Asimov’s Future History Volume 7

by Isaac Asimov

It could be a robot, but it resisted that idea most. It had studied the robots and found them to be too subservient, too easily programmed. Admirable pieces of construction though they were, they simply did not seem complex enough for the Watchful Eye to belong to their class of being. It could not convince itself that there were any resemblances between a robot and it. If anything, it felt more like a computer than a robot. But it had a sentient life that the Robot City computer did not. So it had concluded it could not be a computer, either.

  What was it?

  It intended to find out soon.

  Adam Silverside wandered through the streets of Robot City, not knowing where he was going, not knowing why he had left the medical facility. He had been watching Eve concentrate so completely on Ariel and the dancers that he had come to the conclusion that he was useless to their experiments. Sometimes Ariel and Eve conversed so intently on the behavior of the dancers that it seemed they were unaware of his presence in the room.

  It was not that Adam felt hurt, or even annoyed, at the way he had been ignored. A robot does not feel the pangs of rejection that trouble humans in such matters. A robot would, under normal conditions, not feel left out or even ignored. After all, a robot can even stand alone without anything happening for a long, long time.

  What Adam perceived essentially, and in a logical way, was that he served no purpose in their work. It seemed to him that since Robot City was in crisis and Derec and Ariel were in turmoil about how to solve their respective problems, there should be something he could do. It would be a terribly inefficient use of his time and abilities for him to stay where he was not needed. Their maker, whoever he or she was, had evidently planned them to be special. They were compelled to serve and be useful through the direct or implicit order of humans, a Second Law imperative.

  He came to the lot where they had discovered the first group of dancers. It was completely empty now, with no traces left of its former inhabitants. That was, in itself, another anomaly. Who had taken away all traces of their lives, even including the remains of the campfire around which they had danced? Who had smoothed over the ground so that even the graves could not be detected? Some of the city’s robots were, it seemed, functional.

  He came to a parkland, where precisely sculptured bushes were placed at even distances along a smoothly raked path. There were no footsteps on the path, and no people to sit in the benches under the park’s towering trees. It seemed anomalous to Adam that a park like this, and several other Robot City areas, were so obviously built for human habitation, and there had been as yet so few humans upon the planet. The city itself seemed useless, as useless as he now believed himself to be.

  He came to an area where buildings stretched in a long semicircle around a nonworking fountain. Shops with blank signs were neatly arrayed along the street level of the semicircle.

  The few robots walking through the streets were intent on their own goals. None stopped at any of the buildings. (Adam wondered why he felt no sense of belonging when he saw these robots. How could he be a robot and be so separated from other robots?) There were no goods in any of the shops, no shoppers to select items in the first place. Like the park, another Robot City anomaly.

  Shops and parks with definite purposes and no way to fulfill them. The problem was similar to his own, he thought. He had not only an ability to imprint upon living creatures, but to become astonishingly like them, adopting the patterns and characteristics of their lives as well as their physical appearance. He could even lead them, as he had with the kin. Was this to be his life or, if not life, the parameters of his existence within the universe? He felt compelled to change his shape into that of another; he needed to keep doing it until his dilemma of interpreting what a human was had reached a conclusion. There was no purpose for him in Robot City, no one on whom to imprint. (He did not realize that this frustrating state had been planned by Derec and Wolruf, and they in turn did not know what an astonishing success the plan had been, at least in Adam’s case. It would not have occurred to Adam that he was being tamed. If it had, he would have resisted it firmly.)

  As he had on the blackbodies’ planet, he changed into the kin shape and began to run down the streets of Robot City; then he tried the blackbody shape and clumsily flapped his wings, knocking them against the walls of buildings; then he was a function-robot, picking up debris and depositing it in a sewer grating; then he took on Derec’s shape; then Ariel’s; then Avery’s.

  But all the transformations did not satisfy him. He had done them all before.

  He needed a new creature to imprint on.

  He changed back to kin shape so that he could howl at the stars spread in the sky over the city.

  Then he was Derec again, walking the streets back to the medical facility, his mission in the city unfulfilled. He realized that, in a way, he was acting like the men in some legends he had read in computer files, the kind of legend where men shook their fists at the sky and castigated the universe.

  He found the image odd. He could shake his fist at the sky, but, sadly perhaps, he could not really feel the emotion that inspired the gesture. The human emotion behind the gesture.

  Chapter 13

  AVERY AND THE SILVERSIDES

  ARIEL AWOKE WITH a start. She hadn’t realized she’d been asleep, must have dozed off with her head on the back of the cushioned chair she’d drawn up beside the desk.

  It was certainly disconcerting to come to consciousness and look down on about a half-dozen of the dancers staring up at you, while the rest played at some game that Ariel had not yet interpreted. (They showed each other their hands, palms up or down, any number of fingers extended, sometimes no fingers extended, sometimes a fist.) There was a questioning look on their faces, as if they’d been curious about why their god seemed to need sleep every once in a while. The dancers themselves never seemed to sleep. Ariel had watched them and delegated the Silversides to observe them, but no sleep had ever been detected. She sometimes wondered what it would be like to be awake for one’s entire life. Would you get a lot done or go mad from being conscious without respite?

  As she always did when she hadn’t been studying the dancers for some time, she counted them. There were still fourteen of them. Good. Avery, then, had not somehow eluded Wolruf’s vigilance and, while she was asleep, sneaked to the desk to abduct one of the tiny creatures.

  She glanced toward the other side of the room, where Avery slouched in a chair, apparently dozing himself. (When he was Ozymandias, he insisted that he never slept.) Wolruf sat on the floor, keeping an eye on the doctor while thumbing through a picture book about Auroran art that Ariel had found in the small library attached to the medical facility. She was studying it for practice in reading and to learn about human customs. In the time that Ariel had known her, Wolruf’s ability to read standard had improved significantly, as had her command of the language. The task of guarding Avery had given her free time to add to her education in the ways of humans and robots.

  Ariel couldn’t think of what to do next with the dancers. She’d been studying their customs for several days, and there didn’t seem to be much more to learn. She had tried to communicate with them, but, except for the hand gestures needed either to get their attention or initiate games, most of her attempts had been unsuccessful.

  All the dancers had been examined by a diagnostic scanner, the only piece of equipment in the medical facility that appeared to work successfully. She was not sure why. However, since the only systems Derec had been able to (or been allowed to) restore tended to be life-sustaining, she wondered if the scanner worked because it might be needed in an emergency. Derec was right about the presence in the city, she was sure of it. And that presence was doling out favors, stingily but with some sense. The scanner had revealed nothing new about the dancers. As Avery told her, they were anatomically consistent with full-sized humans. If there was robotic circuitry, the scanner didn’t detect it.

  She missed Derec so. They had not really been together
since that interlude at the Compass Tower. They checked in with each other every once in a while, but at those times he was detached, more concerned with reviving the city than with reviving their passion. And she couldn’t pin all the blame in that arena of life solely upon him. After all, as Derec had pointed out, her attention was just as fiercely fixed on the dancers, Avery, and the Silversides.

  The two of them made a great pair, workaholics without much time for each other. But she did long for a moment alone with him, just a brief time of being held by him, kissing him, feeling his gentle touches upon her back.

  Well, there was no time for romance now. Thing to do, she thought, is get the jobs done, restore equilibrium, then grab each other and race to the nearest dark place.

  She raised her arms, trying to stretch weariness out of them. As always, the dancers were interested in her movement. Whatever she did, they watched her do it with absolute fascination. This time they imitated her, making ritualistic, slow stretching motions that duplicated her gestures. How, she wondered, could Avery keep saying that they were not living beings? With such grace, such skill, they could be nothing less than human.

  Her mouth felt dry, and she was sure that her breath could cause an air-purification system to malfunction. There was the beginning of a headache at the back of her eyes. She needed to use the Personal.

  “Eve?”

  “Yes, Mistress Ariel.”

  “Time.”

  The word was all she needed to bring Eve to the desk to take over from her. Ariel stood up.

  “Have you conceived a new game?” she asked Eve.

  “Yes.”

  “Of course. I should have known. Show it to me when I get back.”

  When Ariel had left, Eve picked up one of the dancers, a short (for a dancer) stocky female. The female did not resist in any way (none of the dancers did, anymore) and merely sat calmly in Eve’s palm.

  “Adam?” Eve called.

  Adam, newly returned from his wanderings, stepped out of a dark corner of the room from which he had been watching her.

  “Yes, Eve.”

  “There seems to be something wrong with the dancers, this one and all of them.”

  “I have not seen it yet.”

  “You have to examine their faces. This one was young, like Ariel, when we first brought them here. Now look.”

  Adam bent down toward the stocky female in Eve’s hand. He hadn’t studied the dancers with the same meticulousness that Eve had and wasn’t certain what she’d meant. Nevertheless, at least he was being asked to do something.

  “What do you see, Adam?”

  “One of the dancers, female category.”

  “Besides that.”

  “Her hair. It was once dark-colored and now it is mostly gray. Her face. Once it was unlined, now there are many lines in it. Her mouth. Once it was —”

  “That is enough, Adam. It is what I see, too. Not only in this one, but in all of them. They have been here for four days, and none of them is young any more. Look at that one.”

  Adam looked where she pointed. A male dancer, one of the game players, had left the group and was sitting alone, his knees pulled up, his arms around his knees. His face was old, pitted, sallow.

  “He appears to be unwell,” Adam commented.

  “I wonder what it means. Are they changing their shapes like we do?”

  “Perhaps, but I do not think so.”

  “They are going to die,” Avery said, sitting up in his chair. His movement forced Wolruf to push her book aside and tense her body.

  Avery stood up and approached the desk. “I’m not sure why they have to die. I suspect that whoever created them was at least partly interested in human life cycles. Otherwise he could have made them as permanent as robots. That is, after all, one of the advantages we robots have. Their creator wanted them to die, or he messed up, I’m not certain which. When they do go, I hope to find out by examining them.”

  “Ariel said ‘u can’t touch them,” Wolruf cautioned.

  “Well, she must at least let me examine a corpse or two.”

  “No!” Eve said suddenly, unsure of why she had spoken out at all.

  The doctor’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “You don’t wish me to, Eve?”

  “That is true.”

  “How curious. Are you a robot with compassion then?”

  “I do not know what you mean.”

  “If you are, and I get a shot at you, we’ll have to program it right out. I don’t know sometimes why things happen as they do in Robot City. First we get robots with artistic leanings (another trait I had to get rid of) and now compassionate robots. Is that a tear in your eye, Eve, or just a trick of the light? Don’t respond, I was only joking.”

  Ariel returned from the Personal in time to hear the last of Avery’s comments. She was about to speak, to tell Avery to zip up his mouth, when she noticed what was happening to Adam.

  Adam stood at the side of the desk, just slightly behind Avery. He was staring at the doctor and at the same time undergoing a transformation, changing shape. It was fascinating to watch. First his body seemed to shrink as he lost a few inches of height. (Was he trying to become a dancer? she wondered. Could that be possible? Wouldn’t his mass have to be concentrated impossibly for him to change to that size?) Then the shrinking stopped, and Adam’s shorter body began to expand outward, making him look rounder. His arms became shorter and hung differently, in a sort of apelike way. Then his face, which had been almost an exact replica of Derec’s, began to undulate slightly, with his chin puffing out and his forehead narrowing, his chin coming to a point, then reshaping itself to a rounder contour. At the top of his head, his metallic version of Derec’s sandy hair lightened to white and got longer, messier. But it was not until the next change that Ariel realized what was happening. Resembling the hair in color and texture, a silver bushy moustache appeared to sprout under Adam’s transformed nose.

  Ariel laughed abruptly, pleased at the first hint of merriment in her life for some time.

  Adam had changed himself from a mimicry of Derec to a nearly exact rendition of the short, round, wavy-haired and moustachioed Dr. Avery!

  Avery didn’t notice Adam’s transformation until Ariel laughed. At first he thought she was laughing at him, and he prepared a withering comment. (Avery could not abide being laughed at. The mockery of too many colleagues had made him sensitive to criticism and developed in him a lightning reflex to respond as cruelly as he could.) Then he saw where Ariel’s attention was directed.

  He saw Adam’s robotic and (to him) nightmarish version of himself, and he screamed in anger. It was the kind of scream that rattled any loose item or emotional equilibrium in its vicinity. On the desktop the dancers scattered in fear.

  Adam had not expected such a violent reaction from Avery, and it shocked as well as intrigued him. He had imprinted upon Avery several times already, but only twice in Avery’s presence. Each of those times the self-centered doctor had not noticed or even looked at him.

  Although Avery knew about the Silversides’ shape-changing abilities, this was the first time he had observed an actual transformation.

  “I won’t have this!” Avery yelled. “It is mockery! You have no right to take my shape! How is it possible even? What kind of material are you made of?” He touched Adam on his arm, his chest, his face. Adam’s skin was still like the syntheskin on any robot, except the few humaniforms. “There’s no human texture to your skin, no —”

  Ariel stepped forward. “That’s because Adam is a robot.” She searched Avery’s face for reactions and saw deep confusion in his eyes, so she added slyly, “Like you, Ozymandias.”

  Avery seemed momentarily confused. “Of course,” he said. “Like me.” He examined Adam more closely. “And robots are fixed, permanent. Not like humans, not like animals. Then Adam can’t be a robot. He’s something else in a robot’s clothing.”

  “What am I?” Adam asked.

  “I don’t know what yo
u are.”

  “If not human, what? If not robot, what?”

  “Yes,” Ariel said, moving closer to Avery, “what is Adam?”

  “Some new kind of creature, but I don’t know what. He is capable of changing his shape?”

  “Yes, he is. He can be human, robot, animal, alien. But he is robot, Ozymandias.”

  “He can’t be!”

  “Oh, but he can. They both can. Derec’s not sure how they shape-change, but he thinks it’s facilitated by a kind of DNA or DNA-analog in their cells. Apparently they can gain voluntary control over their cells, even adjusting their sizes and shapes. They sort of think of the shape they’ll take, and its details are worked out in their positronic brains. Mandelbrot can drastically change the shape of his arm, but these two work miracles on their entire bodies. Adam says he started as a blob and knew how to alter his shape into a practical ambulatory form in his first few moments of awareness.”

  “I refuse to accept that. Why did you laugh?”

  “Because you are like me now. You accused me of being sentimental for believing the dancers to be human, and now you refuse to believe Adam is a robot. Nevertheless, it is true. Why does it bother you so, Ozymandias?”

  “I won’t discuss it.”

  “Of course. Because it would embarrass you. Now that you’re a robot, you’re annoyed when another one comes along who’s greater than you are.”

  “That’s not it at all! And it’s not true! Transmogrification is no special achievement. It makes him no more than a circus freak.”

  “Maybe you’re right. It isn’t true. Good thing you’re not Avery any more, Ozymandias. If you were, I’d have to say that maybe the great Dr. Avery, creator of the Avery robots, is jealous that someone else has designed and built a better model.”

  For a moment Avery did not speak. Instead, he merely stared at Adam, which was like looking in a mirror that slightly distorted the image. Adam’s skin was silvery, and there were more sharp lines in the shape of his body than in Avery’s softly curved figure. Adam’s eyes had a serenity in them that Avery had not, when looking in a mirror, seen in many years. It forced him to consider a human Avery whose life had been more satisfactory, when he had been married and at the top of his profession, adored by many, certainly respected by almost everyone. Why had his eyes changed? he wondered.