by Isaac Asimov
A moment later, there was nothing on the viewscreen but peaceful black starfield.
“The Erani hyperdrive was unstable,” a rich, warm, female voice announced. “Your device caused it to implode, triggering the formation of a microscopic black hole. That hole has now closed.”
As one, Derec, Avery, and Wolruf turned around, wonder on their faces. “Central?”
“That is my proper designation. For the convenience of the citizens I also respond to the name SilverSides...
The humans were still staring, bug-eyed and slack-jawed, when Beta stepped into the atrium and broke the silence. “Please forgive us for not explaining all the details of the plan earlier. We were not certain that the personality rebuild would work.” Beta turned to Adam. “And please, for the benefit of the native humans, you must never assume your SilverSides aspect on this planet again.”
Somehow, Avery found his voice. “But-Central? You, SilverSides?”
“Who better?” Central asked. “My being permeates this city. Within my operational parameters I am powerful, generous, and very nearly omniscient. Who better to watch over and provide for my children?”
“A computer pretending to be a goddess!” Avery erupted. “That’s utterly immoral!”
“It is also necessary,” Beta said, “at least until the kin find their own reasons for living in the city.”
“Do not worry, Creator Avery,” Central added. “We will not maintain this fiction for long. Our analysis indicates that within three standard years, the kin will be ready to discover that their goddess is merely a hollow idol.”
Beta nodded. “In fact, we have already identified the native human best suited to make this ‘discovery.’ Her name is WhiteTail.”
Avery was still sputtering and trying to frame an argument when Central spoke again. “Alert! I detect fragments of Erani wreckage entering the atmosphere!” Everyone in the hall, human and robot alike, spun around to face the giant viewscreen.
A moment later, Central updated her report. “No significant radioactives are present. The largest identifiable fragment is a Massey 0-85 lifepod. There is one lifeform on board. I will attempt to establish communications. Atmospheric ionization may make this difficult.” The viewscreen faded and swirled into an unsteady mass of colors. Static lines raced and jiggled across the screen. Slowly, the colors resolved into a blurry, distorted image.
A head, large and hairless. Two black, glittering eyes in turrets of wrinkled, beaded skin. A wide, lipless mouth, distorted in terror.
“Derrec? Derrrec! I’ll be waiting forr you in Hellll!”
The image dissolved in a wash of static.
“I am tracking the lifepod,” Central said. “If it does not break up, it will impact in the forest approximately fifteen kilometers north of the city..,
A soft sound floated in from the night. Soft, yet ancient, and chilling. Arrooo. Then another voice joined it, across the miles, picking up and relaying the call. Aroooooo! More voices joined in, barking, baying. The night exploded in a clamor of crescendoing howls.
The viewscreen changed to display the view north from the Compass Tower. Hundreds of furry bodies were streaming out of the city and into the forest. “The kin have also spotted the pod’s ionization trail,” Central said. “I am preparing to send a team of hunter/seekers to the projected landing site, but I am afraid that the natives will get there first.”
Central paused, as if disturbed by what she had to say next. “Dr. Avery? Derec and Wolruf? I suggest that you return to the spaceport and prepare to leave. If Aranimas does not survive reentry, the kin will return here...
Epilogue
THE SPACEPORT
SWEET, BRIGHT DAWN broke across the spaceport tarmac, illuminating the Wild Goose Chase in vivid shades of pink and gold. Scattered patches of dew darkened the pavement; BlackMane’s cubs lay in a tumbled heap by a blast deflection wall, snoring softly and dreaming happy puppy-dreams.
“Coming, Ari?” Derec called out from the boarding ramp.
“In a minute, dear.” Ariel turned back to BlackMane. The female kin finished a yawn that stretched clear back to her third bicuspids, then sat down and gravely offered Ariel her paw. Squatting on her haunches, Ariel accepted the paw and shook it.
“I just wanted to tell you,” Ariel began, “that I’ve really enjoyed your company, and I will miss you. Your cubs are terrific; I envy you for them. Of course, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, since you can’t understand a single word that I’m saying.”
“Arf,” said BlackMane. “Arf,” Ariel answered. She stood and started to turn toward the ship. Then she gave in to an impulse and gave BlackMane one last good scratch behind the ears.
Avery and Beta strolled past, talking in low voices. “1 quite agree,” Beta said. “Our most recent analysis indicates that it will be at least two hundred standard years before the kin are prepared enough to be allowed off this planet.”
Avery looked worried. “So you’ll erase all mention of rocketry and spaceflight from the city’s libraries?”
“We will secure and encrypt the information on all advanced technology,” Beta answered. “We will not release the information until such time as we deem the kin to be sufficiently acculturated and no longer a threat to the other species of humanity. After all, the First Law applies to all humans, no matter their form.”
Avery frowned. “That’s not quite what I was hoping for, but I’ll accept it.” He looked up and spotted Adam standing by the landing gear, talking to the spaceport maintenance robots. “Ah, Adam. Have you found any trace of Lucius yet?”
Adam raised an arm and pointed toward the spaceport control tower, behind Avery. “Here he comes now.” Avery and Beta turned around to see Lucius approaching, followed by Wolruf, Eve, and a trio of unfamiliar robots.
“Lucius?” Avery called out. “Lucius, where the blazes have you been? We thought we were going to have to leave you behind!”
Robotic expressions were difficult to read, but Avery couldn’t miss the note of surliness in the robot’s voice. “I kept out of trouble,” Lucius snarled. “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’, Not waiting for a reply, Lucius stormed past Avery and clanged up the boarding ramp.
With a shrug, Avery looked at Beta. The supervisor responded with a quizzical tilt of his head, as if to say that he didn’t understand Lucius, either. Avery and Beta were still looking at each other when Wolruf and Eve came scampering up. “Where’s Derec?” Wolruf asked, her glee barely concealed.
Avery looked around. “In the ship, I think. Derec!”
A sandy blond head popped out an open hatch. “Yes?”
“C’mere, Derec!” Wolruf called out. “Got someone ‘ere I want ‘u t’ meet!” A few seconds later Derec came jogging down the boarding ramp and over to join them.
“Derec Avery,” Wolruf said, turning to the three new robots, “I’d like t’ intr’duce ‘u t’ ‘uman Medical 17.”
“My pleasure,” the Wohler-model robot on the left said.
“‘Uman Medical 21.”,, And mine,,, the robot on the right said.
“An’ —”
“Derrec?” The tall, unfamiliar robot in the center reeled back as if in shock. “Derrrec!” In a blinding flash, the robot raised his hands and lunged for Derec’s throat
And froze, rooted to the spot.
“Our apologies,” Human Medical 17 said to Derec, “we should have warned you. The data from the original Jeff Leong experiment indicated that cyborgs could be unstable and dangerous, so we took the liberty of giving this one a positronic cerebellum. If he so much as thinks of violating the Three Laws, his muscular system locks up.”
“Cyborg?”
The two medical robots looked at each other and then at Derec. “No one told you?” From Derec’s blank look, they inferred that the answer was yes. “That lifepod that crashed last night; there was one survivor aboard. But by the time the hunter/seekers reached the scene, the native humans had mauled him quite badly. An
d we had no information on his physiology, which is not of a human form with which we are familiar. We had no choice but to cyborg what was left.”
Derec turned to the cyborg. “Aranimas?”
“Oh, is that his name? Here, let me reboot him.” Human Medical 17 reached over and touched a large red button on the back of the cyborg’s neck. “Don’t worry, rebooting the cerebellum is quick and painless.” The cyborg shuddered and slowly stepped back and assumed a taut, angry posture. His eyes glowed like hate-filled red coals.
Wolruf stepped between Derec and Aranimas, a toothy smile playing on her lips. “‘Ere, allow me t’ demonstrate ‘is Second Law function.” From behind her back, she produced a footlong stick. “‘Ere, boy!” She waved the stick in front of Aranimas’s glaring eyes. “‘Eere, Aranimas!” Taking a great wind-up and a running start, she flung the stick as hard as she could across the tarmac.
“Go fetch!”
With one exception, the robots had all gone off to their morning tasks. The last of the dew vanished in rising steam; her cubs were awake and getting crabby about breakfast. Still, BlackMane lingered on the tarmac for a few minutes more, watching the silver bird dwindle into the distance.
“You know, Beta,” she said at last, “once you get used to the way they look, those TwoLegs are okay people.”
“Indeed they are, Mistress BlackMane,” Beta answered in the soft tones of KinSpeech.
She watched the ship a while longer and then asked another question. “Do you think they’ll ever come back?”
“It’s difficult to say, mistress. Perhaps not those TwoLegs, but in time, others like them definitely will.”
BlackMane nodded. “I see. Good.” She nodded some more, then let out a pensive whine. “It’s just, I really wanted to ask them one last question, you know?”
Beta took his eyes off the spacecraft and turned his full attention to BlackMane. “Perhaps I can be of help. What was the question, mistress?”
Cocking her head, BlackMane scratched an ear in puzzlement. “Well, you know the game that Wolruf was playing with Aranimas, just before they left? Where she would throw the stick as hard as she could, and Aranimas would run and get it?”
“Yes, I am familiar with the game. It is called ‘fetch.’ What would you like to know about it?”
“It looked like a great game, really it did. Lots of action, very exciting. I think it could be very popular. But there’s one thing that I just don’t understand.”
“Yes.”
BlackMane paused, wrinkled her nose, and then raised her ears and looked the robot straight in the eyes.
“Why did Aranimas get to have all the fun?”
Humanity
3605 A.D.
Chapter 1
HOMECOMING
THEY HAD NAMED the starship the Wild Goose Chase, for when they’d left home in it some of them had doubted that the trip would be of any value. Now the ship once again orbited its world of origin, and its passengers still wondered whether they had accomplished anything useful.
They had accomplished plenty; no one disagreed about that. During their travels they had transformed one of Dr. Avery’s mutable robot cities into a toy for intelligent aliens, had reprogrammed another robot city to serve an emerging civilization on yet another alien world, had formulated a set of rules describing the motivations behind human behavior, had nearly found the mother to four of the group’s members, and had ended the career of the alien pirate who had dogged their steps for years. All the same, the operative word was “useful,” and not one of their actions received the unanimous approval of the entire crew.
None of them supposed that turning a city into a toy was anything other than an irritating lesson in futility. Derec and Ariel also had grave reservations about leaving the other robot city in the hands of the pre-technological Kin. None of the human complement — nor even Wolruf, their alien companion — cared a bit for the robots’ “Laws of Humanics,” and though Derec was excited at the prospect of finding his mother, his father harbored a contrary emotion, and besides that, they had lost her trail.
Even removing the pirate Aranimas from the picture was only a qualified success, for though they hadn’t killed him, the moral implications inherent in their method of dealing with him had driven three of the robots into the positronic equivalent of catatonia.
It was high time to go home and think about things for a while.
Home in this case meant the original Robot City, an entire planet covered with Dr. Avery’s mutable, ever-changing cybernetic metropolis. At least it had been covered in city when they left. Now, however, from their vantage point in close orbit, it looked like a newly terraformed planet still waiting for settlers.
Three humans, one alien, and a robot crowded into the starship’s control cabin to watch it drift by in the viewscreen. They were a motley-looking group by anyone’s standards. The alien, Wolruf, occupied the pilot’s chair, the demands of her canine body warping the chair into a configuration a human would have considered uncomfortable at the very least. Her brown and gold fur had been carefully brushed, but she wore no clothing or ornamentation over it.
To her right stood Derec, a thin, narrow-faced, blond-haired young man who carried the impatient look common to explorers. His clothing was utilitarian: loose pants of soft fabric suitable for anything from Yoga exercises to wiping up oil spills while dismantling machinery, capped by a plain pullover shirt of the same material, both in light blue. Snuggled close to his right stood Ariel, equally thin — though in a softer sort of way — dark-haired, and not as transparently impatient as her companion. It was obvious she had spent more time on her wardrobe than he. She, too, wore pants and a blouse, but her blouse clung where it was supposed to cling, hung loose where loose suited her figure better, exposed enough skin at neck and waist to suggest but not to provoke, and together the pale yellow and brown hues of blouse and pants provided a splash of color to offset Derec’s uniformity.
On the other side of Wolruf stood Dr. Avery. He was an older version of Derec: shorter, rounder, grayer, moustached, his face not yet wrinkled but showing the effects of time and much experience. He wore his usual baggy trousers, white shirt with ruffled collar, and oversized coat today, as most days, in gray. His expression was one of puzzlement shading over into concern.
Behind the humans stood Mandelbrot, the only one of the four robots on board present in the control room. He was an old-model robot of steel and plastic construction — save for his more recently repaired right arm — and he wore no clothing over his angular body plating, nor did his visual sensors or speaker grille convey a readable expression.
Derec, his eyes drifting from the viewscreen to his companions and back, was the first to voice the question all of them were thinking: “You’re sure this is the right planet?”
Wolruf, swiveling slightly around in the pilot’s chair, nodded her toothsome head. “Positive.”
“Then what happened to it?” Ariel asked.
“That’s ‘arder to say.” Wolruf pushed a button to lock the viewscreen picture in place, then moved a slide control upward, increasing the screen’s magnification until the planet’s mottled surface began to show detail. Where they had expected to see the sharp angles of buildings and streets, they saw the tufted tops of trees instead. Narrow pathways wound among the trees, and as Wolruf increased the magnification still further they saw that the paths occasionally joined at landmarks ranging from boulders to dead tree stumps to natural caves. There were no buildings in evidence at all.
The angle of view changed steadily as the ship continued to move in orbit, until they were looking out rather than down over a sea of treetops. The picture grew less and less sharp as the angle changed, and after a moment Derec realized it was because the lower their view angle got, the more atmosphere they had to look through.
“Try another view,” he said to Wolruf, and the golden-furred alien backed off the magnification and released the hold. The camera tracked forward again and
the picture became a blur of motion until they once again looked directly downward from the ship.
A ragged boundary line between the green forest and a lighter green patch of something else caught Derec ‘s attention. “There,” he said. “Zoom in on that.”
When Wolruf did so, they could see a vast meadow of waving grass. It wasn’t like a farmer’s field, all of one type and all the same height, but rather a patchwork of various species, some tall, some short, with bushes and the occasional tree scattered among them. Again there were paths, though fewer than in the forest, and again the scene lacked any sign of human habitation. There were inhabitants, though: small knots of four-legged animals grazing under the watchful eyes of circling hawks or eagles.
“How did they get there?” Dr. Avery demanded.
Derec glanced over at his father, opened his mouth to answer, then thought better of it. He turned back to Wolruf and said instead, “Let’s try another view.”
Wolruf provided it. This one showed a barren expanse of sand, punctuated sporadically by lone stands of cactus. Near the edge of the screen a single tree cast its shadow across a pool of water. A smallish four-legged animal of some sort lapped at the water, looking up frequently to check for predators.
“They really took it seriously,” Derec muttered, scratching his head in bemusement.
“Took what seriously?” Avery demanded. “This is your doing, isn’t it?”
Derec nodded. “I suppose it must be, though I certainly didn’t expect this.”
“What did you expect? What did you order them to do?”
