“Why do you mention him?” said Amadiro quickly.
“Because I wish to,”—said Vasilia with a touch of contempt. “Whatever he has done or thinks he is doing—and don’t be frightened, for I haven’t any idea what that might be—it won’t work. I may not know anything else about it, but I do know it won’t work.”
“You’re babbling idiocies,” said Amadiro.
“You had better listen to these idiocies, Kelden, if you don’t want everything to fall into ruin. Not just you, but possibly the Spacer worlds, one and all. Still, you may not want to listen to me. It’s your choice.” Which, then, is it to be?”
“Why should I listen to you? What possible reason is there for me to listen to you?”
“For one thing, I told you the Solarians were preparing to leave their world. If you had listened to me then, you would not have been caught so by surprise when they did.”
“The Solarian crisis will yet turn to our advantage.”
“No, it will not,” said Vasilia. “You may think it will, but it won’t. It will destroy you—no matter what you are doing to meet the emergency—unless you are willing to let me have my say.”
Amadiro’s lips were white and were trembling slightly. The two centuries of defeat Vasilia had mentioned had had a lasting effect upon him and the Solarian crisis had not helped, so he lacked the inner strength to order his robots to see her out, as he should have. He said sullenly, “Well, then, put it in brief.”
“You would not believe what I have to say if I did, so let me do it my own way. You can stop me at any time, but then you will destroy the Spacer worlds. Of course, they will last my time and it won’t be I who will go down in History—Settler history, by the way—as the greatest failure on record. Shall I speak?”
Amadiro folded into a chair. “Speak, then, and when you are through—leave.”
“I intend to, Kelden, unless, of course, you ask me—very politely—to stay and help you. Shall I start?”
Amadiro said nothing and Vasilia began, “I told you that during my stay on Solaria I became aware of some very peculiar positronic pathway patterns they had designed, pathways that struck me—very forcefully—as representing attempts at producing telepathic robots. Now, why should I have thought that?”
Amadiro said bitterly, “I cannot tell what pathological drives may power your thinking.”
Vasilia brushed that aside with a grimace. “Thank you, Kelden.—I’ve spent some months thinking about that, since I was acute enough to think the matter involved not pathology but some subliminal memory. My mind went back to my childhood when Fastolfe, whom I then considered my father, in one of his generous moods—he would experiment now and then with generous moods, you understand—gave me a robot of my own.”
“Giskard again?” muttered Amadiro with impatience.
“Yes, Giskard. Giskard, always. I was in my teenage years and I already had the instinct of a roboticist or, I should say, I was born with the instinct. I had as yet very little mathematics, but I had a grasp of patterns. With the passing of scores of decades, my knowledge of mathematics steadily improved, but I don’t think I have advanced very far in my feeling for patterns. My father would say, ‘Little Vas’—he also experimented in loving diminutives to see how that would affect me—‘you have a genius for patterns.’ I think I did—”
Amadiro said, “Spare me. I’ll concede your genius. Meanwhile, I have not yet had my dinner, do you know that?”
“Well,” said Vasilia sharply, “order your dinner and invite me to join you.”
Amadiro, frowning, raised his arm perfunctorily and made a quick sign. The quiet motion of robots at work made itself evident at once.
Vasilia said, “I would play with pathway patterns for Giskard. I would come to Fastolfe—my father, as I then thought of him—and I would show him a pattern. He might shake his head and laugh and say, ‘If you add that to poor Giskard’s brain, he will no longer be able to talk and he will be in a great deal of pain.’ I remember asking if Giskard could really feel pain and my father said, ‘We don’t know what he would feel, but he would act as we would act if we were in a great deal of pain, so we might as well say he would feel pain.’”
“Or else I would take one of my patterns to him and he would smile indulgently and say, ‘Well, that won’t hurt him, Little Vas, and it might be interesting to try.’”
“And I would. Sometimes I would take it out again and sometimes I would leave it. I was not simply fiddling with Giskard for the sadistic joy of it, as I imagine I might have been tempted to do if I were someone other than myself. The fact is, I was very fond of Giskard and I had no desire to harm him. When it seemed to me that one of my improvements—I always thought of them as improvements—made Giskard speak more freely or react more quickly or more interestingly—and seemed to do no harm—I would let it stay.
“And then one day—”
A robot standing at Amadiro’s elbow would not have dared to interrupt a guest unless a true emergency existed, but Amadiro had no difficulty in understanding the significance of the waiting. He said, “Is dinner ready?”
“Yes, sir,” said the robot.
Amadiro gestured rather impatiently in Vasilia’s direction. “You are invited to have dinner with me.”
They walked into Amadiro’s dining room, which Vasilia had never entered before. Amadiro was, after all, a private person and was notorious for his neglect of the social amenities. He had been told more than once that he would succeed better in politics if he entertained in his home and he had always smiled politely and said, “Too high a price.”
It was perhaps because of his failure to entertain, thought Vasilia, that there was no sign of originality or creativity in the furnishings. Nothing could be plainer than the table, the dishes, and the cutlery. As for the walls, they were merely flat colored vertical planes. Put together, in rather dampened one’s appetite, she thought.
The soup they began with a clear bouillon was as plain as the furniture and Vasilia began to dispose of it without enthusiasm.
Amadiro said, “My dear Vasilia, you see, I am being patient. I have no objection to having you write your autobiography if you wish. But is it really your plan to recite several chapters of it to me? If it is, I must tell you bluntly that I’m not really interested.”
Vasilia said, “You will become extremely interested in just a little while. Still, if you’re really enamored of failure and want to continue to achieve nothing you wish to achieve, simply say so. I will then eat in silence and leave. Is that what you wish?”
Amadiro sighed. “Well, go on, Vasilia.”
Vasilia said, “And then one day I came up with a pattern more elaborate, more pleasant, and more enticing than I had ever seen before or, in all truth, than I have ever seen since. I would have loved to show it to my father, but he was away at some meeting or other on one of the other worlds.
“I didn’t know when he’d be back and I put aside my pattern, but each day I would look at it with more interest and more fascination. Finally, I could wait no longer. I simply could not. It seemed so beautiful that I thought it ludicrous to suppose it could do harm. I was only an infant in my second decade and had not yet completely outgrown irresponsibility, so I modified Giskard’s brain by incorporating the pattern into it.
“And it did no harm. That was immediately obvious. He responded to me with perfect ease and—it seemed to me was far quicker in understanding and much more intelligent than he had been. I found him far more fascinating and lovable than before.
“I was delighted and yet I was nervous, too. What I had done—modifying Giskard without clearing it with Fastolfe was strictly against the rules Fastolfe had set for me and I knew that well. Yet clearly, I was not going to undo what I had done. When I had modified Giskard’s brain, I excused it to myself by saying that it would only be for a little while and that I would then neutralize the modification. Once the modification had been made, however, it became quite clear to me that I would not neutralize it. I was simply not going to do that. In fact, I never modified Giskard again, for fear of disturbing what I had just done.