Caliban

Only after he was in his own lab, only after Bertran had followed him in and shut the door safely behind him, did Jomaine allow himself to succumb to the fears he was feeling. He crossed the room hurriedly. He dropped back into his favorite old armchair and breathed a sigh of relief.

“Sir, are you all right?” Bertran asked. “I fear the bad news about Lady Leving and the police interview have greatly distressed you.”

Jomaine Terach nodded tiredly. “That they have, Bertran. That they have. But I’ll be fine in just a moment. I just need to think for a bit. Why don’t you bring me some water and then retire to your niche for a while?”

“Very good, sir.” The robot stepped to the lab sink, filled a glass, and brought it back. Jomaine watched as Bertran went over to his wall niche and dropped back into standby mode.

That was the way it was supposed to be. A robot did what you told it to do and then got out of the way. That was how it had been for thousands of years. Did they really dare try and change that? Did Fredda Leving truly think she could overturn everything that completely?

And did she truly have to make a deal with the devil, with Tonya Welton, in order to make it happen?

Well, at any rate, he had managed to steer things away from any discussion of the Three Laws. If he had been forced to sacrifice a few tidbits about gravitonics in order to accomplish that, so be it. It would all be public in a day or so, anyway.

They were safe for the moment. But still, the project was madness. Caliban was madness. Building him had been a violation of the most basic Spacer law and philosophy, but Fredda Leving had gone ahead, anyway. Typical bullheadedness.

Never mind theory and philosophy, she had said. They were an experimental lab, not a theory shop that never acted on its ideas. It was time to take the next step, she said. It was time to build a gravitonic robot with no limits on its mind whatsoever. A blank slate, that’s what she had called Caliban. An experimental robot, to be kept inside the lab at all times, never to leave. A robot with no knowledge of other robots, or the Settlers, or anything beyond human behavior and a carefully edited source of knowledge about the outside world. Then let it live at the lab, under controlled conditions, and see what happens. See what rules it developed for its own behavior.

Did she truly have to build Caliban?

No, ask the question directly,he told himself.We’ve all hedged around it long enough. And yes, that was the deadly secret question. No one else knew. With Caliban broken free of the lab, with Fredda unconscious, there was no one else in the wide world who could ask the question.

So Jomaine asked it of himself.

Did she really have to build a robot that did not have the Three Laws?

4

SIMCOR Beddle lifted his left hand, tilted his index finger just so, and Sanlacor 123 pulled back his chair with perfect timing, getting it out from behind him just as Simcor was getting up, so that the chair never came in contact with Simcor’s body as he rose.

There was quite a fashion for using detailed hand signals to command robots, and Simcor was a skilled practitioner of the art.

Simcor turned and walked away from the breakfast table, toward the closed door to the main gallery, Sanlacor hard on his heels. The door swung open just as he arrived at it. The Daabor unit on the other side of the door had no other job in the world but to open it. The machine marked out its existence by standing there, watching for anyone who might approach from its side of the door, and listening for footsteps from inside the room.

But Simcor Beddle, leader of the Ironheads, had no time to think about how menial robots spent their days. He was a busy man.

He had a riot to plan.

Simcor Beddle was a small, rotund man, with a round sallow face and hard, gimlet eyes of indeterminate color. His hair was glossy black, and just barely long enough to lie flat. He was heavy-set, there was no doubt about that. But there was nothing soft about him. He was a hard, determined man, dressed in a rather severe military-style uniform.

Managing his forces, that was the main thing. Keeping them from getting out of control was always a problem. His Ironheads were a highly effective team of rowdies, but they were rowdies all the same-and as such, they easily grew restive and bored. It was necessary to keep them busy, active, if he were to keep them under any sort of control at all.

No one quite knew where the Ironheads had gotten their name, but no one could deny it was appropriate. They were stubborn, pugnacious, bashing whatever was in their way whenever they saw fit. Maybe it was that stubbornness that earned them their name. More likely, though, it was their fanatical defense of thereal Ironheads-robots. Well, granted, no one used anything as crude as raw iron to make robot bodies, but robots were as hard, as strong, as powerful, as iron.