“Not until I had the brain case,” said Meg. “It was the brain case that made it possible.”
“I gave you the brain case as a crystal ball,” said Rollo. “That was all it was. Just a shiny thing to help you concentrate.”
“Rollo,” said Meg. “Please forgive me, Rollo. It is more than that. I had hoped you would never have to know. Laddie boy and I knew, but we never told you.”
“You’re trying to tell us,” said the A and R, “that the brain still lives within its case; that when a robotic body is inactivated or destroyed, the brain is unaffected, that it still lives on.”
“But that can’t be right,” cried Rollo in a strangled voice. “It could not see or hear. It would be shut up inside itself.…”
“That is right,” said Meg.
“For a thousand years,” said Rollo. “For more than a thousand years.”
Cushing said, “Rollo, we are sorry. That night long ago when you showed Meg the brain case—you remember, don’t you?—she sensed then that the brain was still alive. She told me and we agreed that you should never know, that no one should ever know. You see, there was nothing anyone could do.”
“There are millions of them,” said Rollo. “Hidden away in places where they fell and will never be found. Others collected by the tribes and stacked in pyramids. Others used as childish playthings to roll along the ground.…”
“Being a robot, I mourn with you,” said the A and R. “I am as shocked as you are. But I agree with the gentleman that there is nothing one can do.”
“We could build new bodies,” said Rollo. “At the least we could do something to give them back their sight and hearing. And their voices.”
“Who would do all this?” asked Cushing bitterly. “A blacksmith at the forge of a farm commune? An ironworker who beats out arrowheads and spearpoints for a tribe of nomads?”
“And yet,” said the A and R, “this present brain, isolated for all these years, was able to respond when it was touched by the probing of a human brain. Responded and was of help, I believe you said.”
“I could see the spiders and the gnats,” said Meg, “but they meant nothing to me. With the robot’s brain, they became something else—a pattern, perhaps, a pattern in which there must have been a meaning, although I did not know the meaning.”
“I think, however,” said the A and R, “that herein lies some hope. You reached the data bank; you sensed the data; you were able to put them into visual form.”
“I don’t see how that helps too much,” said Cushing. “Visual form is meaningless unless it can be interpreted.”
“This was a beginning only,” said the A and R. “A second time, a third time, a hundredth time, the meaning may become apparent. And this is even more likely if we should be able to muster, say, a hundred sensitives, each tied in with a robotic brain that might be able to reinforce the sensitive, as this robotic brain was able to make Meg see more clearly.”
“This is all fine,” said Cushing, “but we can’t be sure that it will work. If we could repair the retrieval system …”
“I’ll use your words,” said the A and R. “Who’d do it? Blacksmiths and metalworkers? And even if we could repair it, how could we be sure that we could read the data and interpret it. It seems to me a sensitive would have a better chance of understanding what’s packed away in there.…”
“Given time,” said Cushing, “we might find men who could figure out a way to repair the retrieval. If they had diagrams and specs.”
“In this place,” said the A and R, “we have the diagrams and specs. I have pored over them, but to me they have no significance. I can make nothing of them. You say that you can read?”
Cushing nodded. “There’s a library back at the university. But that would be of little help. It underwent an editing process, purged of everything that had been written some centuries before the Time of Trouble.”
“We have a library here,” said the A and R, “that escaped the editing. Here there’d be materials which might help to train the men you say might repair the system.”
Ezra spoke up. “I’ve been trying to follow this discussion and am having trouble with it. But it appears there are two ways to go about it: either repair the retrieval system, or use sensitives. I’m a sensitive and so is my granddaughter, but I fear neither one of us could be of any help. Our sensitivities, it appears, are specialized. She is attuned to universalities, whereas I am attuned to plants. I fear this would be the case if we sought out sensitives. There are, I would suspect, very many different kinds of them.”
“That is true,” said Cushing. “Wilson had a chapter in his history that dealt with the rise of sensitives after the Collapse. He felt that technology had served as a repressive factor against the development of sensitives and that once the pressure of technology was removed, there were many more of them.”
“This may be true,” said Ezra, “but out of all of them, I would guess you could find very few who could do what Meg has done.”
“We are forgetting one thing,” said Meg, “and that is the robotic brain. I’m not so sure that my powers were so much reinforced by the brain. I would suspect I did no more than direct the brain into the data banks, making it aware of them, giving it a chance to see what was there and then tell me what was there.”
“Sorrowful as the subject is to me,” said Rollo, “I think that Meg is right. It’s not the human sensitives but the brains that will give us answers. They have been shut up within themselves for all these centuries. In the loneliness of their situations, they would have kept on functioning. Given no external stimuli, they were forced back upon themselves. Since they had been manufactured to think, they would have thought. They would have performed the function for which they were created. They would have posed problems for themselves and tried to work through the problems. All these years they have been developing certain lines of logic, each one of them peculiar to himself. Here we have sharpened intellects, eager intellects.…”
“I subscribe to that,” said Ezra. “This makes sense to me. All we need are sensitives who can work with the brains, serve as interpreters for the brains.”
“Okay, then,” said Cushing. “We need brains and sensitives. But I think, as well, we should seek people who might train themselves to repair the retrieval system. There is a library here, you say?”
“A rather comprehensive scientific and technological library,” said the A and R. “But to use it, we need people who can read.”
“Back at the university,” said Cushing, “there are hundreds who can read.”
“You think,” said the A and R, “that we should attack our problem on two levels?”
“Yes, I do,” said Cushing.
“And so do I,” said Ezra.
“If we should succeed,” said Cushing, “what would you guess we’d get? A new basis for a new human civilization? Something that would lift us out of the barbarism and still not set us once again on the old track of technology? I do not like the fact that we may be forced, through the necessity of repairing the retrieval system if the sensitive plan should fail, to go back to technology again to accomplish what we need.”
“No one can be certain what we’ll find,” said the A and R. “But we would be trying. We’d not just be standing here.”
“You must have some idea,” Cushing insisted. “You must have talked to at least some of the returning probes, perhaps all of them, before transferring the data that they carried into the storage banks.”
“Most of them,” said the A and R, “but my knowledge is only superficial. Only the barest indication of what might be in the storage. Some of it, of course, is of but small significance. The probes, you must understand, were programmed only to visit those planets where there was a possibility life might have risen. If their sensors did not show indication of life, they wasted no time on a planet. But even so, on many of the planets where life had risen, there was not always intelligence or an analogue of intelligence. Which is
not to say that even from such planets we would not discover things of worth.”
“But on certain planets there was intelligence?”
“That is so,” said the A and R. “On more planets than we had any reason to suspect. In many instances it was a bizarre intelligence. In some cases, a frightening intelligence. Some five hundred light years from us, for instance, we know of something that you might describe as a galactic headquarters, although that is a human and therefore an imprecise interpretation of what it really is. And even more frightening, a planet, perhaps a little shorter distance out in space, where dwells a race advanced so far beyond the human race in its culture that we would view its representatives as gods. In that race, it seems to me, is a real danger to the human race, for you always have been susceptible to gods.”
“But you think there are some factors, perhaps many factors, from which we could choose, that would help to put we humans back on track again?”
“I’m positive,” said the A and R, “that we’ll find something if we have the sense to use it. As I tell you, I got just a faint impression of what the travelers carried. Just a glimpse of it, and perhaps not a glimpse of the important part of it. Let me tell you some of the things I glimpsed: a good-luck mechanism, a method whereby good luck could be induced or engineered; a dying place of a great confederation of aliens, who went there to end their days and, before they died, checked all their mental and emotional baggage in a place where it could be retrieved if there were ever need of it; an equation that made no sense to me, but that I am convinced is the key to faster-than-light travel; an intelligence that had learned to live parasitically elsewhere than in brain tissue; a mathematics that had much in common with mysticism and which, in fact, makes use of mysticism; a race that had soul perception rather than mere intellectual perception. Perhaps we could find use for none of these, but perhaps we could. It is a sample only. There is much more, and though much would be useless, I can’t help but believe we’d find many principles or notions that we could adapt and usefully employ.”
Elayne spoke for the first time. “We pluck only at the edge of it,” she said. “We see all imperfectly. We clutch at small particulars and fail to comprehend the whole. There are greater things than we can ever dream. We see only those small segments that we can understand, ignoring and glossing over what we are not equipped to understand.”
She was not talking to them but to herself. Her hands were folded on the tabletop in front of her and she was staring out beyond the walls that hemmed them in, staring out into that other world which only she could see.
She was looking at the universe.
24
“You’re mad,” Meg told Cushing. “If you go out to face them, they will gobble you. They’re sore about our being here. Angry about our being here.…”
“They are men,” said Cushing. “Barbarians. Nomads. But still they are men. I can talk with them. They are basically reasonable. We need brain cases; we need sensitives; we need men who have a technological sense. A native technologic sense. In the old days there were people who could look at something and know how it worked, instinctively know how it worked—able, almost at a glance, to trace out the relationship of its working parts.”
“People in the old days,” said Rollo, “but not now. Those people you talk about lived at a time when machines were commonplace. They lived with machines and by machines and they thought machines. And another thing: what we are talking about here is not crude machines, with interlocking gears and sprockets. The retrieval system is electronic and the electronic art was lost long ago. A special knowledge, years of training were required.…”
“Perhaps so,” Cushing agreed, “but here the A and R has a tech library; at the university we have men and women who can read and write and who have not lost entirely the capacity and discipline for study. It might take a long time. It might take several lifetimes. But since the Collapse we have wasted a number of lifetimes. We can afford to spend a few more of them. What we must do is establish an elite corps of sensitives, of brain cases, of potential technologists, of academics.…”
“The brain cases are the key,” said Meg. “They are our only hope. If there are any who have kept alive the old tradition of logic, they are the ones. With the help and direction of sensitives, they can reach the data and probably are the only ones who can interpret it and understand it once it’s interpreted.”
“Once they reach and explain it,” said Cushing, “there must be those who can write it down. We must collect and record a body of data. Without that, without the meticulous recording of it, nothing can be done.”
“I agree,” said Rollo, “that the robotic brains are our only hope. Since the Collapse there has not been one iota of technological development from the human race. With all the fighting and raiding and general hell-raising that is going on, you would think that someone would have reinvented gunpowder. Any petty chieftain would give a good right arm for it. But no one has reinvented it. So far as I know, no one has even thought to do so. You hear no talk of it. I tell you, technology is dead. Nothing can be done to revive it. Deep down in the fiber of the race, it has been rejected. It was tried once and failed, and that is the end of it. Sensitives and brain cases—those are what we need.”
“The A and R indicated there are brain cases here,” said Ezra. “The robots died, he’s the only one that’s left.”
“A half dozen cases or so,” said Meg. “We may need hundreds. Brain cases would not be the same. They’d be, I would guess, highly individualistic. Out of a hundred, you might find only one or two who could untangle what is to be found in the data banks.”
“All right, then,” said Cushing. “Agreed. We need a corps of sensitives; we need brain cases by the bagful. To get them, we have to go to the tribes. Each tribe may have some sensitives; many of them have a hoard of cases. Some of the tribes are out there on the plain, just beyond the Trees. We don’t have to travel far to reach them. I’ll go out in the morning.”
“Not you,” said Rollo. “We.”
“You’ll stay here,” said Cushing. “Once they caught sight of you, they’d run you down like a rabbit and have your brain case out.…”
“I can’t let you go alone,” protested Rollo. “We traveled all those miles together. You stood with me against the bear. We are friends, whether you know it or not. I can’t let you go alone.”
“Not just the one of you or the two of you,” said Meg. “If one goes, so do all the rest of us. We’re in this together.”
“No, dammit!” yelled Cushing. “I’m the one to go. The rest of you stay here. I’ve told Rollo it’s too dangerous for him. There is some danger for me, as well, I would imagine, but I think I can handle it. The rest of you we can’t risk. You are sensitives and we need sensitives. They may be hard to find. We need all that we can find.”
“You forget,” said Ezra, “that neither Elayne nor I are the kind of sensitives you need. I can only talk with plants, and Elayne—”
“How do you know you can only talk with plants? You wanted it that way and that is all you’ve done. Even if it’s all you can do, you can talk with the Trees and it may be important that we have someone who can talk with them. As for Elayne, she has an overall—a universal—ability that may stand us in good stead when we begin digging out the data. She might be able to see relationships that we couldn’t see.”
“But our own tribe may be out there,” insisted Ezra. “If they are, it would help to have us along.”
“We can’t take the chance,” said Cushing. “You can talk with your tribe for us later on.”
“Laddie buck,” said Meg, “mad I think you are.”
“This is the kind of business,” said Cushing, “that may call for a little madness.”
“How can you be sure the Trees will let you out?”
“I’ll talk with the A and R. He can fix it up for me.”
25
Seen from close range, more of the nomads were camped on the prai
rie than Cushing had thought. The tepees, conical tents adapted from those used by the aboriginal North American plains tribes, covered a large area, gleaming whitely in the morning sun. Here and there across the level land were grazing horse bands, each of them under the watchful eyes of half a dozen riders. Trickles of smoke rose from fires within the encampment. Other than the horse herders and their charges, there was little sign of life.
The sun, halfway up the eastern sky, beat down mercilessly upon the prairie. The air was calm and muggy, bearing down so heavily that it required an effort to breathe.
Cushing stood just outside the Trees, looking the situation over, trying to calm the flutter of apprehension that threatened to tie his stomach into knots. Now that he was actually here, ready to begin his trudge across the naked land to the camp, he realized for the first time that there could be danger. He had said so when he had talked about it the previous afternoon, but it was one thing to think about it intellectually and another to be brought face to face with its possibility.
But the men out there, he told himself, would be reasonable. Once he had explained the situation, they would listen to him. Savages they might be, having turned to barbarism after the Collapse, but they still had behind them centuries of civilized logic that even a long string of generations could not have completely extinguished.
He set out, hurrying at first, then settling down to a more reasonable and less exhausting pace. The camp was some distance off and it would take awhile to get there. He did not look back, but kept tramping steadily forward. Halfway there, he paused to rest and then turned to look back at the butte. As he turned, he saw the flash of the sun off a glittering surface well clear of the Trees.