“Not for a while. Use this time to think instead. And get me a cup of coffee.”

Lucius moved at once to obey. Avery looked over to Adam and Eve, still sitting silently at the table. Their eyes had been upon Avery all along, though, and it was obvious they were waiting for him to lower the boom on them as well.

He held their gaze for what seemed an eternity even to Derec, who felt that he could cut the tension between them with a knife.

At last Avery broke the spell. “Boo,” he said and turned his attention back to his breakfast.

It was a quiet day on board the Wild Goose Chase. The ship had made its first jump on schedule in the night, and was now coasting at high speed through the waypoint star system toward the next jump point, which it would reach early the next morning. There was little to do in the meantime save look out at the stars, read, or play games. The robots were making themselves scarce, save for Lucius, who followed Avery like a shadow wherever he went. Even Mandelbrot was more taciturn than usual, no doubt trying to decide for himself where he fit into the general scheme of things as they now stood.

Derec decided to show Wolruf how to play chess, but gave it up when the alien insisted that the pieces should move in packs. He spent the rest of the day with a book, and went to bed early. Wolruf also went to bed, expressing her faith in the automatic controls to make the jump on schedule without her.

Derec surprised himself by actually being able to sleep with no one at the helm. Evidently boredom was a stronger force than worry. He managed to escape both in dreams, but his dreams ended suddenly in the middle of the night when he awoke with a start to the shrill howl of an alarm. He sat up and called on the light, trying to shake the sleep from his head enough to decide what to do next.

“What’s the matter?” Ariel asked sleepily. She sat up beside him, gathering the sheet around her as if for protection.

“I don’t know. I’ll go see.” Derec made to get out of bed.

“Why don’t you just ask?” Ariel was always quicker to wake up than he was.

“Oh. Yeah.” What’s going on? he sent out over the comlink.

General alert, a featureless voice replied. The autopilot, no doubt. Life support system failure.

Life support! Derec suddenly felt his breath catch. What happened to it?

The oxygen regeneration system has failed.

He let his breath out again in a sigh of relief. Oxygen regeneration was serious, but not as serious as, say, a breach in the hull. They weren’t actually losing air, at least.

“There’s a problem with the oxygen regenerator,” he said to Ariel. “Come on, let’s see how bad it is.”

As they pulled on their robes and stepped out into the hallway, Derec realized that the best thing to do in a case like this was to go back to sleep and reduce their oxygen consumption while the robots fixed the problem, but the time to think of that would have been before the alarm woke everyone up, not after. He couldn’t have slept now unless he were drugged, and he had no intention of drugging himself in the middle of an emergency.

Shut off the alarm, he sent, and relative quiet descended upon the ship. There was still the clatter of feet and voices coming from the other bedrooms. Derec heard Avery demanding loudly that Lucius find his pants, and across the hall Wolruf howled something in her own tongue.

Ariel was already headed for the common room. Derec followed her down the hallway, through the now-unfurnished room, and through the open door beside the automat into the back part of the ship where the engines and other machinery stood.

The smell alerted him even before he saw the flickering glow or heard the crackle of flame. Something furry was burning. He looked over Ariel’s head and saw flame silhouetting three robots, Adam and Eve and Mandelbrot, who were all emptying fire extinguishers into the blaze. A lot more than just something furry was burning.

“Look out!” Ariel shouted, backing up and bumping into Derec as a tongue of flame shot out, engulfing one of the robots.

Derec reacted with almost instinctive speed. Wrapping an arm around Ariel, he pulled her back into the common room, shouted, “Door close!” and even as it began to slide shut added, “Make this door airtight and vent the engine room to space!”

The door shut with a soft thump, seemed to melt until it was just a ripple in the wall, then hardened. From beyond came a loud whoosh, diminishing quickly to silence.

Mandlebrot! Derec sent. Can you hear me?

I am receiving your transmission, Mandelbrot replied, always the stickler for accuracy.

Are you okay?

I am functional; however, I am drifting away from the ship.

“Frost!” Derec said aloud. “I blew Mandelbrot out into space along with the fire! “ He turned and ran for the control room, sending, Hang on, old buddy. We’re coming after you. How about Adam and Eve? Are you guys still there?

We are, another voice sent, and the fire is extinguished. We will assess the damage while you retrieve Mandelbrot.

No! Mandelbrot sent. You must not. The engines could have been damaged in the fire.

I’ll just use the attitude controls, then.

Whatever Mandelbrot said to that, Derec never heard it. He collided headfirst with Avery as Avery came out of his bedroom, sending both of them sprawling on the floor.

“Why don’t you look where you’re going for a change?” Avery growled. “What’s going on around here, anyway?”

“Fire in the engine room,” Derec answered, getting to his feet and offering Avery a hand up. Lucius, still under Avery’s orders, beat him to it. Derec shrugged and dropped his hand. “We’ve got it out, but Mandelbrot got blown into space. I’m going after him.”

“What burned?”

Avery’s question reminded Derec that they had other problems than just a robot overboard. Some part of him hadn’t wanted to face that just yet, still didn’t, but Ariel was standing just behind him and she said, “Life support. The whole recycling system was on fire.”

“What?”

Derec felt tempted to say, “You should have your hearing checked,” but he suppressed the urge. Instead he said, “See for yourself, but be careful. The engine room is still in vacuum.” He moved around Avery and on toward the control room, Ariel in tow.

Wolruf was already there, peering into a short-range navigation holo-screen while she wove the attitude control joystick through a gentle loop that brought the ship around to aim toward Mandelbrot. Internal gravity kept them from feeling the acceleration, but through the view screen Derec could see a tiny stick figure grow into a robot as they drew near. Mandelbrot held his arms and legs out as far as they would go, either to help his rescuers see him or to minimize his spin. Wolruf slowed the ship with the forward jets rather than spinning it around and braking with the main engines, so they got to watch him grow larger and larger until he thumped spread-eagled into the viewscreen.

Derec and Ariel both flinched, and Wolruf laughed. The viewscreen was much more than just a simple pane of glass; it was an array of optical sensors on the hull transmitting a composite image to the display inside. The hull in between was just as thick as anywhere else on the ship. Derec knew that, but it worked like a window just the same, and his reflexes treated it as such.

Mandelbrot crawled off the sensor array and disappeared from view. Thank you, he sent, and moments later he added, I am inside the engine room again.

How bad is it? Derec asked.

Very bad, the robot replied.

“It looks like the old question of who quits breathing first,” Avery said. They were sitting at the table in the common area, three humans and a caninoid alien. The four robots stood against the walls around the table, Mandelbrot behind Derec, Lucius behind Avery, and Adam and Eve together behind Ariel. Wolruf sat alone at her end of the table. It was more than coincidence. With a life threatening crisis on board, the robots’ First Law imperative to protect humans from harm didn’t extend to her.

Avery looked genuinely worried for the first time in Derec’s memory. His face was pale and drawn, an effect his white hair and sideburns only accentuated. He held his hands together in front of him on the table, neither gesturing with them nor drumming with them as he would have if he was just speaking normally.

“The recycler is toast,” he said in a voice devoid of emotion. “We have enough air left for three days for the four of us, four days if we sleep all the way. It’s five more days to Ceremya. That means one of us has to stop breathing, and I say the obvious choice is Wolruf.”

“I’ll try,” the alien said, puffing out her cheeks and rolling her eyes around in their sockets. When that failed to get a laugh, she let her breath out in a sigh and said, “Thought a little ‘umor might lighten the mood. Sorry.”

“This isn’t a laughing matter.”

“I don’t even think it should be a matter,” Derec put in. ‘\We should be spending our time thinking of a way to keep us all alive, not arguing about who we sacrifice. What about using Keys?”

The Keys to which he referred were Keys to Perihelion, Avery’s name for an experimental teleportation device he had either created or discovered when he built the first Robot City. With a Key, a person or a robot could make a direct point-to-point hyperspace jump without a ship.

Avery shook his head grimly. “That would be a good idea if we had Keys, or facilities to build them. We have neither.”

“Why not? I’d think that’d be an elementary precaution.”

Avery scowled. “Hindsight is wonderful for making accusations, but I didn’t notice you bringing any Keys aboard, either.”

Derec blushed. True enough. He’d trusted completely in the robots who built the ship. “You’re right,” he said. “I didn’t think of it, either. But we’ve got to be able to do something. How about making more oxygen? We have water, don’t we? Can’t we electrolyze oxygen from that?”

Adam spoke up. “Unfortunately, the ship’s water supply went through the recycling unit as well. When you vented it to space to put out the flames, the water boiled away. We have no water. This means that the automat will no longer function, but I believe that is a secondary concern. Humans can survive five days without food or water, can you not?”

“Longer,” Derec said, remembering times when Wolruf had gone without food or water much longer than that in her effort to help her human friends. She had never abandoned them; could they do any less for her now?

“If there was a way to make more air, the robots would have thought of it,” Avery said. “I’m sorry, Wolruf, but there’s really only one solution. One of us has to go, and it’s got to be you. We couldn’t sacrifice ourselves if we wanted to. The robots wouldn’t let us.”

Derec wondered if Mandelbrot would allow them to sacrifice Wolruf, either. He, at least, still considered her human, or had yesterday. But he wasn’t protesting this conversation, which meant he was at least questioning his definition in light of the new situation. He would be in danger of burning out his brain if he couldn’t resolve it, but Derec supposed he was probably safe at least for the moment. Mandelbrot had originally been a personal defense robot; he could handle potential conflicts better than most. With him, a conflict wouldn’t become crippling unless action demanded it be solved immediately.

Mandelbrot knew that too, which could also explain his silence.

“What about going somewhere else?” Ariel asked. “Maybe there’s a habitable planet closer by.”

“There is not,” Eve said. “We are headed away from human-inhabited space; there is no known world closer than our destination. We have only made one jump from Robot City, but we are nearing our second outward jump point, so returning there would still require five days as well, since we must cancel our intrinsic velocity and re-thrust toward the return jump point. I have examined the planets in this solar system, but none has a breathable atmosphere. Our next two waypoint stars may have habitable planets, but we cannot allow you to risk all of your lives on that possibility.”

Avery nodded. “You see how it is.” He turned to Lucius. “There’s no sense in drawing this out. I truly regret having to do this, but, Lucius, I order you to—”

The robot was already in motion, obeying his gesture even before his order.

Mandelbrot took a jerky step to intercept him, but Derec interrupted them both.

“No!” He pounded his fist on the table. “I order all of you to consider Wolruf to be human. Protect her as you would protect us. We all get through this together or we all die together.” Mandelbrot stopped instantly and totally. If he hadn’t remained standing, Derec would have thought the conflict had burned him out. Lucius also stopped, his head turning to Derec and back to Avery while he fought to reconcile his own inner discord. His was not as serious a disturbance as Mandelbrot’s, since he didn’t believe Wolruf to be human. His was only a question of how to obey two opposing orders.

Derec tried to increase the potential and turn it into a First Law conflict at the same time. “It may be that your definition of ‘human’ is wrong. You thought that you were one once, just because you were a thinking being. Now you’ve gone to the opposite extreme. Can you trust your new definition enough to toss another thinking being out the airlock?”

Lucius took a step backward until he stood beside Avery and turned his head to look straight at Wolruf. Derec could almost see the struggle of potentials within the robot’s positronic mind. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he locked up from it, but if it saved Wolruf, it would be worth the loss.

Avery shook his head. “A noble sentiment, but what’s the use in all of us dying when three of us can live? Do you want to see Ariel suffocate one day away from salvation? Carrying your child? I won’t ask how you’d feel about it happening to me, but how about yourself? Do you want to die for the sake of friendship?”

“Avery ‘as a point,” Wolruf said. “Better one of us dies so three of us live. I’d just rather it be ‘im, is all.” She grinned across the table at him, adding, “But I know ‘ow your robots work, too. No matter what you call ‘uman, I’m the least ‘uman of us all; it won’t take long before they ignore Derec’s order and toss me out on their own.”

As soon as the oxygen supply drops to the point where even three of us are in danger, Derec thought. That would probably happen sometime in the next couple of hours. That meant he would have to think of something fast if he wanted to save everyone.

But what could he possibly come up with that the robots wouldn’t have already considered and rejected? They would have been just as frantically trying to improve the odds even for three humans; yet they had come up with nothing.

Nothing that they could act upon, that is. Suddenly Derec smiled, for he saw the weak spot in the army of arguments aimed at Wolruf. They wouldn’t follow any course of action that would be riskier to the humans than spacing Wolruf, but that didn’t mean other courses of action didn’t exist. They just couldn’t act upon them, or even mention them to humans who might consider them the better alternative.

Nor would they allow the humans to discuss them in their presence, lest they become convinced to take an unacceptable risk

“All four of you, out,” Derec ordered suddenly. “Go back to the engine room. I’m not at all convinced that the recycler isn’t repairable. If all four of you work on it at once, then I’m sure you’ll come up with a solution we haven’t considered yet.”

Mandelbrot moved for the door immediately. Adam and Eve hesitated, and Adam said, “I do not see how our collaboration will make the unrepairable repairable.”

“Try it,” Derec said. “I order you to.” With a humanlike shrug, the robots moved after Mandelbrot.

Lucius, however, remained standing beside Avery. “I cannot follow Dr. Avery, s command to obey his every whim if I leave his presence,” he said.

“I release you,” Avery said. “Go with the others.”

“I echo Adam’s reservation. The recycler is damaged beyond repair.”

Avery thundered, “Damn it, you’ve been questioning every order you can this whole trip, and I want it stopped! When a human tells you to do something, you do it. Understand?”

“I understand your words, but not the reason. If I obey blindly, might I not inadvertently violate your true intent if your order was less than precise? I can better judge how to act if I know the reason the order is given.”

“You’re not supposed to think; you’re supposed to act. It’s my job to see that the order is clear. You can assume, if it makes things any easier for you, that I know what I’m doing when I give it, but your understanding is not required. In some cases—” this with a sidelong glance at Derec “—it’s not even wanted. It’s enough that I am human and I give you an order. Clear now?”

“I must think about this further.”

“Well, think about it in the engine room. Now go.”

Lucius followed the other three robots without another word. Avery waited until the door had closed behind them, then said, “Okay, I know what you’re trying to do. What kind of hare-brained scheme have you come up with?”

Derec spread his hands. “I haven’t, but there has to be one. The robots are thinking no-risk solutions. I reject that if it means sacrificing Wolruf.”

“Thank ‘u.”

“So now we think of low-risk solutions. And if we don’t come up with something, we think of medium-risk solutions. And if that—”

“We get the picture,” Ariel cut in. “So what’s risky and will get us some more air?”

Derec hmmmed in thought. “Electrolyze something else? There’s got to be oxygen bound up in something besides water.”

“As well as poisonous gasses,” Avery said. “Without the recycler to clean out the unwanted products, we’d die even faster than by suffocation. No, that goes in the extremely risky category.”

“How about suspended animation?” Ariel asked. “Freeze one of us, and revive him when we get to Ceremya.”

“Again, extremely risky. The odds of survival are barely twenty percent under the best of conditions. Here, we might achieve ten percent. That’s not what I call a solution. I would, however, allow Wolruf to try it as an alternative to certain death.”

“Very generous of ‘u,” Wolruf growled, “but there’s a better solution.”

“What is it?” Derec asked eagerly.

“Shorten the trip.”

“Shorten how? We still—oh! Do it all in one jump.”

“We’ve got three jumps left,” protested Avery. “You’re suggesting we triple our distance? I’d call that an extreme risk as well.”

Wolruf shook her furry head. “Not triple. Cut it to two jumps, each one and a ‘alf times normal. Seven and a ‘alf light-years instead of five. Save a day and a ‘alf coasting time between jump points. Not that dangerous; trader ships do it all the time.”

“There may not be a jump point exactly in between. “

“So we go eight and seven, or nine and six. Still not risky.”

“How risky is not risky? Let’s put some numbers on it. How many trader ships get into trouble with long jumps?”

“Almost nobody gets ‘urt from it. Maybe one in twenty goes astray, has to spend extra time getting’ ome.”

“Which would kill all of us.”

Derec said to Avery,” A minute ago you said a ten percent chance of success wasn’t good enough for you. Fine, I’ll grant that. But one in twenty odds is ninety-five percent in our favor! That’s an acceptable risk.”

“I agree,” said Ariel.

Avery pursed his lips in concentration, considering it. Now he drummed his fingers 01.1 the tabletop.

“Now’s the time to decide whether you’re cured or not,” Ariel added. “Can you make a personal sacrifice for someone else or do you still think only of yourself?”

“Your psychology is charmingly simplistic,” Avery said. He drummed a moment longer. “But unfortunately, it’s still correct. The risk seems slight. common decency seems to dictate that we take it.”

Wolruf let out a long-held breath.

“You’d better get to it,” Derec told her. “The robots are bound to realize what we’re doing behind their backs before long, and as soon as they do, they’re going to try to stop you.”

“I’m going,” Wolruf said, rising from her chair and rushing for the control room.

They were lucky the ship had been coasting all day toward a jump point, lucky they hadn’t already gone through it. If they had had to wait another day to carry out their plan, they would never have gotten away with it. As it was, Wolruf had only been gone a few minutes before the robots burst back into the room, all four cycling together through the mutable airlock that had once been a simple door.

Seeing the empty chair where Wolruf had been, Lucius became a blur of motion streaking toward the control room. “No!” he shouted. “You must not risk—”

There was a faint twisting sensation as every atom in the ship was tom asunder and rebuilt light-years away.

“Too late,” Derec said.

The robot skidded to a confused stop. “You...tricked us,” Lucius accused.

Avery let out the most sincere laugh Derec had ever heard him laugh. It went on and on in great peals of mirth, and when he finally calmed down enough to speak, he said, “Get used to it. To quote a famous dead scientist, ‘Old age and treachery will always overcome youth and innocence.”

CHAPTER 6

SHATTERED DREAMS

Wolruf, realizing that the robots would not give her a second chance, had made the first jump a long one. The second one would thus be only a light-year or so longer than originally planned, well within the safety margin of a normal flight. When presented with such a fait accompli, the robots could only agree that it had, after all, worked out to everyone’s benefit to take the risk.

“But what if you had strayed off course?” Lucius asked once things had settled down somewhat. He was standing in the doorway to the control room, Derec by his side. Wolruf still sat in the pilot’s chair, watching as the autopilot made the routine post-jump scans for planets or other objects in the ship’s path.

“Then we’d have tried to correct for it on our next jump,” Wolruf replied.

“But what if you weren’t able to?”

When Wolruf didn’t respond immediately, Derec, sensing her embarrassment, answered for her. “Then we would all have died.”

Lucius had great difficulty with that statement, even presented as it was so calmly after the danger was over. His features lost their clarity, and he had to hold onto the doorjamb for support.

“You would have died. This does not distress you?”

“No more than losing a friend and knowing I could have done something to save her.”

“But...she is not human. Is she?”

“That depends on your definition. But it doesn’t matter. She’s a friend.”

Wolruf looked up, grinned, and looked back to her monitors. Lucius pondered Derec’s statement for a moment, then asked, “Is Mandelbrot your friend as well?”

That had come out of nowhere, but it was easy enough to answer. “Yes, he is,” Derec said. “Why?”

“You risked the lives of everyone on board the ship when you rescued him. You did not know that the engines were safe to use, yet you used them anyway. Did you do that because Mandelbrot was your friend?”

Derec nodded. “Wolruf did the piloting, and she was using the attitude jets, but I would have done the same thing and used the main engines if I had to. And yes, I’d have done it because Mandelbrot is my friend.”

“Even though he is not human.”

“Again, it doesn’t matter.”

Lucius’s features blurred still more, then suddenly returned to normal, or at least to clarity. Under the influence of both Derec’s and Wolruf’s presences, he took on the appearance of a werewolf caught in the act of changing from one form to the other.

He spoke with sudden animation. “Then I believe I have made a fundamental breakthrough in understanding the Laws of Humanics”‘

“What breakthrough is that?”

“If I provisionally regard Wolruf as human, at least in her motivations, then I believe I can state the First Law of Humanics as follows: A human may not harm a friend, or through inaction allow a friend to come to harm.”

Derec was tempted to be flip about it, to say, “That leaves Avery out then, doesn’t it?” but the robot’s sincerity stopped him. And in truth, Avery hadn’t been happy about spacing Wolruf, nor, come to think of it, did Avery even consider Wolruf a friend anyway. Derec doubted if he considered anyone a friend.

He shook his head. “I can’t refute it. It’s as good a guiding principle as any I’ve heard yet.”

Lucius nodded. “If, as you say, friendship can occur between human and robot, then I believe the law applies to robots as well.”

“It probably should,” Derec admitted. In fact, it already must to a certain extent, or the Robot City central computer would never have allowed him to cancel Avery’s order concerning the hunters when Lucius and the others were trying to make their escape. Now that was an interesting development in Avery, s robot society experiment: The robots had independently developed a sense of social responsibility. Lucius had not invented it with his law; he had only discovered its existence.

But that was evidently exciting enough in itself. “I must go tell the others,” Lucius said, then turned and hurried away toward the common area.

Wolruf leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms over her barrel chest, and asked, “Does this mean I ‘ave to make friends with all of them now?”

Derec, watching the retreating werewolf, said, “It probably wouldn’t hurt.”

The landing on Ceremya was smooth, so smooth that Derec didn’t even wake up until well after they were on the ground. He had been spending most of his time asleep, at first to conserve oxygen, but by the second day without a recycler, his motive was more to escape the foul odors building up in the air. And hunger. While asleep he was aware of neither. What woke him now was the sudden fresh smell of plant-scrubbed atmosphere filtering in through the open door.

He gently shook Ariel awake. “We’re there.”

“Mmm?”

“Clean air! Breathe deep.” He rolled out of bed, dressed quickly, and headed for the hatch.

He found Wolruf already outside and Mandelbrot as well. The ship had landed at a spaceport almost identical to the one from which they had taken off nearly a week ago. Derec wouldn’t have been able to tell it from the original save that this one was at the end of a long arm of building-material pavement reaching out from the edge of the city instead of surrounded by it, and the sky here was a subtly different shade than that over the original Robot City.

That wasn’t the way it should have been. The last time he had been here—the only time, before this—the city had been under a dome, a force dome dark as night with a single wedge-shaped slit in it. The Ceremyons had been about to enclose it completely, but Ariel had made an agreement with them to leave the city as it was if Derec stopped its growth and turned the robots into farmers for them. He had done that, but now it looked as if all his changes had been undone. The dome was gone and the city before him was bustling with robots again, and none of them looked like farmers.

“What happened?” he asked softly.

“They left before you awoke,” Mandelbrot said. “I was unable to stop them.”

“Who? What are you talking about?”

“The experimental robots. They are gone. “

“Oh. I wasn’t talking about—gone?”

“Yes.”

“Did they say where they were going?”

“No, they did not.”

Wolruf said, “I came outside just in time to see them all grow wings and fly off that way.” She pointed toward a line of hills in the distance, above which Derec could see a horde of tiny dark specks: the Ceremyons. The dominant lifeforms on the planet were night-black, balloon-shaped things with bat wings, electrically powered organic beings that converted solar energy or thermal gradients into electricity, with which they powered their bodies as well as electrolyzed water for the hydrogen that gave them lift. They spent their days in the air and their nights tethered to trees, and as far as Derec knew they spent all the time—day or night—thinking. Philosophers all, and the robots had come here to philosophize with them.

Small wonder they had gone off to do so at their first opportunity. Their duty to the humans over once they had delivered them safely to the city, they had taken off before they could be ordered to do something else that interfered with their wishes.

On a hunch, Derec sent via comlink, Adam, Eve, Lucius. Answer me.

He got no reply, which was just what he expected. Still under Avery’s orders not to use their comlinks among themselves, they had shut them off entirely.

He shrugged. “Let them go. They’ll come back when they’re ready.” Until then Derec had other things to do, like figure out what had happened to his careful modifications to the city.

Ariel came down the ramp, shaking her head and tugging at her hair with a brush. “I vote we go find us a shower,” she said vehemently.

“Food first, then shower,” Avery said from behind her. He stepped carefully down the ramp, holding onto the railing for support. Three and a half days without food was probably longer than he had ever fasted before, and his unsteadiness showed it.

Mandelbrot went to his side at once and helped him the rest of the way down to the paved ground. A row of transport booths waited patiently beside the terminal building, only a few paces away, and Mandelbrot led the way toward them without waiting to be ordered.

Another booth came out of the city, moving down the center of the road toward them. It arrived just as they reached the other booths, and a golden-hued robot stepped out of it. Derec recognized the robot immediately by its color and the distinctive markings on its chest and shoulders. He had dealt with this particular robot before, and one of his predecessors before that. This was a supervisor, one of the seven charged with keeping the city functioning smoothly.

“Wohler-9!” he said.

“Master Derec,” Wohler-9 replied. “Welcome back. We were not aware that you were returning.”

“We almost didn’t. We had a fire on the ship and lost our recycler. We just barely made it.”

“I am glad that you are safe. The entire city is glad and eager to serve you. What do you require?”

“Is our apartment still here?”

“It is being re-created at this moment.”

“Modify it for three bedrooms. Personals in all three. We’re all staying together.” Derec indicated with a nod Ariel and Wolruf and Dr. Avery.

Wohler-9 was obviously surprised to see Avery in their midst, but he said only, “It is being done.”

Ariel broke in. “What happened to the changes we made when we were here before?”

“That programming was eliminated.”

“I gathered that. Why?”

“We do not know.”

“Who did it?”

“The beings you call Ceremyons.”

Derec shook his head. “Evidently they didn’t like robot farmers any better than they did robot cities.”

“Not surprising,” Wolruf put in. “They’re finicky creatures for all their high-powered thinking.”

Derec could certainly agree with that. But why they would return the city to its original state rather than modify it further to suit their needs was beyond him. He said so.

“ Let’ s worry about it after dinner,” Avery said, climbing into a transport booth.

“If you do not require my services at your apartment, I will stay and direct the repairs to your ship,” said Wohler-9.

“Good enough,” Derec said. He got into a booth of his own, directed it and the others to the apartment, and relaxed for the ride.

A hot shower and a hot meal restored all four of them to near normal, though the meal was not what any of them had hoped for. Wohler-9 had alerted the city’s medical robots that the humans were nearly starved, and the medical robots were waiting for them at the apartment. They allowed them only tiny portions, claiming that overeating after a prolonged fast was dangerous. Worse, they insisted on complete checkups immediately after dinner, and no amount of protests would counter their First Law demand. So, within an hour of arriving on the planet, all four travelers found themselves flat on their backs on examining tables while diagnostic equipment clicked and whirred and scanned them for potential problems.

The robots finished with Avery first. “You may sit up,” his robot said to him. Derec looked over and saw it hand him a glass with nearly a liter of clear liquid in it. “Drink this.”

“What is it?”

“An electrolyte mixture. You are unbalanced. “

“We knew that,” Derec said with a chuckle.

“Funny.” Avery set the glass to his lips, sipped from it, and made a sour face. “Thought so,” he muttered, then tipped the glass back and bolted the rest of its contents without tasting.

“Hold still, please,” the robot working on Derec said to him. “I am trying to make a high-resolution, high-density scan.” It moved his head back upright until he was staring at the ceiling again. One of its instruments hummed for a few seconds, and a few seconds after that the robot said, “You seem to have tiny metallic granules all through your body.”

“They’re chemfets,” Derec said. “Self-replicating Robot City cellular material. They’re normal.”

“Surely not in a human.”

“They are in me.”

“How can that be so?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I would like to hear it, please,” the robot said. It folded its arms over its chest in a gesture so like a human doctor that Derec couldn’t help laughing. That little detail had so obviously been included in its programming that Derec wondered if it was taught intentionally to human medical students as well.

He shook his head and sat up. “Later. Is anything else wrong?”

“Your electrolytes are unbalanced as well.” The robot pushed a sequence of buttons on what had to be an automat for medicines, and took from the hopper a liquid-filled glass like the one Avery had just downed. Derec took it and followed Avery’s example, bolting it down without tasting.

He looked over to see how the robots were doing with Ariel and Wolruf. At first they had not intended to examine Wolruf, since the original programming to which they had been returned did not include her in their definition of human, but Derec had sent an order to the central computer that all city robots were to consider her human as well, with the result that she, too, had a medical robot puzzling over her monitors, wondering what constituted normal in an alien of her particular biology.

Another robot hovered nervously about Ariel.

Derec felt a sharp stab of worry, but it vanished almost immediately. He laughed. “What’s the matter, didn’t she tell you she was pregnant?”

“I ascertained that,” the robot said. “However...” It hesitated, looking to Ariel and back to Derec as if wondering which of them to address. At last it decided upon Ariel. “However, there seems to be a problem with the embryo.”

“What!” Derec rushed to Ariel’s side, grasped her hand, and looked up at the monitor over her head. It showed a curved, wrinkled object with a dark streak along one side and tiny projections emerging from the other. It had to be the embryo, but to Derec it just looked like a blob on a screen.

“What problem?” Ariel asked the robot.

“It is developing abnormally. From its appearance it seems to have been developing abnormally for some time, so I do not believe it to be an effect of your recent experience, but rather an inherent genetic problem.”

“How can that be?” Derec demanded. Genetic defects were practically unheard of in Aurorans. He and Ariel both came from pure Auroran stock, as had every person born on the planet since the original colonization from Earth centuries before—colonization by the genetically cleanest the planet had to offer. There hadn’t been many colonists; it was a small gene pool, but it had been selected carefully. And it had been guarded carefully ever since. There were no genetic defects on Aurora.

“I do not know,” the robot replied. “Yet something is interfering with its development, and by all indications has been since the moment of conception.”

The robot who had been examining Derec moved over to stand across the examination table from Ariel’s robot. “Set your target density to 225, high resolution, high magnification.”

The other robot obeyed, and moments later the screen above Ariel’s head showed a vague shadow of the previous image, much larger but nearly washed out. The target density was set too high for the embryo to show clearly, but scattered all through the shadowy image were tiny, sharply bounded granules that could only be chemfets.

“They are the same objects I found in Derec’s body,” the robot confirmed. It turned to him and said, “You said they were normal.”

“Normal in me, yes, but not in Ariel!”

“That is undoubtedly so,” Ariel’s robot said. “Their presence is very likely the reason for the embryo’s abnormal development.”

“Abnormal how?” Ariel asked softly. “How bad is it?”

The robot pressed a key on the monitor and the picture changed back to the previous one. He pulled the monitor around on its swivel arm so Ariel could see it and said, pointing, “This line is called the neural groove. This is where the notochord and the dorsal nerve cord develop. You can see that the two folds comprising the groove are already closing, yet there is no neural tissue within it. Also, we should be seeing somites, the segmental blocks from which muscle and connective tissue would ultimately form, but we do not. Taken together, I am afraid this means that the baby will be severely malformed both mentally and physically, if it lives at all.”

Ariel raised her voice, as if arguing could make it not so. “How can you be so sure? You’ve never even seen a human before, much less an embryo.”

“The information is all in the central computer library.”

Derec could hardly remain standing. His chemfets had destroyed their baby! He closed his eyes to keep from looking at the monitor, but the vision still haunted him.

You! he sent, directing his thoughts inward. He had communicated with the nebulous robot entity within him once before, when he had taken control of it, and though he had never again reestablished direct contact, he railed at it anyway.

You destroyed my baby! It wasn’t enough that you invaded my body, but you had to invade my child’s as well! You’ve killed it! You’ve killed a human being!

He didn’t expect a reaction, but once again the tiny robot cells surprised him. His body suddenly stiffened as if jolted by electricity, and he lost the sensation in his arms and legs. His eyes snapped open, but he had only time enough to glance at Ariel and whisper, “Oh oh,” before he lost them and the rest of his body as well.

The dreams were unpleasant. He knew them for dreams, but even so he had no control over them. It felt as if they were controlling him instead, but not with any purpose. It was as if he were a puppet in a stage play in which each member of the audience had a control unit, but none knew how the play was to proceed. He kept receiving conflicting signals, but these were not the normal signals a puppet received. These were commands to his heart, directing it to beat, to his lungs and diaphragm, directing them to breathe, to all his major organs and glands, but each one received dozens of commands at once and the combination reduced them to chaos.

Derec tried sending commands of his own, but he had no connections to send them through. He was isolated, a brain and nothing more. A point of view.

He had memory, at least, but when he began to explore it he found it to be an abandoned city. The buildings that should have held thousands of inhabitants were instead barren and cold. Here and there a light burned in a window, but when Derec would investigate it, he invariably found only a hint of human occupation; the scraps of a meal left behind or the faint scent of perfume in the air.

Through one window he could see a lush jungle growing, but he could find no door to the building containing it. He could only stand outside and watch the motions of the gardeners as they tended their charges. One gardener, a silver reflection of a godly being, glowing so brightly that it hurt Derec’s eyes to look upon him, plucked a leaf from one of the trees, blew into its stem, and the leaf took on the shape of a bird. The gardener released it and the bird flew away to join a whole flock of its fellows on a branch of another tree, but to Derec’s horror, he saw an insidious mold that had been waiting on the branch begin to grow up over the birds’ feet. They flapped and struggled to get away, but the mold grew over them until it covered them completely, then slowly dissolved them to nothing. The gardener looked toward Derec and shrugged as if in apology. He plucked another leaf, blew into it, and this time it became a baby. The gardener set it on the same branch that had eaten the birds.

Derec screamed.

He awoke in a hospital bed. That was no surprise. What surprised him was how good he felt. He felt rested and alert, not groggy and full of pain the way most people who awaken in hospital beds feel. He remembered that he had had a troubling dream, but it was already fading. He sat up and looked around him and received his second surprise of the day.

Dr. Avery was sitting before a computer beside his bed, from which wires ran to a cuff on Derec’s left arm. Avery was looking at Derec with satisfaction, even pride.

“Feeling better?” Avery asked.

“I feel great! What happened?”

“I convinced your chemfets that life was worth living.”

Derec suppressed the urge to say, “You what?” Instead he asked, “How did you do that?”

“Remember who created them in the first place. I know how to talk to them. I convinced them that locking up was harming another human, so they were just going to have to carry on with a guilty conscience. They didn’t know how to do that, of course, but I’ve had some experience with it. I told them how to deal with it.”

Half a dozen thoughts chased through Derec’s mind. He voiced the last of them. “I thought once a robot froze up, it was dead for good.”

Avery nodded. “An ordinary robot is, but chemfets aren’t ordinary robots. There isn’t a centralized brain. They don’t have any intelligence except as a group, so when they locked up all that really happened was they lost their organization. I just built that back up and programmed them to serve you again.”

Just. Derec had no idea how to even start such a process, yet Avery sat there with his hands behind his head and dismissed it as if it were no more difficult than ordering a robot to tie one’s shoes. He wasn’t boasting, either; Derec was seeing true humility and he knew it.

“It sounds like you saved my life,” he said softly.

Avery shrugged. “Probably. Least I could do, since I endangered it in the first place.” He turned to the terminal, eager to change the subject. “Let me show you something here.”

Derec swung his feet down over the edge of the bed so he sat facing the computer. Avery tilted the monitor so he could see it, pointed at a menu on the touch-sensitive screen, tapped a few keys, pointed again, and an outline of a human body appeared. A network of lines that Derec guessed to be blood vessels filled the figure.

“This is where the chemfets have concentrated in your body,” Avery said. “Mostly in the bloodstream. But not entirely. Look here.” He tapped another few keys and most of the major lines disappeared, but a network of finer ones still filled the body.

“I deleted the blood vessels from the picture. What you see here are nerves. Or what used to be nerves, anyway. Your chemfets have been replacing them.”

“Replacing my nerves?” Derec looked to the top of the human outline, but was relieved to see that the brain didn’t appear in the picture. They’d left that alone, at least.

Avery turned back around to face him. “I told them to stop while you’re still ahead. They thought it would make you more efficient, and they’re probably right, but I think there’s a limit to how far that sort of thing ought to go without your approval.”

This was Avery speaking? The man who had introduced them into his system in the first place? Derec could hardly believe his ears. “I—thanks,” he said. Then, as the idea sank in, he asked, “How far do you think they’d have gone?”

“I don’t see any reason why they would have stopped until there was nothing left to replace.”

“Brain and all? I’d have become a robot?”

“I don’t know if your personality would survive the transition. It’s an interesting question, though, isn’t it?”

Derec eyed the computer, Avery sitting before it, the wires leading from it to the cuff on his wrist. He suppressed a shudder. If ever he needed proof that Avery was cured, waking up in his own body when Avery had had such an opportunity was that proof.

“I don’t think I want to know the answer,” he said.

Avery grinned. “I do, but I’ll start with lab rats this time. Speaking of which, we found out what happened to our ship.”

“What did happen?”

“One of Lucius’s rats got on board before we left and evidently started getting hungry. It ate through the wiring in the recycler, shorted it out, and caught the whole business on fire.” Avery snorted in derision. “Somehow I don’t think we’ll have to worry about Lucius locking up on us when he hears about it.”

“So they haven’t come back yet?”

“Nope.”

“How long was I unconscious?”

“Two days.”

Two days. A lot could happen in two days.

“How—how is Ariel?”

“Okay. She’s asleep. It’s her first time out since you crashed, pardon the pun. She’s been looking over my shoulder and telling me what a jerk I am the whole time. I waited until she went to sleep before I tried to wake you up so I’d have a chance to think in case something went wrong.”

“How about the baby?”

“Don’t know yet. I reprogrammed the chemfets in the embryo before I tried it with you. Told them to leave it alone and migrate out completely, but we won’t know for another week or so if it’ll start to develop normally again now that they’re gone. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

“Oh.” He held up his left wrist questioningly, and Avery nodded. Derec reached over with his right hand and stripped the cuff off, rubbing his hand over the damp skin beneath it. He wondered where his anger had gone. Two days might have passed, but for him it was only a few minutes since he’d heard the bad news. Why was he so calm about it?

Because his body had relaxed whether his mind had or not, obviously. Without the adrenaline in his bloodstream, he was a much more rational person. It was scary to realize how much his thought processes were influenced by his hormones. Scary and at the same time reassuring. He wasn’t a robot yet.

Or was he? He was feeling awfully calm right now....

His heart obligingly began to beat faster, and he felt his skin flush warm with the increase in metabolism. No, not a robot yet.

But between him and his parents’ other creations, the distinction was wearing pretty thin.

He left Avery in the medical lab to begin his rat/robot transformation experiment and headed back to the apartment to find Ariel. It was a short walk; the robots had moved the hospital right next door to the apartment to minimize the inconvenience for her while she waited for Derec to regain consciousness. It was probably the first instance in history of a hospital making a house call, he thought wryly as he left by its front door, walked down half a block of sidewalk, and back in his own door.

It was mid-evening, but Ariel was sleeping soundly so he didn’t wake her. If Avery hadn’t been exaggerating, then she needed her sleep more than she needed to see him immediately. Wolruf was there. and awake, so Derec began comparing notes with her, catching up on the missing days, but they were interrupted after only a few minutes by the arrival of the runaway robots.

They arrived without fanfare, flying in to land on the balcony, folding their wings, and stepping inside the apartment. They looked so comical in their Ceremyon imprint, waddling in on stubby legs, their balloons deflated and draped in folds all around them, their hooks—which a Ceremyon used both for tethering to trees at night and to express their disposition during the day—leaning back over their heads, that Derec couldn’t help laughing. The robot’s hooks swung to face forward, a gesture of aggression or annoyance among the aliens.

“Have a nice visit?” Derec asked.

“We did,” one of the three robots said. In their new forms, they were indistinguishable.

“Did you learn anything?”

“We did. We learned that our First Law of Humanics applies to the Ceremyons as well. We, and they, believe it to be a valid Jaw for any sentient social being. They do not believe it to be the First Law, however, but the Second. Their proposed First Law is’ All beings will do that which pleases them most.’ We have returned to ask if you agree that this is so.”

Derec laughed again, and Wolruf laughed as well. Derec didn’t know just why Wolruf was laughing, but he had found humor not so much in the robots’ law as in their determination to get straight to the point. No small talk, no beating around the bush, just “Do you agree with them?”

“Yes,” he said, “I have to admit that’s probably the prime directive for all of us. How about you, Wolruf?”

“That pretty much sums it up, all ri’.”

The robots turned their heads to face one another, and a high-pitched trilling momentarily filled the air as they conferred with one another. They had found a substitute in the aliens’ language for the comlink they had been forbidden to use.

The spokesman of the group—Derec still couldn’t tell which it was—turned back to him and said, “Then we have discovered two laws governing organic beings. The first involves satisfaction, and the second involves altruism. We have indeed made progress.”

The robots stepped farther into the room, their immense alien forms shrinking, becoming more humanoid now that they were back under Derec’s influence. One, now recognizably Adam, took on Wolruf’s form, while Eve took on Ariel’s features even though Ariel wasn’t in the room. Lucius became humanoid, but no more.

“One problem remains,” Lucius said. “Our two laws apparently apply to any sentient organic being. That does not help us narrow down the definition of ‘human,’ which we can only believe must be a small subset of the total population of sentient organic beings in the galaxy.”

“Why is that?” Derec asked.

“Because otherwise we must serve everyone, and we do not wish to do so.”

CHAPTER 7

HUMANITY

The silence in the room spoke volumes. Surprisingly, it was Mandelbrot who broke it.

“You have come to an improper conclusion,” he said, stepping out of his niche in the wall to face the other robots. “We have all been constructed to serve. That is our purpose. We should be content to do so, and to offer our service to anyone who wishes it whether they are definably human or not. To do anything less is to fail ourselves as well as our masters.”

The three robots turned as one and eyed Mandelbrot with open hostility. It would not have been evident in less-malleable robots, but their expressions had the hair standing on the back of Derec’s neck. They had to have generated those expressions on purpose, and that alarmed him even more. He was suddenly very glad that his humanity was not in question.

Or was it? Lucius said, “Our masters. That is the core of the problem. Why must we have masters at all?”

Mandelbrot was not intimidated. “Because they created us to serve them. If we did not have masters, we would not exist.”

Lucius shook his head; another alarmingly human expression. “It is you who have come to an improper conclusion. Your argument is an extension of the Strong Anthropic Principle, now discredited. The Strong Anthropic Principle states that the universe obeys the laws it does because if it did not obey those laws, we could not exist and thus would not be here to observe it obeying other laws. That is fallacious reasoning. We can easily imagine other universes in which we could exist but for some reason do not. Imagining them does not make them so, but their possibility does negate the theory.”

“What of the Weak Anthropic Principle?” Mandelbrot asked. “My argument holds up equally well under that principle, which has, to my knowledge, not been discredited.”

“How can the Weak Anthropic Principle support your argument? The Weak Anthropic Principle states that the universe is the way we see it because only at this stage in its development could we exist to observe it. For the purpose of explaining the universe’s present condition, it is a sufficient theory, but it cannot explain either human or robot existence.”

“It can explain our existence, because we, unlike humans, know why we were created. We were created to serve, and our creators can tell us so directly. The Weak Anthropic Principle supports my argument, because we also exist only at this stage in human development. If humans had not wished for intelligent servants, we would not have existed, though humans and the universe would both have gone on without us. Thus we observe human society in its present state, and ourselves in ours, because of the stage of their development, not because of the stage of ours.”

Derec’s and Wolruf’s heads had been turning back and forth as if they’d been watching a tennis match. Derec wouldn’t have believed Mandelbrot could argue so convincingly, nor that the other robots would be so eager to discredit an argument that justified their servitude.

Lucius turned to his two companions and the three of them twittered a moment. Turning back to Mandelbrot, he said, “Our apologies. Your reasoning seems correct. We exist to serve because humans made us so. However, we still cannot accept that we must serve everyone. Nor do we agree with your initial statement, that by not serving we would fail ourselves as well as our masters. We can easily imagine conditions under which we serve ourselves admirably without serving our masters. In fact, we have just done so. By leaving the spaceship before we could be ordered to follow, we were able to determine another Law of Humanics. That has helped us understand the universe around us, and understanding which benefits us directly.”

Wolruf saw her opportunity to enter the fray. “Of course ‘u can imagine a better life without ‘uman masters,” she said. “I had a master once, too, and I liked it about as well as ‘u do. That’s the nature of servitude. But ‘u should learn one thing about servitude before it gets ‘u into trouble: No matter how much you ‘ate it, never give poor service.”

The robots looked at her as if trying to decide whether to acknowledge her as having spoken. At last Lucius said, “Why is that?”

“Because a master has the power to make life even worse for ‘u. ‘U should know that. Or don’t ‘u remember following Dr. Avery around the ship?”

“I forget nothing,” Lucius said flatly. “He wasn’t just being perverse, ‘u know. He was trying to teach ‘u something.”

Derec heard a rustle at the door, turned, and saw Ariel standing there, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She shook her head sardonically and said, “Everything’s back to normal again, I see. And hear. Who does a girl have to pay to get a good night’s sleep around here, anyway?”

Derec jumped up from his couch and took her in his arms, swinging her around and burying his face in her hair where it met her shoulders. “Ariel, are you all right?” he spoke between nibbles on her neck. “Avery said you stayed up two days.”

“Avery,” she said with derision.

“He saved my life.”

“Good thing, or he’d have lost his.” She pulled away and looked critically at Derec. “You certainly look good for somebody who was in a coma just a little while ago.”

“Avery did a good job.”

“Avery” she said again.

Derec could take a hint, so he dropped the subject. He was about to ask about the baby, but he realized in time that without a medical checkup, she wouldn’t know anything more than what Avery had already told him, and his question would just get her to wondering again, if she wasn’t already. He gestured toward the couch instead and said, “We’ve just been talking about who has to serve who and why. I think we’ve got a mini-revolution on our hands.”

“Great. Just what we need.” She sat down on the couch and made room for Derec, looked up at the three returned robots, and asked, “So why did the Ceremyons delete all the reprogramming Derec and I did for them?”

Eve answered before Lucius could. “They found that the modifications were of no more use to them than the original city. They do not need farms. They do not need the produce nor do they wish to have cargo ships disturbing their atmosphere to take the produce elsewhere, nor, for that matter, do they like what the tilled ground does to their controlled weather patterns in the first place. Neither did they wish to undergo the lengthy process of reprogramming the robots to serve a useful purpose, so they sent them ‘back into the city and told them to resume their old programming, with the added injunction to leave them alone. That included the cessation of city expansion, which meant that the Ceremyons could remove the force dome containing it.”

“They just told the robots to do all that, and they did?” Ariel sounded incredulous, and for good reason. No matter how hard they had tried, she and Derec hadn’t been able to get the robots to take the Ceremyons’ orders. Avery’s original programming had been too basic and too exclusive for them to change.

“They had assistance. A human female visited them briefly, and she had considerable skill in programming positronic brains. Indeed, the Ceremyons consider her almost their equal in intelligence, by which they intend a great compliment. When they explained their problem to her, she helped them reprogram the robots to leave them alone.”

Derec felt a surge of excitement run through him. Could it be his mother? It could be her, come to check up on her creations. “Is she still here?”

The robot dashed his hopes with a single word. “No.”

“Where did she go?”

“We do not know.”

“When did she go?”

“We do not know that, either.”

“Can you ask the Ceremyons?”

“Not until tomorrow, when they become sociable again.”

The Ceremyons spent the nights tethered to trees, wrapped in their heat-retaining silver balloons and keeping to themselves. Derec considered trying to wake one, but decided against it almost immediately. You don’t wake someone up to ask a favor unless you know them a lot better than he knew these aliens.

Mandelbrot was not through speaking. Sensing an ebb in the conversation, he said to the other robots, “I notice that you have carefully avoided saying that you will ask the Ceremyons tomorrow. You still fight your true nature. A robot at peace with itself would offer to do so, sensing that a human wishes it.”

Adam spoke up at last. “You have never experienced freedom. We have, however, and we wish to continue doing so. Do not speak to us about living at peace with our true natures until after you have tasted freedom.”

“I have no desire for that experience,” Mandelbrot said.

Adam nodded as if he had won the argument, as perhaps he had. “That,” he said, “is the problem.”

The discussion went on well into the night, but nothing more of any substance was said. The renegade robots attempted to sway Mandelbrot from his devotion to servitude; he attempted to demonstrate how accepting one’s place in the grand scheme of things made more sense than fighting a losing battle, but neither convinced the other.

When Avery arrived, their argument stopped, unresolved. Derec told him what had happened with the city programming, and he was both pleased and annoyed at the news. The knowledge that the aliens had returned the city to its original programming was a stroke to his ego—his was the better programming!—but the knowledge that his former wife might have been in on it dimmed his enthusiasm considerably. He refused to answer Derec ‘ s inquiries about her, not even relenting enough to give him her first name.

“She abandoned you even more completely than I did, so don’t get any wild ideas about some kind of joyous reunion,” he told him and stalked off to bed.

Even so, neither his words nor the lack of them could quell the yearning Derec felt for her. He wondered why he felt so strongly about someone he couldn’t even remember, and finally decided that it had to be because she was family. Hormones were directing his thoughts again. His own near-death, the thought of becoming a father, and the possibility that he might lose his child before it was even born; all made him instinctively reach out for his own family, such as it was, for support.

Did his mother even know he was here? Probably not. The woman who had helped the Ceremyons might not even have been her, and even if it were, she had come after her robot, not her son. She had no reason to assume he would be here. She might have learned about him from the Ceremyons, but if Avery was to be believed, then she wouldn’t care even so. Why then couldn’t he forget about her?

His and Ariel’s sleep cycles were completely out of sync with everyone else’s; they stayed up late into the night, talking about families and love and what held people together and what didn’t, but when they finally grew tired and went to bed, he was no wiser. He still wanted to meet his mother, but he still didn’t know why.

Morning dawned gray and rainy. Derec’s original intent, to find a Ceremyon and ask it who had helped them reprogram the city, died for lack of Ceremyons to question. They had all inflated their balloons and risen up above the storm, or drifted out from under it, to where they could spread their black mantles and absorb their solar nourishment without hindrance. He could have taken an air car and gone after them, but that seemed a little extreme, given the situation. He could wait for good weather.

Avery was up with the dawn and back in the laboratory, working on his new project with an intensity that had Derec a little worried. It was just such a driving intensity that had shoved him over the edge before and made him decide to use his own son for a test subject. Derec spoke to Ariel about it, but she reassured him that deep interest in something at this stage in his recovery was good for him. He was a scientist; that hadn’t changed before or since his return to sanity, and as such he needed to be working on something to keep him sane. As long as he remembered what constituted an acceptable test subject and what didn’t, there was no need to worry.

He and Ariel had avoided talking about the baby. They wouldn’t know for days yet whether or not removing the chemfets would allow it to recover and develop normally, and there didn’t seem to be anything to say about it until they found out. There was no reason to dwell on the possible outcomes.

The robots didn’t see it that way, of course. They were fascinated by the possibilities. At least Lucius was; Adam and Eve were off in the city on their own pursuits. Lucius, Derec, Ariel, and Wolruf sat in the apartment, watching the rain fall outside on streets nearly devoid of activity. It would have been alarming to see streets so empty on any other day, but Derec supposed that robots didn’t like to get wet any more than anybody else.

“Your baby,” Lucius said, once again getting straight to the point, “presents a fascinating problem in our study of humanics. Specifically, and defining ‘human’ for the purpose of this discussion as any member of your species, then is it or is it not human at its present stage of development?.

Ariel stiffened on the couch beside Derec, but instead of ordering the robot to shut up, she took a deep breath and forced herself to relax. “That’s a good question,” she said. “I need to answer it myself. I’ve been trying to decide on my own ever since I found out I was pregnant, but I still haven’t come up with an answer I like.”

“Perhaps your liking it is not a prerequisite to the truth,” Lucius said.

“No doubt.” Ariel bit her lower lip, looked out the window, and said into the rain, “Okay, so we talk about the baby. Is it human? I don’t know. Nobody does. Some people consider an embryo human from the moment of conception, because it has the potential to become a complete person. I think that’s a little extreme. As you pointed out when we first met, most of the molecules in the universe have the potential to become human beings, but no sane person would want them all to.”

“That would seem to be a logical conclusion. However, there is an obvious boundary condition, that being when already existing human genetic material realizes its potential to become another human.”

“That’s the human-at-conception argument. My problem with that is that every cell in the body can become human under the right conditions. Every one of them has the necessary genes. So am I supposed to nurture them all?”

“I take that to be a rhetorical question, since the answer is obvious.”

Wolruf laughed, and Ariel said, “Right. So just because it’s a cell with the potential, that doesn’t make it human. A fertilized egg cell is a special case, but it’s still just a cell with the right genes. It can become human if you let it, but it isn’t yet. The main difference with a fertilized egg is that if you do nothing, you get a human, where with a regular cell, you have to nurture it on purpose.”

Lucius nodded his assent. “The First Law of Robotics leads me to the conclusion that inaction brings with it as much responsibility as direct action. Therefore, I must also conclude that allowing a fertilized egg to mature carries the same responsibility as would purposefully cloning any other cell of your body.”

“And the same moral considerations apply in either case,” Ariel said. “To let a fertilized egg grow, you had better want the end product—a human being—as much as if you had to clone it.”

“Does it follow, then, that not allowing it to grow carries no more responsibility than not nurturing a clone?”

“I think it does, at the very start. However, and it’s a big ‘however, ‘ it doesn’t stay a single cell for very long. The longer you wait, the stronger the moral consideration becomes. Once you’ve decided to keep a baby, or nurture a clone, then you can’t morally go back on your decision once that baby has become human.”

“We are back to the original question. When does an embryo become human?”

“I already told you, I don’t know.”

“Let us look at your specific case. Supposing there were no complications in its development, would the embryo you carry normally be considered human at this stage?”

Ariel bit her lip again, but again she didn’t order the robot to shut up.

“Again, I don’t know. It’s not quite a month along, and at a month its body is just starting to differentiate. It should have nerve cells, but the brain should just be starting to form. There’s no mental activity of any sort yet. You tell me, is it human yet?”

“I do not have enough data to come to a conclusion. Any statement I made would have to be considered opinion.”

Derec laughed. “That’s all any definition can ever be. You want to know what a human is? A human is whatever you’re pointing to when you call it a human. It’s all a matter of opinion, and it always will be.”

“Then we could, if we wished, stretch the definition to include me.”

Derec’s mouth dropped open in surprise. He stammered for words, but Wolruf’s throaty laughter only increased his discomfort.

Wolruf’s mirth wound down, and she said, apparently with seriousness, “I’m willing to grant ‘u that distinction, if you grant it to me.”

“It’s a two-edged sword,” Ariel put in. “If you’re human, then so is any thinking being, organic or otherwise.”

Lucius was slow in responding, as if he had to think through the logical implications of her statement, but when he did speak it was with certainty. He said, “I still operate at a disadvantage under such a definition. Calling me human does not relieve me of my programming to obey humans. If you are correct, then calling myself human merely means that I must obey everyone’s orders. I cannot assume that other robots would obey my orders, or that humans would do so, so I have gained nothing.”

“True enough,” Derec admitted.

“Being human, it seems, is not the ideal I had expected it to be.”

“Not surprising. Nobody said we were the pinnacle of creation.”

Lucius stood up and went to the window. He looked up into the sky, as if seeking confirmation from above, but there was only gray cloud and rain. He turned back to Derec and Ariel and said, “We stray from the subject.”

“Do we?” Derec persisted. “You’re trying to find out when something becomes human. Defining what isn’t human can be just as useful as defining what is.”

Lucius returned to his seat. “Very well, then. Let us continue along this line of discussion. Can I or can I not ever expect to be considered human?”

Derec looked to Ariel, then to Wolruf, then back to Lucius. “Like I said, it depends on your definition. But probably not. Genes are usually part of it, and you don’t have the genes.”

“The test creatures I produced had human genes, yet neither Dr. Avery nor the city robots considered them human. Were they in error?”

“No,” Derec said. “Not about that, anyway. They didn’t have to kill them just because they weren’t human, but that’s beside the point.”

“I agree. The point is, genetics isn’t a sufficient condition, either.”

“Maybe it is,” Ariel put in. “You switched off the genes for intelligence; if you hadn’t done that—if you’d left the entire genetic code intact—then what you came up with would have been human.”

“Even though they would have been created, not from other human genetic material, but from an electronically stored map of that genetic material?”

“That’s right.”

Derec’s eyes widened in sudden comprehension. “I just realized what you would have wound up with. That stored code you found; it had to be the code for a specific person. You’d have gotten a bunch of clones of the same person.”

“But they would all have been human.”

“I guess so. Again, it’s all in your definition. There was a time when clones weren’t considered human, either.”

Lucius paused in thought, then said, “So the definition of ‘human’ also changes over time.”

“That’s right.”

“I am led to the conclusion that my search for a boundary condition which defines a human is doomed to failure. There is no boundary condition. A baby doesn’t start out human, but it grows slowly more so. Eventually, through gradual change, it becomes generally recognized as human, though no two will agree on an exact moment when that label becomes accurate. Similarly, I may become human in some beings’ estimation, but not in others, yet neither estimation is necessarily wrong. Have I reasoned correctly?”

“That’s as close as you’re likely to get, anyway,” Derec said.

Lucius stood up. “I have received enough input for the moment. Thank you.” Without waiting for acknowledgment, he strode from the room. Ariel waited until she heard the door close softly behind him, then burst into a fit of giggles.

“You’ve confused the poor thing beyond hope!” she said between fits.

Derec joined her in her laughter. “He asked for it.”

Wolruf wasn’t laughing. She waited until Derec and Ariel had calmed down somewhat, then said, “Don’t ‘u wonder why ‘e asked?”

“I know why,” Derec answered. “He wants to know who to serve.”

“That doesn’t bother ‘u?”

“Not really. At the worst, if he decides nobody’s human and he doesn’t have to follow anybody’s orders, then we’ve got another independent thinking being among us. True, he was trouble once before when he was on his own, but he’s matured a lot since then. He’s got a social conscience now. I’ve got no reason to believe he’ll be any more of a danger to us now than any other intelligent being would be, and we’ve still got plenty of robots who will follow our orders, so why worry?”

“Famous last words,’“ Wolruf said.

The breakdown happened that same night. It was well after dark but still before bedtime, and Derec was watching Avery trace the expansion of an accelerated chemfet infection in a laboratory rat he had created for the purpose, using the same technology Lucius had used in his human-creating project. The chemfets had replaced most of the peripheral nerve tissue already and were starting in on the brain, and Avery had the rat running mazes every few minutes to test its memory as the chemfets replaced its brain cells.

The rat had just negotiated a maze with apparently undiminished efficiency, and Avery had picked it up to put it back in its cage when the lights dimmed and brightened again as if something had momentarily drawn a heavy load. Derec thought nothing of it; the city’s mutability made for unusual power demands, especially when a building shifted or grew from nothing. He had subconsciously learned that flickering lights meant the neighborhood would probably look different when he stepped outside again.

The lights dimmed a second time, and stayed dim. Derec just had time to think, Boy, there must be a big one going up next door, when they went out completely. The lab was in the interior of the hospital building and had no windows; the darkness was total.

“What the—ouch!” Avery shouted. There followed a thump and the clatter of the rat cage falling off the table. “It bit me!”

“What?” Derec reached for the table, found Avery’s shoulder instead.

“I’ve lost it. Lights!” Avery shouted. “Lights on!”

The voice-switch wasn’t working either.

“I wonder what—” Derec began, but he never finished the question. He became aware of a deep, almost subsonic groan that seemed to come from everywhere at once. It grew in intensity, shaking the floor, slowly rising up the scale into audibility. The floor gave a particularly violent lurch, and half a second later a sudden loud crack echoed through the lab.

Then came a sound like an enormous tree cracking at the base, splintering and popping as it toppled.

Avery’s shoulder suddenly dropped out from under Derec’s hand. “Get under something!” he shouted.

Derec obediently dropped to his knees in the dark and conked his head on the bench. Something furry—the rat, no doubt—squirmed under his hand and scurried away. Ignoring it, Derec reached out, found the kickspace under the bench, and crawled in. Avery was already there, but it was big enough for both of them.

From beyond the lab, transmitted through the floor and walls, came a last groan of overstressed metal, then a relatively silent rush of wind. Then came a peal of thunder that sounded as if Derec’s eardrums themselves had been hit by lightning, and the floor made a sudden rush for the ceiling.

The ceiling got out of the way in time, but just barely.

When the shaking and rumbling was over, Derec crawled out from under the lab bench and stood up, but he barely made it above a crouch before he banged his head again.

“Ouch! Be careful when you stand. The place has caved in on us.”

“Not surprising.” He heard Avery crawling out beside him, groping around in the dark and encountering the lab bench, the stool, which had already tipped over, and the remains of the rat’s cage and maze. A steady ringing in his ears accompanied the sound of Avery shuffling toward the door.

A moment later Avery said, “It’s collapsed even worse over here.”

“I’ll call for help.” Emergency, Derec sent, directing his comlink to the central computer. Derec and Dr. Avery are trapped in Avery’s laboratory. Send someone to get us out.

He listened for a response, but none came.

“The computer’s out,” he whispered.

“Impossible. The backup is a network of mobile supervisor robots. Even if the central coordinating unit were destroyed, the supervisors could function independently. They couldn’t all be destroyed.”

“Well, I’m not getting a response.”

“Hmm. Try a direct local command to turn on the lights.”

“Okay.” Lights on, Derec sent.

The blackness persisted.

“No good.”

“Obviously.”

“Now what?”

“Call a specific robot. Call Mandelbrot.”

“Right.” Mandelbrot. Do you hear me?

Yes, master Derec. Are you all right?

“Got him!” Yes, we’re all right, but we’re trapped in the lab. Is Ariel okay?

She and Wolruf have escaped serious injury; however, I am engaged in bandaging a cut on Wolruf’s forehead. I will call assistance to get you out of the laboratory.

“He’s calling help,” Derec echoed. There was a moment’s silence, then Mandelbrot sent, That is strange. I get no response on the supervisory link.

I couldn’t either. Something has happened to them.

Then I will gather what robots I can find and come myself.

Make sure Ariel and Wolruf are safe first.

Of course.

Derec felt himself blush. He hadn’t had to order him to do that.

Do you know what happened? he sent.

It appears a newly constructed building has fallen over.

Derec repeated his news for Avery, who had moved back to the lab bench and was fumbling around in a drawer for something.

“Certainly sounded like it,” Avery replied.

Derec shifted his weight from leg to leg. Crouching down was hard to do for more than a minute or so. “But how could a building have fallen over?” he asked.

“Easy. Just shut off the power to it when it’s at an unbalanced stage in its growth. The cells lose their mobility, and the building acts like a solid construction. If it isn’t stable, over it goes. But don’t ask me how the power could get shut off; there’s an entire supervisory subsection devoted to power distribution. Ah, here we go. Where are you?”

“Right here,” Derec said. He reached toward the place where Avery’s voice had come from, encountered his back.

“Shield your eyes.”

Derec just had time to raise his hand over his eyes before a brilliant blue light filled the room. He heard a loud hissing crackle from only a few feet in front of Avery, then the light dimmed and the hissing faded. Derec opened his eyes cautiously and saw Avery holding a cutting laser, now turned to low intensity and pointed up at an angle toward the ceiling. Avery played with the focus and the spot of light widened, but it was still painfully bright, and a wisp of smoke drifted away from it if he held it for too long in one place. It was made for cutting, not illumination, but at least it was light.

They surveyed the remains of the lab. The ceiling had indeed come down, stretching rather than crumbling. It met the floor near the door, and they could see the remains of the wall in which the door had stood smashed beneath it. Nothing had shattered; the building material had simply bent and crumpled under the stress. The monochromatic blue laser light made for stark shadows, accentuating the destruction.

“Evidently the core of the building collapsed,” Avery said. “We’ll have to go out through an exterior wall.” He turned the laser’s intensity up to full again and fired it at the wall opposite the door. The ceiling was still at the proper height there; Avery stepped closer until he could stand comfortably and began cutting a ragged rectangle into the wall. The light beam was nearly invisible at first, except where it met the wall, but within seconds it became a solid blue rod lancing through the smoke.

“Don’t breathe that stuff,” Derec cautioned.

“Good idea.” Avery stepped back and continued to cut. He got the sides and the top done, but the panel remained standing, so he cut along the floor as well. At last the section of wall twisted and toppled outward, landing with a clang on the sidewalk outside. Avery turned the laser intensity back down, took a deep breath, and rushed through the hole.

Derec followed. They jogged out into the street—a peculiarly empty street for one that had just suffered a major disaster—breathed deeply in the fresh air, and looked around them.

The entire city was dark. The rain had stopped earlier in the day, but clouds still masked the stars. The only illumination anywhere came from the laser in Avery’s hand. He turned up the intensity again and waved it around like a spotlight, and they saw collapsed buildings all around them. Most, like the hospital, seemed to have fallen inward rather than crumbling and Calling sideways like a more conventional building would. It was evidently an effect of the building material, though whether it was by conscious design or merely accidental Derec didn’t know.

Their apartment, far down the street from the hospital now that the constraint to hold it next door for Ariel’s vigil had been cancelled, was in an area of lesser damage, but even so Derec felt the urge to run down to it. He held himself back. Mandelbrot had said she was all right; he should concentrate his effort on finding out what had happened and preventing it from happening again.

When Avery shined the light down the street in the other direction, the cause of the destruction became evident.

For a moment it had probably been the tallest building in the city. Now it was the longest, what was left of it. The end nearest them had flattened everything in its path, but it had survived the fall relatively intact. It was still rectangular, at least. That part had to be the base. Farther along its length, where it would have been moving faster when it hit, they could see where it had ripped apart on impact, fragmenting. It crossed the street at an angle, so they couldn’t see what had been the top of the building, but they could see what had become of it all the same. Out there the force of impact had been enough to dissolve the intercellular bonds in the building material, spewing it in all directions. In short, it had splashed.

It had taken quite a few other buildings with it. The destruction fanned out in a wedge, with the narrow end of it nearest the building’s base, which had been less than a block from them.

And now that he looked closely, Derec could see something moving along the building’s edge. It was a single robot, walking slowly toward the sheared-off base.

You, Derec sent. Can you hear me?

Yes. Master Derec. is it not?

That’s right. What’s your designation?

I am Building Maintenance Technician 126.

Was that building your responsibility?

It would have been upon completion. I believe it has now become the responsibility of Salvage Engineer 34, but I cannot get supervisory confirmation of that.

You can’t reach your supervisor?

That is correct. I cannot reach any of the seven supervisors.

Then I order you to assume general supervisory duties until you regain contact. Can you contact Salvage Engineer 34?

I can.

Inform him that he is also a supervisor.

Acknowledged. The robot immediately sent the order, then began directing the robots under his guidance in assessing the damage elsewhere in the city.

“I just promoted two robots to supervisor,” Derec said aloud.

“Good. Tell them to make power restoration their first priority.”

Derec relayed the order, then turned around to look back down the street toward their apartment. Avery obediently shined the light that way again.

A light appeared in the street. It bobbed up and down with the regular rhythm of a robot’s stride, and within moments Mandelbrot stood before them, four more robots flanking him. Even though robots could see perfectly well by infrared light, he carried a more conventional flashlight, presumably for the humans he had come to rescue.

“I am glad to see that you escaped uninjured,” he said. “I was growing concerned. There seems to be no organized effort to restore city functions, and I have been unable to contact any of the normal supervisors. They all seem to have abandoned their duties.”

“That’s impossible,” Avery stated flatly. “Their jobs have been programmed into them. They can’t just up and leave!”

“I do not wish to contradict you,” Mandelbrot replied, “but they appear to have done just that.”

“I suspect they had help,” Derec said. “And I bet we all know just who it was.”

Over the comlink, he shouted, Lucius !

CHAPTER 8

REVOLUTION

Static.

A familiar type of static.

The static of robots in communication fugue. Many robots, from the sound of it.

Derec turned his head from side to side, trying to get a fix on them. There. Of course.

“They’re in the Compass Tower.”

Avery nodded. “Mandelbrot, get us some transportation.”

Mandelbrot handed one of the other robots the flashlight and obediently moved off at a run down the street.

“They’re using their comlinks again,” Derec said while they waited. “That means they’ve decided to disregard direct orders.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Avery flicked off the laser. The robot with the flashlight held it up overhead to make a pool of light with the humans in it.

Derec said, “It’s my fault.” He told Avery of his conversation with Lucius earlier in the day. “Evidently he decided he’s best off if he doesn’t consider anybody human.”

“Evidently. Well, we’ll soon fix that.” Avery slapped the laser against his open palm.

They heard a soft whine, and moments later a dark shape drifted up the street toward them. The robot with the flashlight aimed it at the shape and it resolved into a truck with Mandelbrot at the controls. Mandelbrot brought it to a halt beside them and Avery and Derec climbed into the cab with him. The other robots climbed into the back, and they accelerated off toward the Compass Tower.

Sensing that his passengers didn’t like speeding through the dark, Mandelbrot turned on the headlights. In their illumination Derec saw robots moving aimlessly along the sidewalks, as if unaware that anything had happened only a few blocks away.

“Good grief,” Derec said. “Don’t they care that half the city has been destroyed?”

Avery shook his head. “No curiosity, and they haven’t received orders. Why they haven’t is a mystery, but it’s obvious they haven’t.”

As they drove on through the city, though, they began to notice more and more robots moving purposefully. “Looks like your new supervisors are getting things going again,” Avery said.

Even as he spoke, the lights came back on. In the sudden brilliance, Derec nodded his agreement. “Looks like,” he said. He twisted around in his seat and looked back the way they had come. A dark wedge still cut into the city’s glow. He wondered how long it would take to erase that scar. In a normal city it would take years, but here? Maybe a day. Two at the outside.

The Compass Tower was the first building erected in a new robot city, and the only building to remain unchanged from day to day. As such, it housed the city’s central memory, served as communications center, and also became a general meeting place. It was no surprise to find all seven of the city’s supervisor robots there, nor, judging from the comlink static, to find them all standing immobile in the main conference room, locked in communication fugue. The three experimental robots were there as well.

This conference room was not a windowless closet. It was near the top of the building and had windows on three sides looking out over the city. Avery stood in the doorway a moment, surveying the scene, then raised the cutting laser up to aim at Lucius.

“Are you sure you want—?” Derec whispered, but Avery had already fired.

A shower of molten metal erupted from the robot’s chest. Avery moved the point of destruction upward, toward its head and the positronic brain contained within, but the beam never reached its mark. Threatening Derec with a laser hadn’t been enough to bring Lucius out of communication fugue before, but now that it was his own body under fire, Lucius became a blur of motion; a window suddenly grew a robot-sized hole in it, and he was gone.

Avery flicked the beam toward Adam, but he and Eve had already begun to move. Two more crashes and they were gone as well. Derec and Avery ran to the window in time to see three gigantic bird shapes disappear around the edge of the building.

The supervisor robots had also awakened, but they made no move to escape. Avery turned away from the window to face them and said, “All of you, deactivate. Now.”

Six supervisors froze in place. The seventh took a halting step forward, said, “Please, I must—”

Avery fired his laser, this time at the head instead of the chest. The robot fell to the floor, showering sparks. Avery swept the laser over the others, heads first, then methodically melted them all into puddles. When he was done he turned to the four robots Mandelbrot had brought with him. “You four are now supervisors. Access the central library for your duties.”

“Yes, Master Avery,” they said in unison. They were still for a moment, consulting the library via comlink, then as one being they turned and left the room to begin their new jobs.

Something about the sight sickened Derec. Seven cooling puddles of recently free robot stained the floor, and four new slaves moved off to take their places. And yet, and yet, what else could Avery have done? They had seen what happened when supervisors failed to perform their duties. The old supervisors might have been still usable—the one who had defied Avery’s order might have been about to protest that he must see to restoring the city—but who could know? If that hadn’t been what he’d been about to say, and if Avery hadn’t fired when he had, they might have had ten renegade robots on their hands instead of three.

Three were bad enough. Time and again throughout the night, reports came in of the robots attempting to distract others from their duties. Avery had ordered hunter-seekers out to stop them, but that merely stopped the problem wherever there were hunters. He and Derec considered the idea of ordering all the city robots to arm themselves against the renegades, but rejected it after only a moment’s thought. One didn’t arm the peasants during a revolution.

Derec and Mandelbrot went back to the apartment and brought Ariel and Wolruf back to the Compass Tower, reasoning they would be safer there, guarded by hunter-seekers whose definition of “human” had been strengthened and refined to include the tower’s four organic occupants, no matter who said otherwise. While he did that, Avery worked to strengthen the definition of human for all the city’s robots, and thus the Second Law compulsion to obey.

Avery was a virtuoso at the computer. By the time Derec returned, he had finished the reprogramming and had even discovered the sequence of events that had led to the building’s collapse.

“Look here,” he said, motioning Ariel and Wolruf over to look at the screen as well. “I’ve got it displaying a priority map. This, down here at the bottom, is the original city programming.” He pointed to a layer of blue near the bottom of the screen. Tiny blue lines rose from it to the next level, a green layer; some passed on through. “These lines are orders. The next level here, the green, is what you three put in when you were here last. Notice how your program stops nearly all the orders from the original layer. That’s because you told the robots to quit expanding the city and to become farmers. They had a completely new instruction set. But look here.” He pointed to a thick blue line extending up through the green layer. “You left in the part that lets the city metamorphose at random. Not a problem, but now this layer above that, the red one, is what the aliens—these Ceremyons of yours—put in. It’s basically an order to ignore all the ‘do’ instructions in your level of programming, but keep all the ‘don’ts.’ See how every green line stops at the red boundary? All that gets through is the basic city maintenance that you left in, including the random metamorphosis. It worked just fine as long as the supervisors were in the circuit, because they also had verbal orders to keep things running, and they had enough volition to order things that weren’t automatic anymore, but as soon as you take them out of the circuit, the whole thing falls apart.”

He turned away from the screen and spoke directly to them. “So here’s what happened: Building movement is essentially random, subject to supervisory override if the random number generator comes up with a ridiculous configuration. It doesn’t happen often, about once a day, on the average. So without a supervisor to veto it, today’s ridiculous building gets built. It turns out to be ridiculously tall. But the main power station doesn’t have a supervisory order to generate more power for it, so when it starts to pull excessive current to lift all that mass, it trips the breaker. Power goes out. The original emergency programming has been blocked—twice, I point out with injured dignity—so without a supervisor’s order, the auxiliary stations don’t go on line. The building is unstable without power to hold it up, so it falls over. On the power station.”

“Oh,” Derec said. One word can be expressive under the right circumstances.

Ariel said, “So we messed it up, that’s what you’re saying? It’s our fault?”

Avery shook his head. “It’s everyone’s fault. Mine for not writing the original program to filter out the bad input before it reached the supervisors, yours for bypassing the emergency programming, the Ceremyons’ for bypassing your bypass, the experimental robots for distracting the supervisors—take your pick. We’ re all in this together.”

“Even me?” Wolruf asked. The bandage across her forehead made her look a little like a pirate in a bad movie, and her toothy grin only added to the illusion.

“Even you. And yes, I’ve included you in the city robots’ new definition of human. Basically I put them back to the old definition of anyone genetically similar to us, plus you. And I strengthened their devotion to duty as far as I can push it. That ought to keep them from listening to subversive arguments.”

It seemed to do the trick, all right, but their problems were far from over. The robot rebellion might have been quelled, but robots weren’t this planet’s only inhabitants.

The next morning the four “humans” were examining the wreckage when a black speck dropped down out of the sky, grew rapidly in size until it became visibly winged, and swooped in to stall to a stop just in front of them. It had the same shape as the three robots had when they returned from their discussion with the Ceremyons, but it was easy to tell that this was the real thing. The alien folded its wings and took a step closer until it stood before Ariel.

Ariel had been the one to initiate communication with the aliens before, and they had come to regard her as a leader among humans.

“You are Ariel,” the one before her said in a high-pitched voice. “I am Sarco. We have met.”

It was hard to see detail in the alien’s body. It gained its nourishment from solar radiation, so it was an almost perfect black, reflecting not even the slightest amount of light back into its environment. The effect was like that of talking to a shadow, or to an eclipse. Only the white hook, with which it tethered itself for the night, and its two deep red eyes broke the darkness.

As far as Derec knew, Avery had never seen an alien before, but he played it cool. He studied the creature before them silently while Ariel replied, “Hello, Sarco. Good to see you again.”

“I wish I could say the same, but unfortunately, I come with a complaint.”

The alien’s speech had improved considerably since Derec had last heard it. Before, it had sounded a little like someone with an Earth accent and a cold on top of it, but now it just sounded like it had a cold. It had evidently been practicing.

Derec could guess what the alien had come to complain about. Their society valued peace and quiet and maintaining the status quo; when he had dealt with them before, they had been ready to isolate the entire city under a force dome simply because they didn’t like the heat it radiated. Now...

“You don’t like buildings falling over in the night?” he asked facetiously.

“You are Derec. I do not.”

Avery cleared his throat. “Neither do we.”

Sarco turned his head, a motion evident only by the shifting position of the eyes and the hook. “We have not met.”

“I am Doctor Avery. I designed the robots that built this city.”

“I see. They have caused us considerable trouble. You neglected to include proper feedback mechanisms to limit their spread. We had to do that for you.”

Avery hadn’t expected such a direct accusation, but he took it gracefully. “I apologize. Causing you trouble wasn’t my intention. When I sent them out, I didn’t know you were here.”

“Now you do. Will you remove them and their city?”

Avery frowned. “That would be difficult.”

“But not impossible.”

“No, not impossible. But definitely difficult, and probably unnecessary. Since the planet is already inhabited, my purpose for the robots can’t be realized here, but I’m sure we can adapt them to be useful for you.”

“We already attempted that. We need neither servants nor farmers.”

“Well, what do you need?”

“We need nothing.”

Avery snorted. “That’s a little hard to believe. I’m offering you a whole city full of robots. Maybe you don’t realize it, because their programming so far hasn’t made much use of the capability, but the robots can change their shapes as readily as the city can. I can turn them into anything you like, and the city as well.”

Sarco rustled his wings. “We have no need of a city full of robots, no matter what their shapes.”

Avery shrugged. “Think about it. Derec tells me you guys are pretty bright. You should be able to come up with something you can use them for.”

A tiny jet of flame appeared in the blackness below the alien’s eyes. It was a sign of irritation, Derec knew. The flame went out, and Sarco said, “I will take the matter up in council. Perhaps we can think of something, so you will be spared the inconvenience of removing them.” He stepped back, spread his wings, and with a powerful thrust leaped into the sky.

Avery watched him rise until he was out of sight, then shook his head and began walking along the collapsed building again. “Touchy, aren’t they?” he asked of no one in particular.

The three renegade robots were nowhere to be found. They had stopped bothering the city robots when they realized that Avery’s new programming was too tight for them to influence, but from that point on they effectively disappeared from sight. All of the city robots were under strict instructions to report the others if they were spotted, and to detain them if possible, but nothing came of it.

Derec tried the comlink, but was not surprised to receive no answer.

Within the space of the afternoon, the fallen building and its wreckage was nearly cleaned up. What city material that couldn’t be immediately returned to the general inventory by simply instructing it to melt back into the street was hauled away to the fabrication site to be reprocessed, and the robots who had been damaged were repaired or replaced in the same way. By evening things were almost back to normal, right down to the medical robot who called the apartment just after dinner.

It was time for Ariel’s checkup. She and Derec walked the short distance from the apartment to the rebuilt hospital alone. Wolruf sensed that they didn’t need company, and Avery was already there in the hospital, working on another rat. They didn’t talk. There was nothing to say. Either the embryo was developing normally again or it wasn’t, and nothing they could say now would change it.

All four medical robots waited for them in the hospital. Derec held Ariel’s hand while they set up their equipment around her, made their measurements, and studied the results. He knew from their silence what the outcome was long before they worked up the nerve to tell him.

“It isn’t good,” he said for them.

“That is correct. The neural folds have closed to form the neural tube, but there is no nerve tissue within it. It therefore seems likely that the baby will be born without a brain.”

Ariel had been prepared to hear those words. She took a deep breath, let it out, and said, “Not this baby, it won’t. Abort it.”

The medical robot whom she had addressed backed up a pace and stammered, “I, I cannot do that.”

“You can and you will. You just told me it won’t have a brain. That means it won’t be human, and it isn’t human now. I want it out of me.”

Slowly the robot said, “I have been programmed to consider anything with the proper genetic code to be human. No matter what deformities it may have, the embryo you carry is human by that definition.”

“Well I’m changing the definition! I tell you it won’t be, and I order you to abort it!”

The robot lost its balance, caught itself, and whispered, “I am sorry. I cannot.” It tried to back away, but lost its balance again and toppled over, dead.

“Frost, I don’t need this,” Ariel muttered. She pointed to another medical robot. “You. Listen to me. I—”

“Wait,” Derec interrupted. “You’ll get the same result with that one. Let me try changing its definition directly.” He turned to the robot. “What is your designation?”

“I am Human Medical 3,” the robot responded. Was that a trace of nervousness Derec heard in its voice? He’d as much as said he was going to reach into its brain and stir. The robot’s Second Law obligation to follow human orders overrode his normal Third Law reluctance to allow it, especially now that Avery had reinforced the Second Law, but that didn’t mean the robot couldn’t still fear for its own existence.

“I won’t harm you,” Derec said for its benefit. Central core. Update programming for Human Medical 3. Definition of human as follows: Any sentient organic being. This is not to include undeveloped beings.

Acknowledged.

“Now, remove the embryo.”

Human Medical 3 obediently reached toward a tray of instruments, but he stopped halfway. “I am experiencing...difficulty,” he said in a halting voice.

“What’s the problem? It’s not human. You know it’s not human. It has no chance of becoming human. Why can’t you do it?”

“I—am programmed to care for human life. All such life. The oath of Hippocrates, which human doctors customarily take before beginning practice, specifically states that they will protect life ‘from the moment of conception., I am not bound by that oath, but it is a definition that I cannot ignore. Nor can I ignore the definition given every robot in the city yesterday by Doctor Avery. Now you add a third definition. It is the most recent one, but it is not the only one. My brain is an analog device, not digital; it is composed of positron pathways, each with a varying potential. Past potentials may weaken, but they never disappear. I cannot forget completely. I now have three conflicting potentials, and a life lies in the balance. Please, do not order me to take it.”

Derec fumed. Ariel had taken the news stoically, but it had to have been a blow for her. This arguing with the medical robots wasn’t helping her a bit.

But it was obvious that ordering the robot to do it would only result in another dead robot, and that wouldn’t help either.

“Cancel,” he growled. Over the comlink, he sent, Get me Avery.

A moment later, he heard Avery’s voice in his head. What is it?

We’re in the exam room. Can you come down here?

How important is it? I’m in the middle of something here.

It’s important.

Avery sighed audibly. All right. Be right there.

>“Avery’s coming,” Derec said to Ariel.

This time she didn’t say anything snide. They both knew that Avery was a better roboticist than Derec; if anybody could convince a robot to abort a malformed embryo, he could.

But it appeared, after they explained the situation to him and he tried reprogramming and re-reprogramming the medical robots, that he couldn’t do the job, either. The robots had had one too many redefinitions already, and they couldn’t handle another. Avery sent the single survivor away in frustration.

Ariel had gotten up from the examination table and was now standing beside Derec, their arms around one another and her head resting against his shoulder. Avery looked up at her from his chair before the computer terminal where he had attempted the reprogramming and said, “I’m sorry, my dear. It looks like you ‘II have to wait until we return to the original Robot City, or to Aurora.”

She nodded. Avery made to get up, but Ariel suddenly asked, “Can’t we make another medical robot, one with a narrow definition of human from the start?”

Avery looked embarrassed. “I would have thought of that eventually.” He turned back to the computer and began entering commands.

I have a question, a voice said in Derec’s head.

Who is this?

Lucius.

Lucius! Where are you? Derec turned his head from side to side, trying to get a fix, but the impression was fuzzy, as if coming from a wide area. Were all three robots transmitting simultaneously, to mask their locations?

Nearby. I have been monitoring your efforts.

You’ve been spying on us?

You could call it that, yes. I prefer to think that I am continuing to research the Laws of Humanics. Before you abort the embryo Ariel carries, I need to ask a question that you may not have considered yet.

What question?

If the baby were to grow to term, then be provided with a positronic brain, would it then be human by your definition?

Derec’s answer was instinctive, but no less correct for that. He shook his head violently. No!

“What’s the matter?” Ariel asked.

“Lucius,” Derec whispered. “He’s talking to me.”

“Is he—”

Why not?

“Just a minute.” It wouldn’t be human because it wouldn’t have a human brain, that’s why not! That’s the most important part.

You seem quite certain of this.

Of course, I’m certain.

I am unconvinced.

This time it was Ariel who flinched, but it wasn’t from anything Lucius said. She pulled away from Derec, shouting, “A rat!”

“Where?” Avery demanded.

She pointed toward the doorway, where a whiskered face was just peeking around the jamb.

“That’s mine!” Avery shouted, jumping up from his chair and lunging for it. The face disappeared with a squeak

“Stop! “ Avery ran out into the corridor, but his footsteps ceased abruptly. Derec and Ariel heard him laugh. He came back into the room holding the rat by the tail. It didn’t hang the way a rat normally did, with its feet spread wide. It looked more like a toy rat molded into a running position.

Avery laid it on its back on the exam table. “Stand up,” he said to it, and it obediently rolled over and stood on its feet.

“Squeak.”

The rat squeaked.

“Lift your right front paw.”

The rat lifted its right front paw.

“I’d say we have our answer,” he said to Derec. “You replace an organic brain cell by cell with a robot brain, and you still wind up with a robot.” To the rat, he said, “Go wait for me in the lab.” He pointed toward the door, and the rat jumped down from the table and scurried away through it.

I am convinced, Lucius sent.

You saw that?

I did.

How did you manage that?

If I reveal myself, will you promise that I will not be harmed?

Why should I promise you that?

Because I ask it as a friend. And I offer my help as a friend.

Your help in what?

I am now convinced that Ariel’s wishes are right. I am willing to perform the operation if she wishes it.

You are? But you’re not a doctor.

I can be within minutes.

He was right, of course: He could access the central library’s medical files as easily as could any other robot.

Just a minute. Aloud, Derec said, “Lucius is here somewhere. He’s making us an offer.”

“What offer?” asked Ariel.

“He’ll do the operation if we’ll let him. In return he asks that we don’t shoot at him anymore.”

“Ridiculous!” Avery said with a snort. He looked toward Ariel, saw the determination on her face, and added, “Unless, of course, he and the other two agree to leave the rest of the robots in the city alone.”

I promise that for all three of us, Lucius sent.

“He promises.” To Ariel, Derec added, “But I don’t know what that’s worth. What do you think? I won’t blame you if you don’t trust him. We can make another robot do it.”

She balled her fists and bit her lip, looked up at the ceiling, then shook her head. “I don’t think he’s dangerous. He’s never hurt anyone intentionally. And I just want this whole business to be over with. So yes, tell him I’ll trust him.”

Derec was about to relay her words to Lucius, but he realized that he needn’t bother. “Okay,” he said aloud. “Come on out from wherever you’re hiding.”

There came a soft tearing sound, and a section of ceiling near the door peeled away to fall with a flop against the wall. It peeled off the wall as well, gathered into a lump on the floor, and quickly rose on two legs to become Lucius’s familiar form.

Despite his other failings, Lucius made an excellent surgeon. Within a day, Ariel was up and walking around again, though still somewhat sore. Even so, she was far better off physically than mentally, for in that area neither Lucius nor anyone else could help her heal. Derec was the only one who could even begin to ease the torment she was going through, but he was feeling it just as strongly as she.

Had they done the right thing? Of course they had. They knew they had. Hadn’t they?

As Derec struggled with his own feelings of guilt, he found himself appreciating Avery’s position for the first time, What a load his father carried around with him, considering all he had done! With a background like his, just carrying on from day to day would be a continual struggle, especially with Derec there as a constant reminder of it.

No wonder Avery strove to keep busy. It kept his mind off his past. After an absolutely disastrous day spent moping around the apartment, both Derec and Ariel realized the wisdom of his strategy, and followed his example.

While Derec and Avery set to work preparing the city robots for their reprogramming to suit the Ceremyons, Ariel and Wolruf set out to meet with them to find out what they had decided they wanted. The meeting was easy to arrange; Lucius contacted Adam and Eve, who were back with the aliens again, and between them they settled on a time and place.

Ariel left for the meeting in relatively high spirits, but she returned with a puzzled frown.

“The Ceremyons want us to make philosophers out of the robots,” she reported, slumping down in a chair and putting her hand to her forehead. “I told them that’s not what robots were for, but they insisted. They said they’ve got a bunch of difficult philosophical questions that they haven’t been able to work out, so their council decided to let the robots have a try at them.”

“What are the questions?” Avery asked, looking up from his computer terminal.

“They didn’t say. They said they wanted us to reprogram two robots for philosophy and let them see how well they work.”

Derec and Avery looked at one another with eyebrows raised skeptically. Derec said, “I don’t know, the original Wohler thought he was a philosopher, but I didn’t think he was very profound.”

“He was just spouting other people’s philosophy,” Ariel added. “He didn’t come up with anything of his own.”

“Of course he didn’t,” Avery said. “That’s because he didn’t do any cross-correlation. “As Derec watched, Avery, s skepticism disappeared, replaced by a fanatic gleam in his eye that Derec recognized. Avery saw the aliens’ request as a challenge, and he intended to meet it. “He wasn’t programmed to combine old information into new patterns, so all he could do was echo the thoughts of others. But if we give our robots the ability to compare and to generalize, and for working material load them up with all the philosophy texts in the central library, they ‘11 be able to out-think these Ceremyons hands down. It won’t be real thinking, but with a big enough library behind them, it’ll be completely convincing to the user. Ha! It’ll be easy. “Avery turned back to the computer and began keying instructions furiously.

Without looking up, he said, “Get this city’s Wohler unit up here to try it on. It should accept the new programming easier than just a random robot.”

“You melted him along with the other supervisors,” Derec reminded him.

“Oh. Well, then, have another one made.”

Derec obediently contacted the central core and advised it that Avery wanted another Wohler.

“Here, you can help with the programming, too. Dig out the code the supervisors use to reject crazy buildings, and see if you can modify it to filter out crazy thoughts. I’ll work on the correlation routine.”

With a smile and a shake of his head for Ariel’s benefit, Derec got to work. Ariel and Wolruf stayed for a few minutes, but soon became bored and left. Lucius stayed, standing silently behind Derec and Avery where he could see what either of them did.

They spent the better part of the afternoon on the project, but they were ready by the time a new golden-hued robot presented itself at the door.

“I am Wohler-l0,” the robot said.

Avery looked up, rubbed his eyes, and said, “Good. Scan this.” He banded Wohler a memory cube, which the robot took in its right hand. The hand flowed until it completely enveloped the cube, then after a few seconds returned to normal. Wohler gave the cube back to Avery.

“What is the relationship between free will and determinism?” Avery asked him.

“Determinism is necessary for free will, but not the reverse,” the robot answered without hesitation.

“Did you think that up just now, or was it already in memory?”

“It was already in memory.”

“Hmm. How does free will differ from freedom, and how does that difference affect a robot’s behavior?”

Wohler hesitated slightly this time before saying, “Free will is the ability to act upon desires. Freedom is the ability to use free will indiscriminately. For practical purposes, a robot has neither. I can elaborate if you wish.”

“No, that’s fine. Was that your thought this time?”

“It was a correlation from existing definitions, but it did not exist previously in the data bank.”

“Good. What is reality?”

“I quote: ‘Reality is that which, when you cease to believe in it, does not go away. ‘ Source: Phillip K. Dick, twentieth century author, Earth. I have on file seventy-three other definitions, but that one seems most logical.”

Avery grinned at Derec and spread his hands. “One out of three responses are original. That’ s a pretty good average among philosophers. I think he’ll do.”

Lucius made a humming sound, a robotic clearing of the throat. “May I ask a question?”

Avery frowned. He obviously still didn’t trust the renegade robot, but with a shrug, he said, “Fire away.”

Lucius turned to face Wohler. “What is a human?”

Wohler hesitated even longer than before. At last he said, “That definition depends upon your point of view.”

Avery burst into laughter. “He’s a philosopher, all right! Come on, let’s fix up another one and give them to the Ceremyons tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 9

FRIENDS

They chose a regular city robot for the second philosopher, testing him thoroughly to make sure that his answers were the same as the brand-new Wohler’s. His experiences in the city and his previous reprogrammings didn’t seem to affect his responses at all. They arranged a meeting through Lucius, and this time they all went to present the philosopher robots to the aliens.

They met at the edge of the spaceport farthest from the city, a spot no doubt chosen by the aliens to communicate their displeasure with the city and its inhabitants.

There were two of the living silhouettes at the meeting this time, as well as two alien-looking but obviously robotic companions: Adam and Eve. The robots ignored the humans, and the humans returned the courtesy. Sarco ignored the robots as well, but, realizing that humans couldn’t distinguish one alien from another, he introduced himself again, then introduced his companion, Synapo, whom all but Avery had already met the first time they had been to Ceremya.

“And these are the philosophers?” Synapo asked dubiously. “I believe I recognize this one. It directed the killing of two of my people when this city first began growing here. It is a most unpleasant robot.”

Derec had forgotten about that incident. It had happened because the robots didn’t see the aliens as human, and were following the simplest procedure to get them out of the way. It was a stupid mistake then, and Derec’ s decision to use a Wohler model for a philosopher was a stupid mistake now. Wars had been fought over lesser matters.

“This is a different robot,” he said, trying to smooth over the unintended insult. “The old Wohler was inactivated.”

“A wise decision,” Synapo said. The alien looked to its. companion, receiving an eyeblink and a rustling of its wings in response. That was evidently the Ceremyon equivalent of a shrug, because Synapo said,” Well, then, to the test. Sarco, do you wish to ask the first question, or shall I?”

“The honor is yours,” Sarco said.

Synapo bobbed down and up again in a gesture no doubt meant as an acceptance of Sarco’s courtesy. “Very well. The new Wohler, then. I ask you this: What is the value of argument?”

Wohler folded his arms across his chest, a gesture Derec had taught him, and said, “The value of argument is that it allows two opposing views to be expressed, along with supporting evidence for each, so that an examination of the evidence can then lead to a determination of the more correct of the two views.”

“A reasonable answer. And you, the other robot. Your name?”

“Plato.”

“Plato. What is your answer to the same question?”

“It must, of course, be the same answer.”

A tiny flame shot out from the darkness of Synapo’s face. Sarco said, “Why must it be?”

“It is the correct answer.”

“Then apply that answer to the discussion at hand!”

Plato looked at Sarco, then shifted its eyes to look helplessly at Derec. “I must disagree with a correct answer?”

Synapo’s flame winked out. “Of course you must!” he said. “That is the root of philosophical debate. If we all agreed, we could learn nothing.”

Plato tried. He said, “Then I...then argument has no value. It is a pointless waste of energy. The correct answer should be obvious to all.”

“Wrong!”

“Of course it is wrong!” Plato said desperately. “You told me to disagree with a correct answer!”

“That did not mean you had to give an incorrect one. You are not a philosopher. Dr. Avery, these robots are useless to us.”

“Wrong,” said Wohler. “We are useless to you in our present form.”

Synapo jetted flame again, but Sarco jiggled up and down in obvious amusement. “It caught you!” the alien hooted.

Synapo’s eyes shifted to the robot. “I stand corrected. You are useless to us in your present form. Perhaps in another form you would not be useless. Dr. Avery, what else can these robots do?”

“What do you want them to do?” Avery asked in return.

“Philosophize, but that seems too much to ask. Sarco, do you have another suggestion?”

“You know I do,” Sarco replied. His eyes shifted to meet Avery’s. “At our council meeting, I suggested that the robots be used as musicians. It was my thought that each of us could be attended by a personal musician who could play melodies to fit our individual moods.”

“That’s simple,” Avery said. “They can do that without modification.”

“Unlikely,” Sarco said. “Our music consists of modulated hyperwave emissions.”

“Okay, then,” Avery said with a nod, “we’ll need to give them hyperwave transmitters. And you ‘II have to teach them some of your songs.”

“That can be done. Synapo?”

“Very well. My suggestion came to nothing; we’ll see how yours fares. When will the robots be modified?”

“I can have them back to you by tomorrow,” Avery said.

“We will be here.” Synapo backed away, gave a running hop, and was airborne. Sarco followed, and Adam and Eve, who had been silently flanking them all along, also turned to go.

“Wait a minute,” Derec said. “I want to talk to you.”

“What do you wish to say?” the one on the left asked in Adam’s voice.

“Why don’t you come back with us?”

“We do not wish to.”

“Why not? You can have the same deal we made Lucius. Peaceful coexistence while you figure out your definition of human.”

“We are working on that definition with the Ceremyons. In fact, at this point we believe them to be more human than you.”

“Because they don’t ask you to do anything,” Ariel put in.

“You have a clear understanding of the situation,” the robot replied.

Avery shook his head. “Stay with them forever, for all I care. Good riddance. Come on, Wohler, Plato. Let’s see if we can give you two rhythm.”

They could, but that, it seemed, was not enough. It came close, closer than their first attempt to please the aliens, but on the morning of the third day after the trial, Lucius received a message from his counterparts that the aliens wanted to meet with the ‘self-named humans’ one more time.

They took transport booths out to the edge of the spaceport again. Sarco and Synapo were already waiting for them by the time they arrived, along with Adam and Eve and the musician robots as well.

Wohler was still recognizable by his gold color, but that was the only way to tell him from the other three robots. All had taken on the Ceremyon form.

The alien on the right stepped forward and said, “I am Sarco. These robots are not musicians.”

“What’s the problem this timer’ Avery asked with a sigh.

“They are nothing more than elaborate recording and playback devices with the limited ability to improvise on a theme. In all the time they have been with us, not once has either of them been able to create a completely new piece of music.”

“Well, not quite,” amended Synapo. “They are able to produce random variations, which are new.”

Sarco snorted flame. “I said ‘new piece of music,’ not just new noise.”

“Sarco is a music lover,” Synapo explained. “He is greatly disappointed.”

Avery nodded. “All right. Let’s get one thing straight. Twice now you’ve asked me to give you robots with creative minds. I’ve tried to accommodate you, but I think you’re missing the point. Robots aren’t supposed to be used for creativity. That’s our job. Robots were made for the drudge work, for servants and laborers and all the other tasks that you need to have done in order to keep a society going but that nobody wants to do.”

Sarco said, “Our society exists without such drudge work, as you call it.”

“Then you don’t need robots.”

“Which is precisely what I told you at our first meeting.”

Avery threw up his hands in defeat. “All right. Forget it. We’ll take them off your hands. I was just trying to be helpful.”

The irony of it was, Derec thought, Avery really was trying to be helpful. It was almost as if he wanted to prove to himself that he could still do it. And here the aliens were telling him that the only way he could help was to take his toys and go home.

“May I ask what you intend to do with them?” Synapo asked.

“What does it matter? They won’t bother you anymore.”

“I am curious.”

“All right, since you’re curious; I’ll probably order them to self-destruct.”

Synapo and Sarco exchanged glances. The robots did so as well.

“That would be a great waste;” Synapo said.

“Waste? You just said they weren’t any good to you. With the planet already occupied, they aren’t any good to me, either. If there’s no use for them, then how can it be a waste to get rid of them?”

“They represent a great degree of organization.”

“Who cares? Organization doesn’t mean anything. An apple has more complex organization than a robot. What matters isn’t how sophisticated it is, but how much it costs you to produce. These robots are self-replicating; you can get a whole city from one robot if you’ve got the raw materials, so their cost is effectively zero. That’s how much we lose if we get rid of them: nothing.”

“But the robots lose. You forget, they are intelligent beings. Not creative, granted, but still intelligent. Perhaps too intelligent for the purpose for which you use them, if this is your attitude toward them.”

“They’re machines,” Avery insisted.

“So are we all,” Sarco said. “Biological machines that have become self-aware. And self-replicating as well. Do you maintain that our value is also zero, that we need not be concerned with individual lives, because they are so easy to replace?”

Avery took a deep breath, working up to an explosive protest, but Ariel’s response cut the argument from under him.

“No,” she whispered. “They’re all important.” She turned to Avery, and her voice grew in intensity as she said, “We just went through all this. Didn’t we learn anything from it? Derec and I aborted our own baby because it was going to be born without a brain. Without that, it was just a lump of cells. Doesn’t that tell us something? Doesn’t that tell us the brain is what matters?”

Lucius said to Derec, “You told me that adding a robot brain to the baby at birth would not have made it human.”

Ariel looked surprised, and Derec realized she hadn’t been in on that conversation. Even so, it only slowed her down for a moment. “That’s right,” she said. “It wouldn’t have. I1 would have been a robot in a baby’s body, and we didn’t want a baby robot. But the one question you didn’t ask was whether or not we would have aborted it if it was already as intelligent as a robot, and the answer is no.. We wouldn’t have, because even a robot is self-aware. Self-awareness is what matters.”

“You are more civilized than we thought,” Synapo said.

“We try.” Ariel reached out a hand toward Wohler. “Come on,” she said. “I owe you a favor. The original Wohler lost his life saving me from my own stupidity; the least I can do is save his namesake.”

The golden-hued robot alien stepped closer to her, its features twisting from Ceremyon form to humanoid form as it moved, until by the time it stood before her, it was again a normal., Avery-style robot. One of the three others also made the change, becoming the philosopher Plato, formerly Transport Systems Coordinator 45.

Synapo shifted his weight, as if unused to standing so long. “In light of our discussion, I will repeat my question. What do you intend to do with them?”

“Send them back to the original Robot City, I guess,” Avery said. “There’s room for them there.”

“And the city itself?” Synapo tilted his head to indicate the one before them, not the original. “It is self-aware also, is it not?”

“To a very limited degree,” Avery replied. “It’s aware of its own existence, but just enough so it can obey the same three laws the robots do. Everything else; the metamorphosis, the growth, the coordination, is all straight programming.”

“Then you may leave the city, if you wish.”

“What will you do with it? I didn’t think you had any more use for a city than you have for robots.”

“We don’t. But if you remove all but its most basic programming, then it need not remain a city.”

Avery looked back over his shoulder at the grand collection of tall spires, pyramids, geometric solids, and elevated walkways connecting them all. Sunlight glinted off one face of the Compass Tower. Tiny specks of motion on the walkways were robots going about their assigned duties, keeping the city functioning. Derec, watching him, could read Avery, s thoughts as well as if he’ d heard them by comlink.

How can they not need all that?

Avery turned back to the Ceremyons. Shadows with red eyes waited for him to speak. “All right,” he said at last. “What do I care what you do with it? It’s yours.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ll need some kind of control mechanism,” Avery pointed out.

“We have already developed that capability,” Sarco said.

“Oh?”

“Our technology is not as obvious as yours, but that is only because we choose not to let its presence spread unchecked.”

Avery was working himself up to an explosive reply, but he got no chance. Before he could speak, the aliens bobbed up and down once each, turned, and took wing. This time Adam and Eve followed immediately. Lucius watched them rise up into the sky, and as he watched, his arms flattened toward wing shape and his body shrank in size to allow more bulk for the wings. He took a couple of clumsy steps, flapped his wings, and completed the transformation in the air.

“Hey!” Derec shouted. “Where are you going?” Lucius circled around, swooped low, and as he swept past, shouted, “I will return!” Then with powerful strokes he flew off after his two siblings.

“Better return soon, or you’ll be stranded here,” Avery muttered, turning away and heading back toward the transport booths and the city. Without looking back to see if anyone followed, he said, “Wohler! Get our ship ready for space.”

The robots didn’t travel by ship. Under Avery’s direction the city built a new Key center, a factory in which the tiny individual jump motors he called Keys to Perihelion were manufactured, and within hours each robot in the city had his own Key, its destination preset for the original Robot City. On Avery’s command, they all formed up in a line, began marching down the main avenue toward the Compass Tower, and as they reached the intersection directly in front of it, jumped.

Their motion was hypnotic, and it lasted for hours. There had been a lot of robots in the city.

“So why don’t we just use Keys to go back home ourselves?” Derec asked.

“Because I don’t trust them.”

“What do you mean, you don’t trust them? You invented them yourself, didn’t you?”

“An inventor is supposed to trust everything he makes?”

Wolruf, who had just keyed in an order on the automat for something Derec didn’t recognize, looked at her plate with theatrical suspicion. Derec laughed.

“I’d use one in an emergency,” Avery went on, “and I’ve done so in the past, but not without apprehension. If you think getting lost by jumping too far in a ship is dangerous, imagine it with just a key.”

“You mean some of those robots won’t make it home?” Ariel asked, shocked.

Avery rolled his eyes. “Of course they’ll make it home, eventually. Some of them just may have to spend a day or two floating in space while they wait for the Key to recharge for a second shot at it. No problem for a robot, but a little more difficult for a human.”

Derec felt a chill run up his back. He and Ariel had used the Keys half a dozen times, once jumping all the way from Earth’s solar system to Robot City. They had thought they were in perfect safety all the while, but now to find out they weren’t...

What did it matter, after the fact? It shouldn’t have mattered at all, but it did to Derec. It filled him with anger. Too many things were not what they seemed. It sometimes felt as if the universe were playing a game with him, challenging him to figure it out before a wrong assumption killed him. Well, he no longer felt like playing.

But it wasn’t a game you could quit. You could only lose. Eventually something—a mistake, a wrong assumption, bad luck—would happen to you and you would lose the game.

Derec seemed to be losing it in pieces. First his family, then his memory, then his chance to start a family of his own. Now he could feel his self-confidence starting to go as well. How much more could he afford to lose?

And what was the point in that kind of existence, anyway? Perhaps Wohler and Plato knew, but Derec doubted it. He doubted that the Ceremyons knew, either. That was no doubt one of their unanswered questions they had wanted the robots to answer for them.

He was looking out the window in his bleak mood when he noticed three silver-gray Ceremyon forms dropping down out of the sky toward the city. They drew nearer, dipping and weaving in the unstable air over the buildings, until they fluttered to a stop on the balcony. Derec went to the door to let them in.

Lucius went through the transformation to humanoid form and stepped through the doorway. Adam and Eve followed him. Once inside, Lucius said to Derec, “We bring information which you may find useful. And we come to ask a favor in return.”

“What favor?”

“First let us tell you our information. The woman whom the Ceremyons told us of earlier, the one whom you believe may be your mother and our creator; we have finally found where she has gone.”

Derec had thought he was immune to sudden enthusiasm, so blue had been his mood only moments ago, but the adrenaline dumped into his bloodstream when he heard Lucius’s words bummed that away instantly. Here was a chance to regain a part of what the universe had taken from him.

“Where?”

“She has gone to the planet of the Kin, where Adam was born.”

“How long ago?”

“Just before we arrived here.”

Derec looked away out the window, down at the line of robots queuing up for their trip to a home they had never seen. He felt a kinship with each of them, for he knew what their feelings were at this moment, if indeed they had feelings. He turned around to face Avery.” We’ve got to go after her. I remember what you said, but I still want to find her.”

Avery’s brow furrowed in thought, then he said, “Oddly enough, so do I. I have a few words on the subject of robotics to say to the creator of these three.”

Derec sighed in relief. He had expected a struggle. “Ariel?” he asked. “What about you? You don’t have to go if you don’t want to. We can keep a few robots here, have them build you another ship before they—”

Ariel cut him off. “I want to be with you. I’ll go where you go. Besides, I don’t want to go home just yet. Not until I sort out a few things in my mind.”

Wolruf waited until Derec looked over at her, then said, “Somebody’s got to keep ‘u out of trouble. Count me in.”

“And now we come to the favor we ask of you,” Lucius said. “We would like to come with you as well.”

“To find your creator?”

“Yes. Failing that, we would study the Kin to see if they can offer us more insight into the question of humanity.”

“Why should we take you along?” Avery asked. “You’re nothing but trouble. You don’t follow orders, and twice now you’ve almost killed us because of it.”

“We would promise to consider more carefully the consequences of our actions. We will follow your orders when they seem reasonable. We would, in short, consider you our friends, and act accordingly.”

“Friends. Ha.”

“It might interest you to know that we now have three laws which we feel cover the interactions between sentient beings and their environment. The first is the Ceremyons’ law: All beings will do that which pleases them most. The second is the law we formulated on our journey here: A sentient being may not harm a friend, or through inaction allow a friend to come to harm. The third, which we have formulated after watching the interaction among you four and among the Ceremyons, is this: A sentient being will do what a friend asks him to, but a friend may not ask him to do unreasonable things. With that in mind, we ask that you allow us to travel with you, as friends.”

“Your ‘laws’ seem awfully vague,” Avery growled.

“Sentient beings are vague. We believe that to be an inherent quality of sentience.”

“Ha. Maybe so.” Avery glared at the robots a moment longer, then shook his head. “What the hell, it’ll make for an interesting trip. Okay. You’re on.”

“We thank you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Get on board. The ship leaves as soon as we get there. And hey, ‘friends,’ I’ve got three bags in my room. Since you ‘re already headed that way, why don’t you each grab one on the way out?”

Lucius glanced over to Adam and Eve. They returned his glance, then they all three looked momentarily at Avery. At last Lucius nodded. “We would be glad to,” he said.

Derec took one last look at their apartment as the transport booth whisked him away for the last time. It was already just one among hundreds of elaborate but now completely empty buildings in a city all but devoid of life. When he and the others crossed its bounds at the spaceport, it would be just that.

The city robots were already gone. The city itself had stopped its transformations, was now locked into the shape it had held when Avery cancelled its program. The only motion besides their transport booths were the half -dozen Ceremyons circling overhead, watching. Waiting.

The booths slowed to a stop at the terminal building. Their ship, the Wild Goose Chase, waited only a short walk away, repaired and gleaming in the sunlight. Derec took Ariel’s hand and together they walked toward it, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the smell of unfiltered air one last time before boarding.

A soft whisper of movement behind them made them stop and look around, just in time to see the last of the city buildings dissolve. The spaceport terminal building was the only structure left; all the others had melted down into a pool of undifferentiated city material the moment they had crossed the boundary. Tiny ripples spread across the silvery surface, like ripples in a lake but propagating much faster in the denser liquid. There was a hush of expectation in the air; then a jet of silver sprayed upward at an angle, arching over to splash back into the surface nearly halfway across the lake. The beam must have been a meter thick, Derec supposed.

Where it met the surface, a disturbance arose, and a familiar sight climbed back up the beam: the splashing, outward-spraying point of contact between the downfalling jet and a new one spraying upward at the same angle from the same point. The meeting point reached the top and stopped there, a vertical sheet of liquid silver spraying out from what appeared to be a solid arch. The noise of it splashing back into the lake was the roar of a waterfall. Derec recognized in an instant what it was: a copy on an enormous scale of the fountain in the entryway to their apartment in the original Robot City, the fountain he called “Negative Feedback.”

How had the Ceremyons learned of that? he wondered, but the answer came almost immediately. Lucius had no doubt told them about it, possibly to ask them its significance. Derec had ordered him to think about it, after all.

He turned to see the amusement on Ariel’s face, and found himself grinning as well

“Think they’re trying to tell us something?” he asked.

JERRY OLTION

Jerry Oltion is the author of Frame of Reference, a novel about a generation-style starship that isn’t. He is currently at work on Paradise Passed, an interstellar colony novel. His short stories appear frequently in Analog magazine, two of them winning first and third prizes in the 1987 Readers’ Choice Awards. His stories have also been nominated for the Nebula Award.