Utopia

“Then why come here? If Hades is so dangerous, it seems to me they ought to be safe enough on the other side of the planet, in Utopia. In that underground city of theirs. They ought to be,” he said again, as if he was not sure they truly were.

One of Alvar Kresh’s first acts as governor was to issue an order, banishing the New Law robots from the inhabited parts of the planet. If that was not the exact wording of the order, it was certainly the effect-and, for that matter, the intent. Fredda could not fault her husband too much for the decision. It had been a choice between banishment and destroying the New Law robots altogether. “They are safe enough in Valhalla, though I don’t think I’d call it a city, exactly,” she said. “It’s more like a huge bunker complex than anything else.”

“Well, I’ll take your word for it,” Alvar said. “You’ve been there, and I haven’t.”

“They may be safe there,” Fredda said, “but they don’t have everything they need. They have to come here to trade.”

“What could a bunch of robots need?”

Fredda wanted to let out a sigh, but she forced herself to hold it back. The two of them had had this argument too many times before. By now each of them had rehearsed his or her part to perfection. But that didn’t make the argument end. They had a good marriage, a solid marriage-but the issue of the New Law robots was one they seemed unlikely to settle between themselves any time soon. “Spare parts, if nothing else,” Fredda said, “as you know perfectly well. They have to keep themselves in repair. Supplies and equipment to maintain and expand Valhalla. Information of all sorts. Other things. This time they were after biological supplies.”

“That’s a new one,” said Alvar. “What do they want with bio supplies?”

“Terraforming projects, I suppose,” said Fredda. “They’ve made a great deal of progress reviving the climate in their part of the world.”

“And trained themselves in some highly marketable skills at the same time. Don’t try to make them into tin saints for me,” said Kresh.

The New Laws were allowed off the Utopia reservation under certain circumstances. The most common reason was to do skilled labor. Every terraforming project on the planet was short of labor, and many project managers were willing-if only reluctantly so-to hire New Law robots for the jobs. The New Laws charged high rates for their work, but they gave good value for money. “What’s wrong with their doing honest work?” Fredda asked. “And what is wrong with their getting paid for it? If a private company needs temporary robot labor, it rents them, and pays the robot rental agent or the owner of the robots for the use of his property. The same applies here. It’s just that these robots own themselves.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Alvar said, moodily stabbing his fork at his vegetables. “But there’s nothing all that noble about it, either. You always try to make them sound like heroes.”

“Not everything they do is for money or gain,” Fredda said, “No one pays them for the terraforming work they do in the Utopia reservation. They do it because they want to do it.”

“Why is that, do you think?” asked Alvar. “Why is it that is what they want to do? I know you’ve been studying the question. Have you come up with anything new on it?”

Fredda looked at her husband in some surprise. The moment she praised anything about the New Laws was normally the point in their well-rehearsed argument when her husband glared at her and suggested that she go the whole distance in making the damned New Laws into angels and rivet wings to their backs, or said something else to the same effect. But not tonight. Fredda realized that Alvar was…different tonight. The New Law robots were on his mind-but usually the subject simply got him angry. This time there was something more thoughtful about him. Almost, impossibly enough, as if he were worried about them. “Do you really want to know?” she asked, her voice uncertain.

“Of course I do,” he replied gently. “Why else would I ask? I’m always interested in your work.”

“Well,” she said, “the short answer is that I don’t know. There is no question that they have a-a drive for beauty. I can’t think of what else to call it. Though perhaps it might be more accurate to call it an impulse to put things right. Where, exactly, it comes from, I can’t say. But it’s not all that surprising that it’s there. When you construct something as complex as a robotic brain, and introduce novel programming-like the New Laws-there are bound to be unexpected consequences of one sort or another. One reason I’m so interested in Prospero is that the programming of his gravitonic brain was still half-experimental. He’s different from the other New Laws in some unexpected ways. He has a much less balanced personality than Caliban, for one thing.”

“Leave that to one side for the moment,” Alvar said. “What about this urge to create business?”