“In Seldon’s Shadow”
Back to Hari, still wild-eyed and frustrated in his prison, which now has geometric facets that recall the shape of the Prime Radiant. His torment is briefly relieved by a flashback to his childhood on Helicon, where his mother praises him for holding up a 3D object (a folded piece of paper) before a fire and casting a 2D shadow. His father ruins the moment by slapping him, snapping that he paid for that book and Hari shouldn’t be tearing out its pages. That unpleasant part of the memory is overshadowed by Hari’s realization that the 3D shadow he’s now seeing is cast by a 4D object—and that he’s in a 4D space. Could he be inside the Prime Radiant? He’s not alone: a woman appears. “Yanna? My love! But you’re dead,” he gasps; she exactly resembles his late wife. “So are you,” she responds. They embrace and he tells her “something’s breaking the future” and that he needs her help to fix it. Then he realizes it’s not really Yanna, but he can’t quite tell who she is. She says it’s up to him to figure out her identity: “Free your mind.”
