far less precise.
Further exploration confirmed that false voids and featureless buildings were not the only flaws in the datastore map.
The map likewise did not report which blocks were busy, full of people and robots, and which were empty, semi-abandoned, even starting to decay.
Some new buildings had materialized since the map was stored in his datastore, and other, older buildings that seemed whole and complete in the datastore had vanished from reality.
No image in the datastore showed anything to be worn-out or dirty, but the real world was full of dust and dirt, no matter how vigorously the maintenance robots worked to keep it all clean.
Caliban found the differences between idealized definitions and real-world imperfections deeply disturbing. The world he could see and touch seemed, somehow, less real than the idealized, hygienic facts and images stored deep inside his brain.
But it was more than buildings and the map, or even the datastore, that confused him.
It was human behavior he found most bewildering. When Caliban first approached a busy intersection, the datastore showed him a diagram of the correct procedure for crossing a street safely. But human pedestrians seemed to ignore all such rules, and common sense, for that matter. They walked wherever they pleased, leaving to the robots driving the groundcars to get out of the way.
Something else about the datastore was strange, even disturbing: There was a flavor of something close toemotion about much of its data. It was as if the opinions, the feelings, of whoever implanted the information into the datastore had been stored there as well.
He was growing to understand the datastore on something deeper than an intellectual level. He was learning thefeel of it, gaining a sense of how it worked, developing reflexes to help him use it in a more controlled and useful manner, keep it from spewing out knowledge he did not need. Humans had to learn to walk: That was one of many strange and needless facts the datastore had provided. Caliban was coming to realize that he had to learn how to know, and remember.
Confusion, muddle, dirt, inaccurate and useless information-those he could perhaps learn to accept. But it was far more troubling that, on many subjects, the datastore was utterly-and deliberately-silent. Information he most urgently wanted was not only missing butexcised, purposely removed. There was a distinct sensation of emptiness, of loss, that came to him when he reached for data that should have been there and it was not. There were carved-out voids inside the datastore.
There was much he desperately wanted to know, but there was one thing in particular, one thing that the store did not tell him, one thing that he most wanted to know:Why didn't it tell him more? He knew it should have been able to do so. Why was all information on that place where the sign said Settlertown deleted from the map? Why had all meaningful references to robots been deleted? There was the greatest mystery. He was one, and yet he scarcely knew what one was. Why was the datastore silent on that of all subjects?
Humans he knew about. At his first sight of that woman he saw when he awoke, he had immediately known what a human was, the basics of their biology and culture. Later, when he glanced at an old man, or one of the rare children walking the street, he knew all basic generalities concerning those classes of person-their likely range of temperament, how it was best to address them, what they were and were not likely to do. A child might run and laugh, and adult was likely to walk more sedately, an elder might choose to move more slowly still.
But when he looked at another robot, one of his fellow beings, his datastore literally drew a blank. There was simply no information in his mind.
All he knew about robots came from his own observation. Yet his observations had afforded him little more than confusion.
The robots he saw-and he himself-appeared to be a cross between human and machine. That left any number of questions unclear. Were robots born and raised like humans? Were they instead manufactured, like all the other machines that received detailed discussion in the datastore? What was the place of the robot in the world? He knew the rights and privileges of humans-except as they pertained to robots-but he knew nothing at all of how robots fit in...
Yes, he could see what went on around him. But what he saw when he looked was disturbing,