ISAAC ASIMOV’S ROBOT CITY

ROBOTS AND ALIENS

Maverick

By Bruce Bethke

Copyright © 1990 by Byron Preiss Visual Publications

For John Sladek, Roderick, and Clifford,

The world’s stupidest springer spaniel.

INTRODUCTION

His memory has been erased. Hers was destroyed by a disease, and reconstructed with his help. His real name is David Avery, but he knows himself as Derec. Her name is Ariel Burgess.

Together they found Robot City and plumbed its mysteries. Derec, at peril to his life and in the throes of one of his mad father’s experiments, learned to master Robot City and its robots. Hordes of chemfets—microscopic robots—in his blood gave him a direct connection with the central computer.

During a brief idyll, Derec and Ariel lived normal lives on Aurora. But Derec’s final confrontation with his father had interrupted what the robots called the Migration Program—the program had not been canceled. Some robots had escaped from Robot City and had built new robot cities on new, uninhabited planets. Planets, at least, that were supposed to be uninhabited.

Supposed to be, but were not. Derec’s placid interlude was shattered by a distress call from one of the new robot cities, telling of an attack. Rushing to the scene without Ariel, he and Mandelbrot discovered that the attackers were beings who looked something like wolves—a race of intelligent wolves.

First, there was a meteor flashing through the sky. Then the strange one came, the metallic-looking one they called SilverSides, who never ate and wished only to protect the Kin and serve their wishes. It could only have been that SilverSides had been sent by the OldMother, ancestress and creator of the Kin. She had been sent to save them from the WalkingStones and the Hill of Stars they had built.

Not even SilverSides knows that she was a robot, cousin to the robots that were building a robot city on the Kin’s planet. She had been designed and built not by Dr. Avery, Derec’ s father, but by Dr. Janet Anastasi, Derec’s mother, who was running her own experiment in robotics.

SilverSides had been born shapeless, unformed, ready to imprint upon the first intelligent being she encountered. But the plan had not allowed for a robot city on the same planet. More intelligent than the Kin, SilverSides soon became their leader in the struggle against the robots. She launched a raid that crippled the city’s main planning computer, and, recognizing Derec as the leader of the robots, attacked him.

Only Derec’s invoking the First Law of Robotics saved him. But SilverSides was left with a dilemma. Were not the Kin human? How could they and Derec be human, and protected by the First Law? SilverSides took on the form of a human and the name Adam, but before this problem could be resolved there was another distress call—from Ariel. Joined now by Wolruf, Derec, Mandelbrot, and Adam went to her aid.

In Derec’s absence, Ariel had gotten a call from yet another robot city. This one was also under attack by aliens, but aliens of a kind vastly different from the Kin.

Ariel found this robot city almost completely enclosed by a dome. This planet’s inhabitants, the bird-like Ceremyons, were as advanced, compared to humans, as the Kin were primitive. Rather than attacking the city directly, they were sealing it under a dome where it could do no harm. The robots, following their programmed impulse to build and to prepare the planet for human habitation, were arranging to rebuild the city at a different location.

As soon as Ariel arrived, she summoned Derec through his internal connection with all the robot cities. But by the time he reached this planet, she had reached a tentative compromise—the Ceremyons, living almost all their lives in the air, would allow the robots to use some of the ground for farming, and they would allow one small enclosed city for the export of the food. Derec, with the help of the supervisor robots, reprogrammed the city.

Adam, still having no clear definition of what a human being is, imprinted on the Ceremyons, but they, needing no protection and having no need of his services, sent him back to Derec. Not yet certain to whom he owed Second Law obedience, he voluntarily set up his own agricultural experiment. In the course of this isolated work, he encountered a great silvery egg—an egg that he recognized as another being like himself, but not yet imprinted. Rushing back to the robot city, he brought Ariel to the egg in time for the new robot to imprint on her. Thus was Eve born.

Eve also went through the trauma of imprinting on the Ceremyons, but she encountered one who convinced her that he and he alone was human. Only his increasingly obvious insanity freed her from that dangerous illusion.

The agricultural reprogramming finished, Derec and Ariel and Wolruf decided to remove Adam and Eve from all possibly harmful influences—they would all go back to Robot City.

They returned to a Robot City in shambles. An unknown influence had seized control of the city’ s central computer, and tiny artificial humans—a few inches tall—were tucked away in many of the buildings. The robots had turned from maintaining the city to wild experimentation that reminded Derec and Ariel of the days of Lucius.

The obvious culprit was Dr. Avery. Although the experiments were of the sort that he had abhorred, he was the only one Derec knew who could seize control of the city. But while Avery did turn up in the city, he was so angry over the changes that he could not have been responsible. He was also no longer responsible for his own actions; he was now completely mad, convinced that he was turning into a robot.

Ariel took charge of the homunculi, and of Dr. Avery. She was more successful with Avery than with the tiny people, effecting the beginnings of a cure. Derec and Mandelbrot, meanwhile, tracked down the invading presence, an intelligence that called itself The Watchful Eye. This intelligence, it appeared, was guiding all the bizarre experiments in the hope of discovering the nature of human beings—and whether it might be one.

With the city collapsing around them, all forces joined to corner The Watchful Eye in its hidden lair. Finding it disguised as an ordinary piece of furniture, they at last forced it to reveal and face its true nature: the third of Dr. Anastasi’s “learning machines. ”

Taking the name Lucius II, the new robot immediately entered an intense exchange of information with Adam and Eve. To the already unresolved question of what constitutes a human being, Lucius II added the possibility that these three robots may be humans.

These discussions took place in isolation from the humans and Wolruf. They were concerned with the issue of what to do with the packs of small, rodent-like animals that roamed the streets, a residue of some of Lucius II’s experiments. Although they were clearly not human, these creatures had been generated using human genetic code as a starting point. Were they, then, also human, or could they be treated as vermin? This problem is complicated by Ariel’s pregnancy, and the discovery that the fetus has been damaged by Derec’s chemfets.

None of the medical robots on Robot City would even consider an abortion, since they considered the fetus human, even though it lacked a complete nervous system and could not survive birth. Adam offered to perform the operation in return for transportation back to the planet of the Ceremyons. The three learning machines hoped to consult with the Ceremyons on the question of humanity.

Robot City created a ship, which Dr. Avery named the Wild Goose Chase, from its own material. Surviving an accident that threatened all their lives, and Wolruf’s definition as human, they reached the planet of the Ceremyons to discover that their elaborate plans had been canceled. Someone—a woman, and apparently a brilliant roboticist—had come and helped the Ceremyons reprogram the entire city. Derec and Dr. Avery tried to adapt the city to serve the Ceremyons, but at last the natives could find only one useful purpose for it. As the humans, Wolruf, and the robots left for the planet of the Kin, they saw the robot city slowly melting into itself, and taking on its new form as a vast metallic sculpture.

PROLOGUE

ARANIMAS

He sat before the horseshoe-shaped control console, like a hungry spider sitting in the middle of its web. Taut, alert, watching and waiting with an almost feral intensity; nearly immobile, except for his eyes.

The eyes: Two black, glittering beads set in bulging turrets of wrinkled skin on opposite sides of his large, hairless head. The eyes moved independently in quick, lizard-like jerks, darting across the massed video displays and instrument readouts, taking it all in.

Watching.

One eye locked in on the image of a small, starfish-like creature. His other eye tracked across and joined it as the video display split-screened to show the starfish on one side and the inky black of space on the other. A small ice asteroid drifted into view, and a pair of ominous-looking rails smoothly rose to track it.

He moved. An arm so gaunt and elongated, with carpal bones so long it gave the appearance of having two elbows, more unfolded than reached out to touch a small stud beneath the image of the starfish.

The grim, lipless mouth opened; the voice was high and reedy. “Denofah. Praxil mastica. ” The rails flared brightly. An instant later the asteroid was gone, replaced by a swiftly dissipating cloud of incandescent gas.

The mouth twitched slightly at the corners, in an expression that may have been a grim smile. He pressed the stud again. “Rijat. ” The screen showing the starfish and the weapon went blank.

An indicator light at the far right end of the console began blinking. Swiveling one eye to the screen just above the indicator, he reached across and pressed another stud. The image that appeared was that of a younger member of his own species.

“Forrgive the intrrusion, Masterr,” the young one said in heavily accented Galactic, with a piping trill on the “r” sounds. “But your orrders were to reporrt any K-band interferrence instantly. ”

Both eyes locked on the image, and he swiveled his chair around so that he was facing the viewscreen. “Did it match the patterrn? Were you able to get a dirrectional fix?”

“Master Aranimas, it still matches the patterrn. Rrobots using hyperspace keys to teleport; there must be thousands of them. We have both a directional fix and an estimated distance. ”

“Excellent! Give me the coordinates; I’ll relay them to the navigator. ” While the young one was reading off the numbers, Aranimas swiveled his left eye onto another screen and pressed another stud. “Helm! Prepare for hyperspace jump in five hazodes. ” Another screen, another stud. “Navigator! Lay in the fastest course possible to take us to these coordinates. ” He repeated the numbers the young one had given him.

When the orders were all given and the screens all blank, he sat back in his chair, entwined his long, bony fingers, and allowed himself a thin smile. “Wolruf, you traitor, I have you now. And Derec, you meddlesome boy, I’ll have your robots, your teleport keys, and your head in my trophy case. ” He reached forward and thumbed a button, and the starfish reappeared on a screen. “Deh feh opt spa, nexori. Derec. ”

The starfish seemed quite excited at the prospect.

CHAPTER 1

JANET

Attitude thrusters fired in short, tightly controlled bursts. With a delicate grace that belied its thirty-ton mass, the small, streamlined spacecraft executed a slow pirouette across the starspeckled void, flipping end-for-end and rolling ninety degrees to starboard. When the maneuver was complete, the attitude thrusters fired again, to leave the ship traveling stem-first along its orbital trajectory and upside-down relative to the surface of the small, blue-white planet.

Slowly, ponderously, the main planetary drives built up to full thrust. One minute later they shut down, and the hot white glare of the final deceleration burn faded to the deep bloody red of cooling durylium ion grids.

A final touch on the attitude jets, and the ship slipped quietly into geostationary orbit. Yet so skilled was the robot helmsman, so flawless the gravity compensation fields, that the ship’s sole human occupant had not yet noticed any change in flight status.

The robot named Basalom, however, patched into the ship’s communications system by hyperwave commlink, could not help but receive the news. He turned to the human known as Janet Anastasi, blinked his mylar plastic eyelids nervously, and allocated a hundred nanoseconds to resolving a small dilemma.

Like the really tough ones, the problem involved his conflicting duties under the Laws of Robotics. The Second Law aspect of the situation was clear: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings. except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Dr. Anastasi had specifically ordered him to alert her the moment they entered orbit about Tau Puppis IV. He’d already cross-checked the navigator’s star sightings against the reference library in the ship’s computer; the small, Earthlike world currently situated some 35,000 kilometers overhead was definitely Tau Puppis IV. Unmistakably, his Second Law duty was to tell Dr. Anastasi that she had arrived at her destination.

As soon as Basalom started to load that statement into his speech buffer, though, a nagging First Law priority asserted itself. The First Law said: A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm. Ever since they’d left the planet of the Ceremyons, any mention of the Learning Machine project seemed to cause Dr. Anastasi tremendous emotional distress. Even an implied reference to her son, her ex-husband, or the way the two of them had thoroughly bollixed the experiment by abducting Learning Machine #2 was enough to send the woman’s blood pressure rocketing and turn her voiceprint into a harsh and jangled mass of severe stress indicators.

Now they’d returned to Tau Puppis IV, the world on which Dr. Anastasi had dropped Learning Machine #1. Basalom integrated that information with the data base he’d built up over two years of working with Dr. Anastasi, and concluded with 95% confidence that breaking the news to her would precipitate a negative emotional reaction. He could not predict exactly what her reaction would be-no robot was that sophisticated—but he could predict beyond a reasonable doubt that the information would cause Dr. Anastasi significant emotional discomfort.

And that was Basalom’ s dilemma. How did this emotional pain fit within the First Law definition of harm? His systems programming was not precise on that point. If emotional pain was not harm, there was little point to his being programmed to perceive it. But if evoking strong emotion was harm, then obeying Second Law orders could become a terribly ticklish business. How could he obey an order to tell Dr. Anastasi something that would upset her?

Basalom weighed positronic potentials. The order to provide the information had been emphatic and direct. The harm that would ensue-that might ensue-was only a possibility, and would, Basalom knew from experience, pass fairly quickly. In addition, he recalled from experience that Dr. Anastasi’s reaction to his not providing the information would be just as extreme an emotion as if he did provide it.

The possibility of harming a human balanced; it was the same, no matter whether he acted or refrained from acting. He began downloading the statement to his speech buffer; as soon as he’d slowed his perception levels down to human realtime, he’d tell her.

Of course, if blood spurted out of her ears when he voiced the words, then he’d know that he’d caused some harm.

“Dr. Anastasi?” The slender blond woman looked up from her smartbook and speared Basalom with a glare. “We have entered geostationary orbit over the fourth planet in the Tau Puppis star system, mistress. ”

“Well, it’s frosted well about time. ” She reacted as if surprised by the tone of her own voice, rubbed the bags under her bloodshot eyes, and smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, Basalom. I’ve shot the messenger again, haven’t I?”

Basalom blinked nervously and did a quick scan of the room, but found no evidence of an injured messenger or a recently fired weapon. “Mistress?”

She dismissed his question with a wave of her hand. “An old expression; never mind. Is the scanning team ready?”

Through his internal commlink, Basalom consulted the rest of the crew. The reply came back as a dialogue box patched through to the scanning team, and a direct visual feed from a camera on the dorsal fin. From Basalom’s point of view he saw Mistress Janet’s image in the upper right corner and the scanning team’s input/output stream in the upper left corner. Both windows overlaid a view of the ship’s top hull gleaming brightly in the reflected planetlight, and as he watched, a long slit opened down the spine of the ship, and a thin stalk somewhat resembling an enormous dandelion began rising slowly toward the planet. At the tip of the stalk, delicate antennae were unfolding like whisker-thin flower petals and dewsparkled spiderwebs.

“They have opened the pod bay doors,” Basalom said, “and are erecting the sensor stalk now. ” He shot a commlink query at the scanning crew; in answer, data from the critical path file flashed up in the scanning team’s dialogue box. “The stalk will be fully deployed in approximately five minutes and twenty-three seconds. ”

Dr. Anastasi made no immediate reply. To kill time while waiting for something further to report, Basalom began allocating every fifth nanosecond to building a simulation of how Dr. Anastasi saw the world. It had often puzzled him, how humans had managed to accomplish so much with only simple binocular vision and an almost complete inability to accept telesensory feeds. How lonely it must feel to be locked into a local point of view! he decided.

At last, Dr. Anastasi spoke. “Five minutes, huh?” Basalom updated the estimate. “And fourteen seconds. ”

“Good. ” She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and tried to work a kink out of her neck. “Boy, will I be glad to get this over with. ”

Basalom felt a tickle in his Second Law sense and formulated a suggestion. “Mistress? If there is another place you’d rather be, we can leave for it right now. ”

Dr. Anastasi opened her eyes and smiled wistfully at the robot; the expression did interesting things to the topography of her face. Basalom quickly scanned and mapped the wrinkles around her eyes, stored the image for later study, and then backed down to normal magnification.

“No, Basalom,” Janet said, in that curiously slow output-only mode that humans used so often. “This is where I want to be. It’s just... ” Her voice tapered off into a little sigh.

Mistress Janet’s last sentence didn’t make immediate sense, so Basalom tried to parse it out. It’ s just. That broke out to It is just. Substituting for the pronoun, he came up with Being in orbit around Tau Puppis IV is just. Quickly sorting through and discarding all the adverbial meanings of just, he popped up a window full of adjective definitions. Reasonable, proper, righteous, lawful, see Fair

Ah, that seemed to make sense. Being in orbit around Tau

Puppis N is fair. Basalom felt a warm glow of satisfaction in his grammar module. Now if he only understood what Mistress Janet meant.

Janet sighed again and finished the sentence. “It’s just, I’ve been thinking about old Stoneface again, that’s all. Sometimes I swear that man is the albatross I’ll be wearing around my neck the rest of my life. ”

Basalom started to ask Janet why she wanted to wear a terran avian with a three-meter wingspan around her neck, then thought better of it. “Stoneface, mistress?”

“Wendy. Doctor Wendell Avery. My ex-husband. ” Basalom ran a voiceprint across the bottom of his field of view and watched with familiar alarm as the hostility markers erupted like pimples in Or. Anastasi’s voice. “Derec’s father. My chief competitor. The little tin god who’s out to infest the galaxy with his little tin anthills. ”

“By which you mean the robot cities, mistress?” Janet put an elbow on the table and rested her chin in the palm of her hand. “I mean exactly that, Basalom. ” She sighed, frowned, and went silent again.

Basalom stood quiet a moment, then switched to thermographic vision. As he’d expected, Or. Anastasi’s skin temperature was rising, and the major arteries in her neck were dilating. He recognized the pattern; she was building up to another angry outburst.

He was still trying to sort out the First Law implications of defusing her temper when it exploded..

“Oammit, Basalom, he’s an architect, not a roboticist!” Janet slammed a wiry fist down on the table and sent her smartbook flying. “That’s my nanotechnology he’s using. My cellular robots; my heuristic programming. But do you think he ever once thought of sharing the credit?”

She kicked the leg of the table and let out a little sob. “The Learning Machine experiments were beautiful. Three innocent, unformed minds, experiencing the universe for the first time. Unit Two, especially; growing up with those brilliant, utterly alien Ceremyons. Just think of what we could have learned from it!

“But instead, old Stoneface dropped one of his architectural nightmares not ten kilometers away and ruined the whole frosted thing. Now Unit Two is traveling with Derec-Ghu knows what kind of hash is in its brain now-and the Ceremyons won’t give us a second chance. ” Janet closed her eyes, plunked her elbows on the table, and put her face in her hands. “I don’t know what I did to deserve having that man in my life, but you’d think I’d have paid for that sin by now. ” Her voice fell silent; a little sound that may have been a sob slipped through her fingers.

Basalom watched and listened, the mass of chaotic potentials that symbolized uncertainty surging through his positronic brain. Mistress Janet was in some kind of pain; he understood that. And pain was equivalent to harm, that was also clear. But while the First Law kept demanding that he take some action to remove that pain, seven centuries of positronic evolution still hadn’t resolved the question of how to comfort a crying woman.

He was saved from further confusion by a message from the scanning team that came in over his commlink accompanied by the video image of the sensor stalk at full extension. “Mistress ? The sensor pod is deployed and operational. ”

She did not respond. A minute later, an update followed. “The scanning team reports contact with the transponder on the aeroshell, mistress. The flight recorder appears to be intact. ” Pause. More data flashed through Basalom’s mind, and a tactical plot of the planet with projected and actual reentry curves popped up in his head. “The pod made a soft landing within 200 meters of the planned landing site. Learning Machine #1 was discharged according to program. Preliminary imprinting had begun. All indicators were nominal. ”

After a few seconds, Dr. Anastasi asked, “And then?”

“The umbilical was severed, as programmed. There has been no further contact with Unit # 1 since that time. ”

Janet sat up, brushed back a few loose strands of her grayblond hair, and dabbed at the corner of one eye with the cuff of her lab coat. “Very good,” she said at last. She pushed her chair back from the table and stood up. “Very good indeed. Basalom, tell the scanning team to begin searching for the learning machine. Contact me the moment they find any sign

of it. ” She began moving toward the door. “I’ll be, uh, freshening up. ”

“Your orders have been relayed, mistress. ” At the door, she paused and softly said, “And thanks for listening, Basalom. You’re a dear. ” She turned and darted out of the cabin.

Basalom felt the draining flow of grounded-out potentials that was the robotic equivalent of disappointment. Dr. Anastasi had called him a deer, but she’d left the cabin before he could ask her to explain his relationship to Terran herbivores of the genus Cervidae.

CHAPTER 2

THE HILL OF STARS

It was an old tradition, older than robotics itself. As was the case with so many of the behaviors passed down to robots from their human forebears, City Supervisor 3 found it to be slightly illogical; with the development of modern telecommunications technology, it had been several centuries since it was actually necessary for the participants in a conversation to meet physically. Yet traditions have a way of developing an inertia all their own, and so when City Supervisor 3-or as he was usually called, Beta-received the summons to an executive conference, he readily bowed to centuries of custom, delegated his current task to Building Engineer 42, and set out for the Compass Tower.

Not that it had been a terribly interesting task, anyway. He’d spent the last few weeks overseeing subtle changes in building designs, and the task he’d left was just one more round in a pattern of minor refinements. Beta’s personality programming was not yet eccentric enough for him to admit to feeling bored, but ever since Master Derec had reprogrammed the robot city to cease expansion, he’d felt a certain sense of frustrated potentials. Installing a new and improved cornice simply didn’t give him the same warm glow of satisfaction as came from, say, completing an entire block of luxury apartments.

Still, Beta reminded himself, a job’s a job. And any job that keeps robots out of the recycling bin is worthwhile. Unbidden, a statement of the Third Law flashed through his mind: A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. ” Yes, Beta thought, that’s what we’re doing. Protecting our existence. As long as we have jobs, we can justify our continued existence. The Third Law potential resolved to a neat zero sum and stopped bothering him.

As he strolled toward the nearest tunnel stop, Beta allocated a few seconds to look around and review his earlier work. The avenue was broad, clean, and straight as a laser beam. The buildings were tall, angular, and functional, with no outrageous flights of engineering fantasy but enough variation in the use of geometric solids to keep the city from looking monotonous.

We certainly have fulfilled our original purpose. We have constructed a city that’s clean, bright, and beautiful. One of the advantages of being a robot was that Beta could crane his neck and look up at the buildings without slowing his walking pace. Perhaps we overdid it on the gleaming pale blue, though. Maybe next week we can paint a few things, just for contrast. Looking down again, Beta found the entrance to the tunnel stop. He started down the ramp. Along the way, he passed a number of idle function robots.

For a moment he considered ordering them to report to the recycling bin. Then he felt a pang of-could it be guilt?—at the idea of destroying even non-positronic robots simply for the crime of being unemployed. Pausing a few microseconds, he managed to think up a busywork assignment for them. It was an illogical notion, of course, but he thought he detected a certain primitive kind of gratitude in the way they clanked off to their new jobs.

In a sense, we’re all function robots. Some of us are a little more self-aware than others, that’s all. Those function robots clean and lube things; I create gleaming, perfect buildings.

Why?

A dangerous question: Already, Beta could feel the stirring of a latent general command to self -destruct if he was no longer serving a useful purpose. Fortunately, with the summons to the executive council still fresh in his input register, he was able to duck that issue. He continued down the ramp.

A half-dozen idle tunnel transit platforms were waiting at the bottom of the ramp. Beta boarded the first one in the queue and gave it his destination. “Compass Tower. ” A fast scanning beam swept over him; the transit platform determined that its passenger was robotic and jumped into traffic with a necksnapping jolt.

Always these subtle reminders, Beta thought. The city was built for humans. Yet we who live here are not human.

The platform shot through the tunnels at maximum speed, darting across lanes and dodging other platforms with reckless abandon. Beta locked his hands tightly on the grips and became a rigid part of the platform.

The force of air alone would knock a human off this platform despite the windscreen. Yet because I am a robot, the tunnel computer trades off safety for efficient traffic flow.

We built this city for humans. We are only caretakers. So where are the humans?

An interesting question, indeed. And one that Beta could not answer.

With another rough jolt, the transit platform slid into the station beneath the Compass Tower and slammed to a stop. Beta unlocked his wrist and knee joints and stepped off; he only had one foot on solid pavement when the platform rocketed off into the storage queue. As i/there was a hurry. Beta looked around the station, saw no one waiting to go anywhere, and dismissed the experience with the positronic equivalent of a shrug. Moving off the apron, he located the ascending slidewalk ramp and started up.

The meeting was to be held in the Central Hall. An apt name, Beta thought. This pyramid we call the Compass Tower is the geographical center of the city. And Central Hall is at the heart of the pyramid. That wasn’t the real reason it was called that, of course; the name came from the fact that the hall housed Central, the enormous, disembodied positronic brain that ultimately controlled all activity in Robot City.

Or used to, anyway. Beta stepped off the last run of slidewalk and entered the cavernous hall.

He was immediately stopped by two hunter robots, tall and menacing in their matte-black armor. Tolerantly, Beta submitted to being surface-scanned, deep-radared, and bitmapped. He was all too familiar with the need for tight security in this, the most critical of all places. After all, it was a lapse in security in this very room that had elevated him to the rank of Supervisor.

The hunters apparently were satisfied that he was who he claimed to be, and had legitimate reason for coming to Central Hall. They waved Beta through the checkpoint, and a moment later he stepped around the corner and got a good look at Central.

Even in its disabled state, Central was an impressive being. A collection of massive black slabs five meters high, resembling nothing so much as a silicon Stonehenge, it blazed with communication lasers, twinkled with monitor lights, and radiated an immense impression of great, dormant intellect on the 104 megahertz band.

At least, we hope it’s intellect. A vague mismatch of positronic potentials flowed through Beta’s brain; he identified the feeling as sadness. Pausing a moment, he watched the security observer robots drift overhead in tight, metric patterns, and stole sidelong glances at Positronic Specialists I through 5, who were once again up to their elbows in Central’s brain.

Beta was capable of free-associating. Looking at the brain crew at work always reminded him of that terrible day

Terrible? Beta caught himself. A judgmental expression? Yes, Beta decided, it was terrible. Great responsibility had devolved on him that day a year before, when a malleable robot named SilverSides had appeared and adopted the wolf-like shape of the local dominant species. Breaking into Central Hall, it had attempted to destroy Central.

In that respect, SilverSides had failed. The backup and protective systems had kicked in in time to save Central’s “life. ”

The city had survived, and Central’s authority was simply distributed to first-tier supervisors, like Beta.

In another respect, though, SilverSides had succeeded. Where once Central was a scintillating intellect that guided all the robots in the city and kept them working and thinking in harmony, now it was a babbling idiot-savant, full of bits and pieces of ideas, only occasionally lucid.

Still, we keep believing that it can be restored. We keep telling ourselves that the damage caused by SilverSides can be repaired. and that it can again be the Central we once knew.

Is this another example of how we are evolving? Simple efficiency demands that we scrap Central and leave the supervisors permanently in charge. Yet we supervisors are reluctant to even suggest the idea. We keep insisting that our authority is only temporary. and that we will return power to Central just as soon as it passes diagnostics. That only Central is equipped to administer our fundamental programming.

Could that be the difference between being intelligent and being civilized? Valuing preservation of a fellow robot over efficiency? Caught between his evolving values and his orders to use resources efficiently, Beta felt himself drifting closer and closer to a Second Law crisis.

He was saved by the arrival of his fellow supervisors, Alpha and Gamma. Alpha spoke first. “Friend Beta, I have-with Central’s permission-called this meeting to discuss the status of our mission. ”

Beta turned to greet the arriving robots. “Friend Alpha, Friend Gamma: I received your summons and I am here. ” Beta couldn’t help but noting that his reply was a redundant statement of a self-evident fact; still the traditions had to be maintained. Alpha and Gamma walked past without breaking stride. Beta wheeled and joined them. Together, the three marched straight into the atrium at the heart of Central.

When they were in their assigned positions, Alpha raised his face and addressed the slab that held Central’s console of audio/ video inputs and outputs. “Central, we are here for the meeting. “

“Hmmm?” Central’s one great red eye glowed briefly, then dimmed.

“The meeting, Central. You remember, to discuss the status of our mission?”

“I have the greatest confidence in the mission,” Central said.

“That’s right, Central, we all have confidence in it. ” Beta and Gamma nodded, in support of Alpha. “And, now, if it’s okay with you, we’re going to discuss the status. ”

“What status?”

“Of the mission, Central. ”

“I have the greatest confidence in the mission,” Central said, then he began softly singing “Daisy. ”

Alpha emitted a burst of white noise and turned to Beta and Gamma. “Let’s get on with this. Beta, what exactly is our mission?”

Beta knew that Alpha and Gamma were both exactly as familiar with the mission as he was. After all, it was darned tough to forget something that was coded in ROM. Still, there were traditions that needed to be maintained, and the recitation of common knowledge was one of them.

“Robot City is a self-replicating mechanism designed to convert uninhabited planets for human use. Through the use of hyperspace teleportation keys and a unique, cellular robot technology—”

“That’s enough, Beta. ” Alpha waved a hand to cut him off. “Gamma, what do you think is the most important word in our mission statement?”

Gamma’s eyes glowed brightly. “The same word that’s the crux of the Laws of Robotics. Human. ”

“Right. ” Alpha looked at Beta again, then back to Gamma. “We have successfully established a viable robotic community on this planet. We have initiated mining operations, developed a manufacturing base, and-insofar as Master Derec allowed—built a city. What’s the one thing missing that prevents us from completing our mission plan?”

Beta thought of his clean, straight, empty streets, and his perfect, unused buildings.

“Humans,” Central said. The heads of all three supervisors jerked up as if they were marionettes on strings.

“Central?” Alpha asked. The great machine’s one red eye glowed brightly. “French: humain. Latin: humanus; akin to humus, the ground. Pertaining to, belonging to, or having the qualities of mankind. ‘The human species is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend. ’ Charles Lamb. ”

Alpha looked down again. “Forget it, Central. ”

“Forgetting. ” The red eye went out a moment and then came back on. “Oh, Alpha, you came to visit!”

“For—” Alpha caught himself. Turning to the other two supervisors, he said, “So this is our problem. How do we serve humans if there are no humans here to serve?”

Gamma thought this over a moment. “There are humans on other planets, correct?”

“We can presume so. ”

“And they have some means of travel?”

“Again, we can presume so. ”

“Then we ca—ca—ca—”

Beta reached through to Gamma by commlink. Priority override. Abort thought pattern. Gamma’s eyes dimmed, and he twitched involuntarily as the reset command upset his joint motors.

He was fine a moment later. “Thank you, Beta. There’s a strong Second Law block in my system. I can’t even voice the thought. ”

Alpha nodded. “I know. I have the same block. Beta?”

“I also. However, if one were to phrase it carefully in passive voice, one could suggest that perhaps a robot with a quantity of hyperspace keys could be sent out to recruit human inhabitants. ”

Alpha agreed. “One could indeed suggest that. However, since we all share the common basic instruction block, one could presume that there are no robots in Robot City capable of carrying out this mission. ”

“In theory, I agree,” Gamma said.

Alpha turned back to Beta. “So if one cannot recruit humans directly, and if one has a similar block regarding building a hyperwave transmitter and broadcasting our location, how would one go about finding humans to serve?”

“The indigenous species?” Gamma suggested.

Beta shook his head. “No. They are clearly not human. ”

“But Master Derec treated them as equals. ” All three supervisors fell silent.

In a small, hesitant voice, Central said, “A equals B. ” Alpha looked up. “What did you say?”

“A equals B,” Central repeated.

Alpha looked to Beta. “Do you have any idea what it’s talking about?”

“If A equals B, and B equals C,” Central said, quite confidently this time, “then A equals C. ”

Slowly, it dawned on Beta. “Central, is A human?”

“Yes. ”

“And is B Master Derec?”

“Yes. ”

Gamma broke in. “What’s C, Central?” But the massive idiot had begun softly whistling an inane ditty.

Beta caught Gamma’s attention. “Don’t you see? If human equals Master Derec, and Master Derec treats the local inhabitants as equals—”

Gamma’s eyes flared brightly. “Then the local inhabitants are equivalent to humans!”

Alpha protested. “Incorrect. A human is a primate of the genus Homo—”

Beta and Gamma both turned on Alpha. “We’re not saying that the local inhabitants are truly human. We’re just saying that they’re equivalent to humans. ”

For long seconds, Alpha’s eyes went dim. Just when Beta was beginning to worry about whether the supervisor had gone into First Law lockup, Alpha spoke.

“ Agreed. For our purposes, we can treat them as nearhumans. Now we have a new question: How can we best serve them?”

“That information is unavailable,” Gamma said.

Beta considered the question. At the same time, not all of his energies were focused on the question; at a lower level in his brain, he sensed the joyous flow of harmonious potentials that came from finally having a clearly delineated problem to work on. “We must study the local environment,” he said at last. “Send out observer robots to study the local inhabitants in their native habitat. Obtain chemical analyses of the substances that are important to their well-being. ”

“Agreed,” Alpha and Gamma said together.

“Above all,” Beta continued, “we must allocate all available resources to linguistic studies. We must establish verbal communications with them. ”

“Agreed. ”

Alpha stepped back and looked first to Beta and then to Gamma, with a warm glow in his eyes. “Friends, I cannot tell you how satisfied I am with the progress we have made in this meeting. Now, at last, we can fulfill the final goal of our mission. ”

“I have the greatest confidence in the mission,” Central said.

Alpha spit out a message at the maximum rate his commlink would allow. “Meeting adjourned!” Switching their leg motors into high speed mode, the three supervisors hurried from the hall as fast as dignity would allow.

CHAPTER 3

ARANIMAS

The assault team leader licked his lips nervously, as if punishment could be inflicted by hyperwave. “Yes, Master?”

Aranimas fixed the figure on the viewscreen with a glare from both eyes. “I am still waiting for your report. How many robots have you taken? Have you been able to capture the traitor Wolruf, or the human Derec?”

The assault team leader’s right eye twitched rapidly, and he licked his lips again. “Actually, Master, we have encountered some, ah, difficulties, and, ah—”

Aranimas leaned in close to the video pickup, and dropped his voice to its most forceful pitch. “How many robots have you taken?”

With a fearful glance at his portable communicator, the team leader blurted it out. “None, Master. ”

“What?”

The team leader smiled helplessly. “We arrived too late. They’re all gone. That static we intercepted was the sound of every last robot on the planet teleporting out. Apparently the natives—they call themselves Ceremyons—could not tolerate the robots. So the robots left. ”

Aranimas spat out several choice curses in his clan’s dialect. When he’d recovered some control, he glared at the viewscreen again. “Did they leave any artifacts? Buildings, parts, or tools?”

“Sort of. ” The team leader turned his video pickup around to capture what he was seeing: a vast lake of liquid metal, crowned with two intersecting parabolic arches. The resolution was poor, but the arches appeared to be jets of silver liquid. “The natives say it’s a work of art; they call it ‘Negative Feedback. ’” He turned the video pickup back on his face again.

Aranimas grumbled and rolled his eyes in counter-rotating circles. “One more chance, then. Have you located the traitor, or the humans?”

The team leader’s expression brightened. “Yes, Master. ”

Aranimas waited a few seconds. When no further information was forthcoming, he said, “Where are they?”

“They left orbit three days ago and are headed in the general direction of Quadrant 224. ”

Aranimas grumbled again. “Not what I was hoping for. But very well, collect your team and return to the ship. ”

The team leader licked his lips once more and again blinked nervously. “Actually, Master, we have a little problem with that. ”

Aranimas’ pale face flushed green with anger. “What now?”

“The natives are soaring creatures; they obtain lift by inflating their bodies with large amounts of raw hydrogen. ”

“So?”

“While attempting to extract information, I ordered the shuttle gunner to hit one of the natives with a low-wattage beam. I expected merely to burn the native; instead, it exploded with considerable violence. ”

“And the shuttle was damaged?”

“Not exactly, Master. ”

“Not exactly?”

“Master, the surviving natives have sealed the shuttle inside some kind of impenetrable force globe. It doesn’t appear to be damaged, but we can’t get to it. Could you send the second shuttle to extract us?”

Aranimas’ heavy eyelids popped wide open, and his face turned a deep, angry green. “Bumbling fool! You can rot there for all the times you have failed me!” He slammed a bony fist down on the horseshoe console, blanking the team leader’s face off his viewscreen. “Scanners! There is a ship in Quadrant 224; find it for me. Helm! Prepare to leave orbit immediately, maximum speed. ” Orders given, he blanked all the screens except one, and through that screen stared out at the glistening starfield in Quadrant 224. Somewhere out there, perhaps one of those tiny points of ninth-magnitude light, was the quarry he had been chasing for so long.

“I swear,” he whispered, talking solely to himself, “I have not come this close only to be cheated again. ”

CHAPTER 4

DEREC

Ariel was in one of her cold and silent moods again. Derec tried to strike up a conversation over breakfast, but all he managed to do was irritate her more.

“Look, Ari,” he said, “I know how you feel about losing the baby. I lost my whole life. When I woke up in that survival pod on the surface of that asteroid—”

A look of fury flashed into Ariel’s eyes, and she fired a buttered scone straight at Derec’s face. “Will you shut up about that stupid asteroid! “

He ducked the pastry and tried his most soothing voice. “But honey, my amnesia is”

“Old news! You’ve been telling me about your frosted amnesia and that crummy little asteroid for the last three years. Don’t you have any other stories?”

“Well, no, honey. The amnesia—”

“Aagh !” She threw another scone at Derec and this time caught him right between the eyes.

By the time Derec finished wiping the butter off his face, Ariel had locked herself in the bedroom. He briefly considered trying to reason with her through the closed door, and then realized that discretion was the better part of valor. Leaving her sulking in their stateroom, he decided to take a stroll around the upper deck of the good ship Wild Goose Chase.

The stroll went almost as badly as the breakfast. Within minutes Derec was thoroughly lost. As he wandered blindly through the great salons and companionways that simply hadn’t been there the night before, the temptation to use his internal commlink to call for help grew very strong.

Derec resisted. Frost, he thought angrily, for once r m going to figure out this mouse-maze myself! Pausing to visualize the latest floor plan of the deck, he thought once more about what a remarkable-and disturbing-ship it was.

Try as he might, Derec could not get used to the idea that he wasn’t aboard a ship so much as he was inside an enormous robot. To make matters worse, the Wild Goose Chase was no ordinary robot, but rather one of his father’s incredible cellular creations, constructed of the same amorphous robotic “cells” as Robot City itself. Back in Robot City, Derec had slowly come to accept that the city constantly rearranged its architecture to suit the perceived needs of its human inhabitants. But out here, in space-far out in space-there was something terribly unnerving about the idea of having nothing between himself and the vacuum except a ship’s hull that changed shape like a Procyan jellyslug on a hot day.

For example, three days before, when they’d left the planet of the Ceremyons, the Wild Goose Chase had been reasonably ship-shaped: long, narrow, and linear, with the control cabin in the nose and the planetary drives in the stern. As soon as they’d cleared the atmosphere, though, the ship had decided to shorten the walking distance between the bridge and the engine room by reconfiguring itself into a thick, flattened disk not unlike an enormous flying three-layer cake. Derec had found being locked inside a Personal during that first transformation to be a terrifying experience. Of course, thought Derec, it was for my own good. There was probably nothing but space on the other side of that door.

Since then, the ship had continued to reconfigure itself in accordance with the expressed or implied needs of its passengers. Already a gymnasium, a synthe-sun deck, and a zero-G volleyball court had come and gone. These enormous, gaudily decorated new rooms puzzled Derec, though, until he remembered that he and Ariel had talked the night before about an old video she’d once seen. The show was some kind of ancient history swords-’n’-togas epic that took place on a steam-driven riverboat on Old Earth, and Ariel had been trying to make a point about the timeless nature of conflict in man/woman relationships. ,

But the ship, apparently, had picked up Ariel’s appreciation for the sets and attempted to respond by recreating the promenade deck of an ancient Egyptian riverboat. No doubt by evening it would have dug enough Dixieland jazz out of its memory banks to provide music in the ballroom.

With a slight pang, Derec suddenly thought of three robots he’d once known. “The Three Cracked Cheeks would have loved this,” he said sadly. “What a pity they’re—” he caught himself—“happily employed elsewhere and couldn’t possibly be here,” he finished loudly. Already, he’d learned to be very careful about what he said out loud aboard the Wild Goose Chase. There was no telling what the ship might try to cook up to satisfy a perceived human need, and Derec had no desire to see it resurrecting cybernetic ghosts.

Just beyond the other side of the ballroom, Derec found a wide staircase that led down. It wasn’t quite what he’d been looking for—he’d wanted to find a way to get up to the bridge—but curiosity led him to try the stairs.

The next level down was pure gray utilitarian metal. Even the environmental responses were down to a bare minimum: A puddle of light tracked him down the companionway, switching on two steps ahead of him and switching off two steps behind. The only door he found opened into a tiny, darkened cell.

His mother’s three robots were in there. Adam, Eve, and Lucius II stood rigidly frozen in position, their eyes dim, as if someone had made an aluminum sculpture of a three-way conversation. For a moment, Derec’s breath quickened. Ever since they’d left Robot City, his father had been itching for a chance to melt the learning machines down into slag, or at the very least shut them down permanently. Had he finally done it?

A quick check of his internal commlink, and Derec relaxed. The three robots weren’t deactivated. They were simply locked up in one of their interminable high-bandwidth philosophical discussions. He moved on.

At the end of the hallway, he found a small lift-shaft much like the one on the original asteroid where the robots had found him. It was a simple platform, one meter square, with one three-position switch on the control stalk: up, down, or stop. Obviously intended for robotic use-the sight of 11 human riding such a contraption would send most robots into First Law conniptions-the platform was also obviously at the top of its guide rail. “Well, that simplifies my choices,” Derec said. He stepped onto the platform and pressed down.

With a sickening lurch, the platform dropped out from underneath him.

Derec didn’t have time to panic. He fell through ten meters of darkness, then brightness flooded the shaft as the platform dropped through into a lighted cabin. Just before he passed through the opening, some kind of localized gravity field caught him and deposited him as gently as a feather, albeit sputtering like a goose, on the deck of the cabin.

Wolruf and Mandelbrot were already there, lounging comfortably in two acceleration couches that faced a large control console. The small, dog-like alien was spooning something that looked like Brussels sprouts in milk out of a bowl and between bites chatting with the patchwork robot. Her furry brown ears went up when Derec hit the floor; together, she and Mandelbrot turned to look at him.

“’ullo,” Wolruf said around a mouthful of greenery. “Nice of ‘u to drop in. ”

Mandelbrot stared at Derec a moment, but did not rise.. , Are you hurt?’, he asked at last.

“Only my dignity,” Derec said, as he got up off the floor and brushed some dust off his posterior.

“That is good,” Mandelbrot noted. The robot turned back to Wolruf... You were saying?”

“ ‘at can wait,” Wolruf said. She favored Derec with a wicked grin, then barked out, “Ship! Master Derec wants t’ sit next t’ me!”

“That’s all right, Wolruf, I can-what!” A glob of floor material suddenly mushroomed up under Derec, sweeping him off his feet and catching him like a giant hand. By the time it’d moved up next to Wolruf, it’d formed into another acceleration couch.

Wolruf leaned over, smiling wolfishly, and offered Derec a dripping spoonful of whatever it was she was eating. “ ‘u want t’ try some gaach? Is real good. Put ‘air on ‘ur face. ”

Derec looked at the thing on the spoon-which, on closer. inspection, looked nothing like a Brussels sprout-and shook his head. “Thanks, I, uh, already ate. ”

Wolruf shrugged as if disappointed. “ ‘ur loss. ” With a practiced flip, she tossed the green globule up, then caught it with a frightening snap of her long teeth. “Mmm,” she said in a deep, throaty growl that was apparently a sign of delight.

Derec finally recovered something of his composure, and started to look around the cabin he’d dropped into. “What... ? Why, this is the bridge!”

“T’row ‘at boy a milkbone,” Wolruf said between bites.

“But last night the bridge was at the top of the ship!”

Wolruf favored Derec with a toothy smile. “ ‘at’s right. But ‘at was ‘en. ‘is iss now. ” Derec kept darting nervous glances around the cabin, as if keeping an eye on everything would stop it from metamorphosing. Wolruf leaned over and put a furry hand on Derec’s shoulder. “Face it, Derec. ‘ur on a crazy ship. ” She shrugged

“But iss not dangerous crazy. ” The little alien finished the last of her gaach. then licked the bowl clean with her long pink tongue. “Mmm,” she growled again as she tossed the bowl and spoon over her shoulder, to clatter onto the deck.

“Wolruf!” Derec was shocked. “Do you always throw your dirty dishes on the floor?”

She rolled over, smiled innocently, and brought a hand up to start scratching her right ear. “What dishes?”

“Why—,” Derec turned to point at it but stopped short. The spoon had already melted into the cabin deck, and only a tiny bit of the bowl’s rim remained.

“Robot City materral,” Wolruf said with a shrug. “So ‘ow’s Arr’el?”

Derec watched the last trace of the bowl disappear, then sighed. “Still having a rough time. ”

“Th’ baby?” Wolruf asked gently.

“Yeah. ” Derec fell back onto the couch and stared at his hands. “Ariel is still trying to pretend that she’s too tough to mourn, I guess. So instead, she treats me like it’s my fault she lost the baby. ” Derec fell silent a minute, thinking about the two-month-old fetus that Ariel had just lost. Maybe it was his fault. After all, the embryo’s brain had been destroyed by an infestation of chemfets, the same microscopic robotic “cells” that swam in his bloodstream and gave him his incredible biological interface with Robot City. He should have realized that the chemfets were a communicable disease.

“Never ‘ad pups myself,” Wolruf broke in with a hint of sadness in her voice. “But unnerstand that th’ mother gets quite attached t’ ‘em long b’fore she actually whelps. ”

“Yeah, well-look, this is depressing. Let’s change the subject, okay? How’s the flight going?”

“ ‘u got ‘ur depressors, I got mine. ” Wolruf sat up, and made a wide sweeping gesture that took in the control panel. “Look a’ it. Perfect automation. Don’t need a pilot ‘r navigator. I ‘aven’t touched a button in t’ree days, and probably won’t until we jump tonight. No way I could everr fly ‘er ‘alf so good. ” Wolruf’s upper lip curled in a silent snarl. “ ‘ur father ever puts this design on the market, ‘ur lookin’ at one bitch ‘oo’s seriously out 0’ work. ”.

“That’s okay,” Derec said. “We still love you anyway. ” To prove the point, he started giving her a reassuring scratch behind the ears.

“Oo! Oo! Don’ stop!” When her left foot began twitching reflexively, though, Wolruf got embarrassed and pulled away from Derec’s hand.

Presently, a new thought came to Derec. “Say, speaking of my father, have either of you seen him this morning?” Wolruf shook her head, but Mandelbrot’s eyes dimmed for a moment as he checked his internal links.

“Dr. Avery is in the ship’s robotics lab,” the patchwork robot announced.

“Robotics lab?” Derec repeated.

“Yes. Dr. Avery had it constructed at 0137 hours last night. It is currently on the port side, two levels up. ”

“Thanks, Mandelbrot. ” Derec bounced off his acceleration couch, said goodbye to Wolruf, then stepped over to the lift plate-and paused, to glare at the lift plate with obvious misgivings. “Oh, ship?” he said at last. “I don’t suppose you could cook up a stairway, could you?” In response, a blank wall resolved into an arched passage that led to the bottom end of a spiral staircase. “Thanks, ship. ” Derec stepped through the passage and started up.

CHAPTERS

MAVERICK

Dusk came to the mountainside forest with the soft chittering of waking nightclimbers and the plaintive cooing of lovesick redwings. It came on a gentle southerly breeze that spoke of young green shoots bravely thrusting up through the warm, damp soil, and twisted old trees grudgingly coming to life again after yet another long dormant season.

Like the silent gray ghost of the winter just past, Maverick padded quietly through the lengthening shadows of the tall trees, alert to the soft sounds and drinking in the earthy smells of the warm spring evening.

He moved quickly and confidently across the needle-covered forest floor, as befitted an eighty-kilo carnivore with something on his mind. Yet there was a nervous twitch in his naked, whiplike tail that suggested different emotions at work; an occasional darting glance over his shoulder suggested he was not as brave as he seemed. At the edge of a clearing, as he stopped and stood up on his hind legs, it became apparent that he was favoring his left rear leg. For a moment the breeze ruffled his mottled grayish-brown fur, exposing the long pink scar of a recently healed wound; he was leaning against the tree trunk for support, not cover. Closing his ice-blue eyes, he lifted his muzzle and tasted the air.

A faint, acrid scent caught his attention. “Sharpfang!” He added a guttural curse in BeastTongue; as if in answer, a deep bellow echoed across the valley.

Maverick’s long, fur-covered ears shot up, and a look of puzzlement crossed his wolf-like face. “That’s not right. ” He closed his eyes again, cocked his head sideways, and tried to concentrate on what the wind was telling him. “ A female scent, but a male roar?’, The bellow sounded again-quite nearby now-this time accompanied by the loud, rending crack of a fair-sized tree being knocked flat.

Maverick’s eyes snapped wide open, and he grabbed for the stone knife in the scabbard on his left shoulder as if a knife could really be of use against a hungry sharpfang. A moment later the beast leaped into view not fifty trots away across the clearing, and Maverick froze.

The giant reptile charged across the clearing on its two massive hind legs, ploughing through the undergrowth and crushing everything in its way like a scaly brown juggernaut. Maverick stood rooted in one spot, staring at onrushing death. The sharpfang’s head was huge; long, armored, and bristling with teeth, it whipped back and forth as if the beast had brain enough to feel fury. Long-taloned hind feet slashed through the brush; the thick, muscular tail trailing behind thrashed whatever had survived the talons into a pulpy green mass.

The sharpfang did not even break stride as it raised its head and opened its great jaws to roar again.

For a long fraction of a second, Maverick watched the dying sunlight flash off the beast’s long wet fangs. Then he sniffed the air again, let out an anxious little whine, and dropped his ears in hope. Maybe, just maybe, the toothy monster wasn’t interested in him. Allowing for windage, there was a family-minded female sharpfang down in the marsh about six hundred trots off to his left.

And if he were wrong?

Maverick carefully loosened the knife in its scabbard. With his injured leg, he knew he couldn’t outrun the sharpfang. That left him only one other option: Wait until the beast was close enough to lick, and then hope that a fast and intelligent counterattack could overcome its overwhelming but mindless strength. He shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet. Reflexively, his naked, whip-like tail tucked itself between his legs and coiled around his thigh. He had to wait for the right moment; exactly the right moment....

A moment later the advancing sharpfang apparently caught a whiff of the female and had a change of heart. It veered off toward the marsh. Saplings crunched; redwings screeched; Maverick stood his ground and pretended to be a tree stump. The beast passed close enough for him to take a long look straight into the fiery, bottomless red pit of its left eye.

Another moment later, and it was gone. Ears erect, Maverick listened to the crunching and roaring as it receded into the distance. Then he lolled out his long pink tongue, wuffed out a little laugh, and cracked into a wide, extremely relieved, panting grin. “They say love has no sense of smell. I’d guess it’s blind, too. ”

He dropped to all fours, nosed around the base of the tree, marked it with his scent, and gave the male sharpfang more time to see if it was coming back for another pass or being followed by any competitors. When the forest at last grew quiet again, save for the thrashing and bellowing of giant lizards in love, he slipped the knife back into its scabbard and set off toward the northwest at a rapid trot.

“Well, Mavvy old boy,” he told himself as he jogged along, “I’d say you handled that pretty well. There’s not many kin who’d stand up to a charging sharpfang like that.

“Of course, the old ones always said that it’s the running away that attracts their attention. ”

He paused to sniff around the base of a rock outcropping and mark it with his scent. Then he went on.

“But here’s another thought: Their eyes are on opposite sides of their heads. Maybe the reason sharpfangs swing their heads when they walk is because they can’t see what’s straight in front of them.

“Interesting idea, Mavvy. So the best way to attack a sharpfang is from right under its chin? That little piece of information ought to be worth something to the next pack we run into. ”

At the thought of a pack, his left rear leg gave him a little twinge to remind him of the last pack he’d run into. “Ooh. A bad night for rock climbing, old boy. Still, it’s got to be done. ”

After a year as a packless outcast, Maverick had stopped noticing that his silent thoughts had turned into one-kin conversations.

He detoured around a patch of stingwort, stopped to mark another tree, and then continued. “But while we’re on the subject of sharpfangs: Mother, they sure are noisy things, aren’t they? It’s a wonder they ever manage to surprise a hunting pack.

“Actually, no it isn’t. The kin in hunting packs spend so much time arguing with each other and bickering over status, the wonder is that they are ever able to surprise anything. ”

As the last ebb of the sunlight slipped away, Maverick finally broke out of the tall forest and reached the foothills. He sat down, paused for a reflective scratch, and stared up at the forbidding, rocky crags.

“Yes,” he told himself, “running solo is definitely the way to go. No status fights, no orders, no drooling little pups slowing you down. ”

His voice took a darker turn. “No food, no warm cave to sleep in, no family. ” Maverick’s voice dropped to a breathy whisper, as if he had finally become aware that he was talking to himself. “Let’s face it, lad. We’ve been on the run too long. We-l have got to find a pack to join. ” He thought back on the winter he’d just lived through and shuddered involuntarily. “I’ve got to find a pack soon. ” Taking a deep breath, he dug his paws into the loose gravel and started up the side of the mountain. Smallface, the lesser of the two moons, was just rising. He had a lot of climbing to do before Largeface rose.

Halfway up the slope, he surprised a feeding whistlepig. The stupid little furball tried to hide in plain sight; scrabbling and clawing, Maverick fell on it and bit its head off with one snap of his long, toothy jaws. The meat was tough and nearly tasteless, but he carefully chewed and swallowed each bite.

Excluding carrion, it was the first meal he’d eaten in three days.

CHAPTER 6

JANET

Robotic Law potentials danced and capered in Basalom’s positronic brain like fireflies on hyperdrive. Impulses and reactions chased each other through his circuits, laughing riotously as molecular relays burst open and slammed shut like hallway doors in an old comedy routine. As much as a robot can be said to enjoy anything, Basalom was beginning to enjoy the incredibly complex nets of conflicting potentials that wove themselves inside his brain. Now, with the latest news just in from the scanning team, an entirely new dimension was added to his decision matrix, imparting a wonderful sense of energy to his cognition circuits. The potentials glittered in his mind like an Auroran filterbug’s web on a dewy morning.

Dr. Anastasi was not going to like the scanning team’s report.

First and Second Law conflicts skirmished in his brain, fighting for priority. Each time his decision gate flip-flopped, the stress register escalated. When the register hit 256, the accumulated potential was shunted to ground through his optical perceptor membrane actuator.

In simpler terms, he blinked.

Dr. Anastasi finished her business in the Personal and emerged into the companionway. Basalom blinked once more to clear his stress register and then addressed his mistress.

“Dr. Anastasi? The scanning team reports finding no trace of Learning Machine #1. ”

“What?”

Again, a surging clash of potentials! How could he obey the implied Second Law command to repeat and clarify the message without violating the First Law by insulting her intelligence?

Basalom settled for slowing his voice clock rate by ten percent and augmenting his speech with “warm” harmonics in the two-kilohertz range. “For the past eight hours, the scanning team has worked outward in an expanding radial pattern from the landing site. Within the limits of their equipment, they have not been able to find any evidence of Learning Machine #1’s existence. ”

Dr. Anastasi ran a hand through her hair. “That’ s impossible. It was powered by a cold microfusion cell. Even if the learning machine was completely destroyed, they still should be able to pick up residual neutron radiation from the power pack. ” Then a thought crossed her mind, and she frowned. “Unless Derec... ”

She shook her head. “No, a coincidence like that would strain credulity. The scanning crew must have made some mistake. ” She turned and started up the companionway toward the bow of the ship. “Well? Come along, Basalom. ”

Basalom was almost disappointed. His lovely, complex decision matrix resolved to simple Second Law obedience, and he dutifully fell in behind.

To minimize the effect of stray radiation from the ship’s engines on delicate equipment, the scanning team’s cabin was located in a blister on the underside of the uttermost bow of the ship. To get to the blister, Basalom and Dr. Anastasi had to leave the cargo bay laboratory, walk the entire length of the living quarters, and then drop down one level to the low-ceilinged companionway that ran beneath the bridge. For the last ten meters, they had to pull themselves along handholds through a narrow, zero-gravity access tube.

Along the way, to keep his mind busy, Basalom reopened his human viewpoint simulation file. He had more observations to add to the file and more data to correlate. In particular, Basalom wanted to record an effect that he had noticed twice before: That Dr. Janet, when given information she did not like, would insist on traveling to the source and verifying the information herself.

This must be a corollary effect of having a purely local viewpoint, Basalom decided. Dr. Anastasi would rather believe that a severe failure has occurred in her information gathering systems than accept unpleasant information.

Basalom logged, indexed, and stored the observation. Someday 1 will meet robots who have been observing other humans in a similar fashion. Perhaps then we will be able to integrate our data and formulate fundamental laws of human behavior.

Perhaps someday, Basalom repeated. But given the way Dr. Anastasi shunned human society, it was not likely to be any time soon.

Puffing with exertion and the indignity of it all, Dr. Anastasi pushed off the last handhold in the access tube and floated into the scanning blister. A moment later Basalom followed; he immediately noted that the four robots that made up the scanning team were still jacked into their consoles. He fired off a quick commburst suggesting that they turn around and look sharp. Slowly, awkwardly, the four robots began disconnecting their umbilical cables, detaching themselves from their consoles, and switching over to their local senses.

Looking at the squat, blocky machines, Basalom felt a surge of the positronic flux that he identified as a feeling of superiority. The scanning team robots were plain metallic automatons designed expressly for work in zero-G. They had ungainly, boxlike bodies, no heads to speak of, and in place of proper arms and legs, eight multi-jointed limbs that ended in simple metal claws. Since the bulk of their sensory data was routed through the scanning consoles, they came equipped with the bare minimum of human-interface hardware: one audio input! output membrane and a pair of monochrome optics on stalks. The effect, Basalom decided, resembled nothing so much as a quartet of giant softshell crabs.

Strike that. Basalom ran a quick cross-reference through his metaphor library. Make that, they look like giant lice.

Dr. Anastasi was still waiting patiently for the scanning team to finish disconnecting themselves, so Basalom allocated a few microseconds for comparative analysis. They are crude, functional devices. 1 have a humanoid configuration. human-like limbs, and an acceptably human face.

They are little more than human-friendly front-ends for the machines that they are connected to. 1 am intelligent. perceptive, and equipped with refined sensibilities.

Verily, 1 am molded in the image of my Maker!

Then a new, unknown potential surged through Basalom’s circuits, and he reevaluated the results of his analysis.

Still, they are my positronic brothers, and 1 must help them elevate themselves if 1 can.

Basalom didn’t realize it, but he had just become the first robot in history to be condescending.

The last of the scanning robots finished disconnecting itself from its instrument console. As one, the four robots rotated their sensory turrets to “face” Dr. Anastasi.

When she was sure she had their attention, Janet began issuing commands. “Eyes, Ears, Nose, and Throat! Report!” As soon as that last word left her lips, Basalom anticipated the cacophony that would result from a literal interpretation of that order and jumped in on the commlink. Override, he squirted out to the scanning robots. Report sequentially.

The scanning robots seemed to accept his authority. Eyes, the robot in charge of scanning in the infrared through ultraviolet portion of the spectrum, began reporting first in a flat, toneless voice.

“Using the design information available for Learning Machine #1, I projected its range of possible operational profiles and thermal dispersion patterns. I found no infrared sources in the target area which met this criteria.

“Next, I used the solar spectrographic information and atmospheric data supplied by Nose, along with our knowledge of Learning Machine #1’s physical structure, to compute the albedo—”

Basalom interrupted via hyperwave. Explain albedo.

“—That is, the optical wavelength reflectivity of its skin. Allowing a 15-percent variance for self-directed changes in surface texture, I still was unable to identify any objects which showed a high probability of being either part or all of the learning machine.

“Finally, based on the knowledge that the ‘cells’ that compose the learning machine are actually polyhedrons with microplanar surfaces, I scanned for moiré patterns in the ultraviolet range. Aside from the aeroshell in which the learning machine landed, I found nothing to match my search profile. ”

Good job, Eyes. The squat little robot did not acknowledge Basalom’s compliment.

Dr. Anastasi nodded thoughtfully. “I see. Next?”

Ears, the robot in charge of monitoring the microwave through hyperwave portion of the spectrum, began reporting in an identical monotonous voice. “While I have been able to locate the transponder on the aeroshell, I have not received any signals from Learning Machine #1 ‘s built-in hyperwave transponder. Nor have I been able to detect any leakage of the kind that should be associated with the operation of the learning machine. ”

Dr. Anastasi’s brow wrinkled.

Explain leakage, Basalom hyperwaved.

“When operating, all cybernetic circuits emit a certain amount of electromagnetic radiation. If we are familiar with the design of the device, we can project the frequency and data encryption of the leakage. No leakage conforming to the learning machine’s profile was found. ”

Dr. Anastasi nodded. “I understand. ”

“Learning Machine #1 was equipped with an internal commlink,” Ears went on. “I have been monitoring the base channel that you assigned to it, but I have been unable to pick up any signals originating from Learning Machine #1. ”

Dr. Anastasi frowned. “Okay, I hear what you’re saying. Next?”

Nose, the robot in charge of spectrography and chemical analysis, spoke up. It was equipped with the same voice synthesizer as Eyes and Ears, but Basalom noted that a microscopic crack in Nose’s voice diaphragm gave it an interesting third-harmonic distortion.

“My specialties are of limited use in this situation. However, I was able to coordinate with the other units. I provided Eyes with spectrographic data regarding the Tau Puppis sunlight and a summary analysis of the planetary atmosphere. Beyond that, I am unable to contribute. ”

Dr. Anastasi frowned. “Hmm. Something smells fishy about that. I’ll have to think it over. Next?”

Throat, the robot in charge of outbound telecommunications, spoke last. “Due to our inability to locate the learning machine, laser and maser communications were not attempted. I have been broadcasting continuous messages on the learning machine’s internal commlink frequency. However, as Ears reported, there has been no response. ”

Dr. Anastasi shot Throat a cold stare. “You don’t say?”

That was a rhetorical question, Basalom added. Do not answer. The robot held its silence.

Dr. Anastasi looked the scanning crew over one more time and screwed her face up into a look of complete disgust. “I can’t believe this,” she said finally. “You robots have been scanning that ball of dirt for eight hours and you haven’t found anything?”

Throat did not wait for a cue from Basalom, but simply spoke right up. “On the contrary, Dr. Anastasi, we have found a great deal. However, none of it matches the profile of either the learning machine or its damaged remains. ”

Dr. Anastasi forgot about Newton’s laws for a moment and waved a hand to cut Throat off. Unfortunately, since she was floating in zero-G, the action sent her spinning toward the neutrino detector. Basalom gently caught her and stabilized her.

“You found something? What?”

Eyes answered the question. “I have detected a significant number of large lifeforms in the area of the landing site. The largest appears to be a warm-blooded grazing animal. The next largest appears to be a cold-blooded predator which follows the grazing animals as they migrate. Since we do not know the final shape of the learning machine, I can tell you only that the average predator outweighs the learning machine by a factor of four to one. ”

Dr. Anastasi frowned. “Oh, great. So our learning machine ran into a monster and got itself demolished. ”

The scanning robots conferred briefly by commlink. “It is possible,” Throat said. “However, in that case we would still expect to find identifiable wreckage. At the very least, we should be able to locate the microfusion cell. We have not found either. ”

“Moreover,” Eyes continued seamlessly, “I have detected a number of clustered infrared sources. The sources are almost always found in the vicinity of what appear to be limestone caves, and the next largest class of lifeforms are generally found clustered around the infrared sources. ”

Dr. Anastasi looked from one robotic “face” to the next with a very puzzled look in her eyes.

Basalom squirted out a hyperwave message to the scanning team. Clarify!

“I studied the spectrographic signatures of the infrared sources,” Nose said. “I detected cellulose, chlorophyll, carbon, and pyroligneous acid. ”

“So our intelligent lupoids are still down there. But they couldn’t have destroyed the learning machine, and they sure couldn’t have removed all traces of it.

“If the robot were inside a cave, would you be able to detect it?”

Eyes, Ears, Nose, and Throat conferred briefly. Ears spoke when they had finished. “The commlink would penetrate all but the deepest caves. Small amounts of positronic leakage from the brain should also be detectable. I detected neither. ”

“So something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” Dr. Anastasi said.

Basalom was still trying to parse out the metaphor when Janet kicked off the wall and dove into the access tube. “Let’s get out of here. I need time to think. ”

As he followed, Basalom reopened his human viewpoint file and made another entry. When Dr. Anastasi wants to avoid having to make a decision, she moves to a different part of the ship and claims a need to think. Does physical location have a significant effect on human cogitative abilities? He logged and indexed the entry; as he was storing it, a dialogue box popped open in the upper left corner of his field of view.

Basalom? It was Eyes. This reaction puzzles us. Have we harmed Mistress Janet by giving her this information?

Basalom responded via commlink. 1 am still trying to determine the First Law implications of emotional distress.

Oh. Eyes was not a particularly bright robot, but it was selfaware enough to realize that it lacked experience in the subtleties of dealing with humans. In that case, perhaps you are best qualified to judge whether or not we should report our one additional finding.

I will try. What is it?

There was a pause; nothing a human would have noticed, but Basalom could plainly see that the scanning robot was having difficulty integrating the information. While we were unable to locate the specific communications and energy signatures of Learning Machine # J, we did record a significant amount of other robotic activity.

Basalom’s curiosity bits skyrocketed. Other robotic activity? Explain.

The little robot made one more try at generating a conclusion from its data and then gave up. I cannot. Stand by for download of raw data.

Basalom cleared several of his unused memory banks, redirected his I/0 to fast storage, and opened his multiplex comm channel. Ready. A nanosecond later, a torrent of raw data flooded into Basalom’s mind. As fast as he could, he sorted, collated, and organized the data. Pushing it through his pattern-recognition algorithm, he tried to isolate and identify the most important points.

One by one, the points swam into clear focus. They quickly formed a structure, a simple pattern that teased comparative memories out of his long-term data storage.

Oh no. His stress register started clicking like a geiger counter, and the pattern took on an ever-more-familiar shape. It can’t be. His First Law sense began to itch like mad as the Second Law potential tried to find a route to ground. One word got out through the First Law filter: “Madam?”

Dr. Anastasi paused in the tube and looked over her shoulder at Basalom. “Yes?”

Power flowed through Basalom’ s cognitive circuits like strong wine. Thoughts spun and danced; potentials crashed and exploded like thunderclouds on a hot summer night.

“Madam, there—” The First Law choked him off again.

A concerned look crossed Dr. Anastasi’s face. “Well?”

In Basalom’s mind, the First and Second Law collided head on, drew apart, and collided again. Neither was the clear winner; he sought desperately to reroute data to his speech centers.

“Ma—”

Dr. Anastasi grew impatient. “Come on, Basalom. Spit it out. ”

His limbs froze; his major joints locked up. He blinked sixty-four times in rapid succession, and then through sheer force of will dumped his speech buffer through his voice synthesizer.

“There is a Robot City on this planet. ”

CHAPTER 7

MAVERICK

The spur of rock jutted straight out from the side of the mountain forming a natural balcony. Maverick sat on the edge of the spur, drinking in the clean pine smell of the forested valley below and watching the moons’ light glitter and dance on the river in the distance. Smallface was now near its zenith, and it cast a cool, white light with almost no shadow. Largeface, just barely above the horizon, was a dull orange globe the color and shape of a vingfruit with a bite taken out of it.

Somehow, the sight of the two moons together in the sky stirred something deep and primal in Maverick’s soul. As if the two were directly linked, his excitement grew as Largeface rose. He paced nervously around the rock spur. A half-dozen times he yelped sharply when he thought he heard something. His excitement only grew stronger when the sounds turned out to be false alarms.

Then the sound he’d been waiting for came wafting gently on the wind, and it was raw, beautiful, and absolutely unmistakable.

At first, it was very soft and distant. Arooo. Just one voice at first, lonely, plaintive, and far away. The sound sent chills up and down Maverick’s spine and set his hackles standing on end.

Then another voice joined in, a little closer. Arooooo! The first voice responded, and the forests and mountains threw back the echo of the ancient, wordless cry.

No, those weren’t echoes, those were yet more voices, joining in the chorus of a song that was as old as his race. Voices joined, and picked up, and repeated. AROOO! The call carried for miles across the hills and valleys. Not just miles; hundreds of miles, as the voices followed the rising moon west across the land. As it had on certain nights for thousands of years, the song chased the twin moons clear across the world, from the eastern shores to the western sea.

When he judged the time to be right, Maverick threw his head back, flattened his ears, and joined in. AROOOO! I am Maverick! I am here, my brothers! I join you! AROOOOOO!

Other intelligible words began rising out of the joyous, incoherent howl of BeastTongue. I am ChippedFang.

I am DoesNotFollow.

I am RaggedEar.

I am SmellsBad. I join you!

The Howl Network had just come on line.

The Howl Network reached from sea to sea, and from the land of AlwaysSnow to the Uncrossable Desert. It covered the land, but it was not terribly efficient. Maverick had plenty of time to think while listening to the threads of news that twisted through the air.

This time, though, he thought silently. How strange, lad. The pack-kin insult and despise the outcasts. If they catch you in their territory—and outnumber you by at least three to one—they’ll attack you, and even try to kill you.

Yet if it weren’t for the outcasts, not a one of them would ever know what was happening just fifty trots outside his pack’s territory.

Oops. A message that he found interesting echoed through the night. Maverick picked it up, repeated it, and added a few comments of his own. Then he went back to thinking.

Hmm. I add comments, and ChippedFang adds comments, and DoesNotFollow adds comments.... Might be interesting sometime to get the originator and the final receiver of the message together, to see how much the message changes along the line.

More messages wafted through the damp spring air. Weather reports from out west; looked like heavy rain this year. Further accounts of renewed fighting between two feuding packs in the southeast; oh, those two had been fighting for years without resolution. A hunting report on the grazer migration in the north; it seemed the calves were fat and slow this year, and the sharpfangs few in number. Maverick dutifully picked up and repeated each message without comment, then went back to his first line of thought.

Yes, the pack-kin hate loners. They attack you; they warn their pups that they’ II turn out like you if they aren’t good. They call you pups o/the FirstBeast, and blame you/or everything that’s wrong with their cozy little world.

Maverick thought of the last pack he’d encountered, less than a week before. The freshly healed scar on his leg gave him another sharp twinge, but he smiled anyway, and for a moment lost himself in a memory of soft young fur and a certain long pink tongue.

Yes, the pack-kin hate you. But on warm spring evenings when the mood is in the air, their virgin daughters seek you out.

And when their huntleaders are all dead or driven off by internal fighting, who do they ask to be their new leaders ?

Maverick stood up on all fours a moment, yawned as wide as his jaw would allow, and indulged in a long stretch that ran from his haunches clear out to the toes of his forepaws. Then he treated himself to one more smile.

“Face it, kid. They’re just plain jealous. ”

Oops! A new message was coming through the night, and he’d almost missed it. Maverick quickly sat down, cocked his ears, and listened attentively to the voice-he thought it was RaggedEar-that relayed the story.

“—report from the eastern lakes country. The kin of PackHome are seeing GodBeings again.

“PackHome was the scene of last year’s so-called ‘Hill of Stars’ incident, in which an enormous, shining sanddigger’s nest reportedly appeared in the midst of isolated hunting territory.

“The sudden appearance of the Hill of Stars was accompanied by an invasion of ‘WalkingStones. ’ These creatures, which walked on their hind legs at all times and had no smell, killed several kin by throwing lightning from their fingertips.

“ At about the same time, a mysterious kin known as SilverSides joined the pack. She destroyed several of the WalkingStones, and forced the GodBeing that lived in the Hill of Stars to come out for single combat. Local kin say that SilverSides became a GodBeing herself and went into the Hill of Stars.

“Since then, SilverSides has been seen only once, in the company of a strange, half-kin, half-GodBeing creature named Wolruf. ”

Wolruf? Maverick wondered. What’s a wolruf?

“LifeCrier, who speaks the history for the kin of PackHome, says that SilverSides was a gift of the OldMother and has returned to her. LifeCrier insists that SilverSides will return to lead the hunt and protect all the kin.

“Young kin from many packs have come to the eastern lakes country to hear LifeCrier speak and hoping to glimpse the GodBeings. But there are stories of widespread confusion.

“In the meantime, the faithful wait, and the Hill of Stars itself remains silent. This report was first cried by StormBringer on the eastern lakes echo. ”

Maverick sat quietly a few moments longer, listening to the last reverberations of the message die out against the mountainside. Then the yips and howls started up again as other kin picked up the story and repeated it. Maverick cleared his throat, laid his ears back, took a deep breath

And thought better of it. “PackHome, eh? In the eastern lakes country?” He squeezed out a tight-lipped smile, got to his feet, and trotted over to where the spur of rock joined the side of the mountain. “Sounds like a chaotic, leaderless mess to me. ” At the top of the trail he paused to look at the stars and get a good fix on the direction he was heading. Then he started carefully picking his way down the talus-covered slope.

“Just the place for a strong kin with a little ambition, eh, lad?”

He looked up at the stars one more time and noted that LargeFace was now well up in the sky. In this phase the shadowy outline of SplitEar, the kin in the moon, stood out very clearly.

Maverick couldn’t help but feel that old SplitEar, first pup of the OldMother, was smiling down on him.

CHAPTER 8

DEREC

Dr. Avery was hunched over a data terminal in the ship’s robotics lab, deeply engrossed in a dense mass of hex code, when Derec called out, “Hi, Dad!” and came bouncing into the room.

Avery pulled his face away from the terminal just long enough to glare at Derec. “Will you please stop calling me that?” he asked, his white mustache bristling with anger. “You know how much it annoys me. ”

“Sure, Dad. ”

Avery shot his son one more if-looks-could-kill glance, ran his fingers through his long white hair, and turned back to the terminal. He would never have said it out loud, of course, but in his heart, Avery admitted that Derec certainly had every right to try to annoy him. After all, it was Avery’s megalomaniacal experiment that had erased Derec’s memory and infected Ariel with amnemonic plague. Now he could not reconstruct how, in his madness, he had caused the amnesia, much less how to reverse it. And while his little chemfet nanomachines had ultimately worked to perfection, they’d nearly killed Derec twice, and they had killed Derec and Ariel’s unborn child.

Given all that, Avery resolved once more to put up with whatever juvenile revenge Derec was in the mood to exact today. He waited patiently while Derec found a noisy tin stool, dragged it over, and sat down. Then, when it appeared that Derec wasn’t going to say anything, he called up another bloc of code.

“Whatcha doing, Dad?” Derec asked brightly.

Avery sighed and turned to his son. ‘. I’m going through the ship’ s systems software, in hopes of finding the shape-changing algorithm. ”

“Why?”

“I’d like to stop the polymorphism, or at least slow it down a great deal. ”

“Why?”

Avery sighed again and ran his fingers through his hair. That’s one of the problems with having children raised by robots, he thought. When they’re about three years old, they go through a “Why, daddy?” stage. The Second Law forces the robots to answer. So the kids never outgrow it.

Avery straightened his lab coat, pasted on his best imitation paternal smile, and answered the question with another question.

“Have you ever walked off the edge of a gravity field?”

Derec sifted through his attenuated memories. “I don’t think so. Why?”

“I did, last night. You‘ve seen how minimal the environment on the second deck is? I was looking for Lucius last night and I walked into a pitch-dark cabin that had no gravity field. ”

“What happened?”

“When you reach the edge of a gravity field, you don’t float up into the air. Rather, down suddenly becomes the floor of the room you just left. There’s no sensation of falling; you simply pivot on the doorsill and follow the field through a 90-degree curve. ”

“So?”

“Have you ever heard the expression,. the floor jumped up and hit me in the face’?”

Derec snickered.

“Blast it, Derec, it’s not funny! If the floor hadn’t realized what was going on and softened itself an instant before impact, I would have broken my nose!”

Derec tried to keep the laugh suppressed, but a small giggle found a crack and wiggled through.

Avery scowled at Derec through his bushy white eyebrows. “You think that’s funny? This morning I happened to think out loud that I needed to use the Personal, and frost me if the chair I was sitting on didn’t transform itself into a toilet!” Avery shot a savage glare at the ceiling of the cabin. “And no, I do not need to use the Personal now!” His chair, which had begun to soften around the edges, quickly firmed up again.

Derec sputtered twice and then exploded into uncontrolled laughter.

Avery’s scowl melted. “Okay, maybe it’s a little funny. But I’ll tell you, the thing that finally pushed me over the edge was the nightmare I had about one this morning. I dreamed that the ship had transformed itself into a giant humanoid robot and was insisting that its name was ‘Optimus Prime. ’ “

Derec abruptly stopped laughing, and his face went pale. “Gad, that’s a horrible thought. ”

“Woke me up in a cold sweat, I can tell you. ”

After a few seconds of thoughtful silence, Avery turned back to his workstation and slapped a hand on the data display. ,, Anyway, that’s when I decided that the shape-changing program had to go. Or at least, it had to get toned down some. ” He looked at Derec, attempted a tentative smile, and then looked around the robotics lab.

“You know, son, there are some really good ideas here. Take this ship’s skin, for instance; cellular robotics is the perfect technology for seamless, self-sealing spacecraft hulls. If we could just find some way to bond the robotic skin permanently to a titanium-aluminide frame, we might really be on to something. ” He turned to Derec and cautiously met his eyes.

“Derec? When we get back to Robot City, we’re going to have to work on this design some more. ”

Derec nodded and looked away. He never enjoyed admitting it, but every once in a great while his father could be right.

While Derec’s face was turned, Avery stole a few moments to really look at his son. It was funny, but despite the nearly twenty years that had passed since Derec was born, Avery couldn’t remember ever once just looking at the boy and seeing him for what he was. He’d always looked at the boy and seen what he wanted him to become. For most of the boy’s life, Avery now noted with a little sadness, he’d treated Derec more like an experiment than a son.

Derec. Even that name was part of an experiment. The boy’s real name was David, but Avery had wiped out that memory along with everything else. This young man who stood before him now, fidgeting uncomfortably and staring at the wall—this Derec—was a stranger.

But blood will tell. While Derec looked away, Avery studied the line of his jaw and the shape of his cheekbones. He saw his ex-wife Janet’s genes everywhere; from the sandy blond hair, through the pale complexion, to his thin, expressive lips.

And what did I give you, my son? Avery didn’t need to ask; he knew he’d given Derec the traits that didn’t show. I gave you my temper, I’m sorry to say. I gave you my coldness, and my fear of being vulnerable. Not for the first time, Avery felt a sudden need to hug his son.

The moment passed. I’m sorry, Derec. I can’t open up either. Still, that didn’t mean he couldn’t build just a little bridge, did it? Avery decided to take a chance.

“So what do you think, Derec? Would you like to give me a hand? The ship can cough up another robotics terminal in a couple of minutes, and I could use the help. ”

Well, son? Please?

Derec said nothing, but his face turned tight and thoughtful. Avery watched closely; Derec’ s body language said that he was trying to say yes. The word was working its way up to his lips, but it was a fight every inch of the way. It had started in his gut, clawed its way up his esophagus, and traversed his soft palate. It was on his tongue now; at any moment it would break through to his lips. Derec started to open his mouth

The intercom buzzed. It was Wolruf.

“Derec? We got somethin’ ‘ere. ‘u better come ‘ave a look at it. ”

Derec broke concentration, swallowed hard, and turned to the intercom panel. “Can it wait? I’m a little tied up at the moment. ”

Wolruf growled something in her native tongue. “Think ‘u better come look at this now. ”

“Oh, okay. ” Derec turned to his father, cracked a weak smile, and shrugged. “Sorry, I have to, you know. ” He gestured toward the intercom and left the sentence hanging.

“That’s okay. We can continue this another time. ” Avery offered Derec a smile.

Derec just looked at his feet and shrugged again. “Sure. If you want. ” Another hesitation, and then he turned and darted through a pair of open lift doors that had appeared in the cabin wall.

The lift doors hissed open, and Derec stepped out onto the bridge. Mandelbrot stood in one corner, staring intently at the external visual display and conversing with a data terminal. Wolruf was crouched over the main control console, her thick, sausage-like fingers flying over the controls like a multisynth player performing Mothersbaugh’s “Toccata and Fugue in. 25 Kilohertz. ” As she punched keys and adjusted sliders, she kept up a steady stream of short, guttural commands in both broken English and her native language. The console seemed to be accepting both with equal ease.

The lift doors slid shut. Derec cleared his throat and said, “Okay, Wolruf. Where’s all the excitement?”

Wolruf neither turned around nor took her hands off the controls. Instead, she simply lifted her head a little and pointed her nose at the visual display. “’ere. ”

Derec looked at the display. It was the view astern, he guessed; the exceptionally bright star off to the right side looked about the right color to be the Ceremyon’s sun. Aside from that star, though, he saw nothing that appeared out of place on the usual visiplate starfield.

“So? I don’t see anything. ”

Wolruf growled something untranslatable and started pounding on a different section of the control console. “Sorry. Keep forgettin’ ‘u ‘umans eyes are almos’ as weak as ‘ur nose. ” The visual display shifted, blurred, and came into focus again.

More starfield. Only this time there was a tiny, smudgy gray blob in the middle of the screen.

“Okay, I see it now,” Derec said. “What is it?” He moved to stand next to Wolruf, but the blob wasn’t any more meaningful when viewed close-up.

Wolruf glared at the little blob and bared her teeth. “Ast’roid,” she said with a growl.

Derec looked at her. “All this fuss over an asteroid ?”

“This ‘uns been gainin’ on us for eight hours. ”

“What!” Derec spun around and looked at the visual display. The blob still wasn’t any more meaningful than it was before.

Wolruf punched in a few more commands, and the display went back to its original image. This time, though, a graceful blue curve was superimposed over the starfield. “ Allowing f’r mass, and all known gravitational vectors includin’ th’ cavitation effect of ‘ur drives, here’s th’ projected orbit for th’ ast’roid. ” She punched two more keys, and a jagged red line twined around the blue.

“And ‘ere’s its actual course. ”

Cautiously, Derec touched the visiplate. He traced the red line with a finger, stopping on one particularly sharp bend. “Any known phenomena that could cause this?”

Wolruf shook her head.

“ ‘At bend ‘u got ‘ur finger on iss a manual course correction I made ten minutes ago. ” Wolruf continued. “Five minutes later, the ast’roid changed course to match. ”

Wolruf paused to lay her ears back and look Derec straight in the eye.

“Derec, ‘at ast’roid iss under power. ”

Derec studied the visual display a bit more and then looked back to Wolruf. “Recommended action?”

Wolruf gritted her teeth and crouched low over the controls. “Recommend we find out ‘00’s behind it. Also recommend ‘u find ‘urself a seat. ‘iss could get a littl’ rough. ” She shot a fierce grin at Mandelbrot, then slapped a finger down on the intercom button. “Arr’el? Dr. Av’ry? ‘old on tight, we’re makin’ an unprogrammed course correction. Now. ”

An acceleration couch popped up out of the cabin deck; Derec just barely had time to dive into it before Wolruf slammed the ship into a violent roll. The starfield in the viewplate spun dizzily.

The ship was still rolling when Wolruf hit the main thrusters.

In all, the experience wasn’t as jarring as Derec had expected. The ship’s gravity fields did an exceptionally good job of compensating for the changing gravity and thrust vectors. Unfortunately, they didn’t do a thing for Coriolis force. Within instants, Derec was feeling thoroughly dizzy and a little nauseated. He wondered how Ariel was taking it.

Then he wondered about something else; about a story he’d once read. “Wait a minute, Wolruf. This won’t work. ”

Wolruf cocked an ear at Derec, but kept flying.

“It can’t work. The angles of incidence are all wrong. If someone’s behind that asteroid, all he has to do is use his maneuvering thrusters to keep the rock between him and us. The asteroid’s too small for us to enter a gravitational orbit; at this range, there’s no other way we can fly around it faster than he can maneuver around it. ”

Wolruf kept flying. Mandelbrot, back in the corner, spoke up. “Mistress Wolruf has already thought of that. I have all ship’s sensors locked on the asteroid. If the unknown vessel emits any form of radiation or hot gasses during maneuvering, we will detect it. ”

“ ‘sides,” Wolruf growled, “ ‘aven’t ‘u ever ‘eard of spookin’ ‘im out? If ‘e’s got some kind of remote sensor watching us, ‘e now knows we know ‘e’s there. No point in ‘im staying ‘idden any more. ”

As if in confirmation of Wolruf’s statement, Mandelbrot said, “Contact. A stream of superheated boron-11 has just been emitted by a source behind the asteroid. ”

Wolruf’s mouth opened in a toothy grin, and her tongue lolled out. “We got ‘ im. ’, She fired a last round of maneuvering thrusters and stabilized the ship’s course. “Now let’s see—”

“More contacts,” Mandelbrot said. “ Additional thruster exhaust; I am projecting

“Cancel. Visual contact. I am putting it on the main viewer. ” The stars swam, blurred again, and resolved into a much closer look at the asteroid than Derec had had before.

A ship was creeping out from behind the right edge of the asteroid. At first glance it looked like a fairly conventional Settler design. Then Derec realized that he was just looking at the foremost piece of it.

The ship came out from behind the asteroid, and kept coming. It wasn’t just large, it was enormous. And yet the design had a curiously improvised look about it, as if someone had decided to build a supervessel by simply welding together a dozen randomly selected hulls. Sleek trans-atmospheric hulls nestled in with ungainly cargo pods, and a hodgepodge of angular bracing and spaghetti-like tubing connected the whole lot. Bits of it looked like standard Spacer equipment, or Auroran pleasure yachts, while other segments looked utterly alien, like nothing Derec had ever seen before.

Then he felt the touch of an icy ghost finger on his shoulder, and the hairs on the nape of his neck stood straight up. He had seen a ship like that before.

Derec glanced quickly at Wolruf. Her hackles were standing up, and she’d bared her teeth. Derec suddenly knew he didn’t need to ask what she was thinking.

“The approaching vessel has opened fire,” Mandelbrot announced. “Primary armament appears to be phased microwave lasers. ”

As one, Derec and Wolruf looked at each other. “Aranimas!”

Wolruf became a flurry of action. She slammed her fists down on controls, jabbed buttons, and barked terse, almost hysterical commands at the ship. In response, the ship yawed hard and pitched wildly as the main drives erupted into life.

“This is impossible,” Derec said. “We destroyed Aranimas in Sol system. I saw his ship explode. ”

“ ‘u saw ‘im jettison second’ry ‘ulls. ” Wolruf punched up some kind of intersecting curve display, peered at it anxiously, and resumed hitting controls. “On my world there’s a small liz’rd called a skerk. ‘u grab its tail, th’ tail breaks off. Skerk gets away, ‘u get its tail. ” She glanced up at the screen again; the flying junkyard was still closing. “ ‘u must ‘ave got a piece of Aranimas’s tail. ”

Derec just stared at the viewscreen and shook his head. “But how in the universe did he find us again?”

“Don’t know,” Wolruf growled. “Matter of fact, don’t care. Just know we need to get away now. ” She leaned back to survey the control board settings and then thumbed the intercom button. “Arr’el! Dr. Av’ry! Stand by for jump!”

“Jump?” Derec shouted. “We can’t jump! We’re too far away from the programmed jump point. ”

“Direct hit on the stem,” Mandelbrot announced.

“Wolruf! You didn’t have time to calculate and enter a new course!”

Wolruf punched more buttons. “ ‘u care about details at a time like thiss?”

“ Another hit,” Mandelbrot said. “Hull breached in Section 17D. ”

“But where will we go?” Derec wailed.

“Someplace Aranimas issn’t!” Wolruf took one last glance at the control settings, and then grabbed the jump control handle and yanked it down hard.

A shift, a spin, Derec felt a rolling disorientation in his inner ear: Enormous energies were expended, and the Wild Goose Chase squeezed through a hole in the space/time continuum. A moment later, it was somewhere else.

Wolruf engaged the autopilot. With’ careful and precise thruster bursts, the ship stabilized its tumble. The viewscreen blanked, cleared, and displayed a binary star consisting of a yellow giant and its white dwarf companion.

With obvious effort, Wolruf relaxed her grip on the jump handle and sagged back into the acceleration couch.

“Where are we?” Derec asked softly.

Mandelbrot spoke up. “I am working on that. We will have a rough navigational fix within six hours, and coordinates precise enough to begin programming another jump in twenty-three. ”

“Twenty-three hours? But what if Aranimas follows us?’

“Then we are caught. ” Mandelbrot exchanged a stream of bits with the data terminal. “Given the availability of free hydrogen in this system, it will be a minimum of ninety-one point five hours before we have accumulated enough hydrogen to fuel another hyperspace jump. ”

Derec frowned. “Well, if that’s it, then, it’ll have to do. Deploy the ramscoops, Mandelbrot. ”

“I have already done so. ”

“Thanks. Wolruf?”

The small alien rolled over and looked at Derec with eyes that had gone past fright and were now simply exhausted.

“Wolruf? You were his navigator once. How did Aranimas find us again?”

Wolruf brought a foot up and scratched her ear thoughtfully. “Don’t know. ”

“But his sensor technology—”

“Iss whatev’r ‘e can steal. No tellin’ what ‘e’s got now. ’;

Derec frowned again. Then his face brightened. “Well, there’s no point in worrying about it. As Mandelbrot pointed out, if he can follow us, the Goose is cooked. ” He turned to Wolruf and smiled. “But I don’t think that’s a real issue. We got away clean. I mean, every schoolboy knows that it’s physically impossible to track a ship through hyperspace, right?”

Wolruf got up on one elbow, reached across the couch, and rested a furry hand on Derec’s shoulder.

“Derec,” she whispered, “I don’t think Aranimas went to ‘ur school. ”

CHAPTER 9

WHITETAIL

Old LifeCrier, spiritual leader of the kin of PackHome and self proclaimed First Believer in SilverSides, sat at the mouth of the cave, watching the milling throng in the clearing below. “Do you hear that, daughter?” he said proudly, using the informal words of KinSpeech. “They’re all speaking my name. ”

From somewhere inside the cave, WhiteTail answered, “That’s sweet, Father. ”

He ignored the humoring tone in her voice and looked back out over the crowd. “ ‘LifeCrier,’ that’s what they’re saying. ‘We’ve traveled for days to hear LifeCrier. ’ “ He let his tongue loll out and smiled clear back to his fourth bicuspids. “You never thought your old father would be heard beyond the pack. ”

WhiteTail carried a few old dry bones up from the darkness and deposited them in the rubbish heap near the opening. “Of course I did, Father. ” She turned to head back into the darkness, but he reached out a paw and gently stopped her.

“Look at them, WhiteTail. Just took at them. What do you see?”

WhiteTail stood up on her hind legs and surveyed the crowd. Then, with a disgusted snort, she dropped back down to all fours. “I see about two hundred extra mouths to feed. We’re running low on food as it is. ”

The old kin smiled sadly and shook his head. “Oh, ye of little vision. That’s the beginnings of the Great Pack out there. ”

WhiteTail sniffed disdainfully. “It’s a hungry mob of outcasts, younglings, and losers, that’s what it is. Not ten decent hunters in the lot of them. And certainly no hunt leader. ”

LifeCrier ignored her. “Think of it, daughter. We have the privilege to be a part of the greatest thing that’s ever happened to the kin. First SilverSides came down from the OldMother. Now the Great Pack is forming. Soon all the packs will be united, and the sharpfangs will be driven away forever. We’re seeing untold generations of prophecy fulfilled right before our very eyes!”

WhiteTail sighed heavily and cast a distempered look at her father. “Do the prophecies say anything at all about how we’re supposed to feed them?”

“Oh, my short-sighted daughter. ” He tried to wrap his tail around her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. “Still thinking about mere physical needs when we have the spiritual sustenance of SilverSides?”

WhiteTail jumped to her feet and impatiently twitched her long, whip-like tail. “ All I’m saying is that somebody better do some hunting around here, or SilverSides is going to be short a few followers if she comes again. ”

“When, daughter. ” LifeCrier slowly roused to his feet and stretched out in an easy yawn. “When SilverSides comes again, she will lead us to all we could ever hope for. Good knives. Warm furs. More food than, than—”

WhiteTail’s eyes narrowed. “Yes? I’m listening. ”

“Well, more food than you can imagine, anyway. We won’t want for anything. ”

“ And in the meantime we’re just supposed to sit and wait patiently?”

“Don’t worry, daughter. SilverSides will lead and protect us. She promised she would. Just as she promised that she would return. ”

WhiteTail turned around in a tight, nervous circle, glared at her father, and turned around again. Whatever was left of her patience finally gave up the ghost.

“You addled old fool! For twelve days and nights now you’ve kept the hunt here in PackHome and filled their heads with stories of SilverSides! In the meantime, the bellies of the younglings growl with hunger and the pups are crying because their mothers have no milk! “

LifeCrier turned to face her; involuntarily, WhiteTail’s hackles went up and her lips drew back in a snarl, exposing double rows of needle-sharp teeth

“Father, I don’t care if SilverSides is coming back someday. Your pack is starving now! You call yourself the leader of PackHome; when will you get your head out of the sky and lead the hunt?”

LifeCrier sagged back on his haunches and let his ears fall flat. With a sudden start, WhiteTail noticed the pain and confusion in the old kin’s eyes. “My own daughter,” LifeCrier whispered. “My own daughter challenges me. ”

Seeing the pain in her father’s eyes, WhiteTail felt a sudden stab of remorse. Fighting for control over her emotions, she lowered her hackles, crouched down on her belly, and laid her head on her forepaws. “I’m sorry, Father. ” She looked up at him with big, sad, puppy-dog eyes. “I spoke without thinking. I said things I didn’t mean. “

LifeCrier stood up, trotted over, and gave her a friendly little nuzzle behind the ears, as he used to when she was just a pup. “That’s all right, WhiteTail. Every now and then the FirstBeast gets into all of us and makes us say things we didn’t mean. ” She relaxed, and gave him an apologetic lick on the muzzle. LifeCrier returned a paternal smile. “I’m sure SilverSides forgives you for your momentary lapse of faith. ”

With great effort, WhiteTail kept her hackles down.

LifeCrier gave her one more nuzzle behind the ears, and then started poking around in the sleeping furs that lay piled in one corner of the cave. “Now, where did I leave that amulet? Ah, here it is. ” LifeCrier pulled out the badge of his office—a broken circuit board suspended from a braided necklace made of robotic nerve wire—and slipped it over his head. “Well, it’s time to address the faithful. Coming, Daughter?”

At first she was going to demur, but then the germ of an idea occurred to her. Suppressing a wicked smile, she sweetly said, “Of course, Father. I’d love to be with you. ” The old kin got to his feet and trotted out of the cave with WhiteTail beside him.

The barking and yipping started the moment someone in the crowd spotted LifeCrier. A few in the crowd gave themselves up to their excitement and howled in BeastTongue. By the time the old kin had crossed to the rocky knoll that overlooked the clearing, the noise had resolved into a rhythmic chant:” LifeCrier, Life-Crier, Life-Crier... ”

WhiteTail stopped at the base of the knoll and watched her father as he climbed. At the top he paused a moment to look out upon the crowd with a broad, tail-wagging smile on his face. All eyes were on him, he knew, and he basked in the glory. Then he sat down, flattened his ears, closed his eyes, and raised his voice in a long, mournful howl of BeastTongue.

The crowd returned his benediction. The sight and sound astonished WhiteTail; over two hundred kin all packed into a clearing, sitting with their backs arched stiffly, muzzles raised in a deafening unison howl.

LifeCrier dropped his head and switched to the formal cadences of HuntTongue. “Listen!” Abruptly, the howling stopped. “Hear me, O kin! I tell of the time before time, and of a promise made to our mother’s mother’s earliest dam. ”

“Praise the OldMother!” an excitable convert near WhiteTail shouted. She looked him over quickly and found him much like the others: scruffy, underfed, possibly good-looking if he’d just groom his fur. But there was a little too much hunger in his eyes, and he sported a fresh scar on his left rear leg. Another loser, she decided, dismissing him with a sniff.

“Listen!” LifeCrier said again. “In the beginning, there was the Great Pack. They lived in the Forest of Dawn, when the world was young. Of game there was no end; of enemies, none that dared invade the dens of the kin. Each hunter had his perfect mate, each little mother her strong and obedient pups, and all the kin lived in harmony. All the days were green and cool, and all the nights were warm and sweet, for time had not yet begun and Death was a stranger to the kin. It was forever summer in the Forest of Dawn, and great were the blessings that the OldMother showered down upon the kin. ”

“Praise the OldMother!” the convert shouted again, this time getting the cue right.

LifeCrier’s face darkened, and his voice took on an ominous tone. “But though they were blessed, those first kin knew it not. Instead, they let the spirit of the FirstBeast move among them, and give them evil counsel. Then brother turned against sister, and father against child, for they all desired to lead the Great Pack. When the OldMother saw this, she was greatly displeased, and she sent her chosen one, GreyMane, to set us back on the scent of righteousness. ”

Several of the other converts had by now picked up on the rhythm of the sermon, and they shouted, “Have mercy on us, OldMother! “

LifeCrier acknowledged the response with a slight nod and resumed. “But hard were the hearts of those first kin, and blind were their eyes to truth. GreyMane’s brother was full of the spirit of the FirstBeast, and the pack stood behind him as he ripped the life from her throat. Then did the OldMother fall on the Great Pack, her hackles as tall as great trees, her fangs gleaming like the sun. With thunder and fire, she drove the kin from the Forest of Dawn and scattered them to the winds, to suffer and die in the world until their children’s children’s children had paid the price of their sins. ” LifeCrier paused for a breath.

The converts yelled their enthusiastic responses.

Slowly, lovingly, LifeCrier looked over the crowd. His ears relaxed; his expression softened. In a gentler tone of voice, he continued. “Thus has it been for a thousand generations. We are born. We suffer. We die. Our pups go hungry, our old ones fall victim to the sharpfangs, and our best and brightest hunters fight tooth and claw for the right to lead, for but a summer or two. While through the ages, the faithful have waited for the sign that we are at last forgiven. Through flood and famine, through the raging fires of autumn and the bitter frosts of winter, even when hope seemed as hard to find as a redwing’s teeth, generations of kin have lived and died in the belief that the OldMother would send the Chosen One again, and we would once again live in harmony in the Forest of Dawn.

“Some have said that the believers were fools. Some have said that we waited in vain. ” LifeCrier paused to look the crowd over one more time, an enigmatic smile playing on his lips. The only sound from the converts was a disorganized mumble.

Then the old kin puffed his chest, raised his ears, and loosed a joyous bark. “Brethren, friends, members of the Great Pack: I am here today to tell you that the wait has not been in vain. For I bring you good news; the Chosen One has been sent among us, and her name is SilverSides!”

The crowd went up in another tumult of yipping and barking. Strained shouts of “Praise the OldMother!” mingled with shouts of “Praise SilverSides!” For a moment, watching the fervor of the crowd, WhiteTail wondered if her father really had any idea of the kind of energy he’d tapped. Then she put the question out of her mind. There were enough little problems to handle without confronting the big one.

“Listen. Listen!” In a bit, the crowd settled down again, and LifeCrier continued. “Look around you. Look at your neighbors. A year ago, this humble place, this PackHome, was a desperate and dying place. Hemmed in by other packs, we faced an invasion from the Hill of Stars. The WalkingStones were terrible enemies: Tall and swift, able to kill with a glance, they were as deadly as silent sharpfangs and twice as hard to kill. The game was driven away, and our young hunters were slain without honor. If ever there was a place that needed the OldMother, surely PackHome was it.

“Now, some have said that the OldMother has grown deaf to the cries of the kin, and her heart has long since hardened against us. But brethren, I am here to tell you that she listens to us still. For the OldMother heard the lamentations of PackHome; she saw the hungry pups, she smelled the unburied dead. The OldMother’s heart was moved, and in our darkest hour she sent us her sign and her help, and the name was SilverSides. “

LifeCrier’s voice dropped to a whisper. Remarkably, the crowd fell silent to listen. For a moment all WhiteTail heard was the wind rustling the leaves of the whitetrees and the distant call of a lonely bluecrest.

“I was there. oh my brethren,” LifeCrier whispered. “You and I, we were born from our mothers. But the mother of SilverSides is the OldMother, who lives in the sky, and SilverSides was born from a fiery star. These old eyes saw her come down from the sky, trailing flame and glory.

“She was as a cub, but she was formed fully grown. As soon as she could move, she felled a mighty sharpfang with one bite. ” LifeCrier looked around the clearing, gauging his audience’s disbelief. “With one bite, brethren. Even before she could speak, she saved an entire hunting pack. And when she could at last speak, did she challenge KeenEye for the leadership of the hunt, as was her right under the law of the FirstBeast?

“No. She said, ‘I am here to serve you. ’ “

He paused to let that thought sink in and catch his breath. After a few quick pants, he resumed speaking in his normal voice. “That is the first lesson, O members of the Great Pack. She accomplished great things; she fought with valor. But all these things she did to serve the pack.

“She hunted with the pack, and she was a mighty hunter. She led us against the WalkingStones, and drove them back in defeat. ” He leapt to his hind feet and held his amulet high. The sunlight twinkled and flashed on the broken circuit board. “This is the token she gave me, to remind me of my faith. It is a piece of the brain of a WalkingStone, and it does not decay!”

LifeCrier flashed the amulet around so all could see it. When the wondrous gasps had settled down, he hung the amulet around his neck again and dropped down to all fours. “That was just one of her miracles. There were many more, and in time I will tell you about them. But for now-for you who are taking your first trots down the path of faith-I leave you with these four promises, which she gave unto me. Let these be the four legs upon which your faith stands:

“SilverSides will protect us.

“SilverSides will serve us.

“SilverSides came once, to awaken us.

“SilverSides will come again, to lead us back to the Forest of Dawn. ”

Abruptly, LifeCrier turned and began descending from the rocky knoll. The crowd exploded in a tumult of barking and howling. Shouts of “Praise LifeCrier!” went up from one side of the clearing, and “Praise SilverSides!” from the other. A small fight started in the back when someone tried to shout “Praise the OldMother!” and the younglings in the front were swept aside by a mob of converts rushing forward to touch the fur of LifeCrier.

Unnoticed in all the noise and confusion, WhiteTail carefully worked her way around to the back side of the knoll. She paused only a moment, to think, I sure hope I know what I’m doing. Then in one quick dash she scampered to the top of the knoll and let rip with her best blood-curdling shriek.

Amazingly, the rabble all froze and stared at her.

Here goes nothing. WhiteTail flashed a wide, joyous, utterly fraudulent smile, whipped her tail excitedly, and barked out, “Hear me! I am WhiteTail, daughter of LifeCrier!”

“Praise LifeCrier!” the scruffy one near the front shouted.

She beamed at the crowd again. Whatever you do, girl, don’t make eye contact with your father. “LifeCrier has asked me to make an announcement. ” She felt the fur on the back of her head prickle and knew that her father was staring at her. She could easily visualize his baffled expression as he tried to figure out what she was up to this time, and she started to glance in his direction. Don’t look at him!

“In honor of this happy occasion,” WhiteTail barked, “LifeCrier wishes it known that he himself will lead the first hunt of the Great Pack! He goes to the forest now; all who would truly follow in the footsteps of SilverSides, follow LifeCrier!” The pack erupted in a maelstrom of baying and hunting howls and surged forward to engulf LifeCrier.

Now, girl. Now you can look at him. WhiteTail picked her father’s face out of the mob at the foot of the knoll. For an instant he looked back at her with daggers flashing in his eyes, and then he was swept away by the furry tide that streamed out into the forest. Okay, Father, WhiteTail thought with a snicker, let’s see you wriggle your way out of this one. Bounding down from the knoll, she blended into the crowd and followed.

All her efforts were concentrated on keeping track of her father. She never noticed the small, green observation robot that drifted along at treetop level, following her.

CHAPTER 10

JANET

Dr. Anastasi charged up the slidewalk from the tunnel transit stop, pinwheeled through a lobby, and caught the next flight of slidewalk. “Look at this, Basalom. Have you ever seen such conspicuous waste before?”

The First and Second Laws of Robotics prevented him from responding with an untruth, but Basalom deduced from experience that his mistress did not want a completely truthful answer. He kept his silence as he strode a respectful three paces behind her, but he carried on an internal dialogue. Actually, Dr. Anastasi, we’ve both seen something exactly like this. Or have you forgotten the Ceremyons already ?

Dr. Anastasi rapped her knuckles on a ceiling support beam as the slidewalk rose up through the next floor. “Good grief. Iron. Chrome steel. Petrochemical plastics. They must have torn down an entire mountain to build this place. ”

“Quite possibly, madam. ” Although in that case the scanning team would have spotted something beyond a little thermal pollution, no?

Dr. Anastasi shook her head. “When I think of all the ecological damage that these things must cause

“I mean, think of it, Basalom. Thousands of hectares of biosphere flattened, graded, and rendered utterly sterile. Entire species displaced. ” She turned around and took in the building with a sweeping gesture. “You know, I think I’ve figured it out. The Robot Cities are fire ant nests. Enormous fire ant nests. ”

The allusion was a bit obscure; it took Basalom almost 30 nanoseconds to cross-reference and make the connection. Fire ant: Solenopsis saevissinul richteri. A fiercely stinging omnivorous ant native to the American continents of Earth, commonly thought responsible for the Great Agricultural Failure of the early 21st century. See North American History, Populist Rising of 2014. Then he realized that Janet was obviously waiting for him to ask her to explain. “Fire ants, madam?”

“Nasty little brown bugs, native to Earth. Every now and then someone accidentally exports them to a Settler world.

“All it takes is one queen, at the start. But her offspring build these huge, networked, almost indestructible nests, strip the land of everything that can be eaten, and kill or drive out all the native species right up to cattle. Pretty soon, instead of a meadow, you’ve got a couple hectares of solid fire ant nest. And then they send out hordes of flying queens to start new colonies. ”

The slidewalk rose through another floor, and Janet looked around. “Yes, fire ants get established someplace, you may as well nuke the whole mess and start over. ”

They’d reached the top of the slidewalk. Janet wheeled and charged through an enormous open archway; Basalom followed an instant later, in time to see Dr. Anastasi get grabbed by two large, matte-black security robots.

His First Law reaction was immediate and overwhelming. Dr. Anastasi is being attacked. I must defend her.

Even as he started to move, within nanoseconds, secondary observations came into his central thought processor. The security robots were standard Robot City Avernus models: massive, solid, four meters tall, equipped with ominous-looking pincer hands-in short, far more menacing than the older “Gort” models found doing most security work on Spacer worlds. These robots are subject to the First Law just as I am. Dr. Anastasi is in no danger. Perhaps they are restraining her in order to prevent her from entering an area of greater potential harm.

Dr. Anastasi’ s face flushed red to the roots of her blond hair, and she pounded ineffectually on the robot’s broad metal chest. “Put me down!”

“This is a restricted area,” the robot said in a voice that sounded like ball bearings in a blender.

“This is Central Hall. It can’t be a restricted area. ”

The robot tilted its massive, helmet-like head back and scanned her face. “You are not in my permissions file. Access denied. If you would like to apply for permission—”

“Shut up!” She thumped the black behemoth on the side of the head, and it responded by shifting its grip so that she could no longer move her arms.

Casually, Basalom strolled into view, stopped a foot short of the security robots’ reaction perimeter, and opened a commlink channel. Hello. Is there some problem here?

This is a restricted area, the unoccupied security robot said. Interestingly, its commlink signal projected the same gravelly tone as the other’s voice synthesizer.

Ah, I see. He looked at Dr. Anastasi as if curious. What did, she do?

She attempted to enter the restricted zone without correct permission.

Dr. Anastasi caught her breath again. “Put me down, you ugly tin lunkhead!”

Basalom nodded sagely. And you stopped her. Good work. But tell me, why is this zone restricted?

To prevent the risk of further attacks on Central. This one fit the profile of a potential attacker. Dr. Anastasi got a foot loose and gave the security robot a good solid kick in the knee joint. The hall echoed with the clang.

Basalom nodded again. Indeed she does. He looked back to the security robot. However, I’m curious about something. Who issued the orders restricting this area?

The Supervisory Council.

I see. And they’re all robots, is that correct?

Yes.

Basalom stepped a bit closer, as if to examine Janet, but still stayed circumspectly outside the security robot’s reaction perimeter. You are aware, of course, that this is a human.

Both security robots responded. Of course. The one holding Dr. Anastasi continued, That is why I am restraining her without harming her.

Basalom stepped back and looked the black robot straight in the oculars. Under the Second Law, an order given by a human supersedes an order given by a robot-even by a robot on the Supervisory Council.

Protection of Central stems directly from our fundamental programming, which was installed by the human Dr. Avery. The security robot hesitated, but persisted. This security detail is therefore following a human order of higher priority.

Basalom shifted his approach. Dr. Anastasi is a former colleague of Dr. Avery’s. True enough, as far as it went. Basalom felt no need to amplify the relationship. She is no danger to Central. In any case, human reactions are so slow compared to robots that you or I could stop her if she attempted an assault on Central. Besides, her order is direct and immediate, and is a situation not foreseen by your programming. Also true enough. I suggest you start obeying her orders.

Security robots could be a bit thick, but even they eventually caught on. Oh.

Janet shrieked, “Let me go!” The robot holding her did, and she hit the floor with a plop. In an instant Basalom was at her side, helping her to her feet. All her attention was fixed on the security robot; the only notice she took of Basalom was to mutter,,, You just have to know how to talk to these things. ”

“Indeed, madam. ”

Getting to her feet, Dr. Anastasi straightened her clothes and fixed the security robots with a steely glare. “Well, I hope you two have learned your lesson. Come along, Basalom.. , Though the security robots were both a good two meters taller than Janet, she brushed them aside and ploughed straight ahead into Central Hall.

Basalom followed her. One of the security robots started to open his commlink channel to challenge Basalom’s security clearance, but Basalom struck first. Implied Second Law: Dr. Anastasi has ordered me to accompany her. Therefore, she wishes me to enter this area, and therefore, she obviously wishes you to allow me to pass. The security robots were still trying to parse that one out when Basalom and Dr. Anastasi disappeared out of sight around the corner.

A few seconds later they stood in the atrium at the heart of Central, facing the massive black slab that held Central’s console input/output devices. Basalom couldn’t quite put a manipulator on it, but he felt a sense of vague disquiet in the presence of the great machine. There were annoying, itchy subsonics in the air, and a deep, unsteady thrumming on the 104-Mhz band. The positronic potentials rose in his brain, meshed, and pointed toward a fuzzy conclusion: Something was wrong. But what?

Dr. Anastasi grew impatient. She crossed her arms. She tapped a foot. She cleared her throat loudly. At last, Central’s one red eye slowly came to life. Clicks and grating sounds emanated from its voice synthesizer, followed by a burst of white noise and a 6O-cycle hum that slowly resolved into a word.

“Hmmm?”

Janet uncrossed her arms and stepped forward. “Central, I am Dr. Janet Anastasi, and I’m here to—”

“Good morning, Dr. Chandra,” the machine said. “I’m looking forward to beginning my lessons. ”

Janet blinked, shook her head, and tried again. “Anastasi. My name is Anastasi. And I’m a little short on time, so—”

“Time,” Central said, “is a convention shaped by the collective mind of all sentience. It has no objective meaning outside the vision. “

Dr. Anastasi turned to Basalom. “Do you have any idea what he’s talking about?”

Basalom tried a brief query on his commlink, but got nothing but static in reply. “No, madam. ”

Janet shrugged and turned back to Central. “One more time, then. My name is Janet Anastasi. I am a roboticist. Roughly a year ago, I left an experimental learning machine on the surface of this planet. Its mission was—”

Central’s eye flared brightly, then dimmed again to extinction.

No answer was forthcoming; Central had gone back into sleep mode. Turning to Janet, Basalom found her staring at her feet and counting to a very high number. The situation was saved by the arrival of a tall, slender, pale blue robot built along the lines of the Avery Euler model.

The robot swept into the atrium and began talking in a harried, accelerated voice. “Hello, you must be Dr. Anastasi. Please accept my apologies for not meeting you at the spaceport. Your arrival caught us completely by surprise. ”

Janet looked up. “No, really?”

The city robot was unused to dealing with humans, and therefore not tuned to detect sarcasm. “Truly, I am City Supervisor 3. You may find it more convenient to address me as Beta. I was involved in a major research project, but I came as soon as I was able to delegate authority. If it is necessary, my fellow supervisors can be summoned as well. You may consider the entire city to be at your disposal. ”

Janet looked around the hall and thought about the many meanings of the word disposal. “Thank you. To be honest—Beta, is it?—I don’t want to spend any more time here than I absolutely must. I only came here to get one question answered.

“Before I ask it, though, I’ve got a new one. What the deuce is going on with Central?”

Beta’s eyes dimmed, and he shuffled his feet nervously. Basalom detected a slight leakage of sadness on the commlink channel... Central has been... damaged,” Beta said.

“No kidding. What happened?”

“A rogue robot invaded the hall and attacked Central. ” Beta looked up... You must understand, this was before we realized the need for tight security measures. ”

Janet absent-mindedly rubbed her upper arm. “Yes, I’ve met your security measures. But back up a moment: You said a rogue robot? No offense intended, but I’ve never heard of a rogue robot before, much less a rogue Avery robot. ”

“This was not an Avery robot. ” Janet was suddenly stricken with a nasty, sinking feeling. “What kind of robot was it?”

Beta’s eyes flashed, and he looked to Basalom for a moment. “We are not certain. It was not a design that we were familiar with. For example, it was constructed of a cellular material similar to our own, but of a much finer grain. And, while it was subject to the Laws of Robotics, it seemed to have no clear idea of what constituted a human. ”

Basalom switched to commlink. Stand by for download of data. When Beta had acknowledged, Basalom transmitted a summary of the learning machine’s design specification. Was this the robot that attacked Central?

Why, yes. Then on audio, Beta repeated, “Yes, that’s it. The rogue robot was a unit of the type you describe as a learning machine. This explains a lot of things. ”

Janet grabbed Beta and turned him to face her. “Like what? Exactly what did the rogue robot do?”

Beta’s eyes flashed again, and there was a hesitation in his voice. “Or. Anastasi, the rogue apparently became convinced that it was a member of the local species. It assumed their form. It took over leadership of a small socio-political unit. From what we have been able to establish lately, it has apparently been adopted by that unit as a minor deity. ”

Janet let go of Beta and sagged. “Frost... ”

“The learning machine led repeated attacks against Robot City. It destroyed several hunter/seekers, a number of worker robots, and City Supervisor Gamma on two different occasions. Ultimately, it attempted to destroy Central. ”

Janet sat down on the floor and buried her face in her hands. “Frost, frost, f—” She looked up and grabbed Beta’s knee. “What happened to it?”

“Master Derec-are you familiar with the human called Derec, also known as David Avery?”

Janet smiled at the mention of her son. “Oh, I’ve heard of him. ”

“Master Derec arrived and convinced the rogue that he was human. It took the form of a fairly normal robot, and has since left the planet as part of Master Derec’s entourage. ”

Frowning at Basalom, Dr. Anastasi got to her feet and began straightening her hair. “Well, I suppose that’s the best we could hope for. At least it isn’t destroyed. ”, She turned to Beta. “You say the learning machine assumed leadership of the primitive sentients?”

“Yes, madam. Our current research project involves studying the primitives. From what we have been able to decode of their language, it appears that primitives now regard the learning machine as a messiah figure. It has caused considerable disruption to their social order. ”

Or. Anastasi stroked her chin. “I see. So now you’re looking for a way to undo the damage?”

“No, madam. We have concluded that the disruption is too significant for us to repair. Instead, we are seeking ways to take advantage of it, in order to persuade the natives to take up residence in the city. ”

“What?”

Beta blithely continued. “Robot City exists to serve humans. Since there are no humans in permanent residence on this world, we have concluded that the intelligent primitives are human equivalents, or near-humans. Therefore, in order for us to protect and serve them, they must take up residence in the city. ”

Janet went back to staring at her feet and counting to high numbers. Basalom switched to thermographic vision and noted that Mount Anastasi was building up to another eruption.

Janet said, “Next I suppose you’re going to tell me that this is for their own good. ”

“Of course, madam. Our observations have shown that the near-humans live in a dirty, dangerous environment. If they can be persuaded to accept some changes, we can make their lives much more pleasant. ”

This time, Janet defused the angry outburst herself. “Okay, Basalom. Contact the ship. Tell it we’re going to be staying here for a while. We may as well try to steer these tin fascists onto a constructive path. ” Basalom opened his commlink channel and did as Dr. Anastasi instructed.

While he was still on the commlink, though, he intercepted a coded transmission intended for Beta. The code was a simple one, composed of prime number transpositions, and Basalom cracked it in about 50 nanoseconds. He was just in time to catch Beta’s answering transmission.

Go ahead, Linguist 6.

We have been engaged by a hunting party of near-humans. Supervisor Gamma has already been destroyed.

Again? Very well; try to salvage his brain, if they’ll let you.

That may be difficult. Biologist 42 is down with a damaged leg, Organic Chemist 20 is locked up in a First Law dilemma, and I’ve lost my left arm below the elbow.

Understood. Mission aborted. Return to the city.

Will comply if possible. The near-humans are circling back. They’ve cut us off. I don’t think we’re going to make it. We’d better upload our observational data now. Stand by for core dump.

Ready.

I am commencing to trans

After that, there was only static.

CHAPTER 11

MAVERICK

A forest glen: sunlight filtered cool and green through the leaves, while nesting redwings darted through the lower branches of the trees, piping cheerfully. High in the canopy above a newly emerged cicabeetle announced its successful pupation with a loud, low-pitched drone, and off in the distance the happy cries and howls of hunting kin echoed across the valley.

The bowl-shaped floor of the forest clearing was covered with rocky outcroppings, mossy old stumps and fallen logs, and the mangled remains of four robots.

A skinny youngling sauntered past, proudly carrying his prize by the wires that had once connected it to a neck. Someone on the other side of the clearing shouted, distracting the youngling; he dropped City Supervisor Gamma’s head onto a slab of exposed rock, and the resulting clang sent him scampering away. By the time the youngling realized what he’d done and turned back to retrieve the head, it had begun rolling down the slope. Picking up momentum, it skittered across a patch of wet slimewort, dinged off a jutting rock, and took an off -kilter hop and then a long, wobbling bounce. The youngling bounded down the slope after it, trying to catch up with the rolling head.

He skidded to a stop when the head thudded to rest in a pile of soft humus and rotting leaves at the base of a mossy tree stump, not half a trot in front of the tough-looking stranger’s nose.

The head apparently annoyed the stranger. He got to his feet, yawned, and cast a baleful glare at the youngling. Then he sniffed the head in a disinterested fashion, marked it with his scent, and sat down again.

The youngling decided to go find another trophy.

Maverick watched the young kin turn tail, then turned his attention back to the head. So that was a WalkingStone, eh? Big furry deal. It wasn’t so tough. He brought a hind paw up and indulged in a good scratch behind the ear and resumed picking at the bit of grainy material that was stuck between his front teeth. On the other paw, I can’t say much for the way they taste. Dislodging the shred of Linguist 6’s arm, he spat it out and turned his attention to the group of kin that was busy dismembering the last relatively intact carcass. WhiteTail was easy to spot.

And that’s the old guy’s daughter, huh? Yuck. She’s got spindly legs. Walks like she’s got starch in her tail. And she’s a bit young, even for your tastes.

Still, what the hey. Maybe in a year or two she’ll turn into something worth howling about. And in the meantime, let’s not lose sight of why we came here. The old guy’s in charge, and he depends on her. Off paw, I’d say that she’s definitely the angle to work, for now. Maverick yawned again, in a deliberately casual way, and gave the rest of the clearing a once-over.

On the whole, he had to admit that this group hunt business hadn’t turned out too badly. At first it’d looked like something straight out of one of his worst nightmares: A chaotic mob of two hundred clumsy pack-kin charging through the briars and stingworts, barking and howling loud enough to send even a deaf smerp running for cover.

But by the time they’d gone a hundred trots from PackHome, the mob had started to break up. Somebody who actually knew something about hunting caught a whiff of a smallgrazer and led a split off on that trail. A bunch of younglings treed a nuteater and stayed behind to bark like fools, jump around a lot, and prove once again that kin can’t climb trees, no matter how hard they try.

Other groups splintered off to chase other promising scents, but Maverick kept his eyes on LifeCrier. There had been a lot of twists, turns, and feints-for a moment there he’d had the absurd idea that LifeCrier was trying to ditch them all and sneak back to PackHome-but even though his left hind leg had started to throb, he’d managed to stick with the old kin the entire way.

After all, that was the whole point of coming to PackHome, wasn’t it? To find the center of power, get close to it, and work your way up In the pecking order. And up to a certain point, the plan really had seemed to be working. The group following LifeCrier was down to fewer than ten kin when they’d burst from the underbrush and run straight into the pack of WalkingStones.

Maverick let out a disgusted little sneeze. WalkingStones? You mean the horrible, nasty, killer monsters that we need SilverSides to protect us from? Mother, I’ve seen trees that put up a better fight! Despite all the scary talk about silent death and glances that killed, there’d been no lightning, and no thunder. The WalkingStones had simply stood there on their hind legs, staring at the onrushing kin, looking for all the world like a bunch of startled whistlepigs caught out in the sunlight.

If LifeCrier had shown even a second’s hesitation, that would have been the end of it. But the old fool obviously believes this SilverSides business. He charged right in.

And OldMother help me, I followed him. One of the WalkingStones had started to point its left foreleg at LifeCrier. Maverick really hadn’t had time to think, or even slow down; he’d feinted, stutter-stepped, and charged straight for the WalkingStone.

It was a good gamble, Mavvy old boy. If the stories about them throwing lightning from their paws are true, you saved the old guy’s life. That could have been a real good play, gratitude-wise. With a mighty grunt, he’d gathered himself and sprung upon the WalkingStone, seizing its foreleg in his jaws.

That’s where everything had gone wrong. Biting the WalkingStone’s limb was like biting gravel. Between the cold pain in his teeth, the oily and utterly unappetizing taste of the WalkingStone’s flesh, and the apparent lack of any bones in the limb, Maverick had momentarily forgotten everything that he knew about balance and timing. He’d been counting on his momentum to pull the WalkingStone off its two feet, just as he’d been counting on its inertia to check his leap.

Instead, the thing’s foreleg had simply tom away in his teeth and he’d gone flying head-over-haunches into a patch of blooming stingwort. His heroic leap had ended up as a clumsy pratfall.

Maverick looked around the clearing again—a clearing full of kin who were not noticing him-and felt a sense of frustration. It’s definitely darned tough to impress the locals by landing fiat on your tailbone.

Of course, I suppose it could be worse. Though at the moment it’s hard to imagine how.

Between getting the wind knocked out of him and giving his sore leg a bad twist, he’d managed to take himself out of the fight for a few minutes. By the time he’d crawled out of the stingworts and gotten back up on all four legs, the battle was over. Old LifeCrier was up on a rock giving a victory benediction (though Maverick had to admit that the old kin did look a bit pale and shaky), the younglings were doing an extremely sloppy job of skinning and dressing the downed carcasses, and WhiteTail was busy braiding a bunch of those silly little amulets, like the one LifeCrier wore, and handing them out to the kin who’d managed to stay in the thick of the fight.

His gaze locked on WhiteTail again, and he allowed himself a wry smile. Okay, Mavvy old boy, so much for coming into PackHome like a conquering hero. Guess it’s time to try Plan B: Fall in love with the leader’s daughter. He groomed his fur a little bit, straightened up his shoulders, and started rehearsing his opening line. Then he gave WhiteTail one last appraising look, and grimaced. All the same, her legs are spindly. Oh, the things I do for my meals. Pasting a cheerful smile on his face, he started his tail going in a slow, friendly wag and sauntered over.

The rest of the younglings had wandered off, dragging the detachable parts of the last WalkingStone with them. WhiteTail was squatting beside the now headless torso, carefully stripping out the thin, tough veins that were threaded throughout its chest cavity. She seemed to be picking them out on the basis of color; the impression was reinforced when she measured out three equal lengths of yellow, green, and black vein and quickly braided them into a necklace.

With deliberate casualness, Maverick sat down and watched her work, an interested expression on his face. When she failed to notice him after a minute or so, he discreetly cleared his throat and wagged his tail a bit more vigorously.

She looked up; their eyes met for an instant. No sparks flew. She went back to her work.

So much for love at first sniff. Mavvy old boy, you’re going to have to talk to her. After a few moments of silence, he cleared his throat again and spoke up. “Praise SilverSides. ”

“Praise SilverSides,” she answered, without looking up or slowing her work.

Okay, Mavvy, let’s turn on the charm. “Say, WhiteTail, can you believe that fight? We took four WalkingStones down and didn’t even get singed. I tell you, SilverSides must be watching over us for sure. ”

WhiteTail paused in her work long enough to fix Maverick with a strange look. “Do I know you?”

The question caught Maverick by surprise. “Well, no. I mean, er—”

WhiteTail’s ears went up, and she leaned in closer to sniff at Maverick. “Still, there’s something familiar about you. ” She sniffed again, and then her eyes narrowed just a hair. “Oh, I remember now. You were in the front row at the meeting, weren’t you?”

Okay, lad, there’s your opening! Maverick leaned back a bit, puffed his chest slightly, and gave her an easy smile. “As a matter of fact, I was. Fascinating sermon, simply fascinating. Your father is—”

“You were the one who kept jumping in early on the cheering, weren’t you?”

Oops. Maverick’s ears went flat. “Er, actually—”

WhiteTail set her knife aside, sat up alertly, and looked closely at Maverick. “Yes, I remember now. Did you know that I was watching you almost the entire time?”

Maverick’s ears popped up straight. “You were?”

WhiteTail turned back to the carcass, but not before shooting one last look of disgust at Maverick. “Did you really think that you were the first one to try to improve your status by loudly faking belief!”

“Fake? Look here, girl, I—” The argument died in his throat.

Face it, Mavvy old boy, she’s a very clever one, and she’s got you by the ears. You may as well try the truth. Maverick plopped down on his belly, crossed his forepaws, and laid his chin on his paws. “Okay, I admit it. Every pack I’ve ever met has their own kind of strangeness, and I thought this SilverSides business was just one more weird local custom. I’ve been on my own for over a year, and I’m getting really tired of being an outcast. Can you blame me for trying too hard to fit in?”

WhiteTail set her knife aside again and favored Maverick with a less enigmatic smile. “You get two points for honesty, stranger. Most fakers just protest louder when they’re caught. You’re the first one I’ve met who’s shown even a vestige of integrity.

“In return for that, I’ll give you a little confession of my own. I don’t believe, either. ” WhiteTail’s eyes narrowed, and she watched him closely, studying his reaction.

Well, Mavvy, this honest bit seems to be getting us somewhere. Let’s go with it. Maverick sat up, cocked his head sideways, raised one ear, and gave WhiteTail a bewildered look. “You don’t? But at the meeting you said-1 mean... ”

WhiteTail’s expression hardened. “Understand one thing, stranger. LifeCrier isn’t just the leader of PackHome, he’s my father, and I’ll do whatever it takes to protect him. That includes tricking him into leading a hunt when the pack is hungry. ” With a swiftness that surprised Maverick, WhiteTail suddenly snatched up her stone knife and set its point against his breastbone. “Or cutting your heart out and feeding it to the sharpfangs if you try your pious-believer act on him. Do I make myself clear?”

Gingerly, Maverick pushed the point aside. “Absolutely. ”

“Good. ” She dropped her guard and turned her attention back to the carcass. “Now either get lost or make yourself useful. Do you know anything about WalkingStone anatomy?”

Maverick followed her gaze down into the jumbled pale blue mess that was the inside of the WalkingStone’s chest cavity. Judging by color, there were at least six different kinds of veins, but the cavity was strangely bloodless and there was nothing that he could clearly identify as a heart. For that matter, he wasn’t even sure that he could tell the difference between organ and muscle. A lot of the cavity was filled with the oily blue gravel he’d been picking out of his teeth since the fight.

“No,” he finally admitted.

“Good. Here’s your chance to learn. Help me roll this thing over, will you?” With a grunt of exertion, WhiteTail started pushing at the corpse. Maverick helped her. Despite being legless and headless, the corpse was surprisingly heavy, but together they managed to get it flipped.

“Now, stranger—” She looked up sharply. “Say, what is your name, anyway?”

He hesitated a moment. Well, boy, just how far do we want to push this honesty business? “Maverick,” he said at last.

“Maverick? That’s an outcast name. Don’t you have a pack name?”

He looked away, and his tail started twitching in tight, nervous jerks. “Not any more. ”

WhiteTail gave him another appraising look and then shrugged. “Pay attention; I don’t like to repeat myself. ” She picked up her knife and turned to the corpse.

“Now,” WhiteTail began in a cool, formal voice, “the problem with hunting for WalkingStones is that there doesn’t seem to be anything inside them that we can eat. ” She dug her knife in between where the shoulder blades should have been-if the thing had had bones-and opened the carcass down the back. By this time it was no longer surprising to find that the WalkingStone had no spine.

“They have no liver,” WhiteTail continued. “No heart, no kidneys, and the muscles-well, you’ve already tried a leg. What did you think?”

Maverick grimaced at the memory. “I’d rather eat a stinktail. ”

WhiteTail nodded sagely. “A popular opinion. ” She caught Maverick’s eye and directed it to the WalkingStone’s shoulder area. “Another problem is that the WalkingStones don’t seem to have a proper skin. It’s impossible to tell where the skin ends and the muscle begins—which makes it really funny to watch the younglings try to flay one of them.

“But there’s something else even more peculiar about the skin that I want you to see. Look there; what’s happening?”

Maverick got up on all fours and sniffed closely at the spot WhiteTail had indicated. “Why, it’s healing. ”

WhiteTail frowned helplessly. “This WalkingStone is dead, right? I mean, its front legs are over here, its back legs are—” she looked around the clearing a bit and gestured in the direction of a fallen log, “—over there, I think. And Mother knows where the head’s gotten to.

“But leave the skin alone for a few minutes, and wounds flow closed so fast you can watch it. Leave the organs alone long enough, and they melt down into this gritty blue stuff that’s indistinguishable from skin or muscle. ” WhiteTail dug the knife in again and extended the cut across the WalkingStone’s hip area.

“So far as we can tell, there are only two organs in a WalkingStone that don’t change shape. One is the brain. The other—” she plunged her forepaws into the wound and began groping around inside the body “—is usually right about—” a slightly startled look flashed across her face, and then resolved into a smile “—here!” With a sucking, popping sound, the corpse gave up the organ, and WhiteTail fell over backward with the recoil.

Maverick looked at the thing she’d gone to so much work to pull out. “ A giant egg?”

“That’s what it looks like, all right. ” WhiteTail got back on her feet, brushed some of the clinging blue grit off the thing, and then found her knife and tapped the egg a few times with the blade. “But it’s got the hardest shell that I have ever seen. “

Maverick wrinkled his nose in a deep frown. “Still, *an egg?”

“Interesting thought, isn’t it? That WalkingStones might be some kind of giant flyer? Although personally I think the shape and size is more like a sharpfang egg. ”

Maverick shook his head. “No. ”

WhiteTail tapped the egg with her knife again. “Agreed, sharpfang eggs are soft and leathery, while this one is as hard as a rock, and too small. Still—”

Maverick pushed in and laid a paw on the egg. “No, you don’t understand. These four WalkingStones we killed; they all carried eggs?” WhiteTail nodded. Maverick looked her straight in the eyes. “Don’t you see?”

WhiteTail didn’t see. “What?”

“No wonder they were such poor fighters. We jumped a bunch of females who were all nesting. ”

The instant those words left his lips, Maverick knew he’d made a mistake. Whatever warmth had been in WhiteTail’s eyes, it was gone now. She drew herself up to her full, slender height and asked, “And tell me, O great hunter, since when is a mother protecting her young harmless?”

“Well,” Maverick hedged, “there are some; female whistlepigs, and redflyers too, and... ”

“Useless, absolutely useless,” WhiteTail growled. “I shouldn’t be wasting my time with you. ”

Maverick froze, rooted to the spot, as his internal voices erupted into a full-scale screaming argument.

Submit, idiot, submit!

What? To this insolent little pup?

Who also happens to be the leader’s daughter!

Don’t do it, lad. Roll over and bare your throat to her now and you’ll never get another chance to show her who rules the den.

But you were wrong, idiot!

“Well?” WhiteTail said in challenge.

Maverick was saved by the arrival of LifeCrier, who blithely trotted right between them. “Okay you two lovebirds, break it up. We’ve still got a day’s hunting ahead of us. ” A few trots away, he looked over his shoulder without breaking stride and added, “Well, daughter? Are you coming?”

WhiteTail’s hackles went down, her lips relaxed back down over her fangs, and she turned to follow him. “Yes, Father. ” Maverick started breathing again, and he turned his back to WhiteTail and took another look at the egg.

The bite on his hindquarters took him completely by surprise.

“Yike!” He leapt half a trot in the air and came down in a whirl. WhiteTail was standing there with a wicked smile on her face and a little bit of his fur in her teeth. “What was that for?” he demanded.

“Just a reminder, sweetheart. I’m not done with you yet. ” Then, with a cold glare and a vicious snap of her whip-like tail, she turned and trotted after her father.

Maverick sat down and watched her go. When she was safely out of earshot, he softly said, “Mavvy old boy, are you sure you want to be in the same pack with her?”

Five minutes later, when LifeCrier had gathered all the other adult hunters and gotten them formed up and ready to move out, Maverick still hadn’t come up with an answer to that question. So he took one last look at the WalkingStone egg—only to discover that a skinny youngling had dragged it off, wedged it in a crevice, and started pounding on it with a rock. Then he sighed, got to his feet, and trotted after the rest of the pack.

Had he understood that the egg was actually Linguist 6’s microfusion power pod, he would have moved considerably faster.

CHAPTER 12

DEREC

Derec and his father sat side by side in the ship’s robotics lab, hunched over a matching pair of robotic data entry terminals, staring intently at the video displays. A casual observer might have mistaken the pair of them for a new breakthrough in humaniform robots, so still were they: unmoving, except for their fingers and the barely perceptible motions of their chests as they breathed; unblinking, their paired attention completely focused on their work.

And yet there was something subtle, barely tangible, yet almost unmistakably lifelike about the pair. It wasn’t the white stubble on Avery’s chin; that effect could have been achieved with common nylon bristle. Perhaps it was the delicate filigree of bloodshot veins that adorned the whites of Derec’s eyes. More likely it was his hair, which had that limp, greasy look that could only be achieved through the use of expensive petrochemical plastics.

Or three days of nonstop programming.

Occasionally, a finger moved. Lips parted; a word or two passed between them, although not in anything that the average observer would have recognized as being part of a human conversation.

“Adb ixform. ”

“Got it. ”

“0B09?”

“15. ”

“0B2C?”

“A0. ”

“Sounds good. ” There was a long pause while Avery studied something on his screen.

Whatever it was caused him to frown and then to speak again. “Can you give me a du?”

“Fifteen-point-four-four-three-seven gigs. ”

“Well, if that’s not enough, I don’t know what is. Set the pipe. ”

“Piped. ”

Avery leaned back in his chair, ran his fingers through his bristly white hair, and blew out a deep breath. “Okay, we’re as ready as we’re ever going to be. Cross your fingers and start the yacc. ”

“Yaccing. ” Derec punched one last command into the terminal and leaned back in his chair in unconscious mimicry of his father. Numbers flashed and danced across the screen; Derec watched it for a few minutes and then rubbed his gritty eyes and turned to Avery. “Now what?”

“We wait. ” Slowly, painfully, Avery got up out of his chair and limped over to the autogalley. “Coffee, black,” he told the machine.

Derec noticed the limp, and a reaction finally worked its way to his vocal cords. “You okay, Dad?” There was genuine concern in his voice.

Avery chuckled a little and slapped his dragging leg. “Yeah, I’m okay. Foot fell asleep, that’s all. ”

“Oh. ” Derec yawned. The autogalley chimed gently, and the serving door slid open to reveal the cup of coffee that Avery had ordered. Derec’s nose perked up at the rich, earthy scent. “Smells good,” he observed.

“You want some?”

Derec thought it over. “Sure. With casein and two lumps of sugar. ”

“Decaf? You look like you could use some sleep. ”

Derec rubbed the back of his neck and then studied the grit that had adhered to his fingers. “Nah. I’ve been in here three days; Ari’ll make me sleep on the couch anyway. Mayas well stay awake. ”

“Okay. ” Avery repeated Derec’s order to the autogalley. When the second steaming cup appeared, he picked it up and carefully carried it over to the work table.

The two of them sat quietly for a few minutes, sipping their cups of coffee, while the numbers danced and capered across Derec’s terminal display.

“I hate robotic coffee,” Avery said at last. Derec spoke without looking up. “Why?”

“Fresh-brewed coffee’s supposed to burn your tongue. That way you take a little more time, drink it a little slower. Robot-made coffee is served lukewarm, gets cold too fast. You have to gulp it down and get back to work. ”

“Oh. ” Derec took another sip and resumed staring into space.

“I could use some food,” Avery said after another long pause. “Anything you’re partial to?” He got up again and toddled over to the autogalley.

Derec gave the matter his deepest available thought. “Snack food,” he decided, with some effort. “Crackers. Cheese. Something along those lines. ”

Avery leaned against the bulkhead, rested a hand on the autogalley’s control panel, and scrolled through the menu of preprogrammed selections. “Cheese is a pretty complex organic compound,” he said. “I’d hate to taste what this thing might come up with if it’s not specifically programmed for—ah, here we go. Magellanic fromage. Close enough for you?”

“Sure. ” Derec waved a hand in a noncommittal gesture. Avery gave the autogalley the order, and in a minute he returned to the table bearing a plate full of blue marbled paste and some little round white things that were either crackers or poker chips.

“Dig in, son. ” Avery smashed a chip into the mound of paste and stuffed the resulting accretion into his mouth. Derec picked up a dry cracker and began nibbling at it in an absentminded manner.

A half -dozen goo-covered crackers later, Avery took a slurp of coffee and turned to Derec. “Well, any lint yet?”

Derec checked his terminal screen. “Nope. ”

Avery frowned. “I hate sitting through yaccs. I mean, I just feel like I should be doing something constructive with this time. ”

Derec looked up and gave his father a bleary-eyed stare. “Such as?’’

“Oh, talking, maybe. Finding out the answers to some questions that have been bothering me for a long time. ”

Derec yawned. “Okay. ” There was a long pause. “Anything in particular you wanted to talk about?”

Avery closed his eyes, stroked his whiskery chin, and thought it over. “Yes,” he decided. “This Aranimas fellow: Who is he, and why is he trying to kill you?”

Derec shrugged. “You want the full story or the condensed version?”

“Depends. Where’s the yacc at?”

Derec rubbed his eyes and checked the terminal one more time. “About twenty percent, I’d guess. ”

“That far already? Better condense it. ”

“Okay. ” Derec took a deep slug of his coffee and closed his eyes in thought. Just when Avery was starting to wonder if he should give the boy a little nudge to wake him up, Derec opened his eyes and began speaking in a low, raspy voice.

“Aranimas is an alien, from somewhere outside Settler space. You could call him a humanoid, depending on how loosely you define human, but when I finally got a close look at him, the first thing I thought of was a plucked condor with fisheyes. ”

Derec took a nip of his cracker, chewed it thoughtfully, and swallowed. “His species call themselves the Erani. They’re a wonderfully simple people: vicious, brutal, and utterly without empathy. In a couple years you’ll be able to look up ‘cruel’ in the dictionary and see a picture of an Erani. You‘d get along great with them. ” Derec paused to sip his now-cold coffee.

Avery bristled at the boy’s cheap shot, but held his tongue.

“The Erani claim to control about two hundred worlds, but I think they must be counting every rock, asteroid, and moonlet in their solar system. That ship of his-did you happen to get a look at his ship before we jumped?” Avery shook his head. “Oh. Well, that ship of his appears to be one-of-a-kind, the first hyperdrive the Erani ever developed. I don’t know whether Aranimas built it or stole it, but the first thing he did when he got to human space was hijack a good Auroran hull to put it in. Wolruf tells me the Erani hyperdrive is fantastically unstable, and that being in the engine room of their ship is almost as dangerous as being on the wrong end of their guns. ”

Avery interrupted. “What is Wolruf, anyway? A genetically engineered dog or something? And how’d you hook up with it?”

“Her,” Derec corrected. “No, Wolruf—that’s not her real name, by the way, that’s just as close as the human voice can pronounce it. I guess our mouths aren’t the right shape, or we don’t have the right ultrasonic frequency components in our speech and hearing to really get her name right

“Anyway, Wolruf was Aranimas’s navigator. She was basically a sort of indentured servant on board that ship; I counted at least four different species of intelligent aliens on board Aranimas’s ship, and they were all conquered subjects of the Erani. I suspect that if we humans ever have a real confrontation with the Erani, we’re going to find a lot of allies on their subject worlds. I met Wolruf when

“But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me put this story in linear order, okay?” Derec gave Avery a questioning stare; Avery didn’t respond, so Derec finished off the last of his coffee and caught his breath.

“Now, this whole thing starts with that asteroid you dumped me on after you wiped my memory. You remember that asteroid?”

Avery looked down. “I—I was insane then, Derec,” he said softly. “I’m not sure what I remember and what I hallucinated. ”

“Well, I was still trying to figure out your asteroid when Aranimas showed up and started shooting the thing to pieces. You see, there’s three things the Erani don’t have: a fleet of hyperdrive ships, a key to Perihelion, and a glimmer of understanding about robotics. They have a slave culture, you see, and since organic slaves are free for the taking, they’ve had no incentive to develop mechanical ones.

“On the other hand, while they don’t know a thing about robotics, they apparently know a lot more about hyperwave than we do. Aranimas was able to identify and track the hyperwave interference caused by a key to Perihelion. ”

Derec abruptly realized that he’d been getting excited and lowered his voice. “That’s what brought him to the asteroid. Once there, I guess he saw all those robots and decided to do a little old-fashioned Erani slave-raiding. It’d never occurred to him that the robots would self-destruct instead of surrendering. Capturing me was just an accidental bonus.

“Not that he was happy about it. Apparently he’s been skulking around human space for a few years, hijacking the occasional ship and trying to pick up robots. When he captured me he was convinced that I’d cheated him out of a good load of slaves, and he—” Derec faltered a moment and winced at the memory of the torture he’d suffered at Aranimas’s hands. “Let’s just leave it at that, okay?” Derec found another cracker, loaded it up with Magellanic fromage, and resumed talking around the mouthful of cheese.

“Wolruf, as I said, was part of the crew. Ariel was a prisoner, although I didn’t find that out for a while. Mandelbrot was a collection of junk parts in a locker. ”

Avery interrupted again. “Mandelbrot? Isn’t he at least three-quarters Capek, Ariel’s old valet robot from back on Aurora?”

Derec scowled at Avery. “Beats me. You gave me amnesia, remember?”

“Sorry. I forgot. ” Derec took another bite of the cracker and continued. “Dad, I don’t know what kind of crazy experiment you really had in mind when you dumped me on that asteroid—”

“I’m not sure I remember either,” Avery muttered, “although I think I remember trying to explain it. But that may have been an hallucination. I was crazy. ”

“—but Aranimas had been doing his share to foul it up. By the time we got away from him, I had no memory, of course, and Ariel was losing hers to the amnemonic plague. I’d cobbled together Mandelbrot and programmed him with a pretty restrictive definition of human, which may have influenced some of the Robot City developments along that line. And Wolruf had finally gotten fed up with the Erani and decided to jump ship. With her help we got away while Aranimas was on a raid on a Spacer station, and then we had to steal the key to Perihelion back from the robots before we could use it to escape—and that’s how we got. to Robot City. “

Avery was silent. Derec ran his fingers through his greasy hair, leaned forward, and shook his head.

“Y’know, Dad, as experiments go, yours didn’t go too well. ”

Avery sighed and nodded. “No. No, it didn’t, son, and maybe someday I’ll be able to apologize for putting you through it. But right now it’s just too big, and I have too much trouble coming to grips with the idea that I actually did that to you. I’m sorry. ” Then an idea hit Avery, and he frowned.

“But before I get too sorry, I’d like to remind you that you still haven’t answered my main question: Why is Aranimas still trying to kill you?”

Derec shrugged. “ An Erani never forgets. ” He helped himself to the last cracker and then looked at his terminal screen. “Oops. We’re just about done yaccing. Better finish that coffee and get back to work. ”

“Okay. ” Avery hurriedly drained the cup, tossed it into the disposal chute, and then slipped into his chair.

Derec checked his screen again and turned to Avery. “Seriously, Aranimas is desperate for robots. That’s why he follows me, I think; he knows that wherever I go, there are bound to be lots of robots.

“I don’t think he can comprehend the Three Laws, though. I mean, he understands the words well enough, but I think the idea that robots simply can’t hurt humans is just too alien a concept for him. Maybe it’s too alien for any Erani. ” Derec stole a sidelong glance at his terminal, and quickly spun back to Avery to squeeze one last thought in.

“So here’s an idea: If we ever find out where the Erani home world is, what do you say we drop a half-dozen Robot Cities on it? That ought to drive those ugly clowns just absolutely crazy...

Avery didn’t have time to respond. The two data terminals chimed simultaneously, then blanked and displayed the final results of the yacc.

Both Avery and Derec immediately switched into zombie programmer mode.

“Any lint?”

“No, it’s clean. ”

“Okay, let’s grep gen_shape. ”

“Grepping. ”

“A053?”

“15. ”

“A0C0?”

“AF. ”

“Very good. Nice it. ”

“Niced with a tee. ”

“Thanks, I forgot about that. Iostat?”

Derec paused a moment to page through several screens of data. “Clean, green, and five by five. I think it worked. ”

“Okay, let’s finish it. Nohup. ”

“Nohupped. ”

“Chown gen-shape. ”

“Chowned. ”

Avery leaned back in his chair and crossed his fingers. “Here goes. I am putting ixform to sleep. Any floating children?”

Derec scrutinized his screen. “No-no, we’re clear. No children floating in the pipe. ”

Avery suddenly realized that he’d been holding his breath. “Well! I think we’ve got it. Do you want to put it to the test?”

Derec smiled and waved an open hand at his father. “You, sir, may have the honor. ”

“Okay. ” Avery pushed his chair back from the terminal, tented his fingers, and frowned. Then he cleared his throat, raised his eyes to the ceiling, and said in a loud, clear voice: “Gosh, Derec, I think I need to use the Personal. ” Both of them locked their stares on Avery’s chair.

Nothing happened. No softening around the edges; no reconfiguration of the seatpad. For over a minute they both held their breaths, waiting to see if the chair was going to reconfigure itself.

It remained a chair.

“Yahoo!” Derec raised his fists in a victorious gesture, and Avery cracked into a broad, beaming smile. “Dad, we did it! We’ve cut out the autonomic shape-changing!”

Avery allowed himself another smile and then sobered. “We’re halfway there, Derec. We made the changes we wanted. Now let’s make sure that we haven’t done any other

damage in the process. ” He turned away from Derec, looked up at the ceiling, and loudly said, “Ship, make this chair two inches higher. ”

Smoothly and silently, as if it were a robobarber’s chair, the seat rose two inches. Avery looked at Derec with a tight smile on his face and a merry twinkle in his eye. “Son, we’ve cut out the autonomic routines, but we’ve kept the voluntary control intact. Now that is what I call a success. ” He hesitated a moment and then impulsively stuck out a hand to Derec.

For a moment, Avery felt terribly uncertain and insecure. Derec was looking at the hand as if he expected to find a joybuzzer. Then he switched to looking Avery straight in the eye, with an unreadable expression on his face.

And then he smiled, reached over, and shook his father’s hand. “Congratulations, Dad. ”

“Thanks, son. ”

The moment passed. They broke off the handshake, both looking a little sheepish about their undisciplined display of raw emotion, and went back to their respective terminal displays.

“You know,” Derec said at last, “I’m beginning to feel that I really understand this polymorphism business. ”

“That’s just what I was thinking,” Avery agreed.

“I mean, look at that pipe. It’s totally tubular. ”

“Totally. ”

The two of them studied their displays a while longer, and then Derec spoke up. “You know, as long as we’re on such a good roll, we really should find something else to work on. ”

“I quite agree. ”

“Got any ideas?”

A wicked smile appeared on Avery’s face. He tried to suppress it, but it could not be denied, so he turned it on Derec. “Where did you say Lucius II was?”

Derec was aghast. “Dad! You promised you’d leave those robots—” Then he realized that Avery was teasing him and broke into a laugh. Avery joined him.

“I think maybe we’ve done enough for now,” Avery said when they’d stopped laughing.

“I think maybe you’re right. ” Derec yawned, rubbed his eyes, and gave the robotics lab one more once-over. “What do you say we catch some shut-eye?”

“An excellent idea. ” Avery looked up at the ceiling and raised his voice again. “Ship, convert these chairs into bunks, and then dim the lights. ” Smoothly and silently, the chairs flowed into their new shapes.

Derec didn’t even get out of his chair. He simply kicked off his shoes, loosened his tunic buttons, and stretched out full-length on the bunk. “G’night, Dad,” he mumbled. The lights in the cabin dimmed down, and within a few minutes Derec’s breathing had shifted into the steady rhythm of sleep.

Dr. Avery watched his son until even the phosphorescent glow of the terminal displays had faded to pitch blackness. Then he kicked off his own shoes, removed his lab coat, and stretched out on his bunk.

“Nighty-night, Davey,” he whispered.

CHAPTER 13

JANET

A cool spring morning in Robot City. The black limousine rolled swiftly through the empty streets, nearly silent save for the soft thrumming of its electric motor and the gentle hiss of rubberoid tires on pavement. Inside the vehicle, Janet Anastasi sat in the passenger compartment, her nose buried in a sheaf of fax pages, while Basalom sat in the chauffeur’s compartment, jacked into the vehicle’s master control panel, driving.

One of the advantages of being a robot with telesensory feeds was that Basalom could rotate his head 180 degrees and still keep an eye on the road. Confident that the vehicle was safely under control, Basalom swiveled around to look at Dr. Anastasi. He allocated every third nanosecond to introspection.

She certainly seems happier now that she’s stopped sleeping in the lander and has taken an apartment in the city. Briefly switching to thermographic vision, he felt a small glow of satisfaction in the part of his brain that Dr. Anastasi had taken to calling his “mother hen” circuit. Dr. Anastasi’s heat contours were a calm, relaxed study in blues and greens. There were no indicators of unpredictable endocrine activity, no hints of dangerous blood pressure or cardiac rate changes. And it’s been 52 hours since her last emotional outburst, Basalom noted with some pride. Yes, she’s definitely happier now that she’s adapting to the city.

Sure, mac, the limousine interjected, give the lady all the credit. Why don’cha ever notice how the city is adapting to her?

Will you kindly keep out of my private thoughts? Basalom asked, not for the first time.

Can’t help it, Mac, the car answered. You go around jacking your main data bus into other folk’s sensory feeds, your thought stream’s gonna become a party line.

Still, you could have the decency to pretend that you aren’t listening.

Yeah, I could, the car said. And on the other tire, if it bugs you that much, you could go back to letting me drive. After all, I am Personal Vehicle One.

You are a pile of steel and plastic with the simulated personality of a twentieth-century Chicago cabbie, Basalom corrected archly, and I will no longer tolerate your verbal abuse of Dr. Anastasi.

Suit yourself, Mac. I get recharged no matter who’s driving. The car’s positronic brain went back into idle mode, and Basalom once more resumed the task of trying to create a private security partition in his brain.

Erecting an encrypted buffer without verbally thinking about how he was doing it was a ticklish job, though. When he thought that he’d succeeded, he moved the stack of pointers that represented his consciousness into the secured partition and initiated a new thought stream. What in the name of Wendell Avery were the supervisors thinking of when they decided to create this mass of argumentative positrons, anyhow?

They were thinking of what Dr. Anastasi said in Tunnel Station # I 7, Personal Vehicle One answered, as clearly as ever. As she was returning via tunnel to the spaceport after her first meeting with Central, she said-and I quote: “Frost, Basalom, look at what the air blast has done to my hair. Why can’t they have some decent groundcars in this city?” She had but to speak, and voila! I was created.

Basalom gave up in defeat. Yes, you certainly were. But tell me, whatever possessed them to decide to give you a simulated personality ?

A slight drop in voltage on pin 16-the positronic equivalent of a shrug-came through the data bus. Dunno. Humans are rare here, all right? Guess they thought the doc might be happier with a little simulated companionship.

“Well,” Basalom said out loud, “they got that wrong. ”

In the back seat, Dr. Anastasi peered over the top edge of the papers she was reading. “Did you say something to me, Basalom?”

“No, madam. I was exchanging information with the vehicle’s onboard computer. ”

“Oh. Very well. ” She looked back to the papers and then glanced out the side window. ‘. Basalom? How much longer ‘til we get to the Compass Tower?”