Until the decay of the Empire eventually reached it and in the Great Sack of a century ago, its drooping powers had been bent back upon themselves and broken forever. In the blasting ruin of death, the metal shell that circled the planet wrinkled and crumpled into an aching mock of its own grandeur.
The survivors tore up the metal plating and sold it to other planets for seed and cattle. The soil was uncovered once more and the planet returned to its beginnings. In the spreading areas of primitive agriculture, it forgot its intricate and colossal past.
Or would have but for the still mighty shards that heaped their massive ruins toward the sky in bitter and dignified silence.
Arcadia watched the metal rim of the horizon with a stirring of the heart. The village in which the Palvers lived was but a huddle of houses to her – small and primitive. The fields that surrounded it were golden-yellow, wheat-cIogged tracts.
But there, just past the reaching point was the memory of the past, still glowing in unrusted splendor, and burning with fire where the sun of Trantor caught it in gleaming highlights. She had been there once during the months since she had arrived at Trantor. She had climbed onto the smooth, unjointed pavement and ventured into the silent dust-streaked structures, where the light entered through the jags of broken walls and partitions.
It had been solidified heartache. It had been blasphemy.
She had left, clangingly – running until her feet pounded softly on earth once more.
And then she could only look back longingly. She dared not disturb that mighty brooding once more.
Somewhere on this world, she knew, she had been born – near the old Imperial Library, which was the veriest Trantor of Trantor. It was the sacred of the sacred; the holy of holies! Of all the world, it alone had survived the Great Sack and for a century it had remained complete and untouched; defiant of the universe.
There Hari Seldon and his group had woven their unimaginable web. There Ebling Mis pierced the secret, and sat numbed in his vast surprise, until he was killed to prevent the secret from going further.
There at the Imperial Library, her grandparents had lived for ten years, until the Mule died, and they could return to the reborn Foundation.
There at the Imperial Library, her own father returned with his bride to find the Second Foundation once again, but failed. There, she had been born and there her mother had died.
She would have liked to visit the Library, but Preem Palver shook his round head. “It’s thousands of miles, Arkady, and there’s so much to do here. Besides, it’s not good to bother there. You know; it’s a shrine–”
But Arcadia knew that he had no desire to visit the Library; that it was a case of the Mule’s Palace over again. There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present for the relies of the giants of the past.
Yet it would have been horrible to feel a grudge against the funny little man for that. She had been on Trantor now for nearly three months and in all that time, he and she – Pappa and Mamma – had been wonderful to her–
And what was her return? Why, to involve them in the common ruin. Had she warned them that she was marked for destruction, perhaps? No! She let them assume the deadly role of protectors.
Her conscience panged unbearably – yet what choice had she?
She stepped reluctantly down the stairs to breakfast. The voices reached her.
Preem Palver had tucked the napkin down his shirt collar with a twist of his plump neck and had reached for his poached eggs with an uninhibited satisfaction.
“I was down in the city yesterday, Mamma,” he said, wielding his fork and nearly drowning the words with a capacious mouthful.
“And what is down in the city, Pappa?” asked Mamma indifferently, sitting down, looking sharply about the table, and rising again for the salt.
“Ah, not so good. A ship came in from out Kalgan-way with newspapers from there. It’s war there.”