“By the Goddess, I’m so sorry, Arla!”
It was McCall’s voice she heard, and McCall’s cold hands she felt on hers and, when she could bear to open her sore eyes, it was the doctor’s face she saw, concern etched into her craggy and bruised features.
“I thought I’d gone blind,” Arla managed, wiping away a tear.
McCall stroked her face. “I’m sorry. They told me you wouldn’t waken for several hours yet. Seems you’re stronger than they imagined.”
“I don’t feel strong,” Arla said, lying back on the bed, “I feel like a lost child and I wish with all my heart someone else was here instead of me.”
Doctor McCall smiled. “Now that is a childish sentiment. Come on, let’s get you something to eat.”
With the doctor’s help, Arla swung her feet out and onto the floor. “I probably don’t need to ask where we are.”
“If you mean our precise location, I haven’t got a clue. Wells gave me the designation, but I just think of it as Robocity. I don’t know how big it is as I’ve only seen the corridors leading to this suite of rooms. Now, come and sit at the table.”
Arla followed McCall out of the sterile little room she’d woken up in, its two beds the only furniture she could see. The table was set in the middle of a larger room of perhaps ten metres by twice that. A padded bench ran along one wall and the floor was soft on her bare feet, though it looked as though it was made of polished grey ceramic. Another door was set into one of the walls which led, McCall said, to a shower room. A small kitchenette had been formed in one corner.
“What the hells are robots doing making apartments like this?”
McCall busied herself in the kitchenette as Arla sat at the table. “I wondered that. What’s even stranger is that while everything looks pretty regular - the sort of thing you’d find on Dawn - when you look closer nothing’s quite right.”
“You’re supposed to be a scientist, Doctor, what sort of an explanation is that?”
“Take this kettle,” McCall said. “It looks perfectly normal and it heats water incredibly efficiently, but it’s like no kettle I’ve ever seen. It’s almost as if they’ve seen one and know what it does without ever having had one to examine themselves. And wait until you use the bathroom, that’s an experience you’ll never forget.”
Intrigued, Arla padded across to the bathroom door, pushed the contact and peered inside. The walls, floor and ceiling were covered in what looked like white tiles but as she ran her fingers along the inside of the wall, she could tell that the grooves had been cut into a smooth, solid material. Set into the corner of the tiny room was a shower that looked, from her vantage point in the doorway, completely conventional if a little luxurious compared to those she was used to on Dawn. Next to it, sat a squat toilet.
“You’ll have to get a bit closer to it,” McCall said. “Lift the lid.”
Reluctantly, Arla edged her way inside. Although she’d become used to the confined corridors and rooms of Dawn, she felt unaccountably claustrophobic as she approached the pan and, reaching out, lifted the lid. “There’s no water.”
“Exactly. I was desperate enough not to care, but I nearly jumped through the door when the suction started.”
“Suction?”
McCall laughed. “Very efficient, admittedly. No smell, no residue. Some sort of liquid gas gets squirted around the bowl. It’s quite a sight. I’m afraid there’s no subtlety to it. We’re going to become pretty familiar with each others toilet schedule while we live together.”
They headed back to the table and McCall handed her a cup of something steamy. “It’s not exactly coffee,” she said. “Looks like it, but it’s actually more of a broth.”
“Smells meaty.”
“But I bet there’s no animal in it, I can’t imagine they keep livestock on the robot planet. Yeast, I reckon.”
Arla put the mug down and wiped her face. “So, what now?”
“No idea,” McCall said between sips. “I guess we just wait.”
Dig
“Is it on?”
“Hold on. Turn around. Yeh, it’s recording.”
“Bollocks... I mean, can’t you edit the footage afterwards? Cut off the beginning?”
“Well, not to be too blunt, but that would defeat the bloody object, wouldn’t it?”
“Right. Okay. I guess this’ll never be watched anyway.”
“Get on with it!”
“Alright, alright... Commencing log entry. Operative Clancy Mainframe recording. Time reference 1315044.59 LSC. Spatial Coordinates X-4b4556 Y-50455441, world designation XTRA1011. We are ready to commence lifting the capstone from the chamber.”
Artur Bladstone pulled and pushed the nest of levers in the cab of the excavator, watching the grabber as it dropped. Rain and wind beat against the windows as his wipers struggled to keep up with the torrent. On any civilised expedition, they’d wait until the weather changed before attempting such a delicate manoeuvre, but there was nothing civilised about XTRA1011 and the weather never altered.
And yet this shithole had once housed a flourishing alien culture - the only non-human intelligence that had ever been uncovered. Three legged, two armed and covered in thick fur that fell to the floor, they’d been dubbed ‘Mammoths’ by the first explorers to find their remains fifty years earlier. The civilisation had died out more than ten thousand years ago by human reckoning and traces had been found on a dozen planets in ten star systems that had this one at their centre. Presumably, then, XTRA1011 was the home planet of the Mammoth-people.
This ought to have been the most significant discovery in human history - the first proof that we’re not alone in the universe - but Artur and Clancy were the only archaeologists assigned to explore this planet and its culture. The Clovis Alliance had other and much more important matters to occupy its attention, including renewed aggression from a loosely affiliated group of independent systems that had grown like weeds from the ashes of the former imperial province of Aswan.
They had enough money to last another week here, and then they’d be able to head home for whatever welcome they might receive from the tiny academic community on Clovis.
Artur squinted at the hook on the end of his crane as it swayed in the storm. He could see Clancy’s lanky form - his colleague held out his hands to grab the hook as it came within reach. The clumsy idiot missed with his first attempt, but then grabbed it and guided it into the eyelet embedded in the surface of the capstone. Of course, the professional thing to do would have been to dig around it and try to access the chamber it protected from the side, but they had neither the manpower nor the time to be bothered so the sledgehammer approach would have to suffice.
Clancy wiped the sulphuric acid rain from his visor and waved up at Artur who wondered, for the hundredth time, what had happened to turn this planet, the home of an advanced civilisation capable of interstellar spaceflight to a global tomb. Presumably they’d done it to themselves. After all, humans had managed to write-off several planets in their time so why should the Mammoths be any different? It was a slightly comforting thought that, perhaps, stupidity was a common trait amongst so-called advanced species. Clancy waved up at him and Artur pulled the lever.
“My colleague has begun to lift the capstone. As described in our notes, it is approximately three metres square and our ground penetrating radar indicates that it’s a perfect cube but that there is a chamber of some sort beneath it.
“The crane appears to be struggling to lift the capstone. What’s the problem, Artur?”
“It’s much more dense than expected. Certainly not made of carved rock - its mass is consistent with it being metallic. The crane is operating beyond its maximum rating, but I am now seeing movement so, given the likely significance of this artefact, I will continue.”
The dials were hogging the red and Artur was beginning to sweat. Yeh, the significance of the chamber - he wondered whether anyone else would appreciate it. War was coming to the Clovis Alliance
and the government’s habitual ambivalence to any science that didn’t directly contribute to giving their military better weapons had transformed into naked hostility.
That was probably why he’d gone along with Clancy’s crazy plan to lift the stone in the first place. Out here, on a dig like this, was the only place his friend felt at home. Billions of kilometres from any other humans and his oddities didn’t seem to matter so much. But perhaps that was what made them such a good team - Clancy, the lad with all the interpersonal skills of a hunk of steel, and Artur, the man who couldn’t walk. Or, put more correctly, the man who couldn’t afford to walk. Even if a broken spine couldn’t be completely fixed, mechanical legs were common-place enough, amongst the rich. Generally speaking, the lazy or the very old rich. Artur could afford to be neither so he pushed the crane far beyond its capabilities and watched as the capstone, or whatever it was, swung clear.
“The capstone has cleared the chamber, I’m walking over to look inside. Turning on my torch. I can see a stairway leading down. I’m going in. The steps are clearly designed for mammoths as they are cut in a staggered fashion, moving backwards and forwards in a zig-zag that would suit a tripedal frame.
“I am going in alone. Oxygen tank is almost full so I have plenty of time to get a first look at whatever is down here. I have reached the bottom of the steps...”
Artur strained to hear the feed from Clancy over the beating of the rain on his cab window. A sense of impending disaster had assailed him as soon as his friend had disappeared out of sight, the only evidence of his progress being the reflection of his torch beam against the rocks.
“...I have reached the bottom of the steps. There is a narrow passageway cut into the bedrock and heading away from me at a slight incline. I am walking along it. My suit tells me that the temperature in here is minus ten celsius. The floor and walls are perfectly smooth and, hold on...”
What is it? What are you seeing? Artur hissed to himself, wishing he could be with his friend while, at the same time, relieved that he wasn’t.
“...yes, there’s a chamber at the end. By all that’s holy, it is a tomb! It seems my interpretation of the warnings carved into the capstone was correct. Though our knowledge of mammoth writing is still very sketchy, it seemed clear to me that the inscription was a traditional curse against tomb robbers. My colleague felt we should heed the warning and return better equipped, but it seems my choice was vindicated...”
Smart-arse.
“The room is full of artefacts. There’s furniture and, on the walls, painted scenes. Looks like some imagination of hell, or Armageddon. There is a huge black shape shown in the sky and stylised figures burning beneath it. Is it possible that, in the sarcophagus, lies the body of the last of the mammoths and that this was some sort of shelter?
I’m moving over to the coffin now. It is made of a black, shiny, material. That’s odd. There’s a second, much more ornately decorated coffin on the floor, almost as if it was replaced by this one. On the side of the coffin is an inscription, some sort of odd algebraic formula. The calculus is easy enough to solve, however...”
Your brains are going to get you into trouble, sonny.
“...and I can see that the solution is printed on one of a series of tiles that decorate the plinth...”
And now you’re going to press it, to see what happens. Artur swung the door open and dropped into his wheelchair. He could still pick up Clancy’s commentary on his suit speaker, but he felt compelled to move further away and he couldn’t do that in the crane.
“I’ve pressed the tile containing the solution. I’ll step back so you can see the plinth and the sarcophagus properly. Ah, that’s disappointing, nothing seems to have happened. I don’t know what I was expecting, perhaps a trap door to open or something ...”
The motor on Artur’s wheelchair whined to a stop as he listened. His breathing relaxed a little. Perhaps he’d been paranoid after all.
“...hold on. Hold on. Something’s moving! It’s the lid of the coffin, it’s lifting. I’m...I’m just going to step back a little, towards the entrance ... The lid is now fully open and I can see a profile ... the head of the corpse, perhaps. Oh by all the gods and angels ... it’s sitting up! It’s sitting up!”
Artur leaned forward in the wheelchair as if hoping gravity would help get him to the transport more quickly. He felt the ground beneath him tremble and heard the tumbling of rocks and, beneath all that, a low rumble. He spun around in his seat at the sound of a deafening explosion from the tomb, and he was in time to see something long and crystalline emerge from where the capstone had been, pointing directly upwards. As he watched, it twisted to face due west, towards where the sun would be, hiding behind the black acidic clouds. He screamed as the crystal came to life, flooding the world with light, blinding him and sending him tumbling from his chair to the corrosive rocks below.
“I’m trapped. Help me someone. Artur? Anyone. Please. Please help me! HELP ME!”
The rain formed pools around the still body of Artur Bladstone as over him stood a tall figure in black, its tentacles sniffing around him like the trunks of a dozen elephants. Its anterior eye cluster watched the x-ray beacon with satisfaction. Soon its people would return and wipe the latest infestation from the galaxy. Soon it would be among friends again.
Raising its clockwise tentacles to the sky it called in exaltation. “Come! Come! Come!”
Robo City
Arla had never seen a city at first hand, but her initial impression of Core#5 or, as McCall would have it, Robo City #1, was that it looked much like the cities of Earth. That is if they’d been built in huge chambers underground and contained not a single living soul except herself, the doctor and, somewhere, Hal.
They stood on a walkway that overlooked the lower part of the metropolis. The buildings here were generally low, square and an off-white colour with rectangular windows set into them with perfect regularity. Vehicles moved at uniform speed, kept separate from pedestrians by clearly marked buffer lanes. And the pedestrians were all robots.
Most were obviously artificial with body plans that suited them for their specific purposes whereas others were more human-like in shape. Indeed, from a distance, it was impossible to tell that they weren’t real people.
“Wells,” she snapped to the figure waiting quietly at her shoulder, “those are robots, aren’t they? The ones that look like humans?”
“Of course,” Wells said, “you are the first humans to set foot on Core since it was established.”
“What I don’t understand is why you have a city here at all? Seems like an outmoded concept for a robot planet,” McCall said.
Wells moved away from the railings and towards the walkway. “All will become clear when you have been oriented, and we are in danger of being late.”
“Right, wouldn’t want to keep a machine waiting, would we?” Arla growled, following the robot as he stepped nimbly onto the moving path. “You haven’t told us anything since we got here, all you keep repeating is that we’ll find out during this mysterious orientation session.”
Wells looked across at her as they stood, side by side, on the accelerating walkway. “It is most efficient for you to learn what you wish and need to know from the source of all knowledge rather than have it related by myself. I am not party to the group-mind and my understanding is therefore likely to be flawed.”
“And it’s just a question and answer session is it?” McCall said, “Not an attempt to brainwash us?”
Wells’ face spread in a passable facsimile of a warm smile. “I believe you have indulged in a few too many vidramas, doctor. No, we will not be using our mind control device on you —”
“Your what?”
“I apologise, Arla, it was a poor attempt at humour. We do not have such a device and, in any case, could not use it without violating the First Law. We have no wish to alter your essential nature - we wish only that you understand us better and, of course, that we learn what you desire.�
��
Arla snorted. “You know that well enough. A few kilotonnes of fuel for our thrusters and permission to leave this system without being blasted into dust.” She watched the robot as he stared impassively ahead, unmoving except for the rippling of his shirt and the ruffling of his hair. They were now entering a densely populated metropolitan area and shared the belt on which they were travelling with robots ahead and others behind. It was as if a crowd had assembled itself without them noticing. She thought about frogs and warming water.
“When you are fully in possession of the facts, you may choose otherwise. That is why we are meeting the Emissary, since he/she/it will be able to answer all your questions.”
“And if we still wish to leave? Will you let us?”
Again, Wells paused for some time before answering. “That is not something I am authorised to confirm, I’m afraid. Now, please prepare to step off the walkway onto a deceleration strip. We are almost at our destination.”
Arla and McCall exchanged shrugs and followed the robot as he stepped nimbly onto an adjacent pathway. Wells shot out an arm to steady McCall as she stumbled, before stepping to the left again and then again, each time slowing, until they reached a stationary walkway that ran along the front of a nondescript pale building.
“The Emissary is inside,” Wells said. “I was requested to bring you here, but am not permitted to enter. You are being afforded a great honour - few indeed are granted a private audience with the Emissary. I hope you find the meeting fruitful. I shall await you here.”
Wells pressed a contact and a section of wall slid back, the bright white light of the interior flooding onto the pathway. Arla shot a glance at Wells as she stepped inside and what she saw froze her to the bone. He’s afraid.
Robot Empire_Planet of Steel Page 2