Asimov’s Future History Volume 19

by Isaac Asimov

  Bander seemed amused. “I asked only out of politeness. I need not have asked at all.”

  It held out its hand and from Trevize’s right holster, there emerged his blaster, while from his left holster, there rose up his neuronic whip. Trevize snatched at his weapons but felt his arms held back as though by stiffly elastic bonds. Both Pelorat and Bliss started forward and it was clear that they were held as well.

  Bander said, “Don’t bother trying to interfere. You cannot.” The weapons flew to its hands and it looked them over carefully. “This one,” it said, indicating the blaster, “seems to be a microwave beamer that produces heat, thus exploding any fluid-containing body. The other is more subtle, and, I must confess, I do not see at a glance what it is intended to do. However, since you mean no harm and offer no harm, you don’t need arms. I can, and I do, bleed the energy content of the units of each weapon. That leaves them harmless unless you use one or the other as a club, and they would be clumsy indeed if used for that purpose.”

  The Solarian released the weapons and again they drifted through the air, this time back toward Trevize. Each settled neatly into its holster.

  Trevize, feeling himself released, pulled out his blaster, but there was no need to use it. The contact hung loosely, and the energy unit had clearly been totally drained. That was precisely the case with the neuronic whip as well.

  He looked up at Bander, who said, smiling, “You are quite helpless, Outworlder. I can as easily, if I so desired, destroy your ship and, of course, you.”

  11. Underground

  47.

  TREVIZE FELT FROZEN. Trying to breathe normally, he turned to look at Bliss.

  She was standing with her arm protectively about Pelorat’s waist, and, to all appearances, was quite calm. She smiled slightly and, even more slightly, nodded her head.

  Trevize turned back to Bander. Having interpreted Bliss’s actions as signifying confidence, and hoping with dreadful earnestness that he was correct, he said grimly, “How did you do that, Bander?”

  Bander smiled, obviously in high good humor. “Tell me, little Outworlders, do you believe in sorcery? In magic?”

  “No, we do not, little Solarian,” snapped Trevize.

  Bliss tugged at Trevize’s sleeve and whispered, “Don’t irritate him. He’s dangerous.”

  “I can see he is,” said Trevize, keeping his voice low with difficulty. “You do something, then.”

  Her voice barely heard, Bliss said, “Not yet. He will be less dangerous if he feels secure.”

  Bander paid no attention to the brief whispering among the Outworlders. It moved away from them uncaringly, the robots separating to let it pass.

  Then it looked back and crooked a finger languidly. “Come. Follow me. All three of you. I will tell you a story that may not interest you, but that interests me.” It continued to walk forward leisurely.

  Trevize remained in place for a while, uncertain as to the best course of action. Bliss walked forward, however, and the pressure of her arm led Pelorat forward as well. Eventually, Trevize moved; the alternative was to be left standing alone with the robots.

  Bliss said lightly, “If Bander will be so kind as to tell the story that may not interest us-”

  Bander turned and looked intently at Bliss as though he were truly aware of her for the first time. “You are the feminine half-human,” he said, “aren’t you? The lesser half?”

  “The smaller half, Bander. Yes.”

  “These other two are masculine half-humans, then?”

  “So they are.”

  “Have you had your child yet, feminine?”

  “My name, Bander, is Bliss. I have not yet had a child. This is Trevize. This is Pel.”

  “And which of these two masculines is to assist you when it is your time? Or will it be both? Or neither?”

  “Pel will assist me, Bander.”

  Bander turned his attention to Pelorat. “You have white hair, I see.”

  Pelorat said, “I have.”

  “Was it always that color?”

  “No, Bander, it became so with age.”

  “And how old are you?”

  “I am fifty-two years old, Bander,” Pelorat said, then added hastily, “That’s Galactic Standard Years.”

  Bander continued to walk (toward the distant mansion, Trevize assumed), but more slowly. It said, “I don’t know how long a Galactic Standard Year is, but it can’t be very different from our year. And how old will you be when you die, Pel?”

  “I can’t say. I may live thirty more years.”

  “Eighty-two years, then. Short-lived, and divided in halves. Unbelievable, and yet my distant ancestors were like you and lived on Earth.-But some of them left Earth to establish new worlds around other stars, wonderful worlds, well organized, and many.”

  Trevize said loudly, “Not many. Fifty.”

  Bander turned a lofty eye on Trevize. There seemed less humor in it now. “Trevize. That’s your name.”

  “Golan Trevize in full. I say there were fifty Spacer worlds. Our worlds number in the millions.”

  “Do you know, then, the story that I wish to tell you?” said Bander softly.

  “If the story is that there were once fifty Spacer worlds, we know it.”

  “We count not in numbers only, little half-human,” said Bander. “We count the quality, too. There were fifty, but such a fifty that not all your millions could make up one of them. And Solaria was the fiftieth and, therefore, the best. Solaria was as far beyond the other Spacer worlds, as they were beyond Earth.

  “We of Solaria alone learned how life was to be lived. We did not herd and flock like animals, as they did on Earth, as they did on other worlds, as they did even on the other Spacer worlds. We lived each alone, with robots to help us, viewing each other electronically as often as we wished, but coming within natural sight of one another only rarely. It is many years since I have gazed at human beings as I now gaze at you but, then, you are only half-humans and your presence, therefore, does not limit my freedom any more than a cow would limit it, or a robot.

  “Yet we were once half-human, too. No matter how we perfected our freedom; no matter how we developed as solitary masters over countless robots; the freedom was never absolute. In order to produce young there had to be two individuals in co-operation. It was possible, of course, to contribute sperm cells and egg cells, to have the fertilization process and the consequent embryonic growth take place artificially in automated fashion. It was possible for the infant to live adequately under robotic care. It could all be done, but the half-humans would not give up the pleasure that went with biological impregnation. Perverse emotional attachments would develop in consequence and freedom vanished. Do you see that that had to be changed?”

  Trevize said, “No, Bander, because we do not measure freedom by your standards.”

  “That is because you do not know what freedom is. You have never lived but in swarms, and you know no way of life but to be constantly forced, in even the smallest things, to bend your wills to those of others or, which is equally vile, to spend your days struggling to force others to bend their wills to yours. Where is any possible freedom there? Freedom is nothing if it is not to live as you wish! Exactly as you wish!

  “Then came the time when the Earthpeople began to swarm outward once more, when their clinging crowds again swirled through space. The other Spacers, who did not flock as the Earthpeople did, but who flocked nevertheless, if to a lesser degree, tried to compete.

  “We Solarians did not. We foresaw inevitable failure in swarming. We moved underground and broke off all contact with the rest of the Galaxy. We were determined to remain ourselves at all costs. We developed suitable robots and weapons to protect our apparently empty surface, and they did the job admirably. Ships came and were destroyed, and stopped coming. The planet was considered deserted, and was forgotten, as we hoped it would be.

  “And meanwhile, underground, we worked to solve our problems. We adjusted our
genes gingerly, delicately. We had failures, but some successes, and we capitalized on the successes. It took us many centuries, but we finally became whole human beings, incorporating both the masculine and feminine principles in one body, supplying our own complete pleasure at will, and producing, when we wished, fertilized eggs for development under skilled robotic care.”

  “Hermaphrodites,” said Pelorat.

  “Is that what it is called in your language?” asked Bander indifferently. “I have never heard the word.”

  “Hermaphroditism stops evolution dead in its tracks,” said Trevize. “Each child is the genetic duplicate of its hermaphroditic parent.”

  “Come,” said Bander, “you treat evolution as a hit-and-miss affair. We can design our children if we wish. We can change and adjust the genes and, on occasion, we do.-But we are almost at my dwelling. Let us enter. It grows late in the day. The sun already fails to give its warmth adequately and we will be more comfortable indoors.”

  They passed through a door that had no locks of any kind but that opened as they approached and closed behind them as they passed through. There were no windows, but as they entered a cavernous room, the walls glowed to luminous life and brightened. The floor seemed bare, but was soft and springy to the touch. In each of the four corners of the room, a robot stood motionless.

  “That wall,” said Bander, pointing to the wall opposite the door-a wall that seemed no different in any way from the other three-” is my visionscreen. The world opens before me through that screen but it in no way limits my freedom for I cannot be compelled to use it.”

  Trevize said, “Nor can you compel another to use his if you wish to see him through that screen and he does not.”

  “Compel?” said Bander haughtily. “Let another do as it pleases, if it is but content that I do as I please. Please note that we do not use gendered pronouns in referring to each other.”

  There was one chair in the room, facing the vision-screen, and Bander sat down in it.

  Trevize looked about, as though expecting additional chairs to spring from the floor. “May we sit, too?” he said.

  “If you wish,” said Bander.

  Bliss, smiling, sat down on the floor. Pelorat sat down beside her. Trevize stubbornly continued to stand.

  Bliss said, “Tell me, Bander, how many human beings live on this planet?”

  “Say Solarians, half-human Bliss. The phrase ‘human being’ is contaminated by the fact that half-humans call themselves that. We might call ourselves whole-humans, but that is clumsy. Solarian is the proper term.”

  “How many Solarians, then, live on this planet?”

  “I am not certain. We do not count ourselves. Perhaps twelve hundred.”

  “Only twelve hundred on the entire world?”

  “Fully twelve hundred. You count in numbers again, while we count in quality.-Nor do you understand freedom. If one other Solarian exists to dispute my absolute mastery over any part of my land, over any robot or living thing or object, my freedom is limited. Since other Solarians exist, the limitation on freedom must be removed as far as possible by separating them all to the point where contact is virtually nonexistent. Solaria will hold twelve hundred Solarians under conditions approaching the ideal. Add more, and liberty will be palpably limited so that the result will be unendurable.”

  “That means each child must be counted and must balance deaths,” said Pelorat suddenly.

  “Certainly. That must be true of any world with a stable population-even yours, perhaps.”

  “And since there are probably few deaths, there must therefore be few children.”

  “Indeed.”

  Pelorat nodded his head and was silent.

  Trevize said, “What I want to know is how you made my weapons fly through the air. You haven’t explained that.”

  “I offered you sorcery or magic as an explanation. Do you refuse to accept that?”

  “Of course I refuse. What do you take me for?”

  “Will you, then, believe in the conservation of energy, and in the necessary increase of entropy?”

  “That I do. Nor can I believe that even in twenty thousand years you have changed these laws, or modified them a micrometer.”

  “Nor have we, half-person. But now consider. Outdoors, there is sunlight.” There was its oddly graceful gesture, as though marking out sunlight all about. “And there is shade. It is warmer in the sunlight than in the shade, and heat flows spontaneously from the sunlit area into the shaded area.”

  “You tell me what I know,” said Trevize.

  “But perhaps you know it so well that you no longer think about it. And at night, Solaria’s surface is warmer than the objects beyond its atmosphere, so that heat flows spontaneously from the planetary surface into outer space.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “And day or night, the planetary interior is warmer than the planetary surface. Heat therefore flows spontaneously from the interior to the surface. I imagine you know that, too.”

  “And what of all that, Bander?”

  “The flow of heat from hotter to colder, which must take place by the second law of thermodynamics, can be used to do work.”

  “In theory, yes, but sunlight is dilute, the heat of the planetary surface is even more dilute, and the rate at which heat escapes from the interior makes that the most dilute of all. The amount of heat-flow that can be harnessed would probably not be enough to lift a pebble.”

  “It depends on the device you use for the purpose,” said Bander. “Our own tool was developed over a period of thousands of years and it is nothing less than a portion of our brain.”

  Bander lifted the hair on either side of its head, exposing that portion of its skull behind its ears. It turned its head this way and that, and behind each ear was a bulge the size and shape of the blunt end of a hen’s egg.

  “That portion of my brain, and its absence in you, is what makes the difference between a Solarian and you.”

  48.

  TREVIZE GLANCED NOW and then at Bliss’s face, which seemed entirely concentrated on Bander. Trevize had grown quite certain he knew what was going on.

  Bander, despite its paean to freedom, found this unique opportunity irresistible. There was no way it could speak to robots on a basis of intellectual equality, and certainly not to animals. To speak to its fellow-Solarians would be, to it, unpleasant, and what communication there must be would be forced, and never spontaneous.

  As for Trevize, Bliss, and Pelorat, they might be half-human to Bander, and it might regard them as no more an infringement on its liberty than a robot or a goat would be-but they were its intellectual equals (or near equals) and the chance to speak to them was a unique luxury it had never experienced before.

  No wonder, Trevize thought, it was indulging itself in this way. And Bliss (Trevize was doubly sure) was encouraging this, just pushing Bander’s mind ever so gently in order to urge it to do what it very much wanted to do in any case.

  Bliss, presumably, was working on the supposition that if Bander spoke enough, it might tell them something useful concerning Earth. That made sense to Trevize, so that even if he had not been truly curious about the subject under discussion, he would nevertheless have endeavored to continue the conversation.

  “What do those brain-lobes do?” Trevize asked.

  Bander said, “They are transducers. They are activated by the flow of heat and they convert the heat-flow into mechanical energy.”

  “I cannot believe that. The flow of heat is insufficient.”

  “Little half-human, you do not think. If there were many Solarians crowded together, each trying to make use of the flow of heat, then, yes, the supply would be insufficient. I, however, have over forty thousand square kilometers that are mine, mine alone. I can collect heat-flow from any quantity of those square kilometers with no one to dispute me, so the quantity is sufficient. Do you see?”

  “Is it that simple to collect heat-flow over a wide area? The mer
e act of concentration takes a great deal of energy.”

  “Perhaps, but I am not aware of it. My transducer-lobes are constantly concentrating heat-flow so that as work is needed, work is done. When I drew your weapons into the air, a particular volume of the sunlit atmosphere lost some of its excess heat to a volume of the shaded area, so that I was using solar energy for the purpose. Instead of using mechanical or electronic devices to bring that about, however, I used a neuronic device.” It touched one of the transducer-lobes gently. “It does it quickly, efficiently, constantly-and effortlessly.”

  “Unbelievable,” muttered Pelorat.

  “Not at all unbelievable,” said Bander. “Consider the delicacy of the eye and ear., and how they can turn small quantities of photons and air vibrations into information. That would seem unbelievable if you had never come across it before. The transducer-lobes are no more unbelievable, and would not be so to you, were they not unfamiliar.”

  Trevize said, “What do you do with these constantly operating transducerlobes?”

  “We run our world,” said Bander. “Every robot on this vast estate obtains its energy from me; or, rather, from natural heat-flow. Whether a robot is adjusting a contact, or felling a tree, the energy is derived from mental transduction-my mental transduction.”

  “And if you are asleep?”

  “The process of transduction continues waking or sleeping, little half-human,” said Bander. “Do you cease breathing when you sleep? Does your heart stop beating? At night, my robots continue working at the cost of cooling Solaria’s interior a bit. The change is immeasurably small on a global scale and there are only twelve hundred of us, so that all the energy we use does not appreciably shorten our sun’s life or drain the world’s internal heat.”

  “Has it occurred to you that you might use it as a weapon?”

  Bander stared at Trevize as though he were something peculiarly incomprehensible. “I suppose by that,” he said, “you mean that Solaria might confront other worlds with energy weapons based on transduction? Why should we? Even if we could beat their energy weapons based on other principles-which is anything but certain-what would we gain? The control of other worlds? What do we want with other worlds when we have an ideal world of our own? Do we want to establish our domination over half-humans and use them in forced labor? We have our robots that are far better than half-humans for the purpose. We have everything. We want nothing-except to be left to ourselves. See here-I’ll tell you another story.”