Continuum 1, page 21
part #1 of Continuum Series
“Reports of what?” Janus asked.
Skowski swept the others with his yellow visual receptors, then looked back at Janus. “Well — reports of footprints similar to our own but not those of any robot, and reports of robotlike forms seen in the woods —”
“Oh,” Janus said, waving a glittering hand as if to brush away Skowski’s suggestion like a fluff of dust, “we get a dozen reports each month about ‘human beings’ sighted in the wilder regions northwest of here.”
“Where We’re going?” Suranov asked.
“Yes,” Janus said. “But I wouldn’t worry. In every case, those who make the reports are robots like yourselves: they’ve had their perceptions decreased in order to make the hunt a greater challenge for them. Undoubtedly, what they’ve seen has a quite normal explanation. If they had seen these things with the full range of their perceptions, they would not have come back with these crazy tales.”
“Does anyone besides stripped down robots go there?” Skowski asked.
“No,” Janus said.
Skowski shook his head. “This isn’t anything at all like I thought it would be. I feel so weak, so…” He dropped his supplies at his feet. “I don’t believe I want to continue with this,” he said.
The others were surprised.
“Afraid of goblins?” Steffan asked. He was the teaser in the group.
“No,” Skowski said. “But T don’t like being a cripple, no matter how much excitement it adds to the adventure.”
“Very well,” Janus said. “There will be only four of you, then.”
Leeke said, “Don’t we get any weapons besides the drug rifle?”
“You’ll need nothing else,” Janus said.
Leeke’s query had been a strange one, Suranov thought. The prime directive in every robot’s personality, when he left the factory, forbade the taking of life which could not be restored. Yet, Suranov had sympathized with Leeke, shared Leeke’s foreboding. He supposed that, with a crippling of their perceptions, there was an inevitable clouding of the thought processes as well, for nothing else explained their intense and irrational fear.
“Now,” Janus said, “the only thing you’ll need to know is that a natural storm is predicted for the northern Rogale area early tomorrow night. By then you should be to the lodge which will serve as your base of operations, and the snow will pose no trouble. Questions?”
They had none they cared to ask.
“Good luck to the four of you, then,” Janus said. “And may many weeks pass before you lose interest in the challenge.” That was a traditional send-off, yet Janus appeared to mean it. He would, Suranov guessed, prefer to be hunting deer and wolves under decreased perceptions rather than to continue clerking at the stationhouse in Walker’s Watch.
They thanked him, consulted their maps, left the station-house and were finally on their way.
Skowski watched them go and, when they looked back at him, waved one shiny arm in a stiff-fingered salute.
They walked all that day, through the evening and on into the long night, not requiring rest. Though the power supply to their legs had been cut back and an effective governor put on their walking speed, they did not grow weary. They could sense their lessened abilities, but they could not grow tired. Even when the drifts were deep enough for them to break out their wire-webbed snowshoes and bolt those in place, they maintained a steady pace.
Passing across broad plains where the snow was swept into eerie peaks and twisting configurations, walking beneath the dense roof of crossed pine boughs in the virgin forests, Suranov felt a twinge of anticipation which had been missing from his exploits for some years now. Because his perceptions were so much less acute than usual, he sensed danger in every shadow, imagined obstacles and complications around every turn. It was positively exhilarating to be here.
Before dawn, a light snow began to fall, clinging to their cold, steel skin. Two hours later, by the day’s first light, they crested a small ridge and looked out across an expanse of pine woods to the lodge where it rested on the other side of a shallow valley. The place was made of a burnished, bluish metal, with oval windows, very straight-walled and functional.
“We’ll be able to get some hunting in today,” Steffan said.
“Let’s go,” Tuttle said.
Single file, they went down into the valley, crossed it and came out almost at the doorstep of the lodge.
Suranov pulled the trigger.
The magnificent buck, decorated with a twelve-point rack of antlers, reared up onto its hind legs, pawing at the air, breathing steam.
“A hit!” Leeke cried.
Suranov fired again.
The buck went down onto all four legs.
The other deer, behind it in the woods, turned and galloped away, back along the well-trampled trail.
The buck shook its huge head, staggered forward as if to follow its companions, stopped abruptly, then settled slowly onto its haunches and, after one last valiant effort to regain its footing, fell sideways into the snow.
“Congratulations!” Steffan said.
The four robots rose from the drift where they’d fallen when the deer had come into sight, and they crossed the small, open field to the sleeping buck.
Suranov bent and felt the creature’s sedated heartbeat, watched its grainy, black nostrils quiver as it took a shallow breath.
Tuttle, Steffan, and Leeke crowded in, hunkering about the creature, touching it, marveling at the perfect musculature, the powerful shoulders and the hard-packed thighs. They agreed that bringing down such a brute, when one’s senses were drastically damped, was indeed a challenge. Then, one by one, they got up and walked away, leaving Suranov alone to more fully appreciate his triumph and to carefully collect his own emotional reactions to the event in the micro-tapes of his data vault.
Suranov was nearly finished with his evaluation of the challenge and of the resultant confrontation, and the buck was beginning to regain its senses, when Tuttle cried out as if his systems had been accidentally overloaded.
“Here! Look here!”
Tuttle stood, Suranov saw, two hundred yards away, near the dark trees, waving his arms. Steffan and Leeke were already moving toward him.
At Suranov’s feet, the buck snorted and tried to stand, failed to manage that yet, blinked its gummed eyelids. With little or nothing more to record in his data vault, Suranov rose and left the beast, walked toward his three companions.
“What is it?” he asked when he arrived.
The stared at him with glowing amber visual receptors which seemed especially bright in the gray light of late afternoon.
“There,” Tuttle said, pointing at the ground before them.
“Footprints,” Suranov said.
Leeke said, “They don’t belong to any of us.”
“So?” Suranov asked.
“And they’re not robot prints,” Tuttle said.
“Of course they are.”
Tuttle said, “Look closer.”
Suranov bent down and realized that his eyes, with half their power gone, had at first deceived him in the weak light. These weren’t robot prints in anything but shape. A robot’s feet were cross-hatched with rubber tread; these prints showed none of that. A robot’s feet were bottomed with two holes that acted as vents for the anti-grav system when the unit was in flight; these prints showed no holes.
Suranov said, “I didn’t know there were any apes in the north.”
“There aren’t,” Tuttle said.
“Then —”
“These,” Tuttle said, “are the prints — of a man.”
“Preposterous!” Steffan said.
“How else do you explain them?” Tuttle asked. He didn’t sound happy with his explanation, but he was prepared to stick with it until someone offered something more acceptable.
“A hoax,” Steffan said.
“Perpetrated by whom?” Tuttle asked.
“One of us.”
They looked at each other, as if the guilt would be evident in their identical, bland metal faces. Then Leeke said, “That’s no good. We’ve been together. These tracks were made recently, or they’d be covered over with snow; none of us has had a chance, all afternoon, to sneak off and form them.”
“I still say it’s a hoax,” Steffan insisted. “Perhaps someone was sent out by the Central Agency to leave these for us to find.”
“Why would Central bother?” Tuttle asked.
“Maybe it’s part of our therapy,” Steffan said. “Maybe this is to sharpen the challenge for us, add excitement to the hunt.” He gestured vaguely at the prints, as if he hoped they’d vanish. “Maybe Central does this for everyone who’s been sated, to restore the sense of wonder that —”
“Highly unlikely,” Tuttle said. “You know that it’s the responsibility of each individual to engineer his own adventures and to generate his own storable responses. The Central Agency never interferes; it is merely a judge. It evaluates, after the fact, and gives promotions to those whose data vaults have reached maturity.”
By way of cutting the argument short, Suranov said, “Where do these prints lead?”
Leeke indicated the marks with a shiny finger. “It looks as if the creature came out of the woods and stood here for a while — perhaps watching us as we stalked the buck. Then he turned and went back the way he came.”
The four of them followed the footprints into the first of the pine trees, but they hesitated to go into the deeper regions of the forest.
“Darkness is coming,” Leeke said. “The storm’s almost on us, as Janus predicted. With our senses as restricted as they are, we should be getting back to the lodge while we’ve still light enough to see by.”
Suranov wondered if their surprising cowardice were as evident to the others as it was to him. They all professed not to believe in the monsters of myth, and yet they rebelled at the thought of following these footprints. However, Suranov had to admit, when he tried to envision the beast that might have made these tracks — a “man” — he was even more anxious than ever to reach the sanctity of the lodge.
The lodge had only one room, which was really all that they required. Since each of the four was physically identical to the others, no one felt a need for geographical privacy. Each could obtain a more rewarding isolation merely by tuning out all exterior events in one of the lodge’s inactivation nooks, thereby dwelling within his own mind, recycling old data and searching for previously overlooked juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated information. Therefore, no one was discomfited by the single, gray-walled, nearly featureless room where they would spend as much as several weeks together, barring any complications or any lessening of their interest in the challenge of the hunt…
They racked their drug rifles on a metal shelf that ran the length of one wall, and they unbolted their other supplies which, until now, they had carried at various points on their functional body shells.
As they stood at the largest window, watching the snow sheet past them in a blindingly white fury, Tuttle said, “If the myths are true, think what would be done to modern philosophy.”
“What myths?” Suranov asked.
“About human beings.”
Steffan, as rigid as ever, was quick to counter the thrust of Tuttle’s undeveloped line of thought. He said, “I’ve seen nothing to make me believe in myths.”
Tuttle was wise enough, just then, to avoid an argument about the footprints in the snow. But he was not prepared to drop the conversation altogether. He said “We’ve always thought that intelligence was a manifestation, solely, of the mechanized mind. If we should find that a fleshy creature could —”
“But none can,” Steffan interrupted.
Suranov thought that Steffan must be rather young, no more than thirty or forty years out of the factory. Otherwise, he would not be so quick to reject anything that even slightly threatened the status quo that the Central Agency had outlined and established. With the decades, Suranov knew, one learned that what had once been impossible was now considered only commonplace.
“There are myths about human beings,” Tuttle said, “which say that robots sprang from them.”
“From flesh?” Steffan asked, incredulous.
“I know it sounds odd,” Tuttle said. “But at various times in my life, I have seen the oddest things prove true.”
“You’ve been all over the earth, in more corners than I have been. In all your travels, you must have seen tens of thousands of fleshy species, animals of all descriptions.” Steffan paused, for effect, then said, “Have you ever encountered a single fleshy creature with even rudimentary intelligence in the manner of the robot?”
“Never,” Tuttle admitted.
“Flesh was not designed for high-level sentience,” Steffan said.
They were quiet a while, then.
The snow fell, pulling the gray sky closer to the land.
None would admit the private, inner fear he nurtured.
“Many things fascinate me,” Tuttle said, surprising Suranov who had thought the other robot was done with his postulating. “For one — where did the Central Agency come from? What were its origins?”
Steffan waved a hand disparagingly. “There has always been a Central Agency.”
“But that’s no answer,” Tuttle said.
“Why isn’t it?” Steffan asked. “We accept, for answer, that there has always been a universe, stars and planets and everything in between.”
“Suppose,” Tuttle said, “just for the sake of argument, that there has not always been a Central Agency. The Agency is constantly doing research into its own nature, redesigning itself. Vast stores of data are transferred into increasingly more sophisticated repositories every fifty to a hundred years. Isn’t it possible that, occasionally, the Agency loses bits and pieces, accidentally destroys some of its memory in the move?”
“Impossible,” Steffan said. “There would be any number of safeguards taken against such an eventuality.”
Suranov, aware of many of the Central Agency’s bungles over the past hundred years, was not so sure. He was intrigued by Tuttle’s theory.
Tuttle said, “If the Central Agency somehow lost most of its early stores of data, its knowledge of human beings might have vanished along with countless other bits and pieces.”
Steffan was disgusted. He said, “Earlier, you ranted about Second Awareness. You amuse me, Tuttle. Your data vault must be a treasure trove of silly information and useless theorizing. If you believe in these human beings — then do you also believe in all the attendant myths? Do you think they can only be killed with an instrument of wood? Do you think they sleep at night, in dark rooms, like beasts? And do you think that, though they’re made of flesh, they cannot be dispatched but that they pop up somewhere else in a new body?”
Confronted with these obviously insupportable superstitions, Tuttle backed down from his entire point. He turned his amber visual receptors on the whirling snow beyond the window, and he said, “I was only supposing. I was just spinning a little fantasy to help pass the time.”
Triumphant, Steffan said, “However, fantasy doesn’t contribute to a maturation of one’s data vault.”
“And I suppose that you’re eager to mature enough to gain a promotion from the Agency,” Tuttle said.
“Of course,” Steffan said. “We’re only alloted two hundred years. And, besides, what else is the purpose of life?”
Perhaps to have an opportunity to mull over his strange “supposings,” Tuttle soon retired to an inactivation nook in the wall beneath the metal shelf where the guns lay. He slid in feet first, pulled the hatch shut behind his head, leaving the others to their own devices.
Fifteen minutes later, Leeke said, T believe I’ll follow Tuttle’s example. I need time to consider my responses to this afternoon’s hunt.”
Suranov knew that Leeke was only making excuses to be gone; he was not a particularly gregarious robot and seemed most comfortable when he was unaddressed and left to himself.
Alone with Steffan in the lodge, Suranov was in an un-pleasandy delicate position. He felt that he, too, needed time to think inside a deactivation nook. However, he did not want to hurt Steffan’s feelings, did not want to give him the impression that they were all anxious to be away from him. For the most part, Suranov liked the young robot; Steffan was fresh, energetic, obviously a first-line mentality. The only thing he found grating about the youth was his innocence, his undisciplined drive to be accepted and to achieve. Time, of course, would mellow and richen Steffan; he did not, therefore, deserve to be hurt. How, then, to excuse oneself without slighting Steffan in any way?
The younger robot solved the problem, by suggesting that he, too, needed time in a nook. When he was safely shut away, Suranov went to the fourth of the five wall slots, slid into it, pulled the hatch shut, and felt all of his senses drained away from him, so that he was only a mind, floating in darkness, contemplating the wealth of ideas in his data vault…
* * *
Adrift in nothingness, Suranov considers the superstition which has begun to be the center of this adventure: the human being, the man:
Though of flesh, the man thinks and knows.
He sleeps by night, like an animal.
He devours other flesh, as does the beast.
He defecates.
He dies and rots, is susceptible to disease and corruption.
He spawns his young in a terrifyingly unmechanical way, and yet his young are also sentient.
He kills.
He can overpower a robot.
He dismantles robots, though none but other men know what he does with their parts.
He is the antithesis of the robot. If the robot represents the proper way of life, man is the improper.
Man stalks in safety, registering to the robot’s senses, unless seen, as only another harmless animal — until it is too late.
He can be permanently killed only with a wooden implement. Wood is the product of an organic lifeform, yet lasts as metal does; halfway between flesh and metal, it can destroy human flesh.
