Asimov’s Future History Volume 7

by Isaac Asimov

  So that confusion with the nature of the biological sexes, and with her discomfort under a female imprint, disturbed her — and yes, that disturbance was the emotion Wolruf had called worry. She was worrying about her imprint on Wolruf because she was disturbed by a desire to return to the Derec imprint, the male form — uncomfortable Wolruf would have described it — so she put that emotion down in her catalog, together with its positronic potential pattern.

  She was becoming more and more convinced that she should go back to the Derec imprint strictly from the standpoint of comfort. That was a notion she catalogued as a strong future possibility, but for now she would retain the Wolruf imprint for whatever help that femininity would provide in her analysis of Ariel and the strange effect she had on Derec.

  SilverSide rose and walked through the hatch, following Ariel and Derec who had just walked up the ramp and into the ship.

  Chapter 16

  THE AGAOBIOLOGIST

  “SO WHAT’S THE crisis here?” Derec asked. “And that screwy message of yours, that bit about my internal engineering’! What’s that all about?”

  They were standing in the control room of the Xerborodezees, where they had gone to get away from the others.

  SilverSide walked in, sat down in one of the deep-cushioned passenger seats behind the pilot’s upholstered bucket, and listened to Ariel and Derec.

  “Some engineering I figured out, quite without your help,” Ariel said. “In fact I’ve brought this planet pretty much under control without your wisdom and guidance. All I need from you now is your muscle, that part between your ears.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Your internal monitor link with the robot cities: I’ll bet you didn’t know that that modulates hyperwave.”

  “Au contraire, my dear,” Derec said. “That is a form of communication that depends on a special understanding of spacetime physics developed by my ever-so-eccentric father, the good Dr. Avery.”

  “And au contraire right back at you, smarty. That is what the aliens on this planet, the Ceremyons, refer to as continuous modulation of hyperwave. Ask Avernus and Keymo, and Jacob, too. He even understands it. It’s the communication version of Key teleportation, just like conventional discrete modulation of hyperwave is the communication version of hyperjump technology. I’ll bet you didn’t even recognize that!”

  They had been together again for all of ten minutes, and already they were going at it hammer and tongs. Is this what love is all about? Derec asked himself.

  “I’ll have to think about that,” he said. Was it possible she was right? He changed the subject.

  “Now what about the crisis? The reason for me being here.”

  “There is no crisis. Except I had to get you here promptly to avoid one.”

  She told him then how the robot city had disturbed the weather, how the Myostrians had capped and controlled the disturbance with the dome, how they were ready to close it completely until she came up with her plan of a planetwide farm, abandoning the idea of a planetwide city.

  “So you see,” she concluded, “your task is straightforward and reasonably simple: just reprogram the Averies into farmers.”

  “I presume that this is another example of your style of engineering?” Derec said.

  “Not bad, huh? Social engineering, Derec. Something you wouldn’t understand.”

  “There is just one minor problem.”

  He paused. Ariel said, “And that is?”

  “In order to program the Averies to pursue a particular technology, one must know something about that technology. I know all about cities. I don’t know the first thing about farms, and I suspect you don’t either.”

  Wolruf came into the compartment in time to hear Derec’s last sentence. She took the passenger seat next to SilverSide.

  Ariel looked stunned. That seems to be a piece of engineering she doesn’t have covered, Derec thought. Perhaps there’s more to engineering than meets her eye.

  He was feeling smug and complacent. The bit about continuous modulation of hyperwave had thrown him for a moment. But now he felt that he was back in control of the expedition.

  “So ‘u don’t know the first thing about farms, Derec. So what?” Wolruf said. “I seem to ‘ave come in on the middle of the show.”

  “So you can’t reprogram Avery robots to be farmers,” Derec said, “if you don’t know anything about farming and farm technology.”

  “‘ave no fear, Wolruf iss’ere,” the small, furry alien said. “I wass raissed on a farm and educated at Agripolytech. I’m ‘urn original’ ayseed engineerrr.”

  “Okay, Derec. What do you say now?” Ariel said. “You think I didn’t know that? Where have you been all this time?”

  Derec ignored Ariel.

  “You, a farmer?” He was looking at Wolruf.

  “What products do ‘u think the Erani bought from my family?” Wolruf asked. “The Erani am not all pirates like Aranimas. They’rrr mostly traders, and they live on an impoverished ball of rock that growss lichens betterrr than it doess tomatoess. In theess days of overpopulation, the Erani survive on the grain and farm products they buy from us.”

  And there was Ariel, glowing now, when she had been shocked half out of her drawers before Wolruf put in her two cents. She had had no more idea than he that Wolruf was a farmer.

  But Derec was quick to regroup, and he was now admitting to himself that Wolruf’s contribution might well amount to more than two cents, Galactic Monetary Standard.

  “Okay. I submit. I’ll handle the computer technology, Wolruf will handle the farm technology, and you can continue to handle the social technology.”

  “Not entirely,” Ariel said. You could tell she was about to reveal something that was not entirely easy to divulge. “You must meet with me and the aliens tomorrow morning. And it looks now as though Wolruf will also need to attend that meeting, as our farm specialist.”

  “For what purpose?” Derec asked.

  “They want to develop a schedule. The Cerebrons are anxious to return to their nomadic life, from which they’ve been diverted by the problem with our city. They’ve been camping out in The Forest of Repose, as they call it, the woods next to the city.”

  Ariel looked at her watch.

  “You may want to watch this,” she said. “It’s sort of spectacular. We can watch the show from the lorry as we drive in to the city. We need to be getting back anyway. It’s almost time for dinner.”

  Jacob and Mandelbrot were standing near the lorry as Derec and Ariel started down the ramp. The robots had already loaded Derec’s gear into the lorry.

  Derec called, “I’ll want you to drive, Mandelbrot.”

  He wanted to stand by the driver, so as to watch better whatever show it was Ariel had scheduled for them, and he dam well didn’t want that musclebot Jacob standing beside him, upstaging him, so to speak, in front of the audience sitting behind.

  He glanced at Ariel, daring her to challenge his decision.

  She looked at him quizzically, but then gave him a quirky little smile and didn’t say anything. And that was as infuriating as if she had questioned his order. She knew exactly why he wanted Mandelbrot to drive. Somehow he always displayed his buttons, and Ariel knew exactly which ones to push.

  But the show was every bit as spectacular as she had intimated. She stood up to point out the one she thought was the Cerebron leader, Synapo, circling high over the dome. And it was he who dropped first: a tiny black ball plummeting toward the forest like a lead shot, becoming a small bomb, trailing a shiny smoke that slowly expanded into a silver ball that drifted gently down into the tree tops and then bobbed up to rest on the top of the forest like a ball of mercury on a countertop.

  That was a solo performance, and then from near Synapo’s flight circle, another followed — Sarco, the leader of the Myostria, Ariel guessed — and after a time, over the space of a quarter-hour, they all dropped until they were dispersed like myriad beads of silvery
moisture over the surface of the green foliage.

  Chapter 17

  THE CEREBOT

  THE PROVISIONAL LAWS OF HUMANICS

  1. A HUMAN BEING MAY NOT INJURE ANOTHER HUMAN BEING, OR, THROUGH INACTION, ALLOW A HUMAN BEING TO COME TO HARM.

  2. A HUMAN BEING MUST GIVE ONLY REASONABLE ORDERS TO A ROBOT AND REQUIRE NOTHING OF IT THAT WOULD NEEDLESSLY PUT IT INTO THE KIND OF DILEMMA THAT MIGHT CAUSE IT HARM OR DISCOMFORT.

  3. A HUMAN BEING MUST NOT HARM A ROBOT, OR, THROUGH INACTION, ALLOW A ROBOT TO COME TO HARM, UNLESS SUCH HARM IS NEEDED TO KEEP A HUMAN BEING FROM HARM OR TO ALLOW A VITAL ORDER TO BE CARRIED OUT.

  FROM CENTRAL COMPUTER FILE: HUMANICS.

  MECHANICAL ACCESS: DRAWER 667, BIN 82.

  KEYWORD ACCESS: HUMANS. SUB KEY: LAWS.

  FILE CREATOR: RYDBERG 1

  THE NEXT MORNING, well before ten o’clock, Mandelbrot parked the lorry near the west edge of the dome opening, and the three mammals got out, instructing the three robots to stay behind in the lorry but to record everything that transpired once the aliens arrived.

  “Well, friend Mandelbrot, it is some time since we’ve been able to talk privately,” Jacob Winterson said.

  “That will hardly be the case with the wild one present,” Mandelbrot said. “Watch what you say and what you do. It is completely unpredictable. It deactivated me on the wolf planet.”

  Jacob and Mandelbrot were still standing behind the control panel of the lorry. SilverSide was sitting on the back seat that she had occupied with Wolruf on the way to the meeting site.

  “For your information,” SilverSide said, “I am not an ‘it.’ I am currently of the female persuasion, having imprinted on Wolruf. You may refer to me with the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her,’ Jacob. And you need not think that I will deactivate either of you now that I know that Mistress Wolruf would not react kindly to that action. Further, I am completely unaffected by what you may say or do, now that I understand that Miss Wolruf wants me to modulate the Third Law slightly to accord you some modest protection.”

  “So, friend Jacob,” Mandelbrot said, “have you pondered further upon that imponderable, the Laws of Humanics?”

  “Yes, I have,” Jacob replied, “and I find them woefully inadequate in describing human behavior. Rydberg and his companions are inexperienced in dealing with humans who are an unfathomable lot. Emotions, not laws, govern their behavior. And I think perhaps the female of the species is the most mysterious of all. I have been researching the emotion of jealousy since I seem to have been acquired essentially to create that emotion in the breast of Master Derec.”

  “I hardly think jealousy can reside in the breast of a human, friend Jacob,” Mandelbrot suggested.

  “Merely a figure of speech used in the literature of the subject,” Jacob replied. “The key point of interest here, however, is the multiplicity of shades and overtones that exist in the minds of humans in their consideration of the opposite sex, shades and overtones of emotion that apparently have nothing to do with reproduction of the species, the ostensible reason for there being the two sexes in the first place.”

  Surprisingly, SilverSide was becoming interested in the conversation after all. She agreed with Jacob’s assessment of any Laws of Humanics that would guide human behavior and supposedly parallel the Laws of Robotics that guided her behavior. And now the subject of their conversation seemed to bear directly on her discomfort with the femininity of the Wolruf imprint that seemed, paradoxically, to be aggravated by the keen interest in everything feminine she had felt earlier in the masculine mode, while imprinted on Derec.

  It was a discomfort that came from an awareness of her own narcissism, something she had never experienced before, that was at once both fascinating and repulsive. She concluded she was attracted to feminine beings, but would rather it were not her own being. But what was the cause for the attraction? She concluded it must stem from that first powerful imprint on KeenEye that had not been altogether dispelled by her preference for the Derec imprint — the male imprint. That comfort with a masculine imprint was only a little less powerful than the laws that were intended to govern her behavior, but which she found so difficult to interpret for want of knowing what a human was. She could deprogram neither those laws nor her feeling of masculinity nor that insidious attraction for all that was feminine.

  She found that she was experiencing another form of discomfort that came from listening to Jacob and Mandelbrot. She had never before heard two robots conversing with one another. The discomfort came not from that process but, again, from their words, what she deduced from their words. They were talking as though they knew what a human was, and she, SilverSide, was still exploring that subject by the process of multiple imprints, trying to progress to ever higher levels of intelligence, for surely only the most intelligent species in the galaxy could be the humans she was seeking.

  “Jacob, you talk of the laws of humanics as though you know what a human is,” she said.

  “Certainly,” Jacob said. “I am so programmed. How else could I implement the Laws of Robotics?”

  “Am I human?” she asked.

  “No. You are a robot,” Jacob replied.

  “How do you know?”

  “Master Derec says so. Further, my own senses tend to support his contention. You are not a mammal.”

  “What about Mistress Wolruf? Is she human?”

  “No.”

  “But she is a mammal.”

  “True. But not all mammals are human.”

  “What is a human, Jacob?” Silverside asked.

  “There are many definitions, some very complicated, some very simple. We are generally programmed with only one.”

  “What is an example of a simple definition?”

  “Accent in speaking Standard. Most humans speak Standard, so a simple definition for a special set of robots on a planet called Solaria once used the Solarian accent to define humans — a very simple test, not requiring any unusual instrumentation.”

  “And how do you define a human, Jacob?”

  “By the number of their chromosomes and the configuration of their X and Y chromosomes.”

  “And how do you determine that information?”

  “With an instrument — a cellular nanomachine — built into my right index finger.”

  “You don’t make that determination each time you meet that same human, do you?”

  “No. Once I determine that a being is human, I put its image into a pattern-recognition table. Further, I am inclined to accept as human any being that approximates an average of those images — without the chromosome test.”

  “Mistress Ariel and Master Derec are both humans, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “And which do you feel more compelled to protect?”

  “My immediate master, Mistress Ariel.”

  “And you, Mandelbrot, which would you favor?”

  “Master Derec, although the choice would be difficult,” Mandelbrot said.

  “And what about Wolruf?” SilverSide asked. “Would you protect her, Mandelbrot?”

  “Yes. Friend Jacob and I are both programmed to treat her as human.”

  “Don’t you find that strange? A being that is...”

  Thoughts of Wolruf as a human were shunted aside by the landing at the meeting site of black demonic beings — two of them — who simultaneously stalled out with perfect choreography, braking with their wings widespread, seeming to shut off the sun in the enveloping blackness of their presence. Then they touched down lightly, folded rustling wings close in to their bodies — shrinking to the size of the mammals they faced — and became black silhouettes surmounted by wicked-looking, snow-white hooks above burning red eyes.

  The impenetrable soft blackness that shrouded their physical essence in mystery projected a disquieting impression of latent power.

  SilverSide concentrated on recording everything that transpired. She thought that she was possibly observing the ultimate form of human
ity, the final objective in a frustrating quest.

  “Good morning, leaders of the Ceremyons,” Ariel said. “This is Wolruf and this is Derec, both members of our reprogramming task force. Wolruf, Derec, I would like you to meet Synapo, leader of the Cerebrons...”

  The alien on the right expanded slightly with the rustling sound of a bat’s wings amplified by an order of magnitude

  “... and Sarco, leader of the Myostria.” The alien on the left expanded, rustling. Derec spoke next.

  “My colleague Wolruf and I are honored that you will be working with us to produce an environment on your planet of benefit to both of our peoples.”

  “That is to be desired,” the alien Synapo said with a strange accent, more pronounced than Wolruf’s, which made understanding the alien even more difficult.

  “But first,” Derec continued, “would you explain the nature of the dome and the method of its construction so that we may determine how best to modify the city within to be as innocuous as possible?”

  “The node compensator is a localized separation of space and time,” Sarco said.

  He said nothing further, as though that fully explained it. “Yes. Go on,” Derec said.

  “That’s it. A localized rift in spacetime,” Sarco said with mild disdain as though he were lecturing a backward student, “a locus of points in the cosmos where our universe no longer exists.”

  “And how do you create such a rift?”

  “Do you understand what I mean by a rift in the cosmos?” Derec hesitated.

  “Not entirely,” he said.

  “Then you ‘re not likely to understand how such a rift is created, and we should move on to more profitable subjects for discussion.”