by Isaac Asimov
“Wohler, while I’m thinking how to screen that material rapidly, download to central core just the dialogue of your meetings with Synapo, and get a printout back to me as soon as possible.”
“Download in progress,” Wohler-9 said.
A fraction of a minute later, while Ariel was still pondering her problem, Wohler-9 said, “Download complete.”
A couple of minutes later, she said, “I really don’t know what I’m looking for, but I do know what I’m not looking for. Wohler, delete all sections of the meetings dealing with linguistics and play back the rest at double speed.”
She could understand neither Wohler-9 nor the alien at that speed. Then when she slowed it down so she could understand Wohler-9, she still couldn’t understand Synapo’s Webster Grove accent. She finally slowed it down to normal and could understand most of what Synapo said, but not all. She refused to slow it any further.
Just as she didn’t hope for much from Keymo and Jacob, she really didn’t expect to get anything much out of listening to Wohler-9 and Synapo. But it did keep her conscious mind actively on the problem and left her subconscious mind to freewheel on all the correlated branches of the main subject.
Neither her conscious mind nor her subconscious mind contributed anything of significance during an inquiry that became dull and dragging after the novelty of watching and listening to a giant bat wore off.
The courier from central core arrived with the printout of the dialogue late in the afternoon, and with that interruption, Ariel decided to take a break and eat an early dinner. She had heard nothing from Jacob and realized she had been expecting him to return for dinner, when there was really no reason why he should, since he didn’t eat and merely kept her company when she did. Still, it was a habit she had become accustomed to, and she missed him now that she was deprived of that pleasure.
Was it Jacob she missed, or really Derec? She had only to ask herself that question, and the longing to see Derec and the flood of homesickness for the beautiful estates and green farmlands of Aurora overwhelmed her.
She tried to put it out of her mind as she ate a lonely dinner, but it was not possible. Her mind rebelled from the magnitude of the problem that faced her on this alien world, and while she ate, she wallowed in her loneliness and homesickness, and before she finished eating, tears of self pity were trickling down her face.
As she finished eating, Wohler-9 asked, “Are you in pain, Miss Welsh?”
Ariel wiped her tears away with a napkin. “No, Wohler. Just lonely.”
“Does my presence relieve your loneliness to any degree?”
“No.”
“To what degree did my assistance this afternoon serve in the preservation of the city, Miss Welsh?”
“Very little, I’m sorry to say,” Ariel said. “Why do you ask? Did you expect otherwise?”
“Certainly I had hoped otherwise, Miss Welsh. I proceed at all times in the direction that best serves the Prime Directive, if that does not violate the more compelling laws that govern my behavior.
“I have been neglecting my supervisory duties in the construction and operation of the city, Miss Welsh, for I concluded that your imperative best served the Prime Directive. If that seems no longer to be the case, I must return to my duties, which are currently spread among the other six supervisors.”
“Very well, Wohler. Return to duty.”
“I will clear the dinner table, request a maid to serve you in the future, and then take my leave.”
“I’ll clear the table, Wohler. And a maid won’t be necessary. Jacob will suffice.”
“But he is on another assignment, Miss Welsh.”
“We’ll handle it, Wohler. Just raise Jacob on the comlink, tell him to get back here no later than ten PM, and then leave.”
She was anxious to be alone. Wohler had begun to get on her nerves, Wohler and that alien she had felt compelled to watch and listen to all afternoon.
“Will you be needing me at the meeting tomorrow morning?” Wohler asked.
“No. Did you get hold of Jacob while you were chattering there?”
“Yes, Miss Welsh. He will be here by ten PM.”
“Then leave, Wohler.”
Despite her warm feelings for Wohler-l, she was fed up with this Wohler-9. Yet in his dialogue with the alien, she felt there had to be some clue to the aliens, to their behavior, to their needs, to their culture, a clue to something that would make the aliens and humans compatible so that this desirable planet did not have to be abandoned and bypassed in the future.
She turned to the printout the courier had delivered before dinner.
Strange how that archaic form of transmitting information — the printed word — had stayed around so long. Yet was it so strange when that marvelous instrument, the human brain, was taken into account: the speed with which she could assimilate the words and conjure related images, the speed with which she could scan the pages?
She quickly thumbed to where Wohler had left off in his projection that afternoon and scanned through the rest of the dialogue — ten times the volume they had covered that afternoon — and she did it in less than two hours. And got more out of it, by being able to easily and quickly replay, fast forward, skip, and ponder over the significance of a phrase, a word.
It was true that central core had eliminated the alien’s accent — and certainly that had speeded things up — but the true efficiency came with the printed word itself: the strange archaic telepathy that extracted alien ideas from an alien mind and moved them into hers.
Yet despite the ancient beauty of the printout, nothing of significance came from its perusal, no more than had come from the boring afternoon with Wohler and the memory projector.
Still, her intuition told her there had to be a solution. She just wasn’t looking at it right, or with the proper frame of mind, or in the proper place. If not the dome, where on this weird world was she supposed to look? The city was the problem, a weather node the aliens had termed it, an aggravating, uncontrollable irritant, like a grain of sand in an oyster.
And the aliens were coating it, smoothing it, to relieve the abrasion, like an oyster coats the sharp edges of a grain of sand with iridescent nacre, mother-of-pearl. Now she was even beginning to think like an alien. This world is an oyster and the city and its dome are a pearl. Oyster World. Pearl City. She had christened a world and a city.
And she had gotten no further by the time Jacob returned at ten PM.
“Well, you’re finally back,” she said when he came in. “What did Keymo have to offer on the hyperwave problem?”
“Very little, Miss Ariel,” Jacob said. “Neither of us could see how Key teleportation technology could be applied to modulation of hyperwave signals.”
“Did you examine the parallel dichotomy of hyperspace jump technology and discrete modulation of hyperwave? That parallel connection should provide clues to the connection between the Key and continuous modulation. Right?”
Ariel had first heard the word dichotomy on the way to Oyster World, when Jacob had used it; and she had been wanting to use it ever since. It had such a ring of erudition. Now she had played it back to him.
“You suggested only that we look for a connection between continuous modulation and Key teleportation. Neither of us could see any during a lengthy discussion which concluded only a half hour ago.”
You dummy, she thought, the creative process is primarily a matter of drawing correlations. If there is a connection between discrete modulation and jump technology, as the aliens claim, you must first ferret out and understand that connection. Then maybe you can deduce what continuous modulation is by examining Key teleportation for the parallel connection the aliens say exists there. She thought she had made that clear before he left. He, too, had heard everything the alien had said.
“Tonight, while I’m sleeping,” Ariel said, “examine everything in your memory concerning jump technology and discrete modulation of hyperwave. Go back and forth comparing the
two at every point. Look for similarities. Correlate one with the other. And give me a report in the morning of all instances where you see a similarity between the two.”
“Very well, Miss Ariel.”
She retired to bed then and thought how she would like to see the full musculature of Jacob without his clothes on. And that made her feel guilty, and her longing for Derec came rushing in, the longing she had been pushing from her mind all evening that had probably brought on the unmaidenly notions concerning Jacob.
She went to sleep, and sometime during the long night, she dreamt of playing in a verdant Auroran cornfield with her personal robot as she had when she was a child, and then the robot became Jacob, and they were running and laughing as he chased her down the rows of tall green plants waving in the gentle breeze, and gradually he was no longer chasing her but waiting for her at the end of the long row, far away; yet it was not Jacob; and then she realized that Derec had come to Oyster World, and he was standing there with his arms outstretched, waiting for her. Joyfully, she ran toward him down the long rows of waving green.
She awoke, and it was morning, and she was indeed on Oyster World. But Derec was not there.
Chapter 8
THE WOLF PLANET
“I’M GRATEFUL YOU took the time to come,” Derec said.
He glanced at his companion sitting next to him in the runabout.
“Wouldn’t ‘ave,’cept ‘u sounded urgent,” Wolruf said.
They were heading east on Main Street toward Derec’s apartment. He had just picked up Wolruf at the wolf planet’s primitive spaceport at the west edge of the robot city.
Wolruf had arrived in the Xerborodezees, a Minneapolis-class hyperspace jumper that the wealthy Ariel had given the small alien the year before to speed her return home. The Xerborodezees could accommodate ten passengers, and as it turned out, it was the only way that Derec and his robotic companions were going to get off the planet. He had accidentally demolished his means of transportation when he arrived.
Wolruf was the size of a large dog with sleek, well-groomed, brown and gold fur; and she was shaped like a dog except for the fat-fingered hands and the flat face which, despite its flatness, bore unmistakable lupine characteristics.
Farther east on Main Street, a half-kilometer beyond Derec’s apartment, a large pyramidal edifice — the Compass Tower — was at that moment strikingly displayed in a glowing frame, redshafted by the morning sun still hidden behind it.
“You mean Ariel,” Derec said. “I sent my call for help through Ariel.”
“‘u signed it. Not Ariel. Wouldn’t ‘ave come if’u ‘adn’t signed it, ‘Situation desperate, Derec.’ Goin’ call ‘u’Desperate Derec’ from now on.”
She gave a funny gargling bark, not a growl, more a sharp rattling gargle, as though her throat were laden with phlegm.
Derec had become so accustomed to her in times past he had forgotten that extraordinary chuckle and her uncommon treatment of Galactic Standard. The imperfections in her pronunciation of Standard had regressed somewhat during the past year on her home planet, but her rolling of the letter “r” had been almost entirely eliminated after prolonged exposure to Ariel and Derec, and that improvement seemed to be still largely in place except for a trailing burr. The left-out and chopped-off pronouns, the missing aitches, and the sibilant hiss for the “zee” sound were still evident. And the “‘u” pronunciation of “you” — not at all an “ooh” sound, but a sort of choked and swallowed bark that masked off the initial “y” — could only come from the throat of a lupine alien, something a human was unlikely ever to match.
“I’d never label this situation desperate,” Derec said. “That’s not the message I sent. I contacted Robot City on my internal monitor link, and they hyperwaved our house computer on Aurora. At least that’s the routing I set up. I expected Ariel to relay my message to you, but that doesn’t sound like Ariel, either. Sounds more like someone with a vital interest in this planet, which is nobody I know of.”
“Doessn’t matter ‘ow I’eard. ‘u succeeded, I’m ‘ere. Now what’s so desperate ‘u’ve got to call ‘alf across the galaxy?”
“I’ve got a rogue robot on my hands, Wolruf.”
“Doessn’t follow the Lawss of Robotics?”
“Yes and no. It’s got the laws but doesn’t seem to know for sure what a human is. It’s like a dam chameleon. The way I’ve got it figured, it changes itself to match as best it can whoever it thinks might be human at the moment.”
“Like Mandelbrot’s arm?”
“Yes and no. The stuff it’s made of isn’t as coarse as the Robot City material. Its cells are a lot smaller than the variety in Mandelbrot’s arm.
“I’ve got the feeling we’re seeing micromolecular robotics here; and I’ve got no way to reprogram it. It’s self-programmed and seems to imprint like a newly hatched chicken at the drop of a hat, and on anything it takes a mind to.”
“So ‘ow can I’elp?” Wolruf asked.
“It had a wolf form when I first arrived. It was the leader of a pack of intelligent wolf-like creatures which it must have thought were human. They were attacking the city’s Avery robots. The wolf robot gutted one of the Averies. Robot City relayed their call for help over my internal monitor.
“When I got here, it imprinted on me, after giving me a really hard time — and I mean a really hard time. It was still humanoid when I left it this morning, and soaking up information from the city library like a second-generation Settler on a mission to Earth.”
“What iss it ‘u think I can do?” Wolruf asked.
“It was wolf-like when it came into the city, after I arrived, and then it imprinted on me. Now it’s coming along a little too fast, too much personality change too quickly. With your wolfish characteristics, you make a natural model for imprinting, a nice compromise between wolves and humans.”
“Amazing! Why do ‘u’umans persist in thinking of us ass wolves? There’ss a species on my world — the dongeedows — that arrr a great deal like the gorillas in ‘urn ssoos, but I don’t think of ‘u... now wait a minute. I take that back.’u arrr beginning to resemble a dongeedow a great deal.”
She gave that phlegm-rattling gargle again. And yes, the trailing burr was definitely still part of the pattern.
“You can joke all you want, Wolruf, but I don’t regard this situation as very humorous.”
Derec was not in the best of spirits. It was good to see Wolruf again, and that had cheered him momentarily. They had known each other for a long time, ever since she had been more or less a slave — an indentured servant — of the alien pirate Aranimas. Derec had freed her with the help of Mandelbrot, the robot he had put together from the pirate’s supply of spare parts.
But Wolruf was hardly a stand-in for Ariel. Just seeing a good friend like Wolruf made him yearn for Ariel even more. If it had just been her and not Wolruf who had run down the ramp of the Xerborodezees, life wouldn’t seem so grim right now.
He shouldn’t have reacted adversely to Wolruf’s weak attempt at humor. He should at least give her credit for trying. But he missed Ariel, and he wasn’t about to let anything cheer him up.
“‘u arrr in a foul mood,” Wolruf said. “A rogue robot couldn’t make ‘u feel that bad. Why issn’t Ariel with ‘u?”
It was eerie the way Wolruf could sense his mood, interpret it, and put her finger on what was bothering him.
“Let’s not go into that. Let’s just say she wasn’t too pleased with me when I left her on Aurora. So she’s probably pouting back there in a snit.”
And he added as a bitter afterthought, “With her playboy Winterson. You’ve never met him. Jacob Winterson. As revolting a bundle of simulated muscle as you’ll ever see.”
“A cyborg? Like Leong?”
Wolruf was referring to Jeff Leong, a young man whose brain had spent a rather unpleasant period in a mechanical robotic body while the Avery robots on Robot City had repaired and healed his damaged human body.
>
“No, a humaniform robot,” Derec said. “Looks exactly like a human. Almost impossible to tell from the real thing.”
“‘u’re jealous of a robot?”
Wolruf gave that phlegm gargle again.
Derec said nothing. The conversation was veering in an unpleasant direction.
“Ah, a sorrr point,” Wolruf said. “My apologies.”
“We’re here,” Derec said as he pulled the runabout to the curb in front of the apartment.
He looked up anxiously to the second floor.
“‘u’re expecting trouble?” Wolruf said.
She was reading his mind again.
“No. Mandelbrot would have phoned me,” Derec said, not quite truthfully, for he did feel just a shade anxious as he got out of the small vehicle. Mandelbrot and SilverSide didn’t seem to understand one another. Perhaps he should not have left a robot to babysit another robot.
But everything seemed normal when they walked into the small two-bedroom apartment on the second floor. Mandelbrot was standing in his storage niche in the wall near the door. SilverSide was plugged into Derec’s terminal and didn’t even turn around when they came in.
“Impressive,” Wolruf said, her eyes going wide as she stared at the robot at the terminal. “‘e’s certainly got ‘urrr scrawny shape.”
SilverSide’s lustrous silvery exterior only approximated the details of Derec’s appearance, but in size and proportions, it was, indeed, an excellent approximation.
Wolruf was exaggerating, of course. Derec was not scrawny. He was thin, but well endowed with sinewy biceps and with the hard plates of muscle across chest and abdomen typical of an older teen’s torso.
But with that humorous barb, Wolruf had hit that sensitive nerve again. Derec did feel inadequate whenever he thought of Jacob Winterson.
“Everything under control, Mandelbrot?” Derec asked. He had walked to the center of the room, hesitated when SilverSide did not respond to their entrance, and then turned to address Mandelbrot.
He got no answer from the robot in the niche.