RA1 - Changeling, Isaac Asimov's Robot City-Robots and Aliens Book 1 - Stephen Leigh

VIP免费
2024-12-03 0 0 650.01KB 77 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Changeling - Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens, Book One
Books in the Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Robots and Aliens™ series
BOOK 1: CHANGELING by Stephen Leigh
BOOK 2: RENEGADE by Cordell Scotten
BOOK 3: INTRUDER by Robert Thurston
BOOK 4: ALLIANCE by Jerry Oltion
BOOK 5: MAVERICK by Bruce Bethke
BOOK 6: HUMANITY by Jerry Oltion
ISAAC ASIMOV’S
ROBOT CITY
ROBOTS
AND ALIENS
Changeling by Stephen Leigh
Copyright © 1989
To Megen and Devon
Who are already exploring their own sense of wonder and who have given new meaning to mine.
ROBOTS AND ALIENS
ISAAC ASIMOV
You may have noticed (assuming that you have read my robot stories and novels) that I have not had occasion to
discuss the interaction of robots and aliens. In fact, at no point anywhere in my writing has any robot met any alien.
In very few of my writings have human beings met aliens, in fact.
You may wonder why that is so, and you might suspect that the answer would be, “I don’t know. That’s just the way
I write stories, I guess.” But if that is what you suspect, you are wrong. I will be glad to explain just why things are as
they are.
The time is 1940...
In those days, it was common to describe “Galactic Federations” in which there were many, many planets, each with
its own form of intelligent life. E. E. (“Doc”) Smith had started the fashion, and John W. Campbell had carried it on.
There was, however, a catch. Smith and Campbell, though wonderful people, were of northwest European extraction
and they took it for granted that northwest Europeans and their descendants were the evolutionary crown and peak.
Neither one was a racist in any evil sense, you understand. Both were as kind and as good as gold to everyone, but
they knew they belonged to the racial aristocracy.
Well, then, when they wrote of Galactic Federations, Earthmen were the northwest Europeans of the Galaxy. There
were lots of different intelligences in Smith’s Galaxy but the leader was Kimball Kinnison, an Earthman (of
file:///E|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Princess%20...and%20Aliens%20Book%201%20-%20Stephen%20Leigh.htm (1 of 77)11/19/2005 4:01:09 AM
Changeling - Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens, Book One
northwest European extraction, I’m sure). There were lots of different intelligences in Campbell’s Galaxy, but the
leaders were Arcot, Wade, and Morey, who were Earthmen (of northwest European extraction, I’m sure).
Well, in 1940, I wrote a story called “Homo Sol”, which appeared in the September 1940 issue of Astounding
Science Fiction. I, too, had a Galactic Federation composed of innumerable different intelligences, but I had no brief
for northwest Europeans. I was of East European extraction myself and my kind was being trampled into oblivion by
a bunch of northwest Europeans. I was therefore not intent on making Earthmen superior. The hero of the story was
from Rigel and Earthmen were definitely a bunch of second-raters.
Well, Campbell wouldn’t allow it. Earthmen had to be superior to all others, no matter what. He forced me to make
some changes and then made some himself, and I was frustrated. On the one hand, I wanted to write my stories
without interference; on the other hand, I wanted to sell to Campbell. What to do?
I wrote a sequel to “Homo Sol”, a story called “The Imaginary”, in which only the aliens appeared. No Earthmen.
Campbell rejected it; it appeared in the November 1942 issue of Superscience Stories.
Then inspiration struck. If I wrote human/alien stories, Campbell would not let me be. If I wrote alien-only stories,
Campbell would reject them. So why not write human-only stories. I did. When I got around to making another
serious attempt at dealing with a Galactic society, I made it an all-human Galaxy and Campbell had no objections at
all. Mine was the first such Galaxy in science fiction history, as far as I know, and it proved phenomenally
successful, for I wrote my Foundation (and related) novels on that basis.
The first such story was “Foundation” itself, which appeared in the May 1942 Astounding Science Fiction.
Meanwhile, it had also occurred to me that I could write robot stories for Campbell. I didn’t mind having Earthmen
superior to robots—at least just at first. The first robot story that Campbell took was “Reason”, which appeared in the
April 1941 Astounding Science Fiction. Those stories, too, proved very popular, and presuming upon their
popularity, I gradually made my robots better and wiser and more decent than human beings and Campbell continued
to take them.
This continued even after Campbell’s death, and now I can’t think of a recent robot story in which my robot isn’t far
better than the human beings he must deal with. I think of “Bicentennial Man”, “Robot Dreams”, “Too Bad” and,
most of all, I think of R. Daneel and R. Giskard in my robot novels.
But the decision I made in the heat of World War II and in my resentment of Campbell’s assumption have stayed
with me. My Galaxy is still all-human, and my robots still meet only humans.
This doesn’t mean that (always assuming I live long enough) it’s not possible I may violate this habit of mine in the
future. The ending of my novel Foundation and Earth makes it conceivable that in the sequel I may introduce aliens
and that R. Daneel will have to deal with them. That’s not a promise because actually I haven’t the faintest idea of
what’s going to happen in the sequel, but it is at least conceivable that aliens may intrude on my close-knit human
societies.
(Naturally, I repel, with contempt, any suggestion that I don’t introduce aliens into my stories because I “can’t handle
them.” In fact, my chief reason for writing my novel The Gods Themselves was to prove to anyone who felt he
needed the proof, that I could, too, handle aliens. No one can doubt that I proved it, but I must admit that even in The
Gods Themselves, the aliens and the human beings didn’t actually meet face-to-face.)
But let’s move on. Suppose that one of my robots did encounter an alien intelligence. What would happen?
Problems of this sort have occurred to me now and then but I never felt moved to make one the basis of a story.
Consider— How would a robot define a human being in the light of the three laws. The First Law, it seems to me,
offers no difficulty: “A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to
harm.”
Fine, there need be no caviling about the kind of a human being. It wouldn’t matter whether they were male or
female, short or tall, old or young, wise or foolish. Anything that can define a human being biologically will suffice.
The Second Law is a different matter altogether: “A robot must obey orders given it by a human being except where
that would conflict with the First Law.”
That has always made me uneasy. Suppose a robot on board ship is given an order by someone who knows nothing
about ships, and that order would put the ship and everyone on board into danger. Is the robot obliged to obey? Of
file:///E|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Princess%20...and%20Aliens%20Book%201%20-%20Stephen%20Leigh.htm (2 of 77)11/19/2005 4:01:09 AM
Changeling - Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens, Book One
course not. Obedience would conflict with the First Law since human beings would be put into danger.
That assumes, however, that the robot knows everything about ships and can tell that the order is a dangerous one.
Suppose, however, that the robot is not an expert on ships, but is experienced only in, let us say, automobile
manufacture. He happens to be on board ship and is given an order by some landlubber and he doesn’t know whether
the order is safe or not.
It seems to me that he ought to respond, “Sir, since you have no knowledge as to the proper handling of ships, it
would not be safe for me to obey any order you may give me involving such handling.”
Because of that, I have often wondered if the Second Law ought to read, “A robot must obey orders given it by
qualified human beings...”
But then I would have to imagine that robots are equipped with definitions of what would make humans “qualified”
under different situations and with different orders. In fact, what if a landlubber robot on board ship is given orders
by someone concerning whose qualifications the robot is totally ignorant.
Must he answer, “Sir, I do not know whether you are a qualified human being with respect to this order. If you can
satisfy me that you are qualified to give me an order of this sort, I will obey it.”
Then, too, what if the robot is faced by a child of ten—indisputably human as far as the First Law is concerned. Must
the robot obey without question the orders of such a child, or the orders of a moron, or the orders of a man lost in the
quagmire of emotion and beside himself?
The problem of when to obey and when not to obey is so complicated and devilishly uncertain that I have rarely
subjected my robots to these equivocal situations.
And that brings me to the matter of aliens.
The physiological difference between aliens and ourselves matters to us—but then tiny physiological or even cultural
differences between one human being and another also matter. To Smith and Campbell, ancestry obviously mattered;
to others skin color matters, or gender or eye shape or religion or language or, for goodness sake, even hairstyle.
It seems to me that to decent human beings, none of these superficialities ought to matter. The Declaration of
Independence states that “All men are created equal.” Campbell, of course, argued with me many times that all men
are manifestly not equal, and I steadily argued that they were all equal before the taw. If a law was passed that
stealing was illegal, then no man could steal. One couldn’t say, “Well, if you went to Harvard and were a seventh-
generation American you can steal up to one hundred thousand dollars; if you’re an immigrant from the British Isles,
you can steal up to one hundred dollars; but if you’re of Polish birth, you can’t steal at all.” Even Campbell would
admit that much (except that his technique was to change the subject).
And, of course, when we say that “All men are created equal” we are using “men” in the generic sense including both
sexes and all ages, subjected to the qualification that a person must be mentally equipped to understand the difference
between right and wrong.
In any case, it seems to me that if we broaden our perspective to consider non-human intelligent beings, then we must
dismiss, as irrelevant, physiological and biochemical differences and ask only what the status of intelligence might
be.
In short, a robot must apply the Laws of Robotics to any intelligent biological being, whether human or not.
Naturally, this is bound to create difficulties. It is one thing to design robots to deal with a specific non-human
intelligence, and specialize in it, so to speak. It is quite another to have a robot encounter an intelligent species whom
it has never met before.
After all, different species of living things may be intelligent to different extents, or in different directions, or subject
to different modifications. We can easily imagine two intelligences with two utterly different systems of morals or
two utterly different systems of senses.
Must a robot who is faced with a strange intelligence evaluate it only in terms of the intelligence for which he is
programmed? (To put it in simpler terms, what if a robot, carefully trained to understand and speak French,
encounters someone who can only understand and speak Farsi?)
Or suppose a robot must deal with individuals of two widely different species, each manifestly intelligent. Even if he
file:///E|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Princess%20...and%20Aliens%20Book%201%20-%20Stephen%20Leigh.htm (3 of 77)11/19/2005 4:01:09 AM
Changeling - Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens, Book One
understands both sets of languages, must he be forced to decide which of the two is the more intelligent before he can
decide what to do in the face of conflicting orders—or which set of moral imperatives is the worthier?
Someday, this may be something I will have to take up in a story but, if so, it will give me a lot of trouble.
Meanwhile, the whole point of the Robot City volumes is that young writers have the opportunity to take up the
problems I have so far ducked. I’m delighted when they do. It gives them excellent practice and may teach me a few
things, too.
PROLOGUE
A SYNOPSIS OF ROBOT CITY, BOOKS 1-6
He woke up...somewhere.
He didn’t know where he was or how he had managed to get there. He didn’t remember anything of his past.
Not even his name.
He was in some small capsule without windows. He could not even see where he was going.
His awakening had stirred a computer into life, and through its positronic personality he found that he was in a
Massey lifepod. A badge on his clothing identified him as Derec—the name seemed to fit as well as anything. The
positronic intelligence built into the lifepod could help him with very little; it had no information to aid him at all, not
even the name of the ship from which it had been ejected.
The lifepod had landed on an asteroid that Derec quickly found was inhabited by a colony of robots. He seemed to be
the only human there. The robots were as little help to him as the lifepod. Strangely silent about their task, they
ignored him for the most part. They were obviously looking for something buried in the rock of the asteroid—it
seemed to be the only explanation. While he tried to decipher just what it was they were looking for and why, a
raider ship appeared.
While the robot colony prepared to self-destruct, Derec made a desperate attempt to escape from the asteroid and
contact the raider.
As he was doing so, the raider’s bombardment uncovered a shiny silver object, perhaps five centimeters by fifteen
centimeters. He would later learn that it was called a “Key to Perihelion.” A pursuing robot revealed that this was the
object for which the robots were so obsessively searching.
Derec grabbed the Key and jumped. With the power of his augmented worksuit and the almost nonexistent gravity of
the asteroid, he reached escape velocity, angling for the raider. But suddenly his faceplate was filled with a glaring
blue light, and he was knocked unconscious.
He awoke on the raider ship and was confronted by a strange creature: wolf-like but with fingers instead of paws and
a flattened, fur-covered face. The alien’s name, as best he could pronounce it, was Wolruf. The creature escorted
Derec to Aranimas, the captain of the raider ship, which seemed to be a jumble of half a dozen or more ships welded
together in a patchwork maze.
Aranimas was also an alien, a humanoid of the Erani race, and very dangerous. Using a form of electrical prod, he
tortured Derec to gain information as to what the robots were doing on the asteroid. Derec, of course, could tell him
nothing. Aranimas then ordered Derec to put together a working robot from the salvaged parts from the asteroid and
other raids.
Through Wolruf, Derec learned that Aranimas intended to replace the subservient Narwe race (who functioned as
Aranimas’s crew) with even more docile robots. Derec found that he did indeed seem to know a great deal about
robotics; the knowledge came naturally to him. He managed to salvage one positronic brain and enough working
parts to create a patchwork robot he called Alpha. The most curious thing about the robot was one of its arms: made
of tiny cellular surfaces that seemed infinitely malleable, it could literally shape itself into any form needed. Derec
remembered that many of the structures on the asteroid bore that same unique design, and he was filled with a desire
to meet the inventor of this new substance.
Aranimas’s constant mistreatment of Derec, Wolruf, and the Narwe made Derec determined to escape. With the use
of Alpha, he and Wolruf successfully mutinied against Aranimas. They also met another prisoner on the ship, a
file:///E|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Princess%20...and%20Aliens%20Book%201%20-%20Stephen%20Leigh.htm (4 of 77)11/19/2005 4:01:09 AM
Changeling - Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens, Book One
human female named Katherine Ariel Burgess. Derec recovered the Key to Perihelion, and they escaped Aranimas’s
ship, landing on a refueling station.
There Derec learned that Kate claimed to know something of his past but stubbornly refused to talk to him about it.
He learned too, that she was suffering from some type of debilitating disease herself, and she also refused to talk
about that.
The robots on the refueling station had taken the Key to Perihelion, and now it seemed that the bureaucrats who ran
the Spacer society were also after the Key. Derec, with Ariel and Wolruf’s help, recovered it. Through a mistake,
Kate activated the Key while Derec was holding it. In an instant, the two were transported to Perihelion, a cold,
formless place of gray fog. Pressing the switch on the Key again, they found themselves on top of a huge pyramidal
tower in the middle of a city.
The Compass Tower of Robot City.
They were to find that Robot City was an intriguing place. The material of which it was composed was shaped like
tiny Keys of Perihelion, and the city itself was undergoing constant change. Buildings would appear and move
overnight. There was a constant blaze of activity by the millions of robots in the city, who claimed to be preparing
this place for human inhabitants, though at the moment, the only humans here were Derec and Kate.
The city was in trouble. Nightly deluges raced through the streets, uncontrollable. Huge lightning storms daily
menaced them. And there was a murdered human, a human named David who had looked exactly like Derec. Derec
slowly realized that the city—as one robotic entity—was responding to what it considered to be a Third Law threat to
its existence. The threat was David’s blood; more specifically, the microbes in it. The rainstorms were a byproduct of
the city’s enormous and uncontrolled growth in response to that perceived threat. To save the city, he reprogrammed
the central computer core to deactivate the city’s defenses.
At the same time, Kate made an effort to recover the Key to Perihelion, which she had hidden in the Compass Tower.
It was gone. She and Derec were trapped here.
They found that the city robots had taken the original Key and were making duplicates of it. In the course of trying to
steal one of the Keys, Derec and Kate began to develop a trust for each other.
Kate admitted to Derec that her real name was Ariel Welsh. She was the daughter of a wealthy Auroran patron of the
sciences. Her mother had furnished one Dr. Avery the funds to design and build his pet project. Avery was an
eccentric, argumentative genius who wanted to create on-going, self-sufficient cities to seed the stars for humankind.
Avery, though, had disappeared. Robot City, Ariel guessed, was his original experiment, now running without
Avery’s control. As for Ariel, she had been banished from Aurora because of her incurable disease, contracted from a
Spacer. Given a ship and funds by her mother, she’d gone looking for a cure.
It was imperative for her to leave Robot City if she was going to live.
In the meantime, Robot City had acquired another human visitor: Jeff Leong, whose ship had exploded just outside
the atmosphere. He was badly injured; to save him, the robots of Robot City turned him into a cyborg: a human brain
encased in a robotic body. Insufficient knowledge of the bio-chemical structure of the brain led to Jeff’s slow
insanity, though otherwise the surgery was a complete success.
Alpha and Wolruf had also made their way to the city via a modified Massey lifepod, big enough for only one
human.
With Alpha and Wolruf’s help, Derec and Ariel were able to capture the increasingly violent and unstable cyborg.
Using Derec’s body as a model, the medical technicians of Robot City were able to transplant Jeff’s brain back into
his own newly healed body. However, he remained ill and largely out of his senses.
Alpha, during the capture of Jeff, had received instructions from the cellular material in his flexible arm ordering the
robot to change its name to Mandelbrot. Derec suspected that the arm, from an Avery-style robot, might well have
also sent a signal to Avery to return to Robot City.
A choice had to be made: let Ariel take the lifepod and escape, or send Jeff back. Ariel insisted that Jeff must be the
one to go.
file:///E|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Princess%20...and%20Aliens%20Book%201%20-%20Stephen%20Leigh.htm (5 of 77)11/19/2005 4:01:09 AM
Changeling - Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens, Book One
Robot City continued its fascinating evolution. Not long after Jeff’s departure, the behavior of the robots began to
show definitely odd tendencies. Circuit Breaker appeared: a building like two four-sided pyramids stuck together at
their bases and balanced on one point. The building, the first work of creative art built by a robot, reflected ever-
changing colors as it rotated. Three robots, calling themselves the Three Cracked Cheeks, formed a Dixieland jazz
band. All this came about as an effort by the city to formulate what it called the Laws of Humanics—corollaries to
the Three Laws of Robotics. The Laws of Humanics were supposed to govern—or at least explain—the actions of
human beings as the Three Laws of Robotics governed those of positronic intelligence.
The most serious and unusual event in all the strangeness was that a robot was murdered by another robot. Lucius,
the creator of Circuit Breaker, was found with all its positronic circuitry deliberately destroyed, so that the brain
could never be reconstructed. It seemed a deliberate attempt to stifle the advances made by the Avery robots.
In the midst of this, Avery himself returned to the city, and Derec, Ariel, Wolruf, and Mandelbrot quickly discovered
that the doctor was a dangerous megalomaniac. All that mattered to Avery was his work; he could not have cared less
about Ariel’s illness or the plight of the others. All that mattered to him was Robot City. He had stationed Hunter-
Seeker robots around the area to take all of them prisoner until he could analyze all that had happened here—in
whatever way was most convenient to him.
They were taken prisoner, and Derec, unknowingly, was given a dose of chemfets: miniature replicas of the city
material that took residence in his bloodstream.
Escaping at last, Derec, Ariel, Wolruf, and Mandelbrot left Robot City on Dr. Avery’s ship. There, in a hidden
compartment, they found a Key to Perihelion.
It was obvious that Avery anticipated their escape, for the ship was sabotaged. Without the ability to home in on the
navigational beacons, they could not program the jumps through hyperspace. Ariel had also taken a definite turn for
the worse. Derec decided that he and Ariel must use the Key to Perihelion to try to get help for her. Wolruf and
Mandelbrot would remain with the ship and try to complete repairs or attract help from another ship.
Derec activated the Key, and he and Ariel found themselves in an apartment on Earth. They found Earth society
paranoid and isolated, with extremely xenophobic attitudes toward Spacers. However, Ariel was getting
progressively weaker, and Derec in desperation took her to a local hospital. If Earth was backward in some ways, it
seemed that its medical facilities were better than Aurora’s. They recognized her disease—amnemonic plague—and
cured her.
Unfortunately, the chemfets in Derec’s body were asserting their presence, and he was rapidly getting weaker
himself. With the help of R. David, an Earth robot, they stole a ship from an Earth spaceport and headed out to rescue
Wolruf and Mandelbrot.
Another spaceship followed them: Aranimas, who had tracked the bursts of Key static to Earth. In a tense battle,
Derec and Ariel, with Mandelbrot and Wolruf, managed to destroy Aranimas’s ship at great cost to their own vessels.
They had only one option left to them with Derec growing weaker: use the Key to jump back to Robot City.
They emerged from the Compass Tower into Avery’s vacant office, intending to force the doctor into helping Derec.
To find him, Wolruf and Mandelbrot went into the city, while Derec and Ariel began searching the tunnels
underneath the tower.
Mandelbrot and Wolruf found that the robots were all following the orders of what they called the Migration
Program. They were leaving the first Robot City and seeking new worlds on which to build. And when they returned
to Compass Tower, they found that Hunter-Seeker robots were searching for Derec and Ariel, who had fled.
Above the planet, a small spacecraft arrived, carrying Jeff Leong. Back to normal, he was returning to rescue the
others. Meeting with Derec and company, he was determined to help them find Dr. Avery.
It was actually Dr. Avery who found them, the Hunter-Seeker robots capturing the company one by one. The Doctor
revealed that Derec was actually David Avery, Dr. Avery’s son, and that the chemfets in his body would one day
allow him to control every Avery robot in existence. Derec would become Robot City.
But Avery had believed Derec would be a willing partner in his plans. He was very wrong in that. Derec used his
file:///E|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Princess%20...and%20Aliens%20Book%201%20-%20Stephen%20Leigh.htm (6 of 77)11/19/2005 4:01:09 AM
Changeling - Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens, Book One
new control of the city to free his companions; Dr. Avery triggered a Key to Perihelion before he could be captured.
He fled into the void.
Derec and the others gave no thought to pursuit. At last, they were safe and free to leave.
It seemed reward enough....
ISAAC ASIMOV’S
ROBOT CITY
ROBOTS
AND ALIENS
Changeling
CHAPTER 1
BIRTH
“I feel uneasy about this, Dr. Anastasi.”
Janet Anastasi glanced up with a half-smile. She brushed blond hair back from bright, hazel eyes cupped in smile
lines. “And just how does a robot feel ‘uneasy,’ Basalom?” she asked with a laugh.
Basalom’s eyes blinked, a shutter membrane flickering momentarily over the optical circuits. Janet had deliberately
built in that random quirk. She built idiosyncrasies into all her robots-eccentricities of speech, of mannerisms. The
foibles seemed to make Basalom and the rest less mechanically predictable. To her, they lent the robots individual
personalities they otherwise lacked.
“The term is simply an approximation, Doctor.”
“Hmm.” She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and wiped it on the leg of her pants. “Give me
a hand with this, will you, my friend?”
The two were in the cargo hold of a small ship. A viewscreen on one wall showed the mottled blue-and-white curve
of the planet they were orbiting. Twin moons peered over the shoulder of the world, and the land mass directly below
them was green with foliage. It seemed a pastoral land from this distance, no matter what the reality might actually
be. Janet knew that the atmosphere of the world was within terran norms, that the earth was fertile, and that there was
life, though without any signs of technology: the ship’s instruments had told her that much. The world, whatever the
inhabitants might call it, fit her needs. Beyond that, she didn’t care.
Her husband of many years ago, Wendell Avery, had said during their breakup that she didn’t care about anything
made of simple flesh—not him, not their son. “You’re afraid to love something that might love you back,” he’d
raged.
“Which makes us exactly the same, doesn’t it?” she’d shouted back at him. “Or can’t the genius admit that he has
faults? Maybe it’s just because you don’t like the fact that I’m the one who’s considered the robotic expert? That’s it,
isn’t it, Wendell? You can’t love anyone else because your own self-worship takes up all the space in your heart.”
His remark had made her furious at the time, but time had softened the edges of her anger. Avery might be a
conceited, egocentric ass, but there had been some truth in what he’d said. She’d looked in that mirror too often and
seen herself backing away from contact with other people to be with her robots. Surely she’d been content here on
this ship for the last few years, with only Basalom and a few other robots for company.
Avery she missed not at all; her son sometimes she missed terribly. Basalom and the others had become her surrogate
file:///E|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Princess%20...and%20Aliens%20Book%201%20-%20Stephen%20Leigh.htm (7 of 77)11/19/2005 4:01:09 AM
Changeling - Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens, Book One
children.
“Gently,” she cautioned Basalom. A spheroid of silvery-gray metal approximately two meters in diameter sat on the
workbench before her, its gleaming surface composed of tiny dodecahedral segments. She’d just finished placing the
delicate, platinum-iridium sponge of a positronic brain into a casing within the lumpy sphere. Now Basalom draped
the sticky lace of the neural connections over the brain and sealed the top half of the casing. The geometric segments
molded together seamlessly.
“You can put it in the probe,” Janet told the robot, then added: “What’s this about being uneasy?”
“You have built me very well, Doctor; that is the only reason I sense anything at all. I am aware of a millisecond
pause in my positronic relays due to possible First Law conflicts,” Basalom replied as he carefully lifted the sphere
and moved it to the launching tube. “While there is no imminent danger of lock-up, nor is this sufficient to cause any
danger of malfunction or loss of effectiveness, it’s my understanding that humans feel a similar effect when
presented with an action that presents a moral conflict. Thus, my use of the human term.”
Janet grinned, deepening the lines netting her eyes. “Longwinded, but logical enough, I suppose.”
Basalom blinked again. “Brevity is more desired than accuracy when speaking of human emotions?”
That elicited a quick laugh. “Sometimes, Basalom. Sometimes. It’s a judgment call, I’m afraid. Sometimes it doesn’t
matter what you say so long as you just talk.”
“I am not a good judge when it comes to human emotions, Doctor.”
“Which puts you in company with most of us, I’m afraid.” Janet clamped the seals on the probe’s surface and patted
it affectionately. LEDs glowed emerald on the launching tube’s panel as she closed the access.
“What does a human being do when he or she is uneasy, Doctor Anastasi?”
Janet shrugged, stepping back. “It depends. If you believe in something, you go ahead with it. You trust your
judgment and ignore the feeling. If you never have any doubts, you’re either mad or not thinking things through.”
“Then you have reservations about your experiment as well, but you will still launch the probe.”
“Yes,” she answered. “If people were so paralyzed by doubt that they never did anything without being certain of the
outcome, there’d never be children, after all.”
As Janet watched, Basalom seemed to ponder that. The robot moved a step closer to the controls for the launching
tube; its hand twitched—another idiosyncrasy. The robot seemed to be on the verge of wanting to say more. The
glimmer of a thought struck her. “Basalom?”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“Would you care to launch this probe?”
Blink. Twitch. For a moment, the robot didn’t move. Janet thought perhaps it would not, then the hand reached out
and touched the contact. “Thank you, Doctor,” Basalom said, and pressed.
Serried lights flashed; there was a chuff of escaping air, and the probe was flung into the airless void beyond.
Basalom turned to watch it on the viewscreen; Janet watched him.
“You never said what your reservations were exactly, Basalom,” she noted.
“These new robots—with your programming, so much is left for them to decide. Yes, the Three Laws are imbedded
in the positronic matrix, but you have given them no definition of ‘human.”‘
“You wonder what will happen?”
“If they one day encounter human beings, will they recognize them? Will they respond as they are supposed to
respond?”
Janet shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s the beauty of it, Basalom. I don’t know.”
“If you say so, Doctor. But I don’t understand that concept.”
“They’re seeds. Formless, waiting seeds coded only with the laws. They don’t even know they’re robots. I’m curious
to see what they grow up to be, my friend.”
Janet turned and watched the hurtling probe wink in sunlight as it tumbled away from the ship. It dwindled as it fell
into the embrace of the world’s gravity and was finally lost in atmospheric glare. Janet sighed.
“This one’s planted,” she said. She took a deep breath. “Now let’s get out of here,” she said.
file:///E|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Princess%20...and%20Aliens%20Book%201%20-%20Stephen%20Leigh.htm (8 of 77)11/19/2005 4:01:09 AM
Changeling - Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens, Book One
CHAPTER 2
THE DOPPLEGANGER
The probe lay encased in mud halfway down a hillside. The once-silvery sides were battered and scorched from the
long fall through the atmosphere; drying streamers of black earth coated the dented sides. Ghostly heat waves
shimmered, and the metallic hull ticked as it cooled and contracted. The echoes of its landing reverberated for a long
time among the hills.
Inside the abused shell, timed relays opened and fed power to the positronic circuitry of the robot nestled in its
protective cradle. The neophyte mind found itself in total darkness. Had it been a living creature, its birth instincts
would have taken over like a sea turtle burrowing from the wet sand to find the shimmering sea. The robot had its
own instinct-analogue—the Three Laws of Robotics. Knowledge of these basic rules flooded the robot’s brightening
awareness.
First Law: A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with
the First Law.
Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not interfere with the First or
Second Laws.
This was the manner in which most of known human space defined the Laws. Any schoolchild of Aurora or Earth or
Solaris could have recited them by rote. But to the fledgling, there was one important, essential difference. To the
fledgling, there were no words involved, only deep, core compulsions. The fledgling had no sense that it had been
built or that it was merely a constructed machine.
It didn’t think of itself as a robot.
It only knew that it had certain instructions it must obey.
As survival instincts, the Laws were enough to spark a response. Second Law governed the fledgling’s first reactions,
enhanced by Third Law resonance. There were imperious voices in its mind: inbuilt programming, speaking a
language it knew instinctively. The robot followed the instructions given it, and more circuits opened.
An opening appeared in the probe’s hull, and the fledgling allowed itself to rollout. The skin of its body shimmered,
the myriad dodecahedral segments flexing and shifting as it stretched like warm putty. The robot extruded
pseudopods to stabilize the round body. Sensory input was taken in through the skin: optical, auditory, tactile, scent.
At the same time, a larger store of basic files was released into the receptive mind: a heavily edited encyclopedia of
carefully chosen knowledge. It paused, searching the programming as it absorbed impressions of its surroundings.
A voice whispered.
Move away from the landing site. Beings may come to investigate; they may be aggressive and dangerous. Hide.
Which left the problem: how to move? The positronic brain searched the files and found an answer. The skin molded
itself further, the pseudopods becoming muscular legs. The robot scuttled away quickly, moving uphill to a stand of
coarse, tall grass. Its round body flattened, the legs retracted; it hunkered down, patient.
As it waited, it inventoried itself dispassionately. The Three Laws overlaid everything else in its mind, but there was
more. Most of its programming, and indeed this very self-evaluation, seemed to be manifestations of the Third Law.
It must protect its own existence; to survive, it must learn as much as possible.
Underneath the Laws was the layer of initial programming, most of which the fledgling had already followed in the
first few minutes of life. Beneath that was a substrate of complex if/then branches. The robot ignored most of those—
they all fed back into the Laws in any case.
Only one set of impulses was immediately needed, and that flowed directly from the Laws. A robot may not harm a
human being. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, the Laws insisted. But what was a human
being?
The programming gave an answer, not a definition but a description: A human being is an intelligent lifeform. So the
fledgling, not knowing what a “robot” was other than a term that applied to itself, knew it had to find human beings,
to protect and serve them. It had to search out an intelligent lifeform.
file:///E|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Princess%20...and%20Aliens%20Book%201%20-%20Stephen%20Leigh.htm (9 of 77)11/19/2005 4:01:09 AM
Changeling - Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens, Book One
It began to formulate a strategy.
The fledgling didn’t move; it continued to wait. Intelligence of necessity implied curiosity. An intelligent lifeform in
the immediate area would have seen the fiery, noisy descent. It would come to investigate the fall. If no life that met
the criterion arrived, then the fledgling would look elsewhere.
The area in which the probe had landed was heavily forested. Tightly packed trees with large, blue-green fronds
huddled nearby and surrounded the grassy, hillside meadow. The area was alive with sound now, and the robot could
see movement in the twilight under the swaying canopy of leaves. The air was temperate and fragrant with damp
earth; the sound of running water trilled not far away. This was a good place, the robot decided. Human beings—
whatever they might be—would probably find this location pleasant. Had they come here, they might well have
stayed.
Afternoon faded to evening. The robot saw several creatures on the hillside, but none displayed any undue interest in
the pod. Once, something with a thin, furred body approached. On muscular hind legs, it stretched out a long, four-
fingered hand to touch the pod, and the robot saw a marsupial pouch on its stomach. Though the versatile hand made
the robot watch closely, the creature did nothing to reveal more than animal intelligence. It wore no clothing, had no
tools, and the robot’s sensitive hearing recorded only meaningless grunts from the beast. The marsupial glanced
around with wide, scarlet-pupiled eyes, nostril slits flapping on its wide, flat head. Then it went back down on all
fours and bounded off. The fledgling decided not to follow. Not yet.
Nightfall came with a surprising quickness after the sun slipped behind the trees; the air temperature dropped as
rapidly. The forest settled into relative quiet as the nocturnal creatures woke and began to prowl. The night was well
lit. The larger of the two moons was full; the smaller, at three-quarters, rose not long after full night.
Somewhere under the trees, a series of coughing barks rose, long and highly modulated. The robot began to listen
closely as the call came again, slightly changed. Another voice answered the first, shorter and deeper; then yet
another, followed by a shivering howl. The intonations were complex and varied, yet obviously from the same
species. Already the fledgling had identified repetitive “syllables” in the phrases.
Twin-shadowed creatures moved under the margins of the trees, sleek and fast. The fledgling counted five of them,
though more may have been lurking farther back in the forest. One of the pack broke away from the group, moving
into moonlight.
The creature was caninoid. At least, it came closest to matching that type in the inbuilt files of the robot’s brain. That
meant little in itself. There was nothing in the robot’s programmed knowledge that said a “human being” could not
be canine. Standing on four legs, the animal stood a meter from shoulder to ground, powerfully built and broad-
chested. The fur was mottled gray and black, glossy with silvered tips; the head was short-muzzled and round, with a
large skull and wide-set, light eyes. The tail was long and furless; it looked nearly prehensile. As the robot watched,
the creature howled again as if in challenge, revealing molars set well back behind a double rank of incisors—an
omnivore, possibly, not strictly a meat-eater. The front legs ended in a clawed paw, but the toes/fingers were long,
separate, and articulated, with a definite closing thumb for grasping. The thick elbow joints seemed capable of a wide
range of motion.
It stared at the pod gleaming in doubled moonlight. It reared up on its hind legs (a female, the robot noted). With a
stabbing motion of her front paw, she gestured: a wave.
Moonlight glinted on something on the creature’s chest, and the fledgling adjusted its vision to see the thing more
clearly: a long, curved fang, hanging on a string of braided vine. Artifact! The word screamed in the fledgling’s
mind, but she continued to wait.
Four others came out of the cover of the trees now, one gray-furred ancient, two adults, and a youngling. They
moved swiftly to the sides of the first but carefully stayed behind her. The adults paced, restless. The ancient
jabbered: half bark, half growl. The leader shook her head. The old one barked again, and the leader turned with a
growl, showing her teeth. She cuffed at the old one, but the raking claws missed as the elder cowered back and lifted
her muzzle to bare the throat in submission. The leader turned her back on the others and stared again at the pod. She
approached the crumpled metal, snuffling.
She sat before it.
file:///E|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Princess%20...and%20Aliens%20Book%201%20-%20Stephen%20Leigh.htm (10 of 77)11/19/2005 4:01:09 AM
摘要：

Changeling-IsaacAsimov'sRobotCity:RobotsandAliens,BookOneBooksintheIsaacAsimov’sRobotCity:RobotsandAliens™seriesBOOK1:CHANGELINGbyStephenLeighBOOK2:RENEGADEbyCordellScottenBOOK3:INTRUDERbyRobertThurstonBOOK4:ALLIANCEbyJerryOltionBOOK5:MAVERICKbyBruceBethkeBOOK6:HUMANITYbyJerryOltionISAACASIMOV’SROBO...

展开>> 收起<<
RA1 - Changeling, Isaac Asimov's Robot City-Robots and Aliens Book 1 - Stephen Leigh.pdf

共77页,预览10页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：77 页 大小：650.01KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-03

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 77
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注