by Isaac Asimov
“Neither.” She actually chuckled. “It’s not human, and yet it’s not like any robot I’ve detected before.”
Pelorat said, “I would like to see that.” He nodded his head vigorously, his eyes wide with pleasure. “It would be exciting. Something new.”
“Something new,” muttered Trevize with a sudden lift of his own spirits—and a flash of unexpected insight seemed to illuminate the interior of his skull.
100.
Down they sank to the moon’s surface, in what was almost jubilation. Even Fallom had joined them now and, with the abandonment of a youngster, was hugging herself with unbearable joy as though she were truly returning to Solaria.
As for Trevize, he felt within himself a touch of sanity telling him that it was strange that Earth—or whatever of Earth was on the moon—which had taken such measures to keep off all others, should now be taking measures to draw them in. Could the purpose be the same in either way? Was it a case of “If you can’t make them avoid you, draw them in and destroy them?” Either way, would not Earth’s secret remain untouched?
But that thought faded and drowned in the flood of joy that deepened steadily as they came closer to the moon’s surface. Yet over and beyond that, he managed to cling to the moment of illumination that had reached him just before they had begun their gliding dive to the surface of the Earth’s satellite.
He seemed to have no doubt as to where the ship was going. They were just above the tops of the rolling hills now, and Trevize, at the computer, felt no need to do anything. It was as though he and the computer, both, were being guided, and he felt only an enormous euphoria at having the weight of responsibility taken away from him.
They were sliding parallel to the ground, toward a cliff that raised its menacing height as a barrier against them; a barrier glistening faintly in Earth-shine and in the light-beam of the Far Star. The approach of certain collision seemed to mean nothing to Trevize, and it was with no surprise whatever that he became aware that the section of cliff directly ahead had fallen away and that a corridor, gleaming in artificial light, had opened before them.
The ship slowed to a crawl, apparently of its own accord, and fitted neatly into the opening—entering—sliding along— The opening closed behind it, and another then opened before it. Through the second opening went the ship, into a gigantic hall that seemed the hollowed interior of a mountain.
The ship halted and all aboard rushed to the airlock eagerly. It occurred to none of them, not even to Trevize, to check whether there might be a breathable atmosphere outside—or any atmosphere at all.
There was air, however. It was breathable and it was comfortable. They looked about themselves with the pleased air of people who had somehow come home and it was only after a while that they became aware of a man who was waiting politely for them to approach.
He was tall, and his expression was grave. His hair was bronze in color, and cut short. His cheekbones were broad, his eyes were bright, and his clothing was rather after the fashion one saw in ancient history books. Although he seemed sturdy and vigorous there was, just the same, an air of weariness about him—not in anything that one could see, but rather in something appealing to no recognizable sense.
It was Fallom who reacted first. With a loud, whistling scream, she ran toward the man, waving her arms and crying, “Jemby! Jemby!” in a breathless fashion.
She never slackened her pace, and when she was close enough, the man stooped and lifted her high in the air. She threw her arms about his neck, sobbing, and still gasping, “Jemby!”
The others approached more soberly and Trevize said, slowly and distinctly (could this man understand Galactic?), “We ask pardon, sir. This child has lost her protector and is searching for it desperately. How it came to fasten on you is a puzzle to us, since it is seeking a robot; a mechanical—”
The man spoke for the first time. His voice was utilitarian rather than musical, and there was a faint air of archaism clinging to it, but he spoke Galactic with perfect ease.
“I greet you all in friendship,” he said—and he seemed unmistakably friendly, even though his face continued to remain fixed in its expression of gravity. “As for this child,” he went on, “she shows perhaps a greater perceptivity than you think, for I am a robot. My name is Daneel Olivaw.”
21
THE SEARCH ENDS
101.
Trevize found himself in a complete state of disbelief. He had recovered from the odd euphoria he had felt just before and after the landing on the moon—a euphoria, he now suspected, that had been imposed on him by this self-styled robot who now stood before him.
Trevize was still staring, and in his now perfectly sane and untouched mind, he remained lost in astonishment. He had talked in astonishment, made conversation in astonishment, scarcely understood what he said or heard as he searched for something in the appearance of this apparent man, in his behavior, in his manner of speaking, that bespoke the robot.
No wonder, thought Trevize, that Bliss had detected something that was neither human nor robot, but, that was, in Pelorat’s words, “something new.” Just as well, of course, for it had turned Trevize’s thoughts into another and more enlightening channel—but even that was now crowded into the back of his mind.
Bliss and Fallom had wandered off to explore the grounds. It had been Bliss’s suggestion, but it seemed to Trevize that it came after a lightning-quick glance had been exchanged between herself and Daneel. When Fallom refused and asked to stay with the being she persisted in calling Jemby, a grave word from Daneel and a lift of the finger was enough to cause her to trot off at once. Trevize and Pelorat remained.
“They are not Foundationers, sirs,” said the robot, as though that explained it all. “One is Gaia and one is a Spacer.”
Trevize remained silent while they were led to simply designed chairs under a tree. They seated themselves, at a gesture from the robot, and when he sat down, too, in a perfectly human movement, Trevize said, “Are you truly a robot?”
“Truly, sir,” said Daneel.
Pelorat’s face seemed to shine with joy. He said, “There are references to a robot named Daneel in the old legends. Are you named in his honor?”
“I am that robot,” said Daneel. “It is not a legend.”
“Oh no,” said Pelorat. “If you are that robot, you would have to be thousands of years old.”
“Twenty thousand,” said Daneel quietly.
Pelorat seemed abashed at that, and glanced at Trevize, who said, with a touch of anger, “If you are a robot, I order you to speak truthfully.”
“I do not need to be told to speak truthfully, sir. I must do so. You are faced then, sir, with three alternatives. Either I am a man who is lying to you; or I am a robot who has been programmed to believe that it is twenty thousand years old but, in fact, is not; or I am a robot who is twenty thousand years old. You must decide which alternative to accept.”
“The matter may decide itself with continued conversation,” said Trevize dryly. “For that matter, it is hard to believe that this is the interior of the moon. Neither the light”—he looked up as he said that, for the light was precisely that of soft, diffuse sunlight, though no sun was in the sky, and, for that matter, no sky was clearly visible—“nor the gravity seems credible. This world should have a surface gravity of less than 0.2g.”
“The normal surface gravity would be 0.16g actually, sir. It is built up, however, by the same forces that give you, on your ship, the sensation of normal gravity, even when you are in free fall, or under acceleration. Other energy needs, including the light, are also met gravitically, though we use solar energy where that is convenient. Our material needs are all supplied by the moon’s soil, except for the light elements—hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen—which the moon does not possess. We obtain those by capturing an occasional comet. One such capture a century is more than enough to supply our needs.”
“I take it Earth is useless as a source of supply.”
“Un
fortunately, that is so, sir. Our positronic brains are as sensitive to radioactivity as human proteins are.”
“You use the plural, and this mansion before us seems, large, beautiful, and elaborate—at least as seen from the outside. There are then other beings on the moon. Humans? Robots?”
“Yes, sir. We have a complete ecology on the moon and a vast and complex hollow within which that ecology exists. The intelligent beings are all robots, however, more or less like myself. You will see none of them, however. As for this mansion, it is used by myself only and it is an establishment that is modeled exactly on one I used to live in twenty thousand years ago.”
“Which you remember in detail, do you?”
“Perfectly, sir. I was manufactured, and existed for a time—how brief a time it seems to me, now—on the Spacer world of Aurora.”
“The one with the—” Trevize paused.
“Yes, sir. The one with the dogs.”
“You know about that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How do you come to be here, then, if you lived at first on Aurora?”
“Sir, it was to prevent the creation of a radioactive Earth that I came here in the very beginnings of the settlement of the Galaxy. There was another robot with me, named Giskard, who could sense and adjust minds.”
“As Bliss can?”
“Yes, sir. We failed, in a way, and Giskard ceased to operate. Before the cessation, however, he made it possible for me to have his talent and left it to me to care for the Galaxy; for Earth, particularly.”
“Why Earth, particularly?”
“In part because of a man named Elijah Baley, an Earthman.”
Pelorat put in excitedly, “He is the culture-hero I mentioned some time ago, Golan.”
“A culture-hero, sir?”
“What Dr. Pelorat means,” said Trevize, “is that he is a person to whom much was attributed, and who may have been an amalgamation of many men in actual history, or who may be an invented person altogether.”
Daneel considered for a moment, and then said, quite calmly, “That is not so, sirs. Elijah Baley was a real man and he was one man. I do not know what your legends say of him, but in actual history, the Galaxy might never have been settled without him. In his honor, I did my best to salvage what I could of Earth after it began to turn radioactive. My fellow-robots were distributed over the Galaxy in an effort to influence a person here—a person there. At one time I maneuvered a beginning to the recycling of Earth’s soil. At another much later time, I maneuvered a beginning to the terraforming of a world circling the nearby star, now called Alpha. In neither case was I truly successful. I could never adjust human minds entirely as I wished, for there was always the chance that I might do harm to the various humans who were adjusted. I was bound, you see—and am bound to this day—by the Laws of Robotics.”
“Yes?”
It did not necessarily take a being with Daneel’s mental power to detect uncertainty in that monosyllable.
“The First Law,” he said, “is this, sir: ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’ The Second Law: ‘A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.’ The Third Law: ‘A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.’ —Naturally, I give you these laws in the approximation of language. In actual fact they represent complicated mathematical configurations of our positronic brain-paths.”
“Do you find it difficult to deal with those Laws?”
“I must, sir. The First Law is an absolute that almost forbids the use of my mental talents altogether. When dealing with the Galaxy it is not likely that any course of action will prevent harm altogether. Always, some people, perhaps many people, will suffer, so that a robot must choose minimum harm. Yet, the complexity of possibilities is such that it takes time to make that choice and one is, even then, never certain.”
“I see that,” said Trevize.
“All through Galactic history,” said Daneel, “I tried to ameliorate the worst aspects of the strife and disaster that perpetually made itself felt in the Galaxy. I may have succeeded, on occasion, and to some extent, but if you know your Galactic history, you will know that I did not succeed often, or by much.”
“That much I know,” said Trevize, with a wry smile.
“Just before Giskard’s end, he conceived of a robotic law that superseded even the first. We called it the ‘Zeroth Law’ out of an inability to think of any other name that made sense. The Zeroth Law is: ‘A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.’ This automatically means that the First Law must be modified to be: ‘A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, except where that would conflict with the Zeroth Law.’ And similar modifications must be made in the Second and Third Laws.”
Trevize frowned. “How do you decide what is injurious, or not injurious, to humanity as a whole?”
“Precisely, sir,” said Daneel. “In theory, the Zeroth Law was the answer to our problems. In practice, we could never decide. A human being is a concrete object. Injury to a person can be estimated and judged. Humanity is an abstraction. How do we deal with it?”
“I don’t know,” said Trevize.
“Wait,” said Pelorat. “You could convert humanity into a single organism. Gaia.”
“That is what I tried to do, sir. I engineered the founding of Gaia. If humanity could be made a single organism, it would become a concrete object, and it could be dealt with. It was, however, not as easy to create a superorganism as I had hoped. In the first place, it could not be done unless human beings valued the superorganism more than their individuality, and I had to find a mind-cast that would allow that. It was a long time before I thought of the Laws of Robotics.”
“Ah, then, the Gaians are robots. I had suspected that from the start.”
“In that case, you suspected incorrectly, sir. They are human beings, but they have brains firmly inculcated with the equivalent of the Laws of Robotics. They have to value life, really value it. —And even after that was done, there remained a serious flaw. A superorganism consisting of human beings only is unstable. It cannot be set up. Other animals must be added—then plants—then the inorganic world. The smallest superorganism that is truly stable is an entire world, and a world large enough and complex enough to have a stable ecology. It took a long time to understand this, and it is only in this last century that Gaia was fully established and that it became ready to move on toward Galaxia—and, even so, that will take a long time, too. Perhaps not as long as the road already traveled, however, since we now know the rules.”
“But you needed me to make the decision for you. Is that it, Daneel?”
“Yes, sir. The Laws of Robotics would not allow me, nor Gaia, to make the decision and chance harm to humanity. And meanwhile, five centuries ago, when it seemed that I would never work out methods for getting round all the difficulties that stood in the way of establishing Gaia, I turned to the second-best and helped bring about the development of the science of psychohistory.”
“I might have guessed that,” mumbled Trevize. “You know, Daneel, I’m beginning to believe you are twenty thousand years old.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Pelorat said, “Wait a while. I think I see something. Are you part of Gaia yourself, Daneel? Would that be how you knew about the dogs on Aurora? Through Bliss?”
Daneel said, “In a way, sir, you are correct. I am associated with Gaia, though I am not part of it.”
Trevize’s eyebrows went up. “That sounds like Comporellon, the world we visited immediately after leaving Gaia. It insists it is not part of the Foundation Confederation, but is only associated with it.”
Slowly, Daneel nodded. “I suppose that analogy is apt, sir. I can, as an associate of Gaia, make myself aware of what G
aia is aware of—in the person of the woman, Bliss, for instance. Gaia, however, cannot make itself aware of what I am aware of, so that I maintain my freedom of action. That freedom of action is necessary until Galaxia is well established.”
Trevize looked steadily at the robot for a moment, then said, “And did you use your awareness through Bliss in order to interfere with events on our journey to mold them to your better liking?”
Daneel sighed in a curiously human fashion. “I could not do much, sir. The Laws of Robotics always hold me back. —And yet, I lightened the load on Bliss’s mind, taking a small amount of added responsibility on myself, so that she might deal with the wolves of Aurora and the Spacer on Solaria with greater dispatch and with less harm to herself. In addition, I influenced the woman on Comporellon and the one on New Earth, through Bliss, in order to have them look with favor on you, so that you might continue on your journey.”
Trevize smiled, half-sadly. “I ought to have known it wasn’t I.”
Daneel accepted the statement without its rueful self-deprecation. “On the contrary, sir,” he said, “it was you in considerable part. Each of the two women looked with favor upon you from the start. I merely strengthened the impulse already present—about all one can safely do under the strictures of the Laws of Robotics. Because of those strictures—and for other reasons as well—it was only with great difficulty that I brought you here, and only indirectly. I was in great danger at several points of losing you.”
“And now I am here,” said Trevize. “What is it you want of me? To confirm my decision in favor of Galaxia?”
Daneel’s face, always expressionless, somehow managed to seem despairing. “No, sir. The mere decision is no longer enough. I brought you here, as best I could in my present condition, for something far more desperate. I am dying.”
102.
Perhaps it was because of the matter-of-fact way in which Daneel said it; or perhaps because a lifetime of twenty thousand years made death seem no tragedy to one doomed to live less than half a percent of that period; but, in any case, Trevize felt no stir of sympathy.