Alice: The Girl From Earth - Булычев Кир. Страница 89

Alice knew robots very well; they were a part of the world in which she lived. When Alice had been very young, she had had a robot baby sitter; it knew all sorts of stories and was even able to change diapers. House robots to make the beds, pick up children’s toys, prepare breakfasts were very common. But most of all robots were used in the places where people were not interested in working. Industrial robots had little in common with human beings they were more thinking machines and tools who laid down roads, mined ore, and swept streets. The taxi cab that Alice had called to take her around the city and to Bertha’s was also a robot programmed with street maps and the traffic code. The day before Alice had flown to the Crimea she had seen a robot space ship on the television. It not only carried freight to the Lunar stations but it loaded itself as well, fly to the moon, land in the spot ordered by the dispatcher, and deliver the precise number of containers to the lunar colonists.

Robots had first put in their appearance long ago, at least two hundred years back, but only in the last hundred years Alice had studied all of this in the first grade had they taken such an enormous place in people’s lives. There were as many robots on Earth as there were people, but there had never been an instance where robots had risen up against the human race. That was impossible. Unthinkable. It was like a frying pan the most ordinary frying pan refusing to heat soup, or attacking its user with its cover. It was people who made the robots, and it was people who had programmed into robots the special programs called the Laws to defend the human race from its creations. No matter how large a robots electronic brain might be, that brain could not conceive of disobedience.

This meant the robots on the island had all succeeded in getting broken in a way no other robots had ever before been broken in the past, or and Alice did not even think of this possibility they had been constructed by people who for some reason decided that the robots should lack the Laws that defended the human race.

It grew quiet. The General lifted his head and saw the old man lay broken beside him. The General turned on the light from his own head lamp and saw the old man was made not from flesh and blood, but from electronic components.

“Treason!” It shouted. “They have betrayed us! Gather everyone for a meeting.”

“What about the other human. Perhaps it too…”

“The lock-up for now. There is no time to learn the details now. Tomorrow the human will be questioned with all severity. But…”

The second robot inclined its head and, pushing Alice toward the exit, strode forward, propelling her from behind with its dirty finger.

The lock-up turned out to be a pit with sharp walls. The robot just pushed Alice over the edge, and she landed painfully on stones and dirt, but she did not start to cry. What had happed to her and to the old man-film robot was so serious that it was simply impossible to cry.

Chapter Six: In The Castle on Cape San Bonnifaccio

Alice had never heard about Cape San Bonnifaccio, nor are any of this story’s readers likely to know the Cape’s turbulent history. Cape San Bonnifaccio rises out of the Mediterranean Sea like a shark’s fin; the surrounding lands are parched and uninviting. Once upon a time, about six hundred years ago, the pirate armada of Hassan Bey, comprising some twenty-three quick moving galleys, lay in wait for and smashed a Genoese squadron to smithereens. Hassan Bey himself fastened the noose around the neck of the Genoese admiral before he strung him up from the yard arm. Or so it’s described in the three volume “History of Lawlessness in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic,” by the famous Argentinian historian of piracy don Luis de Diego.

Since then History has passed Cape San Bonnifaccio by. One can hardly consider the construction of a castle at the edge of the cape by an eccentric English baronet an historic event. The Baronet dreamed of having his own Ghost.

But a true ghost would only put in an appearance once the requisite castle had been constructed, however small. Naturally, a real castle would have been best, but the baronet found the English climate cold, wet, and unhealthy, so instead he built his castle on the Mediterranean sea, almost real, with a draw bridge and a not very deep moat where he put the swans. The baronet settled in, and waited for the ghost to begin to clank his chains. Perhaps a ghost did arrive, but only after the baronet grew sick and died. The castle remained masterless. Who in their right mind would settle in this empty corner of the coast?

The castle was empty for half a century. Decayed, its walls leaning at odd angles, the tourists who passed through on the cruise ships may very well have believed the loquacious guides who swore upon their grandmothers’ honors that the castle was built in the Middle Ages by Queen Bella the Pius.

In the second half of the twentieth century the castle came alive once more. Its new owners renovated the interior and redecorated the walls, and encircled the castle and cape with two rows of barbed wire and put armed guards on the gates. Sometimes covered trucks visited the castle, and then a commotion started in the courtyard. Workers and people of unknown nationality unloaded bags and containers from the trucks and carried them into the castle’s enormous vaults.

The peasants from the neighboring villagers gossiped about the castle’s new owners for a time, but by and by the stories died down and were extinguished, like a fire that isn not fed. Once an article about a secret organization preparing for a war was published in a small newspaper, and this article mentioned the names of the castle at Cape San Bonnifaccio, as one of this organization’s bases. But the people mentioned in the article brought the newspaper to court for slander and the newspaper was forced to pay an enormous indemnity, in as much as the newspaper could not provide the court with a single document, and the sole witness was found dead the day before the trial.

More decades passed. People forgot about the supposed organization which had been preparing for a war, and they forgot about the castle itself. The castle, abandoned by its last owners, fell into decay, and the barbed wire was carefully gathered up by the local shepherds and dumped in a cess pit.

As you can see, Cape San Bonnifaccio has no direct connection to our story, except that about ten days or so before Alice flew to the Crimea, Northern Med Tours decided to construct a flyer station and small tourist hotel beside the cape to deal with the submarine tours trade. Northern Med Tours is an enormous organization, and they do not like to waste time needlessly. On the noon of the day the decision was taken three cargo flyers brought in a load of construction robots, and one student.

The construction ‘bots moved out on their enormous treads and set about to clean up the piles of stone left behind from the old castle from the construction site and the student found a single fig tree and sat down in its shadow to read the immortal work of Akhmedzynov “The Introduction of Six Legged Rabbits Into Domestic Situations.” The student was enrolled in a cybernetics-robotics department of the local university, but had found his life boring and decided to enroll in the Genetic Technologies courses as well; the Department was very fashionable and it was hard to get in; there were seventy Earth students and ten off-worlders for every spot.

The construction ‘bots dug up junk, the enraptured student lost himself in Ahmedzyanov’s singularly dry prose, bees swirled about and a light breeze tugged at the fig tree’s leaves. And suddenly one of the construction ‘bots vanished beneath the ground with a large crash.