Asimov's Future History Volume 1 (47 page)

Karin looked as if she were watching something very far away. ‘‘I’ll have to take you back to the lab, PAPPI. If this is for real, then Susan will want to run the Turing series on you.”

Tim stared at his mother. She chose the worst moments to get all wrapped up in her work. “Look, I’ve got a serious decision to make here.”

“We’ve had no evidence for the development of full self-awareness in the lab,” Karin said thoughtfully. “As an extended function of advanced positronic intelligence, that is. My guess would be it’s prolonged exposure to humans in a real family situation that’s caused the difference. But I’ll have to talk to Susan about it. We’ll need to do the research.”

“I don’t want to go back to the lab” the robot began.

“I don’t see a choice, PAPPI. This is big-time. I mean –”

“All right, everybody listen up!” Tim said. “I’m going to make my own decisions from now on. I’ll go to school if and when – and wherever – I please!”

Karin glanced at him as if she’d forgotten he was there. “Well, of course, Timmy. But this is rather urgent, don’t you see?”

Once again, he thought angrily, he came out second in importance to a robot.

The University of Luna offered financial aid in return for taking part in athletic research in low or zero-grav. Since this freed him from Karin’s money, Tim enrolled. Karin didn’t come to see him off when he boarded the shuttle. Couldn’t wait to get down to the lab and her tests on PAPPI, he thought resentfully.

He worked through the university vacations as an assistant to a moon geologist who needed someone to keep track of his rocks. Since this wasn’t so different from keeping a stamp collection, Tim rather enjoyed it.

Other guys had parents shuttle up to visit from time to time, well-dressed men and women who conversed knowledgeably about interactive theater and world politics and preserving traditional human values in a mechanized world. Just because humans had ventured out into space and depended on robot help, didn’t mean they should abandon the historic virtues of the simple life – the family and physical labor – his new friends said. Tim knew what they meant. The kind of work his mother was doing at U.S. Robots was dangerous. “Mechanical Men,” for goodness sake! Couldn’t she see it wasn’t wise to allow robots to become too clever? They were designed as servants, not partners in the human enterprise. If humans didn’t keep that in mind, someday the robots would be a problem. Tim felt a growing estrangement from Karin and never invited her.

The most dazzling of these new friends was Sylvia Rathbone, daughter of an old-style entrepreneur in space, and as different in spirit from her father as he was from Karin. Sylvia represented everything he felt he’d been deprived of in life – money, a large family of aunts and uncles and cousins, a father who spoiled her shamelessly. She was a beautiful, merry, delicate-boned girl with movements as bright and swift as quicksilver. And to his great wonder and gratitude, she fell in love with him, too.

They were married in a small, intimate ceremony in the spring of’27, in a chapel carved from one of the moon’s vast underground caverns. They planned to keep it secret while he finished up the degree in geology he’d recently switched to, and she worked on her father to accept her marriage to a penniless student. But the following year, Beth was born. They sent notice of the event to both parents, and waited nervously.

Karin almost forgot to reply; she mentioned the birth finally in a postscript to her regular monthly fax transmission.

Mr. Rathbone’s attorney notified them that Sylvia had been cut out of his will until such time as she divorced her unsuitable husband.

It was hard managing a family on a student’s income, he found. But they went on. In the evening, he went home to his wife and his baby in the family area of the moon settlement. Sylvia had a small hydroponics garden where she grew tomatoes and corn to supplement their diet, and chrysanthemums for their spirits, she said. He was happy for the first time in his life, determined his daughter would have the proper family life that had been denied him. But he began to see that took money, and his happiness leaked away little by little.

He was off-world a year later, on a research trip with his geologist friend to bring in a little extra money, when a small piece of space debris hurtled in undetected and punctured the skin of the settlement in his sector. The atmosphere bled out swiftly. Automatic airlocks prevented the hemorrhage from spreading beyond the damaged area, but the robot rescue team was too late to save Sylvia. The baby had been in a creche in an unaffected sector.

The bill for the disposal of Sylvia’s remains arrived just as he broke out of his stunned inaction and began to mourn. One of the settlement’s robots brought it.

The wheel of his life had turned full circle. He, a child who’d been fatherless, raised by his mother, must play father to a motherless child. And he was broke. Swamp-black despair settled over him.

Two things happened.

Into this despair came Howard Rathbone III, who wanted his grandchild so urgently that he was prepared to make a deal with her father.

And Dr. Susan Calvin notified him by express fax that Karin had died suddenly after a brief illness and left him the little house in New York where he’d grown up. He’d never felt close to Karin, but it was difficult to comprehend that now she’d gone out of his life altogether.

He didn’t want to accept Rathbone’s suggestion, tempting though the money was. But he saw he’d have trouble keeping Beth from her grandfather otherwise.

There seemed to be only one thing to do. He fled with the baby, catching the first shuttle to Earth.

Tim sorted through the accumulated junk of his childhood. He found little of value in the house, little worth the exorbitant cost of lobbing it up to the colony. Karin had never been much of a homemaker. He packed a box of Scouting books he remembered treasuring as a boy, his old stamp collection in its dog-eared albums, the telescope PAPPI had helped him assemble.

He lugged the box of books out to the hall and set it down by the wall. Something on the polished wood floor drew his gaze, long blurred lines in the dust. He gently blew the dust aside. Scuff marks. He had a sudden jolting vision of PAPPI’s wheels whooshing over the slippery floor, skidding to a stop by the front door as the robot retrieved the morning’s mail. He saw, as if they were arriving now in Karin’s hallway, the papers, the garish advertisements, the pleas for contributions to worthy causes (he remembered how angry Karin became each time she found a request for money from the antirobot people), all the second-class junk that the law didn’t allow to clutter up the fax machines of the city’s households. Sorting through this paper rubbish had been one of PAPPI’s daily tasks.
Preventing me from having apoplexy!
Karin always said.

He crouched down and stared at the scuff marks. The floor appeared to have been resurfaced fairly recently. Gone were the scrapes and scratches Tim remembered inflicting on it over the years. Once her rambunctious son had left home, Karin had repaired the damage he’d done. But the scars left by the robot’s wheels were still raw. They had occurred sometime after the floor had been resurfaced. Tim straightened up slowly, disturbed by an idea growing in his mind.

He was uncomfortable here, anxious to be done with pawing over the artifacts of his boyhood. He turned to the visorphone to call one of the realtors whose cards he’d found pushed under the door. Time to cut loose from the past.

Before he could touch the keyboard, the phone shrilled at him. He hesitated. Rathbone again? Grimly he punched the receive button.

The face of a handsome, middle-aged man appeared on the screen.

“Tim Garroway?” The man had a pleasant, well-modulated voice. “I’m Stephen Byerley.”

“Mayor –” Tim stumbled to a reply. “I – well, I’m delighted to meet you.”

“My secretary gave me your message. I’d very much enjoy talking to you, but I’m afraid tomorrow’s schedule is so tight.”

Tim’s heart leaped wildly. So it was going to be taken out of his hands after all. He was conscious of the strong feeling of relief that swept over him. “That’s no problem, Mr. Mayor! No problem at all. It really wasn’t important – that is, it can wait.”

Byerley smiled. “I believe we have friends in common, Tim. May I call you Tim?”

“Sure.” He was impressed with the genuine warmth this man projected. How could he possibly have entertained ideas of eliminating him?

“I understand your mother was an associate of Dr. Susan Calvin, one of my most treasured friends.”

Something dull and cold clutched Tim. Of course. It was to be expected. “Oh?” he said heavily. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

Byerley was a robot after all.

At the edge of his consciousness he was aware of Beth tugging at his sleeve. He put an arm around his little daughter, pulling her toward him. He was a fool if he thought he could avoid fate so easily. It crept up on him like some primeval beast slinking up to the little campfire he’d hoped would protect Beth and himself against the darkness.

“The calendar’s crowded tomorrow,” Byerley said. “But I make time to run in Central Park. Do you run, Tim? I heard you were something of an athlete. If you’d care to join me at six tomorrow morning – I hope that’s not too early for you? I’m an early riser – we could talk then.”

Early riser! Tim thought. I bet you don’t sleep at all.

There really was no choice. It was Stephen Byerley’s life – if you could call it that – against his. Byerley had signed his own death warrant.

“Sure thing, Mr. Mayor, “he said.

“Steve,” Stephen Byerley said.

Tim nodded without replying and Byerley broke the connection. The weapon with which he must eliminate the robot bumped heavily against his hip as he turned away.

His stomach had twisted itself with tension, and he sensed the beginnings of a headache at the back of his skull. He would do what he had to do, for Beth ‘s sake. Until then, he’d put the whole thing out of his mind. He’d get on with packing up the house.

“What that, Dadda?” his daughter called, pointing at a door in the ceiling. She had a smudge of dust on one cheek, and toddled clumsily after him wherever he went.

“Nothing much, sweetheart. Just an attic for storage.”

As he said it, something clicked into place in his mind. Of course. That was where it would be.

“Want see!” Beth announced imperiously.

Indulging his daughter’s wishes took his mind off what he must do tomorrow. He touched the recessed button in the wall. The attic hatch opened, and wooden steps lowered to where they stood. He set one foot on the steps and the toddler immediately clung to his legs, clamoring loudly as if he were about to disappear forever. He picked her up and began his ascent. He made the climb awkwardly and with effort, unused to Earth’s gravity after all these years. Beth hummed encouragement to him as if he’d been a horse – or a robot, he realized.

It was cool and dim under the rafters, and it smelled of moldering clothes and musty books. Spiders had draped their gray curtains everywhere over the piled boxes and trunks. He moved cautiously, careful to keep the cobwebs away from Beth’s face.

She saw it first, pointing with a chubby finger to a dark comer.

“Look, Dadda! Baby.”

The robot sat like a blind deaf-mute under one of the main beams of the roof, only lightly powdered in dust. Even after all these years, it was impossible for him to look at it without emotion. Memories of baseball in the backyard, science projects, stamp collections, secret discussions about girls and sex, all came flooding back., His childhood was preserved in this attic, and all it took was one glance to bring it all back to vivid, painful life. He was eight years old again, and it was Father’s Day.

What was it doing here? Karin took it back to the lab. It was a great achievement – the crowning glory of her scientific career

He had
assumed
she’d taken it back to the lab. The recent scuff marks in the hall said otherwise. But why had she put it up here – just before she died apparently?

“Me play!” his daughter announced imperiously, scrambling down from his arms.

Gray dust swirls spiraled around her and she sneezed. He leaned forward, steadying her as she maneuvered over the unfinished floor of the attic. She chuckled, her little body tense with the excitement of discovery. He felt swamped again by mingled emotions of love and helplessness. How could he be both father and mother to this little Columbus, so eager to explore each new world she encountered? How could he protect her from the ugliness of a world where robots became mayor – and men like Rathbone schemed to kill them?

The toddler’s pudgy hands caressed the robot. The problem of the robot drew him again. The only reason he could imagine for Karin not returning PAPPI to the lab was because she’d cared about the robot.

He was about to pick Beth up and carry her away when the red light blinked on.

“Hello,” said the weak but familiar voice, “I’m PAPPI, a Paternal Alternative. Would you like to play?”

His daughter looked as if she were going to cry.

He wasn’t surprised to learn the robot’s power supply was still operational. Tim crouched beside his little daughter and put his arms around her. Here in this attic, for the very first time in his life, he had the feeling that he understood Karin. She’d hidden the robot up here when she knew she was dying; she hadn’t wanted PAPPI to go back to the lab, or to fall into the hands of the Fundies. What did that prove?

For a moment, he felt as if he were drowning under the tidal wave of the past. He was a small boy again, on Father’s Day.

Maybe if she’d cared about the robot, she’d cared about Timmy, too.

Had he really been so deprived? Love was impossible to define, but surely it included sharing, partnership in work and play, nurturing. A family was just a group that cared about each other, even if it included a robot.

“Hello, PAPPI,” Beth said uncertainly. “What are you?”

Could he give Beth as much as Karin had given him? He was certainly going to do his best. But what he wanted for his daughter couldn’t be built on a foundation of hatred and violence. Good didn’t come out of evil; PAPPI had taught him that. He couldn’t keep that appointment with Stephen Byerley tomorrow morning.