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general direction. “I’m boring you,” he said. “I find it painful to be where I’m not wanted. I’ll go.” He turned, seemed to feel for somebody to guide him, and took a step away from the table.
    “No,” Klia said, her voice catching. “Stay for a minute. I want to ask you something.”
    He stopped with a small tremor. Suddenly, he seemed very vulnerable. He thinks I can hurt him. And maybe I can! She wanted to understand his strange flavor—clean and strangely compelling, as if within this man, behind flimsy masks of deception, lurked a basic honesty and decency she had never encountered before.
    “I’m not bored,” she said. “Not yet.”
    The man in dusty green sat down again and put his hand on the table. He took a deep breath. He doesn’t need to breathe ,Klia thought, but put away the absurdity quickly.
    “A man and a woman have been searching for your kind for a number of years, and many have joined their group. I hope they live well where the man and woman will send them; I, for one, am unwilling to take the risk.”
    “Who are they?”
    “They say one is Wanda Seldon Palver, the granddaughter of Hari Seldon.”
    Klia did not know the name. She shrugged.
    “You can go to them, if you want—” the man continued, but she made a sour face and interrupted.
    “They sound connected ,” she said, using the word in its derogatory meaning of close to the Palace and the Commissioners and other government officials.
    “Oh, yes, Seldon was once a First Minister, and they say his granddaughter has gotten him out of a number of tough scrapes, legal and otherwise.”
    “He’s an outlaw?”
    “No, a visionary.”
    Klia pursed her lips and frowned again. In Dahl, visionaries were a dime a dozen—street-corner crazies, out of work, out of the grind, most driven insane by their work in the heatsinks.
    The man in dusty green observed her reaction closely. “Not for you? Now, however, another man is searching for your type—”
    “What type?” Klia asked nervously. She needed more time to think, to understand. “I’m still confused.” She felt out his defenses lightly, hoping not to intrude in a way he would notice.
    The man flinched as if poked. “I am a friend, not an enemy to be lightly manipulated. I know there’s risk even talking to you. I know what you could do to me if you put your mind to it. Somebody else in a position of power thinks your kind is monstrous. But he doesn’t understand at all. He seems to think you are all robots.”
    Klia laughed. “Like tiktoks?” she asked. The worker machines had fallen out of favor long before her birth, banned because of frequent and unexplained mechanical revolts, and the public distaste for them still lingered.
    “No. Like robots out of history and legend. Eternals.” He pointed west, in the general direction of the Imperial Sector, the Palace. “It’s madness, but it’s Imperial madness, not easy to overcome. Best if you leave, and I know the best place to go…on Trantor. Not far from here. I can help you make arrangements.”
    “No thank you,” she said. There was too much uncertainty here for Klia to put herself in the hands of this stranger, however compelling parts of his story might seem. His words and what she sensed did not add up.
    “Then take this.” The man thrust a small display card into her hand and stood once more. “You will call. This is not in question. It is only a matter of time.”
    He stared at her directly, his eyes bright, fully capable.
    “We all have our secrets,” he said, and turned to leave.

5.
    Lodovik stood alone on the bridge of the Spear of Glory , peering through the broad forward-facing port at what might have been a scene of exceptional beauty, had he been human. Beauty was not an easy concept for a robot to grasp, however; he could see what lay outside the ship, and understand that a human would think it interesting, but for him, the closest analog to beauty was successful service, perfect