Asimov's Future History Volume 5

by Isaac Asimov

  “Of course it wasn’t a robot,” Derec said impatiently. “Another human being did it, obviously.”

  Euler said, “Disregarding yourselves, there are no other humans here.”

  “Our guide said something about that,” Derec said. “But just because they have no business here doesn’t mean that they didn’t come over from some other sector anyway. Someone who’d murder wouldn’t worry too long about proper travel passes or whatever it is you use here.”

  “I will clarify,” Rydberg interjected. “Friend Euler meant to say that there are no other human beings in this city.”

  “Then from one of the other cities —,” Katherine began.

  “There are no other cities on this planet.”

  “What are you saying? Where are we?” she demanded.

  “I regret that I may not identify this planet or its star,” Rydberg said. “But we who live here call this place Robot City.”

  “There’s nothing but robots here?” Derec said slowly, an uncomfortable idea pricking at him.”

  Discounting yourselves, that is correct,” Euler said.

  Katherine gaped. “No one in this whole city — it must be fifty hectares —”

  “Two hundred five,” Euler corrected.

  Derec interrupted. “Where are the inhabitants? The builders? Where did they go?”

  Rydberg cocked his head slightly. “We are the inhabitants, and the builders, Friend Derec,” he said matter-of-factly.

  It was the answer he had been expecting, but he still resisted its implications. “Where are your owners?” Derec persisted. “Where are the people you report to?”

  “Your question is based on an erroneous assumption,” Euler replied. “Robot City is a free and autonomous community.”

  “That can’t be,” he protested. “Maybe there are no humans here now. Maybe you’re not presently in contact with any. But they must have brought you here, or sent you here. You must still be following their directives.”

  “No, Friend Derec. We are self-directed,” Euler said. “But we are not unaware of human beings. We have a vast library of book-films by and about human beings. And we have accepted our responsibility to see that humans do not come to harm.”

  “I hope you understand, Friend Derec, why we are obliged to delay your departure,” Rydberg said. “This is our first experience with death. We need your help in understanding how it happened, and in understanding how the experience of death should be integrated into our study of the Laws of Humanics.”

  “The Laws of Humanics? What are they?” Katherine asked, puzzled.

  “The human counterparts of the Laws of Robotics — those guiding principles which govern human behavior.”

  Euler continued, “At present the Laws of Humanics are a theoretical construct. We are attempting to determine if Laws of Humanics exist, and if they do, what they are. This incident has placed the research project in crisis. You must help us. I assure you that you will be afforded every possible comfort.”

  As Euler was speaking, Katherine had slowly ‘and closer to Derec, and now was standing at his elbow. “This is crazy,” she said under her breath. “A city of robots, with no one to guide them? Doing research on human beings, like we were some curiosity?”

  And in that moment, Derec stopped fighting the truth and embraced it: The community on the asteroid and the great city surrounding him were products of the same mind, the same plan. He hadn’t escaped at all.

  But at least he at last understood why — why he was given the key, and why it had brought them there. For the last to touch it had been Monitor 5, an advanced robot desperate to fulfill its First Law obligation to save him. Knowing what it was and what it was capable of, the robot could do nothing other than give it to him — programmed for what it knew would be a safe destination, a sister colony of robots light-years away.

  “Sssh,” he said to Katherine, then looked to the robots. “Could you excuse us for a moment? We need to talk.”

  “Certainly, Friend Derec,” Euler replied, “We will —”

  “You stay. We’ll leave,” Derec said, taking Katherine’s hand and leading her out the door.

  “Where are we going?” she asked breathlessly as he guided her a dozen meters down the corridor. “They’re going to follow us.”

  He stopped short and released her hand. “We’re not going anywhere. At least I’m not. I really did want to talk privately.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not going anywhere?”

  “I’m going to stay,” he said. “I won’t tell them that, though. I’ll offer to stay and cooperate on the condition they arrange transportation for you. They don’t need both of us.”

  “No!” she said emphatically. “You don’t have to do that. They’ve got no right to hold us. They have to let us both go. They’re robots, aren’t they? They have to help us.”

  “They’re robots, yes. But not like any you’re used to. I don’t think they’d agree with your definition of their obligations,” Derec said, shaking his head. “But that’s not the point. I’m not going to stay just to appease them, or to get them to let you go. I’m staying because I want to.”

  “Want to! Why?”

  Derec flashed a tight-lipped smile. “I started thinking about how I’d feel if they did what we asked and put us on a ship to Aurora, or wherever. How I’d feel if I never found out any more about the key —”

  “We could take it with us.”

  “— never found out where this planet is or why the robots are here — never went back for Wolruf or found out what happened to her. I thought about it and realized I couldn’t just walk away. It’s true that I don’t know who I am. Even so, I know that’s not the kind of person I want to be.”

  There was a studied silence, which Derec finally broke. “Part friends?”

  Her eyes flicked upward and her gaze met his. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Because if you’re staying, I’m staying, too.”

  It was his turn to protest. “You don’t have to do that. They’re my causes, not yours. This is a safe world. I’ll be fine alone.”

  “You don’t like my company?”

  He shrugged. “We get on all right.”

  “Then are you trying to tell me that this is something a girl can’t handle or shouldn’t worry her head about?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then it’s okay if I stay just because I want to?”

  Derec surrendered. “Sure.”

  “Then let’s go tell Euler and Rydberg.”

  “After you,” he said, bowing with a flourish of his hand.

  Wearing a contented smile, Katherine led the way back to the office. As the door opened, she turned and whispered back over her shoulder. “Just tell me this — when do our lives turn normal again?”

  Derec laughed aloud, startling the robots. “Maybe never, Katherine,” he said. “Why are you complaining? You said your life was dull, didn’t you?”

  “Dull isn’t so bad,” she said wistfully. “Dull has its good points.”

  Chuckling to himself, Derec picked out a chair and settled in it as though planning to stay for a while. “We’ll do what we can to help,” he said to Rydberg. “Tell us the story. Who’re the suspects?”

  But the robot’s dispassionate answer erased the smiles from both their faces so thoroughly it was as though they had never been there. Like a bitter aftertaste to a sweet drink, it stole all the pleasure that had come before.

  “Yes, David Derec,” Rydberg said. “There are two suspects. Yourself — and Katherine Burgess. We are most curious to learn which of you committed the act, and why.”

  Suspicion

  3604 A.D.

  Chapter 1

  PARADES

  IT WAS SUNSET in the city of robots, and it was snowing paper.

  The sun was a yellow one and the atmosphere, mostly nitrogen/oxygen blue, was flush with the veins of iron oxides that traced through it, making the whole twilight sky glow bright orange like a fo
rest fire.

  The one who called himself Derec marveled at the sunset from the back of the huge earthmover as it slowly made its way through the city streets, crowds of robots lining the avenue to watch him and his companions make this tour of the city. The tiny shards of paper floated down from the upper stories of the crystal-like buildings, thrown (for reasons that escaped Derec) by the robots that crowded the windows to watch him.

  Derec took it all in, sure that it must have significance or the robots wouldn’t do it. And that was the only thing he was sure of—for Derec was a person without memory, without notion of who he was. Worse still, he had come to this impossible world, unpopulated by humans, by means that still astounded him; and he had no idea, no idea, of where in the universe he was.

  He was young, the cape of manhood still new on his shoulders, and he only knew that by observing himself in a mirror. Even his name—Derec—wasn’t really his. It was a borrowed name, a convenient thing to call himself because not having a name was like not existing. And he desperately wanted to exist, to know who, to know what he was.

  And why.

  Beside him sat a young woman called Katherine Burgess, who had said she’d known him, briefly, when he’d had a name. But he wasn’t sure of her, of her truth or her motivations. She had told him his real name was David and that he’d crewed on a Settler ship, but neither the name nor the classification seemed to fit as well as the identity he’d already been building for himself; so he continued to call himself by his chosen name, Derec, until he had solid proof of his other existence.

  Flanking the humans on either side were two robots of advanced sophistication (Derec knew that, but didn’t know how he knew it). One was named Euler, the other Rydberg, and they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell him any more than he already knew—nothing. The robots wanted information from him, however. They wanted to know why he was a murderer.

  The First Law of Robotics made it impossible for robots to harm human beings, so when the only other human inhabitant of Robot City turned up dead, Derec and Katherine were the only suspects. Derec’s brief past had not included killing, but convincing Euler and Rydberg of that was not an easy task. They were being held, but treated with respect—innocent, perhaps, until proven guilty.

  Both robots had shiny silver heads molded roughly to human equivalent. Both had glowing photocells where eyes would be. But where Euler had a round mesh screen in place of a human mouth, Rydberg had a small loudspeaker mounted atop his dome.

  “Do you enjoy this, Friend Derec?” Euler asked him, indicating the falling paper and the seemingly endless stream of robots that lined the route of their drive.

  Derec had no idea of what he was supposed to enjoy about this demonstration, but he didn’t want to offend his hosts, who were being very polite despite their accusations. “It’s really . . . very nice,” he replied, brushing a piece of paper off his lips.

  “Nice?” Katherine said from beside him, angry. “Nice?” She ran fingers through her long black hair. “I’ll be a week getting all this junk out of my hair.”

  “Surely it won’t take you that length of time,” Rydberg said, the speaker on his head crackling. “Perhaps there’s something I don’t understand, but it seems from a cursory examination that it shouldn’t take you any longer than . . . ”

  “All right,” Katherine said. “All right.”

  “ . . . one or two hours. Unless of course you’re speaking microscopically, in which case . . . ”

  “Please,” she said. “No more. I was mistaken about the time.”

  “Our studies of human culture,” Euler told Derec, “indicate that the parade is indigenous to all human civilizations. We very much want to make you feel at home here, our differences notwithstanding.”

  Derec looked out on both sides of the huge, open-air, V-shaped mover. The robots lining the streets stood quite still, their variegated bodies giving no hint of curiosity, though Derec felt it quite possible that he and Katherine were the first humans many of them had ever seen. Knowing nothing, Derec knew nothing of parades, but it seemed to be a friendly enough ritual, except for the paper, and it made him feel good that they should want him to feel at home.

  “Is it not customary to wave?” Euler asked.

  “What?” Derec replied.

  “To wave your arm to the crowd,” Euler explained. “Is it no customary?”

  “Of course,” Derec said, and waved on both sides of the machine that clanked steadily down the wide street, the robots returning the gesture with more nonreadable silence.

  “Don’t you feel like a proper fool?” Katherine asked, scrunching up her nose at his antics.

  “They’re just trying to be hospitable,” Derec replied. “With the trouble we’re in here, I don’t think it hurts to return a friendly gesture.”

  “Is there some problem, Friend Katherine?” Euler asked.

  “Only with her mouth,” Derec replied.

  Rydberg leaned forward to stare intently at Katherine’s face. “Is there something we can do?”

  “Yeah,” the girl answered. “Get me something to eat. I’m starving.”

  Rydberg swiveled his head toward Euler. “Another untruth,” he said. “This is very discouraging.”

  “What do you mean?” Derec asked.

  “Our hypotheses concerning the philosophical nature of humanics,” Rydberg said, “must have their foundation in truth among species. Twice Katherine has said things that aren’t true . . . ”

  “I am starving!” Katherine complained.

  “ . . . and how can any postulate be universally self-evident if the postulators do not adhere to the same truths? Perhaps this is the mark of a murderer.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Derec said. “All humans make . . . creative use of the language. It’s no proof of anything.”

  Rydberg examined Katherine’s face closely. Then he pressed a pincer to her bare arm, the place turning white for a second before resuming its natural color. “You say you are starving, but your color is good, your pulse rate strong and even, and you have no signs of physical deterioration. I must conclude, reluctantly, that you are not starving.”

  “We are hungry, though,” Derec said. “Please take us where we might eat.”

  Katherine fixed him with a sidelong glance. “And do it quickly.”

  “Of course,” Euler said. “You will find that we are fully equipped to deal with any human emergency here. This is to be the perfect human world.”

  “But there are no humans here,” Derec said.

  “No.”

  “Are you expecting any?”

  “We have no expectations.”

  “Oh.”

  Euler directed the spider-like robot guiding the mover, and the machine turned dutifully at the next corner, taking them down a double-width street that was bisected by a large aqueduct, whose waters had turned dark under the ever-deepening twilight.

  Derec sat back and stole a glance at Katherine, but she was busily pulling bits of paper from her hair and didn’t notice him. He had a million questions, but they seemed better left for later. As it was, he had conflicting emotions to analyze and react to within himself.

  He was a nonperson whose life had begun scant weeks before, when he’d awakened without past or memory to find himself in a life-support pod, stranded upon an asteroid that was being mined by robots. They had been searching for something, something he had accidentally stumbled upon—the Key to Perihelion, at least one of the seven Keys to Perihelion. It had seemed of incredible import to the robots on the asteroid. Unfortunately, he had had no idea of what the Keys to Perihelion were or what to do with them.

  After that was the bad time. The asteroid was destroyed by Aranimas, an alien space raider, who captured Derec and tortured him for information about the Key, information that Derec could not supply. There he had met Katherine, just before the destruction of Aranimas’s vessel and their dubious salvation at the hands of the Spacers’ robots.

  The Spacers als
o wanted the Key, though their means of attaining it seemed slightly more civilized and bureaucratic than Aranimas’s. Katherine and Derec were polite prisoners of bureaucracy for a time on Rockliffe Station, their personalities clashing until they were forced to form an alliance with Wolruf, another alien from Aranimas’s ship, to escape their gentle captivity with the Key.

  They found that if they pressed the corners of the silver slab and thought themselves away from the Spacer station, they were whisked bodily to a dark gray void that they assumed to be Perihelion. Pressing the corners again, another thought brought them to Robot City. And then their thinking took them no farther, stranding them in a world populated by nothing but robots.

  And that was it, the sum total of Derec’s conscious life. He had reached several conclusions, though, scant as his reserve of information was: First, he had an innate knowledge of robots and their workings, though he had no idea from where his knowledge emanated; next, Katherine knew more about him than she was willing to tell; finally, he couldn’t escape the feeling that he was here for a purpose, that this was all some elaborate test designed especially for him.

  But why? Why?

  It was worlds that were being turned here, physical and spatial laws that were being forced upside down—all for him? Nothing made sense.

  And then there was the Key, the object that everyone wanted, the object that was safely hidden by the person who couldn’t control it. The robots here didn’t know he had it. Were they looking for it, too? He’d have to find out. The Key seemed to be the one strain that held everything else together.

  Keeping that in mind, he determined to move slowly, to try always to get more in the way of information than he gave. He’d been at a disadvantage for the entire length of his memory. From this point, he wanted to keep the upper hand as far as possible.

  But there was, of course, the murder.

  Derec stood on the balcony of the apartment given to him and Katherine by the robots, looking out over the night city. A stiff, cold wind had come up, the starfield totally obscured by dark, angry clouds that seemed to boil up out of nowhere. Lightning flashed in the distance, electrons seeking partner protons on the surface. It was a beautiful sight, and frightening. Derec watched the distant buildings light to near daytime before plunging once more into darkness.