A Choice of Gods

20

He was polished and he shone in the morning light; he said his name was Stanley and he was glad that they had come. He recognized three of them— Hezekiah, Jason and Red Cloud, in that order—and he said that word and rumor of them had made its way into the Project. Introduced to John, he professed unusual pleasure at meeting a man from among the stars. He was suave and genteel and he glittered when he walked and he said it was neighborly of them to pay a visit, even after all the years, and that he was desolated he could offer neither food nor drink, since robots made no use of either.

Apparently a watch had been kept on them from the time of the flotilla's first appearance, coming up the river, for he had been waiting for them on the blufftop when they came climbing up the path, with the beached canoes and the men who had paddled them waiting on the shore below the bluff.

Above the blufftop towered the structure, whatever it might be—a huge and curving thinness that flared out, with a greater diameter at the top than at that point where it emerged from the ground, black with the shine of many metallic highlights that caught the morning sun, a huge and curving thinness that went up into the sky, more like a fantastic monument or a dreaming sculpture than it was like a structure and, looking at it, it seemed to make no sense. Set in a circle, it did not quite complete the circle, but stood with a V-section of emptiness gaping on one side of it.

From where they stood, at some distance beyond the flaring structure, lay the mounds of the ancient city, with here and there broken walls and the metallic skeletons of buildings still rising above the uneven ground, looking for all the world like the canted arms or the stiffened hands of corpses buried hurriedly and too shallowly for decency.

Across the river stood another mounded area, but here the disintegration of the buildings seemed somewhat less advanced, for at certain intervals great piles of masonry still emerged.

Stanley saw Jason looking at the structures. "The old university," he said. "We have been at great pains to preserve some selected buildings."

"You make use of them?"

"Of the contents of them. Certain instruments and libraries. Old workshops and laboratories. And what was missing in them we have transported, through the years, from other learning centers. Although," he said with a touch of sadness, "there's not much left elsewhere anymore."

"You used the knowledge to build this," said John, indicating the flaring structure with an upward sweep of his arm.

"We did," the robot Stanley said. "You came to hear of it?"

"That, in part," said Jason. "There is something more, however."

"We have a place," said Stanley, "where you can be far more comfortable than standing on this windswept prairie. If you will follow me."

Following him, they went along a beaten path until they came to a ramp that led down into the space enclosed by the flaring structure. As they walked down the ramp, they saw that less than half the structure stood above the ground, that its smooth sides went plunging down into a great hole that had been excavated to accommodate it. The ramp wound steeply downward, curving in a great sweep around the smooth wall of the flaring thing.

"We went down to bedrock to anchor it," said Stanley. "Down to the solid limestone."

"And you call it the Project?" Red Cloud asked. It was the first time he had spoken. Jason had seen him stiffen in something close to outrage when the glittering robot had come out to meet them and had momentarily held his breath, afraid of what his old friend might feel compelled to say. But he had said nothing and Jason had felt for him a surge of affection and admiration. Over the years that Red Cloud had been coming to the house, there had developed between him and Thatcher something that resembled affectionate respect, but Thatcher was the only robot the old chief would give a second glance. And now here was this striding, competent, self-assured dandy of a robot performing as their host. Jason could imagine how the gorge must have risen in the old man's throat at the sight of him.

"That is what we call it, sir," said Stanley. "We called it that to start with and it got to be a habit and we never changed the name. Which is all right, of course. It is the only project that we have."

"And the purpose of it? It must have a purpose?" The way that Red Cloud said it, it was quite apparent he rather doubted that it had.

"Once we get to the place of comfort," the robot said, "I shall tell you all you wish. We have no secrets here."

They met other robots, going up the ramp, but they spoke no greeting and they did not stop. And here, thought Jason, as he went pacing down the ramp, was the explanation of all those hurrying, purposeful bands of so-called "wild robots" they had seen through all the centuries—purposeful, dedicated bands setting off in all directions, and returning from all directions, to get the needed materials for the building of this place.

They finally reached the bottom of the ramp and here the circle of the structure was much smaller than at the top and set in the space at the bottom of the pit was what appeared to be an open-sided house, a roof set on stout columns, housing tables, desks and chairs, along with filing cabinets and some rather strange machines. It was, Jason decided, a combination operations center and construction shack.

"Gentlemen," said Stanley, "if you please will find a place to sit, I shall listen to your questions and endeavor to tell you all you wish. I have associates I can summon…"

"One of you is enough," said Red Cloud harshly.

"I think," said Jason, hurrying to cover Red Cloud's words, "we'll not need to bother any of the others. I take it you can answer for the others."

"I have told you," the robot said, "that we have no secrets. And we're all of a single mind, or very nearly so. I can call the others if there is any need. It is not necessary to tell you, I suppose, that I recognized all of you except the gentleman who came from the stars. Your reputations have preceded you. The chief we know and have admired, although we are aware of the animosity that he and his people hold toward us. We can understand the basis of that attitude, although we do regret it, and we have made a point, sir," he said to Red Cloud, "not to intrude ourselves upon you."

"Your tongue," said Red Cloud, "is smoother than it should be, but I grant you have kept out of our way."

"Mr. Jason," said the robot, "we have regarded as a good, great friend and we've been most proud of Hezekiah and the work that he has done."

"If you felt that way," asked Jason, "why did you never come to visit us?"

"We had thought, somehow, that it might not be proper. You may be able to understand a little how we must have felt when suddenly there was no longer men to serve, when the very purpose of our existence was, in a moment, taken from us."

"But others come to us," said Jason. "We are knee-deep in robots, for which we are quite thankful. They have taken splendid care of us."

"That is true," said Stanley, "but you had all you needed. Perhaps far more than you needed. We had no wish to embarrass you."

"Then I would take it," said John, "that you would be glad to hear the People may be coming back."

"The People!" croaked the robot, shaken from the calm of his self-assurance. "The People coming back?"

"They have only been away," said John, "on other planets. They have relocated Earth and a survey ship is on its way. It may be arriving very soon."

Stanley struggled with himself. They could see him struggle. When he finally spoke, he was himself again. "You are sure of this?" he asked.

"Very sure," said John.

"You ask if we would be glad," said Stanley. "I do not think we would."

"But you said…"

"That was in the beginning. That was five thousand years ago. In that length of time, there must be changes. You call us machines and I suppose we are. But in five thousand years even a machine can change. Not mechanically, of course. But you made us machines with brains and brains can change. Viewpoints can shift. New values can be arrived at and accepted. Once we worked for men; it was our purpose and our life. Given a choice, we would not have changed the situation. We gained satisfaction from our servitude; we were built to gain satisfaction from a life of servitude. Loyalty was the love we gave the human race and we take no credit for it, for the loyalty was built into,us."

"But now," said Hezekiah, "you work for yourself."

"You can understand that, Hezekiah. You and your companions now work for yourselves."

"No," said Hezekiah. "We still work for Man."

The robot Stanley paid no attention to what Hezekiah said. "We were confused at first," he said, "and lost. Not we, of course, but each of us, each one separately. For we had never been one people; there had been no we; just each of us alone, doing what was expected of him, doing what he'd been fabricated for, and happy in the doing of it. We had no life of our own and I think that is what confused us so much when the People went away. For here suddenly, not we, but each of us alone, found that he did have a life of his own, that he could live without his human master, and that he still was capable of functioning had there been anything to do. Many of us stayed on for a time, in some cases a very long time, in the old households, performing the tasks we were supposed to do—as if our people had only gone off on a trip and would soon be coming back. Although even the stupidest of us, I think, knew this was not the case, for not only our own people, but everyone, had gone and that was most peculiar, for never before had everyone gone away at once. I think that the most of us grasped immediately what had happened, but we kept on pretending that it wasn't so, that in time the people would all come home again and, true to our conditioning and training, we continued in the tasks that now were no tasks at all, but simply senseless motions. In time we gave up the pretense, not all of us at once, of course, but a few of us at first and others a little later and others after them. We took to wandering, hunting for new masters, for tasks that were not senseless. We found no humans, but we did find ourselves, we found one another. We talked with one another; we laid our little, short-range, meaningless plans by consultation with others of our kind. First we sought for humans and finally, when we knew there were no humans who would take us in—for your people, Mr. Jason, had all the robots that you needed and your people, Chief Red Cloud, would have none of us, and there was a small band out West, on the coast, who were frightened of everything, even of us who tried to help them…"

Red Cloud said to Jason, "That would be the tribe from which your wanderer came. What was it he said they were afraid of? The Dark Walker, wasn't it?"

"They were field workers to begin with," Jason said. "He didn't tell me this, perhaps he doesn't know, but from what he told me it is very plain. Agricultural people who worked continually in the fields, following the plantings, the tending and the harvest. Ground down in poverty, living hand to mouth, tied so close to the soil they became the very soil. They had no robots, of course. They may only have glimpsed robots from a distance, if at all. Even having seen them, they may not have fully understood exactly what they were. The robots were far better off than they. They would have been frightened of a robot."

"They fled from us," said Stanley. "Not from me. I wasn't there. But from others of our people. We tried to make them understand. We tried to explain to them. But still they fled from us. We finally no longer followed them. We had no wish to frighten them."

"What do you think they saw?" asked Red Cloud. "This Dark Walker of theirs…"

"Perhaps nothing," Jason said. "They would have had, I suspect, a long background of folklore. They would have been a superstitious people. To people such as they, superstition would have been an entertainment and perhaps a hope…"

"But they might have seen something," insisted Red Cloud. "On that night when it happened, there might have been something on the Earth. There may have been netters who swept up the People. In times past my people had their stories of things that walked the Earth and we, in our new sophistication, are too ready to discount them. But when you live as close to the bosom of the Earth as we do you come to realize that some of the old stories may have some shreds of truth in them. We know, for example, that aliens on occasion now do visit Earth and in time past, before the white man came with his fury and his noise, when this continent was quieter and less boisterous than it became, who can say they did not visit then?"

Jason nodded. "Old friend," he said, "you may well be right."

"We came to a time," said the robot Stanley, "when we knew there were no humans we could serve and we stood with idle hands and there was nothing we could do. But through the centuries the idea grew, slowly at first and then with greater impact, that if we could not work for humans, we could work for ourselves. But what can a robot do for himself or for other robots? Build a civilization? A civilization would be meaningless for us. Build a fortune? What would we get a fortune from and what need would we have of it? We had no profit motive, we did not thirst for status. Education we might have been capable of and even have enjoyed, but it was a dead end, for except for a questionable self-satisfaction it might have given us, we had no use for it. Humans used education for their self-improvement, to earn a better living, to contribute to society, to assure themselves of more enjoyment of the arts. They called it self-improvement and that was a worthy goal for any human, but how could a robot improve himself? And to what purpose and what end? The answer seemed to be that we could not improve ourselves. No robot could make himself appreciably better than he already was. He had limitations built into him by his makers. His capabilities were predetermined by the materials and the programming that went into him. Considering the tasks he was designed to do, he served well enough. There was no need for a better robot. But there seemed no doubt that a better robot could be built. Once you thought of it, it became apparent that there was no limit to a robot. There was no place you had to stop and say, this is the best robot we can make. No matter how well a robot was designed, a better one was always possible. What would happen, we asked ourselves, if an open-ended robot should be built, one that was never really finished…"

"Are you trying to tell us," Jason asked, "that what you have here is your open-ended robot?"

"Mr. Jason," Stanley said, "that is, indeed, what I have tried to say."

"But what do you intend?"

"We do not know," said Stanley.

"You don't know? You are the ones who are building…"

"Not any longer," Stanley said. "It has taken over now. It tells us what to do."

"What use is it?" asked Red Cloud. "It is anchored here. It can't move. It can't do anything."

"It has a purpose," said the robot, stubbornly. "It must have a purpose.."

"Now, just a minute there," said Jason. "You say it tells you what to do. You mean that it has taken over the building of itself? That it tells you how to build it?"

Stanley nodded. "It started twenty years or more ago. We have talked with it…"

"Talked with it. How?"

"By printout. We talk back and forth, like the old computers."

"What you really have built is a big computer."

"No. Not a computer. A robot. Another one of us, except it is so big it has no mobility."

"We are talking to no point at all," said Red Cloud. "A robot is nothing more than a walking computer."

'There are points of difference," said Jason, gently. "That, Horace, is what you have refused to see all these years. You've thought of a robot as a machine and it is not. It is a biological concept expressed mechanically…"

"You are quibbling," Red Cloud said.

"I don't think we'll gain anything," said John, "even by the most good-natured argument. We didn't come here, actually, to find what might be building, We came to see how the robots would react to the People, perhaps, many of them, millions of them, coming back to Earth."

"I can tell you, without any question, how the most of us would react to it," said Stanley. "We would view it with some apprehension. For they would take us back into their service or, perhaps worse than that, would have no need of us. Some of us, perhaps quite a number of us, would welcome being taken back into their service, for through all the years we have felt the lack of someone needing us. Some of us would welcome the old servitude, for to us it was never really servitude. But I think, as well, that the majority of us now feel we have started on a road along which we can work out for ourselves something approaching the destiny of mankind—not that precise kind of destiny, of course, for it would not fit us and we would not want it. For that reason we would not want the humans to come back. They would interfere. They could not help the interference; it is intellectually impossible for them not to interfere in any affairs that touch them, even most remotely. But that is not a decision we can make for ourselves alone. The decision is the province of the Project…"

"You mean the monster you have built," said Hezekiah.

Stanley, who had been standing all the time, slowly lowered himself into a chair. He swiveled his head around to stare at Hezekiah. "You do not approve?" he asked. "You do not understand? Of all these people, I would have thought you would."

"You have committed sacrilege," said Hezekiah, sternly. "You have erected an abomination. You have chosen to elevate yourself above your creators. I have spent many lonely, terrible hours, wondering if I and my associates may not be committing sacrilege, devoting our time and utmost effort to a study and a task that should be mankind's study and its task, but at least we still are working for the good of mankind…"

"Please," said Jason. "Let us not debate that now. How can any of us tell if we're right or wrong in any of our actions? Stanley says that it is up to the Project to decide…"

"The Project will know," said Stanley. "It has far more background knowledge than any one of us. We have traveled widely through the years to obtain material that has been fed into its memory cores. We have given it all the knowledge it has been our fortune to lay our hands upon. It knows history, science, philosophy, the arts. And now it is adding to this knowledge on its own. It is talking with something very far in space."

John jerked upright. "How far in space?" he asked.

"We are not sure," said Stanley. "Something, we believe, in the center of the galaxy."