world of Solaria, Baley remembered, on which a very few human beings were in the collective womb of very many robots. Aurora was not like that.
And yet they grew more dependent.
Viewing as he did for intuitive feel - for trend and generality - every step in the course of human/robot interaction seemed to depend on dependence. Even the manner in which a consensus of robotic rights was reached - the gradual dropping of what Daneel would call "unnecessary distinctions" was a sign of the dependence. To Baley, it seemed not, that the Aurorans were growing more humane in their attitude out of a liking for the humane, but that they were denying the robotic nature of the objects in order to remove the discomfort of having to recognize the fact that, the human beings were dependent upon objects of artificial intelligence.
As for the extended life-span, that was accompanied by a slowing of the pace of history. The peaks and troughs smoothed out. There was a growing continuity and a growing consensus.
There was no question but that the history, he was viewing grew less interesting as it went along; it became almost soporific. For those living through it, this had to be good. History was interesting to the extent that it was catastrophic and, while that might make absorbing viewing, it made horrible living. Undoubtedly, personal lives continued to be interesting for the vast majority of Aurorans and, if the collective interaction of lives grew quiet, who would mind?
If the World of the Dawn had a quiet sunlit Day, who on that world would clamor for storm?
Somewhere in the course of his viewing, Baley felt an indescribable sensation. If he had been forced to attempt a description, he would have said it was that of a momentary inversion. It was as though he had been turned inside out and then back as he had been - in the course of a small fraction of a second.
So momentary had it been that he almost missed it, ignoring it as though it had been a tiny hiccup inside himself.
It was only perhaps a minute later, suddenly going over the feeling in retrospect, that he remembered the sensation as something he had experienced twice before: once when traveling to Solaria and once when returning to Earth from that planet.
It was the "Jump," the passage through hyperspace that, in a timeless, spaceless interval, sent the ship across the parsecs and defeated the speed-of-light limit of the Universe. (No mystery in words, since the ship, merely left the Universe and traversed something which involved no speed limit. Total mystery in concept, however for there was no way of describing what hyperspace was, unless one made use of mathematical symbols which could, in any case, not be translated into anything comprehensible.)
If one accepted the fact that human beings had learned to manipulate hyperspace without understanding the thing they manipulated, then the effect was clear. At one moment, the ship had been within microparsecs of Earth, and at the next moment, it was within microparsecs of Aurora.
Ideally, the Jump took zero time - literally zero - and, if it were carried through with perfect smoothness, there would not, could not be any biological sensation at all. Physicists maintained, however, that perfect smoothness required infinite energy so that there was always an "effective time" that was not quite zero, though it could be made as short as desired. It was that which produced that odd and essentially harmless feeling of inversion.
The sudden realization that he was very far from Earth and very close to Aurora filled Baley with a desire to see the Spacer world.
Partly, it was the desire to see somewhere people lived. Partly, it was a natural curiosity to see something that had been filling his thoughts as a result of the book-films he had been viewing.
Giskard entered just then with the middle meal between waking and sleeping (call it "lunch") and said, "We are approaching Aurora, sir, but it will not be possible for you to observe it from the bridge. There would, in any case, be nothing to see. Aurora's sun is merely a bright star and it will be several days before we are near enough to Aurora itself to see any detail." Then he added, as though in afterthought, "It will not be possible for you to observe it from the bridge at that time, either."
Baley felt strangely abashed. Apparently, it was assumed he would want to observe and that want was simply