers, your foresight and my mentalism. Come, then, let us be friends.”

Trevize nodded. “If you wish.”

There was a chill in his voice that caused Bliss’s eyebrows to rise, but at this point Pelorat burst in, nodding his head as though prepared to shake it off its foundations.

“I think,” he said, “we have it.”

39.

Trevize did not, in general, believe in easy victories, and yet it was only human to fall into belief against one’s better judgment. He felt the muscles in his chest and throat tighten, but managed to say, “The location of Earth? Have you discovered that, Janov?”

Pelorat stared at Trevize for a moment, and deflated. “Well, no,” he said, visibly abashed. “Not quite that. —Actually, Golan, not that at all. I had forgotten about that. It was something else that I discovered in the ruins. I suppose it’s not really important.”

Trevize managed a long breath and said, “Never mind, Janov. Every finding is important. What was it you came in to say?”

“Well,” said Pelorat, “it’s just that almost nothing survived, you understand. Twenty thousand years of storm and wind don’t leave much. What’s more, plant life is gradually destructive and animal life— But never mind all that. The point is that ‘almost nothing’ is not the same as ‘nothing.’

“The ruins must have included a public building, for there was some fallen stone, or concrete, with incised lettering upon it. There was hardly anything visible, you understand, old chap, but I took photographs with one of those cameras we have on board ship, the kind with built-in computer enhancement—I never got round to asking permission to take one, Golan, but it was important, and I—”

Trevize waved his hand in impatient dismissal. “Go on!”

“I could make out some of the lettering, which was very archaic. Even with computer enhancement and with my own fair skill at reading Archaic, it was impossible to make out much except for one short phrase. The letters there were larger and a bit clearer than the rest. They may have been incised more deeply because they identified the world itself. The phrase reads, ‘Planet Aurora,’ so I imagine this world we rest upon is named Aurora, or was named Aurora.”

“It had to be named something,” said Trevize.

“Yes, but names are very rarely chosen at random. I made a careful search of my library just now and there are two old legends, from two widely spaced worlds, as it happens, so that one can reasonably suppose them to be of independent origin, if one remembers that. —But never mind that. In both legends, Aurora is used as a name for the dawn. We can suppose that Aurora may have actually meant dawn in some pre- Galactic language.

“As it happens, some word for dawn or daybreak is often used as a name for space stations or other structures that are the first built of their kind. If this world is called Dawn in whatever language, it may be the first of its kind, too.”

Trevize said, “Are you getting ready to suggest that this planet is Earth and that Aurora is an alternate name for it because it represents the dawn of life and of man?”

Pelorat said, “I couldn’t go that far, Golan.”

Trevize said, with a trace of bitterness, “There is, after all, no radioactive surface, no giant satellite, no gas giant with huge rings.”

“Exactly. But Deniador, back on Comporellon, seemed to think this was one of the worlds that was once inhabited by the first wave of Settlers—the Spacers. If it were, then its name, Aurora, might indicate it to have been the first of those Spacer worlds. We might, at this very moment, be resting on the oldest human world in the Galaxy except for Earth itself. Isn’t that exciting?”

“Interesting, at any rate, Janov, but isn’t that a great deal to infer merely from the name, Aurora?”