Star Wars_ The Black Fleet Crisis 03_ Tyrant's Test - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [75]
“Thank you,” Lobot said. “But what makes you think that Lando ever really gambles?”
“Sir, I have heard Master Han speak of it many times. I believe that Master Lando even considered himself a professional gambler during one period of his life.”
“That’s true,” said Lobot. “And no one hates trusting to chance and fate more than a professional gambler. You’ve misread Lando all along, Threepio.”
“Sir, I do not understand.”
“Think about this, then—maybe it will help,” said Lobot, discarding the last piece of his contact suit. “When a human being—a sentient being—faces a question for which there is no known right answer, a decision for which there’s no obvious right choice, he will almost always end up following what feels right. The logician will construct one kind of justification, the magician another, but at the moment of choosing, the two are more alike than they are different.”
“I see, sir. Thank you. But I do not believe a droid is capable of truly understanding a process that is so fundamentally subjective.”
“No?” asked Lobot, raising an eyebrow. “Then tell me, what was going through your circuits when you grabbed that beckon call away from Lando and signaled Lady Luck? Were you doing the logical thing, or what you felt was the right thing?”
“I am not entirely certain, sir.”
“Good,” said Lobot approvingly. “I suggest you think on that a while, too. You may find it has something to do with the questions you asked me in chamber twenty-one. Now, let’s get going.”
A few hundred twisting meters further, the passages narrowed still tighter, to the point where Lobot could barely wriggle through, and Artoo could not.
“Go back to where we dropped off the grid and my suit and wait for me there,” Lobot said. “Artoo, the link I’ve been using to access your event log and memory registers—can you make it bidirectional, so Lando will know what happened to me if I don’t come back? Maybe you could isolate one of my transmit channels.”
Artoo chirped reassuringly and relayed his assent over the link.
“Master Lobot, may I say something before you leave?”
“Quickly.”
“It is possible that there is no command center as you envision it.”
“I don’t have anything ‘envisioned.’ ”
“I mean to say that rule-based logic can be encoded very compactly. My own language processors contain the equivalent of more than eight times ten to the twelfth decision trees, all within a space of approximately five cubic centimeters.”
“And the giant dewback lizards of Tatooine have a neural cluster smaller than the brain of a newborn human. Yes, I understand your point,” Lobot said, looking back at the droids. “But I am not looking for the vagabond’s bridge, or its brain. I could easily miss those, or fail to recognize them. I am looking for its threshold of awareness, and it will know when I have found it.”
Lando lingered in the auditorium as long as the question of whether the vagabond could heal its great wounds hung in the balance.
In the beginning, a thin band of new material appeared around the edges of each opening in the hull. The smaller opening forward continued to close, just as Lando had seen demonstrated at the airlock. But for a long time, it seemed as though nothing was happening at the larger wound, as if the process had somehow stalled.
Before giving up, Lando moved to a portal on the other side of the chamber. From there, the beam from his chest lamp revealed that the entire opening had skinned over with what looked like the same sort of transparent material he was peering through.
That discovery held him there, even though it again seemed for the longest time as if nothing was happening. He remembered how when they had first boarded the vagabond, he had been able to see Lady Luck’s floodlights through the wall of the airlock.
That should have told me something, he thought. Like shining a lantern through your hand. I should have been thinking organic right from the first. But we thought the genetic