Clifford Simak - A Choice of Gods

"They fled from us," said Stanley. "Not from me. I wasn't there. But from others of our people. We tried to make them understand. We tried to explain to them. But still they fled from us. We finally no longer followed them. We had no wish to frighten them."

"What do you think they saw?" asked Red Cloud. "This Dark Walker of theirs…"

"Perhaps nothing," Jason said. "They would have had, I suspect, a long background of folklore. They would have been a superstitious people. To people such as they, superstition would have been an entertainment and perhaps a hope…"

"But they might have seen something," insisted Red Cloud. "On that night when it happened, there might have been something on the Earth. There may have been netters who swept up the People. In times past my people had their stories of things that walked the Earth and we, in our new sophistication, are too ready to discount them. But when you live as close to the bosom of the Earth as we do you come to realize that some of the old stories may have some shreds of truth in them. We know, for example, that aliens on occasion now do visit Earth and in time past, before the white man came with his fury and his noise, when this continent was quieter and less boisterous than it became, who can say they did not visit then?"

Jason nodded. "Old friend," he said, "you may well be right."

"We came to a time," said the robot Stanley, "when we knew there were no humans we could serve and we stood with idle hands and there was nothing we could do. But through the centuries the idea grew, slowly at first and then with greater impact, that if we could not work for humans, we could work for ourselves. But what can a robot do for himself or for other robots? Build a civilization? A civilization would be meaningless for us. Build a fortune? What would we get a fortune from and what need would we have of it? We had no profit motive, we did not thirst for status. Education we might have been capable of and even have enjoyed, but it was a dead end, for except for a questionable self-satisfaction it might have given us, we had no use for it. Humans used education for their self-improvement, to earn a better living, to contribute to society, to assure themselves of more enjoyment of the arts. They called it self-improvement and that was a worthy goal for any human, but how could a robot improve himself? And to what purpose and what end? The answer seemed to be that we could not improve ourselves. No robot could make himself appreciably better than he already was. He had limitations built into him by his makers. His capabilities were predetermined by the materials and the programming that went into him. Considering the tasks he was designed to do, he served well enough. There was no need for a better robot. But there seemed no doubt that a better robot could be built. Once you thought of it, it became apparent that there was no limit to a robot. There was no place you had to stop and say, this is the best robot we can make. No matter how well a robot was designed, a better one was always possible. What would happen, we asked ourselves, if an open-ended robot should be built, one that was never really finished…"

"Are you trying to tell us," Jason asked, "that what you have here is your open-ended robot?"

"Mr. Jason," Stanley said, "that is, indeed, what I have tried to say."

"But what do you intend?"

"We do not know," said Stanley.

"You don't know? You are the ones who are building…"

"Not any longer," Stanley said. "It has taken over now. It tells us what to do."

"What use is it?" asked Red Cloud. "It is anchored here. It can't move. It can't do anything."

"It has a purpose," said the robot, stubbornly. "It must have a purpose.."

"Now, just a minute there," said Jason. "You say it tells you what to do. You mean that it has taken over the building of itself? That it tells you how to build it?"

Stanley nodded. "It started twenty years or more ago. We have talked with it…"

"Talked with it. How?"

"By printout. We talk back and forth, like the old computers."

"What you really have built is a big computer."

"No. Not a computer. A robot. Another one of us, except it is so big it has no mobility."

"We are talking to no point at all," said Red Cloud. "A robot is nothing more than a walking computer."

'There are points of difference," said Jason, gently. "That, Horace, is what you have refused to see all these years. You've thought of a robot as a machine and it is not. It is a biological concept expressed mechanically…"

"You are quibbling," Red Cloud said.

"I don't think we'll gain anything," said John, "even by the most good-natured argument. We didn't come here, actually, to find what might be building, We came to see how the robots would react to the People, perhaps, many of them, millions of them, coming back to Earth."

"I can tell you, without any question, how the most of us would react to it," said Stanley. "We would view it with some apprehension. For they would take us back into their service or, perhaps worse than that, would have no need of us. Some of us, perhaps quite a number of us, would welcome being taken back into their service, for through all the years we have felt the lack of someone needing us. Some of us would welcome the old servitude, for to us it was never really servitude. But I think, as well, that the majority of us now feel we have started on a road along which we can work out for ourselves something approaching the destiny of mankind—not that precise kind of destiny, of course, for it would not fit us and we would not want it. For that reason we would not want the humans to come back. They would interfere. They could not help the interference; it is intellectually impossible for them not to interfere in any affairs that touch them, even most remotely. But that is not a decision we can make for ourselves alone. The decision is the province of the Project…"

"You mean the monster you have built," said Hezekiah.

Stanley, who had been standing all the time, slowly lowered himself into a chair. He swiveled his head around to stare at Hezekiah. "You do not approve?" he asked. "You do not understand? Of all these people, I would have thought you would."

"You have committed sacrilege," said Hezekiah, sternly. "You have erected an abomination. You have chosen to elevate yourself above your creators. I have spent many lonely, terrible hours, wondering if I and my associates may not be committing sacrilege, devoting our time and utmost effort to a study and a task that should be mankind's study and its task, but at least we still are working for the good of mankind…"

"Please," said Jason. "Let us not debate that now. How can any of us tell if we're right or wrong in any of our actions? Stanley says that it is up to the Project to decide…"

"The Project will know," said Stanley. "It has far more background knowledge than any one of us. We have traveled widely through the years to obtain material that has been fed into its memory cores. We have given it all the knowledge it has been our fortune to lay our hands upon. It knows history, science, philosophy, the arts. And now it is adding to this knowledge on its own. It is talking with something very far in space."

John jerked upright. "How far in space?" he asked.

"We are not sure," said Stanley. "Something, we believe, in the center of the galaxy."

He felt the crying need of the creature in the glen, the lack of something that it sought and the damnation of that lack. He stopped so quickly that Evening Star, walking close behind, bumped into him.

"What is it?" she whispered.

He stood rigid, feeling the lack and need, and he did not answer. The wash of feeling from the glen came pouring over him and into him—the hopelessness, the doubt, the longing and the need. The trees stood straight and silent in the breathless afternoon and for a moment everything in the forest—the birds, the little animals, the insects—fell into a silence. Nothing stirring, nothing making any noise, as if all of nature held its breath to listen to the creature in the glen.