Asimov’s Future History Volume 7

by Isaac Asimov

  He shrugged and backed off. “It’s your conscience. But I’m asking you, please don’t cut any of them up. As a favor to me.”

  Avery frowned. “I’ll think about it,” he replied.

  Derec nodded. Now it was up to Avery to decide whether or not to escalate the war. It was a risk, but a calculated one. Derec had felt a spark of humanity in Avery a couple of times today; he was willing to bet his father was sick of confrontation, too.

  “Thanks.” He turned away and said to the cargo robots, “Come on, the rest of you. You can take me back home and then get on with whatever else you were doing.”

  He really had intended to go home, but on the way there the sight of Lucius’s creatures still scavenging in the streets reminded him that he still had to do something about them, and soon, or they were going to start eating each other. With Lucius himself out of commission, there was only one good place to start, and it wasn’t at home. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said to the robot driving the truck. “Take me to Lucius’s lab instead.”

  The robot hesitated a long time — nearly the length of a block — then asked, “Which one do you wish to visit?”

  “How many has he got?”

  “The central computer lists thirty-seven separate laboratories.”

  “Thirty-seven?”

  “That is correct.”

  “What did he do with that many labs?”

  The cargo robot was silent for a moment as it conferred with the computer again, then said, “Fifteen were dedicated to fabricating the artificial humans he called ‘homunculi’ and are now abandoned. The other twenty-two are engaged in fabricating humans.”

  “Are engaged? Still?”

  “That is correct.”

  “We told him not to continue with that!”

  “That is also correct.”

  The cargo robot offered no more explanation, but Derec could see plainly enough what the situation was. Lucius had interpreted his orders to mean only him, leaving the other robots who had been helping him free to continue the project. Well, he would put a stop to that soon enough.

  But twenty-two labs! No wonder the city was full of rats.

  “Take me to the one he showed us yesterday,” Derec said.

  The driver evidently had no problem with Derec’s inclusive “us,” nor with finding the appropriate lab in the computer’s records. It slowed the truck and turned left at the next corner, made another left turn at the next block and they went back the way they had come for a while, then turned right and went on for block after block through the city. The rat population on the streets dwindled, then grew larger again as they left the sphere of influence of one lab and entered another. Evidently Lucius had felt no need to cluster his workplaces.

  Derec, watching the towering buildings slide past, felt again how empty the city was without people in it. None of these buildings had any real purpose, nor did the robots in them, save for Avery’s nebulous experiment in social dynamics. And what could possibly come of that? The robots weren’t creating a society of their own; they were instead simply building and rebuilding in anticipation of someday having humans to serve. And some of them, he thought wryly, were busy building those humans. All because of the Three Laws of Robotics and the poorly defined quantity, “human,” those Laws directed them to protect and obey.

  Derec had felt a great sadness pervading the city since he first arrived. It felt almost haunted to him, the robots wandering about like lost souls, purposeless. He was attributing human qualities to inhuman beings, he knew, but Frost, they didn’t have to be human to be lost, or to feel sad about it. Robots were intelligent beings, no matter what their origin, and it behooved their creators to treat them kindly. That included giving them a sense of purpose and letting them fulfill it. It seemed clear to Derec that none of these Robot City robots, nor the ones lying inert in Avery’s lab, had been treated well by their creators.

  Humans make poor gods, he thought wryly.

  The cargo robots dropped Derec off outside a low, nondescript warehouselike building. If it was the same one Lucius had shown them the day before, then it had been repaired, but not before a veritable horde of the rat-creatures had escaped. Two hordes, Derec decided as he watched them scurrying about through the streets. They had been thick in the other parts of town, but this was ridiculous.

  He ran from the truck to the main door, sending rats squealing off in all directions, but none chased after him.

  Yet, he thought.

  Directly inside the main door a hallway led down the length of the building, with doors opening to either side. Derec walked down the hallway, expecting to find a laboratory sufficient in complexity to support a complete genetic engineering project, but when he peered through the first doorway to his right, he couldn’t help laughing. Avery was the mad scientist, but Lucius’s lab — at least this part of it — was the typical mad scientist’s lair. Vats of bubbling brew stood in various stages of incubation or fermentation or whatever was going on along one wall, while electrical devices of various natures hummed and clicked contentedly over them. A bank of cages along another wall held a bewildering array of small creatures, ranging from insects to something that might have been a mouse to one of the rodentlike creatures now overrunning the city. Another wall held trays of growing plants. In the center of the room, table after table held enough interconnected glassware to distill a lake. From the entire collection came a mixture of smells stronger and more varied than from an explosion in a kitchen automat.

  The necessity of dealing with organic material had forced the lab into the configuration he saw, but Derec found it funny nonetheless. The gleaming robots who tended the equipment made it even more so by contrast. They should have been wearing dark robes and walking with stooped posture.

  One of them walked past carrying a test tube filled with cloudy liquid. Derec cleared his throat noisily and said, “We’ve got a problem here.”

  “That is unfortunate,” the robot answered without pausing in its stride. “How may I help?” It walked on over to a centrifuge, put the tube inside, and started it spinning.

  Derec felt momentary annoyance at talking to a robot who was too busy to stop for him, but some remnant of his thoughts on the trip over kept him from ordering the robot to drop what it was doing. This robot, at least, had a purpose. A wrong one, but maybe they could do something about that without defeating it completely.

  “To start with,” he said, “you can’t create any humans. That goes for all of you, in all of these labs. Is that clear?”

  “Yes,” the robot replied. It looked at Derec, then back to the centrifuge. If it was disappointed, it didn’t show it.

  “All right. Next, then, I need to know what those creatures” Derec waited until the robot looked to see where he was pointing, “— there at the end of the line — eat.”

  “They are omnivorous,” the robot replied, gathering up a handful of empty tubes from a box and inserting them one by one into some sort of diagnostic instrument beside the centrifuge.

  “There’s a whole bunch of them running loose in the city without a food supply. We need to give them one.”

  “That would only increase their numbers. Is that what you wish to do?”

  “No. But I don’t want them to starve, either.”

  “We have discovered that if they do not starve, they will reproduce. There is no intermediate state. The number of creatures existing now are the result of a large food supply, which we have ceased providing.”

  “You intend for them to starve, then?” Derec watched the robot push buttons on the face of the instrument.

  “That is correct.”

  “Why not introduce something that eats them?”

  “That seems needlessly complex. Starvation will reduce their numbers equally well.”

  “I see.” Derec felt somehow vindicated to hear the robot’s answer. Evidently robots didn’t make very good gods, either.

  He thought of Avery’s suggestion to have the
robots collect and kill them. A typical Avery idea, little better than the robots’ starvation plan. Much as he wanted to avoid conflict, Derec couldn’t let that happen, either.

  “Look,” he said, going on into the lab and pulling up a stool, “even if you can’t make humans, this project of yours can still be good for something. Let me tell you about balanced ecosystems....”

  The sun was long down by the time he made it home that night. Ariel was in the library, leaning back on a couch with her feet up on a stool and listening to one of Avery’s recordings of Earther music while she read a book. Neither Avery nor Wolruf were in evidence, though the loud snoring coming from down the hallway was suggestive of at least one of them. Mandelbrot stood in a wall niche behind Ariel, waiting for her to need his services.

  Ariel put down the book and scowled at Derec in mock hostility when he entered the room. “Forget where you lived?” she asked.

  “Almost.” Derec sat down beside her on the couch and nuzzled her neck playfully. “I’ve been trying to plan a simple ecosystem for the city, but it’s a lot tougher than I thought. Do you realize that you have to balance everything right down to the microbes in the soil? Pick the wrong ones, or not enough varieties of the right ones, and your whole biosphere goes crazy.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, that’s so. I’ve been studying it all day.”

  “Sounds exciting.” She yawned wide, and the book slipped from her fingers to land with a thump on the floor. “Oops. Tired.”

  Derec scooped it up for her and laid it on the couch’s armrest. “It’s late. We should go to bed.”

  “I guess we should.”

  Derec took her hand and helped her up from the couch. She let him lead her into the bedroom, where he pulled down the covers and left her on the foot of the bed to undress and crawl in while he used the Personal.

  When he came out, she was already asleep. He slid quietly into bed beside her and within minutes he was out as well, dreaming of food chains and energy flow.

  But once again, he awoke to the sound of someone throwing up in the Personal. He sat up with a start, his heart suddenly pounding. The sun barely reached the window this time, but it was up. It was morning, and Ariel was sick.

  His heart was still pounding when she opened the door and looked out at him. “Does this mean what I think it means?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I think we’d better find out.”

  The urine test came up positive, as they knew it would. Even so, it was hard for either of them to remain standing when the medical robot said, “May I be the first to offer you congratulations on the occasion of —”

  “Wow,” Derec murmured. He and Ariel had been holding hands in anticipation; now he squeezed hers tightly.

  “Oh,” Ariel said, her hand suddenly going slack. “I don’t —”

  “But how?”

  “I wasn’t supposed to be able to —”

  “The cure!” Derec wrapped his arms around her and picked her up off the ground in a hug. “When they cured your amnemonic plague on Earth, they must have ‘cured’ your birth control, too.”

  “They might have warned me.”

  Derec’s grin faltered. He set her back on her feet again.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you want —?”

  Ariel took the two steps necessary to reach a chair and sat heavily. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just such a shock. I’m not ready for it.”

  “Well, we’ve got plenty of time to get used to the idea. At least, I think we do.” Derec turned to the medical robot. “How far along is she?”

  “Fifteen days, plus or minus a day,” answered the robot. “A blood test would be more accurate, but I discourage invasive testing for such minor gain.”

  “Me too,” Ariel said. She held out her hand and Derec took it again. “Well. Two weeks. That leaves us a while yet.” She looked down the corridor into the empty expanse of the hospital, then back to Derec.

  Derec squeezed her hand again for reassurance. He wouldn’t say he knew just how she felt, because he wasn’t the one whose body would swell with the developing baby, and he wasn’t the one who would have to go through the painful process of giving birth, but he did at least share the sudden confusion of learning that he was going to be a parent. Did he want to be a father? He didn’t know. It was too soon to be asking that sort of question, and at the same time, far, far too late. He was going to be one whether he wanted to be or not.

  Well, it wasn’t like he couldn’t provide for a child. He had an entire city at his disposal, and more scattered throughout the galaxy, all full of robots who were hungry for the chance to serve a human. He certainly didn’t have to worry about food or housing or education. Childhood companions might be a problem, though, unless they could bring some more families to Robot City. Derec wondered if Avery would stand for it. If not, then Derec could build his own city. It wouldn’t take much; a few seed robots and a few weeks’ time. Or there was still their house on Aurora, come to think of it. Derec and Ariel had both grown up on Aurora; perhaps their child should as well.

  All those thoughts and more rushed through Derec’s mind as he held Ariel’s hand in the hospital waiting room. He grinned when he realized how quickly he had begun planning for the baby’s future. It was an instinctive response; hormones that had been around since before humanity learned to use fire were directing his thoughts now. Well, he didn’t mind having a little help form his instincts. In this situation, it was about all he had to go on.

  Looking at Ariel, he felt a sudden rush of warmth course through him. He wanted to protect her, provide for her, help her while she bore their child. Was that instinct, too? He had been in love with her before, but this was something else.

  He certainly hadn’t learned it on Aurora. His father had been right: an Auroran family was the next thing to none. Permanent attachments, or even long-term relationships, were rare, even discouraged. An attachment as deep as he felt now for Ariel would be considered an aberration there.

  Which meant that it wasn’t instinct, or Aurorans would have been feeling it, too. Somehow that made Derec feel even better. It was genuine love he was feeling, concern and care born of their experiences together, rather than simple chemicals in his bloodstream. Instinct was just intensifying what he already felt for her.

  She was worried. He could feel it in her hand, see it on her face. She needed time to accept what was happening to her. On sudden impulse, he said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

  She thought about it for a few seconds. “Okay.”

  He helped her to her feet. The medical robot said, “Before you go, I need to impress upon you the importance of regular medical checkups. You should report for testing at regular two-week intervals, and before that if you notice any sudden developments. Your health is critical to the developing embryo, and its health is critical to your own. Also, your diet —”

  Ariel cut him off. “Can this wait?”

  “For a short time, yes.”

  “Then tell me later. Or send it to our apartment and I’ll read up on it there.”

  The robot hesitated, its First Law obligation to protect Ariel and her baby from harm warring against its Second Law obligation to obey her order. Evidently Ariel’s implied agreement to follow its instructions was enough to satisfy its First Law concern, for it nodded its head and said, “Very well. But do not overexert yourself on your walk.”

  Derec led her out of the hospital and along the walkway beside the building, ignoring the row of transport booths waiting by the entrance. They walked in silence for a time, lost in their own thoughts, taking comfort from each other’s presence, but within a few blocks they had a silent host of Lucius’s rodents following them, their hungry stares and soft chittering noises sending shivers up Derec’s spine. He didn’t know how dangerous they might be, but if nothing else, they were certainly spoiling the mood. With a sigh, he led Ariel back inside another building and up the elevator to
the top, where they continued their walk along enclosed paths high above the streets. The rats hadn’t yet reached these levels.

  The tops of some of the buildings had been planted with grass and trees to make pocket parks; after passing three or four of them — all devoid of activity save for their robot gardeners unobtrusively tending the plants — they stopped to sit in the grass beneath a young apple tree and look out over the city. Ariel had been quiet for a long time now, but Derec couldn’t take the silence anymore. He felt an incredible urge to babble.

  “I’m still not sure I believe it’s really happening,” he said. “It’s crazy to think about. A new person. A completely new mind, with a new viewpoint, new thoughts, new attitudes, new everything. And we’re responsible for its development. It’s daunting.”

  Ariel nodded, “I know what you mean. Who are we to be having a baby?”

  “Better us than Lucius, at least,” Derec said with a grin.

  “I suppose. At least we know what one is.” Ariel tried to smile, but hers was a fleeting smile at best. She turned away, said to the city, “Oh, Derec, I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to do this. I keep thinking about having it, and then I keep thinking about not having it, and right now I’ve got to say that not having it sounds a lot better to me.” She looked back to Derec, and he could see the confusion written plain as words in her expression.

  His own face must have mirrored her confusion. “Not having it,” he said. “You mean... you mean... aborting it?” The instincts, or hormones, or whatever they were, still had a strong grip on him. It was hard to even say the word that would take his child from him.

  “Yes, that’s what I mean,” said Ariel. “Aborting it. Stopping it now, while we still can. It’s not like we wanted it, is it? We weren’t trying for one. We were happy without it. If we’d known I could get pregnant, then we would have been using birth control, wouldn’t we? So why should we change our entire lives because of some silly — accident?”

  “Because it’s us! Our child. Because it’s a new person, a new mind, with a new viewpoint and all that. That’s why we should keep it.” Was that why? Derec fought for his own understanding even as he tried to explain it to Ariel. “It’s — do you remember what it was like when we first found ourselves here? Me without a memory at all, yours slowly slipping from you, neither of us with any idea what we were doing here? Remember how lost we felt?”