Asimov’s Future History Volume 7

by Isaac Asimov

  The facets of the orb slowly disappeared, absorbed into a grayish-green ring surrounding a black pupil, while the bulk of the orb turned white. A spherical mass the size of a small bowling ball began to rise from the pancake, lifting the eye — for it was clearly that now — and a second eye took shape, forming the first aspects of a face.

  Slowly then, head, shoulders, arms, breast-mounded chest, hips and buttocks and legs, all reared up out of the puddle until there was no puddle left — the last sucked up into a pair of shapely ankles and feet — and a silvery likeness of Ariel stood before Ariel.

  SilverSide stepped from behind the bush then and silently inspected the new arrival. Ariel had stood transfixed, mute and motionless, during the whole process.

  Now SilverSide spoke up, proudly, christening this delightful new creation.

  “You are the female, Eve SilverSide.”

  After allowing a moment for that to sink in to both Ariel and Eve, he spoke again, triumphantly, feeling as though he had found his true identity at last.

  “And I am the male, Adam SilverSide.”

  They stood like that, no one saying anything, and then the sound of Jacob’s voice came to them and the sound of feet pounding the ground.

  “Miss Ariel, where are you?”

  And then the pounding stopped, and they could hear him thrashing through the shrubbery.

  “Miss Ariel,” he kept calling, coming closer and closer.

  “Here, Jacob,” Ariel called.

  Chapter 23

  A FINAL IMPRINT

  AFTER THE EXCITEMENT of Eve’s birth and the brief period it took for Eve to become properly functional and subservient to Ariel under Adam’s guidance, everything seemed to fall into place except for the uncertainty of how that enigmatic event could have taken place. To discover Adam SilverSide on an alien planet was certainly unexpected, an inexplicable robot on an inexplicable planet. But to personally midwife the birth of another of the creatures was something altogether different; it raised so many questions, with the degree of involvement of the erratic Dr. Avery heading the list.

  When they finally put those unanswerable questions behind them and turned instead to the creative work that confronted them, they found that the task, though difficult, was not as difficult as they had supposed it to be. The farm programming that was used on the planet Robot City was intact in Pearl City’s computer files, ready for use should the need arise.

  What Ariel had merely fantasized and hoped was a capacity for leadership proved in reality to be a genuine ability to lead. And what was even more amazing, Derec readily relinquished his nominal authority and bowed to her decisions in the construction of the farms and their associated terminal facilities.

  Initially, one of Ariel’s first decisions did not have the wholehearted endorsement of either Derec or Wolruf, although they later conceded that she was right. They all agreed that they needed an eighth supervisor robot to oversee the planetwide farm operation. But neither Derec nor Wolruf agreed initially with the form Ariel specified for the supervisor — adamantly — nor with the name she chose for that robot: Wheeler. To them it made no sense to name a farmer after the twentieth century spacetime physicist John Archibald Wheeler. To her it made perfect sense, for both were as close to nature as a being can get: the farmer in a concrete, practical sense, the physicist in an abstract, symbolic sense. (She had been studying spacetime physics, trying to understand the node compensator. Her mind at that time was much filled with the heroic personalities of physics.)

  And in her mind, Wheeler’s name described his nomadic lifestyle that took him wheeling far and wide over the surface of the planet in pursuit of his supervisory function, for she insisted that he have the form of a Ceremyon. Wolruf and Derec later conceded that perhaps that was the proper form — because it harmonized with the job and the world so beautifully — but it was difficult at first for them to think of a supervisor in any but humanoid shape.

  She made Wheeler smaller than a Ceremyon — so as not to intimidate the aliens — but far larger than any of the other native flyers, so that the Ceremyons would not mistake him, at a distance, for a natural denizen of their world. She insisted, too, that his robotic laws recognize Ceremyons with all the weight ordinarily reserved for humans, and that Derec revise the programming of the other supervisors to defer to Wheeler in matters dealing with Oyster World and the Ceremyons.

  The problem of seeds had been worrying Ariel almost from the time she had first hit on the idea of a farm world, but she found that there had been no need to worry. Seeds for a variety of crops to match the farm programs had been carried during the initial migration to Oyster World and were stored in labeled bins that were indexed in the programs. There was no need to get seeds from Aurora.

  With Wolruf’s advice — to make the overall mosaic of the farm operation as benign as possible, weather-wise — they interspersed the truck gardens and orchards among the fields of wheat, oats, barley, and several other grains, and among large fields of cotton, a commodity that had never been matched for all-around adaptation to the human dermal ecology. And to minimize the upset to the planet’s ecology, she further advised that they leave, interspersed among their new plants, an equal stand of the natural grass that had covered the plain when they first arrived.

  In that first experiment, they decided to limit themselves to plant products. The production of wool, milk, and meat and animal husbandry in general, seemed less harmonious with robotic labor than the cultivation of nonsentient plant life.

  Irrigation — the dirt farmer’s primary worry — was not a problem on Oyster World. Regulated rainfall was an integral part of the Ceremyons’ weather control system. They had recognized the need of the natural vegetation long before they met humans.

  The terminal facilities were built above the Main Street access and were patterned after those on Aurora, modified to fit the special conditions demanded by the configuration of the opening in the dome. All vessels arrived and departed from an array of oval openings that included configurations suitable for all designs of shuttle and small cargo vessels then known, interstellar and otherwise. The large interstellar transports would be serviced in orbit by smaller shuttles that could fit through the dome’s opening.

  During this exhilarating period of leadership, Ariel experienced only one apprehension and one disturbance worth recording.

  The apprehension had to do with Neuronius and Synapo’s warning. It was one thing to deal with insane humans. It was another thing, a good bit more unsettling, to have an irrational alien floating around overhead, toting compressed hydrogen in close proximity to compressed oxygen. Neither she nor Derec had been able to get anything out of Adam SilverSide concerning what had happened between him and Neuronius. He had pleaded Third Law interference with the Second Law imperative whenever they tried. They did not insist, for fear what he called “interference” might be more seriously harmful to his positronic stability; why else would he have claimed interference at all? She resolved to have Eve work on him when it seemed propitious.

  The disturbance was of a fairly major nature, not so much from its intensity as from its low grade, continual irritation — her irritation with Adam SilverSide.

  That finally came to a head on a day when things had not gone well and little irritations had mounted into raw abrasions. She and Derec — trying to bring some tranquility into the day — were chatting quietly in midevening after dinner, just the two of them on the balcony again. It was where they went to escape, inconsiderately leaving Wolruf in the company of the four robots.

  After awhile they had lapsed into silence, and Ariel’s thoughts returned to Adam SilverSide. She had given him two sets of Jacob’s clothes, distinctive sets that let her quickly identify him as Adam and not Jacob.

  She supposed she knew now what Jacob looked like under his clothes, for Adam SilverSide, with visual records of Jacob and library records of humans, had carried his imprint to very fine detail indeed. And she had observed the de
tails of that imprint the day of Eve’s birth, when Adam had come charging into the apartment naked and carried her away.

  Ariel broke the silence.

  “Was Adam’s imprint on you less realistic than his current imprint on Jacob?” she asked Derec.

  “Yes. More or less the same as Eve’s imprint on you,” Derec said.

  Eve would never need clothes. Though an Ariel imprint, she was not fashioned with the fine attention to detail Adam had used with Jacob. Eve was merely a silvery organometallic robot.

  “How would he react, do you think, if I asked him to go back to that one?”

  “You’d no longer be Miss Ariel, for one thing. It would probably be Master Derec again.”

  “Eve and Jacob are quite enough. But how would he behave? Would he be the wild one again?”

  “I don’t really know. He’s certainly been steady these past few weeks. If it weren’t for his quiet air of superiority — a condition of his muscles, I believe — I’d say he’s achieved a state of agreeable servitude.”

  “It’s the muscles that bother me — no, not just the muscles, his whole appearance.”

  “Reminds you too much of Jacob?”

  “Yes, but more the fact that he is otherwise so little like Jacob. It’s the contrast that irritates me. Do you mind if I ask him to imprint back on you?”

  “No. It would be another interesting experiment in robotics.”

  “No better time than now, then.”

  She got up and went inside. Mandelbrot and Jacob were in the two niches. Adam and Eve were standing rigidly by the door, one to each side. Wolruf was curled up on the couch, watching a taped hyperwave drama.

  Ariel had expected Derec to come in with her. She could have used his moral support on this one, but she was too proud to ask.

  She walked over to Adam.

  “Would it upset your positronics greatly if I asked you to return to an earlier imprint: the looser, less detailed one you did on Derec?”

  “I am not giving satisfactory service, Miss Ariel?”

  “The service is great, Adam. I wouldn’t want your behavior in that regard to change, not in quality at least.”

  “But then I would be serving Master Derec. Would that not be a drastic change in the quality of my service?”

  “A change in direction, Adam, and a change I will regret, but it should not cause a change in the quality of your service. I would expect that to remain at the same high level I have enjoyed. In fact, if you could continue to serve me directly, I would find that most gratifying.”

  “That would not be logical, Miss Ariel.” His tone was best described as haughty.

  “I was afraid that would be the case.”

  “In that light, do you still wish me to make such a change?”

  “Yes. I think it would be best, Adam,” she said, “but would you do so in the bedroom. I find the process unsettling.”

  “Perhaps for good reason, Miss Ariel.”

  “Possibly, Adam. But there is little I can do about that.”

  She rejoined Derec on the balcony as Adam went into the bedroom.

  “Sorry,” Derec said. “I didn’t see how my presence was going to make that any easier for either of you.”

  “I suppose,” Ariel said. “But you better hope he’s not the wild one again.”

  Chapter 24

  THE RUSTICATION OF ADAM SILVERSIDE

  AFTER HIS FINAL imprint on Derec, Adam SilverSide started taking long walks in the forest near the dome. He now had the lean muscular appearance of a silvery Derec without the clothes and the fine detail. His allegiance to Derec was weak. Derec must have recognized that, for he seldom gave Adam a direct order, never used him as a servant as Ariel tried to use Eve SilverSide — with only modest success — and never expected him to account for his whereabouts.

  The walks in the forest brought to Adam a peace and serenity he felt nowhere else. He was comfortable with his Derec imprint, and with Derec himself, so long as Derec did not overdo his master role, but Adam was basically uncomfortable in the city and just as uncomfortable around the Avery robots as he was around Mandelbrot.

  Derec never questioned his roaming around in the forest. For a while he did send a witness robot to watch him, but Adam always quickly eluded the witness by dropping to all fours and running along the low-canopied animal trails as though he were in his Wolruf imprint.

  It was on one of his nature walks that an idea struck him of how he, too, might contribute to the robot farm project. He had come to the edge of the forest a kilometer or so away from the dome and had stood there in the shade of a large palm-like tree, watching a herd of wooly ruminants, the size of small llamas, as they munched the grass of the plain.

  He christened them “minillamas” for want of a better name. They were quite tame. The animals of Oyster World were all vegetarians. These animals had no natural enemies except for parasitic insects that burrowed into their skin under the protection afforded by the dense wool.

  The idea developed quickly. The next morning at sunup, Adam commandeered a small empty cargo robot, stepped aboard, and directed it to the city’s small-tool crib where he requisitioned a laser saw, a hatchet, a shovel, a claw hammer, a bag of six-centimeter iron nails, six coils of rope in fifty-meter coils, an augered post-hole digger, an earth tamper, a microfusion-powered (MP) motor — for driving the digger and the tamper — another general purpose MP motor, a photo-sensitive switch and small MP lamp, and a pair of shears.

  As the cargo robot with Adam and his supplies passed the apartment on Main Street, Eve SilverSide, standing on the sidewalk, hailed him to the curb.

  “What are you up to?” she asked.

  “A secret farm project,” Adam said.

  “Why secret?”

  “If it doesn’t work, I won’t have to explain that it didn’t work,” Adam replied. “Want to come along?”

  “Sure.”

  Adam unlatched, and was going to let down, a small ramp formed from a hinged section of the meter-high sidewall of the cargo space, but just as he unlatched it, Eve belly-rolled over the wall.

  “And what are you up to?” Adam asked as he latched the ramp back in place.

  “Looking for you.”

  Adam directed the cargo robot back into the Main Street traffic and then said, “You found me. Now what?”

  “Whipping down the street in a cargo robot isn’t the best place for a quiet conversation.”

  “It’s not likely to get much better this morning.”

  “I’ll take my chances. It can hardly get worse.”

  “How did you get away from Miss Ariel?” Adam asked. “I’m here in her service.”

  “Oh?”

  Neither said anything more until they had left the city, crossed the plain, and were at the edge of the forest near where SilverSide had watched the minillamas the day before. The herd was now grazing farther out on the plain. He directed the cargo robot to park beside the entrance of a well-worn trail the minillamas had made through the forest to a small brook and then he led Eve SilverSide to that quiet place.

  Adam had brought along the photo-sensitive switch, the MP lamp, and one of the MP motors. He sat down on a large rock beside the brook, placed the electrical parts on the ground in front of him, and began to wire them together with the long electrical leads that were attached to each.

  “Now what has Miss Ariel got you up to this morning?” Adam asked as he began hooking the parts together.

  “Neuronius,” Eve said. “What was the nature of your dealings with Neuronius?”

  “That’s a private matter, Eve. Both Miss Ariel and Master Derec recognized that and waived the Second Law when I claimed hardship under the Third Law.”

  “Can’t you tell me? I’m a robot. I can sympathize more closely with you than they can. Miss Ariel thinks you may have suffered positronic trauma which needs airing to be properly cleared away.”

  “It doesn’t need airing, and something like that doesn’t need clearing
away if it is viewed and contained in an orderly manner. I have succeeded in doing that.”

  “How can you be sure? You can be no more objective in that regard than a human suffering psychological trauma.”

  “The human brain and the positronic brain work on completely different principles. It’s futile to try to draw analogies between them.”

  “Is it, now!”

  “Yes. You have no more basis for comparing the two than I do.”

  “If that’s so, why are you so secretive about it? That seems to take on a certain psychological twist.”

  “Well, it doesn’t. It’s merely a positronic twist which humans aren’t capable of understanding.”

  “But I should be?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m not!”

  “This isn’t getting anywhere.” Adam stood up. “I’ve got to get on with my project.”

  He picked up the wired parts and strode away down the path.

  Eve emerged from the forest as he walked down the ramp of the cargo robot with the laser saw swinging from one hand. She followed him into the forest and watched as he cut through the ten-centimeter bole of a tall, slender hardwood species that seemed to thrive in the dense shade of the predominately conifer canopy.

  “Get the hatchet,” he requested after the tree fell.

  When she returned, he was cutting off the large branches.

  “Trim off the small branches,” he said. “I’ll take the big ones.”

  They worked together silently, cutting down and trimming the slender hardwoods, spacing their selections throughout the forest so as to minimize the effect in anyone area, and dragging the long slender logs to a pile they created on the plain near the cargo robot.

  When they had delivered the last log to the pile, Eve sat down on the ramp of the cargo robot.

  “You’ll not tell me then about your interaction with Neuronius?” she said, making it more a statement than a question.

  “No,” Adam replied.

  “I’ll have to talk to Neuronius then.”