by Mike Resnick
She fell backward, a new red blotch appearing on the front of her bloodstained dress.
She tried to get up, and he fired once more. This time she lay still.
My Dearest Edith:
Please destroy this letter after you have read it.
I have faked the symptoms of the malaria I contracted some years ago on a trip to the Everglades, and have been relieved of my unofficial duties here. I will be put aboard the next ship to America (quite possibly on a stretcher if you can imagine that!) and within a very few days I will once again be able to hold you and the children in my arms. And I’m pleased to see that Harrison defeated that fool Cleveland without my help.
My work here is done. I would have preferred to arrest the fiend, but I was given no choice in the matter. Jack the Ripper is no more.
If I make that fact public, two things will happen. First, I will probably be arrested for murder. Second (and actually more important, for no jury would convict me once they have heard my story), Whitechapel will remain a blight upon the face of England. Whereas a conversation I had a few days ago has convinced me that as long as the British authorities think the madman is still at large, they might do something positive about eradicating Whitechapel’s intolerable conditions. If that is so, then it may actually be serendipitous that only I (and now you) know that the Ripper is dead.
At least I hope that is the outcome. One would like to think that if one’s life didn’t count for much, at least one’s death did—and if Whitechapel can either be cleansed or razed to the ground, then perhaps, just perhaps, these five unfortunate women did not die totally in vain.
Your Theodore
Theodore Roosevelt returned to London 22 years later, in 1910, on the way home from the year-long safari that followed his Presidency.
Whitechapel remained unchanged.
INTRODUCTION TO “ROBOTS DON’T CRY”
Robert Silverberg
A pro knows where to start a story, where to finish it, and what ought to go in between. We have a very nice example of that in this efficient and effective little robot story, which opens with a classic SF hook—galactic scavengers hunting up interesting old stuff for profit; who could resist reading further?—and goes on to provide a pair of characters, only one of them human, who are deftly and ably characterized with just the right amount of detail and not a bit more—and then, then, proceeds to tell a sweet though not sentimental story within a story that leads to a payoff neatly turning the previously characterized characterizations upside down.
An efficient story, yes, and a moving one, and one that leads the reader on from paragraph to paragraph without a moment’s slackening. It’s what I would call a professional piece of science fiction, and the people who write professional science fiction I call pros. Mike Resnick is a pro. When you see him at a convention he’s often wearing a jacket festooned with a vast armada of those little spaceships that they give you to signify a Hugo nomination—dozens and dozens of them. A story like this goes a long way to explain why he has them.
One day, while thumbing through a coffee-table book on Kilimanjaro in Barnes & Noble, I saw a photo of Richard Leakey holding up the head of what I thought said “Australopithecus Robotus.” I did a double-take and looked again, and of course it was “Australopithecus Robustus.”
But all the way home I wondered what an Australopithecus Robotus would be like, and eventually the only way to come up with an answer was to write this story. It was a 2004 Hugo nominee, and has been made into both a short live-action film (“Metal Tears”) and a short computer-animated film (“Machines Don’t Cry”).
ROBOTS DON’T CRY
THEY CALL US GRAVEROBBERS, BUT we’re not. What we do is plunder the past and offer it to the present. We hit old worlds, deserted worlds, worlds that nobody wants any longer, and we pick up anything we think we can sell to the vast collectibles market. You want a 700-year-old timepiece? A thousand-year old bed? An actual printed book? Just put in your order, and sooner or later we’ll fill it.
Every now and then we strike it rich. Usually we make a profit. Once in a while we just break even. There’s only been one world where we actually lost money; I still remember it—Greenwillow. Except that it wasn’t green, and there wasn’t a willow on the whole damned planet.
There was a robot, though. We found him, me and the Baroni, in a barn, half-hidden under a pile of ancient computer parts and self-feeders for mutated cattle. We were picking through the stuff, wondering if there was any market for it, tossing most of it aside, when the sun peeked in through the doorway and glinted off a prismatic eye.
“Hey, take a look at what we’ve got here,” I said. “Give me a hand digging it out.”
The junk had been stored a few feet above where he’d been standing and the rack broke, practically burying him. One of his legs was bent at an impossible angle, and his expressionless face was covered with cobwebs. The Baroni lumbered over—when you’ve got three legs you don’t glide gracefully—and studied the robot.
“Interesting,” he said. He never used whole sentences when he could annoy me with a single word that could mean almost anything.
“He should pay our expenses, once we fix him up and get him running,” I said.
“A human configuration,” noted the Baroni.
“Yeah, we still made ’em in our own image until a couple of hundred years ago.”
“Impractical.”
“Spare me your practicalities,” I said. “Let’s dig him out.”
“Why bother?”
Trust a Baroni to miss the obvious. “Because he’s got a memory cube,” I answered. “Who the hell knows what he’s seen? Maybe we’ll find out what happened here.”
“Greenwillow has been abandoned since long before you were born and I was hatched,” replied the Baroni, finally stringing some words together. “Who cares what happened?”
“I know it makes your head hurt, but try to use your brain,” I said, grunting as I pulled at the robot’s arm. It came off in my hands. “Maybe whoever he worked for hid some valuables.” I dropped the arm onto the floor. “Maybe he knows where. We don’t just have to sell junk, you know; there’s a market for the good stuff too.”
The Baroni shrugged and began helping me uncover the robot.
“I hear a lot of ifs and maybes,” he muttered.
“Fine,” I said. “Just sit on what passes for your ass, and I’ll do it myself.”
“And let you keep what we find without sharing it?” he demanded, suddenly throwing himself into the task of moving the awkward feeders. After a moment he stopped and studied one. “Big cows,” he noted.
“Maybe ten or twelve feet at the shoulder, judging from the size of the stalls and the height of the feeders,” I agreed. “But there weren’t enough to fill the barn. Some of those stalls were never used.”
Finally we got the robot uncovered, and I checked the code on the back of his neck.
“How about that?” I said. “The son of a bitch must be 500 years old. That makes him an antique by anyone’s definition. I wonder what we can get for him?”
The Baroni peered at the code. “What does AB stand for?”
“Aldebaran. Alabama. Abrams’ Planet. Or maybe just the model number. Who the hell knows? We’ll get him running and maybe he can tell us.” I tried to set him on his feet. No luck. “Give me a hand.”
“To the ship?” asked the Baroni, using sentence fragments again as he helped me stand the robot upright.
“No,” I said. “We don’t need a sterile environment to work on a robot. Let’s just get him out in the sunlight, away from all this junk, and then we’ll have a couple of mechs check him over.”
We half-carried and half-dragged him to the crumbling concrete pad beyond the barn, then laid him down while I tightened the muscles in my neck, activating the embedded micro-chip, and directed the signal by pointing to the ship, which was about half a mile away.
“This is me,” I said as the chip carried my voice b
ack to the ship’s computer. “Wake up Mechs 3 and 7, feed them everything you’ve got on robots going back a millennium, give them repair kits and anything else they’ll need to fix a broken robot of indeterminate age, and then home in on my signal and send them to me.”
“Why those two?” asked the Baroni.
Sometimes I wondered why I partnered with anyone that dumb. Then I remembered the way he could sniff out anything with a computer chip or cube, no matter how well it was hidden, so I decided to give him a civil answer. He didn’t get that many from me; I hoped he appreciated it.
“Three’s got those extendable eyestalks, and it can do microsurgery, so I figure it can deal with any faulty micro-circuits. As for Seven, it’s strong as an ox. It can position the robot, hold him aloft, move him any way that Three directs it to. They’re both going to show up filled to the brim with everything the ship’s data bank has on robots, so if he’s salvagable, they’ll find a way to salvage him.”
I waited to see if he had any more stupid questions. Sure enough, he had.
“Why would anyone come here?” he asked, looking across the bleak landscape.
“I came for what passes for treasure these days,” I answered him. “I have no idea why you came.”
“I meant originally,” he said, and his face started to glow that shade of pea-soup green that meant I was getting to him. “Nothing can grow, and the ultra-violet rays would eventually kill most animals. So why?”
“Because not all humans are as smart as me.”
“It’s an impoverished world,” continued the Baroni. “What valuables could there be?”
“The usual,” I replied. “Family heirlooms. Holographs. Old kitchen implements. Maybe even a few old Republic coins.”
“Republic currency can’t be spent.”
“True—but a few years ago I saw a five-credit coin sell for three hundred Maria Teresa dollars. They tell me it’s worth twice that today.”
“I didn’t know that,” admitted the Baroni.
“I’ll bet they could fill a book with all the things you don’t know.”
“Why are Men so sardonic and ill-mannered?”
“Probably because we have to spend so much time with races like the Baroni,” I answered.
Mechs Three and Seven rolled up before he could reply.
“Reporting for duty, sir,” said Mech Three in his high-pitched mechanical voice.
“This is a very old robot,” I said, indicating what we’d found. “It’s been out of commission for a few centuries, maybe even longer. See if you can get it working again.”
“We live to serve,” thundered Mech Seven.
“I can’t tell you how comforting I find that.” I turned to the Baroni. “Let’s grab some lunch.”
“Why do you always speak to them that way?” asked the Baroni as we walked away from the mechs. “They don’t understand sarcasm.”
“It’s my nature,” I said. “Besides, if they don’t know it’s sarcasm, it must sound like a compliment. Probably pleases the hell out of them.”
“They are machines,” he responded. “You can no more please them than offend them.”
“Then what difference does it make?”
“The more time I spend with Men, the less I understand them,” said the Baroni, making the burbling sound that passed for a deep sigh. “I look forward to getting the robot working. Being a logical and unemotional entity, it will make more sense.”
“Spare me your smug superiority,” I shot back. “You’re not here because Papa Baroni looked at Mama Baroni with logic in his heart.”
The Baroni burbled again. “You are hopeless,” he said at last.
We had one of the mechs bring us our lunch, then sat with our backs propped against opposite sides of a gnarled old tree while we ate. I didn’t want to watch his snakelike lunch writhe and wriggle, protesting every inch of the way, as he sucked it down like the long, living piece of spaghetti it was, and he had his usual moral qualms, which I never understood, about watching me bite into a sandwich. We had just about finished when Mech Three approached us.
“All problems have been fixed,” it announced brightly.
“That was fast,” I said.
“There was nothing broken.” It then launched into a three-minute explanation of whatever it had done to the robot’s circuitry.
“That’s enough,” I said when it got down to a dissertation on the effect of mu-mesons on negative magnetic fields in regard to prismatic eyes. “I’m wildly impressed. Now let’s go take a look at this beauty.”
I got to my feet, as did the Baroni, and we walked back to the concrete pad. The robot’s limbs were straight now, and his arm was restored, but he still lay motionless on the crumbling surface.
“I thought you said you fixed him.”
“I did,” replied Mech Three. “But my programming compelled me not to activate it until you were present.”
“Fine,” I said. “Wake him up.”
The little Mech made one final quick adjustment and backed away as the robot hummed gently to life and sat up.
“Welcome back,” I said.
“Back?” replied the robot. “I have not been away.”
“You’ve been asleep for five centuries, maybe six.”
“Robots cannot sleep.” He looked around. “Yet everything has changed. How is this possible?”
“You were deactivated,” said the Baroni. “Probably your power supply ran down.”
“Deactivated,” the robot repeated. He swiveled his head from left to right, surveying the scene. “Yes. Things cannot change this much from one instant to the next.”
“Have you got a name?” I asked him.
“Samson 4133. But Miss Emily calls me Sammy.”
“Which name do you prefer?”
“I am a robot. I have no preferences.”
I shrugged. “Whatever you say, Samson.”
“Sammy,” he corrected me.
“I thought you had no preferences.”
“I don’t,” said the robot. “But she does.”
“Has she got a name?”
“Miss Emily.”
“Just Miss Emily?” I asked. “No other names to go along with it?”
“Miss Emily is what I was instructed to call her.”
“I assume she is a child,” said the Baroni, with his usual flair for discovering the obvious.
“She was once,” said Sammy. “I will show her to you.”
Then somehow, I never did understand the technology involved, he projected a full-sized holograph of a small girl, perhaps five years old, wearing a frilly purple-and-white outfit. She had rosy cheeks and bright shining blue eyes, and a smile that men would die for someday if given half the chance.
It was only after she took a step forward, a very awkward step, that I realized she had a prosthetic left leg.
“Too bad,” I said. “A pretty little girl like that.”
“Was she born that way, I wonder?” said the Baroni.
“I love you, Sammy,” said the holograph.
I hadn’t expected sound, and it startled me. She had such a happy voice. Maybe she didn’t know that most little girls came equipped with two legs. After all, this was an underpopulated colony world; for all I knew, she’d never seen anyone but her parents.
“It is time for your nap, Miss Emily,” said Sammy’s voice. “I will carry you to your room.” Another surprise. The voice didn’t seem to come from the robot, but from somewhere…well, offstage. He was recreating the scene exactly as it had happened, but we saw it through his eyes. Since he couldn’t see himself, neither could we.
“I’ll walk,” said the child. “Mother told me I have to practice walking, so that someday I can play with the other girls.”
“Yes, Miss Emily.”
“But you can catch me if I start to fall, like you always do.”
“Yes, Miss Emily.”
“What would I do without you, Sammy?”
“You would f
all, Miss Emily,” he answered. Robots are always so damned literal.
And as suddenly as it had appeared, the scene vanished.
“So that was Miss Emily?” I said.
“Yes,” said Sammy.
“And you were owned by her parents?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any understanding of the passage of time, Sammy?”
“I can calibrate time to within three nanoseconds of…”
“That’s not what I asked,” I said. “For example, if I told you that scene we just saw happened more than 500 years ago, what would you say to that?”
“I would ask if you were measuring by Earth years, Galactic Standard years, New Calendar Democracy years…”
“Never mind,” I said.
Sammy fell silent and motionless. If someone had stumbled upon him at just that moment, they’d have been hard-pressed to prove that he was still operational.
“What’s the matter with him?” asked the Baroni. “His battery can’t be drained yet.”
“Of course not. They were designed to work for years without recharging.”
And then I knew. He wasn’t a farm robot, so he had no urge to get up and start working the fields. He wasn’t a mech, so he had no interest in fixing the feeders in the barn. For a moment I thought he might be a butler or a major domo, but if he was, he’d have been trying to learn my desires to serve me, and he obviously wasn’t doing that. That left just one thing.
He was a nursemaid.
I shared my conclusion with the Baroni, and he concurred.
“We’re looking at a lot of money here,” I said excitedly. “Think of it—a fully-functioning antique robot nursemaid! He can watch the kids while his new owners go rummaging for more old artifacts.”
“There’s something wrong,” said the Baroni, who was never what you could call an optimist.
“The only thing wrong is we don’t have enough bags to haul all the money we’re going to sell him for.”
“Look around you,” said the Baroni. “This place was abandoned, and it was never prosperous. If he’s that valuable, why did they leave him behind?”