Asimov’s Future History Volume 7

by Isaac Asimov

  “Yes, sir. I will help.”

  “Thank you. Let’s go.”

  After Derec had taken a few steps, Bogie called to him, “What about us, Master Derec? What should we do?”

  Derec resisted an offensive answer and said instead, “Do you have anything to do at this moment?”

  The Watchful Eye had given the two robots no further orders, so Bogie could truthfully say, “No.”

  “Well, then, I guess the two of you have danced and wisecracked yourselves right into my heart. Why don’t you tag along? That is, come with us.”

  “I know what ‘tag along’ means,” Bogie said, and Derec wondered if there wasn’t a suggestion of huffiness in the robot’s reply.

  Chapter 12

  FRUSTRATIONS

  AVERY ITCHED TO grab one of the tiny creatures, whom Ariel was now calling “the dancers,” and take it apart under a microscopic scanner with a selection of the fine surgical instruments available in the medical facility. However, since Ariel forbade that any harm should come to the dancers, the dissection would be a violation of Second Law, and he must not violate Second Law. She still claimed it would also be a violation of First Law because of the essential humanity of the dancers, but he rejected that preposterous idea out of hand.

  (Sometimes, in the back of his mind, he almost remembered he was really human and not subject to Ariel’s orders. At those moments his hands automatically reached toward the nearest dancer, and his fingers trembled.)

  On her part Ariel felt as if she were swimming from one whirlpool to another. Each whirlpool was a different task, a different goal. At the center of one was Avery, who was acting crazier by the minute. The dancers (occupying her dreams as well as her daily routine) swirled in the middle of another. The third contained Adam and Eve, who, although themselves quite fascinated by the dancers, were still unpredictable and often disobedient. The previous day she had caught them trying to teach the dancers acrobatics. Eve picked up one, a male, and, keeping him firmly but gently between her fingers, tried to show him how to execute a series of midair flips. The little creature was obviously frightened, even though he did not struggle. The dancers, Avery suggested, treated their captors as gods and cooperated with any foolish things a god might try, no matter how dangerous.

  It seemed that the Silversides would do anything to sidestep an order from Ariel. They had apparently never resolved the dilemma of whether or not Derec and Ariel were humans or if they were the proper kinds of humans, those for whom their mysterious and vague programming had been set. They knew they were supposed to serve humans and imprint themselves upon them, but had been given no guidelines about what a human was and how to recognize one. They were frequently puzzled by the behavior of Derec and Ariel (and, for that matter, the insanely contradictory actions of Avery), and had trouble convincing themselves to accept these particular humans as representative of the highest order of being in the universe.

  Earlier in his existence, Adam had believed the blackbodies to be more intelligent than the humans he had encountered up to that time, and Eve had accepted the word of a demented blackbody that it was the only human in the galaxy. Their mistakes were just as responsible for making them cautious as were their doubts about Derec, Avery, and Ariel.

  In a way, they were searching for some higher kind of human, dismissing Derec and Ariel as, like the dancers, some primitive and unworthy form of the species, not worthy of their loyalty and obedience. As a result, sometimes they responded like any robots to the requirements of the Laws of Robotics, but at other times, questioned every word of an order, or analyzed a First Law situation so interminably that Ariel or Derec would have died before the Silversides had stopped them from coming to harm. And sometimes they were just plain ornery, rejecting orders without rhyme or reason, as if they just meant to taunt her.

  Ariel had decided to treat them as if they were human and subject to human weaknesses. If they were being obedient, she gave them orders. If they were not, she ignored them.

  There was enough to do without pampering them.

  Today Adam and Eve were relatively docile. Eve, especially, tended to be cooperative when Ariel was working with the dancers. She would stand beside the desk and study them with the same intensity that Ariel showed (and often looking exactly like her, a state that Ariel found unnerving). When the dancers needed to be fed, Eve even volunteered to do it. She would take a dancer and hold it in her hand, then put some food on the fingers of her other hand while each dancer picked the crumbs off her fingertip and ate them with evident enjoyment. The dancers always ate in a specific order, the leader first, an urge for order that Ariel believed proved their essential humanity.

  She had worked out a proper diet for the dancers through the use of the chemical food processor, trying out various dishes until she found some they would accept. She was glad that Derec had chosen to fix the foodmaking machines early in his repairing of the city’s systems. It had come second, right after getting the Personals operative again.

  “Can we make them play the game again?” Eve asked Ariel, after the last dancer had taken the last crumb from her fingertip.

  “You bet. It represents about all the progress I’ve made with them.”

  Avery, who had been sulking in a corner (guarded by Wolruf because he had already made four tries to escape), came forward to speak to Ariel’s back.

  “Of course you’ve made no progress. There’s so little to be made. If you would only let me at them...”

  “Swallow the words, Ozymandias. I won’t permit you to murder these —”

  “But it wouldn’t be murder. They are no more than toys. They are not even miniature Frankenstein monsters or golems; they are merely mechanical devices. Mistress Ariel, way back in Earth history there were many manmade contraptions that fooled others into believing they were actual living beings or even miracles. There was a mechanical duck that would not only appear to eat and quack but would even excrete materials from its nether end. There was a chess-playing robot that convincingly won games from masters. A small figure with a quill pen that could laboriously but correctly write a letter; a companion piece that could draw kings and ships. There were figures whose movements were lifelike, who even appeared to breathe. Milkmaids swinging pails and mountaineers in alpenstock hats emerged from clocks, appearing very real. In more sophisticated times, people found the early robots, machines that couldn’t really do very much, quite amazing and lifelike. So you see, Ariel, your desktop figures are just extensions of a long tradition. They are partially grown from cells, and partially controlled by technological means, but they are not the small-scale humans you are so protective of.”

  Ariel sighed. She had heard variations of this diatribe so often since they’d captured Avery that she wanted to wrap her hands around the doctor’s throat and strangle him, or at least remove his tongue so that she would not have to hear his whining maniacal voice again. Fortunately, as long as there were robots around, First Law prevented her from taking such drastic measures. That was why she could daydream about them without guilt. Come to think of it, she said to herself, she could not rely on either Eve or Adam to come to Avery’s rescue. If they were not in the mood for First Law that day, they might be willing to be a detached and curious audience to an actual act of murder.

  Maybe strangling Avery wasn’t such a bad idea.

  “Do you have anything constructive to offer, Ozymandias?”

  “Wasn’t that constructive?”

  “Not by a long shot. You know what really frosts me? That you consider yourself a robot and yet appear to hold robots in such low esteem.”

  He shook his head vigorously. “On the contrary, Mistress Ariel. Once we establish that these people are indeed manmade constructs, I will revere them as I revere all robots, even the smallest function-robots that dust rooms and pick up trash. The robot is the highest order of existence, and I am proud to be one.”

  She couldn’t dope Avery out any more. Sometimes he would talk norma
lly — or at least in what was a normal fashion for a man whose eccentricity was legend — and then he’d switch over to this robot identity, praising his own efficiency or going on endlessly about the virtues of his positronic brain. Derec continued to urge her to deal with the man, as if compassion and intelligent conversation with him would bring about a cure. It was simply too large an order. Avery’s madness was beyond anything her homegrown sense of psychology could cope with.

  Still, she had to try. She had promised.

  While Avery and Ariel spoke, Eve moved closer to the desk. She wanted to watch the dancers play the game, which could not take place until Ariel returned her attention to them.

  Or must she wait for Ariel? Indeed, why wait for her?

  She placed her hand in the middle of the desk, resting it on its side, thumb up. The dancers immediately responded to the signal and began forming teams on either side of Eve’s hand. When they were ready, Eve raised her hand and dropped a tiny rolled up piece of paper onto the middle of the desktop. The dancers immediately began scrambling toward it. One of them, the chubby one that Avery had tried to take, reached it first. He picked it up and began to run with it, but the opposing team quickly assembled itself. A female sprang in front of the male carrying the paper and gestured others to join her. In an instant, it seemed, they had surrounded the male. They were not allowed to touch each other during the game, except by accident. That had been one of Ariel’s early rules, rules that she had communicated to the dancers through the use of a series of hand signs she had developed in her study of them. Once the player was surrounded, he must give up the paper, which he did. The new possessors began tossing the paper between them, while the other team, staying close together, watched, waiting for the next move, looking for their chance to surround the player carrying the paper.

  Suddenly one of the females, a gaunt, thin one who had grown gaunter and thinner since the Silversides had brought the group to the medical facility, started to rush forward with the paper tucked under her arm. The other team started to go into a formation that could easily close itself around her, but she suddenly turned and flipped the paper back to a male who was running behind her. He quickly hurled it to another male standing at the edge of the desktop. This one ran in a straight line, along the desk edge, to the other side of the desk. Nobody could catch him.

  When he reached the other side, he abruptly sat down, set the paper in front of him, and did a half-bow to it. The last act established the authenticity of the score, a procedure that Ariel (who had adapted the game from an ancient Auroran sport) had not originally taught them. It seemed they were such slaves to ritual that they had to perform some rite when they succeeded at scoring.

  The male stood up and left the piece of paper where he had deposited it, a signal for Eve to pick it up and again drop it in the center after the teams had re-formed. She was about to let it go, when Ariel hollered at her harshly, “Eve! I did not give you permission to start the game!”

  Eve, holding the paper over the anxiously awaiting dancers, looked up. “I wanted to start it. Since you were speaking with Ozymandias, I decided to —”

  “It’s not up to you to decide. You haven’t learned yet. You are the robot, I am the human. You wait for my orders.”

  “We are not sure that is correct.”

  Ariel threw up her hands in despair. She did not need this kind of robotic sophistry right this minute. Staring down at the desktop, she said, “Okay, who’s ahead?”

  Ariel didn’t have the patent on despairing gestures. In another part of the city, Derec was clenching his fists and resisting the impulse to slam them down on the nearest available surface.

  “Another dysfunctional session, sir?” Mandelbrot said. Derec almost laughed. A dysfunctional session? Frost, an absolute failure.

  “It seems that our computer does not yet want to activate full access, Mandelbrot. This just doesn’t make sense. It’s like the computer is playing with me, letting me do some things, blocking me from others.”

  “Do not the computers obey the Laws of Robotics, too?”

  Derec shrugged. “They’re supposed to. Unless someone is controlling them from some outside source, overriding my requests as I make them.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “I believe so. There is someone in the city somewhere, the same individual that the robots are blocked from telling me about, and he or she or it’s the boss right now. There’s something so, I don’t know, inhuman about our intruder’s actions that I suspect an alien, one as intelligent as the blackbodies and as mean as Aranimas.”

  Aranimas had been the alien who, before Derec came to Robot City, had trapped him on his ship and tried to make a slave out of him. The most fortunate aspects of that terrible experience were that he had met Ariel and Wolruf and constructed the wonderfully loyal Mandelbrot out of spare parts.

  With an expansive hand gesture that clearly dismissed the computer, Derec stood up and began pacing the room. “Mandelbrot, I should be in charge, but the he or she or it is not allowing it. This individual doles out some information through the computer — how to activate the devices for food, Personals, the slidewalk, heat and light — but only that data that we require in order to survive. When it comes to completely activating the computer, getting the services of the city running again, and putting the robots back in their proper jobs, it keeps blocking me from accomplishing anything. Obviously it is not out to destroy us, not at present anyway. But he, she, or it is definitely hiding something from us. Its identity, of course, but maybe something more. Maybe there’s something about its identity that we should not know. Or about its future plans.”

  “What about the chemfets?” Mandelbrot asked. “In the past they have always provided the right information about the city.”

  “That’s what’s really crazy, Mandelbrot. The chemfets aren’t any more functional than the city is now. Oh, I get a sensation or two about our mysterious visitor now and then, but no real clue about who or what he, she, or it is. And I get this vague feeling that there’s some kind of a solution, but it remains just outside my reach. At any rate, the chemfets are messed up, just like Robot City. There are times when I can hardly detect them. And I hate that more than I can tell you.”

  He stretched his arms, as if trying to stir up the chemfets. “You know,” he continued, “I used to think the chemfets were a hellish thing. I thought they were controlling me, racing up and down my bloodstream, making me ill. Now that they’ve reached maturity and I’ve integrated myself with them, I can’t cope with them not working like this. I want to activate them desperately, and I can’t. It’s like me and the city. I want to get Robot City going again. I have to. Yet I’m so darn stymied. There’s got to be a way, Mandelbrot, and I’m going to find it.”

  The Watchful Eye eavesdropped on Derec with some satisfaction. Now, back to its natural shape but completely hidden by layers of the mosslike substance it had strewn over the computer, it considered its next moves.

  The strange word that Derec had used, stymied, seemed to apply to the Watchful Eye’s circumstances also. As Ariel and Avery continued their research on Series C, Batch 21, it did not feel safe in reactivating the robots who had done the original lab work that led to the creation of the various batches. It had convinced those robots that more research was needed on the Laws of Humanics, and, since there were no humans in the city, they would have to create their own. Of course the Watchful Eye knew, as Avery had perceived, that their little models were not full-fledged human beings, that they were just robotically activated biological material formed into human shapes. It could have made them into any shape, even made them look like itself, but it chose to create their appearance from pictures it called up from a computer file of historical figures.

  Because the intruders had to occupy so much of its time, the Watchful Eye could conduct none of its other experiments, either. It had been about to begin a stress-test to see how the iron/plastic alloy that the city was made of could
hold up under many different circumstances. It had intended to fully explore the many facets of Robot City and then, when finished, restructure and refashion it to suit its needs.

  It was concerned with the Laws of Humanics because it wanted to find out just what a human was. Something just beneath the level of its consciousness compelled it to discover humans and emulate them. There were times when it hoped that Derec and Ariel, or Adam and Eve, would finally prove to be the real humans, so that the matter would be settled and it could go on to its future, whatever its future was meant to be. It was certain it had a destiny that would eventually be revealed.

  More than anything else, however, the Watchful Eye missed the freedom to work on the biggest question it faced: who or what it was. It had to be something, fit some category of existence. For it did exist.

  It could be human, although — if the intruders were humans (and which ones? Derec and Ariel? Adam and Eve? The dreadful Avery?) — it did not physically resemble them. But then, in its natural state, or at least the state it had been in when it came to awareness, it had resembled nothing more than a blob of matter. Later it had discovered that it had the ability to change its shape. Right now it could change itself into the shape of a human, but would it be human? Did these humans start out in the same puttylike shape it had? Had they originally hidden in their havens until they had chosen what they must look like?

  It wondered if it could be some kind of animal. There did not appear to be any kind of animal native to Robot City, so it could only judge that subject from information extracted from computer files. The files only confused it further, since it felt no link with any animal in any picture it called up. In addition, it noted that many of the so-called animals resembled the so-called humans in many respects. Were they also kinds of humans?