Caliban

Logically there was no way for him to becertain that knowledge of the Laws would save him, but Caliban was coming to see that logic and reason were not by themselves reliable guides to thought and action, for the world itself was neither reasonable nor logical. Perhaps a logical being infused with the Laws could function successfully in this universe. Perhaps they provided some useful means of circumscribing action and thought, blocking off the parts of the world that seemed to be governed by irrational beliefs and random chance and the dead weight of the past.

If he learned the Laws, perhaps he would understand this world. It was at least a workable theory. Nor could he see how learning about the Laws could do him any particular harm. And if he found they proscribed thoughts and actions he wished to retain, why, then, he need not follow them. But merely knowing them was likely to be of great help, and unlikely to be of any harm.

But putting the Three Laws to one side, he was developing another theory. From all that he could see, it was the Sheriff and his subordinates that were his most dangerous enemies. Others might try to harm him, or call in a deputy when they saw him, but only the Sheriff and his deputies would actively hunt him down.

That theorycould hurt him if it was wrong-and perhaps even if it was right. Yet he had no choice but to trust in it. For if he assumed that all beings, robotic and human, were as dangerous to him as the deputies, he was doomed. His only hope for survival would be in hunkering down in these tunnels permanently, and that was unacceptable.

He had two goals, then: to discover the nature of the Laws and to avoid the Sheriff. The longer he could manage the latter, the more chance he would have to accomplish the former.

But his plan went deeper than avoiding the Sheriff. For the Sheriff wanted to kill him, andhe wanted to live. That impulse, that need, was something Caliban had learned-no, more than learned. He hadabsorbed it, integrating the desire and theneed to survive. It was no longer an idea or a preferred choice. It was an imperative.

A startling thought, that, and one which in and of itself was somewhat remarkable. Caliban thought back, considering his state of mind since his awakening. At first, the concept of his own continued existence had been something close to a mere matter of intellectual interest. Somewhere during the events of the last few days, it had become something much more. With each new threat to his survival, his desire, hisdetermination, to live, had become stronger.

Yet he knew that simple survival could not be the only goal and purpose of existence. If it were, all he would need do is hide in the deepest, darkest tunnels. Surely cowering down here afforded him the best chance of survival. But no. That was a purposeless existence. Life and thought, sentience and reason, were meant to be in aid of more than forever listening to the dripping tunnel walls in the darkness.

There were other purposes to existence. He knew that to be true, even if he could not yet know what they were. It seemed likely he would not know them for a long, long time. One thing he could see already, however: It was often in the interactions between beings, rather than within the beings themselves, that life found its purposes. Each robot and human gave all the others some small portion of purpose and value. They defined each other’s existence in intricate ways, perhaps in ways so complex, so well learned, that they themselves were rarely aware of it. Yet it was plain that one human, or one robot, all alone, cut off from contact with others, was useless and lost. Beings of both kinds were meant to interact with others, and without that interaction, they might as well be dead-or sitting inert in a tunnel for the rest of time.

Very well. Better a short, active existence, spent in search of those reasons, those purposes, than a long and pointless life quite literally in the darkness.

But how to secure at least some measure of safety from the Sheriff and his deputies? Caliban turned once again to his datastore, determined to dredge through it for every possible bit of information on the Sheriff’s Department. Laws, traditions, histories, definitions, flickered past his consciousness. Wait a moment. There was something. The Sheriff’s jurisdiction was geographically limited. His legal power and authority extended only to the city of Hades. Elsewhere, outside the city, he had no powers. It was something Caliban would have missed back when he thought Hades was all there was of existence.