Robots and Empire (Page 65)

"Too pleased, my lady. We wanted you to be our pet Spacer heroine and help keep public opinion cool so that we wouldn’t launch a premature war. You were good on longevity; you had them cheering short life. But then you had them cheering robots and we don’t want that. For that matter, we’re not so keen on the public cheering the notion of kinship with the Spacers."

"You don’t want premature war, but you don’t want premature peace, either. Is that it?"

"Very well put, madam."

"But, then, what do you want?"

"We want the Galaxy, the whole Galaxy. We want to settle and populate every habitable planet in it and establish nothing less than a Galactic Empire. And we don’t want the Spacers to interfere. They can remain on their own worlds and live in peace as they please, but they must not interfere."

"But then you’ll be penning them up on their fifty worlds, as we penned up Earthpeople on Earth for so many years. The same old injustice. You’re as bad as Bistervan."

"The situations are different. Earthpeople were penned up in defiance of their expansive potential. You Spacers have no such potential. You took the path of longevity and robots and the potential vanished. You don’t even have fifty worlds any longer. Solaria has been abandoned. The others will go, too, in time. The Settlers have no interest in pushing the Spacers along the path to extinction, but why should we interfere with their voluntary choice to do so? Your speech tended to interfere with that."

"I’m glad. What did you think I would say?"

"I told you. Peace and love and sit down. You could have finished in about one minute."

Gladia said angrily, "I can’t believe you expected anything so foolish of me. What did you take me for?

"For what you took yourself – for someone frightened to death of speaking. How did we know that you were a madwoman who could, in half an hour, persuade the Baleyworlders to howl in favor of what for lifetimes we have been persuading them to howl against? But talk will get us nowhere" – he rose heavily to his feet – "I want a shower, too, and I had better get a night’s sleep – if I can. See you tomorrow.

"But when do we find out what the Directors will decide to do with me?"

"When they find out, which may not be soon. Good night, madam."

41

"I have made a discovery," said Giskard, his voice carrying no shade of emotion. "I have made it because, for the first time in my existence, I faced thousands of human beings. Had I done this two centuries ago, I would have made the discovery then. Had I never faced so many at once, then I would never have made the discovery at all.

"Consider, then, how many vital points I might easily grasp, but never have and never will, simply because the proper conditions for it will never come my way. I remain ignorant except where circumstance helps me and I cannot count on circumstance."

Daneel said, "I did not think, friend Giskard, that Lady Gladia, with her long-sustained way of life, could face thousands with equanimity. I did not think she would be able to speak at all. When it turned out that she could, I assumed you had adjusted her and that you had discovered that it could be done without harming her. Was that your discovery?"

Giskard said, "Friend Daneel, actually all I dared do was loosen a very few strands of inhibition, only enough to allow her to speak a few words, so that she might be heard."

"But she did far more than that."

"After this microscopic adjustment, I turned to the multiplicity of minds I faced in the audience. I had never experienced so many, any more than Lady Gladia had, and I was as taken aback as she was. I found, at first, that I could do nothing in the vast mental interlockingness that beat in upon me. I felt helpless."

"And then I noted small friendlinesses, curiosities, interests – I cannot describe them in words – with a color of sympathy for Lady Gladia about them. I played with what I could find that had this color of sympathy, tightening and thickening them just slightly. I wanted some small response in Lady Gladia’s favor that might encourage her, that might make it unnecessary for me to be tempted to tamper further with Lady Gladia’s mind. That was all I did. I do not know how many threads of the proper color I handled. Not many."

Daneel said, "And what then, friend Giskard?"

"I found, friend Daneel, that I had begun something that was autocatalytic. Each thread I strengthened, strengthened a nearby thread of the same kind and the two together strengthened several others nearby. I had to do nothing further. Small stirs, small sounds, and small glances that seemed to approve of what Lady Gladia said encouraged still others.

"Then I found something stranger yet. All these little indications of approval, which I could detect only because the minds were open to me, Lady Gladia must have also detected in some manner, for further inhibitions in her mind fell without my touching them. She began to speak faster, more confidently, and the audience responded better than ever – without my doing anything. And in the end, there was hysteria, a storm, a tempest of mental – thunder and lightning so intense that I had to close my mind to it or it would have overloaded my circuits."

"Never, in all my existence, had I encountered anything like that and yet it started with no more modification introduced by me in all that crowd than I have, in the past, introduced among a mere handful of people. I suspect, in fact, that the effect spread beyond the audience sensible to my mind – to the greater audience reached via hyperwave."

Daneel said, "I do not see how this can be, friend Giskard."

"Nor I, friend Daneel. I am not human. I do not directly experience the possession of a human mind with all its complexities and contradictions, so I do not grasp the mechanisms by which they respond. But, apparently, crowds are more easily managed than individuals. It seems paradoxical. Much weight takes more effort to move than little weight. Much energy takes more effort to counter than little energy. Much distance takes longer to traverse than little distance. Why, then, should many people, be easier to sway than few? You think like a human being, friend Daneel. Can you explain?"