<span class="SFPTagline">
From SCIFIPEDIA
</span>
varzellalic
The Currents of Space, published in 1952, is the third and final of Isaac Asimovâs Empire novels. The story appears to be set in a time after the events of The Stars, Like Dust (1951) but before the events described in Pebble in the Sky (1950). It is a time when the galaxy is well settled, and when Trantor is in the process of establishing its hegemony over the known worlds.
Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.
Plot
Most of the book takes place on the planet Florinia. The workers of Florinia produce kyrt, the galaxyâs best fabric, which cannot be produced on any other planet. Years earlier, Florinia had been conquered by the planet Sark, and it is Sark that now controls the lucrative kyrt trade, while keeping the Florinian natives impoverished, downtrodden, and too ignorant even to realize that they are oppressed.
The protagonist of the story opens the book by having an argument with an unidentified man (later referred to as "X"). The protagonist claims that he has information that all of Florinia is in danger and everyone on the planet will die, but the unidentified man uses a psycho-probe on him, pickling his mind. We next see the protagonist lying in a gutter in an isolated Florinian town, his memory gone and his faculties all but fried. On the advice of Terens, the local townman (an educated Florinian who administers the town on behalf of his Sarkite "squire" masters), the protagonist is taken under the care of a local woman named Lona. They call him Rik, and put him to work in the local mill. A trip to a doctor reveals evidence of psycho-probing, but for a year he can remember nothing of his previous life. Then Rikâs memory starts to come back to him—he remembers that there is some danger to Florinia, and that his occupation was that he âstudied nothing.â
Terens takes Rik into a library in a nearby city, where he shows Rik some files and articles. From this, they learn that Rik was very likely a spatio-analyst (one who analyzes space, hence one who analyzes "nothing"), but accessing those files draws the attention of the Sarkite authorities, and in a panic, Terens, Rik, and Lona (who followed them into the city) assault a policeman and go into hiding. They are given sanctuary by a baker, who it turns out is an agent of Trantor (and who therefore has an interest in undermining Sarkite authority). Terens kills the baker, revealing thereby that he has an agenda different from Rikâs. Rik and Lona run off on their own, leaving Terens behind.
Rik and Lona make their way to a spaceport, where they stow away on an outgoing ship. The technology of the day, however, does not make such deception easy, and they are quickly captured. The shipâs chief passenger is Samia of Fife, daughter of the Squire of Fife—one of the five most powerful landholders on Florinia. Excited by the adventure and spoiled beyond imagination, Samia demands to be allowed to interview the stowaways. The captain obliges, and they learn some things about Rik and his escape.
Meanwhile Terens is still running from the Sarkite authorities. It seems Terens, like most townmen, had been suspected of treason by Sarkite police years earlier, but he escaped liquidation because he openly stated that he would not want to trade Sarkite oppression for Trantor oppression. He saw in Rik, however, a possible alternative to both. Now, to get away, he kills again, and makes his way to a spaceport, where he finds a space yacht owned by his last murder victim. Unfortunately he is not a pilot, so when a man wanders by looking to buy a yacht, Terens offers to let him take the ship out for a test drive. This man, it turns out, is a Trantor agent, and he simply waits for Terens to fall asleep, and then captures him. He flies the yacht to Sark, in the hopes of taking his prisoner to the Trantor embassy there. To make this work, however, he has to let Terens go out of the ship alone, as if he escaped. After leaving the ship, Terens is motioned into a car by Samia of Fife—it seems she wanted to continue her investigation by interrogating Terens, and he simply assumed this was the car from the Trantor embassy that was supposed to pick him up. The car is overtaken, however, by other agents, and Terens steals a kiss from the great lady just before he is dragged away.
Meanwhile, the Squire of Fife (Samiaâs father) has been using this incident to try to gain control of the entire kyrt trade. He tells the other four great squires that he believes one of them is X—the man who psycho-probed Rik, the spatio-analyst, and that the only way out of the mess they are in is to let him control everything.
The Trantorian ambassador, Abel, arranges a trimensional conference to discuss all the matters in question. Attending are Abel, the great squires, Terens, Lona, Rik, and another spatio-analyst. In this conference, it is eventually revealed that X—the man who psycho-probed Rik, was not in fact a great squire, but was instead Terens, a lowly townman. It seems that Terens was an administrator in training when he saw a message from Rik about danger to Florinia; he arranged to meet Rikâs ship when it landed, and then psycho-probed Rik to keep him under control. He then arranged to have Rik put in his town, so he could watch him. Terens then sent a letter of blackmail to the great squires, but without more information from Rik, he could not make his threats credible. It was his luck that the great squires, in their contempt for Florinian natives, never suspected that one of the natives could be X.
They now figure out that the danger Rik spoke of was that the star of Florinia is in a pre-nova stage. The factors that are inducing this nova are the same factors that make it possible to manufacture kyrt on this one planet and no other. Arrangements are made to evacuate the planet, and find artificial ways to manufacture kyrt. Rik and Lona agree to move to his home planet, Earth, while Terens, feeling guilty about his various murders, decides to stay on Florinia.
Related Works
Although the third of the three Empire novels to be published, internal evidence seems to indicate that this story takes place before Pebble in the Sky—Trantor is still trying to establish its authority over the entire galaxy, while in Pebble in the Sky it seems that Trantor is already the capital of the galaxy. The references to Trantor also connect this book to the Foundation series.
2008, SCI FI. All rights reserved.
