by Jerry Oltion
“We are working on that definition with the Ceremyons. In fact, at this point we believe them to be more human than you.”
“Because they don’t ask you to do anything,” Ariel put in.
“You have a clear understanding of the situation,” the robot replied.
Avery shook his head. “Stay with them forever, for all I care. Good riddance. Come on, Wohler, Plato. Let’s see if we can give you two rhythm.”
They could, but that, it seemed, was not enough. It came close, closer than their first attempt to please the aliens, but on the morning of the third day after the trial, Lucius received a message from his counterparts that the aliens wanted to meet with the ‘self-named humans’ one more time.
They took transport booths out to the edge of the spaceport again. Sarco and Synapo were already waiting for them by the time they arrived, along with Adam and Eve and the musician robots as well.
Wohler was still recognizable by his gold color, but that was the only way to tell him from the other three robots. All had taken on the Ceremyon form.
The alien on the right stepped forward and said, “I am Sarco. These robots are not musicians.”
“What’s the problem this timer’ Avery asked with a sigh.
“They are nothing more than elaborate recording and playback devices with the limited ability to improvise on a theme. Inall the time they have been with us, not once has either of them been able to create a completely new piece of music.”
“Well, not quite,” amended Synapo. “They are able to produce random variations, which are new.”
Sarco snorted flame. “I said ‘new piece of music,’ not just new noise.”
“Sarco is a music lover,” Synapo explained. “He is greatly disappointed.”
Avery nodded. “All right. Let’s get one thing straight. Twice now you’ve asked me to give you robots with creative minds. I’ve tried to accommodate you, but I think you’re missing the point. Robots aren’t supposed to be used for creativity. That’s our job. Robots were made for the drudge work, for servants and laborers and all the other tasks that you need to have done in order to keep a society going but that nobody wants to do.”
Sarco said, “Our society exists without such drudge work, as you call it.”
“Then you don’t need robots.”
“Which is precisely what I told you at our first meeting.”
Avery threw up his hands in defeat. “All right. Forget it. We’ll take them off your hands. I was just trying to be helpful.”
The irony of it was, Derec thought, Avery really was trying to be helpful. It was almost as if he wanted to prove to himself that he could still do it. And here the aliens were telling him that the only way he could help was to take his toys and go home.
“May I ask what you intend to do with them?” Synapo asked.
“What does it matter? They won’t bother you anymore.”
“I am curious.”
“All right, since you’re curious; I’ll probably order them to self-destruct.”
Synapo and Sarco exchanged glances. The robots did so as well.
“That would be a great waste;” Synapo said.
“Waste? You just said they weren’t any good to you. With the planet already occupied, they aren’t any good to me, either. If there’s no use for them, then how can it be a waste to get rid of them?”
“They represent a great degree of organization.”
“Who cares? Organization doesn’t mean anything. An apple has more complex organization than a robot. What matters isn’t how sophisticated it is, but how much it costs you to produce. These robots are self-replicating; you can get a whole city from one robot if you’ve got the raw materials, so their cost is effectively zero. That’s how much we lose if we get rid of them: nothing.”
“But the robots lose. You forget, they are intelligent beings. Not creative, granted, but still intelligent. Perhaps too intelligent for the purpose for which you use them, if this is your attitude toward them.”
“They’re machines,” Avery insisted.
“So are we all,” Sarco said. “Biological machines that have become self-aware. And self-replicating as well. Do you maintain that our value is also zero, that we need not be concerned with individual lives, because they are so easy to replace?”
Avery took a deep breath, working up to an explosive protest, but Ariel’s response cut the argument from under him.
“No,” she whispered. “They’re all important.” She turned to Avery, and her voice grew in intensity as she said, “We just went through all this. Didn’t we learn anything from it? Derec and I aborted our own baby because it was going to be born without a brain. Without that, it was just a lump of cells. Doesn’t that tell us something? Doesn’t that tell us the brain is what matters?”
Lucius said to Derec, “You told me that adding a robot brain to the baby at birth would not have made it human.”
Ariel looked surprised, and Derec realized she hadn’t been in on that conversation. Even so, it only slowed her down for a moment. “That’s right,” she said. “It wouldn’t have. I1 would have been a robot in a baby’s body, and we didn’t want a baby robot. But the one question you didn’t ask was whether or not we would have aborted it if it was already as intelligent as a robot, and the answer is no… We wouldn’t have, because even a robot is self-aware. Self-awareness is what matters.”
“You are more civilized than we thought,” Synapo said.
“We try.” Ariel reached out a hand toward Wohler. “Come on,” she said. “I owe you a favor. The original Wohler lost his life saving me from my own stupidity; the least I can do is save his namesake.”
The golden-hued robot alien stepped closer to her, its features twisting from Ceremyon form to humanoid form as it moved, until by the time it stood before her, it was again a normal., Avery-style robot. One of the three others also made the change, becoming the philosopher Plato, formerly Transport Systems Coordinator 45.
Synapo shifted his weight, as if unused to standing so long. “In light of our discussion, I will repeat my question. What do you intend to do with them?”
“Send them back to the original Robot City, I guess,” Avery said. “There’s room for them there.”
“And the city itself?” Synapo tilted his head to indicate the one before them, not the original. “It is self-aware also, is it not?”
“To a very limited degree,” Avery replied. “It’s aware of its own existence, but just enough so it can obey the same three laws the robots do. Everything else; the metamorphosis, the growth, the coordination, is all straight programming.”
“Then you may leave the city, if you wish.”
“What will you do with it? I didn’t think you had any more use for a city than you have for robots.”
“We don’t. But if you remove all but its most basic programming, then it need not remain a city.”
Avery looked back over his shoulder at the grand collection of tall spires, pyramids, geometric solids, and elevated walkways connecting them all. Sunlight glinted off one face of the Compass Tower. Tiny specks of motion on the walkways were robots going about their assigned duties, keeping the city functioning. Derec, watching him, could read Avery, s thoughts as well as if he’ d heard them by comlink.
How can they not need all that?
Avery turned back to the Ceremyons. Shadows with red eyes waited for him to speak. “All right,” he said at last. “What do I care what you do with it? It’s yours.”
“Thank you.”
“You’ll need some kind of control mechanism,” Avery pointed out.
“We have already developed that capability,” Sarco said.
“Oh?”
“Our technology is not as obvious as yours, but that is only because we choose not to let its presence spread unchecked.”
Avery was working himself up to an explosive reply, but he got no chance. Before he could speak, the aliens bobbed up and down once each, turned, and took wi
ng. This time Adam and Eve followed immediately. Lucius watched them rise up into the sky, and as he watched, his arms flattened toward wing shape and his body shrank in size to allow more bulk for the wings. He took a couple of clumsy steps, flapped his wings, and completed the transformation in the air.
“Hey!” Derec shouted. “Where are you going?” Lucius circled around, swooped low, and as he swept past, shouted, “I will return!” Then with powerful strokes he flew off after his two siblings.
“Better return soon, or you’ll be stranded here,” Avery muttered, turning away and heading back toward the transport booths and the city. Without looking back to see if anyone followed, he said, “Wohler! Get our ship ready for space.”
The robots didn’t travel by ship. Under Avery’s direction the city built a new Key center, a factory in which the tiny individual jump motors he called Keys to Perihelion were manufactured, and within hours each robot in the city had his own Key, its destination preset for the original Robot City. On Avery’s command, they all formed up in a line, began marching down the main avenue toward the Compass Tower, and as they reached the intersection directly in front of it, jumped.
Their motion was hypnotic, and it lasted for hours. There had been a lot of robots in the city.
“So why don’t we just use Keys to go back home ourselves?” Derec asked.
“Because I don’t trust them.”
“What do you mean, you don’t trust them? You invented them yourself, didn’t you?”
“An inventor is supposed to trust everything he makes?”
Wolruf, who had just keyed in an order on the automat for something Derec didn’t recognize, looked at her plate with theatrical suspicion. Derec laughed.
“I’d use one in an emergency,” Avery went on, “and I’ve done so in the past, but not without apprehension. If you think getting lost by jumping too far in a ship is dangerous, imagine it with just a key.”
“You mean some of those robots won’t make it home?” Ariel asked, shocked.
Avery rolled his eyes. “Of course they’ll make it home, eventually. Some of them just may have to spend a day or two floating in space while they wait for the Key to recharge for a second shot at it. No problem for a robot, but a little more difficult for a human.”
Derec felt a chill run up his back. He and Ariel had used the Keys half a dozen times, once jumping all the way from Earth’s solar system to Robot City. They had thought they were in perfect safety all the while, but now to find out they weren’t…
What did it matter, after the fact? It shouldn’t have mattered at all, but it did to Derec. It filled him with anger. Too many things were not what they seemed. It sometimes felt as if the universe were playing a game with him, challenging him to figure it out before a wrong assumption killed him. Well, he no longer felt like playing.
But it wasn’t a game you could quit. You could only lose. Eventually something-a mistake, a wrong assumption, bad luck-would happen to you and you would lose the game.
Derec seemed to be losing it in pieces. First his family, then his memory, then his chance to start a family of his own. Now he could feel his self-confidence starting to go as well. How much more could he afford to lose?
And what was the point in that kind of existence, anyway? Perhaps Wohler and Plato knew, but Derec doubted it. He doubted that the Ceremyons knew, either. That was no doubt one of their unanswered questions they had wanted the robots to answer for them.
He was looking out the window in his bleak mood when he noticed three silver-gray Ceremyon forms dropping down out of the sky toward the city. They drew nearer, dipping and weaving in the unstable air over the buildings, until they fluttered to a stop on the balcony. Derec went to the door to let them in.
Lucius went through the transformation to humanoid form and stepped through the doorway. Adam and Eve followed him. Once inside, Lucius said to Derec, “We bring information which you may find useful. And we come to ask a favor in return.”
“What favor?”
“First let us tell you our information. The woman whom the Ceremyons told us of earlier, the one whom you believe may be your mother and our creator; we have finally found where she has gone.”
Derec had thought he was immune to sudden enthusiasm, so blue had been his mood only moments ago, but the adrenaline dumped into his bloodstream when he heard Lucius’s words bummed that away instantly. Here was a chance to regain a part of what the universe had taken from him.
“Where?”
“She has gone to the planet of the Kin, where Adam was born.”
“How long ago?”
“Just before we arrived here.”
Derec looked away out the window, down at the line of robots queuing up for their trip to a home they had never seen. He felt a kinship with each of them, for he knew what their feelings were at this moment, if indeed they had feelings. He turned around to face Avery.” We’ve got to go after her. I remember what you said, but I still want to find her.”
Avery’s brow furrowed in thought, then he said, “Oddly enough, so do I. I have a few words on the subject of robotics to say to the creator of these three.”
Derec sighed in relief. He had expected a struggle. “Ariel?” he asked. “What about you? You don’t have to go if you don’t want to. We can keep a few robots here, have them build you another ship before they-”
Ariel cut him off. “I want to be with you. I’ll go where you go. Besides, I don’t want to go home just yet. Not until I sort out a few things in my mind.”
Wolruf waited until Derec looked over at her, then said, “Somebody’s got to keep ‘u out of trouble. Count me in.”
“And now we come to the favor we ask of you,” Lucius said. “We would like to come with you as well.”
“To find your creator?”
“Yes. Failing that, we would study the Kin to see if they can offer us more insight into the question of humanity.”
“Why should we take you along?” Avery asked. “You’re nothing but trouble. You don’t follow orders, and twice now you’ve almost killed us because of it.”
“We would promise to consider more carefully the consequences of our actions. We will follow your orders when they seem reasonable. We would, in short, consider you our friends, and act accordingly.”
“Friends. Ha.”
“It might interest you to know that we now have three laws which we feel cover the interactions between sentient beings and their environment. The first is the Ceremyons’ law: All beings will do that which pleases them most. The second is the law we formulated on our journey here: A sentient being may not harm a friend, or through inaction allow a friend to come to harm. The third, which we have formulated after watching the interaction among you four and among the Ceremyons, is this: A sentient being will do what a friend asks him to, but a friend may not ask him to do unreasonable things. With that in mind, we ask that you allow us to travel with you, as friends.”
“Your ‘laws’ seem awfully vague,” Avery growled.
“Sentient beings are vague. We believe that to be an inherent quality of sentience.”
“Ha. Maybe so.” Avery glared at the robots a moment longer, then shook his head. “What the hell, it’ll make for an interesting trip. Okay. You’re on.”
“We thank you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Get on board. The ship leaves as soon as we get there. And hey, ‘friends,’ I’ve got three bags in my room. Since you ‘re already headed that way, why don’t you each grab one on the way out?”
Lucius glanced over to Adam and Eve. They returned his glance, then they all three looked momentarily at Avery. At last Lucius nodded. “We would be glad to,” he said.
Derec took one last look at their apartment as the transport booth whisked him away for the last time. It was already just one among hundreds of elaborate but now completely empty buildings in a city all but devoid of life. When he and the others crossed its bounds at the spaceport, it would be just that.
The city robots were already gone. The city itself had stopped its transformations, was now locked into the shape it had held when Avery cancelled its program. The only motion besides their transport booths were the half -dozen Ceremyons circling overhead, watching. Waiting.
The booths slowed to a stop at the terminal building. Their ship, the Wild Goose Chase, waited only a short walk away, repaired and gleaming in the sunlight. Derec took Ariel’s hand and together they walked toward it, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the smell of unfiltered air one last time before boarding.
A soft whisper of movement behind them made them stop and look around, just in time to see the last of the city buildings dissolve. The spaceport terminal building was the only structure left; all the others had melted down into a pool of undifferentiated city material the moment they had crossed the boundary. Tiny ripples spread across the silvery surface, like ripples in a lake but propagating much faster in the denser liquid. There was a hush of expectation in the air; then a jet of silver sprayed upward at an angle, arching over to splash back into the surface nearly halfway across the lake. The beam must have been a meter thick, Derec supposed.
Where it met the surface, a disturbance arose, and a familiar sight climbed back up the beam: the splashing, outward-spraying point of contact between the downfalling jet and a new one spraying upward at the same angle from the same point. The meeting point reached the top and stopped there, a vertical sheet of liquid silver spraying out from what appeared to be a solid arch. The noise of it splashing back into the lake was the roar of a waterfall. Derec recognized in an instant what it was: a copy on an enormous scale of the fountain in the entryway to their apartment in the original Robot City, the fountain he called “Negative Feedback.”
How had the Ceremyons learned of that? he wondered, but the answer came almost immediately. Lucius had no doubt told them about it, possibly to ask them its significance. Derec had ordered him to think about it, after all.
He turned to see the amusement on Ariel’s face, and found himself grinning as well
“Think they’re trying to tell us something?” he asked.