Asimov’s Future History Volume 8

by Isaac Asimov

  Not for Avery, at any rate, but Lucius didn’t know what the conflict would eventually do to himself. If he and Basalom weren’t human, he would be in direct violation of the First Law. Without justification, that would probably be enough to overload his brain with conflicting potentials,

  Lucius hesitated a microsecond, but the other side of the argument was just as deadly. If Basalom were human, then not saving him would be an even worse violation of the law.

  He felt a strange potential coursing through his circuits, the same potential he had noted earlier in connection with Avery. He cursed the biological fool before him for forcing him into this dilemma. He, Lucius, could very likely die in the attempt to save someone else.

  There was no time to think it through any further. Avery, s finger was dangerously close to triggering the laser again. In desperation, Lucius did the only thing he could think of to do: he drew back his arm to throw, formed his hand into a thin blade that would cause the least amount of pain possible, and flung it at Avery’s outstretched arm.

  In the moment it took the projectile to reach its target, Lucius wondered if he could have simply knocked the laser from Avery’s hand, but it was easy to convince himself that he couldn’t. It presented a much smaller target, most of which Avery’s fingers covered anyway, and fingers would be even more difficult to reattach than would a forearm.

  Besides, there was a certain amount of poetic justice in taking an entire limb.

  Avery stared at the stump of his wrist in astonished disbelief. One moment a hand had been there, and the next moment it hadn’t. He had hardly felt the pain when — whatever it was — cut it off; shock kept him from feeling it now.

  Intelligence made him grasp the wrist in his left hand and squeeze until he’d closed off the arteries. He carefully avoided looking down at the slidewalk.

  Slidewalk he thought dizzily. Yes, he’d best watch his footing, hadn’t he? Blood could be slippery.

  Dimly, through the tight focus his injury demanded of his attention, he was aware of shouting voices and the sound of footsteps. Someone shoved a hand under his arm and drew him erect; he hadn’t been aware he was slumping to his knees. He looked up to see Janet’s humaniform robot supporting him, heard it say, “Master Avery, we must get you to a hospital.”

  “No kidding,” he managed to say through clenched teeth. It was beginning to hurt now.

  Someone else shouted, “Lucius, come back here! Mandelbrot, stop him!” Metallic feet pounded away down the corridor.

  Another pair of hands reached out to hold him, these ones warm and human, and he found himself looking into Janet’s whitened face. She looked worse than he felt. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Oh Wendell, I’m sorry.”

  “I am too,” he said automatically, and was surprised to realize the words were true, but about what he had no idea.

  The computer’s voice woke Derec out of a sound sleep. “Master Derec, wake up. Master Derec.”

  “Mmmm?” was all he could manage at first. After the elation of figuring out his mother’s name had faded, he’d realized how long he’d been without sleep and he had ordered a bed made for him right there in the study. He’d hoped that his new discovery would trigger memories of his past, and he’d supposed that sleeping on it would be the best way to integrate that knowledge into whatever subconscious switching network controlled memory, but now, even in his groggy state, he knew it hadn’t worked. He suspected he’d slept too soundly for that. He’d been out before his head hit the pillow, exhausted, and he didn’t feel any different now.

  “Wake up,” the computer said again. “Your father has been located.”

  That sped the waking process a bit. He sat up and shook his head, stood, and staggered over to the terminal. “Caffeine,” he said as he sat down, and a moment later the desk delivered a cup of steaming black coffee. “Show me where he is,” he said between gulps.

  The screen lit to show Avery standing between two unfamiliar people. No, one should be familiar, Derec realized. That had to be his mother. Janet. Again he reached for the cascade of memories that should have been there, but nothing responded to the new stimulus.

  That was her, though. It had to be. Then that other person wasn’t a person at all, but her humaniform robot, the one Wolruf had chased northward from the lab. Evidently they had come back together this time. And brought Avery with them? That certainly seemed to be the case. Now that he looked, Derec could see that they were holding onto him, evidently making sure he didn’t get away. Or was that —? No. Avery clutched his right wrist, and he had no hand below it. They were supporting him; that was it. But none of the three was doing anything about his injury! They were instead watching something out of the monitor’s view to the right.

  “Pan right,” Derec ordered, and the view slid left in the screen. As it panned he saw Ariel standing in the doorway of what Derec could now see was indeed the lab where he’d revived the robots, and she was also looking intently down the corridor.

  The objects of their attention slid into view: four robots — Mandelbrot, Adam, Eve, and Lucius — locked in battle.

  They were a blur of motion. It was hard to tell who was on which side — hard even to tell who was who amid the constantly shifting shapes. Only Mandelbrot remained the same from moment to moment. At first it seemed that he fought against the other three, struggling to hold them all captive while they twisted and flowed out of his grasp, but it gradually became apparent that he and two of the others were all three trying to contain only one robot.

  “Give me sound,” Derec said, and suddenly his study echoed with screeches and thuds and a peculiar ripping noise that Derec realized was the sound of robot cells being tom free like Velcro fasteners. The robots had changed tactics now; instead of trying to contain their captive — a task as impossible as stopping a flood with their hands — they began tearing him apart. Mandelbrot was doing the most damage. His rigid left arm moved like a piston, his hand pulling free chunks of silvery robot and flinging them away to splash against the walls and ceiling. The other two robots took over the job of flailing at the constantly shifting amoeba their captive had become, pulling off its arms when it tried to grow around them and forcing it back toward Mandelbrot and destruction.

  At last Mandelbrot exposed his target: the robot’s egg-shaped microfusion power pack. When he wrenched that free, the struggle instantly ceased. He backed away with the power pack in his hand, and the other two robots flowed back into their normal shapes: Adam the werewolf and Eve the silvery copy of Ariel. The third robot remained a much-diminished, ragged-edged tangle of appendages on the floor. It had undoubtedly been Lucius they’d destroyed. Somehow that didn’t surprise Derec.

  Then the implications of what he had seen soaked in, and he spilled coffee all over his desk. Swearing, but not at the spill, he leaped to his feet, knocking over his chair in his haste, and ran from the apartment. His father was hurt. His mother had come out of hiding. And there could only be one reason for the battle he had just witnessed: Lucius had injured a human being. He had directly violated the First Law of Robotics.

  Wolruf was talking with the wolf when she felt the forest shudder beneath her feet.

  “What I want to know,” she’d been in the process of saying, “is whether or not your desire to serve ‘umans is stronger in the immediate case, or over the long term. Do you think ahead to w’at your ‘elp might do to your masters’ civilization, or do you just follow your laws case by — what was that?”

  The wolf had flinched, too, just as the forest had seemed to do. Now it said, “Involuntary response. A robot has just injured a human.”

  “W’ at?” Wolruf felt her hackles rise. That was supposed to be impossible.

  The wolf looked into the forest and spoke as if echoing a news broadcast, as it probably was. “The robot Lucius has inflicted non-fatal damage to the human Wendell Avery. Lucius has been deactivated, but all units are alerted to watch for aberrant behavior among other robots. All units m
ust run a diagnostic self-check immediately.” The wolf turned its head to look up at Wolruf. “I must comply,” it said, and it froze like a statue.

  Wolruf glanced around at the forest, wondering if she should use the opportunity to make her escape. Of all the times to be out in the forest with a robotic wolf, this was probably the worst. If some rogue idea were circulating around, some new thought that could actually allow a robot to override the Three Laws, then Wolruf couldn’t think of a much worse place to run afoul of it than here with a robot who had already convinced itself that injuring animals was all right.

  She forced herself to stay put. It had been Lucius and Avery involved, not this robot before her. Wolruf had lived around robots long enough to know that they seldom — if ever — did anything without a reason, and if ever a robot had a reason to harm a human, Lucius was the one. Scary as the precedent might be, the wolf didn’t have a motive. No matter how much she worried about the long-term damage robots could do to a civilization, Wolruf didn’t think she was in any danger now.

  She waited impatiently for the wolf robot’s consciousness to come back on line, in the meantime listening to the occasional chirps and cries of the forest’s real occupants. Quite a few of them were genuine, by the sound of it. Quite a few of the plants were, too. The fresh, clean aroma of growing things was a constant delight to a nose too often idle in the city.

  That was a good argument in favor of robots right there, Wolruf realized. They had repaired a planet-wide ecosystem in only a few months, with much more careful attention to detail than she or her entire society could achieve. Wolruf’s home world needed such attention, and soon. Most of the forests there were already gone, as were the wide open spaces and the clean lakes. Centuries of industrialization had left scars that would probably never heal on their own. Even accounting for the difficulties inherent in working around an existing population, robots would probably be able to repair it all in a few years, or decades at the longest.

  There was no denying that robots would be useful if she took them home with her. But that still didn’t tell her whether or not they would also be harmful.

  She was no closer to an answer than before. And now she had to worry about the possibility of immediate danger as well as long-term effects of using robots.

  The wolf returned to life as quickly as it had frozen. “My functions check out marginal,” it said. “I am not a direct threat to humans, but under the current conditions my ability to kill animals has caused some alarm. I have been instructed to return to the city for deeper evaluation.”

  “Oh,” Wolruf said. “If you wish to accompany me, we can continue our discussion on the way.”

  “All right.”

  “You were asking about the city’s consideration for long-range effects of its actions.” The robot led off through the ferns toward a large boulder, which obligingly grew a door for them when they were still a few paces away. “I have accessed the pertinent operation guidelines from Central, and find that very little long-term planning exists. However, since this was an experimental city built primarily to test the physical function of the cellular robot concept, that lack of guidelines may not be pertinent to the question. It seems likely that under actual implementation conditions, whatever long-range goals the city’s inhabitants had for themselves would be included in the city programming.”

  They stepped into the elevator and turned around to watch the door slide closed, cutting off the sights and sounds and smells of forest once again. They began to descend, and Wolruf turned her attention to what the robot had said. She had to wade through the unfamiliar terms in its speech to get its meaning, but she was getting good at gathering sense from context. The robot had just said that long-term goals were the responsibility of the humans being served. Which, to answer her question, meant no, the robots wouldn’t concern themselves with it because they believed it was already being covered.

  Wolruf laughed aloud. When the robot asked her to explain, she said, “You’ve ‘eard the cliché about the blind leading the blind?”

  “No, but I have accessed the appropriate files. I fail to see the application here.”

  Wolruf laughed again. “‘umans, at least my particular breed of them — and to all appearances Derec ‘s breed as well — don’t pay much more attention to long-term problems than you do.”

  “Oh,” the wolf said. “We will have to take this under consideration.”

  The elevator came to a stop and the doors opened onto the underground city. Wolruf stepped out ahead of the robot. “Good,” she said. “I was ‘oping you’d say that.”

  The city built the hospital in the suite of rooms just down the corridor from the lab. Medical robots arrived while it was still differentiating, took Avery inside, and made quick work of preparing his wound for surgery. The operating room grew around them while they cleaned the wound, and within minutes they had him anesthetized and were hard at work grafting his hand back on.

  Ariel watched in morbid fascination from behind the sterile room’s transparent wall. To her left stood Derec ‘s mother and her companion robot, to her right Adam and Eve and Mandelbrot. The robots were watching the operation with the same fascination as Ariel, but Derec’s mother was watching Ariel as much as anything else.

  “You’re David’s lover, aren’t you?” she finally asked, her tone less than approving. It was the first thing either of them had said to the other.

  “That’s right,” Ariel said without looking away from the window. Where did this woman get off? she wondered. No introduction, no apology, just “You’re David’s lover.” She didn’t know a thing about the situation, yet she still acted as if she were in control. Ariel turned her head enough to address the reflection beside her own in the window and said, “His name is Derec now.”

  “I heard. I’ve never liked it. It sounds like a spacesuit manufacturer.”

  “Exactly,” Ariel said around a smile.

  “Why did he change it?”

  “Long story.”

  “I see.”

  The medical robots were using some sort of glue on hold the ends of bone together. Lucius’s weapon had been sharp and moving fast; the severed edges were smooth and easily repaired. He had probably done that on purpose, Ariel realized. She wondered why he had bothered. She watched the robots spread the glue on either end, press the two together, and hold them rigid until the glue set. She hoped they’d checked to make sure it was aligned properly; something about the glue looked permanent.

  “You’re not worth the effort he’s put in on finding you,” Ariel said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. As soon as he hears about this, Derec is going to come running in here all ready for a big reconciliation. He wants his family back, and he’ll take what he gets, but you’re no prize. Neither of you. You two are living proof that scientists shouldn’t have children.”

  “I suppose you’re an expert on the subject.”

  “I know how to treat one.”

  “How could you? You don’t — Do you?” The woman was clearly horrified at the thought.

  “What’s the matter, don’t like the idea of being a grandmother?” Ariel snorted. “Relax, you’re safe. He took care of it for you.” She tilted her head toward the window. “One of his wonderful experiments ran amok and killed the fetus while it was still only a few weeks old.”

  “You sound as if you hold me responsible.”

  “You ran off and left your son in the hands of a lunatic. What am I supposed to think?”

  “I couldn’t take him with me. I — I needed to be alone.”

  “You should have thought about that before you had him.” Ariel looked directly at Derec’s mother for the first time since they had begun speaking to one another. If she had looked earlier she might have held her tongue; the woman’s skin was gray, and she looked as if she had aged twenty years in the last few minutes.

  Her robot was growing concerned, too. It said, “Mistress Janet, Mistress Arie
l, I don’t believe this conversation should continue.”

  Janet. That was her name. Ariel had been struggling for it since she’d first seen her.

  Janet said, “It’s all right, Basalom. Ariel isn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know.” She smiled a fleeting smile. “I’ve had plenty of time to dwell on my mistakes.”

  Looking back through the window at Avery and the medical robots, she said, “We thought having a child might save our marriage. Can you imagine anything sillier? People who don’t get along in the first place certainly aren’t going to get along any better under the stress of having a child, but we didn’t see that then. We just knew we were falling out of love, and we tried the only thing we could think of to stop it from happening.”

  Ariel felt herself blush guiltily at Janet’s admission. She’d been thinking along similar lines herself just yesterday, hadn’t she? She hadn’t actually come out and said that a baby would bring her and Derec closer together again, but she’d been working toward that concept. Was it so surprising, then, to find that Derec’s parents had done the same thing?

  “Treating the symptoms doesn’t often cure the disease,” Ariel said, her tone considerably softer than before. “I guess you should have looked for the reason why you were falling out of love in the first place.”

  “I know that now.”

  More softly still, Ariel asked, “Why do you think you did fall out of love?”

  Janet’s laugh was a derisive “Ha!” She nodded at Avery as Ariel had done earlier. “He was out to transform the galaxy; I wanted to study it first. He wanted a castle for everyone and a hundred robots in every castle, but I wanted to preserve a little diversity in the universe. I was more interested in the nature of intelligence and the effect of environment on its development, while he was more interested in using intelligence to modify the environment to suit it. We argued about it all the time. Small wonder we started to hate each other.”