Utopia - Caliban 03

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Well, what about them?” Fredda asked.

  The two control centers were the heart of the reterraforming effort, performing all the calculations and analyses of each new project before it was launched. The original intent had been to build a single control center. There were two basic designs to choose between. One was a Settler-style computational unit, basically a massively complex and powerful, but quite nonsentient, computer. The other was a Spacer-style robotic unit that would be based on a hugely powerful positronic brain, fully imbued with the Three Laws. It would, in effect, be a robot mind without a robot body.

  There had been a tremendous controversy over whether to trust the fate of the planet to a mindless machine, or to a robotic brain that would refuse to take necessary risks. It was easy to imagine a robotic control unit choosing to avoid harm to one human, rather than permit a project vital to the future of the planet. The robotics experts all promised that it didn’t work that way, but experts had been wrong before. Governor Grieg had died before he could reveal his choice between the two systems. In one of the first acts of his administration, Kresh had decided to build both, and interconnect them so that the two systems worked in consensus with each other. In theory, if the two systems could not reach agreement on what to do, or not to do, they were to call in human referees to decide the issue. In practice, the two systems had agreed with each other far more often than anyone could have hoped. Thus far, there had only been a half dozen or so very minor issues that had required human decisions.

  A vast planetary network of sensors and probes, orbiting satellites, mobile units, and on-site investigators, both robotic and human, fed a constant stream of information to both units--and both units fed back a constant stream of instructions and commands to the humans and robots and automatic machines in the field.

  The two interconnected control centers were the only devices on the planet capable of handling the constant stream of incoming data and outgoing instructions. It was plainly obvious that the two of them would have to be consulted regarding the plan to drop a comet on the planet, but Kresh did not wish to risk the sanity of the robotic unit. “You saw what just happened to Donald,” he said. “Will I burn the Robotic Center out if I ask it what I should do?”

  Fredda smiled reassuringly. “There wouldn’t be much point in having a Robotic Control Center that couldn’t consider risks to the planet without damaging itself,” she said. “It took some doing, but we installed some special...safeguards, shall we say, that should keep it from experiencing any serious First Law conflict.”

  “Good, good,” said Kresh, a bit absently. “At least that’s one less thing to worry about. At least we know that part is all right.”

  “Do we?” Fredda asked. “I wonder. When Lentrall asked me about Donald’s name, and how it was not from Shakespeare, that made me wonder.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “I was absolutely certain it was from Shakespeare. No doubt at all in my mind. I never bothered to double-check, any more than I would have bothered to double-check the spelling of my own name. I thought I knew it--and I was dead wrong.”

  “We all make mistakes,” Kresh said.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Fredda said, impatiently. “But that’s not the point. In a sense, it’s a trivial mistake. But it came out of a trusted database. Who knows how long ago the dataset got scrambled, or what else in it is wrong? And if that database can be wrong, lots of other things can be as well. What else is there that we think we know? What other hard fact that we think we have absolutely right will turn out to be absolutely dead wrong? What else do we think we know?”

  There was a moment of long and uncomfortable silence.

  But uncertainty surrounded all of life. To wait until one was sure was to remain frozen in place until it was too late. “We’ll never be able to answer that question,” said Kresh. He paused for a moment and thought. “You’re thinking like a scientist,” he said. “And up until now, I’ve been thinking like a politician. Maybe it’s time to think like a police officer.”

  “I must admit that I do not see how the police viewpoint would be of much use in this situation,” said Fredda.

  “Because back when I was a policeman, I knew I didn’t know,” said Kresh. “I knew, on every case, that some knowledge was hidden, and that I would never have absolutely complete or totally accurate information. But I still had to act. I still had to decide. I had to take the facts I had--or thought I had--and ride them as far as they would take me.” He stepped around Donald so he was facing the robot. He waved his hand in front of Donald’s face. “All right, Donald,” he said. “You can turn around and listen now.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Donald replied.

  Kresh smiled at Donald, then paused a moment and walked to the center of the room. He looked from Donald to Fredda, and then turned around to look at the rainstorm again, to look at nothing at all. “By the time I know enough to decide what to do, it will be too late to decide. Therefore, we will work on the assumption that we are going to divert Comet Grieg. All preparations will go forward as if we were indeed planning to do the job.”

  “So we pretend that you’ve decided?” Fredda asked.

  “More or less,” Kresh said. “It will buy me some time. I won’t have to decide until it’s actually time to deflect the comet.”

  “That’s a dangerous move,” Fredda said. “It’s going to be hard to make all the investment of time and effort and money and then pull back at the last moment.”

  “It’s not the best way to do it,” Kresh agreed. “But can you think of any way that’s less bad? That at least gives us time to examine our options?”

  “No,” Fredda admitted.

  “Then I think we’d better do it my way,” said Kresh.

  “That leaves us with a hell of a lot to do,” Fredda said. “There’s the space-side interception and diversion to set up, the targeting to plan, the site survey of wherever the comet’s going to hit, evacuation of people and equipment, emergency preparations for the cities, food stockpiles to lay in--”

  “Excuse me, Dr. Leving, but, if I may say so, that is the sort of organizational job I was made to do.”

  Kresh smiled. Fredda ought to know that. She had made Donald in the first place. It was as close to a joke as Donald was ever likely to get. “Point taken,” Kresh said. “Donald, I want you to get started on the initial organizational tasks right now. Project management is to be your primary duty, and you are to avoid allowing other tasks to interfere. You are to perform no further personal service for me unless specifically ordered to do so. Report to me via hyperwave in three hours, time as to project status. Thereafter, you are to consult with me as you see fit. Fredda, with Donald tied up, I’m afraid I’m going to have to borrow Oberon as a pilot. I have a feeling Donald would not permit me to do the flying myself in this weather.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Donald.

  “But--but where are you going at this hour of the night?” Fredda asked.

  “Out,” said Kresh. “No one seems to know anything for sure in this whole business. It’s just about time I got some advice from someone who knows what’s going on.”

  THERE’S NO LOGICAL reason to make this trip, Kresh told himself as he stepped out of the elevator car into the covered rooftop hangar of his house. And that was true, as far as it went. No doubt Kresh could have gotten all the information he needed by sitting at his own comm panel in his own house.

  But there were times when being on the scene, being there in the flesh, was useful. There would be some little detail, something that might have been overlooked, or never noticed at all, if seen only through a viewscreen, or heard through a speaker.

  Besides, the journey itself would be of use. There were times when it was important to be alone, to have time to think. Alone even from one’s personal robot, from one’s trusted wife. Alvar Kresh sensed that this was one of those times when he had to be alone--if for no other reason than to remind himself that he would have to
make his decision alone. And he would have the duration of the flight all to himself. Fredda’s robot Oberon scarcely counted as company, and besides, he was taking the long-range aircar. It had a separate passenger compartment behind the cockpit. He stepped aboard, and Oberon followed behind him. Kresh took a seat by the port-side window, allowed Oberon to lock and double-check his seat restraint, and then watched as Oberon stepped forward to the pilot’s compartment and shut the hatch behind himself.

  Alone. Yes, a very good idea, to be alone. Good to get out of the city, see something--at least a little something--of the planet again, while he was considering its fate. The thought appealed to him as Oberon powered up the aircar and it lifted a half-meter or so off the deck of the hangar. The outer doors opened, and the aircar slowly eased out into the driving rain. If anything, the storm had grown more intense.

  Suddenly the aircar was in the middle of the storm, bucking and swaying in the darkness, the rain crashing down on the hull and the ports with incredible violence. Just for a moment, Alvar Kresh would have been just as glad to have stayed at home--but Oberon would not have started the flight if he had not been confident of his ability to deliver Kresh safely to his destination. Kresh certainly would not have been willing to pilot the craft in this sort of weather.

  But even as he grabbed at the arms of his seat and braced himself against the bouncing, bone-rattling ride, there was part of him that knew no fear at all, because a robot was at the controls, and robots and danger to humans simply could not exist in the same place. There were few things in the universe in which Alvar Kresh could place absolute faith, but robots were one of them.

  But tell that to the weather. The storm boomed and roared outside the long-range aircar as it fought for altitude, the banging and rattling getting worse with every moment. Just at the moment when Kresh was ready to decide his faith in robots was not all that absolute, the aircar broke free, punched a hole in the clouds and climbed out into the clear and placid skies above.

  Smooth sailing after the storm, Kresh told himself as he looked down on the storm clouds below. A nice symbol, that. Maybe even a good omen.

  But Kresh knew better, of course. When it came to signs and omens, he had no faith at all.

  The aircar turned toward the southeast and settled in for its flight to the island of Purgatory.

  DAVLO LENTRALL STUMBLED blindly from the aircar and out into the rain-swept darkness of his own front yard. Kaelor stepped out after him, gently threaded his left arm through his master’s right, and led him toward the front door of the house.

  Davlo followed half-consciously, barely aware of where he was or what he was doing. He was in shock, that was all there was to it. It had taken some time for the full impact of what had happened to hit him, but now, at last, it had.

  The one part of him that was still more or less aware had refused to let the police aircar hover forward into the garage attached to the house, even though there was plenty of room and it would have saved him getting drenched in the rain. No. No. He would not let the police in his house, not even that far. Not if he could help it.

  It was irrational, and he knew it, and he didn’t care. Even though he knew perfectly well that the police had been all through the place in his absence, running their security checks and installing their monitoring devices. Even though he knew they would remain just outside his property line, scanning and probing and watching the storming darkness. Even if he knew all that was right, and sensible, given the fact that people with very few qualms about going too far had chosen him for a target. It might well be that the survival of the planet depended on his staying alive--but just at the moment, Davlo Lentrall did not even care about that.

  He moved on leaden feet toward his front door, waited while Kaelor opened it for him, bundled him inside, and closed it behind him. He obeyed unresistingly as Kaelor led him to the center of the main parlor and stripped off his sopping-wet outer garments then and there. Kaelor vanished and returned instantly with a stack of towels and a warm blanket. One of the household robots materialized with a mug of something steaming hot. And then the robots left him alone.

  Davlo found himself sitting in the main parlor, his hair and skin still damp, bundled up in a blanket, drinking the hot soup without tasting it, staring at the far wall without seeing it.

  It had all fallen in. All of it. Davlo Lentrall had never, not once in his life, doubted himself. Never, not once in his life, had he doubted that he was capable of handling whatever life put before him. He was smarter than, sharper than, quicker than, better than other people, and he knew it. He had always known it.

  Until today. Until a bunch of faceless kidnappers took him in completely with their tricks to keep him away from his security detail. Until a robot tossed him around like a rag doll, and shoved him under a park bench for safekeeping. Until a police officer whom Davlo would have dismissed as being of only average intelligence had made all the right guesses, all the right moves, taken all the right chances, and put his own life in grave peril, so as to save Davlo.

  But even all that, galling as it was, would not have been so bad. But it all served as nothing more than background for the real story, the real humiliation.

  Davlo Lentrall had been scared. No. It was time to be honest, at least with himself. He had been terrified. He was still terrified. When the moment had come, when the emergency had popped up from out of nowhere, the Davlo Lentrall of his imagination--the cool, confident, commanding fellow who could handle whatever life threw at him without the least amount of trouble--that Davlo Lentrall had vanished in a puff of smoke.

  It didn’t matter that a courageous, in-control Davlo Lentrall would have ended up shoved under that park bench just the same, that there was nothing he could have done from start to finish to change things, no matter how brave or cowardly he was.

  It was that the Davlo Lentrall who was smarter and better than all the rest, the Davlo Lentrall with the nerve to tell the planet’s foremost robot designer that she had made a mistake naming her robot, suddenly wasn’t there anymore.

  Lentrall had never really known how would react in an emergency, because he had never been in an emergency. But now he knew. From now on, Davlo Lentrall could not help but know that fear could leave him absolutely incapable of action.

  Lentrall took another sip of the hot soup, and, for the first time since had arrived home, really noticed where he was, what he was doing. The soup was good, warming, filling.

  So he had dropped the ball today. So be it. What did it matter? There was nothing even the bravest man alive could have done that would have made any difference. And did it really matter so much if Commander Justen Devray was the hero of the afternoon? Would anyone even remember this afternoon’ s incident, when they wrote the history books? No. They would remember that Dr. Davlo Lentrall had discovered Comet Grieg, and spearheaded the effort that had led to Grieg’s impact, and to the salvation of the planet.

  Yes. Yes. Lentrall finished off the last of the soup in a single swallow, and got to his feet. The blanket still wrapped around his body, he made his way to his home office, in the far corner of the ground floor. Yes. Comet Grieg. That was what they would remember, not this afternoon’s foolish humiliation.

  And the best way to wipe the memory of today’s disaster from his mind would be to get back to work, immediately, on the Comet Grieg project. Kaelor had been quite right to point out there were a large number of unresolved problems to deal with. No time like the present to deal with them. He could call up the appropriate computer files from here and set to work on them.

  It, of course, never so much as crossed Davlo’s mind to consider where, precisely, the computer files actually were. It had never so much as dawned on him that they had an actually physical location, a position in space that held them. They were simply there, in the massively interlinked comm and computer system that interlinked all the comm terminals in the city and all the planet’s outposts of civilization. He could call them up from any place,
any time, and set to work on them, whenever he liked.

  He had never given the matter much consideration, any more than he would have stopped to remember that the air was there for him to breathe whenever he wanted, or that his household robots knew when to serve him soup.

  Lentrall sat down at his home office comm station and activated his files on Comet Grieg. At least he tried to do so.

  Because, quite suddenly, it was as if the air wasn’t there for him to breathe anymore.

  THE FLIGHT OVER the Great Bay had been smooth as silk, the aircar leaving the storm behind with the coastline. That was not too surprising. The climate people had told Kresh that it was a typical pattern: warm, moist air dumping its moisture the moment it came in contact with the cool, dry air over land. Part of it had to do with the air being forced up by the mountain ranges just inland from the city of Hades. The wind blew the air up the side of the hill, and the higher the air went, the more its barometric pressure dropped and the less moisture it could hold. So the water came out of the air, and it rained. A rain shadow effect, they called it.

  But if it could work on the mainland, it could work just as handily on the windward side of an island. Especially a nice, big island like Purgatory. The prevailing winds over the island were from the south. Oberon flew Kresh’ s aircar in from the northwest, up and over the central peak of the island--and then right back down into weather every bit as heavy as what they had left behind at Hades.

  The aircar dropped down into the clouds, and was instantly engulfed by the raging storm. Kresh grabbed at his armrests again as the aircar bucked and heaved and bounced allover the sky, thunder booming all around as lightning lit up the storm-tossed skies outside his viewport. Suddenly Kresh was caught in the urge to get forward, to get to the cockpit and see what was going on, to grasp hold of the controls and take over. But if that was not panic talking, it was the next best thing.