Caliban

The map imagery rushed past him at a breakneck pace, twisting and turning violently, reversing his movements at tremendous speed. At last the images came back to his starting place. He made a strange discovery: The image of the building was incomplete. Nearly every other building was shown in great detail, with doors and windows and basic elements of the architecture clearly shown. But the map showed this building as nothing but a featureless grey rectangular solid, a low, long shape on the land.

Confused, Caliban accessed the datatag system.

And discovered that the map had no information whatsoever about the building inside which he had awakened.

Stunned, surprised, Caliban shut down the map display system. The bright colors and symbols of the map faded from his vision, and he found himself once again standing in the darkness, alone on an empty pathway in a quiet residential district.

Whywas there no information about that building? Perhaps he should go back there, examine the place firsthand. He of course had a perfect, detailed memory of what he had seen there, and no doubt he could work his way back through those memories for information. But he had not been looking for anything when he awakened, had not even been fully aware that he should have known more than he did. If he went back, he would learn more.

He turned around, was about to head back the way he had come, toward the lab. But then he stopped. Wait a moment. There was another factor. One he had not considered yet. He recalled that first moment of awakening, the sight of the woman unconscious at his feet, the blood pooling about her head. The cross-index system of his datastore flitted through a whole series of things even as he thought about that moment.

And it settled at a quotation from the Legal Code that leaving the scene of a crime before being interviewed by the police was itself a crime. His mind flittered through all the datastore had to say about the Legal Code, the concept of crime, and the idea of punishment and rehabilitation. All of it seemed to relate to humans, but it was not a great leap of reasoning to assume that committing a criminal act could mean trouble for a robot as well.

No, he could not go back there.

Wait a moment. Were there other blanks on the map? Other places where detail was limited in some way? Perhaps other places with limited information on the datastore would have something in common with the building he had left. Perhaps examining one ofthem would offer some clue; perhaps some thought or image would stimulate the datastore to offer some sort of information that could tell him about himself.

Caliban looked about the area and decided it would be best to get off the pathway while he was examining the map. He stepped off the path and walked a short way, until he found a slight depression in the rolling landscape. He sat down in it, reasonably sure he could not be seen from the path.

He returned his attention to the datastore map. At first, his mind cast back and forth across the map in random, swooping passes, trying to cover as much ground as quickly as possible while still keeping track of any building or place that seemed suspiciously blank. Then he resolved to quarter the whole city and go block by block, in an orderly manner. Perhaps there was something he could learn from the pattern of blanked places, something he could discern only when he had located them all.

The map of the city had definite edges to it, precise boundaries beyond which was nothingness. Caliban’s knowledge of the world, the universe, stopped at those borders. For a moment, Caliban toyed with the idea of venturing to the closest of those boundaries, just to see what it was like. He imagined himself standing on the edge of the world, looking down into nothingness. The idea was exciting and disturbing.

But no. It would not do to get sidetracked. First he must get answers about himself and about what had happened at the building where he had awakened. After those two mysteries were resolved, he could take the time to indulge his idle curiosity.

He set to work at the southern edge of the map and began to work across it methodically, examining a strip from east to west, then moving northward to examine the next strip, west to east.

And then he found it. Not far from the southern edge of the map was a great void, an emptiness a thousand times, ten thousand times larger than the blank, unmarked building in which he had awakened. But this was no area without detailed markings. This was emptiness, the absence of all things. No land, no water, no buildings, no roads. There was nothing there at all.