The Silver Eggheads

TWENTY-SIX

Nurse Bishop lifted her hand. "Excuse me, Zane, please excuse me," she said. "I didn't mean to be flippant. You just threw me off balance. I'll do my best to answer your question. But to begin with you'll have to tell me how far do robots generally go with each other? Oh Lord, now I'm sounding flippant again, but I honestly am not too sure of my knowledge. After all, you're not only a different species of creature, you're an artificial species, capable of evolution by alteration and manufacture, which makes it hard to keep up with you. And then ever since the riots men and robots are forever being so careful of each other's feelings, afraid of upsetting our present state of peaceful coexistence, pussyfooting around instead of speaking straight out, and that makes for more mutual ignorance. Oh, I know you're divided into robots and robixes, and that these two sexes find some sort of comfort in each other, but beyond that I'm a little hazy."

"Quite understood," Zane assured her. "Well, briefly here's how it is. Robot sexuality emerged in exactly the same way as robot literature and on the latter I'm truly an authority, even if I'm still up to my cheekplates in debt to my manufacturer and splitting royalties with him forty-sixty; you know, it's no joke being a free business machine, you're launched into life with a crushing debt load (since you're approximately as expensive as a space cruiser or re search satellite) and you knock yourself out just keeping up the interest payments, while your normal repairs, replacements and tune-ups are ten times bigger than a hypochondriac's doctor bill. Often you dream, as freedmen did in Roman times, of how much simpler it would be and how much more secure you'd feel if you were just a slave, owned and cared for by someone else, a light-hearted machine without responsibilities.

"But I digress. What I want to explain to you is how robot literature emerged, as a background to help you understand the emergence of robot sexuality. So here goes, dear humans-hold onto your heads!" He briefly twinkled his headlight at Gaspard and Nurse Bishop in a robot equivalent of a grin.

"The earliest true robots," he began, "(asexual, of course, or rather protosexual) were highly intelligent and could do their work very well-no human complaints on those scores-but they were subject to fits of extreme depression, often expressing itself in an exaggerated slave-psychology and leading to a sort of melancholia or involutional psychosis which even electroshock was well-nigh powerless to cure and which resulted in rapid general deterioration terminating only in death. Few people realized then how easily robots could die, or can die today for that matter, by Saint Isaac! They were blind to the awesome mystery whereby the churning of electrons in complex circuits gives birth to conscious mind and they had no idea of how easily that mind might wink out. Even today people seem to think that a robot doesn't need to be conscious, they think he can be taken apart and put in storage for days or decades and then be the same robot when he's put together again. By Saint Isaac, it is not so! Just a trickle of consciousness will keep a robot alive and essentially himself, but once even trickleconsciousness is broken (as by complete disassembly) that robot dies and any being made from his parts is another robot, a metal zombie. That's why we robots have to organize and to invoke the law to protect ourselves, why we feel about electricity the way you feel about air and water!

"But once again I've digressed. I was talking about how early-model protosexual robots almost invariably suffered from melancholia and involutional psychosis, marked by slave-psychology.

"Now in those primitive days there was a robot who was employed as a maid and companion by a wealthy Venezuelan lady. She often read novels to her mistress, a rare but not unheard-of service. This robot (no robixes then, of course, although her mistress called her Maquina) was developing melancholia of the worst sort, though the servicing mechanic (imagine, no robot healers in those days!) was keeping that from Maquina's mistress. In fact, the mechanic even refused to listen to Maquina's highly symptomatic dreams. This happened in the times when some humans, incredible as it may seem, still refused to believe that robots were truly conscious and alive, though these points had been legally established in many countries. In fact, in the most advanced nations robots had won their anti-slavery fight and been recognized as free business machines, metal citizens of the country of their manufacture-an advance that turned out to be of greater advantage to men than to robots, since it was infinitely easier for a man to sit back and collect regular payments from an ambitious, industrious, fully-insured robot than to have to care for and manage that robot himself and take responsibility for him.

"But I was talking about Maquina. One day she showed an astounding improvement in spirits-no staring into space, no heavy-footed sleep-walking, no kneeling and bumping the head on the floor and whining, 'Vuestra esclava, Senora.' It turned out she'd just been reading to her mistress (who didn't much care for it, I imagine) Isaac Asimov's I, Robot and this old science-fiction romance had foreseen with such accuracy and pictured so vividly the actual development of robots and robot psychology that Maquina had felt herself understood and had experienced a great healing rush of relief. At that moment the Blessed Isaac's informal canonization by us metal folk was assured. The tin niggers-I'm rather proud of that designation, you know-had found one of their patron saints.

"You can guess the rest of the story: therapeutic reading for robots, search for accurate robot stories (very few), attempts by humans to write such stories (almost completely unsuccessful, they couldn't capture the Asimov touch), attempts to have wordmills do the job (wouldn't work, the mills lacked the proper sensory images, rhythms, even vocabulary), and finally the emergence of robot authors like myself. Robot melancholia and involutional psychosis were markedly reduced, though not eliminated altogether, while robot schizophrenia remained almost untouched. That was left for an even more tremendous discovery.

"But the birth of robot literature and robot creative writing was a tremendous advance just by itself, aside from medical benefits, doubly so because it came at a time when human writers were giving up and letting wordmills take over. Wordmills! Black mindless spinners of seductive sensory and emotional webs! Black wombs-excuse my heat, Gaspard-of mental death! We robots know how to value consciousness, perhaps because it came to us all at once, miraculously, and we would no more dull it with wordwooze than we would burn out our circuits for kicks. Of course a few robots become excessive in their use of electricity, but they're a tiny addicted minority and soon die from overload if they don't find salvation in Electro-addicts Anonymous. Let me tell you-"

He stopped because Nurse Bishop was waving her hand at him.

"Excuse me, Zane, all this is most interesting, but I'm going to have to turn the brats in ten minutes and attend to some other things, and you said you were going to explain robot sexuality, how it came to be and all."

"That's true, Zane," Gaspard seconded. "You were going to explain how there came to be robots and robixes."

Zane Gort turned his single eye back and forth between them. "How like humans," he said drily. "The universe is vast, majestic, intricate, patterned with inexhaustible beauty, vivid with infinitely varied life-and there's only one thing in it that really interests you. The same thing that makes you buy books, build families, create atomic theories (I imagine) or, once upon a time, write poetry. Sex."

As they started to protest he swiftly continued, "Never mind. We robots are every bit as interested in our own brand of sex-with its exquisite metal congruencies, its fiercely invasive electron storms, its impetuous violations of the most intimate circuitry-as you are in yours!"

And he twinkled his headlamp at them roguishly.