Isaac Asimov - The Robots of Dawn

He settled down to viewing with greater concentration and noted at once that Daneel was viewing the book-film with him. Actual curiosity? Or just to keep his eyes occupied?

Daneel did not once ask to have a page repeated. Nor did he stop to ask a question. Presumably, he merely accepted what he read with robotic trust and did not permit himself the luxury of either doubt or curiosity.

Baley did not ask Daneel any questions concerning what he read, though he did ask for instructions on the operation of the print-out mechanism of the Auroran viewer, with which he was not familiar.

Occasionally, Baley stopped to make use of the small room that adjoined his room and could be used for the various private physiological functions, so private that the room was referred to as “the Personal,” with the capital letter always understood, both on Earth and—as Baley discovered when Daneel referred to it—on Aurora. It was just large enough for one person which made it bewildering to a City-dweller accustomed to huge banks of urinals, excretory seats, washbasins, and showers.

In viewing the book-films, Baley did not attempt to memorize details. He had no intention of becoming an expert on Auroran society, nor even of passing a high school test on the subject. Rather, he wished to get the feel of it.

He noticed, for instance, even through the hagiographic attitude of historians writing for young people, that the Auroran pioneers—the founding fathers, the Earthpeople who had first come to Aurora to settle in the early days of interstellar travel had been very much Earthpeople. Their politics, their quarrels, every facet of their behavior had been Earthish; what happened on Aurora was, in ways, similar to the events that took place when the relatively empty sections of Earth had been settled a couple of thousand years before.

Of course, the Aurorans had no intelligent life to encounter and to fight, no thinking organisms to puzzle the invaders from Earth with questions of treatment, humane or cruel. There was precious little life of any kind, in fact. So the planet was quickly settled by human beings, by their domesticated plants and animals, and by the parasites and other organisms that were adventitiously brought along. And, of course, the settlers brought robots with them.

The first Aurorans quickly felt the planet to be theirs, since it fell into their laps with no sense of competition, and they had called the planet New Earth to begin with. That was natural, since it was the first extra solar planet—the first Spacer world to be settled. It was the first fruit of interstellar travel, the first dawn of an immense new era. They quickly cut the umbilical cord, however, and renamed the planet Aurora after the Roman goddess of the dawn.

It was the World of the Dawn. And so did the settlers from the start self-consciously declare themselves the progenitors of a new kind. All previous history of humanity was a dark Night and only for the Aurorans on this new world was the Day finally approaching.

It was this great fact, this great self-praise, that made itself felt over all the details: all the names, dates, winners, losers. It was the essential.

Other worlds were settled, some from Earth, some from Aurora, but Baley paid no attention to that or to any of the details. He was after the broad brushstrokes and he noted the two massive changes that took place and pushed the Aurorans ever farther away from their Earthly origins. These were first, the increasing integration of robots into every facet of life and second, the extension of the life-span.

As the robots grew more advanced and versatile, the Aurorans grew more dependent on them. But never helplessly so. Not like the world of Solaria, Baley remembered, on which a very few human beings were in the collective womb of very many robots. Aurora was not like that.

And yet they grew more dependent.

Viewing as he did for intuitive feel—for trend and generality—every step in the course of human/robot interaction seemed to depend on dependence. Even the manner in which a consensus of robotic rights was reached—the gradual dropping of what Daneel would call “unnecessary distinctions” was a sign of the dependence. To Baley, it seemed not, that the Aurorans were growing more humane in their attitude out of a liking for the humane, but that they were denying the robotic nature of the objects in order to remove the discomfort of having to recognize the fact that, the human beings were dependent upon objects of artificial intelligence.

As for the extended life-span, that was accompanied by a slowing of the pace of history. The peaks and troughs smoothed out. There was a growing continuity and a growing consensus.

There was no question but that the history, he was viewing grew less interesting as it went along; it became almost soporific. For those living through it, this had to be good. History was interesting to the extent that it was catastrophic and, while that might make absorbing viewing, it made horrible living. Undoubtedly, personal lives continued to be interesting for the vast majority of Aurorans and, if the collective interaction of lives grew quiet, who would mind?

If the World of the Dawn had a quiet sunlit Day, who on that world would clamor for storm?

Somewhere in the course of his viewing, Baley felt an indescribable sensation. If he had been forced to attempt a description, he would have said it was that of a momentary inversion. It was as though he had been turned inside out and then back as he had been—in the course of a small fraction of a second.

So momentary had it been that he almost missed it, ignoring it as though it had been a tiny hiccup inside himself.

It was only perhaps a minute later, suddenly going over the feeling in retrospect, that he remembered the sensation as something he had experienced twice before: once when traveling to Solaria and once when returning to Earth from that planet.

It was the “Jump,” the passage through hyperspace that, in a timeless, spaceless interval, sent the ship across the parsecs and defeated the speed-of-light limit of the Universe. (No mystery in words, since the ship, merely left the Universe and traversed something which involved no speed limit. Total mystery in concept, however for there was no way of describing what hyperspace was, unless one made use of mathematical symbols which could, in any case, not be translated into anything comprehensible.)

If one accepted the fact that human beings had learned to manipulate hyperspace without understanding the thing they manipulated, then the effect was clear. At one moment, the ship had been within microparsecs of Earth, and at the next moment, it was within microparsecs of Aurora.

Ideally, the Jump took zero time—literally zero—and, if it were carried through with perfect smoothness, there would not, could not be any biological sensation at all. Physicists maintained, however, that perfect smoothness required infinite energy so that there was always an “effective time” that was not quite zero, though it could be made as short as desired. It was that which produced that odd and essentially harmless feeling of inversion.

The sudden realization that he was very far from Earth and very close to Aurora filled Baley with a desire to see the Spacer world.

Partly, it was the desire to see somewhere people lived. Partly, it was a natural curiosity to see something that had been filling his thoughts as a result of the book-films he had been viewing.

Giskard entered just then with the middle meal between waking and sleeping (call it “lunch”) and said, “We are approaching Aurora, sir, but it will not be possible for you to observe it from the bridge. There would, in any case, be nothing to see. Aurora’s sun is merely a bright star and it will be several days before we are near enough to Aurora itself to see any detail.” Then he added, as though in afterthought, “It will not be possible for you to observe it from the bridge at that time, either.”