"There are millions of them," said Rollo. "Hidden away in places where they fell and will never be found. Others collected by the tribes and stacked in pyramids. Others used as childish playthings to roll along the ground
"Being a robot, I mourn with you," said the A and B. "I am as shocked as you are. But I agree with the gentleman that there is nothing one can do."
"We could build new bodies," said Rollo. "At the least we could do something to give them back their sight and hearing. And their voices."
"Who would do all this?" asked Cushing bitterly. "A blacksmith at the forge of a farm commune? An ironworker who beats out arrowheads and spearpoints for a tribe of nomads?"
"And yet," said the A and B, "this present brain, isolated for all these years, was able to respond when it was touched by the probing of a human brain. Responded and was of help, I believe you said."
"I could see the spiders and the gnats," said Meg, "but they meant nothing to me. With the robot's brain, they became something else-a pattern, perhaps, a pattern in which there must have been a meaning, although I did not know the meaning."
"I think, however," said the A and B, "that herein lies some hope. You reached the data bank; you sensed the data; you were able to put them into visual form."
"I don't see how that helps too much," said Cushing. "Visual form is meaningless unless it can be interpreted."
"This was a beginning only," said the A and B. "A second time, a third time, a hundredth time, the meaning may become apparent. And this is even more likely if we should be able to muster, say, a hundred sensitives, each tied in with a robotic brain that might be able to reinforce the sensitive, as this robotic brain was able to make Meg see more clearly."
"This is all fine," said Cushing, "but we can't be sure that it will work. If we could repair the retrieval system.
"I'll use your words," said the A and B. "Who'd do it? Blacksmiths and metalworkers? And even if we could repair it, how could we be sure that we could read the data and interpret it. It seems to me a sensitive would have a better chance of understanding what's packed away in there…
"Given time," said Cushing, "we might find men who could figure out a way to repair the retrieval. If they had diagrams and specs.
"In this place," said the A and B, "we have the diagrams and specs. I have pored over them, but to me they have no significance. lean make nothing of them. You say that you can read?"
Cushing nodded. "There's a library back at the university. But that would be of little help. It underwent an editing process, purged of everything that had been written some centuries before the Time of Trouble."
"We have a library here," said the A and B, "that escaped the editing. Here there'd be materials which might help to train the men you say might repair the system."
Ezra spoke up. "I've been trying to follow this discussion and am having trouble with it. But it appears there are two ways to go about it: either repair the retrieval system, or use sensitives. I'm a sensitive and so is my granddaughter, but I fear neither one of us could be of any help. Our sensitivities, it appears, are
A Heritage of Stars
specialized. She is attuned to universalities, whereas I am attuned to plants. I fear this would be the case if we sought out sensitives. There are, I would suspect, very many different kinds of them."
"That is true," said Cushing. "Wilson had a chapter in his history that dealt with the rise of sensitives after the Collapse. He felt that technology had served as a repressive factor against the development of sensitives and that once the pressure of technology was removed, there were many more of them."
"This may be true," said Ezra, "but out of all of them, I would guess you could find very few who could do what Meg has done."
"We are forgetting one thing," said Meg, "and that is the robotic brain. I'm not so sure that my powers were so much reinforced by the brain. I would suspect I did no more than direct the brain into the data banks, making it aware of them, giving it a chance to see what was there and then tell me what was there."
"Sorrowful as the subject is to me," said Rollo, "I think that Meg is right. It's not the human sensitives but the brains that will give us answers. They have been shut up within themselves for all these centuries. In the loneliness of their situations, they would have kept on functioning. Given no external stimuli, they were forced back upon themselves. Since they had been manufactured to think, they would have thought. They would have performed the function for which they were created. They would have posed problems for themselves and tried to work through the problems. All these years they have been developing certain lines of logic, each one of them peculiar to himself. Here we have sharpened intellects, eager intellects…
"I subscribe to that," said Ezra. "This makes sense to me. All we need are sensitives who can work with the brains, serve as interpreters for the brains."
"Okay, then," said Cushing. "We need brains and sensitives. But I think, as well, we should seek people who might train themselves to repair the retrieval system. There is a library here, you say?"
"A rather comprehensive scientific and technological library," said the A and B. "But to use it, we need people who can read."
"Back at the university," said Cushing, "there are hundreds who can read."
"You think," said the A and B, "that we should attack our problem on two levels?"
"Yes, I do," said Cushing.
"And so do I," said Ezra.
"If we should succeed," said Cushing, "what would you guess we'd get? A new basis for a new human civilization? Something that would lift us out of the barbarism and still not set us once again on the old track of technology? I do not like the fact that we may be forced, through the necessity of repairing the retrieval system if the sensitive plan should fail, to go back to technology again to accomplish what we need."
"No one can be certain what we'll find," said the A and B. "But we would be trying. We'd not just be standing here."
"You must have some idea," Cushing insisted. "You must have talked to at least some of the returning probes, perhaps all of them, before transferring the data that they carried into the storage banks."
"Most of them," said the A and B, "but my knowledge is only superficial. Only the barest indication of what might be in the storage. Some of it, of course, is of but small significance. The probes, you must understand, were programmed only to visit those planets where there was a possibility life might have
risen. If their sensors did not show indication of life, they wasted no time on a planet. But even so, on many of the planets where life had risen, there was not always intelligence or an analogue of intelligence. Which is not to say that even from such planets we would not discover things of worth."
"But on certain planets there was intelligence?"
"That is so," said the A and B. "On more planets than we had any reason to suspect. In many instances it was a bizarre intelligence. In some cases, a frightening intelligence. Some five hundred light years from us, for instance, we know of something that you might describe as a galactic headquarters, although that is a human and therefore an imprecise interpretation of what it really is. And even more frightening, a planet, perhaps a little shorter distance out in space, where dwells a race advanced so far beyond the human race in its culture that we would view its representatives as gods. In that race, it seems to me, is a real danger to the human race, for you always have been susceptible to gods."
"But you think there are some factors, perhaps many factors, from which we could choose, that would help to put we humans back on track again?"
"I'm positive," said the A and B, "that we'll find something if we have the sense to use it. As I tell you, I got just a faint impression of what the travelers carried. Just a glimpse of it, and perhaps not a glimpse of the important part of it. Let me tell you some of the things I glimpsed: a good-luck mechanism, a method whereby good luck could be induced or engineered; a dying place of a great confederation of aliens, who went there to end their days and, before they died, checked all their mental and emotional baggage in a place where it could be retrieved if there were ever need of it; an equation that made no sense to me, but that I am convinced is the key to faster than-light travel; an intelligence that had learned to live parasitically elsewhere than in brain tissue; a mathematics that had much in common with mysticism and which, in fact, makes use of mysticism; a race that had soul perception rather than mere intellectual perception. Perhaps we could find use for none of these, but perhaps we could. It is a sample only. There is much more, and though much would be useless, I can't help but believe we'd find many principles or notions that we could adapt and usefully employ."