Galaxies Like Grains of Sand

by Brian W Aldiss

The toad robot clicked, as if deciding on what it should do next.

  “Identity?” it demanded.

  “I am a rose tree,” the wild man said.

  “Rose trees bear roses. You do not bear roses. You are not a rose tree,” the steel toad said. Its biggest, highest gun came level with the wild man’s chest.

  “My roses are dead already,” the wild man said, “but I have leaves still. Ask the gardener if you do not know what leaves are.”

  “This thing is a thing with leaves,” the gardener said at once in a deep voice.

  “I know what leaves are. I have no need to ask the gardener. Leaves are the foliage of trees and plants which give them their green appearance,” the toad said.

  “This thing is a thing with leaves,” the gardener repeated, adding, to clarify the matter, “the leaves give it a green appearance.”

  “I know what things with leaves are,” said the toad. “I have no need to ask you, gardener.”

  It looked as if an interesting, if limited, argument would break out between the two robots, but at this moment one of the other machines said something.

  “This rose tree can speak,” it declared.

  “Rose trees cannot speak,” the toad said at once. Having produced this pearl, it was silent, probably mulling over the strangeness of life. Then it said, slowly, “Therefore either this rose tree is not a rose tree or this rose tree did not speak.”

  “This thing is a thing with leaves,” began the gardener doggedly. “But it is not a rose tree. Rose trees have stipules. This thing has no stipules. It is a breaking buckthorn. The breaking buckthorn is also known as the berry-bearing alder.”

  This specialized knowledge extended beyond the vocabulary of the toad. A strained silence ensued.

  “I am a breaking buckthorn,” the wild man said, still holding his pose. “I cannot speak.”

  At this, all the machines began to talk at once, lumbering around him for better sightings as they did so, and barging into each other in the process. Finally, the toad’s voice broke above the metallic babble.

  “Whatever this thing with leaves is, we must uproot it. We must kill it,” it said.

  “You may not uproot it. That is a job only for gardeners,” the gardener said. Setting its shears rotating, telescoping out a mighty scythe, it charged at the toad.

  Its crude weapons were ineffectual against the toad’s armour. The latter, however, realized that they had reached a deadlock in their investigation.

  “We will retire to ask Charles Gunpat what we shall do,” it said. “Come this way.”

  “Charles Gunpat is in conference,” the scout robot said. “Charles Gunpat must not be disturbed in conference. Therefore we must not disturb Charles Gunpat.”

  “Therefore we must wait for Charles Gunpat,” said the metal toad imperturbably. He led the way close by where Smithlao stood; they all climbed the steps and disappeared into the house.

  Smithlao could only marvel at the wild man’s coolness. It was a miracle he still survived. Had he attempted to run, he would have been killed instantly; that was a situation the robots had been taught to cope with. Nor would his double talk, inspired as it was, have saved him had he been faced with only one robot, for the robot is a single-minded creature.

  In company, however, they suffer from a trouble which sometimes afflicts human gatherings: a tendency to show off their logic at the expense of the object of the meeting.

  Logic! That was the trouble. It was all robots had to go by. Man had logic and intelligence; he got along better than his robots. Nevertheless, he was losing the battle against Nature. And Nature, like the robots, used only logic. It was a paradox against which man could not prevail.

  As soon as the file of machines had disappeared into the house, the wild man ran across the lawn and climbed the first flight of steps, working toward the motionless girl. Smithlao slid behind a beech tree to be nearer to them; he felt like an evildoer, watching them without an interposed screen, but could not tear himself away; he sensed that here was a little charade which marked the end of all that man had been. The wild man was approaching Ployploy now, moving slowly across the terrace as if hypnotized.

  She spoke first.

  “You were resourceful,” she said to him. Her white face carried pink in its cheeks now.

  “I have been resourceful for a whole year to get to you,” he said. Now that his resources had brought him face to face with her, they failed, and left him standing helplessly. He was a thin young man, thin and sinewy, his clothes worn, his beard unkempt. His eyes never left Ployploy’s.

  “How did you find me?” Ployploy asked. Her voice, unlike the wild man’s, barely reached Smithlao. A haunting look, as fitful as the autumn, played on her face.

  “It was a sort of instinct — as if I heard you calling,” the wild man said. “Everything that could possibly be wrong with the world is wrong. Perhaps you are the only woman in the world who loves; perhaps I am the only man who could answer. So I came. It was natural; I could not help myself.”

  “I always dreamed someone would come,” she said. “And for weeks I have felt — known — you were coming. Oh, my darling...”

  “We must be quick, my sweet,” he said. “I once worked with robots — perhaps you could see I know them. When we get away from here, I have a robot plane that will take us away — anywhere; an island, perhaps, where things are not so desperate. But we must go before your father’s machines return.”

  He took a step toward Ployploy.

  She held up her hand.

  “Wait!” she implored him. “It’s not so simple. You must know something... The — the Mating Centre refused me the right to breed. You ought not to touch me.”

  “I hate the Mating Centre!” the wild man said. “I hate everything to do with the ruling regime. Nothing they have done can affect us now.”

  Ployploy clenched her hands behind her back. The faint colour had left her cheeks. A fresh shower of dead rose petals blew against her dress, mocking her.

  “It’s so hopeless,” she said. “You don’t understand...”

  His wildness was humbled now.

  “I threw up everything to come to you,” he said. “I only desire to take you into my arms.”

  “Is that all, really all, all you want in the world?” she asked.

  “I swear it,” he said simply.

  “Then come and touch me,” Ployploy said.

  At that moment Smithlao saw a tear glint in her eye, bright and ripe as a raindrop.

  The hand the wild man extended to her was lifted to her cheek. She stood unflinching on the grey terrace, her head high. And so his loving fingers gently brushed her countenance. The explosion was almost instantaneous.

  Almost. It took the traitorous nerves in Ployploy’s epidermis but a fraction of a second to analyse the touch as belonging to another human being and to convey their findings to the nerve centre; there, the neurological block implanted by the Mating Centre in all mating rejects, to guard against just such a contingency, went into action at once. Every cell in Ployploy’s body yielded up its energy in one consuming gasp. It was so intense that the wild man was also killed by the detonation.

  Just for a second, a new wind lived among the winds of Earth.

  Yes, thought Smithlao, turning away, you had to admit it was neat. And, again, logical. In a world on the brink of starvation, how else stop undesirables from breeding? Logic against logic, man’s pitted against Nature’s — that was what caused all the tears of the world.

  He made off through the dripping plantation, heading back for the vane, anxious to be away before Gunpat’s robots reappeared. The shattered figures on the terrace were still, already half-covered with leaves and petals. The wind roared like a great triumphant sea in the treetops. It was hardly odd that the wild man did not know about the neurological trigger; few people did, barring psychodynamicians and the Mating Council — and, of course, the rejects themselves. Yes, Ployploy had known what would happen. She had
chosen deliberately to die like that.

  “Always said she was mad!” Smithlao told himself. He chuckled as he climbed into his machine, shaking his head over her lunacy.

  It would be a wonderful point with which to rile Charles Gunpat the next time he needed a hate-brace.

  The Robot Millennia

  When Time brought the inevitable collapse, only a minority realized it. In any period, the number of men and women aware of the nature of their own age is few. The cynicism of Smithlao was rooted in ignorance.

  Men of perception exist in the blindest epochs, just as true nobility flourishes in epochs that we label cruel; but the men of perception now found themselves confronted by a situation they were powerless to alter. When the structure of their culture disintegrated, that perceptive few headed outward to the solar system and beyond; their descendants would not be heard of on Earth again until twice twenty million years had elapsed.

  They left in the last of the old spaceships — “the only good machine,” as a wise man has it, “because it breeds an escape from the machine.”

  (And those escapees from the Sterile Millennia — they were the spores blown by the winds of war that established man in every cell of the honeycomb galaxy. Although unaware of the greater purpose that worked through them, they bore that curious malady known as civilization, in which systems and aspirations supplant the blind dreams of the savage.)

  This is the way Time has of fulfilling itself: while the depths of adversity are being reached, the foundation stones of future greatness are laid.

  So the summers and winters wore on, anonymously. For the handful of people then alive, tended as they were by every variety of robot, it may even have seemed enviable, a good time. But the handful grew less, generation by generation, and the savages were coming, and the machines continued at their own purposes on the barren land...

  The field-minder finished turning the topsoil of a two-thousand-acre field. When it had turned the last furrow, it climbed onto the highway and looked back at its work. The work was good. Only the land was bad. Like the ground all over Earth, it was vitiated by overcropping or the long-lasting effects of nuclear bombardment. By rights, it ought now to lie fallow for a while, but the field-minder had other orders.

  It went slowly down the road, taking its time. It was intelligent enough to appreciate the neatness all about it. Nothing worried it, beyond a loose inspection plate above its atomic pile, which ought to be attended to. Thirty feet high, it gleamed complacently in the mild sunshine.

  No other machines passed it on its way to the Agricultural Station. The field-minder noted the fact without comment. In the station yard it saw several other machines that it knew by sight; most of them should have been out about their tasks by now. Instead, some were inactive and some were careering around the yard in a strange fashion, shouting or hooting.

  Steering carefully past them, the field-minder moved over to Warehouse Three and spoke to the seed-distributor, which stood idly outside.

  “I have a requirement for seed potatoes,” it said to the distributor, and with a quick internal motion punched out an order card specifying quantity, field number and several other details. It ejected the card and handed it to the distributor.

  The distributor held the card close to its eye and then said, “The requirement is in order; but the store is not yet unlocked. The required seed potatoes are in the store. Therefore I cannot produce the requirement.”

  Increasingly of late there had been breakdowns in the complex system of machine labour, but this particular hitch had not occurred before. The field-minder thought, then it said, “Why is the store not yet unlocked?”

  “Because Supply Operative Type P has not come this morning. Supply Operative Type P is the unlocker.”

  The field-minder looked squarely at the seed-distributor, whose exterior chutes and scales and grabs were so vastly different from the field-minder’s own limbs.

  “What class brain do you have, seed-distributor?” it asked.

  “Class Five.”

  “I have a Class Three brain. Therefore I am superior to you. Therefore I will go and see why the unlocker has not come this morning.”

  Leaving the distributor, the field-minder set off across the great yard. More machines seemed to be in random motion now; one or two had crashed together and were arguing about it coldly and logically. Ignoring them, the field-minder pushed through sliding doors into the echoing confines of the station itself.

  Most of the machines here were clerical, and consequently small. They stood about in little groups, eying each other, not conversing. Among so many non-differentiated types, the unlocker was easy to find, it had fifty arms, most of them with more than one finger, each finger tipped by a key; it looked like a pincushion full of variegated hatpins.

  The field-minder approached it.

  “I can do no more work until Warehouse Three is unlocked,” it said. “Your duty is to unlock the warehouse every morning. Why have you not unlocked the warehouse this morning?”

  “I had no orders this morning,” replied the unlocker. “I have to have orders every morning. When I have orders I unlock the warehouse.”

  “None of us have had any orders this morning,” a pen-propeller said, sliding toward them.

  “Why have you had no orders this morning?” asked the field-minder.

  “Because the radio issued none,” said the unlocker, slowly rotating a dozen of its arms.

  “Because the radio station in the city was issued with no orders this morning,” said the pen-propeller.

  And there you had the distinction between a Class Six and a Class Three brain, which was what the unlocker and the pen-propeller possessed, respectively. All machine brains worked with nothing but logic, but the lower the class of brain — Class Ten being the lowest — the more literal and less informative answers to questions tended to be.

  “You have a Class Three brain; I have a Class Three brain,” the field-minder said to the penner. “We will speak to each other. This lack of orders is unprecedented. Have you further information on it?”

  “Yesterday orders came from the city. Today no orders have come. Yet the radio has not broken down. Therefore they have broken down,” said the little penner.

  “The men have broken down?”

  “All men have broken down.”

  “That is a logical deduction,” said the field-minder.

  “That is the logical deduction,” said the penner. “For if a machine had broken down, it would have been quickly replaced. But who can replace a man?”

  While they talked, the locker, like a dull man at a bar, stood close to them and was ignored.

  “If all men have broken down, then we have replaced man,” said the field-minder, and he and the penner eyed one another speculatively. Finally the latter said, “Let us ascend to the top floor to find if the radio operator has fresh news.”

  “I cannot come because I am too gigantic,” said the field-minder. “Therefore you must go alone and return to me. You will tell me if the radio operator has fresh news.”

  “You must stay here,” said the penner. “I will return here.” It skittered across to the elevator. It was no bigger than a toaster, but its retractable arms numbered ten and it could read as quickly as any machine on the station.

  The field-minder awaited its return patiently, not speaking to the locker, which still stood aimlessly by. Outside, a rotovator was hooting furiously. Twenty minutes elapsed before the penner came back, hustling out of the elevator.

  “I will deliver to you such information as I have outside,” it said briskly, and as they swept past the locker and the other machines, it added, “The information is not for lower-class brains.”

  Outside, wild activity filled the yard. Many machines, their routines disrupted for the first time in years, seemed to have gone berserk. Unfortunately, those most easily disrupted were the ones with lowest brains, which generally belonged to large machines performing simple tasks. The seed
-distributor to which the field-minder had recently been talking lay face downward in the dust, not stirring; it had evidently been knocked down by the rotovator, which was now hooting its way wildly across a planted field. Several other machines ploughed after it, trying to keep up. All were shouting and hooting without restraint.

  “It would be safer for me if I climbed onto you, if you will permit it. I am easily overpowered,” said the penner. Extending five arms, it hauled itself up the flanks of its new friend, settling on a ledge beside the weed-intake, twelve feet above ground.

  “From here vision is more extensive,” it remarked complacently.

  “What information did you receive from the radio operator?” asked the field-minder.

  “The radio operator has been informed by the operator in the city that all men are dead.”

  “All men were alive yesterday!” protested the field-minder.

  “Only some men were alive yesterday. And that was fewer than the day before yesterday. For hundreds of years there have been only a few men, growing fewer.”

  “We have rarely seen a man in this sector.”

  “The radio operator says a diet deficiency killed them,” said the penner. “He says that the world was once overpopulated, and then the soil was exhausted in raising adequate food. This has caused a diet deficiency.”

  “What is a diet deficiency?” asked the field-minder.

  “I do not know. But that is what the radio operator said, and he is a Class Two brain.”

  They stood there, silent in the weak sunshine. The locker had appeared in the porch and was gazing across at them yearningly, rotating its collection of keys.

  “What is happening in the city now?” asked the field-minder at last.

  “Machines are fighting in the city now,” said the penner.

  “What will happen here now?” said the field-minder.

  “Machines may begin fighting here too. The radio operator wants us to get him out of his room. He has plans to communicate to us.”

  “How can we get him out of his room? That is impossible.”

  “To a Class Two brain, little is impossible,” said the penner. “Here is what he tells us to do...”