But while the house was energized by its solar power plant and was mobile by virtue of its anti-gravity apparatus, it was much more than that. It was a robot — a robot with a good-servant complex built into it, and at times, it seemed, almost a mother complex. It took care of the people that it housed. It had their welfare firmly fixed in its computer mind. It talked with them and served them, it reminded them and bullied them and nagged at them and coddled them. It was house and servant and companion all rolled into one. A man, Blake told himself, in time could come to look upon his house as a loyal and loving friend.
The House did everything for you. It fed you and did the washing, it tucked you into bed, and given half a chance, it would wipe your nose. It watched over you and anticipated every single wish and sometimes was objectionable in its wish to do too much. It dreamed up things that it imagined you might like — like the animated wallpaper (oops, not wallpaper!) with the rabbit and the singing bird.
But, Blake told himself, it took some getting used to. Maybe not for someone who had lived his life with it. But come back from the stars, God knows from where or when, and be thrown into a house like this — then it took some getting used to.
'Come and get it! bawled the Kitchen. 'Ham and eggs are ready!
6
It came alive humped in a place it had never sensed before — a strange enclosure inhabited by artifacts made mostly out of wood, although there was some metal and some fabric.
It reacted instantly. It snapped out its defences and blotted out the place. It built itself into a pyramid, which was a solid state of being, and constructed about itself a sphere of isolation.
It tested for the energy that it would need to power its life and spark its mentality and the energy was there, a surging tide of energy deriving from some source it could not detect.
It found that now it could cogitate. Its mental processes were bright and clear, its logic like a knife. No longer was there a dreamlike quality in its thinking. The unquestioned pyramidal body mass gave it stability and a theatre in which its mind could operate.
It directed its thinking towards the solution of what had happened to it — how, after an unknown period of time, during which it had only been marginally operative, if even marginally, it suddenly had come free and whole and efficient once again.
It sought for a beginning and there was no beginning, or, perhaps, only a beginning so hazed and indistinct that it could not be sure. It sought and dug and hunted, sniffing through the dark tunnels of its mind, and there was no beginning it could peg down tight and solid.
Although that, it told itself, was of no great consequence, for a beginning might not be essential. Had there ever, it wondered, been a beginning or had it always hunted thus, scrabbling in its mental mazes for an anchor post? A beginning, of course, was not necessary, nor was an ending necessary, either, but somewhere, somehow, there must be an approximation of a beginning and an end.
Perhaps the question, rather, was had there been a past, and it was certain there must have been a past, for its mind was packed with the floating foam of flotsam that came drifting from the past — background bits of information, like the background radiation that could be found upon a planet. It tried to patch the foam into a pattern and no pattern came, for there was no way that the bits of information could be made to fit into one another.
The data, it thought in panic — once there had been data. It was sure there had been data. Once there had been something with which its mind could work. And the data might still be present, but masked or under cover, appearing only in spots and patches, and some of it irrelevant, although one could not be sure, for there did not seem to be enough of it to establish relevance.
It squatted in its pyramidal form and listened to the empty thrumming of its mind, a polished able mind, but without the facts to work on — a mind that was running wild and empty, with no accomplishment.
It sought again in the jumbled tangle of the bits and pieces that floated from the past and it found the impression of a rocky, hostile land, out of the rock of which reared up a massive cylinder, black as the rock itself, soaring up into the greyness of the sky until it made one dizzy to tilt to follow it. And within the cylinder, it knew, was something that defied all imagination, something so great and wondrous that the mind recoiled at the thinking of it.
It sought for the meaning, for some hint or recognition, but there was nothing but the image of the black and rocky land and the blackness and the bleakness of the cylinder that came soaring out of it.
Reluctantly, it let the picture go and dredged for another piece and this time it was a flowery glen that opened on a meadow and the meadow was wild with the thousand hues of a billion blooming flowers. The sound of music shivered in the air and there were living things that romped among the flowers and again there was a meaning here, it knew, but there was no clue that it could find which would allow it to approach the meaning.
There had been another, once. There had been another being and it had been this being which had snared and held the pictures and transmitted them — and not the pictures only, but the data that went with them. And still the pictures were filed within the mind, although jumbled all together, but the data that was tied in with them had somehow disappeared.
It crouched lower and deeper and more massively into its pyramidal form and within its brain the emptiness and the chaos ached and it tried gropingly to go back into its twilit past to find that other creature which had supplied the picture and the data.
But there was nothing to be found. There was no way to reach out and touch this other one. And it wept in loneliness, deep inside itself, without tears or sobbing, for it was not equipped for either tears or sobbing.
And in the bareness of its grief it drove back deeper into time and found a time when there had been no creature, when it still had worked with data and with abstract pictures based upon the data, but there had been no colour in either the data or the concept, and the pictures so erected had been stiff and prim and at times even terrifying.
There was no use, it thought. There was no use in trying. It still was inefficient, it was only half itself, and it could not function properly because it lacked the material to perform its function. It sensed the blackness drifting in upon it and it did not fight against it. It stayed and waited and let the blackness come.
7
Blake awoke and the Room was screaming at him.
'Where did you go? it screamed at him. 'Where did you go? What happened to you?
He was sitting on the floor in the centre of the room, sitting with his legs pulled underneath him. And it was not right, for he should have been in bed.
The Room began again.
'Where did you go? it bellowed. 'What happened to you? What did…
'Oh, shut up, said Blake.
The Room shut up.
Morning sunlight was streaming through the window and somewhere outside a bird was singing. The room was ordinary. Nothing had been changed. It was all exactly as he remembered it when he had gone to bed.
'Now tell me, he said. 'Exactly what did happen?
'You went away! wailed the Room. 'And you built a wall around you…
'A wall!
'A nothingness, said the Room. 'A blob of nothingness. You filled me with a cloud of nothingness.
Blake said, 'You are crazy. How could I do a thing like that?
But even as he said the words, he knew that the Room was right. The Room could only report the phenomenon that it had sensed. It had no such thing as imagination. It was only a machine, although a sophisticated one, and in its experience there was no such thing as superstition, or myth or fairy tale.