Foundation's Triumph

by David Brin

  “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 ro
botic “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, according 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.

  But the Pride of Rhodia’s captain seemed as surprised as anybody. His unarmed yacht had been ill prepared for any sort of attack, let alone one launched by such a powerful ship.

  As the airlock cycled, Hari kept a hand on Kers Kantun’s sleeve. This situation called for patient waiting. I’ve been around a long time, he thought. There’s no type of person I haven’t learned to handle by now.

  But when their captors came aboard, they looked nothing at all like what Hari expected.

  Maserd stared in surprise. Horis Antic gasped, and tension rippled along Kers Kantun’s arm.

  But Jeni Cuicet clapped her hands and murmured in clear admiration.

  “Cool!”

  The first one wore a segmented garment that shimmered like an oil slick, flowing across her exaggeratedly pneumatic torso like something erotically alive.

  “I am Sybyl,” she said. “We have met before, Dr. Seldon, though I’m convinced you won’t remember me.”

  Hari squinted at the unpleasant confusion of colors. A luminescent motif extended even to the woman’s hair, which shifted and gently writhed of its own accord, like a sleeping pet draped across her head. Her face had a stretched look, and he guessed that advanced surgical microadjustments had been used to smooth out age wrinkles, at the cost of giving her skin a paper-thin translucence.

  “I would surely remember, madam, if I ever beheld an entrance like the one you just performed. But as your appearance is utterly unmatched in my experience, you’ll have to remind me where and when we knew each other.”

  Her eyelids closed, and briefly Hari saw them flash, as if for the barest moment they had become miniature holo screens.

  “All in good time, Academician. But first, let me introduce my collaborator, Gornon Vlimt.”

  She lifted a hand languidly toward the airlock, through which stepped an exaggeratedly male figure, lithe where Maserd was hefty, but wiry and evidently augmented in ways that bulged
through his tight clothes. His garments did not gyre and move the way hers did. But their pattern of weave was complex to a degree that made Hari recall the fractal lichen artwork in the imperial gardens. The mathematical corners of his mind felt instantly drawn, as if to a singularity.

  “I am Biron Maserd,” the captain replied. “Since you know the name of my ship, I assume you are also aware that it’s unarmed. We are on a peaceful scientific survey mission. I demand to know why you murdered those policemen and seized us in this way.”

  The woman named Sybyl scanned Maserd up and down.

  “Why you pompous aristo-throwback! Is that the gratitude we get for rescuing you from arrest? How dare you call it murder for the combat forces of a free republic to destroy their sworn enemies!”

  When silence greeted her, she sneered. “Do you mean to say that you really have no idea what this is about? You haven’t heard about the war?”

  Maserd glanced at Hari, who shrugged and looked at Horis. Evidently none of them had the slightest idea what she was talking about.

  “The war that’s being waged by the whole damned Galactic Empire of Humanity against planet Ktlina!” shouted the man in the fractal bodysuit. Gornon Vlimt grew more agitated when no one seemed to comprehend. “By great Baley’s beard. Sybyl, it’s worse than we thought. There’s been a total news blackout!”

  “I figured. But these three, with their contacts, should have heard by now. Seldon has stringers allover the galaxy, feeding him data for his sociomathematical models. The Grey Man and the aristo would have their own sources. I can’t understand how--”

  “Oh!” Jeni Cuicet cried. “I’ve heard of Ktlina. It’s the latest chaos world!”

  Hari blinked, feeling a dawn of recognition.

  “I think...there may have been something about it in one of Gaal Dornick’s reports.”

  “Oh, yes.” Horis Antic snapped two fingers. “A notice came down, for star-level executives and above. There’s been a sanitary embargo of sorts...out in far Demeter Sector.”