Have Robot, Will Travel

by Alexander C. Irvine

  The rest of his business consisted of hooking pathogen screenings out of hospital databases at the behest of nervous parents, often right before a wedding, and tracing original lessees of various parcels of land occupied by squatters. The end of the blockade had brought land 165

  HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL

  speculators to Nova Levis like fleas to a stray dog, producing no end of legal entanglements. Masid tried not to take sides—it wasn’t good for business—but he had an irrestistible tendency to tilt his findings ever so slightly in favor of the squatters, when it was possible. They had things hard enough without off-planet developers bulldozing their shacks.

  All in all, he could live with himself. After a career spent undercov-er, Masid figured that put him ahead of the curve.

  He shut down his terminal when he’d finished tracking down one Marta Xiu, apparently operating an off-the-books cleaning service in Stopol. Her cousin Thuy, two weeks on-planet and daily hovering outside Masid’s door, would get some good news tomorrow.

  12:19. Long past time to walk the six blocks to his apartment and get some sleep before the three-year-old twins who lived downstairs commenced their daily uproar at six o’clock. That was something he’d forgot to do today; for months Masid had been telling himself that the kids weren’t getting older nearly fast enough, and he’d have to move before he went downstairs one morning and killed the two of them along with their dazed parents.

  And he’d forgotten to call Ariel. Masid debated the relative merits of waking her up versus worrying about her all night. On the one hand, she’d be sleepy and impatient and he wouldn’t accomplish anything except the interruption of her sleep and the postponement of his; on the other, he might lie awake all night wondering if something had happened to her on the way to, or at, the reanime camp.

  Gernika. Third thing he’d meant to do was look that up, see if it was more than a random string of syllables.

  If you’re still worried about her when you get home, call her, Masid told himself. Talk loud, wake up those little demons downstairs, let them suffer for a change.

  Good plan.

  God, was he tired.

  166

  HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL

  He was reaching for the light switch when someone knocked at his door. “Mr. Vorian?”

  Sounded like a robot. Well, there he was standing by the door.

  Might as well open it.

  It was a robot, an older model that looked like it had done some hard service. “Masid Vorian?” the robot asked again.

  “That’s me,” he said. As he spoke, two things happened: The robot’s optic lenses fluttered briefly, and Masid experienced the unwelcome return of a sensation he hadn’t felt since he’d walked away from the wreckage of the Noresk cyborg lab and gone into respectable businesss. It was the feeling you got when someone you couldn’t see was aiming a gun at you, and Masid had long since learned not to ignore it. The robot tried to say something else, but what came out was a growl, and as Masid took an instinctive step back a different voice came out of it, saying, “Violationtakeashotatviolationmenotpermittedy-oubastard!”

  Its right arm lashed out in a punch that would have fractured every bone in his face if he hadn’t moved at exactly that moment.

  Masid’s life had been in immediate danger more times than he cared to remember, and one of the things that happened to him in these situations was that his mind compartmentalized. Part of this was training, part just the constitution of his personality. The result was that even as he took another step back into his office, he was observing that the ferocity of the robot’s swing had overbalanced it, which gave him enough time to go out the window, maybe enough time to go past it out the door, and definitely not enough time to get his gun out of the desk. At the same time he was decoding what it had said— take a shot at me, you bastard—and musing on the irony that he had just been thinking about the cyborg lab when a robot with murder on its mind had knocked on his door. Then he put it together, and the force of the realization paralyzed him for just that tiny bit too long.

  The robot caught its balance and shut the door behind it.

  167

  HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL

  “That you, Parapoyos?” Masid said. “Looks like you haven’t treated the new body all that well, or was that all the reanimes could come up with? Can’t count on gratitude from a cyborg.” He was running his mouth, stepping back as the robot came forward, hoping that Parapoyos was angry enough to make another mistake. Judging from the garbled sounds coming out of the robot, it was possible, which was good, since a straightforward physical confrontation would end very quickly. With the door shut and the desk between him and the window, Masid had to hope that he could work Parapoyos’ anger to his advantage.

  His desktop’s edge banged into the backs of his thighs. “Wish I’d hit you, you son of a bitch,” Masid said. “Then I’d get a decent night’s sleep tonight.”

  One chance, he thought. If he decides to make it quick, I’m done.

  The second voice he’d heard gradually won out over the first. “Don’t you worry about sleep, gato,” Kynig Parapoyos said.

  The robot came across the room faster than Masid had anticipated, barely giving him time to scoot back onto the desktop and get his arms out of the way as the robot’s weight came down on him and its hands closed around his head. The pressure started out at agonizing and got much worse from there. One chance, Masid thought again.

  His vision was failing him, and he could hear the bones of his skull groaning in the robot’s grip. One chance.

  His right arm fell away from the robot’s arm—where it had been, what had it been doing, Masid couldn’t remember. He was having trouble remembering. He’d wanted the arm to fall because then the hand would be somewhere else, and there was a reason for that.

  “Hurt yet, gato?” Parapoyos said.

  The question focused Masid just enough. It did hurt, yes it did, and he tried to say that, but his entire being was devoted to remembering just why he’d wanted his arm to fall down behind him. His left cheekbone broke with a sharp crack.

  Figures that would go first, Masid thought vaguely. Someone had 168

  HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL

  broken it once before, he couldn’t remember when. And even though he’d never been a believer in the idea that adversity builds character, with dim shock he realized that the stab of pain from his cheekbone had brought him a moment of clarity.

  The gun, idiot.

  And then, already fading again, he managed to flip the drawer open, get the gun in his hand, lay it against the side of the robot’s head—and fire.

  He drifted awake, furious that even though he was dead the pain in his head was worse than anything he’d ever felt. A sense of motion reached him, and there were lights in his eyes, people talking. Masid wasn’t sure what they were saying, but he tried to respond anyway, complain that being dead wasn’t supposed to hurt, that was the whole point.

  “Is he talking about robots?” someone said.

  “Put him out,” came the answer.

  Hiss of a transdermal.

  He drifted awake, this time uncertain whether he was dead. His head still hurt, but there was a covering on his body and a low light coming from somewhere. Masid opened his eyes and saw familiar objects: bedside monitor, bland art on light green walls, edge of a pillow. So that’s it, he thought. A hospital. Good sign.

  Then in a blaze of adrenalin, he remembered the robot. Kynig Parapoyos was alive, had tried to kill him, and sure as Masid had a broken cheekbone would try again if Masid hadn’t killed him last night.

  Had it been last night?

  Masid fumbled along both sides of the bed until he found the call button. After a minute or so, a nurse came into his room. His eyes were figuring out how to focus at greater distances again, and he took that as a hint that maybe he could sit up.

  He could, but the change in altitude didn’t do his head much good.

  169


  HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL

  Masid screwed his eyes shut and rode out the initial wave of pain.

  “You need to lie down, Mr. Vorian,” the nurse said.

  “What I need is to know what happened to that robot,” he said.

  She looked confused. “What robot?”

  Masid sensed that he was headed down the wrong path. “I can sit up,” he said. “I promise I won’t do anything else if you go and find whatever police officer is investigating what happened to me. Okay?”

  The nurse glanced at the readouts on his monitors. “Don’t move, Mr. Vorian. There’s a detective waiting downstairs.”

  Three minutes later, the detective walked in. She was young, Terran by the look of her, and if Masid was any judge of body language she didn’t much like being involved with whatever was going on. “Mr.

  Vorian,” she said. “Detective Linsi.”

  They shook hands and Linsi pulled a chair up next to his bed. “Are you feeling up to some questions?” she asked.

  “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, as long as you tell me one thing first,” Masid said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I need you to describe what you found in my office. Other than me.” He smiled at his own weak joke, and regretted it instantly when the smile pulled at the muscles attached to his cheekbone.

  “That’s not the way things are done,” Linsi said. “You know that as well as anyone.”

  “Listen, Detective. If you’re worried about prompting me, don’t. I know exactly what happened to me, and I’m pretty sure I know why, but I’m not going to tell you either unless you tell me first what you found when you walked in my door.”

  She didn’t like it, but after a brief pause Detective Linsi nodded.

  “A building alarm went off when a window was broken at twenty-four minutes past midnight,” she said. “That’s about thirty-six hours ago, if you’re curious. They kept you out for a while to seal up the fractures in your head. Arriving on the scene, officers discovered you lying unconscious and supine on your desk, your office window 170

  HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL

  broken, and a recently fired energy weapon on the floor next to your desk. Care to tell me who you shot?”

  “There was nobody else there?”

  Linsi shook her head. “A forensics sweep came up with several hundred little bits of melted plastics and metals, but your office was empty except for you.”

  So Parapoyos had gotten away. Masid had been hoping that the head shot had scrambled the robot’s physical controls enough that it wouldn’t be able to move, but now he didn’t have that hope. Where had Parapoyos gone? There weren’t many places in Nova City where a robot with its head half-melted could walk around and not attract notice. The one consolation was that Parapoyos hadn’t felt comfortable enough to stick around and finish Masid off. That meant he, or his robot body, had suffered, and it meant that he wasn’t willing to risk discovery just for the sake of squeezing Masid’s head like a grape.

  There were other implications, but he needed some time to let everything sort itself out in his head. And he had to get in touch with Ariel.

  “I’m going to tell you the absolute truth and nothing but the truth,”

  Masid said. “At twelve-nineteen on what I guess was the night before last, a robot with Kynig Parapoyos’ brain inside it knocked on my door, and when I opened it the robot tried to kill me.”

  Linsi’s lips thinned into a straight line and a muscle twitched in her jaw. “I was hoping you would cooperate, Mr. Vorian. You were nearly killed, and my guess is you know who it was that tried.”

  “Yes, I do. I just told you.”

  She stood. “Look. I know who you are, and I know that you were out at the lab when Parapoyos was killed. If you want to keep your mouth shut, I guess that’s your right, but I’m not going to waste any time on you if all it gets me is this kind of condescending crap.”

  Which was fine. Perfect, in fact. The last thing Masid wanted was police trooping around looking for Parapoyos. They might catch him, but some of them would get killed. Masid had an idea that if he could 171

  HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL

  keep the game one on one, he might be able to keep the body count lower.

  “Do me a favor, Detective Linsi?” he asked. “On your way out, let the nurse know I’d like to talk to my doctor.”

  “Call the nurse yourself,” Linsi said, and walked out the door.

  Police, Masid thought. They made him glad he’d been a spy instead.

  172

  CHAPTER

  25

  As it turned out, Ariel spent two days in Gernika before she came to terms with the fact that she could no longer rational-ize her opposition to cyborg citizenship. They weren’t robots, so that argument didn’t hold; they had been born human, and without resorting to the most tortured metaphysics, no one could suggest that the process of making them into cyborgs had stripped them of their humanity; and there was, after all, a precedent. Jerem Looms. Ariel had grown used to the fact that her day-to-day life on Nova Levis was outrageously steeped in irony, but to have that homicidal lunatic provide a legal basis for the betterment of people like Arantxa… this was a little much.

  Before she made a public commitment, though, Ariel had to get some straight answers from Basq. She requested an appointment with him and waited an hour or so for him to clear a block of time for her.

  They met, as always, in his blockhouse headquarters. This time, Ariel walked past the sentries without waiting for his invitation, and what she saw stopped her dead in the doorway.

  Basq was painting.

  At some point in the last forty-eight hours, workers had finished 173

  HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL

  one interior wall of the blockhouse, covering the stripped logs with sheetrock. Ariel wondered where they’d gotten it, and made a mental note to ask Basq about Gernika’s trade with the human settlements.

  After, that was, she figured out what exactly he was doing here.

  The cyborg leader had a bucket of black paint and a heavy brush, and he was outlining crude figures on the bare sheetrock. He didn’t acknowledge her presence for several minutes, as several humans and what looked like a horse took shape on his makeshift canvas. Basq painted without any skill Ariel could see, but with an unshakable commitment that against her will had a powerful effect on her. Of course, they would make art—but to see it happening…

  Basq dropped the brush into the bucket and stood back. “For a start,” he said, “it will do.”

  “What is it?” Ariel asked.

  Wiping his hands on his shirt, Basq grinned at her. “Surprised to see the metal abominations acting human, Ms. Burgess? No, that’s not fair. I know. But it is sometimes so fulfilling to be unfair. My apologies. The truth is that I am merely copying. What you see on this wall is a poor and ragged imitation of a painting called Gernika.

  Look at it for a moment and tell me what you see.”

  She did. The paint had dripped, and the figures were deranged to begin with, but the power of the composition was beyond denying, even to someone as relatively unschooled in art as Ariel. All of the people in the painting were contorted with some kind of suffering, she couldn’t tell what; and somehow the whole thing coalesced around a horse trying to rise near the center. Ariel started to speak, stopped herself because she had nothing to say. Then, after some time spent in silent absorption of the scene, she said, “It’s a war.”

  “No,” Basq said. “It’s a massacre.”

  Prophecy, she wondered? Was this what Brixa had been getting at when he mentioned religious extremists among the reanimes? How easy it would be to brainwash a population of diseased outcasts, 174

  HAVE ROBOT, WILL TRAVEL

  school them in the belief that the world beyond their borders was biding its time to strike and slaughter them.

  Ariel didn’t know much about cults, but she did know that many of the more extreme ones had some
thing in common. “Why do you make them change their names?” she asked.

  “Ah,” Basq said. “The kernel of the matter. I’m pleased we’re finally here. Shall we sit?”

  Still looking at the painting, Ariel said, “I’d rather stand.”

  “As long as we’re both comfortable. I have them change their names because when they undergo the transformation, they are renouncing what they once were. Not because I or they choose to have it that way—because you do. You consider us monsters, or in your more enlightened moments, just inscrutably different. Well, throughout history, groups of the disenfranchised have taken terms meant pejor-atively and made them into empowering badges of identity. Others have practiced a brand of identity politics so consuming that they have no politics other than identity. When I saw that this settlement needed a unifying force, I turned to a group of people from Earth’s history. I adopted their name as my own, and I named this settlement after the city that was their heart.

  “Once there was a war that threatened to overflow the borders of its country and engulf all neighboring nations. The Basques fought on one side, and their opponents were the state that claimed them.

  They were unlike the rest of the people—their language was different, their genetic makeup contained markers found nowhere else among humanity, and they had been fighting for centuries to gain their independence from the succession of emperors and kings who oppressed them. When this war came, they used it for their own ends, and had the great misfortune that their opponents had an ally looking for an opportunity to make a statement about its own military strength. A deal was struck, and one afternoon the town of Gernika was erased from the face of the earth. There was no army present, no valuable industry; the only reason to strike the town was as a show 175