The Foundation Trilogy: Part Six of Eight

[james_davis_nicoll]

Foundation: Flight From The Mule

This follows immediately on the events of the previous episode. Terminus has fallen and it can only be a matter of time before the trader world of Haven follows it. All appears lost and there is a general air of malaise on Haven.
spoilers
The one ray of hope comes from researcher Eblin Mis, who believes that the mysterious Second Foundation, set up at the same time as the Foundation, might prove the Foundation's salvation. Unfortunately the Second Foundation's location is not known, aside from it being at the other end of the galaxy, and so an expedition consisting of Mis, less-newly-weds-than-before Toran and Bayta Darell and Magnifico, who is on the lam from the Mule since leaving his employ, head to the old Imperial capital of Trantor to see if its library has some clue.

Trantor was sacked some time ago and the capital is now on Neotrantor, formerly the world Delicass. It is a sign of how far the Empire has fallen that the quartet have no trouble obtaining an audience with the elderly and rather senile Dagobert IX. Emperor Dagobert is an amiable old duffer who has no trouble authorizing a salvage operation on Trantor but his son, also Dagobert, is a would-be rapist and Magnifico kills the fellow with weaponized music for the insult to Bayta.

Interestingly, while Magnifico is protective of Bayta, he doesn't seem to have much trouble using an area-effect lethal weapon on the man standing near her husband. I also notice that while Magnifico warns Bayta, he does not warn anyone else.

Trantor is now an agrarian world but while its inhabitants are trading away its metals, they have preserved the great library. Mis proceeds to work himself to death looking for the Second Foundation; aided by a curiously talented Magnifico, Mis demonstrates insight and genius he never had before. Indeed, Mis manages to work out where the Second Foundation is from the deliberately unhelpful records on Trantor. Which is the point at which Bayta guns poor Mis down.

Bayta, you see, has put together all the clues: the way calamity followed Bayta, Toran and Magnifico across the galaxy, Mis's odd fervor, his sudden genius, the fact that the Mule is known to be able to alter people emotions and the fact that large parts of Magnifico's back-story makes no sense and she has concluded that Magnifico is none other than the Mule. Since Mis was about to expose the Second Foundation to the Mule and since the Second Foundation might be as unprepared for the Mule as the Foundation was, poor Mis had to die.

Exposed, Magnifico admits he is is the Mule, rues that his affection for Bayta kept him from altering her mind, gives a bit of his tragic back story (and I am sure the Music of Death he felt the need to compose as a young man figures into it) and then leaves to administer his new Empire. The Second Foundation will have to wait.

He leaves Toran and Bayta alive and unharmed. He could force her to love him but what he valued in her was that her emotions were sincere. He has no expectation of establishing a lasting dynasty; Mules are sterile...

This had comparatively few war crimes compared to previous episodes but made it up with the first attempted rape scene in the series. I cannot help but notice that in general Bayta is the focus of a lot of men's attentions and aside from Toran, who is just a bit of drip, most of the men seem to be poorly behaved at best or actual monsters. At least she gets to be the hero in the end.

Which reminds me, compare and contrast the speeches Crown Prince Rapey McBlasterfodder and the Mule make to Bayta.

I did like that there is an explanation in this story for the sometimes odd decisions people make: there's a telepath screwing with people's minds. That explains so much! And given the hints that the Second Foundation may also be exploring psychic realms, some of the odder decisions in previous stories may have involved some tuxedoed man just off-stage, making hypnotic gestures.



Well, perhaps not tuxedoed.

There's an interesting bit about things that could disrupt the Plan. One problematic item is advancements in technology of the sort that Seldon could not foresee. Is the Second Foundation shaping what fields get researched by the Foundation?

Oh, another thing that occurred to me: FTL in this setting is lickity split fast: do we know no extragalactic expeditions were ever made? The distances to the LMC and SMC are not much larger than the width of the galaxy and ships track that all the time.

I wonder how it is ships track each other across parsecs?

Comments

[oh6]

I'm pretty sure you mean "on the lam" where you write "on the lamb".

I suppose these are spoilers so it doesn't really matter, but you refer to Magnifico as the Mule well before his unmasking.

[onyxlynx]

I remembered the great reveal, oddly enough, and Ebling Mis' use of "unprintable" as a curse word (I was fifteen when I first read the Foundation books and substituted "damn," which was the dirtiest word I knew at the time), but I don't remember an attempted rape scene. I suppose I'll have to reread (shuddering because Asimov's prose style, which I ignored at fifteen, now reads to me as clonk clonk clonk) the whole thing.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Handwave - FTL navigation depends on clumpy mass distribution in a way that makes leaving the galaxy difficult or impossible.

ISTR there's exactly one short story set in Asimov's Galactic Empire that involves actual aliens (not just mutants or robots or whatever), and at the end the aliens head for Elsewhere - I assume that was outside the galaxy.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Oh, forgot to mention: I knew space flight is really cheap in this universe but I was still a little surprised that it's so cheap the "crooked cop blackmails a couple of hundred bucks out of tourists" routine seems plausible. Of course, it's not like the space cop is paying for his ship and its upkeep.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

What always makes me laugh in hindsight is that the Mule isn't even particularly evil, so much as he's a pretty standard way most people play their non-psion 4e Bard PCs – you've got him pulling an AoE attack out, "assisting" with history and wisdom rolls, pulling outrageous diplomacy and bluff checks when they really shouldn't work...

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

To give Toran some credit (and yes, he is a bit of a drip) the Mule is deliberately making him clueless.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

Haven't read the Foundation Series since my Golden Age, but I remember the Mule being a remarkably sympathetic villain; unusually so for the era and the space-opera setting.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Ah, knew I forgot something: Asimov has his characters seriously underestimate how many mutations one might find in a given population or he's using mutation in an idiosyncratic way. Also, people seem to be built on a points systems in Foundation: mutants pay for way awesome powers with disabilities and poor Bayta seems to have paid off her intellectual skills by taking at least two points in Guy Magnet.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

From the wikipedia entry on Dagobert IX:

His son, the crown prince Dagobert, who was a clone,

Wait, cloning is available? Then the Mule could have had kids (granted, since his various maladies killed him by 30, maybe he didn't want to inflict them on his off-spring).

[(Anonymous)]

There's a passage in (IIRC) "Forward the Foundation" which shows that either the LMC or the SMC had been colonized. Hari Seldon made sure that the colonies were dismantled to avoid disturbing the Galactic Empire somehow.

[rpresser.livejournal.com]

"clone" does not appear (http://books.google.com/books?id=BJcgLVibkrEC&pg=PA199&lpg=PA199&dq=dagobert+IX&source=bl&ots=T4w5tZ3Hsg&sig=nghHRy-tnYYaRI4MlJf163bHyvE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2aB7UMqXEsbX0QHI2oH4Aw&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=clone&f=false) in Foundation and Empire.

Hyperwave transmitter

[(Anonymous)]

There are two big problems with Magnifico´s hidden hyperwave transmitter.
One, in previous part of Foundation and Empire, we hear that ultrawave transmission has a limited range. When Devers fled Riose´s base, he tried connecting to the Merchants - with difficulty because of the extreme range. Specified as 500 lightyears.
It follows that Mule, or any non-psychic agent whom Mule may have sent out, could not have kept ultrawave communications with the headquarters of Mule´s army if they were out of the range for listeners of Mule´s army.
Two, Mule could have detected, and given memory gaps, to any people who confronted him when operating his radio transmitter. But how about people elsewhere on the planet listening to ultrawave spectrum for any broadcasts not authorized by their side? Mule would not have been physically near them to tamper with them, and he would not have known where they were.