Robots and Empire trs-4

by Isaac Asimov

  Amadiro shook his head. “It isn’t as though I have a choice in the matter, my friend. The Council wouldn’t follow me if I try to argue them into surrendering the woman to a Settler. And the mere fact that I have suggested it will be used against me. My political career will be shaken and we may then have a war in addition. Besides, the thought of a Spacer woman dying in service to a Settler is unbearable.”

  “One would suppose you were fond of the Solarian woman.”

  “You know I am not. With all my heart I wish she had died twenty decades ago, but not this way, not on a Settler ship. But I should remember that she is an ancestress of yours in the fifth generation.”

  Mandamus looked a bit more dour than he usually did. “Of what consequence is that to me? I am a Spacer individual, conscious of myself and of my society. I am not an ancestor-worshiping member of a tribal conglomerate.”

  For a moment, Mandamus fell silent and his thin face took on a look of intense concentration. “Dr. Amadiro,” he said, “could you not explain to the Council that this ancestress of mine is being taken, not as a Spacer hostage but only because her unique knowledge of Solaria, where she spent her childhood and youth, could make her an essential part of the exploration and that this exploration might even be helpful to us, as well as to the Settlers? After all, in truth, wouldn’t it be desirable for us to know what those miserable Solarians are up to? The woman will presumably bring back a report of the events—if she survives.”

  Amadiro thrust out his lower lip. “That might work if the woman went on board voluntarily, if she made it clear that she understood the importance of the work and wished to perform her patriotic duty. To put her on board ship by force, though, is unthinkable.”

  “Well, then, suppose I were to see this ancestress of mine and try to persuade her to get on the ship willingly; and suppose, also, that you speak to this Settler captain by hyperwave and tell them he can land on Aurora and have the woman if he can persuade her to go with him willingly or, at least, say that she’ll go with him willingly, whether she does or not.”

  “I suppose we can’t lose by making the effort, but I don’t see how we can win.”

  Yet to Amadiro’s surprise, they did win. He had listened with astonishment as Mandamus told him the details.

  “I brought up the matter of the humanoid robots,” Mandamus said, “and it’s clear she knew nothing about them, from which I deduced Fastolfe had known nothing about them. It has been one of those things that nagged at me. Then I talked a great deal about my ancestry in such a way as to force her to talk of that Earthman Elijah Baley.”

  “What about him?” said Amadiro harshly.

  “Nothing, except that she talked about him and remembered. This Settler who wants her is a descendant of Baley and I thought it might influence her to consider the Settler’s request more favorably than she might otherwise have done.”

  In any case, it had worked and for a few days Amadiro felt a relief from the almost continuous pressure that had plagued him from the start of the Solarian crisis.

  But only for a very few days.

  61

  One point that worked to Amadiro’s advantage at this time was that he had not seen Vasilia, thus far, during the Solarian crisis.

  It would certainly not have been an appropriate time to see her. He did not wish to be annoyed by her petty concern over a robot she claimed as her own—with total disregard for the legalities of the situation—at a time when a true crisis exercised his every nerve and thought. Nor did he wish to expose himself to the kind of quarrel that might easily arise between her and Mandamus over the question of which was eventually to preside over the Robotics Institute.

  In any case, he had about come to the decision that Mandamus ought to be his successor. Throughout the Solarian crisis, he had kept his eye fixed on what was important. Even when Amadiro himself had felt shaken, Mandamus had remained icily calm. It was Mandamus who thought it conceivable that the Solarian woman might accompany the Settler captain voluntarily and it was he who maneuvered her into doing so.

  And if his plan for the destruction of Earth worked itself out as it should—as it must—then Amadiro could see Mandamus succeeding as Council Chairman eventually. It would even be just, thought Amadiro, in a rare burst of selflessness.

  On this particular evening, in consequence, he did not so much as expend a thought upon Vasilia. He left the Institute with a small squad of robots seeing him safely to his ground-car. That ground-car, driven by one robot and with two more in the backseat with him, passed quietly through a twilit and chilly rain and brought him to his establishment, where two more robots ushered him indoors. And all this time he did not think of Vasilia.

  To find her sitting in his living room, then, in front of his hyperwave set, watching an intricate robot ballet, with several of Amadiro’s robots in their niches and two of her own robots behind her chair, struck him at first not as much with the anger of violated privacy, as with pure surprise.

  It took some time for him to control his breathing well enough to be able to speak and then his anger arose and he said harshly, “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

  Vasilia was calm enough. Amadiro’s appearance was, after all, entirely expected. “What I’m doing here,” she said, “is waiting to see you. Getting in was not difficult. Your robots know my appearance very well and they know my standing at the Institute. Why shouldn’t they allow me to enter if I assure them I have an appointment with you?”

  “Which you haven’t. You have violated my privacy.”

  “Not really. There’s a limit to how much trust you can squeeze out of someone else’s robots. Look at them. They have never once taken their eyes from me. If I had wanted to disturb your belongings, look through your papers, take advantage of your absence in any way, I assure you I could not have. My two robots are no match against them.”

  “Do you know,” said Amadiro, bitterly, “that you have acted in a thoroughly un-Spacer fashion. You are despicable and I will not forget this.”

  Vasilia seemed to blanch slightly at the adjectives. She said in a low, hard voice, “I hope you don’t forget it, Kelden, for I’ve done what I’ve done for you—and if I reacted as I should to your foul mouth, I would leave now and let you continue for the rest of your life to be the defeated man you have been for the past twenty decades.”

  “I will not remain a defeated man—whatever you do.”

  Vasilia said, “You sound as though you believe that, but, you see, you do not know what I know. I must tell you that without my intervention you will remain defeated. I don’t care what scheme you have in mind. I don’t care what this thin-lipped, acid-faced Mandamus has cooked up for you—”

  “Why do you mention him?” said Amadiro quickly.

  “Because I wish to,”—said Vasilia with a touch of contempt. “Whatever he has done or thinks he is doing—and don’t be frightened, for I haven’t any idea what that might be—it won’t work. I may not know anything else about it, but I do know it won’t work.”

  “You’re babbling idiocies,” said Amadiro.

  “You had better listen to these idiocies, Kelden, if you don’t want everything to fall into ruin. Not just you, but possibly the Spacer worlds, one and all. Still, you may not want to listen to me. It’s your choice.” Which, then, is it to be?”

  “Why should I listen to you? What possible reason is there for me to listen to you?”

  “For one thing, I told you the Solarians were preparing to leave their world. If you had listened to me then, you would not have been caught so by surprise when they did.”

  “The Solarian crisis will yet turn to our advantage.”

  “No, it will not,” said Vasilia. “You may think it will, but it won’t. It will destroy you—no matter what you are doing to meet the emergency—unless you are willing to let me have my say.”

  Amadiro’s lips were white and were trembling slightly. The two centuries of defeat Vasilia had mentioned had had
a lasting effect upon him and the Solarian crisis had not helped, so he lacked the inner strength to order his robots to see her out, as he should have. He said sullenly, “Well, then, put it in brief.”

  “You would not believe what I have to say if I did, so let me do it my own way. You can stop me at any time, but then you will destroy the Spacer worlds. Of course, they will last my time and it won’t be I who will go down in History—Settler history, by the way—as the greatest failure on record. Shall I speak?”

  Amadiro folded into a chair. “Speak, then, and when you are through—leave.”

  “I intend to, Kelden, unless, of course, you ask me—very politely—to stay and help you. Shall I start?”

  Amadiro said nothing and Vasilia began, “I told you that during my stay on Solaria I became aware of some very peculiar positronic pathway patterns they had designed, pathways that struck me—very forcefully—as representing attempts at producing telepathic robots. Now, why should I have thought that?”

  Amadiro said bitterly, “I cannot tell what pathological drives may power your thinking.”

  Vasilia brushed that aside with a grimace. “Thank you, Kelden.—I’ve spent some months thinking about that, since I was acute enough to think the matter involved not pathology but some subliminal memory. My mind went back to my childhood when Fastolfe, whom I then considered my father, in one of his generous moods—he would experiment now and then with generous moods, you understand—gave me a robot of my own.”

  “Giskard again?” muttered Amadiro with impatience.

  “Yes, Giskard. Giskard, always. I was in my teenage years and I already had the instinct of a roboticist or, I should say, I was born with the instinct. I had as yet very little mathematics, but I had a grasp of patterns. With the passing of scores of decades, my knowledge of mathematics steadily improved, but I don’t think I have advanced very far in my feeling for patterns. My father would say, ‘Little Vas’—he also experimented in loving diminutives to see how that would affect me—‘you have a genius for patterns.’ I think I did—”

  Amadiro said, “Spare me. I’ll concede your genius. Meanwhile, I have not yet had my dinner, do you know that?”

  “Well,” said Vasilia sharply, “order your dinner and invite me to join you.”

  Amadiro, frowning, raised his arm perfunctorily and made a quick sign. The quiet motion of robots at work made itself evident at once.

  Vasilia said, “I would play with pathway patterns for Giskard. I would come to Fastolfe—my father, as I then thought of him—and I would show him a pattern. He might shake his head and laugh and say, ‘If you add that to poor Giskard’s brain, he will no longer be able to talk and he will be in a great deal of pain.’ I remember asking if Giskard could really feel pain and my father said, ‘We don’t know what he would feel, but he would act as we would act if we were in a great deal of pain, so we might as well say he would feel pain.’”

  “Or else I would take one of my patterns to him and he would smile indulgently and say, ‘Well, that won’t hurt him, Little Vas, and it might be interesting to try.’”

  “And I would. Sometimes I would take it out again and sometimes I would leave it. I was not simply fiddling with Giskard for the sadistic joy of it, as I imagine I might have been tempted to do if I were someone other than myself. The fact is, I was very fond of Giskard and I had no desire to harm him. When it seemed to me that one of my improvements—I always thought of them as improvements—made Giskard speak more freely or react more quickly or more interestingly—and seemed to do no harm—I would let it stay.

  “And then one day—”

  A robot standing at Amadiro’s elbow would not have dared to interrupt a guest unless a true emergency existed, but Amadiro had no difficulty in understanding the significance of the waiting. He said, “Is dinner ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the robot.

  Amadiro gestured rather impatiently in Vasilia’s direction. “You are invited to have dinner with me.”

  They walked into Amadiro’s dining room, which Vasilia had never entered before. Amadiro was, after all, a private person and was notorious for his neglect of the social amenities. He had been told more than once that he would succeed better in politics if he entertained in his home and he had always smiled politely and said, “Too high a price.”

  It was perhaps because of his failure to entertain, thought Vasilia, that there was no sign of originality or creativity in the furnishings. Nothing could be plainer than the table, the dishes, and the cutlery. As for the walls, they were merely flat colored vertical planes. Put together, in rather dampened one’s appetite, she thought.

  The soup they began with a clear bouillon was as plain as the furniture and Vasilia began to dispose of it without enthusiasm.

  Amadiro said, “My dear Vasilia, you see, I am being patient. I have no objection to having you write your autobiography if you wish. But is it really your plan to recite several chapters of it to me? If it is, I must tell you bluntly that I’m not really interested.”

  Vasilia said, “You will become extremely interested in just a little while. Still, if you’re really enamored of failure and want to continue to achieve nothing you wish to achieve, simply say so. I will then eat in silence and leave. Is that what you wish?”

  Amadiro sighed. “Well, go on, Vasilia.”

  Vasilia said, “And then one day I came up with a pattern more elaborate, more pleasant, and more enticing than I had ever seen before or, in all truth, than I have ever seen since. I would have loved to show it to my father, but he was away at some meeting or other on one of the other worlds.

  “I didn’t know when he’d be back and I put aside my pattern, but each day I would look at it with more interest and more fascination. Finally, I could wait no longer. I simply could not. It seemed so beautiful that I thought it ludicrous to suppose it could do harm. I was only an infant in my second decade and had not yet completely outgrown irresponsibility, so I modified Giskard’s brain by incorporating the pattern into it.

  “And it did no harm. That was immediately obvious. He responded to me with perfect ease and—it seemed to me was far quicker in understanding and much more intelligent than he had been. I found him far more fascinating and lovable than before.

  “I was delighted and yet I was nervous, too. What I had done—modifying Giskard without clearing it with Fastolfe was strictly against the rules Fastolfe had set for me and I knew that well. Yet clearly, I was not going to undo what I had done. When I had modified Giskard’s brain, I excused it to myself by saying that it would only be for a little while and that I would then neutralize the modification. Once the modification had been made, however, it became quite clear to me that I would not neutralize it. I was simply not going to do that. In fact, I never modified Giskard again, for fear of disturbing what I had just done.

  “Nor did I ever tell Fastolfe what I had done. I destroyed all record of the marvelous pattern I had devised and Fastolfe never found out that Giskard had been modified without his knowledge. Never!

  “And then we went our separate ways, Fastolfe and I, and Fastolfe would not give up Giskard. I screamed that he was mine and that I loved him, but Fastolfe’s kindly benevolence, of which he made such a parade all his life—that business of loving all things, great and small—was never allowed to stand in the way of his own desires. I received other robots I cared nothing for, but he kept Giskard for himself.

  “And when he died, he left Giskard to the Solarian woman—a last bitter slap at me.”

  Amadiro had only managed to get halfway through the salmon mousse. “If all this is intended to advance your case of having Giskard’s ownership transferred from the Solarian woman to yourself, it won’t help. I have already explained to you why I cannot set aside Fastolfe’s will.”

  “There’s something more to it than that, Kelden,” said Vasilia. “A great deal more. Infinitely more. Do you want me to stop now?”

  Amadiro stretched his lips into a rueful gri
n. “Having listened to so much of this, I will play the madman and listen to more.”

  “You would play the madman if you did not, for I now come to the point.—I have never stopped thinking of Giskard and of the cruelty and injustice of my having been deprived of him, but somehow I never thought of that pattern with which I had modified him with no one’s knowledge but my own. I am quite certain I could not have reproduced that pattern if I had tried and from what I can now remember it was like nothing else I have ever seen in robotics until I saw, briefly, something like that pattern during my stay on Solaria.

  “The Solarian pattern seemed familiar to me, but I didn’t know why. It took some weeks of intense thought before I dredged out of some well-hidden part of my unconscious mind the slippery thought of that pattern I had dreamed out of nothing twenty-five decades ago.

  “Even though I can’t remember my pattern exactly, I know that the Solarian pattern was a whiff of it and no more. It was just the barest suggestion of something I had captured in miraculously complex symmetry. But I looked at the Solarian pattern with the experience I had gained in twenty-five decades of deep immersion in robotics theory and it suggested telepathy to me. If that simple, scarcely interesting pattern suggested it, what must my original have meant—the thing I invented as a child and have never recaptured since?”

  Amadiro said, “You keep saying that you’re coming to the point, Vasilia. Would I be completely unreasonable if I asked you to stop moaning and reminiscing and simply set out that point in a simple, declarative sentence?”

  Vasilia said, “Gladly. What I am telling you, Kelden, is that, without my ever knowing it, I converted Giskard into a telepathic robot and that he has been one ever since.”

  62

  Amadiro looked at Vasilia for a long time and, because the story seemed to have come to an end, he returned to the salmon mousse and ate some of it thoughtfully.

  He then said, “Impossible! Do you take me for an idiot?”