by Jerry Oltion
“I still think we ought to take one of them apart.” Avery was leaning over Lucius, positioning the internal scanner for yet another cross-section through the robot’s body. It may have resembled a robot on the outside, but that was as far as the similarity went; Lucius’s interior resembled a human body far more than it did a robot’s. It didn’t have any unnecessary internal organs, but those it did need were modeled after the human pattern. It had bunches of cells arranged like muscles, bones, and nerves, at least, rather than the more conventional linkages and cams.
Interesting as that discovery was, it had been hours since they had made it, and Avery was getting frustrated
“And I still say it won’t tell us anything we can’t find out indirectly,” Derec replied. He was sitting on a stool on the opposite side of the examination table, watching the screen and getting bored. “They’re obviously comparing notes, probably on their experience with humans. Why not let them go for a while? They might come up with something interesting.”
“Like some wonderful new way to disturb my cities,” said Avery.
“Your cities can take care of themselves. And if not, I can take care of them.”
“You think so. I think you’re just trying to protect your mother’s experiment.”
Derec considered that possibility. Was he trying to protect her experiment, or was he simply trying to protect three robots from being needlessly destroyed? He had thought it was the latter, but now that Avery mentioned it…
“Maybe I am,” he said.
“You don’t even know her.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“And it is mine. Guilty. I shouldn’t have wiped your memory. When I think of a good way to make it up to you, I will, but believe me, you’re better off without it.”
“I’d like to be the judge of that.”
Avery had been looking at the scanner display, but now he turned his head and looked his son straight in the eyes. “Of course you would. I can understand that. But bear in mind, if you got your memory back, what you’d have memories of. I told you once before that you had a fairly normal childhood, and that’s true enough, but it was a normal childhood in an Auroran family, which is the next best thing to no family at all. Your mother and I hardly saw one another after your birth. You hardly saw either of us. In fact, you spent most of your childhood with robots.”
“No wonder I fit in so well here,” Derec said drily.
Avery said nothing, and Derec sensed his embarrassment. At least he’s embarrassed, he thought, then chided himself for feeling vindictive. Learning to live with a recovering psychopath was almost as difficult as being the recoveree. The things his father had done while insane were not his fault, at least not in the sense that he could be held responsible for them, yet Derec still felt that he had been poorly treated. Somebody should feel bad about it, shouldn’t they?
Or was this another situation like the one they had just gone through with the laser? Was wishing for remorse just another way of mistreating a human?
No wonder the robots were having such a time trying to understand human interactions. The humans themselves didn’t understand them half the time.
But the robots were learning. Witness the cargo robots, still standing patiently around the lab, watching for signs of recurring violence. They had already learned not to trust a human’s stated intentions.
How could that be a good thing? Before long these robots of his father’s would decide that humans were not to be trusted at all, and hence not to be obeyed in any situation where trust was necessary to avoid an internal conflict with the Three Laws. As for his mother’s robots, if they ever came out of their communication fugue, who could predict what conclusions they would draw from their collective experiences? The only prediction Derec was willing to make with any certainty was that they would be even less useful than before.
That thought made Derec ask, “What were our house robots like?”
Avery looked up momentarily in surprise. “What do you mean, ‘what were they like?’ Like robots, of course. Old-style robots. I didn’t develop the cellular robot until after you’d left home, and your mother stole her design from me.”
“That’s what I thought. The point is, they did the mundane work for you, right? Cooking and cleaning and changing diapers and emptying the trash.”
“Of course they did,” Avery said. He sounded indignant, as if the very thought that he would have done any of those chores was obscene.
“They were useful, then.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I’m getting at the obvious observation that the robots around here, despite their advanced design-maybe because of their advanced design-aren’t as useful as the older models. They’re more trouble. Too much independence.”
Avery moved the scanner a fraction and keyed the display again. Another view into the nerve and musclelike masses of Lucius’s interior appeared on the screen. “Maybe my definition of useful is different from yours,” he said.
They had already had that conversation. Avery was simply not interested in immediate utility, and Derec was. There was no sense arguing over it. Derec got up off his stool with a sigh, stretched, and said, “I’m about to fall asleep here. Are you going to keep at it all day?”
“Probably,” Avery replied. “I think I’ll leave you to it, then.”
“Fine.”
“Just don’t cut any of them up, okay?”
Avery looked pained. “I’ll do with them whatever I please. If that includes cutting them up, then that’s what I’ll do.”
Derec and Avery stared at one another across the unmoving robot’s body for long, silent seconds. One of the cargo robots near the wall took a step toward them. Derec looked up at the robot, then back to Avery. He considered ordering the robot to keep Avery from harming the others, but decided against it. It would just escalate the war between them. Besides, there were better ways.
He shrugged and backed off. “It’s your conscience. But I’m asking you, please don’t cut any of them up. As a favor to me.”
Avery frowned. “I’ll think about it,” he replied.
Derec nodded. Now it was up to Avery to decide whether or not to escalate the war. It was a risk, but a calculated one. Derec had felt a spark of humanity in Avery a couple of times today; he was willing to bet his father was sick of confrontation, too.
“Thanks.” He turned away and said to the cargo robots, “Come on, the rest of you. You can take me back home and then get on with whatever else you were doing.”
He really had intended to go home, but on the way there the sight of Lucius’s creatures still scavenging in the streets reminded him that he still had to do something about them, and soon, or they were going to start eating each other. With Lucius himself out of commission, there was only one good place to start, and it wasn’t at home. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said to the robot driving the truck. “Take me to Lucius’s lab instead.”
The robot hesitated a long time-nearly the length of a block-then asked, “Which one do you wish to visit?”
“How many has he got?”
“The central computer lists thirty-seven separate laboratories.”
“ Thirty-seven?”
“That is correct.”
“What did he do with that many labs?”
The cargo robot was silent for a moment as it conferred with the computer again, then said, “Fifteen were dedicated to fabricating the artificial humans he called ‘homunculi’ and are now abandoned. The other twenty-two are engaged in fabricating humans.”
“ Areengaged? Still?”
“That is correct.”
“We told him not to continue with that!”
“That is also correct.”
The cargo robot offered no more explanation, but Derec could see plainly enough what the situation was. Lucius had interpreted his orders to mean only him, leaving the other robots who had been helping him free to continue the project. Well, he would put
a stop to that soon enough.
But twenty-two labs! No wonder the city was full of rats.
“Take me to the one he showed us yesterday,” Derec said.
The driver evidently had no problem with Derec’s inclusive “us,” nor with finding the appropriate lab in the computer’s records. It slowed the truck and turned left at the next corner, made another left turn at the next block and they went back the way they had come for a while, then turned right and went on for block after block through the city. The rat population on the streets dwindled, then grew larger again as they left the sphere of influence of one lab and entered another. Evidently Lucius had felt no need to cluster his workplaces.
Derec, watching the towering buildings slide past, felt again how empty the city was without people in it. None of these buildings had any real purpose, nor did the robots in them, save for Avery’s nebulous experiment in social dynamics. And what could possibly come of that? The robots weren’t creating a society of their own; they were instead simply building and rebuilding in anticipation of someday having humans to serve. And some of them, he thought wryly, were busy building those humans. All because of the Three Laws of Robotics and the poorly defined quantity, “human,” those Laws directed them to protect and obey.
Derec had felt a great sadness pervading the city since he first arrived. It felt almost haunted to him, the robots wandering about like lost souls, purposeless. He was attributing human qualities to inhuman beings, he knew, but Frost, they didn’t have to be human to be lost, or to feel sad about it. Robots were intelligent beings, no matter what their origin, and it behooved their creators to treat them kindly. That included giving them a sense of purpose and letting them fulfill it. It seemed clear to Derec that none of these Robot City robots, nor the ones lying inert in Avery’s lab, had been treated well by their creators.
Humans make poor gods, he thought wryly.
The cargo robots dropped Derec off outside a low, nondescript warehouselike building. If it was the same one Lucius had shown them the day before, then it had been repaired, but not before a veritable horde of the rat-creatures had escaped. Two hordes, Derec decided as he watched them scurrying about through the streets. They had been thick in the other parts of town, but this was ridiculous.
He ran from the truck to the main door, sending rats squealing off in all directions, but none chased after him.
Yet, he thought.
Directly inside the main door a hallway led down the length of the building, with doors opening to either side. Derec walked down the hallway, expecting to find a laboratory sufficient in complexity to support a complete genetic engineering project, but when he peered through the first doorway to his right, he couldn’t help laughing. Avery was the mad scientist, but Lucius’s lab-at least this part of it-was the typical mad scientist’s lair. Vats of bubbling brew stood in various stages of incubation or fermentation or whatever was going on along one wall, while electrical devices of various natures hummed and clicked contentedly over them. A bank of cages along another wall held a bewildering array of small creatures, ranging from insects to something that might have been a mouse to one of the rodentlike creatures now overrunning the city. Another wall held trays of growing plants. In the center of the room, table after table held enough interconnected glassware to distill a lake. From the entire collection came a mixture of smells stronger and more varied than from an explosion in a kitchen automat.
The necessity of dealing with organic material had forced the lab into the configuration he saw, but Derec found it funny nonetheless. The gleaming robots who tended the equipment made it even more so by contrast. They should have been wearing dark robes and walking with stooped posture.
One of them walked past carrying a test tube filled with cloudy liquid. Derec cleared his throat noisily and said, “We’ve got a problem here.”
“That is unfortunate,” the robot answered without pausing in its stride. “How may I help?” It walked on over to a centrifuge, put the tube inside, and started it spinning.
Derec felt momentary annoyance at talking to a robot who was too busy to stop for him, but some remnant of his thoughts on the trip over kept him from ordering the robot to drop what it was doing. This robot, at least, had a purpose. A wrong one, but maybe they could do something about that without defeating it completely.
“To start with,” he said, “you can’t create any humans. That goes for all of you, in all of these labs. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” the robot replied. It looked at Derec, then back to the centrifuge. If it was disappointed, it didn’t show it.
“All right. Next, then, I need to know what those creatures” Derec waited until the robot looked to see where he was pointing, “-there at the end of the line-eat.”
“They are omnivorous,” the robot replied, gathering up a handful of empty tubes from a box and inserting them one by one into some sort of diagnostic instrument beside the centrifuge.
“There’s a whole bunch of them running loose in the city without a food supply. We need to give them one.”
“That would only increase their numbers. Is that what you wish to do?”
“No. But I don’t want them to starve, either.”
“We have discovered that if they do not starve, they will reproduce. There is no intermediate state. The number of creatures existing now are the result of a large food supply, which we have ceased providing.”
“You intend for them to starve, then?” Derec watched the robot push buttons on the face of the instrument.
“That is correct.”
“Why not introduce something that eats them?”
“That seems needlessly complex. Starvation will reduce their numbers equally well.”
“I see.” Derec felt somehow vindicated to hear the robot’s answer. Evidently robots didn’t make very good gods, either.
He thought of Avery’s suggestion to have the robots collect and kill them. A typical Avery idea, little better than the robots’ starvation plan. Much as he wanted to avoid conflict, Derec couldn’t let that happen, either.
“Look,” he said, going on into the lab and pulling up a stool, “even if you can’t make humans, this project of yours can still be good for something. Let me tell you about balanced ecosystems…”
The sun was long down by the time he made it home that night. Ariel was in the library, leaning back on a couch with her feet up on a stool and listening to one of Avery’s recordings of Earther music while she read a book. Neither Avery nor Wolruf were in evidence, though the loud snoring coming from down the hallway was suggestive of at least one of them. Mandelbrot stood in a wall niche behind Ariel, waiting for her to need his services.
Ariel put down the book and scowled at Derec in mock hostility when he entered the room. “Forget where you lived?” she asked.
“Almost.” Derec sat down beside her on the couch and nuzzled her neck playfully. “I’ve been trying to plan a simple ecosystem for the city, but it’s a lot tougher than I thought. Do you realize that you have to balance everything right down to the microbes in the soil? Pick the wrong ones, or not enough varieties of the right ones, and your whole biosphere goes crazy.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, that’s so. I’ve been studying it all day.”
“Sounds exciting.” She yawned wide, and the book slipped from her fingers to land with a thump on the floor. “Oops. Tired.”
Derec scooped it up for her and laid it on the couch’s armrest. “It’s late. We should go to bed.”
“I guess we should.”
Derec took her hand and helped her up from the couch. She let him lead her into the bedroom, where he pulled down the covers and left her on the foot of the bed to undress and crawl in while he used the Personal.
When he came out, she was already asleep. He slid quietly into bed beside her and within minutes he was out as well, dreaming of food chains and energy flow.
But once again, he awoke to the sound of someone throwing
up in the Personal. He sat up with a start, his heart suddenly pounding. The sun barely reached the window this time, but it was up. It was morning, and Ariel was sick.
His heart was still pounding when she opened the door and looked out at him. “Does this mean what I think it means?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think we’d better find out.”
The urine test came up positive, as they knew it would. Even so, it was hard for either of them to remain standing when the medical robot said, “May I be the first to offer you congratulations on the occasion of-”
“Wow,” Derec murmured. He and Ariel had been holding hands in anticipation; now he squeezed hers tightly.
“Oh,” Ariel said, her hand suddenly going slack. “I don’t-”
“But how?”
“I wasn’t supposed to be able to-”
“The cure!” Derec wrapped his arms around her and picked her up off the ground in a hug. “When they cured your amnemonic plague on Earth, they must have ‘cured’ your birth control, too.”
“They might have warned me.”
Derec’s grin faltered. He set her back on her feet again.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you want-?”
Ariel took the two steps necessary to reach a chair and sat heavily. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just such a shock. I’m not ready for it.”
“Well, we’ve got plenty of time to get used to the idea. At least, I think we do.” Derec turned to the medical robot. “How far along is she?”
“Fifteen days, plus or minus a day,” answered the robot. “A blood test would be more accurate, but I discourage invasive testing for such minor gain.”
“Me too,” Ariel said. She held out her hand and Derec took it again. “Well. Two weeks. That leaves us a while yet.” She looked down the corridor into the empty expanse of the hospital, then back to Derec.
Derec squeezed her hand again for reassurance. He wouldn’t say he knew just how she felt, because he wasn’t the one whose body would swell with the developing baby, and he wasn’t the one who would have to go through the painful process of giving birth, but he did at least share the sudden confusion of learning that he was going to be a parent. Did he want to be a father? He didn’t know. It was too soon to be asking that sort of question, and at the same time, far, far too late. He was going to be one whether he wanted to be or not.