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had finished.  The commlink would penetrate all but the deepest
caves. Small amounts of positronic leakage from the brain should also
be detectable. I detected neither. 
 So something is rotten in the state of Denmark, Dr. Anastasi said.
Basalom was still trying to parse out the metaphor when Janet kicked
off the wall and dove into the access tube.  Let s get out of here. I need
time to think. 
As he followed, Basalom reopened his human viewpoint file and made
another entry. When Dr. Anastasi wants to avoid having to make a
decision, she moves to a different part of the ship and claims a need to
think. Does physical location have a significant effect on human
cogitative abilities? He logged and indexed the entry; as he was
storing it, a dialogue box popped open in the upper left corner of his
field of view.
Basalom? It was Eyes. This reaction puzzles us. Have we harmed
Mistress Janet by giving her this information?
Basalom responded via commlink. 1 am still trying to determine the
First Law implications of emotional distress.
Oh. Eyes was not a particularly bright robot, but it was selfaware
enough to realize that it lacked experience in the subtleties of dealing
with humans. In that case, perhaps you are best qualified to judge
whether or not we should report our one additional finding.
I will try. What is it?
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There was a pause; nothing a human would have noticed, but Basalom
could plainly see that the scanning robot was having difficulty
integrating the information. While we were unable to locate the
specific communications and energy signatures of Learning Machine
# J, we did record a significant amount of other robotic activity.
Basalom s curiosity bits skyrocketed. Other robotic activity? Explain.
The little robot made one more try at generating a conclusion from its
data and then gave up. I cannot. Stand by for download of raw data.
Basalom cleared several of his unused memory banks, redirected his
I/0 to fast storage, and opened his multiplex comm channel. Ready. A
nanosecond later, a torrent of raw data flooded into Basalom s mind.
As fast as he could, he sorted, collated, and organized the data.
Pushing it through his pattern-recognition algorithm, he tried to
isolate and identify the most important points.
One by one, the points swam into clear focus. They quickly formed a
structure, a simple pattern that teased comparative memories out of
his long-term data storage.
Oh no. His stress register started clicking like a geiger counter, and
the pattern took on an ever-more-familiar shape. It can t be. His First
Law sense began to itch like mad as the Second Law potential tried to
find a route to ground. One word got out through the First Law filter:
 Madam?
Dr. Anastasi paused in the tube and looked over her shoulder at
Basalom.  Yes?
Power flowed through Basalom s cognitive circuits like strong wine.
Thoughts spun and danced; potentials crashed and exploded like
thunderclouds on a hot summer night.
 Madam, there  The First Law choked him off again.
A concerned look crossed Dr. Anastasi s face.  Well?
In Basalom s mind, the First and Second Law collided head on, drew
apart, and collided again. Neither was the clear winner; he sought
desperately to reroute data to his speech centers.
 Ma 
Dr. Anastasi grew impatient.  Come on, Basalom. Spit it out. 
His limbs froze; his major joints locked up. He blinked sixty-four
times in rapid succession, and then through sheer force of will
dumped his speech buffer through his voice synthesizer.
 There is a Robot City on this planet. 
CHAPTER 7
MAVERICK
The spur of rock jutted straight out from the side of the mountain
forming a natural balcony. Maverick sat on the edge of the spur,
drinking in the clean pine smell of the forested valley below and
watching the moons light glitter and dance on the river in the
distance. Smallface was now near its zenith, and it cast a cool, white
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light with almost no shadow. Largeface, just barely above the horizon,
was a dull orange globe the color and shape of a vingfruit with a bite
taken out of it.
Somehow, the sight of the two moons together in the sky stirred
something deep and primal in Maverick s soul. As if the two were
directly linked, his excitement grew as Largeface rose. He paced
nervously around the rock spur. A half-dozen times he yelped sharply
when he thought he heard something. His excitement only grew
stronger when the sounds turned out to be false alarms.
Then the sound he d been waiting for came wafting gently on the
wind, and it was raw, beautiful, and absolutely unmistakable.
At first, it was very soft and distant. Arooo. Just one voice at first,
lonely, plaintive, and far away. The sound sent chills up and down
Maverick s spine and set his hackles standing on end.
Then another voice joined in, a little closer. Arooooo! The first voice
responded, and the forests and mountains threw back the echo of the
ancient, wordless cry.
No, those weren t echoes, those were yet more voices, joining in the
chorus of a song that was as old as his race. Voices joined, and picked
up, and repeated. AROOO! The call carried for miles across the hills
and valleys. Not just miles; hundreds of miles, as the voices followed
the rising moon west across the land. As it had on certain nights for
thousands of years, the song chased the twin moons clear across the
world, from the eastern shores to the western sea. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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