City (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by Clifford D. Simak

  As it was, there wasn’t much that could be done. You scratched yourself. You had your robot pick them off, although the robot usually got more fur than fleas. You rolled in the sand or dust. You went for a swim and drowned some of them . . . well, you really didn’t drown them; you just washed them off and if some of them drowned that was their own tough luck.

  You had your robot pick them off . . . but now there was no robot.

  No robot to pick off fleas.

  No robot to help him hunt for food.

  But, Archie remembered, there was a black haw tree down in the river bottom and last night’s frost would have touched the fruit. He smacked his lips, thinking of the haws. And there was a cornfield just over the ridge. If one was fast enough and bided his time and was sneaky about it, it was no trouble at all to get an ear of corn. And if worse came to worse there always would be roots and wild acorns and that patch of wild grapes over on the sand bar.

  Let Rufus go, said Archie, mumbling to himself. Let the Dogs keep their feeding stations. Let the wardens go on watching.

  He would live his own life. He would eat fruit and grub for roots and raid the cornfields, even as his remote ancestors had eaten fruits and grubbed for roots and raided fields.

  He would live as the other raccoons had lived before the Dogs had come along with their ideas about the Brotherhood of Beasts. Like animals had lived before they could talk with words, before they could read the printed books that the Dogs provided, before they had robots that served in lieu of hands, before there was warmth and light for dens.

  Yes, and before there was a lottery that told you if you stayed on Earth or went to another world.

  The Dogs, Archie remembered, had been quite persuasive about it, very reasonable and suave. Some animals, they said, had to go to the other worlds or there would be too many animals on Earth. Earth wasn’t big enough, they said, to hold everyone. And a lottery, they pointed out was the fair way to decide which of them would go to the other worlds.

  And, after all, they said, the other worlds would be almost like the Earth. For they were just extensions of the Earth. Just other worlds following in the track of Earth. Not quite like it, perhaps, but very close. Just a minor difference here and there. Maybe no tree where there was a tree on Earth. Maybe an oak tree where Earth had a walnut tree. Maybe a spring of fresh, cold water where there was no such spring on Earth.

  Maybe, Homer had told him, growing very enthusiastic . . . maybe the world he would be assigned to would be a better world than Earth.

  Archie hunched against the hillside, felt the warmish sun of autumn cutting through the cold chill of autumn’s wind. He thought about the black haws. They would be soft and mushy and there would be some of them lying on the ground. He would eat those that were on the ground, then he’d climb the tree and pick some more and then he’d climb down again and finish off the ones he had shaken loose with his climbing of the tree.

  He’d eat them and take them in his paws and smear them on his face. He might even roll in them.

  Out of the corner of one eye, he saw the scurrying things running in the grass. Like ants, he thought, only they weren’t ants. At least, not like any ants he’d ever seen before.

  Fleas, maybe. A new kind of flea.

  His paw darted out and snatched one up. He felt it running in his palm. He opened the paw and saw it running there and closed the paw again.

  He raised his paw to his ear and listened.

  The thing he’d caught was ticking!

  The wild robot camp was not at all the way Homer had imagined it would be. There were no buildings, just launching ramps and three spaceships and half a dozen robots working on one of the ships.

  Although, come to think of it. Homer told himself, one should have known there would be no buildings in a robot camp. For the robots would have no use of shelter and that was all a building was.

  Homer was scared, but he tried hard not to show it. He curled his tail over his back and carried his head high and his ears well forward and trotted towards the little group of robots, never hesitating. When he reached them, he sat down and lolled out his tongue and waited for one of them to speak.

  But when none of them did, he screwed up his courage and spoke to them, himself.

  ‘My name is Homer,’ he said, ‘and I represent the Dogs. If you have a head robot, I would like to talk to him.’

  The robots kept on working for a minute, but finally one of them turned around and came over and squatted down beside Homer so that his head was level with the dog’s head. All the other robots kept on working as if nothing had happened.

  ‘I am a robot called Andrew,’ said the robot squatting next to Homer, ‘and I am not what you would call the head robot, for we have no such thing among us. But I can speak with you.’

  ‘I came to you about the Building,’ Homer told him.

  ‘I take it,’ said the robot called Andrew, ‘that you are speaking of the structure to the north-east of us. The one you can see from here if you just turn around.’

  ‘That’s the one,’ said Homer. ‘I came to ask why you are building it.’

  ‘But we aren’t building it,’ said Andrew.

  ‘We have seen robots working on it.’

  ‘Yes, there are robots working there. But we are not building it.’

  ‘You are helping someone else?’

  Andrew shook his head. ‘Some of us get a call . . . a call to go and work there. The rest of us do not try to stop them, for we are all free agents.’

  ‘But who is building it?’ asked Homer.

  ‘The ants,’ said Andrew.

  Homer’s jaw dropped slack.

  ‘Ants? You mean the insects. The little things that live in ant hills?’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Andrew. He made the fingers of one hand ran across the sand like a harried ant.

  ‘But they couldn’t build a place like that,’ protested Homer. ‘They are stupid.’

  ‘Not any more,’ said Andrew.

  Homer sat stock still, frozen to the sand, felt chilly feet of terror run along his nerves.

  ‘Not any more,’ said Andrew, talking to himself. ‘Not stupid any more. You see once upon a time, there was a man named Joe . . .’

  ‘A man? What’s that?’ asked Homer.

  The robot made a clucking noise, as if gently chiding Homer.

  ‘Men were animals,’ he said. ‘Animals that went on two legs. They looked very much like us except they were flesh and we are metal.’

  ‘You must mean the websters,’ said Homer. ‘We know about things like that, but we call them websters.’

  The robot nodded slowly. ‘Yes, the websters could be men. There was a family of them by that name. Lived just across the river.’

  ‘There’s a place called Webster House,’ said Homer. ‘It stands on Webster’s Hill.’

  ‘That’s the place,’ said Andrew.

  ‘We keep it up,’ said Homer. ‘It’s a shrine to us, but we don’t understand just why. It is the word that has been passed down to us . . . we must keep Webster House.’

  ‘The websters,’ Andrew told him, ‘were the ones that taught you Dogs to speak.’

  Homer stiffened. ‘No one taught us to speak. We taught ourselves. We developed in the course of many years. And we taught the other animals.’

  Andrew, the robot, sat hunched in the sun, nodding his head as if he might be thinking to himself.

  ‘Ten thousand years,’ he said. ‘No, I guess it’s nearer twelve. Around eleven, maybe.’

  Homer waited and as he waited he sensed the weight of years that pressed against the hills . . . the years of river and of sun, of sand and wind and sky.

  And the years of Andrew.

  ‘You are old,’ he said. ‘You can remember that far back?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Andrew. ‘Although I am one of the last of the man-made robots, I was made just a few years before they went to Jupiter.’

  Homer sat silently, tumult stirring in his brai
n.

  Man . . . a new word.

  An animal that went on two legs.

  An animal that made the robots, that taught the Dogs to talk.

  And, as if he might be reading Homer’s mind, Andrew spoke to him.

  ‘You should not have stayed away from us,’ he said. ‘We should have worked together. We worked together once. We both would have gained if we had worked together.’

  ‘We were afraid of you,’ said Homer. ‘I am still afraid of you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Andrew. ‘Yes, I suppose you would be. I suppose Jenkins kept you afraid of us. For Jenkins was a smart one. He knew that you must start fresh. He knew that you must not carry the memory of Man as a dead weight on your necks.’

  Homer sat silently.

  ‘And we,’ the robot said, ‘are nothing more than the memory of Man. We do the things he did, although more scientifically, for, since we are machines, we must be scientific. More patiently than Man, because we have forever, and he had a few short years.’

  Andrew drew two lines in the sand, crossed them with two other lines. He made an X in the open square in the upper left hand corner.

  ‘You think I’m crazy,’ he said. ‘You think I’m talking through my hat.’

  Homer wriggled his haunches deeper into the sand.

  ‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said. ‘All these years . . .’

  Andrew drew an O with his finger in the centre square of the cross-hatch he had drawn in the sand.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘All these years you have lived with a dream. The idea that the Dogs were the prime movers. And the facts are hard to understand, hard to reconcile. Maybe it would be just as well if you forgot what I said. Facts are painful things at times. A robot has to work with them, for they are the only things he has to work with. We can’t dream, you know. Facts are all we have.’

  ‘We passed fact long ago,’ Homer told him. ‘Not that we don’t use it, for there are times we do. But we work in other ways. Intuition and cobblying and listening.’

  ‘You aren’t mechanical,’ said Andrew. ‘For you, two and two are not always four, but for us it must be four. And sometimes I wonder if tradition doesn’t blind us. I wonder sometimes if two and two may not be something more or less than four.’

  They squatted in silence, watching the river, a flood of molten silver tumbling down a coloured land.

  Andrew made an X in the upper right-hand corner of the cross-hatch, an O in the centre upper space, and X in the centre lower space. With the flat of his hand, he rubbed the sand smooth.

  ‘I never win,’ he said. ‘I’m too smart for myself.’

  ‘You were telling me about the ants,’ said Homer. ‘About them not being stupid any more.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Andrew. ‘I was telling you about a man named Joe . . .’

  Jenkins strode across the hill and did not look to either left or right, for there were things he did not wish to see, things that struck too deeply into memory. There was a tree that stood where another tree had stood in another world. There was the lay of ground that had been imprinted on his brain with a billion footsteps across ten thousand years.

  The weak winter sun of afternoon flickered in the sky, flickered like a candle guttering in the wind, and when it steadied and there was no flicker it was moonlight and not sunlight at all.

  Jenkins checked his stride and swung around and the house was there . . . low-set against the ground, sprawled across the hill, like a sleepy young thing that clung close to mother earth.

  Jenkins took a hesitant step and as he moved his metal body glowed and sparkled in the moonlight that had been sunlight a short heartbeat ago.

  From the river valley came the sound of a night bird crying and a raccoon was whimpering in a cornfield just below the ridge.

  Jenkins took another step and prayed the house would stay . . . although he knew it couldn’t because it wasn’t there. For this was an empty hilltop that had never known a house. This was another world in which no house existed.

  The house remained, dark and silent, no smoke from the chimneys, no light from the windows, but with remembered lines that one could not mistake.

  Jenkins moved slowly, carefully, afraid the house would leave, afraid that he would startle it and it would disappear.

  But the house stayed put. And there were other things. The tree at the corner had been an elm and now it was an oak, as it had been before. And it was autumn moon instead of winter sun. The breeze was blowing from the west and not out of the north.

  Something happened, thought Jenkins. The thing that has been growing in me. The thing I felt and could not understand. An ability developing? Or a new sense finally reaching light? Or a power I never dreamed I had.

  A power to walk between the worlds at will. A power to go anywhere I choose by the shortest route that the twisting lines of force and happenstance can conjure up for me.

  He walked less carefully and the house still stayed, unfrightened, solid and substantial.

  He crossed the grass-grown patio and stood before the door.

  Hesitantly, he put out a hand and laid it on the latch. And the latch was there. No phantom thing, but substantial metal.

  Slowly he lifted it and the door swung in and he stepped across the threshold.

  After five thousand years, Jenkins had come home . . . back to Webster House.

  So there was a man named Joe. Not a Webster, but a man. For a webster was a man. And the Dogs had not been first.

  Homer lay before the fire, a limp pile of fur and bone and muscle, with his paws stretched out in front of him and his head resting on his paws. Through half-closed eyes he saw the fire and shadow, felt the heat of the blazing logs reach out and fluff his fur.

  But inside his brain he saw the sand and the squatting robot and the hills with the years upon them.

  Andrew had squatted in the sand and talked, with the autumn sun shining on his shoulders . . . had talked of men and dogs and ants. Of a thing that had happened when Nathaniel was alive, and that was a time long gone, for Nathaniel was the first Dog.

  There had been a man named Joe . . . a mutant-man, a more-than-man . . . who had wondered about ants twelve thousand years ago. Wondered why they had progressed so far and then no farther, why they had reached the dead end of destiny.

  Hunger, perhaps, Joe had reasoned . . . the ever-pressing need to garner food so that they might live. Hibernation, perhaps, the stagnation of the winter sleep, the broken memory chain, the starting over once again, each year a genesis for ants.

  So, Andrew said, his bald pate gleaming in the sun, Joe had picked one hill, had set himself up as a god to change the destiny of ants. He had fed them, so that they need not strive with hunger. He had enclosed their hill in a dome of glassite and had heated it so they need not hibernate.

  And the thing had worked. The ants advanced. They fashioned carts and they smelted ore. This much one could know, for the carts were on the surface and acrid smelting smoke came from the chimneys that thrust up from the hill. What other things they did, what other things they learned, deep down in their tunnels, there was no way of knowing.

  Joe was crazy, Andrew said. Crazy . . . and yet, maybe not so crazy either.

  For one day he broke the dome of glassite and tore the hill asunder with his foot, then turned and walked away, not caring any more what happened to the ants.

  But the ants had cared.

  The hand that broke the dome, the foot that ripped the hill had put the ants on the road to greatness. It had made them fight . . . fight to keep the things they had, fight to keep the bottleneck of destiny from closing once again.

  A kick in the pants, said Andrew. A kick in the pants for ants. A kick in the right direction.

  Twelve thousand years ago a broken, trampled hill. To-day a mighty building that grew with each passing year. A building that had covered a township in one short century, that would cover a hundred townships in the next. A building that would push out and take t
he land. Land that belonged, not to ants, but animals.

  A building . . . and that was not quite right, although it had been called the Building from the very start. For a building was a shelter, a place to hide from storm and cold. The ants would have no need of that, for they had their tunnels and their hills.

  Why would an ant build a place that sprawled across a township in a hundred years and yet that kept on growing? What possible use could an ant have for a place like that?

  Homer nuzzled his chin deep into his paws, growled inside his throat.

  There was no way of knowing. For first you had to know how an ant would think. You would have to know her ambition and her goal. You would have to probe her knowledge.

  Twelve thousand years of knowledge. Twelve thousand years from a starting point that itself was unknowable.

  But one had to know. There must be a way to know.

  For, year after year, the Building would push out. A mile across, and then six miles and after that a hundred. A hundred miles and then another hundred and after that the world.

  Retreat, thought Homer. Yes, we could retreat. We could migrate to those other worlds, the worlds that follow us in the stream of time, the worlds that tread on one another’s heels. We could give the Earth to ants and there still would be space for us.

  But this is home. This is where the Dogs arose. This is where we taught the animals to talk and think and act together. This is the place where we created the Brotherhood of Beasts.

  For it does not matter who came first . . . the webster or the dog. This place is home. Our home as well as Webster’s home. Our home as well as ants’.

  And we must stop the ants.

  There must be a way to stop them. A way to talk to them, find out what they want. A way to reason with them. Some basis for negotiation. Some agreement to be reached.

  Homer lay motionless on the hearth and listened to the whisperings that ran through the house, the soft, far-off padding of robots on their rounds of duties, the muted talk of Dogs in a room upstairs, the crackling of the flames as they ate along the log.

  A good life, said Homer, muttering to himself. A good life and we thought we were the ones who made it. Although Andrew says it wasn’t us. Andrew says we have not added one iota to the mechanical skill and mechanical logic that was our heritage . . . and that we have lost a lot. He spoke of chemistry and he tried to explain, but I couldn’t understand. The study of elements, he said, and things like molecules and atoms. And electronics . . . although he said we did certain things without the benefit of electronics more wonderfully than man could have done with all his knowledge. You might study electronics for a million years, he said, and not reach those other worlds, not even know they’re there . . . and we did it, we did a thing a webster could not do.