Isaac Asimov - Robots and Empire

“I’m sure they’re not,” D.G. had said, “but you say you won’t go anywhere without them and we can’t very well have Daneel sitting there exposed to the cold. It would seem against nature. Nor do we wish to arouse hostility by making it too clear you have robots.”

“They must know I’ve got robots with me and Giskard’s face will give him away—even in a coverall.”

“They might know,” said D.G., “but the chances are they won’t think about it if they’re not forced to—so let’s not force it.

Now D.G. was motioning her into a ground-car that had a transparent roof and sides. “They’ll want to see you as we travel, my lady,” he said, smiling.

Gladia seated herself at one side and D.G. followed on the other. “I’m co-hero,” he said.

“Do you value that?”

“Oh, yes. It means a bonus for my crew and a possible promotion for me. I don’t scorn that.”

Daneel and Giskard entered, too, and sat down in seats that faced the two human beings. Daneel faced Gladia; Giskard faced D.G.

There was a ground-car before them, without transparency, and a line of about a dozen behind them. There was the sound of cheering and a forest of arm-waving from the assembled crowd. D.G. smiled and lifted an arm in response and motioned to Gladia to do the same. She waved in a perfunctory manner. It was warm inside the car and her nose had lost its numbness.

She said, “There’s a rather unpleasant glitter to these windows. Can that be removed?”

“Undoubtedly, but it won’t be,” said D.G. “That’s as unobtrusive a force field as we can set up. Those are enthusiastic people out there and they’ve been searched, but someone may have managed to conceal a weapon and we don’t want you hurt.”

“You mean someone might try to kill me?”

(Daneel’s eyes were calmly scanning the crowd to one side of the car; Giskard’s scanned the other side.)

“Very unlikely, my lady, but you’re a Spacer and Settlers don’t like Spacers. A few might hate them with such a surpassing hatred as to see only the Spacerness in you.—But don’t worry. Even if someone were to try—which is, as I say, unlikely—they won’t succeed.”

The line of cars began to move, all together and very smoothly.

Gladia half-rose in astonishment. There was no one in front of the partition that closed them off. “Who’s driving?” she asked.

“The cars are thoroughly computerized,” said D.G. “I take it that Spacer cars are not?”

“We have robots to drive them.”

D.G. continued waving and Gladia followed his lead automatically. “We don’t,” he said.

“But a computer is essentially the same as a robot.”

“A computer is not humanoid and it does not obtrude itself on one’s notice. Whatever the technological similarities might be, they are worlds apart psychologically.”

Gladia watched the countryside and found it oppressively barren. Even allowing for winter, there was something desolate in the scattering of leafless bushes and in the sparsely distributed trees, whose stunted and dispirited appearance emphasized the death that seemed to grip everything.

D.G., noting her depression and correlating it with her darting glances here and there, said, “It doesn’t look like much now, my lady. In the summer, though, it’s not bad. There are grassy plains, orchards, grain fields—”

“Forests?”

“Not wilderness forests. We’re still a growing world. It’s still being molded. We’ve only had a little over a century and a half, really. The first step was to cultivate home plots for the initial Settlers, using imported seed. Then we placed fish and invertebrates of all kinds in the ocean, doing our best to establish a self-supporting ecology. That is a fairly easy procedure—if the ocean chemistry is suitable. If it isn’t, then the planet is not habitable without extensive chemical modification and that has never been tried in actuality, though there are all sorts of plans for such procedures.—Finally, we try to make the land flourish, which is always difficult, always slow.”

“Have all the Settler worlds followed that path?”

“Are following. None are really finished. Baleyworld is the oldest and we’re not finished. Given another couple of centuries, the Settler worlds will be rich and full of life land as well as sea—though by that time there will by many still-newer worlds that will be working their way through various preliminary stages. I’m sure the Spacer worlds went through the same procedure.”

“Many centuries ago—and less strenuously, I think. We had robots to help.”

“We’ll manage,” said D.G. briefly.

“And what about the native life—the plants and animals that evolved on this world before human beings arrived?”

D.G. shrugged. “Insignificant. Small, feeble things. The scientists are, of course, interested, so the indigenous life still exists in special aquaria, botanical gardens, zoos. There are out-of-the-way bodies of water and considerable stretches of land area that have not yet been converted. Some indigenous life still lives out there in the wild.”

“But these stretches of wilderness will eventually all be converted.”

“We hope so.

“Don’t you feel that the planet really belongs to these insignificant, small, feeble things?”

“No. I’m not that sentimental. The planet and the whole Universe belongs to intelligence. The Spacers agree with that. Where is the indigenous life of Solaria? Or of Aurora?”

The line of cars, which had been progressing tortuously from the spaceport, now came to a flat, paved area on which several low, domed buildings were evident.

“Capital Plaza,” said D.G. in a low voice. “This is the official heartbeat of the planet. Government offices are located here, the Planetary Congress meets here, the Executive Mansion is found here, and so on.”

“I’m sorry, D.G., but this is not very impressive. These are small and uninteresting buildings.”

D.G. smiled. “You see only an occasional top, my lady. The buildings themselves are located underground—all interconnected. It’s a single complex, really, and is still growing. It’s a self-contained city, you know. It, along with the surrounding residential areas, makes up Baleytown.”

“Do you plan to have everything underground eventually? The whole city? The whole world?”

“Most of us look forward to an underground world, yes.”

“They have underground Cities on Earth, I understand.”

“Indeed they do, my lady. The so-called Caves of Steel.”

“You imitate that here, then?”

“It’s not simple imitation. We add our own ideas and we’re coming to a halt, my lady, and any moment we’ll be asked to step out. I’d cling to the coverall openings if I were you. The whistling wind on the Plaza in winter is legendary.”

Gladia did so, fumbling rather as she tried to put the edges of the openings together. “It’s not simple imitation, you say.”

“No. We design our underground with the weather in mind. Since our weather is, on the whole, harsher than Earth’s, some modification in architecture is required. Properly built, almost no energy is required to keep the complex warm in winter and cool in summer. In a way, indeed, we keep warm in winter, in part, with the stored warmth of the previous summer and cool in summer with the coolness of the previous winter.”

“What about ventilation?”

“That uses up some of the savings, but not all. It works, my lady, and someday we will match Earth’s structures. That, of course, is the ultimate ambition—to make Baleyworld a reflection of Earth.”

“I never knew that Earth was so admirable as to make imitation desirable,” said Gladia lightly.