Asimov’s Future History Volume 7

by Isaac Asimov

  Confused as he was, with Synapo ordering him to serve Miss Ariel, it was as though Synapo himself were telling him to listen to Neuronius.

  “I will listen a short while, then,” SilverSide said, “but then I must leave you.”

  So they proceeded a little way farther along the path to a small clearing alongside a brook. Neuronius opened his wings, fluttered them as though to shake out uncomfortable creases, and then folded them to his sides again. He tottered over to the brook, sat down on a low flat rock lying half into the small stream, and dangled his feathery tail in the water.

  “The secret of the dome is merely a matter of understanding space and time and their relationship to black concavities,” Neuronius said. “That relationship is best described in the terms of tensor analysis.”

  SilverSide was already familiar with tensor mathematics, quantum mechanics, general relativity, and spacetime physics, which, although more sophisticated in their language and applications, were still the basic sciences developed by Schroedinger and Einstein.

  Hyperjump and hyperwave technology were little more than tools that man had discovered quite accidentally and still did not really understand, any more than he understood what an electron was.

  So now Neuronius led SilverSide along mathematical pathways dealing with space and time which, familiar at first, became rapidly unfamiliar and bizarre, and twisted his positronic thoughtways in patterns that became ever more uncomfortable.

  With that discomfort he began to suspect that Neuronius — if he could twist SilverSide’s mind to such a degree — was perhaps superior to Synapo. Certainly Neuronius was different, and maybe it was the difference of a superior mind. He continued to record what Neuronius was saying but stopped generation of associative memory links — stopped listening — in order to pursue that intriguing comparison of the two aliens. Finally he interrupted Neuronius in his lecture.

  “What is a human, Neuronius?”

  “What?”

  “I have been searching for humans, the beings whose laws govern my behavior. I had thought that humans must be the most intelligent species in the galaxy, but Synapo says Miss Ariel is human, and that he is not, even though he is more intelligent than Miss Ariel.”

  Neuronius hesitated. In the silence, the twitter of the jungle birds came to SilverSide, registering with sharp clarity a serenity and tranquillity that was strikingly at odds with the turmoil in his mind.

  “I am human,” Neuronius said. “Synapo is not.”

  Was there no peace in this life? Unquestionably Neuronius was more intelligent than Miss Ariel, and it seemed more and more apparent that Neuronius was indeed more intelligent than Synapo, yet Synapo was the leader of the Ceremyons. The logical question came immediately to mind.

  “Where do you fit into the society of the Ceremyons?”

  “I am not a Ceremyon,” Neuronius replied. “I may appear to be so, but I am not. I am far superior to any Ceremyon.”

  “Are there others of your kind?”

  “Not on this planet. This one is mine. The others each dominate a planet of their own.”

  SilverSide was impressed. Yet there was something about Neuronius that bothered him — his wordiness, perhaps; Mandelbrot bothered him that way, but there it was a bother that need not concern him. Mandelbrot was merely a robot. But Neuronius was not a robot, and his words were exceedingly tantalizing, and yet disturbing, uneasily so. Mandelbrot had never made him feel uneasy.

  If Neuronius were the only one of his kind on this planet, he had to be the most intelligent being here — if he were indeed more intelligent than Synapo. So he was back to that simple comparison. On balance, Neuronius appeared to be the more intelligent. He had delved far deeper into dome technology than Synapo had during his meeting with the mammals. Synapo had seemed to be withholding information, as though he were not altogether sure of what he was saying. Neuronius certainly did not give that impression. He seemed to be bursting with information. So much so that SilverSide’s positronic potentials on the subject of domes were now a complete jumble.

  His indecision was excruciating. He had to get the question resolved. He had thought it was resolved, and arriving at that point once again, after having been through it so many times, had been an unsettling experience that he had accepted finally with his imprint on Jacob Winterson. Now all that ordeal seemed to have gone for naught. But how was he to get it resolved?

  “I must know who is the more intelligent, you or Synapo. Can you suggest how that can be determined?”

  “I am not interested in your petty games, SilverSide. I am offering you knowledge that will allow you to serve whomever you please with greater efficiency. Surely you can see that.”

  “But whom I am to serve must clearly be resolved before the service itself can take place. Surely, with your intelligence you can see that.”

  “One can train for service quite efficiently without knowing who will ultimately be served.”

  “But how one trains — what type of service should be stressed — depends on who will be served.”

  That seemed clear to SilverSide, and if Neuronius couldn’t understand something as simple as that, he could not be as intelligent as he had at first appeared.

  “You are right, of course,” Neuronius said. “But I find it exceedingly distasteful and uncomfortable to promote myself at the expense of others. It makes me appear slow, I suppose. I have no desire to denigrate Synapo.

  “You must have this question resolved, must you?” Neuronius said as a small green jet flamed momentarily in the air below his red eyes.

  That was one piece of alien body language SilverSide had learned to read. It lent an air of great sincerity to the discomfort Neuronius claimed to feel.

  “Yes,” SilverSide said.

  “Then you must serve me. I am human, the only human on this planet and the most intelligent of the various species that exist here, and certainly more intelligent than Synapo.”

  That must do for the moment. SilverSide could do nothing more immediately. He must try to accept what Neuronius had said, but the acceptance was not something that was going to come easily. He had come to many forks in the path of his quest for humans, and each time — at each crux — the resolution of the dilemma subjected him to more agony.

  That conflict, repeated now, and his attempt to cope with it, sent little stabs of pain shooting through his positronic brain, little stabs that congealed into a ball of pure agony, and finally he could bear the pain no longer. He jumped up and fled down the path into the forest while Neuronius’s shouts grew fainter and fainter.

  Finally exhausted, after Neuronius was left far behind, he stopped. He had left the path and had been plunging through dense vegetation, ripping it out by the roots when it would not yield otherwise. He stood there, recharging his reserve pack. In the wild scramble, he had used all the output of his microfusion reactor and more, bleeding his reserves until he was forced to stop.

  Then he slowly began to transform from one imprint to the next, trying to find peace of mind, going back from Jacob to Synapo to Wolruf to Derec and finally to KeenEye, to the form in which he had first known being and BeastTongue.

  In the wolf-like KeenEye imprint, using only a fraction of the output from her reactor, she began loping easily through the forest, finding and following the animal trails that had been created by the natural denizens of Oyster World. She found a measure of peace in the pleasant natural scents left there by those very basic creatures, creatures much lower in the scale of life than LifeCrier, but still so like him in their familiar but dissimilar musky scent.

  The night passed as she roamed aimlessly through the Forest of Repose.

  Dawn found her at the edge of the forest below The Cliff of Time, back at the trail that led to the clearing where Neuronius had lectured her. The night had served to clarify one thing. She must talk to Synapo again before she could make a final judgment of the humanity of Neuronius.

  She could find Synapo by radio, but th
e only tactful way to talk to him was on the wing. She could not ask him to come to her. He had left the clear impression he did not want to talk to her further. She must go back to the Synapo imprint in order to talk to him on his terms.

  When SilverSide finished the transition to blackbody form, the sun was just rising over The Cliff of Time. There was a Ceremyon circling high over the dome in Synapo’s accustomed station. SilverSide wobble-hopped into the air and climbed in a long, slanted rise, gaining the necessary altitude to reach the alien in the course of spanning the distance from The Cliff of Time.

  When SilverSide arrived above the dome, the alien’s hook was pointing aft, so he must be amenable to conversation.

  With his hook also pointing aft, SilverSide quietly glided up beside the alien and said, “Leader Synapo, I need to resolve a matter of...”

  “Sarco,” the alien said. “Synapo will arise late this morning.”

  Talking to Sarco might be better than talking to Synapo. Sarco knew both Neuronius and Synapo and was a leader himself. Who better to judge between the two?

  “I must get a matter of extreme urgency resolved, leader Sarco, a matter of understanding Synapo better so as to compare him with Neuronius — and properly place him in a hierarchy of intelligence relative to Neuronius — who claims to be the most intelligent creature on this planet.”

  “Neuronius? By the Great Petero,” Sarco hissed, emitting a small green flame simultaneously.

  “Neuronius says further that he is a human, and not a Ceremyon, that there are no others of his species on this planet.”

  “I hesitate to term him a Ceremyon myself,” Sarco said, “but unfortunately he is — a paranoid Ceremyon suffering delusions of grandeur. He is certainly not more intelligent than Synapo, take my word for it. He wouldn’t have been ejected from the Cerebron elite if he were.”

  “He has been a member of Ceremyon society then?”

  “Most certainly. Something we all regret now, but did little about at the time, because Neuronius was so insidiously clever. Cleverness, however, does not equate to wisdom and intelligence.”

  “Thank you for your help. You have been of great assistance. I will take my leave now.”

  SilverSide balled and dropped.

  Chapter 21

  REPRIEVE

  THEY HAD POSTED Jacob and Mandelbrot on the balcony of the apartment to watch throughout the night for premature closing of the dome.

  “This reminds me of another night before you came,” Jacob said to Mandelbrot. “I spent it much as we are destined to spend this night, but I did not have your company.”

  “I trust nothing untoward happened that night,” Mandelbrot said.

  “No. But that was the last night Miss Ariel spent under a dome that might imprison her inescapably. She spent the next night in the lorry, sleeping on the back seat. The next morning that first crisis with the aliens was resolved.”

  “Let us hope this crisis will be similarly resolved with a pleasant ending. What are the chances of the wild one, do you think?”

  “As you observed earlier, he is unpredictable,” Jacob said, “but I wished him a great deal of success for Miss Ariel’s sake. It would seem that wish has gone astray. His return is long overdue.”

  “I fear you are right,” Mandelbrot said. “Master Derec observed that the alien leaders returned in midafternoon to their normal stations, though that was not altogether clear to me, since one looks so much like another.”

  They had all waited, sitting in the lorry outside the dome, watching for SilverSide’s return.

  A flock of the black aliens had returned from the direction they took when they flew off with him in their midst. But he was not with them on their return. That did not bode well for the safety of the wild one.

  For Jacob, the night passed much as it had before, except that this time he had the company and the conversation of Mandelbrot: They had a short inconclusive exchange regarding the Laws of Humanics, and then they began a long investigative conversation, delving into the many ramifications of Jacob’s new knowledge of hyperwave communication, the knowledge that there were two types of modulation, not just one: the old discrete type that they were all familiar with, and now this new continuous type, that they had deduced from the aliens’ remarks, and which now explained Derec’s mysterious internal monitor link with the supervisors of the robot cities. The technology for that link was developed by the erratic Dr. Avery, and understood only by him until Miss Ariel had pushed them into drawing parallels and connections with the two types of hyperspace travel: jump teleportation, which was related to discrete hyperwave modulation, and Key teleportation, which was related to continuous hyperwave modulation. In the course of the long night, they drew parallels and derived conclusions that they recorded by joint effort as a long and comprehensive dissertation for the robot city’s archives, an exhaustive treatise that was intended to answer any and all questions on the subject.

  It was a longer night for Ariel and Derec, a night they spent closeted in their bedroom to avoid exposing Wolruf to their disagreement. That friction had now escalated beyond the mild and not unusual interplay for dominance that characterizes the relationship of many pairs of lovers.

  It started immediately after dinner, when Ariel had gone into the bedroom to get away from the rest of them. She was feeling intensely sorry for herself. Why was it so important that she pull off this effort at conciliation and cohabitation with a bunch of aliens, this attempt to save and incorporate into their galactic community a world she didn’t give a dam about?

  Was it merely a matter of pride, an attempt once again to prove her capacity for leadership? Derec had never insisted that his must always be the last word, the final and ultimate judgment on things that affected both of them and that they were both mutually responsible for.

  Yet why did he always make her feel childish when she tried to establish her individuality in that regard? She had as much right to make decisions as he did, and frequently the decisions he made that were right, were right only because her advice kept him from going astray.

  Certainly she knew more about controlling robots than he did. He might know more about what made them tick physically, but she knew far more about how to get the most out of them socially, even out of Mandelbrot, who Derec had created himself. Her upbringing on Aurora, surrounded by robotic servants, had given her experience in that regard, a natural dominance over robots that could never be achieved without that easy confidence one acquires in childhood when waited on hand and foot by robots. Strangely, Derec had not had that common upbringing.

  One can become quite attached to them and even treat them like pets. The intelligence of some robots can make that attachment even stronger than that for an animal pet, particularly if the robot is one of the rare humaniform creations, the kind Aurorans were so leery of. Jacob was certainly more than a pet.

  That thought sneaked up on her and startled her now when it came so consciously to mind. Before Derec had come to Oyster World, she had been feeling guilty about Jacob, about how obviously uncomfortable Derec had been in the company of that handsome robot on Aurora. Now she didn’t feel guilty at all. Derec had more than overcome those odds with the robotic monster he had brought with him from the wolf planet. With all her skill in handling robots, she had no confidence at all that she could reliably control SilverSide.

  And now he had caused an irreparable disruption of the tremendous rapport she had established with the Ceremyons, particularly with Synapo. Sarco had remained a small enigma, a sort of friendly enemy, as best she could judge. She sensed that it was not that he disliked her, but more that he could not treat her as anything but an alien. Well, she felt the same way about him, so that made them even. And now, with SilverSide’s shenanigans, Sarco was indeed the enemy, she felt sure.

  Derec walked into the bedroom at that moment, and that feeling for Sarco was transferred to Derec, except that in Derec’s case the feeling was not nearly so mild. Derec was more an enemy l
over, and one that she could not love now because he had become so much the enemy.

  “Come on out, Ariel,” Derec said. “You’ve got no reason to punish Wolruf by pouting in here. Maybe you’ve got a case against me — and I’m not even sure of that — but you’ve got no reason at all to make her feel bad, too. She’s probably more on your side than mine. After all, she’s the one who bailed out your farm project.”

  Ariel didn’t say anything. She was sitting in the far corner of the room — burrowed into an overstuffed chair that resembled a bean bag more than a piece of furniture — and looking out a corner window, adjacent to the balcony, which overlooked Main Street. She could see Jacob and Mandelbrot standing at the end of the balcony, looking toward the opening in the dome.

  “SilverSide may bring the Ceremyons around,” Derec continued, “but if he doesn’t, we could be just as well off. We’ve probably got no business setting up shop on an inhabited planet. I’ve sort of felt that way ever since I arrived.”

  Ariel still didn’t see any need to respond and even less to respond to his last remark. He did have a minor point when it came to Wolruf. It was her expertise that would have made the robot farms practical, if SilverSide hadn’t screwed up everything

  “And anyway, the robot farm project is a dumb idea,” Derec added. “The city robots are just that, city robots. City planners and city builders. Trying to make farmers out of them is like trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

  Now he was getting personal.

  “You’re forgetting they’ve already done it on a planet called Robot City,” Ariel said. “And you’re such a great engineer you didn’t know your own internal hardware was modulating hyperwave in continuous mode. You even thought your screwy father had invented some altogether new form of communication. Right, genius?!”

  “You’re likely wrong about that. What are the odds that a woman and a bunch of dumb robots are going to come up with anything the least way innovative?”