Asimov’s Future History Volume 8

by Isaac Asimov

  “You were trying to produce human minds?” Adam asked.

  Janet looked as if she wouldn’t answer, but after a moment she sighed and said, “Ah, what the heck. Looks like that aspect of the experiment’s over anyway. Yeah, that’s one of the things I was trying to do. I was trying to create intelligence. I gave you what I consider the bare minimum in a robot: curiosity and the Three Laws, and I turned you loose to see if any of you would become anything more. Of course I didn’t count on you all getting together, but that doesn’t seem to have hurt anything. You’ve all surpassed anything I expected. Welcome to the human race.” She held out her hand.

  Adam reached out gingerly, as if after all this time spent searching for the truth, he was now unsure he wanted the honor she conveyed. He took her hand in his and shook it gently. and still holding on, he asked, “What about Basalom?”

  Janet shook her head. “The jury’s still out on him. I think I gave him too much initial programming for him to develop a human personality.”

  “But you’re not sure?”

  “No, I’m not sure. Why?”

  “Because if you’re not sure, then neither could Lucius be, and he was right in protecting Basalom’s life.”

  Derec had to admit that Adam’s argument made sense. So why were the hackles standing up on the back of his neck? He looked back to the monitor, saw the fuzzy yellow glow that Adam said indicated anger. That was why. With only five volts going to his brain, Lucius was effectively in suspended animation at the moment. He was still furious at Avery, and if they woke him up, he might very well continue to be furious. If they were going to reanimate Frankenstein’s monster, Derec wanted to calm him down first, at least. If possible, he wanted to do even more.

  “What can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?” he asked aloud.

  “Treat him better,” Janet said. “Follow the Laws of Humanics they’ve set up for us.”

  Derec couldn’t suppress a sardonic laugh. “That may be fine for us, but what about Dad? He’s not going to do anything he doesn’t want to.”

  His mother tossed her head, flinging her blond hair back over her shoulders. “Leave your father to me,” she said.

  Avery woke from the anesthetic with the impression that his tongue had swollen to twice its normal size. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry for that. His vision was blurry, too, and when he tried to raise his right hand to rub his eyes, it didn’t respond.

  He was in bad shape, that much was clear. Damn that meddlesome robot! Damn him and damn Janet for building him.

  He was evidently sitting up in bed, judging from the few somatic clues he could gather. He opened his mouth and used his swollen tongue and dry mouth to croak out the single word: “Water.”

  He heard a soft clink of glassware, the blessed wet gurgle of liquid being poured, and then a dark shape leaned over him and held the glass to his lips. He sipped at it, blinking his eyes as he did in an effort to clear them so he could see his benefactor.

  She spoke and saved him the effort of identification. “Well, Wendy, it looks like we have a lot to talk about, and finally plenty of time to do it in.”

  Turning his head away from the glass, he said, “We have nothing to discuss.” It came out more like, “We a uthi oo ithcuth.”

  She understood him anyway. “Ah, well, yes we do. There’s us, for instance. I can’t really believe it’s just coincidence that brought us back together after all this time.”

  Avery blinked a few more times, and his vision finally began to clear. Janet was sitting on a stool beside his bed, wearing a soft, light blue bodysuit with a zippered neck, which she’d pulled strategically low. Watch yourself, he thought as his eyes immediately strayed to the target she’d provided.

  She smiled, no doubt recognizing her slight victory.

  “I don’ know wha’ you’re talking abou’, “he said carefully.

  Her smile never wavered. “I think you do.” She held the glass to his lips and let him drink again while she said, “Face it; this whole city project of yours seems almost designed to attract my attention. You didn’t really think I’d ignore it once I heard about it, did you?”

  Avery, s tongue seemed to be returning to normal. When Janet removed the glass, he said, “I tried not to think about you at all.”

  “Didn’t work, did it? I tried the same thing.”

  Her question made him distinctly uncomfortable. “What do you want from me?” he demanded. “I’m not going to take you back, if that’s it.”

  “I didn’t ask that,” she said, frowning.

  “What, then?”

  Janet set the glass down. “Ah, Wendy. Always business. All right, then, we’ll start with my learning machines. I want you to leave them alone.”

  “I told you I would before you had Lucius attack me. I’ll be glad to be rid of them.”

  “I didn’t have Lucius attack you. He decided to do it on his own. Considering the provocation, I think he showed admirable restraint.”

  “He injured a human to protect a robot. You call that restraint?” Avery looked down to his right hand, found the reason why it didn’t respond. I1 was encased in a sleeve of dianite from his elbow to the ends of his fingers. Tiny points of light winked on and off along its length, each one above a recessed slide control. No doubt tiny robot cells were busy inside his arm as well, repairing the damage Lucius had done.

  “He injured a human to protect another human,” Janet said. “Or so he thought. Evidently that’s a trick you taught him.”

  “Another of my many mistakes.”

  Janet laughed. “My, how times do change us. The Wendell Avery I knew could no more have admitted a mistake than he could fly.”

  “And the Janet Anastasi I knew could no more have cared about a robot than she did about her son.”

  She blushed; he had scored a hit. She didn’t back away, though. “Let’s talk about David for a minute,” she said. “You wiped his mind after I left. Care to tell me why?”

  Avery looked around for the medical robot, thinking maybe he could claim fatigue and get it to usher Janet out, but there was no robot in sight. No doubt she had given it some line of rationalization to convince it to leave them alone. He wished he’d had the forethought to hide a Key to Perihelion in his pockets; he’d have gladly taken his chances with the teleportation device rather than face any more of Janet’s questions. It looked like he was going to have to, though. She didn’t look like she was prepared to let him off the hook just yet.

  Sighing in defeat, he said, “I wish I could tell you. I... went a little crazy there for a while, I’m afraid. He says I told him it was a test to see if he was worthy of inheriting my cities, but whether that was really it, or if I had a different reason, I don’t know.”

  “You don’t suppose you could have been trying to eliminate his memory of me, do you?”

  Avery shrugged. “I have no idea. Possibly. I was quite... angry with you.”

  “Ah, yes, anger. 1t makes people do things they later regret. We’ll return to that in a minute, but let’s not change the subject again just yet. You and David had pretty much patched things up again, hadn’t you? You were getting along pretty well. Almost like a normal father and son. What happened to that?”

  “He betrayed my trust,” Avery said. His voice came out harsh, and he held out his left hand for more water.

  Pouring, Janet asked, “Betrayed how? What did he do?”

  Avery accepted the glass and drank half of its contents in two gulps. “He turned my city into a zoo, that’s what. Worse, he turned it into a caricature of a zoo. Behind my back.”

  Janet’s laugh was pure derision. “You were ready to sacrifice everything you’d gained with him because of that?”

  “It wasn’t the act itself, but the betrayal.”

  “Which you can’t bring yourself to forgive. Not even after all you did to him, and all the forgiving he had to do.”

  Avery gulped down the rest of his water. He had no a
nswer for her. He was thinking of all the times in the last few weeks he had tried to open up to Derec, tried to make up for his earlier failings as a father. At the time it had seemed the most difficult thing he’d ever done, which was why the sudden discovery of Derec’s subterfuge had affected him the way it had.

  Janet got up off her stool and stood beside the bed, looking down on him with angry eyes. “I wouldn’t come back to you even if you’d have me. Why do you think I left you in the first place? Because you could never forgive anything, that’s why. The least little mistake and you’d be sore for a week, and Frost help me if I made a big one. Is it any wonder I learned to prefer the company of robots?” She turned away and stalked to the window separating the recovery room from the rest of the hospital. Beyond it, Derec and Ariel were discussing something with the medical robot. Janet said, “You’ve learned to admit to your own mistakes; isn’t it time you learned to forgive other people for theirs?”

  “Is that what you want from me, then? You want me to forgive our son for his... mistake?”

  Janet turned back to face him. “That’s right, I want you to forgive him. I don’t think he even made a mistake, but that’s beside the point. The practice will do you good, because when you’re done forgiving David, then I want you to forgive Lucius for what he did, too.”

  Avery looked for signs of a joke, but she seemed to be serious. He snorted. “You don’t ‘forgive’ robots. You melt them down and start over. Which is what I should have done with your three the moment I found them.”

  “You’d have been committing murder if you had. In fact, according to David, you almost did just that. If he hadn’t revived them, you’d have been guilty of that, too.”

  “Janet, I think you’ve been away from human companionship a little too long. They’re robots.”

  “They’ve got intelligent, inquisitive minds. They feel emotion. You know what was going on in Lucius’s mind when he saw you again? He was mad. Furious, to hear Adam tell it. Does that sound like a robot to you?”

  Avery waved his free arm. “Oh, they’re accomplished mimics, granted. You did a wonderful job with them in that regard. But there’s no way they can be anything but robots. They’ve got positronic brains, for God’s sake. It’s like —” He searched for an example as unlikely as a robot becoming human. “Ah, it’s like Derec’s precious ecosystem just over our heads. Most of the trees are robots. They do just about everything a tree can do, including feeding the birds, but could you seriously suggest that any of them really are trees? Nonsense. They’re robots, just like your ‘learning machines.’”

  Janet sat back down on the stool and took the empty glass from Avery. “I think we’re arguing semantics here. My robots may not be human in the most technical sense, but in every way that counts, they are. They’re every bit as human as any of the aliens you’ve met, and you’ve granted human status to most of those.”

  “Reluctantly,” Avery growled. He remembered an earlier thought and asked, “Was that what you were attempting to do? Create your own aliens?”

  “I was trying to create a true intelligence of any sort. Alien, human, I didn’t care. I just wanted to see what I’d get.”

  “And you think you’ve got both.” Avery didn’t make it a question. He ran a hand through his hair, then let out a long sigh. “I don’t care. I’m tired. Call them what you want if it’ll please you, but keep ’em away from me. As soon as this heals” — he nodded toward his right arm —” I’m leaving anyway, and you can do whatever you please.”

  Janet shook her head. “No, you’re not going anywhere until we agree on a lot more than just my learning machines. I don’t much like your cities, either.”

  “Fat lot you can do about that,” Avery said.

  Janet smiled sweetly, but her words were a dagger of ice. “Oh, well, as a matter of fact, there is. You see, I patented the entire concept, from the dianite cell all the way up, in my name.”

  Chapter 8

  THE OTHER SHOE DROPS

  THE APARTMENT WAS empty when Wolruf arrived. She padded softly through the living room, noting Ariel’s book reader lying on the end table by her chair and the empty niche where Mandelbrot usually stood, then went into Derec’s study and saw the bed there, still rumpled from sleep. The computer terminal was still on. She saw no cup in evidence, but the air conditioner hadn’t quite removed the smell of spilled coffee.

  “W’ere is everybody?” she asked of the room.

  “Derec and Ariel’s location is restricted,” Central replied.

  Oh, great. Now they’d all disappeared. Unless... “Are they at the same restricted location as before?” she asked.

  “That is correct.”

  Wolruf laughed aloud. She was learning how to deal with these pseudo-intelligences. She stopped in her own room just long enough to freshen up, then left the apartment and caught the slidewalk.

  She found not only Derec and Ariel in the robotics lab, but an unfamiliar woman who had to be Derec’s mother as well. Derec was busy with the humaniform robot Wolruf had attempted to catch the last time she’d been near here. He was trying to remove the stump of its severed arm, and by his expression not having much success at it. Ariel was holding a light for him and Derec’s mother was offering advice.

  “Try reaching inside and feeling for it,” she said.

  Derec obediently reached in through the access hatch in the robot’s chest, felt around inside for something, and jerked his hand out again in a hurry. “Ouch! There’s still live voltage in there!”

  “Not enough to hurt you,” his mother said patiently. “Not when he’s switched into standby mode like this. Would you like me to do it?”

  “No, I’ll get it.” Derec reached inside again, but stopped when he heard Wolruf’s laugh. He looked up and saw her in the doorway.

  “‘Ello.”

  “Hi.” Grinning, Derec withdrew his hand from the robot and used it to gesture. “Mom, this is my friend Wolruf. Wolruf, this my mother, Janet Anastasi.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Wolruf said, stepping forward and holding out a hand.

  Janet looked anything but pleased to be so suddenly confronted with an alien, but she swallowed gamely and took the proffered appendage. “Likewise,” she said.

  Wolruf gave her hand a squeeze and let go. Looking over Janet’s shoulder, she noticed a huddle of four robots in the far corner of the lab: three learning machines and Mandelbrot. They looked to be in communications fugue. Nodding toward them, she said, “I ‘eard Lucius ‘urt Avery some’ow.”

  “That’s right,” Ariel said. “He was trying to protect Basalom, here. We’ve got him in psychotherapy, if you can call four robots in an argument psychotherapy. They’re trying to convince him it’s all right.”

  “It is?” Wolruf asked.

  “Well, not the actual act,” Derec said, “but the logic he used wasn’t at fault. He just made a mistake, that’s all. He thought he was protecting a human.” Derec outlined the logic Lucius had used, including the First and Zeroth Law considerations that had finally made him do what he’d done.

  Wolruf listened with growing concern. The Zeroth Law was just the thing she’d hoped for to reassure her that taking robots home with her wouldn’t destroy her homeworld’s society, but if that same law let a robot injure its master, then she didn’t see how it could be a good thing.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Sounds like a bad tradeoff to me.”

  “How so?” Janet asked.

  “I’m wondering ‘ow useful all this is going to be. Right now I’m not sure about regular robots, much less ones who think they’re ‘uman.”

  “What aren’t you sure about?”

  Was Derec’s mother just being polite, or did she really want to know? Wolruf wondered if this was the time to be getting into all this, to bring up the subject of her going home and to get. into all her reasons for hesitating, but she supposed there really wasn’t going to be a much better time. She knew what Derec and Ariel thought
about the subject; maybe this Janet would have something new to say. “I’m not sure about taking any of these robots ‘ome with me,”

  Wolruf said. “I’m not sure about w’at they might decide to do on their own, and I’m not sure about w’at might ‘appen to us even if they just follow orders.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She’s talking about protecting people from themselves,” Ariel said.

  “Am I?”

  “Sure you are. I’ve been thinking about it, too. The problem with robot cities is that they’re too responsive. Anything you want them to do, they’ll do it, so long as it doesn’t hurt anybody. The trouble is, they don’t reject stupid ideas, and they don’t think ahead.”

  “That’s the people’s job,” Janet said.

  “Just w’atone of the robots in the forest told me,” Wolruf said. “Trouble is, people won’t always do it. Or w’en they realize they made a mistake, it’ll be too late.”

  Janet looked to Derec. “Pessimistic lot you run around with.”

  “They come by it honestly,” he said, grinning. “We’ve been burned more than once by these cities. Just about every time, it’s been something like what they’re talking about. Taking things too literally, or not thinking them through.”

  “Isn’t Central supposed to be doing that?”

  “Central is really just there to coordinate things,” Derec said. “It’s just a big computer, not very adaptable.” He looked down at Basalom again, nodded to Ariel to have her shine the light inside again as well, and peered inside the robot’s shoulder. After a moment he found what he was looking for, reached gingerly inside, and grunted with the strain of pushing something stubborn aside. The something gave with a sudden click and the stump of the robot’s arm popped off, trailing wires.

  “There’s also a committee of supervisory robots,” Ariel said, “but they don’t really do any long-range planning either. And they’re all subject to the Three Laws, so anybody who wants to could order them to change something, and unless it clearly hurt someone else, they’d have to do it.”