by Isaac Asimov
Amadiro said, “Spare me. I’ll concede your genius. Meanwhile, I have not yet had my dinner, do you know that?”
“Well, “said Vasilia sharply, “order your dinner and invite me to join you.”
Amadiro, frowning, raised his arm perfunctorily and made a quick sign. The quiet motion of robots at work made itself evident at once.
Vasilia said, “I would play with pathway patterns for Giskard. I would come to Fastolfe – my father, as I then thought of him – and I would show him a pattern. He might shake his head and laugh and say, ‘If you add that to poor Giskard’s brain, he will no longer be able to talk and he will be in a great deal of pain. ‘I remember asking if Giskard could really feel pain and my father said, ‘We don’t know what he would feel, but he would act as we would act if we were in a great deal of pain, so we might as well say he would feel pain.’
“Or else I would take one of my patterns to him and he would smile indulgently and say, ‘Well, that won’t hurt him, Little Vas, and it might be interesting to try.
“And I would. Sometimes I would take it out again and sometimes I would leave it. I was not simply fiddling with Giskard for the sadistic joy of it, as I imagine I might have been tempted to do if I were someone other than myself. The fact is, I was very fond of Giskard and I had no desire to harm him. When it seemed to me that one of my improvements – I always thought of them as improvements – made Giskard speak more freely or react more quickly or more interestingly – and seemed to do no harm – I would let it stay.
“And then one day –”
A robot standing at Amadiro’s elbow would not have dared to interrupt a guest unless a true emergency existed, but Amadiro had no difficulty in understanding the significance of the waiting. He said, “Is dinner ready?”
“Yes, sir,” said the robot.
Amadiro gestured rather impatiently in Vasilia’s direction. “You are invited to have dinner with me.”
They walked into Amadiro’s dining room, which Vasilia had never entered before. Amadiro was, after all, a private person and was notorious for his neglect of the social amenities. He had been told more than once that he would succeed better in politics if he entertained in his home and he had always smiled politely and said, “Too high a price.”
It was perhaps because of his failure to entertain, thought Vasilia, that there was no sign of originality or creativity in the furnishings. Nothing could be plainer than the table, the dishes, and the cutlery. As for the walls, they were merely flat-colored vertical planes. Put together, in rather dampened one’s appetite, she thought.
The soup they began with – a clear boullion – was as plain as the furniture and Vasilia began to dispose of it without enthusiasm.
Amadiro said, “My dear Vasilia, you see I am being patient. I have no objection to having you write your autobiography if you wish. But is it really your plan to recite several chapters of it to me? If it is, I must tell you bluntly that I’m not really interested.”
Vasilia said, “You will become extremely interested in just a little while. Still, if you’re really enamored of failure and want to continue to achieve nothing you wish to achieve, simply say so. I will then eat in silence and leave. Is that what you wish?”
Amadiro sighed. “Well, go on, Vasilia.”
Vasilia said, “And then one day I came up with a pattern more elaborate, more pleasant, and more enticing than I had ever seen before or, in all truth, than I have ever seen since. I would have loved to show it to my father, but he was away at some meeting or other on one of the other worlds.
“I didn’t know when he’d be back and I put aside my pattern, but each day I would look at it with more interest and more fascination. Finally, I could wait no longer. I simply could not. It seemed so beautiful that I thought it ludicrous to suppose it could do harm. I was only an infant in my second decade and had not yet completely outgrown irresponsibility, so I modified Giskard’s brain by incorporating the pattern into it.
“And it did no harm. That was immediately obvious. He responded to me with perfect ease and – it seemed to me – was far quicker in understanding and much more intelligent than he had been. I found him far more fascinating and lovable than before.
“I was delighted and yet I was nervous, too. What I had done – modifying Giskard without clearing it with Fastolfe – was strictly against the rules Fastolfe had set for me and I knew that well. Yet clearly, I was not going to undo what I had done. When I had modified Giskard’s brain, I excused it to myself by saying that it would only be for a little while and that I would then neutralize the modification. Once the modification had been made, however, it became quite clear to me that I would not neutralize it. I was simply not going to do that. In fact, I never modified Giskard again, for fear of disturbing what I had just done.
“Nor did I ever tell Fastolfe what I had done. I destroyed all record of the marvelous pattern I had devised and Fastolfe never found out that Giskard had been modified without his knowledge. Never!
“And then we went our separate ways, Fastolfe and I, and Fastolfe would not give up Giskard. I screamed that he was mine and that I loved him, but Fastolfe’s kindly benevolence, of which he made such a parade all his life – that business of loving an things, great and small – was never allowed to stand in the way of his own desires. I received other robots I cared nothing for, but he kept Giskard for himself.
“And when he died, he left Giskard to the Solarian woman – a last bitter slap at me.”
Amadiro had only managed to get halfway through the salmon mousse. “If an this is intended to advance your case of having Giskard’s ownership transferred from the Solarian woman to yourself, it won’t help. I have already explained to you why I cannot set aside Fastolfe’s will.”
“There’s something more to it than that, Kelden,” said Vasilia. “A great deal more. Infinitely more. Do you want me to stop now?”
Amadiro stretched his lips into a rueful grin. “Having listened to so much of this, I will play the madman and listen to more.”
“You would play the madman if you did not, for I now come to the point. – I have never stopped thinking of Giskard and of the cruelty and injustice of my having been deprived of him, but somehow I never thought of that pattern with which I had modified him with no one’s knowledge but my own. I am quite certain I could not have reproduced that pattern if I had tried and from what I can now remember it was like nothing else I have ever seen in robotics until – until I saw, briefly, something like that pattern during my stay on Solaria.
“The Solarian pattern seemed familiar to me, but I didn’t know why. It took some weeks of intense thought before I dredged out of some well-hidden part of my unconscious mind the slippery thought of that pattern I had dreamed out of nothing twenty-five decades ago.
“Even though I can’t remember my pattern exactly, I know that the Solarian pattern was a whiff of it and no more. It was just the barest suggestion of something I had captured in miraculously complex symmetry. But I looked at the Solarian pattern with the experience I had gained in twenty-five decades of deep immersion in robotics theory and it suggested telepathy to me. If that simple, scarcely interesting pattern suggested it, what must my original have meant – the thing I invented as a child and have never recaptured since?”
Amadiro said, “You keep saying that you’re coming to the point, Vasilia. Would I be completely unreasonable if I asked you to stop moaning and reminiscing and simply set out that point in a simple, declarative sentence?”
Vasilia said, “Gladly. What I am telling you, Kelden, is that, without my ever knowing it, I converted Giskard into a telepathic robot and that he has been one ever since.”
54.
Amadiro looked at Vasilia for a long time and, because the story seemed to have come to an end, he returned to the salmon mousse and ate some of it thoughtfully.
He then said, “Impossible! Do you take me for an idiot?”
“I take you for a failure,” said
Vasilia. “I don’t say Giskard can read conversations in minds, that he can transmit and receive words or ideas. Perhaps that is impossible, even in theory. But I am quite certain he can detect emotions and the general set of mental activity and perhaps can even modify it.”
Amadiro shook his head violently. “Impossible!”
“Impossible? Think a while. Twenty decades ago, you had almost achieved your aims. Fastolfe was at your mercy, Chairman Horder was your ally. What happened? Why did everything go wrong?”
‘The Earthman –” Amadiro began, choking at the memory.
“The Earthman,” Vasilia mimicked. “The Earthman. Or was it the Solarian woman? It was neither! Neither! It was Giskard, who was there all the time. Sensing. Adjusting.”
“Why should he be interested? He is a robot.”
“A robot loyal to his master, to Fastolfe. By the First Law, he had to see to it that Fastolfe came to no harm and, being telepathic, he could not interpret that as signifying physical harm only. He knew that if Fastolfe could not have his way, could not encourage the settlement of the habitable worlds of the Galaxy, he would undergo profound disappointment – and that would be ‘harm’ in Giskard’s telepathic Universe. He could not let that happen and he intervened to keep it from happening.”
“No, no, no,” said Amadiro in disgust. “You want that to be so, out of some wild, romantic longing, but that doesn’t make it so. I remember too well what happened. It was the Earthman. It needs no telepathic robot to explain the events.”
“And what has happened since, Kelden?” demanded Vasilia. “In twenty decades, have you ever managed to win out over Fastolfe? With all the facts in your favor, with the obvious bankruptcy of Fastolfe’s policy, have you ever been able to dispose of a majority in the Council? Have you ever been able to sway the Chairman to the point where you could possess real power?
“How do you explain that, Kelden? In all those twenty decades, the Earthman has not been on Aurora. He has been dead for over sixteen decades, his miserably short life running out in eight decades or so. Yet you continue to fail – You have an unbroken record of failure. Even now that Fastolfe is dead, have you managed to profit completely from the broken pieces of his coalition or do you find that success still seems to elude you?
“What is it that remains? The Earthman is gone. Fastolfe is gone. It is Giskard who has worked against you all this time – and Giskard remains. He is as loyal now to the Solarian woman as he was to Fastolfe and the Solarian woman has no cause to love you, I think.”
Amadiro’s face twisted into a mask of anger and frustration. “It’s not so. None of this is so. You’re imagining things.”
Vasilia remained quite cool. “No, I’m not. I’m explaining things. I’ve explained things you haven’t been able to explain. Or have you an alternate explanation? – and I can give you the cure. Transfer ownership of Giskard from the Solarian woman to me and, quite suddenly, events will begin to twist themselves to your benefit.”
“No,” said Amadiro. “They are moving to my benefit already.”
“You may think so, but they won’t, as long as Giskard is working against you. No matter how close you come to winning, no matter how sure of victory you become, it will all melt away as long as you don’t have Giskard on your side. That happened twenty decades ago; it will happen now.”
Amadiro’s face suddenly cleared. He said, “Well, come to think of it, though I don’t have Giskard and neither do you, it doesn’t matter, for I can show you that Giskard is not telepathic. If Giskard were telepathic, as you say, if he had the ability to order affairs to his own liking or to the liking of the human being who is his owner, then why would he have allowed the Solarian woman to be taken to what will probably be her death?”
“Her death? What are you talking about, Kelden?”
“Are you aware, Vasilia, that two Settler ships have been destroyed on Solaria? Or have you been doing nothing lately but dreaming of patterns and of the brave days of childhood when you were modifying your pet robot?”
“Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Kelden. I have heard about the Settler ships on the news. What of them?”
“A third Settler ship is going out to investigate. It may be destroyed, too.”
“Possibly. On the other hand, it would take precautions.”
“It did. It demanded and received the Solarian woman, feeling that she knows the planet well enough to enable them to avoid destruction.”
Vasilia said, “That’s scarcely likely, since she hasn’t been there in twenty decades.”
“Right! The chances are, then, that she’ll die with them. It would mean nothing to me personally. I would be delighted to have her dead and, I think, so would you. And, putting that to one side, it would give us good grounds for complaint to the Settler worlds and it would make it difficult for them to argue that the destruction of the ships is a deliberate action on the part of Aurora. Would we destroy one of our own? – Now the question is, Vasilia, why would Giskard, if he had the powers you claim he has – and the loyalties allow the Solarian woman to volunteer to be taken to what is very likely to be her death?”
Vasilia was taken aback. “Did she go of her own free will?”
“Absolutely. She was perfectly willing. It would have been politically impossible to force her to do so against her will.”
“But I don’t understand –”
“There is nothing to understand except that Giskard is merely a robot.”
For a moment, Vasilia froze in her seat, one hand to her chin. Then she said slowly, “They don’t allow robots on Settler worlds or on Settler ships. That means she went alone. Without robots.”
“Well, no, of course not. They had to accept personal robots if they expected to get her willingly. They took along that man-mimic robot Daneel and the other was” – he paused and brought out the word with a hiss –” Giskard. Who else? So this miracle robot of your fantasy goes to his destruction as well. He could no more –”
His voice faded away. Vasilia was on her feet, eyes blazing, face suffused with color.
“You mean Giskard went? He’s off this world and on a Settler ship? Kelden, you may have ruined us all!”
55.
Neither finished the meal.
Vasilia walked hastily out of the dining room and disappeared into the Personal. Amadiro, struggling to remain coldly logical, shouted to her through the closed door, perfectly aware that it damaged his dignity to do so.
He called out, “It’s all the stronger an indication that Giskard is no more than a robot. Why should he be willing to go to Solaria to face destruction with his owner?”
Eventually, the sound of running water and splashing ceased and Vasilia emerged with her face freshly washed and almost frozen in its grip on calmness.
She said, “You really don’t understand, do you? You amaze me, Kelden. Think it through. Giskard can never be in danger, as long as he can influence human minds, can he? Nor can the Solarian woman, as long as Giskard devotes himself to her. The Settler who carried off the Solarian woman must have found out, on interviewing her, that she had not been on Solaria in twenty decades, so he can’t really have continued to believe, after that, that she could do him much good. With her he took Giskard, but he didn’t know that Giskard could do him good, either – or could he have known that?”
She thought a while and then said slowly, “No, there is no way he could have known it. If, in more than twenty decades, no one has penetrated the fact that Giskard has mental abilities, then Giskard is clearly interested in having no one guess it – and if that is so, then no one can possibly have guessed it.”
Amadiro said spitefully, “You claim to have worked it out.”
Vasilia said, “I had special knowledge, Kelden, and even so it was not till now that I saw the obvious – and then only because of the hint on Solaria. Giskard must have darkened my mind in that respect, too, or I would have seen it long ago. I wonder if Fastolfe knew –”
“How mu
ch easier,” said Amadiro restlessly, “to accept the simple fact that Giskard is simply a robot.”
“You will walk the easy road to ruin, Kelden, but I don’t think I will let you do that, no matter how much you want to. – What it amounts to is that the Settler came for the Solarian woman and took her along, even though he discovered she would be of little – if any – use to him. And the Solarian woman volunteered to go, even though she must dread being on a Settler ship along with diseased barbarians – and even though her destruction on Solaria must have seemed to her a very likely consequence.
“It seems to me, then, that this is all the work of Giskard, who forced the Settler to continue to demand the Solarian woman against reason and forced the Solarian woman to accede to the request against reason.”
Amadiro said, “But why? May I ask that simple question? Why?”
“I suppose, Kelden, that Giskard felt it was important to get away from Aurora. – Could he have guessed that I was on the point of learning his secret? If so, he may well have been uncertain of his present ability to tamper with me. I am, after all, a skilled roboticist. Besides, he would remember that he was once mine and a robot does not easily ignore the demands of loyalty. The only way, perhaps, that he felt he could keep the Solarian woman secure was to move himself away from my influence.”
She looked up at Amadiro and said firmly, “Kelden, we must get him back. We can’t let him work at promoting the Settler cause in the safe haven of a Settler world. He did enough damage right here among us. We must get him back and you must make me his legal owner. I can handle him, I assure you, and make him work for us. Remember! I am the only one who can handle him.”
Amadiro said, “I do not see any reason to worry. In the very likely case that he is a mere robot, he will be destroyed on Solaria and we will be rid of both him and the Solarian woman. In the unlikely case that he is what you say he is, he won’t be destroyed on Solaria, but then he will have to return to Aurora. After all, the Solarian woman, though she is not an Auroran by birth, has lived on Aurora far too long to be able to face life among the barbarians – and when she insists on returning to civilization, Giskard will have no alternative but to return with her.”