【正文】 do you have a spear? No, Patrdo. Then Ignacio will get you one. Ignacio took a handful of the sticks and thrust the ends into the fire, blowing on them. After a moment Nicholas leaned over and blew, too, until all the sticks were blazing. 第 25 頁(yè) 共 34 頁(yè) Now we must find you some bamboo, and there is some back here. Follow me. The light, still nearly shadowless, was dimming 。s theory, and not a wea kness, that it serves ` to explain many of the activities of machines as well as the acts of persons. Hello there, Corradora. And hello, Ignacio. My head, moving from side to side, must remind you of a radar scanner. My steps are measured, slow, and precise. 1 emit a scarcely audible humming as 1 walk, and my eyes are fixed, as 1 swing my head, not on you, Ignacio, but on the waves at the edge of sight, where they curve up into the sky. 1 stop ten meters short of you, and 1 stand. You go 1 follow, ten meters behind. What do 1 want? Nothing. Yes, 1 will pick up the sticks, and 1 will followfive meters behind. Break them, and put them on the fire. Not all of them, just a few. Yes. Ignacio keeps the fire here burning all the time. Sometimes he ta kes the coals of fire from it to start others, but here, under the big palm log, he has a fire always. The rain does not strike it here. Always the fire. Do you know how he made it the first time? Reply to him! No. No, Patrdo! `No, Patrao.39。 Nicholas had not liked them, and he did not think Ignacio would have liked them either. If he had liked his therapy robot he probably would not have 第 24 頁(yè) 共 34 頁(yè) had to be sent here. He thought of the chipped and rusted old machine that had cleaned the corridorsMaya had called it Corradora, but no one else ever called it any F thing but Hey! It could not (or at least did not) speak, 1 and Nicholas doubted that it had emotions, except possibly a sort of love of cleanness that did not extend to its own person. You will understand, someone was saying inside his head, that motives of all sorts can be divided into two sorts. A doctor? A therapy robot? It did not matter. Extrinsic and intrinsic. An extrinsic motive has always some further end in view, and that end we call an intrinsic motive. Thus when we have reduced motivation to intrinsic motivation we have reduced it to its simplest parts. Take that machine over there. What machine? Freud would have said that it was fixated at the latter anal stage, perhaps due to the care its builders exercised in seeing that the dirt it collects is not released again. Because of its fixation it is, as you see, obsessed with cleanliness and order。 those r obots were almost like people, and living with them would be like living with people. Nicholas wished that he could speak Brazilian. There had been the therapy robots at St. John39。m going to try to open a coconut. If I can I39。m her. Turning back Nicholas asked, When was the last time you had anything to eat? I don39。ve found out I39。t stand up now if I tried, but she isn39。ve been drinking water here, trying to drown her. I think I39。t I? But inside I39。 and then a turtle and a hedgehog that turned into armadillos for the love of God, Montressor. He said, Why didn39。 that39。t be sick if only there weren39。t want to be looked at, doesn39。 when he was there, there wasn39。 did he tell you that? On= Earth. On a plantation in Brazil, way up the Amazon Dr. Island told me. I thought it was crowded on Earth. The cities are crowded, and the countryside closes to the cities. But there are places where it39。s probably given up by now. The girl nodded, looking into the dar k waters of they pool, but did not seem to have heard him. He began to wor k his way around to her, climbing across the sna kelike roots of the crowding trees. Why does Ignacio want to kill me, Diane? Sometimes he wants to kill me, too, the girl said. But why? I think he39。t think I said anything. He tested the dark water with his foot and found that it was very cold. 第 23 頁(yè) 共 34 頁(yè) You gave a little gasp, I fancy. I heard it, and I said to myself, that39。 she looked up as she saw him, and smiled. Hello, he said. Hello, Nicholas. I thought I heard you. I wasn39。 he heard her nose cartilage break with a distinct, rubbery snap. Her eyes, as blue as the sky above Madhya Pradesh, the sparkling blue sky of the egg, looked up at him, but he could no longer look into them, they retreated from his own, and it came to him quite suddenly that Lucifer, in falling, must have fallen up, into the fires and the coldness of space, never again to see the warm blues and browns and greens of Earth: 1 was watching Satan fall as lightning from heaven. He had heard that on tape somewhere, but he could not remember where. He had read that on Earth lightning did not e down from the clouds, but leaped up from the plaary surface toward them, never to return. Nicholas. He listened, but did not hear his name again. Faintly water was babbling。 he had several times seen coconuts lying in the sand under the trees. He moved quietly, still a little afraid, trying to think of ways to open the coconut w hen he found it. He imagined himself standing before a large and raggedly faceted stone, holding the coconut in both hands. He raised it and smashed it dow n, but when it struc k it was no longer a coconut but Maya39。 but his stomach revolted at the thought of the raw flesh, and he did not know how he might build a fire, although Ignacio seemed to have done so the night before. Raw fish, even if he were able to c atch a fish, would be as bad, or worse, than raw monkey。 fore and knew on which side of hunger he stood。s over, expecting Dr. Island to answer from somewhere。s long, prehuman day. For a time he listened for any sound Ignacio might make searching for him。 out of br