Isaac Asimov's Robots and Aliens 6 - Humanity

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Isaac Asimov's Robots And Aliens 6, Humanity
ISAAC ASIMOV’S
ROBOT CITY
ROBOTS AND ALIENS
Book 6
Humanity by Jerry Oltion
Copyright © 1990
ROBOTS AND EVOLUTION
BY ISAAC ASIMOV
In general, there are two types of change that take place in the Universe:
catastrophic and evolutionary.
A catastrophic change is characterized by a large alteration of conditions in
a short period of time. An evolutionary change is characterized by slow
alterations of conditions over a long period of time.
Clearly, catastrophic change is more dramatic, but if we observe the Universe
around us, it is equally clear that evolutionary change is the rule.
A star shines for anywhere from many millions to many billions of years,
slowly evolving, until it reaches a point where (if it is large enough) there
is an overbalancing, so to speak, and, in the space of a few minutes or a few
hours, it explodes as a supernova and collapses. Catastrophe! But, thereafter,
it exists as a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole, and returns to
prolonged evolutionary change.
Again, a huge cloud of dust and gas slowly circling and condensing undergoes
evolutionary change, until its center reaches the level of temperature and
pressure where nuclear fusion can begin. There is then ignition and a sun is
born. Catastrophe! But, thereafter, a planetary system evolves over the space
of a few million years, achieves equilibrium, and continues to evolve over the
space of a few billion years.
Still again, a planet like Earth can evolve, geologically, over a period of
millions of years, perhaps even billions, undergoing slow changes that result
in sea-floor spreading, moving plates and shifting continents, rising and
eroding of mountain chains, and so on. There are punctuations in the form of
minor catastrophes, an earthquake here, a volcanic eruption there, a sudden
flooding yon, but, beyond and between such events, evolutionary change
proceeds. There is even, once in a while, the chance of a cometary or
asteroidal collision that may bring about a far greater catastrophe, but after
that, too, evolutionary change continues.
Catastrophic changes, because they occur at long intervals (the greater the
catastrophe, the longer, in general, the intervals), because they are sudden,
and because they are often unpredictable, are difficult to study. Evolutionary
changes, however, are always at our doorstep, always available for detailed
and prolonged study.
Following the line of least resistance, then, let us forget about catastrophe—
in this introduction, at least—and concentrate on evolution.
There are two types of evolution that need concern us. First, there is
evolution that is non-directed but takes place only in response to the blind
forces of nature. These are governed, we might say, by the generalizations we
have observed which we call “the laws of nature.”
Second, there is directed evolution, changes that take place in response to
the guiding needs of some intelligence.
Non-directed evolution is what we generally study—the slow changes that take
place in the Universe, in individual stars, in the planet we live on.
Yet, if we consider the daily lives of human beings, surely directed evolution
is the more important. Over the four or five million years of hominid
evolution, human beings have learned to make stone tools, use fire, develop
herding and agriculture, form pottery, invent metallurgical techniques, and
guide technology in multifarious directions. Over the last two and a quarter
centuries we have industrialized the world, and now we have at our disposal
such things as computers and spaceships. In addition, we have developed
cultural as well as technological techniques—and have created literature, art,
and philosophy.
All this has not been in blind and direct obedience to the laws of nature. We
are controlled by those laws, yes, and we have limits set for us by them.
Within those laws, however, humanity and its ancestors have made advances
directed by their own intelligent responses to the needs of life.
You can see the evolutionary nature of human technology if you imagine a
display of all the mechanical devices intended for transportation that have
been produced by humanity—starting with the wheeled carts of the Sumerians
right down to the rocket ships of today.
If you were to study a vast array of these devices carefully arranged in the
direction of increasing complexity and efficiency and allowed to branch off in
different directions—land vehicles, water vehicles, air vehicles, those
dragged by human beings, those dragged by animals, those powered by wind or
water, those powered by engines of various shapes—what would your conclusions
be?
If you were a disembodied intelligence from elsewhere, who did not know those
devices were human-made, you might suppose that some non-directed evolutionary
process had taken place; that somehow there was an inherent drive in
transportation devices that would lead them to fill various technological
niches and to do so with increasing specialization and expertise. You would
study ancestral forms, and note how aircraft developed from landcraft, for
instance, and find intermediate forms. Or if, in some cases, you found no
intermediate forms, you would blame it on the incompleteness of the record.
You would devise all sorts of technological forces (other than intelligence)
that would account for the changes you see.
But then, when you were all finished and had a complete theory of
technological evolution, someone might tell you, “No, no, you are dealing with
directed evolution. All these objects were created by human intelligence. All
these changes are the result of human experience learning bit by bit to
manufacture devices that more efficiently take care of human needs.”
That might make you think that scientists may have misinterpreted the records
of biological evolution in the same way. We have a vast array of fossils
representing ancient and now-extinct forms of life. We arrange them in such a
way as to show a steady change from simpler to more complex forms, from lesser
to greater variety, from those less like us to those more like us, and from it
all we induce a theory of non-directed biological evolution that involves
forces acting in blind response to the laws of nature.
But can we now say that, as in the case of transportation devices, we were
fooled? Can we imagine the history of life on Earth to be a case of directed
evolution with intelligence (call it “God”) behind every one of the changes?
No, there is a fundamental difference. In the case of technological evolution,
every device, every single device, is human-made. No technological device (of
the kind we have had hitherto) can make others like itself. If human beings
withheld their hands and brains, therefore, technological evolution would stop
at once.
In the case of biological evolution, each device (if we can use the term for a
living organism) produces many more or less like itself, and with no sign of
any direction from outside. It is the imperfection of the process, the fact
that the offspring are not exactly like the parents or like each other, that
directs the evolution.
But can undirected evolution become directed under some conditions?—Clearly,
yes.
Through almost all of Earth’s history, living things had no choice but to
change blindly as a result of random gene mutations, and of slow evolutionary
changes in living conditions. Catastrophes sometimes resulted in mass
extinctions—also unavoidable.
It was only with the coming of Homo sapiens sapiens that a brain finally
existed that was capable of deliberate interference with evolutionary
development. Beginning about ten thousand years ago, human beings began to
breed plants and animals in such a way as to emphasize those characteristics
they considered most valuable. Grains were developed that yielded more food
per acre; animals that produced more meat, or milk, or eggs, or wool; that
were larger, stronger, and more docile.
In a way, we even guided our own evolution, making ourselves more social
beings, more capable of surviving in crowded cities, or in the grip of a
fearfully complex technology. (Not that we fit in very well, but we’ve only
had a short time in which to evolve these characteristics.)
Now we are beginning to be capable of genetic engineering, and our direction
of evolution may become more precise and efficient (if we can make up our
minds as to the particular direction in which it will be safe to proceed).
That brings us to robots, which represent what is perhaps a peculiar middle-
ground between technology and life.
The robots I have pictured in my early robot stories were machines. However
intelligent they seemed, they were as helpless in the grip of technology as a
wheelbarrow was. They were devices that could not reproduce themselves and
that, therefore, could not engage in non-directed evolution. If an improved
robot was desired, a different robot, a more specialized robot, a more
versatile robot, such a thing would have to be constructed by human designers.
Sure enough, as I continued to write my stories, robots did advance, grow more
complicated, more intelligent, more capable—but their evolution remained
directed.
What about the robotic brains? As they approached the human brain in
character, might they not eventually take matters into their own hands? The
brains of my robots, however, are tied tightly to the Three Laws of Robotics,
and that limits them as human brains are not.
But let’s think again. Evolution is a matter of generations, of numerous
individuals, each one slightly different from all the others, coming and
going. A single organism in a single lifetime does not evolve in the
biological sense. An individual chimpanzee does not become a human being, or
even make any step, however small, toward becoming a human being in the course
of its own lifetime.
If an individual organism cannot evolve by itself, it can learn, and the more
complex the brain, the more efficiently and radically it can learn. Learning
is a form of change, if not biologically, then at least culturally. This point
does not have to be belabored in connection with human beings, but what about
robots?
I reached a turning point in my own robot stories with the appearance of R.
Daneel Olivaw in The Caves of Steel and of R. Giskard Reventlov in Robots and
Empire. Daneel was a humaniform robot, indistinguishable from human beings if
you don’t count the fact that it was far superior to human beings in a moral
sense. Giskard was metallic but possessed the power of adjusting human
emotions.
Each was sufficiently complex to be capable of learning, despite the weight of
the Three Laws of Robotics. In Robots and Empire, Daneel and Giskard learned
friendship for each other. They also labored with the concept of working for
the good of humanity as something superior to the task of working for the good
of individual human beings, thus groping toward what I called the “Zeroth Law
of Robotics.”
In a way, robots can even offer mental complexities far beyond those in human
beings. What if the “wiring” of a robot brain is replaced with another set but
imperfectly so, so that a robot is aware of two sets of impressions—a kind of
robotic schizophrenia? What if a robot originally intended for a particular
society is forced to perform its functions in an entirely different society?
How does its brain react to that? (This volume of the Robot City series
involves questions of this nature.)
Can the undirected nature of robot evolution also become directed? For
instance, suppose it is the task of robots to form other robots and, in
particular, to design the brain patterns of other robots. This would be the
robotic equivalent of genetic engineering, and robots in this way could direct
their own evolution.
Or if you had humaniform robots like Daneel, and divided them into male and
female with the ability of self-propagation, human fashion, a form of
biological evolution might result—but then the distinction between robots and
human beings would tend to disappear, and with it the possibility of
meaningful robot stories.
CHAPTER 1
HOMECOMING
They had named the starship the Wild Goose Chase, for when they’d left home in
it some of them had doubted that the trip would be of any value. Now the ship
once again orbited its world of origin, and its passengers still wondered
whether they had accomplished anything useful.
They had accomplished plenty; no one disagreed about that. During their
travels they had transformed one of Dr. Avery’s mutable robot cities into a
toy for intelligent aliens, had reprogrammed another robot city to serve an
emerging civilization on yet another alien world, had formulated a set of
rules describing the motivations behind human behavior, had nearly found the
mother to four of the group’s members, and had ended the career of the alien
pirate who had dogged their steps for years. All the same, the operative word
was “useful,” and not one of their actions received the unanimous approval of
the entire crew.
None of them supposed that turning a city into a toy was anything other than
an irritating lesson in futility. Derec and Ariel also had grave reservations
about leaving the other robot city in the hands of the pre-technological Kin.
None of the human complement—nor even Wolruf, their alien companion—cared a
bit for the robots’ “Laws of Humanics,” and though Derec was excited at the
prospect of finding his mother, his father harbored a contrary emotion, and
besides that, they had lost her trail.
Even removing the pirate Aranimas from the picture was only a qualified
success, for though they hadn’t killed him, the moral implications inherent in
their method of dealing with him had driven three of the robots into the
positronic equivalent of catatonia.
It was high time to go home and think about things for a while.
Home in this case meant the original Robot City, an entire planet covered with
Dr. Avery’s mutable, ever-changing cybernetic metropolis. At least it had been
covered in city when they left. Now, however, from their vantage point in
close orbit, it looked like a newly terraformed planet still waiting for
settlers.
Three humans, one alien, and a robot crowded into the starship’s control cabin
to watch it drift by in the viewscreen. They were a motley-looking group by
anyone’s standards. The alien, Wolruf, occupied the pilot’s chair, the demands
of her canine body warping the chair into a configuration a human would have
considered uncomfortable at the very least. Her brown and gold fur had been
carefully brushed, but she wore no clothing or ornamentation over it.
To her right stood Derec, a thin, narrow-faced, blond-haired young man who
carried the impatient look common to explorers. His clothing was utilitarian:
loose pants of soft fabric suitable for anything from Yoga exercises to wiping
up oil spills while dismantling machinery, capped by a plain pullover shirt of
the same material, both in light blue. Snuggled close to his right stood
Ariel, equally thin—though in a softer sort of way—dark-haired, and not as
transparently impatient as her companion. It was obvious she had spent more
time on her wardrobe than he. She, too, wore pants and a blouse, but her
blouse clung where it was supposed to cling, hung loose where loose suited her
figure better, exposed enough skin at neck and waist to suggest but not to
provoke, and together the pale yellow and brown hues of blouse and pants
provided a splash of color to offset Derec’s uniformity.
On the other side of Wolruf stood Dr. Avery.He was an older version of Derec:
shorter, rounder, grayer, moustached, his face not yet wrinkled but showing
the effects of time and much experience. He wore his usual baggy trousers,
white shirt with ruffled collar, and oversized coat today, as most days, in
gray. His expression was one of puzzlement shading over into concern.
Behind the humans stood Mandelbrot, the only one of the four robots on board
present in the control room. He was an old-model robot of steel and plastic
construction—save for his more recently repaired right arm—and he wore no
clothing over his angular body plating, nor did his visual sensors or speaker
grille convey a readable expression.
Derec, his eyes drifting from the viewscreen to his companions and back, was
the first to voice the question all of them were thinking: “You’re sure this
is the right planet?”
Wolruf, swiveling slightly around in the pilot’s chair, nodded her toothsome
head. “Positive.”
“Then what happened to it?” Ariel asked.
“That’s ‘arder to say.” Wolruf pushed a button to lock the viewscreen picture
in place, then moved a slide control upward, increasing the screen’s
magnification until the planet’s mottled surface began to show detail. Where
they had expected to see the sharp angles of buildings and streets, they saw
the tufted tops of trees instead. Narrow pathways wound among the trees, and
as Wolruf increased the magnification still further they saw that the paths
occasionally joined at landmarks ranging from boulders to dead tree stumps to
natural caves. There were no buildings in evidence at all.
The angle of view changed steadily as the ship continued to move in orbit,
until they were looking out rather than down over a sea of treetops. The
picture grew less and less sharp as the angle changed, and after a moment
Derec realized it was because the lower their view angle got, the more
atmosphere they had to look through.
“Try another view,” he said to Wolruf, and the golden-furred alien backed off
the magnification and released the hold. The camera tracked forward again and
the picture became a blur of motion until they once again looked directly
downward from the ship.
A ragged boundary line between the green forest and a lighter green patch of
something else caught Derec ‘ s attention. “There,” he said. “Zoom in on
that.”
When Wolruf did so, they could see a vast meadow of waving grass. It wasn’t
like a farmer’s field, all of one type and all the same height, but rather a
patchwork of various species, some tall, some short, with bushes and the
occasional tree scattered among them. Again there were paths, though fewer
than in the forest, and again the scene lacked any sign of human habitation.
There were inhabitants, though: small knots of four-legged animals grazing
under the watchful eyes of circling hawks or eagles.
“How did they get there?” Dr. Avery demanded.
Derec glanced over at his father, opened his mouth to answer, then thought
better of it. He turned back to Wolruf and said instead, “Let’s try another
view.”
Wolruf provided it. This one showed a barren expanse of sand, punctuated
sporadically by lone stands of cactus. Near the edge of the screen a single
tree cast its shadow across a pool of water. A smallish four-legged animal of
some sort lapped at the water, looking up frequently to check for predators.
“They really took it seriously,” Derec muttered, scratching his head in
bemusement.
“Took what seriously?” Avery demanded. “This is your doing, isn’t it?”
Derec nodded. “I suppose it must be, though I certainly didn’t expect this.”
“What did you expect? What did you order them to do?”
Derec faltered for a starting point, said at last, “You remember our argument
just before we left, when I wanted to use the animals Lucius had created as
the starting point for a real biological ecosystem, but you had the hunter
robots kill all of them instead? Well, when we boarded the ship, I told the
computer to access my files on balanced ecosystems, and to...well...to make
one based on what it found there.”
Avery visibly considered his response to that revelation. His fists clenched
and unclenched, and the tendons in his neck worked as he swallowed. Mandelbrot
took a step toward Derec, readying to protect his master should Avery decide
to attack him physically.
Avery noticed the motion, scowled, and lashed out with a kick to the robot’s
midsection instead. The hollow clang of shoe against metal echoed in the
control room. Concurrent with the kick, Avery shouted, “Why do you always have
to do this to me? Just when I think I’ve got something running smoothly, you
go and throw sand in the works. Literally.” He waved at the screen, still
showing desert, but at such a low angle now that the atmospheric disturbances
between it and the ship made it shimmer as though they were actually standing
in its midday heat.
Mandelbrot had rocked back with the kick, absorbing the blow so Avery wouldn’t
hurt his foot, but that was his only move. Derec looked from his father to the
robot and back again. In a way, Mandelbrot was Derec’s first real achievement
in life. He had reconstructed the robot from parts, and in the years since
then the robot had grown from a servant to a companion. Perhaps for that
reason, Avery had mistreated the poor thing since the day they had met. Derec
had been about to apologize for his mistake with the city, but now, in answer
to Avery’s question, he said simply, “Maybe it’s a family trait.”
They stared at one another for long seconds, their anger weighing heavy in the
room, before Ariel said in disgust, “Boys.” Dismissing them and their
argument, she stepped around Derec to stand beside Wolruf’s chair, saying,
“Can you find any sign of the city at all?”
“Not visually,” the alien admitted, “but we ‘ave other methods.” She spent a
moment at the controls, during which the viewscreen image zoomed out again,
blurred, shifted to false color imaging, and displayed what might have been a
color-coded topographic map.
“Definitely getting neutrino activity,” she said. “So something’ s still using
microfusion powerpacks. “
Derec relinquished the staring match in order to see the viewscreen better.
“Where?” he asked.
“Everywhere,” Wolruf said. “Many sources, scattered allover the planet. Even
more beneath the surface. “
“Has the city gone underground?” asked Ariel.
“We’ll see. “ Wolruf worked a few minutes longer at the controls, explaining
as she went. “I’m trying penetration radar, looking for ‘ollow spots. And sure
enough, there they are.” On the screen a shadowy picture showed the familiar
rectangular forms of a city.
“What’s on the surface above them?” It was Avery, his tone almost civil.
Perhaps as a reward, or perhaps out of her own curiosity, Wolruf replaced the
radar image with the visual once again and they found themselves looking down
on a wide, flatbottomed river valley. The river that had carved it meandered
lazily through stands of trees, past low bluffs covered with grass and bushes,
and on without hindrance out of the viewscreen’ s reach. No remnant of the
city that once covered the planet’s entire surface marred the now perfectly
natural setting, and nothing visible in normal light indicated that below it
lay anything but bedrock.
The sight of bare ground without city on it rekindled Avery’s ire. “And just
how are we supposed to get inside?” he demanded.
Without looking up at him, Ariel said, “There must be access hatches or
something. “
“And how do we find them?”
“By asking.” Mandelbrot paused for the half second or so it took for everyone
to look at him, then added, “I am now in communication with the city’s central
computer. It confirms Ariel ‘ s assertion: elevators to the surface have been
provided in the new city plan. It can direct us to anyone of them we wish to
use.”
Wolruf laughed the gurgling laugh of her kind. “What difference does it make?
It’s all the same anyway.”
“All except the Compass Tower,” said Avery. He looked from Wolruf to Derec.
“Provided it’s still there.”
“It is,” Mandelbrot replied. “The original city programming was inviolate in
its case. It is the only building on the planet that remains above the
surface. “
“Then that’s where we’ll go.”
Wolruf turned to the controls. “Easy enough,” she said. “Zero degrees
latitude, zero longitude. It’s just after dawn there, so we have light. We can
make it on this orbit if we go now. “
“Then do it. The sooner we get down, the sooner I can get my city back to
normal.” Avery favored Derec with a last crusty look, then stalked out of the
control room.
Derec grinned at Ariel and shrugged his shoulders. “Oops.”
She giggled. “ ‘Oops,’ “ he says. “You changed the surface of an entire planet
with a single order, and that’s all you have to say about it? Oops?”
Coming from Avery, those words would have stung, but Ariel meant no harm and
Derec knew it. She thought it was funny, as did he. Robots were always
misinterpreting their orders, always doing things you didn’t expect them to
do; this was just an extreme case. Even so, it wasn’t anything to get upset
over. They would figure out why the city had done what it had, correct the
problem, and that would be that.
“Deceleration coming up in seven minutes,” Wolruf warned.
Derec looked out the viewscreen. Wolruf had aligned the ship so they were
aimed just above the horizon behind them in orbit. Internal gravity had kept
the ship’s occupants from feeling any of her maneuvering, as it would keep
them from feeling the braking thrust, but Wolruf’s warning carried with it an
implicit suggestion: time to strap in. Cabin gravity compensated for planned
motion like rocket thrust, but it was slow to react to unexpected shifts. Air
buffeting on reentry would still throw them around, as would any last-minute
maneuvering the gravity generator couldn’t anticipate.
The ship understood Wolruf’s meaning as well. A week earlier it wouldn’t have—
while attempting to keep the starship from responding to every comment as if
it were an order, Derec and Avery had inadvertently made it ignore the alien’s
orders as well—but they had since fixed that. The ship had functioned
perfectly the entire way home, and it did so now. When Wolruf issued her
warning, two bumps rose up in the floor behind and to either side of her
control chair, molded themselves into more human-style chairs, and swiveled
around to allow Derec and Ariel to seat themselves. When they were
comfortable, waist and shoulder restraints extruded themselves from the arm
and back rests, crossed over the chairs’ occupants, and joined seamlessly to
hold them in.
Mandelbrot remained standing, but the ship grew a holding bar beside him,
which he gripped with his left hand. It seemed inadequate, but with the energy
of a microfusion powerpack behind that hand, he wasn’t going anywhere either.
No doubt Avery, wherever he happened to have gone, was also being coaxed into
a chair, and the three unresponsive robots in the hold were probably being
restrained in some way as well.
The observers in the control cabin watched the planet roll by beneath them
while the countdown ran out; then the descent engine fired and they watched it
roll by a little slower. They could hear the soft roar of the nuclear engines
through the not-quite-soundproof hull, but that and the changing perspective
as they began to fall toward the planet were the only indications that
something was happening,
As they lost orbital velocity and picked up downward velocity, their apparent
speed began to increase. The horizon grew flatter, and they seemed to be
rushing away from it faster and faster. Wolruf turned the ship around until
they were again facing in the direction of motion, and they fell the rest of
the way into the atmosphere. The howl of air rushing past replaced the roar of
the descent engine.
Wolruf was an excellent pilot. She had to be; if she were anything less, the
robotic ship wouldn’t have let her near the controls, for the ship could have
landed itself perfectly without her assistance. That it allowed her to do so
without its assistance was a supreme compliment, one which Wolruf proved she
deserved only seconds from landing.
They had dropped down through a layer of high, thin cloud, and were gliding
now on wings the ship had grown once they’d reached air thick enough to use
them in. The ship had reconfigured its engine into an atmospheric jet, which
Wolruf let idle while they bled off the last of their orbital speed. Through
the viewscreen they could see an undulating sea of treetops rushing by beneath
them, and off in the distance a glittering flat-topped pyramid that had to be
the Compass Tower. Wolruf steered to the right of it, swinging the ship in a
wide circle around the tower while she examined the forest for landing sites.
There were none. The canopy of trees was complete. As she completed the
circle, Wolruf turned her head toward Mandelbrot and asked, “So where are we
supposed to land?”
“On the—” Mandelbrot started to reply, but Derec, who had not looked away from
the viewscreen, saw a sudden flash of movement directly ahead and shouted,
“Look out!”
There came a loud thump and a lurch not quite compensated for by internal
gravity. Wolruf snapped her head back toward the viewscreen just as another
fluttering black shape swept toward them and another thump shook the ship.
In the next instant the air seemed filled with frantic, flapping obstacles.
They were huge birds of some sort, easily three or four meters across. The
ship shuddered under impact after impact, and ragged sections of the
viewscreen went dark as the outside sensors were either obliterated or simply
covered up by their remains. Wolruf howled what was no doubt a colorful oath
in her own tongue, pushed the throttle all the way forward, and pulled back on
the flight controls to take the ship above the flock. Three more birds swept
toward them. Wolruf ducked, but so did the birds; there came a triple hammer
blow to the ship, and suddenly they heeled over and began falling.
“Engine failure,” the autopilot announced.
“Grow another one,” Wolruf commanded it.
“Fabricating. “
Wolruf struggled to right the ship, got it into a glide again, and peered out
between the dark patches in the viewscreen. “We’re too low,” she muttered. “
‘urry up with that engine.”
“I am transmogrifying at top speed. Engine will be operational in four
minutes. “
“We don’t ‘ave four minutes!” Wolruf howled, then immediately added, “Give me
more wing.”
“Expanding wing surface.”
Derec looked over to Ariel, found her looking back at him with wide eyes.
“We’ll make it,” he said, surprised at how calm his voice sounded. She nodded,
evidently not trusting her own voice, and reached out a hand toward him. He
realized that no matter how calm he had sounded, he was gripping his chair
hard enough to leave finger depressions in its yielding surface. He unclenched
his hand and took hers in it, holding more carefully. Together they looked
back to the viewscreen.
The treetops looked as if they were only a few meters below the ship. The view
directly ahead was obscured; Wolruf weaved the ship back and forth to see what
was in their path. Between one weave and the next an especially tall tree
loomed up seemingly from out of nowhere, giving her only time enough to swear
and bank sharply to miss it. The ship lurched as the lower wing clipped
another treetop, but wing proved stronger than wood, and they flew on. Wolruf
leveled them out again and pulled back gently on the flight control to give
them more altitude. They were still moving fairly fast, but slowing noticeably
now.
“We really need that engine,” Wolruf said.
“Two and a half minutes,” the autopilot responded.
“We’ll be down by then,” she muttered. She looked to her left, out a
relatively unobscured section of viewscreen, and came to a decision. With a
cry of “ ‘ang on!” she banked the ship to the left, held the bank until they
were aimed directly at the Compass Tower, then leveled off again.
“The tower is too narrow,” the computer began. “You have too much airspeed to
land on it without reverse thrust—” but it was too late. The Compass Tower
came at them, a slanting wall rising well overhead, visible now through the
clear spots to either side and above. Wolruf held their angle of approach
until it seemed they were about to smash headlong into it, then at the last
moment pulled back hard on the control handle and brought them up almost
parallel to the slanting wall.
The pyramid-shaped tower rose up out of the jungle at about a sixty-degree
angle. They hit at about fifty, give or take a few degrees. The violent lurch
of impact threw everyone against their restraints, and even Mandelbrot took a
step to avoid losing his footing; then with a screech of metal sliding on
metal they skidded up and over the top edge of the tower.
Cabin gravity had died completely in the collision. They felt a sickening
moment of weightlessness, then another lurch as they smashed sideways onto the
flat top and continued to skid along its surface. All four of the control
room’s occupants watched with morbid fascination as the far edge drew nearer.
“Frost, I should’ve gone comer to comer,” Wolruf growled, and for a moment it
seemed as if that would be their epitaph, but as they slid across it the
surface of the tower grew rougher ahead of them, and the ship ground to a halt
with four or five meters to spare.
Derec found that he had nearly crushed Ariel’s hand in his own. He would have
if she hadn’t been gripping him almost as fiercely herself. Breathing hard,
neither of them willing to test their voices yet, they loosened their hold on
each other and flexed their bruised fingers.
Wolruf let out a sigh, pulled her seat restraints loose, and braced herself to
stand on the tilting floor. “Well,” she said, “welcome ‘ome.”
Some hours later, Wolruf stood at the base of the tower and peered out into
the dense jungle surrounding it. She had begged off from the congratulatory
dinner Ariel had suggested, claiming stomach cramps from the anxiety and
excusing herself to go take a run to stretch her muscles. She fully intended
to go for a run, if only to guarantee her solitude, but in truth the reason
she wished to be alone was not stomach cramps but shame. Despite her
companions’ congratulations—even Avery had commended her for her flying skill,
while making a not-so-subtle jab at Derec for creating the birds that had made
that skill necessary in the first place—despite their heartfelt thanks, Wolruf
knew that it was she, not Derec, who was ultimately responsible for the
accident in the first place.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, to circle low above a forest and not watch out for
birds. Especially an unfamiliar forest, full of unfamiliar and unpredictable
species. If she’d pulled a stunt like that at home, she’d have been kicked out
of the training academy so fast her tail wouldn’t even have been caught in the
slammed door.
Yes, she’d shown some quick thinking afterward, had pulled their collective
fat out of the fire, but all the praise she got for that bit of fancy flying
simply galled her all the more. Her initial mistake had nearly killed them
all.
“So you learn from your mistakes,” she growled in her own language, quoting
one of her old instructor’s favorite phrases, but hearing the guttural
gnashing and snarling of her native tongue brought a sudden pang of
homesickness, and she cocked back her head and let fly a long, plaintive howl.
An echo bounced back at her from the trees. Then, faintly, coming from far
deeper in the jungle, she heard an answering cry.
A cold shiver ran down her back at the sound of it. It wasn’t exactly an
answer—not in words, at any rate—but the meaning was just as clear as her own
howl had been. You are not alone.
And just who might be making so bold an assertion on this planet so recently
filled only with robots? Wolruf had no idea. The odds of it being a member of
her own species were no odds at all; she was the only one of her kind in human
space, and she knew it. But whatever mouth had voiced that cry belonged to a
creature at least similar to herself, and it had given her an open invitation
for companionship.
At the moment she wasn’t feeling picky. She took a deep breath, tilted her
head back and howled again, forgoing words for deeper meaning: 1 am coming.
Not waiting for an answer, she struck off into the trees.
Ariel heard the howling from her room in the apartment they had chosen
practically at random from among thousands in the underground city. The
windows were viewscreens, currently set to show the scene from partway up the
Compass Tower, and they evidently transmitted sound as well. Ariel had been
brushing out her hair; she stopped with the brush still tangled in a stubborn
knot of dark curls, stepped to the window, and listened. Another howl echoed
through the forest, and another. One was recognizably Wolruf, but not both. A
bird added a shriek of alarm—or perhaps derision—to the exchange.
Some primitive instinct triggered her hormonal reflexes, dumping adrenaline
into her bloodstream, readying her to fight or flee should either need arise.
She felt her pulse rate quicken, felt the flush of sudden heat in her skin.
The howls came again.
She swallowed the taste of fear. She was ten levels below ground! “So strange,
摘要：

IsaacAsimov'sRobotsAndAliens6,HumanityISAACASIMOV’SROBOTCITYROBOTSANDALIENSBook6HumanitybyJerryOltionCopyright©1990ROBOTSANDEVOLUTIONBYISAACASIMOVIngeneral,therearetwotypesofchangethattakeplaceintheUniverse:catastrophicandevolutionary.Acatastrophicchangeischaracterizedbyalargealterationofconditionsi...

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