Hotel Andromeda

by Edited by Jack L. Chalker

  There are elegant diagnostic and reconstructive programs, Doctor, I thought. Couldn’t Andromeda take Mary and run the programs on her and find a way to help her?

  The doctor didn’t say anything in response to that, at first.

  Can you? I asked Andromeda. Can you do this?

  Why do you want this, William Addison? Andromeda asked me. The laws and procedures for AI replacement are set up to help you, to protect you.

  Because I love her, I thought, and it was the first time I had told that to anyone except Mary. Andromeda had spoken my thoughts through the speaker, and no one said anything to me about my love, not the doctor or Andromeda. The room was quiet for a rime.

  “It’s been eight years, Mr. Addison,” the doctor said, finally. “MAR-1 programs like yours start to fail at eight years. Some might last longer, but for how long we don’t know. Keeping this particular AI in you any longer would be dangerous, especially when you’ve already seen the beginnings of its failure.”

  Do people abandon their sick? I asked the doctor. I don’t want to abandon Mary when she is the equivalent of sick. I am trying to find programmers who can help her—and one did two weeks ago. Mary and I are traveling to Earth to get even better help. We have a chance on Earth, if we can get there.

  It would be a danger to me to work with your AI. Andromeda told me in thoughts. Her corruptions might infect me.

  Leave her in my mind. I thought. Copy a part of your program and put it in my mind and check her that way. Don’t take her out into any part of you.

  And in a rush of AI action I felt a movement in my mind and a door open and a program entering it. I rushed to follow. I’m coming, too, I said.

  You’ll slow me down.

  Then go slowly. I want to talk to Mary, to see her. Tell the doctor what we’re doing.

  I was in the bedroom in our house in Mary’s Spain, and it was as Mary and I had left it that morning: the bed unmade, the windows open. But there was a storm outside, and no one had closed the windows. Rain and leaves had blown in onto the bed and floor.

  Take this, Addison. I turned and caught a gun thrown into my arms. It wasn’t a gun, of course, but a representation of a program that could kill an AI. I knew that, but still it looked and felt like a gun to me. Andromeda, or at least a copy of a part of her, stood in the form of a woman at the side of the door, heavily armed, dressed in black jeans and T-shirt, a gun held at the ready. I threw my gun on the bed and closed the windows.

  Keep that gun, Andromeda said. I don’t know what damage can be done to your mind with you in here.

  I couldn’t shoot Mary.

  It might not be Mary you have to shoot.

  I thought about that and picked up the gun.

  Andromeda smirked at the bed. Not platonic, you and Mary, are you? she said.

  Does it matter?

  What do you feel when you hold her?

  A woman.

  What does she feel when she holds you?

  I’d wondered that, too. Me, I said. She says she feels me.

  Call her in. Open the door and call her in.

  I opened the door, and Mary was standing there in the hallway, pale, shocked to see me. I reached out to touch her, but Andromeda shoved me aside and leveled her gun at Mary. Come in, Mary, she said. We’re going to have a little talk.

  I stepped back and aimed my gun at Andromeda. Put down your gun, I said. Now. Mary, I won’t let her kill you.

  Andromeda pointed her gun at the floor. Do you think this gun is the only way I have of doing my work? Andromeda asked me without looking at me. She never took her eyes off Mary.

  What’s wrong? I asked Mary. Do you know?

  Why are you here?

  Do you have to ask?

  Cut this talk, both of you, Andromeda said, and she told Mary what we had come to do. Now sit on the bed and let me check you. Addison, put down that gun.

  Mary walked in and sat on the bed. She had evidently been outside because her hair was blown. She looked sad, very sad.

  I’m old, William, she said.

  Not old enough to die.

  Andromeda walked over to Mary and touched her—but suddenly drew back. Something black and fanged crawled around from behind Mary’s head and hissed at me. Mary tried to throw it off, but she couldn’t. I ran to pull it off her, but Andromeda shot first, and Mary disappeared.

  What have you done! I shouted.

  Moved her! I’ve put her in a holding cell. I’m downloading every diagnostic program I’ve got now, so shut up and let me work.

  Andromeda sat on the floor and held her head and appeared deep in thought I sat on the bed where Mary had sat, and waited. The bed was wet, and the leaves blown onto it smelled like fall. I brushed them onto the floor.

  And Andromeda looked up at me. She’s fine, she said. Mary is fine. I can find nothing wrong with her.

  Then run the programs again. Why did my body stop functioning? What was the creature on her neck?

  Her creation, to scare you, probably. I think all of this was to scare you into letting her go before she got sick and hurt you. She doesn’t want to hurt you. William Addison. She loves you, too.

  I couldn’t speak for a time after Andromeda said all that, after I knew what Mary was willing to do to protect me. I didn’t know what to say. I was afraid for Mary and me, too. But I believed the responsibility of love meant staying together and helping each other till the end. I looked out the window and at the bed and back at Andromeda.

  Bring her back, I said.

  I have already. I’m going out to tell the doctor what I’ve seen.

  And she was gone, after the end of the sound of her last word, just gone.

  But she’d left the gun in my hands. I threw it on the bed and walked out to find Mary.

  She was sitting on the low, stone wall, looking across the plain toward Africa. It was blowy and cold outside, and I’d picked up a wool sweater for her. I put it around her shoulders and sat next to her. She pulled the sweater tighter around her against the cold. There were riders on the plain again, far off, near the coast, and I wondered now who and what they were.

  I thought maybe I’d have to take that gun I’d left up on the bed and walk down to them someday to find out.

  I want to take the risks of being with you, I told Mary.

  Have my programs corrupted you, William? You want to cure me, and you can’t. I’m mortal, like you.

  And I accept that. Everyone we love will die, Mary. But we can love till then and face our loss when it comes.

  She kept looking toward Africa, not at me. I took her hand and held it for a long, long time, and she let me hold it and she held on to my hand till the winds had blown the storm clouds over us and the sun was shining down and drying all the rain.

  I sat on the edge of the bed while the doctor removed the electrodes from my body and turned off the machines. I could feel the edge of the bed under my legs; I could feel the sheets;

  I could feel the doctor’s hands touching my body. “You realize Mary’s manufacturer will not be liable for any consequences of your decision,” she said.

  “I’m liable,” I said. “I’m choosing this life.”

  The doctor looked hard at me. “It will be interesting to see how long your Mary will last. I wish you both luck.”

  She left the room, and I dressed and followed her out. I passed the room where the medical robots sat waiting to be of service. Six robots were in the room, looking at me with their brilliant, ruby eyes. I walked in to thank the two who had carried me to the hospital, if they were there, and to leave word if they were not, but before I could say anything, one of them reached up and touched me. It knew. I suddenly realized that, because of Andromeda, the robots knew about Mary and me. I put my hand on its hand and held it for a time. The metal was cool, but not alien.

  I had connections to rebook, programmers to contact, and I was hungry. But I let it all wait. I walked to an observation deck under a dome that looked out on the black of
space and all the stars and sat in a chair and looked at the beauty of it for Mary and me. I felt a metal hand touch my shoulder, and I looked up at another robot with a tray of food, and I took the tray and thanked the robot but it never said a word to me. It just pressed my shoulder and left. I held the tray, and closed my eyes, and went into my mind to Mary and home.

  To Caress the Face of God

  Dave Wolverton

  Warren Garceau had been imprisoned on Darius IV for so long that he no longer knew which he wanted more: death or sex. He no longer even dreamed of freedom, but freedom is what we gave him, in the form of a ticket off planet and a ride back to Earth after a brief layover at the Hotel Andromeda.

  Warren had worn out six bodies serving as many consecutive life sentences. I watched him, as was my Job. Each time his deaths came nearly the same: In his late sixties he would develop prostate cancer, and I’d take the prison infirmary to him, download a temporary medical program, and operate. Yet after the operation, he’d slow for the next dozen years. His arms would purple with liver spots while the wispy silver hair on his head became only a memory. His bones turned brittle, like the pumice in the red rocky fields where he worked day after day hoeing the corn, his breath coming in sharp gasps as he slaved beneath the double suns.

  I kept Warren’s little farm distant from those of other inmates. When he was young, during the first three lifetimes, Warren had some neighbors that he was allowed to see, men working fields far away from him. As he aged the others won their freedom, and I sent them home.

  Until he became the last, and I watched him from a distance those final two lifetimes, mainly using automatic sensors. Yet sometimes I would use my natural eyes, and in the night I would spy on him from the mountains through a telescope with an infrared lens. He would hoe well into the night, even when the scorpions came out, as if, like me, he too were part machine. I can still see him back bent, his arms gouging downward automatically, as if the hoe were some giant claw. After six lifetimes, he knew nothing but the hoeing and the harvest. When Warren fell and broke his hip that last time, there was no one to help and though my sensors did not indicate an attempt at escape, I did not learn that he was injured for two days. Warren had dragged himself to his shack, and there he passed out by his front door in the shade. I found him dehydrated and swollen, so I carried the infirmary to him, then pumped his body full of fluids.

  But he died. So I thawed his last young clone, one with a powerful twenty-two-year-old physiology, and I dumped Warren’s memories into the clone.

  He woke in his crude little hut with machines, pumping food and water into his veins. He faded in and out of sleep for a few days, always waking in pain, sometimes crying out for sleep, for eternal sleep, shouting, “For God’s sake. Ray, let me die! Just let me die!” or sometimes he would call a woman’s name.

  But I fulfilled my duty, as is my job. I had kept him alive so he could serve his sentence; now I kept him alive so he could be free. When the clone began to stabilize, I made a quick trip back up to the guardhouse and began dismantling it. After nearly four hundred years, I too would be allowed to leave Darius IV.

  That evening as I worked, I glanced down into Brutal Valley to the barren red plains like rusted iron. Warren stood bent over his hoe, working mechanically. I got on a hovercraft and went to him. “You are free,” I said as I floated through his field, sweeping the tender young plants away with my exhaust. He looked up at me, his face dirty and wet with sweat.

  “What?”

  “You are free.”

  He stopped, thought for a long moment. “What… what does that mean?”

  At first, I thought he might still be in shock, disoriented from the transfer. But I had not talked to him for two lifetimes, and I knew that at last he had forgotten. “It means you no longer have to hoe.”

  He stared into the short corn, uncomprehending. For nearly four hundred years he had worked that field. Little grew on Darius IV, not even weeds, so for those four hundred years I’d been forced to go into his fields from time to time and sow the thistles, dandelions, and morning glory. At harvest, I’d grind his grain into flour and add vitamin and mineral supplements provided from Earth. The corn had been Warren’s only food now for a long time.

  “What will I do without corn?” he asked.

  “You are a rich man,” I answered. “Over the years, you’ve been paid for your work—one International Dollar per day—and the government has let it accrue interest. You will be a very rich man. You can eat more than corn now. You can eat anything. You can go anywhere, do anything. You are free.”

  Warren looked up. His eyes were pale blue and empty, his wispy red hair down to his shoulders. His biceps were thick and powerful, and I had noticed even from a distance how he worked with gusto, glad to be young again. Yet even as a clone fresh from the vats, he had crags in his face, lines and creases, a map of all the empty roads and blind alleys he had walked down during his long lives.

  “Free?” he said at last. A smile broke across his broad face. He looked up at me, then gazed off at the Plentiful Mountains with their scarred red stone surfaces and their snow-capped peaks. All of Darius IV was covered with red pumice down here on the plains, but up in the mountains, where my guardhouse rested in a valley, was a hazy swath of gentle green. “Can I go up there?”

  “If you like,” I answered.

  “I like,” he said, and he snapped the handle of the hoe between his two broad hands.

  I took him to the valley with its carpet of rye grass and orchards with pear and pecan and olive and fig trees. Robot drones fretted, draping nets over a ripening cherry tree to keep out the flocks of ivory cockatoos. I pulled the hovercraft up to the marble columns at the guardhouse compound.

  “I had always hoped it might be like this,” Warren said, “but I never imagined…” For the following several days I did not talk to Warren much, though he often stood near me, as if craving my presence, any human contact. I had a great deal of work to do, and there was no point in trying to speak to Warren. He could not carry on a conversation. After four hundred years he no longer recalled the meanings of most words. He could name the sun and the rocks and corn and a toilet, but he had no names for my flocks of cockatoos or for the color pink, and he could not recall the word star. Often, he would ask me the names of objects, and I would tell him, and he would forget again only moments later. Yet he did not fear his own ignorance. He grinned like a lunatic, happy to be free, and for him the world was filled with wonder.

  Twice, he asked me, “Ray, why am I here?”

  “You are a criminal. You have hurt people, so the government sent you here to recover.”

  “What did I do?” he asked. “I remember a woman, a woman’s beautiful face. I remember wanting to love her.”

  “I don’t know. I used to store that information in my temporary memory,” I admitted, “but I erased it long ago. I know only that you were found guilty, but that your term is up.”

  Warren went to the window of the guardhouse, looked out through the leaded crystal to the orchards. For the first time in the past several days, his smile faltered. “Have I recovered,” he asked, “or will I still hurt people?”

  “I suspect… that either you will hurt people, or you will not.”

  “I don’t want to hurt people.”

  “Maybe that will change,” I said. “You’ve been here a long time. People have hurt you by putting you here. Maybe you will want to get even.”

  Warren shook his head innocently, as if denying my accusation. “I hate this body,” Warren admitted. “A few days ago, I was an old man and all of my bones ached. I wanted only to die. But when you put me back into this young flesh, I feel uncomfortable. I want only sex. I want to rut like an animal. I can feel my flesh burning with that desire, as if I were working hard in the midday sun. For me, this young flesh is more uncomfortable. Death or sex. I’ve lived six lifetimes. Ray, and all through them, I have craved only those two things. Not vengeance.” He held
the windowsill, clenching and unclenching his powerful hands.

  I think, at that moment, I feared what he might do. He reminded me of a panther, so passionate, so powerful, so volatile. “Perhaps,” I ventured, “you will finally satisfy your cravings for both.”

  At the end of four days, I drugged Warren to keep him pacified during the initial stage of his trip home, and I sent him flying in the shuttle to the star cruiser Reliable. From there he connected with the terminal at Hotel Andromeda, and met his fate.

  Aboard the Hotel Andromeda, Warren went to a public restaurant where the air was heavy, fetid. Few humans dined at the tables—a handful here, a handful there. In the center of the room, seven amphibious Fenroozi swam in a pool, like massive red newts, chasing their own tails and grabbing at golden fish. Warren sat at a table, grinning monstrously, watching three nubile young girls all dressed in glittering white. He stared at them, forgetting about food, and wondered how to approach them, how to ask for sex. Yet a more subtle craving enveloped him as he watched. He felt distant, isolated, and he craved human presence, any attention. In a nearby tree, a tall hairy silver beast that was all bones crouched while serving robots brought live prey for it to sniff.

  Warren ignored the predator as he watched the girls. One woman finally saw that he was staring, and Warren turned away. The silver beast was watching him with all six eyes, surreptitiously inhaling Warren’s scent. Warren did not have to understand the beast’s guttural chatter to know that it was asking the serving robots if Warren was on the menu. Warren smiled, walked up to the beast, grasped one of its massive lower canines with his fist, and shook the beast vigorously. A long black tongue snaked out, tasting Warren’s hand.

  “Don’t even think about it!” Warren said with a grin, slapping the predator’s snout.

  He ambled to the table, sat with three girls in white. They looked like clones, all red hair and freckles and sad eyes. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Warren,” and he said no more, feeling unsure of himself. How do you tell someone that you have not held a normal conversation in four hundred years? How do you tell a woman that you want her body, but you also want her to love you after you’ve used her? How do you casually slip into conversation the fact that you’ve forgotten how to read a menu, or that foods have changed so much that you don’t know what they taste like anymore? He listened to the girls, feigning interest in things other than their bodies. One girl kept calling him “voracious,” but she used the word as if it were a slang compliment. He imagined luring the girls to his room, grabbing them, making love to them wildly there. He was strong now, in his young body. He knew he could do it, with one of them at least. He ordered a light dinner made of things he could not remember ever having tasted.