"You found you could handle people emotionally, and you found it was so easy that you grew contemptuous. The only mind that responded to your logic was McGuire's. But your logic is occasionally as bad as your feminine reasoning is good. So, every time you talked to McGuire, you eventually gave him data that he couldn't reconcile in his computations. If he did reconcile them, then his thinking had very little in common with the actual realities of the universe, and he behaved in non-survival ways.
"McGuire was your friend, your brother, your Father Confessor. He never made judgments or condemned you for anything you did. All he did was sit there and soak up troubles and worries that he couldn't understand or use. Each time, he was driven mad.
"The engineers and computermen and roboticists who were working on it were too much under your control to think of blaming you for McGuire's troubles. Even Brock, in spite of his attitude of the tough guy watching over a little girl, was under your control to a certain degree. He let you get away with all your little pranks, only making sure that you didn't get hurt."
She nodded. "They were all so easy. So very easy. I could speak nonsense and they'd listen and do what I told them. But McGuire didn't accept nonsense, I guess." She laughed a little. "So I fell in love with a machine."
"Not a machine," I said gently. "Six of them. Each time the basic data was pumped into a new McGuire brain, you assumed that it was the same machine you'd known before with a little of its memory removed. Each time, you'd tell it to 'remember' certain things, and, of course, he did. If you tell a robot that a certain thing is in his memory banks, he'll automatically put it there and treat it as a memory.
"To keep you from ruining him a seventh time, we had them put in one little additional built-in inhibition. McGuire won't take orders from a woman."
"So, even after I turned him on, he still wouldn't take orders from me," she said. "But when you came in, he recognized you as his master."
"If you want to put it that way."
Again, she laughed a little. "I know why he took off from Ceres. When I hit you, you said, 'Get away'. McGuire had been given his first order, and he obeyed it."'
"I had to say something," I said. "If I'd had time, I'd have done a little better."