A Heritage of Stars

"I must explain to you a little further what has happened here," said the A and R. "After the human population finally died off, there were only robots left and, as I've told you, as the years went on, fewer and fewer of them. There was not much maintenance required, and so long as there were several of us left, we had no problem with it. You must realize that the data-storage system has been simplified as much as possible, so that there are no great intricacies that could get out of whack. But one system has got out of whack and presents some difficulties. For some reason that I am unable to discover, the retrieval system—"

"The retrieval system?"

"That part of the installation that enables the retrieval of data. There are mountains of data in there, hut there is no way to get it out. In my humble and fumbling way I have tried to make some head or tail of it in hopes I could repair whatever might be wrong, hut you must understand, lam no technician. My training is in administrative work. So we have the situation of having all that data and not being able to get at any of it. When you came along, I felt the faint flutter of some hope when the Trees reported to me that there were sensitives among you. I told the Trees to let you through. I had hopes that a sensitive might get at the data, might be able to retrieve it. And was shocked to find that your one outstanding sensitive was not looking at our data at all, but at something beyond our data, overlooking it as a thing of small consequence.

"But you said the Trees told you," protested Cushing. "It must be that you're a sensitive, yourself."

"A technological sensitivity," said the A and B. "I am so designed as to be keyed in to the Trees, but to nothing else. A sensitivity, of course, but a contrived and most selective one.

"So you thought that a human sensitive might get at the data. But when Elayne didn't do it—"

"I thought it was all a failure at the time," said the A and B, "but I've thought it over since, and now I know the answer. She is in no way a failure, but a sensitive that is too far reaching, too keyed in to universal factors, to be of any use to us. When she inadvertently caught a glimpse of what we have in the data storage, she was shocked at it, shocked at the chaos of it; for I must admit that it is chaos—billions of pieces of data all clumped into a pile. But then there came this morning another one of you. The one that you call Meg. She reached into the data; she touched it. She got nothing from it, but she was aware of it.

"Not until I had the brain case," said Meg. "It was the brain case that made it possible."

"I gave you the brain ease as a crystal ball," said Rollo. "That was all it was. Just a shiny thing to help you concentrate.

"Rollo," said Meg. "Please forgive me, Rollo. It is more than that. I had hoped you would never have to know. Laddie boy and I knew, but we never told you.

"You're trying to tell us," said the A and R, "that the brain still lives within its ease; that when a robotic body is inactivated or destroyed, the brain is unaffected, that it still lives

on.

"But that can't be right," cried Rollo in a strangled voice. "It could not see or hear. It would be shut up inside itself

"That is right," said Meg.

"For a thousand years," said Rollo. "For more than a thousand years."

Cushing said, "Rollo, we are sorry. That night long ago when you showed Meg the brain case—you remember, don't you? — she sensed then that the brain was still alive. She told me and we agreed that you should never know, that no one should ever know. You see, there was nothing anyone could do."

"There are millions of them," said Rollo. "Hidden away in places where they fell and will never be found. Others collected by the tribes and stacked in pyramids. Others used as childish playthings to roll along the ground

"Being a robot, I mourn with you," said the A and B. "I am as shocked as you are. But I agree with the gentleman that there is nothing one can do."

"We could build new bodies," said Rollo. "At the least we could do something to give them back their sight and hearing. And their voices."

"Who would do all this?" asked Cushing bitterly. "A blacksmith at the forge of a farm commune? An ironworker who beats out arrowheads and spearpoints for a tribe of nomads?"

"And yet," said the A and B, "this present brain, isolated for all these years, was able to respond when it was touched by the probing of a human brain. Responded and was of help, I believe you said."

"I could see the spiders and the gnats," said Meg, "but they meant nothing to me. With the robot's brain, they became something else-a pattern, perhaps, a pattern in which there must have been a meaning, although I did not know the meaning."

"I think, however," said the A and B, "that herein lies some hope. You reached the data bank; you sensed the data; you were able to put them into visual form."

"I don't see how that helps too much," said Cushing. "Visual form is meaningless unless it can be interpreted."

"This was a begi

"This is all fine," said Cushing, "but we can't be sure that it will work. If we could repair the retrieval system.

"I'll use your words," said the A and B. "Who'd do it? Blacksmiths and metalworkers? And even if we could repair it, how could we be sure that we could read the data and interpret it. It seems to me a sensitive would have a better chance of understanding what's packed away in there…

"Given time," said Cushing, "we might find men who could figure out a way to repair the retrieval. If they had diagrams and specs.

"In this place," said the A and B, "we have the diagrams and specs. I have pored over them, but to me they have no significance. lean make nothing of them. You say that you can read?"

Cushing nodded. "There's a library back at the university. But that would be of little help. It underwent an editing process, purged of everything that had been written some centuries before the Time of Trouble."

"We have a library here," said the A and B, "that escaped the editing. Here there'd be materials which might help to train the men you say might repair the system."

Ezra spoke up. "I've been trying to follow this discussion and am having trouble with it. But it appears there are two ways to go about it: either repair the retrieval system, or use sensitives. I'm a sensitive and so is my granddaughter, but I fear neither one of us could be of any help. Our sensitivities, it appears, are

A Heritage of Stars

specialized. She is attuned to universalities, whereas I am attuned to plants. I fear this would be the case if we sought out sensitives. There are, I would suspect, very many different kinds of them."

"That is true," said Cushing. "Wilson had a chapter in his history that dealt with the rise of sensitives after the Collapse. He felt that technology had served as a repressive factor against the development of sensitives and that once the pressure of technology was removed, there were many more of them."

"This may be true," said Ezra, "but out of all of them, I would guess you could find very few who could do what Meg has done."

"We are forgetting one thing," said Meg, "and that is the robotic brain. I'm not so sure that my powers were so much reinforced by the brain. I would suspect I did no more than direct the brain into the data banks, making it aware of them, giving it a chance to see what was there and then tell me what was there."