Asimov’s Future History Volume 7

by Isaac Asimov

  “Looks like we ‘ave four jumps,” Wolruf said as Derec slid into the copilot’s seat beside her. “First one tonight.”

  “Good. The sooner the better. Things are getting a little strange on this trip already.”

  “Could say that, all ri’.”

  “We didn’t tell them to follow your orders. Avery wants to see if they’ll decide to do it on their own.”

  Wolruf nodded. The motion took her head into and out of the star field before her; for a moment she had a pattern of tiny white dots on her forehead.

  “If you don’t want to be part of an experiment like that, I’ll go ahead and order them to. We don’t have to do what Avery says. He isn’t God.”

  “None of us are,” Wolruf said with a toothy smile. “That’s what the robots’re trying to tell us. We aren’t gods and they aren’t servants, even if ‘umans did create them to be.”

  Derec laughed. “You know, when you think of it, this whole situation is really sick. I’m here because Avery was playing God; the robots are here because my mother, whoever she is, is playing God; I’ve got an entire Robot City running around in my body and giving me control of even more cities; Ariel and I are playing God right now with the fate of our baby — everyone’s caught up in this web of dominance and submission. Who orders who around, and who has to obey who? It’s twisted, warped!”

  A twinge of conscience made Derec add to himself, And I’m playing God with the ecosystem project....

  “Everybody plays God,” Wolruf said. “Maybe that’s what life is all about. None of us is God, but we all try to be. Even I don’t mind ‘aving an order obeyed now and then.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Trouble with being God, is she ‘as too much responsibility. Power always brings responsibility, or should.”

  “Yeah, that’s the problem, all right.”

  Derec looked out the viewscreen. An entire galaxy full of stars beckoned him. Who would want control over all that? The use of it, definitely, but control? Not him.

  He laughed again. “It reminds me of the old question of who runs the government. Some people want to, but the best ones for the job are the people who don’t. They take their responsibility seriously.”

  Wolruf nodded. “Maybe that’s why most robots like taking orders. No responsibility. Those other three started out on their own, learned to deal with it, so don’t like taking orders.”

  “It’s possible,” Derec admitted. Was that why he didn’t like taking orders, then; because his earliest memories were of being on his own, of making his own decisions? Or was something deeper driving him? Nature or nurture? No one had ever answered that question successfully, not for humans, anyway. For robots the answer had always been obvious: Their behavior was in their nature. It was built in. But now, with these three and their insurrection, that answer didn’t seem so pat anymore.

  Silence descended upon the control room while he and Wolruf both thought their own thoughts. Wolruf turned back to the star map and pressed a few keys on the console beneath it. One of the silver lines shifted position, bridging the gap between two of their waypoint stars in one jump instead of two. At once the line turned red and an annoying beep filled the cabin. The proposed modification to the jump path was unacceptably risky to the computer:

  “Very conscientious navigator,” Wolruf remarked. “Better than ‘uman. Or me.”

  Was that a note of regret in her voice? Wolruf was the best pilot of the group; she had always done the flying when she and Derec and Ariel had gone anywhere. Was she feeling useless now?

  “You could still use the manual controls if you want,” Derec offered.

  “Oh, no. I’m not complaining.” Wolruf pressed another few buttons and the original jump path returned to the star field. She leaned back in the pilot’s chair and crossed her arms over her chest. Smiling toothily, she said, “Less responsibility for me.”

  Despite her confidence in the autopilot, Derec was sure Wolruf would stay in the control room for the jump. Knowing that, he knew that he could put the whole thing out of his mind, safe in the knowledge that she could take care of any problem that might arise should the automatic system fail to do the job right. All the same, when the scheduled time approached, he found himself shifting restlessly in bed, waiting for the momentary disorientation that would mark their passage through hyperspace. He had jumped dozens of times, but he still couldn’t sleep with the knowledge that he was about to be squeezed through a warp in the universe and squirted light-years across space.

  At last he could stare at the ceiling no longer. He got up, put on his robe, and slipped quietly from the room. The bedrooms opened onto a hallway, with the control room at one end and the common room on the other. Derec hesitated, wondering which way to turn, but finally decided against looking over Wolruf’s shoulder at the countdown clock. Already relegated to backup status, she might misinterpret his nervousness as concern over her competence.

  He turned toward the common room. He might not be able to sleep before a jump, but eating was no problem.

  As he approached, he heard a babble of quiet voices. Remembering Avery, s command to the robots to refrain from using the comlink, he expected to find all three of them in a huddle, but when he stepped into the room, he found only Lucius and Eve, whispering like lovers in the dimly lit room. They had picked up another human trait since their last communication fugue: Both were seated in a loveseat, leaning back comfortably with their legs crossed.

  They stopped their whispering and turned to look at Derec. “Just getting a midnight snack,” he said, feeling silly explaining his actions to a robot but feeling the need to do it all the same.

  “Make yourself at home,” replied Lucius. He turned to Eve and whispered something too quick to follow, and she whispered something back. Derec — already heading for the automat — nearly tripped over himself when Eve emitted a high, little-girl-like giggle in response.

  Derec recognized that giggle. It was almost a perfect copy of Ariel’s. Did Eve know what a giggle was for, or was she just testing it out?

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  The whispering and giggling continued behind him as he dialed for a cup of hot chocolate and a handful of cookies. He had just about decided to join Wolruf in the control room after all when Wolruf silently entered the room. He turned to say hello and realized that it wasn’t Wolruf, but Adam in Wolruf’s form. He had evidently been talking with her, and in the close environment had slowly imprinted on her.

  “Hello,” Derec said anyway.

  “‘ello,” Adam said. He waited for Derec to get his cookies and chocolate, then punched a combination of his own on the automat. Derec bit into a cookie and waited, assuming that the robot was getting a snack for Wolruf as well and intending to accompany the robot back to the control room.

  The automat took a moment to shift over to whatever it was Adam had ordered. While they waited, Derec noticed that Wolruf’s features were slowly losing clarity as the robot’s form shifted back toward the human under Derec’s influence.

  The automat chimed and Wolruf’s snack, a bowl of something that might have been raw brussels sprouts, rose up out of its depths. Adam reached out for it, hesitated, took it in his hands, then dumped it back in the waste hopper and turned away.

  “Wait a minute” ‘Derec said, blowing cookie crumbs toward the departing robot in his haste. “Come back here.”

  Adam turned around and stepped forward to stand in front of Derec.

  “Why did you throw Wolruf’s snack away?”

  “I did not wish to be ordered about.”

  “Then why did you dial it up in the first place?”

  “I — do not know. Wolruf and I were talking about hyperspatial travel, and Wolruf expressed a desire for something to eat. I offered to get it for her, but now I do not know why.”

  Because you were imprinting on her, that’s why, Derec thought, and then I reminded you what a “true” human was.

  He didn’t s
ay that aloud, but he did say, “So rather than let anyone think you would accept an order from a nonhuman, you tossed it away as soon as you realized what you were doing.”

  “That... was my intention, yes.”

  “What about a favor to a friend? Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  “I do not know about favors.”

  Derec was rapidly growing tired of the robots’ foolishness, especially where Wolruf’s comfort was concerned. “This,” he said. He punched the “repeat” button and waited while the automat delivered up another bowl of crisp vegetables, then dropped his cookies in the bowl, picked it up in one hand and took his chocolate in the other, making sure the robot saw how awkward it was, and walked toward the door with it. In the hallway, he turned back and said, “This is a favor.” Then he turned away and headed for the control room to wait for the jump with his friend.

  Chapter 5

  FAVORS

  SPACE TRAVEL DIDN’T seem to affect morning sickness. Derec, lying in bed and listening to Ariel in the Personal, wondered if this was the way their days were going to start for the next nine months or if her body would slowly get used to being pregnant. He was glad it was her and not him. It was an awful thought and he knew it, but all the same that was how he felt. Pregnancy scared him. It was an internal change nearly as sweeping as the one he had gone through when Avery had injected him with the chemfets, and he knew from experience what that kind of thing felt like. The physical changes were nothing compared to what went on in your mind. Watching and feeling your body change and not being able to do anything about it — that was the scary part.

  When Ariel emerged, Derec gave her a hug and a kiss for support, then took his turn in the Personal while she dressed. He showered away the fatigue left over from spending most of the night in the control room, standing beneath the cascading water until he was sure he must have run every molecule of it on board through the recycler at least twice. When he emerged, pink and wrinkled, Ariel was already gone, so he dressed quickly and went to join her at breakfast.

  He found her arguing with a trio of stubborn robots.

  “Because I ordered you to, that’s why!” he heard her shout as she walked down the hallway.

  A robot voice, Lucius’s perhaps, said, “We have complied with your order. I merely ask why it was given. Your order to cease our conversation, combined with Dr. Avery’s order to refrain from using our comlinks, effectively prevents us from communicating. Can this be your intent?”

  “I just want some quiet around here. You guys talk all the time.”

  “We have much to talk about. If we are to discover our place in the universe, we must correlate a great deal of information.”

  When Derec entered the common room, he saw that it had indeed been Lucius doing the talking. The other two were sitting quietly alongside him and opposite Ariel at the breakfast table, but they were either following Ariel’s order to keep quiet or else simply content to let Lucius be their spokesman. Mandelbrot was also in the room, but he was having nothing to do with the situation. He stood quietly in a niche in the wall beside the automat.

  Lucius turned to Derec as soon as he had cleared the doorway and asked, “Can you persuade Ariel to rescind her order?”

  Derec looked from the robot to Ariel, who shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “It’s a mystery to me, too.”

  “Why should I do that?” Derec asked.

  “It inflicts an undue hardship upon us.”

  “Shutting up is a hardship?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought it was a courtesy.” Derec went to the automat and dialed for breakfast.

  “It would be a courtesy to allow intelligent beings engaged in their own project to do so without hindrance.”

  “Ah. You’re saying you have no time to obey orders, is that it?”

  “Essentially, yes. The time exists, but we have our own pursuits to occupy it.”

  Derec took his breakfast, a bowl of fruit slices covered with heavy cream and sugar — 0r their synthetic equivalent, at any rate — and sat down beside Ariel. The robots watched him take a bite, look over to Ariel in amusement, then back to the robots again without saying anything. They seemed to sense that now was not a good time to interrupt.

  Derec puzzled it over in his thoughts for half a bowl of fruit before he had sufficiently organized his argument to speak. When he finally did, he waggled his spoon at the robots for emphasis and said, “Duty is a bitch. I agree. But we all have duties of one sort or another. When Adam led his wolf pack against the Robot City on the planet where he first awoke, I had to abandon what I wanted to do and go off to try to straighten out the mess. At great personal danger to myself and to Mandelbrot, I might add. While I was gone, Ariel had to go to Ceremya to try to straighten out the mess from another Robot City. We’d have both rather stayed on Aurora, but we went because it was our duty. We took Adam and Eve back to the original Robot City because we felt it was our duty to give you a chance to develop your personalities in a less confusing environment,” — he nodded toward the two silent robots —” and when we got there we had to track you down, Lucius, because it was our duty to stop the damage you were doing to the city programming. Now we’re heading for Ceremya again because all three of you need to learn something there, and we don’t feel comfortable letting you go off on your own.

  “None of this is what we would have been doing if it was left up to us. We’d much rather be on Aurora again, living in the forest and having our needs taken care of by robots who don’t talk back to us, but we’re here because our duty requires it.”

  He waved his spoon again to forestall comment. “And even if we had stayed there, we’d still have duties. Humans have to sleep, have to eat, have to shower — whether we want to or not. Most times we want to, but we have to nonetheless. Ariel is going to be carrying a developing fetus for nine months, which I’m sure she would rather not do if there was a better way, but there isn’t, and she’s decided to keep the baby so she’s going to have to put up with being pregnant. That’s a duty. I’m wasting my time explaining this to you, but I do it because I feel it’s my duty to do that, too.

  “The point is, we all have duties. When you add them all up, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for whatever else you want to do, but you have to put up with that. Everybody has to structure their free time around their duties.”

  Lucius shook his head. “You overlook the obvious solution of reducing the number of your duties.”

  “Ah,” Derec said. “Now I get it. That explains yesterday. You want to cut down on your duties, but you’ve got a hard-wired compulsion to follow any orders given by a human, so you narrow down the definition of human to exclude Wolruf. Suddenly you have only three-fourths as many orders to follow. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  Lucius was slow in answering, but he finally said, “That was not our conscious intent, but now that I examine the incident in light of your comments today, I must conclude that you are correct.”

  “It works both ways, you know.”

  “What other way do you mean?”

  “You thought you were human once. Now you’re excluded by your own definition.”

  “Oh.”

  Ariel clapped softly. “Touché,” she said.

  Avery chose that moment to enter the room. “Sounds like a lively discussion going on in here,” he said, taking the only remaining chair, the one beside Derec. He turned to Lucius and said, “I’ll have a cheese omelet.”

  “Ariel and Derec each got their own breakfast,” the robot replied. “Why can you not do the same?”

  “Wrong answer,” Derec muttered.

  Avery stared in amazement at the root, his mouth agape. “What the —?” he began, then banged his hand down flat on the table. “Get me a cheese omelet, now!”

  Lucius lurched to his feet under the force of Avery’s direct command. He took a faltering step toward the automat, and as he did his form began to change. His smooth, humanoid surface becam
e pocked with circles, each of which slowly took on the teeth and spokes of a gear, while his arms and legs became simple metal levers driven by cables and pulleys. His head became a dented metal canister with simple holes in it for eyes and a round speaker for a mouth. The gears meshed, the pulleys moved, and with a howl of unlubricated metal, Lucius took another step. His quiet gait changed to a heavy “clomp, clomp, clomp,” as he lurched the rest of the way to the automat.

  “Yes, master,” the speaker in his face said with a loud hum. “Cheese omelet, master.” He poked at the buttons on the automat with fingers that had suddenly become stiff metal claws.

  Too stunned by his performance to do more than stare, Derec, Ariel, and Avery watched as he took the plate from the automat, clomped back to Avery’s side, and set it down in front of him. The speaker hummed again, and Lucius said, “I may have to follow your orders — it may be my duty to follow your orders — but I don’t have to like it.”

  The explosion Derec expected never came. Avery merely said, “That’s fine. Everybody should hate something. But from now on you are to consider my every whim to be a direct order for you to perform. You will be alert for these whims of mine. You will neither intrude excessively nor hesitate in carrying them out, but will instead be as efficient and unobtrusive as possible. Do I make myself clear?”

  “You do. I wish to —”

  “Your wishes don’t concern me. My wishes do. And I preferred your former shape.”

  Lucius became a blur of transformation, the gears and pulleys blending once again into a smooth humanoid form.

  “There, you see?” Avery said to Derec. “You just have to know how to talk to them.” He picked up his fork and stabbed a bite of egg, put it in his mouth, and said around the mouthful, “I’ve had lots of practice. You were a lot like that as a child, you know. Rebellious and resentful. A parent has to learn how to handle that early on.”

  “May I speak?” Lucius asked.