The Hunters were speaking with one another now, short bursts of high-pitched sound. SilverSide fingered the strands of semiconductors and colored wire around her neck. They were just made-things. Tools. They were less than animals, for all their sophistication. Yes, the technology made SilverSide ache to know more, but they violated all her most primal urges.

She wanted desperately to break these tools.

A crisscrossing of sudden laser fire raked the underbrush. SilverSide pushed to her feet with a howl and ran again. She felt the awful heat of their weapons strike her, and she turned and twisted as she fled so that none of the beams could touch her for more than a few seconds. Even so, she could sense internal damage: automatic alarm circuits overloaded and caused emergency sub-routines to be run, rerouting her nerve signals along undamaged paths to the brain.

Again her wolf shape aided her as it had before; she outdistanced the Hunters quickly. But she could still hear them, could still smell that sharp tang of steel and lubricants. They would track her forever, she realized, and if they did that, they would find PackHome.

You cannot allow that to happen. The First Law was plain here.

A new positronic pathway opened, glimmering. Another robot might have kept running until it ran out of power or was caught. Another robot might have been trapped by inbuilt programming.

The Hunters were tracking a wolf, and though she had chosen that shape, it was not the only one she could be.

SilverSide’s body began to alter. The great bulk of the wolf collapsed in on itself, the body becoming much smaller. The excess mass SilverSide squeezed outward, thinning it until the alloy was as thin as she could make it.

Great, powerful wings overshadowed her now. The wings beat, cupping air.

SilverSide flew.

She was a lousy bird. She was too massive, and there was nothing she could do to alter that. She didn’t fly well, and she couldn’t fly fast or high, but she flew.

Her moonshadow passed over the Hunters moving through the woods below.

The WalkingStones didn’t even look up. A wolf that changed into a bird was not in their experience.

“You’re certain you left them behind?”

The sun was just peeking over the edge of the hills, and most of the kin had come out to greet SilverSide as, in wolf form again, she loped from the forest. KeenEye prowled the packed ground outside the entrance to PackHome. She kept looking back into the fog drifting through the shafts of light under the trees.

“I am mostly certain,” SilverSide replied. One of the pups came up to her and playfully nipped her back leg. She gently nudged the pup aside, and it ran back to its mother, yelping. “I was heading south away from the Hill of Stars, not toward here at all.”

“They will follow your tracks and your scent.” KeenEye would not let go of the argument, but at least it was in respectful KinSpeech and not HuntTongue, where SilverSide might have been compelled to challenge her.

“I became a bird. I left no tracks, and the wind took my scent.”

“You became a bird....” KeenEye’s stance stiffened; she crouched slightly, offensively. That said more than her words.

“You doubt SilverSide, KeenEye?” LifeCrier asked mockingly. “You saw the Egg. You’ve seen her kill a Hunter, which none of us could do. You saw her kill another of the WalkingStones and escape the Hunters’ lightnings. We all know she’s from the OldMother, and yet you scoff. 1 believe her, KeenEye, because I have listened to the tales of the OldMother. I have faith. What of the rest of you?”

The kin gave barks of agreement, and SilverSide could scent their pride in her. KeenEye’s lips lifted, exposing teeth.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said disdainfully. “Bird or not, we’ve still done nothing about the WalkingStones. All we’ve accomplished is to anger them, and if they come here, to PackHome, we will all die. SilverSide might be able to kill one, but what of the rest of us?”

KeenEye’s tail thrashed dirt. She fingered the necklace SilverSide had given her. “How many here have seen the bodies of kin slain by the Hunters?” she continued. “How many of you have pups who are thin because the meat is scarce? How many mothers have little milk to give the litters? We can’t stand against the WalkingStones. And that is true with or without SilverSide, with or without the OldMother.”

“Then we can go elsewhere,” SilverSide suggested. “Give the WalkingStones this place and find another. “

“Where? We’ve already discussed that. The other packs already watch their borders, knowing the trouble we’re having. No other pack will let us into their territory.”

“Then you are telling me that we must stay here,” SilverSide said. “This is something I need to know—KeenEye, LifeCrier, all the rest of you. I do not know this world as you do. The OldMother left you the task of teaching me about the kin. Must we stay here?”

They nodded, howling softly. “In that, I’m afraid I must agree with KeenEye,” LifeCrier said. “Our pack is already weak and small. In a fight with other pack-kin, we would all die.”

That answer gave the logic circuits in SilverSide’s brain the information they needed. Electrical synapses closed. It was simple.

The First Law demanded that human life must be protected. Her positronic brain, like every robot’s, logically resolved inevitable conflicts to protect the many over the few. If the kin stayed here, the conflict would be human against WalkingStone. If they moved, another, uglier conflict must be confronted, and that would pit human against human. SilverSide could not kill humans.

That realization allowed her to make an unpleasant decision. “Then we will stay here,” she said, “and my choice is made for me.”

“What choice?” KeenEye demanded.

“The choice to fight the WalkingStones.”

“We can’t fight them,” KeenEye insisted.

“I know a way,” SilverSide said. “I do not like it, but I know a way.”

“Then speak. Tell us,” KeenEye said, and the insolence was back in her voice, in her stance, in her smell. SilverSide stared at KeenEye, daring the former leader to challenge her again. SilverSide let her body enlarge slightly, her already massive chest puffing out. KeenEye growled and backed away.

“Kin will probably die, my way,” SilverSide said, still looking at KeenEye. “But you tell me there is no other choice that is not worse. If you tell me wrong, you may well destroy the pack. If there is any way for us to go elsewhere, tell me now.”

“There is no way,” KeenEye said, snorting. She pawed at the ground with a clawed hand. “There are other packs all around us: One Eye’s, ScarredPaw’s. They’ve already said they will kill any of our litter-kin who trespass. Ask LifeCrier—he can tell you of the battles between packs. I didn’t lie. And I’m not afraid to fight. Kin die all the time—it is part of the Hunt, it is part of defending territory.”

“Then it is time to hunt WalkingStones,” SilverSide answered.

“It is time to challenge them.”

CHAPTER 14

AROUND THE CAMPFIRE

It was difficult to hear anything above the racket Derec and Mandelbrot made moving through the woods. Derec quickly realized that there was no hope he’d be able to survive by hunting for food. He’d starve first.

They’d seen very little wildlife except during their rest periods. Otherwise, whatever animals lived here simply fled from the clamor of their passage. Shapes skittered through the trees ahead of them, birds took to the air with shrill cries. But a new sound intruded, making Derec cock his head quizzically.

“Did you hear that, Mandelbrot?”

Derec had stopped, leaning on the walking stick he’d cut from a dead branch and breathing heavily. They were struggling up a slope tangled with dense, close underbrush and tenacious, sticky-leaved vines; the place seemed to have been designed to give them trouble. The sun was already behind the hill and dropping rapidly, and Derec’s legs itched wherever the plants had scraped skin through his clothing. Mandelbrot, ahead of him and sounding in dire need of an overhaul, was moving very slowly with his malfunctioning leg. The robot stopped and turned his head around, the neck grating metallically.

“I have heard several things, Master Derec. Which sound were you referring to?”

“The howling. There—you hear that?”

Very faintly, a mournful wail greeted the dusk. Another voice joined the first, then several others. The mournful chorus continued for several seconds, then went back to the solo voice once more. The forest seemed suddenly very dim and dangerous. Derec shivered involuntarily.

“That sends cold chills down my back,” he said.

“There are thermal blankets in the pack,” Mandelbrot told Derec. “Let me get one for you—”

Derec smiled. “It’s not that kind of chill. It sounds like recordings I’ve heard of wolves—made before they became extinct.”

The barking howls began again, echoing and reverberating among the slopes. Mandelbrot’s neck joint screeched again as the robot looked up slope. “Their voices are complex,” he said. “In some ways it reminds me of Wolruf’s language. “

Mention of the caninoid alien’s name made Derec nod; he missed Wolruf, missed her quick wit and odd temper. “I wish it were, believe me. At least then we might get out of this mess. We have to find a place to camp for the night, Mandelbrot. Any level and halfway open space will do. I don’t want to get caught out here in the open during the dark.”

“My data banks say that even in the days before Earth was settled, most wild animals were afraid of humans. They very rarely attacked anyone without provocation.”

“Well, I’m not going to count on them having been fed the same data. Let’s keep going, Mandelbrot. Maybe at the top of this hill...though from the size of it I’m beginning to think we should promote it to mountain.”

It took them another hour to struggle to the summit. There, the trees thinned out and finally disappeared on a wind-swept, rocky ledge that, looming above the surrounding hills, gave them an excellent vantage point.

Every last muscle in Derec’s body ached from the exertion of the climb. His broken arm throbbed and burned; he was breathing in quick gasps, afraid to breathe any deeper because of his ribs. Derec swung his pack down with a grimace and found the medical supplies. An EndPain injection allowed him to keep moving. Mandelbrot, every joint rasping, helped Derec inflate the tent and arrange their pitifully few supplies. Derec started a small fire in a circle of rocks, and they sat on the hilltop watching the stars appear in the dark blue of the zenith, sprinkled across the sky in their millions.

“They certainly are persistent, those wolves or whatever they are.” The howls had continued to serenade them as they’d made camp. They seemed to be coming from the west, in the same general direction they were heading though several hills over. Derec sat on the edge of the ledge and tossed pebbles into the trees below, listening to them crash through the branches. He looked at the shadowy landscape ahead of them and grimaced. “Look at that. You’d figure the hills would all have to run north and south—we’re going to walk five kilometers up and down for every one due west.”

Derec glanced over at the robot standing alongside him. It didn’t seem to have heard. “Mandelbrot?”

“I am sorry, Master Derec. I was listening to them.”

“Just make sure they don’t get closer.” Derec threw another stone, then squinted toward the west. “How well are you seeing, Mandelbrot?”

“My night vision is very poor due to the crash damage. It is no better than yours.”

“Uh-huh. Take a look anyway and tell me if that isn’t a glow in the northwest, maybe four or five of those hills over. I didn’t notice it before, but with the darkness—”

Mandelbrot peered in the direction Derec was pointing. “I see a patch of light reflecting from underneath clouds....”

Then, for a moment, they were both silent, listening to a voice that whispered in both their heads.

All units: central computer under attack. All units...

The voice was very faint. It faded even as Derec tried to get the voice to respond.

“My fa—” Derec began, then stopped himself. He hated the man too much to call him that, and on Aurora it meant very little anyway. “Mandelbrot, it must be Avery.”

“It is possible. “

“It’s more than possible. It explains everything: the distress call, the central computer not responding to the chemfets, our crash-landing—everything. He could have used a Key, jumped to the Compass Tower here, and started disrupting the city.”

“Why?” Mandelbrot asked. “The first Robot City was his creation. “

“He was also very disturbed that I could control it. Maybe he’s decided to destroy all the others.”

“It is possible, I suppose,” Mandelbrot admitted. “But we will not know until we arrive.”

“We have to push harder, Mandelbrot. The city’s in trouble.”

“Why should that concern you so much, Master Derec?”

The question sounded like one Ariel might have asked, and the reminder hurt more than his physical pain. Derec scowled. “It just does. Maybe it’s the chemfets—some chemical bonding with the city that’s due to them. I don’t know, Mandelbrot. All I can tell you is that I hurt when the city hurts, and it makes me want to do something about it. Can you understand that?”

“I can, Master Derec. What you describe sounds very similar to the compulsion of the Three Laws within every robot. And if we must push ourselves tomorrow, I would suggest that you rest,” the robot said gently. “You are exhausted, and I cannot carry you.”

Derec wanted to argue, but Mandelbrot was right. He could feel the weariness; and the effort it took to get to his feet convinced him. “Then I’m going to try to sleep. What about you?”

“I do not know how much longer I will be able to walk. The less I move, the better. I will stand here and watch. Have a good sleep.”

His dreams were haunted by his father, who could take on the shape of a wolf. Ariel was there, but wolf-Avery chased her away, and though Derec tried to run after her, his feet were leaden and horribly slow.

Derec awoke with a start. For a moment, he was disoriented and nearly panicked until the nagging pain in his arm and ribs reminded him. He opened the tent and poked his head out through the flaps.

It was still dark. Two moons were in the sky; one high, the larger one low to the west. Backlight against the moonlight, he could see Mandelbrot, standing motionless at the edge of the overlook and staring out into the night. He could hear the wolf-creatures baying at the moon.

“Mandelbrot?”

“Everything is fine, Master Derec. I was listening to them. Their voices; it is almost like a language.”

‘Their voices make me want to avoid them at all costs. They’re probably discussing how tasty my bones and your metal would be. Good night, Mandelbrot.”

“Good night, Master Derec.”

He lay there for a long time in the darkness, not wanting to go to sleep. He didn’t know if it was because Avery would be waiting for him in his dreams, or because he was afraid Ariel would not.

CHAPTER 15

FEINT AND THRUST

SilverSide’s creator herself might have been distressed by the robot’s logic. Janet Anastasi might well have been appalled and considered SilverSide’s positronic mind to be hopelessly damaged. It is impossible to say.

Surely an Auroran robot would have been crippled, if not driven into outright positronic lockup, by the implications of this decision. But to SilverSide, the Three Laws were simply the morals of the OldMother, and her logic and her interpretations were not shaped by human standards, but by those of the kin.

Inclined to respond physically and aggressively to a challenge.

It took the pack another day to prepare, a long day of using their “found” tools such as sticks and flat stones, their few flint-shaped blades and planes. No one was exempt; even the very old and the very young helped as far as they were able.

After SilverSide was satisfied with the arrangements, she sent most of the kin back to PackHome after warning them to take a circuitous, long route. She sent some of the hunting kin with them for protection, not wanting to leave PackHome entirely undefended should her plan fail. KeenEye and LifeCrier insisted on remaining behind with SilverSide, and she chose another half-dozen of the pack to stay as well.

As the sun set, they said their farewells to the rest of the kin and watched them make their way among the trees. When they were gone, SilverSide howled a long challenge to the rising moons and turned to the others.

“Now, let us go find a WalkingStone to kill,” she said.

The city had changed, even in the two days since she had last seen it. It had encroached farther on the forest, spilling from the valley that had confined it. Worker WalkingStones with roaring chainsaws for arms were tearing at the trees at the leading edge of the city; farther in toward the Hill of Stars, everything seemed to have changed. The ice-blue building to the west had been farther over and shorter the last time, and the flying buttresses linking it to the building alongside had not been there at all. The cluster of geodesic domes at the base of the Hill of Stars was certainly new, and an open space lush with greenery yawned under the bright lights of a slender needle tower. It was as if the WalkingStones were not satisfied with their expansion; they had to tear down and rebuild even in the center of their city.

The valley was awash in them. The wind stunk of metal; the VoidEyes in the sky above were lost in the glare.

Yet the WalkingStones’ ceaseless toil impressed SilverSide, even as she growled at the sight of the naked, muddy hillsides in their path.

“They rape the land, like a male taking a female before her time,” KeenEye snarled. She growled in BeastTongue: a sound of pure loathing. “There are always more of them, always more of their stone caves, always more of their lights and noise and smells.”

“They leave nothing for us,” LifeCrier agreed. “Is this the way the Void looks, SilverSide? Is this the way the gods live?”

“I do not know,” SilverSide answered. “It is possible. I feel...I feel a pull to it, LifeCrier. There is something in the smoothness, in the many tools they use, in the way they move. Perhaps it is something I once knew.”

“Then the gods can have the Void,” KeenEye said in irreverent KinSpeech. “I hate it.”

“OldMother will eat the souls of kin as we rise to the Void,” LifeCrier chastised the former leader, using HuntTongue to emphasize his point. “She takes us to the One Pack again, and we run in the Endless Forest.”

SilverSide snapped at the two of them. “Silence!” she ordered. LifeCrier immediately moved back into the pack; KeenEye stared at SilverSide for a moment, then dropped her muzzle. “Move forward now. Quietly. We don’t want to bring the Hunters too quickly.”

The pack flowed among the trees following SilverSide. She brought them to a halt near the cleared section downwind of the WalkingStones and surveyed the area.

“There,” SilverSide whispered, pointing. “They will do.”

The wall of a building rose several meters away, a building under construction. A group of three WalkingStones was hauling materials to a wheeled cart alongside the wall, their backs to the forest. The workers were isolated, most of the continuing work being done in a floodlit area half a kilometer away. Their head-voices were silent.

“Now,” SilverSide said, and leaped into the open.

As one, the pack followed her, sweeping across the ground like a gray wind and then falling on the WalkingStones with savage growls. SilverSide took one of them by the throat, shaking with all her robotic strength and feeling the hated thing die before it could sound an alarm. The others hit the remaining two WalkingStones in a rush.

Central! Under attack—

SilverSide heard the distress call cut off in mid-sentence even as she turned to help KeenEye and the others. She needn’t have been concerned. As she had suspected from her encounter with the other worker, the kin’s strength was great enough to disable this species of WalkingStone. Under the floodlights across the open field, other workers were looking at them, and SilverSide heard them alerting Central to the pack’s presence.

She grasped KeenEye’s shoulder. “The Hunters will be coming. We must go.”

“Then we’ll meet them here,” KeenEye said. Her eyes were bright with the death of the WalkingStones.

“No,” SilverSide said in emphatic HuntTongue. “KeenEye will destroy the pack if she does that. We’ve prepared for them—they will follow. I promise that. Take them; I’ll follow.”

KeenEye gave a howl of both challenge and triumph to the nearest workers and turned. The pack followed her back into the forest. SilverSide waited, standing over the downed workers. Yes, they were like the krajal. The others had turned back to their work, following the orders of Central. She heard Central call the Hunters. When she saw the first gleam of their armored skin rushing toward her, she turned and followed the path of the others back into the forest.

Behind her, she heard the crashing as the Hunters bulled their way into the undergrowth.

SilverSide snaked her way through the trees, making sure she stayed well ahead of them but left a clear path behind. Even so, the WalkingStones remained close behind her. When she finally broke through into the glade where the others waited, they were not far behind. All the kin could hear them; birds were rising in panic above the trees, and they could smell the oily stench. The kin stirred restlessly, muttering in angry BeastTalk as they milled around SilverSide.

She stood in the center of the glade, pacing. The open spot was situated in a deep valley, surrounded on all sides but one by steep slopes. “The rest of you—into the trees and make ready,” she ordered. “Do not let them see you. Remember that their lightning will kill you if it touches you. I will lure them in and then run. KeenEye, you will do the rest.”

They were barely in position when the first of the Hunters broke through the ring of trees, the others at its heels. SilverSide gave a rumbling BeastTalk challenge, then broke and ran when the Hunters raised their hands to her. Laser fire raked the trees, just missing her, and the Hunters lumbered into motion again. Follow, the voices in her head said. Do not let the creature escape this time.

This was exactly what SilverSide had hoped for. The hillsides formed a natural funnel; the WalkingStones had to move as a group. The WalkingStones moved across the glade as one.

And, as one and intent on their pursuit of SilverSide, they tumbled into the deep pit the kin had dug across the glade and hidden with dry grass.

“Now, KeenEye!” SilverSide cried.

The dirt removed from the pit had been piled next to it and blocked with fallen logs. Now KeenEye cut the lashings holding the logs. They rolled crazily over the edge, followed by a roaring landslide of dirt and stones. The kin pushed at the mounds of dirt, howling, keeping it cascading down on the Hunters as a choking cloud of dust rose. SilverSide could hear the head-voices wailing distress as the WalkingStones were covered under the weight of two meters of rocky clay.

When the dust settled at last, there was nothing to be seen of the Hunters. They were gone. Buried. Even the head-voices were silent.

The pack howled and wailed in BeastTalk. They clambered over the pit, stomping on the earth that hid the WalkingStones and packing it down. LifeCrier licked SilverSide’s cold muzzle; even KeenEye rubbed her flank in appreciation. “We’ve done it!” LifeCrier sighed. “We’ve killed Hunters. All the kin can see the gift of the OldMother now.”

The reminder served to temper KeenEye’s satisfaction. The former leader only grunted. “It might seem so. But this was only one battle, LifeCrier. Only half of SilverSide’s plan. There’s still the rest.”

SilverSide nodded in agreement and the mood of the kin darkened again. The celebration ended as they gathered around her again. “All of you must stay here to watch,” she told them when they were quiet. “Central may send workers to dig these Hunters out, or it may have other Hunters to send. KeenEye, your task is harder than mine. You must watch. If other Hunters come, flee, but remember that you cannot go back to PackHome until you have lost them. No matter what, you must keep them occupied for as long as you can. If workers come, you must stop them from unearthing these Hunters, or if you find that the Hunters can dig themselves out somehow, you must find a way to stop them or slow them down. We’ve not won. Not yet. We’ve only made the first step.”

SilverSide picked up a clod of dirt and crumpled it in her hand, letting the dust trickle back through her long, clawed fingers. “Now, I must go and find this Central.”

CHAPTER 16

A DEATH

“They have been following us for the last few hours, Master Derec.”

“I know. I can hear them.”

Derec didn’t like the sound of the long, quavering howls echoing among the hills. He also didn’t like the fact that the sun was just ready to set.

Their last few days had been slow and painful, but mostly uneventful. Mandelbrot’s knee had seized up entirely; the robot walked with a stiff-legged limp that made their progress halting. Derec’s arm was still sore and throbbing, but he nursed the remaining painkillers, taking them only when it became unbearable. He watched his own footing carefully, knowing that if he stumbled he couldn’t easily break his fall. Derec would have sworn that their backpacks, light enough when they’d started out, seemed to be gaining weight as the days wore on.

He wasn’t much enjoying his first days on this world. He would have given nearly anything for a hovercraft. His feet hurt, his boots rubbed his toes raw, he’d found a hundred bruises he hadn’t known he’d had, and they had no idea if they’d ever see the Robot City that still adamantly refused to talk to him.

What good are the chemfets if you can’t communicate both ways?

It was just like something Dr. Avery would do. More and more he was convinced that he would find Avery here, that Avery would somehow be behind it all.

Worst of all, he missed Ariel. He missed her terribly. He’d replayed their argument over in his head a thousand times. He’d come up with a hundred lines that would have made it better, if only he had a chance to do it over again. It would have been so easy.

Okay, Ariel. I’m sorry. Come with us. Please.

But of course there was no way to go back in time and tell her that. There was no way for him to turn back the clock and stop the argument before it began. It would always be there between them. The best he could hope for was that she’d be willing to forgive him when he returned to Aurora.

If he returned to Aurora.

All in all, Derec sorely regretted his decision to come to this place.

And now there were wolves.

They had been shadowing Derec and Mandelbrot since yesterday, always staying out of close range but always just on the edge of sight.

“I believe it is a territorial problem,” Mandelbrot said. “I think we are just on the edge of their land and they are warning us away.”

“We’re not going to harm them. We just want to get to Robot City.”

“That doesn’t seem to be something they would understand, Master Derec.”

Derec stopped and slipped the pack from his back, grimacing as the straps put weight on his broken arm. There was a compressed-air gun in the survival gear, a short-range weapon only, but the glass darts contained a deadly nerve poison. Derec felt Mandelbrot watching him as he loaded the gun and slid the holster on his belt. “They could be carnivores,” he said to the robot. “I don’t want to take any chances.”

“I have been listening to them,” Mandelbrot said. “The calls are remarkably complex.”

“And their teeth may well be remarkably sharp.”

“Understood, Master Derec. Still, I have been carefully watching and listening. They seem to be staying within these hills.” Mandelbrot pointed to the area directly ahead of them. “One of them will come directly into view and howl to us, like a challenge or warning—that is why I believe they are telling us to turn away. What if their calls are a language? Perhaps we should avoid confrontation all together.”

“How? By going a hundred kilometers around? Mandelbrot, we’re both hurt. We need help, and the only help is in Robot City. Which is—we think—that way. Wolves or no wolves. I’ve heard the wolves, too, and it doesn’t sound like any kind of language to me.”

“I understand, Master Derec. Still, the voices are very complex: the falling tones, the breaks...”

“We don’t have time for detours. We won’t live long enough for that.”

Mandelbrot nodded. Derec’s insistence forced First Law overtones and Third Law obedience: the robot went silent. They began walking again.

Long shadows covered the landscape; the disc of the sun was gone behind the hills, and the western sky was a bath of crimson. Already the first stars were up in the east, with the largest of the two moons a crescent horn high in the sky.

Derec and Mandelbrot used the remaining light to push on into the hills. The barks and yips and howls stopped ominously as they topped the first crest. When it became too dark to see the tree roots and stones in their path, they stopped. Derec unpacked the tent; Mandelbrot made a fire. “Wolves are often afraid of fire,” Mandelbrot said.

“I’ll remember to hire you as a guide next time we go on safari,” Derec said. Firelight threw moving, wavering shadows through the trees; the wood hissed and sparked, and it was hard to see anything beyond the glare of the flames. Derec thought it worse than the darkness itself. It was easy to imagine shapes in the erratic light, and none of the shapes in Derec’s mind was pleasant.

“I’ll get some food started—” Derec began to say.

And then the shapes from his nightmares streaked from the woods, growling and snarling.

They were not wolves, at least not like any wolves Derec knew. They were larger than the old pictures Derec had seen: lean, gray-furred bodies and massive chests, their heads peculiarly shaped, large-skulled but with a distinct canine muzzle. They ran from the woods on all fours but reared up on the hind legs at will, slashing with forepaws—well-articulated fingers tipped with razor claws. Their eyes were red from reflected firelight, and they roared and howled and shrieked as they attacked.

The creatures hit Mandelbrot first, which very likely saved Derec’s life. They ignored Derec, slamming into the hobbled robot. Mandelbrot could not move quickly enough to avoid them. The robot flailed back at them, the Avery arm snaking like a whip. It struck one of the wolves across the snout and there was a distinct crack of bone as the wolf-creature yelped, rolled, and fled.

Three more struck Mandelbrot at once, and the impact, combined with Mandelbrot’s bad leg, knocked the robot entirely over. He fell into the fire, clasping two of the attacking wolf-creatures. Sparks flared and snapped; the wolves howled in fear and pain as they struggled to get away from the robot’s steel grasp. Mandelbrot let them go at last and the wolves yelped and fled, their fur scorched and burning. Mandelbrot struggled to get back on his feet, sending glowing embers flying through the air.

Then everything was confused. Derec had dragged the gun from its holster. He squeezed the trigger at anything moving beyond the campfire; the gun bucked in his hand. Something big and horribly strong hit him from behind and he went down, shouting with pain and nearly losing consciousness as he landed on his bad arm. He couldn’t see anything; his head was full of exploding blotches. Somehow Derec held onto the gun and fired blindly. He couldn’t tell if he hit anything or not, but all at once the battle was over. One of the wolves gave a short, high bark; the others dropped the attack and fled into the woods.

Derec felt a metallic hand on his shoulder. “Master Derec?”

“Wolves are afraid of fire, huh?”

“I have made the correction in my data bank.”

“Good. Wonderful. Now help me up.”

The camp was a mess. Bumming logs were scattered around the area; the tent had collapsed. There was a long rip in one of the packs, and several cans of food had spilled out. “Great,” Derec sighed. “We’ll be up half the night fixing things. If our friends don’t make a return visit,” he added. “Man’s best friend, they aren’t.”

They found the body in the morning as they began their trek once more. Derec nearly stumbled over it in the underbrush. “What the—” he began, then stopped.

“Oh, no,” Derec said breathlessly. “Please, no.”

“What is it, Master Derec?” Mandelbrot said, limping over.

Derec didn’t answer. He only stared.

The wolf-creature had evidently caught one of the stray darts Derec had fired the night before. It was a young one, a female who had evidently been watching the fight from the cover of the trees. She certainly had not been involved herself.

She couldn’t have, even if she’d wanted to. Lashed around her body with vines was a primitive travois built of trimmed sticks, a carrier. And in one hand, uselessly, she clenched a stone knife the chipped edges of which showed the mastery of a flint knapper.

“By any god you care to name...” Derec breathed. “Mandelbrot, you were right. The wolves—they’re sentient.”

Derec looked at the body, stricken. “And I killed one.”

CHAPTER 17

IN THE HILL OF STARS

She bayed a challenge to Central from the nearest hill, for no kin would go into battle with an equal without first warning them.

There was no answer. She hadn’t expected one.

Packing along the hills at the edge of the city, SilverSide watched for several minutes, paying careful attention to the movements of the nearest WalkingStones and listening to their voices in her head.

There were several types that seemed to roam freely through the streets. SilverSide left the heights and moved down from the trees to get a closer look at them. She ran quickly across the cleared area around the spreading city and into the shadows of the buildings. When one of the WalkingStones passed her hiding place, SilverSide quickly memorized its shape and walk; once it was gone, SilverSide willed her body to change once more, patterning herself after the WalkingStone. Her head became round and smooth; her body straightened and she stood upright, letting the markings of the kin disappear.

When it was done, she took the necklace of wires from her head and laid the token of her first victory on a ledge. She walked onto the hard stone walkways and eternal daylight of the city.

SilverSide watched and listened carefully for any sign of recognition or alarm in the first few WalkingStones she passed, but none of them paid her any attention at all. As she went deeper into the steel canyons of this place, the WalkingStones became more numerous. Soon SilverSide was moving in great crowds of them, of all manner of shapes and sizes. This was certainly not the forest, where a kin could—at need—wander for a day or more without seeing another of the kin. LifeCrier’s analogy, which had first sparked this idea in her, seemed more and more apt. These were krajal, hive-insects. They could not exist without each other. They had no individuality at all. They existed only to serve Central, and without Central they were nothing.

Their society seemed very wrong to SilverSide. Her decision now gave her no pause at all. It was right to destroy this place, despite the sophisticated technology it showed. It spoke of intelligence, yes, but of intelligence used in the wrong way. This was not logical, she decided. This was not the way of humans.

SilverSide continued on. The kin, she knew, would have been puzzled by the silence of the city: there were few noises at all beyond the hum of machinery and the sound of the WalkingStones’ passage. None of them spoke in what the kin would have considered an audible range. But SilverSide heard the racket of their thousands. She listened to the WalkingStones’ endless chatter in her head. Already she was missing the good smell of earth and foliage and the sounds of life. This was a dead place. This was a sterile and horrible place, and she was headed for the very heart of it.

The Hill of Stars. There, Central would be waiting for her. LifeCrier had said that the Hill of Stars was the first thing the WalkingStones had built. The krajal always built first a room for their queen.

The different species of WalkingStones all used different frequencies to communicate with Central—SilverSide knew that without understanding frequencies or bandwidths: each species resonated in a slightly different place in her head. Janet Anastasi had also built into her robot a primitive location device: SilverSide could listen to Central and know from which direction the transmission came.

It was easy enough to walk the streets and listen, tracking Central. None of the workers even questioned her right to be there; they ignored her, going about their own tasks.

Central was concerned about her, though. SilverSide heard a continuous stream of unanswered queries directed to the Hunters. As she approached the Hill of Stars itself, Central ordered a group of workers into the forest to seek the Hunters. SilverSide felt satisfaction at that, for it meant that Central either had no more Hunters to send or that it was not going to expend more of them until it understood what had happened. Either way, it meant that the other kin were relatively safe for the moment.

SilverSide continued on until she reached the large open plaza in which the Hill of Stars stood.

The gigantic pyramidal structure overshadowed any of the other buildings in the city, towering higher than the hills surrounding the valley. Its steep, sloping faces were pocked with windows behind which she could occasionally see one the WalkingStones moving. The scale of the structure was something she could only now begin to understand. It was immense, far larger than anything else in this place. A fitting place for the Central, for this queen WalkingStone, she decided. There were large doors cut into each of the sides. SilverSide began walking across the plaza toward the nearest of them.

She expected to be stopped and challenged. She had prepared herself to be ready to move quickly and violently, knowing that once an alarm was raised, Central would immediately take steps to protect itself, and she would have scant minutes to finish her task.

It was almost too easy. None of the WalkingStones in the plaza made any move to prevent her from entering the Hill of Stars. Like the rest, they paid no attention to her at all. She was simply another one of the workers, going silently about her task without question—why should another of them question her right to be there? She entered into a cold dimness bounded by stone and cut with wide hallways.

There were fewer of the WalkingStones here, and most of them had a different body construction: more streamlined, with hands obviously designed for delicate work. From the orders given them by Central, SilverSide knew that these were the attendants of Central, the ones allowed into its presence. SilverSide let her body change to match their shape in a brief moment when she was alone in the hall and then continued walking, waiting.

It took only a few minutes. An order came from Central to one of the attendants who had just passed SilverSide, summoning it. The WalkingStone turned to obey, and SilverSide followed, moving with the WalkingStone along the labyrinthian corridors deeper into the heart of the Hill of Stars. In time, they passed through a set of wide doorways into a vast interior chamber.

And SilverSide looked upon Central.

The huge chamber was brightly lit from hanging lamps. Four doors entered into it on the ground level; balconies rimmed the walls to the ceiling, twenty or more stories high. In all that vast space, WalkingStones moved on all sides, but the ground floor was left mostly empty but for a cluster in the exact middle. There stood a quartet of Hunters, one at each corner of an array of eight wafer-thin, two-meter-tall rectangles, arranged like the rays of a stylized sun around a central column. The column was all black and chrome, with tiny lights blinking red and amber up and down its length. The presence of the Hunters would have been enough, but SilverSide could sense the power and energy coming from the structures.

Central. The Queen. The mind behind the WalkingStones.

And with the Hunters guarding it, SilverSide knew that a frontal attack would not work. She altered her course in what she hoped looked to be a purposeful way, angling toward another of the exits from the room. One of the Hunters watched her, but she heard nothing in her head from Central. SilverSide left the room and went into the hallway beyond.

Had she been kin, she might have felt despair. Isolated as it was, with the Hunters around it, there seemed to be no way to reach Central. It would be a long run across that floor; before she could hope to reach the unit, she would be cut down by the Hunters’ laser fire. As for the balconies...

She passed a glassed-in elevator rising toward the top of the Hill of Stars, climbing the outside of Central’s chamber. The glimmer of an idea sparked in her positronic brain.

SilverSide stepped into the open door of one of the elevators as another of the WalkingStones stepped off. A row of marked buttons was set next to the door; she pressed one and the elevator rose swiftly up, stopping gently with a chime. SilverSide stepped out and found the nearest door leading into the central chamber. She stepped to the railing and looked down.

Far, far below in that dizzying space, she could see the sunray design of Central.

Any Third Law requirement that she protect her own life was lost in the First Law possibilities represented by the death of Central. The fact that she might die in the effort meant nothing weighed against the fact that it would save the lives of kin. SilverSide climbed up on the railing, her body changing back to wolf shape. Her powerful hind legs gathered.

She leapt.

Her robotic strength took her out over the well of emptiness. At the zenith of her leap, over the center of the space, she willed herself to change once more, letting the body expand and thin and flatten into a glider shape like the paraseeds she’d seen fall from the trees near PackHome. She sailed, soaring and spiraling down—a silent enemy descending.

For several seconds, she heard nothing. SilverSide began to think that this would work, that she would plummet unhindered down to Central.

But a worker pointed as she passed one of the balconies in her descent. SilverSide realized that there were certain things too out of the ordinary for even the workers to ignore.

Central! Alert!

The Hunters looked up and saw SilverSide.

One of the younglings heard them first. “KeenEye,” he hissed. “WalkingStones!”

KeenEye growled in BeastTalk. Since SilverSide had left, she had been prowling the ground where the Hunters were buried, nervous and agitated. She’d been expecting this. She’d known that this was a foolhardy idea from the beginning. But SilverSide was the leader—there was nothing she could do about that short of challenging her again, and SilverSide was simply too strong. KeenEye gave LifeCrier a baleful, accusing glance and bounded toward the youngling.

“Go see where they are,” she ordered the young male. “Quickly!”

“SilverSide hasn’t had time yet to destroy Central,” LifeCrier said, coming up behind KeenEye as she watched the youngling rush away. “Only a few more minutes—”

“Or perhaps she’s already been killed and this is a squad of Hunters who will kill the rest of us.”

“SilverSide is the OldMother’s—”

“Be quiet!” KeenEye growled in savage HuntTongue. “I am tired of hearing this prattling about OldMother and the Void. SilverSide has made a mistake, whether she is from the OldMother or not.”

“And what would you have done, KeenEye? Would you let us slowly starve to death? At least SilverSide is trying to do something about the WalkingStones.”

Their argument went no further. The youngling came back panting. “They are workers,” he gasped, his head lolling and his tongue out. “But one of them has hands like the Hunters. That one walks in front, like a leader.”

“SilverSide had said that Central might send workers,” LifeCrier said.

“She didn’t say that they would have the weapons of the Hunters, though, did she?” KeenEye glowered. “If they’re workers, then we will destroy them as we did the others. They will be expecting us here. LifeCrier, you will go to the west and circle to come behind them; I will go east and do the same. The rest of you will hide in the trees until these workers begin to dig. Then we’ll hit them from all sides at once. Make sure the first one attacked is the one with Hunter’s hands.”

KeenEye looked at each of the small group of kin and lapsed back into KinSpeech, gruffly affectionate. “We must stop them from unearthing the Hunters. We must try to give SilverSide the time she asked for.” She looked at LifeCrier last of all. “Even if it means nothing,” she added. “Nowgo!”

KeenEye and LifeCrier streaked away as the others melted into the cover of trees around the glade.

CHAPTER 18

ENCOUNTER WITH KIN

The wolf-creatures did not attack again that day, though Derec and Mandelbrot heard them often or glimpsed them shadowing their progress through the trees. Derec watched them, his weapon at ready but not certain that he could fire it again, not with the knowledge that they were intelligent. Once or twice, he called out to the wolves or gestured to one of them slipping past, but they never responded.

By noon, the calls had faded behind them, and they were left alone in the forest.

“I think we must have passed only through a far comer of their territory,” Mandelbrot said. “The attack was simply to ensure that we came no closer to their den or whatever, and they stayed with us to be certain that we left. It is a lucky accident that our path did not lead us in the wrong direction.”

“It would have been luckier if it hadn’t led us to them at all,” Derec answered morosely.

“We must be very careful,” Mandelbrot said. “There are likely to be more tribes in the area. Master Derec, do you think that perhaps these wolf-creatures would be able to help us? Perhaps we do not have to find the Robot City.”

“No,” Derec replied, but the question made him glance over to Mandelbrot. “We need Robot City. Stone Age technology won’t do either of us any good. Are you going to repair your knee with a flint joint? Are you going to find servos and high-grade lubricants and a new optical circuit?”

Mandelbrot was silent after that, but Derec knew that the robot was experiencing a mental quandary after their encounter with the wolf-creatures. Mandelbrot was obviously troubled by their sentience. It showed in the questions he asked, in the way that he looked at Derec’s weapon, in the attention the robot paid to the movement of the wolf-creatures watching them.

Knowing the robot as he did and having seen the reactions of the original Robot City robots to Wolruf, Derec knew where the problem lay. He could almost hear balances shifting within the robot’s mind.

“Mandelbrot,” he said as they walked, “how do you regard the wolf-creatures? How do the Laws apply to them?”

“Are you asking if I consider them ‘human,’ Master Derec?”

“Yes. I suppose that’s the basic question. Are they human? I know you came to class Wolruf as human.”

“Positronic minds are as variable as those of humans, Master Derec. What is human? There are many ways to answer the question, all of them valid and all of them with shortcomings. Certainly it is more than simply the way a being looks; even among the humans I have seen there is a great variance.”

Derec was shaking his head. “But every one of them you’ve encountered has been Homo sapiens, a bipedal, upright-walking mammal descended from apes and able to trace their ancestry back to Earth. These wolf-things, whatever they are, aren’t bipedal, aren’t apes, and aren’t descended from anything on Earth.”

“That description fits Wolruf as well.”

“Point taken. But you haven’t answered my question yet. Let me give you a hypothetical situation: If I told old Balzac back on Aurora that Wolruf was a great danger to me and the only way to remove the danger was to kill her, would Balzac do it?”

“The danger would have to be demonstrated, Master Derec. Your word would not be enough.”

“All right, assume it was. Assume I can convince Balzac of the imminent risk. I know I couldn’t order Balzac to kill a human, but what about Wolruf? Balzac’s seen her walk and talk and use the computer and pilot a ship. Would he still be able to protect me?”

Mandelbrot’s eyes gleamed. His bad leg dragged through underbrush, and the robot came to a halt alongside Derec. “You are asking this because you are concerned that I will not be able to protect you should these wolf-creatures attack again.”

Derec shrugged. He patted his broken arm, then waggled the gun in his hand. “We’re not in the greatest of shapes, Mandelbrot. Neither one of us. First, I don’t want to have to use this thing, not after what we know now, but if I have to in order to stay alive, I probably will. What about you, Mandelbrot?”

The robot seemed to consider that for a long moment, and for a moment Derec was afraid that he might have inadvertently driven the robot into positronic lockup. Then servo motors whirred as it began walking again. “I have searched my data banks and checked the functions of my logic system, Master Derec, and the readouts are very erratic. My priority circuits are almost in balance. Had I never met Wolruf, had I never seen sentient alien lifeforms, and did I not have memories of Robot City in my mind, I am sure it would be different.”

“What are you saying, Mandelbrot?”

“That I do not know what I would do, Master Derec. I do not know.”

He could have insisted. He could have made it a direct question and stressed the importance of an answer—the Second Law would have forced Mandelbrot to answer. “Mandelbrot, do you consider these wolf-creatures to be as human as me?”

But somehow it didn’t seem right to ask.

After all, Derec wasn’t sure of the answer himself.

All of the sudden, it was too late to ask.

They had continued to walk even after the sun had set. The moons were up and bright, and Derec wanted to cover as much ground as they could before settling for the night.

Mandelbrot’s comlink overheard the short-range call. “Derec,” it said. “There are robots in the near vicinity.” Mandelbrot’s flat, emotionless voice sounded strangely dispassionate. “They seem to be searching for Hunter-Seekers that are also supposed to be in this vicinity.”

Derec couldn’t help the grin that split his face. “That’s wonderful, Mandelbrot. Now we can finally get out of here.” He focused his thoughts inward, trying to contact the robots via the chemfets in his body, but the link was still not there. “Can you contact them, Mandelbrot? Tell them there’s a human in need of aid—”

Derec got no farther.

A fury in gray fur hit him from behind. Claws raked his shoulder as he was sent sprawling to the ground. His broken arm hit a root protruding from the earth. Derec screamed involuntarily as the world went dim. His attacker, a wolf-creature, had turned to attack again, snarling. Derec tried to raise himself up with his good hand and could not. The wolf-creature gathered itself to pounce.

Derec knew he was going to die.

The wolf-creature, sentient or not, was going to rip his throat out.

Derec struggled to crawl, to move. He saw a blur of metal and heard the whine of overtaxed gears. Mandelbrot had moved to intercept the wolf-creature. But the gear-whine became a wail and the robot’s leg seized up entirely. Mandelbrot started to fall, internal gyros protesting, as the wolf-creature leapt.

Mandelbrot’s Avery-type arm snaked out even as he fell, even as the body of the wolf-creature bounded over the robot’s prone body. Mandelbrot grabbed, held, and threw. It was all he could do. The wolf yelped in surprise and pain, then the body thudded against the tree next to Derec and slumped to the ground.

The stars in Derec’s head went away slowly. His vision cleared to see Mandelbrot lying next to him and staring. “Master Derec?” the robot asked. “I think I may have killed it.” His voice seemed to grind from his metallic larynx, halting. Derec understood immediately that the robot was very near lockup. His one good eye was dim, and his hand was fisted tightly.

“Mandelbrot,” he said desperately. “You had to do it. I would have died otherwise. I’m...I’m okay, I think. You saved my life, Mandelbrot. You had no choice. No choice at all. If you lockup now, you’re committing a First Law offense. I need you.”

Derec tried to rise and fell back again with a groan. He’d intended it as an act—it wasn’t. The pain was all too real.

His discomfort stirred Mandelbrot. The eye came back to full brilliance, the hand unclenched, and the robot stood up, his left leg sticking out stiffly in front of him. Gently, he helped Derec to his feet. “Thank you, Mandelbrot,” Derec said and went to the wolf-creature. It was not breathing. Up close, it was magnificent: muscular, the thick fur rich with glossy highlights in the moonlight, the face expressive even in death. Derec’s gaze was caught by the forepaws. They were true hands, despite the deadly curved claws, the long fingers delicate and jointed, the thumb opposed and ideal for grasping. The creature must walk on its knuckles, he realized, for the tops of those joints were wide, flat, and bony. Except for that difference, the hands might have been those of a human.

Derec sighed. Mandelbrot was right to be bothered by the death.

The massive head lolled, the neck broken. Derec stroked the fine, gray-tipped black fur of the creature with his good hand. “You couldn’t help it, Mandelbrot,” he said again, knowing the robot was watching him. “You have to know that.”

He stopped. His fingers had found something in the fur of the creature’s neck. Derec pulled it loose. It was a necklace of colored wire. Soldered to the end of one of the strands was a small circuit board. Derec’s breath hissed in with surprise. “Mandelbrot, look at this! Mandelbrot?”

Mandelbrot was no longer listening. The robot had suddenly straightened in an attitude of listening. “Master Derec! The robots I heard a few minutes ago—they are being attacked!”

From somewhere very close by, they could hear the sudden, savage howling of wolves.

CHAPTER 19

ESCAPE FROM THE CITY

SilverSide’s reaction to being seen by the Hunters was swift and powered by the Three Laws. The Third Law forced her to try to save herself. Second Law demanded that she follow the orders of humans, and though she was their leader, KeenEye’s commands to save the kin still carried weight; the First Law compelled her to do whatever she could to keep her people alive.

Which meant the prime consideration was that Central be destroyed.

SilverSide changed her shape as the Hunters turned to look up at her. She drew back the parafoil and thickened the body. Even as the Hunters raised their hands to fire their lasers, she became a streamlined, compact mass instead of a glider, and she dropped the last thirty feet like a massive stone, crashing heavily into the central column of Central. Laser beams crisscrossed the air where she had been; delicate circuitry smashed under her fall. SilverSide changed back to wolf form even as she rose from the wreckage of the core unit. She went to the wide panels surrounding the core and pushed with all the strength of her durable body. A panel toppled, striking the next in line—the array went down like a row of dominoes, sparking and crashing, the thunder of their destruction ringing in the cavernous room.

SilverSide fled the room, howling the ritual triumph of a victor even as she anticipated the Hunters’ lasers cutting her down. It didn’t matter to her. She’d done what she’d come to do.

But nothing happened; the Hunters had stopped.

Already confusion was spreading through the city—she could hear it, a thousand voices crying out in the VoidTongue that the OldMother had given her. WalkingStones were asking Central for instructions, but Central was not replying, would never reply. The alarm was spreading out through the various levels of this krajal-like society.

EMERGENCY! Central core memory damaged and off-line Command program inactive: secondary routines down.

Activate supervisory backups.

Behind her, SilverSide heard the Hunters stir. She raced into the corridor beyond Central’s room. There were no WalkingStones in sight there. She quickly altered herself once more to appear as one of the Hill of Stars’ Hunters, depending on the disguise to give her cover as she headed for the exit from the place. She listened to the continuing dialogue in her head.

City command given to Supervisor units Alpha, Beta, Gamma. The general announcement went out first over all frequencies, then three new voices boomed in her head. The direction finder in her skull indicated that all three were in widely scattered sections of the city.

ALPHA: Normal city subroutines accessed. City functions on-line and programming reinstated.

BETA: Alert situation! Central computer destroyed. Attacking unit in shape of local wolf-creatures is rogue robot. Repeat, attacking unit is robot not under control of City Supervisors.

GAMMA: Alert update. Witnessing units report sophisticated shape-changing abilities. Compass Tower Hunter-Seekers programming altered to compensate.

SilverSide increased her pace as she moved toward the exit. The corridor was crowded now, the WalkingStones returning to their routines. If the Hunters were aware that she could change shape, then her WalkingStone guise was not going to help her for very long. Someone would report her presence or discover the charade through some inadvertent response.

She knew that her victory had been short and bittersweet. Yes, she had destroyed Central. She had disrupted the city, if only momentarily. But the city had responded to the challenge all too well. If she interpreted the signals correctly, there were now three sub-Centrals, all in different places, and they knew her one advantage. If she were going to win this battle, she must move quickly, find all three of these Supervisors, and destroy them.

The next command from the trio of Supervisors dashed any hope SilverSide had at all.

ALPHA: All city units: access subroutine 3067.A.296. Immediately report any units not responding. Hold that unit at all costs until Hunter-Seekers arrive. Third Law precedence invoked—city survival involved: higher priority than individual survival.

All around her, moving WalkingStones came to an abrupt halt. An instant later, SilverSide did the same; it seemed safest.

She was wrong. A simultaneous alert was broadcast from the worker WalkingStones around her. ANOMALY! Hunter-Seeker unit in Compass Tower has stopped. In the same instant, all the workers in sight lunged for her.

SilverSide growled as she dropped back into her preferred wolf shape. She threw the nearest worker aside, the fragile body crumpling under her blow, and dashed through the opening it gave her. The alarm followed SilverSide as she darted from the building—she plowed through a worker who tried to block the entrance to the Hill of Stars and emerged into cool night.

She howled a lament.

Then she turned into the lumbering bird shape she had used once before, a black and sorrowing form.

Clumsily, her wings beat air, and she retreated from the city into the open sky. The false stars of the city below mocked her, and she knew there would be no hiding from the Hunters now.

CHAPTER 20

CONTACT

The uproar was furious, and mixed in with it was an occasional metallic grating, as if someone were bashing a steel plate over and over with a rubber hammer. All at once, there was a yelp of terror and a wail.

“The wolf-creatures,” Derec said. “They’re the ones who have been attacking the city. They’re why we got the distress call. Look!” He held up the braided wire from the dead wolf-creature to Mandelbrot. It sparkled in the yellow-white light of the larger moon.

“The city does not know that they are sentient,” Mandelbrot said. The robot seemed to shudder once allover. “The robots think they’re just animals. They are simply exterminating them when they find them, like pests.”

“This circuit board didn’t come from the wolves originally. Sure, the city might think the wolf-creatures are just animals—after all, we did too. But they’ve obviously destroyed at least one robot already. Mandelbrot, we have to do something. Now.”

Derec laid the necklace on the dead wolf-creature’s body and took his gun in his hand, his face grim. Mandelbrot’s hand closed over his wrist, firmly. “No,” the robot said. The odd grating slur was back in its voice. “I cannot allow you to kill them, Master Derec. I am sorry.”

“Mandelbrot, you misunderstand.”

“It does not matter if the robots are destroyed. That is only the Third Law and this Robot City can easily build more. I have made the decision you asked me about earlier. To kill a wolf-creature is to break the First Law.”

“Please. You must trust me. I am not going to kill them.” Derec tried to move his hand; the robot’s grip was gentle but unyielding. “Mandelbrot, I am ordering you to release my hand. I will not kill the wolf-creatures. Do you understand that?”

Derec thought that Mandelbrot might not respond. The robot was staring at the dead wolf-creature, at the bright wire. The incident had further upset the positronic brain; Derec began to fear that Mandelbrot would freeze now, with Derec’s one good arm locked in a death grip.

It would be an ignoble and curious way to end, anchored to a dead robot.

Mandelbrot’s fingers opened slowly. Derec let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “Thank you,” he said. “Mandelbrot, I’m going to need your help. I need a delicate touch and two good hands. Here—take the gun. Unload it. Quickly, we may only have a few minutes.”

The battle was still going on within the darkness under the trees. In fact, the uproar seemed to have intensified. As the robot took the darts from their chambers, Derec opened his backpack and found the medical kit. Luckily, everything there was well padded and nothing had broken in his fall. He looked through the collection of vials, squinting in the dim light, and found what he needed.

“Mandelbrot, break open the dart chambers and empty out the nervekiller. Put this in.”

“Master Derec—”

“It’s a sedative. Undiluted, and with their body weight, it should knock them out.”

Mandelbrot didn’t move. His one good eye gleamed an unblinking, insistent red. “Master Derec, these creatures are unknown. Their metabolism might be so different from yours that this kills them.”

“Or it may not work at all,” Derec pointed out. He sighed. The sound of the nearby struggle was intensifying —he hoped there was still time. He patted Mandelbrot on the shoulder—the robot looked terrible: dinged, scratched, and battered. Having pieced the robot together from several different models and after the patchwork repairs following the crash, Derec felt pleased that the robot was still operating at all. He also hoped that he looked better, but the distorted reflection of himself in the robot’s body looked just as disheveled and abused.

They needed help. Quickly.

“Mandelbrot, we can’t communicate with them,” Derec continued. “Twice now we’ve been attacked without provocation. They may be sentient, but they’re also very dangerous. We need the robots. If we don’t do something now, they may destroy all of them, and then they may well come looking for their friend here and take care of us. “

“That is not certain.”

“No, but it’s probable. This is a chance that we have to take, one way or the other. A full-strength dose would take out a person of their general weight in two or three seconds and keep them down for an hour or two. Now—take the sedative and put it in the darts. I can’t do it myself.”

Derec held out the vial.

Mandelbrot hesitated, then the Avery arm extended toward Derec and its fingers closed around the vial. “Yes, Master Derec,” Mandelbrot said. With delicate but quick precision, it began to do as ordered.

Mandelbrot reloaded the modified darts into the gun and handed it back to Derec. “Okay, let’s go,” Derec said. The shivering, challenging howls of the wolves still came from just behind the trees. Derec shouldered the backpack once more and began walking quickly in that direction. Mandelbrot followed more slowly, his left leg dragging and a distinct whine coming from his hip servomotors.

Derec broke through the trees at the top of a steep hill, the sides of which were bare dirt. Below, in a small, grassy glade well lit by the moons, a group of five wolf-creatures were struggling with four robots of the laborer type. One other wolf-creature lay dead from what looked to be a laser bum, but the robot fitted with the laser arm was already down—it was obvious that the wolf-creatures would eventually win this battle. They harried the robots, darting in with great leaps, ripping with the claws and tearing with their jaws, and then bounding away again before the robots could hold them.

As Derec watched, another of the robots slumped to the ground as a wolf-creature ripped a power connector away in a gush of violet sparks that left glowing afterimages in Derec’s eyes. Mandelbrot was still struggling through the undergrowth toward him. The wolves were nearly two on one now, and Derec knew there was no time left if he wanted to save any of the robots.

He hoped this would work, but he knew that, though he couldn’t say it, he was as skeptical as Mandelbrot. “The way things have gone so far...” he muttered under his breath.

He raised the gun, sighted down the long barrel, and pressed the trigger, aiming for a gray-furred male who seemed to be the leader. A chuff of compressed air: in the glade below, the wolf yelped and leaped into the air. On its hind legs, it reached around and plucked the dart from its skin, looked at it, and threw it down. The old wolf-creature’s gaze swept around the glade.

It saw Derec even as he fired the gun once more, hitting another of the wolves.

The old one howled and pointed. Dropping down on all fours again, it charged. Derec counted softly as he fired three more times, injecting all the wolves. Another of them, unhindered by the robots, followed the old wolf’s lead and—howling—rushed up the hill toward Derec. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven...”

The wolves kept coming. They looked far more angry than sleepy, and Mandelbrot was still laboring through the trees.

“Oh, Frost,” Derec hissed.

The wolf-creatures were fast and powerful. He knew he was not going to be able to retreat anywhere near fast enough. He doubted seriously that he was going to be able to lose them in the darkness.

He threw the useless gun at the old one bounding up the hill.

It missed.

That figures, he thought.

CHAPTER 21

THE VOIDBEING

The old wolf-creature leaped over the edge of the hillside with the second close behind. The old one started to leap and then abruptly halted as if startled, pawing the ground with its clawed hands. The grizzled head cocked quizzically, and it growled something in its sibilant language.

But the younger wolf-creature following it had no hesitation at all. It flashed past the old one with a howl, baring its teeth and its claws flashing in mid-leap. Derec shouted and spun aside as the wolf hurtled toward him. It missed, through Derec felt the wind of its passage. The creature twisted in midair and spun as it hit the ground, kicking up dust. Derec waited for the creature to regain its balance and charge again.

There was nothing he could do. He was trapped between the old one, now snarling at him, and the younger attacker.

As Derec watched, trying to decide which way to run, the younger gathered itself again.

Whimpered.

And fell on its side. The old leader had fallen as well; down in the glade, the wolf-creatures had also been affected, dropping to the ground in the middle of the attack. Derec sunk down to the ground himself as Mandelbrot finally thrashed through the last trees. “Master Derec!” the robot called.

“I’m all right, Mandelbrot. It worked, I think.” Derec gazed down in the glade below, glad that the nights were bright here.

The remaining three robots, suddenly free, had turned to take advantage of the situation. They advanced to the unconscious wolves, raised their hands to strike and kill

“Stop!”

Derec’s shout made them pause. They turned and looked. Derec stood at the edge of the slope, letting them see him fully. “You can see that I am a human,” he said loudly. “You must obey me. Come here—the wolf-creatures are no danger now.”

They stopped, though they didn’t back away from the wolf-creatures. Mandelbrot came up to stand alongside him. “These creatures are no danger to me or to yourselves now,” he repeated. “Come here.”

“Yes, human master,” one of them said. The trio headed for them as Derec and Mandelbrot examined the two sedated wolf-creatures beside them.

The drug had far less effect on the beasts than it would have had on Derec or any other human. Derec went to the leader; it was still awake, its disturbingly humanoid eyes watching him. The body twitched, muscles jerking without control as it struggled to rise and either attack or flee. Derec sat down beside it and stroked the head as he might have a dog. “I’m sorry,” he said. “If we could understand each other...”

Mandelbrot was looking over Derec’s shoulder. “It worked,” Derec told the robot. “It wasn’t what I expected, and I’m not sure how long it will last, but it worked. Now we need to get out of here before it wears off.” Derec gave the grizzled lupine body a pat and laid the head down gently. The old one’s eyes continued to follow his movements.

The three robots had reached them as Derec rose, slapping dirt from his pants. Derec tried to contact them via the chemfet link, but there was still nothing there but silence. “You’re from the Robot City?” he asked them.

“Yes.”

“Who is in charge there? Are there other humans? Is Avery there?”

“There are no other humans. The central computer directs all city activities.”

Derec could feel his shoulders relaxing with their words, and he realized just how tense he’d been at the thought of another confrontation with his father and his twisted genius. He let out a deep sigh. “Then inform the central computer that you have found a human and will be returning with him and another robot to the city,” he said. “Tell Central that we’ve come in response to its distress call, and that we have information for it regarding these wolf-creatures. Tell it also to open a channel to respond to Mandelbrot, the robot with me; I will communicate with the central computer through him.”

The robots went silent for a moment, then one of them spoke again. “I am sorry, Master, but the central computer is not responding.”

“Mandelbrot?”

“They are correct, Master Derec. There is silence on all...just a moment.” Derec saw the other robots stiffen as if listening to something only they could hear; his own chemfet link seemed to be utterly dead. He could no longer hear the central computer at all.

“Master Derec,” Mandelbrot said, “the situation in Robot City has changed radically. The central computer has just been destroyed by a rogue robot. The city is now under control of three Supervisor units. I have contacted them and informed them of your arrival and the situation here. They ask that we come to Robot City as quickly as possible for consultation. The robots here will guide us, and the Supervisors will send out more robots in our direction to escort us in case the rogue attacks us. It seems very violent.”

Derec was puzzled. “Surely they don’t think the rogue would attack a human, Mandelbrot? And how did the city ever lose control of it?”

“That is the odd thing, Master Derec,” Mandelbrot answered. “It is not a city robot at all. It is not even humanoid.”

Mandelbrot pointed to the drugged wolf-creature.

“It looks like one of these,” the robot said.

The dark bird glided over the forest, silent except for the rushing of the wind past its widespread wings. Circling the glade once and seeing nothing, it banked sharply and descended, clipping the treetops and landing clumsily on the top of the hillside overlooking the clearing.

There, under the watching moons, it changed shape and became SilverSide once more.

The Hunters were still buried below. She noted that first of all because it was most important to her positronic mind—First Law. Three WalkingStones lay here as well, and that was also good.

But the dark shapes on the ground near the WalkingStones were kin. SilverSide howled a lament to the stars and then called for any of the other kin—there was no answer. She shifted her vision into the infrared and immediately saw warmth radiating from the ground nearby: two of the kin, and the shape of one was very familiar. SilverSide let out a glad BeastTalk cry and went to him.

LifeCrier was moving, at least. The old one had lifted himself up on his front legs and was trying to walk, though his rear legs dragged limply behind as if paralyzed. “SilverSide,” LifeCrier barked in happy KinSpeech. “You’ve returned. Did you kill Central?”

“I destroyed it, but it did no good,” SilverSide replied flatly. “What happened here? Are the others dead?”

“I don’t think so.” LifeCrier sank down again, exhausted, but his voice held a rich excitement. “SilverSide, there was a VoidBeing here. It had a companion, another WalkingStone unlike any of the ones around the Hill of Stars.”

“A VoidBeing? From the OldMother?” LifeCrier’s words stirred odd resonances deep in SilverSide’s mind.

“Not from the OldMother. No, not with that shape. From another of the gods, perhaps. The VoidBeing carried a stick that threw small knives at the kin, and a magic in the knives took away our bodies while leaving our spirits inside. I attacked it because it had the look of the WalkingStones, and I knew it couldn’t be from the OldMother. But before I reached it, r could no longer move. I could only watch as it came to me and touched me. I thought it would kill me then, but it didn’t. It stroked me like a mother stroking her pup and talked to me in the VoidTongue even though it seemed to know I could not understand it. Then it laid me back down. It left a short time later with the WalkingStones from the city.”

Delicate balances were shifting inside SilverSide. Core programming in her positronic mind gave her a feeling akin to yearning. She could hear the echo of the first voice she’d ever heard, talking to her in the VoidTongue in the darkness of the Egg. A human being is an intelligent lifeform. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings.

But this VoidBeing is not of this world, she reminded herself, not alive as we are. It is a MadeThing of the gods, or one of the gods themselves. So it cannot be human. The kin are human.

The feeling receded, but only slightly. There was in her a pull toward intelligence. “I must go find this VoidBeing,” she said to LifeCrier.

“It’s gone back to the Hill of Stars,” the old kin told her. “The WalkingStones went with it.”

LifeCrier struggled to rise again and this time succeeded in standing on wobbly legs. The other kin were beginning to stir as well, easing SilverSide’s First Law concerns.

Until she noticed that there was one less of the kin than there should have been. “Where is KeenEye?” she asked.

LifeCrier’s grizzled forehead wrinkled. “I don’t know,” he answered. “We’d separated the kin to better fight the WalkingStones, and she was to have attacked from over there.” LifeCrier pointed into the woods behind them. “I never saw her.” The others were coming up to them shakily, and LifeCrier asked all of them: “Did any of you see KeenEye during the fight?”

All the kin shook their heads.

SilverSide looked at the ground and the tracks left by the VoidBeing. It was an extremely clumsy creature; it had left a path through the trees that was as easy to follow as one of the WalkingStone’s straight stone paths. An uneasy suspicion came to SilverSide. “Follow me,” she said.

She ran into the cover of trees, LifeCrier and the others following slowly behind.

It took no skill at all to follow along the trail the VoidBeing had taken. The creature had broken branches underfoot and on all sides, and the ground still radiated the faint trace of heat from its passage. SilverSide saw a patch of kin-shaped warmth ahead and barked a quick hello.

“KeenEye!”

KeenEye didn’t answer. The infrared red blotch didn’t move. SilverSide took her vision back up into shorter wavelengths for detail, and then she saw the strange cant of the head and the odd way KeenEye was slumped on her side.

SilverSide growled, deep and warningly. She burst through the underbrush between them, hoping that KeenEye was simply sleeping as the others had been and knowing from the disquieting stillness that she wasn’t.

“KeenEye?” SilverSide sat beside the body and lifted her into her arms. The head simply fell back, limp, the eyes open and unseeing; the neck was broken. SilverSide could smell the odd scent of the VoidBeing on KeenEye’s fur along with the oily essence of the WalkingStones. That told her all she needed to know.

The VoidBeing had killed KeenEye.

SilverSide threw her own head back and howled her loss to LargeFace, singing KeenEye’s spirit into the Void as she had seen the kin do with others who had died. From the trees, the kin-hearing SilverSide’s sorrow—joined her with their own voices. The rising and falling of their song went on for long minutes, and then SilverSide let the empty body fall back to earth. It no longer held KeenEye; it was simply a dead husk.

“First we will return to PackHome,” SilverSide said to LifeCrier. “And then I will come back here. If this VoidBeing lives in the WalkingStone’s city, then it must be their leader.”

She lifted her head and howled a BeastTalk challenge. “And if it is their leader, then it would kill all kin in the way it killed KeenEye. I must make sure that threat ends.”

CHAPTER 22

BEST LAID PLANS

Derec had forgotten what a bath felt like.

“I have died and gone to heaven,” he groaned as he sank back in the swirling warmth. Clouds of bubbles drifted over the enormous tub, and he lowered himself into the delicious heat until only his nose was out of the water. He could feel every bruised and aching muscle in his body starting to relax for the first time in days. Sitting up, he leaned back against the tiles, propping his broken arm (newly braced) on the edge. He motioned the attendant robot forward to scrub away the accumulated grime of his trek through this world.

Derec simply luxuriated, letting the robot do it all.

When it was over, he stepped out into the fluffiest, thirstiest towel he could imagine, allowed the robot to dry him, and put on a warm robe.

He felt soothed and comfortable as he went into the main room of the apartment.

The main room was as large and plush as the bathroom had been. Far up in one of the taller buildings of the city, immense windows on three sides offered a view of the sweeping expanse of the Compass Tower, by far the largest edifice in the city. Mandelbrot was standing there looking out at the landscape, along with another robot that Derec recognized as one of the Supervisor units. The antennae-studded globe of a witness robot hovered nearby.

“Master Derec, you look much better,” Mandelbrot said, turning.

Derec grinned. “A bath does wonders, doesn’t it. And I can certainly say the same for you.” The dings and dents in Mandelbrot’s body had been smoothed, his external linkages straightened, and his body polished. The robot’s optical circuits now gleamed brightly, and when he moved, servos no longer protested.

“I am again fully operational,” Mandelbrot said. “Master Derec, this is Supervisor Beta, one of the control units for this Robot City.”

“Beta,” Derec nodded. “There’re a hundred or so questions I want to ask you.”

“I can understand that, Master Derec,” the supervisor answered. “Mandelbrot has told me of your journey here. First, I should tell you that the medbots who examined you tell me that you have no serious internal injuries. Your arm has been reset, and a drug that accelerates the knitting of bones has been given to you. Most of your injuries are bruises and contusions that will heal with time. You should be fully recovered within the week. As for your companion, Mandelbrot has been serviced and repaired entirely from parts in city stocks.”

“For which we both thank you. But it’s entirely possible that none of it would have been necessary in the first place had your central computer answered me.”

Derec saw the distress his comment gave Beta; the robot’s eyes dimmed briefly, and it backed away slightly. “You sent out a distress call,” Derec continued, “but you wouldn’t respond to our answer, either through contact via the original Robot City or via the chemfets in my body. Had you done that, we might never have needed to come here at all.”

And Ariel and I might never have argued, he thought, and with the image of her that put in his mind, he felt again a deep sadness. I have to call her. I have to apologize.

“We deeply regret that, Master Derec,” Beta was saying.

“Then why? It doesn’t make any sense to ask for help and then ignore someone answering it.”

Beta gave an oddly human shrug. “I agree with you, Master Derec. In explanation, all I can tell you is that this city was to be self-sufficient; there were instructions against direct contact with the original Robot City, but that does not explain why we would not respond to a human’s inquiry. My fellow supervisors and I have conferred, and we assume the reason was a command in the central computer’s programming. When the rogue destroyed the central computer, it also wrecked that portion of the backup units. None of the supervisors had been activated at that time; as you can see, the city is not very large or complex yet.” Beta waved a glistening hand to the cluster of buildings below them. “There was no need to disperse city control. I cannot answer your question at this time, though we are attempting to reconstruct as much of the central computer’s core memory as possible. If we learn more, I will inform you.”

“It was Avery,” Derec said with certainty. He rubbed at his damp hair with the towel. “He has the Key of Perihelion. He could have come here and programmed the central computer.”

“That is possible. There is no way to be certain.”

“Dr. Avery might still be in the city,” Mandelbrot said to the supervisor. “In that case, Master Derec is still in danger.”

Beta gestured to the window and the horizon, where the city nudged up against what looked to be an endless forest. “This city, as I said, is very small. I doubt that a human could be in the city and not be noticed.”

“Your city let a rogue robot get in and destroy your central computer,” Derec reminded Beta.

“The rogue has very special abilities,” Beta answered. “We have taken steps to insure that it cannot do this kind of damage again. One of those steps was to activate myself and the two other supervisors so that city control no longer resides only in one place. And as you can see, a witness robot accompanies each of us, coded with instructions to return immediately to a haven should the supervisor be attacked. That way, very little of the city’s knowledge would be lost should the rogue manage to destroy one of us. There are other supervisor units waiting to take over should that happen. We are also building new Hunter-Seeker units with special detection devices.”

“Great, but I doubt it’ll help much. I’d make you a bet that this rogue came from Avery,” Derec said. “It has all his earmarks: inventive, cunning, and very, very dangerous. Which brings us to another problem. You’ve said that this rogue leads the wolf-creatures?”

“Yes. It was seen directing a pack of them that attacked workers on the edge of the city. They have given the city problems since the beginning, harassing our workers clearing the forest. As we felt them to be hindering our directives and to be dangerous both to ourselves and to any humans who would stay here, the Hunter-Seekers were directed to find and kill them.”

Mandelbrot had swiveled to face Beta. “No,” it said. “You cannot do that.”

“I do not understand. All three of the Laws of Robotics demand it. By the Third Law, we must protect our own existence: they have damaged and destroyed units of this city. By the Second Law, we must obey the commands given to us by humans: they hinder us from following our basic programming. By the First Law, we must above all protect humans, and these creatures are undeniably dangerous. They attacked Master Derec and would have killed him had you not been there. How can there be any question about this?”

“Because it’s not exactly that simple, Beta,” Derec answered for Mandelbrot. “They’re not just ‘creatures’ attacking you because you’re here. I expect that they’re protecting their home the same way I would. They’re not just animals, Beta. They’re sentient. They use tools; they have a language.”

“Are you saying that they built the rogue?”

Derec sniffed. “Not a chance. They’re barely at a Stone Age level. This rogue sounds more sophisticated than anything here. “

“Then how did they get involved with the rogue?”

“I don’t know that, but I’m willing to bet that Avery had a hand in it somewhere. The thing to do now is to figure out how to proceed without harming the wolf-creatures, There’s a way to do that, I think.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“The first thing that has to be done is to inform all city units to view the wolf-creatures as human. The First Law applies to them as well—you are to do nothing that does them harm. Will you do that?”

“You can do it yourself, Master Derec,” Beta said. “We have reprogrammed the city to respond to the chemfets in your body. This Robot City is now under your direction. All you need do is give us your orders.”

Derec had paid no attention to the chemfets, silent and useless so long. Now he opened his mind to the sub-miniature replicas of Robot City material. He could hear the city now, roaring in his blood. The flood of information was almost too much to comprehend, and he hastily closed down most of the channels, leaving open only the direct links to the supervisors.

You see, Master Derec? It was Beta, talking to him via the chemfets. All Robot City is now yours.

Good. Derec nodded and went to the window, looking out over the rooftops and up to the summit of the Compass Tower.

“Then we’ll let the rogue in if it wants in,” he said. “Avery didn’t know that I would come here. Even a rogue has the Three Laws built into it. Avery might be able to design a robot capable of destroying other robots, but I find it hard to believe that even he could build a robot that could knowingly hurt a human.”

SilverSide watched two of the cubs wrestling on the floor of PackHome. They rolled over and over on the dusty, broken stones, growling in high-pitched BeastTalk and nipping at each other with their sharp milkteeth. Finally one of them yelped in real pain and lay on his back, paws up and throat bared in submission.

It was ritual play modeled after the adults. SilverSide could hear one of the nursing mothers chuckling throatily as the victor gave a thin howl. She lunged and snapped at the triumphant pup from behind, and it screeched suddenly, leaping high into the air as the fur on its back ruffled in fright. The pup stumbled and fell, and the adults in the cavern laughed as it ran under SilverSide’s legs for safety. The pup peered out at them half-puzzled, half-embarrassed.

SilverSide reached down and lifted it in her hands. “You see, the leader always has to be ready for a new challenger,” she said to it in soft KinSpeech. She stroked the soft fur and set the pup down again.

The little one ran for its own mother.

“It’s always good to see the younglings playing,” LifeCrier said to SilverSide as the pup started to nurse. “It reminds you that even though our spirits leave here to go into the Void, OldMother will send them back again.” LifeCrier licked SilverSide’s face affectionately. “KeenEye will come back one day. She is not gone forever.”

“I am not concerned with KeenEye,” SilverSide said. “She is dead and doesn’t matter any more.” It was only true—there were no emotions in her positronic matrix, only the priorities built into it by the Three Laws. Yet SilverSide sensed that her uncaring words hurt LifeCrier, and she tried to explain to the gray-furred kin. “All that concerns me is how she died and why, and what I must do to stop that from happening again. You do not understand me, LifeCrier. You cannot see what is happening inside me.”

They were all staring at her now: LifeCrier, the rest of the adult kin, the younglings. Their obvious respect and dependence on her stirred the boiling cauldron inside. SilverSide felt pulled in a dozen different directions at once. Things had seemed very clear-cut and simple when she had hatched from the Egg. But now...

The part of her imprinted with the kin hated the VoidBeing who ruled the WalkingStones. Yet another part of her yearned to find this creature who seemed more advanced than the kin, who could fashion creatures from shiny stone and have them do its bidding.

LifeCrier had backed away a step in deference to SilverSide’s rank. He lowered himself slightly to indicate subservience. “I don’t understand KeenEye’s death,” he said. “The VoidBeing could have killed me or any of the others. Yet it didn’t. I saw it raise its hands and stop the WalkingStones from hurting the kin it had paralyzed. It held my head and did nothing but stroke it. It did not seem dangerous.”

“It killed KeenEye,” SilverSide repeated. “I could smell its presence on her fur.”

“I know. Still...”

“The WalkingStones seemed to obey it, you said. That would mean that the VoidBeing ranks higher than Central or these new Supervisors.”

“I suppose....”

“Then the VoidBeing must be an enemy of OldMother. It attacked you, even if it did not kill you. It saved the WalkingStones and left with them. It had a WalkingStone as a companion. It is an enemy.” SilverSide recited the facts in a monotone. Around her, the kin began to nod in agreement. Only LifeCrier seemed hesitant.

Inside SilverSide, synapses closed erratically. Her positronic mind no longer resembled that of any other robot; her life among the kin had changed it far more than her creator might have expected. In that sense, she was truly a rogue. No human standards worked for her anymore. She was an alien, and she had overlaid the Three Laws with an alien morality. She could not disobey them, but her vision of them was skewed.

“I must do what best protects us,” she told LifeCrier. “Nothing has changed. We still cannot leave PackHome; my attempt to destroy Central only made it more difficult to damage the WalkingStones. You tell me that this VoidBeing is a being of flesh, and flesh is very fragile and very tasty. It had its knife-stick, but even a SharpFang has its teeth and claws. If the gods had to send it from the Void, then we must have hurt the WalkingStones more than we know. Perhaps if we also kill the VoidBeing, then the OldMother will have won. What do you think, LifeCrier?—you are the one who knows the OldMother best.”

“SilverSide is the leader,” LifeCrier answered, using HuntTongue. “If she says that the OldMother wishes us to kill the VoidBeing, then we will kill it.”

CHAPTER 23

STALKING THE GODS

Derec knew what the supervisor robot wanted before Gamma entered the room. The chemfets had told him, whispering into his mind.

“We’re going to have to change your name,” he told the robot. “Gamma—it shows a definite lack of imagination. But it can wait. What’s up?”

“There are wolf-creatures on the far hill, Master Derec. They are approaching the city boundaries.”

“I’m aware of it. They didn’t give us much time, did they? Is everything ready?” There was little need to ask—he could have found out via the chemfets, but somehow it seemed more reassuring to ask the supervisor. There was only so much information he could absorb from the flood the chemfets allowed him. Even if he wanted to control every function of the city, it would have been impossible.

When the chemfets injected into him by his father had first asserted their presence, Derec had thought that he was going insane. He couldn’t control them, couldn’t handle the eternal input. But he’d learned how to filter out most of it, learned to let the city take care of itself. The supervisors were invaluable, and the lesson Derec had been taught in the original Robot City was to delegate his authority. It was the only way to remain sane.

Derec yawned. He’d tried to sleep that afternoon, knowing the wolf-creatures would come at night, but he’d been too wound up. He yawned again, forcing oxygen into his lungs.

“Everything is set as you instructed, Master Derec.” The supervisor robot, identical to its counterparts Alpha and Beta, went to the balcony high up in a building near the Compass Tower. City lights gleamed red and yellow on the robot’s burnished skin. Mandelbrot came from the next room and went onto the balcony with Derec.

“I see them,” Mandelbrot said. “There—just below the tree line. There are six or perhaps seven of them.”

“Get your eyes fixed at last and you have to show off,” Derec chided Mandelbrot jokingly, but the robot missed the humor entirely.

“I am sorry, Master Derec,” he said. In retrospect, it was the only reaction Derec should have expected, but Derec suddenly knew how much he missed human company. Ariel, especially. I need to talk to her. Sometimes I feel half-robot myself with the chemfets chattering away inside.

There had been no time to contact her. Derec had known the wolf-creatures would come to the city again, and quickly. It was what Dr. Avery would have done, after all, and the rogue had to be Avery’s—it just made sense.

He didn’t think it would be much trouble dealing with it. In fact, his mood was rather jovial. Scrubbing away the filth of their journey through the forest and being in the city made him feel almost human again. He felt safe here, and with the resources of the city, nothing was impossible.

He’d be home again, soon. He’d see Ariel and patch up the rift caused by their fight.

The rogue was not a problem. The wolf-creatures he was more concerned about, but they should be easy enough, too. A general reprogramming of the city, an understanding of their language so they could communicate, and some compromise could be reached. This stupid war with the city would end.

Derec squinted into the night, cradling his sling in his good hand so that his injured arm wouldn’t brush up against the railing. It was impossible for him to see anything at all. He couldn’t even make out the individual trees, a kilometer and more away in the murk. The sky was overcast; even if this world’s two moons had been up, their reflected light would never have penetrated the cloud cover.

“I told you they’d move,” he said. “Can you see the rogue, Mandelbrot?”

“No, Master Derec, I do not. But it could still be there, back in the trees.”

Derec shook his head. “No. Not that one, not if it’s really the leader. If these beings are anything like the old wolves, they’re pack animals. The leader would be first, or the others wouldn’t follow. Remember Wolruf? Always headlong into the fray...” Derec grimaced. “I suppose it’s possible it’s already among the buildings, maybe in some other form. We might have missed it. “

He shrugged. The city was alert now. The chemfets in his bloodstream fed him a continuous stream of information over the security channels. “Supervisor Gamma?”

“Yes?”

“You’re certain the robots will consider the wolf-creatures human? You’re certain they won’t allow them to be harmed?”

“You have instructed them so yourself, Master Derec. If there were direct danger to you from one of them, I believe we would protect you first, as you most fit our programmed definition of ‘human,’ but otherwise, yes. We will not harm them.”

“I can’t stress that enough. The city can always build more robots. I don’t care how many robots these wolf-creatures might destroy—I don’t want them hurt. We can find some other way to coexist with them.”

“That is understood, Master Derec. Mandelbrot has explained much to help us reinforce your orders.”

Derec could feel adrenaline building inside him. He wanted to run back into the room and out to the edge of the city. He wanted to be there. He’d made plans to do so, but the idea had distressed Alpha, the supervisor to whom he’d first broached the subject. “That would be extremely dangerous,” the robot had said, very slowly and carefully. “I do not know that the Laws would permit it....The rogue robot...”

Derec could have argued; it hadn’t seemed worth the trouble. Even Mandelbrot had agreed: the rogue was an unknown and obviously dangerous. Despite Derec’s assurances that even a rogue would follow the Three Laws and thus be unable to harm him, all the robots had been noticeably “pleased” when he agreed to remain in the city. Okay. He’d play general this time, staying behind the lines and directing his forces. He noticed that the supervisors had also placed a cordon of Hunter-Seekers around his building, but he didn’t comment on it.

“Give me the visual, Gamma. And make sure we’re recording—we’re going to need every scrap of sound these creatures make to start deciphering the language.”

The wall of the building directly across from them was a milky white, translucent plastic. Now it glowed with inner light, and a huge image of the forest gleamed there, red with enhanced infrared imaging. Derec could easily see the wolf-creatures moving cautiously through the tall grass toward the city.

“Mandelbrot,” he said, leaning forward slightly and pointing to the wolf in the front of the pack. “Isn’t that the old one from the glade? See—it has the same gray fur around the muzzle, the same markings.”

“I see him, Master Derec.”

“He might be the best one to capture. He might remember that we didn’t harm him last time. He might even cooperate. Gamma?”

“I have already so instructed all units, Master Derec.”

“Good. I imagine we’ll have to put most of them to sleep before they’ll give up this attack. They seemed rather aggressive.” Derec patted his arm and the bandages swaddling the claw wounds. He watched them moving slowly toward the city. “They’re magnificent creatures in their own right,” he said. “Look at them. So strong and sleek; we saw what they could do to a robot.”

He could see now that several of them were wearing bright wire collars: totems against the city, perhaps, or simply trophies of past victories. The sight made him nod. “Mandelbrot, you were absolutely right. They are human. Maybe if Wolruf were here...”

As the pack approached, Derec sent messages through the chemfets. Several Hunter-Seekers advanced from the outbuildings of the city in a line. Half of them carried neural disruptors hastily built during the previous day: the computer models of the wolf-creatures indicated that the disruptors would interfere with the electrical impulses of the wolf-creatures’ brains and cause mental confusion. The jury-rigged models had also been prone to leakage and had disabled more than one of the robots as well. As a backup, other Hunter-Seekers loaded with sedative darts also moved toward the invaders. Worker units waited to capture one or more of the creatures in hopes of learning to communicate with them.

Derec didn’t think they’d go quietly. He fully expected a bitter battle before the wolf-creatures would be overcome.

He was wrong.

Halfway down the hill, the old one simply stopped. In full view, making no effort to hide himself, he rose up on his hind legs, pointed to the Hunter-Seekers, and howled in that eerie language. The gesticulation needed no translation—it was obvious enough: Come and get me.

There were evidently certain universals when it came to body language.

“That doesn’t make any sense at all.” Derec squinted at the meters-tall image of the wolf. “You’d think a pack animal would just attack. “

“They are not just animals,” Mandelbrot reminded Derec.

“Yeah. And I’ll bet the rogue’s taught them a few sneaky tricks of its own.” He grimaced. “Well, he’s obviously not going to come to us. Obviously they want the fight to come to them. Gamma, let’s send the Hunter-Seekers forward.”

But it was not a fight they wanted. Not at all. As the Hunter-Seekers advanced, the wolf-creatures retreated. Step by grudging step. They stayed out of range of the disruptors and the darts, though Derec suspected that was accident rather than anything else.

Derec tried direct communication through the Hunter-Seekers, hoping they might understand the tone of his voice if not the words. They simply howled back at it.

He sent an unarmed worker forward, arms outstretched peacefully. When it reached the pack, they tore it apart.

At last, frustrated, he sent the Hunter-Seekers forward at a quick trot. The wolf-creatures melted back into the woods, and Derec called the Hunter-Seekers back.

As a confrontation, it was an elusive, aggravating thing. As an effort to solve the conflict, it was an utter failure.

“Frost,” Derec muttered as the wall across the street went dark again and the city lights reasserted themselves. “Now just what in space was that intended to prove?”

SilverSide listened to the chorus of head-voices, waiting. She was just to the south of the city, having circled halfway around it from PackHome.

Already she could hear the alarm spreading as LifeCrier showed himself and the other kin at the edge of the forest to the west, and she could hear the new voice that directed the city functions, instructing even the triumvirate of Supervisors.

The GodBeing. The one of flesh, not stone.

The city was stupid. The WalkingStones had not learned. They expected the kin to attack the same way they always had, as if they could not create new tactics. She could hear the GodBeing telling the Hunters to move forward, speaking to them in the VoidTongue they both shared. Do not kill them, it said. Capture the old one.

SilverSide growled at that, pleased that she had cautioned LifeCrier only to show himself and to avoid an actual fight if he could. It was a First Law decision; SilverSide only knew that it felt right to her.

Do not harm the wolf-creatures. That was what the GodBeing said, but SilverSide wasn’t sure that she believed it. SilverSide could not lie herself—the OldMother had made such a thing impossible for her—but the kin could. Flesh could lie, and the GodBeing was flesh.

The city’s attention was on the kin now. It was time for her to move.

She had tilted and canted the dodecahedral segments of her body so that they reflected as little light as possible. Becoming a WalkingStone had not worked the last time; she knew that the city was now aware of her abilities and would have taken precautions against that type of deception. Nor had the shape felt right to her.

Still, the Third Law demanded that she protect her own existence, and to enter the city as kin would have been dangerous. The bird shape had served her well twice now; she would use it once more until she found this GodBeing.

SilverSide’s decision to accept the kin had given her a definite preference for their “human” shape. She was kin. She might enter the city as a bird, but she would meet this GodBeing as kin.

SilverSide willed her body to change. She spread wide, dark wings, and rose quietly toward the banked clouds.

The GodBeing would be near the Hill of Stars. She felt certain of that. The Hill of Stars was the heart of the city, and the GodBeing would be placed there, perhaps in the Hill itself, perhaps even in the room Central had used. SilverSide banked and swooped, letting the wind lift her as she moved toward the glowing pyramid in the center of the city.

Lights dimmed near the Hill, then a brightness glimmered on the side of one of the buildings. SilverSide brought her wings in, let herself drop lower as her optical circuits switched to a telephoto setting.

LifeCrier! She could see the kin, their images projected on a building alongside the Hill of Stars. In her head, the GodBeing seemed puzzled by the kin’s behavior, and it ordered the Hunters forward.

SilverSide circled the area, her eyes searching.

There! The GodBeing stood on a balcony opposite the view of LifeCrier, with two WalkingStones standing alongside it. SilverSide howled softly, banked, and plummeted like a stone as the wall showing LifeCrier went suddenly dark.

The wind whistled past her as she dropped in silence.

A few meters above them, she pulled up with a savage beating of wings. The WalkingStones noticed her at the same moment. SilverSide changed instantly into kin form and dropped. The WalkingStone nearest her she picked up and hurled over the edge of the balcony—it clutched at her desperately, missed, and fell with a strange silence. The other WalkingStone, an odd one with mismatched arms, immediately planted itself between SilverSide and the GodBeing. It made no move toward SilverSide, though she knew it would not let her pass.

The GodBeing was a strange creature, she thought, its face a pasty, dead color and its fur all gathered on the top of its head and nowhere else. It concealed its body behind some strange substance so that she could not even see its sex, and one arm was bound to its body. It had no claws, and its teeth seemed to be flat and dull like a planteater’s. It smelled horrible, like some obscene cross between a dead WalkingStone and a TreeWalker.

It hardly looked formidable enough to be leading the WalkingStones.

And yet...SilverSide was strangely fascinated by the creature. It was a being of flesh, and it ruled this world of technology. Find intelligence, her old programming had ordered.

SilverSide shook the feeling aside. Protect the kin; that was what the First Law demanded.

“I challenge you!” SilverSide roared to the GodBeing in HuntTongue, but it only shook its head, not understanding. “I challenge you, GodBeing,” she said again, using the VoidTongue. The words felt odd coming from her throat and yet were strangely familiar at the same time. The GodBeing reacted to her use of the VoidTongue, its eyes going wide and startled. “Let us fight to decide who controls the WalkingStones.”

SilverSide growled and shifted into the challenge stance, her hind legs gathered as if to leap, her claws extended. The WalkingStone in front of the GodBeing began to move toward SilverSide, and she snorted. It reached for her, and her jaw clamped around its arm, tearing savagely. It was like chewing on stone, but the grasp gave her leverage and she flung the robot to one side.

The GodBeing backed away, trying to escape back inside the Hill of Stars, and SilverSide moved to block it. “No,” she said. “I will not allow you to run. We must fight. That is the way to decide this.”

“There is no need to fight,” the GodBeing said. “You will not fight me. You will move aside from the doorway.” There was a tone of imperious command in its voice. Almost, SilverSide wanted to obey, and for just a moment her stance changed, becoming servile and submissive. But she shook her massive head and growled again in angry BeastTalk.

“The OldMother sent me to save the kin. You kill them. We must fight. That is the way.”

The GodBeing was shaking its pasty-fleshed head. “No. I’ve changed all that. I’ve told the city to stop. Back away now. You’re a robot. You have to obey me.”

“I am the leader of the kin. I obey the will of the OldMother.”

“Who is the OldMother?” the GodBeing asked, and SilverSide could not believe its stupidity. How could it not know the OldMother? Corning from the FirstBeast, it must know her.

But there was no time to question the GodBeing. From the edges of her peripheral vision, SilverSide caught movement; trebled movement. The WalkingStone she had flung aside was advancing toward her, and from inside the GodBeing’s cave in the Hill of Stars, she could see two Hunters running toward the ledge and their confrontation.

SilverSide howled in fury and faced the GodBeing.

“You are afraid of me. I should be the leader. If you rule the city, then meet me. I will wait for you.”

She flung aside the hand the WalkingStone laid on her and rushed to the edge of the ledge, knocking the GodBeing down in her leap. It was certainly a fragile being, for it cried out in pain as she plummeted over the side.

She willed herself to become the bird again and swooped up and away. The WalkingStones had helped the GodBeing to its feet and were watching her as she gained altitude. She watched them carefully to see if they aimed their awful fire at her, but the GodBeing held them back.

Howling her BeastTalk challenge once more, SilverSide left the city. Landing in the forest, she resumed her preferred form and sat down to wait.

CHAPTER 24

A CALL RECEIVED

It had to be one of the most frightening sounds he’d ever heard, those shivering howls coming from the throat of the huge black carrion bird. More than anything else, the fluidity of the rogue’s body was terrifying. It had seemed to simply melt into its new shape....

Watching the rogue flyaway, Derec was suddenly very certain that this wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d thought it would be. Not at all.

He took a deep breath of the cold night air. Cradling his arm, he went back inside.

“Master Derec, are you hurt?”

“Mostly my pride, Mandelbrot,” he answered. “I suspect it’ll heal slower than the rest of me.”

Derec’s arm was throbbing again, and his head ached where he’d hit the railing as the rogue swept past him, but none of it was as serious as it could have been. He’d seen those teeth, those claws, and he’d seen how the rogue had flung Mandelbrot aside like a broken doll. A few scrapes and bruises were nothing. Nothing at all.

Derec sat down on the couch and leaned his head back.

“We need Wolruf,” he said. The city was still in an uproar. He could hear it all in his head. Supervisor Alpha was directing the Hunter-Seekers to try to track the rogue, but Derec knew that it would be hopeless. There were too many shapes it could have taken to avoid pursuit.

“Wolruf?” Mandelbrot queried.

“Yes. Think about it. She’d understand these creatures better than we can. At the very least she’d be dealing with a canine intelligence that is—maybe—more like her own in contrast to our apish thought patterns. That’s our problem. The rogue seems to believe it’s one of them; their leader, in fact. Which means it’s thinking like them. The rogue’s logic is utterly alien. It’s obvious that I didn’t understand it,” he added ruefully.

“It is still a positronic intelligence, Master Derec. It was built by a human, if not Dr. Avery himself. That much is certain. I observed it as closely as possible during the skirmish. The skin was definitely dianite, like the material of the city itself, and it spoke in Standard. There are certain givens with a positronic brain. It may even be that it will respond to the city’s orders, being made from the same substance.”

“Yes, Mandelbrot. It follows the Laws, or should, at any rate. I just wonder how it might interpret them. A pack society, a carnivore’s mores...” Derec took a deep breath. “Frost, I’m thirsty.” He went to a dispenser unit in the wall and ordered a drink, downing it all in one quick gulp.

“We can’t understand these beings, not easily,” he continued. “Wolruf has a closer affinity to them than we ever will. Besides, you were the one insisting that they should be treated as human. How can we do that if we don’t understand them? How are we going to handle this rogue if we can’t understand what it might be thinking?”

“I agree with you, Master Derec. Send for Wolruf.”

“Good.” Derec nodded. “It’s about time I made a decent decision.” Which hasn’t been since Aurora.

Still holding the empty glass, he went out to the balcony again and stared out at the darkness into which the rogue had disappeared. The sound of the rogue’s howling still seemed to echo. He felt the skin of his back prickling at the memory.

He didn’t mention all the other reasons for wanting to make the call, though he knew Mandelbrot would also be aware of them, if too concerned with causing a human pain to mention them. Wolruf’s outlook would help them, yes, but Wolruf would also bring a ship which would allow them to leave the world if they needed to. And Derec wanted very badly to call Ariel. He wanted Ariel more than Wolruf in many ways.

Wolruf could also bring Ariel.

He sighed again.

Derec felt in his head for the chemfet channels and called: Alpha. Beta. Status on Supervisor Gamma.

Beta responded immediately. Gamma unit inactive after fall. Positronic brain has been taken to repair station and will be reinstalled in a new body if possible. Extent of damage to brain is unknown; a new supervisor unit has been activated. Alpha reports that Hunter-Seekers have lost rogue. Instructions regarding rogue and wolf-creatures?

You will continue to regard the wolf-creatures as human, Derec answered. The rogue is not to be harmed if you do find it, but there’s no need to send the Hunter-Seekers past the city boundaries. The rogue will be back.

Derec was certain of that much.

Understood. Derec could almost imagine distaste in the flat, emotionless response.

In the meantime, I need access to the city hyperwave transmitters. You should have coordinates for Aurora in the city memory banks. Please transmit the following message:

Ariel: Find Wolruf Send her immediately—imperative! And...I’m sorry. I love you. Please send an answer to these coordinates. And Ariel—1 would like you to come with her. Derec.

The message arrived at Aurora as a highly compressed squirt emanating from the Aurora system’s wormhole, punched through the incredible distances and the space-time anomaly by the powerful transmitters in Robot City.

The weakened signal was received by Aurora’s orbiting communications complex, the charges billed against Ariel’s family’s account, and transferred down to the planetary net decoded and strengthened. There it was posted to Derec and Ariel’s computer terminal.

That was exactly as Derec had intended, except that Ariel was no longer there to receive it.

Someone else was.

“Wolruf? Who or what is Wolruf? You must answer me. It is extremely important.”

The household robot didn’t seem inclined to answer the query. The inbuilt command against revealing an owner’s business was perhaps the most highly stressed program code in its memory, the Second Law priority reinforced to the best of factory’s technicians’ abilities.

But there was one higher priority that could always be invoked, and the speaker was very skilled with positronic logic. The words simply had to be carefully chosen and constantly repeated.

“It is very important that you tell me, Balzac. Mistress Ariel is not on Aurora, as you know. She has left this world and cannot help. Master Derec is in trouble; that is implied by the message. He needs this Wolruf to aid him. I will contact Wolruf, but I first must know where to begin looking. You must tell me all that you know. This is a First Law situation, Balzac. First Law. Ariel and Derec are in danger, and your refusal to speak increases that danger. This supersedes any previous instructions you may have received. Do you understand?”

It took an hour of careful argument and resulted in a badly damaged robotic mind. Balzac would never be of much use to its owners again.

But it did speak, the words halting and slurred....

CHAPTER 25

DECISIONS

For the next two days, Derec checked with the city communications center every hour or so, though he knew that he would have been alerted via chemfet if a message had been received.

There was never an answer. Ariel said nothing.

That was very unlike her. Derec was certain that even if she’d been furious, she would have sent back some scathing reply. But the hyperactive frequencies were silent coming from Aurora.

He hoped that she’d simply decide to head for the planet with Wolruf, that any day a ship would appear in orbit around the world. He instructed the city to turn its attention to the sky, to search the night for the faint glimmer of a ship’s drive. Maybe she was out there already, a day or two away after the jump.

But the sky was devoid of ships. Derec waited for eight days, not eating or sleeping well and leaving control of the city entirely in the Supervisors’ hands after giving them firm orders: The city is to cease any new construction and any clearing of land. Remember that the wolf-creatures are to be regarded as human insofar as harming them. Do not destroy the rogue.

As the days passed, the wolves grew less cautious. The rogue appeared every night on the hillside outside the city, pacing the perimeter and howling in the speech of the wolf-creatures. Derec didn’t need to know what it was saying; that was obvious enough. And the wolf-creatures seemed to realize that the city was doing nothing to resist them. On the third day after the rogue’s challenge, the pack made a blitzkrieg attack on a party of workers, destroying most of them before the Hunter-Seekers arrived and the wolves fled. Following Derec’s last orders, the Hunters didn’t pursue the wolves but simply let them go back into the safety of the forest.

The rogue itself made a dash into the city on the fifth night, and it destroyed Delta, the replacement Supervisor for Gamma. The positronic brain was wrecked beyond repair; Gamma was restored to working status in a different body.

On the sixth night, a Hunter-Seeker managed to sneak up on the pack and sedate one of the wolves from a distance. But when two Hunters went to capture the creature, the rogue attacked from the shadows. The Hunter-Seekers were disabled; the rogue seemed unharmed.

It was apparent to Derec that the stalemate could not continue. It was also apparent that Wolruf, if she were coming at all, would not be there soon, and that Ariel had either never received the message or had ignored it and was not going to answer.

That left very little choice for Derec. He was entirely healed now, the broken arm knitted if still a little tender after the accelerated treatment. He had no excuses not to confront the problem directly. Anything was better than brooding.

Despite that, he was not at all pleased with the prospect.

Mandelbrot woke Derec from his sleep. “The rogue is outside the city again,” the robot said softly. “I saw it in the distance, walking along the edge of the trees. “

“Did you try ordering it in again?” Derec asked. With the help of the city’s technical library, Mandelbrot had been trying to subvert the rogue’s base programming, since it evidently had a comlink to the city. The robot had been broadcasting orders over various frequencies, but to no effect.

“Yes. In the Robot City program code once more and also in human speech using a recording of your voice. It used the comlink to growl.”

“Maybe you should offer it a biscuit,” Derec grumbled.

“If you think that will work, Master Derec. One moment—”

Derec grimaced. The robot was already moving swiftly toward the door.

“No! Mandelbrot, come back here. Frost, can’t you tell when a person’s joking? Wait a second and let me get ready.” Derec rolled out of his bed and rubbed at his eyes. “It’s time I went to see it personally. It’s time I answered the damned thing’s challenge. The rogue’s right; one of us has to be in control of things.”

Mandelbrot’s eyes glittered at him from the night darkness. Beyond the robot, the wide archway to the balcony was open. Neither of the moons was up; the sky beyond Mandelbrot’s head was dusted with stars. The wolves would be out there now, and the rogue would be with them.

“Master Derec, I do not like this.”

“I don’t either, believe me.” Derec pulled on his pants, tugged a loose-fitting tunic over his head.

“The rogue is dangerous. It has destroyed city robots, it has damaged the central computer, it has harmed the Supervisors. It has even threatened you.”

“None of which necessarily violates the Three Laws,” Derec pointed out. “Not even the threat. It’s in the shape of those wolf-creatures; it thinks like them, too.”

“In which case it is very dangerous. And I must disagree. No robot in a sane state could say what the rogue said to you on the balcony. Such a statement would cause extreme reactions within my positronic potentials. Even contemplating such an act now sets up vibrations that I can sense. To actually make such threats meaningfully would be impossible. The damage to my brain would cause an immediate dysfunction if not an outright freeze.”

“The rogue follows the Laws,” Derec insisted.

“The rogue is insane. It must be. Its interpretations of the Laws cannot be trusted. It injured you the first time you met.”

“Nevertheless, I’m going to go meet it.”

Mandelbrot stepped in front of Derec, blocking his path. “Master Derec, I cannot allow that. I am sorry. The First Law forbids it.”

“This is a direct order, Mandelbrot, and I’ve already told you your assumptions are in error. This isn’t a First Law matter. Step out of my way.”

“I...am sorry.” The robot’s voice was slightly slurred, hesitant; the delicate balances between the Laws shifted, but it remained in place before the door.

“Mandelbrot, the rogue hasn’t harmed me. Not really. It was protecting its own existence, and it made a judgment call that it could move past me. You might have made the same decision—a small bump against the likelihood of destruction. It could as easily have taken my head off with those claws.”

“I...do not...know…”

Derec saw that the robot’s resolve was visibly weakening. He pressed his argument. “The rogue could have killed me in an instant, Mandelbrot. It chose not to. That tells me that the Three Laws are still functioning. And we’re not going to resolve anything here unless we confront it. If we just order the city to build us a ship and leave—assuming the city’s even capable of such a task at this point, and I seriously doubt that—then we’ve abandoned these wolf-creatures. They’re going to continue to try to attack the city, and once we’re gone, who knows what will happen? They may well die. We’ve certainly disrupted their society already, and if the city continues to grow, it will contact other packs as well. They’re sentient beings, Mandelbrot. You know it yourself. I can’t and won’t just leave them, and just sitting here is useless.”

As he spoke, Derec realized that he was also talking to himself. He had just been sitting there, moping about Ariel and Wolruf and doing nothing. It was time to confront the rogue, one way or the other. He had to face the challenge.

“Mandelbrot, I’m ordering you again to move.”

The robot took a hesitant step aside. “I would like...to accompany you.”

Derec smiled. “Of course. You always need a second in a duel.” Then, before Mandelbrot could say anything else: “Just kidding, of course.”

CHAPTER 26

A CHALLENGE MET

SilverSide watched the city as she’d watched it every night since SmallFace was a crescent horn. The moon was entirely gone now, waiting for the OldMother to birth it once more in its endless cycle. Still the GodBeing ignored her. But SilverSide came every night and renewed her challenge.

The GodBeing would come to her. It must.

At least some of what it said had been true. The city had changed; it no longer pursued the kin when they attacked. Only a few nights past, LifeCrier had led the pack down to kill. Though the Hunters had come to protect the worker WalkingStones, they had not followed the pack when the kin retreated.

Then the youngling SlowPaw had been caught straggling as usual, and one of the Hunters had shot him. SilverSide had been certain that SlowPaw was dead. But the Hunters came after the body, and after SilverSide disabled them, she found that they had only made SlowPaw sleep. She had been certain that the Hunters would follow her for revenge and had been ready to lead them away from PackHome again.

But the rest of the Hunters remained in the city. The GodBeing—whose name was Derec, as she knew from listening to the city’s VoidTongue—had ordered it so.

What kind of creature would stay hidden in its cave for so long? How could it hunt there, when all the game had been driven elsewhere? The GodBeing was flesh like the kin; it must eat.

Which meant that it would come out.

Most strangely of all, SilverSide could feel the urge in her to meet this GodBeing again. The remembrance of it stirred odd thoughts in her mind. She felt a pull, a yearning.

It has knowledge. It is intelligent. It is a toolmaker far superior to any of the kin. I have heard the city say that the one WalkingStone was built by this Derec.

There were moments when she did not want to fight it at all. But the challenge was demanded by the OldMother’s commands inside her. Above all else, she could let no harm come to the kin, and the city harmed kin simply by its existence. She must control the city as she controlled the kin, and the GodBeing prevented that.

That meant it must be challenged. If it refused her that privilege, it must die.

The edge of the city was well defined, like the boundaries of a cooled lava flow. Derec stepped from a hard level walkway and with the next step, he was on grass. Outside.

He suddenly, foolishly, felt unprotected.

That’s silly, he told himself. Mandelbrot’s alongside you, and Alpha’s monitoring the whole thing through Witness robots. There are a half-dozen Hunters waiting back in the city; they’ II get to you in seconds if anything happens. You’re as safe as you can be. Besides, you’re the one who insisted that the Three Laws protected you from the rogue.

He suddenly didn’t feel very confident at all.

A low rumbling came from his right. Derec turned.

The rogue was there.

It crouched fifty meters up slope where a stand of trees had been cleared by workers from the city. Perched atop one of the fallen logs and in wolf shape, the rogue looked bigger than Derec had remembered. Its claws were displayed, its mouth slightly open to reveal the metal teeth set there. It reared up on its back legs as Derec turned to it, standing perhaps a half-meter taller than Derec himself. Mandelbrot had come alongside Derec without prompting, the implicit threat in the rogue’s pose forcing the robot to stay close enough to intervene.

It’ s a robot. It follows the Laws. Derec took a deep breath, motioning Mandelbrot back. “I’ve come to talk with you,” he said to the rogue.

It growled, then spat out in Standard: “I have challenged you already. I did not come to talk.”

“At least tell me your name.”

“I am called SilverSide,” the rogue answered, and Derec could have sworn there was a hint of bravado in its voice, far more inflection than any robot he had ever heard before. Whoever had programmed it had been good. “I am the Chosen of the OldMother, the Bane of WalkingStones. Tell your WalkingStone to leave so that we may decide who is the leader.”

Derec looked at Mandelbrot, who had taken yet another step closer at the rogue’s words. “Mandelbrot is compelled to protect me, SilverSide. Tell him that you’re not going to hurt me, and I can send him back.”

“It is no protection to you at all,” SilverSide answered, and her pale eyes glanced at Mandelbrot. “I have already defeated it once. I will do it again, and then you and I will settle this.”

“No, I order you—” Derec began, but it was already too late.

The rogue moved faster than Derec thought possible. If Mandelbrot had not been there, Derec would not have had a chance. Derec felt a wind as Mandelbrot shot by him and met SilverSide.

The rogue collided with the onrushing Mandelbrot in a thunderous, resounding crash. There was a blur of violent motion, and Mandelbrot was suddenly down in the dirt, his legs thrashing helplessly from a severed cable held in the rogue’s claws. The rogue itself had a long scratch in its flank but otherwise seemed unharmed.

Derec opened his mouth to shout, to protest, to scream. The chemfets told him that the Hunter-Seekers were coming, but they would be too late.

Much too late.

SilverSide growled terribly, flung the cable away, and was on him. He tried to raise his hands, hopelessly. Claws raked Derec’s sides as she grappled him and bore him down. “No!” he screamed. “You can’t hurt me! I’m a human—”

The rogue wailed.

“I’m a human—” the GodBeing Derec cried. The word set off a bewildering spark of reactions in SilverSide’s mind. Human! The resonance from that VoidTongue word was stunning, and SilverSide reeled from its effects.

A human being is an intelligent life form.

Intelligence. Human.

“You are not human,” SilverSide roared in denial, but she spoke in HuntTongue—the language of “humans”—and no answer came to her. Taking advantage of SilverSide’s confusion, the GodBeing had rolled to its feet, and now she struck at it once more, intending to slash it open with her claws for its lie.

She could not. Could not. It was as if the OldMother controlled her hand and brought the claws back at the last instant so that she missed the GodBeing. She leapt at it instead, bearing it down again to roll it gasping in the dirt, then moving away a step so that it could stay on its back, submissive and beaten.

It either did not know to submit, or it would not. The GodBeing staggered up once more, defiant. SilverSide rushed at it again. The GodBeing screeched with pain as her arms wrapped around its chest and squeezed.

“Submit!” she whispered to it, and it was as if the OldMother’s will made the words a plea. She wanted this to end. She wanted the GodBeing to go limp and end this farce.

She was so much stronger than this thing of flesh. The GodBeing was weak, weaker than the sickest of the kin. And yet it still struggled.

“No!” it shouted back, its face gone red, its eyes wide and mouth gaping open. She could smell its breath, strangely sweet. “No. You must stop this. I order it. I am a human. You must obey me.”

The words staggered SilverSide as if they were physical blows. Her grasp loosened, and the GodBeing sagged to the ground. SilverSide stared at it without seeing it, all her attention on the confusion within her.

Human.

You must obey.

SilverSide howled in BeastTalk.

Somehow, he wasn’t dead. The rogue was howling again like a mad thing, and, as Derec stared at it, its body was changing. The snout was shortening, the ears moving lower on the body, and the canine jaws softening. Yes, the face was humanoid, and the features were startlingly like Derec’s own.

“GodBeing, I...I must know...more,” it said, and he could hear the confusion in its mind in its halting voice. Positronic drift. Derec began to feel some hope. “I...need information.”

There was someone or something behind the rogue, some shape. Mandelbrot had managed to lock his legs and rise, lumbering stiff-legged to them and impelled by the First Law. Derec saw the blow coming a moment before it landed. “Mandelbrot, no—” he began to shout, but it was too late.

Mandelbrot’s closed fist fell on the rogue’s neck. It went to its knees, a wolfish snarl coming from its human mouth, and now it was changing again, returning to wolf form. “No, Mandelbrot!” Derec ordered again. “I’m in no danger!”

The rogue was confused. It looked from Mandelbrot to Derec, to the forest, to the Hunter-Seekers moving rapidly toward them. It screeched, a sound of raw animal fury, its features changing rapidly and ceaselessly. Human/wolf/ human/wolf.

Wolf.

It stared at Derec. “Don’t go,” he began, but the rogue shook its head.

Dropping to all fours, it began to run for the cover of the forest.

“Come back!” Derec shouted. “I can teach you! In the city...”

But it was already gone.

CHAPTER 27

CHANGELING

Below, the kin huddled on the ledge before PackHome. The pups yelped and played mock fights and nursed. The younglings old enough to be in the Hunting Pack strutted and told fanciful tales about how they had helped SilverSide kill WalkingStones. The adults simply nodded and occasionally looked to the summit of the hill where SilverSide and LifeCrier had gone.

It had been a strange fight, that of SilverSide and the GodBeing. They still did not know who had won.

“You are unhappy with me,” SilverSide said in HuntTongue.

LifeCrier shook his grizzled muzzle from side to side. He used KinSpeech, telling SilverSide that she needn‘t be so concerned. “No, SilverSide. Not unhappy with you. I’m sad that you’re leaving.”

“I have not decided that. I have decided nothing.”

“I can smell the change in you.”

“LifeCrier has the nose of a DirtDigger,” SilverSide said in HuntTongue, and LifeCrier bowed his head at the rebuke. He did not move away, though, standing his ground on the rise. They could see the Hill of Stars in the twilight, an aching brightness, and they both stared at it for long minutes.

“I saw the OldMother move in you,” LifeCrier said. “My eyes are not as sharp as KeenEye’s, but you and the GodBeing...”

“I know. I felt it.”

“What will you do?”

SilverSide howled, and after a second, LifeCrier joined her. Their twined voices caused flocks of birds to rise in the trees below. “I am kin,” SilverSide said at last. “I lead the litter-kin here.”

“I know. No one would challenge you. You are the OldMother’s Gift.”

“I am kin,” SilverSide repeated. “Yet...” She stopped and looked at LifeCrier.

“I must do what is best for kin,” she said.

LifeCrier nodded. “That is all the OldMother would ever ask,” he told her.

“Derec!” Mandelbrot whispered urgently and pointed.

Campfire and city lights glinted on the robot’s polished body; the red gleam of its eyes glanced at Derec and then back into the night darkness beyond the city.

Derec rubbed sleep from his eyes. He struggled from under his thermal blanket and stood. The night was very quiet. Even the brilliantly lit city at his back seemed quiet, though he knew that thousands of robots were about their tasks there. The sweet odor of woodsmoke filled the air; a gentle and cool night wind tossed the mane of smoke back toward the city.

They’d been camped outside the city for the past two nights, waiting. Each night he’d expected the rogue to come to him. The city was broadcasting an endless invitation to SilverSide. Come into the city. You will not be harmed. The city’s library is open to you. Come and learn.

At last, it looked like it would answer the invitation.

The only question was how.

On the wooded crest of a hill, Derec saw the wolf-creatures. Their dark, quick shapes moved like fleet shadows under the swaying rooftop of the trees. Both moons were up; despite the city’s glare and the campfire, Derec could see them quite well. Mandelbrot had moved near Derec, ready to protect him should the wolf-creatures show any hostility.

Hunter-Seekers can be sent, Alpha reminded him.

No. Not yet. anyway.

The shivering howls and barks of the wolf-creature’s language drifted down toward them. Derec shuddered. In the weeks he’d been on this world, he still hadn’t become used to that sound. Mandelbrot noticed and shuffled even closer. “Old racial memories die hard,” he told the robot.

“The rogue is with them,” Mandelbrot said. “They’re gathering around it. Master Derec, I think we should have the city call the Hunter-Seekers. I am not sufficient protection for you. Regardless of whether the rogue will harm you, the wolfcreatures are certainly nor bound by the Laws....”

“I’ve already ordered Alpha to hold them back, Mandelbrot. The wolves are no danger. Not yet. Be patient; you’re the one who worked so hard to convince me they’re intelligent, remember?”

“Intelligent is not a synonym for ‘not dangerous,’ “ Mandelbrot pointed out. “You as a human should be well aware of that.”

“Hmph.” Derec snorted. “We’ll wait, anyway.”

The pack had gathered at the edge of the trees closest to the city. Derec could see the rogue now, glinting in the moonlight between the pacing outriders of the wolf-creatures. Now it stepped out into full moonlight, the old one at its side. The two licked each other, nuzzling and giving playful nips. Then the rogue began walking alone down the grassy slope toward Derec and Mandelbrot.

Halfway down, the robot turned and looked back to the pack, which had gathered at the lip of the hill to watch the descent. The rogue lifted its muzzle to the wolves and gave a long, ululating lament.

The wolves chorused back.

To Derec, they sounded wild and sad.

The rogue began picking its way among the rocks toward Derec’s camp once more. As it approached, the rogue’s body began a slow metamorphosis. Step—the lupine muzzle shortened; step—the tail began to shorten and retract into the body; step—it raised up to walk on its hind legs; step—and the legs themselves altered, the knees beginning to flex forward.

When the robot stopped a few meters in front of them, it was recognizably humanoid in the firelight. It glanced at Mandelbrot, then at Derec.

“GodBeing Derec, I have come to learn,” it said. Except for the stilted, formal grammar, its voice sounded very much like Derec’s. “I have come so you may teach me of the Void from which we both fell. I have come to learn what is human.”

Derec nodded. He pointed back to the city and the looming bright presence of the compass Tower. “The answers are all in there,” he said. “follow me, and I’ll show you the way. Mandelbrot, if you’ll take care of the fire, please...we wouldn’t want the woods to burn.” He said it mostly for the rogue’s benefit, wanting it to understand that he was concerned about the well-being of the wolf-creatures.

It was difficult for Derec to give the rogue his back. He half expected it to leap on him again, biting and tearing. He listened intently for a suspicious sound behind him. Derec knew that Mandelbrot was already on edge and would respond instantly, but still...

Nothing happened.

Alpha, we’re coming in. The rogue is with me.

We will have the apartment ready, Master Derec.

Derec began walking, then glanced back when he didn’t hear the robot following. It was staring back at the forest, and as it did, the malleable face went vaguely wolfish again.

“It’s your choice,” Derec told it softly. “I won’t force you to make that decision. Come with me or go back to them. I won’t try to stop you.”

The robot howled to the wolves one last time, the bestial sound eerie and wrong to be coming from that human-shaped throat.

Then the rogue turned from the darkness of the trees and the huddled pack.

It followed Derec into the eternal light of the city.

STEPHEN LEIGH

Stephen Leigh is the author of several science fiction novels, including Crystal Memory, The Bones of God, the Neweden trilogy, and the first book in the Dr. Bones series. He is also a contributing author to the Hugo-nominated Wild Cards shared world anthologies, and has had several pieces of short fiction in such markets as Analog, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and various anthologies. His current project is an off-beat contemporary fantasy novel entitled The Abraxas Marvel Circus. He is married to Denise Parsley Leigh; they have two children, Megen and Devon. He is also employed by Kelly Services as an Office Automation Manager. Other interests include Aikido, juggling, working with his Macintosh, and finding spare bits of free time.