Isaac Asimov's Utopia

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Why is it, exactly, that they need to come here anyway?” Alvar asked as he leaned back in his chair. “They have passes that give them the freedom of the city.”

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” Fredda warned. “Dinner in just a few minutes.”

  “Fine,” Kresh said, leaning forward again. “I’ll be as uncomfortable as you like. But answer my question.”

  Fredda laughed, leaned over and kissed Alvar on the forehead. “Once a policeman, always a policeman,” she said.

  The robot Oberon chose that moment to appear. “Dinner is served,” it announced.

  “Always a policeman,” Alvar said to his wife. “So don’t think this little interruption is going to get you off the hook.”

  He stood up, and husband and wife went in to dinner, Oberon leading the way, Donald trailing behind. Donald took up his usual wall niche, and Oberon set about serving the meal.

  Fredda decided it would all go a bit smoother if she didn’t force her husband to prompt her for an answer. Oberon set a plate before her and she picked up her fork. “They come here to have a safe place to meet,” she said. “That’s the main answer. There aren’t many places in Hades where they aren’t in some sort of danger of an NL basher gang, passes or no passes.” There had been Settler robot-bashing gangs in the past, though most of them had faded away by now. But certain Spacers had learned the bashing game from the Settlers. There were still radicals; extremists even beyond the pale of the Iron-heads, who were always itching to do in a New Law robot, given the chance. “New Law robots aren’t safe in this city. I’ve told you that before, even if you don’t quite believe it.”

  “Then why come here? If Hades is so dangerous, it seems to me they ought to be safe enough on the other side of the planet, in Utopia. In that Underground city of theirs. They ought to be,” he said again, as if he was not sure they truly were.

  One of Alvar Kresh’s first acts as governor was to issue an order, banishing the New Law robots from the inhabited parts of the planet. If that was not the exact wording of the order, it was certainly the effect—and, for that matter, the intent. Fredda could not fault her husband too much for the decision. It had been a choice between banishment and destroying the New Law robots altogether. “They are safe enough in Valhalla, though I don’t think I’d call it a city, exactly,” she said. “It’s more like a huge bunker complex than anything else.”

  “Well, I’ll take your word for it,” Alvar said. “You’ve been there, and I haven’t.”

  “They may be safe there,” Fredda said, “but they don’t have everything they need. They have to come here to trade.”

  “What could a bunch of robots need?”

  Fredda wanted to let out a sigh, but she forced herself to hold it back. The two of them had had this argument too many times before. By now each of them had rehearsed his or her part to perfection. But that didn’t make the argument end. They had a good marriage, a solid marriage—but the issue of the New Law robots was one they seemed unlikely to settle between themselves any time soon. “Spare parts, if nothing else,” Fredda said, “as you know perfectly well. They have to keep themselves in repair. Supplies and equipment to maintain and expand Valhalla. Information of all sorts. Other things. This time they were after biological supplies.”

  “That’s a new one,” said Alvar. “What do they want with bio supplies?”

  “Terraforming projects, I suppose,” said Fredda. “They’ve made a great deal of progress reviving the climate in their part of the world.”

  “And trained themselves in some highly marketable skills at the same time. Don’t try to make them into tin saints for me,” said Kresh.

  The New Laws were allowed off the Utopia reservation under certain circumstances.The most common reason was to do skilled labor. Every terraforming project on the planet was short of labor, and many project managers were willing—if only reluctantly so—to hire New Law robots for the jobs. The New Laws charged high rates for their work, but they gave good value for money. “What’s wrong with their doing honest work?” Fredda asked. “And what is wrong with their getting paid for it? If a private company needs temporary robot labor, it rents them, and pays the robot rental agent or the owner of the robots for the use of his property. The same applies here. It’s just that these robots own themselves.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” Alvar said, moodily stabbing his fork at his vegetables. “But there’s nothing all that noble about it, either. You always try to make them sound like heroes.”

  “Not everything they do is for money or gain,” Fredda said, “No one pays them for the terraforming work they do in the Utopia reservation. They do it because they want to do it.”

  “Why is that, do you think?” asked Alvar. “Why is it that is what they want to do? I know you’ve been studying the question. Have you come up with anything new on it?”

  Fredda looked at her husband in some surprise. The moment she praised anything about the New Laws was normally the point in their well-rehearsed argument when her husband glared at her and suggested that she go the whole distance in making the damned New Laws into angels and rivet wings to their backs, or said something else to the same effect. But not tonight. Fredda realized that Alvar was . . . different tonight.The New Law robots were on his mind—but usually the subject simply got him angry. This time there was something more thoughtful about him. Almost, impossibly enough, as if he were worried about them. “Do you really want to know?” she asked, her voice uncertain.

  “Of course I do,” he replied gently. “Why else would I ask? I’m always interested in your work.”

  “Well,” she said, “the short answer is that I don’t know.There is no question that they have a—a drive for beauty. I can’t think of what else to call it. Though perhaps it might be more accurate to call it an impulse to put things fight. Where, exactly, it comes from, I can’t say. But it’s not all that surprising that it’s there. When you construct something as complex as a robotic brain, and introduce novel programming—like the New Laws—there are bound to be unexpected consequences of one sort or another. One reason I’m so interested in Prospero is that the programming of his gravitonic brain was still half-experimental. He’s different from the other New Laws in some unexpected Ways. He has a much less balanced personality than Caliban, for one thing.”

  “Leave that to one side for the moment,” Alvar said. “What about this urge to create business?”

  “There you get into very dangerous waters,” Fredda said. “I’d be very reluctant to credit them with true creative impulses, I’m sure Donald would agree with me.”

  “I certainly would,” Donald said, speaking from his wall niche, and startling Fredda just a fraction. The convention was that robots were to speak only when spoken too, especially during meals, but Donald often found ways to make liberal interpretations of that rule. ‘’Robots do not and cannot achieve true creativity,” he went on. “We are capable of imitation, of reproducing from an existing model, and even of a certain degree of embellishment. But only humans are capable of true acts of creation.”

  “All right, Donald. Let’s not get off on that debate,” Kresh said. “By creation or repair or imitation, the New Laws have done great things on the Utopia reservation, in ways that don’t seem to offer them any sort of benefit. Green plants and fresh water and a balanced local ecology don’t do them any good. So why do they do it?”

  “Ask them and they’ll tell you it’s because they want to—and good luck getting a more detailed answer,” Fredda said. “I haven’t, and I’ve tried enough times. I don’t know if it’s their Fourth Law, or the fact that they were designed for terraforming work, or the synergy between the two of those things. Or maybe it’s because Gubber Anshaw designed their gravitonic brain with an underlying internal topography that is closer to the human brain’s pattern than any other robotic brain has even been.”

  Alvar smiled. “In other words, you don’t know,” he said.

  Fre
dda smiled back, and reached across the table to take his hand in hers. “In other words, I don’t know,” she agreed. It was good to talk with him, on this of all subjects, without anger. She knew he had never really felt completely confident in his decision regarding the New Laws. And, in her own heart of hearts, she had to admit it was at least possible it might have been better all around if she had never created them. “But even if I don’t know why they feel the impulse, I do know .that they feel it.”

  “I guess that will have to do,” he said. “There are times when I wonder about that. It is something new and different in the universe for robots to work for something without orders, without direction. And Donald’s observation to the contrary, I am not absolutely convinced it is impossible for an artificial mind to have creative ability. I don’t like the New Law robots. I think they are dangerous, and not to be trusted. But I cannot quite bring myself to believe they, and all their work, should be wiped off the face of the planet.”

  Fredda pulled her hand back, and looked at her husband in alarm. “Alvar—what are you talking about? You decided years ago that they should be allowed to survive. What you’re saying now makes it sound like there’s a new reason you might . . .” Her voice trailed off, but her husband understood.

  “There is a new reason,” Kresh said. “A new reason they might have to go. I may have to choose between destroying them and saving the planet. I don’t need to tell you what my choice would be.”

  “Alvar, what in the name of the devil are you talking about?”

  Alvar Kresh did not answer at first. He looked at her most unhappily, and let out a deep and weary sigh. “I should never have accepted this job,” he said at last. “I should have let Simcor Beddle take it, and let him have the nightmares.” He did not say more for a moment. Instead he picked up his fork and made an attempt to eat a bite or two more. But the sudden silence in the room, and the expression on Fredda’s face, were too much for him. He let’ the fork clatter onto the plate,and leaned wearily back in his chair. “I want you to come in with me tomorrow morning,” he said. “There’s someone I want you to meet. I want your opinion of what he has to say.”

  “Who—who is it?” Fredda asked.

  “No one you’d know,” said Kresh, “A young fellow by the name of Davlo Lentrall.”

  TONYA WELTON WAS worried. She had reason to be. Something was going on. Something was going on, and she did not know what it was. And she would not know until the Settler Security Service debriefing team was ready to tell her. The SSS had told her that an informant named Ardosa had risked his cover getting into Settlertown, and that he had claimed to have some vital information, and that it concerned an astrophysicist named Davlo Lentrall. They would not be able to have anything more for her until the transcripts of his debriefing were drawn up and checked over, and the information verified.

  There had been something in the voice of the SSS officer who had reported the news, something that told her it was big enough that they didn’t want to risk letting it out until they were sure the information was credible. They were going to have a try at breaking into Lentrall’s computer files. The University was using a Settler-built computer system, which ought to give them an advantage, but it still would not be easy. There was nothing to do but wait.

  Tonya had a gut feeling that told her they were going to find out Ardosa’s information damn well was credible. She was tempted to call over and demand to be given the raw information immediately. But she knew better than that. When the professionals turned cautious, there was, more often than not, good reason for them to do so. Let them work. She would know in good time.

  As she sat there, worrying, Gubber Anshaw came into the room. He bent down to kiss her on the forehead, and she gave him a little pat on the arm before he straightened up and crossed the room to settle into his own chair with a contented sigh.

  Tonya watched him pull out his technical journals and start in to read. She loved him dearly, there had been times when he had been of tremendous help—but this was not likely to be one of those times.

  Gubber was a world-class expert on robots, but whatever was up, it definitely did not involve robots. At the moment, Gubber was reading up in preparation for his long-planned trip to Valhalla. Gubber, as the designer of the gravitonic brain, had never really approved of the way Fredda Leving had appropriated his work to create the New Law robots. However, over time, he had come to accept the situation—and from there, it was not much of a step to taking advantage of it. The New Laws were still the only gravitonic-brain robots ever made. It was only common sense that Gubber take advantage of the chance to study them more. Gubber was due to take the morning suborbital flight to Depot in the morning, and meet up with a New Law robot by the name of Lacon-03 there for the journey on to the hidden city of Valhalla.

  Normally, Tonya would have entertained the hope that Gubber might have heard something through the rumor mill. But when Gubber was wrapped up in his work, it took something on the order of a blaster shot at the book he was reading to direct his attention elsewhere. It seemed highly unlikely he had spent much time recently with his friends chatting about the doings of obscure astrophysicists.

  Damnation, what was this Lentrall person up to? Why was he suddenly so important? It involved terraforming, that much was for sure. Therefore, it had to affect the Settlers on Inferno. And, as she was the leader of the Settlers on Inferno, it sure as hell was going to affect Tonya.

  The contingent of Settlers were on Inferno for the express purpose of reterraforming the planet. Very few of the Settlers sent on the project had been particularly thrilled about the assignment. After all, it required them to live on a Spacer world, and to deal with Spacers on a daily basis.

  But enough could be said for the Spacer life that many of the Settlers had lived up to their name, and settled on Inferno, more or less permanently. They had discovered there were other ways to live, besides in the vast underground warrens that were the Settler cities. They had met husbands and wives, started families. They had bought property, built houses. Some had actually taken on robot servants. There were more than a few of them who had no particular desire to go back home. As terraforming a planet was, at the very least, a task measured in decades, some of her people—including Tonya herself—had begun to take comfort in the knowledge that they could stay as long as they liked, perhaps their whole lives long.

  Therefore, anything that threatened, or even affected, the Settlers’ terraforming project, was of the gravest concern. And Tonya had the very distinct impression that this Lentrall affair could play merry hell with the terraforming project.

  Their operative at the University of Hades, a fellow by the name of Ardosa, had alerted the Settler Security Service that Lentrall had come up with something that had thrown the whole terraforming department for a loop. Ardosa had also reported that the upper ranks of the university’s administration had likewise been thrown into an uproar by the news. There had been some extremely stormy meetings.

  Beyond all that, Ardosa didn’t know much—simply that something was up, and that it was urgent, and that Lentrall had met with the university’s top terraforming experts. Or at least what passed for terraforming experts over there. Tonya was confident her own people were way ahead of anything the Infernals could do. At least she had been confident, up until now.

  Once alerted by Ardosa, the Settler Security Service had spotted Lentrall going in and out of Governor Kresh’s office complex. The SSS also managed to get a private peek at the governor’s daily appointment list. All the other entries were routine, but the listing Davlo Lentrall—reterraforming proposal had caught Tonya’s eye.

  Who was this Lentrall, and what was he up to? Her people knew almost nothing about him. About all they had was that he was very young—even by Settler standards—and that he was some sort of scientist in the university’s astrophysics department. He seemed to have an informal connection to an obscure research center that was vaguely attached to the Infernal side o
f the terraforming project. That was all they knew.

  That, and the fact that he had had a rapid series of appointments with progressively higher-ranking Infernal government officials, culminating in a meeting with the governor himself. The question was obvious—what could be important or urgent enough to propel an obscure astrophysicist into the governor’s office?

  Tonya felt frustrated. The time had been when her people could have worked up a complete dossier on a fellow like Lentrall no time at all. There had been an odd sort of freedom for her spies and intelligence operatives, in the old, confrontational days. Back then, relations between the Settlers and the Spacers had been so bad it didn’t much matter if they got worse. In fact it was difficult to see how they could have gotten worse. Cinta Melloy, the head of the SSS, could have, and had, used all sorts of dirty tricks—taps on comm calls and databanks, bribes, agents tailing a subject, the whole works—in order to develop information.

  But now everyone had to be very respectful and polite, on both sides. Over the past few years, the SSS had developed a very close working relationship with Justen Devray’s Combined Inferno Police. They shared intelligence and assisted each other in enforcement work. It would not do to jeopardize all that with a flurry of ham-handed snooping around. In some ways, peace was a lot more complicated than confrontation.

  Tonya looked back over at Gubber. Speaking of relationships, theirs, Tonya’s and Gubber’s, had caused more than a small stir, back when the secret got out. The hard-as-nails leader of the Settlers on Inferno, quite literally in bed with the quiet, retiring, soft-spoken Spacer roboticist. It had been a tremendous scandal.

  Tonya realized she was missing a bet. Even if it was unlikely that Gubber had heard anything, it couldn’t hurt to ask. Besides, scientists tended to know each other. Maybe Gubber would know something useful about Lentrall’s background, even if he wasn’t up to date on the latest rumors.

  “Gubber?” she asked in a casual tone of voice.