Robots and Empire (Page 94)

"You would play the madman if you did not, for I now come to the point. – I have never stopped thinking of Giskard and of the cruelty and injustice of my having been deprived of him, but somehow I never thought of that pattern with which I had modified him with no one’s knowledge but my own. I am quite certain I could not have reproduced that pattern if I had tried and from what I can now remember it was like nothing else I have ever seen in robotics until I saw, briefly, something like that pattern during my stay on Solaria.

"The Solarian pattern seemed familiar to me, but I didn’t know why. It took some weeks of intense thought before I dredged out of some well-hidden part of my unconscious mind the slippery thought of that pattern I had dreamed out of nothing twenty-five decades ago.

"Even though I can’t remember my pattern exactly, I know that the Solarian pattern was a whiff of it and no more. It was just the barest suggestion of something I had captured in miraculously complex symmetry. But I looked at the Solarian pattern with the experience I had gained in twenty-five decades of deep immersion in robotics theory and it suggested telepathy to me. If that simple, scarcely interesting pattern suggested it, what must my original have meant – the thing I invented as a child and have never recaptured since?"

Amadiro said, "You keep saying that you’re coming to the point, Vasilia. Would I be completely unreasonable if I asked you to stop moaning and reminiscing and simply set out that point in a simple, declarative sentence?"

Vasilia said, "Gladly. What I am telling you, Kelden, is that, without my ever knowing it, I converted Giskard into a telepathic robot and that he has been one ever since."

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Amadiro looked at Vasilia for a long time and, because the story seemed to have come to an end, he returned to the salmon mousse and ate some of it thoughtfully.

He then said, "Impossible! Do you take me for an idiot?"

"I take you for a failure," said Vasilia. "I don’t say Giskard can read conversations in minds, that he can transmit and receive words or ideas. Perhaps that is impossible, even in theory. But I am quite certain he can detect emotions and the general set of mental activity and perhaps can even modify it."

Amadiro shook his head violently. "Impossible!"

"Impossible? Think a while. Twenty decades ago, you had almost achieved your aims. Fastolfe was at your mercy, Chairman Horder was your ally. What happened? Why did everything go wrong?"

"The Earthman – " Amadiro began, choking at the memory.

"The Earthman," Vasilia mimicked. "The Earthman. Or was it the Solarian woman? It was neither! Neither! It was Giskard, who was there all the time. Sensing. Adjusting."

"Why should he be interested? He is a robot."

"A robot loyal to his master, to Fastolfe. By the First Law, he had to see to it that Fastolfe came to no harm and, being telepathic, he could not interpret that as signifying physical harm only. He knew that if Fastolfe could not have his way, could not encourage the settlement of the habitable worlds of the Galaxy, he would undergo profound disappointment – and – that would be ‘harm’ in Giskard’s telepathic Universe. He could not let that happen and he intervened to keep it from happening."

"No, no, no," said Amadiro in disgust. "You want that to be so, out of some wild, romantic longing, but that doesn’t make it so. I remember too well what happened. It was the Earthman. It needs no telepathic robot to explain the events."

"And what has happened since, Kelden?" demanded Vasilia. "In twenty decades, have you ever managed to win out over Fastolfe? With all the facts in your favor, with the obvious bankruptcy of Fastolfe’s policy, have you ever been able to dispose of a majority in the Council? Have you ever been able to sway the Chairman to the point where you could possess real power?

"How do you explain that, Kelden? In all those twenty decades, the Earthman has not been on Aurora. He has been dead for over sixteen decades, his miserably short life running out in eight decades or so. Yet you continue to fail – you have an unbroken record of failure. Even now that Fastolfe is dead, have you managed to profit completely from the broken pieces of his coalition or do you, find that success still seems to elude you?

"What is it that remains? The Earthman is gone. Fastolfe is gone. It is Giskard who has worked against you all this time – and Giskard remains. He is as loyal now to the Solarian woman as he was to Fastolfe and the Solarian woman has no cause to love you, I think."

Amadiro’s face twisted into a mask of anger and frustration. "It’s not so. None of this is so. You’re imagining things."

Vasilia remained quite cool. "No, I’m not. I’m explaining things. I’ve explained things you haven’t been able to explain. Or have you an alternate explanation? – And I can give you the cure. Transfer ownership of Giskard from the Solarian woman to me and, quite suddenly, events will begin to twist themselves to your benefit."

"No," said Amadiro. "They are moving to my benefit already."

"You may think so, but they won’t, as long as Giskard is working against you. No matter how close you come to winning, no matter how sure of victory you become, it will all melt away as long as you don’t have Giskard on your side. That happened twenty decades ago; it will happen now."

Amadiro’s face suddenly cleared. He said, "Well, come to think of it, though I don’t have Giskard and neither do you, it doesn’t matter, for I can show you that Giskard is not telepathic. If Giskard were telepathic, as you say, if he had the ability to order affairs to his own liking or to the liking of the human being who is his owner, then why would he have allowed the Solarian woman to be taken to what will probably be her death?"