"Just a robot?" A little passion entered her voice. "That's the argument always. Just. Just! Why should the Solarian, Bander, have hesitated to kill us? We were just human beings without transducers. Why should there be any hesitation about leaving Fallom to its fate? It was just a Solarian, and an immature specimen at that. If you start dismissing anyone or anything you want to do away with as just a this or just a that, you can destroy anything you wish. There are always categories you can find for them."
Trevize said, "Don't carry a perfectly legitimate remark to extremes just to make it seem ridiculous. The robot was just a robot. You can't deny that. It was not human. It was not intelligent in our sense. It was a machine mimicking an appearance of intelligence."
Bliss said, "How easily you can talk when you know nothing about it. I am Gaia. Yes, I am Bliss, too, but I am Gaia. I am a world that finds every atom of itself precious and meaningful, and every organization of atoms even more precious and meaningful. I/we/Gaia would not lightly break down an organization, though we would gladly build it into something still more complex, provided always that that would not harm the whole.
"The highest form of organization we know produces intelligence, and to be willing to destroy intelligence requires the sorest need. Whether it is machine intelligence or biochemical intelligence scarcely matters. In fact, the Guardian Robot represented a kind of intelligence I/we/Gaia had never encountered. To study it was wonderful. To destroy it, unthinkable-except in a moment of crowning emergency."
Trevize said dryly, "There were three greater intelligences at stake: your own, that of Pelorat, the human being you love, and, if you don't mind my mentioning it, mine."
"Four! You still keep forgetting to include Fallom. They were not yet at stake. So I judged. See here-**Suppose you were faced with a painting, a great artistic masterpiece, the existence of which meant death to you. All you had to do was to bring a wide brush of paint slam-bang, and at random, across the face of that painting and it would be destroyed forever, and you would be safe. But suppose, instead, that if you studied the painting carefully, and added just a touch of paint here, a speck there, scraped off a minute portion in a third place, and so on, you would alter the painting enough to avoid death, and yet leave it a masterpiece. Naturally, the revision couldn't be done except with the most painstaking care. It would take time, but surely, if that time existed, you would try to save the painting as well as your life."
Trevize said, "Perhaps. But in the end you destroyed the painting past redemption. The wide paintbrush came down and wiped out all the wonderful little touches of color and subtleties of form and shape. And you did that instantly when a little hermaphrodite was at risk, where our danger and your own had not moved you."
"We Outworlders were still not at immediate risk, while Fallom, it seemed to me, suddenly was. I had to choose between the Guardian Robots and Fallom, and, with no time to lose, I had to choose Fallom."
"Is that what it was, Bliss? A quick calculation weighing one mind against another, a quick judging of the greater complexity and the greater worth?"
"Yes."
Trevize said, "Suppose I tell you, it was just a child that was standing before you, a child threatened with death. An instinctive maternalism gripped you then, and you saved it where earlier you were all calculation when only three adult lives were at stake."
Bliss reddened slightly. "There might have been something like that in it; but it was not after the fashion of the mocking way in which you say it. It had rational thought behind it, too."
"I wonder. If there had been rational thought behind it, you might have considered that the child was meeting the common fate inevitable in its own society. Who knows how many thousands of children had been cut down to maintain the low number these Solarians think suitable to their world?"
"There's more to it than that, Trevize. The child would be killed because it was too young to be a Successor, and that was because it had a parent who had died prematurely, and that was because I had killed that parent."
"At a time when it was kill or be killed."
"Not important. I killed the parent. I could not stand by and allow the child to be killed for my deed. Besides, it offers for study a brain of a kind that has never been studied by Gaia."
"A child's brain."
"It will not remain a child's brain. It will further develop the two transducer-lobes on either side of the brain. Those lobes give a Solarian abilities that all of Gaia cannot match. Simply to keep a few lights lit, just to activate a device to open a door, wore me out. Bander could have kept all the power going over an estate as great in complexity and greater in size than that city we saw on Comporellon-and do it even while sleeping."
Trevize said, "Then you see the child as an important bit of fundamental brain research."
"In a way, yes."
"That's not the way I feel. To me, it seems we have taken danger aboard. Great danger."
"Danger in what way? It will adapt perfectly-with my help. It is highly intelligent, and already shows signs of feeling affection for us. It will eat what we eat, go where we go, and I/we/Gala will gain invaluable knowledge concerning its brain."
"What if it produces young? It doesn't need a mate. It is its own mate."
"It won't be of child-bearing age for many years. The Spacers lived for centuries and the Solarians had no desire to increase their numbers. Delayed reproduction is probably bred into the population. Fallom will have no children for a long time."