Herl drew a deep breath. If the goddess of the lobby were even partly human, he was going to have to know her a great deal better. He visualized her rounded smiling face, its look of utter awareness, her graceful arm. Galaxy women were not like this. It must be for this he'd stayed a bachelor.
Unable to admit aloud his desire and unable to look at Crawford when thinking of her, he went back to carving the steak, half listening to the exposition which Crawford continued.
"When people go Eyefer who already have children," the commissioner went on between sipped spoonfuls of gruel, "we have to institutionalize the kids. Sterilize them too, to protect the rest of us. You may even get the idea that we're a planet of petty puritans because we care more for our race than for particular children and because the 'mortality' among scientists and artists was very high so that there are few such among us these days. However, we've taken care of the latter recently by appointing semi-guardians for the artists and scientists as soon as they announce their professions. The semi-guardians take care of all routines at their wards' expense. The architect of the Civil Center here," he waved a spoon around to indicate their environment, "is that gray-haired man over there. It justifies the change in rules."
"Why couldn't any rich man hire a 'semi-guardian' who would take care of the formalities for him?" Herl asked.
Crawford looked shocked. "That would be grossly unfair to the rest of the population," he insisted. "There is no particular advantage to a society to perpetuate the strain of wealthy individuals; while we do need scientists and artists. But to get back to the story ... shortly after the sterilization program began, a noted psychologist went Eyefer and managed to get himself assigned by placement to the head of one of the children's asylums. He worked with the Eyefer children there and somehow the gods are the result. They have perfect recall, perfect bodies, telepathy, intuitive perception of the nature of matter, teleportation, and some precognition. Occasionally even today, a child disappears from one of the asylums and we have a new god or goddess. And there you are."
"Are they what Commissioner Guildris was talking about? The Galaxy will really be excited," Herl said eagerly.
"Heavens, no!" Crawford laughed heartily. "They wouldn't be any more use to you than they are to us. Their bodies are changed in some way so that they are nearly pure energy."
Herl had a tight sensation of loss, of incipient grief.
"They don't eat, they don't need clothes, they don't even reproduce. As far as we can discover, they have no motivations at all except that they seem to like to watch people doing things ... you could hardly call it curiosity. So ... since they have no motivations there's no way to get them to cooperate with society; they can't be bribed or threatened, paid or deprived. And yet they'd beat any calculator made if we just had some means of getting them to stay around while we put the problems. They answer any questions you can ask correctly; but there's no way we know of to get them to come around when we have the questions. Oh, you can go out and pretend to do some crazy thing when you have a problem with all the factors in your head. Maybe one of them will turn up and you can ask the question before he reads your mind and fades away ... and maybe you can't. So we call them gods and forget about them."
Calculators indeed, was Herl's inner reaction, as he tried to recapture the sensation of being completely understood which he had felt upstairs in the lobby. She had to be a woman, not a supercalculator. "But they're so beautiful, so perfect. There must be a reason for them," he insisted.