Asimov’s Future History Volume 8

by Isaac Asimov

  “Hmm,” she said. Maybe it wasn’t. Easy come, easy go, and all that. Besides, Avery had just been beginning to act like a human being before he discovered Derec’s ecosystem project; maybe it would be worth it to let him put the city back the way he’d originally planned it if it would keep him easy to get along with.

  “Where’d he go, anyway?” she asked.

  Derec let his arm flop down over his eyes again. “Computer center, where else?”

  “Of course.” Ariel turned away from the window and walked back over to stand in front of the mirror. She continued to brush her hair, but she watched Derec’s reflection, not her own. She could have stared at him directly, since he had his eyes closed, but somehow she liked using the mirror, as though she might see something in it that she wouldn’t otherwise.

  What she saw pleased her well enough no matter which way she viewed it. Derec was trim, well-muscled, attractive by nearly anyone’s standards. Certainly he was attractive by Ariel’s. She had fallen in love with him twice now, without the complication of falling out of love in between. Amnesia had its good points.

  And he had fallen in love with her twice, too. At least she thought so. Once, definitely, and that was this time, so what did it matter if the first was merely infatuation, as she suspected it had been? He loved her now, didn’t he?

  As if he could read her mind, she saw him raise his arm up again and peek out at her from under it, and the openly appreciative smile that spread across his face told her all she needed to know. He raised up off the bed in one smooth motion, came over to nuzzle his face in the hollow between her neck and shoulders, and whispered, “So why don’t we take a blanket and go for a walk in the forest while it’s still there?”

  Dr. Avery had indeed gone to the computer center, but only long enough to use a private terminal to direct the city to create a fully stocked robotics lab for him. While that was being done, he commandeered a team of six general service robots and led them back up to the wreckage of the starship at the top of the tower.

  “In the cargo hold of that mess,” he told them, pointing in its general direction, “you’ll find three robots in communications fugue. I want you to bring them out and take them to my lab. Under no circumstances are you to try to wake them. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Master Avery,” the robot nearest him said.

  “Good. Go to it.”

  The robots filed into the ship, using a convenient rent in the hull rather than the airlock. Avery smiled at the sight, for the still-crumpled presence of the wreckage signaled that his plan was proceeding smoothly. He had ordered the ship not to repair itself, not to do anything until he got the robots removed. They hadn’t awakened during the crash, but who knew what might trigger it? Better to err on the safe side. This was only the second time they had gone into fugue in his presence, and he had blown his chance to study them in detail the first time. He wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass unused as well.

  Derec wouldn’t approve — he’d been the one who convinced Avery not to the first time, pleading with him not to interrupt their development — but Avery really couldn’t care less about Derec’s wishes now. Not any more. For a while there he’d come close to thinking he might actually care about his son again, but to discover that all this time the boy had been deceiving him, distracting him with his silly trip off planet while his insidious program wiped out Avery’s greatest creation — that betrayal extinguished any feeling he may have had for him.

  And by association, for Janet as well, though he had never fooled himself into thinking he cared for her again.

  Her robots, on the other hand...

  Yes, he cared a great deal about her robots. Not necessarily for them, but definitely about them. Such strange creations they were! Infinitely malleable, even more so than his own proteiform robots; these three robots of Janet’s were not only physically mutable but mentally mutable as well. You never knew what strange notion they might come up with next. Their initial programming was radically different from a normal robot’s, and they had the uncanny ability to integrate their life’s experiences directly into that programming, modifying their basic motivations with each new situation they faced. They were the first truly heuristic learning machines Avery had ever seen.

  They weren’t without flaws, of course. Janet’s typically scatterbrained execution of a brilliant idea had left their psyches scarred beyond repair, but the idea itself was exquisite. Like the concept of cellular robots in the first place, the possibilities it opened up were endless, but it would take Avery’s own genius to realize them.

  The general service robots emerged from the wreck in pairs, each pair carrying an inert robot like a rigid statue between them. Avery examined each one as they brought it past.

  First came Lucius II, the self-named successor to Robot City’s first creative robot. Since the original was gone, no one bothered with the numeral. Lucius looked a little like the robots carrying him: smooth and featureless in the torso and limbs, little more than an idealized humanoid figure optimized for efficiency. He wasn’t quite as well defined as they, though. Without conscious direction, his physical form had begun to drift back toward the shape of his first imprinting, but for Lucius that had been late in coming. He had spent his first few weeks as a formless blob, and that experience showed now in the rounded, almost doughy shape of his body.

  His face was better articulated. It, too, had smoothed somewhat, like that of a wax figure left too long in the sun, but it was still recognizably based upon Derec’s.

  Avery wasn’t surprised. The boy had always been a strong influence on the robot. Lucius had even proposed that the two treat one another as friends, with all the rights and obligations that entailed; it was no wonder the imprinting process had gone down to the instinctual level.

  Next came Adam. A casual examination would have led an observer to believe that Adam had first imprinted on Wolruf, for that was who the robot most resembled, but the casual observer would have been mistaken. Adam’s canine features came from his early imprinting on the Kin, the backward, Stone Age, wolflike aliens who even now marked their territory in one of Avery’s cast-off cities. Wolruf’s resemblance to the Kin was purely coincidental — unless one considered parallel evolution to be something other than coincidence.

  Perhaps it was, Avery thought. The separate evolution of two wolflike species — three actually, if you counted wolves themselves — was fairly good evidence that the canine form was an efficient housing for at least moderate intelligence. Avery doubted that it was better than the human form, but he was scientist enough to realize that was his own prejudice showing. Maybe the canine form was more efficient. Right now the evidence stacked up three against one. One and a half, maybe, if you counted the pirate Aranimas as marginally humanoid, but humanoids were still outnumbered.

  It was a pitifully small sample to be making a judgment, though. They needed to study far more aliens before they could be sure.

  Was that what Janet had been trying to do with these robots of hers? Had she stranded them, formless and with only the most basic programming, on what she thought were empty worlds in order to see what shape they would eventually mimic in intelligent form? Was she making her own aliens to study?

  If so, then she had succeeded at least partially in that ambition. Her robots certainly behaved strangely enough to be aliens.

  The service robots brought the third inert one out of the ship. This one, Eve, looked most human of all, but Avery knew that was only a surface phenomenon. Her first encounter with an organic being had been with Ariel, and that was who she resembled now, but her experiences from then on had been largely the same as the others ‘. She was just as dangerous, just as unpredictable, as either of them.

  With the robots out of it, Avery had no more use for the ship. “Tell Central to clear the wreckage,” he told one of the service robots.

  “Yes, sir,” the robot replied, and almost immediately the starship began to slump down to a puddle of
undifferentiated dianite, the robot cells which made up the city. The cells from the starship joined the cells of the tower, returning to the general inventory. The few parts that weren’t made of dianite — mostly engine parts — were swallowed whole, to be transferred internally to a recycling center.

  Avery didn’t stay to watch. He followed the robots back into the elevator and took them down, far below the tower to the transport level, then along the moving slidewalks toward his newly fabricated lab. He snorted in disgust as he stepped from the slow outer walk to the inner, faster ones, then waited impatiently for the fastest to carry them to their destination. Earther technology! Slidewalks were fine for moving huge crowds of people, but they were ridiculously inefficient for a city of robots. Avery looked to both sides, ahead and behind, and saw only three other passengers, far enough away to be merely specks in the distance.

  Why had they built slidewalks? he wondered, but he came up with the answer almost immediately. Because they had put the city underground to implement Derec’s orders, and the only underground city on record — Earth’s planet-wide megalopolis — had slidewalks.

  Another bit of proof that robots weren’t good at independent thought, as though Avery needed the reminder.

  He considered ordering them to rebuild the city on the surface the way he had originally designed it, but after a moment’s thought decided against it. He was too busy to fool with details. Let Derec have his ecosystem, if it would keep him occupied.

  He led the robots through an interchange with a wide cross-corridor, traveled that one for a while, then stepped to a slower strip to make a connection with a smaller corridor running parallel to the first. This one had only a single slidewalk running in each direction, and as they proceeded down the northbound one Avery counted doorways, at last stepping off onto static pavement in front of an unmarked door about two thirds of the way down the length of the block.

  Behind that door should be his new laboratory. Avery had instructed the central computer to build it here in this thoroughly anonymous location and then forget that location — and to fend off any inquiry about it as well — hoping to keep his inquisitive son from tracking it down quite so easily as he might otherwise. Avery knew that Derec would find it eventually, but he only needed secrecy for a short while. Just long enough to take these three robots of Janet’s apart and see what made them tick.

  A few hundred kilometers above him, Janet Anastasi looked out the viewscreen at much the same scene Dr. Avery and Derec had seen earlier in the day. Her reaction was considerably different from what theirs had been, however. She had been expecting the ultimate city-gone-amok, a planet despoiled and overrun by her ex-husband’s Machiavellian monstrosities, but when she found what appeared to be unspoiled wilderness, she could hardly believe her eyes. Wendell Avery had actually left something alone for once in his life? Unbelievable.

  She almost regretted the errand that had taken her a week out of her way before coming here.

  Her original impulse, when she’d seen the mess Wendell had made of Tau Puppis IV and the aliens who called themselves the Kin, had been to track him down and demand that he stop using her invention to meddle in alien affairs, but as soon as she’d cooled off she’d realized how futile that would be. He had never listened to her before; why should he start now? She needed a lever if she intended to move him.

  She had found that lever, too, but after seeing this incredible display of ecological conscientiousness she began to have second thoughts. Perhaps she had underestimated old Stoneface. Maybe she should hold off a while and see what other changes he had undergone in the years since they had parted company.

  Or was this David’s influence she saw here? Had her son grown up to be a romantic? What an interesting notion. To think that he might now be a thinking being in his own right, rather than the squalling, vomiting, excreting lump of protoplasm she had so gladly left in the care of her robots when she had made her escape from Wendy and domestic life so many years ago. An adult now. The very concept nearly boggled the mind.

  Nodding, she said softly, “Yes, I think we should have a closer look at this.”

  “Of course, Mistress.” The robot at her side reached out to the ship’s controls, twisted a knob, and the viewscreen began to zoom in on the mountaintops beneath them.

  Wearily, she said, “No, no, Basalom, I meant the whole situation. Land and have a look around, see what they’re up to down there.”

  Basalom’s humaniform face remained blank, but his lips moved silently, forming the words, See what they’re up to down there. He blinked, first one eye, then the other; then he nodded and smiled and said, “Of course, Mistress.”

  Basalom had lately taken to nodding and smiling when he had no idea what she was talking about. Janet considered trying to explain to him what she’d meant, but she supposed his reaction was probably a defense against just such an explanation, which often as not just made things worse. He was learning. Good. That’s why she had deliberately left gaps in his programming: to see if he could fill them by using intuitive thought processes. He apparently was doing so, though not in the way she had expected.

  Not surprising. Nothing about this project seemed to be going quite the way she’d expected it to.

  Chapter 2

  THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE

  THE JUNGLE WAS most dense right near the Compass Tower. As soon as they had pushed their way through the first hundred meters or so of thick underbrush, Derec and Ariel found that it gave way to more open forest floor. The reason for the change was obvious: overhead, the thick canopy of treetops all but blocked out the sun, leaving the lower layers in dim twilight. Only where the Tower penetrated the upper level did enough light come through to support a complex undergrowth.

  “It’s creepy,” Ariel whispered, holding Derec’s hand tight in her left and the blanket in her right.

  Derec was nearly lost in the rich blend of aromas assaulting his nostrils. Every bush, every leaf, every blossom had its own fragrance, and if he paid attention he could distinguish their individual signatures in the air. Finally Ariel’s comment penetrated his consciousness, and he frowned in puzzlement. “Creepy? It’s wonderful! I’ve never seen or felt or smelled anything like it.” He stooped down to examine the ground at the edge of the trail, pulling Ariel down with him. “Look. It goes from trees all the way down to these tiny little lichens. I bet if we had a microscope we’d even see protozoans and bacteria. I had no idea the robots would be this thorough.”

  “Just what did you tell them to do, anyway?”

  Derec stood and brushed his hands against his pants. A butterfly glided toward him, hovered near his face a moment, then drifted on toward Mandelbrot, who had insisted on coming along to guard them but was maintaining his distance to give them privacy. Grinning sheepishly after the butterfly, Derec said, “Well, I told them to make an ecosystem based on the information I’d gotten from the central library. I assumed they’d integrate it into the existing city; you know, make a lot of parks and open spaces and stuff like that. Instead, they did this.” He held his arms out to indicate their surroundings, then led off down the trail again.

  “Have you asked why yet?”

  “Oh, I know why. I wasn’t specific enough. I didn’t tell them exactly what I had in mind, so in my absence they did what they thought was safest: removed the city and reconstructed the classical biomes as thoroughly as they could. Which turns out to be pretty thoroughly, by the look of it.”

  “But we’ve only been gone what — five or six months? How could they have done all this in so short a time?”

  Derec had lost track of the time during their travels, but he supposed it had been about that. Ariel was right; that was an awfully short time to have created something like this. Derec didn’t know that much about trees, but the tall ones towering over their heads had to have been older than just a few months. Could the robots have created them fully grown? Did their genetic engineering capabilities extend to that?

  A s
udden suspicion came to him, and he stopped in the middle of the trail, looking out into the forest all around them. Ariel bumped into him from behind. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  By way of answer, Derec strode off the path toward a tree trunk, swishing through the low ferns and pushing aside vines until he reached it. It was about twice as big around as he could have encircled with his arms, arrow-straight, and covered with a rough, scaly sort of grayish bark. He swung his hand around to slap it with his open palm. The thunk was barely audible. His hand stung from the impact, but that proved nothing. Derec made a fist and punched the tree with a fair amount of force behind it. It jarred his hand and forearm, but he had pulled the punch and again the results were inconclusive.

  “What are you doing?” Ariel asked, and Mandelbrot, hurrying up behind her, echoed her question.

  “Testing a hunch,” he answered, and swung at the tree with all his might.

  It felt as if he had hit a boxer’s training bag: stiff enough to let him know he’d hit something, yet yielding just enough to prevent damage to his knuckles. When he pulled his fist away it left a depression in the tree, a depression that slowly began to fill in until it was once more the same scaly gray bark it had been moments before.

  The significance of that was not lost on Ariel. “It’s a robot,” she said in quiet disbelief. “This whole forest is artificial.”

  Derec leaned close to the tree and inhaled, then repeated the process with a fern. The tree was sterile, but the fern had the wet, musty smell that only a living plant could produce. “Not everything,” he said, plucking off a frond and handing it to Ariel. “This is real enough. Evidently they cloned what they could and simulated the rest. I’ll bet they plan to let real trees grow up to replace the fake ones as soon as they can, but until then they need something to fill the biological niche, so they do it with robots.”

  “You are correct,” a soft, featureless voice said behind him.