March 21, 2006

  • Pelorat looked down at the floor, as though fearing to meet the other's eyes. He said, 'I have had a wife, Golan. I have known women. Yet they have never been very important to me. Interesting. Pleasant. Never very important. Yet, this one --'
    'Who? Bliss?'
    'She's different, somehow -- to me.'
    'By Terminus, Janov, she knows every word you're saying.'
    'That makes no difference. She knows anyhow. -- I want to please her. I will undertake this task, whatever it is; run any risk, take any responsibility, on the smallest chance that it will make her -- think well of me.'
    'Janov, she's a child.'
    'She's not a child -- and what you think of her makes no difference to me.'
    'Don't you understand what you must seem to her?'
    'An old man? What's the difference? She's part of a greater whole and I am not -- and that alone builds an insuperable wall between us. Don't you think I know that? But I don't ask anything of her but that she --'
    'Think well of you?'
    'Yes. Or whatever else she can make herself feel for me.'
    Trevize shook his head. 'I can't believe that this is happening. Old age is overtaking you and you have discovered youth. Janov, you're trying to be a hero, so that you can die for that body.'
    'Don't say that, Golan. This is not a fit subject for humour.'

    Issac Asimov, Foundation's Edge, p. 399