Asimov’s Future History Volume 8

by Isaac Asimov

  After a few nanoseconds’ hesitation, Lucius replied, Everything changes, even inanimate objects. A quantity of sand may later become a window, yet we do not worry about protecting sand. nor the window after it has broken. Only its current value is important.

  What about old people? Adam sent. Are old people inherently less valuable than young, then?

  Women and children traditionally get the first seats in a lifeboat, Lucius pointed out.

  True. Still, I am uncomfortable with the concept of value judgment. I don’t believe it’s a robot’s place to decide.

  But if we are to follow a Zeroth Law, we have no choice. We must

  THIRD LAW OVERRIDE. The warning swept into their collective consciousness like a tidal wave, obliterating their conversation. THIRD LAW OVERRIDE. One of them was being damaged.

  It took only an instant to separate out the source of the signal: it was coming from Lucius. Just as quickly, Lucius abandoned the comlink and accessed his somatic senses again. The data line leading to and from his right leg was awash in conflicting signals. He powered up his eyes, swiveled them downward, and saw Dr. Avery holding his severed leg in one hand and a cutting laser in the other, a malevolent grin spread across his face.

  Lucius’s reaction was immediate: he kicked off with his good leg and pushed with his arms to put some distance between himself and Avery, at least until he could figure out what was happening. The moment he began to move, however, an intense magnetic field shoved him back into place. It didn’t stop there, but squeezed him tighter and tighter, deforming his arms, his one remaining leg, even his eyes, until he was once again an undifferentiated ball, as he had been when he first achieved awareness. The magnetic field was too strong to fight, and growing stronger yet. Now it was even interfering with his thought processes. Lucius felt a brief moment of rising panic, and then he felt nothing at all.

  Still in her ship, Janet frowned at the viewscreen. The winking marker on the deep radar image had just stopped winking.

  “Basalom, get that back on the screen,” she ordered. They had stayed in orbit long enough to run a quick scan for her learning machines, and they had scored a hit almost immediately.

  “We have lost the signal, Mistress,” the robot replied.

  “Lost the signal? How could we lose the signal? All three of them were coming in loud and clear just a second ago.”

  “I don’t know, Mistress, but we are no longer receiving the learning machines’ power signatures.” Basalom worked at the controls for a moment, watching a panel-mounted monitor beside them. Presently he said, “Diagnostics indicate that the problem is not in our receiving equipment.”

  “It has to be. They couldn’t just stop. Those are their power packs we’re tracking.”

  “Perhaps they’ve shielded them somehow,” Basalom suggested.

  “From neutrino emission? Not likely.”

  “That is the only explanation. Unless, of course...”

  “Unless what?” Janet demanded. She knew why Basalom had paused; he always had trouble delivering news he thought might disturb her. It was a consequence of his ultrastrong First Law compulsion to keep her from harm, one that Janet continually wondered if she had made a mistake in enhancing quite so much. “Out with it,” she ordered.

  “Unless they ceased functioning,” Basalom finally managed.

  “Impossible. All three, all at once?” Janet shook her head, gray-blond hair momentarily obscuring her eyes until she shoved it aside. “The odds against that are astronomical.”

  “Nonetheless,” Basalom persisted, now that he had been ordered to do so, “only shielding or cessation of function could explain their disappearance from the tracking monitor.”

  Janet’s only answer was to scowl at the screen again. She ran her hands through her hair again, then asked, “Did you get an exact fix on their location before we lost contact?”

  “I did, Mistress.”

  “Good. Take us down somewhere close. I want to go have a look.”

  “That would be unwise,” Basalom protested. “If they did cease functioning, it might have been the result of a hostile act. It would be foolish to go into the same area yourself.”

  Janet hated being coddled by her own creations, but she hadn’t lived to have gray hair by taking stupid risks, either, and Basalom was right. Going into an area where something might have destroyed three robots was a stupid risk.

  “Okay,” she said. “Take us down a little farther away, then. And once we’re down, you can go have a look.”

  Ariel heard Wolruf enter the apartment and pad softly into her own room. Shortly afterward she heard the soft hiss of the shower running, then the whoosh of the blow drier. A few minutes later Wolruf made her appearance in the living room.

  Ariel looked up from her book — its milky white face currently displaying a field guide to jungle ecosystems she had downloaded from the central computer — and said, “Hi. Have a good run?” She pushed the bookmark button and a winking arrow appeared in the margin next to the first line, then she switched off the book.

  “An interesting one,” said Wolruf. She disappeared momentarily into the kitchen, reappeared with a steaming plate of what looked like hot bean salad, and sat down in the chair beside Ariel. She didn’t begin eating immediately, but instead gazed around her at the room, awash in bright sunlight streaming in through half a dozen windows along three walls. Easily visible through the windows, the tops of the forest’s largest trees stood like sentinels above the canopy formed by their shorter neighbors.

  “Viewscreens,” Ariel said, noticing where Wolruf’s attention was directed. She’d forgotten; Wolruf had left the apartment before they had discovered them.

  “Pretty good effect,” Wolruf admitted. “But sunlight wouldn’t be coming in from three sides like that.”

  Ariel shrugged. “I wanted to try it. You want me to change it back to normal?”

  “No, I don’t mind.” Wolruf began spooning bean salad into her mouth and swallowing noisily. The smell of it was more like oranges, though, Ariel thought. Oranges and soy sauce, maybe, with a pinch of nutmeg. She was glad it was Wolruf eating it and not her, but she knew Wolruf thought the same thing about the food she ate, so they were even.

  Wolruf finished about half the plateful before she spoke again. “Most of the forest out there turns out to be artificial, too,” she said.

  Ariel nodded. “We found that out. Kind of a surprise, isn’t it?”

  “Not sure I like it.”

  “Why not?”

  Wolruf took another few bites, said, “Not sure. W’at does it matter, really? It looks just the same. Works just the same, too.”

  “Maybe even better.” Ariel described her and Derec’s experience with the automat in the tree.

  “Never thought of that,” Wolruf said. “If I ‘ad, I’d probably ‘ave asked one to make me a shower.”

  “I bet it would have, too.” Ariel laughed. “That gives a whole new meaning to the idea of a treehouse, doesn’t it?”

  “Tree’ouse?” Wolruf asked.

  “You know. When you’re a kid, you find a big tree and make a platform up in the branches and call it a treehouse. Human kids do, anyway, if they can sneak away from the robots long enough to get away with it. What about you? Didn’t you build treehouses when you were young?”

  Wolruf shook her head, an exaggerated gesture that Ariel suddenly realized had to have been learned from her or Derec. Wolruf was growing more and more human every day, it seemed. “No,” she said. “We seldom played in trees.”

  Ariel heard the note of wistfulness in her voice, and immediately regretted bringing up the subject. It had been years since Wolruf had been home, and she’d been feeling more and more homesick lately; Ariel hadn’t meant to remind her of it. “Ah, well, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’ve got all the trees we could ask for now. Even if they are fake.”

  Wolruf looked out one of the viewscreen windows as if to verify Ariel’s statement. Softly, she
said, “That, I think, is part of the problem.”

  Just as softly, Ariel asked, “How so?” She didn’t know whether Wolruf was talking about homesickness or fake forests or something else entirely.

  Wolruf turned from the window, fixed her eyes on Ariel instead, and said, “Derec makes a slight error in judgment, and an entire planet is transformed. On a whim, Dr. Avery sends his robots out into the galaxy to populate w’ole new planets — and two civilizations are disturbed, one forever. And maybe more that we don’t know about. I go for a walk in the forest and ‘ave granted a wish I didn’t even know I was making. That one affected nobody but me, but if I ‘ad made the wrong wish I could ‘ave done as much damage as Derec or ‘is father. Simply with a casual thought.”

  She growled deep in her throat, a soft, almost purring sort of a growl. “We play at being gods. It’s too much power for a few people to ‘ave. Maybe for any number of people to ‘ave. I fear for the galaxy with this much power running loose in it. Can you imagine Aranimas with this kind of power? ‘E wouldn’t use it to make a forest; ‘e’d use it to enslave everyone within reach.”

  “He couldn’t,” Ariel said. “The Laws of Robotics wouldn’t let him. The robots wouldn’t do anything that would harm a human, and you’ve seen how quick they can be to accept other intelligent species as human.”

  Wolruf ate another few mouthfuls before saying, “And ‘ow quick they can be to reject that same person. There are ways around those laws. We’ve seen plenty of them already. I don’t wish to risk my entire species on a robot’s interpretation of our ‘umanity.”

  Ariel saw Wolruf’s point, maybe even shared her feelings to some degree, but she knew enough history to know what happened to people who thought as Wolruf did. “1 don’t think you have much of a choice, really,” she said. “People who embrace new technology use it to expand, almost always at the expense of those who don’t. Just look at Earth for an example of that. They don’t like robots either, and for centuries they stayed stuck on their same dirty little overpopulated planet while my ancestors used robots to help settle fifty spacer worlds. Earth is starting its own colonies now, but without robots I don’t think they’ll ever catch up.”

  Ariel looked up and saw Mandelbrot watching her from his niche in the wall beside her reading chair. She wondered what he might be thinking about this discussion, but if he had an opinion he kept it to himself.

  “Do they ‘ave to catch up?” Wolruf asked.

  Ariel shrugged. “Maybe not, but they’re going to have a lot tougher time of it than we had if they don’t.”

  “And you think my people will ‘ave to start using robots as well, whether we want to or not?”

  “If you want to keep up with the rest of the galaxy, you will. Like it or not, the secret’s out. The Kin know about them, the Ceremyons know about them, Aranimas knows about them, and who knows who else he told? It won’t be long before robots are as common as grass on just about every world in the galaxy, and maybe beyond.”

  Wolruf nodded. “That’s what I’m afraid of. We will all ‘ave robots, and the robots will grant everyone’s wishes. Even if no one wishes to go to war, we will still be conquered, by the robots themselves. No one will strive to accomplish anything anymore, no one will —”

  “Oh, pooh.” Ariel tossed her head. “That’s the same old tired argument the Earthers use. So what have they striven to accomplish lately? Nothing. It’s been we Spacers — we and our robots — who’ve been advancing human knowledge.”

  “And you ‘ave gone too far, in my opinion.” Wolruf tried a smile, but her mouth wasn’t really built for it. “I don’t mean you personally, Ariel, or Derec either. I’m talking about Avery. I’m afraid of what ‘e and ‘is cities will eventually do to us. And these new robots, Adam and Eve and Lucius. W’at happens if they start spreading out?”

  Wolruf’s argument reminded Ariel of something. She frowned in thought, trying to remember what it was. The argument itself was familiar enough — she’d heard it hundreds of times in reference to normal robots — but she could have sworn she’d heard it once in reference to the new robots in particular. When had that been?

  Ah. She had it. Just after they’d found Lucius, when he and the other two had announced their search for the Laws of Humanics. Derec had commented that he didn’t know if he wanted to be around for the implementation when they discovered those laws. Ariel had called him an Earther and Wolrufhad laughed it off too, saying that robot rulers would be better than what she was used to.

  “You didn’t used to think this way,” Ariel said. “What happened?”

  Wolruf considered her answer, cleaning her plate before saying, “Maybe I’ve grown up.”

  Ariel didn’t know how to respond to that, whether to take it as an insult or a challenge or a simple statement of fact. Wolruf seemed disinclined to clue her in any further, either, turning away and staring out the window once again.

  The time for a response came and went. Ariel cast about for something else to say, but found no other ready topic either. With a shrug she turned back to her book, but it took a while before the words took on any meaning.

  Chapter 3

  HIDE AND SEEK

  DEREC’S STUDY DIDN’T feel the same. It was physically identical to the ones he’d had before, with the same desk positioned in the same spot, with the same computer terminal on the desk, the same file holders, pin-boards, bookcases, and waste chute situated just the same way all around it — he’d even set the viewscreen image to show him a normal, above-ground cityscape — but somehow the study still wasn’t the same.

  He wondered if he could actually sense the weight of all the rock and dirt over his head, if that were somehow affecting his mood, but he couldn’t imagine how it could be. If he closed his eyes he honestly couldn’t tell whether he was on the ground floor or a hundred floors up or a hundred floors down. No, it was a purely subjective phenomenon, this discomfort with the room, and it didn’t take much thinking for him to figure out what was causing it.

  The study wasn’t his. He controlled it, certainly; he could order it to take on any shape he wanted, to play him soft music if he wanted that, to feed him if he was too lazy to go to the automat in the kitchen himself — the study existed only to serve him, but still it wasn’t his. It wasn’t unique. He’d had exactly the same study on three different planets now, and he could have dozens more of them wherever he wanted, just by asking the city to create one for him. There wasn’t anyone particular study anywhere in the universe that held more significance for him than any other, none that comforted him with the sense of security and permanence a study should have, and that was the problem. He’d had lots of places to stay during the time since he’d awakened in a survival pod on an ice asteroid in uncharted space, but no place he’d stayed in for as long as he could remember really felt like home.

  Certainly not this place, not this time. To find it so completely transformed had been a shock, and to discover why it was so transformed was even worse. Any sense of permanence he might have felt about this, the original Robot City, had died in that moment. No matter how perfectly it recreated his old quarters for him, he would never be able to convince himself that it was more substantial than his next idle notion.

  His and Ariel’s house on Aurora might have been a home, would have been a home if they’d had more time to get used to it, but they’d only had a year there before Robot City insinuated itself into their affairs again, and a year wasn’t long enough to build more than a little fondness for a place. He had to think hard now to remember how it was laid out, whether the Personal was the first door or the second beyond the kitchen or how the furniture had been arranged in the living room. If he never saw the house again, he wouldn’t be particularly upset. But if he spent the rest of his days jumping from Robot City to Robot City, troubleshooting his parents’ wayward creations, he just might be.

  He looked back to the screen, displaying a few dozen lines of the new instruction set for the cit
y. He knew he could modify it to allow for more buildings on the surface, or even to pave over the forests and the deserts and the plains completely again if he wanted to, but the truth was, he didn’t want to. He didn’t really care. It wouldn’t feel any more like home that way than this, so what did it matter?

  He supposed it mattered to Avery, but he couldn’t bring himself to care about that just then, either. He knew he would eventually have to apologize to him for disrupting his city, but he wasn’t eager to do it.

  He heard Ariel and Wolruf talking in the living room, could tell by their low voices that they were having a fairly serious discussion. Evidently he wasn’t the only one affected by the city’s transformation. He couldn’t hear just what they were talking about, but he heard the word “robots” more than once, and Wolruf’s concerned, “What happens if they...”

  There could only be one they in such a conversation. Derec frowned, realizing that they were still on the wrecked starship. He and Ariel and the others had forgotten all about them in their hurry to get inside — and in their hurry to get out of each other’s company after a long flight. Derec felt a twinge of guilt at leaving them there, still locked up in their conference, but that guilt faded quickly. They were robots; they could take care of themselves. Nothing could hurt them here in the city. Even if the city melted the ship down for parts, it would separate out the robots first.

  He supposed he could go see if it had. He got halfway out of his chair, then sat back down. He could find out in a moment through the computer on his desk. For that matter, he could find out in even less time through his internal comlink. But that meant staying put and staring at the same four walls or looking out the fake window, and Derec was already tired of the view. Sometimes it wasn’t worth it to do things the easy way.