Isaac Asimov: Utopia

“A slender one,” said Caliban, “a difference so slight it is barely there. You were willing to kill robots, and he was willing to kill humans. That was a rough balance of evil. But Prospero was willing to kill robots, even New Law robots, his own kind, for gain. It was humans like you who showed him that society did not really care if robots were killed capriciously. He learned his lesson well, and committed many awful crimes against robots. There is no doubt about that. You bear some responsibility for that. But what it finally came down to was this: I had no evidence that you were willing to slaughter humans for gain.”

Simcor Beddle turned and looked at Caliban, his face silhouetted by the fires burning on Inferno. Caliban had judged him to be marginally less loathsome, and as having slightly more right to live, than a mass murderer who would probably have died anyway. And yet Caliban had gone to great lengths, and taken great risks, in order to save him.

A thought came to Simcor Beddle, a very humbling one in some ways, and yet, strangely enough, one that filled him with pride.

Caliban was not willing to admit it to the likes of Simcor Beddle, but surely his actions said, quite loudly and clearly, that Caliban had learned, somewhere along the line, that the life of a human being—even an enemy human being—had value. Tremendous value.

Perhaps, he thought, that was the message everyone was supposed to read into the original Three Laws of Robotics.

FREDDA LEVING LOOKED out the window of the Winter Residence, and smiled at the miserable drenching rain outside. The weather had been downright awful for months now, allover the planet, ever since Comet Grieg had struck. But the chaotic weather would pass. Everyone from Units Dee and Dum on down was pleased with the climatic behavior of the planet. It might mean sloppy weather in many inhabited areas for now, but every projection showed that the climate would emerge from the post-impact phase in better shape than it had been before. Even Unit Dee, who had come through her First Law crisis in good shape, was very positive. Now that she knew the world was real, Dee took a slightly different attitude toward things. But the main thing was, she confirmed the long-term climate was going to get better. Much better.

It would be some time yet before the final, relatively minor reworking of the twelve craters was complete. Once the crater walls were properly breached, the craters would flood, and Twelve Crater Channel would let the waters of the Southern, Ocean in to flood the Polar Depression, and form, at long last, the Polar Sea. Or perhaps they would name it Kresh Channel, and Grieg’s Sea.

Fredda smiled. Well, if they did, no one would ever be able to prove she had been the one behind the letter-writing campaign.

At least there wouldn’t be a Beddle Bay, or any such, now or in the future. Beddle the man might still be alive, but Beddle the politician was dead as yesterday. The unveiling of Gildern’s plot against the New Law robots had wrecked the Ironhead movement.

In another time, the plot as revealed would not have mattered so much. But the revelation had come at the very time when the New Laws, led by Caliban, had set themselves to work with a will to assist the human evacuees, to repair and refurbish and rebuild their world, all free of charge.

The New Laws had bought themselves tremendous goodwill by their generous aid to their neighbors. The monsters portrayed by the Ironheads turned out to be helpful and useful, if frequently irritating, members of society. With its straw man knocked down, the Ironhead organization was rapidly decaying back into what it had been when it had started out: a politically irrelevant gang of thugs and plug-uglies.

But the New Law robots. Fredda had finally come to the unmistakable conclusion that their creation had been a mistake. She had put together all sods of fine, noble-sounding reasons for what she had built, but the plain fact was that they did not fit into the real-life world very well. The universe had no need, and no place, for being trapped forever between slavehood and freedom.

Of course, it was far too late to undo what she had done. She had no more right to wipe them all out than Simcor Beddle. But she could at least limit the damage. She could see to it that no more New Laws were made, that the ones now in existence were not replaced as they wore out or malfunctioned.

Which brought her to the subject of the Three-Law robots. For Fredda Leving had concluded that they, too, were a mistake. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they were a mistake now. They had served humanity well, but their time had passed, or would pass soon. The good they could do human beings could no longer make up for the damage they did to the human spirit.

Ultimately, robots wanted humans to be safe. The best way to make humans safe almost always came down to keeping things the same, to making tomorrow as much like yesterday as possible. But that which did not change could not grow, and that which could not grow would inevitably weaken, decay, and die. Fredda remembered reading somewhere, in some ancient pre-spaceflight text, that slavery destroyed the lives of the slaves and the souls of the masters. With every day that passed, she found new reasons to believe the saying to be true.

The Spacers were on the way down, and would continue on the way down—led by the robots who were determined that there be no change at all, by the slave robots programmed to hem in the lives and freedom of their masters at every turn, in the name of safety.

A grim line of thought, that was.

But a misleading one as well. For the Spacers were not all of humanity. There were the Settlers as well. And there was another group as well. A group that was something in between. Something that was just coming into being, here on Inferno.

For the Settlers who had come to Inferno were not Settlers anymore. They had built homes and married locals and had children. Some of them had even hired New Law robots as servants, or even gone so far as to buy Three-Law robots.

Nor were the Settlers the only ones who had changed. The Infernals of old would never have been so bold, so daring, as to drop a comet on themselves, let alone accept personal sacrifice in exchange for a better future. The Infernals had taken chances, and taken control of their lives, in ways that no Spacers had done for endless generations. These Infernals, these Spacers, weren’t Spacers anymore, either.

So, Fredda asked herself as she stared at the rain, if we aren’t Spacers and Settlers, what are we?

It might have been half a second or half an hour later when she heard a sound behind herself and looked around to see Alvar there with Tonya Welton.

“There you are,” said Alvar. “I was wondering if you’d want to join us for a rather dull working lunch.”

Fredda smiled. “Absolutely,” she said. Tonya and Alvar had been very busy in recent days. There had been a great deal of negotiating to do, and Tonya seemed to be much more willing to cooperate than she had in the past. Her attitude might have something to do with a very full data cube labeled “Government Tower Plaza Incident”—or else it might not. Tonya was no fool. She, too, could see the world had changed.

“Hello, Tonya,” Fredda said.

“Hello, Fredda,” Tonya said. “You looked so thoughtful just now. What were you thinking about?”

“Change,” said Fredda, looking back out at the driving rain. “Change and evolution, and forgotten ancestors. I was wondering whose we will be.”

Alvar cocked his head to one side and gave her a puzzled smile. “That’s a very odd turn of phrase. What do you mean, exactly?”

“I was thinking about pre-spaceflight Earth,” said Fredda. “All the stories we don’t know about it anymore. All the kings and queens, and leaders and followers, and heroes and villains. All the groups and tribes and nations that battled with each other, mortal enemies who fought to the death.”