"As for me . . . I am finished."
  Those words resonated in his mind. They clung, like the relentless 
blanket that Hari's nurse kept straightening across his legs, though it 
was a warm day in the imperial gardens. 
  I am finished. 
  The relentless phrase was his constant companion. 
  . . . finished. 
  In front of Hari Seldon lay the rugged slopes of Shoufeen Woods, a 
wild portion of the Imperial Palace grounds where plants and small 
animals from across the galaxy mingled in rank disorder, clumping and 
spreading unhindered. Tall trees even blocked from view the ever-
present skyline of metal towers. The mighty world-city surrounding this 
little island forest. 
  Trantor. 
  Squinting through failing eyes, one could almost pretend to be 
sitting on a different planet--one that had not been flattened and 
subdued in service to the Galactic Empire of Humanity. 
  The forest teased Hari. Its total absence of straight lines seemed 
perverse, a riot of greenery that defied any effort to decipher or 
decode. The geometries seemed unpredictable, even chaotic. 
  Mentally, he reached out to the chaos, so vibrant and undisciplined. 
He spoke to it as an equal. His great enemy. 
  All my life I fought against you, using mathematics to overcome 
nature's vast complexity. With tools of psychohistory, I probed the 
matrices of human society, wresting order from that murky tangle. And 
when my victories still felt incomplete, I used politics and guile to 
combat uncertainty, driving you like an enemy before me. 
  So why now, at my time of supposed triumph, do I hear you calling out 
to me? Chaos, my old foe? 
  Hari's answer came in the same phrase that kept threading his 
thoughts. 
  Because I am finished. 
  Finished as a mathematician. 
  It was more than a year since Stettin Palver or Gaal Dornick or any 
other member of the Fifty had consulted Hari with a serious permutation 
or revision to the "Seldon Plan." Their awe and reverence for him was 
unchanged. But urgent tasks kept them busy. Besides, anyone could tell 
that his mind no longer had the suppleness to juggle a myriad 
abstractions at the same time. It took a youngster's mental agility, 
concentration, and arrogance to challenge the hyperdimensional 
algorithms of psychohistory. His successors, culled from among the best 
minds on twenty-five million worlds, had all these traits in 
superabundance. 
  But Hari could no longer afford conceit. There remained too little 
time. 

  Finished as a politician. 
  How he used to hate that word! Pretending, even to himself, that he 
wanted only to be a meek academic. Of course, that had just been a 
marvelous pose. No one could rise to become First Minister of the 
entire human universe without the talent and audacity of a master 
manipulator. Oh, he had been a genius in that field, too, wielding 
power with flair, defeating enemies, altering the lives of trillions--
while complaining the whole time that he hated the job. 
  Some might look back on that youthful record with ironic pride. But 
not Hari Seldon. 

  Finished as a conspirator. 
  He had won each battle, prevailed in every contest. A year ago, Hari 
subtly maneuvered today's imperial rulers into creating ideal 
circumstances for his secret psychohistorical design to flourish. Soon 
a hundred thousand exiles would be stranded on a stark planet, faraway 
Terminus, charged with producing a great Encyclopedia Galactica. But 
that superficial goal would peel away in half a century, revealing the 
true aim of that Foundation at the galaxy's rim--to be the embryo of a 
more vigorous empire as the old one fell. For years that had been the 
focus of his daily ambitions, and his nightly dreams. Dreams that 
reached ahead, across a thousand years of social collapse--past an age 
of suffering and violence--to a new human fruition. A better destiny 
for humankind. 
  Only now his role in that great enterprise was ended. Hari had just 
finished taping messages for the Time Vault on Terminus--a series of 
subtle bulletins that would occasionally nudge or encourage members of 
the Foundation as they plunged toward a bright morrow preordained by 
psychohistory. When the final message was safely stored, Hari felt a 
shift in the attitudes of those around him. He was still esteemed, even 
venerated. But he wasn't necessary anymore. 
  One sure sign had been the departure of his bodyguards--a trio of 
humaniform robots that Daneel Olivaw had assigned to protect Hari, 
until the transcriptions were finished. It happened right there, at the 
recording studio. One robot--artfully disguised as a burly young 
medical technician--had bowed low to speak in Hari's ear. 
  "We must go now. Daneel has urgent assignments for us. But he bade me 
to give you his promise. Daneel will visit soon. The two of you will 
meet again, before the end." 
  Perhaps that wasn't the most tactful way to put it. But Hari always 
preferred blunt openness from friends and family. 
  Unbidden, a clear image from the past swept into mind--of his wife, 
Dors Venabili, playing with Raych, their son. He sighed. Both Dors and 
Raych were long gone--along with nearly every link that ever bound him 
closely to another private soul. 
  This brought a final coda to the phrase that kept spinning through 
his mind-- 

  Finished as a person. 
  The doctors despaired over extending his life, even though eighty was 
rather young to die of decrepit age nowadays. But Hari saw no point in 
mere existence for its own sake. Especially if he could no longer 
analyze or affect the universe. 
  Is that why I drift here, to this grove? He pondered the wild, 
unpredictable forest--a mere pocket in the Imperial Park, which 
measured a hundred miles on a side--the only expanse of greenery on 
Trantor's metal-encased crust. Most visitors preferred the hectares of 
prim gardens open to the public, filled with extravagant and well-
ordered blooms. 


From FOUNDATION'S TRIUMPH by David Brin. Copyright (c)1999 by David 
Brin. Reprinted by arrangement with HarperPrism, an imprint of 
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.