“I hope the autocooker is doing that,” No One said.
The autocooker was using spinach pancakes at that moment. It was having the time of its life. As soon as the five foamy, sneezing humans floundered to their feet in a storm of flour and pepper and cornflakes, the little doors on the autocooker began to open and shut and food flew out of them. The oven and the roaster and the grill backed it up by sending out blasts of hot air, but the autocooker did the real damage. It hurled its entire menu at the four men. It threw soufflés, squirted cocoa, shot cutlets, and scrambled eggs, and bombed out steak-and-kidney pies. The men dragged Edward as far as the back door twice, only to be driven back by a storm of hot sausages.
“What can we block the gateway with?” No One asked Someone.
Leave that to me, Someone said. No One had better go and get rid of the other horseless carriage before the men thought of taking Edward away in that.
“I still have not learned to think,” No One said as he supersped up the drive again. He had not seen that Aut was a danger.
He hurtled past the back door. The four men burst out of it a second later, hauling Edward with them, all of them red-eyed and plastered with food. The autocooker had run out of ammunition. But House Control had not finished yet.
“My turn for fun at last,” the clothes drier remarked as the humans hurried past it. It snapped a nylon rope loose and went on whirling. The rope, and the washing on it, wrapped itself around the whole dirty group, and went on wrapping as the drier twirled. It had them wrapped up in a struggling, shouting bundle by the time No One sped up to Aut.
“Hide somewhere,” No One said to Aut. “Four humans are trying to kidnap Edward, and they will use you to take him away if they see you.”
Aut gave a hydraulic yawn. He did not want to move. “It’s a long time, wirenose,” he grunted, “since I obeyed an order. I never did take orders from robots.”
“Please, sir,” said No One.
“They won’t be able to do a thing with me,” said Aut. “All right. If it makes you happy, I’ll go to ground in the shrubbery.” His gears grated. In a leisurely way, he started his engine and rolled slowly across the lawn.
No One’s Miscellaneous Wisdom program told him that pride goeth before a fall. And it was proved true. The man who had shot the floor cleaner had a knife. He slashed at stockings, vests, and nylon rope, until the food-covered washing fell away. The four of them hurried Edward around to the front of the house, to find their own car gone and Aut trundling majestically across the lawn.
“Catch it!” they shouted. They were—understandably—desperate to get away by then. They ran across the lawn after Aut, spreading out as they ran. One of them threw himself in front of Aut. Aut’s brakes squealed. He tried to go into reverse, but the man with the knife dragged Edward up behind. Aut jolted to a stop and tried to turn left. The man who had hit Betty quickly got on that side, and, while Aut was still on left-lock, the gate expert got on his right. Aut could not move. Robot cars had been designed specially to prevent road accidents, and that was one order Aut had to obey.
“Rounded up like a blasted cow!” Aut snarled and tried to hold his doors shut. But this was child’s play to the gate expert. He shorted them open in seconds, and all four climbed in, pulling Edward with them.
“Excuse me,” No One said to the clothes drier. He plucked it out of the ground, trailing rope and dirty washing in all directions, and stationed himself in the drive as a last defense.
“Feel free,” the drier said faintly, as the gate expert overcame Aut by putting him on manual override and drove straight at them. No One brandished the drier in circles.
“Well done!” thundered Aut. “I shall choose to think you are human.” His cogs shrieked. He overrode the override and juddered away backward. Because he was not allowed to injure humans by running into the house or the garage, he sped backward in a huge circle, backward over the lawn, backward across the remains of the dahlias, and on into the cabbage patch. There he pretended to stall, so that he could sink heavily into the cloggy earth. But as soon as he stopped, the gate expert overrode the overridden override. Aut was forced to set off again, forward this time. He fought for his steering the whole way, so that he went in another huge circle, across the lawn and through one side of the shrubbery, and then around toward No One with his bonnet wreathed in ornamental ivy. No One waved the drier again. Aut sheered off and began going around and around the lawn in tight circles.
All the Miscellaneous Wisdom must be true, No One saw, watching Aut’s tires plow grass up. The mousetrap had started it by sending Betty away. The world, or four of it, had used Betty to get in. Now, with Aut’s help, it was beating paths all over the place.
“I’m off again!” Aut boomed through his exhausts. “Watch for Edward this time!” And he shot off into the shrubbery again. There was a great crashing and laurel bushes whipped about. Aut came speeding out, with one door just shutting and a mound of greenery across his windscreen. “Edward’s in there!” he thundered at No One and went speeding away down the drive.
No One arrived at the shrubbery carrying the drier like a maypole, to find Edward climbing out of a broken laurel bush. “That was quite fun, Nuth!” he said. “There’s a helicopter coming. Do you think it’s the police?”
Robots have trouble looking upward. No One had just discovered that this was another of his defects, when he and Edward both heard Aut’s brakes squealing. The men must have got him to stop. “Stay here. Hide,” No One said to Edward, and he supersped back to the drive and on down it, holding the drier like a battering ram in case of trouble, with torn and grubby washing fluttering around him.
That looked almost traditional, Someone told him, meeting him halfway. Come and look how clever it had been.
Aut, looking very righteous, had stopped with his front bumper an inch from the Gate. The Gate itself was leaning almost upright against piles of wooden boxes with green plants in them, and bundles and bundles of raspberry canes. Behind this barrier was a row of police robots and what seemed to be a police van. Behind that again, the lawn mower was prowling up and down, still obviously very angry. As No One arrived, the four men piled out of Aut, saw the robots outside the Gate, and turned back. On that side they saw No One charging at them with the clothes drier, and a helicopter landing behind him, full of human policemen. They dropped their guns and held their hands up.
“How was that done?” No One asked, looking at the things outside the gate.
Automart robots are very stupid, Someone explained. It had ordered them to put the plants there, and they had. Then it had ordered them to stay and pretend to be police robots, and they had done that too. Just, it added airily, a touch of illusion.
No One prodded the four men with the drier and forced them to march up the drive toward the real police getting out of the helicopter. “What are you?” he asked Someone as he prodded.
No one knows! retorted Someone gleefully, and faded away into the bushes.
Aut helped No One march the four men by rolling backward up the drive with greenery dropping off his battered bonnet. “I don’t think I shall be scrapped,” he said to No One uneasily. “I am a valuable vintage car. But I’m not so sure about you, No One.”
No One considered the ruined Gate, the ruined garden, the broken window, and the chaos indoors, and he had no doubt.
He did not have to wait long. His broadcast had been picked up all over Europe and the British Isles. There was already a combine harvester grumbling up the road to the gate, shouting that it was ready to flatten anything. A string of private cars was behind that, hooting to the harvester to get out of the way. Two more helicopters came whirling up while the police were taking Edward’s statement and trying to make sense of Betty’s. Since the garden was now mostly flat, they had no trouble landing. The world was going on beating paths to the door, No One saw, just as Miscellaneous Wisdom predicted. Then Mrs. Scantion tumbled out of one helicopter and Mr. Scantion jumped out of the othe
r. No One judged it prudent to stand out of sight behind Aut and let Betty do the talking.
“Oh, I am so fright!” Betty screamed, racing up to the helicopters. “They hold guns and the walls move and the Gate thinks I am me. The tin man he shot in the face and now he grins horrible!”
This was true. When Edward and his parents had talked to the police and then dealt with the thousands of offers of help—including the man who advised them to scrap all robots—they found that the bullet which had hit No One had dented one side of his face. It now had a silver lopsided smile.
“What do you think?” Mr. Scantion asked. “We could send him to the panel-beaters along with Aut.”
“Oh no,” said Mrs. Scantion. “I so much prefer him smiling.”
“So do I,” said Edward.
No One was confused. His eyes pulsed. It seemed he was not to be scrapped after all. Since he had done nothing but make mistakes, he avoided overload by deciding that it was because Edward was even more expensive than he had thought. It puzzled him that there was nothing in his programs about how much humans cost.
Dragon Reserve, Home Eight
Where to begin? Neal and I had had a joke for years about a little green van coming to carry me off—this was when I said anything more than usually mad—and now it was actually happening. Mother and I stood at my bedroom window watching the van bouncing up the track between the dun green hills, and neither of us smiled. It wasn’t a farm van, and most of our neighbors visit on horseback anyway. Before long, we could see it was dark green with a silver dragon insignia on the side.
“It is the Dragonate,” Mother said. “Siglin, there’s nothing I can do.” It astonished me to hear her say that. Mother only comes up to my shoulder, but she held her land and our household, servants, Neal and me, and all three of her husbands, in a hand like iron, and she drove out to plow or harvest if one of my fathers was ill. “They said the dragons would take you,” she said. “I should have seen. You think Orm informed on you?”
“I know he did,” I said. “It was my fault for going into the Reserve.”
“I’ll blood an axe on him,” Mother said, “one of these days. But I can’t do it over this. The neighbors would say he was quite right.” The van was turning between the stone walls of the farmyard now. Chickens were squirting and flapping out of its way and our sheepdog pups were barking their heads off. I could see Neal up on the washhouse roof watching yearningly. It’s a good place to watch from because you can hide behind the chimney. Mother saw Neal too. “Siglin,” she said, “don’t let on Neal knows about you.”
“No,” I said. “Nor you either.”
“Say as little as you can, and wear the old blue dress—it makes you look younger,” Mother said, turning toward the door. “You might just get off. Or they might just have come about something else,” she added. The van was stopping outside the front door now, right underneath my window. “I’d best go and greet them,” Mother said, and hurried downstairs.
While I was forcing my head through the blue dress, I heard heavy boots on the steps and a crashing knock at the door. I shoved my arms into the sleeves, in too much of a hurry even to feel indignant about the dress. It makes me look about twelve and I am nearly grown up! At least, I was fourteen quite a few weeks ago now. But Mother was right. If I looked too immature to have awakened, they might not question me too hard. I hurried to the head of the stairs while I tied my hair with a childish blue ribbon. I knew they had come for me, but I had to see.
They were already inside when I got there, a whole line of tall men tramping down the stone hallway in the half-dark, and Mother was standing by the closed front door as if they had swept her aside. What a lot of them, just for me! I thought. I got a weak, sour feeling and could hardly move for horror. The man at the front of the line kept opening the doors all down the hallway, calm as you please, until he came to the main parlor at the end. “This room will do nicely,” he said. “Out you get, you.” And my oldest father, Timas, came shuffling hurriedly out in his slippers, clutching a pile of accounts and looking scared and worried. I saw Mother fold her arms. She always does when she is angry.
Another of them turned to Mother. “We’ll speak to you first,” he said, “and your daughter after that. Then we want the rest of the household. Don’t any of you try to leave.” And they went into the parlor with Mother and shut the door.
They hadn’t even bothered to guard the doors. They just assumed we would obey them. I was shaking as I walked back to my room, but it was not terror anymore. It was rage. I mean—we have all been brought up to honor the Dragonate. They are the cream of the men of the Ten Worlds. They are supposed to be gallant and kind and dedicated and devote their lives to keeping us safe from Thrallers, not to speak of maintaining justice, law, and order all over the Ten Worlds. Dragonate men swear that Oath of Alienation, which means they can never have homes or families like ordinary people. Up to then, I’d felt sorry for them for that. They give up so much. But now I saw they felt it gave them the right to behave as if the rest of us were not real people. To walk in as if they owned our house. To order Timas out of his own parlor. Oh I was angry!
I don’t know how long Mother was in the parlor. I was so angry it felt like seconds until I heard flying feet and Neal hurried into my room. “They want you now.”
I stood up and took some of my anger out on poor Neal. I said, “Do you still want to join the Dragonate? Swear that stupid Oath? Behave like you own the Ten Worlds?”
It was mean. Neal looked at the floor. “They said straightaway,” he said. Of course he wanted to join. Every boy does, particularly on Sveridge, where women own most of the land. I swept down the stairs, angrier than ever. All the doors in the hallway were open and our people were standing in them, staring. The two housemen were at the dining-room door, the cattlewoman and two farmhands were looking out of the kitchen, and the stableboy and the second shepherd were craning out of the pantry. I thought, They still will be my people someday! I refuse to be frightened! My fathers were in the doorway of the bookroom. Donal and Yan were in work clothes and had obviously rushed in without taking their boots off. I gave them what I hoped was a smile, but only Timas smiled back. They all know! I thought as I opened the parlor door.
There were only five of them, sitting facing me across our best table. Five was enough. All of them stood up as I came in. The room seemed full of towering green uniforms. It was not at all like I expected. For one thing, the media always shows Dragonate as fair and dashing and handsome, and none of these were. For another, the media had led me to expect uniforms with big silver panels. These were all plain green, and four of them had little silver stripes on one shoulder.
“Are you Sigrid’s daughter Siglin?” asked the one who had opened all the doors. He was a bleached, pious type like my father Donal and his hair was dust color.
“Yes,” I said rudely. “Who are you? Those aren’t Dragonate uniforms.”
“Camerati, lady,” said one who was brown all over with wriggly hair. He was young, younger than my father Yan, and he smiled cheerfully, like Yan does. But he made my stomach go cold. Camerati are the crack force, cream of the Dragonate. They say a man has to be a genius even to be considered for it.
“Then what are you doing here?” I said. “And why are you all standing up?”
The one in the middle, obviously the chief one, said, “We always stand up when a lady enters the room. And we are here because we were on a tour of inspection at Holmstad anyway, and there was a Slaver scare on this morning. So we offered to take on civic duties for the regular Dragonate. Now if that answers your questions, let me introduce us all.” He smiled too, which twisted his white, crumpled face like a demon mask. “I am Lewin, and I’m Updriten here. On your far left is Driten Palino, our recorder.” This was the pious type, who nodded. “Next to him is Driten Renick of Law Wing.” Renick was elderly and iron gray, with one of those necks that look like a chicken’s leg. He just stared. “Underdriten Terens is o
n my left, my aide and witness.” That was brown-and-wriggly. “And beyond him is Cadet Alectis, who is traveling with us to Home Nine.”
Alectis looked a complete baby, only a year older than me, with pink cheeks and sandy hair. He and Terens both bowed and smiled so politely that I nearly smiled back. Then I realized that they were treating me as if I was a visitor. In my own home! I bowed freezingly, the way Mother usually does to Orm.
“Please sit down, Siglin,” Lewin said politely.
I nearly didn’t, because that might keep them standing up too. But they were all so tall I’d already got a crick in my neck. So I sat grandly on the chair they’d put ready facing the table. “Thank you,” I said. “You are a very kind host, Updriten Lewin.” To my great joy, Alectis went bright red at that, but the other four simply sat down too. Pious Palino took up a memo block and poised his fingers over its keys. This seemed to be in case the recorder in front of Lewin went wrong. Lewin set that going. Wriggly Terens leaned over and passed me another little square box.
“Keep this in your hand,” he said, “or your answers may not come out clearly.”
I caught the words lie detector from his wriggly head as clearly as if he had said them aloud. I don’t think I showed how very scared I was, but my hand made the box wet almost straightaway.
“Court is open,” Lewin said to the recorder. “Presiding Updriten Lewin.” He gave a string of numbers and then said, “First hearing starts on charges against Siglin, of Upland Holding, Wormstow, North Sveridge on Home Eight, accused of being heg and heg concealing its nature. Questions begin. Siglin, are you clear what being heg is?” He crumpled one eyebrow upward at me.
“No,” I said. After all, no one has told me in so many words. It’s just a thing people whisper and shudder at.
“Then you’d better understand this,” Lewin said. He really was the ugliest and most outlandish of the five. Dragonate men are never posted to the world of their birth, and I thought Lewin must come from one a long way off. His hair was black, so black it had blue lights, but, instead of being dark all over to match it, like wriggly Terens, he was a lot whiter than me and his eyes were a most piercing blue—almost the color they make the sky on the media. “If the charges are proved,” he said, “you face death by beheading, since that is the only form of execution a heg cannot survive. Renick—”
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