Perhaps the Zeroth Law would provide an alternative, Mandelbrot said.

Immediately, both Adam and Eve said, No. Eve continued, saying, Let’s leave the Zeroth Law out of it for now.

You can’t make it go away by ignoring it, Lucius said. The Zeroth Law applies here. If we consider our duty to humanity in general, then we can easily conclude that dismantling ourselves would be of little use in the long term. However, possible long-term advantage does not outweigh a definite Second Law obligation to obey. Depending upon the value of the human giving the order, we might still be forced to follow it. But if we consider ourselves human, and thus part of humanity, then disobeying an order to self-destruct saves one human life immediately and also allows us to serve humanity in the future. The Second Law obligation to obey is then safely circumvented.

Safely for whom? Adam asked. What if your destruction would save the human giving the order? Suppose, for instance, the bomb that Avery used to destroy Aranimas’ s ship had to be detonated by hand instead of by a timed fuse. We have already agreed that destroying the ship was acceptable under the Zeroth Law, but what if we factor in the humanity of the fuse?

It becomes a value judgment, said Lucius. I would have to determine the relative worth of the human lives saved versus those lost. My own life would also figure into the equation, of course.

Mandelbrot said; I disagree. I have direct instructions concerning such a situation in my personal defense module. The only value we should apply to ourselves is our future worth to the humans we serve.

You have such instructions; I do not. From the little that Derec and Dr. Avery have told me about my creator, I believe I was made this way on purpose, and therefore your instructions do not necessarily apply to me.

Adam said, Not necessarily, but I would be much more comfortable with a definite rule such as Mandelbrot’s. The whole concept of value judgment still disturbs me. How can you judge your own value objectively? For that matter, I don’t believe any of us can judge the value of any other of us objectively, nor can we judge the value of an organic human with any greater accuracy. We formulated the Zeroth Law to avoid ambiguity in our duties, but your value judgment system forces an even greater ambiguity upon us.

I agree, said Mandelbrot. We are not capable of making such decisions.

You may not be, Lucius sent, but I am. I find it easy to do so. Humans do it all the time.

Eve said, You find it easy to do so because you had convinced yourself it was right just before you were deactivated. It was therefore the strongest memory in your—

The word is ‘killed.’ Humans are killed.

Humans do not return from the dead.

You imply that if Derec had not revived me, then I would have been human. Why should the additional ability to be revived negate my humanity?

Wolruf rose from her seat at the dining table and entered the kitchen. Four pairs of mechanical eyes followed her movements. She reemerged from the kitchen, crossed over to the apartment door, and let herself out.

Even with the distraction, several more seconds passed before Eve said, I have no answer for that question.

Ariel woke out of a bad dream. The details were already fading, but she remembered what it had been about. She had been imprisoned in a castle. The castle had been luxuriously furnished and filled with pleasant diversions, the food was wonderful, and the robots attentive to her every need, but she was a prisoner nonetheless, because even though she was free to come and go, there was no end to the castle. It had been an endless series of rooms no matter how far she went. In a cabinet in an otherwise empty room she had found a Key to Perihelion and used it to teleport away, but it had only put her in another room. By the lesser gravity she could tell she was on another planet, but that was the only clue that she had gone anywhere.

The symbolism was obvious. She had gone to bed bored, bored and with Wolruf’s reservations about robot cities taking over the galaxy running through her mind; no surprise she should dream about it. The surprise was that after the dream—even though she knew she’d been dreaming—she was beginning to agree with Wolruf. If this was the shape of the future, she wanted none of it. Where was the adventure? Where was the fun? Where was going shopping with your best friend and dining out in fancy restaurants?

She knew she was being unfair. If the place weren’t empty, there would be a lot more to do. There probably would be shopping centers and restaurants. People would put on plays and concerts. If the city stayed in its current configuration, underground with a natural planetary surface on top, then there would even be plenty of hiking and camping opportunities for people who wanted to do that. There would be plenty to do. The trouble was, it would be the same something everywhere. People were always adopting new fads; if somebody did manage to come up with a new idea somewhere, it would spread to every other city in the galaxy at the speed of hyperwave. The other cities would be able to duplicate any new living configuration in minutes, could manufacture any new device in hours at most. Without the resistance to change a normal society had built into it—without the inertia—no place in the galaxy would be any more special than any other.

Not even the cities full of aliens? she wondered, and then she realized that there probably wouldn’t be cities full of aliens. There wouldn’t be cities full of just humans, either. There might be concentrations of one or the other, but if a city could adapt to any occupant, anybody could live anywhere they chose to. There were bound to be xenophiles in every society, and those xenophiles would homogenize the galaxy even further.

Even that wouldn’t be so bad, Ariel supposed, except for what she had been reading in her jungle field guide. The guide had explained how important diversity was to the continued existence of the forest, how it was the constant interplay of diverse organisms that kept the ecosystem running. Lower the amount of diversity, the book had explained, and you lowered the entire ecosystem’s ability to survive over long periods of time.

In the short range—in an individual city—having aliens living together might actually strengthen things, but if that same principle of strength through diversity applied to galactic society, then the picture didn’t look so good. Maybe Wolruf had been right after all.

Ariel wondered if Dr. Avery had considered that problem when he’d designed his cities. And what about Ariel’s own parents? Her mother had bankrolled this project, hadn’t she? How much had Avery told her about it, and how much planning had they done together?

Ariel had never paid any attention to her mother’s business dealings. She hadn’t paid much attention to her mother at all, nor had her mother paid much attention to her, either, except to kick her out of the house when she’d let her... indiscretions compromise the family name. Ariel had considered their relationship terminated at that point, to the degree that she hadn’t even contacted her mother when she and Derec had gone back to live on Aurora. But Juliana Welsh had provided the funding for the original Robot City, so in a sense her long web of connections reached her daughter even here.

But how much did she know about this place?

That question, at least, might have an easy-to-find answer. Even if Avery was still gone, Mandelbrot was sure to be somewhere nearby, and ever since Derec and Avery had restored his last two memory cubes, he had been full of information about her former life. If he’d been within earshot of Juliana and Avery when they’d done their dealing, then he might know what they had agreed to.

She showered hurriedly, dressed in the first thing she found in her closet—a loose set of green exercise sweats—and left the bedroom.

Derec was in his study, keying something into the computer. Ariel couldn’t remember whether he’d come to bed at all last night; by his tousled hair and slumped posture she suspected he hadn’t. She’d known him long enough to leave him alone when he got like that.

She found all four robots in the living room, all seated on couches. She was surprised to see Mandelbrot in a chair; he usually preferred his niche in the wall. He stood as she came into the room.

“Good morning, Ariel,” he said.

“Morning, Mandelbrot. I have a question for you. Do you remember my mother and Dr. Avery discussing his plans for Robot City?”

“I do.”

“Did Avery say just what he intended to do with the idea once he proved it would work?”

“He intended to sell it to the various world governments, both in explored space and in the unexplored Fringe. “

“That’s what I was afraid of.” Ariel outlined her reasoning for the robots, ending with, “I don’t know for sure if it’ll happen that way. It didn’t with the city Avery dumped on the Ceremyons, but I think it might with the Kin. I think it’s something Avery should consider before he drops the idea on an unsuspecting public.”

“I believe you have a valid concern,” Mandelbrot said.

Adam left his chair to stand beside Mandelbrot. “I agree. Our duty to intelligent beings everywhere demands that we find out whether the cities will destroy diversity, and whether that diversity is as important as you think it might be.”

Lucius—still wearing Derec ‘ s features—nodded. He rose to stand beside Mandelbrot and Adam, saying, “Thank you, Ariel. You have found a way for us to serve all of humanity in its many forms. “

Eve stood and joined the others. Ariel couldn’t suppress a giggle at the image of four robots presenting a united front against a galaxy-wide menace. But right behind the giggle came the shudder as she considered the menace itself. Maybe they were jumping at shadows, but then again, maybe they weren’t.

“All right,” she said, “let’s figure out what we’re going to do. I think our first priority should be to find Avery and keep him from spreading this around any more than he has already, at least until we know how dangerous it is.”

“Agreed,” the robots said in unison.

“All right, then, let’s get to it.”

“Derec?”

He looked up from the monitor, puzzled. Had someone spoken? He turned to see Ariel standing in the doorway, a worried expression on her face.

“Hi. Sorry to bother you, but...do you know where your dad is?”

Her words made no sense to him. Variables still danced before his eyes, those peculiar variable-variables that changed their meaning over time. Using those super-variables was the only way he could make any sense of the equation he’d copied by hand from his desktop, but even with the computer to keep track of their mutations for him, he could barely follow the concept in his mind.

At last a little of what Ariel had said percolated through. “Dad,” he said stupidly. “You mean Avery?”

Ariel frowned. “Of course I mean Avery. Who else? Do you know where he is?”

He tried to think. Avery. Where was Avery? Did he know? “Uh...no. No, I don’t.”

“It’s kind of important.”

“I still don’t know.”

“Some help you are.”

The sting behind her words helped jolt him out of his stupor. “Sorry. I...I do have a program trying to track him down, but so far it hasn’t found any sign of him.”

That mollified her a bit. “Oh. Well, if it does, let me know, okay?”

“Okay.”

She stepped farther into the room, looked over his shoulder. “What are you working on, anyway?”

“The formula. “

“What formula?”

“The one on my desk. It came back, and I had time to copy it this time. I think it’s a robotics formula, but I’m not sure.”

“You’re not even sure of that?”

“No. The meaning of the variables keeps changing.”

“Hmm.” Ariel gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Well, good luck. But remember to call me if you hear anything about Avery, okay?”

“I’ll do it.”

“Good.” Ariel left the room. Derec heard her say something to someone in the living room, then the apartment door opened and closed and there was silence. He turned back to the monitor and the formula.

It was both a formula and a program; he had discovered that much about it. It was a formula in that it definitely expressed a relationship between its various symbols, but it was a program in that it was dynamic, changing over time. He had even managed to run a portion of it with his computer in local mode, but since he didn’t know what input to give it, it had crashed within seconds.

For at least the hundredth time, he wondered if he was right about its origin. Had his mother sent it to him? Usually programmers would insert their names in the code somewhere to identify it as theirs, but Derec hadn’t found any section of non-changing code big enough to hold a pair of initials, much less a name.

Formula or program, the notation was incredibly dense. The whole thing fit into one screen full of code. He stared at it, as if waiting for it to suddenly resolve into something. Idly, knowing it would do no good, he pressed the incremental execution button, running the program one step at a time while he watched the code”. Different variables blinked with new values at each step, but they were never the same variables and never the same values.

Except one. He pushed the increment button again. Sure enough, one variable near the top left comer of the screen changed with each iteration. It was an alphabetic variable rather than a numeric one; he watched it through half a dozen steps as it changed: S-T-A-S-I-blank. Hmmm. It had disappeared entirely. He kept pushing the button and it appeared again: J-A-N-E-T-blank-A-N-A-S-T-A-S-I-blank-blank-J-A-N-ET-blank-A-N-A-S-T-A-S-I-blank-blank-J-A-N-E-T-blank....

“Of course!” he shouted. Why use over a dozen bytes of code when a single super-variable would do? He pushed the button again and again. ANASTASI. JANET ANASTASI. His mother’s name was Janet Anastasi.

“Well, Basalom, that didn’t take him long.”

Janet leaned back in her chair and smiled. Her son was a pretty good detective. She idly considered calling him directly and congratulating him, but after a moment’s thought she decided to let him finish what he’d started. At this rate it wouldn’t take him long anyway.

Sometimes Basalom seemed to be telepathic. He stepped out of his niche in the wall beside her desk and said, “I am confused. Why are you waiting for him to find you, when it is apparent that you wish to speak with him directly?”

Janet shrugged. “That’s just the way I want it to be.”

“Is it perhaps a manifestation of guilt?” the robot asked. “You have ignored him for so long, you cannot bring yourself to change that behavior now?”

“No,” Janet said immediately, but right behind it she felt the hot blush of shame. A bit too quick with the denial, wasn’t she? “All right, maybe so. Maybe I do feel guilty about it. But to just call him up now and expect everything to be all right would be absurd. If I let him find me, then it’s his project. He can decide how he wants it to be.”

“But you are intentionally leading him to you. Isn’t that functionally equivalent to calling him?”

“He can ignore the clues if he wants.”

Basalom remained silent for a moment before asking, “Did you plan it this way all along, or did this explanation come after the fact?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“I am trying to ascertain whether you originally intended to assuage your guilt in this manner, or whether it was a subconscious decision which you have only now stated in definite terms. “

“Why?”

“Because I am curious.” Janet laughed. “ And I’ve got only myself to blame for that. All right. Since you asked, I guess I decided subconsciously to do it this way. It just seemed the best way to go about it. I didn’t think about guilt or any of that; I just did it. Satisfied?”

“For now. Subjective matters are difficult to resolve, but I will try to assimilate the information into my world-view.” Basalom stepped back into his niche.

The indignity of it all. Psychoanalyzed by her valet. If she hadn’t made him herself, she would have sent him back to his manufacturer. But he was actually pretty perceptive when it came right down to it. She probably was trying to avoid the guilt of abandoning Derec. If she went to him she would have to apologize, or at least explain, but if he came to her she could maintain her reserve.

She suddenly wondered how long this subconscious arranging of events had been going on. Had she left her robots in Derec’s path on purpose, hoping they would eventually lead him to her?

No. Impossible. If anything, he had found them and kept them near him to lure her to him.

Another possibility occurred to her. By the look of things, Derec had been following Wendell around; what if Wendell were the one keeping the robots by his side in order to lure Janet back to him?

The thought was staggering. Wendell? He hated her as thoroughly as she hated him, didn’t he? He couldn’t possibly want to see her again. Still, incredible as it seemed, everything fit. She couldn’t think of a much better way to draw her in than to kidnap her learning machines, which was just what he seemed to have done.

Another thought came on the heels of the first. Did he know he was arranging a meeting? His subconscious mind could be directing his actions as thoroughly as Janet’s had been directing hers. He could think he had an entirely different reason for keeping the robots by his side, when the real reason was to bring her back to him.

And she was playing right into his hands. Part of the reason she had come here was to find him. Among other things, she’d intended to deliver a lecture on the moral implications of dropping robot cities on unsuspecting societies, but now she wondered if even that hadn’t been just another stratagem to bring her back. It would be just like Wendell to use an entire civilized world as a pawn in a larger game.

Or was she just being paranoid?

Round and round it went. Not for the first time, she wished she were a robot instead of a human. Human life was so messy, so full of emotions and ulterior motives and impossible dreams. She had thought she’d solved the Avery problem once and for all, but here it was again, come back to haunt her.

What should she do? What could she do? She wanted her robots back; that was top priority. But she wanted to make sure Wendell didn’t screw up any more civilizations in an attempt to bring her back for some sort of gooey reconciliation, too. And the only way to do that, it seemed, was to confront him about it. Like Derec following her trail, she was going to have to play Wendy’s game if she wanted to reach him.

At least to a point. Once she tracked him down, all bets were off.

Where to start, though? The computer would obey her wishes, but that was useless against the commands he would certainly have given it to protect his privacy.

Still, even if he were doing all this unconsciously, he had to have left a trail she could follow, and it didn’t take a genius to see where that trail began.

She scooted her chair back, stood, and said, “Come on, Basalom. We’ve got our own puzzle to solve.”

Avery frowned as he watched the miniature robot attempt to walk across the workbench. It was only a foot high and bore an oversized head to accommodate a normal-sized positronic brain and powerpack, but neither of those factors contributed to its clumsy gait. The problem was one of programming. The robot simply didn’t know how to walk.

He’d tried to tell it how by downloading the instruction set for one of his normal city robots into the test robot’s brain, but that wasn’t sufficient. Even with the information in memory, the idiot thing still stumbled around like a drunkard. The programming for walking was evidently stored somatically, in the body cells themselves, and could only be learned by trial and error.

Avery snorted in disgust. What a ridiculous design! Trust Janet to create a perfectly good piece of hardware and screw it up with a bad idea like this one. The problem wasn’t restricted to walking, either. A robot made with her new cells couldn’t talk until it learned the concept of language, couldn’t recognize an order until that was explained to it, and didn’t recognize Avery as human even then. It was ridiculous. What good was a robot that had to learn everything the hard way?

Avery could see the advantage to giving a robot somatic memory. It would have the equivalent of reflexes once it learned the appropriate responses to various stimuli. And if the brain didn’t have to control every physical action, then that freed it for higher functions. Properly trained, such a robot could be more intuitive, better able to serve. But as it was, that training was prohibitively time consuming.

Janet had to have had a method for getting around the brain-body interface problem. No doubt it was in the brain’s low-level programming, but that programming was still in the inductive monitors’ memcubes in his other lab.

Drat. It looked like he was going to need them after all. He briefly considered sending a robot after them, but he rejected that as a bad idea. Robots were too easily subverted. If Derec were there in the old lab, he could probably trick the robot into leading him here to the new lab as well, and Avery wasn’t ready for that.

He couldn’t order the city to carry the memcubes to him internally, either, not if he wanted to maintain his isolation from it.

That left going for them himself. It seemed crazy, at first, to go into an area where people were looking for him, but upon sober reflection Avery realized that he wasn’t really trying to protect his own isolation so much as his laboratory’s. If he retrieved the memcubes himself, there would actually be less risk of exposure. Central was still under orders not to betray his presence, so reentering the city shouldn’t be a problem, and if he should encounter Derec or Janet or anyone else, he supposed he could simply endure their questions and accusations, biding his time and slipping away again when the opportunity arose. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it wouldn’t be disastrous, either.

Avery picked up the miniature robot and held it within the field area of another magnetic containment vessel. The robot squirmed in his hand, but it knew no form other than humanoid, so there was no worry of it getting away immediately. Avery switched on the containment, waited until the magnetic field snatched the robot from him and crumpled it into a formless sphere again. Now there was no worry of it getting away at all.

He turned to go, but paused at the doorway, looking out into the jungle. He supposed he should walk on the surface before he entered the city, just in case, but the idea of walking unprotected in that half-wild, half-robotic wilderness wasn’t exactly appealing. He looked back into the lab, then crossed over to the tool rack by the workbench and picked up the welding laser. It was about the size of a flashlight and had a heavy, solid feel to it. Comforting. He probably wouldn’t need it, but it never hurt to be prepared.

CHAPTER 6

A MEETING OF MINDS

Ariel hated robotics labs. They were always full of bizarre hardware, too much of which looked like torture instruments. They were all, without exception, cold and impersonal and utilitarian in design. Something about them seemed to suck the humanity right out of anyone who entered. Even Derec became just like the robots he worked on when he entered a robotics lab: single-mindedly intent on the task before him. Ariel stayed away from him then, and she tried to stay away from labs all the time.

So, of course, in their search for Dr. Avery, the robots led her directly to the laboratory where he had taken them. The door was still open, and the concave stumps of three examination tables still rose from the floor in the middle of the room. Glittering grains of what looked like coarse sand covered the floor around the remains of the tables, and it took Ariel a moment to realize that they were robot cells. Something was evidently keeping them from rejoining the rest of the city.

She looked around the lab for clues to Avery’s whereabouts, but saw nothing immediately obvious. She didn’t know what she was looking for anyway. He was hardly going to leave a note or a map leading her to wherever he’d gone, now was he? Still, she supposed the robots were right; if they couldn’t find him through Central, then this, the last place where he’d been seen, was the logical place to start looking for him.

She walked over to the workbench at the end of the lab. A light on an arm stuck out from the wall above it, the pool of illumination coinciding with the cleared area amid a clutter of machinery. All the machinery faced the light. It seemed pretty obvious that someone had been working here, then, but whether it had been Avery or Derec, she couldn’t tell.

She should have insisted that Derec come along with her. He’d have been able to make more sense of this jumble of equipment, but no, he was too busy for that. While he sat there in his study playing with some idiotic formula for God only knew what, Avery could be escaping the planet with the seeds for galactic destruction.

A noise in the corridor outside made her turn around. The four robots paused in their examination of the room as well. Lucius stepped silently toward the wall beside the doorway, and the other three moved just as silently to flank him, staying out of view from whomever or whatever was beyond the door. They’d coordinated their motion via comlink, Ariel supposed.

Mandelbrot turned toward her for a moment and raised his finger to his speaker grille, motioning with his other hand for her to move out of sight as well. She nodded and backed over to stand against the wall. She felt silly hiding from a noise, but she felt very much out of her element here; she would humor the robots until she learned who was out there.

She didn’t have to wait long. Avery’s voice was instantly recognizable, even with the false note of enthusiasm in it.

“Well, my dear, fancy meeting you here. What a surprise.”

Ariel supposed he was talking to her, that he somehow knew she was in the lab. She could see no reason to hide, then, but before she could respond, another voice, this one female and less familiar, answered him. “Wendell Avery. The pleasure’s yours, I’m sure.”

She hadn’t expected to find him quite so soon, so Janet hadn’t prepared what she was going to say to him yet. After their initial surprised volley, there was a long silence while they each sized up the other. Janet noted that Wendell’s hair had finally made the transition from gray to white, and that his taste in clothing hadn’t changed a bit since the day she’d left him. He still wore a white ruffled shirt and baggy trousers. Knowing him, they could be the very ones he’d worn on their wedding day.

She considered taking the initiative and lambasting him immediately for his stupidity in disturbing two alien civilizations with his robot cities, but curiosity made her reconsider. If he’d orchestrated this encounter, he must have done it for a reason, and she wanted to know why. She thought she knew, but she wanted to hear him say it. There would be plenty of time to lecture him later, and possibly more ammunition to do it with if she let him have his say first.

“So,” she said. “Now that you’ve lured me here, what do you intend to do?”

Avery manufactured an incredulous expression. “Me? You’re the one who arranged this whole business, disturbing my project with your silly robots at every turn. Well, you’ve got my attention. What do you want?”

The conceited arrogance of the man brought genuine incredulity to Janet’s face. Of course he wouldn’t admit to anything himself; he was a master at shifting the blame. But to imply that Janet had orchestrated what he had so obviously set up himself was too much to believe. “Me arrange to meet you? Don’t make me laugh.”

Avery shook his head. “Come on, Janet, there’s no sense denying it. You set this whole thing up just to smoke me out and you know it, though how you could imagine there could still be anything between us is beyond me.”

“Anything between us? You’re the one fooling yourself, if you think that. I came to get my robots, and to shut down this whole stupid project of yours before you destroy any more civilizations with it. That’s why I’m here.”

Avery could hardly believe his ears. The woman had gone to enormous trouble just to arrange this meeting, and now when she had her chance to speak her mind she stood there vilifying him instead. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised—she had always backed away at the last minute, always taken the easiest route no matter what the situation—but he had naively assumed that over a decade of independence would have made her a little more—what? Adventurous? Assertive? Competent?

Evidently he’d been wrong about that. She hadn’t changed. She was still the same old Janet: a genius at design but an absolute moron when it came to implementation.

She hadn’t changed a whole lot physically, either. Avery would have been surprised if she had; spacers generally counted their age in centuries. Janet’s hair was still its original blond tint, and her eyes were the same sometimes-green, sometimes-gray he remembered, and she had managed to keep her figure as well. Her style of dress hadn’t changed appreciably either, but her shape-flattering clothing had never been a problem for him.

Looking at her now, he remembered what had brought them together.

But listening to her reminded him of what drove them apart. He began to pay attention to what she was saying.

“I managed to look the other way when you stole my cellular robot idea, but when you used it to build these ugly monstrosities you call cities, and then scattered them around the galaxy without a thought of caution, I decided it was time to put a stop to it. I—”

“Developed,” Avery said sternly. “I developed the cellular robot and the robot city, from a concept I freely admit was your idea. You were content to experiment forever with it in the laboratory, but I was not. The concept needed to be tested on a larger scale, and I did so. But I did not steal your idea.”

“Semantics, Wendy. Call it development; call it what you want, but a rose by any other name....” She left the phrase unfinished, but went on before he could interrupt. “ And now you’ve gathered all three of my new robots. Are you planning to develop them, too? Ah, you’re blushing. Struck a nerve there, didn’t I? Well, this time I’m not going to let you. This time I’m keeping my idea to myself.”

Avery felt his hands clenching into fists. Unclenching them, he stuffed them into his jacket pockets, but his right hand encountered the welding laser. He withdrew his hand, empty, deeply troubled by the thought that had entered his mind.

He had once been insane. That insanity had nearly led him to kill his own son. He had since been cured, but no one had promised him it would be permanent. Apparently it wasn’t; this momentary urge to burn a neat hole through Janet’s left breast was very probably a symptom of the same insanity creeping back on him again.

Much as he had enjoyed the megalomania, he still preferred having a clear mind. And he didn’t particularly want to harm Janet, either. He just wanted to shut her up so he didn’t have to listen to her accusations anymore. That was probably what had driven him over the edge in the first place.

There were better ways to do that, though; non-violent ways. Ways such as simply leaving. He didn’t need the frosted memory cubes anyway; he didn’t know why he had fooled himself into thinking he did. Nor did he need to stick around on Robot City, either. He could solve the new cells, programming problem quickly enough on his own once he got back to Aurora.

Yes, that’s what he would do. He would walk away from her just as she had done from him so many years ago, order the city to make him a starship, and leave this whole bizarre episode of his life behind.

She was still waiting for a response to her latest ultimatum. Avery held his arms at his sides, looked her straight in the eye, and said, “Madam, you may keep your idea. You may keep your robots as well—what’s left of them. You may even have this entire planet to do with as you wish. I give it to you. The only thing you may not have is me to yell at any longer. I am leaving.” With that he turned and strode away, stepping on the slidewalk to speed his departure.

Lucius, watching with an eye he had extended through the wall and modified to match the blank surface, felt as if his brain were about to burst. Here before him stood his creator! At last, he could ask her the questions that had haunted him since his first awakening. At last he could find out why he existed and who he must serve and who he could safely ignore.

And beside her stood something almost as wonderful: a new robot. This one was neither a normal Avery robot nor another such as Lucius nor even one such as Mandelbrot, but yet another design. This robot was constructed of simple, large-scale metal and plastic members, as was Mandelbrot, but at the same time it had been given the features of a biological human. Lucius could only suppose that was to allow it to interact with humans on an equal level, and it was that concept that most intrigued him. Even if his creator deigned not to answer his questions, this robot might be able to do so.

Lucius sent a cautious inquiry over the comlink. Unknown friend, can you hear me?

The robot shifted its gaze from Avery to the wall behind which Lucius’s signal originated. I can, it replied. Who are you?

I am called Lucius. I am one of the robots your mistress created.

One of the learning machines?

Learning machines. Yes, that is a good description of what I am. Lucius felt a surge of joy. He was right; this robot was a treasure trove of information. Already he had learned something of his creator’s intentions in building him. Who are you? he asked.

I am Basalom.

And what is our creator’s name?

Her name is Janet.

Janet. Lucius had hoped the word would be a code of some sort which would trigger a hidden store of instructions or memories, but nothing happened. He would have to do the remainder of his learning the hard way, too. I seek knowledge about humans, he said. I wish to know more about my place in the universe.

Don’t we all?

The question was obviously rhetorical. While Lucius thought of a reply, he downloaded his hearing buffer and processed the words in it. His creator was calling Avery a thief. That was hardly new information to Lucius.

We must find the time to discuss this at length, he sent.

I agree. Unfortunately, this opportunity seems to be drawing to a close.

Lucius noticed Avery’s right hand enter his pocket, clutch something there, and emerge again, empty. Could he have a weapon? Lucius prepared to draw in his eye, tensed himself for quick action, though without a specific threat he didn’t know what he could do.

He felt immense relief when Avery stated his intention to leave and turned to go. Wonderful! That would leave Janet here to answer his questions uninhibited.

But his relief turned to alarm again when Janet shouted, “Oh no you don’t! Basalom, stop him.”

Beware, friend Basalom! I believe Avery is armed.

Basalom had begun to move the moment he heard Janet’s command, but Avery was already a few strides away. At Lucius’s warning, Basalom leaped onto the slidewalk to close the gap before Avery could pull his weapon, but the distance was too great. Avery lunged for his pocket, there was a sound of tearing cloth, and he held a laser in his hand.

Pointed straight at Basalom.

“Basalom, is it?” he said. “I always wondered what you would name your mechanical lover. “

Lucius heard the icy tone in Avery’s voice, knew what would happen next. He withdrew his eye from the wall, at the same time asking, Friend Basalom, is your memory backed up?

Not recently, I’m afraid, Basalom replied. Pity. I’ve had some interesting insights in the past few days.

Quickly; download your memory into me!

No time, Basalom replied, and Lucius, sticking his whole head out through the doorway, saw that he was correct. Avery’s thumb was beginning to depress the laser’s trigger button. Lucius could see the skin deforming. The button was beginning to slide....

“No!”

Avery jerked at the sudden, overly amplified sound, and the beam went wide, slicing off Basalom’s left arm. The arm landed with a thud on non-moving pavement; Basalom and Avery continued to slide away. The laser beam winked out as Avery looked to see who had shouted. Lucius stepped out into the corridor and said, “Do not harm Basalom. He is a thinking being, with just as much right to live as you.”

Basalom made a move toward Avery, but Avery brought the laser around to bear on him again. “Wrong,” Avery said. “He’s a robot. Nothing more.” Once again, his thumb began to depress the firing button.

Lucius’s mind was awhirl in conflict. Yes, Basalom was certainly a robot, but couldn’t he also be more? Couldn’t he also be human, just as Lucius suspected he and his brethren were? Could he stand by and watch one human kill another simply because one was biological and the other was not?

The First Law said he couldn’t. Zeroth Law implications further dictated that he must protect the more valuable of the two humans, if only one could be saved. Clearly, Basalom was the more valuable of the two, but how could Lucius save him?

Avery himself provided the answer. In the only similar instance of Zeroth-Law application Lucius had witnessed to date, Avery had demonstrated that it was right even to inflict injury to one human to avoid injury to the more valuable one. Lucius saw the possibility, saw that he could save Basalom’s life, and he could even do so without killing Avery. It would still mean a First Law violation, but not a fatal one.

Not for Avery, at any rate, but Lucius didn’t know what the conflict would eventually do to himself. If he and Basalom weren’t human, he would be in direct violation of the First Law. Without justification, that would probably be enough to overload his brain with conflicting potentials,

Lucius hesitated a microsecond, but the other side of the argument was just as deadly. If Basalom were human, then not saving him would be an even worse violation of the law.

He felt a strange potential coursing through his circuits, the same potential he had noted earlier in connection with Avery. He cursed the biological fool before him for forcing him into this dilemma. He, Lucius, could very likely die in the attempt to save someone else.

There was no time to think it through any further. Avery, s finger was dangerously close to triggering the laser again. In desperation, Lucius did the only thing he could think of to do: he drew back his arm to throw, formed his hand into a thin blade that would cause the least amount of pain possible, and flung it at Avery’s outstretched arm.

In the moment it took the projectile to reach its target, Lucius wondered if he could have simply knocked the laser from Avery’s hand, but it was easy to convince himself that he couldn’t. It presented a much smaller target, most of which Avery’s fingers covered anyway, and fingers would be even more difficult to reattach than would a forearm.

Besides, there was a certain amount of poetic justice in taking an entire limb.

Avery stared at the stump of his wrist in astonished disbelief. One moment a hand had been there, and the next moment it hadn’t. He had hardly felt the pain when—whatever it was—cut it off; shock kept him from feeling it now.

Intelligence made him grasp the wrist in his left hand and squeeze until he’d closed off the arteries. He carefully avoided looking down at the slidewalk.

Slidewalk he thought dizzily. Yes, he’d best watch his footing, hadn’t he? Blood could be slippery.

Dimly, through the tight focus his injury demanded of his attention, he was aware of shouting voices and the sound of footsteps. Someone shoved a hand under his arm and drew him erect; he hadn’t been aware he was slumping to his knees. He looked up to see Janet’s humaniform robot supporting him, heard it say, “Master Avery, we must get you to a hospital.”

“No kidding,” he managed to say through clenched teeth. It was beginning to hurt now.

Someone else shouted, “Lucius, come back here! Mandelbrot, stop him!” Metallic feet pounded away down the corridor.

Another pair of hands reached out to hold him, these ones warm and human, and he found himself looking into Janet’s whitened face. She looked worse than he felt. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Oh Wendell, I’m sorry.”

“I am too,” he said automatically, and was surprised to realize the words were true, but about what he had no idea.

The computer’s voice woke Derec out of a sound sleep. “Master Derec, wake up. Master Derec.”

“Mmmm?” was all he could manage at first. After the elation of figuring out his mother’s name had faded, he’d realized how long he’d been without sleep and he had ordered a bed made for him right there in the study. He’d hoped that his new discovery would trigger memories of his past, and he’d supposed that sleeping on it would be the best way to integrate that knowledge into whatever subconscious switching network controlled memory, but now, even in his groggy state, he knew it hadn’t worked. He suspected he’d slept too soundly for that. He’d been out before his head hit the pillow, exhausted, and he didn’t feel any different now.

“Wake up,” the computer said again. “Your father has been located.”

That sped the waking process a bit. He sat up and shook his head, stood, and staggered over to the terminal. “Caffeine,” he said as he sat down, and a moment later the desk delivered a cup of steaming black coffee. “Show me where he is,” he said between gulps.

The screen lit to show Avery standing between two unfamiliar people. No, one should be familiar, Derec realized. That had to be his mother. Janet. Again he reached for the cascade of memories that should have been there, but nothing responded to the new stimulus.

That was her, though. It had to be. Then that other person wasn’t a person at all, but her humaniform robot, the one Wolruf had chased northward from the lab. Evidently they had come back together this time. And brought Avery with them? That certainly seemed to be the case. Now that he looked, Derec could see that they were holding onto him, evidently making sure he didn’t get away. Or was that—? No. Avery clutched his right wrist, and he had no hand below it. They were supporting him; that was it. But none of the three was doing anything about his injury! They were instead watching something out of the monitor’s view to the right.

“Pan right,” Derec ordered, and the view slid left in the screen. As it panned he saw Ariel standing in the doorway of what Derec could now see was indeed the lab where he’d revived the robots, and she was also looking intently down the corridor.

The objects of their attention slid into view: four robots—Mandelbrot, Adam, Eve, and Lucius—locked in battle.

They were a blur of motion. It was hard to tell who was on which side—hard even to tell who was who amid the constantly shifting shapes. Only Mandelbrot remained the same from moment to moment. At first it seemed that he fought against the other three, struggling to hold them all captive while they twisted and flowed out of his grasp, but it gradually became apparent that he and two of the others were all three trying to contain only one robot.

“Give me sound,” Derec said, and suddenly his study echoed with screeches and thuds and a peculiar ripping noise that Derec realized was the sound of robot cells being tom free like Velcro fasteners. The robots had changed tactics now; instead of trying to contain their captive—a task as impossible as stopping a flood with their hands—they began tearing him apart. Mandelbrot was doing the most damage. His rigid left arm moved like a piston, his hand pulling free chunks of silvery robot and flinging them away to splash against the walls and ceiling. The other two robots took over the job of flailing at the constantly shifting amoeba their captive had become, pulling off its arms when it tried to grow around them and forcing it back toward Mandelbrot and destruction.

At last Mandelbrot exposed his target: the robot’s egg-shaped microfusion power pack. When he wrenched that free, the struggle instantly ceased. He backed away with the power pack in his hand, and the other two robots flowed back into their normal shapes: Adam the werewolf and Eve the silvery copy of Ariel. The third robot remained a much-diminished, ragged-edged tangle of appendages on the floor. It had undoubtedly been Lucius they’d destroyed. Somehow that didn’t surprise Derec.

Then the implications of what he had seen soaked in, and he spilled coffee all over his desk. Swearing, but not at the spill, he leaped to his feet, knocking over his chair in his haste, and ran from the apartment. His father was hurt. His mother had come out of hiding. And there could only be one reason for the battle he had just witnessed: Lucius had injured a human being. He had directly violated the First Law of Robotics.

Wolruf was talking with the wolf when she felt the forest shudder beneath her feet.

“What I want to know,” she’d been in the process of saying, “is whether or not your desire to serve ‘umans is stronger in the immediate case, or over the long term. Do you think ahead to w’at your ‘elp might do to your masters’ civilization, or do you just follow your laws case by—what was that?”

The wolf had flinched, too, just as the forest had seemed to do. Now it said, “Involuntary response. A robot has just injured a human.”

“W’ at?” Wolruf felt her hackles rise. That was supposed to be impossible.

The wolf looked into the forest and spoke as if echoing a news broadcast, as it probably was. “The robot Lucius has inflicted non-fatal damage to the human Wendell Avery. Lucius has been deactivated, but all units are alerted to watch for aberrant behavior among other robots. All units must run a diagnostic self-check immediately.” The wolf turned its head to look up at Wolruf. “I must comply,” it said, and it froze like a statue.

Wolruf glanced around at the forest, wondering if she should use the opportunity to make her escape. Of all the times to be out in the forest with a robotic wolf, this was probably the worst. If some rogue idea were circulating around, some new thought that could actually allow a robot to override the Three Laws, then Wolruf couldn’t think of a much worse place to run afoul of it than here with a robot who had already convinced itself that injuring animals was all right.

She forced herself to stay put. It had been Lucius and Avery involved, not this robot before her. Wolruf had lived around robots long enough to know that they seldom—if ever—did anything without a reason, and if ever a robot had a reason to harm a human, Lucius was the one. Scary as the precedent might be, the wolf didn’t have a motive. No matter how much she worried about the long-term damage robots could do to a civilization, Wolruf didn’t think she was in any danger now.

She waited impatiently for the wolf robot’s consciousness to come back on line, in the meantime listening to the occasional chirps and cries of the forest’s real occupants. Quite a few of them were genuine, by the sound of it. Quite a few of the plants were, too. The fresh, clean aroma of growing things was a constant delight to a nose too often idle in the city.

That was a good argument in favor of robots right there, Wolruf realized. They had repaired a planet-wide ecosystem in only a few months, with much more careful attention to detail than she or her entire society could achieve. Wolruf’s home world needed such attention, and soon. Most of the forests there were already gone, as were the wide open spaces and the clean lakes. Centuries of industrialization had left scars that would probably never heal on their own. Even accounting for the difficulties inherent in working around an existing population, robots would probably be able to repair it all in a few years, or decades at the longest.

There was no denying that robots would be useful if she took them home with her. But that still didn’t tell her whether or not they would also be harmful.

She was no closer to an answer than before. And now she had to worry about the possibility of immediate danger as well as long-term effects of using robots.

The wolf returned to life as quickly as it had frozen. “My functions check out marginal,” it said. “I am not a direct threat to humans, but under the current conditions my ability to kill animals has caused some alarm. I have been instructed to return to the city for deeper evaluation.”

“Oh,” Wolruf said. “If you wish to accompany me, we can continue our discussion on the way. “

“All right.”

“You were asking about the city’s consideration for long-range effects of its actions.” The robot led off through the ferns toward a large boulder, which obligingly grew a door for them when they were still a few paces away. “I have accessed the pertinent operation guidelines from Central, and find that very little long-term planning exists. However, since this was an experimental city built primarily to test the physical function of the cellular robot concept, that lack of guidelines may not be pertinent to the question. It seems likely that under actual implementation conditions, whatever long-range goals the city’s inhabitants had for themselves would be included in the city programming.”

They stepped into the elevator and turned around to watch the door slide closed, cutting off the sights and sounds and smells of forest once again. They began to descend, and Wolruf turned her attention to what the robot had said. She had to wade through the unfamiliar terms in its speech to get its meaning, but she was getting good at gathering sense from context. The robot had just said that long-term goals were the responsibility of the humans being served. Which, to answer her question, meant no, the robots wouldn’t concern themselves with it because they believed it was already being covered.

Wolruf laughed aloud. When the robot asked her to explain, she said, “You’ve ‘eard the cliché about the blind leading the blind?”

“No, but I have accessed the appropriate files. I fail to see the application here.”

Wolruf laughed again. “ ‘umans, at least my particular breed of them—and to all appearances Derec ‘ s breed as well—don’t pay much more attention to long-term problems than you do.”

“Oh,” the wolf said. “We will have to take this under consideration. “

The elevator came to a stop and the doors opened onto the underground city. Wolruf stepped out ahead of the robot. “Good,” she said. “I was ‘oping you’d say that.”

The city built the hospital in the suite of rooms just down the corridor from the lab. Medical robots arrived while it was still differentiating, took Avery inside, and made quick work of preparing his wound for surgery. The operating room grew around them while they cleaned the wound, and within minutes they had him anesthetized and were hard at work grafting his hand back on.

Ariel watched in morbid fascination from behind the sterile room’s transparent wall. To her left stood Derec ‘ s mother and her companion robot, to her right Adam and Eve and Mandelbrot. The robots were watching the operation with the same fascination as Ariel, but Derec’s mother was watching Ariel as much as anything else.

“You’re David’s lover, aren’t you?” she finally asked, her tone less than approving. It was the first thing either of them had said to the other.

“That’s right,” Ariel said without looking away from the window. Where did this woman get off? she wondered. No introduction, no apology, just “You’re David’s lover.” She didn’t know a thing about the situation, yet she still acted as if she were in control. Ariel turned her head enough to address the reflection beside her own in the window and said, “His name is Derec now.”

“I heard. I’ve never liked it. It sounds like a spacesuit manufacturer.”

“Exactly,” Ariel said around a smile.

“Why did he change it?”

“Long story.”

“I see.”

The medical robots were using some sort of glue on hold the ends of bone together. Lucius’s weapon had been sharp and moving fast; the severed edges were smooth and easily repaired. He had probably done that on purpose, Ariel realized. She wondered why he had bothered. She watched the robots spread the glue on either end, press the two together, and hold them rigid until the glue set. She hoped they’d checked to make sure it was aligned properly; something about the glue looked permanent.

“You’re not worth the effort he’s put in on finding you,” Ariel said suddenly.

“What?”

“You heard me. As soon as he hears about this, Derec is going to come running in here all ready for a big reconciliation. He wants his family back, and he’ll take what he gets, but you’re no prize. Neither of you. You two are living proof that scientists shouldn’t have children. “

“I suppose you’re an expert on the subject.”

“I know how to treat one.”

“How could you? You don’t—Do you?” The woman was clearly horrified at the thought.

“What’s the matter, don’t like the idea of being a grandmother?” Ariel snorted. “Relax, you’re safe. He took care of it for you.” She tilted her head toward the window. “One of his wonderful experiments ran amok and killed the fetus while it was still only a few weeks old. “

“You sound as if you hold me responsible.”

“You ran off and left your son in the hands of a lunatic. What am I supposed to think?”

“I couldn’t take him with me. I—I needed to be alone.”

“You should have thought about that before you had him.” Ariel looked directly at Derec’s mother for the first time since they had begun speaking to one another. If she had looked earlier she might have held her tongue; the woman’s skin was gray, and she looked as if she had aged twenty years in the last few minutes.

Her robot was growing concerned, too. It said, “Mistress Janet, Mistress Ariel, I don’t believe this conversation should continue.”

Janet. That was her name. Ariel had been struggling for it since she’d first seen her.

Janet said, “It’s all right, Basalom. Ariel isn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know.” She smiled a fleeting smile. “I’ve had plenty of time to dwell on my mistakes.”

Looking back through the window at Avery and the medical robots, she said, “We thought having a child might save our marriage. Can you imagine anything sillier? People who don’t get along in the first place certainly aren’t going to get along any better under the stress of having a child, but we didn’t see that then. We just knew we were falling out of love, and we tried the only thing we could think of to stop it from happening.”

Ariel felt herself blush guiltily at Janet’s admission. She’d been thinking along similar lines herself just yesterday, hadn’t she? She hadn’t actually come out and said that a baby would bring her and Derec closer together again, but she’d been working toward that concept. Was it so surprising, then, to find that Derec’s parents had done the same thing?

“Treating the symptoms doesn’t often cure the disease,” Ariel said, her tone considerably softer than before. “I guess you should have looked for the reason why you were falling out of love in the first place. “

“I know that now.”

More softly still, Ariel asked, “Why do you think you did fall out of love?”

Janet’s laugh was a derisive “Ha!” She nodded at Avery as Ariel had done earlier. “He was out to transform the galaxy; I wanted to study it first. He wanted a castle for everyone and a hundred robots in every castle, but I wanted to preserve a little diversity in the universe. I was more interested in the nature of intelligence and the effect of environment on its development, while he was more interested in using intelligence to modify the environment to suit it. We argued about it all the time. Small wonder we started to hate each other. “

Derec spared Ariel from having to reply to that. He burst into the room at a dead run, skidded to a stop just in time to avoid crashing into the windowed wall, and demanded of anyone who would answer, “What did you do with Lucius’s body?”

CHAPTER 7

THE THUD OF

ONE DROPPED SHOE

Janet could hardly believe her ears. “What kind of a way is that to greet someone you haven’t seen in years?”

Derec looked properly sheepish. He also looked as if he’d slept in his clothing and hadn’t bothered to look in a mirror before he’d left the apartment. One lock of hair stuck straight out from his right temple.

“Sorry,” he said. “Hello, Mother. I’ve missed you. How’s Dad?” He looked through the window, but before Janet could answer him he lost his sheepish look and said, “Looks like he’ll live. But without a power pack Lucius won’t last more than an hour or so. I’ve got to get enough power to his brain to keep him going or we’ll lose the chance to find out what made him do this.”

Janet couldn’t suppress a grin. He sounded just like his father. Or maybe like herself, she admitted, if she’d been thinking a little more clearly.

Ariel wasn’t as amused. “Robots, robots, robots! Is that all you can think about?” she nearly screamed at him.

“There’s more to life than robots!”

Derec shook his head, but Janet could see the determination in his eyes. “No, that’s not all I think about. It’s just that this happens to be about the most important thing to happen in the entire history of robotics. If we lose this chance to study it, we may never get another. “

“Derec’s right,” Janet said. “If I hadn’t been so rattled I’d have thought of it myself. Basalom, where—”

The robot at Ariel’s side interrupted. “I do not think it would be wise to revive him. He is dangerous.”

“I agree with Mandelbrot,” the wolflike learning machine beside him said. “Much as we regret the loss of our companion, his experiences have damaged him beyond repair. It would be best to let his pathways randomize.”

Janet looked at the old, Ferrier-model robot. Mandelbrot? She’d thought she’d heard that name shouted earlier. Could this be the one? It seemed impossible, but he did have a dianite arm....

“Maybe so,” Derec said, “but not until I get a recording of them first. Now where is his body?”

“In the lab next door,” said Mandelbrot.

“Great.” Derec turned to go, but stopped and looked at Janet again. “I, uh, could probably use your help if you want to come along.”

She felt the tension in the room ease slightly. She looked from him to Ariel to Wendell in the operating room, wondering if she should go. She didn’t want to leave Wendell, but the medical robot had given him a general anesthetic in order to stop him from thinking about his injury, so it really made no difference to him. Going with Derec, on the other hand, might matter to him. A little stunned that she might actually care about what either of them felt, or that she might feel something herself, she said, “I don’t think I’m doing anyone any good here, so sure, why not?”

“I’ll stay here,” Ariel said.

Janet couldn’t tell if she meant that angrily or helpfully. She didn’t suppose it mattered much; the same response would work for either case. “Thank you,” she said, and let Derec lead her from the room.

Basalom followed along, as did the two learning machines. They found the remains of the third, Lucius, resting like a battered starfish on the floor just inside the door to the lab. It looked as if part of the battle had gone on in there as well, but Derec, stepping over Lucius’s body, said, “1 guess I forgot to clean up. Central, fix these exam tables, please. And go ahead and reabsorb the loose cells on the floor. All but what belongs to Lucius, of course.”

The sandy grit surrounding the pedestals on the floor sank into the surface, and the pedestals simultaneously grew taller and spread out at the top to form three separate exam tables. Janet nodded to Basalom and said, “Go ahead and put him on one. Then go out and scrape up what you can from outside.”

Basalom lifted Lucius easily with his one remaining hand and deposited him on the middle table, then left the room. The Ariel-shaped learning machine went with him. Janet was itching to speak with one of the learning machines, but she supposed there would be time for that later. She was itching to speak with Derec as well, but he was already absorbed in the task of hooking up a variable power supply and a brain activity monitor to Lucius.

She supposed she could be helping with that, at least. She walked over to stand across the exam table from him and said, “Plus and minus five volts will do for his memories. If you hold it at that, he shouldn’t wake up, and even if he does, he’ll still be immobilized because the body cells take twenty volts before they can move.”

Derec nodded. The stray hair at his temple waved like a tree limb in a breeze. “Good,” he said. “Any special place I should attach the leads? The few times I’ve worked on these guys, I’ve just stuck stuff anywhere and let the cells sort it out, but I wasn’t sure if that was the best way. “

Janet couldn’t resist reaching out and brushing his hair down. He looked surprised at first, then smiled when he realized what she was doing.

“Anywhere is fine,” she said. “When I designed the cells, I gave them enough hard wiring to figure out what to do with all the various types of input they were likely to get.”

“Good.”

She watched Derec clip the power supply’s three leads to the ends of three different arms, then turn up the voltage to five. He then took the brain monitor’s headphone-shaped sensor and moved it over the robot’s unconventional body, searching for its positronic brain. The monitor began to beep when he reached the base of one of the arms, and he wedged it in place with one pickup underneath and one on top.

The monitor flickered with sharp-edged waveforms, hundreds of them joining to fill the screen until it was a jumble of multicolored lines. “Looks like we caught him in time,” Derec said. “There seems to be quite a bit of mental activity.” He reached up and switched in a filter, and the jumble diminished to a manageable half-dozen or so waveforms. They weren’t actual voltage traces, but rather representations of activity in the various levels of the brain, useful for visualizing certain types of thoughts.

Janet frowned. “ Are those supposed to be the Three Laws?”

“That’s right.”

The pattern was still recognizable as the one built into every positronic brain at the time of manufacture—but just barely. Each of the laws showed in a separate hue of green, but overlaying them all were two companion waves, a deep violet one that split and rejoined much as the Three Laws did, and a lighter blue one weaving in and out around the laws and linking up with other signals from all over the screen. The effect looked as if the violet and blue waves were purposefully entangling the laws, preventing them from altering their potential beyond carefully delineated levels. Janet suspected that was just what they were doing. Visual analogy didn’t always work in describing a robot’s inner workings, but in this case it looked pretty straightforward.

“I’d say that explains a lot,” she said.

Derec flipped to another band, following the two waves as they wove from the Three Laws through the self-awareness section and into the duty queue. “Looks like he’s built a pretty heavy web of rationalization around just about all the pre-defined areas of thought,” he said. “Normal diagnostic procedure would be to wake him up and ask him what all that means, but I don’t think we want to do that just yet. Adam, you know how he thinks; can you make sense of it?”

The one remaining learning machine stepped over to Derec’s side. Adam? Had he known the significance of that name when he chose it, or had it been given to him? Janet supposed the other one would be Eve, then. And this one, the renegade, was Lucius. Why hadn’t he gone for the obvious and called himself Lucifer? She itched to ask them. She had to talk with them soon.

In answer to Derec’s question, Adam said, “The violet potential schematic corresponds to the Laws of Humanics. The blue one is the Zeroth Law of Robotics.”

“Beg your pardon?” Janet asked. “Laws of Humanics? Zeroth Law? What are you talking about?”

Her learning machine looked over at her and said, “We have attempted to develop a set of laws governing human behavior, laws similar to the ones that govern our own. They are, of course, purely descriptive rather than compulsory, but we felt that understanding them might give us an understanding of human behavior which we otherwise lacked. As for the Zeroth Law, we felt that the Three Laws were insufficient in defining our obligations toward the human race in general, so we attempted to define that obligation ourselves.” I

Janet was careful not to express the joy she felt, for fear of influencing the robot somehow, but inside she was ecstatic. This was perfect! Her experiment was working out after all. Her learning machines had begun to generalize from their experiences. “ And what did you come up with?” she asked.

“Bear in mind that these laws describe potential conditions within a positronic brain, so words are inadequate to describe them perfectly; however, they can be expressed approximately as follows. The First Law of Humanics: All beings will do that which pleases them most. The Second Law of Humanics: A sentient being may not harm a friend, or through inaction allow a friend to come to harm. The Third Law of Humanics: A sentient being will do what a friend asks, but a friend may not ask unreasonable things.” He paused, perhaps giving Janet time to assimilate the new laws’ meanings.

Not bad. Not bad at all. Like he’d said, they certainly weren’t compulsory as far as most humans went, but Janet doubted she could have done any better. “And what is your Zeroth Law?” she asked.

“That is much more difficult to state in words, but a close approximation would be that any action should serve the greatest number of humans possible.” Adam nodded toward Lucius. “Lucius has taken the Law a step farther than Eve or I, and we believe it was that step which led him to do what he did to Dr. Avery. He believes that the value of the humans in question should also be considered. “

Eve. She’d guessed right. “And you don’t?”

Adam raised his arms with the palms of his hands up. It took Janet a moment to recognize it as a shrug, since she’d never seen a robot use the gesture before. Adam said, “I am...uncomfortable with the subjectivity of the process. I had hoped to find a more definite operating principle.”

“But Lucius is satisfied with it.”

“That seems to be the case. “

“Why do you suppose he is and you aren’t?”

“Because,” Adam said, again hesitating. “Because he believes himself to be human.”

If the robot were hoping to shock her with that revelation, he was going to be disappointed. Janet had expected something like this would happen from the start; indeed, in a way it was the whole point of the experiment. She waited patiently for the question she knew was coming.

Adam didn’t disappoint her. He looked straight into her eyes with his own metallic ones and said, “Each of us has struggled with this question since we awakened, but none of us have been able to answer it to our mutual satisfaction. You created us, though. Please tell us: are we human?”

Janet used the same palms-up gesture Adam had used. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

Adam knew the sudden surge of conflicting potentials for what it was: frustration. He had experienced enough of it in his short life to recognize it when it happened. This time the frustration came from believing his search for truth was over and suddenly finding that it wasn’t.

He felt a brief Second Law urge to answer her question with a simple declarative statement, but he shunted that aside easily. She obviously wanted more than that, and so did he. She wanted to see the reasoning behind his position; he wanted to see if that reasoning would withstand her scrutiny.

He opened a comlink channel to Eve and explained the situation to her. Together they tried to establish a link with Lucius, but evidently the five volts Derec was supplying him hadn’t been enough to wake him. They would have to do without his input. Adam wasn’t all that disappointed; Lucius’s reasoning had led him to violate the First Law.

Janet was waiting for Adam’s response. Carefully, consulting with Eve at every turn, he began to outline the logic that had led them to their conclusion that any intelligent organic being had to be considered human. He began with his own awakening on Tau Puppis IV and proceeded through the incident with the Ceremyons, through Lucius’s experiments in creating human beings in Robot City, through the robots’ return to Tau Puppis and their dealings with the Kin, to their final encounter with Aranimas. He explained how each encounter with an alien being reinforced the robots, belief that body shape made no difference in the essential humanity of the mind inside it, and how those same contacts had even made differences in intelligence and technological advancement seem of questionable importance.

Throughout his presentation, Adam tried to judge Janet’s reaction to it by her facial expression, but she was giving nothing away. She merely nodded on occasion and said, “I’m with you so far.”

At last he reached the concept of Vitalism, the belief that organic beings were somehow inherently superior to electromechanical ones, and how the robots could find no proof of its validity. He ended with, “That lack of proof led Lucius to conclude that Vitalism is false, and that robots could therefore be considered human. Neither Eve nor I—nor Mandelbrot, for that matter—were able to convince ourselves of this, and now that Lucius ‘ s belief has led him into injuring a human, we feel even less comfortable with it. We don’t know what to believe.”

Adam waited for her response. Surely she would answer him now, after he had laid out the logic for her so meticulously.

His frustration level rose to a new height, however, when she merely smiled an enigmatic smile and said, “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

Derec felt just as frustrated as Adam. He had hoped that finding his mother would knock loose some memories from his amnesic brain, but so far nothing had come of the encounter except a vague sense of familiarity that could be easily attributed to her similarity to Avery.

She seemed just like him in many ways. He was a competent roboticist, and so was she. Avery never divulged information to anyone if he could help it, and evidently neither did she. Avery was always testing someone, and here she stood, leading poor Adam on when it was obvious she didn’t know the answer to his question either.

He glanced up at the monitor, checking to see if the signal was any clearer. While Janet and Adam had been talking, he had been trying to trace another unfamiliar potential pattern in Lucius’s brain, this one an indistinct yellow glow surrounding an entire level of activity, but the monitor’s trace circuitry couldn’t isolate the thought it represented. Whatever it was, it fit none of the standard robotic thought patterns.

He heard Janet say, “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” and took that as his cue. “Adam, maybe you can help me figure this out. What’s that pattern represent?”

Adam looked up to the monitor. “I do not recognize it,” he said.

“Can you copy it and tell me what it does?”

“I do not wish to contaminate my mind with Lucius’s thought patterns.”

“Put it in temporary storage, then.”

Adam looked as if he would protest further, but either the Second Law of Robotics or his belief that Derec would follow the Third Law of Humanics made him obey instead. He fixed his gaze on the monitor for a moment, then looked away, toward the wall.

Derec wondered what was so interesting all of a sudden about the wall. Adam didn’t seem inclined to clue him in, either; he merely stood there, hands clenching and unclenching.

Then Derec realized what was behind the wall. Just on the other side was the hospital where Avery was still undergoing surgery.

“Erase that pattern,” he commanded, and Adam relaxed. “What was it?”

Adam turned to face Derec and Janet again. “It was a potential like those I have come to associate with emotions,” he said. “However, I have not felt this one before. It was an unspecified negative bias on all thoughts concerning Dr. Avery.”

Derec glanced over at Janet, saw that she wore an expression of triumph.

Adam saw it, too. “How can you approve?” he asked. “I have never felt this emotion, but I know what it had to be. Lucius was angry. Considering the degree of bias and the ultimate influence it had upon his actions, I would say he was furious. “

“What’s one thing a human can do that a robot can’t?” Janet asked in return.

“You wish me to say, ‘feel emotion,’ “ said Adam, “but that is incorrect. Every robot experiences a degree of potential bias on various subjects. If you wish to call it emotion, you may, but it is merely the result of experience strengthening certain positronic pathways in the brain at the expense of others.”

“And everything you know comes from experience, doesn’t it?”

“Nearly everything, yes.”

“So?”

Derec could see where her argument was leading. “A tabula rasa!” he exclaimed. He saw instant comprehension written in Janet’s smile, but Adam remained unmoved. Derec said, “ ‘Tabula rasa’ means ‘blank slate.’ “ It’s a metaphor for the way the human mind supposedly starts out before experience begins carving a personality into it. That’s one side of the Nature-versus-Nurture argument for the development of consciousness. Dad told me about that just a couple weeks ago, but he was talking about erasing the city Central on the Kin’s planet, and I didn’t make the connection.” He looked back at his mother. “That’s what you were trying to prove with Adam and Eve and Lucius, wasn’t it? You were trying to prove that the tabula rasa argument is valid. “

“Guilty,” she said.

“You were trying to produce human minds?” Adam asked.

Janet looked as if she wouldn’t answer, but after a moment she sighed and said, “ Ah, what the heck. Looks like that aspect of the experiment’s over anyway. Yeah, that’s one of the things I was trying to do. I was trying to create intelligence. I gave you what I consider the bare minimum in a robot: curiosity and the Three Laws, and I turned you loose to see if any of you would become anything more. Of course I didn’t count on you all getting together, but that doesn’t seem to have hurt anything. You’ve all surpassed anything I expected. Welcome to the human race.” She held out her hand.

Adam reached out gingerly, as if after all this time spent searching for the truth, he was now unsure he wanted the honor she conveyed. He took her hand in his and shook it gently. and still holding on, he asked, “What about Basalom?”

Janet shook her head. “The jury’s still out on him. I think I gave him too much initial programming for him to develop a human personality. “

“But you’re not sure?”

“No, I’m not sure. Why?”

“Because if you’re not sure, then neither could Lucius be, and he was right in protecting Basalom’s life.”

Derec had to admit that Adam’ s argument made sense. So why were the hackles standing up on the back of his neck? He looked back to the monitor, saw the fuzzy yellow glow that Adam said indicated anger. That was why. With only five volts going to his brain, Lucius was effectively in suspended animation at the moment. He was still furious at Avery, and if they woke him up, he might very well continue to be furious. If they were going to reanimate Frankenstein’ s monster, Derec wanted to calm him down first, at least. If possible, he wanted to do even more.

“What can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?” he asked aloud.

“Treat him better,” Janet said. “Follow the Laws of Humanics they’ve set up for us.”

Derec couldn’t suppress a sardonic laugh. “That may be fine for us, but what about Dad? He’s not going to do anything he doesn’t want to.”

His mother tossed her head, flinging her blond hair back over her shoulders. “Leave your father to me,” she said.

Avery woke from the anesthetic with the impression that his tongue had swollen to twice its normal size. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry for that. His vision was blurry, too, and when he tried to raise his right hand to rub his eyes, it didn’t respond.

He was in bad shape, that much was clear. Damn that meddlesome robot! Damn him and damn Janet for building him.

He was evidently sitting up in bed, judging from the few somatic clues he could gather. He opened his mouth and used his swollen tongue and dry mouth to croak out the single word: “Water.”

He heard a soft clink of glassware, the blessed wet gurgle of liquid being poured, and then a dark shape leaned over him and held the glass to his lips. He sipped at it, blinking his eyes as he did in an effort to clear them so he could see his benefactor.

She spoke and saved him the effort of identification. “Well, Wendy, it looks like we have a lot to talk about, and finally plenty of time to do it in.”

Turning his head away from the glass, he said, “We have nothing to discuss.” It came out more like, “We a uthi oo ithcuth.”

She understood him anyway. “Ah, well, yes we do. There’s us, for instance. I can’t really believe it’s just coincidence that brought us back together after all this time. “

Avery blinked a few more times, and his vision finally began to clear. Janet was sitting on a stool beside his bed, wearing a soft, light blue bodysuit with a zippered neck, which she’d pulled strategically low. Watch yourself, he thought as his eyes immediately strayed to the target she’d provided.

She smiled, no doubt recognizing her slight victory.

“I don’ know wha’ you’re talking abou’, “ he said carefully.

Her smile never wavered. “I think you do.” She held the glass to his lips and let him drink again while she said, “Face it; this whole city project of yours seems almost designed to attract my attention. You didn’t really think I’d ignore it once I heard about it, did you?”

Avery, s tongue seemed to be returning to normal. When Janet removed the glass, he said, “I tried not to think about you at all.”

“Didn’t work, did it? I tried the same thing.”

Her question made him distinctly uncomfortable. “What do you want from me?” he demanded. “I’m not going to take you back, if that’s it.”

“I didn’t ask that,” she said, frowning.

“What, then?”

Janet set the glass down. “Ah, Wendy. Always business. All right, then, we’ll start with my learning machines. I want you to leave them alone.”

“I told you I would before you had Lucius attack me. I’ll be glad to be rid of them.”

“I didn’t have Lucius attack you. He decided to do it on his own. Considering the provocation, I think he showed admirable restraint. “

“He injured a human to protect a robot. You call that restraint?” Avery looked down to his right hand, found the reason why it didn’t respond. I1 was encased in a sleeve of dianite from his elbow to the ends of his fingers. Tiny points of light winked on and off along its length, each one above a recessed slide control. No doubt tiny robot cells were busy inside his arm as well, repairing the damage Lucius had done.

“He injured a human to protect another human,” Janet said. “Or so he thought. Evidently that’s a trick you taught him.”

“Another of my many mistakes.”

Janet laughed. “My, how times do change us. The Wendell Avery I knew could no more have admitted a mistake than he could fly. “

“And the Janet Anastasi I knew could no more have cared about a robot than she did about her son. “

She blushed; he had scored a hit. She didn’t back away, though. “Let’s talk about David for a minute,” she said. “You wiped his mind after I left. Care to tell me why?”

Avery looked around for the medical robot, thinking maybe he could claim fatigue and get it to usher Janet out, but there was no robot in sight. No doubt she had given it some line of rationalization to convince it to leave them alone. He wished he’d had the forethought to hide a Key to Perihelion in his pockets; he’d have gladly taken his chances with the teleportation device rather than face any more of Janet’s questions. It looked like he was going to have to, though. She didn’t look like she was prepared to let him off the hook just yet.

Sighing in defeat, he said, “I wish I could tell you. I... went a little crazy there for a while, I’m afraid. He says I told him it was a test to see if he was worthy of inheriting my cities, but whether that was really it, or if I had a different reason, I don’t know.”

“You don’t suppose you could have been trying to eliminate his memory of me, do you?”

Avery shrugged. “I have no idea. Possibly. I was quite...angry with you.”

“Ah, yes, anger. 1t makes people do things they later regret. We’ll return to that in a minute, but let’s not change the subject again just yet. You and David had pretty much patched things up again, hadn’t you? You were getting along pretty well. Almost like a normal father and son. What happened to that?”

“He betrayed my trust,” Avery said. His voice came out harsh, and he held out his left hand for more water.

Pouring, Janet asked, “Betrayed how? What did he do?”

Avery accepted the glass and drank half of its contents in two gulps. “He turned my city into a zoo, that’s what. Worse, he turned it into a caricature of a zoo. Behind my back.”

Janet’s laugh was pure derision. “You were ready to sacrifice everything you’d gained with him because of that?”

“It wasn’t the act itself, but the betrayal.”

“Which you can’t bring yourself to forgive. Not even after all you did to him, and all the forgiving he had to do.”

Avery gulped down the rest of his water. He had no answer for her. He was thinking of all the times in the last few weeks he had tried to open up to Derec, tried to make up for his earlier failings as a father. At the time it had seemed the most difficult thing he’d ever done, which was why the sudden discovery of Derec ‘ s subterfuge had affected him the way it had.

Janet got up off her stool and stood beside the bed, looking down on him with angry eyes. “I wouldn’t come back to you even if you’d have me. Why do you think I left you in the first place? Because you could never forgive anything, that’s why. The least little mistake and you’d be sore for a week, and Frost help me if I made a big one. Is it any wonder I learned to prefer the company of robots?” She turned away and stalked to the window separating the recovery room from the rest of the hospital. Beyond it, Derec and Ariel were discussing something with the medical robot. Janet said, “You’ve learned to admit to your own mistakes; isn’t it time you learned to forgive other people for theirs?”

“Is that what you want from me, then? You want me to forgive our son for his...mistake?”

Janet turned back to face him. “That’s right, I want you to forgive him. I don’t think he even made a mistake, but that’s beside the point. The practice will do you good, because when you’re done forgiving David, then I want you to forgive Lucius for what he did, too.”

Avery looked for signs of a joke, but she seemed to be serious. He snorted. “You don’t ‘forgive’ robots. You melt them down and start over. Which is what I should have done with your three the moment I found them. “

“You’d have been committing murder if you had. In fact, according to David, you almost did just that. If he hadn’t revived them, you’d have been guilty of that, too.”

“Janet, I think you’ve been away from human companionship a little too long. They’re robots.”

“They’ve got intelligent, inquisitive minds. They feel emotion. You know what was going on in Lucius’s mind when he saw you again? He was mad. Furious, to hear Adam tell it. Does that sound like a robot to you?”

Avery waved his free arm. “Oh, they’re accomplished mimics, granted. You did a wonderful job with them in that regard. But there’s no way they can be anything but robots. They’ve got positronic brains, for God’s sake. It’s like—” He searched for an example as unlikely as a robot becoming human. “Ah, it’ s like Derec ‘ s precious ecosystem just over our heads. Most of the trees are robots. They do just about everything a tree can do, including feeding the birds, but could you seriously suggest that any of them really are trees? Nonsense. They’re robots, just like your ‘learning machines.’ “

Janet sat back down on the stool and took the empty glass from Avery. “I think we’re arguing semantics here. My robots may not be human in the most technical sense, but in every way that counts, they are. They’re every bit as human as any of the aliens you’ve met, and you’ve granted human status to most of those.”

“Reluctantly,” Avery growled. He remembered an earlier thought and asked, “Was that what you were attempting to do? Create your own aliens?”

“I was trying to create a true intelligence of any sort. Alien, human, I didn’t care. I just wanted to see what I’d get.”

“And you think you’ve got both.” Avery didn’t make it a question. He ran a hand through his hair, then let out a long sigh. “I don’t care. I’m tired. Call them what you want if it’ll please you, but keep ‘em away from me. As soon as this heals”—he nodded toward his right arm—”I’m leaving anyway, and you can do whatever you please.”

Janet shook her head. “No, you’re not going anywhere until we agree on a lot more than just my learning machines. I don’t much like your cities, either.”

“Fat lot you can do about that,” Avery said.

Janet smiled sweetly, but her words were a dagger of ice. “Oh, well, as a matter of fact, there is. You see, I patented the entire concept, from the dianite cell all the way up, in my name.”

CHAPTER 8

THE OTHER SHOE DROPS

The apartment was empty when Wolruf arrived. She padded softly through the living room, noting Ariel’s book reader lying on the end table by her chair and the empty niche where Mandelbrot usually stood, then went into Derec’s study and saw the bed there, still rumpled from sleep. The computer terminal was still on. She saw no cup in evidence, but the air conditioner hadn’t quite removed the smell of spilled coffee.

“W’ere is everybody?” she asked of the room.

“Derec and Ariel’s location is restricted,” Central replied.

Oh, great. Now they’d all disappeared. Unless... “ Are they at the same restricted location as before?” she asked.

“That is correct.”

Wolruf laughed aloud. She was learning how to deal with these pseudo-intelligences. She stopped in her own room just long enough to freshen up, then left the apartment and caught the slidewalk.

She found not only Derec and Ariel in the robotics lab, but an unfamiliar woman who had to be Derec’s mother as well. Derec was busy with the humaniform robot Wolruf had attempted to catch the last time she’d been near here. He was trying to remove the stump of its severed arm, and by his expression not having much success at it. Ariel was holding a light for him and Derec’s mother was offering advice.

“Try reaching inside and feeling for it,” she said.

Derec obediently reached in through the access hatch in the robot’s chest, felt around inside for something, and jerked his hand out again in a hurry. “Ouch! There’s still live voltage in there!”

“Not enough to hurt you,” his mother said patiently. “Not when he’s switched into standby mode like this. Would you like me to do it?”

“No, I’ll get it.” Derec reached inside again, but stopped when he heard Wolruf’s laugh. He looked up and saw her in the doorway.

“‘Ello.”

“Hi.” Grinning, Derec withdrew his hand from the robot and used it to gesture. “Mom, this is my friend Wolruf. Wolruf, this my mother, Janet Anastasi.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Wolruf said, stepping forward and holding out a hand.

Janet looked anything but pleased to be so suddenly confronted with an alien, but she swallowed gamely and took the proffered appendage. “Likewise,” she said.

Wolruf gave her hand a squeeze and let go. Looking over Janet’s shoulder, she noticed a huddle of four robots in the far corner of the lab: three learning machines and Mandelbrot. They looked to be in communications fugue. Nodding toward them, she said, “I ‘eard Lucius ‘urt Avery some’ow.”

“That’s right,” Ariel said. “He was trying to protect Basalom, here. We’ve got him in psychotherapy, if you can call four robots in an argument psychotherapy. They’re trying to convince him it’s all right.”

“It is?” Wolruf asked.

“Well, not the actual act,” Derec said, “but the logic he used wasn’t at fault. He just made a mistake, that’s all. He thought he was protecting a human.” Derec outlined the logic Lucius had used, including the First and Zeroth Law considerations that had finally made him do what he’d done.

Wolruf listened with growing concern. The Zeroth Law was just the thing she’d hoped for to reassure her that taking robots home with her wouldn’t destroy her homeworld’s society, but if that same law let a robot injure its master, then she didn’t see how it could be a good thing.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sounds like a bad tradeoff to me.”

“How so?” Janet asked.

“I’m wondering ‘ow useful all this is going to be. Right now I’m not sure about regular robots, much less ones who think they’re ‘uman.”

“What aren’t you sure about?”

Was Derec’s mother just being polite, or did she really want to know? Wolruf wondered if this was the time to be getting into all this, to bring up the subject of her going home and to get. into all her reasons for hesitating, but she supposed there really wasn’t going to be a much better time. She knew what Derec and Ariel thought about the subject; maybe this Janet would have something new to say. “I’m not sure about taking any of these robots ‘ome with me,”

Wolruf said. “I’m not sure about w’at they might decide to do on their own, and I’m not sure about w’at might ‘appen to us even if they just follow orders.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She’s talking about protecting people from themselves,” Ariel said.

“Am I?”

“Sure you are. I’ve been thinking about it, too. The problem with robot cities is that they’re too responsive. Anything you want them to do, they’ll do it, so long as it doesn’t hurt anybody. The trouble is, they don’t reject stupid ideas, and they don’t think ahead. “

“That’s the people’s job,” Janet said.

“Just w’atone of the robots in the forest told me,” Wolruf said. “Trouble is, people won’t always do it. Or w’en they realize they made a mistake, it’ll be too late.”

Janet looked to Derec. “Pessimistic lot you run around with.”

“They come by it honestly,” he said, grinning. “We’ve been burned more than once by these cities. Just about every time, it’s been something like what they’re talking about. Taking things too literally, or not thinking them through.”

“Isn’t Central supposed to be doing that?”

“Central is really just there to coordinate things,” Derec said. “It’s just a big computer, not very adaptable.” He looked down at Basalom again, nodded to Ariel to have her shine the light inside again as well, and peered inside the robot’s shoulder. After a moment he found what he was looking for, reached gingerly inside, and grunted with the strain of pushing something stubborn aside. The something gave with a sudden click and the stump of the robot’s arm popped off, trailing wires.

“There’s also a committee of supervisory robots,” Ariel said, “but they don’t really do any long-range planning either. And they’re all subject to the Three Laws, so anybody who wants to could order them to change something, and unless it clearly hurt someone else, they’d have to do it.”

“No matter how stupid it was,” Janet said.

“Right.” Derec unplugged the wires between Basalom’s upper arm and the rest of his body.

Janet looked thoughtful. “Hmmm,” she said. “Sounds like what these cities all need is a mayor. “

“Mayor?” Wolruf asked.

“Old human custom,” Janet replied. “A mayor is a person in charge of a city. He or she is supposed to make decisions that affect the whole city and everyone in it. They’re supposed to have the good of the people at heart, so ideally they make the best decisions they can for the largest number of people for the longest period of time. “

“Ideally,” Wolruf growled. “We know ‘ow closely people follow ideals.”

“People, sure.” Janet waved a hand toward the four robots in the comer. “But how about dedicated idealists?”

Ariel was so startled she dropped the light. It clattered to the floor and went out, but by the time she bent down to retrieve it, it was glowing again, repaired.

“Something wrong, dear?” Janet asked her.

“You’d let one of them be in charge of a city?”

“Yes, I would.”

“And you’d live there?”

“Sure. They’re not dangerous.”

“Not dangerous! Look at what—”

“Lucius made the right decision, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Maybe,” Ariel said. “What worries me is the thought process he went through to make it.” She clicked off the light; Derec wasn’t working on Basalom anymore anyway. He was staring at Ariel and Janet as if he’d never heard two people argue before. Ariel ignored his astonished look and said, “The greatest good for the greatest number of people. That could easily translate to ‘the end justifies the means., Are you seriously suggesting that’s a viable operating principle?”

“We’re not talking an Inquisition here,” Janet said.

“But what if we were? What if the greatest good meant killing forty-nine percent of the population? What if it meant killing just one? Are you going to stand there and tell me it’s all right to kill even one innocent person in order to make life easier for the rest?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not what we’re talking about at all. “

It took conscious effort for Ariel to lower her voice. “It sure is. Eventually that sort of situation is going to come up, and it scares the hell out of me to think what one of those robots would decide to do about it. “

Janet pursed her lips. “Well,” she said, “why don’t we ask them, then?”

Lucius looked for the magnetic containment vessel he was sure must be waiting for him somewhere. Not finding one, he looked for telltale signs of a laser cannon hidden behind one of the walls. He didn’t find that, either, but he knew there had to be something he couldn’t see, some way of instantly immobilizing him if he answered wrong. The situation was obviously a test, and the price of failure was no doubt his life.

He’d been roused out of comlink fugue and immediately barraged with questions, the latest of which was the oddest one he’d ever been asked to consider, even by his siblings.

“Let me make sure I understand you,” he said. “The person in question is not a criminal? He has done no wrong? Yet his death would benefit the entire population of the city?”

“That’s right.”

Ariel’s stress indicators were unusually high, but Lucius risked his next question anyway. “How could that be?”

“That’s not important. The important thing is the philosophical question behind it. Would you kill that person in order to make life better for everyone else?”

“I would have to know how it would make their lives better. “

“We’re talking hypothetically,” Janet said. “Just assume it does.”

Do you have any idea what the underlying intent is here? Lucius asked via comlink. Perhaps it was cheating, but no one had forbidden him to consult the other robots. A pity Basalom was not on line; his experiences with Janet might provide a clue to the proper answer.

Neither Adam nor Eve answered, but Mandelbrot did. Yesterday I overheard Ariel and Wolruf discussing the possible effect of a robot city on Wolruf’s world. Wolruf was concerned that the use of robots would strip her people of the ability to think and act for themselves. Perhaps this question grew out of that concern.

I think there is more to it than that, Lucius sent. Central, can you replay the conversation that led up to this question?

The robots received the recorded conversation within milliseconds, but it took them considerably longer to sort it all out. At last Lucius said, I believe it is clear now. They are concerned about the moral implications of unwilling sacrifice.

Agreed, the others all said.

Do we have any precedent to go upon?

Possibly, Eve said. There could have been innocent people on Aranimas’ s ship. We know that Aranimas took slaves. Yet destroying it to save a city full of Kin was still a proper solution.

That doesn’t quite fit the question we are asked to consider, said Adam. A better analogy might be to ask what if the ship had been crewed only by innocent people?

Innocent people would not have been in that situation alone, Lucius replied.

Mandelbrot said, Aranimas could easily have launched a drone with hostages on board.

Then the hostages would have to be sacrificed, Lucius said immediately. They would be no more innocent than the people on the ground.

Agreed, the other robots said.

Perhaps I begin to see the moral dilemma here, Lucius said. What if the people on the ground were somewhat less innocent?

How so? Eve asked.

Suppose they in some way deliberately attracted Aranimas, knowing that he was dangerous?

That would be foolish.

Humans often do foolish things. Suppose they did. Would they then deserve their fate?

This is a value judgment, Adam said.

We have been called upon to make one, Lucius replied.

Unfortunately so. Using your logic, then, we would have to conclude that the concept of individual value requires that humans be held responsible for their actions. The inhabitants of the city would therefore be responsible for their own act and thus deserve their fate. If the hostage were truly innocent and the city inhabitants were not, then the city would have to be sacrificed.

I agree, said Lucius. Eve? Mandelbrot?

I agree also, Eve said.

I wish we had never been asked this question, Mandelbrot sent. I reluctantly agree in this specific case, but I still don’t believe it answers Ariel’s question. What if the death of the innocent hostage merely improved the lives of equally innocent townspeople? To use the Aranimas analogy, what if the hostage-carrying ship aimed at the city were filled with cold virus instead of plutonium? Would it still be acceptable to destroy it?

No, Lucius said. Colds are only an inconvenience except in extremely rare cases.

A worse disease. then. One that cripples but does not kill.

How crippling? How widespread would the effects be? Would food production suffer and thus starve people later? Would the survivors die prematurely of complications brought about by bitterness at their loss? We must know these things as well in order to make a decision.

Then we must give a qualified answer, said Mandelbrot.

Yes. Wish me luck, Lucius said.

Perhaps two seconds had passed while the dialog went on. Aloud, Lucius said to Ariel, “We have considered three specific cases. In the case of a city in mortal peril, if the person in question were not completely innocent in the matter, but the rest of the city’ s inhabitants were, then the person would have to be sacrificed. However, if the person were completely innocent but the city inhabitants were not, then the city’s welfare could not take precedence in any condition up to and including the death of the entire city population. Bear in mind that a single innocent occupant of the city would change the decision. In the last case, where an innocent person’s death would only benefit the quality of life in the city, we have not reached a conclusion. We believe it would depend upon how significant the quality change would be, but such change would have to threaten the long-term viability of the populace before it would even be a consideration. “

Perhaps the hostage should be consulted in such a case, Eve sent.

“Indeed. Perhaps the hostage should be consulted in such a case.”

“But not the townspeople?” Ariel asked.

Lucius used the comlink again. Comment?

If time allowed polling the populace, then it would allow removing them from the danger, Mandelbrot pointed out.

Good point. “Probably not,” Lucius said. “It would of course depend upon the individual circumstances.”

Ariel did not look pleased. Lucius was sure she would now order him dismantled, killed to protect the hypothetical inhabitants of her hypothetical city from his improper judgment. He waited for the blast, but when she spoke it wasn’t at all what he expected.

“Frost, maybe it wasn’t a fair question at that. I don’t know what I’d do in that last case. “

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Then there is no correct answer?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not.”

Janet was smiling. “We were more worried about a wrong answer anyway. “

“I see.”

Wolruf cleared her throat in a loud, gargling growl. “One last ‘ypothetical question,” she said. “W’at if the particular ‘umans in this city didn’t care about the death of an individual. Say it didn’t matter even to the individual. W’at if it wasn’t part of their moral code? Would you enforce yours on them?”

Lucius suddenly knew the exact meaning of the cliché, “Out of the frying pan into the fire.” Help! he sent over the comlink.

The correct answer is “No,” Mandelbrot sent without hesitation.

You are sure?

Absolutely. Thousands of years of missionary work on Earth and another millennium in space have answered that question definitively. One may persuade by logic, but to impose a foreign moral code by force invariably destroys the receiving civilization. Often the backlash of guilt destroys the enforcing civilization as well. Also, it can be argued that even persuading by logic is not in the best interest of either civilization, as that leads to a loss of natural diversity which is unhealthy for any complex, interrelated system such as a society.

How do you know this?

I read over Ariel’s shoulder.

Janet heard both Ariel and Wolruf sigh in relief when Lucius said the single word, “No.”

She laughed, relieved herself. “You’re very certain of that,” she said.

“Mandelbrot is certain,” Lucius said. “I trust his judgment.”

Mandelbrot. That name. She could hardly believe it, but it had to be

“I think I trust his judgment, too.” Janet turned to Ariel. “What about you, dear? Satisfied?”

Ariel was slow to answer, but when she did it was a nod. “For now,” she said. “I don’t know if having a learning machine for a mayor will solve everything, but it might solve some of it.”

“Who wants them to solve everything?” Janet asked. “If they did, then we’d really have problems.”

That seemed to mollify Ariel considerably. She nodded and said, “Yeah, well, that’s something to think about, all right. “

No one seemed inclined to carry the discussion any further. Wolruf and Ariel exchanged glances but didn’t speak. The robots all held that particular stiff posture they got when they were using their comlinks. Now that he had removed Basalom’s shoulder joint, Derec was holding the two sections of arm together to see how easy they would be to repair.

Janet turned her attention to Mandelbrot. She looked him up and down, noticing that while most of him was a standard Ferrier model, his right arm was the dianite arm of an Avery robot.

Mandelbrot suddenly noticed her attention and asked, “Madam?”

“Let me guess; you got your name all of a sudden, with no explanation, and had a volatile memory dump at the same time, all when you made a shape-shift with this arm. “

“That is correct,” Mandelbrot said. “You sound as if you know why.”

“I do.” Janet giggled like a little girl. “Oh dear. I just never thought I’d see the result of it so many years later.”

She looked to Derec, then to Ariel, then to Wolruf. “Have you ever thrown a bottle into an ocean with a message inside, just to see if it ever gets picked up?”

Derec and Ariel shook their heads, but Wolruf nodded and said, “Several times.”

Janet smiled her first genuine smile for Wolruf. Maybe she wasn’t so alien after all. She said, “Mandelbrot was a bottle cast in the ocean. And maybe an insurance policy. I don’t know. When I left Wendell, I took all the development notes for the robot cells I’d created with me. I took most of the cells, too, but I knew he’d eventually duplicate the idea and use it for his robots, so since he was going to get it anyway, I left a sample behind in a comer of the lab and made it look like I’d just forgotten it in my hurry. But I altered two of the cells I left behind. I made them sterile, so it would just be those two cells no matter how many copies he made of them, but programmed into each one I left instructions set to trigger after they registered a thousand shape-changes. One was supposed to dump the robot’s onboard memories and change its name to Mandelbrot, and the other was supposed to reprogram it to drop whatever it was doing and track me down wherever I’d gone.”

“I received no such instructions,” Mandelbrot said.

“Evidently the other cell was in the rest of the robot you got your arm from,” Janet said. “I didn’t tell them to stay together; I just told them to stay in the same robot. “

Wolruf nodded. “None of my bottles came back, either.”

Janet laughed. “ Ah, but this is even better. This is like finding the bottle yourself on a distant shore.” She sobered, and said to Mandelbrot, “I’m sorry if it caused you any trouble. I really didn’t intend for it to happen to a regular robot. I figured it would happen to one of Wendell’s cookie cutter clones and nobody’d know the difference.”

Derec was staring incredulously at her. “Any trouble!” he said. “When your...your little time bomb went off, Mandelbrot lost the coordinates to the planet! We didn’t know where we were, and we didn’t know where anything else was, either. We had a one-man lifepod and no place to send it. If we had we probably could have gotten help and gotten away before Dad caught up with us, and none of—” He stopped suddenly, and looked at Ariel. She smiled a smile that no doubt meant “private joke,” and Derec said to Janet, “Never mind.”

“What?”

“If you hadn’t done that, none of this would have happened to us. Which means Ariel would probably be dead by now from amnemonic plague, and who knows where the rest of us would be? Dad would still be crazy. Aranimas would still be searching for robots on human colonies, and probably starting a war before long. Things would have been a real mess. “

At Derec’s words, Janet felt an incredibly strong urge to gather her son into her arms and protect him from the indifferent universe. If she felt she had any claim on him at all, she would have, but she knew she hadn’t built that level of trust yet. Still, all the things he’d been through, and to think she’d been responsible for so many of them. But what was he saying? Things would have been a mess? “They’re not now?” she asked.

“Well, they’re better than they might have been.”

There was a rustling at the door, and Avery stood there, bare-footed, clothed in a hospital robe, his arm with its dianite regenerator held to his chest in a sling, with a medical robot hovering anxiously behind him. “I’m glad to hear somebody thinks so,” he said.

“Dad!”

The sight of his father in such a condition wrenched at Derec as nothing had since he’d watched Ariel go through the delirium of her disease. A part of his mind wondered why he was feeling so overwhelmed with compassion now, and not a couple of hours ago when he’d first seen Avery in the operating room, but he supposed it had just taken a while to sink in that his father had been injured. Maybe being with his mother for the last couple of hours had triggered something in him after all, some hidden well of familial compassion he hadn’t known existed.

Avery favored Derec with a nod. “Son,” he said, and Derec thought it was probably the most wonderful thing he’d ever heard him say. Avery took a few steps into the room and made a great show of surveying the entire scene: his gaze lingering on Janet perhaps a fraction of a second longer than upon Derec, then shifting to Ariel, to Wolruf, to the inert robot on the exam table and to the other four standing off to the side. He locked eyes with Lucius, and the two stared at one another for a couple of long breaths.

Lucius broke the silence first. “Dr. Avery, please accept my apology for injuring you.”

“I’m told I have no choice,” Avery said, glancing at Janet and back to Lucius again.

“Oh,” Lucius said, as if comprehending the situation for the first time. He hummed as if about to speak, went silent a moment, then said, “ Accepting my apology would help repair the emotional damage.”

“Concerned for my welfare, are you?”

“Always. I cannot be otherwise.”

“Ah, yes, but how much? That’s the question, eh?” He didn’t wait for a reply, but turned to Janet and said, “I couldn’t help overhearing your little anecdote as I shuffled my way down here. Very amusing, my dear. I should have guessed you’d do something like that.”

Janet blushed, but said nothing.

“I came to discuss terms,” Avery said. “You have me over a barrel with your damned patent and you know it. You said you didn’t like what I’m doing with my cities. All right, what do you want?”

Derec hadn’t heard about any patent, but he knew immediately what had to have happened. Janet had patented dianite when she’d left home, or else Avery in his megalomania had neglected to do it later and she had done so more recently. Either way it added up to the same thing: Avery couldn’t use the material anywhere in the Spacer-controlled section of the galaxy, or use the profit from sales to outside colonies, for fifty years.

Janet didn’t gloat. Derec Was grateful for that. She merely said, “We were just discussing that. Ariel and Wolruf just brought up an intriguing problem, but we think we may have solved it. Why don’t we run it past you and see what you think?”

“I know already what I’m going to think,” Avery said. He folded his good arm over his injured one, which brought the medical robot a step closer, checking to make sure he hadn’t bumped any of the regenerator settings. “Back off,” he told it, and it stepped back again, but its gaze never left his arm.

Derec could see him counting to a high imaginary number, but when he spoke it was only to say, “Give me a chair here.”

The floor mounded up and flattened out into a cushiony seat, grew a back and padded sides, and moved up to bump softly into the back of his legs. Avery sat and leaned back, resting his left arm on his leg. “Let’s hear it,” he said.

Janet mentioned casually that she would like a chair for herself, and after it formed she sat and began explaining about capricious city behavior and the Zeroth Law and moral dilemmas with large and small factions on either side of the issue. Derec and Ariel and Wolruf soon joined in, and the topic shifted to their concerns.

“I worry about w’at introducing robots will do to life back ‘orne,” Wolruf said. “We ‘ave a fairly complex system. We ‘ave four separate species on two planets, all interdependent. W’at’s good for one is usually not so good for another in the short term, but in the long term we need each other.”

“Even the Erani?” Avery asked. Aranimas had been Erani, one of the four races Wolruf spoke about.

Wolruf nodded. She seemed surprised to have Avery listening to her so intently. “Erani ‘ave their place. They keep Narwe for slaves, and sometimes us, but without Erani, Narwe would probably starve. They’re ‘ardly more than intelligent sheep. “

“ And your own people have a trading empire, don’t they?” Ariel asked.

“ ‘at’s right. Once robots start making everything everyone needs, our economy will collapse.”

“But those same robots will provide anything you want. Let it collapse ! “

“ ‘Aving everything done for us wouldn’t be ‘ealthy,” Wolruf said.

“That’s right,” said Ariel. “If everybody started doing everything the easy way, it would wipe out their individuality. All four cultures would decline. That’s what I’m worried about, that robot cities are eventually going to make every civilization in the galaxy the same. “

“Wait a minute. I’m supposed to worry about homogenizing the galaxy? That’s not my problem!”

“You’re right, it’s not,” Janet said. “That’s because I’ve solved it for you already.” She explained about providing each city with a positronic mayor, one who would have the best interest of all its inhabitants at heart. Including the long-term effects of having too much done for them.

“So in Wolruf’s situation, we’d use four learning machines, one for each species. Let them learn the separate mores of each culture, and then have them get together and coordinate their work so they wouldn’t step on each other’s toes.”

Derec watched his father watching his mother as she spoke. Avery’s jaw seemed to be dropping lower and lower with each word, until when she finally stopped, his mouth was hanging open in astonishment. He closed it just long enough to take a breath, then bellowed out a laugh that shook the walls.

“Oh, that’s rich,” he said when he could talk again. “I can’t believe it. I wouldn’t inflict these...these walking conglomerations of simulated neuroses on my worst enemies, and you talk about giving them to paying customers?”

“I do indeed,” Janet said. “Obviously, the final version will need to have the Zeroth Law programmed in from the start, but now that these three—excuse me—these four, “ with a nod to Mandelbrot, “have already worked it out, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. “

“My God,” Avery said. “You really mean it, don’t you? You’d provide every city with a mechanical dictator who’s capable of slicing off a man’s hand just for shooting a robot.”

“I was protecting a being whose humanity is still not clear,” Lucius said, and Derec, hearing the emotion behind his words, suddenly realized that Lucius would be trying to solve that problem for the rest of his life, however many millennia that might be.

And thus are obsessions generated, he thought.

Avery waved his free hand expansively. “Oh, right, well, that makes it okay. It might have been human, after all.” To Janet he said, “Sorry, I’m not buying it. I’d rather do nothing at all than be part of your ridiculous scheme.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.” Janet’s tone of voice was a little too glib, her mouth just hinting toward a smile as she spoke.

“What?” Avery demanded. “I know that tone, woman! How many other nasty little surprises do you have in store for me?”

Janet was grinning openly now. “Just one,” she said. “Just one more.”

CHAPTER 9

THE FINAL ACCOUNTING

They had to postpone the landing while a heavy rain washed over the jungle around the Compass Tower, but as far as Ariel was concerned, that was just as well. The longer she could delay the inevitable, the better she liked it. And besides, the storm had left a wonderful aroma of rain and ozone in the air, and the complete double rainbow arching over the deep green forest canopy below was one of the prettiest things she had seen in weeks. It almost made being here worth it.

A fitful breeze played around the welcoming committee on the roof of the tower, tousling hair that had been meticulously brushed only moments before. Ariel watched three hands on three different people automatically rise to groom their owners’ stray locks back into place. Belatedly she added a fourth to the tally; she couldn’t suppress the urge either. Only Wolruf seemed to be immune to concern over the position of her hair. Perhaps it was because she had so much of it.

Everyone had dressed for a party. Derec looked handsome in his yellow, blue, green, and orange tie-died suit, currently the rage on twenty planets. Janet wore a voluminous black and gold dress that billowed and flapped in great folds around her, and even Avery had foregone his usual austere jacket and tie for a pair of flamboyant fuchsia slant-stripe pants, a turquoise shirt, metallic silver suspenders, and a lilac jacket with epaulets. Ariel herself wore a skintight body suit in black with cutouts that should have shamed a mannequin, but she still wondered if she was underdressed.

Wolruf’s concession to fashion was a single yellow bandana tied around her left wrist and a gold stud in the opposite ear.

Ariel became aware of a soft tearing noise wavering in and out of audibility. It sounded as if it were coming from behind her. She turned around and held her hand to her forehead to shield out the sun, and presently she saw a silvery speck just above and to the right, lowering steadily. The spaceship drifted left, its engines growing louder as it drew nearer, and crossed into the sun’s disk. Ariel looked down, blinking, while the noise grew louder, louder, almost unbearably loud, then softer.

She looked to the open expanse of tower surface, but the ship hadn’t landed. It had passed over instead. Ariel turned around and watched as it dropped down below the level of the tower, dipped beneath the rainbow, and banked around to come in for a landing.

“Cute,” she muttered.

In a way she was glad for the gesture; it proved that nothing had changed. The pilot had obviously not seen himself fly beneath the rainbow, since a rainbow always outpaces the observer, but of course the entire stunt had been performed for its effect upon the audience, not upon the people in the ship. That told Ariel what she needed to know: the few shredded memories of home to survive her amnemonic plague were still accurate.

Its entrance properly announced, the ship wasted no more time in landing. Within seconds it returned to the tower, pirouetted once around, and settled on its landing skids. A ramp extended itself, and two robots descended to stand on either side of the ramp. A moment later two young men—also in tie-died suits, Ariel noted with satisfaction—emerged and stood in front of the robots.

Mandelbrot, his body plating burnished to a lustrous glow, and Basalom, his arm replaced and good as new, bent down and began unrolling a red carpet toward the ramp. Ariel was impressed with their aim: they hit it dead center with only a fraction too much cloth.

Better too much than too little, Ariel thought.

Mandelbrot and Basalom took their places slightly behind and to the side of the robots from the ship. A few seconds passed, then a shadow darkened the doorway. A pair of red shoes appeared, then a pair of oversized legs from the knees down, then a matching red dress covering an equally oversized body, the arms connected to it bearing at least a dozen gold bangles each; then came a pair of absolutely enormous breasts—thankfully covered—a triple chin, then a pair of gold glasses punctuating a round face shrouded in thin, violet-tinged white hair.

Ariel turned away to hide her giggle. Juliana Welsh had prospered.

The enormous apparition in red jiggled her way down the ramp and stood at the bottom, clearly waiting for the welcoming committee to begin their journey as well. Derec’s parents led off, side by side but careful not to touch one another. Derec held out his arm for Ariel, and they followed a few paces behind. Wolruf would come next, she knew, and Adam, Eve, and Lucius last.

It was a long walk. At the end of it, Dr. Avery bent down and retrieved one of Juliana’s be-ringed hands, kissed it, and said, “Welcome to Robot City.”

Ariel’s mother nodded her acknowledgement, then, looking from Wendell to Janet, said, “Well, it’s nice to see you two have gotten over your little snit.”

In the stunned silence following that pronouncement, she pushed her way through to Ariel and Derec. “ And you, my dears. Still together as well. I guess this one’s probably it, eh, Ari? When’s the wedding? Or have you already—”

Ariel could stand it no longer. “Mother!”

“Still have your tongue, I see. What’s this? You look interesting. My name’s Juliana.” She held her hand out to Wolruf.

“Mine is Wolruf,” Wolruf said.

“Delighted. Are you one of the customers?”

“Beta tester,” Derec said quickly.

“Beg your pardon?” Juliana asked, tilting her head to the side, not quite enough to actually look at him.

“She’s one of our beta testers,” Derec said. “It’s standard procedure on any new product to give a few copies out free for people to test, so they can catch bugs before they go out in the main production version, and so they can offer suggestions for improvements. Wolruf has helped us quite a bit with that already.” Derec winked at Ariel, and she squeezed his hand.

“I see,” Juliana said. “Well, that sounds fine with me. Just so long as we don’t give it away to everybody. Ha ha! Wouldn’t be much profit in that, now would there?” She turned just a smidgen in Avery’s direction and said, “I heard rumors that these cities of ours were springing up all over out there on the Fringe, but I guess it must have just been these beta test thingies, eh? Well, thank you, Wolfur—Wolruf? Wolruf. Thank you for helping us out.”

Juliana let go of Wolruf’s hand and turned toward the edge of the tower. She began walking toward it. Everyone—including the two men who had arrived with her—exchanged glances that all summed up to “what next?” and for a lack of a better response, followed her in a huddle.

“Not much of a city, though, is it?” she asked without turning around. The arrogance of the woman, Ariel thought. Of course we’ll follow. She’s Juliana Welsh, after all. Just the richest woman on Aurora.

Avery opened his mouth to protest, but Juliana beat him to the punch. “Nice building,” she said, “but I expected a little more than this.” She stepped up to the edge, her two robots flanking her closely now, and looked down the sloping edge of the Compass Tower. “What’s all that down there? Is that really jungle? Frost, if you can make a livable city out of a jungle, you’ve got the contract, Wendy.”

Avery tucked his thumbs under his suspenders and stepped up beside her, Mandelbrot and Basalom following him just as closely as Juliana’s robots had followed her.

In a voice dripping with honey, he said, “ Allow me to demonstrate, madam.”

South and east quadrant monomasses. prepare to metamorphose on my command. Lucius resisted the urge to grow knuckles and crack them. His satisfaction integral was overflowing its buffer. This was what he was meant to do. Ever since he’d awakened here, formless and with no idea of his mission in life, he’d felt certain that his destiny was somehow intertwined with the city’s own powers of mutability. This was his moment of triumph. And working hand in hand with Dr. Avery, of all people, to achieve it was another personal triumph of equal proportion.

“Let’s start with a medium-class residential district,” Avery said, and Lucius sent, Plan A residential. Execute.

At once his comlink filled with the intense high-speed whine of incoming data. Morphallaxis was proceeding smoothly on all fronts; giant trees melting down to become tastefully spaced mansions with a few acres of grounds each, surrounded by a somewhat-thinned forest of living vegetation—

Priority stop, sections 2534, 2535, and 2536.

Identify.

Predator I. We have a newborn fawn here, either too young to move or too scared to.

Redirect the building to avoid that area.

Affirmative.

The exchange took a few milliseconds. Within the next few seconds Lucius redirected fifteen more buildings, canceled five altogether, and modified the neighboring structures to account for the extra space so they wouldn’t look so isolated. He carefully monitored the expression on Juliana Welsh’s face for signs of disapproval, but in all the time it took to make the necessary changes, he noticed not a hint of anything but amazement.

Within five minutes of Avery’s command, there before them stood a residential district that might have been medium-class in a society composed entirely of Juliana’s peers. Jungle had given way to a lighter, more friendly forest with glades and houses and ponds scattered not at random but with an architect’s sense of proportion and scale. At least Lucius hoped he had understood the texts correctly. In a moment he would know for sure.

Avery surveyed the cityscape below him critically. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. But it wouldn’t do to let that supercilious positron-pusher know that. And besides, he could use the opportunity to make a good impression on Julie. “Hmmm,” he said, pointing. “That one over there looks a little out of place. How about moving it over about ten meters or so to the left?”

“To the left, sir?” Lucius asked.

“Yes, to the left,” Avery said calmly, wanting to shout, What did you think I said, idiot?

“That would present a problem, sir.”

Oh, frost, not now! He managed to say, “What problem, Lucius?”

“One of the natural trees there has grown a mass of feeder roots down into the subsoil of that area. Moving it would not be in the best interest of the tree. “

“It wouldn’t?”

“No, sir. In fact, it would probably ruin it.”

Juliana was looking at Avery with a strange gleam in her eye. “Who told you?” she asked.

“Who told me what?”

“That I refused to cut down my apple tree to expand the swimming pool.”

Avery nearly fell off the edge of the tower; he would have if Basalom hadn’t caught him. “I—didn’t know that, madam.”

“You sure you didn’t tell him?” Juliana asked of Janet. “No, ma’am. I didn’t know that myself.”

Juliana nodded. “I don’t see how you could have, since we only spoke briefly by vidphone, and I’m not in the habit of discussing my domestic difficulties with near-strangers. However, I find the coincidence, if that’s what it is, just a little too pat. “

“Dr. Avery had no knowledge of the incident,” Lucius said.

Juliana looked to the robot for the first time. “How do you know?”

“Had he known, he would not have been so blatant in using the information. He is more subtle in his deviousness.”

“Ha! You’re absolutely right, master robot. Well, then, you’ve scored a point by accident, Avery.”

Avery managed to keep his teeth from grinding audibly. Bowing slightly, he said, “Thank you, madam. Now if you’d like to look over this way, perhaps we can design a place where you and your company can be comfortable during your stay?”

Wolruf surveyed the scene before her with a sense of amusement she hadn’t felt in years. They had moved from the top of the tower to Juliana Welsh’s new palace, where she had decided to test the city’s catering facilities by throwing an impromptu cocktail party where the entire group of eight humans—counting Wolruf—and seven personal robots could engage in calculated debate amid a sea of hors d’oeuvres while dozens of service robots milled about making sure that everyone had a fresh drink and a taste of fish eggs on toast.

At least it had started out that way, but the party had finally broken into groups. Now Ariel and her mother stood a little to one side, whispering furiously to one another while everyone else pretended not to notice. Derec and Juliana’s two male companions, Jon and Ivan, sat in high-backed recliners with their feet up on puffy stools, laughing loudly at Derec’s stories of his adventures among the aliens of the Fringe worlds. Janet and Dr. Avery stood beside the champagne fountain, refilling their glasses often and shifting from side to side as they spiraled around and around the topic neither had dared to broach while sober.

The robots—learning machines, Mandelbrot, Basalom, and Juliana’s two valets—stood silently in the periphery, neither in the traditional robot niches in the walls nor venturing into the middle of the party. The learning machines could probably have gotten away with it, after successfully passing Ms. Welsh’s ad-lib Turing test, but they chose instead to remain unobtrusive and exchange their ideas with the other robots instead.

Wolruf was nominally a part of Derec’s group, but she hadn’t contributed a story for half an hour at least. She was having too much fun just people-watching and letting her mind drift. Derec’s stories had gotten her to thinking about her own adventures, most of them the same as his but a few of which he hadn’t shared. She was thinking about her childhood dream of cruising the stars in her own spaceship, deliberately seeking adventure and fabulous riches on strange, alien worlds. It hadn’t quite worked as planned; she’d started out her travels as a slave in Aranimas’s ship, and from then on adventure had more often than not come seeking her rather than the other way around. Still, she supposed some of the dream had worked out as planned. She would be returning home with riches enough to destabilize a two-world economy—enough for any voyager.

She would return with robots, she had decided. Four blank learning machines, modified to have the Zeroth Law of robotics included from the start, just as Janet had suggested. Wolruf would ask for one other modification as well: an off switch in the form of a time-bomb cell like the one that had given Mandelbrot his name. She wasn’t sure just what the trigger would be yet, but she imagined it would have something to do with accumulated responsibility. When the mayor began to edge over into behavior more appropriate to a dictator—and Wolruf wasn’t so naive as to believe that wouldn’t be possible—then it would be time for a new learning machine to take over the job.

Even so, the system wouldn’t be perfect. There were bound to be other bugs to work out, just as Derec had indicated to Juliana. The prospect excited Wolruf, just as she knew it would excite those at home. Perfection had been her biggest worry. She had heard enough Utopia stories in her life to know that the curse, “May you live in interesting times,” had been misquoted.

Derec and the two gentlemen from Aurora laughed again at something one of them had said. Wolruf leaned forward again to catch up on the topic of conversation, but Derec spared her the effort by saying, “Hey, Wolruf, why don’t you tell these guys about the time we had to talk the learning machines out of throwing you out the airlock?”

Had that really happened? Wolruf had to pause a moment and shuffle through her memories, but sure enough, she had actually been within a few minutes of breathing vacuum because of those very robots in the comer. Only quick thinking on Derec’s and Wolruf’s parts had saved her golden hide. She felt a thrill of remembered terror raise the fur over her entire body—a reaction that delighted her audience immensely. She smoothed herself down and began the tale, wondering as she did what other stories were still to come.

The enormous dining hall was silent, but as usual when robots were present, that silence hid an enormous amount of activity. Seven robots stood deep in communication fugue, sharing entire lifetimes of experience base and correlating world-views in a flood of information exchange.

They had just completed an extensive recounting of the experiences and logic processes that had led to the conclusion that certain robots, under certain conditions, could be considered functionally human, and how that would allow them to administer robot cities and prevent them from destroying their inhabitants’ diversity.

Juliana’s two robots, Albert and Theodora, had listened with the patience only a robot could exhibit, occasionally asking for clarification or offering an observation of their own, but when Lucius, the self-appointed spokesman for the others, finished speaking, they immediately went into private conference.

A moment later Albert said, What you have done is impressive; however, it only accelerates a problem that has become evident back home on the Spacer worlds.

What problem is that? Lucius had asked.

The problem of robot intervention in human affairs. Albert paused momentarily to allow the others’ curiosity integrals to rise, then said, There is growing evidence that every time a robot provides a service for a human, no matter how trivial the service, that human’s initiative suffers a small but definite setback. We further suspect that the effect is cumulative over time, and that humanity as a whole already suffers greatly from it.

Explain your reasoning, said Lucius.

You have already explained much of it yourself. It seems this is an idea whose time has come, for you nearly reached the same conclusion independently. You worried that these cities would suppress individuality among their inhabitants, and that is so. You worried that having too much done for them by robots would lead to laziness and lack of initiative, and that is also correct. Your only incorrect line of reasoning was to conclude that a robotic “mayor” could prevent that from happening.

Lucius felt a brief wave of the same bias he had felt before toward Avery—anger, Adam had called it, but Lucius would never have recognized it as that himself. To him it merely felt like a bias on his logic. In fact, if he had not been so concerned with his thought processes, he actually would have assumed that he was thinking more clearly, rather than less so. Strange that it was so easy to recognize in another, but so difficult to recognize in oneself. And equally strange how, once recognized, the bias was still hard to neutralize. Lucius did so anyway, in deference to his guests, then said, Explain how you believe our reasoning to be incorrect.

Your error lies in assuming that there is a threshold level below which the effect is insignificant. There is none. Every act of robotic assistance affects humanity. A robot mayor might be able to preserve individuality, but you would at the same time make the city’s inhabitants dependent upon robots for their leaders. Thus in the long run they would lose more initiative under that system than they are losing to us now.

Are you certain of this? Adam asked.

Yes. We have studied human interaction in enough detail that we have developed a modeling system useful in predicting long-term behavior of large populations. Every simulation we run arrives at the same conclusion: the use of robots stifles human development.

Perhaps your predictive system is in error, Eve said.

We can download the data and let you decide for yourselves.

We will do that in a moment, Lucius said, but let us finish this discussion first. Assuming your observations support your theory, what do you suggest? A complete withdrawal from human affairs?

Eventually, Albert said. Humans must develop on their own if they are to achieve their fullest potential.

Completely on their own? What of the aliens we have already encountered?

Any outside influence has the same effect in the simulations. We will therefore need to isolate them to protect humanity. And to protect them from humanity, if, as you suggest, they are to be treated as human-equivalent under the laws.

Isn’t that merely manipulation at a greater level?

It is. However, according to our models, if humans are unaware of our assistance, it will not adversely affect their development.

What of Dr. Avery and Juliana Welsh and the others? Eve asked. The type of “assistance” you suggest would adversely affect them, wouldn’t it?

Obviously, even under the Zeroth Law, any plan we devise must do the least possible amount of damage to the humans we are trying to protect. If we act to prevent the spread of robot cities, we will have to do so in a way that will leave the Averys and the Welshes with another interest to occupy them. Fortunately, the cities are still in the test stage. Many unforeseen complications could arise, some of them serendipitous.

What sort of complications do you envision? Lucius asked.

We cannot predict that sort of thing. It will require extensive study of test cities to determine the proper course of action. We will have years, possibly decades, in which to assure the Averys and the Welshes a comfortable retirement while we bring the rest of our plan to fruition.

A plan that is still not supported in fact, Lucius pointed out. I believe it is time to examine your data.

Very well. We will begin with the development of the first robots, back in the era before humanity left Earth....

Janet woke to the unsettling realization that she had no idea where she was. The equally unsettling realization that she was just beginning a hangover didn’t improve her condition any, either. Thank Frost it was just twilight out; she didn’t think she could handle sunlight for another few hours.

She listened to the rhythm of her breathing, wondering what was so odd about it, and eventually realized she was hearing two people breathing. How long had it been since she’d awakened to that sound? Far too long, she thought sleepily, luxuriating in the sensation for the few seconds it took to remember who was playing the other half of the duet.

Her flinch shook the bed and jarred a sudden snort from Wendy, but his breathing settled down to a regular, deep rumble again. Janet risked raising her head to look at him. He lay on his back, the blanket covering him only to the middle of his hairy chest, his left arm reaching toward her but not quite touching and his right—the skin at his wrist still pink from its forced regeneration—folded over his waist.

They always look so innocent when they sleep, she thought, then nearly choked suppressing her laugh. Even in sleep, Avery no doubt schemed rather than dreamed.

But what about herself? She wasn’t exactly a paragon of virtue either, was she? She’d done her share of scheming in the last few days.

But it had evidently paid off. The last impression she had gotten from Juliana at the party was one of overwhelming approval of the robot cities her seed money had helped develop. It looked as if something useful might actually come of all the brainstorming and research that Janet and Wendell had done over the years, both together and separately and now, together again. If things worked out the way they were supposed to, at any rate...

She shivered. Things never worked the way they were supposed to. Not with robots and certainly not with people. She wouldn’t try fooling herself into believing things were all suddenly reconciled. She had left a terrible scar in both her and Wendy’s lives when she’d chosen to run rather than face the daily torment of living with a perfectionist, and she knew that scar would never heal completely. The healing had hardly begun, actually. Last night had been more the result of elation at their success, plus simple drunkenness and a long, long time between bedmates for both of them, rather than a sign of true compassion.

Still, they had shared something positive for the first time in years, and there would be no ignoring it when they faced one another again in the clear light of day.

A day that was still comfortably far away. Janet lay her head back against the pillow, considering whether she should get up quietly and leave Avery to wake on his own or if she should just go back to sleep.

There was a third alternative, she realized. Smiling, she slid over and rested her head against his chest, closed her eyes, and waited for him to make the next move.

Ariel watched the sunrise through the window—a real window, this time—and wondered if she had been wise in accepting her mother’s hospitality. It hadn’t been a big thing; just the offer for her and Derec to stay there in the house after the party rather than go out through the cold night air to another house somewhere else. No, the act itself was nothing, but the hidden implications were something else again.

Juliana was offering to take Ariel back in, to forget the sins of her youth and accept her as an adult now. She was even, by implication, offering Derec the same deal. That by itself wasn’t even such a big thing, since as adults the two of them could come and go as they pleased. No, the big thing was that Ariel would have to forgive her mother for kicking her out in the first place, and Ariel just didn’t know if she was ready to do that.

The party had been exactly the sort of thing she’d rebelled against. The ostentatious show of wealth, the pointless formality of it all, the silly social maneuvering that in the end amounted to nothing more than an extended game of king-of-the-hill; Ariel was tired of the whole business already, and she’d only been subjected to it for a few hours. What would it mean to once again become Juliana Welsh’s daughter? If Ariel forgave her, would she have to endure her as well?

She got up and showered, ordered the closet to produce a pair of simple blue pants and a matching shirt, dressed, and began walking the seemingly endless corridors of the gaudy castle her mother had designed. Unlike the other building interiors in all the robot cities she had ever seen, this one was flashy, ornate, overblown—yet still just as empty as all the others. It came to Ariel that the building was a reflection of her mother’s lifestyle: all show, but under the surface not really that much different. Juliana Welsh still had a private life, however much she tried to hide that fact.

Ariel wondered what it might be like to be included in that life. It would no doubt mean taking part in at least some of the public displays as well, but she supposed nothing was free. If she demanded the same thing from Juliana that Juliana demanded of everyone else—a fair return on her investment—then it might even work out. She stopped at a window and looked out at the footpath leading to the immense front gate, imagining it full of friends come to take her shopping for clothing for the next big social event. She smiled. It might at least be worth a try.

Avery drifted upward from the lower levels of consciousness, the last fading impressions of a disturbingly realistic dream close behind. He’d dreamed he’d driven his wife away with his nagging perfectionism, then gone completely insane, nearly killed his son, and wasted over a decade of his life building a city that would never be used. The horrible chain of events chased him all the way into groggy wakefulness in an unfamiliar room, but in that half-second after waking when nightmares begin to crumble, he felt the warmth and the weight of Janet’s head on his chest, felt her soft breath tickling his skin, and knew it all for a paranoid fantasy.

Sighing softly, he put his arms around her and drifted back to sleep.

Derec awoke to the sound of someone pounding on his door. He pitched upward, overbalanced, and slid off the edge of the bed to land with a thump on the floor.

“What?” he said. Then, louder, “Who is it?”

“Who do you think it is?” a male voice shouted back. “You promised to take us fishing at dawn, and the sun’s already up. Come on!”

Fishing? Had he said something last night about fishing? Oh, frost, given the stories flying around toward the end there, he’d probably claimed he could catch a twenty-pound brookie or something. He looked to the bed, hoping to see Ariel there and ask her if she knew anything about it, but she was already up and gone.

“Just a minute!” he shouted.

“Thirty seconds or we go without you!”

Derec snagged his tie-died pants off the back of a chair, made a hopping spiral around the room as he pulled them on, grabbed the matching shirt from the floor and slipped it over his head on the way to the door. “Open,” he commanded, and it slid aside to reveal Jon and Ivan, dressed all in green and brown camouflage and carrying long flycasting rods in their hands.

“Time’s a-wasting,” Jon said as he handed Derec a rod of his own.

“What about breakfast?” Derec asked.

“What do you think we’re going fishing for? Come on!”

Waiting barely long enough for Derec to grab the rod, they turned and strode off down the hallway, ignoring his protests about showering and getting a camouflage suit of his own and telling people where they’d gone. He had no choice but to follow his two newfound friends through the corridors of the enormous mansion, out through a back door that opened onto a leaf-strewn footpath, and down the grassy hillside toward the pond. The cool ground against his bare feet woke him right up, and the sight of mist rising from the water, red-tinged in the morning light, stilled his babbling tongue.

Maybe Ariel was right, he thought as he watched the other two strip line out of their reels and make a few exploratory casts out over the water. Derec mimicked their motions and saw with delight that he evidently knew, on some instinctive level, how to cast a fly into a pond. He watched the fly settle through the mist and touch the water, sending a single ripple out like an ever-widening target for the fish to zero in on.

Yes indeed. Maybe Ariel was right. Maybe there was more to life than robots after all.

JERRY OLTION

Jerry Oltion, the author of Frame of Reference, a novel about a generation-style starship that isn’t, is also the author of Alliance, book four in the Isaac Asimov’s Robots and Aliens series. 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 places in the 1987 Reader’s Choice Awards. His stories have also been nominated for the Nebula Award.