Asimov’s Future History Volume 16

by Isaac Asimov

  Madder Loss, whose prideful flare threatened to ignite chaos across the entire galaxy, before it abruptly sputtered out.

  And Santanni... where Raych died, amid riots, rebellion, and horrid violence.

  With a dry mouth, Hari ordered –

  Superimpose both of these displays. Do a simple correlative enhancement, type six. Show commonalities.”

  The two images moved toward each other, merging and transforming as the computer measured and emphasized similarities. In moments, the verdict could be seen in symbols, swirling around the galactic wheel.

  A fifteen percent causation-correlation... between the appearance of chaos worlds and... and...

  Hari blinked. He could not even remember what silliness the bureaucrat had been jabbering about. Something about molecules in space? Different kinds of dirt?

  He almost shouted for an immediate visiphone link, to wake Horis Antic, partly in revenge for ruining Hari’s own sleep.

  Gripping the arms of his chair, he reconsidered, remembering what Dors had taught him when they lived together as husband and wife.

  “Don’t blurt the first thing that comes to mind, Hari. Nor always go charging ahead. Those traits may have served males well, back when they roamed some jungle, like primitive pans. But you are an imperial professor! Always fool them into thinking you’re dignified.”

  “When in fact I’m –”

  “A great big ape! “Dors had laughed, rubbing against him. “My ape. My wonderful human.”

  With that poignant memory, he recovered some calm. Enough to wait a while for answers.

  At least until morning.

  6.

  A FIGURE STEPPED out of the forest, crossing a clearing toward the spot where Dors stood waiting. She scrutinized the newcomer carefully.

  Its general shape remained the same – that of a tall, barrel-torsoed human male. But some details had changed. Lodovic now wore a somewhat younger face. A little more handsome in the classical sense, though still with fashionably sparse hair.

  “Welcome back to Panucopia,” the other robot told her, approaching to a distance of three meters, then stopping.

  Dors sent a microwave burst, initiating conversation via high-speed channels.

  Let’s get this over with.

  But he only shook his head.

  “We’ll use human-style speech, if you don’t mind. There are too many wild things infesting the ether these days, if you know what I meme.”

  It was not unusual for a robot to make a pun, especially if it helped play the role of a clever human. In this case, Dors saw his point. Memes, or infectious ideas, might have been responsible for Lodovic’s own transformation from a loyal member of Daneel’s organization to a rogue independent who no longer acknowledged the laws of robotics.

  “Are you still under influence of the Voltaire monstrosity?” she asked.

  “Do you and Daneel still talk to Joan of Arc?” Lodovic responded, then laughed, even though there were no humans present to be fooled by his emulation. “I confess that some bits of the ancient Voltaire sim still float around amid my programs, driven there by a supernova’s neutrino flux. But its effects were benign, I assure you. The meme has not made me dangerous.”

  “A matter of opinion,” Dors answered. “And opinion has no bearing when it comes to the safety of humankind.”

  The robot standing across from her nodded. “Ever the good schoolgirl, Dors. Loyal to your religion – much the way Joan remained true to her own faith, across so many millennia. The two of you are compatible.”

  It was an acerbic analogy. The religion Lodovic referred to was the Zeroth Law, of which Daneel Olivaw was high priest and chief proselyte. A faith which Lodovic now rejected.

  “And yet, you still claim to serve,” she said with more-than-feigned sarcasm.

  “I do. By volition. And not in complete accordance to Daneel’s plan.”

  “Daneel has slaved for humanity’s benefit ever since the dawn ages! How can you presume to know better than he does what is right?”

  Lodovic shrugged again, simulating the gesture so believably that it must surely have personal meaning. He turned slightly, pointing toward a cluster of nearby, vine-encrusted domes – the old abandoned Imperial Research Station – and the great forest beyond.

  “Tell me, Dors. Did it ever occur to you that something awfully convenient happened here, four decades ago? When you and Hari had your adventure, barely escaping death with your minds trapped in the bodies of apes?”

  Dors paused. Out of habit, her eyelids blinked in company with surprise.

  “Non sequitur,” she replied. “Your references do not correlate. What does that event have to do with you and Daneel –”

  “I am answering your question, so please humor me. Hearken back to when you and Hari were right here, running and brachiating under this very same forest canopy, experiencing a full range of emotions while hunters chased your borrowed ape bodies. Can you vividly recall fleeing from one narrow escape to another? Later, did you ever bother going over the experience in detail, calculating the probabilities?

  “Consider the weapons that your pursuers had available – from nerve gas to smart – bullets to tailored viruses – and yet they could not kill a pair of unarmed animals? Or ponder the way you two just barely managed to sneak back into the station, overcoming obstacles and villains, in order to reclaim your real bodies from stasis and save the day.

  “Or how about the remarkable way your enemies found you here in the first place, despite all of Daneel’s precautions and –”

  Dors cut him off.

  “Dispense with the melodrama, Lodovic. You are implying that we were meant to experience that peril... and meant to survive. Clearly you conjecture that Daneel himself stood behind our entire escapade. That he arranged for our apparent endangerment, the pursuit –”

  “And your assured survival. After all, you and Hari were important to his plans.”

  “Then what purpose could such a charade possibly serve?”

  “Can you not guess? Perhaps the same purpose that drew Hari here.”

  Dors frowned.

  “An experiment? Hari wanted to study basic human-simian nature for his psychohistorical models. Are you saying that Daneel took advantage of the situation by throwing us into simulated jeopardy here... in order to study our reactions? To what end?”

  “I will not say more at this time. Rather, I’ll leave it for you to surmise, at your leisure.”

  Dors found this incredible. “You summoned me all this distance... in order to cast absurd riddles?”

  “Not only that,” Lodovic assured. “I promised you a gift, as well. And here it comes.”

  The male figure in front of her gestured toward the forest, where a squat, heavily built machine now emerged, rolling on glittering treads. A ridiculous caricature of a human face peered from a neckless torso. Cradled in a pair of metal arms, the crude automaton carried a lidded box.

  “A tiktok,” she said, recognizing the mechanism by its clanking clumsiness, so unlike a positronic robot.

  “Indeed. New variants were being invented on many worlds about the time your husband became the most powerful man in the empire. Of course, he ordered all such work stopped, and the prototypes destroyed.”

  “You weren’t on Trantor when tiktoks went berserk. Humans died!”

  “Indeed. What better way to give them a bad reputation, making it easy to forbid their reinvention. Tell me, Dors. Can you say with any certainty that the tiktoks would have gone ‘berserk’ if not for the meddling of Hari and Daneel?”

  This time Dors remained silent. Clearly, Lodovic did not expect an answer.

  “Haven’t you ever wondered about the dawn ages?” He continued. “Humans invented our kind swiftly, almost as soon as they discovered the techniques of science, even before they had starflight! And yet, during the following twenty thousand years of advanced civilization, the feat was never repeated.

  “Can you explain it, Dor
s?”

  This time it was her turn to shrug. “We were a destabilizing influence. The Spacer worlds grew overreliant on robotic servants, losing faith in their own competence. We had to step aside”

  “Yes, yes,” Lodovic interrupted. “I know Daneel’s rationalization under the Zeroth Law. You are reciting the official reason why. What I want to know is... how?”

  Dors stared at Lodovic Trema.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Surely the question is simple. How has humanity been prevented from rediscovering robots! We are discussing a span of a thousand generations. In all that time, upon twenty-five million worlds, would not some ingenious schoolchild, tinkering in a basement hobby shop, have been able to replicate what her primitive ancestors accomplished with much cruder tools?”

  Dors shook her head.

  “The tiktoks...”

  “Were a very recent phenomenon. Those crude automatons only appeared when ancient constraints loosened. A sure sign of imperial decline and incipient chaos, according to Hari Seldon. No, Dors, the real answers have to lie much farther back in time.”

  “And I suppose you’re going to tell me what they are?”

  “No. You wouldn’t credit anything I say, believing I have a hidden agenda. But if you are curious about these matters, there is another, more reputable source you can ask.”

  The crude “tiktok” finished approaching from the forest, roiling to a halt within arm’s reach and offering Trema the box it carried. Lodovic removed the lid and drew an oblong object from within the container.

  Dors took an involuntary step back.

  It was the head of a robot! Not humaniform, it gleamed with metallic highlights. The eye cells, glossy black, were empty and vacant. Yet, when Dors sent a brief probing microwave burst, there came back a resonance – a faint echo showing that a positronic brain lay within, unshielded and unpowered, but also largely undamaged.

  That echo set off an involuntary shiver in her circuits. Dors could tell at once, the head was old.

  When Lodovic Trema next spoke, his voice was both amused and sympathetic.

  “Yeah, it struck me the same way. Especially when I realized who this once was.

  “Dors Venabili. I now entrust you with the most precious relic in the galaxy – the head and brain of R. Giskard Reventlov – co-founder of the Zeroth Law of Robotics... and slayer of the planet Earth.”

  7.

  BY MUTUAL CONSENT, Hari met the Grey Man at a cafe near the offices of the Imperial Soil Service, in one of the seedier bureaucratic levels of Coronnen Sector. Horis Antic expressed confidence that their conversation would be private, in a shielded booth that he must have prepared meticulously beforehand.

  In fact, Hari did not care if Linge Chen’s Special Police were still following him around, or listening in. This conversation would be dry enough to put the goons to sleep in no time.

  “As you might guess, my superiors don’t look kindly on unapproved research,” the small man told Hari, pausing to dispense a blue tablet from his belt pouch and washing it down with a gulp of ale. “Our agency is not well regarded, politically. Even a small scandal might cost us overhead allotments, recruitment priorities, or a percentum of our office cubicles!”

  Hari tried not to smile. Greys lived in a world of tense struggles over minutiae. Office politics and worries over government appropriations kept most senior bureaucrats in a constant state of agitation. No wonder Horis Antic seemed nervous, his eyes constantly darting. Even for a Grey, he took an inordinate number of calming pills.

  Perhaps he harbors a secret dream, that his freelance studies might get him plucked out of the rat race, into the more serene world of the meritocracy.

  That was what had happened to Hari – though admittedly before he was eight years old when those first algebra papers won him meritocratic robes.

  Only the gentry class – the noble aristocracy whose thousand ranks and levels ranged from mere township squires all the way past planetary earls and sector dukes to the emperor himself – inherited their social status at birth. All others were born citizens, then recategorized according to their nature and accomplishments. Still, such changes generally took place during youth. Hari saw little hope for Antic to make a switch at his age... unless he would consider becoming an eccentric. In some ways, the fellow already qualified.

  “It all began when I had a hunch to reexamine the ancient question of tilling,” the bureaucrat explained, after a new round of drinks was served.

  “The question of what?” Hari asked.

  Antic nodded. “Of course you wouldn’t have heard of it. The whole issue is rather obscure. Not many news reports or popular accounts are written about planetary soil analysis, I’m afraid. Let me begin again.

  “You see, Professor Seldon, it has long been axiomatic that nearly all human-settled worlds have a narrow range of traits – for instance, oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres with a roughly twenty: eighty ratio. Most of the multicelled life-forms on these planets descend from the forty or so standard phyla, using the same basic DNA structure... though there are exceptions.”

  “Chickens on every world,” Hari summarized with a smile, trying to put the man at ease. Antic kept twisting his cloth napkin, and it was starting to make Hari nervous.

  “Ha! “The bureaucrat laughed eagerly. “And crabgrass on every lawn. I forgot that you’re not a Trantor native. Some of this will be familiar to you, then. Indeed, a farmer from Sinbikdu would recognize most of the animals on far-off Incino. This supports the most popular theory regarding the origins of life – that similar species evolved naturally on many planets at the same time, due to some fundamental biological law. These similar creatures then naturally converged on the highest form of all, humanity.”

  Hari nodded. Antic was describing what a mathist would call an at tractor state... a situation that all surrounding states will drift toward, compelled by irresistible driving forces, so that all trajectories wind up intersecting at the same point. In this case, the standard dogma said that all evolutionary paths should inevitably produce human beings.

  Only he knew for certain that this at tractor notion was dead wrong. Years ago Hari had applied the tools of psychohistory to galaxy-wide genetic data and quickly determined that people must have emerged quite suddenly from somewhere in Sirius Sector, about twenty thousand years ago. This was recently confirmed by what he read in A Child’s Book of Knowledge.

  Naturally, he had no intention of announcing the truth, or trying to dispute the convergence theory. Nothing would bollix up the Seldon Plan worse than having the attention of the entire empire suddenly transfixed on a tiny world near Sirius, asking questions about events two hundred centuries ago!

  “Go on,” Hari urged. “I assume that similar patterns apply to the distribution of soil types?”

  “Yes. Yes indeed, Professor! Oh, there are geological differences from planet to planet... sometimes profound ones. But certain aspects seem almost universal. The tilling I spoke of has to do with the natural state of lowland soils that colonists found on most planets, when they first settled each world. (We do have records stretching that far back, for about a million planets.) In each case soil conditions were similar – crushed and sifted to a depth of several dozen meters, with an abundance of familiar vegetation growing thereupon. Excellent conditions for farming, by the way. Of course, the mission of my organization is to see to it that things stay that way, through proper care and maintenance, preventing erosion or losses caused by industrial pollution. I’m afraid this sometimes makes us unpopular with farmers and local gentry, but we have to take the long view, eh? I mean, if somebody doesn’t think about the future, how are we all going to have one? Sometimes it can get so frustrating –”

  “Horis!” Hari cut him off. “You’re drifting. Please get to the point.”

  Antic blinked, then nodded vigorously.

  “Quite right. Sorry.” He took a deep breath. “Anyway, theoreticians have long assumed that tilling is j
ust another universal phenomenon – one that naturally accompanies having an oxy-nitrogen atmosphere. Only –”

  Antic paused. Although he had checked the booth’s security twice at the beginning of their conversation, he still craned his neck to look around.

  “Only... members of my service have always known better,” he continued in a much lower voice.

  Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a flattish piece of stone. “Look carefully at the impressions here, Professor. Do you see symmetrical patterns?”

  Hari hesitated. Meritocrats had a traditional aversion to touching rocks or dirt, one reason why they traditionally wore gloves. No one knew the origins of the custom, but it was ancient and deep.

  And yet, I’ve never felt it. I’ve plunged my hands into soil before, enjoying the reaction this caused in my academic peers.

  Hari reached out and took the stone, instantly fascinated by the series of jagged grooves Antic pointed out.

  “It’s called a fossil. There, see the weird eye sockets? Note the pentagonal symmetry. Five legs! This thing is unrelated to any of the forty standard phyla! I picked it up it on Glorianna, but that hardly matters. You can actually find fossils on about ten percent of settled worlds! If you go up in the mountains, or anywhere away from the tilled areas. Highland dwellers know all about them, but there are taboos against talking about it. And they’ve learned better than to mention such things to their local scholars, who always get angry and change the subject.”

  Hari blinked, transfixed by the outline traced in stone. His mind fizzed with questions, like how old this creature was, and what its story could have been. He wanted to follow up on Antic’s story about the things farmers knew on innumerable worlds, and what meritocrats would not – or could not – learn.

  But none of these things brought them any closer to the issue that burned foremost in his mind.

  “Horis, your paper speaks of anomalies in the tilling. Please tell me about the exceptions. The ones that roused your suspicions.”

  The bureaucrat nodded again.