Robots and Empire trs-4

by Isaac Asimov

  “Sexual competition?” said Mandamus calmly.

  For a moment, Gladia’s gaze met his levelly. Did he know of her long-ago love for the robot Jander? Did it matter if he did?

  There seemed nothing in his expression to make it appear that he meant anything beyond the surface meaning of the words.

  She said finally, “Competition in every way. If Dr. Han Fastolfe did anything to contribute to such a feeling, it was that he designed his robots in too human a fashion, but that was the only way.”

  “I think you have thought about the matter,” said Mandamus. “The trouble is that sociologists find the fear of competition with too-human, a set of robots to be simplistic, as an explanation. That alone would not suffice and there is no evidence of any other aversion motive of significance.”

  “Sociology is not an exact ‘science,’” said Gladia.

  “It is not altogether inexact, either.”

  Gladia shrugged.

  After a pause, Mandamus said, “In any case, it kept us from organizing colonizing expeditions properly. Without humanoid robots to pave the way—”

  Breakfast was not quite over, but it was clear to Gladia that Mandamus could not avoid the nontrivial any longer. She said, “We might have gone ourselves.”

  This time it was Mandamus who shrugged. “Too difficult. Besides, those short-lived barbarians from Earth, with the permission of your Dr. Fastolfe, have swarmed over every planet in sight like a plague of beetles.”

  “There are plenty of available planets still. Millions. And if they can do it—”

  “Of course they can do it,” said Mandamus with sudden passion. “It costs lives, but what are lives to them? The loss of a decade or so, that’s all, and there are billions of them.

  “If a million or so die in the process of colonizing, who notices, who cares? They don’t.”

  “I’m sure they do.”

  “Nonsense. Our lives are longer and therefore more valuable—and we are naturally more careful with them.”

  “So we sit here and do nothing but rail at Earth’s Settlers for being willing to risk their lives and for seeming to inherit the Galaxy as a result.”

  Gladia was unaware of feeling so pro-Settler a bias, but she was in the mood to contradict Mandamus and as she spoke she could not help but feel that what began as mere contradiction made sense and could well represent her feelings. Besides, she had heard Fastolfe say similar things during his last discouraged years.

  At Gladia’s signal, the table was being rapidly and efficiently cleared. Breakfast might have continued, but the conversation and the mood had become quite unsuitable for civilized mealtime.

  They moved back into the living room. His robots followed and so did Daneel and Giskard, all finding their niches. (Mandamus had never remarked on Giskard, thought Gladia, but then, why should he? Giskard was quite old fashioned and even primitive, entirely unimpressive in comparison to Mandamus’s beautiful specimens.)

  Gladia took her seat and crossed her legs, quite aware that the form-fitting sheerness of the lower portion of her slacks flattered the still youthful appearance of her legs.

  “May I know the reason for your wishing to see me, Dr. Mandamus?” she said, unwilling to delay matters any longer.

  He said, “I have the bad habit of chewing medicated gum after meals as an aid to digestion. Would you object?”

  Gladia said stiffly, “I would find it distracting.”

  (Being unable to chew might put him at a disadvantage. Besides, Gladia added to herself virtuously, at his age he shouldn’t need anything to aid his digestion.)

  Mandamus had a small oblong package partway out of his tunic’s breast pocket. He shoved it back with no sign of disappointment and murmured, “Of course.”

  “I was asking, Dr. Mandamus, your reason for wishing to see me.”

  “Actually two reasons, Lady Gladia. One is a personal matter and one is a matter of state. Would you object to my taking up the personal matter first?”

  “Let me say frankly, Dr. Mandamus, that I find it hard to imagine what personal matter there could be between us. You work at the Robotics Institute, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And are close to Amadiro, I have been told.”

  “I have the honor of working with Doctor Amadiro,” he said with faint emphasis.

  (He’s paying me back, thought Gladia, but I’m not taking it.)

  She said, “Amadiro and I had an occasion for contact twenty decades ago and it was most unpleasant. I have had no occasion for any contact with him at any time since. Nor would I have had any contact with you, as a close associate of his, but that I was persuaded that the interview might be important. Personal matters, however, would surely not make this interview in the least important to me. Shall we proceed onward, then, to the matters of state?”

  Mandamus’s eyes dropped and a faint flush of something that might have been embarrassment came to his cheeks.

  “Let me reintroduce myself, then. I am Levular Mandamus, your descendant in the fifth degree. I am the great-great-great grandson of Santirix and Gladia Gremionis. In reverse, you are my great-great-great-grandmother.”

  Gladia blinked rapidly, trying not to look as thunderstruck as she, in actual fact, felt (and not quite, succeeding). Of course she had descendants and why should not one of them be this man?

  But she said, “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure. I have had a genealogical search made. One of these years, after all, I am likely to want children and before I can have one such a search would be mandatory. If you are interested, the pattern between us is M-F-F-M.”

  “You are my son’s daughter’s daughter’s son’s son?”

  “Yes.”

  Gladia did not ask for further details. She had had one son and one daughter. She had been a perfectly dutiful mother, but in due time the children had taken up independent lives. As to descendants beyond that son and daughter, she had, in perfectly decent Spacer fashion, never inquired and did not care. Having met one of them, she was Spacer enough still not to care.

  The thought stabilized her completely. She sat back in, her chair and relaxed. “Very well,” she said. “You are my descendant in the fifth degree. If this is the personal matter you wish to discuss, it is of no importance.”

  “I understand that fully, ancestress. My genealogy is not, in itself, what I wish to discuss, but it lays the foundation. Dr. Amadiro, you see, knows of this relationship. At least, so I suspect.”

  “Indeed? How did that come about?”

  “I believe that he quietly genealogizes all those who come to work at the Institute.”

  “But why?”

  “In order to find out exactly what he did find out in my case. He is not a trusting man.”

  “I don’t understand. If you are my fifth-level descendant, why should it have more meaning to him than it does to me?”

  Mandamus rubbed his chin with the knuckles of his right hand in a thoughtful manner. “His dislike for you is in no way less than your dislike for him, Lady Gladia. If you were ready to refuse an interview with me for his sake, he is equally ready to refuse me preferment for your sake. It might be even worse if I were a descendant of Dr. Fastolfe, but not much.”

  Gladia sat stiffly, upright in her seat. Her nostrils flared and she said in a tight voice, “What is it, then, that you expect me to do? I cannot declare you a nondescendant. Shall I have an announcement placed on hypervision that you are a matter of indifference to me and that I disown you? Will that satisfy your Amadiro? If so, I must warn you I will not do it. I will do nothing to satisfy that man. If it means that he will discharge you and deprive you of your career out of some sort of disapproval of your genetic association, then that will teach you to associate with a saner, less vicious person.”

  “He will not discharge me, Madam Gladia. I am entirely too valuable to him—if you will pardon my immodesty. Still, I hope someday to succeed him as head of the Institute and that, I
am quite certain, he will not allow, as long as he suspects me of a descent worse than that which stems from you.”

  “Does he imagine that poor Santirix is worse than I am?”

  “Not at all.” Mandamus flushed and he swallowed, but his voice remained level and steady. “I mean no disrespect, madam, but I owe it to myself to learn the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “I am descended from you in the fifth degree. That is clear in the genealogical records. But it is possible that I am also descended in the fifth degree, not from Santirix Gremionis but from the Earthman Elijah Baley?”

  Gladia rose to her feet as quickly as though the undimensional force, fields of a puppeteer had lifted her. She was not aware that she had risen.

  It was the third time in twelve hours that the name of that long-ago Earthman had been mentioned—and by three different individuals.

  Her voice seemed not to be hers at all. “What do you mean?”

  He said, rising in his turn and backing away slightly, “It seems to me plain enough. Was your son, my great-great-grandfather, born of a sexual union of yourself with the Earthman Elijah Baley? Was Elijah Baley your son’s father? I don’t know how to express it more plainly.”

  “How dare you make such a suggestion? Or even think it?”

  “I dare because my career depends upon it. If the answer is yes, my professional life may well be ruined. I want a ‘no’ but an unsupported ‘no’ will do me no good. I must be able to present proof to Dr. Amadiro at the appropriate time and show him that his disapproval of my genealogy must end with you. After all, it is clear to me that his dislike of you—and even of Dr. Fastolfe—is as nothing—nothing at all—compared to the incredible intensity of his detestation of the Earthman Elijah Baley. It is not only the fact of his being short-lived, although the thought of having inherited barbarian genes would disturb me tremendously. I think that if I presented proof I was descended from an Earthman who was not Elijah Baley, he would dismiss that. But it is the thought of Elijah Baley—and only he—that drives him to madness. I do not know why.”

  The reiteration of Elijah’s name had made him seem almost alive again to Gladia. She was breathing harshly and deeply and she exulted in the best memory of her life.

  “I know why,” she said. “It was because Elijah, with everything against him, with all of Aurora against him, managed anyhow to destroy Amadiro at the moment when that man thought he held success in his hand. Elijah did it by the exercise of sheer courage and intelligence. Amadiro had met his infinite superior in the person of an Earthman he had carelessly despised and what could he do in return but hate futilely? Elijah has been dead for more than sixteen decades and still Amadiro cannot forget, cannot forgive, cannot release the chains that bind him in hate and memory to that dead man. And I would not have Amadiro forget or cease hating—as long as it poisons every moment of his existence.”

  Mandamus said, “I see you have reason for wishing Dr. Amadiro ill, but what reason have you for wishing me ill? To allow Dr. Amadiro to think I am descended from Elijah Baley will give him the pleasure of destroying me. Why should you give him that pleasure needlessly, if I am not so descended? Give me the proof, therefore, that I am descended from you and Satitirix Gremionis or from you and anybody but Elijah Baley.”

  “You fool! You idiot! Why do you need proof from me? Go to the historical records. You will find the exact days on which Elijah Baley was on Aurora. You will find the exact day on which I gave birth to my son, Darrel. You will find that Darrel was conceived more than five years after Elijah left Aurora. You will also find that Elijah never returned to Aurora. Well, then, do you think I gestated for five years, that I carried a fetus in my womb for five Standard Galactic Years?”

  “I know the statistics, madam. And I do not think you carried a fetus for five years.”

  “Then why do you come to me?”

  “Because there is more to it than that. I know—and I imagine that Dr. Amadiro well knows—that although the Earthman Elijah Baley, as you say, never returned to Aurora’s surface, he was once in a ship that was in orbit about Aurora for a day or so. I know—and I imagine that Dr. Amadiro well knows—that although the Earthman did not leave the ship to go to Aurora, you left Aurora to go to the ship; that you stayed on the ship for the better part of a day; and that this took place nearly five years after the Earthman had been on Aurora’s surface—at about the time, in fact, that your son was conceived.”

  Gladia felt the blood drain from her face as she heard the other’s calm words. The room darkened about her and she swayed.

  She felt the sudden, gentle touch of strong arms about her and knew they were those of Daneel. She felt herself lowered slowly into her chair.

  She heard Mandamus’s voice as though from a great distance.

  “Is that not true, madam?” he said.

  It was, of course, true.

  2. THE ANCESTOR?

  5

  Memory!

  Always there, of course, but usually remaining hidden. And then, sometimes, as a result of just the right kind of push, it could emerge suddenly, sharply defined, all in color, bright and moving and alive.

  She was young again, younger than this man before her; young enough to feel tragedy and love—with her death-in-life on Solaria having reached its climax in the bitter end of the first whom she had thought of as “husband.” (No, she would not say his name even now, not, even in thought.)

  Closer still to her then-life were the months of heaving emotion with the second-not-man—whom she had thought of by that term. Jander, the humanoid robot, had been given to her and she had made him entirely her own until, like her first husband, he was suddenly dead.

  And then, at last, there was Elijah Baley, who was never her husband, whom she had met only twice, two years apart, each time for a few hours on each of a very few days. Elijah, whose cheek she had once touched with her ungloved hand, on which occasion she had ignited; whose nude body she had later held in her arms, on which occasion she had flamed steadily at last.

  And then, a third husband, with whom she was quiet and at peace, paying with untriumph for unmisery and buying with firmly held forgetfulness the relief from reliving.

  Until one day (she was not sure of the day that so broke in upon the sleeping untroubled years) Han Fastolfe, having asked permission to visit, walked over from his adjoining establishment.

  Gladia looked upon him with some concern, for he was too busy a man to socialize lightly. Only five years had passed since the crisis that had established Han as Aurora’s leading statesman. He was the Chairman of the planet in all but name and the true leader of all the Spacer worlds. He had so little time to be a human being.

  Those years had left their mark—and would continue to do so until he died sadly, considering himself a failure though he had never lost a battle. Kelden Amadiro, who had been defeated, lived on sturdily, as evidence that victory can exact the greater penalty.

  Fastolfe, through it all, continued to be soft-spoken and patient and uncomplaining, but even Gladia, nonpolitical though she was and uninterested in the endless machinations of power, knew that his control of Aurora held firm only through constant and unremitting effort that drained him of anything that might make life worthwhile and that he held to it—or was held to it—only by what he considered the good of—what? Aurora? The Spacers? Simply some vague—concept of idealized Good?

  She didn’t know. She flinched from asking.

  But this was only five years after the crisis. He still gave the impression of a young and hopeful man and his pleasant homely face was still capable of smiling.

  He said, “I have a message for you, Gladia.”

  “A pleasant one, I hope,” she said politely.

  He had brought Daneel with him. It was a sign of the healing of old wounds that she could look at Daneel with honest affection and no pain at all, even though he was a copy of her dead Jander in all but the most insignificant detail. She could talk to him
, though he answered in what was almost Jander’s voice. Five years had skinned over the ulcer and deadened the pain.

  “I hope so,” said Fastolfe, smiling gently. “It’s from an old friend.”

  “It’s so nice that I have old friends,” she said, trying not to be sardonic.

  “From Elijah Baley.”

  The five years vanished and she felt the stab and pang of returning memory.

  “Is he well?” she asked in a half-strangled voice after a full minute of stunned silence.

  “Quite well. What is even more important, he is near.”

  “Near? On Aurora?”

  “In orbit about Aurora. He knows he can receive no permission to land, even if I were to use my full influence, or I imagine he does. He would like to see you, Gladia. He had made contact with me because he feels that I can arrange to have you visit his ship. I suppose I can manage that much—but only if you wish it. Do you wish it?”

  “I don’t now. This is too sudden for thought.”

  “Or even impulse?” He waited, then he said, “Truthfully, Gladia, how are you getting along with Santirix?”

  She looked at him wildly, as though not understanding the reason for the change of subject—then understanding. She said, “We get along well together.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “I am—not unhappy.”

  “That doesn’t sound like ecstasy.”

  “How long can ecstasy last, even if it were ecstasy?”

  “Do you plan to have children someday?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Are you planning a change in marital status?”

  She shook her head firmly. “Not yet.”

  “Then, my dear Gladia, if you want advice from a rather tired man, who feels uncomfortably old—refuse the invitation. I remember what little you told me after Baley had left Aurora and, to tell you the truth, I was able to deduce more from that than you perhaps think. If you see him, you may find it all disappointing, not living up to the deepening and mellowing glow of reminiscence; or, if it is not disappointing, worse yet, for it will disrupt a perhaps rather fragile contentment, which you will then not be able to repair.