Asimov’s Future History Volume 16

by Isaac Asimov

  For a robot, duty was everything, self nothing; yet in his present circumstance, he could look through the port at the effects of the shock front and speculate for no particular reason about physical processes. While not completely stopping his constant processing of problems associated with his long-term mission, he could drift in the middle of the bridge, his immediate needs and work reduced to nothing.

  For humans, this could be called a time of introspection. Introspection without the target of duty was more than novel; it was disturbing. Lodovik would have avoided the opportunity and this sensation if he could have.

  A robot, above all else, was uncomfortable with internal change. Ages past, during the robotic renaissance, on the almost-forgotten worlds of Aurora and Solaria, robots had been built with inhibitions that went beyond the Three Laws. Robots, with a few exceptions, were not allowed to design and build other robots. While they could manage minor repairs to themselves, only a select few specialty units could repair robots that had been severely damaged.

  Lodovik could not repair this malfunction in his own brain, if it was a malfunction; the evidence was not yet clear. But a robot’s brain, its essential programming, was even more off-limits to meddling than its body.

  There was one place remaining in the Galaxy where a robot could be repaired, and where occasionally a robot could be manufactured. That was Eos, established by R. Daneel Olivaw ten thousand years ago, far from the boundaries of the expanding Empire. Lodovik had not been there for ninety years.

  Still, a robot had a strong urge to self-preservation; that was implicit in the Third Law. With time to contemplate his condition, Lodovik wondered if he might in fact be found, then sent to Eos for repair...

  None of these possibilities seemed likely. He resigned himself to the most probable fate: ten more years in this crippled ship, until his minifusion power reserves ran down, with nothing important to do, a Robinson Crusoe of robots, lacking even an island to explore and transform.

  Lodovik could not feel a sense of horror at this fate. But he could imagine what a human would feel, and that in itself induced an echo of robotic unease.

  To cap it all, he was hearing voices–or rather, a voice. It sounded human, but communicated only at odd intervals, in fragments. It even had a name, something like Volda”. And it gave an impression of riding vast but tenuous webs of force, sailing through the deep vacuum between the stars

  Seeking out the plasma halos of living stars, reveling in the neutrino miasma of dead and dying stars, neutrinos intoxicating as hashish smoke. Fleeing from Trantor’s boredom, I grow bored again–and I find, between the stars, a robot in dire straits! One of those the Eternal brought from outside to replace the many destroyed–Look, my friends, my boring friends who have no flesh and know no flesh, and tolerate no fleshly ideals

  One of your hated purgers!

  The voice faded. Added to his distress over the death of the captain and crew of the Spear of Glory and his odd feedback of selfless unease, this mysterious voice–a clear sign of delusion and major malfunction–brought him as close as a robot could come to complete misery.

  6.

  FROM HIS VANTAGE in the tiny balcony apartment overlooking Streeling University, R. Daneel Olivaw could not feel human grief, lacking the human mental structures necessary for that bitter reassessment and reshaping of neuronal pathways; but, like Lodovik, he could feel a sharp and persistent unease, somewhere between guilt at failure and the warning signals of impending loss of function. The news that one of his most valued cohorts was missing distressed him at the very least in that way. He had lost so many to the tiktoks, guided by the alien meme-entities, it seemed so recently–decades, however, and his discomfort (and loneliness!) still burned.

  He had seen the newsfilm in a store window the day before, of the loss of the Spear of Glory and the probable end to any hope of rescue for the citizens of several worlds.

  In his present guise, he looked very much as he had twenty millennia before, in the time of his first and perhaps most influential relationship with a human, Elijah Bailey. Of medium height, slender, with brown hair, he appeared about thirty-five human years of age. He had made some small accessions to the changes in human physiology in that time; the fingernails on his pinkie fingers were now gone, and he was some six centimeters taller. Still, Bailey might have recognized him.

  It was doubtful that Daneel would have recognized his ancient human friend, however; all but the most general of those memories had long since been stored in separate caches, and were not immediately accessible to the robot.

  Daneel had undergone many transformations since that time, the most famous of them being Demerzel, First Minister to the Emperor Cleon I; Hari Seldon himself had succeeded him in that post. Now the time was approaching when Daneel would have to intensify his direct participation in Trantor’s politics, a prospect he found distasteful. The loss of Lodovik would make his work all the more difficult.

  He had never enjoyed public displays. He was far more content to operate in the background and let his thousands of cohorts act out public roles. He preferred, in any case, that his robots assert themselves in small ways here and there over time, at key locations, to effect changes that would in turn effect other changes, producing a cascade with (he hoped) the desired results.

  In the centuries of his work he had seen a few failures and many successes, but with Lodovik he had hoped to insure his most important goal, the perfection of the Plan, Hari Seldon’s Psychohistory Project, and the settlement of a First Foundation world.

  Seldon’s psychohistory had already given Daneel the tools necessary to see the Empire’s future in bleak detail. Collapse, disintegration, wholesale destruction: chaos. There was nothing he could do to prevent that collapse. Perhaps had he acted ten thousand years ago, with then-impossible foresight, using the crude and piecemeal psychohistory then at his disposal, he might have put off this catastrophe. But Daneel could not allow the Empire’s decline and fall to proceed without intervention, for too many humans would suffer and die–over thirty-eight billion on Trantor alone–and the First Law dictated that no human should be harmed or allowed to come to harm.

  His duty for all of those twenty thousands of years had been to mitigate human failures and redirect human energies for the greater human good.

  To do that, he had mired himself in history, and some of the changes he had effected had resulted in pain, harm, even death. It was the Zeroth Law, first formulated by the remarkable robot Giskard Reventlov, that allowed him to continue functioning under these circumstances.

  The Zeroth Law was not a simple concept, though it could be stated simply enough: some humans could be harmed, if by so doing one could prevent harm for the greater number.

  The ends justify the means.

  This dreadful implication had powered so much agony in human history, but it was no time to engage in that ancient internal debate.

  What could he learn from the loss of Lodovik Trema? Nothing, it seemed; the universe sometimes decided things beyond the control of rational action. There was nothing so frustrating and difficult to encompass, for a robot, as a universe indifferent to humans.

  Daneel could move anonymously from Sector to Sector, along with the migrating unemployed now pandemic on Trantor. He could maintain contact with his cohorts through a personal communicator or his portable informer, as well as through illegal hookups to the planet’s many networks. Sometimes he dressed as a pitiful street beggar; he spent much of his time in a cramped, dirty apartment in the Trans-Imperial Sector, barely seventy kilometers from the Palace. Nobody wished to look at a figure so old, bent, filthy, and pitiful; in a way, Daneel had become a symbol of the misery he hoped to overcome.

  No humans remembered a fictional character who had so enjoyed going out in disguise among the common people, the lower classes, a man of pure and impossibly discerning intellect, a detective much like Daneel’s old friend Elijah Bailey. With Daneel’s frequent memory dumps and adjustments, all
that he remembered was a single name and an overall impression: Sherlock.

  Daneel was one of the many robots who had become disguised Sherlocks among the masses; tens of thousands throughout the Galaxy, trying not just to solve a mystery, but to prevent further and greater crimes.

  The leader of these dedicated servants, the first Eternal, brushed as much of the street’s filth from his rags as he could manage, and left the cramped and empty General Habitation Project hovel in search of finer clothes.

  7.

  “THEY’VE SEARCHED THE entire apartment,” Sonden Asgar moaned, rubbing his elbows and looking smaller and more frail than she had ever seen him before. Klia’s respect for her father had not been high in the last few years, but she still felt a pang for his misery–and an abiding sense of guilt that strengthened a sense of responsibility. “They went through our records–imagine that! Private records! Some Imperial authority...”

  “Why your records, Father?” Klia asked. The apartment was a shambles. She could imagine the investigators pulling up cabinets and throwing out the boxes and few dishes within, tugging up the worn carpets... She was glad she hadn’t been here, and for more than one reason.

  “Not my records!” Sonden shouted. “They were looking for you. School papers, bookfilms, and they took our family album. With all your mother’s pictures. Why? What have you done now?”

  Klia shook her head and upturned a stool to sit. “If they’re looking for me, I can’t stay,” she said.

  “Why, daughter? What could–”

  “If I’ve done anything illegal, Father, it’s not worth the attention of Imperial Specials. It must be something else...” She thought of the conversation with the man in dusty green, and frowned.

  Sonden Asgar stood in the middle of the main room, three meters square, hardly a room at all–more of a closet–and shivered like a frightened animal. “They were not kind,” he said. “They grabbed me and shook me hard... They acted like thugs. I might as well have gotten mugged in Billibotton!”

  “What did they say?” Klia asked softly.

  “They asked where you were, how you had done in school, how you made your living. They asked whether you knew a Kindril Nashak. Who is that?”

  “A man,” she said, hiding her surprise. Kindril Nashak! He had been the kingpin in her greatest success so far, a deal that had put four hundred New Credits in her accounts with the Banker in Billibotton. But even that had been trivial–surely nothing worth their attention. Imperial Special police were supposed to seek out the Lords of the Underground, not clever girls with purely personal ambitions.

  “A man!” her father said sharply. “Someone who’s willing to take you off my hands, I hope!”

  “I haven’t been a burden to you for years,” Klia said sourly. “I only dropped by to see how you were doing.” And to discover why any thought of you made my head itch.

  “I told them you’re never here!” Sonden cried. “I said we hadn’t seen each other in months. None of it makes sense! It will take days to clean this mess. The food! They spilled the entire cookery!”

  “I’ll help you pick up,” Klia said. “Shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

  She certainly hoped not. Other faces were making her head itch now: Friends, colleagues, anyone associated with Nashak. One thing she was sure of: She had suddenly become important, and not because she was a clever member of the black market community.

  An hour later, with the mess largely taken care of and Sonden at least beginning to recover his calm. she kissed him on the top of the head and said good-bye, and she meant it.

  She could not look at her father without her scalp seeming to burn. Nothing to do with the Guilt, she told herself. Something new.

  Hereafter, any contact with him would be extremely dangerous.

  8.

  MAJOR PERL NAMM of Special Investigations, Imperial Security, assigned to the Dahl Sector, had been waiting for two hours in the private Palace office of Imperial Councilor Farad Sinter. He adjusted his collar nervously. The desk of Farad Sinter was smooth and elegant, crafted from Karon wood from the Imperial Gardens, a gift from Klayus I. The top of the desk held only an inactive Imperial-class informer. A sun-and-spaceship plaque hovered to one side of the desk. The office’s high ceiling was supported by beams of Trantorian basalt, with intricate floral patterns spun-carved by tuned blaster beams. The major looked up at these beams, and when he looked down again, Farad Sinter stood behind the desk, wearing an irritated frown.

  “Yes?”

  Major Namm, very blond and compact, was not used to private audiences at this social level, and in the Palace, as well. “Second report on the search for Klia Asgar, daughter of Sonden and Bethel Asgar. Survey of the father’s apartment.”

  “What else did you learn?”

  “Her early intelligence tests were normal, not exceptional. After the age of ten, however, those tests showed extraordinary jumps–then, by the age of twelve, they revealed that she was an idiot.”

  “Standard Imperial aptitude tests, I assume?”

  “Yes, sir, adjusted for Dahlite... ah... needs.”

  Sinter walked across the room and poured himself a drink. He did not offer any to the major, who wouldn’t have known what to do with fine wine anyway. No doubt his tastes were limited to the cruder forms of stimulk, or even the more direct stims favored in the military and police services. “There are no records of childhood illness, I presume,” Sinter said.

  “Two possible explanations for that, sir,” the blond major said.

  “Yes?”

  “Hospitals in Dahl typically record only exceptional illnesses. And in those cases, if the exceptions might reflect badly on the hospital, they report nothing at all.”

  “So perhaps she never had brain fever at all... as a child, when almost everyone of any intelligence contracts brain fever.”

  “It’s possible, sir, though unlikely. Only one out of a hundred normal children escape brain fever. Only idiots escape completely, sir. She may have avoided it for that reason.”

  Sinter smiled. The officer was stepping outside his expertise; the number was actually closer to one in thirty million normals, though many claimed they had never had it. And that claim in itself was evocative, as if escaping conferred some added status.

  “Major, are you at all curious about the Sectors you do not patrol?”

  “No, sir. Why should I be?”

  “Do you know the tallest structure on Trantor, above sea level, I mean?”

  “No, sir.”

  “The most populated Sector?”

  “No, sir.”

  “The largest planet in the known Galaxy?”

  “No.” The major frowned as if he were being mocked.

  “Most people are ignorant of these things. They don’t care to know; tell them and they forget. The larger vision is lost in the day-to-day minutiae, which they know well enough to get along. What about the basic principles of hyperdrive travel?”

  “Sky, no... Pardon me. No sir.”

  “I’m ignorant of that myself. No curiosity at all about such things.” He smiled pleasantly. “Have you ever wondered why Trantor seems so run-down nowadays?”

  “Sometimes, sir. It is a nuisance.”

  “Have you thought to complain to your neighborhood council?”

  “Not my place. There’s so much to complain about, where to begin?”

  “Of course. Yet you’re known as a competent and perhaps even an exceptional officer.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Sinter looked down at the polished copperstone floor. “Are you curious why I am so interested in this woman, this girl?”

  “No, sir.” But the major thought it worth a small, conspiratorial wink.

  Sinter’s eyes widened. “You believe I’m interested in her sexually?”

  The major straightened abruptly. “No sir, not my place to think anything of the sort.”

  “I would be frightened even to be in her presence for long,
Major Namm.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “She never had brain fever.”

  “We don’t know that, sir. No records.”

  Sinter dismissed that with a shake of his head. “I know that she never had brain fever, or any other childhood disease. And not because she was an idiot. She was more than merely immune, Major.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And her powers can be extraordinary. And do you know how I know that? Because of Vara Liso. She first detected this girl in a Dahlite market a week ago. A prime candidate, she thought. I should send Vara Liso with you on your rounds now, just to refine the hunt.”

  The major said nothing, merely stood at parade rest, eyes fixed on the opposite wall. His Adam’s apple bobbed. Sinter could read the man well enough without seeing into his mind; the major did not much believe all this, and knew little or nothing of Vara Liso.

  “Can you find her for me, without Vara Liso’s aid?”

  “With sufficient numbers of officers, we can find her in two or three days. My small crew, by itself, would probably take two or three weeks. Dahl is not in a cooperative mood right now, sir.”

  “No, I suppose not. Well, find her, but do not attempt to arrest her or attract her attention in any way. You would fail, as her kind has made so many others fail...”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell me what she does, whom she sees. When I give you the order, you will shoot her with a large-bore kinetic-energy gun, from a distance, in the head. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “As you have so faithfully done before.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then you will bring her body to me. Not to the criminalists, but to me, my private chambers. Enough, Major.”

  “Sir.” Major Namm departed.

  Sinter did not much trust the competence of any police, in any Sector. They could be bribed easily enough, yet Sinter’s extended police patrols had not yet managed to bring down one robot; all of their targeted individuals had been humans, after all. The robots had deceived them very cleverly.