We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  Harris nodded, and watched Maltzer’s hands tremble as he tilted the decanter. The man was clearly on the very verge of collapse, and Harris felt a sudden cold uncertainty open up in him in the one place where until now he had been oddly confident.

  “She is all right?” he demanded, taking the glass.

  “Oh yes, she’s perfect. She’s so confident it scares me.” Maltzer gulped his drink and poured another before he sat down.

  “What’s wrong, then?”

  “Nothing, I guess. Or… well, I don’t know. I’m not sure any more. I’ve worked toward this meeting for nearly a year, but now—well, I’m not sure it’s time yet. I’m just not sure.”

  He stared at Harris, his eyes large and indistinguishable behind the lenses. He was a thin, wire-taut man with all the bone and sinew showing plainly beneath the dark skin of his face. Thinner, now, than he had been a year ago when Harris saw him last.

  “I’ve been too close to her,” he said now. “I have no perspective any more. All I can see is my own work. And I’m just not sure that’s ready yet for you or anyone to see.”

  “She thinks so?”

  “I never saw a woman so confident.” Maltzer drank, the glass clicking on his teeth. He looked up suddenly through the distorting lenses. “Of course a failure now would mean—well, absolute collapse,” he said.

  Harris nodded. He was thinking of the year of incredibly painstaking work that lay behind this meeting, the immense fund of knowledge, of infinite patience, the secret collaboration of artists, sculptors, designers, scientists, and the genius of Maltzer governing them all as an orchestra conductor governs his players.

  He was thinking too, with a certain unreasoning jealousy, of the strange, cold, passionless intimacy between Maltzer and Deirdre in that year, a closer intimacy than any two humans can ever have shared before. In a sense the Deirdre whom he saw in a few minutes would be Maltzer, just as he thought he detected in Maltzer now and then small mannerisms of inflection and motion that had been Deirdre’s own. There had been between them a sort of unimaginable marriage stranger than anything that could ever have taken place before.

  “—so many complications,” Maltzer was saying in his worried voice with its faintest possible echo of Deirdre’s lovely, cadenced rhythm. (The sweet, soft huskiness he would never hear again.) “There was shock, of course. Terrible shock. And a great fear of fire. We had to conquer that before we could take the first steps. But we did it. When you go in you’ll probably find her sitting before the fire.” He caught the startled question in Harris’ eyes and smiled. “No, she can’t feel the warmth now, of course. But she likes to watch the flames. She’s mastered any abnormal fear of them quite beautifully.”

  “She can—” Harris hesitated. “Her eyesight’s normal now?”

  “Perfect,”Maltzer said. “Perfect vision was fairly simple to provide. After all, that sort of thing has already been worked out, in other connections. I might even say her vision’s a little better than perfect, from our own standpoint.” He shook his head irritably. “I’m not worried about the mechanics of the thing. Luckily they got to her before the brain was touched at all. Shock was the only danger to her sensory centers, and we took care of all that first of all, as soon as communication could be established. Even so, it needed great courage on her part. Great courage.” He was silent for a moment, staring into his empty glass.

  “Harris,” he said suddenly, without looking up, “have I made a mistake? Should we have let her die?”

  Harris shook his head helplessly. It was an unanswerable question. It had tormented the whole world for a year now. There had been hundreds of answers and thousands of words written on the subject. Has anyone the right to preserve a brain alive when its body is destroyed? Even if a new body can be provided, necessarily so very unlike the old?

  “It’s not that she’s—ugly—now,” Maltzer went on hurriedly, as if afraid of an answer. “Metal isn’t ugly. And Deirdre… well, you’ll see. I tell you, I can’t see myself. I know the whole mechanism so well—it’s just mechanics to me. Maybe she’s—grotesque. I don’t know. Often I’ve wished I hadn’t been on the spot, with all my ideas, just when the fire broke out. Or that it could have been anyone but Deirdre. She was so beautiful—Still, if it had been someone else I think the whole thing might have failed completely. It takes more than just an uninjured brain. It takes strength and courage beyond common, and—well, something more. Something—unquenchable. Deirdre has it. She’s still Deirdre. In a way she’s still beautiful. But I’m not sure anybody but myself could see that. And you know what she plans?”

  “No—what?”

  “She’s going back on the air-screen.”

  Harris looked at him in stunned disbelief.

  “She is still beautiful,” Maltzer told him fiercely. “She’s got courage, and a serenity that amazes me. And she isn’t in the least worried or resentful about what’s happened. Or afraid what the verdict of the public will be. But I am, Harris. I’m terrified.”

  They looked at each other for a moment more, neither speaking. Then Maltzer shrugged and stood up. “She’s in there,” he said, gesturing with his glass.

  Harris turned without a word, not giving himself time to hesitate. He crossed toward the inner door. The room was full of a soft, clear, indirect light that climaxed in the fire crackling on a white tiled hearth.

  Harris paused inside the door, his heart beating thickly. He did not see her for a moment. It was a perfectly commonplace room, bright, light, with pleasant furniture, and flowers on the tables. Their perfume was sweet on the clear air. He did not see Deirdre.

  Then a chair by the fire creaked as she shifted her weight in it. The high back hid her, but she spoke. And for one dreadful moment it was the voice of an automaton that sounded in the room, metallic, without inflection.

  “Hel-lo—” said the voice. Then she laughed and tried again. And it was the old, familiar, sweet huskiness he had not hoped to hear again as long as he lived.

  In spite of himself he said, “Deirdre!” and her image rose before him as if she herself had risen unchanged from the chair, tall, golden, swaying a little with her wonderful dancer’s poise, the lovely, imperfect features lighted by the glow that made them beautiful. It was the cruelest thing his memory could have done to him. And yet the voice—after that one lapse, the voice was perfect. “Come and look at me, John,” she said.

  He crossed the floor slowly, forcing himself to move. That instant’s flash of vivid recollection had nearly wrecked his hard-won poise. He tried to keep his mind perfectly blank as he came at last to the verge of seeing what no one but Maltzer had so far seen or known about in its entirety. No one at all had known what shape would be forged to clothe the most beautiful woman on Earth, now that her beauty was gone.

  He had envisioned many shapes. Great, lurching robot forms, cylindrical, with hinged arms and legs. A glass case with the brain floating in it and appendages to serve its needs. Grotesque visions, like nightmares come nearly true. And each more inadequate than the last, for what metal shape could possibly do more than house ungraciously the mind and brain that had once enchanted a whole world?

  Then he came around the wing of the chair, and saw her.

  The human brain is often too complicated a mechanism to function perfectly. Harris’ brain was called upon now to perform a very elaborate series of shifting impressions. First, incongruously, he remembered a curious inhuman figure he had once glimpsed leaning over the fence rail outside a farmhouse. For an instant the shape had stood up integrated, ungainly, impossibly human, before the glancing eye resolved it into an arrangement of brooms and buckets. What the eye had found only roughly humanoid, the suggestible brain had accepted fully formed. It was thus now, with Deirdre.

  The first impression that his eyes and mind took from sight of her was shocked and incredulous, for his brain said to him unbelievingly, “This is Deirdre! She hasn’t changed at all!”

  Then the shift of perspecti
ve took over, and even more shockingly, eye and brain said, “No, not Deirdre—not human. Nothing but metal coils. Not Deirdre at all—” And that was the worst. It was like walking from a dream of someone beloved and lost, and facing anew, after that heartbreaking reassurance of sleep, the inflexible fact that nothing can bring the lost to life again. Deirdre was gone, and this was only machinery heaped in a flowered chair.

  Then the machinery moved, exquisitely, smoothly, with a grace as familiar as the swaying poise he remembered. The sweet, husky voice of Deirdre said, “It’s me, John darling. It really is, you know.”

  And it was.

  That was the third metamorphosis, and the final one. Illusion steadied and became factual, real. It was Deirdre.

  He sat down bonelessly. He had no muscles. He looked at her speechless and unthinking, letting his senses take in the sight of her without trying to rationalize what he saw.

  She was golden still. They had kept that much of her, the first impression of warmth and color which had once belonged to her sleek hair and the apricot tints of her skin. But they had had the good sense to go no farther. They had not tried to make a wax image of the lost Deirdre. (No woman born who was so beautiful— Not one so beautiful, of all the women born—)

  And so she had no face. She had only a smooth, delicately modeled ovoid for her head, with a… a sort of crescent-shaped mask across the frontal area where her eyes would have been if she had needed eyes. A narrow, curved quarter-moon, with the horns turned upward. It was filled in with something translucent, like cloudy crystal, and tinted the aquamarine of the eyes Deirdre used to have. Through that, then, she saw the world. Through that she looked without eyes, and behind it, as behind the eyes of a human—she was.

  Except for that, she had no features. And it had been wise of those who designed her, he realized now. Subconsciously he had been dreading some clumsy attempt at human features that might creak like a marionette’s in parodies of animation. The eyes, perhaps, had had to open in the same place upon her head, and at the same distance apart, to make easy for her an adjustment to the stereoscopic vision she used to have. But he was glad they had not given her two eye-shaped openings with glass marbles inside them. The mask was better.

  (Oddly enough, he did not once think of the naked brain that must lie inside the metal. The mask was symbol enough for the woman within. It was enigmatic; you did not know if her gaze was on you searchingly, or wholly withdrawn. And it had no variations of brilliance such as once had played across the incomparable mobility of Deirdre’s face. But eyes, even human eyes, are as a matter of fact enigmatic enough. They have no expression except what the lids impart; they take all animation from the features. We automatically watch the eyes of the friend we speak with, but if he happens to be lying down so that he speaks across his shoulder and his face is upside-down to us, quite as automatically we watch the mouth. The gaze keeps shifting nervously between mouth and eyes in their reversed order, for it is the position in the face, not the feature itself, which we are accustomed to accept as the seat of the soul. Deirdre’s mask was in that proper place; it was easy to accept it as a mask over eyes.)

  She had, Harris realized as the first shock quieted, a very beautifully shaped head—a bare, golden skull. She turned it a little, gracefully upon her neck of metal, and he saw that the artist who shaped it had given her the most delicate suggestion of cheekbones, narrowing in the blankness below the mask to the hint of a human face. Not too much. Just enough so that when the head turned you saw by its modeling that it had moved, lending perspective and foreshortening to the expressionless golden helmet. Light did not slip uninterrupted as if over the surface of a golden egg. Brancusi himself had never made anything more simple or more subtle than the modeling of Deirdre’s head.

  But all expression, of course, was gone. All expression had gone up in the smoke of the theater fire, with the lovely, mobile, radiant features which had meant Deirdre.

  As for her body, he could not see its shape. A garment hid her. But they had made no incongruous attempt to give her back the clothing that once had made her famous. Even the softness of cloth would have called the mind too sharply to the remembrance that no human body lay beneath the folds, nor does metal need the incongruity of cloth for its protection. Yet without garments, he realized, she would have looked oddly naked, since her new body was humanoid, not angular machinery.

  The designer had solved his paradox by giving her a robe of very fine metal mesh. It hung from the gentle slope of her shoulders in straight, pliant folds like a longer Grecian chlamys, flexible, yet with weight enough of its own not to cling too revealingly to whatever metal shape lay beneath.

  The arms they had given her were left bare, and the feet and ankles. And Maltzer had performed his greatest miracle in the limbs of the new Deirdre. It was a mechanical miracle basically, but the eye appreciated first that he had also showed supreme artistry and understanding.

  Her arms were pale shining gold, tapered smoothly, without modeling, and flexible their whole length in diminishing metal bracelets fitting one inside the other clear down to the slim, round wrists. The hands were more nearly human than any other feature about her, though they, too, were fitted together in delicate, small sections that slid upon one another with the flexibility almost of flesh. The fingers’ bases were solider than human, and the fingers themselves tapered to longer tips.

  Her feet, too, beneath the tapering broader rings of the metal ankles, had been constructed upon the model of human feet. Their finely tooled sliding segments gave her an arch and a heel and a flexible forward section formed almost like the sollerets of medieval armor.

  She looked, indeed, very much like a creature in armor, with her delicately plated limbs and her featureless head like a helmet with a visor of glass, and her robe of chain-mail. But no knight in armor ever moved as Deirdre moved, or wore his armor upon a body of such inhumanly fine proportions. Only a knight from another world, or a knight of Oberon’s court, might have shared that delicate likeness.

  Briefly he had been surprised at the smallness and exquisite proportions of her. He had been expecting the ponderous mass of such robots as he had seen, wholly automatons. And then he realized that for them, much of the space had to be devoted to the inadequate mechanical brains that guided them about their duties. Deirdre’s brain still preserved and proved the craftsmanship of an artisan far defter than man. Only the body was of metal, and it did not seem complex, though he had not yet been told how it was motivated.

  Harris had no idea how long he sat staring at the figure in the cushioned chair. She was still lovely—indeed, she was still Deirdre— and as he looked he let the careful schooling of his face relax. There was no need to hide his thoughts from her.

  She stirred upon the cushions, the long, flexible arms moving with a litheness that was not quite human. The motion disturbed him as the body itself had not, and in spite of himself his face froze a little. He had the feeling that from behind the crescent mask she was watching him very closely.

  Slowly she rose.

  The motion was very smooth. Also it was serpentine, as if the body beneath the coat of mail were made in the same interlocking sections as her limbs. He had expected and feared mechanical rigidity; nothing had prepared him for this more than human suppleness.

  She stood quietly, letting the heavy mailed folds of her garment settle about her. They fell together with a faint ringing sound, like small bells far off, and hung beautifully in pale golden, sculptured folds. He had risen automatically as she did. Now he faced her, staring. He had never seen her stand perfectly still, and she was not doing it now. She swayed just a bit, vitality burning inextinguishably in her brain as once it had burned in her body, and stolid immobility was as impossible to her as it had always been. The golden garment caught points of light from the fire and glimmered at him with tiny reflections as she moved.

  Then she put her featureless helmeted head a little to one side, and he heard her laughter as famili
ar in its small, throaty, intimate sound as he had ever heard it from her living throat. And every gesture, every attitude, every flowing of motion into motion was so utterly Deirdre that the overwhelming illusion swept his mind again and this was the flesh-and-blood woman as clearly as if he saw her standing there whole once more, like Phoenix from the fire.

  “Well, John,” she said in the soft, husky, amused voice he remembered perfectly. “Well, John, is it I?” She knew it was. Perfect assurance sounded in the voice. “The shock will wear off, you know. It’ll be easier and easier as time goes on. I’m quite used to myself now. See?”

  She turned away from him and crossed the room smoothly, with the old, poised, dancer’s glide, to the mirror that paneled one side of the room. And before it, as he had so often seen her preen before, he watched her preening now, running flexible metallic hands down the folds of her metal garment, turning to admire herself over one metal shoulder, making the mailed folds tinkle and sway as she struck an arabesque position before the glass.

  His knees let him down into the chair she had vacated. Mingled shock and relief loosened all his muscles in him, and she was more poised and confident than he.

  “It’s a miracle,” he said with conviction. “It’s you. But I don’t see how—” He had meant, “—how, without face or body—” but clearly he could not finish that sentence.

  She finished it for him in her own mind, and answered without self-consciousness. “It’s motion, mostly,” she said, still admiring her own suppleness in the mirror. “See?” And very lightly on her springy, armored feet she flashed through an enchainement of brilliant steps, swinging round with a pirouette to face him. “That was what Maltzer and I worked out between us, after I began to get myself under control again.” Her voice was somber for a moment, remembering a dark time in the past. Then she went on, “It wasn’t easy, of course, but it was fascinating. You’ll never guess how fascinating, John! We knew we couldn’t work out anything like a facsimile of the way I used to look, so we had to find some other basis to build on. And motion is the other basis of recognition, after actual physical likeness.”