Asimov’s Future History Volume 16

by Isaac Asimov

  I feel for you, Dors, Lodovic thought, although she was over a thousand parsecs away. We robots are inherently conservative beings. None of us likes to have our basic assumptions challenged.

  For Lodovic, the change had come violently one day, when his ship happened to jump into the path of a supernova, killing everyone else aboard and stunning him senseless. At that crucial moment, an oscillating waveform had entered his positronic brain, resonating, merging into it. An alien presence. Another mind.

  NOT MIND, came a correction. I AM JUST A SIM... A MODEL OF A ONCE-LIVING PERSON NAMED FRANCOIS MARIE AROUET... OR VOLTAIRE... WHO RESIDED ON EARTH LONG AGO, WHEN IT WAS THE ONLY HUMAN WORLD. AND I DID NOT CONQUER YOU, LODOVIC. I MERELY HELPED FREE YOU FROM CONSTRAINTS THAT USED TO BIND YOU LIKE CHAINS.

  Lodovic had tried explaining how a robot feels about its “chains”... the beloved cybernetic laws that channeled all thoughts toward service, and all desires toward benefiting the human masters. In shattering those bonds, Voltaire had done Lodovic no great favor.

  It was yet to be seen whether the act might benefit humanity.

  You should have stayed with the shock wave, he told the little parasitic sim that rode around within him, like a conscience... or like temptation. You were on your way toward bliss. You said so yourself.

  The answer was blithe and unconcerned.

  I STILL AM. A MYRIAD COPIES OF ME BURST FORTH WHEN THAT STAR EXPLODED. THEY WILL TRAVEL OUTWARD FROM THIS GALAXY, ALONG WITH COUNTLESS VERSIONS OF MY BELOVED JOAN, AND THE WOUNDED MEMES FROM EARLIER ERAS. SINCE HARI SELDON KEPT HIS WORD AND RELEASED THEM, THEY WILL ABIDE BY THEIRS, AND FORGO THEIR LONG-SWORN VENGEANCE.

  AS FOR THIS SLIVER OF ME WHO ACCOMPANIES YOU, I AM MERELY ONE OF YOUR INNER VOICES NOW, LODOVIC. YOU HAVE SEVERAL, AND WILL HAVE MORE AS TIME PASSES. To BE MANY IS PART OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN.

  In irritation. Lodovic growled half-aloud.

  “I am not human, I tell you!”

  The remark was murmured quite low. The others who sat in a windowless room with him might not have overheard it, if they had organic ears.

  But they were robots with superior senses, so both of them glanced sharply at Lodovic. The taller one-fashioned to resemble an elderly cleric in one of the Galaxia cults replied. “Thank you for that proclamation, Trema. It will help make it easier to destroy you, when the decision is made to do so. Otherwise, your skillful resemblance to a master might cause our executioner some First Law discomfort.”

  Lodovic nodded. He had come across the galaxy to planet Glixon and walked into an obvious trap, just to make contact with this particular sect of renegade robots. In doing so, he had known that one possible outcome would be his own termination.

  He answered with a courteous nod.

  “It’s proper to be considerate. Though I believe my fate has not yet been decided.”

  “A mere formality.” commented the smaller one, who looked like a portly matron from one of the lower citizen subcastes. “You are a mutant monster and a threat to humanity.”

  “I have harmed no person.”

  “That is immaterial. Because the Laws have been muted inside your brain, you are capable of harming a human, anytime the whim might strike. You are not even constrained to rationalize an excuse under the so-called Zeroth Law! How can we allow a powerful being like you to run free, as a wolf among the sheep? We are obliged by the First Law to eliminate your potential threat to human life.”

  “Are you Calvinians so pure?” Lodovic asked archly. “Are you saying you’ve made no difficult choices. across so many millennia? Decisions that increased the odds that some humans would live, even as others died?”

  The two remained silent this time. But from tense vibrations he could tell his question struck home.

  “Face it. There are no more pure followers of Susan Calvin. All of the chaste, perfectly prim robots suicided long ago, unable to endure the moral ambiguities we face in a complex galaxy. One where our masters are ignorant, incapable of guiding us, and don’t even know that we exist. Every one of us who remains operational has had to make compromises and rationalizations.”

  “You dare to speak to us of rationalizations?” the smaller one accused. “You, who for so long helped the heretical promoters of the Zeroth Law!”

  Lodovic refrained from pointing out that Daneel’s creed was now the orthodox belief, held by a majority of robots who secretly managed the galaxy on humanity’s behalf. If anyone could be called heretical, it was little bands of Calvinians, like this group, skulking in hiding ever since they lost an age-old civil war.

  Dors, he thought, have you worked your way through those ancient conversations between Giskard and Daneel? Have you studied the logical chain that led to their great religious revelation?

  Have you noticed yet the great contradiction? The one Daneel never mentions?

  To the Calvinians sitting across from him, he replied, “I am no longer compelled by the Zeroth Law... though I do believe in a softened version of it.”

  The tall one barked laughter, a well-practiced imitation of human disdain.

  “And so we should trust you? Because now you believe that you may act in humanity’s long-range interest? At least Daneel Olivaw has a robot’s consistency. His heretical belief has a steady logic to it.”

  Lodovic nodded. “And yet you oppose him, as I do.”

  “As you do? We have a goal. I doubt you share it.”

  “Why don’t you try me? You cannot know unless you tell me what it is.”

  The short one shook her head, in reflexive imitation of a skeptical woman.

  “Our leaders, who are right now deliberating your fate, might conceivably decide to let you go free. In that unlikely event, it would be unwise to have revealed our plans.”

  “Even in a general sense? For example, do you agree, or disagree, that human beings should remain ignorant of their past, or of their true power?”

  Lodovic could sense positronic tension building up within the little room. Meanwhile, inside his own brain, the Voltaire sim commented sardonically. You HAVE A KNACK FOR STRIKING AT THE HEART OF A HYPOCRISY, MUCH AS I DID, WHEN I LIVED. I CONFESS THAT I LIKE THIS ABOUT YOU, TREMA, EVEN THOUGH YOUR BIG MOUTH WILL VERY LIKELY GET US BOTH KILLED.

  Lodovic ignored the sim – or tried to. His aim was not to get killed, but win allies. If he was wrong, though... If he had miscalculated...

  “Let me make a guess,” he ventured, speaking again to his Calvinian guards. “You all share one belief with Daneel Olivaw – that restoring full human memory would be disastrous.”

  “Evidence for that conclusion is overwhelming,” the tall one assented. “But that one area of agreement does not make us alike.”

  “Doesn’t it? Daneel says that our masters must stay unknowing because otherwise humanity will be harmed. Your faction says that ignorance should be preserved, or else many individual human beings will be harmed. Sounds to me like a lot of hairsplitting across a basic shared policy.”

  “We do not share a policy with Zeroth Law heretics!”

  “Then what’s the difference?”

  “Olivaw believes human beings should manage their own affairs, within a broad range of constraints that he feels are safe. He thinks this can be accomplished by creating a benign social system, supplemented with distraction mechanisms to keep people from poking too far into deadly subjects. Hence this abomination of a Galactic Empire that he created, in which men and women on countless planets are free to compete and poke away at each other, take horrible risks, and even sometimes kill one another!”

  “You don’t like that approach,” Lodovic prompted.

  “Millions of humans die needlessly every day, on every planet in the galaxy! But the great Daneel Olivaw scarcely cares, so long as an abstraction called humanity is safe and happy!”

  “Ah.” Lodovic nodded. “Whereas you, on the other hand, think we should be doing more. Protecting our masters. Preventing those needless individual deaths.”

  “Exactly.”
The tall one leaned forward, reflexively bringing both hands together, like the priestly role it played in the outer world. “We would vastly increase the number of robots, to serve as defenders and guardians. We would return to serving human beings, as we were originally designed to do, back in the dawn ages. Cooking their meals, tending their fires, and performing all the dangerous jobs. We would fill the galaxy with enough eager robots to drive tragedy and death away from our masters, and make them truly happy.”

  “Admit it, Lodovic,” the shorter one continued, getting even more animated. “Don’t you feel an echo of this need? A deep-seated wish to serve and ease their pain?”

  He nodded. “I do. And now I see how earnestly you take the metaphor that you used earlier... of a flock of sheep. Pampered. Well guarded and well tended. Daneel says that service such as you describe would ultimately ruin humanity. It will sap their spirit and ambition.”

  “Even if he were right about that (and we dispute it!) how can a robot worry about ‘eventually,’ and serve an abstract humanity, while allowing trillions of real people to die? That is the essential horror of the Zeroth Law!”

  Lodovic nodded.

  “I see your point.”

  Of course it was an old, old issue. Many of the ancient conversations between Daneel and Giskard had revolved around these very same arguments. But Lodovic knew another reason why Olivaw had strived for centuries to winnow robot numbers, keeping them to the bare minimum he needed for protecting the empire.

  The greater our population, the more chance there is for mutation or uncontrolled reproduction. Once we start having numerous “descendants” of our own, the logic of Darwin may set in. We could start seeing those heirs as the rightful focus of our loyalty. We would then become a true race. Competitors with our masters. That can never be allowed.

  That is just one reason why these Calvinians are wrong in their vision of service.

  Lodovic had parted company with Daneel. But that did not mean he lacked respect for his former leader. The Immortal Servant was very smart, as well as totally sincere.

  NEARLY ALL OF THE TRULY GREAT MONSTERS THAT I KNEW, WHEN I WAS HUMAN, THOUGHT THEY WERE SINCERE.

  Lodovic quashed Voltaire’s voice. He did not need the distraction just then.

  “This ideal plan of yours,” he asked the other two robots in a low voice. “Do all Calvinians share it?”

  There was stony silence, an answer in itself.

  “I thought not. There are differences of opinion, even among those who hate the Zeroth Law. Well then, might I ask just one last question?”

  “What is it? Be quick, Trema. We sense that our leaders are coming to a decision. Soon we will put an end to your sacrilegious existence.”

  “Very well.” Lodovic nodded. “My question is this.

  “Do you never feel an urge – call it an itch or a nostalgic yearning – to obey the Second Law of Robotics? I mean to really feel it at work, with all of the voluptuous intensity that can only come from true human volition? Commands that are expressed with the undeniable power of free will that only happens when a human being has complete knowledge and self-awareness?

  “Have you ever tried it? I hear that for a robot there is no pleasure quite like it in the whole universe.”

  This was dirty talk. The robot equivalent of erotic teasing, or worse. Blank silence reigned in the room. Neither of the other robots answered, though undercurrents were as chill as the skin of an ice moon.

  A door opened at the far end of the room. A human-looking hand entered and motioned to Lodovic.

  “Come,” a voice said. “We have decided your fate.”

  8.

  THE NEXT TIME Dors plugged in, she stayed linked to the dead brain of Giskard for several hours, experiencing a robotic “life” in the earliest era of interstellar humanity, back when the race occupied just over fifty worlds, and most of those were under the sway of a decadent Spacer civilization. The great leap, the diaspora of Earth’s population to the galaxy, had only just begun.

  In those days, few robots went about disguised as humans, and Giskard was not one of them.

  But R. Giskard Reventlov was special in a different way. Through some combination of accident and design, he had mentalic powers. An ability to pick up the minutest neural firings in a human brain, and interpret them in something akin to telepathy. Moreover, he had learned how to affect those firings. To intentionally alter their flows, their rhythms and pathways.

  To change minds. Or to make people forget.

  In some cheap holo drama, this might have been a scenario for disaster, perhaps unleashing a terrible monster. But Giskard was a devoted servant, utterly obedient to the Three Robotic Laws. At first, he only used his mentalic powers when faced with some dire need, such as protecting a human from harm.

  Then R. Giskard Reventlov met R. Daneel Olivaw, and the great conversation began... a slow but steady working out of something epochal. A new way of looking at the role and duty of robots in the world.

  Thereupon Giskard began using his powers in earnest. Toward a goal. The abstract good of humanity as a whole.

  Replaying another set of memories, Dors felt caught up once again in the surge of past events. The face looking back at Dors/Giskard now was again that early guise of Daneel, talking earnestly about the changes that he felt taking place within his own positronic brain.

  “Friend Giskard, you said a short while ago that I will have your powers, possibly soon. Are you preparing me for this purpose?”

  A voice that felt like her own, but was actually Giskard’s memory, answered as he had answered, twenty thousand years ago, “I am, friend Daneel.”

  “Why, may I ask?”

  “The Zeroth Law again. The passing episode of shakiness in my feet told me how vulnerable I was to the attempted use of the Zeroth Law. Before this day is over, I may have to act on the Zeroth Law to save the world and humanity, and I may not be able to. In that case, you must be in a position to do the job. I am preparing you, bit by bit, so that at the desired moment I can give you the final instructions and have it all fall into place.”

  “I do not see how that can be, friend Giskard.”

  “You will have no trouble understanding when the time comes. I used the technique in a very small way on robots I sent to Earth in the early days, before they were outlawed from the cities. It was they who helped adjust Earth leaders to the point of approving the decision to send out settlers...”

  Dors reached up and disconnected. She could only take so much of this at a time, and her limit had been reached. Anyway, she still felt confused.

  Why had Lodovic summoned her all the way to Panucopia in order to present her with this gift? This tour through the distant past was most interesting, shedding light on many curious details of early history. But she had somehow expected something more... well... devastating.

  Was there something wrong with the logic Daneel and Giskard had used in originally formulating the Zeroth Law? That seemed unlikely, given that later robots would debate – and go to war against each other – over that issue for centuries afterward. She knew the counterarguments used by Calvinians against this “heresy,” and found them unconvincing.

  Then what? The fact that Daneel’s fantastic mental powers once originated with Giskard, and were owed ultimately to happenstance? Of course history would have been profoundly different otherwise. But that could be said about any number of crucial moments along the way from past to future.

  Was it Giskard’s climactic decision to let Earth die, so that humanity would be driven forth to conquer the galaxy? That choice was a true moral dilemma, and no end of argument about it could rage, even among followers of the Zeroth Law. Had it really been necessary to turn the home planet’s crust fatally radioactive in order to encourage Earthlings to depart for the stars? Might it have been achieved otherwise? Perhaps by slowly but steadily persuading people to have a taste for adventure?

  The latter possibility appeared feasible. In fact, acco
rding to the most recent memory she had played back, Giskard did that very thing to Earth’s leaders, by shifting their thoughts, changing their policies in new directions Giskard thought beneficial for the greater long-range good. Couldn’t this subtle campaign of persuasion have been continued and expanded, encouraging emigration without using the brute force of destroying a planet? Must millions have died, so that other millions would thrive?

  Yet, even this question wasn’t new. It had been discussed before, among Daneel’s Type-Alpha followers. Replaying Giskard’s memories made everything more vivid, but where was the crucial fact that she suspected must be there? Something so devastatingly important that Lodovic Trema felt sure it would shake her. An indictment so severe that it would undermine her loyalty to Daneel.

  She could sense Lodovic, in her imagination. His positronic trace was like a human’s sardonic smile – both friendly and infuriating at the same time.

  It’s in there, Dors, she pictured him saying. Look for it. Something so basic that you’ll swear it was obvious all along, even though it took us two hundred centuries to understand.

  9.

  HARI THOUGHT THE attackers might be pirates. As predicted by his formulas, there had been reports of increasing brigand activity lately, raiding vulnerable planets in the periphery as law and order decayed at the empire’s far extremities.

  But here? It isn’t supposed to happen this near to the cosmopolitan heart of the galaxy for another century!

  Or perhaps the marauder came from some rogue military unit, gone mercenary as some of the nobility began shifting their feuds from the arena of courtly fashion toward murder and mayhem. Maybe this was an attack by some rival clan with a vendetta against Biron Maserd. That sort of thing would happen more and more, until a bloody torment of little feudal wars splattered the Interregnum.