Humanity

Chapter 1. Homecoming

They had named the starship the Wild Goose Chase, for when they’d left home in it some of them had doubted that the trip would be of any value. Now the ship once again orbited its world of origin, and its passengers still wondered whether they had accomplished anything useful.

They had accomplished plenty; no one disagreed about that. During their travels they had transformed one of Dr. Avery’s mutable robot cities into a toy for intelligent aliens, had reprogrammed another robot city to serve an emerging civilization on yet another alien world, had formulated a set of rules describing the motivations behind human behavior, had nearly found the mother to four of the group’s members, and had ended the career of the alien pirate who had dogged their steps for years. All the same, the operative word was “useful,” and not one of their actions received the unanimous approval of the entire crew.

None of them supposed that turning a city into a toy was anything other than an irritating lesson in futility. Derec and Ariel also had grave reservations about leaving the other robot city in the hands of the pre-technological Kin. None of the human complement-nor even Wolruf, their alien companion-cared a bit for the robots’ “Laws of Humanics,” and though Derec was excited at the prospect of finding his mother, his father harbored a contrary emotion, and besides that, they had lost her trail.

Even removing the pirate Aranimas from the picture was only a qualified success, for though they hadn’t killed him, the moral implications inherent in their method of dealing with him had driven three of the robots into the positronic equivalent of catatonia.

It was high time to go home and think about things for a while.

Home in this case meant the original Robot City, an entire planet covered with Dr. Avery’s mutable, ever-changing cybernetic metropolis. At least it had been covered in city when they left. Now, however, from their vantage point in close orbit, it looked like a newly terraformed planet still waiting for settlers.

Three humans, one alien, and a robot crowded into the starship’s control cabin to watch it drift by in the viewscreen. They were a motley-looking group by anyone’s standards. The alien, Wolruf, occupied the pilot’s chair, the demands of her canine body warping the chair into a configuration a human would have considered uncomfortable at the very least. Her brown and gold fur had been carefully brushed, but she wore no clothing or ornamentation over it.

To her right stood Derec, a thin, narrow-faced, blond-haired young man who carried the impatient look common to explorers. His clothing was utilitarian: loose pants of soft fabric suitable for anything from Yoga exercises to wiping up oil spills while dismantling machinery, capped by a plain pullover shirt of the same material, both in light blue. Snuggled close to his right stood Ariel, equally thin-though in a softer sort of way-dark-haired, and not as transparently impatient as her companion. It was obvious she had spent more time on her wardrobe than he. She, too, wore pants and a blouse, but her blouse clung where it was supposed to cling, hung loose where loose suited her figure better, exposed enough skin at neck and waist to suggest but not to provoke, and together the pale yellow and brown hues of blouse and pants provided a splash of color to offset Derec’s uniformity.

On the other side of Wolruf stood Dr. Avery.He was an older version of Derec: shorter, rounder, grayer, moustached, his face not yet wrinkled but showing the effects of time and much experience. He wore his usual baggy trousers, white shirt with ruffled collar, and oversized coat today, as most days, in gray. His expression was one of puzzlement shading over into concern.

Behind the humans stood Mandelbrot, the only one of the four robots on board present in the control room. He was an old-model robot of steel and plastic construction-save for his more recently repaired right arm-and he wore no clothing over his angular body plating, nor did his visual sensors or speaker grille convey a readable expression.

Derec, his eyes drifting from the viewscreen to his companions and back, was the first to voice the question all of them were thinking: “You’re sure this is the right planet?”

Wolruf, swiveling slightly around in the pilot’s chair, nodded her toothsome head. “Positive.”

“Then what happened to it?” Ariel asked.

“That’s ‘arder to say.” Wolruf pushed a button to lock the viewscreen picture in place, then moved a slide control upward, increasing the screen’s magnification until the planet’s mottled surface began to show detail. Where they had expected to see the sharp angles of buildings and streets, they saw the tufted tops of trees instead. Narrow pathways wound among the trees, and as Wolruf increased the magnification still further they saw that the paths occasionally joined at landmarks ranging from boulders to dead tree stumps to natural caves. There were no buildings in evidence at all.

The angle of view changed steadily as the ship continued to move in orbit, until they were looking out rather than down over a sea of treetops. The picture grew less and less sharp as the angle changed, and after a moment Derec realized it was because the lower their view angle got, the more atmosphere they had to look through.

“Try another view,” he said to Wolruf, and the golden-furred alien backed off the magnification and released the hold. The camera tracked forward again and the picture became a blur of motion until they once again looked directly downward from the ship.

A ragged boundary line between the green forest and a lighter green patch of something else caught Derec ‘ s attention. “There,” he said. “Zoom in on that.”

When Wolruf did so, they could see a vast meadow of waving grass. It wasn’t like a farmer’s field, all of one type and all the same height, but rather a patchwork of various species, some tall, some short, with bushes and the occasional tree scattered among them. Again there were paths, though fewer than in the forest, and again the scene lacked any sign of human habitation. There were inhabitants, though: small knots of four-legged animals grazing under the watchful eyes of circling hawks or eagles.

“How did they get there?” Dr. Avery demanded.

Derec glanced over at his father, opened his mouth to answer, then thought better of it. He turned back to Wolruf and said instead, “Let’s try another view.”

Wolruf provided it. This one showed a barren expanse of sand, punctuated sporadically by lone stands of cactus. Near the edge of the screen a single tree cast its shadow across a pool of water. A smallish four-legged animal of some sort lapped at the water, looking up frequently to check for predators.

“They really took it seriously,” Derec muttered, scratching his head in bemusement.

“Took what seriously?” Avery demanded. “This is your doing, isn’t it?”

Derec nodded. “I suppose it must be, though I certainly didn’t expect this.”

“What did you expect? What did you order them to do?”

Derec faltered for a starting point, said at last, “You remember our argument just before we left, when I wanted to use the animals Lucius had created as the starting point for a real biological ecosystem, but you had the hunter robots kill all of them instead? Well, when we boarded the ship, I told the computer to access my files on balanced ecosystems, and to…well…to make one based on what it found there.”

Avery visibly considered his response to that revelation. His fists clenched and unclenched, and the tendons in his neck worked as he swallowed. Mandelbrot took a step toward Derec, readying to protect his master should Avery decide to attack him physically.

Avery noticed the motion, scowled, and lashed out with a kick to the robot’s midsection instead. The hollow clang of shoe against metal echoed in the control room. Concurrent with the kick, Avery shouted, “Why do you always have to do this to me? Just when I think I’ve got something running smoothly, you go and throw sand in the works. Literally.” He waved at the screen, still showing desert, but at such a low angle now that the atmospheric disturbances between it and the ship made it shimmer as though they were actually standing in its midday heat.

Mandelbrot had rocked back with the kick, absorbing the blow so Avery wouldn’t hurt his foot, but that was his only move. Derec looked from his father to the robot and back again. In a way, Mandelbrot was Derec’s first real achievement in life. He had reconstructed the robot from parts, and in the years since then the robot had grown from a servant to a companion. Perhaps for that reason, Avery had mistreated the poor thing since the day they had met. Derec had been about to apologize for his mistake with the city, but now, in answer to Avery’s question, he said simply, “Maybe it’s a family trait.”

They stared at one another for long seconds, their anger weighing heavy in the room, before Ariel said in disgust, “Boys.” Dismissing them and their argument, she stepped around Derec to stand beside Wolruf’s chair, saying, “Can you find any sign of the city at all?”

“Not visually,” the alien admitted, “but we ‘ave other methods.” She spent a moment at the controls, during which the viewscreen image zoomed out again, blurred, shifted to false color imaging, and displayed what might have been a color-coded topographic map.

“Definitely getting neutrino activity,” she said. “So something’ s still using microfusion powerpacks. “

Derec relinquished the staring match in order to see the viewscreen better. “Where?” he asked.

“Everywhere,” Wolruf said. “Many sources, scattered allover the planet. Even more beneath the surface. “

“Has the city gone underground?” asked Ariel.

“We’ll see. “ Wolruf worked a few minutes longer at the controls, explaining as she went. “I’m trying penetration radar, looking for ‘ollow spots. And sure enough, there they are.” On the screen a shadowy picture showed the familiar rectangular forms of a city.

“What’s on the surface above them?” It was Avery, his tone almost civil.

Perhaps as a reward, or perhaps out of her own curiosity, Wolruf replaced the radar image with the visual once again and they found themselves looking down on a wide, flatbottomed river valley. The river that had carved it meandered lazily through stands of trees, past low bluffs covered with grass and bushes, and on without hindrance out of the viewscreen’ s reach. No remnant of the city that once covered the planet’s entire surface marred the now perfectly natural setting, and nothing visible in normal light indicated that below it lay anything but bedrock.

The sight of bare ground without city on it rekindled Avery’s ire. “And just how are we supposed to get inside?” he demanded.

Without looking up at him, Ariel said, “There must be access hatches or something. “

“And how do we find them?”

“By asking.” Mandelbrot paused for the half second or so it took for everyone to look at him, then added, “I am now in communication with the city’s central computer. It confirms Ariel ‘ s assertion: elevators to the surface have been provided in the new city plan. It can direct us to anyone of them we wish to use.”

Wolruf laughed the gurgling laugh of her kind. “What difference does it make? It’s all the same anyway.”

“All except the Compass Tower,” said Avery. He looked from Wolruf to Derec. “Provided it’s still there.”

“It is,” Mandelbrot replied. “The original city programming was inviolate in its case. It is the only building on the planet that remains above the surface. “

“Then that’s where we’ll go.”

Wolruf turned to the controls. “Easy enough,” she said. “Zero degrees latitude, zero longitude. It’s just after dawn there, so we have light. We can make it on this orbit if we go now. “

“Then do it. The sooner we get down, the sooner I can get my city back to normal.” Avery favored Derec with a last crusty look, then stalked out of the control room.

Derec grinned at Ariel and shrugged his shoulders. “Oops.”

She giggled. “ ‘Oops,’ “ he says. “You changed the surface of an entire planet with a single order, and that’s all you have to say about it? Oops?”

Coming from Avery, those words would have stung, but Ariel meant no harm and Derec knew it. She thought it was funny, as did he. Robots were always misinterpreting their orders, always doing things you didn’t expect them to do; this was just an extreme case. Even so, it wasn’t anything to get upset over. They would figure out why the city had done what it had, correct the problem, and that would be that.

“Deceleration coming up in seven minutes,” Wolruf warned.

Derec looked out the viewscreen. Wolruf had aligned the ship so they were aimed just above the horizon behind them in orbit. Internal gravity had kept the ship’s occupants from feeling any of her maneuvering, as it would keep them from feeling the braking thrust, but Wolruf’s warning carried with it an implicit suggestion: time to strap in. Cabin gravity compensated for planned motion like rocket thrust, but it was slow to react to unexpected shifts. Air buffeting on reentry would still throw them around, as would any last-minute maneuvering the gravity generator couldn’t anticipate.

The ship understood Wolruf’s meaning as well. A week earlier it wouldn’t have-while attempting to keep the starship from responding to every comment as if it were an order, Derec and Avery had inadvertently made it ignore the alien’s orders as well-but they had since fixed that. The ship had functioned perfectly the entire way home, and it did so now. When Wolruf issued her warning, two bumps rose up in the floor behind and to either side of her control chair, molded themselves into more human-style chairs, and swiveled around to allow Derec and Ariel to seat themselves. When they were comfortable, waist and shoulder restraints extruded themselves from the arm and back rests, crossed over the chairs’ occupants, and joined seamlessly to hold them in.

Mandelbrot remained standing, but the ship grew a holding bar beside him, which he gripped with his left hand. It seemed inadequate, but with the energy of a microfusion powerpack behind that hand, he wasn’t going anywhere either.

No doubt Avery, wherever he happened to have gone, was also being coaxed into a chair, and the three unresponsive robots in the hold were probably being restrained in some way as well.

The observers in the control cabin watched the planet roll by beneath them while the countdown ran out; then the descent engine fired and they watched it roll by a little slower. They could hear the soft roar of the nuclear engines through the not-quite-soundproof hull, but that and the changing perspective as they began to fall toward the planet were the only indications that something was happening,

As they lost orbital velocity and picked up downward velocity, their apparent speed began to increase. The horizon grew flatter, and they seemed to be rushing away from it faster and faster. Wolruf turned the ship around until they were again facing in the direction of motion, and they fell the rest of the way into the atmosphere. The howl of air rushing past replaced the roar of the descent engine.

Wolruf was an excellent pilot. She had to be; if she were anything less, the robotic ship wouldn’t have let her near the controls, for the ship could have landed itself perfectly without her assistance. That it allowed her to do so without its assistance was a supreme compliment, one which Wolruf proved she deserved only seconds from landing.

They had dropped down through a layer of high, thin cloud, and were gliding now on wings the ship had grown once they’d reached air thick enough to use them in. The ship had reconfigured its engine into an atmospheric jet, which Wolruf let idle while they bled off the last of their orbital speed. Through the viewscreen they could see an undulating sea of treetops rushing by beneath them, and off in the distance a glittering flat-topped pyramid that had to be the Compass Tower. Wolruf steered to the right of it, swinging the ship in a wide circle around the tower while she examined the forest for landing sites.

There were none. The canopy of trees was complete. As she completed the circle, Wolruf turned her head toward Mandelbrot and asked, “So where are we supposed to land?”

“On the-” Mandelbrot started to reply, but Derec, who had not looked away from the viewscreen, saw a sudden flash of movement directly ahead and shouted, “Look out!”

There came a loud thump and a lurch not quite compensated for by internal gravity. Wolruf snapped her head back toward the viewscreen just as another fluttering black shape swept toward them and another thump shook the ship.

In the next instant the air seemed filled with frantic, flapping obstacles. They were huge birds of some sort, easily three or four meters across. The ship shuddered under impact after impact, and ragged sections of the viewscreen went dark as the outside sensors were either obliterated or simply covered up by their remains. Wolruf howled what was no doubt a colorful oath in her own tongue, pushed the throttle all the way forward, and pulled back on the flight controls to take the ship above the flock. Three more birds swept toward them. Wolruf ducked, but so did the birds; there came a triple hammer blow to the ship, and suddenly they heeled over and began falling.

“Engine failure,” the autopilot announced.

“Grow another one,” Wolruf commanded it.

“Fabricating. “

Wolruf struggled to right the ship, got it into a glide again, and peered out between the dark patches in the viewscreen. “We’re too low,” she muttered. “ ‘urry up with that engine.”

“I am transmogrifying at top speed. Engine will be operational in four minutes. “

“We don’t ‘ ave four minutes!” Wolruf howled, then immediately added, “Give me more wing.”

“Expanding wing surface.”

Derec looked over to Ariel, found her looking back at him with wide eyes. “We’ll make it,” he said, surprised at how calm his voice sounded. She nodded, evidently not trusting her own voice, and reached out a hand toward him. He realized that no matter how calm he had sounded, he was gripping his chair hard enough to leave finger depressions in its yielding surface. He unclenched his hand and took hers in it, holding more carefully. Together they looked back to the viewscreen.

The treetops looked as if they were only a few meters below the ship. The view directly ahead was obscured; Wolruf weaved the ship back and forth to see what was in their path. Between one weave and the next an especially tall tree loomed up seemingly from out of nowhere, giving her only time enough to swear and bank sharply to miss it. The ship lurched as the lower wing clipped another treetop, but wing proved stronger than wood, and they flew on. Wolruf leveled them out again and pulled back gently on the flight control to give them more altitude. They were still moving fairly fast, but slowing noticeably now.

“We really need that engine,” Wolruf said.

“Two and a half minutes,” the autopilot responded.

“We’ll be down by then,” she muttered. She looked to her left, out a relatively unobscured section of viewscreen, and came to a decision. With a cry of “ ‘ang on!” she banked the ship to the left, held the bank until they were aimed directly at the Compass Tower, then leveled off again.

“The tower is too narrow,” the computer began. “You have too much airspeed to land on it without reverse thrust-” but it was too late. The Compass Tower came at them, a slanting wall rising well overhead, visible now through the clear spots to either side and above. Wolruf held their angle of approach until it seemed they were about to smash headlong into it, then at the last moment pulled back hard on the control handle and brought them up almost parallel to the slanting wall.

The pyramid-shaped tower rose up out of the jungle at about a sixty-degree angle. They hit at about fifty, give or take a few degrees. The violent lurch of impact threw everyone against their restraints, and even Mandelbrot took a step to avoid losing his footing; then with a screech of metal sliding on metal they skidded up and over the top edge of the tower.

Cabin gravity had died completely in the collision. They felt a sickening moment of weightlessness, then another lurch as they smashed sideways onto the flat top and continued to skid along its surface. All four of the control room’s occupants watched with morbid fascination as the far edge drew nearer.

“Frost, I should’ve gone comer to comer,” Wolruf growled, and for a moment it seemed as if that would be their epitaph, but as they slid across it the surface of the tower grew rougher ahead of them, and the ship ground to a halt with four or five meters to spare.

Derec found that he had nearly crushed Ariel’s hand in his own. He would have if she hadn’t been gripping him almost as fiercely herself. Breathing hard, neither of them willing to test their voices yet, they loosened their hold on each other and flexed their bruised fingers.

Wolruf let out a sigh, pulled her seat restraints loose, and braced herself to stand on the tilting floor. “Well,” she said, “welcome ‘ome.”

Some hours later, Wolruf stood at the base of the tower and peered out into the dense jungle surrounding it. She had begged off from the congratulatory dinner Ariel had suggested, claiming stomach cramps from the anxiety and excusing herself to go take a run to stretch her muscles. She fully intended to go for a run, if only to guarantee her solitude, but in truth the reason she wished to be alone was not stomach cramps but shame. Despite her companions’ congratulations-even Avery had commended her for her flying skill, while making a not-so-subtle jab at Derec for creating the birds that had made that skill necessary in the first place-despite their heartfelt thanks, Wolruf knew that it was she, not Derec, who was ultimately responsible for the accident in the first place.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, to circle low above a forest and not watch out for birds. Especially an unfamiliar forest, full of unfamiliar and unpredictable species. If she’d pulled a stunt like that at home, she’d have been kicked out of the training academy so fast her tail wouldn’t even have been caught in the slammed door.

Yes, she’d shown some quick thinking afterward, had pulled their collective fat out of the fire, but all the praise she got for that bit of fancy flying simply galled her all the more. Her initial mistake had nearly killed them all.

“So you learn from your mistakes,” she growled in her own language, quoting one of her old instructor’s favorite phrases, but hearing the guttural gnashing and snarling of her native tongue brought a sudden pang of homesickness, and she cocked back her head and let fly a long, plaintive howl.

An echo bounced back at her from the trees. Then, faintly, coming from far deeper in the jungle, she heard an answering cry.

A cold shiver ran down her back at the sound of it. It wasn’t exactly an answer-not in words, at any rate-but the meaning was just as clear as her own howl had been. You are not alone.

And just who might be making so bold an assertion on this planet so recently filled only with robots? Wolruf had no idea. The odds of it being a member of her own species were no odds at all; she was the only one of her kind in human space, and she knew it. But whatever mouth had voiced that cry belonged to a creature at least similar to herself, and it had given her an open invitation for companionship.

At the moment she wasn’t feeling picky. She took a deep breath, tilted her head back and howled again, forgoing words for deeper meaning: 1 am coming. Not waiting for an answer, she struck off into the trees.

Ariel heard the howling from her room in the apartment they had chosen practically at random from among thousands in the underground city. The windows were viewscreens, currently set to show the scene from partway up the Compass Tower, and they evidently transmitted sound as well. Ariel had been brushing out her hair; she stopped with the brush still tangled in a stubborn knot of dark curls, stepped to the window, and listened. Another howl echoed through the forest, and another. One was recognizably Wolruf, but not both. A bird added a shriek of alarm-or perhaps derision-to the exchange.

Some primitive instinct triggered her hormonal reflexes, dumping adrenaline into her bloodstream, readying her to fight or flee should either need arise. She felt her pulse rate quicken, felt the flush of sudden heat in her skin.

The howls came again.

She swallowed the taste of fear. She was ten levels below ground! “So strange, to hear live animal sounds here,” she whispered.

Derec lay on the bed, one arm draped over his eyes and the other sprawled out at his side. He shifted the one enough to peer under it at Ariel and said, “It is. I think I like it, though.”

“Me too.” Another howl made her shiver, and she added, “As long as I’m inside, anyway.”

“Don’t get too attached to it. Avery’ll probably have the whole thing covered in city again inside of a week.”

Ariel tugged at her brush again, got it through the tangle, and took another swipe at it. “Do you really think he will?”

“I imagine. He sounds pretty intent on it.”

“Couldn’t you stop him? Your order has precedence. If you tell the robots you want it to stay the way it is, they’ll obey you, won’t they?”

“Maybe. I don’t know if it’s worth it.”

“Hmm,” she said. Maybe it wasn’t. Easy come, easy go, and all that. Besides, Avery had just been beginning to act like a human being before he discovered Derec’s ecosystem project; maybe it would be worth it to let him put the city back the way he’d originally planned it if it would keep him easy to get along with.

“Where’d he go, anyway?” she asked.

Derec let his arm flop down over his eyes again. “Computer center, where else?”

“Of course.” Ariel turned away from the window and walked back over to stand in front of the mirror. She continued to brush her hair, but she watched Derec’s reflection, not her own. She could have stared at him directly, since he had his eyes closed, but somehow she liked using the mirror, as though she might see something in it that she wouldn’t otherwise.

What she saw pleased her well enough no matter which way she viewed it. Derec was trim, well-muscled, attractive by nearly anyone’s standards. Certainly he was attractive by Ariel’s. She had fallen in love with him twice now, without the complication of falling out of love in between. Amnesia had its good points.

And he had fallen in love with her twice, too. At least she thought so. Once, definitely, and that was this time, so what did it matter if the first was merely infatuation, as she suspected it had been? He loved her now, didn’t he?

As if he could read her mind, she saw him raise his arm up again and peek out at her from under it, and the openly appreciative smile that spread across his face told her all she needed to know. He raised up off the bed in one smooth motion, came over to nuzzle his face in the hollow between her neck and shoulders, and whispered, “So why don’t we take a blanket and go for a walk in the forest while it’s still there?”

Dr. Avery had indeed gone to the computer center, but only long enough to use a private terminal to direct the city to create a fully stocked robotics lab for him. While that was being done, he commandeered a team of six general service robots and led them back up to the wreckage of the starship at the top of the tower.

“In the cargo hold of that mess,” he told them, pointing in its general direction, “you’ll find three robots in communications fugue. I want you to bring them out and take them to my lab. Under no circumstances are you to try to wake them. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Master Avery,” the robot nearest him said.

“Good. Go to it.”

The robots filed into the ship, using a convenient rent in the hull rather than the airlock. Avery smiled at the sight, for the still-crumpled presence of the wreckage signaled that his plan was proceeding smoothly. He had ordered the ship not to repair itself, not to do anything until he got the robots removed. They hadn’t awakened during the crash, but who knew what might trigger it? Better to err on the safe side. This was only the second time they had gone into fugue in his presence, and he had blown his chance to study them in detail the first time. He wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass unused as well.

Derec wouldn’t approve-he’d been the one who convinced Avery not to the first time, pleading with him not to interrupt their development-but Avery really couldn’t care less about Derec’s wishes now. Not any more. For a while there he’d come close to thinking he might actually care about his son again, but to discover that all this time the boy had been deceiving him, distracting him with his silly trip off planet while his insidious program wiped out Avery’s greatest creation-that betrayal extinguished any feeling he may have had for him.

And by association, for Janet as well, though he had never fooled himself into thinking he cared for her again.

Her robots, on the other hand…

Yes, he cared a great deal about her robots. Not necessarily for them, but definitely about them. Such strange creations they were! Infinitely malleable, even more so than his own proteiform robots; these three robots of Janet’s were not only physically mutable but mentally mutable as well. You never knew what strange notion they might come up with next. Their initial programming was radically different from a normal robot’s, and they had the uncanny ability to integrate their life’s experiences directly into that programming, modifying their basic motivations with each new situation they faced. They were the first truly heuristic learning machines Avery had ever seen.

They weren’t without flaws, of course. Janet’s typically scatterbrained execution of a brilliant idea had left their psyches scarred beyond repair, but the idea itself was exquisite. Like the concept of cellular robots in the first place, the possibilities it opened up were endless, but it would take Avery’s own genius to realize them.

The general service robots emerged from the wreck in pairs, each pair carrying an inert robot like a rigid statue between them. Avery examined each one as they brought it past.

First came Lucius II, the self-named successor to Robot City’s first creative robot. Since the original was gone, no one bothered with the numeral. Lucius looked a little like the robots carrying him: smooth and featureless in the torso and limbs, little more than an idealized humanoid figure optimized for efficiency. He wasn’t quite as well defined as they, though. Without conscious direction, his physical form had begun to drift back toward the shape of his first imprinting, but for Lucius that had been late in coming. He had spent his first few weeks as a formless blob, and that experience showed now in the rounded, almost doughy shape of his body.

His face was better articulated. It, too, had smoothed somewhat, like that of a wax figure left too long in the sun, but it was still recognizably based upon Derec’s.

Avery wasn’t surprised. The boy had always been a strong influence on the robot. Lucius had even proposed that the two treat one another as friends, with all the rights and obligations that entailed; it was no wonder the imprinting process had gone down to the instinctual level.

Next came Adam. A casual examination would have led an observer to believe that Adam had first imprinted on Wolruf, for that was who the robot most resembled, but the casual observer would have been mistaken. Adam’s canine features came from his early imprinting on the Kin, the backward, Stone Age, wolflike aliens who even now marked their territory in one of Avery’s cast-off cities. Wolruf’s resemblance to the Kin was purely coincidental-unless one considered parallel evolution to be something other than coincidence.

Perhaps it was, Avery thought. The separate evolution of two wolflike species-three actually, if you counted wolves themselves-was fairly good evidence that the canine form was an efficient housing for at least moderate intelligence. Avery doubted that it was better than the human form, but he was scientist enough to realize that was his own prejudice showing. Maybe the canine form was more efficient. Right now the evidence stacked up three against one. One and a half, maybe, if you counted the pirate Aranimas as marginally humanoid, but humanoids were still outnumbered.

It was a pitifully small sample to be making a judgment, though. They needed to study far more aliens before they could be sure.

Was that what Janet had been trying to do with these robots of hers? Had she stranded them, formless and with only the most basic programming, on what she thought were empty worlds in order to see what shape they would eventually mimic in intelligent form? Was she making her own aliens to study?

If so, then she had succeeded at least partially in that ambition. Her robots certainly behaved strangely enough to be aliens.

The service robots brought the third inert one out of the ship. This one, Eve, looked most human of all, but Avery knew that was only a surface phenomenon. Her first encounter with an organic being had been with Ariel, and that was who she resembled now, but her experiences from then on had been largely the same as the others ‘. She was just as dangerous, just as unpredictable, as either of them.

With the robots out of it, Avery had no more use for the ship. “Tell Central to clear the wreckage,” he told one of the service robots.

“Yes, sir,” the robot replied, and almost immediately the starship began to slump down to a puddle of undifferentiated dianite, the robot cells which made up the city. The cells from the starship joined the cells of the tower, returning to the general inventory. The few parts that weren’t made of dianite-mostly engine parts-were swallowed whole, to be transferred internally to a recycling center.

Avery didn’t stay to watch. He followed the robots back into the elevator and took them down, far below the tower to the transport level, then along the moving slidewalks toward his newly fabricated lab. He snorted in disgust as he stepped from the slow outer walk to the inner, faster ones, then waited impatiently for the fastest to carry them to their destination. Earther technology! Slidewalks were fine for moving huge crowds of people, but they were ridiculously inefficient for a city of robots. Avery looked to both sides, ahead and behind, and saw only three other passengers, far enough away to be merely specks in the distance.

Why had they built slidewalks? he wondered, but he came up with the answer almost immediately. Because they had put the city underground to implement Derec’s orders, and the only underground city on record-Earth’s planet-wide megalopolis-had slidewalks.

Another bit of proof that robots weren’t good at independent thought, as though Avery needed the reminder.

He considered ordering them to rebuild the city on the surface the way he had originally designed it, but after a moment’s thought decided against it. He was too busy to fool with details. Let Derec have his ecosystem, if it would keep him occupied.

He led the robots through an interchange with a wide cross-corridor, traveled that one for a while, then stepped to a slower strip to make a connection with a smaller corridor running parallel to the first. This one had only a single slidewalk running in each direction, and as they proceeded down the northbound one Avery counted doorways, at last stepping off onto static pavement in front of an unmarked door about two thirds of the way down the length of the block.

Behind that door should be his new laboratory. Avery had instructed the central computer to build it here in this thoroughly anonymous location and then forget that location-and to fend off any inquiry about it as well-hoping to keep his inquisitive son from tracking it down quite so easily as he might otherwise. Avery knew that Derec would find it eventually, but he only needed secrecy for a short while. Just long enough to take these three robots of Janet’s apart and see what made them tick.

A few hundred kilometers above him, Janet Anastasi looked out the viewscreen at much the same scene Dr. Avery and Derec had seen earlier in the day. Her reaction was considerably different from what theirs had been, however. She had been expecting the ultimate city-gone-amok, a planet despoiled and overrun by her ex-husband’s Machiavellian monstrosities, but when she found what appeared to be unspoiled wilderness, she could hardly believe her eyes. Wendell Avery had actually left something alone for once in his life? Unbelievable.

She almost regretted the errand that had taken her a week out of her way before coming here.

Her original impulse, when she’d seen the mess Wendell had made of Tau Puppis IV and the aliens who called themselves the Kin, had been to track him down and demand that he stop using her invention to meddle in alien affairs, but as soon as she’d cooled off she’d realized how futile that would be. He had never listened to her before; why should he start now? She needed a lever if she intended to move him.

She had found that lever, too, but after seeing this incredible display of ecological conscientiousness she began to have second thoughts. Perhaps she had underestimated old Stoneface. Maybe she should hold off a while and see what other changes he had undergone in the years since they had parted company.

Or was this David’s influence she saw here? Had her son grown up to be a romantic? What an interesting notion. To think that he might now be a thinking being in his own right, rather than the squalling, vomiting, excreting lump of protoplasm she had so gladly left in the care of her robots when she had made her escape from Wendy and domestic life so many years ago. An adult now. The very concept nearly boggled the mind.

Nodding, she said softly, “Yes, I think we should have a closer look at this.”

“Of course, Mistress.” The robot at her side reached out to the ship’s controls, twisted a knob, and the viewscreen began to zoom in on the mountaintops beneath them.

Wearily, she said, “No, no, Basalom, I meant the whole situation. Land and have a look around, see what they’re up to down there.”

Basalom’s humaniform face remained blank, but his lips moved silently, forming the words, See what they ’ re up to down there. He blinked, first one eye, then the other; then he nodded and smiled and said, “Of course, Mistress.”

Basalom had lately taken to nodding and smiling when he had no idea what she was talking about. Janet considered trying to explain to him what she’d meant, but she supposed his reaction was probably a defense against just such an explanation, which often as not just made things worse. He was learning. Good. That’s why she had deliberately left gaps in his programming: to see if he could fill them by using intuitive thought processes. He apparently was doing so, though not in the way she had expected.

Not surprising. Nothing about this project seemed to be going quite the way she’d expected it to.