Robots: The Recent A.I.

by Elizabeth Bear

  Push.

  With a final heart-wrenching scream, Zoquitl expelled the last of the Mind from her womb. It slid to the floor, a red, glistening mass of flesh and electronics: muscles and metal implants, veins and pins and cables.

  It lay there, still and spent—and several heartbeats passed before Dac Kien realised it wouldn’t ever move.

  Dac Kien put off visiting Zoquitl for days, still reeling from the shock of the birth. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw blood: the great mass sliding out of the womb, flopping on the floor like a dead fish, the lights of the birthing room glinting on metal wafers and grey matter, and everything dead, gone as if it had never been.

  It had no name, of course—neither it nor the ship, both gone too soon to be graced with one.

  Push. Push, and everything will be fine. Push.

  Hanh tried her best, showing her poems with exquisite calligraphy, speaking of the future and of her next posting, fiercely making love to her as if nothing had ever happened, as if Dac Kien could just forget the enormity of the loss. But it wasn’t enough.

  Just as the ship hadn’t been enough.

  In the end, remorse drove Dac Kien, as surely as a barbed whip, and she boarded the shuttle to cross to the ship.

  Zoquitl was in the birthing room, sitting wedged against the wall, with a bowl of pungent tea in her veined hands. The two holos framed her, their white-painted faces stark in the dim light, unforgiving. The birth-master hovered nearby, but was persuaded to leave them both alone, though he made it clear Dac Kien was responsible for anything that happened to Zoquitl.

  “Elder sister.” Zoquitl smiled, a little bitterly. “It was a good fight.”

  “Yes.” One Zoquitl could have won, if she had been given better weapons.

  “Don’t look so sad,” Zoquitl said.

  “I failed,” Dac Kien said, simply. She knew Zoquitl’s future was still assured, that she’d make her good marriage, and bear children, and be worshipped in her turn. But she also knew, now, that it wasn’t the only reason Zoquitl had borne the Mind.

  Zoquitl’s lips twisted into what might have been a smile. “Help me.”

  “What?” Dac Kien looked at her, but Zoquitl was already pushing herself up, shaking, shivering, as carefully as she had done when pregnant. “The birth-master-”

  “He’s fussing like an old woman,” Zoquitl said, and for a moment her voice was as sharp and as cutting as a blade. “Come. Let’s walk.”

  She was smaller than Dac Kien had thought, her shoulders barely came up to her own. She wedged herself awkwardly, leaning on Dac Kien for support, a weight that grew increasingly hard to bear as they walked through the ship.

  There was light, and the sound of water, and the familiar feel of qi flowing through the corridors in lazy circles, breathing life into everything. There were shadows barely seen in mirrors, and the glint of other ships, too—the soft, curving patterns of The Golden Mountain; the carved calligraphy incised in the doors that had been the hallmark of The Tiger Who Leapt Over the Stream; the slowly curving succession of ever-growing doors of Baoyu’s Red Fan—bits and pieces salvaged from her design and put together into . . . into this, which unfolded its marvels all around her, from layout to electronics to decoration, until her head spun and her eyes blurred, taking it all in.

  In the heartroom, Dac Kien stood unmoving, while the five humours washed over them, an endless cycle of destruction and renewal. The centre was pristine, untouched, with a peculiar sadness hanging around it, like an empty crib. And yet . . .

  “It’s beautiful,” Zoquitl said, her voice catching and quivering in her throat.

  Beautiful as a poem declaimed in drunken games, as a flower bud ringed by frost—beautiful and fragile as a newborn child struggling to breathe.

  And, standing there at the centre of things, with Zoquitl’s frail body leaning against her, she thought of Hanh again, of shadows and darkness, and of life choices.

  It’s beautiful.

  It would be gone in a few days. Destroyed, recycled, forgotten and uncommemorated. But somehow Dac Kien couldn’t bring herself to voice the thought.

  Instead she said, softly, into the silence, knowing it to be true of more than the ship, “It was worth it.”

  All of it, now and in the years to come, and she wouldn’t look back, or regret.

  TIDELINE

  ELIZABETH BEAR

  Chalcedony wasn’t built for crying. She didn’t have it in her, not unless her tears were cold tapered-glass droplets annealed by the inferno heat that had crippled her.

  Such tears as that might slide down her skin over melted sensors to plink unfeeling on the sand. And if they had, she would have scooped them up, with all the other battered pretties, and added them to the wealth of trash jewels that swung from the nets reinforcing her battered carapace.

  They would have called her salvage, if there were anyone left to salvage her. But she was the last of the war machines, a three-legged oblate teardrop as big as a main battle tank, two big grabs and one fine manipulator folded like a spider’s palps beneath the turreted head that finished her pointed end, her polyceramic armor spiderwebbed like shatterproof glass. Unhelmed by her remote masters, she limped along the beach, dragging one fused limb. She was nearly derelict.

  The beach was where she met Belvedere.

  Butterfly coquinas unearthed by retreating breakers squirmed into wet grit under Chalcedony’s trailing limb. One of the rear pair, it was less of a nuisance on packed sand. It worked all right as a pivot, and as long as she stayed off rocks, there were no obstacles to drag it over.

  As she struggled along the tideline, she became aware of someone watching. She didn’t raise her head. Her chassis was equipped with targeting sensors that locked automatically on the ragged figure crouched by a weathered rock. Her optical input was needed to scan the tangle of seaweed and driftwood, Styrofoam and sea glass that marked high tide.

  He watched her all down the beach, but he was unarmed, and her algorithms didn’t deem him a threat.

  Just as well. She liked the weird flat-topped sandstone boulder he crouched beside.

  The next day, he watched again. It was a good day; she found a moonstone, some rock crystal, a bit of red-orange pottery, and some sea glass worn opalescent by the tide.

  “Whatcha picken up?”

  “Shipwreck beads,” Chalcedony answered. For days, he’d been creeping closer, until he’d begun following behind her like the seagulls, scrabbling the coquinas harrowed up by her dragging foot into a patched mesh bag. Sustenance, she guessed, and indeed he pulled one of the tiny mollusks from the bag and produced a broken-bladed folding knife from somewhere to prise it open. Her sensors painted the knife pale colors. A weapon, but not a threat to her.

  Deft enough—he flicked, sucked, and tossed the shell away in under three seconds—but that couldn’t be much more than a morsel of meat. A lot of work for very small return.

  He was bony as well as ragged, and small for a human. Perhaps young.

  She thought he’d ask what shipwreck, and she would gesture vaguely over the bay, where the city had been, and say there were many. But he surprised her.

  “Whatcha gonna do with them?” He wiped his mouth on a sandy paw, the broken knife projecting carelessly from the bottom of his fist.

  “When I get enough, I’m going to make necklaces.” She spotted something under a tangle of the algae called dead man’s fingers, a glint of light, and began the laborious process of lowering herself to reach it, compensating by math for her malfunctioning gyroscopes.

  The presumed-child watched avidly. “Nuh uh,” he said. “You can’t make a necklace outta that.”

  “Why not?” She levered herself another decimeter down, balancing against the weight of her fused limb. She did not care to fall.

  “I seed what you pick up. They’s all different.”

  “So?” she asked, and managed another few centimeters. Her hydraulics whined. Someday, those hydraulics or her fuel c
ells would fail and she’d be stuck this way, a statue corroded by salt air and the sea, and the tide would roll in and roll over her. Her carapace was cracked, no longer watertight.

  “They’s not all beads.”

  Her manipulator brushed aside the dead man’s fingers. She uncovered the treasure, a bit of blue-gray stone carved in the shape of a fat, merry man. It had no holes. Chalcedony balanced herself back upright and turned the figurine in the light. The stone was structurally sound.

  She extruded a hair-fine diamond-tipped drill from the opposite manipulator and drilled a hole through the figurine, top to bottom. Then she threaded him on a twist of wire, looped the ends, work-hardened the loops, and added him to the garland of beads swinging against her disfigured chassis.

  “So?”

  The presumed-child brushed the little Buddha with his fingertip, setting it swinging against shattered ceramic plate. She levered herself up again, out of his reach. “I’s Belvedere,” he said.

  “Hello,” Chalcedony said. “I’m Chalcedony.”

  By sunset when the tide was lowest he scampered chattering in her wake, darting between flocking gulls to scoop up coquinas by the fistful, which he rinsed in the surf before devouring raw. Chalcedony more or less ignored him as she activated her floods, concentrating their radiance along the tideline.

  A few dragging steps later, another treasure caught her eye. It was a scrap of chain with a few bright beads caught on it—glass, with scraps of gold and silver foil embedded in their twists. Chalcedony initiated the laborious process of retrieval—

  Only to halt as Belvedere jumped in front of her, grabbed the chain in a grubby broken-nailed hand, and snatched it up. Chalcedony locked in position, nearly overbalancing. She was about to reach out to snatch the treasure away from the child and knock him into the sea when he rose up on tiptoe and held it out to her, straining over his head. The flood lights cast his shadow black on the sand, illumined each thread of his hair and eyebrows in stark relief.

  “It’s easier if I get that for you,” he said, as her fine manipulator closed tenderly on the tip of the chain.

  She lifted the treasure to examine it in the floods. A good long segment, seven centimeters, four jewel-toned shiny beads. Her head creaked when she raised it, corrosion showering from the joints.

  She hooked the chain onto the netting wrapped around her carapace. “Give me your bag,” she said.

  Belvedere’s hand went to the soggy net full of raw bivalves dripping down his naked leg. “My bag?”

  “Give it to me.” Chalcedony drew herself up, akilter because of the ruined limb, but still two and a half meters taller than the child. She extended a manipulator, and from some disused file dredged up a protocol for dealing with civilian humans. “Please.”

  He fumbled at the knot with rubbery fingers, tugged it loose from his rope belt, and held it out to her. She snagged it on a manipulator and brought it up. A sample revealed that the weave was cotton rather than nylon, so she folded it in her two larger manipulators and gave the contents a low-wattage microwave pulse.

  She shouldn’t. It was a drain on her power cells, which she had no means to recharge, and she had a task to complete.

  She shouldn’t—but she did.

  Steam rose from her claws and the coquinas popped open, roasting in their own juices and the moisture of the seaweed with which he’d lined the net. Carefully, she swung the bag back to him, trying to preserve the fluids.

  “Caution,” she urged. “It’s hot.”

  He took the bag gingerly and flopped down to sit cross-legged at her feet. When he tugged back the seaweed, the coquinas lay like tiny jewels—pale orange, rose, yellow, green, and blue—in their nest of glass-green Ulva, sea lettuce. He tasted one cautiously, and then began to slurp with great abandon, discarding shells in every direction.

  “Eat the algae, too,” Chalcedony told him. “It is rich in important nutrients.”

  When the tide came in, Chalcedony retreated up the beach like a great hunched crab with five legs amputated. She was beetle-backed under the moonlight, her treasures swinging and rustling on her netting, clicking one another like stones shivered in a palm.

  The child followed.

  “You should sleep,” Chalcedony said, as Belvedere settled beside her on the high, dry crescent of beach under towering mud cliffs, where the waves wouldn’t lap.

  He didn’t answer, and her voice fuzzed and furred before clearing when she spoke again. “You should climb up off the beach. The cliffs are unstable. It is not safe beneath them.”

  Belvedere hunkered closer, lower lip protruding. “You stay down here.”

  “I have armor. And I cannot climb.” She thumped her fused leg on the sand, rocking her body forward and back on the two good legs to manage it.

  “But your armor’s broke.”

  “That doesn’t matter. You must climb.” She picked Belvedere up with both grabs and raised him over her head. He shrieked; at first she feared she’d damaged him, but the cries resolved into laughter before she set him down on a slanted ledge that would bring him to the top of the cliff.

  She lit it with her floods. “Climb,” she said, and he climbed.

  And returned in the morning.

  Belvedere stayed ragged, but with Chalcedony’s help he waxed plumper. She snared and roasted seabirds for him, taught him how to construct and maintain fires, and ransacked her extensive databases for hints on how to keep him healthy as he grew—sometimes almost visibly, fractions of a millimeter a day. She researched and analyzed sea vegetables and hectored him into eating them, and he helped her reclaim treasures her manipulators could not otherwise grasp. Some shipwreck beads were hot, and made Chalcedony’s radiation detectors tick over. They were no threat to her, but for the first time she discarded them. She had a human ally; her program demanded she sustain him in health.

  She told him stories. Her library was vast—and full of war stories and stories about sailing ships and starships, which he liked best for some inexplicable reason. Catharsis, she thought, and told him again of Roland, and King Arthur, and Honor Harrington, and Napoleon Bonaparte, and Horatio Hornblower, and Captain Jack Aubrey. She projected the words on a monitor as she recited them, and—faster than she would have imagined—he began to mouth them along with her.

  So the summer ended.

  By the equinox, she had collected enough memorabilia. Shipwreck jewels still washed up and Belvedere still brought her the best of them, but Chalcedony settled beside that twisted flat-topped sandstone rock and arranged her treasures on it. She spun salvaged brass through a die to make wire, threaded beads on it, and forged links that she strung into garlands.

  It was a learning experience. Her aesthetic sense was at first undeveloped, requiring her to make and unmake many dozens of bead combinations to find a pleasing one. Not only must form and color be balanced, but there were structural difficulties. First the weights were unequal, so the chains hung crooked. Then links kinked and snagged and had to be redone.

  She worked for weeks. Memorials had been important to the human allies, though she had never understood the logic of it. She could not build a tomb for her colleagues, but the same archives that gave her the stories Belvedere lapped up as a cat laps milk gave her the concept of mourning jewelry. She had no physical remains of her allies, no scraps of hair or cloth, but surely the shipwreck jewels would suffice for a treasure?

  The only quandary was who would wear the jewelry. It should go to an heir, someone who held fond memories of the deceased. And Chalcedony had records of the next of kin, of course. But she had no way to know if any survived, and, if they did, no way to reach them.

  At first, Belvedere stayed close, trying to tempt her into excursions and explorations. Chalcedony remained resolute, however. Not only were her power cells dangerously low, but with the coming of winter her ability to utilize solar power would be even more limited. And with winter the storms would come, and she would no longer be able to evade the ocea
n.

  She was determined to complete this last task before she failed.

  Belvedere began to range without her, to snare his own birds and bring them back to the driftwood fire for roasting. This was positive; he needed to be able to maintain himself. At night, however, he returned to sit beside her, to clamber onto the flat-topped rock to sort beads and hear her stories.

  The same thread she worked over and over with her grabs and fine manipulators—the duty of the living to remember the fallen with honor—was played out in the war stories she still told him. She’d finished with fiction and history and now she related him her own experiences. She told him about Emma Percy rescuing that kid up near Savannah, and how Private Michaels was shot drawing fire for Sergeant Kay Patterson when the battle robots were decoyed out of position in a skirmish near Seattle.

  Belvedere listened, and surprised her by proving he could repeat the gist, if not the exact words. His memory was good, if not as good as a machine’s.

  One day when he had gone far out of sight down the beach, Chalcedony heard Belvedere screaming.

  She had not moved in days. She hunkered on the sand at an awkward angle, her frozen limb angled down the beach, her necklaces in progress on the rock that served as her impromptu work bench.

  Bits of stone and glass and wire scattered from the rock top as she heaved herself onto her unfused limbs. She thrashed upright on her first attempt, surprising herself, and tottered for a moment unsteadily, lacking the stabilization of long-failed gyroscopes.

  When Belvedere shouted again, she almost overset.

  Climbing was out of the question, but Chalcedony could still run. Her fused limb plowed a furrow in the sand behind her and the tide was coming in, forcing her to splash through corroding sea water.

  She barreled around the rocky prominence that Belvedere had disappeared behind in time to see him knocked to the ground by two larger humans, one of whom had a club raised over its head and the other of which was holding Belvedere’s shabby net bag. Belvedere yelped as the club connected with his thigh.