Caliban - Caliban 01

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Forgive a most awkward question, sir,” Donald said, “but is it possible that you might have missed the crash if it had happened earlier, when you and Lady Leving were together in the duty office?”

  Gubber glanced up, beet-red, plainly embarrassed. “ Ah, well, yes,” he said. “There were certainly times in that period when we would not have heard anything.”

  “One other question, sir,” Donald went on. “Can you characterize any marks or things you might have noticed on the floor of the room?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You said you saw the smashed mug and the blood pooling under Dr. Leving’s head. Was there anything else of note?”

  “Oh, I see. No, not that I noticed. But I can assure you that I was not in much of a state to notice anything at all. The moment I heard the tone code coming out of that robot, there was nothing on my mind but leaving. I doubt that I was in the room more than thirty seconds at most.”

  “This tone code,” Kresh said. “You said it was part of the robot’s wake-up sequence, and that it indicated how long until the robot would come on. Can you tell us how long before that tone the robot would be switched on?”

  “Not without knowing a great deal more about how that unit was configured. There are three or four brain types, gravitonic and positronic, that can be installed in that body type, and there is other equipment that can add variation. The size and type of the on-board datastore, for example. It could take anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour to go from a cold gravitonic robot to a tripled triple.”

  Damnation. Events seemed to be conspiring against solving the case. Each new bit of information seemed only to muddle the time sequence or confuse the issue. Kresh felt he would go mad if he did not come up with some sort of witness, and it seemed there was only one potential witness left. “Is there any way that Caliban would have been aware or operational before the moment you came in?” he asked.

  “Yes, certainly,” Gubber said. “I realized that afterwards. From the time I left him to see Tonya, there was more than enough time for him to power up, run his full activation sequence, and then be switched off again--or switch himself off, for whatever reason. Then he could be switched on again, or program his own delayed power-up. Most robots have the capacity to set themselves to switch off and on again. It’s quite likely something like that is what happened.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, somehow or another, Caliban moved off the service rack to a standing position. Besides which, his arm was raised as if to strike a blow. That’s not how I’d position his limbs if I was getting him off a rack. It seems to me that either Fredda got him down off the rack, or he got down himself, but it’s more likely he did it on his own. Pity she can’t remember the incident.”

  “Traumatic amnesia does that to a person,” Kresh said dryly. “But how could she possibly get him down off that rack?” Kresh objected. “ A robot that size must weigh five times what she does.”

  “The rack has all sorts of power-assistance features. It’s designed to lift and carry robots, pick them up and put them down, and hold them in any position.”

  “All right. Let’s go back to your actions. You saw Caliban over the body, you panicked, and you left. What happened then?”

  “I went home,” Gubber said. “I went out to my aircar, and my pilot robot flew me home. I called Tonya from home and--” Gubber stopped.

  “And what?”

  “Well, at first, I was going to accuse her, ask how she could have done such a thing. But then I saw her face on the screen. Fresh, and calm, very much at ease. I knew she could not have done it. And it was starting to sink in how wrong it had been for me to run off that way. I didn’t want to admit that to Tonya. All of a sudden I realized that I couldn’t say anything to Tonya. I told her--I told her that something terrible had happened at the lab and that I was going into seclusion. Then I locked all the doors and cut off all the comm systems, and left them that way for the next few days.”

  Leaving Tonya Welton knowing just enough that she would be bound and determined to .find out more at any cost, Kresh thought. Unless, of course, his whole story is fabricated from beginning to end and they cooked it up together. They would have wanted a detail like that in there, to account for Tonya jumping into my investigation like a ton of bricks, ready and willing to misdirect it toward every direction but the right one.

  “And that’s it,” Kresh said. “That’s all you saw, and all you did.”

  “Yes, sir. I assure you that I would be delighted if there were more I could tell you--but that is honestly all I know.”

  And it’s enough to wipe out every start toward a lead I’ve made in this case, Kresh thought. “All right, then,” he said. “You are free to go, at least for the moment.”

  Gubber Anshaw looked surprised. “You mean, that’s it?”

  “That’s it for now,” Kresh growled. “Go. Now. Before I change my mind.”

  Gubber swallowed hard, stood up, and went.

  ALVAR Kresh watched Anshaw go and then turned toward Donald. “ All right, what have you got? Were they telling the truth?”

  “Before I answer that, I must note that the situation is of course complicated by the fact that both Anshaw and Terach had a hand in my design and construction. They are therefore riot only more aware than the average citizen that I have sensors designed to serve to assist in detecting falsehoods by witnesses, they have detailed knowledge of how those sensors operate. It is possible they could be able to use that knowledge and feign the sort of responses that tend to indicate veracity.”

  “Do you judge that to be likely?”

  “No, sir. It seems quite unlikely that either of them is capable of the sort of fine control of their involuntary reactions required for such a gambit to succeed. Indeed, they both seemed so nervous that I would not be surprised if they both had forgotten about my capabilities in that area. On the other hand, if one or both were skillful enough to feign the biomarkers of veracity while lying, that is exactly what I would expect to detect.”

  “Very well, then. I will keep in mind that your answer will be more of a balance of probabilities than a hard-and-fast answer. What is your judgment of their veracity?”

  “Both men exhibited the classic suite of biophysical reactions for truthful male adults in stressful situations. They were agitated, worried, upset, but all that is to be expected. I believe that both were telling the truth--and indeed, at some pains to conceal nothing.”

  Alvar nodded and sighed. “I am forced to agree. If I’m any judge at all, the two of them were both telling the truth. But if they were telling the truth, then we are further from a solution than ever before. All they managed to do was muddy the waters. Did you notice any sort of unusual emotional reaction that might possibly tell us something?”

  “I did note several strong emotional reactions, but I doubt they will be of much use. Gubber Anshaw’s exhibited evidence of strong feeling for Tonya Welton. I will freely confess, sir, that I am no expert in the arena of human emotions, but there is much there that baffles me. I do not quite understand what there is in Gubber Anshaw that Tonya Welton finds attractive. Judging against the romantic couples I have had occasion to observe, the two of them do not strike me as, well, compatible.”

  Alvar Kresh laughed, and it felt good to do so. There had not been a lot to laugh about in the past few days. “Donald, you are far more expert than you think. I would expect that every single person who knows about this affair has wondered the same thing. And wondered why Anshaw worships her, instead of being terrified by her.”

  “That question also crossed my mind. She is a rather intimidating person. But what is the answer, then? How can this sort of unlikely alliance be explained?”

  Kresh shook his head. “No one has ever figured that out, and no one ever will, I expect. Perhaps Tonya Welton does not care a bit about Anshaw, and is merely using him for some end of her own. She’s the sort of woman who could turn a Gubber Anshaw in
to a willing slave without a great deal of trouble, if she set her mind to it.”

  “Do you think that is the explanation?”

  Kresh thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “She has had too many chances to cut her losses. Gubber Anshaw is a very dangerous man to know right now. He is in very deep trouble, and she knows it. Yet she went to some effort to distract our attention away from him. I believe that she has real affection for Gubber, though what there is that inspired that feeling, I cannot say.”

  “What do you make of it all on a broader scale, sir? What do you make of the case at this time?”

  “It is the damnedest tangle I have ever seen. Either Terach and Anshaw and Tonya Welton are all the most consummate of liars, or else none of them had anything to do with it. And you can add Fredda Leving to that list of skilled liars, too, and make her part of the conspiracy to cover up the attack on herself. All of the other stories hang together with hers. There isn’t any meaningful discrepancy that I can see.”

  Kresh leaned back in his seat and stared at the ceiling thoughtfully. “They all have pretty fair motives as well. Jomaine could have feared that Fredda’ s work is going to get them all in deep trouble. A well-placed fear, as it develops. Tonya might have wanted a clear hand to run Limbo without Fredda joggling her elbow. Or maybe Tonya got wind of Caliban and got Gubber to monkey with him as a way of discrediting robots. The last thing Gubber was doing before going off with Tonya was fiddling with Caliban. But if that is so, then we must assume that the entire crisis has been manufactured by the Settlers, and that just seems like an awful lot of trouble when they could wreck our world just by leaving and sitting back to wait.

  “Or maybe Gubber was carefully hiding his bitterness and jealousy over the woman who took over his lovely gravitonic brains and perverted them away from the Laws. Or perhaps his temper got the better of him and he coshed her for being abusive toward Tonya. Damnation, any of those could be right! All of the motives are plausible.

  “It’s the way the crime was done that seems so implausible. If one of them did it, that still leaves us with whoever it was strapping on robot-foot shoes and procuring a robot arm for a weapon, and using both with utterly inhuman precision, taking the time to walk through the room twice in robot boots during a period of time when people were still coming and going from the labs. Madness.”

  There was silence in the room for a while, until Kresh could bring himself to speak. It was rarely easy to admit you were wrong and someone else was right. Especially when that someone else was a robot. “That leaves us with Caliban. And the more I think about your objections to him as a suspect, the more I am forced to agree with you. He doesn’t make much sense as an assailant. He has had many other chances to kill, and many better reasons to do so, and he hasn’t taken them. And yes, a robot who could kill and wanted to kill would have done a better job of it. A robot who wanted to kill would succeed, not botch the job by striking a nonfatal blow.”

  Kresh lowered his eyes to look at Donald. He drummed his fingers on the table and rubbed his chin with his hand. “Which leaves us with a totally unknown assailant as our prime suspect. Someone who can disable Settler security devices, because no one else showed up on the access recorder. Maybe a Settler disguised as a robot, someone who wanted to kill Fredda Leving so the whole operation would collapse so he or she could go home. Maybe some other motive.

  “Or it could be one of Simcor Beddle’s Ironheads, maybe even Simcor himself. Say one of them got wind of the New Law robot project and feared it as a threat to their sacred, inert way of life. If it was Simcor or one of his chums, then the Ironheads have more skill with Settler hardware than I would give them credit for.”

  “All of what you say seems quite logical, sir. But if I might observe, sir, we are losing sight of our other problem.”

  “I know, I know. Caliban. Caliban the rogue robot. Whether or not he attacked Fredda Leving, he is out there. He is a rogue, he is lawless, and we need to catch him. I’d been hoping that making progress on the Leving assault would help lead us to him. Except now we’re no further along with the assault case, either. I take it the search teams out after him don’t have any leads as of yet?”

  “No, sir, they don’t. No word at all.”

  “Damn it!” Alvar Kresh stood up and began pacing the room. “I’ll admit it. I’m stumped. Totally stumped. I don’t know how to put it all together. The two sides of this case are so intertwined, and yet it’s as if they have nothing to do with each other.” He stepped to the window and stared down at the city. Dusk was settling. It had been another long day, with meals forgotten and a hitch in his back from sitting in that damn chair all day. “Caliban,” he whispered to himself. “Maybe he’s the one who can tell us what the hell happened that night.”

  “But we have to catch him first, sir. He could hide in the city tunnels for years without our finding him.”

  “Yes, I know. But somehow I don’t think that is what he will do. He does not strike me as the sort who would be willing to molder underground. No. He wouldn’t settle for that. He had the chance to do that when he first entered the tunnels and he didn’t take it. He’ll want out. Out of the city, maybe, away from all the people trying to hunt him down.,

  “Caliban is out there,” Kresh said again. “He’s out there and he wants to get away.

  “And if I were Caliban, I’d make my move tonight.”

  18

  GOVERNOR Chanto Grieg signed the waiver and pushed it across his desk toward Fredda Leving. She reached for it a bit too eagerly, and that bothered Grieg. There was something wrong here. Grieg pulled back the paper and held on to it.

  “I do not understand why you are demanding this bit of paper, Fredda,” Grieg said. “I’m still tempted to refuse it and take my chances on your threat to resign from Limbo.”

  “Please, Governor, give me the waiver. I assure you that I am not bluffing. If you refuse it, I will resign. I will wash my hands of the whole matter.”

  But Grieg still held on to it. “You realize this waiver is not retroactive,” he said. “It does not absolve you from the crime of building a Lawless robot. It merely notes that you take responsibility for exactly one such robot as of today and are granted permission to own it. You could still be brought up on charges, very serious charges. If Kresh decides to arrest you, there would be nothing I could do. This piece of paper will do nothing to protect you.”

  “It is not me that I am looking to protect,” Fredda said. “I have done almost nothing except think about this question since the riot. At first, I wanted to go and hunt him down myself. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to find him to save him or to destroy him. But the more I thought, the more I knew I did not like the idea of his being captured and executed for the crime of being the way I made him. If he dies, it will be because I committed the crime of creating him. He should not be punished for my crimes, but that will be what happens to him without this waiver.”

  “In my opinion, the preponderance of information still indicates that he committed the attack against you. The situation is confused, but that still seems the most likely explanation.”

  “Then if that is shown to be true, let him be punished for what he did. That would be justice. To destroy him for what he is would be savagery. Caliban is the first robot with no shackles on his intellect. He is the first with the potential to think the way we do, except that perhaps he will do it better. He is the first robot made for freedom. And for this crime, he is to be hunted down and destroyed. I say that if we are so threatened by the freedom of others that we must kill them, we are not deserving of freedom ourselves--and we will not keep it long.”

  Governor Chanto Grieg did not speak, did not look at Fredda Leving. Instead he turned to the magnificent city that was slowly decaying outside his window. “That’s a big change you’re talking about, Dr. Leving, and change is never easy,” he said. “Sometimes I feel as if I am a doctor with a very sick patient, and the only medicine I have is change. If I administe
r too much of it, or give it at the wrong time, it will kill the patient. But if I instead prescribe no change at all, the patient will surely die. More than once, I have wondered if we Spacers will ultimately decide that change is too bitter a pill. We may decide that it would be easier, more pleasant, to refuse our medicine and to die instead. What do you think?”

  “For the moment, sir, that waiver is all I am interested in. May I have it, please?”

  Grieg looked at Fredda, her eyes bloodshot and sunken, her face pale, a bit of the scruffy stubble of her new-growing hair peeking out from under her turban. This was a woman long past worrying what she looked like, a woman who had clearly been struggling for some time with the question of what was the right thing to do.

  At last he spoke. “Very well. If our society is so fragile, so rigid, that it cannot survive the existence of a single No Law robot, then I doubt very much if there is much chance of keeping the patient alive in any event.” Chanto Grieg handed over the slip of paper.

  “Thank you, sir. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I must go.” Fredda bowed, turned, and left.

  Chanto Grieg watched her as she left, and found himself alone with the very uncomfortable notion that he was not at all sure Inferno could survive the advent of a single free robot.

  In which case, of course, there was no hope at all.

  THERE was no more point in further static practice. Either the thing would work or it would not. Either he could pilot it or he could not. Caliban sat in the pilot’s seat of the open cockpit aircar. He gripped the controls firmly, adjusted his feet over the pedals, and engaged what he thought was the lift control. The car lifted slowly off the ground. Yes, good. It worked.

  He had been more worried over whether the car would work than whether he had figured out the controls properly. After all, it seemed likely that the car had been sitting, forgotten, in Periphery Skyport Six since the underground Skyport went out of service, sometime in the last century. Working by his internal infrared light source, Caliban brought the decrepit old craft up to a reasonably steady hover at about ten meters over the floor of the cavernous room. He performed a circuit of the room with about as much grace and agility as one of the more elderly citizens he had seen tottering about the city his first day out on the street.