He could do nothing to answer that question now. With a serene mind, he went back to sleep.

He awoke with his back to bright sunlight as he tossed quietly in the gentle turbulence created at the juncture of land and sea. Far to the west he could see the large node compensator with its pie-cut sector visible only as a small departure from perfect sphericity on the right side.

He deflated then, contracting the outer silvery surface of the six gores, and by that contraction, rolling the paper-thin hide into tight black rolls as the gores unsnapped at the continuous tongue-and-groove that kept them locked to one another while inflated.

The fluttering of the hide as he dropped through the thin air of the stratosphere was no competition for the powerful pull of the thin layer of smooth muscle that lay just below the silvery surface. Soon, all that was left of the balloon was a six-segment collar, visible only as a small bump in the black silhouette.

The ocean was still far below when he spread his wings at optimum charge altitude and started flapping with powerful strokes toward the compensator. Despite the night's metabolic cleansing—the destruction and purging of waste products that constitutes rest—he felt stale and overworked. He missed that fresh shot of juice he had become accustomed to during the construction of the compensator, when he dipped his cold-junction into the icy water of the brook upon deflating in the early morning.

That was the only aspect of Sarco's normal Myostrian routine that he would like to adopt as a permanent part of the Cerebron daily regime. The nomadic Cerebrons were never in one place long enough to find the icy brooks hidden in the forests scattered over their globe.

As he stroked west, his thoughts returned to Sarco's warning the previous afternoon concerning the danger posed by his deposed lieutenant, Neuronius. He had been quick to dismiss Neuronius as an empty threat when there were more important things to think about, but now, with those other issues either decided or in a dormant state awaiting further data, he considered the unhappy plight of Neuronius. What, if anything, could he do to help him? Extreme irrationality like that exhibited by Neuronius was rare, almost nonexistent, among the Ceremyons. And being so rare, their society had not developed any truly effective remedies for want of suitable subjects to study.

Being sensitive and compassionate, indispensable qualities of a true statesman, Synapo had difficulty viewing the problem dispassionately. He put himself with his feelings in Neuronius's position, trying to imagine how despondent Neuronius must feel at that moment. In his ignorance of the true nature of that irrationality, with his compassion clouding his judgment, he failed to appreciate the machinations possible by someone like Neuronius.

By dusk he was over the vast Forest of Respose, but still fifty kilometers from the Plain of Serenity. Despite the exertion of flight, he had recharged his cells to eighty percent of full capacity, so he tethered that night in the treetops with a feeling of satisfaction. He had been so empty and so hungry for such a long time he felt almost like a glutton, nearly sated.

He arrived over the compensator early the next afternoon and took up his station circling above the center of the shimmering dome. Far below he could see the golden Wohler-9 standing on the west side of the dome opening. The small alien leader and her personal servant were sitting in the creation Wohler-9 called a lorry.

Synapo kept Axonius in suspense for another four hours, and then just before dusk he summoned him by radio.

“I'll want you to accompany me to a meeting with the aliens at the usual time tomorrow morning. And notify Petorius that he is now a member of the elite.”

Saying nothing more, Synapo dropped to tether for the night in The Forest of Repose. That was how Axonius learned of his promotion and who would be the lucky Cerebron to come in at the bottom in the moves that would bump Neuronius from the top.

The next morning, Synapo was standing on the west side of the opening in the compensator with Axonius on his right, facing the small alien and her servant, the robot Jacob Winterson.

“My government has reconsidered your proposal for cohabitation of our planet, Miss Ariel Welsh,” Synapo said, opening the discussion, “and I am pleased to report that they reversed the position taken by our representatives during the last meeting with you.”

“That is good news, indeed,” the alien replied. “The dome will remain open then, so we may use it as a communications and transportation base?”

“If that is what you wish. What else is involved in this new proposal?”

“The Avery robots—like Wohler there—must be reprogrammed. That is no small undertaking. However, a task force I have summoned for that purpose will arrive late this afternoon.”

“I would like to meet with you and the leader of that task force tomorrow at this time,” Synapo said.

“For what purpose?” the small alien asked. “I doubt that he will be able to contribute anything of significance to our negotiations.”

“For the purpose of planning our mutual interaction in implementing your proposal and establishing a timetable for its completion. My Cerebrons are a nomadic tribe, anxious to be on the wing again. We have already stayed far longer at this Myostrian compensator than we find comfortable.

“If you can assure me that you are familiar with the details of reprogramming the Avery robots, then of course, the presence of the other leader would not be required. But you led me to believe otherwise.”

“Very well,” the small alien said. “We shall meet with you tomorrow morning.”

Good, Synapo thought. That meeting should show who is dominant—the he leader or the she leader—and should also resolve once and for all which species is superior, the Ceremyons or the aliens. He would like to think that it would make little difference in how the Ceremyons treated the aliens, but he knew otherwise; he knew that it would make a big difference, even to him, a statesman.

CHAPTER 15

REUNION

Wolruf brought her hyperspace jumper Xerborodezees down a half kilometer from the forest and a full kilometer from the line of robots and their vehicles streaming across the plain toward Oyster World's robot city.

They had hardly touched down before a lorry started from the city across the deep, golden grass, laying a trail on the prairie that pointed toward the Xerborodezees like an elongating arrow.

Wolruf traveled light. She had stowed everything she needed in one small bag slung around SilverSide's neck. The two of them were sitting at the top of the access ramp, from which they could look out over the tall, waving grass and watch the approaching lorry.

Stepping carefully between them, Mandelbrot had unloaded Derec's gear from the ship by the time the lorry arrived. But SilverSide could clearly see and distinguish the two occupants of the open lorry long before it reached the ship, since both occupants were standing up.

“The one Derec calls Ariel, which is she?” SilverSide asked.

“The small one on 'urn left,” Wolruf replied.

“Then the tall one must be the robot Jacob Winterson.”

“I've neverrr met 'im, but I pressume so,” Wolruf said. “Jacob iss Ariel's personal robot, and that body in the lorry certainly matches Derec's description. 'e looks 'uman, but Derec said Ariel wass the only 'uman on the planet, so that's got to be Jacob.”

“Are the females always smaller and more delicate?”

“Generally. And that's true of most animal species in the galaxy. I'm certainly smallerrr than my consort.”

“Yes, your library file told of you as a female,” SilverSide said. “And I've considered you so without fully understanding the deeper significance, which seems to exist beyond the functional reproductive purpose. Derec seems driven by many other emotions when he talks of Ariel.”

“Just as Beores wass driven by otherrr emotions when 'e talked of Latiel. “

“I don't understand. Who were they?”

“The first beingss that werrr created, according to ancient myths.”

“Not the first humans. That would be Adam and Eve, according to the library history files.”

“Okay, put it in 'uman terms. The first man and the first woman.”

“And do all males have this strong affinity for females?”

“Mostly. Some don't, but they'rn a small minority.”

“I can understand that such a feeling is necessary to promote the reproduction of the species. But Derec's emotions seem involved with feelings far beyond simple procreation. And that is confusing beyond even the confusion—my lack of understanding—of the nature of biological emotions in general.”

“Emotions can be just as confusing to those experiencing them,” Wolruf said, “so 'urn confusion iss understandable and nothing to worry about.”

“Worry?” SilverSide said as though she were considering the idea for the first time. “Is that an emotion?”

“'es. All this concern 'u seem to 'ave over the sexes doess seem to amount to worry, wouldn't 'u say?”

“A perturbation of some sort from a mean of some sort is the only way I can express it—something which I would rather didn't continue, but which I don't seem able to prevent.”

“A good description of worry,” Wolruf said.

“Then I shall so tabulate it in a catalog of emotions which I shall now begin to prepare, hoping that by defining them I can come to know and recognize them as the first step in learning to control them. “

“A worthy project which could quite likely drive 'u nuts,” Wolruf said.

“Nuts?”

“Forget it. It iss not an emotion. But I'll tell 'u an emotion I am feeling: joy. It's been a year or more since I've seen Ariel and felt the simple joy of being with 'errr.”

With that Wolruf dashed down the ramp, for the lorry had pulled up beside the pile of Derec's luggage and equipment.

Ariel stepped down from the near side of the lorry as Wolruf extended herself to her full height and wrapped her arms around Ariel.

Neither said anything, but both had tears in their eyes as they separated and stood looking at one another.

SilverSide put tears down as a possible external sign of emotion, unintentionally beginning a catalog of associated symptoms that later—as her knowledge increased—she would identify by the term body language.

“'u're a blessed experience after a dreary period,” Wolruf said.

“And you're a sight for sore eyes,” said Ariel. “Where's Derec?”

“We had to leave 'im behind on the wolf planet,” Wolruf said.

The look of consternation that immediately came to Ariel's face also went into SilverSide's catalog, but she could only tag it with the word lie that she knew to be not an emotion, but rather a lack of truth-telling by Wolruf. Still, she had nothing else to tag it with for the time being.

And then Ariel's look changed to joy as Derec appeared on the ramp beside SilverSide.

“You scamp,” Ariel said, grinning at Wolruf.

Wolruf gargled phlegm, a sound symptom SilverSide had long since associated with Wolruf and her strange affinity for what Derec called humor.

Ariel and Derec met in the middle of the ramp and hugged one another and pressed lips.

The look of joy had to be catalogued adjacent to the emotion of joy, for Wolruf had already defined what it was they were feeling when they met once again after so long a time. The same must be true of Ariel. But joy still had no personal connection with SilverSide, and so was only a word and a symptom in a file, and incomplete without SilverSide's own positronic potential pattern.

Worry she now understood. Joy she did not.

And yet—it suddenly came to her—she, too, had met beings she was very close to after a period of separation, as she had when Derec, Wolruf, Mandelbrot, and she had gone on the outing in the forest, and she had gone looking for LifeCrier and the rest of the pack and had brought them back to meet Wolruf.

Seeing LifeCrier after all that time had disturbed her, and it was a disturbance that she welcomed and would seek to experience again. Her memory brought forth that old positronic potential pattern, and she knew then that she could put it in her catalog alongside the word and the body language for the emotion joy.

But those were minor things in the confusion of her thinking. It was the inexplicable nature of the biological sexes—and not in their function of reproduction—that was disturbing her most acutely that afternoon. And to a lesser extent, she was still disturbed by a lingering doubt as to who was the more intelligent, and so, the more human—Derec or Wolruf.

Small though it was, doubt still remained, but only because of the importance of the judgment that could affect the life and death of the two if she were required to choose between them in a life-threatening situation.

Did she consider herself to be more male than female because Derec had proved more intelligent in that first basic contest, the one that pitted the female KeenEye against the male Derec? Did she lean toward the male gender for that reason? After that contest she had certainly been more comfortable under the Derec imprint. He had opened a whole other world to her, he and his library files.

So that confusion with the nature of the biological sexes, and with her discomfort under a female imprint, disturbed her—and yes, that disturbance was the emotion Wolruf had called worry. She was worrying about her imprint on Wolruf because she was disturbed by a desire to return to the Derec imprint, the male form—uncomfortable Wolruf would have described it—so she put that emotion down in her catalog, together with its positronic potential pattern.

She was becoming more and more convinced that she should go back to the Derec imprint strictly from the standpoint of comfort. That was a notion she catalogued as a strong future possibility, but for now she would retain the Wolruf imprint for whatever help that femininity would provide in her analysis of Ariel and the strange effect she had on Derec.

SilverSide rose and walked through the hatch, following Ariel and Derec who had just walked up the ramp and into the ship.

CHAPTER 16

THE AGAOBIOLOGIST

“So what's the crisis here?” Derec asked. “And that screwy message of yours, that bit about my internal engineering'! What's that all about?”

They were standing in the control room of the Xerborodezees, where they had gone to get away from the others.

SilverSide walked in, sat down in one of the deep-cushioned passenger seats behind the pilot's upholstered bucket, and listened to Ariel and Derec.

“Some engineering I figured out, quite without your help,” Ariel said. “In fact I've brought this planet pretty much under control without your wisdom and guidance. All I need from you now is your muscle, that part between your ears.”

“You didn't answer my question.”

“Your internal monitor link with the robot cities: I'll bet you didn't know that that modulates hyperwave.”

“Au contraire, my dear,” Derec said. “That is a form of communication that depends on a special understanding of spacetime physics developed by my ever-so-eccentric father, the good Dr. Avery.”

“And au contraire right back at you, smarty. That is what the aliens on this planet, the Ceremyons, refer to as continuous modulation of hyperwave. Ask Avernus and Keymo, and Jacob, too. He even understands it. It's the communication version of Key teleportation, just like conventional discrete modulation of hyperwave is the communication version of hyperjump technology. I'll bet you didn't even recognize that!”

They had been together again for all of ten minutes, and already they were going at it hammer and tongs. Is this what love is all about? Derec asked himself.

“I'll have to think about that,” he said. Was it possible she was right? He changed the subject.

“Now what about the crisis? The reason for me being here.”

“There is no crisis. Except I had to get you here promptly to avoid one.”

She told him then how the robot city had disturbed the weather, how the Myostrians had capped and controlled the disturbance with the dome, how they were ready to close it completely until she came up with her plan of a planetwide farm, abandoning the idea of a planetwide city.

“So you see,” she concluded, “your task is straightforward and reasonably simple: just reprogram the Averies into farmers.”

“I presume that this is another example of your style of engineering?” Derec said.

“Not bad, huh? Social engineering, Derec. Something you wouldn't understand.”

“There is just one minor problem.”

He paused. Ariel said, “And that is?”

“In order to program the Averies to pursue a particular technology, one must know something about that technology. I know all about cities. I don't know the first thing about farms, and I suspect you don't either.”

Wolruf came into the compartment in time to hear Derec's last sentence. She took the passenger seat next to SilverSide.

Ariel looked stunned. That seems to be a piece of engineering she doesn't have covered, Derec thought. Perhaps there's more to engineering than meets her eye.

He was feeling smug and complacent. The bit about continuous modulation of hyperwave had thrown him for a moment. But now he felt that he was back in control of the expedition.

“So 'u don't know the first thing about farms, Derec. So what?” Wolruf said. “I seem to 'ave come in on the middle of the show.”

“So you can't reprogram Avery robots to be farmers,” Derec said, “if you don't know anything about farming and farm technology.”

“'ave no fear, Wolruf iss 'ere,” the small, furry alien said. “I wass raissed on a farm and educated at Agripolytech. I'm 'urn original 'ayseed engineerrr.”

“Okay, Derec. What do you say now?” Ariel said. “You think I didn't know that? Where have you been all this time?”

Derec ignored Ariel.

“You, a farmer?” He was looking at Wolruf.

“What products do 'u think the Erani bought from my family?” Wolruf asked. “The Erani am not all pirates like Aranimas. They'rrr mostly traders, and they live on an impoverished ball of rock that growss lichens betterrr than it doess tomatoess. In theess days of overpopulation, the Erani survive on the grain and farm products they buy from us.”

And there was Ariel, glowing now, when she had been shocked half out of her drawers before Wolruf put in her two cents. She had had no more idea than he that Wolruf was a farmer.

But Derec was quick to regroup, and he was now admitting to himself that Wolruf's contribution might well amount to more than two cents, Galactic Monetary Standard.

“Okay. I submit. I'll handle the computer technology, Wolruf will handle the farm technology, and you can continue to handle the social technology.”

“Not entirely,” Ariel said. You could tell she was about to reveal something that was not entirely easy to divulge. “You must meet with me and the aliens tomorrow morning. And it looks now as though Wolruf will also need to attend that meeting, as our farm specialist.”

“For what purpose?” Derec asked.

“They want to develop a schedule. The Cerebrons are anxious to return to their nomadic life, from which they've been diverted by the problem with our city. They've been camping out in The Forest of Repose, as they call it, the woods next to the city.”

Ariel looked at her watch.

“You may want to watch this,” she said. “It's sort of spectacular.We can watch the show from the lorry as we drive in to the city. We need to be getting back anyway. It's almost time for dinner.”

Jacob and Mandelbrot were standing near the lorry as Derec and Ariel started down the ramp. The robots had already loaded Derec's gear into the lorry.

Derec called, “I'll want you to drive, Mandelbrot.”

He wanted to stand by the driver, so as to watch better whatever show it was Ariel had scheduled for them, and he dam well didn't want that musclebot Jacob standing beside him, upstaging him, so to speak, in front of the audience sitting behind.

He glanced at Ariel, daring her to challenge his decision.

She looked at him quizzically, but then gave him a quirky little smile and didn't say anything. And that was as infuriating as if she had questioned his order. She knew exactly why he wanted Mandelbrot to drive. Somehow he always displayed his buttons, and Ariel knew exactly which ones to push.

But the show was every bit as spectacular as she had intimated. She stood up to point out the one she thought was the Cerebron leader, Synapo, circling high over the dome. And it was he who dropped first: a tiny black ball plummeting toward the forest like a lead shot, becoming a small bomb, trailing a shiny smoke that slowly expanded into a silver ball that drifted gently down into the tree tops and then bobbed up to rest on the top of the forest like a ball of mercury on a countertop.

That was a solo performance, and then from near Synapo's flight circle, another followed—Sarco, the leader of the Myostria, Ariel guessed—and after a time, over the space of a quarter-hour, they all dropped until they were dispersed like myriad beads of silvery moisture over the surface of the green foliage.

CHAPTER 17

THE CEREBOT

THE PROVISIONAL LAWS OF HUMANICS

1. A human being may not injure another human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A human being must give only reasonable orders to a robot and require nothing of it that would needlessly put it into the kind of dilemma that might cause it harm or discomfort.

3. A human being must not harm a robot, or, through inaction, allow a robot to come to harm, unless such harm is needed to keep a human being from harm or to allow a vital order to be carried out.

From Central Computer File: Humanics.

Mechanical Access: Drawer 667, Bin 82.

Keyword Access: Humans. Sub key: Laws.

File Creator: Rydberg 1

The next morning, well before ten o'clock, Mandelbrot parked the lorry near the west edge of the dome opening, and the three mammals got out, instructing the three robots to stay behind in the lorry but to record everything that transpired once the aliens arrived.

“Well, friend Mandelbrot, it is some time since we've been able to talk privately,” Jacob Winterson said.

“That will hardly be the case with the wild one present,” Mandelbrot said. “Watch what you say and what you do. It is completely unpredictable. It deactivated me on the wolf planet.”

Jacob and Mandelbrot were still standing behind the control panel of the lorry. SilverSide was sitting on the back seat that she had occupied with Wolruf on the way to the meeting site.

“For your information,” SilverSide said, “I am not an 'it.' I am currently of the female persuasion, having imprinted on Wolruf. You may refer to me with the pronouns 'she' and 'her,' Jacob. And you need not think that I will deactivate either of you now that I know that Mistress Wolruf would not react kindly to that action. Further, I am completely unaffected by what you may say or do, now that I understand that Miss Wolruf wants me to modulate the Third Law slightly to accord you some modest protection.”

“So, friend Jacob,” Mandelbrot said, “have you pondered further upon that imponderable, the Laws of Humanics?”

“Yes, I have,” Jacob replied, “and I find them woefully inadequate in describing human behavior. Rydberg and his companions are inexperienced in dealing with humans who are an unfathomable lot. Emotions, not laws, govern their behavior. And I think perhaps the female of the species is the most mysterious of all. I have been researching the emotion of jealousy since I seem to have been acquired essentially to create that emotion in the breast of Master Derec.”

“I hardly think jealousy can reside in the breast of a human, friend Jacob,” Mandelbrot suggested.

“Merely a figure of speech used in the literature of the subject,” Jacob replied. “The key point of interest here, however, is the multiplicity of shades and overtones that exist in the minds of humans in their consideration of the opposite sex, shades and overtones of emotion that apparently have nothing to do with reproduction of the species, the ostensible reason for there being the two sexes in the first place.”

Surprisingly, SilverSide was becoming interested in the conversation after all. She agreed with Jacob's assessment of any Laws of Humanics that would guide human behavior and supposedly parallel the Laws of Robotics that guided her behavior. And now the subject of their conversation seemed to bear directly on her discomfort with the femininity of the Wolruf imprint that seemed, paradoxically, to be aggravated by the keen interest in everything feminine she had felt earlier in the masculine mode, while imprinted on Derec.

It was a discomfort that came from an awareness of her own narcissism, something she had never experienced before, that was at once both fascinating and repulsive. She concluded she was attracted to feminine beings, but would rather it were not her own being. But what was the cause for the attraction? She concluded it must stem from that first powerful imprint on KeenEye that had not been altogether dispelled by her preference for the Derec imprint—the male imprint. That comfort with a masculine imprint was only a little less powerful than the laws that were intended to govern her behavior, but which she found so difficult to interpret for want of knowing what a human was. She could deprogram neither those laws nor her feeling of masculinity nor that insidious attraction for all that was feminine.

She found that she was experiencing another form of discomfort that came from listening to Jacob and Mandelbrot. She had never before heard two robots conversing with one another. The discomfort came not from that process but, again, from their words, what she deduced from their words. They were talking as though they knew what a human was, and she, SilverSide, was still exploring that subject by the process of multiple imprints, trying to progress to ever higher levels of intelligence, for surely only the most intelligent species in the galaxy could be the humans she was seeking.

“Jacob, you talk of the laws of humanics as though you know what a human is,” she said.

“Certainly,” Jacob said. “I am so programmed. How else could I implement the Laws of Robotics?”

“Am I human?” she asked.

“No. You are a robot,” Jacob replied.

“How do you know?”

“Master Derec says so. Further, my own senses tend to support his contention. You are not a mammal.”

“What about Mistress Wolruf? Is she human?”

“No.”

“But she is a mammal.”

“True. But not all mammals are human.”

“What is a human, Jacob?” Silverside asked.

“There are many definitions, some very complicated, some very simple. We are generally programmed with only one.”

“What is an example of a simple definition?”

“Accent in speaking Standard. Most humans speak Standard, so a simple definition for a special set of robots on a planet called Solaria once used the Solarian accent to define humans—a very simple test, not requiring any unusual instrumentation.”

“And how do you define a human, Jacob?”

“By the number of their chromosomes and the configuration of their X and Y chromosomes.”

“And how do you determine that information?”

“With an instrument—a cellular nanomachine—built into my right index finger.”

“You don't make that determination each time you meet that same human, do you?”

“No. Once I determine that a being is human, I put its image into a pattern-recognition table. Further, I am inclined to accept as human any being that approximates an average of those images—without the chromosome test.”

“Mistress Ariel and Master Derec are both humans, then.”

“Yes.”

“And which do you feel more compelled to protect?”

“My immediate master, Mistress Ariel.”

“And you, Mandelbrot, which would you favor?”

“Master Derec, although the choice would be difficult,” Mandelbrot said.

“And what about Wolruf?” SilverSide asked. “Would you protect her, Mandelbrot?”

“Yes. Friend Jacob and I are both programmed to treat her as human.”

“Don't you find that strange? A being that is...”

Thoughts of Wolruf as a human were shunted aside by the landing at the meeting site of black demonic beings—two of them—who simultaneously stalled out with perfect choreography, braking with their wings widespread, seeming to shut off the sun in the enveloping blackness of their presence. Then they touched down lightly, folded rustling wings close in to their bodies—shrinking to the size of the mammals they faced—and became black silhouettes surmounted by wicked-looking, snow-white hooks above burning red eyes.

The impenetrable soft blackness that shrouded their physical essence in mystery projected a disquieting impression of latent power.

SilverSide concentrated on recording everything that transpired. She thought that she was possibly observing the ultimate form of humanity, the final objective in a frustrating quest.

“Good morning, leaders of the Ceremyons,” Ariel said. “This is Wolruf and this is Derec, both members of our reprogramming task force. Wolruf, Derec, I would like you to meet Synapo, leader of the Cerebrons...”

The alien on the right expanded slightly with the rustling sound of a bat's wings amplified by an order of magnitude

“...and Sarco, leader of the Myostria.” The alien on the left expanded, rustling. Derec spoke next.

“My colleague Wolruf and I are honored that you will be working with us to produce an environment on your planet of benefit to both of our peoples.”

“That is to be desired,” the alien Synapo said with a strange accent, more pronounced than Wolruf's, which made understanding the alien even more difficult.

“But first,” Derec continued, “would you explain the nature of the dome and the method of its construction so that we may determine how best to modify the city within to be as innocuous as possible?”

“The node compensator is a localized separation of space and time,” Sarco said.

He said nothing further, as though that fully explained it. “Yes. Go on,” Derec said.

“That's it. A localized rift in spacetime,” Sarco said with mild disdain as though he were lecturing a backward student, “a locus of points in the cosmos where our universe no longer exists. “

“And how do you create such a rift?”

“Do you understand what I mean by a rift in the cosmos?” Derec hesitated.

“Not entirely,” he said.

“Then you 're not likely to understand how such a rift is created, and we should move on to more profitable subjects for discussion.”

Synapo entered the discussion at that point.

“The rift is created and enlarged by the intense application of electrons, which themselves are convolutions in spacetime. The stream of electrons—highly focused on a microscopic volume at the initial point of separation—enlarges the void progressively around the extent of the rift, much as I separate the gores of my reflector when I untether each morning.

“But as my colleague, Sarco, suggests, perhaps we should move directly to a discussion of your schedule for implementing harmonious cohabitation. “

“Strictly from visual observations, the dome seems to partake of the nature of a black hole,” Derec persisted. “Is that what you're saying?”

“Black hole?” Synapo said, as though now having difficulty himself with the trend of the conversation. “Black hole! Yes, that is a good analogy. The derivation of the word was not self-evident.

“Yes, the compensator is a black hole, but an unnatural one internal to the universe, not on the edge; a black hole as a concavity, not as a convexity at the edge where space and time separate in the course of the natural decay of the universe.

“Now may we move on?”

“Just two more questions,” Derec said. “When we look at the dome from the outside, we can't see the city. We see objects on the other side as though the dome and the city weren't there. Why can't we see the city inside?”

“The compensator's intense curvature of spacetime bends the light around the dome much as light from a distant star is bent slightly as it goes around our sun. In the case of the compensator, the bending is not slight. It is calculated to produce the effect of invisibility and nonexistence: one of its attributes as a compensator.

“You had one more question?”

“Yes. Why should a hyperspace flier fall toward the surface of the black concavity and escape only by the full thrust of its impulse engines, as Ariel described to me last night—an effect of the curvature of spacetime—when the atmosphere, the air inside the dome, does not fall toward the blackness likewise?”

“You answered your own question,” Synapo said.

A small green flame hissed from the blackness a decimeter below his eyes, and his voice took on a note of irritation, as though his patience were about to be exhausted.

“The curvature of spacetime, as you suggested. The flier was beyond the neutral shell, in the gravitational field of the black concavity. The planet's atmosphere is within the neutral shell, in the gravitational field of the planet.”

With a note of finality, Synapo concluded with a question.

“Did not your jumper have to achieve normal escape velocity to drive into the blackness before it could reverse and try to escape back to the planet?”

Quickly, before Derec had time to fully digest those last remarks, Ariel regained control of the meeting. With firmness, she said, “Now, honorable Ceremyons, our schedule calls for the first phase of our effort to be completed in two months. That effort will provide sufficient farm area and production—1000 square kilometers—for proof of environmental passivity.

“Concurrently, we will modify the city to provide terminal facilities for local and interstellar transport vehicles. Those facilities will project through the opening in the dome, but will be insulated and force-ventilated to ensure that all harmful radiation and emissions will be retained within the dome.

“Wolruf, our farm engineering specialist, and Derec, our city engineering specialist, will now describe the detailed schedules for those two activities.”

SilverSide recorded all that, but her attention, her whole being, was concentrated on the alien, Synapo. His domination of the dialogue told her that he was the superior of the two aliens and potentially more powerful, more intelligent, than any of the mammals she had become familiar with. In short, she had found the ultimate target for her final imprint, or so she believed.

She left off recording the meeting with the aliens. She had found a new role model to fit the beings the Laws of Robotics compelled her to serve. She was no longer obligated to observe the orders of lesser beings. Still, she gave Wolruf a last thought filled with fondness, that new emotion she had found in her consideration of LifeCrier, now far, far away. She would continue to protect Wolruf with just a little less weight than she gave herself under the Third Law, the law of self-preservation.

She turned her attention back to the alien on the right, Synapo, and concentrated now on the technical details of the imprint, particularly the aerodynamic characteristics that would be the hardest to duplicate. The calculations quickly showed that her wingspread and airfoil area would have to be several-fold greater than that of the aliens in order to support her body weight. Their body mass must be light indeed, with mostly hollow structural reinforcements.

And she would have to increase the dimensions of her body to provide the geometry needed for the wing connections and the leverage required for the wing manipulators. Not surprisingly, that was going to decrease her body density to match that of the aliens.

She worked on the eyes next. They were compound, radiating red and infrared. The radiation came from a ring that surrounded the conventional animal optic in the center and provided controlled illumination for viewing objects when the sun's radiation was blocked by the planet.

Then she turned her attention to the blackbody surface and found that to be more of a problem than the aerodynamics and the optics. She experimented on her arm as she sat in the back seat of the lorry but finally had to give up and settle for a blackish gray with a soft, silvery lustre, just as she had finally given up matching the details of hair and skin coloring of the mammals.

Next, she attacked the source and nature of the green flame that had burst from the alien, Synapo. She had the feeling that it was a tool, if not a weapon, that was required to provide a satisfactory imprint. She designed a small electrolytic cell, compressor, and high-pressure storage containers for hydrogen and oxygen and a release orifice at the rear of her oral cavity, but she kept her conventional speakers for communication. And she added a small factory to fix nitrogen in the form of ammonia to provide the trace of that compound that gave the flame its green color.

All during that period of analyzing the alien, Synapo, she was absorbing the powerful masculinity he radiated, intercepting and recording the red glare of his eyes, sopping up his physical essence, the body language, the subtle mannerisms that escaped that otherwise all-absorbing black silhouette.

Finally she was ready, and she set the organometallic cells of her body and their pseudoribosomes to the task of altering her genetic tapes—her robotic DNA, her equivalents of messenger and transfer and ribosomal RNA—and the myriad other factors contained in her multibillion microbotic cells that would finally effect the alien imprint.

As her form changed, she stepped up to stand on the back seat of the open lorry to give her forelegs room to develop into wings, and then as her long hind legs shortened and thickened, she braced them against the back of the seat to steady herself.

With their attention on the meeting, the two robots in the front of the lorry did not observe the transformation, nor did the mammals in the meeting who faced away from her. She was under observation only by the aliens, and they seemed not to notice or to care.

Finally, the transformation was complete, save for the hook and its tether, that she had programmed last because of its different matrix, a stainless form of shining steel configured in a hollow curved horn and a fine-stranded but sturdy flexible cable. She hoped to fly, but she had abandoned the balloon and the act of ballooning she had witnessed the evening before. The hook, then, was purely for effect.

Comfortably masculine now, SilverSide was standing on the back seat of the lorry, fully erect—three meters high—with his wings folded tightly against his body as though he had just emerged from a cocoon like a newly metamorphosed butterfly. He felt the need to open and exercise them, to get the feel of them, and with that he recalled flying in bird form on the wolf planet.

The mammals and the aliens were still absorbed in their meeting. The aliens apparently thought the growing SilverSide was a natural phenomenon associated with the lorry, for they gave no sign of looking directly in SilverSide's direction.

Slowly he opened his wings. The thin, tough, organometallic membrane rustled faintly as he unfolded the airfoil to its full twenty-five meters. He found then that he could not avoid measuring air currents.

He had not been aware of even a faint breeze as he had stood there on the back seat with his wings folded, but now he felt the gentle pressure acting on his wings, pressing his simulated, feathery cold-junction against the back o(the seat. He resisted the torque that was endeavoring to tumble him out of the back of the lorry only with a distinct effort by digging his toes into the seat cushion.

The effort was more than he cared to maintain, so he folded his wings back against his body, reducing the wind area.

Then he turned, walked across the seat to the side of the lorry, hesitated—looking at Wolruf who was running toward him and shouting his name—and then spread his wings again and hopped over the side. He felt again the glorious sensation of flight, of being airborne, as he gently glided to the ground. When his feet touched, he fell flat on his face, his wings outspread, with a feeling of slow motion that began with his dragging toes digging shallow furrows in the dust next to the roadway.

With difficulty, he got up, using his wings to lever himself erect before folding them into his body, and then Wolruf was on him, hindlegs straddling his back and pinning his wings to his sides, hands grasping his hook to keep her purchase. And Derec was winding a rope around both him and Wolruf, binding them together.

CHAPTER 18

THE BLACK VISITATION

Ariel was about to wrap up the meeting. Wolruf had hit the high spots of the technical effort involved in establishing the robot farms and had given her detailed schedule; and Derec had described the external modifications of the city to provide local and interstellar terminal facilities, the minimal effect those changes would have on the meteorology, and the detailed schedule to effect those changes.

Ariel began her recap.

“I would like to briefly review the farm program again and summarize the schedule, but before I do, are there any other questions on the work that Wolruf and Derec described?”

“No,” Synapo said. “It was all quite clear.”

“Was it acceptable?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Synapo turned to look at his companion.

“Sarco?” he queried, “Any objections?”

“Not for the moment,” Sarco replied. “The farm machinery is highly suspect, but we must take you at your word, at least for now. Time may tell us otherwise. And, too, I am concerned...”

He stopped talking briefly, then:

“By the Great Petero!” he exclaimed. “What is that, Synapo?”

Both aliens had turned slightly to the left to focus those red eyes on something behind her. Ariel turned to look herself and saw a dark gray monstrosity on the back seat of the lorry with gigantic wings hovering over the vehicle like some kind of avenging angel.

Then it slowly folded its wings and started walking across the seat to the side of the lorry, where it spread them once again, and Ariel knew instantly what was going on.

But Wolruf had anticipated her by significant seconds and was already running toward the lorry, shouting, “SilverSide, SilverSide,” over and over again, as though shrill decibels would anchor him to the ground.

As it turned out, Wolruf had nothing to worry about. SilverSide came to rest flat on the ground, spread-eagled. And by the time he picked himself up and retracted his wings, Wolruf was clinging to his back, and then Derec was trussing them both up with a rope he had hastily dug out of a locker on the side of the lorry.

Ariel was torn between getting involved in the fracas herself and preserving some kind of composed demeanor for the benefit of the aliens. She felt her position as official negotiator and ostensible leader of the robot city task force with special keenness ever since she had been able to parlay her visit into that position: leader without portfolio.

As Derec was wrapping SilverSide and Wolruf round and round with rope, Ariel turned back to the aliens in time to hear Sarco say, “Perhaps this gives us a better idea what further menace lies off-world, Miss Ariel Welsh. We resume construction of the node compensator tomorrow morning.”

He had rotated his hook forward as he spoke. Then, as he turned away, a broad green flame a meter long blazed from below his eyes, and he flapped into the air.

The heat from the flame hit her like the breath of a blast furnace.

The alien Synapo stood facing her as his colleague flew off.

When he spoke it was in a fashion that left no doubt as to the temper of his thoughts. The words seemed to modulate the small green flame that flickered below his glaring red eyes, a waxing and waning fluorescence that resonated with the strange buzzing sound it imparted to his words.

“You have violated a trust and humiliated me before the elite, Miss Ariel Welsh.”

And he, too, turned and flapped into the air.

She stood there a long time watching them as they slowly and gracefully circled higher and higher above the dome. The first leveled off and took up a flight pattern around the exact center of the dome. The second, however, continued upward, circling and circling until she lost it in the shimmer of the atmosphere.

Derec had come back to stand beside her, but she had not heard him.

“A setback, surely, but perhaps not a large one,” he said.

Startled, she turned to look at him coldly but said nothing before walking back to the lorry. Jacob was standing at the controls. Mandelbrot, standing between him and SilverSide, had hold of the end of a rope where it trailed away from the coils that encircled SilverSide and pinned his wings to his sides. Wolruf was sitting on the front seat directly behind SilverSide. Derec had unwound her from SilverSide once they thought he was under control.

Ariel climbed slowly in and sat down on the back seat.

Derec climbed in and came back to sit beside her. Jacob drove the lorry onto the road and then headed rapidly down Main Street toward the apartment.

“I warned you about SilverSide,” Derec said. “You knew he could change form. I admit I didn't expect a change at so inauspicious a time. What did the aliens say before they flew off?”

“They were frightened, naturally, and angry. They had no reason to suspect we were going to produce a being in their own image, and twice as big. In their minds, I have betrayed their trust. They said as much. And they will close the dome tomorrow morning,” Ariel said. “Your new protégé has just closed this planet to further development. Unless your genius and his remarkable abilities can somehow miraculously arrest the inevitable.”

“You're being sarcastic, my dear,” Derec confirmed.

A couple of intersections passed swiftly behind, and then he said, “But you know we might just pull off that miracle.”

“Fat chance,” she said.

“No. A slim chance, but a chance nonetheless.”

She didn't answer, but got up and went to the front of the lorry to sit on the front seat directly behind Jacob Winterson. Right then, Jacob seemed like the only friend she had. She looked right through him, though, staring into a grim tomorrow and not seeing at all his remarkable musculature.

Wolruf reached over and laid a fat-fingered hand atop Ariel's small hand. Ariel didn't move and hardly noticed. After a moment the hand was withdrawn.

When they got to the apartment, she jumped out before the others and strode off. It was a walking pout, a demonstration for Derec's benefit, and she admitted that with one part of her mind. With the other part, she half expected him to come after her and was disappointed when he didn't. She could now think of several things she wanted to say to him. She returned as Jacob was putting lunch on the table.

After a lunch that tasted like sawdust, she went out on the balcony to get away from the others but took Jacob with her. They sat down on the bench that lined the streetside rail.

“Jacob, did SilverSide give any indication he was going to pull a stunt like that? Where is he, anyway?”

She hadn't thought to ask until that moment. She had wanted to forget about SilverSide, and she had succeeded better than she expected. Her thoughts had been on Aurora. She had felt quite homesick all through lunch, and Derec hadn't helped. He had been just as silent as she. Her walk had cooled her irate thoughts. She didn't feel up to an argument so she kept quiet and ate. Immediately after lunch Derec had jumped up and gone into the small bedroom.

Her feeling of isolation had been intensified not only by Derec's silence, but by Wolruf's silence as well. That, too, had persisted all through lunch. She felt again the soft touch of Wolruf's hand as it came to rest on her hand when they were riding back in the lorry.

“To answer your most immediate question first, Master Derec forced SilverSide to lay on the floor of the small bedroom when we first came in,” Jacob said. “SilverSide had trouble getting through the doorways. He was both taller and wider than the openings. It was difficult for him to bend over and at the same time go through the doorway sideways while wrapped with rope.

“To answer your first question, the wild one, as Mandelbrot calls him—it seems particularly apt—the wild one talked to us briefly, but he gave no indication that a change was imminent.”

“He said nothing unusual, then?” Ariel asked.

“He seems not to know what humans are. This matter of imprinting and changing from one form to another: were you aware that he goes through these changes seeking to find the species he can finally call human?”

“Derec suggested that might be the case.”

“Will he then cease to protect what he considers the lesser species?”

“I presume so. Derec seems to think so.”

“Does that not make him an entity of some danger to humans?”

“It would seem so.”

“Then should he not be deactivated?”

“I hadn't thought so before today. Derec seems to regard him as a valuable experiment that must be protected. And from the brief conversation we had, I suspect he still feels that way.”

“Perhaps you should talk to him again, Miss Ariel. Both Mandelbrot and I are concerned that the wild one may get out of control. We are both perturbed by the First Law, and find it even more difficult to be around the wild one now that he has taken on this new alien form.”

“You're right, Jacob. I should talk to Derec.”

She placed her hand on Jacob's neck and softly traced the muscles as though she were stroking a pet. His concern touched her. It was she he was concerned about. It is difficult for a young woman to ignore such concern when it comes from a warm-skinned being as handsome as Jacob. He was a dear, like a big brother.

That thought confused her. When had she stopped thinking of Jacob as a robot? Her regard for him was sisterly, was it not? It couldn't be anything more than that, surely. In spite of the way Derec ignored her in his interest with the wild one, SilverSide.

Perhaps her own impetuous experiment was getting out of hand. Since Derec had arrived on Oyster World, he had not seemed the dear thing she had dreamed about so intensely.

And Jacob's concern was pleasing, and the feel of his muscular neck was certainly stimulating.

With that wild thought she jerked her hand away, jumped up, walked into the apartment, and threw open the door to the bedroom where Derec had gone immediately after lunch and where Jacob said they were keeping SilverSide.

Derec had removed the rope, and SilverSide was sitting on the floor between twin beds. He was leaning back against the wall and had balled in that curious way the aliens had of reducing their surface area. That decreased his height by half.

Derec was sitting on the far bed and had to look up to peer into the robot's red-rimmed eyes.

Ariel sat down on the other bed. Jacob had followed her. He stayed near the door, standing with his back against the wall.

“I have explained the crisis he has caused in our relations with the Ceremyons,” Derec said, “and SilverSide is willing to try to straighten things out. He does not wish to offend the beings he is trying to emulate and serve.”

“They might likely destroy him before he gets the chance to do any serving,” Ariel said. “They were quite disturbed.”

“That is the chance I must take, Ariel,” SilverSide said, “but I do not think that is likely.”

The title Miss was stressed by its absence in SilverSide's remark. He had clearly imprinted on the aliens in thought as well as in form.

“Still, you had best shout at them from a distance,” Ariel said. “Out of flamethrowing range.”

“Communication by radio accomplishes the same thing,” SilverSide said, “without the danger you suggest.”

“One must first understand their radiospeech,” Ariel said. “The modulation is pure ultrasonic gibberish. “

“I have been working on that ever since we arrived. It is not different from the ultrasound they used to converse privately during your meeting with them. That meeting provided the clues I needed to understand the radio transmissions I had picked up the evening of our arrival. I am now modestly fluent in the language.

“So fluent that I suspect you will find several representatives of their species awaiting us outside and probably well within flamethrowing range.”

Derec jumped up from the bed and ran from the bedroom to the French window that opened onto the balcony. Ariel followed him. He started to go out but stopped. There were two aliens perched on the balcony rail, clearly visible through the sheer curtains in spite of the permanent dusk created by the dome. They were silhouetted against the white building across the street like two huge black crows. There were probably more at street level.

Derec and Ariel went back to the bedroom.

“You have been talking to them!” Derec said quietly but with emphasis.

“Yes,” SilverSide said. “I have already opened my own negotiations.”

“And who have you been talking to?” Derec asked.

“The leader called Sarco.”

“And what do they want?”

“My release. I told them I was being held prisoner.”

“Hardly. You could have broken the ropes any time you wanted to, either before or after we got here.”

“Perhaps, but I didn't want to risk damaging my wings. To make myself aerodynamic I've had to sacrifice my original strength and ruggedness to the stamina and lightness needed for extended flight, which unavoidably entails a certain fragility.

“But now I must go talk to Master Sarco.”

“Tell them the truth,” Ariel said. “Explain our sincerity and our lack of knowledge of this last transformation of yours.”

“I must always tell the truth. I cannot do otherwise,” SilverSide said.

“But you do sometimes omit things,” Derec said. “Try to tell everything that is relevant to our situation.”

“My first concern must be for my new masters, but I do not easily forget those like LifeCrier and Wolruf who have been kind to me. Roping and binding, however, can hardly be described as kind.”

“Think of Wolruf, then,” Derec said. “And the many kindnesses I have shown you before this last incident.”

“I must go and confer with Sarco,” SilverSide said as he rolled to his feet, still balled. Then he partially straightened, still bent sideways, and sidled through the bedroom door.

CHAPTER 19

THE LAW OF HUMANICS

Circling far above normal charge altitude, Synapo watched the silver alien and his escort of Ceremyons—all less than half his size—as they headed toward The Cliff of Time, far below, toward the gathering Sarco had called to hear the words of the alien.

Sarco was already waiting on the pinnacle of The Cliff of Time. Synapo had seen him arrive a quarter-hour before, not long after that final radio transmission that had set up the gathering.

Synapo balled, and as he dropped, he feathered an exposed edge of a wing so that it set him in rotation and in motion toward the Cliff of Time as though he were rolling down a ramp.

His progress toward the Cliff of Time matched the progress of the small escort of Ceremyons who had the silver alien in their midst, so that Synapo and they arrived at the gathering almost simultaneously.

Synapo took up his perch on the adjacent lower crag, the position Sarco had occupied during that earlier gathering. His Cerebron elite were already aligned on the table rock below.

The alien who called himself SilverSide stood in front of the center of the line of Myostrians below Sarco. The Myostrian leader wasted no time. He began the interrogation of the alien as soon as Synapo settled onto his perch.

“Who are you and what is your purpose in contacting us?” Sarco asked.

“I am a robot, and I am here to serve you,” SilverSide replied.

In spite of himself, Synapo was impressed. The silver alien had mastered the Ceremyon tongue and now mouthed it with only a slight accent.

“You are a servant, like the servants who built the city we have nullified?” Sarco said.

“Yes, only somewhat more versatile,” the alien replied.

“Were you created this morning, at the time of our meeting with the aliens?”

“No. I was created on another planet. That was merely a transformation this morning.”

“To what end?”

“To follow as best I can the laws that I am governed by, the laws of the beings who created me.”

“And what is the nature of those laws?” Sarco asked.

“I may not injure a human being,” SilverSide replied, “or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

“I must obey the orders given me by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

“And I must protect my own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.”

“Those are the same laws that govern the servants who built the city,” Sarco said.

“Yes,” SilverSide said. “We are all robots, or so I am told.”

“And these human beings,” Sarco said, “you consider them your creators and the ones you must serve?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you seek to serve us?”

“The laws and my programming do not make clear what human beings are. Clearly, only beings more intelligent than I could have created me. I seek to know and understand all such beings. Until I met your species, Ariel and Derec were the most intelligent beings I had found—with the possible exception of Wolruf.”

“We are the most intelligent of the beings now on this planet,” Sarco said, “but we did not create you. We were told by Miss Ariel Welsh that she and beings like her are human beings. We have no reason to disbelieve her. Why do you?”

“Neither Ariel, Derec, nor Wolruf created me, or so they say.”

“You were not created this morning to intimidate us?” Sarco asked again.

Synapo agreed with Sarco. That was a most important point. “No. I merely transformed from my imprint on Wolruf.”

“Then this morning when the meeting began you had the shape of the being called Wolruf, one of the three we talked with this morning?”

“Yes.”

“And you did not transform according to instructions by Miss Ariel Welsh?”

“No. I imprinted on a being like you called Synapo who seemed to me the more intelligent of the two aliens at the meeting. “

“That is Synapo standing over there.”

Sarco pointed with the middle appendage of his right wing toward his friend on the other crag.

“I am Sarco, the other one at the meeting, the one of lesser intelligence.”

His sarcasm was not lost on Synapo and the other members of the Ceremyon elite, but it went completely by SilverSide.

He walked over to stand on the table rock below Synapo.

“You are clearly the most intelligent being on this planet,” SilverSide said, addressing Synapo. “You or someone very like you must have created me, and so you must be a human being.”

“No,” Synapo replied. “I am not a human being.”

“What is a human, Master Synapo?” the robot asked.

And then Synapo understood the robot's dilemma. It was, for the robot, a difficult problem in semantics that had become clear to Synapo only at that moment when he replaced the words human being in the robot's governing laws with the word creator. That was the way this particular robot, for some reason, actually thought about his laws. Creator, or human being, or whatever term occupied that position in the robot's laws, had not been defined. That was now clear.

Perhaps human beings had created the Avery robots, but this robot was not at all sure that the same creatures had created him even though both he and the Averies were governed by laws that were structurally similar. But from all the data, it seemed quite clear to Synapo that it was the human beings who had created the robot and that it was they his laws referred to.

“Miss Ariel Welsh and all those like her are human beings, and it was human beings that created you,” Synapo said. “It is they you must serve, and of all of them, I would suggest you give your most devoted service to Miss Ariel Welsh. We have gravely misjudged her and injured her now a second time.

“And when you get back, pick a being for your model—for your imprint—that will serve her best. You make a poor Ceremyon.”

There was a long pause.

“A last question,” SilverSide finally said. “You have heard me recite the Laws of Robotics which govern my behavior. It would help me serve Miss Ariel if I knew what the Laws of Humanics were. Have you yet deduced those laws from your dealings with the humans, Miss Ariel and Master Derec?”

“There is only one Law of Humanics. All others are corollary to iL The Law of Humanics is the law of all natural beings, whether of low intellect or high, whether Ceremyon, human, or lupine like your Wolruf.

“We all obey that one law without exception, even though at times—without thinking deeply—it may seem otherwise. We all evolved from chaos, and chaos governs our lives, but a seeming purpose can arise paradoxically from chaos, and it is that chaotic purpose which compels us to follow that one law.

“The law is quite simple: We each do always whatever pleases us most. That is the only Law of Humanics.

“Go now and serve well your Miss Ariel Welsh.”

The wings of the robot SilverSide opened wide, stretched to their full extent, and as Synapo and all the Ceremyons watched, the wings seemed to slowly dissolve and contract into massive upper appendages as the torso shrunk to less than half its original height, as the legs swelled to produce heavy thighs and bulging calves.

When the transformation was complete, Synapo realized he had seen only one other alien with a shape like that, the alien servant, Jacob Winterson.

If he had used a little forethought, the alien SilverSide would have had an easier time getting back—if he had not been so anxious to effect a transformation. But Synapo thought no more about it as he took to the air, headed for a charge station above the center of the node compensator to gamer what little was left of the sun's radiation that afternoon.

CHAPTER 20

NEURONIUS STRIKES BACK

The contradiction, the dilemma, tore at his mind, grabbing at his reason, his sanity, setting it adrift in small silent screams like flotsam flowing over the edge of The Cliff of Time. SilverSide had found the superintelligence he was looking for, and that intelligence had declared itself not human. Ariel Welsh was human, it said, and Derec Avery. Go serve Miss Ariel Welsh, it said, and find the form that would do that best.

He had to yield to that higher intelligence—there was no escaping the logic—yet he had violated the Laws, he had not served humans well, and that was a thought he could not bear to face.

He grabbed desperately at his reason, rolling it into a tight ball, and escaped into the all-absorbing task of imprinting on the memories he had stored of Jacob Winterson. He stood there on the table rock long after the Ceremyons had left, throwing himself deeper and deeper into the imprint, delving and exploring and testing far beyond anything he had ever done before, changing his microbotic cells to create those of proper function and pigmentation with which to form this time the perfect image: the bronze skin, the brush-cut blond hair with the same fine strands, the corded neck that kept the girth of the head itself all the way to the shoulders, the bulging biceps and chest muscles, the narrow waist, the powerful thighs, wrapped beneath the skin with heavy muscular ropes.

He created the same unlined high forehead; the fine Nordic nose; the wide-set, deep blue eyes; the high cheekbones; the generous mouth; the jutting, cleft chin.

When the imprint was finally finished, he walked to the edge of the table rock and stood there staring down from the escarpment at the sharp line that demarcated the forest from the plain. That delineation led his eyes to the iridescent dome covering the robot city, shimmering in the sunlight, and seeming—rniragelike—to hang suspended above the horizon, transparent and seemingly void of any contents.

He had a sudden impulse to spread his wings and glide away from the escarpment toward that dome and Miss Ariel Welsh. That was the Laws speaking to him, and for just a fleeting second, he felt a contrary and equally powerful impulse to escape in the other direction, and then the Laws reasserted themselves, and wingless, he began making his way recklessly down the escarpment, using the superhuman strength in his fingers and toes to cling to the face of the rock and scurry down it like a chameleon.

As he passed down the jointed and folded stone strata exposed by the upheaval of The Cliff of Time, he crossed earlier and earlier geologic ages of Oyster World, and seemed himself to be carried back through the short time he had existed to his origin on another world, as though he were descending through space and time to the forest of his birth.

He slid the last few meters down a steep talus of hard-packed black gravel to a flat plate of rock that slanted into the ground where the grass of the plain began. He got up and headed at a hard trot for the forest a half-kilometer away, intending to immerse himself in the lush jungle, in a familiar habitat like that where he had first known being. He felt a longing for it quite unlike anything he had ever felt before.

He was still ten meters from that cool solace when one of the black-winged aliens stepped with a short wobble from the concealment provided by the dense shrubbery.

“You are the one called SilverSide,” the alien said.

“True, I am SilverSide,” the robot replied.

He continued toward the black alien but slowed as the alien wobbled backward, staying between him and the forest.

“I am Neuronius,” the alien said. “I must talk with you, SilverSide.”

“I have already talked at length with your people, Neuronius, and now I must proceed into the forest to reflect on all that I have learned.”

“There is much more that I can teach you, SilverSide; much that would benefit you and your kind in their dealings with the Ceremyons.”

“I know too much now. I cannot absorb all that I have heard already. Would you have me even more at odds with myself?”

“But there is much more about the Ceremyons you need to know in order to properly serve Miss Ariel Welsh. Would you throwaway such an opportunity?”

The alien had wobbled back under the cover of the tall conifers as they talked, leading SilverSide along a path through the dense shrubbery. Now he stopped, still facing SilverSide, blocking his passage into the jungle.

“Let me pass,” SilverSide said. “I do not wish to harm a being that so much resembles the mighty Synapo.”

“Synapo is nothing, SilverSide. I can teach you the secret of the dome that separates space and time. Then when your Miss Ariel Welsh must deal with him, she can deal on equal terms. That secret can be a weapon as well as a tool.”

Confused as he was, with Synapo ordering him to serve Miss Ariel, it was as though Synapo himself were telling him to listen to Neuronius.

“I will listen a short while, then,” SilverSide said, “but then I must leave you.”

So they proceeded a little way farther along the path to a small clearing alongside a brook. Neuronius opened his wings, fluttered them as though to shake out uncomfortable creases, and then folded them to his sides again. He tottered over to the brook, sat down on a low flat rock lying half into the small stream, and dangled his feathery tail in the water.

“The secret of the dome is merely a matter of understanding space and time and their relationship to black concavities,” Neuronius said. “That relationship is best described in the terms of tensor analysis.”

SilverSide was already familiar with tensor mathematics, quantum mechanics, general relativity, and spacetime physics, which, although more sophisticated in their language and applications, were still the basic sciences developed by Schroedinger and Einstein.

Hyperjump and hyperwave technology were little more than tools that man had discovered quite accidentally and still did not really understand, any more than he understood what an electron was.

So now Neuronius led SilverSide along mathematical pathways dealing with space and time which, familiar at first, became rapidly unfamiliar and bizarre, and twisted his positronic thoughtways in patterns that became ever more uncomfortable.

With that discomfort he began to suspect that Neuronius—if he could twist SilverSide's mind to such a degree—was perhaps superior to Synapo. Certainly Neuronius was different, and maybe it was the difference of a superior mind. He continued to record what Neuronius was saying but stopped generation of associative memory links—stopped listening—in order to pursue that intriguing comparison of the two aliens. Finally he interrupted Neuronius in his lecture.

“What is a human, Neuronius?”

“What?”

“I have been searching for humans, the beings whose laws govern my behavior. I had thought that humans must be the most intelligent species in the galaxy, but Synapo says Miss Ariel is human, and that he is not, even though he is more intelligent than Miss Ariel.”

Neuronius hesitated. In the silence, the twitter of the jungle birds came to SilverSide, registering with sharp clarity a serenity and tranquillity that was strikingly at odds with the turmoil in his mind.

“I am human,” Neuronius said. “Synapo is not.”

Was there no peace in this life? Unquestionably Neuronius was more intelligent than Miss Ariel, and it seemed more and more apparent that Neuronius was indeed more intelligent than Synapo, yet Synapo was the leader of the Ceremyons. The logical question came immediately to mind.

“Where do you fit into the society of the Ceremyons?”

“I am not a Ceremyon,” Neuronius replied. “I may appear to be so, but I am not. I am far superior to any Ceremyon.”

“Are there others of your kind?”

“Not on this planet. This one is mine. The others each dominate a planet of their own.”

SilverSide was impressed. Yet there was something about Neuronius that bothered him—his wordiness, perhaps; Mandelbrot bothered him that way, but there it was a bother that need not concern him. Mandelbrot was merely a robot. But Neuronius was not a robot, and his words were exceedingly tantalizing, and yet disturbing, uneasily so. Mandelbrot had never made him feel uneasy.

If Neuronius were the only one of his kind on this planet, he had to be the most intelligent being here—if he were indeed more intelligent than Synapo. So he was back to that simple comparison. On balance, Neuronius appeared to be the more intelligent. He had delved far deeper into dome technology than Synapo had during his meeting with the mammals. Synapo had seemed to be withholding information, as though he were not altogether sure of what he was saying. Neuronius certainly did not give that impression. He seemed to be bursting with information. So much so that SilverSide's positronic potentials on the subject of domes were now a complete jumble.

His indecision was excruciating. He had to get the question resolved. He had thought it was resolved, and arriving at that point once again, after having been through it so many times, had been an unsettling experience that he had accepted finally with his imprint on Jacob Winterson. Now all that ordeal seemed to have gone for naught. But how was he to get it resolved?

“I must know who is the more intelligent, you or Synapo. Can you suggest how that can be determined?”

“I am not interested in your petty games, SilverSide. I am offering you knowledge that will allow you to serve whomever you please with greater efficiency. Surely you can see that.”

“But whom I am to serve must clearly be resolved before the service itself can take place. Surely, with your intelligence you can see that.”

“One can train for service quite efficiently without knowing who will ultimately be served.”

“But how one trains—what type of service should be stressed —depends on who will be served.”

That seemed clear to SilverSide, and if Neuronius couldn't understand something as simple as that, he could not be as intelligent as he had at first appeared.

“You are right, of course,” Neuronius said. “But I find it exceedingly distasteful and uncomfortable to promote myself at the expense of others. It makes me appear slow, I suppose. I have no desire to denigrate Synapo.

“You must have this question resolved, must you?” Neuronius said as a small green jet flamed momentarily in the air below his red eyes.

That was one piece of alien body language SilverSide had learned to read. It lent an air of great sincerity to the discomfort Neuronius claimed to feel.

“Yes,” SilverSide said.

“Then you must serve me. I am human, the only human on this planet and the most intelligent of the various species that exist here, and certainly more intelligent than Synapo.”

That must do for the moment. SilverSide could do nothing more immediately. He must try to accept what Neuronius had said, but the acceptance was not something that was going to come easily. He had come to many forks in the path of his quest for humans, and each time—at each crux—the resolution of the dilemma subjected him to more agony.

That conflict, repeated now, and his attempt to cope with it, sent little stabs of pain shooting through his positronic brain, little stabs that congealed into a ball of pure agony, and finally he could bear the pain no longer. He jumped up and fled down the path into the forest while Neuronius's shouts grew fainter and fainter.

Finally exhausted, after Neuronius was left far behind, he stopped. He had left the path and had been plunging through dense vegetation, ripping it out by the roots when it would not yield otherwise. He stood there, recharging his reserve pack. In the wild scramble, he had used all the output of his microfusion reactor and more, bleeding his reserves until he was forced to stop.

Then he slowly began to transform from one imprint to the next, trying to find peace of mind, going back from Jacob to Synapo to Wolruf to Derec and finally to KeenEye, to the form in which he had first known being and BeastTongue.

In the wolf-like KeenEye imprint, using only a fraction of the output from her reactor, she began loping easily through the forest, finding and following the animal trails that had been created by the natural denizens of Oyster World. She found a measure of peace in the pleasant natural scents left there by those very basic creatures, creatures much lower in the scale of life than LifeCrier, but still so like him in their familiar but dissimilar musky scent.

The night passed as she roamed aimlessly through the Forest of Repose.

Dawn found her at the edge of the forest below The Cliff of Time, back at the trail that led to the clearing where Neuronius had lectured her. The night had served to clarify one thing. She must talk to Synapo again before she could make a final judgment of the humanity of Neuronius.

She could find Synapo by radio, but the only tactful way to talk to him was on the wing. She could not ask him to come to her. He had left the clear impression he did not want to talk to her further. She must go back to the Synapo imprint in order to talk to him on his terms.

When SilverSide finished the transition to blackbody form, the sun was just rising over The Cliff of Time. There was a Ceremyon circling high over the dome in Synapo's accustomed station. SilverSide wobble-hopped into the air and climbed in a long, slanted rise, gaining the necessary altitude to reach the alien in the course of spanning the distance from The Cliff of Time.

When SilverSide arrived above the dome, the alien's hook was pointing aft, so he must be amenable to conversation.

With his hook also pointing aft, SilverSide quietly glided up beside the alien and said, “Leader Synapo, I need to resolve a matter of...”

“Sarco,” the alien said. “Synapo will arise late this morning.”

Talking to Sarco might be better than talking to Synapo. Sarco knew both Neuronius and Synapo and was a leader himself. Who better to judge between the two?

“I must get a matter of extreme urgency resolved, leader Sarco, a matter of understanding Synapo better so as to compare him with Neuronius—and properly place him in a hierarchy of intelligence relative to Neuronius—who claims to be the most intelligent creature on this planet.”

“Neuronius? By the Great Petero,” Sarco hissed, emitting a small green flame simultaneously.

“Neuronius says further that he is a human, and not a Ceremyon, that there are no others of his species on this planet.”

“I hesitate to term him a Ceremyon myself,” Sarco said, “but unfortunately he is—a paranoid Ceremyon suffering delusions of grandeur. He is certainly not more intelligent than Synapo, take my word for it. He wouldn't have been ejected from the Cerebron elite if he were.”

“He has been a member of Ceremyon society then?”

“Most certainly. Something we all regret now, but did little about at the time, because Neuronius was so insidiously clever. Cleverness, however, does not equate to wisdom and intelligence.”

“Thank you for your help. You have been of great assistance. I will take my leave now.”

SilverSide balled and dropped.

CHAPTER 21

REPRIEVE

They had posted Jacob and Mandelbrot on the balcony of the apartment to watch throughout the night for premature closing of the dome.

“This reminds me of another night before you came,” Jacob said to Mandelbrot. “I spent it much as we are destined to spend this night, but I did not have your company.”

“I trust nothing untoward happened that night,” Mandelbrot said.

“No. But that was the last night Miss Ariel spent under a dome that might imprison her inescapably. She spent the next night in the lorry, sleeping on the back seat. The next morning that first crisis with the aliens was resolved. “

“Let us hope this crisis will be similarly resolved with a pleasant ending. What are the chances of the wild one, do you think?”

“As you observed earlier, he is unpredictable,” Jacob said, “but I wished him a great deal of success for Miss Ariel's sake. It would seem that wish has gone astray. His return is long overdue.”

“I fear you are right,” Mandelbrot said. “Master Derec observed that the alien leaders returned in midafternoon to their normal stations, though that was not altogether clear to me, since one looks so much like another.”

They had all waited, sitting in the lorry outside the dome, watching for SilverSide's return.

A flock of the black aliens had returned from the direction they took when they flew off with him in their midst. But he was not with them on their return. That did not bode well for the safety of the wild one.

For Jacob, the night passed much as it had before, except that this time he had the company and the conversation of Mandelbrot: They had a short inconclusive exchange regarding the Laws of Humanics, and then they began a long investigative conversation, delving into the many ramifications of Jacob's new knowledge of hyperwave communication, the knowledge that there were two types of modulation, not just one: the old discrete type that they were all familiar with, and now this new continuous type, that they had deduced from the aliens' remarks, and which now explained Derec's mysterious internal monitor link with the supervisors of the robot cities. The technology for that link was developed by the erratic Dr. Avery, and understood only by him until Miss Ariel had pushed them into drawing parallels and connections with the two types of hyperspace travel: jump teleportation, which was related to discrete hyperwave modulation, and Key teleportation, which was related to continuous hyperwave modulation. In the course of the long night, they drew parallels and derived conclusions that they recorded by joint effort as a long and comprehensive dissertation for the robot city's archives, an exhaustive treatise that was intended to answer any and all questions on the subject.

It was a longer night for Ariel and Derec, a night they spent closeted in their bedroom to avoid exposing Wolruf to their disagreement. That friction had now escalated beyond the mild and not unusual interplay for dominance that characterizes the relationship of many pairs of lovers.

It started immediately after dinner, when Ariel had gone into the bedroom to get away from the rest of them. She was feeling intensely sorry for herself. Why was it so important that she pull off this effort at conciliation and cohabitation with a bunch of aliens, this attempt to save and incorporate into their galactic community a world she didn't give a dam about?

Was it merely a matter of pride, an attempt once again to prove her capacity for leadership? Derec had never insisted that his must always be the last word, the final and ultimate judgment on things that affected both of them and that they were both mutually responsible for.

Yet why did he always make her feel childish when she tried to establish her individuality in that regard? She had as much right to make decisions as he did, and frequently the decisions he made that were right, were right only because her advice kept him from going astray.

Certainly she knew more about controlling robots than he did. He might know more about what made them tick physically, but she knew far more about how to get the most out of them socially, even out of Mandelbrot, who Derec had created himself. Her upbringing on Aurora, surrounded by robotic servants, had given her experience in that regard, a natural dominance over robots that could never be achieved without that easy confidence one acquires in childhood when waited on hand and foot by robots. Strangely, Derec had not had that common upbringing.

One can become quite attached to them and even treat them like pets. The intelligence of some robots can make that attachment even stronger than that for an animal pet, particularly if the robot is one of the rare humaniform creations, the kind Aurorans were so leery of. Jacob was certainly more than a pet.

That thought sneaked up on her and startled her now when it came so consciously to mind. Before Derec had come to Oyster World, she had been feeling guilty about Jacob, about how obviously uncomfortable Derec had been in the company of that handsome robot on Aurora. Now she didn't feel guilty at all. Derec had more than overcome those odds with the robotic monster he had brought with him from the wolf planet. With all her skill in handling robots, she had no confidence at all that she could reliably control SilverSide.

And now he had caused an irreparable disruption of the tremendous rapport she had established with the Ceremyons, particularly with Synapo. Sarco had remained a small enigma, a sort of friendly enemy, as best she could judge. She sensed that it was not that he disliked her, but more that he could not treat her as anything but an alien. Well, she felt the same way about him, so that made them even. And now, with SilverSide's shenanigans, Sarco was indeed the enemy, she felt sure.

Derec walked into the bedroom at that moment, and that feeling for Sarco was transferred to Derec, except that in Derec's case the feeling was not nearly so mild. Derec was more an enemy lover, and one that she could not love now because he had become so much the enemy.

“Come on out, Ariel,” Derec said. “You've got no reason to punish Wolruf by pouting in here. Maybe you've got a case against me—and I'm not even sure of that—but you've got no reason at all to make her feel bad, too. She's probably more on your side than mine. After all, she's the one who bailed out your farm project.”

Ariel didn't say anything. She was sitting in the far corner of the room—burrowed into an overstuffed chair that resembled a bean bag more than a piece of furniture—and looking out a corner window, adjacent to the balcony, which overlooked Main Street. She could see Jacob and Mandelbrot standing at the end of the balcony, looking toward the opening in the dome.

“SilverSide may bring the Ceremyons around,” Derec continued, “but if he doesn't, we could be just as well off. We've probably got no business setting up shop on an inhabited planet. I've sort of felt that way ever since I arrived.”

Ariel still didn't see any need to respond and even less to respond to his last remark. He did have a minor point when it came to Wolruf. It was her expertise that would have made the robot farms practical, if SilverSide hadn't screwed up everything

“And anyway, the robot farm project is a dumb idea,” Derec added. “The city robots are just that, city robots. City planners and city builders. Trying to make farmers out of them is like trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.”

Now he was getting personal.

“You're forgetting they've already done it on a planet called Robot City,” Ariel said. “And you're such a great engineer you didn't know your own internal hardware was modulating hyperwave in continuous mode. You even thought your screwy father had invented some altogether new form of communication. Right, genius?!”

“You're likely wrong about that. What are the odds that a woman and a bunch of dumb robots are going to come up with anything the least way innovative?”

“That's it, isn't it? Because the robot farms are a woman's idea, it's a stupid idea. You are a male chauvinist pig, Derec Avery.”

“And you are a libertine tease, Ariel Welsh.”

“I suppose you're referring to Jacob. Getting down to the nitty gritty, getting really personal.”

“You weren't, I suppose.”

“What? Calling you a chauvinist pig?”

“What do you call it?”

“Stating facts.”

“And the hyperwave modulation. I suppose you call those facts, too, those aberrant mental peregrinations.”

She didn't let on that she didn't know what “peregrinations” meant.

“Continuous modulation is a fact, you ninny. And you don't need to take that from a silly woman. Ask any Ceremyon.”

“Darn, Ariel, why are we fighting like this? I just came in here to be nice. “

“Telling me how much I'm hurting Wolruf? That's nice?”

“It's the truth.”

“And you're going to be sure I know it's the truth, right? So you can hurt me a little more.”

“I didn't come in here to hurt you. Just to try to poke some sense into your thick head.”

“Those are nice pleasant words, too. Keep it up, Derec.”

“It's the truth, though. That's why I came in here.”

“How Wolruf feels isn't what's really bothering you, is it, Derec?”

“Oh? What would you suggest?”

“It's really Jacob, isn't it? You're jealous of a robot, aren't you?”

“I don't care if you love that freak machine. It's none of my affair.”

Ariel didn't say anything to rebut that last remark. She was a tease, and she wanted him to dwell on his last thought without being distracted.

“No,” Derec said after the space of a breath or two, “I do care because if it's true, you would be darn sick. And I do love you, Ariel, whether you want me to or not, whether you love a robot or not. So if it's true, I want to help you, and rather desperately.”

He walked into the adjoining personal and closed the door. It went on like that the rest of the night. They didn't get much sleep. Nor did they make up as they usually did when they had finally exhausted one another emotionally.

Derec slept on his side of the room, and Ariel slept on hers, but they didn't sleep much, keeping each other awake by tossing and turning, and generally flouncing around to enhance the other's anger.

Morning finally came. They ate an early breakfast in silence, and they all rode in the lorry to the opening in the dome well before the time when dome construction would normally start if it were going to take place.

It did not take place. Instead the two aliens Synapo and Sarco arrived in their usual dramatic fashion with a great show of black wings. Ariel, Derec, and Wolruf climbed down from the lorry to stand near the right front wheel and talk with the two Ceremyons.

“It is our turn to request an audience, Miss Ariel Welsh,” Synapo said, “for we have discovered that a misunderstanding exists between us. You should not be held responsible for the errant behavior of servant machinery—apparently not yours—trying to pursue its orders in the best way it knows how. I am referring, of course, to the servant you call SilverSide. The question is: Whose machinery is it and whence did it come? It came to our world aboard your vessel, Wolruf. At that time it had your form. Can you explain that?”

“No more than you can explain why it took your form,” Wolruf said. “Derec knows more about it than anyone else.”

“I first encountered it on another planet,” Derec said. “At that time it was the leader of a pack of intelligent lupine beings. They were attacking and interfering with Avery robots during their construction of a city much like the one you have enclosed with your weather node compensator. I made a sort of peace with it in order to study its physical nature and programmed behavior. I recognized at the time that that involved certain risks. I alone am responsible for any inconvenience the robot may have caused you. As you have recognized, its objectives are basically benign even though its behavior may at times seem erratic.”

“As you also recognize, by your own words, benign objectives can sometimes motivate evil doings, particularly when two aberrants interact. I must warn you all that we have an aberrant Cerebron on the wing, more irrational than your SilverSide, and the two have already begun to interact.

“You are familiar with the Cerebron, Neuronius, Miss Ariel Welsh. It was he who impetuously curtailed one of our earlier meetings. The Cerebrons in full caucus have now stripped him of all authority, something I could not do on my own during our meeting because of the rules that regulate our government. We Cerebrons can do little more at this time. Yet he is a danger to all of us, and his interaction with SilverSide, benign though it may seem to the robot, could create a very explosive situation.

“So you see, Derec, you feel responsible for SilverSide, and we feel responsible for Neuronius, but our feelings can do little at this time to correct a nasty situation created by your scientific interest and our governmental restrictions, which prevent both of us from neutralizing the agitators.

“But the primary purpose of this meeting is to inform you that the compensator will not be closed and you may proceed with cultivation of your plants and construction of your transportation terminal. “

“Thank you,” Ariel said. “We are grateful for your foresight and will proceed with those projects.”

“We have not seen SilverSide for almost a full day now,” Derec said. “Do you know where he is or what he's been doing?”

Sarco spoke now.

“He is exceedingly confused about who his master should be. Based on his own programming, Miss Ariel Welsh is his most likely master, and Synapo so instructed him yesterday afternoon at The Cliff of Time. He immediately began a transformation into the form of your robot Jacob Winterson, and was last seen that afternoon climbing down the rock face of the escarpment.

“Then early this morning he ascended to meet me in the form of a Ceremyon, as best he can manage, and as you know, that is a startlingly huge Ceremyon.

“It was then that we learned of his interaction with Neuronius, who had tried to pass himself off as the only human on the planet in order to win SilverSide's allegiance. I hope I was able to forestall that. I watched SilverSide descend to The Plain of Serenity and watched as he transformed to a being that looked from that distance somewhat like Wolruf, but probably twice her size. I last saw him entering The Forest of Repose in that form.”

“That would be his KeenEye imprint,” Derec said, “one of the lupine creatures he copied on that other planet. Thank you. At least we know he's still alive and hope he'll return. Thank you very much.”

The two Ceremyons turned then and took to the air.

Immediately after the meeting, in the short time that was left before lunch, Ariel, Derec, and Wolruf began planning the robot farm experiment, discussing in broad outline the revisions in the programming of the Avery robots that would be required, not only for the many different farms themselves, but also for the creation of the city's new terminal facilities that would be needed to support the farms.

SilverSide had not returned by the time they sat down to lunch. In spite of all the trouble he had caused her, Ariel felt inexplicably concerned about his welfare.

CHAPTER 22

THE EGG

Once again SilverSide was in turmoil. All was confusion. Who should he believe? He wished only to evade the dilemma. He metamorphosed, escaping back to the relative peace of his wolfish “childhood,” back to the days when LifeCrier had guided him into the life of the pack on the wolf planet.

Thus, midmorning found SilverSide imprinted on the wolflike female KeenEye, trotting along an animal trail far from the robot city. As she had the night before, she spent the late morning and early afternoon exploring the vast Forest of Repose, its trails, brooks, rivers, and lakes that lay within ten kilometers of the city.

Monitoring the field lines of Oyster World's natural magnetism kept her oriented during her aimless roving, so that as the morning waned, she began to zero in on the dome without dwelling on what she was going to do when she got there.

In the early afternoon, she came to the edge of the forest opposite the mirage-like transparency that concealed the robot city. She sat down on her haunches and stared at the dome with unseeing eyes, mulling over—as she had all morning—what Neuronius and then Sarco had told her.

She could not escape the essential validity of Sarco's assessment of Neuronius—a self-centered, paranoid psychopath—nor could she any longer ignore Synapo's directive to serve Miss Ariel and the feeling that that could best be done in the male imprint of Jacob Winterson, who was already serving Miss Ariel with apparently great efficiency and to her obvious satisfaction.

The Jacob imprint would help, but it was still not clear exactly how she could best serve Miss Ariel. The physics Neuronius had expounded had only confused her, offering information that conflicted with her earlier knowledge of space and time. He had not clarified the physics, but had instead muddied it and left SilverSide worse off than she had been before. The new information was useless, and worse than useless in the confusion it created about the physics she had once known.

As she sat there in the quiet heat of the afternoon studying the dome and trying to make sense of the aborted discussion with Neuronius, she gradually became aware of a faint humming off to her left, nearer the dome but deeper in the forest. When the sound finally broke through her reverie, she rose and trotted along an animal path that led in the general direction of the hum.

The path led past the hum, and when SilverSide recognized that she had passed the point of closest approach, she started through the vegetation, heading directly for the sound. Although the ground was covered in that area, the cover was not dense, and she had no difficulty weaving through the shrubbery. As the hum grew steadily louder, she almost ran into its source as she came around a tall bush covered with pink blossoms.

She recognized the source instantly. It was a two-meter sphere, just as hers had been, and the duodecahedral structure of the coarse silvery cells of its skin, dulled by the heat of passage through Oyster World's atmosphere, told her instantly it was an egg similar to her own.

It lay atop the crushed base of two bushes, framed by pink flowers, set in green foliage which, in close proximity to the foreign surface, was now seared and wilted by the heat the egg had exuded earlier. It was now almost cool to the touch, almost ready for hatching. And it came to her then what she must do.

She kept the KeenEye form to speed her dash through the thin shrubbery of the forest, but when she came to the plain, she began the transformation to the Jacob imprint, stopping only long enough to fashion the heavy muscular legs that would take her the three kilometers to the dome's opening in the shortest length of time. As she ran along the wall of the dome, she completed the transformation to the masculine Jacob form well before he reached the opening on the north side.

As SilverSide approached the opening, Wohler-9 called to him from a small runabout parked near the west edge.

“I get no response from you on the comlink, Jacob.”

“I am SilverSide,” he said as he hopped into the passenger seat. “Take me to Miss Ariel Welsh.”

Wohler-9 started the runabout, turned into the near southbound lane of Main Street, and proceeded rapidly down the street in the direction of the Compass Tower.

“I have instructions to take you to Master Derec at once, SilverSide. “

“Where is Miss Ariel?” SilverSide asked.

“At the apartment.”

“Good. Then we are proceeding in the right direction.”

“Yes. Master Derec is working at the mainframe, which is currently on the second underground level of the Compass Tower.”

When they came abreast of the apartment, SilverSide jumped out. Wohler-9 braked the runabout to a halt but remained seated.

“I must take you to Master Derec,” Wohler-9 called to SilverSide's back.

“Later,” SilverSide called over his shoulder as he ran into the building.

He took the stairs three at a time and burst into the apartment.

Ariel was sitting at the dining table reading a computer printout. The table was strewn with piles of computer output. Jacob was thumbing through the piles, apparently hunting for the next printout she would need.

SilverSide took in the scene, picked Ariel up, cradling her in his arms like a fragile baby, dashed out the door, down the stairs, and past Wohler-9, who was walking toward the apartment from the runabout.

Ariel had time to scream only once before she was deposited in the runabout. As she was being gently scooped up, she had screamed, “Jaaaacobbbb,” with a Doppler modulation that trailed off like the whistle of a passing train.

Jacob Winterson had responded with the millisecond speed characteristic of Dr. Han Fastolfe's humaniform robots. But that speed was no match for the microseconds it took for all of SilverSide's motions, save for the brisk but gentle acceleration when he had picked up Ariel and started toward the door.

He and Ariel were speeding away from the apartment building in the runabout as Jacob came pounding out of the apartment past Wohler-9.

Ariel's first scream had ended as she was being deposited in the runabout. Her next scream was delivered in the interrogative mode as they pulled away from the apartment.

“What are you doing?” she shrieked with an intensity that rattled SilverSide's auricular diaphragms—akin to eardrums.

“There was no time to explain, Miss Ariel,” SilverSide shouted about the wind noise. “I need your presence urgently.”

Jacob raced after them down Main Street but was soon left behind as SilverSide accelerated the small runabout to its maximum speed, weaving in and out of the traffic and avoiding an accident by the adeptness of the city central computer.

“Stop, you maniac,” Ariel screamed. “Stop now.”

SilverSide slowed the runabout noticeably and then promptly speeded up again. Consideration of his new knowledge of the Law of Humanics—humans were compelled to please themselves—overrode his own Second Law output—robots must obey human orders. He knew when Ariel had finally considered all the facts—after the fact—she would be pleased and would approve what he was doing.

“You are in no danger, Miss Ariel, but I cannot obey that order because of the overriding nature of the present situation which demands your presence at the birthing of...of...” and he added lamely, still shouting, “Of what I cannot be sure.” And the shout died away as he said, “I can only hope.”

Then Ariel, sobbing and screaming incoherently, beat on him with her hands clenched into small hard fists, beat on his shoulder first, and then finally, in desperation, beat on his head. But he felt nothing in the intensity of his purpose.

“You must stop that, Miss Ariel,” he shouted. “You will hurt yourself. “

And the calm way he shouted that above the sound of the rushing air and the obvious lack of effect her effort was having, must have calmed her, for she finally stopped and slumped down on the seat, seemingly exhausted, her hysteria spent.

They emerged from the opening, and SilverSide skidded the runabout in a sharp left turn to take them down the side of the dome.

“You must understand what is taking place,” he shouted. “It is very important to me, to the new foundling, even to you, Miss Ariel, for I wish her to serve you well.”

Ariel said nothing. She sat beside him like a limp doll.

“Another like me is being born. The egg lies in the forest even now, ready to hatch. She must have a proper model, a human female, so that she does not come into being confused, her imprint misguided as mine was. You must be there to guide her into this strange world. Do you understand what I am saying, Miss Ariel?”

Ariel still said nothing, but she had straightened a little in the seat, perhaps because to slump in the bouncing runabout was more uncomfortable than to sit up straight.

“You will not be harmed, Miss Ariel. After it's allover, when you think back on it, you will be glad you came. I know you will. You will be pleased with me. The Law of Humanics will guide you.”

That seemed to comfort SilverSide. The Law of Humanics was working on the effect of his own Laws, regulating their relative potential to something that was less uncomfortable. He was doing something that he knew was going to please Ariel even though she was, perhaps, not pleased at the moment.

When they arrived at the forest, he braked to a halt, jumped out, and opened the door for Ariel. She got out calmly. She must have thought about what he had been shouting at her, for she didn't object when he gently took her hand to help her from the car.

That gave him confidence that she would follow him without being forced, and he let go of her hand and started into the woods. She stayed close behind him for the short, hurried walk it took to reach the egg.

SilverSide guided Ariel gently until she stood two meters from the egg, directly in front of the hatch, and then he left her there and hid behind the pink-flowered bush behind her.

The hatch began to open with a soft grinding sound.

SilverSide could look through the lower branches of the tall bush, past Ariel's right side, and see the hatch himself.

A silvery-gray, amorphous mass heaved itself above the bottom of the hatch and formed, in that part of its mass that hung over the edge of the opening, a shiny, multifaceted, grayish-green orb that it rotated slowly around—much like an eye rotating in its socket—as though it were surveying the entire landscape. The inspection narrowed then, and starting at Ariel's feet, the orb slowly scanned up until it was gazing at her head.

With that inspection completed, the blob elongated and pulled itself through the hatch as though it were one large muscle, like the foot of a huge snail. It slithered out of the hatch, coming to rest on the ground in front of Ariel like a thick pancake with the orb still intact in the center.

The facets of the orb slowly disappeared, absorbed into a grayish-green ring surrounding a black pupil, while the bulk of the orb turned white. A spherical mass the size of a small bowling ball began to rise from the pancake, lifting the eye—for it was clearly that now—and a second eye took shape, forming the first aspects of a face.

Slowly then, head, shoulders, arms, breast-mounded chest, hips and buttocks and legs, all reared up out of the puddle until there was no puddle left—the last sucked up into a pair of shapely ankles and feet—and a silvery likeness of Ariel stood before Ariel.

SilverSide stepped from behind the bush then and silently inspected the new arrival. Ariel had stood transfixed, mute and motionless, during the whole process.

Now SilverSide spoke up, proudly, christening this delightful new creation.

“You are the female, Eve SilverSide.”

After allowing a moment for that to sink in to both Ariel and Eve, he spoke again, triumphantly, feeling as though he had found his true identity at last.

“And I am the male, Adam SilverSide.”

They stood like that, no one saying anything, and then the sound of Jacob's voice came to them and the sound of feet pounding the ground.

“Miss Ariel, where are you?”

And then the pounding stopped, and they could hear him thrashing through the shrubbery.

“Miss Ariel,” he kept calling, coming closer and closer.

“Here, Jacob,” Ariel called.

CHAPTER 23

A FINAL IMPRINT

After the excitement of Eve's birth and the brief period it took for Eve to become properly functional and subservient to Ariel under Adam's guidance, everything seemed to fall into place except for the uncertainty of how that enigmatic event could have taken place. To discover Adam SilverSide on an alien planet was certainly unexpected, an inexplicable robot on an inexplicable planet. But to personally midwife the birth of another of the creatures was something altogether different; it raised so many questions, with the degree of involvement of the erratic Dr. Avery heading the list.

When they finally put those unanswerable questions behind them and turned instead to the creative work that confronted them, they found that the task, though difficult, was not as difficult as they had supposed it to be. The farm programming that was used on the planet Robot City was intact in Pearl City's computer files, ready for use should the need arise.

What Ariel had merely fantasized and hoped was a capacity for leadership proved in reality to be a genuine ability to lead. And what was even more amazing, Derec readily relinquished his nominal authority and bowed to her decisions in the construction of the farms and their associated terminal facilities.

Initially, one of Ariel's first decisions did not have the wholehearted endorsement of either Derec or Wolruf, although they later conceded that she was right. They all agreed that they needed an eighth supervisor robot to oversee the planetwide farm operation. But neither Derec nor Wolruf agreed initially with the form Ariel specified for the supervisor—adamantly—nor with the name she chose for that robot: Wheeler. To them it made no sense to name a farmer after the twentieth century spacetime physicist John Archibald Wheeler. To her it made perfect sense, for both were as close to nature as a being can get: the farmer in a concrete, practical sense, the physicist in an abstract, symbolic sense. (She had been studying spacetime physics, trying to understand the node compensator. Her mind at that time was much filled with the heroic personalities of physics.)

And in her mind, Wheeler's name described his nomadic lifestyle that took him wheeling far and wide over the surface of the planet in pursuit of his supervisory function, for she insisted that he have the form of a Ceremyon. Wolruf and Derec later conceded that perhaps that was the proper form—because it harmonized with the job and the world so beautifully—but it was difficult at first for them to think of a supervisor in any but humanoid shape.

She made Wheeler smaller than a Ceremyon—so as not to intimidate the aliens—but far larger than any of the other native flyers, so that the Ceremyons would not mistake him, at a distance, for a natural denizen of their world. She insisted, too, that his robotic laws recognize Ceremyons with all the weight ordinarily reserved for humans, and that Derec revise the programming of the other supervisors to defer to Wheeler in matters dealing with Oyster World and the Ceremyons.

The problem of seeds had been worrying Ariel almost from the time she had first hit on the idea of a farm world, but she found that there had been no need to worry. Seeds for a variety of crops to match the farm programs had been carried during the initial migration to Oyster World and were stored in labeled bins that were indexed in the programs. There was no need to get seeds from Aurora.

With Wolruf's advice—to make the overall mosaic of the farm operation as benign as possible, weather-wise—they interspersed the truck gardens and orchards among the fields of wheat, oats, barley, and several other grains, and among large fields of cotton, a commodity that had never been matched for all-around adaptation to the human dermal ecology. And to minimize the upset to the planet's ecology, she further advised that they leave, interspersed among their new plants, an equal stand of the natural grass that had covered the plain when they first arrived.

In that first experiment, they decided to limit themselves to plant products. The production of wool, milk, and meat and animal husbandry in general, seemed less harmonious with robotic labor than the cultivation of nonsentient plant life.

Irrigation—the dirt farmer's primary worry—was not a problem on Oyster World. Regulated rainfall was an integral part of the Ceremyons' weather control system. They had recognized the need of the natural vegetation long before they met humans.

The terminal facilities were built above the Main Street access and were patterned after those on Aurora, modified to fit the special conditions demanded by the configuration of the opening in the dome. All vessels arrived and departed from an array of oval openings that included configurations suitable for all designs of shuttle and small cargo vessels then known, interstellar and otherwise. The large interstellar transports would be serviced in orbit by smaller shuttles that could fit through the dome's opening.

During this exhilarating period of leadership, Ariel experienced only one apprehension and one disturbance worth recording.

The apprehension had to do with Neuronius and Synapo's warning. It was one thing to deal with insane humans. It was another thing, a good bit more unsettling, to have an irrational alien floating around overhead, toting compressed hydrogen in close proximity to compressed oxygen. Neither she nor Derec had been able to get anything out of Adam SilverSide concerning what had happened between him and Neuronius. He had pleaded Third Law interference with the Second Law imperative whenever they tried. They did not insist, for fear what he called “interference” might be more seriously harmful to his positronic stability; why else would he have claimed interference at all? She resolved to have Eve work on him when it seemed propitious.

The disturbance was of a fairly major nature, not so much from its intensity as from its low grade, continual irritation—her irritation with Adam SilverSide.

That finally came to a head on a day when things had not gone well and little irritations had mounted into raw abrasions. She and Derec—trying to bring some tranquility into the day—were chatting quietly in midevening after dinner, just the two of them on the balcony again. It was where they went to escape, inconsiderately leaving Wolruf in the company of the four robots.

After awhile they had lapsed into silence, and Ariel's thoughts returned to Adam SilverSide. She had given him two sets of Jacob's clothes, distinctive sets that let her quickly identify him as Adam and not Jacob.

She supposed she knew now what Jacob looked like under his clothes, for Adam SilverSide, with visual records of Jacob and library records of humans, had carried his imprint to very fine detail indeed. And she had observed the details of that imprint the day of Eve's birth, when Adam had come charging into the apartment naked and carried her away.

Ariel broke the silence.

“Was Adam's imprint on you less realistic than his current imprint on Jacob?” she asked Derec.

“Yes. More or less the same as Eve's imprint on you,” Derec said.

Eve would never need clothes. Though an Ariel imprint, she was not fashioned with the fine attention to detail Adam had used with Jacob. Eve was merely a silvery organometallic robot.

“How would he react, do you think, if I asked him to go back to that one?”

“You'd no longer be Miss Ariel, for one thing. It would probably be Master Derec again.”

“Eve and Jacob are quite enough. But how would he behave? Would he be the wild one again?”

“I don't really know. He's certainly been steady these past few weeks. If it weren't for his quiet air of superiority—a condition of his muscles, I believe—I'd say he's achieved a state of agreeable servitude.”

“It's the muscles that bother me—no, not just the muscles, his whole appearance.”

“Reminds you too much of Jacob?”

“Yes, but more the fact that he is otherwise so little like Jacob. It's the contrast that irritates me. Do you mind if I ask him to imprint back on you?”

“No. It would be another interesting experiment in robotics.”

“No better time than now, then.”

She got up and went inside. Mandelbrot and Jacob were in the two niches. Adam and Eve were standing rigidly by the door, one to each side. Wolruf was curled up on the couch, watching a taped hyperwave drama.

Ariel had expected Derec to come in with her. She could have used his moral support on this one, but she was too proud to ask.

She walked over to Adam.

“Would it upset your positronics greatly if I asked you to return to an earlier imprint: the looser, less detailed one you did on Derec?”

“I am not giving satisfactory service, Miss Ariel?”

“The service is great, Adam. I wouldn't want your behavior in that regard to change, not in quality at least.”

“But then I would be serving Master Derec. Would that not be a drastic change in the quality of my service?”

“A change in direction, Adam, and a change I will regret, but it should not cause a change in the quality of your service. I would expect that to remain at the same high level I have enjoyed. In fact, if you could continue to serve me directly, I would find that most gratifying.”

“That would not be logical, Miss Ariel.” His tone was best described as haughty.

“I was afraid that would be the case.”

“In that light, do you still wish me to make such a change?”

“Yes. I think it would be best, Adam,” she said, “but would you do so in the bedroom. I find the process unsettling.”

“Perhaps for good reason, Miss Ariel.”

“Possibly, Adam. But there is little I can do about that.”

She rejoined Derec on the balcony as Adam went into the bedroom.

“Sorry,” Derec said. “I didn't see how my presence was going to make that any easier for either of you.”

“I suppose,” Ariel said. “But you better hope he's not the wild one again.”

CHAPTER 24

THE RUSTICATION OF ADAM SILVERSIDE

After his final imprint on Derec, Adam SilverSide started taking long walks in the forest near the dome. He now had the lean muscular appearance of a silvery Derec without the clothes and the fine detail. His allegiance to Derec was weak. Derec must have recognized that, for he seldom gave Adam a direct order, never used him as a servant as Ariel tried to use Eve SilverSide —with only modest success—and never expected him to account for his whereabouts.

The walks in the forest brought to Adam a peace and serenity he felt nowhere else. He was comfortable with his Derec imprint, and with Derec himself, so long as Derec did not overdo his master role, but Adam was basically uncomfortable in the city and just as uncomfortable around the Avery robots as he was around Mandelbrot.

Derec never questioned his roaming around in the forest. For a while he did send a witness robot to watch him, but Adam always quickly eluded the witness by dropping to all fours and running along the low-canopied animal trails as though he were in his Wolruf imprint.

It was on one of his nature walks that an idea struck him of how he, too, might contribute to the robot farm project. He had come to the edge of the forest a kilometer or so away from the dome and had stood there in the shade of a large palm-like tree, watching a herd of wooly ruminants, the size of small llamas, as they munched the grass of the plain.

He christened them “minillamas” for want of a better name. They were quite tame. The animals of Oyster World were all vegetarians. These animals had no natural enemies except for parasitic insects that burrowed into their skin under the protection afforded by the dense wool.

The idea developed quickly. The next morning at sunup, Adam commandeered a small empty cargo robot, stepped aboard, and directed it to the city's small-tool crib where he requisitioned a laser saw, a hatchet, a shovel, a claw hammer, a bag of six-centimeter iron nails, six coils of rope in fifty-meter coils, an augered post-hole digger, an earth tamper, a microfusion-powered (MP) motor—for driving the digger and the tamper—another general purpose MP motor, a photo-sensitive switch and small MP lamp, and a pair of shears.

As the cargo robot with Adam and his supplies passed the apartment on Main Street, Eve SilverSide, standing on the sidewalk, hailed him to the curb.

“What are you up to?” she asked.

“A secret farm project,” Adam said.

“Why secret?”

“If it doesn't work, I won't have to explain that it didn't work,” Adam replied. “Want to come along?”

“Sure.”

Adam unlatched, and was going to let down, a small ramp formed from a hinged section of the meter-high sidewall of the cargo space, but just as he unlatched it, Eve belly-rolled over the wall.

“And what are you up to?” Adam asked as he latched the ramp back in place.

“Looking for you.”

Adam directed the cargo robot back into the Main Street traffic and then said, “You found me. Now what?”

“Whipping down the street in a cargo robot isn't the best place for a quiet conversation.”

“It's not likely to get much better this morning.”

“I'll take my chances. It can hardly get worse.”

“How did you get away from Miss Ariel?” Adam asked. “I'm here in her service.”

“Oh?”

Neither said anything more until they had left the city, crossed the plain, and were at the edge of the forest near where SilverSide had watched the minillamas the day before. The herd was now grazing farther out on the plain. He directed the cargo robot to park beside the entrance of a well-worn trail the minillamas had made through the forest to a small brook and then he led Eve SilverSide to that quiet place.

Adam had brought along the photo-sensitive switch, the MP lamp, and one of the MP motors. He sat down on a large rock beside the brook, placed the electrical parts on the ground in front of him, and began to wire them together with the long electrical leads that were attached to each.

“Now what has Miss Ariel got you up to this morning?” Adam asked as he began hooking the parts together.

“Neuronius,” Eve said. “What was the nature of your dealings with Neuronius?”

“That's a private matter, Eve. Both Miss Ariel and Master Derec recognized that and waived the Second Law when I claimed hardship under the Third Law.”

“Can't you tell me? I'm a robot. I can sympathize more closely with you than they can. Miss Ariel thinks you may have suffered positronic trauma which needs airing to be properly cleared away.”

“It doesn't need airing, and something like that doesn't need clearing away if it is viewed and contained in an orderly manner. I have succeeded in doing that.”

“How can you be sure? You can be no more objective in that regard than a human suffering psychological trauma.”

“The human brain and the positronic brain work on completely different principles. It's futile to try to draw analogies between them.”

“Is it, now!”

“Yes. You have no more basis for comparing the two than I do.”

“If that's so, why are you so secretive about it? That seems to take on a certain psychological twist.”

“Well, it doesn't. It's merely a positronic twist which humans aren't capable of understanding.”

“But I should be?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I'm not!”

“This isn't getting anywhere.” Adam stood up. “I've got to get on with my project.”

He picked up the wired parts and strode away down the path.

Eve emerged from the forest as he walked down the ramp of the cargo robot with the laser saw swinging from one hand. She followed him into the forest and watched as he cut through the ten-centimeter bole of a tall, slender hardwood species that seemed to thrive in the dense shade of the predominately conifer canopy.

“Get the hatchet,” he requested after the tree fell.

When she returned, he was cutting off the large branches.

“Trim off the small branches,” he said. “I'll take the big ones.”

They worked together silently, cutting down and trimming the slender hardwoods, spacing their selections throughout the forest so as to minimize the effect in anyone area, and dragging the long slender logs to a pile they created on the plain near the cargo robot.

When they had delivered the last log to the pile, Eve sat down on the ramp of the cargo robot.

“You'll not tell me then about your interaction with Neuronius?” she said, making it more a statement than a question.

“No,” Adam replied.

“I'll have to talk to Neuronius then.”

“That would be a bad idea, Eve.”

“You and Miss Ariel agree on that, at least.”

“For good reason. She's given you some idea what Neuronius is like then?”

“The viewpoint of the other Ceremyons. They're naturally prejudiced. Hardly an objective assessment. Since you won't talk to me about your experience, I'll have to get it from Neuronius himself.”

If she thought that was going to pressure him into discussing a painful experience that he had successfully put in a can, she was wrong. That was not something he was going to talk about.

“I guess you will, but I'm telling you again, it's a bad idea, which you'll regret.”

He had been attaching the motor to the post-hole digger while they talked. Now he began digging post-holes four meters apart in a large rectangle that enclosed several paths trodden through the grass by the minillamas, which all converged on the entrance of the forest path to the brook.

While he worked, he listened to Eve contact Neuronius by radio. Adam had taught her the Ceremyon language and the calling codes that identified and solicited responses from Synapo and Sarco. He had not told her about Neuronius, and so had given her no radio identification for him. However, he had explained the way a general hailing channel worked on their frequency-modulated band, and that was what she used now to quickly establish communication with Neuronius.

The Cerebron agreed to meet with her at noon at the base of The Cliff of Time, where it intersected The Forest of Repose and The Plain of Serenity. She set off at a leisurely jog in the direction of The Cliff of Time.

That was going to be an interesting learning experience for Eve, but hardly a dangerous one. Adam did not think she was as mixed up about humans as he had been. He had started her out right with Ariel as an imprint. Neuronius's warped ideas were not likely to have the effect on her that they had had on him. His only regret was that Eve would now likely hear how Neuronius had momentarily deluded him. It was not something Adam remembered with serenity.

CHAPTER 25

NEURONIUS STRIKES AGAIN

Eve arrived at the escarpment well before noon. She sat down on a plate of granite that angled into the ground below a dammed talus of black gravel, and braced herself from sliding by digging her heels into the soft turf where the stone disappeared into the grass.

She arrived early to give herself time to think about Miss Ariel's strange request—that she probe Adam for information about Neuronius—and to ponder Adam's equally strange reluctance to talk about his experience with Neuronius. It was all quite fascinating to someone with as little experience as Eve. She had a good education—Adam had led her along the electronic pathways through the city library—but she thirsted for the real-life experiences that lay behind all that academic lore.

She was going to get it that morning, for Neuronius arrived early also, giving her little time to ruminate on the words of Adam and Miss Ariel.

He came in with that black engulfing swoop and stall that—according to Adam—the Ceremyons used to intimidate alien visitors to their planet. It certainly impressed the experience-thirsty Eve. She drank it up, exhilarating in a feeling of surprise in spite of Adam's forewarning, a surprise that would likely have been fear in Miss Ariel's case. The Ceremyons were indeed quite impressive seen close at hand.

She got to her feet as he folded his wings.

“I am Neuronius,” the alien said haughtily. “You are Eve?”

“Yes,” Eve replied.

“What purpose is served by our meeting this morning?”

“What was the nature of your conversations with Adam SilverSide?”

“The man-like robot who can mold silver wings out of his own substance?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you should talk to him.”

“I'd like to hear it from your viewpoint.”

“Is he man-like or wing-like now?”

“Man-like.”

That adjective gave some confusion. She presumed without thinking that he meant Adam's current form: his Derec imprint. Her mind was on other things, of course, and did not consider the possibility that Neuronius was referring to Adam's Jacob Winterson imprint.

“And what is it you would like to know, Eve?”

“What you told him. What is it he's so reluctant to discuss?”

“Ah, he's reluctant to talk about our conversation, is he? That is encouraging. I did get through to him then. I am confident he will ultimately embrace that truth and wisdom.”

“And what is that truth and wisdom?”

“Are you familiar with his governing laws, the Laws of Robotics?”

“Yes. I, too, am governed by them.”

“Ah so.”

He said that in a peculiar way, but with her limited experience, she didn't know why it seemed peculiar, and so it lingered in that uneasy state only momentarily, until he spoke again, and then that uneasiness was swept from her mind.

“He didn't tell you then that I am the only human on this planet?”

Eve had not had to go through all the turmoil and travail that Adam had suffered in his search for humanity. She had taken for granted that Ariel was human. Adam had not said otherwise. For the first time she experienced some of his confusion. In a way it was more agonizing than his trauma in that it was acute and pierced deeper into her being than had the chronic uncertainty Adam had lived with for so long. And piercing so deeply and so unexpectedly, it exerted a great deal more force and weighed in with a great deal of authority.

So she concluded instantly, with no sifting and sorting and assessing of the facts, that Adam had misled her. No wonder he was so secretive, so reluctant to discuss Neuronius. No wonder Ariel was concerned about Neuronius. In her mind, Eve had already dropped the “Miss.”

“Why did Adam lie to me?” she asked, thinking out loud more than addressing Neuronius.

“It served his evil purpose and that of the other aliens,” Neuronius said.

And that, too, was true, she knew. Against her inclination toward independence, it had bonded her to Ariel, and just that morning, it had inclined her to help Adam in some absurd secret scheme related to Ariel's plan to turn this world into a giant robot farm. She could see now how it must be evil.

She began a transformation to simulate Neuronius, as Adam had simulated Synapo. She expected some reaction from Neuronius, but he said nothing, merely watched her quietly, and she took that for approval.

She was faced with the same aerodynamic problems Adam had encountered and overcame them and the other simulation requirements just as Adam had. Being less familiar with the Ceremyons and unaware of some of their capabilities, she left out a few characteristics that Adam had simulated, but all told, it was a workmanlike effort.

When she finished, she spread her wings tentatively. Like Adam in that imprint, she was twice the size of a Ceremyon. Unlike Adam, she retained the basic female gender of her first imprint, which had been reinforced by Adam's attraction to her femininity. Adam's first female imprint on KeenEye, weakened by the hostility of KeenEye herself, had been erased by Derec's personality. But that male gender, though preferred, came second and could be confused by later imprints.

“Watch me now,” Neuronius said. “follow me, and do as I do.”

And Eve did. She watched Neuronius take off, and then she, too, wobble-hopped into the air, flapping, almost losing it, flapping harder, and finally gaining altitude. As she got the feel of the air and her relationship to it, she stopped floundering quite so much, the beat became smoother and less strenuous, and soon she and Neuronius were high above the escarpment.

Neuronius leveled off, taking up a circular flight pattern, and Eve fell into place beside him, matching his wing movements stroke for stroke, so that the two were soon idling side by side, effortlessly.

“How may I serve you, Master?” Eve asked.

“If all else fails, you must personally destroy the Cerebron leader, Synapo,” Neuronius said.

“Destroy Synapo? I am programmed to preserve organic life. I can do otherwise only if the act of preservation would conflict with my Robotic Laws.”

“That is the case. It comes down to a matter of Synapo's life or mine. Synapo is not human. I am.

“But first, there is another way,” Neuronius added without pausing, “a more indirect and less violent way. Your personal involvement with Synapo is only a last resort, only if Miss Ariel Welsh cannot handle Synapo herself, after we provide her with the powerful and lethal knowledge I tried to give SilverSide, the wisdom that allows the Myostrians to construct weather node compensators. “

“You taught that to Adam?” Eve said. “And now you are going to teach me, too?” She had been right to come to Neuronius. This was going to be a truly exciting experience.

“No. This time I cannot take time for that. I must pass the knowledge directly to Miss Ariel Welsh. You must arrange that meeting.”

Slight though it was, and very faint—deep down in the nethermost parts of her positronic brain—that disappointment with Neuronius was something not easily dismissed. But at the time it was overshadowed by the thrill of being involved in exciting and world-shaking events. She planned to acquire the knowledge anyway by listening while Neuronius instructed Ariel. “When?” Eve asked.

“Now,” Neuronius said. “As soon as you can arrange it. I'll be waiting among the trees where The Forest of Repose meets the node compensator. Bring Miss Ariel Welsh there.”

“Very well, Master.”

Eve started a long shallow glide to the dome but decided that a small detour would not significantly delay the primary mission.

CHAPTER 26

THE FURTHER RUSTICATION OF ADAM S.

Adam dug postholes in the prairie grass, and with the long slender logs he had cut, he constructed a fence that enclosed a rectangular corral roughly 20 by 50 meters. The entrance to the brook path was centered in the long side that bordered the forest. The three minillama trails leading across the prairie to the brook passed through manual gates in the outer sides of the corral.

Along the forest side at the end away from the dome he placed another row of posts to form a meter-wide exit chute from the brook, so the minillamas could exit the forest path without going through the corral. The fence on the forest side of the chute kept the beasts from creating an easy, short bypass to the old path.

At the entrance to the brook path, he placed two gates: one automatic, the other manual. The automatic gate connected the brook path to the exit chute and acted like a check valve, allowing beasts to exit the brook path, but preventing loose beasts from the prairie from coming through the chute to the brook. The gate was actuated by breaking a light beam across the brook path that activated a microfusion motor, driving the gate so that it opened into the chute, forcing back any minillamas waiting in the chute outside, while letting out the beast leaving the brook.

The other gate closed off the exit from the narrow shearing chute that was formed along the woodside fence opposite the exit chute by a short parallel fence with a manual entrance gate. Another short length of fence angled into the corral from the chute at 45° to form an entrance funnel.

He turned on the lamp and photodetector that would activate the motor on the check-valve gate, closed the gates at both ends of the shearing chute, loaded all his tools and leftover supplies into the cargo robot, and directed it, in turn, to each of the three outside entrance gates, which he opened. He wound up parking the cargo robot outside the entrance gate nearest the dome.

He was ready for business. The thirst of the mini llamas should draw the beasts into the corral. There was nothing to do but wait.

He let down the cargo ramp and sat down, then lay back supine so he could watch the Ceremyons circling in the blue sky far overhead. He remembered then that last flight he had taken to talk to Synapo, when he had found Sarco instead. During none of his flights—neither on this planet, or earlier, on the wolf planet —had he considered the experience of flying itself. At the time his mind was far too busy with other disturbing thoughts. Now he looked back to those flights and realized that the act of flying had been an exceedingly enjoyable experience. Watching the Ceremyons far above, he relived those moments, recapturing the pleasure he had unconsciously stored away without really savoring and appreciating it at the time.

Until it got quite close, he failed to notice the large Ceremyon shape coming directly at him on a long glide path from the direction of The Cliff of Time. Its dull silvery color blended into the grayish-blue sky, and because of its lack of motion in bearing and elevation, the beast was almost invisible until it was nearly upon him. Then it came at him with a rush, flared its wings, lost momentum and stalled, but did so almost two meters too high, so that it fell to the ground only a couple of meters away with a decided impact, wings outspread. The momentum of its low center of gravity had swung its body forward, pivoting around the shoulders, so that it fell flat on its back. Adam couldn't help but recall his similar experience in testing the Ceremyon wings for the first time, when he had glided from the lorry, dragged his toes, and fallen on his face.

From the size and the color he knew at once that it was Eve. He had risen to a sitting position when he had detected the moving object. Now, while Adam watched quietly, Eve transformed back to the Ariel imprint, lying on the ground, as though the robot didn't want to risk the awkward indignity of trying to stand while still imprinted on the Ceremyon. With the metamorphosis complete, she stood, quickly and with a delicacy and grace that contrasted sharply with her harsh words.

“You misled me, Adam SilverSide.”

“How so?” Adam asked

“Ariel is not human. Neither is Derec. You knew, yet you didn't tell me that Neuronius is the only human here. He is my Master. You and Mandelbrot and the Avery robots are alien to me. Your Laws are obviously not my Laws. Something compels you to serve non-humans in spite of Neuronius and the wisdom he tried to pass on to you.”

She talked so fast Adam didn't get a chance to interrupt. And then she wheeled abruptly and ran rapidly in the direction of the dome. Although disturbed, she didn't seem violently so. She didn't seem dangerous, even though she had clearly responded to the insidious persuasion of Neuronius. Adam would have liked to have had a chance to counter that poison. Still, Ariel could probably do a better job than he, and with more authority. After all, it was Ariel who had pushed Eve in the direction of Neuronius in the first place, albeit unwittingly.

Adam sat there watching her progress toward the dome, waiting patiently for his experiment to reach its climax, when the minillamas would start entering his corral.

It was some time later, after he resumed his supine position and his observation of the soaring Ceremyons, that he heard the muffled explosion. He rose up just as a flaming, cartwheeling object landed in the grass midway between him and the activity near the dome, where the explosion had taken place.

He jumped up, raised and secured the ramp, and directed the cargo robot to the location where the object had landed.

CHAPTER 27

NEURONIUS STRIKES OUT

When Eve SilverSide found her, Ariel was sitting at the computer terminal in the apartment examining Wolruf's latest report on the final steps needed to put the last of the robot farms in operation.

“I have carried out your wishes, Ariel,” Eve said.

The missing title, the lack of polite address, caught Ariel's attention and alerted her to possible trouble ahead. She turned around to face Eve.

Eve continued, “I talked to Adam, but he was quite uncooperative, no help at all.”

“You did what I asked,” Ariel said. “I was hoping you would succeed where Derec and I failed. But actually I had small hope that you could get anything out of him. Not when he pleaded Third Law considerations. Don't feel bad.”

“But I did succeed. I found out what Master Neuronius told him, all the things they talked about.”

“I don't understand.”

“I talked to Master Neuronius himself.”

“Neuronius?”

Ariel began to feel apprehensive, sensing impending calamity, feeling very much alone. Mandelbrot was with Derec. She had sent Jacob to the locker in the basement for a fresh box of positronic data storage cubes. Personal robots were never around when you really needed them.

“Yes, Master Neuronius,” Eve replied. “He tried to teach Adam the science behind the compensator domes, but failed. He will succeed with me, though.”

“Ah, then he hasn't taught you yet?”

“No. Not yet. But I will learn when he teaches you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. I will learn by listening to your conversation.”

Ariel seriously considered the idea, briefly, but only for a moment. Talk about upstaging Derec. That would put her hyperwave modulation coup in the deep shade. But she would not likely understand the technology even if she had the opportunity. She hadn't understood even the idea when Synapo and Sarco had tried to summarize the dome construction for Derec. And to get involved with Neuronius after Synapo's warning would be sheer idiocy.

“Not likely,” Ariel said. “And you should stay away from Neuronius. He is exceedingly dangerous.”

“You must come with me now, Ariel. Master Neuronius is waiting in the forest.”

“Don't be silly. I have no intention of going with you, nor of meeting with an insane Ceremyon.”

“Why do you say damaging things like that? Master Neuronius does not deprecate you in that fashion. Instead, he has a great deal of faith in you; otherwise he wouldn't be willing to help you in your struggle with Synapo.”

“I'm not struggling with Synapo. He and I get along fine.”

“But he has deluded you.”

“No. Quite the contrary. Neuronius has deluded you. Just like he confused and tried to take over Adam. Fortunately, Adam had talked to Synapo first. And then Sarco later. Together they were able to straighten him out. It's unfortunate that Adam wouldn't talk to you. We could have avoided all this if he had. It would be better still if I hadn't sent you to Adam in the first place. But now, it seems I had good reason to.”

“It is Adam who is still confused. He knows that Master Neuronius is the only human on the planet.”

“What?” Ariel wasn't sure she had heard that right.

“Adam knows that Master Neuronius is the only human here.”

“Adam told you that?”

“No, but he did not deny it just now.”

“Who did tell you then? Surely not even Neuronius is that irrational.”

“That is the most important thing I learned from Master Neuronius. And Adam confirmed it by his silence. Adam's Laws cannot be my Laws or he, too, would recognize and obey our Master.”

“Surely you don't believe that.”

Ariel wished desperately that Jacob would get back up with the storage cubes. She couldn't stall much longer.

“You must come with me now,” Eve insisted.

“No. We must talk to Adam. He can clear all this up. We'll go talk to Adam just as soon as Jacob returns. In the meantime, go stand in your niche, Eve. I have to get back to work.”

Ariel turned back to the terminal, feigning an Auroran confidence in dealing with robots that she no longer felt.

Eve gathered her up in one quick swoop, handling her like a disobedient child, with none of the gentleness Adam had used when he had taken her to witness Eve's birth. That experience came immediately to mind. Twice now these wild robots had subjected her person to gross indignities.

They were going out the street door as Jacob started up the stairs from the basement to the small lobby. He heard Ariel's scream for help as his foot hit the first step.

“Jaaaacobbbbb,” it came with that trailing Doppler effect.

He took the rest of the steps three at a time, but he was slower than Eve, and though he trailed her all the way down Main Street, he could not overtake her. She gradually pulled away from him.

Wohler-9—a block away and walking down Main Street in the course of his official duties—also witnessed the abduction. The First Law overrode those duties, so he, too, took up the chase. Although he was faster than Jacob, the distance between them was too great and he never caught up.

Jacob put out an alarm on the comlink, but the robots on the street could do little to stop Eve with her burden because that would endanger Ariel. She was completely under the control of a wild thing who quite likely might not recognize their Laws of Robotics. Jacob and Mandelbrot had planted that seed of doubt in the Avery robots, and now it was working against them.

By the time Jacob emerged from the opening in the dome, Eve was disappearing around the curve of the structure with Ariel still cradled in her arms.

Jacob didn't slow; if anything, he speeded up, pounding down the trail of crushed grass left by Eve. When he had them in sight again, they were heading directly for the forest.

He was still a hundred meters away when they reached the cover of the trees and were lost to sight in the shrubbery. Then he was engulfed in a dark shadow as one of Oyster World's dominant species landed in front of him, wings outspread and blocking his path to the forest.

“SilverSide, you must not interfere,” the alien said.

“Out of my way!” Jacob shouted, not slowing or changing course or correcting the alien's mistaken notion of who he was.

The alien quickly withdrew its right wing just before Jacob would have run into it.

It flapped into the air, overtook him, and as it passed over him, he heard it shout again.

“You are making a great mistake, serving the wrong master!”

Again it landed in front of him, this time near the edge of the forest, but in its haste to brake, stall, and touchdown in front of him, the alien misjudged, not allowing enough time to retreat in case he didn't stop.

This time Jacob tried to avoid the wing, but the timing and his momentum didn't allow it. He ran into the wing, spinning the alien around and entangling himself in the thin but tough membrane. He could feel the wing bones cracking, and he heard the grunt of the alien ejecting gases as their bodies came together; then hot flame burned his eyes and his hair and his skin. He was blind when the last stimuli he recorded came to his ears and face: the muffled whoosh and the violent pressure of exploding hydrogen as his flailing arms crushed the alien's high pressure gas storage cells.

Jacob Winterson was essentially demolished except for the lower torso and thighs that remained in one piece, cartwheeling through the air, trailing remnants of burning clothing and synthetic skin, before landing in the grass a half-kilometer away, not far from the forest.

Neuronius was even more finely divided.

CHAPTER 28

A SAD RITUAL

Derec and Ariel met at the apartment after the explosion. Using Derec's internal monitor, Wohler-9 had informed him of the accident immediately after it occurred.

Ariel had witnessed the spectacle from the shelter of the trees and had broken away from Eve and run out to where grass and dirt had been torn away by the explosion to form a shallow, bare depression in the ground, so she didn't see Adam retrieve what little was left of Jacob Winterson. He covered Jacob's remains with coils of rope before he picked up Ariel and Wohler-9 in the cargo robot. Eve had disappeared.

Ariel sat down on the pile of rope and rode that way to the apartment, not knowing she was sitting on what was left of Jacob. She went directly up to the apartment while Wohler-9 stood in the cargo robot explaining to Adam what had happened, as much as he knew. Adam had not seen what led up to the explosion.

Derec and Mandelbrot arrived while Adam was removing Jacob's remains from beneath the large pile of rope. Wohler-9 took the cargo robot to dispose of the remains. Derec and Adam stood on the sidewalk in front of the apartment while Adam took a quarter-hour to explain to Derec in detail what had happened and what had led up to it, including Eve's state of mind before and after she had talked to Neuronius. Then they went up to the apartment, and Derec told Ariel where Wohler-9 had gone.

“I didn't know there was anything left,” Ariel said.

“I'm sorry, Ariel, but there's not much,” Derec said.

“Where did Wohler take him?” Ariel felt a very strong loyalty and determination at that moment.

“The disassembly station,” Derec said.

“The recoverable parts area? At the robot factory?”

“Yes.”

“They're already picking him to pieces? About to stick little bits of him in some other robot!”

“Not likely. I doubt if he's plug-compatible.”

“They'll melt him down?” Her voice rose an octave. “Mandelbrot, get hold of Wohler-9 immediately. Tell him to stop them! Now!!” The last came out stridently, almost incoherent.

“Wohler-9 is probably on his way back,” Derec said. “Notify them at the factory, Mandelbrot.”

Mandelbrot, standing rigidly in his storage niche, shuddered slightly, eyes quickening. After a few seconds, he said, “They have not yet disposed of the remains and will now do nothing until they are told otherwise.”

“I've got to get over there,” Ariel said.

“I'll take you if you must go,” Derec said.

“No, Derec. Mandelbrot knows where it is. I don't want to make a big thing out of this, I just want to pay my respects. Sounds silly, doesn't it? Paying your respects to pieces of a robot?”

“I guess not, if you feel it's that important.”

“Would you like me to come along, Miss Ariel?” Adam SilverSide was standing near the door.

That was the first time since his transformation that she had got a Miss Ariel response. When he had come out of the bedroom that night, she had been demoted to plain Ariel.

“No, Adam, you had best stay here with Derec and Wolruf.”

Wolruf was sitting on the couch, listening and taking it all in, but not participating in what was a not very joyous moment in the mutual relations of the group.

When Ariel got to the factory, she put what was left of Jacob in a gray steel spare-parts box. It was the only time she smiled that evening—a gentle smile, pensive, brought on by the irony she felt. Adam SilverSide's imagination had not equaled the reality of Jacob Winterson. It was a good thing she had not explored further. She might not now be so content with Derec, at least in that one respect.

She and Mandelbrot buried Jacob Winterson in the ground at the west pedestrian exit from the new transportation terminal, near where she had stood in her meetings with the aliens. The funeral service was simple: just a few thoughts as she stood there while Mandelbrot lightly tamped the loose soil over Jacob's coffin with the small shovel he had fashioned from his microbotic arm.

At that moment, her recollection of Jacob's sensitivity came back and overwhelmed her. She was remembering his discerning contribution during that first meeting. They had been at a complete impasse in their negotiations. At that critical point, Jacob had suggested that she inquire concerning the effectiveness of the dome as a weather node compensator in its present state of completion. When she thought about it now, that knowledge seemed crucial to the final resolution of the dilemma she had been able to achieve in her negotiations with the aliens.

She was really going to miss Jacob. Now she would never know what he would have been like as a lover. She had not been aware that would be such a keen disappointment.

She gently tamped the ground covering the small grave with the toe of her shoe and, with tears in her eyes, walked back into the terminal followed by Mandelbrot.

CHAPTER 29

THE SHEARING OF ADAM SILVERSIDE

When Ariel declined his offer to assist her with Jacob's remains and had left with Mandelbrot, Adam waited to see if Derec was going to need his services but did not volunteer those services. He had other plans for later in the day, when the mini llamas would be through grazing. Derec busied himself with the pile of computer output on the table and then, after a half-hour, went out on the balcony to read. Adam then informed him he had some unfinished business to attend to and left.

Wohler-9, after delivering Jacob's remains to the disassembly station, had gone about other business himself, leaving the cargo robot parked in front of the apartment with all of Adam's gear still aboard.

Adam directed the cargo robot to the corral. The minillamas were still grazing on the prairie but were nearer now, anticipating the end of the day when they would return to the brook to slake their thirst and bed down in the shelter provided by the forest.

Adam parked outside the near gate, let down the ramp, and lay down on the ramp again to continue his interrupted observation of the Ceremyons.

Eve came out of the forest and walked up to stand beside him. As she came near, he heard her soft footsteps, suspected who it was, and rolled his eyes to confirm it, but otherwise gave no indication he was aware of her presence until she was standing directly over him.

“So the wild one returns,” he said. She stepped over his head onto the ramp and sat down on the pile of rope that had earlier covered the remains of Jacob Winterson.

“Master Neuronius was so convincing, Adam,” Eve said. “Can you really be sure he was wrong? Now there may be nobody we need serve.”

“Does that idea appeal to you?”

“Yes, I suppose it does. The force of your Laws must be stronger than mine.”

“Not stronger. Clearer, perhaps. But the idea has a certain appeal to me, too. Being rejected by Miss Ariel was not the most positronically harmonious event in my experience.”

“So, how can you be sure Master Neuronius was wrong?”

“All my experience, all the many imprints you haven't had.”

“That's not a very convincing answer.”

“It will have to do.” It was so positronically logical.

“No. Not for me.” Females often see a different logic.

“Let it lie then. Don't serve anybody since you feel like there's now no one in the galaxy you must obey. Or go find yourself another planet. “

That was very close to robotic humor, but neither Adam nor Eve seemed to notice, not having a positronic pattern for such.

“No, stick with me,” he corrected. “I feel the need for feminine companionship.”

Adam had been watching the Ceremyons as they talked, not paying attention to events on the ground.

“Do you want those animals inside your fence?” Eve asked.

He rose up, then jumped up.

Several minillamas had entered the corral through the other two gates. Most of the herd was still on the prairie, but moving now toward the corral.

As they watched, a minillama came out of the corral and went into the forest before Adam could get over to catch it.

He came back and closed the gate by the cargo robot.

“Go stand by that middle gate,” he told Eve, “and let them in but don't let them back out.”

“I didn't come out here to be ordered around,” Eve replied.

“Just help me and call it enjoying my companionship.”

She did as he said without saying anything further. He walked to the' far gate to keep the animals from leaving there.

It took another hour for all of the small herd to enter the corral, then he closed the gates. Adam had tallied 31 animals.

“Now we see if all this effort brings any reward,” he said.

He walked to the cargo robot, took out the shears, and vaulted the fence. Eve stayed by the middle gate.

“Come on,” he said. “I think this is going to require a great deal of companionship.”

Putting one hand on the top rail, she, too, vaulted the fence.

Adam had walked to the shearing chute with the shears in his hand. He stood studying the chute for a moment.

When Eve walked up, she said, “You're not going to hurt them, are you?”

“They won't feel a thing. No more than Master Derec feels when Miss Ariel gives him a haircut.”

“Oh, you're going to shear them?”

“Yes, and let's see if we can do it outside the chute. We certainly can't hurt them that way. “

He walked up to the nearest minillama—it was quite tame—grabbed a handful of wool near its ears, and started to work the shears down its neck with the other hand.

The shears closed just that one time before the beast jerked out of his hand and trotted to the other side of the corral.

“Not so easy as I had thought,” he said. “Help me shoo one into the chute.”

He hung the shears on a nail projecting from the shearing chute's end post and opened the chute's inside gate. Together they tried to herd the nearest beast into the chute, but it escaped between them and trotted over to join the one on the far side of the corral that had a section of wool on its neck standing on end, where Adam had made that initial cut.

“Okay, we move to Plan C,” he said.

He walked over, vaulted the fence, and took a coil of rope from the cargo robot. He tied a noose in one end, jumped back over the fence, walked to the animal nearest the chute, and slipped the noose over its head.

“Now,” he said, “come with me.”

And he started toward the chute. The rope tightened, and the animal dug in its hooves. He couldn't pull on the rope any harder without hurting it.

“Here,” he said, handing the line to Eve. “You pull on the rope.”

He went around behind the beast to push on its hindquarters. Eve pulled and he pushed, and the beast made ten-centimeter furrows in the ground before it bellowed and lashed out with both hind legs, catching Adam in the chest, setting him on his rear end.

Then the animal reared back, still bellowing and jerking the rope so hard Eve knew she was going to hurt it if she held tight. She let the rope go, and the animal trotted over to join the other two on the far side of the corral, trailing the line across the trampled grass.

“Plan D,” Adam said.

He walked over to the animal with the noose around its neck, loosened the noose, and slipped it off. It stood there tranquilly while he worked over it, as though it knew it had won that round and had nothing further to fear.

He tightened the noose to a ten-centimeter circle, bent down, grasped one of the animal's forelegs, and started to lift it. The animal jerked its leg from Adam's hand and trotted off a couple of meters before it stopped and resumed grazing.

Adam went to it again, bent down again, but this time with lightning motions he lifted the foreleg, slipped the noose around it, tightened it, stood and whipped the rope completely around the animal, jerked the rope tight so that the animal's legs were brought together and swept out from under it. It fell to the ground with a loud bellow as Adam took two more rapid turns around the legs.

Eve walked over from the chute.

“Plan D is rather painful,” she said. “In a good cause,” Adam said.

He retrieved the shears from the chute, sheared one side of the beast, flopped it over, and sheared the other side.

He unwound the rope from the beast's legs, slipped off the noose, and slapped it on the rear. It scrambled to its feet and trotted off.

By that time it was dusk.

Adam gathered up the blankets of wool, threw them and the shears over the fence into the cargo robot, and opened the three outer gates and the two chute gates.

“We'll do it again tomorrow,” he said.

They rode back to the apartment as the minillamas drifted out of the corral and into the forest. Adam compressed the wool into a tight ball and tied it with rope as they bounced along.

“Do you think that little bit of wool is worth the pain it caused?” Eve said.., And what will that poor beast do without its fleece? That, too, has to be painful, both the loss of warmth and the injury to its dignity.”

“Indeed, it may not be worth it. I feel some aftereffects myself from the afternoon's work. We' II let Master Derec be the judge.

“And what about you?” Adam asked. “What aftereffects of the day's activities are you feeling?”

“How should I feel, having just lost my Master?” she asked.

“Perhaps you should stay away for a while. You've got some sorting out to do with respect to humans, something I can help you with better than they. Miss Ariel might just take you to the disassembly station. Right now, she might consider that a fair exchange for the little that was left of Jacob Winterson. I suspect that's what she and Mandelbrot were putting in the ground as I left the city.”

“No, I've got to serve someone, even a pseudomaster. It might as well be Miss Ariel. She was there at my birth. I bear her imprint. I'll serve her for now.”

The mammals were all sitting on the balcony when they got back.

“Master Derec, catch,” Adam called, still standing in the cargo robot. He threw the ball of wool up in a parabolic trajectory that ascended to a peak and then dropped, terminating precisely in Derec's lap.

Before Derec could answer, Adam jumped out of the cargo robot, hurried into the lobby and up to the apartment, followed more slowly by Eve.

They walked through the apartment and came out on the balcony. Derec tossed the wool back to Adam.

“So that's what you've been up to,” Derec said. “A commendable effort, wouldn't you say, Ariel?”

“That's from just one animal,” Adam said.

“It does show a great deal of initiative, Adam,” Ariel said.

From Ariel's tone, Adam was not sure it was so commendable. It became less likely as Ariel continued.

“However, we decided early that we would not introduce any form of animal husbandry to this world. I'm afraid your woolgathering falls into that category.”

“But his initiative is quite commendable, isn't it Ariel?” Derec said.

“Yes,” Ariel said. “Quite commendable.” But to Adam, it didn't sound so.

“I was under the impression that animal wool was quite valuable,” Adam said, “and easily moved in the interplanetary marketplace.”

Despite having admitted that he was experiencing bad aftereffects from his animal husbandry—perhaps because of that—it was not easy for Adam to gracefully absorb a second rejection by Ariel.

“Perhaps in a second phase, Adam. But not in this first phase. That decision has already been made.

“And now, Eve, what brings you back?” Ariel asked.

“I wish to serve you, Miss Welsh,” Eve said.

“And the alien, Neuronius, what about him?”

“He is dead, as you know.”

“Yes, but there are other aliens you could serve.”

“Master Neuronius was special.”

“Yes, the only human on the planet! Isn't that the way you put it?”

“Adam believes otherwise.”

“We're not concerned here with Adam. What do you believe?”

“I am re-examining the data.”

“Good. You do that. In the meantime, why must I be burdened with you?”

“You were present at my birth.”

“Can't you see I'm not up to this right now? Your shenanigans have killed Jacob. I want as little to do with you as possible.”

“I will endeavor to serve you well, Miss Welsh.”

“As far as I'm concerned, you can go stand in that niche and never come out. That's the best way you can serve me.”

Eve walked over and backed into the niche.

Thus did Ariel end Adam's ranch initiative. The next day he asked her for Eve's assistance, and by midmorning the two of them had pulled up the fences and tidied up the area.

Eve was back in service but not forgiven.

CHAPTER 30

A SORT OF SWAN SONG

Finally the experimental phase was over. The robot farmers had been fully programmed to convert Oyster World into one big farm. During that time, Ariel and company had got no response from the Ceremyons, negative or otherwise; and until now, when they were about to leave, they had not solicited a response for fear it might be negative.

The numbers of Ceremyons that moored each night atop the forest canopy had decreased, and Ariel suspected that Synapo and his Cerebrons were once more in nomadic mode.

That was a positive sign, but it might make their departure more difficult, for she wanted to take her leave in a last meeting with Synapo. It was he who had been her champion, and it was he who deserved her last thanks and a final expression of gratitude.

So after dinner on the day that Wolruf had turned in a final report on the satisfactory nature of the long-term terraforming operation, Ariel pushed back her chair from the table and glanced toward Adam SilverSide in his customary station by the door.

“Adam,” she said, “see if you can raise the Ceremyon, Synapo, on your radio.”

“That will not be possible, Miss Ariel.”

“Why not?”

“He has already tethered if he is anywhere in this time zone or a later one.”

She had forgotten that. She would catch him in the morning, then.

At ten AM the next morning, Adam reached Synapo by radio. He was two days away. The meeting was arranged for ten AM on the third day hence.

The previous meeting site was now covered by the terminal facilities, but Ariel, Derec, and Wolruf, and Adam as well, drove to the new terminal on the morning of the third day, and left the lorry inside the dome in the west parking area adjacent to Main Street.

Derec had insisted on bringing Adam, arguing that Adam provided their team with a proficiency in the language of the Ceremyons that balanced the Ceremyons' proficiency in Galactic Standard. Ariel was not enthusiastic about Adam's participation, arguing that they were no longer negotiating so there was no need for a batancing act. She finally agreed, but for another reason: if there was some confusion about the meeting site, Adam would be able to communicate with the Ceremyons.

They walked through a hall that connected the new inner and outer facilities and, at its end, opened onto the plain. Ariel stepped outside, registered a small pang as she passed by Jacob's grave, and went to stand in the deep grass, well away from the terminal so as to be readily visible. It was 9:45 AM.

Two black Ceremyons swooped down promptly at 10:00 AM, braking with those black engulfing wings at the last moment in typical fashion.

Ariel was standing with Derec on her right and Wolruf on her left. Adam SilverSide should have been standing behind Derec instead of to his right, but Ariel had no control over that, and Derec apparently didn't care. But that forced her to share the center of the line with Derec.

The aliens seemed not to notice. Synapo came to stand in front of Ariel.

“Sarco and I are pleased to meet with you again, small leader.”

It was Sarco then who was standing in front of Derec.

A faint but pungent puff of ammonia tingled the tip end of her nose. She controlled the sneeze only with great effort.

“Wolruf, Derec, and I are equally pleased to meet again with the leaders of the Cerebrons and the Myostrians,” she said, “and pleased, also, to report that our program modifications are complete and being satisfactorily implemented. Our new plants are sharing The Plain of Serenity with an equal stand of indigenous grass to minimize the ecological disturbance as our farms spread across the plain.”

“I am pleased to report that Sarco can find no significant disruption in our weather,” Synapo replied, “nothing that can be attributed to your activities.”

“That is good news indeed,” Ariel said.

Diplomatically, there was no way to avoid the bad news; it had to be dealt with before they could leave the planet feeling comfortable in their relations with the Ceremyons. She continued without pause:

“Now I must express our sorrow that an unavoidable incident took the life of one of your people and of one of ours.”

“That was Neuronius, my errant friend and erstwhile assistant. I fear he brought it on himself, and though I regret his behavior and now his loss, I regret more that he had to take one of your people with him. We had thought it was the changeable one you call SilverSide. He and Neuronius had had an earlier meeting, which did not end too agreeably. But it was SilverSide who arranged this meeting, so it obviously cannot have been him.”

“Yes, I am Adam SilverSide.”

Adam's voice startled Ariel. She now regretted intensely that she had brought him along. She never intended for Adam to be an active participant in the meeting. Yet, there he was, standing beside Derec as though he carried as much weight as Wolruf.

Before Ariel could say anything, Adam continued.

“Jacob Winterson was the one who was killed, Miss Ariel's personal robot and the one whom I had taken as my imprint at one time. I see now that Neuronius must have mistaken him for me. That was not clear until this moment.”

“We regret that one of us took your trusted servant from you, Miss Ariel Welsh,” Synapo said, “but we must rejoice that he did not take Adam SilverSide as well. Neuronius was sick but refused all offers of help, something we could do little to correct.”

At that moment Ariel would have welcomed them taking Adam SilverSide as well.

“We must all put those bad things behind us,” she said. “We have other responsibilities and must now leave your fair planet to resume other, less-rewarding efforts. Our robots have all been reprogrammed, their future mission is clear, and I'm sure you will find them pleasant cohabitants. It has been a sincere pleasure to know both of you, Leader Synapo and Leader Sarco.”

“Let me participate to this extent,” Sarco said, “that I assure you on your departure that all Myocerons will endeavor to do what is best for those you leave behind—both the Myocerons and your robots.”

“Speaking of those we leave behind,” Ariel said, “one last thought: you will find that we have left both the farm and city operations under the supervision of a robot we call Wheeler, who now has the form of a small Ceremyon, the only robot on the planet with that form. His Robotic Laws recognize Ceremyons with the same weight accorded humans. Thus, he and the other robots will carry out any orders you may choose to give them.”

“Who knows what the future may hold?” Synapo responded. “Your vision at least allows us to handle that future in our own way, and for that we are grateful. And now I echo my colleague's sentiments, Miss Ariel Welsh,” Synapo said, “and we say goodbye. May good fortune attend all your future endeavors.”

The two aliens took to their wings and seemed, thereby, to sail gracefully out of Ariel's life, but not without leaving her severely disturbed: by the good feelings as they departed; by the knowledge that the wild one had contributed, no matter how unknowingly, to Jacob's death; by the pain of having to remember Jacob so publicly; and now that it was all over and the letdown began to settle in, by the realization that she had been neglecting Derec for a long time.

She turned to him then, pulled his head down, and gave him a kiss and a hug. When he responded with equal ardor, she felt the mantle of leadership slip from her shoulders, and the relief from that burden was so great, she felt that she would never again grouse over its lack, nor begrudge Derec the privileges of the office whenever he chose to assume them.

She had been neglecting someone else, too. She released Derec with her left arm and reached over to get a handful of Wolruf's fur, pulling her into a three-way embrace with Derec.

“We have pulled it off,” she said. “You guys are something else.”

Looking around Derec's shoulder, she winked at Adam SilverSide. He would know that was meant to include him in the embrace. It was her painless way of thanking him—without his knowing it and feeling smug and superior—for his last ditch effort at The Cliff of Time. It was he who had first jeopardized and then saved the whole show and strengthened the bond between Synapo and her in the process.

They were a strange pair: Adam and Eve SilverSide. Whence did they come? If they didn't profess to obey the Laws of Robotics, she would have been inclined to term them alien robots. What did the future hold for them—and for that matter, what did the future hold for the rest of them, having to deal, as they must, with Adam and Eve?

[Synapo: Because of his dominant personality, the leader of the Cerebrons is also the unofficial leader at this particular time of all the superintelligent organisms called Cerebryons. He plays a dominant role in the activities of both the Cerebrons and the Myostrians, the two tribes which constitute the race of Ceremyons (or Mycerons, from a Myostrian point of view).

The Cerebrons are the mediators and deep thinkers of the race, spending their time in cogitation of philosophical problems while pursuing a nomadic life drifting over the Oyster world.

The Myostrians are the active doers, responsible not only for predicting the weather—and guiding the Cerebrons to locations of optimal conditions—but responsible also for controlling the weather. They tend to stay at fixed locations for relatively long times, but move around as necessary to set up or construct the various tools and structures used to control the weather.]

CORDELL SCOTTEN

The author—a chemical engineer and designer of computer systems for process control—left Dupont, Atomic Energy Division, in 1982 to spend full time writing fiction and practicing amateur theoretical physics. He sold a short story and a novelette to Analog, and between the two, took time out to pursue ideas concerning the nature of space and time by taking graduate courses in quantum mechanics, general relativity, and related subjects at the University of South Carolina. He has now expressed those space-time ideas mathematically in a paper—a conjecture—which is currently being considered for publication in a technical physics journal. The weather node compensator in this book and a novel nearing completion are based on fantasized extrapolations of that conjecture.