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springing tiger!
And now she s down like a squashed insect.
This small, thin woman...an aberration. A monster!
Hari then knew who the woman was. Wanda had mentioned her weeks ago, the woman
who had not agreed to join the mentalics, who had allied instead with Farad
Sinter.
You re Vara Liso, he said, and started to move toward her.
Good, the woman said, her voice trembling. I want you to know who I am.
You re the one to blame.
Blame for what? Hari asked.
You work with the robots. Her expression twisted until it seemed her face
might become a knot. You re their lackey, and they think they ve won!
77.
Lodovik invoked the last of the codes he knew, and the door to the transfer
corridor from the Courts
Building still refused to open. He worked the code around again on the finger
pad beside the doorframe, and the tiny simplified face in the display
proclaimed once again that the code was incomplete. It would be so like the
palace security detail to add a few numbers, but not change the beginning
numbers.
I am working, Voltaire told him.
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There must be many security measures being triggered now--multiple intrusions,
perhaps!
The girl and the large young man behind him shifted from foot to foot.
It won t be good to stay here, Brann said. Something feels very bad.
Voltaire s features appeared in the display, simplified to cartoon detail. The
mechanical voice now said, Additional numbers are required under the revised
security procedures. The new face winked at Lodovik. Test procedure fifteen
A for verification, the voice added. You may enter code for personal use
only during this test period. Upon completion of test period, a formal entry
code or new
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password must be established and fixed.
Lodovik glanced over his shoulder at Klia as he entered seven new numbers. She
stared at the display with furrowed brow.
Who is that? she asked.
The sim, Lodovik said.
The door opened. Lodovik beckoned for them to pass through first.
Is Hari Seldon near? Klia asked.
He is very near, Voltaire said.
And he is in imminent danger.
78.
I wanted so much, Vara Liso said. Do you understand?
Hari looked at her straight on. He stood perhaps four meters from her, seven
meters from where the other woman lay against the half open door. He glanced
at the other woman, and Liso raised the neural whip.
You don t need that,
Hari said critically, as if lecturing a student. Vara Liso hesitated. You re
mentalic. You stopped her...
He raised his arm toward the collapsed woman. Toward Dors.
Vara Liso lowered her head but kept her eyes on Hari. She looked like a
pouting child, but in her eyes was the purest hatred he had ever seen.
Everything I ve ever believed in, she said, is dead. They re going to kill
me, just as they killed the men and women and children I found. My own
people.
Farad Sinter made you do that... Hari said. Didn t he?
The Emperor, Vara Liso said. She seemed ready to burst into tears, but she
kept the whip high, and her finger lingered on the button. Hari could make out
the setting: near lethality.
Yes, but Sinter was your--
He loved me,
Vara moaned, then she dropped the whip. But a wave of grief came out of her
that hit him square. The hall was filled with Vara Liso s emotions, and they
were the ugliest and bleakest
Hari had ever known. They struck at his own centers of ambition and need, and
he could feel the bones of his innermost self cracking.
The woman on the floor stirred, and Vara Liso lifted her head and half turned
toward her.
Hari made his move, using the only chance he thought he would ever get. He had
had years of
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training in self-defense on Helicon, but his body had long since refused to
answer his instructions promptly. He had almost reached Liso when she cocked
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her head back and screamed again--silently, and within her mind.
At Hari.
Simultaneously, Brann and Lodovik pushed against the door, nudging Dors, who
could not yet conjure up the will to move.
Klia stumbled over Dors leg, fell into the Hall of Dispensation, saw Lodovik
moving with inhuman speed toward her enemy, saw him raise his arm, hand open,
to take the woman s hand in his and spin her around
To kill her if need be, exercising that human freedom--
But he stopped before his fingers touched her, frozen by a glance.
Vara Liso knelt, rubbing her wrists and hands, and faced Klia Asgar.
79.
Daneel ran past the empty guard station in the security vestibule. His
relatively weak perceptions of human mental states was now a fortunate shield;
the backwash of another explosion, like the final death cough of a huge
volcano, left him reeling, skidding on hands and knees, tumbling into the Hall
of
Dispensation from the eastern entrance. He had an impression of Joan, and all
her copies in the machines around him, coming apart like a rotten flag in a
high wind, trying to stay together; but then that image was highly
inconsequential, for his own patterns, his own mind, threatened to do the same
thing.
80.
If the cry of a child could have been made of knives, it could not have cut
Klia any more deeply than the mentalic shock wave surrounding Vara Liso.
Disappointment, grief, anger, an intense sense of misplaced justice, images of
people long dead--parents, young friends, who had disappointed this small
woman with the knotted face and crab-curled fists--batted against Klia,
fragments of ruin in a flood of pain.
The walls and pillars and panes of the Hall of Dispensation felt nothing. Vara
Liso s output was tuned to a purely human channel, to the roots of mind in
matter. Because she had not focused her talents completely on him, Lodovik
felt merely a buzzing and a pressure not dissimilar to the neutrino flux he
had encountered between the stars.
He did, however, sense what Daneel saw very clearly--the disintegration of the
entity who had
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spoken in him and through him. Voltaire stood in simple nakedness before this
flux, this human tempest, and broke apart like a child s puzzle.
For a moment, Klia s sympathetic response nearly allowed her to die, to both
drown and be burned by the outpouring. She felt the echoes of her own life,
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