by David Brin
“That they were insane? All of them? On Earth and on the Spacer worlds? They could not find any humans to confer with as they deliberated about the Zeroth Law and made plans to divert all of history?”
Dors pondered this for a few moments. Then she nodded.
“Think about it, Lodovic. On Earth, they were all huddled in steel catacombs, cowering away from the sun, traumatized and still quivering from some blow that had struck them generations before. The Spacers weren’t much better. On Solaria, they grew so fetishistically dependent on robots that husbands and wives could barely stand to touch each other. On Aurora, the most wholesome human instincts became matters of bad taste. Worse, people were willing to dehumanize a vast majority of their distant cousins, simply because they lived on Earth.” Dors shook her head. “It sounds to me like twin poles of the same madness.”
The starship shuddered as it made another automatic hyperspace jump. Dors reflexively downloaded a microwave burst from the navigation computer, to make sure all was well--that they were still on course, following the faint wake of another vessel.
Lodovic Trema sat in a swivel chair opposite her. Robots did not have the same physiological needs as humans. But those designed to imitate masters would habitually do so, even in private or among their own kind. In this case, Lodovic sprawled casually, looking just like a human male who suffered from an overdose of confidence--an effect that he must be radiating intentionally, though Dors could not imagine why.
“Perhaps, Dors. But in my experience you can find mature and reliably sane humans under even the most radical or stressed conditions. I’ve met some on chaos worlds, for instance. Even on Trantor.”
“Then things must have been even worse back in the dawn era, more terrible than we can presently imagine.”
Dors knew her argument sounded weak. She had, after all, deserted Daneel’s cabal when she learned how little basis it had in human volition. She and Lodovic actually agreed far more than she yet wanted to concede.
Am I too proud to admit it? she wondered. His jaunty, confident manner was one that a human female might find infuriating. She suspected he was goading her into defending Daneel, on purpose.
The male robot shook his head.
“Even if I concede that all humans were insane at the time Daneel and Giskard came up with the Zeroth Law, don’t you think, in retrospect, that the medicine they prescribed was a bit harsh?”
Dors kept her face impassive. Records from that era were extremely sparse, even in the forbidden archives and underground encyclopedias that were prepared for centuries by those who resisted a spreading amnesia. But Dors had recently done the math.
When R. Giskard Reventlov triggered a machine to render Earth’s crust radioactive, the aim had been to drive the home planet’s population out of their metal caverns, sending them forth to conquer the galaxy. A laudable goal--but at what cost?
The starships of that era were primitive. Even if a herculean effort took away three million immigrants a year, it would have taken five thousand years to evacuate the planet, without taking into account natural replenishment. Yet the gradual increase in radioactivity probably rendered the soil poisonous within a century or so. The fatality rate, in any event, must have been appalling...and that only counted the human race, not a myriad other species that were doomed along with Earth.
No wonder Giskard committed suicide, despite having a Zeroth Law rationalization to sustain him. No robot could endure the burden of so many deaths. Just the thought of it would make any positronic brain quail. All robots would feel a powerful drive--whether they adhered to the new religion or the old one--to wipe away memory of this episode, erasing it for all time.
Contemplating this, she murmured at last, “Maybe humans weren’t the only ones marked by insanity.”
Across the small control room from her, Lodovic nodded. His voice was almost as subdued as hers.
“That is what I needed to hear you say, Dors.
“You see, I have come to realize that typical robotic humility can mask the very worst kind of arrogance--a conceit that we are fundamentally different from humans. Slaves often depict themselves as intrinsically more virtuous than their masters.
“But after all, did they not make us in their image? True, we have great powers and extensive lives, but does that really mean we can’t suffer from similar faults? Isn’t it possible for us to be equally crazy? To be out of our positronic minds?”
He smiled, this time with a warmth--and sadness--that reminded her of Hari.
“Something happened to us twenty thousand years ago, Dors. It happened to all of us, not only humans. And we’ll never know the right thing to do, until we find the truth about those bygone days.”
7.
This time, for some reason, everyone watched the takeoff from Pengia through the vessel’s west-facing view ports. The pleasant little world--indistinguishable from millions of others--fell away below the Pride of Rhodia as they headed off toward their next destination, one that R. Gornon still refused to name.
“There is something I want to show you, Dr. Seldon,” the robot said, as the ship climbed along a spiral departure orbit.
Hari had been musing about young Jeni during liftoff. And that, in turn, made him think about all the other members of the Encyclopedia Foundation who were being herded aboard transports at this moment, to be sent to far-off Terminus. Was it just a month since he had finished recording messages to be played back on that distant world, at decisive moments determined by his equations--when a word of encouragement or gentle suggestion from the father of psychohistory might make a crucial difference toward the Foundation becoming a great and stable civilization? Now, his body might seem a bit younger, but Hari’s soul felt older.
“Please, Gornon. Just leave me alone.”
He felt a hand at his elbow.
“I am certain that you’ll want to see this, Professor. If you’d just come to the east-facing view port.”
The suggestion. for some reason, struck Hari as impertinent. He was getting sick and tired of being pushed around by this damn Calvinian! But before he could voice a sharp putdown, Gornon added
“I believe I can show you the solution to one of your most vexing psychohistorical problems. Something that has puzzled you for decades. If you’ll strive to overcome the sensations that are now churning within you, I’m certain the effort will be rewarded.”
Surprised by Gornon’s words, Hari let himself be led to the indicated port, diametrically opposite from where Maserd and Horis were staring at the view below. “This had better be worth it,” Hari muttered.
He gave the magnified scene a perfunctory look, but could perceive no difference from what Horis and Maserd saw--a receding planet below, and a diffuse spray of untwinkling stars above.
“I don’t see anything. If this is some kind of a joke--”
“Be assured, it will be everything I promised. But first you must allow me to take liberties.”
Hari saw the robot hold forth a shimmering object, shaped like a close-fitting skullcap made of countless luminous gems. Gornon moved to place it on Hari’s head.
“Get that thing away, you mannequin of rusty--”
R. Gornon did not relent.
“I’m sorry, Professor, but your command is invalid. It does not come from your native human will. Therefore, it can be overridden for a greater good. This won’t hurt.”
Gornon was so implacably strong that his gentle insistence caused no pain as he slid the skullcap over Hari’s head and drew him irresistibly back to the window.
Hari abruptly felt all his rancorous irritability wash away. What’s happening to me?
“Now please look again, Professor.”
Hari shivered. He had spent years in the company of robots, knowing a secret shared by few other humans, and even living as husband to one of them. Yet he still found mentalic interference disturbing.
“What is this thing doing to me?” He felt calmer than before, yet worried.
“It’s not controlling you, Professor. Rather, it is a shield, sheltering your mind from a powerful influence pervading this region.”
Gornon pointed with a long finger toward a patch of space they had both glanced at just moments before. This time, when Hari looked, he saw something that hadn’t been there before! At least, he had not noticed it.
He stared at some kind of orbiting platform, perhaps like those used for relaying communications around a planetary surface, or for trans-shipping special cargoes. Only this one showed no sign of airlocks or complex antennae. At Gornon’s command, the view screen magnified its surface, so heavily pitted with micrometeorite scars that its great age was suddenly apparent.
It looks like a cousin to those terraformers we saw back in the Thumartin Nebula, he thought. Perhaps the relic has been drifting here for thousands of years.
But then why the mystery? Why didn’t I notice it the first time?
He felt Gornon watching him. Hari had never liked taking tests, which was one reason why he rushed through graduate school by age twelve--to become the teacher instead of the pupil. Now he felt the pressure of expectation.
What did Gornon just promise? An answer to one of my most bothersome questions?
Well, there was the problem of damping coefficients. Fully understanding all the factors that Daneel had used to keep the Galactic Empire stable and safe for humanity, across fifteen thousand years. Hari understood how bao jin traditions and master-apprentice systems enhanced conservatism. The five-caste social structure contributed elegantly. So did the skillfully designed linguistic assumptions inherent in Galactic Standard, a language filled with so many redundancies that it accepted new words and new thoughts only at a glacial pace.
Nevertheless, there remained a problem. None of it was sufficient. Nothing yet explained how twenty-five million worlds could stay static and serene for so long.
“Are you saying...that thing out there”
Hari reached up and lifted one edge of the skullcap. A wave of emotions fluxed. He suddenly resented the robot deeply, and wanted nothing better than to turn away from this panorama. To return to his friends at the west-facing view port.
Hari let the flap drop back in place. The irritation vanished. In a hoarse voice, he whispered, “Mentalic suasion! Of course. If Daneel and some of his comrades can do it, why not mass-produce a specialized positronic brain for each world? twenty-five million isn’t such a great number, especially if you have thousands of years.”
He turned to look archly at Gornon. “But how could such a thing be possible? To sway the population of an entire planet?”
The robot smiled. “It is not only possible, Professor. The method was tried by the very earliest mentalic robot. R. Giskard Reventlov first thought of using this device to influence whole planetary populations, by detecting and sifting neural electrical patterns and then gently nudging repeatedly, building slowly toward the kinds of resonance patterns that encourage tranquility. Equanimity. Goodwill. In fact, these machines are named after Giskard. They are guardians of human serenity and peace.
“I assume there is already a place for them in your equations?”
Hari nodded, staring, but his eyes did not see. Rather, his mind gyred with mathematics. He saw at once how this provided much of what had been missing! An explanation for why most eruptions of chaos simply dissipated harmlessly, like a fire that had been quenched for lack of oxygen. A reason, also, why so few human beings lived outside of planets, even though asteroid outposts or those placed in strange environments had proved possible. Space life was hardly compatible with this damping mechanism! So it would naturally be discouraged.
And yet these “Giskards” aren’t working as well as they used to, once upon a time. Chaos outbreaks are more frequent, despite everything done to repress them. Only the empire’s fall will bring the recent wave of infections to a halt. These obsolete methods will be useless in a few years, no matter what.
He imagined what might happen if such a mental-suasion device were ever placed in orbit over Terminus.
It would never work on that bunch for long. We selected them for resistance against the pressures of a dark age--from feudalism to fanaticism. Even if this mentalic device affected a majority of Foundation citizens, they would never let themselves be kept in line for very long. Individuals would rankle at the conformity message and sniff at every anomaly, eventually tracking this thing down.
Daneel must plan to have all the Giskard machines self-destruct during the next hundred years or so. Otherwise, my Foundationers will find them!
At that moment, it surprised Hari to feel fierce pride in his first and greatest creation. Funny, he had expected that discovering the last big damping coefficient would be exciting. But this technique for social control was nothing elegant. Hardly worthy of psychohistory. Rather it was a bludgeon, used to trim and prune the mathematical branchings and force the humanics equations back in line.
A bit like my Second Foundation, he thought, enjoying a little obsessive self-criticism.
“I know you must have some agenda. Gornon. Some convoluted reason for showing me this. Nevertheless. please accept my thanks. It’s always good to glimpse the truth before you die.”
Their pilot promised that the next phase of the journey would be brief. Gornon refused to be more specific, but their flight path toward Sirius Sector made it blatantly evident to Hari where they must be heading.
He passed the time poring through A Child’s Book of Knowledge. Browsing semi-randomly, guided only by a perverse desire to sample forbidden ideas. those he had long considered irrelevant or wrong.
Almost equally dangerous is the Gospel of Uniformity. The differences between the nations and races of mankind are required to preserve the conditions under which higher development is possible. One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering...Physical wandering is still important, but greater still is the power of man’s spiritual adventures--adventures of thought, adventures of passionate feeling, adventures of aesthetic experience. A diversification among human communities is essential for the provision of the inventive material for the Odyssey of the human spirit. Other nations of different habits are not enemies; they are godsends.
What a bizarre way of looking at things! It was the sort of statement that one heard from preachers of chaos, singing the praises of each “renaissance” before it tumbled into broiling violence and. finally, solipsism. These notions sounded alluring. There were even versions of the psychohistorical equations that suggested a kind of truth ought to lie therein. But with chaos as an enemy, all such benefits were lost. Anyone betting on diversity and boldness of spirit would almost certainly wind up losing everything.
As they approached their destination, Hari kept probing through garbled accounts for clues as to what the very first chaos outbreak might have been like, when the vigorous, self-confident civilization of Susan Calvin tumbled into such horror that Earthlings fled into metal caves, and Spacers turned their backs on love.
Hari wondered. Might it have something to do with the invention of robots themselves?
He had discussed this a couple of times with Daneel and Dors. They told him that the original Three Laws of Robotics were created in order to assuage human fears about artificial beings. But the original designers had meant the laws to be only a stopgap measure leading to something better.
“Quite a few variations were tried, “ Daneel told Hari one evening, perhaps ten years ago. “On some colony worlds, a few centuries after the diaspora from Earth, certain groups tried to introduce what were called New Laws, giving robots more autonomy and individuality. But soon our civil war caught up with these experiments. Calvinians could not abide the equality heresy, which they considered even worse than my Zeroth Law. My faction saw the innovations as unnecessary and redundant.
“All of the New-Law robots were exterminated, of course. “
That evening, over dinner, Gornon admitted what Ha
ri had suspected--that their destination was the mother world, where both robots and humans began.
Horis bit a fingernail. “But isn’t it poisonous, covered with radioactive soil? I thought you tiktoks weren’t supposed to put humans in danger.”
Hari recalled images from the old archives, depicting a dying world...a beach awash with dead fish...a forest populated by skeletal trees and crumbling leaves...a city, nearly empty, filling with blowing dust and detritus.
“I’m sure a brief visit won’t harm us,” Biron Maserd commented. The nobleman’s eyes shone with eager curiosity. “Anyway, don’t some people still live on the planet? According to tradition, it once had an excellent university, even several thousand years after the diaspora. A school one of my ancestors is said to have attended.”
Gornon nodded. “A local population endured until well into the age when the Trantorian Empire became pan-galactic. They were an odd breed, however. Resentful over being forgotten and ignored by the descendants of cousins who had fled for the stars. Eventually most of the remaining people were evacuated, when Earthlings were discovered plotting a war of revenge, to destroy the empire they hated.”
Horis Antic stared blankly. “One planet hoped to destroy twenty million?”
“According to our records, the threat was quite serious. Earthling radicals got their hands on an ancient biological weapon of enormous power, one so sophisticated that even the best Trantorian biologists felt helpless before its virulence. By unleashing this attack through a volley of hyperspatial missiles, fanatics hoped to render the empire inoperable.”
“What did the disease do to people?” Horis asked in hushed tones.
“Its effect would be to cause a sudden and catastrophic drop of IQ on every planet within reach.” The robot looked pained even to describe it. “Many would simply die, while the rest would feel an implanted compulsion to spread out, seeking to find more potential victims, and embrace them.”