Asimov’s Future History Volume 11

by Isaac Asimov

  Gladia said softly, “I’m a Spacer. You’re a Settler.”

  “Who cares, Gladia? Do you?”

  “I mean, there’s no question of children. I’ve had mine.”

  “What difference does that make to me! There’s no danger of the name Baley dying out.”

  “I have a task of my own. I intend to bring peace to the Galaxy.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “And your trading? Will you give up your chance to be rich?”

  “We’ll do some together. Just enough to keep my crew happy and to help me support you in your task as peacebringer.”

  “Life will be dull for you, D. G.”

  “Will it? It seems to me that since you joined me it’s been too exciting.”

  “And you’ll probably insist on my giving up my robots.”

  D. G. looked distressed. “Is that why you’ve been trying to talk me out of this? I wouldn’t mind your keeping the two of them – even Daneel and his small lecherous smile – but if we’re going to live among Settlers –”

  “Then I suppose I’ll have to try to find the courage to do it.”

  She laughed gently and so did D. G. He held out his arms to her and she placed her hands in his.

  She said, “You’re mad. I’m mad. But everything has been so strange since the evening I looked up at the sky in Aurora and tried to find Solaria’s sun that I suppose being mad is the only possible response to things.”

  “What you’ve just said isn’t only mad,” said D. G., “it’s crazy, but that’s the way I want you to be.” He hesitated. “No, I’ll wait. I’ll shave my beard before I try to kiss you. That will lower the chances of infection.”

  “No, don’t! I’m curious about how it might feel.”

  And she promptly found out.

  73.

  Commander Lisiform strode back and forth across the length of his cabin. He said, “There was no use losing the ship. No use at all.”

  His political adviser sat quietly in his chair. His eyes did not bother to follow the agitated and rapid to-and-fro movement of the other. “Yes, of course,” he said.

  “What have the barbarians to lose? They only live a few decades, in any case. Life means nothing to them.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Still, I’ve never seen or heard of a Settler ship doing that. It may be a new fanatical tactic and we have no defense against it. What if they send drone ships against us, with shields up and full momentum but no human beings aboard?”

  “We might robotify our ships entirely.”

  “That wouldn’t help. We couldn’t afford to lose the ship. What we need is the shield knife they keep talking about. Something that will slice through a shield.”

  “Then they’ll develop one, too, and we will have to devise a knife-proof shield, and so will they, and it will be a standoff again at a higher level.”

  “We need something completely new, then.”

  “Well,” said the adviser, “maybe something will turn up. Your mission wasn’t primarily the matter of the Solarian woman and her robots, was it? It would have been pleasant if we could have forced them out of the Settler ship, but that was secondary, wasn’t it?”

  “The Council isn’t going to like it, just the same.”

  “It’s my job to take care of that. The important fact is that Amadiro and Mandamus left the ship and are on their way to Earth in a good speedy ferry.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “And you not only distracted the Settler ship but delayed it as well. That means Amadiro and Mandamus not only left the ship unnoticed but they will be on Earth before our barbarian captain will.”

  “I suppose so. But what of that?”

  “I wonder. If it were only Mandanus, I would dismiss the matter. He’s of no consequence. But Amadiro? To abandon the political wars back home at a difficult time and come to Earth? Something absolutely crucial must be going on here.”

  “What?” The commander seemed annoyed that he should be so nearly – and so all-but-fatally-involved in something of which he understood nothing.

  “I haven’t any idea.”

  “Do you suppose it might be secret negotiations at the highest level for some sort of overall modification of the peace settlement Fastolfe had negotiated?”

  The adviser smiled. “Peace settlement? If you think that, you don’t know our Dr. Amadiro. He wouldn’t travel to Earth in order to modify a clause or two in a peace settlement. What he’s after is a Galaxy without Settlers and if he comes to Earth – well, all I can say is that I wouldn’t like to be in the shoes of the Settler barbarians at this time.”

  74.

  “I trust, friend Giskard,” said Daneel, “that Madam Gladia is not uneasy at being without us. Can you tell at her distance?”

  “I can detect her mind faintly but unmistakably, friend Daneel. She is with the captain and there is a distinct overlay of excitement and joy.”

  “Excellent, friend Giskard.”

  “Less excellent for myself, friend Daneel. I find myself in a state of some disorder. I have been under a great strain.”

  “It distresses me to hear that, friend Giskard. May I ask the reason?”

  “We have been here for some time while the captain negotiated with the Auroran ship.”

  “Yes, but the Auroran ship is now gone, apparently, so that the captain seems to have negotiated to good effect.”

  “He has done so in a manner of which you were apparently not aware. I was – to an extent. Though the captain was not here with us, I had little trouble sensing his mind. It exuded overwhelming tension and suspense and underneath that a gathering and strengthening sense of loss.”

  “Loss, friend Giskard? Were you able to determine of what that loss might consist?”

  “I cannot describe my method of analysis of such things, but the loss did not seem to be the type of loss I have in the past associated with generalities or with inanimate objects. It had the touch – that is not the word, but there is no other that fits even vaguely – of the loss of a specific person.”

  “Lady Gladia.”

  “Yes.”

  “That would be natural, friend Giskard. He was faced with the possibility of having to give her up to the Auroran vessel.”

  “It was too intense for that. Too wailing.”

  “Too wailing?”

  “It is the only word I can think of in this connection. There was a stressful mourning associated with the sense of loss. It was not as though Lady Gladia would move elsewhere and be unavailable for that reason. That might, after all, be corrected at some future time. It was as though Lady Gladia would cease existing – would die – and be forever unavailable.”

  “He felt, then, that the Aurorans would kill her? Surely that is not possible.”

  “Indeed, not possible. And that is not it. I felt a thread of a sense of personal responsibility associated with the deep, deep fear of loss. I searched other minds on board ship and, putting it all together, I came to the suspicion that the captain was deliberately charging his ship into the Auroran vessel.”

  “That, too, is not possible, friend Giskard,” said Daneel in a low voice.

  “I had to accept it. My first impulse was to alter the captain’s emotional makeup in such a way as to force him to change course, but I could not. His mind was so firmly set, so saturated with determination and – despite the suspense, tension, and dread of loss – so filled with confidence of success –”

  “How could there be at once a dread of loss through death and a feeling of confidence of success?”

  “Friend Daneel, I have given up marveling at the capacity of the human mind to maintain two opposing emotions simultaneously. I merely accept it. In this case, to have attempted to alter the captain’s mind to the point of turning the ship from its course would have killed him. I could not do that.”

  “But if you did not, friend Giskard, scores of human beings on this ship, including Madam Gladia, and several hundreds mor
e on the Auroran vessel would die.”

  “They might not die if the captain were correct in his feeling of confidence in success. I could not bring about one certain death to prevent many merely probable ones. There is the difficulty, friend Daneel, in your Zeroth Law. The First Law deals with specific individuals and certainties. Your Zeroth Law deals with vague groups and probabilities.”

  “The human beings on board these ships are not vague groups. They are many specific individuals taken together.”

  “Yet when I must make a decision it is the specific individual I am about to influence directly whose fate must count with me. I cannot help that.”

  “What was it you did do, then, friend Giskard – or were you completely helpless?”

  “In my desperation, friend Daneel, I attempted to contact the commander of the Auroran vessel after a small Jump had brought him quite close to us. – I could not. The distance was too great. And yet the attempt was not altogether a failure. I did detect something, the equivalent of a faint hum. I puzzled over it a short while before realizing I was receiving the overall sensation of the minds of all the human beings on board the Auroran vessel. I had to filter out that faint hum from the much more prominent sensations arising from our own vessel – a difficult task.”

  Daneel said, “Nearly impossible, I should think, friend Giskard.”

  “As you say, nearly impossible, but I managed it with an enormous effort. However, try as I might, I could make out no individual minds. – When Madam Gladia faced the large numbers of human beings in her audience on Baleyworld, I sensed an anarchic confusion of a vast jumble of minds, but I managed to pick out individual minds here and there for a moment or two. That was not so on this occasion...

  Giskard paused, as though lost in his memory of the sensation.

  Daneel said, “I imagine this must be analogous to the manner in which we see individual stars even among large groups of them, when the whole is comparatively close to us. In a distant galaxy, however, we cannot make out individual stars but can see only a faintly luminous fog.”

  “That strikes me as a good analogy, friend Daneel. – and as I concentrated on the faint but distant hum, it seemed to me that I could detect a very dim wash of fear permeating it. I was not sure of this, but I felt I had to try to take advantage of it. I had never attempted to exert influence over anything so far away, over anything as inchoate as a mere hum – but I tried desperately to increase that fear by however small a trifle. I cannot say whether I succeeded.”

  “The Auroran vessel fled. You must have succeeded.”

  “Not necessarily. The vessel might have fled if I had done nothing.”

  Daneel seemed lost in thought. “It might. If our captain were so confident that it would flee –”

  Giskard said, “On the other hand, I cannot be sure that there was a rational basis to that confidence. It seemed to me that what I detected was intermixed with a feeling of awe and reverence for Earth. The confidence I sensed was rather similar to the kind I have detected in young children toward their protectors – parental or otherwise. I had the feeling that the captain believed he could not fail in the neighborhood of Earth because of the influence of Earth. I wouldn’t say the feeling was exactly irrational, but it felt nonrational, in any case.”

  “You are undoubtedly right in this, friend Giskard. The captain has, in our hearing, spoken of Earth, on occasion, in a reverential manner. Since Earth cannot truly influence the success of an action through any mystical influence, it is quite possible to suppose that your influence was indeed successfully exerted. And moreover –”

  Giskard, his eyes glowing dimly, said, “Of what are you thinking, friend Daneel?”

  “I have been thinking of the supposition that the individual human being is concrete while humanity is abstract. When you detected that faint hum from the Auroran ship, you were not detecting an individual, but a portion of humanity. Could you not, if you were at a proper distance from Earth and if the background noise were sufficiently small, detect the hum of the mental activity of Earth’s human population, overall? And, extending that, can one not imagine that in the Galaxy generally there is the hum of the mental activity of all of humanity? How, then, is humanity an abstraction? It is something you can point to. Think of that in connection with the Zeroth Law and you will see that the extension of the Laws of Robotics is a justified one – justified by your own experience.”

  There was a long pause and finally Giskard said, slowly as though it were being dragged out of him, “You may be right friend Daneel. – and yet, if we are landing on Earth now, with a Zeroth Law we may be able to use, we still don’t know how we might use it. It seems to us, so far, that the crisis that Earth faces involves the use of a nuclear intensifier, but as far as we know, there is nothing of significance on Earth on which a nuclear intensifier can do its work. What, then, will we do on Earth?”

  “I do not – as yet know,” said Daneel sadly.

  75.

  Noise!

  Gladia listened in astonishment. It didn’t hurt her ears. It wasn’t the sound of surface slashing on surface. It wasn’t a piercing shriek, or a clamor, or a banging, or anything that could be expressed by an onomatopoetic word.

  It was softer and less overwhelming, rising and falling, bearing within it an occasional irregularity – and always there.

  D. G. watched her listening, cocking her head to this side and that, and said, “I call it the ‘Drone of the City,’ Gladia.”

  “Does it ever stop?”

  “Never, really, but what can you expect? Haven’t you ever stood in a field and heard the wind rustling the leaves, and insects stridulating, and birds calling, and water running. That never stops.”

  “That’s different.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s the same. The sound here is the melting together of the rumble of machinery and the various noises people make, but the principle is precisely the same as the natural nonhuman noises of a field. You’re used to fields, so you don’t hear the noise there. You’re not used to this, so you hear it and probably find it annoying. Earthpeople don’t hear it except on the rare occasions when they come fresh in from the countryside – and then they are very glad indeed to greet it. Tomorrow you won’t hear it either.”

  Gladia looked about thoughtfully from their position on a small balcony. “So many buildings” ‘

  “That’s true enough. Structures in every direction – stretching outward for miles. And up – and down, too. This is not just a city, in the fashion of Aurora or Baleyworld. It is a City – capital ‘C’ – of the kind that exists only on Earth.”

  “These are the Caves of Steel,” said Gladia. “I know. We’re underground, aren’t we?”

  “Yes. Absolutely. I must tell you that it took me time to get used to this sort of thing the first time I visited Earth. Wherever you go in a City, it looks like a crowded city scene. Walkways and roadways and storefronts and mobs of people, with the soft and universal lights of fluorescents making everything seem bathed in soft shadowless sunshine – but it isn’t sunshine and, up above the surface, I don’t know if the sun is really shining at the moment, or is covered by clouds, or is absent altogether, leaving this part of the world plunged in night and darkness.”

  “It makes the City enclosed. People breathe each other’s air.”

  “We do anyway – on any world – anywhere.”

  “Not like this.” She sniffed. “It smells.”

  “Every world smells. Every City on Earth smells differently. You’ll get used to it.”

  “Do I want to? Why don’t people suffocate?”

  “Excellent ventilation.”

  “What happens when it breaks down?”

  “It never does.”

  Gladia looked about again and said. “Every building seems loaded with balconies.”

  “It’s a sign of status. Very few people have apartments facing out and if they do have one they want the advantage of it. Most Citypeople live inside w
indowless apartments.”

  Gladia shuddered, “Horrible! What’s the name of this City, D. G.?”

  “It’s New York. It’s the chief City, but not the largest. On this continent, Mexico City and Los Angeles are the largest and there are Cities larger than New York on other continents.”

  “What makes New York the chief City, then?”

  “The usual reason. The Global Government is located here. The United Nations.”

  “Nations?” She pointed her finger triumphantly at D. G. “Earth was divided into several independent political units. Right?”

  “Right. Dozens of them. But that was before hyperspatial travel – prehyper times. The name remains, though. That’s what’s wonderful about Earth. It’s frozen history. Every other world is new and shallow. Only Earth is humanity in its essence.”

  D. G. said it in a hushed whisper and then retreated back into the room. It was not a large one and its furnishings were skimpy.

  Gladia said, disappointed, “Why isn’t there anyone about?”

  D. G. laughed. “Don’t worry, dear. If it’s parades and attention you want, you’ll have them. It’s just that I asked them to leave us alone for a while. I want a little peace and rest and I imagine you do, too. As for my men, they have to berth the ship, clean it up, renew supplies, tend to their devotions –”

  “Women?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean, though I suppose women will playa role later. By devotions, I mean that Earth still has its religions and these comfort the men somehow. Here on Earth, anyway. It seems to have more meaning here.”

  “Well,” said Gladia half-contemptuously. “Frozen history, as you say. – Do you suppose we can get out of the building and walk about a bit?”

  “Take my advice, Gladia, and don’t jump into that sort of thing just now. You’ll get plenty of it when the ceremonies begin.”

  “But that will be so formal. Could we skip the ceremonies?”