And so the pieces were laid out. Hyperlord Kikaju Jama could now see his own closing move to clinch the arrangement he wanted to make. He v/as elated. No hurry. Bring this old spaceman aboard the revolution with deft diplomacy. Wait months, even years, before broaching the subject of conspiracy. “You have obviously been a staunch supporter of good government. My own cerebrations on the subject have never satisfied me. I would appreciate your conclusions. What kind of government do you subscribe to if not that of the Pscholars?”
The captain smiled sadly. “I found that the most a ship could teach me was how to run a good ship. As captain I felt like a damn psychohistorian: I made the decisions about destiny and I postured to command the loyalty of the crew. They carried out my decisions. But...what I learned doesn’t scale—any analogy one might make between a ship’s crew and the galactic commonalty is like hoping to understand an elephant’s walk by watching a microbe swim.” Kargil laughed at his analogy as if that is exactly what he had been trying to do.
He continued, “I thought I might learn more about large-scale governing when I retired to the swarming trillions of the Imperialis Star System and set up residence among the warrens of Splendid Wisdom.” He smiled more mellowly. “I even thought my wife would return to me! So far I’ve learned how to keep a motherless family going, and as mayor of my little nonterritorial village I’ve learned an efficient form of democracy that just might scale as high as a thousand people before it broke down.” His smile had grown to a grin. “For eighty thousand years we’ve been bred to survive in political groups larger than the village but, as yet, I don’t see much evidence of it in our genes. Ah, the squabbles!”
Kikaju was listening to Kargil intently but the assembler he was watching was thoroughly as fascinating as any scheme to seduce the old man into creating a security system for the revolution. His eyes were being mesmerized by the unit that was building the atomos.
Mildly cross at the seeming inattention to his speech, Kargil pulled at the Lord’s sleeve. “Watching isn’t going to make them grow faster. It will be a spell yet. Building a hydrogen annihilator isn’t as easy as duplicating antique artwork. Come. I don’t know how I’d handle all the squabbles without my robot. Have I told you about my robot? Come. I’ll show you. He’s far from having the cunning abilities of an old Imperial viceroy, but he’s the best statesman I’ve ever enlisted in my cause. Comer Finally he pulled Jama away from his hypnotic vigil.
Kikaju followed his host to a neatly stacked clutter of boxes where he was shown a bronze buddha that was humanoid from the waist up and a giant insect from the waist down—dressed in one of the more blatant striped styles of the ninety-fifth century with ruffles of lace fendering his six legs.
“Meet Danny-Boy,” said Kargil proudly, “the savior of my sanity. He’s not powered so don’t expect him to be polite. Actually, he’s never polite. He’s been programmed with a Robot’s Ritual Rundown, which states simply:
“Law 1—a robot must be able to recite twenty thousand human jokes in context.
“Law 2—a robot must listen to a human patiently until that human makes his first move to derail the agenda.
“Law 3—a robot must know how to bang a gavel.
“He’s our chairbot for democratic meetings that require a quorum. He has all our bylaws and decisions memorized and, believe me, he can check for contradictions in real time. Within his round little belly are the Galaxy’s finest set of rules of order. He can stick tenaciously to an agenda. His simulated gavel is a marvelous gong that rings from his skull with an authority that will hypnotically stop any diversionary thought in midflight. Minutes are ready by meeting’s end and are supplied out of his behind in verbal famfeed format since if we try to link him to a printer he only recites an incomprehensible error message. Sometimes we get so mad at Danny-Boy’s rulings that we turn him off—but by the time we get down to debating how many infinitives should appear in the second paragraph of some unpopular amendment to a critically unimportant motion, we turn him back on. Mostly we put up with him. We don’t really like to cut his power because it takes Danny-Boy all of sixty jiffs to reinitialize his operating system.”
“An actual chairbot! Impressive! Is Danny-Boy an antique?” Jama knew where he could sell sixtynes of such devices.
“He’s supposed to be the creation of Emperor Hagwith-the-Ingenious, who hated staff meetings, but nobody is sure because Hagwith had the unfortunate habit of stealing inventions and executing the inventor—perhaps just a myth invented by his successor who achieved the Robes by assassinating Hagwith. I personally think Danny-Boy’s guts predate Imperial times, perhaps from that mythical era before time when there were dwarfs who forged robots to last. We joke that his operating system was written back on old Rith where a cave full of hereditary slaves are still trying to clean up the code. But he still works.”
“Amazing!” exclaimed Jama, who loved all functioning antiques. “Are you going to turn him on for me?”
“No!”
“No?”
“He has a strong personality,” said Kargil ruefully. “Animated iron! He tends to come up with complaints. He’s old.” “Problems?”
Kargil wiggled his six fingers. “We have our work arounds. He’s built like a plasteel commode. His logic-modals are huge, about the size of a neuron—how could they fail? A hundred fams would fit in his braincase. He’s certainly stupid enough to date from antiquity; for all his massively crude quantronics he has no more brainpower than an unaided human teenager. Maybe fifty or eighty giga-switches at most. We might try to smarten him up with a fam”—Kargil laughed—“but he’d just reply with one of his device-unknown error messages.” Kargil paused. “He’s a good chairbot.”
“So he’s a one-function wonder.” Even with such a limitation he was valuable.
“One function! He has thousands of features we can’t figure out: network manager, detective, you name it—all tacked on as brilliant afterthoughts! How about his telescope-managing mode? When we tried to hook him into a telescope, he asked for one of forty different telescope protocols we’ve never heard of. That’s Danny-Boy! We once tried to hook him into a flatplate after he asked for a screen so he could communicate with us visually, but no matter what screen we tried he kvetched with error message 2247. Don’t ask him what that means—he never knew—he’ll refer you to the manual. When we found him at the local flea market he was cheap because he was paralyzed from the waist down so we sawed off his bi-legs and tried to plug him into the six-legged walking platform you see. Error messages galore! He’s quite a complainer! But we finally taught him how to talk to his legs to make them move. Talk he can do! He has a philosopher mode you don’t want to know about. He would run the Galaxy if he could; forever if he had the spare parts. He does not lack for ego.”