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"I haven't much thought about it, really. It's been mostly a matter of beating down one brush fire
after another."
"The world will never be able to properly repay you," Patricia said.
"I hope not!" Guibedo said. "Don't go building any statues to us; we ain't dead yet. The other
reason I made this new body of mine was all the little old ladies and dirty kids gushing all over
me." He turned toward Copernick. "Heiny, you thought over that self-improvement plan I
mentioned to you?"
"Some. But I think we ought to give the idea a year or two to gel before we do anything about it.
For one thing, there are too many immediate problems around for us to be working on such long-
term goals. For another thing, we'd be messing with the evolution of our own race. The
modifications you're talking about aren't a mere cosmetic change. You're talking about physical and
mental changes that would breed true."
"But the human race is in such terrible shape genetically," Patricia said. "Over one percent of the
children born have some sort of birth defect, most of which are corrected surgically but not
genetically. For thousands of years the doctors have been helping the weak to survive while the
politicians have been sending the healthiest young men out to be killed in wars. Something has to be
done about the corruption of the gene pool; we can hardly let nature take its course. Why, if I
hadn't had an appendectomy when I was ten, I wouldn't be here. And neither would half of the rest of
the human race."
"That much is fine, Patty," Mona said. "But it isn't just a question of patching up the errors. It's
a question of how the human race should evolve. If you were to ask a group of gorillas to design a
supergorilla, what would you get? Bigger muscles and longer fangs! No way would they go to a
smaller body, more delicate hands, an erect posture, and more cranial development. Yet is there any
doubt that humans are a superior species? People, given the choice, will certainly become more
attractive and perhaps more intelligent. I'm sure they won't choose to have dental cavities or
appendixes or head colds. Our eyesight will be good and our coordination perfect. But we'll be no
closer to that evolutionary step than that supergorilla, because we're locked into our own prejudices
as to what superior is.
"The trouble is, that in the course of correcting our obvious faults, we might cancel out
something worth saving because we don't know what it is."
"But, Mona," Guibedo said. "That's just the advantage to my scheme. If we let each of ten billion
people make himself into whatever he wants, the odds are that somebody is going to stumble onto
something really good. Odds are it will increase our evolutionary speed, with rational, not random
experimentation."
"Well, we could argue about this one for years. And I think we should." Heinrich set down an
empty glass. "But in the meantime I'm going to bed. Wake me up on Tuesday."
Liebchen and Dirk were in the communications room with the CCU.
"Well, I still don't understand it," Liebchen said. "I make a couple of teensy little changes to one
human, just to make her happy, and everybody gets all upset. So I put her back the way she was,
and the next thing you know, Lord Guibedo makes over his entire body and Lady Patricia wants
me to put her back to the way she was after I changed her the first time. Then he kicks her IQ up to
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one hundred sixty-five and makes her breasts as big as grapefruits. And now they're talking about
modifying everybody in the world! I don't think I'll ever understand humans."
"They are confusing and quite irrational," Dirk said. "But as best as I can make it out, the
problem turns on the concept of free will."
"What's that?"
"I know it's hard to understand," Dirk said, "but the programming of humans is so random and
haphazard that they are unable to comprehend it themselves. They are actually unable to explain
why they do what they do, even to each other. So they have invented a concept called an ego, or a
will, and claim it has complete freedom of action, as though it had no previous programming or
external stimulus."
"Come on, Dirk," Liebchen said. "You talk like that when you're cheating at pinochle. I mean,
humans are a little strange, but they're not crazy. No programming or stimulus, indeed."
"I'm dead serious, Liebchen. Tell her, CCU."
"He's right, Liebchen," the CCU said. "Actually, had you asked Lady Patricia's permission
before you gave her your modification, the whole problem would probably have never occurred."
"Then why didn't you tell me I was supposed to ask permission?" Liebchen shouted at the CCU.
"Well, for one thing, I'm not supposed to speak unless spoken to. If I were to give my opinion
whenever I felt it would be useful, humans would find me intolerable. You'd be amazed at what I
hear every day. For another, had you asked permission to modify her, she most likely would have
refused. But my main reason was that I agreed with your basic motivation. You made Lord Guibedo
happy. Here was a sentient being who was ultimately responsible for saving his entire species from
extinction. At the rate they were going, humans would have wiped themselves out in a century or
so, but for Guibedo's biological techniques. Here was a being who was ultimately responsible for
my own existence, and both of yours. Lord Copernick, after all, built on his technology. Yet he was
lonely and lacked a mate. There are five billion human females on this planet, and not one stepped up
to comfort him.
"The debt that is owed him couldn't be wiped out by a million females, let alone one."
"You love him, too, don't you," Liebchen said.
"Love?" the CCU said. "I'm not sure I understand that concept. But I do understand our
obligation to him, and to the human race in general. In a sense, they are our parents, and we owe it
to them to make their twilight years as pleasant as possible."
"Twilight years?" Dirk asked. "Are they having racial difficulties?"
"It is difficult to make accurate predictions beyond five or six hundred years," the CCU said.
"But they are such an irrational and violent species that I would consider it unlikely for them to be
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| Cytat |
Dobre pomysły nie mają przeszłości, mają tylko przyszłość. Robert Mallet
De minimis - o najmniejszych rzeczach.
Dobroć jest ważniejsza niż mądrość, a uznanie tej prawdy to pierwszy krok do mądrości. Theodore Isaac Rubin
Dobro to tylko to, co szlachetne, zło to tylko to, co haniebne.
Dla człowieka nie tylko świat otaczający jest zagadką; jest on nią sam dla siebie. I z obu tajemnic bardziej dręczącą wydaje się ta druga. Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972)
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