More Tales of Pirx the Pilot Read Online Free PDF

of spontaneity that grudgingly bespoke an inner life. Popular wisdom held that robots could think but were devoid of any personality. Admittedly, no robot had ever been known to throw a fit, go into ecstasies, laugh, or cry; they were perfectly balanced, just as their constructors had intended them to be. But because their brains were not mass-produced, because they were the product of a laborious monocrystallization susceptible to wide statistical variability and minute molecular shifts, no two were ever created exactly alike. So they were individuals, then? Not at all, replied the cyberneticists, merely the products of a random probability—a view shared by Pirx and by just about anybody who had ever rubbed elbows with them, spent years in close quarters with their thinking, with their always purposeful, logical bustle. Though more similar to one another than to humans, they, too, were subject to whims and predilections; some, when called upon to execute certain commands, even practiced a kind of passive resistance—a condition that, if it persisted, was remedied by a general overhauling.
    In his attitude toward these quaint machines, so punctilious, at times even ingenious in carrying out orders, Pirx, and probably not he alone, had a not altogether clear conscience, perhaps a throwback to his navigational stint on the Coriolanus. In Pirx’s mind there was something inherently unfair, something fundamentally wrong, about a situation whereby man had created an intelligence both external to and dependent on his will. A slight unease, difficult to define, yet nagging at his conscience like an unbalanced equation or a bad decision—bluntly put, the sense of having perpetrated a very clever but nonetheless nasty trick. In the judicious restraint with which man had invested these cold machines with his cumulative knowledge, granting them only as much intelligence as was required, and no chance of competing with their creators for the world’s favor, lay a perverse subtlety. When applied to their ingenious constructors, Goethe’s maxim “In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister ” acquired the ring of a tribute perversely transformed into a mocking condemnation: they restrained not themselves but their own products, and with a mean precision. Pirx, of course, was not about to announce his qualms, knowing full well how preposterous they would have sounded. Robots were not really handicapped or exploited. No, a much simpler method had been found, one that was both more sinister and harder to attack morally: robots were crippled even before they were born—right on the drawing board.
    That day—their next to last on the planet—was clean-up day. But when it came time to collate the recorded data, one of the tapes had been discovered missing. They ran a search through the computer, then ransacked all the drawers and files, in the process of which Krull twice made Pirx go through his gear, an insinuation resented by Pirx, who had never laid hands on the missing tape and who, even if he had, most certainly would not have stashed it in his grip. Pirx was itching to pay him back, all the more so because of all the anger he had been swallowing, bending over backward to rationalize Krull’s tactless, even abrasive manner. But, as usual, he held his tongue, volunteering, if worse came to worst, to team up with Aniel and re-record the missing data.
    Krull said that Aniel was quite capable of handling it on his own, and after loading him up with camera and film stock, after stuffing his holsters with jet cartridges, they sent him up the massif’s lower summit.
    The robot left at 0800 hours, with Massena boasting he would have the job done by lunchtime. The hours ticked by—two o’clock, three, then four… Darkness fell, but still no Aniel.
    Pirx sat in one corner of the Quonset hut, trying to read a badly battered book lent him by one of the pilots back at the Base, but was unable to concentrate. He was not in the most