by Isaac Asimov
Why did the Compass Tower look so diseased? Derec asked himself. Was it possible for him, as a lucid dreamer, to change that? He concentrated on the building’s shape, trying to restore it to its architecturally magnificent pyramidal form. But nothing happened. If anything, the tower became uglier, and he had to look away from it.
In the distance something came toward him, traveling down the street at a high speed. As it passed by buildings, the buildings changed. When it neared, he saw it was a vehicle, but one quite unlike any Robot City mode of transportation. It ran on three thick wheels, making it vaguely resemble a jitney, the smaller, lighter utility type of vehicle used for taxiing around the city. The vehicle’s body was misshapen, as if a lot of ungeometric chunks had been welded together on a long central stem. It was colored black and gray in an illogical and splotchy fashion.
Still certain he was in the midst of a lucid dream, Derec stood defiantly in the center of the roadway — daring the vehicle to come to a screeching stop at his feet. Which it did. Good, he thought, I’m in control of the dream at last. Just watch me now.
A large hatch at the top of the vehicle sprang open with an explosive sound, and Dr. Avery, his father, pulled himself through the opening. What kind of a lucid dream was this? The last person he wanted to see was his megalomaniacal father, interfering in a dream in just the way he’d interfered with Derec’s life, injecting him with chemfets and transforming him into a walking computer. Half-computer, anyway.
Avery was looking more demented than usual. His eyes, usually intense, now glowed with an overdramatic madness. In fact, Avery looked so exaggerated that Derec felt he could relax. No reason to be afraid, after all, just a dream. A dream he would seize control of at any moment.
Ariel placed her hand upon Jacob’s. His hand, she noted, felt soft, more like human than humaniform. She told him to stop. There was no need for him to become human. Even if he found a formula, it would be foolish to use it. As a humaniform robot, Jacob had all the virtues of human existence without all the miseries, without human physical and emotional pains.
Jacob turned away from the computer and looked at Ariel, for a moment a humanlike sadness in his eyes.
“Don’t you see?” he said, “I want the misery. I want to feel what a human feels. Pain, happiness, love. I want to love you, Mistress Ariel.”
She put a finger on his lips. In contrast to his hand, they felt robotic, hard metal lips that could, if she pressed hard enough, make her fingertip bleed. She almost wanted to test that out. If she tried to cut her hand, would Jacob be able to invoke the First Law of Robotics — the part stating that a robot could not allow a human to come to harm — fast enough to prevent her from succeeding?
“You can’t love me, Jacob,” she said tenderly. “I love Derec, so there’s no point in your loving me. It would be — what do they call it in romances — unrequited.”
“That wouldn’t matter. I would be happy with that, too. I could respond to it, as in your great literary works. I could, like one of your legendary lovers, die falling off a bridge or swimming a river or with a vial of poison and a great dagger plunging in —”
“Hush, Jacob. Please stop. I wouldn’t want you to die for me.”
“I am already dead.”
“No, don’t say that. You’re here. You’re —”
“In a grave.”
“Jacob —”
“A rotting scrap pile of metal, spare parts covered by soil.”
His words were so fiercely spoken they frightened her. She backed away from him.
Dr. Avery was dressed in a black-and-gray silver-buttoned uniform that seemed too militaristic for a scientist.
“You look bemused,” he said, then added almost contemptuously: “... my son. What is bothering you?”
“It’s well, it’s that this is my dream, and I’m supposed to be in control, and you’re not welcome in it.”
Avery smiled sinisterly. “You can’t get me out of it. I am everywhere. In the city, in your dreams, in your hat.”
“My hat? I don’t even wear a —”
“Just an old Earth expression. I am an expert in old Earth expressions. Can it, flip out, you’re the bee’s knees, life is hard and then you die. I know Earth expressions from all parts of its history.”
“But I wouldn’t know any, and this is my dream, and you come out of my mind.”
“Are you sure?”
“I know you’re nowhere near. I am on a ship heading for Robot City. You may be in the city, muddling things up as usual, but you’re not on this ship.”
“Maybe I am. I am, after all, omniscient and omnipotent.”
“I know, I know. Always a god in your own mind.”
“Yes.”
If this was a lucid dream, Derec thought, then he should be able to flee from the old bastard. He whirled around and started running down the street. On both sides of him buildings seemed to slip into the ground while new ones popped out.
Many buildings were oddly shaped, not at all like any existing Robot City ones. Some were tilted at odd angles, with several leaning into others while others leaned away. In the distance a tall edifice swayed from side to side as if caught in a violent wind. But there was a rhythm to its swaying, reminding him of a dance. What dance? Something intruding from his past, a vague memory that would not get focused. His past had a way of doing that, with some memory fragment flashing into his mind and going right out again before he could make any connection with it. There were so many parts of his past life that were still blocked from his mind by the amnesia that had once been total.
Ariel suddenly found herself in an underground corridor on Earth, but it looked nothing like any of the tunnels she had seen during her actual visit there. For one thing, it was deserted. You never saw an empty passageway on Earth. Human bodies were visible everywhere, except in private quarters.
Her steps echoed hollowly through the corridor, with a hundred echoes of echoes. She felt as if she were being hounded by a mob of people all walking at her exact pace. Each time she turned around to confront her trackers, there was no one in sight.
She came to a Section Kitchen, the kind of public eating area she’d come to despise. Plenty of food steamed on cafeteria-style trays, but no people sat at the many numbered tables or worked behind the counters. The room looked as if there had been a sudden alarm and everyone had scurried out.
She felt hungry, and, taking a spoon and wiping it thoroughly on a paper napkin (she was an Auroran, after all, who was repelled by Earth’s poor hygienic habits), she scooped out a biteful of something soft and white. However, when she put it in her mouth, it seemed to flame up and singe her tongue and the roof of her mouth. She spit it out.
“Are you poisoned, Mistress Ariel?” It was Jacob again, appearing at her side as if by magic.
“No. But it is good of you to ask.”
“I must. First Law.”
“Oh, of course. If you decide to become human, Jacob, you won’t have to obey the Laws of Robotics any more. I’ll miss the advantage of having you protect me.”
“I would protect you, mistress, whether I were human or robot.”
There was something so touching, something so sad and vulnerable about this dream version of her dead robot companion, that Ariel began to cry. She cried in her dream, and she was still crying when she woke up.
Derec looked back. Avery and his strange vehicle had vanished from the center of the street. Good, at least something in this lucid dream had worked out right.
Ahead of him there was a park. Derec could see tall trees, thick with branches, heavy with green leaves. Brightly colored flowers lined cobblestone paths. Metal umbrellas shaded soft lights that were spaced evenly along the pathways. At the top of a slight rise, he could see swings, slides, see-saws, monkey bars, all the equipment of a playground.
He raced toward the park, picking up his pace. The street seemed to speed beneath him as if he were powering a treadmill. Before he reached the park, the bu
ildings lining the street grew larger, towering over the thoroughfare, bending toward it, shading the light and making everything darker.
His last step from the city street onto the park’s cobbled path was an impressive leap, one longer than he could normally accomplish. Landing, he stumbled forward for several steps.
He started walking toward the playground. The pathway was soft, resilient. He decided to trot, and the bounciness of the path added a spring to his steps. He attained such a speed that he nearly skidded past the playground entrance.
A closed gate blocked the way into the playground. Above the gate was a gilded sign that read, A VERY PARK. The old reprobate, he’d named a park after himself. What gall! playgrounds were supposed to represent happiness and joy. In no way did they suggest the doctor’s monstrous cynicism.
Underneath the large sign was a smaller one that read, STAND ON SOAP, ALL GEEKS WHO MENTOR HERE. What did Avery mean by that? And how could he, after all, mean anything? He was merely a figure in Derec’s dream. The real question was how could Derec’s mind have formed this unusual scene, these strange words. He would have to discuss all this with Ariel, the expert on such matters.
When he opened the gate, there was a sonorous beep as the gate-latch separated from its fastening. A deep voice that seemed to come from above said, “Welcome. Enjoy.”
“Enjoy what?” Derec asked. There was no reply, no doubt because the voice was a recording cued by the opening of the gate.
Tentatively he took a couple of steps into the playground. To his immediate right was a high slide. Even though he didn’t remember his childhood, he knew it was a slide. It even looked like a familiar one. Walking up to it, he discovered it was incomplete. No ladder led up to the platform from which a child would start his downward plunge. The slide appeared to stand without any support.
An overwhelming urge to try out the slide came over him. Although he could have climbed from the bottom edge of the slide up to the platform at its top, he knew he had to start from the platform itself. This was his lucid dream and he could do anything he wanted to, including jump higher than was physically possible. Crouching down as close to the ground as he could get, he jumped up. He reached for the edge of the platform, but just missed. Back on the ground, he scrunched down again and made a second, magnificent leap that took him higher than the level of the platform. Reaching out, he grabbed its rim. Struggling and grunting, he pulled himself onto the small platform. It bounced up and down like a diving board, nearly flinging him back to the ground.
The slide seemed even taller than it had from ground level, or else he had become very small, a child again. Looking down at his hands, he saw they’d shrunk. They were child’s hands. Not only that, his clothing had been magically transformed. He was now dressed in one of those silver jumpers that were once all the rage for toddlers. (How did he know about silver jumpers?) Before he could even speculate on this mystery, a voice from down below called to him: “C’mon down the slide, honey. I’ll catch you.”
There was a woman standing at the foot of the slide. She seemed tall and thin, but he could not make out the details of her face, even though it was turned upward at him. Her voice was soft and wonderfully friendly. He felt ready to slide down to her. But, even as he stared at her, her shape changed. Now she was a short, rather plump lady in odd, out-of-date clothes, but the face was still not discernible. Was this some trick of one of the Silversides? Were they experimenting with human shapes, using pictures they extracted from the ship computer?
“Don’t be afraid, honey,” the woman said. Was he mistaken, or was that Eve Silverside’s voice? “You won’t falloff the slide. It’ll be all right.”
If it was a Silverside, he or she just might make him fall to the ground by pulling her hands away just as he reached the bottom edge. He shrunk back, no longer wanting to slide down.
The woman was now medium height, medium build, wearing a pristinely white lab smock. No matter what shape she took, what clothes she wore, he still saw no face. He knew there was a face there. It just wouldn’t come into focus for him in spite of the vivid details of the rest of her.
“Let go of those bars, dear, and come down. Don’t worry. Mommy’ll catch you.”
Mommy! This was his mother? No, it must be a Silverside, playing a joke. He didn’t know his mother and, in fact, knew very little about her. His father had provided no information. How could a Silverside even hope to duplicate her? Wait. This was a dream. The woman below was neither Silverside nor his mother. It was an apparition from his own mind.
One thing he did know now. He didn’t want to go down the slide, not even to his mother’s eagerly awaiting arms. He started to scream. His screams sounded childlike, shrill, highpitched, tremulous.
“No, I’m not coming down. I’m not! I’m not!”
“It’s all right, David. Mommy’s right here.”
David: his real name, or at least the one that Ariel and his father had said was the right one. Perhaps this was no dream and this was really his mother. If he slid down, he could see her better. But her arms might turn into knives, fire, pain. He was suddenly very afraid of her.
“Leave me alone!” he screamed. “Leave me alone!”
Suddenly the bars he was clutching became red-hot, and so did the metal beneath him. It felt the way a slide did when it had been standing in the sun at high noon on the hottest day of the year. (How did he know that?)
He could not hold on.
He had to let go.
He slid down, screaming.
His mother’s face seemed to come up at him, but there were still no recognizable features on it.
He saw her reach out toward him.
And woke up.
He could feel the sweat on his face as he stared up into the lovely face of Ariel Welsh. She stood beside his bunk, her arms reaching out to him just like his dream-mother’s had.
Chapter 2
DEALING WITH THE SILVERSIDES
ARIEL RUBBED DEREC’S forehead gently. The way she touched him was now one of his favorite things in life. It seemed to him that her fingertips did not actually make contact with his skin but merely gave off comforting rays as they passed above it. Ariel had told him that there were people who appeared to heal the sick because of the comforting warm emanations that came from their hands. The warmth had actually been measured and was sometimes burning hot. On the planet Solaria, she told him, such affection or healing was rare. Solarians obeyed taboos against touching others, and that seemed sad to her.
“You’re positively drenched in sweat, Derec. That must have been one whale of a dream.”
“It was. Awful.”
“I know how you feel. I just had a lulu of a nightmare myself.”
“What was your dream about?”
She didn’t want to tell him that it concerned Jacob Winterson or that she had awakened crying. He’d been somewhat jealous of Jacob, so the subject was best ignored right now.
“Nothing special. Tell me yours.”
“There was the city, Robot City, and it was all strange, mixed up. And my father in a car that looked like a disease. And... and... my mother...”
“Hush, hush. Take it easy. When you’re ready, tell me all about it, calmly and in order.”
He nodded. Getting up from the bunk, he brushed past her. As he paced, he concentrated on stretching the sleep out of his muscles and lowering his breathing to an acceptable rhythm, “I thought I was having a lucid dream, but, you know, I was never able to control it, not even for a second.”
As he related the dream, Ariel noted that his face and voice were childlike. Sometimes she forgot how young they actually were. All the responsibility and strain of their lives since they had first come to Robot City had seemed to age them incredibly. Sometimes her mental image of herself was of a much older woman, one who’d been coping with adversity for so long that the experience registered in deep lines on her face. However, a look into any mirror showed her the same young, almost adolescent
, mien: the baby fat of her cheeks, the brightness of her eyes, the radiance of her long black hair, the youthful sheen of her skin. Her figure, once fairly gaunt, had filled out well, too — as Derec so often reminded her.
Looking into his tired eyes, realizing he had not slept well for some time, she wondered how a couple of kids like them had stumbled into a life filled with so much tension and danger. Why couldn’t they go back to Aurora (they had been there, excited with their love, for too brief a time) and romp without care through one of its lovely forests or swim in a placid lake? If not Aurora, the strictly regimented, uncomfortably overpopulated Earth might even do. Anywhere where they could be suitably young for a while.
“What do you make of it, Ariel? The dream?”
She wondered how much analysis he could take right now. His face pale beneath his damp, sandy hair, he looked vulnerable.
“Well, I don’t really know. Maybe all the worries you’ve had, what with the strange messages you’ve been getting from Robot City, maybe they’re just coming out in your dreams.”
Derec’s chemfets had gone haywire when he had tried to contact Robot City. Normally he could easily check on operations there from vast distances across space, but all he could sense these days was some vague activity and some nonsense he could not interpret. The last time he’d tried, he could swear the central computer was too occupied with transmitting a medley of unusual songs to bother responding to him. That wasn’t the way the chemfet system was supposed to work. The computer was the conduit between Derec’s chemfets and Robot City, allowing him to run the place and, since the responsibility was so awesome, to delegate authority properly to the appropriate robots. In a way, Robot City had become an extension of Derec, or at least of him and his wishes, his orders, his plans and dreams for the city’s future. He had previously been able to take charge of any part of the city’s operations in an instant, without having to accept musical digressions from a computer. Now a good part of the city’s activities seemed shut off from him.