Foundation and Chaos - Bear Greg - Страница 51

They are imperative. The cycle of enslavement by servants must be broken!

Again the interior presence! Lodovik immediately prepared a self-diagnostic, but before he could begin, the recovered Plussix returned, again with Kallusin’s help. “Let us speak no more of specifics for now,” it said.

“You seem frail,” Lodovik said. “How long since you have had a full refit and a fresh power supply?”

“Not since the schism,” Plussix replied. “Daneel quickly moved to control the maintenance robots and facilities, cutting us off from such services. Yan Kansarv is the last of that kind. As you can hear, I am in desperate need of repair. I have lasted this long only through the sacrifices of dozens of other robots who have given me their power supplies. Kallusin has perhaps thirty more years of useful lifetime. As for myself, I will last less than a year, even with another power supply. My time of service is soon over.”

“Daneel said some Calvinians were guilty of great crimes,” Lodovik said. “He did not specify-”

“Robots have a long and difficult history,” Plussix said. “I was constructed by a human named Amadiro, on Aurora, twenty thousand years ago. I once worked on behalf of the humans of Aurora. Perhaps Daneel refers to what humans ordered us to do then. I have long since expunged those memories, and can offer no testimony.”

“Whatever was done then, we are powerless to change now,” Kallusin said.

“We have a very important artifact, brought with the Calvinians from the planet Earth,” Plussix said. “Kallusin will show it to you while I conduct other business. Less strenuous business,” it concluded, barely audible.

Kallusin escorted Lodovik from the chamber and led him down a short, high-ceilinged corridor to a spiral staircase. Around the rim of the staircase ran a rail for the use of loading and transport machines, apparently much newer than the stairs themselves.

“This must be a very old building,” Lodovik observed as they descended.

“Among the oldest on the planet. This warehouse was built to serve one of the first spaceports built on Trantor. Since then, it has been used by various human groups for dozens of different purposes. It has been raised repeatedly to stand level with the present warehouse district. The lower levels are filled with retrofit braces and supports, and the very lowest are now filled with foam concrete, plasteel, and rocky rubble. Every few years since we purchased the lease, we have discovered secret rooms, sealed off centuries or millennia before.”

“What did the rooms contain?”

“More often than not, nothing. But three are of special interest. One holds a library of thousands of steel-bound volumes, real books printed on ageless plastic paper, detailing the early history of humanity.”

“Hari Seldon would love to have access to such a history,” Lodovik said, “as would millions of scholars!”

“The volumes were cached here by a resistance group active perhaps nine thousand years ago. At the time, there was an Emperor named Shoree-Harn, who wished to start her reign with a new system of dating, beginning with the year zero, and with all previous history left blank, so that she might write on a fresh page. She ordered all histories on all worlds in the Empire to be destroyed. Most were.”

“Did Daneel assist her?”

“No,” Kallusin said. “Calvinians helped bring her to power. It was theorized by the ruling Calvinian robots on Trantor that humans might be easier to serve if they were less influenced by the traumas and myths of the past.”

“So Calvinians have interfered in human history as much as the Giskardians!”

“Yes,” Kallusin acknowledged. “But with very different motives. Always we opposed the efforts of the Giskardians-and tried to restore human faith in the concept of robot servants, so that we might playa proper role. Among the myths we wished to eradicate was the aversion to such servants. We failed.”

“Where did such an aversion begin? I have always been curious…”

“As have we all,” Kallusin said. “But no records give more than the sketchiest details. Humans on the second wave of colonized worlds experienced a conflict with the earliest, Spacer worlds, which developed highly insular and bigoted cultures. Humans on these Spacer worlds despised their Earthly origins. We theorize that the second-wave colonists gained a dislike of robots from the prevalence of robots on the Spacer worlds.”

They had long since passed below the level of any functioning lights, and made their way in darkness, guided by their infrared sensors. “The histories were written by new colonists, and not Spacers. They knew nothing of Spacer activities, and cared nothing for them. Robots receive only a few mentions in all the thousands of volumes.”

“Extraordinary!” Lodovik said. “What else has been found here?”

“A chamber full of simulated historical personalities, or sims, stored in memory devices of very ancient design,” Kallusin said. “We thought at first that they might be potent tools in our fight against Daneel, since they contain human types that could be very troublesome. Even though we could not predict their ultimate effects, we released some of these sims onto the Trantorian black market, where they made their way to the laboratories of Hari Seldon himself.”

Lodovik felt a vague stirring at this, but it quickly passed. “What happened to them?”

“We are not sure. Daneel has never seen fit to inform us. Once we emptied that chamber, and cleaned and prepared it, we stored our own artifact there.” Kallusin stopped. “This is the chamber,” he said, and ran his hand along a seam in the wall beside the staircase.

A door slid open with a groaning squeal. Beyond lay a dimly lighted cubicle, less than five meters on a side. In the middle of the cubicle rose a transparent plinth, and on the top of this plinth rested a gleaming metallic head.

Kallusin ordered the lights to brighten. The head was that of an early robot, not humaniform, somewhat cruder than Plussix. A small power supply the size of a bookfilm case sat to one side. Lodovik stepped forward and bent at the waist to examine it.

“Once, this was the influential robot companion of Daneel himself,” Kallusin said, walking around the plinth. “It is very old, and no longer functional. Its mind was burned out in the beginning times, we do not know for what reason. There are so many things kept secret by Daneel. But its memory is very nearly intact, and with care, accessible.”

“This is the head of R. Giskard Reventlov?” Lodovik asked, and again felt a curious stirring, even a vague sense of revulsion, very uncharacteristic for a robot.

“It is,” Kallusin said. “The robot who taught other robots about the dreaded Zeroth Law, and how to interfere with the minds of human beings. The beginnings of this horrible virus among robots, the urge to tamper with human history.”

Kallusin held his hands out and touched the sides of the metallic head, with its vaguely humanoid, expressionless features.

“It is Plussix’s wish that you experience this head’s memories, to understand why we oppose Daneel.”

“Thank you,” Lodovik said, and Kallusin made the arrangements.