Asimov’s Future History Volume 10

by Isaac Asimov

  They walked through the crowd, past Derec’s lab to the south gate, and on from there into New Nova, where the party was more intense but also tinctured with mourning for Gernika’s dead. Here the cyborg question had always been more than philosophical, and here the bigoted opposition ran deepest, because poverty breeds extremism.

  Derec and Ariel found the address they were looking for and knocked on the door.

  Basq opened it and let them into the apartment that had once housed Mika Mendes. The surviving cyborgs were in the middle of their own more reflective celebration; the looks they cast in Derec and Ariel’s direction were thoughtful and curious. How he had survived the bombing of Nucleomorph, neither Derec nor Ariel knew, and he would not speak of it. He rarely left the apartment, and during his days there had scored every wall with the devastating lines of the painting, reworking them with obsessive care. His leadership was at an end, and he was content to withdraw; but the survivors of Gernika clustered around him because he was their only link to the lives they led before.

  “Even you use us,” Basq said.

  Derec nodded. “We did. With your consent.”

  Basq shrugged. “You’ll ask again. Perhaps the next time we will refuse.”

  “Perhaps we won’t have to ask.”

  A few of the cyborgs chuckled. “And I was called utopian,” Basq said with glittering eyes.

  “You were utopian,” Ariel said.

  “Of course I was. Without a dose of utopian dreaming, I could never have held Gernika together.”

  That, and a dose of authoritarian brutality, Derec thought. But there had been no shortage of that on Nova Levis.

  “And your little revolution is not utopian?” Basq prodded. “We abound in ironies.”

  “That we do,” Derec said.

  They left soon after. Walking back through the boisterous streets of New Nova, Derec found himself thinking of the opposition to their plans that even now must be under discussion as intense as the constitutional convention that would be in the coming weeks. Nova Levis would never speak with one voice; the task was to keep each voice respected and distinct. Easy.

  He chuckled, and Ariel said, “What?”

  “Nothing.” They entered the city proper again, walking north along Nova Boulevard with the sounds of celebration ringing around them.

  Enjoy it now, Derec thought. It gets much harder.

  Ariel nudged him. “This is supposed to be a party.”

  Derec gave an embarrassed laugh. “Don’t let me ruin the mood,” he said. “I’ve just got one other thing to do.”

  “One? Would that be putting together a census, arranging for naturalization, conducting an inventory of natural resources and vacated property, setting up elections, or what?” Ariel laughed. “Tomorrow, Derec. There will be plenty of time for that tomorrow.”

  They had reached his lab. Derec stopped. “I’ve got to take care of something here.”

  Ariel rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. Didn’t you hear me?”

  “I did, and I’ll meet you at Kamil’s in half an hour. Okay?”

  Now she was interested. “What are you going to do?”

  “Half an hour. Kamil’s.”

  She gave him a beat to change his mind, then said, “Have it your way,” and walked off in the direction of the Triangle plaza.

  The lab was dark and quiet, the only light a faint ambience of telltales from the few terminals that ran around the clock doing gene sequences or regressions. Miles was back at Derec’s apartment and if there was any justice in the universe, Elin was joyously drunk and surrounded by her friends.

  Derec crossed to a closet, moving mostly by feel, and opened the door. On the floor at the back of the closet, under the lowest shelf, was a malfunctioning centrifuge that he’d been unable to get permission to repair. He slid it out and reached inside, removing the datum Hofton had given him.

  Derec didn’t speak until he’d crossed the lab again and opened the door. The sounds of celebration broke like a wave over the silence.

  He held the datum up. “Hear that?”

  No response.

  “Hofton. I know you’re listening.”

  No response.

  “All right. I’m going to say this once, to you and Bogard both: Leave us alone.”

  He dropped the datum to the floor and crushed it under his heel.

  Then Derec walked away from his lab, back into the jubilant chaos of Nova Boulevard where Ariel was waiting.

  Robots and Empire

  3630 A.D.

  Part I-Aurora

  1. The Descendant

  1.

  GLADIA FELT THE lawn lounge to make sure it wasn’t too damp and then sat down. A touch at the control adjusted it in such a way as to allow her to be semirecumbent and another activated the diamagnetic field and gave her, as it always did, the sensation of utter relaxation. And why not? She was, in actual fact, floating – a centimeter above the fabric.

  It was a warm and pleasant night, the kind that found the planet Aurora at its best – fragrant and star-lit.

  With a pang of sadness, she studied the numerous little sparks that dotted the sky with patterns, sparks that were all the brighter because she had ordered the lights of her establishment dimmed.

  How was it, she wondered, that she had never learned the names of the stars and had never found out which were which in all the twenty-three decades of her life. One of them was the star about which her birth planet of Solaria orbited, the star which, during the first three decades of her life, she had thought of merely as “the sun.”

  Gladia had once been called Gladia Solaria. That was when she had come to Aurora, twenty decades before two hundred Standard Galactic Years – and it was meant as a not very friendly way of marking her foreign birth. A month before had been the bicentennial anniversary of her arrival, something she had left unmarked because she did not particularly want to think of those days. Before that, on Solaria, she had been Gladia-Delmarre.

  She stirred uneasily. She had almost forgotten that surname. Was it because it was so long ago? Or was it merely that she labored to forget?

  All these years she had not regretted Solaria, never missed it.

  And yet now?

  Was it because she had now, quite suddenly, discovered herself to have survived it? It was gone – a historical memory – and she still lived on? Did she miss it now for that reason?

  Her brow furrowed. No, she did not miss it, she decided resolutely. She did not long for it, nor did she wish to return to it. It was just the peculiar pang of something that had been so much a part of her – however destructively – being gone.

  Solaria! The last of the Spacer worlds to be settled and made into a home for humanity. And in consequence, by some mysterious law of symmetry perhaps, it was also the first to die?

  The first? Did that imply a second and third and so on?

  Gladia felt her sadness deepen. There were those who thought there was indeed such an implication. If so, Aurora, her long-adopted home, having been the first Spacer world to be settled, would, by that same rule of symmetry, therefore be the last of the fifty to die. In that case, it might, even at worst, outlast her own stretched-out lifetime and if so, that would have to do.

  Her eyes sought the stars again. It was hopeless. There was no way she could possibly work out which of those indistinguishable dots of light was Solaria’s sun. She imagined it would be one of the brighter ones, but there were hundreds even of those.

  She lifted her arm and made what she identified to herself only as her “Daneel gesture.” The fact that it was dark did not matter.

  Robot Daneel Olivaw was at her side almost at once. Anyone who had known him a little over twenty decades before, when he had first been designed by Han Fastolfe, would not have been conscious of any noticeable change in him. His broad, high-cheekboned face, with its short bronze hair combed back; his blue eyes; his tall, well-knit, and perfectly humanoid body would have seemed as young and as calmly unem
otional as ever.

  “May I be of help in any way, Madam Gladia?” he asked in an even voice.

  “Yes, Daneel. Which of those stars is Solaria’s sun?”

  Daneel did not look upward. He said, “None of them, Madam Gladia. At this time of year, Solaria’s sun will not rise until 0320.”

  “Oh?” Gladia felt dashed. Somehow she had assumed that any star in which she happened to be interested would be visible at any time it occurred to her to look. Of course, they did rise and set at different times. She knew that much. “I’ve been staring at nothing, then.”

  “The stars, I gather from human reactions,” said Daneel, as though in an attempt to console, “are beautiful whether any particular one of them is visible or not.”

  “I dare say,” said Gladia discontentedly and adjusted the lounge to an upright position with a snap. She stood up. “However, it was Solaria’s sun I wanted to see – but not so much that I intend to sit here till 0320.”

  “Even were you to do so,” said Daneel, “you would need magnilenses.”

  “Magnilenses?”

  “It is not quite visible to the unaided eye, Madam Gladia.”

  “Worse and worse!” She brushed at her slacks. “I should have consulted you first, Daneel.”

  Anyone who had known Gladia twenty decades before, when she had first arrived in Aurora, would have found a change. Unlike Daneel, she was merely human. She was still 155 centimeters tall, almost 10 centimeters below the ideal height for a Spacer woman. She had carefully kept her slim figure and there was no sign of weakness or stiffness about her body. Still, there was a bit of gray in her hair, fine wrinkles near her eyes, and a touch of graininess about her skin. She might well live another ten or twelve decades, but there was no denying that she was already no longer young. That didn’t bother her.

  She said, “Can you identify all the stars, Daneel?”

  “I know those visible to the unaided eye, Madam Gladia.”

  “And when they rise and set on any day of the year?”

  “Yes, Madam Gladia.”

  “And all sorts of other things about them?”

  “Yes, Madam Gladia. Dr. Fastolfe once asked me to gather astronomical data so that he could have them at his fingertips without having to consult his computer. He used to say it was friendlier to have me tell him than to have his computer do so.” Then, as though to anticipate the next question, “He did not explain why that should be so.”

  Gladia raised her left arm and made the appropriate gesture. Her house was at once illuminated. In the soft light that now reached her, she was subliminally aware of the shadowy figures of several robots, but she paid no attention to that. In any well-ordered establishment, there were always robots within reach of human beings, both for security and for service.

  Gladia took a last fugitive glimpse at the sky, where the stars had now dimmed in the scattered light. She shrugged lightly. It had been quixotic. What good would it have done even if she had been able to see the sun of that now-lost world, one faint dot among many? She might as well choose a dot at random, tell herself it was Solaria’s sun, and stare at it.

  Her attention turned to R. Daneel. He waited for her patiently, the planes of his face largely in shadow.

  She found herself thinking again how little he had changed since she had seen him on arriving at Dr. Fastolfe’s establishment so long ago. He had undergone repairs, of course. She knew that, but it was a vague knowledge that one pushed away and kept at a distance.

  It was part of the general queasiness that held good for human beings, too. Spacers might boast of their iron health and of their life-spans of thirty to forty decades, but they were not entirely immune to the ravages of age. One of Gladia’s femurs fit into a titanium-silicone hip socket. Her left thumb was totally artificial, though no one could tell that without careful ultrasonograms. Even some of her nerves had been rewired. Such things would be true of any Spacer of similar age from any of the fifty Spacer worlds (no, forty-nine, for now Solaria could no longer be counted).

  To make any reference to such things, however, was an ultimate obscenity. The medical records involved, which had to exist since further treatment might be necessary, were never revealed for any reason. Surgeons, whose incomes were considerably higher than those of the Chairman himself, were paid so well, in part, because they were virtually ostracized from polite society. After all, they knew.

  It was all part of the Spacer fixation on long life, on their unwillingness to admit that old age existed, but Gladia didn’t linger on any analysis of causes. She was restlessly uneasy in thinking about herself in that connection. If she had a three-dimensional map of herself with all prosthetic portions, all repairs, marked off in red against the gray of her natural self, what a general pinkness she would appear to have from a distance. Or so she imagined.

  Her brain, however, was still intact and whole and while that was so, she was intact and whole, whatever happened to the rest of her body.

  Which brought her back to Daneel. Though she had known him for twenty decades, it was only in the last year that he was hers. When Fastolfe died (his end hastened, perhaps, by despair), he had willed everything to the city of Eos, which was a common enough state of affairs. Two items, however, he had left to Gladia (aside from confirming her in the ownership of her establishment and its robots and other chattels, together with the grounds thereto appertaining).

  One of them had been Daneel.

  Gladia asked, “Do you remember everything you have ever committed to memory over the course of twenty decades, Daneel?”

  Daneel said gravely, “I believe so, Madam Gladia. To be sure, if I forgot an item, I would not know that, for it would have been forgotten and I would not then recall ever having memorized it.”

  “That doesn’t follow at all,” said Gladia. “You might well remember knowing it, but be unable to think of it at the moment. I have frequently had something at the tip of my tongue, so to speak, and been unable to retrieve it.”

  Daneel said, “I do not understand, madam. If I knew something, surely it would be there when I needed it.”

  “Perfect retrieval?” They were walking slowly toward the house.

  “Merely retrieval, madam. I am designed so.”

  “For how much longer?”

  “I do not understand, madam.”

  “I mean, how much will your brain hold? With a little over twenty decades of accumulated memories, how much longer can it go on?”

  “I do not know, madam. As yet I feel no difficulty.”

  “You might not – until you suddenly discover you can remember no more.”

  Daneel seemed thoughtful for a moment. “That may be so, madam.”

  “You know, Daneel, not all your memories are equally important.”

  “I cannot judge among them, madam.”

  “Others can. It would be perfectly possible to clean out your brain, Daneel, and then, under supervision, refill it with its important memory content only – say, ten percent of the whole. You would then be able to continue for centuries longer than you would otherwise. With repeated treatment of this sort, you could go on indefinitely. It is an expensive procedure, of course, but I would not cavil at that. You’d be worth it.”

  “Would I be consulted on the matter, madam? Would I be asked to agree to such treatment?”

  “Of course. I would not order you in a matter like that. It would be a betrayal of Dr. Fastolfe’s trust.”

  “Thank you, madam. In that case, I must tell you that I would never submit voluntarily to such a procedure unless I found myself to have actually lost my memory function.”

  They had reached the door and Gladia paused. She said, in honest puzzlement, “Why ever not, Daneel?”

  Daneel said in a low voice, “There are memories I cannot risk losing, madam, either through inadvertence or through poor judgment on the part of those conducting the procedure.”

  “Like the rising and setting of the stars? – Forgive me, Daneel
, I didn’t mean to be joking. To what memories are you referring?”

  Daneel said, his voice still lower, “Madam, I refer to my memories of my onetime partner, the Earthman Elijah Baley.”

  And Gladia stood there, stricken, so that it was Daneel who had to take the initiative, finally, and signal for the door to open.

  2.

  Robot Giskard Reventlov was waiting in the living room and Gladia greeted him with that same pang of uneasiness that always assailed her when she faced him.

  He was primitive in comparison with Daneel. He was obviously a robot – metallic, with a face that had nothing human in expression upon it, with eyes that glowed a dim red, as could be seen if it were dark enough. Whereas Daneel wore clothing, Giskard had only the illusion of clothing – but a skillful illusion, for it was Gladia herself who had designed it.

  “Well, Giskard,” she said. “Good evening, Madam Gladia,” said Giskard with a small bow of his head.

  Gladia remembered the words of Elijah Baley long ago, like a whisper inside the recesses of her brain:

  “Daneel will take care of you. He will be your friend as well as protector and you must be a friend to him – for my sake. But it is Giskard I want you to listen to. Let him be your adviser.”

  Gladia had frowned. “Why him? I’m not sure I like him.”

  “I do not ask you to like him. I ask you to trust him.”

  And he would not say why.

  Gladia tried to trust the robot Giskard, but was glad she did not have to try to like him. Something about him made her shiver.

  She had both Daneel and Giskard as effective parts of her establishment for many decades during which Fastolfe had held titular ownership. It was only on his deathbed that Han Fastolfe had actually transferred ownership. Giskard was the second item, after Daneel, that Fastolfe had left Gladia.

  She had said to the old man, “Daneel is enough, Han. Your daughter Vasilia would like to have Giskard. I’m sure of that.”