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Some new buildings had materialized since the map was stored in his datastore,
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and other, older buildings that seemed whole and complete in the datastore had
vanished from reality.
No image in the datastore showed anything to be worn-out or dirty, but the
real world was full of dust and dirt, no matter how vigorously the maintenance
robots worked to keep it all clean.
Caliban found the differences between idealized definitions and real-
world imperfections deeply disturbing. The world he could see and touch
seemed, somehow, less real than the idealized, hygienic facts and images
stored deep inside his brain.
But it was more than buildings and the map, or even the datastore, that
confused him.
It was human behavior he found most bewildering. When Caliban first approached
a busy intersection, the datastore showed him a diagram of the correct
procedure for crossing a street safely. But human pedestrians seemed to ignore
all such rules, and common sense, for that matter. They walked wherever they
pleased, leaving to the robots driving the groundcars to get out of the way.
Something else about the datastore was strange, even disturbing: There was a
flavor of something close to emotion about much of its data. It was as if the
opinions, the feelings, of whoever implanted the information into the
datastore had been stored there as well.
He was growing to understand the datastore on something deeper than an
intellectual level. He was learning the feel of it, gaining a sense of how it
worked, developing reflexes to help him use it in a more controlled and useful
manner, keep it from spewing out knowledge he did not need. Humans had to
learn to walk: That was one of many strange and needless facts the datastore
had provided. Caliban was coming to realize that he had to learn how to know,
and remember.
Confusion, muddle, dirt, inaccurate and useless information--those he could
perhaps learn to accept. But it was far more troubling that, on many subjects,
the datastore was utterly--and deliberately--silent. Information he most
urgently wanted was not only missing but excised, purposely removed.
There was a distinct sensation of emptiness, of loss, that came to him when he
reached for data that should have been there and it was not. There were
carved-out voids inside the datastore.
There was much he desperately wanted to know, but there was one thing in
particular, one thing that the store did not tell him, one thing that he most
wanted to know: Why didn t it tell him more? He knew it should have been able
to do so. Why was all information on that place where the sign said
Settlertown deleted from the map? Why had all meaningful references to robots
been deleted? There was the greatest mystery. He was one, and yet he scarcely
knew what one was. Why was the datastore silent on that of all subjects?
Humans he knew about. At his first sight of that woman he saw when he awoke,
he had immediately known what a human was, the basics of their biology and
culture. Later, when he glanced at an old man, or one of the rare children
walking the street, he knew all basic generalities concerning those classes of
person--their likely range of temperament, how it was best to address them,
what they were and were not likely to do. A child might run and laugh, and
adult was likely to walk more sedately, an elder might choose to move more
slowly still.
But when he looked at another robot, one of his fellow beings, his datastore
literally drew a blank. There was simply no information in his mind.
All he knew about robots came from his own observation. Yet his observations
had afforded him little more than confusion.
The robots he saw--and he himself--appeared to be a cross between human and
machine. That left any number of questions unclear. Were robots born and
raised like humans? Were they instead manufactured, like all the other
machines that received detailed discussion in the datastore? What was the
place of the robot in the world? He knew the rights and privileges of humans--
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except as they pertained to robots--but he knew nothing at all of how robots
fit in..
Yes, he could see what went on around him. But what he saw when he looked was
disturbing, and baffling. Robots were everywhere--and everywhere, in every
way, robots were subservient. They fetched and they carried, they walked
behind the humans. They carried the humans loads, opened their doors, drove
their cars. It was patently clear from every scrap of human and robot behavior
that this was the accepted order of things. No one questioned it.
Except himself, of course.
Who was he? What was he? What was he doing here? What did it all mean?
He stood up and started walking again, not with any real aim in mind, but more
because he could not bear to sit idle any longer. The need to know, to
understand who and what he was, was getting stronger all the time. There was
always the chance that the answer, the solution, was just around the corner,
waiting to be discovered.
He left the park and turned left, heading down the broad walkways of downtown. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]