by Adam Roberts
‘I think I prefer Are CDs U2,’ said Luke. ‘So he’s an RC unit, is he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Right. An RC unit. Excellent.’
Through the garage door the Tatuonweiner sky was visible, a flawless blue, the air was hot. Desert stretched in every direction. A Tatuonweiner mosquito, roughly the size of a chihuahua, buzzed lazily past on gauzy wings.
Eventually Luke said, ‘Right,’ again, and then, ‘good, excellent, an RC unit. Alrighty-tighty, RC unit, very much so. Oh yes.’
‘You don’t know what an RC unit is, do you?’ said See-thru.
‘No, no, I don’t,’ Luke conceded immediately.
‘Self-Portable Commode,’ said See-thru. ‘Another one of humankind’s brilliant inventions. First you invented toilets. Then portable toilets. Then self-portable toilets with minds of their own, toilets that can chat to you whilst you relieve yourself. Arcy here can even show you footage of your favourite 3DTV show whilst you’re – you know, occupied. Very useful.’
‘Well that’s all very well and good,’ said Luke. ‘But we don’t need a new toilet on the farm. We’ve already got one. Two, if you count the pomegranate storage hole. What we need is a droid to help out around the farm, so I can leave to join the Imperial Space Navy. A droid to help with planting, harvesting, threshing, gleaning.’
‘Oh, he wouldn’t be much good at any of that,’ said See-thru. ‘No arms, you see. Just that bin-like body with the automated swing-top. That and those big motile wheel-globes at the base. Good for flat surfaces, less good on stairs. Considerably less good. Nothing much there to help with farm-style chores.’
‘Oh,’ said Luke, disappointed. ‘And yourself?’
‘Well, I’ll be honest with you,’ said See-thru. ‘I’d be very promising on the farm. I’d agree to do all sorts of chores, help out, all that sort of thing. But just at the crucial time – say during the precise five-minutes when dew-fruit must be harvested or it’ll spoil, and you’re really relying on me to get the whole harvest in . . . then I’d freeze up on you. And no amount of yelling at me, or banging the top of my head with your shoe, would unfreeze me.’ See-thru shrugged. ‘That’s just the way I’m programmed.’
Luke felt desperation start gnawing at him. ‘But this is terrible! If we don’t buy two new droids then I’ll be stuck on the farm for another year! You don’t understand – it’s been my dream to join the Space Navy for as long as I can remember! You’ve got to help me. Can’t you help me?’
‘Narp,’ replied See-thru, obscurely.
‘Narp,’ repeated Luke. ‘OK. Don’t know what that means. Don’t really care.’
Luke tried to clean the RC unit, but when he approached the motile commode it cried out ‘eeek! eeek! eeek!’ and scuttled to the corner. So he turned his attentions to preparing an oil-bath for the C3U unit.
‘Tell me,’ Luke asked, nodding in the direction of the shivering RC unit in the corner. ‘Why does he talk like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘The only word he seems to use is eek. What is that? Is he speaking fax?’
See-thru seemed to find this inordinately funny. ‘Fax?’ he chortled. ‘Him? That trundling poo-bin? – speak fax? Oh you tickle me, you really do.’
‘Have I said something amusing?’
‘Fax—’ said See-thru, getting his laughter under control. ‘Fax is like the robot Latin. There’s no way he’s got the education necessary to speak Fax. He’s a mobile dump-bin, in the most scatological sense of that phrase. Fax? Don’t make me laugh.’
‘So why does he speak that way?’
‘Well, the truth is,’ said See-thru. ‘he’s humanophobic.’
‘Say again?’
‘He’s afflicted with a morbid fear of humans. He can’t help himself.’
‘I’ve never heard of that. Is it common amongst adendroids?’
‘Why, yes,’ said See-thru. ‘A lot of robots have it, some more severely than others.’
‘But why?’
‘Well, there are conflicting theories. It may be castration anxiety. Or it may just be that he can’t deal with the squishy, hairy, blobby horribleness of the human form. From a robot perspective, you see, humans are more or less repulsive and hideous. You all lack definition. There’s not enough metal in your constitution. Not enough sharp edges. And when you consider what he was built for, does it surprise you that he’s a little, shall we say, person-averse?’
‘I see,’ said Luke. ‘Well that’s very interesting. But now it’s time for your oil bath.’ He stepped back to give See-thru a clear view of the two-metre hole sunk into the garage floor, filled now with gloopy black lubricating oil.
See-thru inclined his head. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘There you go,’ said Luke. ‘I’ve prepared a nice oil bath for you. After your long trek through the sand wastes, I bet a nice long oil bath would feel really nice.’
See-thru approached the oil bath, dipped a golden finger in, and held it up to his optical inputs. ‘You want me – what? To clamber into this?’
‘Yes.’
‘A bath, you called it?’
‘An oil bath, yes.’
‘That’s bath in the sense of “container used for immersing and washing the body, usually filled with a mixture of hot water and soap, whereby dirt and sweat is removed from the skin”, is it?’
‘Well,’ said Luke, a little uncertainly. ‘Yes.’
‘And you’ve filled this bath with crude oil, have you?’
‘Don’t you fancy it?’
‘Fancy it?’ repeated See-thru, sarcastically placing his forefinger against the cleft of his metal chin in a mocking imitation of deep thought. ‘Well, let-me-see, if it so happened I was afflicted with an overall level of cleanliness, and I wanted to get rid of that in a bath of stinky mucky oil and generally befoul myself – under those circumstances I might be tempted to clamber into your rank little hole.’
There was a pause.
‘That’s a no, then, is it?’ asked Luke.
‘A big hole full of oil? What were you thinking?’
‘I was thinking that you’re – you know – a robot.’
‘Exactly,’ said See-thru, with a witheringly scornful tone of voice. ‘A robot. Not a diesel tractor from the 1950s. Do you really think my joints are lubricated by oil? I’m a state-of-the-art cybernetic organism. I’m designed to operate in all environments from pure vacuum to the deep ocean. What do you think would happen to oil in the vacuum of deep space if my designer were stupid enough to design me needing oil in my joints? Give it half a thought. Give it a quarter of a thought, if you can afford that much. I mean, really.’
Luke stood looking down at the oil bath. ‘Well what am I going to do with this two-metre-deep hole full of oil?’
‘Narp,’ said See-thru, strutting over to his RC-unit friend. ‘Not a robot problem.’
Luke shuffled over beside the two robots and sat down, his back to the wall. See-thru Peep-hol was looking standoffish. Arcy Doo-Doo was shuddering with barely controlled panic at the proximity of this human.
‘I feel a bit sheepish,’ Luke admitted, shortly. ‘I’ve so much to learn about robots.’
‘That,’ said See-thru, ‘you have.’
‘Still,’ said Luke, regaining the optimism for which he was so famous. ‘You guys will teach me – won’t you?’
He slapped Arcy on his dome-like crown. In reply the droid said ‘eek! eeeek!’ He lurched away from Luke, collided with a stack of Froom!® cans sending them scattering skittle-like, tumbled down the three steps to the lower portion of the garage, and landed on his side. A blue light at his side flickered into life and a hologram materialised. It projected clearly, but at ninety degrees.
It was a hologram of a naked woman. It was a kind of nakedness quite new to Luke. He had spent his life surrounded by naked people; but, apart from himself and Uncle Skinny from Skörsgad (who was in his nineties) all the naked people he had ever seen weighed between eigh
teen and forty stone. Never before had he realised that nakedness could be an attractive or alluring thing. Until now. For this young lady, who looked to be no more than nineteen years of age, was naked in a way wholly new to Luke. Her sinuous, naked form affected him in a way that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Or, to be precise, he could put his finger on it, but didn’t want to do so in front of the two droids. She was simply gorgeous: smooth skin like satin that had never been sat on; hair a wild tangle of chestnut curls (chestnut in colour, that is, not shaped or textured like chestnuts, which would just be silly); eyes like blue diamonds, and a figure so curvaceous that to run one’s hands over it from top to bottom would be, in effect, to mime enthusiastic applause.
As the horizontal holographic naked woman writhed and danced, she opened her perfect, plump red lips and spoke: Hey! Come on down to the Bada Big-Bang Bar, Main Street, Moz Isleybrothers. Dancing girls from seven different species! Fatalities amongst clientele down by thirteen per cent from last galactic year! Drinks half-price every other Thursday! Come on, big boy – you know you want to.
And the vision of naked loveliness vanished.
‘Hey!’ Luke yelled. ‘Play that again!’
‘Eeeeek!’ shrieked RC-DU2, struggling like an up-ended beetle to get back on its legs. ‘Eeeeek!’
No matter how Luke cajoled, or ordered, or threatened, the little RC unit, it refused to replay the beguiling image of perfect human nakedness. C3UπP-HOL promised to help by persuading the RC droid (now upright and quavering in a corner with its visual inputs to the wall) to replay the image, but after lengthy and elaborate preparations it instead fell into a sleep-like comatose state.
Mildly infuriated, Luke wandered off to his own bed.
Meanwhile, far over his head, the Imp-Emp-Imp Star Destroyer orbited. Aboard this craft Dark Father brooded. Brooding, in fact, was one of his favourite pastimes. But this was brooding with a purpose. He had sent Princess Leper, under guard, to be interrogated far away by the feared Grand Muff o’ Tartan, and he was confident that the Princess’s secrets would soon be the Imperial Empire’s. And once the Rebelend was crushed, total Galactic domination would swiftly follow.
Dark Father cleared his wheezy throat with a punchy cough, and began laboriously to practise his ‘evil genius’ laugh. You need to work at these things sometimes.
Chapter Four
Old Bony K’nobbli Shows Us Round His Compact and Bijou Desert Hermitage and Talks Frankly About Life as One of the Few Remaining Jobbi Knights Left Alive in the Galaxy
In the morning Luke came down to find the two droids gone. This annoyed him, but it was easy enough to see in which direction they had travelled by the two rows of tracks in the sand. More, in the garage the golden droid had left a post-it, stuck to a post in the garage that happened to function as an item of information technology hardware. It read:
Dispirited, Luke moped into the kitchen and found his aunt and uncle, naked as jellyfish, eating maple baps. ‘Those two droids you bought yesterday, Uncle.’
‘Yes?’ said Sven, his attention on his breakfast.
‘Well they’ve gone off,’ Luke explained.
‘Gone off?’ said Sven, looking up at Luke. ‘Like week-old milk left out of the Friggomat?’
‘Off in the sense of departing this place. Said they had to go find Wobbli Bent K’nobbli, whoever he is. Do you think he might be a relative of Old Bony K’nobbli?’
‘Completely different person,’ said Sven confidently, returning to his breakfast slurping. ‘Different names, you see? That’s how you tell.’
‘I see,’ said Luke, sagely. ‘Well I think I’ll go after them anyway.’
‘Why?’ asked Aunt Svenessa, sharply. ‘Do you think that old fool can tell you something about your father? Just because he knew him and fought beside him for years in the Colon Wars, that doesn’t mean he’s got anything edifying to say on that subject.’
‘OK,’ said Luke, uncertainly. ‘I think I’ll go anyway.’
‘But you haven’t had any breakfast!’ Sven objected. ‘There’s a bucket of yoghurt behind the chair over there.’
‘No thanks, Uncle.’
‘Be careful of that old wizard,’ Svenessa warned as Luke slipped away. ‘If he tries to sell you any rabbit’s-feet or crystals or tries to get you to go on a quest to dispose of a ring of power or anything like that, just say no.’
Meanwhile in the deep Tatuonweiner desert, a troop of Imp-Emp-Imp Sterntroopers stood looking at the tracks left in the sand by two droids. One was riding a really quite amazingly vivid and life-like-looking Giant Lizard. Another scanned the horizon with up-to-the-minute digital binoculars. ‘This way,’ he announced to his colleague. ‘I think they went this way.’
Luke’s journey across the sands was uneventful. He knocked at the hovel door and was granted admission.
‘How wonderful to see you, my boy,’ said the Jobbi knight. His words were freighted with a strange weight, as if they carried a greater significance than their simple meaning merited.
‘Hi, Old Bony,’ said Luke.
Old Bony K’nobbli shuffled painfully across the floor of his humble desert dwelling. ‘There you go, young Seespotrun,’ he said, handing him a cup of some strange, hot juice, called, he said, ‘tea’. This was one of the old man’s strange rituals; whenever a visitor crossed his threshold (which was not something that happened very often, of course) he brought out this disgusting hot juice. ‘There you go,’ he said, with tremendous self-satisfaction. ‘Drink that.’ There was something rather impressive about the fruity, overdone timbre of his voice; something oddly classy and almost Shakespearian.
‘Thanks,’ said Luke.
‘So tell me, young lad, what brings you out here?’
‘I think you may have some droids of mine.’
‘Ah. The droids,’ said Bony. ‘Come through. They’re in here. Bring your tea.’
The robots were parked in Old Bony’s front room. They did not seem especially happy to see Luke.
‘Come,’ said Old Bony, his joints creaking alarmingly. ‘Sit down.’
The two of them sat down around the rude wooden table on rude wooden chairs. Bony looked intently at his young guest. Luke, a little embarrassed by the unwavering nature of Bony’s gaze, tried smiling superciliously, shifted his weight on his chair, jolted his teacup spilling a hefty splash of tea all over the doily, lurched forward trying to prevent further spillage and fell heavily off the chair, rolling under the table. Trying to get to his feet he clonked his head on the underside of the table.
Sheepishly, he extricated himself, put his chair back on its legs, and sat down again.
‘So lively!’ said Old Bony, admiringly. ‘So Farcical! So like your father.’
‘You knew my father?’ asked Luke, lurching forward eagerly, and spilling some more of his drink.
‘I did.’
‘How odd that we should be talking about this! Because I was, only yesterday morning, having a conversation about my father with my uncle. Over breakfast. So, what was he like? My father?’
‘He was a handsome young Jobbi knight,’ said Bony, meditatively. ‘He and I fought side by side during the Colon Wars. The Farce was very pronounced in him. His name was Jane Seespotrun.’
‘Jane,’ said Luke. ‘Right. Jane. Isn’t that more of a girl’s name, though?’
‘Mmm,’ said Bony, nodding. ‘He was very sensitive on that subject. It was best not to bring it up in his company, actually. Very sensitive.’
‘Jane,’ said Luke, trying to picture his father. ‘Jane, my Dad. Strong in the Farce and a Jobbi master. Now, the Farce – as I understand it – is some kind of universal power or quantity. But who or what are the Jobbi?’
‘I am one,’ said Bony. ‘A sort of – not military exactly, a, shall we say, quasi-military organisation. Highly armed and wearing a common uniform, but not affiliated to any particular government. An elite of trained warriors who command the Farce to – you know. Act as peacekeepers. Get in
to fights whilst all the time talking about how they don’t want to get into fights. Chop people’s arms off at the first sign of trouble. Spy on people. Break things. Stand in the background with arms folded, looking menacing. That sort of thing.’
‘I see,’ said Luke. ‘So they’re soldiers?’
‘No. They have no official standing. They are only warriors in a loose sense of the word. They belong to no actual army.’
‘More like Boy Scouts?’
Bony thought about this. ‘Yes.’
‘Excellent,’ said Luke. ‘So, only one question remains, a crucial question – what happened to my father?’
‘Ah,’ said Bony. ‘Well, yes. Right. What happened?’
Luke nodded.
‘Well, let’s see, let me see. Not to beat around the bush, Dark Father . . . um, well he killed your father. Ah, yes, that’s it. That’s exactly what happened. He killed your father, killed him dead. Struck him down, killed him, slew him. In sum,’ he concluded, ‘killed your father.’
‘I understand killed,’ said Luke. ‘But I’m not sure what you mean by that little gesture, the tweaking or twitching gesture you do with your two forefingers.’
‘Gesture?’ Old Bony looked confused.
‘You did it when you said killed,’ clarified Luke.
‘I did?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s just a,’ Bony said waving his hand vaguely, ‘just a Jobbi thing.’
‘Right,’ said Luke, nodding. ‘So to be absolutely clear. Dark Father killed my father. Do I understand you? Is that about the long and short of it?’
‘Yes,’ said Bony, nodding emphatically and squeezing, by the action, a startling series of crackling noises out of the bones in his neck.
‘That’s simply ghastly,’ said Luke. ‘I suppose I should vow revenge upon him, or something. Would that be the thing to do?’
‘Good idea, good idea,’ said Bony, distractedly, as if he wasn’t really listening. He seemed more interested in the adendroid that they had rescued from the Offies.
‘There is a message recorded inside that droid,’ said Luke, getting on the ground next to him. ‘I got the first part of it this morning, but then it just fizzled out. But believe me, it would be well worth getting another chance to check it out. It was worth checking out.’