"I didn't say that, either. I intend to give it one more try after recess. But to be honest, Andrew, we can't win. Look at the numbers." She touched a button and a screen came to life on the wall of her office. "The group on the left side of the chart, the section in green-those are the members who are unalterably opposed to any kind of loosening of the definitions. That's just about 40% of the Legislature: immovable, permanently committed to opposing you. The segment marked in red: there are your supporters. 28%. The rest are the undecided ones."
"In two different colors? Why is that?"
"Yellow is the group that's undecided but leaning in your direction. That's a 12.5% slice. Blue is undecided against you. That's 19.5%."
"I see."
"In order to get a majority, we need to keep every single one of the undecideds in the yellow slice of the chart, and win over more than half of those who are still on the fence but currently thinking of voting against you. Plus, of course, retaining the solid support of your basic 28% group. Even if we can manage to win over a few of your diehard opponents, I don't think we can put together the vote, Andrew."
Andrew said, "Then why bother even bringing the bill up for debate?"
"Because I owe you that much. As you can see, it isn't going to work, and I'm afraid this is going to be my last try. Not because I'm walking away from the fight-not at all-but because I'm not going to be in a position any longer where I can stay in it. Everything that I've been doing on your behalf is going to be wrapped around my neck at the next election and it's going to pull me down to defeat. I have no doubt of that. I'm going to lose my seat."
"I know," said Andrew, "and it distresses me. For your sake, not for mine. You saw it coming long ago, didn't you, Li-hsing? And yet you stayed with me. Why? Why, after telling me at the start that you'd drop me if you found that I was endangering your career? Why didn't you?"
"One can change one's mind, you know. Somehow, Andrew, abandoning you involved paying a higher price than I was willing to pay for the sake of winning just one more term. As it is, I've been in the Legislature for over a quarter of a century. That's long enough, I think."
"But if your mind could change, why not the minds of the others?"
"We've changed all that are amenable to reason. The rest-and it's a majority of them, I'm sorry to say-simply can't be moved. It's a matter of deep-rooted emotional antipathy."
"Theirs, or the people who voted for them?"
"Some of each. Even those members of the Legislature who are more or less rational themselves tend now and then to assume that their constituents aren't. But I'm afraid that plenty of them have powerful antipathies of their own, when it comes to anything robotic."
"And is relying on emotional antipathy a valid way for a Legislator to decide how to vote?"
"Oh, Andrew-"
"Yes. How terribly naive of me to say a thing like that."
"Naive isn't the right word. But you know that they'd never admit they were voting their emotions. They'd offer this or that carefully reasoned-out explanation for their decision-something about the economy, or an analogy from Roman history, or some antiquated religious argument-anything but the truth. But what does it matter? It's how they'll vote that counts, not why they do it."
"It all comes down to the question of the structure of the brain, then-isn't that so?"
"That's the problem, yes."
Andrew said cautiously, "I don't see why that should be such a sticking point for them. What a brain is made of isn't the essential thing: it's how the brain functions. Its thought patterns, its reaction time, its ability to reason and to generalize from experience. Why does the whole issue have to be drawn down to the level of organic cells versus positrons? Is there no way of pushing through a functional definition?"
"Functional?"
"My brain does everything that an officially legal human brain can do -does it better, in many ways, faster, more directly, more logically. Perhaps that's what bothers them. Well, it's too late for me to start hiding my intelligence, if that's the problem. But must we go on insisting that a human brain has to be made