Nebula Awards Showcase 2004

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman! Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman!”

  “Attention all saurs! Keep back! When the piece of junk goes berserk—”

  “Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman! Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman!”

  “—will be indiscriminately crushed under—”

  Rotomotoman jerked very slightly, hardly a movement at all. The download was finished. A faint hum and whir emanated from his mechanical innards. His hemisphere head turned slightly to the left and the pupils of his huge eyes followed the same general direction, then started back slowly to the right, taking in the whole scene.

  The chanting stopped. Even Agnes held off her shouted warnings.

  It is hard to imagine a more startled expression on a piece of machinery, if one can imagine an expression on a piece of machinery at all. The eyes had much to do with it, looking like enormous versions of the eyes that adorned toys and dolls in years long past—but much more active, animated, in fact. Those eyes and the mouth-like seam in his cylinder-torso created an expression: surprise, panic, astonishment.

  He surveyed the ninety-odd dinosaur-looking creatures staring up at him—and one human, with arms folded, leaning back against a desk, smiling with apparent admiration.

  Rotomotoman raised his arms in a gesture of surrender and recoiled right into Preston’s desk.

  The liquid-gray display screen on his torso—his only means of communication—filled with exclamation points, question marks and other strange symbols that may even have been incomprehensible to other rotomotomen, if any existed.

  “See?” Agnes shouted. “Just as I told you! The monster is ready to pounce! Back away!”

  But Rotomotoman just froze in that posture until Axel approached him on the back of the large brown triceratops named Dr. David Norman. Dr. Norman lowered his head and Axel dismounted. He walked straight up to his creation with his left forepaw upraised.

  “Hiya! I’m Axel!”

  Rotomotoman stared down at the small blue creature. He lowered one of his arms and bent the joint that approximated the elbow of the other. His display screen cleared of symbols, except for five characters of simple, recognizable alphabet and punctuation:

  “Hiya!”

  Many of the saurs cheered. Tom Groverton put his hands together and applauded.

  Agnes nudged Preston and muttered, “You sure there aren’t any machine guns in those fingers?”

  “Positive.”

  “No flame throwers or lasers?”

  “You saw the instructions yourself. Rotomotoman is weapon-free. He does have a rotating red flashing light that comes out of the top of his head, but as you can see he hasn’t had cause to use it yet.”

  Agnes grumbled. “He still looks like a trashcan made up for Halloween!”

  “Hey! Guys!” Axel said, as if the other saurs might not know yet, “I want you to meet your new friend! This is Rotomotoman!”

  Rotomotoman held his metal hand horizontally just above his eyes: a salute to the assembly, with “Hiya!” still on his display screen. More cheers greeted him.

  “Come on!” Axel coaxed his metal friend away from the desk. “A little this way! Follow me!”

  Words appeared on his display screen: first “Axel,” then “follow.”

  Rotomotoman complied with each direction, if a little tentatively. His software may have overly cautioned him about running over little ones, but he cast his gaze downward and thoroughly surveyed the floor, checking to make sure no one was underfoot. If a meter-and-a-half tall cylinder rolling on four wheels could be described as moving “daintily,” it would describe Rotomotoman just then.

  Axel led him to the door of the workroom. Rotomotoman—making no sound but an efficient, high-pitched whir—saluted the door. The word “door” appeared on his display screen. He followed Axel down the hallway, holding his salute all the way to the lift platform, where he stopped cold.

  Rotomotoman didn’t seem confident that he could keep his balance on the flatbed lift, with its guardrails set no more than a few centimeters high. Axel coaxed him on with the assurance that the lift moved so slowly he would be in no danger—and with the assistance of Diogenes and Hubert pushing from behind. With “Help!” replacing “Hiya!” on his display screen, Rotomotoman held so tightly to the staircase wall he left a trail of grooves in it, but everyone was too excited to notice them.

  As he rolled from the platform to the floor he cast his gaze upward as if in thanks to some heavenly Rotomotogod.

  “Look over here, Rotomotoman!” Axel said, pointing to the living room. “That’s where the video is.”

  Rotomotoman saluted the video screen. His own screen alternated the words, “Video” and “Hiya!”

  “Over in that room is where we eat!”

  Rotomotoman saluted the dining room. “Dining room—Hiya!—Dining room—”

  He saluted everything that Axel showed him, including the computer, the plastic stairs, the bookcases and the Five Wise Buddhasaurs’ plastic saxophones. And all their names were printed out on his display screen, each punctuated with the same greeting.

  “I suppose this question should have come up long ago,” Doc asked the ecstatic Axel, while Rotomotoman saluted the lamp table, the couch and a broom Tom had left leaning by the living room window, “but just what exactly is Rotomotoman supposed to do?”

  “Rotomotoman is here to protect good guys from the bad guys!”

  “Well,” Doc sighed deeply and patted Axel’s head, “may your labors be few.”

  * * *

  The notion of “bad guys” was not entirely forgotten by Doc as Tom Groverton gathered all the saurs around in the library later that afternoon. In the back of the room—standing at attention, of course—was Rotomotoman, his creator proudly at his side.

  “They’ll be here tomorrow, and they’ll be looking for eggs,” Tom said, his hands folded loosely as he sat on a little stool in the center of the room.

  “Tell them to mind their own damn business!” Agnes shouted back.

  “That would be fine,” Tom said, “if we could. But these folks have rescinded their so-called ‘proprietary rights,’ based on a certain definition of what you guys are. And as you know they’ve been looking for loopholes ever since they agreed to the Atherton Foundation’s proposal. Your intelligence, your emotional capacity, your longevity—it’s baffled them for years. They have the support of a certain portion of the scientific community who’d like very much to make you the subject of study. And they want desperately to find out what they did, well, ‘right,’ so to speak, when they designed you. Generating eggs might change the deal if they find out. I mean—” Tom cleared his throat, “if they find any.”

  “Any what?” Doc asked in a whisper.

  Tom smiled. “That’s the spirit. I won’t ask any questions and you won’t tell me any lies—other than the ones you may already tell me.”

  “Why, Tom!” Doc said, his heavy eyelids raised as far as they would go. “What makes you think we’d tell you any lies?”

  Tom ignored the remark. “Remember, I’ll be here. Dr. Margaret will be here and even Ms. Leahy will be here to make sure these folks don’t do anything out of line. But they will be thorough, and we can’t really stop them, because we want to show them that we have nothing to hide.”

  “We have nothing to hide,” Doc said.

  “Exactly.” Tom stood up. “Now, I have some things to do upstairs before I start dinner. But there’s one more thing: it might be a good idea to keep Rotomotoman in the background when they come. We don’t want to hit them with more than they can take.”

  “What did he mean by that?” Axel asked as Tom left the room.

  “He means that our visitors tomorrow are unprepared for your genius,” said Doc.

  “Genius!” Agnes marched up to Axel. “Spelled the same as ‘idiot!’ This is all your fault! Sending messages to ‘space guys!’ You’re the one who should be locked up! Not Bronte!”

  “Bronte!” Axel gasped. “Who wants to loc
k up Bronte?”

  “No one said anything about locking up Bronte!” Kara looked over at Bronte, whose concern about her egg had done little to steady her nerves for the meeting. Now she was trembling.

  “What do you think they’ll do?” Agnes continued. “They’ll take her off to a laboratory and stick her with needles and cut her up to find out how she did it!”

  A cry of alarm rose from the surrounding saurs. Memories of past injuries and dangers became acutely tangible even to the smallest and simplest of them.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Kara said to Bronte. “Agnes is overreacting as usual. No one’s going to take you away.” She turned angrily to Agnes. “Can’t you ever keep your mouth shut? We’re all in a panic when we need our heads about us!”

  “They’ll take the egg away, won’t they?” Bronte stammered. “Like the scientists in the video we saw once, climbing into nests and stealing the eggs of rare birds.”

  “No one’s going to do that here,” Preston put his hand on Bronte’s back. He could feel her shivers. “We’ll think of something.”

  “I’m sorry, Bronte,” Axel said. His face never before looked so long and mournful. “I didn’t know this would happen.”

  “It’s not your fault,” said Bronte, her nubby teeth grinding at her lower lip. “You were just—just being Axel.”

  “That’s the whole damn problem right there!” Agnes said.

  “Maybe Rotomotoman can help us now,” Axel said in a low voice.

  Rotomotoman, in the back of the room, saluted at the mention of his name.

  “Listen,” Agnes barked at Axel, “I don’t want to hear one more word about Rotomotoman! Space guys! Electric trashcans! Frogs watching the video! If I hear anything more from you—”

  Agnes was interrupted by a voice that had so far not entered the discussion. It came back from the little bed over by the window, and in a low, raspy voice.

  “Axel is right,” said Hetman.

  “What?” Agnes was ready for verbal battle, and the words “Axel is right” set her back plates upright, but they were spoken by the one saur she would not assail. “What did you say?”

  “I said, Axel is right. Something Axel told me a few nights ago has kept me up thinking and—I could be wrong, but—Axel, do you still have the assembly directions for your Rotomotoman?”

  “They’re with Preston’s stuff, up by the computer,” he said.

  “Bring them down here, and hurry! We have stuff to do!”

  “Stuff to do!” Axel ran upstairs without hesitation.

  “The rest of you,” Hetman continued, “I want you to look very carefully at the sections on that sheet which refer to the Thermostat Assembly F and Carrier Drawer Assembly F1. Perhaps I’m completely wrong, but I think we’ve been overlooking something remarkable about that creation of Axel’s.”

  * * *

  When the big car arrived the next morning, Axel was at the window, up on the little lamp table, scouting.

  “Huuuu-mans!” He announced to the others. “They’re here! And they’re in a bad guys car!”

  The long dark limousine had an official seal from The Office of Bioengineering Standards on the side door. It stopped right in front of the house and out came three strangers, Dr. Margaret and Mrs. Leahy. Of the strangers, there was a young African-American, impeccably dressed in a topcoat and dark suit; a gray-haired Caucasian, much more casually dressed, in an unbuttoned leather jacket and a dark T-shirt; a young Asian-looking woman with very short canary-colored hair, wearing a plaid workshirt and a denim jacket.

  Ms. Leahy led the way. Tom met the little group out on the porch.

  “I’m really sorry about this,” she said as she shook Tom’s hand. Susan Leahy was trim and efficient as always, and she was starting to let the gray come into her hair. She was one of those eccentrics who still wore glasses, though hers were rimless. “You’ve told them what this is all about, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, they know.”

  She nodded and turned to the three persons who were to search the house.

  “Okay, folks, you know the rules. You can search everything, everywhere, but if anything you do seems to be upsetting or traumatizing the saurs, I or Dr. Pagliotti here will have to ask you to back off. This is Tom Groverton.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “Any questions you may have I’m sure he’ll be glad to answer. We want to cooperate fully, but you have to understand that we have to act in the best interest of the saurs.”

  The young African-American, Dr. Phillips, nodded politely to Ms. Leahy. “We’ve done this kind of work at other houses. I can assure you we’ll be as non-disruptive as we possibly can.”

  Dr. Margaret, who had seen some of the saurs’ eggs herself, came up to Tom and gripped his hand. She wore a white jacket that looked a little like a short lab coat, and for once her long brown hair wasn’t tied back. She didn’t say a word but searched his expression for any sign of what she might expect.

  Tom could only shrug. Anything can happen, he seemed to say, but don’t get worried yet.

  “You know,” Ms. Leahy said, “it’s nice to have an excuse to come here and visit some old friends.”

  Axel was still standing at the window, waving to her.

  She waved back. “Hiya!”

  When the group entered the house, some of the saurs stopped to watch them, cautiously and curiously. The smaller saurs went on with their business, moving from room to room on skates, getting their computer lessons, a brief game of Not So Hard, or watching the video.

  “Attention humans!” Agnes announced from atop a lamp table near the door. “Attention all humans! It’s time to SHAPE UP!”

  “Don’t mind Agnes,” Ms. Leahy told the officials. “She greets most humans that way.”

  “Humans!” Agnes continued, “It’s time to SHAPE UP! You’ve been running things stupidly for too long! It’s time to STOP BEING STUPID!”

  “So here’s the little guy who’s caused all the ruckus.” Ms. Leahy went straight to Axel.

  “Miss Lay-hee! Miss Lay-hee! Howya doing? What are you doing with the bad guys?”

  Ms. Leahy carefully picked him up and perched him on her shoulder. “Important stuff, Axel. Want to see?”

  “Yeah!”

  She made sure she had a safe grip on him and that he wouldn’t slip, even with all his excited gesticulations. “So what’s all this about you sending messages to space?”

  “Yeah!” said Axel. “Reggie and me! We sent a message to the space guys and told them all about us!”

  The three investigators gathered around to listen to the conversation. The young woman, Dr. Yoon, took out a pocket computer to record it.

  “And have you heard anything back from the ‘space guys’ yet?”

  “Yeah! Maybe! At least I think that’s why TV Frog is here! He comes at night and watches the video, but no one’s seen him but me! Doc almost saw him but he fell down the stairs! He’s okay, though. Doc, I mean, but TV Frog’s okay too. Anyway, I think TV Frog just wants us to think he’s here because he can’t sleep. But Geraldine said he was really sent by the space guys, because they know how to drill holes in time and space!”

  Ms. Leahy looked at the three investigators.

  “Well, here’s your source for the egg story.”

  Dr. Yoon slipped the computer back into her pocket.

  “And who’s that over there?” Mrs. Leahy pointed to the metal cylinder with the hemisphere head, standing out of the way, just to the left of the video screen.

  “That’s Rotomotoman! I built him myself! Well, Reggie helped me, and Preston, and Doc, and Agnes, and a lot of the other guys. But I thought him up all by myself!”

  Rotomotoman was motionless. His display screen was empty. His left arm was listless at his side but his right arm was raised in a salute. It was hard to say what he might have been saluting—his right eye looked off to his left and his left eye looked off to his right.

  The investigators looked over Rotomotoman carefully. Th
ey even took his head off and inspected the components. Some of the saurs got very quiet and even Agnes briefly desisted from her shouted exhortations.

  “What is it supposed to do?” the man in the leather jacket, Mr. Chase, asked Tom.

  “Ask the inventor.” He pointed to Axel. “You can talk to them, you know.”

  “He fights bad guys and protects the good guys!” Axel offered without waiting to be asked.

  “Doesn’t look like he can fight any bad guys in his shape,” Dr. Yoon said as she re-secured Rotomotoman’s head.

  “I—I forgot to plug him in last night!” Axel looked over at Doc, sitting on his little box, nodding almost imperceptibly. Then he looked to Agnes, who waved her tail threateningly.

  “I’ve got to charge him up! He’ll be okay tomorrow!”

  “The kitchen is this way,” Tom said to Dr. Phillips, “but I’m afraid the only eggs you’ll find are in the refrigerator.”

  The investigators looked anyway—very carefully. They looked into every cabinet and along the baseboards and around the ceilings. They went through the cellar and the litter room, the living room, the dining room and the library. They looked behind all the books on the shelves. Dr. Margaret wouldn’t let them look under Hetman’s pillow, but she took the pillow out herself and let them inspect it.

  “If the lady and gentlemen wish to look under the mattress,” Hetman said, “they are welcome to do so.”

  “If I may?” Dr. Phillips said in an apologetic voice and did his work as quickly as possible. Before he moved on, he said “Thank you,” to Hetman, came back and added, “Thank you—sir.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  They searched all the rooms upstairs and even went up into the attic, where the saurs had their “museum,” made up of all the things friends and former “owners” had left them over the years: toys, paintings on construction paper, knick-knacks and little articles of clothing. The investigators found several egg-shaped things, made of glass and plastic, but not one real egg.

  Mr. Chase’s attention was drawn to a little charm on one of the shelves, a gold-plated Star of David on a slender chain. He picked it up to examine more closely.