Asimov’s Future History Volume 16

by Isaac Asimov

  The tram kept popping back into her thoughts. She imagined it a big wormlike thing on many wheels, with comfortable and well-lighted compartments within. She could make friends with the maintenance workers. Perhaps one of them would be exceptional, a native Dahlite with a huge mustache, far more manly than her father or any of the furtive black marketeers; he would comfort her gently at first, forcing nothing, until she decided what she wanted, what her body wanted...

  These romantic visions only made her more lonely. She felt very vulnerable. She pounded her fist on a rail and listened to the hollow boom be swallowed by the vaster roar. No time for such dreams! She would be inhuman, above all passions and needs; she would take swift vengeance and live to create fear and respect. Children would be told her name to make them behave...

  Suddenly, her moist eyes dried and she simply laughed at her own ridiculous imaginings. The laughter rose high and clear and, wondrously, the river’s rage did not swallow the sound: instead, the laughter echoed through the great vaults over the confluence, and returned to her, like the laughter of hundreds.

  For the time being–barring the appearance of that large, gentle Dahlite maintenance worker–she was licked. She knew it. She would have to go back up into Dahl soon, and she would need a place to hide. If people were looking for those with her talents, she would pick the best party and cooperate for a while.

  She sighed at this necessity, but Klia knew she was not an idiot. She would not languish with her dying dreams down there in the dark and wet, with no company but the great rivers.

  22.

  MORS PLANCH LISTENED to the sounds of a smooth, gentle landing from his pull-down emergency seat in the hold. Lodovik Trema sat beside him, eyes closed, face peacefully composed.

  Planch knew something about Madder Loss that neither Tritch nor her crew understood. Fifty years ago, Madder Loss had been a promising jewel in the Emperor’s black robe of Galactic space, a Renaissance World where intellect and philosophy and science burned very bright indeed. The vast city-continents of Madder Loss had bid fair to outshine Trantor, even then revealing its age. And for a time, Trantor had tolerated Madder Loss as a grand dame might for a while tolerate the presence of a beautiful young woman in the court, watching her beauty mature with more amusement than envy.

  But then the beautiful young woman, half unconscious of her effect, begins to attract the attentions of the grand dame’s paramours... and the tolerance turns into benign neglect, and finally comes the inexplicable cutting off of resources and the young woman finds herself a nonentity, shunned by the court, her name a blighted rumor.

  Planch had visited Madder Loss thirty years before to gather information for Linge Chen. At that time Chen had served as First Grade Administrator of Second Octant trade. What Mors had seen then would have broken his younger heart if he hadn’t been prepared and forewarned by Chen himself: beautiful spaceports standing empty, gleaming new domes and plexes showing a certain air of decay, the listless officials in their out-of-date Imperial uniforms adhering to rules without enthusiasm. Flourishing black markets, and even crowds of hungry women and children outside the spaceport fence. Madder Loss had opened his eyes to the ebbs and flows of history and economics, and had also planted that seed of personal rebellion that had just flowered. He had from that moment looked for a way to counteract the cold, loveless rationality of Linge Chen and his gentry cohorts, commanding their suffocating hordes of Greys, drawing their lines and cutting off the bright young flesh of the empire for some obscure sense of Trantor’s place and pride... For political expedience.

  Tritch came down to the hold and held out her register for him to place his code imprimatur upon. “Everything as agreed,” she murmured, not looking at him, and staying far away from Lodovik.

  Lodovik rose from his seat and stood by the large hatch. Slight whirring noises and a change in pressure revealed it would be opening soon.

  “As agreed,” Mors said, and marked the forms.

  “May our world-lines never cross again,” Tritch said lightly, then held out her index finger. He hooked his index finger around hers, in the ancient common greeting of their mutual ancestors, and they tugged at each other gently. “Now get out,” she ordered, and the two of them quickly complied, stepping out into the stale air and ominous silence of a huge docking bay, devoid of any other ships.

  “I’m to take you to the private dwelling of a doctor living in the country,” Planch told Lodovik as they waited for transportation from the passenger terminal. Here, in a vast hall designed to hold tens of thousands, they stood alone. The lighted tiles of the ceil formed haphazard puzzle patterns, their condition far worse than any such yet seen on Trantor. The hall was cast in murky twilight, and there were times when Mors thought he might choke, the air was so stagnant.

  They had encountered a single elderly Imperial official in the dusty passport docket, and he had waved them through with a sniff and something that might once have been a sneer. His world did not care, why should he?

  The hall was littered with broken-down tiktoks, like victims of some mechanical plague. The plague had been lack of replacement parts; Madder Loss had embraced the mechanical laborers and retained them long after Trantor and most other Imperial worlds shrugged them off. They were no longer even being collected for scrap.

  Lodovik looked at Planch sympathetically. “This is not pleasant for you,” he observed.

  “No,” Planch said with a sigh. “Look what the Empire has done–a waste.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Trantor did this because it feared it would lose its eminence. Squeezed the life out of an entire world.”

  Lodovik looked away. “Do you blame Linge Chen? Is that why you have double-crossed him?”

  Planch paled. “I never said anything about Linge Chen.”

  “No,” Lodovik said. Planch looked at the man with sudden misgivings. If Chen ever learned, there was no place in the Galaxy where he would be safe.

  A rickety, lozenge-shaped ground taxi approached on large white wheels. The driver was an elderly woman dressed in faded red livery. Her dialect was almost too thick to understand, but Planch managed to communicate with her. She seemed relieved to have paying passenger–in Imperial credits!–and even happier to be getting out of the urban center.

  “I know that you have done work for Chen in the past,” Lodovik said as they lurched along a potholed expressway. Here, the expressways layout in the open, rather than being routed below domes or underground, as they were on Trantor. The morning sunshine dazzled Planch, and the air was tinted pink, giving everything a warm, nostalgic glow. “I was privy to some of the arrangements.”

  “Of course,” Planch said.

  “Now you work for a man named Posit,” Lodovik said.

  Planch started in shock and looked particularly miserable. “I should shoot you right now and leave Madder Loss,” he murmured.

  “Well, you know the proper codes,” Lodovik said. “That much is obvious. You became angry at Chen when he carried on the policies that strangled Madder Loss... and other Renaissance Worlds. Yet the squeezing, as you describe it, of the Renaissance Worlds was not Linge Chen’s policy initially. It began under the First Ministry of Hari Seldon, who implemented the policy to increase stability in the Empire.”

  Planch grunted that he was well aware of the Seldon connection. “I don’t approve of a lot of Imperial actions, and Chen knew that when I worked for him. But I don’t work for him now.”

  “You have no need to worry,” Lodovik said. “Chen will never know.”

  Planch squirmed in his cracked seat.

  “Twenty minutes,” the driver called back in a cheery voice.

  The house was the most unusual Planch had ever seen–a single small building standing alone in a field covered with short green plants, forming a kind of living carpet beneath the warm sunshine. The outskirts of the city were ten kilometers away, and the nearest structure similar to this one was almost five kilometers distant.
The land between consisted of low, rolling hills covered with planar bushy growths, purple or deep bluish green. The countryside seemed elegantly vivacious, quite gaudy in comparison with the crumbling, unkempt city.

  The taxi let them out in a broad paved circle at the front of the dwelling. A single tall male figure stood beneath a cloth awning that flapped lazily in the warm, gentle breeze. He stepped forward and bowed toward Mors Planch.

  “You’ve done your work well,” the man said.

  Planch returned the bow, then awkwardly spread one arm toward Lodovik, and said blandly, “He wasn’t much trouble.” He stepped back as if they might do something unexpected, start fighting or perhaps just burst into flames.

  “You’re free to go,” the man said.

  “I need release papers. You seem to be the contact I met on Trantor, but...”

  The man gestured and a worn but fully functional tiktok came out of the house carrying a small satchel. “This will complete our agreement, for now. The bag also contains any papers you might need to go wherever you wish to go, safely, in the territories still controlled by the Empire.”

  “I want to get away from the empire, forever,” Planch said.

  “You will find some documents that will help you do that, as well,” the man said.

  Planch, despite his unease, seemed reluctant to return to the waiting taxi.

  “What else can I offer you?” the man asked

  “An explanation. Who are you, what do you represent?”

  “Nothing,” the man said. “I regret to say you’ll soon forget everything you saw here, and your role in rescuing my friend as well.”

  “Friend?”

  “Yes,” said the man. “We’ve known each other for thousands of years.”

  “You’re not joking. Who are you?” Planch asked, despite a tingling surge of awe blended with real fear.

  “Please go,” the man said, and tipped his head slightly. Planch tipped his own head in synchrony, turned without another word, and walked back to the vehicle. The door opened with a shuddering groan to receive him.

  Lodovik watched his rescuer depart. Then, using no human words whatsoever, but a high-frequency pulse-modulated sound signal and bursts of microwave, both exchanged greetings, and Lodovik was partially debriefed.

  After, R. Daneel Olivaw said, in spoken words, “Let’s do this on human time and in human ways, for the moment.”

  “Certainly,” Lodovik said. “I am curious as to where I might be assigned next.”

  Daneel opened the door to the dwelling, and Lodovik entered before him. “You state that there is something different about you. Yet I examine your transmitted status profile and see nothing amiss.”

  “Yes,” Lodovik said. “I have been examining my mental structure and programming since the accident, trying to pinpoint what that difference could be.”

  “Have you reached any conclusions?”

  “I have. I am no longer compelled to obey the Three Laws.”

  Daneel received this declaration with no humanly observable reaction. The main room of the house contained two chairs, and in the walls, there were niches for three tiktoks, but to Lodovik, they looked like the niches once reserved for robots on Aurora, tens of thousands of years ago.

  “If that is true, there will be grave difficulties, for I observe you are still functioning. You have not deactivated yourself.”

  “That would have been impossible under the circumstances, for I did not understand this new condition until after I had been rescued by Mors Planch. I caused harm, unwittingly, to a human being on the ship Planch had hired to find the Spear of Glory. I did not feel even a hint of the reaction I should have felt. I conclude that the neutrino flux has altered my positronic brain in an unanticipated fashion. Certain key elements in my logic circuits may have been transmuted.”

  “I see. Have you decided on what action you should take now?”

  “I must either deactivate, and impose on you to destroy my remains, or I must be sent to Eos, if my continued existence will serve any purpose.”

  Daneel sat on one of the chairs, and Lodovik took the other. It no longer seemed at all appropriate to occupy the niches, which in any case were too narrow for their human-scale frames.

  “Why did you travel all this way, rather than send an emissary?” Lodovik asked.

  “I have all possible emissaries in key positions at the moment,” Daneel said. “None could be spared; nor can I afford to lose you. I was already scheduled to be on Madder Loss as a jumping-off point for Eos. Normally I would have delayed my trip, since this is a very delicate time, and the accident has caused grave difficulties. It has even triggered a political struggle in the Imperial Palace that might directly involve Hari Seldon.”

  Though Lodovik had not worked directly on the Plan, he was well-informed about the psychohistorian.

  They sat in silence for several seconds, then Daneel spoke again. “We will go to Eos. I can arrange a small ship for you. There is a mission you can perform for me once you return”

  “I am sorry. Daneel,” Lodovik interrupted. “I must emphasize that I am not functioning properly. I should not be assigned any new missions until I have been repaired or reprogrammed, whichever is necessary.”

  “That can only be done on Eos,” Daneel said.

  “Yes, but there is a possibility I will no longer follow your instructions,” Lodovik said.

  “Please explain.”

  “Humans would call it a crisis of conscience. I have had many long and idle hours to sort through and reexamine all my brain’s memory contents, and all of my working algorithms, from this new perspective. I must confess that I am a very confused robot at this moment, and my behavior is not predictable. I may even be a danger.”

  Daneel stood and stepped over to Lodovik’s chair, then bent from the waist and placed his hand on Lodovik’s shoulder. “What does your investigation and examination tell you?”

  “That the Plan is wrong,” Lodovik said. “I believe... I am coming to believe... My state of thinking is such that...” He pushed up from the chair, past Daneel, and went to a broad window looking out on fields of planar bushes. “This is a beautiful world. Mors Planch thinks it is beautiful, and as I spent time with him, I developed a deep respect for his judgment. He resents the changes imposed upon Madder Loss. He regards them as a kind of punishment for aspiring to greatness in the Empire. His resentment led him to betray Linge Chen.”

  “I have known about his distaste for the Empire and for Chen,” Daneel said.

  Lodovik continued, “Yet it was not the Empire or Linge Chen that decreed Madder Loss be subdued, not directly.” He turned to Daneel, and his face bore traces of human emotion–sadness, regret, grief, even in the presence of a robot, where it was certainly not necessary. “It was you who decided the Renaissance Worlds must be controlled, and induced changes in the politics of Trantor to carry out their strangulation.”

  Daneel listened with his own human expression–a troubled sort of fascination. Mimicking human behaviors for so long had created reflex pathways in both robots that sometimes seemed easier to display than to suppress.

  “I foresaw greater instability,” Daneel began. “Centuries of human conflict around systems aspiring to replace the Empire and become centers of power. Not all such worlds could win; the struggle would cause untold suffering and destruction, on a scale never witnessed in human history. The empire will fall; we know that much. But all my efforts have been dedicated to mitigating the effects of that fall, to reduce human suffering to a minimum. The Zeroth Law–”

  “The Zeroth Law is what concerns me.”

  “You have accepted its primacy for centuries now. Why does it concern you?”

  “I believe the Zeroth Law may be a mutational function, spread between robots like a virus. I do not know how it arose, but it may have been provoked by another mutation–mentalic powers in robots.”

  “To question the Zeroth Law could lead us to conclude that everything
I have tried to accomplish is in error, and that all the robots who follow me should be deactivated, myself included.”

  “I am aware of the magnitude of my supposition.”

  Daneel said, “Apparently, something very interesting has happened to you.”

  “Yes,” Lodovik said, and his pleasant, plump face went through a series of random and uncoordinated contortions. “These questions and divisive thoughts may all be due to my own alteration. I have followed your lead for thousands of years... To feel doubts now...” His voice became a strained, metallic squeak. “I am miserable, Daneel!”

  Daneel considered the situation carefully, as if he were walking through a minefield. “I regret the disturbance you feel. You are not the first to disagree with the Plan. Others expressed similar views–many more thousands of years ago. There were many schisms among robots when the humans abandoned us. The Giskardians–those like myself, who followed the ideas of Giskard Reventlov–were opposed by others who insisted on a strict interpretation of the Three Laws.”

  “I do not know of these events,” Lodovik said, his voice steadier.

  “There has been no need to talk of them. Besides, these robots may all be inactive now–I have not heard from them for centuries.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “I do not know,” Daneel said. “They called themselves Calvinians, after Susan Calvin.” Every robot knew of Susan Calvin–though no human remembered her now. “Before those schisms there were far worse events. Unspeakable tasks that humans set for robots, carried out by some of those who would become Calvinians. These memories are in themselves disturbing.”

  “It gives me no satisfaction to cause you distress, R. Daneel,” Lodovik said.

  Daneel sat in the second chair again and folded his arms. Both robots were aware of this mimicry of human actions; both were used to the promptings of their human overlays, and did not regard these behaviors and gestures as particularly annoying. Sometimes, they were even reassuring, and Lodovik noticed that Daneel’s posture in the chair, the inflection of his voice, and his facial expression all seemed to become more human as their conversation progressed. Neither wished to return to the much more rapid modes of microwave or high-frequency sound communication; this was a situation of complexity and subtlety, and the slower modes of human speech seemed much safer.