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And all the time some of them, a few, anyway, kept looking for new worlds. You say to them, Let’s go back into the ocean, let’s be fishes again, it’s easier that way. And maybe half of them are ready to do it, more than half, maybe, but there are always some who say, Don’t be crazy. We can’t be fishes any more. We’re men. And so they don’t go back. They keep climbing up.
In times of fatigue or tension he became morbidly conscious of the presence of his body as a prison engulfing his soul. The folds of belly-flesh, the island of perpetual rigidity at the base of the neck, the tiny tremor of the upper left eyelid, the slight constant pressure on the bladder, the rawness in the throat, the bubbling in the kneecap, every intimation of mortality rang in him like a chime. His body often seemed absurd to him, a mere bag of meat and bone and blood and feces and miscellaneous ropes and cords and rags, sagging under time’s assault, deteriorating from year to year and
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Robots were things that could be thought of as things and treated as things. But androids were things that looked uncomfortably like people, and they might not acquiesce in their status of thinghood forever.
If you’re in a jail, you break out of it. If you see a door, you open it. If you hear a voice, you answer it. That’s what man is all about. And that’s why I’m building the tower. We got to answer them. We got to say we’re here. We got to reach toward them, because we’ve been alone long enough, and that gives us funny ideas about our place, our purpose. We got to keep moving, out of that ocean, up on that shore, outward, outward, outward, because when we stop moving, when we turn our back on something ahead of us, that’s when we’re going to sprout gills again.
