Clifford Simak - A Heritage of Stars

"It must have seemed a good life," Monty said. "You enjoyed it. It helped to wipe away the memories. Buried them to some extent; softened them, perhaps."

Cushing nodded. "I suppose it was a good life. I still think back on it and recall how good it was, remembering the good things only. Not all of it was good."

"And now perhaps you want to go again just to see how good it was. To find out if it was as good as you remembered it. And the Place of Going to the Stars, of course.

"The Place of Stars," said Cushing, "has haunted me ever since I found Wilson's notes. I keep asking myself, what if there should be such a place and no one went to find it?"

"You plan to be leaving, then?"

"Yes, I think I will. But I'll be back. I won't stay away forever. Only until I've found the Place or know it can't be found."

"You'll be going west. Have you ever gone into the West?"

Cushing shook his head.

"It's different from the woods," said Monty. "When you get out a hundred miles or SO, you come to open prairie. You'll have to watch yourself. We have word, remember, that there is something stirring out there. Some warlord pulling some of the tribes together and going on the prod. They'll be heading east, I would imagine, although one can never know what goes on in a nomad's head."

"I'll watch myself," said Cushing.

The Team rolled along the boulevard, as they did each morning. It was their time for cogitation, for the absorption and classification of all that they had learned or sensed or otherwise acquired the day before.

The sky was clear, without a cloud in sight, and once the star got up it would be another scorcher. Except for the birds that chirped discontentedly in the scraggly trees and the little rodents that went skittering through the tunnels in the grass, there was nothing else astir. Bank grass and lusty weeds grew in the pavement cracks. Time-grimed statuary and no-longer-operative fountains lurked in the jungle of unattended shrubbery. Beyond the statuary and the fountains the great piles of the buildings went up against the sky.

"I have thought much upon the situation," said #1, "and still I fail to comprehend the logic of the Ancient and Revered in pretending to be hopeful. By all the criteria that we have developed in our millennia of study throughout the galaxy, the dominant race upon this planet is lost beyond redemption. The race has gone through basically the same process that we have witnessed elsewhere. They built their civilization without realizing the inherent flaw that brought them to destruction. And yet the A and R insists that what has happened is no more than a temporary setback. He tells us that there have been many other setbacks in the history of the race and that in each case it has triumphed over them and emerged in greater strength than it knew before. I sometimes wonder if his thinking could be twisted by the loyalty he still carries in this precious race of his. Certainly one can understand his ingrained faith in these creatures, but the evidence all would indicate the faith is wrongly placed. Either he is unconsciously being intellectually dishonest or is naive beyond our estimation of him."

#2, who had been gazing up into the sky, now floated a group of eyes down across the smooth ball of his body and stared in some disbelief at his companion.

"I am surprised at you," he said. "You surely must be jesting or are under greater strain that I had thought you were. The A and R is neither naive nor dishonest. On the face of what we know, we must accord him the honor of believing in his sincerity. What is more likely is that he has some knowledge that he has chosen not to communicate to us, perhaps an unconscious knowledge that we have failed, with all our investigation and our probing, to uncover. We could have erred in our assessment of the race

"I think," said #1, "that is quite unlikely. The situation fits a classic pattern that we have found time and time again. There are, I grant you, some disturbing factors here, but the pattern is unmistakable We know beyond any question that the race upon this planet has arrived at the classic end of a classic Situation. It has gone into its last decline and will not recover.

"I would be inclined to agree with you," said #2, "except for certain doubts. I am inclined to believe that there are hidden factors we have not recognized, or worse, factors that we have glimpsed and paid no attention to, considering them to be only secondary."

"We have found our answer, #1 said, stubbornly, "and we should long since have been gone from here. Our time is wasted. This history is but little different from the many other histories that we have collected. What is it that worries you so much?"

"The robots, for one thing," said #2. "Have we accorded them the full consideration they deserve, or have we written them off too hastily? By writing them off too quickly, we may have missed the full significance of them and the impact they may have had—or still may have—upon the situation. For they are, in fact, an extension of the race that created them. Perhaps a significant extension. They may not, as we have told ourselves, be playing out previously programmed and now meaningless roles. We have been unable to make any sense out of our interviews with them, but—"

"We have not, in a certain sense, actually interviewed them," #1 pointed out. "They have thrust themselves upon us, each one intent on telling us meaningless stories that have no coherence in them. There is no pattern in what they tell us. We don't know what to believe or if we should believe any of it at all. All of it is gibberish. And we must realize, as well, that these robots can be no more than they seem. They are machines and, at times, atrociously clumsy machines. As such, they are only an embodied symptom of that decay which is characteristic of all technological societies. They are a stupid lot and, what is more, arrogant. Of all possible combinations, stupidity and arrogance is the worst that can be found. The basic badness of them is that they feed on one another."

"You generalize too much," protested #2. "Much of what you say may be quite correct, but there are exceptions. The Ancient and Revered is neither arrogant nor stupid, and though somewhat more sophisticated than the others, he is still a robot."

"I agree," said #1, "that the A and R is neither arrogant nor 5t~pid. He is, by every measure, a polished and well-mannered gentleman, and yet, as I pointed out, he fails of making sense. He is involved in fuzzy thinking, basing his viewpoints on a slender reed of hope that is unsupported by any evidence—that, in fact, flies in the face of evidence. We are trained observers with a long record of performance. We have existed for a much longer span of time than the A and B and during that existence we have always striven for strict objectivity—something that is alien to the A and B, with all his talk of faith and hope."

"I would judge," said #2, "that it is time for us to cease this discussion. We have fallen into crude bickering, which will get us nowhere. It is amazing to me, and a source of sorrow, that after all the time we have worked together we still are capable of falling into such a state. I take it as a warning that in this particular study there is something very wrong. It indicates that we still have failed to reach that state of crystal perfection we attempt to put into our work and the reason for that, in this study, must be that there are underlying truths we have failed to come to grips with and that in our subconscious they rise up to plague us.

"I do not," said #1, "agree with you at all, but what you say about the futility of continuing this discussion is very solemn truth. So let us, for the moment, derive whatever enjoyment we may from our morning stroll."

Cushing had crossed the river, using a crudely constructed log raft to protect his bow and quiver and to help him in his swimming. He had started opposite the wall of the university and allowed the swift current to carry him downstream as he kicked for the other shore, calculating in his mind that he would reach it at about the point where a creek cut through the walls of the bluff. This way there'd be no bluffs to climb, the valley of the creek giving him easy access across the southern limits of the city. He'd not been in this part of the city before and he wondered what he'd find, although he was fairly certain it would not be a great deal different from those fringe sections of the city he had seen—a tangle of olden houses falling in upon themselves or already fallen, faint trails leading in all directions, the remnants of ancient streets where, even to this day, the hard surface of the paving kept them free of heavy growth.