Foundation and Chaos [antikvár]

ii - !,i ' I' 'The centuries recede, and the legend of Hari Seldonj )' ^ igrows: the brilliant man, wise man, sad man who| charted the course of the human future in the oldj j i ,;Empire. But revisionist views prosper, and cannot!j | :always be easily dismissed. To understand Seldon, wej'are sometimes tempted to refer to apocrypha, myths,j ' ^even fairy tales from those distant times. We are frus-I ,trated by the contradictions of incomplete documents; 'and what amount to holographies.This we know without reference to the revisionists:i ithat Seldon was brilliant, Seldon was key. But Seldon,,was neither saint nor divinely inspired prophet, and of course, he did not act alone. The most pervasive myths involve -Encyclopedia Galactica,117th Edition, 1054 F.E.1.Hari Seldon stood in slippered feet and a thick green scholar's robe on the enclosed parapet of an upperside maintenance tower, looking from an altitude of two hundred meters over the dark aluminum and steel surface of Trantor. The sky was quite clear over this Sector tonight, only a few vague clouds scudding before nacreous billows and sheets of stars like ghostly fire.Beneath this spectacle, and beyond the ranks of gently curving domes, obscured and softened by night, lay a naked ocean, hs floating aluminum covers pulled aside across hundreds of thousands of hectares. The revealed sea glowed faintly, as if in response to the sky. He could not remember the name of this sea: Peace, or Dream, or Sleep. All the hidden oceans of Trantor had such ancient names, nursery names to, I .11,'