Asimov’s Future History Volume 11

by Isaac Asimov

  Ariel stared blankly at the opposite wall, pale green eyes dimly glowing, as the two humans made love in the darkness.

  Night had come, and there was darkness, and shadow, but no quiet, or rest, or safety. Whatever else changed, danger was the constant. Of that much Caliban was sure.

  Caliban walked the busy downtown, ghost-town streets of Hades. The place was bustling with energy, and yet there was a feeling of the tomb about the place, as if it were a busy, active corpse, not yet aware of its own death, hurrying about its business long after its time had come and gone.

  Night and day did not seem to matter so much here, in the heart of town. Here, the streets were just as busy now as they had been when he had passed this way in daytime.

  But no, it was inaccurate to say that there was no difference between day and night. There was no change in the amount of traffic on the streets and walkways, but there was a huge change in the character of that traffic. Now, late at night, the people were all but gone, but the robots were here.

  Caliban looked about himself, at the proud, brightly lit, empty towers of Hades, the grand boulevards of magnificent and failed intentions. But the heart of that world, that city, was empty, barren.

  Yet the unpeopled city was still crowded. Humans had been a sizable minority during the day, but in the wee hours of the night, it was robots, robots, everywhere. Caliban stood in the shadow of a doorway and watched them all go by. These robots of the night were different from the daytime robots. Almost all of those had clearly been personal servants. In the night, the heavy-duty units came out, hauling the heavy freight, working on construction jobs, doing the dirty work while there were fewer humans around to be disturbed by it.

  A gang of huge, gleaming black construction robots trudged down the street, past Caliban, toward a tall ivory-colored tower, half-finished and yet already lovely. But there were already half a dozen equally lovely towers within a few blocks of where Caliban stood, all of them virtually empty. Across the street, another gang of robots was hard at word disassembling another building that seemed scarcely any older or more used.

  Caliban had seen many other work crews come out in the last hour or so, likewise doing needless maintenance work: searching for litter that was not there; polishing the gleaming windows; weeding the weedless gardens and lawns of the parks; busily keeping the empty city core shining and perfect. Why were these robots not employed in the emptier, threadbare, worn and dirty districts, where their work could have some meaning? Why did they work here?

  The empty city. Caliban considered the words. They seemed to echo in his head. There was something wrong with the very idea of such a place. From his datastore, from the emotions of whoever had loaded the store, came the sure, certain knowledge that cities were not meant to be so. Something was going desperately wrong.

  Another piece of data popped up from the datastore, a straight, solid fact, but the ghosts of emotion hung about this one fact more strongly than any other emotion he had absorbed. It was the thing that the person who created his datastore cared about most of all: Every year the total human population went down – and the robot population went up. How could that be? he wondered. How could the humans allow themselves to get into such a predicament? But no answer came up from the datastore. For no reason that he could understand, the question, though it had nothing to do with him, was suddenly of vital importance to him.

  Why? he wondered. And why do I wonder why? Caliban had noted that most robots he observed had a distinct lack of curiosity. Few were even much interested in their surroundings. Something else, yet again, that set him apart. When his maker had molded his mind into an oddly shaped blank, had that maker also blessed him and cursed him with an overactive degree of curiosity? Caliban felt certain it was so, but in a way it did not matter. Even if his sense of curiosity had been deliberately enhanced, that did not stop him from wondering all the same.

  Why, why, why did the robots blindly, needlessly, build and disassemble, over and over, rather than leaving things as they were? Why create huge buildings when there were none to use them? Madness. All of it madness. The voice of the datastore whispered to him that the city was a reflection of a society warped, twisted, bent out of any shape that could make normal life and growth possible. It was opinion, emotion, propaganda, but still, somehow, it spoke to him.

  The world was mad, and his only hope of survival was to blend in, be accepted as one of the inmates of this lunatic asylum, get lost among the endless robots that tended to the city and its inhabitants. The thought was daunting, disturbing.

  Yet even perfect mimicry would not protect him. He had learned that much, almost at the cost of his existence. Those Settlers last night had clearly meant to kill him. If he had acted like a normal robot, he had no doubt that they would have killed him. They had expected him to stand placidly by and permit his own destruction. They had even thought it possible that he would willingly destroy himself on the strength of hearing that weak and tortuous argument about how his existence harmed humans. Why had they thought that strained line of reasoning would impel him to commit suicide?

  Caliban stepped out from the shadowy doorway and started walking again. There was so much he had to learn if he was to survive. Imitation would not be enough. Not when acting like a standard robot could get him killed. He had to know why they acted as they did.

  Why was he here? Why had he been created? Why was he different from other robots? How was he different from them? Why was the nature of his difference kept hidden from him?

  How had he gotten into this situation? Once again, he tried to think back to the beginning, to search through the whole recollection of his existence for some clue, some answer.

  He had no memory of anything whatsoever before the moment he came on, powered up for the first time, standing over that woman’s unconscious body with his arm raised from his side. Nothing, nothing else before that. How had he come to be in that place, in that situation? Had he somehow gotten to his feet, raised his arm, before he awoke? Or had he been placed in that position for some reason?

  Wait a moment. Go back and think that through. He could see no compelling reason to assume that his ability to act could not predate his ability to remember. Suppose he had acted before his memory commenced? Or suppose his memory prior to the moment he thought of as his own awakening had been cleared somehow? Alternately, what if, for some reason, he had been capable of action before his memory started, and his memory had simply not commenced recording until that moment?

  If any of those cases were possible, if the start of his memory was not a reliable marker for the start of his existence, then there were no limits to the actions he might have taken before his memory began. He could have been awake, aware, active, for five seconds before that moment – or five years. Probably not that long, however. His body showed no signs of wear, no indication that any parts had ever been replaced or repaired. His on-line maintenance log was quite blank – though it, too, could have been erased. Still, it seemed reasonable to assume that his body was quite new.

  But that was a side issue. How had that woman come to be on the floor in a pool of blood? It was at least a reasonable guess that she had been attacked in some way. Had she been dead or alive? He reviewed his visual memories of the moment. The woman had been breathing, but she could easily have expired after he left. Had the woman died, or had she survived?

  The thought brought him up short. Why had he not even asked himself such questions before?

  Then, like twin blazes of fire, two more questions slashed through his mind:

  Had he been the one who attacked her? And, regardless of whether or not he had – was he suspected of the attack?

  Caliban stopped walking and looked down at his hands.

  He was astonished to realize that his fists were clenched. He opened out his fingers and tried to walk as if he knew where he was going.

  The night before, Alvar Kresh had taken a needle-shower in hopes of helping him to sleep. Tonight h
e took one in hopes of waking up. He was tempted to watch the recording of Leving’s lecture while sitting up in bed, but he knew just how tired he was, and just how easy it would be for him to doze off if he did that. No, far better to get dressed again in fresh clothes and watch on the televisor screen in the upper parlor.

  Kresh settled down in front of the televisor, ordered one of the household robots to adjust the temperature a bit too low for comfort, and told another to bring a pot of hot, strong tea. Sitting in a cold room, with a good strong dosage of caffeine, he ought to be able to stay awake

  “All right, Donald,” he said, “start the recording.”

  The televisor came to life, the big screen taking up an entire wall of the room. The recording began with a shot of the Central Auditorium downtown. Kresh had seen many plays broadcast from there, and most times the proceeds were rather sedate, if not sedated, and it looked as if the occasion of Leving’s first lecture had been no exception. The auditorium had been designed to hold about a thousand people and their attendant robots, the robots sitting behind their owners on low jumper seats. It looked to be about half-empty.

  “... and so, without further ado,” the theater manager was saying, “allow me to introduce one of our leading scientists. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dr. Fredda Leving.” He turned toward her, smiling, leading the applause.

  The figure of Fredda Leving stood up and walked toward the lectern, greeted by a rather tentative round of applause. The camera zoomed in closer, and Kresh was startled to be reminded what Leving had looked like before the attack. In the hospital, she had been wan, pale, delicate-looking, her shaved head making her look too thin. The Fredda Leving in this recording looked as if she had a slight touch of stage fright, but she was fit, vigorous-looking, with her dark hair framing her face. All in all, an unfashionably striking young woman.

  She reached the lectern and looked out over the audience, her face clearly betraying her nervousness.

  She cleared her throat and began. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” She fumbled with her notes for a moment, clearly still somewhat nervous, and then began. “I would like to start my talk this evening with a question,” she said. “One that might seem flippant, one wherein the answer might be utterly obvious to you all. And yet, I would submit, it is one that has gone thousands of years without a proper answer. I do not suggest that I can supply that missing answer myself, now, tonight, but I do think that it is long past time for us to at least pose the question.

  “And that question is: What are robots for?”

  The view cut away to reaction shots of the people in the auditorium. There was a stirring and a muttering in the audience, a strangled laugh or two. People shifted in their seats and looked at each other with confused expressions.

  “As I said, it is a question that few of us would ever stop to ask. At first glance, it is like asking what use the sky is, or what the planet we stand upon is for, or what good it does to breathe air. As with these other things, robots seem to us so much a part of the natural order of things that we cannot truly picture a world that does not contain them. As with these natural things, we – quite incorrectly – tend to assume that the universe simply placed them here for our convenience. But it was not nature who placed robots among us. We did that to ourselves.”

  Not for ourselves, Kresh noticed. To ourselves. What the devil had Leving been saying the night of the lecture? He found himself wishing that he had been there.

  Fredda Leving’s image kept talking. “On an emotional level, at least, we perceive robots not as tools, not as objects we have made, not even as intelligent beings with which we share the universe – but as something basic, placed here by the hand of nature, something part of us. We cannot imagine a world worth living in without them, just as our friends the Settlers think a world that does include them is no fit place for humans.

  “But I digress from my own question. ‘What are robots for?’ As we seek after an answer to that question, we must remember that they are not part of the natural universe. They are an artificial creation, no more and no less than a starship or a coffee cup or a terraforming station. We built these robots – or at least our ancestors built them, and then set robots to work building more robots.

  “Robots, then, are tools we have built for our own use. That is at least the start of an answer. But it is by no means the whole answer.

  “For robots are the tools that think. In that sense, they are more than our tools – they are our relatives, our descendants.”

  Again there was a hubbub in the audience, a stirring, this time of anger and surprise. “Forgive me,” Fredda said. “That is perhaps an unfortunate way to phrase it. But it is, in a very real sense, the truth. Robots are the way they are because we humans made them. They could not exist without us. There are those who believe that we humans could not exist without them. But that statement is so much dangerous nonsense.”

  Now there was a full-fledged roar from the back of the hall, where the Ironheads had congregated. “Yes, that does strike a nerve, doesn’t it?” Fredda asked, the veneer of courtesy dropping away from her voice. “‘We could not live without them ‘– it is not a factual statement, but it is an article of faith. We have convinced ourselves that we could not survive without robots, equating the way we live with our lives themselves. We have to look no further than the Settlers to know that humans can live – and live well – without robots.”

  A chorus of boos and shouts filled the hallway. Fredda raised her hands for quiet, her face stern and firm. At last the crowd settled down a bit. “I do not say that we should live that way. I build robots for a living. I believe in robots. I believe they have not yet reached their full potential. They have shaped our society, a society I believe has many admirable qualities.

  “But, my friends, our society is calcified. Fossilized. Rigid. We have gotten to the point where we are certain, absolutely certain, that ours is the only possible way to live. We tell ourselves that we must live precisely as our ancestors did, that our world is perfect just as it is.

  “Except that to live is to change. All that lives must change. The end of change is the beginning of death – and our world is dying.” Now there was dead silence in the room. “We all know that, even if we will not admit it. Inferno’s ecology is collapsing, but we refuse to see it, let alone do anything about it. We deny the problem is there.”

  Kresh frowned. The ecology collapsing? Yes, there were problems, everyone knew that. But he would not place it in such drastic terms. Or was that part of the denial she was talking about? He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and listened.

  “Instead,” Leving’s image went on, “we insist that our robots coddle us, pamper us, while we go about our self-indulgent lives, as the web of life that supports us grows ever weaker. Anytime in the last hundred years, we, the citizens of Inferno, could have taken matters into our own hands, gotten to work, and saved the situation – saved our planet – for ourselves. Except it was so easy to convince ourselves that everything was fine. The robots were taking care of us. How could there be anything to worry about?

  “Meantime, the forests died. The oceans’ life-cycle weakened. The control systems broke down. And we, who have been trained by our robots to believe that doing nothing is the highest and finest of all activities, did not lift a finger.

  “Things got to the point where we were forced to swallow our pride and call in outsiders to save us. And even that was a near-run thing. We came very close to choosing our pride over our lives. I will admit quite freely that I found calling in the Settlers just as galling as any of you did. But now they are here, and we Spacers, we Infernals, continue to sit back, and grudgingly permit the Settlers to save us, treating them like hired hands, or interlopers, instead of rescuers.

  “Our pride is so great, our belief in the power of robot-backed indolence so overpowering, that we still refuse to act for ourselves. Let the Settlers do the work, we tell ourselves. Let the robots get their hands dirty.
We shall sit back, true to the principle that labor is for others, believing that work impedes our development toward an ever more ideal society, based on the ennobling principle of applying robotics to every task.

  “For robots are our solution to everything. We believe in robots. We have faith in them – firm, unquestioned faith in them. We take it hard, get emotional, when our use of them is questioned. We have seen that demonstrated just moments ago.

  “In short, my friends, robotics is our religion, to use a very old word. And yet we Spacers despise the thing we worship. We love robotics and yet hold robots themselves in the lowest of regard. Who among us has not felt contempt toward a robot? Who among us has not seen a robot jump higher, think faster, work longer, do better at a job than any human ever could, and then comforted himself or herself with the sneering, contemptuous – and contemptible – defense that it was ‘only’ a robot. The task, the accomplishment, is diminished when it is the work of a robot.

  “An interesting side point is that robots here on Inferno are generally manufactured with remarkably high First Law potential, and with an especially strong potential for the negation clauses of the Second and Third Laws, the clauses that tell a robot it can obey orders and protect itself only if all human beings are safe. To look at it another way, robots here on Inferno place an especially strong emphasis on our existence and an especially weak one on their own.

  “This has two results: First, our robots coddle us far more than robots on most other Spacer worlds, so that human initiative is squelched even more here on Inferno. Second, we have a remarkably high rate of robots lost to First Law conflict and resultant brainlock. We could easily adjust our manufacturing procedures to create robots that would feel a far lower, but perfectly adequate, compulsion to protect us. If we did that, we would reduce our own safety little, if at all, but our robots would suffer far less needless damage attempting rescues that are impossible or useless. Yet instead we choose to build robots with excessively high compulsion to protect. We make our robots with First Law potential so high that they brainlock if they see a human in trouble but cannot go to the human’s aid, even if other robots are attempting to save the human.