by Brian Aldiss
Keith Anderson sat on the balcony of his flat with his wife, Sheila, and drank an ersatz coffee, looking out onto the pens below, not without relish.
"Well, the robots are behaving very strangely," Sheila was saying. "When you disappeared, three of the very tiny ones came and searched everywhere. Your story was the only thing they seemed interested in. They must have photostatted it."
"I remember now—it was in the trunk under the bed. I'd forgotten all about it till they mentioned it—my sole claim to literary fame!"
"But that side of it can't interest them. What are they excited about?"
He looked musingly at her. She was still partly a stranger to him, though a beloved one. In the chaos to which he returned after the Nehru trip, it was a case of marrying any eligible girl while they were available—men outnumbered women two to one; he'd been lucky in his blind choice. Sheila might not be particularly beautiful, but she was good in bed, trustworthy, and intelligent. You could ask for no more.
He said, "Do you ever admit the truth of the situation to yourself, Sheila? The new automata are now the superior race. They have a dozen faculties to each one of ours. They're virtually indestructible. Small size is clearly as much an enormous advantage to them as it would be a disadvantage to us. We've heard rumors that they were on the threshold of some staggering new discovery. From what I overheard the Tenth Dominant say, they are on the brink of moving into some staggering new dimensions of which we can probably never even get a glimpse. And yet...."
"And yet they need your story!" She laughed— sympathetically, so that he laughed with her.
"Right! They need my goddamned story! Listen— their powers of planning and extrapolation are proved miraculous. But they cannot imagine; imagination might even be an impediment for them. So the Dominant, who can tap more knowledge than you or I dream of, is baffled by a work of fiction. He needs my imagination."
"Not entirely, Mr. Anderson." Anderson jumped up, cup in hand, as his wife gave a small scream.
Perched on the balcony rail, enormously solid-looking, yet only six inches high, was the stubby shape of an automaton!
Furious, Anderson flung his cup, the only weapon to hand. It hit the machine squarely, shattered, and fell away. The machine did not even bother to refer to the matter.
"We understand imagination. We wish to ask you more questions about the background to your story."
Anderson sat down, took Sheila's hand, and made an anatomical suggestion which no automaton could have carried out.
"We want to ask you more questions about the story. Why did you write that you stayed on Nehru when really you came back?"
"Are you the Chief Scanner who captured me on D-Dump?"
"You are speaking with Tenth Dominant, in command of Eastern Seaboard. I have currently taken over Chief Scanner for convenience of speaking with you."
"Sort of mechanical transvestism, eh?"
"Why did you write that you stayed when you in reality came back?"
"You'd better give him straight answers, Keith," Sheila said.
He turned to her irritably, "How do I know the answer? It was just a story! I suppose it made a better ending to have the Anderson-figure stay on Nehru. There was this Cro-Magnon-Neanderthal business in the story and I made myself out to be more Neanderthal than Crow for dramatic effect. Just a lot of nonsense, really!"
"Why do you call it nonsense when you wrote it yourself?" asked the Dominant. It had settled in the middle of the coffee table now.
The man sighed wearily. "Because I'm older now. The story was a lot of nonsense because I injected this Crow-Neanderthal theory, which is a bit of free wheeling young man tripe. It just went in to try to explain what actually happened on Nehru—how the egghead camp broke down and everything. The theory doesn't hold water for a moment; I see that now, in the light of what happened since, Nuclear Week and all that. You see "
He stopped. He stopped in mid-sentence and stared at the little complex artifact confronting him. It was speaking to him, but he did not hear, following his own racing thoughts. He stretched forward his hand and picked it up; the automaton was heavy and warm, only mildly frightening, slightly, slightly vibrating at the power of its own voice; the Dominant did not stop him picking it up. He stared at it as if he had never seen such a thing before.
"I repeat, how would you revise your theory now?" said the automaton.
Anderson came back to reality.
"Why should I help you? To your kind, man is just another animal in a zoo, a lower species."
"Not so. We revere you as ancestors and have never treated you otherwise."
"Maybe. Perhaps we regard animals in somewhat the same way since, even in the darkest days of overpopulation and famine, we strove to stock our zoos in ever greater numbers. So perhaps I will tell you my current theory.... It is real theory now; in my story that theory was not worth the name—it was a stunt, an intellectual high-jinks, a bit of science fiction. Now I have lived and thought and loved and suffered, and I have talked to other men. So if I tell you the theory now, you will know it is worked for—part of the heritage of all men in this zoo."
"This time it is truth not false?"
"You are the boss—you must decide that. There are certainly two distinct parts of the brain, the old limbic section and the neocortex surrounding it, the bit that turns a primate into a man. That much of my story was true. There's also a yet older section, but we won't complicate the picture. Roughly speaking, the limbic is the seat of the emotions, and the neocortex the seat of the intelligence. Okay. In a crisis, the new brain is still apt to cut out and the old brain take over. "And that in a nutshell is why mankind never made the grade. We are a failed species. We never got away from the old animal inheritance. We could never become the distinct species we should have been."
"Oh, darling, it's not as bad as that...." He squeezed Sheila's hand. "You girls are always optimists." He winked the eye the Dominant could not see. The Dominant said, "How does this apply to what happened on Nehru II?"
"My story departed—not from the facts—but from the correct explanation of the facts. The instinct to go there on Swettenham's part was sound. He and Arlblaster and the rest believed that on a planet away from animals, mankind could achieve its true stature-homo superior, shall we say? What I called the N-factor let them down. The strain was too great, and they mainly reverted instead of evolving."
"But you believe a species can only escape its origins by removing itself entirely from the site of those origins."
Sheila said, "That was the whole human impulse behind space travel—to get to worlds where it would be possible to become more human."
The Dominant sprang from Anderson's hands and circled under the low ceiling—an oddly uneasy gesture. "But the limbic brain—such a small part of the brain, so deep-buried!" "The seat of the instincts."
"The seat of the instincts.... Yes, and so the animal part of man brought you to disaster."
"Does that answer all your questions?"
The automaton came back down and settled on the table. "One further question. What do you imagine would happen to mankind now, after Nuclear Week, if he was left alone on Earth?"
Anderson had to bury his face in his hands to hide his triumph.
"I guess we'd carry on. Under D-Dump, and the other dumps, lie many of the old artifacts. We'd dig them up and carry on."
"But Earth's resources are almost spent. That was mankind's doing, not the doing of automata."
The man smiled. "Maybe we'd revert, then. It is a sort of Neanderthal planet, isn't it? Things go wrong for animals and men and robots, don't they? Just as they did for dinosaurs and Neanderthals!"
"I am going now," said the Tenth Dominant. His voice cut He disappeared.
Gasping, Anderson clutched his wife. "Don't say a word! Come inside. Hold me and kiss me. Pray, if you feel like it."
All she said as they went to their bed was, "Maybe you will end up a writer after all. Yo
u show a talent for storytelling!"
It was all of five days before the human beings in the big zoo noticed that the automata were disappearing. Suddenly, they were all gone, leaving no word. The whole continent, presumably the whole world, lay almost empty; and mankind began to walk back into it on his own ill-shod feet.
"And you did it, Keith Anderson!" Sheila cried.
"Nope. They did it themselves. They made the right decision—maybe I spurred them on."
"You did it—a genius who is now going to turn himself into a pig-breeder."
"I happen to like pigs." As he spoke, he stood in the middle of a dozen of the animals, which he and Sheila had taken charge of.
"So the entire automata horde has disappeared into the invospectrum, wherever that is, leaving us our world...."
"It's a different world. Let's try and make it saner than the old one."
Pious hope? New Year's resolution? New design for living? He could not tell, although it filled his mind.
As they drove the pigs before them, Anderson said, "When the Dominant got onto the subject of our animal inheritance, I remembered just in time that I heard him tell the Scanner, "We must free ourselves from our human heritage.' You can see the spot they were in! They had scrapped the humots, all too clearly anthropomorphic in design, and had taken more functional forms themselves. But they still had to acknowledge us as father-figures and could never escape from many human and naturalistic concepts, however much they tried, as long as they remained in a naturalistic setting. Now, in this unimaginable alternative-energy universe, which they have finally cracked, they can be pure automata—which is something else we can't conceive! So they become a genuine species. Pure automata... “
They broke off to drive their pigs through the doorway, doubling back and forth until all the animals were inside, squealing and trying to leap over one another's backs. Anderson slammed the outer door at once, gasping.
"What I'd like to know is, what would it be like to be pure human being!" Sheila exclaimed.
He had no answer. He was thinking. Of course, they needed a dog! On D-Dump there were feral hounds whose young could be caught and trained.
It was lucky that the ground-floor tenants had gone. Most human beings had moved out of the zoo as soon as possible, so that the great block of flats was almost empty. They shut the pigs in the hall for the night and climbed up rather wearily to their flat.
Today, they were too tired to bother about the future.