Robots

by Jack Dann

  "The year one million. Humanity evolves beyond anything we can currently imagine. How does she respond?"

  "She mimics their evolution. No—she's been shaping their evolution! She wants a risk-free method of going to the stars, so she's been encouraging a type of being that would strongly desire such a thing. She isn't among the first to use it, though. She waits a few hundred generations for it to prove itself."

  The mech, who had been listening in fascinated silence, now said, "Suppose that never happens. What if starflight will always remain difficult and perilous? What then?"

  "It was once thought that people would never fly. So much that looks impossible becomes simple if you only wait."

  "Four billion years. The sun uses up its hydrogen, its core collapses, helium fusion begins, and it balloons into a red giant. Earth is vaporized."

  "Oh, she'll be somewhere else by then. That's easy."

  "Five billion years. The Milky Way collides with the Andromeda Galaxy and the whole neighborhood is full of high-energy radiation and exploding stars."

  "That's trickier. She's going to have to either prevent that or move a few million light-years away to a friendlier galaxy. But she'll have time enough to prepare and to assemble the tools. I have faith that she'll prove equal to the task."

  "One trillion years. The last stars gutter out. Only black holes remain."

  "Black holes are a terrific source of energy. No problem."

  "One-point-six googol years."

  "Googol?"

  "That's ten raised to the hundredth power—one followed by a hundred zeros. The heat-death of the universe. How does she survive it?"

  "She'll have seen it coming for a long time," the mech said. "When the last black holes dissolve, she'll have to do without a source of free energy. Maybe she could take and rewrite her personality into the physical constants of the dying universe. Would that be possible?"

  "Oh, perhaps. But I really think that the lifetime of the universe is long enough for anyone," the granddaughter said. "Mustn't get greedy."

  "Maybe so," the old man said thoughtfully. "Maybe so." Then, to the mech, "Well, there you have it: a glimpse into the future, and a brief biography of the first immortal, ending, alas, with her death. Now tell me. Knowing that you contributed something, however small, to that accomplishment—wouldn't that be enough?"

  "No," Jack said. "No, it wouldn't."

  Brandt made a face. "Well, you're young. Let me ask you this: Has it been a good life so far? All in all?"

  "Not that good. Not good enough."

  For a long moment, the old man was silent. Then, "Thank you," he said. "I valued our conversation." The interest went out of his eyes and he looked away.

  Uncertainly, Jack looked at the granddaughter, who smiled and shrugged. "He's like that," she said apologetically. "He's old. His enthusiasms wax and wane with his chemical balances. I hope 'you don't mind."

  "I see." The young man stood. Hesitantly, he made his way to the door.

  At the door, he glanced back and saw the granddaughter tearing her linen napkin into little bits and eating the shreds, delicately washing them down with sips of wine.

  Jimmy Guangs House of Gladmech

  Ala' Irvine

  New writer Alex Irvine made his first sale in 2000 to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and has since made several more sales to that magazine, as well as sales to Asimov's Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, Strange Horizons, Live Without a Net, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Starlight 3, Polyphony, Electric Velocipede, and elsewhere. His well-received first novel, A Scattering of Jades, was released in 2002 and was followed by his first collection, Rossetti Song. His most recent book is a new collection, Unintended Consequences, and coming up is a new novel, One King, One Soldier. He lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

  Here he takes us to a remote, war-torn country to visit a sporting arena where the combatants cannot die—but the stakes are life-or-death.

  Jimmy Gllang Hamíd smoked tobacco cigars until he found out that vat-grown lungs were still prone to immune-rejection problems and that the vat wranglers hadn't made much headway on what they called amongst themselves the Larynx Problem. Then he went over to herb-andmarijuana panatelas, anxious to maintain his image as a Golden Age wheeler-dealer, but not so anxious for a long convalescence or opportunistic infection following a double pulmonary.

  But he was in Kyrgyzstan, anyway, a long way from organ vats, and the only people there who cared about his image were the Russians. The Russians were the only people who cared about lots of things in the brutalized city of Osh, a still-proud prominence in the tank-tracked, cluster-bombed, spider-mined, cruise-missiled ruins of what had once, a hundred years or so before, been the southern part of the Soviet Empire. Now Kyrgyzstan was a member of the Islamist Federation, a loose group of non-Arab Muslim states, and the Russians fought with the IF out of concern over concentration of power in Central Asia but mostly out of sheer terror of what would happen if their soldiers were ever allowed to come home.

  Jimmy Guang was not a deeply religious man, although he'd been raised a Muslim and inhabited the belief the way he inhabited his tastes in food or. music. He took no sides between the IF and the Russians and the Chinese, who hovered like a storm waiting to break from the East. He had come to these wars thinking he could make money.

  He came to the city of Osh, on the flanks of the Ferghana Valley, a sliver of warm green pointing up into the windswept expanse of the Tien Shan ranges. Once Osh had been a major stop along the Silk Road. Alexander the Great had slept there. Mohammed had prayed there. Now there wasn't much left after sixty years of sporadic war, but it was close to Tashkent without being too close, and the last thing a foreign entrepreneur wanted was to be too close to Tashkent. Or, for that matter, Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, which was still alive with bad, bad bugs the Russians had left during their previous visit.

  Osh was no longer a major part of anything. It still had its legendary bazaar, and it was still warmer than just about anywhere else in K-stan, but even for war profiteering it didn't offer the potential of Karachi or Almaty or Yerevan. Still, Jimmy Guang came there with his cigars and his pinstriped suits and his silk ties, a good hundred years out of fashion, and he started making • deals. He knew people in Singapore, his father was still living in Jaipur and an uncle in Xian, he'd gladhanded his way over the Khyber Pass and through the Karakoram, sneaking through the Muslim hinterlands of China on the strength of his gap-toothed grin and fragmentary bits of half a dozen languages he'd picked up around the house when he was a kid. Jimmy Guang Hamid could get things.

  He set up quietly, in a bombed-out storefront on Lenin Street, not far from the bazaar but not too close either. Jimmy Guang was always careful about distance. For the first week he swept and cleaned and arranged, covered over holes. in the walls and made himself a pallet behind a curtain. He would take his meals at restaurants, the better to be seen, but not expensive restaurants because behind his facade of leisure and comfort Jimmy Guang Hamid was desperately poor. He washed in the restrooms of the restaurants he patronized; he burned incense under his shirts so he could save the expense of cleaning them; he scavenged in the burned-out university campus for flaps of furniture vinyl to stitch onto his shoes. If he did not succeed here in Osh, there was a good chance that he would starve to death on his way back to India or China.

  He was as piratical and polyglot a stereotype as had ever been encountered in those parts, and that's exactly how he wanted it. Let them think him a buffoon. Let them insult the many strains of his ethnicity, and the many colors of his ties. He would consider bargains.

  It only took a few days for him to get to know people, and a few days after that to broker his first deal, between a Russian quartermaster suffering from an excess of toothpaste and an Uzbek merchant who had found himself awash in vodka straight from Kiev. The Uzbek traded mostly among the more fundamentalist IF brigades, who wouldn't drink the vodka anyway, and the Russian would make a ki
lling from his alcoholic and lonely compatriots.

  "Amazing thing, war," Jimmy Guang said in his creolized Russian to the quartermaster, whose name was Yevgeny. They clinked glasses. "Even in the midst of all this misery and misunderstanding, still there is commerce. Still we find ways to get what we need. Something grand about it."

  Allahu akbar, thought Jimmy Guang, even though he wasn't particularly religious.

  Yevgeny muttered a toast and drank. Jimmy Guang knew in that moment, early on a Thursday morning in May of 2083, with a fine sharp breeze shuddering down out of the Pamir range, that he would survive. He had been right to come to Osh.

  The man who sold Jimmy Guang his first gladmechs reminded him of his father, and for that reason Jimmy Guang walked away-from the deal certain that he had gotten the worse of it. No man could bargain with his father.

  "I have no use for these," the old German trader said.

  "Nor do I," Jimmy Guang said. He thought it odd that a German should remind him of his father Reza, a proud glowering Persian who claimed ancestry among the Mughal conquerors of India. He had already decided to buy the robots, six creaking Izmit general-services models. He knew he could put them to use, and he was beginning to have financial reserves sufficient to quiet his anxieties about the return voyage to India, should that become necessary.

  "Put them in a pit, have them fight each other," said the Russian who had inspected the truck and pocketed three of Jimmy Guang's cigars to ignore its doubtful papers. "That's what they do everywhere else."

  "Is that so," said Jimmy Guang, and just like that his course was set.

  On the edge of the university campus was a long row of corrugated-tin sheds. One, which judging from the deep oil stains in its concrete floor had once held heavy equipment, was still intact. It measured forty meters long by some twenty-five wide, which Jimmy Guang figured was big enough to cordon off an arena and still pack in something like a thousand spectators. He placed a call to the robots, and was surprised to see them all arrive in a Russian army truck driven by the beneficiary of Jimmy Guang's smoky baksheesh the day before.

  "I was waiting for you to tell them where to go," the soldier said as he got down from the truck's cab. He was tall and heavy and blond. Jimmy Guang could not imagine what it would be like to fight him when he was fully suited and armed. "Monitoring you. My name is Slava. You want these robots to fight, you're going to need them fixed up a little. I'll do it."

  "There's no money for a mechanic," said Jimmy Guang, thinking that brushing Slava away would cost him more cigars. He resolved to get better encryption for his personal commlink. •

  "I'll do it free. Just to see them fight." A toothy grin split Slava's blunt face.

  This was a deal Jimmy Guang could not refuse. He and Slava got the six Izmits off the truck and into the hangar, where they spent the rest of the day cleaning and cordoning off the arena space. Then Jimmy Guang gathered the mechs together.

  "What we're going to do here is you're going to fight each other," he said.

  "This is outside our parameters," one of the mechs said.

  "We are not adaptive intelligences," added another.

  Jimmy Guang had anticipated this. "The instructions are simple. A waste-management task. Each of you is to render the others fit for a standard industrial recyc. This requires separation of extremities from the trunk. Are you familiar with this protocol?"

  "I am," each of the robots said.

  After that, it was a matter of hanging posters, making sure there were enough pretty girls to run concession stands, and letting it be known that the house would take forty percent of all wagers. A few days later the six Izmits, painted different colors on Jimmy Guang's theory that this would promote audience identification and therefore wagering, banged and jerked each other to sparking pieces before a raucous and intensely partisan crowd of locals. By the end, the last surviving robot careened around the arena to thunderous cheers, missing one ann and trailing glittery strings of fiber-optic from holes punched in its trunk.

  Jimmy Guang made enough on the evening that he didn't have to worry about hunger for two weeks. With some of what was left over he had his trousers hemmed and splurged on a box of tobacco cigars from Ankara, vat problems or no. That night he sat in his office listening to Russian rockets exploding in the hills, and he thought to himself: You can take your mind off anything. You can even take your mind off love. But you cannot take your mind off being hungry.

  Of course the next day he fell in love.

  Iviarta WAS her name. Jimmy Guang met her while trying to sell her uncle Gregor razor blades and Sri Lankan pornography. She looked curiously at the porn disks, then crinkled around the eyes and looked at her feet when she saw him watching her. This combination of humor and modesty caught his attention, as did the fall of her hair across her eyes. She had his mother's eyes, thought Jimmy Guang, that sharp black gaze that missed nothing. "Marta is ruined," her uncle said. "The Russians did it. At least she fought."

  She had three missing teeth, Gregor went on, where a Russian soldier had hit her with a rifle butt to stop her fighting back. Gregor told the story like it had happened in a video. Jimmy Guang listened to it with growing embarrassment that made him look more closely at Marta. A crease of scar split her upper lip on the left side, and he thought about her missing teeth. He himself was missing a tooth, although he had no dramatic story other than gingivitis and an unsympathetic dentist.

  And he had been ruined himself a time or two. He waited until Gregor was preoccupied with the finest filth Colombo could produce, and then he sidled up next to Marta and asked if she would like to take a trip to the Toktogul Reservoir.

  No, she said. It was too heavily guarded.

  Jimmy Guang knew a way in.

  He smiled at her, made sure that the gap was visible between bicuspid and incisor on the upper right side of his mouth.

  Marta glanced at him, then looked away. Her left hand rested at the corner of her mouth. It has been a long time since I went swimming, she said.

  He didn't see her for nearly a week after their first meeting, but she was never far from his mind. The thought of her distracted him as he dickered with Yevgeny over another truckload of robots. When he'd paid too much for the robots and even absently agreed to take the stolen truck off Yevgeny's hands, he went back to his office and thought about how much he wanted to watch Marta swim. She would remove her vest and shoes, perhaps her top skirt. Maybe she even would appear in a bathing suit, or he could present her with one. That was it. Yes. She would strip down to her bathing suit, every line and motion clean and wary as a cat's, and he would sit on the bank with a cigar while she stepped into the black water, disturbing the reflections of mountains, and swam, eyes closed and corners of her mouth relaxed into a faint smile. It struck him that he very badly wanted to see her happy, and he could not understand why.

  Jimmy Gam' second evening as gladiatorial impresario eetered on the edge of debacle from the moment the grim cluster of Russian soldiers entered the arena. What had been a raucous crowd of several hundred fell nearly silent. Jimmy Guang heard muttered profanities in Kirghiz, Russian, Arabic.

  The lone officer in the group of Russians approached Jimmy Guang. "You are fighting robots here," he said.

  Jimmy Guang saw no way to plausibly deny this, so he nodded.

  The officer nodded back. "How much to watch?"

  A delicate situation, this. The officer might be leading Jimmy Guang into an admission of war privateering. He might simply expect Jimmy Guang to announce that he and his men could watch for free, which would of course remind everyone present of the inequities that had provoked the Islamic Federation's war in the first place.

  Or, thought Jimmy Guang, he might be willing to pay. "Rubles, dollars, or yen?" he said.

  The Russian officer paid for himself and his men—in American dollars—and they moved in a loose group toward one corner of the arena. Slava Butsayev was already there, and he came across the arena floor to jo
in the other Russians. Jimmy Guang continued his introductory patter—he had already begun flamboyantly naming each of the robots and claiming an illustrious heritage of victory for most—until he was interrupted by a teenage Kirghiz boy who leaned forward as one of the Russian soldiers walked by and spat on the man's boots.

  Jimmy Guang knew for the rest of his life that many people might have died in those next few seconds, and that he might have been one of them. But in the endless moment that stretched out after the boy's expectoration, he thought of only one thing: walking across the Khyber Pass to India, penniless and hungry with hundreds of kilometers of empty mountains between him and the nearest human who cared.

  "No!" he shouted, and rushed to put himself between the soldier and the defiant boy. "No!" The soldier took a step, and Jimmy Guang, to his everlasting surprise, put a hand in the man's chest and nudged him back. "Not in here! Everyone pays the same here, everyone watches the same here. The war is outside! The war stops at the door!"

  A long moment passed, and then the Russian officer touched him on the shoulder. Jimmy Guang shut his mouth and made himself ready to die.

  "Tell the boy to clean up his mess," the officer said. Jimmy Guang looked at the boy. He grew more acutely aware that had saved a life. Perhaps more than one.

  His bravado began to melt away, and as it did Jimmy Guang felt the enormity of what he was doing begin to impress itself on him. He drew his handkerchief from his breast pocket and passed it to the soldier, who wiped his boot and handed it back. Jimmy Guang, already regretting the loss of his only good silk handkerchief, held it out for the boy to take. A small voice in the back of his mind said, Now you've done it. Now you'll always be stuck in between them. At the edge of his field of vision he saw Slava Butsayev looking intently at him, as though he were one of the robots with unclear prospects in the ring.