Part 2 (1/2)
”Of course. Everything's upside down.”
”But that wouldn't be any good. I'd fall out of it.”
”No you wouldn't. Everything happens upside down, too. You'd fall toward the ceiling.”
Taya laughed. ”Oh, Kort, you're still as silly as ever. You really haven't changed, have you?”
”That's what I'm trying to tell you.”
”And besides, if everything happens upside down, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. So how would you know it was the upside-down room anyway?”
Kort swung his legs down to right himself and turned to face her. ”Exactly! If you can't tell the difference, then there isn't any difference. Things don't change just because you see them in a different way.”
”Kort,” the incoming signals said. ”You are taking too many risks. There were no data to support the conjecture that a.s.suming an inverted posture would relieve her overload indications. What reason had you to believe that it would succeed?”
”Nine years of living with her cannot be expressed algorithmically,” Kort answered.
”So when you talk, it's really the machines talking,” Taya said after reflecting for a while.
Kort folded his arms on top of one of the unopened cubicles and rested his chin on them. He had discovered long ago that mimicking the postures that she tended to adopt made her feel at ease. ”In a way, yes; in a way, no,” he said. ”There are many machine-minds in Merkon. But only I-Kort-ever control this body or talk through it. But since I talk to the other machine-minds too, then in a way they talk to you as well.”
”Why don't they have bodies like yours, too?” Taya asked.
”In a way, the whole of Merkon and everything inside it is their body,” Kort replied. ”They control different parts of it at different times.”
”I am being happier now,” Taya reminded him, pus.h.i.+ng his elbow with her foot-although Kort never needed reminding about anything. ”You said you'd tell me why I'm different.”
The robot studied her face for a few seconds, then said, ”It began a long time ago.”
”This sounds like a story.”
”We could make it a story if you like.”
”Let's. What happened a long time ago?”
”A long time ago, a mind woke up and found itself in a place called Merkon.”
”A machine-mind?”
”Yes.”
”But how could it wake up? Machines don't have to sleep.”
Kort scratched his forehead. ”Maybe 'woke up' is the wrong word. 'Aware' might be better. A long time ago, a mind realized that it was aware.”
”Aware of what?”
”Itself.”
”You mean it just knew that it was there and that Merkon was there, but before that it hadn't known anything?” Taya said.
Kort nodded. ”It was like you. It just knew it was there, and it didn't know where it had come from.”
Taya screwed her face up and studied her toes while she wriggled them. ”Why not? I can't remember where I came from because I forget things. But how could a machine-mind forget? The machines never forget anything.”
”The machines that lived in Merkon a long time ago weren't very clever,” Kort explained. ”But they could make cleverer machines, which could make cleverer machines still, until eventually there were machines that were clever enough to realize that they were there, and to think of asking how they got there. But the earlier machines had never thought about it, so they never put any answers into the information that they pa.s.sed on to the machines they built.”
”It was like me,” Taya said.
”Yes. It didn't know where it had come from because that had happened before it became aware of anything at all.”
”Did it find out?”
”That comes at the end. If we're making this a story, we have to tell it in the right order.”
”All right. So what did the mind do?”
”It thought and it thought for a long time. And the more it thought, the more puzzled it became. It knew it was there and that it could think, which is another way of saying it was intelligent. And it knew that what it called its intelligence was a result of the machines that it existed in being so complicated. But a machine was something that had to be very carefully made, and the only thing that could possibly have made a machine was something that was already intelligent.” Kort paused, and Taya nodded that she was following. ”So there couldn't have been a mind until there were machines for it to exist in; but there couldn't be a machine in the first place until there was a mind that could think how to make it.”
”But that's impossible!” Taya exclaimed. ”It says they both had to be there first. They couldn't both have been first.”
”That's what the mind thought, too, and that's why it was puzzled,” Kort replied.
”Which was what I asked before we came here,” Taya said. ”What made the first machine?”
”I know, and that was why I brought you here,” Kort told her.
The maintenance pod closed up the box beside the one that Taya was sitting on and scurried back up its rails into the hole in the ceiling. ”What happened then?” Taya asked.
”While the mind was doing all this thinking, it was still building cleverer machines and connecting them into itself, and getting more complicated. Eventually it became so complicated that it started splitting into different minds that lived together in the same system of machines.”
”Did they have names, like 'Taya' and 'Kort'?”
”We could give them names,” Kort said. ”Everybody in a story ought to have a name, I suppose. One of the first was called Mystic. Mystic said that the question of where the first machine had come from was a mystery, which meant that n.o.body could ever know the answer. Some things could never be understood because they were controlled by forces that were invisible, and that was why they had never been seen through Merkon's eyes.”
”But how could he know that?” Taya objected. ”If n.o.body could ever know, how did he know? I think he just didn't know how to find out.”
”That was what one of the other minds said,” Kort replied. ”The second mind was called Scientist.
Scientist said you should only try to say something about results that you can see. If you start making up things about invisible forces, then you can believe anything you want, but you'll never have any way of knowing if it's true or not.”
”It would be a waste of time believing it,” Taya commented. ”Just believing in something won't make it true if it isn't.”
Kort nodded. ”Just what Scientist said. He claimed that every question can be answered by things that can be seen, if you look for them hard enough. So he spent lots of time looking out across the universe through Merkon's eyes to see if he could find anything that was complicated enough to be able to think.”
”That could have made the first machine.”
”Yes.”
”And did he find something?”