A Heritage of Stars (22 page)

“The gossipers,” said Cushing. “That is what they are—robotic interstellar probes. The Team looks on them as story tellers.”

“The Team,” said the A and R, “are a pair of busybodies from some very distant planet who intend some day to write what might be called “The Decline and Fall of Technological Civilizations.' They have been vastly puzzled here, and I've made no attempt to set them straight. As a matter of fact, I've made it my business to further puzzle them. If I gave them any help, they would hang around for another hundred years, and I don't want that. I've had enough of them.

“The travelers—those probes you call the gossipers—could be made far more cheaply than starships. The research and development was costly, but once the design was perfected, with the various sensors all worked out, the information processing design—so that the probes could use their own data to work out information instead of just bringing back to us masses of raw data—once all this was done, they could be made much more cheaply than the ships. We built and programmed them by the hundreds and sent them out. In a century or so, they began coming back, each of them crammed with the information he'd collected and stored as code in his memory storage. There have been a few of them who have not come back. I suppose that accidents of various kinds might have happened to them. By the time the first of them started coming back, however, the Collapse had come about, and there were no humans left at this station. Myself and a few other robots, that was all. Now even the few other robots are gone. Through the years, there has been attrition: one of them killed in a rockfall; another falling victim to a strange disease—which puzzles me exceedingly, since such as we should be disease-immune. Another electrocuted in a moment of great carelessness, for despite the candle, we do have electricity. It is supplied by the solar panels that top this building. The candle is because we have run out of bulbs and there is no way to replace them. But, however that may be, in one way or another all the robots but myself became dysfunctional until only I was left.

“When the travelers came back, we transferred their coded data to the central storage facility in this place, reprogrammed them and sent them out again. In the course of the last few centuries I have not sent them out again as they came back. There has seemed little sense in doing so. Our storage banks are already crowded almost to capacity. As I transferred the data, I should, I suppose, have deactivated the travelers and stored them away, but it seemed a shame to do so. They do enjoy life so much. While the transfer to the central banks removes all the actual data, there is a residue of impressions remaining in the probes, only a shadow of the information that they carried, so that they retain a pseudomemory of what they have experienced and they spend their time telling one another of their great adventures. Some of them got away that first night you arrived, and before I called them back, they had given you a sample of their chatter. They do the same with the Team and I have made no attempt to stop them, for it gives the Team something to do and keeps those two roly-poly worthies off my back.”

“So, laddie boy,” said Meg to Cushing, “you have found your Place of Stars. Not the kind of place you looked for, but an even greater place.”

“What I don't understand,” said Cushing to the A and R, “is why you're talking to us. You sent us word—remember?—that the place was banned to us. What made you change your mind?”

“You must realize,” said the A and R, “the need for security in a place as sensitive as this. When we began developing the facility, we looked for an isolated location. We planted the belt of Trees, which were genetically programmed to keep all intruders out, and planted around and outside the belt a ring of living rocks. The Trees were a passive defense; the rocks, if need be, active. Over the years, the rocks have been largely dispersed. Many of them have wandered off. The Trees were supposed to keep them in control, but in many cases this has not worked out. At the time this station was established, it seemed to be apparent that civilization was moving toward collapse, which meant not only that the station should be kept as secret as possible but that defenses be set up. Our hope was, of course, that collapse could be staved off for another few hundred years. If that had been possible, we might have been able to offer some assurance that we were working toward solutions. But we were given somewhat less than a hundred years. For a long time after the Collapse came about, we held our breath. By that time the Trees were well grown, but they probably would not have held against a determined attack made with flamethrowers or artillery. But our remote situation, plus the secrecy which had surrounded the project, saved us. The mobs that finally erupted to bring about the Collapse probably were too busy, even had they known of us, to take any notice of us. There were richer pickings elsewhere.”

“But this doesn't explain what happened with our party,” said Cushing. “Why did you change your mind?”

“I must explain to you a little further what has happened here,” said the A and R. “After the human population finally died off, there were only robots left and, as I've told you, as the years went on, fewer and fewer of them. There was not much maintenance required, and so long as there were several of us left, we had no problem with it. You must realize that the data-storage system has been simplified as much as possible, so that there are no great intricacies that could get out of whack. But one system has got out of whack and presents some difficulties. For some reason that I am unable to discover, the retrieval system—”

“The retrieval system?”

“That part of the installation that enables the retrieval of data. There are mountains of data in there, but there is no way to get it out. In my humble and fumbling way I have tried to make some head or tail of it in hopes I could repair whatever might be wrong, but you must understand, I am no technician. My training is in administrative work. So we have the situation of having all that data and not being able to get at any of it. When you came along, I felt the faint flutter of some hope when the Trees reported to me that there were sensitives among you. I told the Trees to let you through. I had hopes that a sensitive might get at the data, might be able to retrieve it. And was shocked to find that your one outstanding sensitive was not looking at our data at all, but at something beyond our data, overlooking it as a thing of small consequence.”

“But you said the Trees told you,” protested Cushing. “It must be that you're a sensitive, yourself.”

“A technological sensitivity,” said the A and R. “I am so designed as to be keyed in to the Trees, but to nothing else. A sensitivity, of course, but a contrived and most selective one.”

“So you thought that a human sensitive might get at the data. But when Elayne didn't do it—”

“I thought it was all a failure at the time,” said the A and R, “but I've thought it over since, and now I know the answer. She is in no way a failure, but a sensitive that is too far reaching, too keyed in to universal factors, to be of any use to us. When she inadvertently caught a glimpse of what we have in the data storage, she was shocked at it, shocked at the chaos of it; for I must admit that it is chaos—billions of pieces of data all clumped into a pile. But then there came this morning another one of you. The one that you call Meg. She reached into the data; she touched it. She got nothing from it, but she was aware of it.…”

“Not until I had the brain case,” said Meg. “It was the brain case that made it possible.”

“I gave you the brain case as a crystal ball,” said Rollo. “That was all it was. Just a shiny thing to help you concentrate.”

“Rollo,” said Meg. “Please forgive me, Rollo. It is more than that. I had hoped you would never have to know. Laddie boy and I knew, but we never told you.”

“You're trying to tell us,” said the A and R, “that the brain still lives within its case; that when a robotic body is inactivated or destroyed, the brain is unaffected, that it still lives on.”

“But that can't be right,” cried Rollo in a strangled voice. “It could not see or hear. It would be shut up inside itself.…”

“That is right,” said Meg.

“For a thousand years,” said Rollo. “For more than a thousand years.”

Cushing said, “Rollo, we are sorry. That night long ago when you showed Meg the brain case—you remember, don't you?—she sensed then that the brain was still alive. She told me and we agreed that you should never know, that no one should ever know. You see, there was nothing anyone could do.”

“There are millions of them,” said Rollo. “Hidden away in places where they fell and will never be found. Others collected by the tribes and stacked in pyramids. Others used as childish playthings to roll along the ground.…”

“Being a robot, I mourn with you,” said the A and R. “I am as shocked as you are. But I agree with the gentleman that there is nothing one can do.”

“We could build new bodies,” said Rollo. “At the least we could do something to give them back their sight and hearing. And their voices.”

“Who would do all this?” asked Cushing bitterly. “A blacksmith at the forge of a farm commune? An ironworker who beats out arrowheads and spearpoints for a tribe of nomads?”

“And yet,” said the A and R, “this present brain, isolated for all these years, was able to respond when it was touched by the probing of a human brain. Responded and was of help, I believe you said.”

“I could see the spiders and the gnats,” said Meg, “but they meant nothing to me. With the robot's brain, they became something else—a pattern, perhaps, a pattern in which there must have been a meaning, although I did not know the meaning.”

“I think, however,” said the A and R, “that herein lies some hope. You reached the data bank; you sensed the data; you were able to put them into visual form.”

“I don't see how that helps too much,” said Cushing. “Visual form is meaningless unless it can be interpreted.”

“This was a beginning only,” said the A and R. “A second time, a third time, a hundredth time, the meaning may become apparent. And this is even more likely if we should be able to muster, say, a hundred sensitives, each tied in with a robotic brain that might be able to reinforce the sensitive, as this robotic brain was able to make Meg see more clearly.”

“This is all fine,” said Cushing, “but we can't be sure that it will work. If we could repair the retrieval system …”

“I'll use your words,” said the A and R. “Who'd do it? Blacksmiths and metalworkers? And even if we could repair it, how could we be sure that we could read the data and interpret it. It seems to me a sensitive would have a better chance of understanding what's packed away in there.…”

“Given time,” said Cushing, “we might find men who could figure out a way to repair the retrieval. If they had diagrams and specs.”

“In this place,” said the A and R, “we have the diagrams and specs. I have pored over them, but to me they have no significance. I can make nothing of them. You say that you can read?”

Cushing nodded. “There's a library back at the university. But that would be of little help. It underwent an editing process, purged of everything that had been written some centuries before the Time of Trouble.”

“We have a library here,” said the A and R, “that escaped the editing. Here there'd be materials which might help to train the men you say might repair the system.”

Ezra spoke up. “I've been trying to follow this discussion and am having trouble with it. But it appears there are two ways to go about it: either repair the retrieval system, or use sensitives. I'm a sensitive and so is my granddaughter, but I fear neither one of us could be of any help. Our sensitivities, it appears, are specialized. She is attuned to universalities, whereas I am attuned to plants. I fear this would be the case if we sought out sensitives. There are, I would suspect, very many different kinds of them.”

“That is true,” said Cushing. “Wilson had a chapter in his history that dealt with the rise of sensitives after the Collapse. He felt that technology had served as a repressive factor against the development of sensitives and that once the pressure of technology was removed, there were many more of them.”

“This may be true,” said Ezra, “but out of all of them, I would guess you could find very few who could do what Meg has done.”

“We are forgetting one thing,” said Meg, “and that is the robotic brain. I'm not so sure that my powers were so much reinforced by the brain. I would suspect I did no more than direct the brain into the data banks, making it aware of them, giving it a chance to see what was there and then tell me what was there.”

“Sorrowful as the subject is to me,” said Rollo, “I think that Meg is right. It's not the human sensitives but the brains that will give us answers. They have been shut up within themselves for all these centuries. In the loneliness of their situations, they would have kept on functioning. Given no external stimuli, they were forced back upon themselves. Since they had been manufactured to think, they would have thought. They would have performed the function for which they were created. They would have posed problems for themselves and tried to work through the problems. All these years they have been developing certain lines of logic, each one of them peculiar to himself. Here we have sharpened intellects, eager intellects.…”

“I subscribe to that,” said Ezra. “This makes sense to me. All we need are sensitives who can work with the brains, serve as interpreters for the brains.”

“Okay, then,” said Cushing. “We need brains and sensitives. But I think, as well, we should seek people who might train themselves to repair the retrieval system. There is a library here, you say?”

“A rather comprehensive scientific and technological library,” said the A and R. “But to use it, we need people who can read.”