Asimov’s Future History Volume 19

by Isaac Asimov

  Trevize thought that never before had he manipulated the ship’s entry mechanism so rapidly. And it was possible he might never do so again.

  38.

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN before Trevize felt something approaching to normal. The’ small patch of syntho-skin on the scrape on his hand had soothed the physical pain, but there was a scrape on his psyche for which soothing was not so easy.

  It was not the mere exposure to danger. He could react to that as well as any ordinarily brave person might. It was the totally unlooked-for direction from which the danger had come. It was the feeling of the ridiculous. How would it look if people were to find out he had been treed by snarling dogs? It would scarcely be worse if he had been put to flight by the whirring of angry canaries.

  For hours, he kept listening for a new attack on the part of the dogs, for the sound of howls, for the scratch of claws against the outer hull.

  Pelorat, by comparison, seemed quite cool. “There was no question in my mind, old chap, that Bliss would handle it, but I must say you fired the weapon well.”

  Trevize shrugged. He was in no mood to discuss the matter.

  Pelorat was holding his library-the one compact disc on which his lifetime of research into myths and legends were stored-and with it he retreated into his bedroom where he kept his small reader.

  He seemed quite pleased with himself. Trevize noticed that but didn’t follow it up. Time for that later when his mind wasn’t quite as taken up with dogs.

  Bliss said, rather tentatively, when the two were alone, “I presume you were taken by surprise.”

  “Quite,” said Trevize gloomily. “Who would think that at the sight of a dog-a dog-I should run for my life.”

  “Twenty thousand years without men and it would not be quite a dog. Those beasts must now be the dominant large predators.”

  Trevize nodded. “I figured that out while I was sitting on the tree branch being a dominated prey. You were certainly right about an unbalanced ecology.”

  “Unbalanced, certainly, from the human standpoint-but considering how efficiently the dogs seem to be going about their business, I wonder if Pel may be right in his suggestion that the ecology could balance itself, with various environmental niches being filled by evolving variations of the relatively few species that were once brought to the world.”

  “Oddly enough,” said Trevize, “the same thought occurred to me.”

  “Provided, of course, the unbalance is not so great that the process of righting itself takes too long. The planet might become completely nonviable before that.”

  Trevize grunted.

  Bliss looked at him thoughtfully, “How is it that you thought of arming yourself?”

  Trevize said, “It did me little good. It was your ability-”

  “Not entirely. I needed your weapon. At short notice, with only hyperspatial contact with the rest of Gaia, with so many individual minds of so unfamiliar a nature, I could have done nothing without your neuronic whip.”

  “My blaster was useless. I tried that.”

  “With a blaster, Trevize, a dog merely disappears. The rest may be surprised, but not frightened.”

  “Worse than that,” said Trevize. “They ate the remnants. I was bribing them to stay.”

  “Yes, I see that might be the effect. The neuronic whip is different. It inflicts pain, and a dog in pain emits cries of a kind that are well understood by other dogs who, by conditioned reflex, if nothing else, begin to feel frightened themselves. With the dogs already disposed toward fright, I merely nudged their minds, and off they went.”

  “Yes, but you realized the whip was the more deadly of the two in this case. I did not.”

  “I am accustomed to dealing with minds. You are not. That’s why I insisted on low power and aiming at one dog. I did not want so much pain that it killed a dog and left him silent. I did not want the pain so dispersed as to cause mere whimpering. I wanted strong pain concentrated at one point.”

  “And you got it, Bliss,” said Trevize. “It worked perfectly. I owe you considerable gratitude.”

  “You begrudge that,” said Bliss thoughtfully, “because it seems to you that you played a ridiculous role. And yet, I repeat, I could have done nothing without your weapons. What puzzles me is how you can explain your arming yourself in the face of my assurance that there were no human beings on this world, something I am still certain is a fact. Did you foresee the dogs?”

  “No,” said Trevize. “I certainly didn’t. Not consciously, at least. And I don’t habitually go armed, either. It never even occurred to me to put on weapons at Comporellon.-But I can’t allow myself to trip into the trap of feeling it was magic, either. It couldn’t have been. I suspect that once we began talking about unbalanced ecologies earlier, I somehow had an unconscious glimpse of animals grown dangerous in the absence of human beings. That is clear enough in hindsight, but I might have had a whiff of it in foresight. Nothing more than that.”

  Bliss said, “Don’t dismiss it that casually. I participated in the same conversation concerning unbalanced ecologies and I didn’t have that same foresight. It is that special trick of foresight in you that Gaia values. I can see, too, that it must be irritating to you to have a hidden foresight the nature of which you cannot detect; to act with decision, but without clear reason.”

  “The usual expression on Terminus is ‘to act on a hunch.” ‘

  “On Gaia we say, ‘to know without thought.’ You don’t like knowing without thought, do you?”

  “It bothers me, yes. I don’t like being driven by hunches. I assume hunch has reason behind it, but not knowing the reason makes me feel I’m not in control of my own mind-a kind of mild madness.”

  “And when you decided in favor of Gaia and Galaxia, you were acting on a hunch, and now you seek the reason.”

  “I have said so at least a dozen times.”

  “And I have refused to accept your statement as literal truth. For that I am sorry. I will oppose you in this no longer. I hope, though, that I may continue to point out items in Gaia’s favor.”

  “Always,” said Trevize, “if you, in turn, recognize that them.”

  “Does it occur to you, then, that this Unknown World is reverting to a kind of savagery, and perhaps to eventual desolation and uninhabitability, because of the removal of a single species that is capable of acting as a guiding intelligence? If the world were Gaia, or better yet, a part of Galaxia, this could not happen. The guiding intelligence would still exist in the form of the Galaxy as a whole, and ecology, whenever unbalanced, and for whatever reason, would move toward balance again.”

  “Does that mean that dogs would no longer eat?”

  “Of course they would eat, just as human beings do. They would however, with purpose, in order to balance the ecology under deliberate direction, and not as a result of random circumstance.”

  Trevize said, “The loss of individual freedom might not matter to dogs, but it must matter to human beings.-And what if all human beings were removed from existence, everywhere, and not merely on one world or on Several? What if Galaxia were left without human beings at all? Would there still be a guiding intelligence? Would all other life forms and inanimate matter be able to put together a common intelligence adequate for the purpose?”

  Bliss hesitated. “Such a situation,” she said, “has never been experienced. Nor does there seem any likelihood that it will ever be experienced in the future.”

  Trevize said, “But doesn’t it seem obvious to you, that the human mind is qualitatively different from everything else, and that if it were absent, the sum total of all other consciousness could not replace it. Would it not be true, then, that human beings are a special case and must be treated as such? They should not be fused even with one another, let alone with nonhuman objects.”

  “Yet you decided in favor of Galaxia.”

  “For an overriding reason I cannot make out.”

  “Perhaps that overriding reason was a glimpse of t
he effect of unbalanced ecologies? Might it not have been your reasoning that every world in the Galaxy is on a knife-edge, with instability on either side, and that only Galaxia could prevent such disasters as are taking place on this world-to say nothing of the continuing interhuman disasters of war and administrative failure.”

  “No. Unbalanced ecologies were not in my mind at the time of my decision.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I may not know what it is I’m foreseeing, but if something is suggested afterward, I would recognize it if that were indeed what I foresaw.-As it seems to me I may have foreseen dangerous animals on this world.”

  “Well,” said Bliss soberly, “we might have been dead as a result of those dangerous animals if it had not been for a combination of our powers, your foresight and my mentalism. Come, then, let us be friends.”

  Trevize nodded. “If you wish.”

  There was a chill in his voice that caused Bliss’s eyebrows to rise, but at this point Pelorat burst in, nodding his head as though prepared to shake it off its foundations.

  “I think,” he said, “we have it.”

  39.

  TREVIZE DID NOT, in general, believe in easy victories, and yet it was only human to fall into belief against one’s better judgment. He felt the muscles in his chest and throat tighten, but managed to say, “The location of Earth? Have you discovered that, Janov?”

  Pelorat stared at Trevize for a moment, and deflated. “Well, no,” he said, visibly abashed. “Not quite that.-Actually, Golan, not that at all. I had forgotten about that. It was something else that I discovered in the ruins. I suppose it’s not really important.”

  Trevize managed a long breath and said, “Never mind, Janov. Every finding is important. What was it you came in to say?”

  “Well,” said Pelorat, “it’s just that almost nothing survived, you understand. Twenty thousand years of storm and wind don’t leave much. What’s more, plant life is gradually destructive and animal life-But never mind all that. The point is that ‘almost nothing’ is not the same as ‘nothing.’

  “The ruins must have included a public building, for there was some fallen stone, or concrete, with incised lettering upon it. There was hardly anything visible, you understand, old chap, but I took photographs with one of those cameras we have on board ship, the kind with built-in computer enhancement-I never got round to asking permission to take one, Golan, but it was important, and I-”

  Trevize waved his hand in impatient dismissal. “Go on!”

  “I could make out some of the lettering, which was very archaic. Even with computer enhancement and with my own fair skill at reading Archaic, it was impossible to make out much except for one short phrase. The letters there were larger and a bit clearer than the rest. They may have been incised more deeply because they identified the world itself. The phrase reads, ‘Planet Aurora,’ so I imagine this world we rest upon is named Aurora, or was named Aurora.”

  “It had to be named something,” said Trevize.

  “Yes, but names are very rarely chosen at random. I made a careful search of my library just now and there are two old legends, from two widely spaced worlds, as it happens, so that one can reasonably suppose them to be of independent origin, if one remembers that.-But never mind that. In both legends, Aurora is used as a name for the dawn. We can suppose that Aurora may have actually meant dawn in some pre-Galactic language.

  “As it happens, some word for dawn or daybreak is often used as a name for space stations or other structures that are the first built of their kind. If this world is called Dawn in whatever language, it may be the first of its kind, too.”

  Trevize said, “Are you getting ready to suggest that this planet is Earth and that Aurora is an alternate name for it because it represents the dawn of life and of man?”

  Pelorat said, “I couldn’t go that far, Golan.”

  Trevize said, with a trace of bitterness, “There is, after all, no radioactive surface, no giant satellite, no gas giant with huge rings.”

  “Exactly. But Deniador, back on Comporellon, seemed to think this was one of the worlds that was once inhabited by the first wave of Settlers-the Spacers. If it were, then its name, Aurora, might indicate it to have been the first of those Spacer worlds. We might, at this very moment, be resting on the oldest human world in the Galaxy except for Earth itself. Isn’t that exciting?”

  “Interesting, at any rate, Janov, but isn’t that a great deal to infer merely from the name, Aurora?”

  “There’s more,” said Pelorat excitedly. “As far as I could check in my records there is no world in the Galaxy today with the name of ‘Aurora,’ and I’m sure your computer will verify that. As I said, there are all sorts of world and other objects named ‘Dawn’ in various ways, but no one uses the actual word ‘Aurora.” ‘

  “Why should they? If it’s a pre-Galactic word, it wouldn’t be likely to be popular.”

  “But names do remain, even when they’re meaningless. If this were the first settled world, it would be famous; it might even, for a while, have been the dominant world of the Galaxy. Surely, there would be other worlds calling themselves ‘New Aurora,’ or ‘Aurora Minor,’ or something like that. And then others-”

  Trevize broke in. “Perhaps it wasn’t the first settled world. Perhaps it was never of any importance.”

  “There’s a better reason in my opinion, my dear chap.”

  “What would that be, Janov?”

  “If the first wave of settlements was overtaken by a second wave to which all the worlds of the Galaxy now belong-as Deniador said-then there is very likely to have been a period of hostility between the two waves. The second wave-making up the worlds that now exist-would not use the names given to any of the worlds of the first wave. In that way, we can infer from the fact that the name ‘Aurora’ has never been repeated that there were two waves of Settlers, and that this is a world of the first wave.”

  Trevize smiled. “I’m getting a glimpse of how you mythologists work, Janov. You build a beautiful superstructure, but it may be standing on air. The legends tell us that the Settlers of the first wave were accompanied by numerous robots, and that these were supposed to be their undoing. Now if we could find a robot on this world, I’d be willing to accept all this first-wave supposition, but we can’t expect after twenty thou-”

  Pelorat, whose mouth had been working, managed to find his voice. “But, Golan, haven’t I told you?-No, of course, I haven’t. I’m so excited I can’t put things in the right order. There was a robot.”

  40.

  TREVIZE RUBBED HIS forehead, almost as though he were in pain. He said, “A robot? There was a robot?”

  “Yes,” said Pelorat, nodding his head emphatically.

  “How do you know?”

  “Why, it was a robot. How could I fail to know one if I see one?”

  “Have you ever seen a robot before?”

  “No, but it was a metal object that looked like a human being. Head, arms, legs, torso. Of course, when I say metal, it was mostly rust, and when I walked toward it, I suppose the vibration of my tread damaged it further, so that when I reached to touch it-”

  “Why should you touch it?”

  “Well, I suppose I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. It was an automatic response. As soon as I touched it, it crumbled. But-”

  “Yes?”

  “Before it quite did, its eyes seemed to glow very faintly and it made a sound as though it were trying to say something.”

  “You mean it was still functioning?”

  “Just barely, Golan. Then it collapsed.”

  Trevize turned to Bliss. “Do you corroborate all this, Bliss?”

  “It was a robot, and we saw it,” said Bliss.

  “And was it still functioning?”

  Bliss said tonelessly, “As it crumbled, I caught a faint sense of neuronic activity.”

  “How can there have been neuronic activity? A robot doesn’t have an organic brain buil
t of cells.”

  “It has the computerized equivalent, I imagine,” said Bliss, “and I would detect that.”

  “Did you detect a robotic rather than a human mentality?”

  Bliss pursed her lips and said, “It was too feeble to decide anything about it except that it was there.”

  Trevize looked at Bliss, then at Pelorat, and said, in a tone of exasperation, “This changes everything.”

  Part IV: Solaria

  10. Robots

  41.

  TREVIZE SEEMED LOST in thought during dinner, and Bliss concentrated on the food.

  Pelorat, the only one who seemed anxious to speak, pointed out that if the world they were on was Aurora and if it was the first settled world, it ought to be fairly close to Earth.

  “It might pay to scour the immediate stellar neighborhood,” he said. “It would only mean sifting through a few hundred stars at most.”

  Trevize muttered that hit-and-miss was a last resort and he wanted as much information about Earth as possible before attempting to approach it even if he found it. He said no more and Pelorat, clearly squelched, dwindled into silence as well.

  After the meal, as Trevize continued to volunteer nothing, Pelorat said tentatively, “Are we to be staying here, Golan?”

  “Overnight, anyway,” said Trevize. “I need to do a bit more thinking.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Unless there’s something worse than dogs about,” said Trevize, “we’re quite safe here in the ship.”

  Pelorat said, “How long would it take to lift off, if there is something worse than dogs about?”

  Trevize said, “The computer is on launch alert. I think we can manage to take off in between two and three minutes. And it will warn us quite effectively if anything unexpected takes place, so I suggest we all get some sleep. Tomorrow morning, I’ll come to a decision as to the next move.”