by Isaac Asimov
Perhaps other cultures, Settler cultures, might regard youth as attractive, or let youthful zeal serve to excuse a multitude of sins. But Spacer culture was old, and its ways were old. Most of its people were old as well. For the average citizen, the exuberance and passion of youth was, at most, a distant, and slightly distasteful, memory, and Lentrall was a walking reminder of why that was. Brashness, impetuosity, and arrogance rarely won any friends.
But there was some possibility that the message Lentrall carried was important, no matter how annoying the messenger might be. “Let’s both back off on this, just for the moment,” Kresh said. “We’re not getting anywhere anyway.”
Lentrall shifted uncomfortably on his feet. He seemed to debate the idea of protesting again, and then think better of it. “Very well, sir,” he said. “I – I apologize for my outburst. It’s just that the strain of all this, the thought that the survival of the planet might be in my hands – it’s a lot to deal with.”
“I know,” Kresh said, his voice suddenly gentle. “I know it very well. I have been living with just that thought for years now.”
Once again, Lentrall reddened a bit. “Yes, sir. I know you have. It’s just the idea of letting this chance slip away. But even so, I shouldn’t have presumed to, to –”
“That’s all right, son. Let’s just leave it there. We’ll talk again in a few days. In fact, tomorrow. Come in tomorrow morning. I will bring my wife, and you can give the full presentation to both of us. I would very much value her opinion on all this.” And that was true for more reasons than he would care to share with young Dr. Lentrall just at the moment.
“Yes, sir. I’ll do that. Tomorrow, first thing. Would ten be all right?”
“That would be perfect. Donald, get the door for our guest, will you?”
“Of course, sir.” Donald 111, Kresh’s personal robot, stepped out of his wall niche and walked smoothly across the floor. He led Lentrall to the door, activated the door controls, and watched Lentrall leave.
Donald was a short, rounded-off sort of robot, all smooth curves and no hard edges, quite specifically designed to be as nondescript and nonthreatening in appearance as possible. He was sky-blue in color, the sky-blue of the old Hades Sheriff’s Department, a hold-over from the days when Kresh was the sheriff of the city – and there was a sheriff. Perhaps Kresh should have had Fredda recoat him in some other color. But Kresh liked the reminder of those days, when he had dealt with problems a lot smaller than the ones he had now – even if they had seemed quite large enough at the time.
Donald closed the door after Lentrall and turned back to face Kresh.
“Your opinion, Donald?”
“Of what sir? The message, or the man who delivered it?”
“Both, I suppose. But start with the messenger. Quite a determined young man, isn’t he?”
“Yes, sir. If I may say so, he puts me in mind of what I know of your own early days.”
Kresh looked toward Donald suspiciously. “What do you know about my early days?” he demanded. “How could you know about them? You weren’t even built until after I was sheriff.”
“True enough, sir, but you have been my master for many years now, and I have made you my study. After all, the better I know you, the better I can serve you. I have examined all the extant records regarding you. And, unless every record is misleading or inaccurate, that young man there bears a striking resemblance to the man you were at his age.”
“Donald, that comes dangerously close to being sentimental.”
“I trust not, sir. I do not have any of the emotional overlay protocols needed to experience sentimentality. Rather, I have merely stated an objective opinion.”
“Have you indeed?” Kresh asked. “Well, if you have, it is a most disconcerting one.” Kresh stood up and stretched. It had been a long day, and Lentrall had given him a lot to think about. “Come on, Donald, let’s go home.”
“Yes, sir.” Donald turned back toward the door, unlocked it, and reopened it. He led Kresh and out of the office, down the hallway, and over to the governor’s private elevator. The elevator door opened, and man and robot stepped into it. The door closed behind them, and carried them up toward the roof of Government Tower, where Kresh’s private aircar waited in a secured hangar. There were actually two landing pads on the roof – a smaller one on the very apex of the building, for the use of the governor only, and a larger one about fifteen meters lower down. The governor’s private landing pad had been added after the Grieg incident, by the simple expedient of building a ten-meter-wide, hollow stresscrete-and-steel pillar in one corner of the existing landing pad. The builders then put a flat disk thirty meters across atop of the pillar and used heavy buttressing to reinforce it. There was a small observation post built into the pillar itself, about ten meters above the original landing pad. The CIP used it as a sort of control tower for the main landing area.
Locked doors, private elevators, secured hangars, controlled-access landing pads. Kresh brooded over it all as they rode up in the elevator. Sometimes it seemed to Kresh that the walls between him and the world he was supposed to be governing were impossibly high. How could he run the planet if the whole system conspired to keep him cut off from it all, in the name of his own safety?
On the other hand, his immediate predecessor had been murdered in cold blood. The were reasons for the walls, the barriers that were everywhere. Even the roof had walls.
The elevator doors opened, and Kresh stepped out onto his private rooftop landing pad, warmed by an evening sun. But instead of walking toward the hangar, he went over to the edge of the platform. A low wall, about one hundred thirty centimeters tall, surrounded the landing pad. Like just about everything else on this planet, it was intended as a safety measure, but it also just happened to be the right height for Kresh to fold his arms on top of the wall, rest his chin on his forearms, and think. He could lean on the wall and look out over the world, and think his own thoughts undisturbed.
Not completely undisturbed, of course. That never happened. Not on a Spacer world. Kresh could hear Donald behind him, moving in close to protect Kresh against whatever imaginary danger the robot might choose to worry about: the wall giving way, an impossible gust of wind blowing in some inconceivable direction and sucking Kresh up into the air before throwing him clear of the edge of the building, Kresh suddenly giving way to some long-hidden – and completely imaginary – urge to self-destruction and deciding to fling himself over the edge. There was no end to the dooms and dangers a Three-Law robot could imagine.
And that, of course, was part of the problem. But don’t worry about it now. Take now, take the moment, and look out at the city of Hades, at the sky, at the world.
Alvar Kresh looked out over the world he governed, the world put into his keeping. Kresh was a big, burly, broad-shouldered man with a strong-featured, expressive face. He was light-skinned, with a thatch of thick white hair that stood up bottle-brush straight from his head. There were times when he started to think the years were catching up with him, and the thought did flit through his mind tonight – no doubt inspired by Donald’s comparison of Lentrall with Kresh the younger. Had he, Kresh, ever been that prickly, that pushy, that sure of himself when there was no good reason to be sure?
No, he told himself. Let that go, too. Let it all drift away, to be caught by the wind and carried to the far horizon. Let the office and the duties and the worries go, and just look. Just look, and see.
For, in truth, there was much worth seeing. The planet Inferno had come a long way in the five years Kresh had been governor – and Kresh took no small measure of pride in knowing that he had some fair-sized part in making that true.
He took a deep breath, and the air was cool and sweet, fresh and alive. When Kresh had taken office, the city of Hades had been all but literally on the verge of drying up and blowing away, The deserts had been spreading, the plants dying, the flower beds and gardens covered with the dust that blew into town with every gus
t of wind.
But now the deserts were retreating, not advancing. At least here, at least around the city, they were beating back the desert. Now the breeze carried the scents of life, of green things and freshness. Now he could look out and see green where once there had been brown and ocher. Now the city of Hades, and the land around it, were coming back to life.
The price had been high, there was no doubt of that. For five years now, the people of Inferno had been enduring restrictions on the use of robots that would have been unimaginable on any other Spacer world. But the planet of Inferno, the world itself, had had more need of that robot labor than its people did.
Kresh’s predecessor, Chanto Grieg, had drafted a large fraction of Inferno’s robotic population into government service. He had taken robots away from household duties and put them to work on terraforming and reclamation projects. Robots that had served as assistant cooks and stand-by drivers, robots that had served no other function than to wait until someone wanted to enter or leave a room, and then push the button that activated the automatic door, robots that had been wasted on the most menial and absurd of tasks, suddenly found themselves planting trees, operating earth-moving equipment, hand-pollinating flowers, and raising fish and insects and mammals to be released into the wild.
To this very day, there were those who moaned and complained about the terrible hardships imposed by the robotic labor laws. But it seemed there were fewer and fewer such complainers as time went by. People were getting used to the idea of living with fewer robots. People had discovered – or rediscovered – the pleasure of doing things for themselves. Things were changing, and changing for the better.
The question was – would the change be enough? Kresh knew that the fate of the planet was still balanced on a knife edge. Locally, things might be improving. But from a global perspective, thing were...
No. Never mind. Worry about it all later. Lentrall’s idea had – had disturbed him. No question about it. He needed to hear what Fredda would say about it.
Kresh turned away from the view of the city, and headed toward his aircar. “Come on, Donald,” he said again, “let’s go home.”
It was lucky. Kresh told himself as Donald flew him home, that Spacers had a long tradition of respecting each other’s privacy, and of defending their own. Otherwise, the scandalous nature of his own domestic arrangements might well have brought a thunderstorm of controversy down upon his head.
To get the worst of it over with first, Alvar Kresh and his wife, Fredda Leving, lived together, and maintained only one household. In the typical Spacer marriage, husband and wife each had their own household, and spent a large fraction of their time apart from each other.
It was more or less expected that newlyweds would spend an inordinate amount of time together, but the typical pattern was for a couple to spend less and less time together as the years went by. A couple who had been married some years might see each other once a week, or once a month. Some older marriages didn’t so much end as wear out; the two partners might never see each other at all, from year’s end to year’s end. While divorce was simple enough on Inferno, many couples couldn’t even work up the energy to go through the legal motions. They stayed married out of sheer inertia.
Alvar Kresh had discovered, much to his own surprise, that his own marriage was not corning anywhere close to following any such pattern. Three years after their wedding, he and Fredda still spent every night not only under the same roof but, even more scandalously, in the same room – and the same bed.
While there was nothing seen as actually wrong or immoral in such an arrangement, it was most unusual in Infernal society. If it had gotten around, the good people of Inferno would Rave thought their governor and his wife most peculiar.
And that in itself was strange, in Kresh’s mind, at least. He stared out the window, at the green and lovely city below, reflecting once again on the peculiar ways of his own people. Infernals prided themselves on being quite open-minded when it came to questions of personal relationships. And so they were – at least in theory. But Kresh had learned, over the years, that while their minds might be open to the idea of most sorts of physical relationships, their hearts were far less prepared to deal with the idea of emotional intimacy. The idea, the theory, of sex was something an Infernal could deal with. The fact, the reality, of sex would bring a blush to an Infernal’s face, but he or she could at least countenance such a thing. The idea of love was something most could not deal with at all.
Infernals were Spacers, and Spacers had always been a people who kept their distance, physical and emotional, from each other. At least Infernals had never gone to the extremes of some Spacer worlds, worlds that had no real cities, no towns, no villages, only widely scattered villas, with one human and an army of robots making up the average household. But Infernals were not exactly a gregarious people.
That Kresh and Fredda slept together on occasion would be seen as perfectly acceptable. That they slept together every night, in the same bed, would be seen as a trifle odd. That they had their meals together, spent their free time together, and were in each other’s company as much as possible – that would be seen as quite beyond the pale. Infernals simply did not open up to each other, expose themselves to each other, that way. They did not make themselves vulnerable to each other.
More fools they, Kresh told himself. They would never know the strength, the confidence, the sense of security that Fredda gave to Kresh. He could only hope he gave as much to her.
Kresh knew the Infernals, and what they would say if they knew. He knew how the idea would float up from somewhere that his unconventional home life made him unsuited to continue as governor, or that Fredda obviously had an undue influence on him. Even as it was, they said she was far too young for him – and Infernals were suspicious of youth. They said she was entirely too cozy with the Settlers. Simcor Beddle, leader of the Ironheads, was never reluctant to put that notion about at one of his mass meetings – and there was at least a grain of truth in it. Fredda did tend toward the Settler view on a number of subjects. Beddle was already leading a whispering campaign, putting it about that her radical ideas were dangerous. But then, Kresh was inclined to believe that himself. Fredda and he had some remarkably vigorous arguments on the subject of robots, among other things.
If Kresh had been a private citizen, he would not have much cared if the rest of the universe knew every detail of his domestic arrangements. But the last thing he needed at this point was for his personal affairs to become an issue. Better, far better, to keep such matters well away from the public eye and avoid the talk in the first place.
Kresh paid lip service to the conventions. He maintained – but did not use – fully staffed and equipped living quarters at Government Tower. The only time he put them to use was after official entertainments of one sort or another. At such times, he would make a show of retiring to his own private rooms in Government Tower at the end of the evening, long after Fredda had gone home to “her” house. Sometimes, if the hour was very late, they would actually spend the night apart, but, more often than not, Donald would end up secretly flying one of them to where the other waited. All of it was quite absurd. But better such nocturnal charades than the poisonous gossip that would result if the story got around that Alvar Kresh was passionately in love with his wife.
Kresh remembered arguing with Chanto Grieg, just hours before Grieg’s death. Grieg had tried to explain to Kresh how the job of posturing, of pretending, of smoothing over, was vital to the job of governance, that he could not get to his real work until all the nonsense had been dealt with. Kresh had not quite believed it then – but he had learned the truth of it since. Simcor Beddle had taught him that much. Kresh had learned the hard way that he could do nothing unless he first neutralized the Ironheads.
The Ironheads. Kresh smiled to himself as he imagined what Beddle and his crew could do with the news if they discovered everything about the goings-on at the Kresh-Leving household. T
here were things more shocking than romance. For the sake of domestic harmony, Kresh himself spent a lot of time pretending he knew less than he did about what went on when he was away from home. Best if he could pretend he did not know all about the meetings of subversive robots taking place in his own house.
It was bad enough that he himself knew. But if Beddle ever found out – oh, yes, there was need enough for privacy.
There was a change in sound of the aircar’s engine, and Kresh came back to himself as the car banked smoothly to one side and eased down out of the sky. He blinked and looked toward the front of the craft, out the forward viewport. There it was. There was home.
The aircar settled in for a landing.
Fredda Leving stood up from her chair and looked across the table at the two robots. “It would be best if you both were going,” she said. “My husband will be home at any moment.”
The smaller of the two robots, the jet-black one, rose from his chair and regarded his hostess thoughtfully. “Surely your husband is aware that we meet here with you.”
“Of course he is,” she said. “But it is best for all concerned that we do not rub his nose in it.”
“I do not understand,” said the black robot. He was Prospero, self-proclaimed leader of the New Law robots. He was a gleaming metallic black, about a hundred eighty centimeters tall, with the solid, heavy-set body design common to many of the New Laws. His eyes glowed a deep, burning orange that seemed to make his personality all the more intense. “If he knows we come here, why conceal it from him?”
“I do not understand why you ask questions to which you already know the answer,” Fredda replied.
Prospero swiveled his head about to glance at his companion and then swung abruptly back toward Fredda. “Do I know the answer?” he asked in a suspicious voice.
The larger of the two robots stood as well, and looked toward his companion. “There are times, friend Prospero,” said Caliban, “when I believe that you quite deliberately play at being ignorant. The governor wants no contact with us. He tolerates, but does not approve of, these meetings. The less we bring them to his official attention, the more likely they are to continue.”
